From Rajahs and Yogis to Gandhi and Beyond: Images of India in International Films of the Twentieth Century Vijaya Mulay.

Ascarate, Richard John

From Rajahs and Yogis to Gandhi and Beyond: Images of India in International Films of the Twentieth Century

Vijaya Mulay. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2010. 554 pages. Soft cover $39.95; hard cover $99.95

Vijaya Mulay was born 16 May 1921 in an India that was part of the British Raj. While a university student in Calcutta, she saw her first Bioscope and immediately fell in love with the medium. After completing scholarship studies at the University of Leeds (during which she discovered that reel British and the real British were not quite the same thing), she received a position in the Central Ministry of Education in New Delhi. There, she founded the Delhi Film Society and by 1959 became one of two joint secretaries of the influential Federation of Film Societies in India. Three years later, she was appointed to the Central Board of Film Censors in (then) Bombay. She befriended French director Louis Malle and the two carried on a lengthy correspondence. In her roles as censor, critic, and filmmaker, she has viewed, reviewed, and analyzed virtually every film emanating from or concerning India in the last century. All of which is to say that at the fragile age of 88, when she published her book, Mulay was (for she is 92 years old now) more qualified than perhaps anyone in the world to write the definitive study of the representation of India in cinematic history. Unfortunately, From Rajahs and Yogis to Gandhi and Beyond is not that study.

Mulay divides the book into ten chapters, laid out more or less chronologically. The first treats short films of the silent era, with synopses of works by Georges Melies. The author argues, unsurprisingly, that for the French filmmaker, "India was anything sufficiently distant in appearance from familiar Western life and customs-exotic and mysterious enough to establish its difference" (38). She then turns to the so-called Durbar Films, shot to highlight Britain's power and grandeur. She takes to task Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905 and master of ceremonies for Durbar pageants, for being, well, imperialistic. In the second chapter, Mulay compares Danish and German films with themes featuring rajahs and yogis. Two such films, Maharajahens Yndlingshustru (The Maharajah's Wife, 1917, 1918, 1925) and Das Indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb, 1921, 1938, 1959) were made three different times, with key Indian characters growing increasingly unsavory. Mulay attributes the German fascination with India to the former's desire to escape the horrible realities of the First World War and, more tenuously, to Germany's desire to define its national identity.

In the third chapter, the author analyzes Empire Films of the colonial era, primarily The Black Watch (John Ford 1929), Clive of India (Richard Boleslawski 1935), and The Drum (Zoltan Korda 1937). Once again, as might be expected, White people are depicted in these films as "civilized, brave and noble; they have a code of honour, of service and sacrifice," while Indians are shown to be "evil and perfidious, except those who have had the benefit of a Western education" (121). Meanwhile, as Mulay contends in the fourth chapter on Empire Films of the postcolonial era, the post-Second World War political environment necessitated a new aesthetic strategy in depicting India so that Britain might retain colonial control. Thus, in films such as Bhowani Junction (George Cukor 1956) and North West Frontier (John Lee Thompson 1959), Indians are depicted as sorrowful about the departure of the British and uncertain about their own ability to govern their vast country. The author devotes the fifth and sixth chapters to the films of Jean Renoir, Louis Malle, Roberto Rossellini, and Arne Sucksdorff, international directors who traveled to India to discover the spiritual peace and connection to nature that the West had lost through technology and its endless hegemonic quest for market and political power.

The seventh chapter covers films made by westerners whose close ties to India gave them unique insight into the land and its people. Mulay makes a chronological leap backward to discuss the Indian films of German director Franz Osten, whose Die Leuchte Asiens (The Light of Asia, 1925), Das Grabmal einer grossen Liebe (Tomb of Great Love, 1928), and Prapancha Pash (Throw of the Dice, 1929), though largely forgotten today, helped establish Indian cinema. She then jumps forward to analyze three films by James Ivory, who collaborated with producer Ismail Merchant and writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to direct, among other stylistic classics, A Room with a View (1985).

In the eighth chapter, Mulay analyzes new filmic trends from Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982), which "helped create anew an India 'hype' in the West" (327), to Mahabharata (Peter Brook, 1989) and Manika une vie plus tard (Manika, One Life Later/Manika, the Girl Who Lived Twice, Franpois Villiers 1988), which depict India not as the "Other but as a microcosm of the universe, a part of 'us'" (333). The ninth chapter gives a nod to gender roles and relations in films about India. Taking her examples across several decades of cinema, Mulay inarguably--and hence uninterestingly--contends that "[t]hough the portrayal of White and Black women differed to some extent in Anglo-American and European cinema at certain times, both unvaryingly portrayed women as objects of masculine desire" (385). This, of course, can be said of cinema (or painting or sculpture or dance, etc.) from any nation and era. The last chapter is given over to the author's glib historico-philosophical musings on the nature of reality, globalization, and the decline of the nation-state, with a gratuitous jab at the "myth of Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction" (398) (presumably advanced to destroy the Iraqi state and abscond with its oil) and a wink at Al Gore for apprising mankind (via An Inconvenient Truth (David Guggenheim, 2006)) of its impending doom from global warming.

Mulay acknowledges that a "work of this magnitude, covering films over the 100-year span of the twentieth century, could not have been completed without the help of a vast number of individuals" (xiv). One of them should have been an editor. At 554 pages, the book is of an appropriate heft for the subject, but the author too often gives inordinately long descriptions of film plots, providing details that contribute nothing to her own scant and simplistic analyses. She also liberally borrows (with citation) insights and findings from other film critics and theorists but rarely deepens, challenges, or complicates their arguments in any way. Mulay does warn the reader early on that "[t]hroughout this project I have been aware that, in analyzing films, my bias against imperialism and imperialists may be colouring my better judgement and I have tried my best to guard against it" (5). Had she taken this caveat to heart, she might not have relied so heavily on Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm for theoretical underpinning. She seems to invoke his name every three pages. Surprisingly, despite the author's preoccupation with the evils of Western political, military, and cinematic "hegemony," Michel Foucault makes nary a cameo appearance in the volume.

The book contains an extended discussion of the life and films of Louis Malle, whom Mulay befriended in 1967, as well as an appendix with facsimiles of several letters the French director and his crew sent her over the years. One almost wishes she had saved this material for a separate volume on the filmmaker alone. Further, the author's autobiographical asides may jar some readers. In discussing various versions of Das Indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb), for example, Mulay relates in the text proper: "I have seen all three versions on videos and the Eichberg version in celluloid too, on an editing table in the Prague archive," and "I have a DVD of the Joe May version in my collection" (78). Meanwhile, curios of cinematic history lie buried in the footnotes. Thus, when Franz Osten needed to portray a dying man in one of his films, his Indian factotum knew of a poor fellow on his last legs in a nearby house. The desire for screen time overcoming even morbidity, the gasping Hindustani assured Osten through gestures that he would indeed die the next day (312-313).

To her credit, Mulay proffers a tremendous amount of material--including film stills, photographs, and promotional material--gathered over a lifetime that coincided with historic international upheavals and transformations. The reader willing to overlook her idiosyncratic style and snide political commentary will find From Rajahs and Yogis to Gandhi and Beyond: Images of India in International Films of the Twentieth Century a rich, if uneven, scholarly resource.