1870

Part 1.

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 irises of the eyes 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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Part 2.

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 is all clothes, and a small face. The young Ravi Varma has spent the time reserved for her carefully dilineating the folds of her clothes. The littlest boy is pushing himself further into his mothers lap. The other two boys stand besides.

Ravi Varma's eye shies before the eye of the patriarch- the dark skinned, bearded man, the head of the Khizakkepat Palat Family sits before him, least innocent in the group that he is part of, most tired, most knowing. He looks consideringly into the eyes of the painter. Ravi Varma has spent a large time trying to 'capture' that which arrests him about this man, and failing. That vitally alive being, that expanse of brown skin remain frustratingly outside the grasp of his brush. What he paints is flat brown canvas, nothing compared to the contoured body that sits before him, just beyond that canvas. Ravi Varma is confining himself to that which he knows better- the ornamentation he has learnt from his uncle. He deftly paints a single pearl in the patriarch's ears and extending his confidence in painting pearl whites, carefully works on the patriarch's mother of pearl eyes on which, like inlay work, sit those dark, shining irises, crowned with the darkest gem of the pupil.

Like a speaking necklace on the neck of a woman, those eyes are suddenly his, Ravi Varma's, on his canvas. The portrait comes alive. More confidently now, the young man paints, and soon, the middle child's irises show the fear of a little animal that is caught, the oldest one's are opened up like the startled doe of Shakuntala- the painter likes that. And the woman's face, guileless as a child, her gaze blinder than everyone else's as she faces the painter. The gaze of a creature dulled by her unexpected exit from the confines of her routines, to this sunlight. 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.

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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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19th century kalighat painting

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Part 3. A book about espionage written in many parts

The government was not taking any chances. A small band of whitemen controlling a large brown land choc-a-bloc with people, crawling with indecipherable languages, with any number of seditious possibilities. There was only one way, the hardest way, spring cleaning from the bottom. The most absolute identification, classification, file-ification, of every genus type, every sub type, every tribe of the land mass.

The project, started in 1868, and going on for 8 years, was precisely named " People of India".

There was a special agent recruited into her Majesty's Secret Service, called the Photographer. He plastered his wet plates on one wall of a Lilliputian dark room and in front of it, on a clamp, fixed the fan of an accordion.

The seditious possibility, subversive element, was seated before this box that the natives call a 'camera', since it looks so much like its eponymous room, the native 'kamara'. (In fact a distressing tendency has been noticed among the men in the barracks to pick up such words from the native tongue and integrate them into the Queen's language) The subject is seated before this mini room and asked to stare into its windows. As the subject sits quietly facing that glass, first entry into that darkness, something in him is stilled. The fiercest Gond warrior becomes tentative in that moment of gazing. The 'camera' then pulls an image of the subject into those dark interiors, where the wet plate is waiting for both, the image and the intrepid photographer. The real battle takes place in that iodised darkness. The quicksilver image, evasive creature has to be trapped , fixed into that glass plate rapidly, delicately, with an unerring tackle, a rapid roll on the floor, where she tries, with characteristic guile to escape with a flurry of black dust that she flings all over the glass. If this happens, it is all over, that moment of dust thrown becomes a dust storm of the kind that chokes everything every summer in the Gangetic Basin.

It is not easy. The image is a slippery creature, not surprising when you think of who it is a exact reflection of- extremely slippery people. Ramoshis, Kolis, Santhals, Jats, Gujjars, long considered incapable of any civilised mediation, are slowly, incredibly being pinned down to these pieces of glass, and quite like the Hibiscus rosa sinesus, the Rattus norvegicus, the Rana Tigrina, labelled, seperated, classified and stored away in our Majesty's secret shelves. .

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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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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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