3) What were your best discoveries and why do they stand out?

When I started working on this project, it was clear that FD productions from the 1950s and early 1960s were similar both in terms of content and formal representation. There was a pronounced break in the late 1960s, with a collective of artists including J. S. Bhownagary, S. Sukhdev and S.N.S. Sastry, who became associated with the organisation. There was a clear dichotomy between the two periods of FD’s history.

But later, I found films from 1950s in the archive that were not fully consistent with the cinematic templates that FD was pushing forward. This discovery pushed me to rethink my original arguments. I was able to identify traces of doubts, of thinking about film, development and nation building that had coexisted within FD from the very beginning. I believe some of this dissonance was due to the nature of the organisation as a creative production house, which attracted people with creative tendencies and ways of thinking about history and politics that did not fully align with the political mainstream of the period.

It thus only made sense that FD became a battleground for ideas, where different actors entered the stage at different points in time. This provided a fascinating window into the development imagination not only of the elites, but also of other groups of actors within the state.

4) Your monograph 'Visions of Development, Films Division of India and the Imagination of Progress, 1948-75' will come out with Hurst in late 2015. What is the main argument of the book?

There are two main arguments. One is the original argument I made in my thesis, which has to do with continuities from the colonial into the post-colonial period. Part of the book is dedicated to colonial cinema of the 1940s, looking at colonial-era thinking about documentary films, the ways in which they served the colonial project of the British Empire and affected Indian documentary practices. These continuities included the content of the films—the ways in which the idea of development and progress was discussed, the models of development that were prioritized (mainly the Western ideas of industrial modernity). Another continuity could be seen in the cinematic representation of the idea of development. The meaning of these films was derived primarily from spoken commentary, while images just served as illustrations of the verbal messages. The third continuity had to do with the organisation’s staff, the creative artists who had in many cases previously worked for Information Films of India and the Film Advisory Board during colonial times, or at least were influenced by fellow filmmakers associated with these organisations. By examining different layers of continuities from the colonial into the post-colonial, I suggest that some of the limitations of the Nehruvian model of development could be traced back to the colonial ways of thinking about progress.

The second argument of the book considers the fragmentation of the different layers of actors entering the stage within FD. This argument tries to refine the first one by showing that in the post-colonial period, even though the dominant trend was a continuation of the colonial ways of thinking about development and film, alternative ways of looking at development, progress and nationhood as well as the social purpose of film co-existed with these trends. There was a very powerful 'middle layer' of state bureaucracy, which made a lot of decisions and exerted a lot of agency in the filmmaking process. Each of the different groups—the filmmakers, the middle layer of bureaucracy and the political leadership—brought into the picture their own assumptions about development and the purpose of film in the process of development. For instance, the middle layer of state bureaucracy consisted in most cases of the urban middle class, which resulted in various middle class notions of modernity being inserted into the films. These ideas included, for example, small families, themes of consumerism and transnational culture, ideas of urban aesthetics. This was not always in full alignment with the Nehruvian state agenda. In some cases, it actually went beyond the official political line in its degree of restrictiveness. For example, on the one hand, the government was, at least in its rhetoric, respectful of the indigenous populations and their lifestyles. But the films were condemning those lifestyles and talking about how they should be reformed much the same way colonial-era films depicted “indigenous” lifestyles in colonies.

This is why the book is entitled 'Visions of Development’. It is talking about multiple visions that coexisted at the same time. The book suggests that post-colonial condition in India could be characterised by these multiple visions that were to some extent overlapping, to some extent discrete.

5) Your book will refer to about 200 documentary films produced by Films Division out of the thousands produced over the period 1948-1975. How did you select these films?

It is close to 250 in the final version, but it is still a small percentage of the total output. I was interested in films about 'development', and after viewing a lot of films in the FD archives, I realised there were specific themes that lent themselves the most effectively to the study of development. The five themes I chose were economic planning and industrialisation, large dams, indigenous populations, family planning, and civic education. Incorporating these five categories into the book allowed me to carry out two kinds of analysis.

The first one was looking at the model of development pursued by the government. Films on economic planning, industrialization and large dams are suitable for this kind of analysis, because in many cases these films were projecting images of the end-goal of industrial modernity and prosperity. These films were talking more about the future than the present; the idea of development was always associated with the future imagination: what was going to happen in the future was the result of current efforts and policies.

The other three groups of films dealt with behavior changes that the government tried to inspire among citizens in order to carry out these visions of development. Such films were valuable in studying the government's imagination of the audiences' participation, the kinds of lifestyle changes that were envisioned as a prerequisite to the project of development.

In the first two categories of films, the government offered visions of what India would eventually look like. The other three categories were saying:  in order to make this happen, this is what the viewers need to do. Within these five categories of films, I tried to get access to all the films that I could identify in FD catalogues, but not all of these titles were available. I chose films that survived in good condition, and for which additional material was available either in the form of documentation or oral history, so that I could back up my film analysis with other kinds of sources.

6) The documentary film in India was born out of a government decision. What impact did it have on the organization of Films Division and on the films' content and form?

What I mentioned about the continuity from the colonial into the post-colonial period is an obvious place to start. Moving beyond that, there was a degree of conformity of the filmmakers to the official government line. The state agenda and state interests were reflected in the films: They became a historical source, a window into this time period. But at the same time, the state's pressure for conformity also created opportunities for filmmakers to rebel against the establishment.

In my book, I refer to an argument by Denis Vidal, who talks about documentary filmmakers’ ability to create a 'sphere of autonomy' that was to some extent independent both from the demands of the patrons and the expectations of the audiences. The filmmakers were sometimes able to position themselves in such a way that they could convince both the patrons (the state) and the audiences that they were representing their interests. But in reality, what they were doing was inserting their own subjective viewpoints into the films, which may not have had anything to do with the patrons’ or the audience's interests.  The emergence of the sphere of autonomy points to a degree of fragmentation within the state.

I also refer to the concept of 'development regime,' coined by the historian David Ludden, who talks about a political setup that derives its legitimacy from the conduct of development. In his interpretation, the development regime is a homogeneous and hegemonic phenomenon. It supports itself through the rhetoric of development, and justifies its actions by convincing the citizens that these actions are performed in the name of development.

The emergence of the sphere of autonomy within FD shows that the Nehruvian development regime was neither homogeneous nor hegemonic. There were departures from the colonial notions of development within the regime, openings for creative freedom and alternative ways of thinking about progress and nation-building. The sphere of autonomy also shows that a certain degree of opposition to mainstream ideas existed at the time (for example, as seen in the film 'The Case of Mr. Critic', which acknowledged the opposition to state planning and recognised that not everyone in India agreed with the Nehruvian vision of development and nation-building). The short answer to your question is that state patronage of FD made for an extremely rich interaction of different forces and ideas, making the organization a fascinating subject of study from a contemporary frame of reference.

7) Both the documentary film and art cinema came out of government decisions (and not from filmmakers). What were the specific relations between the Films Division and art film institutions (FFC) from 1948 to 1975? What are the main similarities and differences in terms of film content and style?

There was significant overlap. FD was one of the few platforms for young filmmakers in India during those years. When I looked at FD archives, I found films by filmmakers who went on to become some of the most prominent figures in Indian cinema, particularly parallel cinema. People like Shyam Benegal, Mani Kaul, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak made films for FD mostly in the beginning of their careers. This goes back to the earlier point I made about the different groups of actors entering the scene. Originally, government filmmaking in India in the 1940s was a matter of government bureaucrats deciding the form and content of the films. A group of craftsmen who had mastered skills of operating cameras, editing and so on then executed these projects. Over time, there was a shift away from this model, and FD hired creative personnel whose background was not in the government bureaucracy but in art, and who brought with them a different understanding of the social purpose and aesthetics of film.

8) Your research mainly focuses on FD films, yet private companies were also making documentaries in India. What was their exact role and significance?

Private companies interested in having their films approved for compulsory screenings in cinemas had to obtain Film Advisory Board certificates; this created a pressure towards conformity, and so even productions that were made outside of FD tried to emulate the style of FD. The end goal was to get the productions approved for compulsory exhibition, so that the filmmakers could get paid for the work they did. At the same time, FD hired outsiders to produce a certain number of films every year. From the oral history and FD documents, it is clear that FD’s internal production policies extended to these productions. In those years, it was difficult to be an independent production company and make films markedly different from what FD was producing.

However, at times, independent film companies did create a platform for alternative forms of expression, when they were able to attract funding from outside sources, such as the Burma Shell Film Unit or the American Technical Cooperation Mission. These funding sources allowed people like Paul Zils and S. Sukhdev to engage in a different kind of filmmaking. They also made possible the intermittent publication of the ‘Indian Documentary’ magazine through the 1950s, which became an open forum to debate the purpose of film, to engage with international trends of documentary cinema. But it is also important to recognise the limitations: alternative sources of funding dried up by the late 1950s, and so this was a short-lived phenomenon. Perhaps because of it being so short-lived it did not succeed in articulating a coherent alternative to statist filmmaking during this period.

9) Which documentaries made between 1948 and 1975 would you say defined and set standards for documentary filmmaking in India?

In many ways, the films that set standards were not made during this period. For many, John Grierson and the British Documentary Film Movement were the gold standard of filmmaking in those years. A lot of filmmakers that I interviewed considered Housing Problems and Night Mail to be models of effective documentary filmmaking. Ezra Mir, who had produced war-era films in the 1940s, was later involved in FD in the 1950s and was very vocal about his admiration for the American newsreel March of Time. In many ways the frame of reference for the filmmakers of this period originated outside post-colonial India both geographically and temporally.

FD itself perhaps did produce several films that were seen to be setting standards, but it is difficult to identify them, because the films are so similar. I remember reading an Indian documentary review about a film about one of the large dams, which claimed the film set standard for all the films on large dams. But when I went back to the archive and looked at that film, the films about dams made before and after it looked similar in content and form. That perhaps changed somewhat in the late 1960s when Bhownagary took the center stage and encouraged a group of creative talents to come forward and make different kinds of films. Certainly documentaries like India ’67 (which received a lot of attention within and outside India), Face to Face, or I Am 20 (which made an extensive use of synchronised sound and interview footage) were influential. These were films that set new trends, but the fresh way of thinking about filmmaking was short-lived and ended after the departure of J. S. Bhownagary from FD. So when you look at the period as a whole, it is quite rare for films to attain this status of a trend-setter.

10) What were the main evolutions in terms of content and style from the 1950s to the mid-1970s?

I would not say that the evolution was linear, but that filmmaking of the period did respond—to some extent—to international trends in cinema and also to developments in filmmaking technology. Synchronous sound in films like Face to Face or I am 20 is one example. Another major development was the use of animation and the establishment of the cartoon film unit in 1957. Animation allowed for novel ways in which visions of future development, modernity and prosperity could be visualised and projected to the audiences. It enabled the government to create films entirely devoid of contemporaneous frames of reference. There was no longer a need for live footage to represent what the future held. The government was free to create these projections in almost infinite ways, whereas previously it had been dependent on footage that was filmed in the real world. This evolution, I think, is a very interesting one.

But it became a double-edged sword. Animation started off as a tool that supported the state propaganda machinery; yet, later on FD filmmakers with creative tendencies started realising that animation could also be used to undermine the films’ claims to authenticity. It could accentuate the very nature of these films as artificial constructs, highlight their ability to create a parallel reality rather than depicting the reality the audiences lived in. By the mid-1970s, many FD films started using various animation techniques, which acknowledged the constructed nature of the medium and to some extent undermined the authority of the state in promoting development.

Another trend, perhaps a less explicit one but one also worth thinking about, was the use of colour. FD was initially limited to the use of black-and-white film, but within a few years of its inception, it was able to make films in colour. The technique was used in some of the films about India’s indigenous groups, such as documentaries shot in Nagaland. The Orientalist idea of romanticising the indigenous “other” and freezing in time the “traditional” lifestyle became more of a spectacle when shot in colour. The use of colour thus added to the entertainment value of some of these films, even though colour film had the potential to create more visually accurate, more realistic portrayals of the realities captured in the documentaries. These technological developments can be seen as an evolution in film form, yet they often separated the audience from the subjects of the films rather than bring the two closer.

11) What was the importance of the documentary film in a national context dominated by commercial cinema and later by television?

It is important to note that television did not get significant traction in India until after the Emergency, and that compulsory exhibition in cinemas prior to commercial films gave FD documentaries the kind of exposure filmmakers in other countries could only dream of. Yet, there seems to be a definite disconnect between pre-1975 FD productions and the medium of activist documentary that emerged during the Emergency and beyond. In an interview Anand Patwardhan gave me, he did not acknowledge that he was influenced by FD in his work. When you look at his early films, however, you see fragments of FD films. For example, he used a scene from Sukhdev’s A Village Smiles in one of his films [A Narmada Diary, 1995], which showed the viewer how the state point of view was highly obscured and propagandist in nature. Paromita Vohra felt a sense of resonance with S.N.S. Sastry. Again, it was not a direct inspiration that influenced her way of making films. It was only later in her career that she discovered FD archival collections. The relationship between the early post-colonial period and more contemporary films is not as linear as the continuities I was able to trace from the 1940s into the 50s, 60s and 70s.

But the very fact that the compulsory exhibition scheme exposed so many people to documentary film is significant. I have talked to people active in the documentary film industry in India, who told me that this was, in a sense, a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it provided exposure and made the viewers aware of the documentary medium. But at the same time, because of the repetitive cinematic templates used by FD, the audiences were often not engaging with the films.

It is really difficult to state with certainty whether the FD has created more or less interest in documentary among Indian audiences. It is fair to say that it has privileged a particular form of filmmaking over alternative forms. In spite of the internal tensions and minor departures from its internal norms, FD films skewed the public's perception into a very narrow understanding of the possibilities of the documentary medium. In this sense, perhaps it did disservice to the medium in India. But at the same time, it created a platform for the production of very interesting inventive films, like India 67, which became landmarks of Indian cinema and put India on the map of International documentary filmmaking. It is a complex picture.

12) Can you identify the best achievements and main limitations of the documentary film endeavor over the period 1948-1975?

Personally, I would say that the greatest achievement was perhaps that the documentary film movement in India generated novel ways of thinking about film, mainly during the Bhownagary period but also to some extent before and after it. There were attempts to think outside of the box, to think beyond the Griersonian model of filmmaking.

And by the same token, perhaps the greatest failure was that unfortunately this tendency to search for a truly Indian documentary did not go far enough to create an alternative model of filmmaking that could replace statist production rooted in the Griersonian tradition. Perhaps if this movement had lasted for a longer period of time, it would have been able to attract more artists. Perhaps it could have generated a model of filmmaking indigenous to India, one that would not be so heavily influenced by the earlier colonial traditions of the British Empire and John Grierson.

 

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Peter Sutoris’s upcoming book 'Visions of Development, Films Division of India and the Imagination of Progress, 1948-75' examines the Indian state’s postcolonial development ideology between Independence in 1947 and the Emergency of 1975-77. Sutoris pioneers a novel methodology for the study of development thought and its cinematic representations, analysing films made by the Films Division of India between 1948 and 1975. By comparing these documentaries to late-colonial films on ‘progress’, his book highlights continuities with and departures from colonial notions of development in modern India. It is the first scholarly volume to be published on the history of Indian documentary film. Of the approximately 250 documentaries analysed by Peter Sutoris, many of which have never been discussed in the existing literature, most are concerned with economic planning and industrialisation, large dams, family planning, schemes aimed at the integration of tribal peoples (Adivasis) into society, and civic education.

For more information, please refer to:
The book's companion website: www.visionsofdevelopment.com
Peter Sutoris’s personal website: www.petersutoris.com