Cinematic bid to boost Indian image overseas
AN itinerant tribe, they live in the western part of Rajasthan moving in the desert regions around Barmer, Jodhpur and Jaisalmer. And although they seldom frequent big towns, their music has travelled far and wide, and even crossed international boundaries.

The ethics of photography
IN our private lives, most of us take manipulated photographic images — the studio portrait, the touched up ‘matrimonial’ photograph, the airbrushed detail — so much for granted that the thought of there being questions in all this does not even cross our minds.

The stained-glass paintings
By Vidhi Bisht
INTERPRETATION of romance, relics of ancient times, myths and an accumulation of facts and fiction are a few things which spring into our minds while beholding the visible splendour of art and architecture in the form of our historical monuments.

Commercial cinema not his cup of tea

BHASKAR Chandavarkar, one of the best rated musicians in the country, who created the score for landmarks like “Khandahar”, “Thodasa Rumani Ho Jaaye”, has turned his back to cinema as his kind of films are not being made.

“The kind of films I used to make music for are not being made anymore. Nobody gives money to people who make this kind of films. Shyam Benegal has almost stopped making films. We hear of Govind Nihalani’s ‘Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Ma’. But it is never seen in theatres.

“Commercial cinema, which people say I could and should have done, is not my cup of tea. I cannot churn out three songs a day, and in the industry it matters only if you are a brand name,” says Chandavarkar, who provided music for Mrinal Sen’s “Khandahar”, Aparna Sen’s “Paroma” and Amol Palekar’s “Thodasa Rumani Ho Jaaye”.

“I was closely associated with films and their makers who at one point of time thought their creations were a kind of revolution, who gave lot of scope for experimentation.

“But now, you even have song banks from where producers select readymade tunes and then weave a story around them,” says Chandavarkar, who is a major name in the country’s music scene as far as theatre is concerned.

Composer, author, stage director and above all an uncompromising artiste, Chandavarkar today vividly recalls his greatest moment of creative glory when Satyajit Ray showered encomiums on him.

“Ray saw Girish Karnad’s ‘Once Upon a Time’ twice, and later said first time he saw the film and second time he just listened to the music, which was composed by me.

“He said it was the best music he had heard in any Indian film. It sort of made it for me. I think it is the best compliment I have ever received,” says Chandvarkar, whose experiences as a musician are being brought out in a Kannada book.

“I can never work in the ambience of music on demand”, says the man who has steadfastly refused to bow to the market forces and knows this might have had cost him a prominent place in commercial cinema.

“There are some people who still come and talk with me, but the hard reality is that money does not come anymore for projects in which I would like to work,” he says.

However, now Chandavarkar is far removed from the world of celluloid, except for rare associations like last year’s music for an animated film, and is deeply immersed in theatre.

In recent years, apart from creating scores for innumerable plays, he has formed his own group in hometown Pune and also worked in some groups in Karnataka as well as rural areas in Maharashtra.

“My inspiration to turn a director at this age came from John Russel Brown, the grand old man of British theatre”. Closely involved with the National Theatre in London in the company of legends like Laurence Olivier, John Gilgud and Peter Hall, Chandavarkar has now opened a small group of his own.

“I translated Karnad’s ‘Fire and Rain’ into Marathi, and I have plans to stage an original play and an adaptation in the near future. Rudra Da (legendary theatre director Rudraprasad Sengupta) has suggested I do a musical, and I am giving a serious thought to it,” he says.

Greatly appreciative of the “Bharat Rang Mahotsava ‘99”, the recent National Theatre Festival organised by the National School of Drama (NSD) in the Capital, he says such fests will give opportunities to groups from all over the country to interact and thus take Indian theatre to greater heights.

“We need such festivals at a time when theatre is being threatened by the electronic media and market forces which project a culture in a unipolar world dominated by everything American,” says Chandavarkar, who has a long experience of working in countries like the USA and Germany.

However, he is worried over the growing intolerance towards freedom of artistic expression. “The trend of monolithic culture where those who express otherwise are almost branded traitors is very dangerous.”

“In Maharashtra, there have been at least three plays which were forcibly stopped because someone or the other did not agree with their contents.

“There was a one-act play in a Pune competition, called ‘Ram Bharose’, the visual presentation of which angered the Patit Pavan and Sangh Parivar so much that they came onto the stage, beat up the artistes and blackened their faces.

“The cases of ‘Mee Nathuram Godse Boltoy’, Deepa Mehta’s film ‘Fire’ and M.F. Hussain’s paintings are too well known. This is a dangerous trend for not only theatre, but also other art forms,” Chandavarkar cautions.

Such extra-legal pressures, he says, are pushing all art forms towards mediocrity and devoid of any zeal.

Chandavarkar, who is writing a Marathi book on his experiences in theatre and has also been offered a book on Indian cinema by a leading publisher, despite his own mastery over music, is still a student of Pandit Ravi Shankar.

And he has strong views on the recent controversy over the Bharat Ratna Award to the maestro “which he deserved to have received a long ago”. —PTI

Cinematic bid to boost Indian image overseas

AN itinerant tribe, they live in the western part of Rajasthan moving in the desert regions around Barmer, Jodhpur and Jaisalmer. And although they seldom frequent big towns, their music has travelled far and wide, and even crossed international boundaries.

And though the little-known Langa folk singers of Rajasthan have seldom interacted with masters, their music is a vast treasure trove based on classical ragas, especially “Maand” and “Bhairavi” to folk songs of the region. They have learnt to play on the instruments available to them — the ravanhatta, mayurbhanj, kudtall, algoza, sarangi and dholak. Their children begin training in this style of singing from a very young age and attain an astonishing proficiency in music and rhythm.

“Of Melodies Divine”, a film directed by Juhi Sinha and Umesh Bisht for the External Affairs Ministry as part of its attempts to boost the national image overseas through exhibition of documentary and short films, also highlights their secular outlook as most of them are Muslims but sing bhajans ranging from the scriptures to those of Meera, apart from local folk tales.

According to ministerial sources, the aim of the films made by private filmmakers is not merely to project the nation’s achievements in various fields, but to show the country and its people in various moods and colours in an integrated manner and to look at India in an international context.

While a global review was being undertaken at present to see how the Indian missions could play a more constructive role in exhibiting these films for target audiences in their respective countries, the ministerial sources said plans were also being drawn up to exploit the growing presence of transnational television channels and of Doordarshan’s International channel.

Some of the films which have already been produced include “A Nation Celebrates” by Madhur Das with director Kabir Khan, and the four-part “India 5555” by renowned filmmaker S. Krishnaswamy. Others include “Passion for Peace” by Pushpesh and Indrajit Pant, “Her Own Sky” by Yasmin Kidwai and Sabiha Farhat, “The Empire Writes Back” by T.Tejpal, and “Transition Times” by Shantanu Dey.

Apart from these, a large number of new films are being produced involving several important filmmakers. Siddharth Kak, who is better known for the weekly television cultural programme “Surabhi”, is making a film in six parts entitled “Wisdom of India”. Kumar Shahani’s film is on the “flute”, while Arun Khopkar’s is on the “confluence of north-eastern music”. Muzaffar Ali’s project is on “fragrances of love” while T.Tejpal is making a film on “rooted imagination”. Usha Albuquerque’s project is on alternate systems of medicine. Ramesh Sharma’s film is entitled “City Scapes” and is aimed at showing the transition in metropolitan cities.

The films already produced had a variety of subjects presenting the country in myriad forms. Whereas “Her Own Sky” depicted the empowerment of women by showing some women doing extraordinary jobs like running trains, pilots, rural businesswomen, bank owners and so on, “Passion for Peace” attempted to show the nuclear experiment in Pokhran by placing it in a historical context of a nation that has always stood for peace and peaceful disarmament. “Transition Times” was a documentary about the changing attitudes in cities and villages of the country and also tells of the migration to the cities or vice versa.

“A Nation Celebrates” told about the celebration of the human spirit, showing ordinary Indians and their extraordinary feats. “India 5555” was aimed at apprising the foreign investor about business opportunities in the country by tracing the growth of the Indian economy from the ancient days to the present time. —UNI

The ethics of photography

“Nature photographs are generally accepted as and trusted to be straightforward records of what the photographer witnessed and recorded on film in a single instant.... This is an acceptance hallowed by years of communication between photographers, editors, publishers, and viewers.”

— Gary Braasch, 1994

“Mankind has lived through ages of stone, iron, bronze, exploration, enlightenment, the atom, space. Our own time is, as much as anything else, the Age of Falsification. The nip, the tuck, the face-lift, the silicone implant. The fascination with virtual reality in a world teeming with real realities.”

— Kenneth Brower, 1998

IN our private lives, most of us take manipulated photographic images — the studio portrait, the touched up ‘matrimonial’ photograph, the airbrushed detail — so much for granted that the thought of there being questions in all this does not even cross our minds. And yet, in formed, passionately engaged, circles, an intense debate on the ‘ethics of photography’ has been raging for some years now, a debate that has acquired an even sharper edge with the coming in of digital technology. It is true that the debate centres, for the most part, round ‘reportage photography’, work done by photo-journalists in the field, who go out there for recording ‘things as they are’. But questions are also being raised, in a manner of speaking, about all photography. For there is nothing, it seems, that the viewer can trust any more: terms like computer-modified images, digital enhancement, colour management, hang about in the air, everywhere.

In his splendid, recent essay, “Photography in the Age of Falsification”, Kenneth Brower, takes us right into the heart of the debate. He opens with a recollection of some 30 years back when he, together with the nature photographer, Eliot Porter, met up with some other photographers in the Galapagos Islands. There, he says wittily, he had “the opportunity to study the habits of cameramen in the wild”. Conversations in the evening, especially after a stimulating drink or two, turned often to “nature fakery”. Reminis-cences, inside stories, were shared. There was talk of a photographer, assigned to do a cover for the Life magazine, producing for his editor a picture of “a leopard killing antelopes in the wild against a sunset”, having used in fact a captive leopard made to pose on a ‘kill’ against the background of artfully arranged antelope skins on a tree. The classic case of Walt Disney’s sensational ‘nature documentary’, The Living Desert, came up: everyone knew by then that most of it had been filmed on made-up sand dunes built on a vast stage-sound table. So on it went, with cases of ‘photofakery’ being cited by one photographer after another, almost with a sense of glee.

Has this always been the case with photography? Some of the greatest names, Ansel Adams included, are known to have used the all too familiar devices of dodging and burning in the darkroom: the former being the withholding of light from an area of the print for a timed period in the developing process, and the latter consisting of concentrating light on an area of the print. Does this amount to falsification? For the purist, yes perhaps. But more like a misdemeanour than a crime. For a man with Adams’ passion — “the negative is the score; the print is the performance”, he used to say — it was important to get from a negative a print of the highest quality. Others, however, have moved away, very far away, from the basic tenet of photography, especially nature photography: that is essentially a matter of trust between photographer and viewer, a form of contract in which what is delivered is what was promised.

Speaking of trust, there were howls of protest when it was established, in 1982, that a photograph of three camels moving in front of the pyramids at Giza, published by the redoubtable National Geographic, had been altered by the publisher. The alteration was slight — the camels had been digitally pushed back a few paces to accommodate some words — but even this was unacceptable to readers who were used to taking everything they saw and read in the magazine on faith. This was no “adjustment to reality”: this was “betrayal”.

For more serious, however, for it concerned the very nature of the debate over ethics, is the case of Art Wolfe. A remarkably active man — seven continents, more than 2,000 rolls of film in an average year — Wolfe published a book of nature photographs, Migrations, which met with much acclaim initially. Many of the images in it, it was found out, however, were ‘digitally enhanced’, sitting on a computer. On the cover of the book was a dazzling photograph of zebras, a virtual tapestry of stripes, with the herd standing so close together that not a speck of ground or anything else non-zebraic appeared in the frame. But, as another nature photographer was quick to point out, no zebra looks exactly like another, the stripes on it serving as ‘fingerprints’. Here, however, was one zebra identical to another in another part of the picture; one head was repeated although placing it at a different angle artfully concealed the fact. The conclusion? Different frames of the same zebra had been used to make the picture up.

Again, in the same book, was a seemingly brilliant photograph of a herd of elephants on the move. An angry newspaper published the same photograph after colour-coding several groups of elephants appearing in it. The result? One could see that one group of seven elephants had been cloned and used again in another part of the photograph; one pair could be seen several times even though it was cleverly merged with other groups; and so on. For many, something had faded from the photograph after this was discovered.

Trick photography

Remember the ‘trick photography’ which advertised our own mythological films in the days of innocence? But this is different; this is trickery. The din of protest that went up over Wolfe’s book has still not died in the west. The photographer, however, remained unbowed, dismissing these as minor matters of ‘artistic adjustment’. “Whenever I hear the word ‘ethics’, it raises the hair on the back of my neck”, he said angrily. To countless others, like Brower, however, the position he has taken is anathema. For them, it is the name Wolfe that is enough to raise the hair on the back of their necks.

The stained-glass paintings
By Vidhi Bisht

INTERPRETATION of romance, relics of ancient times, myths and an accumulation of facts and fiction are a few things which spring into our minds while beholding the visible splendour of art and architecture in the form of our historical monuments.

India, with its deep-rooted history, is blessed immensely with numerous monuments, each a silent narrator of the times in which it was constructed. One such powerful dimension of these historical monuments as also a valuable treasure of art related to the colonial days is the Gothic art or the art of stained-glass paintings found in the churches of that time and now lying in ruins.

In European countries, after a long era of Romanesque interiors, came the Gothic era in which the interior walls of churches got reduced to an absolute minimum and large windows took their place. It was this change which promulgated the blossoming of the stained-glass paintings, which thus became an integral element of Gothic architecture.

The magic of coloured light streaming down on to the interior through large stained-glass windows seemed unforgettable to anyone who experienced their intense jewel-like hues. These windows admitted usually far less light than what one may expect; they acted mainly as multicolored diffusing filters that changed the quality of ordinary light, endowing it with almost spiritual and symbolic value — as a sort of miraculous light.

It infused an ethereal sensation within the beholders by diluting the distinction between the temporal and divine realms, creating an intensely mystical and spiritual experience. When light rushed in from the brightness outside, through these inspiring hues and images on glass, into the dark interiors, people felt as if they were passing through divine forms and it brought with itself something chastening, something meditative.

Gothic art came to India with the setting up of the European rule, which brought with itself religious and non-religious architecture in the form of magnificent churches which were constructed and adorned with handsome stained-glass paintings in windows frames.

There are many churches, cathedrals and chapels scattered in various parts of our country with these stained-glass paintings, especially the churches of hill areas like Nainital, Mussoorie, Shimla, Kashmir etc, but only in some of them the remains of these paintings have survived up to this day. Therefore, it is now quite important for us to protect and preserve whatever Gothic art has survived in our country.

This art of making stained-glass paintings is unique in itself and commands respect and admiration. So, the churches having such type of paintings should be taken under proper care, and preservation at state museums by the state governments as also the Central Government.