Half A Century Ago

The Sixties

No sentiment is more dangerous, they say, than nostalgia. The past is another country, another reality. But the past is also history. And without a sense of history, it is scarcely possible to begin to understand the present…or the future.

I remember the sixties mainly as a period when the Nehruvian vision of society was still alive. It was honourable to be poor or moderately comfortable financially. It was bad to be rich and absolutely unspeakable to flaunt wealth. One depended implicitly on the State for education, health and a host of other services. Inefficiency and corruption were bemoaned but the public sector was seen as something that needed to be improved, not discarded.

And aah!...the arts, the arts. You went to a host of all- night music festivals and discussed the performances, bleary eyed, in the college canteen or nearby coffee house the following day. That, in any case, was where most of the teaching and learning took place, not in the classroom.

You thronged to film festivals. Cinema seemed to have been re-discovered as the new medium after Pather Panchali. (The re- discovery of Bimal Roy and Guru Dutt came much more recently- whereby hangs another interesting tale). There was no question that cinema had a social purpose (though Cesare Zavattini, Italian Communist Party member, Neo- realism ideologue and De Sica’s contemporary, had said long ago that cinema changed nothing).

The first New Wave package of films came from France around 1963, and we were agog. Soon after, Mrinal Sen made Aakaash Kusum, complete with freezes and jump cuts, which we had not seen till then.

There was a sense that something was about to happen, although that is probably being wise after the fact. Look at the late 60-s and early 70-s and see what did happen – Ray’s Kolkata films, Sen’s Bhuvan Shome and Kolkata films, Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s best work, Ritwick Ghatak, Aravindan…quite apart, of course, from the tremendous things that were happening in Europe…