Framed in the celluloid

From Raj To Swaraj: The Non-fiction Film in India

 

Just a little over six months after the initial Paris screening of their 'moving pictures', the Lumiere brothers despatched their representative to a huge market waiting to be tapped - India. The Cinematographe was a brilliant invention and the opening of the Suez Canal had reduced sea journey from four months to three weeks. There was, therefore, no reason to lose time.

The representative arrived at Apollo Bunder in Bombay, and took a horse-drawn carriage to Watson's Hotel, barely half-a-km up the road. It was here that several short-films were exhibited to an all-European audience on July 7, 1896. Come and witness "living photographic pictures in life-size reproductions", the advertisement said. The entry ticket was Re 1 and everyone was delighted with the results.

The era has passed, so has Watson's Hotel. The building, now called Esplanade Mansion, is a dilapidated structure populated mostly by lawyers' chambers and stationery shops. People who occupy these are, by and large, unaware of the history buried inside the debris. Gone too is the 'Kala Ghoda' (a mounted Black Horse) statue - symbol of British imperialism.

What has, however, not disappeared is the concept of cinema. Over the decades, India has achieved the distinction of being the largest movie-making nation in the world. These films are primarily commercial in nature, targeting the Hindi audience. There are also films made in regional languages. Again, there is the distinction of mainstream as well as 'art' cinema.

Then, there is a completely different genre of documentary films. Primarily non-fiction, some of these are often seen in movie-halls prior to the screening of commercial cinema. It is this strain of film that author BD Garga deals with in this book.

From Raj To Swaraj traces the origins of this genre of filmmaking since the early 20th century: About how young and excited photographer HS Bhatwadekar became the first Indian to shoot moving picture as early as 1899. His first two films dealt with two wrestlers and a monkey trainer respectively. Later, he made films on Parsis, affluent then as they are now.

Then, there was a wealthy Parsi from Kolkata, Jamshed Madan, who took over this fledgling 'trade' and converted it into an 'industry'. In 1907, he built the Elphinstone Theatre in Kolkata, which was to be followed by the establishment of three-dozen more such theatres. His team would screen events of local interest, besides films on industries like jute, coal, steel, etc.

The author has spent over 50 years in the business of filmmaking, and his experience gets reflected in the book. Narratives on the documentaries of the two Delhi Durbars (1903 and 1911) and on several films made over the years by a range of filmmakers - Satyajit Ray, Sukhdev and Anand Patwardhan - are dealt with detail.

However, non-fiction alone is not given attention in the book; equally detailed is the treatment of the Indian ethos and our political history of the past 100 years. As such, we come across choice pickings of trivia throughout the book. For example, when King George was to be crowned the Emperor of India, he was delighted. The reason being the provision in the British law that forbade the crown from leaving the English shores; a new crown would cost £ 60,000 - too much for the British taxpayer. Eventually, the Indian taxpayer paid for the new crown, currently lying in the Tower Of London.

The book makes one gasp at the large number and scope of films being made in the country over the past 100 years. And it talks of several unknown films, say, Tagore's Paintings (1962), which documents the fact that the Nobel laureate took up painting in his 67th year! What's even more surprising is the information that in the next 12 years, he brushed 2,000 paintings.

If you are looking for a scholarly book on Indian documentaries, this one is definitely for you.