Cinema and freedom struggle

By Gautam Kaul

Amongst the first major acts which Parliament was asked to approve after India attained freedom was the amended Cinematograph Act of 1918. Having ignored Indian cinema all the past five decades and right through the period of freedom struggle, the Nehru Government of right-minded Congressmen, with R. R. Diwakar as the Minister in charge of Information, moved a new Bill to bring major amendments to the existing Act controlling the public screening of films made, or imported in India. The formulation of rules and regulations followed the passing of latest legislation on cinema.

In effect, the new Act and its attending regulations created a new Board of Films Censors, a new set of guidelines on categorising films for public screening and new controls on the release of film raw stock and equipment for film-making.

More, the new Act also created the Films Division and sought that films made by the division were compulsorily screened and paid for by private film exhibitors in the country.

Finally the new legislation created conditions for transfer of official control on print, audio and audiovisual media from the Ministry of Home Affairs to the new Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

The Nehru Government was now adopting the Soviet model of management of information for its grand plan to create a Socialistic society in the country. Nehru and his colleagues were not looking back beyond 1947, how Indian cinema had grown, although Nehru at least knew what the Indian cinema was like.

There were, however some, from within the film industry who found time to be reflective on the contribution of Indian cinema and who could be identified as having shared the pain in the struggle for freedom for the country. The people’s elected government now installed, could adopt this group of traders in cinema for official patronage and business support. A demand was made from within the Indian cinema to get one representative of this sector of business to sit in Parliament.

The Indian National Congress and Nehru finally conceded the demand and Prithviraj Kapoor was nominated as the first member in the Rajya Sabha, the Upper House, to represent the Indian film industry.

There was, however, a different school of thought also existing within the Indian film industry which assessed that the film industry had betrayed the nation.

The Indian National Congress was one centrally organised all-India body. Cinema was not. It was an individual passion and pursuit in about a dozen different places across the subcontinent. And in each of these film-making centres, widely separated as these were, the economics of film-making and the ecology of local cinema had distinct peculiarities of their own. A national purpose, especially 1920s onward, was indeed pervasive but investment in this commercial art was bound to be subject to the profit motive.

The first association of film workers was the Indian Motion Picture Producers Association (IMPPA). Set up in May 1937, its main function basically was to arbitrate in trade disputes amongst various trade interests in their respective regions. Film producers were certainly least interested in the politics of the time.

When this happened, they looked for the attention and support of political leaders to obtain relief to carry on their business.

In Calcutta, the New Theatres bosses always tried to maintain cordial ties with the ruling British elite, often inviting them, including the Viceroy, to visit the studios, or join at some important get-togethers. However, it was the creative team — the writers, lyricists and directors — that was alive and responsive to what was happening around them. Who among them could be labelled as social activists committed to the cause of freedom and were eventually sucked into the film medium?

In our view, Hemen Gupta, K. Subrahmanyam and G. Ramabraman stand out as committed individuals. Also of significance were K.A. Abbas, Bhalji Pendharkar, B.N. Reddy and V. Shantaram. They rather more successfully portrayed the social reconstruction programme of the Congress party, though by no reckoning the full spectrum of the party’s political struggle. Nationalist fiction was created but it was proscribed as soon as it saw the light of day. Film-makers understandably were reluctant to base their commercial ventures on proscribed works. The best example are the works of Malayalam litterateur, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer (which was not filmed until recently).

It is plausible to assume that in these years of struggle, independent film-making was hard to come by. We could, for the sake of argument, lay one ghost to rest, which is: the mainstream movement for freedom itself did not seek to involve the film industry in their political charter. Nowhere, and on no occasion did the leaders of the freedom struggle plan to harness the vast resources of this privately-run business of propaganda, opinion-making and entertainment. If anything, they looked down upon the entire film community as untouchables to be kept at a safe distance.

The other media then available were broadcasting, phonograph and theatre. The phonographic industry was largely owned by foreign interests. Fanchise broadcasting had failed to make any headway, so that in 1930s the government conveniently stepped in and monopolised the air waves. Theatre did have the stirring of the freedom movement but it was closest to being curbed, because scripts were subject to pre-censorship and public performances needed approval of local police authorities. Without doubt, cinema did shirk from filming revolutionary theatre.

For the sake of record, there were only three occasions when individuals from the INC attempted to use or consider the option of trying out this medium. The first instance is of Bal Gangadhar Tilak who wanted to exploit the medium as a business proposition. He was a mediaman and had the foresight to realise the impact of cinema on the general masses. His death in 1921 possibly robbed Indian cinema of a potential saviour of the type we are visualising.

The second occasion was the political rise of S. Satyamurthy, as the dramatist-turned-politician, who organised the first congress of the Indian film industry in 1939, at Bombay, and was also elected president of the Madras Provincial Congress Committee. His tenure was the high point in the association of the Indian film industry with the working of the INC. But, INC’s interest did not go beyond contractual movie coverage of the annual conventions of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) and its circulation as newsreel material. Even here, when film-makers came to grief, the INC’s intervention to rescue the films and the film-maker is not traceable in existing records.

The third opportunity that came is a weak example. It was the momentary interest shown by Vallabhbhai Patel. In him, we see small flickers of interest in cinema for the sake of the INC’s own political functions. He does not disapprove the company of film artistes, he attends film premieres; he has a view on cinema which he expresses publicly and must have been grateful to the film-makers of Bombay to rescue his government on the eve of the first Independence Day. J.B.H. Wadia had on behalf of IMPPA filmed the moment of freedom at midnight of August 14-15, 1947, and the jubilation after the sunrise to compensate for the absence of any government agency existing to do the same.

Cinema, being a performing art, came to be influenced by the period of its creation. A Bhakt Vidur could not have been created in the manner it was, had not Mahatma Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement gathered momentum and found general public support. Year after year we learn of new creative film writers and directors entering the arena providing a commentary of their times; either they attempted to full theme based on subjects which could be associated with the sentiments of the freedom struggle, or made passing references.

If censors were hoodwinked to let pass depravity in films, and there certainly was a good deal of it to arouse public outcries, the more purposeful film-makers were not averse to use the same tricks for the national cause.

Stepping out of its stage of infancy around 1918, the Indian cinema joined this movement of social reconstruction. Utterances of Swami Vivekanand, Ram Tirath Shastri, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Swami Sharaddhanand Saraswati, Motilal Nehru, Ishwarchandra Vidya Sagar, Jawaharlal Neuru, Annie Besant, Sister Nivedita, Mahatma Gandhi, to name just a few of the moulders of public opinion, became the seed of new stories for films. Characters representing the old and the new orders made points and counterpoints on the screen, and large cinema audiences heard these debates. The screen debate percolated to the village level, sometimes supplemented by popular songs.

Indian cinema may have helped tremendously in the early recognition of the role of women in modern Indian society, espoused specially by Mahatma Gandhi. Not only women came out of homes to see films in large numbers, they were also exposed to such radical messages on women’s emancipation as one heard in Duniya Na Mane, Balayogini, Sumangali, Indira MA or Apna Ghar. These young ladies quietly endorsed the work of their menfolk who were often found in the streets in demonstrations and other political activities. Women also took to education in a big way. Certainly their new participation, contrasting the earlier total absence from schools, was a new phenomenon. As this generation grew, it also began to work actively in the freedom struggle as field activists, courting arrests and undergoing jail terms which not many European women did.

Films ridiculed social taboos, outworn customs, negative conventions and also sartorial influences of western civilisation, thus reinforcing national pride. A whole range of films which fell in the generic term of "social themes" eulogised things Indian, Swadeshi, and secular. Practically in each film, there would be a khadi clad youth a Muslim character as a young friend, or elder kindred soul. The negative forces would be represented by a character imitating western ways alone, or in a group, or even as a villainous character, a satan personified.

The reformative zeal in Tamil, Telugu films must be lauded by a special mention. Inspired from the success of dramas performed in the countryside, film-makers adopted their messages to a wider audience. In Bengal, the wholesale adaptation of stories by Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chander Chatterjee and others filled the void of positive themes when film-makers wanted to contribute to the sentiments of their times. In this respect the contribution of films from the workhouse of New Theatres is outstanding. Marathi cinema on the other hand adopted the language of satire and social comment to decry westernisation.

Indian cinema has truly been the recorder of is times. It is unfortunate that for the earliest examples of film-making, we have only the comments of film critics and the film publicity put in the newspapers to depend upon, to make up for the absence of films themselves. Another not a very precise means, is the oral accounts of aging contemporaries with fading memories and self-willed nostalgia. But from the ‘talkie’ era we have fairly comprehensive collection of films available in the country to analyse public thinking on social issues.

These were to be gauged both from the stray utterances of the characters and from the created environment in which the drama was unfolded. A more forthright approach would have been noticed by the censors and brought retribution on the film-makers.

It is pertinent to offer one last comment regarding an important result yielded by the author’s research in the subject. This is the discovery of the attitude of the film-makers and the film industry of the country towards the overall concept of the national freedom struggle. The author’s research has revealed that appearing before various official committees, hearings as well as in various memoranda submitted to the government from time to time, the leaders of the film industry have taken a stand that Hindi films had contributed immensely in weaving the country into one secular society. A large section of the film industry had also claimed rightly that more than the government efforts, it was the film industry which had spread the Hindi culture.

Sections of Indian society not friendly to the Hindi language have also accepted Hindi films without protest perhaps only to see the entertainment part of the Bombay’s ‘glossies’. But in the bargain have acquired a working knowledge of the Hindi language in the course of sitting for hours in cinema halls to view Hindi films. This is notwithstanding the excellent work done over the past years by the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha to introduce the language in regional populations.

Quite often they were attracted by the star personalities of Ashok Kumar, Sunil Dutt,Rajesh Khanna,Amitabh Bachchan, Meena Kumari, Madhubala, Vyjayanthimala,Hema Malini, Sridevi, Madhuri Dixit and now Karisma Kapoor.

Contrary to this the saddest part of the revelation is that this author could not come across a single official document from the film industry sources which laid claim that the film industry had also contributed to the national freedom struggle. Strange it may seem when we recall there were people still making films on patriotic themes, getting into trouble with the authorities, paying the price in pain and bankruptcy. It was not the case of the odd individual effort, each of the first five decades of Indian cinema tell the stories of such sacrifices. But the film fraternity has not taken the responsibility to accept and honour these soldiers of the freedom struggle from their own ranks.

We are unable to seek parallels with other national film industries but we are aware that there is greater sympathy amongst the film professionals for those who had worked as war veterans.A society like India, which has not been disturbed by any catastrophic war, is not likely to respect its dead in wars, and least of all the soldiers of the freedom struggle from the film industry itself.

David Robinson, in his A Short History of World Cinema (1974) characterises the worldwide sway of American cinema with the birth of Hollywood as "pillage". Even today, there is not one country in the world where the domestic box office is not dominated by the American film to the point of strangulation of the local movie industry. In 1982, the European cinema Union made it a cause celebre to rid the West European movie-TV horizon of the predominance of US movies. They failed. A couple of years later 27 top movie celebrities of British cinema signed a memorandum of their government to save the national film.

Such a situation never once arose in the entire history of Indian cinema. In fact imported films always had to struggle for survival in India. This is a tribute to the spirit of Swadeshi that inspired the pioneers to create not only the art form of movies but also an infrastructure that made it possible for India as early as the close of 1920s, while the country was still a British colony, to outnumber the movie output in Britain itself and claim third position in the world in respect of annual movie production. This fact is never unrelated to the nationalist urges of the pioneers.

Our verdict can ill-afford to ignore the many lapses and shortcomings in dealing with the freedom theme in cinema. Most glaring in this respect is the lack of focus on the outstanding role of women in India’s freedom struggle which indeed is so significant that few freedom struggles in world history can rival. S.D. Narang did make a film about the Chittagong Armoury Raid by a woman revolutionary.

We are fortunate to have still with us Laxmi Sehgal, Momata Desai (mentioned earlier in connection with the INA film) besides others, especially the untold suffering of Veer Savarkar’s wife who was reduced to starvation so that she had to look for throwaway food in crematoria. Our film-makers did not focus on them. The lone example is of the unknown woman whose life took a dark turn because of her involvement with a freedom fighter, as narrated by Jarasandha and filmed by Bimal Roy in Bandini 1963.

The ambience of the freedom struggle was always in the air in the home and in the street. It was, as if, the colour of life itself.

Except Bimal Roy’s Bandini, no other film has captured that feeling, that ambience, that all-pervasive air that enveloped everyone in the family, young, or old. Today, that serene grimness of living for a cause has become a thing of the past and beyond all recollections.

If at all, it resides in the bosoms of those who breathed in that epoch. Cinema never cared to recall, or reconstruct that inspiring environment. One is reminded of poet Ghalib:

Yaad-e-maazi azaab hai, Ya Rab,

Chheen le mujh-se haafiza mera.

(How painful are the memories of the past: O God, could thou erase my memory altogether.)

Excerpted from Cinema and the Indian Freedom Struggle by Gautam Kaul. Published by Sterling Publishers Pvt Ltd.