Indian Background is notable for two main reasons. The first is the way in which it represents the Government’s filmmaking response to the changing political climate in India. The second is the way in which it reinterprets previously issued film footage. The film itself is comprised of three sections: its opening outlines the current political situation in India; its main central section is its ‘Indian background’, a survey of the principal characteristics of life in the sub-continent; and its conclusion ponders how India will progress.

The film begins with sequences showing large Indian crowds. These are shot from a number of angles, but often with the cameraman looking down from a vantage point. Not only does this help to emphasise the scale of the crowds, it also produces a level of separation between the cameraman/viewer and the mass of people below. These crowd scenes are intercut with footage of the leading political figures of the day: Gandhi, Jinnah and Nehru. The commentary meanwhile tells an old story about India being a land of contrasts: rich and poor; old and new; Hindu and Muslim. Although this set of oppositions is related to some of the images on display, it is notable that none of the leaders is mentioned by name. Instead the commentary emphasises the fact that it is among contradictions that ‘a nation is being born’.

The film then provides its ‘Indian background’. It first posits a belief that is familiar from many other British documentaries – that ‘the life of India is in the villages’ – and moreover uses materials from previous rural films to underline this point. The tone and the re-use of materials are startling. The film pours almost vindictive scorn on the backwardness of farming communities, where tools have ‘not altered in a 1000 years’ and where ‘to live is an achievement of which there is little to be remembered’. It condemns both child and adult labour. A sequence from Hillmen Go To War (1944), originally used to illustrate the increased productivity and wealth of the villagers, is now accompanied by the information that ‘much work, little food and the long summer’s brutal heat age the peasants before their time’. Footage from In Rural Maharashtra (1940), showing the villagers crops on their way to market, is now accompanied by talk of global exploitation: ‘the peasant is the producer, but most of his product goes from him, a journey that takes it into another world’. Both of the earlier films feature traditional village celebrations, where life is praised for its ‘harmony’ and the festivities are termed ‘exciting’. Re-used here the commentator states that ‘tradition is an invisible tyranny that binds the villager to his heritage of poverty, dirt, ignorance and disease’. The commentary doesn’t always subvert the original use of the film materials, however. The camerawork of the earlier films is commonly their most sympathetic aspect in terms of highlighting the dignity of the people. Now accompanied by a wholly partisan commentary, the images and the rhetoric are often at odds.

It is with mechanised India that this film throws in its lot, in keeping with the enthusiasms of many contemporaneous official productions about industry on Britain’s own shores. The film cuts abruptly from footage of rural industry to scenes of a large factory. ‘Now that’s more like it’, the commentator says. He turns away from the trope of depicting the sub-continent by means of its village life, stating that ‘this is happening in India too’. Footage from War Pictorial News No. 51 (1942), originally used to illustrate the contribution of India’s factories and factory workers to the war cause, is now used to highlight general Indian mechanisation. The commentator instructs us that ‘it’s no use sentimentalising about machines destroying old crafts and old ways of living’; these are ‘changes for the better’.

In conclusion the film returns to the contradictions of India. The footage of traditional celebrations is cut sharply into an image of urban nightlife. Next the film shows several shots of scientific buildings, among them a college of agriculture, and contemplates ‘how are these able to flourish in the same land and century as the villages rooted in the past?’ (here an image of a woman working a handloom is perhaps used to link this Gandhi-inspired practice with a dangerously backwards-looking India). The film calls for ‘changes in men’s minds’. It argues for an India of technical progress, and it makes it clear from where this progress will be derived. The images of scientific endeavour are accompanied by western music, and the commentary states that the future ‘will inevitably be shaped by western methods’. Nevertheless, the parade of contradictory images has rendered the filmmakers uncertain. This surprisingly complex, ambivalent, even confused film reflects the current tumult of India. ‘It’s hard to understand what all this adds up to’, the commentator admits.

Richard Osborne (October 2009)