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In 1949, the French filmmaker Jean Renoir came to Kolkata (then Calcutta) to scout locations for 'The River', his adaptation of Rumer Godden's 1946 autobiographical novel of the same name, which he described as "a film about India without elephants and tiger hunts." Guided by a young Satyajit Ray on weekends, Renoir spent much of the trip searching for locations on the outskirts of Kolkata. The result of Renoir's hands-on, on-location approach was 1951's meditative, almost mystical 'The River', which revitalised Renoir's career and launched a new era of Western films about India.
Before Renoir's The River, the portrayal of India in Western films was limited to exotic action and spectacle seen through a British colonial gaze, as in Henry Hathaway's 'The Lives of a Bengal Lancer' (1935), Zoltàn Korda's 'The Drum' (1938), and MGM's adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's 'Kim' (1950).
Made in the aftermath of India's Independence — and the bitter religious conflict and the violent Partition that followed — The River was a stark departure from such Colonial, Orientalist imaginations of India. While the film still suffered from a certain amount of Western myopia, it also captured a more authentic cinematic portrait of the Indian life.
Beginning with Renoir in 1949, Western filmmakers saw India as a mirror in which the West could examine its existential crises. As the sun set over the days of Empire, filmmakers like James Ivory, Louis Malle, and David Lean turned to the East. India, simultaneously ancient and emerging, mystical and modern, became one of Western cinema's most evocative and powerful 'elsewheres'; a site of projection; a palimpsest onto which the West mapped its colonial guilt, its counter-cultural disillusionment, and its existential anxieties.
While Renoir saw India through a humanist's eye and sought to capture the rhythms of daily life — religious ceremonies, rituals, village scenes, and the immutable sacred river — James Ivory's 'The Guru', made almost two decades later, reflected a very different Western sensibility. By the 1960s, the Empire was long gone, and a different form of Orientalism had emerged — one shaped by the counterculture's hunger for transcendence and rebellion.
Set against the backdrop of the 60s' hippie movement, The Guru follows a seemingly straightforward plot: Tom Pickle, a British rock musician clearly modeled on George Harrison and played by Michael York, travels to India to train under a renowned sitar player, the titular 'Guru' played by Utpal Dutt. Tom arrives in India hoping to become a better musician — and perhaps a better man — but what he really seeks is salvation by osmosis. But the India he discovers is both comic and earnest — part mystical seduction and part cultural confusion.
On one hand, The Guru critiques the superficial appropriation of Indian spirituality by self-absorbed Westerners. On the other, the film itself indulges in the romance of India-as-wisdom. Unlike earlier films, Indians here are not merely peripheral characters — they push back, question the Westerner's intent, and retain agency. Still, the narrative arc belongs primarily to the White seeker. Even the satire cannot escape the gravitational pull of its own self-centred seeking. Enlightenment remains a one-way transaction: the East gives, and the West receives.
Released the same year, Louis Malle's 'L’Inde fantôme' (Phantom India, 1969) stands apart by virtue of its genre: it is not narrative fiction, but a seven-hour documentary series made during Malle's travels across the country in 1968. Malle intended it to be subjective, impressionistic — a personal diary rather than a definitive portrait — and in that sense, he succeeded.
Malle's camera lingers on village life, street scenes, temples, and day-wage labourers. Malle narrates in voiceover, often reflecting on his own ignorance or discomfort. He admits that he doesn't quite understand what he is seeing. But the honesty of this confession doesn't absolve the documentary of its blind spots. For every scene of contemplation, there is one that slips into voyeurism. India's thriving intellectual life, cities, or post-independence political vitality finds little to no mention in Malle's narrative of India's poverty, backwardness, and superstition. In Malle's Phantom India, modernity remains elusive. Time stands still. The result is less a record of India than a projection of Western fatigue and disillusionment — a story of looking and not quite seeing.
The cycle culminated with David Lean's 'A Passage to India', based on E.M. Forster's seminal 1924 novel of the same name. Set in a fictional Indian town during the 1920s, the story centers on Dr. Aziz, an Indian Muslim physician (played by Victor Banerjee) accused of assaulting a British woman, Adela Quested (Judy Davies), in the mysterious Marabar Caves. The film, like the novel, explores cultural misinterpretation, suspicion, and the impossibility of friendship between the oppressor and the oppressed under Empire.
Despite Lean's attempt to present Indians with dignity, the story ultimately revolves around the emotional epiphanies of Adela and Mrs. Moore. India remains an enigma and the inner life of Indians remains obscure; what matters is their effect on the colonizers. The Marabar caves serve as a metaphor for everything the British Empire could not understand or control. Here India represents not just a geographic location, but a psychological space where the West confronts itself.
A Passage to India was one of the last major Western films to engage directly with the legacy of the British Raj. Released in 1984, it marked the end of a long cinematic arc, going from colonial romance to a postcolonial reckoning of India's image.
By the late 20th century, however, Indian filmmakers began not just to resist but to reframe the Western gaze in their own work. Satyajit Ray, notably, declined to collaborate with David Lean on A Passage to India, reportedly disliking the patronizing tone of the screenplay. Ray's own body of work like the Apu trilogy, 'Charulata', 'Devi', and 'Ghare-Baire' offered Indian perspectives rooted in the realities of postcolonial life, often subtly interrogating the legacies of British Raj without reducing India to a metaphor of its failures.
Still, to examine how Western filmmakers captured India is to trace not only a cinematic journey but an epistemological one: these films chart the West's shifting self-understanding from imperial confidence to spiritual emptiness to postcolonial guilt. India, in these narratives, is rarely the subject. Instead, it is the cipher. Yet, there is value in revisiting them — not to endorse their images, but to read their blind spots. They are records of how one part of the world tried, and often failed, to see another; they are reminders that seeing is never neutral. It underlines that to look is to interpret, to frame, and to assert.
