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Framework 1986. Views expressed in these
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\
Bombay Our City: Interview with Anand Patwardhan

INDIAN
CINEMA

everything is made to advertise another world: that other world of

advertisements in the West might seem to be an imaginary Utopia, but in
India the Utopia is the West. And the music is part of that, the jazz and the
classical music. And how everyone in the upper class speaks English, but the
slum-dwellers speak Hindi?
"I feel that people should use the film wherever there are housing
problems, and where there are people organising to protect and defend
themselves and their homes, or wherever there are landlords. It is an anticolonialist film, but one that can be used by the working class in the
imperialist nations."

Framework n. 30/31

r<>

When I reviewed Bombay Our City for City Limits during the London Film
Festival, I said it was the best documentary I had seen. In a way I regret that:
it makes it sound as if you should go into the cinema and come out
completely transformed by the experience of the film. That is not what it is
about. It is a film that, for this white westerner otherwise unconscious of
the struggles in India, refuses to stay on the screen. I began to wonder how
and where to screen it - with Edgar Anstey's Housing Problems and
contemporary tenants' rights tapes? How to tie it in with London's appalling
housing shortages, with the community groups of Tower Hamlets and
Ealing? Unlike so many documentaries, it refuses to be appreciated or loved.
I feel no especial warmth for the people whose struggle briefly emerges on
the screen. But perhaps a shared anger, and a sense renewed of the value of
film as a politicising medium. To the maker the last word: "They cannot take
away my anger."
Bombay Our City is to be shown in Spring 1986 on Channel Four in the Eleventh
Hour slot. It is distributed in the UK by The Other Cinema; in the USA by
Icarus of New York; in Canada by DEC and in India by the People's Union
for Civil Liberties and Samvaad.
(London,

November

1985.)

Ashish
Rajadhyaksha
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Introduction to
Kumar ShahanVs Essays
KUMAR SHAHANI'S WRITINGS on film, and on several areas around that
central interest, have been a relatively unknown aspect of his work. Written
mainly in the period 1974-77 - the years immediately preceding and during
the Emergency - they are at once extremely personal statements,
expressions of a deeply felt anger and hurt, and very much part of a larger
political and artistic context.1
They permit us a valuable glimpse into his cinema, and into the
cinematic tradition he supports in India and internationally. Film-making
for Shahani has been difficult, but in those years writing had come to be a
kind of substitute. From expressing his own torments they went on to a
polemic about the position of the artist, aesthetic issues and those involving
tradition and history.
This material is enormously relevant to the entire question of a "Third
World" aesthetic, a regrettable term that may have to do until a better one
has been coined, and concentrates on the more general aspects of Shahani's
thinking, as a valuable introduction to his films which, unfortunately, have
not yet been made available to general British audiences ( one hopes this will
soon be rectified). But it should be made clear that these essays are to be
seen in the context of Shahani's film-making. Ultimately, this material can
be understood only in the way it extends into the cinema: that of Shahani
himself, of his teacher Ritwik Ghatak and of his colleagues.
Perhaps one central idea, giving us an insight into the way his formal
and political concerns come together, is the idea he outlines in his Notes
Towards An Aesthetic of Cinema Sound. Linking the continuous scale of Indian
classical music, a scale that has defied efforts to enclose it in notation form,
and extending this into film, he writes:
"It seems clearer than ever before that notations are a mere
approximation.
"Since shrutis (the microtones defining the continuous scale) have to be
heard, we should strive only to name approximations, not absolutes.
"Yet it is heartening to find that it is the search for precision that yields
to flexibility. And vice versa, that it is the flexible language structure which
is meaningful.
"Heartening for every artist who wishes to place himself in a tradition
and yet to innovate, to individuate."
68

The possibility that one could speak in a clearly contemporary political

context, and yet find means to do it through a language, a narrative, that
echoed social ties going back into several centuries was crucial for Shahani.
It meant that one could relate to the present ( and thus the past and future)
but not be tied down to the limited discourses bound to the present "today".
In the late 1950s and '60s the historian D. D. Kosambi had depended on a
material present all around him, in the languages, the rituals, the cults, of
people to analyse changes in modes of production from ancient India
onwards. The politics of a cultural unification, of people sharing ancient ties
going beyond artificial political divides, was central to Ritwik Ghatak's
cinema. In Shahani this moves into a concern for the epic - working out the
flexibilities of an epic tradition, its history of a synthesis of ethics, politics,
technology, material experience, by re-configurating the relations between
the sensate universal and classical traditions such as Indian music, into the
material universals of lived experience.
With the epic comes the struggle to re-place into the artistic experience
its ethical aspect. As he points out, the bourgeois view, displacing ethics into
the moral, proliferating art into decorativeness and regionality, extending
art into pure organisation, has always held the lyrical to be the highest form
of artistic experience. But the great artists of this century that explicitly
fought the bourgeois notions of art, like Eisenstein, Picasso and Brecht,
replaced the primacy of the epic. And in doing this they also went back to the
great traditions of synthesis that have been central to the cultural pinnacles
of civilisations, whether Indian, European or "Western".
Shahani's first film, Maya Darpan (1972), used the rigid rhythm of the
lyric to encapsulate the daily experience of his central figure, the woman
Taran, caught in a feudal family, amid a universe of change. The rhythm
itself defining colour, gesture and the editing, suggested a freer epic flow in
changes that she perceives and, later, experiences. Tarang (1984) is much
vaster in its scale, locating several layers of discourse - involving
technology, class-antagonisms, relations between male and female, and
finally the universe itself beyond the realm of the "known" which, in the
bourgeois world, equates with what can be "possessed". In his work it has
been consistently the way in which certain kinds of experience themselves
open out myths or suggest correspondences between the way people see
and the way they live, which permits a new kind of synthesis between the
various ways we encounter our environment and nature.
The following essays are designed - and reprinted in Framework - to
suggest similar concerns to the reader. They were written at different times
and in differing contexts, but would have this in common: the effort to
_

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Introduction to Kumar Shahani's Essays

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SHAHAN1
relate the "now" with that history providing us with our material traditions,
our identity, intervening in our perceptions of our world. Shahani believes
that this perceived world must today be global, in material and not merely in
romantic terms. At times, as in Invocation (written in 1976 during the
Emergency but never published) this becomes only a personal cry in the
wilderness. Shahani's has been, then and now, a lone voice.
Footnote:
1. Myths for Sale, Seminar Dec. 1974. Violence And Responsibility, written for a Ritwik
Ghatak Retrospective, 1975. Invocation, 1976, unpublished. Ideological Ironies, paper
written for a seminar on Arts & the People, sponsored by United Education Foundation, 1976. The
Media Police, International film festival of India, 1978. Notes Towards An Aesthetic of
Cinema Sound, journal of Arts & Ideas, No. V, 1983.

.70.

Myths for S ale

THE CINEMA for us is the most important of all the arts. The mechanical
reproduction of physical reality - after centuries of frustrated tentatives should have, once and for all, freed us from both its narrow fixed
perspective and from the nebulous other-worldliness of art. Instead, here,
as elsewhere, it has delivered the twin enemies of the people: a barely
masked elitism and the naked force of an under-developed market. Hitler
and Leni Reifenstahl discovered that the triumph of the will could be
engineered through the lie of the camera. Here, we have made of
photographic verisimilitude the medium of lumpen fantasy. The logic of
"mass communication" and its opposite, "elitist withdrawal", both borrowed from a country which controls 70% of the world's resources, is
supposed to extend across a nation that has yet to electrify more than 60%
of its villages. We want to communicate with a "mass" after having cut off
all contact with the people - confirm the audiences in their repressed
consciousness, continue to use the language developed through centuries of
oppression, made more powerful by technology.
A local monopolist, and others who envy him - including coffee-house
militants - ask grandiloquently, for whom does one make commodities
( films)? The answer should be obvious, especially since those who ask the
question seem to amass the fortunes themselves. A surplus is extracted
from the masses with whom they claim to communicate. Innocently, left
intellectuals join the chorus, demand instant messages - the plan of a
struggle without the prolonged process of arming the people with
consciousness and weapons.
On the other hand, artists engaged in the moral pursuit of the "finer"
things, with obvious access to the country's resources, condemn the
committed to heroic suicide. People who did not know that the CPI(M-L)
existed consistently held up the examples of so-called "Naxalites". The
distortions of the bourgeois press are unblushingly used by those who wish
to produce objects of mass consumption or objects d'art. We seem to be
moving to the mystery of the commodity form before establishing the
relations of production that produce it. When we look at ourselves in the
image of the West, we associate Indianness with products of feudal hands
and feudal minds. The western man's notion of India is derived from
handloom fabrics, the sitar and "transcendence" in various forms. The
object d'art and the "mass-movie" alike alienate men from themselves - to
invest their creativity in a totality outside.

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Myths for Sale

For good reasons, therefore, we continue to congratulate ourselves on

our myth-making capacity. Our ancients often chose to disguise their
knowledge in religious myths. Today, as religion is replaced by other forms
of culture, new myths are made so palpable that they can replace actuality
itself.
The basic contradiction of the cinematographic form arises from its
capacity of replacing the object of its "contemplation" by its image. The
commercial cinema has used it to create not only dreams that substitute
reality, but its commodity gods known as stars. Even montage has, with the
best of intentions, led to the necessary juxtaposition of icons or signs which
totally replace reality instead of evoking or analysing it, thus creating a
structure close to myth with all its falsehood. The avant garde experiments,
borrowing a syntax from the other arts, have merely been attempts at
achieving a kind of respectability for the cinema.
Well intentioned as these experiments may be, they are a repetition of
failures demonstrated earlier on in Europe, particularly towards the end of
the silent era. But in our country, literariness or painterliness and,
surprisingly, even theatricality, when compared to the normal orgies of the
vulgar imagination, still pass for good cinema. The cinema has indeed
incorporated into its language elements from all the parallel arts but only
after having transformed them into its specific means (of spatializing time
and temporalizing space). In fact, after neo-realism, it had gone through a
complete phase of rejecting all syntax - as a reaction, undoubtedly - to
achieve a kind of savage lyricism. Onomatopoeia was not a cinematic device
for the French New Wave. It was its vocabulary. Its syntax - where it had
articulated any - was that of the American "B" film.
The theory that there exists a Cartesian polarity between arbitrary
(aesthetic) signs and total realism necessarily led to quantitative conclusions and meaningless oppositions: the proliferation of detail as against
metaphysical truth (where quality cannot be seized), the fluidity of miseen-scene as against the metre of montage, the existential tension of
suspense (Hitchcock) as against the tragic release from pity and fear.
The terms of reference were purely idealist: the human being
unsocialized and nature untransformed. Or, when socialized and transformed, superficially so. This attitude necessarily tended either to exclude
syntax progressively (realism) or to impose it as totally arbitrary
structures, which could therefore yield only transcendental or socially
insignificant meaning. If in practice some of the East European avant-garde
adopted the same methods, it may not necessarily be a reflection of their
societies but the apathy into which materialists are driven by the
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bombardment of questions posed ahistorically.

The "dialectic of pure reason" necessarily led to the belief that in the
cinema, nature would imitate art (Andre Bazin). The intervention of the
artist had to be asocial and, therefore, there is the intervention of God
(derived from Bresson) or revealed by minimising the intervention
( derived from Rossellini). What started as a healthy reaction against facism
( particularly in Italy), because it spoke in terms of abstract morality, had to
degenerate into a passive acceptance of the evil by proposing metaphysical
solutions. Here is proof of the fact that fascism is but a logical extension of
the bourgeois ethic. Morality, linked to the abstract rights of man rather
than the concretizations of specific historical freedoms, has to lead to
notions of natural superiority ( of a race, caste or a class ) and can, at best, be
benevolently merciful to lower beings who have, however, to continue to
perform their original functions!
When, however, montage - or the juxtaposition of "linguistic"
(arbitrary ) elements - was discovered to be inevitable at every stage of filmmaking, an attempt was made to reconcile the materialist dialectic of
Eisenstein to the anarchic flux of nature. This resulted in fruitful changes,
gradually ripening into a break with passivity. But, so long as it remained
rooted in philosophical speculation, it could at best express impotent moral
indignation and, in the absence of any concrete solution, offer suicide or
undirected violence as an escape from the human condition. Godard's
trolley shots, as he claimed, were acts of morality as they exposed characters
in the process of living, or of tragic lyricism as they went past landscapes
( Vivre sa Vie). To explore essence through existence. It is only after he had
stopped "clowning for the bourgeoisie" (said in an interview to Le Monde)
that he discovered the significantly commentative use of movement - the
dehumanization in a large, impersonal department store, (Tout va Bien).
Formal considerations have to be linked not merely to immutable,
perennial ideation or subject matter nor to naturalistic detail, but to specific
historic circumstance. Otherwise it will have no content. It will be a
narrative of events (with some rhetoric thrown in for appearing "left", if
found necessary) or a juxtaposition of empty abstractions, meaningful in a
period gone by. It is not surprising that even directors with predominantly
"spiritualist" pre-occupations should abandon them for a more material life.
Rossellini moves towards the didactic and shows how the bourgeoisie
collaborated with the monarch to imprison the aristocracy ( La prise du pouvoir
de Louis XIV). Bresson admits sociology not only into human relations (les
blousons noirs in Au Hasard Balthasar) but into form itself (the scene at th
Museum of Modern Art in line Femme Douce). Godard makes a complete
73

DOSSIER:
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Myths for Sale

break with his "clowning" and almost with the visual image. With his newly
found commitment, he wants to learn the cinema all over again and is as
awkward as a child taking his first steps.
Have we made our first steps, one wonders, towards a cinema that
could lift itself from the morass of underdevelopment. One can say with
some pride that there have been instances where one has glimpsed far, open
horizons. But, by and large, the stranglehold of the commercial cinema still
has a suffocating grip. Even on those of us for whom "economic viability" is
not a primary condition. Those who speak in terms of compromise - or its
denial - are being cynical or choosing not to recognise the objective
situation.
Individualism always requires the support of false idealism and
morality. If freedom is the recognition of necessity, to speak of "absolute"
truths, dialectics reduced to formal principles, or a perennial humanity is to
fetter oneself with the same ideology that the ruling classes use in their
more savagely naked forms - the artistic objects of mass consumption. The
Dara Singh mythological may be reserved for the rural and semi-urban
markets. But the other classes need their own icons to worship. We have
already observed how a set of cinematographic signs, even in far more
developed societies, can degenerate into mythical constructions in which
the container of content takes the place of what it contains (the thing
signified). Thereby it becomes sufficient unto itself, content becomes
transcendental, the argument tautological, the action ritualistic. Such
forms are needed for upper-class consumption, the classes who are most at
home when they speculate - at the stock market or on the universe.
The less sophisticated myths of sentimental alleviation are designed for
the consumption of the working and lower middle-classes. Since they most
need the cinema as a substitute for life - their conditions of work being the
most dehumanising - the bulk of investment goes into films that can
successfully distort their fantasies of sex and violence. One is almost certain
that, if left alone to their real fantasies, they could be far healthier. Perhaps
they would recognize the actuality of the violence daily practised on them
and the constant denial of human contact to which they are subject inclusive of the emotional, of the sexual and of the increasing possibility of
collective co-operation. But the fight sequence is as necessary to divert one
from the fundamental nature of violence in society as is the voyeuristic
cabaret to degrade at least half of humanity. Combine this with a rebellion
against authority which ends up in the humanising of the parent-villain or
the employer-villain without changing the nature of the exploitative
relationships.
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Censorship policies which have tied down the members of the Board to
seemingly absurd irrationalities help, in fact, to sustain this obscenely
unreal world. An anti-communal film could easily be denied a certificate for
fear of arousing religious passions among the majority. Allusions to the
caste system are permitted only if the lower castes are not mentioned by
their generic name. Even if you wish to condemn the orthodox reactionary
bigot who can only refer to the lower castes as "shudras", you will not be
allowed to use the pejorative word. You may, however, use the appellation
"brahmin", taken from the same hierarchical structure! Such contradictions
can only exist in a "secular democracy" which allows you to swear by the
Koran, the Bible or the Geela.

"That the song divine is sung for the upper-classes by the brahmins and
only through them for others, is clear. We hear from the mouth of Krsna
himself (G. 9.32): 'For those who take refuge in Me, be they even of the
sinful breeds such as woman, vaisyas, and sudras.' That is, all women and all
men of the working- and producing classes are defiled by their very birth
though they may in after-life be freed by their faith in the god who
degrades them so casually in this one. Not only that, the god himself had
created such differences (G. 4.13): 'The four-caste (-class) division has
been created by Me'; this is proclaimed in the list of great achievements."
(From Myth and Reality by D. D. Kosambi.)
These texts may indeed be worthy of study. As are Pericles' "Funeral
Oration" or Aristotle's "Politics". But to revere them is to suggest deviously
that democracy will be achieved through slave labour or that a modern
society could realise its goals through inequality. The children of God (not
shudras) will inherit the earth so long as their masters inherit its wealth.
Censorship confirms the extension of assigned social roles not only
along caste and class lines but along the lines of family functions and sex as
well. The heights of feminine heroism are still found in a bovine version of
motherhood. Even as the country starves. It is far removed from the vitality
of Kali or the other fertility goddess images.
The docile heroine must look like a whore but must neither bare her
body in its raw splendour nor show her human desire. The censorship laws
allow cabarets which fragment the female body into cut-out objects for male
acquisitiveness. The nude, however, is dangerous, for she can be a whole
person with her own subjectivity. When will we learn, once again, to take
pride in ourselves as human beings? If not like the athletes of the city-state,
can we not restore the graceful line reserved for our goddesses of Elephanta
and Bahrut to the humans in whose image they were made? Before we can
do that, we will have to change our ideology transmitted through myth.
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Because ideas of masculinity and femininity in these metonymical

constructs are also worked out in irreconcilable opposites. Contradiction
without a possibility of actual synthesis, since it denies change, movement.
According to the mythical system, the female has to prepare everything
for consumption, including food and herself. And the male has to produce.
Men have to project and women withdraw. Right down to the last detail
where masculinity may allow smoking and femininity forbid it. When such
detail - or in the more sophisticated films, formal elements stand
irreversibly for concepts - replace meaning itself, one does not have to wait
for ideas to degenerate into ritual rather than praxis. The language of myth
by its very nature of replacing the symbol for its content spreads false
consciousness: the more vulgarly sensate form in the commercial cinema
and the more abstract ahistorical form in the "art" cinema.
The dichotomy between commercial and art cinema is as spuriously
created by the exploitative system as is the one between public and private
money. One feeds the masses with opium and then one complains that art is
inaccessible to them. One extracts the surplus value of labour and then
divides it arbitrarily into public and private money. Recently some "socially
committed" critics have called the few worthwhile experiments sponsored
by the F.F.C. a waste of public money. Radicals in this country often do not
seem to recognise how capital is amassed or profits made. They seem to be
concerned more about the taxpayer's money than about how he made his
money in the first place!
The government itself has been sufficiently pressurized into believing
that the F.F.C. is behaving like Oliver Twist. In recent times, it had dared to
ask for more. The F.F.C. and its Board of Directors may not resemble the
emaciated Oliver. But if the present stagnation continues (it has financed
one film in the last 11 months and may well be in the process of rejecting
scripts which have potential artistic merit without being "safe", commercial
propositions), the hopes that it had raised by its courage may fall. The
reasons for its short-lived dynamism may be found in the half-hearted
reformism of our ruling classes. Pushed back from this reformatory,
therefore, the cineastes will go back into the underworld of smuggling
Fagins who have built India's comprador cinema upon its major port towns.
A confirmed plagiarist speaks of some of F.F.C.'s significant products as
third-rate copies of third-rate foreign films. A globe-trotting socialite
whose sole claim to be a critic is her access to people and places (and who
ecstasizes over Manoj Kumar's "Shor") aids the big sharks by her learned
associations. A self-confessed amateur, applauded for his bold themes,
speaks of films as "formal exercises" when they are not in his own
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blundering idiom. Others disguise their concern for financial return (on
both "public" and "private" money!) in terms of mass communication. Yet
another old hand at bringing humanism to the box office in outrageous
costumes advises the government to nationalise cinema houses before it
finances films which make an attempt at speaking a radical language.
Utopian ideas always subvert their own declared purpose. Even in the
unlikely event of nationalisation, given the honesty of our bureaucrats and
the socialism of our system, one can visualise what new monsters will
emerge. Some of these suggestions and comments may, indeed, be wellintentioned, made by "innocents" who believe in the image that they
project, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to sift out the cinema's
enemies from its friends.
The atmosphere is ridden with opportunism. Gossip and facile
opinionating, not analytical criticism, is the order of the day. Theoretical
debate is possible only in organized forums free of fear and personalised
mud-slinging. We have not even begun to come together to solve our
practical problems. The State governments have yet to exempt films of
artistic merit or the cinema houses that screen them from entertainment
tax. A film-maker who conceives in colour has to sign bonds of over a lakh of
rupees with the Ministry of Trade and Commerce to be able to make prints.
In this regard, I. K. Gujral has made an encouraging statement of policy.
When it will be implemented is anyone's guess.
In the meantime, a wage freeze is expected to bring down prices while
black money circulates freely. A Marxist film-maker speaks of poverty
being the same through the ages and depicts an antagonistic contradiction
between the lumpen proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie! We pass from
gimmick to gesture. Red is the favourite colour of rhetoric. Nostalgia for
unity, albeit heirarchical in form and matter, is the over-riding content. We
move from long shot to close-up around stars or other idols and mandalas.
Cezanne may have dreamt of the cinema when he shifted view-points or
wished that his canvas could reach humbler folk. Eisenstein may have
realised his dream among the Soviets. While we move ahead and up the
Himalayas from our tryst with destiny. Like Yudhishthir, anxious to know
and preserve the truth, we may ask why Arjuna had to suffer so much even
after the great battle. Krishna's answer was as usual evasive and capable of
all kinds of imaginative interpretation: the hero's cheek bones were too
high. Draupadi resented this slighting reference to the beauty of her loved
one. But she and the other heroes and heroines are falling by the way-side
out of exhaustion and starvation or shot in the back for desperate acts of
courage. And we will continue to pursue the truth with our faithful dogs:
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mass communication, perennial subjects, medieval Indian aesthetics,

unchanging poverty. Or the more sensate forms of myth: Eurasian rubber
dolls in ballets of violence, orgies of fragmented sexuality, the magical
change of heart in the prodigal son, or authoritarian father; the change of
image in the sex object into a lactating machine.

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Violence & Responsibility

PEOPLE OFTEN ASK what we, his students, have inherited from Ritwik
Ghatak. The problem, here, is that they have not realised what it means to
work in a continuous line of tradition. Our elders prefer imitation to
development. They would prefer that learning still be restricted to the
feudal mode. The hereditary principle may be removed but the young must
copy what they have picked up from the master-craftsman. It is the most
certain method of retaining the status quo; of endorsing the work of
opportunistic mediocrity. In an atmosphere where our cultural attitudes
and artefacts have been identified with the objectification of effete feudal
Brahminism and European humanism inflicted on us by the colonials,
Ritwikda's work is the violent assertion of our identity. It is the cry of the
dying girl in Meghe Dhhaka Tara which echoes through the hills, our right to
live.
The division of Bengal which was responsible for her tragedy was only
the immediate symptom of a broader division. The impetus, not only to the
obvious narrative content to his films, but to their very language, was given
by the tremendous splintering of the social system, of its values, while a
facade of a hoary culture was still being maintained. The contradictions of a
society that could have modernized itself after attaining formal independence are the prime cause of a deeper division. The middle-class is seen at
the unsteady apex of the inverted triangle, brought about by the three-way
division central to the structure of Meghe Dhhaka Tara. The feminine
principle, borrowed from our earlier lower level of materialist culture, also
suffers the split into the three principal women characters - the cruel
mother, the sensual daughter and the preserving and nurturing heroine.
The triangular compositions and the multiple allusions to Durga on the rich
sound-track reinforce the pattern.
To those critics who are indifferent to this method of structuring,
Ritwikda's work may appear melodramatic. It is true that he has combined
elements of tragedy such as "the chorus" and the rigorously worked out
inevitability of the scenario, to make his statement. However, he has freed
the form from the classical supernatural and the later romantic individualistic concepts by replacing Hamlet's "particular fault" by socio-historical
forces. The pessimism of "fatalism" is countered by the last shot to restore
hope. This could only be done in its powerful manner because class
generalisation is present right through the film.
The hope obtains an objective reality precisely because the "melo79

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Violence & Responsibility

dramatic" techniques are inverted from their basically petty-bourgeois

position to that of a strong, vigorous explosion of life assertion. The
"melodrama" is clearly identified as a form by the expressionist use of the
wide-angle lens in close-ups at important points of transition or through the
clearly obvious division of dramatic and visual planes. There is no tendency
either to render the physical reality itself "pathetic" as our school of pettybourgeois "realism" does or to make that reality more palatable through
decorative and sentimental composition. The sound-track as well is
unashamedly commentative. It is not there merely to enhance the illusion of
reality and thereby to present a false catharsis through unthinking
identification. In fact, in Ritwikda's films, no shots are more eloquent than
the circular panoramics which speak of the indifference of nature to human
suffering and conflict.
The characters may invest the landscape with their feelings. The young
lover in Subarnarekha finds the landscape beautiful because the discovery of
his desire makes him feel so, and he is too shy to confess it directly. The
heroine of Meghe Dhhaka Tara may dream of freedom in the expanse of the
hills but these very images are turned objectively against the subjective
feeling of pathos. The subjectivity and the lyricism of poetry is retained
without the most pernicious form of falsification achieved by directors who
manipulate minds through cathartic realism. Whenever, indeed, the
landscape is made to reinforce the feeling, it is done with such violence - the
platform scene in Subarnarekha - that it can only be seen as the intervention
of the director, not reality as it is. There are no lamps flickering
"realistically" in symbolic sympathy with a dying girl. Nor are there
characters "storming" one's life with elaborately detailed sound and fury.
The falsification of such symbolisation is often justified on grounds of
"communication". In other words, because the feelings of the characters or
their formalisation by a large section of our audiences is still struggling to
find a genuine method of meeting present-day reality, the"communicators"
unhesitatingly exploit this regression. Thereby they negate the function of
the artist, who living and performing in a technological society and a
collective medium, deliberately avoids bringing this new consciousness to
his audience for fear of affecting the sale of his commodity. For these
symbolisations not only violate the medium but are in stark contradiction
for one who has experienced the partial conquest of nature. A man who has
travelled by an aeroplane, in other words a man who has taken advantage of
modern meteorological techniques, is being dishones when he signifies
pathos or sentiment through a storm. On the other hand, let us examine the
symbolisation which transforms tradition by maintaining a close link and
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yet changes its meaning and arms us with new consciousness.
Thus, for example, Ritwik Ghatak uses what were earlier merely
religious symbols. But he secularises them through juxtaposition - for
example the Bahurupia in Subarnarekha and even the deserted airport are both
"archetypes". In a society which is only now trying to break away from
feudal relations it is inevitable that secularisation be one of the foremost
functions of the artist. The European Renaissance clearly demonstrated this
principle. "Pamos" is reduced, passion is replaced by perspective. Nature is
objectified. Even the creatures and characters of Christian religion and
mythology are sensualised. In our own country when mercantile capital
evolved through commodity production for a brief while after the Buddhist
revolution, art along the trade routes (e.g., in the caves) demonstrated its
rationality and its serene sensuousness. Unfortunately, the low-level of
technology could not sustain the Mauryan centralisation necessary for the
protection of trade-routes against warring chieftains. The logic of the selfsufficient villages led to their domination by narrow, local un-productive
astrologers and samantas to take over power. Thought no longer led to
material change but hair-splitting argument. Our sensuousness no longer
retained the security and satisfaction of activity. Instead it substituted the
frenetic orgiastic ritual. Reality became over-burdened. Form did not
materialise into a lively means of exchange, a language, but was an end in
itself. Structure was decomposed into the proliferation of detail.
It is therefore frightening to see how the total realism invented by
world capitalism's last ideologists is being combined with our medieval
tastes for detail or hair-splitting formalism. This should have been a period
for construction in every sense of the word. But even some self-styled
committed critics are content with the crass distortions of the commercial
cinema. They have forgotten the fundamental meaning of montage, i.e.,
that construction, not isolated passages, shots, dialogue or the like, makes
for content. They seem to believe that progressive art should be bought like
soap. They are therefore willing to endorse the humanism which dilutes
class contradiction in "eternal" moral sentimental relations to exploit not
only the labour of the working-class but to wash away their residual
violence and creativity in tears, blood, or the humours of refined sentiment.
Ritwik Ghatak had proceeded to draw attention to the real problems by
the very violence of his audio-visual structure; the nature of symbolisation,
the wide-angled lens, the whip-lash on the sound-track. His ruggedness
emanates from his personality. We have, of course, to find means that are
derived directly from our environment and individuated from our
temperament. And, hopefully, to carry forward from where he leaves off. I
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Violence & Responsibility

remember that my introduction to his work was through Suharnarekha. By

then he had broken up the "melodramatic" narrative sufficiently to
approach the epic form. The epic was implicit even in his earlier films,
specially Meghe Dhhaka Tara and Komal Gandhar. Already the narrative was
interspersed with song, with elements of structure which were allusive, not
affective. Predominantly, however, they had been made in the dramatic
mode with the abstraction of music, poetry and didactic reference freeing
them from being the extended organic metaphor that drama implies. In
Subarnarekha, the dramatic element disintegrates, its cliches are turned against
itself; the traumatic prostitution of our culture is exemplified as Sanskrit
becomes part of La Dolce Vi/sinoneof the world's poorest cities. We are made
to face our self-destructive incestuous longings which are otherwise so
delicately camouflaged by both our sophisticated and vulgar film-makers.
The sophisticate camouflages by presenting a formally created void,
through signs that negate each other or, at the other extreme, by recourse
to a superabundant realism. Both deny the active intervention (even its
possibility) of the artist and the audience in reality. They lull him into the
acceptance of a reality which is apparently objective but which can never be
so, precisely because it is dissociated from the very creator of that objectivity - social man. The creator in the vulgar film is, quite literally, God or
his surrogates, natural law, human nature - external, immutable,
omnipresent, transcending history.
But the collapse of Ritwikda's hero is also the breaking up of the values
created by our world. If he could see the golden bank of the river, it is
because he could once again be responsible, see the significance of his acts. The
primary role of cinema is also to signify, to develop a language which leads to
rational action, not to fascist incitement nor the emasculation of abstract
"moral" or metaphysical individual salvation. In the early '60s, when I had
first come into serious contact with the cinema, I had naively asked Ritwikda
how he reconciled significant form with photographic realism. He had
merely smiled in acknowledgement of the problem. Its parametres were not
then specified, even in the cinema of the more advanced countries. Today
these problems of language are more clearly defined. We are making a
beginning in cinema. If Ritwik Ghatak's films are individually incomplete
accomplishments as some critics feel, it is precisely because as a body of
work they are the most complete, the most generative. He has never cared
much to show-off his technical accomplishment, and I understand that in
his latest film, he is totally indifferent to it. But one can be relatively certain
that his work will always serve as a landmark to the young whom he loves so
well and continues to relate to his work, even to break away from it; to
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Framework n. 3 0/31
return and to move forward in uncertain areas in the spirit of the pioneer
that Ritwikda has been. The others faltered after the first few steps, having
mimicked reality they mimicked themselves.
This (Jukti, Takko ar Gappo) is a film of arguments, the story element
being incidental... Those of us who are interested in visual cinema will
find this one frightfully boring. This film is conversational andl have tried
to disallow romanticism as the only point in the art of creation. It is an
attack against me and also against others who are also a part of this life.

Ritwik Ghatak

Notes
I.

Samantas: Feudal chieftains.

.83.

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Invocation
THE CINEMA IS ON ITS DEATH-BED.
All its high priests have gathered around to chant its safe pa?sage to heaven.
Death is a ceremonial occasion. In its own way, festive. The brahmins have
to be fed. The relatives forget, for a while, their frivolous pre-occupations
and wear compassionate faces. Once they have all gone the family's
disparate members will seek the dead, each in his own corner. The cinema
will survive, resurrected in the minds of the young and the not-so-young
who seek liberty. But will they be able to act or applaud in freedom?
While violence and sex are more and more expressly forbidden,
fantasised fight-sequences and cabarets of dismembered women proliferate. The Film Finance Corporation, denied promised funds, has a recent
annual average of two-and-a-half films. The tyranny of the market is said to
provide a natural freedom. At least we learn who cannot make films here.
The workers' right to strike is compensated by the duty of the nation to
them, or vice versa. How lucky, I hear children say, echoing the liberals of
our generation, for Kista Gowd and Bhoomaiah to be tried before they were
executed. If children embarrass us, we have only ourselves to blame. Civil
liberties were an abstraction for the many, gossip columns for the few.
Absolutist, "total" revolutionary movements as unreal as the spectre of a
national liberation movement being conducted by mighty foreign powers.
The rubble of destabilisation has collected into a pyramid. Social relevance is
measured by the profit and loss, entered into account books. The procurer
of Roti, Kapda aur Makan for our unfed, unclothed, unsheltered masses
ushers in Naya Bharat.
In this promised land, what will film-makers do? Someone suggests
that their fate will be that of the poets in Plato's Republic. But we already
have "traditions" in our society, faithfully reflected, for all the distortions of
detail, emphatically realistic or outrageously melodramatic, that have
banished truth from poetry. The sentimentalisation of poverty, anarchist
rebellion or, better still, the majesty of fate, transformed into images that
deny action. Even if the heroic image has changed from the self-lacerating
Devdas, the newly-found, other-directed aggression of the middle-class
turns upon itself. The dynamic still conjures up the criminal. Revolutionary
violence is still explained away in psychological terms or purged through the
balletic fight-sequences. The ultimate aim is collaboration, as in Lang's
Metropolis, even of those who protest against the dehumanisation of the
machine. Political order emerges from progressive social entropy. It is in
84

these conditions that one may seek the supernatural in as many forms as
possible.
Metaphysical anguish, at a popular level, expresses itself in miracles. At
higher levels, perhaps unable to bear what a critic friend has called the
grittiness of existence, it looks beyond reality. The imitative realists,
because of the poverty of their structure, make the ugly personify evil and
the beautiful, good. One would have thought that by the very quality with
which realism allows processes to reveal nature, such idealisations would
automatically be avoided. But perhaps we are at the end of this Oriental
quiescence. We may yet discover amongst us Lenin's Tolstoy: a Utopian "with
critical elements capable of providing valuable material for the enlightenment of the advanced classes."
Or, soon enough, access to an Open City; open from within.
The cinema in our country, and those who shape it, have neither faced a
crisis nor fostered the togetherness of diversity. Instead it has meant to
them and their confreres of the other arts "instant recognition, money and
popularity". Durga Bhagwat has spoken of how even men of letters distort
their social role when confronted with a so-called mass media. A free (and
somewhat clumsy) translation from her presidential address to the 51st
Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Samelan reads:
"Those who wanted to enrich the mass media have ultimately
become their slaves ... They [ the authors ] forget their traditional
craft of pure writing, do not go deep into the framework of mass
media and accept their limitations of theme and content as
extensive. Crisp language, a little bit of pathos, a little humour,
titbits of incomplete information are strung together to create a
colourful form, to entertain people... An author is no longer a
thinker or an artist but becomes an entertainer...
So long as there are voices that ring as true as hers, even the exiles will take
heart. Forced to be mute, they will forge links where once they were
voyeurs. Voyeurs of the present, delighting in detail and fragmented
visions. Voyeurs of an imaginary past, positing order alienated from reality.
Voyeurs of the future, rushing towards suicide or spontaneous Utopia. In a
sense, you cannot remain on this side of the lens any longer. You may not
speak, you may know. Not the word or the icon. Nor the immediate
sensuous experience. For the observer in his act may soon find himself
changed. Like nature in primordial man, suddenly conscious of itself.
This, then, is our identity. This, our home. Here is where we work and
sleep. Five hundred and fifty million people or more. Yes, we were among
85

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Invocation

the first to count without the aid of the abacus. You, as delegate or visitor,
are most welcome, specially if we forget to send you an invitation. Bring us
the pride and impatience of your youth. At the moment, you may find us
neither wise nor playful. We are a little pre-occupied.
Ganga has washed away her sons. The child, proficient in arms, is yet to
be born.

Notes
1. Kishta Gowd and Bhoomaiah: Members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)
who were sentenced to death and hung during the Emergency.
2.

Roti Kapda Aur Makaan, literally translating as food, clothing and shelter, is also a
reference to a Hindi commercial film of that name, selling a vulgarised nationalism.

3.

Naya Bharat, translating as "new India", also a film by the same film-maker, Manoj Kumar,
in a way embodying the vulgar, exploitative idea of "Indianness".

4.

Devdas, a character from a Bengali novel by Saratchandra Chatterjee, later filmed and
suddenly elevated into a "type" characteristic of its age: a suffering, self-destructive romantic hero.

5.

51st Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Sammelan: 51st All India Marathi Literary
Conference.

.86

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The Media Police

THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION facing us today is, surely, the promise
of freedom. The autonomisation of all the government corporations, the
reconstitution of the Censor Board and its colonial regulations should not
be mere formal exercises. But, no government, however democratic its
manner of coming into power, will cede to its people rights that it has not
learnt to value itself. The promise of freedom is one that we pride ourselves
upon, of having given it to ourselves. Or is it likely that we will forget the
torture practised on our friends, our own fearful, muted voices as easily as
the previous generation forgot the homespun to develop teeth of gold?
There are signs that we are on our way to a meek new world of make
believe. The press has settled back into the comfort of its armchair,
furnished by the monopoly houses, discussing the diet and manners of the
new men in power and reserving its investigations for the horrors of the
past. Political prisoners are being asked to abjure violence without any
corresponding pledge that the police or para-military forces would not
intervene in strikes or provoke demonstrators and students to violence. The
universities are still open to uniformed men and, worse, to administrators
who relay authority. The broadcasting media continue to act as vendors of
cultural opiates. The Films Division is still paralysed by its 20-point
paralyses. The feature films divert all social and political compassion into
erotica and criminal heroics. Far more than mere legislative action would be
necessary to give content to the freedom acquired through institutional
change.
In the first place, all forms of censorship have to be aimed at the
removal of these very constraints. The position taken to formulate the
guidelines should, therefore, not be one of abstract moral principles nor of
such primitive quantification as the amount of blows given per fight
sequence or the extent of exposure of the human anatomy. The main
guidelines can make sense only if sufficient discretion is given to the people
who constitute the Board in deciding whether a particular sequence
encourages the people to think freely or leads them to a passive acceptance
of social, political, religious and economic institutions that enslave them. It
may, indeed, sound Utopian to suggest a policy which would be difficult to
implement, given the extraordinary influence of commercial cinema on
those very gentlemen who are likely to constitute the Board. However, any
other formulation would defeat the purpose of any institution meant to
defend the people against the violation of their freedom and their culture.
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The Media Police

So far, the Censor Board and its sister institution, the Film Advisory Board
(which certifies short films for compulsory exhibition ) have played a role in
complete opposition to their original purpose. The Film Advisory Board was
meant to protect the viewers from wrong and misleading information.
Instead, it killed the documentary in India by allowing only the tendentious
to pass through its clutches. What is more, it took upon itself an aesthetic
burden. In a recent film, they are said to have remarked that the close-ups,
showing the corrosive effects of a disease should be eliminated, having
found them too horrifying. And the poor film-maker was meant to motivate
his audience against precisely the causes that produced such disfigurement!
They are said to force a change of pace and rhythm of almost every film that
goes to seek their approval. Yet they did not demur when a portion of a
newsreel suddenly burst into colour to cover the rising political star who has
now burnt himself out.
The censors have, over the years, covered themselves with glory from
their imperial origins, the British having first imposed this draconian
measure. Thus, the police and the administration remain the most dedicated
servants of our society even in the most "realistic" of our films. National
"leaders" are idealised beyond human recognition. Violence against the evil
in one's own class is balletised through fight sequences, with the kind eye of
the censors allowing slum children to fancy themselves as brave and
handsome as Amitabh, growing more heroic from one lumpen scrap to
another. But, if you happen to suggest that there exists violence between
classes or castes, you would be accused of conspiracy against the state and
society. Here, even the word has turned too violent. You may refer to the
upper castes by their generic names - Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Banias. But
even the most orthodox fanatic may not utter the word, Sudra - in the
censor's version of India. All authority, religious, political, economic and,
above every other, that of kinship, is revealed to have a heart of gold after it
has rid you and itself of the evil force of circumstance. Social destiny, it
would seem, has its own logic. If you have any fight in you, take it out on the
evil within yourself or your class. Never direct at the institutions that
perpetuate exploitation, the violence generated by them. Individuals may be
transformed but let the family, property and state alone. Is it, perhaps, a
way of admitting that nothing has changed since we declared ourselves
free?
The new Minister for Information and Broadcasting has promised to
make the necessary changes in the governmental organisations. So far, as
far as the press is concerned, he has scrupulously kept his word. But the
press itself and the reading public remains hesitant, unable to make much of
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its status. The fear is that the controls of the market will now take over from
the controls of a state subservient to the dictates of international agencies.
Recently, a journalist candidly admitted that, during the Emergency,
only those newspapers whose proprietors permitted it, could stand up and
speak freely. Few journals have men like Romesh Thaper of the Seminar at
their head. Or a trust, like the one that controls the Economic and Political
Weekly, which would allow policies to be boldly decided by its editors. It is
clear that the mode of ownership and control in journalism must change.
This can happen only at the initiative of the intelligentsia and the journalists
themselves. But the question itself is not being raised.
If the leading information channels are controlled by the monopolies,
the most effective of all the arts, the cinema, is in the hands of a bewildering
class of "operators". The cinema has become, in our country, an extension of
the flesh trade. It has been allowed to produce a culture of unabashed
voyeurism. The cabaret is only one aspect of this perversion. Just as it
degrades women and makes genuine sexual contact impossible, the
proliferation of mother goddesses after Santosho Maa alienates people
from their own creativity, to wait upon superstition and miracle. It is not
surprising that a population forced into a destitute existence from childhood
should accept such spiritual deprivation. On the other hand, our elite still
sticks to several curious versions of Brahmanic non-duality, denying all
contradiction through the Perennial and the Static, proclaiming their
psychological "need" as the original Indian metaphysics. Their insecurity
makes them take the postures of omnipotence and omnipresence. Born out
of the incapacity to change reality, the culture that they produce reduces
truth and beauty to a matter of proportion, of profit and loss or of
technological servitude. From the Hindu revival, we have inherited a moral
code which justifies its own violation at every opportune instant. The basis
of all authoritarian societies has been the denial of conflict, of problems.
Here, our censors, our film-makers and our text books are all in accord: deny
the existence of strife and replace it by the idyllic or the empty tautologies of
formalist arrangements, claiming philosophical ancestries.
We can make a tradition come alive only by negating it. Not by axial
opposites nor by raising standards of different colours. But by example. By
living openly, freely and in simple, everyday confrontations with our
hallowed institutions of the family, the class, the state. After all, we meet
their manifestations everywhere - at home, on the street and in the lecture
room and factory. One can enjoy the fact of not reading a book or seeing a
film which makes one into a spiritual, political and sexual voyeur. From this
refusal, we can move to the direct celebration of our faculties. Voyeurs
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The Media Police

replace the act by a fragmented image. We could replace the image by the
act. At that stage, we will need no censors. There will be neither spectators
nor a spectacle. The precipice between pornography and art could become a
runway to a flight of lively imagination.

Notes
1.

This essay was written very soon after Indira Gandhi's government collapsed after the Emergency
and the new Janata Party had come into power.

2.

T w e n t y Point paralyses: during the Emergency the Films Division had started a system of
short propaganda featurettes involving well-known film-makers. These were to be mainly around
Mrs Gandhi's Twenty Point Programme.

3.

S u d r a - untouchable, the lowest caste.

4.

Santoshi Maa: a film made in the early '70s about an obscure Mother Goddess suddenly
became one of the most successful Indian films ever made. Going to the film became a ritual, and
the actress who played the goddess was herself treated like a goddess incarnate. Even when the film
was shown on television, the ritual of breaking coconuts before the deity was commonly done before
TV sets.

Framework n. 30/31

Notes for an A esthetic

of Cinema Sound
As life slowly climbed Ihe ladder of evolution, one sense after another
arrived and developed. Hearing was the last to arrive, and the last to attain
a state bordering on perfection.
We have acquired the habit of giving the greater part of our attention
to what we see, leaving a mere fraction to what we hear.

James Jeans (1937)

BOTH THE SENSES of sight and sound, it may be noted, arose out of the need
to perceive movement; to locate an object, and one's own relationship to it;
to gauge the pressures at work; to achieve points of equilibrium and to move
in a controlled manner not only from static point to static point, as we
seemed to imagine in our classical civilisations, but to find in these different
vibrations, and differences of pressure, the vitality of being itself.
"When does one say that a piece of material lives. When it
continuously does something, moves . . . "
The atomic physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, quoted by Fritz Winckel. Winckel
goes on to add that
" . . . impulses to movement are, for example, electrical or chemical
potential differences. When they are equalised, the tendency to
form a chemical bond ceases: temperatures become equalised
through heat transfer. Thermodynamic equilibrium results in a
condition of constant rest (of maximum entropy), a condition
which is precisely: death. From the physical standpoint, disorder is
continuously created out of a condition of order. Nature strived for
a condition of ideal disorder...
And again Schrodinger
"The trick by which an organisation can keep its place on a rather
high level of order consists in reality of a continuous absorption of
order out of the surrounding world."
Thus Music;

.90.

Music is perhaps the most highly developed sensate function of human

understanding.
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Notes for an Aesthetic of Cinema Sound

One can begin to speak of the aesthetics of sound only in relation to

music, because it is this that provides the most fundamental expression of
the states of being and of acting in a continuously impinging disorder.
It is possible to read speech, to make sense of words one has never
heard, as signs that refer to a content for a state of being or of action.
As for incidental and atmospheric sounds in the cinema, they lie
between
The organised sounds (music) drifting into entropy and Contextual Sounds, (speech)
The rest is silence.
Yet silence, from which everything was originally supposed to begin,
does not exist in an absolute sense. "The soundtrack invented silence" says
Robert Bresson, and this is perhaps true in a far deeper sense than even he
meant it. On the most obvious level, silence in music relates to space
indirectly. In the cinema, on the other hand, it relates to space in movement. In
music, it relates to the sustaining of a note, to reverberation, to absorption
by the spatial enclosures, producing, transmitting, reflecting, and receiving
the sound. In the cinema all this and more. In fact, cinema may or may not
relate to the spaces which produce and receive sound.
It is the arbitrariness of silence, created both by the sounds, the music,
the speech and its juxtaposition with the visual imagery, changing in tone,
line and colour that articulates silence further. For this perhaps a referencepoint could be the discontinuities of sound in the scene where the heroine of
Subarnarekha kills herself off-screen.
Neither the spoken word nor music can work in such discontinuity.

Framework n. 30/31
who has worked in the cinema - I include those who actively see the cinema
-that there is a great deal of overlap between all our categories.
In the development of almost all traditions of music, at any rate, the
speech and the recitative has always been closely related to changes of
frequency, if not the motive force. Many of the classical languages - and
perhaps some modern languages - had developed meters from pitch and
frequency variations rather than stress. In fact the Khayalgayaki, a system of
music we are all familiar with, may be recognised as the highest form of the
speech-music continuum.
The absence of rigid notations, experienced by us today as a near
impossibility, along with the apparent semantic poverty of its words, has
perhaps made it possible for us to come nearer to what James Jeans
conjectures to be the music of the future: " . . . a continuous scale in which
every interval can be made perfect." The simplest example can come from
the infinite variations upon the Bhairavi. But closer examination may reveal
that we approach it even in pentatonic ragas like the Bhoop.
For Helmholtz (1877) from whom all modern studies of the sensation
of the tone, and the theory of music, begin, a continuous scale was
unimaginable - at least its understanding was impossible. For Winckel
(1939 ), it is only in the context of disorderly sound movement that order
arises. And music already begins for him to link itself with indeterminacy.
It seems clearer than ever before that notations are a mere approximation.
Since shrutis have to be heard, we should only strive to name
approximations, not absolutes.

The smallest unit of the spoken word in any language is the allophone.
In specific languages, it is the specific manner of continuously linking of
allophones that constitutes a word or even a nonsense syllable.

Yet it is heartening to find that it is the search for precision that yields
to flexibility. And vice versa, that it is the flexible language structure which
is meaningful.

An isolated note cannot be perceived as music. If it is held for very long

it may not be perceived at all. An isolated note is no different in meaning and
perception than what we have just cited as an example of discrete sounds in
silence.

Heartening for every artist who wishes to place himself in a tradition

and yet to innovate, to individuate.

The silence of John Cage, or the pure frequency of the computer, if it is

music, is so in a special sense which corresponds more closely with the
function of speech, of context.
Yet I am sure that it does seem to you, as it seems to me or to anyone
92

It seems to me that in the use of sound, the cinema has only opened up
great possibilities without realising them.
When Bresson speaks of the evocation achieved by sound, he is often
still speaking of the visual images it can conjure up as against the visual
images that are concretely present. When Godard speaks of the destruction
of the images, his form becomes anarchic - subservient to speech. And yet
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Notes for an Aesthetic of Cinema Sound

they, including Ghatak, have gone about the furthest so far in the
juxtaposition and superposition of text, sound and music.
When Bresson asserts that the eye is less attentive than the ear, he is
speaking of a condition when the spectator is attentive at all! For in the
West, the twin enemies of the development of sound in cinema have been
realism (note the unnecessary, unimaginative, recourse to music in the best
of neo-realistic work of Rossellini, De Sica) and the theatre (the privileged,
synchronous word). Even today despite the most sophisticated mixing
equipment available, you can see the dips that take place the moment
characters project dialogue. In India it is this same expressionist realist
theatrical tradition that has deafened our ears to sound in films.
Our epic theatre not only used music as part of its narration, but had
linked itself to what we clearly find as a correspondence with music in the
gesture and the use of verbal imagery.
In koodiyettom, Draupadi's lotus eyes, touched by kajal, could find a
myriad means of expression through the employment of a few basic modes.
The curvatures of sculpture find a unity in our aesthetic with the melodic
lines that lead to a point of rest {nyasa).
It is this epic unity that we seek today, which would include in it the
theories of causation and of history that have shaken us from our refined
slumber...
It is chronology, not narrative, that we have to abandon.

Notes
1.

Khayal Gayaki: a form of classical music born from the earlier religious dhrupad and taking
in several traditions from folk to Sufi traditions; it emphasised the primacy of synthesis, between
rhythm, raag (the configuration of notes) and the poetic content.

2.

Bhairavi: a raga employing the continuous complete scale.

3.

Bhoop: a pentatonic raga, involving the fewest notes possible from the scale.

4.

Shrutis, the microtones evoked through a certain kind of movement between notes. Theoretically
the overtones in between the two notes, there are by one version 22 shrutis between two notes, but
practice demonstrates actually a continuous scale.

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Ideological Ironies
IT IS IRONICAL, to say the least, that the cinema should continue to find its
place along with radio and television among the so-called mass media. It
speaks of a widespread ignorance, if you will pardon my saying so, that a
highly developed language should be confused with media which are
primarily means of transmission. Secondly, in India, at any rate, only the
radio can claim for itself the appelation of a mass medium. Because of the
advantages the radio has in its relatively cheap and ready availability,
specially after transistorization, it has been the most efficient instrument of
information and a means of transmission, which has made even classical
music, once the preserve of the temple and court culture, available to a large
audience. Television has had much too short a history in our country and
may play a significant role only in the future. The cinema, on the other
hand, has a long tradition in our country, however perverted, and has been
beset with problems which are totally dissimilar to the problems of the socalled mass media. These problems cover the full range from the system of
finance available to the possibility of actual and spurious mass participation
and, therefore, of a sociologically based aesthetic. In fact, unless we wish
deliberately to distort matters or to practise an ideology of confused
rhetoric, I propose that we drop terms like the "mass media" and "mass
communication", much abused as they are not only in relation to the cinema
but to the radio and TV transmission systems. We would thereby avoid
spurious generalization and come to terms with problems of aesthetics and
sociology which are relevant to the practice of the arts and to the active
participation in them of individuals and classes.
At the centre of a valid socio-aesthetic investigation would be the
qualitative and historical changes brought about by the interaction of
language with reality. By language is meant the juxtaposition of thematic
and formal elements, arising out of a society moving towards a higher stage
of organization.
The cineaste, unlike other artists, is doubly alienated. The direct
transformation of nature is now superceded by technological intervention.
His participation in commodity production is of necessity far more complete
than a painter's or a musician's. The participation of the audience in his
work also takes place through the system of commodity distribution. With
the result that people are often forced to consume films as they would
consume Coca Cola. It is by recognizing these constraints on his work and in
a sense, using them against themselves, that he can create the "liveliest art".
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SHAHAN1

His direct contact with society and its means of production accounts for its
vitality. However, he is often driven to the most unabashed compromises
which are then regularly justified in rhetorical terms of "mass communication", "economic viability", etc. Melodrama, the child of tragedy and opera,
and catharsis, become in his hands the tools of overwhelming the audiences
with an ideology manufactured by his financiers. Worse still, with the
capacity of the cinema to make life more life-like (what Kracauer calls "the
redemption of physical reality") it increases the catharsis by giving a total
illusion of reality. The cinema can lie so "truthfully", because it makes its
statements through juxtaposition, of formal elements of which the
audience is largely unaware while it appears to be a continuous succession of
"realistic" images. Thus the realism of detail, when combined with
catharsis, alienates the people from reality and involves them, instead, in a
ready-made dream: the more fantastic is its content, the more it is realistic
in its detail. David Wark Griffith, the first great film-maker of America and
the world, perfected the art of illusion through the introduction of the closeup and a meticulous imitation of reality. He was also the first to make a
tentative gesture to break away from it, to make a cinema capable of higher
generalization. (Intolerance.)
The Indian cinema has, by and large, worked without an attempt at that
higher generalization which took the other cinemas and specially the early
Soviet cinema of Eisenstein, to discover the great intellectual possibilities of
this new art. But I would like to mention the fact that both Eisenstein in the
cinema and Brecht in the theatre drew upon sources of Oriental theatre to
introduce and develop discontinuous, significant elements juxtaposed to
make the cinema more meaningful. These elements, present in our
different regional forms of folk theatre, appeared in our cinema in a cruder
fashion and continue to flourish in our song sequences whenever the motif
is not purely erotic. There were rare examples, of course, of partially
successful achievements like Sanl Tukaram but usually all attempts at
overcoming purely physical representation of artificial situations were
reduced to naive, conventional symbolism, borrowing metaphorical structures from an underdeveloped box theatre and the overall influence of the
"analytic-dramatic" school (as characterised by Bazin) prevalent in the
sound film.
For some time there seemed to be no way out of this impasse. Not for
us, not until we became aware of ourselves. The liberation of Italy from the
fascists had just preceded our own declaration of independence. The Italians
abandoned syntax. For all order seemed to them, quite rightly at that time,
to be imposed, oppressive, fascist. They rejoiced in reality, were happy to be

alive, to pursue the pleasure of just simply being human and flowing into
nature's unbroken continuity. Unlike the realism of the Renaissance, it was
anti-rationalist. It so emphasised the evocative, lyrical qualities of nature
that social institutions, including language, became irrelevant. And that was
where it failed. It had a world-wide impact. Even on our largely mythmaking commercial cinema. While melodrama was maintained, Bimal Roy
intensified physical reality in Do Bigha Zamin, through comparative
photographic verisimilitude, to make a socially relevant film. Even a great
showman of Bombay, Raj Kapoor, took something from neo-realism to
make films like Boot Polish. The heroes played by the glamorous stars like Raj
Kapoor himself, Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and others, could play
unemployed graduates, taxi drivers or the dispossessed lumpen of our
streets.
But the romantic-humanist seed of neo-realism found its best soil in
Bengal. Its literature had already cross-fertilised extremely well with the
literature of 19th century Europe. To produce the realism of detail, along
with the necessary off-shoot of romanticism, the pathetic fallacy, the
strictly chronological and sequential development of narrative from the
serialised novel. Satyajit Ray, who is our finest exponent of this form,
brought to it the related tradition of the caricature of social types. Ritwik
Ghatak was the first to try and integrate neo-realism with an operatic, epic
structure working directly from the folk arts and the theories of Eisenstein
and Brecht. The movement had its support in what was perhaps India's
largest linguistically cohesive middle-class. Necessarily again, as a corollary
to romanticism, Calcutta also spawned the now widely accepted theory in
India of a regionally "rooted" cinema. While the theory had a healthy
contempt for a spurious internationalism which consists in producing
derivative art (like much of our painting of that period) it had all the
possibilities of degenerating into a narrow, medieval and decorative idea of
culture. Fortunately, there are signs that it will be given up by the artists
before their apologists.
Fortunately again, we have a classical culture and it is a classicism which
is not totally divorced from our folk traditions as Dipali Nag demonstrates
in her paper on music. From all accounts, the Europeans had to destroy some
of their cultural achievements to accommodate the more "civilized" GrecoRoman tradition. It was an attempt to reconcile - and even to discover and
enlarge, as in the case of the Renaissance, through art, a scientific tradition
to a society governed by religious thought and hierarchical organization.
Unless realism in art is founded upon an attitude which grows out of the
contemporary scientific relationship between the subject and the object, it
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Ideological Ironies

will be used inadvertently against the people. The catharsis that an illusion
of reality, linked to a tragic vision, provides can lead us even more
convincingly into fatalism and put nature above men. Such a realism would
be a realism of surface appearances and not even of form. For, form consists
of concepts - which could either be metaphysical or "scientific" in the
broadest sense. Instead of reducing realism or our own traditional epic
forms to decorate surfaces, instead of appeasing and exploiting the people,
one should be approaching them with an open, free and truthful discourse.
Instead of manipulating their feelings through identification, one can try
and understand their logic.
There are many ways in which epic form, rejuvenated through a
scientific and not a mythic attitude, can serve this function:
The epic form in its verbal, musical, visual manifestations, is not a
chronology of static events. The strictly chronological, sequential narrative
arose out of a mechanistic and closed system of causation. The intervention
of the narrator or the subject in the transformation of the object in nature is
clearly recognized in both the epic form and in the modern practice of
science. To know is to change. This new relationship between the subject
and the object, if accepted, can take us away from both a mechanical idea of
objectivity and from a subjectivity which extends into nature, through the
pathetic fallacy. The imitation of reality can be replaced by the internal
relationship of society or the social, historical man's consciousness of
nature.
All this can, however, be done if the artist does not calculate social
relevance from box office receipts, cathartic participation or the closeness of
images to narrow, regional idiosyncracies. Nor can it be achieved through
high-pitched ideological rhetoric with formal and, therefore, conceptual
untidiness in an attempt to substitute thematic vocabulary for content and
grammar. Such an approach can only lead back to subjectivist anarchism,
manipulating the people to revolt impotently against individual circumstances of poverty and deprivation, rather than against the entire social
order with a code which only organized practice and conscious theory can
unravel.
We have so far been shy of revealing the organizing logic of the
director, as Eisenstein termed it, to our audience. In other words, we have
equipped them with experiences by proxy and not with a system of signs
which can convert their gestures into meaningful acts. The sensuous reality
that surrounds us should be freed from irrational feeling. The myths can be
given back their original vitality by displaying the very process by which
they are formed. To decode the myths is to destroy them as myths and to
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destroy their falsification of a true human contact with nature. By showing

the process by which myths or other systems of signs are formed, one can
move from ritual to significant act.
The cinema may have the unique privilege of doing so, with its dual
capacity to record nature in flux and simultaneously, to articulate the
process of human interaction with it through the organizing logic of the
director-spectator.

Notes
1.

Sant Tukaram, a Marathi "saint-poet" film made by the Prabhat Studio in 193 6, now
recognised to be a major work in the popular cinema of the pre-lndependence period.

2.

D o Bigha Zamin, a film by Bimal Roy made in 1953 under Italian neo-realist influence.

3.

Boot Polish, made by Raj Kapoor in 1954.

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Interview

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Ashish Rajadhyaksha

By Ashish Rajadhyaksha
AR: Acknowledging the European readers of this discussion, I'd like to begin with the
problem of cultural exchange today, the formal consequences of some of its established
assumptions. For example, on the one hand there is a greater degree of exchange than ever,
through growing markets, mass-communications and cultural export. But on the other, the
only response to this seems to limit the individual work to purely culture-specific boundaries which of course rapidly become geographical boundaries. In most cases there is a
straightforward ethnicist argument operating, but even progressive positions seem to find
political survival only through perpetuating these divides.
I think your work with the epic provides new ways with which to look at the entire issue,
in the way it concerns relationships, and the traditions that determine them. Could you speak
of your approach to it?

KS: There is, of course, a strong essentialist thinking that operates when
people restrict cultural traditions to regional limits. And people still
seem to feel a pressing need - here and elsewhere - to seek a
homogeneity of culture, static and unvarying in space and time.
I think we must re-examine the high points in the history of
different cultures, the achievements that today constitute this
"essence", and see how they came to be - whether in India, Greece or
the so-called "West". In India, for instance, if we take the period from
the Mauryas (4th - 1st century B.C.) to the Guptas ( 4th - 7th century
A.D.) we see so major a cultural development that it remains the
source, and for some, of course, the essence of many things in our
culture today. Now this development, if we follow D. D. Kosambi's
writings,1 shows not only vast technological changes leading to
changes in social organisation and communication, but also that its
entire strength lay in its ability to synthesise from a variety of
different sources. This "essence" we realise was not in a static
homogeneity but a dynamic of exchange, in technology, trade and,
consequently, a synthesis of several different ways of looking at the
world.
Our epic tradition is one of synthesising several traditions, taking
into itself the material base, social organisation, technology. It is
therefore completely universal. Yet the need to search for a
homogeneity seems to remain, and I believe it is a psychological need
emanating from remnants of tribalistic ways of thinking and emoting.
This inability, in a way, to tackle new realities, new relationships, and
to think in terms of a larger fellowship of human values, leads to a lot
of frustration, to incestuous relations, a kind of embarrassment at
speaking about, and sharing, the actual experience of living.
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I think the synthesising process is crucial to the European

traditions as well. Geometry, for instance, as developed by the Greeks,
was later again seen as the essence of "Western" civilisation. But it was
first employed by the Egyptians, whose use of proportions the Greeks
so magnificently formalised, and it was later amalgamated into the
numerical system by the Arabs. I think the history of European
languages, the change in their living habits, design in the 18th and
19th century, the portrayal of women, all these would demonstrate
that their "essence" came through their openness to influences
outside, although they felt the need to keep calling it "Western".
By no stretch of imagination is Greece closer to the West than it is
to the East.
Assimilating this history, the crucial question we face today is
whether we can continue to speak of each other, to each other, in
terms other than those of wanting to conquer each other. Can this
synthesis, as a continuing effort, speak of an equal exchange that
would break barriers of regionality and overcome the tendency to
appropriate other cultures without acknowledgement? I think the
first effort of all artists must be to re-think that constricted area of
artistic practice that we are allowed, and to re-install its primacy in
human activity.
AR: From both what you've said, and from your work, it is evident that this crisis has been
there for some time; we can see it in the disintegration of classical writing, in the political
"feudalising" of the epic, and the breakdown of traditions before commodification. How do
you actually see these barriers in your work, and your social position as an artist?

KS: It does seem to happen that the very systems that gave birth to the
great institutions of art, whether music or painting, literature or
theatre, end up themselves oppressing those forms. It has come to a
point today that actually to create something one has to challenge that
whole system formally - and it is a global system now. This is evident
not only in art but in all formalising, even in political activism. On the
whole there has been a disorganised response. Right now we depend
on a few individuals. And on a discourse that is in one sense peripheral
to the system.
One specific problem of our times is that the bourgeoisie has set
up, even institutionalised, this response. The post-romantic period
shows that even the dominant system demands from the artist an
individuated style while actually levelling everything out into an
acceptable, easily consumable, mediocrity. This newness, and uniqueness, that is so much in demand, makes it possible for one to work, but
it simultaneously annihilates one's individuality, reducing that
newness to a sort of trade mark. Television is frightening in its ability
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Interview

To fight the great leveller, one can perhaps learn from the
experience of the great saint-poets of India; they, too, were made
marginal while simultaneously being converted into heroes. Even
today, the artist and the critic are constantly expected to provide
insights by the very system that makes them marginal to it. We may
have to accept this as a fact, and only then begin to work: the fact that
the artist is simultaneously marginal and the "hero" of society,
struggling to exist but making existence possible for others.
AR: Your epic construction in T a r a n g emerges from very immediate concerns in the present
which then grow into larger contradictions of history. What was that immediate response,
when you began working on it almost 12 years ago, to the conditions prevailing and how did
they move into the epic?

KS: I think those specific conflicts, in the '70s here in the political and
economic situation, were definitely part of a world-historical crisis.
Commodification, that had so completely become the basis of human
relations everywhere, was something that had begun throwing up
extreme contradictions - as the drought situation in Maharashtra,
which was the subject of my documentary Fire In The Belly, and from
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where I initially got my character, Janaki, in Tarang. But then evidently

this conflict also went back into the post-War situation, with all its
formal aspects in art, like Bazin's theories on realism, and modernism
itself.
As I viewed it, the epic always has to find its expression through
the dominant mode of exchange. I had to place it in the present, in a
historical situation where it had to articulate itself with the positive
aspects of commodification. I had to realise the languages that
revealed the material states of oppression, as formulated in the
ideologies that emerged, and a universe of experience, contained by
mythology, that was equally shaped by those material states. With a
lyrical construction I would have had to work only with sensuous
experience, and to give it a metrical structure; or with the dramatic I
would have had to turn the social environment into a metaphor, of
death possibly.
Here I wanted to open up the language, to reveal every
articulation in reality by revealing every articulation in the form. It
demanded a kind of oscillating movement that concerned the very
question of being, revealing the transitions from the social to the
psychological, to the spiritual and back. I believe that, in their different
ways, both Ritwik Ghatak and Robert Bresson have emphasised
precisely this. From them I learnt about the importance of acting, and
all that it conveys, which is more than merely conveying experience. In
every shot the effort has been to reveal these transformations within
human personalities, to orchestrate their performance with their
presence, to extend this into composition, mise en scene, editing. What
I was trying to militate against was that tendency, in realism and in
modernism, to stultify the object before its transformative relations -1
think Goldmann has said somewhere that voyeurism emerges because
everything is dealt with as an object, and therefore a commodity. I saw,
in the form I was using, the ability to divide and counterpose actions
and objects into those that were natural, those worked on with
gratuitous purpose and those wrought for exchange.
AR: The oppositions in your films are clearly drawn from movements in world cinema, and
you are working with and, more importantly, against Eisenstein, the neo-realists and
others. In your effort to find a "discourse of history" that takes in layers of verbal and visual
language, paralleling history itself, do you feel that you have been able to find alternatives to
work beyond that crippling trap of realism/modernism, that trap also of the denotative and
depictive?

KS: The trap of realism/modernism, as all the other oppositions contained

i n it, arises out of presenting experience as a thing: through the
transparency of the image in realism and the opacity of the image in
modernism. Both procedures lead to a reduction of relationships,
events, human action and being to lifeless things.
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In realism, the object/event referred to is a fetishised commodity.
In modernism it is the image itself that has been reduced; the one says
"reality is", and the other says "the image is", both in a static,
unmediated way. How does it become what it is? After all, the image is
created and should begin to have a life of its own, as life itself is created
by history and individual mediations.
I think if we structure our work on the basis of the great
possibilities of "exchange" that the commodity form has opened up, if
we recognise and reveal what has gone into the making of an image,
we may be able to breathe life into it.
When the camera and the tape-recorder deny the making of an
image, propose a totalitarian reality or a wholly made object, as if it
were not capable of further transformation, the film-maker is telling a
lie, however "truthful" his intentions. I think even Rossellini realised
this when he went into didactic film-making. I remember spending an
evening with him where he completely disowned his "children" of the
'60s and '70s who claimed that "reality is".
At the other extreme, Ritwik Ghatak proposes mythological
images in the first part of Titash Ekti Nadir Naam( A River Named Titash)-

i.e., wholly-made images ostensibly resistant to transformation - and

then he delivers them to history.
One has to employ several subterfuges to upset established habits
of reading, to use transparence in a way that is not transparent, a way
that would draw attention to oppositions.
One has finally to restore history by restoring the place of the
viewer as one actively engaged in a dynamic relationship to the reality
and to cinema. One has to put the object of one's creation back into the
world of flux.
Definitely we have an advantage over those who inherited the
realist tradition, grand as it has been from the time of the Renaissance,
or perhaps from the time of Aristotle. We would have to learn from this
tradition because it has already changed our ways of seeing
dramatically. Similarly the modernist movement has drawn our
attention to the code.
But the crisis that we have all faced, whether in the West or East,
has been that of the restoration of significance. Ever since the novel
and then the film came into being, the realist image has acquired a
meaningless, a false mythical value. It has claimed to be more lifelike
than life itself. The modernist image, in reaction, has proposed itself as
a saturated mental reality.
And with both tentatives the significance of the image has been
drained.
I think this restoration of significance comes for us through two
definite conditions in which we find ourselves, if we look sufficiently
104

clearly at ourselves. We don't have to try very hard, because it is visible

to anyone who comes here. We are in a condition where history is
being played out before our eyes. The remnants of tribal, agrarian, and
other stages are still around us. We cannot escape this, even if we don't
"know" it.
We are, ultimately, the oppressed and the oppressed cannot
function without examining every act of oppression that surrounds
them. For us, automatically, what might be considered a daily act of no
significance becomes an act of significance - drinking tea, for instance,
we cannot forget that tea is grown in India and China and Sri Lanka
but for Frenchmen to this day it is an "English" habit. I have even met
people on the Continent who think that tea is grown in England.
In the economically more advanced countries, there appears to be
a sort of curtain around the historical relationship with the object.
Somehow, despite the fact that the bourgeoisie has a considerably
greater consciousness of history, which led to its formalising, the
actual relationship with the object - in the way it is packaged, "used"denies history. In the United States, Europe, even in the Soviet Union,
one is presented something like an outsider's view of history. This
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does not happen here; nobody can really escape the dominance of
history, whoever one is. What people can and do end up doing is to
capitulate to the oppressor and perpetuate imperialist dominance
through the mass-media, or adopt a "nativism" that would shut out all
so-called alien influences. But for those who don't do that, to grapple
with our materials afresh, to recast any relation between tradition and
practice, and consequently the "extent" of our perceived world, this is
a continuing struggle.

AR: You've often spoken of the importance of tradition. In the way you use it you see it as
repeatedly intervening in contemporary experience. You use the archetypes it provides you,
and even the language that works around the confrontation of man and nature. But what
about the more conservative manifestations of tradition as rigidly encoded areas of experience,
but accessible to all prevalent ideologies? Also, there is a contradictory tension between
"naming" the archetype and evoking it through recollection and seeing it as a container for
memory and desire. But when you extend this to the present political and social experience, do
you not encounter anxiety situations with your audience, and a resistance? How do you
actually contend with that problem in T a r a n g ?

KS: It's true that there are certain encoded ways of making you ready for
an experience. For instance, the most rigidly encoded information
given to us through heredity is about our motor impulses - the way we
walk, or move our arms, hands and feet. Pure theatre, dance, displays
the whole history of the body. Yet, in the most traditional forms of
dance there is the capacity and the need to innovate.
When the body finds realisation or resistance in experience, it
produces energy, thought, emotion, and re-creates life. I think that's
when metaphor comes into being: dance becomes imbued with
dramatic significance. Through certain stages of transformation, the
dramatic becomes socialised, yielding systems of thought that are
more complex than the purely metaphorical one.
The absence/presence of the nourishing breast is perhaps the
basic metaphor, not only of drama but also of religion. In mythology,
the metaphorical relationship is transformed into one of the container
and the contained.
Myth finds its practice in ritual. Ritual extends into the social act.
And so the metaphorical-mythological framework opens out into new
sets of relationships, some "scientific", some "associative"; the rational
deals with the irrational; the irrational yields new configurations of
the unknown.
I think the film-maker has to work with all this and more: the dead
metaphors of advertising; the metonymies of political ideology that
make up myths that cannot enter into practice - containers that are
empty; the "scientific" cults of idealised relationships in nature; the
worship of the irrational, of the Past or the Future that would want to
replace the "spiritual" or significant.
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When we try to make sense of our whole experience, we naturally

succumb to all manner of anxiety.
Language breaks down and turns into bizarre objects. Instead of
the metaphor equipping us to face the reality of the absent object, it
proposes itself as the all-containing reality. We break it apart and fill
the world with pornographic images, irrational fears, voyeurised
fragments of the real container.
I feel very strongly that if the critical tradition does not begin at
some point to see all that its investigative probes are evoking, it will
end up only with self-flagellation. In the modern world, the moment a
mental act is performed, it gets surrounded by fragmented images.
Those who begin by mourning the state of civilisation end up
mourning the subjective state of the person mourning the state of the
civilisation. Thus, everyone is rendered voyeuristic, pornographic,
self-destructive. An ethical-spiritual question gets reduced to a moralreligious one.
The standard communist response is its mirror image, since all it
does is to take a moral-religious stance of condemning the decadence
of such art. One is right in seeking an affirmative art. But it has to
begin with the affirmative discovery of the Self, as it gets realised in
the Other.
I think our material condition in India and our traditions do both
push us to take this position vis-a-vis the world built upon the debris of
our civilisation.
For Ghatak, the development of archetypes came from traditions
of the Natyashastra2 as well as folk-cultures, which included above all
folk music. He did have a tremendous facility with that, using when he
needed an Eisensteinian-Cherkassovian methodology. I have tried to
reject expressionistic content completely, depending more on the
psychoanalytic insights provided towards understanding archetypes,
and the consequences this would have on, for instance, realistic acting
that does not take into account the social-historical signs sufficiently
while claiming to do so.
Unlike Bresson, who would jettison the layers of signs to free the
actor to the point where s/he would come into contact with the
unnamed presence, I've depended on our traditions that would
interact these layers to arrive at a transformative, "cosmic", universal
language. As a dancer depicting Radha's love for Krishna may include
the maternal love of Yashodhara or the heroism of Draupadijanaki in
Tarang alludes to many Mother Goddesses - Durga, Radha, Sita,
Urvashi - and is therefore free of the encapsulated meaning contained
by the "name", freed in a way by the contemporary cosmos of the
commodity form which is, although few acknowledge it, a new form of
exchange which therefore develops a new language.
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AR: Continuing this question of freeing meaning, 1 want to discuss the use of some of the
elements of the film-making medium, in the way you free those. Colour in M a y a D a r p a n
was used rigidly, metrically as in lyric poetry, but in T a r a n g if is freer, taking in several
movements that would counterpoint and again "free" the dramatic movement. Here you seem
to have made use of the modernist effort to liberate elements. But elsewhere in your visuals you
have arrived at a freedom through fairly ancient traditions, for instance in the way Indian
classical music has been symphonically composed and the way it has found correspondences
with the visuals.
On the other hand, you've also had to move towards a concretising, especially in
positioning your spectator before the universe of your theme, and in developing a sequencing
order that would acknowledge the spectator's sites, which is obviously an ethical issue as well
as a formal one. Could you speak of this process?

KS: I have always felt that in film, one constructs space primarily through
sequence: movement from shot to shot, movement within.
The most evolved form of sequence that I know of is the khayal,
the North Indian classical vocal system of music. The nuanced
tensions between the "named" notes, the proportions that always lead
from a kinetic home to a point of rest; the sculpting of sounds from the
continuous scale suggest modes of composing movement, including
improvisation, revealing transitions, rather than suggesting them.
The Western mode of music seems to be more like architecture. It
builds up a structure. It has fixed lines of stress and strain. I find that
architecture (and music that evokes architecture) a fine constructive
principle for the layers of sound that we use in film.
I feel that if form, colour and tone are made as fluid as Indian
music, it frees the spectator from the "immutable". Similarly
(conversely?) I would like to hold together sound through the
principles of Western music, to create an architectural structure. I
think that the achievements of Eisenstein, of Bresson, of Western
artists, have been in the extensions of geometry, to the exclusion of
processes that reveal themselves in melodic time, of being.
I think we must begin by trying to breathe life into our icons,
sculpted from the infinity of space which has become our acoustical
environment.
(Bombay, November 1985)
Notes
1. D. D. Kosambi: Marxist historian and anthropologist, author of An Introduction to The
Study of Indian History, Myth & Reality, and many other studies.

2.

Natyashastra: the ancient Indian text on drama (including music and dance) written by the sage
Bhanata Muni.

.108.

Framework n. 30/31

KUMAR SHAHANI: BIO-FILMOGRAPHY

Born: December 7th, 1940. Graduated from the University of Bombay
(1962) and obtained the diploma in Screenplay Writing ( ranked first) from
the Film & Television Institute of India in 1965 before coming top of the
class again in 1966 in the Advanced Direction course, where he was taught
by the great Ritwik Ghatak. He studied film in France (1967-68) where he
worked with Bresson. He lectured extensively, served on the Executive
Council of the Indian Film Directors' Association (1980-81) and was a
contributing editor of the influential Journal of Arts & Ideas (1982-83).
1966: The Glass Pane (35mm, b&w, 10 mins).
Graduation film about a couple who return from a funeral and feel
drastically disoriented.
1967: Manmad Passenger (35mm, b&w, 15 mins).
About a young man in search of something to commit himself to.
1969: A Certain Childhood (35mm, b&w, 22 mins).
Documentary.
1970: Rails for the World (35mm, Technicolour, 20 mins).
Promotional documentary for Hindustan Steel Ltd on behalf of the
government of India.
1971: Object (16mm, Kodachrome, 10 mins).
A film about phantasies made for a psychoanalyst's thesis.
1972: Maya Darpan (35mm, Eastmancolour, 100 mins., Hindi).
Produced and directed by Kumar Shahani; Sc: Nirmal Verma; Ph.: K.
K. Mahajan; Mus.: Bhaskar Chandragupta; Ed.: Madhu Sinha; Art
Dir.: Bansi Chandragupta. Cast: Aditi, Anil Pandya, Kanta Vyas, Anil
Kaul.
1973: Fire in the Belly (35mm, b&w, 18 mins).
Documentary about the drought in Maharashtra.
1974- Montage (Bombay TV ).
76:
Programme on film appreciation.
1976: Our Universe (16mm, b&w).
Educational film.
1984: Tarang (35mm, colour, cinemascope, 171 mins, Hindi).
Dir.: Kumar Shahani; Prod.: National Film Development Corporation
(India); Sc: Roshan and Kumar Shahani; Dial.: Vinay Shukla; Ph.: K.
K. Mahajan; Mus.: Vanraj Bhatia; Lyrics: Raghuvir Sehay and Gulzar;
Sd.: Narendra Singh. Cast: Smita Patil, Amol Palekar, Dr Shriram
Lagoo, Girish Karnad, Jayanti Patel, Arvind Deshpande, M. K. Raina,
Om Puri, Sulabha Deshpande, Jalal Agha, Rohini Hattangady, Kawal
Gandhiok.

.109.

DOSSIER:
SHAHINI

Interview

Framework n. 3 0/31

Selected Bibliography (in addition to the items published in this issue):

1975: The Necessity of a Code: paper read at the Symposium on Parallel
Cinema, Int. Film Festival, New Delhi.
1975: Colour, Light and Shade: AIR broadcast.
1976: Pour Ritwik Ghatak in Cinema '76, Paris.
1977: Film-maker's Purpose read at Int. Film Festival, New Delhi.
1978: Internationalism and the problem of authenticity, paper read at the 3rd
Triennials of International Art, Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi.
1978: I'm burning ... the universe is burning - a tribute to Ritwik Ghatak in Filmotsav
Documentation, Madras.
1978: A Meeting with Miklos jancso, journal of the National Center for the Performing

Arts, September.
1979: Homage to Tarkovsky, New Delhi International Film Festival Documentation.
1980: The Saint Poets of Prabhat in Film World, January.
1980: Meet Julia, in Imprint, February.
1980: On Pornography, in Imprint, March.
1980: Cinema of Research & Relevance, in Film World.
1981: The Cinema and the Press, Indian Institute of Mass Communication,
New Delhi.

110.

111.