Revisiting Renoir's "The River"

Watching Renoir’s The River (1951), one cannot help but notice its oddly apolitical quality, as the camera seems to glide, like an unwitting kite, over colonial India and its landscape of toiling bodies. It brings to mind what Orwell once wrote in his essay "Marrakech" in a stark evocation of colonialism’s camouflaged violence:

“All colonial empires are founded upon that fact – the fact that it is difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings . . . They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the less visible they are.”

Renoir’s portrait of India is all the more puzzling given its contrast to his earlier career of socially engaged cinema, particularly his derisive satire in The Rules of the Game (1939), which predicted the rise and consequences of anti-Semitism in French society. In The River, there is not the slightest touch of scorn toward the ruling class, nor toward the three female protagonists who belong to it. The stories of their listless lives, suddenly stirred by the arrival of an American soldier, unfold in dream-like obliviousness.

What were Renoir’s intentions when he made The River? Why does this film not contain more of a political subtext, let alone commentary, on colonial India? Was it a strategic decision, intended for marketing purposes within Hollywood? Was it because of Renoir’s own Euro-centric views of India? Was he merely more interested in the formal elements that went into play – the pioneering Technicolor production, the elaborate sets, and the incorporation of mystical Hindu motifs? Or is it simply because of the way the author, Rumer Godden, tells her story – from the perspective of a British adolescent who is unaware of the greater political questions of her day, let alone the brutal realities of colonialism? Existing scholarly works have partially addressed these questions: Nandi Bahti’s “Whither the Colonial Question?,” Andre Bazin’s “The River: a Pure Masterpiece,” and Renoir’s own account of The River in My Life and My Films.

Can one agree with Bazin that it might be unwarranted to criticize Renoir for omitting political commentary or failing to use his directorial position to go beyond the naïve neutrality of Godden’s work? Or should one be more inclined to heed Bahti’s point that Renoir’s aesthetic choices have carelessly de-historicized India, rendering colonial realities through a sort of harmless haze even as the film was presented as an “authentic portrayal” of the country? As Orwell points out, it is this very obliviousness to the humanity of those that an empire exploits that insidiously nourishes its existence. Renoir may have been faithful to the novel and may have succeeded in his own goal of telling a human story in India; but to treat the country and its political turmoil as extraneous may be to commit the very act of “not seeing” that Orwell calls to mind.