73. Binayak Bhattacharya

Abstract 73
Binayak Bhattacharya  

Cinematic Journey of the Dissident Nationalists:
Indian People’s Theatre Association and the Hindi Films of 1940s and 1950s,

Abstract

Indian Cinema, from the beginning, was successful in creating its own diverse frame of reference, where various nodes of social and political actions and events had manifested their presence in different degrees. If we reflect on this paradigm in the late-colonial and post-colonial perspective, it invokes certain questions that have resemblances with the nation’s early encounter with radical humanism and Marxism in 1930s and 1940s emerging as the dissident alternatives to the existing modes of nationalist political practice. In this context, the progressive cultural movement in India in general and the Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association (IPTA) in particular provide a fascinating cultural history. The influences of IPTA were experienced not only in the fields of literature and theatre, but also in the Indian Cinema of the time. Interestingly, from the 1940s, we see a significant number of Indian films gradually have started to represent the misery of people and the nation form a newer perspective. One can take references from the films like Bimal Roy’s Humrahi (Fellow Travelers, 1945) and Do Bigha Zamin (Two Acres of Land, 1953), Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar (The Lower City, 1946), IPTA and K A Abbas’s  Dharti Ke Laal (Children of The Earth, 1946), Raj Kapoor’s Awara (The Vagabond, 1949) and  Jaagte Raho (Keep Awake, 1956). While engaging mostly with the Hindi films of that period, my paper will try to explore the site of this particular cultural trend that was successful to erect an idea of a common man’s nation by structuring an indigenous form of people’s culture. The idea, for me, is derived from a progressive-humanist ideological position. However, this peculiar construction continued to exist for a long time as a specific trait of Indian Cinema.

Historically, we may observe that the phenomenon of IPTA was neither an abrupt occurrence in 1940s, nor it was ground down unexpectedly in 1950s. I would rather argue that the progressive cultural movement in India as a whole had tried to reclaim the nation in their own manner. The approach of the movement during that period– although materialized within the Nationalist institution– was successful in marking a different trajectory for cultural representation. Moreover, events like the World War-II, Quit India Movement (1942), Bengal Famine (1943), Communal Riots (1946), Partition (1947) etc had not only ruffled the pattern of national imagination but had also induced a sense to imagine India differently. Thus, the intellectual dissent of IPTA during this period had played a pivotal role in forming a specific cultural language for Indian Cinema. We may observe– later in 1950s– how this form was gradually taken over by the Nehruvian discourse of nationalism and how a new generic form in Indian (mostly in Hindi) Cinema, i.e. the Social was born. In my paper, through revisiting the history of IPTA, I would like to present a trajectory of Indian social films– its genesis, growth and development– while considering the progressive cultural movement in India as the matrix containing the elements of the dissident progressive nationalism.