We were four people travelling together

..city to city, tracing Phalke.

.. city to city, tracing Phalke.

Hansa, Rahul, Saikat and I, once in a while Ganesh and Renu would join us. All of us had, at different times, spent a few years studying and watching films at the Film and Television Institute of India.

Before taking to the road, we had put a whole lot of information about Phalke on our website, built like a wikipedia. This was material needed for our workshops.

We took a camera to trace the journey we were setting out on. Anybody could shoot anything; books being scanned, printouts making towers on printer trays, suitcases being filled books, CD's and Xeroxed 'course' material for each participant, getting a taxi, the road to Nasik. Associations, forged connections, the changing landscapes, faces, gas stations, motels, advertisements, decorations, trying to link the old with the new.. taking linear, non linear approaches, never losing sight of the idea of ageing. I never forgot that I was least skilled amongst all. Everybody called me Kamalji.

At Nasik we stayed in a hotel overlooking the banks of the Godavari river. With a telelens, we could easily peep into numbers of houses, the temple premises, watch over markets immersed in the business of buying, follow a swimmer. This is the place where the "Kumbha' happens every twelve years. Phalke documented it in the year 1916.

We were a group of 25 participants in the beginning, younger ones from School of Architecture and the others from various sections of Nasik society. Writers, painters, engineers, politicians and.. curious about 'Phalke' from Trimbakeshvar, Nasik, father of Indian cinema.

To begin with, we had covered the walls with Xeroxed pages from the Phalke book. It was our own kind of wall painting. The room looked like a story box. In Nasik, most of the participants were from 'Story box', a cultural organisation that was hosting our workshop. Rahul, who had taken me around Nasik before, and with whom I had intensively planned the workshop, knew what we were doing. To the others, the idea of our workshop seemed vague.. what were they supposed to do?

We started our workshop by reading the document "Bees Raniyon ka Bioscope" , explaining the process of disseminating the Phalke Book into five Phalke cities, then networking them territorially and arriving at a 'Phalke Story Board'.

Our workshop was to generate Phalke's stories from Phalke's life and times in Nasik city, his childhood, the times when he was making films, the time when he was an old man in the city of his childhood.

They were to write in Marathi, each one was given a Xerox copy of Phalke stories and a password for the website.

Everyone introduced themslves, their childhood memories, lineage, learning's and call for the crafts. Appropriate traditions, roots, migrations, origins of Chitpavans, their Arab, Iranian, Greek, European roots, their entrepreneourship, the arrogance of Konkanasth Brahmans, Tilak, Parshuram.

I could easily have stuck to the Nasik chapter of the course book but I could not resist going through the whole Phalke book from 1870 to 1944, taking tangents in the telling, making associative links. Sources of imagination, early technologies, developments, Walter Benjamin, arts and nationalism in colonial times, Photos of God, Camera Indica, Imprints of the British Raj, Maharashtra and personalities of the 19th century.

After the feast of information, it was time to write stories. It seemed only a few of the participants were keen on writing, the rest seemed grateful for a rich experience, and were ready to help us explore the city, introduce us to some old time characters(who became prototypes the Phalke stories), take us to different locations, assist us in our field work- necessary to locate the stories.

One of the incentives for writing was that may be in the near future, they would turn into small films that could be put together and speak to each other, because of having a singular process background.

First, paticipants had to identify the timeline or a concept within the framework of which he had to weave his or her story. For example, suppose there was a moral cause for his short phase of blindness, why did he renounce the world of printing! Was he play acting, taking on amnesia because he could not face the truths of his poverty or his helplessness as a failed father? There were many entry points in reality..the participants were now exploring the city, with camera, interviewing people, locating and finding their characters.. building their time machines to get transported in the world of fact and fiction.

The easiest way was to place yourself in the place of a character or to watch as if you existed at that time of a character's life, and at that age of the character as is your own age in the present. It worked, around the 6th day, we were a group of storytellers sailing over the river, climbing hills, sitting under trees, attracting attention from pilgrims and tourists as listeners. And our supportive elders were adding to this with their reminscences and recalls.

Now it was time for the actual story writings. On the eighth day we shifted to Trymbakesvar- Phalke's birthplace. We took up residence in a large hall overlooking the main temple and fort of the Brahmagiri hills. We stayed there for the next four days writing, reading, or moving around the town looking for our characters. In Nasik, we came out with eight stories.