Jean Renoir’s The River and Roberto Rossellini’s India Matri Bhumi will continue to be liked, yet it is no longer possible to hide behind polite euphemisms and avoid the fact they are also products of specific post-colonial attitudes.
Imperial mentality did not automatically vanish with the formal political end of Indian colonialism in 1947. Films like The River (1951) and India Matri Bhumi (1959), both made by Westerners and for Westerners during the first decade of India’s independence, stand in testimony. Their directors – the revered Jean Renoir and Roberto Rossellini respectively – were well intended and open-minded individuals, yet they were men of their time and thus Eurocentric in many of their artistic decisions. Colonialism – along with artistic brilliance – was tightly interwoven in the very texture of their India-set films2.
The stylistic achievements have been extensively praised. Writing now, I feel it is important to also spend some time unpacking the lingering colonial attitudes that come through to the surface of these films.
First and foremost, Renoir’s The River, a film credited with reviving his career after a hiatus in Hollywood. Shot some three years into India’s Partition in one of the most affected areas, West Bengal, it was made in a context where things were far from settled.
Renoir did an extensive location scouting in and around Kolkata3. During these short trips he often saw overcrowded trains full of refugees fleeing what was then known as East Pakistan (now Bangladesh); he is known to have made comments showing how deeply he was affected by what he witnessed4. Yet in spite its seemingly contemporary setting The River’s rose-tinted glasses approach is a distortion, an indirect glorification of colonialism5. There is no trace of social cataclysms in The River; everything is in the reins of jovial good order and routine under the watchful eye of a competent white manager. Local Indians appear cheerful and carefree; the only disturbances relate to the emotional upheavals within the colonial family.
The River’s temporal setting is undefined, so it remains unclear if the film is set before or after Partition (even though, judging by the costumes and mannerisms, as well as by the references of the recent war in which Captain John lost his leg, one is left with the impression it is set after World War II). Whatever the answer, however, Renoir’s representation of India is – in spite all of its beauty – insensitive and disrespectful to the host country. If the film is set before Partition, The River effectively celebrates the colonial period whilst being filmed at a time when the country is painfully emerging from decades of anti-colonial struggles. If it is set after the end of WWII and in the period of Partition, it is oblivious to the immediate suffering of the region. These issues would not come up if the film had not been shot in India; praising The River for being, progressively, shot entirely on location, is problematic.
Turning a blind eye to the reality of India’s suffering is not just a missed opportunity for Renoir, who fails to cement the humanist credentials of anti-war films like The Great Illusion (1937). It is a failure of judgement which could be explained, perhaps, by his desire for American success.
And American success he got. The River was well received and widely distributed in the USA, where the impressionable nine-year-old Martin Scorsese admired it during one of his early outings to the cinema. This success is not unexpected, as The River is a bona fide American product, even if a bizarre one6. It is a curious – if enthralling – transcultural pastiche, where a typical American story, one that feels like a version of Vincente Minelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1946) or Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Women (1949), both evolving around the teenage love rivalries of families with multiple female siblings for whom marrying off well is of paramount importance, is transposed onto the colourful backdrop of India, with its vibrant ceremonies and its bronze-bodied servants, alluring dancers, and dusty snake-charmers.
Making best use of the lush Technicolor, The River delivers unforgettable glimpses of magnificent reds, blues, and whites – and there are also the yellows and greens of clothes, the stunning blossoms, the flickering Diwali lights, and the silvery jute. Yet, it is a film in which only the whites can speak. The story is told from the point of view of a normative white narrator; it gravitates around the feelings and trepidations of white protagonists. The Indians are present but mainly stay silent. The only one who is given lines is Melanie, the mixed-race daughter of this expatriate Englishman Mr. John, dignified and smart7. And even though she is quite present and allowed to speak, her most memorable scene in the film is the moment when she expresses doubtful if someone like herself should have been born at all.
Made some years later and clearly with a focus on India as an independent country, Rossellini’s India Matri Bhumi stays away from The River’s ahistorical fuzz. A semi-fictional hybrid project that was shot in parallel with a documentary series, it features stories from the lives of concrete protagonists inhabiting different parts of the subcontinent8. It is well researched, it recognizes India’s triumphs and challenges, and it talks of its diversity, multiculturalism, and peace-promoting efforts. And indeed, the film is all about them, about the Indians.
Yet the matter of ‘who can speak’ pops up with an alarming urgency once again – even if prompted differently – and, once again, Indians cannot speak. The ‘normative narrator’ is not seen but heard, its function is assumed by a voice-over commentary in Italian, delivered to the background footage from Mumbai and Varanasi. The voice-over narration seems to disappear in the dramatized segments that take up the longest screen time: here, Indian protagonists play themselves and, at a first glance, it appears they also speak for themselves. But not really: they ‘speak’ through a layer of added voice-over monologue, supposedly their own but in fact an extra layer of Italian narration that is pasted on top. They do engage in dialogues on screen – in their respective native languages – and these dialogues are left to be seen yet not translated. The added narration is delivered in first person, as if a monologue of the respective protagonist: yet, pasted on top, this layer feels strangely artificial9. Apparently, the unnamed Indian actors are fine to be in the film and re-enact stories from their own life; they are even fine to be seen talking – as long as this talking does not interfere with the overriding narrative through which Rossellini wants to keep control whilst presenting it as their own. It is all pasted on top and read by someone else. By someone who can talk.
Most drastically this is seen in the third segment, where scenes from the daily life of an old man from the South are re-enacted. He is agile and fast to move; if he were to speak, his talking would be shrill and breakneck paced, in the manner of South Indians. In the film, however, the man’s real voice is suppressed whilst his ‘monologue’ is delivered in a ceremoniously slow and deep Italian bass, which conveys one piece of awesome wisdom after another. The dissonance between voice and image is astounding, a true cacophony of visuals and soundscape.
I am not going to go into the other aspects where the Eurocentrism of the two films plays out. Digging deeper into the way Indian contributors are credited (or not) in The River and India Matri Bhumi would open a veritable Pandora’s box10. If the way the affair of Rossellini with Sonali Senroy-Dasgupta was covered at the time is investigated, one would find a host of racial bias – the ‘Indian seductress’, who was often not even named, was most certainly not expected to speak a word. She was judged and treated very differently from her Swedish-American celebrity predecessor, and no one ever acknowledged that the damage she suffered was more severe than Rossellini’s. I can only hope to see someone make a documentary on the subject one day: it would be an eye-opener on love and post-colonialism11.
Jean Renoir (L) । Roberto Rossellini (R)
Do not get me wrong. These films will continue to enchant, yet it is no longer possible to hide behind polite euphemisms and avoid the fact they are also products of specific post-colonial attitudes. Renoir and Rossellini are great directors. Just that, at the time, they were still not clear that the subaltern can speak. The films are innovative and fresh in their artistry, and in many other aspects that remain little discussed. I find The River – where Renoir opts for casting a real war-time amputee – fascinating in the way it treats matters of disability and impaired masculinity. India Matri Bhumi is deeply relevant today with its representation of precarious hard labour at the vast expanses of the Hirakud Dam construction site, preceding Sebastião Salgado’s Workers by some three decades. Rossellini’s observations of climate emergency, especially as triggered by big business’ damaging interventions, and on the importance of maintaining humankind’s harmonious relationship with nature and animals, are principal take-aways that acquire renewed pertinence in our current context. I hope others will talk more about these matters in their writing.
References:
1. I am grateful to Sanghita Sen who helped with researching for this essay and shared some of the material from her forthcoming documentary on Ritwik Ghatak.
2. This was also the case of other contemporary films of the Western gaze, from Hans Nieter’s Seven Years in Tibet (1956) to Fritz Lang’s 1959 exotic Indian Epic, all precursors to later work by Spielberg, Jean-Jacques Annaud and Scorsese.
3. Various locations were considered, particularly in the Khardaha and Sodepur areas, settling on a shooting site in Barrackpore near the Hooghly River, at the building currently occupied by the Ramkrishna Vivekananda Mission School, as seen on Google maps.
4. He was accompanied by DoP Ramananda Sengupta (1916-2017), himself a refugee from East Bengal; occasionally, Satyajit Ray would come out, too. Sengupta was 35 years old then, and the first Indian to be trained in using Technicolor in London. He was to be credited as camera operator, whilst Ray remained uncredited.
5. The film is based on a 1946 memoir by colonial writer Rumer Godden, who was a romantic with a special attraction to exotics, who also wrote romantic fantasies about Gypsies. Godden’s Indian experiences dated from earlier on and indeed her memories were of a happy and care-free pre-Partition existence in East Bengal.
6. Even though it was produced by an American company and made in English, The River was voted to the ‘top five foreign films’ by the National Board of Review.
7. The actress playing Melanie (who also performs the memorable Indian dance) is only credited as Radha; her full name is Radha Burnier. Already by that time, she was one of the key figures of India’s Theosophical Society, over which she later presided for several decades, claiming a major spiritual presence in the country.
8. Rossellini comes to India on invitation from Jawaharlal Nehru in view to make a series of documentaries marking the tenth anniversary of the country’s Independence. He travels widely – from the Himalayas to the Malabar Coast and Kerala, and from Madhya Pradesh to Odisha — and acquires remarkable knowledge about the country. The result is a series of ten documentary shorts, L’India vista da Rossellini, to which he provides live commentary, in dialogue with another presenter. It aired on RAI television early in 1959.
9. These are credited to Vincenzo Talarico.
10. For example, none of the dozen Indian amateur actors in India Matri Bhumi –yttt at least four of whom have significant memorable screen presence – are identified by name in the credits.yyyyaqyBttyy
11. India Matri Btty the sake of having easier access to her. Subsequently, she ran a boutique for luxury Indian textiles in Rome. The relationship with Rossellini came to an end in 1973 yet she remained in Italy for another four decades, until her death.
An authority on world cinema, her special expertise is in the cinema of the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Europe in general. Her research approaches cinema on a meta-national level and focuses on the dynamics of transnational film. She has published extensively on international and transnational film art and film industry, and convenes research networks on film festivals and on the Dynamics of World Cinema,
Opinions expressed in this article are of the author’s and do not represent the policy of The Edition. The writers are solely responsible for any claim arising out of the contents of their articles. This essay has been published with the BFI’s anniversary release DVD of The River by the British Film Institute in 2021.
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