Cinema at the End of Empire: a Politics of Transition
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cinema at the end of empire CINEMA AT duke university press * Durham and London * 2006 priya jaikumar THE END OF EMPIRE A Politics of Transition in Britain and India © 2006 Duke University Press * All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data and permissions information appear on the last printed page of this book. For my parents malati and jaikumar * * As we look back at the cultural archive, we begin to reread it not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts. —Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism CONTENTS List of Illustrations xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 1. Film Policy and Film Aesthetics as Cultural Archives 13 part one * imperial governmentality 2. Acts of Transition: The British Cinematograph Films Acts of 1927 and 1938 41 3. Empire and Embarrassment: Colonial Forms of Knowledge about Cinema 65 part two * imperial redemption 4. Realism and Empire 107 5. Romance and Empire 135 6. Modernism and Empire 165 part three * colonial autonomy 7. Historical Romances and Modernist Myths in Indian Cinema 195 Notes 239 Bibliography 289 Index of Films 309 General Index 313 ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Reproduction of ‘‘Following the E.M.B.’s Lead,’’ The Bioscope Service Supplement (11 August 1927) 24 2. ‘‘Of cource [sic] it is unjust, but what can we do before the authority.’’ Intertitles from Ghulami nu Patan (Agarwal, 1931) 32 3. The British Board of Trade Cinematograph Films Act Registration Form C, 1927 47 4. Reproduction of ‘‘The Quota Is Definite!’’ The Bioscope (17 March 1927) 59 5. Publicity still of the actress Sulochana (a.k.a. Ruby Myers) 73 6. Cover of filmindia (May 1938) 92 7–10. Stills from Sanders of the River (Korda, 1935) 113–122 11. Still from The Drum (Korda, 1938) 138 12. Still from The Four Feathers (Korda, 1937) 143 13. Still from The Drum (Korda, 1938) 148 14. Poster of Sabu in Jungle Book (Korda, 1942) 150 15–16. Stills from The Drum (Korda, 1938) 153–158 17–24. Stills from Black Narcissus (Powell and Pressburger, 1947) 169–188 25–26. Stills from Diler Jigar (Pawar, 1931) 207–210 27. Film poster for Sikandar (Modi, 1941) 212 28. Still from Diamond Queen (Wadia, 1940) 214 29. Still from Sikandar (Modi, 1941) 215 30–31. Stills from Thyagabhoomi (Subrahmanyam, 1939) 216–217 32. Still from Amar Jyoti (Shantaram, 1936) 219 33. Still from Admi (Shantaram, 1939) 231 34. Still from Amritmanthan (Shantaram, 1934) 233 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS With each year that I worked on this manuscript, I accrued new debts of grati- tude. For access to documents, films, and film stills, I am thankful to the helpful staff at the National Film Archive of India in Pune; the Maharash- tra State Archives in Mumbai; the Nehru Memorial Library and the National Archives in New Delhi; the British Film Institute, the Public Records Office, and the British Library in London; and the University of Southern California (usc) Cinema-Television Library in Los Angeles. Generous grants sponsored my bicontinental archive crawl. Of particular assistance were the American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Research Fellowship, Northwestern Uni- versity’s DissertationYear Fellowship, travel grants from the Center for Inter- national and Comparative Studies and the University Research Grants Com- mittee, travel funds from the English Department at Syracuse University, and a sabbatical from usc’s Critical Studies Division. Friends and family—particularly Arundhathi Subramaniam and Vikram Kapadia in Mumbai; Anuradha Nayar, Rajeev Nayar, and Sanjay Suri in Lon- don; the Vartaks and the Mukherjees in Pune; and my parents in New Delhi— sustained mewith their hospitality, food, drink, and conversation as I worked my way through files and films. Navigating the voluminous holdings of the xiv acknowledgments India Office Library would have been no fun without the help of my friend and fellow film-enthusiast Kaushik Bhaumik. And thanks are due to Arjun Mahey for introducing me to Joseph Conrad in his inimitable way, many years ago. Several people offered invaluable feedback as I went through drafts of this book. I am particularly grateful toTom Gunning, Madhu Dubey, Mimi White, Steve Cohan, Sarah Street, Marsha Kinder, Dana Polan, Urmi Bhowmik, Alex Lykidis, and to Syracuse University’s English Faculty Reading Group for help- ing me clarify the project. Gunning is wholly responsible for turning my inter- est in cinema into a passion and a profession; I would not have written this book without him. Dubey’s take-no-prisoners attitude toward what she calls ‘‘lazy cultural-studies jargon,’’ kept me honest, and Noël Burch’s interest in my work spurred me on at a crucial moment. Roopali Mukherjee wrote her book as I wrote mine, and it was immeasurably helpful to go through the process together. I can only hope that our long phone conversations about books, theorists, and the point of it all were as indispensable to her as they were to me. Tom Holden reminded me to stick to deadlines and take breaks, often treating me to dinners and road trips. His close reading of sections of this book helped me to streamline the project and, more important, to conclude it. The love, friendship, and intelligence of these people and of my family equipped me for the luxuries and labors of academic writing. I am incredibly fortunate to have had the experienced and astute guidance of Ken Wissoker, Courtney Berger, and the staff at Duke University Press for the publication of my first book, which is so much better because of their careful and inspired work and theirenthusiastic support. Anonymous review- ers for the press suggested changes that alsovastly improved the text’s quality and readability. Revised versions of three previous articles are included in the book, and I thank Cinema Journal, Screen, and The Moving Image for granting me permission to reprint the material. The British films discussed here are still in circulation, and a few that are not (like The Great Barrier and The End of the River) can be found at the British Film Institute in London. The Indian films analyzed in the final chapter can be viewed at the National Film Archive of India in Pune. Never had a larger area of the globe been under the formal or informal control of Britain than between the two world wars, but never before had the rulers of Britain felt less confident about maintaining their old imperial superiority. —Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes INTRODUCTION We must abandon the rubric of national cinemas if we are to consider the multiple, conjunctural pressures applied by decolonization on the political entities of an imperial state and its colony. Declining British imperialism, in- creasing U.S. hegemony, and internal nationalist factions implicated Britain and India in each other’s affairs, shaping state policies, domestic markets, and emergent cinemas in both regions. A parallel narration of their inter- twined histories clarifies the global function of cinema during late colonial- ism by interrogating the consequences of a redistribution of political power in plural and linked cultural contexts. In 1931 Winston Churchill spoke to the Council of Conservative Associates in Britain, explaining his resistance to granting India dominion status. ‘‘To abandon India to the rule of Brahmins would be an act of cruel and wicked negligence....TheseBrahmins who mouth and patter the principles of West- ern Liberalism...arethesameBrahmins who deny the primary rights of existence to nearly sixty million of their own countrymen whom they call ‘un- touchable’...andtheninamomenttheyturnaround and begin chopping logic with Mill or pledging the rights of man with Rousseau.’’1 In castigating 2 introduction Hindu Brahmins for their adherence to oppressive social practices despite a competent knowledge of Western liberalism, Churchill exposed the ineffable qualifications in his own rationale for Britain’s continued control over India. His suggestion was that although Britain also denied sovereignty to well over sixty-million people, it did not patter on about liberalism but grasped the true essence of that political philosophy. Two kinds of commercial British and Indian film from the 1930s responded directly to this line of argument. The first recreated similarly paternalistic defenses of empire, with films like Sanders of the River (1935) and The Drum (1938), both produced by Churchill’s friend and confidant Alexander Korda.The second, against Churchillian con- demnation, imagined an alternative Indian society. Nitin Bose’s Chandidas, a popular 1934 film produced by the Calcutta-based film studio New Theaters, opens with the declaration that it is ‘‘based on the life problems of the poet Chandidas—A problem India has not been able to solve.’’2 The film tells the melodramatic tale of a young poet (K. L. Saigal) and his beloved Rani (Uma Shashi), a lower-castewoman, through a narrative and a musical soundtrack that continually link the romantic tribulations of these young lovers to contemporary social issues. Chandidas fights the Brah- min taboo against washerwoman Rani dhoban’s entry into a Hindu temple, weighing the arguments for humanity (manushyata) over religious conduct (dharma). By the film’s conclusion, a coalition of commoners supports the transgressive couple’s vision of an egalitarian future for India. Popular British