Dada as kanva

From PhalkeFactory

File:Shakutala Story Book.pdf

I am now running seventy. I do not know wheter i should be glad or sad for God's keeping me alive for seventy years. If I look at my long life from the perspective of happiness, I am really experiencing heavenly joy.On this occasion, I think of Shakuntala of Mahabharata and her foster father Kanva Muni. She grew up in a hermitage of a poor hermit, Kanva Mahamuni. SHe grew up on cereals and roots and wore barks of trees for dress. The same is the case with my daughter, the Cinema. The joy that I feel today is the same or even more than the joy Kanva Muni felt on seeing Shakuntala as a young maiden, dressed up in royal splendour. My daughter, the Cinema, too grew up in poor circumstances. Now she is in the compay of princely pelf. Forty to fifty maidservants are unhappy if they do not get a chance to serve her. Artists in more than two hundred industries are exerting to serve her.

Seeing such a wealthy daughter and her twenty-fifth birthday, that is her 'Silver Jubilee' being celebrated with such fanfare as would make even a prince blush, which father would not feel fulfilled? Which father's eyes would not moisten with joy? However, where there is light, there is shade. The allure of wealth is so extraordinary and those possessed by it get so blinded that they do not recognise their own parents. That is what has happened to my daughter, the Cinema.

Leaving my poor hermitage in Nasik when she stepped in the alluring city of Mumbai, she was dazzled and her unbridled pranks started.The extent of her wealth-induced blindness went so far as to question me, in a daze of affluence, 'Who are you? You, my father? I do not know you. Because of my fame and riches, many have petitioned me for fatherhood. You may be one of them. ' She uttered such vile language. In the meantime, an extraordinary thing happened which helped open her eyes. Many of the servants and maidservants attending on her chanced to see her father wandering with his family away from his home crying out,'O my daughter! My daughter!' On making inquiries, they came to know that many honorable men had looted her father's hermitage. The trees and bushes on the roots of which she fed herself. had been completely rooted out and that her hermit father had not tree left to clothe himself from tis barks. Her father's hermitage had turned into a barren piece of land. Hearing of her father's wanderings and famished condition, she was distressed.She thought a little and said, " My countrymen, where am I? What am I doing? I seem to have lost myself. I will soon hold a congress to get my life analysed.Until then, do not bring my father to me. For the present, take this bowl, go to people all over India who love my father and collect a purse fund. Do something so that my father can go and meditate in a holy place. See that he is not put to hardship. Whatever happened cannot be undone. The daughter is doing and will do everything just and proper for her father. However, I pray to GOd that at least for sometime in the future let there not be born in India crazy persons like me who are pious by nature, straightforward in dealings, have boundless love for art, make sacrifices for art to any extent and for whom art is only an ideal.


for complete speech and context ( Silver Jubilee Functions of the Indian Film Industry) look up 1939


[1]translation of kalidasa's shakuntala. the rejection. [2]a translation of kalidasa's shakuntala by Arthur W. Ryder, 1914