Cinema, Transnationalism, and Colonial India

Entertaining the Raj

Babli Sinha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136765070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Through the lens of cinema, this book explores the ways in which the United States, Britain and India impacted each other politically, culturally and ideologically. It argues that American films of the 1920s posited alternative notions of whiteness and the West to that of Britain, which stood for democracy and social mobility even at a time of virulent racism.

The book examines the impact that the American cinema has on Indian filmmakers of the period, who were integrating its conventions with indigenous artistic traditions to articulate an Indian modernity. It considers the way American films in the 1920s presented an orientalist fantasy of Asia, which occluded the harsh realities of anti-Asian sentiment and legislation in the period as well as the exciting engagement of anti-imperial activists who sought to use the United States as the base of a transnational network. The book goes on to analyse the American 'empire films' of the 1930s, which adapted British narratives of empire to represent the United States as a new global paradigm.

Presenting close readings of films, literature and art from the era, the book engages cinema studies with theories of post-colonialism and transnationalism, and provides a novel approach to the study of Indian cinema.

1 Historicizing entertainment

There was only one snag for Mohini. A crocodile! At the gateway of the picture house a giant cardboard crocodile was at grips with Tarzan. For a moment Mohini grew pale because of her childhood fear of crocodiles. But once inside, she was jubilant with this freedom, and waited eagerly for the empty seat on her left to be filled. Bad luck. A fat-encased man in his middle years, bulging over the armrests of his seat thumped down beside her as the lights were about to switch off. A bania, she thought, with a cloth shop in Burrabazar! Her face saddened, but there was Mickey Mouse on the screen, and her eyes were soon full of tears from the spilling laughter. How she loved these cartoons! How happy she felt!¹

Mohini has gone to the movies with her brother, and what is she watching with such emotional intensity? While the reference to Tarzan and Mickey in Bhabani Bhattacharya’s 1952 novel, Music for Mohini, might suggest that she’s attending an American double feature, in fact, Mohini is at a Hindi film, Tarzan ki Beti (Tarzan’s Daughter, 1938), which is accompanied by Mickey Mouse shorts. Going to the movies with her family is a tradition for Mohini. Even Mohini’s grandmother enjoys the shows—“the ‘shadow-show’ was to her mind a wonder of wonders, the supreme achievement of the Western peoples.”² This tradition ends when an arranged marriage leads her to a conservative new family outside Calcutta.

Refusing to be isolated by her new environment, Mohini draws on her early experiences with media, not only cinema but also her recordings for All-India Radio, to engage those around her. Bhattacharya’s novel presents the consumption of media as a way of integrating the urban and the rural, the Western and the Indian, the orthodox and liberal whose divides were starkly drawn at this historical moment. The social possibilities and problems of the media described by Bhattacharya are at the heart of this book. The marketing of the cinema as an accessible American mass culture proved to be problematic in elitist imperial societies. The debate around the cinema in South Asia referenced Americanism and found there both new social and economic potential and distinct forms of racism and world hegemony. This book is about the consequences of American engagement with the Raj via the primary American cultural export to South Asia, the cinema, and is interested in the intersection of global mass culture and empire and in the cultural exchanges between South Asian and American filmmakers, audiences, and intellectuals.

In historicizing cinema from the 1910s to the 1930s, I attempt not a linear, teleological, or comprehensive historical narrative of the cinema but rather a consideration of a series of dialogues that took place around the medium. These include interactions between the regulatory organization, the Indian Cinematograph Committee, and its interviewees and between American and South Asian audiences, writers, and artists. Many of these discussions are traceable via films and archival documents. Given the fragmented nature of these materials, whose existence is largely a matter of happenstance, it is crucial to understand how they were mediated by corporate and national interests, censorship decisions, and audience context.

Understanding the encounter between the American film studios, South Asian filmmakers and audiences, and the colonial censorship apparatus requires a theoretical paradigm different from the dialectical post-colonial and global-local models, which often assume hegemonic relationships between groups defined in essentializing terms and work within a vertical model of power in which a dominant society gradually annexes other cultures into its system. It requires a transnational approach, which encompasses the diverse linkages between and within the major and minor,³ but without the binaries which suggest that a particular formation of the minor is the only source of resistance to an oppressive major. For example, American film studios and their distributors constitute complex figures in relation to colonial India. On the one hand, American distributors were frequently accused of monopolistic practices, and American films often featured orientalist and caricatured representations which proved problematic in the colonial context, especially in the 1930s. On the other hand, Hollywood studios were positing a rhetoric of free trade and consumerism at odds with the existence of a large and deliberately impoverished colonial population. They were always a major economic presence, but they were sometimes aligned with pro-imperial rhetoric and at other times seemed to be clashing with it.

While this work is critical of a certain kind of post-colonial methodology which succumbs to the same binary it critiques in colonial discourse, it is also reliant on the work of post-colonial scholars including Edward Said, Anne McClintock, and Gauri Viswanathan, who have explored the ways in which cultural representation, including a wide array of materials from dish soap advertising to the British educational system, was bound to the politics and economics of empire. Scholars of Indian nationalism have understood the ways in which modes of communication and representation were essential to the success of anti-imperial efforts, and members of the Subaltern Studies Group in particular have been innovative in reintroducing histories of resistance that had been neglected by historians for being insufficiently modern.

Referencing nationalism, Ranajit Guha argues “that there was no such unified and singular domain of politics and the latter was, to the contrary, structurally split between an elite and a subaltern part, each of which was autonomous in its own way.”⁴ Guha describes the history of imperial rule as not merely a struggle between unified categories of imperialists and nationalists but as a network of relationships between many fractious groups, evidence of the “dominance without hegemony” of imperial capital.⁵ Guha’s studies have been valuable for showing that although capital might have a universalizing tendency, “to create a world market, subjugate all antecedent modes of production, and replace all jural and institutional concomintants of such modes and generally the entire edifice of precapitalist cultures,” the process of transformation is always incomplete.⁶ The incompleteness of hegemony and the competition with other global forces created disjunctures in colonial assumptions about cultural consumption.

The concept of transnational cultural dialogue is appropriate for a denationalized cinema study. Resistance to national models of cinema itself interrogates linear notions of cultural consumption and allows for the wide array of responses by Indian writers and filmmakers to orientalist representations, from essentializing characterizations of religion and ethnicity to innovative solidarities across cultural boundaries. Many archival documents and media accounts regarding movie-going in this period use terms such as Indian cinema or American cinema in a way that suggests a unified aesthetic and language. I will refer to terms such as Indian or American filmmakers when engaging with these accounts, but never to suggest a unitary concept of Indian or American cinemas. Only a paradigm resisting concepts of national cinema would be appropriate for a study, which considers the statements of Hollywood trade representatives, imperial police officials, and spectators to be all relevant to the experience and transformation of the cinema in South Asia.

This book understands transnational cultural exchange to work within and between the categories of major and minor, including competition between empires and nations as well as solidarities between minoritized communities. I am aware of the importance of “provincializing” the categories of major and minor by being attentive to the narratives produced by institutions and individuals while acknowledging the helpfulness of these terms in understanding the unevenness of power.⁷

This approach draws on the theory of deterritorialization formulated by Deleuze and Guattari.⁸ In conceptualizing a transition from a centralized imperial system and a deterritorialized American Empire, from a system governed by “supreme and sovereign authorities” to a decentered apparatus, which “manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command,” Hardt and Negri explore the dissonance within what Deleuze and Guattari call a capitalist machine.⁹ Marking the era of Woodrow Wilson as a time of an expansive Empire of a “world network of powers,” Hardt and Negri write that “this new sovereignty [of Empire]does not annex or destroy the other powers it faces but on the contrary opens itself up to them, including them in the network.”¹⁰ Missing is the agency that can arise from the dissonance between what Hardt and Negri call Empire and imperialism. Just as the hegemony of imperialism was not complete, so the deterritorialized economy of Empire did not constitute an invulnerable sovereign body.

This agency also involves more than the post-colonial concept of transculturation. By transculturation, Pratt refers to “how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture.”¹¹ Concepts of creative adaptation have been criticized by Dilip Gaonkar, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Leo Ou-fan Lee, among others, for the sense of progress which they imply.¹² Transculturation and creative adaptation presuppose an original cultural product that is transformed but retains an aura despite the different context of spectatorship. In lieu of these concepts of all-absorbing empire or progressive transformation of originary texts, I suggest a rhetoric of engaged and dialogical creativity.

This book is in conversation with other historical analyses of film which take a transnational approach in considering the cinema in South Asia from the 1910s to the 1930s with attention to agency within regulation, exhibition, aesthetics, and performance. A reflection upon the relationship between the Indian Cinematograph Committee and the 1927 British Films Quota Bill can be found in the work of Priya Jaikumar. Committee members alleged the bill, under the guise of promoting film production across the different parts of the Empire, was designed to promote British films, and Jaikumar has investigated the ways in which members of the Indian Cinematograph Committee (ICC) negotiated the desire to promote an Indian film industry with their charge by the colonial state.¹³ Scholars William Mazzarella and Manishita Dass have interrogated the nature of the publics who constituted audiences in colonial India and the reason why they may have been a source of concern for officials. Mazzarella discusses the complications posed by the “not necessarily nationalist, not necessarily activist” public,¹⁴ while Dass explores the simultaneously “menacing and vulnerable” nature of the emergent mass public.¹⁵ Poonam Arora has analyzed the social space of the theater and the anxieties aroused by the proximity of European and Indian audiences attending the cinema.¹⁶ What I find particularly intriguing is the notion that this public was often being formed around the viewing of American films.

There is a body of transnational scholarship on film genres and performers which examines the incorporation of foreign film conventions with an eye to innovation within a multinational medium. Early on, Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy situated Phalke in the international genre of trick films.¹⁷ Following this approach, Ashish Rajadhyaksha has analyzed the influence of films such as the Mark of Zorro on a genre of stunt films such as those by Master Vithal.¹⁸ Rosie Thomas has discussed how the “Fearless Nadia” films of the 1930s adapted and “indianised” the Pearl White film serials and dealt with the whiteness and otherness of its star.¹⁹ Priti Ramamurthy has compared the actress Sulochana in the context of the international movement of the modern girl and explored her role in the construction of gender and nation.²⁰

In considering agency in the context of exhibition, Bhaskar Chandavarkar, Ram Mohan, and P.K. Nair have researched music in the theaters and tent shows, the presence of interpreters and readers who read, translated, and sometimes invented intertitles for illiterate audiences, and the use of special effects.²¹ Sudhir Mahadevan has explored the ways in which foreign “junk films” were exhibited by itinerant “bioscopewallahs” and the ways in which this tradition continues today.²² Finally, scholars such as Sharmistha Gooptu and Stephen Hughes have resisted regional and national binaries in order to consider the global as well as the national imbrications of Bengali and Tamil cinemas, respectively.²³ Films from this period are often studied as part of nationalist teleological narratives which both consider film’s development in isolation and see it culminating in a large commercial industry. The work of these scholars is vital to achieving a fuller understanding of an underexplored era in film history through a focused examination of particular figures, films, and aesthetic issues. They are particularly skillful in thinking about agency, which can look like a number of things and can certainly be an inadvertent consequence of cultural contact.

The often unintended impact of American films is the concern of Chapter 2, in which I argue that American films became a battleground for debates about social division and identity in colonial India. The cinema’s representation of whites in the genres of comedy, adventure, and romance was thought to erode the prestige of the British, undermine colonial rule in India, and distract from Indian cultural traditions. My claim is that the cinema’s marketing as mass entertainment was at odds with traditions of social segregation. I argue that its tendency to encourage empathy across national, racial, and gender boundaries and to provide spatial intimacy with bodies and objects also clashed with notions of social hierarchy. I make these arguments by examining some of the most popular as well as controversial American films in 1920s colonial India, including Hot Water, The Sheik, Orphans of the Storm, Foolish Wives, and The Thief of Baghdad.

I also study the ways in which South Asian filmmakers deployed conventions of American films in imagining a modern national identity. In Chapter 3, I focus on the genres of comedy, adventure, and historical films, which evaded bans on political content, and examine the few films still in existence from this period along with documentation of lost films. In my discussion of the comedies Brother-in-law and An Idiot’s Intelligence, I claim that these films represented a Western orientation signified by romantic prowess, technological savvy, and familiarity with English, as being part of ordinary life at a time when others were pathologizing it as being outside of Indian identity. I find that the mythological films King Harischandra, Death of Kaliya, and Birth of Krishna sought to reconcile Indian contexts with the conventions of the foreign cinema by combining stories from Hindu mythology with elements of slapstick, adventure, and trick films. I contend that the historical films Fall of Slavery and Gallant Hearts drew on adventure tropes to present the pre-colonial past as a model of a better society and as a source of inspiration for the creation of an independent nation.

Because this book is about cultural exchange rather than unidirectional influence, several chapters focus on the impact of South Asians and the Raj on the American cultural imaginary in the 1920s and 1930s. In Chapter 4, I reflect on orientalist films of the 1920s which tend to represent South Asians as tyrants or hapless victims. This kind of entertainment is part of an erasure of the persecution of Asians via immigration legislation, quiescence regarding mob violence, and institutionalized discrimination, particularly on the West coast of the United States. I explore the dialogical relationship between these narratives, captured most controversially in Katherine Mayo’s infamous book, Mother India, and the responses to it from Indian diasporic writers residing in the United States. While many of these writers sought to preserve a low profile in order to continue their nationalist activism, some including Lala Lajpat Rai and Dhan Gopal Mukerji built alliances across ethnic boundaries and worked within innovative rhetorical forms in order to articulate the relationship between colonial India and the United States.

In Chapter 5, I consider how ideas of empire in British films and literature impacted the cinema in the United States. I do this by studying representations of the...