Religion Has Shaped Indian Film
Prabhu Guptara discusses Indian film and film-makers, and the considerable influence which religious thought and values have had upon this medium
The Indian film industry started surprisingly early. The Lumiere brothers’ cinematrographe, invented on 28 December 1895, was exhibited in India just over six months later, on 7 July 1896. The following years were to see the later marvels, “Stewart’s Vitograph’, ‘Hughes’ Moto-Photoscope’, ‘the Andesonoscopograph’, and more developed machinery, in India. However, the first motion camera was ordered for an Indian in 1896, and was used to shoot several films including the first Indian newsreel in 1901. ‘Bioscope’ shows were regularly held in Bombay, Calcutta, and other places. Most of the films were naturally, imported.
The first Indian film-maker
The Indian feature film industry started under a clearly religious influence. For one of those imported films, a Life of Christ, inspired D. G. Phalke to undertake the making of films based on stories from Indian myths and legends. Phalke was originally trained for the hereditary task of priestand Sanskrit scholar, but showed a greater interest in photography, fine printing, painting, acting, and magical tricks. His name is unfortunately little known to western aficionados of film.
Phalke’s first film Raja Harischandra (King Harischandra), completed in 1912, was 3,700 feet long – probably the longest film then in existence. Phalke has been called ‘a special-effects genius’. He experimented with animation, with the use of colour and with scenic models, and combined in himself the roles of producer, director, editor, writer, cameraman, scenic artist, make-up man, and (for at least one film) that of actor-magician. In his penultimate film Setu Bandhan(Bridging the Sea), 1931, he used photo-synchronised dialogue for the first time in India.
To people unacquainted with Indian legends, the films must have appeared naïve, as indeed such films do today. But to those for whom these legends are charged with meaning, and religious meaning atthat, the films opened up a new world. When gods such as Shri Rama and Shri Krishna appeared on the screen, Indian audiences prostrated themselves. By 1917m Phalke had produced some one hundred films ranging from short documentaries, topicals, and trick films, to more substantial features.
Phalke laid the foundations of the Indian film industry. Indian in conception, expertise, execution and management, his mythological films appealed to the powerful religious instincts of his audience. His impressive success in drawing crowds persuaded many people to invest money in films, and encouraged many hopeful cinematographers to actually enter the field. Single-handed, Phalke made film an indigenous medium, appealing alike to villagers, city dwellers, and Indian emigrants in Burma, Singapore, East Africa and other parts of the world. In contrast, those who had exhibited imported films just a few years earlier had only catered to European residents in Bombay and Calcutta, and to sophisticated and westernized members of the Indian urban elites.
Not only did Indian feature films commence under religious inspiration and concentrate on religious subjects for decades, it was a religious film that first won an international film festival award (at Venice) for India – the Marathi language Sant Turkaram (Saint Turkaram), 1936, directed by V. Damle and S. Fathelal.
Religion and social values are inextricably intertwined everywhere, but nowhere more clearly than in ‘developing’ countries such as India. It was not surprising, and certainly not long before film-makers were helping to shape a new generation of Indians who did not have such a highregard for tradition as before.
Film articulated and catalysed change; it has been the single most powerful modernizing influence in India. This is at least partly because it began by tapping the religious sympathies of the vast majority of Indians, because it rarely strayed from where people actually were, and always seemed to put its finger on issues about which they were disturbed, issues such as caste, arranged marriages, dowry and widowhood. Indian film grew organically from Indian oil and was always conscious of the varied and even contradictory interests of its massive Indian audience with a hierarchical caste and class structure. Consciously or otherwise, Indian film has, in a variety of ways,recognized but sought to elude the tension between the city and the village in their dual aspects of image and locus.
Commercialism has its own in-built dynamics, however, and mythological and social films quickly gave way to more crassly ‘entertainment’ films. Ironically, the first casualty was Phalke himself, who did not make any films for the last thirteen years of his life because he felt unable to cope with the new commercial pressures. As an artist who took to film as an absorbingand deeply demanding art, he felt a deep distaste for the direction in which cinema was moving.
From 1940, the song-and-dance, hero-heroine-and-villain routine formula of entertainment films became increasingly entrenched. But it must be remembered that over the years, Indian film-makers have continued to treat religious subjects, covering every major subject from Indian myth and legend to Hindu-Muslim relations and the life of Mahatma Gandhi and the Buddha.
In a sense, the story describes something of a circle with the production in 1979 of a Tamil language film on the life of Jesus. This is only the third full-length film on Jesus to have been made by a non-Christian, the other two being Pasolini’s film version of The Gospel According to St. Mark, and Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth. What is surprising is not that a follower of traditional South Indian religion should have made the film, or that the film should have been a box office success in a predominantly non-Christian country: Indians are deeply interested in religious matters, are usually quite catholic in the religious leaders they esteem and have always held Jesus in high respect, though Christianity and churches draw less universal admiration.
What is surprising, in view of all this, is that it should have taken Indian film-makers so long to get on to such a potent subject as the life of Jesus. It is also somewhat strange that the film should have attracted so little attention abroad.
Christians in Indian film
From one point of view, it is only to be expected that few Indian Christians would be involved in film. They form, after all, less than 3 per cent of the population. But 3 per cent of the India’s massive population (680 million, according to the latest census) amounted even in 1900 to several million and, with the churches’ pioneering role in Indian education, a very large proportion of them were highly educated. Most of them, however, seem to have followed aspirations of bourgeois professionalism and became doctors, engineers, etc. Few of them took the arts seriously, even in areas of high Christian concentration such as south and north east India.
There were a few exceptions, however, such as the lone Indian Christian among 114 Europeans and 239 Indians, who gave evidence to the 1927 Indian Cinematograph Committee (its Report was published in four volumes, as Evidence: Indian Cinematograph Committee, 1927-28, by the Central Publications Branch of the Government of India, then at Calcutta.)
More recently, Mr. B.G. Verghese, a well-known and senior Indian journalist and editor, was appointed Chairman of a Working Group on the Indian radio and TV networks, Akashvani and Doordarshan. The report ofthis Working Group which recommended autonomy for both Akashvani and Doordarshan after the BBC pattern, was published as Akash Bharati (two volumes), by the Indian Ministry of information and Broadcasting at New Delhi in 1978 – ie before the General Elections brought Mrs Gandhi back to power. However, I understand that Akash Bharati has not been shelved, and is being considered by Mrs Gandhi’s government.
It is not generally known that ‘Sulochana’, a movie idol for two decades and the highest-paid actress in India in 1933, was the screen name of Ruby Meyers. Other actresses of interest to readers of this article include Indira Devi (Effi Hippolet), Lalita Devi (Bonnie Bird), Madhuri (Beryl Claessen), Manorama (Winnie stewart), Sabita Devi (Iris Gasper), and Sita Devi (Renee Smith). These early figures played a crucial part in making acting a socially acceptable profession for women, and forthis they must be honoured. The Indianisation of their western names may have been necessary for screen survival in the circumstances of those times, but it did symptomise a desperate need to ‘fit in’ with Indian society.
The situation today is more liberal with younger and promising actors like Benjamin Gilani not attempting to hide the religious affiliations of their upbringing, even if the extent to which they hold any Christian belief is not clear. It is possible that some kind of fellowship group based perhaps on the Arts Centre Group in the UK may spring up among them in the future, and help them to think through the relationship between their artistic work and their faith. This kind of thinking has rarely been attempted in the world of Indian cinema, though a pseudo-Marxist orientation is now evident in the work of some film-makers (eg Mrinal Sen); and the world-wide revival of Islam may inspire the production distinctively Islamic films – for India, surprisingly, has the third largest Muslim population in the world (after Indonesia and Bangladesh) but has not yet produced any Islamic films of note.
Committed film-makers: GIFTS
In an industry where rabid commercialism has almost eaten up art, it is not surprising that committed film-makers, of whatever persuasion, should find it more or less impossible to produce feature films. This area began to be opened to committed film-makers again, albeit on a severely limited scale, with the establishment of the Film Finance Corporation by the Government of India in 1960. This was a direct result of Satyajit Ray’s impeccable productions, beginning with his first film, Pather Panchali, which won the ‘best human document’ award at Cannes in 1954.
Christian film-makers who have attempted to think through the relationship between their faith and their films have, as might be expected, generally steered clear of feature films, though GIFTS (Galilean International Film and Television Service) has its first feature film in production at present, on the life of the remarkable mystic, Sadhu Sundar Singh. GIFTS describes itself as a non-profit, non-sectarian audio-visual organization established in 1977 to produce and distribute film, filmstrips and video programmes based on the message of Jesus. It plans to produce one feature film every year and, among other activities, ahs run an annual Basic Workshop in the production and use of audio-visuals sine 1979. It hopes to organize advanced-level and professional workshops in the future.
V. Senapathi: St. Thomas of India
The Sadhu Sundar Singh film is being directed by V. Senapathi, a TV producer with Doordarshan, Madras, who has several notable television programmes to his credit, including The Inner Radiane (1976), a 46-minute documentary on a blind automobile engineer whose inner strength and optimism shine through.
Senapathi has also produced T. Dayanandan Francis’s play St. Thomas in Tamil Nadu. This was, so far as I know, the first television programme on the life and impact of the doubting Apostle, who is reputed to have been martyred near Madras and to have seen many people in South India begin to live in communication with Jesus. Senapathi has also produced TV plays on Christian themes written by non-Christians. What isof greater interest are his more experimental efforts. Bethlehem Kuravanchi tells the Christmas story in the form of a Tamil dance drama, and Station of the Cross has Shri Stephen, a painter and batik artist, telling the story of the last few days of Jesus’ mortal life in a series of batiks that depict the mudras (symbols) of the Bharathanatyam school of dance drama.
The most ‘religious’ of Senapathi’s programmes are only implicitly ‘Christian’, being directed naturally towards information and education rather than evangelism. He feels that there is a need for more pointed material, but that the appropriate medium for that is not the national television system of a secular country but feature films – a field in which he plans to do more. Senapathi works in a solidly conservative film and TV tradition, influenced more by the indigenous film industry than by foreign models.
P.K. Rajhuns: ‘Think!”
Of the documentary film producers, perhaps the most outstanding is P.K. Rajhuns, who was recently awarded an honorary doctorate by an American college. Born in 1923, Rajhuns started his film career at nineteen as an apprentice in the Cinematography Department of the pioneer Prabhat Studios in Pune (now the site of the Film and Television Institute of India). By tenacity and sheer hard work, Rajhuns made the leap across the terrible gulf in India between a blue and a white collar worker, shifting to educational and documentary film-making in 1956 to become a producer-director. Though on the panel of producers approved by the government of India, Rajhuns also produced films for Indian and foreign non-governmental organizations. He is Honorary General Secretary of the Indian Documentary (Film) Producers Association. Filmfare Awards, the Indian equivalent of the ‘Emmy’ awards, invited him to serve on their panel of judges in 1975, 1976 and 1979.
Rajhuns has produced some 55 documentaries on subjects as wide-ranging as defence, agriculture, aircraft, wildlife, medicine, the railways and the postal services. The best work fro this phase of his life was The Danger Signal, a short documentary on the population explosion and the need for birth control, which won a Merit Award at the Oberhausen Youth Festival, as well as the Indian National Award for the best film in its category that year.
Four years later, Rajhuns almost lost his life from perforated stomach ulcers. As he was wheeled to the operating theatre for a final touch-and-go operation, helooked back on his life and evaluated it as vain and futile. He decided that if further life was granted to him, he would dedicated it to the service of God and of his fellow man. The doctors were pleasantly surprised when he survived the operation.
He then waited for a full and trying year to clarify what direction his life ought to take –‘for God’s orders’, as he puts it. Then he was invited to direct a film on the work ofa missionary organization that works among drug addicts in Europe; invitations to filmreligious and medical work followed, and Rajhuns finds himself back in the film world, but now with clear sense of purpose. His recent documentary Think! Think!! Think!!!, for example, focuses on man’s abuse of God’s gift of wisdom, which even tempts him to forget his obligations to God, to other people and to the otherwise beautiful environment we have been given.
The government of India’s Film Division not only approved of that film but, seeing the way Rajhun’s film-making was developing, commissioned a documentary from him on the Churches of Kerala, which he has just completed. According to the rules governing the showing of films in India, these two films will be among those that were dubbed in the 15 recognised Indian languages and regularly released for compulsory showing at the approximately 6,000 theatres and 26000 touring cinemas in the country which draw an average daily audience of over 11 million. The success of these informative and educational films has naturally cheered Rajhuns, and he is working on several projects, some of them more directly religious.
Raijhuns is more of an experimentalist than Senapathi, and though a wide variety of influence is evident from his films as a result of having grown up with films, his style is distinctive. The film-maker Rajhuns most admires is S. Sukhdev, little known outside India, and probably best known in India for his India’67, an oddly inspiring juxtaposition of India’s accomplishments and the tasks that remain. It used visuals and sound from all over the country in a manner that is both humorous and biting. The danger that faces Rajhuns is that of being sucked into the international Christian subculture and its lack of bite. But if he can continue to apply Jesus’ radical teachings and relate them to the problems facing India and the world, then Rajhuns may begin to have international stature.
Nathaniel Jacob: Documentaries
One committed film-maker who has a reputation abroad rather than in India, is the Bombay Bene Israeli Jew, Nathaniel Jacob. After graduating in Geology and physics from BombayUniversity, Jacob developed an interest in photography in London, where he has lived since, except for two spells in Israel. During the first of these, from November 1966 to April 1971, he became a ‘fulfilled’ or ‘Messianic’ Jew. On his second stint in Israel, Jacob was appointed Head of Television and Film at BenGurionUniversity, where he built up a department for closed-circuit as well as transmitted television, and for documentary film. For the last two years, Jacob ahs been an independent producer, based in London, and has worked on geographical, current affairs, nature and biographical documentaries.