Indian Film

Satyajit Ray in action

ERIK BARNOUW and S. KRISHNASWAMY. Indian Film. Pp. xi, 301. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. $7.50.

We get so used to regarding mass culture as a peculiarly American problem-I was tempted to write "disease"-that it is enormously illuminating to see an aspect of mass communication from so strange a new perspective. To us, for whom the movies today are a curiously promising mixture of wide-screen spectacles, teen-age quickies, and a fresh leading edge of low-budget innovation, it is positively heady to see an Indian perspective on the film medium: what a linguistic tangle: puritanical, Oxonian-trained socialist bureaucrats in search of dull documentaries; exotic genres such as mythologicals, vaguely related to earlier folk traditions; and a star system which makes ours look like the height of rationality, where these and other factors combine to create a system theoretically incapable of having permitted a Satyajit Ray to have emerged professionally. The Bombay-Madras-Calcutta axis is so volatile as to render our Radio City-Chicago-Hollywood entertainment triangle tame by comparison.

Several themes explored in this fascinating fifty-year history of Indian movies will interest social scientist and humanist alike. The charge of American cultural imperialism and debasement by celluloid has been a staple of both the British colonial administrator and the post-independence Indian official. Soekarno appended a surprising footnote to this debate when he congratulated astonished Hollywood executives for being revolutionaries in Asia-by fueling the revolution of rising expectations, however unwittingly, with images of durable consumers goods in their productions.

More interesting is the evidence provided of the irrelevance of All India Radio's aspirations to revive classical Indian music and extend this revival to the masses. Radio Ceylon answered this utopian pipe dream with its most successful hit-parade of banned film songs on the Binaca Toothpaste Hour, reminiscent in its audience appeal of early "Amos and Andy" listener loyalty. It would be a grim paradox indeed if India's economic take-off were slowed down to any considerable extent by the unrealistically high cultural ambitions of the Indian political literati. Radio and documentary film both, by the evidence presented here, seem to be woefully out of touch with the masses they are supposed to be moving.

Linguists and anthropologists will find the unique language and culture complex of modern India very interesting as it impinges on film. The three major film centers at the advent of sound were outside the mainstream of Hindi-140 millions: Bombay-a market of 21 million Marathi; Madras-20 million Tamil; and Calcutta-53 million Bengali. This led to the Indian expedient of shooting a film in two languages, one's own and Hindi, which was not even as easy as that sounds, for what kind of Hindi would you use-Sanskritized? Persianized? lowbrow?

Other features will attract the comparative film scholar: the intense censorship tradition, and its double standard for Western and Indian films; the greater activism of the Indian audiences; the compulsory unhappy ending which is a formula in the "social" film; the ambiguous results of the blind-and block-booking of Government-made documentaries; the "talky," voiceover-narrative tradition of these documentaries which must appear in all of India's many languages; the undeveloped role of the film society in nurturing a sense of creativity; and, of course, the relationships of the great Ray to the main body of Indian motion pictures.

As regional and national cultures interpenetrate in the emergence of a global community, we will be fortunate if we have more clear, solid books like this one. Its Indian author came to Columbia University to get his M.A. and then returned to film production in Madras; the American author, a former network writer and one of our sanest academic analysts of mass communication, took a Fulbright to India to collaborate on this book. It is an earnest model of the kind of transnational collaboration that will make an international intellectual world a productive and satisfying milieu. This side of that paradise, we must suffer inadequate indexes with a grim smile-my only quibble with a very worthwhile volume.

Source: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 350, The Crisis in the American Trade-Union Movement (Nov., 1963), pp. 165-166 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. in association with the American Academy of Political and Social Science