When the West came filming

The gaze of foreign eyes on India has been an enduring subject. From travellers to writers, from colonialists to scholars, foreigners have looked at this land in different ways.

The one common strand has been their perception of India as a vast, chaotic and mostly exotic country, at once comfortable in its amazing diversity and uneasy in managing its contradictions.

The 20th century brought in a new breed of foreign India-gazers: filmmakers. From Hollywood to the more “serious”, arty director, they all came seeking out stories and locations for their audiences.

There are many old Hollywood movies about the mysterious and capricious Orient, though often this included a kitschy mix of everything from Arabian nights to Maharajas, with snake charmers, dagger-throwers and veiled damsels thrown in.

The Europeans, recovering from the ravages of the war, “discovered” India only later. But in the 1950s, filmmakers as diverse as Fritz Lang and Roberto Rossellini made films here.

Lang made The Indian Tomb and The Tiger Of Eschnapur, while Rossellini came to India to film a documentary India Matri Bhumi during which he also found love and eloped with a married Bengali woman, causing great scandal at the time.

These fascinating forays are discussed in a new book, Outsider: Films On India, 1950-1990, edited by Shanay Jhaveri, a recent graduate of Brown University. The choice of films is eclectic — it does not, for example, contain Attenborough’s Gandhi which has been over-analysed, nor Slumdog Millionaire, which came out long after 1990. We have film directors as diverse as Jean Renoir, James Ivory, Louis Malle and Pier Paolo Passolini. The essayists are mostly historians and critical theorists.

Jhaveri’s own essay on Shakespearewallah rips apart the genteel pretensions of the film — and by extension of the Merchant Ivory weltanschauung — which laments the emergence of the lowbrow at the expense of high-culture in post-Independence India.

The connection with the present day, when seemingly “different” films are being made based loosely on the plays of Shakespeare as opposed to cheap masala movies, is well made.