India : Fast Forward OR Let's Have Gandhi Versus Munnabhai (published title)

In the summer of 1995, a documentary commissioned by Channel Four, the UK, introduced me to Video Sewa, an initiative of the SEWA trade union founded by Ela Bhatt. Inspired by a project in Mali, West Africa, Ela Bhatt established Video Sewa in 1984 with one set of production equipment. With three weeks of training, 20 illiterate women memorised the placement of functions on the equipment and its usage, after which they progressed towards a functional literacy with 20 video terms.

I met the legendary Urmilaben — a vegetable vendor — who had made a film about the eviction and harassment of street vendors by the Ahmedabad police, presented the evidence to the Supreme Court and won a stay! These illiterate vendors and workers of different ages, from diverse communities and walks of life had experienced empowerment and most importantly broken the barriers of illiteracy, with the words ‘rewind’, ‘play’ and ‘fast forward’. While Urmilaben was grappling at the deep end of visual literacy, I had just graduated. I subjected myself to self-indoctrination in learning to ‘read’ a film, to appreciate every nuance, turn of visual phrase and recognise what was good, bad and utterly ugly. This process involved watching up to three films a day, in various languages, from various corners of the world, ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime!

When Urmilaben was making her films with a minimum of video technology, I had graduated from film school and was using sophisticated and very expensive mammoths to film stories for the BBC and Channel Four. With the advent of the digital age in the mid ’90s, I was eventually able to purchase one of the first DV cameras in India, much cheaper, much smaller, yet still way beyond the means of most Indians.

Fifteen years later, India is enamoured by the camera; everyone is making a short film using their cell phones, while the rest spend their waking hours titillated by the moving image through television, computer or the movies. Just as Urmilaben breached barriers of literacy through video, cinema can expedite literacy for the nation through the ‘reading’ of the visual image, that in turn can transform a nation of film buffs into film ‘readers’ and ‘speakers’ of the moving image.

If India has to encourage its millions towards literacy, that certainly will not happen with chalk and slate. It will happen cheaply, effectively and on a considerable scale by employing the moving image to spark the imagination, trigger learning and literacy will follow. Visual literacy has to be unshackled from the ivory tower confines of departments of film and media studies. Cinema as a language ought to be ‘read’ in schools and colleges complementing English, Hindi and regional languages.

Long years ago, it was easier to see Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy at the National Film Theatre in London than in Kolkata. To have experienced cinema from Latin America, Eastern Europe or Africa placed one amongst the crème de la crème of the visually literate. Today, there is a surfeit of world cinema on television, with Kurosawa, Bergman, Truffaut and other great story-tellers available. In being exposed to the good, the bad and utter rubbish evolves the appreciation of the finest that the moving image has to offer.

Let Attenborough’s Gandhi contrasted with Lagey Raho Munnabhai inspire the youth to find the real Gandhi. Do they prefer to be motivated by the values and ethics of Chariots of Fire or Chak De India? Would they want to effect change as depicted in Dead Poets’ Society or Rang De Basanti? Could they be sensitised to restore the primacy of family by watching Kramer vs Kramer and Masoom?

Later in the 21st century, language might play second fiddle to the moving image. Just like our knowledge of English has propelled India in the era of the knowledge economy, our passion for the moving image could be that advantage that continues to keep us at the forefront, if we press ‘fast forward’.