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From Raj to Swaraj: The Non-fiction Film in India AS a child I remember sitting glued to my chair in a darkened hall, watching a black and white newsreel before the start of a film. Those were the days when it was the norm in all cinema halls to show a documentary film before the start of a movie. The newsreel invariably ended with the entire hall rising for the National Anthem and then settling down to enjoy a fiction film. The turf war between the fiction and non-fiction film has been raging for years and today, the documentary film has well and truly lost out to the big guns of Bollywood.
The idea of using cinema for publicity was first raised in 1918 with war-related recruitment effort of the British Empire. This was the initial phase that eventually led to the making of the newsreel. Always quick to learn, the Indian film-makers also began to experiment with this new genre and the Indian public saw a slew of films on the Indian struggle for independence with the focus being on Mahatma Gandhi. B. D. Garga, with great panache, weaves together two separate skeins of history—the history of India’s struggle for freedom and the history of the rise of non-fiction film. Garga takes us through the holocaust of Partition and also describes the manner in which the film The British Empire in Colour recorded the Partition-related carnage and stunned audiences all over the world with its realistic depictions. But, the genre of the documentary film saw a sudden decline in the post-Independence era. Official restraints contributed to the decline in the 1960s. The 1970s saw the documentary film touch the nadir with the government insisting that new films be telecast on Doordarshan prior to their theatrical release. It was this or MISA. Then the Censor Board stepped in paring the wings of the film-makers and attempting to make documentaries a government-controlled media. Garga has, with complete honestly, laid the blame for decline of the documentary film on a government that attempts to feed the audience "make-believe and half-truths" and discourages the inbuilt ability of this genre to "unmask the ugly realities around us". An honest book that is a call to arms to the film fraternity to take up the cause of freedom of the documentary genre.
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B.
D. Garga’s book From Raj to Swaraj gives an insight into the
growth and decline in the popularity of the documentary film. Garga in
an interesting study traces the antecedents of the non-fictional film.
The first attempt to record life vividly and with great intimacy of
detail started in 1896 with a short film aptly called The Arrival
of a Train at a Station. These Lumiere screenings were followed by
more ambitious undertakings that recorded historic events like The
Great Delhi Durbar of 1903 and 1911. These films gave way to
propaganda films of "the empire needs you" variety.