Made in India: Television, Documentary, and the Everyday

Luke Stadel, University of Iowa

This paper explores the controversy surrounding the broadcast of Louis Malle’s L’Inde fantôme (Phantom India) on British television in 1970. In 1967, Louis Malle traveled to India as part of a French cultural envoy screening New Wave films. He returned in early 1968 with a crew to make a documentary; following four months of shooting, he spent over a year editing the footage. The film was originally released in France in July of 1969, and was picked up by the BBC in 1970 for broadcast with a new voice-over narration in English, and assembled as a seven-part series. Controversy erupted after just a few weeks, due to a strong negative reaction by the Indian diasporic community in the UK, leading to an 18-month ban of the BBC from the Indian subcontinent. In this paper, I analyze the controversy through articles and letters published in the London Times in 1970 and examine programming discourse within which the film was aired in the UK. I then use the event to consider the way that a televisual presentation inscribed the film within a different viewing context than the theatrical presentation common for films of the French subjective documentary tradition. Ultimately, this case study raises questions not only about the role of television in mediating the reception of documentary films, creating what I identify as an everyday sphere of reception, but also about the larger enterprise of postcolonial documentary and the West writing the history of the East through cinema.