1871

Two hands kneaded the dough, broke off a piece, rolled it into a ball and ran the rolling pin over it. She picked up the rolled out circle of dough and threw it into the air, her nimble fingers making a game of the catching and the throwing. She landed her little continent of dough onto the griddle. The flame shuddered in the earthen fireplace made of clay, throwing a light on Ma's face. Drops of sweat shone on her skin like early morning dew reluctant to be woken by the day. Ma turned and looked and found that Dhundiraj had walked on his knees/crawled on all fours to the door where he was digging the earth by the door, readying to eat the mud.

She leaped up and picked him into her lap. She pushed a finger into his mouth and picked out the mud. Slapped him across his face, twice over, and dumped him on the ground. Dhundiraj howled.

Dwarkabai: Cry all you want.

A thought struck her and she got up and found a torn bit of saree. She tore it further, and tied the two pieces onto her child's hands, making horse hooves of them.

"Go on, eat more mud, your hands are going to stay tied like this"

Lying in his cradle, the child looked one glance at Dwarkabai, and one at the sky. A single cloud in the blue expanse... After a few seconds, as the cradle stopped rocking, the cloud started moving, and came up, right over Dhundiraj. His crying suddenly stopped. He lay quietly in his rocking bed, a mute witness to an event that crossed the boundaries of different worlds.

His pupils dilated and floated like boats, towards his nose. A strange bird on long grey legs settled near the cradle. He was made of some porous grey material.

Ma had covered the embers of the fireplace and was sitting, lost in thought, when the silence woke her up. Why had Dhundiraj's crying stopped so suddenly? She ran to the cradle with her heart in her mouth. Dhundiraj looked like he was in a samadhi. His palm was half open like it was Tukaram's palm holding the kartal. His face had a unsettling smile, but he made no sound and the cradle was still. As though that small piece of cloud in the sky had hypnotised him.

The sudden excitement in the atmosphere subsided, the air had movement again and started bearing that cloud away. The cloud had barely moved when the cradle began to rock again, Dhundiraj came out of his trance and cried out.

Dwarkabai was relieved " You scared me, son. Oof, forgive me! I will never tie your hands again".

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Stamfer disk akin to the Phenakinetescope

Optical toys which work on the principle of persistence of vision were very popular in the 19th century. People peered through key holes and looked at the image of simultaneously rotating discs in mirrors to see a moving image. Projector lamps lit up glass slides of paintings, and gradually, of photographs, in quick succession and people saw them 'move'

The giant backdrops behind the small actors on stage gave perspective, opened out vistas.

It was time for the birth of cinema

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Lord Napier, Governor of Madras wanted the development of an Indian style that 'deals with the ideal and the allegorical', in which 'the virtues, the graces.. and other abstract conceptions and agencies are clothed in human forms which owe their majesty or their terrors to the Artist"

He saw the endless possibilities of re-imagining the treasures of the epics "All that is needed to promulgate their beauty and fame is that, in their purest and nobler passages and with the powers of European Art, they should engage in the service of the national pencil as they have fastened on the national memory and animated the national voice"

European perpective, the drawing of objects, people and space, as 'they really are', in relationship to each other, in the visible world, was being retaught to the native. The idea was somewhere also that this would change the way the native thought, it would enable the process of rational thinking, so lacking in the idol worshippers.. It seemed implied that the flat, frontal images that were popularly made and worshipped, were representative of a equally childish way of judging and looking at the world.

matsya

The screen of the picture is the sky, the abode of the gods. A piece of sky before me where from his world, God looks me in the eye. The person on the screen sees me as I see him, he knows me, I can see it in his eyes.

Should he look away at some one else on the screen, then what is the picture to me?

A little girl wants to visit Sharukh Khan's house in Bandra.. he knows me, she says, when her mother points out the bad manners of barging into an unknown person's house. He sees me from the television every day.

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