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 tsklgovernment and Paramount Chief Scbwa is gratefully acknowledged by the producers:'

18. Emma sandon, "Representing 'African life': from the Ethnographic Exhibitions to Niongaand Stampede, in Young and Innocent? Higson. ed.. 191-207.

19. Barber, 13. Barber draws on Colin Bundy, The Rise and Fa" of the South AfricanPeosontTy (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 HistoricalStudies 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 ofhis attitudes in supporting African political representation. There were huge divisionsbetween the cape Ubetals and the Afrikaner nationalists in the Union Government. theSouth African National Party under Prime Minister louis Botha. tt was James Hertzog. aformer Boer general and militant Afrikaner nationalist in the cabinet who had actuallydrafted the biD and other pro-Hertzog ministers pushed for it to become law. Sauer wasforced to table it so as not to alienate the more nationarlSt Afrikaner vote for the SouthAfrican 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: A Cinematographic.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: PublicCulture 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 Britain1896-1930 (2002), Re-viewing Television History: Critiml Issues in TelevisionHisroriography (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-delade I'analyse textueJle, rexamen de ces films SQuleve plusieurs questions historio-graphiques, telles que la fonnation accidentelJe du canon reliee au hasard de lasurvie ou de la disparation des reuvres; les conditions de lecture partielle que c.esfilms permettent; Jes relations entre Ie cinema local et Ie cinema colonial, enparticulier pour les films de promotion de la Indian Railways; et les styles de pho-tographies deployes dans ces documentaires, tel Ie pittoresque

AllhOUgh there is a substantial historical record of the hundreds of silent non-fiction films produced in South Asia between 1899 and the early 1930s, onlythree silent Indian documentary films have actually survived. The. historicalaccount of this period of documentary history in South Asia can be reasonablyfleshed out with the information that is available about filmmakers. productionunits. the titles and subject matter of specific fIlms, and even some ffim stills. lIn such an account of South Asian documentary film history. however. the threesurviving films would merit hardly even a footnote were it not for the accidentof their sUNival. Yet. unlike. for example, th.e celebrated status of a text likeBeowulf not only as the only (accidentally) surviving English epic, but also as ahighly representative one. no such honor has befallen these three fllms. whichremain unremarkable and marginal in every way except in their survival. Assuch. these films had no entry in the groundbreaking and comprehensiveEncyclopaedia of Indian Cinema of 1999, and the only written discussion of thesefilms is in the catalogue of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival of 1994. whichshowcased Indian silent cinema. l Not least of the reasons for the resistance ofthese films to any inclusion in a canon or auteur-based approach to the writingof Indian documenlary film history is the lact that each of the terms in the phrasethat 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 roSouth India (647 feet), and Khedd.a Opemlioru; in Mysore (621 feet) persist in

CANADIAN IOURNAl OF FILM STUDIES REVUE CAHADIINNE D'ETuDS CINEMATOCRAPHlqUESVOLUME III NO.1 SPRINC PRINTEMPS:100'7' pp 113-71

exercising a certain weight against the logic of the historical record. j With theundeniable force of their sheer material presence, even as ruins that bear thetraces of time. lhese films invite a consideration of questions of historiographythal Walter Benjamin raised more than seventy years ago as he collected whathe dubbed the "refuse of history" for his monumental and incomplete Armde.sProjecc.4 Benjamin's conception of a materialist history privileges fragmentationof meaning over unity and linearity, and foregrounds the work of time by positing a dialectical relation between past and present in the body of the historicalimage or artifact. The ruin is the central metaphor here precisely because it existsin the present, while carrying traces of the past in the contours of its decay. Bytheir accidental survival, these three films have been automatically "'blasted outof the continuum of historical succession. '"5

One of the key differences in any approach to these three films andBenjamin's planned methodology in his An:ades Project is the element of choiceor 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 ofaccidental fragments becomes a foundation for historywriting in the work of theGerman historian Johann Gustav Droysen who "believed that remains accidentally left over are what grab the attention of the historian, precisely because theywere not intended to be sources. something predestined for becoming history."1Droysen's valorization of the accidental remnant coincides with the salvagingurge in the nineteenth century that ranged from salvage ethnography to theestablishment of museums and archives. all of which are monuments to theinsertion of design and planning in the preservation of the past for the future. InDroysen'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. "8In its emphasis on valid historical work. Droysen's project is the positivist oneof Dot only getting to the truth of the past. but also of building a coherent andunified narrative out of the accidental remnants of the past. My approach to thethree archivaUy administered but accidentally surviving silent Indian nonfictionfilms combines Droysen's emphasis on the accidental with Benjamin's valoriza-tion of the material fragment or image as the unrecuperable site of a dialecticsof past and present.

What is the value of film fragments that randomly resurface and resist easyinclusion in a coherent historical narrative? For one thing. such fragments graphically foregrou.nd the persistent tendency in film historiography towards coherence,unity, and linearity, as also the privileging of auteurs. canons. teleology, andboundaries, whether of nation or genre. In contrast. the accidentally survivingfragment forces the random over lhe representative, chance over patterns; inshort. (he marginal over the meaningful. Hence the work of historiography tends

54 tiEfM MAJUMDAR

either towards reimerpreting and recuperating tbe accidental fragment into anexisting historical account or eliminating it entirely from the narrative. as hasbeen the case wilh lhese three films. Indeed, of the less than twenty silent Indianfilms-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 asthe 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 oftheir randomness? Walter Benjamin recommends carrying what he calls "themontage- principle" over into history: "That is. to build up the large consrructionsout of the smallest, precisely fashioned structural elements. Indeed, to detect thecrystal of lhe total event in the analysis of the small. individual moment"'jl Fromthis perspective, even the most random and unremarkable films can be used toilluminate the network of connections that constitute film culture. In this paper,then, I make no claims about Lhe aesthetic or historical significance of the threefilms, but use precisely their randomness as a nodal point for examining multi-ple, perhaps even disjointed, frameworks in which South Asian documentaryfilm 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 historicalaccount 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 colonialera. This means that the films were most likely made by British film units; hencethe 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 atourist's journey, while the third film, Khet1da Operations in Mysore, demon-strates the method of capturtng wild elephants. The existence of this third filmpoints to a body of non-promotional films that were also made by IndianRailways. The dates of production of all three films are unknown, although i[ islikely that they were made between the late 1920s and the early 1930s. Thwelsin Bengal was made silent, but a recorded sound commentary was added, pre-sumably replacing a live lecture; hence the problem of designating all three filmsas belonging (Q the silent era. 1Ta.vels in Bengal is also the only one of the threefilms to include a list of credits and to explicitly address its spectator through anopening dedication to the men. women, and children of Bengal, reminding themof the many years of service Eastern Bengal Railways has given them in theirtravels for purposes of "business. pleasure, and religion." The film implicitlyacknowledges pilgrimage as a major source of revenue in its emphasis on placesof worship and its inclusion of "religion" in its list of reasons for travel. Althoughpilgrimage 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 (0potentiallravelers at the start of the film.

THE BRInSH DOCUMENTARY MOYEMENTAs films produced by Indian Railways, these three films point to a body of nonfiction films in South Asia that must be placed in the global colonial context ofthe 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 theBritish Ceneral Post Office films and more generally to the work of the EmpireMarketing 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 asBunnah-Shell, had active film units. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy note that theBurmabShell film unit. headed by James Beveridge, made not only promotionaland 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 Ceylonlea Board, which produced Basil Wright's Song of Ceylon (UK, 1934). JamesBeveridge's career illusrrates the global connections of Griersonian documentaryassociated 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 documentarythrough 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 JamiaMillia Islamia Institute of Mass Communication Research Centre. "12

The three surviVing Indian Railways films point to a broader film practicethal insists on the need to reconsider the British documentary movement outsidethe lIame of national cinema and in terms of its intersections with a much largercolonial project whose network extended lO the colonies. We can flesh out thisglobal colonial net\lI/ork not only through the figure of James Beveridge. but alsovia William J. Moylan, the director of 1hwels in Bengal. Moylan went on tobecome director of one of two British war propaganda documentary units in pre-Independence India, Indian News Parade, the other being Information FilmsIndia which was headed by Ezra Mir.U Indian News Parade was dissolved by theIndian interim government just before Independence in 1947 because of its affil-iation with British colonial propagandaY But independent India's FilmsDivision. which was set up in 1948, owed its organizational prindples 10 theseearlier British state-run film bodies, which in turn can trace their lineage back. toearlier official bodies such as the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee(COVle) founded in 1902. Under COYle. lantern-slide lectures and illustratedtextbooks were developed as a form of imperial propaganda to "convey anaulhoritative 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 withthe broader colonial project rep.resented by the Empire Marketing Board and alsowith the institutional future of Indian documentary, which remained dominatedby Films Division until the 1970s.

While existing histories of Indian documentary cinema. indicate the institu-tional affiliations between slate-supponed, post-lndependence Indian documentafyfilm and the British documentary movement. very little research has been doneon the complex and conttadicrory affiliations. both nationalist and colonialist, ofdocumentary film practice in pre-Ind,ependence South Asia. A small sign of thestate affiliations of nonfiction filmmaking in India is to be found in the Repon ofthe lTUIian Cinematograph Committee of 1927. which recorrunends setting up aCenLral Cinema Bureau for overseeing and supporting films produced in thecause of mass education and propaganda. In this comext, lhe Committee saw theIndian Railways as exemplary: "The Central Publicity Bureau of the Indian SlateRailways is already producing railway and public utility films. While we weicome and applaud that effort, we are confident that a transfer of the technicalside 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 usthe quotidian face of nonfiction filmmaking in colonial South Asia, standing infor the scores of educational, informational. training. and advertising films thatwere 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 expressedequal concern over aesthetics as cuhural impact:

The Railway Board has already begun to adverlise by means of the cinematograph, but there is vast scope for improvement in the technique of itspropaganda films, particularly as these are to be shown abroad, where thetaste in these matters is highly developed. It will be not only more effectivebut also more economical if there can be co-ordination of e(fon between theprovinces and certain departments of the Government of India. particularlythe Railway and the Army Departments. and the trade in this maner. 18

THE PICTURESQUE AND HUMAN SUBJECtSWhile the Railway films have an institutional affiliation with British documentaryfilms in that they were produced from similar imperatives of commerce andempire. aesthetically they share few similarities with the British documentaryfilms despite the temptation to read at least the two travel films alongside NigtuMail (UK, 1936. Harry Watt and Basil Wright) and Song o[Ceylon. I ' Rather, Travelsin Bengal and The Shortest and Best ROUle to South India seem strongly inflectedby 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 shotin 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 (seeFigure 1), are magically erased in the next shot which is otherwise identical toit. Of course. in the COntext of colonial filmmaking, staffage is no longer simplyan aesthetic issue of composition and harmony. but takes on racial overtoneswith the evacuation of "native" presence from the framings of Brilish architectural sites in Calcutta in 'Itavel.s in Bengal. This is not to say that the potentialtourist in these films is specifically British, since both films clearly addressBritish and Indian travelers alike. But the language of representation that d~rivesfrom 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 thefilm or photographic image. anJy the most carefulJy selected native presence isrequired for the picturesque effect and this is precisely the source of the problemin landscape photography, Samuel Bourne complains about "the obstinacy of thenatives when I wanled to introduce them into my pictures. By no amount of talking 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 ofa village bumpkin in the big city. While both films rely on the touristic displayof sights of Calcutta such as Victoria Memorial. Eden Gardens. and HowrahBridge. visually iliey offer an interesting contrast. In a sequence of six shots inTravels in Bengal that closely parallel simiJar shots in the fiction film, the fram-ings are carefully organized around distance shots. from high angle extra longshots to medium long shots and 00 to camera placements on the street, thusimparting to the viewer a disembodied touristic gaze that allempts to efface theurban frenzy and chaos aD the ground that the fiction film stresses. Unanchoredto any subjective point of view, the street scenes in 7tavels in Bengal distance usfrom the sensory overload characle,rizing urban modernity through an emphasis

61 "EM MAJUMDU

on to still photOgraphy, though with significant changes.'" Writing about paintingand photographs of monuments in South Asia. Tapati Guha-Thakuna notes thaithe use of the picturesque in English painting "enabled a re-enchantment of[Englisb) domestic rural landscape, [while) abroad it gave free rein to alternativefantasies of ruggedness. turbulence. and the primeval powers of nature." all ofwhich "'offered themselves as rich contrasts to the tameness and order of theEnglish landscape. nZ1 A canerast between home and abroad underlies the trans-planting of the picturesque aesthetic to the colonies. As in Guha-Thakurta'saccount, there is the contrast between the domestic pictureSQue of the Englishcountryside and the alternative picturesque of rugged turbulence in India. 1biscontrast also generates nostalgia for the English countryside. which resuhs in areshaping of the Indian landscape in the image of home. As we shalI see, thisopposition between home and abroad finds representational expression not onlyin painting, photography, and film, but also in landscape design in Indian hill sta-tions. In framing a composition, whether in photography or film, the selectionthat 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 theimage. which is the concept of staf(age in painting. Denoting subordinate humanfigures and animals used in a landscape, sca{fage was an eighteenth cenUirypractice, in which "landscape painters employed specialist figure painters to pop-ulate their works. and the practice continued into the 19th century."JJ In the caseof photography, smffage is modified with the change in medium. The absence ofcontrol associated with the "realIty effect" of photography required that theequally carefully chosen human subjects in a photograph appear casual ratherthan posed. In the words of Samuel Bourne, of the famous Bourne and Shepherdphotographic studios in Calcutta and Simla. some of the rules of picturesquephotography 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 wasinformed by a search for powerful correspondences with the English countryside: if the photographer "could only uansport English scenery under theseexquisite skies. what pictures could he not produce."25 if staffage was a practiceof addition in painting, sometimes even employing additional paimers, in colernial photography, it became mostly a practice of subtraction.26

In tbe context of the two travel films, of which TIuvel5 in Bengal is at leastpartially also a city fIlm, the "problem" of human presence in the frame pointsto a specifically distanced and mediated gaze. structured by the "machineensembles" of both camera and train and by the visual conventions of painting 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.l9Picturesque framings of monuments, landscapes, and ruins are accompanied bya regular. even monotonous. alternation between slow pans and slow tilts, thepan 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 alook 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 avariety 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 sightson display, but also miming the act of visual appropriation. the natural andcultural consumed as sights [italics in the original).-

Interestingly. the only significant camera movements in the entire film comelater. with several point-of-view shots from a moving train, as the film takes usaway from Calcutta to Darjeeling, which briefly "place on view the unfoldingvisual horizon."32 Shots from the train and also the more static "view" shotspoint 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 ofVictoria Memorial. reflected in the water-while carefully eliminating any of lheunsightly barriers, including human ligures, that the photographer Bourne hadcautioned against. By its aestheticized display of various sights, IhIvels in Bengalironically ends up foregrounding cinematography over touristic sights.

MAPPING COLONIAL SPACEWhile ostensibly geared towards promoting Indian Railways, 'Dnvels in Bengaland The Shortest and Best Route also function as travelogues that map out thespatial hierarchies of colonial geography. The Bengal film traverses a colonialspatial 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 Britishimperial power. to Vishnupur, the ancient seat of pre-colonial Bengal rulers.Between these two spaces and lheir picturesque monuments. the film and traintravel through two other spaces of colonial and indigenous interest. the hill station. Darjeeling. and pilgrimage destinations of North Bengal. Both in Calcuttaand in North Bengal, there is an emphasis on places of religious worship on theone 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 plainsof Mysore and ending in the hill station of Ootacamund. Much has been writtenon the Indian hill station as a surrogate English space for the British colonialimagination,33 and while both films reference this. i[ is the South milia film thatdirectly gestures towards this particular allure of the hiE station by pointing tothe "rolling downs" of the landscape on the drive up to Ootacamwtd.

In [act. this film is more properly a journey than lhllJeIs in Bengal, whicharranges its shots e.xaclly like a slide show composed oi the kind of picturesqueimages one might possess a{t.er a trip. The Soonest and. Best Route begins andends with informational intenitles explaining the best route to Southern India,relegating train travel. the ostensible subject of the advertisement, to the realmof the purely utilitarian. The opening intertitle. lhe shortest. cheapest. and mostpicturesque route to Southern India is by rail to Bangalore and Mysore. is followed by two shots of maps with a dotted rail line moving over the route thetrain 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 thefilm is then taken up in following the bus on its road journey from Mysore toOotacamund. ending with the final intertitle indicating that the rest of the trainjourney to South India can resume there: "The "Blue Mountain Express" leavingOotacamund for Southern lnctia. By this train me traveller can continue his jour-ney to Madurai. Tanjore. Trichnopoly. and other places of tourist interest." Thefinal two shots show the Blue Mountain Express. the only train visualized in theentire film, slowly moving out of the station first in a movement towards thecamera. 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 thejourney to Oo[acarnund. while the architectural attractions of the rest of SouthIndia are reserved for the final intertitle of the film. displacing the visual on tothe 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 andhigher leaving the tropicaJ plains behind and entering the "rolling downs" of theAnglicized hill statioo.

COLONtAL JNDlAN ONEMA 11

Figure S. The Shortest and Best Route toSouth 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) andTodas (the first item in the second semence). is another nyc-.shot punctuationpoint, a caesura of sons, announced by an intertitle: "Approaching Ootacamundthe '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 movementsto create a literal panorama of a hilly landscape, and begin with a brief glimpseof a shepherd with some sheep (Figure 5). undoubtedly a Toda, explained in thevery 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 arelaboring bodies and picturesque natives. While Travels in Bengal ackno\l.!ledgesd 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 [romplains to hills, where the landscape begins to change. To continue the metaphorof 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 plainsspread 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 moredirectly addresses the viewer and lists the personal and touristic attractions ofthe journey. Here too each ilem in the list merits its own single shot placed oneafter another in a rhetorical relation of absolute equivalence. In this case, eachshot on the list is preceded by an imenitle as foHows:

Figure 4. The Shortest ond Best Route toSouth India.

n NnM MAJUMDAJ:

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 ofattraction in this film. The attempt to "fabricate an English setting" in Indian hillSlations 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 {Qresemble the English countryside, provoking the oft-quoted remark hy LordLynan in 1B77 that it reminded him of "HertIordshire lanes, Devonshire downs,Westmoreland lakes, Scotch trout streams," delighting even in rain and mudbecause they were "such English rain, such English mud. '"35 But Ootacamund issignificant not only for its malleability 10 the English geographic imagination, butalso for its lmponance 10 the colonial economy. Desmond Ray outlines theimportance of Cinchona or Quinine to British economic history and the impactof its introduction in Ootacamund in 1860.36 Thus. Ootacamund had an emo-tional and economic resonance for the bomesick British ~lonial, so thai "travelguides 'packaged' Ootacamund as a summer capital of Empire which combinedthe romantic

South India film is more fully secular and addresses the fl1m viewer only aspotential tourist and consumer of landscape. resources, and visual spectacle.

If Ootacamund occupies a special place in the colonial geography of Indianhill slations. the Toda occupy a similar place in colonial anthropology as an IndianaboriginaJ type that to British eyes bore fascinating European features, produc-ing, as one of many myths about them, the notion that they were descended froma lost lIibe of IsraeL The Toda thus naturally provide the evocatively Anglicizedlandscape of Ootacamund with the appropriate human subject, so that the pie-turesque aesthetic with its sraffage requirements are to be found readymadethere. Fwthermore. the hierarchy of buman subjects in these spaces also matchesthe hierarchy of colonial space mapped by the bus tour from the plains to thehills. 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 andlowland people as intrinsically different, as two places and (WO peoples, ... and avisil to a Toda village became a regular part of tourist itineraries.19

In ltavels in Bengal. we see an alternative to the picturesque aesthetic inthe representation of lowland peoples. In the shots of pilgrimage sites. the appro-priate human subject is no longer determined sp much by the demands ofstaffage. as by the anthropological gaze in which natives engaging in ritual WOI-s!:Vp are fully appropriare filmic subjects. Yet, such a statement regarding theanthropological gaze is also an oversimplification when one recalls the openingdedication to the men and women of Bengal, who are clearly both the objects andthe subjects of this film. This points to another significant distinction betweenTravels in Bengal and The Shortest and. Best Route. The latter includes somethinglike 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 temporallydistinct, separated from the tourists who end up in the Indian and EuropeanhOlels pictured at the end of the film.

"HISTORY DECAYS INTO IMAGES. NOT STORIES-"Fragmentation and discontinuity resurface even within this triumvirate of IndianRailways 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 thattests the bistoriograpbic urge toward design, order, and clarity. A film about thecapture and taming of wild elephants in India. it is a fragment that refuses to berecuperated even in the microspace of the three Indian railway films. Ye( thehermeneutic urge towards unity and coherence is not hard pressed to connectthese three films. with the colonial reshaping of landscape and human subjectextending 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 ofthe film's titles. tbis is "A Drama of the Wilderness" fealuring "Natives of theWild," "Wild Beasts," and "The Jungles of Northern Siam." The film includes afamous sequence of a wild elephant stampede and also dramatizes their subse-quent subjugation. A series of intertitles celebrates the taming of nature whenthe 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 mallerhow 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-upshots of tame elephants' tusks prodding wild elephants into an enclosure, orrepeated shots of resistant wild elephants planting their legs to the ground andbeing 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 sympatheticmanner."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 ofpresence/absence and past/present, intensifies the temporal aspect of history:13No picturesque aesthetic is deployed in Khedda, though the decaying printallows for another kind of romanticization since the ruin serves as [he centralemblem for both the picturesque and Benjamin's his[oricaJ materialism. It is nosurprise that the particular ruins conslituted by decaying nitrate film have lentthemselves 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), LyricalNirroIe (Netherlands, 1991, Peter Delpeut), and Decasia (USA, 2002, BillMorrison) 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 constitutesa kind of optical unconscious, in which the residues of the past are preserved astraces 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 theviolence of colonial photography in the context of Benjamin's notion of thedream-state of nineteenth century European material culture, understandingwhat he calls the "phantasmagoric aesthetics" of nineteenth century colonialphotography 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 institutionalpractice,situated at the intersections of anthropology and statistics, among otherdiscourses of governmentality.46 In tbe case of cinema., ranging from Edison's1903 Electrocuting an Elepluml to the innumerable hunting, wbaling, and safarishots in From the Pole to the Equator, th~e flick~ records of violence consti-tute an important strand in the optical unconscious of colonial modernity. Inrelaying this colonialist gaze in a packaging of evocative mood music, From rhePole co the Equator may be said to participat.e in a neocolonial recuperation ofimages and ideology. Yet, the images recycled in the film arguably also resistsuch recuperation. For many contemporary viewers, the film's relentless con-centration of shots of animal slaughter can only be imperfectly reduced to theregister of romantic nostalgia and instead reveal to consciousness the violence ofthe colonial imaginary. Khedda Operations in. Mysore can thus be inserted into along line of photographs and films that picture the hunting and subjugation ofanimals, "camera hunting" forming a familiar topos of colonial photographyY

VJhile "it is good to giv~ materialist investigations a truncated ending, "48 itis worth drawing some conclusions from the three Indian Railways films. Theirpresent existence and their demand to be read point to the need for reconfiguringdocumentary history more broadly than in terms of national cinema, within whichmuch of docUfQ.entary fJJm history has been written. They also show that edu-cational and runofthemill promotional and training films, which have largelybeen excised from the existing accounts of documentary cinema, might rewarda closer look. Moreover, in keeping with Droysen's valorization of the accidentalover the planned, I have attempted to show that the accidentally surviving filmfragment, precisely by virtue of its insignificance in the existing narrative, canilluminate hitherto marginalized areas of film history. In doing so, 1 have alsosuccumbed to the temptations of coherence and unity, perhaps reinserting thesefragments back into the continuum of history, a move that might not have beenapproved by Benjamin.

1& MEEPA. MAlUMDAR

NOTES1. Eric Bamouw and S. Krishnaswaniy. Indian Film.2M 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 comprehensiveac.counts to date. Cinema in India also published a series of five more articles by Gargaon post-Independence Indian documentary up to the 19805 in subsequent issues: "HopesRe....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"NRevised 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 andNational Film Archive of India, 1994).

3. Travels in Bengars original Bengali title is Banglar Bhraman which has been listed asBoo90 Darshon in dlabria, ed., light ofAsia. 41.

4. Walter Benjamin, "On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress" in The ArcadesProjed, Howard Eiland and Kevin Mc1.alJghlin, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1999), [N2, 6], 461.

5. Ibid.. (NIO, 3J, 475.6. Ibid., [N I a, al, 460. The full quote is: "Method of this project: literary montage. I needn't

say anything. Merely show~7. Comelia Vismann, "The love of Ruins; Perspectives on Science 9.2 (2001): 196-209,201.8. Ibid., 20~.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 1927~1928 (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 andTelevision 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

COLONIAL INDIAN CINlMA 79

NEEPA MNUNDAR is an Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at theUniversity of Pittsburgh. She bas published in Fbst Scripr. Film Analysis: ANonon Reader, and SoandlTlUk Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music. Sheis currently finishing a book, Wanted! Cultured Ladies Only: Female 5tardom andQnema. 193Qs co 19505.

Chabria.51.Benjamin. [N7a, 3], 471.Vanessa R. Schwartz., "'Walter Benjamin for Historians, The American HistoriCDI Review106.5 (2001): 50 pars. http://W'NW.historycooperative.org/joumals/ahr/106.5/ah0501001TIt.htmJ (accessed 18 Apr. 2006): 18 and 46.Catherine RUss.eJ1,~~ta/ 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. andIntrod. (New York: SChocken Books, 1968): 217~2S2.Russell, 86.lahid Chaudhary, '"Phantasmagoric Aesthetics: Coloniar Violence and tile Management ofPerception,- Culrural Critique 59 (2005): 71-n.Ryan. 131.Benjamin. (9a,. 2], 473.

41.4243.

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, Annalsof 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. inTraces of India, Pelizzari, ed.. 62-85. For a historical discussion of changes in the practiceof 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 ;mwandel der zeir [Landscape and Stoffage: Their Cho09;ng Relationship aver theCenturies] (Zurich: Galerie Dr. SChenk, 15 March-1S June 1986).

24. Quoted in Gary D. Sampson. -Unmasking the Colonial Picturesque: Samuel Boorne'sPhotographs of Banackpore Park.- in Colonialist Photography: lmog(in)ing Race andPIoce, Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson. eds. (Landon: Routledge, 2002), 89. Seealso Gary D. Sampson,. '"Photographer of the Picturesque: Samuel Bourne,- in IndioThrough the Lens: Photogrophy 184~19l1 (Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution,2000): 163~197.

25. Quoted in Zahid R. Chaudhary, Frames of Violence: British Photography in Coloniallnclia,- PhD dissertation (ComeJl University, August 20(4). 123.

26. Thanks to the anonymous reader at The Canadian Journal of Film 5tudies for pointingout 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 CalifomiaPress, 1986).

28. Quoted in Chaudhary, 14229. Chabria, ed... lJghr ofAsia. 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 Indiothrough the Lens, 35-66.

31. Tom Gunning, -setore OoaJmentary: Early Nonfiction films and the VIeW Aesthetic:,, inUncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, Daan Hertogs and Nico De aeri:eds. (Amsterdam: Stichting Nedetlands Filmmuseum, 1997), 15. The anachronism ofusing Gunning's discussion of 19005 nonfiction films in the context of these early 19305Indian 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 ofMemory,- 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.