Philosophical Issues in Indian Cinema

Approximate Terms and Concepts

MK Raghavendra

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000296341
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book interrogates the vocabulary used in theorizing about Indian cinema to reach into the deeper cultural meanings of philosophies and traditions from which it derives its influences. It re-examines terms and concepts used in film criticism and contextualizes them within the aesthetics, poetics and politics of Indian cinema.

The book looks at terms and concepts borrowed from the scholarship on American and world cinema and explores their use and relevance in describing the characteristics and evolution of cinema in India. It highlights how realism, romance and melodrama in the context of India appear in a culturally singular way and how the aggregation of constituent elements – like songs, action, comedy – in Indian film can be traced to classical theatre and other diverse religious and philosophical influences. These influences have characterized popular film and drama in India which present all aspects of life for a diverse nation. The author explores concepts like 'fantasy', 'family' and 'patriotism' by using various examples from films in India and outside, as well as practices in the other arts. He identifies the fundamental logic behind the choices made by film-makers in India and discusses concepts which allow for a fresh theorizing on Indian cinema's characteristics.

This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of film studies, media studies, cultural studies, literature, cultural history and South Asian studies. It will also be useful for general readers who are interested in learning more about Indian cinema, its forms, origins and influences.

1
REALISM AND REALITY

Cinema began as an extension of photography, an imprint of actual reality taken by a mechanical device. Louis Lumière devised a way of synchronizing the shutter movement of the camera with the movement of a strip of photographic film. The Lumières were manufacturers producing photographic film, and Louis Lumière also envisaged cinema as a way of recording real life in movement. The first showing of films to a paying public happened on 28 December 1895 in Paris and lasted half an hour. When this program was scheduled Louis Lumière and his brother Auguste had made about fifty tiny films, the very first one showing workers leaving the Lumière factory in Lyon and shot from the window of the house opposite. All these films were recordings of events, either public – a head of state arriving for a reception – or from family life – Lumière’s father playing cards with his friends.

Among those invited to that first screening in 1895 was George Méliès, a magician and illusionist, who saw other possibilities in Lumière’s ‘cinematograph’. When Méliès was filming with his primitive camera, the film jammed and it took a few moments for the camera to resume working. By that time what was before the camera had changed, but the instrument continued to record. In the developed film Méliès therefore saw that a bus had turned into a hearse and men into women. Where the Lumières had seen the cinematograph as a way of recording reality, Méliès hence saw it as promoting illusion. The proximity of the cinematic image to reality would convince the spectator that what was on the screen was a recording of what had happened. The stream of images a cinematograph created were taken for ‘reality’ when they were the result of tricks, and that made it perfect for magic. Among Méliès’s films were The Melomaniac (1903), in which a man juggles with his own head, and The Man with the India-Rubber Head (1902), in which a mad scientist detaches his head and blows it up like a balloon until it explodes. Méliès also adapted fairy tales and stuffed them with inventions like these.

This dichotomy between reality and illusion has widely permeated discussions around film practice ever since then. Illusion is not only something that is ‘not real’ but also what a human being might imagine, an inner reality. This has meant that reality and illusion became identifiable with objective and subjective reality respectively; still, this contrast did not engage Indian cinema.

Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, or Dada Saheb Phalke as he is usually called, is credited with making the first feature film, Raja Harishchandra (1913). The other Phalke silent fiction films to have survived in bits and pieces are Pith-ache Panje (1914), Lanka Dahan (1917), Sri Krishna Janma (1917), Kaliya Mardan (1919), Sant Eknath and Bhakta Prahlad (1926). Phalke envisaged the future of Indian cinema very differently from the ways suggested by the Lumières and Méliès. He reportedly saw a film called The Life of Christ around Christmas in 1910 and became excited at the prospect of seeing ‘Indian images’ on the screen. A parallel between Phalke’s exercises in film and what Ravi Varma did in the medium of oil painting has been suggested since both of them attempted a recreation of the mythical past to reclaim it as a nationalist proposition.¹

If Phalke, who was preoccupied with establishing and nurturing an Indian film industry, was also intent upon bringing ‘real’ Indian images to the screen, these were not just any ‘Indian images’; his aim was to introduce the traditional sacred into the space of the colonial ‘modern’.² What being ‘realistic’ meant to Phalke was that audiences would recognize pre-existent truths/beliefs when they saw the films – from their understanding of mythology and the sacred texts. Where realistic/mimetic cinema in the West mimicked what was apparently real in the world, this reality was felt to represent only ephemeral or passing truths because there was knowledge that was ‘truer’ than everyday experience. Where, to the Lumières and Méliès, cinema was an extension of photography, cinema was to Phalke a recording of sacred performance which was a different kind of mimesis – that of the encounter between the human and the divine. What was implicated in cinema was not simply the ‘real’ but the ‘truth’, with a different provenance.

Hindi cinema moved out of the genre of the mythological in the early 1940s for a variety of reasons, although the genre continued to be popular in South India. But what is important is that the sense remained that cinema was not an extension of photography but the recording of a sacred enactment that had instruction for all members of the social order. The Natyasastra, which is an ancient Sanskrit text laying down rules pertaining to dramatic and musical performance, may be pertinent here, at least to the extent of indicating their accepted purpose. It states³ that at a time when people were addicted to sensual pleasures, desire and greed, and jealousy and anger, the god Indra along with some of the other gods approached Brahma, the creator, and sought that he should create an object of diversion that would be audible as well as visible. Indra asked that all members of the social order be permitted to hear it. When the show got under way, the asuras (‘anti-gods’) took offence and caused the actors to forget their lines and movements. They contended that the play depicted them in unfavourable light vis-à-vis the gods. In replying to their complaints, the creator Brahma articulated the objective of drama and theatre. He explained that drama would be instructive to all through actions and states depicted and through sentiments arising out of it. There would be no wisdom, no knowledge, no craft, no device not found in drama. But the Natyasastra also says that ‘drama should be diversion for people weighed down by sorrow or fatigue or grief or ill-luck; it should be a rest (for the body and mind)’.⁴ The purpose of sacred theatre, it would seem, was hence not only to instruct all members of the social order but also relieve them of their worldly worries. Since theatre no longer had such propensity, an alternative was needed, and this is where cinema, because of its incalculable reach, stepped in, instructing even while providing solace.

What is particularly important here is the clarity with which social purpose of performance is laid down – rather than defined as an occult or ritualistic practice that performance elsewhere (as in ancient Greece where it was meant to ‘honour the gods’) is usually taken to be. Since theatre can only be local, it can be argued that cinema eventually took to addressing a larger part of the social order and continued performing the same role, instructing the audience through familiar truisms (given its social thrust),⁵ even as it provided escape from everyday anxieties. A charge often made against it – especially in the 1970s when the state demanded social commitment out of cinema – was that it was escapist, but it has always also instructed. Even after the reign of the mythological ended in popular cinema and the ‘social’ (domestic melodrama) took root, the task of instructing audiences across the social order remained central.

If cinema is a recording of sacred enactment intended to instruct a public across the social order, it moves into new territory from where it stood elsewhere. Cinema outside India, as already indicated, moved between two narrative functions – that of recording and exploring external reality through mechanical means and using the same technology to introduce the subjective element, that is, either an inner truth or external reality as apprehended/mediated by the subject. Its intent was exploration of the world, which was ultimately not knowable. But in India it avoided these functions and attempted to relay that ‘universal truths’ play a definite social role. Instead of exploring an unknowable universe, it set about propagating what was ‘known’, that is, received wisdom useful in one’s existence. The following are some key characteristics of Indian cinema which result from this approach:

• a) The camera eye is omniscient, and this means that subjectivity is noticeably absent. Since the camera eye sees ‘everything’, Indian cinema is hard put to produce surprise and suspense, which rely on complete information not being made available to the camera. To illustrate, in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) a murder is witnessed by several persons who give different versions of the events to the authorities, each one trying to tell the story to make himself/herself emerge from it as creditworthy. At no point is the ‘actual tale’ told since ‘reality’ cannot be independent of the observer. Such a fractured strategy would be impossible for an Indian popular film, say Suraj Barjatya’s Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! (1994) (HAHK) – a film about exemplary family togetherness amidst celebrations associated with conjugality – where there cannot be ‘different versions’ of the narrated events or an ‘authorial viewpoint’ on them. In HAHK what the audience sees is all there is to see and never anything as subjectively viewed.⁶
• b) A second aspect pertains to the nature of the ‘truths’ relayed by popular films. According to the Natyasastra theatre should produce an aesthetic experience reflecting the truth apprehended through the mystical encounter, although only a connoisseur (rasika) will fully appreciate it. The primary consideration is that at the culmination of the aesthetic experience, the rasika⁷ is forced into a silent understanding of the unity of the world and his/her part in it.⁸ How this works out today is difficult to suppose, but if popular cinema is proceeding on the same basis (as I believe it is), a key factor may be that there is no connoisseur or rasika for film, which targets mass audiences. Cinema therefore adapts by propagating truths recognizable to every member of the audience, that is, they are impersonal truisms, independent of context. Situational ethics (i.e., particular to the situation) are disallowed – as for instance the impropriety of ‘insider trading’ on the stock market, which one can easily see informing a Hollywood film. The truths must be general enough to be taken for ‘universal’, for example, like sanctity of dosti⁹ or friendship as in Raj Kapoor’s Sangam (1964) or the need to follow, in a career, the need for self-fulfilment instead of succumbing to the rat race as in Rajkumar Hirani’s 3 Idiots (2009).
• c) Both neo-Aristotelian mimesis (followed by classical Hollywood) and the aesthetic experience posited by the Natyasastra (and drawn upon by Indian cinema) reflect in the story; the shape taken by the story in the two cinemas demonstrates the difference between the two modes of narration. The classical Hollywood film begins with an initial disturbance in the condition of the protagonist followed by the struggle to deal with it, the film concluding with either a victory or a defeat.¹⁰ The disturbance could be caused by any circumstance ranging from war to a social obstacle to love. Within this set-up the human dilemma explored by the film is the ‘theme’¹¹ – like the conflict between love and duty – usually associated with the context. If the conflict between love and duty happens in a war film, the film in question could affirm either value. A German soldier in World War II might be correct to choose love while an American would not abandon duty.¹² The theme allows the film to choose a slant – and the relationship between the theme, context and slant can be subtle, even meriting interpretation. An illustration would be Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), which deals with love, self-interest and patriotic duty in the context of the US entering the War.
• d) The story in Indian cinema has different connotations because it is the vehicle for a pre-existent idea recognizable to the audience as traditional wisdom. There is little in the story corresponding to the ‘theme’ – that is, exploration of a human dilemma – and even the Indian art film usually has a ready truth to relay. Where popular cinema deals with notions like the sanctity of the community (Mehboob Khan’s Mother India, 1956) or the need for reciprocity in true love (Tanu Weds Manu, 2011), art cinema transmits liberal socio-political truths like the oppression of the socially marginalized (Shyam Benegal’s Ankur, 1974) or the cruelty of the patriarchal order (Girish Kasaravalli’s Ghatashraddha, 1977). The pre-existent nature of the truths relayed by popular cinema is responsible for the familiarity of its resolutions – what will happen being generally determined, but how it will happen being variant and remaining open to narrative strategy.¹³

The notion of the ‘truth’ (as opposed to the ‘real’) manifested in a film’s ‘message’ is one of the foundational aspects of popular cinema in India; many other aspects ranging from stereotypical characters and situations to its unique employment of music owe to the notion. Although Indian cinema has sometimes eschewed it (as in some films of Satyajit Ray), the reach of the notion will be experienced time and again in this book and represents the key factor to differentiate it from the rest of world cinema, including films from Asia and the ‘Third World’.

If ‘truths’ are what Indian popular cinema has been broadly relaying, it would be useful to categorize them. They cannot always be subsumed under a prescriptive ethic and in this manner differ from the fable in which a lesson is learnt by the protagonist. In Sangam, for instance, the truth is not prescriptive ethics pertaining to the need for loyalty between friends, since loyalty would then need to be problematized through an instance of disloyalty – which does not happen. (In fables people always learn lessons.) The truth, rather, pertains to an essential, exemplary condition, which is not prescribed but is in some way natural, just as the tragic circumstances of Karna’s life and the end...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Realism and reality
• 2 Content, interpretation and meaning
• 3 Causality
• 4 Family and genealogy
• 5 Romance and marriage
• 6 Melodrama
• 7 Faith and devotion
• 8 Fantasy
• 9 Station and hierarchy
• 10 Humour or comedy
• 11 Character and individuality
• 12 Genres
• 13 National cinema
• 14 Regional or local cinema
• 15 Orality and literacy
• 16 Film music
• 17 Film art and the avant-garde
• 18 Stardom
• 19 Place and time
• 20 Ethics and morality
• 21 Gender
• 22 Radicalism or activism
• 23 Marginalization, oppression and disadvantage
• 24 Patriotism
• A conclusion
• Bibliography
• Film Index
• Subject Index