The Majoritarian Politics of Art Films.

AC Sreehari

The news that the Bengali film Pather Panchali by Satyajit Ray is the Only Indian Film in

BBC’s Top 100 Foreign Language Films List and it was placed at number 15 in the list, hit

market recently. The Japanese film Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa has been adjudged the

best film in this list. The BBC noted that a quarter of the film’s listed were East Asian, but none

of the six Japanese critics who took part voted for a single Kurosawa film. The BBC admitted

that only four of the 100 films have been directed by women, although 45% of the critics who

responded were women.

Critics are of the opinion that the ‘art’ film of Bengal, particularly Satyajit Ray’s oeuvre, with its

more select audience, thematised the dilemma of women in modernity. Ray is said to be adept at

developing the psychology of his female characters, almost entirely through his mise-en-scenes,

pauses in the dialogue, gestural movement, and pace of narrative momentum. His film Devi (The

Goddess; 1960) illustrates the process by which the mythologisation of women is fuelled by male

desire and deeply destructive to the community at large. The dilemmas confronting one, while

viewing realist cinema1 are problematic as much as in other contemporary film industries. The

weight of social issues imposed on the female character render her bearer, rather than the maker,

of meaning. “The visual style of the parallel cinema, its long shots, and relatively slow-paced

editing contrived paradoxically to make some of the female characters less energetic and more

passive, particularly as this visual style depended on symbols and imagery rather than dialogue

to get its message across. This is not to detract from their powerful onslaught against stagnant

ideas but to suggest that realism has its limitations in envisioning a different future for women.”2
A passionate nationalist fervor was integral to the Western realism-based art genre in India.

There may be seen parallels in the way in which nationalists like Jawaharlal Nehru and film

makers like Ray and Adoor used films. In 2000, when corporatization of the film industry had

just begun, Girish Karnad had said that the uniqueness of the “Indian” cinematic idiom had been

in the ways in which narrative modes had to be worked through music and therefore dance. He

went on to counsel against adopting the song-less, Neo Realistic “Western” style that had been

popularised by Satyajit Ray and by himself, if Indian cinema is to survive the onslaught of

globalised corporate interests. However, the slant was always towards the realist tradition in

Indian film. Virginia Wright Wexman, a Chicago based critic, in the book A History of Film,

begins her evaluation of Indian film with Satyajit Ray: “The industry gained western

consideration through a single entry in an international film festival. In 1956 at Cannes, Pather

Panchali bagged the “best human document” award. Appropriately, its screening followed right

after a Kurosawa film. Ray's work has been described as full of humanism and universality, and

of simplicity with deep underlying complexity.3

His works, as well as his followers were in keeping with the nationalist agenda, which was what

film was initially used. It was supposed to help document developmental schemes like dam

construction, and thereby highlighting India as a developed nation. Soon after Independence,

Jawaharlal Nehru realised that the newly formed country needed a mechanism to reach out to the

vast population which was multilingual, multicultural, unaware of the notion of the nation–state,

and mostly illiterate. He took a special interest in reviving the set-up of the former Indian News

Parade. The Films Division was started in 1948 with a mainstream film producer, Mohan

Bhavnani, as chief producer. As if to compensate for the slip-on Independence Day, all state

functions, public announcements and social initiatives in the 1950s and 1960s were documented

and circulated by the Films Division with missionary zeal. The most famous among them, of
course, was Nehru inaugurating the Bhakra-Nangal Dam in 1955. the newly emerging medium

of cinema to effective use and gained ideological, and later political, hegemony in Tamil Nadu,

which has seen five Chief Ministers from the Dravidian stables with a cinema connection: C.N.

Annadurai, M. Karunanidhi, M.G. Ramachandran, Janaki Ramachandran and Jayalalitha.

The art film movement in India was officially initiated only in 1969 under the direct influence of

the Prime Minister of Ms. Indira Gandhi. (In Italy, it was Mussolini 4) The role of central

financing saw an element of homogeneity creeping into the Indian art film and, if a single label

must be used to characterize the films, the appropriate term would be “social realist” (37). Many

of the films were not centrally financed but the presence of a national impetus was enough for

talent to sprout in regions far away from Delhi (37).5 The two states to have dominated regional

art films in India are Bengal and Kerala known largely due to Satyajit Ray and Adoor

Gopalakrishnan (1). The realist cinema of India is only as sensitive to issues as are other popular

films, and can’t claim for more non-sexist representation.

Films were to carry the messages of anti-colonial nationalism, social reform, Nehruvian

“socialism,”6 and so on. This was precisely what Adoor had in mind too. He has various

documentaries like Dam, Family Planning7 etc. which are part of a modern patriarchal nationalist

project.

The Indian New Wave has often been described as a middleclass enterprise an educated

middleclass revolt and reaction to the post-independence socio-political situation. With the land

reforms, the joint family system was in shambles which gave rise to a new sense of self

(Venkiteswaran 213-14). By the seventies, the nationalist and Nehruvian dreams had set and the

hopes aroused by the communist movement had drifted towards parliamentary shores.
Adoor’s clear cut notion of what is India and what constitutes Indianness talks volumes about his

middle class patriarchal sensibilities. He has been an ardent supporter of Ray and his films,

claiming those to be real cinema. In an interview talking about the importance of Ray films over

Bollywood films, Adoor says,

The films churned out from Bombay, by and large, are not Indian cinema in the sense that

they do not reflect the truth or reality of our lives, though there may be rare exceptions.

Each and every film by Satyajit Ray is Indian cinema; it shows our life, our vision of the

world and our culture. The notion that Indian cinema is nothing but song and dance,

existed earlier. It is the outsiders’ notion about Indian cinema. But, of late, we too have

started celebrating that notion. That is why we unabashedly promote the term Bollywood

for Indian cinema. Actually, the very term “Bollywood” is a derogatory one and we

should be ashamed of condemning ourselves to such subservience. It is to be studied as to

why Bombay film-makers have chosen this lowly role for themselves. Now we are

propagating Bollywood as a brand name. These days, in several world capitals,

Bollywood is paraded as Indian cinema, and awards are distributed to oneself in a

flagellatory fashion unmindful of what others think about it. Thus, the bad ones

masquerade as Indian cinema to the total detriment of the genuine ones. But what we

witness is the aping of violence in Hollywood films. New technology is put to use here.

Gradually, surreptitiously, these films will find an audience here too, further deepening

the crisis faced by genuine cinematic work.8

This idealization of Indianness is symptomatic of a middle-class patriarchal perception of an

Indian as to what India and Indian film ought to be. It is a perception that is against any kind of

regionalism, be it gender, caste or religion. According to Meena T. Pillai, 9 the much-

celebrated film society movement was hardly able to address the female spectator and women

remained largely on the fringes of the film viewing experience. The high modernist artistic

sensibilities of the New Wave in Malayalam unwittingly paved the way for a split between art

and commercial movies, the borders of which had remained rather subtle and tenuous till then.

Meena T. Pillai views 1970s as a period of modernism with its dichotomisation of art and

literature as high and low, privileging the former. According to her, this ushered in a space of

woes to Malayalam cinema that was divided into “art” and “popular,” with art films supposedly

dealing with a specific bunch of themes that offer alternative representations of reality, ... that

had appeal only in the ‘West’ and film festivals” (20).

Pillai considers auteurs form Adoor to T.V. Chandran as brilliant directors providing Malayalam

cinema with new idioms that earned it numerous accolades in national and international forums.

The efforts taken by these art film makers couldn’t shake the bastion of the popular films. Pillai

argues that "this split, in the long run, proved detrimental to wo/men. A market-oriented cinema

started blatantly flaunting itself as made to the measure of popular desire where male could, of

course, substitute popular. The films of this period continued the project of the eroticised family,

popularising the notion that only within the confines of a home can she find true happiness" (22).

Pillai’s critique of gender representation in art films articulates the hegemonic realm of such

films. Though Pillai talks about gender only in terms of femininity, it is essential that the

construction of masculinity in such art films has also been considered. Gendered beings, be it

femininity or masculinity, are for art film makers including Adoor, objects as part of constructing

Kerala as a pre modern spectacle to suit the oriental gaze of the Western market.

From English Literature to Film Studies

The syllabi of film studies similarly tend to create a canon of realist history perpetuated by the

Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). From world, to Indian to regional; as well as from

parallel to popular, there is a selection of texts that narrate the tales of male victory and

martyrdom. From Ray to Adoor, who are celebrated in these syllabi, there is an uncovering of

the saga of the hegemonic male. The classical film texts that are prescribed in the syllabi like

Battleship Potemkin and The Bicycle Thieves are tales of male martyrdom and heroism.

The canonicity marks the selection of films from Malayalam as well. This accounts for the

selection of films like Neelakkuyyil (The Blue Koel; 1954), Chemmeen10(The Anger of the Sea;

1965), Elipathayam (The Rat Trap; 1981), Newspaper Boy (1955), all of which subscribe to an

overarching ideology of patriarchal engendering. Coming to popular texts, once again there is an

extollation of the hyper masculine through films like Sholay. The hit Sholay (1975) drives

women out of the messy business of the modern using the entrenched storyline of the male as

quester. Unlike the parallel formula in Hollywood films where the boy conquers the enemy,

saves girl, and gets the girl, the reward in these Hindi male quest films is male friendship.

Interestingly, most of the film makers who make it to these syllabi are those who have been

trained at FTII, the premium film institute of India which follows closely in the heels of a

Western classical past. There has apparently been a blind adaptation of neo realist, new wave

tendencies at the behest of being a harbinger of modern tendencies in and through Indian film.

The Film Institute of India in 1960 in Pune, FTII11 boasts of a rich legacy in quality Indian films.

The Institute was renamed The Film and Television Institute of India in 1971. The Television

Wing, earlier located in New Delhi was shifted to Pune in the early seventies, bringing together

the training in film and television under a common roof. Today, the FTII is commonly regarded

as a center of excellence across the world. The FTII is an autonomous body under the Ministry of
Information and Broadcasting of the Government of India as well as a member of The

International Association of Film and T.V. Schools (CILECT), an international association of film

schools. K. Hariharan, a former student of FTII and the present director of L.V. Prasad Film &

TV Academy, Chennai says that FTII takes one away from popular cinema, and conceives of it as

the biggest issue plaguing film education in the country:

FTII has a slightly elitist kind of agenda. They look at realism as the only way of making

films because they borrowed their syllabus from European film schools. So, it was Satyajit

Ray or nothing else. And then there was only Kurosawa, Truffaut and Bergman…. No

people's cinema.12

The Pune film institute, constituted by the Government of India, framed the entire policy modeled

upon the French film institute, their prime motive being to sanitise Indian cinema from the

clutches of popular films. They shared the attitude of the West in considering the Indians as non-

realistic and non-rational beings and the cinema as melodramatic, non-rational, based upon

primary emotions, and above all, opposite of realist films.

Screened in London Festival in 1956, the West had ruled out Mother India, a film by

Mehboob Khan, inspired by the Russian Movement (Hammer and Sickle), as rubbish and

considered as melodrama, a quintessential Indian cinema where a woman/India asserts her

identity (Hariharan, 2010).

As Satyajit Ray was actually Tagorean/Vaishnavite/Brahmanical/masculine, he got acceptance

rather than an Italian Neo-Realist Vittorio De-Sican. His Pather Panchali (Song of the Little

Road; 1955) produced by the Government of of West Bengal, the first film from independent

India to attract major international critical attention, won "Best Human Document" award at
the1956 Cannes Film Festival, establishing Satyajit Ray as a major international

filmmaker. Pather Panchali is today considered as one of the greatest films ever made and has

been instituted as a canon of Indian cinema in the curriculum in Kerala right from the school

syllabus.

When Rashomon (1950) was screened in Venice in 1951, Akira Kurosawa was giving the West

what they wanted to see (Hariharan 2010). From 1950-60s, more than four hundred Samurai films

were said to have been made across the world. These sought to demean and demonise the East,

which was precisely what the Oriental project was all about. In Kerala, the film societies widely

screened the Japanese film maker, Kurosawa. M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s Oru Vatakkan Veeragatha

(A Northern Story of Valor; 1989) could be considered as one conceived from ‘Papa’

Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea (1952) and Kurosava’s exotic Samurai films (1954).

Orientalism is not one that is limited to the Western view of Eastern culture but rather it accounts

for certain Easterners’ representations of themselves as well can be seen right from the paintings

of Raja Ravi Varma, exhibited in Europe and America, which are virtually indistinguishable from

some Western “Orientalist” images. This tendency may be seen in the films of celebrated veterans

like Adoor. Adoor, if he is dealing with the culture of Kerala, as claimed by Derek Malcolm, is

catering to the taste of the West just as Ray and Kurosawa. He often draws upon the Orientalist

construction of the Indian past; his films are strikingly similar to those of the Orientalists.

Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s films are centered on men caught in a world of crumbling structures and

ideologies. Women are there mostly to reflect the existential dilemmas of his male protagonists,

without any inner life of their own.13 Mankata Ravi Varma, Adoor’s cameraman, was doing the

same with a movie camera what Raja Ravi Varma was doing in the nineteenth century in painting.

Raja Ravi Varma “morphed” and reconfigured his characters and Mankata Ravi Varma relocated
Adoor’s characters in a similar semiotic context. Thus, “There Comes ‘Papa’ Hemingway”,

serves the purpose of a pastiche as well.14

FTII may be seen to have had its continuing influence on the syllabus of film studies across India,

constructing film as another Ideological State Apparatus. The inclusion of the films of Adoor

Gopalakrishnan, alumni of the Institute, in the film studies syllabi of our universities, especially

Vidheyan (1993) is to be seen as symptomatic of such ideological shifts.

End notes
1
Bourdieu describes how an art film viewer thinks himself to be in a community of high taste, feels self-assured in his
“ability to adopt the posture socially designated as specifically aesthetic,” Pierre Bourdieu, “The Aristocracy of Culture,”
Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, eds., Richard Collins, James Curren, et al., (Delhi: Sage Publications, 1986)
179.
2
Geetha Ramanathan, “Missing Angle,” http://www.frontline.in/arts-and-culture/cinema/missing-angle/article5185806.ece;
accessed on 28/12/13.
3
The Japanese director Akira Kurosawa said, "Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without
seeing the sun or the moon.” [Ray was criticised by an Indian M.P. and actress Nargis Dutt, who was in the lead role in
Mother India, accused Ray of "exporting poverty." After all, “he is only a ray and not the Sun,” was her comment.]
4
P.K. Sreekumar talks about how film festivals have an alternative history of fascism to it. He discusses how Mussolini had
exhibited films, understanding its capabilities as a medium for political propaganda. The deteriorating status of film
festivals needs to be looked at in such a context, according to Sreekumar in “Mooladhanathinte Kaattu, Vyaaparathinte
Kodipadam” [“The Wind of Capital, the Flag of Trade”] Mathrubhumi Weekly December 2010. 98.
5
M.K. Raghavendra, Director’s Cut (Noida: Collins, 2013).
6
C.S. Venkiteswaran. “Swayamvaram: Classic Prophesies,”Film and Philosophy - Exotic India, www.exoticindiaart.com ›
Books › Indian Cinema.
7
J. Devika who speaks about developmental idealism in Individuals, House Holders, Citizens: Family Planning in Kerala
(New Delhi: ZUBAAN, 2008). 29.
8
http://www.frontline.in/arts-and-culture/cinema/indian-cinema-began-with-ray/article; accessed on 18.10.2013.
9
Meena T, Pillai. ed. Women in Malayalam Cinema: Naturalizing Gender Hierarchies (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan,
2010).
10
Chemeen is variously translated as The Prawn and The Anger of the Sea.
11
http://www.ftiindia.com; accessed on 30/05/2010, for details on the Film Institute of India.
12
His lecture in the Film Appreciation Course, Film and Television Institute of India, 2010 May-June.
13
See C. Gouridasan Nair. “The Master Film Maker Tells the Tale of Women”. The Hindu Sunday, October 28, 2007. P. 4.
14
See the cover picture of Kathapurushan (Man of the Story; 1996).