Almost eight decades after the end of British rule, many Indian women will be asking themselves again this week whether the basic rights accorded to men also apply to other citizens. A film made just before independence, all evidence of which was thought lost, reveals that these ambiguities about equality and status are baked into our nationhood.
I first learned of the 1942 film Ulti Ganga (“The Ganges flows in reverse”) when I interviewed P.K. Nair, the late founder and the former director of the National Film Archive of India in 2015. A pioneering and prolific film preservationist, Nair considered Ulti Ganga one of his ‘Most Wanted’ missing Indian films because of its historic significance.
Two years after my interview with Nair, on a research visit to the V. Shantaram Library in Mumbai in 2017, I was astounded to find a faded, but complete, promotional song booklet for Ulti Ganga – the only remaining material relating to this film.
Such ‘song booklets’, which were printed for promotional purposes, are often the only surviving records of many Indian films made in the 1920s-1950s. Especially for missing films, these song booklets – which include details such as a plot synopsis, the genre, list of the cast and crew and song lyrics – allow us to fill in some gaps in this hugely important history. Such materials are also significant because they give us important context about how a film was presented and promoted to patrons.
Ulti Ganga, directed by Sohrab Modi, was promoted as a social comedy. This genre was especially popular in the 1930s and ‘40s as it allowed filmmakers to present hot-button social issues of the day in a palatable fashion and reach the widest possible audience. Ulti Ganga depicted a gender-flipped ‘dystopia’ where women take over the world, relegating men to the domestic realm and childcare.
A 1942 publicity piece for the film in the Times of India describes how “women, tiring of a society decimated by the mere male, decided in a moment of rash indignation to turn the tables on their lords and masters and run the world themselves”.
Ulti Ganga’s plot is reminiscent of the 1905 short story titled ‘Sultana’s Dream’ by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. The story was originally published in the Indian Ladies Magazine, the first Indian magazine founded and edited by an Indian woman – Kamala Satthianadhan – and written by and for Indian women.
‘Sultana’s Dream’ envisioned a futuristic feminist utopia called ‘Ladyland’, where women ran the world, while men were secluded in the purdah quarters. In stark opposition, Ulti Ganga’s world is an unmistakable dystopia, where the women’s administration soon descends into bedlam. The conflict is eventually resolved with the help of some women who rebel against the ‘zenana takeover’, side with men and help them restore the ‘natural order’.
The song booklet discovered in the V. Shantaram library describes how the women convinced men into relinquishing control of the world:
“The fair sex became wild and threatened to fast unto death if men did not give in to their supremacy. The ‘zenana sircar’ was thus established by upending the natural order, where the woman worked in the street and the man nursed the baby.”
The references to the women’s ‘fast unto death’ are especially significant considering that the film was released during the peak of the civil disobedience in India, which reached a high point in August 1942 with the Quit India Movement.
Photos provided by author.
Images found in the song booklet give us a sense of how the film depicted this ‘zenana sircar’ as an unequivocal evil. One depicts the lead actress Pramila wielding a whip, conveying her dominance and ‘taming’ of men. In others, women are shown in authoritative poses and dressed in male attire, while male characters bear anguished facial expressions, sit cross-legged on the floor or in the kitchen cooking.
In one image, we see a woman with her hand raised against a man (possibly her husband), about to strike him. Another shows a husband and wife, with the wife dressed in a man’s suit and tie, looming over her husband who is seated in a chair. The husband’s character is styled to look effeminate through his body posture and hand gesture, while the woman’s is masculinised and dominant.
Advertisements from 1942 show that Ulti Ganga was promoted as a “laugh laden” comedy. On the one hand, it appears to dismiss the women’s coup as a laughably fantastical idea, yet the film seems to also issue a warning about what might happen to society if the women’s rights movement ‘ran amok’.
Ulti Ganga and its depiction of the women’s movement is especially significant when we consider the social context during its release. Women’s participation in the political independence movement also resulted in women’s increased participation in education, the workforce and public life. Against the grand backdrop of the fight for India’s independence, women’s rights organisations were also rallying for legal protections for women in relation to issues such as marital age, the right to divorce and the right to inheritance.
When examined within this social context, Ulti Ganga shows us how Indian society was grappling with these dual impulses – women’s political activism and labour was desired but also resisted.
Before Ulti Ganga’s release, the plot for another lost film – Gorakh Aya (1938) – similarly revolved around a fictional Amazonian kingdom that descends into a Sodom and Gomorrah-esque nightmare under the rule of women, as described in its surviving publicity booklet.
Gorakh Aya is a particularly compelling example because of its publicity campaign where the film’s premiere day (July 30, 1938) was declared as ‘No Males Day’ at the West End Cinema in Bombay. Advertisements in The Times of India decreed that all screenings at this cinema on this day would be exclusively for women audiences only and “even a newborn babe, if it happens to be a male, will not be admitted”.
An advertisement for Service Ltd in the Times of India, February 3, 1939. Photo provided by author.
This publicity campaign highlights how cinema and its spaces were a microcosm of an Indian society that was navigating its own anxieties about the women’s rights movement.
Film studios were appealing to young cinema audiences (especially women) not just through provocative publicity campaigns, but also through several films in the 1930s and ‘40s that reflected women’s contemporary lives and realities through portrayals as working professionals, college students, entrepreneurs and desh sevikas.
Films such as Brandi Ki Botal (1939) depicted a politically engaged protagonist leading other young women in the fight for independence, while Seva Samaj a.k.a Service Ltd (1939) revolved around a female heiress who starts a detective agency to fight social evils.
However – as a foil to these modern and contemporary depictions – films like Ulti Ganga warned us that socially and politically engaged women were potential threats to the prevailing order and thus, needed to be carefully monitored.
The case of Ulti Ganga shows us how such materials – quiet echoes from our country’s filmic history – can help us understand social battles which are still being waged. These fragile materials, and the archives that house them, deserve preservation and our attention.
Dr Shruti Narayanswamy is an educator and film historian based at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Her research focuses on marginalised histories of film production, exhibition and audiences in South Asia.
