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. The crumpled skin of the newborn was pinko grey as the skin of a baby dhundi- elephant, and it was hoped he would still have the dark allure of the lover, Govind. And if you looked deep into his tined marble eyes, you could see dancing reflections of fresh banana fronds: Phalke.

Those marble eyes are like our family jewels.. 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, long time ago, when the feet of that ancient mountain were still tickled by young waters.

The angry ascetic, Parshuram came upon these bodies. Parshuram had allowed himself, in a rage, to kill so many Kshatriyas, that he was soaked in their blood. The disgusted Brahmans refused to do any rites for him. That is when 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 brought them to shore, naively, to show them off, like her booty, to the Sahyadris.

Parsuram cremated them- and made their bodies pure. He taught them the scriptures and made brahmans out of them. Such can be the stubborness of the extremely self righteous.

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: That is also how 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 held you the waters of my womb. Like a young turtle underwater, you rushed out swimming from your house of nine months.

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

Charting the child’s horoscope at Trymbakeshwar in Nasik district on 30 April 1870 at 8.30 p.m., the father foretells that he will deal insomething white...

At this time, the professor of English at Elphinstone College who is studying Vedic astronomy from Phalke’s father invites him to join the college as a Sanskrit teacher.

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By 1870, limelight was replacing the use of oil lamps for light in magic lantern projectors. Limelight was more combustile, but also more effective. 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]

He was a pat painter by lineage, by having learnt his father's occupation. He had moved to Calcutta a few summers ago. One day a rich old man with a taste for the cheap- he lived with an aged prostitute when he came to Boribazaar for three, sometimes five weeks and more- gifted the painter a picture of the gods, spectacular with colours fresh from some new 'press'. The old man liked to transfer some things from his river facing mansion, to the poorer quarters he frequented. He was an alright fellow, really, he would smile hugely when he shared his second hand goods.

The modern print of Kali lay in the back of the painter's hut, in pride of place. He quite 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/ In Spirit of Enterprise/ around the Chinese coast dey tossed/ and den he don't feel nice

Dair stomachs compelled de crew to retire/ Dey did, but not dis 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"

De painter agreed, the storm abated They sailed till "Land Ahoy"/ Dis-embarking, dis story, den 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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Like an alphabet leaves an impression on paper, an image must leave an impression on the mind that sees. The wood engraving must be stamped on the soft matter of the human brain. The painter's brush must paint her lines there. At the turn of the nineteenth century the Indian market was flooded with images, so many that they were like a parallel world. The rule that decided whether an image would live, was its ability to leave its mark: only those images that left their mark and slowly dissolved into the blood of the viewer, changing its chemical composition, survived. Printing presses proliferated and kept trying to update themselves with new sorceries to draw watching eyes towards the image. Once the eye was absorbed, the image was able to travel the distance into the darkness that lay behind those watching eyes, to become mind, to float there and look back saucily at the torch that was flashed along those labyrinthine corridors from time to time. There was an active move of the world of 'representation' to take over the real, it is a war that continues.

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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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22 year old Ravi Varma, who has been noticed by the King of Travancore and his Dewan, Tanjore Madhava Rao, and encouraged, gets his first commission- a portrait of the Khizakkepat Palat Krishna Menon family. A few years ago, he has shifted to the Trivandrum court. He is from a family related to the royal family of Travancore by marriage. It is also a family soaked in the arts. His mother is a poet, his uncle a painter, his brother will go on to be a musician and two younger siblings will be painters of some repute too.

His first commission, done in oils, is more in the flat style of Varma's predecessors. His talent for individuation of faces is already visible.

He is yet to learn how to mix the pigments and prepare them for painting.