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A Washington Post reporter covering dissent about the Emergency gets kicked out of the country, his notebooks confiscated as he goes. The notebooks are mysteriously returned to him several months later, the names of his government sources underlined in red. Many of the sources had been picked up and taken to prison.
This is just one story amid thousands from the start of the Emergency in the summer of 1975—the season when a daughter separated from her father in childhood by the British use of prison as a political muffler began taking political prisoners of her own. Over the course of a few days, jails filled up with her critics. Journalists and editors were detained alongside the political opposition, as she had also ordered a news blackout. Under the provisions of the Emergency, those arrested could be held without trial or judicial review for as long as the Emergency lasted. To justify this, she talked over the heads of the elites to the people, as was her wont. They needed her to save the economy, to protect them from black marketeers and other enemies.
The trouble had started with a court judgment that overturned Mrs. Gandhi’s 1971 election to Parliament, and therefore her eligibility to be prime minister, on the basis of a minor technicality concerning campaign conduct. She became convinced that there was a large-scale conspiracy, possibly international, to overthrow her; she told her ambassador in Moscow to let Brezhnev know that the CIA was “aiming at killing her.” The idea wasn’t totally crackpot: Chile’s Salvador Allende had been deposed not long before, in 1973, and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of Bangladesh was assassinated not long after Allende, both with the involvement of the CIA. In these days of economic instability, Gandhi didn’t trust anyone else to lead. She decided that instead of resigning, she would rule by decree, drawing upon state emergency powers inherited from the Raj.
As shocking as the Emergency was to international opinion, it was the police state version of what she’d been doing for years: draining away power from India’s regional governments and channeling it toward New Delhi and herself. With the opposition locked away, her party could act with legislative abandon, and indeed brought some stability to the economy through measures to control prices and increase productivity. Yet a 1976 program to reduce the birthrate by incentivizing sterilization quotas was a major misjudgment.
Officials who oversaw large numbers of sterilizations were rewarded (in some cases, with Ambassador cars). Those who failed to meet quotas saw their salaries held up. Thus, in communities across India, poor people were coerced by government workers to exchange their fertility for housing, access to water, or medical care. Deeply involved in running this sterilization effort was Mrs. Gandhi’s younger son, Sanjay, an unsuccessful apprentice engineer who commandeered a wing of the party, the Youth Congress, and directed its thuggish methods. The sterilization program was a physical and psychological violation of some of Mrs. Gandhi’s most passionate supporters—and, ironically, it barely moved the population-control needle. Instead, as she confided to one of her officials in 1976, it made parents afraid to bring their children for routine TB and smallpox vaccinations.
In 1977, after almost twenty-one months, Mrs. Gandhi ended the Emergency and called for an election. Her policies, particularly on the economy, had supporters. (J.R.D. Tata, then chairman of the Tata business empire, found them “refreshingly pragmatic and result-oriented.”) She believed that ordinary citizens, too, would trust that her actions were in their long-term interest. But being deprived of their rights sensitized many citizens to just how valuable those rights really were. Voters in North India in particular roundly rejected her and the Congress, and for the first time since Independence, the party was out of office in New Delhi.
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Mrs. Gandhi’s countermand of democratic principles instilled something important in independent India’s public life: it deepened a spirit of dissent, and of civic and legal activism. “For the first time,” says the Delhi social scientist D. L. Sheth, recalling the spontaneous protests, “you felt that democratic culture had been imbibed in Indian life.” Congress’s stranglehold on power ended, and among other things, a Hindu nationalist party was revived in a new mold: the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, which is now in government. The memory of Mrs. Gandhi’s transformation during the 1960s and ’70s into democratic India’s most powerful leader has helped create a polity in which it has been difficult for any subsequent leader to accumulate the power she did. Being able to vote so dominant a leader out of office in 1977 gave voters a sense of the power they now held—and in subsequent decades, Indians participated in elections and politics at higher rates than ever before.
Another way to understand the Emergency, I think, is as a critical episode in the history of the conflict between the two ideas that have defined modern India: the idea of the state and the idea of democracy. The Emergency was a parodic version of the desire to retain the Indian state in the hands of a do-good elite. And it came at the very time when, as a result of Indira Gandhi’s electoral style, the democratic idea was achieving an unprecedented diffusion across Indian society. In effect, she was stepping on the brake and the accelerator at the same time—a move that, in the end, politicized India more profoundly than ever before.
The coda to her story, that she came back to power in 1980, was less a result of her mollification and the people’s forgiveness than of infighting among the opposition. Yet now she had to face the political blowback provoked by her centralizing urges and by the breakdown of federal structures that might have moderated rising challenges to New Delhi’s authority. As she mourned the death of Sanjay in a plane accident, she was also wrangling with the escalating demands and actions of regionalist parties and factions across the county—Assam to the east, Punjab to the west, and Kashmir to the north. Some pressed for secession, and were prepared to use violence. Her botched efforts to take control in Punjab resulted in the 1984 assault on the Sikhs’ Golden Temple (see 13, Guru Nanak), which in turn led to her own assassination by her Sikh bodyguards a few months later.
“As a child I wanted to be like Joan of Arc,” Mrs. Gandhi told a close adviser early in her premiership: “I may yet be burnt at the stake.” She ended up achieving a certain kind of political martyrdom. But the broader political legacy of the era she dominated was to imprint on the political imagination of Indians the vital necessity of democracy.
47
SATYAJIT RAY
India Without Elephants
1921–1992
One of the most iconic scenes in the career of the Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray was shot during his very first week making movies. The camera follows a young village boy, himself tracking his mischievous older sister as she goes deep into a field of kash. Unnerved by her rashness and fearful of getting lost, he begins to panic when the blooming reeds, taller than his head, obscure his sister’s zigzagging path. The panic grows when the reeds start to tremble and a faraway sound becomes a roar. But his adventuresome sister has lured him here for a loving reason. A black locomotive, the first he’s ever seen, chuffs by.
Ray had been planning the minutest aspects of this film, Pather Panchali (1955), in his head for years. Yet he became nervous with equipment in his hand, so he asked an experienced photographer to be his cameraman. At a moment of particularly exquisite light, the cameraman suggested a close-up of the girl. The shot was lovely—a loveliness that, Ray saw afterward, had nothing to do with the meaning of the scene or the film. As if justifying what the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa would later say of him—“There is nothing irrelevant or haphazard in his cinematographic technique”—Ray decided to reshoot. But having a day job, he had to wait until the next weekend. By then, cattle had wrecked the continuity of his shot by eating the tops of the reeds. He wouldn’t have the money to reshoot the scene until two years later, the reeds once again in bloom.
The lesson Ray took from this costly mistake (to trust his own vision, even against expert advice) helps explain the arc of a career spanning some three dozen films. Some filmmaker
s start by doing everything themselves, then make enough cash to delegate. Ray started out doing plenty—directing, casting, costuming, roving all over Calcutta picking up props—and eventually did more. He wrote music for his films, did most of the lighting, illustrated the screen credits, and served as primary cameraman. He loosened his control only with his best actors, which is why they returned to him again and again. He liked “hiding” behind the camera, he used to say, so that the actors couldn’t tell if they had his approval. They relaxed, became more real.
The result was a body of work of which Kurosawa would remark, “Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.” You can see Ray’s influence in many contemporary filmmakers, among them Wes Anderson and Martin Scorsese. In Ray’s films, Scorsese has said, “the line between poetry and cinema dissolved.”
Yet not all Westerners have seen the point. “I don’t want to see a movie of peasants eating with their hands,” François Truffaut shrugged, while the legendary American critic Dwight Macdonald thought Ray should stick to homey village tales, cities and their themes being too difficult for him to handle. When I read that one, I had to laugh, for as we can deduce from his failure to factor roaming cattle into the kash scene, village life was where he was winging it. Urbane Calcutta was his home.
Ray’s father, who died so young that Satyajit barely knew him, had been a brilliant illustrator and inventor of Bengali nonsense verse, writing lilting gibberish that delights Indian children to this day. Ray’s grandfather, uncles, and cousins were intellectuals deeply involved in the Brahmo Samaj founded by Rammohun Roy (22). They drew, took photographs, argued philosophy, made music, and invented fantastical stories. A printing press and a photographic developing room were among the furniture of Ray family life, and for the children, making art was as expected as going to school. In 1947, after taking a practical degree in economics at Presidency College, Calcutta, Ray started the Calcutta Film Society, gathering his friends to watch foreign films, including ones directed by Frank Capra and John Ford.
“What is wrong with Indian films?” Ray wrote in an article the next year. “The raw material of cinema is life itself. It is incredible that a country that has inspired so much painting and music and poetry should fail to move the filmmaker. He has only to keep his eyes open, and his ears. Let him do so.” Later, after his employer, an ad agency, sent him to London—where he was introduced to the work of the Italian neorealist director Vittorio De Sica—“Let him do so” became “Let me do so.” “It just gored me,” Ray said later of De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), claiming he left the movie theater determined to make his own films.
In the history of Indian cinema, there is a Before Ray and an After. He’s the first truly modern filmmaker we have, though his career in India might not have continued past its first few films had he not been celebrated in the West. I first saw one of his films, The Chess Players (1977), at an art house cinema just as I began university in England, and I’m hardly the only one of his Indian fans who first encountered him outside the country.
In Bengal, several of his films were popular. More were disliked, and in today’s thriving Bengali film culture, he’s often held at arm’s length: the guy who served it up for the West, and served it up a little sweet. Indeed, Ray looks almost as sentimental as Raj Kapoor (42) in comparison to the harsh, brilliant, but lesser-known Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak.
Representing the mainstream Indian critique of Ray was the screen legend Nargis, who in later life became something of a politician. She was one of many who felt he had done the country a disservice by making poverty and India synonymous in the minds of the West. Films such as Pather Panchali were popular abroad “because people there want to see India in an abject condition,” she argued, adding, “What I want is that if Mr. Ray projects Indian poverty abroad, he should also show ‘Modern India.’”
Yet Ray had no interest in doing a report card on Indian modernity, just as he had no interest in doing a report card on Indian poverty (the latter could be left to Louis Malle). Nor was he especially original when it came to themes. The Apu Trilogy (the three films he made about the little boy in the reeds, growing to manhood) explores the conflict a young man feels between tradition and modernity, the village and the city—already, by the early 1960s, a global cinematic cliché from Ozu to Visconti. But his films made ideas hanging in the air feel fresh, for Ray brought to them an unusually large chunk of small gifts: psychological and sensory acuity, humor, humanism, a deep appreciation of family relationships, an ability to withhold judgment, an ear equally adept at dialogue and sound, and the visual imagination of a third-generation illustrator and photographer. These were sufficient to allow him, time and again, to achieve a realism few in Indian cinema wanted to confront. “It’s the truth in a situation that attracts me,” he told his actors. “And if I’ve been able to show it, that’s enough for me.”
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“Our mind has faculties which are universal,” Rabindranath Tagore (32) once wrote, “but its habits are insular.” The medium of film in India, Ray felt in the late 1940s, was too bound by that insularity. Indian directors, preoccupied with song-and-dance diversions, had failed to develop a cinematic vocabulary to articulate the fine grades of emotion and humor in Indian life. These habits had to be broken, so that Indian filmmakers and their audiences could fully join a more universal conversation. Yet it would be a mistake to think that Ray, as he studied films from the “developed” world, felt himself to be an outsider looking in. High Bengali culture—and sophisticated, upper-caste Brahmo Samaj culture particularly—had long seen itself in cultural and intellectual dialogue with the West. Ray was himself a product of Tagore’s incubator of universal humanism, the school and university at Shantiniketan.
Not long after his young man’s outburst against Indian films, Ray met the French director Jean Renoir, who had come to India to make The River (1951), a meditative film about an English girl’s adolescence in Bengal that Hollywood studios had declined to finance. “In every case the response was the same—India without elephants and tiger-hunts was just not India,” Renoir said later.
Ray, who considered Renoir’s earlier film The Southerner (1945) a narrative breakthrough, pinioned the older man at a hotel and told him his idea for Pather Panchali. Renoir didn’t run screaming. Instead, sensing Ray’s intelligence and eye, he took off with the twenty-eight-year-old to scout locations for The River. Ray’s job prevented him from visiting Renoir’s shoots regularly, though. Instead, nightly, he would go through the script and grill a friend who was working on set about how each scene had been filmed. Through the friend, he also passed on the occasional thought about how a scene might be done. He was moved when he heard that Renoir had taken his advice.
It’s interesting to speculate to what extent the long-distance tutorials that Ray received from Renoir shaped his filmmaking. Like Renoir, he would come to value multiple viewpoints, even though he figured that deviating from the Bengali film norm of a single perspective hurt him at the box office. Yet Ray wasn’t particularly impressionable, and he didn’t spend enough time watching Renoir’s work to be overly influenced by the director who showed him kindness. I think he was just a formidably confident Bengali. Later, several young filmmakers would point to him as the sterling example of the ability to internalize influences and then break free of them. “He didn’t follow anyone,” the director Shyam Benegal said. “He showed us you had to make your own way.”
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In a Calcutta tenement, a bored young bride fans her husband as he eats his dinner—your quintessential patriarchal setup. The camera pulls close to the fan as it moves rhythmically back and forth. When it pulls back, we find the man, equally bored, fanning his wife.
This delightful, expectation-subverting move in the final part of the Apu Trilogy, which tells so much about a young marriage, is one of many moments in early Ray films that we might put down to crack editing. Yet much of Ra
y’s early film work was, as the phrase goes, “cut in the camera.” Lacking editing skills, or the money to hire someone with them, he had to get it exactly right on set. Sharmila Tagore’s first role, at the age of thirteen, was that young bride; she would become one of Ray’s most famous heroines. She recalls the tall, soft-spoken director on that first set smoking constantly, chewing nervously on a handkerchief, wolfing down his lunch, telling her how to hold her shoulders just so, and seeming to concentrate like mad on a hundred things at once.
“We all had to come prepared, because he didn’t have the money to do three or four takes,” she says. “And even the studios had potholes, making simple trolley shots almost impossible.” There were also frequent power cuts. “Imagine if your film is in the lab then. You lose the negatives.” But even with these kinds of obstacles, Ray still thought he could do something new and start that creative dialogue with the best directors in the world. In 1961 he was amused to read an article in American Cinematographer that credited Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly (1961) with inventing a technique simulating shadowless, diffused sky light; Ray’s cinematographer Subrata Mitra had been using it since 1954, to circumvent the difficulties of shooting in Indian glare.
The scene of the newlyweds and the fan represents another trademark of Ray’s films: the implicit argument that cinema can get by on fewer words. A sitar riff by Ravi Shankar is the only thing that speaks. Finding the dialogue of most Hindi films inane and incessant, Ray strove for lyrical but realistic speech, with pauses. Better still was replacing words altogether, and letting a knot tied in a dupatta or the reed trills of a shennai elicit the emotion of the viewer. (If you’re a Ray aficionado, you’ll know just the moments I mean.) Charulata (1964), based on the Tagore story “The Broken Nest,” opens with the excruciating ennui of the bright, neglected wife of a wealthy editor (a woman soon to fall in love with her visiting cousin-in-law). In five minutes, virtually wordless apart from a call for tea, sounds alone convey an irresolute anxiety that make the viewer want to climb the walls, too. Book pages flip. A clock strikes four. Bird wings flap. A beggar drums. Window slats clack open and closed. Ray’s choices, psychologically astute, are the polar opposite of what’s known in the American film industry as “sound by the pound.” They also overturn the convention of loud background music that had featured in Indian film since the first talkies. To Ray, everyday noise (radio static, a thunderstorm, a drip from a tap, voices in a tenement building) was not just a potential score. It was another way of storytelling. In Charulata, the sounds themselves hint at how all the tension might break.
Incarnations Page 44
