Difference between revisions of "1871"
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| − | My wife, so | + | My wife, who could have been my child really, so young is she. Who has more often than not had only a share in the extraordinary trials seem to be the fate I have chosen for myself, has consented to write this text for me. Sometimes I narrate it to her, sometimes I talk to my children, sometimes, in the quiet of this house, where I try to forget how my studio has fallen silent, I write myself. In these recent dark days my family has gathered around me like a clay holder sheltering this faltering lamplight. I hear my children talk and want those conversations recorded. |
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| − | I look at her and often think I could have given her more, she was a child when she came to me, I could have taught her more. I have | + | I look at her and often think I could have given her more, she was such a child when she came to me, and I was so lost, I never noticed. I could have taught her more. I could have.. |
| + | Instead, like she has ably shared in all my work, she now shares in my writing. I have asked her to make a faithful a record of these days, to become the Vyas to my Ganesh. | ||
Revision as of 14:15, 19 October 2009
My wife, who could have been my child really, so young is she. Who has more often than not had only a share in the extraordinary trials seem to be the fate I have chosen for myself, has consented to write this text for me. Sometimes I narrate it to her, sometimes I talk to my children, sometimes, in the quiet of this house, where I try to forget how my studio has fallen silent, I write myself. In these recent dark days my family has gathered around me like a clay holder sheltering this faltering lamplight. I hear my children talk and want those conversations recorded.
I look at her and often think I could have given her more, she was such a child when she came to me, and I was so lost, I never noticed. I could have taught her more. I could have.. Instead, like she has ably shared in all my work, she now shares in my writing. I have asked her to make a faithful a record of these days, to become the Vyas to my Ganesh.
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, 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 crawled on all fours to the door where he was digging the earth, readying to eat the mud.
She leaped up and picked him onto 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 like this"
Lying in his cradle, the child looked one glance at Dwarkabai, and one at the sky. There was 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 thinned the boundaries dividing the worlds.
His pupils dilated and floated like boats towards his nose. A strange bird on long grey legs settled near the cradle. He was composed of a 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.
And then, the sudden excitement in the atmosphere subsided, restoring movement to the air once more, and bore that cloud away. The cloud had barely moved when the cradle began to rock again, and Dhundiraj came out of his trance and cried out aloud.
Dwarkabai was relieved " You scared me, son. Oof, forgive me! I will never tie your hands again".
5th annual tour B.A. Bamber's
Dime Show
The Planet arium
Natural Scenery
The Ill Fated Ship
The Highland Lover's Courtship for Marriage
Statutary
Miscellaneous- Numerous Comic SCenes
Electricity witout Extra Charge
Positively everyything advertised on this Bill will be Shown
Only 10 cents for Anybody and Everybody
we paid for the patches of light that slowly swam out of the darkness. Not constant patches, they were soft outlines of shapes that slowly revealed themselves, aided by our willing eyes, as illusions of the world as we know it. Heavenly dramas controlled by us this time. The stars came on and went off with beautiful precision above painted houses. Or we made day, where silly suitors knelt in yellow sunlight. His lips could move, repititively, the way you could say suitors lips do, especially when they are pressing a fruitless suit. Thick pears bunched up on the trees above him. A ship tossed. A man fell off his bed. Three things- a light source, a glass plate with a picture on it and a screen, and the pictures we were making were beginning to flicker with signs of imminent life.
Professor Pepper on The Siege of Delhi
The optical effects were assisted by various sounds in imitation of war's alarms, for the production of which more volunteers than were absolutely required would occasionally trespass behind the secenes, and produce those terrific sounds that some persons of a nervous temperament would say were really stunning"
Two schoolmates meet on the west side of the Vijaynarayanam tank. Lord Napier and Bishop Caldwell. Caldwell is living in a village in Idayankudi. School gossip is exchanged. Napier is intrigued by Caldwell's work on the "Red Tree River". Caldwell tells him so many stories of the genesis of that name, Napier realises this man before him is immersed in some idea of personal study of local mythologies. Thamiraparani..the red tree flows through Tirunelveli district. Like the branches of a tree it permeates corners of the red soil.
Caldwell asks for some geru and draws for him- one of the symbolic, totemic seeming drawings that women make at their doorsteps- with rice powder and red geru. The clasp of a snake, the flow of a river, the self entangled vine with flowers, all growing out of the same bed, an identical grid of dots makes them all. Lord Napier is a bit repelled by this Englishman using his finger as a pencil,dipping it in a liquid rice paste to paint. But the patterns those fingers allow to emerge, never leave his mind. Two snakes intertwined, their forked tongues facing each other. A grid of white dots over which a liquid white line runs. It comes back to him many years later in a dream in Scotland.An entangled vine made of red and white liquid pulls him into its messy estuaries, the choking smells of the streets of India engulf him as he lies in a large canopied bed in his family estate in Scotland.
He is easier with the Thirumalai Nayak Palace that he visits in Madurai, the Indo Saracenic architecture, the thousand pillars the elaborate paintings on the ceiling, he feels in control of, impressed by and willing to restore. Devi Meenaxi marries the poet Sunderesvar on the ceiling of the palace. "Why do I not see such work on canvas? " asks Lord Napier. "Why does such third rate work come from the Madras School of Art?" All the people around him nod their heads so he thinks he is saying something important. Ha ha ha
Sarasvati bai: But people must be nodding their heads at him all the time
Phalke: Yes..
Sarasvati bai: Maybe that day he sees something in their eyes that makes him feel maybe he has really said something worth thinking about again.
Phalke(shortly) : yes.
He thinks about the matter.. quite often actually, and later makes his famous address.
Late evening on the balcony of the old navy building. Ships are docking in the distance. Young soldeirs from different parts of the world must be loitering around the docks.
Lord Napier, Governor of Madras talks of how he wants 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 sees 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"
goes to meet his childhood friend Bishop Caldwell who lives in a village in Idayankudi. Caldwell writes about the 'red tree'- Thamiraparani- the river and various interpretations of why it is thus named. A local big family hosts the meeting of the two friends. Marthandam family of Vijayanarayam. The two friends meet in tents put to the west side of the Vijaynarayanam tank. They are guests of the Marthandam family. Lineage- Napier should understand that- he himself is a Scottish Lord, a title he gets as lineage.. and will go on to be Lord Ettrick on the United Kingdom. He is briefly Viceroy in 1872 after the assasination of Lord Mayo.
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 somewhere was 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. The gods needed to be 'unstraightened' a bit to straighten out the native! Perhaps, once seen in perspective, they would lose their ubiquitous power.
The screen of a framed picture is like 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".
