1870

April 30, in the dark of 8.30 pm, I was born to a kathavachak's family in Trymbakeshvar. My name was to be Dhundiraj Govind Phalke.

Saraswati : The crumpled skin of the newborn was pinko grey as the skin of a baby dhundi- elephant, and it was hoped he would grow up to have the dark allure of the lover, Govind. If you looked deep into the glass marbles of his eyes, you could see dancing reflections of fresh banana fronds: Phalke.

Dada: Those jewel like pupils are a family inheritance.. they were there, nesting behind the eyelids of the fourteen dead foreigners who were washed ashore at the feet of the Sahyardris. This was a long time ago, when the feet of that ancient mountain were tickled by the young waters.

Parsuram, the embodiment of rage, came upon these bodies. He had let his fury destroy so many Kshtriyas, he had let so much blood, that his co Brahmans refused to do any rites for him.

It was at such a time that he came upon our ancestors, or rather, the remains of our ancestors, because they were dead of an accident at sea, and the waves had naively brought them to shore, to show them off like her booty, to the Sahyadris.

Parsuram cremated them, and let the fire purify their bodies, and ready them for change. He then brought them to life again, taught them the scriptures and made brahmans out of them, brahmans who would serve him.

Sarasvatibai: Such can be the stubborness of the extremely self righteous.

Dada: He forced the sea to yield up a stretch of land, on either side of the river Vashishthi, for them.

That is how we came to be Chitpavan Konkanast Brahmans.

Saraswati: The mountain lost the companionship of the sea, and grew old in her memory.

When you were born, we performed the same rites as we did when your father was born. I was made to lie on my back, and a brahman untied the knots in the house, the way you were loosening yourself from the coiled mattresses that kept you in the waters of my womb. Like a young turtle underwater, you swam your way out from your house of nine months.

He must have been small in there, like you were small, like the soft, fresh walnut kernel if you broke open the shell.

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Nasik, April 30th, 8.30 pm Charting the child’s horoscope the father foretells that he will deal insomething white...

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Dada:

A magic lantern needed a steady, bright and focused light source, an image painted on transparent glass, with transparent dyes, a lens to focus the image and a white cloth to project it on. The painted slide would face its colourful reflection. Image would stare at shadow. ( I have often wondered, what is it about shadows that moves us so? Reality magnified and reshown to us, larger, thinner, more broken down than life, that is the cinema image. The world breaks up into a mist on screen, stand closer, world made of these mists, is so beautiful, it cannot ever hurt us.)

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had developed the magic lantern to a fine art. Multiple projectors, clamps that slid over the lens openings, overlapping images, would create an illusion of movement, of appearance and disappearance, of a shift from day to night. By 1870, limelight was replacing the use of oil lamps for light in magic lantern projectors. Limelight was more combustile, but it also shone brighter, more steadily, for longer. It was produced by burning oxygen and hydrogen on a pellet of lime.

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Popularity of Kalighat paintings at its peak

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[1]

A pat painter in the byelanes behind Kalighat temple, startled by the printed image gifted to him by one rich oddball character who lived for long stretches with a prostitute, and revelled in 'slumming it', secure in the knowledge of his home on the other side of the city, waiting for his return.

He would often give out random gifts to his acquaintances in these lanes, and he had given Chandi this printed image of Kali.

The print lay in the back of the painter's hut, in pride of place. He admired it, without wanting to, and felt derisory without wanting to either.

When his dazzled jealousy subsided enough to enable him to look closely, he noticed the pursed lips in the lines, a kind of mendicancy of making. Those small, careful strokes compensated for by the profusion of colours. The colours did not stand out, it seemed like the machines they came from had a way of sinking them INTO the paper, they became the picture. His own Kali, he thought, was a single line. Continuous as a human hair was the stroke of the hair brush that made it. That was the way with their paintings.

The devi was looking away in anger. Her fury showed like he had never shown her.. That look troubled him.. she never looks thus when she looks at you, not in the many idols that make white shadows of the lanes that crowd around the Kali temple.. not in the temple either, does she ever look like this, not in their scrolls. She is somewhere else, in another land, somewhere far away from me. Not here, she is somewhere.

Which wonderful machine had this ability to dream, he wondered, this too human apparition, inhuman dream, like on a long night of indigestion?

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The Kalighat painters were pat painters who had come to the city to expand their livelihoods- in the city, they transformed their traditional scroll of a story into the single frame of a painting, a poor man's wall hanging.

They looked curiously at the other images that surrounded them, and would have to contend seriously with the technologies that were mechanically reproducing images: the oleograph, the wood-cut print, and the newsheet, all threatened the livelihood of these artisans.

The Kalighat painter also knew how to multiply his images, but with human machines: within the family, the patriarch might draw the image, the family copy and colour them. Many copies of a single image could be made speedily like this.

But the printing machine was a reproducing monster, it scattered its seed far and fast.

Worse, the simple outlines of the Kalighat paintings made them grist for the mills of the lithograph presses. Endless copies could be made ready to be filled in with colour. (Only with the coming of the chromolithograph was it possible to mechanically render the vivid colour in these paintings.)

Images flooded the markets, a Shiva in one corner of a bale of Manchester cotton, a mass printed Kalighat painting with a German wallpaper motif that would reveal its antecedents to future researchers. The Kalighat painters also opened the windows of their pictures further and let in the new worlds of life and image that they were encountering- satirical image comments, often moralistic, on changing times, jostled in the Kalighat market with the traditional images of the Devi. Even when the image was traditional, her feet might suddenly show the outline presence of a shadow, never there before, and her body might be turned, just a little away from the audience. --- In principle a work of art has always been reproducible.. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 1955

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19th century kalighat painting

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Jeejeebhoy, Jagannath Shankar Seth, Framjee Cawas, and Ibrahim Magba were at the forefront of nascent Indian capitalism.

Jeejeebhoy Jamset in English boat/ called Spirit of Enterprise/ around the Chinese coast they tossed/ and then he don't feel nice

Their stomachs compelled the crew to retire/ They did, but not one man/ Who painted a compe-ti-tive storm/ With con-si-drable elan

Jamesetji, he forgot his stomach! and said/ "Teach at my school of art/ My city has gale enough to fill/ Your oil painterly heart"

The painter agreed, the storm abated They sailed till "Land Ahoy"/ Dis-embarking, this story, then brought / More glory to Jeejeebhoy

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Two brothers went looking in opposite directions, to make a route for a long telegraph cable that was their joint fate. One went east, from Sukhumi near the Georgian coast, past Tiflis, Erevan, Dzulfa, Tabris, Teheran, Bushir Karachi, till he reached the Presidency of Calcutta. The other brother went into the Black Sea and out, past Kerch, Odessa, Balta, Vinista, Berdichev, Zhitomir, Warsaw, Berlin, Emden, into the North Sea, into London. Except in the sea, they kept close to the Railway tracks.. a known technology felt safe when you were bearing the new unknown.

The IndoEuropean Telegraph line comes into operation. [2]

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A huge anthropological project using the modern agent of photography is on. Titled "People of India", it was started in 1868, and is to come out in eight volumes.

An enormous eye in the black sky pursues the criminal through space and to the bottom of the sea, where it devours him after taking the form of a fish. Multiple eyes nevertheless multiply under the waves.

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The shadow of the Indian 'betrayal' of 1857 fuelled an increasing racism towards elite Indians, especially, in 'humorous' magazines of the British.

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GRIFFIN OF THE NIGHT

I'm holding my son in my arms/ sweating after nightmares/ small me/ fingers in his mouth/ his other fist clenched in my hair small me/ sweating after nightmares.

Michael Ondtaaje

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Trivandrum.

Diwan Madhav Rao watches his protegee.

The 22 year old painter is still working on the canvas of his first commission, a portrait of a upper class nuclear family from Trivandrum. The group of five are looking back at the painter. The woman whose face has the blindness of a child, in its inability to strike an attitude in repose, in its just letting go as she faces the painter. Or maybe it is that she is simply not pretty. Or just that she has never expected to face a good looking young man, not her husband, in this manner. The littlest boy is pushing himself further into his mothers lap, the middle child looks a bit caught, the oldest one has opened up his eyes like the startled doe of Shakuntala- the painter likes that. And the father, the head of the Khizakkepat Palat Family, least innocent of all, most tired, most knowing, looks consideringly into the eyes of the painter, he interests Ravi Varma most of all, he paints him most of all, the brown skin of his bare body saturating the canvas, is frustratingly not coming alive, the way its touchable expanse sits before him. Ravi Varma concentrates on that which he can do better- the ornamentation he has learnt from his uncle, he deftly paints single pearl in his ears, and then extends his confidence in painting pearl white, to the bearded man's mother of pearl eyes on which, like inlay work, sit those dark, shining pupils which give a measured gaze back to the painter.

If Ravi Varma's own family were to be painted, a group of musicians would come alive- a poet for a mother, a painter for an uncle, a sibling immersed in music, the other two showing promise at painting.