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Attackers Of Kuki-Zo Village Disguised In Military Gear; Behind The Scenes Of 1930s Bombay Cinema

Umar Khalid’s 1,000 days behind bars, judge applies Manusmriti to minor’s rape case, para-athlete must move to go to school, OTT filmmakers fume about smoking curbs, science communicators in overdrive

Jun 9, 2023

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Snapshot of the day

June 9, 2023

Pratik Kanjilal

Umar Khalid has been in jail for 1,000 days without trial, with a little help from the judiciary. Article 14 examines 10 failings that vitiate the police case but bail remains beyond reach because judges interpret draconian laws in an unyielding fashion, even as a string of cases collapses.

The Supreme Court has denied urgent hearing of pleas against the Internet shutdown in Manipur. The same court had earlier established it as a fundamental right, which may be suspended only briefly and selectively in extreme situations.

After patrolling by the Army and the Central Armed Police Force had prevented violence in Manipur for two days, miscreants dressed in camouflage gear, driving military vehicles and armed with automatic weapons killed three and injured attacked the Kuki-Zo village of Khoken, which lies in the boundary between Kangpokpi District and Imphal West district, today. Yesterday, the state government passed on six cases to the CBI, which will investigate whether the ethnic violence was pre-planned, The Hindu reported. As per an official, the Union home ministry had sought a CBI probe. While nearly 35,000 people have been displaced because of the violence, the government has announced only Rs 101.75 crore in relief. The New York Times reports on how an outburst of ethnic hatreds has fractured an ancient kingdom and turned neighbours into enemies.

In The Hindu, the BJP stands exposed by the Thiruvavaduthurai Adheenam itself by attempting to twist the Sengol story.

https://twitter.com/Jairam_Ramesh/status/1667029852069982208?s=20

Satellite images show that China has consolidated its positions at the Line of Actual Control, but External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar says that the border stand-off was not about China encroaching on Indian territory, but the issue of “forward deployment” of troops at the LAC which could end in violence due to the proximity armies facing each other. This supports PM Narendra Modi’s 2020 denial of an intrusion.

But sometimes, he does step out of line:

In Ladakh, the names of local elected councillors were missing from foundation stones of development projects in their constituencies in Kargil district laid by BJP MP Jamyang Tsering Namgyal. In the BJP’s tradition, they were replaced by the names of BJP-affiliated councillors and the chairman of the Ladakh’s Haj committee.

While hearing a plea for medical termination of pregnancy of a minor rape victim, Justice Samir J Dave of the Gujarat High Court orally observed that the Manusmriti records that in the remote past, girls were married by the age of 14-15 and it was normal for them to bear children while they were still minors.

The Morning Context reports on a new K-shaped trend: as demand for air conditioners increases despite higher taxes and the higher climate burden, the most vulnerable don’t have options to tackle extreme heat. Two classes are emerging ― those who have ACs, and those who don’t.

After ‘land jihad’, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has cooked up ‘fertiliser jihad’, a conspiracy by the largely Bengali-origin vegetable growers of the state to use more fertilisers to give consumers of their produce lifestyle disorders. The furious farmers point out that their families eat the very same produce.

An international referee has confirmed a charge in the FIR filed by six adult wrestlers against Wrestling Federation of India president Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh. He is among 125 witnesses joining the police probe, which is to be closed by June 15.

Universal access to potable water would avert 4 lakh diarrhoea deaths, finds a WHO study commissioned by the Jal Shakti Ministry.

As NCERT “rationalises” textbooks in order to stop taxing young minds with weighty matters, academic and political scientist Suhas Palshikar and activist Yogendra Yadav urged the organisation to remove their names as ‘chief advisors’ from texts. They wrote to NCERT Director Dinesh Prasad Saklani that they find the text has been “mutilated beyond recognition”.

An ICMR-INDIAB national study on non-communicable diseases published in Lancet finds that the incidence of diabetes has grown 44% in four years, and it now afflicts 101 million Indians. At least 136 million, or 15.3% of the population, is pre-diabetic. Goa, Kerala and Puducherry lead the field. The study calls for state-specific interventions because while the disease is being contained in some states, it is surging in many others.

Hiring has slowed year on year, indicating an economic slowdown, but it has held the line in Tier II cities like Jaipur, and surprisingly, in secondary industries like advertising and PR, according to tracking company Foundit.

Signalling distress in the diamond polishing trade, a diamond worker, his wife and children have killed themselves with poison in Surat.

A week late, the southwest monsoon has reached Kerala. Rainfall this year is expected to be 96% of the Long Period Average of 87 cm, or at the lowest end of what the IMD considers normal.

The formalin horror is back: Meghalaya has banned shipments of fish from other states after formalin was detected in freshwater fish intended for the market. The state produces only about a third of its demand for fish. Formalin is used for preserving biological tissues, and has been misused earlier for protecting edible fish from cold chain defects. In April, contaminated samples were discovered in Assam.

Eight private schools in her hometown Dehradun declined to admit Hope Teresa David, 12, one of India’s youngest para-athletes and the only one from Uttarakhand to have participated in national and international wheelchair marathons. Apparently, they could not provide disabled-friendly infrastructure on campus and feared that she would not be able to “assimilate”. Her family is relocating to Bengaluru.

Indian schools are not built to deal with extreme heat. Scroll reports that the poor and marginalised will suffer the most, but the issue has received no legislative attention. The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has issued a notice to the Bihar government over reports that about 150 students of a school in West Champaran district got food poisoning from the mid-day meal and required attention in hospital.

Three former Doordarshan news anchors recount what television news looked like in their time, when despite government ownership, covered stories from all over India.

Smoking to be smoked out of OTT

The OTT industry is fuming about the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s plan to inject intrusive pop-ups into every scene with a lit cigarette, plus anti-smoking messages at the beginning and middle of every film. On mobile screens, they would swamp the real estate, and cinematographers, editors and directors who take their frames seriously are disturbed. Naturally, the industry was not consulted about the move. The government wants to use this measure to turn India into a “global leader” in tobacco control measures, which sounds in character. The Hindu says that a legal challenge is contemplated.

Micro-irrigation scheme generates mega scam

The implementation of ‘Per Drop More Crop’, a key element of an ambitious central micro-irrigation scheme under the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana, by the JMM-Congress-RJD government in Jharkhand, has been marred by the misuse of Aadhaar cards to create beneficiaries. New equipment gathers dust, farmers don’t know that money has been collected by private companies in their name, and fraud is rampant, finds The Indian Express.

Of 90 beneficiaries of the scheme, 17 didn’t know they were included and 60 said they were “misled” into signing up.

Book excerpt

Behind the scenes of 1930s Bombay cinema

Debashree Mukherjee

Ever since films became a popular medium of mass entertainment audiences have been intensely curious about life and work on a film set. How are films made, we have wondered, hoping that first-hand knowledge of a film set will explain and subdue the hold that cinema has on us. But, fortunately or unfortunately, that has rarely happened. The experience of the film set has historically confounded any straightforward process of demystification.

Bombay Talkies: An Unseen History of Indian Cinema presents a selection of photographs from the personal archive of Josef Wirsching, one of the pioneering film artistes of Indian cinema, who moved from Nazi Germany in the early 1930s to make India his workplace and his home. These photographs, most of them taken on film sets and outdoor locations for films produced by Bombay Talkies Ltd., show us a world of meaning that was never intended to be projected on the silver screen.

Seeing images of film practitioners immersed in the work of making movies, attempting to build a new local industry and shape an emerging art form, unsettles our assumptions about the past in fundamental ways. For one thing, these images show us that early filmmaking in India was often organizationally and technically robust despite the well-known challenges of finance and infrastructure. We are also confronted with the fact that the earliest makers of Indian cinema belonged to many different classes, religions, castes, genders, even nationalities, and it is misguided to demand a superficial authenticity from the past. Instead, as the essays in this book suggest, the past continues to surprise us as new sources emerge, showing us that history itself is a vital ongoing project.

The work of reinstituting Josef Wirsching within the known history of Indian cinema offers us an expansive perspective on the contours of so-called national cinemas. How can a German cinematographer be considered a pioneer of Indian cinema? And what was he doing in the Bombay film industry in the first place? Tracking these questions leads us to a fascinating network of people, places and practices that converged on Bombay city in the 1930s. From London to Lahore, Calcutta to Berlin, the Bombay film industry was built by people and resources from across the world. When one enquires after the ethnicities, linguistic identities and nationalities of the pioneers of Bombay Talkies, it becomes clear that the category ‘Indian cinema’ is a tenuous construct and includes a wide array of transregional and transnational influences, borrowing equally from Hollywood and Parsi theatre even as its practitioners crossed the borders of old and new nation states.

Bombay Talkies was set up by producer Himanshu Rai and his actress wife, Devika Rani Chaudhuri, in 1934. This Bengali couple met and married in London in the late 1920s, moved to Germany to work at the UFA Studios, worked on a couple of international co-productions, and finally set up their own studio in Bombay in 1934. In Europe, Himansu Rai and Devika Rani had strategically positioned themselves as authentically Indian filmmakers who wanted to accurately narrate Indian stories to Western audiences. Their early co-productions showcase a spectacular, spiritual and ahistorical India, which might seem exotic, even self-Orientalizing to viewers today. But Bombay Talkies’ mission was different. Envisioned as an Indian studio producing films for an Indian market, it sought to establish itself as a swadeshi business with a definite regional voice and location. Further, the studio consciously modelled itself as a national institution that would train a creative workforce at par with international standards. Bombay Talkies’ team of European personnel headed the main departments at the studio and simultaneously doubled as mentors to young recruits. Joseph Wirsching was the head of the Camera Department.

Josef Wirsching’s decision to move to Bombay in the 1930s seems mainly motivated by the fact that film studios in Germany were being taken over by the Nazi Party and non-Jewish filmmakers were being compelled to make propaganda films. This coercive atmosphere made artistic production very difficult for many independent-thinking filmmakers. Unlike many others who made the eastward journey to India during the Nazi years, Wirsching was neither Jewish nor a political exile. Still, his decision to migrate to India is significant. Bombay Talkies offered Wirsching the professional status and creative freedom that was not possible in Germany’s crowded and politicised film scene. Moreover, the content and themes of Bombay Talkies’ films, with their emphasis on progressive reform and the socially marginalised, offered a worthy vision of an inclusive future that was the antithesis of the Nazi project.

Bombay cinema from the 1930s to the 1950s reveals a strong influence of German Expressionism and Josef Wirsching played a pioneering role in popularising this stylized film form. German Expressionism, in the cinema of the 1920s (eg The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), was a strongly non-naturalistic style in which sets, costumes, acting and lighting all took on the role of “expressing” complex and dark human psychology. You see this influence most strongly in Bombay Talkies’ debut feature film, Jawani ki Hawa (1935), a romantic thriller. In it, Wirsching composed frames with huge pools of darkness, sharp highlights, eerie shadows, distorted angles and sets which appear to overwhelm the humans. These Expressionist techniques lent themselves beautifully to Bombay Talkies’ early melodramatic screenplays, where socially transgressive emotions found visual expression in song and mise-en-scène. The crisis of the alienated individual in postwar Europe was thus transferred, via melodramatic Expressionism, to the crisis of the modernising self in a colonised nation.

While the Indian founders of Bombay Talkies were largely from the Bengali upper castes, from the first year of its operation, the studio employed a demographically diverse roster of creative personnel. Across the departments of acting, writing, sets, makeup, camera, costume and lighting, the studio hired persons from various strata of Indian society. About 300 “students” were interviewed in the first year itself. A whole generation of film industrywallahs ‘graduated’ from Bombay Talkies, which became a veritable film school with experienced practitioners as well as newbie recruits amongst its ranks: Saraswati Devi (née Khorshed Homji) as music director, Mumtaz Ali as choreographer, Madame Azurie as dancer, Niranjan Pal as scriptwriter, KA Abbas as publicist, Gyan Mukherjee as director, Sashadhar Mukherjee as producer, Najam Naqvi as script supervisor, Savak Vacha as sound engineer, Madame Andrée as makeup person, JS Casshyap as dialogue writer, Dattaram N Pai as editor, and RD Pareenja as cameraperson. Himansu Rai and Devika Rani insisted that all salaried staff be housed near the studio complex in Malad and ran an on-site medical facility, canteen and recreation room to foster a sense of community and collegiality. The studio’s top-notch equipment, multiple sound stages, processing laboratory and cross-departmental training requirements made it a prime destination for film aspirants who wanted to learn the ropes of production. At its zenith, Bombay Talkies had about 400 employees on its rolls.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Bombay Talkies’ German employees abruptly found themselves branded ‘enemy aliens’. It is said that Himansu Rai’s premature death in 1940 might have been partly due to the great shock of losing his best personnel and friends. After Rai’s death, Devika Rani took over the studio and some of the biggest hits of the period were produced under her watch. However, dissatisfactions were brewing in the studio and two rival factions were formed, with Ashok Kumar, Sashadhar Mukherjee, Savak Vacha, and Rai Bahadur Chuni Lall all leaving in 1943 to form their own studio, Filmistan. In 1945, Devika married the Russian artist Svetoslav Roerich and retired from the film industry, paving the way for Ashok Kumar’s return to Bombay Talkies as producer. Josef Wirsching did not participate in any of these power tussles or transitions as he spent the entire war period, and longer, in internment camps. Upon his release he once again decided to stay on in India. In the postwar years, Wirsching scaled greater artistic heights with Mahal (1949), Dil Apna aur Preet Parai (1960) and Pakeezah (1972), the last completed after his death in 1967.

(Excerpted from ‘Introduction: What Photography Can Tell Us About Cinema’s Past’ in Bombay Talkies: An Unseen History of Indian Cinema, by Debashree Mukherjee, Mapin Publishing & Alkazi Collection of Photography.)

Reportedly

Irony dies a thousand deaths every day in Kashmir. At a meeting commemorating the completion of nine years of Modi government, J&K Waqf Board chair and BJP spokesperson Dr Darakhshan Andrabi declared that the Press Club at Anantnag will come up soon. Press clubs were forcibly closed after Article 370 was abrogated, and the media found itself in a black hole.

Prime Number: 1 kg per head per day

Deutsche Welle estimates that as India’s construction boom continues, the cities need 1 kg of sand per capita per day. Some 50 million tonnes is mined every year from riverbeds and lakes, especially near cities like Delhi, and it will take thousands of years to be replenished. Riverine ecosystems are being changed by illegal mining and lands which were once very fertile are hard to farm. At the same time, sea sand, which cannot be used for construction, is a problem which is intensifying as more ports and breakwaters are built.

https://www.dw.com/en/sand-a-priceless-resource/video-65863289

Deep Dive

Henry Kissinger had described Bangladesh as a “basket case”, but within decades it was making great strides. But now, South Asia’s steadiest success story is junk grade, and in need of bailouts.

Opeds you don’t want to miss

In Manipur, the spark was lit by the majority Meitei demand for Scheduled Tribe status, but the fuel was an artificial ‘hill-valley’ divide in the state.

“Nero will, of course, continue to fiddle, while Manipur burns,” writes Pratap Bhanu Mehta on the limits of the BJP’s politics in the Northeast.

Speaking up is a privilege in a country where sharing what happened to you can mean persecution, even death. Priya Ramani, who fought a case for two years, accused by a minister of criminal defamation, writes to the wrestlers.

Akhand Bharat has finally backfired on the BJP, which must now fear bad blood across South Asia.

Patrick Patterson explains, from a legal perspective, how and why we must ban caste discrimination in California.

The worst rail accident in recent years was used to attempt to smear Muslims. It’s become second nature.

India’s use of bulldozers and anti-encroachment drives on Muslims resembles Nixon’s ‘War On Drugs’ policy, writes Saddam Hussian and Nafis Haider.

“Unless an acceptable compromise formula is agreed upon, round two of ethnic violence is inevitable. This round will be a virtual ethnic civil war where the Army will not be dealing with mobs but militia groups,” writes Lt Gen HS Panag (Retd).

From e-commerce platforms to payments to app stores, the government wants to do it all. This can be costly, ineffective, distortive and opaque, writes Anupam Manur.

On delimitation, Yogendra Yadav argues that “democratic principle must be weighed against the federal principle. And at this juncture in our national history, the federal principle must trump.”

Listen up

With presenter Sangeeta Datta, Indian Express columnist and film critic Shubhra Gupta discusses the legacy of Irrfan Khan – the subject of a new book Irrfan: A Life in Movies – in an episode of ‘My Book’ on Cineink.

Watch out

With The Hindu’s Shilajit Mitra, Director Hansal Mehta and actors Karishma Tanna, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub and Harman Baweja discuss their new series Scoop – which is inspired by former crime journalist Jigna Vora’s book.

Over and out

Read an excerpt from Dennis Dalton’s Indian Ideas of Freedom, from Gandhi, Ambedkar and Tagore to MN Roy.

In Cherrapunjee, people generally use umbrellas to protect themselves from the rain at this time of year. But this year, umbrellas are keeping off the sun. The Quint has a photo essay on the climate crisis.

There are more Indian science communicators than ever before, from CERN scientist Archana Sharma toYouTubers like Gareeb Scientist, who are a mission to take science out of the pages of journals to common people and students, reports The Print.

That’s it for today. We’ll be back with you on Monday, on a device near you. If The India Cable was forwarded to you by a friend (perhaps a common friend!) book your own copy by SUBSCRIBING HERE.