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To my children: the first Phalke Book


Dada:

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.


Saraswati :

The crumpled skin of the newborn was pinko grey as the skin of a baby dhundi- elephant.

It was hoped he would grow up to have the dark allure of Govind.

If you looked far enough into the glass marbles of his eyes, you could see dancing reflections of fresh banana fronds: Phalke.

Dada:

Those jewel like irises of the eyes are a family inheritance.. they were nesting behind the eyelids of the fourteen foreigners who were washed ashore at the foot of the Sahyadris.

This was a long time ago, when the feet of that ancient mountain were tickled by the young waters.

And then along came Parshuram

A righteous Ram bearing an axe.

His father Jamadagni had commanded him to kill his mother once.

She came back to life, later, but what to do with the moment when he had killed her? That memory would later make every killing much too easy for that boy, inconsequential, undemanding in comparison. Maybe that is why he thought little of making five pools of Kshatriya blood to avenge his Brahman father.

Parsuram wanted to avenge his caste by killing all the Kshatriyas in the world. He almost did so.

(His compressed telling has left my children dazed. I see fear in their eyes, and incomprehension. And I speak)

Sarasvatibai:

His fellow Brahmans fled the axe man in horror.


Dada:

His fellow Brahmans fled from him, unwilling to share in the crime he had committed in their name. He walked alone with his axe, his body caked with blood.

His father was dead. No other Brahman was willing to perform rites for Parsuram?

That is when he came across the remains of our ancestors. I say 'remains' because they were dead of an accident at sea.


Sarasvati:

It was the waves- you remember them? Those companions of the mountains had naively brought the bodies to shore, to show them off, like the booty of the sea.

Parsuram let fire wash their bodies, readying them for change. He made them come alive again, taught them the scriptures and made brahmans out of them, brahmans who would serve him.

Dada:

Parsuram was a brave man, he killed because he was angry, the Kshatriyas thought that just because they had arms while the Brahman had only the word, that they could rule the Brahman. Parsuram showed them how a Brahman can get angry.

He forced the sea to yield up a stretch of land to the new Brahmans he had made, on either side of the river Vashishthi.


Sarasvatibai writes : The stubborness of the self righteous


Dada: That is how we came to be settled in these areas as Chitpavan Konkanast Brahmans.

Jotirao Phule

Late evening, Sarasvatibai writes at the table. Dada is lost in thought.

Saraswati writes: The mountain lost the companionship of the sea, and grew old in her memory.

When you were born, we performed the same rites as when your father was born. I was made to lie on my back, as your Ajji lay once. A brahman untied the knots in the house, echoing your movements in my womb, where you were loosening yourself from the coiled mattresses that kept you in my waters. My waters broke loose and like a young turtle suddenly let into the deep, you swam your way out. He must have been small in there, like you were small, like the soft, fresh walnut kernel if you broke open the shell.


Dada: What did we write last?

Sarasvatibai:

Nasik, April 30th, 8.30 pm Charting the child’s horoscope the father foretells that he will deal insomething white...

Dada:

White? My father told stories by an oil lamp, with a white sheet hanging behind him. I sometimes think that this is reason why I have always loved shadows. white shadows?

(The tin moon is sending reflections dancing into the room. The couple goes at the window to stare at Babaraya's eyes. Larger than his parents, each eye looks like a world unto itself, with concentric islands floating on oceans, each speckled island in its turn becoming a speckled ocean to an island within. )


Dada:

It is the year of my birth. And far away from Trymbakeshwar, an artist is being born, the artist who I feel is the father of my imagination. In Travancore Diwan Madhav Rao is watching his protegee, Raja Ravi Varma, paint.

The 22 year old Ravi Varma is working on the canvas of his first commission, a portrait of a upper class nuclear family from Trivandrum. The group of five are looking back at the painter. The woman is all clothes, and a small face. The young Ravi Varma has spent the time reserved for her carefully delineating the folds of her clothes. The littlest boy is pushing himself further into his mother's lap. The other two boys stand between their parents, staring at the painter.

Ravi Varma's eye shies before the eye of the patriarch- the dark skinned, bearded man, the head of the Khizakkepat Palat Family , least innocent in the group sitting before the artist, his eyes most tired, most knowing. His gaze seems to consider the painter standing before him. Ravi Varma has spent a large time trying to 'capture' that which arrests him about this man, and failing. That vitally alive being, that expanse of brown skin remain frustratingly outside the grasp of his brush. What he paints is flat brown canvas, nothing compared to the contoured body that sits before him, just beyond that canvas. Ravi Varma is confining himself to that which he knows better- the ornamentation he has learnt from his uncle. He deftly paints a single pearl in the patriarch's ears, and is reassured by the perfect gleam. He then tries to make pearls of those eyes. He carefully works on the patriarch's mother of pearl eyes and places on them, like inlay work, the beads of those dark, shining irises, crowned with the deepest gem of the pupil.

Like a necklace that speaks on the neck of a woman, those eyes are suddenly his, the painters', the portrait has comes alive. More confident now, the young man paints, and soon, the middle child's irises show the fear of a little animal that is caught, the oldest one's are opened up like the eternally startled doe of Shakuntala(the painter likes that). And the woman's face, guileless as a child, her gaze blinder than everyone else's as she faces the painter. The gaze of a creature dulled by her unexpected exit from the confines of her routines, into this sunlight, facing a young good looking man, being asked to be still, sitting around her family.

If Ravi Varma's own family were to be painted, a galaxy of artists would come alive- a poet mother, a painte uncle, a sibling immersed in music, the other two showing the promise at painting.

Ravi Varma faces the frustration of having to make the world out of a thick piece of cloth. I bring a cloth alive too. But I always feel that his was the greater skill, dependent on one person, his brush and his mind.

The patuas near the temple at Kalighat made rapid multiple paintings. The quickness required of them to make enough sale hastened their stroke, maybe kept the brushes more wet. Those wet brushes would confidently, rapidly make life upon those scrolls of paper. Kalighat paintings. But the lithographic machines were coming to change all that. [1]


The lithograph print lay in the small space where the wall had leaned back in the painter's hut. Chandi looked at it all the time, his mind leaping up in uncontrollable waves, his every glance a comparison of his own representation of Kali, with this one. That grey blue dye of the print was not something he could make. Their own dyes bloomed in the water to make their art: this dye, on the other hand, was like some heady poison. The greys had got fixed at the waist to the blues like some eternal marriage of skeletons that then transformed the paper they had walked in to live in. Everywhere there were small pieces black, straight lines, part of the page. Kali-ma herself was looking away, out of the page, indicating landscapes with her gaze. Their own Kali faced the viewer, indicating him opposite her with this straightforward presence.


Chandi looked across the work- her skulls thin and horrible. The blood was red and serious. A cremation ground was coming alive.

Chandi felt a momentary disgust for the splash of orange-vermilion he would joyously let down from Kali's mouth like she had opened out another bale of her hair.

So much background and so- available? What had Mohenbabu said when he gave him the painting? That it was becoming available everywhere, the same terrible Kali. That some Bengalis had learnt the tricks of the white machines of reproduction. If they made one, they could make a million mirror images, all with no effort at all. Chandi remembered staring at Mohanbabu's index finger swinging as he indicated the ease of the new artists.

Chandi struggled through the layers of rage that was becoming a longing to be able to see it clearly enough for the moment to say it.. the pursed lips in the lines was a kind of mendicancy of making. Those hesitant strokes were compensated for by the seductive poison of the dyes. Feeling more stable he wrote upon his mind..his own Kali was in single lines. Continuous as a human hair was every stroke of the hair brush that made it. Large and wet her eyes that floated in the pink waters of rage. Straggles of blue ran out from her head in all directions, and if you saw them, you could enjoy the painters pleasure with his brush. The orange red tongue was beautiful and hung just long enough to not completely reveal that it belonged to little Mita who spent the afternoons running around their workplace in the October light.

Holding onto the walls of this newly found stability, Chandi invoked Mohenbabu, also a muse! Mohenbabu whose skin was smooth and soft and woman like golden. He would spend days with Jameela, this side of the city. He was said to have a mansion on the other side of the river, and somewhere inside that mansion lived a shadow of a wife. Mohenbabu who caught his dhoti end just so and placed those delicate feet with the foppishness of one who is pretending to be poor. Chandi tried to conjure Mohanbabu's fey delicacy in his head, his keenness to sit on the buggy with Jameela in public. Chandi tried to imagine it clearly enough to be able to paint it, to get back to work and leave the print where it lay- behind his back.

As he began to draw the outlines of Mohenbabu in his buggy, the lithographed Kali hovered in the centre of his forhead. Chandi nodded his head to the image, and wondered, what magic contraption was it that had the ability to dream like this..to human an apparition, inhuman dream, like on a long night of indigestion?


Shiva kalighat painting1.jpg 19th century kalighat painting


A seperate file, in which are assorted papers of Empire, with still a loose hand of intent that has gathered these and no other, together.

Colonel Longhand, Gwalior, 1870.

It has been a hard time since that cruel summer of 1857 when we lost many fine men and their innocent families to the perfidious intent of subjects who we had served, as well as we possibly could, in our sacred duty as rulers.

I have heard a retired general, a survivor of that time, tell me that that summer, like never before, he felt the malign character of this land, the dust storms that whips its giant Gangetic bowl, the millions of people like ants, crawling about in that bowl, but unlike those ants, with no sense of a whole, no disciplined serving out of a duty in a life time. "Vermin" the venerable had said: However we might try to temper our language with our own sense of decency, and the occasional sweetness of an encounter with some native serving in the cantonement, the truth must be faced, for better discharge of our own functions." And in essence, I agree. In this strange country crawling with almost as many languages as seditious people, we are a small group of white men, who have to rule, we have to do it with utmost alertness, with all the superiority that technology can give to us.

We should only welcome then the great photographic project called "People of India", even if it feels like we are being made to dive into the sea, before we have even tested the waters thereof.

With this project has come into our orbit this winning galaxy of young stars called photographers. Often young officers on early deputations to this country, these young men have in the most, all displayed an outgoing personality and a single mindedness of purpose, which are, I believe, a result of the particular demands of their profession.

I believe it is essential that all of us who are working with some thought, in Her Majesty's Service, in the honeycombs of the barracks spread all over the country, should know something of the technological apparatus that serves them. Unfortunately, sometimes, the very age that gives us wisdom and seniority often keeps us blind to the the particular skills of the younger generation. I believe we cannot afford to do so any more, if the skills of these men are to be deployed in any way by us, if we believe we are indeed sincere in our services.

I have befriended to this end for a while, a young man, W. W. Hooper, who had come in on the 7th Madras Cavalry. He has very kindly tried to explain the workings of his machinery to this old fuddy called moi. I venture to explain therefore, hoping that my layman's language might enable the process of understanding. I hope, where I err, it will be from the enthusiasm of the unexperienced and will therefore be forgiven


Without further ado, the process

The photographer first clears a frame- empties it of all visible signs, often using a black cloth to shut out the obtruding landscape even, before he sets up his apparatus.

He plasters his wet plates on one wall of a Lilliputian dark room and in front of it, on a clamp, fixes the fan of an accordion.

The subject, who I might venture to ironically name 'a Seditious Possibility', or 'a Subversive Element' in the guise of man, is seated before this box that the natives call a 'camera', since it looks so much like its eponymous room, the native 'kamara'. (Indeed a distressing tendency has been noticed by the author among the men in the barracks to pick up such words from the native tongue and integrate them into the Queen's language. He hopes this piece might bring this distressing habit into relief and therefore help to stem it before it corrupts what is most surely our own,our language. )

The subject is seated before this mini room and asked to stare into its windows. As the subject sits quietly facing that glass, first entry into that darkness, something in him is stilled. The fiercest Gond warrior becomes tentative in that moment of gazing. The mini room then pulls an image of the subject into those dark interiors, where the wet plate is waiting for both, the image and the intrepid photographer.

The real battle takes place in that iodised darkness. The quicksilver image, evasive creature has to be trapped , fixed into that glass plate rapidly, delicately, with an unerring tackle, a rapid roll on the floor, where she tries, with that sly guile which is her truest nature, to escape in a sudden flurry of black dust that she tries to throw over everything. If she is able to do so, then it is all over, the battle of her capture is lost in a black dust of the nature of that same duststorm which choked everything in sight in those two months of May and June, in 1857.

It is not easy. The image is a slippery creature, not surprising when you think of who it is a exact reflection of- extremely slippery people. Ramoshis, Kolis, Santhals, Jats, Gujjars, long considered incapable of any civilised mediation, are slowly, incredibly being pinned down to these pieces of glass, and before long will enjoy the tranquil order that inhabits the botanists' shelves back home- where the Hibiscus rosa sinesus, the Rattus norvegicus, and the Rana Tigrina, co -exist, quiet and known, labelled, seperated, and file-ified in the generous bowers of our Majesty's laboratories. .


Buneuldalieye.jpg

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.

Eye under water.JPG


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