Like many other rural documentaries about India (and indeed other locations), In Rural Maharashtradepicts a land that is unchanging. We hear of the ‘daily round, the same time for each new task each day’, and learn that ‘hundreds of years ago these families would have looked the same’. Various devices are employed to convey the circularity of this life. The film portrays a day in the life of a farming family, taking us from dawn until dusk. Within this conventional narrative structure we also get a movement through the seasons, from ploughing through to harvest time and autumnal celebrations. There is also a movement from the village towards the market town. However, the neat patterning of the film falters with the closing segment, which unexpectedly depicts a second excursion for the family, as they head out to a fair. It is here that military recruitment is mentioned for the first time.

Again, like several other Indian documentaries, this film stresses primitive farming methods: a milling wheel is of ‘ancient design’ and the village uses ‘one of the most primitive forms of irrigation’. However, it does take care to show working methods in some detail. Multiple camera shots are employed to show the processes of sowing, reaping, and food preparation. Although the location of the village is not given, the filmmakers do illustrate some distinct local features: ‘From the way these women wear their saris and the style of the temple, from the Banyan tree, we know we are in Maharashtra’. Similarly, the people’s festivals and customs are outlined carefully and with a restraint from condescension.

This film stresses harmony, both within the farming family and between that family and the land. Correspondingly, the actors are constantly smiling at one another. There is also a bizarre sequence in which the wife cradles a giant cauliflower and kisses it like a baby. Inauthenticity is apparent in other parts of the film. A dance sequence in the market town employs character actors, and in the cauliflower fields there is further choreography: a line of women pick their vegetables in unison.

In its review of the film the Monthly Film Bulletin complained that ‘some scenes were not only acted but idealised and one wonders how many of the rest suffered in the same way’ (MFB, October 1946, 144). This intermingling of fact and fiction serves one of the film’s purposes, however. It produces an image of a fecund land with a fecund people, ripe for recruitment for the War. There is attempted subtlety in the film’s introduction of its military theme. We first get a glimpse of an Indian in khaki at the celebrations in the market town. Next there is a display by the local regiment of Maharashtra soldiers at the local fair. However, the film tests our credulity by now arguing that the harmonious Maharashtra villagers are ‘first and foremost a martial people’. This is illustrated by cutting to a wrestling match, and then by recounting the story of Shivaji. The film attempts to reconcile its aims by returning to tradition, stating that ‘these twentieth century soldiers are dressed in khaki, but their ceremonial of departure is the same as it was in Shivaji’s great days’. The new characterisation of the Maharashtra people in these scenes, and the way in which these scenes affect the overall structure of the film, makes them feel as though they are  tagged on. As such, the film unwittingly conveys something of the intrusion of the War into everyday life.

Richard Osborne (October 2009)