2nd December Part 2

One of the features of being in a strange culture is that one has very little idea of the social or political backgrounds of those with whom you are speaking. In England it takes one sentence, in the U.S. a paragraph and I can make a fair guess but In India I have no obvious linguistic or social cues. My one insight into Madhav came when we went together to a film conference. The conference had the distinctly unpromising title “Teaching Film Studies in India” . My plan was to snooze through the first day and escape to Eden Park for an England India cricket match on the second. To my amazement I found myself electric with attention the whole two days. I reaslised that the conference was not as it seemed when Madhuja Mukherjee, the Chair of the host department arrived looking like a film star, shortly followed by our animator Moinak Biswas, looking  like a very sleek film producer ( which it turned out he was). The first day was riveting in its analysis of how the four decades model of film studies was now superseded both by its own theoretical impasses and by the technological developments of the past decade which turned all our students into filmmakers..

It was half way through this first day that I realized that almost all the speakers were, with different topics and examples, starting from the kind of Marxist analyses that proliferated in the sixties and seventies in Communist parties all over the world. It wasn’t that they still espoused those analyses but they provided one of the crucial contexts for their thinking. I suddenly understood why I felt so at home and so invigorated. “The discussion is so good because they’re all ex-Communists “ I scribbled in a note to Mhadav who smiled in acknowledgment. Of course India is the one country in the world where Communist parties are thriving, indeed they have three of the them, the old pro Soviet Communist party of India , The Communist Party of India (Marxist) which split in 1964  and the Communist Party of India (Maoist) which gathered together in 2004 a whole host of parties and groupings engaged in armed struggle. The Maoists are generally referred to as Naxalities and I wonder how many of the conference have been sympathisers or activists .

After the first day of the conference we went off to dinner in a Chinese enclave of  Tangda which is a law unto itself. The chosen restaurant was the Golden Joy and the streets approaching it are so narrow that  I expected our car to get stuck. Nor was there much in the way of street lighting. Finally we arrived at a building that not only showed no sign of being a restaurant but proved to be darker inside than out.

As a general rule of thumb in India the less light showing in a restaurant the more likely it is to serve drink so there were likely to be compensations for the Stygian gloom. I did consider asking if the restaurant’s real name was the Black Hole of Calcutta but decided that I didn’t know the company well enough to risk what might be some terrible colonial faux pas. Finally right at the end of the restaurant I spied Madhav and other speakers from the conference, all of them with fifths of spirits in front of them which they were emptying rapidly

When I sat down at the table I intended to carry out a comprehensive survey of the social and political backgrounds of these pioneers of film studies in India. As it was I just got drunk. I did observe enough to see that this was a fellowship and that much of Madhav’s professional energies over the past two decades must have gone into establishing film studies. As we finished our dinner in Hyderabad I reflected that it made it all the more striking that his own work was now focussed on questions of language. However, we agree to think about the possibilities of mounting a multi-partner research project on Telegu cinema. My keenness to reflect on research possibilities is not simply intellectual. As my departure looms I am desperate to ensure my return to India.