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  • An Archive of DevelopmentThe Road Film's Tyranny of Proximity
  • Ateya Khorakiwala (bio)

The aesthetic cliché of railways and roads subduing sublime landscapes animates the opening sequence of P. B. Pendharkar's ca. 1965 Films Division of India documentary short, Border Roads. The film begins by contrasting the smooth and manifold capacity for movement in the city with the stillness and insurmountability of the mountains. The Hindi-speaking narrator, Vijay Menon, attempts to interview city folk about their transportation choices, who, for comic effect, ignore him in multiple languages. They are too busy hopping into taxicabs and trains and whizzing by on scooters to consider the conveniences offered by the infrastructural regime of the modern city. The camera, and the narrator too, partake in the thrill of speed, gliding along roads and trains, reminding the documentary film's urban audience of its access to access: motor cars, trains, and roads, and where there are no roads, bridges, and where no bridges, boats. The lilting music heightens the giddiness and the crush of urban space, where movement and speed define the meaning of the city itself. Pendharkar cuts from this visual and aural sequence to a sublime view of still, snowclad mountains accompanied by soft meditative sounds (fig. 1). As the camera slowly pans, Menon asks his audience, "But what will you do here? If you aren't an Everest champion, you may as well give up."1

What new ideologies of infrastructure, connectivity, and communication was Pendharkar mobilizing by representing the city and mountain as contiguous developmental space? And if both mountain and city were part of the same political space of the postcolonial, developmental nation-state, then what work—infrastructural and cognitive—needed doing, to join them to each other and produce a seamless contiguity? Even as developmental infrastructure in India in the 1960s aimed to modernize, it also operated in a realm of fantasy and desire, a realm archived by the propaganda film. In response to the call of this special section, to interrogate how aesthetic, material, and spatial figurations get written out, archived, and indexed, this article proposes two methodological strategies: first, to consider the technology of connectivity and communication (roads) as aesthetic figurations in the built environment, and second, to consider propaganda documentary films as archival documents of these aesthetic inscriptions, and thus, of the developmental state. In doing so, it charts a point of access to the history of infrastructure, illuminating its status as a site of desire: the violent desire to enact imperial strategies by rehearsing colonial arguments about subduing nature in the pursuit of development and progress.

One way that roads intersected with propaganda films was through a Cold War concern with the science of communications.2 While the new roads inscribed a political geography of communication onto the physical terrain of the nation, the new films wrote the resulting political geography onto the psychic terrain of its audiences, reminding moviegoers of their belonging to a contiguous state.3 In the 1940s, US ideas about communications were influential enough that at the 1943 Indian Roads Congress, revenue advisor to the governor of the Central Provinces and Berar H. C. Greenfield, in his welcome address, stressed "the need for a co-ordinated plan of road communications for India, since it was a truism that civilization spread with communications, which [End Page 541] opened up the countryside" (italics mine).4 These films presented facts while drawing from the language of Hindi and Western cinema, fundamental to imaging the national in postcolonial India.5 Documentary directors folded cinematic tropes into a stylistic realism that was then refracted through constraints of time, money, and technology. Because of its interest in producing films, newsreels, and television shows, the Indian government invested money into filmmaking with direct consequences on both the industry and aesthetics of Indian cinema.6


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Figure 1.

Stills from Border Roads (dir. P. B. Pendharkar, 1965).

Following Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi's provocation to investigate the architectural beyond the regimes of authorial intent or technical complexity and instead "as a central concept and as a subject of historiography and methodology,"7 this article performs a speculative reading of the...

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