New Cinema Movement and the "no land's man", text only

New Cinema Movement and the "no land's man":
questions of land in Ankur and Aakrosh

Tracing the "no land's man" before the advent of the late sixtie

Moving from Eric Hobsbawm to Benedict Anderson to Partha Chatterjee, the concept of “nation” has referred to a collective historical identity that became an instrument of resistance against colonial and theocratic oppressions, giving rise to sovereign citizenship and a state. Virdi (1993) refers to Iain Chambers' Border Dialogues: Journeys in Post-modernism (1990) as she interprets popular Hindi cinema’s portrayal of nation in terms of the cultural and political imagination of the ruling elites. She points out how cultural artefacts and non-print media create an “elite hegemony” of the ruling class. In this way they endorse a kind of nationalism that remains in a constant process of reinventing itself. Land remains at the heart of this process of creation and re-creation of an Indian identity even after independence. Land and its meaning undergo negotiations with structures of power either by consolidating or providing challenges to that power.

Two significant films, taken as representatives of the era of post-independence land reforms, clearly indicate how 50s Hindi films attempted to address the land question as a locus of national identity. In one, Mehboob Khan's Mother India of 1957, the spirit of a unified geo-political identity lies in the motherhood of a peasant woman representing the holy land, a place (Nehru's "Bharat Mata") where people share an organic relation to the land irrespective of diverse ethnicities and differences in culture. That film overtly disseminated a sense of pride in national identity by affirming an enduring memory of the past as the nation’s unique and quintessential identity while envisioning a present based on consent to a common life. French philosopher Ernst Renan would view this as a nation and its people committed to a “large-scale solidarity.”

On the other hand, Bimal Roy's 1953 classic Do Bigha Zameen rejected that kind of projected nationalist imagination because it diffused questions of land ownership. Roy’s film interrogated the very state of “peasantry” and its plight within India’s transitional society, one of bourgeois dominance of the ruling elites of the Indian National Congress. . Unlike Mother India, Bimal Roy's film excluded iconic images of land reform’s historical success under the new government. Rather, Do Bigha Zameen depicted common peasants’ plight in India’s new era of capitalist development as a sovereign state. The concept of land was converted into some sort of a property, something which can be measured in terms of money. That denoted a huge change in the Indian way of life and how people looked at land. In the story arc of this film, Shambhu Mahato, the protagonist of Do Bigha Zameen, considers his land to be a mother. But in order to pay off his debt, he is forced to sell his two acres of land. The businessman and the moneylender force Shambhu to sell off his land and become a labourer, dispossessing him from his own way of life. Shambhu denies such a proposition claiming his land to be his mother. “By selling the land,” the businessman, grabbing Shambhu's land, says with a sneering laugh, “the mother will become the father.”

A similar theme is traced in Dharti Ke Laal, a film made by K.A. Abbas in 1946 using a backdrop of the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 that claimed the lives of millions. In this first feature film made under the banner of IPTA —Indian Peoples Theatre Association, the oldest cultural forum initiated by the Communist Party of India—the Samaddars, a family of farmers, join an exodus of the peasant community to the city in search of food, eventually becoming part of the reserve army of labour [1] similar to the Mahatos in Do Bigha Zameen.

Historically, the fate of India’s agricultural community-at-large came about through deep-seated changes in the nature of capitalism that took place toward the end of the nineteenth century. The question of land relations as portrayed in cinema cannot be understood without looking at the political economy of the land laws passed by the British in India. These laws, the most prominent of all being the Permanent Settlement, not only shaped national consciousness but aided the formation of a new hegemonic class. With this kind of political process at work, where a traditional community undergoes an historical change, a displacement where modernity with all its trajectories opens new ways of seeing life, it became a progressive imperative to locate the people of the land as legitimate/legitimized citizens of the nation. For the purpose of this essay, I have coined a term for the peasantry in their new status in a pun on the common term: no-man's-land. Here, the appellation "no land's man" delineates a category of the transitional peasantry in its historical specificity. In this light, Dharti Ke Laal is one of the first Indian films trying to use cinema as a vehicle for social, historical and political consciousness. This script not only traces the plight of the modern day peasant-turned-labourer, but directs the struggles of these "no land's men" (the peasant community along with the Samaddar family) toward collectivity, thus keeping their faith in a socialist future (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1995).

In the late 1950s this new urban identity of the erstwhile landless peasants failed to make itself relevant in the popular imagination of Hindi Cinema in the wake of the Second Five Year Plan. Concerns over peasantry, who were the locus of national identity, faced a complete erasure in popular cinema from the late 1950s to the end of the next decade. Prioritizing industrial development by the Indian State became the ideological foregrounding of a new bourgeois cinema that saw the emergence of some sort of a class interest divorced from agrarian concerns. Popular Hindi cinema of the 60s became obsessed with a certain bourgeois nationalism that also influenced the way it saw land relations and patterns of ownership. From Mother India in 1957 to Waqt in 1963, Hindi cinema saw a stark visual shift with a rural mise-en-scene, giving way to urban spectacles of the new bourgeoisie.

This shift can be analyzed through Partha Chatterjee's reading of Nehruvian development: that is, films provided an imaginary path, a “new theoretical work” for the necessary reconstruction of the very idea of nationalism. For Chatterjee, rapid industrialization aided by the vehemence of state-capitalism shaped a notion of two large groups/classes —a progressive one (the group which aligned itself with the scientific and economic interest of the Nehruvian equations of national development) and a reactionary one (a group which did not align itself with such aspirations). The political economy’s transition from the fifties to the sixties has been called Passive Revolution (Prasad 1998) and notably this period saw the emergence of what Vasudevan would call Transitional Cinema.

In Transitional Cinema, issues of agrarian reforms, peasantry, and consciousness of rural life ceased to dominate India’s projected national character. Chatterjee's category of progressive Indians seemed to be the future of the nation. This class began to manifest itself in popular films through characters who were closely linked to the newly formed institutions of the state (the judicial and the military) along with industrialists who were elite upper-caste Hindus. This bourgeoning script emphasis in transitional cinema turned land into an absent entity in Hindi films for years to come. Protagonists hailing from bourgeois background turned out to be the only existing class to focus on within the rapidly developing nation. Most of them were shown as descendants of righteous landlords who have become industrialists in this new era of capitalist development. In this light, transitional cinema saw the rise of the family romance—a self-sustained genre that revolved around love stories, inevitably culminating in marriage. Families, family secrets, family inheritance and lineage played a key role in the resolution of such narratives. A kind of sub-genre, which Rajadhyaksha calls “lost-and-found,” became a popular trope in family romance where revelation of the protagonist's royal inheritance became a marker of his social acceptance; such a story arc resulted in a narrative resolution devoid of critical or historical interrogation Transitional Cinema treated questions of inheritance and ownership of land as ahistorical, something that is natural, heralding the emergence and legitimacy of this new class.

Nasir Hussain’s Tumsa Nahin Dekha in 1957 and Dil Deke Dekho in 1959 and Shakti Samanta's Kashmir Ki Kali in 1964 are some of the major hits of this genre, with Shammi Kapoor starring in the lead in all of them. In Tumsa Nahi Dekha (1957) and few years later in Shankar Mukherjee's Jhumroo (1961), an imagology (a term borrowed from literature referring to an ideological kind of imagery) depicts certain communities of local tribes, feeding the audience with a socio-political construct of these marginalised communities through presenting a pattern of image culture, thereby evoking ideas of stereotypes and giving rise to imaginations, ideas and Vorstellungsbilder (performance pictures) in order to create national typological fictions (Beller 2007).The habitats of tribal and rural communities get reduced to mere visual pleasure, and the films’ settings are turned into exotic locations, where the Hindi-speaking protagonists have their adventures. In films like Tumsa Nahin Dekha or Jhumroo, an entire tribal community is mocked at and caricatured, their leaders often shown as goons; their only narrative purpose is limited to action sequences with elite, righteous protagonists. Their engagement with the new nation that aspires to be industrious became “weak” in the sense that the lifestyles, values and concerns of these marginalised communities become irrelevant to the larger goal of nation-building.

As is clear, these ideologically manipulated representations of a marginalised “other” were paired with dominant, monolithic representations of the Hindi speaking, educated, progressive, Hindu, bourgeois protagonists owning the stakes of a modern nation. Such protagonists continue to dominate the mise-en-scene and scripts of Vijay Bhatt’s Hariyali Aur Raasta, Lekh Tandon’s Professor (both in 1962), Samanta’s Kashmir Ki Kali (1964) and B.R.Chopra’s Humraaz (1967). The property-owning elites not only own erstwhile peasant lands but also have a territorial ownership over historically disputed regions of India, like Kashmir and Darjeeling [2]. For instance, in Humraaz, lands of working-class ethnic groups of Darjeeling are represented-under-erasure through the plot device of a military takeover. The film depicts a military contractor who loves to hold boisterous drinking parties for his army officer friends on his lavish property yet whose aim is to keep his daughter from marrying someone in the army, as he wants a son-in-law to whom he can hand over his estate.

This form of bourgeois cinema created a certain abstraction of national identity that suppressed other identities, the "no land's man," either through stereotyping (through imagologies) or through absence. However, the opacity of such national bourgeois culture then came under harsh interrogation by the films of the New Cinema Movement (henceforth NCM) which can be said to have revived the question of the "no land's man." That is, it critiqued the very legitimacy of the Nehruvian project as well as the tropes of Transitional Cinema that dominated mainstream culture till the late sixties.

New Cinema Movement (NCM) and the "No Land's Man"

Kalyan Sanyal in his Rethinking Capitalist Development (2007) states how a process through which imperialist penetration in a third world economy selects a few segments (like the agrarian and artisanal societies) of the pre-existing economic formation for transformation, including the division of labour that remains associated with it. Transformation occurs in those selected sectors that could provide raw materials for a capitalist mode of production. This creates excessively uneven development by displacing peasants from their primary means of production. In reaction, such a development eventually leads forces of traditional modes of production to put up resistance against such expansion. The "no land's men" are a group who belongs to this sector, who are left as a residue in the continual process of land-grabbing. In India, they formed the backbone of the Naxalbari Movement [3] during the seventies, when state-capitalism led to what David Harvey termed “accumulation by dispossession” (2003).

Named after the district in West Bengal, the flames of Naxalbari peasant rebellion spread like a forest fire in the middle of 1967. Peasants had already formed village committees for reclaiming the lands that had been taken from them. Scholars like Bernard D' Mello in his India after Naxalbari: Unfinished History (2018) finds the movement to be India's “1968” [4] of revolutionary humanism. But what is important here in the context of Indian popular cinema is how the Naxalbari Movement brought about a change in the way we perceive the nation. This happened through the cinematic imaginations of New Indian Cinema, irrespective of the fact that Prasad terms it as a cinema of containment (Prasad 1998).The film industry's response, as Madhava Prasad finds, was an internal segmentation that led to the establishment of New Cinema on one hand and a middleclass or the middlebrow cinema on the other. An “aesthetic mobilisation” was being forged by the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) that tried to fuse the binary between the spectatorial aspiration and state-intervention. Finally the FFC created its third segment via a politically charged negotiation with state-form and the political disequilibrium by using the star image of Amitabh Bachchan (Prasad 1998). My point of departure would be to locate the "no land's man" in some filmic narratives under the NCM that distanced themselves from the aesthetics of middle-class cinema made by directors like Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee.

Moinak Biswas has discussed how official archives of Indian history have for a long time deliberately avoided any record that would reflect presence of a subaltern mind. New historians like Ranajit Guha, Kalyan Sanyal and Partha Chatterjee re-read these official documents “against the grain” which unravel traces of subaltern consciousness (Biswas2020). A sense of history that colonial and even postcolonial writing has created reverberates in the same vein in commercial Hindi films too, until 1968, a year significant for more than one reason. Echoing Simon Gunn's views of “history from below” (Gunn 2014) which aims to make the voices of the marginalised audible in the elite dominance over the Indian national narrative, advent of films like Ankur (1974)and Aakrosh (1980) brought to the fore a poignant history of the marginalised who were hardly seen in transitional cinema of the sixties.

Before excavating the factors behind the ideological and formal aesthetics of NCM, one must recall the political turmoil that India was engulfed in—the Moplah rebellion of Malabar [5], the Bardoli Satyagraha [6], the Tebhaga Movement [7], and of course, the Naxalite movement. Within this environment of the late sixties, the NCM manifesto written by Arun Kaul and Mrinal Sen was released in the year 1968 (republished in 2014 in Scott MacKenzie's Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology). Instead of maintaining a distance from the mainstream and the popular films in Hindi, NCM vowed to reflect a conscious reaction to it (Ghosh 2011). Critiquing thoughtlessness in mainstream film culture, the manifesto proclaimed the need for a “better cinema” and it explained and advocated for assimilating international film cultures:

“This New Cinema Movement (NCM), as it might be termed has manifested itself through the ‘New Wave' in France, the ‘underground' in America, and yet other yet unlabelled currents in other countries. The time for launching such a movement in India is now ripe, for, we believe, that the climate needed to nourish it obtains today” (Kaul and Sen 1968).

The time that Kaul and Sen are talking about, when they see the need to launch such a “conscious” cinema movement, is stated clearly in the manifesto. The year 1968 was one of the most significant periods in the world across nations, including India following the 1967 Naxal uprising. Kaul and Sen use the claims of an authorial signature to provide legitimacy for artistic expression and creative freedom, something which will no more be limited by equations of studios and production houses. They further declare,

“New Cinema stands for a film ‘with a signature.’ New Cinema engages itself in a ruthless search for ‘truth’ as an individual artist sees it. New Cinema lays stress on the right questions and bothers less about the right answers. New Cinema believes in looking fresh at everything including old values and in probing deeper everything, including the mind and the conditions of man” (Kaul and Sen 1968).

The “truth” that NCM manifesto talks about is not limited to the ambits of the aesthetic mode of realist representation under the statist gaze, but also implicitly refers to the political excesses of the time (Prasad 1998). Although Prasad looks at NCM as a state-controlled aesthetic program without any other attribute, the manifesto released in 1968 clearly prescribes a certain version of "truth" that the filmmakers of the movement were regarding in terms of their own artistic perception. Two major points found in the NCM manifesto would affect both form and content. The first is that of raising question rather than seeking answers, implying a polemical structure that would go against the very aesthetics of popular representations. Such polemic, for example, is deeply woven into the phrase “conditions of man,” entailing the very material aspect of the conditions of existence. The second aspect of the manifesto is that it challenges the aesthetics of representation in terms of ideology. The words "looking fresh at everything including old values" make it evident that their films would examine structural discrimination such as class, caste, and gender.

Using a rural landscape in the first half of NCM becomes a key cinematic figuration of its mise-en-scene. Apart from Mani Kaul's Uski Roti (1969) that operates on a different plane of territorial realism, Mrinal Sen's Bhuvan Shome (1969) and Shyam Benegal's Ankur (1974) investigate the ideological terrain of the rural-urban dialogue in terms of how different sectors perceive land. The aesthetics of placing films in varied rural landmasses contributes as a key factor to some NCM films. The scripts inevitably raise direct as well as indirect questions of land and its relation to marginalised communities in various parts of India in a new way. However, this did not mean that the NCM directors stood apart from the FFC. For Prasad, for example, Benegal “forged” a developmental aesthetic that appropriated regional realism and proclaimed to be “political cinema par excellence.” In alliance with the developmental aesthetic that FFC had created, Prasad puts Benegal along with other NCM filmmakers in a position of appropriating the statist gaze. For their purpose of creating a national cinema backed by the state, NCM created a spectatorial position exploiting regional realism. In hindsight, it should also be mentioned here, as Rajadhyaksha in his Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid (2009) observes, FFC's exploitative opportunism of turning young filmmakers into producers themselves forced committed artists of NCM to take loans by mortgaging their personal belongings. However, Prasad reads FFC's involvement in state control of film aesthetics as a sort of “research and development” which in turn enhanced mainstream film production to assimilate aesthetic strategies and exploit a spectatorial position of dissent and social realism in the turbulent decade of the seventies.

Coming back to the question of land and land relations in the context of NCM, I posit that films like Ankur and Govind Nihalani's Aakrosh are open to further re-readings beyond a limited and simplistic explanation of their alliance with the statist gaze of realist aesthetics. In one of the seminars on "Looking Back at the Indian New Wave (or NCM)" organised by the University of Chicago in the year 2015, Rajadhyaksha points out some key perspectives on NCM that bails the film movement out of the dismissals presented by Prasad previously in his work (1998). For him, the idea of the national in NCM films did not sit well with the agenda of the state. He also pointed out that there has not been a single national cinema under a single homogeneous project; rather, there are multiple national cinemas in India. This makes the cinema of NCM national indeed, but a specific national cinema that invests deeply in its regionalism, creating a spectrum of national cinemas (Rajadhyaksha 2015). A deliberate creation of national cinemas eludes a monolithic idea of the nation.[8] NCM's political films invest into what may be called a realist metaphor— realist in terms of film language and a film style endorsed by the state following Satyajit Ray's international recognition for using the standardised tropes of realism. For instance, following the peasant uprisings of Andhra Pradesh, Ankur's untouchable landless working-class woman (who makes the character triply marginalized while ironically named after a Hindu goddess of prosperity) becomes a metaphor of land exploited by the landowning class. For me, it is therefore irrelevant whether the films of NCM were the result of statist gaze or not because the very question of land that was long lost and eclipsed by transitional cinema in the previous decade is now brought to the forefront once again.(Image#27 + Image#28)

Ankur and the dawn of rebellion

Ankur, Shyam Benegal's most celebrated film (1974), saw a process of consolidating a production process with realist aesthetics, that is, in terms of organizing the stylistic principles on which NCM was based. Although Benegal's first two films (Ankur in 1974 and Nishant in 1975) followed the path of political cinema under NCM, they were not the products of the state but were produced by an advertising company called Blaze, with which Benegal had made a few commercials earlier. What makes Shyam Benegal stand apart artistically is his treatment of land relations. He employs a set of parallels about land in his narrative strategy, especially in Ankur. He establishes intersectional ties and complexities between rural/feudal land relations, on one hand, and a metaphoric representation of woman as the land on the other; the theme of gender enters the broader thematic structure of the narrative as a secondary motif. Ankur, for Madhava Prasad, indicates how a director can commercially exploit the political dimension of the FFC's aesthetic project (1998). For him, the feudal plots work as a "spectacle of rebellion," a narrative set in the past only to reinstall the present’s social contract. Prasad has a significant meaning for “pastness” as he uses a feudal setting:

“The date is simply a device of distanciation that enables the spectator to gain access to the fascination and power of the spectacle of the feudal oppression and rebellion without being reminded of its proximity in time and space, without undermining the realist spectatorial position” (1998).

Emerging out of such a narrative is the "no land's man," rather it should be said in Benegal's case, the "no land's woman." Prasad argues that Ankur's plot uses temporal distanciation to create a spectator position oblivious of the proximities of such exploitations and rebellions, but I find that that argument does not hold strong ground because of the very nature of the realist strategy that Benegal's film employs. In an interview, Benegal stated that he wanted to give the film a sense of temporality by situating its plot in a village near Telengana. That means that the space of Ankur's narrative is not far from the city of Srikakulam, the place where the Srikakulam Peasant Uprising [10] took place from 1967 to 1970 following the footsteps of Naxalbari in Bengal. Ankur's narrative is only a little deferred in terms of historical temporality. It does not take place in an a historical past that bears no relevance to the political conditions of contemporary times or political awareness among spectators. Space, as we know, is a social construct (and not a mere geographical landmass) that is defined by fixed social relations while also creating new ones. Ankur's diegetic space becomes a historical space of relations between a landless working class and a landowner's liberal yet patrilineal progeny Surya, just another representative of the same feudal tradition. The setting becomes significant as a site of a disrupted and a disturbing historical moment that encounters the seed of rebellion by the landless and Dalits.

Before delving into the nature of such a complicated representation of an “othered” space in Ankur, one must locate these issues in the specificity of the script. Surya, the son of an absentee landlord comes to a village in Andhra Pradesh to look after his vast land. A Dalit couple, Lakshmi and Kishtayya, (who are shown anxious to have their first child), start working for the new and seemingly liberal landlord. (Later critics have speculated regarding the caste portrayal of the “Kumhars”—Lakhsmi and Kishtayya—as Dalits [9].) The caste of Laxmi (the protagonist) and her mute husband Kishtayya is pivotal to the plot. Dominance of caste in shaping Indian social structure affects the material aspect of the conditions of existence even to this day. Being untouchable Dalits, Laxmi and Kishtayya can own no land, are not allowed to touch those who belong to the upper caste, and do not have a right to raise their voice against the age-old atrocities against their community. Such an historical silencing is used as a metaphor in Kishtayya's muteness (which can also be seen in the tribal character in Aakrosh, discussed later in the essay). Laxmi's caste establishes one of the decisive factors in her multilayered marginalisation, along with her gender and class position.

After Kishtayya's disappearance following his humiliation for stealing meager produce from Surya's tree, Surya seduces Lakshmi who starts living with him as his mistress. But after Surya's newly-wed wife comes to the village to stay with him, Surya is forced to abandon Lakshmi only after making Lakshmi pregnant. Surya's constant pressure on Lakshmi to abort the child does not work. One fine morning Kishtayya comes back and is overjoyed when he finds that Lakshmi is bearing a child. As Kishtayya approaches the landlord Surya with jovial innocence, the latter thinks that Lakshmi's rustic husband would unleash his agony for all the oppressions poured on the Dalit couple. In a frightful retaliation, Surya starts beating Kishtayya mercilessly, while most of the villagers gather around to witness such cruelty. Surya, scared for his uncontrolled atrocity, runs and hides inside his house fearing Lakshmi's wrath.

This climactic scene is carefully organised in terms of a series of shots and counter-shots. One of the key elements of this scene is the vast land that belongs to the landlord Surya, which is visible in almost all the shots. The other element is the depiction of the historical nature of relationships between landlord and landless, here the relationship between Surya as landlord and a landless Dalit couple, Laxmi and Kishtayya. The scene begins with an over-the-shoulder shot (OTS) of Surya flying a kite in his courtyard. He gazes at Kishtayya, who is approaching Surya to request work. Kishtayya is seen walking through the acres of a paddy field belonging to Surya. Shot in deep focus, a sense of graphic tension is given, configuring the vast stretch of land to be a site of historical and political struggle. The OTS and Point of View Shot (POV) of Surya cuts to a patient, calm and innocent Kishtayya making his way through the ridges of the paddy field, while the slow, stealthy and petrified, retreating Surya is shown in mid-closeup. The next shot is that of Surya giving orders to his men to grab Kishtayya, and this mid-long shot includes the visual refrain of the same green paddy field in the background. As the scuffle reaches its zenith, Surya appears with a whip (a symbol of power and feudal dominance including the right to punish the subordinated subject) and unleashes it on Kishtayya. Benegal juxtaposes the historical condition of land relations with all three vertices of the triangle—landlord, landless and land. Lakshmi is late to discover the chain of events, and as she gazes from a distance, her point of view grazes through the same paddy fields, only to reinforce the power structure of the same vertices from an opposite angle.

The denouement of the film is a scene of a series of emblematic shots, and not just in terms of the film title—Ankur, “the seedling” of rebellion. The title is synonymous with the action of a little boy hurling a stone to break a windowpane in the landlord's home. It offers a symbolic gesture to indicate what the marginalised and oppressed "no land's man" feels brewing within the self (as seen earlier in Lakshmi's disavowal to submit to caste prejudice and sexual exploitation by refusing to abort the child). For Prasad, this was a powerful moment that captured in minuscule the awakened consciousness of an innocent oppressed peasant (1998).

What is more important here is how the upper caste, upper-class landlord controls land in Ankur. It becomes the space of an historical culmination of the recent peasant uprising in Srikakulam, Naxalbari and even the peasant uprising of Telengana People's Struggle (1948-1951) that proved to be an anticipatory spirit of that which defined the Naxalbari Movement. All these added a pre-text to the film's theme (Needham 2013). Scripting the Dalit couple as "no land's (wo)men" and the protagonist owning vast lands is essential to depicting the specificity of that “other” space, with shots of the paddy field as a visual leitmotif. It may well be said that these signifying vertices of Ankur's narrative transcend the film’s apparently banal storyline, but I think it points to a bigger signified, one that Ranajit Guha observes—the politics of historiography in the Indian state. Plotting a stereotypical “outsider” in Benegal's films becomes an essential ploy to introduce the spectator to this “other” space (Prasad 1998 and Needham 2013). But one must also notice the politics that Benegal's films deploy in terms of gender with the male as the outsider, the female as metaphor for the landless. In Ankur, this outsider assumes a subject position, becomes a mediator of sort. He is aloof from the familial securities and becomes a locus of engagement with subjects from other groups and sects, thereby becoming a more "responsible and responsive national subject" (Vasudevan 2010). But this middle-class subjectivity through the protagonist Surya is soon disposed of as he turns into a replica of his own father, the absentee landlord, as he makes Lakshmi his mistress (his father had a mistress in the same village with an illegitimate son) and dispenses orders over others. In this regard, Anuradha Needham remarks,

“… these strategies are not necessarily deployed towards conservative ends alone, linked, for instance, with the bourgeoisie's attempts at selfdefinition and authorisation, but rather can be, and have been used… to represent hitherto marginalised or unknown or unknown groups, experiences, and attitudes” (2013).

Needham considers Lakshmi a metaphor of the very land that Surya owns— the land becomes an object of dominion, possession as well as exploitation—the same treatment that Surya has in store for his mistress. The regional specificity of Ankur and Lakshmi's unparalleled courage thus let the film implicitly refer to "significant continuities" historically in reference to the emancipatory role of the women who had participated in the fight for land rights in the Telengana People's Struggles (2013). (Image#43)

The Adivasi land and Nihalani's Aakrosh

Only a few films have been made in Hindi about the dispossessions of tribal communities. The cinematic gaze employed in commercial Hindi films in previous decades was limited to stereotypes of tribal communities, as already discussed in the case of Jhumroo (1961). Nihalani, Shyam Benegal's cinematographer in his previous films, made a directorial debut with Aakrosh (1982). Realist aesthetics are a key feature of the film that demanded verisimilitude in showing the region. Set in a small town of Bhiwandi in Maharashtra, the film is based on a real incident that Vijay Tendulkar and Satyadev Dubey adopted for the script (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1995). The film then became a strong political commentary about using land as a site of economic and social exploitation of tribal inhabitants, especially since inhabitants of the region suffered at the hands of the local bureaucrats of the Indian democratic machinery. In the film,t he town of Bhiwandi becomes a space of complicated social and political equations for different classes and castes; the script shows them all caught up in the deep malaise caused by the failure of the various apparatus of the state. The landscape has a heterogeneous aspect that appears to have a thematic resemblance to the characters and their violence-underneath-the-apparent-calmness of their presence. Around the town are sea, rugged mountains, an almost barren forest where the bureaucracy controls the extraction of timber, and the plains. All of these become sites of contestation and occasion the social mutilation of the tribes who live there. While talking about a much more contemporary issue in Deccan Chronicle, Bela Bhatia makes some remarks about the film that sums up what Aakrosh stands for:

“...the film conveyed the dashed hopes of the swathes of landless for the redistributed land, the undiminished power of the local ‘government’ of upper-caste landlords, politicians and local police, and the feudal and patriarchal society they command with violence and impunity while labourers toiled like oxen in their fields and despite begari—free labour—remained in their debt and subjected to unspeakable indignities as a matter of routine” (2020).

Landlessness is not the primary theme in Aakrosh, but it appears as a structuring element of the script. The protagonist is a tribal man named Bhiku Lahanya, mute throughout the film, after his arrest for the alleged murder of his wife (she was raped and murdered by the forest contractor, local police and the aide of the local minister). The protagonist is characterised by an uncanny silence, causing a discomfort for viewers, especially since it is a constant expression of repressed anger. A young upper-caste lawyer Bhaskar is the other innocent character and was recruited by the government to defend the convict. Bhaskar discovers the truth through his experience and investigation, largely helped by a Naxalite. While the case sways a little toward the defendant through Bhaskar’s constant interrogation, during the trial Bhiku Lahanya loses his father. Then, while at the cremation, Bhiku grabs an axe and deals a heavy blow to his sister who was being eyed lustfully by the perpetrators. That is because his sister otherwise would have definitely suffered the same fate as his late wife. The “aakrosh,” or the agony of Bhiku's climactic scream rents the air with deafening magnitude, piercing the doldrums of state development. The film does not end here, rather has a dialogue sequence between two lawyers, discussing the very validity of such a democratic system that fails to deliver justice to the weak.

Aakrosh is primarily concerned with the exploitation of the tribal community by the hands of a post-colonial system that the state has stuck with. One of the crudest instances of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2003), Bhiku Lahanya becomes the face of the revolutionary subject; his revolt presupposes a movement against agents of the state whose resource accumulation has resulted in the misery of the already marginalized. This holds true for the NCM’s themes in the 1980s. This more vibrant and politically committed cinema from art-house filmmakers revealed a new order of reflexivity about their own social position within the Indian polity and culture. To create a character like Bhiku Lahanya and show his subjugation by the bureaucracy and government officials under India’s democratic system of India means showing the result of that growth in the economy since the 1980s that had put a demand for land and other natural resources. Aakrosh's story becomes an intertwined tale of two dominant themes—first, land as a space of power structure and second, land as a sight of violence—both political and sexual. Tribal identities like that of Bhiku Lahanya did not gain much from the Indian independence in terms of “freedom” in its truest sense. This fact, which Nihalani refers to in Aakrosh, is evident from the National Forest Policy of 1952 that permits the tribal neighbourhoods to use woodland resources but not at the cost of national interests.

Although the term “Adivasi” implies the original inhabitants of the land, it became an acceptable and legal norm in the state machinery that said that the state has the rights to evict Adivasis. The legitimacy of the state, its right to “receive the benefits of a national asset,” enters the film script in the scene of the forest contractor in Aakrosh. He’s gathering timber in the forest, employing the members of the local tribes as daily wagers, thereby turning a community of collectors and gatherers into wage earners. Furthermore, a sense of psychological violence is not limited to the treatment of the tribal members, but it is disseminated through the spatial representation of the organised town, shaping it into a microcosmic schism of the state itself. There’s the space of bureaucratic operatives of colonial capacities—the court of law, the prison, the club for the elite bureaucrats, the "private property" of the judge (where trespassing is strictly prohibited), the office of the District Council, the telephone exchange. On the other hand, there are the free press, the forest and the tribal village. Violence is communicated in the film through representation of an apparently serene and peaceful town infested by the above operative units of the state. In that way, the town itself becomes a metaphor of the “system” of the democratic process that operates on the principles of accumulation by dispossession.

Bhaskar is the outsider character. Through such a character, a subject position is created with a deep investment in the values of the educated middle-class who gains access to the “other” land. It is a character viewers can identify with. Bhaskar becomes the embodiment of the self-reflexivity of the middle-class within the political milieu of the state (Sarkar 2009), but is a character who fails to render any assistance to those caught in this bureaucratic landscape, the very nature of which is to exploit “land” and further marginalise its inhabitants. The underlying tension of caste and its relation to land ownership in Aakrosh reveals the hollowness inside the very machinery of the law the Indian state operates with. As Ranajit Guha (2010) aptly puts it, the characterization of a hierarchy among Indian subjects based on caste has been a means of justifying the conquest of the lands belonging to the inferior castes (like Bhiku Lahanya and other members of his tribe). And these were the same justifications on which the colonial laws of land acquisition were often based. The state's despotic gaze on Bhiku Lahanya and members of his kind (the tribes) can be summed up by what Arundhati Roy had to say in her first non-fiction work, The Cost of Living:

“the ethnic “otherness' of their [state's] victims[the tribal people] takes some of the pressure off the nation-builders. It's like having an expense account. Someone else pays the bills” (1999).

Conclusion

A new cinematic historiography can be charted while tracing the depiction of "no land's men" from fifties to the New Cinema Movement. Although the Subaltern Studies project began in India in 1982, almost thirteen years after NCM, and there is hardly any connection between the two, the new historians' attempts at locating the “politics of the people” in configuring Indian history has its resonance in film history. It can be traced in the approach of the Indian New Wave trying to restore consciousness and agency to neglected historical agents. From Shambhu Mahato of Do Bigha Zameen to Laxmi in Ankur and Bhiku Lahanya of Aakrosh, Hindi cinema has addressed no land's men and women in different decades, trying to point out a kind of black hole of Indian independence in terms of deaing with land relations. But unlike Shambhu of Do Bigha Zameen, in Ankur and Aakrosh the category of "no land's man" has ceased from being “pre-political,” implying a lack of political coherence that would disenfranchise people from identifying the forces of their exploitation (Hobsbawm 1959), to the disenfranchised being the “subject conscious of his own history” (Guha 1983). In Do Bigha Zameen, Shambhu and his family look on in utter hopelessness at the construction of the mill on their usurped land, the beginning of industrialisation in post-independence India. As Shambhu takes a little bit of soil from the construction site, he seems to have accepted his fate as within a newly disenfranchised community. On being accused as “thieves” by the security guard, the Mahatos simply leave the scene. There is no retaliation, no assertion. While in the filmic narratives of the "no land's men" of the fifties, social conflict (narratives of exploitation and dissent) is quite understandably missing, there is a renewed sense of community consciousness in films under NCM. Lakshmi is aware of the rigid caste-class-gender exploitation prevalent in villages (evident from a scene in the film where she looks angrily at the village headman for forcing a woman to stay on in marriage with her abusive husband). Yet, she chooses to keep her illegitimate child, lose work, and take in her stride the humiliation that the entire village will subject her community to. With land rights but no land, Bhiku Lahanya refuses with stunned steeliness to be legally framed for a crime he has not committed. His dissent continues even when he has to kill his own sister in defense.

The political films of NCM did not align themselves ideologically with the state. As the neo-liberal economy unleashed its iron-claws on the Indian market with the economic liberalisation of 1991, NCM began to lose its institutional as well as financial back up before it finally lost its relevance. With the dissolution of state patronage towards NCM, political cinema per se ceased to exist in India. However, there has been a recent upsurge of a political tendency in certain cinemas of India (Tamil, Malayalam and a few Hindi ones too) that have begun to question the neo-liberal project. Anusha Rizvi's Peepli Live (2010), Prakash Jha's Chakravyuh (2012), Vishal Bharadwaj's Matru Ki Bijlee KaMandola(2013) are some of the popular Hindi films that have attempted a kind of a political subject addressing land as the biggest crisis of contemporary India even after more than half a century of Indian independence.

The theoretical framework of this essay has been to point out to the historical and yet unresolved social, political and cultural issues related to land and Hindi Cinema's response to it.

Notes:

1. Reserve Army of Labour is a concept first used by Friederich Engels in his The Condition of the Working Class published in 1845. Marx used the term in Critique of Political Economy to delineate the condition of the misery of the working class, as there is always an army of excess labour to acquire from to continue an unhindered condition of production. The reserve army is created due to unemployment or underemployment in a capitalist society.

2. Kashmir and Darjeeling are two regions of India which are not only disputed in terms of their inclusion in India after the Indian independence in 1947, but are controversial as geo-political entities as well. Kashmir was a Princely state with a majority of Muslim population and a Hindu king named Hari Singh. But after the Indian independence, Hari Singh neither joined the newly formed nation of Pakistan, nor the Hindu majoritarian India. Kashmir went into a standstill agreement with Pakistan, which was broken by Pakistani rebels since Kashmir population were mostly Muslim. When Hair Singh sought help from India, India made Hari Singh sign the Instrument of Accession, and later was given special status within the Indian constitution with independence in everything except defense, communications and foreign affair. Hindi cinema's territorial nationalism puts Kashmir as a region integral to India, overshadowing the historical fact that Kashmir under Hari Singh had dreamt for a “Free Kashmir.” Darjeeling, a district in West Bengal had been seeking separation from Bengal since 1907 for their cultural and ethnic difference with the people of the state. Forcefully brought to the hilly-town of Darjeeling by the British and their Indian agents as tea-plantation labourers from Nepal and Bhutan, the majority of the population in Darjeeling was treated as second grade citizens exploiting them to the fullest. Owing to a shameful history of the colonial exploitation of the Nepalese of Darjeeling, the movement for a separate state is still going on. The agenda of national integration and territorial unity became a cultural concern for Bombay films as well. This has led a number of films to set its narrative in the hill-station of Darjeeling, of course with narratives that represents Darjeeling as a part of the greater whole called India without paying any attention to the ethnic and people's history of the region.

3. Naxalbari Movement is an armed peasant movement spearheaded by a group of radical communists in the year 1967 in the village called Naxalbari (and hence the name) in Siliguri sub-division in West Bengal, India. Naxalbari uprising was a culmination against the landlords and the bureaucratic structure of the Indian Government that tried to change the political and economic structure of the state that hardly underwent any change since the British Raj. A number of scholars, intellectuals, and students from erudite institutions from Kolkata and rest of India joined what they called the people's war. Soon it spread to wide parts of India including Bihar, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and other parts. For more, read Sumanta Banerjee's seminal work In the Wake of Naxalbari: A History of the Naxalite Movement in India.

4. 1968 is one of the most remarkable years of the twentieth century in the entire world and especially in the United States. The year was marked by the escalation of the Vietnam War and assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. But more than these two events along with the US aerospace achievement of Apollo 13, the year is remembered for revolutionary humanism that delivered a seismic social and political change. From anti-Vietnam War protests to civil rights movements, famine in Africa and to students' protests across the globe, the way we looked at the political and social structures of the world changed. These political and social movements on a global scale had an unprecedented overwhelming effect on music, literature, theatre and cinema.

5. The Malabar rebellion, also called Mappila revolt, was a remarkable event that saw people in southern Malabar, predominantly Muslims, wage an armed struggle against the British for nearly six months beginning August 1921. Three different political movements merged to trigger the rebellion — one of these, the tenancy movement, was rooted in local agrarian grievances (particularly in south Malabar); the other two were the Khilafat (Caliphate) movement and the Non-Cooperation movement, launched jointly by the All-India Khilafat Committee and the Indian National Congress.

6. The Bardoli Satyagraha in Surat, Gujarat, was a peasants’ movement against the British government’s decision to raise land revenue led by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. It was the child of the non-cooperation movement started by Gandhi. This movement earned Patel the title “Sardar.”

7. Tebhaga Movement of 1946-1950 was started by the share-croppers who fought for two-thirds of the produce from the land against the rich peasants called the Jotdars.

8. Sangh Parivar is an umbrella term for the ultra Hindu nationalists, the institutional face of the right wing volunteers. This parivar (which means family) describes the matrix of the family or the community of the ultra Hindu nationalists of RashtriyaSayamsevakSangh or known by its acronym as RSS. The present right wing government of India, Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP, is an apparent democratic extension of the SanghParivar participating in the electoral process after RSS was banned for the first few years following the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. BJP, being a part of the larger ideology of SanghParivar with the super objective of creating a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu State), is instrumental in projecting a religious nationalism with a significant control almost over all the media houses in India and major industries.

9. Social Justice reformer from Maharashtra, Jyotiba Phule, who has provided the first systematic theory of caste is said to have coined the term “Dalit' in the 19th Century. Initially it was used in public discourse to mean “brokenness' and talk about “broken' people oppressed by the Hindu varna system. The term and its usage gained popularity in 1970s in Maharashtra with the emergence of the Dalit Panthers. The term “Dalit' in their manifesto came to mean "all those who are exploited politically, economically and in the name of religion". The Dalit Panthers heralded a new approach in Dalit politics in post-independence India by advocating for radical politics outside the framework of both parliamentary and Marxist-Leninist politics, fusing Ambedkar, Phule and Marx.

10. Having its roots in the Telengana Rebellion of 1946, Srikakulam Peasant Uprising took place in Srikakulam, Andhra Pradesh in the month of October of 1967. Inspired from the Naxalbariuprising, this uprising was triggered by the murder of two villagers by the local landlords. In retaliation, almost the entire tribal community took up arms, looted the landlords of their land and produce. The next year saw a more organised armed uprising that hurled its guerrilla attack on the state.

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List of films

Aakrosh. Directed by Govind Nihalani.1980.

Ankur. Directed by Shyam Benegal. 1974.

Chakravyuh. Directed by Prakash Jha. 2012.

Dharti Ke Laal. Directed by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas. 1946.

Dil Deke Dekho. Directed by Nasir Hussain. 1959.

Do Bigha Zameen. Directed by Bimal Roy. 1953.

Hariyali Aur Rasta. Directed by Vijay Bhatt. 1962.

Humraaz. Directed by B.R.Chopra. 1967

Jhumroo. Directed by Shankar Mukherjee. 1961

Kashmir Ki Kali. Directed by ShaktiSamanta. 1964

Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola. Directed by Vishal Bharadwaj. 2013.

Mother India. Directed by Mehboob. 1957

Nishant. Directed by ShyamBenegal. 1975.

Peepli Live. Directed by Anusha Rizvi. 2010.

Professor. Directed by Lekh Tandon.1962.

Tumsa Nahi Dekha. Directed by Nasir Hussai. 1959.