Sep 14, 1998
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BOOKS Cinema, Congress-style Kaul's information is not suspect. His linear view of the freedom struggle is. By Ravi Vasudevan CINEMA AND THE INDIAN FREEDOM
STRUGGLE
There are also very different views of what the movement was about, who it represented and even who led it. Thus in a recent advertisement Delhi's BJP Government left Nehru out of its pantheon of freedom movement leaders. Less motivated interpreters have seen freedom to have been inextricably tied to Partition and have charged the national movement with a failure to adequately represent religious and regional identities. If the present suggests apathy and a fractured viewpoint, some writers still seem inspired enough to extol the achievements of India's national movement as being entirely uncomplicated. Gautam Kaul's Cinema and the Freedom Movement presents one such scenario, in which the struggle is pretty much the product of the Indian National Congress. Kaul has chapters on ties between cinema and freedom fighters, on the national leaders' opinion about films, on the links between nationalism, social reform and the movies. For him, the theme of the freedom struggle conjures up images of swadeshi, of social and cultural awakening and of how films politically addressed audiences by referring through song and image to the fight against an oppressive government. Symbols and leaders of the Congress -- the charkha, Tilak, Gandhi, Patel -- were sometimes inserted directly. But more often films used myths and history to invoke national role models and inspire patriotism while circumventing censorship. A few anecdotes are suggestive, but the author doesn't outline issues clearly. Certainly, it never strikes him that people might want different kinds of freedom. Thus, the Tamil nationalist DMK is called "right-wing", presumably because it opposed the Congress rather than for its social programme, which was quite radical in the 1940s. Some of the writing on lesser-known Congressmen and their work in the industry is interesting. Kaul has used interviews and read contemporary film periodicals. However, much of his material comes from writers like S. Theodore Baskaran, Randor Guy, Firoze Rangoonwala, B.D. Garga and the Ashish Rajadhyaksha-Paul Willemen Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema. The volume then seems only a cursory assembling of material. It may have been better to write a reference book on films and personalities relating to the freedom struggle, rather than a set of essays. Actually, there isn't enough information on either count. The book doesn't substantially add to our knowledge of or insight into the cinema of the pre-Independence period.
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What resonances does the
Indian freedom struggle carry today? Judging from the general climate of opinion
surrounding the celebration of 50 years of independence, there are substantial doses of
cynicism, doubt and anxiety in public perception. 
