Documentary News Letter (1942-1943)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER FEBRUARY 1942 that there is an India in dungarees as well as in dhotis. So all that part of the programme was I'airlx easy as far as subjects and facilities were concerned (1 will speak of the people who made the films in a moment or two), but the really difficult part of the programme was to come. We had decided in Delhi in December, 1940, to make six films on "Modern India". These films were to have no political slant. They were not to say that everything in the garden was lovely, neither were they to echo 'Mother India*. They were intended to show the world that India was not only a land of temples and stiff shirts, of pukka sahibs and wandering saddhus, but that it was also a land of great modern industries, of science and of some progressive social movements. These films were intended as a counterblast to the colourful travelogues with their everdancing snakes and the equally highly coloured travel books with their tales of princely intrigue and stories of tropical, passionate, nights in Bombay. We thought that it was important that at a time like this, with the problem of India increasingly in the news, the people who do not follow politics, the people, to whom Amery and Nehru are names in some political tangle and Gandhi a funny old fellow dressed in a sheet, should be shown that India is a great and important country. One day, perhaps sooner than most people expect, they will be called upon to consider your strange vast country, and it is right that they should know something else about it than the twopence coloured picture usually presented to them. But now the opposition became difficult and serious. Difficult because our opponents presented a point of view with which we could agree; serious because without its co-operation the films would have been impossible to make. We wanted the help of University students, of progressive teachers, of scientists and writers and artists. Their attitude was that the films were being made for the Government of India, that Congress was opposed to the Government and that, therefore, they could not help in the making of the films in any way. This refusal, of course, was not put as bluntly as I have put it, but that is the gist of it. Their attitude was understandable, but was obviously not going to get any rummy played. One or two people were helpful (and they were not necessarily among the supporters of the British Raj), because they agreed that the value of spreading knowledge about India outweighed the political objections. But it was you who really put us in touch with India — you who helped with all the films, and Premila Rama Ran and Minoo Masani. I hope people haven't put very black marks against you all for helping "the enemy". Your names used judiciously and with your consent opened nearly all doors. To have a drink with you was one of our few pleasures, to be seen having a drink with you was a passport which led to many places. It was a talisman, not only in Bombay but all over your country, which in spite of its size is in many ways a very small land. So, with the help of you and a few others, we were finally able to make films about India to-day. We already had material enough to pay tribute to Sir Jamsitjee Tata, one of the world's greatest industrial pioneers. We filmed the great Salt City which is growing up on the shores of the Arabian Sea: we filmed the cotton mills of Bombay and the paper mills of Calcutta. We went to the engineering workshops and into the civil aviation sheds. The mass production methods of the West provided material at Batanagher, and on the Western Ghats the striding pylons suggested a revolution in power. Using Minoo's brilliant script, we made a film of your great industries. There were other subjects. The life of the villages going on unchanged through the centuries and the life of the cities where science and industry are building a new India. The performing bear and the marionettes, the ballroom at the Taj Hotel and the crowded cinemas, the Institute of Industrial Science at Bangalore, the Haffkine Institute where Colonel Sokhy fights the diseases and epidemics of the East, the Agricultural Station at Poona where new crops are being experimented with, all provided us with subjects. There were so many things to film that several years' work on a carefully prepared programme would only begin to cover them. Perhaps these things are as yet only a small part of the life of India compared with the size of your vast country, but the work they do is growing and will benefit all its peoples. In spite of the many Indian women who have travelled abroad, the West still tends to think of Indian women as veiled creatures moving softly through the shadows, so we made a film of modern Indian women taking their place in the important work of their country. Politicians, social workers, film stars and architects helped us with this film, which shows the women of India in a new light. The women argued the political point stubbornly but helped us in the end. Always excepting she-whogives-no-cup-of-tea ; I have not forgotten her early morning attack, the faint breeze off the placid sea and the group of bitter, contemptuous faces. In Calcutta a unit working under Burmah Shell, made a film of the Grand Trunk Road for us — that fantastic road which runs from the Khyber Pass across a continent to Calcutta, cutting through history, linking the port and the factory, the pilgrim and the shrine. These are only some of the films we made. You were away from Bombay at the end and we did not see them togethc, but when you did see them I hope that you did not feel that you had wasted your help. Finally, there were the people who made the films. The directors and cameramen and cutters and assistants who made up the Indian Film Unit, as well as the people from outside who wrote the scripts and spoke the commentaries. They joined us in ones and twos — suspiciously. They nagged and criticised and felt rather ashamed at first at being attached to this notorious body. The studios, quite unable to make short films themselves and with various evil reasons of their own as well, were non-cooperative; and at first it did nobody's reputation any good to be associated with the Indian Film Unit. But gradually they came along. They came from all over the place. You will remember some of them. Gian Singh, the Sikh from Delhi. He was the strong and silent man of the Unit, marvellous in a crisis, unmoved by the sudden squalls which occasionally swept across us. Then there was Pratap Parmar ; he came from the studio cutting rooms and worked like a fury, determined that the films should be finished. He became the mainstay of the Unit. Ezra Mir. an old hand at the film game, with tales of might) deeds in Hollywood in the earl> days of talkies There was Mittra from Calcutta via Hitchcock and Carol Reed, the Hamlet of the Unit, and Bodhye from Kholapur who always said that the light was too bad, but who always brought back superb rushes. In a way they mirrored India. They had their civil wars, they quarrelled, Hindu with Hindu, or Hindu with Mohammedan. But if the Unit was attacked from outside they presenteu a united front. There was never any communal question in the Unit. And if it wasn't for one or two unscrupulous, power-seeking, politicians there wouldn't be any communal question in India. At least that's how it seemed to me. To the Unit, as to the Indian filmgoer, a short film was something running about ten reels. Even the trailers ran a quarter of an hour. The Indian film producers had never thought of the film as being used to interpret real life or that ordinarv people and their jobs could be a subject for the They had, it is true, started to make one or two films on the social problems of to-day, but always from a studio point of view, with actors playing on sets which looked as like the real India as English studio country scenes look like rural England. If they went on location thev imitated the processions of the Rajahs and took the entire studio with them, and when they came back, excessive make-up and their own idea of how Indian peasants dress plus poor exterior photography made a sorry show. Your film industry is going through a transition stageperhaps. The men of money have got to make way for the men of ideas. But it is going to be a tough fight. Documentary brought something new to India. It brought not only a new sort of film, but a new way of making films. Everybody in the Unit found these two things difficult at first. If I asked a director to do a sequence of Indian village women at work, he would try and slide off to a studio, hire a few extras, and proudly present me with hundreds of feet of leering, posturing pretty-pretties. Often, when sent away on his own to shoot, he would panic at being cut off from the constant, nagging supervision to which he was used. But it worked. It worked— with false starts and alarums and excursions but with the wheels eventuallv turning. Everybody came new to their different jobs. Nobody had written or spoken commentaries before, or worked on a proper script, or mixed three tracks with split-second cues or used other than the most tentative of filters. \s you know, not any of the film people had even looked at India before, except through conventional spectacles. Perhaps we started something that will last even after the necessities of war. And now to finish this long letter, in which there is much that you alreadv know but which may serve as a postscript to an absorbing year. I hope that one day soon we shall meet again, and that when that happens I shall be a real guest in your country and not come as Unrepresentative of an unwelcome rule. Although I don't think that your hospitality could be an) the more delightful. My best wishes to you and Mrs. Purshottam and all our friends. We have not forgotten the Mahableshwar trip or the cool evenings at the Bar Club. I hope we shall repeat them together one day. Yours sincerely, ALEX SHAW