Hollywood’s India: The Meaning of RKO’s Gunga Din

The Spirit of Independence

“You have sworn as soldiers, if need be, to die for your country, your England. Well, India is my country and my faith, and I can die for my faith and my country as readily as you for yours.”¹ These are the words, not of an Indian nationalist hero, but of the “Thug Master,” arch villain in the film Gunga Din (RKO, 1939), directed by George Stevens and based loosely on the Rudyard Kipling poem, in which British soldiers repulsing Thugee terrorists in India rely on Gunga Din, a lowly water carrier (bhisti), not only to serve them but, in the end, to save them from death. In 1939, the typical film from Hollywood and Britain was heralding the British Raj and the “long live England” reflex that united these Anglo-Atlantic powers against Germany. The villain’s defiance of British Imperialism in Gunga Din was, therefore, an unexpected turn in the artistic, popular, and profitable series of Hollywood pictures appearing from 1929–39 about British rule over nineteenth-century India. Suddenly a film in this series was introducing reservations about the British Empire and implicitly recognizing the legitimacy of the impulse toward Indian independence, which had dramatically intensified during the 1930s. The film also prefigured American sympathy for this impulse, a sympathy that would cause wartime controversy between London and Washington.

Anti-imperialism in Gunga Din, however, remains a subtext because the film simultaneously glorifies the British Raj and operates primarily as an adventure tale, not a political-message movie, even though it has fallen prey to scholars of political cinema since then, most of whom have viewed empire cinema before World War II as an apologia for the white man’s burden. Harold Isaac’s Images in Asia (1958) criticized all the flag waving in both the poem and the film. Gary Hess, in America Encounters India (1971), and Jeffrey Richards, in his pioneering Visions of Yesterday (1973), the most comprehensive survey of the imperial film, castigated the entire genre, not just the movie and its hero. These sentiments were echoed in Rudy Behlmer’s Behind the Scenes (1982) and in Prem Chowdhry’s Colonial India and the making of the empire cinema [sic] (2000). Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), the bible of “postmodern” and “postcolonial” chastisement of imperialism, presented Kipling as the iconic bard of western, white dominion over the Orient.²

Previous analyses have obscured the full meaning of Gunga Din, however, which must be understood in its historical context, with America en route to World War II and India on the threshold of independence. By the late 1930s, Hollywood was ready to look more critically at British hegemony. America had become a superpower; Britain, weakened in World War I, was already in decline. The modification of Hollywood’s British-Indian epic was imminent. Participants in the production of Gunga Din could feel it. The tension permeated the script, the casting, the acting, and the directing of Gunga Din, yet most participants seemed only intermittently aware of their ambivalence toward Britain. Although they wanted to sustain its defense against the growing threat of German attack, as Americans, whose nation was born in the War for Independence, who identified with Wilsonian world liberation, and who took pride in the Philippine Independence Act (1935), they naturally sympathized with subordinate nations yearning for self-determination, especially with India, which, even in England, was increasingly considered ready for autonomy. By the mid-1930s, the political situation in India had made the old Hollywood screenings of India seem dated and inappropriate.

In 1935 the British parliament, after negotiations with Indian political groups, passed the Government of India Act, which gave the large Indian provinces virtual selfgovernment in local affairs under the ostensible control of elected Indian ministers. Because Whitehall retained real sovereignty, though, the Indian National Congress, led by Mahatma Gandhi, denounced the Act for leaving too much authority in British hands. Nevertheless, Congress participated in the elections of 1937 and 1938 and won control of a number of provinces. But it refused to join a...