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Description
India is an ancient civilization and has a mind of its own on each
issue. But our views are moving in parallel with the US and Anglo-Saxon world. (1) Sanjay Baru History in India, as the historian D.D.Kosambi liked to show, often expresses itself geographically. (2) Ashish Rajadhyaksha
"OLD FILM, IT'S FINISHED"
Recently I went to a spice shop in Sydney, one of those that rents out videos and DVDs, looking for Lagaan (2001) to be told by the saleswoman, with a decisive South Asian shake of head and hand gesture, "That's an old film, it's finished." Also recently, I was informed that the negative for Kumar Shahani's 1988 film Khyal Gatha had congealed in a lab in Chennai; "... old film, it's finished"? Not quite, a dupe negative can be struck from the remaining good print, I am told, if the Indian Film Archive acts fast before it gets damaged as well. Even as Hindi cinema in its Bollywood avatar enters the main film circuits and the vernacular, becoming a fairly familiar genre here in Australia, the accelerated obsolescence of films as commodities makes the problem of the archiving of Indian films a pressing one.
This essay, essentially an introduction to Shahani's cinema (part of a larger project), (3) will sketch out how he individuates his cinematic vocabulary by developing an epic idiom, the lineaments of which will be fleshed out through a brief analysis of Maya Darpan (Mirror of Illusion, 1972). Shahani received the 1998 Prince Claus award of the Netherlands for the creation of a "new cinematic idiom," an epic idiom. The Rotterdam Film Festival showcased his work along with other innovative independent and avant-garde films. The assuredly emergent epic idiom perceptible in Maya Darpan, may be understood by examining the principles of movement and design governing the compositional features of the block printed design called Ajrakh, indigenous to Gujarat, Rajasthan (the desert regions of Western India) and the province of Sind in Pakistan.
Shahani was born in Larkana, Sind, in 1940 and his family moved to India as refugees with the partition of India after independence from Britain in 1947. The political frontier violently established between India and Pakistan cannot obliterate the cultural practices connecting this region, which according to historians of world trade, such as Fernand Braudel, constituted a major zone of commerce (with links to the silk route) prior to European colonialism, entailing exchange of goods, skills and technologies and the mingling of peoples over a long duration. In addition, Larkana, Sind, is the archaeological site of Mohenjo-daro, the ancient Indus Valley civilization of India circa 2000 B.C. There is a fascinating link between the bronze Dancing-Girl figurine found at this site (now in the National Museum in Delhi), and the "main character" Taran in Maya Darpan, which I will discuss later in terms of Shahani's iconic conception of character.
THE EPIC MODE--AN EPIC IDIOM
What India does have in terms of its civilisationallegacy are its epics, myths and legends rather than chronicled history. One of Shahani's mentors, the historian of ancient India, D. D. Kosambi, attuned him to the sedimentations of time and human praxis in myth and the epics as well as in archaeological artefacts, even the most humble and mundane. Shahani's cinematic project entails a modern reformulation of the ancient tradition of epic narration to address the contemporary and he says that his task is made easier by the fact that epic forms are still performed and therefore alive in India, unlike, say, the case of Bertolt Brecht in the 1920s who heroically developed an epic theatrical idiom in the absence of a living epic tradition in Europe. Walter Benjamin who wrote eloquent commentaries supporting Brecht's unfashionable formulation of epic theatre, describes epic duration, albeit in a spatial image, in his essay "The Story Teller":
One must imagine the transformation of epic forms occurring in rhythms comparable to those of the change that has come over the earth's surface in the course of thousands of centuries. Hardly any other forms of human communications have taken shape more slowly, been lost more slowly. (88) Memory is the epic faculty par excellence ... It creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation (97-98) ...
Here, as elsewhere in his work, one of Benjamin's most pressing concerns was the problem of the transmissibility of experience in modernity where, what he calls, "the chain of tradition" has been brutally severed, lost irretrievably.
For Shahani too, there is no pristine intact tradition after colonialism, nor is retrieval of a pre-colonial tradition an option. Invention on the basis of what remains, in a modern, decolonising context is his problematic. To further this end Shahani researched epic forms cross-culturally on a Homi Bhabha Fellowship. He studied Indian theatrical forms including Kudiyattam, Tamasha and the Indian epics (Mahabharata in particular), and the work of European film directors who worked in an epic mode such as Jancso and Eisenstein, in addition to Brecht. His terms of reference are therefore both national and international, inflected by the great modern European traditions of political cinema and theatre, which were also vital points of reference for Ritwik Ghatak, his other mentor at the Indian film school.
The splendor of the Benjaminian image of epic duration, illuminating like a flash of light, is however insufficient to work out how exactly time is invested with performative power in the epic mode. The Aristotelian typology of literary forms is instructive here. I refer to his distinction between the lyric, the dramatic and the epic, in his Poetics. Traditionally the lyrical mode, accompanied by the lyre, expresses subjective, intimate feelings; the dramatic entailing action involves dialogue and requires at least two persons. The epic as a mode of narration, as story telling, in its temporal expansiveness can incorporate both the dramatic and the lyric and as such has a greater structural flexibility to vary its mode of enunciation and address. This is possible because the epic mode is not wedded to a dramatic, chronological mode, nor is it limited to the sensuous expressivity of the lyrical. It has a demonstrative power beyond an anthropocentric point of view. Hence the image is not limited to an anthropomorphic scale and rhythm. The idea of epic cinema to be formulated here is a technical concept (though it does have other dimensions as well), pertaining to a particular organization of time and narration where time acquires a maximum freedom from chronological unfolding: let's call this freedom time as rhythm. (4)
Most Hollywood films produced, marketed and distributed as epic are in fact technically dramatic in conception (true to the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action), not epic. (5) These films structure time chronologically and subordinate it to the discursive matrix of past, present and future; time enchained--lets call this metrical time. Also the Hollywood conception of epic is a matter of large scale; lots of money, cast of thousands, big themes. While the Hollywood form of the epic film, because of its overall dramatic inflection, has become very nearly a "universal... |
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