50 Indian Film Classics

By M K Raghavendra

An eclectic collection of essays by the winner of the National Award Swarna Kamal for Best Film Critic 1997 With more than a thousand films produced annually in over fifteen languages India is acknowledged as the largest producer of motion pictures in the world.50 Indian Film Classics provides detailed critical accounts of the most important Indian films beginning with Prem Sanyas (1925) to Rang De Basanti (2006) in languages ranging from Bengali and Hindi to Manipuri and Malayalam and representing a whole gamut of themes: from the 1930s mythological Sant Tukaram to the politically radical Calcutta '71, from art-house favourites like Uski Roti and Mukhamukham to blockbusters like Sholay and Lagaan. These perceptive essays introduce the reader to the many moods that inform Indian cinema, the austerity of Pather Panchali, the lavishness of Hum Aapke Hain Koun...!, the solemnity of Samskara and the fun and frolic of Amar Akbar Anthony.Illustrated with rare posters and stills this is an invaluable guide to the most significant cinema India has ever produced.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Collins India
• Release date: Jul 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9789351360407

M K Raghavendra

M.K. Raghavendra has authored six volumes of film criticism including three academic works on Bollywood and one on Kannada cinema. He has also authored two books of popular criticism from HarperCollins.

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PREM SANYAS

(SILENT, 1925)

Oriental India

DIRECTOR: FRANZ OSTEN

B&W, 9437 FT

PRODUCTION COMPANIES: GREAT EASTERN FILMS,

EMELKA FILMS (MUNICH), THE INDIAN PLAYERS

STORY: EDWIN ARNOLD

SCREENPLAY: NIRANJAN PAL

CINEMATOGRAPHY: JOSEF WIRSCHING, WILLI KIERMEIER

CAST: SEETA DEVI, HIMANSU RAI, SARADA UKIL, RANI BALA,

PRAFULLA ROY, DAYANANDA, MODHU BOSE

THE MAJOR PROBLEM WITH DOING AN EXHAUSTIVE STUDY OF THE EARLIEST Indian films is the paucity of prints belonging to the period prior to 1930. Dadasaheb Phalke is credited with making the first feature film, Raja Harishchandra (1913), which must have run to about an hour, but only 1475 feet of the original film have apparently survived. The other Phalke silent fiction films to have survived in bits and pieces are Pithache Panje (1914), Lanka Dahan (1917), Sri Krishna Janma (1917), Kaliya Mardan (1919), Sant Eknath and Bhakta Prahlad (1926).

Of the early Indian films that survive in their entirety today, two are from the Pune-based Agarwal Films—Ghulami Nu Patan (Shyam Sunder Agarwal) and Diler Jigar (G.P. Pawar). Both were made in 1931. These were, however, preceded by three important films made in India by a German director named Franz Osten (Prem Sanyas in 1925, Shiraz in 1928 and Prapancha Pash in 1929) which also survive in their entirety. While Niranjan Pal scripted these films, actor–producer Himansu Rai too had a major hand in each as producer and actor. It is particularly interesting that while these three films are largely orientalist exercises, Franz Osten stayed on to make sixteen more films in Hindi, including a mythological, Savitri (1937), and ended his career in India with Kangan (1939). Osten’s later films genuinely fit into the Indian format (as identified in the Introduction), which had established itself by the late 1930s.

Franz Osten was director of the German film production company Emelka when it went into partnership with Himansu Rai’s production company Bombay Talkies Ltd. Prem Sanyas or The Light of Asia was based on Edwin Arnold’s poem ‘The Light of Asia’, about Gautama Buddha, which had been turned into a script by Niranjan Pal. Osten’s partnership with Rai turned out to be enormously fruitful. The Light of Asia was sold as an authentic Indian film around the world, and as Prem Sanyas it also occupies an important position in the history of Indian cinema. The story of Prem Sanyas does not bear retelling because it is the story of the Buddha from the time of his birth to his spiritual awakening under the Bodhi tree. Himansu Rai himself plays Gautama, and for the role of Gautama’s wife, the Princess Gopa, Osten and Rai got an Anglo-Indian actress named Renee Smith who had taken the name Sita Devi for the screen.

The aspect of the film that marks its vision out as European is, ironically, its ‘authenticity’. The entire film is shot on location and sets are scarcely in evidence. An Indian film about the Buddha would have erected enormous sets with almost no eye to the ‘authenticity’ so cherished by Osten. If this seems a good thing, it must also be remarked that India in 1925 was a fascinating destination for tourists. The image of a starving beggar on a narrow Indian street could therefore have had an inherent exotic appeal, perhaps comparable to the attraction a field of tulips in Holland has for one of today’s Hindi blockbusters! To an Indian viewer, an ‘authentic’ India would be the most commonplace of visual stimuli and a film about India would therefore shun this kind of authenticity and opt more obviously for the spectacular. While Prem Sanyas is able to turn a cart pulled along by two overworked oxen into a spectacle, an Indian mythological film would need a chariot driven by six magnificent horses to achieve something comparable.

Prem Sanyas begins with a prologue: a group of tourists arrive in contemporary India, visit Bodh Gaya, see the Bodhi Tree, and are told about Gautama Buddha by a priest. The story of the Buddha then unfolds in flashback. The curious thing is that Osten uses the same kind of imagery in the prologue (set in 1925) that he uses in the main narrative (set in 500 BC). The priest telling the story to the tourists looks no different from the yogis, soothsayers and magicians of Buddha’s period; the costumes and the architecture of the two ages are almost identical. We conclude that the India of 1925 was no nearer to the European consciousness than the India of Buddha’s period—no attempt is made to differentiate visually between the two epochs.

Another interesting aspect of the film is the preponderance of the medium-shot and the long-shot, at the expense of the close-up. This has the effect of foregrounding the milieu, perhaps not to lose sight of ‘India’ in its emphasis upon one of its personages. Also, whenever the subject of a film is a visionary or a sage of the Buddha’s stature, the hero of the film is usually made larger than life so that he may tower above his fellow men and his magnitude brought home loud and clear to the spectator. However, the Buddha in Prem Sanyas is an Indian and cannot, therefore, be of more interest to an occidental audience than the land from which he comes. Gautama, in the film, is as such much more diminished in scale than one is prepared for. He takes his place as another object in a colourful landscape and he seems to lack stature even as a distinct individual. If Gautama Buddha is the ‘Light of Asia’, the continent of Asia still remains very dimly lit because neither he nor his message shines brightly enough.

Niranjan Pal apparently had serious disagreements with Osten about his vision of India:

During the production of [Prem Sanyas] I had very serious differences with [Osten] which exasperated me to such an extent that finally I had to practically retire from the production … My quarrels with him were not concerned with film technique. They were more serious than mere questions of camera angles and such matters. To mention one thing: I chose Mrs Sarojini Naidu’s nephew—a baby boy of about two years, and a beautiful specimen of healthy childhood—as the baby Buddha. But Herr Osten was horrified. ‘Why, everyone in Germany would take him to be a German child … We must have a dark little boy as Gautama,’ declared Osten … Osten had his own way and a sickly child of an elephant trainer was ultimately chosen to represent baby Buddha.¹

At first, the anecdote related by Niranjan Pal only seems to demonstrate Herr Osten’s racist inclinations (Franz Osten later joined the Nazi Party). Still, it can also be read differently. Osten may have felt that even a sickly infant could represent the Buddha as a child because it is only the process of his development that is important in the life of the sage. Niranjan Pal perhaps believed that a child growing up to become the Buddha must be innately ‘beautiful’—because the essence of the sage could not be entirely absent in the child. Where Franz Osten only saw an ‘Indian child’, Niranjan Pal apparently saw ‘the baby Buddha’.

The original music written for Prem Sanyas (intended to be performed during screenings) has been lost but most films of the genre depend upon mood music delivered with exotic instruments to recreate the ambience of the period or the locale. A print of the film toured India in 2000 (courtesy the Goethe Institut) and the score played on the occasion of the screenings relied entirely upon a piano. The piano, as the reader may concur, is a Western instrument virtually incapable of oriental flourishes. The use of the piano today is telling because it is an honest attempt to emphasize the ‘inauthenticity’ of the film. It is perhaps ironic that something promoted for its ‘authenticity’ in 1925 is of interest today only because its content is seen to be completely fictitious.

DEVDAS

(HINDI, 1935)

Tragedy without Finality

DIRECTOR: P.C. BARUA

B&W, 141 MINUTES

PRODUCTION COMPANY: NEW THEATRES

STORY: FROM THE NOVEL BY SARATCHANDRA CHATTERJEE

CINEMATOGRAPHY: BIMAL ROY

MUSIC: TIMIR BARAN

CAST: K.L. SAIGAL, JAMUNA, KSHETRABALA, RAJKUMARI, K.C. DEY

P.C. BARUA’S HINDI VERSION OF DEVDAS WITH K.L. SAIGAL IS LESS CELEBRATED than the Bengali version in which the director played the lead role. But the latter film has been lost and it is only the accessible Hindi version that can be examined. Saratchandra Chatterjee’s celebrated novel Devdas has been adapted for cinema several times. Its self-destructive protagonist has also appeared in other guises very often and we are perhaps justified in remarking that the figure of Devdas has exerted a huge influence on Indian cinema, greater perhaps than any other character from the realm of twentieth-century literature. The story of Devdas is quintessentially Indian, and non-Indian readers or listeners, especially those from the West, will perhaps find it difficult to respond to its fatalistic viewpoint.

Devdas is the son of a zamindar and Parvati is his childhood sweetheart. Parvati’s family is poorer, with a lower place in the social hierarchy than Devdas’s, and the zamindar forbids the union of the two when it is suggested by Parvati’s father. Devdas is unable to stand up to his tyrannical father and is summarily packed off to Calcutta, essentially to acquire sophistication. Devdas is unhappy but at a weak moment in Calcutta, he writes to Parvati and, in effect, disavows his love for her. Parvati therefore sees no way out but to marry an elderly widower, taking up her duties as mistress to his estate and resolving to discharge her responsibilities with earnestness. Devdas is unable to contend with this turn of events and relapses into drink, coming into the company of a courtesan named Chandramukhi who understands his innate goodness and recognizes the permanent state of distress to which he is condemned. Chandramukhi becomes attached to Devdas but the latter is unable to pull himself together; he gets deeper into debt and is lost even to this sympathetic girl. When Chandramukhi first meets him, his condition is already too far deteriorated for her ministrations to make any difference. Devdas finally leaves Chandramukhi and embarks upon a long and aimless train journey even as he is terminally ill, arriving finally at Parvati’s doorstep, to die there and be discovered by her.

The story of Devdas may be touched by more than a hint of fatalism but it has discernible virtues that lie elsewhere. K.L. Saigal, who plays Devdas, was not really much of an actor but he convincingly presents Devdas as a weak individual throughout the film. The motif of the train, which is employed to great effect in the best parts of the film, suggests Devdas’s inability to be anything more than a passenger on life’s journey. Both Parvati and he resign themselves to their destinies but Parvati is shown to embrace the responsibilities thrust upon her with a sense of purpose while Devdas allows life to slip away from him. Barua’s Chandramukhi also emerges as a strong character in her own right although her own situation is hardly enviable. Rajkumari plays Chandramukhi wonderfully well and there is more than one poignant moment in the brothel when she is seen bemused and lost. In one remarkable sequence filmed through the bars of the balustrade, we see her preoccupied with her own thoughts as she sits at the doorway to her quarters, the faint music of revellers coming from somewhere down below. Chandramukhi’s feelings towards Devdas are also shown more ambivalently than in Bimal Roy’s 1955 film version of the story. Her concerns do not seem those of a lover and there is a touch of maternal fondness in the way she gazes at him. It is perhaps even possible to interpret the changes that come over her as brought about by her ‘motherly’ responsibilities towards Devdas.

Bimal Roy shot Barua’s film in 1935 and when he remade Devdas in 1955 he hardly departed from it in its essential elements although parts of it are better realized. In Bimal Roy’s version, Dilip Kumar interprets Devdas’s weakness as essentially one of the flesh. Dilip Kumar has an economical language of gestures (something that K.L. Saigal noticeably lacked) suggesting a submerged vulnerability. While delivering his lines, for example, he employs a pronounced blink (Indian actors usually stare at intense moments) that hints at verbal awkwardness even when his rendering of the dialogues is unfaltering. This incertitude infuses many of Devdas’s lines in the later version with gravity not found in K.L. Saigal’s interpretation of the role. There is a tragic dimension to Bimal Roy/Dilip Kumar’s Devdas not to be found in Barua/Saigal’s.

Devdas has sometimes been immoderately interpreted as dealing with the ‘spinelessness of the feudal class’ but the film is, first and foremost, a paean to the working of karma and its formal devices are employed to emphasize this metaphysical discourse. Early in the film, for example, Devdas finds himself too weak to woo and wed Parvati when his own family is against the marriage. At one moment, he lashes out at her suddenly with his stick as if he would rather take recourse to violence than make this admission of weakness to himself, or to her. The mark on Parvati’s forehead becomes, thereafter, a token of Devdas’s rightful possession of her heart even as she is another man’s wife. Barua also uses the device of the premonition to wonderful effect: when Devdas falls over in his train compartment, Parvati stumbles in her own home hundreds of miles away.

Barua’s use of music is also interesting. Most of the songs (notably Dukh ke din ab beetat nahin, sung by K.L. Saigal) function as commentaries upon aspects of existence and there are several songs sung by K.C. Dey, who is present in the film only for this purpose. Barua often uses musical interludes to make the narrative shifts between the happenings in Parvati’s village and the kotha life in Devdas’s Calcutta. The narrative of the film alternates between Devdas and Parvati but because there is no crosscutting in evidence, both Devdas and Parvati are perceived to occupy ideal spaces rather than physical sites that exist concurrently.

On his final journey, Devdas takes a capricious train from Calcutta that passes through Varanasi, Delhi, Lahore and Bombay (and even through Madras in Bimal Roy’s version) before finding himself close to his beloved’s village. He has not intended to come there because such intent would imply resoluteness, a trait that has not been his. As Parvati attempts to run out of her husband’s mansion towards Devdas’s wasted corpse, the gate is hastily shut upon her and she crashes into it. Her forehead takes the blow and she begins to bleed from the same scar that her beloved once left upon her.

As a tale of ‘star-crossed’ love, Devdas may take its position alongside Romeo and Juliet but it will not be correct to describe its effect as comparable. This is perhaps because the fate befalling Devdas and Parvati does not have the finality of the one befalling Shakespeare’s lovers. We do not see Devdas and Parvati meeting and falling in love, and when the film begins we learn they have been sweethearts since their early years. Barua’s film begins with the two grown into adulthood but Bimal Roy’s 1955 version even has a prelude set in their childhood and it is the childish attachment between the two that matures eventually into love. Since their feelings for each other precede the film’s commencement, one can say, technically, that these feelings have always existed. The resolution of the film, with Parvati bleeding once again for Devdas, is also designed to assure the lovers of a place in eternity regardless of the torments and frustrations that have been their lot in the narrative. Where in Romeo and Juliet the lovers are undone by a malevolent alignment of real circumstances, the lovers in Devdas seem to belong to a world where they are not undone but merely carried along. No definite circumstances align themselves against them but the lovers do nothing to either force the hand of fate or take them towards ends that they might have desired. Even Chandramukhi is a curious figure because she basks eternally in the beauty of Devdas’s unrequited love for Parvati and is not even permitted longings of her