1879-86 Bombay
The birth of the Indian National Congress
The clock of Rajabai Towers
Buying shoes, taking measurements
Shakuntala
The photographic gun is invented to take photo sequences of birds in flight.
Phalke's brother from Baroda brings home an oleograph of Raja Ravi Verma's
The thought of Bombay excites Phalke, but he is saddened by the seperation from his friend.
Somewhere, he is hurt.
He takes his frustration out on his sister, who is teasing him for his tears. He is around nine years old.
With his parents, uncle, brother and sister, Phalke first crosses the sacred Godavari river from Trymbak to Nasik.
They then catch a train bound for Bombay.
That evening on the train, Phalke's father takes out a miniature ritual yagnavedi in metal to perform his evening puja.
From the train we see, at a far distance, a huge bellows camera being carried on a bullock cart handled by eight Lilliputian men.
As within, a ritual is taking place, the train stops and the eight men assemble and load the Gulliver-like camera to take a single profile shot of the entire length of the train.
The sight of the huge machine mesmerizes Phalke, the boy.
The train moves on.
After a while, it enters a cave-like Victoria Terminus, almost as though entering a camera obscura, and halts.
A crowd gets off.
Phalke is seperated from his family and gets lost.
Darkness descends.
He is alone in a deserted Victoria Terminus, bewitched by the carvings of gargoyles, lizards, lions, tigers, flora and fauna, like in a fairyland.
Suddenly it satrs to rain, and everything comes to life.
Streams of water pour out of the stone mouths of mythical monsters, frothing at the jaws.
Phalke is shaken, shivering with cold, crying for his father in the dark.
But it is still unreal twilight outside VT station that a group of boys from the JJ School of Arts sit with hammers and knives, carving out figures on the terraces and the tops. The cotton loaders are tasing a Victoria look-alike, a mad woman at the fountain outside.
Picking up leaves as if to build a nest, small birds move above.
A Victoria enters and drags a woman away by the hair.
A mad dog chases Phalke through a backdrop- streets, railways lines, ships and factories.
He enters a palace and finds the princess stretching her arms and calling his name, and then metamorphising into a frightening old woman.
With a jerk, Phalke comes awake.
He is fifteen years old. And he has to run for his examination at Sir JJ School of Art.
He has been woken by his father, is fed by his mother, and sent off for the exam.
As he sketches the live model sitting nude, the hands and toes of the drawing keep disappearing.
As in the peeling frescos of Ajanta, where we see the same students taking photographs of the frescoes, or tracing through the cross hairs of the camera obscura prints being enlarged.
The JJ School boys have come to Ajanta and are living in camps outside the caves.
Mr. Griffith and Mr. Pestonjee are conducting a class about Ajanta, and discussing the differences between the art of Raja Ravi Verma and that of Ajanta.
Phalke and his colleagues talk to Lady Hardinge, the future Vicergine of India, and to Abanindranath Tagore.
Young Phalke is being teased- he has to leave for Nasik the next day, for he is getting married.
His bride, Kamala, is twelve years old.
Together they play the ritual wedding games, spouting water from their mouths into other's face, trying to snatch the supari from each other's fists, feeding the other while calling him names, almost reminiscent of the frescoes at Ajanta.
After the wedding day, the boy Phalke manages to talk to his child bride one last time before leaving her behind.
Going from Trymbak to Nasik, he crosses the Godavari River by boat.
a kind of pyschic fourth dimension that could suggest life in the tortured immobility of baroque art a b
