A Celluloid History of India : Melting Pot Cinema Part Three
In the year 1947, India would finally see it's independence from the long British colonial rule. Fatefully, the British administration would leave behind a clumsy system of raw film stock, ripe for the creative picking, however they would also enact, in puritanical fashion, a censorship of films that would prevail, as a means for the British to stifle the national pride of a passionately patriotic India, during their trials for achieving independence. Film-makers as a result of this, would have a tariff imposed - up to sixty percent of their revenue would be taxed. In spite of this, much of this heritage survived the departure of the British as did the system of illicit payments to avoid taxation.
Bombay would serve as the main center of film productions that were in Hindi, which is India's most widely-spoken tongue, among the many indigenous languages of the country. And it would be six songs, three dance segments, melodramatics, mood swings and a dose of comedy relief, and this would prove formulaic and become the tried and true recipe for assured success when following this template.
However in 1948, things would surely evolve as S.S. Vasan (1903-1969) would break ground with his release, Chandraelekha and this film made quite the splash spurring a whole new new thread of films that would feature chorus-dance sequences.
Director Mehboob Khan, seen as one of the country's most celebrated and world over renowned. A multitude of established stars would grace themselves in films such as Aan (Savage Princess, 1952)
and Bharat Mata (Mother India, 1952) which were bona fide blockbusters. This was the juncture of time that would be the beginning of a new day in the Indian Cinema - films that would exhibit more self and social-awareness, kinder, gentler, containing more sensitivity and combined with commercial ingredients, whilst simultaneously being referential to society's particularly oppressed classes. On the polar-opposite side of the vast spectrum, was Raj Kapoor and his entertainment packed productions, such as Awara (The Vagabond, 1952) and these were essentially stripped down musicals that centered on the sublimity of love. Bimal Roy was engaged in making off-center and iconoclastic releases such as Do Bigha Zamin ( Two Acres of Land, 1953) and 1960's Sujata - edgier subjects almost always focused on the impoverished, white collar crimes like money-lenders and laundering and the untouchables. K.A. Abbas himself would garner world wide acclaimed success with Munna ( The Lost Child, 1954) a heart string tugging tale of an orphan.
In the South, it was Madras that would be the main production hub, and there was an apparent verisimilitude between the thematic of films produced in Madras studios and the releases of Bombay. More often than not, these productions were musical-dramas and showcased the struggles of the joint family system. Tamil was the official language of the region, albeit many of the efforts in Telugu would be additionally produced in Madras.
In the Sri Lanka (nee Ceylon) market, the films would be shot mainly in the South. The dialogue was written by the Sri Lankans in the Sinhalese language, while the rest were done entirely by the South Indians. A high percentage of these films were note by note, taken off the pages of the typical Tanil or Hindi film. In 1957, Lester James Peries would turn out Rekava (The Line of Destiny) done in a deliberate neo-realist fashion and filmed on location. This would mark the first official National film to appear from Sri-Lanka. Peries' third entry Gamparalaya (The Changing Village, 1963) would prove an eyebrow raiser, and serve him quite well, securing the Grand Prix of the third International Film Festival of India. It was historic for becoming the first time a Sinhalese film would earn an International award.
Satyajit Ray (1921-1992) was universally acknowledged as India's premier film-maker. His long day didn't end with just making films, born into a gifted family of artists, he, himself was also a highly gifted and established artist, journalist, novelist, musician and composer. His roots and middle-class lineage, were the two most important aspects behind his talents for perceiving the truth that he was privy to and rendering it with simplicity.
In 1948, when Ray was still working as a commercial artist for a local advertising firm, both he and his close friends would found and form the Calcutta Film Society. It was here that he would also have the golden opportunity to view many of the world's acclaimed films and at the same time hobnob with a celebrity set. One of his most fruitful encounters, was meeting the inimitable director Jean Renoir It was in the year 1950 when Renoir came abroad to India to make The River. It was this film that would leave an indelible impression on Ray, and it would become a dominant influence on Ray's subsequent body of work.
Ray's yen to make a film himself, grew deeper and he soon would opt to adapt for the screen, writer Bibhutisbhushan Bandyopadhyay's
Pather Panchali novel (that Ray himself was asked to illustrate a few years prior) The pragmatic Ray was concerned with the security of his job at the time, so he would venture this project on Sundays and holidays only and devote his free days to shoot this film. He was in a financial crisis and had to take drastic measures, pawning his wife's jewels and ultimately selling his own prized possessions of first print books and records, so that he could purchase Raw stock and hire a camera.
Ray still required more funding to complete this project and it would be in the eleventh hour that his mother in-law's friend would save the day by persuading the Bengali government to provide monetary assistance.
Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) was completed by the year 1955 and screened at the Cannes Film festival the following year and garnered universal praise. On the heels of it's success, ensued countless offers for Ray to produce films abroad, but despite the fact that he spoke and understood English impeccably, he had said he felt incapable of being able to produce any films other than in his native language - Bengali.
His next effort would be the story of a boy named Apu, coming of age in a small village, and two sequels would follow : in Aparajito (1956, The Unvanquished) Apu moves house to Benares where his father succumbs and then to university in Calcutta during which time his mother also passes away back in the village. In Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959) he marries, but his wife tragically dies during childbirth and many years pass, until he is reconciled with his son. The Apu trilogy bolstered Ray's worldwide reputation.
On some of the issues in Ray's other film, he said ' ' Devi (The Goddess, 1960) was against superstition and dogmatism. Jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958) tried to show the inevitability of the old being replaced by a new ( and not a necessarily better) system. But my commitment is not to a particular political system. I am certainly not interested in power politics'.
The depiction of women in Ray's body of work, alters from film to film; at times they border on feminist, and others they are completely servile to their husbands. In The Goddess, Dayamoyee (Sharmila Tagore), deified as the result of a vision that is seen by her father-in-law, ultimately rebels against being the focus of worship. In Kanchenjunga (1962) would be Ray's first feature dealing with the issues of contemporaneous society, where the women are assertive and find their independence, taking stands against the so-called man's world. In Mahanagar, (The Big City, 1963) Arati Majumdar ( Madhabi Kukherji) fights against the chauvinistic conventions of making women home-bound and empowers herself further by becoming her family's breadwinner.
Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970) chronicled the political climate of the Indians in the late 1960s. And here it would be that Ray would also focus on the pilgrimage of security (the perennial problem of an Indian youth) undertaken by the her, Siddhartha, the unwavering political activism of Siddhartha's sibling is kept in the background . In Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder, 1973) a man-made famine that was ignited by requisition of food for military requirements, leads to the demise of five million people. Only the events up until the point of that calamity are shown. The film's final and lingering shot of starving villagers is without commentary, but inspires queries about the human values and priorities of civilization. These themes are met once again in Seemabadha (1971, Company Limited), in which a newly married couple must struggle to acclimate to the competitive business ethics of a Western capitalist system.
One of the key exceptions to his usual practice of filming in Bengali was Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players, 1977) which he made in Hindi-Urdu. This film was based on a novella by the esteemed Hindi author, Munshi Premchand, and focuses on two chess players who are so consumed and obsessed with their game that they are completely in oblivion about the radical political developments that take shape around them. Ray interwove Premchand's story with details of the annexation of the state of Oudh by the British in 1856, one of the main factors behind the Indian Mutiny of the following year.
It would be in 1984 that Ray would satiate his long-cherished aim to film Rabindranath Tagore's The Home and the World, though in it's final stages, the production would be prejudiced by Ray's severe decline in ill health, which would also prevent him from editing with his usual standard of economy and of precision.
Ray had an undeniable soft spot for children and in fact he not only produced four films solely for children, but he would also create much of his fiction and illustrative pieces exclusively for the young.
Ray used the term 'artless simplicity' to define his signature style. Although he has made a number of films in colour, he always theorized that colour can never truly be realistic, as it has a tendency to glamorize, whatever the context should be. Ray would often operate the camera himself and leave the more technical processes of shooting to his cameraman - and he had one that was quite faithful in Subrata Mitra. Ray knew how to take in a shot and precisely where to cut it while he is filming, but he had little compunctions regarding improvising by his actors, which he felt would add more dimension to the finished films. The dialogue would be strictly functional, though in Charulata (The Lonely Wife, 1964) and this he considers to be his finest hour, he resorted to dialogue as a means to probe the psychological pathology of his characters.
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