by Jerry Pinto
The client?
‘Her bodice must be glistening,’ he said. ‘Glistening.’
So I got her a bodice made of metal scales. It glistened.
In 1965, I was suddenly told that A Certain Childhood was being sent to the Leipzig International Film Festival. When I arrived in Leipzig, I found that the theme of the festival was peace. Among a whole bunch of films about war and peace, I wasn’t sure what my film on children with learning disabilities was doing, but it was probably the only peaceful thing the government could find to send.
From Leipzig I went to Paris, invited by Claude Nedjar, one of the big French producers. I had assisted Jacques Brissot when he was shooting the Pune and Bombay legs of India: Culture for a Few Rupees, a documentary. I had taken the unit to Pune to the ashram of B.K.S. Iyengar, under whom I had studied yoga. The film had been initiated by Pierre Schaeffer, head of the Department of Research of French TV. It was supposed to be a scathing attack on tourists who go to other countries looking for la differance and then find fault with the country because it is different. The cultural attaché of the Indian embassy had got wind of the documentary and wanted to see it first. Schaeffer and Nedjar wanted me to read it and make an educated guess about what would upset the government of India in the person of the cultural attaché. With my red pencil, I underlined the sections in which blue-rinsed Belgian ladies and grizzled German pensioners expressed their disgust at diseased people begging in the Street, the pot-bellied children and the filth of Benares.
‘But you do see, Madame Leela, this is not what we say,’ said Schaeffer worriedly. ‘We are mocking these people for not understanding poverty and wanting the world to be made in the image of their homes.’
‘I can see that,’ I said. ‘But will the attaché?’
The attaché responded exactly as I expected. He said he would advise the government of India to ban the film. He also suggested that the government might feel less cooperative on future projects.
Schaeffer listened with the utmost politeness and then decided that it would be rather a pity if the film was to be banned in India, but he was not going to alter it. He then asked me if I had any other ideas for future films.
‘To be made in India?’ I asked.
‘Indeed,’ he replied.
I thought of the great travellers like Fahien and Hiuen Tsang. I thought of the women of Asansol whose husbands faced hell each day in the coal mines. I thought of the water problems that India was facing. I thought of the maharajas of India and wondered what Peter Ustinov would make of them.
Schaeffer loved all our ideas. He wanted me to be executive producer on all four films, but my first challenge was to get the government of India to give the team visas. When I returned to Bombay, I was told that I would have to get the finance minister, Morarji Desai’s approval. I could not imagine why the finance ministry would have to be involved, but I had dealt with Indian bureaucracy long enough to know that it was not mine to reason why. Morarjibhai was in Nepal and when I finally got through to him, he said he would take a look at the papers when he got back.
Claude Nedjar came with me to meet him, when he agreed to meet us, many months later. He had entered the country on a tourist visa, since the government was not giving out any business visas to this bunch of French filmmakers. We flew into the most terrible pea-souper of a fog in Delhi. Outside my window, I could see the plane jettisoning fuel. Claude suddenly turned to me and straightened his tie.
‘I shall now pray,’ he said.
I thought it rather wonderful that he should want to meet his maker with the knot of his tie up against his neck. But we did land and we did get to see Morarji Desai. He put us through a series of odd questions—‘Who is Peter Ustinov?’ ‘What does he want with the princes?’ ‘Who are these Chinese persons, Fahien and Hiuen Tsang? ‘—and finally agreed.
But that wasn’t where it ended.
I had spent three years working on these films when suddenly the Ministry of External Affairs got into the act. In 1969, when the crews were ready to leave for India, they refused their visas at the very last moment. That was the straw that broke the back of Nedjar’s tolerance. He decided that it was not possible to work with the Indian government.
He did send me some French francs and gave me copyright on all that I had written, but it was cold comfort.
And then I made my potty film.
By the end of the 1950s, thousands of Punjabis were migrating to London. They were truly fresh off the farms and like all Indian farmers, they were used to squatting in the fields. This worked fairly well among the bright sunbursts of mustard flowers, but it wasn’t quite as effective if you tried it in the early morning on a flight to London.
‘I have to fly jamaadaars down to London because no one will clean the airplanes,’ said J.R.D. Tata to me and Bobby Kooka. ‘And they get tiddly on the flight and don’t clean the airplanes either. Leela, will you make a film to show them how to use the toilets on the planes? And while you’re doing it, can you also include a message about the middlemen? They should know that they can walk into one of our offices and book a ticket without paying a middleman.’
It seemed like an odd sort of challenge. We would have to make a film that did not condescend to those encountering the new technologies of an alien culture. I thought it would be nice if we could use a little girl as the central character, a little girl on her way from India to England. All children must feel that they are encountering an alien culture as they grow up, moving from the honesty of their own responses to the decorum of what is considered polite. By using a child, we would not be offending the people who were watching the film, for in all cultures, children are meant to learn. If the learning rubs off on adults, they can always pretend that they knew all about sitting on a bowl and flushing a toilet.
But to get that, we had to start in the Punjab and it was a scalding summer among the fields. It was so hot I had prickly heat in my hair. The loo was blowing, (yes, yes, I can see the possibilities but I’m resisting), a hot gritty rush of air from the deserts of Western India. I had asked a doctor friend what to do and he advised me to immerse my arms right up to the armpits in water. So I’d slip my arms into a trough and wait for the next shot. I did ask if the buffaloes would mind a foreign body in their drinking water. There were huge Punjabi guffaws at this. They smacked each other about, laughing. Maybe they were making jokes at my expense. Maybe they were imagining the buffaloes complaining, ‘Farmer, there’s a filmmaker in my drinking water.’
Every day, I would come back and sit in a bathtub full of water. I had the only room with any air-conditioning, but that was because it also housed the film and that needed to stay cool. People can manage the heat but Eastman colour film in those days? It needed delicate handling and cool air.
The room had obscene ashtrays with images of women high kicking on them. I had to get them to clear those out.
‘We thought you’d like them since they’re women,’ the manager protested.
‘You may take them away.’ I said.
He seemed a little peeved.
Every day, I would set out at five in the morning to fetch Munni, who was playing the little girl in our film. The excitement of acting in a film soon faded and we had quite a few tantrums. One morning, for instance, Munni decided that she wanted make-up. A little girl from a village with make-up? It was absurd but Munni was not to be deterred. So I worked Industriously on her face, dusting it with this and wiping it off again, painting it with that and then cleaning it off again and then presented her with a mirror. She pouted at herself, quite entranced.
Munni enjoyed her spell on the toilet, which we shot at the Air India office at Connaught Place. She liked the toilet paper too and began to pull out huge ribbons of it. She didn’t want to get off the potty after that. And when she finally flushed the toilet, she stared mesmerised at the swirling water and then turned to the camera to ask puzzled, ‘But where does it all go?’
Despite the heat, despite
being up to my armpits in buffalo spit, I enjoyed making the twenty-minute film. Zafar Hai seemed unable to make up his mind about anything in time. S.R. Rao, the cameraman would ask me, ‘How long is he going to take to make up his mind?’
Zafar overheard once and replied, ‘I was just wondering …’
Rao replied, ‘Wonder all you want but wonder fast. The sun isn’t going to wait for you.’
For all her tantrums, Munni was a natural and she seemed delighted at her success at flushing the toilet. J.R.D. was delighted too and the jamaadaars stopped flying to London.
The United Nations Development Project sent Dom to India to make films for SITE, the pilot programme that came before television was launched in India. We returned to Delhi from New York in 1973. He was supposed to write the films and then get the government of India to fund them for him. Films Division was an underfunded, understaffed department and the staff weren’t quite sure how to deal with a request such as Dom’s. They were accustomed to the notion of commissioning someone to make a film, but they had no idea how to deal with a UN body commissioning a poet to make a film and then asking them to foot the bill.
We met I.K. Gujral who was the Information and Broadcasting minister. He was very charming but he said that the ministry had no money. And so we decided that we would try and go it alone. There were two films whose synopses Dom and I had written. The first one was on the mud-workers of Paharganj, kumbhars who also worked as undertakers and lived on practically nothing. For this one, I called Sukhdev Singh, who declared that he would work for free, his team would work for free and he would bring his own stock. He was a generous Punjabi and I was delighted when he addressed my husband as Dom Singh. Dom did not quite know how to respond to that, but when I explained that Singh came from sinh, the lion, he grew to like the appellation. They became great friends too.
The last schedule of the film was somewhere in Haryana, in a kumbhar village. On the penultimate day, Sukhi decided that the government needed to be needled a little. So he went to the manager of the government resort where we were staying and announced that a wedding party, a baraat, was expected that evening. He, Sukhi, was the host of the baraat and he expected to feed them as befit the guests of a wedding. The staff bustled about all day, getting into the spirit of a wedding. In the evening, everyone who had been involved in the film, from the crew to the kumbhars came to dine.
The bill came to several thousands, a considerable sum in the 1970s. Sukhi took a look at it and then signed it in a lordly fashion. Then he handed it to Dom.
‘Dom Singh, give this to the bloody government,’ he roared, his bonhomie powered by generous libations of rum.
The lion began to look a little green about the gills, if I may mix my zoological metaphors. Dom knew that the government was not going to pay a bill that large. He was right. I paid it.
The other film was called A Profile in Courage and we had Ram Mohan to direct it. He had worked on the titles of my other films and on the storyboard of my Terene commercial. He too agreed to work for free. The film was on Major Hari Singh Ahluwalia, one of the first men on Mount Everest. He had been shot in the spine by a sniper and had been rendered a quadriplegic. However, that had not slowed him down. He founded the Indian Spinal Injuries Centre in New Delhi and his resilience simply shone out of him.
Some time ago, Fabien Stillman came to see me. He was doing research on Louis Malle and he wanted to find out how the team had operated. Malle was making a series on India—what would eventually come to be called L’Inde Phantome or Phantom India. It was an extremely dangerous experiment since he was travelling across the country with no script, no plan, and only a single cameraman and a single sound recordist as his team. But when the cameraman is Etienne Becker—whose father was Renoir’s cinematographer—and when the sound recordist is Jean-Claude Laurieux, this fool-hardy mission sounds less impossible.
When they arrived in India, I presume the French Embassy asked them what help they needed. Later, Malle told me that he had asked for someone who understood something about India, something about cinema, who knew a local language, but also knew French because his team members understood no English. They came up with my name.
Malle had a 16mm camera. He never used the viewfinder. He used his eyes. He left his cameraman to do what he had to do. They had a symbiotic relationship, sharing a complete understanding. He did not pontificate but he let Tinou, as Etienne was known, capture the atmosphere and he told Laurieux what he wanted and left him to figure it out.
I remember him telling me, between puffs of his black cheroots from Kerala, ‘I don’t have a script. It would be presumptuous of me to have one. India will speak for itself. It will write the script for me.’
We went to shoot at the temple of Vajradevi at Vajreshwari, about ninety kilometres from the city, and famous for its hot springs. Today, the growing city seems to have surged right up to the steps of the temple but in those days, it was quite a trek and you prepared for it in advance, checking the tyres and stocking up on boiled water.
When we arrived, it seemed like we would never get to shoot. The devotees at the temple peered curiously at this team of French men, peered at their camera, peered straight into the lens. This disconcerted the team because it was not the cinéma-vérité they were looking for. Tinou was growing exasperated. I tried to explain that looking at someone is not quite as much of a crime in India as it is in Europe. I also tried to explain that Indian villagers were not very likely to encounter a French film crew in the ordinary course of their lives.
‘Imagine a tiger wandering through Paris,’ I said. ‘That is the effect.’
He calmed down a little. Call a man a predatory beast and it always has a soothing effect. But it wasn’t helping him film. Finally, I went up to someone who looked like a matron, a woman in charge.
‘The foreigners are here to show the world how devout Indians are,’ I said. ‘And if people look at them, the world will think we do not pay attention to God, when someone comes near us with a camera.’
‘And the world would be right,’ she said and barked out a series of commands. Suddenly all eyes were to the front and the shooting proceeded.
The next day Malle asked, ‘Do you know a space in Bombay, an isolated space, something that talks about its past, something that might remind us of the village it was?’ I immediately thought about Banganga, the little temple tank on Malabar Hill.
He loved it when he saw it and did some shots. He had a great sense of music and explained an idea in his head. It involved a singer with a coloratura voice and an old folk song. I looked through my telephone diary and found the number for the Rishi Valley School. Principal Balasundaram’s wife was my Vijayalakshmi akka. I had met her at an education camp organised by J. Krishnamurthi at the Rishi Valley School. I knew that she had a beautiful antique Saraswati veena in her possession and that her voice was an extraordinary one.
I called her and explained that Louis Malle wanted her to sing for a film of his, to provide a theme for his exploration of India. She made only one condition. She would not stay at a Hotel but at our home. I assured her that we would be honoured. And she would not sing at a studio but in our home. I assured her that it would not be a problem. But Laurieux did not look delighted at the thought. If sound recordists could do it, they would turn off the entire world while filming a theme or an important song.
Three days later she arrived. And the problems began.
First of all, there were the crows. Tinou wanted the windows open so that the light would be natural. But when you let in the light, you let in the sound of crows as well.
They spent an awful lot of time settling the matter. Then they decided that they would have the windows closed but Mumbai’s crows are not easily denied. More heated Gallic discussion. Then I told them that we could be sure that the crows would be silent around two in the morning.
All eyes turned to Vijayalakshmi akka. She nodded serenely. She would sing at two in the morning, but she would
like me to be her audience. I was delighted.
We did a trial run. Jean-Claude had a huge EMI with an automatic mixer. But again, he wasn’t happy with the resonance coming off the floor. Twenty Persian carpets, which my mother had bought at various times and places, were unrolled and they went down on to the floor.
Early that morning, when the crows finally settled down to sleep and the city was still, Vijayalakshmi akka sat down and tuned her Saraswati veena for a while. Then she began to sing and we were all transfixed. After a while, Malle asked if she could sing an old folk song, perhaps something she thought was the oldest folk song of South India …
She sang again. And then she retired to bed. She did not eat and so none of us ate. Something spiritual seemed to have set in.
The next morning, Malle said to me, ‘Avec une femme de cette dignité, je crois que nous ne pourrons pas demander qu’est-ce qu’on paie.’
He was right, of course. She would not have dreamt of asking for payment. He could not have dreamt of paying. How does one pay for magic?
Again, it was on returning to Mumbai in 1981 that Uncle Jeh (J.R.D. Tata) asked me to suggest some films that I could help make. He asked me if I would write a synopsis for a film on vocational training for those who were not suited for academic degrees, which was the hobby-horse of someone on the board at the Tatas. I did another about the elections and the problems attendant upon them. There was one about adoption and another about commercial sex workers and beggar women. But the one that they eventually funded was on the problems of the city we lived in, which then went by the name of Bombay.
Bhagwan Das Garga was to direct it. He was not a young man by that time and I worked on the research, the scene synopses, the script, the scene break-down and I did the interviews too.
