Seton was an actress turned film historian & biographer who penned a
remarkable series of biographies without ever having her own life
recorded by a single biographer—of Eisenstein in 1952, Paul Robeson in
1958, Nehru in 1967 and Satyajit Ray in 1971. (Her biography of Krishna
Menon which she started researching in 1958 was never published, but, as
Jairam Ramesh now tells us, ‘Much of the material she collected (for
that) is neatly preserved in his (Menon’s) archive’.) Seton wrote about
people she knew well, so the range of personalities covered in the four
published biographies shows what an incredibly fascinating life she must
have led.
That Seton moved in socialist circles from a fairly young age is shown
by a succession of visits to Russia at the end of the 1920s and in the
early 30s. It was Seton who got Eisenstein to invite Paul Robeson to
Moscow to discuss filming of The Black Consul. That was Eisenstein’s
name for a film he was planning on Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian
Revolution. Seton took the invitation back with her to London in 1934,
where she presented it to Robeson in November. ‘It is doubtful Robeson
took too much persuading to make a trip to Moscow to discuss
Eisenstein’s plans for The Black Consul’, for the following month he,
‘together with his wife Eslanda and Marie Seton, made the voyage to meet
Eisenstein, arriving in Moscow in late December 1934’ (Forsdick and
Høgsbjerg, ‘Sergei Eisenstein and the Haitian Revolution’, History
Workshop Journal 2014). But in May 1936 ‘the Soviet film industry
officials…decided to cancel Eisenstein’s The Black Consul project
formally’. (In fact, in those depressing years all of Eisenstein’s
projects were rejected by Boris Shumyatsky, the head of the Soviet film
industry.)
Yet Robeson did go on to play Toussaint , not in the film that
Eisenstein never made but when in 1936 Seton helped C.L.R. James stage
his own play about the Haitian Revolution (Toussaint Louverture- the
story of the only successful slave revolt in history) at the Westminster
Theatre in London. Twenty years later it was Seton who introduced
Satyajit Ray to Nehru and his daughter, making sure that the PM would
reject ‘the advice of his bureaucrats that Pather Panchali should not be
shown abroad because of its unvarnished portrayal of Indian poverty’.
Seton came to India in 1955, invited by the Audio Visual department of
the Ministry of Education. 1955 was the year Ray released Pather
Panchali and it was in Bombay that she herself first saw the film.
These were overlapping circles. Nehru knew and enormously admired
Robeson and his wife ‘Essie’. In his own biography of the singer (actor,
author, civil rights activist), the American historian Gerald Horne
writes, ‘Robeson and Nehru met in London in the 1930s and the Indian
leader was so moved by his presence that he penned an ode to him,
informing readers that ‘you have been the voice of man…the song of
germinating earth/and the movement of nature’’. Nehru’s reference here
was to Robeson’s signature song, “Ol’ Man River” which had been adapted
into several South Asian languages (Horne, Paul Robeson, p.7). Robeson’s
voice, embodied and disembodied, ‘became a staple at revolutionary and
socialist meetings globally’ (p.131), so it’s interesting that decades
later, in 1958, ‘there were birthday celebrations for Robeson in all of
India’s key cities’ (p.166).
It is a pure irony that a woman whose astonishing capacity for
friendship could make her the source of some of the most intimate
details we have about cultural and political figures like Eisenstein and
Krishna Menon (E.’s deeply religious impulses, K.M.’s anguished state of
mind in 1957) has never had her own life mapped in any biography. But
Seton was a prolific letter writer and the basis is certainly there for
such a narrative. For example, here is her complete puzzlement about
Indian cultural inhibitions about sexuality, in a letter written in May
1956 to the Jamaican-born sculptor Ronald Moody and his wife Helene:
‘Having been all around the country (India) and lived in innumerable
houses with diverse people, it seems as if the only really uninhibited
people are the tribal people who are for the most part “pagan”. I have
the impression that this is the most puritanical society that exists
anywhere. But how on earth did this come about? The most puritanical
part of India is the South, yet in the South (also to some extent in the
North) there is not a single temple which I know of which does not
include a great deal of erotic sculpture. In some cases the entire
temple has virtually nothing but erotic sculpture and some of it can
only be described as more or less out and out pornography. There is a
great deal of difference between the erotic and the pornographic, that
is in emotion. It certainly appears as if there is total conflict today
between this expression of Hinduism and Hindu practice’.
Seton lived in India for most of the sixties and seventies, and was
actively involved in the film society movement. According to a close
friend of hers, at the time of her death in 1985 she was working on a
biography of Indira Gandhi. The plaque of her ashes in Golders Green
crematorium reads: ‘Marie Seton Hesson, Padma Bhushan, Citizen of the
World’.
Satyajit Ray photographed with Marie Seton (1910-1985) c.1956.
May be an image of 2 people and text
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