1902
Kakuzo Okakura, a Japanese artist and a militant proponent of pan- Asian ideology, arrives in Calcutta as a guest of Surendranath Tagore. His ideas influence the Bengal School of Painting and are given a nationalist gloss by Sister Nivedita. The first Indian to record a song on gramaphone disc is Sashi Muskhi of Classic Theatres, Calcutta.
J.F.Madan launces his bioscope show in a tent on Calcutta's Maidan, a foundation of a massive exhibition and distribution empire which dominated silent Indian, Burmese and Sri Lankan cinemas.
first gramaphone disc cut in Calcutta. Gauhar Jaan recorded
September 1902. "the whole of the Madras-bombay train was wrecked at Cudappa" entry in Raja Raja Varma's diary [1]
Fred Gaisberg of the Gramaphone and Typewriter Ltd.(check) travels to India to make more Indian recordings and to try and set up some kind of infrastructure for the marketing of recorded music in India.
Half tone engraving, three colour engraving
It all came of use. The camera that I had invested in 12 years ago, when I was still a young man scaling the Brahmagiri.. the time I had invested in the Kala Bhavan library, the eye that the kindly Professor Gujjar had rested on me..
I became a line engraver. I started the Phalke Printing and Engraving Works in partnership with Shri Ramkrishna Bhandarkar. I would make photographs of the paintings and then, expose the negative onto a place of zinc on which was a light sensitive cover of gelatin. That image, in lines, would then be engraved and printed. I remember personally etching the lines of the cascading hair of the Ravi Varma women, delineating the waters of the ponds around Laxmi, seperating the wings of Jatayu. There was a woman wearing a golden blouse, holding a betel nut. Her hair was pulled back behind her ears, like this, but one tendril had escaped and had run over her brow. Was she pulling her saree pallu over her shoulder or was she slipping it off? It was difficult to say, looking into her eyes. That fine line of eyebrow.. I have let it emerge after etching other parts of the plate. I knew those paintings, under my fingers. That year, I was awarded a silver medal for my prints. I made photo litho transfers for the Raja Ravi Varma's press. They trusted my work with the camera, they trusted my special skill- I knew about both, photography and printing. They wrote about me in foreign magazines. I got so much work that I had to shift from Lonavala to Dadar.
I was learning to be a businessman, I had moved so far away from everything my father knew as work.. and still, whatever he knew was returning to me, it helped me bring alive all those paintings and stories, it showed me the way to the films.
