Book Review: Peter Sutoris,Visions of Development: Films Division of India and the Imagination of Progress,1948–75

Peter Sutoris’ Visions of Development is a timely contribution to the current academic as well as popular interest in the Films Division of India (FD), thanks to the FD Zone which was initiated in 2012. ¹ Younger readers have probably seen the films that Sutoris describes at FD Zone’s curated screenings where, typically, an older film from the archive is paired with a contemporary film, generating productive intergenerational conversations. ² Older readers, though, may retain a dim recollection of these films as the bitter pill that had to be swallowed before the “real” film started—Indian government regulations of the time had made it mandatory, across theaters in India, to screen the FD documentary before rolling the commercial film. Of the films themselves, what one recollects are the Indian-Oxbridge accents in the voice-of-god commentaries, and stock images of dams, irrigation canals, temples, visiting dignitaries, and a catalogue of other dreary subjects of development. Sutoris ought to be commended for drawing our attention, beyond this commonsensical view, to the complex nature of the FD archive as a diverse, rich body of work and a living and dynamic artifact that helps us understand the past and present of not only film but also India’s tryst with modernity.

Sutoris’ work contributes to a small though growing body of work on the Films Division, which was established in 1948. ³ What marks this book, however, is that it captures the contrapuntal energies at work in the films. On the one hand, the films reflect the statist and middle class agendas of the so-called Nehruvian “development regime,” on the other, they embody the dissonant energies of multiple agents within the statist bureaucratic machinery—politicians, civil servants, filmmakers, and subject experts. In the final instance, as Sutoris points out, it was the mounting critique of Nehruvian policies in the public domain that put pressure on the FD film to implode and move out in new directions in the 1960s, only to be reined in again from the Emergency (1975–1977) onward. In many ways, the films are in excess of the bureaucratic apparatus that produced them, and that is what makes them fascinating objects of study. Certainly fascinating for the author, who has watched and documented nearly 250 of these films—surely a labor of love! ⁴ The Films Division is notorious as the “Files Division” to insiders and Sutoris deserves high praise just for wading through the red tape and bureaucracy to find the gems that he did. Besides, there is also a creative mining of the FD archive: for example, the fascinating diary of Samuel Berkeley-Hill, an early commentator, whose voice is so familiar to us from the films of that period, for a detailed account of everyday FD practices.

Sutoris begins by tracking continuities between the productions of the colonial film units, Information Films of India (IFI), and post-independence FD films. If the IFI films helped sustain the war effort against the Axis powers, then the FD films sustained the war against the later enemy, that is, the underdevelopment of the colonies. Sutoris argues that there is a seamless way in which the colonial idea of progress merges with post-independence Nehruvian values of development, and the creation of an ideal citizen who participates in the developmental planning process. FD output of the period is divided into three categories—education, family planning, and tribal films—all of which follow the IFI/FD template to reproduce colonial binaries (including Paul Zils’ Vanishing Tribe, 1959, on the Todas of the Nilgiris). Using select case studies, Sutoris illustrates that the old Manichean divisions of western civilization vs. the to-be-civilized orient were replaced in independent India by a new binary of the urban-progressive vs. rural/tribal/hyper-sexualized illiterate in urgent need of development programs like family planning and literacy missions. The emphasis was on keeping the language of cinema really simple for fear that the intended targets of development would not get the message otherwise, which also explains the simplistic and often schematic look of these films.

In one of the useful, informative chapters of the book, “The Emergence of the Films Division: Institutional Roots and Tensions,” Sutoris maps the organizational structure and practices of FD. By the 1960s, FD was a huge, well-endowed organization occupying prime real estate in South Mumbai’s Peddar Road and, in Sutoris’ statistics, employed “860 staff, 99 directors, 14 newsreel camera men across India and was producing 100s of films that reached nearly 25 million Indian viewers” making it the “largest peace time program of public information films ever seen among the democratic countries” (p. 61). Sutoris cites various reasons for the fossilization of FD from the 1980s onward: deflection of government attention to public television (Doordarshan), FD-bureaucracy and red-tapism, excessive government intervention, internal censorship, armchair direction (often making films with little or no fieldwork), and low raw stock to exposure ratio (that made for poor output quality). One of the significant phenomena that the book touches upon in this chapter is the beginning of the Indian animation industry in the Cartoon Film Unit of FD in 1957. It was a highly accomplished unit, doing pixilation, animation, and puppetry, and was headed by the likes of Ram Mohan, and Pramod Pathy (who had studied with Czech puppet master Jiri Trinka). One wished there were more on this undocumented and little known history of Indian animation.

Having worked in the development sector across the world—including regions in South Asia and the South Pacific—Sutoris’ book is not only about reading FD films for their development ideology but also about exploring the uses of film in development. Indeed students and scholars of development studies will find Sutoris’ approach to the FD films particularly useful. If the Nehruvian developmental teleology aimed at what he called an “electrically minded” population, this was also the moment when the nation fell “in love with concrete” (to quote Sunil Khilnani’s phrase that Sutoris borows to good use). The Nehruvian emphasis was on linear progress toward industrial modernity whose outward symbols were dams, irrigation systems, huge government programs. What the FD films did was to capture this spectacle of industrial modernity to which the citizens had to willingly submit. So, the extolling of dams seems to be a favorite FD theme. Sutoris captures an interesting moment from Pathy’s Earth and Water (1956) told from the happy-to-be-dammed river Bhavani’s perspective while several low angle shots frame the sheer gigantism of the dams, juxtaposing them with monumental temples. The production of the ideal citizen is also achieved through a combination of pedagogy and co-optation of critical voices—where the Citizen-Critic X or Y is incorporated into the film and is seen as being wrong in their hasty judgment of the government’s well-intentioned schemes.

The chapter on the 1960s, “Films Division’s Transient Outliers, 1965–c.1973,” is certainly the most interesting one in the book, also because it was such a dynamic phase in the life of FD—we see its flowering under Jean Bhownagary and the “outliers”—SNS Shastry, Pramod Pathy, Sukhdev, and others. New experimental visual storytelling, non-linear editing, stop motion animation, self-reflexivity, and on-camera interviews mark this phase of FD. Not only are there new subjects of development, there is a critique of the state and its projects, as well as a questioning of the entire Nehruvian development philosophy on which it rested. Sutoris emphasizes the galvanizing presence of Jean Bhownagary (himself a multi-talented sculptor, painter, poet, and magician), on loan from the UNESCO, and a close personal friend of Indira Gandhi who gave him a free hand in the running of FD. Bhownagary belongs to the long list of illustrious FD directors: from Ezra Mir, Mohan Bhavnani, V. Shantaram et al. to VS Kundu. Besides a detailed discussion of the experimental films of Pramod Pathy and S.N.S. Sastry’s interview film, I am 20 (1967), this chapter also contains documentation of the dramatic career of Sukhdev aka Comrade Sukh, one of the most interesting and controversial FD directors.

Sutoris concludes with SNS Shastry’s This Bit of that India (1972) that cites a scene from Federico Garcia Lorca’s play House of Bernarda Alba (1945), where after the suicide of her youngest daughter, the weeping senior matriarch forcefully tells her children to remain silent about the fact that she was no virgin when she died. This is the film’s and the book’s central metaphor for the state’s patriarchal (or even matriarchal after Indira Gandhi) attitude to the “subjects of development” whose voices and visions are what Sutoris has tried to capture in the book.