The Cinema in Eastern India and its Social Significance | Dr. Hiren Gohain

Utpalendu Chakraborty’s Maina Tadanta gains in authenticity from the director’s years in the villages as a political activist. He is still close to the theatre in his conceptions. Except here and there the camera does not help us to see things in a new way and he falls back upon older directors, as in the shot of the two young lovers taking shelter from a storm under a tree drenched to the skin, so obviously an echo of Apu and Durga of Pather Panchali. But the feverish apocalyptic dream of the frustrated young lover, the starvation in the mud-huts, and the frantic concern of the mother, her face a study in suffering and immense patience, are memorable things in lt. A rebellious spirit is broken on the grim wheels of the machinery of class exploitation, and it drives the long-suffering mother to hurl a violent accusation against the guardians of that machine Technically it is far from finished. There are romantic traces as in the boy’s affinity to the untamed tribals. But great parts of this film have compelling sincerity.

The West Bengal government has financed the production of a large number of films with such social content. Today there definitely is a parallel cinema in the country, largely inspired by radical popular struggles. But there are no parallel screening facilities. These films are not even screened ln workers and peasants‘assemblies and meetings which take place frequently The dependence on commercial distributors who have their own ideas on the good film is tragic. This probably underlines a lack ol solid links between the progressive cinema and the progressive workers’ movements. Unless something is done about it the film-makers will either fall silent or drift away in other directions.

Yet one more problem for film makers in the North—East is the isolation it has been condemned to. Previously batches of young men went to Calcutta every year for admission to colleges and university for admission to colleges and university classes. They not only took their degrees but absorbed a variety of cultural influences. To the extent that Calcutta had the benefit of international cultural contacts, they profiled from this exposure to cultural stimuli and innovative trends. We now have universities and high courts, but not cities that are at crossroads of international commerce in commodities and ideas. As a result, our cultural stagnation has increased, and with it our paradoxical dependence on Calcutta for scraps of new ideas. If we had at least a few good film libraries, with facilities for wide and liberal screening of such films, our young people would at least have made the film part of their accustomed culture. An Assamese young man in the thirties or forties would have had the freedom to choose from the many influences prevailing in Calcutta for the use of his own society and culture. Now he is no longer in that position. Hungry for new ideas almost starved, he tends to clasp whatever the Calcutta media held up, and regardless of whether that is of any significance for his society at the particular moment. I do not know when this unfortunate situation is going to end. At least if we had a film institute somewhere here, run by enlightened people, visited by eminent filmmakers of the country, it would have been useful. Or we shall be condemned to producing little Mrinal Sens by the dozen or, considering the money-factor, by the half-dozen.

One of the greatest cultural figures of Assam in pre-independence times, Jyoti Prasad. scion of an enlightened Rajasthani family who married into Assamese society and became thoroughly assimilated, made in the thirties a film that still surprises us with its creative use of the medium. Joymoti Kunwari, the story of A legendary historical figure, might have been yet another fight into nationalist infantilism. But Jyotl Prasad had been to Germany to learn the art of filmmaking. He also had in his bones a deep and unaffected love for the people of Assam, a passionate understanding of their culture, The film thus becomes a celebration of their true national heritage. Jyoti Prasad’s own family had little notion of its artistic worth. The film was kept in a garage once it ran out of circulation, and was irreparably damaged. But a few sequences remain to surprise and haunt us. When the tyrant prince’s henchmen were arresting and tormenting youths of royal blood and other nobles, a young man tries to escape the man-hunt with his wife. He sends her back on an urgent errand to the home they had deserted alter travelling some distance. He is shown waiting for her. leaning for support on a tree. Tension had been built up with the secret police in close pursuit. Now there is a moment of vibrant stillness. Only thousand of fireflies flicker around him in the darkness. The suspense and tension become almost unbearable at this point. At another point, as the heroine is being tortured for political reasons by the king‘s agents in public, with crowds of common. Assamese villagers standing around in mute terror and grief there is a sudden explosion of anger in an elderly woman bent double by age. She snatches a stout staff from a guard belabours him with blows, shouting shrill curses in impassioned language, This dramatic interruption of the expected flow of the narrative is cinematic homage to the spirit of the people, oppressed but unsubdued. Jyoti Prasad also handled music contrapuntally to the visual image. As Joymoti is summoned to the king’s court and she is made ready for that unprecedented and exceptional event, she retains her grave and calm demeanour. At the background there is the totally unexpected melody of an Assamese wedding song, traditionally melancholy and touched with pity, but at the same time associated with the joys of marriage celebrations.

But Jyoti Prasad nearly went bankrupt with this film. He followed it up with one our two pot·botlers and then packed up. Principal returns for his huge investments in those days were unthinkable. The other patriotic films that followed him did not reach the same level. In the fifties, under the impact of the IPTA, films began to display more social consciousness. The anomalous situation of the artists in Assamese society, who could not be supported by popular audiences or by rich patrons, who literally squandered their properties in the cause ol art, seems to have stirred their sympathies for the oppressed and exploited peoples revolt. But since most ol them were stage artistes theatre actors and directors, their films had a stagy flavour. Yet I am not sure it they will arouse our contempt, as surely some recent films made in Bombay-style are bound to do. Since they did not study the people closely, their image of protest and revolt reflected their own ideas rather that the truth of popular upsurges. And this vein dried up in the sixties as there was an expansion of the middle-class in both small town and village The new audience clamoured for entertainment And a fairly liberal supply of such entertainment was provided by shrewd Assamese film-makers. These films conjure a vision comfort and affluence within reach of the rising middle-class, complete with birthday parties, but take care not to offend the deep-rooted rural attitudes of the same class. The Bihu dance makes an obligatory appearance. Anything threatening the status quo is ridiculed extravagantly. There are appropriately humble references to Fat and God. Add to the mixture a dash of fighting and a dash of sex, and we have the modern Assamese hit. Its social function is to prop up the given social structure, to paper over its cracks, and prevent reality from breaking through.

The first man to raise the standard of revolt against both the outworn theatrical mode and the new, slick, Bombay-style movie, is Sri Padum Barua. He took ten years to complete his first film, on account of financial, not artistic difficulties. The awkward moments, the clumsy touches in the film will be obvious to everyone. The alterness is not consistently maintained. But Barua has chosen a story that probes beneath the superficial dynamism and affluence, and exposes the waste and barrenness underneath. The promise of growth in human terms is strangled at birth by powerful social conventions, by hidebound customs and ideas by fear. Society has now become fate. The heroine’s face, a mask of stoic apathy, only occasionally torn by longing or despair, stirs us out of smug adjustment to the world. The unhappiness that strikes her husband, her former lover, is a direct consequence of her original betrayal of her heart, which had surrendered to the old gods of authority and family loyalty Out of this story Padum Barua creates the small town environment in depth, sometimes cluttered up with detail, but nowhere false or insincere. It is his commitment to his perceptions that rescues the film. He is a director who can show us things. It is a comment on the state of our present culture that he has since found little scope to express his interests and perceptions. Given the present social structure, his enterprise is unlikely to find real recognition from bureaucratic managers. l fervently wish that young film-makers of Assam will loin him in lighting the new cultural bureaucracy. For the film gives body to our new apprehension and intuition in a way that can vitally affect our thinking about society.

Dr. Hiren Gohain writes on Indian Review.