1871
A large shadow on the wall, of a suited man, writing.
Phalke:
My wife, who has more often than not had only a share in the extraordinary trials that 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 want to leave behind me a record for my children.
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 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 horses' 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 noisily.
Dwarkabai was relieved by the sound " You scared me, son. Oof, forgive me! I will never tie your hands again".
Memories of an unknown man who had also dabbled in the art of magic lanterns, who continued to love it till his dying day. His diary entries have been culled and part of Hepworth's 1897 book on film, but somehow got edited out. We include some of those excerpts in this edition of The Fathers of Film. Copyright with Messrs. Craddock and Haddock, London.
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. Thick pears leaned down from the branches. The maiden sat under the tree, the suitor was on his knees. His lips moved, repititively, the way suitors' lips do, especially when they are pressing a fruitless suit.
A ship was tossed like an egg on a pan. A man fell off his bed. What use those glass cased butterflies that it is our botanists wont to collect. What comparison with the milliseconds of time those same wings, alive, generate when their flutter? Movement makes time. The light source, lenses, glass plates with pictures on them, and a screen, these made our magic lanterns. Limelight had made the illumination so steady, the pictures were beginning to flicker like the light sources once used to. That flickering was the breath of 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"
Thamiraparani
This is a story of a red tamarind tree that flows as a river past the village of Idayankudi. Two schoolmates met here, Lord Napier and Bishop Caldwell. Would you have thought, looking at one's frocks and the others grand vestments that once they were boys rolling together on the grass of Eton? Napier is adding titles to his name, the very next year, he would be Baron of Ettrick. Caldwell was collecting stories, all stories about the sourly named many limbed river that flowed by the Indian village he lived in- Idayankudi.
It is funny how old schoolmates can, regardless of change of dress, of habitat, of visions of happiness, still rush into old school gossip, repeat the names of teachers and their own names for them, like a holy litany. But Napier did feel uneasy by the man before him, by his immersion in an alien- culture?
And Caldwell was immersed. Had he not, in that very meeting, asked for some red chalk- geru, and there on the floor by the Vijayanarayanam tank, drew him a snake like object, like a totemic representation of a river. How he stood back in satisfaction looking at his schoolmate.
Two schoolmates meet on the west side of the Vijaynarayanam tank. Lord Napier and Bishop Caldwell. Caldwell is living in a village in Idayankudi.
"The red tree flows through Tirunelveli district. Like the branches of a tree it permeates corners of the red soil". He had laughed when Napier expressed his unease with the drawing "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." Caldwell's finger had become his pencil, he was not even using the chalk any more, he was dipping it in a white we rice paste, it set up a rising distate in Napier, who had once seen, from a distance, an Indian squelching rice in a plate with his fingers, before eating it. And still he could not get his eyes off the pattern that seemed to be coming out of that wet finger, trailing behind it.
It came 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, that seem to be a coil of snakes, his mattress.. he sinks further, screaming, into a grid of white dots made of sticky paste.
"Is that not how these Indians paint their gods, totemic, lines, circles, stuck to the canvas like these lines are stuck to the floor." He had said that time, standing with the strange Caldwell.
He felt relief when he saw the Thirumalai Nayak Palace that he visited some time later 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: Hmm 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"
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".
