‘Scam compliance is fraud-enabling actions that the victims take that ultimately work to their peril’. (Illustration by Atikh Rashid)
Stephen Lea, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Exeter (UK), known for his work on the psychological dimensions of scams, speaks to Atikh Rashid on why even the highly educated fall prey to scams and how the digital era has transformed scams and scammers.
Financial frauds and cyber scams continue to dupe scores of individuals every day. Stephen Lea, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Exeter (UK), known for his work on the psychological dimensions of scams, speaks to Atikh Rashid on why even the highly educated fall prey to scams and how the digital era has transformed scams and scammers. Excerpts:
What factors contribute to individuals falling prey to scams despite extensive awareness campaigns and widespread media coverage on the subject?
A mixture of reasons. Sometimes fraudsters are just very clever or they get lucky. They send out multiple scam appeals some of which just happen to hit someone for whom the scam fits well: people who are expecting a communication of the same sort from their bank or solicitor; people who are short of money, those who are in a hurry when the message comes in… And then, yes, people are eager to get money – through greed or desperation. So they want to believe that they can get higher returns, or that they have won the lottery.
Professor Stephen Lea (Photo by Ingmar Visser)
The Internet has made it extremely cheap, practically costless, to send out phishing messages, and computer technology has made it much easier to imitate genuine communications convincingly – word-processor-produced documents are much easier to mimic exactly than a typewriter-written, hand-signed letter on headed notepaper that had been professionally printed.
In the days when most scam appeals were distributed by post, fraudsters had to operate out of countries with the cheapest postal rates – Spain and Canada were the favourites – and even then, carrying out a fake lottery scam, for example, required considerable capital outlay.
What’s ‘scam compliance’? Are some people – owing to their psychological make-up – more compliant than others?
Unlike almost all other crimes, scams require some degree of cooperation from victims for them to be pulled off successfully. Scam compliance is fraud-enabling actions that the victims take that ultimately work to their own peril. Among the factors that may lead to compliance are the human tendency to place trust in authority figures, the susceptibility to social influence, sensation-seeking tendencies among some victims leading to the perception of scams as gambles, and a lack of self-control.
Psychologists are divided on whether there is a general personality trait of being open to persuasion – but if you feel you are like that, then it would be a good idea to be extra cautious whenever someone seems to be trying to get you to do something.
My guess – but it is a guess – is that compliance is domain-specific: some people may tend to be compliant towards, say, marketing, and scamming is really just an extreme form of marketing in my view, but not towards, say, romantic approaches.
What do you mean by ‘Scamming is an extreme form of marketing’?
Both scamming and marketing are trying to get you to make a financial transaction that you would not have made spontaneously. In the case of marketing, you will on average end up with some product (goods or services), but the more effective the marketing, the less likely that it will be worth what you paid for it
Scamming just takes this to extremes: what you end up with is nothing (or something that is worth almost nothing to you). Both activities use the same well-documented techniques of persuasion.
Often even highly educated, tech-savvy, and finance-literate individuals succumb to fraud as seen in Selva Nadar’s ‘profile investment scam’ in Pune, where IT professionals and individuals from the banking sector were defrauded.
This raises the question: can anyone, irrespective of education and exposure, be defrauded using the right techniques?
It’s a common belief – even shared by some perpetrators, according to our research – that the prime victims of fraud are the old and financially/technically unsophisticated; it’s even been suggested that the reason some ‘Nigerian letter’ scams are so absurd is that the perpetrators are trying to prevent anyone with a modicum of common sense from responding. While there are plenty of case histories of old and poorly financially educated victims, statistics do not bear out the idea that they predominate. In my view, you are right to suggest that “anyone – irrespective of the education and exposure – can be defrauded if the right techniques are employed”.
In the Pune case you describe, the victims were probably vulnerable precisely because they were (relatively) prosperous and tech-savvy. They thought they knew about investment, and I am sure the perpetrator would have flattered them with remarks about their knowledge and sophistication. The result is overconfidence, which is one of the prime causes of falling for a scam (as well as making other kinds of errors).
From a cybercriminal’s perspective, is committing online theft emotionally and physically less (shifted ‘less’) demanding compared to traditional methods involving violence or assault. Does the distance make evasion of ethical and conscience-related dilemmas easier?
This is the kind of thing that is often said, and not only about crime: e.g. in warfare, it is often argued that it is morally easier to drop bombs on a hospital, or fire rockets at one, than to enter it and bayonet the patients face to face. I’m not sure there’s any real evidence base to support this kind of argument. One might also point out that, as well as maintaining ethical distance, cyber fraudsters expose themselves to (a) less danger of giving themselves away by facial expression, tone of voice, etc (b) less risk of physical danger than traditional theft, where a victim might fight back effectively.
In most cases of online fraud, victims often feel reluctant to come out in public because of the possible stigma: ‘How foolish of you to have fallen for this!’
I agree that there is a reluctance for fraud victims to come forward (though it is difficult to measure how prevalent this is), and it applies to fraud in general, not just cyber fraud. I think this is a consequence of the (almost) unique character of fraud as a crime in which the victim has to cooperate – you have to do something to be defrauded, even if it is only clicking on a link in an email. Although there are multiple reasons in these cases, part of it is again the fear of being seen as complicit. That need not be so, because we all are vulnerable. In fact, when media interviewers ask me if I have ever fallen victim to a scam, I have only once (the first time it was asked) answered “No”; nowadays I always say, “Not yet”
Using Kells Priory, an Irish medieval site, as a case study, this essay examines how Stanley Kubrick transforms a specific historical and geographical place into cinematic space, drawing upon the priory’s architectural form, medieval history, and associations with conflict, power, and decline to create meanings that extend beyond landscape realism in Barry Lyndon.
This scene involving Redmond Barry confronting his childhood sweetheart Nora Brady and wealthy English Army Captain John Quin during their outdoor rendezvous was shot at Ballynatray Estate near Youghal situated on the border of County Cork and County Waterford. (Photo: Still from Barry Lyndon (Dir: Stanley Kubrick)
ATIKH RASHID
When Stanley Kubrick arrived in Waterford in July 1973 to scout for locations for Barry Lyndon, he was unknowingly or knowingly entering a landscape whose depictions on canvas or celluloid, in lyric and prose, are charged with layers of political, cultural, and emotional meaning.
The vision of Ireland as a pastoral utopia has evolved through various historical stages: from Oliver Cromwell’s displacement of native Catholic populations of Ireland to the less fertile western lands in 17th century, to Paul Henry’s renderings of rural life on canvas, to nationalist reappropriations of the countryside as the moral heart of the colonised nation. The postcolonial Irish state further instrumentalised this imagery to promote tourism, as did Hollywood with depictions of Ireland’s countryside – with films such as The Quiet Man (1952) – as rural utopia, for its own purposes. This story came full circle in the decade of 1970s with Irish filmmakers actively trying to deconstruct this image with films such as Caoineadh Áirt Úi Laoghaire (1975) and Poitin (1977).
The excitement around Kubrick’s plan to shoot ‘Barry Lyndon’ in Ireland is palpable in this article published by the Sunday Independent on July 7 . 1973 (Accessed on November 23 2026 through Irish Newspaper Archives)
Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, coming as it did in the middle of this decade, could be seen as another portrayal of Ireland of the older kind. Yet, the film was not – or hasn’t been – seen with the same derision that The Quiet Man and Ryan’s Daughter were for their stereotypical portrayal of Ireland and its people. In fact, Barry Lyndon was adjudged as the best Irish Film ever made by a jury at The Irish Times in 2020.
In the film, a young Irishman tries to climb the English aristocratic ladder through hook, crook and marriage only to lose everything as he is crushed by the rigid social order of 18th-century Britain. Looking for reasons for Barry Lyndon’s positive appraisal, film scholar Maria Pramaggiore argues that although the film “both indicts and participates in the colonial figuring of Ireland’s geographical and social landscape”, it sidesteps the Hollywood depiction by using melancholia and by framing the landscape through the 18th century debate about “the beautiful, the picturesque and the sublime”.
Later in this essay, I compare the cinematic space created by the filmmaker with the geographic place that Kells Priory is. (Graphic created by author; screengrabs taken from Barry Lyndon (Dir: Stanley Kubrick)
Last month, I visited the Kells Priory, County Kilkenny, one of the outdoor shooting locations of the movie in Ireland, to seek the answers to these questions for myself and to see how this site, which figures prominently in the film, was in real life. How was the cinematic place created from the geographic space? Has it changed since? How do the history of Kells Priory and its use in Barry Lyndon interact with each other?
Monastic-Military Complex
Founded in 1193 by Geoffrey FitzRobert, an Ango-Norman baron, Kells Priory was a monastic sanctuary with a defensive structure situated along the King’s River in Kilkenny County. Dedicated to ‘Blessed Virgin Mary’, the Priory was endowed with extensive lands and over the next two centuries came to comprise several buildings including a church, cloister, chapter house, dormitory, and refectory. These are parts of the monastic precinct at the priory.
The other part is the Burgess Court, which is mainly a defensive courtyard made of five defence towers linked to each other by a tall, stone-built compound wall. During its heyday, the priory served spiritual, economic and military functions that included worship, pastoral outreach, lodging for the canons, management of agricultural lands, mills and the defence of its occupants from outsiders in that turbulent era.
In March 1540, as per the policies of King Henry VII, the priory was surrendered and its lands were granted to other English nobles . Following this, the buildings gradually fell into disuse, some being adapted for secular uses. In recent times, the ruins became an important heritage site with archaeological excavations starting at the location beginning in 1972.
It’s plausible that filming and excavation took place parallely at Kells Priory. From 1972 to 1975, a large-scale programme of excavations was undertaken and it went on until 1980s. 7 The filming for Barry Lyndon took place in Kilkenny from October to December 1973.
‘The Dunleary camp’ : Barry at Kells Priory
In the movie, the scenes shot at the priory take place in the first half of the film before Barry leaves Ireland for Germany after he enlists in the Redcoats army. The priory has been used as a location to portray a fictional temporary training camp for the newly recruited Irish troops near the Dún Laoghaire harbour at the outskirts of the then Dublin city. This is a divergence (although not narratively important) from W M Thackeray’s novel, as in the latter Barry spends some time in Dublin with Fitzsimons’ family after leaving Barryville before enlisting for the English army and embarking on a ship to Prussian territories. In the novel, the episodes depicting the fistfight with Mr Toole and meeting with Captain Grogan (Fagan in novel) occur aboard the ship. In the film, these sequences are staged on land and specifically at the ‘Dunleary Training Camp’, which the novel has no mention of.
Interestingly, the first draft of the Barry Lyndon screenplay placed these sequences in Germany, unlike the finished film. Clearly, Kubrick decided to shoot more scenes in Ireland than initially planned, and the reasons for this could only be speculated. Notwithstanding the reason, it can be safely stated that this choice considerably expanded the Irish duration of the film and helped build a historical layer to the film’s depiction of a colonised Ireland.
Barry at the ‘Dunleary’ camp before he embarks on the ship to Prussia. (Screengrab: Barry Lyndon, Dir: Stanley Kubrick)
Interestingly, in an example of cinematic manipulation of space, the sequences shot at the Kells Priory are intermixed with scenes shot at Moorstown Castle, about 60 kms away, giving an illusion that these two spaces form a single place, a third, totally fictional, cinematic site of ‘Dunleary Camp’.
When I visited Kells Priory earlier this month, I found the site much the same as it appears in the film (minus the redcoats, their tents and paraphernalia) although 50 years have passed since the shooting of the film. The meadows inside and outside the walls, I saw, were populated by grazing sheep instead of redcoats having their humble lunch (as in the scene), which becomes the reason for Barry’s fistfight with Mr Toole. Of the two parts of Kells Priory – monastic precinct and Burgess court – only the latter has been used in the film.
Redmond Barry’s entry at Dunleary training camp. (Screengrab Barry Lyndon, Dir: Stanley Kubrick)The location today as photographed by the author from inside Burgess Court at Kells Priory. There is very little identifiable difference – apart from some dry patches seen in the movie visuals as compared to lush green grass at present, and sheep taking advantage of the greens. (Photo Credit:Atikh Rashid)
This space, characterized by its open, geometrically defined stone walls and towers, takes many a shapes in the mind of the visitors, becoming a place of multilayered meaning: as an ecclesiastical site with religious and colonial history, as an archival excavation site holding vast possibilities for anthropological and historical knowledge (some of the excavated material is stored inside the priory), and its ruined look harking back nostalgia and a sense of loss. By using the site in Barry Lyndon, Kubrick activates these layers of meaning and imbues it with additional ones by using it as a place where important incidents in the life of the protagonist occur.
It’s a space where Barry starts a new life as a Redcoats soldier, where a faux-aristocratic country-boy gets hardened by intermingling with ‘lower classes’. His fistfight with Mr Toole makes the green meadow an intimate Place of conflict and class tension thus imbuing the space with personal and meanings that transcend its existing associations.
The cinematic space of Dunleary training Camp soon after the protagonist’s induction into the British army.Image 2. A photo taken by the author at Burgess Court of Kells Priory. The Burgess court, an enclosure that was built for defensive purposes, has seven such towers, the monument is also called ‘Seven Castles’. There is some perspectival difference between the referenced shot and the image taken by the author is largely due to camera height and Kubrick’s well-known use of a telephoto lens for this film . The film scene may have been shot by placing a camera at a height, capturing three towers in the background. The tree cover in the mid-ground has changed considerably, affecting the visibility of the wall compound as well as the towers in the background from this angle.
For an audience sensitive to Irish history, the sight of a foreign military occupying a historical Irish ruin (a stand-in for native institutions) is a powerful, active cultural stimulus that may recall the historical trauma of conquest and dissolution. The redcoats trampling the lush green terrain under their feet in the backdrop of ruins from Ireland’s past does tell a colonial story in itself and could possibly be read as the colonial fantasy of conquering a virgin land.
Perhaps, this is exactly what sets Barry Lyndon’s depiction of Irish life and landscape apart because the film does not idealise them but depicts them as sites of loss and domination. The lush green Irish terrain is not a cite of rural utopia but must be left behind to make a life thus symbolising displacement and colonial tension. The painterly aesthetic of the film inspired from 18th century art evokes a sense of loss and melancholia, the slow and restrained visual momentum helps the film – although a Hollywood product – stand apart from the melodramatic or picturesque clichés of Hollywood films mentioned earlier.
A mere location?
The question of whether the use of Kells Priory is merely locational in Barry Lyndon is a vexed one.
On one hand, the site is used as a location in the most functional sense as it stands for something fictional – the Dunleary training camp. On the other hand, it’s more than purely locational as basing the scenes at an identifiable Irish ruin, Kubrick imbues the scene with layers of historical and cultural meaning due the site’s documented history of loss and conquest and Barry’s own personal and ultimately unsuccessful struggles within British aristocracy.
Remains of the archaeological excavations that took place at Kells Priory can still be seen at the site. Photo Credit: Atikh Rashid
Kells Priory, although a national monument and an important medieval ecclesiastical site of great archaeological importance, is not a popular tourist destination. Barry Lyndon shoot there has not helped it (unlike the locations of The Quiet Man and Star Wars franchise), one would imagine, largely because the film itself doesn’t enjoy a broad popularity, claiming fanfare among a niche cinephile crowd. The tourism data published by Failte Ireland shows that within the Kilkenny county, the Priory is not a sought-after destination, with only 31,000 visitors in a year (although it’s a free-entry monument) as opposed to Kilkenny Castle which attracted 452, 383 visitors who had to buy a ticket.
Kells Priory, however, makes frequent appearances on online forums on platforms like Reddit in discussions involving shooting locations in Ireland. The film has gained in popularity with passage of time which shows in the online mentions of the film and its shooting locations but it’s still a niche to send crowds in the direction of the Kells. Also, in the crowded list of historic shooting locations in Ireland listed on portals such as Screen Ireland, Heritage Ireland or OPW, Kells Priory does not prefigure prominently
References/Further Reading:
Bradley, John, ‘Kells Priory, County Kilkenny: Archaeological Excavations 1972–1975’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 80C (1980), 345–420.
Harper, Graeme, and Jonathan Rayner, eds., Cinema and Landscape: Film, Nation and Cultural Geography (Bristol: Intellect, 2010).
McLoone, Martin, ‘Landscape and Irish Cinema’, in Cinema and Landscape: Film, Nation and Cultural Geography, ed. by Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner (Bristol: Intellect, 2010), pp. 131–46
Peckham, Robert Shannan, ‘Landscape in Film’, in A Companion to Cultural Geography, ed. by James S. Duncan, Nuala C. Johnson and Richard H. Schein (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp 420-429 Poitín, dir. by Bob Quinn (CineGael, 1977).
Pramaggiore, Maria. Making Time in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon: Art, History, and Empire. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015
Thackeray, William Makepeace, The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. by Himself (London, 1844).
Cinema and Landscape: Film, Nation and Cultural Geography, edited by Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner, Intellect, 2010, pp. 131–146.
A project by Atikh Rashid, Emmanuel Kofi Quist-Haynes & Andres Prypchan
Film genres emerge within particular production centres but frequently spread beyond their sites of origin through adaptation and reinterpretation. Characterising these patterns at a global scale can provide insights into cultural exchange and the evolution of film industries. We examine the temporal and geographic distribution of three genres with identifiable production hubs—Film Noir, Western, and Martial Arts cinema—across six major film-producing regions: the United States, India, China, Italy, Mexico, and Nigeria.
Using metadata compiled from TMDb, IMDb, Wikipedia, and the Hong Kong Movie Database (HKMDB), we construct decade-level genre production counts and visualise them using logarithmically scaled heatmaps and multichannel RGB composite heatmaps. The composite representation enables simultaneous comparison of three genres, revealing both genre-specific dominance and cross-genre co-occurrence. The visualisations reproduce established historical patterns, including the sustained dominance of Westerns in the United States, their later concentration in Italy during the Spaghetti Western period, and the strong localisation of Martial Arts cinema in China. More broadly, the analysis suggests that genres typically remain concentrated around their centres of origin or develop secondary centres of reinterpretation rather than exhibiting uniform global diffusion.
Data and Methods
Data Sources
The analysis combines metadata from four primary sources: the TMDb API, IMDb downloadable datasets, Wikipedia, and the Hong Kong Movie Database (HKMDB). Together these datasets provide information on film genres, production countries, and release dates. Because no individual source provides complete global coverage, missing or inconsistent records were cross-checked against supplementary references, including the British Film Institute (BFI), the American Film Institute (AFI) Catalogue, the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée (CNC), the Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum (DFF), the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, and national box-office datasets.
Data Processing
Data were collected through API access, downloadable datasets, and web scraping where appropriate. The combined dataset was cleaned by standardising country names, genre labels, and release dates, resolving missing metadata using supplementary sources, and assigning geographic coordinates to major production centres. Film counts were aggregated by decade to reduce year-to-year variation and facilitate long-term comparisons.
Visualisation
The processed dataset was visualised in Python using Matplotlib and Plotly. Individual heatmaps were generated for Film Noir, Western, and Martial Arts films, with colour intensity representing logarithmically transformed production counts to account for the substantially larger output of Hollywood. These three heatmaps were subsequently combined into a multichannel RGB composite. RGB encoding allows simultaneous comparison of three independent variables while preserving their overlap, making temporal co-occurrence immediately visible without requiring multiple figures.
Multichannel RGB heatmap of film genres by selected country and decade (created using Python). Red represents martial art movies, green film noir, and blue represents ‘Western’ genre.
Each colour channel represents one genre: red denotes Martial Arts, green denotes Film Noir, and blue denotes Westerns. Composite colours indicate genre co-occurrence, with yellow representing Martial Arts and Film Noir, magenta representing Martial Arts and Westerns, cyan representing Film Noir and Westerns, and white indicating the simultaneous presence of all three genres. Dark colours correspond to low or zero production. Colour intensity is proportional to the logarithmically transformed film count for each genre, country, and decade.
Findings
The composite heatmap reproduces several well-established historical patterns while revealing differences in the geographic trajectories of individual genres.
Westerns remain consistently dominant in the United States throughout the study period. A second period of high production appears in Italy between the 1950s and 1970s, corresponding to the rise of the Spaghetti Western, demonstrating that some genres develop important secondary production centres rather than remaining confined to their origins.
Surge in Western productions in Italy (Spaghetti Western) and Mexico in 1960 and 1970s.
Film Noir is strongly concentrated in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s before declining substantially in subsequent decades. Production increases later in countries including India and China, although at considerably lower levels than those observed in the United States, suggesting adaptation rather than displacement of the genre’s original production centre.
Film noir production saw a surge in India (Bombay-based film industry) in 1950s and 2000s
Martial Arts cinema exhibits its strongest concentration in China. During the 1980s, China also shows substantial Film Noir production, producing a yellow (red + green) region in the composite heatmap that indicates simultaneous activity in both genres. Similarly, cyan regions observed in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s indicate the concurrent production of Film Noir and Western films.
Overall, the visualisations suggest that film genres rarely diffuse uniformly across production centres. Instead, they tend either to remain concentrated around their historical origins or to establish a limited number of secondary centres characterised by local reinterpretation. The relative scarcity of white regions in the composite heatmap indicates that sustained, high-volume co-production across all three genres is uncommon.
With the departure of British from India in August 1947, Indian filmmakers hoped to see a liberal censorship regime in the country that would accommodate their creative aspirations. This turned out to be a misplaced expectation, as the nascent Indian state embarked on its own censorship project avowing to safeguard its citizenry from the evil influence of ‘immoral cinema’. As a result, censorship of films was stepped up with ‘colonial anxieties’ of the British being replaced by ‘moral anxieties’ of Indian elite in deciding what goes on the screen.
This essay explores the position taken by filmgoer-citizens on the issue of censorship during this period by surveying the ‘letters to editor’ column of filmindia magazine, the most popular film journal of the time, for a period of three years immediately after independence. The letters show that the English speaking elite of the nascent state were enthusiastic votaries of censorship and wanted the state to exercise more – not less – control over the silver screens to ensure that ‘uneducated’, ‘rustic’ masses of the country are safeguarded from the “moral degradation”. Under the missionary leadership of editor Baburao Patel, the ‘letters to editor’ column of filmindia became a faux control room to which ‘morality guards’ from across the country could write to raise alarm about violations committed by ‘money minded film producers’ and demand action from the “government of the people”.
A research paper by ATIKH RASHID
IN 1954 as many as 13,000 homemakers sent a signed petition to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru asking him to take steps to control the evil influence of cinema on youngsters, claiming that “immoral and vulgar films” threatened “the moral health of the country” and that they were ‘a major factor in incitement to crime and general unsettlement of society’. (B D Garga,1996 ). In November that year, the issue was also raised in the Indian Parliament by Lilavati Munshi, a Rajya Sabha MP, saying that the cinema’s celebration of crime and lust was encouraging young Indians to copy these traits in real life and demanding that the government take steps to curb immorality in cinema. The issue was discussed in the upper house of the Indian parliament under the heading of ‘Steps to Ban Undesirable Films’ and makes for interesting reading. (Rajya Sabha debate, November 1954).
Munshi, known for her ultra-conservative stance, moved the resolution in the house in the presence of then Information and Broadcasting Minister B V Keskar, veteran filmmaker Prithviraj Kapoor who served as a nominated MP between 1952 and 1960, eminent poet Ramdhari Singh ‘Dinkar’ among others, stating that cinema was the “root of many crimes, especially juvenile crimes and the unruliness of the younger generation”. Calling cinema a “powerful weapon”, she said that “good or bad…it has come here to stay” adding that it has the potential to “make or mar a whole generation of the entire nation”. She cited several examples of the ‘ill effects of cinema’, almost all of which she had seen around her or had heard from others. One of those was about a young boy she knew…
While the masses loved it, the elite were riled up by Jugnu’s provocative framing of sexuality and depiction of college as a space for free intermingling of sexes. Several provincial governments banned the film, forcing the distributors to chop it drastically to rid it of ‘vulgarity’.
The singing star Noor Jehan’s depature for Pakistan with her husband Shaukat Hussein Rizvi, who was the producer-director of Jugnu, may have contributed to lack of sympathy for the film among decision makers in India.
ATIKH RASHID
Jugnu (Firefly, 1947) was an important film in many respects. It was the first box office success for Dilip Kumar, then a newbie in the industry, and the last film of singing star Noor Jehan before she permanently left Bombay for Karachi. Jugnu was peculiar in another regard. It was among a few films that were conceptualised and made in pre-independence India but were released in theatres after the dawn of Independence and the pain of Partition.
The response to Jugnu – the love it received from the masses, the ‘moral panic’ it evoked among the elite, and the punitive action it invited from the young government – was an outcome of the time of transition that the country was going through. It also set the tone for the censorship project that Independent India would embark on –aiming to protect the ‘fragile morality’ of the ‘gullible masses’ – and continues to obsess itself with even today.
The present-day audience would likely judge Jugnu as a run-of-the-mill romantic comedy (which like many latter films of Dilip Kumar ends in a tragedy) that ticks some boxes and misses a few. The film produced and directed by Shaukat Husain Rizvi, then-husband of Noor Jehan, has a simple story. Dilip Kumar’s Suraj and Noor Jehan’s Jugnu study in separate colleges located on the same campus and fall in love. Jugnu is an orphan and Suraj is the only son of an ostensibly rich raisaheb who has accumulated debt. The family has planned to marry Suraj to a girl from a wealthy family hoping to receive dowry that will end their financial troubles. The circumstances mean that the lovers can’t marry each other and must feign unfaithfulness. The mutual heartbreak, ultimately, leads the couple to their tragic ends.
Those against the film objected to, among other sequences, this scene in which Jugnu and Suraj indulge in a flirtatious chit chat hiding behind a sofa in the latter’s home.
Although a mixed bag in terms of performances, the film is salvaged by the comedic episodes in the first half and a couple of good songs in the latter.
While the newspaper advertisements from the time tell us that the film, branded as ‘The Song of the Youth’, was celebrating ‘Silver Jubilees’ in multiple cities, it was also evoking an adverse response from the elite for depicting ‘college’ as a place of the intermingling of the sexes, and its provocative framing of youthful sexuality. It portrayed Indian youngsters as carefree romantics for whom the only thing that mattered was the success and failure in love.
Another topic of contention, repeatedly raised by its critics, was its depiction of a romance between the ladies’ hostel matron, played by Ruby Myers, and a professor from the boys’ college. There were still others who blamed it for slandering India’s higher education institutions by not focussing at all on learning activities that, ideally, should go on in a college.
The song ‘Loot Jawani Phir Nahin Aani’ performed by Latika in the film as part of the college drama was a major point of criticism. Many objected to the lyrics as well as “vulgar”, “nude”, “courtesan-like” performance by Latika.
A peek into the archive tells us that popular periodicals like Filmindia were routinely receiving letters from its English speaking readers complaining about Jugnu. While some wondered how such a ‘vulgar film’ was cleared by the Censor Board. Others demanded that it should be re-examined. Readers would reproduce the lyrics of an entire song (Loot Jawani…) to prove their point of Jugnu’s indecency and its portrayal of college girls as ‘courtesans’. Even Indians residing in Singapore and Colombo wrote with angst that the film was spreading the “wrong impression about college life in India”.
“Believe me, Mr Patel. The whole audience was exasperated – barring a few perhaps – when they saw a college girl dancing with the full garb of vulgarity in a drama staged in the college… Patrons of Indian films here like good stories with melodious songs and not historical distortions and semi-nude dances,” wrote M T Piyaseela from Colombo, in a letter published in the October 1948 issue.
Shiv Das Singh, a student from Jodhpur, feared that Jugnu might affect his educational prospects. “What would be the effect on our parents’ minds seeing the film…Will our parents then be ready to allow us to continue our studies further?” he wondered.
After a successful north India run, Jugnu was released at Bombay’s Capitol Cinema on October 1, 1948 but was pulled off the theatre within four weeks “in the midst of its triumphant run” after Filmindia editor Baburao Patel wrote a scathing review headlined ‘Jugnu: A dirty, disgusting, vulgar picture!’.
“Jugnu…tells us that college life in India is nothing more than a long sex hunt in which boys chase girls, explore their hand bags, rob their tiffin boxes and sing suggestive love ditties while making vulgar gestures; while girls sigh about heavily, seduce boys to tea, pimp for their friends, puncture their cycle tyres and sing songs of frustrated love,” Patel wrote in the review, adding, “no decent exhibitor with any pride for his profession or any self-respect should exhibit it in his theatre.”
Interestingly, Patel was Noor Jehan’s neighbour in Oomer Park, Warden Road, Bombay.
In fact, Patel informs us in the review, that he had sent an ‘advanced copy’ of the write up to the then Bombay Home Minister Morarji Desai who watched the film on October 26 and issued a ban three days later under Section 21 of General Clauses Act of 1897. This led to a lot of protests from the film producers and distributors for the ‘arbitrary action’ by the Home Minister on a film already cleared by a ‘full board’ of the censors, but to no avail.
The romance between hostel matron played by Ruby Myers and a professor from boy’s college was a major cause of the films popularity among the youth. It, on the other hand, also added to Jugnu‘s trouble with the government.
After Bombay, several other provincial governments banned the film. The distributor – Bharat Pictures, Akola – was forced to re-submit the film for certification where it was chopped off significantly. Records show that when the film obtained its first Censor certificate from the Bombay Board of Film Certification on July 7, 1947, its total length was 14,093 feet. After revisions made following the ban, it was reduced to 11,559 feet. In terms of the run time, the film lost 28 minutes of its original duration of 156 minutes. The film returned to the screens after a few months in truncated form.
In many ways, the extent of criticism that Jugnu received seems disproportionate to the provocation contained in the film. This response can be understood in two contexts. Firstly, the elite discourse in the newly-Independent India was focused on ‘nation building’, a project that would require the energies and services of the youth. Jugnu’s celebration of youngsters as carefree lads inclined to shrug off responsibility in favour of romantic pursuits did not go well with the government and others with a say.
Secondly, the decision by the film’s female lead Noor Jehan and producer-director Rizvi to choose Pakistan over India left little sympathy for them and their product among the Indian elite. For example, in its review of Jugnu, Patel made a misplaced and far-fetched connection between director Shaukat Rizvi and Qasim Rizvi, the head of extremist, separatist Razakar movement in Hyderabad.
In the pages of Filmindia, which was the most powerful film magazine at the time, Muslim filmmakers who were travelling between India and Pakistan in the fog of the Partition (some of which decided to stay back in India) are repeatedly referred to as ‘fifth columnists’ who need to be watched to ensure that “they do not use the powerful medium of the films” for nefarious purposes.
“The censors must watch carefully such anti-social and anti-religious activities of these fanatic producers who live with us to stab us from day to day,” warns an editorial in the November 1948 issue of Filmindia.
Notwithstanding the legal and circumstantial impediments, Jugnu went on to become one of the biggest films of the time and launched Dilip Kumar’s career in the true sense. In fact, it was a large poster of Jugnu put up in Bandra that broke the news to Ghulam Sarwar ‘Agha’, the fruit seller from Peshawar, that his son Yusuf had entered the film business and had become a star.
In 1897, 34-year-old Indian Civil Service officer Charles Walter Rand undertook strong segregation and containment measures to “stamp out plague from Poona”, deploying the military personnel to search homes to take out infected persons. Soon, reports and rumours of harassment of locals – especially of Indian women – at the hands of British soldiers started emerging from the city.
Dead bodies of Pune residents who died from plague being cremated at a city crematorium. Pic Credit: George Lambert’s India, The Horror Stricken Empire.
ATIKH RASHID
THE FIRST recorded case of bubonic plague in Pune – then Poona – was discovered on October 2 1896 when two passengers from Mumbai alighted at the railway station. By December that year, the city was showing signs of local transmission and the disease had started to spread rapidly – especially in the densely populated Peth areas. Earlier, soon after the reports of plague came in from Mumbai in September 1896, the municipal corporation had appointed a medical officer at Pune Railway Station to watch out for persons with Plague symptoms and send them to special sheds erected at Sassoon General Hospital.
The plague wave that had reached Pune was part of the ‘Third Plague Pandemic’ which had started in Yunnan, China in 1855 and entered India through the port city of Mumbai via Hong Kong. The epidemic would last for well over two decades and would kill about 10 million Indians by between 1896 and 1918, as it ravaged one city after the other.
However, none of the scores of cities that were afflicted by the pestilence would cause as much political uproar as the Poona Plague did.
This curve shows mortality in Pune City plotted with deaths in each five-day interval on the Y-axis between December 20 to May 30. As per Surgeon Captain Beveridge who made the curve, it shows a steady rise until the first week of March and then a marked fall which could be accounted for by measures taken by the plague committee.
‘A DANGEROUS PLAGUE CENTRE’
By the end of February, Pune had recorded 308 cases of plague with 271 deaths. The dread of the disease which such a high mortality rate had caused the locals to flee the city. The municipal officials estimated that about 15,000 to 20,000 locals had left the city to escape the pandemic and had settled in villages in the outskirts. At this was happening, locals, as well as Englishmen, were asking for the appointment of a ‘strong officer’ who would improve the sanitary and health situation in the city, failing which, they feared, “the matters will never mend and go down form bad to worse.”
The strongman that the Bombay Presidency Governor William Mansfield Sandhurst decided to appoint was 34-year-old Walter Charles Rand, an Oxford-educated officer of the Indian Civil Service, who was then serving in Satara. Rand was appointed on February 10 1987 as an Assistant Collector for Pune and Chairman of the Poona Plague Committee.
“My first duty was to ascertain the extent to which the disease had already spread in Poona,” Rand wrote in the plague report that he drafted but was killed before he could submit it to the Governor. “After examining the current death register of Poona Municipal Corporation and mortality returns for previous years I discovered that … the morality in the city was growing at an alarming rate since the beginning of January…On the same day I also informed the Collector that Poona had become a very dangerous plague centre,” Rand wrote.
WHY MILITARY HELP WAS TAKEN?
As per Rand, Surgeon Captain Beveridge arrived in Pune to assist in fighting the epidemic in the city with the idea of using military men in the plague operations. “Up to the time of Surgeon Captain Beveridge’s arrival, the use of anything but civil agency for dealing with the epidemic had not been considered. That officer, however, who had had considerable experience of the Plague in Hong Kong and methods adopted there for stamping it out, formed a decided opinion that the help of soldiers would be desirable in Poona, especially to search for sufferers from plague, their removal to suitable hospitals, and the disinfection of plague-infected houses,” Rand says in the report.
Following this, Poona Collector RA Lamb sent out a formal request to the government of Bombay Presidency for this purpose. “The aid of the soldiers is needed because the men are available, they are disciplined, they can be relied upon to be thorough and honest in their inspection, while no native agency is available, or could be relief on if it were,” he said.
At this time the population of Pune – including those residing in municipal limits, cantonments and suburbs – was 1.61 lakh. The plan prepared by Rand attached the greatest importance to house-to-house search for infected patients and suspects …. There was intense aversion among the townsfolk for taking out the plague-infected family members to the hospital. The families resorted to “incredible shifts” in order to prevent authorities from detecting a plague patient. Such patients were hidden in lofts, cupboards and gardens or “anywhere where their presence was least likely suspected”. This, the administration argued, would leave no option but to resort to “compulsory methods” to ensure isolation of the infected patients.
Five special plague hospitals were erected in various parts of the city, each for Hindu, Muslim, Parsi communities in addition to one general hospital and Sassoon Hospital where Europeans were treated. On the same line, four segregation camps were set up where family members and other contacts of the plague patients were kept under observation.
“There was, it is true, no Indian example of the suppression by strong measures of an epidemic of plague which had established itself in a large town, but the possibility of so suppressing the disease had been demonstrated at Hongkong in 1894. It was certain that if the plague was not to be allowed to run its course but was to be stamped out of Poona, stringent measures would have to be taken,” Rand observed in the report.
The containment policy adopted by Rand and his team was to actively search the localities in the city with the help of the soldiers accompanied by natives for plague-infected patients (or their dead bodies) and take them to the hospitalS (or cremate the bodies under medical supervision). The houses where patients were found were cleaned, fumigated, dug up (to destroy rats) and lime washed.
The work of search parties was carried out between March 13 and May 19 1987. About 20 search parties (later increased to 60) each consisting three British soldiers and one native gentleman were formed for his purpose. A division of 10 search parties had one medical officer and a lady searcher to inspect women in purdah.
“In order that plague patients might not be removed before the arrival of the troops, no intimation as to what area was to be searched was given to the public. The streets in which the search took place were patrolled by Cavalry. The only important complaint about the first day’s work was that doors forced open by the troops were not reclosed. This difficulty was got over on subsequent occasions by attaching to each search division a few Native troops with hammers and staples to fasten up doors after the searchers
As per Rand’s report, the attitude of the residents was “friendly” to the search parties except that of the Brahmin community which was unfriendly and tried to obstruct the searches. The medical officers were supplied with cash advances and had instructions to pay compensation for any articles belonging to plague patients that might be destroyed.
“It was found at the beginning of the operations that rather too many articles were at times destroyed as rubbish. Orders were accordingly issued on March 26th to Officers commanding limewashing divisions to visit, if possible, all houses to be limewashed and to decide what should be destroyed in each. It was also laid down that when a property of any value to the owners was destroyed by limewashing party, the Officer commanding the division should note the approximate cost of replacing what had been destroyed in order that compensation might afterwards be paid. In practice nothing was destroyed after the first fortnight of the operations except in the presence of an officer,” reads the report.
The searches, the Committee claimed, bore results. Between March 13 and May 19 1987, it searched 2,18,214 houses and found 338 plague cases and 64 corpses.
The Committee also claimed that it had given instructions to the limewashing parties to limewash all articles in the house, in case a plague patient or dead body was found, all rubbish found in the house should then be burnt, but no property of any value to the inmates should be destroyed, the whole interior of the house should then be limewashed. If the floor is of earth it should be dug up to a depth of 4 inches and disinfected with liquid chloride of lime.
All entry and exit points to the city were manned by British soldiers to ensure that no one from infected area enters Pune or plague suspects flee the city or smuggle out the dead bodies to escape testing by the authorities.
As per the British, there were very few complaints about the conduct of the soldiers – both British and Native – and whenever any complaint was made action was taken against the violators. In a letter written to Rand on May 20 1987, Major A Deb V Paget who was commanding the operations lists six cases which were found to be true involving stealing of money while conducting house searches, stealing goods and receiving money from the native residents.
The committee also claimed that these “energetic measures” carried out by military officers with “praiseworthy zeal” led to the decline of the disease by the end of May 1897 after a peak in March.
HOW INDIANS SAW THESE OPERATIONS?
Local experience of these search operations and forceful segregation of plague patients and suspect, however, was not as benign. The complaints sent to senior officials – including Rand – and news reports in the local publications suggests that residents looked at these operations as a reign of terror.
As per the petitions, as summarised by Rajnarayan Chandavarkar in his essay ‘Plague Panic and Epidemic Politics in India: 1896-1914’ published in the book Epidemic and Ideas, there was wanton and indiscriminate destruction of the property during searches. The segregation and limewashing parties would dig up the floor, put gallons of disinfectant in the nook and crannies of the houses, at times broke open the doors and left them ajar, took away “perfectly healthy” persons and, in some cases, even neighbours and passers-by.
“…There were complaints that ‘all the females are compelled to come out of their houses and stand before the public gaze in the open street and be there subjected to inspection by soldiers. Soldiers were said to behave ‘disgracefully with native ladies’ and the tenor of the official response was that they had ‘merely joked with a Marathi woman’ suggest that sexual harassment probably did occur. Shripat Gopal Kulkarni, an octogenarian, complained that ten or twelve soldiers had burst into his house, forced him to undress, ‘felt…the whole of my body and then made me sit and rise and sitting around me went on clapping their hands and dancing,” writes Chandavarkar.
It was at this backdrop that Bal Gangadhar Tilak wrote in Mahratta, his English newspaper, that the” Plague is more merciful to us than its human prototypes now reigning the city. The tyranny of Plague Committee and its chosen instruments is yet too brutal to allow respectable people to breathe at ease.”
No doubt that the regulations and measures as they were imposed in Pune were the most stringent among all the cities which were afflicted by the pandemic. In fact, Antony MacDonnel Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces had observed in July 1897 in a communique that “If the plague regulations had been enforced in any city of these provinces in the way in which …they were…enforced in Poona, there would have been bloodshed here.”
THE MURDERS
Blood was indeed shed. On June 22 1897, Chapekar brothers – Damodar (27), Balkrisha (24) and Vasudev (17 or 18) – shot Rand and Lieutenant Charles Ayerst while they were returning from Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Celebration at Government House in Ganeshkhind (now Pune University). While Ayerst died immediately, Rand succumbed to the injuries on July 3.
Damodar Chapekar, who is said to have planned and led the assassination, said in his confession (which was later retracted by him) that the search operations carried by British soldiers were behind his decision to kill Rand.
“In the search of houses a great zulum (atrocities) was practised by the soldiers and they entered the temples and brought out women from their houses, broke idols and burnt pothis (holy books). We determined to revenge these actions but it was no use to kill common people and it was necessary to kill the chief man. Therefore we determined to kill Mr Rand who was the chief,” Damodar was recorded to have said on October 8 1897 in front of a magistrate following his arrest.
This roadside sclupture in Pune depicts the assassination of Rand by Chapekar brothers – Damodar, Bal Krishna and Vasudev – in a rather erroneous manner. As per police records, Damodar had shot Rand at “point blank range” from behind by climbing up the moving tonga and throwing up the curtain. (Picture: Atikh Rashid)
While none of the Chapekar brothers or their other accomplices hinted so, the British also surmised that the attack may have been inspired by the “peculiarly violent writing of the Poona newspapers regarding the plague administration” and “some of the recognised organs (of the Poona Brahmins) have, in articles that shortly preceded the murders, almost openly advocated the duty of the forcible resistance to the authority. The reference here was Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s editorials in Kesari as well as writings and reporting in other newspapers such as Sudharak and Poona Vaibhav among others.
The government – startled, embarrassed by the murders – booked Tilak of sedition under Section 124 of Indian Penal code for exciting feelings of disaffection among the public through his writings in Kesari. It was also alleged that by glorifying and justifying Shivaji’s killing of Afzal Khan in the 17th century, he directly supported violence and resultantly caused murders of the two British officers barely a week after the publication of the articles. The court found Tilak guilty and sent him to 18 months of imprisonment.
ACCUSATION OF SEXUAL VIOLATIONS
The alleged atrocities committed by British soldiers during plague control operations also caused an uproar in United Kingdom when Congress leader from Maharashtra Gopal Krishna Gokhale who was visiting England to appear before Welby Commission gave an interview to The Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian) on July 2 1897 (published on July 3) in which he levelled serious accusations against the British soldiers. These “rumours” were the talk of the town in India but were raised outside the country with such prominence for the first time.
Apart from detailing how soldiers “ignorant of the language and contemptuous to customs” offended scores of ways, he also made allegations of “violation of two women, of whom is said to have committed suicide rather than to survive her shame” attributing the information to his contacts back home in Pune. This caused an uproar in the British parliament as well back home in India. The Bombay Presidency government called it a “malevolent invention” and challenged Gokhale to prove them or share with the government the names of the persons who had shared this information with him.
After his return to India, Gokhale tried his best to gather evidence from the persons who had written to him about the atrocities against the women – especially the two cases of rape – but nobody was willing to come forward, especially in the light of the severe crackdown in Pune post-Rand’s assassination including sedition case against Tilak. A detailed account of this episode has been given by Stanley Wolpert in his book Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and reform in the making of modern India.
Unable to substantiate these claims, Gokhale published an “unqualified apology” to British soldiers which was published the Manchester Guardian and The Times of India on August 4.
As per, Chandavarkar the rumours of these violations – which may or may not be confirmed – should be seen as the nightmarish experience of the local population of their private places being “invaded and violated” by uninformed foreign agents.
“Stories about the behaviour of the soldiers may have borne a considerable measure of truth but they also reflected the nightmarish invasion and violation of privacy – even god-rooms and kitchens – by the most frightening, powerful, uniformed foreign agent of public authority. Sexual harassment by the soldiers and their ‘disgraceful behaviour towards the native ladies’ almost certainly occurred – ad, indeed, physical examination, ‘the exploration of the native’s body’ in the street of at railway checkpoints may themselves be regarded precisely as that – but reports of them also served as a metaphor for the violent eruption of the state into the privacy of people’s lives,” Chandavarkar writes.
The plague, meanwhile, continued its killing spree in the city for several years. By May 1904, it infected 45,665 and killed 37,178.
The first IFFI was organised by the Films Division with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s “blessings”, at a paltry budget of Rs 1 lakh.
ATIKH RASHID
THE International Film Festival of India was born in Bombay in January 1952 but it was conceived six months prior in the Kashmir valley. The idea of organising such a festival of motion pictures, which would be a first for the East, was proposed to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru by Films Division’s then Chief Producer Mohan Bhavnani when he was visiting Srinagar for a political event. Bhavnani, a filmmaker trained in Germany who had made several silent films after his return to India and was appointed to head the Films Division after it was established in 1948, had recently returned from a visit to Paris where he had attended a meeting of Film Experts Committee of UNESCO and was toying with the idea to hold India’s own film festival.
In an essay written in 1983, filmmaker K L Khandpur has described how the decision to organise the first film festival came about. As per his account, he was shooting a documentary for Films Division (Facing the Facts, 1951) in Srinagar with his crew when, on a Sunday afternoon, Bhavnani- who was staying in a houseboat at Dal Lake – summoned him. Bhavnani was to meet the then Information and Broadcasting Minister R R Diwakar and Prime Minister Nehru, who was visiting Srinagar to speak at a rally organised by National Conference ahead of the state’s plan to hold elections for the Constituent Assembly in August-September that year, later that day.
Weekly Screen announcing the government plans to hold an international film festival in India in its September 21, 1951 edition. (Credit: Screen)
Although the initial plan was to hold a ‘competitive film festival’ and the event was publicised such, the idea was later dropped after the International Federation of Motion Pictures Associations (IFMPA) objected to the prospect saying “only Venice and Cannes had been granted permission to hold competitive festivals” in that year. The festival was then categorised as ‘non-competitive representative show’.
Curtains went up on January 24 at the New Empire Cinema. I&B Minister Diwakar chaired the opening ceremony as PM Nehru, who was supposed to attend the event missed it due to some reason. It was a star-studded event with who’s who of the Bombay film industry attending it.
A total of 12 foreign countries had sent in their delegations to participate in the event. The largest among those was from USSR which had sent 13 members headed by Deputy Minister of Cinematography N Semenov, while Chinese had sent one with six members. The American delegation was headed by film director Frank Capra. Notwithstanding the Indo-Pak tension over Kashmir, Pakistan had sent a delegation consisting of actor Swarna Lata, director Shaukat Hussain headed by Sardar A Rehman.
Actor Suraiya with Hollywood director Frank Capra who headed the US delegation to first IFFI. (Photo Credit: Films Division)
The festival offered a bouquet of 40 international films and over 100 short films that were showcased, In Mumbai, the film shows were held at three open-air theatres that were erected at Azad Maidan apart from four other regular cinema houses namely the New Empire, Excelsior, Strand and Kum Kum. Among the films that proved popular among the audience were the Italian films Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948), Rome Open City (Rosselini, 1945) and Miracle in Milan (De Sica, 1951); Japanese film Yukiwarisoo (Minoru Mtasui, 1951); British short film Dancing Fleece ( Wilson-Reiniger, 1950,) Soviet war film Fall of Berlin (Mikheil Chiaureli, 1950) and Hollywood films The Greatest Show on Earth (DeMille, 1952) and An American in Paris (Minelli, 1951). Indian entries for the festival were Awara (Raj Kapoor, 1951), Babla (Agradoot, 1951), Patala Bhairavi (Ketiri Reddy, 1951), Amar Bhoopali (V Shantaram, 1951) among feature films and Adivasi (National Education and Information Films) and Lest I Forget Thee (Singh Brothers) among documentaries.
In Delhi and Madras huge road parades of Indian film stars and visiting delegates were held that received huge response from the crowd which, in Frank Kapra’s words, made Indian politicians realise for the first time “the power of Indian film stars”. In Madras, a friendly cricket match between film starts was held at Corporation Stadium of Madras where Raj Kapoor’s “deadly bowling” grounded the opposing team to much delight of over 15,000 audience members.
PM Nehru attended the inauguration of the Delhi leg of the festival and President Rajendra Prasad hosted the guests and Indian film fraternity at Rashtrapati Bhavan.
An open-air screen erected for first IFFI at Azad Maidan in Mumbai (then Bombay). Photo Credit: International Film Festival of India)
Virchandra Dharamsey was a lad of 17 at that time. Now 84 and a well-regarded film historian, he recalls his experience of visiting the festival in Bombay. “In my memories, the first IFFI was like a fair. My interest in cinema has just begun at that time but I knew nothing about international cinema. I can hazily recall watching De Sica’s Miracle in Milan in an open theatre at the Azad Maidan. I also caught glimpses of several other films such as Japanese film Yukiwariso, (Italian) Rome: Open City and Bengali film Babla from the side without having to buy the ticket,” said Dharamsey.
The Film Enquiry Committee Report
Among the factors that led to the organising of the first IFFI including PM Nehru’s own interest in art and culture, an important one was the report of the Film Inquiry Committee that was submitted to the government exactly three months before the Srinagar meeting between Bhavnani, Diwakar and Nehru. The inquiry committee was headed by S K Patil – former member of Constituent Assembly of India and who later become Mayor of Bombay – and was constituted in 1949 to, among other things, suggest “what measures should be adopted to enable films in India to development into an effective instrument for promotion of national culture, education and healthy entertainment”. Among the members of the committee were filmmakers V Shantaram and B N Sircar.
After exhaustive research, interviews with over 300 prominent personalities including filmmakers, educationists, public representatives and journalists and studying memorandums submitted by over 250 important individuals, the committee submitted a report which called for widespread changes to improve its financial management and aesthetic quality of the films. The committee took the view that although the Indian film industry made significant progress on the technical aspects, it was lacking in content and the “medium’s potential for the education of the masses and nation-building” was not being utilised. The committee observed that for the Indian film, “the story remains a secondary consideration”, the play-back system is over-exploited, the dance sequences are used indiscriminately, the comedies “degenerates into the burlesque” and “hilarity and buffoonery is expressed through meaningless grins and gestures”.
In fact, the motive of the government to ‘reform Indian cinema’ by exposing the Indian filmmakers to better cinema traditions elsewhere in the world was evident in the message Prime Minister Nehru sent for the inauguration of the festival. Effectively rebuking the Indian filmmakers, he said in the message: “India, I’m told, is the second biggest film producer in the world, coming only after the United States of America. This quantity production is impressing, but I would like to lay stress on quality. I hope that the Indian film industry, which has made such great progress in the past, will make every effort to improve the quality of films also.”
First IFFI’s influence
Interaction with filmmakers from abroad and exposure to international films coming from Japan, Italy, France and Russia at the first film festival did influence the discourse around cinema in the country and also nudged filmmakers to experiment with the medium. This was especially true with the aesthetic of ‘realism’ as espoused in the neo-realist films that came from Italy and were the most appreciated among the foreign lot.
Still from Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen.
Among those who were directly and admittedly influenced by Italian films they saw at IFFI 1952, was Bimal Roy who immediately embarked upon making Do Bigha Zamin (1953) promising himself that it would be “as start and austere and will be shot on location” like Bicycle Thieves. For the film, he largely chose his caste from IPTA actors as opposed to well-known film stars and shot a majority of the film in streets of Calcutta and a nearby village. There are many obvious thematic similarities between Do Bigha Zamin and Bicycle Thieves with streets of Calcutta replacing those of Rome and the land-plot standing in for the stolen bicycle in the Italian masterpiece.
It is well known De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves was behind Satyajit Ray quitting his job in the advertisement industry and deciding to make his first film Pather Panchali (1952). (Although he had watched the film during his six-month stay in London in 1951, much before it was shown in Calcutta as part of IFFI).
“Thus within days of the festival, Italian neorealism provided a specific and concrete rallying point around what had been since the early 1930s an endemic Indian disavowal of popular cinema,” says film scholar Neepa Majumdar further arguing that the brush with neo-realism during first IFFI affected both the “parallel cinema movement” which developed in the with Ray, Ghatak and others but affected the thematic and aesthetic concerns of mainstream commercial products such as Booth Polish (Prakash Arora, 1954) and Footpath (Zia Sarhadi, 1953).
The festival also gave a fillip to the film society movement in India – by creating interest for world cinema among the locals and making the job of those who ran the societies easier. “Above all, the first IFFI which sourced films from various diplomatic missions in India, opened up a new avenue of sourcing films, almost free for the fledging film societies,” wrote VK Cherian in his book India’s Film Society Movement: The Journey and Its Impact.
The festival was wound up in Calcutta on March 5 1952. As per a gossip column published in ‘filmindia’ magazine’s April edition, the Films Division had actually earned a profit of Rs 7 lakh from the festival.
As per Dharamsey, the interest in world cinema that festival kindled among local Bombay cine-goers caused regular film theatres to play international hits (outside Hollywood) soon after the first IFFI. “I distinctly remember that months after the festival, Liberty Cinema ran Kurosawa’s Roshomon, De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear as regular shows,” he recalled.
Despite the success of the first festival, Indians would wait for nine years for the IFFI to return with its second edition in 1961.
(This essay was originally published in The Indian Express on November 23, 2019)
