Total Recall: Two Indias for midnight's children

While an Indian documentary captured the hopes and fears of young citizens in 1967, a French film depicted the chaos

In 1967, exactly 20 years after India’s Independence, the Film Division commissioned a documentary on young Indians born on 1947. The film, eventually titled I Am 20, was directed by bureaucrat-filmmaker SNS Sastry and followed a simple narrative conceit. The interviewees, comprising both urban and rural men and women, spoke of their ambitions, fears, hobbies and frustrations. Some of them addressed the camera in English, while others used their native tongues — Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi. After doing the rounds of cinemas, it was stowed away in an archive and remained inaccessible to a larger audience, till it was uploaded on YouTube in 2013, where it has been viewed by more than 200,000 people.

While some of the interviewees expressed hope at India’s economic and industrial growth since Independence, others complained about corruption, persistent inequality, and shortage of essential items. “I don’t have any love for my country,” claims one of them. An engineering student adds that the country’s freedom meant “that man has freedom to starve, to go naked, to die of hunger, and to go uneducated”. While India might have changed significantly since then, becoming one of the fastest growing economies in the world, the inequality in Indian society has become more entrenched in the 75th year of its independence. As a recent Oxfam report shows, only 10 percent of India’s population controls 77 percent of its national wealth, and 63 million Indians are pushed into poverty each year because of health care costs.

The 1960s was not a time of great hope for India. The decade began with the disastrous war with China in 1962, and things only went downhill with an inconclusive war with Pakistan in 1965, a growing foreign debt, drought and famine and communal tensions at home. The economic crisis became evident when former prime minister Indira Gandhi’s government decided to devaluate the rupee on 5 June 1966. Political scientist Michael Brecher, revisiting the decision in a 1977 essay, claimed that it proved to be of little gain in the short term, and attracted criticism from the leftist parties as well as the Hindu right Jana Sangh.

Even in the long term, India’s economy showed no signs of recovering. Economist Ranjit Sau in his appraisal of the crucial 10 years of 1967-77 wrote: “India in the decade of 1967-77 was like a grand feast at a marriage ceremony somewhere in a posh suburb of Calcutta or Bombay. In the glare of florescent lights, amidst the soothing fragrance of precious flowers, you are all flush with the spirit of merriment. Stretch your sight a little, you will see at the far end where light fades into darkness a huddle of rag-tag beggars bent on left-overs. Such was the decade, 1967-77.”

Journalist Samanth Subramanian tracked down several of the people featured in Sastry’s documentary for a 2015 article, whose headline “Midnight’s grown-ups” echoed Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children (1981) almost like a cliché. Unlike Rushdie’s protagonist Saleem Sinai, who is endowed with magical powers of telepathy, because he is born in the magical midnight hour when India gains independence, the “midnight’s grown-ups” whom Subramanian spoke to have nothing magical about them. In fact, some of them were not even born on August 15, India’s Independence Day, but somewhere near that date. Sastry also gamed the interviews by selecting candidates from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. As a result, most of the interviewees are male and middle-class, who would go on to have perfectly regular middle-class lives.

Though an important historical document now, I Am 20 failed to capture the fault-lines that would roil Indian society over the next several decades. As Shailesh Gandhi, one of the interviewees in Sastry’s film, told Subramanian, 1967 was a troubled year, when the social injustices and deprivation led to a Maoist insurrection in the eastern state of West Bengal. Taking its name from Naxalbari, the village where leftist activists Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal, and Jangal Santhal had begun an armed peasant movement, the insurrection “spread rapidly, (and) engulfed large chunks of the country,” writes historian Ranajit Samaddar in an introduction to From Popular Movements to Rebellion: The Naxalite Decade (2019), a collection of academic essays on the movement. Another documentary, Calcutta 1969, by French film director Louis Malle captured the zeitgeist of the economic disparity and desperation and the political turmoil in the eastern Indian metropolis in 1968.

Malle arrived in India to show the films of the French New Wave to Indian cinephiles and found the experience to be somewhat shocking. It prompted “a passionate return to filmmaking”, writes cultural and political historian Hugo Frey in his book-length study of Malle’s work. “India offered a completely different world to any of Malle’s previous experiences and proved a cathartic release from the tensions that had built up at home,” Frey adds. The result of the hours of documentary footage he shot was Calcutta 1969 and L’Inde fantôme, a seven-part TV documentary. Arriving in India to find inspiration had become a fad of sorts after American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s famous Calcutta journey, perhaps best chronicled in Deborah Baker’s A Blue Hand. In fact, some of the shots in Malle’s documentary — of leprosy patients, destitute and homeless people, the Howrah Bridge — remind one of the black-and-white pictures Ginsberg and his lover and travelling companion Peter Orlovsky included in the former’s Indian Journals.

The narrative technique Malle uses in the documentary is one of contrasts. Visuals of relative prosperity in golf clubs or the race course in Calcutta are juxtaposed with the desperate poverty of the slums near jute mills or Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. Young musicians practicing sarod and sitar dissolve into leftist students union leaders raising slogans outside Calcutta University and clashes between protestors and the police. The march of protestors itself is interrupted by a religious procession before the exchange of bricks and tear gas shells between the police and the students resume. This technique would be adopted by Indian film director Mrinal Sen in his experimental 1972 feature film Calcutta 71 (even the name acknowledges the inspiration), where the opening montage would similarly juxtapose disparate images to a background of Ananda Shankar’s fusion music.

The city becomes a metonym for the country. The disparity of prosperity and opportunity, which even I Am 20 had to acknowledge, becomes even more evident in Malle’s documentary. In his cool, detached style, with very little commentary, the French filmmaker manages to reveal the fault-lines in Indian society of the late-1960s. One can accuse him of putting an orientalist lens on his camera that could at times fetishize the evident poverty on India’s streets. At the same time, it is a percussor to films such as Calcutta 71 or Satyajit Ray’s Jana Arnaya (1976), or even Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Namak Haram (1973) that use similar documentary footage in fiction feature films. Rewatching these films now — 50 years after they were made — can be a shocking experience. Not because they preserve a particular moment in India’s contentious history for us, but because they hold up a mirror to our contentious present.

Uttaran Das Gupta teaches journalism at O P Jindal Global University, Sonipat. His novel, Ritual, was published in 2020.