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Celebrating Nehruvian vision

Madhur Tankha

Film festival to commemorate Nehru’s 120th birthday

On the menu: ‘Mother India’ will be screened on November 16 during the month-long festival, ‘Popular Bombay Cinema of the Nehru Era’, which opened at Teen Murti House in Delhi on Tuesday.

NEW DELHI: To commemorate the 120th birth anniversary of the country’s first Prime Minister, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library is now hosting a month-long film festival at its Teen Murti House premises here revisiting the Nehruvian period and looking at issues that cinema of that era expressed.

“Popular Bombay Cinema of the Nehru Era” was inaugurated on Tuesday with the screening of noted Bollywood film-maker Yash Chopra’s Dharmputra that speaks forcefully on issues of secular national identity and an inclusive and expansive vision of India that was so central to Nehru’s vision for the nation.

Guru Dutt’s ‘Pyaasa’

The festival will also see the screening of Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa, a resounding critique of the capitalistic impulses of the new nation, and one which poignantly asks whether there is any space for non-exploitative and non-deadening relationships between people and individuals and society. It will also screen classics like Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420, Mehboob Khan’s Mother India and Bimal Roy’s Sujata followed by an analysis by seasoned film scholars.

The NMML festival is screening those films that articulate a Nehruvian vision and ideology as well as movies that were critical of the homogenising and capitalistic impulses of the nationalist project during that period. The films express the ebullience that accompanied the sense of belonging to an independent nation as well as examine often critically, what Independence actually means. Politics, caste, gender, community, the rural-urban dialectic, questions of modernity versus tradition, social and legal justice and the meaning of secularism and democracy are the issues that this cinema questions, grapples with and attempts to find resolutions to.

At the same time, the films express new imaginaries of self-hood that the modern moment with its liberating sense of individual freedom made possible.

According to NMML director Mridula Mukherjee, the Nehruvian years were an extremely creative and innovative period of Bombay cinema that demonstrated exciting developments in all its fields.

“It witnessed the emergence of a mature and distinctive cinematic aesthetic form with the power and potential of communicating with mass audiences and initiating debates on several pressing political and social issues of the day. Aesthetically, discursively and ideologically, the films of what has come to be known as the ‘Golden Age’ of Bombay cinema, and some of which are represented in this festival, mark a crucial and democratising intervention in the constitution of a significant public culture of the time.”

Pointing out that the Nehruvian years were a foundational period in the life of the contemporary modern Indian nation, Ms. Mukherjee says the liberal, secular, democratic, modern and cosmopolitan imaginary that is justifiably associated with Nehru came to have widespread currency in political, social and cultural terms in the years that he was at the helm of affairs. Bombay cinema responded in many different ways to the euphoria of the early years of Independence, as well as to the modernising impulse that provided such an ideological impetus in the Nehruvian years.

In all, ten movies will be screened at NMML up till November 29.

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