Filmindia (1941)

THIS monsTER Of communRbism KEEP IT OUT OF STUDIO GHTES THIS CURSED COUNTRY MUST BE SAVED! By: " Zabak India is cursed ! It is a terrible curse. The worst curse any nation on God's earth could ever be inflicted upon. When I say cursed I do not refer to those shackles that bind us to British Imperialism, or to the great economic distress that is the unhappy lot of this miserable country of mine .... but I refer to the huge barrier of hate that we Indians have built among ourselves — and which others have taken much pain and labour to keep erect. Recently in Bombay we had a taste of this terrible hate. Its repurcussions have not died down. . . . they will never die down for that matter — as there are people in India who will see to that. For over a month the bazars of this first city of India ran with blood, arson was rife, murder stalked the streets in broad daylight as the two major communities unleashed their pent-up fury to indulge in one of the maddest orgies civilisation has ever known. It was terrible! It was what could happen nowhere else in the world except India — and as an Indian I am ashamed of this fact. STRUGGLING IN SLAVISH SHACKLES Yes, it is to a certain extent true that the curse of communalism that is at present eating into the vitals of Indian culture, is a bye-product of British Imperialism, which helps to keep India in fetters. This is what makes the curse all the more terrible and it becomes all the more necessary that it should be removed. Unfortunately, this cannot be so. As things stand to-day we have little voice in the shaping of our destiny. The voice of a powerful free nation has an aulhority behind it which a slave country lacks .... and this makes the greatest diflffrence. When a nation loses its liberty and feels helpless it gradually begins to lose its initiative. The exploiting power considers it to its interest to discourage all sorts of initiative on the part of the exploited. It does all it can to reduce the exploited to a state of utter helplessness and degeneration. That has been, in short, the fate of India — India that has for centuries been continuously oppressed exploited, robbed of all possible liberty and sucked dry by an organised system of Imperialism .... the like of which has no parallel in the history of the world. When a friend dies, the grief comes home. Mr. Mangalbhoy G. Vakil of the Roxy Photo Co. died suddenly on the 8th August. Many a producer in India was indebted to him for his sympathetic support and advice. He brought Gevaert raw films into India. Zabak, otherwise known as Z. B. Kureishi, the popular newspaper columnist of Bombay. THE MONSTER OF COMMUNALISM The result of all this has been disastrous to India. Instead • of uniting the various castes and communities together in their common misfortune the reverse has been the case, and thus to-day we see the hate of centuries rising to the surface like a terrible demon of destruction demanding and everdemanding fresh blood to keep it alive and India divided. The hate of the two major communities for each other has almost come to be a proverb and this intense hatred is manifest everywhere .... from one length of India to the other. Worse still, the monster has been allowed to invade every field of our public and private life.... in fact, it has entered unchecked, unhampered and unrestrained — gathering momentum with every passage— into every nook and corner of our thought, commerce and sport. One can find this demon of hate nestling in the innermost recesses of the Stock Exchange; one can locate it in any of the spanky offices along Ballard Estate; one comes across it in colleges; one discovers it in the smile of a prostitute; one meets it in all its stark fury in the dirtiest of dirty brothels at Foras Road, in fact one contacts it everywhere.... 57