These sections are constructed in different ways. The first of them is broken down into two parts. It opens with panoramic shots of the factory compound, followed by footage of barge repairs. Its second part follows one of the standard patterns of the industrial film: it covers the manufacturing process in detail and in chronological order. One of the aims of many industrial films was to demystify methods of production for an audience that was buying mass-manufactured goods (Peterson).

There are other aspects to this film’s portrayal of the jute production process. It stresses the up-to-date techniques used at the factory. A title card indicates that the mill is ‘worked on the most modern lines’. We are further informed that the mill is ‘often visited by distinguished visitors to India’, that ‘The Engine Room of this Mill is recognised as one of the finest in India’ and that the plant ‘compares very favourably with any similar lay-out in the British Isles’.

These latter title cards indicate that the film was perhaps intended for a British audience. However, this stress upon the forward-thinking nature of Thomas Duff & Co. Ltd takes on a different light during the ‘Indian Workman’ section of the film. Here the title cards boast of ‘Modern Sanitation’ and ‘Septic Tank Latrines’. They outline the difference between a ‘Typical Indian Hut’ compared with ‘present day accommodation provided for workers’. This section of the film also features the workers’ playground, the company’s school and, in a staged scene, a white nurse instructing a group of Indian women about ‘abnormal labour’. The section concludes with an ethnographical shot of ‘A Happy family’, in which an Indian woman holding her child faces the camera, eventually breaking into a broad smile.

The second section of the film can be seen as a response both to the threat of welfare legislation that would limit the flexibility of the workforce (sickness compensation was also an issue, hence, perhaps, the focus on sanitation) and to contemporary public concerns with welfare and conditions. This also explains the sequence showing new mothers taking their babies into the factories to attend to their ‘modest needs’: given the lack of acceptable childcare within the mills and the ambiguous nature of maternity and other employment rights this was of course a necessity rather than a luxury, but the film presents it as illustrative of a concern with family welfare.

Although Jute aims to show Thomas Duff & Co. Ltd in the most positive light, viewed today this intention is undermined by the film’s structure and by its content. One of the film’s title cards claims that ‘The comfort and welfare of the Indian Workers employed at these Mills are the first consideration of the Company’. This is not necessarily borne out in the structure of the film itself: it is the workings of the factory’s machinery and the processing of jute that are prioritised within the film’s chronology; jute processing is in addition given the largest proportion of screen time (however, these are in part generic conventions).

The film is revealing in other ways: we see that the regime in the factory mirrors that of the British Raj. British rule in India was one in which the many were governed by the few: at the beginning of the twentieth century nearly 300 million Indian subjects were administered by fewer than 1,000, mostly British, members of the Indian Civil Service (Louis, 2001, 5-6). In this film we witness the 7,000 workers of the Titaghur company’s mill being overseen by 15 male European staff, to whom 44 Indian clerical staff are subordinate. Further examples of the hierarchy of the company are in evidence. The European staff are given a matching uniform of white suits and pith helmets; their role appears to be the passive monitoring of the mill’s engines and of the Indian staff. The Indian clerical staff have no set uniform; most are wearing dhoti, some have western-style jackets. The workers in the factory are in traditional Indian clothing. Their work and play contrasts strongly with the behaviour of European staff. We witness two workers cutting jute on an open steel blade; we also witness two, near naked, Indians in a wrestling match. There is also a clear separation between male and female workers in the factory. Furthermore, although the workers’ homes are portrayed as an improvement on the typical Indian hut, they are also seen in close proximity to the mill; part of the compound that had been coolly surveyed by the camera at the film’s beginning.

Richard Osborne and Francis Gooding (May 2010)