From Cannes glory to domestic disdain: India's cinematic journey

It was 1938. Philippe Erlanger, a French diplomat, looked out of the window as he took a train from Venice, Italy, to France. He reflected on what had happened earlier at the Venice Mostra.

At the world's first international competitive film festival, Nazi propaganda film Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl and Pilot by Goffredo Alessandrini snatched away the Mussolini Cup under the relentless pressure of Hitler.

The return journey home was never the same for Erlanger, whose brainchild would one day become the Cannes Film Festival. The inaugural festival was announced in June of 1939 and slated to begin in September of that year.

But it wasn't to be. With political tensions escalating in Europe and on the same day the festival was supposed to begin, Germany invaded Poland.

Seven years later, the first Cannes Film Festival made its debut on September 20, 1946; its mandate was universal artistic spirit and absolute impartiality.

On the final day of the festival, with the night sky alit in fireworks, a 25-year-old Chetan Anand from undivided India was honoured with the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film for his debut film Neecha Nagar (Lowly City). Winning the top prize was a first for any Indian-origin director.

Adapted from Maxim Gorky's play Lower Depth (1902), Lowly City was scripted by Hayattullah Ansari and Khwaja Ahmed Abbas and addressedland grabbing, a subject still relevant today.

Produced in the months leading up to the partition and formation of India and Pakistan, the film grounded itself in social realism, resulting in a hard-hitting story of an unequal society.

Though the film was honoured at Cannes, back home it was met with an unexpected cold shoulder. It contained zero songs and that, combined with its realistic narrative, was a downer for its local audience.

Partition too added to the film's fateful destiny, with many from the film industry moving to Pakistan including A. Halim, the producer. Halim took the film's negative with him, as the rights belonged to him.

Lowly City's debacle compelled its director to adhere to a different cinematic approach going forward, writes his former wife, Uma Anand, in Anand's biography, Chetan Anand – The Poetics of Film.

Yet Lowly City left indelible impressions on future filmmakers, including Satyajit Ray, who wrote a letter to Anand expressing how driven he felt in pursuing his own filmmaking goals.

Government involvement

Post-independence, the Indian government began to support film efforts. This decision was spurred primarily by the country's first Prime Minister after independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, and his commitment to building a robust, open film culture.

Nehru understood the power of cinema as a vehicle of outreach as well as messaging. He even involved daughter Indira (a future PM) in helping shape the Federation of Film Societies.

"To what extent the independence of India from British rule had a direct impact on the rise and growth of the film society movement remains unclear, but Independence certainly increased governmental involvement in a general societal search for 'good cinema," writes Rochona Majumdar in Debating Radical Cinema – The Film Society Movement in India.

Important government officials were involved in promoting the cause of cinema, including Indira Gandhi, "who acted as Vice President of the Federation of Film Societies for India and, in that capacity, helped film societies to obtain permission to exhibit to their members uncensored films imported from abroad," Majumdar added.

In 1952, India organised its first International Film Festival. The movies screened included modern-day classic Italian neo-realist film Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio Di Sica, 1948).

Mesmerised by Di Sica's craft, filmmaker Bimal Roy who was in the audience, excitedly decided to make a film that he would shoot on location (minus sets). The result would be Do Bigha Zameen (Two Bighas of Land, 1953) which set the tone for India's early parallel cinema.

Pertinently the story lines of Lowly City or some of the later films like Do Bigha, Dharti Ka Lal (Children of the Earth, 1946) and Boot Polish (1954)) were critical of aspects of Nehruvian policies and highlighted existing social inequality, joblessness and poverty. But the government did not react to these films in any punitive way.

Do Bigha even turned out to be a box office success. The script centres around protagonist Shambhu Mahato, a small holding farmer (played by famed Balraj Sahani) and his relentless struggle to save his land from the clutches of the landlord.

The film highlighted "some critical questions too about the darker side of Nehruvian developmental strategy, typical of the liberal atmosphere that the period represented," Partha Ghosh said in his essay Nehruvian Cinema and Politics.

"The idea was to constantly remind him about his unfinished and unaddressed tasks," Ghosh added.

Other films such as Footpath (1953), Shree 420 (Mr. Fraud, 1955), Pyasa (The Thirsty, 1956), Naya Daur (The New Era, 1957) and Hum Hindustani (We Indians, 1960) also fell in this category.

Two Bighas of Land went on to win the International Prize in 1954 at Cannes, and the following year Baby Naaz won Special Mention as a child artist for Boot Polish.

Had there been reservations in letting these films represent India, the government would have held the films back. It didn't - until the following year.

Changing policy

In 1955, Satyajit Ray made Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road, 1955). According to his biographer Marie Seaton, the film was acclaimed in Bengal, but caused trouble after two Americans wrote to West Bengal's Chief Minister Dr. B.C. Roy, who had authorised state finances to complete the film.

Seaton said, "The writers had declared Pather Panchali depicted poverty; therefore it was not a desirable film to be screened abroad lest it serve as unfavourable propaganda."

But Nehru came to the defence of the film, "countering criticism that Pather Panchali 'sold' Indian poverty to the world. He argued, what was 'wrong about showing India's poverty? Everyone knows that we are a poor country. The question is: Are we Indians sensitive to our poverty or insensitive to it? Ray has shown it with an extraordinary sense of beauty and sensitiveness."

Pather Panchali did finally arrive at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, but according to Seaton, the film was unheralded and announced on a hot afternoon toward the end of the event. However, a small audience stayed back for the screening, including Italian critic Arturo Lanocito.

Seaton quoted Lancito as saying, "we had witnessed a kind of self-revelation of Indian film art. In absentia its creator received the award for 'the best human document.' "

Looking back, it was both Bidhan Roy (Dr. B. C Roy, Chief Minister of West Bengal) and Nehru's involvement that allowed Pather Panchali, widely regarded as one of the greatest films in world cinema, to be screened internationally, an impossibility in current times.

Fast forward to 1973. That year, M.S. Sathyu made his seminal film Garam Hava (Hot Winds). Films on partition had been made before, but this one stood apart. For one, it was set in Uttar Pradesh, as opposed to Punjab.

It also showed the impact on an "Indian Muslim family the year after independence, as well as the creation of the new state of Pakistan, rather than focusing on the violence and forced migrations of 1947 itself," according to Indian culture Professor Emeritus Rachel Dywer.

Hot Winds is the story of Salim Mirza, a Muslim in the business of shoe making, and how most of his family members are enticed by the idea of moving to Karachi except for him, his youngest son Sikandar and his frail centenarian mother, who relentlessly resent the idea, all for their own individual reasons. The film ends on a bittersweet note, as those unwilling to migrate are compelled to stay back with life taking sudden turns.

Throughout the film's production, there were constraints and disruptions. This included putting together a film on a shoestring budget of 2.5 lakhs (about $2,400 today) by taking a loan from the government's film financing agency and borrowing the rest from various individuals.

The crew also could not afford on-location sound recording due to costly equipment. The entire cast was dubbed later in post-production.

Additionally, the Film Certification Board initially rejected the film over fears that it would stir up communal trouble. The board held the film back for 11 months. Later, Sathyu used his contacts to approach then-prime minister Indira Gandhi. She ordered the film to be released without any cuts.

Garam Hava made it to Cannes in 1974, where it was nominated for Palm D'Or, the top prize at the festival since 1955.

Ironically back home, it never found a wide distribution and disappeared from screening circuits until it resurfaced, restored, decades later. Pertinently, the film's saviour Indira Gandhi would revoke democratic rights of the citizens of India in the following months as she declared The Emergency (from June 1975 to March 1977).

It's hard to decipher why a premier, liberal enough to release a sensitive film like Garam Hava, in which neither Hindus nor Muslims are shown as the "other," also called for political emergency – but that's another story.

Diminishing legacy

What is significant is that India once appeared proud of the critical, non-commercial films, films that may question the country's leaders or even show it in a "negative" light, but were still allowed to represent India in a global platform like Cannes or elsewhere.

Perhaps somewhere it was the idealist, humanitarian liberalism that Nehru hailed, leaving its diminishing legacy.

As the 77th Cannes Film Festival gets underway this month, there are some powerful and finely-made Indian films in both the competitive and noncompetitive categories. But not one of them has been produced with the support of India's official film agency.

The tangible reason for this lies in a paradigm shift of what is considered "representative cinema" in India, and which films are deemed "honourable" or "shameful."

In the current climate, films critical of the social inequality and discrimination facing many Indians are impossible to make or become representational unless of course they are slanted towards a propagandist approach.

There is a constant need to have an "other" in the films of today, which wasn’t the case in yesteryears. Yet even Satyajit Ray faced a loggerhead situation for his film Devi (The Goddess, 1960) which the Nehru government thought spoke of Hinduism in a regressive light.

But they let it pass finally. Today one doubts a similar scenario would occur.