JK & Tamil Cinema Part 1

Saravanan Natarajan writes:

JK & Tamil Cinema Part 1:

Paadhai Theriyudhu Paar

“Nothing has a right to live without a purpose. We don’t create our lives, but we create in our lives. Sometimes people may not be able to articulate the purpose in their lives. That's what a writer does. He gives... voice to those who can't speak; eyes to those who can't see; a mind to those who can't think; a heart to those who can't feel….”

-Dhandapani Jayakanthan (24.4.1934- 8.4.2015)

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns. These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. We too often confound them-they should not be confounded. Appearance should not be mistaken for truth. Narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of The Almighty. There is a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.

The world may not like to see these ideas dissevered, for it has been accustomed to blend them; finding it convenient to make external show pass for sterling worth-to let whitewashed walls vouch for shrines. It may hate him who dares to scrutinise and expose, to raise the gilding and exhibit the base metal beneath, to penetrate the sepulchre and reveal charnel relics; but hate as it will, it is indebted to him.

Jayakanthan was one such writer who defied sacrosanct convention and prim niceties all his life and did so in such a way that he found his way into the hearts of generations of Tamils for whom he will forever remain a glittering star in the firmament of Tamil literature.

His forays into the film world (well documented in his ‘Or ilakkiyavvathiyin kalai ulaga anubavnagal’) have been limited, but he has left an indelible mark and brought a refreshing whiff of realism into the melodramatic portals of Kodambakkam.

Between 2003- 2008, being actively involved in the songs in the Song of the Day series of dhool.com, I was fortunate to present songs from movies that Jayakanthan was associated with. The discussions that followed were animated, enriching and memorable.
Posting the JK series again here for new members.

The first is on ‘Paathai Theriyuthu Paar’ (1960) of which today am posting the first part.
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"Writers and artists… Come actors and dramatists, Come all, those who work by hand and the thinkers, come and dedicate yourself to create a brave new world and a society that values freedom, independence, and social justice!" This was the clarion call of Hiren Mukherjee on May 25, 1943, and thus began a magnificent era in the cultural history of India with the formation of the Indian People’s Theater Association (IPTA).

And IPTA was not formed just overnight; it was the culmination of the efforts of various artistes over a period of time. The Progressive Writer's Association Conference held in 1936, the founding of the Youth Cultural Institute at Calcutta in 1940, and establishment of the People's Theatre at Bangalore by a young Sinhalese writer Anil De' Silwa in 1941 were all catalysts that helped hasten the constitution of the IPTA.

But more than these, the harrowing times that India was going through and the need to pull the people out of their lethargy and indifference to the happenings around them was largely the necessity that mothered this invention. The ruinous, largely man-made famine in Bengal in 1942 stirred many radical artistes and writers into action (In later years, Satyajit Ray’s Ashani Sankat and Mrinal Sen’s Akaler Shondhaney have dealt with the cataclysmic famine) Binoy Roy, along with like-minded artistes like Prem Dhawan, Usha Dutt, Dasrat Lal and Reva Roy, formed the Bengal Cultural Squad and traveled all over the country with his adaptation of Vanik Jaunpuri’s Bhooka Hai Bengal, collecting money for famine relief. This ‘Squad’ and its missionary zeal was the forerunner of several such cultural groups springing up in various parts of the country.

It is a fact that most of these groups were inspired by leftist idealogies and P.C.Joshi, then the General Secretary of the CPI, was the man behind persuading these groups to unite on a common platform. Thus IPTA was born in a humble hall of the Marwari school in Bombay. (The name IPTA itself was put forward by scientist Homi Bhaba) Jawaharlal Nehru sent a congratulatory message to the Conference, hailing the formation of the IPTA. Trade Union Leader Joshi was first president, Anil De' Silwa was the General Secretary, Khwaja Ahmed Abbas was appointed the Treasurer, Binoy Roy and K.D.Chandi were the Joint-Secretaries. Regional Committees were also set up, drawn from reformist performers and members of various People Fronts in Bengal, Bombay, Madras, Delhi, Hyderabad, Punjab, Mangalore, Malabar and the North-East.

IPTA’s symbol, designed by the painter Chitta Prasad, was a profile of a drummer, serving as a reminder of the ancient, trusted mode of communication. The stated objective of IPTA was ‘to portray through the stage and other traditional arts the internal and external crises facing Indian society and polity and to enlighten the masses about their rights and the proper way to fight the twin evils of imperialism at home and fascism abroad’ . The formation of the IPTA co-coordinated and canalized all progressive tendencies that had hitherto manifested themselves in the form of music, dance and drama, and brought about trail-blazing changes in theater concepts. IPTA soon became a national movement that swept the length and breadth of India with its socialistic and nationalistic zeal. A wave of realistic performances in theater, music and cinema was ushered in by the promoters of IPTA.

Over the years, the roster of artistes/thinkers associated with IPTA reads like a who’s who of Indian Performing Arts. These include Niranjan Sen, Amar Shaikh, Shombhu Mitra, Dr. Raja Rao, Krishanchander, Rajendra Raghuvanshi, M. Nagabhushanam, Kaifi Azmi, Vallathol, Eric Cyprian, Sarla Gupta, Dr. S.C. Jog, Bimal Roy, K. Subramaniam, K.V.J. Namboodri, Shiela Bhatia, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Sahir Ludhianvi, Balraj Sahni, Mohan Segal, Ali Sardar Jafri, Mulkraj Anand, Romesh Thapar, T. Chalapthi Rao, Hima Devi, Bijon Bhattacharya, Annabhau Sathe, Shailendra, Prem Dhawan, Ismat Chugtai, Kanu Ghosh, Chetan Anand, Dina Pathak, Pt. Ravi Shankar, Sachin Shankar, Bahadur Khan, A.K.Hangal, Habib Tanvir, Abrar Alvi, Hemant Kumar, Adi Marzban, Salil Chowdhari, Manoranjan Bhattacharya, Tarla Mehta, Khayyam, Phani Muzumdar, Dev Anand, Shanti Bardhan, Chittoprasad, Harindranath Chattopadhyay, Thopil Bhasi, VP Sathe, Durga Khote, Keshavrao Date, Utpal Dutt, Ritwik Ghatak, Satyen Kappu, Sanjeev Kumar, Zul Vellani, Shaukat Kaifi, Manmohan Krishna, Basu Bhattacharya, Tapas Sen, Abid Razvi, M.S.Sathyu, Kuldip Singh, Ramesh Talwar, Sulabha Arya, Shabana Azmi, Farooque Shaikh, Kader Khan, Yunus Parvez, Mac Mohan, Javed Siddiqi, Sudhir Pande, Anjan Srivastava, Bharat Kapoor, Rakesh Bedi, and many, many others. Time and again, these artistes ‘established a new definition of the relationship between art, artists and the audience’.

And two great men who came to Tamil Cinema, fresh from their fruitful association with IPTA, were Nimai Ghosh and M.B. Srinivasan.
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Hugging the delighted young director, the redoubtable Russian director and theorist, Vsevolod Pudovkin exclaimed with wondering joy “I have seen an Indian movie for the first time!” For Pudovkin, his widely publicized visit in 1950 to India as the head of a large cultural contingent, had been disappointing, to say the least. All the Indian movies he had been shown were either mythological costume dramas or unabashed copies of Hollywood hits, or a confused hotchpotch of both. And all this changed when he chanced to see a just released offbeat effort of a debutant director.
The movie was Chinnamul (The Uprooted/ 1950/Desha Pictures) Chinnamul was the first film that dwelt on the partition of India, narrating with brooding sensitivity the story of story of a group of farmers from East Bengal who are forced to migrate to Calcutta because of the Partition. The trauma was real; refugees were huddled in hordes on railway platforms, or herded into overcrowded camps.

Entire hamlets were razed to the ground; plunder, rape and murder were ruthless and rampant. Employing innovative idioms juxtaposed intelligently with documentary footage, the film managed to convey the gruesome, gory terror that was unleashed, without even a single shot actually showing any violence! Chinnamul was a courageous and scathing indictment of the powers that planned the partition. Ritwik Ghatak, who started his illustrious career by making an on-screen appearance in Chinnamul, as well as working behind the camera as an assistant to Nimai Ghosh, was to demand with characteristic candour, “Nimai Ghosh's Chinnamul has started a new era. Have we been able to proceed further in our consciousness?”

Nimai Ghosh was born in what is now Bangladesh, in 1914. He was drawn to cinema as a young man, and enrolled as an assistant to cameraman Bhibuti Das in 1932. He was among the young pioneers of IPTA, and became a close friend of Satyajit Ray. He was one of the founder members of the Calcutta Film Society in 1947, along with Ray and Chidananda Dasgupta. Ghosh was horrified by the Partition and the suffering that it brought in its wake, and set about recording on celluloid his own outrage at the tumultuous events. Thus the movie had a sense of rare, uncanny immediacy.

Chinnamul used mostly new faces bereft of any make-up, a hidden camera for shooting in the streets, and quite daringly for its time, had no songs. The cinematography, in particular, fetched universal acclaim. Half a century has gone past, and even in a recent interview P.C. Sreeram says, ‘I was zapped by Nimai Ghosh's Chinnamul!’

Speaking of Chinnamul years later, Nimai Ghosh remarked, “I wanted to project the miseries of the refugees after the partition and also to expose the selfish motives of the politicians who were behind the partition. The Indian People’s Theatre Association movement helped me to understand the actual reality. Had I not been associated with this movement, I would not have been aware of the human beings around me. This awareness prompted me to make the film Chinnamul, which is regarded by some as a political film. I did not deliberately include politics, but it could not be separated from life either. I took the camera out of the studios into the open, to bring out the truth which shaped this film. I also used artists from I.P.T.A., some of them without previous acting experience, because I thought it could lend an air of authenticity to the film.”

Pudovkin was so enchanted with Nimai Ghosh’s work that he carried a print of Chinnamul back home, and lost no time in propagating the movie all over the Soviet Union. And it was in Moscow that our N.S.Krishnan and Director K.Subramaniam saw the Indian movie that had taken Russia by storm, and became aware of the genius of Nimai Ghosh. NSK and K.Subramaniam were in Moscow in 1951 as part of an Indian Cultural Delegation. There they met Nimai Ghosh, and NSK invited him to come to Madras and work in Tamil Movies. It was thus that Nimai Ghosh came to Madras.

Another account that I remember reading regarding Nimai Ghosh’s relocation to Madras is like this: Satyajit Ray had been so impressed by Ghosh’s unconventional angles arresting frames in Chinnamul that Ghosh was Ray’s first choice to handle the camera for his Pather Panchali. But Nimai Ghosh, a member of the Communist Party, had to go underground when the party was banned and thus the cinematography of Pather Panchali went to Subrata Mitra. Presently, Nimai Ghosh resurfaced in Madras, and continued to live and work there.

When we look at the resourceful and talented technicians who were working in Tamil movies in the 50s, we find that many of them were from the Bombay and Calcutta. Even amongst the cameramen, we had the likes of Kamal Ghosh, Jithen Banerjee and Sailen Bose who hailed from Bengal and who were much sought-after cinematographers in Tamil and Telugu movies. Nimai Ghosh joined this bustling brigade and worked for many Tamil films throughout the 50s. The Tamil films for which he handled the camera include TKS Brothers’ Inspector (1953), T.R. Ramachandran’s Pon Vayal (1954), TKS Brothers’ Raththapaasam (1954), T.R. Ramachandran’s Gomathiyin Kaathalan (1955), R.S.Mani’s Maaman Magal (1955), Nagerkoyil S. Nagarajan’s Avan Amaran (1958) and Sahasranamam’s Naalu Veli Nilam (1959).

It was at this juncture that like-minded communists, who had been awed by the visual impact of Chinnamul, approached Ghosh to handle the camera and also direct their pioneering joint effort, Paathai Theriyudhu Paar.

In later years, Nimai Ghosh went on to do the cinematography of Balachandar’s early films, up to Anubhavi Raja Anubhavi (1967). He handled the camera for Jayakanthan’s experimental Yaarukkaga Azhuthaan (1966) and Malliyam Rajagopal’s Kasturi Thilagam (1970). During this time, he worked in some landmark Kannada movies as well. Sooraavali, written by M.A. Abbas with cinematography and direction by Nimai Ghosh saw a belated release in 1981.

Nimai Ghosh passed away in 1988, but to a discerning cineaste, a genius like Nimai Ghosh knows no death. To this day, there functions in Trichy, a ‘Nimai Ghosh Film Society’, which does excellent work in propagating good cinema.
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‘Paadhai Theiyudhu Paar’ to continue...

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