A British documentary film-maker's encounter with empire: the case of Alexander

Shaw (1938-1942)

Ravi Vasudevan

Centre for the Study of Developing Societies/Sarai,

29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054 India

raviv@sarai.net

Abstract: This article takes up the transnational itinerary of a British documentary film-maker
and film expert, Alexander Shaw, to explore connections between the official film cultures of
colonial and emergent nation states. Shaw made Five Faces (1938) for the documentary film
company Strand in Malaya and Men of Africa (1940), for the Colonial Empire Marketing
Board in East Africa, and was then producer for the Film Advisory Board, a colonial initiative
to develop war propaganda films in India. I look at the films on Malaya and East Africa to
draw attention to certain stylistic details and production contexts, and for certain points of
contrast with the films Shaw made in India in 1940-1941. I put particular emphasis on how
the local film-industrial context provided for differentiation in the official film product,
considering the differences between films made by the director A. Bhaskar Rao for Shaw and
for an important Indian filmmaker, V. Shantaram. Key to my exploration of Shaw’s work is
the race and ethnic dimensions which emerge in the configuration of British documentary
practice as it engaged the question of empire and of decolonization.

Keywords: British documentary, empire, race, ethnic, India, Alexander Shaw

This article takes up the transnational itinerary of a British documentary film-maker and film

expert, Alexander Shaw, to explore connections between the official film cultures of colonial

and emergent nation states and to contrast the contexts of their production. It considers the

institutional, aesthetic and narrative information furnished by a selection of films made under

Shaw’s leadership from the late 1930s into the Second World War at various locations in

empire, speculating on the interface between distinct professional, aesthetic and political

configurations. A substantial, if not iconic figure of the British documentary movement, Shaw

was involved in the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit from around 1933, and made films

for important documentary companies such as Realist and Strand. He is best known for a

highly regarded science education film Penicillin, produced by Imperial Chemicals (1944).
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His association with Strand took him to Malaya to work on a film titled Five Faces (1938),

and to East Africa to make Men of Africa (1940), for the Colonial Empire Marketing Board,

both significant films in the British documentary movement’s tryst with empire. I look at

these films to draw attention to certain stylistic details and production contexts, and certain

points of contrast with those made in India. This will in turn help me situate some of the work

Shaw produced in India in 1940-1941, when he was producer for the Film Advisory Board, as

part of the colonial government’s bid to develop war propaganda films. I put particular

emphasis on how the local film-industrial context provided for differentiation in the official

film product, considering the differences between films made by the director A. Bhaskar Rao

for Shaw and for an important Indian filmmaker, V. Shantaram. Key to my exploration of this

body of work is the race and ethnic dimensions which emerge in the configuration of British

documentary practice as it engages the question of empire and of decolonization.

Shaw’s itinerary needs to be considered at least partially in relation to what has been

referred to as ‘the Grierson effect’. Zoe Druick and William Deane describe this as a project

to bring an enlightened civil service and film-makers together to educate a broader public in

the ways of nation-building and citizenship (Druick and Deane 2014, 2). As several authors

on the subject show, two motifs emerge in the way ‘the effect’ was distributed. The

transplantation of the vision across the Dominions and dependent colonies of the British

Empire carried with it a tension built into the Grierson-sponsored form, between creative and

goal-oriented film-making. There was in fact a suspicion that the master, drawing upon the

model of the Colonial Film Unit, which emphasised the importance of technically simple

films to prevent confusion in the untutored native mind, was himself veering towards the

more instrumental use of film after the Second World War, especially for developing

countries (Smyth 2013). The second approach is one which emphasises the different political

impulses, including the momentum of revolutionary events in Latin America (Mestman and

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Ortega 2014), which could draw on the model to create heterogeneous results. In the Indian

context, Srirupa Roy (2007) and Camille Deprez (2013) suggests that the ‛effect’ assumed a

more statist form. The independent Indian Government’s filmmaking unit, they argue,

focused on the state’s display of its development achievements, downplaying the role of the

citizen and of alternative perspectives on social and economic possibilities. The recent work

of Peter Sutoris (Sutoris, 2016) on the visions of development cultivated by Films Division,

develops a similar account.

These approaches analyse governmental film to show how it becomes a vehicle of ideology,

but one that did not quite fulfil the original mandate for how governments sought to use

media as a form of public service that would highlight popular initiative and engage a broader

public investment. Sutoris argues that the original source of inspiration was itself

contaminated. He invokes the Grierson model as a negative influence, a top-down one using

`voice of god narration’ and an expository form which does not give the audience the

opportunity to participate in the film. Here Sutoris draws on Bill Nichols’ typology of

documentary models, (Nichols 1985) but treats them, unhelpfully, as mutually exclusive. For

example, he contrasts the expository form as authoritarian because of its voice of god narration, and

the way it uses images to illustrate the voice over, and the observational form as less prescriptive,

showing rather than telling, as it were. This does not account for the possibility of counterpoints and

conflicts between voice and image in the expository form; nor the fact that exposition also inevitably

draws upon observation, lending the image more than an illustrative function. Arguably the British

documentary, while often using an expositional voice over, was also strongly invested in the

observational, the register of the empirical.

Where Sutoris provides for a departure is in moving beyond the analysis of film to engage the

question of bureaucracy and its paper protocols. There is a longer history of the notoriously

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complicated institutional structures of the colonial government with their many levels of

authority and decision making (Gupta 2012: 141-190, Hull 2012: 5-26, Kaushik 2015: 16-54,

Sutoris 2016, chapter II). Shaw, the carrier of the Grierson effect into the Indian context, felt

stiflingly becalmed by colonial bureaucracy and felt it had hampered the reception of new

film-making practices. The rich literature now on the history of paperisation and the

materiality of documentary forms and practices urges us to assess the material registers of the

commissioning process, the circulation of files and their multiple inscriptions, the coming of

paper and film together in scripts and dope sheets, all of which facilitates a more complex

framework to investigate ideological content. Towards the end of this article, I will show how

the file housing scripts, script comments and political exchanges amongst empire bureaucracy

and film experts offers us interesting insights into film as political and bureaucratic product.

While approaches focusing on the institutional and material practices of documentary film-

making introduce a more complex account, they may in some instances entirely skirt their

location in ideological frames. Scott Anthony argues that British documentary represents a

long-term imagination and aesthetic experimentation around technologies, of energy,

communications and travel, how, for example `old ideas of imperialism were stretched

towards new conceptions of internationalism'. (Scott Anthony 2011: 144)1 This shift in focus

enlivens research possibilities, inviting us to explore the constitution of media institutions

through aesthetic, technological and professional engagements. However, this article argues

that even if we need to circumvent the pitfalls of too general an ideological analysis, attention

to such aesthetic and technological imaginaries cannot be separated out from the race and

ethnic politics and political economies of late colonialism, and of emergent nation-states. As

Martin Stollery (2000: 161-171) points out, the drive to ally film to new forms of

1
Anthony has developed an argument for exploring the creativity of a liberal media intelligentsia in
the development of British documentary and other forms of publicity. See Scott 2011 and 2013
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technological intelligence for managing distance was shaped by a hierarchical understanding

of how to see, separate oneself from and know and control the world. This proposition is

exemplified for him in a series of films by Strand highlighting air travel, one of which, The

Future’s In the Air (1937) was also directed by Alexander Shaw.

Thus, my premise is that the aesthetic practices and technological imaginaries of

colonial information film were filtered through the politics of race and ethnicity characteristic

of late colonialism. I begin by illustrating the way in which documentary techniques were

pliable to specific political requirements. If one of the hallmarks of the observational style of

the British documentary is the premium it puts on explaining how something works, and its

close detailing of the textures of the material which is being worked upon then Shaw’s Cable

Ship (1933) provides a good illustration. The film captures the telephone network, the

breakdown of one undersea line, and the repair of the cable, using graphic means and a step-

by-step exposition. It also gives us a sense of the material composition of the cable and of the

bodily demeanour of the engineers and seamen who undertake the work. Here we have a case

of the techno-material imaginary, the telephone network, what holds it together, the actual

processes of its maintenance and a capture of working lives. However, when we shift focus to

one of Shaw’s empire films a different configuration emerges, in which technology is bound

up with the articulation of ethnicity and race. This article takes Shaw’s Men of Africa (1940),

made for the Colonial Marketing Board, to explore its use of voice for what it can tell us

about the pro-filmic assembly of imperial power, but also about a specific amalgamation of

ethnicities, technologies and sound. It then moves onto Five Faces (1938), a film made by

Shaw for Strand Films, as instance of how a British documentarist focused on the body, work,

technology and environment to develop a picture of the emergent nation-state of Malaya. The

film is held together by a politically knowing narration about the country’s five ethnic

communities. The empirical/observational style is deployed to develop a hierarchical

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perspective on the ethnic standing, variously of British, Malay, Indian, Chinese and the Sakai

in the imminent nation-state. In counterpoint to the African and Malayan cases, the chapter

concludes by looking at Shaw’s troubled stint in India. While he had little time to make a

significant impact, both institutionally and aesthetically, his work with a local Indian film-

maker, A. Bhaskar Rao, and in comparison to the work Bhaskar Rao did with V. Shantaram,

one of India’s leading film directors of the time, provides a suggestive contrast. It indicates

that official information film products could be quite differentiated in their aesthetic and

political emphases, depending on the types of assembly, of people, techniques and film

traditions that were put in place.

Men of Africa: Empire, communication technologies and race hierarchies

The first part of Men of Africa is a compilation film, a commonplace format in the colonial,

and more broadly documentary film. It draws upon a number of films, including earlier

Strand Films such as Five Faces, to create a tapestry of the colonial cultures and societies of

the British Empire. Its second part, however, generates new work on the East African

territories of British colonialism. As Tom Rice (2010) and others have suggested, the film is

governed by a paternalist and self-congratulatory tone, about the benefits white rule has

brought to primitive peoples. This benevolence is tracked through health, nutrition,

agricultural improvement, new technologies and skills, and the cultivation of self-governing

institutions as a pathway to the future. The film conveys how exhibitions such as the

agricultural show were used to showcase new techniques, to make bricks, preserve soil and

improve nutrition, to inculcate the use of insecticides, and to display models of ideal houses.

But this is exhibition, not exposition or observation of a process.

The primary target of such films, Tom Rice notes, was not the African population, but

a metropolitan audience to whom the achievements of Britain’s imperial work were being

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explained (Rice 2010). However, a closer look is needed to explore films as historical

documents imprinted by indexical vectors, in this instance, the functions of sound and voice.

Here, the film highlights broadcast and telephony in a communicational immediacy which

enables the Colonial Office to respond to the needs of the various territories of empire. 2 The

geographical orbit of the discussion is framed by cutting from the sites of official enunciation

to an appropriate location in Africa. Key voices such as Colonial Secretary Malcolm

Macdowell are lip-synched, lending a sense of presence to the official image. This illustrates

Scott Antony’s argument that a significant strand of the British documentary movement was

enthused by the possibilities of new technologies of communication and their ability to link

widely dispersed spaces which would stretch into decolonisation (Anthony 2011: 135–48).

At the moment of their making however, films such as Men of Africa were not simply

about spaces coming into connection but about hierarchies which structure the

communication order. It is as if telephony and telegraphy provided direct access between

metropolis and colony to facilitate command structures and information flows, rendering

technology and film as vehicles of imperial authority. Further, such race hierarchies extend

into the aural realm through the doubling of voice in the film’s section on the agricultural

show. Firstly, at a more recessed level, the soundtrack captures a pedagogical address to the

peasant audience relayed in the local language. This voice, not located in a particular

presenter at the show, is nevertheless likely to have come from such a source. There is a

second unsynchronised voice on the soundtrack, placed to override and translate the first, and

spoken in English. This voice-over is clearly accented to suggest an African speaker for

whom English is a second tongue.

This aural feature enables us to speculate on how complicated the geography of actual

film production could be. We do not have information about how the soundtrack of Men of
2
David Trotter (2011: 151–66) explores the way film and communication media were articulated

through sound and image in works produced for the Ceylon Tea Board.
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Africa was composed, but looking at a film such as Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, Empire

Marketing Board, 1934) may provide some insight. Wright, who was also producer for Men

of Africa, had not recorded sound in Ceylon, as the sound apparatus was far too cumbersome

to take on location and there were no recording facilities in Colombo or Kandy. He made a

silent cutting copy, putting shots and sequences in the right order, and then assembling and

syncing the sound in the studios in England. Referring to a particular sequence in which

pilgrims climb a hill, Adam’s Peak, he noted:

In this sequence all the sound was recorded at once – there was no re-

recording, so this was the set-up in the studio. The microphone was placed

in one corner of the studio; on its right was a small group of Sinhalese

gentleman who we found in the East End of London, chanting a religious

song pianissimo. Opposite the mic was a collection of percussion

instruments including chromatic tubular bells. On the left of the mic was

the orchestra and the choir from the local church. The choir had no words,

but sang ‘Aah’ and were integrated with the orchestra . . . Some passages in

the film needed Sinhalese singing or chanting and these were, of course,

easily supplied by our friends Ukkuwa and Suramba, who also provided the

fantastic roar of the drums during the dance sequence at the end. Another

sequence of the film showed children learning the ceremonial dances at an

early age, working at the bar and later dancing round their teacher. For

rhythm they recited ‘De Gita, de dum, de gita, de dum’; and here we had to

call on the local church choir who had been trained by Ukkuwa to produce

just the right sounds . . . we had great difficulty finding a voice for the

narration, and finally tried out Lionel Wendt, who turned out perfect:

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 Lionel's voice was neither European nor Sinhalese, but a sort of miraculous

amalgam of the two . . .3

This information opens up a geography involving studio-based sound production in London

which the soundtrack gestures to indexically but which the image screens off by asserting the

primacy of what we see as a way of integrating what we hear. So East London Sinhalese, a

travelling Sinhalese singing troupe (Ukkuwa and Suramba), and the Sinhalese intellectual,

pianist and photographer, Lionel Wendt, were assembled in London along with a local choir

to construct the film’s soundtrack. What meaning can be derived from such an assemblage,

based on resources mobilised locally and through colonial networks (Wendt) and networks

for oriental performance (the travelling folk troupe)? What is clear is that the inquiry into

sound composition exposes a complex set of race relations whose terms are not transparent.

The assembly of these various contributors provides a key frame for thinking about how the

official film was organised within global colonial circuits. While we do not have the detail of

soundtrack construction for Men of Africa, it may be surmised that something similar was

involved: for example that educated voice which expeditiously rendered an amalgam of

European and African intonations. There is an indexical coalition involved here, inviting us to

reframe the documentary as evidentiary trace of stereoscopic space, as gesturing to spaces

beyond the screen and identifying a three dimensional geometry within which the film’s

surface and auditory field were composed. This points to the way metropolis and colony were

brought together, not only through the logic of montage and the representation of

communication, but in terms of how the material offered for a view and, more importantly, to

be heard, is assembled across different spaces, disclosing the articulation of new bodies and

relations in a sensory geography. The two sets of voices in Men of Africa – one in dialect, the

3
Song of Ceylon memoirs, Basil Wright Collection, File 1/1/4, British Film Institute.
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other in accented English – are produced in different spaces, addressing different audiences.

It is possible that the retention of the first also offers a certain authentication to the second

voice, as it relays the film for audiences in the West.

Five Faces: The imperial enunciation of a multi-ethnic nation

Five Faces (1938), Shaw’s earlier film on the colonies, was more complex in terms of

narrative construction, and it also invites reflection on the film techniques it deployed to

weave a tapestry of Malaysia’s ethnic groups: Sakai tribesmen, often cast along with the

Mongols as the originators of the Malay race; the Malay, depicted both as subaltern figure,

fisherman and peasant, and in the kingly figure of the Sultan; the Chinese migrant, framed in

relation to work in the tin mines, and the Tamil Indian peasant in relation to rubber-

extraction. Finally, and most disingenuously, the film shows the British in Malaya to be a

casual lot playing golf and tennis, profiled by their leisure activity rather than by any

productive or significant administrative and political role. The Briton is there merely as one

more element in the ethnic mix, where, in fact, he sits on top, for his is the voice which

narrates ethnicity. 4 The film exemplifies the delight which the British information film took

in close observation of technology right down to a scrutiny of the body as it melds into the

process being operationalised. Thus, the film looks at the workings of a blowpipe used by the

Sakai to hunt for their food, a water-wheel, the pounding of grain, the tapping of liquid from

the rubber tree, its processing into rubber sheets, and the various forms of tin extraction. This

pedagogical or explanatory technique combines with a certain attention to environmental

detail and setting, and to a careful pacing of individual segments relating to forests, paddy
4
The analysis of the film comes from the version available on the colonialfilm.org database.

However, a screening of the print held by the BFI at Birkbeck College in May 2014 appeared to have

more to say about the British presence, indicating the availability of different versions being made for

different territories.
10 | P a g e
fields and the sea front. The empirical detail given to the human body as it operates

technology is closely observed, as in the cut to the mid-riff of a Sakai tribesman to capture

the sudden sharp release of air when he discharges a blowpipe; or the up-and-down rhythm

of an impassive peasant woman operating a mortar and pestle with her feet.

The film uses Soviet-inspired horizon shots, low angles to frame a figure against an

elevated backdrop. This was a device quite characteristic of the British documentary at the

time, and is used here in the ethnographic mode, to fix and frame the ethnic type. However,

the way in which the body is placed in relation to the production process is carefully

calibrated to the logic of ethnic hierarchy. Indians and Chinese move in the medium distance,

they are not available for closer views in contrast to the Malay tribal and peasant. The film

provides a special focus on Malay women, both in the fields, at home cooking and in the

royal court of the Sultan.5

Over the time of the narrative, this pattern of difference amongst communities,

presented as defined by separation, segregation and non-interference, is seen positively, as a

means to peaceful co-existence. Shaw himself would extol the British Empire’s role in

Malaya:

Five races, five creeds – and oddly enough they all get on fairly well . . .

after all the nonsense one has heard about the British Empire at least one

can say that if there are going to be Empires, Malay would serve as a pretty

5
The intention perhaps was to show the Malay woman as the progenitor of the nation at its most

significant locations, the earth, the hearth and the royal centre, but this is rendered with a certain

exotic, othering touch, perhaps leavened by an Orientalist curiosity that often moves beyond the

strictly functional, power-driven modes of representation.

11 | P a g e
 good model for how they should be run – although of course I have

collected a few really good ‘damn the wog’ incidents.6

While Shaw acknowledged that racist gibes persisted, he did so with the amused

tolerance of the Englishman at ease in the world of his fellow expatriates. His reading of a

benign imperial management of races fails to register Britain’s own interests in Malaya, and

reflects at best a certain naïveté about the hierarchical and antagonistic dimensions of race

and ethnic separation in that country. These features of Malayan society would be heightened

explosively by the Japanese occupation and the post-war communist insurgency. In fact, there

was great differentiation amongst the ethnic groups. Along with their work in the mines, the

Chinese had a powerful presence in banking and insurance, and also a growing control over

mines and plantations. There was an Indian merchant community, but the Indian presence

was defined overwhelmingly by the Tamil plantation workers. The Malays, favoured by the

British, had acquired a strong presence in the police and military, and the British, of course,

used the colony as an important military and naval base and as a major provider of rubber and

6
Alexander Shaw to Paul Rotha, 18 February 1937 (Scott Athony: 2011: 143). While the Oxford

English Dictionary and Websters define the term wog as racist, but rather minimally, there have been

more complicated accounts. Various assumptions about the word deriving from gollywog, of being an

acronym for ‘westernised/worthy/wily oriental gentleman’ are often denied by experts as being false

etymology, and yet have obviously had currency. Everyone appears to agree that it is racist, and was

first spotted by a lexicographer, F. C. Bowen, who recorded it in 1929 in his Sea Slang: a Dictionary

of the Old-timers’ Expressions and Epithets, where he defines wogs as ‘lower class Babu (literally

gentleman, but also used condescendingly to refer to English educated Indians) shipping clerks on the

Indian coast’. In general, the implication was that of a figure of obsequious demeanour whose

pretensions to western speech and manner were deemed hilariously wrong. For a gloss on the term,

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wog accessed on 29 October 2015.

12 | P a g e
tin.7 Apart from the film’s inadequacy in capturing this complex social and political field, it is

hardly even-handed or multi-cultural as some scholars have suggested (Anthony 2011: 142–

4). The Malay is privileged as the subject of the narration: a primordial tribal genealogy is set

out for this ethnicity, its intimate relationship to land and sea highlighted, and its connection

with the regal figure of the Sultan. The Malay is also the embodiment of the future, as in the

concluding image of Malay cadets marching forward. The film’s dissimulation about the

significance of the British presence is signalled in the throw-away remarks about the

importance of Singapore for the British forces, gesturing to but rapidly moving away from

their military domination of the region; and the way that rubber, key to the Malay economy,

was founded on research into Brazilian plant sample at Kew Gardens, a key institution in the

way nature came to be governed, as Richard Drayton has argued (Richard Drayton 2001:

221-268, especially 248-49). The recessed position occupied by the British in the film, their

position of externality to the narrative world does not minimise their role, but rather elevates

their authorial power to set out the social and material lineaments which define Malaya on the

road to decolonisation. Following Priya Jaikumar,8 this projection was emerging from a long-

term bid to anticipate the end of colonialism and work out a sustainable pattern of influence

for Britain in former colonial territories.

There is a distinct politics, of ethnic imagination, to the way the techno-material

imaginary and the observational style of the British documentary in Men of Africa and Five

Faces are mobilised. In both of these films, there is a superordinate narrator who oversees the

unfolding of the scenes and situations on display. In shifting focus to the Indian scene, a

7
Tim Harper (2001, 21-27) provides an overview of indirect political control, the distribution of
ethnic groups in the economy, and of the sources of inter-ethnic conflict.
8
`Operating throgh implicit and strategic trade terms was one of the ... ways in which the British
State, caught between assisting its domestic film industry and withdrawing from direct control over
colonial and dominion governments, could assert its economic preferences.' (Jaikumar, 2006: 45)
There was also a bid to sustain influence over documentary production in the transition, as this
chapter will show.
13 | P a g e
rather different dynamic emerges, one in which a local public and political sphere makes its

presence felt, in ways which both sent Shaw into paroxysms of impatience, but also offered

him a context to forge certain modernizing agenda.

Shaw in India: Patterns of alliance in a progressive axis

Shaw’s short career in India has been documented elsewhere (Philip Woods 2001: 293-308,

B. D. Garga 2011: 67-71). My focus is on specific films and the collaborations which

underwrote them. A producer for the Film Advisory Board in India, Shaw’s filmography was

composed of 13 original films, 9 showing India’s war effort, 4 on ‘various aspects of modern

India’ and 5 films assembled from newsreels ‘showing the might of the Commonwealth’.

These films were made for worldwide circulation. 9 Nevertheless, while any search for a Shaw

filmography will provide comprehensive details from his work with the GPO Film Unit, the

Crown Film Unit, Strand and Realist, there is hardly anything on his stint in India. In the

British Film Institute’s filmography for Shaw, only one of his Indian productions is

mentioned, The Changing Face of India (A. Bhaskar Rao, 1942).10 Was this a reflection of

the low professional status accorded to propaganda work done in a dependent colony? The

filmic material we have is uneven, yet there are ways of ‘seeing’ which are common to

Shaw’s work in the metropolis and in India, as in the emphasis on empirical observation and

exposition, the mobilisation of Soviet tropes of framing and the engagement with women

subjects in the mapping of the social. However these elements, in particular the engagement

9
Draft Memorandum on Film Publicity During the War by SB Sharma, IOR/L/I/462/14E; elsewhere it

was reported that Shaw had made 8 films, Arthur Elton to Gates, 12 March 1942, File INF 1/216

1942, National Archives UK.

10
Accessed on 18 September 2015 at http://explore.bfi.org.uk/4ce2b9f0a1758.
14 | P a g e
with the figure of the ‘new’ woman acquired a different kind of resonance because of the new

setting and alliances Shaw found available to him.

The importance of the Shaw/Bhaskar Rao film Women of India (1942) lies in the fact

that it outlined a range of professional role models for women – doctor, lawyer, architect,

journalist, teacher, telephone operator, shop assistant, typist and, most innovatively of all, the

profession of the actress, a vocation otherwise regarded with considerable social

ambivalence. The realm of possibility held out for the modern Indian woman extends to the

space of leisure and everyday public and political life: a fashionable young woman in a car

with her beau, a group of elegant girls sipping tea and smoking cigarettes; scenes of meetings

of a women’s association.11 (Fig. 1)

Thus, in counterpoint to the other works cited on Africa and Malaya, in which there is

a sense of removal, or distance and hierarchy in the construction of the narrative, Women of

India is imprinted with the viewpoint of a public sphere crucially defined by an articulate,

professionally active, politically assertive female constituency. Premila Rama Rau, who also

collaborated in the scripting of Women of India was in fact an employee of the Film Advisory

Board Film Unit set up in 1940 (Filmindia, 1941: 57). But there were quite startlingly

different ways of portraying women which were finding expression in official film at the very

same time.

The director of Women of India, A. Bhaskar Rao, deployed some modernist elements

characteristic of the British documentary in his other films as well. His School for Farmers,

(A. Bhaskar Rao, 1942), used Soviet horizon shots and angled frames to lend a dynamic feel

to the theme of agricultural improvement, manifesting itself in the image of young people

going forth into the fields, notebooks in hand, to research and develop farming conditions.

Rao also did films on handicrafts, and an award-winning film on the coconut tree and the

11
For a longer discussion of this film, see Vasudevan (2011: 73–94).
15 | P a g e
wide range of products it offered, Tree of Life (A. Bhaskar Rao, 1944). This film showcases

the modernist visual apparatus of creating new senses of mass and volume out of so-called

traditional materials such as coconut shells and fibre (Vasudevan 2011: 83-84). He would also

direct another film produced by Shaw, The Changing Face of India (1941), a rather

disorganised mixture of elements which tried to communicate a sense of the widely varying

worlds of modern India, from dance clubs and social scenes to traditional agrarian life and the

welter of changes taking place through education and agricultural improvement.

A sense of Rao's work captures the complex and differentiated aesthetic and

ideological context the British documentary expert was stepping into. Strikingly different

from Rao’s Women of India was Daughters of India, which he made later that very same

year.12 This film had been commissioned when Shantaram took over the Film Advisory Board

in February 1942 and was formally released by Films of India, a V. Shantaram production

unit. The title card features a peasant woman with sickle, two traditional women dressed in

saris, their foreheads decorated with the marital mark, Kunku, a Eurasian wearing western

dress, and a woman in a sari and helmet who looks like an air- raid warden. With the

exception of the Eurasian, there is a more traditional evocation of women in the opening

iconography, quite in contrast to the rhetorical dismissal of such roles in Women of India. In

Daughters of India, a woman cuts vegetables in the kitchen, another serves the family at the

dining table and the next teaches her son from a textbook. The soundtrack then intones a

change: ‘the Indian woman seems to have broken the barrier and come out in the open to

12
Philip Woods (2001) contrasts the same films, chosen, it appears, on the basis of film reviews rather

than actual viewing. His argument is that Shaw lacked a way of rooting his work in the Indian

context, in contrast to Shantaram’s evocation of indigenous traditions. In contrast, I suggest that rather

than differentiate on the basis of authenticity, the films capture different social dispositions and

aesthetic engagements, in which Shantaram’s would be no less modernist than Shaw’s, but through

the prism of expressionist techniques.

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share with the menfolk the responsibility in this hour of crisis.’ The film transits to an image

of a woman soldier operating a fire-hose, but the voice-over reassures us that the ‘the modern

daughters of India are only giving a fitting expression to the heritage of the past’. The film

then goes onto outline this heritage: ‘Women of Ancient India, even while attending to their

household duties took much time in the pursuit of truth’. From here there are recreations of

female icons such as Gargi, learned in the Vedic scripture and able to take on male scholars in

textual debate; and of Padmini, the Rajput queen who took her life by jauhar, a form of ritual

suicide to protect her chastity and her husband’s honour in the face of defeat in war by the

Muslim Sultans. (Figure 2)

As if to ethnically balance off this image of Muslim aggression and a Hindu queen’s

sacrifice, the figure of Chand Bibi, the Muslim queen of Ahmednagar who fought Mughal

power, is also invoked. These references to the past give way to a more conventional clutch

of modern roles, images of women in education, sitting for exams, working in laboratories,

taking part in oratory and debates, and women at war. The film concludes by going back to a

nurturing image of women, ‘inspired by the past, enlightened by the future’.

The two films are simple collage films, putting together a spectrum of images of

women, their roles, the sources of their inspiration and their function in the war. The presence

of A. Bhaskar Rao as director in both films is suggestive, precisely because they are so

different. The difference starts with the titles, the first casting women as one half of a modern

nation, the second having a definite paternalist impulse, suggestive of a male authority

overseeing the parade of femininity on display. In Daughters of India, the filters of tradition

and propriety ensure that modern women are depicted as reassuringly low-key and docile

even when captured in debate, in counterpoint to the array of strong women professionals,

lawyers, architects and women’s association activists on display in Women of India. When

Daughter of India shows women engaged in physical exercise, arms aloft, legs akimbo, there

17 | P a g e
is the suggestion of the school drill, not of a military formation, even if images from the

military are also in play. Female heroism of archaic provenance provides an altogether

stronger imagery for the role of women in war, including a very dark one associated with

sacrifice and ritual death, and composed through expressionist lighting codes.

Arguably, Daughters of India runs counter to anything else Bhaskar Rao did at the

time; it is as if the two films on women were in dialogue with each other, not only about the

possible range of roles and sources of inspiration possible for Indian women but the very

aesthetic terms on which a narrative of female modernity could be organised. Here Rao’s

prior association with the Prabhat film company and its main director, V. Shantaram, suggests

a different network and set of coordinates for the film’s aesthetic. Shantaram, who had visited

Germany and whose work was known for its expressionist style, made several key films

about the struggles of women in modern times, especially Kunku/Marital Mark (1937) and

Aadmi/Man (1939, script by A. Bhaskar Rao).13 The first is a classic of sorts, a story of a

young woman deceived into marrying an old man, and her resilience in dealing with her

oppressive situation. While she keeps her husband at bay, the conclusion is deeply

ambiguous; the old man, assailed by shadows, distorting mirror reflections and a growing

sense of emasculation takes his own life. There is vivid emulation here of the haunted men

and failed father-figures of German expressionism. Such ambiguous destinies assail

Shantaram’s women characters, and in Bhaskar Rao’s script for Aadmi, a young woman

courtesan offered the promise of romance and marriage is broken by a crippling sense of low

self-esteem when confronted with the image of her beloved’s devout mother, emblematising a

virtuous world she cannot possibly enter. These films are amongst the strongest works of the

time in their delineation of the complex and uncertain circumstances of modern life for

women. There is perhaps more than a shadow of such concerns and ambivalences in the

13
I owe this information to Ritika Kaushik.
18 | P a g e
expressionist tonalities of Daughters of India, made by the fleeting revival of an alliance

between Shantaram and Bhaskar Rao.

Women of India and Daughters of India, were located in different film networks made

up of distinctive aesthetic and political dispositions. Their contrasting attitudes and film

styles emphasise that at practically the same moment in time and under the same director

official film could emerge as a differentiated product. Shaw came to be aware of the different

political configurations that emerged, quite contingently, during his stint as producer,

primarily around a group of intellectuals and film-makers who privileged anti-fascism over

nationalism. This awareness in turn conditioned his imagination about how decolonisation

should be shaped to conform to British interests.

Shaw and the official film in the early light of decolonisation

In India, Shaw complained of inertia and bureaucratic impediment, and of the basic lack of

definition about what he was producing, and, more importantly, for whom he was

producing.14 On his return to England, he also gave vent to strident criticism of the Indian

film industry.15 Despite an air of estrangement from the overall situation in India, it is

remarkable that within a few months of his departure, there is evidence of his having

substantially accepted the viewpoint of the Congress, the main party of the movement for

independence from British rule. This apparent volte face related to the politics of

14
Shaw to Basil Wright, 16 September 1941, Basil Wright Collection 5/1/2 British Film Institute, is a

vituperative account of his Indian experience, lambasting in particular the bureaucracy.

15
The Indian Film Industry: Mr. Alexander Shaw's Criticism, Times of India, 23 May 1942, 6; see also

White Man of the West, filmindia, editorial, July 1942, 3, referring to Shaw’s article in Cine

Technician, February March 1942; FAB Chairman condemns Alexander Shaw, filmindia, September

1942, 27, featuring JBH Wadia’s letter responding to Shaw’s criticisms, 23 July 1942.
19 | P a g e
decolonisation, a politics from which the narratives of race and ethnic hierarchy observable in

the trajectories of British documentary empire films had been re-constituted, not excised.

Shaw’s unexpectedly pro-nationalist stance surfaced in his script for a compilation film,

Faces of India, planned with a view to reassuring US public opinion about Britain’s

democratic agenda for India. Shaw’s script highlighted Nehru’s vision ‘for the union of all

free people’, and for an India in which ‘Freedom and Self-Government . . . is higher than

interests of any minority’. This challenged the official position that Congress was

unrepresentative of Muslim minority interests and of the ‘Depressed Classes’ (referring to

‘untouchable’ communities) and therefore could not be the only party which would decide the

terms of the transfer of power. One observer from the Empire division noted that, whatever the

merits of Shaw’s script, it `is politically impossible being practically indistinguishable from straight

Congress propaganda’.16 Critics from the Empire division of the British government insisted

that the script should reflect the key role of the British as arbiters between various

irreconcilable interests. The Congress, it reiterated, could not play this role because it

represented only the Hindu majority, not the Muslims and Depressed Classes. It urged that

Britain’s policies to ameliorate poverty should also be captured, whereas the voice-over of

Shaw’s script spoke of how ‘Congress asks freedom to settle her own problems, develop her

own industries, raise the low standards of her overwhelming peasant population’. These

quarrels about the message of the film, and the fact that some episodes of the March of Times,

the influential and widely circulated US newsreel, fulfilled the purpose of the compilation

film led to the project being abandoned.17

The file contains different scripts, script comments, and correspondence, is composed

of graphic elements, as critics score through typed passages and inscribe by hand alternative

political scenarios and selection of representative images. It thereby captures an intermedia

16
Robert Fraser to Grubb, 21 May 1942, File INF 1/216, National Archives UK
17
File INF 1/216 1942, National Archives UK.
20 | P a g e
context, film narrative formulated in the material forms of type and hand-written inscriptions

and a graphic scoring-out. It also lays out in its correspondence both official hierarchies and

networks of professional documentary expertise and solidarity: in counterpoint to the political

imperatives of Empire Division officials such as Burton Leach who sought to highlight

British mediation of a conflicted indigenous polity, British documentary mainstays such as

Jack Beddington, then heading British Films Division, and Stuart Legg, weighed in to support

Alexander Shaw. (File INF 1/216) As Matthew Hull has argued in his analysis of the

composition of records in Pakistan, the file constitutes a media artefact with distinct material

features, and provides inscriptional traces of a variety of authors, of bureaucratic protocols

and hierarchies. It also indexes through letterheads, governmental and company insignia a

matrix of printed signs, here displaying the iconic configuration of Empire division, Films

Division, and Strand film company and the British Newsreel Association as constitutive of

the compiled empire documentary film; and in terms of what it refers to, the file puts together

a pre-existing template of words and images: feudal elements, princes, peasants, industry,

workers, political leaders, parties and ethnicities and discourses of poverty, development,

representation and constitutional arrangements. This template is also the template of pre-

existing footage, so that the reference is not only to things in the world but to their material

deposit in archival footage. If earlier I have suggested that we consider sound and voice as

key traces of the embodied geography of official film production, the domain of print and

writing points to film-making as an intermedia artefact.

How do we account for this turnaround in Shaw’s approach, occurring at exactly the

time when he was expressing his disgust in private with Indian affairs? Argument and

counter-argument around the film script echoed the tensions surrounding the ethnic

composition of the national project. At the time, there were proposals to put up federal

models of decolonisation to bring a better balance to ethno-religious interests (Ayesha Jalal

21 | P a g e
1985: 241). Contemporary scholarship on this moment between late colonialism,

independence and the partition of India has challenged the univocal narrative of the

emergence of the nation-state in India with perspectives from minority positions, whether of

Muslim, former untouchables or tribals. These have involved different chronologies through

which their histories have been recounted, quite distinct from the official biography retailed

for the nation-state (Chatterjee 1993: 76-94, Nigam 2009: 57-64, Rawat 2012: 120-123).

Perhaps Shaw was struggling to capture a vision for decolonisation that would circumvent the

politics of differentiated interests and offer to Britain the possibility of dealing with a

coherent, integrated polity. Here, questions of race and ethnicity were not dissolved, rather,

they were refigured, ethnicities of religion and caste subordinated under the desirable unity of

the nation-state.

A few years later, after India became independent from British rule, and the Indian

government had set up its ambitious – if much criticised – official film-making unit, the

Films Division, Shaw indicated that the bureaucracy had been the main hurdle to the Film

Advisory Board, but he lauded the progressive elements present in its fold. Writing in Four

Times Five, a Films Division publication, he noted,

With their usual intuition, some Indians saw the possibilities for the future

that the idea of a Government Film Unit contained. Left-wing politicians,

journalists, intellectuals and fighters for women’s rights decided to support

our efforts to keep the unit going. They often had to remain covert because

of the independence movement, but they gave advice, they opened doors,

they showed us the path . . . we were surrounded with a goodwill . . . it was

important that we should realize that what we were doing was for the

22 | P a g e
 future, however equivocal the background of the project and its production

might be . . . (Gopal Dutt 1969: 14–5)

However, this does not necessarily mean that there was a latent democratic and anti-

imperialist perspective in the British documentary movement requiring merely a progressive

local context to find expression. At the time Shaw’s response to Indian politics and Indian

society had in fact been outright hostile. His preference for the Nehruvian vision of an

integrated polity over a ‘messier’ federal form related to the wider bid to frame a coherent

transition to decolonisation in which Britain could ensure a continued influence over post-

colonial regimes. One of his colleagues, J. B. Holmes, who was technical adviser to the Film

Advisory Board’s successor institute, Information Films of India, put up a plan to set up an

independent documentary unit with Indian personnel and British financial support in the

transitional period.18 Though nothing came of the venture, it was an index of a concern to

give British documentary film-makers a position from which they could shape the

information order at the time of decolonisation. Arguably, this was a bid to secure an

influence which had never been particularly significant. Shaw’s stint had not produced the

results that were hoped for, whether in terms of the volume of film output or in the shaping of

local film-makers.

There are other stories of the expert which remain to be told. They will be found in the

sphere of the Army Film Units who trained Indian film-makers in Bombay, Delhi and

Calcutta to do war coverage, whose interviews suggest a quite different regime of film-

making from that of the British documentary; the role of expatriates such as the German Paul

Zils between 1946 and 1959, who brought the kulturfilm discourse of German documentary
18
J. B. Holmes to Krishna Gopal, 1 May 1946, Holmes had the Information Films of India director

Gopal in mind for this position, and Gopal responded positively to the idea. Krishna Gopal to Holmes,

7 May 1946, both in IOR/L/I/462/14E.

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into the mix along with collaborations invested in post-independence industrial

modernization; and in the corporate engagement with information film in the Burmah Shell

Film unit set up by the Canadian film expert, James Beveridge in 1954, a Griersonian who

brought a specific social science oriented engagement with the social type into a variety of

film series promoting Indian modernization. This article suggests we need to look at the

interplay of these international networks with local influences displayed in the work of

filmmakers such as A. Bhaskar Rao, and also to explore the colonial bureaucratic structures

which framed the government documentary. There was no single profile for the emergent

Indian documentary and official film, and the influence of the British expert needs to be

situated in the complex network of politics and aesthetics that defined this transitional period.

Acknowledgements

I thank Radhika Singha for careful editing and very helpful suggestions in bringing this

article into coherent shape.

References

Primary Sources

Basil Wright Papers, British Film Institute

Information Department Files, India Office Records, British Library (IOR/L/I)

Information files, National Archives, United Kingdom (INF files)

Films

Cable Ship (Alexander Shaw, 1933), The GPO Film Collection, British Film Insitute DVD

collection

Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934), The GPO Film Collection

24 | P a g e
Daughters of India (A. Bhaskar Rao, 1942), National Film Archives of India NFAI

Five Faces (Alexander Shaw, 1938), colonialfilm.org, British Film Institute

Men of Africa (Alexander Shaw, 1940), colonialfilm.org

School for Farmers (A. Bhaskar Rao, 1941), NFAI

The Changing Face of India (A. Bhaskar Rao, 1941) NFAI

Tree of Life (A. Bhaskar Rao, 1944), NFAI

Women of India (A. Bhaskar Rao, 1942) NFAI

Books and Articles

Anthony, Scott (2011) (edited) The Projection of Britain: a History of the GPO Film Unit,

London, BFI

_____________(2011) Scott, Anthony (2011), ‘Imperialism and Internationalism: The British

Documentary Movement and the Legacy of the Empire Marketing Board’, in

Grieveson and MacCabe (eds), (2011) Empire and Film, pp. 135–148.

_____________(2013), Public Relations and the Making of Modern Britain: Stephen Tallents

and the Birth of a Progressive Media Profession, Manchester, Manchester University Press

Chatterjee, Partha (1993), The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial

Histories, Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Datt, Gopal (1969), Four Times Five: Films Division, Bombay: Ministry of Information and

Broadcasting

Drayton, Richard (2000), Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the

‘Improvement’ of the World, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Deprez, Camille (2013), ‘The Films Division of India, 1948-1964: the early days and the

influence of the British documentary tradition’, Film History, 25 (3), 149–173.

25 | P a g e
Druick, Zoe and Deane Williams (eds) (2014), The Grierson Effect: Tracing Documentary’s

International Movement, London: British Film Institute/Palgrave MacMillan.

filmindia (1942) editorial, ‘White Man of the West’, Filmindia, July, 3

filmindia (1942) `FAB Chairman condemns Alexander Shaw', September, 27

Garga, B. D. (2007), From Raj to Swaraj: The Non-fiction Film in India, London/Delhi:

Penguin.

Grieveson, Lee and MacCabe, Colin (eds) (2011), Empire and Film, London: Palgrave

MacMillan.

Grieveson, Lee and MacCabe, Colin (eds) (2011), Film and the End of Empire, London:

Palgrave MacMillan.

Gupta, Akhil (2012), Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India,

Durham: Duke University Press.

Harper, Tim (2001), The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Hull, Matthew S. (2012), Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban

Pakistan, Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Jaikumar, Priya (2006), Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and

India, Durham: Duke University Press.

Jalal, Ayesha (1985), The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand

for Pakistan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kaushik, Ritika (2015), The Sun in the Belly: Film Practice at Films Division, 1965-1975,

M.Phil dissertation (unpublished), School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal

Nehru University.

Mestman, Mariano and María Luisa Ortega (2011), ‘Grierson and Latin America: Encounters,

Dialogues and Legacies’, in Druick and Williams (eds), The Grierson Effect: Tracing

26 | P a g e
 Documentary’s International Movement, London: British Film Institute/Palgrave

MacMillan.

Nigam, Aditya (2009), ‘Empire, Nation and Minority Cultures: The Postnational

Moment’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. XLIV (10), 57–64.

Rice, Tom (2010), entry on Men of Africa accessed on 27 October 2015 at

http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/5730.

Rawat, Ramnarayan S. (2011), Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History

in North India, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Smyth, Rosaleen (2013), ‘Grierson, the British Documentary Movement, and Colonial

Cinema in British Colonial Africa’, Film History, 25 (4), October, 82–113.

Sutoris, Peter (2016) Visions of Development: Films Division and the Indian Documentary,

Delhi, Oxford University Press

Roy, Srirupa (2007), Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism,

Durham: Duke University Press.

Stollery, Martin (2000), Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of

Imperialism, Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

Trotter, David (2011), ‘Representing Connection: A Multimedia Approach to Colonial Film,

1918-1939’, in Grieveson and MacCabe (eds), Empire and Film, 151–156.

Vasudevan, Ravi (2011), ‘Official and Amateur: Information Films in Colonial India, 1920s-

1940s’, in Grieveson and MacCabe (eds), Film and the End of Empire, 73–94.

Woods, Philip (2001), ‘From Shaw to Shantaram: The Film Advisory Board and the Making

of British Propaganda Films in India, 1940-1943’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio

and Television, 21 (3), 293–308.

Captions

Figure 1: Women of India (A. Bhaskar Rao, 1942)

27 | P a g e
Figure 2: Daughers of India (A. Bhaskar Rao, 1942)

Short bio

Ravi Vasudevan works at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, and with Sarai, the
Centre’s media and urban research programme. He is guest faculty in Film Studies at Jawaharlal
Nehru University, Delhi, and Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Vasudevan is editorial advisor to the film
studies journals Screen, Cinema and Cie, and Reframe and co-founder/editor of the journal BioScope:
South Asian Screen Studies. He has curated and organised film screenings, lecture series and
conferences, including The Many Lives of Indian Cinema, 1913-2013 and Beyond: Disciplines,
Histories, Technologies, Futures (Sarai/CSDS January 2014) and the current Sarai Wager on Cinema
series. His publications include (ed.) Making Meaning in Indian Cinema (Delhi, OUP, 2000) and The
Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema (Permanent Black, 2010). He is
currently working on non-fiction film infrastructures, the film archives and questions of
historiography; post-cinema media artefacts and political imaginaries; contemporary stardom and
political discourse; and the dispersed urban imaginaries of contemporary cinema.

28 | P a g e