Given the wealth and complexity of the social life and cultural traditions of the Indian subcontinent, the paucity of systematic film-making of an ethnographic character in this region in the first half of the twentieth century is really quite remarkable.
Ethnographic film-making under the British Raj
During the colonial period in India, the British – be it as commercial film-makers, anthropologists or other scholars, the colonial government or private individuals resident in the country – showed very little interest in making films about local social life and custom.
If the collection of colonial-era films at the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge, or the recent selection of such films assembled in celebration of Indian Independence by the British Film Institute (BFI), are anything to go by, it would seem that when the British did make films, it tended to be about their own activities: military parades, scientific or climbing expeditions, missionary endeavours, the building of hospitals and schools, polo matches and so on.
All ethnographic in their own way, of course, but if local people and their customs appeared in these films, it was generally only in passing, as walk-on parts, as it were, in the general account of life under the Raj. The contrast with the great quantity of films of ethnographic interest that the French made in their colonies in Southeast Asia is striking (and similar to the contrast between French and British colonial film-making in Africa).
Major secular spectacles, notably durbars, attracted the attention of professional cameramen in British India – a remarkable early example from 1902 can be viewed here – but then they often also involved colonial elites. By contrast, there is very little on the major religious traditions of India, and the many public ritual and ceremonial events associated with them.
When it came to filming scenes of everyday Indian life, it was mainly amateur film-makers who did so, but typically their material would consist of a few sequences here and there, often shot in a hesitant, distant manner, without any real engagement with the subjects, and lost in amongst some more personal coverage of the film-maker’s travels.
There were some exceptions to these generalisations, but very few, and even fewer were directly and intentionally ethnographic. Basil Wright’s classic film, The Song of Ceylon might qualify`as such an exception, though the ethnographic validity of some of the sequences has been questioned. So too might the series of short films available on the BFI site that were made by World Window Productions, a US company, but using British crews. Produced in the late 1930s and shot in Technicolor, they include A Village in India, A Road in India, Temples of India, and the extraordinary Indian Durbar.
These films carry voice-over commentaries that now seem intolerably patronising and clichéd, and much of the action has obviously been set up. However, faute de mieux, they do offer something approaching an ethnographic account, and they are also very well-made from a cinematographic point of view. They can all be accessed via the BFI website here.
But these exceptions, and a few others like them, merely prove the more general rule that during the colonial era, the British did not systematically engage in making films of ethnographic interest in South Asia.
Ethnographic film-making by visiting film-makers
The closest to an indigenous filmmaker to make ethnographic films in the colonial period in South Asia appears to have been Ananda Coomaraswamy, the Anglo-Tamil art historian and philosopher, though by the time that he came to make these films, he held the post of Keeper of Indian Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and had not been resident in the region for many years.
In 1920 and again in 1924, accompanied by his companion and later wife, the New York dancer Stella Bloch, Coomaraswamy travelled widely in India and Sri Lanka as well as in various other countries in Asia and made a series of shortdescriptive films, mostly about traditional forms of dance. The films that he made specifically in South Asia included Indian Dramatic Dances, Yakkun Netuma: Devil Dancing in Ceylon, both probably made in 1920, and Holi Festival near Mathura, which Coomaraswamy appears to have made during his second trip in 1924.
There were, however, quite a number of other visitors to the region who made films that are of ethnographic interest. In the early years, as in many parts of the world, the subcontinent was often visited by the prodigiously active cameramen of the French newsreel agencies, Gaumont and Pathé. Although typically no more than a few minutes long, these films offer a series of remarkable ethnographic snap-shots of South Asian life in the early twentieth century. A particularly impressive example concerns the celebration of muharram in Delhi, now long discontinued, as sketched by an anonymous Pathé film-maker in 1909 and viewable here.
There were also some US visitors whose footage, though not viewed for the Silent Time Machine project, has attracted positive comment from other authors. In 1916, George A. Dorsey, Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago made a film entitled Native India, while Robert Haupt, an American school-teacher shot some travel footage between 1933 and 1937 that is said to include some sequences of ethnographic interest, notably a sequence about a mela at Allahabad, and another about a saddhu initiation at a similar festival at Nagpur.
Ethnographic film-making by intention
It would not be until the late 1930s that any film-making that was intentionally ethnographic appears to have taken place in the region. Probably the earliest example is provided by the remarkable figure of Ursula Graham Bower, who although not formally trained as an anthropologist, nor as a film-maker, shot about 2.5 hours of ethnographic footage of surprisingly high technical quality, some of it even in colour, in Northeast India, between the late 1930s and the mid 1940s.
This mostly concerned the Naga, but in the final period of her time in India, she also shot footage among the Apa Tani. Her films are not only technically competent and aesthetically assured, but they are also suffused with an intimacy with the subjects that was unrivalled in South Asia at that period.
Exceptional though Graham Bower’s film-making might be, she only produced a very small amount of film. A much more prolific figure in the history of ethnographic film-making in South Asia is Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, an Austrian anthropologist who was a member of staff and ultimately Professor of Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Haimendorf began making films among the adivasi or ‘tribal’ groups of the Deccan plateau in the 1940s. Over the next thirty years, he would produce a large body of ethnographic film work shot in various different locations around the subcontinent, but particularly in Nepal and in Nagaland. An extensive collection of around 80 of his films, of variable lengths and from various periods, is available as a playlist on the ayabaya website created by Alan Macfarlane, which is accessible here.
Haimendorf’s principal purpose in shooting this material was for research, or to support his teaching, and for the most part, it consists of assemblies of silent edited footage, seemingly arranged in a specific order, but without being polished, freestanding films with titles and a clear narrative thread.
However, Haimendorf did make a number of films that were intended to be free-standing, often, though not always, involving collaboration with BBC Television. These films were Land of the Gurkhas (1959), Hill Tribes of the Deccan (1960), Wanchu Nagas (1962), The Land of Dolpo (1965), The Men Who Hunted Heads (1972) and Trading Societies of Western Nepal (1976).
After Indian Independence
After Indian Independence, there was no immediate dramatic increase in ethnographic film-making. Haimendorf continued with his work, but he had few ethnographic film-making peers. Prince Peter of Greece made Kalbopfer (Calf Sacrifice) a film about a Toda cremation ceremony, but there appears to have been few other examples of anthropologists making films.
Over the course of the 1950s, the Swedish film-maker, Arne Sucksdorff made three films in India. These were classed as ‘documentaries’ at the time (but now would be more likely to be considered ‘ethnofictions’). The best known of them is the The Flute and the Arrow, which concerned the Muria, an adivasi group of central India.
On the other hand, in contrast to the colonial period, when the government showed virtually no interest in ethnographic film-making, between 1954 and the 1975, the Anthropological Survey of India, funded by the Indian government, made some 35 films all over the country. These are of variable lengths and are listed here.
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