THE IPTA –EFFECT IN THE HINDI CINEMA OF THE FIFTIES AND SIXTIES1

Rashmi Doraiswamy

Published in ‘Leftist Thought in Indian Cinema’’, special issue of the South Asian Cinema Journal, Nov-Dec 2008

The movements launched by the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) in 1936 and the Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association (IPTA) in 1943 were some of the most significant mass cultural movements in twentieth century India. Their effects were felt not only in the fields of literature and theatre, but also in the Bombay cinema of the time. They also exerted an influence on the Indian New Wave Cinema.

The movements were launched when, on the one hand, the struggle for Indian independence, had reached a peak, and on the other, the forces of fascism in the Second World War were knocking on the doors of the Soviet Union. The anti-imperialist struggle was linked to the anti-fascist struggle. The draft resolution of the IPTA conference in 1943 states: “The immediate problems facing the people are external aggression by the Fascist hordes who are the deadliest enemies of freedom and culture; internal repression by an alien Government which seeks to hold our people in subjection and prevent them from organizing an effective defense of their homeland; rapid disintegration of the entire economic life of our people and particularly the havoc wrought on the morale and the health of our people by the shortage of food and other essential articles; and lastly the absence of sufficient unity among the people’s forces which alone can compel the imperialist to retire, stop the economic disintegration of the country and defeat the Fascist aggressors”2.

Despite the fact that the movement developed in leaps and bounds across the country, it had begun to lose its all-India character by the end of the fifties. The reasons for the dissolution of this vibrant movement by 1958 were many. According to Sudhi Pradhan,

“The foreign policy of the Government of India, which moved from a pro-American position to a non-aligned stance of great material advantage, managed to create confusion among Marxists, as did the internal policy of five-year plans and other ‘progressive’ measures. This made the parliamentary path seem an attractive alternative, but in turn created its own contradiction within the movement.

The second world conference of communist parties sought to make a compromise between the Soviet and Chinese paths, and this had repercussions on the cultural situation in India as well”3.

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However, it is clear from the accounts available that there were many internal reasons as well for the disintegration of the movement. These reasons were ideological, organisational and inter-personal4.

The splitting of the communist movement through the sixties led to a splintering of the peoples’ theatre movement into group theatres, owing affiliation to one or the other of the Left parties, or having an independent Left disposition. The eighties saw the revival of the need for different groups active all over the country to re-forge the all-India character of the movement5. Chandreshwar in his Bharat Mein Jan-Natya Andolan (The Peoples’ Theatre Movement in India) divides the history of the peoples’ theatre movement into three phases: The first phase (1943-1947), which saw the birth and development of IPTA; the second phase (1948-1958) that encompassed the Indian peoples’ theatre movement after Independence; and the third phase which began in 1986, and continues till today6.

The Extent of InfluenceDirectors, actors, scriptwriters, lyricists, music directors and dance directors – a large spectrum of the talent that went into filmmaking – came from the IPTA, moulding the vision of the world that the film presented7. Among the well-known actors who had an allegiance to the IPTA were Balraj Sahni, A. K. Hangal, Utpal Dutt. Well-known music directors included Anil Biswas, Salil Choudhury, Hemant Kumar and Ravi Shankar; song writers Sahir Ludhianvi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Prem Dhawan, Shailendra, Kaifi Azmi were associated with the PWA and IPTA; scriptwriters K. A. Abbas and V. P. Sathe were IPTA members; directors Bimal Roy, Shambhu Mitra, Mohan Sehgal were closely involved with the IPTA, as were the dance directors Uday Shankar and Prem Dhawan (who choreographed songs in Do Bigha Zameen and Naya Daur).

It is difficult to ‘quantify’ or ‘accurately measure’ the actual nature of the influence of the IPTA on the film industry. The reasons for this are many: Cinema is an industrial art form in which many economic factors, specialized skills and several individuals come together to produce a film. Moreover, the play of the public and private ideological positions taken by people who were associated with the IPTA, the dynamics of personal beliefs and their translation into creative practice, are also important factors in the evaluation of the ‘IPTA-effect’. However, it is possible to assume that whether they were members of the mass progressive movements or of the Communist party, whether they were with the movement for a short time or remained, like Kaifi Azmi, committed to Left ideals throughout their lives, the people who passed through the influence of the IPTA, did not easily forget the ideals it stood for in their cultural practice. The IPTA influence could also be felt in the works of filmmakers who were not members but were associated professionally with IPTA activists, such as Raj Kapoor who worked K. A. Abbas, V P Sathe and Shailendra; Guru Dutt who had studied dance under Uday Shankar, whose first film Baazi (1951) had script and dialogues by Balraj Sahni8; and who had Majrooh Sultanpuri, Sahir Ludhianvi and Kaifi Azmi write the lyrics of his films; Vijay Anand and Dev Anand who with their brother, Chetan, set up Navketan….

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During the riots that occurred at the time of Partition, K. A. Abbas describes how the IPTA, PWA and fifty other cultural organizations came together to remove the mental barriers that were dividing Bombay into ‘Hindu Bombay’ and ‘Muslim Bombay’.

“The procession was a great success. We had different trucks – one with Prithviraj Kapoor, the doyen of the film industry, and his teenaged sons – Raj Kapoor and Shammi Kapoor – beating the drum. The IPTA truck had Balraj Sahni and Prem Dhawan and Chetan Anand and Dev Anand. The Urdu Progressive Writers were represented by Sajjad Zaheer, Ali Sardar Jafri, Kaifi Azmi, Sahir Ludhianvi and Majrooh Sultanpuri.

There were my friends, V.P. Sathe and Inder Raj Anand and Manmohan Sabir”9.

The Indian New Wave in a sense took up the unfinished agenda of the nationalist movement. Casteism, the empowerment of women, migrations from villages to cities, the impoverished state of the peasantry, class struggles, communalism, collective action, the disenchanted middle-class – these were some of the issues that were taken up by this pan-Indian movement. The ‘people’ and their problems now found a more realistic representation in the New Wave cinema. Several artistes who had had links with the IPTA and the PWA were to energise this movement as well: Utpal Dutt (who starred in, among other films, in Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome, one of the three10 founding films of the movement which began in 1969); Bhisham Sahni (whose Tamas was made into a film by Govind Nihalani, and who acted in New Wave films such as Saeed Mirza’s Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho and Tamas); Balraj Sahni (who acted in IPTA activist M.S. Sathyu’s Garam Hawa/1973), Kaifi Azmi who wrote the dialogues for Sathyu’s Garam Hawa and Kanneshwar Rama (1977) and Benegal’s Manthan (1976); Salil Choudhury who gave music for Basu Chatterjee’s Sara Akash (1969) and Ramu Kariat’s Chemeen, Ismat Chugtai on whose story Garam Hawa was based and who wrote the dialogues for Benegal’s Junoon (1978) and Shama Zaidi who worked with Satyajit Ray, Benegal and Sathyu on their films.

K. A. Abbas’ links with the IPTA and his contribution to the Hindi cinema have been written about in detail: “IPTA had a profound impact on the performing arts and many associated with it later joined films and contributed in giving a new dimension to cinema. Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, journalist, film critic, author, was one of the founder-members of IPTA. He wrote an autobiographical film Naya Sansar , about a journalist under pressure from business tycoons. … Abbas had another success when he persuaded V. Shantaram, who had himself pioneered a number of films of social concern, to produce a film based on his book, And One Did Not Come Back. The film Dr Kotnis ki Amar Kahani (1946) was about a medical mission which the Congress Party had sent to China. Abbas has many firsts to his credit. His Dharti ke Lal (1949), based on an IPTA play was the first realistic film on rural indebtedness and dispossessed peasantry shown in the context of the Bengal famine. Munna (1954) – the first Hindi film without songs or dances – was about a seven year old boy in a big city” 11.

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The contribution of other IPTA activists to the Hindi cinema, however, are not as well documented. Again, while material is available on the contribution of Bengal IPTA activists to the Indian New Wave cinema, less is written about the contribution, if any, from other regions12.

Ritwik Ghatak and Bimal RoyRitwik Ghatak remains a key IPTA figure in the cinema of the fifties in more ways than one. Making films in Bengal he created a new aesthetic parallel to the realism practiced by Ray in which many time-frames alluded to each other spanning myths and contemporaneity in sensuous melody and drama. He also worked in Bombay. He is credited with the story of Bimal Roy’s Madhumati (1958) and Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Musafir (1957). Madhumati, in fact, transforms Ghatak’s fascination with multiple time-frames into the popular mode. This is a story of rebirth, encapsulating the encounter of the different times of the tribal, the feudal and the modern, much in the same way that Ajantrik (1958), Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960) or Subarnarekha (1962) do. Memory that recalls past social formations in a continuum with contemporaneity is woven into a complex but popular narrative, bringing together the IPTA talents of Ghatak, Bimal Roy, Shailendra and Salil Choudhury. There is also a paradoxical insistence on the materiality of memory. ‘Is duniya mein koi cheez nahin mithti’, says Madhumati. The film is about the continuance and passage of the material spirit in the bodies of Dilip Kumar and Vyjantimala through tribal, feudal and modern selves. The talents of Ghatak and Roy in the framing and picturisation of songs is amply evident through the film. Suhana safar aur yeh mausam haseen in Madhumati in many ways foresees the wonderful song picturised in Ghatak’s Komal Gandhar (1961): ‘Aakash Bhora’. In both songs the protagonist gazes at the hillside and sings with wonder at the beauty of nature and his oneness with it. In Bandini, Bimal Roy uses sound in a manner that is remniscent of Ghatak. Sound passes from literality to the realm of the symbolic. Just as the crackle of rice boiling and cooking comes to signify Nita’s mother’s machinations in fixing up Gita’s marriage in Meghe Dhaka Tara, so does Roy use the three-leveled sound of a train whistle, iron being cut and iron being hammered. He creates a design in which the sound reaches a pitch, and is followed by silence and poison being poured; the iron sounds and whistle emerge again, to signify the excessive stress and trauma the heroine is going through, causing her to resort to murder. An incidental sound, from the diegetic reality is thus ‘lifted’ to the realm of the symbolic.

Bimal Roy’s contribution to a democratic cinema in the framework of the Bombay industry cannot be overemphasised. He brought together several talents from the IPTA in his films. Ghatak, Balraj Sahni, Salil Choudhury, Hemant Kumar Mukherjee, Hemen Gupta, a radical and private secretary to Subhash Chandra Bose, whose Kabuliwala (1961) he produced. Ashraf Aziz speaks of Shailendra’s contribution to Roy’s films: “Yet another significant influence on the young Shailendra was Bimal Roy; the lyrics of Do Bigha Zamin (1953), Madhumati (1958) and Bandini (1963) were principally written by Shailendra and given musical form by Salil Choudhury and S. D. Burman. All Bimal Roy’s movies were drenched in melancholy and anguish; the selection of Shailendra to give poetic expression to Bimal Roy’s subdued, autumnal and frequently fatalistic films was entirely appropriate. Also to the point was the fact that the

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plots of these films unfolded in the Ganges basin or neighbouring areas whose ethos Shailendra understood only too well”13.

The coming together of IPTA concerns (the economic travails of the peasant with the small land-holding) and neo-realist cinema is clearly felt in Do Bigha Zameen (1953). If war-torn Italy, or post-War Italy were the themes dealt with in neo-realist cinema, Roy concentrated on the fate of the displaced and the dispossessed. In Do Bigha Zameen, it is drought and indebtedness that leads the lead protagonist, a farmer with a small holding, played by Balraj Sahni, to migrate to the city in search of work. The rich farmer, plans to sell off land to builders; Balraj Sahni’s little plot comes in the way. The love of the farmer for his small piece of land and his attachment to it, causes him to refuse selling it, despite his indebtedness. He goes to the city in search of work and becomes a rickshaw puller. The whole family has to shift to the city; the land is taken over because he has not been able to pay his debts. Balraj Sahni imparts a sense of realism through his acting, which creates a counter-balance to situations which are often melodramatic in essence. What the film shares in common with the neo-realist vision, is the focus on the dispossessed, including the children, and the submergence of the individual fate under the large indifference of the city. What it shares with the Hindi cinema of the time is the creation of the ideal community of subalterns, in the peasant community in the village, as well as a small city within the city. The communitarian ethos of the peasants is expressed mainly through songs choreographed by Prem Dhawan: ‘Apni kahani chod ja’, in which as Balraj Sahni leaves his village the farmers sing and engage in different kinds of labour and the joyous rain song after drought ‘Hariyali sawan dhol bajata aaya’. The ‘community’ in the city, in the chawl, is headed by a woman whose bark is worse than her bite. The film also remains focused on the fate of its lead protagonist; the loosening of the grip of what Deleuze calls ‘sensory-motor perception’, a dominant characteristic of neorealist cinema, is rare. The camera, observing from a distance, Pina’s death in Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) and moving on, without the narrative lingering in any way on the death of one of its lead protagonists, is not to be found here. However, there is a moment of the loosening of the cause-effect cycle, when Meena Kumari, a well-to-do woman who helps the protagonist’s wife (Irrupt Roy) out, sings a lullaby, ‘Aaja ri aa, nindiya tu aa’, which Nirupa Roy, expecting her second child in impoverishment, listens to, in a break from the chores and worries of her life.

Ideological HorizonThe IPTA had an extended influence, creating what Pavel Medvedev/Mikhail Bakhtin called an ‘ideological horizon’, which was broadly shared by members and well-disposed non-members alike. According to Medvedev/Bakhtin, every epoch has its own ideological environment. This environment is material, existing ‘between us’. All art forms occupy their own specific spaces in this environment. Every creative work signifies, reflects and refracts this ideological environment. Many ideological paths converge in this environment, creating an ideological horizon:

“The artist seeks that material which lies at the point where several ideological series intersect. The greater the number of intersecting ideological paths and the more varied their ideological interest, the more sharply the material is perceived.

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Within aspirations of the ideological horizon of every epoch, there is a value centre toward which all the paths and aspirations of ideological activity lead. This value centre becomes the basic theme or, more precisely, the complex of themes of the literature of a given epoch….

The ruling themes of every literary epoch are always those which pass through all the spheres of ideological creation….

Art, in being oriented toward the common value centre of the ideological horizon of the epoch, not only does not loose its specificity and individuality as a result, but, on the contrary, only reveals its full power in this way”14.

1NOTES

? Sections of this essay were written as part of my project ‘Changing Narrative Strategies of Hindi Cinema’ for the MAJLIS Fellowship Programme, Jan-Dec, 1999. 2

? Marxist Cultural Movement in India: Chronicles and Documents, Sudhi Pradhan, Vol. I, National Book Agency, Calcutta, 1979, pp. 130-131. Henceforth referred to as MCMI.3

? MCMI, Vol. II, Navana, Calcutta, 1982, p. 12. 4

? The ideological issues included, among several others, the combining of anti-fascist struggle with the anti-imperialist struggle, the urban-rural divide, reformism, revisionism…. Questions of aesthetics and technology were also debated. Utpal Dutt, for instance, has written on the use of folk traditions in productions which was actively encouraged by the IPTA: “Our political theatre has not even approached the problem of creating proletarian myths. … The recent common use of folk-elements, tales, songs – is all geared to comedy, and sound like parodies of the original…. By knocking out precisely that content and using only the score is to replace a vision with a slogan, to misuse folk-lore, to descend to formalism. Form and content are thoroughly integrated in folklore; to divide them is to kill it…. And that is precisely what has been thought worth preserving in the IPTA tradition. The lyrics have been replaced by problems of contemporary politics, invariably satirical, betraying the composer’s petty bourgeois belief that folk-tunes can only be effective if used comically”. (‘On Proletarian Myths’ by Utpal Dutt in People’s Art in the Twentieth Century: Theory and Practice, Jan Natya Manch, July 1999-Sept. 2000, New Delhi, p. 330.) Malini Bhattacharya also refers to the “… debate on technical excellence versus ‘simple and direct art for the people…’ (‘The IPTA in Bengal’, Malini Bhattacharya in Journal of Arts and Ideas, Jan-March, 1983, No. 2, p. 11).

The documents point to several organizational problems as well: the functioning of the party-group within the IPTA, the level of intervention of the Party into the functioning of a cultural organization. According to Pradhan, the movement could not sustain the very momentum it had unleashed. “The resurgence in folk art was thwarted by the built-in metropolitan bias in the IPTA, and the lack of politicization in the ranks of the folk artists and IPTA activists prevented the growth of organization” (MCMI, Vol. III, p. vi). Ghatak in his On the Cultural ‘Front’: A Thesis Submitted to the Communist Party of India in 1954, expresses his resentment against ‘art-organisers’: “There is no such thing as Art-organisers; it is a monstrous tautology. No such job exists. The nature of the job indicates that only artistes can handle the job. Non-artistic Art-organisers will solve these problems to the exact extent that Eskimo hunting songs will rouse and guide Hottentots to revolutionary action!” (Ritwik Memorial Trust, Calcutta, 2000, p. 19).

A reading of the material also reveals the existence of interpersonal tensions based on functioning within the IPTA. There is, for instance, Ghatak’s criticism of Niranjan Sen and Nirmal Ghosh for conducting ‘hush-hush’ campaigns against artistes with the IPTA.

“1952 was their target year for Utpal Dutta. This genuinely good and highly capable worker had his faults, as we all have, but he has been called an American agent, a Trotskyite….

In 1953, these comrades concentrated upon Comrade Salil Chaudhuri, who, again has his faults and greatnesses. They circulated stories that Salil had worked as a Strike-breaker in the

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The ruling themes of the ideological horizon were three: Gandhian ideals of non-violence, social equality of castes/creeds and secularism; Nehruvianism defined above all by institution-building, and Marxism, with its focus on the problems of social justice to the working class and the poor peasantry and the need for unity and collective action. These three themes were themselves not monolithic, with clear-cut distinctions, but created a specific ideological horizon, in which the underprivileged, the dispossessed, the displaced, the marginal were the dominants. The Nehruvian vision which shaped the ideological horizon of the fifties, at least in the post-Independence institution building stage was itself not a monolithic vision. Given the presence of a Marxist line in Nehru’s thinking, its coming together with the IPTA line did make the ideological scales weigh

Gramophone Company of Dum Dum...” p. 74.Sudhi Pradhan’s introductions to his volumes, too, are not devoid of personal statements. See, for instance, his views on Shambhu Mitra (MCMI, Vol. I, p. xv) and his remarks on Anil D’Silva (MCMI, Vol. I, p. xx-xxi). 5

? DATE LIST OF CONFERENCES1936: PWA set up in Lucknow1941: People’s Theatre in Bangalore1942: Progressive groups in various parts of the country1943: Formation of IPTA; I Conference in Bombay1944: II National Conference in Bombay 1945: III National Conference in Bombay1946: IV National Conference in Calcutta 1948 V National Conference in Ahmedabad1949: VI National Conference in Allahabad1953: VII National Conference in Bombay1957-58: VIII National Conference in Delhi1985*: National Convention of IPTA in Agra1986: IX National Conference in Hyderabad1992: X National Conference in Jaipur2001: XI National Conference in Trichur Nov 12 – 14, 2005: XII National Conference in Lucknow*Till 1957, IPTA was undivided. The dates mentioned above from 1985 onwards refer to the conferences held by the IPTA affiliated to the Communist Party of India. According to Jitendra Raghuvanshi, the name ‘IPTA’ in Assam is used by both the theatre groups affiliated to the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist). In West Bengal, IPTA is affiliated to the CPM, while the IPCA (Indian Peoples’ Cultural Association) is affiliated to the CPI. In Andhra Pradesh, all the three theatre groups, affiliated to the CPI, CPM, CPI (ML) are called Praja Natya Mandali.6

? Bharat Mein Jan-Natya Andolan, Chandreshwar, Shabdpeeth, Allahabad, 1994.7

? In the IPTA documents on how to prepare for the VII Conference (1953), there is the following section: “Film: Since a large number of IPTA members and progressive writers and artistes are entering

into the film world, due to the increasing demand of the people for healthy and realistic films, the present position of the film industry requires special study. Delegates specially from Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, who are most concerned with the industry, will form the main body of this Commission, papers for which should be prepared on the following broad lines: Condition of the industry today; how production and distribution are controlled; living conditions of film workers of all categories; Government policy and British and American influence; strength and influence of progressive trends inside the film industry; is there any organized functioning with definite outlook; what suggestions can be made so that Indian films can inspire the people; what should be the role of IPTA; how IPTA and progressive workers should work in the film industry and what should be the relation with their work in IPTA”. MCMI, Vol. II, pp. 106-107.

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down in favour of a left orientation in the horizon. Ralph Russell writing on the early years of the PWA notes that ‘… within months some of the most prominent writers of verse, prose-fiction and literary criticism had declared their sympathies for the movements, including not only those on the left, but Congressmen of predominantly Gandhian outlook …, and men of not very articulate political views at all. This wide support for a movement being formed by avowed communists looks more surprising in the 1970s than it did in the India of 1935. At that time a political climate was forming to which the nearest parallel the West can offer is perhaps provided by the years from mid-1941 to the end of the Second World War. In those years the necessities of the war against fascist Germany, Italy and Japan, fought in alliance with the Soviet Union and with a China in which nationalists and communists were formally in alliance, made communism respectable and evoked ardent expressions of radical populism from even the most unlikely quarters”15. This explains the orientation of the narratives towards the

The documents of the inauguration also point to the active involvement of several leading film personalities in the IPTA: “Following the welcome address Producer-Director Bimal Roy, Chairman of the Reception Committee, the great dancer Uday Shankar declared the conference open amidst tremendous applause”. Ibid, p. 157. “Following a Tagore song by Hemanta Mukherjee, the Conference was greeted by Sachin Sen Gupta, member of the Presidium”. Ibid, p. 158.

The reports on the delegate sessions are also of interest: “The Music Commission which was presided over by the famous music director, Anil Biswas, saw some lively discussion and controversy on the use of folk and classical Indian forms and the introduction of modern forms taken from western music. …. Among those who participated were Omar Sheikh, Salil Chowdhury, Hemengo Biswas, Surinder Kaur, Sreenivasan, Prem Dhawan and many other well-known singers and composers”. Ibid. pp. 158-159 “In the Film Commission, discussions were restricted to the general problems in producing healthy and realistic films for the people and did not deal with the role of IPTA members and other progressive artists in the film industry, as seen from the films already produced. Ritwik Ghatak, Balraj Sahni, Om Sagar, Shova Sen and Herbert Marshall were among those who took part”. Ibid, p. 159. 8

? The story was written by Guru Dutt and Balraj Sahni.9

? ‘Who Killed India?’, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas in India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom, Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Vol. 2, Roli Books, New Delhi, 1997, p. 244.10

? The other two films being Mani Kaul’s Uski Roti and Basu Chatterjee’s Sara Akash.11 ‘The Context: A Social Cultural Anatomy’ by Raghunath Raina in Indian Cinema Superbazaar, Aruna Vasudev & Philip Lenglet (eds.), Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 1987, p. 12.

See also The New Indian Cinema, Aruna Vasudev, Macmillan India Ltd., New Delhi, 1986, p. 11: “It was Abbas who launched Amitabh Bachchan on his meteoric rise to fame, giving him a role as one of the Saat Hindustani (1969), with national integration as its theme. It was Abbas who made The Naxalites, about the movement passionately embraced by militant young activists from the late sixties onward”.12

? Bengali film personalities such as Ritwik Ghatak, Bijon Bhattacharya, Mrinal Sen, had links with the IPTA. According to Vasudev, in Kerala, “The theatre-wing of the CPI, the Kerala Peoples’ Artists Company took over where the Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association, particularly active in Bengal in the pre-Independence days, had left off. Film versions of their plays – You Made me a Communist, Prodigal Son, New Sky, New Earth were not quite as popular but they brought a number of theatre personalities into the cinema”. The New Indian Cinema, Aruna Vasudev, Macmillan India Ltd., New Delhi, 1986, p. 84. 13

? Light of the Universe, Essays on Hindustani Film Music, Ashraf Aziz, Three Esaays Collective, New Delhi, 2003, p.47.14

? The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, Pavel Medvedev/Mikhail Bakhtin, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1978, pp. 157-158.

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dispossessed and the displaced in the films of the fifties, contributing to the ‘gold’ of the ‘golden era’.

A song like ‘Mera joota hai japani’ (Shailendra / Shri 420 /1955) could only be born of a vision in which there was a knowledge of the world outside, of an anti-imperialist and anti-fascist struggle, and a pride in India’s new, independent, non-aligned position within it. Even in a film like Naya Daur (1957), that calls for a Gandhian negotiation in the installation of machines in the place of man-power, there is a rousing call to collective action in Sahir Ludhianvi’s song ‘Saathi haath badhana’. As M.S. Sathyu points out, “At the time of independence and after that, there was a lot of hope in the country. There was a dedicated leadership in the country. If that failed, people still had an alternative in the Left, which was really strong, and was the largest party after the Congress. However, in the course of a decade towards or so, both the socialists and the communists split within their own parties and became splinter groups”16.

The other significant aspect of this ideological horizon was the very notion of ‘the people’17. The word ‘people’ in the Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association stood for the modest and small-landed peasantry, the working class, the middle-class on the threshold of slipping into lower socio-economic strata18. Malini Bhattacharya observes that “It is surprising that today one hears of ‘proletarian theatre’ or ‘socialist theatre’, but not of people’s ‘theatre’. Surely it is only through the realization of the idea of a people’s theatre that one can even come to contemplate the subsequent phases”19. This notion of ‘people’ prevalent in the practice of a progressive theatre was also present in the cinema of the post-independence period, contributing to its ‘golden’ aura. “ ‘People’s theatre’ had aimed to establish a cultural link among various social strata, into which, in a class society the ‘people’ are divided. There are wide cultural gaps and even contradictions between them; yet in a semi-feudal society, the lives and the interests of the urban middle class, the urban working class and the various ranges within the agricultural population from the rich peasant to the agricultural labour have at least a minimum of common

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? ‘Leadership in the All-India Progressive Writers’ Movement’ in How Not to Write the History of Urdu Literature, Ralph Russell, OUP, New Delhi, 1999, p. 72.16

? Talking Films, Rafique Baghdadi, Rajiv Rao, Indus, New Dellhi, 1995, p. 92.

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ingredients which alone can serve as the basis of a ‘people’s theatre’”20. It is this point of view of the subaltern on society and social justice that directs the narrative drive of the films of the fifties.

The Raj Kapoor persona in his home productions and the Dev Anand persona in the Navketan productions of the fifties and sixties in fact bring together different energies of the ‘people’. These are ‘composite’ personae, with many significations in one character. Raj Kapoor’s ‘Raj’ in his films, for instance, stood for the ‘global dispossessed’ (Chaplinesque tramp), an outsider to the city (migrant from a small town or village, who knows not the ways of the city) and marginal (lives in the chawls). It is probably the benign coming together of the global and the local, the rustic, the outsider, who quickly adapts to the city, but insists on his ethical values, that audiences in socialist states, states under the yoke of colonialism, and newly independent nations responded to intuitively, and made Kapoor’s films of the fifties so popular abroad, in different continents. Dev Anand’s modernity was of a different order: social marginal, but insider to the city and street smart, best exemplified in Navketan’s Baazi, Kala Bazaar (1960) and Taxi Driver (1954). His body does not carry the imprint of rural India, or the small town. Baazi was as important a narrative as Awaara, in charting the narrative of the desperate underdog, pushed to the wall, who takes to a life of crime to get ahead in life. If Raj in Awaara (1951) is inscribed in mythic and social references and arguments, and experiences the dilemma of choices, the protagonist of Baazi, is unfettered by such mythic and moral dilemmas and consequently has a nervous edginess that the Raj Kapoor persona lacks.

All this is not to attribute to IPTA an originary role in moulding the narratives of the fifties and sixties. On the contrary. It is as if a matrix of viewpoints existed that engendered different narratives. Often the more radical viewpoints were subsumed into a reformist or institution-building ending, but not before the subaltern / the marginal / the criminal spoke at a trial – literal or metaphoric – that had the feel of a ‘people’s court’. The climactic scenes in Raj Kapoor’s Awaara and Jagte Raho (produced by him and directed by Shambhu Mitra) immediately come to mind here. At the crucial moment of speech and address, to the people as well as to their conscience, a passionate plea is made

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? “The name of the Indian People’s Theatre Association must have been suggested on the basis of Romain Rolland’s famous book ‘People’s Theatre’ either by Dr H. Bhabha, the great scientist, or by Anil D’Silva, and the first secretary of the Bangalore unit of the IPTA formed in 1941”. MCMI, Vol. I, National Book Agency, Calcutta, 1979, p. xiii.18

? “The first bulletin of the IPTA brought out in 1943 is headed by the epigraph: ‘People’s theatre stars the people’. The specific application of the term ‘people’ is not made very clear in the bulletin. But from the work of the IPTA, one may infer that the term referred mainly to the vast masses of workers, peasants and various sections of the petty bourgeoisie whose ‘struggles for freedom, economic justice and a democratic culture’ all over the world are found to be the predominant characteristic of the period following the First World War”. ‘The IPTA in Bengal’, Malini Bhattacharya in Journal of Arts and Ideas, Jan-March, 1983, No. 2, pp. 5-6. 19

? Ibid, pp. 21-22.20

20 Ibid, pp. 17-18.

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for social justice. The film-text, therefore, has many pressure points that encapsulate the different articulations of the ideological horizon, Nehruvian, Gandhian, and Marxist.

AdaptationsIPTA talent was likewise involved at various levels in the adaptation of Russian literary classics: Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar (1946), inspired by Gorky’s Lower Depths, Chetan Anand’s comedy, Afsar (1950), for Navketan, based on Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General, and Ramesh Saigal’s Phir Subah Hogi (1958) based on a loose adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Sahir Ludhianvi wrote two outstanding songs for Phir Subah Hogi, set to memorable music by Khayyam. Of these, the rousing song of optimism, ‘Woh Subah Kabhi to Aayegi’ probably remains the most wasted song in the history of Hindi cinema for its unimaginative picturisation. Mala Sinha, who has just suffered an outrage to her modesty, lies supine in Raj Kapoor’s lap and for most of the duration of the song, Kapoor caresses her, crushing her ears crudely in his hands. The other song, ‘Chino-Arab hamara’ is widely considered to be Sahir’s parody of Iqbal’s Saare Jahaan se Achcha, which had been set to music by Ravi Shankar. It also, however, punctures the global vision of Mera Joota Hai Japani, positing that our national achievements economically hardly measure up to our achievements as a non-aligned power. A harsh critique in the ironic mode of the existing socio-economic conditions, the song is comparable to Ludhianvi’s Jinhe naaz hai Hind par woh kahan hai? in Pyaasa. While both songs express deep disillusionment, the latter is searing in its direct references to the disease and rot in society; the first is ironic, with black humour. Chino-arab21 is also interesting for the way it has been composed by Khayyam: the song unfolds on an even keel, almost as if the singer is talking without any rise in the tune to support arguments. The even keel only increases the impact of the laconic words.

Pressure PointsApart from an ideological horizon to which the IPTA contributed, the ‘IPTA-effect’ can also be felt as ‘pressure points’ in the text. These pressure points may manifest themselves n the acting, with a pull towards realism, as in the case of Balraj Sahni’s performances in Do Bigha Zameen and Kabuliwala (1961). It also manifested itself in the themes chosen and their treatment. Bimal Roy, for instance, took up themes of untouchability (Sujata), women who commit crimes under stress (Bandini), adaptations that show the transition in epochs and values (Devdas / 1955), in a humanist, reformist vein. Parakh (1960) is Roy’s most didactic film, articulating a view on nation-building by IPTA artistes. The story and music were by Salil Choudhury and the dialogues and lyrics by Shailendra. The film sketches a host of characters of a village, including a postmaster who receives no letters and a philanthropist businessman who wants to give away a large sum of money to the village for its development. To give away the money to an honest and reliable person, he comes disguised as the postmaster’s assistant to the village. Here he meets the typical characters of the village: the trouble-making priest, the cunning landowner farmer, the young dedicated school-teacher…. Development and

21

? Of this song, Gulzar writes “A communist by political conviction, Sahir wrote some very patriotic songs…. In later years he became so disillusioned by the establishment that he wrote a parody of Iqbal’s Saare jahan se achcha….” ‘A Song Travels’… Encyclopedia of Hindi Cinema, Encyclopedia Britannica, New Delhi, 2003, p. 289.

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governance can only be entrusted to those who work with selfless dedication for the common good.

Lyrics and MusicLyrics and music created the other major pressure points in a film text, creating islands of excessive radical signification. Pyaasa’s (1957) critique of bourgeois values can hardly be evoked without a reference to the crucial role Sahir Ludhianvi’s poetry plays in the film.

The lyricists associated with the PWA and IPTA wrote songs in a variety of genres, often lending the song that emotion of excess that deepened the narrative with an ideological colouring. These included the lyrics of nationalism. One of the most popular and evocative songs in this genre is Aye mere pyare vatan from Kabuliwala, written by Prem Dhawan22. This song, written for a film about a Pathan from Kabul who comes to India to earn money, not only poignantly evokes the sense of separation from the homeland, but also draws on a long tradition of viewing the vatan, the homeland as mother, as beloved, as religious shrine. This repertoire of images about one’s native land seems to have existed all the way from India to Central Asia23. The other popular song in this genre was Kar chale hum fida jano-tan saatiyon, Ab tumhare hawale vatan saathiyon by Kaifi Azmi (Haqeeqat/ 1964). There was also the deep commitment to secularism which resulted in songs such as Tu hindu banega na musalman banega, insaan ki aulad hai, insaan banega (Sahir Ludhianvi in Dhool ka Phool / 1959).

Since the collective was valourised, community songs and songs that roused people to collective action were almost essential songs in films these lyricists worked on. There was a wide spectrum of such songs that included those related to professions such as Apni kahani chod ja or Hariyala sawan dhol bajata aaya (Do Bigha Zameen), Saathi haath badhana (Naya Daur), folk songs - Daiya re daiya re, chad goyo paapi bichua (Madhumati), songs from the bazaar tradition Pan khaye saiyan hamaro (Teesri Kasam, produced by Shailendra / 1966), and those that evoked a region: Jhoot boleya koi na by 22

? Prem Dhawan, in an interview with Amin Sayani, in a programme on ‘Red FM’ stated that he wrote this song when he was in Soviet Union on a visit and he missed India. 23

? Adeeb Khalid, writing of Abd ar-Rauf Fitrat (1886-1938), one of the most important of the first generation of modernist reformers in Central Asia, says this of his concept of vatan. “Fitrat … came to see Bukhara as a territorially defined homeland (vatan), which should be the focus of one’s loyalty and love. This is also a remarkable shift, since until the Russian conquest, Central Asian states were strictly dynastic entities, with boundaries permanently in flux and allegiance paid only to the rulers. The protectorate had fixed Bukhara’s boundaries and allowed a sense of patriotism to emerge. Fitrat articulated a passionate sense of Bukharan patriotism during his stay in Istanbul: the vatan became for him ‘the place where my body and soul prostrate / my place of ease, my honour and my glory / my Ka’ba , my kibla, my garden.’ The vatan coexisted with Islam as an axis of loyalty: ‘Islam is our glory, our happiness, … the source of our pride, and the cause of our ease…. Bukhara is our sacred homeland, our loving mother, the place where we grew, where we make our living, our beloved whom we love as our own souls. Bukhara is ours, and we are Bukhara’s.’ Territory and Islam served to define the Bukharan nation for Fitrat at this point”. ‘Visions of India in Central Asian Modernism’, Adeeb Khalid, in Looking at the Coloniser: Cross-Cultural Perceptions in Central Asia and the Caucasus, Bengal and Related Areas, Beate Eschment & Hans Harder (eds.), Ergon Verlag, Germany, 2004, p. 257.

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Shailendra in Jagte Raho. Songs that evoke collectivity in this manner have almost disappeared from the Hindi cinema, which now are only choreographed as group aerobics. The complex and sensuous dancing by Vyjantimala in Zulmi sangh aankh lagi or the Bichua song in Madhumati, evoke the different levels of the hillside with its planar choreography.

It is of interest that the two lyricists who are widely acknowledged as the poet among lyricists (Sahir Ludhianvi) and the lyricist poet, who understood the specificity of writing a film song as distinct from a literary poem (Shailendra24) had both passed through the influence of the progressive movement.

There was also a subversion of genres or their hybridization. Women prisoners in a jail in Bandini sing Ab ke baras bhejo… (by Shailendra), metonymically condensing the prison and sasural (the house of the in-laws for a married woman), creating a hybrid image of a space away from the maternal home. This hybridization is also evident in communitarian song of the chawl - Ajab tori duniya (Do Bigha Zameen) sung in the tempo of a bhajan, but with a complaint that is political: ‘Ho ke hamari hui nahin hamari, alag tori duniya o more rama. The same is true of Kaifi Azmi’s Tu hi sagar hai tu hi kinara, Dundhta hai tu kiska sahara which uses the paradoxical contraries that traditionally describe god (sagar, kinara) to describe man. The first line of the song seems to be addressed to god, but the second posits an opposite point of view, for the addressee is man.

This was not to imply that lyricists who had been under the impact of the progressive movement did not also write songs of the self in the context of alienation. Kaifi Azmi’s Waqt ne kiya kya haseen sitam (Kaagaz ke Phool / 1959), Sahir Ludhianvi’s Main zindagi ka saath nibhata chala gaya and Kabhi khud pe kabhi haalat pe rona aaya (Hum Dono / 1961) belong to this register. Ashraf Aziz finds a trace of Shailendra’s death wish even in his love-songs:

“At approximately the midpoint of his career as a lyricist, we find metronomic timing devices in his lyrics – as if he was counting his days on earth. … in Madhumati, he wrote:

Ghari, ghari mera dil dharkeHai dharke, kyun dharke

Dil tarap tarap ke keh raa hai aa bhi ja,Dil dharak dharak ke

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? Gulzar rightly points out that songs written by Sahir were remembered more for the poetry, than for the tune. Of Shailendra he says, “Shailendra was a poet of a very high caliber, and probably the best lyricist to happen to the Hindi film industry. He understood the difference between a poem and a lyric. He was a poet of the masses with a trade union background, and had worked in the Indian Railways. His songs were in the language of the masses though they carried deeper meaning and had a literary standard”. ‘A Song Travels’, Gulzar, Encyclopedia of Hindi Cinema, Encyclopedia Britannica, New Delhi, 2003, pp. 288-289.

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He used the words ghari (= watch, moment, stage of the day or night), dharak and tarap as if they were the chimes of the clock of his life”25.

Shailendra, in fact, uses the contrary paradox in his lyrics very often a sense of the split and the loss in the self when in love: Main nadiyan, phir bhi main pyaasi, bhed yeh gehra, baat zara si (Aaja re pardesi in Madhumati); Jeevan bhar ka naata pardesiyon se joda, aap gayi piya sangh, mujhe kya choda (Gira hai kisi ka jhumka in Parakh).

The genres of music drawn on were equally diverse: folk, modern and classical from India and abroad. According to Jitendra Raghuvanshi, “Modern chorus singing was developed by IPTA”26. This was in keeping with the IPTA resolve to use simple and direct means to present to the masses the solutions to the problems facing them. “A revival of the folk arts, mass singing, open air stage are specially desirable for this purpose”27.

While the chorus signified the collective so important to the thought of the progressive movement, it was used both literally and metaphorically in songs in cinema, to denote actual or imagined communities. One of the most radical uses of the chorus is in the song Jaago Mohan Pyare in Jagte Raho. The song summarises the play of night and day in the film along with its signification of ignorance and fear (night) and confidence (day). The song is a rousing one (particularly in the portions sung by the chorus in which the strong influence of the IPTA can be felt), but also in the mode of a bhajan, of a prabhati song, that is, a song sung at dawn and addressed to god, the ‘dear one’. The devotional and revolutionary modes thus come together in this unique song. The metonymic shift from god to the simple protagonist is evident, urging him to know the new age and his own strength.

The sound design of Madhumati too has the chorus of women humming woven into it. While the first chorus of women when the title roll, is scary and haunting, it later creates a sense of the hill community of women, of an enduring presence, of an other-worldly call in the hillside. As Dilip Kumar’s memory gets activated and he begins to recall his past life, it is the choral humming and Madhumati calling out ‘Babuji’ that takes us to a time gone by. The prologue to the song, Suhana safar aur yeh mausam haseen, has several sounds that underline the beauty of the journey, its pastoral idyllic nature: the chirping of birds is woven into an orchestration that sounds like a chorus, which then passes on to women humming in chorus, creating a sound perspective; birds chirping, followed by the shepherd’s call to move the sheep along, is followed by Mukesh’s voice starting the song right on beat.

25

? Light of the Universe, Essays on Hindustani Film Music, Ashraf Aziz, Three Esaays Collective, New Delhi, 2003, p. 56.26

? ‘IPTA ki hirak jayanti’, Jitendra Raghuvanshi in Manorama Year Book 2005 (in Hindi), Kotayyam, p. 91.27

? MCMI, Vol. I, p. 131.

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Keep Awake, Keep AlertShambhu Mitra’s Jagte Raho28 (1956) deals with the nation metonymically through the building complex. The house and its rooms holding within it the different times of the nation within itself, was also used in Sahib Bibi Ghulam (1962) and in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1974). In Jagte Raho, the housing colony is used to effectively put across the idea of keeping alert and defending the new nation from internal enemies. A migrant, the poor son of a farmer, enters a housing complex looking for water to drink. The inmates take him to be a thief and organise themselves into a group, to search the houses and capture the thief. The community here is thus bound together only spatially and not through any profession. The inhabitants’ ‘army’ sets out to look for the thief and the police, too join in. A panorama of nefarious activities that go on, under the cover of respectability is uncovered: the brewing of illicit liquor, printing of counterfeit notes, the ill treatment of women, the murderous intentions of the corrupt rich and their lackey accomplices. The inhabitants of the block, with all their intended aggressivity and their vigilance are ineffective in catching the real culprits, the anti-social elements within their own fold. The poor ‘thief’ who is being hounded is unwittingly the witness to all these illegal activities. He is the contramodern flaneur, the country simpleton walking through a building block in the city, in fear and wonder. He is mute and terrified and on the run because of fear; but in an effective reversal breaks into speech when the crowd catches him. He addresses it stating his innocence and speaks out against the corruption he has witnessed. This is a crucial moment in the narrative when the protagonist bursts into speech, a specific moment of the subaltern speaking. What is of interest here is that after his speech, he does not cease to be hounded by the crowd. It is almost as if his conscience rousing words have had no impact. But it is precisely his role as unwitting witness and as conscience-keeper of a nation that the film as a whole emphasises. The trial sequence has an important space in the narrative of the Hindi film because the moment of breaking silence and speaking out occurs here. Compare this scene with the courtroom sequence in Awaara where the same actor (Raj Kapoor) speaks out against his father, the Law and the elite who do not take cognisance of the parallel ‘society of the gutter’. This is an important dramatic moment in the narrative for it works as an agent that moves the narrative forward. This is more often than not, in the Hindi film, in its most potent manifestations, the moment of the subaltern29 not just speaking, but speaking out against injustice. Jagte Raho in this respect is unique among Hindi films, not just with its engagement with social realism, but also in that this moment of speaking out does not prove to be an agent of change. The passive and silent observer speaks and the crowd continues to hound him as before. It is only in the end that he moves out of the building block having evolved to a new consciousness of himself, without having changed either the people around him, or his surroundings. His new-found timid confidence is also a 28

? There was a Bengali version of the film - Ek Din Raatre. 29

? A concept brought into critical focus by Ranajit Guha in his writings. His ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’ “… accused the dominant historiography of Indian nationalism of leaving out ‘the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and the intermediate strata in the town and country – that is, the people’. Guha’s essay inaugurated the widespread use of the term ‘subaltern’ in postcolonial studies, which he defined as the ‘demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those we have defined as the elite’.” Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Ania Loomba, Routledge, London, 1998, p. 199.

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silent one, unarticulated! Though he is not an agent of change, he has, in all innocence, disrupted a whole range of nefarious activities, not through active intervention, but by merely being an unwitting witness, a ‘passive disrupter’30. The police finally arrest the counterfeiters and black marketers. It is a compassionate child whom the protagonist encounters in one of the flats he accidentally enters when on the run, who tells him to be fearless. At dawn a woman in the nearby temple finally offers him the water he was thirsting for all night. The innocent but wise child and the spiritual woman are thus his ‘saviours’.

Night and day are very effectively used in this film to show the emergence from hopelessness to hope in this film directed by Shambu Mitra, an eminent theatre personality and IPTA activist. The dialogues were by K. A. Abbas, lyrics by Shailendra and Prem Dhawan and music by Salil Choudhury. The film has few songs but all are extremely well-placed. ‘Koi na, bhai koi na’ is a robust counterpoint to nocturnal goings-on, and ‘Zindagi khwab hai’ by one of he drunken residents questions what the meaning of truth or falsehood is, when all of life is a dream. These are satirical in spirit. The last song, ‘Jaago mohan pyare’ sung at dawn and picturised on Nargis, her last ever appearance with Raj Kapoor in a film after their off-screen break-up, epitomises the hope for a nation through the presence of the bumbling, but honest simpleton. At dawn, this unnamed citizen walks away from the nightmare of being thought a ‘thief’ and the housing complex towards the nearby temple where the song is being sung. The songs in the film, in fact, play a role very different from the role they traditionally perform in the Hindi film. They are all sung by characters who play important roles in the chapters in the unfolding of narrative: a group of sikhs, a drunken man and the worshipping woman; but they are not sung by the protagonist. The songs carry within themselves a greater understanding of social forces and life – satirical, ironical, devotional and revolutionary – than is invested in any of the characters, including the protagonist. This decentring of narrative energies is very unusual for a Hindi film: the viewer moves towards a larger perspective on the events that have taken than does any of the characters, who at best have partial visions.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: I am grateful to the following people for helping me out with some of the references and material used in writing this article: Jitendra Raghuvanshi, General Secretary, All-India IPTA; Rajendra Prasad of SAHMAT; N.K. Sharma of the theatre group Act One; and Indira Chandrashekar of Tulika Publications.

30

? Stuart Hall uses the concept of ‘passive disrupter’ in another context, but I find the phrase aptly describes the character of Raj Kapoor in Jagte Raho: “…in spite of the fact that the popular masses have never been able to become in any complete sense the subject-authors of the cultural practices in the twentieth century, their continuing presence, as a kind of passive historical-cultural force, has constantly interrupted, limited and disrupted everything else”. ‘On Postmodernism and Articulation’, Stuart Hall, Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, D Morley, K H. Chen (eds.), London and New York, Routledge, 1996, p. 140, quoted in Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Ania Loomba, Routledge, London, 1998, p. 244.

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