ATIKH RASHID

I like most city symphony films: Dziga Vertov’s eccentric, stylized, and self-aware The Man with the Movie Camera (1929), Walter Ruttman’s vibrant portrayal of the rhythm and energy of a single day in Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, and oris Ivens’s Rain (1929), a lyrical and atmospheric portrait of Amsterdam that transforms a passing rainstorm into a study of urban movement, texture, and light.

In this company, Leitão de Barros’s Lisbôa, Cronica Anedótica (1930), is a peculiar exception. It creates a poetic montage of the lives of various dwellers of Lisbon, like the other great city symphony films made elsewhere and before it. In addition, it incorporates staged visuals that set it apart from other symphony films.

I have often wondered what a city symphony film of an Indian city would look like. Each of the great cities of India in the second and third decades of the 20th century would have made great material for a symphony film: Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, and Madras. Full of activity and brimming with political excitement, they were just a decade or two shy of freedom from colonial rule.

India did have a filmmaking practice since the beginning of the 20th century, but it’s true that most of the films that were made during this period were made by westerners: British, French, or American filmmakers who headed to India with a camera to shoot it as an exotic land or as the “crown jewel of the British Empire.”

Numerous actualité and travel films were produced by companies such as Pathé and Gaumont which presented India less as a lived social reality and more as a spectacle to be consumed by audiences in Europe and North America. As film historians have noted, these early films often privileged scenes of religious ritual, bustling bazaars, royal processions, and picturesque landscapes, framing the subcontinent through a colonial gaze that emphasized difference, wonder, and imperial possession rather than everyday life.

Although there are no city symphony films for any of the Indian cities, if one looks through the archives, one may find that there’s some proto-city-symphony material that was shot in India by visiting filmmakers, and some of that material survives.

For instance, one of the earliest films shot in India, called Panorama of Calcutta (1899), does have the ethos, at least visually, of a symphony film. However, as has been pointed out by scholars, the visuals that one sees are not even from Calcutta but from a town (Benaras) almost 700 km to the west.

As Robin Baker wonders, “Maybe the cameraman got confused about his travels, or perhaps the company thought a more familiar name might be more tempting for audiences?”

The absence of an Indian symphony film is partially resolved when British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri uses the ‘India on Film’ footage made available by the British Film Institute (BFI) in 2016 as part of the celebrations to mark the centenary of the Indian film industry to make Around India with a Movie Camera in 2018. She repurposes the visuals captured in India by British, French, and Indian cameramen to decolonise the gaze and create a symphony set to freshly composed Indian music of life in India before Independence.

A striking moments in Suri’s film is her use of footage from the Delhi Durbar of 1911, particularly the appearance of Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III of Baroda. Historical accounts confirm that Gaekwad caused controversy by allegedly offering only a perfunctory bow to King George V and Queen Mary and turning away hastily, an act that was widely interpreted by colonial authorities and the British press as a breach of imperial protocol.

By incorporating this footage into her film, Suri invites viewers to look beyond the spectacle of imperial grandeur and attend instead to the tensions, ambiguities, and acts of dissent embedded within the colonial archive. In her hands, images originally produced to celebrate imperial rule are recontextualised to reveal the unseen tensions that prevailed at this historic moment and highlight the fragility of authority and the presence of Indian agency within spaces designed to display colonial dominance.