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Book Review
Journey of Indian cinema
THEODORE BASKARAN
SEEING IS BELIEVING — Selected Writings on Cinema: Chidananda Das Gupta; Penguin Books, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017. Rs. 499.
Long before academia discovered cinema as a fertile source of grist to its mill and, culture and subaltern studies brought in a wave of researchers into the discipline of film studies, there were a few scholars in India taking a serious look at cinema and leading them was Chidananda Das Gupta. He has been associated with the major developments in Indian cinema and has made some memorable films, like “The Dance of Shiva” (1971). He knows his cinema and has been writing on Indian cinema since 1946 drawing from his experience in film society movement, in policy-making and in film-making.
Essay collection
The book is a collection of essays the author had published since 1966 to the present day, in magazines such as Asian Film Quarterly. But quite a few essays, which really form the core of this book, have already appeared as part of his earlier book Painted Face. The subject of the essays in this book under review ranges from the place of songs in Indian films to national awards. He points out that filmmakers like Guru Dutt, who found space for personal cinema within the precincts of box office, and Ritiwik Ghatak, who made memorable films that have acquired cult status, never got an award. The essay “Precursors of Unpopular Cinema” is an impressive work in film history. In the essay on Ritwik Ghatak he discusses Marxism as one strand that runs through the works of a few well-known film-makers in India. Das Gupta moves easily from poetry to painting and on to cinema. He points out that the cinema of the leftists followed the tradition of using arts for social engineering, set up by Subramania Bharati and Amrita Shergil. He points out that though the leftist filmmakers had proletarian sympathies, the proletarian audience hardly saw their movies. However, the international recognition they got invited the hostility of some filmmakers at home. When Nargis entered the parliament as a nominated member she launched a virulent attack on the cinema of Satyajit Ray in her maiden speech.
The seminal essay in the book is the one on film studies in India. Often academics approach cinema as if it were a piece of literature. So, image, the core component of cinema, is often discounted. One reason is that many scholars who immigrated to the discipline of film studies were from literature and were oriented to words. “There is a limit to language’s ability to translate sensory experience into words: without that limit, there would have been no need to invent music, or painting or cinema. There is a whole world of experience in reality or in dream that lies beyond the realm of words,” says Das Gupta. He points out that cinema should not be brought back into the domain of print civilisation. This tendency is seen more in the academics from the West, a pattern copied with alacrity in India. The number of Ph.Ds on cinema which was 200 in the U S in 1964 rose to more than 2000 by 1997. The subject became popular. Scholars from literature, anthropology, history and even theology flocked to the cinema arena.
Film in politics
In the essay on the Dravidian movement, Das Gupta looks at the intersection of cinema and politics which coincided with the age of mass entertainment in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. He has taken the popular stand that the Dravidian movement was the one which pioneered the use of film in politics in our country. In fact in the Madras Presidency, it was the Indian National Congress that first utilised cinema for political propaganda beginning in the 1930s and set the process of the interaction between screen and politics. Particularly during the Congress interregnum, 1937-39, when censorship was lifted, many explicatively propagandist films came out. The first star to enter politics in India was a congress worker—K.B.Sundarambal who entered the legislature in 1958. That marked the birth of the star-politician. S. Satyamurthy, who was the secretary of the Tamil Nadu Pradesh Congress Committee, was also the president of the South Indian Film Chamber of commerce. There is a section on five filmmakers — Satyajit Ray, Ritwick Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Shyam Benegal — providing an excellent introduction to their art and ideology. The book is well produced, meticulously documented and comes with a thoughtfully prepared index. Any scholar trying to study Indian cinema, should begin with this book.
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