For the first several minutes he said nothing, just guiding his yellow and black Suzuki taxi through the clamorous traffic of midday Delhi. My daughter wanted me to ask him what his name was. โJai Bhagwan,โ he said. โAn old-fashioned name.โ His smile is half apologetic.
โYouโll be going to Jaipur? Thatโs a beautiful city. They call it the Pink City. Its a five hour drive from Delhi and Pushkar is another 2 or 2 and half hours further. Youโll stay in Pushkar for a few days? No? I see, just for a day. Ajmer is just half hour more away. What a place that is. Moinuddin Chisti…the Emperor of India! Will you be taking the train from Ajmer to Varanasi? No, from Agra. Ok. I see, your agent arranged it that way. Watch out for these agents. Theyโre in it for themselves, a lot of them.
This traffic is like this but not for too long. Thereโs a fly over up ahead and the road narrows so everything slows down to a crawl. But soon weโll be moving again. Yes, that metro line was made for the Commonwealth Games in 2010. What a rip off! The organizers stole 80% of the investments. Only 20% was spent on the infrastructure. The main crook, Kapladi is in jail but what does it matter. It wonโt change anything. The rich and our netas donโt give a shit. All the rules are for the poor, not one of them is for the rich. It never changes.
My people used to own the land around the airport. A long time ago the government came and forced us off the land and gave us Rs1.40 per square meter! A very low price. But they got what they wanted. You know Gandhi? They say he is the father of the nation. We say heโs the number one Thief. Donโt believe me? What did he ever do for us? Did he do anything to improve our lot? He and Nehru did everything for themselves and to make their own money and name. Gandhi, the old bastard, used to feed his goat grapes while the rest of the country starved.
The real hero of India was Subhas Chandra Bose. What a guy. You know what his slogan was? Give me your blood and Iโll give you freedom! He was a man of action. Thatโs why they killed him. You know Gandhi could have freed Bhagat Singh but he didnโt. He let him hang. All for his own glory.
Ambedkar? Yeah, he was a good man too. He wrote the Constitution. No one else could have done that. He was a great man actually. I have nothing bad to say about Ambedkar.
Right, weโre almost at your destination. Just 5-10 minutes more.โ
Life as they say is always full of surprises and U turns and black ice.
I’ve neglected this blog due to all of the above. It may continue for a while. Or maybe not.
It’s Life.
Thanks for your support and encouragement through many years. I will definitely be back at some point but unlikely to be posting regularly until the turbulent skies clear a little.
Other than that, I am physically and mentally well.
One of the most telling ‘words’ in the English language is sonder. Defined in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, sonder is, “the realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own”. It highlights the profound and often overlooked fact that everyone around us is experiencing a unique and intricate existence, similar to our own.
I don’t take many portraits these days. But over the years I’ve captured a few faces that I cause me to enter a state of sonder.
Double click on each image for a full screen experience.
Custodian of the Nepali Temple in Varanasi. 1980Selling posters on the sidewalks of Kolkata (Calcutta). 1989Construction worker in Hyderabad. 2006Mr Cool taking the evening air on the stoop of his house in Rajahmundry. 2006A pious (bhakt) street sweeper in the early morning. Rajahmundry. 2006Satyanarayan and a silver Gandhi statue at a market in Rajahmundry. 2006A young girl acting up in a backstreet of Old Delhi watched over by Lord Shiva. 2008An old woman in Dehra Dun. 2006Brothers Mohammad Amin and Mohammad Karim enjoy a morning chai in Allahabad’s busy chowk. 2007Kamala Das and Ram Das are wandering sadhus who have walked from Kashmir to Allahabad. 2007
Last night Australians demonstrated their good sense, groundedness and well-honed pique in a big way. They voted for an imminently moderate, Elmer Fudd-like, Labor party lifer, someone who I (like almost all Aussies, except Labor party lifers) thought would probably lose the election or be so constrained by the political forces around him and his party that he/we would limp through another 3 years of soothing talk but precious little action on things we all care about: climate action, costs of life and health care.
His opposite number, the bald pated ex-Queensland cop (for non Australians, that is like being an ex-LAPD cop) not only the lost the election but also was given a tight kick in the pants by his own constituents. His career was yanked out from under him and there will be few tears shed.
Peter ‘Spud’ Dutton/Trumpf
I watched Albo’s acceptance speech. This guy has turned from Elmer Fudd into Conan the Barbarian! He spoke like he has rarely done. Confident, strong-voiced (yes he still has a high, slightly silly voice) and full of grace, goodwill and kindness. He didn’t bag the Liberals or his counterpart. He spoke of doing things the ‘Australian way’, with decency and kindness and caring for those doing it tough.
It’s easy to get cynical about politics and I’m a deep cynic. But I felt my chest swelling (for once outdoing my belly) as he spoke. I especially felt glad and proud to be Australian for one of the first times since I became a citizen. I am so grateful to be living in a country that despite being full of larrikins, (Crocodile) Dundees and (Breaker) Morants and which can be pretty crude from time to time, is indeed a country in which decency is deeply felt and practiced across all layers of society.
Pundits predicted a minority government for Labor. Once again, they got it wrong. Not only did Labor win a thumping majority, on track to have more than twice the number of seats of the Libs, but have won the largest number of primary votes (sort of like the popular vote in the USA) ever by a Labor government since WWII. And that includes those of Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Kevin Rudd!
The Liberals have experienced a plane crash in which most of their leaders (a pretty low standard I admit) are gone and their brightest rising stars have all been killed. They have almost no (zero, zip) representation in the major urban centres of the country where most Aussies live. They’ve lost young people, women and the sane.
The Liberal/National Party are now even more adrift than the American Republicans. At least the spineless yesmen of the GOP are united in blindly marching over the cliff. Where they stand is clear…behind Trump with their noses and tongues on his arse. Their Australian wanna-be’s have no idea of what they want, should want and most of all have spent nearly two decades stubbornly ignoring what their own constituents want. Good luck to the grubs.
The Australian Labor Party has delivered every major social and economic reform that makes us a modern serious country. It began with Whitlam 50 years ago and continued through Julia Gillard. The Liberal grubs have done nothing but undermine, block and seek to take a torch to all of these reforms all the while espousing pioneering ideas on how to mistreat asylum seekers (El Salvador and Trump have lifted the overseas gulag idea from the Liberals), demonstrated their luddite attitude toward technology while all the time bashing the oldest human culture, Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples, at every turn.
Like the Republicans in Washington they’ve become more extreme and stupid with every election. They can be formidable in opposition but perfectly inept and corrupt when every they get near the cookie jar. Their analysis of their own coalition and approach was summarised by a senior Liberal senator last night as a ‘knife fight’.
Corruption, fear mongering. A party of drunks and women haters the LNP is out of touch with Australians on every single issue. So confused were they this time they actually took a policy of ‘tax increases’ to the election.
We did the needful, Australia. We wiped them off the mat, save for a few skid marks.
Suddenly, we are in a new era of gradual change but decency in public life. That sounds like a winner to me.
Trump was a definite factor in the final tally. Dutton praised Trump’s ‘big thinking’ and announced a cut of 40,000 bureaucrats which went down like a loud fart in church. One of the Party’s attack dogs, a young Aboriginal woman, who goes about with 3 or four bouncer types pinned in close, swore to Make Australia Great Again and proudly sported the ubiquitous red cap.
In the words of a former Liberal Prime Minister, a man who was politically assassinated by Peter Dutton in one of their Party’s famous ‘knife fights’, Trump was the mood music in the background to the election. Very clearly Australians don’t dig that sort of music. Another reason to be proud today. Trump was not THE factor as in Canada. The LNP just got whupped everywhere on every issue. Refer to my comments on ineptitude above.
So, today is a bright sunny day. Literally and politically. This has been a victory for consistent trimming of the “system” in favour of the non-millionaire class, calm and considered responses to the devils Trumpism has released. Australians chose not to go with radical ambition or goofy ideas but rather voted for the dull, the gradual and the diligence of the Labor Party lifers.
Lollywood: stories of Pakistanโs unlikely film industry
Homi & JBH Wadia
Of the many Parsi clans who leveraged their interaction with the British in Bombay to establish themselves as economic powerhouses, even to this day, the shipbuilding Wadia family is worth a closer look.
Even before the community fled Persia to seek refuge along Indiaโs western coast, the Zoroastrians were renowned ship builders and sailors. During the reign of King Darius (522-486 BCE) the Persians had learned well from the Phoenicians (1200-800 BCE) and become the acknowledged shipbuilding and maritime empire of the epoch. Though their numbers were tiny in their new home in India, (never more than 100,000) the community kept these ancient skills alive.
Settled and working out of Surat, the Wadia (Gujarati for โship builderโ) clan, interacted with the various European trading nationsโPortugal, Netherlands, Franceโthat sought trade with the Mughal empire and its wealthy business communities of Gujarat. When the rather slow-starting English received the islands of Bombay from the Portuguese, Parsis began to migrate from the hinterland south. One of Suratโs most prominent shipbuilders, a Parsi named Lovji Nusserwanji Wadia who had built ships for a number of European trading firms in Surat, was invited by the English to establish a branch of the family business in Bombay. And so, beginning in 1736, Lovji along with his brother Sorabji set to work building Asiaโs first dry docking facility where EIC ships could be drawn entirely out of the water to be repaired and refurbished. This single bit of infrastructure increased the economic and strategic value of Bombay immensely. It brought to the foreground Bombayโs exceptional qualities as one of the best deep water harbours (the city’s name derives from the Portuguese words Bom (good) and Bahia (harbour)) from which the British, with their new infrastructure and world-class Parsi shipbuilders, were able to not only vanquish the Portuguese, Dutch and regional Indian naval powers but also clear the Arabian Sea of pirates which led to a steady increase in traffic and trade. By the mid-19th century Bombay had become a major international commercial and naval port and the most important city in British India.
By 1759 the dry dock was operational. At the same time the brothers Wadia were providing many of the ships that carried cotton and spices and eventually that fateful black gold, opium, from India to China and other Asian ports. Given the EICโs monopoly on the Indian trade and the massive growth in the economy opium facilitated, particularly in the first part of the 19th century, the Wadiaโs became immensely wealthy. Theirs was a full-service enterprise, building single-sailed sloops, water boats that managed trade up and down the west coast, beautifully sleek, fast-moving clippers, well armed frigates and man-o-wars for the military as well as cutters, schooners, and eventually steamships for the Asian/Chinese trade. Using teak, rather than English oak for the hulls, the Wadiaโs ships were lighter and more resilient than ships made in Britain. Over the years, the family built over 400 ships for the EICโs Maritime Service and others including their fellow Parsi sethias.
Lovjiโs grandson, Nusserwanji Maneckji continued the family business and in addition to servicing the British became a much sought after local agent for early American traders building up the trade between India and New England. Maneckji Wadia was so well regarded by the Americans that he and his relatives enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the Yankee business with many American traders exchanging effusive letters with him in which his โimpeccable characterโ is praised and his family compared to โsatrapsโ. Both sides profited handsomely. In the words of one Yankee businessman, they profited โmonstrouslyโ, recovering up to 300% on the Indian textiles and other goods sourced by the Wadias.
HMS Minden in the heat of the Battle of Algiers
One of Nusserwanjiโs sons, Jamshetji Bombanji, was appointed Bombayโs Master Builder[1], a role usually held by an Englishman, but which the Wadia family was to hold for 150 years running. Several of Bomanjiโs ships found their way into the larger events of the time, including the first man-o-war built in Indiaโa huge warship with three masts and loaded with 74 large cannonsโthe HMS Minden. When it set sail in 1810 a Bombay newspaper, the Chronicle, praised โthe skill of its architectsโ and went on to note that with โthe superiority of its timber, and for the excellence of its docks, Bombay may now claim a distinguished place among naval arsenalsโ. Several years later, on the night of 13 September 1814, the HMS Minden was tied to a British ship in Chesapeake Bay, along the east coast of the United States, after a local lawyer, Francis Scott Key, had helped to secure the release of an American prisoner-of-war held by the British. Fighting between the Americans and British was intense with the night sky flashing red and yellow. The frightening spectacle inspired Key to write a poem, The Star Spangled Banner, which was eventually adopted as Americaโs national anthem.
Steel eventually replaced teak in the building of ships and steam took over from wind. The Wadias, like many Parsis diversified initially into textile production where steam-derived technologies helped to propel the Wadiaโs Bombay Dyeing mill into one of the most successful and iconic of Indiaโs modern businesses. And when the movies came to India, two great-great grandsons of Lovji Nusserwanji took the daring decision to turn their back on textiles and ships altogether and embrace the world of moving pictures.
Jamshed Boman Homi Wadia, known as JBH, was only 12 when Dadasaheb Phalke exhibited Raja Harishchandra, but spent his youth captivated by the Hollywood films that were becoming an increasingly common form of entertainment in Bombay. Though well-educated as a lawyer JBH horrified his family with his announcement that he intended to make films for a living. He quickly found work with the then prominent Kohinoor Studios producing a dozen films for the studio, some of which saw moderate success. But being an entrepreneur JBH didnโt want to work for anyone else, so, joined by his younger brother Homi, launched his own studio, Wadia Movietone in 1933, retaining the family’s shipbuilding past as part of the studio’s logo.
The brothers became icons of the early Indian film history and throughout the 30s and 40s Wadia Movietone was the most profitable of all Indian filmmaking enterprises.
Wadia Movietone studios was financially backed by several other Bombay Parsi families-including the famous Tatas-and grew into one of the most successful and consistently profitable studios of the 1930s. The brothers were basically in love with stunts and action. They especially adored derring-do characters like Zorro and Robin Hood played by Douglas Fairbanks Jr, and blatantly copied many of Fairbanksโ movies for Wadia Movietone. When Fairbanks visited Bombay, JBH made sure the actor visited his own studio; so impressed was his American idol that Fairbanks agreed to sell the Indian rights of his mega hit Mark of Zorro to Wadia Movietone.
The brothers proudly low-brow fare of fistfights, speeding trains and masked heroines dominated Indiaโs box offices throughout the 30s and became the most popular genre in India at the time. Sadly, as film historian Rosie Thomas states, Indian โfilm history was rewrittenโ, by starchy Hindu nationalists who objected that stunt films did not inspire sufficient pride in Indiaโs Hindu classical past. The whole stunt movie genre was effectively eliminated from most histories of Indian film giving virtually all attention on the more staid and far less fun, middle-class targeted โsocialโ melodramas focusing on family and relationships.
At their height, however, the Wadia brothersโ studio was the rage of the box office. Their greatest success was without a doubt a series of action films which in todayโs parlance might be called a franchise, starring a stunning white woman they billed as Fearless Nadia.
Mary Evans, a West Australian girl of Scottish-Greek extraction, moved in 1911, at the age of three, to India where her father served with the British army. Settled and schooled for several of her early years in Bombay, Evans father was killed in 1915 while fighting in France and eventually moved to Peshawar to live with an โuncleโ who in fact was a friend of her deceased father. It was the wilds of the NW frontier of India that stimulated Maryโs tomboy personality to blossom. She discovered a love for the outdoors, sports and horse riding and with a mother who had once been a belly dancer, found herself singing (often bawdy songs) and dancing on stages across the NW and Punjab. Between 1927 and 1934, Mary performed as a dancer and singer in various troupes and circuses as well as a solo performer, travelling across the Indian subcontinent performing for wealthy maharajas as well as illiterate labourers. It was a risky job for a slightly big boned, well-built blonde-haired woman, travelling (often) alone across India, speaking only English and Greek, working at night in (often) seedy venues but it was one that seemed to suit her. When an Armenian fortune teller predicted a bright career for Mary, they used tarot cards to select a stage name, eventually settling on Nadia.
Mary Evans aka Fearless Nadia
Sometime in the early 1930s, a Mr. Langa, the owner of Lahoreโs Regent Cinema, saw one of Maryโs stage shows. Given that cinemas in those days regularly booked dance troupes to complement the movie, it is possible Langa hosted Mary at the Regent itself. Whatever the circumstances, Langa was taken by her presence and striking looks. He offered to introduce Evans to a friend of his, someone named JBH Wadia, who ran a movie studio in Bombay. Was she interested? With sparkling blue eyes and blonde hair, Nadia hardly fit the bill as the ideal Indian woman but she was not alone. Throughout the silent era and even into the age of Talkies, many of Indiaโs initial generation of female starlets were in fact Anglo-Indian (mixed European and Indian heritage), European and Jewish women. At a time when acting was considered a dishonourable career by most Indians, non-Indian women felt less inhibited socially to take to the stage. Most adopted Indian stage names and worked hard to improve their unmistakably foreign accents. Still, the basic assumption was that actress was a synonym for prostitute. German film historian, Dorothee Wenner, whose biography of Evans, Fearless Nadia, sums up the situation as follows:
The connections between theatre, dance, music and prostitution remained so closely entwined well into the twentieth century that any official attempt to limit prostitution simultaneously represented a threat to the dramatic arts. The consequences for cinema were first felt by the father of Indian cinema, D.G. Phalke. He knew that filming made different demands on the realism of scenes than the stage did and therefore he wanted a woman to play the female lead in his first film Raja Harischandra. It was 1912 when he went looking around the red-light district of Bombay for a suitable performer. Although the impoverished director offered the few interested parties more money than they would normally earn, all the prostitutes turned the film work downโฆit was below their dignity!โ[2]
When they met, Wadia immediately understood Evansโ appeal and potential. He suggested that the Australian change her name to Nanda Devi and wear a plaited dark wig. But Mary refused. โLook here Mr Wadia,โ she said, undeterred of her future employerโs power or status, โIโm a white woman and Iโll look foolish with long black hair.โ As for the name change, she scoffed. โThatโs not in my contract and Iโm no Devi! (goddess)โ She pointed out that her chosen stage name, Nadia, resonated with both Indian and European audiences, and also just happened to rhyme with his own name, Wadia. JBH, not used to be spoken to so boldly by an employee, let alone a woman, figured she just might have what it takes to make it in the movies. He hired her on the spot.
An agreement was reached and in 1935 the brothers tested her in a couple of small roles in two films. Her charisma, not to mention her stunning and exotic looks, were obvious. She stood out like a ghost at midnight. Immediately, she was offered the lead in a Zorro-like picture called Hunterwali (Lady Hunter) which became a smash hit and is now considered one of the most significant milestones in South Asian film. The Wadia brothers had been unable to find a distributor for their extravagant production. Most considered it too radical and unsuitable for local tastes. A white masked woman, cracking a whip, smashing up villainous men, riding a horse and sporting hot pants that revealed her very white fleshy thighs? Absolutely not!
Unbowed, the brothers pooled their resources and sponsored the filmโs premier at the Super Cinema on Grant Road, on a wet June evening in 1935. This was make or break. The Wadias believed in Nadia even though everyone else did not. Not without a little trepidation rippling through the cinema the lights dimmed and the show began. Fifteen minutes in, as Nadia pronounced that โFrom now on, I will be known as Hunterwali!โ, the working class male audience stood up, cheered and clapped and in their own way pronounced the coronation of the Queen of the Box Office, a title she would hold for more than a decade.
The Wadiaโs, as indeed most of their countrymen and women, were politically active (supporting Independence from Britain) and socially progressive. They championed womenโs rights, Hindu-Muslim solidarity and anti-casteism. Though official censorship prohibited open discussion of these themes the Wadias made sure their superstar made casual references to them. As Nadia herself said, โIn all the pictures there was a propaganda message, something to fight for.โ[3]
The girl from Perth via Peshawar and Lahore, was now a superstar of action and stunt film with millions of fans. Known and billed as Fearless Nadia she insisted on doing all her own stunts be it fistfights on the top of a fast-moving train, throwing men from roofs or being cuddled by lions. She starred in nearly 40 pictures most made by the Wadia brothers (she married Homi in 1961) with such fantastical titles as Lady Robinhood, Miss Punjab Mail, Tigress, Jungle Princess and Stunt Queen.
In 1988 a version of Hunterwali, perhaps the most famous of all of Nadiaโs films was released in Pakistan, starring Punjabi movie icons, Sultan Rahi and Anjuman.
[1] A highly critical and strategic role that oversaw ship design and construction but innovation, compliance with international shipping regulations and development of the shipbuilding industry.
[2] Wenner, Dorothee. 2005. Fearless Nadia: The True Story of Bollywoodโs Original Stunt Queen. Penguin. Pg. 79.
[3] Thomas, Rosie, โNot Quite (Pearl) White: Fearless Nadia, Queen of the Stuntsโ, in Bollyword: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens, ed. Raminder Kaur & Ajay J Sinha (New Delhi: Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd, 2005) 35-69.
Though the early years of the East India Company are remembered in history as a time when hundreds of British men came to India and rapidly became very wealthy, life in a small up-country district was tough. Though the British public, to the extent they had time to care, resented the new โnabobsโ who returned home to England full of ill-gotten wealth and social swagger, relatively few servants of the company actually made fortunes. Many stayed on in India after their tours setting themselves up as indigo planters or scrounging for work in the big cities. For those not part of the elite โCovenanted Officerโ class which included most non-Indians, the Englishmanโs daily round involved three essential things: work, avoiding illness and drink, with the last usually combined with the first two. Alcohol consumption was both a way to stay aliveโespecially since local water supplies were contaminatedโand a way to pass the time. The highest rungs of British society had access to a variety of European wines, porters and spirits. The sailors, soldiers and planters, on the other hand, could mostly only afford locally brewed (and occasionally, deadly) concoctions that mixed ingredients like coconut spirits, chillis and opium.
Though the origin of its name is contended (does it refer to the 500 litre wooden barrel that held it, known as a โpuncheonโ or to the Hindustani word, panch, for the number 5, the number of ingredients) punch was an alcoholic innovation invented in India by early European residents who wanted a lighter, sweeter drink than the local spirits or fiery rum. ย Experimentation found that by mixing rum or arrack,ย sugar,ย lemon/citrus juice, rosewater andย spices in water a very tasty and potent beverage emerged. As early as the 1630s, Englishmen were writing home about this new drink they called โpunchโ. ย When the Companyโs ships returned from India loaded with exotic luxuries, the shipsโ crew and locals enjoyed evenings together drinking Punch on the docks. Though the many of the individual ingredients (lemons, nutmeg) were expensive in Britain, punch became โthe tipple of choice for English aristocratsโ for the next hundred years and since then has become a regular offering at parties, weddings and even church potlucks across the English-speaking world.
In India, however, the grimy taverns where such alcoholic drinks were sold became known as punch houses. Not dissimilar to the famous jook joints in the southern United States, famous for their cheap booze and violence, punch houses were perfect venues for drinking binges, rowdy roughhousing, fisticuffs and whoring by bored sailors, down on their luck Europeans and soldiers. Indeed, one Englishman summarised the entertainment available for the British lower classes in India as amounting to โdrinking hells, gambling hells or other hells.โ For the upper-class elite, punch houses were a definite โno goโ.
By the early decades of the 19th century this public drunkenness and violence was so pervasive in the three colonial cities as well as smaller outposts across the country that the authorities grew increasingly alarmed at the damage such behaviour was doing to the image of European and Christian superiority. Serial campaigns were launched. Multiple strategies tested. Workhouses were built, as were insane asylums. Forced religious conversion was tried out, so too was jail time. None was very successful and the problem of European drunkenness remained forever an embarrassing black spot on the rulers publicly promoted sense of moral superiority.
Though alcohol abuse remained a problem among the British, over time the raw violence of the punch house gave way to other forms of entertainment. Musical evenings, card games and regularly scheduled visits to other European homes were popular among the โbetterโ classes. The rowdier types (i.e. drunken sailors high on Punch) were drawn to disrupting dramas and causing havoc at dramatic performance at a number of theatres that began to pop up across Bombay.
Bombayโs first theatre opened in 1776, situated on a space known as โThe Greenโ surrounded by other official buildings. The Bombay Theatre, as it was christened, catered to officials and their families and staged performances by amateur drama enthusiasts from among the European community. It experienced a difficult life through the early years of its existence and ultimately stood shuttered and unused for many. It was eventually bought by the cityโs post prominent businessman, Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, a Parsi opium and shipping magnate, who never bothered to reopen it.
By the mid 1840s, the city was wealthy and large enough (thanks in large part to the illegal trade of opium smuggling) to demand better entertainment. Wealthy Indians, again mostly Parsis, championed theatre building as an important part of their civic duty which grew to include funding public charities, colleges and museums. The Grant Road Theatre opened on the northern edge of the city in 1846, at the time, quite a distance from the Fort area inhabited by the elites of the Company. Though opened with an eye on that market few English found the prospect of travelling into underdeveloped outer suburbs, where hygiene and other surprises lay in wait, attractive. Very quickly the financiers opened the halls to local artists who staged plays in Bombayโs most widely spoken languages, Gujarati, Urdu and Hindi.
Somnath Gupt, who wrote a history of Parsi theatre summed up the transition this way. โAs long as it was patronized by the governor and high-level officials, the theatre was frequented by people of good family. Because of the location on Grant Road, however, their attendance decreased. Some Christian preachers also opposed the theatre as depraved and immoral. The Oriental Christian Spectator was chief among those newspapers that wrote in opposition to Hindu drama. In consequence, the theatre was attended by sailors from trading ships, soldiers and traders. A low class public came and made the theatre foul-smelling with their smoking. The performances began to start late, and etiquette deteriorated. Drunken sailors and soldiers behaved rudely with the women. It began to be necessary to bring in the police to keep order. This audience wasโฆinherited by the Parsi theatre.โ[1]
Grant Road Theatre, Bombay ca 1860
The Grant Road Theatre hosted international troupes enroute to and from Australia when they showed up but the 1850s saw Parsi-owned theatrical troupes mushroom to fill the supply of plays, actors and audiences. Based on the European proscenium-style theatre that featured a huge arch over the stage as a frame for the action, the Parsis saw the theatre as a way to both entertain and educate Bombayโs growing middle class.
What quickly became known as Parsi theatre was an instant hit. The plays set the imagination of Bombay-ites on fire. Many of the plays were wildly popular, running to packed houses night after night for years on end. A whole new class of Parsi actors, playwrights, directors, composers and producers grew up, many of whom moved seamlessly into the film world in the early 20th century. Many companies toured the countryside, not just around Bombay but to far flung parts of the interior and even to places as far away as Sumatra, Malaya, Burma and Ceylon. Drawing on local talent and tales from Hindu, Islamic and Persian epics, Parsi theatre became a uniquely Indian and lively form of entertainment many aspects of whichโsong, dance, bawdy humor, melodramaโwere directly absorbed by the subcontinentโs early film makers.
Along with the companies and cohort of professional players, more theatres were built with names like the Elphinstone, Gaiety, Novelty and Tivoli. The staging of dramas was by the 1870s and 80s a huge part of Bombayโs entertainment scene. Jamshedji Framji Madan โ๏ปฟthe Parsi actor-turned-wine merchant-turned owner of the largest chain of theatres and cinemas in India in the first three decades of the 20th centuryโ[2] exemplifies the central role the Parsi community played not just in whetting the Indian appetite for staged comedic and dramatic entertainment in purpose built buildings, but of leading the transition from Parsi Theatre to what would become one of the most consequential film industries the world has ever seen.
J.F. Madan
Madan started his career in the theatre first as an actor but he made a considerable fortune in y securing large contracts to provision British troops with the wine that the governing classes so condemned for corrupting Her Majestyโs troops. Sensing greater opportunities in the capital of British India, Calcutta, and loaded with money from his wine-provisioning business, Madan in 1902 set up a diversified business group, J.F Madan & Co., with interests in everything from insurance to film equipment and real estate. He also began buying up Calcutta theatres (the Alfred and the Corinthian) where playwrights including Agha Hashr Kashmiri, aka Indiaโs Shakespeare, plied their trade. Kashmiri, though from Banaras, moved to Lahore in his later years where he also wrote for films, an early example of the cross fertilisation of cinematic talent between India and what would soon become Pakistan.
Immediately after arriving in Calcutta, he set up the โ๏ปฟElphinstone Bioscope Company and began showing films in tents on the Maidan before opening the first dedicated movie house in Calcutta, the Elphinstone Picture Palace.โ[3] The venue not only was Calcuttaโs and Indiaโs first dedicated movie hall but marked the beginning of Indiaโs first cinema hall chain. In 1917 his company, Far Eastern Films, partnered with Maurice Bandman, an American entertainment magnate based in Calcutta to distribute foreign films in India. ๏ปฟ ๏ปฟโIn 1917 his company Madanโs Far Eastern Films joined forces with Bandmann to form the Excelsior Cinematograph Syndicate dedicated to distributing films as well as owning and managing a chain of cinemas. In 1919 Madan, like Bandmann, floated a public company, Madan Theatres Ltd, which incorporated the other companies. It was this company that formed the basis of the remarkable growth of the Madan empire.โ Madanโs multiple interests in theatre and commerce led him to producing his own films, including the first commercial length feature in Bengali, Bilwamangal (1918).
Title page of a programme of the Empire Theatre Calcutta, the headquarters of Maurice Bandman’s theatrical company and his touring circuit. It was modelled on the Gaiety Theatre in London.
Madanโs strong commercial eye recognized that the medium would need its own venues and screening halls, rather than relying on established theatres. By 1919 the Madan Theatres Limited was in business and set to become India’s largest integrated film production-distribution-exhibition company with assets located not just across India but in Ceylon and Burma as well. Madan issued shares that generated Rs. 10 million and through effective management practices was able to procure a huge number of theatres across South and SE Asia. Though film making was picking up steam in India, the vast majority of films shown were foreign. In 1926 only 15% of films were Indian. 85% were foreign, mostly American, movies. By partnering with the French company ๏ปฟPathรฉ Madanโs theatres were to a significant degree responsible for creating an audience for American and European films in India by importing and screening Hollywood films, such as the Perils of Pauline, The Mark of Zorro and Quo Vadis.
By the mid-1920s Madan controlled half of all revenues from the Indian box office and owned 127 movie houses. His hiring of foreign directors such as the Italian, Eugenio De Liguoro who directed 6 films for Madan Theatres, gave many of his films a sheen of expertise and craft that was not yet visible within local ranks. In essence, Madan had monopolised Indiaโs nascent film industry.
**
The Lumiere brothers may not have understood the commercial viability of their inventions but it seemed that many Indians did. The great colonial cities of Bombay and Calcutta both quadrupled in size between 1850 and 1900 to be home for nearly 1 million people. Bombay and Calcutta were now world cities. It was not surprising that this most modern and hypnotic of new technologies would catch on in places like this. But Bombay, Calcutta and Madras were not alone. Far to the West, on the far frontier of British India another city was starting to make waves in the movie world too.
[1] Hansen, Kathryn. (Translator) 2001, โThe Parsi Theatre: Its Origins and Development (Pt 2).Pdf.โ
[2] Balme, Christopher. 2015. โManaging Theatre and Cinema in Colonial India: Maurice E. Bandmann, J.F. Madan and the War Filmsโ Controversy.โ Popular Entertainment Studies 6: 6โ21.
Lollywood: stories of Pakistanโs unlikely film industry
Of Tea and Opium
That movies were instantaneously embraced in the new, purpose-built metropolises of British India is no surprise. Bombay, Calcutta and Madras were the throbbing hubs of an expansive world power at the peak of its self-belief. These great new empire cities were magnets for people of all persuasions, creeds, backgrounds and regions. The only requirement to be a success in this brave new world was to be open to new ideas. And quick on your feet. Being coastal cities, the three great colonial cities served as entrepรดt to the Jewel in Queen Vicโs crown, guarding and servicing the shipping lanes which were the new global trade routes that connected an expanding Europe with the wealth of Africa and Asia.
And not just Indians, but people from all over the world sought their chances in Indiaโs boom and bust emerging economy. Armenian merchants, American missionaries, German scholars as well as businessmen, administrators and artists of all types and nations including some of America and Europeโs finest jazz men and women, all sensed that Bombay and Calcutta were the place to make their names and fortunes. The cities were linked not only to Paris, London and New York but other colonial metropolises like Shanghai, Johannesburg and Singapore. The cities were part of a new international order tied together by a globalizing modern culture in which film was the shiniest element.
Built on marginal landsโoften, malarial swampsโand leased by the British East India Company from local rulers, Madras, Calcutta and Bombay were in conception and culture European cities. They just happened to be located in Asia. Their European quarters and administrative districts were laid out like European cities and they looked outward, to the future for inspiration. What happened in the mofussil (interior, countryside) across the vast plains of India was of interest only to administrators and scholars. In 1857, after a brutally fought war launched from within the East India Companyโs own Indian troops, the British crown took direct control of India from the East India Company and ushered in a century of high imperialist rule. To the British administrators in Calcutta and London 1857 marked the end of Indian history. Henceforth, under their enlightened stewardship, India would exemplify the very best of Britainโs civilizing Will. The great Indian past would now be an object of wonder best gawked at in museums. And the great cities of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta were the ultimate symbols of Lightโs victory over Darkness.
Though the absolute number of Europeans and non-Indians living in India was was its peak in 1911, it never exceeded between 150,000-200,000 depending on how you identified the various groups. The population of India in 1911 was about 300 million souls. Even though Europeans counted for less than 1% of the population their presence had a massive impact on the culture of the cities. Christian missionaries influenced the way Hindus and Muslims understood and organised themselves.ย Religious groups like the Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj, adopted reformist, educational and progressive social agendas that were in form if not doctrine heavily influenced by similar movements in Europe and North America.
Educational systems and curricula that emphasised Western sciences and philosophy and cultural institutions that pumped new, so called modern ideas and technologies into the daily lives of Indians sprang up.ย The new trade of journalism was quickly embraced by writers, marking the beginnings of modern Indiaโs lively, vibrant press. The publication of the Urdu novel Umrao Jan Ada in 1899 was the first in what would be a glorious and still current run of South Asian prose writing.ย After some initial resistance, musicians realised they could reach a much bigger audience by recording their music on phonographs and radio.ย In a relatively short space of time economically empowered Indians in the major coastal cities became both the consumers of new technologies and creative adapters of tradition.ย
**
The Parsis, Zoroastrian refugees from Persia, had been settled in Gujarat for centuries by the time the British took possession of a swampy, malarial set of islands from their imperial rivals, the Portuguese. The seven islands were known collectively as Bombay and with the establishment of a British fort, the settlement began to draw migrants from the hinterland. Dorabji Nanabhoy, the first Parsi to make Bombay his home arrived in 1640 but he was joined by a steady stream of thousands of others, mainly weavers and artisans from upcountry Gujarat, who began transforming themselves into one of Indiaโs elite and most influential business groups.
An entrepreneurial community with a sense of adventure, the Parsis had been engaged with Europeans before the British became the dominant Western power in India. Joining Dutch and Portuguese traders operating out of Gujarati ports like Surat and Khambay in the 17th century, they showed themselves to be expert traders and developed a refined taste for European luxury goods.ย The East India Companyโs trade with China began in the early 18th century and immediately a number of Indian traders, including two Parsi brothers, Hirji and Mancherji Readymoney, established themselves in Canton.ย Of all the groups it was the Parsis who were the most successful. By the early 19th century they dominated the China trade; nearly half of all the Indian trading companies in China were Parsi owned.
The only product that really mattered in the China trade was tea. Initially the British offered English wool and Indian cotton for the little black leaves which had taken Blighty completely by storm from the day it was first introduced in the late 1650s–just about the same time the East India Company was setting itself up in Bombay.ย Sensationally, tea became the single biggest import into Britain during the late 17th century. Though at first it was the exclusive drink of the aristocracy and royal family by the mid-1700s it was the undisputed national drink, displacing the traditional gin and beer whose declining sales alarmed the King who personally and financially depended on the taxes from these drinks. More than 2000 tea shops sprang up in London alone.ย
But wool–heavy and hot–did not exactly suit the Chinese climate and was rejected by the Chinese who, upon the Emperorโs orders, demanded silver in exchange for their liquid gold.ย The Company had no option but to oblige and approached the government for access to the countryโs silver stocks.ย So insatiable were the appetites of both English tea drinkers and the Chinese merchants, that the tea trade came dangerously close to draining the English treasury of its bullion reserves and seriously jeopardising the English economy. Despite the best efforts of Parliament to legislate away the negative impacts of the tea crazeโincluding slapping a 119% tax on tea which only opened the way for smugglers to set up elaborate networks up and down the countryโs bounteous coastline– by the early 1700s it was obvious that the East India Company would need to find something far more sexy and attractive than tweed and wool toย offer the Chinese hongs (licensed traders).ย ย
The Dutch had been peddling Indian opium across SE Asia and China where it had been valued as both a medicine and recreational narcotic since the mid 1600s. The Dutch had invented the long opium pipe which made the smoking experience far more potent and addictive than eating opium which was how Indians preferred to consume the drug. It was the long pipe that proved so deadly to the Chinese population and that caused so much havoc over the next centuries.
By the mid-18th century with the opium fields of Bihar and Bengal firmly within their control, the East India Company (EIC) took its first steps into the opium trade and was rewarded with instant success.ย The company quickly established a monopoly on Indian opiumโclaiming a right that the Mughal Emperor Akbar had initially established–and watched their main city Calcutta and British power surge beyond imagination as the product was introduced as a new currency in the tea trade.
The importation of opium had been banned by the Chinese Emperor for a hundred years by the time the British entered the racket. And as the EIC had multiple interests in China it arranged for the opium to be sold to licensed third partiesโmany of them Parsisโwho stored the narcotic in British-controlled warehouses along the SE coast near modern Guangzhou. Corrupt hongs completed the transaction by smuggling the narcotic into the countryside beyond the British zone. As one writer summed up the neat arrangement, โthe British East India Company was thus able to deny responsibility for importing opium and retain its other trading rights with China.โย But still reap incredible profits from the trade.ย By the early decades of the 1800s, China was home to millions of addictsโsome estimate as many as 10-12 millionโand the once shaky, threadbare English Exchequer was bursting with opium derived revenue. Ten percent of all British tax revenue came from the trade and as for the EIC, with 16% of its entire revenue coming from this single source, the further conquest and development of the Raj in India was secured.
But on the western coast of the subcontinent, Bombay, a lonely, underdeveloped and rather neglected British settlement struggled to justify its existence.ย While Bombay enjoyed one of the great natural harbours in Asia the political realities of strong regionalโmainly MarathaโMughal successor states in western and central India meant that the EIC was unable to find a political or economic footing.ย The EIC chiefs in Calcutta and London had grown weary of Bombayโs drain on Company subsidies. As Gov. General Cornwallisโ (the very same who had surrendered to George Washington a few years prior) complaint to Prime Minister William Pitt shows, were the Company was even ready to abandon Bombay as a city.
โI have reflected most seriously and have conversed with the most sensible men in this country, on the utility of the civil establishment at Bombay and I am perfectly convinced that the Company derive no benefit from it.โ
Something had to be done. If Bombay was to survive, a source of revenue had to be secured. And quick. At last, in the late 18th century, Dame Fortune smiled and caused the political winds to blow in such a way that the Company was able to exercise indirect control of large parts of the hinterlands to the north of Bombay, including the central Indian opium producing area of Malwa.ย Though the Company still held a monopoly on the cultivation and production of opium in the east region of India, in Bombay, unlike in Calcutta, the Company made the decision to not take a direct role in the actual transport and sale of opium to China. This it left to local enterpreneurs, among which a number of Parsis immediately came to prominence, including the first Indian to be knighted, Sir Jamsetji Jejeebhoy.ย
The Chinese Emperor, alarmed at the havoc opium continued to wreak upon his people, despite repeated bans on its import, began in the 1830s to make moves to crack down on the trade. Traders were forbidden from repatriating their profits to India.ย Tensions were rising between the Emperor and western nations, that now included American trader/smugglers (including the forebears of a certain Franklin Roosevelt).
In March 1839, the governor of Canton forcibly confiscated and destroyed 1.2 million kgs of Indian opium held in the tradersโ warehouses.ย ย Jejeebhoy, Readymoney and the other Parsi and Indian traders could do nothing as they watched 500 Chinese laborers work for 23 days straight mixing their precious opium with lime and salt and tossing it into the sea. In all, not one rupee of compensation was paid. Incensed that an Asian despot would dare threaten their smuggling operation so dramatically the British navy immediately launched an attack in what has become known as the First Opium war.ย The war ended in the defeat of the Chinese three years later. The British received Hong Kong as part of the settlement,ย from where the smuggling operations continued for years to come.
The disruptions of the Opium Wars caused many Parsi families to diversify their interests. Given their background as producers of fine textiles many Parsi opium lords switched to cotton production thereby establishing the mills of Bombay as major world players.ย In the 1860s, when Civil War in the United States temporarily interrupted the global supply of cotton, the Parsi Sethias happily filled the gap and reaped yet another windfall.ย By this time the Parsis were the wealthiest and most influential group in Bombay. They used their fortunes made in China and cotton to go into banking and insurance and played a critical role in establishing Bombay as Indiaโs financial capital. The Sethias (a professional name often used for powerful businessmen) in fact, laid many other foundations of modern Bombay: its culture of philanthropy, its museums, educational and social institutions, its wealth and its world of entertainment.
Jamsetjee Bomanjee Wadia (1756-1821) painted by J. Dorman. The Wadias were for many years one of the most influential and powerful Parsi families in Bombay and played a significant role in the development of the South Asian film industry.
Fifty one years to the day before India won its Independence, on 15th August 1896, the well heeled citizens of Bombay enjoyed a final evening of the most โmarvellousโ spectacle the city had ever experienced. For several weeks, first at Watsonโs Hotel in Kalaghoda and then at the Novelty Theatre on Grant Road, a Frenchman en route to Australia, had been delighting audiences with the latest hi-tech entertainment. Called the โcinematographeโ his contraption, which looked like an ordinary wooden box with a hand crank on one side and a small brass-encased lens on the other, was the closest thing to magic audiences could imagine. As the Frenchman rotated the crank a spool of thin grey film through which light flowed from a second box attached to the top, the most unbelievable photographic images danced against a white screen. In the darkened hall the rapt viewers wondered if they had not been transported to a new dimension.
The projection of moving pictures was the most exciting development yet in the short life of the revolutionary new science of photography. Two French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere had been experimenting with colour photography for a number of years and as a sort of intellectual side-project had attacked the problem of combining animation with projection of light. Just nine months earlier, in December 1895, at Parisโ Grand Cafe, the brothers had stunned audiences with the first commercial showing of a film, which over a span of 49 seconds, depicted a train pulling into a station and passengers jumping on and off.
The Lumiere brothersโ version of the movie camera-cum-projector was small and light enough to be carried about outdoors. At first, the inventor brothers didnโt know what to make of their apparatus. In fact, they saw it not so much as an idea whose time had come but, as Louis Lumiere said, as โan invention without a future.โ His brother put it even more emphatically: โour inventionโฆhas no commercial future whatsoever.โ
But in direct contradiction of their conviction, the siblings launched a campaign to take the Cinematographe experience to audiences around the world. To assist them they contracted a fellow Frenchman, a pharmacist by trade, named Marius Sestier to be this new technologyโs evangelist in the furthest end of the world, Australia. So dubious of their inventionโs prospects were the brothers that a year or two later they put together a travelling road show complete with 40 magicians to tour Asia, the Far East and the Fiji Islands. If the moving pictures didnโt draw the crowds perhaps the wonder workers would be a profitable Plan B.
Sestier, who sported a trim beard and moustache with ends that curled confidently upwards in the style of an upperclass gentleman, set sail, with this wife, from Marseilles on 11 June 1896 with a passage to India. They docked in Bombay nineteen days later and though it seems Sestier knew little English, he immediately set out making arrangements for the showing of several films. Over a period of four nights people crammed into a small room in Watsons Hotel to watch six short films[1], including the much bally-hooed Arrival of a Train, all produced by the Lumiere brothers. The local papers proclaimed this new thing, โThe Wonder of the World!โ
The impact was tremendous and immediate. More showings were added (though one was cancelled due to an early case of load shedding) and additional, larger venues were secured. The local press gushed enthusiastically about this amazing Marvel of the Century but found Mr Watsonโs hotel to be somewhat unsuitable. The Bombay Gazetteโs reporter complained that because of โthe smallness of the room, the operator is unable to have the instrument sufficiently removed from the canvas to make the figures life-size, and this has the further disadvantage that it makes the actors in each of the scenes move about rather too quickly.โ
Sestier responded to the criticism by securing the premises of the Novelty Theatre as a corrective measure. Built in 1878, the Novelty was one of Bombayโs glittering new theatres along Grant Road, the cityโs answer to Broadway. It boasted a large 90 x 65 ft. stage and accommodated 1400 people. The Lumieres were in business! At Rs. 1 a seat, Sestier grossed close to Rs. 100,000 (close to one million in contemporary terms) over more than 60 sold-out shows, which proved beyond any argument, that inventors should not be relied upon for their business acumen.
By the time Sestier boarded the French steamship Caledonien for Colombo and Sydney on 26th August, he had changed India forever. The movie bug had found a new host. Many Indians had attended the shows at the Novelty Theatre and one in particular, a photographer, Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatwadekar (aka ‘Save Dada’) was so enraptured he immediately placed an order for a Lumiere Cinematographe with the London firm Riley Brothers. The investment set him back a pretty penny but within three years Bhatwadekar had made and shown Indiaโs first documentary film, The Wrestlers, which depicted a match at Bombay’s Hanging Gardens between a couple of popular local wrestlers, Pundalik Dada and Krishna Navi. Over the next several years Save Dada made a number of other films, all of mundane everyday subjects and reached his cinematic zenith by documenting the grand Delhi Durbar, a celebration of King Edward VIIโs accession to the Imperial throne in 1903.
Save Dada was not alone. In Calcutta and Madras, other men (yes, they were all men) were just as excited about this stunning new invention. With a buzz that can only compare to the one we experienced when we received our first email or spent our first hours surfing the web, dreamers and entrepreneurs in every corner of British India sensed the magic of films and moved quickly to grab hold of it.
In Bengal, a rakishly thin lawyer, Hiralal Sen, scion of one of Bengalโs prominent Bhadralok families moved to Calcutta from Dhaka in 1887 to indulge his fascination with photography and cameras. Some years after his arrival in Calcutta, the legendary studio of Bourne and Shepherd sponsored a photographic competition which Sen, eager, like all budding photographers for some recognition, entered. When he won a prize, the young lawyer was so encouraged he abandoned the Bar and rather rashly established his own photo business.
Though photography had been around for nearly half a century by this time, it was still so new. Its possibilities intrigued practitioners who experimented with all manner of materials and processes. Everything had to be tested and tried. In between taking portraits of Calcuttaโs citizenry Sen began experimenting with light by projecting shadowy images against the wall using a lantern and black cloth. But as far as we know, by 1896 Sen had not yet seen a motion picture.
This happy event happened in 1898, two years after Sestierโs shows on the other side of the country. A certain Mr Stevenson, one of those minor characters that wanders across the stage of history but about whom next to nothing is known, hired a swank venue on Beadon Street, the Star Theatre, where he exhibited a โBioscopeโ film that ran on the same bill as a popular stage play, The Flower of Persia.
Charles Urban, an American book and office supplies salesman with a fetish for silk hats, fell in love with movies from the first moment he put his eye to the peephole of a Kinetoscope, the early American film projector invented by Thomas Edison. Ever the salesman, Urban immediately cottoned to the commercial potential of moving pictures (even if Edison, like the Lumieres, did not) and arranged to be Edisonโs agent for the state of Michigan. By 1896, as Sestier was wowing Bombayโs citizens at the Novelty Theatre, Urban was trying to sell Edisonโs updated projector, the Vitascope from his shop in Detroit. A year later, after asking an engineer friend to come up with a better projector that didnโt โflickerโ as each frame passed through the light, Urban was marketing his very own Bioscope, a single wooden box more tall and narrow than Lumiereโs but like theirs with a hand crank. His projector had the added advantage of not requiring electricity to operate. The Bioscope was so successful that an English firm, Warwick Trading Company, invited Urban to move to London and head up the company with his Bioscope as its flagship product.
Charles Urban
Given his familyโs wealth it appears not to have been a big deal for Sen to fork out Rs. 5000 for one of Urbanโs spiffy new inventions. Upon its arrival in India though the equipment was slightly damaged. And to complicate matters it came with no instruction manual. But Sen was not easily deterred. He sought out a European friend, a Jesuit priest named Father Lafouis, who assisted Sen in repairing the Bioscope as well as figuring out how the contraption functioned. Within a short time Sen had so mastered the Bioscope that with the financial help of his brother Motilal and two other investors, he established the Royal Bioscope Company in 1899. Sen quickly became an importer of European films and within a year had shot his own footage. Taking a cue from the mysterious Mr Stevenson, who appears to have moved on to greener pastures, Sen cut a deal with the Classic Theatre, to exhibit his films between acts of a stage play, as a sort of bonus entertainment. The first Sen film to gather notices was Dancing Scenes from the Flower of Persia, which was a popular stage production at the time. Encouraged by the publicโs response Sen filmed scenes from other stage productions including Ali Baba, Sitaram and Life of Buddha which were then shown at other city theatres including the Star and Minerva. As in Bombay, the shows stunned the local press. โThis is a thousand times better than the live circuses performed by real persons. Moreover, it is not very costly โฆ Everybody should view this strange phenomenon,โ gushed one local daily.
And it wasnโt just the residents of Indiaโs most populous city that got to partake of this strange phenomenon. Royal Bioscope took their films to the countryside, setting up impromptu open-air cinemas in small towns across Bengal and Orissa, starting a practice of travelling movies that continues up to the present. Hiralal turned out to be an artiste of amazing inquisitiveness and is credited with making Indiaโs first political film (fiery nationalist speeches denouncing the British Raj by Surendranath Bannerjee, a founder of the Indian National Congress) as well the first commercials for a certain Edwards Tonic and Jabaskum Hair Oil. He continued to film stage shows as well as produce short films of everyday life for a decade and a half but sadly his entire ouvre went up in smoke. Literally. In 1917 the Royal Bioscope Company warehouse caught fire and destroyed all his work and some of South Asiaโs earliest and most important films.
Senโs success ignited the imaginations of others and movies began their journey from novelty toward industry. Back in Bombay, in 1911, Dhundiraj Govind โDadasahebโ Phalke, another photographer cum magician cum printmaker was completely smitten after catching a film called Amazing Animals, a sort of early David Attenborough nature film, at the America India Picture Palace. He returned for more, this time buying a ticket to an Easter time showing of a French film called The Life of Jesus. โWhy,โ he whispered quietly to his to his sceptical wife as they sat in the dark, โcouldnโt I tell the story of our Hindu gods and deities on film, as well?โ
How his wife answered we donโt know. But Phalke who had struggled up this point to find anything that could capture his interest for more than a few years at a time, and whoโs several business partnerships had ended acrimoniously, spent the better part of a year buying up equipment and learning as much as he could about film making before travelling to England in February 1912 to meet with moviemakers and technicians. During this time one of Phalkeโs correspondents was an American magician named Carl Hertz. Hertz had spent time in India tracking down fakirs who could reveal to him the secret of the Indian Rope Trick and meeting with the painter Raja Ravi Varma. Given subsequent events, in which he tours the South Pacific as part of the Lumiere brothers troupe of 40 magicians/ projectionists it seems likely that he may have met Sestier himself at one his Bombay movie exhibitions.
Dadasabeb Phalke
In any case, both men, Phalke and Hertz, were in Bombay around the same time and shared a passion for moving pictures and magic. In the years proceeding his cinematic career, Phalke for a time had billed himself as a magic man named Professor Kelpha, an anagram of his family name. In another intriguing twist Phalke had done business with Raja Ravi Varma through one of his other commercial ventures the Phalke Engraving and Printing Works. So it is possible that Hertz had met Phalke as well. After leaving India, Hertz integrated moving images into his magic show as a regular feature and went on to achieve a minor notoriety as the first man to show a film on a ship and in South Africa.
Phalkeโs London sojourn was a lightening trip.ย He was back on Indian soil three months later, and on 1 April 1912, the very day he landed in Bombay, he registered the Phalke Films Company, and began putting together this first film, Raja Harischandra, based upon a legendary ruler of ancient India described in the epic Mahabharata and other literary works.
Released in 1913, Raja Harishchandra holds the official title as Indiaโs first feature film. But in fact, a year earlier, in 1912, another enterprising Maharashtrian exhibited a movie titled, Shree Pundalik, at the Coronation Cinematograph at Girgaum. Most film historians reject the idea that it was in fact, โDadasahebโ Tornay, the maker of Shree Pundalik, who deserves the accolade as Indiaโs earliest feature film maker, on the rather lame grounds that the camera was operated by a European named Johnson. And that the film was sent to London for processing. Had these criteria been sufficient to disqualify a film from being judged Indian, many films including some of the most loved such as the classic Pakeezah (1972) which was shot by German Josef Wirsching would also need to be removed from the canon.
But whereas Tornay failed–Shree Pundalik was a commercial flop–Phalke went on to make more than a hundred silent films many of which included his wizardry with special effects like the Hindu god Hanuman flying through the sky. After a falling out with his business partners Phalke, who rightly, is credited as the father of Indo-Pakistani cinema, retired to the banks of the Ganges in Varanasi, a somewhat disillusioned and lonely man. For years he resisted making more films but eventually agreed to accept an offer from the maharaja of Kholapur to produce one final film, a talkie called Gangavatran. Like many others Phalke struggled to cope with the transition from silent to sound films and was unable to repeat his early silent film success. He passed away in 1944 a forlorn and rather forgotten figure.
In the southern city of Madras, a dealer of imported American cars, Nataraja Mudaliar, was a fan of Phalkeโs films, and like Sen, Bhatwadekar and Phalke just had to try his hand at the new craze. Mudaliar requested an Englishman by the name of Stewart Smith who was in town filming a documentary on Lord Curzon ( Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905), to give him several lessons on the finer points of using a camera. With a confidence that only the amateur can muster, Mudaliar, established Indiaโs first film studio, the India Film Company in Puruswalkam. The year was 1917. Within a year, he had produced a series a well-received historical pictures including South Indiaโs first feature film Keechaka Vatham, an episode from the Mahabharata, exhibited at the Elphinstone Theatre. The film was a smash hit by any standards thrilling audiences and netting Mudaliar Rs. 50,000. Excited by the money making potential of his film, Mudaliar arranged for it to be shown in cities outside of India with large Tamil populations including Rangoon, Singapore and Colombo. These venues further netted him a handsome Rs. 15,000. So infectious was this new art form that even the Father of Independent India, Mahatma Gandhiโs family was caught up. His son Devdas Gandhi, then a journalist, was hired by Mudaliar to write the script cards for Keechaka Vatham in Hindi, in order that the film could be shown in the north.
[1] During his stay in Bombay, Sestier screened between 35-40 films, all presumably shot by his sibling sponsors in France. They included such delights as Rejoicing in the Marketplace, Foggy Day in London and Babies Quarrels.
The bloody cataclysm of 1947 which resulted in the death and displacement of multiple millions of people, the destruction of an ancient cityโs sense of community, the disruption of a vibrant economy and a fundamental reassessment of a peopleโs and cityโs very meaning and identity seemed to signal, beyond any shadow of doubt, the end of Lahoreโs emerging movie making dream.
Within a month of Roop Kishoreโs escape and the razing of his sparkling new studio the guts were ripped out of the entire industry. The financers and producers, most of whom were at least โnominalโ Hindusโ like Shorey, many of the editors and writers of the cityโs lively film press, actors, music director, playback singers, directors and countless Sikh and Hindu techniciansโcameramen, editors, sound recordists and visual artistsโfled. While most probably harboured hopes that โwhen things calm downโ they would return–โmaybe a few weeks, at most a month or twoโ– and pick up finishing the picture they were working on, all except a small handful never set foot in Lahore again. As it happened, Roop Kishore Shorey was one of the few who did. But weโll get to that a bit later.
By the end of 1947 the writing was on the wall. The exciting glory days of making films in Lahore was over. The cityโs movie refugees reconciled themselves to re-establishing themselves in Bombay, which except for the biggest names and most established stars turned out to be a struggle. Eventually some made it and went on to become rich. Even giants. Most found work, maybe even had a hit or three, but within a decade, they quietly faded away like the pages of the film magazines that once published their pictures.
Back in Lahore the remnant of the industry had other priorities: rebuilding their city, burying their dead, feeding and schooling their children. Making films seemed frivolous under the circumstances. And already questions were being raised by the mullahs, those who had championed the very idea of Pakistan as a thing, about whether there was a place for such a ridiculous, scandalous and even anti-Islamic thing as movies in the new country.
A number of Muslim actors, directors, producers singers and writers did leave Bombay and Calcutta and move to Lahore. But their number was small, especially in the early days.ย It is said that Mehboob Khan, one of Indiaโs most revered directors, maker of Mother India, made a quick post Partition foray into Lahore to assess whether he should emigrate. โI need electricity to make films,โ he is reported to have snorted upon his return to Bombay.
Yes, Noor Jehan, Indiaโs most famous and beloved singing actress, โoptedโ for Pakistan as did Manto, the incendiary writer, and a few other biggish names but obstacles and hurdles were so many that the idea of putting Lahore back on the film making map seemed the stuff of madmen. Manto drank himself to death, after spending most of his time in court fighting for artistic freedom.
One can empathise with their gloom. The dream had ended not only so abruptly, but too soon.
Films had been a part of Lahoreโs life since at least the 1920s though one source claims that the Aziz Theatre in Shahi Mohalla was converted to a cinema in 1908. The cityโs residents, especially the large number of students who attended Lahoreโs many premier universities and colleges, were instant fans and supporters of the medium. Hollywood movies starring Mary Pickford, Hedy Lamar, Charlie Chaplain, Douglas Fairbanks and especially Rudolph Valentino were hugely popular. Rowdy Punjabi audiences were recognised (and most of the time appreciated) for their unabashed preference for action and romance pictures; by the late 1920s and early 30s the Northwest region of India was the number 1 film market outside of Bombay. The big production centers of Calcutta and Bombay made pictures that would appeal to the Punjabi and Muslim audience churning out Mughal era historicals and recreations of Arabic and Persian folk stories.
In the late 1920s a Bhatti Gate resident, Abdul Rashid Kardar, turned to making his own films. Filmed in open air along the banks of the Ravi river or amidst the cityโs many medieval ruins, the films were well received even if by a tiny local audience. Wealthy businessmen and civic leaders started investing in the new technology. A high court judge invested Rs45,000 in a German Indian co-production called Prem Sanyas (The Light of Asia), a story of the Buddha, that has gone on to be claimed as a classic of world cinema.ย
When speaking and singing pictures became possible others jumped into the river. โStudiosโ and production units popped up all over the place in Muslim Town, on McLeod Road, along Multan Road, and especially Laxmi Chowk. Lahoreโs publishing industry sprang into action and began pumping out film magazines in English and Urdu from as early as the 1920s and 30s. Roop Kishore Shorey started making rip offs of American and Bombay action films some of which got fair notices. After a downturn in the mid-1930s by the early 1940s Lahore was fast developing into the B-movie capital of India. A source of talent and story lines (the number of Lahore or Punjab born and or educated actors, directors, producers, singers and writers who made and whose children and grandchildren continue to make Bombay the world leading industry it is, is too numerous to count) Lahore was what the Americans call a farm club. A place where talent was procured tested and then sent up to the big leagues in Calcutta and Bombay.
While the smart movies were made in Calcutta and the big productions came out of Bombay the filmmakers of Lahore in no way suffered from an inferiority complex. They prioritised quantity, action and speed. They prioritised fun. They made money, they drank, they swapped wives, they got divorced, they gambled and raced the horses. They travelled the world looking for money and even produced films for international markets.
But then the dark clouds of politics rolled in and poofโlike the bomb in one of their action movies–the game was up.
Yet, it was in the bloody rubble of Lahore that the seeds of a new industry were born. Not just a minor player, but within a few decades, a booming national film industry. By 1970 Pakistan was the largest film producer in the Islamic world and the 4th largest (by volume) in the world. Without its old stars it produced several generations of superstars, actors, starlets, writers and singers, oh the singers. Not just Noor Jehan, but Mehnaz, Irene, Nahid and the Bengali bomb, Runa Laila. A lot of them went on to sing for Bollywood and still do (Atif, Adnan Sami, Ali Zafar, Rahat).
That Lahore would be a major world film centre is on the face of it improbable. It was far removed for the colonial power centers and indeed, is the only major south Asian movie city not based in a colonial city, that has survived and thrived. How weird is that? Especially, in such a hostile environment. In a land where official, political and religious biases have constantly been more of a threat than the erstwhile films of India which are forever being outlawed.
To understand this amazing, improbable story we have to start not with Roop Kishore Shorey staring into the ashes of his modern studio but go back in time to the very beginning.
Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits 