collaborated with the Union.

resutting in l1lOfe films being made there, which can be wit-

nessed in the aed"rt of The Swazi People (1935): co-operation of the Swazi land tskl
government and Paramount Chief Scbwa is gratefully acknowledged by the producers:'
18. Emma sandon, "Representing 'African life': from the Ethnographic Exhibitions to Nionga
and Stampede, in Young and Innocent? Higson. ed.. 191-207.
19. Barber, 13. Barber draws on Colin Bundy, The Rise and Fa" of the South African
PeosontTy (london: Heinemann. 1979) for this point
20. KA Eales. compiler. "'Zebediela Citrus Estate and The African Realty Trust"
(Johannesburg. Historical and Uterary Papers, The library, University of Witswatel"Sfand,
1984).
21. Kaplan, 144.
22. Harvev M. Feinberg. "The 1913 Natives Land Act in South Africa: Poljties, Race and
Segregation in the Early 20th Century," The Intemooonol Journal of African Historical
Studies 26.1 (1993): 86.
23. Bamer. 68.
24. Feinberg, TI.
25. Ibid., 76. T1lere has been much debate as to why the Ad was passed and why Sauer,
who was a cape Uberal, had tabled it He was referred to as a "'white kaffi'- becaUf>e of
his attitudes in supporting African political representation. There were huge divisions
between the cape Ubetals and the Afrikaner nationalists in the Union Government. the
South African National Party under Prime Minister louis Botha. tt was James Hertzog. a
former Boer general and militant Afrikaner nationalist in the cabinet who had actually
drafted the biD and other pro-Hertzog ministers pushed for it to become law. Sauer was
forced to table it so as not to alienate the more nationarlSt Afrikaner vote for the South
African National Party.
26. Gutsche, 213 n. 38.
27. Ibid., 345 and 32$-6.
28. Gutsche, 345350.
29. Ouistopher Saunders, consultant editor, Reader's Digest Illustrated HistDry of South
A/ricrJ, (Cape Town: Readers Digest Association South Africa, 1988), 348.
30. see Mai"iard for a fuU discussion of De VoortrekketS and They Built a Nation-Die Bou
vun 'n Nosie.
31. I am indebted to Teresa Castro for pointing out to me the relationship of film in this peri-
od to cartography; see Teresa Castro. "les Archives de la P1anete: ACinematographic.
Atlas, Jump Cut (Spring, 2006), www.ejumpwlorg/currentissue/KahnAtlas!index.1ltm1,
and Sam Rohdie. "Geography, Photography, the Cinema: les Archives de la Planete-
Screening the Post, (1ssue 4.1998), www.lauobe.edu.au/saeeningthepast/. See also,
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism, Multicu/turoHsm and the Media,
(london: Routledge, 1994); for a broader application of this notion of film as cartogra-
phy. see Ella SOOhat, "Imagining Tefra Incognita: The Disciplinary Gaze of Empire: Public
Culture 3.2 .(1991): 41-70.
EMMA SANDON lectures in film and lelevision sludies at Birkbeck CoUege,
Univel"3ity of London. and is an associate tutor for the British Film Institute.
Among her publications are essays in YolUlg and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain
1896-1930 (2002), Re-viewing Television History: Critiml Issues in Television
Hisroriography (2004), and Visual Culture and Decolonisation in BriIain (2006),
and a co-ediled book on law and lilm, Law's Moving Irrwge (2004).
61 lMMA SANDON
NEEPA MAJUMDAR
FILM FRAGMENTS. DOCUMENTARY HISTORY,
AND COLONIAL INDIAN CINEMA
Resume: Seulement trois documentaires muets indiens existent toujours. Au-dela
de I'analyse textueJle, rexamen de ces films SQuleve plusieurs questions historio-
graphiques, telles que la fonnation accidentelJe du canon reliee au hasard de la
survie ou de la disparation des reuvres; les conditions de lecture partielle que c.es
films permettent; Jes relations entre Ie cinema local et Ie cinema colonial, en
particulier pour les films de promotion de la Indian Railways; et les styles de pho-
tographies deployes dans ces documentaires, tel Ie pittoresque
A
llhOUgh there is a substantial historical record of the hundreds of silent non-
fiction films produced in South Asia between 1899 and the early 1930s, only
three silent Indian documentary films have actually survived. The. historical
account of this period of documentary history in South Asia can be reasonably
fleshed out with the information that is available about filmmakers. production
units. the titles and subject matter of specific fIlms, and even some ffim stills.
l
In such an account of South Asian documentary film history. however. the three
surviving films would merit hardly even a footnote were it not for the accident
of their sUNival. Yet. unlike. for example, th.e celebrated status of a text like
Beowulf not only as the only (accidentally) surviving English epic, but also as a
highly representative one. no such honor has befallen these three fllms. which
remain unremarkable and marginal in every way except in their survival. As
such. these films had no entry in the groundbreaking and comprehensive
Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema of 1999, and the only written discussion of these
films is in the catalogue of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival of 1994. which
showcased Indian silent cinema.
l
Not least of the reasons for the resistance of
these films to any inclusion in a canon or auteur-based approach to the writing
of Indian documenlary film history is the lact that each of the terms in the phrase
that I have used to describe them. "silent Indian documentary." is open to ques-
tion. as will become clear in the course of this discussion.
Yet, despite their seeming insignificance, by virtue of their present existeoce,
these three films, 1ravels in Bengal (989 feet), The ShoTtes' and Besr RoUle ro
South India (647 feet), and Khedd.a Opemlioru; in Mysore (621 feet) persist in
CANADIAN IOURNAl OF FILM STUDIES REVUE CAHADIINNE D'ETuDS CINEMATOCRAPHlqUES
VOLUME III NO.1 SPRINC PRINTEMPS:100'7' pp 113-71
exercising a certain weight against the logic of the historical record. j With the
undeniable force of their sheer material presence, even as ruins that bear the
traces of time. lhese films invite a consideration of questions of historiography
thal Walter Benjamin raised more than seventy years ago as he collected what
he dubbed the "refuse of history" for his monumental and incomplete Armde.s
Projecc.
4
Benjamin's conception of a materialist history privileges fragmentation
of meaning over unity and linearity, and foregrounds the work of time by posit
ing a dialectical relation between past and present in the body of the historical
image or artifact. The ruin is the central metaphor here precisely because it exists
in the present, while carrying traces of the past in the contours of its decay. By
their accidental survival, these three films have been automatically "'blasted out
of the continuum of historical succession. '"5
One of the key differences in any approach to these three films and
Benjamin's planned methodology in his An:ades Project is the element of choice
or design in Benjamin's collection of artifacts that would serve as objects in a
"show'" ralher than "teU" form of history writing.
6
ln fact, it is precisely the ele-
ment of the accidental in the existence of lhese films that interests me, specifi-
cally in terms of the implications of randomness for bislOriograpby. A theory of
accidental fragments becomes a foundation for historywriting in the work of the
German historian Johann Gustav Droysen who "believed that remains acciden
tally left over are what grab the attention of the historian, precisely because they
were not intended to be sources. something predestined for becoming history."1
Droysen's valorization of the accidental remnant coincides with the salvaging
urge in the nineteenth century that ranged from salvage ethnography to the
establishment of museums and archives. all of which are monuments to the
insertion of design and planning in the preservation of the past for the future. In
Droysen's view, the most valid historical remains belong 10 a pre-archival past
"since a past administered in its smallest detail will lose its unplanned nature. "8
In its emphasis on valid historical work. Droysen's project is the positivist one
of Dot only getting to the truth of the past. but also of building a coherent and
unified narrative out of the accidental remnants of the past. My approach to the
three archivaUy administered but accidentally surviving silent Indian nonfiction
films combines Droysen's emphasis on the accidental with Benjamin's valoriza-
tion of the material fragment or image as the unrecuperable site of a dialectics
of past and present.
What is the value of film fragments that randomly resurface and resist easy
inclusion in a coherent historical narrative? For one thing. such fragments graph
ically foregrou.nd the persistent tendency in film historiography towards coherence,
unity, and linearity, as also the privileging of auteurs. canons. teleology, and
boundaries, whether of nation or genre. In contrast. the accidentally surviving
fragment forces the random over lhe representative, chance over patterns; in
short. (he marginal over the meaningful. Hence the work of historiography tends
54 tiEfM MAJUMDAR
either towards reimerpreting and recuperating tbe accidental fragment into an
existing historical account or eliminating it entirely from the narrative. as has
been the case wilh lhese three films. Indeed, of the less than twenty silent Indian
films-not just documentaries-that have survived out of more than thirteen hun-
dred known titles, only three or four have been wrinen about, and those are pre-
cisely the films that can be read in terms of auteurs. genres, and canons, such as
the films of D. G. Phalke. the so-called. falher of Indian cinema.
How can these films speak to us without our having to renounce a sense of
their randomness? Walter Benjamin recommends carrying what he calls "the
montage- principle" over into history: "That is. to build up the large consrructions
out of the smallest, precisely fashioned structural elements. Indeed, to detect the
crystal of lhe total event in the analysis of the small. individual moment"'jl From
this perspective, even the most random and unremarkable films can be used to
illuminate the network of connections that constitute film culture. In this paper,
then, I make no claims about Lhe aesthetic or historical significance of the three
films, but use precisely their randomness as a nodal point for examining multi-
ple, perhaps even disjointed, frameworks in which South Asian documentary
film practices functioned.. That is, even as they are by no means fully represen-
tative of early South Asian documentary, the three films can be productively con-
nected to multiple strands of aesthetic. economic, and vieWing practices.
What is it about these films that makes them seem irrelevant [Q a historical
account of early South Asian cinema? All three m.ms were produced by the pub-
licity division of various branches of Indian Railways dUring the British colonial
era. This means that the films were most likely made by British film units; hence
the problem of identifying them as properly "Indian" films. 1\\'0 of the films,
"1!nve/s in Bengal and The Slwrtesc and Best Route co South India are railway pro-
motional films chat function somewhat like travelogues, taking the viewer on a
tourist's journey, while the third film, Khet1da Operations in Mysore, demon-
strates the method of capturtng wild elephants. The existence of this third film
points to a body of non-promotional films that were also made by Indian
Railways. The dates of production of all three films are unknown, although i[ is
likely that they were made between the late 1920s and the early 1930s. Thwels
in Bengal was made silent, but a recorded sound commentary was added, pre-
sumably replacing a live lecture; hence the problem of designating all three films
as belonging (Q the silent era. 1Ta.vels in Bengal is also the only one of the three
films to include a list of credits and to explicitly address its spectator through an
opening dedication to the men. women, and children of Bengal, reminding them
of the many years of service Eastern Bengal Railways has given them in their
travels for purposes of "business. pleasure, and religion." The film implicitly
acknowledges pilgrimage as a major source of revenue in its emphasis on places
of worship and its inclusion of "religion" in its list of reasons for travel. Although
pilgrimage potentially offers an alternative visual regime to that of tourism, this
COlOHIAllNDIAH ONEMA 65
alternative. as I will show, is not developed beyond the rhelOricai address (0
potentiallravelers at the start of the film.
THE BRInSH DOCUMENTARY MOYEMENT
As films produced by Indian Railways, these three films point to a body of non
fiction films in South Asia that must be placed in the global colonial context of
the British documentary movement. The fact that Indian Railways had a publici-
ty division that included a film unit points to a model of production similar to the
British Ceneral Post Office films and more generally to the work of the Empire
Marketing Board. a model that extended to the colonies, where the EMB's mis-
sion of purting a positive face on British commercial enterprise had equal rele-
vance.
lO
We also know tbat other commercial enterprises in South Asia. such as
Bunnah-Shell, had active film units. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy note that the
BurmabShell film unit. headed by James Beveridge, made not only promotional
and training films. but also films that won awards at the Edinburgh ftlm festival."
Perhaps the most famous South Asian corrunercial sponsor of film was the Ceylon
lea Board, which produced Basil Wright's Song of Ceylon (UK, 1934). James
Beveridge's career illusrrates the global connections of Griersonian documentary
associated with the British documentary movement. Mentored by Grierson.
Beveridge was the fu.t Canadian to be hired at the National Film Board of Canada.
But as a typical example of the interconnection of international documentary cin-
ema in the 1950s, Beveridge also helped "shape postwar Indian documentary
through his work as Head of Production of the Burmah_ Shell Film Unit [in India)
and his co-founding of the Pune Film and Television Institute (lodia) and Jamia
Millia Islamia Institute of Mass Communication Research Centre. "12
The three surviVing Indian Railways films point to a broader film practice
thal insists on the need to reconsider the British documentary movement outside
the lIame of national cinema and in terms of its intersections with a much larger
colonial project whose network extended lO the colonies. We can flesh out this
global colonial net\lI/ork not only through the figure of James Beveridge. but also
via William J. Moylan, the director of 1hwels in Bengal. Moylan went on to
become director of one of two British war propaganda documentary units in pre-
Independence India, Indian News Parade, the other being Information Films
India which was headed by Ezra Mir. U Indian News Parade was dissolved by the
Indian interim government just before Independence in 1947 because of its affil-
iation with British colonial propagandaY But independent India's Films
Division. which was set up in 1948, owed its organizational prindples 10 these
earlier British state-run film bodies, which in turn can trace their lineage back. to
earlier official bodies such as the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee
(COVle) founded in 1902. Under COYle. lantern-slide lectures and illustrated
textbooks were developed as a form of imperial propaganda to "convey an
aulhoritative pictwe of Britain to children in the Empire and the Empire to children
" HEEM MAJUMDAR
in Britain. "'I> Thus the figure of Moylan serves to connect 7tavels in Bengal with
the broader colonial project rep.resented by the Empire Marketing Board and also
with the institutional future of Indian documentary, which remained dominated
by Films Division until the 1970s.
While existing histories of Indian documentary cinema. indicate the institu-
tional affiliations between slate-supponed, post-lndependence Indian documentafy
film and the British documentary movement. very little research has been done
on the complex and conttadicrory affiliations. both nationalist and colonialist, of
documentary film practice in pre-Ind,ependence South Asia. A small sign of the
state affiliations of nonfiction filmmaking in India is to be found in the Repon of
the lTUIian Cinematograph Committee of 1927. which recorrunends setting up a
CenLral Cinema Bureau for overseeing and supporting films produced in the
cause of mass education and propaganda. In this comext, lhe Committee saw the
Indian Railways as exemplary: "The Central Publicity Bureau of the Indian Slate
Railways is already producing railway and public utility films. While we wei
come and applaud that effort, we are confident that a transfer of the technical
side of their work to the Central Bureau will yield results better in every way. "16-
Far from being insignificant, then, the three Indian Railway rums show us
the quotidian face of nonfiction filmmaking in colonial South Asia, standing in
for the scores of educational, informational. training. and advertising films that
were sponsored by various British and Indian commercial enterprises. both Slale-
run and private, 17 In this context, it is also worth noting that the Reporr expressed
equal concern over aesthetics as cuhural impact:
The Railway Board has already begun to adverlise by means of the cinema
tograph, but there is vast scope for improvement in the technique of its
propaganda films, particularly as these are to be shown abroad, where the
taste in these matters is highly developed. It will be not only more effective
but also more economical if there can be co-ordination of e(fon between the
provinces and certain departments of the Government of India. particularly
the Railway and the Army Departments. and the trade in this maner. 18
THE PICTURESQUE AND HUMAN SUBJECtS
While the Railway films have an institutional affiliation with British documentary
films in that they were produced from similar imperatives of commerce and
empire. aesthetically they share few similarities with the British documentary
films despite the temptation to read at least the two travel films alongside Nigtu
Mail (UK, 1936. Harry Watt and Basil Wright) and Song o[Ceylon.
I
' Rather, Travels
in Bengal and The Shortest and Best ROUle to South India seem strongly inflected
by the visual practices of an earlier colonial gaze, specifically the picturesque,
which is both more painterly and more static in its display. The picturesque tra-
dition in South Asian visual culture originated with colonial painting and moved
COLONIAL INDIAN ONMA 67
I
!
,
,
Figure 1. Travels in Bengal.
COLONiAL INDtAN ONEMA 69
landscapes and cityScapes of alI but a few carefully selected and graphically con-
sistent figures. In (he motion picture context of even less conlrol over staffage,
this problem of the inappropriate human figure is made visible in at least one shot
in Travels in Bengal in which two men who accident.a.lly gel in !.he foreground of
. an otherwise beautifully composed shot of the Governor's house in calcutta (see
Figure 1), are magically erased in the next shot which is otherwise identical to
it. Of course. in the COntext of colonial filmmaking, staffage is no longer simply
an aesthetic issue of composition and harmony. but takes on racial overtones
with the evacuation of "native" presence from the framings of Brilish architec
tural sites in Calcutta in 'Itavel.s in Bengal. This is not to say that the potential
tourist in these films is specifically British, since both films clearly address
British and Indian travelers alike. But the language of representation that ~ r i v s
from the picturesque tradition transmits its racialized vocabulary. Native p.res-
ence poses a problem both in the lext and in the prodution of the text. In the
film or photographic image. anJy the most carefulJy selected native presence is
required for the picturesque effect and this is precisely the source of the problem
in landscape photography, Samuel Bourne complains about "the obstinacy of the
natives when I wanled to introduce them into my pictures. By no amount of talk
ing and acting could I get them to stand or sit in an easy, natural attitude. "28
The difference between a picturesque and non-picturesque aesthetic in film-
ing calcutta is made clear if we compare 1h,"el5 in Bengal with the BengalI silenl
(iaian film, lamaibabu Undia. 1931, Kalipada Das), which is about the antics of
a village bumpkin in the big city. While both films rely on the touristic display
of sights of Calcutta such as Victoria Memorial. Eden Gardens. and Howrah
Bridge. visually iliey offer an interesting contrast. In a sequence of six shots in
Travels in Bengal that closely parallel simiJar shots in the fiction film, the fram-
ings are carefully organized around distance shots. from high angle extra long
shots to medium long shots and 00 to camera placements on the street, thus
imparting to the viewer a disembodied touristic gaze that allempts to efface the
urban frenzy and chaos aD the ground that the fiction film stresses. Unanchored
to any subjective point of view, the street scenes in 7tavels in Bengal distance us
from the sensory overload characle,rizing urban modernity through an emphasis
61 "EMMAJUMDU
on to still photOgraphy, though with significant changes.'" Writing about painting
and photographs of monuments in South Asia. Tapati Guha-Thakuna notes thai
the use of the picturesque in English painting "enabled a re-enchantment of
[Englisb) domestic rural landscape, [while) abroad it gave free rein to alternative
fantasies of ruggedness. turbulence. and the primeval powers of nature." all of
which "'offered themselves as rich contrasts to the tameness and order of the
English landscape. nZ1 A canerast between home and abroad underlies the trans-
planting of the picturesque aesthetic to the colonies. As in Guha-Thakurta's
account, there is the contrast between the domestic pictureSQue of the English
countryside and the alternative picturesque of rugged turbulence in India. 1bis
contrast also generates nostalgia for the English countryside. which resuhs in a
reshaping of the Indian landscape in the image of home. As we shalI see, this
opposition between home and abroad finds representational expression not only
in painting, photography, and film, but also in landscape design in Indian hill sta-
tions. In framing a composition, whether in photography or film, the selection
that takes place is similar to the shaping of landscape itself, so that the pic-
turesque is not only a representational strategy. but also a practice of geography.22
Because the picturesque invested landscape and monuments with emotion.
the human subjects placed in the frame had to be appropriate to !.he tone of the
image. which is the concept of staf(age in painting. Denoting subordinate human
figures and animals used in a landscape, sca{fage was an eighteenth cenUiry
practice, in which "landscape painters employed specialist figure painters to pop-
ulate their works. and the practice continued into the 19th century."JJ In the case
of photography, smffage is modified with the change in medium. The absence of
control associated with the "realIty effect" of photography required that the
equally carefully chosen human subjects in a photograph appear casual rather
than posed. In the words of Samuel Bourne, of the famous Bourne and Shepherd
photographic studios in Calcutta and Simla. some of the rules of picturesque
photography included: I} there sbould be no unsightly objects in the foreground;
2) all elements in the photograph should be harmonized for breadth of effect;
and 3) ardstic light, "light which nature never sheds," should be used for effec-
tive shadows.
24
Bourne's own interest in landscape photography in India was
informed by a search for powerful correspondences with the English country
side: if the photographer "could only uansport English scenery under these
exquisite skies. what pictures could he not produce. "25 if staffage was a practice
of addition in painting, sometimes even employing additional paimers, in coler
nial photography, it became mostly a practice of subtraction.
26
In tbe context of the two travel films, of which TIuvel5 in Bengal is at least
partially also a city fIlm, the "problem" of human presence in the frame points
to a specifically distanced and mediated gaze. structured by the "machine
ensembles" of both camera and train and by the visual conventions of paint
ing and still photography.27 Such conventions were invested in evacuating
on architecture over people.
The cinematic style of Travels in Bengal. which the Pordenone festival cata
logue sums up as a "beautifully photographed travelogue," produces this aestheti-
cized view with minimal camera movement. strongly evoking still photography.l9
Picturesque framings of monuments, landscapes, and ruins are accompanied by
a regular. even monotonous. alternation between slow pans and slow tilts, the
pan or panorama, arguably being the camera movement of choice for a visual tra-
dition derived from the picturesque.
3D
The slow pans and tilts minimally modify a
look that is predominantly governed by what Tom Gunning identifies as the
'"view" aesthetic o[ early nonfiction film:
While the imagery may capture either natural landscapes, man-made struc-
twes or a combination of both. the selection of shots serves to develop a
variety of Sights-much like a touris[ album-and to articulate an aesthetic ma[
would remain remarkably consistent in travelogue films of future decades.
The view of the tourist is recorded here. placing natural or cultural sights
on display, but also miming the act of visual appropriation. the natural and
cultural consumed as sights [italics in the original).-
Interestingly. the only significant camera movements in the entire film come
later. with several point-of-view shots from a moving train, as the film takes us
away from Calcutta to Darjeeling, which briefly "place on view the unfolding
visual horizon."
32
Shots from the train and also the more static "view" shots
point to the mediated nature of touristic vision. The tourist site is framed by
'"barrier" shots of foliage or architecrure (Figures 2 and 3)-or. in the case of
Victoria Memorial. reflected in the water-while carefully eliminating any of lhe
unsightly barriers, including human ligures, that the photographer Bourne had
cautioned against. By its aestheticized display of various sights, IhIvels in Bengal
ironically ends up foregrounding cinematography over touristic sights.
MAPPING COLONIAL SPACE
While ostensibly geared towards promoting Indian Railways, 'Dnvels in Bengal
and The Shortest and Best Route also function as travelogues that map out the
spatial hierarchies of colonial geography. The Bengal film traverses a colonial
spatial and temporal hierarchy in terms of a journey from colonial to pre-colo-
nial architecture. paralleled by the train journey from Calcutta, the seat of British
imperial power. to Vishnupur, the ancient seat of pre-colonial Bengal rulers.
Between these two spaces and lheir picturesque monuments. the film and train
travel through two other spaces of colonial and indigenous interest. the hill sta
tion. Darjeeling. and pilgrimage destinations of North Bengal. Both in Calcutta
and in North Bengal, there is an emphasis on places of religious worship on the
one hand, and colonial architecture on the other. The ShoTTest and Best Route /i)
70 NlEPA MAJUMDAR
Figures 23. Trovets in Bengol.
South lTUlia traverses a different kind of spatial hierarchy, beginning in the plains
of Mysore and ending in the hill station of Ootacamund. Much has been written
on the Indian hill station as a surrogate English space for the British colonial
imagination,33 and while both films reference this. i[ is the South milia film that
directly gestures towards this particular allure of the hiE station by pointing to
the "rolling downs" of the landscape on the drive up to Ootacamwtd.
In [act. this film is more properly a journey than lhllJeIs in Bengal, which
arranges its shots e.xaclly like a slide show composed oi the kind of picturesque
images one might possess a{t.er a trip. The Soonest and. Best Route begins and
ends with informational intenitles explaining the best route to Southern India,
relegating train travel. the ostensible subject of the advertisement, to the realm
of the purely utilitarian. The opening intertitle. lhe shortest. cheapest. and most
picturesque route to Southern India is by rail to Bangalore and Mysore. is fol
lowed by two shots of maps with a dotted rail line moving over the route the
train takes. The rlfSt filmed shot is outside Mysore Station. identified by an imer-
title. with a bus leaving it and moving past the panning camera. The bulk of the
film is then taken up in following the bus on its road journey from Mysore to
Ootacamund. ending with the final intertitle indicating that the rest of the train
journey to South India can resume there: "The "Blue Mountain Express" leaving
Ootacamund for Southern lnctia. By this train me traveller can continue his jour-
ney to Madurai. Tanjore. Trichnopoly. and other places of tourist interest." The
final two shots show the Blue Mountain Express. the only train visualized in the
entire film, slowly moving out of the station first in a movement towards the
camera. then away from tb.e camera until the image fades (Figure 4). Thus the
"South India" of the title is pri!:'"arily visualized through the landscape of the
journey to Oo[acarnund. while the architectural attractions of the rest of South
India are reserved for the final intertitle of the film. displacing the visual on to
the verbal. This film's interest. then. is less in heritage architecture than in na[
ural resources in a literally hierarchized landscape as the bus climbs higher and
higher leaving the tropicaJ plains behind and entering the "rolling downs" of the
Anglicized hill statioo.
COLONtAL JNDlAN ONEMA 11
Figure S. The Shortest and Best Route to
South Indio.
COLONIAL INDIAH aNEMA n
Thus "native" Todas, lake, and hotels are equal altIactions to the tourist.
Between the shot of fishing (the last item in the first rhetorical sentence) and
Todas (the first item in the second semence). is another nyc-.shot punctuation
point, a caesura of sons, announced by an intertitle: "Approaching Ootacamund
the 'rolling downs' ex:tend for twelve miles" (quotation m.a.rks in the original).
The two shots of the "rolling downs" use long slow lateral camera movements
to create a literal panorama of a hilly landscape, and begin with a brief glimpse
of a shepherd with some sheep (Figure 5). undoubtedly a Toda, explained in the
very next interlitle. Interestingly, then, it is the picturesque downs and the abo-
riginal native. an element of landscape equally for Indian and British tourists,
which provide the transition between natural resources and touristic comforts.
Noteworthy too is the fact that the only human figwes in this section of the film are
laboring bodies and picturesque natives. While Travels in Bengal ackno\l.!ledges
d pre-touristic mode of popular travel in its gesture towards the pilgrimage. the
"The Todas are an aboriginal race inhabiting the Nilgiris."
"Ootacamund possesses a pretty lake."
"... and a number of good hotels. "
"Tbe Modem (Hindu) Hotet."
'"The Grace Hotel."
"The Savoy Hotel."
this list, cinchona and river fishing, bring us up to the point of transition [rom
plains to hills, where the landscape begins to change. To continue the metaphor
of the senlence, between "sensitive plant" and "cinchona plantation and factory:'
is a two-shm puncruatioo mark of the plains: "As the car c1lmhs higher. the plains
spread out below." These panning shots of the plains .are bathed in fog and light.
The second sentence in the film's imagined two-sentence structure more
directly addresses the viewer and lists the personal and touristic attractions of
the journey. Here too each ilem in the list merits its own single shot placed one
after another in a rhetorical relation of absolute equivalence. In this case, each
shot on the list is preceded by an imenitle as foHows:
Figure 4. The Shortest ond Best Route to
South India.
n NnMMAJUMDAJ:
It is fully in keeping with the lineage of the picturesque in paintings, phc-.
tography, and landscape design that Ootacamund should be the main point of
attraction in this film. The attempt to "fabricate an English setting" in Indian hill
Slations was most successful in Ootacamund, which was "convincingly evoca.
tive of pastoral England or the Scottish hills. -34 Judith Kenny outlines the spe-
cific ways in which the landscape in Ootacamund was changed and reshaped {Q
resemble the English countryside, provoking the oft-quoted remark hy Lord
Lynan in 1B77 that it reminded him of "HertIordshire lanes, Devonshire downs,
Westmoreland lakes, Scotch trout streams," delighting even in rain and mud
because they were "such English rain, such English mud. '"35 But Ootacamund is
significant not only for its malleability 10 the English geographic imagination, but
also for its lmponance 10 the colonial economy. Desmond Ray outlines the
importance of Cinchona or Quinine to British economic history and the impact
of its introduction in Ootacamund in 1860.
36
Thus. Ootacamund had an emo-
tional and economic resonance for the bomesick British ~ l o n i l so thai "travel
guides 'packaged' Ootacamund as a summer capital of Empire which combined
the romantic <call of the East' with the amenities of an English town. ")7 It was
in tbe 1930s when this film was made that Ootacamund became "primarily a
place for holidays" rather than the summer seat of government."
If Thwels in Bengal is structured like a photo album preserved after a trip.
The Shortest and. Bese Rowe's structure is analogous to two sentences, each one
enumerating a list. The first sentence would be a catalogue of the natural and etc-.
nomic resources of the plains, each item on the list corresponding to one or (WO
shots on the journey uphill. most shots accompanied by a slow pan: elephants,
anthills ("dot the hiUside"J, coffee ("grows in ahundance"J, sandalwood trees
("are state property"), sensitive planls ("'clothe the banks by the roadside"), cin-
chona plantation. quinine factory, and river fishing. In this representation, the
plains and foothills of the Nilgiri Mountains, which the bus traverses and leaves
behind. are nothing less than the economic bulwark provided by the tropical
colonies to the empire. Human figmes are limited to hands plucking coffee, touch.
ing the leaf of the sensitive plant to demonstrate how it curls up, and of women
hoeing the ground among trees in a cinchona plantation. The last two items in
South India film is more fully secular and addresses the fl1m viewer only as
potential tourist and consumer of landscape. resources, and visual spectacle.
If Ootacamund occupies a special place in the colonial geography of Indian
hill slations. the Toda occupy a similar place in colonial anthropology as an Indian
aboriginaJ type that to British eyes bore fascinating European features, produc-
ing, as one of many myths about them, the notion that they were descended from
a lost lIibe of IsraeL The Toda thus naturally provide the evocatively Anglicized
landscape of Ootacamund with the appropriate human subject, so that the pie-
turesque aesthetic with its sraffage requirements are to be found readymade
there. Fwthermore. the hierarchy of buman subjects in these spaces also matches
the hierarchy of colonial space mapped by the bus tour from the plains to the
hills. Physiognomical analyses would read character traits in the Todas'
"European" features so that "by ascribing qualities of gentleness, grace, and sim-
plicity to the hill tribes, these Britisb representations...depicted highland and
lowland people as intrinsically different, as two places and (WO peoples, ... and a
visil to a Toda village became a regular part of tourist itineraries.
19
In ltavels in Bengal. we see an alternative to the picturesque aesthetic in
the representation of lowland peoples. In the shots of pilgrimage sites. the appro-
priate human subject is no longer determined sp much by the demands of
staffage. as by the anthropological gaze in which natives engaging in ritual WOI-
s!:Vp are fully appropriare filmic subjects. Yet, such a statement regarding the
anthropological gaze is also an oversimplification when one recalls the opening
dedication to the men and women of Bengal, who are clearly both the objects and
the subjects of this film. This points to another significant distinction between
Travels in Bengal and The Shortest and. Best Route. The latter includes something
like a third term in tbis visual regime by inViting its Indian and European traveler-
viewers alike to regard the radical alterity of the Toda as spatially and temporally
distinct, separated from the tourists who end up in the Indian and European
hOlels pictured at the end of the film.
"HISTORY DECAYS INTO IMAGES. NOT STORIES-"
Fragmentation and discontinuity resurface even within this triumvirate of Indian
Railways films. While the two travel films form a symmetrical pair, the third film.
Khed.d.a Opemtions in Mysore. enacts the role of the instructive anomaly that
tests the bistoriograpbic urge toward design, order, and clarity. A film about the
capture and taming of wild elephants in India. it is a fragment that refuses to be
recuperated even in the microspace of the three Indian railway films. Ye( the
hermeneutic urge towards unity and coherence is not hard pressed to connect
these three films. with the colonial reshaping of landscape and human subject
extending in this case to animals. Let me for a moment juxtapose Khedda.
Operations in Mysore v..>ith the roughly contemporary film Chang. Merian C.
Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's popular 1927 HoUywood film dramatizing
74 MUM MAJUMDAJ:
Figures 6-7. Kheddo Operations in Mysore.
tbe conflict between human intruders and the jungle. In the florid language of
the film's titles. tbis is "A Drama of the Wilderness" fealuring "Natives of the
Wild," "Wild Beasts," and "The Jungles of Northern Siam." The film includes a
famous sequence of a wild elephant stampede and also dramatizes their subse-
quent subjugation. A series of intertitles celebrates the taming of nature when
the humans turn .. the jungle's own against the jungle itself." Proclaiming that
"two months in the stocks breaks the elephants' spirilS," the film quotes G. P.
Sanderson, the "great English authority on elephants," as saying that no maller
how large or wild an elepbant migbt be. it can still be subjugated. Khedda demon-
strates a similar subjugation of wild elephants through carefully framed clpse-up
shots of tame elephants' tusks prodding wild elephants into an enclosure, or
repeated shots of resistant wild elephants plantingtheir legs to the ground and
being dragged by a rope. But in this case. the intertitles use the language of incar-
ceration to provide a space of critique, as the fUm points out "a tired youngster"
or the prisoners' detention camp" or "leading the captives out of the stockade"
(Figures 6 and 7). As the Pordenone calalogue puts it, "The patbos of the cap-
tUfe of these majestic wild animals is observed in a discreet and sympathetic
manner."4l
U history is to be produced by juxtaposing material fragments that "tele-
scopLe] the past through the present....(2. then cinema, with its own dialectic of
presence/absence and past/present, intensifies the temporal aspect of history:13
No picturesque aesthetic is deployed in Khedda, though the decaying print
allows for another kind of romanticization since the ruin serves as [he central
emblem for both the picturesque and Benjamin's his[oricaJ materialism. It is no
surprise that the particular ruins conslituted by decaying nitrate film have lent
themselves to a genre of found footage filmmaking analogous to romantic/pic-
turesque art. Films such as Val polo all'eqUJUore/From the fb/e ro the EqUJUor
(Germany and Italy. 1987, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucci), Lyrical
NirroIe (Netherlands, 1991, Peter Delpeut), and Decasia (USA, 2002, Bill
Morrison) all work decaying found footage of early cinema into an aestheticized
COLONIAlIHDlAN CINEMA 75
whole, using such filmic traces in nitrate film fragments to produce an experi-
ence of cinema's optical W1conscious.
Following Benjamin, catherine Russell argues that "the cinema constitutes
a kind of optical unconscious, in which the residues of the past are preserved as
traces of experience. "44 Particularly in the case of From the Pole w the Equator,
we find that "the optical unconscious of early cinema is also the optical uncon-
scious of colonialism, insofar as the gaze is a mechanism of dividip.g and con-
quering, of preserving and possessing. "4S zahid Chaudhary similarly places the
violence of colonial photography in the context of Benjamin's notion of the
dream-state of nineteenth century European material culture, understanding
what he calls the "phantasmagoric aesthetics" of nineteenth century colonial
photography as a "way of managing the very structure of vision and visibility."
Violence, both physical and epistemological, constitutes the "material-bodiiy-
dimension of colonial governmentality," with photography as an institutional
practice,situated at the intersections of anthropology and statistics, among other
discourses of governmentality.46 In tbe case of cinema., ranging from Edison's
1903 Electrocuting an Elepluml to the innumerable hunting, wbaling, and safari
shots in From the Pole to the Equator, records of violence consti-
tute an important strand in the optical unconscious of colonial modernity. In
relaying this colonialist gaze in a packaging of evocative mood music, From rhe
Pole co the Equator may be said to participat.e in a neocolonial recuperation of
images and ideology. Yet, the images recycled in the film arguably also resist
such recuperation. For many contemporary viewers, the film's relentless con-
centration of shots of animal slaughter can only be imperfectly reduced to the
register of romantic nostalgia and instead reveal to consciousness the violence of
the colonial imaginary. Khedda Operations in. Mysore can thus be inserted into a
long line of photographs and films that picture the hunting and subjugation of
animals, "camera hunting" forming a familiar topos of colonial photographyY
VJhile "it is good to materialist investigations a truncated ending, "48 it
is worth drawing some conclusions from the three Indian Railways films. Their
present existence and their demand to be read point to the need for reconfiguring
documentary history more broadly than in terms of national cinema, within which
much of docUfQ.entary fJJm history has been written. They also show that edu-
cational and runofthemill promotional and training films, which have largely
been excised from the existing accounts of documentary cinema, might reward
a closer look. Moreover, in keeping with Droysen's valorization of the accidental
over the planned, I have attempted to show that the accidentally surviving film
fragment, precisely by virtue of its insignificance in the existing narrative, can
illuminate hitherto marginalized areas of film history. In doing so, 1 have also
succumbed to the temptations of coherence and unity, perhaps reinserting these
fragments back into the continuum of history, a move that might not have been
approved by Benjamin.
1& MEEPA. MAlUMDAR
NOTES
1. Eric Bamouw and S. Krishnaswaniy. Indian Film.2
M
Edmon (New York: Oxford University
Press., 1980 and Columbia University Press, 1963) and B. D. Carga, "The Indian Documentary:
The Evolution.." in Cinema in India 1.1 (1987): 25-30 remain the most comprehensive
ac.counts to date. Cinema in India also published a series of five more articles by Garga
on post-Independence Indian documentary up to the 19805 in subsequent issues: "Hopes
Re....ived: 1.2 (April 1987): 24-28; "A Movement in the Making" 1.3 (July-Sept 1987):
34-37; "Synchronous Sound and Fury" 1.4 (Oct-Oec. 19B7): 2529; "Turbulent years" 2.1:
(Apr-June 1988): 3236; andls anyone watching?"' 2.3 (July-Sept 1988): 2&30.
2. Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, eds., Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, Ne"N
Revised Edition (london: BA and Oxford University Press, 1999) and SlJresh Chabria, ed.
Ught of Asia: Indion Silent Onemo /912-1934 (n.p.: Le Giomate del Cinema Muto and
National Film Archive of India, 1994).
3. Travels in Bengars original Bengali title is Banglar Bhraman which has been listed as
Boo90 Darshon in dlabria, ed., light of Asia. 41.
4. Walter Benjamin, "On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress" in The Arcades
Projed, Howard Eiland and Kevin Mc1.alJghlin, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999), [N2, 6], 461.
5. Ibid.. (NIO, 3J, 475.
6. Ibid., [NI a, al, 460. The full quote is: "Method of this project: literary montage. I needn't
say anything. Merely
7. Comelia Vismann, "The love of Ruins; Perspectives on Science 9.2 (2001): 196-209,201.
8. Ibid.,
9. Benjamin, (N2, 6], 461.
10. See John Baxendale and Chris Pawling. Na"ating the Thirties: A Decade in the Making,
J930 to the Present (New York: St Martin's Press, 1996) and Richard M. Barsam.
Nonfiction Film: A Critical History (Bloomington: Indiana Univers.ity Press, 1992).
11. See Bamouw and Krishnaswamy, 197.
12. Entry on James Beveridge in Ian Aitkin, ed. fncydopedio of the Documentary Film (New
York: Routeldge, 2006). Beveridge also played a key role in setting up Films Division,
independent India's state-.run documentary film unit
13. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy. 126.
14. Garga,!he Indian Documentary: The Evolution; 30.
15. James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 167.
16. Report afthe Indian Cinematograph Committee (Madras: Government of
India, 1928), paragraph 206.
17. We can flesh out the possible range of these films from the categories under which
British nonfiction films from this period have been classified in the BFI National Film and
Television Archive's Nonfiction Collection. including "Industry; "Urban, RlJral, and 'Exotic'
locations," "Transport," "Science and Natural History; uActuality: Newsreels: and
"Travelogues." One of the categories is "Oocumentary- or films spe<ificaUy assodated
with the ...Griersonian definition of 'DocumentaIY,''' http://movinghistOly.ac.uk/archives/
bn/collection.html (accessed 15 March 2(06).
18. Report of the Indian Cinematograph Cammittee, paragraph 115.
19. tf such a comparison were to be made, an important point of difference would be the
emphasis on ordinary people, the masses. in the British doclJmentary, in contrast to the
erasure of people from the spectacle in these films.
20. For an evaluative overview of the picturesque aesthetic. see Kim Ian Michasiw. "Nine
Revisionist Theses on the Picturesque," RepresentOOons 38 (Spring 1992): 76-100.
21. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, -rhe Compulsions of VISUal Representation in Colooiallndia," in
COLONIAL JNDlAN CINEMA 11
COLONIAL INDIAN CINlMA 79
NEEPA MNUNDAR is an Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at the
University of Pittsburgh. She bas published in Fbst Scripr. Film Analysis: A
Nonon Reader, and SoandlTlUk Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music. She
is currently finishing a book, Wanted! Cultured Ladies Only: Female 5tardom and
Qnema. 193Qs co 19505.
Chabria.51.
Benjamin. [N7a, 3], 471.
Vanessa R. Schwartz., "'Walter Benjamin for Historians, The American HistoriCDI Review
106.5 (2001): 50 pars. http://W'NW.historycooperative.org/joumals/ahr/106.5/
ah0501001TIt.htmJ (accessed 18 Apr. 2006): 18 and 46.
Catherine RUss.eJ1, Ethnography, (Durham,. NC: Duke Uni\'ersity Press,
199?)' '57. BenJamm dtSCUsses the concept of tt1e "optical unconscious in 1he Work of
In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: in IUummaOOtls, Hannah Arendt, ed. and
Introd. (New York: SChocken Books, 1968):
Russell, 86.
lahid Chaudhary, '"Phantasmagoric Aesthetics: Coloniar Violence and tile Management of
Perception,- Culrural Critique 59 (2005): 71-n.
Ryan. 131.
Benjamin. (9a,. 2], 473.
41.
42
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
11 NUPA MAJUMDU:
Traces of Indio: Photography. Architecture, and the Politics of Representation. l85t).
1950, Maria Antonella Pelizzari, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 14.
22. For an account of the picturesque in landscape design, see Judith T. Kenny, Oimate,
Race, and Imperial Authority: The Symbolic Landscape of the British Hill Slation, Annals
of the Association of American Ceographers, 85.4 (1995): 694-714. See also Ryan.
23. David Rodgers, Staffage, in The OXford Companion to Western Art, Hugh Brigstocke, ed.
(Oxford University Press, 2001) Qove Art Online (Oxford University Press.. 2005),
http://Y.ww.groYeart.com/(accessed February 10,2007). See also Stephen Bann,
.Antiquarianism. Visuality, and the Exotic Monument William Hodge's A Dissertation. in
Traces of India, Pelizzari, ed.. 62-85. For a historical discussion of changes in the practice
of staffage and its role in the production of meaning in landscape paintings. see Hein.-
Th. Schulze A1tcappenberg and Leo Krause, Landschoft und 5taffoge ihre Beziehung ;m
wandel der zeir [Landscape and Stoffage: Their Cho09;ng Relationship aver the
Centuries] (Zurich: Galerie Dr. SChenk, 15 March-1S June 1986).
24. Quoted in Gary D. Sampson. -Unmasking the Colonial Picturesque: Samuel Boorne's
Photographs of Banackpore Park.- in Colonialist Photography: lmog(in)ing Race and
PIoce, Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson. eds. (Landon: Routledge, 2002), 89. See
also Gary D. Sampson,. '"Photographer of the Picturesque: Samuel Bourne,- in Indio
Through the Lens: Photogrophy (Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution,
2000):
25. Quoted in Zahid R. Chaudhary, Frames of Violence: British Photography in Colonial
lnclia,- PhD dissertation (ComeJl University, August 20(4). 123.
26. Thanks to the anonymous reader at The Canadian Journal of Film 5tudies for pointing
out this asped of the translation of staffage from painting to photography.
27. Far a discussion of the mediation of perception by the -machine ensemble- of the rnil-
ways, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (Berkeley: UnivefSity of Califomia
Press, 1986).
28. Quoted in Chaudhary, 142
29. Chabria, ed... lJghr of Asia. 42.
JO. See Angela L Miller, Ihe Panorama. the Cinema and the Emergence of the Spectacular,"
Wide Angle 18.2 (1996): 34-69. and John Falconer, -Appeal of the Panorama: in Indio
through the Lens, 35-66.
31. Tom Gunning, -setore OoaJmentary: Early Nonfiction films and the VIeW Aesthetic:,, in
Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, Daan Hertogs and Nico De aeri:
eds. (Amsterdam: Stichting Nedetlands Filmmuseum, 1997), 15. The anachronism of
using Gunning's discussion of 19005 nonfiction films in the context of these early 19305
Indian films is nat unique to this discussion. as the temporal parameters of -early" cine-
ma vary in diffet'ent international contexts.
32 Ib;d, 16.
33. See, for example, Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), especially Chapter 3, 1.andscapes of
Memory,- 39-62.
34. Kenny, 222 and 226.
35. Quoted. in Kenny, 702.
36. Desmond Ray, The European Discovet)' of the Indian Floro (New York.: Oxford Uni\'ersity
Press. 1992), n7.
37. Kenny, 708.
38. Ibid., 710.
39. Ibid., 709. See also Alexander Morrison, '"'Vv'hite Todas': The Politics of Race and dass
amongst European Settlers on the Nilgiri Hills, c.1860- 1900,- Journal of Imperial &
Ccmmooweolth History. 323 (May 2004); 54-85.
40. Benjamin, [N11,4L 476.