How the Emergency in the 1970s undermined the New Indian Cinema movement

Ashish Rajadhyaksha rightly underlined the Emergency’s “complicated presence” in the history of New Indian Cinema. He wrote, “There may indeed be a connection between the state support of independent cinema and the vicious disciplining of the mainstream film industry: a national project around media control gone badly wrong.” He rightly concluded that the Emergency affected the form and aesthetics of the New Cinema movement, and called it “aesthetics of state control”.

Secondly, due to the Emergency, the practitioners of India’s New Cinema found themselves in the middle of a storm. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy share an important incident from Karnataka New Cinema industry.

In Karnataka the makers of Samskara felt the hand of the Emergency in a more cruel fashion. Snehalatha Reddy, the leading actress in Samskara and wife of its director Pattabhi Rama Reddy, was accused of concealing information about the whereabouts of George Fernandes, a trade union leader whose arrest had been ordered in the Emergency roundup. She was known to be a friend of the Fernandeses. She denied knowledge of his whereabouts and was jailed and questioned for eight months. An asthmatic deprived of needed medicines, she fell seriously ill, and was released only when near death. She died in January, 1977 – five days after her release.

Mum’s the word

Mrinal Sen faced an “uncomfortable” situation during a question-answer session after a screening of his film Chorus (1974) at the Berlin Film Festival just a week after the Emergency was declared. A young woman asked him how he would relate his film Chorus to the state of Emergency imposed in India. Sen “composed” himself and spoke with pauses between the lines,

“True, much to my countrymen’s discomfort, Emergency has just been imposed in India. But, to be honest, I am not aware of the legality of Emergency. So, I do not know when, at what point, I cross the boundary of law. Under the circumstances, I prefer to keep mum and not answer your question.” I repeated, “Sorry, no answer from me, not a word.” The hall was silent for a few moments. I did not know how it happened, but it did happen and I got a bit emboldened and said, “Got my answer? Have you? I shall not answer. I hope I am clear.”

Kumar Shahani recounted his memory of the Emergency in a personal conversation,

“During the Emergency I was invited maximum to Delhi by the universities…it’s all connected with cinema…I came very often to Delhi at the invitation of both Delhi University and JNU. And almost every time I would be surrounded by my body guards.”

He remembered to have addressed the protesting students and talked about films with them. John Abraham was invited to address the students during the Emergency, at a place Shahani referred to as “freedom square”, an open space in the then JNU. He shared how the Shiv Sena “saw me out” from a weekly Doordarshan programme he was doing on film appreciation, “hugely popular”, because, since he did not have the programme in Marathi, he should not be there. Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s sister-in-law was arrested and imprisoned, for eighteen months, for supporting a strike. She was a school teacher and taught music and piano to students.

The FFC [Film Finance Corporation] and New Cinema was mum during most of these 19 months. FFC’s autonomy was bypassed, and New Cinema’s aesthetic spirit had to pass the test of its contribution to the national treasury.

The burden of financial disciplining, utilitarian approach to institutions, and misuse of power by ministers concerned altered the course of the New Cinema movement and the nature and objectives of FFC. These alterations led, firstly, to the mass resignation of FFC Chairperson B.K. Karanjia, along with other important Directors. Secondly, the Emergency gifted the FFC with the recommendations of the Seventy Ninth Report of CPU (1975-6).

Several board members, including Chairman B.K. Karanjia, and Hrishikesh Mukherjee, resigned in 1976 protesting against constant interference by state functionaries in the FFC. The Indian Film Directors’ Association (IFDA) passed a resolution, expressing its shock at the resignation of the FFC Chairman. The resolution pointed out that “under the stewardship of Mr. Karanjia,” the FFC had worked “a revolution in the film industry”, paved the way for offbeat films, and led the crusade for art cinemas. The resolution said, with the resignations “the entire movement has been nipped in the bud.”

Aruna Vasudev called this whole affair “one of the early casualties of the Emergency”. A reader from Bombay expressed his shock over the resignation, terming it as a “great blow to the growth of the new cinema movement in India, especially when the people have started realising the evils of cheap commercial films.”

The reader called Mr. Karanjia a “dynamic and foresighted chairman”, who “encouraged radicals like M.S. Sathyu, Basu Chatterji, Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani and the late Awtar Kaul to make realistic low budget films.” The reader credited the FFC films for creating a supportive atmosphere in the Indian film industry which encouraged filmmakers like Shyam Benegal, Girish Karnad, etc. to make similar socially purposeful and artistic films, in various regional languages.

The VC Shukla effect

V.C. Shukla did not let a single chance go away to humiliate, demean, and defame Karanjia and the FFC. That included giving out press statements saying how the experience of his Ministry with the FFC had not been a happy one, providing factual errors relating to its functioning, not acknowledging the letter of clarification sent to Shukla by Karanjia, ignoring the FFC at the IFFI held in January 1976, and replacing Karanjia at the eleventh hour with G.P. Sippy, “known to be a close friend of the Minister’s”, as the Chairman of the Festival Managing Committee.

Shukla also tried to influence the FFC’s autonomous decision-making power by writing to an official of the Corporation directing him to sanction a loan for a film that Rajinder Singh Bedi wanted to make. His application had already been turned down by the Board of Directors. This was the first time during Karanjia’s tenure that the Ministry sought to influence the FFC’s discretion in granting loans. Immediately after the mass resignation, the first thing the Corporation did, in violation of the resolution of the Board, was to sanction a loan for Bedi.

In April 1977, when the Emergency was called off and elections were announced, Karanjia wrote a detailed editorial piece in the Filmfare, discussing how difficult it was to work with Shukla, and other related issues. According to him, due to the Emergency, more “incalculable harm” was done to the film trade than to other spheres of national life. Clarifying the reasons behind their resignation, he wrote, “When it became abundantly clear to us that what this Minister [Mr. Shukla] wanted was not one who would stand up for the cause of good cinema but a yes-man, we preferred to resign.” He claimed that the circumstances in which he and other directors were “compelled” to resign were “sordid enough.”

It took the Ministry more than seven months to accept their resignations and even before they received official intimation of the acceptance of these resignations, the Ministry took steps, for reasons which should be obvious, to censor the news in all dailies. The manner in which one of the resigned Directors became Chairman of the Corporation, without withdrawing his letter of resignation to us, added a touch of slapstick to the entire sorry episode.

Excerpted with permission from The State and New Cinema in Contemporary India: 1960-1997, Sudha Tiwari, Routledge India.