The Dance of Shiva (1998) is a curious little cameo of a short film. I want more of it, but I want it differently, which happens sometimes with history, too.
The history at hand is the unsung heroism of the Indian Army on the Western Front, witnessed by a bemused, disapproving, finally partisan chaplain of the British Army—undersung to this day, even when it comes in the form of a lesson through a white lens. Far too few English officers learned it besides. Scripted by Joseph Miller, directed and co-produced by Jamie Payne, the film has less than half an hour to pass it on to us, so its action time-lapses in micro-vignettes, an epic boiled down to its bones. In India of 1916, the cross-cultural friendship between Sergeant Bakshi (Sanjeev Bhaskar) and Lieutenant Frewer (Malcolm Ridley) of the "5th Bengal Rifles" is established with a handshake across the board of a chess game and an impish "God save the King" while the fretting Captain Greville (Paul McGann) flounders in his duty toward men whose faith he doesn't share. No sooner has the palette changed from red saris and sun-gilded rivers to the sullen shell-soaked overcast of the trenches of France than the lieutenant falls in no man's land and the sergeant's efforts under heavy fire rescue merely a corpse, passing command of the regiment to Lieutenant Davies (Samuel West), so green and useless with his pale, disgusted face that he doesn't even know to reach for his mask when the gas-gongs start clanging and only the sergeant's quick thinking saves his life, if perhaps not his lungs in the red, wet, long run. For neither act is the sergeant officially recognized any more than he's decorated for the daring raid on a German trench instigated and accomplished on his initiative, playing the defector—no more than some of his superiors suspect—before leading his sepoys to a dearly bought victory. Greville may be puzzled by the present of a looted cross, but we understand it at once as a return for the gift he made the sergeant of a bronze icon of Shiva Nataraja, the same one he himself was given somewhat contemptuously by Colonel Evans (Kenneth Branagh) to encourage him toward understanding, not patronage. "In the beginning, Shiva strikes his drum and existence is born . . . The fire that surrounds him is both creation and destruction. The dance of birth followed by the dance of death followed by the dance of rebirth." It is their one real moment of meeting, terribly echoed inside the Oriental irony of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton when all the chaplain can understand is the one phrase from the interpretation of Shiva, the hand that signs fear not. What he understands most in the end is how shabbily his empire has treated these men it made part of itself and sent to die for its preservation, no less a lost generation than their white commissioned officers. We are left with the ghost-memory of Sergeant Bakshi and his men, turbaned, mud-stained, disposable, indispensable, and the written words of General Willis (Julian Glover), bitterly resigning his commission with the moral of the film: "I can only hope that the nation will one day share my pride in these men's valor, and somehow demonstrate its gratitude to them and their families."
I would love to know how this film even happened. It has the feel of a trial piece, as though on finishing it you should be able to go straight on to the BAFTA-winning feature it was adapted into, and you really cannot. The writer never seems to have done much else, the director went into prolific TV; they left this brilliantly detailed miniature with a cast to die for and a crew much the same. The production design advised by John Box could support an epic of the trenches on the budget of a skirmish, the practical realities of mud-trodden planks and wire and sandbags and rough earth walls that make a blood-stinking chill come right off the screen. The score by Nitin Sawhney makes elegant, haunting use of voice and tabla and cuts out in favor of Elgar at the point of maximal irony. The cinematography by Jack Cardiff is unsurprisingly stunning, as beautifully artificial with color as his work for Powell and Pressburger—I mean it as a compliment when I say that the shot of blue-lit bronze Shiva swung up against the stars by Sergeant Bakshi's half-mittened hand could have come from the '40's, even from the Pinewood India of Black Narcissus (1947). The two women grinding flour in the dawn-flood of sun could be visiting from The River (1951). The screenplay could stand to catch up to its year. For all its sympathy and admiration for Bakshi, who is permitted to show not just his courage and his sense of humor but his tension and his leashed frustration with his supposed betters, The Dance of Shiva tells his story from the outside. It doesn't refer to him emotionally as it does with Greville, it observes little of him away from the British characters, his Hindi is left opaque to the general audience except for that crucial डरो मत. It's such an expressive gesture when he straightens the identity disc at his throat before going over the top, the film could afford to let us into his head more often before then, and it feels more like an oversight than privacy that it doesn't. None of his men emerge as even supporting individuals, save perhaps for the one who leads the singing in the trenches at night. I don't fault the film for its runtime, but it leaves me wanting not this anecdote of injustice but the full story at scale, told from the margins themselves. Maybe someone will write and direct it one of these days.
I ran across The Dance of Shiva in the filmography of Jack Cardiff, after which it handily made itself available on Vimeo; I wouldn't mind catching it in a theater sometime as its ambition deserves. Until such time as a full-fledged treatment exists of the Indian experience in WWI, this short subject does the most with the history that I'm aware of and ardently wants us to care about it, too, on more than the level of military trivia or setting the record straight. Wherever else it falls short, it succeeds on that front. "The Lord of the Dance," Bakshi concludes his exegesis of Nataraja, gazing through the ring of bronze fire into the deep night sky. "Christ," breathes Greville, and the sergeant corrects him: "Shiva." I didn't even think of Sydney Carter until after the fact. This beginning brought to you by my demonstrative backers at Patreon.
The history at hand is the unsung heroism of the Indian Army on the Western Front, witnessed by a bemused, disapproving, finally partisan chaplain of the British Army—undersung to this day, even when it comes in the form of a lesson through a white lens. Far too few English officers learned it besides. Scripted by Joseph Miller, directed and co-produced by Jamie Payne, the film has less than half an hour to pass it on to us, so its action time-lapses in micro-vignettes, an epic boiled down to its bones. In India of 1916, the cross-cultural friendship between Sergeant Bakshi (Sanjeev Bhaskar) and Lieutenant Frewer (Malcolm Ridley) of the "5th Bengal Rifles" is established with a handshake across the board of a chess game and an impish "God save the King" while the fretting Captain Greville (Paul McGann) flounders in his duty toward men whose faith he doesn't share. No sooner has the palette changed from red saris and sun-gilded rivers to the sullen shell-soaked overcast of the trenches of France than the lieutenant falls in no man's land and the sergeant's efforts under heavy fire rescue merely a corpse, passing command of the regiment to Lieutenant Davies (Samuel West), so green and useless with his pale, disgusted face that he doesn't even know to reach for his mask when the gas-gongs start clanging and only the sergeant's quick thinking saves his life, if perhaps not his lungs in the red, wet, long run. For neither act is the sergeant officially recognized any more than he's decorated for the daring raid on a German trench instigated and accomplished on his initiative, playing the defector—no more than some of his superiors suspect—before leading his sepoys to a dearly bought victory. Greville may be puzzled by the present of a looted cross, but we understand it at once as a return for the gift he made the sergeant of a bronze icon of Shiva Nataraja, the same one he himself was given somewhat contemptuously by Colonel Evans (Kenneth Branagh) to encourage him toward understanding, not patronage. "In the beginning, Shiva strikes his drum and existence is born . . . The fire that surrounds him is both creation and destruction. The dance of birth followed by the dance of death followed by the dance of rebirth." It is their one real moment of meeting, terribly echoed inside the Oriental irony of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton when all the chaplain can understand is the one phrase from the interpretation of Shiva, the hand that signs fear not. What he understands most in the end is how shabbily his empire has treated these men it made part of itself and sent to die for its preservation, no less a lost generation than their white commissioned officers. We are left with the ghost-memory of Sergeant Bakshi and his men, turbaned, mud-stained, disposable, indispensable, and the written words of General Willis (Julian Glover), bitterly resigning his commission with the moral of the film: "I can only hope that the nation will one day share my pride in these men's valor, and somehow demonstrate its gratitude to them and their families."
I would love to know how this film even happened. It has the feel of a trial piece, as though on finishing it you should be able to go straight on to the BAFTA-winning feature it was adapted into, and you really cannot. The writer never seems to have done much else, the director went into prolific TV; they left this brilliantly detailed miniature with a cast to die for and a crew much the same. The production design advised by John Box could support an epic of the trenches on the budget of a skirmish, the practical realities of mud-trodden planks and wire and sandbags and rough earth walls that make a blood-stinking chill come right off the screen. The score by Nitin Sawhney makes elegant, haunting use of voice and tabla and cuts out in favor of Elgar at the point of maximal irony. The cinematography by Jack Cardiff is unsurprisingly stunning, as beautifully artificial with color as his work for Powell and Pressburger—I mean it as a compliment when I say that the shot of blue-lit bronze Shiva swung up against the stars by Sergeant Bakshi's half-mittened hand could have come from the '40's, even from the Pinewood India of Black Narcissus (1947). The two women grinding flour in the dawn-flood of sun could be visiting from The River (1951). The screenplay could stand to catch up to its year. For all its sympathy and admiration for Bakshi, who is permitted to show not just his courage and his sense of humor but his tension and his leashed frustration with his supposed betters, The Dance of Shiva tells his story from the outside. It doesn't refer to him emotionally as it does with Greville, it observes little of him away from the British characters, his Hindi is left opaque to the general audience except for that crucial डरो मत. It's such an expressive gesture when he straightens the identity disc at his throat before going over the top, the film could afford to let us into his head more often before then, and it feels more like an oversight than privacy that it doesn't. None of his men emerge as even supporting individuals, save perhaps for the one who leads the singing in the trenches at night. I don't fault the film for its runtime, but it leaves me wanting not this anecdote of injustice but the full story at scale, told from the margins themselves. Maybe someone will write and direct it one of these days.
I ran across The Dance of Shiva in the filmography of Jack Cardiff, after which it handily made itself available on Vimeo; I wouldn't mind catching it in a theater sometime as its ambition deserves. Until such time as a full-fledged treatment exists of the Indian experience in WWI, this short subject does the most with the history that I'm aware of and ardently wants us to care about it, too, on more than the level of military trivia or setting the record straight. Wherever else it falls short, it succeeds on that front. "The Lord of the Dance," Bakshi concludes his exegesis of Nataraja, gazing through the ring of bronze fire into the deep night sky. "Christ," breathes Greville, and the sergeant corrects him: "Shiva." I didn't even think of Sydney Carter until after the fact. This beginning brought to you by my demonstrative backers at Patreon.
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