This year, no Indian feature film has made it to the ‘competition’ section at the Cannes Film Festival. A documentary is featured in the official selection — Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya’s The Cinema Travellers in the ‘classics’ segment — while > Anurag Kashyap’s Raman Raghav 2.0 has found a place in the independent, parallel Directors’ Fortnight.
The only time an Indian entry won the Grand Prix at Cannes was before Independence, in 1946. Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar shared the award with ten other films including David Lean’s Brief Encounter, Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend , and Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City .
Contrasting lifestyles Among the very first Indian films to follow the ‘social realism’ approach — where issues are seen from a subaltern perspective — Neecha Nagar ’s shooting was done partly on location and starred new and untrained actors. It was the debut vehicle of actress Kamini Kaushal. Its big win presaged international recognition for films like Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali and Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen in the next decade. However now, 70 years later, though its content still remains relevant, the significance accorded to this classic has been more in the academic realm than the aesthetic.
hari Narayan Neecha Nagar, the tale of a non-violent protest by people living in a shanty town in pre-Independent India, is based on a short story by Urdu writer Hayatullah Ansari who had, in turn, taken cues from Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths . Starting from the names of towns inhabited by the people on the two extremes of the socio-economic spectrum — Ooncha Nagar and Neecha Nagar — the film is replete with allegories about their contrasting lifestyles. The clever use of lighting — the affluent are shown in bright light and exude glow while the poor are seen in some darkness — only strengthens this duality.
Even the names of the lead characters depict a credo or a quality. The municipality head is Sarkar (signifying authority). The leader of the resistance is named Balraj (signifying youth power). Sarkar’s daughter, who Balraj loves, is Maya (illusion) and Balraj’s sister, who dies in the course of the revolt, is Rupa (beauty and grace). The role of Balraj was initially said to have been offered to Balraj Sahni but after Sahni’s colleague Rafiq Anwar helped Chetan Anand obtain a licence (only licensed producers were allowed to make films during those days), the lead role was given to Anwar himself.
Despite the destitution in Neecha Nagar , the townsmen are not presented as fatalists; the close-ups establish their optimism. Despite being pushed into a situation where water scarcity and an epidemic loom large, they refuse to compromise: they boycott a newly opened hospital that they see as a symbol of the same external aggression that brought the town to a near state of epidemic. However, they don’t indulge in violence; their approach is Gandhian and they believe in bringing change in the opposing authority’s conscience through their own suffering. Also, the poverty notwithstanding, they never cease to create art and music for inspiration. It is Pandit Ravi Shankar’s sitar strings that make music for these masses on the screen, his debut as a composer in cinema.
Neecha Nagar was certainly not the first Indian movie to explore the theme of political or social reform. Filmmakers such as Baburao Painter and V. Shantaram had brought content that could be considered much more radical through films like Savkari Pash (1925), Duniya Na Maane (1937), Aadmi (1939), and Padosi (1941). However, what made Chetan Anand’s debut film unique was both its immediacy and its universality. Further, the 1920s and 1930s were a period of incremental change. However, the freedom struggle of the 1940s, especially after the horror of World War II, had acquired a certain urgency. It was natural that filmmakers would want to bring this to the screen. Neecha Nagar , through its anti-imperial undertones and songs like Utho Ki Hamein Waqt Ki Gardish Ne Pukara , reflected this urgency. What also made Neecha Nagar more appealing was the movement that inspired it. In 1942, Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), a group of progressive, left-leaning thinkers and artists, was formed to evolve a new cultural grammar to express ideas such as political transformation. The names involved with Neecha Nagar — Chetan Anand, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Pandit Ravi Shankar and Zohra Sehgal — were all part of this intellectual wave.
Far-reaching impact It is understandable that a movie that showed struggles against colonialism would have found resonance in France back then, a country just freed from the clutches of the Nazis and fatigued by violence and war. Chetan Anand is said to have showed Neecha Nagar to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders at the first Asian Relations Conference. That Neecha Nagar gained appreciation at the conference proved that a documentation of struggles in India could have a far-reaching regional impact.
However, like many other films made before Independence, India almost lost the movie to the ravages of time. Having failed to find a proper commercial release, Neecha Nagar ’s stock languished and finally landed up in a scrap vendor’s store in Kolkata. But for the efforts of Subrata Mitra, Satyajit Ray’s cameraperson who accidentally discovered it and sent it to the National Film Archives of India, the film would have just lived as yet another entry in a cinema website.
narayanan.g@thehindu.co.in
The article earlier mentioned Hayatullah Ansari as Hindi writer. He was actually Urdu writer. The error has been corrected.
