Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood

The New Independent Cinema Revolution

Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351254243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

This is the first edited volume on new independent Indian cinema. It aims to be a comprehensive compendium of diverse theoretical, philosophical, epistemological and practice-based perspectives, featuring contributions from multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners across the world. This edited collection features analyses of cutting-edge new independent films and is conceived to serve as a beacon to guide future explorations into the burgeoning field of new Indian Cinema studies.

1 Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan

The Politics and Legacies of the New Wave Movement in Contemporary Indian Cinema

Anuja Jain

It is a foggy, winter morning. A man wakes up to the call of alms for the blind horses in a village, and asks for a cup of tea. His wife implores the daughter to get up and make the tea. She does, lighting the earthen stove in the outer courtyard, waking up her brother and sending him out with the goats while the water comes to a boil. The father sits sipping tea when a neighbour passing by, calls out for him to join the village council to demand justice for the demolition of a house on the outskirts of the village. A few shots later, against a haunting soundtrack, we see the camera slowly tracking through a fog-covered lane with the father eventually entering the frame (see Figure 1.1). Another neighbour passing by taps him on the shoulder and implores him to walk faster. He comes to an abrupt halt. The camera continues to track forward rendering him out of focus, and cuts 180° to a direct frontal shot. As the camera re-orients on him, he still doesn’t move, and the camera swiftly switches to a flattened telephoto lens with him in an extreme close up. The camera begins pulling back, continuing its onwards tracking, rendering the image estranged, oneiric. The man continues to stand still, experiencing time as it too stands still (see Figure 1.2). Doing so, the film foregrounds the juxtaposing experiences of duration, time and attention as it experiments with encounters between objects, materials, tonalities and temporalities.

Figure 1.1 Father walking to join the village council.

This opening sequence is the prologue to Gurvinder Singh’s debut film Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan/Alms for a Blind Horse (Henceforth, AGDD). Made in 2011, the film is based on a novel of the same name by Jnanpith award winning Punjabi writer Gurdial Singh. Shot in just 45 days in a village near Bhatinda, Punjab, and funded by the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), the film became the first Punjabi language film to premiere and compete at the 68th Venice International Film Festival and went on to win critical acclaim both nationally and internationally. It won awards for the best director, cinematography, and best feature film in the Punjabi language at the 59th National Awards in addition to special mention at the Venice and Abu Dhabi film festivals among others.

An NFDC production, the title at the beginning of the film reads: For Mani, in Remembrance. Mani Kaul, one of the key figures of the New Wave cinema in the 1970s, was significantly the creative producer of the film. In July 2011, he passed away after a long battle with cancer.¹ In its form and narrative, AGDD is a tribute to Kaul who was Singh’s long-standing mentor, and vividly evokes Kaul’s landmark first film Uski Roti/A Day’s Bread (1970). Based on a short story by Indian novelist and playwright Mohan Rakesh (1925–1972), narrated in third person point of view, Uski Roti describes a day in the life of Balo, a housewife who lives in a village in Punjab and waits at a bus stop for her husband to collect his meal, his daily bread. Sparse in its narrative and dialogues, as Uski Roti dramatises Balo’s interiority that Rakesh’s modernist story attempted in literary form, the film is indicative of Kaul’s larger preoccupation with exploring temporality and space, both inner and outer, to playing with the cinematic image and form to convey a deep stillness of being (Bhaskar, 2013: 22). Distinct in its use of stillness of camera and scenes, shot stunningly by cinematographer K.K. Mahajan who went on to work with a lot of other New Wave filmmakers, the film is marked by a strong predominance of close-ups, long silent sequences and measured, slow motion gestures which create an extremely slow rhythm.

Figure 1.2 Time stands still, experience of duration.

Saturated with almost chromatic images, and a powerfully evocative play of silence and sound, reminiscent of Uski Roti, AGDD too narrates a day in the lives of a family in a village in Punjab. It is a haunting portrayal of their existence as they battle poverty, feudalism and industrial development. The film tells the story of a Dalit household with an elderly father, mother, two brothers and a sister. It begins with the demolition of a house by the local landlords who have sold the land for setting up a factory. Gradually we learn that the mother works on the farm of a landlord, and Melu, the elder son, is a cycle rickshaw driver in the city. He participates in a strike, and gets injured. He tries to spend the night at a friend’s house, but is denied room. Fatigued, he returns to the village just when his father has left for the city to meet him. Melu runs into his sister, Dayalo who has been wandering, restlessly through the village. And the film ends with both of them walking home in silence. In an interview, talking about the film, director Gurvinder Singh says:

At the surface, Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan speaks about the margins where the socially repressed and exploited have been conveniently cast away. It’s about a day in the lives of a family who are witnesses to the play of power equation unfolding around them. It’s about silent witnesses devoid of power to change or influence the course of destiny. It’s about invisible violence and desires, simmering discontent and angst that is reflected on people’s faces.

(Dutta, 2011)

As the film portrays the listlessness, the sheer helplessness of Dalit life both in rural and urban contexts, and meticulously charts the miniscule shifts of emotion in human behaviour, the film is as much invested in exploring the way cinema can affect us and sensitise us to the precarious human condition as it is oriented towards an experimentation with cinematic modalities for exploring new relations between meaning and form. Filmed in 35 mm, and shot on location with a cast of non-professional actors, the film is informed by a slow, careful formalism. When the film won the national award, the press release read:

For its haunting portrayal of the lives of people in a village as they battle with the reality of large scale industrial development. Gurvinder Singh deploys an inventive storytelling form where sound, space and body operate distinctly to frame the experience of a fragile existence. Each face portrayed in the film carries the signs of persistent trauma. This is an aesthetic tour de force that confidently and successfully reinvents the contours of Indian experimental cinema.

(Cited in Bhaskar, 2013: 31)

This citation not only underlines the aesthetic concerns and innovative form of the film, but also invokes the significance of the experimental traditions within the Indian New Wave movement, pointing to an inheritance to be cherished and celebrated. Launched in the early 1970s by the state funding made available through the setting up of the Film Finance Corporation (FFC), a cluster of low-budget, non- commercial, non-studio produced films succeeded in creating a niche for themselves.² The diverse and uneven range of cinematic forms and practices that this state-funded experiment made viable has variably been termed as ‘New cinema’, ‘Art cinema’ or ‘Parallel cinema’. The term ‘New Wave’ remains contested, and in this essay, I use the term as it captures effectively the surge of cinematic innovation and experimentation in the 1970s and 80s, denoting a marked shift in the production, aesthetics and concerns of cinema.

Marked by unconventional themes and styles, a resolute rejection of values and mode of mainstream commercial cinema, ranging from auteurist experimentation to cinematic realism, the films generated a kind of seriousness and enthusiasm which Indian cinema had never before received. In her writing on the New Wave, Bhaskar aptly notes,

despite the tremendous diversity in political ideologies and aesthetic choices, the “new Indian cinema” that these films inaugurated was connected to a shared concern with aesthetics, to a seriousness of intent, and to a representation of social issues with a drive towards an understanding of reality in all its complexities, contradictions and ambiguities.

(2013: 19)

While the lack of distribution and exhibition, inability to reach its audiences, and a consequent financial non-viability, led to the demise of the movement by the mid-1990s, it has nonetheless left an important legacy of cinematic innovation that can be seen influencing the contemporary forms of Indian cinema today.

Since the mid-2000s, in conjunction with the shift from a Nehruvian developmentalist paradigm to a neoliberal context, the Bombay film industry has witnessed a dramatic corporatisation and regulation of production and finance practices. The re-organisation of industrial practices has dramatically altered modes of movie distribution and exhibition. It has engendered structural transformations of the film industry from a highly unregulated, unorganised sector located within the domain of India’s informal economy to its refashioning as a global entertainment industry. It has also made viable experimentation and new transformations in film form and style. However, within the emergence of these new formations and practices, initiated by the changes in the industry and impact of global cinema on contemporary filmmakers, I would argue that the impulses and the influence of the New Wave moment have also persisted. From Nishant Kamat’s Marathi language film, Dombivali Fast (2005) and Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan (2015) that focus on the representation of social reality to cinematic experimentation with the ever-changing form of realism in Amit Dutta’s Nainsukh (2010) and Ashim Ahluwalia’s Events in a Cloud Chamber (2016) the legacy of the New Wave movement and its variety of concerns are discernible. In Ankhon Dekhi (2013), as actor-director Rajat Kapoor undertakes the philosophical exploration of life, and notions of seeing and believing, he echoes Gurvinder Singh in dedicating the film ‘to his idols and teachers, filmmakers Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani’. Doing so, he too explicitly foregrounds the influence of the New Wave moment. Though the context and form of many of these current films, often referred to as the new ‘indies’ in journalistic and industrial frames of reference is different from that of the New Wave films, I would argue that it is very much informed by the legacy of a short-lived but powerful cinematic moment of innovation and experimentation.

Drawing on Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan, my essay will analyse the form and style of the film to trace and interrogate this legacy and its politics in contemporary South Asian cinema. Focusing specifically on Kaul’s influence on Singh, the essay will focus on the ways in which the formal experimentation and idealistic affinities of Kaul, especially those in Uski Roti have come to influence Singh’s own cinematic language as he seeks to lend visibility to the invisible violence and desires, simmering discontent and interior consciousness of the suffering villagers.

In an interview talking about his long-standing association with Kaul, and Kaul’s influence on his directorial debut, Singh reminiscences that Kaul could only see the first seven minutes of the opening sequence of the film which he edited at Kaul’s house. He was waiting for Singh to come and show him the full edit when he suddenly passed away. His last email to Singh read:

In the realm of employing time as a cinematographic tool, the space must freely become what it will. Time is not enslaved by spatial conventions of creating physical significances. Space is devoted to cause and effect paradigm, time is free of it because it is carried by no (cause and effect) agency. One reason why we continue to hopelessly imagine that cause and effect will save us. The truth is that quite unexpectedly time takes or does not take its toll. It saves when things point to an end, it destroys when things appear imperishable. MK

(Dutta, 2011)

A similar space-time axis also comes to influence AGDD. Rather than organising space, the film places itself in juxtaposing temporalities, into a certain quality of attention and let the space be. For example, in the closing sequence of the film, Dayalo, the youngest daughter of the household, restless, steps out in the middle of the night to the edge of the village when her older brother, Melu, who is a cycle rickshaw driver in the city, returns to the village and runs into her. He takes her back with him, and the meeting of the two protagonists possibly takes place (see Figure 1.4). I say ‘possibly’ because as the film draws to a close, we witness how Singh, sharing Kaul’s commitment to Bressonian principles of fragmentation and combination, creates a cinematic form that embodies the experience of the crisis of human subjectivity.

In this sequence as through the film, he alternates between the use of two lenses—28 mm and 135 mm and attributes thematic characteristics to them that generate opposing visual effects. The first lens, a medium wide-angle with its total focusing confers a hyper realistic quality to the images, as we see Dayalo walking through the sombre, mist- shrouded frames dominated by the constricting physical contours of the space within which the lives of the villagers is set (see Figure 1.3). Whereas, the second, a narrow telephoto lens with its selective and critical focusing lends a dream quality to images as we see at various points in the sequence—Dayalo in extreme close up or when the camera pauses on the wide-angle composition of the villager chiding the man asking for alms for the blind horses and shifts to a tightly closed in telephoto shot, isolating the men from their surroundings as it does with the shot of Melu towards the end where following the lenses two-dimensional effect, the image loses its space-time coordinates and instead becomes a mental image.

Figure 1.3 Medium wide-angle framing of Dayalo wandering in the night.

Figure 1.4 Possible meeting of two protagonists, Dayalo and Melu.

In playing with the lenses and shifting camera distances, Singh follows Kaul’s experimentation of using this technique in Uski Roti. As Kaul explains, he

confines the film to two lenses, and makes them represent the actual and mental life of the waiting wife… . I mean, the wide angle provided the universal focus and the extra actuality of the cinematographic image, and the long [focal length] a critical range of sharpness or a certain dream quality.

(1974: 5).

As in Uski Roti, where mid film onwards, the line between Balo’s inner and outer reality grows thinner and dimmer, and according to Kaul, the lenses were freed of their strict representation so that it is the ‘real’ world which appears almost as hallucination while hallucination takes on the shape of reality, in this sequence also we witness a similar blurring of the distinction between Dayalo’s outer and inner reality.

However, while this dream-reality paradigm is symptomatic of Dayalo’s mentalscape, as it conveys the emptiness of her life, her loneliness and larger sense of isolation and alienation of the people in the village, given Singh’s stated experiment with cinematic space, it is difficult to ascribe any immediate and simple symbolism to the experience of the shot as it unfolds. I would argue that rather than strictly indicating Dayalo’s fusion of dream and reality, instead, free of diegetic compulsions it is also part of film’s overall experimentation with the encounter between the object and the viewer across cinematic space.

At a Robert J. Flaherty seminar, in response to a question about the process of composing the images in Uski Roti, Kaul (1998) pointed out that it doesn’t interest him to compose his shots, or frame them in anyway. Even when he is editing, his shots have a mobility—when a shot travels through the reels and finds a place, he knows tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: New Independent Indian Cinema: Disciplinary Evolution and Cinematic Revolution
• 1 Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan: The Politics and Legacies of the New Wave Movement in Contemporary Indian Cinema
• 2 From New Cinema to New Indie Cinema: The Story of NFDC and Film Bazaar
• 3 Breaking Curfew, Presenting Utopia: Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider Inside the National and International Legal Framework
• 4 Queer Radiance: Margarita with a Straw, Disability and Vision
• 5 Indie Crowdfunded Narratives of Commercial Surrogacy, or the Contested Bodies of Neoliberalism: Onir’s ‘I Am Afia’ and Arpita Kumar’s Sita
• 6 Film Festivals as Cosmopolitan Assemblages: A Case Study in Diasporic Cocreation
• 7 Documentary as Witness; Documentary as Counter-Narrative: The Cinema of Sanjay Kak
• 8 Divercity: Independent Documentary as an Alternative Narrative of the City
• 9 Zanjeer to Pink: The Trajectory of Amitabh Bachchan’s Angry Young/Old Man Persona From Mainstream to Indie Cinema
• 10 Rapping in Double Time: Gandu’s Subversive Time of Liberation
• 11 Sairat’s Transgressive Femininity: Quizzing Marathi Cinema
• 12 Untold Stories, Representations and Contestations: Masaan (Crematorium) and Asha Jaoar Majhe (Labour of Love)
• 13 Haobam Paban Kumar and the Cinemas of North East India
• 14 The Subaltern Screams: Migrant Workers and the Police Station as Spatio-Carceral State of Exception in the Tamil Film Visaranai
• Contributors
• Index