In this chapter, I have tried to provide a theoretical excursus towards a comparative history of the institution of Sociology in Indian Universities, and the evolution of Cinema as a sacred institution in Indic civilisation. In any vibrant society, history is written and rewritten by each succeeding generation. The task of reinterpreting institutional history often takes the form of recognising and developing a new perspective on already well-known events. The imperative of this section is to understand the structure, process and function of the two institutions—synchronically and diachronically.
My journey as a student of Modernisation of Indian Culture and Cinema began under the influence of Prof. Yogendra Singh, when he had come to deliver a lecture in a seminar at A. N. Sinha Institute of Social Sciences, Patna University in 1979, where I was a student of Sociology. Prof. Singh introduced me to his friend, Prof. Satish Bahadur of F.T.I.I, Pune. Prof. Singh and Prof. Bahadur had worked together in the beginning of their career at Agra. Both of them remained close friends and intellectual partners throughout their lives. Prof. Satish Bahadur’s contribution to F.T.I.I, Pune occupied Prof. Singh’s fertile mind as a test case of modernisation of Indian tradition. Unfortunately, Prof. Singh never wrote about Indian cinema personally. It is an attempt by Prof. Satish Bahadur and myself to show Prof. Singh’s relatively unknown academic contribution to the Sociology of Indian Cinema.
This segment outlines a new reading of the already well-known histories of Sociology and Cinema in India. This process of the new reading tries to accommodate the not so accounted facets of the institutional unfolding of Sociology and Cinema in the Indian state, market, military cantonment, civil society and culture, their development, roles and dynamics synchronically and diachronically.
Cinema is both an element of culture as well as technology to transmit, preserve, promote and transform
The cinema is a captivating route to the past. As a popular art, set in the economic, cultural and political spheres, cinema inevitably bears the birthmarks of its passage into the light. And as a technological art, crucially defined by its capacity for the automatic registration of sights and sounds, it is composed of pieces of the culture it represents. Therefore, in order to understand and trace the full discourse of the films, the student of film must be at once a historian and an interpreter of the art, and be able to shift constantly between the objective examination of the context of a film and the subjective immersion in the experience it offers.
Cinema is perhaps a better index of culture than painting, music, or poetry, because it visibly partakes of the stuff of cultural life. Moreover, the solutions it arrives at in the artistic struggle to represent that life can be trusted as broadly social solutions, tied to groups who lived through the era, rather than to the private comprehension of the gifted and isolated, a few individuals who dominated these arts. Nevertheless, the very compromises and business decisions leading to the production of a film ensure that it is related to its era.
Cinema had already developed in continuity with the storytelling traditions of pre-modern society and with the artistic conventions of iconic representation. Gottschall (2012) says, “our love of stories is rooted in our human nature.” Every concept of human nature is rooted in our ethnic or mythic stories, which we inherit as human beings. The story is not the icing; it is the cake. The medium of storytelling may change with space, time or context. But human life is neither possible nor meaningful without stories. It may be a story told by our kinsmen or women, priests or wards, shown on television or in cinema halls, written in books, or programmed in video games. It may come through our dreams or during meditation. It may be part and parcel of our love life, everyday life, or it may be dished out through advertisements of the culture industry. It may even be presented by our politicians during their election campaign.
Many times, writers or storytellers compare their craft to painting. Each word is a dual of paint. The writer or presenter creates images that have all the depth and crispness of real life. The writers, however, are merely drawing, not painting. It is the reader’s or the audience’s mind that supplies most of the information in the scene or most of the colour, shading or texture by reading or watching a story, mostly sub-consciously. The writer of a story or screenplay is not, then, an all-powerful architect of our reading or watching experience. In the case of cinema, the director initiates collaboration with the future possible audience for making a meaningful and rich lived experience in the cinema hall by filling open-ended details within the screenplay. A writer lays down words, but they are inert. They need a catalyst to come to life. That catalyst is the reader’s imagination.
Now the question is: how does a film exist in culture and culture in film? As satisfying as the metaphor of a movie screen as a cultural mirror, the power of the camera to set the scene of culture is a power much stronger than that of mere reflection. The cinema literally contributes to a culture’s self-image, inflecting, and not just capturing daily experience. In art history, we can think of language as the ruling systems or conventions at play in various epochs. Thus, Rubens was a shining genius, twisting the language of the baroque to his own design. The same holds true in literature, where we treat Wordsworth as an inimitable soul, who gave to the romanticism of his age a peculiar sound and feel. In sum, a cultural history of cinema must reconstruct the temper of the times, neither through the direct appreciation of its products nor through the direct amassing of “relevant facts,” but through an indirect reconstruction of the conditions of representation that permitted such films to be made. More than this, the movies create as well as display a culture’s imagination.
Traditional historical documents tend to privilege great events and political leaders, so historians use other records to discern the lives of “ordinary” people like census records, accounts of harvests and markets, diaries and memoirs and local newspapers. Film is, perhaps, more like these records of daily life. Motion pictures may provide the best evidence of what it was like to walk down the streets of Paris in the 1890s, a Japanese tea ceremony in the 1940s, World Series in 1950, or how the people in factories did their work or spent a Sunday afternoon in the park. As a record of time and motion, films preserve gestures, gaits, rhythms, attitudes and human interactions in a variety of situations. Hence, cinema is both an element of culture as well as technology to transmit, preserve, promote and transform.
Technology is a medium
In principle, a work of art has always been reproducible. However, mechanical reproduction of a work of art represents something new. It evolved from techniques of founding, stamping, lithography, photography and then film. And mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses towards the art. Paul Valery (1871-1945), a French poet, essayist and philosopher says that the growth of techniques, their adaptability and their precision, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient art and craft of the ‘Beautiful’. Neither matter, nor space, nor time has been what it was before. Hence, we must anticipate great innovations to transform the entire technique of arts.
Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilisation (1934) stresses the determining role of technology. It presented the compelling history of the machine and a critical study of its effects on civilisation in 1934; even before television, the personal computer and the Internet appeared on our periphery. Drawing upon art, science, philosophy and the history of culture, Lewis Mumford explains the origin of the machine age and traces its social results, asserting that the development of modern technology had its roots in the middle ages, rather than the Industrial Revolution. Mumford sagely argues that it is the moral, economic, and political choices we make and not the machines that we use, that determines our industrially driven economy. He traces the way that technology could increase human capacities. In order to understand the close relationship between human power and mechanical power, he introduces the idea of ‘mega-machine’ to refer to the hierarchical systems of human actors, through which massive works of construction could be achieved.
Raymond Aron (1963) has conceived, prepared and directed the Basel Rheinfelden Conference titled Tradition and Evolution. He brought forth the fact that the technical revolution has been spreading throughout the world. New techniques have been revolutionising our way of life. But he questions, whether the industrial society dictates to the mind to the point of imposing a determined ideology upon it or do our moral values allow us to impress various forms on this society? He highlights the fact that necessity and liberty, the one and the many, instrumental values and ultimate values present questions of a philosophical nature. Raymond Aron felt that there are certain salient features of economic and technical organisation, which are transmitted throughout the world. But there is a devaluation of the nineteenth century ideological conflicts in the western societies.
In this context, the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan (1964) coined the phrase “The medium is the message” and introduced it in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McLuhan proposes that the primary focus of study should be the communication medium itself, and not the messages it carries. He showed that artefacts as media affect any society by their characteristics or content. McLuhan uses the term ‘message’ to signify content and character. The content of the medium is a message that can be easily grasped and the character of the medium is another message, which can be easily overlooked. McLuhan says “Indeed, it is only too typical that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium”. For McLuhan, it was the medium itself that shaped and controlled “the scale and form of human association and action”. Taking the movie as an example, he argued that the way this medium played with conceptions of speed and time transformed “the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure”. Therefore, the message of the movie medium is this transition from “lineal connections” to “configurations”.
Extending the argument for understanding the medium as the message itself, he proposed that the “content of any medium is always another medium”. Thus, speech is the content of writing, writing is the content of print, and print itself is the content of the telegraph. It means that the nature of a medium (the channel through which a message is transmitted) is more important than the meaning or content of the message. McLuhan tells us that a “message” is “the change of scale or pace or pattern” that a new invention or innovation “introduces into human affairs”. For example, the light bulb is a clear demonstration of the concept of “the medium is the message”; a light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect, that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that “a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence”. Likewise, the message of a newscast about a heinous crime may be less about the individual news story itself (the content), and more about the change in public attitude towards crime that the newscast engenders by the fact that such crimes are in effect being brought into the home to watch over dinner.
In Understanding Media, McLuhan describes the “content” of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. This means that people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly or gradually over long periods of time. We tend to realise the social implications of the medium when society’s values, norms and ways of doing things change because of technology. These changes range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions that we are not aware of.
In the above given backdrop, Semiotics becomes significant. Semiotics is an investigation into how meaning is created and how meaning is communicated. Its origins lie in the academic study of how signs and symbols (visual and linguistic) create meaning. It is a way of seeing the world and of understanding how the landscape and culture, in which we live, have a massive impact on all of us—unconsciously or subconsciously. Hence, Symbolism becomes a powerful and common technique, used by composers to provide more depth and significance to an idea through an object, action, situation or character. However, a metaphor explicitly compares two subjects, whereas symbolism requires the audience to search for a meaning themselves.
Edmund Leach is best known for his symbolic studies like technical studies in the fields of kinship, marriage, ritual and myth. The touchstone of his work, first elaborated in ‘Political Systems of Highland Burma’ (1954), is the notion of ‘verbal categories’. Thus, Leach is a contextual Structuralist, interested in the patterning of verbal concepts themselves. In his book Culture and Communication: The Logic By Which Symbols Are Connected—An Introduction to the Use of Structuralist Analysis in Social Anthropology (1976) Leach investigates the writings of ‘Structuralists,’ and their different theories—the general incest theory and of animal sacrifice. The principal ethnographic source is the Book of Leviticus (known as the third book of the Old Testament or Third Book of Moses. It is developed over a long period of time, reaching its present form during the Persian Period between 538-332 BC); this gives the essentials of ‘semiology’—the general theory of how signs and symbols come to convey meaning. His core thesis is that “the indices in non-verbal communication systems, like the sound elements in spoken language, do not have meaning as isolates, but only as members of a set.” It makes this kind of jargon comprehensible in terms of our everyday experience. Thus, it is in this way, we can see the dynamics of culture and art/cinema through the prism of technology, where technology acts as the medium.
Culture
It is now accepted that both the Cinema and Technology are embedded in the Culture, and each influences or produces or reproduces the other, and vice versa. We have tried to understand the dynamism of Cinema and technology above. In order to understand human behaviour and trace the evolution of societies, art/cinema and technology, it is important to understand Culture and its patterns. Moreover, in order to trace the theoretical excursus towards a comparative history of the institution of sociology in Indian universities and the evolution of cinema as a sacred institution in Indic civilisation, it is imperative to understand the structure, process and function of the two institutions—both synchronically and diachronically, through the Sociology of Culture and Sociology of Culture in India.
Generally, Culture is the way of life of people. It consists of conventional patterns of thought and behaviour, including values, beliefs, rules of conduct, political organisation, economic activity and the like which are passed from one generation to the next by learning, and not by biological inheritance. The concept of ‘culture’ is an idea of signal importance, for it provides a set of principles for explaining and understanding human behaviour. A large part of culture is below the level of conscious awareness. Language, which is a sub-system of culture, is an example. The same is true for other spheres of culture, in that the members of the society share a large body of implicit conceptions about nature, moral values, property ownership and the like. Thus, cultural patterns structure both the thought and the perception.
The term culture has undergone many changes. The nineteenth century usage, which characterised the works of Sir Edward B. Tylor (1871) and Lewis Henry Morgan (1877) viewed culture or civilisation as the conscious creation of rational minds for the purpose of improving the lives of society’s members. However, these Victorian anthropologists had an ethnocentric bias, arranging the world’s cultures in a single hierarchy, from least cultured to the most with the Western civilisation, standing at the progressive end of the scale.
However, by the turn of the century, the modern concept of ‘culture’ developed in opposition to the Victorian idea. Franz Boas (1911) explains that culture item’s occurrence in certain people is historical accident, and not raw intellect. Once a trait is created, it is borrowed and modified to fit its new cultural context, and then it is borrowed again by another society and modified further and so on. Similarly, Emile Durkheim (1938) has talked about ‘collective representations’, that express certain properties concerning the way society is organised. If the physical arrangement of members of the society is changed, its collective representation will also change accordingly and automatically. It was now understood that people acquire the ideas, beliefs, values and the like, of their society and that these cultural features provide the basic material by which they think and perceive.
Thus, culture contains principles for interpreting behaviour and institutions. This is done by explicating the values, beliefs, and symbols and so on, which is behind it and which make an enigmatic pattern intelligible, not just to explain why but to make a sense of it. In order to understand these principles of human behaviour, we need to look into sociology of culture in general, and sociology of culture in India in particular.
