Marxist-reformist legacy not a hit with Indian cinema-goers?

NEW DELHI, Jun 26 (Agencies): Seasoned filmmakers of India like Mrinal Sen, Saeed Mirza, Goutam Ghose and M S Sathyu among others tried to touch the subject of Marxism in their works in diverse ways but the Marxist-reformist legacy failed to impress the Indian cinema-goers, says a new book.

"Marxists would give their right hand to reach the mass audience that popular cinema commands.

But alas, most of the films driven by the Marxist ideological engine did not, do not, reach the people for whom they were meant," writes noted film critic Chidananda Das Gupta in "Seeing is Believing: Selected Writings on Cinema".

"First of all, cinema is an urban medium.

It calls for stable, high-voltage power not available in most villages.

That leaves out the peasantry.

It does leave in the urban working class, largely a class of migrants to the city," the veteran film historian argues.

According to the writer, the cinema audience also comprise the urban unemployed, the destitute, the lumpen who live by their wits and are not nearly as amenable to Marxist preaching as the organised workers.

The history of unpopular cinema is largely a tale of the often self-imposed struggle of the individual artist with the dictates of the collective, that is the Party.

"Even to formidable individuals like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, it has been an important point of reference, for instance in 'Mukhamukham' (1984).

Ritwik Ghatak was tormented by the struggle.

Mrinal Sen, Ketan Mehta, Saeed Mirza, M S Sathyu, Buddhadev Dasgupta, Goutam Ghose and many others contented with it for decades in their diverse ways.

But the Marxist-reformist legacy in cinema ran into a frustrating inability to communicate with the people," he says.

The book says the popular cinema product is designed for this large urban configuration to which the middle class is an adjunct.

"Due to the paucity of films custom-built for them, educated middle-class men and women become interlopers to this audience and remain so until they are slowly sucked into the vortex of its culture.

From the Marxist point of view even this section is not a good recruiting ground of revolution." Das Gupta says Marxism sets model for large-scale state patronage of the arts, giving primacy to cinemas.

"But it is imposed upon the artist's freedom in no uncertain manner.

Nehruvian India tried to steer a path between the two, not without some success." India, according to the writer, has been able to support art with dictating its content.

"Nonetheless, the Russian model, being the central one for the Marxist ideology, played an important role for several decades in the history of unpopular cinema.

Its influence still provides the leavening to many a film, years after the collapse of the Soviet edifice and its satellite states.

It flowed into the reformist channel and enlarged the agenda of social change in independent India." Popular commercial cinema, he says, is primarily interested in making money, not in the overthrow of bourgeois governments.

"The revolutionary artist sworn to the promotion of class struggle is therefore left in the void, and has to be content with the creme de la creme of an intelligentsia thinly spread across the cities," the book, published by Penguin, says.

But this dilemma is not solely India's, he writes.

"There is the outstanding international example of Bertolt Brecht which ran into the same quagmire in Germany.

His artistically outstanding plays became instrumental in rousing the intellectual's conscience without making contact with the masses." Das Gupta says the Catch-22 in Indian cinema was most manifest in Ghatak.

"It is an important issue because Marxism has been one of the important strands running through the history of unpopular cinema.

Apart from the known exponents of it like Khwaja Ahmed Abbas (whose scripts coloured the work of Raj Kapoor), Ritwik Ghatak, Saeed Mirza, Govind Nihalani, Goutam Ghose and others, there is a host of direc tors for whose work Marxist ideology has provided an important leavening.

These included Bimal Roy, Raj Kapoor, Chetan Anand, Nemai Ghosh, Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal, Mrinal Sen, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Buddhadev Dasgupta - all of whom had (some still have) proletarian sympathies derived from the Marxist experience if not directly from the Soviet model." For many of these filmmakers, especially the ones with a commitment to the values of parallel cinema, there existed the problem of making films for proletarian audiences which the proletarian hardly ever saw.

They had to be content with exposure only to the urban middle class, sometimes not even that.

"Seeing is Believing: Selected Writings on Cinema".