The “New” Indian Cinema 79

transparency. While there were instances in new literature and the new cinema
in India that appear to be textbook illustrations of these protocols of political
modernism, such as the works by Nirmal Verma and Mani Kaul, to invoke just
two examples from each, there were many that were not. That does not, how-
ever, disqualify them as ideal candidates of the new Indian cinema.
Nor was newness a matter of mimicking (film) movements of the past. Bene-
dict Anderson observed the ubiquity among Europeans from the sixteenth
century onward of naming places in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia
with the prefix new—New London, Nova Lisboa, Nouvelle Orleans, and so on.
It was as if the “new” existed in distant places with the “blessings” of the old.112
As a postcolonial film movement, the new Indian cinema was inarguably influ-
enced by its European predecessors. The postcolonial always bears the ironic
burden of belatedness and mimicry.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha eloquently captures something of new cinema’s
yearning to identify with European exemplars in a tribute to director Kundan
Shah. Writing about Shah and others like him at the Film and Television Insti-
tute of India, Rajadhyaksha says, “You had the overweening ambition, to be up
there with Antonioni, to remake Blow-up. And at the same time, no ambi-
tion: it was enough to show it to friends.” Shah’s favorite story, Rajadhyaksha
tells us, was one of Fellini wanting to make a film about a clown who, balanc-
ing on a horse on a trapeze, cannot resist bowing to the audience even as he
hurtles to his death. None of the new cinema films

were made to a mass audience and none reached a mass audience: they did how-
ever reach a number that may well be many times more than that of the aver-
age mass audience: through people passing prints underground, through pirate
networks, and eventually through digital means. . . . The cult-option was the
only way these films could get past the dual stranglehold of state support that
was often the kiss of death, and the impossibility of a commercial release. The
only solution left, it appeared, was to make a film nobody could control.113

By way of concluding this discussion, let me turn now to a film that heralded
the new cinema and that surpassed its maker’s expectations in terms of the level
of success it garnered—Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome—to touch on what the aes-
thetic of newness felt like.

Bhuvan Shome

Bhuvan Shome, writes Madhava Prasad, made “realism . . . a national political

project.” Not the “humanist realism” of Satyajit Ray, with its “aura of individ-
ual artistic achievement” and accents of Henri-Cartier Bresson and Jean Renoir,
but a radical realist practice that used the comic mode to critically comment
 80 T H E H I S TORY OF A RT   C I N E M A

on and even subvert realism.114 Prasad is not alone among Indian film theo-
rists to regard realism as the chosen aesthetic mode of the developmental
state. Sen’s radicalism inheres in crafting a film where the agenda of a mod-
ernizing, developing state, embodied in the persona of the bureaucrat pro-
tagonist, Bhuvan Shome, is brought into conversation with and eventually sub-
dued to the needs of the people or nation. In Prasad’s analysis, Bhuvan Shome’s
transformation remains the most radical element in Sen’s film. Following his
encounter during a bird-shooting holiday with a charming village girl, Gauri,
Shome thaws from an irascible, hidebound state functionary to someone toler-
ant of petty bribes as necessitated by the “realities of everyday life.”115 Interest-
ingly, Ray, too, had focused on this theme of transformation, albeit in less com-
plimentary terms. Recall his seven-word summary of the film: “Big Bad
Bureaucrat Reformed By Rustic Belle.” To focus on the transformation, while
not wrong, misses out on the work of detail in the film. Bhuvan Shome, as its
director once noted, was about mapping an open-ended journey of what hap-
pens to a person when he leaves familiar surroundings for utterly unknown
settings.116 The film’s depiction of experiences that ensue during this encounter
with the unknown contributed to the lasting freshness of Bhuvan Shome. It is
to one of those moments in the film that I will focus below. But first some
background.
Bhuvan Shome was based on a story of the same name by Banaphool a.k.a.
Balai Chand Mukhopadhyay (1899–1979). It appeared in the Bengali magazine
Sachitra Bharat in 1956. Mrinal Sen read it and contacted the author, a medical
doctor by profession, who spent most of his working career as a prabasi Ban-
gali (emigrant Bengali) in the Hindi-speaking region of Bhagalpur in the state
of Bihar, expressing his interest in making it into a film. It was difficult to secure
a loan, with one financier agreeing to make an advance provided “Shome-
saheb” was made younger so that “some kind of relationship with the girl was
possible.”117 Finally, the FFC approved a loan based on a draft script of “seven
or eight pages.”118 In an extended conversation about the film, Sen shared his
thoughts on why it marked a break in Indian cinema.
There is a humorous tone to the film—“inspired nonsense” is how Sen
described it citing Jacques Tati—much of it accomplished through the use of
animation, sound effects, freezes, mask shots, and a creative background score.
The numerous freeze frames in Bhuvan Shome have a ludic effect, and are thus
quite different from the use of this device at the end of Charulata (The Lonely
Wife, Satyajit Ray, 1964), or in revolutionary films from Latin America such as
Hour of the Furnaces (Getino and Solanas, 1968) or Memories of Underdevelop-
ment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968). The use of animation too was novel in
Indian cinema. Ram Mohan, an animation expert based in Bombay; K. K.
Mahajan, a graduate of the Film Institute who became the film’s cinematogra-
pher; Sadhu Meher, who played the role of Gauri’s husband and also served as
 The “New” Indian Cinema 81

Sen’s production assistant; Vijay Raghav Rao, the music director then employed
by the Films Division; and Suhasini Mulay were all new entrants into the world
of professional Hindi cinema and their iconoclasm shone through the film. The
film was also a Hindi debut for Utpal Dutt, a renowned theater and Bengali
film actor who played the titular role.
The humorous tone appears early in the film, when the protagonist is intro-
duced through the voiceover of Amitabh Bachchan, another newcomer who
would go on to become Indian cinema’s superstar.119 As it tells us that Shome is
an honest and upright officer in the Indian railways, we see a succession of ani-
mated images of heaps of ill-arranged files, a pen signing them rapidly without
pause, a set of swing doors with “Shri Bhuvan Shome” scrawled in uneven let-
ters (as was usual with nameplates in government offices), and a telephone that
rings incessantly. A different voice answers the telephone, interrupting the
voiceover, with a “hello” that dissolves into an echo that in turn is reminiscent
of the testing of microphones at political rallies, a staple of Bengali public life
at the time.120
According to Parag Amladi, these innovations in Bhuvan Shome have to be
seen in line with ongoing experiments in the documentary-making unit of the
government of India, the Films Division. Documentary filmmakers like S.
Sukhdev, Pramod Pati, K. S. Chari, S. N. S Sastry, and N. V. K. Murthy attempted
to integrate “the formal approach of the Western experimental and indepen-
dent cinema, as well as . . . the creative atmosphere of the National Film Board
of Canada.”121 Sen himself contributed to a FD endeavor entitled Know Your
Country. Bhuvan Shome, in Amladi’s reading, bore the stamp of an “institu-
tional movement” that included the FFC and FD, especially the latter’s anima-
tion unit. It was replete with elements of developmental documentary and
experiments with sound: “musique concrete, electronic manipulation of tradi-
tional music, and sound montages.” Sen’s use of animation was likely inspired
by animation in FD documentaries that used it to “push through civic mes-
sages” about family planning, public safety, or the conservation of water and
electricity. Finally, “the voiceover, so common to the traditional documentary,
is used here in counterpoint, as just another character or ‘voice’ in the ensem-
ble.”122 Amladi also saw Bhuvan Shome as replete with subtle references to
Indian cinema, ranging from popular films such as Kshudhita Pashan (Hun-
gry Stones, Tapan Sinha, 1960) and Junglee (Wild, Subodh Mukherjee, 1961) to
Ray’s Charulata.123
Underlying the humor, the “profusion of madness,” is a complex take on the
contemporary.124 Bhuvan Shome’s oddities are attributed to his being a Ben-
gali. The late sixties were a period when critiques of the Bengali bhadralok (gen-
tle folk, educated, salaried people) constituted a dominant strand of Bengali
history and politics. Middle class Bengalis, of which Sen himself was a mem-
ber, engaged in autocritiques that attributed the dismal plight of Bengali youth,
2.2 The animated office sequence, Bhuvan Shome.
 The “New” Indian Cinema 83

industrial backwardness, and widespread unemployment to the ingrained com-

prador characteristics of that class. Bengalis were seen as classic mimic men,
subservient and fawning toward their British overlords. Yet this was the same
class that produced a panoply of talent. Sen’s characterization of Bengali his-
tory and heritage in the early scenes that introduce Bhuvan Shome to the audi-
ence lays out this dense history in a highly condensed albeit whimsical fashion.
A series of shots that last a little under two minutes unfold as the voiceover
announces “Bangal,” “Sonar [Golden] Bangal . . . Mahan [Great] Bangal . . .
Vichitra [Diverse] Bangal”—“Bangal” highlighting a non-Bengali speaker’s
locution—melting into a melee of voices chanting the revolutionary slogan “inq-
ilab zindabad” (long live the revolution), that in turn dissolves into complete
silence, followed by another anonymous, angry, male voice threatening to go
on strike if certain demands by cinema workers were not met. The images
accompanying these sounds are stills of Swami Vivekananda and Rabindranath
Tagore followed by moving images of Satyajit Ray and Pandit Ravi Shankar.
The parade of illustrious Bengalis dissolves into shots of processions, a police
lathi charge, posters of Ho Chi Minh, an effigy of U.S. President Lyndon John-
son, and Bengali women marching on the streets, ending with a shot of the film
poster of An Evening in Paris (Shakti Samanta, 1967) featuring a scantily clad
woman under which is tacked a list of demands by cinema employees. Bhuvan
Shome is the bearer of this heritage and its myriad contradictions. Sen’s out-
look on Bengali history sets him apart from contemporary artists and intel-
lectuals who had grown impatient of the achievements of the bhadralok and
emphasized only their shortcomings. The rest of the film is about the fate of an
individual from this class when he finds himself in unfamiliar surroundings
where he is the boss of no one, including himself.
Let me now turn to a brief spell in the film that is at odds with the rest of its
humorous narrative. Shome has something of an epiphany during this sequence
that has a strange, dreamlike, fabulist quality. Interestingly, this sequence was
Sen’s improvisation and is absent in Banaphool’s original story.125
Gauri dresses Shome up as a Western Indian villager—a short kurta, churi-
dar, a big turban, and a stick—sufficiently scruffy so as to not alert the birds
that there is a stranger in their midst. They will head over to the haunted (bhoot)
bungalow, she tells him, a prime site to spot birds. We see the two figures, Gauri
and Shome, in a long shot, running on a dazzling, empty expanse of rocky sand,
his gun effortlessly perched on her shoulder. Shome quizzically inquires where
she is taking him as there is a cut to a darker, shadowy, uneven terrain, with a
ramshackle house in the background. Gauri and Shome appear in the fore-
ground, their backs to us, as they make their way nimbly toward the building.
We hear their excited voices against the sound of the wind blowing in the empty
landscape. Once they are inside the building, the sound of the wind is
2.3 Scenes of protests in Calcutta, Bhuvan Shome. Above, Police lathi charge; below,
protester.
2.4 Protests in Calcutta, Bhuvan Shome. Above, Effigy of President Johnson; below,
women marching.
 86 T H E H I S TORY OF A RT   C I N E M A

punctuated by a musical birdcall. As the two enter a room, Shome asks Gauri
about the place.
“It used to belong to a king” she tells him, but is now an abandoned, haunted
house. “Fantastic” mutters Shome, in English, completely transfixed by the
strange beauty of his surroundings as Gauri launches into a tale she has heard
from her father. The king came here to escape from the extreme heat of the land,
she tells him. The house would never be hot as a cool breeze always wafted
through its rich, tall, interiors. We catch a glimpse of a body of water in the
background as the soundtrack switches to classical music. Gauri comes into
focus again, this time framed against the window beyond which is the body of
water. Pointing at two empty hooks on the ceiling, Gauri tells Shome that there
used to be a swing that hung there on which sat the queen. This is the moment
that is reminiscent of the swing sequences in Ray’s Charulata, except Gauri is
not the immaculate Charu. She is dusty and bedraggled, as rural women used
to manual labor are. In rapid shot reverse shot we see her through Shome’s
eyes, as he imagines her as the queen. The soundtrack is now playing a song
that commemorates the mythic figure of Radha on a swing with her female
playmates. As dusk comes, the king joins his queen and regales her with
stories—tales of foreign lands, of battle, and hunting—until she falls asleep.
We don’t see Gauri’s face as she narrates this account to a rapt Shome; the
lower quarter of her lehenga-clad body pacing up and down is visible in the
frame, the mirrorwork on the garment twinkling in the sunlight pouring in
through the latticed architecture of the walls.
Suddenly she interrupts her narrative, and we see her face once again as she
nimbly runs over to a verandah and points toward something on the horizon.
As Shome trains his binoculars to where she is pointing, the background musi-
cal score changes into a medium paced instrumental melody, and we see the
birds—a pat of flamingoes over which fly a wedge of swans. Shome and Gauri
gaze eagerly, passing the binoculars between each other with a familiarity that
is intimate. As most of the birds fly off, she suggests they run to a sand dune
close by to keep looking. The magic spell of the four-minute-long sequence is
broken, and we return to Shome’s hunting quest.
Sen described the shooting of this sequence as something that was decided
on location. The brother of the Raja of Bhavnagar, the place in Saurashtra in
Gujarat where they were filming, told them about a spot where flamingoes came
to feed around noon. They then flew off to a lake about four kilometers away.
During filming, there were so many birds that Mahajan, the cinematographer,
said, “I cannot see anything.”126 As for the house, Utpal Dutt sighted it when
the film crew was making its way to the dunes. “A small house with a
verandah. . . . The sea where the birds landed.” The housekeeper (chowkidar)
narrated the story about the king and queen that Gauri told Shome. “This was
exactly how I arranged the shots with Utpal and Suhasini.”127
2.5 Above, Shome and Gauri running into the haunted (bhoot) bungalow, Bhuvan
Shome; below, Gauri on an imaginary swing.
2.6 Above, Mirrors twinkling on Gauri’s lehenga, Bhuvan Shome; below, a rapt Bhu-
van Shome.
2.7 Shome and Gauri sight the birds, Bhuvan Shome.
 90 T H E H I S TORY OF A RT   C I N E M A

A moment of perfect beauty so unsettles the obstinate bureaucrat that when

he returns to his regular job, he makes an uncharacteristic judgment by reward-
ing a bribe-taking functionary—Gauri’s husband Jadav Patel. Images of his
hunting holiday, Gauri’s face, and her laughter, flash in his mind when Shome
decides to promote Patel instead of punishing him. But the tone of the last scenes
is once again comedic. The moment in the bungalow was a brief respite in a
comedy that often hit notes of sarcasm. When asked about Bhuvan Shome’s
reception among European audiences as his “most erotic film,” Sen strenuously
downplayed it. “Those [themes] were not my primary objective,” he noted.

There was a complexity in Bhuvan Shome’s character and temperament and I

tried to foreground that element. He was a widower and a moralist; he stared
at women and yet, almost immediately averted his gaze. . . . In the bird hunt-
ing scene, when Suhasini puts her hand gently on Shome-saheb’s shoulder, he
shivers and steals a glance at her. While we were shooting, Suhasini enquired
about the relationship being just a father-daughter one. Was there perhaps more
to it than that? I would like to say that this element was only superficial and
had no bearing on the real issues which I tried to address in the film.128

Sen’s disclaimer of any trace of sexuality in the Shome-Gauri relationship might

appear quaint and anachronistic against the backdrop of global radical poli-
tics in the 1960s. But it is not quaint when we analyze it through the lens of a
strand of Indian nationalism—the Gandhian kind. As Ashis Nandy and Leela
Gandhi have argued, “In a milieu where orthodox Indian nationalism was
countering imperial allegations of ‘effeminacy’ through hysterical recuperation
of a lost Indian ‘manhood,’ Gandhian ahimsa was predicated on a rigorous
refusal of heteronormative masculinity, western or eastern.”129 Contrary to Ray’s
complaints against censorship in India, both men were legatees of an ethic of
sexuality that was premised upon an acknowledgment of eroticism, but a denial
of sex. Bhuvan Shome’s “arrogant” and “lonely and sad” ways were irrevocably
shaken by his erotic encounter with another India during the bird-hunting
adventure, and Gauri was its catalyst.130
Where does this leave us with the question of novelty or newness of the
“Indian new wave?” Let me offer a provisional response via Daniel Morgan’s
recent discussion of Bazin as a realist avant-garde. In “The Evolution of the Lan-
guage of Cinema” Bazin argued that by 1939—the year that two very signifi-
cant films for Bazin, La Règle du Jeu and Stagecoach released—“cinema had
arrived at what geographers call the equilibrium profile of a river.” That profile
could be disturbed, however, if any “geological movement occurs.” Morgan
speculates (with Bazin) on the factors that could lead to major stylistic change
in cinema that were comparable to geological movements. It could be external
events like the Second World War, whose aesthetic consequence was Italian
 The “New” Indian Cinema 91

neorealism. Or it could be new technology: new screen formats, other media,

new lenses, cameras, and lighting. Finally, there was the impact of “individual
films and filmmakers” that instigated fundamental changes in the medium by
charting “new ways of showing a world on film.” Such a film or filmmaker could
dig into “cinema’s chalk bed” and shift its directions.131 Bhuvan Shome effected
a geological shift in Indian cinema.
The erotic epiphany of the sequence I describe above in Bhuvan Shome is the
engine of the film’s radical democratic possibilities. The trope of a city man cut
loose of rigid urban regulation in the countryside, proximate with a beautiful,
lively, young woman, is repeated enough in Indian cinema to confound judg-
ment, as it did for Ray, about the film’s radical newness.132 Indeed, the question
of newness is quintessentially postcolonial in that the postcolonial modern is
often misrecognized as a copy—a poor and sly one at that—of the metropoli-
tan modern that precedes it in time.133 Ray’s brutal seven-word denunciation
of Bhuvan Shome resulted from a similar misrecognition of the modest, low-
budget, new Indian cinema. Ranjani Mazumdar and Arjun Appadurai have
analyzed the phenomenon of repeat viewing in the context of popular Hindi
films as a complex cultural enjoyment of déjà vu. Bhuvan Shome flips the sense
of déjà vu to produce an entirely new experience out of something that at first
glance seems utterly familiar.134
As Dipesh Chakrabarty reminds us through his reading of Gilles Deleuze
in an essay entitled “Belatedness as Possibility,” newness enters the world
through acts of displacement and disguise. It can confound judgment by mak-
ing it difficult and challenging to distinguish the new from a “simulacrum, a
fake that is neither a copy nor original.”135 The desire to explain it as that which
we already know, and that which is habitual, is overwhelming. There was enough
in Bhuvan Shome that make it possible for us to historicize the many stylistic
and narrative elements in the film as I have done above. But historicism falls
short when we analyze the moment of aesthetic opening I described in the
haunted house scene. Echoing Sen, I would submit that we miss the film’s new-
ness through “conventional viewing” in which the wish that a “bad man” will
turn “good at the end” comes true. We also reduce it when we see it as a saga of
a colonial-era bureaucrat embracing the postcolonial nation through his for-
giving of petty infractions and the corruption of a subordinate. Bhuvan Shome
is new because it is a challenge to political, moral, and aesthetic judgment. It
resists ad infinitum a positive definition of newness while inciting the critic to
always debate what is new in new cinema.