India In-Between: Culture and Nation Representation in Jean Renoir’s Film the River (1951)

Abstract

The above conversation from Jean Renoir’sFootnote1 film, The River, based on Rumer Godden’s 1946 book of the same name, is jarringly symbolic of the identity formation of India as a colonized nation. History, as documentation of past experiences and narratives, has predominantly existed in the form of written texts. Historical documents, journals and newspaper articles have elaborately discussed India under the colonial rule and during partition. The post-colonial experiences have also manifested itself in biographies, autobiographies and even in works of fiction such as that of Manto and Chughtai, to name a few. But with the advent of technology in the form of a camera, history and narration have found a novel way to manifest itself not just as written words but also as images. Further on, these still images have evolved into motion pictures. “In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” Bazin argues that photography and cinema are discoveries that finally satisfy the obsession with realism… The photographic image is a mechanical reproduction of reality and we therefore accept as real the object reproduced or re-presented”.Footnote2 Set in the banks of the river Ganges in West Bengal, Renoir’s cinematography establishes the topography as the mise en scène while the camera captures daily activities of human lives in a realistic manner. Faulkner in The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir writes:Footnote3