The Epic Melodrama terms of a sort of nationalist angst, India's first truly influential existentialist stereotype, an indigenous Camus outsider inflicted with and utterly alienated by a dread disease of the soul. To see the truly revolutionary shift in the film, it is important to locate Barua's 66 lead characters—at least in Deudas and in Mukti / The Liberation of the Soul (1937)— in his own class: the aristocrat Devdas and the wealthy, arrogant and impulsive amateur painter Prasanta (Mukti)', importantly, both characters were played by Barua himself. And it was in his acting, and then of course that of his wife Jamuna Barua, that he evolved a performative idiom, of static stories and a stultified, mask-like actorial countenance, against which he mounted what was the most mobile subjective camera of his time in Indian cinema. The hyperactive camera moves through walls, pans endlessly over a sweeping landscape and, in the penultimate sequence of Devdas as the dying hero goes on his famous bullock-cart ride, creates a negative effect that turns the sky black and the trees white, using a green filter and shooting against the sun. (The only other film where I have seen this effect is in Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico, although other New Theatres directors following Barua have also tried it later with less success, e.g., Kidar Sharma in his Banwre Nain, 1950). The film was one of the first in Indian cinema to mark a decisive shift in the realist imperative, a shift that was concretized only in the context of the second world war and its aftermath when Indian cinema, following the abolition of raw-stock licensing, saw the major expansion that the S.K. Patil Report chronicles. The performative 'subjectivity capable of action' moved away from iconic placement and into the cinema itself: into shooting, editing and sound, creating thereby a different role for both the iconic figure and the technological apparatus. The realist referent was updated to include, for the first time, the cinematic-technological modern: a lexicon that located radically new relations with both technology as well as the cinema's diegesis of neo-traditionalism. It became the most important of the 'other voices' placed within quotation marks, making reference to something like 'the dominant political issues of the day', that was less a shoring up of the fiction (as in Phaike), or a release of the phantasy (Gunsundari), and more a 'making familiar', and thus also a means of making legitimate. We have Devdas going through a train journey—the only point in the film where modem technology is referred to (trains, for some reason, have always been equated with realism in Indian cinema)—as a metaphor for his inner condition. In the Barua lineage then, we have Nitin Bose whose Desher Mati / Dharti Mata (1938) deals with collective farming, use of machinery and fertilizer and how we can improve our agricultural output, and whose Dushman/ Jiban Maran (1939) addresses the tuberculosis eradication campaign of Lady Linlithgow. Bose's Hindi melodrama Deedar (1951) characterizes science in the role of a benevolent tool in the hands of the eye surgeon, against which the blind hero Dilip Kumar fiercely rebels when he puts his eyes out again. And in Anari (1959) by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, also a New Theatres product, the pivot of the drama is Motilal's pharmaceuticals business which sells poisoned drugs to Raj Kapoor's foster-mother Lalita Pawar. Journal of Arts & Ideas