India: Matri Bhumi

In 1980, the iconic actress-turned-politician Nargis stood up in the Indian parliament and denounced the films of Satyajit Ray for exploiting poverty and shaming India. In a subsequent interview, she accused Ray of disseminating an “abject” instead of a “correct image of India”. Nargis was thinking about the image of India abroad. Popular Indian films played to many millions at home but had little impact on global discourse in the late 1950s, unlike figures like Ray, whose work screened at prestigious international festivals and was discussed by influential international writers, thereby promulgating a particular image in the West of what India was Really Like. It was this image that annoyed Nargis and her political allies – she wanted to disseminate a “Modern India” that was more than just poverty, illiteracy, famine, hatred, and violence. When pressed on what she meant by “Modern India”, she replied “Dams…”¹

Perhaps what Nargis wanted was a film like India: Matri Bhumi (1959). After all, Roberto Rossellini’s documentary/fiction hybrid was commissioned by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first post-independence Prime Minister, who wanted a nation-building cinema to help promote his progressive agenda and highlight the entrenched socio-economic problems he faced. The project may have ended in humiliation and acrimony – the married Rossellini was essentially kicked out of the country after another of his ‘scandalous’ liaisons, this time with his married co-writer Sonali Senroy Dasgupta. Nevertheless, the film he produced seems faithful to his secular, modernising, technocratic sponsor. India: Matri Bhumi is a travelogue – many shots show people travelling through and looking at the landscape – that demonstrates the natural and cultural beauties of India. One of the film’s four episodes is set around the Hirakud Dam, an awesome engineering achievement to control alternating droughts and flooding in Central India. Most importantly, the framing sequences set in Bombay (modern day Mumbai) proclaim independent India as a utopia of tolerance and diversity, with the many millions who belong to different religions and speak different languages living in peaceful co-existence.  

This vision of harmony belies the fact that the film was begun less than a decade after the violent partition of British India, that saw mass displacement and widespread communal violence resulting in up to two million deaths. The tensions between castes and religious groups did not go away, occasionally erupting in clashes and worse that continue to this day. For all his expert expansiveness about modern India articulated in interviews with titles like “The India I Have Seen” – the filming campaign also resulted in the ten-part series L’India vista da Rossellini (1959) for Italian public television – Rossellini either did not or chose not to see these tensions.²  

As might be expected from Rossellini – and a film enthusiastically promoted by Jean-Luc Godard and the Cahiers du cinéma contingent³ – India: Matri Bhumi is not simply state propaganda. Rossellini counters Nehru’s desire for Western-style modernisation with his own Western-style ‘Orientalism’: he projects Western clichés and fantasies onto modern India. After seeming to celebrate crowded, multicultural, urban India in the opening sequence, the narrator goes in search of ‘authentic India’ – the India of the small rural village, in nature, in ‘Mother Earth’ (the meaning of “Matri Bhumi”). An oasis where natural man lives at one with the animal world. The episodes repeatedly link the rural populace with animals. The first story concerns a mahout whose courtship of a circus performer is paralleled with that of the elephants he keeps, down to the simultaneous pregnancies of the ‘wives’. In the third episode, an 80-year-old farmer protects a wounded tiger from marauding prospectors. The protagonist of the final episode is a monkey, completing the film’s move from Compromised Culture to Authentic Nature.  

Only the third episode focuses on the ‘manmade’, industrial, and modern – and this presents an alienated protagonist, Devi, exiled from his homeland in East Bengal by Partition, and forced to move his family once more after his work on the Hirakud Dam is done. Devi’s angst is reflected audio-visually by an eerie, electronically treated sound design and silhouetted shots of the vast, alien landscape at dusk and dawn, generating an atmosphere closer to sci-fi dystopia than documentary or docufiction. (Speaking of dystopian sci-fi, the croaking voice of the aging narrator in the third episode surely influenced that of the Alpha 60 computer in Godard’s Alphaville [1965] a few years later.) This inner violence is finally externalised when Devi strikes his dissatisfied wife from whom he has been progressively distanced throughout the episode.

Rossellini effects the separation of Modern Bombay from Timeless India by audio-visual means. The rapid editing, rapid delivery of the narration, and rapid rhythms of classical Indian music in the framing section gradually decelerates, giving way to long, slow tracking shots and slow, plonking, ‘primeval’ piano notes. This astonishing section surely influenced the opening sequence of the following year’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), wherein Alain Resnais narrates another Europeanised, post-war, post-conflict approach to an ancient Asian culture.  

Rossellini’s ultimate aim in India: Matri Bhumi appears to be a little different from that of 19th century Orientalists. He characterises India as a kind of spiritual bathhouse in which modern Westerners, jaded by industry, technology, and culture, can refresh themselves: “People, in modern society and in the entire world, except perhaps in Asia, have become the gears of an immense, gigantic machine”.⁴ Rossellini’s generalisations serve to elide individual Indian people, who are spoken for by Italian narrators speaking in Italian. Indian people are not encouraged to engage with the filmmaking process – as in the contemporary ethnological fictions of Rossellini’s friend Jean Rouch – or to voice their own perspectives on contemporary India, as in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s later Appunti per un film sull’India (1968). Rossellini, invited to make a film by a former colony, falls back on the bad habits of the coloniser – the kind of habits someone like Satyajit Ray spent his entire career working against.  

More troubling is the exclusively Hindu focus of the film. ‘Authentic’ India here is Hindu India. The protagonists of the fictional episodes are Hindus – even the female monkey’s name is a variant of the revered Hindu hero Rama. The huge Muslim presence in India (over 35 million in the 1951 census) is reduced to picturesque ruins, a thing of the past with no place in the future. This was doubtless inadvertent or ignorant on Rossellini’s part – a failure of ‘vision’ – but the film’s fusion of Hindu hegemony, cultural patrimony, and technological modernity would play well with current prime minister Modi and his Hindutva supporters.

This said, India: Matri Bhumi may be Rossellini’s most visually and aurally inventive film and prepared the ground for his epochal television experiments of the next decade. Nor did Rossellini simply plunder Indian culture for what he could use before leaving. Indian cinema in its turn owed much to the Italian neo-realism developed by Rossellini. In 1952, India held its first International Film Festival in three key regional venues: Bombay, Calcutta (today Kolkata), and Madras (today Chennai). A huge contingent from Italy brought neo-realist films, which had an enormous impact on filmmakers throughout the sub-continent. It was felt that the problems faced by both countries were similar – modernity represented by select cities belied by an impoverished, almost feudal agricultural system – and that neo-realism was the best way to represent them. 

At the festival, neo-realist screenwriter and proselytiser Cesare Zavattini met the Bombay Cinema’s ‘Great Showman’ Raj Kapoor, who had already shown a penchant for social conscience in blockbusters influenced by Charlie Chaplin and Frank Capra. Zavattini encouraged Kapoor to shoot outdoors. Other filmmakers followed suit, including the Bengali-born master of Hindi ‘socials’ Bimal Roy and his collaborators, such as Ritwik Ghatak and Hrishikesh Mukherjee; Malayalam pioneer P. Ramdas and, yes, Satyajit Ray. Superstar actors like Dilip Kumar and Nutan modulated performances to a more ‘realistic’ key. Rossellini’s India: Matri Bhumi should be cherished as one more element in a feedback loop of influence and revision.  

India: Matri Bhumi (1959 Italy/France 89 min)

Dir: Roberto Rossellini Scr: Roberto Rossellini, Sonali Senroy DasGupta, Fereydoun Hoveyda, and Vincenzo Talarico, based on a story by Rossellini Phot: Aldo Tonti Ed: Cesare Cavagna Mus: Philippe Arthuys 

Cast: The non-professional cast are not credited.

Endnotes