To create their idyll the filmmakers chose to focus on a series of key events in the lives of a young couple, Ramdas and Mangri: their courtship, their marriage, and the birth of their first child. To this end workers of the tea estate are employed in acting roles; the Monthly Film Bulletin praised the lead couple for being ‘completely unselfconscious’ and also commended the ‘charm and humour’ of the enactment of the story (MFB, 30 April 1948, 44). Their rituals are sensitively portrayed and are covered in some detail. The film explains the negotiations that are involved leading up to the marriage, and the crew apparently worked hard to make the wedding appear ‘authentic’, as only members of the same caste could be filmed together in these scenes (MFB, 30 April 1948, 44). The film also benefits from the production talents of its crew. It is skilfully shot, for example employing panning movements that move from landscapes towards individuals, thus mirroring the story’s progression from the general to the personal; Lutyens music is sympathetic, using both Indian and western art music idioms to dramatise the story; and Laurie Lee’s script provides deeper characterisation than always to be expected of sponsored films.

Ramdas and Mangri’s story provides opportunities to show the foresight of the employers, in particular in revealing the maternity provisions on the estate. The pastoral bliss of the young couple and the role of the tea estate are not always so easily brought together, however. In fact, to depict an idyll the tea-garden sometimes has to be removed. In the opening scenes we first see Ramdas beyond its bounds, buying his string of beads at the local market; we are told that ‘all the morning is his, all the river is’. The couple’s initial meeting also takes place at a distance from the estate’s compound. We see Mandri at the end of her working day journeying away from the cultivated tea-gardens, ‘through the living colours of her country’, to the wilderness of the jungle, where Ramdas is shown hunting a bird; when they come across each other Ramdas makes a gift of his beads to her: ‘the hunter has found his prize’.

The film also has a need to depict the work of the estate, and here it is surprisingly frank in showing how the young couple’s lives are circumscribed. The morning after their wedding we are informed that ‘the short, sharp holiday is over and Ramdas and Mandri awake to their new life, which is their old life, their life of work and wages’. Similarly, after their child’s birth they soon return to the gardens, accompanied by ‘the first of their family’, who is lain on a blanket as they return to work. While they are depicted as being happy in their employment, the film has no qualms about underlining their endeavour, admitting that Mandri’s ‘body is tired, her fingers are stained from the green leaves’. But who are they working for? The film removes almost all traces of white people from its depiction of the estate (there is just one senior white worker present, captured in the distance in a large group scene). Elsewhere, Indian workers are shown in senior positions, and there is an interesting scene in which workers are shown receiving their pay and bowing in gratitude to someone who remains out of shot.

Is there a larger metaphor at work in this film? It was made as India moved from being a colony to being a commonwealth country, achieving independence but still linked economically to Britain. Here the workers on the tea estates are shown to have assumed control over certain aspects of their own lives – the film concludes with its shots of the young family in the tea garden, stating that ‘they are its children and its inheritors’ – they are nevertheless shown as being reassuringly hardworking, loyal and productive.

Richard Osborne (June 2010)