A page from Maratha cultural history: Ramshastri (1944)

A truncated version of this post first appeared as "Of truth and politics" in The Hindu on September 21, 2012.

Actor-director Gajanan Jagirdar as Ramshastri

Ramshastri (1944) is considered to be one of the most significant Indian films of all time—in the same way that To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) is thought to be one of the greatest American classics ever made. The two have more in common: both feature exemplars of the legal profession. In their respective contexts and very different time periods in which they are set—the political intrigue-ridden world of eighteenth-century Maratha India and the racism-ridden world of early twentieth-century Southern America—Ramshastri and Atticus Finch boldly epitomize the ideal of judicial integrity. Finch, played by actor Gregory Peck, unshakably adheres to the truth at all times and helps shape public sentiment the way Ramshastri, played by actor-director Gajanan Jagirdar, does in the eponymous film from Prabhat Film Company in 1944.

The very successful Ramshastri, made in Marathi and Hindi, was Prabhat’s swansong of sorts—despite later films such as Dev Anand’s first starrer Hum ek hain (1946) and the Khurshid-Dev Anand starrer Aage badho (1946)—with co-founder V. Damle’s death in 1945 leaving a void that resulted in the company’s decline and eventual bankruptcy in 1953. V. Shantaram, one of Prabhat’s co-founders, had clearly laid down the company’s motto at the start in 1929: "art for life’s sake," as opposed to art for art’s sake. Prabhat’s films tackled social problems head-on, thus hoping to improve the day-to-day quality of life for its viewers. With Ramshastri, Prabhat traveled back in time to the eighteenth-century Maratha Empire, although highlighting issues of contemporary relevance, such as the importance of fairness of judgment and the indispensability of ethics in administration.

Keshavrao Bhole composed the music for the Marathi version, with lyrics by S. A. Shukla and Shantaram Athavale, while the Hindi version (which, woefully, seems to have vanished) had music by G. Damle (relation of V. Damle?) and lyrics by Qamar Jalalabadi.

Anant Marathe as the young Ramshastri

Baby Shakuntala? as Ramshastri's child-wife

Based on the life of Ramshastri Prabhune (1720-1789), the legendary chief justice at the court of Peshwa Madhavrao, the film starts with the young Ram (Anant Marathe), eager for knowledge, battling odds to educate himself in the face of adversity. In the opening scenes, we are introduced to the boy who will not lie, no matter what, much to the annoyance of his greedy uncle, who hopes to make money off the lie that his nephew is attending scripture school for Brahmin children. Ram’s widowed mother and his child-wife, Janaki (Baby Shakuntala?), are pleased by his integrity, but times are tough. Ram leaves home for Benares in search of a teacher but is turned down for not knowing enough to start with. This only fuels his desire to learn, and in Ekalavya style, he educates himself by overhearing the teacher’s lessons—the big difference here being that the guru is nowhere as unkind as Drona. Impressed, the teacher accepts Ram as his student. Twelve years roll by, and Ram is now Ramshastri. Ram’s mother is dying, and she is happy to see her scholar son before her death.

The scene then shifts to Pune, where Ramshastri settles down as a religious scholar. This part of the film appears rather disjointed, and that is probably because the film had three different directors (Raja Nene and Vishram Bedekar other than Jagirdar) at different times, with the result that there is a jerky feel to the narrative.

Hansa Wadkar? as Shyama

The film suddenly cuts to a slave market, where Shyama the slave girl (possibly Hansa Wadkar) is being auctioned off. Ranoji, a poet-singer, and an employee of the ruling Peshwa Madhavrao, falls for Shyama—together they sing the lovely "Hasoon Bolna," my most favorite song in the Marathi version—and runs away with her to get married. There is opposition from Ranoji’s rival at the auction, Tulaji (an employee of the peshwa’s wily uncle Raghunathrao), who argues that since slaves don’t have the right to marry, the marriage is invalid, and that Ranoji’s hands must be cut off. The peshwa, not very imaginative in such matters, agrees.

Meenakshi as Ramshastri's wife

Ramshastri intervenes on behalf of the newly-weds, and argues that the slave market is in itself an illegal institution, and can neither be authorized by religion nor by the state, and that marriage under Hindu law cannot be invalidated because the girl is a slave. Ramshastri’s earth-shattering conviction wins over the peshwa, who then appoints this fearless advocate of human rights as the chief justice of his court. It is jubilation back home, where Ramshastri’s wife (actress Meenakshi I would guess from the resemblance to her granddaughter Namrata Shirodkar) looks on fondly as her son sings "Me Kaashila janaar"—he, too, will go to Benares like his illustrious father—with Shyama and Ranoji joining in, as the royal guards bring in the newly appointed chief justice’s regalia. A note about the music: Keshavrao Bhole's compositions are irresistibly beautiful and have a simplicity that cannot be ignored.

Soon, Ramshastri becomes famous for his impartial judgments that are based on the case’s merits, as opposed to his favoring the mighty and the influential. In one instance, he condemns the peshwa’s governor who has swindled the plaintiff, a foreign contingent, much to the dismay of the peshwa’s chief secretary who had slyly granted the governor a reprieve.

Lalita Pawar as Anandi, oozing villainy

At this point, the film abruptly and somewhat jumpily cuts to Anandi (Lalita Pawar oozing villainy), the wife of Raghunathrao, colluding with General Sumersingh Gardi—buying his loyalty rather—against Peshwa Madhavrao. The sickly peshwa is dying, and Anandi is busy hatching a plot to ensure that her husband will be the next peshwa. Just before he dies, the peshwa gets Ragunathrao to promise that he will protect the former’s younger brother, the heir, Narayanrao, which Ragunathrao does, carried away by the emotions of the moment.

Pomp and splendor of the peshwa's durbar

On coronation day, the pomp and splendor of the peshwa’s durbar come alive as the film recreates the pageantry of bygone days: there is the swish of swords and spears, as the cavalry rides by and the royal flag flutters, while flower petals are strewn at the feet of the monarch-to-be. Prabhat’s co-founder S. Fattelal, the film’s art director, was known for his keen artistic eye that he had honed under his mentors—the famous artist brothers, Anandrao and Baburao Painter.

In keeping with protocol, Ragunathrao, as guardian to the new ruler, is supposed to offer the first salute to his nephew Narayanrao—a fact that has the uncle wincing. Ramshastri insists that Ragunathrao, regardless of his guardian status, offer the first salute since there is only one occupant to the peshwa throne. Ragunathrao complies but an irate Anandi stomps out of the court. She mocks her husband for not staking claim to the throne; the meek Ragunathrao then promises that he will listen to her.

During the festival of Ganesh Chaturthi, Anandi gets a chance to put her evil ideas into action. Without her husband’s knowledge, she rewords a royal order, thereby instructing the generals to kill Narayanrao, who is mercilessly slaughtered in front of a stunned Ragunathrao who then becomes the peshwa. Orders are issued that the public celebrate Raghunathrao’s ascendancy and the people are forced into merrymaking, which Ramshastri denounces.

Meanwhile, the faithful Ranoji manages to bring to Ramshastri the royal order that had Narayanrao executed. Ranoji’s wife, Shyama, also tells Ramshastri that she had heard Anandi commanding Sumersingh to finish off the young peshwa. Outraged, Ramshastri confronts Ragunathrao on his coronation day, and calls him a coward and a sinner for abusing the custodianship of Narayanrao. When Ramshastri produces evidence in the form of the royal order, Ragunathrao’s bad conscience pricks him and he is willing to atone.

Away from  power mongers

An uncompromising Ramshastri pronounces that death is the only atonement for such a sin. Ramshastri is hailed for protecting the honor of the peshwa throne, but, having exposed the truth, he decides to leave the power-mongering world of the court once and for all. He walks away with his family as people sing, “Till sun and moon shine in the sky, your praise will be sung everywhere.”

A concluding thought: The choppiness in the film does not, however, detract from the powerful characterization of Ramshastri, who comes across as an emblem of rectitude, indeed as the very personification of truth. Given the context of India’s independence movement, and Gandhi’s overriding belief in the ultimate triumph of truth, the iconic figure of Ramshastri must have been, undoubtedly, reassuring to viewers. During a period when the national imagination was in search of glorious, idealized visions from the past, the heroic figure of Ramshastri could very well have been that.

P.S. Please help fill in the blanks/confirm the names of the cast members whom I have not identified/am not sure of.

Disclaimer: My screencaps from the film are used for academic/discussion purposes only; they may be reproduced only if accompanied by a link to this blog.

Reflections on K. A. Abbas’s Rice and other stories, 1947

I recently chanced upon an old, yellowed copy of writer-journalist-film director Khwaja Ahmad Abbas’s Rice and other stories, published in 1947 by Kutub, Bombay, with a preface by writer Mulk Raj Anand. Having seen most of the films that Abbas (1914-1987) wrote—all classics in their own right—such as Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar (1946), his own Dharti ke Lal (1946), V. Shantaram’s Dr. Kotnis ki Amar Kahani (1946), and Raj Kapoor’s Awara (1951), Shree 420 (1955), and Jagte Raho (1956), I was curious about Abbas the short-story writer.

The book is a thin volume of ten short stories that can be read in one go. The stories are about ordinary people in ordinary situations— with candid glimpses into life’s extraordinary moments. Every now and then the veil lifts to reveal life’s surprises, its splendors, its ironies. Reality is what we see on the outside, but it is also what we fleetingly see on the inside, made visible through cracks and gaps. And it is those cracks and gaps that Abbas draws our attention to—although I distinctly felt a certain predictability about Abbas’s style, which kind of dampens the reader’s attention. The same does not hold true of his films, which are vastly more imaginative. Halfway through many of the stories, I correctly guessed what the ending would be! For me, maudlin is the word that describes the treatment of many of the stories.

The title story, “Rice,” is about Durga, a poor mill worker’s wife who delivers her baby when she is out standing in the long queue to buy rations. It is stark and grim, and yet represents the joys of new beginnings. The queue is relentless, but hungry mouths have to be fed, and hundreds of women patiently wait their turn outside the government grain store, miraculously open after many days, during a period of grain shortage (which is reminiscent of the darkness of the Bengal famine of 1943 captured on celluloid in Dharti ke lal, 1946). As the crowds teem around and bags are filled with rice, birth—at once mundane and magical—unfolds.

In “Sylvia,” a nurse is elated at the thought that it is her last night of work at the hospital, but then as dawn approaches, she confronts a mind that goes in loops. The more she looks forward to her new life, the greater her wavering. Expectedly, the stories have a certain cinematic feel about them, and it is not difficult to imagine the characters playing themselves out before the camera. In “Sparrows,” Rahim Khan, who is callously indifferent to his family and fellow beings—he is constitutionally incapable of amicability towards his kind—is like moldable clay in the company of the chirpy sparrows that make his hut their home. There is a certain self-destructiveness about Rahim that he is unable to help, which makes the reader at once loathe and pity him. He has a touch of Thomas Hardy’s Henchard about him.

In “Twelve hours,” Vijay, a revolutionary leader released after sixteen years in prison is briefly freed for a few hours—and in that time, he goes to see a film, a talkie, in the company of Bina, a female comrade. It is 1943 and, as Abbas says, Vijay, having missed out on the arrival of the talkie in 1931, has neither heard Saigal’s songs, nor seen stars such as Joan Fontaine, Paul Muni, Bette Davis, Ashok Kumar or Kanan Bala. Vijay and Bina go to the screening of a rather outdated action movie called Toofan Mail (1934), famous in its days, produced by Ranjit Studios, starring Billimoria and Madhuri. (For the vintage-film buff in me, these references to big names from the past were most entertaining.) Vijay is absorbed in the picture for a while, but then it triggers certain emotions that he has not known in a long while. Restless, he leaves midway. Having been a prisoner for so long, Vijay has forgotten the pleasures of life, and the reawakening is painful.

The most filmi (if I may use that word) of the stories is “Flowers for her feet,” where a prostitute called Chandra purposely spurns, in the end, the kind young man who loves her because she has lost her legs, a fact that she hides from him because she does not want to ruin his life (somewhat like Deborah Kerr trying to throw off Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember, 1957); and while he still brings flowers for her feet as always, Chandra pretends that she favors somebody else.  “Saffron Blossoms” is a figurative tale, though no less melodramatic, of the blood from a dying Kashmiri bride, shot by soldiers putting down anti-establishment protests, giving the saffron flower its red color. “Three Women” takes a look at three women, all disillusioned for various reasons, dying on the train tracks, and the reactions that the deaths evoke. It is the least sentimental of the lot.

In “The Umbrella,” a man, on his payday, gets ripped off a by a woman, a petty thief, during a bus ride on a rainy day: this was a giveaway from the start. “Reflection in a mirror” is about Radha, a beautiful nautch girl who briefly becomes the mistress of a wealthy man, only to realize that a mistress can never take the place of a wife, and decides to return to her courtesan life. That familiar, age-old wife-mistress divide of Hindi films, beaten to death. Finally, “The mark of an Indian” is about an Indian bravely taking on a drunken British cop, and earning the latter’s respect in the process.

In his preface, Mulk Raj Anand praises Abbas’s lyricism, but I would qualify that. There is a certain lyricism but, unfortunately, the soppy treatment of many of the stories detracts from that lyricism. Anand also mentions that Abbas has captured both the strengths and weaknesses of his characters: while this may be true to some extent, one puts down the book with a feeling that the characters are not as well rounded and fleshed out as they ought to have been. And, finally, as I said before, the predictability of the stories kills it for the reader. One had rather read Abbas’s script of Shree 420 (1955) or his other films—that is inspired writing—than wade through this insipid stuff.

The poetry and egalitarianism of Chandidas (1934)

A truncated version of this post with a missing punch line first appeared as "Messages in black and white" in 
The Hindu on July 18, 2012.

Calcutta's New Theatres’ 1934 Hindi version of its 1932 Bengali film Chandidas has a strong ballad-like feel to it as it musically lays before the audience the story of the legendary poet-saint from fifteenth-century Bengal. Reminiscent of the Romantic poets for his staunch belief in humanity, Chandidas was quite the recalcitrant figure of his times who opposed orthodoxy, rituals, and social stratification; favoring humanity as the only true religion, he saw the caste system as man-made, not God-made, and consequently invalid.

The Bengali Chandidas, directed by Debaki Bose (himself a Vaishnava follower), with Durgadas Banerjee in the lead role, was a runaway hit—indeed, it was New Theatres' first hit, which played for 64 weeks at the Chitra theatre in Calcutta. Two years later, the Hindi version directed by Nitin Bose (the cinematographer of the Bengali Chandidas) and starring K. L. Saigal—his first major success—was released. With his dreamy eyes, Saigal is a convincing Chandidas, a Brahmin fearlessly in love with the lower-caste washerwoman Rami (played by Umashashi, who made her Hindi film debut in 1933 with New Theatres’ Puran Bhagat after the Bengali Chandidas, before which she acted in silent films). Early in the film, Rami, while at her washing chores, sings “Premnagar men banaoongi ghar main,” when Chandidas comes by to the ghats and joins in, in a very memorable duet by the two actors. Song 1:



Music composer R. C. Boral, who is credited with introducing the playback system of recording in Indian cinema in Bhagyachakra / Dhoop chhaon (Bengali and Hindi, 1935), pioneered the use of background music in Chandidas to heighten the film’s lyrical movement. There is a sense in which the music is a character all by itself as it helps drive the narrative forward in this film filled with poetry from medieval Bengal. Indeed, Boral’s music and Chandidas’s poetry together create an aesthetically significant film that has, at its heart, the theme of liberation from the clutches of organized religion. Agha Hashr Kashmiri wrote the lyrics for the Hindi Chandidas. Listen here to the heart-tugging strains of “Tarpat beete din rain” in this very characteristically Saigal song. (Boral, who composed music for over 150 films, was, of course, one of Saigal's early mentors.) Song 2:



The film depicts a time when temples were closed to the lower castes. Chandidas, an apprentice to a temple priest, flouts the rules by insisting that the lord’s bounties are for everyone. His egalitarianism irks Gopinath (actor Nawab?), the local Brahmin merchant, who, in true filmi fashion, lusts after Rami. For all his condemnation of the lower castes, Gopinath has no scruples about hounding Rami, who is at a disadvantage because of her gender, caste, and economic status.

When Gopinath traps Rami in his house, the latter mockingly wonders about the irony of such an action by a supposedly incorruptible being such as a Brahmin. Rami’s outspokenness angers Gopinath, who sets fire to the house she shares with her brother Baiju—actor Pahari Sanyal, who sings quite a bit in the film. Listen to him here in "Chhayee basant aayee basant karke solah shringaar," my most favorite song in the film. (There is no audio from 0:20 to 0:26 with the print freezing; I apologize for that and for the poor print of all these clips.) Song 3:




Chandidas rescues Rami, and the priest rules that Chandidas will have to atone to be accepted back into the Brahmin fold. An aghast Rami goes to meet Chandidas, when Gopinath’s goons assault her. When Chandidas sees the battered Rami, he is disgusted enough with the rigidities of his brahminical roots to decide not to perform repentance, and, convinced that the human cry for justice is the greatest cry, he abjures forever his ties to the orthodox religious order. No longer bound by any societal shackles, at last he is free. Chandidas, Rami, Baiju and Baiju’s wife make a foursome as they walk away, singing “Prem ki ho jai jai,” vindicating the religion of love. Song 4:



A concluding thought: It would be a more somber ending for the lovers—the low-caste girl and the Brahmin boy—two years hence in Bombay Talkies’ hit film on the evils of caste in contemporary India—Achhut Kanya (1936). The lesson was the same, however: the caste system and untouchability were vices that ate into the Indian psyche, and could not be afforded when the nation needed to unite against the conqueror. According to Chandidas’s credits that commented on the lingering national problem of caste, the film is “based on the life problem of the poet Chandidas—a problem India has not been able to solve.”

The surrealism of a non sequitur world: Un Chien Andalou (1929)

This post first appeared as "The real and the surreal" in The Hindu on February 15, 2012.

A sharp blade slices through an eyeball just as a cloud slices through a full moon. This perhaps is the singularly most unforgettable scene from one of the most intriguing films ever made—Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929), which, at just 17 minutes duration, packs in bizarreness on such a mammoth scale that it leaves the viewer desperate for any sort of meaning. Bunuel made this silent film, his first, in collaboration with fellow Spaniard, the famous surrealist painter Salvador Dali, after the two exchanged notes on their dreams—the dream world being central to their surrealist imagination, according to which the unseen powerful reality of life lies in the darkness of sleep, or in the subconscious, and not in the rationality of daylight.

As surrealist French director-writer Jacques Brunius has observed, sleep is akin to film viewing in that both involve a descent into darkness and a shutting off of the immediate physical world: In sleep, the mind commences its journey into dreams, just as, in film viewing, the mind embarks on a journey into a world of fast-changing images. Both are subterranean travels that subvert the notions of time and space, which are rendered meaningless by the merging of past, present, and future, and the merging of geographically distinct spaces. As Bunuel and Dali record the disjointedness on celluloid, the resultant onslaught of unanchored images and events is disconcerting to even the least rationally inclined of viewers. The human mind naturally tends to discern meaning or pattern in any information that it is presented with—and the film precisely staves off that tendency to find comfort in the act of comprehension.

In the dream state, we are faced with random situations, and while all that disjointedness may make sense in sleep, governed as sleep is by its own dream logic—where conventional logic is temporarily suspended, and just about anything is possible—the waking state shows the same disjointedness to be impossible and unrealistic. The film’s realism is then a surrealistic realism, and the film could be described as an ode to the realism of the irrational—something that it portrays in the form of a stark bunch of incidents which, in the waking world, may just as well signify or not signify anything. If entropy is the natural state of the universe, then Un Chien Andalou, with its clash of random images, stands for entropy—and here I am succumbing to my human tendency to rationalize as I sift through chaos in search of beauty.

Dali himself appeared fleetingly in this film whose visuals defy the orderly world of a meaningful narrative. A range of fantastic and absurd images float around in no particular order, untethered, rooted in nothingness: ants crawl out from the palm of a human hand; books turn into pistols; a dismembered hand is poked at with a stick; the hand is then placed into a square box, which, earlier, a man in nun’s attire, wears around his neck when he cycles down the street; a figure on the road is mowed down by a passing vehicle; and two pianos with donkey carcasses on top, tied to two priests, are dragged across a room, with ropes. These visuals frustrate the viewer in their non-amenability to any sort of pattern. Yet, the non sequitur-ness that is irritating is, paradoxically, liberating since everything is both relevant and irrelevant, real and unreal. A surrealist work such as Un Chien Andalou is everything that the viewer wants it to be, and everything that the viewer does not want it to be.

Image credit: http://eclecticipher.blogspot.com

A page from Indian film history: Dharti Ke Lal (1946)

A shorter version of this post first appeared as "Life, the way it was" in The Hindu on November 28, 2011. (A note: The accompanying photo in The Hindu is not from Dharti Ke Lal as the caption mistakenly says, but from Do Bigha Zameen to which the article refers.)

The "Bhookha hai Bengal" chorus song in Dharti ke Lal

Khwaja Ahmad Abbas’s directorial debut film Dharti Ke Lal (1946) begins and ends on an idyllic note, with a sailboat gently wafting across the water in rural Bengal. But what happens in between is the epic ugliness of hunger, poverty, and human suffering. Set against the backdrop of 1943’s Bengal famine in which nearly 5 million people perished, the film documents the anguish suffered by the family of a farmer and his two sons.

The film was a first in many respects. It was the multifaceted Abbas’s first film as a director. It was actor Balraj Sahni’s first major role, and a distinct precursor to his famous role of Shambhu in Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen (1953). Theatre couple Shombhu Mitra and Tripti Mitra appeared on the screen for the first time, as did veteran dancer-actress Zohra Segal. It was the first film presented under the aegis of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) and starred, for the first time, a non-professional cast of “the people”—from organizations such as the Dhulia District Kisan Sabha and the Navjavan Mazdoor Party, among others.

The IPTA, formed in 1942, brought together intellectuals of the day who felt, in the then context of a growing nationalism, that theatre could be an effective medium for both social and artistic awakening among the people. The worlds of art and nationalism collided to produce plays that helped formulate the public ethic on important issues of the day. Socialist realism—rooted in songs, dance, and drama—was the mainstay of IPTA productions.

It was a shaky time: The war was on, and with it, a rising inflation and the consequent curse of starvation that was the lot of the impoverished. 1943-44 saw an exodus of hungry people from the villages to Calcutta and their disappointment at the apathy of the city dwellers. Many died, while others returned to the villages, forced to rely on themselves. This is broadly the context in which Abbas decided to make his first film that would highlight the people’s power in fighting against the plague of degradation and various institutionalized injustices. Individual empowerment would lead to collective empowerment, which, then, would create an enlightened public psyche that would keep at bay all the greedy zamindars, moneylenders, grain hoarders and other go-betweens of this world.

An advertisement in The Times of India dated 31 August 1946 invited audiences to Capitol Theatre to watch Dharti Ke Lal, “the story that had to be told in all its simple grandeur and stark realism!” The film merged its socialist realism with the new cinematic style of social realism that it helped set off—where the camera’s meaningful engagement with reality meant capturing life the way it was for the poor, dispossessed folks, in all its utter rawness, indeed in all its brutishness and nastiness as Thomas Hobbes would have said.

During his numerous visits to Calcutta around 1943-44, Abbas was appalled by the villagers’ starvation-induced deaths and other miseries that he saw playing out routinely on the streets. A successfully running IPTA play of the time, Bijon Bhattacharya’s Nabanna (The New Harvest), powerfully captured the grimness of the situation while offering hope for a new beginning in terms of rural self-sufficiency. This fuelled Abbas’s desire to tell the story and convey its positive message to the rest of India as well—through the medium of celluloid. After all, a Hindi film on a contemporary issue could have a strong pan-India appeal. Abbas was also influenced by three other works—Bhattacharya’s plays Jabanbandi and Antim Abhilasha, and Krishan Chander’s story Annadata—all of which strengthened his vision of Dharti Ke Lal. 

Except for a couple of outdoor shots that were filmed in Calcutta—wartime restrictions made shooting impossible in Calcutta—the film was mostly shot outdoors in Dhulia in modern Maharashtra that was the setting for rural Bengal, with city scenes shot in the studios in Bombay.

The film is set in the fictitious village of Aminpur in Bengal, which is home to Samuddev Pradhan, his wife, elder son Niranjan (played by Balraj Sahni), elder daughter-in-law Binodini ((played by Damayanti, Balraj’s Sahni’s wife) and younger son Ramoo (played by Anwar Mirza). Communal harmony is depicted in the form of Ramzaan, Pradhan’s close family friend and neighbour. After a bucolic opening celebrating the expanse of Bengal’s landscape, to the accompaniment of Pandit Ravi Shankar’s music (his second film after Neecha Nagar that also released in 1946), the film immediately cuts to the reality of people’s hardships, signified by plaintive notes on the sitar. Dark poverty and doleful sitar—there is a certain Pather Panchali air about that.

Ramoo is to be married and, to afford the wedding, Pradhan sells off his stock of grains to Kalijan Mahajan, a devious grain hoarder who is busy stockpiling rations to sell later at a steep price. Actor David plays the tout who prods Pradhan to sell his grains to Mahajan. As the days go by, Pradhan’s is just one family that is faced with severe scarcity of food. When Ramoo goes one day to buy grains from Mahajan, he is shocked to notice the latter’s overflowing granary. Indeed, the man from the kisan sabha or farmer’s association had rightly cautioned farmers from giving in to the grain hoarders. Ramoo belatedly realizes the family’s mistake in selling off the grains.  The astute Niranjan had foreseen this situation.

From this point on, Pradhan’s family has no choice but to buy grains from Mahajan on credit in the form of a promised next harvest or by pawning off jewellery, with the illiterate Ramoo leaving a thumb impression on the ledger each time, thus getting more and more entangled in debt. Meanwhile, Ramoo’s new wife Radhika (played by Tripti Mitra) wants to learn to read books and urges her husband to learn so that he can teach her. Ramoo goes to Dayal, the local schoolteacher, and starts lessons that he then imparts to his wife. Illiteracy, which is the reason for the impoverished getting mired deeper and deeper into degradation, is no less a bane than starvation, and the film addresses that issue, as an undercurrent though.

When Ramoo’s baby is born, there is not a morsel of food in the house. The family loses its cow Lakshmi (Ramoo’s pet) to the zamindar for not paying lagaan or taxes in two years. As Lakshmi is dragged away, Ramoo says, “Today the son is not able to save his own mother.” Later, when Ramoo, in a fit of helplessness, tells his family to sell the land (over which the zamindar, the tout, and Mahajan all have a vulturous eye), Pradhan and Niranjan are shocked.

Niranjan reminds his brother of the sacredness of the land and reminds him that “the land is our mother.” In keeping with the nationalist discourse, the land and the cow—that provide sustenance to the villagers—represent the life-giving mother figure, a primal inner force, now threatened by the collusion of corrupt outside forces. The recovery of this inner power—or the ability to protect the mother figure, which, in turn, means protecting oneself—is at the heart of Dharti Ke Lal’s socialist parable. With Ramoo affronted by a slap from Niranjan and breaking away from the family to try his luck at the city, the task of realizing the socialist dream will ultimately be up to Niranjan, who is aware that the scarcity of food is just an artificially created phenomenon by the larger power nexus that excludes the farmer.

With grain hoarders sending away their loot to Calcutta to be sold at astronomical prices, shops in Aminpur all shut down, resulting in sordid wretchedness all around. Dayal sees his family die before his eyes and almost loses his mind. As Aminpur turns into a “bhooton ki nagari” or a place of ghosts, the surviving few decide to brave it all the way to the city to beg for food. And then comes the famous exodus scene in the film, with many dropping dead en route, to dirge-like background music.

In Calcutta, the degradation of the hungry reaches a new low as they squat on the streets outside mansions, begging, scavenging dustbins, fighting with each other for scraps, grunting miserably—while the city around turns a blind eye. The rich dine luxuriously, while outside the glass door, the hungry look on: the disparity is Dickensian. When it is impossible to suffer further, respite comes in the form of death to many.

Moreover, the communal divide is fomented in the form of separate relief kitchens for Hindus and Muslims. As pots clang, Hindus shoo away Muslims, and vice-versa—this is in contrast to the religious unity of the village. The city’s inhumanness is personified in the rich Seth saheb (played by K. N. Singh, as villainous as ever), a grain-hoarding merchant who is permanently busy on the phone, making profitable deals.

Meanwhile, Ramoo who has been working as a rickshaw puller loses his job and, reminiscing about the good old days in the village, turns to alcohol for comfort. Pradhan’s family is languishing: Radhika prostitutes herself in exchange for milk for her child; her mother-in-law, weak and mad with hunger, steals the child’s milk; Pradhan is dying; and an unsuccessful Niranjan watches all this helplessly. 

When Niranjan turns to a kind, conscientious relief worker named Shambhu dada (possibly Shombhu Mitra) for moral strength, the latter says with conviction that the people’s awakening will definitely happen, and that Niranjan, as a tiller of the soil—tillers are, after all, known for their indefatigability—should not get dispirited. It is just that hunger has crushed people’s spirits. The voice of hunger needs to be heard by all of the country for help to arrive, and that should be the mission of the hour. The stage is set for the chorus song, “Bhookha hai Bengal” (Bengal is hungry), a hard-hitting plea for help addressed to the rest of India. On a map of undivided India stand the singers, and, in the background, silhouetted, are images of Bengal’s misery.

As the news spreads to the rest of India, Niranjan has finally some reason to hope for the better, and he tells his dying father about this encouraging turn of events. Pradhan is delusional and sees green fields, clouds, oxen, and a golden harvest. He tells his family and Ramzaan to return home and start life again, and dies. Niranjan resolves to make the golden harvest a reality. Shambhu, too, reminds Niranjan of the power of the people, of their power to help themselves, and Niranjan is convinced.

Everyone returns to Aminpur, except Radhika who despises herself so much they she can never go back home again. Radhika and Ramoo cross paths in a very unmemorable way: when he hears that there are only two items for sale in the market—“woman and food,” in the words of the same vile tout from Aminpur—Ramoo, with no job and no food, forces himself to be a pimp and tries to strike a deal with a woman who turns out to be Radhika. She informs him that his father is dead, and the rest have returned home with their child who has been entrusted to Binodini. Ramoo and Radhika are reunited in their suffering, and Ramoo is deeply pained that he came close to selling his wife.

Back in Aminpur, Niranjan tells his fellow farmers about the new concept of collective farming, where everyone will jointly plough the land, sow seeds, water the crops, and harvest food, and enjoy the fruits of hard work equally; then no land will go unused and no one hungry. The villagers are first taken aback by this radical idea, but then realize that there is no other option, and agree. The sense of togetherness among the people is echoed by schoolchildren who chime in unison: “Hindustan is our country. This field is yours. This field is mine. We will together make a big field, which will be neither yours nor mine, but everyone’s.” This grand lesson in the people’s empowerment pays off as the next harvest turns out to be a dream harvest. 

As the villagers make merry, and sing cheerful songs about the power of unity, Ramoo and Radhika—the wistful outsiders—look on. As the idyllic mood of Bengal’s landscape is reaffirmed, the film ends on a fable-like note with Radhika reminding her husband that as long as the country suffers from oppression and hunger, until then will the flame of their—the outcasts’—memory burn brightly in the hearts of the people of Aminpur.

One wonders at this bittersweet ending: why does Abbas not reintegrate the couple into the social fabric? They have, perhaps, strayed from their roots very far, but do they deserve to face permanent alienation? Perhaps it is Abbas’s way of equating the sanctity of womanhood with the sanctity of land: despite pressures, Niranjan could never be forced to part with his land; in contrast, Ramoo urges his brother to sell the land and, later, tries to sell his wife; Radhika goes one step ahead and sells herself. In the nationalist discourse of the time, women and land were routinely conflated, with each signifying the other, and representing what was sacrosanct. Selling one is the same as selling the other—and both are transgressions of the highest order that confer on the seller an outcast status.

That Dharti Ke Lal’s social realism made it an unusual Indian film for its time is illustrated in a rather interesting anecdote from Abbas’s autobiography. When Abbas visited the Cinematheque film library in Paris in 1955, the librarian told him that of all the Indian films they had received, there was one particular film (without titles) that seemed to stand out in that it was not the typical fighting-dancing movie; she was curious to know who had made it, and what its name was; when she described what she had seen to Abbas, it turned out to be Dharti Ke Lal.

(P.S. I am away from my home turf now. When I have access to my video equipment, I will post the "Bhookha hai Bengal" song and other excerpts that I have with me. Watch this space.)

Image credit: The Times of India, Mumbai, December 26, 2010

The eternal and the transient: Jean Renoir’s The River (1951)

A shorter version of this post first appeared as "The River sutra" in The Hindu on November 6, 2011.

Watching Jean Renoir’s film The River (1951), made in Technicolor, is like watching a picture book come to life—a picture book of the young English girl Harriet’s girlhood days, spent in Bengal in the early years of the twentieth century. Growing up by the river that is punctuated with rice fields and jute fields, Harriet and her siblings lead a carefree life that is splendidly caught by Renoir’s camera in a way that is reminiscent of a series of Impressionist paintings. Indeed, the film could be described as one long painting that captures life’s fleeting moments and faithfully records the flow of life. As the flow of the mighty river mingles with the flow of life, the film places events—small and big—in perspective.

This was Renoir’s first color film, and the first Technicolor film to be shot in India, on location in Bengal. It had art direction by Bansi Chandragupta, who later became famous for his work with Satyajit Ray. Ramananda Sengupta, the cinematographer of Ritwik Ghatak’s first feature film, the classic Nagarik (1952), was the camera operator. During the making of the film, Renoir greatly valued the counsel of Satyajit Ray who was not yet known to the world.

Based on a somewhat autobiographical 1946 novel of the same name by Rumer Godden (who wrote many such works about life during the British Raj in India—see my posting on Black Narcissus, 1947), substantially rewritten for the screen, The River intertwines Harriet’s immediate life with the larger life around her—the latter largely shot by Renoir in the form of documentary footage on a riparian lifestyle.

Harriet and her siblings and their rather proud friend Valerie playing in the lush green garden watched by their Indian nanny; Harriet’s naughty little brother Bogey transfixed by the cobra in the pipal tree, which will sadly be his undoing; Harriet’s father going to and from the jute factory where he works; the pensive Mr. John next door, with his half-Indian half-English daughter, Melanie (played by a young Radha Sri Ram before she became Radha Burnier, the famous theosophist), and their new guest—the young American, Captain John; a rather Christmassy Diwali party hosted at Harriet’s place that is exciting to all the children because Captain John, the dashing war hero with one leg, is attending—the subjectivity of this world is interspersed with the life around that is shaped by the flowing of the river on whose banks people eke out a living.

Life simmers by the river, and the everyday comes alive under Renoir’s photographic eye: boatmen tug at their oars, with the boats ferrying jute from Chittagong and Burma to the local jute factories, as the workers toil away; bazaars sell colorful wares including papayas, mangoes, jasmine flowers, betel nuts, candies, kites, silk saris, grains, and livestock; fortunetellers and snake charmers jostle with the crowds, while babies with kohl-lined eyes, heavily smudged, look on; children play, buffaloes graze, holy men meditate, and women wash clothes.

Days come and go, the seasons change, the festivals follow one another—and life goes by as the perennial river does, in one broad, majestic sweep, a relentless force that can neither be paused nor reversed.

As the earthen idol of Kali becomes earth once again, at the end of the festival, only to come alive the following year, so does the cycle of birth and death—of creation and destruction—form the basis of all life, which plays out without beginning or end. Harriet and Valerie painfully realize that they cannot always remain cocooned in the carefree world of their childhood, and as Valerie comments insightfully, “I didn’t want it to change, and it’s changed.”

This stoicism seems to come much more naturally to the half-Indian Melanie than to the westerners, all of who, unlike Melanie, have to work hard at accepting the inevitable. Considering that the character of Melanie was not in the book, and was an invention for the screen, one wonders if Renoir, as part of the West’s Orientalist discourse—that Orientals are natural mystics—inevitably equated her Indianness with an innate Eastern wisdom.

When Melanie’s father worries about the future of his half-caste daughter and tells her that perhaps she “should never have been born,” Melanie, with philosophical confidence, retorts: “But I am born. Someday I shall find where I belong.” In the same vein, she makes Captain John—a man whose disability frustrates him so much that he is always running away from himself—face the truth. When, in denial mode, he distraughtly says, “I am a normal man in any country,” Melanie replies ruthlessly but realistically, “Where will you find a country of one-legged men?” Melanie, in Renoir’s world, represents the unfathomable wisdom of the Orient.

I have never heard Carnatic music in the context of Bengal, but I must say Renoir’s choice of music is hardly incongruous. Melanie’s Bharatanatyam recital to the song Karunai irukka vendumae in melodious Kambhodhi raagam, and Bogey’s funeral procession to the accompaniment of a song in majestic Kaanada raagam only reiterate the macro-view of life that Renoir paints in all its sublime colors. The music elevates; and, to put it metaphorically, the soul glides off the boughs of the film’s magnificent pipal tree.

As the narrative reaches its end, the black blotch of Bogey’s untimely death gives way to riotous springtime. It is Holi, and as the postman (who brings Captain John’s letters from faraway America to the eager Valerie, Harriet, and Melanie) is bombarded with the colors of life, there is life and hope yet again in the form of a newborn, Harriet’s latest sibling, an entity now firmly present in the world, but who did not exist awhile back—while the river continues to flow as it has done, uninterrupted, for centuries.

Image credit: The Criterion Collection

Dev Anand's first film: Hum Ek Hain (1946) and its rhetoric of nation

This post first appeared in the PassionForCinema blog on  September 26, 2010.

Kamala Kotnis & Dev Anand

Dev Anand—of the lithe frame and the tilted gait; the impish turn of the head and the quick nod; the doffing of the cap and the dreamy gaze—will be 87 years old this September 26th. When it comes to an Indian film legend who is so deeply rooted in the public imagination as Dev Anand is, and about whom information is galore, I had rather not add to the redundancy of information—information redundancy (or regurgitation) being the bane of today’s Internet world. Instead, I take this occasion to remember his first film.

Let me hark back to a time when Dev Anand was not yet the wildly popular Dev Anand that he would become from the 1950s onward and cause many female hearts to flutter. In life, a certain finesse or confidence emerges with the passage of time and accumulation of experiences; and it is snapshots in time—such as a photo, or a film, or a piece of writing, or a rendering of a song—that capture these various stages of self-formation so palpably. In 1946, when Dev Anand debuted in Prabhat Film Company Limited’s Hum Ek Hain (We are one) under P. L. Santoshi’s direction—Santoshi wrote the dialogues and song lyrics as well—the Dev Anand mien (as one can call it), is still some distance away, although one gets, in the lanky newcomer, a whiff of that persona to come.

In Hum Ek Hain, a story of unity in the face of religious and class differences, Dev Anand shared equal screen space with a host of others, including debutants Rehman, Rehana, and Kamala Kotnis, all saplings in the shade of a banyan tree-like figure that is Durga Khote, a mother who looks on dotingly over her brood—biological and otherwise.

A rather detailed synopsis here. (Spoiler alert: This section of my post gives away the story; so if you prefer suspense, you might want to skip the synopsis bit, and go down to my critique of the film.) The setting is an Indian village. Times are bad, with famine and starvation taking a toll on the poor farmers. A heartless zamindar (or landlord) called Badebabu (? actor) exploits his farmers’ vulnerability by forcing them to sell their small pieces of land—their only subsistence—in return for meager portions of food. In stark contrast, there is a very noble, kind lady whom the villagers refer to as Zamindari Ma (played by Durga Khote), the widow of the good zamindar who is remembered in death as in life for his generosity and good deeds. Zamindari Ma keeps alive the glorious tradition set by her late husband, and rises magnificently to the occasion by opening her granaries to one and all—not just to the farmers who work under her, but also to all the other farmers in the village, including those who work under Badebabu.

She also takes under her wing many orphaned children, and adopts three of them—a Muslim, a Christian, and a low-caste girl—as her own. So, Shankar (her biological son), who is a likeness of his noble parents, now has siblings in Yusuf, John, and Durga. The old faithful of the family is Rehman Chachha (? actor), and Zamindari Ma relies on his counsel. And one big happy family it is, affirming the “hum ek hain” motto under the music director-duo of Husnlal Bhagatram. Song 1: “Meri aankhon ke ujiyaarey ho tum”

As Zamindari Ma spins her charkha, time flies, and the children grow up. Shankar (Dev Anand) looks after the zamindari of his father; Yusuf (Rehman) is a hunting enthusiast; John (? actor) is a doctor; and Durga (? actor) is—well—just all grown up, a lively lass. Zamindari Ma, her heart swelling with pride, says: “Teen ladke, teen tarah ke” (Three sons, of three kinds); she leaves out poor Durga, I guess. Shankar completes the line for her, with Yusuf and John in tow: “… lekin ma, hum ek hain (but mother, we are one).” Durga seconds that, and so does Mithoo the family parrot.

Meanwhile, Badebabu’s son, Chhotebabu (also a crook, like his father; played by Ramsing), has come back to the village as a “vakil” or lawyer, and goes around throwing his weight. Both father and son are intent on fixing the latter’s marriage with Vidya (Kamala Kotnis), the daughter of their family friend from town, Shyamacharan (? actor). Father and daughter are visiting the village and staying at Badebabu’s. On an outing, Vidya witnesses Chhotebabu’s haughty behavior, and is not impressed. She instantly falls in love with the upright Shankar who puts his foot down at Chhotebabu’s domineering ways. Shankar reciprocates Vidya’s feelings.

Yusuf and John also find their ladyloves—Nargis (Rehana) and Dolly (? actor), respectively, and both alliances are fixed. Durga is very excited for her three brothers, but comes to know from the local astrologer that Vidya’s wedding with Chhotebabu is almost finalized. She breaks the news to a dejected Shankar. Meanwhile, an upset Vidya tells her father that she cannot stand Chhotebabu one bit. Shyamacharan is an understanding parent and makes the trip to Zamindari Ma to fix the Shankar-Vidya marriage. Shubh vivaah. Three in one go. Song 2: “Meri aayi hai teen bhabhiyaan”



After the celebrations, Chhotebabu turns up at Zamindari Ma’s household in a suspiciously cordial mood. In a false show of solidarity, he chimes “hum ek hain,” and says how happy he is for the three brothers. When Shankar leaves for town with his new wife to visit his ailing father-in-law, Chhotebabu visits John at the clinic and tells him that the place is too run-down for practice and that he needs to build a bigger hospital. He prods John to write to Shankar for money, and introduces him to an engineer who will head the construction work.

Chhotebabu is hand in glove with the unscrupulous engineer, and together they plan to fleece John. Shankar sends the money, and construction begins, and so does the engineer’s menacing demands for more and more money. John hesitates to ask Shankar again for money, but Chhotebabu assures him that he will visit Shankar in town and get the funds.

Meanwhile, the crop yield is poor that year, and the farmers under Zamindari Ma are unable to pay “lagaan” or taxes. Shankar, who is the family accountant, is informed; and, naturally, he feels reluctant to divert more money to the construction work when there is shortage of funds—and especially so, given the family’s priority of the farmers’ well being. As he discusses this with Vidya, Chhotebabu walks in and notices Shankar’s worried look. When Shankar explains the quandary that he is in, Chhotebabu spews more venom and condemns John for wasting money and urges Shankar to go in person and stop the construction.

Shankar immediately returns to the village and tells the engineer to stop work. John objects, but Shankar tells him that he will explain it all to him at home. The engineer walks off in a huff, the work stops, and John gets angry with Shankar. Back at home, during mealtime, Zamindari Ma notices that John and Shankar, for the first time in their lives, look sullen. Soon, to everybody’s shock, the two brothers fight openly and John remarks angrily that the most important thing in life is money and that he has just realized it.

John then takes his wife’s jewelry to Chhotebabu, who, feigning horror, offers to fund the construction work—but on one condition: no one must know that Chhotebabu is financing the project. Having extracted this promise, however, Chhotebabu goes to Shankar and wonders aloud about John’s new source of money—and prophesies that John’s irresponsible spending will only bring Shankar, the eldest brother, a bad name. In a wily way, he also introduces the idea of “batwaara” or splitting of the family property. Shankar is horrified, but nevertheless the seed is sown.

When Shankar questions John about the source of the money, the latter refuses to tell—followed by a fierce exchange of words. Yusuf intervenes, but the other two only get angrier, and Shankar blurts out that splitting the property is the best option. Pained, Yusuf leaves the house with his wife, followed by John and wife, all in the middle of the night. Zamindari Ma appropriately wakes up from a nightmare of her three sons on a capsizing boat and finds two of her sons gone. She is upset with Shankar and orders him to go bring back his brothers. An irate Shankar refuses and leaves as well with his wife.

As Zamindari Ma sits staring vacantly at her empty nest, Chhotebabu comes pretending how sad he is—and offers to help with the zamindari work. The grief of seeing a broken home is too much for Zamindari Ma, and she takes to bed.

Denouement is in the form of a raging fire in Zamindari Ma’s fields. She rushes out concerned for her farmers, who are frantically trying to save the crops, and faints. Hearing the commotion, her three sons arrive—and in the face of calamity, realize their mistake of straying from the family motto of “hum ek hain.” The farmers catch the culprit (Chhotebabu’s henchman, of course). The angry farmers, accompanied by Shankar, Yusuf, and John, arrive at Badebabu’s, who apologizes for his son’s wicked deeds.

Shankar, Yusuf, and John almost speak in one voice when they realize that this fire is just an extension of the inner fire of brotherly feud started by Chhotebabu. The demand is unanimous: the arsonist should leave the village. The unconscious Zamindari Ma magically springs to life when she hears her three sons declare, with a newfound zeal, the family motto of “hum ek hain.” The lesson of unity firmly in place, the “hum ek hain” song fills the air one last time. Song 3: Version 2 of “Meri aankhon ke ujiyaarey ho tum” that starts as “Hum jaag uthey hain sokar”



Reflections and a critique: If Amar, Akbar, and Anthony famously symbolized religious unity on celluloid in 1977 and thereafter, their predecessors on the eve of Indian independence were Shankar, Yusuf, and John. Director P. L. Santoshi’s story on national integration resounded with the volatility of those tension-filled times of 1946: the fear of communal disharmony dividing India is represented in the film by the fallout between the brothers, which threatens to break up the family and endanger the life of the all-straddling matriarch, quite a Mother India figure.

The Mother India imagery is quite explicit in the film’s publicity material. An advertisement in The Times of India dated 17 August 1946 had an eye-catching silhouette of a partial outline of India’s map, filled with nameless individuals, all children of the same mother, defiantly screaming “Hum Ek Hain.” The ad declared the film, then in its “6th sonorous week at Central [Cinema]” to be a “picture of the moment.” Further, it reproached the colonial policy of sowing disunity amongst the ruled when it emphatically announced: “Turn east—and hear India speak! [This] is today’s tip to the west! …The voices of millions sing in unity—and Prabhat has caught the magic of the words ‘Hum Ek Hain.’”

In the context of the then emerging nation, the idea of unity is unequivocally tied to the figure of the mother. Disunity—within the family or within the nation—is a threat to the mother, the life-giver. This rhetoric of nation, which is the centrality of the mother in the scheme of things, is, however, based on a very simplistic arrangement: it conveniently dispenses with the father, the absent zamindar of the narrative. And clearly it is a world of mothers and sons—with the mother’s deepest and most meaningful relationship with the son and not the daughter.

I end this piece on a lighter, musical note, with a delightful dance by the inimitable Cuckoo as she, the village belle, performs before Chhotebabu and Vidya. The opening credits name Guru Dutt for “dance composition.” Song 4: “Ho nadiya ke paar mora saawarey”



Acknowledgments: My reading of the film would not have been possible without access to the full film. On my last visit to India, I got the VCD of this film from which I have uploaded four songs onto my YouTube channel. But when I was searching for a better print of the film, I realized that what I have is an identical copy of the VCD available at the ExDesi.com Desi Torrents Links and Streams site, where it has been uploaded (and possibly digitized in the first place) by a generous soul who goes by the username of Trinidad. My heartfelt thanks to Trinidad, or the person who made it first available. Just go to the site, or google “Hum Ek Hain 1946,” and you should find it. In there, you can also find screenshots and songs from the film, a profile of Dev Anand, and a description of 1946 in Hindi films.

Also, members at the hamaraforums site have uploaded the audio of the songs in MP3 format, with as much song information as is presently known. For song credits, I have entirely relied on them.

P.S.: If anyone identifies some of the actors/singers here, please help fill in the blanks.