TheDaak review

Book: Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India by Manishita Dass, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, 248 pp., US$ 29.95, ISBN: 9780199394395

by Aditi Mann

Manishita Dass’ Outside the Lettered City is a comprehensive work on cinema and reception studies. By using various archival materials- film fragments, interview transcripts, government reports, autobiographies, journalistic writings, and publicity materials et cetera., she attempts to explore and understand the complex and contradictory discourse formed around the formation of the ‘Indian’ audience. Her explorations are located within the debates on the public sphere and the emerging mass culture in late colonial India (Dass 2016). 

The book is divided into different sections consisting of an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion. In the introduction, the author introduces her objective and explains the title of the book. The first chapter is titled, Conjuring Tricks: Mythologicals and the Invention of an “Indian” Public. The chapter name is self explanatory, as Dass talks about the genre of the pauranikas, images and cinematographic techniques (special effects) that helped lure people to the cinemas. She explores the ways in which faith intertwined with performances on the screen to evoke feelings of nationalism. The second chapter is titled Shadows on the Screen: Imagining the Mass Audience in 1920s India. In this chapter, the author contextualises cinema in contemporary society- she discusses the differences in the “Indian” audience and the suspicions surrounding cinema. In the next chapter, A School for Scandal: Cinema and Lessons in Modernity, Dass explores the idea of cinema as representative of modernity and also the perceived evils of modernity. She locates this duality in the space of the city and the figure of the women. Chapter 4, Distant Observers: Film Criticism and the Making of a Bengali Film Culture, focuses on the emergent film culture of the lettered city. Here she explores the ways in which the elites thought of and talked about cinema and how through their discussions tried to reclaim authority over a public sphere now dominated by the masses. The conclusion that follows tries to bring all the strands of explorations pursued by the author together and ends with a potential theme of research: looking at experiences of modernity from the margins of metropolis, through the lens of cinema.

In the early twentieth century, cinema emerged as a new mass medium capable of communicating to a much larger and more heterogenous public, than print or any other visual media could. The performative aspect of the films and their spectacular thrills- use of special effects, manipulations of time, space, and image to represent the fantastic, added to the non-verbal appeal of cinema amongst the masses. Interestingly, one of the first responses towards the new media was to take cognizance of its instructive capacity. 

Rabindranath Tagore, the famous Bengali polymath, advocated using ‘the bioscope’ as a nation-building tool. Cinema was extolled as a means of teaching the ‘public’ “lessons of good citizenship, patriotism and other qualities which books or speeches cannot do effectively” (p.5). Cinema was thought of as a tool of nationalist propaganda. This teaching, Dass has quite correctly identified, was meant for the non-elites of the Indian society. Who were these non-elites? They are to be understood in opposition to the elites, i.e., the literary public spheres’ members- spaces created by the print culture where educated Indians engaged in political, cultural, economic and intellectual discourses and shaped public opinion. These doyens of culture and leaders of the nationalist movement who were thinking about cinema and its effects were located in what the author calls the “lettered city”. She has borrowed the term ‘Lettered City’ to denote colonial cities like Calcutta and Bombay, and their heterogeneous public spheres-  domains of power and privilege that was not only urban for the most part but also urbane, largely restricted to a print-literate public, and fully accessible only to an elite minority of the Indian population  differentiated by class and gender (p.4). Dass’ lettered city is not an isolated monolith detached from the realm of the popular. It is more of a conurbation of multiple zones of communication separated by language, i.e. a confederation of vernacular public spheres.

The crux of Dass’ argument lies in the multiple discourses that cinema generated as a site of the public sphere. She explores these strands to prevent the caging of cinema and cinematic studies in a singular framework of interpretation. She discusses cinema as a mass medium of mass appeal, a pedagogical tool, a nation building tool and cinema creating persistent anxieties amongst the denizens of the lettered city of its’ morally corruptive influences on the masses. 

Cinema as a nation-building enterprise is a well-established trope. Dass brings into this discussion the role that mythologicals or the Pauranika movies played in the Indian context.  

“. . . While the life of Christ was rolling fast before my physical eyes, I was mentally visualizing the Gods, Shri Krishna, Shri Ramchandra, their Gokul and Ayodhya. I was gripped by a strange spell. I bought another ticket and saw the film again. This time I felt my imagination taking shape on the screen. Could this really happen? Could we, the sons of India, ever be able to see Indian images on the screen?” (Phalke, cited in Dass p. 2)

The Indian images that Phalke is hitherto referring to were “familiar” stories from Indian (read Hindu) mythology and history- for example, Raja Harishchandra (1913), Lanka Dahan (1917), Kaliya Mardan (1919) etc. The familiar narrative coupled with special effects and new cinematography techniques (like the diegetic audience) helped foreground the act of group spectatorship as the basis of an Affective community. Dass notes that this association of the modern media with traditional themes offers a complex alternative narrative of modernity cinematic public sphere as spaces of re-enchantment (p. 59) . These films operated in the novel space of realist mytho-politics. In the late colonial period, religion has remained one of the few areas that still eluded colonial political surveillance and censorship. Indian filmmakers used this aperture to produce religious narratives replete with political allegory. It served a two-fold purpose- firstly, by blurring the lines between faith and patriotism, these films harnessed a public sphere that extended beyond the limits of the lettered city. Secondly, while these films did not forever escape the colonial state, their re-working of mythology into political symbolism lured in masses. Dass highlights their role, but is not remiss to point out that by primarily borrowing stories and images from the Hindu tradition these films projected the former as the national cultural heritage. Consequently, this excluded substantial sections of the Indian population- Muslims, Christians, Parsis etc. 

However, this idea of cinema transforming the masses (spectators) into citizens, is only a singular understanding of cinema as a site of the public sphere. She draws out the nuances of the discursive web of cinema by bringing in the reaction of the owners of the cinema halls in the lettered cities. For them, the masses storming in the halls were not the undifferentiated Indian audience. The Indian public was not an egalitarian national community but divided along class lines. Cinema also operated as a site of asserting differences- of distinctions based on gender, education and the degrees of westernization.

Extending the argument about cinema’s appeal to the masses, Dass brings in the discourse about cinema as a potentially dangerous space of modernity. The elites of the lettered city were anxious of the corrupting influences that cinema, especially western cinema, could exert on the unassuming, impressionable youth and uneducated masses. They feared that the ideals, lifestyles and romance shown in the western films would bring a sense of discontentment with the native environment and lead to social and political unrest. Another source of anxiety was the threat to the traditional by blind emulation of the west and its modernity. The films made in the 1920-30s reflect the concern regarding the harmful consequences of modernity- individual alienation, cultural unmooring and threat to the identity of an emerging nation. The city’s site and women’s figures were increasingly associated with the idea of the modern. The apprehensions of the time were projected onto them. Cities and modern women led the naïve Indian men astray and alienated them from their roots. Dass, interestingly, observes that quite possibly these concerns of the elites stemmed from the trespassing of the masses into the boundary of the lettered city and the subsequent division of stakeholdership in the cultural sphere. The elites’ attempt to cultivate ideal viewership – by categorizing films and producing authoritative narratives around the production of cinema and the industry as whole- were their attempts to reclaim the monopoly over the cultural space.

Manishita Dass has undertaken a vast project. In her endeavour to bring out the intricacies of the discursive web created around cinema in the late colonial period in India, she brings in a lot of variables. And while interesting anecdotes and other archival material enrich her writing, I found her arguments scattered. It was difficult for me to follow the progression in her argument- there was a lot of going back and forth. Even so, her work is significant in foregrounding reception studies as the primary framework of analysis. By focusing on what cinema and spectatorship meant to Indian viewers, she has tried to expand the scope of reception studies beyond viewer responses to individual films or the study of distribution and exhibition. Dass’ focus is on understanding how the Indians thought of themselves and fellow Indians as a film audience with cinema emerging as a mass media in the context of colonial modernity and nationalism. She was not only able to show how cinematic spectatorship came to align with rudimentary notions of citizenship, but also highlighted the duality of cinema’s symbolicism. The book is a significant addition to the field of cinematic and reception studies for bringing out the complexities and contradictions in the formation of a public by moving beyond the theories of public sphere and masses.

References

Ranita Chatterjee. (2016). “Book Review: Manishita Dass, Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India”. 

Manishita Dass. (2016).  Outside the Lettered city: Cinema, Modernity and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India, Oxford: OUP

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