7th July 1896
7th July 1896 -
After a quiet start, the Bombay exhibition soon gathers momentum.
There is such a bustle and hurry. Over the living picture craze. Rivals rushing, full of worry, In their advertising days. Each the first and each the only, Each the otherworldly. But it is a wonder really, How the constant flood of life O’er the screen keeps moving freely, Full of action, stir and strife.
At the party after the show are, among others, Harischandra Bhatwadekar, or Save Dada, a photographer who later turns exhibitor and filmmaker, Raja Ravi Verma, HH the Maharaja of Baroda, the famous sculptor Mhatre, Pestonjee, who traced the Ajanta frescoes under the supervision of the Englishwoman Lady Hardinge, Mr. Havell of the Calcutta School of Art, Sir Jeejeebhoy Jagannathshankar Seth, Framjee Cawas, Ibrahim Magba, all nascent industrialists.
Somebody winds the recently acquired phonograph.
Outside the windows, at Flora Fountain, Queen Victoria’s bonfires burn.
Inside, people converse.
‘Freud has begun psychoanalysis…’
‘Kipling’s “Jungle Book” has won the Nobel Prize for Literature…’
‘The best reproductions of Raja Ravi Verma have arrived from Germany. They reach distant homes, and set a style. Mr. Slasher…runs his lithopress at Bhatwadi, Bombay,’
‘Mhatre is exhibiting his sculpture, “To the Temple”’.
‘How did Socrates escape the plague?’
‘When we define the photograph as a motionless image this does not mean that the figures it represents do not move. It means that they do not emerge, do not leave…they are anesthetized, fractured, broken down like butterflies.’
‘Why has Bal Gangadhar Tilak been imprisoned?’
‘Why is there famine in Bombay?’
Someone sees and comments on a photograph of the first train arriving at Victoria Terminus.
Two gentlemen debate the use of aluminum for cooking utensils.
‘Yes, it was a matter of chance which phase of the horse’s movements was captured when the shutter was fired. Muybridge was still using wet plates as the news of the gelatin dry plates had yet made little impact in America.’
‘Shall you be at the Poona races tomorrow?’
‘What’s this new thing they’re calling radium?’
‘What is cinema?’
‘Magic.’
‘Witchcraft…’
Later there is a shadow-puppet show by Anandrao Patwardhan, in which the hearth becomes a theatre.
The figures are manipulated from inside the chimney, in which the operator is concealed by green baize.
All goes well until a large bird tumbles down the chimney, covers everything with soot, bursts its way through the cloth, flaps its great wings and claws at everything within reach.
The women shriek and flee, sure that the Devil himself has come for them.
