#modhu bose

The Outcast Director: Modhu Bose Year: 1945 (10:45) A hotshot detective from “the big town” goes undercover to bring down dastardly provincial super-criminal Amrit Lal in this decadent Raj-era wartime propaganda-thriller directed by Modhu Bose and produced by Ezra Mir for the Information Films of India. The IFI was established under Mir’s leadership in the spring of 1943 with a special mandate to promote “the right kind of war-mindedness,” and represents a transitional, chrysalis stage in the metamorphosis from the rather unprepossessing larva that was the Film Advisory Board (1940) to the great methuselah-butterfly of many colors that is the Films Division of India, established in 1948. Amrit Lal, as we soon learn, is both suave pillar and mustachioed “bloodsucker” of our narrator’s fetid little backwater — “you should’ve seen his godown." Lal's in the cement trade but as every bumpkin in town knows -- but is too timid to say -- his real business is black-market rice: Amrit Lal is not only an arch-capitalist, he is a rice hoarder. Mir brilliantly uses voiceover narration (the script is credited to one Peter Johnson) in order to place viewers deep within the shifting, coercive moral landscape of the detective drama — it is as though we are being told the whole story by a keen-eyed, middle-aged small-town noseypoke with a bleak sense of irony. When black market rice turns up by mistake in a cement bag at a construction site in the city and questions are raised there, he comments, wryly: “Now I myself would never have thought of telling the police something like that —“ Now I myself — “but those people in the big town did.” The narrator’s voice — now I myself — his subjectivity and placement within the narrative functions like a proxy for the concerned but conflicted viewer of the film, caught between loyalties, between worlds. “And imagine!" yes, do — “they suspected Amrit Lal of being up to something!” The foreman with his fez, the native-colonial policeman in his clean sola topi penning notes. “Well… they can do that sort of suspecting business in the big town, but none of us would have dared think of such a thing in our small town. And you know? They dared to keep a watch on his house. Secretly, of course…” Will Amrit Lal get his redhanded comeuppance? Will the detective’s fake beard hold up under Lal’s toady’s careful scrutiny? Will the poor people finally have enough rice to eat? Yes and yes! And no.