The Ritual (1977): protested, lost and found, an incendiary Indian debut

It sounds like a horror movie, but it isn’t – well, not in a genre sense. The new Blu-Ray from Second Run is a film whose restoration was partly the work of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, partly the work of George Lucas’s Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation and partly the result of Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s Film Heritage Foundation. Dungarpur may be the less famous name there but he’s the most important in terms of what to expect. His Film Heritage Foundation has partnered with Second Run on a laudable series of restorations of Indian realist dramas from the late twentieth century, putting previously overlooked classics back in the spotlight and reminding the wider world that Indian independent and social realist cinema didn’t end with Satyajit Ray.

This time, the film in question is Girish Kasaravalli’s feature debut The Ritual. Much of the Film Heritage Foundation’s work has concentrated on regional movements, far outside the Mumbai industry that lent mainstream Indian cinema its “Bollywood” nickname, and this is no exception. Kasaravalli is part of the Kannada-language cinema tradition based in Bengalaru; it is tiny in comparison to the main Hindi-language industry, and yet there are still more cinema screens devoted to it in its home territory than there are in the whole of Britain. As with previous Indian films released by Second Run such as Manthan and War and Peace, it uses its position outside the country’s mainstream industry to tackle issues too gritty or controversial for big-budget films. In the case of The Ritual, it’s one of the most explosively contentious matters in Indian culture: caste prejudice.

The story of The Ritual centres on a young boy, Nani, who enters a Brahmin school full of optimism. Excited by the prospect of learning at an elite institution, he’s dismayed and puzzled by what he finds. A lot of reviews of The Ritual describe it as a film about religious hypocrisy, which is presumably a relic of the protests it received on initial release. The issue of caste is more complex than simple religious prejudice; it exists across different Indian religions, and incorporates classism and the legacy of colonialism. As Dr. Omar Ahmed notes in the disc’s inlay booklet the Brahmin authorities are depicted as complex and flawed, rather than irredeemable. But it’s true that, as is often the case with religious prejudice, the weight of it falls on a woman. This is the headmaster’s daughter Yamuna, played in a pained and yearning performance by Meena Kuttappa.

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Best to play coy about how the plot affects Yamuna, but it’s fair to say the crux of the drama lies in the growing friendship between her and Nani. Indeed, you could argue (as Ahmed does) that by the end of it she’s the protagonist. I don’t know if Kasaravalli (who wrote the screenplay, based on a novel by U.R. Ananthamurphy) felt this was a commercial necessity to disguise the film’s potentially incendiary subject matter in the clothes of a coming-of-age tale. The switch of protagonist was a bit of a stumbling block for me, making the film feel disjointed despite Kasaravalli’s skilful attempts to smooth it over.

There are nevertheless plenty of pleasures, not least in Kasaravalli’s visual skill. In a short interview included on the disc, Kasaravalli says this was one of the last black-and-white films made in Bengalaru, to the extent where he had some difficulty finding a lab that could process it. It was worth the hassle. The incredibly crisp black and white is showcased to the fullest extent by this restoration, but it’s more than just a good look. It brings the film closer to the Italian neorealist school that was such an inspiration for the early Indian “parallel cinema” directors, even as Kasaravalli’s camera style moves subtly away from it. The push-ins and tracking shots in The Ritual suggest an influence from the more flamboyant Italian cinema that came after neorealism, an influence that may explain Scorsese’s fondness for the film.

But visuals in a fictional film are nothing without visual storytelling, and Kasaravalli scores very highly in this department too. Dr. Ahmed rightly points out the numerous images of people looking through shuttered windows and gaps in fences, a visual representation of the secrets in The Ritual‘s story, which are similarly fenced-off yet easy to see through. As a dramatist, Kasaravalli is similarly alert to the power of a telling moment. There’s a scene late on where a frightened Nani asks a passer-by to hold his hand, and the stranger refuses. Not because he’s heartless, but because he is, in his own words, “low-caste”, and he knows there’ll be social repercussions if he touches a Brahmin child. The harm prejudice does to its victims and beneficiaries alike has rarely been so swiftly illustrated.

The people who protested its initial cinema release might not agree, but in one way The Ritual is the most Indian of the Film Heritage Foundation’s Second Run releases. The Circus Tent and Manthan are both stories about working-class subcultures, and they dramatise those cultures with an awareness that even a domestic audience might not be familiar with them. Ishanou is about a very marginal religious group; they’re real but the film wouldn’t be radically different if they were fictional. The Ritual drops you straight into some of the most ingrained assumptions in Indian society. It can be slightly alienating for outsiders, but it’s worth seeing it through to the incredibly powerful conclusion. Extras are limited to the aforementioned director’s interview and the booklet, with includes Dr. Ahmed’s useful essay as well as further writing from Kasaravalli.