BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

This essay examines the interface between the indexical and the gestural, through the practice of early twentieth-century painters active in the Bombay Presidency and adjoining princely states such as Kolhapur and Aundh. It draws upon archival materials such as biographies, memoirs, and photographs documenting artists at work in the studio, as well as remains of posed photographs that were produced as aide-mémoire for paintings. It throws light on the fraught place of photography as aesthetic practice in the art academy, its association with colonial protocols of scientific accuracy, capture and control, and its use to construct suggestive representational hybrids of the anatomical and the painterly outside the academy. The article explores patterns of patronage and of the use of photography in the practices of art production, publication, and exhibition, looking, in particular, at the role of the photographic basis of the portrait painting, and how photography became a supplement to “life-study” or the practice of drawing from nude models. The gendered politics of this interface, between artist, technology, and female model is a recurrent thread of analysis, drawing on critical debates that were published in Marathi periodicals of the time. The article explores the braiding of technologies in artistic practice in different sites, from the academy and the artist’s studio through to publication and exhibition in galleries, and illustrated magazines. While the essay considers a number of artists, including Ravi Varma, Durandhar, and Thakur Singh, it focuses, in particular, on Baburao Painter for his engagement with photography and painting in a career which traversed theater, painting, photography, and film production.

This essay explores the rich archive of photographer Nemai Ghosh whose production stills on the sets of Satyajit Ray kept his cinema alive in popular memory. While it might appear that Ghosh was overwhelmed by the vision of Satyajit Ray, the essay explores how the documentary impulse in his work created continuity as well as rupture with the cinema of Ray and others in Bengal. Nemai Ghosh’s forte lay in capturing candid moments of actors just before and after filming on the sets. These interstitial moments caught between the vision of the director and the photographer shooting a production still could be used to tease out other deeper meanings about star personas. As we look through Nemai Ghosh’s larger body of work, particularly at images which may not have found public circulation as film stills, we see other kinds of mediations between the photographer, the camera and his subjects. By extricating still frames out of motion, Ghosh’s photographs invite us to contemplate certain tensions between female actors, their roles and their extra cinematic lives. Recollections of these stars are layered by stories, anecdotes and popular myths. In this essay, I explore what it might mean to look back at Nemai Ghosh’s images through the prism of these overlapping memories.

Through historicizing photographs made by celebrated Indian photographer Sunil Janah (1918–2012), this paper will elucidate the ways in which Janah created “secular icons” of historical moments during India’s passage from the colonial to the postcolonial. I will primarily focus on two sets of Janah’s photographs: the first set is from the 1940s, and centers on the Bengal Famine of 1943, communal violence, and the displacement of population before and after the partition of 1947, while the second set is from the 1950s, and emphasizes in particular photo-documentations of independent India’s industrial growth during the first two five-year plans. Contrast between these two sets will focus on two distinct ways of becoming iconic, while also highlighting the politics of revival/retrospection and the ways in which particular genres of photographs are memorialized, while others remain relatively unknown. Later day viewers of Janah’s photographs have seen only the political import of his pre-independence photographs of the Bengal Famine (1943) and the post-Partition mass exodus, while I argue for a seamless continuity between Janah’s pre-Independence social-documentation and post-independence industrial photography. I further contend that Janah’s photographs were material traces of an indubitable reality that embodied and at the same time exceeded their ideological message.

This article studies two post-war documentary films set in India, Indian Village (1951) and The Wind and the River (1953), directed by the celebrated Swedish filmmaker Arne Sucksdorff. While many scholars have studied these films in relation to Sucksdorff’s biography and Swedish national cinema, less emphasis has been placed on these Indian documentaries in relation to other international documentary work that took place in India during the post-independence period. The excursion to India took place on commission from the Swedish Cooperative Union and Wholesale Society and therefore the films are studied in relation to Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson’s notion of “useful cinema.” In doing so, this article emphasizes the didactic ideas behind the production of sponsored film and the way in which ideas of the welfare state were projected onto post-independence India. Reading these documentaries against the grain, this article also addresses the question of how these films affected the authorial discourse surrounding Arne Sucksdorff and conversely what impact his films had among critics and filmmakers in India.

This article looks at one decade (1965–1975) in the history of Films Division of India (FD), the first state film production and distribution unit in the country. It tracks the changing political environment and several administrative, infrastructural, and policy changes of the time, along with the emerging “experimental” film and interview format films. Under the dynamic supervision of Jean Bhownagary, a constellation of film makers and artists like Pramod Pati, S.N.S. Sastry, S. Sukhdev, among others came to the fore, experiment with film form was encouraged, and dissonant voices rose against the state itself. I suggest that it is possible to study certain experiments and formal practices emerging at a particular time and space not as mere aberrations, but as something that emerges from complex shifts in institutional practice. I locate these as part of a layered body of film uses, a palimpsest, in which the filmmaker’s creative engagement needs to be situated in a bureaucratic order that could be arbitrary and inflexible but also provide for a regime of the permissible.

Video in the form of “little media” arrived in India in the mid-1970s shortly after Wilbur Schramm proposed the concept in 1973. In this article, I investigate the ways in which the discourse and practices of “little media” were re-formulated in India through specific historical contexts and media formations that assigned it political meanings beyond its initial developmental functions. Taking the case of the important media initiative, Centre for the Development of Instructional Technology (CENDIT), this paper explores the production and circulation of “little media” and the range of context-specific interactive methods the center deployed. The historiographic account of video at this particular juncture contributes to an expansion of Indian screen history. It complicates the dominant understanding of video during this period as a medium for the circulation of commercial cinema with a parallel narrative of purposive and emancipatory video-based initiatives.

Hari Sadhan Dasgupta (1923–1996) was arguably the most significant documentary filmmaker to emerge from the circle of film aficionados, intellectuals, and writers who gathered at the Calcutta Film Society (and at the Indian Coffee House on Central Avenue in Calcutta) in the late 1940s and 1950s. He received institutional training in filmmaking at the film school of the University of Southern California and served Irving Pichel as observer apprentice on three films after completing his university program. He was the first among the Calcutta Film Society group to make films and went on to make 50 odd documentaries and commercials between 1948 and 1984, of which Panchthupi: A Village in West Bengal (1955), The Story of Tata Steel (1958), and Konarak (1949) have earned iconic status. He also made two feature-length fiction films Eki Ange Eto Rup (1965) and Kamallata (1969).

Madhusree Dutta, Kaushik Bhaumik and Rohan Shivkumar (Eds), Project Cinema City. Designed by Sherna Dastur. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2013, 560 pp., ₹3,500 (Hardback), ISBN 978-93-82381-22-8

Peter Sutoris, Visions of Development: Films Division of India and the Imagination of Progress, 1948–75. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016, 318 pp., ₹995, ISBN-13:978-0-19-947210-9, ISBN-10:0-19-947210-6

Ali Khan and Ali Nobil Ahmad (Eds), Cinema and Society: Film and Social Change in Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2016, US$105 (Hardback), ISBN 978-0-19-940222-9