Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Documentary Films in India: Critical Aesthetics at Work
Documentary Films in India: Critical Aesthetics at Work
Documentary Films in
India
Critical Aesthetics at Work
Aparna Sharma
Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance,
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
© Aparna Sharma 2015
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Introduction 1
Part I 27
1 Constructing the Self, Constructing Others: David
MacDougall’s Observational Films on Institutions
for Children in India 29
2 New Boys at the Doon School 56
3 Gandhi’s Children 78
Part II 105
4 An Arrested Eye: Trauma and Becoming in Desire
Machine Collective’s Documentary Installations 107
5 Passage 134
6 Residue 150
Part III 175
7 A Turn Towards the Classical: the Documentaries
of Kumar Shahani 177
8 The Bamboo Flute 212
Epilogue 237
Notes 243
Bibliography 256
Index 264
vii
List of Figures
viii
List of Figures ix
In many ways, this book traces its origins to the 2003 Beyond the Theory
of Practice Conference convened by Dr Clive Myer in Cardiff, UK. The
conference title referenced Noel Burch’s seminal 1973 book Theory of
Film Practice and it was oriented towards questioning the history and
future of reflexive and critical film practice, asking how contemporary
film pedagogies prepare students of film to raise the complex relations
of theory and practice. This question assumes weight in quite a specific
way for the field of film education. Often, given the capital-intensive
nature of filmmaking, film education gets polarized into Film Studies as
the scholarly pursuit, and Film Production as the creative and technical
pursuit. These binaries are limiting. In contemporary times, film educa-
tion is in need of a dialogue between practices and theories spanning
Film and Critical Cultural Studies.
Film and Documentary Studies specifically need to assimilate inter-
disciplinary approaches that overcome a persisting cultural blindness in
these fields. However, this move towards interdisciplinarity ought not
to be reduced to an exercise in cultural inclusion or assertion. The impe-
tus of Critical Cultural Studies in documentary is to foster appreciation
for the ways by which makers negotiate complex realities and histories,
institutional mechanisms and their own voices as practitioners – ways
that may not necessarily be explicit or transparent to the untutored eye.
Many times the efficacy of documentaries and documentary discourses
from outside the European and North American contexts is confused
with issues of decipherability. Documentary-makers across the world
work in highly specific contexts. The roles they adopt and the postures
they devise through their works are tied to the broader cultural, histori-
cal, political and technological contingencies and pressures those con-
texts present. Without appreciating those contexts, we are in a position
of lack with respect to engaging with those documentary practices. To
then impose criteria of decipherability alone as the measure of efficacy
is to unknowingly dominate and dilute disparate documentary practices
and agendas.
This book takes up three non-canonical documentary-makers from
India and follows their oeuvres to plot the methodological, political,
aesthetic and philosophical underpinnings of their works. My empha-
sis in this text is on placing these works within the context of broader
x
Preface xi
Thanks are due first and foremost to my teacher and fellow filmmaker,
Dr Clive Myer, who encouraged in my thinking an appreciation for
critical cinema and who, by his own example, taught me that the
values with which we make and appreciate films are inseparable from
the values by which we live our lives. I thank Dr Teri Brewer and Prof.
Michael Punt for their unfailing support during my career as a student
and filmmaker. Thanks are extended to convenors and respondents
at the following conferences where key portions of this book were
presented as research-in-progress: Visual Cultures in Contemporary India
(Aarhus University, 2011), Poetics and Politics of Documentary Research
Symposium (Aalto University, 2013) and Film Philosophy (Amsterdam
School of Cultural Analysis and Eye Film Institute Netherlands, 2013).
I acknowledge the Hellman’s Fellows Fund and UCLA Council for
Research, whose grants supported research for this book.
I thank all my colleagues at UCLA who engaged with me in discus-
sions about this work. Anurima Banerji shared her deep and compelling
insights into the history of Odissi dance. If D.D. Kosambi suggested
that India’s history is at one’s doorstep, Anurima reversed that, bring-
ing her entire research on the history of Odissi dance to my doorstep
in Los Angeles. Thank you. I extend deep thanks to Peter Nabokov for
his persistent encouragement, interest and enthusiasm for this project;
and to Saloni Mathur for following and reading this work with a close
eye and for those regular breakfasts where we talked through ideas and
approaches that shaped this book.
Thank you in particular to the anonymous readers whose atten-
tion, feedback and suggestions inform this book, despite the seeming
‘idiosyncrasies’ of this project at its start. Thank you to Chris Penfold,
Felicity Plester, Christabel Scaife and all staff at Palgrave Macmillan who
assisted with this project, and special thanks to Nick Brock for his sug-
gestions and careful eye in copy-editing.
Valuable support for the writing process came from senior colleagues
and friends: Diane Negra, Lucy Bolton, Helen Rees, Lisa Lewis, Chrissie
Harrington, Andrew Petit, Inga, James, Amarjit, Rachel, Danielle, Ally,
Tajender, Mona, Jean and Juliet.
I thank my mother for her Presence in my life, and my father, in
whose breath I have heard that no matter the borders we are forced
xii
Acknowledgements xiii
imaginaries do their film forms and aesthetics devise, and how do those
advance our understanding of the nation and its experiences? These
questions assume particular relevance in India whose trajectory as a
modern nation has been rather complex.
A variety of approaches mark the ways in which the self appears in the
Indian documentary today. These include the openly autobiographical
films, those that approach the autobiographical through biographies
of others and films that use autobiographical elements to interrogate
the nature of the filmic encounter. (Gadihoke 2012: 146–7)
The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is,
for a living creature, to be intervolved in a definite environment, to
identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed
to them. (2006: 94)
Scarcely twenty years were enough to make two billion people define
themselves as underdeveloped.
and short films per year, making it one of the world’s largest documentary
producers at the time (Rajadhyaksha in Nowell-Smith ed. 1997: 683).
It focused largely on the production of instructional and educational
films that were rooted in IFI’s approach. In the late 1950s it also
started two new arms, the National Education and Information Films
Ltd and the Cartoon Film Unit. With its active production of films,
the Films Division devised an institutionalized form of documentary
representation.
I draw here on Noel Burch’s concept of the Institutional Mode of
Representation (IMR) that he uses to classify cinematic codes of main-
stream film.16 Burch’s discussion pertains to classical cinema that he
argues as interpellating the viewer as a ‘voyeur’, an incorporeal individ-
ual with no affective relation to what they see or hear (1990: 250). I find
Burch’s concept of the IMR applicable to the institutionalized documen-
tary form perpetuated by the Films Division. This institutionalized form
of documentary, which continues to some measure in the contemporary
moment, is principally instructional and expository in a very prosaic
way. Its formal elements include an informative and verbocentric narra-
tion based on the voice of an authoritative, often western-accented male
speaking over images that are purely understood as evidence, illustrative
of facts and information.
A clear persistence with the instructional approach of the FAB and IFI
documentaries from the war years is evident in the FD’s work. The FAB
and IFI films made extensive use of Indian music for background sound;
approached shots in the spirit of giving a flavour of things; and were pre-
dominantly verbocentric, narrated in the voice of an often essentialising,
white male figure. This voice structured documentary discourse in terms
of deciphering and interpreting India,17 which was portrayed as a foreign
land with very particular ways of living. The FD institutionalized this
style through which viewers, in a manner quite like the classical cinema
Burch critiques, became incorporeal entities who documentary informs
and educates in a quite unilinear and pedantic way. Commenting on
the bases of the FD’s institutionalized style, film historians Barnouw and
Krishnaswamy note that:
From the very beginnings of the system, the films were under the con-
trol of ministry [Information & Broadcasting] representatives with little
or no film background. Some were men of considerable education,
products of a highly verbalized culture. To them, it was quite naturally,
the words in the narration that counted. The pictures – subsidiary, in
their view – that would accompany those words could safely be left
Introduction 13
to others. The typical Films Division film has had constant narration,
crowded with information. (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980: 201)
The Films Division promoted broadly two kinds of films, both at the
service of India’s nation-building agenda.18 The first kind emphasized
the benefits of modernized development. They focused on such themes
as industrialization, the building of dams, and the spread of hygiene
in villages – depicting a whole gamut of public programmes and pub-
lic sector utilities in affirmative terms and often deploying Nehruvian
iconography of industrialization. The second kind of films, follow from
IFI’s films on India’s crafts and cultures. They have been loosely termed
as ethnographic documentaries that take up subjects including folk arts,
crafts, India’s festivals and numerous communities. These ethnographic
films celebrate India’s cultural diversity, visualizing in celebratory terms
India’s national dictum of ‘unity in diversity.’ They are not grounded
in any serious visual ethnography research principles. Film historian
B.D. Garg has critiqued these, stating that:
Kapur holds the new Indian documentary as a tool aligned with strug-
gles for social justice against global capital with which nation states
such as India are increasingly complicit. A key protagonist for Kapur in
this scenario has been Anand Patwardhan, whose documentaries have
confronted a whole range of issues, including the 1975 Emergency, the
slums of Mumbai, the people’s movement against the Narmada Dam
Project, India’s caste politics and the links between Hindutva fascistic
ideology and the crisis of Indian masculinity. Patwardhan’s essayistic-
investigative form has focused consistently on the intensifying cleav-
ages in Indian polity and society, those undercurrents that set ablaze
in the confrontations between citizens and state apparatuses. Kapur
goes on to note how the documentaries of the younger filmmaker,
Amar Kanwar on subjects such as ethnic and tribal minorities, envi-
ronmental degradation and the India–Pakistan partition constitute an
alternative, a generational advance over Patwardhan’s essayistic docu-
mentary form. The notable distinction between the approaches of the
two documentarists – the former historical and probing at the level
of discourse; the latter more subjective, open-ended and vulnerable –
according to Kapur, references a ‘generational change in the nature
and pursuit of politics itself’ (2008: 45).
18 Documentary Films in India
Black waters gushing out of sewage pipes into an open field. Lumps
of human faeces floating in choked lavatories. Children peering out
through the cracked glasses of rusted windows. These images recur in
Gandhi’s Children, ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall’s 2008
film about a shelter home and juvenile detention center for home-
less and orphaned children in New Delhi. We could dismiss these as
stereotypical images of poverty and destitution from the third world,
but in Gandhi’s Children, which documents everyday life at the shelter,
these recurrent images expose the viewer to the sensory extremities
the shelter’s inmates face on a daily basis. The inmates are destitute
children: lost, abandoned, runaway, ailing, criminal, violent – and
equally, if not more often, violated themselves. Gandhi’s Children fol-
lows these inmates’ life stories and their experiences at the shelter.
This is not done in a conventional voiceover-led, expository style of
documentary. The film is shot principally from within the shelter and,
using the principles of observational cinema, MacDougall follows the
everyday goings-on here.
The film is punctuated with images of the Delhi vista as seen from the
narrow windows of the shelter. The winter air is hazy; a ring of dense
smog encircles the city and the piercing cold, we see, bites both skin
and bone. Through the entwining of this grey and cold panorama with
the living conditions at the shelter, MacDougall subtly gestures to the
position of destitute children in Delhi – and, given this is happening in
India’s capital city, within Indian society more broadly. But MacDougall
29
30 Documentary Films in India
opposition. This chapter examines the first film in the quintet, Doon School
Chronicles, whose essayistic structure clearly suggests how colonial-
ism’s cultural and epistemic constructs permeate and shape the Doon
School’s imaginations of the nation, nation-building as a process of
modernization and, given that it is a boys’ boarding school, its concep-
tion of masculinity. This film also alerts us to the exclusionary dynamics
and the processes of othering rooted in the school’s cultural discourses.
These processes of othering are advanced by the fourth and fifth films
in the quintet, The New Boys and the The Age of Reason, which are stud-
ied in chapter 2. Chapter 3 focuses on Gandhi’s Children, examining the
home’s treatment of destitute children. The home in which this film is
set is run by an NGO with funding support from various state, national,
private and foreign sources and stands as a concrete statement of soci-
ety’s will to provide welfare. As the film reveals, however, this will is
interrupted and compromised through the home’s bureaucratized and
summarily dismissive approach towards its inmates.
A second area of my study considers how the selected films derive
from the broad tenets of observational cinema and extend its emphasis
on reflexivity in terms of the filmmaker–subject relationship. I specifi-
cally examine how a filmmaker’s relation with their subjects shapes film
narrative, constituting the basis for the insights and meanings offered
by the films. One defining feature of observational cinema is its empha-
sis on exposing the relation/s filmmakers develop with their subjects.
Observational filmmakers hold that the filmmaking process situates
filmmakers and subjects into a social contract or relationship. This rela-
tion is the basis for the knowledge, meanings and understandings that
a film offers. In contrast to popular documentary, observational cinema
holds that the filmmaker and the cinematic apparatus are not an objec-
tive or omniscient presence and that, therefore, it is necessary that the
filmmaker–subject relation/s be made transparent to the viewer. This is
to enable the viewer to appreciate the processes by which the knowl-
edges and understandings films offer, have been elicited. The centrality
of this concern in observational cinema is neatly summarized by Colin
Young’s comment on the filmmaker–subject relation:
The scope of this film is vast and it considers a number of subjects: the
school’s formal and informal pedagogies; its numerous official and sub-
cultural rituals; issues of community building across the school’s diverse
student body; the school’s aesthetic, including students’ visual cultures;
hierarchies instituted and endorsed by the school’s dominant cultural
discourses and the numerous subcultural formations within the larger
school body. In this work, MacDougall engages with a cross-section of
students and school staff who share their views and perspectives on
the school’s ideals and practices, expressing how the school culture has
been shaped in contemporary times, when it commands an established
and unshakeable profile for producing luminaries across fields.
MacDougall approaches the Doon School as a constructed community
where individuals come to share in common experiences (MacDougall
2006: 96). This approach to the school as a constructed community
is tied to observational cinema’s central tenet that people’s subjectivi-
ties are co-extensive of the landscapes and environments they inhabit.
Accordingly, landscapes and environments are not abstract categories
have seen any students – the subjects of the film – we are made aware
of them constituting numerical figures within the school’s bureaucratic
set-up. The uninhabited school uniforms announce the film’s thematic –
the relation between uniformity and individuality, between community
and the individual. To indicate that this theme is not an imposition
of the filmmaker but that it has historical currency and has occupied
debate within the school, at the end of this sequence MacDougall shares
a comment from the school’s first headmaster, A. E. Foot through an
intertitle:
A year ago the present members of the Doon School were an assort-
ment of two hundred boys from all over India. Now you can think
of yourselves as a pack of cards all with the same pattern of blue and
grey on your backs; on the other side is each boy’s special character. –
A. E. Foot, Headmaster, 1936.
Our first encounter with the students occurs when we see them
respond to a roll call. The camera faces them frontally. In a neat file,
students step forward, responding to their names being called out by
an authoritative figure, who is outside the film frame. The camera’s
angle is low and this viewing position emphasizes the students’ place
in a hierarchical set-up. They are filmed looking up to the figure of
authority who calls out their names, to whom they respond as ‘Sir.’ The
film’s title follows this sequence and the film then cuts into a scene
where schoolboys are seen being measured for height and weight. This
regimen features repeatedly through the film, highlighting the school’s
emphasis on physicality.
The next scene shows a group of boys in their dorm interacting with
MacDougall, who is teaching them how to use a camera. It is thus revealed
to us that this filmmaker does not approach his subjects purely as inform-
ants. He shares his apparatus with them, and trains them to use it. Theirs
is a cinematic contract and it is clearly dialogic, involving exchange
between subjects and the filmmaker. As one of the boys frames shots, the
others are seen making poses for him. The sequence then cuts to a series
of stills from the group. As images freeze on the screen, synchronous
sound continues and a temporal confusion occurs. We have seen similar
freeze frames earlier in the film, in its opening school uniforms sequence.
In these sequences, we sense time is flowing because the sounds of the
scene continue, but we are seeing still images in which time is frozen.
The stilling of images with sound flowing in the background cre-
ates a complex reflexive instance in this film – alerting us to, through
40 Documentary Films in India
thinking and probing deeper into the experience of time. She elaborates
on this, stating that:
At a time when new technologies seem to hurry ideas and their rep-
resentations at full tilt towards the future, to stop and to reflect on
the cinema and its history also offers the opportunity to think about
how time might be understood within wider, contested, patterns of
history and mythology. Out of this pause, a delayed cinema gains a
political dimension, potentially able to challenge patterns of time
that are neatly ordered around the end of an era, its ‘before’ and its
‘after.’ (Mulvey 2009: 22–3)
Following from Mulvey, the stilled images sequence at the start of Doon
School Chronicles can be seen as confusing temporalities and this com-
pels us to ask what constitutes the present: that which we hear and is
flowing, or, that which we see and is frozen? The sequence only lasts
for a few moments and MacDougall cuts back to the scene in the dorm.
We see the same group of boys sharing biscuits among themselves and
offering some to MacDougall. After this, we see a first exterior shot of
the school’s main building, showing its colonial-style architecture. This
first resonance of a colonial imaginary is crucially timed and it builds
upon the sense of temporal confusion that has been provoked by the
sequence involving still images. In placing the still images sequence
before suggesting the colonial ties of the Doon School, MacDougall
has introduced a subtle theme that is explored in this film and also
all his other works based in India: how the country negotiates her
colonial past. Is the colonial past squarely in the realm of the past, or
are its remains somewhere hidden and suppressed, bursting forth on
particular instances in the present? The remainder of the Doon School
Chronicles will dwell on this as it will with some of the other themes
the film’s opening has raised, namely: the uniform/community vs
individual; the Doon School’s preoccupation with the male body in
physical terms; and reflexivity in terms of the social mediation between
filmmaker and subjects.
Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz have noted how the film’s opening sets
up MacDougall’s approach to the institution as an aesthetically con-
structed environment. They hold that approaching the school in this
way facilitates understanding how the educational experience it offers is
based on very select values that are embodied in the school’s aesthetic.
They state:
times, particular styles of speech and gesture, and the many rituals
of everyday life that accompany such activities as eating, school
gatherings, and sport (itself already a highly ritualised activity).
(MacDougall 2006: 98)
English Public Schools have often been criticized, but… these schools
do attempt to develop those qualities of responsibility, of self-reliance
and of discipline which are so essential for all public service. –
Sir Jagdish Prasad, School Board of Governors, 1937.
discourse4 – the idea that India, following colonial rule, was in a state
of ‘essential lack’ across many arenas (food, energy, defence, to name
a few). This was the basis of India’s development needs, which it was
understood could be fulfilled through applications of science. She states:
The identity of the new India was defined in terms of the privileged
place that it accorded to science and technology in all arenas of life.
For instance, techno-scientific artifacts such as dams, steel plants,
and atomic reactors were hailed as the icons of the new nation-state.
Policy debates on the many problems and needs that India faced in
economic, educational, social and cultural arenas emphasized their
solution through the application of the objective methodologies and
neutral rationalities of science. (Roy 2007: 114)
…an early 20th century recipe for the ideal school boy… it may have
something to do with the imperial view of leadership and growth[,]
and the mould that a society that looked at militancy as a way of
expression expected its men to grow and behave.
The headmaster adds that as times have changed the need to believe
in these as ‘the only outlets for expression or the only ways by which
a person can become a man’ has successively diluted. But Doon School
Chronicles clearly contests this.
In this film, as in the entire Doon School Project, MacDougall con-
structs very detailed sequences around exercise, sports and sports com-
petitions, dwelling on physical skills and minutiae, training methods
and the students’ social and emotional dispositions in relation to sport.
We repeatedly see images of students rising and attending morning PT
(physical training) exercises. Contingents of schoolboys are seen per-
forming march-pasts at various school events. In their recreational hours
the Doon boys are seen undertaking games such as cricket, table tennis,
boxing or chess – their games always laden with subtle undertones of
interpersonal rivalry. At the Founder’s Day, when the alumnae visit the
school, we see them too engage in sports activities such as playing a
tug-of-war and the incumbent students performing a PT display using
torch-lights that heighten the militant undertones of physical exercise. In
With Morning Hearts (the second film of the quintet) and Karam in Jaipur
(the third film of the quintet), MacDougall follows individual students
through sports regimes: preliminary competitions for qualification to
participate in sports events, fitness regimes, preparations for and perfor-
mance in the finals, and how those students approach the outcomes –
success or failure. Further endorsement for the physical aesthetic at the
school comes through the motivational events that are organized when
famous national sports personalities visit the school and address the
students. In Doon School Chronicles we see a sequence in which Kapil
Dev, who had captained India to its first Cricket World Cup victory in
1983, visits the school. He interacts with the Doon boys, emphasizing
the importance of physical discipline in order to achieve international
acclaim in one’s chosen field. In these various contexts we are exposed to
students’ sentiments towards sport that to some degree evoke the ethos
48 Documentary Films in India
‘gentleman cadets’ entering the armed forces. One of the most prestigious
military academies in the subcontinent, the IMA’s curriculum holds
physical fitness as essential to the skillful and accurate performance of
defence functions that bear directly upon national security and sove-
reignty. Physical fitness is conceived in tightly defined terms spanning
exercise, freedom from contagion and an overall practice of orderly
life. Exercise is a crucial disciplinary mechanism within this schema as
it enhances the performance of physically oriented military functions;
and facilitates the classification of body types, their functions and
graduated situation within the rank and file of the military. In this con-
ceptualization, the body is hollowed out of all cultural associations and
it is constructed as a carrier of national will for security and sovereignty.5
The Doon School liaises with the IMA, particularly for sports. Some of
the physical trainers at the school are retired military officers. In some
sequences we see a military band playing to performing students, for
instance, in a march-past or during a PT display. One sequence of exer-
cises and march-past concludes with a senior army officer commending
the boys on their performance. The viewer can discern correspondences
between the IMA’s discourse on physicality and the Doon School’s
physically dominated aesthetic. While the IMA does not directly influ-
ence the school, its physical discipline bears symbolic value for it.
If the Doon School’s association with the IMA spans the field of sports
and physical discipline, its liaison with the Forest Research Institute
(FRI) advances a pursuit for order by qualifying the body’s relation
to the physical world. The Doon School was founded on the former
grounds of the FRI and it continues to use some of its old buildings. The
FRI was set up in 1906 to undertake scientific observation and to classify
the plants and wilderness produce in the region. With this functional
remit, the FRI can be understood as epitomizing a colonial relation of
the Occident to the Orient – the former with the command of science
‘studying’, categorizing and thus bringing under classified order, in
quite clinical terms, the natural world of the latter. The aesthetic of
the Doon School campus is based on the principles by which British
administrators constructed the FRI campus. Open and natural spaces are
linked to buildings in a fashion through which nature appears to be on
constant and ornamental display. There is no unruly or disorderly wil-
derness; and the grounds and lawns are neatly designed and manicured.
School flora, including trees and plants, are labeled with their biological
names. Beyond the school’s flora, a natural history museum on campus
traces and classifies the animate world, with the human situated at the
helm of the evolutionary cycle.
Constructing the Self, Constructing Others 51
In its closing segments, Doon School Chronicles maps the ways by which
an exclusionary dynamic operates at the Doon School. First, in conver-
sations with MacDougall, the students, both individually and in groups,
share their perceptions of the school environment. Many students indi-
cate that the school’s male ideal sits in stark contrast with the masses of
citizen subjects who are distanced from and located outside the school
environment. One student offers a succinct comment on this when
MacDougall asks if the school environment feels ‘real?’ The student
states that it is ‘not real at all. It’s pretty artificial.’ He lists the many
opportunities, the green fields, the tennis courts, and boys laughing
all around – attributes of a constructed school environment, what he
52 Documentary Films in India
The Doon School has conducted its national identity and citizenship
dialogue through such a ‘science’ of personality which has emphasized
the need to develop the secular, rational, metropolitan citizen, and
the depredations of the opposite personality-type upon the health
of civil society. The conflict becomes one between the ‘modern’ type
of personality – the light of the nation state – and the ‘backward’
psyche, forever ready to undermine its integrity. (Srivastava 1998: 10)
Doon School Chronicles ends on a quiet and somewhat somber note. Using
the observational method that suppresses explicit interpretation and
didactic conclusions in favour of a more subtle and derivative approach,
this film has introduced us to the Doon School community from multi-
ple perspectives. It has minutely followed the school as a unique cultural
and social environment; traced its history, which is entwined with India’s
nation-building project; exposed how that informs the school’s epistemo-
logical and cultural discourses; mapped the emphasis on scientific and
rational thought within the school community; and also shown how
those are complemented by the school’s physically dominated aesthetic.
The film has explored issues such as community formation and con-
formism within the school. In its concluding sections it has taken an
impassioned view of the institution, following regimes of punishment
and bullying that introduce viewers to the school’s exclusionary dynam-
ics and processes of ‘othering’ that the film indicates are not isolated
instances, but tied to the school’s broader discourse on masculinity.
The Doon School has a tightly defined idea of national progress and
the processes of nation-building. It sees its pedagogies and cultural
Constructing the Self, Constructing Others 55
The films The New Boys (2003) and The Age of Reason (2004) follow the
experiences of newcomers to the Doon School. The first film does this
through focusing on the experiences of a new class and the second
examines the experiences of a single student from that class, a Nepali
boy called Abhishek Shukla. The students featured in these films pro-
vide a unique perspective on the school – an outsider-becoming-insider
viewpoint. They are beginners who enter and explore the school;
accept, resist and adapt to it; and also question and transact its practices
and discourses. Through their eyes the school experience becomes more
immediate and textured than that to which we were exposed in Doon
School Chronicles. In the earlier film the school we encountered was an
institution constructed in tightly defined terms and one that followed
deeply entrenched practices of learning and living. The students who
we saw, mostly seniors, had been at the school for a number of years
and so they had devised their own methods for navigating through its
environment. Having found a place for themselves in the school, they
bore a more or less predetermined disposition in relation to it.
In The New Boys and The Age of Reason MacDougall introduces us to
a group of newcomers who are entering the school and who are yet
to form a relationship with it. As such, they represent any number
of possibilities and potentials for the relations with the school, as an
institution, and within it as, for example, between peers, colleagues,
and the school’s environment including its little, innocuous corners.
In these films we see newcomers encounter the school’s dominant and
numerous subcultures; the rhythms and ways of life at the school; its
sense of community, its hierarchies, and how authority is expressed and
enacted in its numerous contexts, both formally and informally. As the
group of newcomers begins to form their own sense of collectivity and
56
New Boys at the Doon School 57
The New Boys focuses on a group of entrants to the Foot House – one of
the two dorms that the school designates for newcomers. Functioning
as holding houses, these dorms help them to adapt gradually to the
school environment. Their aim is to foster a sense of community among
the newcomers and thus to soften the transition from home into this
boarding institution. The film spans the newcomers’ first term (four
months) at the school, and it begins by focusing on the processes of
their initiation into the school environment.
58 Documentary Films in India
The film opens with shots of Dehradun’s streets, referencing the world
beyond the school. We are thus positioned near the new boys for, like
them, we too will enter the school from outside. The next part of the
film takes us inside the Foot House where the school staff are seen pre-
paring the house to receive the newcomers. Beds are being made, win-
dows are cleaned, and boxes containing students’ belongings are moved
and placed next to beds assigned for each student. Mothers and boys
tally lists of personal belongings. Some parents converse, sharing why
they selected the Doon School. Some are Doon School alumnae them-
selves and they comment on how much the Foot House has changed
since their time. Some boys are introduced to their housemates while
others scan their new home with a gaze laden as much with inquisitive-
ness as it is with anxiety at the novelty of this whole encounter.
In the following sequence of the film, the school’s headmaster wel-
comes the new class at a reception held for both parents and students.
This meeting has an atmosphere of excitement and achievement
because the newcomers are understood as having been accepted at the
school following a rigorous process of selection. At night, after dinner,
the entire class of new boys is seen in their dorm’s study room, called
the toye room, where each newcomer introduces himself with his
name and the region from where he is coming. The class is composed
of students from diverse backgrounds, including some from countries
neighbouring India. MacDougall moves through the toye room from
one newcomer to the next, framing each individually. Through this
visual introduction the film establishes its intention to follow the new-
comers as individuals, by exploring their unique personalities. This is
an important undertaking after Doon School Chronicles which had raised
issues of individuality, community formation and conformism within
the community of Doon School.
upper edges of the film frame. Though visually we could argue that this
pointing of the subject’s gaze beyond the film frame is disorienting for
the viewer, in the context of the Foot House, it emphasizes the human
element in the footies’ performances before the camera.
A most comical instance occurs one evening when the boys share the
process of calling up a ghost. Late in the night, they are in their dorm,
dressed and preparing to go to bed. A group gathers around MacDougall
and two footies begin to describe how to conduct the process of calling
a ghost, its requirements and its outcomes. Others interrupt them with
questions and clarifications; and everyone appears enraptured by what
they are hearing. The two footies who describe the process appear very
conscious and dramatic before the camera, dramatizing in their descrip-
tions how the process of calling up a ghost can go wrong and what the
negative outcomes can be. It is evident in the footies’ exaggerated per-
formance that the filmmaker’s presence has provoked their expression
of interest in the other-worldly. Besides the entertainment value of this
sequence, where we see children at their performative best, within the
broader context of the Doon School project, this interaction serves to
shift and extend MacDougall’s focus away from the dominant cultural
discourse of the school. The footies’ faith in the occult stands in clear
opposition to the school’s emphasis on scientific thought and rationalism
and, therefore, it constitutes a competing and non-normative perspective
from within the school community.
students hold that the confrontations are at the level of the dorms and
houses only, all in a healthy spirit of competition. These confrontations
do not pertain to individuals. Others vehemently contest this and argue
that the confrontations can be more deep-seated and vicious, almost
like the India–Pakistan conflict. The students continue to argue and
MacDougall allows the camera to linger on this discussion. As viewers,
we are sensitized to the volatility in this exchange, the impossibility
of a resolution, and how promptly differences within the school com-
munity become transposed onto broader and imagined categories such
as the nation, its others, its strategic ‘enemies’. If differences surface
spontaneously, we see that equally spontaneously the footies resolve
their conflicts and develop friendly relations with their housemates.
They play games together and participate in collective projects such as
fruit picking and pickling, all of which foster a sense of camaraderie.
In the concluding sections of The New Boys the footies are seen prepar-
ing to leave for their holidays at the end of term. The film closes with
shots of bed linen being removed by house staff and we return to where
we started. The film ends by coming full circle as the newcomers’ first
term at the Doon School ends. As the footies are seen leaving we are
reminded of their earliest moments when they had first arrived at the
Doon School. There is now a visible contrast in their demeanours and
dispositions towards the school environment. There is a perceptible
sense of belonging to the school and a feeling of being at ease in it. The
footies know and relate with people across the campus, be they their
housemates, classmates, teachers or school staff. This is unlike their first
days here when most footies, no matter their personality, felt vulnerable
not knowing the environment or having any sense of connection with it.
The Foot House is a smaller environment within the larger school and
it can be understood as loosely liminal in that it is the space where new-
comers arrive and from where they make a transition into the school.
At the Foot House, the footies are, for the first time, by themselves and
their tenure here is a period as much of exploring their new environ-
ment as it is for understanding how they themselves function and
move through this new social space. The Foot House culture displays
attributes similar to those that Victor Turner defines in his discussion
of the liminal phase in his study, Liminality and Communitas (1969, eds.
2008).1 While the Foot House does not offer a transition in terms of a
rite of passage in a more formal or event-oriented sense, attributes such
as transition, the absence of status and rank, equality, and communitas –
we see these operating loosely in the environment of the Foot House. It
is a liminal site in which newcomers negotiate leaving home and adapt
New Boys at the Doon School 63
They are all individuals still. It is not a group as yet. But I think it’s
early maybe… Maybe after the holidays it’ll change. Because one
holiday, when they go back, they start missing their friends. This is
the first holiday they’ll go back. And usually when they come back,
they’re totally different from the first term. Some of them really want
to come back, that feeling they’ve never had before.
With Morning Hearts (2001), the second film in the Doon School project
also surrounded a new class at the Foot House and in comparing the
two films MacDougall himself notes how the footies in The New Boys
were particularly differentiated. He states:
In filming The New Boys I was surprised to find that the social dynam-
ics of the new group were quite different from those of the previous
group. The boys seemed more divided, argumentative, and class-
conscious. There was much less of the former group’s solidarity or
kindness toward one another. Certain boys were subject to teasing;
others remained isolated and quietly unhappy. My filming this time
focused more on themes of homesickness and conflict. And yet I felt
an affection for many of these boys, for they were as spirited and
inventive as the former group. It seemed as if they were more unsure
64 Documentary Films in India
The New Boys does not present the footies’ differences in a spirit of either
dismissing their behaviours and dispositions as infantile, or celebrat-
ing, in a patronizing way, the diversity of their personalities or cultural
backgrounds, a feeling one might have gathered at the start of the film
when the students introduced themselves. MacDougall’s take on the
experiences and disparities of this group of footies draws attention to
the volatile mechanisms and dynamics through which individuals in
the group are mobilized and partake in community-formation. Though
we have seen the footies devising camaraderie among themselves and
becoming accustomed to the ways of the school, as the film closes there is
a sense that there are differences between the footies and, more crucially,
the school offers limited tools to address those differences constructively.
Sitting within a broader portrait of the Doon School, The New Boys
raises how differences in ways of thinking, intelligence and culture get
overlooked and/or subsumed within the Doon School’s broader cultural
framework. The last film of the quintet, The Age of Reason, raises this more
deeply and it is the subject of the next part of this chapter.
encounters and experiences as the basis for the film. It is highly reflexive,
grounded in a trusting and creative friendship that Shukla develops
with MacDougall. This friendship allows the expression of the indi-
vidual personalities of both Abhishek and, to an extent, MacDougall,
providing the film with much of its contents. The film, I hold, can be
understood as a subtle montage that juxtaposes Shukla’s sense of dis-
placement in an institution, which offers limited means for attending
to cultural difference, with his relation to MacDougall that constitutes
a creative platform through which he explores and expresses himself in
remarkably intelligent and articulate terms. For the purposes of analysis,
the film can be divided into two parts: the first focuses on Shukla’s early
encounters at the Doon School that raise his cultural differences; the
second part of the film focuses more deeply on him as an individual,
exploring his unique personality. This occurs after Shukla feels a bit
settled in the school. The two parts focus on two competing ways of
understanding Shukla: the first based on the normative approach of
the school community towards Shukla as a foreigner; and the second,
contesting his foreignness as indecipherable in favour of an empathetic,
textured and rounded portrait of his personality.
Having given the viewer a cue to the film’s origins, MacDougall lays
the ground for Shukla’s entry. Some of the shots with which The New
Boys introduced newcomers arriving at the Foot House are repeated,
and viewing the two films together we can appreciate how the same
footage assumes disparate meanings when used and contextualized for
different purposes. As students are seen settling inside the Foot House,
MacDougall adds:
It’s the first day of classes and last year’s boys are helping the new
ones get ready. One of the new boys is Abhishek Shukla who seems
to be turning up wherever I am filming. He’s become a little like my
shadow. And he seems interested in the camera.
These words coincide with a shot of Shukla peering into the lens; his
face becoming enlarged in close-up as he leans towards the camera.
The effect of this sequence is heightened by the application of a slow-
motion effect that clearly positions Shukla as the film’s focus; his inter-
est in the camera being the starting premise for the film. A sequence of
shots follows in which Shukla is seen enthusiastically looking into the
camera lens, pointing at and estimating what MacDougall is recording.
The British documentary editor and critic Dai Vaughan has com-
mented that this opening sequence places the viewer into a distinct
order of discourse, one that takes MacDougall’s broader concern for rep-
resentation of childhood into a singularly individual realm. Vaughan
states:
of expression and all the factors that give that environment its particular
character. It can then be said that in observational cinema, observation
is not passive or inert looking and documentation of a subject. It implies
following the observed with a sense of respect towards them that in turn
opens new lines for film narrative.
MacDougall did not dismiss or hold Abhishek Shukla’s attraction
towards the camera, his repeated peering into its lens, his overall
inquisitiveness surrounding the whole apparatus as interferences with
the filmmaking process. He followed them as unexpected encounters,
avenues through which to devise a possible relationship with a new
subject. Unlike earlier films from the quintet in which the filmmaker–
subject relations remained limited as the films were focused on collec-
tive bodies (with the exception of Karam in Jaipur); The Age of Reason
spans a narrative arc in which this relation traverses different points of
closeness and distance shaped through a medley of spontaneous inter-
actions, open-ended dialogues, creative thought, empathetic support
and playful engagements – all resting on the sheer interest of both
subjects towards each other.
and accent. Shukla counters him firmly. He does not stop polishing
his shoes and, without making eye contact with the mocking peer, he
questions – ‘so what’, if he is different? Shukla is determined not to
stand by passively and be exposed to ridicule. In addition to obvious
indicators such as accent, Shukla’s foreignness also surfaces because of
his unique perspectives on topics such as culture. In an interview, one
of the house staff raises this with MacDougall, stating that Shukla has
‘a lot to offer the school’ and she is concerned that his difference might
make him ‘clam up’. Shukla’s distinct cultural perspectives are evident
in one of his earliest conversations with MacDougall. Shukla makes one
particularly revealing comment:
One thing that we did not have to learn in Nepali history that we
have to learn in Indian history is this thing that India was invaded
by foreigners.
This clearly sets up the historical and political disparities that distin-
guish Shukla’s subjectivity from that of his Indian peers. He goes on
to skeptically add that the history of Nepal that he has read posits it
as ‘a beautiful country that never fell into the hands of foreign rulers’.
We sense that he finds this jingoistic. He concludes his discussion with
MacDougall by stating that in modern times ‘development’ has tended
to be concentrated in the western world, even though Asia has always
been more developed – a statement in support of which he cites the
technological advances of the Indus Valley civilization. Through these
observations on South Asian history we are exposed to Shukla’s criti-
cal faculties: his ability to equally question colonialism and jingoistic
nationalism alongside his critical take on the hierarchies between the
first and third worlds.
Shukla and MacDougall’s friendship continues to grow and they both
become increasingly relaxed and open in one another’s company. Any
hierarchies, of age or life experience for example, take a back seat and
we are introduced to dimensions of Shukla’s personality as a child that
can only be documented in-the-moment, when his awareness of the
camera is less as a piece of technology and more as a social apparatus,
interacting with which is constructive for him. Shukla shares and per-
forms before MacDougall playful and witty activities such as cracking
riddles or reading a touching diary account of his first fortnight at the
Doon School. MacDougall follows Shukla through a range of activities,
including some innocuous ones: playing games with his peers, oiling
his hair or reading at bedtime. Shukla also entrusts his assignments and
70 Documentary Films in India
We reach out to others with our senses as a sort of probe (in films
through the extension of the camera) and make sense of them through
what we contain in ourselves. Our knowledge is transposed, or displaced,
toward them, so that it appears to be of them. (MacDougall 1998: 29)
is not that Rouch did not command a deep rapport with his subjects,
he clearly did and that is the basis of the cine-trance he devised. But the
histories that inform the subjectivities of filmmakers and subjects are
not as transparent in Rouch as they are in MacDougall. MacDougall’s
reflexive approach inaugurates lines of connection between subjects
and filmmakers by fully taking into account their histories and how
those impact their subjectivities, particularly in the context of filming.
The end of The Age of Reason is gestured at the moment when Shukla
clicks a picture of MacDougall. This instance registers the transforma-
tion that the film’s protagonist has undergone: a student who at the
start of the film was curious about a camera and that led him towards
the filmmaker is now seen composing his own photographic images of
the filmmaker. This transformation also marks his changed disposition
with relation to the school. When he had first been drawn towards
MacDougall’s camera he was a foreigner unconsciously seeking support
in a new environment. Though Shukla continues to be the subject of
MacDougall’s camera, his subjecting MacDougall to a photographic
gaze marks his full separation from the filmmaker. This separation coin-
cides with Shukla’s adaptation into the school environment, his find-
ing his own ways and rhythms, building community and confidently
conducting himself in it. He is now an adapted member of the school
community.
The term results are announced and Shukla begins to prepare to leave
for the holidays. While packing his belongings he shares his academic
results with MacDougall and shortly thereafter shows him a broken
tooth. The term results mark his academic progress and also the comple-
tion of one term at the school. His broken tooth indexes his ongoing,
natural passage into adulthood. The Age of Reason concludes with a
‘Postscript’ when Shukla returns back from vacation. MacDougall shares:
When I next see Abhishek five months have passed. It’s the time of
Diwali: the festival of lights. He’s well into the second term at school.
These days he rarely speaks to me as he once did. He seems far away
now – at home among his friends. But that, after all, is what we
wished for him.
MacDougall’s films surrounding the Doon School and the Rishi Valley
School offer disparate imaginaries of middle- and upper-middle-class
India, their perceptions and constructions of the ideal community,
often the nation, and the values of normative nationalism endorsed by
these classes. His next project, in which he points the lens away from
these well-to-do institutions, throws the viewer into a raw environment,
whose economic, social and cultural contours are as harsh and fragile
as they are in stark contrast with the environments we have seen until
now. In this project, MacDougall is both limited and poised to advance
deep reflexivity as he immerses himself and plots very precarious and
unstable narratives at a shelter home for destitute children in India’s
capital, New Delhi. The next chapter discusses Gandhi’s Children.
3
Gandhi’s Children
the home’s exteriors are images of the home’s interiors. The interior
shots focus on the inmates, who are introduced to us as they awaken to a
new day. They rise slowly from beneath thick quilts and go on to relieve
and wash themselves. MacDougall takes us inside their lavatories. These
are choked and water is scarce. After washing, we see the inmates gazing
into the open fields and the city in the far horizon through many of
the home’s windows and balconies. The winter sun casts a warm golden
hue on the children’s skin and its rays glint in their eyes. The murmur
of traffic rumbling at a distance mixes with the children’s voices, which
echo in the home’s sparsely furnished insides to form a dull cacophony.
Through this opening MacDougall interweaves two of the film’s
main themes. First, from the start the camera is positioned with-in the
Children’s Home, even when it looks at the city beyond. This empha-
sises the filmmaker’s closeness, and how he places himself in proximity
to the film’s subjects as opposed to looking at them or approaching them
from a distance. Through this position of proximity, the viewer, from
the start of the film, is positioned near to the home’s inmates and this
is a very powerful move. The inmates come from very impoverished
backgrounds and they are rarely, if ever, represented in any media,
except perhaps on the most stereotypical terms as symbols of third
world poverty and destitution. Further, the very location of the home
at Jahangirpuri Colony – a low-income, resettlement colony – means
that the home we are seeing has been deliberately placed away from
the center of India’s capital city. The inmates, much like the broader
population of Jahangirpuri, are subjects who will not be readily encoun-
tered in Delhi. In cartographic terms, they are distanced from the city’s
center and confined to its periphery. MacDougall’s emplacement of the
camera in the midst of the home’s inmates overcomes the institutional-
ized distancing of the inmates from public view, be that through the
location of the home at the city’s periphery or by way of the absence
of such subjects in media and the public imaginations more broadly.
Positioning the camera inside the home from the start also announces
the film’s intentions. This film aims to devise and advance feelings of
proximity with the inmates, hearing their stories and appreciating their
conditions on terms that are of value to them rather than based on cri-
teria imposed from the outside or distant from their lived experiences.
More concretely, by opening the film at dawn MacDougall places
a poetic imperative in the film. In seeing the inmates wake up, wash
and prepare themselves for the day ahead, we observe their bodies
making a most intimate transition from one state of consciousness to
another; from sleep to wakefulness. It is as if by showing the inmates as
80 Documentary Films in India
they make this transition, the film presents its commitment to project
destitute children as commanding a prerogative of mobility. The chil-
dren we see may be destitute, but it intends to follow how they make
meaning of their existence and express themselves – all with a view to
opening up their image, and advancing and complicating the viewer’s
understandings of destitute children. This is in line with MacDougall’s
broader concerns to explore how children’s viewpoints and experiences
can be depicted through cinema, countering any rationalizations or
analysis by which adults may attempt to comprehend their experiences.
Figure 3.1 Young inmates share a bed and quilts at the Prayas Children’s Home
Image courtesy, David MacDougall.
Gandhi’s Children 83
and as such their physical, cultural and emotional dispositions are each
quite distinct. They do not perform collective activities such as praying
or learning with a shared sense of purpose and vocabulary.
The first half of Gandhi’s Children dwells extensively on the processes
by which inmates are deposited at the home and how they adapt to
it. The camera closely follows the new inmates’ interactions with the
home’s staff. The staff receive the inmates, introduce them to the
home’s provisions and assist them by responding to their queries.
This task is delicate, its sensitivity heightened by the often-disturbed
emotional dispositions in which most newcomers arrive at the home.
MacDougall follows, in detail, the process of recording each new
inmate’s personal data when they arrive at the home. As we observe a
number of inmates recollecting the circumstances that brought them to
the home we are introduced to an entire under-economy that operates
on traffic in lost, abandoned and vulnerable children, situating them
in exploitative practices including child labour, crime and abuse. The
documentation of new inmates’ arrival and orientation processes at the
home, reveals that most have been previously arrested, some more than
once, during police raids at sites of illegal child labour such as railway
stations or factories.
Since the Doon School quintet we are aware of how the transition
into a boarding environment is a delicate and fragile process. But in
contrast to the feelings of homesickness and the seemingly more struc-
tured processes of adaptation that characterise this move in the Doon
School, in the context of the Prayas Home this experience is more tense,
emotionally volatile and often calls up a whole reorientation of the
inmates’ aspirations for their lives. Most newcomers state that they do
not want to be confined in a boarding environment. This environment
is constraining because they are not free to ‘roam the streets’ or earn
money. Some express the view that they do not want to be educated
since they feel that education will not provide them with the necessary
economic support and ‘freedom’ to which they are accustomed. A few
even indicate that the discipline the home will inculcate in them is at
odds with the lives they are used to living in the streets and that they
do not feel drawn towards – or even prepared to lead – a disciplined life.
As MacDougall sustains focus on the early interactions between
inmates and staff we are alerted to a bureaucratic mentality that charac-
terises the home’s approach to the inmates. At first the Home’s staff are
warm, cajoling and attempt to dispel any fears the newcomers express
towards the Home. But as most newcomers persist in their resistances
the staff lose patience. They retort back, isolate the inmates or silence
Gandhi’s Children 85
It returns to Abhay, who is now sitting fully clothed, having applied the
ointment. Without a prompt, he breaks into the following dialogue:
of objects in sight. This contrasts with the latter, optical visuality that
exposes those dimensions of phenomena that can be seen and perceived
by the eye – namely, colour and light. He elaborates, stating:
The eye merely conveys colored appearances, which may well con-
form to the actual contours of the thing itself, but do not necessarily
do so. It is only finally the sense of touch that can inform us about
the relative impenetrability of things. And all our impressions of
solid things, which we have absorbed via the detour of our visual
faculty, will finally revert us back to the primitive experience of our
tactile faculty. (Riegl 1988: 181)
The film theorist Noel Burch was the first to use haptics in order to
qualify the distinct aesthetics of early film (Burch 1990).4 In recent
years haptics has gained particular currency in phenomenologically
oriented film scholarship. Laura Marks uses haptic visuality to develop
a ‘phenomenological understanding of embodied spectatorship.’ She
states that:
Haptic cinema appeals to a viewer who perceives with all the senses.
It involves thinking with your skin, or giving as much significance to
the physical presence of an other as to the mental operations of sym-
bolization. This is not a call to willful regression but to recognizing the
intelligence of the perceiving body. Haptic cinema, by appearing to us
as an object with which we interact rather than an illusion into which
we enter, calls on this sort of embodied intelligence. (Marks 2002: 18)
slowed in their everyday activities at the home. Their bare feet absorb
the cold of the earth, their teeth chatter and their skin shrivels with the
dipping temperatures. One of the most striking evocations of winter is in
a sequence in which we see breakfast being cooked in the kitchen. Here
smoke rises from the utensils and mixes with a narrow strip of sharp
morning sunshine casting a deep golden glow within the shots. Such a
sensorial rendition ties in with other images that consistently punctuate
the film and evoke its atmosphere – the sensorial experience of tangible
and intangible things: objects, clothes, skin, air, smells and temperatures.
Some instances in Gandhi’s Children work on both the tactile and
olfactory senses. There are repeated references to a sewage line with
black waters flowing into an open field that is adjacent to the home.
One image that recurs on selected moments in the film is of the home’s
choked lavatories. The observational stance, standing back and look-
ing at these creates sensorial impressions, hints at the smell and the
overall atmosphere in these spaces. In this way we experience what the
home feels like at the most elementary levels: touch and smell. Laura
Marks has argued that the sense of smell is the most mimetic of all
senses, ‘because it acts on our bodies before we are conscious of it’. She
holds that the sense of smell can be provoked through haptic images
that resist ‘the control of vision… encourage the “viewer” to get close
to the image and explore it through all of the senses, including touch,
smell and taste’ (Marks 2002: 118). In Gandhi’s Children haptic visuality
extends beyond the textures of tangible objects and surfaces that can be
physically touched, on to more ethereal substances such as the qualities
of the atmosphere.
The senses of touch and tactility often provoke a sense of pleasure in
the act of viewing, for they push viewing from looking into a form of
touching. Vision becomes an inroad through which touch is performed.
Through vision we, the viewers, reach out and touch the subjects and
environments in the image; and it is through vision itself, that is, the
image, that those subjects and environments with their varied textures
touch us back. MacDougall’s emphasis on touch and the olfactory expe-
rience in Gandhi’s Children is in the context of his exploration of the
textures of things at the home and through these he contains the pleas-
ure of touching through vision. Suggesting the atmosphere of a choked
lavatory, or experiencing cold temperatures through observing Delhi’s
winter smog – these all make Gandhi’s Children a difficult sensory and
viewing experience. This is a critical use of haptics. The efficacy of these
images is suggested in the audience reactions at a preview screening of
select clips from this film during the Beyond Text conference organized
98 Documentary Films in India
Figure 3.3 The Prayas Home’s courtyard where sounds from the home echo
Image courtesy, David MacDougall.
Gandhi’s Children 99
The film is also carefully punctuated with silences. These often arise
on cathartic instances, when inmates break down sharing their personal
stories and all inmates around them fall silent in solidarity, acknowledg-
ing and appreciating the intensity of one another’s experiences. This
sensitive use of sound that provokes the aural atmosphere of the Prayas
Home, encompassing its noises and silences, does not approach sound
as purely a carrier of information. This is an affective and tactile use
of sound that envelops the viewer with the aural sensations of place.
The affect is, as Elsaesser and Hagener note, enveloping the specta-
tor’s body with sound; offering them an experiential evocation of the
everyday aural atmosphere at the Prayas Home (Elsaesser and Hagener
2011: 137). This use of sound further pushes the sensory experience of
Gandhi’s Children away from pleasure. The affects the film provokes are
often disturbing and they approximate the sensory experiences of the
film’s subjects.
The noon-bell rings at the Episcopal Church on New York’s West 86th
Street. A truck beeps, backing up on West 85th Street. In between, the
entrance to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is livened by street
vendors calling out hot dogs, roasted nuts and New York souvenirs.
Visitors meet, greet and gradually quieten as they queue up to enter
the museum. Melding into this everyday soundscape of the Manhattan
landmark are the sounds of a distant rainforest. A sacred rainforest,
known as Mawphlang. The Mawphlang sacred forest belongs to the
Khasi peoples from India’s northeastern state of Meghalaya. On the day
I encountered Mawphlang’s forest sounds at the Guggenheim Museum,
a thick winter cloud had formed a kind of sound box enveloping
Manhattan, absorbing its street noises and amplifying Mawphlang’s
plentiful and overlapping sounds. Croaking insects, singing birds,
rustling leaves, frog calls, mild wind, dew drops, small water streams
and the pregnant silence of a dense, humid rainforest – these and
many other forest sounds flowed imperceptibly into the chilly atmos-
phere, mixing with the everyday sounds of Manhattan. These forest
sounds were from a sound installation entitled Trespassers will (not) be
Prosecuted,1 developed by northeast India-based moving-image artist
collective, Desire Machine Collective (henceforth DMC).2
The sound installation used a computerized sensor program that
responds to the footsteps of the visitors to the museum. The number and
speed of the steps provoke a random mix of pre-recorded sounds from
the forest, which are contained in a digital archive. A persistently form-
ing soundscape flows, unique because its mix of sounds is constituted
live in response to the movements of the museum visitors. Projected
from eight speakers installed along the Guggenheim outdoor ramp,
Trespassers… had no finite beginning or end. Infinitely constitutive in
107
108 Documentary Films in India
such as guaranteed public order by the state – are taken for granted.
Such routines were either absent or barely present in many parts of
Northeast India… The war with China and the pro-independence
rebellions [by indigenous peoples] emphasized the dangers of this
absence in the post-colonial era… The war of 1962 brought home to
Indian policy-makers the lesson that an infrastructure of state institu-
tions is necessary to reinforce among the people of the region the sense
that they are part of a pan-Indian national community. (2012: 39)
The Indian media, spanning daily news (both print and television) on to
the mammoth Hindi film industry have contributed to intensifying the
northeast’s acute sense of cultural distance and otherness in relation to
mainland India. South Asian media critics have noted that the north-
east is represented in a largely limited and negative way by the Indian
media.19 Applying Gramscian analysis of hegemony, Prasun Sonwalkar
has argued that the Indian media’s approach towards the northeast is
hierarchical, exclusionary and largely event-centered. He elaborates
that an ‘us–them’ binary is a key discursive framework in Indian media
representations of the region. Specifically commenting on the English-
language press, he notes that there is an overall ignorance and lack of
understanding about the northeast’s cultures and this often becomes
the basis for presenting the region’s peoples through the most reductive
stereotypes such as ‘backward’, ‘violent’, ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘tribal’
in the worst sense (2004, 2005). For Sonwalkar, a discourse of power
underscores the ‘us-them’ binary with the nation constituting the ‘us’
and the northeast, being a cultural-minority constituting the ‘them’ in
this equation. He explains:
At the time of its release in India, Dil Se was praised for giving visibil-
ity to the northeast. In the northeast and in critical media discourses
this ‘visibility’ has been problematized because the counter-insurgent
gaze underscores a kind of political and cultural divide between main-
land India and the northeast. This gaze abstracts insurgency from the
118 Documentary Films in India
which the positions of media have been unreflexively suffused with the
positions of armed forces apparatuses operating to control insurgency
in the northeast. Daily Check-up illustrates how – at the level of form –
mainstream media have come to share in the counter-insurgent gaze
of the armed forces. This explains how mainstream media representa-
tions of the northeast depict it on the very terms by which armed forces
rationalize the northeast’s political conditions, that is, as a disturbed
territory where insurgency and terrorism dominate.
Figure 4.1 A bright, single point, white light confronts the viewer in Daily
Check-up’s opening shot
Image courtesy, Desire Machine Collective.
An Arrested Eye 125
Figure 4.2 Performance images of young men being inspected, juxtaposed with
found news footage of counter-insurgency operations
Image courtesy, Desire Machine Collective.
security personnel (and thus the camera). The shakiness of the camera
and its tentativeness are emphasized by the use of the telephoto lens
for zooming in that suppresses depth of field and exaggerates even the
slightest camera movement. This heightens the overall sense of disrup-
tion, tension and urgency within the visual field. In contrast, the camera
for the performance images is stationary and uses a wider magnification
that contextualizes bodies spatially, viewing them more stably. These
formal contrasts point to the different modes through which both sets
of images have been constructed and this, in turn, alerts the viewer to
how the seeming verisimilitude of news footage is itself manufactured.
News footage is seldom composed from neutral ground between
security personnel and terror suspects. Though news images serve the
function of witness, they do not necessarily approach terror suspects in
a neutral or balanced way. News seldom identifies the terror suspects
in terms of any social background and it rarely shares any of their life
narratives. As such, news enforces the arms of the state, here security
personnel as bearers of the gaze, agents of scrutiny who, in turn, reduce
suspects to the objects of the gaze. News images of counter-insurgency
operations, violence and even protest underscore this binaristic equa-
tion through their very formal vocabulary. When to the formal features
of shaky hand-held camera, fuzzy image quality, erratic punctuation by
isolated shouts or gunfire are added the specific techniques of editing –
rapid and random cuts, very short shot durations (no more than a few
seconds) and an authoritative voiceover that decodes these images
‘objectively’ for the viewer – the ‘terror suspect’s’ body is obscured and
distanced from the viewer. It is disempowered by the bearers of the gaze:
the surveillance apparatus and the media who do not offer suspects any
possibility for voice. The positioning of the terror suspect’s body at the
edges of the news frame parallels the place of that body on the edges of
society where it is implicated in an overarching equation of dissonance
and disturbance. News media’s visual vocabulary thus encodes the terror
suspect’s body as faceless, marginal and without presence. The new view-
ing position of the performance images, by contrast, places the viewer
in direct proximity to the young men. From this position the body
of the terror suspect is neither obscured nor distanced from the viewer.
The viewer commands the possibility to engage with the young men on
terms that contest the codification of their bodies through news media
and other visual regimes deploying the counter-insurgent gaze.
Performance images of the young men under inspection continue to
be juxtaposed with news clips. We repeatedly see groups of suspected
youth dragged, arrested, beaten and punished. The news clips depicting
An Arrested Eye 129
these are judiciously used in Daily Check-up. Mostly such images are
selected that fleetingly bring the viewer face to face with the ‘suspected
youth’ – for example, a handheld shot in which the camera tracks along
a group of young boys who roll their bodies on a deserted road in an
act of punishment; or an image in which we first see a suspect running
into the forest, only to be halted by gunfire at which he surrenders and
walks towards the camera. In extracting those sparse instances that
bring suspects face to face with the viewers, Daily Check-up subtly recon-
textualizes news footage. When these selected images are seen outside
the flow of a news report and each suspect has a face – both literally
and metaphorically, we are alerted to how the assembly processes of
news editing suppress the possibility of viewers identifying suspects and
building empathy with them. It is through this suppression that news
shapes viewer perceptions, depositing on the youths’ bodies suspicions
of terror and danger.
Daily Check-up’s revelation of how light, security arms and media are
networked, each partaking in the viewing positions of surveillance,
offers a critical understanding of news media. This is not a critique
geared to pointing media errors, but it is a broader undertaking that
operates at the level of representational vocabularies and the discourses
they uphold.
While the camera constructs proximity with the bodies of suspected
youth through performance images and select news clips, the soundscape
An Arrested Eye 131
of Daily Check-up deepens this proximity. As the film advances, the sound
of ticking that had been heard initially merges with repetitive machinic
sounds. Sometimes the sound of ticking resonates with a clock indicating
the passage of time; sometimes it resonates with a time bomb indicating
a sense of impending danger. Occasionally, the work is punctuated with
sounds of machine gunfire. While we hear synchronous sounds in the
news images, often gunfire and shouting, the sound of the performance
images is predominantly acousmatic – that is, its sources are not visible in
the image. The film’s acousmatic soundtrack uses sounds linked to counter-
insurgency but that are not directly synchronous with what is seen in the
image. Sounds of ticking, gunfire, machinic ambience, different forms of
heavy breathing – these are all used extensively.
Acousmatic sounds are often held as disorienting, for the listener cannot
see the source of sound (Chion 1994: 32). In Daily Check-up, however,
the sounds are identifiable as they are all related to regimes of vio-
lence and counter-insurgency. Further, the particular mode of sound
design in the work suggests that what we are hearing is subjective
and interior. All sounds are maintained at a high pitch and they do
not fade in or out smoothly. The mix of sounds on the track does not
coincide with the visual cuts, so often sounds overlap over a series of
images. Sustained over long durations, the sounds provoke feelings
of urgency, tentativeness, prolonged uncertainty and a sense of being
silenced. When they run over performance images in which the camera
is close to the bodies of the suspects, the viewer derives a sense that the
soundtrack is evoking the inner emotional states of the young men.
What the viewer is hearing is from the perspective of the terror suspects.
The repetition of sounds on the soundtrack coincides with the film’s
posturing of counter-insurgency operations as routine activities whose
repetitiveness is, in turn, disturbing and unsettling for those who are
subjected to it. Their emotional states are characterized by distress and
the viewer’s recognition of this advances their sense of empathy with
the young men that is in keeping with the camera’s viewing position of
nearness towards terror suspects.
and performance images throws into light the disparity in the visual
codes of both and the understandings they so offer about northeast
youth. The formal contrast between both reveals how mainstream
news media constructs the figure of the ‘terror suspect’. In doing this,
it displays news media’s complicity and networked relation with the
surveillance apparatus. By offering a competing viewpoint in the per-
formance images Daily Check-up defamiliarizes the viewer to the codes
and terms by which popular media represents insurgency and counter-
insurgency. The two modes speak to each other in contrast and this
serves in highlighting the disparity between viewing terror suspects in a
dehumanized way as in news coverage and humanizing them through
DMC’s new viewing position in the performance images. The disparity
between both modes is almost like the partitioning of living beings
Agamben speaks of in relation to the apparatus: ‘… a general and mas-
sive partitioning of beings into two large groups or classes: on the one
hand, living beings (or substances), and on the other, apparatuses in
which living beings are incessantly captured’ (Agamben 2009: 13).
Through Daily Check-up DMC establishes how the collective’s practice
emanates from a position of interrogating the dominant terms by which
landscapes such as the northeast are imagined and constructed. This is
a project steeped in the politics of representation; that sees cinematic
language as a site of political contest and is geared to offering compet-
ing viewpoints, epistemologies and perceptual experiences through film
form. In this contest the function of representing the northeast has
evolved into the function of re-imagining it outside normative terms
as perpetuated through the discourses of networked apparatuses. The
work’s emphasis on the subjective dimensions of counter-insurgency
in terms of the distress experienced by northeast youth institutes what
will, through future works, become a central theme in DMC’s oeuvre –
the corporeal and perceptual experiences of living in the northeast and con-
tending with the traumas of its insurgent and counter-insurgent histories.
DMC holds cinema as a medium whose fundamental principles – the
framing of space and time – are key in writing an alternative history of
the northeast and through which non-normative perceptions of the region
can be catalysed. Their next work, Passage, advances Daily Check-up’s
interest in light. The work takes up light, cinema’s fundamental and
ethereal ingredient, and recontextualizes its usage by breaking away
from the colonial and missionary functions of shedding light on the
dark corners of the empire, here the northeast.
5
Passage
Light
134
Passage 135
Figure 5.1 A column of golden light emerges from the center of the frame
Image courtesy, Desire Machine Collective.
vertically split image. This is a very intricate and nuanced use of the
zoom movement, disparate from its conventional uses as popularized
by mainstream media.
Technically, movements of the zoom lens are not considered to be
camera movements. When first introduced, the zoom lens was devised
to offer video operators a range of focal lengths on one lens.2 Zooming
in and out offers a scan through the successive focal lengths available
on a video camera. Televisual uses in the 1970s–80s popularized the
zoom for its informational potential.3 In the processes of zooming in
and out as conventionalized by television, the agency of the camera
operator’s hand performing them was thoroughly erased. The smoother
the zooming movement, the more efficacious its information poten-
tial was considered to be. The aim was not to draw attention to the
zooming movement, but to maintain the viewer’s attention on con-
tent. In Passage, the zooming movements provide no content-related
information. They are not smooth or mechanical, but aesthetically
choreographed. They evoke a whole register of moods ranging from the
138 Documentary Films in India
Passage works with the formal properties of image and sound: light,
optical effects and acousmatic sounds. As such, it is reflexive, fore-
grounding the processes of image-making and their construction into
a whole combining elements such as sound. As a piece of experimental
cinema it bears affinity with the structuralist-materialist cinema that
arose in Europe and North America following the events of May 1968.
Structuralist-materialist filmmakers, including figures such as Peter Gidal,
Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, Peter Kubelka, William Raban and
140 Documentary Films in India
and slow dissolves involving the emergence of one column of light from
another heightens these emotional affects and the sensations we feel.
The haptic aesthetic is particularly relevant for visualizing a process of
formation and becoming. The feminist phenomenologist Luce Irigaray
holds that touch is a most primal sensation that we experience even
before birth. In her essay, The Fecundity of the Caress, she notes:
In her influential essay, Divine Women, she evokes the natural elements
as tied to our processes of becoming. If the waters of the womb mark
146 Documentary Films in India
the birth of form, then the passage to air through birth, is, for Irigaray,
a move towards a quintessential freedom. For this freedom we have
‘to construct a space for ourselves’; a space of ‘bodily autonomy, of
free breath, free speech and song, of performing on the stage of life’
(Irigaray 1993b: 66). Irigaray asserts our becoming as our flourishing
and growing in air, thriving in the light from the sky and being fed by
the waters of the earth and rain. Passage works with these elements –
light, rain, water – each shaping the narrative of cinematic becoming,
moving towards an individuated newness where cinema is driven by a
creative drive and not limited by narrow political agendas.
Passage’s subtle narrative of organic becoming leads to an immersive
viewing experience. While the film’s abstract and tactile imagery and
sounds emphasise the acts of looking, listening and synthesizing mean-
ing from them, this looking and listening is in contrast to witnessing a
visual spectacle such as, say, through a kaleidoscope that rests on the
disparity between the spectacle/the viewed and the viewer. Haptic visu-
ality and aurality situate the viewer and the film into an intersubjective
mode. In the intersubjective mode, looking is not limited to examining
and evaluating that which is on display. Looking and listening through
haptic visuality and aurality propel an overcoming of the separateness
between the viewer and the viewed – it is almost as if the viewer, through
sight and sound, touches the viewed, the film. They then interact with it
and, as Laura Marks specifies, overcome one’s sense of separateness from
the image (Marks 2000: 183). For Marks, haptic cinema is inherently
intersubjective because it involves a mutual exchange, a muddying of
the boundaries between viewer and viewed. She adds that haptic images
are grounded in an intersubjective eroticism:
Regardless of their content, haptic images are erotic in that they con-
struct an intersubjective relationship between beholder and image.
The viewer is called upon to fill in the gaps in the image, to engage
with the traces the image leaves. By interacting up close with an
image, close enough that figure and ground commingle, the viewer
relinquishes her own sense of separateness from the image – not to
know it, but to give herself up to her desire for it. (Marks 2000: 183)
The visual regime of Passage advances from DMC’s earlier work, Daily
Check-up. In that piece DMC created a discursive break by separating the
position of their camera from the networked surveillance apparatus. Daily
Check-up, however, operated very much within the realm of representa-
tion where the camera was understood in positivist terms as an apparatus
representing the pro-filmic, that which is external to the camera. DMC’s
new camera position in that work inaugurated an altering perspective, one
of nearness to the pro-filmic – that is, the bodies of those marginalized
and violated by the networked apparatus. Passage advances this altering
perspective by problematizing representation itself, pushing the camera
into the realm of abstraction. Set in a site tied to colonialism, Passage’s
haptic aesthetic unsettles a unidirectional flow of light that stands in as
a move to break away from the colonial and now national imaginations,
which Passage, coming after Daily Check-up, asserts as complicit. This film
also frees DMC’s cinema project from the functions of interpretation,
spokesmanship, translation, and exposition – prerogatives that are com-
monly deposited on documentary practice in politically sensitive zones.
The cinematic project whose formation Passage exemplifies is
marked by a will to write beyond the terms set by colonialism and
nationalism. This is a dialectical move away from the dominant
representations pertaining to the northeast – dialectical in that this
constitutes a repudiation of the very terms on which the northeast is
visually imagined. But this is not a crude dialectic limited to a critique
or reversal of dominant representational media codes. This is more
complex and creative, inaugurating a position of composing cinema
from within the region, near to it, embodying its cultural histories,
Passage 149
The film opens with a shot of decaying matter. Heaps of dust and moss
line a large object that lies obscured from our sight. A sharply focused
camera notes minuscule dust particles floating in seemingly damp
air. Apart from the movement of these dust particles there is no other
action in this shot. It is static and provides no establishing or contextual
information – such as, for example, the location, time or the very object
that lies decaying before us. Composed from a position close to the
ground, with a mid- to close-up magnification, this shot emphasizes the
material textures of dust and moss. A unity is imbued by colour – dusty,
earthy browns and greens convey an overall sense of melancholy in
relation to decaying matter. In spite of the relative absence of any action
in this shot, we register the pure passage of time – thereby conveying
the film’s intentions. The film will not feed the viewer with a linear
narrative that explains or rationalizes the causes for the decay before us.
152 Documentary Films in India
This opening shot thus positions the viewer as an observer to whom the
rest of the film, like this shot, will offer meaning through the suggestion
of ideas and emotional overtones that are constructed through image
and sound composition. The viewer ought necessarily to be an active
participant, deciphering the cinematic (not verbal or textual) cues and
meaning affects embedded in the film.
After a fade to black, the film opens to the first, wide views introduc-
ing the power plant. We see its exteriors through three tracking, long
shots that become successively longer in duration, with the final shot
running close to one minute and twenty seconds. The power plant
was made up of two units situated on the same campus – the first was
established in 1978 and the second in 1989. From the images it is quite
apparent that one unit appears older than the other. The tracking shots
are framed from the inside of one of the units, looking out onto the
exteriors of the second. From the very beginning of the film, therefore,
we are inside the power plant, and our vision is emplaced within its
campus. Thus even though we are viewing the exterior of its structure,
our viewpoint is constructed from inside the power plant campus. We
are not external, distant or disconnected observers and this brings a
sense of proximity and empathy to our encounter with the power plant.
The tracking shots have been composed from a high angle, the
camera placed on an elevation of two floors above the ground level of
the multistoreyed power plant. From this height, the camera’s address
towards the power plant is both direct and frontal. The camera is placed
low, near the floor with a slight angulation upwards, and it tracks space
along a straight horizontal line. The power plant unit whose exterior is
the subject of the image is seen at a distance, placed far into the depth
of field. It is flanked on either side by lush greenery under a flat, grey
sky pregnant with monsoon clouds. This situation of the film’s subject
within the depth of field and the camera’s frontal address towards it
help to evoke the gigantic proportions of the power plant and allow
the viewer to gauge the relevance of this site, and how it towered above
the broader landscape. This is distinct from the affect of a high or low
angle shot that would either look down upon, diminishing the subject
within the frame as in the former, or look up at, glorifying and empha-
sizing authority in what we see, through the latter.
Depth of field and the long duration of these tracking shots imbue
our viewing experience with a necessary ambiguity. This ambiguity,
the absence of any contextual or interpretive information, lends to our
encounter with the power plant a sense of immediacy, without any
mediation. The power plant has not been constructed and presented
Residue 153
There is an equivalence between the viewer and the viewed. Our sense
of proximity to the power plant, our emplacement in it, does not yield
into any hierarchies.
The tracking shots thus very fruitfully combine the techniques of
what western film theory2 has projected as two seemingly opposed
approaches to the construction of filmic meaning: the realist (achieved
through depth of field) and the constructivist/montage (as through
dramatic foregrounds). Residue’s opening, tracking shots give us a very
nuanced and intricate view of things. The viewer is allowed to register,
to observe, and from the film’s very beginning their traversal of space is
imbued with a sense of nearness and mutuality in relation to what they
see. The overall sense of melancholy and empathy that has persisted
since the film’s opening shot dissipates any of our own preconceptions
about ruins or abandonment as inorganic waste. Seen in continuity
with DMC’s earlier works, which evoke dimensions of life in a landscape
littered with the dehumanizing effects of counter-insurgency and vio-
lence, these first images of the power plant incline us to ask a series of
questions: what is becoming of this site in its state of abandonment and
what does that becoming tell us about the overall landscape to which
this site serves as a window? Finally, how is the coming to a standstill
of this site perceived by the people who belong here and who used and
relied upon this source of energy?
Figures 6.1 Dust-laden and halted pressure meters mark the stoppage of electricity
production and work at the abandoned power plant
Image courtesy, Desire Machine Collective.
Residue 157
The fact is that, in Europe, the post-war period has greatly increased
the situations which we no longer know how to react to, in
spaces which we no longer know how to describe. These were
‘any-spaces-whatever’, deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses,
waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction.
And in these any-spaces-whatever a new race of characters was stir-
ring, kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted, they were seers.4
(Deleuze 2001: xi)
What happened is that, from one result to the next, the characters
were objectively emptied: they are suffering less from the absence
158 Documentary Films in India
breeze, distant electrical noise and urbanity, add to the power plant’s
state of isolation, conjuring for us that this site’s process of decay and
disintegration is a continuing organic process.
In its second half, Residue further sculpts and defines the absent humans
and memories it has made present. The absences we feel appear unset-
tled and laden with simmering sentiments that get qualified as the
film advances and in this two elements of the film are key: recurring
images with very fine, subtle movements and the film’s soundtrack.
164 Documentary Films in India
Soundtrack
standing in for the peoples’ backlash based on the senses of loss and
trauma embodied by the power plant.
Further, in keeping with Buddhist thought, we now understand
silence as relative. It assumes its character in relation to sound and,
in fact, silence is not devoid of sound. Just in the way that the wilder-
ness we are witnessing visually characterizes the power plant’s state
of abandonment as a process of resurgence, life organically persisting
where activity has been deliberately stalled; the silence at this site is
not an absence of sound. The atmospheric silence that characterizes
this site is pregnant with sound, the intangible sounds of trauma and
agitation.
DMC’s construction of wilderness involves a subtle recontextualiza-
tion of forest spaces that much mainstream media in India project as
the breeding ground for terrorists. Forests contain militant training
camps and establishments related to many dissident movements in
India, including those of the northeast. In a way Residue takes us back
to Daily Check-up where, in news footage, we had seen terror suspects
running towards and merging with wilderness. The visual conventions
of dominant media, as that work demonstrated, construct wilderness as
a site to which the body of the terror suspect, the transgressor or mis-
creant turns to escape the arms of the state. Forests and wilderness in
mainstream media discourse are dangerous sites, the very opposite of
civil society, for they contain the body that threatens the national fabric.
Residue reclaims wilderness and it can be seen as situating wilderness in
a dialectical relation to the network of state apparatuses that were high-
lighted in Daily Check-up. Wilderness and forests become containers of
festering discontent, they are grounds where suppressed memories and
emotions—those that are dismissed and forgotten – crystallize and form
into a backlash.
Residue can thus be classified as a ‘trauma’ film for it contextualizes,
excavates and works upon collective trauma. Trauma cinema is a term
coined by Janet Walker to designate films and videos that take up trau-
matic events: personal and/or political (Walker 2005). Trauma cinema
is geared to expressing distress, catastrophe, damage and shock and it
adopts a subjective approach in which data, information or statistics
are regarded as less significant than the unuttered and lived dimensions
of traumatic human experiences. Focusing on subjects such as incest
and the Holocaust, Walker cites the works of Rea Tajiri, Laura Bialis and
Lynn Hershman as examples of trauma cinema. Through their films,
these filmmakers confront the impacts of catastrophes and, in order to
Residue 171
Figure 6.3 Wilderness buries a roofed conveyor belt at the power plant
Image courtesy, Desire Machine Collective.
that mainstream films are based on the assumption that traumatic events
are unproblematically available to be remembered, represented and
communicated as coherent experiences (Baer 2002). This, according to
him, evades and oversimplifies the inherent impossibility and resistance
to representation that traumatic catastrophes such as say the Holocaust
involve (Baer 2002: 169–70). Experimentation with the formal pos-
sibilities of cinema and a commitment to revealing how cinema is a
constructed artefact, are key to trauma cinema. For both Walker and
Baer, avant-garde and experimental film, which reflect disjunctive, dis-
integrated and fragmentary narratives, are the vehicles for the cinematic
evocation of traumatic experiences and memories.
Residue raises a traumatic past of which the abandoned power plant
is both evidence and symbol. The film recognizes the incoherence of
traumatic memory. Deliberatively, the camera navigates through the
innards and skin of the abandoned power plant, enveloping the viewer
with visual impressions and tactile sensations, inventorying the innocu-
ous goings-on and organic decay at this abandoned site. The film’s dis-
junctive and poetic visual and aural associations articulate an absented
and alienated peoples’ steadily accumulating sentiments. In this, there
is a blurring of the boundaries between past and present. The anguish
and loss suffered through insurgent violence; the dehumanized subjec-
tion of people to armed forces’ surveillance and acts of state-sanctioned
crimes; all set against a backdrop of persistent neglect, reductive cultural
stereotyping and reinforcement as other—these are all constitutive of
the deep senses of remove, loss and trauma that mutate into a silence
and the traumatic memories of anger, dismay, violation and disillusion-
ment that pervade a site such as the abandoned power plant.
Residue closes on a shot of pure wilderness with a faint path leading
into the deep background. This is a futuristic image. Coming at the end
of the film this shot projects that the traumas, angers and agitations the
abandoned power plant embodies and which the film has galvanized,
necessarily have a future. We do not know what this future is, what
shape it will take, or what actions and reactions will manifest in it.
DMC will not give us concrete or tangible answers. The whole project of
the collective has been at the level of representational politics and it
has tended towards creating, for the viewer, a sensory and perceptual
experience, rooted in a site but not limited to it.
Residue is an exercise in historiography and documentary poetics
and through this work DMC’s oeuvre opens up a new and innovative
way for approaching corporeal experiences spanning flesh, memory
and emotion. This interest in the corporeal was evident in Daily
Residue 173
sound of rock being dug and cut by human hands using metal tools.
These sounds are rhythmic, but not mechanical; it is clear that they
come from the labours of a human figure. The montage advances and
the camera intercuts close-up shots of rock surfaces with abstract views
of a human figure chiseling and carving them. We follow the contrac-
tions and expansions of muscles as the craftsman’s legs, shoulders, spine
and torso move back and forth rhythmically, working upon the rock.
Viewed from such a tight close-up position the labouring body and
the rock are infused with a primal eros, forming, as it were, into new
sculptural wholes within the filmed frame. Every shot in this sequence
is composed along a diagonal line of viewing achieved through the
camera’s position and the rapidly diminishing crimson-golden light at
dusk. The labouring body and the rocks are so placed that they make a
subtle diagonal line across the frame, and the crimson-golden light of
the setting sun too, falls on the subjects diagonally, often from the oppo-
site direction. This composition, based on diagonals, implies movement
and it infuses the mise-en-scène with a sense of dynamism, of a flow of
energy. Combined with chiaroscuros of moving shadows the mise-en-
scène is animated, lending to the scenario a sense of process, of things
coming into being. The human figure and the rock it carves appear in
a state of subtle pulsation and becoming. Through this very primal and
elemental take the film posits movement, the very material and labour
of dance as living and constitutive in relation to the world, rather than
fixed or abstracted from it. And so, Bhavantarana announces how it will
approach its subject: the life of Guru Mohapatra. It will not present
dance as an ornamental embellishment in the Guru’s life. Rather, it will
depict dance as intimately tied to his being in a particular landscape –
Odisha – at a particular time in history: the better part of the twentieth
century, punctuated with India’s independence, when Guru Mohapatra
carved out a place for Odissi dance.
Kumar Shahani’s oeuvre includes both fiction and documentary films.
While his fiction films, such as Maya Darpan (1972), Tarang (1984)
and Khayal Gatha (1989), have received considerable critical acclaim at
prominent film festivals both within and outside India, and also through
film scholarship, his documentary films have received only limited view-
ing and critical attention. Dismissed in part for their complex aesthetic
that resists meaning through explicit exposition, these documentaries
have been largely unavailable to audiences because the government
agencies that have financed them, in bureaucratic fashion, devote few
resources to their promotion and distribution. Shahani’s documentaries
are rarely seen; their exhibition has been limited to select forums.
A Turn Towards the Classical 179
understanding that India’s cultural pasts and presents are porous. They
have and continue to receive, imbibe and create cultural epistemologies,
thought and practices from the numerous little cultures of the subcon-
tinent as also through wider migrations – say the silk route, or India’s
cotton trade with America, and the ever so invisible cultural permeations
between west, central and south Asia.
Shahani studied with parallel Indian cinema master Ritwik Ghatak –
an exilic figure whose cinema persistently questioned the reductive terms
by which India and Pakistan were partitioned.2 Ghatak’s cinema articu-
lated the traumas arising from the division of syncretic civilizations and
the displacements that this caused. Ghatak’s melodramatic, pathetic and
critical montage-based films sensitized Shahani to the question of how
cinema may address the Indian subcontinent’s vast and varied cultures,
and their evolution in relation to history’s multiple and competing moves.
A central question formulated in his work: How would a filmmaker-artist
use cinema to devise a sense of culture as a historical category shaping the
present? Following independence, a whole generation of cultural practi-
tioners, scholars and thinkers were drawn to rethinking India’s history
and reconstructing its narratives. The colonial establishment and Indian
nationalists had both devised epistemologies surrounding India’s pasts
shaped by their respective ideological postures.3 Independence infused
an energy and vigour into the thinking and writing of history, reassess-
ing the narratives, reasonings and methods that had been used and the
ends they had served. A key concern pertained to method and sources for
history, for in India written sources are not the sole and always reliable
records for assembling views of the past.
The Marxist mathematician and historian D.D. Kosambi had asserted
the need for field-based research in the construction of Indian history.
Kosambi worked extensively in the field of ancient Indian history. His
materialist approach was grounded in the recognition of India as a class
society, whose essential relations, he asserted, were not based on kin-
ship (Kosambi 1975: xii–xiii).4 Based on the Marxist political-economy
approach, Kosambi emphasized that the essential relations in a society
are developed through the production and exchange of commodities.5
To study a society based on this materialist schema, he emphasized
field-work, conducted ‘on foot’.
There is no substitute for work in the field for the restoration of pre-
literate history. This extends to all historical periods for any country
like India where written sources are so meagre and defective while
local variations are indescribably numerous. (Kosambi 1975: x)
182 Documentary Films in India
Thus the whole gamut of material, visual and aural forms such as sculp-
ture, painting, musical traditions, the very lay of the land, its physi-
cal features, the persistence of the ancient and folk practices into the
present – Shahani came to see these all as sources through which to study
the past and how it commingles with and shapes the present. Fieldwork,
with its emphasis on being present to the multiple layers and traces of
pasts, implied a kind of embodied approach to studying and understand-
ing culture and history. It was as if experiencing a place or practice in
the present, based on a materialist understanding, allowed one to access
the ways by which these had been shaped through multiple pasts.
The Kosambian understanding of fieldwork sat seamlessly with the
practices of India’s parallel cinema to which Shahani was exposed
while studying with Ritwik Ghatak. India’s parallel cinema, through
Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, had devised an ideologically grounded
posture in favour of location filming. Through the Apu trilogy Ray had
implanted in India a seed of Italian neorealism, characterized by its dis-
tinctive features, including location shooting and the use of non-actors.
Ghatak’s clustered alleyways of urban Bengal were framed so as to recre-
ate the senses of dislocation and trauma of partition and they offered a
A Turn Towards the Classical 183
I believe that every society, every social system including the one
that had colonized or covets us, contained within itself several
184 Documentary Films in India
observes, is the only art that can capture Nature in its flux. It can also
negate that flux by the movement of the subject (the camera or the
microphone). Echoing classical film theory’s debates around cinema’s
specificity, he cites an example of fluttering trees that, being framed by
the camera and without any other element like metaphorical structur-
ing or speech, become the object of contemplation for the viewer.
Shahani’s film practice has been devised through complex processes
wherein his aesthetics are radically removed from institutionalized
modes of representation, eventhough his films are supported by state
funding. Shahani insists on the availability of public support for the arts
and in the same vein asserts that a filmmaker-artist is not the bearer of
a predetermined agenda or objectified conclusions in relation to a film’s
subject matter.9 With regard to the making of documentary films, he
insists that documentation should not be approached as a prosaic pro-
cess of ‘capturing’ predetermined meanings or narratives.
Echoing an existentialist stance, Shahani’s writings on cinema express
a will to self-discovery and knowledge through cinema. He insists that
no system of knowledge or medium can offer total comprehension or
understanding of material phenomena and existence. Knowing the
limits of each holds the key to critically and creatively advancing it.
He elaborates how the quest for knowledge translates into the pursuit
of art thus:
I am inclined to believe that all life seeks meaning, changes form, not
merely to survive but, in the very first place, to want to live, it must have
that impulse.
— Shahani, K. ‘The Image in Time’, 1988
Following this ecstatic announcement, the film’s first visuals: the mon-
tage of a craftsman’s body sculpting rock, appear. At the conclusion of
this montage, the craftsman exits frame and the camera pans up, reveal-
ing a vast, pastoral landscape. We see silhouetted trees and hints of a
setting sun, all bathed in deep hues of crimson light. The camera pans
from right to left across this landscape. The film cuts to the next shot.
We are still in the pastoral landscape and the camera pulls out from a
close shot of a tree trunk to reveal a dance surface: a loosely marked
square of earth in the image middle ground. An Odissi dancer rises from
the square and performs Mangalacharana – an invocation to the Lord
Jagannath, seeking auspicious beginnings for the dance performance
and, being the film’s first dance sequence, the film too. The sequence is
set in the hour of dusk, godhuli, and as the dancer performs we see cows
returning after grazing in the background.
A typical structure of Mangalacharana includes bhumi-pranam, or rever-
ential touching of the earth punctuated with short nritta or pure dance
sequences that mark the physical movements and postures on which
the Odissi dance vocabulary is based.12 The entire Mangalacharana
A Turn Towards the Classical 189
placed on the funeral pyre but his navel was not consumed by the
fire. So it was set afloat in the sea, and reached Nilachala where King
Indradyumna was performing tapasya (penance) to experience a
vision of Lord Vishnu. Lord Vihsnu appeared in a dream and ordered
him to put the navel in a wooden image and worship it as Vishnu.
(Kothari 1990: 4)
image has been recorded and which the girl references as a mirror,
a prominent gesture within Odissi dance vocabulary. As the young
girl emerges from lush greenery towards the camera, this image takes
us back to the opening shot from Shahani’s teacher, Ritwik Ghatak’s
1960 classic Meghey Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star) where the film’s
female protagonist approaches the camera as if emerging from a large
tree seen in deep background (Sheridan 2004:113). This composition
of a female figure emerging from nature is significant as it references
the position of the female within the cultural imaginaries of east India.
The female as shakti is equated with nature. She is the daughter of
nature, she emerges from and then merges back into nature. Using
the same principle, Ghatak and Shahani offer two very contrasting
approaches to visualization and meaning. Where Ghatak’s composition
in Meghey Dhaka Tara emphasizes the female protagonist’s emergence
from nature as inaugurating a pathetic narrative that will disassemble
the cultural ideal of female/shakti as equated with nature, Bhavantarana
preserves this unity for the young girl who emerges from lush greenery,
exits the frame returning to and merging with nature. This is significant
for it asserts that she is united with nature. Both positions are politi-
cally significant for Ghatak’s approach serves to critique Bengali Hindu
society, while Shahani celebrates the meaning systems specific to the
cultural landscape where Bhavantarana is set.
In the next shot, the young girl enters the courtyard of an Odishan
home. She repeats the gesture of looking into the mirror. Like this occa-
sion, the film is punctuated with a number of moments when perform-
ers make gestures of, or actually look into mirrors. In the context of
classical dance this gesture of looking admiringly into the mirror sits
within a broader theme of shringara, or the beautification and adorn-
ment of the body. To beautify oneself is to mark and prepare oneself for
the other, be that an audience, the beloved or the divine. As such, this
action extends associations of auspiciousness. Following this gesture,
the Battu sequence of Bhavantarana unfolds and in it the young dancer
performs movements depicting Indian musical instruments such as the
veena (stringed instrument), drums, cymbals and the flute. Through
this the film introduces us to the key movements of Odissi dance. In
this sequence the film also introduces a new theme into its vocabulary.
At the start of this sequence, as the young girl enters the courtyard
she passes by the vacant seat of her Guru, who is represented by the
cymbals lying next to his sitting mat. In the middle of her dance, we
glimpse Guru Mohapatra, for the first time in the film, playing cymbals
enthusiastically to the rhythmic music that is building in tempo. As the
194 Documentary Films in India
sequence concludes, the dancer returns to the seat of her Guru and she
bows before it. The seat is now empty as at the start of this sequence.
The Guru’s body is invisible.
theories that inform the dance. For example, one sequence that thinly
ties a quotation to a dance sequence surrounds the enactment of a scene
from the Ramayana. This sequence opens with a sloka from the Rg Veda.
The sloka:
Its [Odissi] revival began very late, only after the attainment of inde-
pendence. The Odissi dance, as it is seen today is the result of strenuous
efforts made by some young dancers and scholars of Orissa, who have
A Turn Towards the Classical 197
achieved when four points of the body: the two arms turned outwards,
parallel to the earth and bent forwards at the elbows come into line with
the two knees bent, facing outwards.19 The imaginary line connecting
the elbows to the knees makes a square. Kapila Vatsyayan notes that in
chowka the weight of the body is equally divided and therefore this posi-
tion implies the perfection of balance (Vatsyayan 1974: 37). This attain-
ment of perfect balance is a basis of movement in many Indian dances.
Vatsyayan adds that the attainment of a perfect point or moment of
balance called sama along the body’s vertical median underpins Indian
dance and sculpture. In the latter it is termed samabhanga. Given this, the
dancer’s body is principally concerned with the human form’s relation
to gravity and so Indian dances are devoid of acrobatics, sudden leaps or
gliding movements in the air.20
Tribhangi, Odissi’s second notational position, is achieved through
the resting of one leg in front of the other, knees bent, with feet pivoted
in opposite directions to create a curvilinear stance. An imaginary line
runs diagonally across the body and links three points: the knees, torso
and neck. While the body in chowka is composed in linear form, in trib-
hangi it arcs. Vatsyayan elaborates: ‘In Orissi, the tribhanga is achieved
by the sharp deflection of the hip from the horizontal kati sutra
(horizontal plane), an opposite deflection of the torso, and the head
deflecting to the same side as the hip’ (Vatsyayan 1974: 36). Tribhangi
implies dynamism and the entire corpus of Odissi dance movements
relates these two notational positions and through this Odissi displays
its distinctly sculptural form.
Deriving from the sculptural are Odissi’s kinetic principles. In Odissi
dance, the dancer’s body is divided into two planes: the upper and
lower halves that are demarcated along the navel. The lower part of the
body performs sharply defined and angular movements of the feet that
coincide with the rhythmic beats of music or tala. These movements are
understood as performed in rhythmic time. The upper body or torso per-
forms movements based on the melody of the raga on which the dance
is based. The torso’s movements occur in what is termed as melodic time
and they reflect the constant energetic flow of the body as it depicts dif-
ferent rasas and bhavas. The torso’s movements tend to end at a slight
delay from the footwork such that there are no clearly demarcated move-
ment episodes within the dance. Anurima Banerji comments on the
delay between the upper and lower halves of the body stating that:
The delay between the movements of the feet and the torso gives the
dancer’s body the impression of a rounded, curvaceous and delicate
whole in which the flow of energy across time and space is finely
evident. Bhavantarana’s persistent framing of the dancers’ bodies as a
whole through the long shot enables the observation of the imaginary
and delicate lines: the square and the diagonal that lead to the many
sculptural formations in Odissi dance. This facilitates appreciating the
dance’s full spectrum of movements in which the upper and lower body
are coextensive and related through a temporal delay. This emphasis
on reflecting the performing body as a whole ties in further with the
tradition of miniature paintings in Odisha where bodies are reflected as
whole, emplaced in landscape.
Further, all of the dance sequences have been composed using a
wide-angle magnification that provides a sense of the proxemics – that
is, spatial dynamics within the frame. All of Bhavantarana’s dance
sequences emplace the dancer’s body in the wider landscape, here rural
Odisha. Most of the film’s dance sequences have been composed in
lush green surroundings or on the sea coast. While this serves to situ-
ate Odissi dance in its specific landscape, there is a subtler principle of
scenography in operation here. Bhavanatarana, in a most radical depar-
ture from the conventions of concert dance and its depiction through
mass media such as Indian national television, situates most dance
sequences in outdoor locations.21 Concert dances are often performed
on stages and televisual representations of Odissi dance, as is the case
with most Indian classical dance and music, are recorded indoors in
television studios with bland backdrops, usually composed of a single-
tone, fully lit, neutral-coloured wall.22
Each of the outdoor locations in Bhavantarana has a thematic link
with the particular dance sequence for which it is used. For instance, all
sequences surrounding Krishna’s love-play with Radha and the gopis are
set in pastoral landscapes, near water ponds or large trees like the ban-
yan that frame the performer’s body and create a fine rendition of one of
the oldest avant-garde film techniques of a frame within a frame. Here
Shahani’s scenography extends the principles of folk visual arts, includ-
ing miniature painting that depict Krishna’s romances in pastoral idylls
A Turn Towards the Classical 201
where cows graze, soft breeze blows, maidens bathe and where Krishna
first teases the gopis and then goes on to intoxicate them through his
raas leela dances – where each gopi is paired with a Krishna, dancing in
a circular formation. Similarly, the film’s closing dance sequence, the
only piece pertaining to Lord Shiva, is set at night before an ancient
temple. Guru Mohapatra performs an episode in which Lord Shiva
retrieves the charred remains of his wife Sati, who immolated herself
on learning the false news of her husband’s death. Through sharply
angulated movements, we see him enraged and mourning the loss of
his beloved whose remains he carries back to heaven. Single-point light-
ing partially illuminates the rock surfaces of the temple that frame Guru
Mohapatra’s body23 and add to the sense of loss and grief embodied by
the performer.
Shahani’s emplacement of Odissi dance in exterior locations reminds us
of Maya Deren’s 1945 A Study in Choreography for the Camera. The open-
ing shots of this short film show the camera panning across a forested
landscape. Dancers are dispersed across this space, some performing in
the background, others placed dramatically in the foreground. The camera
does not linger on any dancer. The panning movement equalizes the danc-
ing bodies whilst emplacing them in space. The film’s visual construction
emphasizes how the dancer embodies a living relationship with space and
that movement in the body emanates in relation to space. Bhavantarana’s
mise-en-scène resonates with Maya Deren’s Choreography… in which the
camera emphasizes dance movement as co-extensive of space.
Maya Deren’s Choreography… uses another cinematic technique: a
dancer’s movement begins in one shot with a defined background in
the shot seen through a specific camera magnification. It continues and
is completed in a succeeding shot with a starkly varying background
and differing camera magnification. Usually there is a cut from a wide-
angle shot to a close-up. The sharp disparity in image background and
camera magnification emphasize the organic unity of dance move-
ments, though these techniques of framing and editing subtly alter the
viewer’s perceptual experience of the dance on screen. Shahani also
composes dance sequences with a few shots in which there is a dramatic
disparity in background space. However, unlike Deren, he does not
change the camera’s magnifications or markedly alter its distance from
the dancer’s body. Shahani’s camera is geared to preserving the body as
a whole within the frame and it seeks to persistently situate the body’s
movements as coextensive with landscape. The dramatic disparities
between the shots of Bhavantarana’s dance sequences occur through
changes in location and the movements of the camera.
202 Documentary Films in India
body within the frame. In fact, they are the opposite, for the camera
often loses the dancer from the frame when it moves. It freely mean-
ders away, looking over the vast landscape, be it a pastoral expanse or
a quiet seashore. Then, either through a cut or a completed movement
arc, it catches up with and reintroduces the performer’s body, now in
an entirely different position or location than when we had last seen it.
These camera movements are not scripted, but spontaneous. Their pace
and direction alters quite tentatively within shots. On instances when
Figures 7.3 Free Camera Choreography: The camera begins to pan across, looking
over the landscape in Pashyati Dheeshi Dheeshi
Image courtesy, Roshan Shahani.
204 Documentary Films in India
the camera breaks into movement we can even sense, in the initial
moments, how the camera’s pace is being correlated to the overall mood
of the performance before it.
The first instance of the film when this free choreography occurs is
in the dance sequence entitled Pashyati Dheeshi Dheeshi, based on an
episode from the Geeta Govinda in which Radha welcomes her beloved
Krishna. Guru Mohapatra performs the sequence from Radha’s perspec-
tive, adoring her divine lover, Krishna. This performance is set against
a vast river and as the piece crescendos the camera tilts up, losing Guru
Mohapatra from the frame, and pans across to the right, mapping the
vast riverine vista. It does not return to the figure of Guru Mohapatra.
The dance sequence that most hypnotically advances this principle
of free camera choreography occurs later in the film and it is termed
Arabhi Pallavi, which is a pure dance piece with no narrative. This piece
is set against a seashore and the sequence opens with a centered shot
of ocean waves crashing in the image foreground. The camera tilts
down to reveal Guru Mohapatra in the center of the frame who, as he is
revealed, breaks into dance. This first shot pans across to the right, fol-
lowing him as he makes a diagonal move away from the water and exits
the frame on the right. The sequence then cuts, breaking the 180 degree
rule, and frames the same seashore from an opposite perspective. The
camera pans slightly to the left and catches up with Guru Mohapatra
as he re-enters the frame from the left-hand side. Thereafter the shot
remains static and the camera maintains this position, looking out to
the vast sea as Guru Mohaptra once more exits and re-enters the frame.
He continues to perform with waves crashing and receding at his feet,
causing a momentary disorientation in our perspective. He occupies the
center of the frame throughout this shot and the piece closes with him
turning his back to the camera, settling into the chowka position, and
facing the vast eternity of the sea beyond.
During the making of Bhavantarana Shahani had directed the film’s
cinematographer, Alok Upadhyaya, to move the camera in response to
what he (the cinematographer) felt in his body, not only what he saw in
terms of the movements in the dance sequences. Shahani had encour-
aged the camera to be moved as part of a bodily whole as though the
camera was co-extensive of the cinematographer’s body. The intent
here was to devise an embodied cinematographic practice based on the
interrelations between what lies before the lens and the cameraperson
operating it. Shahani recalls that during shooting Upadhyaya repeatedly
alternated the position of his eye behind the viewfinder – that is, between
the composed frame and a larger view of the scene by pulling back,
A Turn Towards the Classical 205
a few inches from the lens. This enabled Upadhyaya to maintain a sense
of the wider setting throughout the dance sequences, the elements in
it – waves, breeze and trees – and how the performer’s movements cre-
ated shifting relations and lines within space. Upadhyaya’s participation
through the camera was based on an embodied and sensory response
towards the moving body and how its relations to space were persistently
forming and changing. The moving camera followed the ephemeral lines
of exchange between the dancing body and its setting. This approach to
camera movement, I term as a form of free camera choreography.
In free camera choreography, the camera’s movements are provoked
by the fluid patterns and changing lines of flow between the danc-
ing body and the setting where it performs. The movement dynamics
that the camera is witnessing spill over and the camera builds on these
dynamics. In doing this, it may maintain the dancer’s body through
shifting positions within the frame, or, as in Bhavantarana, it may lose
the dancer’s body completely from the frame for a few moments. This
free camera choreography is an enactment of the cinematographer’s
bodily and sensory experience in relation to the dance/performance phe-
nomenon. In this, persistent accommodation of the primary elements
within the mise-en-scène loses significance and the visual field opens
up with the camera freely navigating through space. Mise-en-scène is no
longer a sealed totality, separate from and external to the camera.24 In
responding to the dance performance the camera’s navigations open up
the performance setting.
None of Upadhayaya’s camera movements for Bhavantarana were
rehearsed. This was as much because of Shahani’s insistence that the
cinematographer respond spontaneously to the dance performances, as
it was because Guru Mohapatra was improvising movements for every
dance sequence. Thus, camera movements were devised at the instance
of filming. Shahani and Upadhyaya had engaged in long and sustained
conversations about the scope of cinematography in this film. Shahani
had insisted that cinematography in documentary ought not to be
approached as a practice for capturing reality as if reality were separate
and external to the camera. Cinematography was to be approached as
bearing a creative relationship with the subject. A very specific director–
cinematographer relationship can be seen in operation here, one in which
the cinematographer is not simply a figure executing the director’s vision.
Through free camera choreography the cinematographer, Upadhyaya,
aligned with and advanced the vision of the director, Shahani. This par-
ticular kind of cinematographer–director collaboration can be termed
as an open-visionary collaboration using practitioner-scholar, Phillip
206 Documentary Films in India
elements – that is, the dancer’s body within the image at all times. This
embodied approach is based on the intersensory relations between the
cinematographer and the dance phenomenon. These intersensory rela-
tions, which shape camera choreography, can be further understood
using Merleau-Ponty’s discussion from the Phenomenology of Perception
where he notes that the body’s experience of the world and things in it
is not in the order of encountering them as externally constituted or as
entities separate from the perceiving body. Whether through the sense
of sight or touch, the body experiences a thing and it is through that
experience, sensory and tactile, that its forms a perception of that thing.
Merleau-Ponty states:
Gell’s discussion pertains to idols and forms through which gods are vis-
ualized and, as such, it can be applied to visual representations under-
stood most broadly. Bhavantarana takes up the presence of the divine
as permeating all material phenomena as its cue and, using free cam-
era choreography, the montage integrating dance, Guru Mohapatra’s
life narrative and images of the Odishan landscape, it evokes that
presence cinematically. This is a very crucial move in the representa-
tion of divinity in the context of Odissi dance. As indicated earlier,
Bhavantarana departs radically from the conventions of concert and
televisual representations of Odissi dance by filming dance sequences
in exterior landscapes. This contrast extends into how the film evokes
the presence of the Divine who, in concert and media performances,
is usually represented in the form of an idol of Lord Jagannath, quite
like how the Nataraja is part of the mise-en-scène of a Bharatanatayam
A Turn Towards the Classical 211
Birah Bharyo Aangan Kone or, entitled in English, The Bamboo Flute, is
Kumar Shahani’s cinematic contemplation on the origins of sound.
The film focuses on a single instrument, steeped in myth and lore, cel-
ebrated in all of India’s numerous cultures – the bamboo flute. Krishna
is the patron of this instrument and so in India, the flute stands for the
mischief, charm, cunning and romance – all characteristics exempli-
fied by this deity through numerous episodes of his fantastical incar-
nation on earth. The Bamboo Flute uses this instrument as an anchor
through which to explore and philosophically contemplate the pro-
cesses and principles that govern creative expression through sounds,
specifically the sounds of music.
Divided in two parts, The Bamboo Flute ambitiously and impressively
takes us through many cultural landscapes of India, glimpsing numer-
ous forms of human industry and arts, evoking in each encounter how
sounds generally, and music specifically, emerges. What is the source
of sound? How do sounds come about and what are the ways in which
they flow? These questions delicately inform the episodes that make up
The Bamboo Flute. I specifically term The Bamboo Flute an episode film for
it threads together a series of episodes that each dwell on how sounds
come into being and flow.
Though music is a key theme running through the film, its episodes
are not tied to each other sequentially or in any other narrative terms.
Each episode takes up different sounds and dwells on how they come
into being, flow and dissipate. Very subtly, almost imperceptibly, the
film’s episodes propose a clear relation between sounds and the cultural
settings from which they emerge. In this, The Bamboo Flute illustrates
the features of what German film theorist Siegfried Kracauer defined
and designated as the episode film in his seminal 1960 text, Theory
of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. In his discussion, Kracauer
emphasized that episode films present stories that are intimately tied
to what he calls ‘the flow of life’ in the settings where they are set.
The Bamboo Flute 215
the rhythms of the flutist’s breath. Every flutist, as every being, has a
characteristic breathing pattern that flows in particular rhythms that
are tied, in turn, to such factors as the flutist’s physical and emotional
dispositions. No two flutists, as no two beings, breathe alike. Listening
to the finer rhythms and nuances of a flutist’s breath, the craftsman
said, enabled him to determine the kind of bamboo, its width, the loca-
tion of finger holes on it – all of which are design elements to optimize
the flow and rhythm of a flutist’s breath and define the particular sound
of music that emanates from the flute.
Shahani returned from this workshop gripped by the thought of how
a flutist’s breath animates the hollow insides of a bamboo to produce
notes of music. Pt. Chaurasia extended this thought: just as breath
animates the hollow insides of a bamboo, breath animates the body,
another hollow vessel, with life. Breath is the substance of existence.
It is a marker of life. This understanding of breath as infusing life and
manifesting as sound through the flute stayed with Shahani through
the making of The Bamboo Flute. He did not want to visualize the flute
or the process by which sound and music are created using it. Shahani
regarded the flute as an instrument through which the raw and unme-
diated flow of breath is contained, defined and formed into the sound
of music. Further, the idea that breath, an invisible force, flows and
animates the flute to produce sound, was in a way transposed onto each
of the film’s episodes, where images and sounds are so constructed and
sustained that we are alerted to how the flow of visible and invisible
elements provokes and forms into music and sound.
While the bamboo flute is the principal instrument on which The
Bamboo Flute focuses, Shahani does not make it a singular or visible sub-
ject of description in the film. Each episode of The Bamboo Flute is set in
a defined cultural landscape and it takes up sounds and forms of music
particular to that landscape. Most episodes are based on a piece of music,
played on the flute, and each episode follows how the piece emerges
and flows. Persisting with a Kosambian approach to Indian aesthetics, in
The Bamboo Flute, Shahani weaves a rich, panoramic survey of cultural
landscapes that cuts across north and south India. Through the film’s
episodes we glimpse India’s numerous arts and crafts, including dance,
sculpture, architecture, sacred iconography, poetry, epic mythology,
painting, communal performances such as tribal dances and trance, on to
everyday practices of livelihood such as farming, fishing and metallurgy.
As the film documents these, it follows the rhythms and flow of sound
in each setting. Different episodes of the film also reference thinkers,
grammarians, historians and mythic figures from across historical eras,
The Bamboo Flute 217
and textured panorama is not structured in a linear way and the film’s
successive episodes juxtapose disparate and distant landscapes. Thus
one episode takes us into the midst of central India’s Rathwa tribal peo-
ples’ late night forest festivities. In another, we follow India’s acclaimed
flutist, Pt. Hariprasad Chaurasia, as he contemplates the flute at his
home in Mumbai. A number of episodes in the film recreate iconic
scenes from the life of Lord Krishna – the child Krishna stealing butter
from the village; a young Krishna romancing gopis or maidens near a
pool of water; and an old Krishna dying in a forest after being hit in
his toe by a stray arrow. A range of episodes consider folk art and craft
practices: we see gold being beaten into ornaments in a south Indian
village; a performer in a trance dancing before an elaborate painting
detailing a scenario of tribal life; we observe rice farmers working in
water-filled fields. Some episodes purely meditate upon dramatic land-
scapes that are strewn with gigantic rocks or silently flowing rivers,
all so framed as to make new sculptural formations within the filmed
frame. Numerous episodes of the film bring us face to face with ancient
sculptures and medieval monuments, and the film closes, poignantly,
with Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra performing against a setting sun, by
a seashore.
While observing these cultural landscapes, the film’s episodes focus
on how everyday life unfolds in them. There is a persistent emphasis
on the emplacement of sounds so that we appreciate them as embody-
ing the material and tactile qualities of the environments from which
they emanate and in which they flow. Besides the flute’s music, the
film’s aural track contains a number of other, mostly ambient sounds.
These ambient sounds – the chirping of a bird, the soft waves of a flow-
ing river, a gentle breeze, thunder, raindrops, the silence of an ancient
monument, a distant locomotive like a train – these are often brief and
incidental sounds and they enrich our sense of the aural atmosphere of
the film’s settings. This emphasis on emplacing sound informs our per-
ception of sound in the film in a specific way, for not only do we hear
sounds, but we also link those sounds to the worlds in which they are
set, seen visually. Our experience of sound is thus audio-visual.
Further, as we look at landscapes and listen to the atmospheric sounds
in them, our experience of what we see is subtly integrated with what
we hear, visible or invisible. The landscapes we see assume a presence
that exceeds the visual register and sounds play a key role in this.
A very particular sensory experience is constructed, one that rests on the
specificity of cinematic perception. Cinema, it is understood, entails a
The Bamboo Flute 219
kind of sense perception in which neither vision nor sound are absolute
entities. Michel Chion discusses the work of sound in cinema, the way
that it adds value to the image and creates what he terms the audio-
visual contract for the viewer.
While the device of framing delineates the field of view in a shot; sound
is potentially boundless and a film’s sounds may or may not emanate
from within the shot itself. ‘Film sound is that which is contained or
not contained in an image; there is no place of the sounds, no auditory
scene already preexisting in the soundtrack – and therefore, properly
speaking, there is no soundtrack’ (Chion 1994: 68). The Bamboo Flute uti-
lizes this possibility most fully for much of the film’s sound is off-screen,
though clearly diegetic. It is related to the worlds, the landscapes we
see, though the film’s images do not always contain the sources of the
sounds we hear.
Unlike Bhavantarana, The Bamboo Flute does not use any interpretive
intertitles. There is no informative or interpretive voiceover either, and
verbal discourse in the film is used in a limited way. The film experi-
ments with modes of speech. A poem recited to a beloved, a verbal col-
lage debating the birth of grammar as understood in Indian philosophy,
episodes narrated from India’s epic mythology – these are the kinds of
literary discourses that are performed verbally in the film. The verbal
discourses are not visually sited in the film, that is, no figure speaks
before the camera. All speech is performed offscreen and has been
added to the episodes in postproduction. The performative mode of each
verbal utterance is emphasized so as to remind the viewer that what
they are hearing is a piece of verbal discourse mediated by the camera.
Further, unlike Bhavantarana, which builds a narrative as it proceeds,
The Bamboo Flute does not construct a singular narrative that advances
through the film’s successive episodes. Each episode can be understood
as a self-contained unit and when all episodes are strung together they
suggest to us the many and intricate ways by which sounds are sited
and come into being.
220 Documentary Films in India
Classical ragas are closely linked with the broader theories of rasaesthetics
in India. Specific melodic models are devised for the expressive delivery
of particular rasas or sentiments and bhavas or emotions (Theilemann
1999: 22). Richard Schechner notes that in raga performances the com-
munication of rasa can become so deep that in ‘moments of intense
expressivity’ meaningless vocables temporarily even replace words. ‘The
extension of sounds built on modulations of pitch, volume, and duration
characterizing the raga is a formal way of giving over to the phatic quality
of ‘pure music’ (Schechner 2005: 252).
In addition to classical ragas, The Bamboo Flute includes some folk
music too. The flute is the principal instrument in most of the film’s
episodes accompanied on occasions by other instruments such as the
mrindangam and tabla. Formally, the film’s episodes are closely tied to
the structuring principles of the music on which they are based. Most
of the film’s episodes are based on the alaap – that is, the introductory,
unmetred movement of a piece (Clayton 2000: 211). Being unmetred,
alaap serves in identifying and establishing the notes and contours
of a raga. Only a few episodes in the film use musical pieces beyond
the alaap, either as whole or running into the first stanzas of the raga.
The film’s emphasis on alaap is related to its broader theme regard-
ing the origins of sound. Using the alaap, the film directs the viewer’s
attention to how a sound emanates, what elements in the environment
converge upon and shape an emerging sound, how sounds evoke and
suggest moods and how those moods evolve as the sounds of music
flow. The tone or mood introduced by the first use of alaap in an
episode is developed through the film’s other elements, including its
The Bamboo Flute 221
For this reason, ragas are not considered objective entities and the vir-
tuosity of a performance is not based on how closely it replicates any
original. Every raga performance is singular, for ragas are not based on
a fixed structure. Ragas exist in time and they have a very subtle rela-
tionship to time that provokes quite exact and unrepeatable affects (or
bhavas) in terms of the moods and emotions evoked for the listener
(Clayton 2000: 14).
222 Documentary Films in India
The partakers’ interest is not tied to the story, but to the enacting of
the story; the partakers do not want to “see what happens next” but
to “experience how the performer performs whatever is happening.”
There is no narrational imperative insisting on development, climax,
recognition, and resolution (Schechner 2005: 357).
The Bamboo Flute takes this up and uses the structural features of raga
performance – the delineation of ragas into episodes and the building
of a particular idea or mood within it through techniques such as repe-
tition or acceleration. Both of these structural features – the episode
and the devising of an idea or mood within it – form the basis of The
Bamboo Flute’s episodes. It is almost as if each episode takes up a tal and
persists with it till such time that it has made the propositions it aims
224 Documentary Films in India
A blue sky in which small clouds make tender impressions is seen from
a low angle and the camera tracks down, revealing an ancient temple in
the deep background, its reflection in a pond seen in the middle ground,
and, finally, a Bharatanatayam dancer, Alarmel Valli, emerges in the fore-
ground. She performs an invocation to the Lord Ganesha, the harbinger of
auspicious beginnings who forcefully and elegantly overcomes all obsta-
cles. This opening is based on the raga Hamsadhwani, which is mostly
associated with Carnatic music, though it is also heard in the north Indian
repertoire. The raga Hamsadhwani starts slowly and melodically, and then
rises up, using very defined notes and emphatic transitions.
This opening sequence consists of two shots. In both, the dancer is set
against a dramatic landscape. In the first she is framed to one side, in
the foreground of the temple and pond. The camera freely tracks up and
down in response to the scene before it; its movements building on the
rhythm of the raga. These movements of the camera are reminiscent of
The Bamboo Flute 225
Figure 8.2 Alarmel Valli performs in the opening sequence of The Bamboo Flute
Image courtesy, Roshan Shahani.
The first origins of organizing inner and outer space lie in ritual.
Through a series of transformations, it has come to mean mise-en-scene
The Bamboo Flute 229
Ritual is not an ahistorical category and therefore for Shahani the prac-
tice of mise-en-scène is also a historical one. In his own films, Shahani
has used mise-en-scène as a mode for articulating a cosmomorphism
that de-emphasizes the human as the source and center of experience
and understanding. For Shahani, cinema is uniquely equipped to do this
because it can establish how subjectivities are contingent, shifting and
fluid (Shahani, ‘The Self as an Objective Entity’, 1987). In his writings
Shahani ties cosmomorphism to the rise of phenomenology and the
new novel of modern literature. He elaborates:
In this critical comment, Shahani takes issue with the reduction of film
techniques such as montage to a prescriptive aesthetics. He calls for a
recognition of cinema’s twin capacities: one, to make viewers witness to
what is recorded, for the camera replaces the object of contemplation
230 Documentary Films in India
by its image; and two, the camera’s ability to decenter and relativise
meanings and affects. These twin capacities facilitate in reflecting
reality and experience as shifting and forming from no one privileged
perspective. This leads to his idea of cosmomorphism in cinema, for,
through its twin capacities, cinema, like the new novel, can overcome
anthropocentric representations.
Every episode of The Bamboo Flute commences with a suggestion of
site, where the camera has taken us. This is not necessarily through
an establishing shot, say a long shot that gives us a contextual view
of place. The camera’s approach privileges a sensory experience of
site, and how time and elements flow in it. We may be introduced
to a site with an emphasis on the changing light cast upon it at a
particular time of day, say in the episode with a majestic performance
by Guru Keluchrana Mohapatra when we see him increasingly silhou-
etted, performing against a darkening crimson-grey, evening sky. We
may encounter a site sensing the flow of elements like breeze, as in
the episode of Lord Krishna’s flirtatious love play with the gopis or
village maidens. We see a pastoral pond shaded by a tree on which
maidens’ saris sway to the breeze – suggesting they are bathing – and
the soft notes of the flute to the romantic, early evening raga Maru
Bihag, go on to gently prompt the stirrings of passion in this tran-
quil setting. Each episode takes us to a site and identifies sensory
qualities – sound, wind, light, among others – that we see flowing, in
movement and evolving. Site is persistently presented as living and
breathing.
Further, seemingly inanimate elements of site, such as physical
features like rocks, water bodies, hillocks, statuary, or architecture are
animated by the camera that, through framing, imbues particular emo-
tional tones in them. For instance; when we are navigating the insides
of a medieval palace, we cannot but register its sense of lonesomeness.
Or, the destructive ferocity we sense as we observe large rocks and sculp-
tures while navigating a rock temple site in south India. The affective
qualities the camera ascribes to the film’s disparate sites coincide with
the moods that are evoked through the flow of sounds on the film’s
soundtrack.
An episode that most clearly depicts the evolution of landscape and
sound occurs in the middle of the first part of the film. This episode is
based on the Hindustani raga, Puriya Dhanashri. Puriya Dhanashri is an
evening raga that suggests a pensive mood. The film’s episode strings
shots of an Indian landscape awaiting the monsoons. The episode starts
on the sound of thunder accompanying three shots of a parched and
The Bamboo Flute 231
The link to the world, what Kracauer specifically terms as the flow of life,
is the basis of his definition of the episode film. The episode film is thus
234 Documentary Films in India
The true film artist may be imagined as a man who sets out to tell
a story but, in shooting it, is so overwhelmed by his innate desire
to cover all of physical reality – and also by a feeling that he must
cover it in order to tell the story, any story, in cinematic terms – that
he ventures ever deeper into the jungle of material phenomena in
which he risks becoming irretrievably lost if he does not, by virtue
of great efforts, get back to the highways he has left… The episode
film, then, is full of gaps into which environmental life may stream.
(Kracauer 1997: 255–6)
The episode film both suggests and represents the flow of life and a
successful episode film is one that finds a balance between its principal
narrative or themes and the permeation into the film of the world in
which it is set. The Bamboo Flute achieves this fine balance. Each epi-
sode of the film starts by observing a setting, how elements flow in it.
Then sounds and actions get stirred in that setting. These sounds and
actions both extend from the setting and are influenced by it. Once the
sounds and actions have been performed, they steadily dissipate back
into the environment. Thus, while the film borrows from Indian music
the impulse for an episodic form, the audio-visual form of episodes the
film devises is tied more closely with Kracauer’s discussion of the flow of
The Bamboo Flute 235
life and the permeability of physical reality in the episode film than the
structural principles governing Indian classical music.
Closing notes
classical arts in which the will to historicity – through the visual and
the aesthetic – sits seamlessly with sensuous experience. As a historical
project, Shahani, through these two films resuscitates, celebrates and
contemporizes the numerous traditions of thought, contemplation and
epistemologies in India surrounding her classical arts and cultural herit-
ages. Laleen Jayamane has termed Shahani’s cinema as epic for it ‘entails
a reformulation of the ancient tradition of epic narration to address the
contemporary’ (Jayamanne 2006: 2). Thus, through cinema, Shahani
brings into the contemporary flow of life – after a colonial interruption –
India’s knowledge systems and schools of thought.
The words fill up the sounds; the images, the words. The body, the images.
Invocations of breath in the body, of life which returns it to life, music,
enchantment.
– Shahani, ‘Narrativity’, 1995
Epilogue
Introduction
1. Gellner differentiates nations from states and holds that both can emerge
independent of each other. See Gellner, E. 2008. Nations and Nationalism.
New York: Cornell University Press.
2. During the inter-war period and war years documentary was used for propa-
gandist purposes to shape favourable public opinion towards the war. Leni
Riefenstahl’s spectacular representations of Germany around the time of the
Nazi ascendance to power, and Britain’s charged propaganda documentaries
during the war both come to mind here. Propagandist documentary has
also been mobilized to celebrate national development and planning pro-
grammes, for example, Dziga Vertov’s dynamic representations of the Soviet
Union’s five-year plans through his kino-pravda series and other full-length
documentaries. The vast body of investigative, activist and exposé documen-
taries has questioned nations, their institutions and ideological discourses.
3. Corner, J. 1996. The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction to Documentary.
New York: Manchester University Press.
4. I take my cue here from Noel Carroll who, while discussing objectivity in relation
to the non-fiction film, argues that documentary debate has been marred by con-
fusions in the use of language that conflate objectivity with truth (Carroll 1983:
14). While I agree with Carroll that lack of objectivity does not necessarily mean
bias, as a practitioner I am inclined to hold documentary making and reception
as subjective experiences exercising subjects’, makers’ and the audiences’ ideo-
logical stances, knowledge systems and even aesthetic preferences.
5. Governmental and semi-governmental funding bodies such as Prasar Bharati
(Broadcasting Corporation of India), Public Service Broadcasting Trust and
the Indian Foundation for the Arts offer financial support for documentary
makers and Indian filmmakers have also secured funding from international
agencies such as the European Union’s cultural funds.
6. Paromita Vohra elaborates on this stating that ‘It may be an overstatement, but
there are periods when imaginative, idiomatic forms flower and periods when
more reality-based or classical forms again become prominent. It is not that
one is supplanted by the other, but rather that these two formal approaches
coexist with different intensity and visibility. In addition, it seems, each domi-
nates the other in alternation. For instance, you see the 1960s as a time when
formal approaches multiply in Films Division under Bhownagary. These then
lose traction and are replaced by vérité and agit-prop forms, searching for a
cinema that will be ‘a voice for the people’. With the coming of video, and then
digital formats, you see again a proliferation of forms using fictional elements,
which then give way to an emphasis, currently fuelled by European broadcaster
funding, on character-driven, observational documentaries which will have the
seamlessness of pure fiction while being made up of purely documentary mate-
rial’ (Rajagopal and Vohra 2012: 17).
243
244 Notes
… the Indian cinema megalith since 1960 has been effectively catego-
rized in popular discourse as two things: the ‘Hindi movie’ and ‘Satyajit
Ray’: the former being the song-dance-action stereotype made in over
twelve languages and representing the most enviable of all national
possessions, a cultural mainstream, and the latter a highly generalized
category involving a variety of different directors generically celebrated
as being culturally rooted in their context. Both categories have been
sustained as much by marketing strategies as by a committed and articu-
late brand of cinephilia accompanying each of them. (Rajadhyakasha
1997: 678)
9. Dada Save, as he was called, went on to shoot many short actuality films,
including documentation of such newsworthy events as the 1901 return
of an Indian student from Cambridge who had earned a distinction in
Mathematics, R. P. Paranjpaye, and the 1903 Delhi Durbar celebrating the
coronation of Edward VII (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980: 6).
10. Some of the names associated with the topicals include: Hiralal Sen,
F.B. Thanawala, Jyotish Sarkar, Bulchand Karamchand, Dwarkadas Sampat,
and J.F. Madan.
11. Short films became the staple for travelling cinema or bioscope shows.
12. To secure audiences, legislations such as the Defence of India Act 1943
made it mandatory for exhibitors to screen government-approved films, up
to twenty minutes in length in each film programme. In 1943, the British
government also launched the Indian News Parade (INP), whose screenings
were compulsory in cinema halls.
13. IFI elicited productions from Indian film companies such as the Prabhat
Film Company and Wadia Movietone. Musical Instruments of India, In Rural
Maharashtra and Tree of Wealth are among the films produced during this
time that document the cultural heritage and crafts of India.
14. Sanjit Narwekar elaborates:
The one positive effect of the War was that the documentary and its
techniques filtered into the country, gaining considerable impetus due to
the presence of such stalwarts as Jack and Winifred Holmes, Tom Stobart,
Alexander Shaw and later Sinclair Road. A number of filmmakers like Paul
Zils, Dr. P. V. Pathy, A Bhaskar Rao and Krishna Gopal were discovered
and many others like V. M. Vijaykar, Clement Baptista, Homi Sethna were
trained. (Narwekar 1992: 22)
even more so in a formally democratic country again like ours, where each
regardless of his mental equipment has a vote with the awesome power to
influence your destiny. The potential of documentary in building public
opinion is immense and also one which has remained largely untapped.
(Chanana eds. 1987: 39)
16. In Life to those Shadows (1990), Burch extensively discusses the socio-
economic and socio-ideological determinations of the IMR within the context
of the French, British and American cinemas.
17. Some of these films can be accessed online at The Colonial Film Project
website: http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/production-company/information-
films-of-india. The colonial film project is a combined project of universi-
ties (Birkbeck and University College London) and archives (British Film
Institute, Imperial War Museum and the British Empire and Commonwealth
Museum).
18. A number of short documentaries produced by the Films Division between
1950 and 1965 can be accessed at the Library of Congress’s Indian Film
Collection, Washington, DC.
19. For more details on the bureaucratic operations of the Films Division see
Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, 1980.
20. They secured funding from private and semi-private sponsors such as
Burmah-Shell, Technical Co-operation Mission (a wing of the International
Co-operation Mission of the USA), Art Films of Asia and National Education
and Information Films of India. A Short Film Guild was also formed compris-
ing such figures as D.B.D. Wadia, Harnam Motwane and Paul Zils, who had
played a key role in the initial years of the documentary movement under
the Films Division. Zils was crucial in the founding of the journal entitled,
Indian Documentary.
21. Sumita Chakravarty eloquently elaborates on the value of realism in Indian
cinema stating that:
4. The needs-based discourse itself had colonial origins. Deriving from Dipesh
Chakrabarty, David Ludden, and Partha Chatterjee who have illustrated that
postcolonial India’s development discourse drew upon colonial dichotomies
of civilization and backwardness, Roy elaborates:
Through the operations of the ‘rule of colonial difference,’ and its elaboration
of a hierarchical distance between civilized colonial self and the primitive,
to-be-civilized colonial other, colonial historicist reasoning had, from the
nineteenth century onwards (and possibly earlier as well), placed India
and Indians in a ‘waiting room’ outside the progressive march of history.
(2007: 108)
5. This is indicated most clearly in the IMA’s oath when cadets get recruited as
army officers.
‘I will remain as duty-bound, honestly and faithfully serve in the regular army
of the Union of India and go wherever ordered by land, sea or air and that
I will observe and obey all commands of the President of the Union of India
and the commands of any officer, over me, even to the peril of my life…’
3 Gandhi’s Children
1. The Jahangirpuri Colony in northwest Delhi is a large slum resettlement
colony set up by the Delhi municipal authorities for resettlement of slum
dwellers who are low-scale casual labourers, scavengers and rag pickers. The
colony is divided into 12 blocks and its total population is a little over 5 lakhs.
The colony is dominated by migrants from Bihar, Bengal and Bangladesh.
About 30 per cent of the population is Hindu, the rest are Muslims. Children
and adults living in the colony engage with some form of labour.
2. Most state they earn anywhere between Rs. 50–200 ($1–4) per day.
3. Jacques Aumont notes that ‘psychic distance cannot be quantified’ (Aumont
1997: 77). He states that; ‘… a given representation in an image is more
accurately described, in psychological terms, as the organization of “existen-
tial relations experienced with their instinctual force, with a predominantly
248 Notes
1. This installation was part of the ‘Being Singular Plural’ exhibition at the
Guggenheim Museum that ran from March–June 2012. Curated by Sandhini
Poddar, this exhibition included select works by contemporary Indian moving
image artists.
2. Desire Machine Collective, as the name suggests, draws on the ideas of
Deleuze and Guattari, particularly their concept of desiring machines that
they define in relation to the operations of capitalism. Deleuze and Guattari
emphasise that there is no such thing as desire, only desiring machines that
are principally binary machines, with one machine always coupled with
another. ‘The productive synthesis, the production of production, is inher-
ently connective in nature’ with flows that create a linear series (Deleuze and
Guattari 1977: 5). DMC is interested in confronting how capitalism perpetu-
ates many forms of fascism and violence and though their work is situated
in northeast India, they are committed to a cinema practice that speaks to
the links of capitalism and violence globally.
3. Interview conducted with Tambor Lyngdoh, member of the Khasi commu-
nity in the Mawphlang Sacred Forest, 19 June 2012.
4. For example, 25/75 is a surreal exploration of the links between dreaming and
the game ‘teer’ or arrow betting popular in the Khasi hills of Meghalaya. 30/12
juxtaposes an audio announcement of Saddam Hussein’s execution with a
market scene in Shillong, Meghalaya. A+Type dwells on traditional Assamese
home architectures to invite viewers into a sensory spatial imaginary.
5. Northeast India is bordered by China in the north, Burma in the east,
Bhutan and Bangladesh to the west. A narrow corridor of land to the north
of West Bengal, popularly called the Chicken’s Neck, links the northeast to
mainland India. Seven states, collectively known as the seven sisters consti-
tute the northeast region. These are: Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya,
Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura and Manipur. Topographically the northeast is
composed of low-lying soft hills, river basins and plains. The plains flank
either side of the wide and ferocious river Brahmaputra that originates in the
Notes 249
high plateaus of Tibet and cuts through Arunachal Pradesh and Assam before
entering Bangladesh where it merges into the Gangetic Delta. The northeast
region houses dense rainforests with rich deposits of natural resources such
as coal, rubber, petroleum and minerals. The region is best known for its
world famous, Assam tea.
6. Hinduism, brought by settlers of India, and Christianity, spread through
missionary contact during colonial times, have been differentially assimi-
lated by the region’s indigenous peoples.
7. Sir James Bampfylde Fuller, the first British Governor of the provinces of East
Bengal and Assam, famously termed the region as a ‘museum of nationali-
ties’, referencing the region’s cultural diversity (cited in Playfair 1909: xii).
8. Datta classifies the region’s population into three broad groups: tribal com-
munities occupying the hills; tribal communities occupying hills and plains;
and the non-tribals. While this classification draws from the policies of seg-
regation enforced in colonial times, it is reflective of the complex cultural
architecture of contemporary northeast India. In Datta’s schema, a first
group of communities is composed of those tribals who occupy distant hills
and are rather ‘isolated and free’ of organized Hindu or Christian contexts.
The second category is composed of communities whose tribal identity per-
sists alongside their acculturation with non-tribal cultures. These communi-
ties can be found in both the hills and plains. Besides Hinduism, a number
of such communities (the Khasis from Trespassers… for instance) practice
Buddhism or Christianity alongside tribal belief systems. The third category
is the non-tribal population who are mostly within the fold of the Hindu,
Sanskritized social and cultural structures (Datta 2012: 9–11).
9. During British colonial rule, all the states that today make up the northeast
constituted a single administrative unit that was called Assam. Today Assam
is one of seven states in northeast India.
10. Today Cooch-Behar is a district in West Bengal, while Cachar is included in
Assam.
11. The Tai-Ahoms are linked to the Tai peoples whose presence spans across
southeast Asia where they are known by different names for eg. Shan in Burma,
Thai in Thailand or Tay-Thai in Vietnam (Baruah 2011: 217 and Das 1999: 8).
12. Throughout British colonial rule, a range of policies were exercised to main-
tain the segregation of the hill regions. The Government of India Act 1919
pronounced the hill regions as ‘backward’ and later, the Simon Commission
of 1930 termed the hill regions as ‘excluded’, implying that the hill regions
were in such a state that they fell outside the social and cultural mainstream
of British India.
13. At the time of India’s independence the British administration even made
a proposition for the segregated hill regions to form into a separate ‘Crown
Colony’ of the British Empire on the grounds that these areas were so ‘backward’,
they were not ready for independence or assimilation into independent India.
14. Under colonial rule, Christian missionaries were encouraged and gained wide-
spread following across the hill regions with the result that today hill states
such as Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland are predominantly Christian.
15. The addition of Assam to the Bengal Province was to facilitate the trade of tea
and other cash crops through the nearest port of Calcutta. This also became
the basis for mass migration of landless peasants displaced from the eastern
250 Notes
5 Passage
1. The United Liberation Front of Assam, one of the key separatist outfits of
Assam, has categorically termed as ‘colonial’ the relationship between Assam
Notes 251
6 Residue
1. The film has been presented as a single screen installation. It is 39 minutes
long and it contains end credits. After these have rolled, the installation loops
back to the start. Viewers can enter and leave the screening at any time.
2. See disparity between realism and montage in Hill, J. & Gibson, P. C. (2000,
2nd edn.) Film Studies: Critical Approaches. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. According to Deleuze, the ‘movement image’ is related to cinemas such as
classical Hollywood in which the image involves causal action. Then there
is the ‘time image’ that depicts time in non-causal terms. Deleuze relates the
rise of the ‘time image’ after the Second World War because the link between
the sensory-motor schema, at the heart of the action and movement images
was broken-up. He states that after the war there has been a ‘rise of situations
to which one can no longer react, of environments with which there are now
only chance relations, of empty or disconnected any-space-whatevers replac-
ing qualified extended space’ (2001: 272).
4. Emphasis mine.
5. Deleuze identified the any-spaces-whatever in Italian neorealist films. These
often focused on sites devastated by the Second World War. Here characters
were pushed away from being active protagonists to seers and observers,
252 Notes
feeling the limitations of rationalizing what they were witnessing. The young
child in Rosellini’s Germany Year Zero, the old man in De Sica’s Umberto D –
these are all the characters who witness, who see and cannot perform any
action in the empty, deserted spaces where they are emplaced. They are the
‘new race of mutants’ who do not act but see (Deleuze 2001: xi).
6. The masses in Eisenstein’s masterpieces, Battleship Potemkin and October come
to mind here. They were visible subjects of history.
7. Acousmatic sounds in the film follow the wave principle. They arise and per-
sist over a series of images. A sound will be steadily introduced on low level
and it will slowly gain in pitch and level. After peaking and being held at that
level for a while, where on most occasions it is all we hear, it will slowly wear
off through a long drawn fade-out.
9. This has provoked very complex equations with funding bodies that have
supported Shahani and found that his films do not contain the ideologies
they would like to advance. It is for this reason that Shahani’s documenta-
ries, Bhavantarana and The Bamboo Flute, both made by support from public
sources, have received sparse distribution.
10. For further discussion of Shahani’s break with Godard see, Sharma, A. ‘The
Theory-Practice Interface in Film Education’; in, Myer, C. (2011 ed.) Critical
Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice. USA: Columbia University Press.
11. All classical dances of India draw upon the other arts, synthesizing influences
from literature, sculpture and music. The themes of the dances span the epic
and mythic narratives of Hindu Gods, asuras (demons), kings and humans.
Kapila Vatsyayan notes that Indian dances cannot be separated from the
broader canon of drama. Drawing upon the seminal text, Bharata’s Natyashastra
Vatsyayan states that ‘… at a very early stage of development, both these arts
[dance and drama] fused themselves into one and, by the time Bharata wrote
his treatise, dance was very much a part of drama, they had many points of
contact and both were consciously perceived as one’ (Vatsyayan 1974: 6).
12. The dancer is in a traditional Odishi costume that serves in locating this
dance for it has ikkat patterns particular to Odisha. The distinctly identifiable
waist belt and other ornaments such as those for the hair have designs in
silver filigree that is typical to Odisha.
13. See, Banerji, Anurima. 2012 ‘Dance and the Distributed Body: Odissi, Ritual
Practice, and Mahari Performance’, About Performance. No. 11. Centre for
Performance Studies.
14. Within dance documentation discussions, often the function of the camera is
reduced to recording – standing back and documenting movement. The aim
of such documentation is to preserve the performance in its entirety. While
this approach has methodological relevance in that performers and dancers
can use such footage to study their own work; both performers and filmmak-
ers find this role of the camera passive and limiting. Some scholarship in
the field of dance and camera has argued for a more dialogical relationship
between both. See Rosenberg, D. 2000. Screen Dance. available @ http://www.
dvpg.net/docs/screendance.pdf and, Harrington & Sharma 2013. ‘Practices
of Undisciplining: Notes on the Interface of Dance and Moving Image
Performance’; in, Journal of Choreographic Practices, 4.2, 151–71.
15. Vatsyayan bases this classification on classical texts, including Bharata’s
Natyashastra, the Abhinaya Darpana, and the Sangitaratnakara alongside numer-
ous medieval texts.
16. Gotipuas are cross-dressed transgender performers who perform a less refined
form of dance in public spaces.
17. Maharis were female ritual dancers who performed exclusively in the temple.
This practice has now completely diminished.
18. Tribhangi is also known as tribhanga. The two terms refer to the same posture.
Tribhangi is used more commonly in Odissi parlance.
19. This position entails a dipping of the spine towards the earth.
20. Comparing Indian dance with western forms such as ballet Vatsyayan states:
In the latter, a moment in space where the human form is free from gravity
is emphasized. Western ballet strives thus to eliminate space by covering as
much space as possible, whether floor-space or air-space. It cuts space into
254 Notes
chunks of movement, leaps and floor choreography. These are woven into
the most intricate patterns. The Western dancer is reaching out into space
vertically and horizontally in order to arrest a moment of perfect dynamic
movement. Whatever perfection the Western dancer achieves, he does by
making geometrical patterns in space, where movement is conceived as
an attempt to be free from gravity. The Indian dancer, on the other hand,
attempts quite the opposite; consequently the two differ completely in
their approach to movement. The Indian dancer’s preoccupation is not so
much with space as with time, with the dancer constantly trying to achieve
the perfect pose to convey a sense of timelessness. The human form here
achieves geometrical shapes in time rather than in space, for the intricacy of
the nritta technique depends on the very fine and deliberate manipulation
of rhythm (tala) to achieve a series of poses. The perfect pose is a moment of
arrested time – in limited space. (Vatsyayan 1974: 09)
21. Indian parallel cinema depictions of Odishan performance practices such
as the gotipua dance have also been set in outdoor locations for example,
Amol Palekar’s 1996 film, Daayra. For discussion see, Sharma, A. ‘The Square
Circle: Probelmatising the National Masculine Body in Indian Cinema’; in
Fouz-Hernandez, S. 2009 (ed.) Mysterious Skin: Male Bodies in Contemporary
Cinema. London: I. B. Tauris.
22. Two popular exceptions include Michael Jackson’s music video Black or
White, in which an Odissi dancer is seen on the curb of a busy freeway and
the opening montage of Zee TV’s travelogue Namaste India in whose closing
shot we see an Odissi dancer performing against a temple entrance.
23. Similarly, dance sequences pertaining to episodes from the Mahabharata are
composed in locations that uphold the complex dynamics of the political
moves from the epic poem. The game of dice where Yudishthira pawns all
his possessions including his brothers and wife is composed against a pitch
black background against which Guru Mohaptara performs in a striking red
silken outfit – the limited and strong colours of this sequence enhancing the
overall tension in this piece.
24. Camera movements are at the most basic level geared to accommodating all
elements necessary within the mise-en-scene and reflecting their interrela-
tions within the visual field, here the frame. Even when the camera moves
in a more subjective way, say when emulating a character’s shifting points
of view as s/he moves navigating space, camera movement remains geared
towards accommodating those aspects of the visual field that are pertinent to
the mise-en-scene, here in relation to the subjective stance of the character.
Camera movements are thus planned and/or rehearsed with the entire
team of camera operators including focus pullers so that any magnification
changes that may take place during movement can be supported with neces-
sary focal length changes.
25. Merleau-Ponty elaborates on vision and touch stating that while at an
immediate level, these are distinct senses, tactile perception draws on them
together. He states:
first sight, draws an absolute distinction between touch and vision, infact
makes it possible to draw them together. It is true that the visible object is
in front of us and not on our eye, but we have seen that in the last resort
the visible position, size or shape are determined by the direction, scope and
hold which our gaze has upon them. (Merleau-Ponty 2006: 367)
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262 Bibliography
Note: Page numbers in bold type refer to Figures; numbers in bold italic indicate
related text on that page.
AASU (All Assam Students alaap 220–1, 222
Union) 114 Anderson, Benedict 1
abhinaya (dance/drama Andhra Pradesh see Rishi Valley
concept) 195, 197–8 School
absent memory 161, 181 aniconic idols 210
actuality films 10, 15 Antonioni, Michelangelo 157
see also topicals any-space-whatever 6, 24, 157, 158,
aesthetics 3, 14, 16, 18, 33, 37, 95, 159
132, 135–7, 213, 236, 240 Appadurai, Arjun 48
aural 24 Arabhi Pallavi (dance sequence) 204
austere 31 Asian-American media arts 167
Bazinian 153 Assam 113–15, 118, 149, 151, 160
commercial 142 British control established 111–12
complex 178 see also Delhi; Guwahati
critical 20–5, 239 Assam Cinearts Society 119
Grierson’s perceived displeasure Assam Sahitya Sabha 114
with 15 Assam State Electricity Board 150
haptic 24, 96, 142–8, 149, 154 Assamese language 112, 160
Kosambian approach to 216 promotion of 114
orderly 51 Aumont, Jacques 95
photographic 32 aurality see hapticity
physically dominated 46–9, 50, 54 Australia 32
prescriptive 229 Australian National University Center
rasa 197, 220 for Cross-Cultural Research 23
realist 9, 15, 215 authenticity 19, 101
social 41–4, 81 style and 9
subtle 94 avant-garde film 2, 21, 35, 40, 140,
visual 24, 70, 74, 118, 238 147–8, 200
see also documentary aesthetics
AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers background sound 39, 60, 83, 177–8
Act, 1958) 120, 162 extensive use of Indian music
Agamben, Giorgio 24, 130, 133 for 12
Age of Reason, The (MacDougall Baer, Ulrich 171–2
2004) 34, 55, 238 Bamboo Flute, The (Shahani
Abhishek Shukla in 56, 57, 64–5, 2000) 24, 179, 211, 214–36, 238
66, 67, 68, 70, 71–4, 75–6, 93 see also Valli
Aggarwala, Jyotiprasad 118 Banerji, Anurima 197, 199–200
Ahom kingdom 111–12 Banerji, S. C. 222
AJK Mass Communication Research Bangladesh 111, 114
Center 14, 15 war of liberation (1971) 121
264
Index 265