The Cover
The year 2007 marks the sesquicentennial (1857-2007) of the First War of Independence initiated by Mangal Pandey and taken forward by Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi and Nana Phadnavis. The First War may not have brought the desired results but it did bring about a national awakening among the common people of India, a realization that freedom had to be seized from British domination. Ravi Jadhav’s cover design celebrates this very awakening and blends it with its depiction in Indian cinema – which is the theme of this inaugural issue of Documentary Today.
5
A Labour Of Love
Former Chief Producer of Films Division and noted documentarian N.S.Thapa writes about the days he was recalled from retirement to oversee the production of a series of documentaries on the Indian freedom struggle.
13 Remembering the Past
National Award-winning film critic and documentary filmmaker Sanjit Narwekar takes an overview of the freedom struggle as depicted by Hindi films.
20
Men who played Gandhi
A feature detailing the various actors who have, over the years, played the Father of the Nation.
22 Shaheed: The Fulfilment of a Dream
Film journalist and writer Roshmilla Bhattacharya interviews Manoj Bharat Kumar on the conception and making of his alltime classic Shaheed, based on the life and times of India s revolutionary hero Bhagat Singh.
28 Nationalism and the Tamil cinema
Film historian S.Theodore Bhaskaran writes about the politicalisation of the Tamil cinema soon after the advent of Mahatma Gandhi. In the spirit of a new awakening the cinema was all set for a meaningful interaction with this political ferment.
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Born in a Deceived Age
Noted critic and documentary filmmaker Shama Zaidi feels that historical themes are used by filmmakers either to tell a story or to make an oblique comment on the present through the past. Films on recent events are not effective as cinema because these events have not seared the psyche of our writers and film-makers.
39 The Cellular Jail: A Unique House of Torture
Noted cinematographer-director Prem Vaidya recalls the days when he shot two documentaries at the dreaded Cellular Jail, Kala Pani, the unique house of torture conceived and constructed by the British to contain the heroes of the freedom struggle.
44 A Modern Look at Two Heroes of the Freedom Struggle
Film critic Aarti Wani makes an attempt to understand history as a part of our endeavor to understand ourselves and shape our world today.
Fellow documentary filmmakers and lovers of documentary, I welcome you all to a new reading experience called Documentary Today, an unexplored virginal area of magazine journalism which has, for some unfathomable reason, remained untouched by even the large magazine chains who could have afforded such a magazine. However, the Films Division has ventured into the area and this new magazine promises to take you to an unlimited number of exciting new locations which any documentary generally travels to.
Editor Kuldeep Sinha Executive Editor Sanjit Narwekar Production Team V.Packiriswamy V.S.Narvekar N. B. Sonawane Cover Design Ravi Jadhav Printed at Work Center Offset Printers (I) Pvt Ltd. A2/32, Shah & Nahar Industrial Estate, S. J. Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai 400013 Tel.: 24943227 / 24929261 Published by Films Division, 24, Dr.Gopalrao Deshmukh Marg, Mumbai 400026 Tel.: 23510461 / 23521421 Our thanks to the National Film Archives of India, Pune for many of the rare and historical photographs used in this issue.
There was a time deep into my past when documentaries were as alien to me as life on the moon and Mars. My days at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune were splashed with the bright and enticing colours of fiction films, then being made all around the world by those names of cinema which even today spell magic. Documentary films were relegated to a small insignificant space in our film studies and obviously they did not make any lasting impression on our fiction-oriented minds. After all, hadn t we joined the Film Institute to become an intimate part of the glamorous FEATURE film industry? No one and I mean, NO ONE took documentaries seriously, let alone dreamt of being a maker of documentary films. Once, as part of my initial struggle to establish a foothold in the conventional film industry, I was offered a series of documentary films on social issues for Doordarshan. I rejected the offer without a thought and forged ahead with my struggle. I knew I was going to make it so why documentaries? Documentaries were like the daily newspaper which has a fleeting importance for half-an-hour in the morning with the first cup of tea. The only documentaries I had seen were the ones shown before the feature films: 20-minute developmental and propagandist packages known as newsreels , promoted by Films Division. And then, one day, just like that, I joined the Films Division and became a documentary filmmaker. As the captivating world of everyday life unfolded before me, as the realism of the format began to seduce me I began to realize what I had missed out in my life as a film student. There were some wonderful documentaries on display at the Film Institute borrowed from the wonderful library of the National Film Archive of India but I had been too preoccupied to see them. How I hanker to go back and watch all of them again! I have seen all of them since but the carefree joy of student life is gone. I am a documentary filmmaker today! Someone who makes those developmental and propagandist packages and surprise! surprise! finds great joy in doing so! Life has a way of suprising you which is what makes the documentary more seductive than the feature film. It is real life captured and encapsulated! Our once beloved but now almost forgotten first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru saw the great potential of documentaries to inform and educate the majority of the masses who were, unfortunately, unlettered then. Like Lenin and Stalin before him, he saw how the visual medium could cover up for the lack of literacy. He wanted to use documentaries to bring the people of diverse cultures together, to make DOCUMENTARY TODAY
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them understand the unity that existed in their diversity. He wanted to use documentaries to inform the people of the great experiment that India had undertaken: to develop into a huge industrial nation. He wanted documentaries to show that dams and factories were indeed the temples of modern India . When India became free at the bewitching midnight hour on that post-monsoon night of August 14-15, 1947 there was no official media to cover the momentous event and to this day we keep showing what is essentially borrowed footage . The moment was lost but there were other moments to be secured and thus, in April 1948, the Films Division was born in Mumbai and since then it has stood steadfast holding its own ground amidst the glamour of Bollywood. And over the years some of the biggest name in Bollywood and Indian cinema have made films for the FD. Pramod Chakravorty started here and so did Loksen Lalwani! Many filmmakers began their careers with documentaries and many others ended it making documentaries. Over the years the Films Division has made great strides in the production of documentary films. In its archives it has now got the largest number of documentary films on a wide variety of subjects: culture to agriculture, arts and music, science and sports, biographies and anthropology, education and current affairs, experimental and animation. But, unfortunately, documentary films have still not been able to become a part of our life like its more prosperous sibling: feature films. Documentaries are still struggling to create a mass appeal for themselves. Those who consider documentary films boring not only undermine their educational and archival values but also forget that anything we think, we imagine, we do, we expect, we dream, we live, we relish can be preserved for posterity and that is the role played by documentary films. A documentary film is a record of moving times. It is a record of history in the making! But today the movement has expanded manifold thanks to the availability of cheaper and faster technology: the digital video. Independent filmmakers many of them young people barely out of college have come forward to make documentary films on the triumphs and turbulences of our times. Many of them want to make only documentaries which is a refreshing change from the earlier days of which I was a part and which I have elaborated on earlier in this piece. The advent of video and digital technology have 4
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helped them to swim in the shark-infested waters without the need of a safety device. The Mumbai International Film Festival hosted by the Films Division every alternate year has given these documentary filmmakers in India and all over the world a platform which has now become THE MOST REVERED platform in the world. The battle to establish the documentary as a socially desirable tool seemed to have been won but there still was one need: a magazine for the movement, a platform which documentary filmmakers could call their own. There are hundreds and thousands of periodicals and magazines in the market today but not a single one devoted to the art and craft of documentary in fact, we have reached a point when there is not a single decent magazine on cinema. We at Films Division thought that we would do our bit to fill in this lacuna with this sincere effort, Documentary Today. We hope to make this a magazine for those who value ethics and traditions, history and culture. This is a magazine for all documentary filmmakers and lovers of documentary. And by all I really mean ALL. Let not our small sectarian differences divide us into smaller groups of us and them . We are all filmmakers devoted to a single cause: for the betterment of Indian documentary. We may seem to adopt different paths but our aim is the same. Like the MIFF we hope the Documentary Today will become a successful effort. This year 2007 India celebrates the sesquicentennial (1857-2007) of the First War of Independence. We thought of having a small festival of feature and documentary films which celebrates this special occasion and this first issue of Documentary Today is devoted to that event. The year also sees us celebrating the entry into the 60th year of Films Division (1948-2008). Maybe we will devote the next issue to that event. And then there is the MIFF 2008 coming up so another issue to that occasion And did I tell you about this idea that I had about a documentary channel but then as usual I am running ahead with my thoughts. For the moment, I hope you enjoy reading this issue like we all enjoyed putting it together for you.
KuldeepSinha
The Making of the Freedom Struggle Documentaries By N.S.Thapa
After retirement when mother asked me to come home, I told her that since I can t take up farming at the ripe old age of 58, I would like to stay in Bombay, make some corporate films for the industry and publicity films for the state government and earn some money. But there is a vast distance between desire and destiny. After my retirement I did make a few films on contract basis and earned some money from corporate and educational films but all that was to change soon. In 1984, I was summoned to Delhi by H. K. L. Bhagat, Minister for Information and Broadcasting. He showed me a letter from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi asking him to have some documentary films produced to be screened during the centenary year of Indian National Congress, Please seek the assistance of N. S. Thapa in implementation of the project. Bhagat asked me, What do we do? My reply was, Make films, with or without my help. I called on the Prime Minister to thank her for her confidence in me and to express my inability to undertake the project of such importance. I told her that though I am interested in history, my knowledge is limited to school books and would not be able to do justice to the subject. She gave me a warm smile, Thapaji, I know that you are not a historian nor are you a politician but I also know that you are a fighter. In the past you have made films on many challenging subjects. I have confidence in your ability to understand the spirit of our fight for freedom. You should go and meet Dr. Shankar Dayal Sharma, the convener of the Congress centenary celebration committee. He will tell you more about it. As a retired person I needed money but in my stupidity I blurted out, Since the films are required to serve a national cause, I would like to offer my services in an honorary capacity. Indira Gandhi thought for a minute and said, Before committing yourself, you should consult your wife. 6
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I walked to the office of Dr. Sharma, a mild person with a rich voice. He spoke like a teacher, There is a great need to educate the present generation about our struggle for freedom. Even if your films succeed in educating 20 to 30% of our youth, about the great sacrifices made and the trials and tribulations of our freedom fighters, you would have achieved a great deal. A committee of freedom fighters and historians, headed by Umashankar Dixit will help you check factual accuracies. A paper on the line of action to be followed for making the film was submitted to Umashankar Dixit, chairman of the committee of historians. It was planned that instead of one film, we will have to produce a series of films to cover the ninety-year-long struggle for freedom from 1857 to 1947. My suggestion to begin the series of documentaries with the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, which was also known as India s First War of Independence, was accepted. The Prime Minister was informed that the first film would be released on 15 th August 1984, the beginning of the centenary year. On my return to Bombay I was invited by the Films Division to a meeting of some documentary filmmakers to plan the production of freedom movement 1857- The Beginning.
films. V. S. Jafa, Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, was chairing the meeting but officials were clueless about the plan. I raised a question, Since Government of India has already appointed a high power committee to handle the project, why another committee? Jafa explained, It is not another committee but an attempt to work out the modalities for implementing the programme. After going through my notes about what could and should be done, the Bombay committee recorded its recommendations: 1. All the films would be produced and directed under Shri Thapa s supervision. 2. Shri Thapa s assignments will be on ad-hoc basis and paid for according to the Films Division norms. 3. The committee appreciates Shri Thapa s offer and places on record that after completion of the films, the government will decide on how to award or reward Shri Thapa for his services. To make a documentary on historical subjects is far more difficult than
climbing the Everest. For a film on mountaineering one is dependent on the technique, weather and stamina of a mountaineer, while for a film on history, one requires intensive research to unravel historical facts and a director s ability to project the images of the past convincingly. Subdha Narvekar, the Research Librarian of Films Division was given the task of digging out information about what happened in history, how and where it happened. Unfortunately for us, India of the middle ages was not one nation, but a conglomeration of hundreds of kingdoms fighting internecine wars. Our lack of unity invited foreign adventurers to take advantage of our weaknesses and inability of Indian feudal lords to unite and defend their kingdoms. The merchants of the East India Company succeeded in making India a colony ruled by merchants. It was the only instance in the history of the world where merchants not kings ruled a sub-continent of India s size. That may be because India was not one country but a jumble of countries. It was planned to start the series of films with the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, because that was the flash point, which helped to arouse the national consciousness of India of being one country and one people. Not much of background material was available on the subject except Lord Canning s book Indian Mutiny , Malison s History of the Mutiny and some gazetteers. The only book available by an Indian author was Veer Savarkar s History of the War of Independence. Subdha Narvekar collected historical facts from the National and State Archives, books, gazetteers and old newspapers. She enlisted the support of institutions and scholars like Dr. Arun Tikekar of Times of India and Anderson of Bombay University Library. Offers of help were also received from the National Archives of India, Maharashtra Archives, Asiatic Library of Bombay, the National Library Calcutta, Marathi Granth Sanghralay,
Writing of the Raj. Bharatiya Vidhya Bhavan, Gandhi Smarak Nidhi and all the prominent newspapers of India. Collection of facts was essential but film being a visual medium, we also had to plan how to illustrate numerous events and battles. We collected a large number of paintings, sketches, gazetteers and guns of that period. British tradition of drawing sketches or painting pictures of the battles fought by their armies were very useful in illustrating history. At the same time K. K. Garg was sent to England to procure old newsreel films, paintings and photographs from the British Newsreel Companies, Imperial War Museum and other sources. At the Movietone library, he found thousands of feet of films on Indian freedom movement but its cost was prohibitive. Garg, jocularly told the Librarian, In the past your ancestors had plundered India. Now you are trying to loot us. Where is the British sense of justice? Movietone library responded with magnanimity and reduced the cost by half. The Films Division director, Prem Vaidya, discovered another treasure in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. A man called Krishna Swami had retrieved
from a trash-heap a complete documentary film on the exploits of the Indian National Army. We were aware that a film was made on the subject but had been lost. We never knew who the producer of the film was and how it found its way into a garbage dump. The film was like a precious jewel and purchased from the finder. Available records showed that in 1857, the East India Company was maintaining a large army of 50,000 British Mercenaries and 200,000 Indian soldiers, purportedly to guard its commercial interests in India. In the world history that was the largest private army and the only instance of a private army occupying by force of arms, 70 percent of a large sub-continent like India. It was the British East India Company that provided gunpowder for the Mutiny by the Indian soldiers on their pay roll. In the 1850s they began to issue grease-coated cartridges for muzzle-loading rifles used by Indian soldiers of their army. The tip of the cartridge had to be chewed off before pouring the gunpowder into barrels of guns supplied by the Company. Rumours had spread that the grease was animal fat. The sepoys wanted to know which animal, cows or pigs. Cows are sacred to Hindus and DOCUMENTARY TODAY
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Muslims abhor pigs. Soldiers, belonging to both the communities were averse to using the cartridges on religious grounds. The first in the series of films was an incident we had picked up from British records. On 29 th March 1857, Mangal Pande, a sepoy of 34 th regiment, stationed at Barrackpore near Calcutta, was found to be making inflammatory statements in front of a Guard Room. He was asking his compatriots not to accept the greased cartridges. Pande was arrested, charged with mutiny, court-martialled and hanged. We had only a sketch of Pande s face. Director Bhanumurthi looked for and found a soldier of similar build and face. He procured the uniform of 1857 from the Army sources and re-enacted the scenes of that fateful day. It was sad, brushing aside the objection of Indian soldiers, the East India Company kept issuing new cartridges. Mutiny broke out at Meerut on l0th May 1857, when sepoys of 3rd Cavalry Regiment killed their British officers and marched towards Delhi, the capital of the once powerful Mogul Empire. Although Delhi was under the occupation of the British Army, the ailing and aged Bahadur Shah Zafar still sat on the throne at Red Fort. After defeating the British garrison in Delhi, Aisee Thi Narayani.
Indian soldiers entered the Red Fort. They declared Bahadur Shah Zafar as the Emperor of Hindustan. Paintings and sketches of battles, obtained from various history books and museums helped us to illustrate the fierce battle fought, won and lost by the Indians for occupation of Delhi. To illustrate the spread of rebellion to Kanpur, Lucknow, Allahabad and parts of Central and North-western India, we depended on location-shots, paintings, maps and sketches. According to some writers the revolt was a feudal uprising. One finds it hard to believe, because feudal rulers were interested only in saving their own interests. They jumped into the fray only when the British seemed to be losing their grip on India. To start with, it was essentially a mutiny by the Indian soldiers in the service of East India Company. It was fascinating to show how chapattis (Indian breads) were used to conceal messages and sent to scattered batches of Indian revolutionaries. The most important battles shown were Delhi, siege of Residency at Lucknow, carnage at Kanpur and General Neil s Bloody Assize , when according to one historian, British soldiers were slaying natives regardless of their age
or sex. We used sketches drawn by British artists showing hundreds of bodies of Indians hanging from trees lining the roads. While the British forces were fighting well co-ordinated battles, Indians on the other hand had many leaders, fighting their own wars. Some brilliant leaders like Tantia Tope, Nana Sahib, Feroze Shah and above all Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi rose to fight unto death. Their deeds were inter-cut with the battles they fought. Raw courage of the Indian rebels was not enough to fight a far better organized and better equipped enemy. At Kalpi, Lakshmibai fought her last battle before martyrdom. British General Hugh Rose called her, Bravest of the brave military leader of the rebels. The Indian rebels lost the war because they lacked unified leadership and logistic support. But out of the ashes of a failed revolution was born our nationhood a united India. On the morning of 15th August 1984, the Independence Day, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi unfurled the national flag on the ramparts of Red Fort in Delhi and spoke about the 1857 uprising which was the beginning of our fight for freedom. The documentary India s Struggle for Freedom - 1857- the Beginning , was released in cinema houses that day and showed on television. Being an optimist, I was confident that we would be able to release one film on freedom movement every alternate week. To achieve that, Films Division had placed at my disposal half a dozen directors and engaged on contract some directors/producers like Ali Sardar Jaffri, B. D. Garga and others. While I wrote the majority of scripts and commentaries, Garga, Ali Sardar Jaffri and Prem Vaidya preferred to write their own scripts and commentaries. As producer of the majority of films, I followed an assembly line production procedure with eight units at work, shooting, editing or recording one or the other documentary. Once a fortnight I would catch the early morning flight to Delhi, show the new
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film to the committee of historians and fly back the same night. Real freedom fighters and historians like Umashankar Dixit and Dr. Amba Prasad knew their subjects and approved the films and called them well-researched documentaries. The second film of the series was on the transfer of administration of India from East India Company to the British Crown. It also depicted the contradictions of the British rule. While Indian raw materials were helping to bring about Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, India s rural industries were being destroyed by high taxation and exploitation of the plantation workers. The subsequent film showed the rise of leaders of Indian Renaissance and setting up of colleges, universities and publication of newspapers in Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu to awaken national consciousness. Bankim s book Anand Math was essentially a salutation to Mother India Bandemataram. Subramaniya Bharati s poem, India has thirty crore souls but her heart is one. She speaks eighteen languages yet her mind is one helped to stir national awakening. On 28th December 1885, the Indian National Congress was born atTejpal Hall, Bombay. For the first time in our history, the seeds of a national parliament for India had been sown. W C. Bonnerjee was elected the first President with K. T. Telang and A. O. Hume as Secretaries of the Congress. The Congress demanded a Royal Commission to enquire into the working of Indian administration. We illustrated the event with the aid of photographs of the Congress session, paintings and newspaper cuttings obtained from the archives. The film was called, The Spirit of Nationalism. Public, press and specialized agencies appreciated our efforts at unravelling the history of India s struggle for freedom. On 4th October 1984 Raja Ramanna, the former Chairman of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and General Secretary of the Nehru
Poorna Swaraj. Planetarium, Bombay wrote to the Information Minister, Some of us had an occasion to see the documentary film on India s Struggle for Freedom in three parts. The subject of the film is no doubt of abiding interest and the production values are also excellent. This indeed is a creditable achievement for the Films Division.
and Steel Works offered to produce rails for the British owned railways, the Railway Board Chairman, Sir Frederick Upcott, expressed his misgivings and queried, Do you mean to say that Tatas propose to make rails to British specifications? Why, if they do, I will undertake to eat every pound of rails they make.
The third film on the freedom movement dealt with inconsistencies of the British policies in India. We showed how India s economic structure was being disintegrated and her artisans and craftsmen were forced back to villages. In the words of Lord Bentick, the misery hardly finds parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of cotton weavers were bleaching the plains of India. At the beginning of the 20 th century, a new breed of educated Indian entrepreneurs was asserting India s right to promote her own industries. Textile Mills were established in Bombay, Nagpur and Ahmedabad. Jamshedji Tata believed that industrialization was the key to economic progress and set up an integrated Iron and Steel mill at Sakchi (renamed Jamshedpur) in south Bihar. At that time it was the largest steel production complex in the British Empire. It is said that when Tata Iron
Tata Steel not only fulfilled the promise to the railways but also supplied 1500 miles of rails to British army in Mesopotamia during the 1st World War. Jamshedji s son Dorab Tata was to comment, Had Sir Frederick carried out his undertaking, he might have suffered from indigestion. Jamshedji Tata also established the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore in the State of Mysore. On 9th of January 1915, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned to India, after his successful experiment with truth and non-violence in South Africa. In the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, He did not descend from above. He seemed to emerge from the millions of Indians. He was like a powerful current of fresh air teaching us fearlessness and truth. Some photographs and a few feet of archival films helped us to illustrate the events of that period. But DOCUMENTARY TODAY
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neither photographs nor films were available on the unique non-violent Satyagraha of plantation workers of Champaran in Bihar, led by Gandhi and on the no-tax campaign of Bardoli, Gujarat led by Sardar Patel. The grand children of Indigo plantation workers of north Bihar and Bardoli peasants in Gujarat volunteered to re-enact the historic scenes of victory of nonviolence over mindless brutal forces. Baisakhi-ka-mela, the beginning of the harvesting season is an important festival of Punjab. To celebrate the festival, unique to Punjab, a large congregation of the people of Amritsar had gathered at Jalianwala Bagh on the 13th of April 1919. The bagh was a spacious open ground, barricaded by high walls. The appearance of army troops on the opposite high grounds came as a surprise to the peaceful assembly Without any warning or provocation, General Dyer ordered his troops to open fire on innocent men, women and children. According to British records 379 persons were killed and 1150 injured in a massacre without a parallel in the history of the world. Some live film footage of troop movement in Amritsar, obtained from British sources, helped us to create the atmosphere for what was to follow. General Dyer s inhumanity against people was depicted with the help of some paintings and fresh shots of bullet marks still existing on the garden wall. General Dyer haughty posture before the Hunter Committee was re-created with audio only. The documentary was, Massacre at Jalianwalabagh. To illustrate the events of the 1920s we had some live footage. Plenty of still photographs were available on the visit of Simon Commission. We were also happy to have been able to obtain live shots of the Lahore Congress of 1930, where the resolution on Poorna Swaraj (Complete Independence) was passed unanimously. The resolution was, It is the inalienable right of the Indian people as of any other people to have freedom and enjoy the fruits of their toil and have the necessities of 10
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Jallianwala Bagh. life so that they have the full opportunities of growth. Documentaries were about real people and real events. The films on the freedom movement were one of the toughest assignments the Films Division had ever handled? We had to ensure factual accuracies of people and events. We were able to recall that liberal education had helped people like Gandhi, Tilak, Sardar Patel, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jai Prakash Narayan, Sarojini Naidu, Subhas Chandra Bose and tens of thousands of other young men and women who took a plunge into our freedom movement. Young Subhas joined the Congress party with a clarion call, Give me blood, I will give you freedom. Some of the most poignant scenes ever filmed were those of the great Salt March, Mahatma Gandhi s unique protest against tax on salt, the most common commodity of everyman s use. Over and above Gandhi s 11-point programme for independence was the abolition of the salt tax. On 2nd of March 1930, the 60 year old Mahatma embarked on his march from Ahmedabad to Dandi. Reverend John Holmes of New York compared it to
Christ s march from Galilee to Jerusalem to face death and glory. The Mahatma had begun the march with 78 hand-picked volunteers but every hour and every day their number kept growing. By the time the cavalcade reached Dandi on the sea, it had swelled into a sea of human determination. On the morning of 6th April 1930, Gandhi walked to the seashore and picked up a fistful of salt in a symbolic defiance of the law for manufacture of salt. The gesture was to shake an empire and facilitate in changing the course of history. In the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, Salt suddenly became a mysterious word, a word of power. Sarojini Naidu led 2,500 volunteers to raid the salt depot at Dharasana. She advised her followers, you must not resist. You must not even raise a hand to ward off a blow. We had obtained excellent film footage from international newsreel companies to illustrate the harrowing scenes of police brutalities. An American journalist Webb Miller had best described the drama, In 18 years of reporting in 20 countries, I have never witnessed scenes as harrowing as those at Dharasana.
Those struck down fell unconscious. The survivors, without breaking ranks, silently and doggedly marched on until struck down. In spite of mindless violence backed by armed might, the Raj was losing its grip on India. Louis Fisher summed up the impact of the Dandi March on the Indian political scene, The British beat the Indians with batons and rifle butts. The Indians neither cringed, nor complained nor retreated. That made England powerless and India invincible. Prem Vaidya, the director of the film, was meticulous in research, re-shooting and in the use of stock-shots of that historic march and in citing quotations from newspapers. The Great Salt March was a great film. Though the struggle was non-violent, we could not overlook the awe inspiring feats of brave young revolutionaries of Bengal, Punjab, U. P., Madras and Maharashtra. We used photographs of the revolutionaries like Khudiram Bose, Bhagat Singh, Chandra Shekhar Azad, Surya Sen, Savarkar, Vanchi, Pritilata Wadedar, Matangini Hazra and a host of other young men and women. Other historical events, which were captured in the film, were shots of Gandhi attending the Second Round Table Conference in London, where every community or group from India, with the exception of women, had asked for reservations.
mosquitoes and leeches. The Cellular Jail built in 1895, was used as a high security prison for the imprisonment of political prisoners considered to be dangerous. The prisoners were lodged in separate cells. To earn their daily bread, a prisoner had to extract two pounds of coconut fibre every day. If a prisoner failed to fulfill his quota, he was handcuffed to the wall and flogged. The concluding part of the film Kala Pani showed that in 1942 the Japanese forces had occupied Andaman and Nicobar islands. On 29th of December 1943, Netaji Subhas Bose landed at Port Blair and accepted the transfer of the islands as the head of the Provisional Government of free India. The film Kala Pani: A Pilgrimage was a touching tribute to hundreds of freedom fighters. While making films on the history of 20th century India, we did not forget the distant past. We made two films on the Vijian community of North Bihar for establishing the concept of an elected village republic of the 5 th century BC. The only other such example of village republics in the ancient world was that of Greek village republics around the same period in history. We made two films on the subject called, Roots of Democracy.
It was easy to recall the events of 1940s because as a young man I was a witness to many historic happenings of that period, such as World War II and the defeat of Axis Powers and the emergence of power rivalries among nations. We had sufficient newsreel films for documentaries on post war events like the release of Congress leaders from jail and the trial of three Indian National Army Officers: Shah Nawaz Khan, Dhillon and Sehgal at the Red Fort in Delhi. Two of the most important films on India s struggle for freedom we made were called, Towards Freedom based on the final phase of negotiation with the Cabinet Mission and India Wins Freedom. Making a film on the integration of former Princely States was both intriguing and entertaining. In the now forgotten past Kipling had written, Providence had created Maharajas to offer mankind a spectacle. That spectacle had come into existence in 1858 when more than 600 Princely States that had maintained their separate identities had accepted the British Monarch as the paramount power. With the end of British Paramountcy, Viceroy Lord Mountbatten had advised the rulers of Princely States, to keep geographical
The Great Salt March.
Gandhi was clear in his mind and said, In an independent India, all the people will vote only as Indians and for Indians. During my student days I had heard of Kala pani but did not know what Kala pani (black water) meant. Later in life I learnt that the term was used for the penal colony in Andman Islands for those serving life imprisonment. Director Prem Vaidya made a film on the prison islands, where thousands of political prisoners served life imprisonment in the notorious Cellular Jail in Andaman. The savage islands were full of snakes and scorpions, DOCUMENTARY TODAY 11
compulsions in view and to integrate with the Indian Union or Pakistan before 15th August 1947.
Quit India.
Though some princes were peeved and even pulled out revolvers to display their anger at the negotiating tables, all of them ultimately heeded to the advice except for the royalties of Hyderabad and Kashmir. The Nizam of Hyderabad eventually succumbed to internal political pressure and with the entry of the Indian army into the state signed the instrument of accession to India. Only Kashmir became a sad story of failed ambition of its ruler and got embroiled in controversies and intrigues. The final documentary was on the framing of the Indian Constitution, called We the People. It won a prize at the National Film Festival. Between March 1983 and January 1987, a number of Films Division directors and outside producers helped me produce 31 films on freedom struggle and allied subjects. The duration of each film was 22 minutes.
India Wins Freedom.
In October 1985, Dr. Usha Mehta, a freedom fighter and the Hon. Secretary, Gandhi Sanghralaya wrote, The films give an authentic account of our struggle. You have unearthed some rare material and brought to light some unknown aspects of history. (Excerpted from N.S.Thapa s biography The Boy From Lambata, published by Pahad Pothi.)
Agony of Partition. 12
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(N.S.Thapa began his career as a combat cameraman during World War II and later joined the Films Division as a newsreel cameraman soon becoming Pandit Nehru s favourite cameraman. He worked his way up the organization and retired as Chief Producer in 1983, only to return to work on a series of films on the freedom struggle. He was awarded the Padma Shree and then the Ezra Mir-IDPA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002.)
Remembering the Past &
HINDI CINEMA THE INDIAN FREEDOM STRUGGLE By Sanjit Narwekar After years of making inane films about plastic heroes and their derring-dos, Bollywood seems to have woken up to the possibilities of real-life heroism. At first the recent skirmishes with our neighbouring state were the centre of focus with films like J.P.Dutta s Border and LOC Kargil, Anil Sharma s Hero: The Story of a Spy and many other lesser-publicised ventures like Maa Tujhe Salaam. But then the runaway success of a Partition-based love story Gadar: Ek Prem Katha followed by a spate of films on Bhagat Singh (The Legend of Bhagat Singh, 23rd March 1931: Shaheed and Shaheed Bhagat Singh) opened the floodgates to a rash of films based on the freedom struggle. Cut to 2007 the sesquicentennial of the First War of Independence and there was Ketan Mehta s Mangal Pandey ready to celebrate the occasion. The hype the film generated (if not its success) has egged Ketan Mehta on to make two more films to complete the trilogy on the heroes of the 1857 War: films on Jhansi Ki Rani and Bahadur Shah Zafar are already on the anvil. (Why choose Bahadur Shah Zafar who was a mere titular and a somewhat reluctant leader of the first war of independence as against Nana Phadnavis who played a more active role is a question besides the point since the choice of heroes seems to as whimsical as the films themselves.) DOCUMENTARY TODAY 13
foreign rule. The film itself did not base itself on any specific hero of the freedom struggle but portrayed the quintessential freedom struggle leader in a passionately nationalistic drama about the Quit India movement and the resulting surge in terrorism and sabotage for the sake of Indian independence. The two opposing sides are represented by the revolutionary leader Ram (Dilip Kumar) and his colonial bureaucrat-father Raibahadur Dwarkadas (Chandramohan). There is of course the obligatory love story (with Kamini Kaushal) but the climactic court scenes where the two ideologies clash are portrayed with a great deal of conviction and patriotic fervour.
V. Shantaram in Udaykal. Inspite of this flurry to catch various anniversaries this is not the first time that the Hindi cinema has paid cinematic tribute to the heroes of the freedom struggle. Some like Bhalji Pendharkar spent an entire lifetime eulogising Shivaji Maharaj in his films. An early silent era film Udaykaal starring later-day filmmaker V.Shantaram in the role of Shivaji caught the eye of the British censor who rightly sensed an attempt to disguise modern-day feelings of patriotism with a historical theme and came down heavily on the release of the film. Udaykaal was banned and no amount of revision could salvage it. Another early day film Bhakt Vidur met with similar censure when the British censors felt that the character of Vidur was too closely modeled on Mahatma Gandhi and spoke suspiciously patriotic dialogue which was too contemporary for comfort. 14
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However, this early-day vigil seems to have been relaxed a bit by the early 1940s when the same set of British censors allowed composer Anil Biswas and lyricist Pradeep to get away with the highly volatile song Aaj Himalaya ki choti se hum ne yeh lalkara hai/Dur hato, dur hato ae duniya walo Hindustan hamara hai... in a film which actually had nothing to do with the freedom movement, Kismet (1943). To make matters worse the visuals accompanying the song had Mumtaz Shanti waving the Indian flag against the backdrop of a then united India. Another song another film! Half-adecade later, in 1948, Mohammed Rafi and Khan Mastana warbled Watan ki raah mein watan ke naujawan shaheed ho to the lyrics of Qamar Jalalabadi and tune of Ghulam Haidar in Ramesh Saigal s Shaheed (1948) and caught the imagination of a nation just freed from
The clash of two ideologies was once again the centerpiece of Ramesh Saigal s next film Samadhi (1950), set against the backdrop of the Indian National Army. A patriotic youngster Shekhar (Ashok Kumar) answers Subhash Chandra Bose s call to join the anti-imperialist front and joins the Indian National Army only to cross swords with his brother Suresh (Shyam), who is a captain in the British army and an unwitting part of a spy ring. Once again there is an emphasis on romance (with Nalini Jaywant) but there is enough patriotic fervour to keep the plot moving.
Door hato aie duniyawallon Hindustan hamara hai... an ode to Bharatmata in Kismat. The first few years of the 1950s was a rather fecund period for patriotic films the newly-won independence still ringing in most ears and Hindi cinema still a decade away from its inane formulaic colourful star-spangled extravaganzas which would soon define Bollywood on the world map. 1951 saw the release of Phani Majumdar s Andolan, starring Kishore Kumar who had come to try his luck in Bombay films as a singer but stumbled onto histrionics thanks to his betterknown elder brother Ashok Kumar. The film did not become a classic and nor did it do much to push the fledgling hero but it did cover the obligatory events of the freedom struggle: Gandhi s satyagraha, the Simon Commission, Vallabhbhai Patel s Bardoli satyagraha and, of course, the 1942 Quit India agitation.
and though the song is still played the film has slipped out of view. A year earlier Hemen Gupta had made Beyalis on the Quit India movement. Sohrab Modi who had made several intensely patriotic/historical films in the early talkie era, especially Pukar (1939), Sikandar (1941) and Prithvi Vallabh (1943), came up with his magnum opus Jhansi Ki Rani (1953)
starring his actress-wife Mehtab in the title role. Mehtab starred as the young queen of Jhansi who took up arms against the British during the First War of Independance of 1857 with Modi essaying the role of the Rajguru, her chief advisor. The film was notable for its authencity in creating the right period and delineating historical events, its spectacular battle scenes and Mehtab s stirring performance even if she was far too old for the role. She achieves stirring dignity in the role as she vows to protect Jhansi from all enemies both within and outside. Sadly the film failed to connect with the audience and was a costly misfire for Modi as it crashed at the box-office. Producer-director Modi who had spent a pretty packet for the film because of his having imported artistes (Michael Shea and Gloria Gasper) and technicians (cinematographer Ernest Haller) from Hollywood was felled with a single blow. The film had also been made in English as The Tiger and the Flame but with the flopping of the original Hindi version, Sohrab Modi was unable to give it the lavish international release that he wanted. Much later (1955) the film was
Mehtab played the role of Jhansi ki Rani in Sohrab Modi s spectacular masterpiece which was made in two versions, Hindi and English.
A year later the IPTA director Hemen Gupta came up with a strong Anandmath (1952), starring Prithviraj Kapoor in the pivotal role of Satyanand, the master of Anandmath (the Abbey of Bliss) who led the Sanyasin Uprising against the British. Based on the Bankim Chandra novel of the same name it had the stirring Vande Matram sung and tuned by Hemanta Kumar (the Lata Mangeshkar version was used in the film). The film and the song became hugely popular DOCUMENTARY TODAY 15
released in a curtailed 93-minute version and expectedly failed because the sheer magnificence of the film s sets were lost and so was the storyline. Hal Erickson of All Movie Guide comments, Though the storyline of The Tiger and the Flame proved remote and confusing to American audiences, the film was at least handsomely mounted in the manner of the best Hollywood historical epics. The international version was once again released as a DVD in 2005 by Gemmon but did not make much of an impact. Two other actresses had played the brave queen immortalized by Subhadra Kumari Chauhan s stirring poem still taught in schools all over India: Shobhana Sammarth (Veerangana in 1946, directed by Nandlal Jaswantlal) and a little known actress Urvashi (Maharani Jhansi in 1952, directed by Jagdish Gautam). Both films flopped and so did Jagdish Gautam s next attempt at patriotism: Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh (1954) with Prem Adeeb playing Bhagat Singh. The box-office failure of Modi s magnum opus seems to have put an end to other films on the freedom struggle. Also, Hindi filmmakers began to shy away from such films because of the inevitable controversy it raised after the film s release. 16
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In any case, with the advent of Big Stars, Hindi cinema itself was moving towards a period of fantasy films set in Nowhere Land. These entertainers suited the filmmakers, the stars and the audience. It was like one major conspiracy. The few films that continued to be made on such subjects went by unnoticed. The only notable success of the period was Shaheed, (1965) written and ghost-directed by its star Manoj Kumar on the life and times of Bhagat Singh. It was a bold subject to take up because just two years before Shammi Kapoor had played the great hero in K.N.Bansal s resounding flop Shaheed Bhagat Singh, ghost-directed by Vishram Bedekar but ultimately credited to the producer K.N.Bansal. While Shammi Kapoor took off in a different direction of breezy romantic musicals Manoj Kumar became the quintessential Bharat. None of his other films Upkaar, Purab Aur Paschhim and Kranti were based on the freedom
struggle but they were patriotic ventures which justified the sobriquet. Bhagat Singh is one hero who has always caught the imagination of Hindi filmmakers. The subject has been made a record six times: Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh (1954/Jagdish Gautam) with Prem Adeeb; Shaheed Bhagat Singh (1963/K.N.Bansal) with Shammi Kapoor; Shaheed (1965/S.Ram Sharma) with Manoj Kumar; The Legend of Bhagat Singh (2002/ Rajkumar Santoshi) with Ajay Devgun; 23 rd March 1931: Shaheed (2002/ Guddu Dhanoa) with Bobby Deol; and Shaheed-e-Azam: A Story of Shaheed Bhagat Singh (2002/Sukumar Nair) with newcomer Sonu Sood. Not even Mahatma Gandhi, more enduring and more revered today, has been made so many times (in fact, never except in Richard Attenborough s version) though he may have been portrayed in other films oftener than Bhagat Singh (see box items).
Ajay Devgun played Shaheed Bhagat Singh.
The First War of Independence had formed the backdrop of many an earlier film 1857 (1946), Lal Qila (1960) but it was with Satyajit Ray s Shatranj Ke Khilari (1977) that the period really came alive. Based on a short story by the famed Hindi writer Premchand, the film starred Sanjeev Kumar and Saeed Jaffrey as the two Awadhi nobleman who draw swords to defend their chessboard but are too uncaring to defend their motherland from the gori fauj which marches in effortlessly to depose Wajid Ali Shah. Shyam Benegal s sensitive Junoon (1978), produced by its star Shashi Kapoor, also makes a comment which is identical: the Nawab is keener on chasing an English girl rather than join the War. And when he does so, it is only to get the girl.. Strangely enough the original novella by Ruskin Bond A Flight of Pigeons only had the First War as a backdrop to tell the tragic love story between an English girl and a fiery Pathan but Benegal gave it a different dimension by making the First War central to its theme (winning the War will result in the English girl s mother agreeing to the marriage). 1857 was once again the backdrop of Ketan Mehta s The Rising: The Ballad of Mangal Pandey (2005) with Aamir Khan playing the role of the famed revolutionary who lit the flames of the 1857 War for Independence. (Ironically the only other Mangal Pandey made in 1982 and starring Shatrughan Sinha had nothing to do with either the freedom struggle or the revolutionary.) Ketan Mehta s film is too recent to merit any additional comment. Suffice to say that its success has inspired the filmmaker to make two more films in the 1857 series to complete a trilogy: one on Jhansi Ki Rani (made thrice before and once for television with Varsha Usgaonkar playing the title role) and the other on Bahadur Shah Zafar (made by B.R.Chopra for television with Iftikhar playing the title role ironically Iftikhar had played the same role for Sohrab Modi s Mirza Ghalib).
Lagaan s international success paved the way for other films based on the freedom struggle. It is generally accepted that it was the huge success of Lagaan (2001/ Ashutosh Gowarikar) which has made films on national figures popular. It is not really so because Lagaan was based in the British Raaj but more a fable (which is why it carries the slug: Once Upon A Time In India) than a true story. The film at best is a brilliant combination of patriotism and cricket. In fact, Gowarikar s next film Swades (2004) is closer in spirit to nationalistic fervour and epitomizing the Gandhian spirit than any other film not even Richard Attenborough s much-touted but superficially made Gandhi (1982) with Krishna Bhanji (better known in international cinema as Ben Kingsley) playing the part. Probably the best of the Gandhi films is the rarely seen Shyam Benegal effort written by Faitma Meer (from her own book The Apprenticeship of a Mahatma) and produced for a South African producer, The Making of the Mahatma, with Rajit Kapur playing Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (not yet the Mahatma). The film is a much more incisive and penetrating exploration of what made M.K.Gandhi the man India learned to revere.
In fact, Shyam Benegal has given us some of the best explorations in our own freedom struggle: the feature length documentary film Nehru (1985), made for Films Division contains some of the best footage (acquired from the Russian vaults) on Pandit Nehru, Gandhi s political and spiritual heir and much more recently, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero (2005, with actor Sachin Khedekar playing Bose). And who can forget his grand sweeping work for television Bharat Ek Khoj (1988), based on Nehru s Discovery of India and which covers 5000 years of India s glorious history. Other recent films on India s freedom heroes include Ketan Mehta s Sardar (1993 with Paresh Rawal playing Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel) and Dr Jabbar Patel s Ambedkar (1999 with Malayalam superstar Mamootty playing Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar). So many films have been made in so many languages on our national heroes that it would be impossible to list each and every one of them. Most of the films made are straight biographicals. They narrate stories which have now become a party of the country s psyche. Few filmmakers have dared to go DOCUMENTARY TODAY 17
Shaheed Bhagat Singh and his friends are reborn in Rang De Basanti. beyond that probably fearing that they would raise a controversy. As Gyan Prakash, Professor of History at Princeton University observes, In spite of the existence of multiple traditions of recounting the past, Indian film-makers followed the Attenborough model. Using the timeRajit Kapur in The Making of the Mahatma.
worn view of history as a chronicle of great men, Attenborough told Gandhi s story as an account of India s coming into being as a nation. The Mahatma appeared as an embodiment of India, a towering force who gathered in his personality all the strengths of the good to triumph over evil. The film was enormously successful, though it greatly simplified and distorted both Gandhi and India s history. As an Indian response to Hollywood s Gandhi, Shyam Benegal s The Making of the Mahatma was historically more accurate, more balanced in giving due to other leaders. But the effort at achieving accuracy, while remaining within the genre of history as the nation s biography, produced a flat film that struggled for narrative coherence and dramatic flourish. The Legend of Bhagat Singh tried to be different. Showing the Sikh revolutionary s disillusionment with Gandhi, the film is one of the few that broke the
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nationalist consensus. But so overwhelming is the representation of history as the story of the nation that these social complexities become a sideshow to the drama of the heroic sacrifice for the country. The tone was so high-minded that it appeared like we were watching God rather than a human being with complex motives, desires and ideas. Why is it that no Indian filmmaker tries to even break with the straightforward linear story and experiments with jagged time lines? Two young filmmakers who have tried to do just that and capture the essence of the philosophy rather than the biography are Raykesh Mehra with Rang De Basanti (2006) and Rajkumar Hirani with Lage Raho Munnabhai (2006). Both films deal with heroes of India s freedom struggle but at extreme opposite ends of the spectrum: Bhagat Singh and Mahatma Gandhi. Both films are not biographies of the heroes but interpretations of the philosophy
Freedom heroes are reborn in Vijay Ghate s Shobhayatra. Here Jhansi ki Rani is seen with Jawaharlal Nehru. they propounded. Both are flawed but brave works and demand attention. Another film which sought to interpret the core philosophies of our national heroes with lesser élan and even lesser success is Shobhayatra (2004/Vijay Ghate). The film is a black comedy, a satire on today s times. Based on a play of the same name written by Shahfat Khan, the film tells the story of a local goon who organises a procession for the golden jubilee celebrations of India winning Independence. Six citizens from different walks of life a businessman, bureaucrat, lawyer, professor, teacher and a vagabond gather in a godown of a dilapidated
mill. They are dressed as well known personalities from the Indian History Gandhi, Nehru, Bose, Tilak, Rani of Jhansi and a lesser known martyr Babu Genu for a procession that is to start from the mill gate. As the procession gets delayed, the six are left to themselves in the mill as they wait impatiently for the delayed parade to
start. Soon, small skeletons in their personal cupboard begin to rattle, highlighting the irony of their present engagement. Their anxieties and fears are in direct contrast to the masks that they are wearing. The atmosphere turns claustrophobic and bitter, showing us the post Independent India where muscle and money power have corrupted the environment and robbed its citizens of their actual freedom.
Into this tense atmosphere, in walks the irresistible and seductive Barbie, the American dream- embodiment of free and affluent Western world, walking the thin line between caricature and reality. The fear and hypocrisy of the characters surface as they fall prey to her seductive charm. In all this madness emerges the hidden face of the underworld don who has sponsored the parade. The film faced censor trouble and was released after several cuts. To compound its troubles, the low-budget film did not get a proper theatrical release and was shown in a few festivals. Worse, it is unlikely to ever be shown on television. The film itself is not a classic but there is no denying that it has a certain strength of purpose which refuses to be cowed down. Lacking the resources of a Lage Raho Munnabhai or a Rang De Basanti it is destined to remain a cult movie. Sanjay Dutt in Lage Raho Munnabhai.
The question that remains to be asked is: are all these films an indication for a more mature more analytical cinema? I doubt it for a few swallows do not make a summer but there certainly is hope!! (Sanjit Narwekar is a National Award winning author and filmmaker who has written and lectured on Indian cinema since 1970. He has written more than two dozen books on various aspects of Indian cinema.) DOCUMENTARY TODAY 19
MEN WHO PLAYED
GANDHI
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Annu Kapoor plays Gandhi while Paresh Rawal plays Sardar Patel in Ketan MehtaÂ’s Sardar.
Do you know who among the heroes of the Indian freedom struggle has proved to be the most enduring image on the big screen. No prizes for guessing! It is none other than the Father of the Nation Mahatma Gandhi or Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, to give the name he was born with. Bhagat Singh comes a close second. There is one difference however: while Bhagat Singh has been played by only Indian actors several foreign-born actors have also brought the Mahatma to life on the big screen. Here is a listing which we hope is exhaustive: Darshan Jariwala in Gandhi My Father (2007)
Prithvi Sankhala in Shobhayatra (2004/Vijay Ghate)
Annu Kapoor in Sardar (1992/ Ketan Mehta)
Dilip Prabhavalkar in Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006/Rajkumar Hirani).
Mohan Gokhale in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (2000/Dr Jabbar Patel).
Anupam Kher in Nehru Jewel of India (1990/Kumar Kiran)
Bernie Meyer in Gandhi from the series A Force More Powerful (2000/Steve York)
Ben Kingsley in Gandhi (1982/ Richard Attenborough)
Mohan Jhangiani in Water (2005/ Deepa Mehta). His voice was dubbed by Zul Vellani. Surendra Rajan in Veer Savarkar (2001/Ved Rahi), The Legend of Bhagat Singh (2002/Rajkumar Santoshi) and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero (2005/Shyam Benegal).
Naseeruddin Shah in Hey Ram (2000/Kamal Hassan). Sam Dastoor in Lord Mountbatten: The Last Viceroy (1986/Tom Clegg) and Jinnah (1998/Jamil Dehalvi).
J.S.Casshyap in Nine Hours To Rama (1963/Mark Robson) Milton Selzer in the episode The Sacrifice of Mahtama Gandhi in the television serial You Are There (Season 2, Episode 22)(1954).
Rajit Kapur in The Making of the Mahatma (1996/Shyam Benegal). DOCUMENTARY TODAY 21
Shaheed
The Fulfilment of a Dream By Roshmila Bhattacharya
Shaheed was a dream Manoj Kumar never expected to see on celluloid.
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He was around 10 years old the first time he was chosen to play Bhagat Singh. It was in a street play. I was so nervous that just before the curtains went up I ran away, Manoj Kumar remembers with a laugh. But the incident also sparked off what was to be a lifetime s fascination with one of our martyrs. Like many North Indians, he grew up idolising the man in the felt hat who went to the gallows with a smile. By the time he was 16, he was obsessively haunting roadside bookstalls, hunting out material on his hero. He must have read almost 200 books on Bhagat Singh but none offered a picture of the real man. So when he was 22, Manoj picked up the pen and started writing...The script of Shaheed was ready. Shaheed was a dream Manoj Kumar never expected to see on celluloid. After the overwhelming success of Haryali Aur Raasta, he was relentlessly pursued by producers. But he knew that none of them would want to make a film on a freedom fighter the world had long since forgotten. Kewal P Kashyap was one of the few people he had shown the Shaheed script to. The publicist was an old friend. One day, Kewal came to him and confessed that he was bored with his job and wanted to make a film. Manoj was expecting him to make a routine, romantic masala movie. He was shocked when Kewal told him he had his heart set on Shaheed. Manoj reminded him that the subject had already been attempted twice. In 1954, Jagdish Gautam had directed Shaheed-E-Azam Bhagat Singh with Prem Adeeb playing the title role. Nine years later, Vishram Bedekar made Shaheed Bhagat Singh with Shammi Kapoor as the fiery revolutionary and Premnath as Chandrashekhar Azad. Both films had flopped. This one is more emotional. It ll work, Kewal assured him. Those days Shankar-Jaikishen, OP Nayyar and Ravi ruled the box-office. Kewal had planned on roping in the very saleable Shankar-Jaikishen to compose the score for his film. That ll
bring in the distributors, he pointed out to Manoj. His game plan went for a six when the star told him that he d do the film only if Kewal signed on Prem Dhawan as music director. But he s a lyricist. We ll take a couple of songs from him and give them to Shankar-Jaikishen, Kewal argued. Manoj wouldn t agree and finally, reluctantly, Kewal accompanied him to Prem Dhawan s house. The song-writer when told that Manoj wanted him to compose the music for Shaheed thought it was a joke till the actor told him quietly, If you don t we won t make the film. Shaheed was Prem Dhawan s debut as a composer. His Aye wattan, aye watan.., Pagdi sambhal jatta and Mera rang de basanti chola.. are unforgettable. Manoj Kumar insists that the poetrevolutionary really sang Mera rang de basanti chola.... My research cannot be faulted, he snaps. But he confesses that he changed one word from the original. Mera rang de basanti chola maa rang de..., that s how Bhagat Singh would sing the song, he informs. Manoj changed maa to mahi. And that s how the song is sung today, he smiles. The song was picturised first and recorded later. Prem Dhawan who was acting in the film too, wrote it while shooting at Ludhiana jail. A charged
Manoj Kumar filmed it with 80-90 junior artistes singing it along with him. Back in Mumbai it was dubbed in a recording studio. The actor-filmmaker also strongly refutes charges that the character of Kehar Singh was a figment of his imagination. He asserts that there are documents proving that the daku who insisted on shaking hands with Bhagat Singh before he was hanged because zindagi mein kisi nek aadmi se haath nahin milaya, really existed and was brought to life by Pran attempting his first character role. Pran who was then a top-ranking villian overheard Manoj discussing the character with Raj Khosla on the sets of Do Badan and immediately wanted to play the character. We can t afford to pay you your price? Manoj told him candidly. Pran was not dissuaded. He told me to send my producer across to him once shooting that had ground to a halt because funds from friends had dried up, resumed, Manoj reminisces. Soon after, FC Mehra agreed to finance Shaheed after Manoj Kumar himself signed the bank guarantee. Remembering his promise to Pran, Manoj sent Kewal to him. Kewal went reluctantly but half-an-hour later he was back, dancing with joy. He told Manoj that Pran had agreed to do the film for a mere Rs 7,000. DOCUMENTARY TODAY 23
The film was shot on a budget of Rs 10 lakh in Delhi and Ludhiana. The jail scenes were shot in an actual prison. For more than two months Manoj and his unit actually lived in Ludhiana jail and interacted with real qaidis everyday. We even sent Pransahab who was playing a daku who is sentenced to death for looting and murdering, into a cell for condemned prisoners, he laughs. One of the prisoners was an old Sardar who showed a lot of interest in the shooting. After a few days he would walk up to Manoj, touch his feet and hurry away. Finally, Manoj asked him why he was doing that and the prisoner sentenced to life for many murders, confessed that he d been a warden in jail when Bhagat Singh was there. I know that everything you re doing in the film is right, he congratulated. He had been telling his story in complete darkness following a power cut. When the lights returned, Madan Puri who was playing the jailor, quipped, I hope no one is missing. He hasn t committed another murder, has he? His lighthearted response to the emotional moment drew gales of laughter. Even the gallows Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru walk towards were actual gallows, Manoj informs. The only creative liberty we took was to have them walk down a long corridor to heighten the drama of the moment. Incidentally, it was only in this scene
that Manoj Kumar wore make-up because he wanted his face to glow with the spirit of nationalistic fervor. Bhagat Singh, he points out, could have been acquitted if he d only apologized. Even when he was imprisoned, Chandrashekhar Azad had made plans to break in and spirit him away. But he chose to be publicly hanged because this was the only way he knew to bring about a public awakening against British imperialism. Last year there was a festival of Bhagat Singh films. Manoj Kumar confesses he hasn t seen any of the films, not Sunny Deol s 23 March, 1931 Shaheed nor Rajkumar Santoshi s The Legend Of Bhagat Singh. He didn t want to be put in a position where he d be asked to comment on someone else s work. Besides, he points out he was emotionally involved with both projects. Sunny was his old friend, Dharmendra s son who had wanted to remake Shaheed and was willing to pay Manoj Kumar good money to shuffle scenes in his old script. To his surprise the actor-filmmaker told him, I can t cheat my pen or my friend s sons, and requested a fortnight s time to write a new script for Sunny. I wanted to concentrate on Chandrashekhar Azad. Focussing on the jail scenes in Shaheed, the Kakori conspiracy, the assasination of Saunders and the Central Legislative
Assembly we had run out of time and money and not been able to do justice to Azad, he rues, pointing out that he has so much material he can make 4-5 films on Bhagat Singh and each one will be very different. He tried explaining to Sunny that Bhagat Singh s story needed to be told but differently. Sunny wasn t convinced. I want to make a film just like Shaheed that I ve never been able to forget, he told him who reluctantly turned down his very generous offer. Ajay Devgan who played the martyr in Rajkumar Santoshi s film was the son of another old friend, fight master Veeru Devgan who would duplicate for Manoj Kumar during stunts in his early films. The veteran actor has heard of Ajay winning the National Award for Best Actor for his soul-stirring performance in the film. He reminds you that Shaheed too won three National Awards For Best Film, Best Actor and Best Story. Shaheed was Manoj Kumar s baby. Though its official director was S. Ram Sharma it was the actor who often called the shots. Late into the night, when the director, cameraman and many of the unit had dozed off, Manoj Kumar and Kewal Kashyap would be wide awake, diligently struggling with their dream project. So immersed was Manoj Kumar in the film that he would often forget to eat and had to be reminded by unit members to bite into a makke ki roti and take a sip of garam chai so he could keep his strength up. I didn t have to consciously remind myself to stay off food when we were shooting Bhagat Singh s fasting scenes. I was too charged up to eat anyway. Besides, those who know their history are aware that Bhagat Singh didn t lose weight during those 40 days. Like me he was so focused on his mission that he didn t feel hunger or thirst. Yes, there were a couple of times when he was taken to court on a stretcher but that was because he was ill, not faint with hunger, he explains. He submitted himself completely to the role and even put his palm over a lit
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candle for a shot, burning himself badly. There were more ordeals. Once he slept on blocks of ice for 48 hours at Prakash Studio. When the scenes were canned to his satisfaction after two days, he finally realised that he was numb from the cold. For four months he didn t feel any sensation. All through the film I had on a coat I d first worn when in the ninth standard in school. It came as a surprise to see that it still fit me. Its style also fit in with the style of the period, Manoj laughs. As the film progressed, he began to behave so eerily like the dead patriot that even Bhagat Singh s mother started calling him Bhagat. She confessed that he reminded her in so many ways of the son she had loved and lost, that it was almost as if her beta had come back to her. Bhagat Singh s brothers knew that she adored Manoj and didn t resent him her affection. In fact, when chaiji was ill and in hospital in Chandigarph, refusing to take medicine, it was to the actor that they turned to for help. He immediately dashed to her bedside. Maaji dawayi kha leejiye, he begged. Achcha tum bolte ho to kha leti hoon, she smiled and swallowed the pills. Chaiji s role in the film was played by Kamini Kaushal. When Manoj Kumar approached the actress who had by then retired from films and settled down to a quiet married life, she was expecting him to offer her a starring role in one of his romantic musicals. When he narrated the script of Shaheed to her she looked surprised and said, You want me to play a mother? Manoj Kumar was quick with his reply, I don t want you to play just any mother but Bhagat Singh s mother. The answer satisfied her and she gave her nod to the role. Kamini Kaushal who had played the heroine in the Dilip Kumar starrer, Shaheed way back in the 40s, was perfect as the mother two decades later, Manoj Kumar raves. She was such a
dedicated artiste and so very caring. When she called me beta I actually felt as if I was her son, he reminisces. When they were shooting the film, Kamini Kaushal was seven months pregnant but she never once complained . Chaiji was present at the Rashtrapati Bhavan the day Manoj Kumar received his first National Award. He had sent his father to bring her to Delhi from Chandigarh and she was seated next to him. When his name was announced, the actor walked up to the stage and invited Bhagat Singh s mother to come up. As the old lady, simply dressed in white but wearing a dazzling smile, slowly walked up to the dais, the auditorium erupted with thunderous applause. Manoj Kumar s eyes instinctively turned towards Indira Gandhi who was also seated there. For the first time I saw Mrs Gandhi flustered. She didn t know whether to touch Chaiji s feet, fold her hands in the traditional namaste or embrace her. She did all three. The standing ovation continued for 10 minutes, he smiles mistily. The memory is even today fresh in Manoj Kumar s mind. The other memorable moment for which he has Shaheed to thank, occurred during the film s premiere in 65. The film was released during the Indo-Pak war and Lal Bahadur Shastri was a very preoccupied and stressed Prime
Minister at the time. When Manoj Kumar approached Babuji with the humble request that he come for the premiere of his film, Babuji couldn t refuse him. But he warned Manoj Kumar that he was very busy and tired and wouldn t stay longer than 10 minutes. The film started and within minutes I saw that Babuji was completely engrossed. I knew then that he was not leaving and went up to tell the guys in the projection room not to take an interval break. For the next three hours Babuji sat and watched the film. Not a single word was spoken. And when the lights came on I saw that he had been crying. He was the first person to jump up. He clapped the loudest, recalls an emotionally moved Manoj Kumar. The film had ended. But Shashtriji was now in no mood to hurry away. Spotting a microphone he allowed himself to be lead to the dais and gave a 20 minute speech. Only after that did he head out towards his car. Manoj Kumar was escorting him out, trying to ward off enthusiastic onlookers, when suddenly he was grabbed by someone in the crowd and embraced fiercely. You ve done it, the man told him repeatedly. The actor tried desperately to shrug him off but the man just wouldn t let go. Finally in exasperation Manoj Kumar turned to him and snapped, Who are you? The DOCUMENTARY TODAY 25
man looked at him and said quietly, humbly, I m Pranlal Mehta. The name triggered off an unpleasant memory. When Kewal Kashyap and Manoj Kumar had first decided to make Shaheed they had gone to Delhi with Prem Dhawan to meet with people who had known their hero. One of them was Aruna Asif Ali. Asif Ali had been an eye-witness to the Assembly bombing and they had hoped she d be able to shed more light on the incident. But she turned them away. Their next stop was advocate Pranlal Mehta who had been Bhagat Singh s class fellow. Bhagat Singh took the road of nationalism and became a revolutionary while Pranlal Mehta remained on the right side of the law. He was on the committee of judges formed by Motilal Nehru who assisted on Bhagat Singh s trial. Manoj Kumar requested a meeting with Mehta. He invited him over thinking he wanted to discuss a litigation case. When Manoj Kumar told him he wanted to make a film on Bhagat Singh, Mehta was unexpectedly rude. Don t try to flirt with their lives, he told the actor abruptly. Manoj Kumar and Kewal Kashyap made the film without his help and ended up with his grudging admiration.
More compliments came their way. Bhagat Singh s sister told Manoj Kumar in Punjabi after seeing the film, Veer, tumne bahut achcha kiya (Well done my brother). The common man too loved the film. Manoj Kumar was shooting a song for Amanaat in Goa soon after Shaheed was released. Suddenly, it became cloudy and as the unit waited for the light to return, Manoj Kumar took off to a government tea house nearby for a cup of tea. After draining the steaming beverage he went to the counter to pay only to be told that the bill had already been settled. Surprised, the star turned around to look for the production controller. Not spotting him he insisted on knowing who had paid for his chai. The boy at the counter refused to divulge the identity of his fan but the star perisisted. Finally he was told that it was the sweeper who had bought him his tea. Manoj Kumar called for him. He shuffled up and said quietly, Sahab living so far away I knew nothing about our great patriots. It was only after seeing your film that I learnt about Bhagat Singh and the sacrifice he d made for the country. The least I can do is offer you a cup of tea. The actor was moved to tears by his words. However, the best compliment he received was from the Prime Minister
himself. On the night of the premiere, at around 2 a.m. Manoj Kumar was woken up by a call from the Prime Minister s residence. Babuji himself was on the line. He confessed that he couldn t sleep. Your film has taken me back to the old days, he told Manoj and invited him and his team over for a cup of tea the next morning. The following day when Manoj Kumar met the Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri had a proposition for him. I gave the slogan Jai jawan, jai kisan. But I don t look like either a jawan or a kisan. Can you make a film on the slogan? he requested. Manoj Kumar assured him that he could and would. He requested Kewal to get him two note books and a pen. That night he took the train back to Mumbai. Sitting in the deluxe coach he wrote the story of Upkaar. Three days after the release of the film, Manoj Kumar bumped into Filmistan boss, S Mukerji who punched him hard and boomed, Hey Bharat, how are you? The name stuck. Manoj Kumar became Mr Bharat. As memories of Shaheed come flooding in, Manoj Kumar s eyes turn to a photograph of him with Bhagat Singh s mother taken in Delhi at the National Awards ceremony. It s one of my most treasured possessions, he says in an emotion-choked voice. The biggest gift Shaheed brought me was chaiji s love. Thirty-eight years after its release, Shaheed still lives on in public memory. If anything Rajkumar Santoshi and Sunny Deol s tributes Bhagat Singh have only played up Shaheed s enduring appeal. No one talks of the earlier two films on Bhagat Singh but they still remember Shaheed. History had forgotten Bhagat Singh but celluloid has resurrected him, Manoj Kumar beams proudly. (Courtesy: Screen) (Roshmila Bhattacharya is a noted freelance writer who has specialized on cinema.)
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MEN WHO PLAYED
BHAGAT SINGH Prem Adeeb in Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh (1954/ Jagdish Gautam) Shammi Kapoor in Shaheed Bhagat Singh (1963/K.N.Bansal) Manoj Kumar in Shaheed (1965/S.Ram Sharma) Ajay Devgun in The Legend of Bhagat Singh (2002/Rajkumar Santoshi) Bobby Deol in 23 rd March 1931: Shaheed (2002/Guddu Dhanoa) Sonu Sood in Shaheed-e-Azam: A Story of Shaheed Bhagat Singh (2002/ Sukumar Nair)
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Nationalism and the Tamil cinema By S.Theodore Bhaskaran
Following the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1919, the commercial drama companies of Tamil Nadu had become deeply involved in political propaganda. By the time of the Civil Disobedience Movement, every drama staged was geared towards nationalistic propaganda. When the talkie was introduced and songs came to form the predominant element in filmic entertainment, actors and other artistes from the popular stage moved into the studios and as a result, the Tamil cinema emerged as a factor in the political life of the country. Many of the stage-actors who came to act in films had taken part in direct political action and their association with Tamil cinema inevitably brought in a political flavour. 28
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The song-writers, who had been the back-bone of the popular stage and the main force behind its politicalisation, also began to work for films. To begin with, they introduced covert reference to political events in film songs, in the same way that they had previously done in dramas, even though most of the early Tamil films were adaptations of stage versions of popular mythologicals like the Ramavana episodes or folklore tales like Nallathangal and the references were largely irrelevant. K. S. Santhanakrishna Nayudu of Arya Gana Sabha, a drama company which had staged many patriotic plays and was a kind of home for nationalistic actors, was one of the earliest song-writers to enter films. Madurai M. S.
Thyagabhoomi (1939) was the centrepiece of the early Tamil cinema. Balasundaram, another song-writer of the early years of Tamil cinema, had been a stage-actor and song-writer who had become known through his song lamenting the death of Motilal Nehru. Baskara Das and Bhumi Balagadas, already well-known for their nationalistic songs in dramas, were also among the earliest to get into films. N. G. Nataraja Pillai, who had been imprisoned during the Civil Disobedience Movement, and S. V. Subbaiya Bhagavathar, who had courted arrest picketing toddy shops, were some of the earliest heroes of Tamil films. Sundaramurthy Odhuvar,
another popular actor of early Tamil films, had been an active campaigner for the removal of untouchability in the Tirunelveli area. M. V. Mani had been compaigning from the Congress platforms for many years before he entered films. S. Devudu Ayyer, an active volunteer in the political agitations following the Vedaranyam March and who was jailed for singing seditious songs, later shone as a film actor. A number of actresses from the stage, including M. R. Kamalaveni who was imprisoned for nationalistic activities, entered films with a history of political activitism. With so many song-writers and actors with avowed sympathy for the Congress working in early Tamil films, the cinema was bound to reflect the spirit of the times. But film censorship was so strict that to begin with films could register only veiled support for nationalistic ideas. This came in the shape of films supporting the social reforms so passionately advocated by Mahatma Gandhi and other political leaders. A. Narayanan, the most significant personality of this early south Indian cinema and the founder of the first sound studio, envisioned a political role for the Tamil cinema. His sympathies were with the Congress and he openly advocated propaganda through films. He appealed to the filmworkers and film-fans to buy Indian and encouraged young men and women to come forward to act in films. Va. Ra., who formed a part of the highly politicised group of writers that grew around the Tamil monthly Manikodi (a phrase describing the tri-colour flag, borrowed from a Bharathi song), was one of the major influences on Narayanan s political outlook. Narayanan was associated with Rajaji, Sathyamurthy and T. Prakasam and after a much publicised bonfire of foreign clothes in his house, took to wearing only khaddar. As head of General Pictures Corporation, he had produced a large number of silent movies and newsreels covering the Congress happenings and had visited filmmaking centres in America,
England and Japan. The articles he wrote in The Hindu on cinema clearly show that he was aware of the power of this medium on the mass audience and its unique possibilities for aiding the momentum of the freedom movement. While drama actors, singers and prominent film-makers like Narayanan made individual efforts to invest the Tamil cinema with a political purpose, there was also the powerful influence of the prevailing political climate. At the time of the appearance of the Tamil talkie, the political atmosphere in Madras was such that no performing art as mass-based as the cinema could remain unaffected by it for long. The Civil Disobedience Movement had given the national movement for the first time a truly popular basis, and in its wake the Congress had gained control over a number of municipalities and other local self-government bodies. With Rajaji as the President, the Tamil Nadu Congress Committee had launched a campaign to strengthen its mass-base. The workers at the grassroot level were using the commercial
stage, popular songs and the gramophone to carry the message of nationalism into the villages. The Taluka Congress Committees organised conferences, processions, bhajans and padayatras in the villages. The political activism of the Civil Disobedience years had left the atmosphere in Madras Presidency surcharged with the spirit of a new awakening. The cinema was all set for a meaningful interaction with this political ferment. The Government had attempted to muzzle all mass media during the Civil Disobedience Movement and film censorship had grown very tight, but once the movement ended and the Government of India Act of 1935 ushered in new elections, the governmental hold on mass media was relaxed and filmmakers in Tamil Nadu utilised this opportunity to introduce propaganda into their films. In Sathyamurthy, who was then at the helm of affairs in Tamil Nadu politics, the cinema found an enthusiastic patron. He had all along pleaded for
Rajaji was one of the prominent Tamil leaders who had a significant influence on the makers of Tamil films.
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the involvement of performing arts like the drama and dance in politics, and when the talkie appeared he recognised its vast potential for bringing the message of nationalism to the masses. He believed that for thirty years to come the cinema was going to be the predominant medium and that in a country like India, where literacy was so low, such an entertainment form should tackle contemporary sociopolitical questions. At a time when the educated elite as a class was condemning the cinema as immoral and culturally demeaning, Sathyamurthy s positive support put the role of cinema in a different
perspective. Through his speeches and newspaper articles he was a prolific writer both in English and Tamil he persistently pleaded for such a role for the cinema. The need of the moment in the talkie, he wrote in one of his articles in The Hindu, is for a producer who has the genius to translate the gripping questions of social and political life into the language of talking pictures. Sathyamurthy set the pattern by reviewing films in journals and by persuading other leaders to take the cinema seriously. He himself produced two short propaganda films on behalf of the
Anadhai Penn was one of the more popular nationalist films made in Tamil Nadu.
Congress, one on the eve of the 1934 Municipal elections and the other during the 1937 Assembly election campaign. While the first one was screened widely, the second film featuring Sathyamurthy, Rajaji and Bhulabai Desai was banned by the provincial government. Following Sathyamurthy s example, many other Congress leaders like K.Santhanam, V.S.Srinivasa Sastri and Rukmani Lakshmipathy associated themselves with the cinema world and encouraged film-makers. When Iru Sakodhararkal (1936) was released, Sathyamurthy persuaded Rajaji to see this nationalistic film and took him along to the Elphinstone cinema. Rajaji s attitude to films with nationalistic appeal changed from that time. Rajaji attended the premiere of the film Sathi Anusuya (1937), praised the scene showing the heroine working on a charka, and appealed to the audience to take to khaddar. Given such a leavening political climate, a fairly sound commercial basis, a group of directors and artistes sympathetic to the freedom movement, the Tamil cinema began to reflect the political aspirations of the people. To begin with, symbols of nationalism like the charka and Gandhi cap were deftly introduced in the visuals, and nationalistic song-writers from the popular stage kept up a steady stream of songs on the model of those popular songs that were so widely used during the Civil Disobedience Movement: Mother India, Will she ever be liberated absolutely? So many castes and, religions, Will they ever rise Into a single will And smash her shackles down? From Anadhai Penn (1931) Temperance had been an enduring theme in the company dramas, and the play Pathibhakti had proved particularly popular. Two films derived from this play, Sathi Leelavathi (1935) and Pathi Bhakti (1936) were both well
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received. It was the story of a young man from a respectable family who becomes addicted to alcohol and brings misery to himself and his family. He runs away to Ceylon and toils in the tea gardens while his wife ekes out a living by working on a charka. In addition to introducing nationalist symbols, the film-maker added a few songs praising the swadeshi movement, and focussed attention on the miserable conditions of labourers from Tamil Nadu in the tea estates of Ceylon. In Chandra Mohan or Samuga Thondu (1936), the hero Chandrasekar, a young graduate, quit a government job to go back to his village, set up an ashram and engage himself in rural uplift. This was an obvious reference to Gandhi s call to resign from government jobs during the Civil Disobedience Movement and to Gandhi s plan for bolstering the rural economy. The film also included songs glorifying Bharatha Matha. Even in mythological films, nationalistic symbols came to be introduced, albeit in a very contrived and uncinematic manner. In Naveena Sarangadhara (1936) the citizens of Hastinapura demonstrated against the tyranny of King Narendra and many of them were shown wearing Gandhi caps. Kovai. A. Ayyamuthu, a trusted lieutenant of Gandhi in the swadeshi movement, had produced a successful play Inbasacaran which used the fight against the Pandyan occupation of Ceylon as an allegory on British India. The play had received the appreciation of Congress leaders like Bulusu Sambamurthy as being inspiring and patriotic. K. Subrahmanyam made it into a film under the same title but unfortunately it could not be screened as the negative was destroyed in a fire accident at the studios. Lakshmi or Harijan Girl (1937) dealt with untouchability and the question of the conversion of harijans to Christianity. The most significant film of the period was Bala Yogini (1936), made by K. Subrahmanyam for the Madras United Artistes Corporation. The film attacked the caste system, exposed the hypocrisy in the priesthood and
A still from A. K. Chettiar s documentary on Mahatma Gandhi. pleaded for better treatment of widows. There was a sequence showing a brahmin widow and her little daughter taking shelter in the household of a low-caste servant who offered to take care of them. One genre of cinema that had survived the silent era was the stunt film. Even these films had at least one obligatory song or sequence glorifying nationalism, somehow thrust into the story. Bombay Mail (1939), for example, opened with a scene showing the Congress volunteers with tri-colour flags. (1938) Maya Mayavan (1938) had a song praising Gandhi. Jayakodi (1939) was about a brahmin girl who turned into a kind of Robin Hood, imprisoned a group of orthodox people in a cave and lectured to them on the evils of the dowry system. To bolster up the Congress programme of mass contact, many film-makers produced newsreels of the Congress happenings and screened them as side attractions along with feature films. A powerful documentary movement had begun during the silent era and gained in volume and impact with the coming of the talkie. By actually showing scenes of nationalistic appeal, speeches
by leaders and the deliberations in the Congress sessions, these films brought the audience closer to the movement. A. Narayanan s Srinivasa Ginetone at Madras and Modern Theatres at Salem were the two concerns that produced a large number of such documentaries. One of the earliest was Narayanan s Unfurling of the National Flag. The Congress session at Bombay in 1933 under the presidentship of Rajendra Prasad was shot as a ten-reel talkie and shown in instalments along with the film Pavala Kodi (1934). Similarly the film Sathi Akalya was shown along with the short Nehru Visits Salem made by Modern Theatres. The Forty-ninth Congress session was shot as a newsreel, recording in detail even the discussions of the subjects committee, and The Hindu commented that The film shows the patriotic fervour evident at the sessions . Sri Nammalvar Films produced a short titled Gandhi Jayanthi in 1939, while another memorable documentary was Modern Theatres The Opening of Salem Swadeshi and Khadi Exhibition by V.V.Giri which was screened along with their feature film Padma Jothi (1937). These authentic and intimate cinematic records provoked many film-makers in DOCUMENTARY TODAY 31
best representative of this group of films was Thyagabhoomi (1939).
K. Subrahmanyam (left) directed Thyagabhoomi (above) and became one of the leading directors of early Tamil Cinema. the only documentary of the period that has survived, albeit in parts.
Madras to lace their feature films with scenes of patriotic appeal. The biggest effort in this direction came from A. K. Chettiar, a free-lance writer and a nationalist of Madras who collected actuality material on Gandhi, shot thousands of feet with Dr. P. V. Pathi as technical director, wove all the material together and produced a mammoth four-hour long documentary called Mahatma Gandhi in 1940. Many well-known and distinguished talents from various fields assisted in the making of this documentary. Tha. Na. Kumaraswamy wrote the script. The novelist Kothainayakiammal, actor Serukalathur Sama, and nationalist leader Sa. Ganesan spoke the commentary. The singers D. K. Pattammal and Surya Kumari provided the background songs. Chettiar got the active co-operation of Congress leaders for making this film, and it is 32
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Nationalistic propaganda became fully explicit in films after the popular government headed by C. Rajagopalachari was formed in Madras Presidency following the 1937 elections. The tight censorship policy was relaxed and the Censor Board under the control of the provincial government was re-organised on a popular basis. The predominantly bureaucratic character of the Board was changed by the addition of representatives from the press, university and cinema industry, and the Board was obliged to confine its attention to moral issues like sex and violence and give a free run to the expression of political ideas. Filmmakers who had hitherto adopted indirect cinematic devices to escape the censors hurried to utilise the new-found freedom. It was during this two and a quarter years of the Congress interregnum that patriotic cinema attained its peak in Tamilnadu and a series of patently propagandist films like Valibar Sangam (1938), Anandashramam (1939) and Desabhakthi (1939) were released. The
K. Subrahmanyam, the maker of Thyagabhoomi, was typical of the nationalistic film-makers. Born in 1904 in a Brahmin family in Kumbakonam, the seat of orthodoxy, he studied to be a lawyer but gave it up to work for Associate Films in Madras in 1928. His father C. S. Krishnaswamy Ayyer was a lawyer handling the cases of big mutts around Kumbakonam. He would often feel guilty about being a party to the injustices perpetrated by the mutts in the name of religion and deplored that the priesthood was not playing the positive role it should in society. Subrahmanyam imbibed all these ideas from his father, and his highly critical view of the priesthood was reflected in all his films, particularly in Balayogini (1936), where he treated priests with ridicule and even used scenes showing priests for comic relief. Earlier during the silent era, he had produced films with contemporary themes, like Anadhai Pen (1931) with the actor Raja Sandow. After a few yearsÂ’ break, during which time he was actively engaged in the Scout Movement, he came back to film in 1934 when the studio Minakshi Cinetone was started in Madras. The next year itself he floated his own filmproducing company, Madras United Artistes Corporation, and brought out a steady stream of films. He saw the tremendous possibility of cinema and the need for better organization of the industry. He was instrumental in establishing the South Indian Film Chamber of Commerce, an organisation which up to the present day guards the interests of the industry in south India. He pleaded for an insurance scheme for the industry, a common bank, a library and a school for acting. After he joined the Congress, his films began to have more and more patriotic flavour. In all his films there was also a powerful plea for a re-thinking on many social institutions. While filmÂmakers in general were wary
about treading on the sensibilities of middle class audience, Subrahmanyam came out boldly attacking their beliefs. The best example of his works, and the film for which he is remembered, was Thyagaboomi. K. Subrahmanyam gave the film a powerful impact by confirming the basic beliefs of Indian society and then going on to question the social evils that have come up as accretions to religious life. Subrahmanyam liked to present the main currents of national life through various characters in his films. Sambu Sastri, with his strong religious faith and a passion for harijan uplift, represented Gandhi. Nallan, the farmhand, stood for the anonymous multitude of long-suffering harijans and Savithri exemplified the Indian women caught in the conflicting values of a, society in transition. As with the drama artistes and songwriters, many of the prominent figures of the Tamil cinema began to take an active role in nationalist politics. M. V. Mani, who became very popular as an actor through films like Sathi Leelavathi (1935) and Venu-oanam (1941), toured with Rajaji and appeared on many political platforms with him. It was Mani who first organised all the film actors into an association and held their first meeting in the Congress office at Madras in 1938. K. S. Ananthanarayanan, who had a number of successful films, including Alli Arjuna (1935) to his credit, took a leading part in political demonstrations. Many artistes who had become involved in politics while working on the stage kept up their political activity after they had made the transition into the cinema. These included S. V. Subbaiya Bhagavathar who was the singing star of Subhadraharan (1935) and M. G. Nataraja Pillai who made his name in films such as Thakshayaqnam (1938). The singer K. B. Sundarambal made her biggest mark in politics after the sensational news that she had been paid a lakh of rupees for her role in Nandanar (1935), which had also made her into Tamil Nadu s first proper
film star . It was soon after this that Sathyamurthy took her on his election tours, where meetings would start with a song by Sundarambal and continue with Sathyamurthy s powerful oration. This impressive combination was also recorded on a gramophone record, with Sundarambal s song on one side and Sathyamurthy s speech on the other. The most active among this group of film artistes who were both in politics and films was K. S. Gopalakrishnan. He dropped out of Madras Law College to join the agitation to boycott the Simon Commission in 1928, and later attended the Lahore Congress session. When Civil Disobedience was launched he organised the All India Swadeshi Exhibition in Madras, was in charge of the salt satyagrahis camp at Udayavanam near Santhome, and organised a number of picketing points around Madras as part of the salt agitation. These activities led him to become the Secretary of the Madras branch of the Hindustan Sevak Dal. In all his efforts to raise money for the picketeers camp, he got help from stage and film artistes, and with the realisation that the cinema could be a potent means for propaganda, he himself got into films. He starred in a number of patriotic films including Desa Munnetram (1938) and Jalaja (1938), and later emerged as a very popular director with Chakradhari (1948), one of his most popular films. Later he became a trade union leader and organised the workers in the film industry.
Sathyamurthy s aim was to make the film industry an integral part of the freedom movement. The participation of cinema in political propaganda forced the intelligentsia, which had so far looked upon the cinema as a cheap and contemptible popular art, to take a closer and more serious look. A writeup in the conservative Tamil daily Dinamani reflected this change: What our country wants at present are only propaganda films. The cinema can participate to a large extent in the struggle for the liberation of the country. It is possible for the cinema to carry on simultaneously in several places a great agitation that can be carried on only by great orators and writers... A new spirit can be created among the people by introducing the songs of poet Bharathi in political, economic, social and devotional films . The resignation of the Congress ministry in protest against India s participation in the war and the renewed tightening of censorship marked the end of propaganda films. As it depended entirely on imported material for survival, the industry was badly hit by the wartime restrictions on import of raw stock. At the same time, the blackout precautions, petrol rationing and the general scare due to rumours on the war situation put a severe strain on filmmaking.
Sathyamurthy was quick to perceive the propagandist value of actors involvement in political activities and inducted many of them officially into the Congress. V. Nagaiya, for instance, was persuaded to go as a delegate to the Gauhati Congress. Balayogini was one of Subramanyam s many films which were critical of priests. DOCUMENTARY TODAY 33
(1940) was a story set in the years immediately preceding the Sarada Act. It dealt with a child widowed at the age of seven and her father who defied orthodox opposition and arranged for the girl to be married again when she came of age. The shooting of this bold film was inaugurated by Sathyamurthy. Vimochanam (1940) and Neelamalai Kaithi highlighted the evils of alcoholic drinks. Jayakodi (1939) attacked the practice of accepting dowry. K. Subrahmanyam s Bhaktha Cetha (1940) also created considerable stir.
Burma Rani (1944) which was set in Japanese-occupied Burma and glorified the Indian resistance and the role of the IAF Hostilities with Japan led to the closure of markets for Tamil films in Burma and other eastern countries. From a total output of thirty six films in 1940, production of Tamil films dropped to a mere fifteen in 1943. Nationalistic propaganda ceased to be an essential ingredient of Tamil films. The government encouraged war effort films, such as Burma Rani (1944) which was set in Japaneseoccupied Burma and glorified the Indian resistance and the role of the IAF, and Kannamma En Kathali (1941) which was also set in the backdrop of the Japanese invasion of Burma. The irrepressible K. Subrahmanyam however came out with a war effort film with a difference. He 34
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made Manasamrakshanam (1944), in the face of protest from nationalists who thought that he was falling in line and supporting the war. The story was about a girl, a Burma evacuee, who came to Madras to locate the hide-out of Japanese agents and foil their attempt to blow up an Indian ship. Though apparently a war-effort film, Subrahmanyam had a hidden message for Indians. By telling the Japanese that India could take care of herself, he was hitting at the British. Although nationalistic overtones began to disappear from films, reformist themes persisted. For nearly two decades the marriage of pre-pubescent girls had been a widely discussed question, and the film Child Marriage
By 1945 a popular government was once again established in Madras presidency. The wave of nationalistic films subsided as Independence came into view. The occasional, sentimentally patriotic films like Nam Iruvar (1947) or Thyagi (1947) marked the last eddies of this wave. In the absence of a powerful motivating force such as the struggle for freedom, the Tamil cinema lapsed into a predominantly escapist form of entertainment. K. Subrahmanyam s attempt to involve the Tamil cinema in nation-building through his Geethagandhi (1949) was merely an exception to the general trend. Meanwhile, with the death of Sathyamurthy in 1943, Tamil cinema lost its link with the higher echelons of political leadership. The signs of a meaningful interaction between the intelligentsia and the cinema did not develop further, but disappeared with Independence. The course of the Tamil cinema since 1947 merely throws into bold relief the distinctive character of the patriotic cinema of the thirties and forties. (Excerpted from S.Theodore Bhaskaran s book The Message Bearers, published by Cre-A) Sundararaj Theodore Bhaskaran took his Master s in History and then worked with the Tamil Nadu Archives for some time before joining the Indian Postal Service. He has written extensively on archaeology, art history and cinema.
Historical themes are used by filmmakers either to tell a story or to make an oblique comment on the present through the past. Films on recent events in our history are not effective as cinema perhaps because these events have not seared the psyche of our writers and film-makers to the same extent that the traumatic events of World War II did for many in Europe and Japan. However, there are two personalities whose work can be considered as haunted by the events and consequences of the Partition of 1947: Ritwik Ghatak and Saadat Hasan Manto. Ritwik Ghatak, writing on Partition, has said, We were born in a deceived age. The days of our childhood and adolescence saw the full flowering of Bengal: Tagore; the renewed vigour of Bengali literature in the works of the Kallol group; the widespread national movement among the youth of Bengal; the villages of Bengal, with their folk
tales and folk songs and festivals brimming over with the hope of a new life. Just then came the war, came famine. The Muslim League and the Congress Party brought the country to ruin by tearing it apart and accepting a destructive Independence ... the waters of the Ganga and Padma were red with the blood of our brothers ... our dreams faded. Similar sentiments were expressed by Faiz Ahmed Faiz in his famous poem Dawn of Freedom (Subah Azadih): This blighted dawn, this darkening morn. Is this the day for which we have waited so long? Ritwik Ghatak goes on to write, In the films I have made in recent years, I have not been able to free myself from this theme .... I have never been able to accept the Partition, not even today. And in three of my films, I have tried
Ritwik Ghatak, Bengal s Poet of Partition.
to say just that. Quite unintentionally they formed a trilogy, Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar and Subarnarekha .... I did not talk of political unity because it is not easy to alter something that is already a historical fact. What hurt me most was that cultural unity too was impossible to achieve and there were political and economic factors involved in the problem. At the root of many of our economic problems lies the Partition. In his three films on the refugees from East Bengal there is echoing in the background the memory of an idyllic past which, like our lost childhood, has
Born in a deceived age Commenting on the Present Through The Past By Shama Zaidi
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disappeared for ever. As an essential part of this nostalgia he constantly evoked the Mother Goddess image, so much a part of the psyche of the uppercaste Bengali Hindus. It would be interesting to know why in a Bengal which was 60% Muslim, leading writers like Tagore and filmmakers like Ghatak (by no stretch of imagination communally oriented) should ignore the major factor in Bengali life to concentrate largely on the travails and sorrows of their own class and community. This was quite unlike the writings of Premchand or even Saadat Hasan Manto who reflected the multi-layered humanity of north India in their works. After the liberation of Bangla Desh, Ghatak had an opportunity to recreate on cinema the Bengal of his childhood in Titash Ekli Nadir Naam. The film was based on the novel by Advaita Malla Burman which had been dramatised for the stage earlier by Utpal Dutt. Of this film, Ritwik has written, The memories of those days, the nostalgia, maddened me and drew me towards Titash to make a film on it. The period covered in the novtl Titash is forty years old, a time I was familiar with. Consequently Titash has become a kind of commemoration of the past I left behind long ago ... it was as if I was journeying backward in time to the East Bengal of 30 years ago.
When I was making this film, it occurred to me that nothing of the past survives today, nothing can survive. History is ruthless. No, it is all lost, nothing remains.... . An anguish similar to that of Ghatak was felt by the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto who wrote a series of stories on the events following Partition. But, unlike Ghatak, there is in Manto no lyrical hankering after an idyllic past. Manto s stories on Bombay depicted the netherworld of prostitutes, petty thieves, gamblers and drunks, with a passionate understanding of their humanity. Manto s short story Toba Teksingh is perhaps the most searing comment on India s Partition which has as yet been written. Tariq Ali scripted a dramatisation of this story in English, called Partition for Channel 4 in England. All the leading talent among expatriate Indians and Pakistanis likeZohra Sehgal, Saeed Jaffrey, Roshan Seth, Zia Mohiuddin have been used in this film. On paper the idea of using Manto s story dealing with the inmates of a mad house about to be partitioned into Indian madmen and Pakistani madmen, interspersed with ironic comments on freedom and Partition by members of the Raj and their lackeys seems a brilliant idea. But in this particular film it becomes an exercise in pretentiousness. The acting
A dramatic scene from Hemen Gupta s Beyalis.
of the madhouse inmates is theatrical and stylised while the Raj figures adopt a more direct style (both are played by the same actors). The film ends with the poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, No one can mend broken glass (Sheeshon ka masiha koi nahin): There is no physician to heal broken glass: winegoblet or bead/ What is broken can never be put together again/ No tears can serve to join it together/ What is broken is gone for ever. It is a pity that such a mediocre piece of cinema emerged from the pooling together of so many talents starting with Manto whose original story evokes emotions with so much effect and economy. Of a series with Partition, a documentary, Divided Hearts, was also shown on Channel 4. Divided Hearts scripted by Sati Khanna and directed by Peter Chappel is a series of interviews with ordinary people who experienced or played a more direct role in the tragic events of 1947 that led to the greatest mass migration the world has ever seen. This longish documentary would make an excellent companion piece for showing along with Tamas but that is hardly likely, at least not on Doordarshan. Many of the aspects and events depicted in Tamas are revealed to us through the words of these nameless people on both sides of the Indo-Pak and Indo-Bangla Desh border. They are ordinary people, tangawallahs, subsistence farmers, iron-smiths, tea-shop owners, middleclass housewives and clerks. Because Divided Hearts lets the material speak for itself, it is that much more effective and even moving. One of the earliest films made on the theme of Partition, is Nemai Ghosh s Chinnamul (The Uprooted) made in 1951 in which we can even see Ritwik Ghatak as one of a group of East Bengal villagers who were forced to migrate to Calcutta in the aftermath of Partition. With a fair share of theatricality, it is nevertheless a direct and moving account of the trials and tribulations of an uprooted group of people. The stubborn refusal of the old
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mother of one of the families to leave her ancestral home, her stubborn clinging to a pillar of the house while the departing group tries to persuade her to join them is one of the most poignant moments of the film. Chinnamul provided a take-off point for Ritwik Ghatak to make his more intensely felt and tragic cinematic masterpieces. Another film made at about the same time as Chinnamul is Hemen Gupta s 42, a romantic drama of the 1942 movement, as seen in a Bengal village. The film is extremely theatrical, and Tagorean in theme: in its choice of a brave young hero fighting injustice inspired by a gallant heroine and facing a monstrous villain. But, in spite of all this hokum, the film seems to work purely on its transparent sincerity. This film is probably the original model followed by later commercialisations of the freedom movement like Shaheed (1948). The
use of patriotic songs, marching crowds, emotionally charged scenes of carrying forward the standard of freedom, the shooting down of unarmed satyagrahis are all motifs which have now become much worn with usage. All these elements are available in the film Jalianwala Bagh directed by Baldev Tah and scripted by Gulzar. But, the genuine impulse which inspired Hemen Gupta seems to be missing. Though made in the seventies it does not manage to say anything which had not already been stated 25 years earlier in a film like Beyalis. What we now require are more analytical and introspective films on our history. Mere flag-waving is not enough. To my mind, there have been two such historical films which have attempted an analysis of our recent past: Satyajit Ray s Ghare Baire and Shatranj Ke Khilari, both set in British
India. In both these films, the two sides of particular historical situations have been presented in a much more objective and balanced manner than is usually the case in our cinema. The positing of the extremist versus moderate conflict in Ghare Baire and the colonialism versus decadent feudalism of Shatranj Ke Khilari have made many so-called progressive writers and others condemn Ray as either pro-British or anti-extremist. About Shatranj Ke Khilari Ray has stated: The historical event I saw as being on a serious level throughout, with considerable probing into both Wajid s and Outram s characters and motivations. I was attracted by the possibilities of turning both of them into rounded, complex characters Wajid with all the traits of a decadent Nawab redeemed at least partially by his gifts as a poet and musician, striving to retain his dignity in the face of
Saeed Jaffrey and Sanjeev Kumar play the chess-playing nawabs in Shatranj ke Khilari.
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bound to go into extinction and deservedly so. I saw no point in flogging a dead horse. Easy targets don t interest me very much. The condemnation is there ultimately, but the process of arriving at it is different. I was portraying two negative forces, feudalism and colonialism. You had to condemn both Wajid and Dalhousie. This was the challenge.
Ghare-Baire represents Tagore s attitude to the terrorist movement and its ultimate futility, said the film s director Satyajit Ray.
His remarks on Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) are even more pointed: The Home and the World is a triangular love story. And the husband is really Tagore. There are essays by Tagore on this terrorist movement, and some of the things he wrote, even exact sentences, are put into the mouth of the main character. Nikhil, the husband, represents Tagore s attitude to the terrorist movement and its ultimate futility. It s a very valid viewpoint, very rational. It was really a middle-class movement with no connection to the lower strata of society at all. So ultimately it just fizzled out, and in other cases it turned into very violent riots between Hindus and Muslims. Tagore withdrew from the movement and came out with the essays, and then four or five years later, in 1912, he produced this novel. If our own attitudes towards the past are to mature it is to films like Shatranj Ke Khilari and Ghare Baire that we must turn to for guidance. We need to analyse our past in a more even-handed and honest manner and refuse to get carried away by slogans, false patriotism and complacent imagemaking myths. Courtesy: Cinema India, National Film Development Corporation
annihilation and turning ultimately into a tragic figure. Outram I saw as a dual personality, suffering moral qualms in the seclusion of his study, betraying not a trace of it in his capacity as the loyal servant of the Company. The annexation was illegal and yet Dalhousie pursued it with calm 38
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ruthlessness. The policy itself deserved nothing but condemnation. In fact it was roundly condemned by both British and Indian historians..... There are hints of lawlessness and of the misery of the people in the film. If I had dwelt in detail on such matters I would have run the risk of justifying the annexation. The feudal class was
(Shama Zaidi is a noted writer, costume designer, art director, theatre person, art critic, and documentary filmmaker. She was educated at Woodstock School, Mussoorie and at Miranda House, New Delhi. She has a B A Hons in English from Delhi University. She has a diploma in stage design from the Slade School of Art, UK. She is married to filmmaker M S Sathyu.)
The Cellular Jail: A Unique House of Torture By Prem Vaidya
I first saw the Central Cellular Jail or Kala Pani as it was then named by the Indians during the British Raj when I went there to shoot for my documentary on Veer Savarkar. It was a momentous day and I can recall it very clearly. It was February 15, 1978 and I had gone there with Balarao Savarkar. We had flown in from Calcutta to Port Blair and the unitmembers were to follow us by ship. I had been petitioning the appropriate authorities for days for permission to shoot within the Cellular Jail since Veer Savarkar was, indeed, the jail s most illustrious prisoner, and at last the permission had been granted. I was also in touch with Govindrao Harshe, the former jailer of the Central Cellular
Jail. Although Harshe came from the mainland, he became so fascinated with the history of the Andamans that he had preferred to settle on the island after retirement. He was one of those who had gathered old records, studied valuable information on freedomfighters coming from the mainland since 1858. He had also established a museum inside the jail. Harshe s assistance proved extremely valuable while filming the Cellular Jail sequences.
G.R. Playfare and Lt. Heathcole. And it was on March 10, l858 that James Peterson Walker, the Superintendent of the Penal Settlement, landed in Andaman with the first batch of 200 chained prisoners, who were, in fact, Indian freedom fighters. They had raised the banner of revolt against the foreign domination of India during the First War of Indian Independence in 1857. Within the short period of three months the number of prisoners increased to 773.
The history of this notorious Indian Penal Settlement dates back to November 20, l857, when the swampy and densely forested site on the Andaman was first selected by the British officers: Dr. F.J. Mouat, Dr.
Branded as the Sepoy Mutiny, the uprising was ruthlessly crushed by the empire-builders. In the beginning, the prisoners were left to their fate on the Viper Island, the domain of venomous creatures. In February 1872, Lord DOCUMENTARY TODAY 39
Mayo, the Viceroy of India, came to Andaman in connection with the penal settlement. It was during this visit that he was assassinated by Sheer Ali, a Pathan convict at Hope Town Jetty, at the foot of Mount Harriet. Later, Ali had to face the hangman s rope like a martyr. As the number of prisoners coming from the mainland started increasing rapidly achieving the staggering figure of 9,603 by 1874 it became difficult to check their patriotic indiscipline. The word transportation was redefined in 1876 by the British authorities of the Indian Penal Settlement to mean: Hard labour and strict discipline with only such food as is necessary for health. Any mitigation of the above is an indulgence which may at any time be withdrawn in whole or in part. To keep the freedom fighters at a distance from the freedom they so desired, an Order No. 423 dated September 13, 1893 was issued by the British-Indian Administration for construction of a bigger and wellsecured jail as a matter of great urgency so as to dehumanise freedomfighters and put them into shackles!. The estimated cost of Rs. 5,17,352 was sanctioned with unseemly haste. Ironically, at that very moment one of India s noblest sons, Swami Vivekananda, was speaking at the A view of The Cellular Jail.
Parliament of Religions in Chicago, on Service to humanity as the highest act of worship. And he was being heard in silence and with rapt attention. In his famous address to the Sisters and brothers of America , he said: I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. The construction of the House of Torture began by the end of the 19th century. Half-starved, chained prisoners were used as forced labour for the construction of the jail to imprison themselves and their fellow countrymen. Constant vigil was maintained on these labourer-prisoners during the construction work so that they could not organise any revolt. It was for this reason that the target of three years for the completion of the jail actually took 13 years and the task was completed in 1906. By this time the prisoner population had risen to 14,086 persons of which 13,364 were men. Situated on the sea coast, in the northeastern portion of Port Blair town, the imposing jail building was the first hair-raising sight from the ships for deported incoming prisoners. Like some man-eating octopus with eight tentacles, the jail had seven arms
sprawling out from the central watch tower. Each arm (wing) had three floors with total number of 698 cells each cell measured 4.1 by 2.7 meters, just enough for one convict. The cell had single ventilator, half-covered, at a height of three meters from the floor so that a prisoner from the cell could not see the other prisoners in the front wing and communicate through. All the seven wings of the Cellular Jail had a meeting point at the central watch tower for entry and exit. Each cell had separate iron bolts and a locking device outside, beyond the reach of the prisoners hand. In spite of leaving no chance of escape, there was constant watch by 21 wardens; seven on each floor facing their respective wings. There were also sentries at the central watch tower. One could very well visualise the conditions of freedom fighters in their sadness, loneliness and pathos, day after day, years together. The Cellular Jail was the prison within prison. The idea of having one cell for each prisoner was imported from civilized England on the lines of the Pentonville Prison in London. The inhuman treatment of hard toil and soul-cursing punishment was forced on convicts to make them non-communicable so that the contagious revolutionary thoughts would not spread among other prisoners. The rules clearly said: All convicts on their arrival in the settlement shall undergo a preliminary stage of solitary confinement for six months in the Cellular Jail. Like bullocks, prisoners were yoked to the oil-grinding machine to extract oil. The work outside the jail was of clearing of forest or laying 1220 bricks per day. The assigned work had to be done irrespective of the scorching sun or heavy downpour. The only relief one could think of from all this was to commit suicide. Many revolutionaries died and many became insane owing to the inhumane treatment meted out to them. The period from 1911 to 1916 has recorded the highest number of suicides. It was then that a jail
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committee (1919-1920) was appointed to make a thorough inquiry into the jail affairs. From the middle of the first decade of the 20th century, jails in the mainland were packed with young revolutionaries and political prisoners. Whosoever clashed with the imperialcrown and opposed the Raj was put behind the bars. The most feared among them were sent on Kala Pani to the Cellular Jail in Andaman. Starting with Narayan, a convict of the 1857 Mutiny from Danapur who was shot dead by British bullets in the jail, there are many unheard, unsung and unlisted heroes who perished in this soil to make the land fertile for the freedom of the country. They were revolutionaries, the freedom fighters, the political activists of · · · · · · · ·
The Chittagong Armory Case. The Alipore Bomb Case. The Nasik Conspiracy Case. The Lahore Conspiracy Case. The Nadia Conspiracy Case. The Gadar Party heroes. The Khulna Conspiracy Case The Benaras (Banaras) Conspiracy Case. · The Rampa Peasants Case, and many more. Most of them were charged under Section 121 of the Indian Penal Code, that is, for waging of war against the crown. One such illustrious prisoner who spent time at this horrifying jail was Veer Savarkar. The day Savarkar s sentence was announced by the Bombay High Court, his entire property was confiscated by the government to be sold through public auction. Savarkar thus had nothing in the form of personal belongings. However, the merciful officer of the Empire allowed him to carry a copy of the Bhagwad Geeta and a pair of spectacles with the understanding that he was to use them as property belonging to the government. (Isn t it an irony that the Holy Geeta should be considered to be the property of the British
Veer Savarkar was the Jail s most illustrious prisoners. Government!) Savarkar landed with his feet in fetters. He carried a bedroll on his head and a pot and pan in his hand. The riveted Jail-Ticket (Badge) hung from his neck. The inscribed metal piece read: 32778 C (Convict s Number) 121, 121A, 109, 302 (Offence under the British-India Penal Code, of waging war against the King and the abetment of murder.) 50 Years (Duration imprisonment)
of
24.12.1910 imprisonment)
of
(Date
D (Dangerous person) 23.12.1960 (Date of release)
The actor who was playing Savarkar, David Devram Kasbe, actually a Films Division driver, had great difficulty in climbing the steps of pier when he was put in fetters so one could well imagine the fate of the real Savarkar who actually had to put on the real fetters. We were filming this sequence on February 24. The ship we were using was the SS Maharaja and we had docked at the Aberdeen jetty. Soon after we got down the ship blew its horn for a few lengthy seconds as though announcing the arrival of our unit. Savarkar writes of this event in his book, My Transportation for Life (page 19): The first thought that struck me as I stepped on the island was of its potential use as a formidable naval base for India s Defence. A prophetic thought which became a reality 36 years after independence! DOCUMENTARY TODAY 41
he had the ability to separate from his physical body and travel on the astral plane and monitor the experience of awareness. To him the white-washed walls of his cell were like sheets of paper. The pointed thorns of the cordage plant or pebbles served as a pen. For, no political prisoner here was allowed to use pen or pencil. Savarkar worked around this by scratching on the walls and memorizing his writing as the walls were periodically white-washed. A remarkable feat for he had composed in all 13,500 lines 6000 of them in the Andamans .
Savarkar s walk from the pier to the prison cell through the long corridor was replicated by Prem Vaidya. Not a single prisoner was allowed to see Savarkar when he entered the Cellular Jail. He was taken to Barrack Seven on the third floor to an isolated prison-cell. We replicated Savarkar s walk from the pier to the cell and my camera was running all through as Kasbe was escorted passing through the aisle, along a row of cells. This 200-foot shot is the longest in the film and a very rare treatment in documentary films. In the film, this shot is accompanied with the sound-effect of clanging iron-fetters and the prisoner s footsteps mixed with a famous couplet composed by Savarkar using words from the Bhagwad Geeta: Anadi Mee, Anant Mee, Avadhya Mee Bhala, Maril Ripu Jagati Aasa Kavan Janmala 42
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(My soul is unbreakable and insoluble. It can neither be burned nor dried. It is everlasting, all pervading. Unchangeable, immovable and eternal. O fools! Whom are you trying to catch?) The Jail s History-Records show that Savarkar underwent the first sixmonths in solitary confinement (starting on August 30, 1911) in complete isolation! Savarkar sustained his spirit in the depressing atmosphere of prison-life marveling at the beauty of God and the immense variety and epic vastness of India s history. As he wrote in My Transportation for Life, I could offer my daily sacrifice, I could perform my daily Yajna in a little space of the prison as I had performed it in the world outside. Like a Yogi,
One sequence required Kasbe to chop dry coconut shells and separate the fibres to make ropes. Another tough task for Kasbe was being yoked to the oil-mill. He had to push the oil-mill lever like a bullock to be able to crush the dry coconuts and extract the oil. Two days before filming this sequence, Balarao and I began preparing Kasbe for this challenging performance. When he was finally ready, we filmed the scene at night in the Cellular Jail so that we were not disturbed during the shooting of this sequence. When this sequence was played on the screen on the day of release, some women among the audience were heard sobbing. The History-Ticket shows that Savarkar was twice hooked to the wall as a punishment. The first time was from September 10, 1912 for a period of seven days. He was handcuffed standing for possessing a letter written to other convicts. And again, for the second time from June 9, 1914 for seven days for refusing to work. Kasbe was also handcuffed and hooked. He could stand in that position for barely an hour and was completely exhausted by the time we finished filming of the sequence. When released , Kasbe was heard saying, I don t know how that great man must have endured this? So as to demoralize him, Savarkar s prison-cell was so chosen that he could get a full view of the prisoners being flogged on the ground below. As
though this were not enough, he could also see the condemned prisoners being taken to the gallows. As the prisoners were lashed with whips, shrieks of Vande Mataram could be heard repeatedly all around. So also, the sudden sharp screams as political prisoners were executed. We reenacted these sequences and filmed them with defiant and determined close-up shots of Kasbe playing Savarkar. The patriotic words, Vande Mataram were prohibited in BritishIndia and many were imprisoned for just uttering them. For some, these were their last words! Indian freedom fighters were freed much later. Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, the Supreme Commander of the Indian National Army (INA), arrived at Port Blair on December 29, 1943 to take control of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. His first visit on landing was to the Cellular Jail where he paid a silent respect to martyrs who had died in the cause of freedom. The next day, on December 30, he hoisted free India s National Flag at Port Blair an event which was to be repeated just four years later on August 15, 1947! To this day, the names of freedom fighters, revolutionaries and martyrs from all over the country (undivided India, today: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) are inscribed on thirty marble slabs on the walls of the jail. Only three of the seven wings have
survived the ravages of time. And yet, one can go inside the jail and still feel the vibrations of the past pathos so much so that even the toughest man is compelled to bow before this monument. I finished shooting and editing my film on Veer Savarkar and it went on to garner rave reviews but I could not forget the Cellular Jail, the place which had seen the last days of so many Indian martyrs. I hankered to record this place on film. My fondest dream came true and I returned to make a film on this unique jail. The film was appropriately named Kala Pani and garnered even more tributes for me. Making two documentaries in and around the Cellular Jail was a rare opportunity for me my own humble tribute to the many who sacrificed their lives for the country. Several decades later while speaking at a function in Pune, on May 28, 1997, at the presentation of the first Veer Savarkar Award for Promotion of National Security Awareness and Strategic Thinking , Army Chief General Shankar Roychowdhury referred to his visit to the Cellular Jail and said that the list of people, who were banished to the Kala Pani and suffered for their patriotism was incomplete. Not all names had been traced and inscribed there. The General Roychowdhury pleaded for the recognition of all those who undertook the armed struggle for India s Independence.
Much earlier, speaking on the occasion of Veer Savarkar s death anniversary, on February 26, 1983, at the Cellular Jail, P.L. Deshpande, the eminent thinker and Marathi dramatist and humorist, had said: To remind our people at the mainland every year, there should be a Day of Remembrance right here, in the Cellular Jail, on national level to be attended by the highest authority of the country. Today the red brick walls and the iron bars of the Cellular Jail are a mute witness to man s brutality to man. Today the Cellular Jail is a national memorial, dedicated to the nation. For the citizens of free India, this silent monument should be the first among the places, to be enshrined for paying homage to our patriots, revolutionaries and martyrs for the Independence that they have given us through their sufferings and in return demanded nothing. Then the place of sacrifice during the colonial days has now become a place of pilgrimage. (Prem Vaidya is a noted writercinematographer-director whose films like Man in Search of Man, Veer Savarkar and Kala Pani have become milestones in the history of Indian documentary. He has been associated with the Films Division for his entire working life. He was awarded the Ezra Mir-IDPA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003. He lives in Pune.)
Prisoners at The Cellular Jail were made to undergo several hardships. They were flogged mercilessly (left) for the slightest misdemeanour or made to extract oil at the oil grinding machine (right).
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A Modern Look at Two Heroes of the Freedom Struggle By Aarti Wani The present being a product of the past, our attempt to understand history is a part of our endeavor to understand ourselves and shape our world today. However, it is also true that often our understanding of the present determines the way we look at history. So, when it is popular imagination that is involved in this engagement with history, it can afford an insight into some of the dominant ways in which our social existence is being understood and redesigned. Rang De Basanti and Lage Raho Munnabhai, two films released last year to considerable popular acclaim, were also this year s Oscar contenders. Rang De Basanti was the official entry from India while the producers of Lage Raho Munnabhai had the confidence of popular support to enter it as a 44
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private contestant. But it is not Oscar dreams (now dashed) alone that these films have in common. The films have been considered together by commentators because both of them engage with characters from another narrative, that of the freedom struggle. Rang De Basanti recruits Bhagat Singh, the young revolutionary who was hanged by the British at the age of 23, while Lage Raho Munnabhai calls upon Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the national movement for independence. In recent years, filmmakers have again and again visited the site of the freedom struggle and brought to screen the events and personalities associated with that moment. What make these most recent attempts different from the earlier ones is that both the films are
located squarely in the present with contemporary characters who are inspired by Bhagat Singh and Mahatma Gandhi respectively. Thus there is an obvious effort at interpreting the words and actions of these figures from the past in the context of contemporary reality Bhagat Singh, a young revolutionary, was influenced by the Russian revolution and Communist ideology. He and his comrade Batukeshwar Dutt were tried for throwing bombs in the assembly. The bombs were only meant to make a noise with the aim of drawing attention to and protest against the passing of two bills the Trade Dispute bill and the Public Safety bill that would severely curtail the rights of workers to strike and protest. After throwing the bombs, they stood their
ground distributing pamphlets and courted arrest. In the course of this trial, Bhagat Singh s involvement in the murder of Saunders, a British officer, was revealed, and he was hanged, along with his comrades Sukhdeo and Rajguru. Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the Congress Party that was at the forefront of the struggle for independence, inspired a generation with his ideas and practice of nonviolence as a tool of resistance to the British rule. Popular imagination has often perceived these two figures as opposites, without fully understanding their real ideological differences. During the last few decades, with the ascendancy of militant Hindu Right, Gandhi s politics of non-violence and Satyagraha (insistence on truth) has increasingly come under disrepute as effeminate, and Bhagat Singh s young passion divested of its ideological moorings has been seen as a manly antidote. In short, regrettably, a simple dichotomy of violence and nonviolence has become popularly equated with the difference between these two. Therefore, the fact that both Rang De Basanti and Lage Raho Munnabhai were enthusiastically received by the same audience despite the two films apparently containing opposed messages is surprising and reason to look closely at the messages and their politics. The pre-release publicity of Rakyesh Mehra s Rang De Basanti A Generation Awakens had hinted at the theme of youth as architects of change. The film traces the transformation of a gang of friends from carefree, bohemian, disillusioned good for nothings to people who sacrifice their lives for a cause. This transformation is the result of their participation as actors in a film on the life of Bhagat Singh. Sue (Alice Patten), an English girl, comes to India to make a documentary on the lives of the Indian revolutionaries with a script based on a diary kept by her grandfather James McHeneley, who served as a
superintendent in a jail where Bhagat Singh and his comrades were imprisoned. After initial resistance (the result of their inability to understand or identify with Bhagat Singh s commitment), the youngsters agree to play the characters in Sue s film mainly because Daljeet or DJ (Amir Khan) has taken a fancy to Sue and is able to convince his friends. DJ himself plays Chandrashekar Azad, while Karan Singhania (Sidharth Suryanarayan), an alienated son of his rich industrialist father, plays Bhagat Singh, Aslam (Kunal Kapoor) plays Ashfaqullah Khan, Sukhi (Sharman Joshi) plays Rajguru, Laxman Pande (Atul Kulkarni) plays Ramprasad Bismil, and Sonia (Soha Ali Khan) plays Durga Bhabi. Throughout the film, Sue s documentary (which is nothing like a documentary she claims to be making but a regular fictionalized feature) inter-cuts with the main story line of DJ and his friends and is distinguished from it by its sepia tones, thus continually juxtaposing the present-day Indian youth with the y o u n g revolutionaries of the past.
and possibilities. And films have exploited the context of a college campus as a space where romance blossoms between the hero and the heroine. As such, for decades, a set formula consisting of pranks against teachers and others, rival gangs, initial hostility and competitiveness between the main protagonists, and the song and dance through which the hero pursues/ woos/threatens the heroine came to define this boy meets girl scenario in numerous film. In recent years, these campuses have acquired a designer sheen (Kuch Kuch Hota Hai) or have altogether shifted abroad (Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gum). Rang De Basanti, breaking from this formula that has been so predictable in its artificiality, takes a refreshing look at the life style, values, and concerns of a section of young Indians. This break is possibly also a sign of the Hollywood style narration slowly inching its way into mainstream Indian cinema. There are no classrooms because no one attends class; there are
One of the achievements of the film is the near natural portrayal of these youngsters. College life has been a perennial theme of Popular Hindi cinema. In a society where only 6.4% of the young people who are eligible for higher education actually have access to it, the college campus naturally becomes a dream site of privilege, freedom, DOCUMENTARY TODAY 45
Arshad Warsi and Sanjay Dutt live it up in Lage Raho Munnabhai. songs, but they are either played on the record player as the students dance crazily to the music or used as background scores; there are spontaneous humor and tremendous raw energy of the youth language slang, abuses, and jokes which approximates what may be spoken by footloose youngsters in the north of India. That the film s depiction of youth in its element made identification easy, thus attracting the young audience to the film, is obvious. It is the significance of this identification that is problematic. A large early portion of the film is given to the making of Sue s documentary as the friends, reluctantly and irreverently, participate in the enterprise. What also emerges is a certain picture of the young as disillusioned but not particularly bothered by what they see around them. India for them is a corrupt and overpopulated country where people are helpless to do anything about their problem. The only exception is Laxman Pande. Initially, he does not belong to the group and in 46
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fact despises these boys and girls for their Western lifestyle and even disrupts their parties. He belongs to the youth wing of a political party, and the saffron scarf around his neck and his derogatory remarks about Muslims directed against Aslam establish his allegiance to the ideology of the Hindu Right. But Laxman is also idealistic and gradually gets drawn to the filmmaking process and soon starts acting in it although always holding himself aloof until the events that give a major twist to the plot. Sonia s fiancé Ajay Rathod (Madhavan), who is a pilot in the Indian Air Force, dies in a Mig 21 crash. It becomes evident that inferior spare parts and corruption in the services are responsible for the crash. The Defense Minister, instead of inquiring into the corruption charges, blames the pilot for rash flying. The group leads a peaceful protest that is brutally attacked by the state police machinery. Replicating the revolutionaries murder of Saunders, the group murders the Defense
Minister and then takes over the radio station to explain their actions to the nation. Commandoes are called in, and DJ, Karan, Sukhi, Aslam, and Laxman die, smiling valiantly. Finally, they have acted; they are not impotent! A well-made film in terms of script, acting, and visual style, what does Rang De Basanti say? Hundreds of college-going young people take their education and career seriously, become doctors, engineers, and computer programmers, join the military, the police force, or the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). A few youngsters, for various complex social and psychological reasons, remain outside the gambit of this socialintegration machine. So are the characters in this film they are misfits and refuse to buy the promise of the system. For example, DJ graduated from the university five years ago but continues to hang onto the campus because he knows that, while he is respected there, outside he has no role or identity. Karan refuses the advice of his rich businessman
father to make something of his life, Aslam spurns the narrow Muslim identity offered by his family, and in the end Laxman sees through the politics of convenience practiced by the Hinduist Party to which he belongs. Potentially this is a group of youngsters whom Bhagat Singh could have spoken to and made half of them converts to his politics. But Bhagat Singh is never allowed to speak to them. The Bhagat Singh of Mehra s imagination, mediated through the diary of an English jailer and his grand-daughter, is only a hotheaded patriot who willingly sacrificed his life for his country. Nowhere do we hear about his ideas on religion, imperialism, exploitation, oppression, or Socialism. And Bhagat Singh was a prolific writer. He died so young, and yet in his letters, diaries, pamphlets, and booklets, his ideas of a just equitable society found ample expression. He even wrote a booklet titled Why I Am an Atheist while in jail. As a matter of fact, Bhagat Singh had much to say to students, too. At one point, while allowing their concern for education and career, he said that they should also be ready when the time came to move beyond self-interest and give themselves to a larger struggle! However, Bhagat Singh and his comrades in Mehra s picture are exactly like the ones we have encountered in our school textbooks. The fictional Mr. McHeneley has after all seen only the courage of the young revolutionaries in the face of death and is naturally clueless about what gave them this courage. So, Mehra s revolutionaries are only fiery-eyed young men of action, sans thought, sans ideas. Consequently, Rang De Basanti merely succeeds in effectively silencing Bhagat Singh.
the state and private corporations. They do not become aware of the deep divide in the country between the handful rich and the poor majority. We see only Laxman Pande, the Hinduist student leader, gradually changing as his hardcore Muslim hatred gives way to a more sympathetic identification with the other. But the rest continue to have a ball as they shoot the film and occasionally rail against corruption and people s impotency to do anything about it. The only rejoinder to them is in the form of Ajay Rathod, who claims that he is in the Indian Air Force because he loves his country and would sacrifice his life for it. Indeed, on those rare occasions when they do discuss the problems besetting the country and the solutions to them, it is always in terms of dying for your country by joining the military! Thus it is only with Ajay s death, that is, when they get a personal blow, that they wake up to prove to the world that the youth will not take things lying down any more! But, what according to the film is the way forward for the young of India? The answer is to be found in Karan Singhania s dialogue with the nation. When the boys take over the radio station, Karan takes the mike to declare that they are not terrorists but only students from the university, frustrated
with corruption. A question and answer session ensues, and in an answer to a question regarding the possible choices before the young of India, he advises them to join the Military, the Police force, and the Indian Administrative Services! Precisely what numerous students do anyway and what a few like these youngsters did not. It should be noted that he does not advocate struggle or protest, violent or otherwise. That, minutes after this message, Karan and his friends fall to bullets fired by commandoes summoned by the State is an irony evidently unintended by Mehra. If in Rang De Basanti innocuous college youngsters make a violent choice, then in Rajkumar Hirani s Bollywood comedy Lage Raho Munnabhai, Munnabhai (Sanjay Dutt) and his sidekick Circuit (Arshad Varsi), the pair of hoodlums made famous by the hugely popular Munnabhai MBBS (2003), become advocates of a version of Gandhian non-violence. Munnabhai falls in love with a radio jockey, Jhanvi (Vidya Balan). In order to meet her, he must win a quiz on Gandhi, which is well nigh impossible because of his supreme ignorance about Gandhi. He asks Circuit the relevance of 2 n d October (Gandhi s birthday, which is a national holiday), and Circuit answers
Rang De Basanti
Not surprisingly, we see no gradual transformation of DJ and his group of friends. They do not notice that farmers, tribals, and workers are daily protesting and struggling to protect their livelihoods from an onslaught of DOCUMENTARY TODAY 47
that that it s a dry day (a day when liquor is not sold)! Even so, he wins the quiz with the help of Circuit and by kidnapping and bullying certain history teachers into telling him the right answers. To Jhanvi, he pretends that he is a professor and wishes to propagate Gandhianism among the youth by using the tapori lingo (the street Hindi spoken by the lumpen in Mumbai, perhaps a Bollywood construct). When Jhanvi invites him to speak to a group of elderly men living with her grandfather and herself because their children have abandoned them, Munnabhai is in trouble and has to make an attempt to know something about Gandhi. After reading for three days and nights in a library dedicated to Gandhi s life and works, Gandhi appears to Munnabhai. Henceforth, Gandhi (played by Dilip Prabhavalkar) becomes a mentor to the hallucinating Munnabhai, counseling him and prompting answers to questions people ask him, not only during his visit to Janhvi s geriatric family but also later when, with Jhanvi, he starts advising people about their everyday problems from her radio studio, becoming a kind of agony aunt. Lage Raho Munnabhai, which has been applauded for making Mahatma Gandhi hip, is a funny film and through its humor occasionally manages to strike at some of the evils plaguing our social existence, most notably, corruption, superstition, and incivility. That this critique is light-hearted is also the reason why the humor is never black and why the mantra of Gandhigiri , which emerges as the message of the film, is a simplistic solution to our problems. Gandhigiri, an obvious foil to the Gundagiri (hooliganism) practiced earlier by Munnabhai and Circuit, advocates truth and non-violent means of changing the adversary s heart. Thus, Lucky Singh (Boman Irani), an unscrupulous businessman, who has grabbed Janhvi s and her extended family s home, is to be prevailed upon 48
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by sending him flowers and get-wellsoon cards; a young boy is advised to tell the truth to his father about his misadventures with stocks; and an old former teacher must shame the clerk into releasing his pension by stripping to his underwear in front of the whole office and handing over his little belongings his watch, glasses, shoes, etc. to the clerk to make up the sum of the bribe demanded. This packaging of Gandhianism in an easy usable formula has been rightly criticized for commodifying a complex socio-political vision. Simple repeatability is essential to branding, and Lage Raho, which is already using the Munnabhai brand, creates a new brand Gandhigiri by turning truth and non-violence into the catchphrase for the brand promising a quick fix for any problem. Lage Raho Munnabhai s Gandhigiri as propagated by a pair of goons, whose physical prowess is never in doubt, resonates with Gundagiri and goes some way in legitimizing a gentler form of resistance. Thus the Hindu Right s charge of the weakness and effeminacy implicit in Gandhian methods is, in a manner of speaking, answered. Rang De Basanti also articulates disenchantment with the Hindu Right, through the disillusionment of Laxman Pande. The last few years have been witness to a setback in the political fortunes of Hinduist and extreme right-wing parties, and the popularity of both these films echo this mood. While this is essentially welcome, what seeks to replace the lure of a communal identity is possibly a promise of a new lifestyle held out by these films. Lage Raho Munnabhai differs from Rang De Basanti in that, unlike the latter s absolute erasure of Bhagat Singh s politics, Lage Raho Munnabhai s interpretation of Gandhi merely simplifies. And yet the understanding of the present that fuels both these interpretations reveals their essential similarity. The chief problem faced by the characters in these films
is corruption and fraud in which the state is complicit, in the form of the Chief Minister in Rang De Basanti and petty officials in Lage Raho Munnabhai. That corruption truly plagues individuals and institutions across regions and classes cannot be denied. At the same time, it must be noted that corruption is the major problem discussed by the ideologues of neo-liberalization who see it as a hurdle in the efficient working of market policies. And yet, when thousands of farmers commit suicide, they do so not because of corruption but because of the too efficient implementation of neo-liberal policies. In other words, in making corruption the central dilemma, both the films express the angst of the upwardly mobile urban Indians. Both Bhagat Singh and Gandhi, despite their dissimilar ideologies, are recruited for the same cause, that of cleaning up the system without fundamentally recognizing or questioning the real malaise. Consequently, Bhagat Singh s transformative politics is unnecessary, while Gandhi s non-violence comes in handy merely to teach people manners: do not spit in public corners, be polite to the lower classes, etc. To be sure, along with corruption, Lage Raho Munnabhai also communicates, however light-heartedly, the family disconnect that people experience resulting from increasing individualism and competitiveness. Nevertheless, the film s solution of flowers, gifts, and cards only endorses, once again, the promise of a consumer haven. The massive transformation in economic and cultural lives of the people in face of the onslaught of global capital has visibly increased and hardened divisions along the axes of caste, gender, and class. In such a context, while the very poor are being almost pushed out of existence, others, like criminals or students who resist integration into the system, exist on the periphery, with immense disruptive potential of one kind or other. When the popular media seek to understand
the pressures, conflicts, struggles, and discontents in a rapidly changing world, in their tragic or comic aspect, it is often through the medium of these outsiders, as in the case of these two films. Bhagat Singh and Mahatma Gandhi are interpreted neither through the medium of those who belong business leaders and IT professionals nor through those who see the neo-liberal agenda for what it is and are consciously active in resisting it but through those who are seen as outsiders and in need of cooption. Students must give up their cynicism and help improve the system or their despair may drive them to self-destruction like the youngsters in Rang De Basanti. And criminals must never learn that they are a necessary appendage to big business but instead ought to give up their violent ways, learn some manners, and use their native wisdom to help people who are struggling to cope in a
world where old family values seem to be eroding rather rapidly. Ordinarily, identification with criminals is a complex negotiation involving revulsion as well as attraction. By domesticating the hoodlums and divesting them of their menace, Lage Raho Munnabhai simplifies this process. Similarly, the young audience can easily identify with the youngsters in Rang De Basanti who speak and behave like them, not only because of the naturalistic portrayal, but also because their own social position makes it possible for them to momentarily understand the cynicism of someone like DJ, who says that with one foot in the past and the other in the future he is pissing on the present. However, the difficulties of the present, as experienced by these characters with whom the audience identify, are simply the difficulties of a section of people
who actually stand to gain from the economic transformation taking place in our society, provided they participate sensibly. Hence, Gandhi s Satyagraha can be relieved of the burden of its history as one of the most potent weapons against British imperialism and become Gandhigiri, a gentle tool to sort out civic tensions. And because the truly exploited majority is always already forgotten, Bhagat Singh who had forewarned against brown evil replacing the white need not be summoned for anything more than holding our hand as we merrily take off on this bumpy ride. (Aarti Wani is a lecturer in English at Symbiosis College of Arts, Commerce, & Computer Science, Pune. A member of AIDWA (All India Democratic Women s Association), Wani is involved in many youth-, media-, and culture-related activities and projects in the city.). DOCUMENTARY TODAY 49