1883

From PhalkeFactory

Dada:

If I were to tell you the story of when I was thirteen, I would like to tell a story of the pictures I saw and collected, some in my notebook, so many neatly filed away in my mind. Because in my mind there are bookshelves, with thin paper folders for pictures, and everything is filed away, carefully, nothing is lost. Bombay was a city of boxes, I told you.. house boxes, theatre boxes, and the small beautiful match boxes with pictures on them. The wonder of paper, how much you children take it for granted, the way your books look, how my throat catches when I see you crumpling a sheet and throwing it away so easily, you, Prabhkar, especially.

Bombay was the city of paper, and pictures on paper, and words on paper and I collected them, things that the household in Dadar would throw away, I kept everything, carefully. I would look at the grain on the paper, it looked like sand, like a sprinkling of rain over the sea. The same rain falls on film, have you seen it?

What I missed about my hometown was the charcoal. That made paper of the walls and the ground around me. Limited paper, so I soon learnt to draw well. Hold the coal down on the wall and complete the picture in one stroke. I would do the same on paper, in Dadar, at school, at my work. Everything was precise, it has to be so. It is the virtue of scarcity.


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. The rule that decides whether an image will live, is its ability to leave its mark: only those images that leave their mark and slowly dissolve into the blood of the viewer, changing its chemical composition, survive.


Printing presses were proliferating in the 80's, 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 lamp that lit those labyrinthine corridors from time to time.


We photograph things to drive them out of our minds. My stories are my way of shutting my ears: Kafka.

1st-brownie.jpg Bombay photographic company kalba devi road.gif

Atomic Theory of electricity.

A proposal that electric and magnetic fields filled the void.

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From this came many proposals- can not we plug into this all pervasive energy in the air? and run our civilisation on this endless resource? Nikolas Tesla[1] was to ask.

Rayon


Brooklyn Bridge


Calcutta International Exhibition to encourage art wares. However while art wares were displayed, the precedence of fine art in art schools and in the minds of the general public became more and more evident. Oils, watercolours and drawings by the Calcutta Art School( a commercial enterprise run by ex students) were shown and given medals, copies of Ajanta frescoes by students of the Bombay art school got medals. There was an educational section demonstrating the progress oof teaching in art schools in India. Calcutta Art Studio lithographs and Poona Chitrashala Press oleographs were also praised for the 'perfect marriage' between Western and Indian methods.


Waajid Ali Shah


phrenology

phrenology

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and 21st century [2]


Malka Jaan, Gauhar's mother, shifts with her child and consort- Khurshid, to Calcutta, on Khurshid's planning: in Calcutta, Wajid Ali has recomposed the charms of his court in Matiya Burj, in exile. Soon Gauhar will catch the eye of Bindadin Maharaj, famous Kathak dancer of this court in exile and he will become her Kathak teacher. Gauhar is 11 when she starts learning, often traveling to Oudh with her master, who has not yet left his old city behind.