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   IN  RESPONSE TO THE  CRYING  NEED   FOR  A  POST COLONIAL ANALYSIS

 

 

 

CONCEPT PAPER 

 

A post colonial inquiry in to the “new wave cinema “in Kerala

 

  P.N.SREEKUMAR

 

                                                       Post independent India witnessed unprecedented turbulence in all spheres of life during the late 60s and 70s. There was wide disillusionment among all sections of people about conventional institutions. Politically, the concept of the state itself was in crisis. The Promised Land of abundance and happiness as enshrined in the constitution appeared a distant goal if not an illusion. People felt that the Nehruite project failed in delivering tangible  results and  hence they lost faith in it.  There were protest movements everywhere. The emergence of protest movements such as Naxalite, Dalit and the JP movements gained rapid momentum.  All these uprisings seemed to have gone out of control of the state and the reaction of the state culminated in the declaration of internal emergency. In essence, these movements were rebellions against the existing order. These hectic activities in politics reflected in culture too. As in politics and economics, in culture too sensitivity and creativity are constantly engaged in desperate search for alternatives.  In fact, all forms of art had reflections of these crises, which were manifested in both content and form. These intense searches resulted in the demolition of the existing at least in part and the creation new forms and contents. Film being the most powerful medium underwent deep revolutions. In a way, the rebellious minds questioned the very function of art and the role of an artist in society. Of course, there was little consensus on the answers they found out.  Nevertheless, they attempted to revolutionize the consciousness of the practitioners and viewers though this category was small in numbers.  This small elite of Indian cinema that took films ‘seriously’ produced avant- garde practices in the films, writing and teaching on the art of cinema and some even tried for a new film theory. Their attempt was to elevate the status of cinema in the existing hierarchy of different forms of art.  (There is another category, which we call the mainstream which represents the majority and the powerful that reacted differently and the study of the action and reactions in that domain are equally important if not more.   But it is a subject matter broad enough for another project.) The artists as well as audience in this category or more precisely genre were looking for new experiences. Definitely, there was utter confusion of values, methods and contents as in the case of initial phase of any movement and there was little consensus on anything except the fact that the existing modes of representations inadequate for realisation of their inner self.  Hence innovations and experiments - some successful and most not so successful - prevailed. All these efforts cumulatively embodied in their films and these films, their criticisms and the theories and assumption they proposed contributed to the movement. Some called it new cinema / New wave / art cinema /off stream cinema, parallel cinema etc. In its simplest terms, the movement was a desire to break from the past with an urge to create something new. Here it is important to make a clear the definition of art/ new/ parallel cinema movement of the period in question. Even before late 60s and 70s different streams or genre of cinema existed. As everybody knows, Ray and Ghatak started their career during late 40s and early 50s itself.  In 1948 Ray inquired about “ What is wrong with Indian Films” He wrote  “ In India, it would seem that the fundamental concept of a coherent dramatic pattern existing in time was generally misunderstood ……often by a queer process of reasoning , movement was equated with action and action with melodrama”( Ray , Satyajit “What is wrong with Indian films ?” ‘Our films their films’ Orient Longman (1976 reprint). During 40s and 50s films like in Hindi cinema  Chetan Anand’s Necha nagar . Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen   Guru Dutt’s Pyasa ( 1957) and Kagaz Ke Phool  (1959) were made which were aesthetically different from the rest.   During the same period in regional languages too similar productions were made. For instance In Malayalam Neelakkuyil (1954),Newspaper boy  (1955)Chemmeen (1966), Iruttinte atmavu (1967) and Olavum Theeravum (1970)  were off stream.  But question is whether these films are considered as new wave cinema?  The protagonists of new wave do not believe so.  Hence we also exclude these films from the category at least for the purpose the study Here the terminology of new wave cinema is specifically used to denote the cinema that claims be a break from the earlier ones. It is true that when we observe a pan Indian scenario it is seen that the authors of new cinema were influenced by Guru Dutt, Bimal Roy and of course by Ray, Ghatak, and even Mirnal Sen.. However, they refuse to accept the legacy and continuity. Many wanted to negate the film practices of them especially of Ray. Instead, they try to rationalise their stand using imported theories and philosophy. Though they talked about French nouvelle vague, Italian neo realism or Latin American cinema they created films, which is essentially based on the contents pertaining to this culture and the forms too got influenced by the cultural practices though they profusely borrowed from other cultures. Some critics and historians who disagree perceive this as merely aping of the west which is far from reality. Politically, declaration of internal emergency was the culmination of the attempts of the state to defend itself. Even during emergency, there were attempts for protest in these directions though they were covert and failed miserably to communicate with people. The strict policing in all the spheres of media prevented these attempts from reaching the audience. The political situation created by the declaration of internal emergency might have led the art to become extremely abstract, ambiguous and personal in those days as part of the so called “modernist” project. Just after emergency during 80s, there was an outburst of creative activities as a response to the real and perceived authoritarian excesses of the state.

 

                                                                  Historiographers and historians have attempted to evaluate the contributions of this period. Ashish Rajadhayaksha tries to create history of Indian cinema of that period. He finds three distinct phases since emergency.  The first phase followed by the deep political crisis caused by the Emergency led to numerous inquiries. The second phase constituted the formal entry of post-colonial theory and with this the reinvestigation of the history of Indian Nationalism itself as one that specifically opened up the ‘biography of the nation state’. The third dimension opened up the realm of film studies in India. All these phases contributed substantially to Indian cinema. There were serious attempts to study all these development with a pan Indian perspective.  Hence, the history created by scholars like Rajadhayaksha try to draw a pan Indian project. 

 Brief history of Indian cinema

Virtually all conventional history of India cinema begins with the man considered its pioneer- Dadasaheb Phalke. He launched his film career with Raja Harichandra in 1914. But according to Ashish Rajadhayaksha, India had a nearly century  old history  popular visual art extending in to what has come to be called Company school painting and further developing in to bazaar painting and art for growing publishing industry . This practice constituting among other things the first encounter with western oil painting and naturalism which also extended into still photography which then formed a key bridge in to cinema itself.

(  Ashish Rajadhayaksha) “Indian Cinema “the Oxford Guide to film studies. Edited by John Hill and Pamella Church Gibson. Oxford University Press. 1998)The more concrete historiograhy of Indian cinema however , emerges only from 1920s ,with the founding of major studios –notably the Kohinoor and Ranjit in Bombay , the New Theatres in Calcutta., the Maharashtra Film company and its famous offshoot  , Prabhat , which moved to Poona. These studies and their famed sound version introduced professional distribution system. as well as star manufacture establishing a substantial base for Indian cinema before the Second World War.

Conventional film histories of this period usually focus on three studios mentioned above and its famous film directors including V. Santharam. The world war was crucial . … the big studios were overwhelmed by independent financier –producer entering the film industry with mainly short term benefits in mind.

Three min trends were in Indian cinema were evident after the war. First, there was the founding of something like a national, or nation wide audience for Hindi. Cinema. secondly there was  an extension of the all India aesthetic of fantasies that often called masala films in to languages notably Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi  and new production bases in Hyderabad bangalore, and Coimbatore. Thirdly a major political influence came with the founding of Indian state itself, and the adoption of official measures to discipline the film industry into new cultural and ideological priorities.  The latter initiative led to the government itself entering film production, and establishment of an art cinema movement that produced India’s best filmmaker, Satyajit Ray. This period has been written up as the “ golden age of “ Indian Cinema.

In late 1960s direct state action realized some of the recommendations of Film Enquiry Committee (1951) to provide afford or procure finance or other facilities for the production of films of good standard, by designing new priorities for the FFC ( film Finance Corporation which helped to launch the famed New Indian film movement. Mirnal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome(1969), Mani Kaul’s Uski Roti (1969)  and Kumar Shahni ‘s works…With the works of Shyam Benegal s  aesthetic of ‘state realism’.. .. a major investment in regional roots as against Hindi cinema’s ‘rootless’ pan nationalism.- the nerw cinwma helped establishing local industires notably in Kearala , Assam and Orissa which were all relatively marginal until the 1970s.

 However this was also the time when the mainstream Hindi cinema transformed itself again . in the light of political development culminated in the national emergency  .. a transformation usually equated with the star who was to dominate Hindi cinema Amitabh …

Nationalist Film theory: a brief history

 

         In 1948, a year after independence, Satyajit Ray wrote his influential essay ‘What is Wrong with Indian Films?’ to launch a now well-entrenched attack on the             Indian cinema for its inability to comprehend what is basic to film, namely temporality and movement. ‘In India, it would seem that the fundamental concept of coherent dramatic pattern existing in time was generally misunderstood… often by a queer process of reasoning, movement was equated with action and action with melodrama’.

         Ray’s own cinema, which has conventionally been seen as the point at which Indian cinema’s initiatives towards realism, and the mastering of story telling idiom, were finally realized, has also provided the post-independence focus for debates about divisions between realism versus modernism, high art versus low, and, after the avant-garde practise of some New Indian Cinema filmmakers, modernism versus avant-garde (usually mapped onto the two very different legacies of Ray himself as against the equal influential, but less well-known, contemporary Ritwik Ghatak; for Ghatak , see Rajadhykaha 1982,1987; Ghatak 1987). One of the key figures embodying the Ray aesthetic is the writer Chindananda Das Gupta, his long-time colleague, with whom Ray launched the seminal Calcutta Film Society in 1947. Das Gupta’s important collection of essays, published mainly in film society periodicals like the Indian Film Review and Indian Film Culture—a crucial forum for educating people into modernist film making and film seeing practices—includes the classic “The Cultural Basis of Indian Cinema” (1968). In that article Das Gupta argued for a the “all-Indian film”, a genre of the nationalist mass entertainer that played the political function culturally integrating the country and that sense performed by default a role that Ray also, with greater self-consciousness, was attempting in his practice. Another key writer from this period addressing a range of issues from the viewpoint of this modernist divide, was Kobita Sarkar (1975, 1982).

            As the question of art cinema merged into that of the specific reformist role of the Indian state in the area of film, there emerged a substantial body of both historical writing (see notable Barbouw and Krishnaswamy (1963), best known book on Indian cinema until recently) and writings on film policy, the nature of state funding, questions of censor ship, and the role of the reviewer in popular journals. Key roles were played by mass circulation periodicals like Filmfare ( a fortnightly owned by the Times of  India) and Screen (a film weekly owned by the Indian Express Group); and by B.K. Karanja, a film journalist who at different times in his career edited both journals, and was responsible, as chairman of the FFC in the late 1960s for many of the aesthetic decisions and choices made by that organization regarding the New Indian Cinema.

         This body of nationalist film writing also addressed the ‘pre-Ray’ era through an often evolutionist notion of history which saw filmmakers like Barua, Bimal Roy, and those associated with the left-wing Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association as the precursors of what reached  fruition with Independence. Much of this earlier ‘author’ cinema, produced by the major feature of early critical writing in films of this time (see Jha 1990). Alongside this critical writing are two other influences: the film reviewers and journalists who took upon themselves the responsibility of ‘educating’ viewers into realism (eg. Kalki, in Tamil, and the critic with the pseudonym Cynic in Malayalam), and the government reports addressing state intervention (the Film Enquiry Committee Report, 1951) censorship (the Khosla Report on Film Censorship, 1969), and the role of the FFC (Committee on Public Undertakings Report on the Film Finance Corporation, 1976).

     Much recent theory on this period has addressed the role of melodrama, rather than realism in its orthodox sense, as having played a pivotal role in the cinematic ‘writing of the biography of the nation-state’ (see Chakravarty 1993). Both Ravi Vasudevan (1993) and Madhava Prasad (1994) examine melodrama as a system of cohering narratives post-independence urbanization in particular.

 

Recent film theory: a brief history

                                                                                                                                                                                            A politically well-researched area in India is the 1970s, when the earlier nationalist definition of the state underwent a series of crises: the emergence of the extreme left Naxalite movement, working-class agitation culminating in the Nav Nirman movements in Bihar and Gujarat and the declaration of an internal Emergency by Indira Gandhi in 1975 (see Frankel 1978).

          The later New Indian Cinema in this period also yielded a specifically avant –garde practice in the films, teachings and writings of Kumar Shahani. A student of Ritwik Ghatak, Shahani’s cinema and his body of writing constitutes, alongside the political developments of that decade, the first major shift in the ‘national modernist’ writing of the Indian film history (Shahani 1986). Shahani’s work parallels a range of practices in Indian visual art, music and theatre that systematically sought both formal and ideological alternatives to realism, often reworking pre- colonial practices with the awareness of a historical internationalist avant- garde. The key theories of this time are mainly encapsulated in an influential journal, the Journal of Arts and Ideas, founded in the late 1980s. The journal demonstrates at least three phases through which Indian cultural and film theory have gone since the Emergency. The immediate and specifically political crisis following the Emergency led to numerous inquiries into an aesthetic that might resurrect the still-valuable nationalist imperative, but on lines other than those which had prevailed in ‘official’ histories and which were incarnated in official cultural institutions. Geeta Kapur’s writings covering this period (1990,1991,1993) are key markers of this shift towards investigating the history of specifically Indian, and generally non-Western, modernism. Other important writings from this time, criticizing state formations, include M.S.S. Pandian’s landmark book (1992) on the movie megastar and Chief Minister M.G. Ramachdran and his despotic rule even as he became an almost unreachable icon in Tamil Nadu.

      The second phase constituted the formal entry of post-colonial theory, anc with this the reinvestigation of the history of Indian nationalism itself as one that specifically opened up the ‘biography of nation state’. Arts and Ideas’ special issue Careers of Modernity, edited by Tejaswini Niranjana, goes alongside Niranjana, P.Sudhir and Vivek Dhareshwar’s seminal anthology Interrogating Modernity (1993), to form the definitive material on this area. This by-now-substantial body of work has been mainly influenced by the new terrain of analysing nationalist historiography opened up by the Subaltern Studies historians, and notably Partha Chatterjee (1986,1994). Chatterjee’s work is premissed on the Gramscain concept of the passive revolution, in which the state first exits and then constructs the pre conditions of its existence, which include the terms of normative and designative interpellation of its ‘citizen subjects’.

     The third, and perhaps most recent, dimension opened up specifically in the realm of film studies in India follows the founding of the first postgraduate department of film studies at Jadavapur University, Calcutta. Apart from Prasad’s own theses (1994) and Vasudevan’s writings, recent developments in film studies include the now-famous ‘Roja debate’, around Mani Rathnam’s film, following Niranjana’s (1994) essay in the Economic Political Weekly. In late 1995 conferences in film studies in Simla (at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies), Poona (at the National Film Archive of India), and on cultural studies(organized by the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences) indicate a growing academic acceptance of film studies in orthodox literature, history, and social science departments.  

 

 

 

 

PART II

 Theoretical premises and problems

 

                                When pan Indian history is attempted, the cultural specifics of different regions may not find enough space in that. Of course, the common trends could be bundled together as generalisations. This is not to deny the importance of such generalisations. However, to understand the regional cultures deeply we have to go for diversities and divergences exist in our culture as well.  Little traditions will have to co –exist with great tradition in a cultural diversity like India. In fact, the basic problem India is facing is that regional centres are clamoring for more spaces at the centre.

 

Further, Kerala is not a cross-section of India It is felt that Kerala is at least a few decades ahead of others So these pan Indian studies tend to ignore the microlevel uniqueness of the social structure and cultural discourses. In a hurry to find neat categories of study, cultural specifics were overlooked. It is beyond doubt that we are quite different from other parts of India in cultural specifics.  We have more differences than commonalties with rest of India.  Hence we have to study new wave movement at the socio- cultural background of Kerala. Further, this researcher feels in a deep analysis the new wave and other protest movements were an attempt to establish our cultural identity at the centre.  

 Any author in Malayalam takes inspiration from our culture.  It is felt that our cultural discourses that are found in the contemporary works have three dimensions, one is Kerala’s folk culture, and the other is Sanskrit culture and thirdly the modern culture that we have imbibed through the western education. Nobody can rule out any one of these cultures for the sake of embracing the other. They have gone deep in our psyche in different mix as our archetype. When a creative author scripts his work, these cultures in different proportions inspire him.  But we have to read closely to appreciate it.

 

Some academicians attempted to study this period of history too. However, these attempts are fragmented and they need updating in the wake of new theoretical paradigms. Any work in this direction would contribute to the discipline of film studies. This can be considered as a humble attempt to make a space for film studies in the academic field.

 

 We are trying to construct a social history of cinema during a small but relevant period. As in other parts of the country all institutions including democracy was beginning to lose its credibility. People were looking at grand theories with suspicion.  As everybody knows Kerala has an international distinction as the first state to be ruled by a democratically elected communist government which shows the major problem of Keralite was communist world unlike the people of other states.  Using the great thinker Satres’ concept the “major philosophy” of Kerala at that time was communism or scientific socialism.  Hence, the degeneration of the communist movements affected Kerala’s psyche more deeply than any other event. In the Pan- Indian political scenario, Naxalite, Dalit and JP movements emerged. But naxalite movement with extreme communist dreams gained momentum in Kerala while JP movement swept across other parts of the nation. Finally all the dissatisfaction and anxieties culminated in spontaneous movements in all walks of life-in politics, literature, and in cinema. Breaking rules was at the heart of these movements.

 

 We believe that art is socially constructed and it serves social functions and reflects crises, anxieties and hopes of the people. The basic premises is that art or culture enjoys “relative autonomy’ in their respective spheres, which means we are not following a deterministic view regarding the relationship between economic base and superstructure. Althusser’s concept  “structure in dominance” may be useful in explaining the phenomenon that one of the factors either in the base or superstructure influences all other factors. This relationship is very complex and philosophical postulates of social realism are no longer acceptable, though it is true that some specific factor can be a function of others.

 

 Every work of art is torn between pure illusion and pure commodification. Mimesis and rationality may be irreconcilable as absolute concepts; but when they are yoked together in a dialectical process, they are complementary in projecting an image of reconciliation.  This image is the promise of something that is not real or in Lacanian terms, a symptom.  Art rises above the artist and the consumer of art because the image content of art is collective or intersubjective.  According to Adorno, the categories of aesthetic experiences are essentially historical.  Because works of art are structured like monads they store up historical content through their formal response to the historical context and not through their direct reference to it. Analysing means, “becoming conscious of the immanent history stored up in them. Art cannot be said to reflect a context rather as a segment of objective time within history, it reflects itself as a historical form. Because art has the structure of a monad it is autonomous and that autonomy is its historical form. Still art does not transcend history but is the means by which history engages in self-reflection with out transcending itself.   The work of art is the objective materialization of the historical process, the ideological form that it is able to rupture by negating itself.

 

In addition, we look at the problem as part change in culture. The factors of cultural change can be either “orthrogenetic” (factors with in the cultures) or heterogenetic outside influences). According to Singer all cultures begin with orthrogenetic /primary powers of growth and they get transformed through outside contacts. The basic forces existed in our culture and heterogenetic factors like NFDC, Film Institute of India, Pune film society movement etc accelerated the pace of the change.

 

 As mentioned earlier during late 60s and early 70s, there was hectic and urgent search for new forms and contents in Kerala. In literature “modernism” emerged in late 60’s itself. But in cinema it started only in early 70’s. ‘Swayamvaram’ ( Adoor Gapalakrisnan ,1972) inaugurated ‘new wave’. It was followed by ‘Nirmalyam’ (M. T.Vasudevan Nair, 1973) and ‘Uttarayanam’ (G. Aravindan, 1974). 

 

 The hypothesis is that the “High Modernism” in Malayalam literature and new wave in cinema was created by the specific social structure of this state. In fact Modernism as a movement started and spread in the west during 1920s. However, the modernist movement started in Kerala only in late 60s.  The question is why such a long delay? The tentative answer is that the specific conditions created by the socio-cultural structure of the state. The works of Madhavikutty, M.T Vasudevan Nair, O. V. Vijayan, Mukkundan, Kakkanadan, Pattathuvila Karunakaran, Ayyappa Panicker, Kakkad, Madhavan Ayappattu, K.Sachidhanandan, K. G SankaraPillai. Attoor Ravi Varma and many others contributed to the literary movement. They too tried to break the laws existing theory of aesthetics.  They refused to accept aesthetics of realism, romanticism, social realism etc. which were dominant during the period. The polemics that appeared in the cultural arena such as Sukumar Azhikode vs O. V. Vijayan and Sakharia vs Kesavadev   can be seen as the struggle to reject the existing order of things. Mukkundan’s “ Enthannu adhumikatha” can be viewed as an attempt to create a theory for the “modernist movement”

 

 We can find similar situation that occurred in the west. Neo realist Movements (Italy) and the new wave movement (France) were inaugurated after Second World War. These movements had their counterparts in western literature. The works of Thomas Mann, Proust, and Satre can be cited as examples. What ever is the medium, all works, which were made during that period, reflected similar concerns.  The assumption is that all works of art were created by the tensions in the social structure .The Italian neo classical films namely “Open city” (Roberto Rossellini, 1945) “The Bicycle Thieves “ (Vittorio Desica, 1948), “Miracle In Milan”(Desica, 1951) “Lastranda” (Fellini, 1954), “81/2 “(Fellini, 1963) Theorama (Pasolini, 1968) were inspirations to our film makers during 70s. Also “The River” (Renoir, 1951),“Shoot the Piano Player”(Trauffaut, 1960) “Weekend” (Gordad, 1968) from the French side. Another important influence was the Latin American authors like Glauber Rocaha who started his career in 1962. The works of non-conformist filmmakers like Miklos Janso and Istvan Szabo( “The age of day dreams”) from the East European world were of great interest to our filmmakers. Of course, the classic films of Eisntenstein too served as models. The point I would like to emphsise here is that we can not trace a specific film genre of the west as a source of imitation for our authors. Whatever appealed to our authors they took them as a source of inspiration.    The theory that our authors aped the west is not tenable. Styles, techniques, methods even plots may have been imitated. However, even when they borrowed from different cultures the creative product that they created was different from the original.

 

 This is true of even Dada Saheb Phalke the founder of Indian Cinema. He writes on seeing the film ‘The life of Christ’ in 1898, “ that day, that Saturday in Christmas marked the beginning of a revolutionary change in my life… while the life of Christ was rolling before my eyes, I was mentally visualising the gods of Sri Krishna, Sri Rama Chandra, their Gokul and Ayodhya … Could we the sons of India ever be able to see India images on the screen.”(Kumar Shahani, ‘Modes of representation’ Cinema in India, April- June 1988, Vol.II. No. 2). Of course Phalke’s aspirations came true. Nobody would say that his films had foreign content. This is quoted to prove the earlier point that even when imitated the creative product will be different

 

After Independence Keraliltes due to their education and higher political consciousness could negotiate with centers of authority to get larger share in resources and power. A substantial number of lower caste/ class got upgraded to the middle class. Kerala’s socialist pattern concentrated on the distribution of income. This middle class was trying for legitimisation. In fact, art cinema and middle cinema became a instrument for this legitimisation. A small group of intellectual elites from the middle class initiated a new project, which was to be different from the earlier one. They wanted to have a ‘break’ from the past. These vanguards of the middle class imbibed western values and ideas through their education. They tried to recreate history by reacting to the socio- cultural reality. Though these authors captured reality from our cultural milieu, more precisely from the popular culture itself, they saw a clear artistic break between their films and other films. These filmmakers saw themselves as part of a proper medium of individual and cultural self-expression. They postulated that mainstream films have little ascetic value and social relevance. The critics who promoted art film makers and propagated new aesthetic values viewed commercial films as pathological. 

 

The art film was part of the ‘modernity movement’, which was specific to Kerala. Though individual authors differed in specifics due to their unique styles, we can find some common characteristics in this movement. Firstly, they tried to break traditional ways of representation. Almost all of their works were social critiques. They were rigid in their approach to film making. They believed that art is a means for self-expression, rather than a vehicle for communication. According to them audience need special training for appreciating good works of art. To fulfill this, they conducted appreciation courses which not known till then. State funded institutes and a new set of film academics and critics and film societies contributed in this direction. They never cared for desire and pleasure of the ordinary viewers. Their texts were so rigid that an ordinary viewer found it difficult to intervene. Therefore, the reader or viewer never gets empowered while appreciating them. This created repulsion. But the authors did not care, since state or producers who didn’t care for the box office collections fund their films. To put it briefly, we have to concede that the approach of these authors was totalitarian. Their works could not fulfil the social functions of the present. That is why when the states or the benevolent producers withdrew the support they fell flat on the face. Beyond any doubt it is proved that there was little support or sympathy from the audience.