Chapter 1
The political popular
The big bang theory of Indian cinema
Like many formerly colonized nations, India likes its history clean. And one way to unclutter history is to invent creation myths. On 13 February 1928, a man named Dhundiraj Govind Phalke laid claim to one such myth for the Indian cinema. Answering a direct question that day to the colonial government-appointed Indian Cinematograph Committee, ‘I suppose you began the film industry in this country’, he uttered the famous words, ‘Yes, I began the Indian film industry in India in the year 1912.’
Phalke released his first film, the mythological Raja Harishchandra/King Harishchandra on the evening of 3 May 1913 at Bombay’s Coronation Cinematograph. That he was making history in doing so he did not in the least doubt. Six years after Harishchandra, in a series of essays on the cinema, he proclaimed that ‘the art of cinematography is the next stage of photographic art’. Such an art had a decidedly political purpose. Even as he watched The Life of Christ, the film that originally gave him his vision, he wrote: ‘I was mentally visualizing the gods Shri Krishna, Shri Ramachandra, their Gokul and Ayodhya … Could we, the sons of India, ever be able to see Indian images on the screen?’
Harishchandra was an extravagant mythological, a popular tale from the Mahabharata involving a truth-loving and upright king. Out on a hunt in all his regal glory, the king clashes with the spiritual universe of the sage Vishwamitra. The furious sage banishes the king from his kingdom, forcing him to lead the life of an exile and to sacrifice his son. In the end, as the sage is pacified, the dead prince is brought back to life, and the king returns to his throne, the deus ex machina proves to be, as with Indian mythologicals ever since, literally a god.
This film has since been officially consecrated as the moment when the Indian cinema began and Phalke officially commemorated as its father. But this wasn’t the first film made in India; it wasn’t even the first mythological. Its claim of having begun something new lay partially in the manner of its production, but mostly in its conscious claim that it inaugurated a particular understanding of an Indian cinema, as against films merely made or shown in India. In providing a first, influential, stab at an answer to a question that has given filmmakers a hard time—namely, what really is Indian about the Indian cinema—Phalke relied on the larger political movement of swadeshi (support for indigenous produce) that dominated the subcontinent at that time. Mahatma Gandhi would later define swadeshi as ‘that spirit in us which restricts us to the use and service of our immediate surroundings’, whose essential principle was to ‘use only things that are produced by my immediate neighbours and serve those industries by making them efficient and complete where they might be found wanting’.
Phalke translated his political ambition into his film partly through his choice of theme, and partly in the way he announced his project—as a cottage-industry enterprise he named Phalke’s Films, set up in his home in the city of Nasik in Western India. He used shooting locations close by, and processed his footage in a makeshift lab in his wife’s kitchen. Phalke’s Films was an indigenous enterprise in the classically swadeshi sense.
In achieving all this, Phalke also achieved something else: he translated into nationalist advantage an effect of the cinema that had already been widely viewed with considerable anxiety. Its unprecedented capacity to unleash millions of unlettered masses into movie theatres was a matter of concern to the colonial British administration. Perhaps ironically, it was no less a concern to an emergent nationalist elite that had still not figured out whether introducing mass culture into what was still a rarefied political domain was a good or a bad thing. The moment of swadeshi would be India’s first truly modern instance of the political popular and, not for the last time, the cinema would play its role.
This wasn’t the Indian cinema’s only instance of a Big Bang moment. India became independent in 1947, and found with it a second creation myth, in another debut. Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali/Song of the Road, completed thirty-two years after Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra, was inaugurated coincidentally on the same day—3 May—at a screening in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It was commercially released on 26 August 1955, received a minor award at Cannes the following year, and only went on to become what it now is—India’s most famous film ever—in 1958, when it ran for eight months at the Fifth Avenue Playhouse in New York.
Long before he made the film, Ray was setting the stage for a claim that would be, in the end, no less than Phalke’s. In an essay in Calcutta’s The Statesman, published in 1948, a scant year after Independence, entitled ‘What’s Wrong With Indian Films?’, he wrote: ‘It is easy to tell the world that film production in India is quantitatively second only to Hollywood; for that is a statistical fact’, ‘but can the same be said of its quality?’ ‘Let us face the truth,’ Ray asserted, ‘There has yet been no Indian film which could be acclaimed on all counts’. He would of course soon make the first.
While Phalke did not begin the Indian film industry and Ray certainly did not make its first ‘quality’ movie, both filmmakers inaugurated an influential representation of an industry against which they placed their work. The Indian cinema would be now and forever defined, by proponents of state policy, by social reformers, and by industry experts, as primarily comprising a handful of significant individuals heroically battling a mass of unoriginal Indian films that nobody outside India wants to see, a low-cost industry catering to a vast domestic audience of the illiterate underclass, buying cinema tickets that typically cost less than ten American cents.
The many industries of cinema
What if we begin this introduction with a reverse strategy: not with the standard opening line of a typical history book—‘Indian cinema begins with the making of Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra in 1913’—but with precisely all that such a narrative leaves out? To see Phalke as the point where the Indian cinema is launched is necessarily to place the cinema into a project of nation-building, one where the cinema strives ever higher for realism, for better and better ‘quality’. Such a project is, with Ray, necessarily scornful of the vast bulk of India’s movie production that gets left by the wayside in the eternal struggle for a cinema of excellence.
Ignoring the ‘trash’ has had some deadly practical consequences. One such has been that the films have not even been preserved. India has had the world’s poorest record of film survivals, with the National Film Archive of India possessing less than 5 per cent of everything that has been made. The damage is greater as you go further back in time: of the approximately 1,400 films made during the silent era for which we have some data, fewer than thirty exist, and those mostly in fragments.
In contrast to the widespread belief that these films were not worth preserving has been the fact that for millions of Indians, wherever they live, a major imagination of India derives from its movies. Their loss has meant that much of the Indian cinema survives only as a memory, its physical demise making the memory the more intense. Since the films themselves often haven’t been preserved, in producing a history of this Indian cinema that relies on fallible memory and other, equally unreliable, secondary sources, both historian and cinephile are compelled to be innovative with their means. Such creativity has had one further influential consequence: the Indian cinema has commonly been cast as a larger cultural entity, perhaps even the most pervasive driving force of popular modernity in modern India.
Let us therefore suggest a few alternative films, and moments, that tell us a fundamentally different story of what might have happened when the cinema took root in India. Let’s begin this story with a somewhat later film that appears, at first glance anyway, as different from Raja Harishchandra as could be: a virtually unknown low-budget film Pitru Prem/Father’s Love, made in 1929. The only reason to choose this film is the historical accident that 1,262 feet survive, for, unlike Phalke, we know nothing about its producers, Mahavir Photoplays. We have therefore to do something that Indian film historians are routinely forced to do: namely, make intelligent speculative guesses at what may have happened. When we do so, however, we open up a history of the cinema that both precedes and follows Phalke by some decades.
Pitru Prem, in its available fragment, tells the story of a rich, pious, and enlightened landlord betrayed by his wayward and dissolute son. The son falls into the clutches of a comic villain named Gadbaddas, and is seduced by a courtesan named Nurjehan. The surviving fragment unfortunately ends just at the point when Nurjehan is about to begin her seduction, but this now forces us to imagine what the remaining film was probably like.
Such a story resonates through much of India’s popular fiction and even its mythology: a good man done in by a woman’s deadly charms. In this case it is not the man himself who is done in, but his son, which effectively damages the family and the home.
Both family and home were essential constructs to the nationalist imagination. In invoking them, the film now works its moral universe through a series of spaces, each opening into another. The landlord, busy with his good works and with social upliftment, is in the verandah of his house where he meets his public, speaks to his tenants, his dependants, and eventually to us directly. Within the home, where the debauched and self-indulgent son is shown, is an interior space of domesticity that the plot will bring under threat. It will do so through surrounding this space with other spaces of dangerous modernity: the evil villain’s den and the courtesan’s brothel.
This footage has been lost, but it is safe to presume that the music attached to her seductive performances in her brothel would have been in the thumri, a popular semi-classical musical form to do with romantic love, and associated with the courtesans of Benares and Lucknow, and perhaps performed in the screening space by a live orchestra lustily singing out Nurjehan’s devious love.
This focus on cinema’s live aspect takes us to the most intriguing part of Pitru Prem, the mysterious courtesan Nurjehan—clearly the high point of the film. She is played by one Miss Gaby Hill. We know little about Gaby Hill. However, as the Times of India (of 27 July 1927) says, most of the film studios maintained ‘a permanent staff of technicians and stars’ and the ‘stars were still largely drawn from among “dancing girls” and Jewesses or Anglo-Indians like Sulochana (Ruby Myers), Ermeline and Patience Cooper’. Hill presumably would have been one such. Such stars were freed of any moral frame and could, as Neepa Majumdar says in her book Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!, occupy the ‘low-class status aligned with public performance’ along with the necessary ‘implications of sexuality and immorality’, even as they claimed an ‘upper-class status linked to a type of modern female identity’.
Imagining Gaby Hill’s performance takes us to the great era of live theatre and music that dominated the first two decades of the 20th century, where singers, dancers, and actors performed in heterogeneous entertainments across India’s metropolitan centres. In Calcutta, which then housed the country’s biggest theatre industry, major venues such as the Star, the Manmohan, the Minerva, the Cornwallis, and the Ripon jostled with each other to advertise their wares in the Amusements page of the Amrita Bazar Patrika newspaper. As a random example, on 31 May 1916, we have the Star Theatre announcing an ‘extraordinary’ special night variety programme which includes stage plays like ‘G. C. Ghose’s Religious Play in V Acts Billymangal, A. N. Dutt’s charming amatory piece Kiss-Miss, Kherode Babu’s Evergreen opera Ali Baba, A. N. Dutt’s Funny farce The Zeppelin of Love and D. L. Roy’s Side-splitting Farce Harnather Sasoorbari jattra’.
In short, had Pitru Prem survived, it would have revealed the cinema as an omnibus package of diverse entertainments, and thus diverse markets, of song, dance, concert-hall, and circus. Nurjehan would have embodied what came later to be known within the film industry as the ‘romantic track’, one of several tracks (to use subsequent industry terminology) that all films necessarily encompassed. Others might have been the comedy track, perhaps represented by the villain Gadbaddas, the action track or musical track, all held together by the barest storyline as the film moved from tragic to comic, from individual to family and social, from speech to song.
Pitru Prem thus reveals Indian cinema as an amalgam, of several discrete commodities loosely stitched together rather than a single commodity. In sharp contrast to say Hollywood, which, in its studio era, famously worked a linear assembly line with clarity as to what the final film would look like, here the cinema’s ability to bring multiple spaces into a coherent story plays another, and rather different function. From its very origins, the cinema amalgamates different spaces of performance. In 1902, when the Original American Biograph Company arrived for a six-day engagement at the South Indian city of Madras’s Victoria Public Hall, the films—mostly documentaries on the coronation of King Edward VII with material that was ‘laughable, sensational, historical, dramatic’—were presented together with a variety of other events. The films themselves were shown, the Madras Mail of 13 November 1902 says, along with ‘apposite comments … displayed in artistic lettering, frequently exquisitely coloured on the huge screen before it was presented’. To that artistic display was added live music, in this instance an orchestra run by an Indian musician who specialized in Western music and played the violin and piano.
There is no Big Bang here, no grand entry that the cinema makes. Even at the epochal screening of 3 May, when Phalke showed his Raja Harishchandra at the Coronation and when the Indian cinema celebrates its birth, the film wasn’t the star attraction of that evening. It was only the last in a line-up of entertainments that included The MacClements: A Comical Sketch and Alexandroff The Wonderful Foot Juggler. As our Amusements page of Calcutta’s Amrita Bazar Patrika shows (Figure 1), the cinema, if it has a presence at all, is a part of a live show. That evening, both the New Cornwallis and the Ripon are showing imported serials. Cornwallis has ‘two powerful dramas The Wages of Crime, Touching Drama, 6,000 feet, and The Ladder of Love, Feature Photoplay, 3,000 feet’, while the Ripon is showing ‘The Greater Cinema Detective Drama by Itala Coy, “Tigris” ’.
1. ‘No Big Bang’: films advertised alongside theatrical shows in the ‘amusements’ page of the Amrita Bazar Patrika, Calcutta (31 May 1916).
As the decade proceeded, most of the famous plays—including the very ones listed in the Amrita Bazar Patrika’s amusements page, Khirode Prasad Vidyavinode’s operas and Dwijendralal Roy’s farces—would soon be filmed, and the films would crowd the theatre literally off the stage. Arriving at the bottom end of the variety show, as the second decade unfolded, cinema would climb up that ladder, gobbling up these diverse entertainment forms, to eventually regurgitate them through the 20th century into diverse media, from television to fashion, from fanzines to event management.
Colonial misreadings
If Pitru Prem becomes the point of departure of our inquiry, then, the Indian cinema becomes a story of a new technology stealthily entering, and, as it took root, escalating a late 19th-century tradition of mass entertainment that went together with the birth of a new public that read books, bought popular prints, had themselves photographed, and, if they could afford it, got their portraits painted.
A new problem was created for colonial authority. The music, theatre, print, and painting that this new public consumed were local adaptations of forms imported from Victorian England, to fulfil a specific imperial ambition. Ever since the disastrous ‘sepoy’ mutiny of 1857, which saw India officially taken over from the private East India Company by the British Crown, Britain had become determined to give this land a ‘proper’ history. The great Imperial Assemblage in Delhi in 1877, when Victoria was crowned Empress of India, had been choreographed as a visual spectacle. The sequel 1903 Durbar that celebrated the coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, designed in meticulous detail by Lord Curzon, was ‘India as international spectacle’ created for the camera: ‘mysterious India … staged as slow-motion photo opportunity’, writes photography historian Christopher Pinney.
All of this spectacle would take a different and somewhat unexpected turn. Photography studios springing up in Calcutta’s Elgin Street, Madras’s Mount Road, and Bombay’s Fort, had effectively made the imperial durbar style with all its paraphernalia available to anyone who could pay for it. It was often said of the venerable firm of Calcutta’s Bourne & Shepherd, known initially for exotic travel photography in the Himalayas and later for commissions by the British Raj, Indian royalty, and the colonial elite, that no official engagement, investiture, marriage, or even birthday party was considered complete without the presence of B&S photographers.
Such use of photography went alongside Calcutta’s Battala printing presses, turning out massive quantities of cheap literature, like almanacs, educational books, and fiction. As far back as the 1880s, the print bazaar was selling pictures in the thousands, using simple engraving technology such as woodblock printmaking, and later the imported techniques of lithography and oleography. As Francesca Orsini shows in her path-breaking work on the publishing boom in the 1860s, the print boom went alongside theatre: it was the ‘commercial theatre with its corollary, chapbooks and songbooks’ that propelled so many song and poetic genres into the world of book-buying for leisure. ‘Learning these songs by heart would transform the viewer into an active producer, thereby socializing the pleasure of the song and the play within circles of friends,’ she writes. ‘If we are allowed to read back the pleasure of the modern film songs into that of the theatre songs of the 19th century, we could also say that learning these songs meant appropriating for oneself, and playing with, the emotions and sensuality contained in texts and the tunes.’
It was a matter of no little concern when the newly arrived mass publics of theatre and print began adopting forms as venerated as oil on canvas without understanding—or even, it often appeared to the British, recognizing the need to understand—the discipline that was required to practise them. Artists trained in the academic style in the art schools of Calcutta, Bombay, and Lahore, whose curricula had been modelled on that of the Royal College of Art, found themselves doing things that they were certainly not taught to do. Some of their work was in a familiar domain, as when they were hired for ‘Company School’ painting duty, by Maharajahs and Nawabs wanting to introduce the grandeur of the Durbar into their own courts, or by the colonial elites to do their portraits.
It became a major problem for the colonial administration when portrait or landscape painting was made to do things that were, at the very least, unorthodox. It wasn’t always clear what was going on when art school aesthetics got merged into local popular traditions, still photographers commonly painted over their photographs with thick paint and pasted photographic cut-outs on paintings, and painters were commissioned to produce gigantic stage backdrops of forests, gardens, and palace interiors in front of which plays would be staged. Consider, for example, the virtually unknown mid-19th-century painter Shaykh Muhammad Amir of Karrya, who art historian Stuart Cary Welch says must have been a ‘boxwallah’, the ‘lowest of lowly traders who went from door to door selling boxfuls of ribbons, thread and trinkets’, a man who almost certainly ‘offered his services to all comers, hawking his talents in promising neighbourhoods’. What precisely happens, Welch asks, when a man such as this paints a palatial colonial house and garden in Calcutta, and shows ‘views of house and gardens, of house pets, horses, and servants’ and catches with some whimsy ‘the mood of a period that must have been glorious for the blessed few’? Was there some possibility of even a hint of subversion in this whimsy?
Cinematic fakes and the credulous Indian
If the 1903 Durbar belonged to photography, its 1911 sequel—announced to commemorate the coronation in Britain of King George V and Queen Mary—was ‘almost certainly the biggest newsreel event to date’, says historian Stephen Bottomore. It was filmed by two dozen film crews, and although pride of place went to Charles Urban’s feature-length Kinemacolour film titled With our King and Queen Throughout India, in the throng of cameramen were three venerable Indian crews: those of Hiralal Sen, S. N. Patankar, and the Madan Theatres.
All three are at least as significant as Phalke as pioneers of the Indian cinema. All three would now use, or we might say misuse, the colonial Durbar spectacle to create an indigenized variant. In the process, like Phalke, they too would open up another, rather more covert, ambition of the colonial popular.
Even before the Indians came on the scene, the British colonial administration was having problems administering its production of authorized spectacle, as photographers and filmmakers ‘dressed up’ their images with scant regard to any verisimilitude. As far back as in their celebrated photographs of the great 1857 Indian mutiny, Italian‐British photographer Felice Beato, of the firm of Robertson & Beato, had artificially reconstructed scenes for the camera, including deliberately adding corpses and skeletons to shots showing the violence of the Indian mutineers. Again in 1915, indeed soon after the Durbar, there was the major scandal of British filmmaker Hilton DeWitt Girdwood, the first official cameraman to work with the British army on the western front, filming the most elaborate fakes of the First World War with the help of soldiers dressed in British and German uniforms.
What now happened was that Indian entrepreneurs not only began imitating this tendency, but brought to this misappropriation a potentially political edge. Calcutta’s Star Theatres, which had shown miscellaneous imported footage as far back as in 1898 (by a man we only know as ‘Professor Stevenson’), began screening shows that actor, author, and impresario Amritlal Basu literally named ‘fakes’ and ‘actualities’. Such fakes featured extensively in Hiralal Sen’s work, which began with filming stage plays, and would now, in 1911 and at the end of his career, extend to documentary footage of the Grand Delhi Coronation Durbar and Royal Visit to Calcutta Including Their Majesties’ Arrival at Amphitheatre, Arrival at Howrah, Princep’s Ghat, Procession, Visit to Bombay and Exhibition.
It was S. N. Patankar, also present at the 1911 Durbar, who took the further step, adapting British regalia to dress up the 17th-century Western Indian Maratha warrior king Shivaji Bhosle. Shivaji’s exploits in battling first the Adilshahi sultanate of Bijapur and later the Mughals had become the stuff of popular legend, and now the Shivaji historical became a genre in its own right, combining the popular influence of Walter Scott’s novels together with a courtly idiom to tell adventure sagas and tales set in palaces and forts around Kolhapur and Pune. Patankar’s Narayanrao Peshwa (1915) has not survived, but this tale of a Maratha courtier who was killed in a palace coup was almost certainly the very first of a cycle of historicals that would be made in various studios such as the Kolhapur Cinetone and the Prabhat Film Company, owing their ancestry to an imperial spectacle that Patankar encountered in the pageantry of Delhi in 1911.
Even more extraordinary was the Madan Theatres’ assimilation of the 1911 Durbar. Purchasing two prominent theatrical companies, the Elphinstone and the Khatau-Alfred, the enterprise of Parsee magnate J. F Madan had brought into the cinema a popular stage style known as the Parsee Theatre, that merged influences from Persian lyric poetry and its love legends, in genres like the historical, the romantic melodrama, and the mythological. Eventually, it would crystallize these into a unique brand, adapting the Elizabethan form—especially plays by its key employee, ‘India’s Shakespeare’ Aga Hashr Kashmiri, who adapted A Winter’s Tale, Measure for Measure, and, most famously, Macbeth—into sagas of blood ties and blood feuds, honour, sacrifice, and destiny, using Farsi, Arabic, and Moorish legends.
Censorship
We arrive, then, at the end of the first decade of the 20th century into the era of cinema at a time when technologies introduced in the Victorian and Edwardian eras find themselves proliferating locally, developing local content, and, occasionally, a real or sometimes imagined political edge. Paintings, photographs, and finally films found both practitioners and audiences, with material that was at best of dubious evidentiary and aesthetic value being widely considered poor or cheap imitations of British aesthetics.
If Indian inability to internalize the properties of verisimilitude led many British administrators to despair at the ‘astonishingly credulous’ nature of the native Indian, as evidenced in their ‘plays (native-dramas) and stories (folk-lore)’, in the words of Constance Bromley, secretary and manager of Opera House, Calcutta, it also revealed a contrary fear: that Indians, far from being credulous, might well be knowing exactly what they were doing.
As far back as the late 1880s, the Travancore painter Raja Ravi Varma, already India’s leading portraitist, was making a new reputation with his expansion of the heavy Victorian idiom of portraiture to paint figures from Indian mythology. He would soon further adapt to the growing market with his own Lithographic Press in 1894, which released a flood of popular visual material that would, over the next decades, directly and through his numerous imitators, literally engulf the country.
Controversy around Varma’s practice, which included modifying colonial oil painting to include mythological figures and subjects, also now inaugurated an entire debate that would dominate the colonial era: of censorship primarily targeting indigenous mythologicals and historicals in Indian literature, theatre, and painting. Varma’s own late 1880s painting Sita’s Ordeal caused a sensation when it arrived in Baroda. It depicts the final ordeal of Sita, wife of the god-king Rama, who had rescued her after her kidnap by Ravana, upon her return to Ayodhya, when her chastity is openly questioned. Unable to endure this insult, Sita appeals to Bhoomi Devi, the earth mother, and a chasm opens at her feet. Sita was apparently read as Mother India, whose own honour was threatened by colonial interrogators.
Two problems were caused by such works: first, their content and meaning, and how these were being locally interpreted; and second, the potential consequences of their unprecedented dissemination. It was less a matter of subversive or inflammable content and more its mass-duplication that bothered the colonial censor: of just what might happen when such content could be mass-produced and become effectively available for (mis)interpretation on every wall of every household in India.
Formal censorship was introduced into India in the theatre with the Dramatic Performances Act of 1876, more to control dissemination rather than content. According to this Act, governments could prohibit any performance they deemed to be of a ‘scandalous nature, disrupting social values, or felt that it might excite feelings of disaffection against the government established by law, or that it would corrupt persons’. As Sir Arthur Hobhouse, Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, outlined it, the problem was ‘the manner in which all the most revered institutions under which we have lived had been brought into contempt by public exhibitions (such as these)’ and while their staging ‘may not amount to treason, and not even to sedition, yet nevertheless, everything which politically ought to be treated as sacred in the eyes, not only of Europeans, but more especially of natives, might be brought day after day, month after month, into greater and greater contempt’.
Hobhouse was putting it delicately. Others were more direct. A. C. Logan, Commissioner, Central Division, to the Bombay government, said that the problem was that ‘the performances of such plays is calculated to excite the lowest classes, who would not be reached by newspapers or meetings’.
The economy of swadeshi
By the first decade, the economy of swadeshi had in itself become a viable market for indigenous produce. From the 1890s, swadeshi had given indigenous popular culture an explicitly political turn in the movements spearheaded by nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak. In 1893 Tilak inaugurated a new form of the political popular with the sarvajanik (community) festival of the famed elephant god Ganesha, with massive public gatherings in which, in the words of Bombay Police Commissioner S. M. Edwardes, ‘bands of young Hindus gave theatrical performances and sang religious songs, in which the legends of Hindu mythology were carefully exploited to arouse hatred of the “foreigner”, the word mleccha or “foreigner” being applied equally to Europeans and Mohammedans’.
Many of the plays banned for inciting hatred were historicals and mythologicals. The most famous censorship case of the period was of the Marathi stage play, K. P. Khadilkar’s Keechak Vadh/The Killing of Keechaka (1907), which told the Puranic story of Pandavas in exile, living incognito as lowly servants of the King Virat, and apparently made allegorical links between the evil Keechaka and Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India and the man responsible for the Partition of Bengal in 1905.
To counter this growing industry of cultural nationalism in the cinema, in 1918 the government of India passed the Indian Cinematograph Act, setting up a formal Censor Board for ‘examining and certifying films as suitable for unrestricted public exhibition or for public exhibition restricted to adults’. In narrowly legal terms, there was some confusion as to the criteria for deciding ‘suitability’, with the Act itself attempting to defuse the situation by arguing—along the lines of the British Cinematograph Act of 1909—that all that the Censors were concerned with was the ‘safety of persons attending exhibitions therein’.
If in the late 19th century swadeshi had become a major political movement, by the end of the First World War it would grow into a significant economic sector as well, as Indian entrepreneurs benefited from the informal ban on imported goods. Swadeshi cloth was being made in mills in Bombay, Bengal, and Ahmedabad; soap, sugar, pharmaceuticals, and many other commodities were also made and sold under this label. It got to a point where many corporate entrepreneurs understood economic nationalism as simply transferring British industry to Indian hands. In 1919 Gandhi drew political attention to the problem, warning that ‘all imitation of English economics will spell our ruin’. In 1938 he further complained that it had become the fashion ‘to bamboozle the unwary public by adding “India Limited” to full-blooded British concerns’, with the ultimate irony that ‘Lever Brothers (India) Limited have their factories here now. They claim to produce swadeshi soap.’
As it grew, the somewhat unstable combination of swadeshi politics and industry presented yet another challenge to the colonial administration: it began to appear as though all Indian films, in their very existence, were liable to be viewed by paranoid censors as potentially swadeshi, and therefore possessed of subversive content. As the newspaper Vilás argued in a 1925 essay titled ‘Government Should Abolish the Bombay Board of Censors’: ‘We do not know of even a single film that has come up before the public without being cut up to some extent by the sharp sword of the Censor’s Board.’
This was the origin of a long-held belief that all cinema made in India, in its very nature, has to be viewed inherently as willy-nilly playing a political role. Was there ever a more substantial definition of swadeshi cinema? Again it was Phalke who volunteered one. Despite the fact that many industries had been born and had died in India’s villages, he said, if ‘my Indian film enterprise had died like this, it would have been a permanent disgrace to the swadeshi movement in the eyes of people in London’. What was on display when he made cinema was (his) uniquely Indian entrepreneurial genius: films, ‘whose single copy could bring in incomes worthy of a millionaire’ had been ‘produced in only eight months and that also with hand-driven machines, without a proper studio and with technicians who were so new and inexperienced that they were ignorant of even the spelling of the word cinema’. From all of this Phalke pulled out his all-encompassing definition of what made a swadeshi film: ‘My films are swadeshi’, he wrote, ‘in the sense that the capital, ownership, employees and stories are swadeshi.’
Notwithstanding the success of swadeshi economics in several sectors, at the time Phalke and Patankar began their film careers, four-fifths of all organized productive capacity in the Indian economy was still colonially controlled. India’s industrial elite was, at the time, still a small set of well-established families who had made the most of the cotton and opium boom in the 19th century. These business houses—in Bombay it was the Petits, the Wadias, the Readymoneys, the Sassoons, and the Tatas—had grown through their interaction with the British; they intermixed with the Europeans and frequented the same clubs.
In sharp contrast were the traditional trading communities of India. These communities would, as a part of their investment in the local bazaar economy, also patronize popular calendar-art, which represented the religiosity of new business cultures, providing new practices of popular image-making and image-worship. These were the people who both embraced the ideology of swadeshi and who also entered the movies as its financiers. Phalke’s own first venture into professional studio production, the Hindustan Cinema Films Company, was launched in 1919 by a group of Indian partners with equal shareholding. Patankar too managed to attract investments from local financiers, in his instance with direct assistance from Tilak himself, who persuaded two swadeshi financiers to invest. It was the lowly class of indigenous traders, rather than the colonial corporate elites, who funded the cinema, and on the way set up strong links between local production practices in the cinema, indigenous finance-capital, and local content.
Gul-e-Bakavali and the political popular
In 1921, financier-producer Dwarkadas Sampat began India’s first major studio, the Kohinoor (described as the MGM of the Indian silent cinema). It was inevitable, given the social status of the cinema and the rise of a swadeshi subaltern public, that his first film would be a mythological. It was equally inevitable (and perhaps Sampat might have even wanted this to happen) that the colonial Censor would immediately see political intent in his film. This film was Bhakta Vidur/Saint Vidur, a story taken from the Mahabharata and advertised as a ‘series of events between Pandavas and Kauravas, which led to the decline and downfall of the ancient empire and culminated in terrible war between the two rival factions’. Bhakta Vidur’s own claim was that it was ‘a Swadeshi film, portraying the Glory of the East’ with a ‘skill of acting which defies European art’ (Bombay Chronicle, 13 August 1921). As described by the Censor Board on the other hand, the Mahabharata tale was a ‘thinly veiled resume of political events in India, Vidur appearing as Mr. Gandhi clad in Gandhi-cap and khaddar shirt’.
Sampat was not making a political film with propagandist intent as much as exploiting a swadeshi market. However, as the studio itself grew into a Hollywood-style film factory, with simultaneous productions, story sessions, and star careers, it also set up a new parameter for the political popular. The studio itself did not last very long; much of it was destroyed by a fire in 1925. But its brief success effectively paved the way for the major studio that inherited its mantle, Ardeshir Irani’s Imperial Film Company, which would in turn take us to the doorstep of the mainstream cinemas of Bombay.
On the one hand, then, both Kohinoor and Imperial spent time and money manufacturing India’s first generation of proper movie stars in the Hollywood sense of the term, even if they occasionally bent the meaning of that term to cater to local needs. One of Imperial’s biggest projects was silent cinema’s major star, Sulochana’s film Wildcat of Bombay (1927), in which she played eight roles (gardener, policeman, Hyderabadi gentleman, street urchin, European blonde, an old banana-seller, and an expert pickpocket who gives her money to charity). Designed to showcase the star’s many performance skills, it would have also reconfirmed the omnibus character of the cinema including, here, its ability to absorb European influences. On the other hand, what was also happening was a kind of cinema with nascent political content, and thus—the Censor’s dread—always with the potential to be used, or misused, for political ends.
This was the cloud beneath which a major popular culture was launched, in Bombay, in Calcutta and Madras: a cinema that was, in its very nature, an unreliable creature, always to be watched out for. When such an object produces its own history, it tells a very different one, as did the next film Sampat made after Vidur: the immensely popular Gul-e-Bakavali/The Magic Flower (1924).
Gul-e-Bakavali was almost certainly the first truly national commercial hit in India. If Pitru Prem exists in fragments, Gul-e-Bakavali—whose original version has been entirely lost—survives only through popular memory, its content kept alive in numerous remakes, each maintaining some of its essence even as it adapts its content over the decades to different kinds of use. What is of significance is the incipient political nature of the saga, which is what has been resurrected in version after version, in language after language, across India.
The first version, at Imperial, was set up as a star vehicle. Made with silent stars Zubeida and Khalil, who with Sulochana were India’s first real movie stars, it adapted a well known theme from the Parsee stage: the folklore adventure. It drew on legends associated with the mythic flower Gul, the fairy Bakavali, and the eastern prince Taj-ul-Mulk, who wants the flower to cure his blind father. The legend itself varies from Persia to Kashmir, but takes its contemporary form from the theatre. Especially popular on the Parsee stage were scenes in which Taj-ul-Mulk faces his villainous brothers who have stolen the flower and turned Bakavali to stone, and her spectacular human re-birth.
Thirty years after the Kohinoor film, as evidence of the political twists and turns that popular culture would take in India, in 1955 the story became an unlikely source for a Tamil version featuring its legendary superstar-politician M. G. Ramachandran. This adaptation, now more explicitly ideological, in support of Ramachandran’s political ambitions, has a prince banished by his father to the forest, because the father had received a prophecy that he would lose his sight if he ever set eyes on his son. As the banished son grows up to be the hero, there is the inevitable reunion, and the son restores his father’s sight as he finds, after many adventures, the healing flower. The story now turns into a popular rendition of the legitimizing of the crown prince, an identity that Ramachandran would claim for himself politically.
An even more heavily plotted Telugu film Gul-e-Bakavali Katha/Saga of the Magic Flower (1962) with Ramachandran’s Telugu counterpart, the major star and future politician N. T. Rama Rao, shifted the problem largely into a royal palace intrigue: the good King Chandrasena has two wives, one good, the other evil. When the good wife finally gets pregnant, the evil one bribes an astrologer to present the prophecy of blindness to the King. The child (future hero Rama Rao) is born in a forest and eventually—with the help of that elusive flower—brings back his father’s sight and saves his country.
A century on
Both Pitru Prem and Gul-e-Bakavali give us a glimpse into other histories of the Indian cinema, of generic survivals in popular consciousness, and ultimately a kind of incipient subaltern politics that the cinema always threatened to foment. If Phalke is where the ‘official’ Indian cinema is born, such a birth commits it also for all time to strive and reach higher and higher levels of realism and of excellence. If a somewhat less legitimate, but perhaps more pervasive, history of the cinema is glimpsed from the entertainments assembled by Pitru Prem, what we get is a practice that is not itself quite an industry, but survives in the way it stitches together diverse industries and economies. If Gul-e-Bakavali is our marker, we encounter a popular culture that, by virtue of its sheer popularity, is perennially on the verge of its politicization. Whichever history we choose—and as we shall see, there will be many to choose from—we shall find that it is rather longer than genres condemned to being forgotten are usually allowed to reveal.