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 the 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.
Saraswati passes by, crossing the shadow.
Phalke:
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.
दो हाथों ने आटा गून्दा, तोड़ कर गोल किया, बेलन चलाया. फिर हाथों से उठाकर हवा में नचाया. और गरम तवे पर रखा. मिट्टी के चूल्हे पर आग भभक रही थी और इस वजह से माँ का चहरा दमक रहा था. स्वर्ण कण ऐसे कि सूरज के आने पर इन्कार करती सुबह की ओस. माँ ने मुड़कर देखा तो घुटने के बल चलकर धुन्दिराज दीवार के पास मिट्टी खोद कर खा रहा था. फ़ौरन उठ खड़ी हुई और भाग कर उसे गोद में उठाया. एक उंगली मूँह में डालकर मट्टी बाहर निकाली. दो थप्पड़ रसीदे और धम से ज़मीन पर पटक दिया. धुन्दिराज चीख कर रोने लगा .
द्वारकाबाई: रो, पेट भर कर रो!
द्वारका को कुछ सूझा. तेज़ी से उठ कर कुछ ढूँढने लगी. एक साड़ी का फटा टुकड़ा मिला. उसे दो टुकड़ों में फाड़ा और गोविन्द के हाथों में ऐसे बाँधा जैसे घोड़े के खुर.
बाल सवारते द्वारकाबाई ने एक नज़र आसमान देखा. आकाश में एक इकलौता बादल. कुछ क्षणों बाद जैसे -जैसे पलंग का डोलना स्तंभित हुआ.. बादल का टुकड़ा गतिमयी हुआ. धुन्धिराज की नाक की सीध में आया. रोदन अचानक थमा. पालने में ऐसे पड़ा रहा जैसे कि परलोकिक घटना का मूक साक्षी. उसकी आँखों की पुतलियों में एक कम्पन हुआ. चल कर नाक के पास मिलीं. तभी एक विचित्र सा सफेद सारस पालने के पास उतर कर बैठा. वह किसी धूसर सफेद धातुओं के कलपुर्जों से बना था.
इधर, चूल्हे के अंगार को राख से ढक कर वो सोच रही थी... हवा में छाई स्तभ्दता ने उसे चौंका दिया. धुन्दिराज का रोदन अचानक थम क्यों गया? दिल पर हाथ रख कर वो बाहेर की ओर लपकी. धुन्दिराज मानो समाधि में लीन था. हाथ ऐसे खुले थे जैसे तुकारामजी ने करतल पकड़ रखी हो. चहरे पर विघ्नकारी मुस्कान पर मूंह में कोई आवाज़ नहीं. पालना स्थिर था. मानो आकाश पर उस बादल के टुकड़े ने उसे सम्मोहित कर रखा था. यकायक तभी वातावरण में छाई तीव्रता लुप्त हुई. हवा बहने लगी और साथ साथ उस बादल के टुकड़े को भी ले जाने लगी. इधर बादल हिला और उधर पालना खुद ब खुद झूलने लगा..
धुन्दिराज की समाधि टूटी. वह रोया
द्वारकाबाई: हे देवा, मैं तो डर गयी थी, क्षमा कर दे. अब कभी न बाँधूंगी.
translation Dwarkabai and Dhundi
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 Planetarium
Natural Scenery
The Ill Fated Ship
The Highland Lover's Courtship for Marriage
Statutary
Miscellaneous- Numerous Comic SCenes
Electricity without Extra Charge
Positively everything advertised on this Bill will be Shown
Only 10 cents for Anybody and Everybody
We paid for the patches of light that wobbled out of the darkness. Soft outlines of shapes slowly revealed themselves aided by the eagerness of our straining eyes. Stars came on and went off with precision above the quiet of painted houses. Thick pears leaned down from branches under which the haughty maiden sat. The suitor on his knees be her feet opened and closed his lips with a mechanical repitition which so well expressed a craven hopefulness.
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 that those same wings, alive, generate with a flutter? Movement makes time. We were working with machines which were beginning to make time. The light source, lenses, glass plates with pictures on them, and a screen, these made our magic lanterns. The discovery of Limelight had made the illuminated image larger, the projections more defined. Their 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 scenes, and produce those terrific sounds that some persons of a nervous temperament would say were really stunning"
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- could he call it a culture?
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. He had then 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".
