In the Name of the Father

Film director Kamal Swaroop has been involved for the last 20 years in rehabilitating the figure of Dadasaheb Phalke in diverse ingenious ways. Here, he talks to Abhay Sardesai about entering the portals of history and communing with ghosts from the past.

Abhay Sardesai As a documentational endeavour with a pedagogic angle and as a research intiative entailing forays into fiction-writing and film-making, The Phalke Factory project uses what I would call a kaleidoscopic method to get several people involved in collectively and simultaneously producing varied histories about one man and his period. It's a challenging approach. What are the difficulties involved?

Kamal Swaroop: I began with a monograph on Dadasaheb Phalke that the National Film Archives had brought out - a slim 15-page tract. This was all I had. I wanted to understand more about his life and times. I therefore decided to do two things - visit all the places that Phalke had resided and worked in and establish time-lines for all the 'characters' who were part of the theatre of his life. We started from Mumbai and went on to have workshop sessions with interested participants in Nashik, Kolhapur, Pune and Baroda. Unfortunately, we couldn't have one in Varanasi, where Phalke spent some of his darker years. I only chose participants who were willing to learn and unlearn and imagine and re-imagine a dead past. The questions we asked were both simple and complex - for example, what was Raja Ravi Varma doing when Phalke was 30 years old, in 1900? What was the nature of Phalke's interactions with the iconic artist? How did they agree and disagree on certain issues? The research also involved meeting people, recording interviews, reading books ranging from Laxmibai Tilak's Smriti- Chitre to the plays produced by the Kirloskar Natak Mandali. I also had to look at the changes happening in other spheres in the late 19th century - the birth of dactylography in Calcutta, the uses to which phrenology was put, the new interest in classical Indian literature, the proliferation of translation projects.

I relied on free associations. Let me give you an example. If you look at 19th century Indian literature, there is a lot of stuff written about society and politics - the caste system, poverty, nationalism - but we do not have much stuff on science and technology. We don't have our counterparts of Jules Verne or H. G. Wells. So, since we don't have too many Sci-Fi narratives, the logical next step is to invent them! This is what we did at the workshops. I gave the participants copies of my scrap-book, A Journey: The Phalke Chronofile: The Man and His Times (1870- 1944). The scrap-book, as you know, is a collection of xeroxed advertisements from India and Europe, reproductions of paintings and newspaper articles from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It also has a collection of lists and invented stories about the characters in Phalke's life.

I believe that our minds have dominant cognitive patterns. Can we by-pass them and get in touch with what I call, 'pre-cinema' memories? Phalke had around eight children. Could the participants assume their positions and look at experiences related to the family, to a world that was rapidly changing? What would a participant see if he was present during Phalke's time and a part of his family? These kinds of questions excite your imagination and help the process of writing a new kind of history.

Around 20 people were involved in each of the workshops we held; around 40 stories were written and 12 films were made. The filmmaker Hansa Thapliyal put the semi-fictionalized time-lines and the stories on the website www.phalkefactory.net. What do you know, I have now an eighthour long script for a film!

A. S.: When you reclaim the past and remodel it, there is always the pressure to interpret it in contemporary terms. Given the scope and nature of your project, was there a pressure to preserve the sanctity of the past even as you re-invented it?

K. S.: Yes, that is always difficult. I believe, however, that our imagination is a powerful tool. Let's take an example. In the last few decades of the 19th century, you see photo-technologies evolving at great speed - the box camera, the roll camera change our way of being in the world. Eventually, sound replaces silence and the Talkies are born. What happens to the world when cinema affords a new experience of recording life? I wanted to know more about phenomena that dealt with lived experience in those times. Suppose Phalke had his first child, Babaraya, when he was working in Raja Ravi Varma's press. How did he greet his arrival? What was their interaction like as Babaraya grew up, got alienated from his father and was disowned by him? And his third child, Mandakini, who played Krishna in Kaliya Mardan- what kind of a change did she bring to Phalke's life? If we put these questions and related issues on a grid comprising time-lines and event-lines, we would be able to create a third dimension to present Phalke. This approach has worked quite remarkably for us.

A. S.: So, how would Phalke come across, if one were to meet him? What kind of a man have you seen taking shape in front of your eyes?

K. S.: Phalke was an adventurous man. A real Chitpavan. He worked as a photographer in Godhra, where he was accused of witchcraft; for some time, he was involved in extracting silver out of film; he experimented with enamel printing - many of his signboards can still be seen in Nashik; he was a draughtsman in archaeologist John Marshall's team; he co-wrote a play called Rangabhoomi; and made around 108 films. Out of which, only a handful have survived - around three reels of Raja Harishchandra, Sri Krishna Janma, Setubandhan, Kaliya Mardan, documentaries on brick-making and a glass factory, among others. Gangavataran almost got made sometime in the mid-1930s. The story goes that he tried to cover a hill in Kolhapur with wool, lime and salt so that it looked like the Himalayas where the story of Ganga's descent on earth is set. The Maharaja of Kolhapur had commissioned the film. The rains, however, played spoilsport. The set got washed away. Phalke was 65 then. He went off to Poona, a frustrated man. As an innovator, he constantly responded to experiments in technology.

A. S.: Let's jump from Phalke to Swaroop. Your only film Om Dar- Ba-Dar (1988) has acquired a kind of cult status - there is a community of people who've been enormously influenced by its exploration of adolescence and death. Why did you not make any film after it?

K. S.: You have to understand that Art Cinema in the '70s and the '80s survived only because of state support. I got none. I suffered during the making of the film. In the second shooting schedule in Pushkar all my three cameras died. I cannot forget that one moment when we were shooting a scene where a boy's body floats up and a crow sits on it. I remember the sun was setting on one side and the moon was rising on the other. There were seven crows and one peacock in the frame. This was a dream shot. It was tragic, it was magical! But I could not record it - all the machines had broken down! The experience of making Om Dar-Ba-Dar took its toll on me. It broke me down! For several reasons, it was banned. The experience traumatized me for years. I began to fear the very act of making a film. I consulted my friend, the psychoanalyst Udayan Patel - he suggested I work with children. I became involved in educational projects. In 1984, I had written the dialogues for Kumar Shahani's Tarang and the script for Mani Kaul's Mati Manas; in 1989, I did the art direction for Mani Kaul's Siddheswari and wrote the script for Kumar Shahani's Khayal Gatha. In the 1990s, I tried to work on a kind of sequel to Om Dar-Ba-Dar. I called it Om and the Satellite City. The project did not get off the ground. This was when the figure of Dadasaheb Phalke began to fascinate me. Phalke had hopped from profession to profession and faced enormous odds in his life. I decided then to pursue the father of Indian cinema as a subject - he was truly worthy of being explored. I have been with him and he with me for the past 20 years now! At the moment, I am also involved in making two other films, titled, Miss Palmolive All Night Cabaret and Kankal. A man changing for the better or for the worse over time is a theme that I still hold dear to my heart.

Contrary to what people might think, I love mainstream Hindi cinema. Its message is simple - entertainment. A film like Half- Ticket from the 1960s is a real classic! You must realize that I had no hope of making it big in the Hindi film industry. In the '80s, your family connections mattered. They still do, probably. Talent was secondary. I was just a Kashmiri Saraswat from Ajmer striking roots in Bombay. I used to hang out at J. J. and other places in the Fort area, read Miller and Burroughs and pursue my dream of making a mark in films. It is now, only after around 35 years in the city, that I feel somewhat settled here.

A. S.: Along with the moving image, its history and reception, the written and the spoken word have exercised a great deal of influence on you. Your scrapbook The Phalke Chronofile, for instance, throws up an exciting model of book production - the pages have been photo-copied, assembled and bound. Copies of the original have been made and are being sold. The book feels like a strangely antique artifact - its lack of gloss and finish and its whimsical make-up renders it that much more open-ended. It preserves the look of a work in progress.

On a different note, wasn't literature a major source of inspiration for the avant-garde film-makers in the '70s and the early '80s?

K. S.: Correct baat hai. The trio of Hindi writers Kamleshwar, Mohan Rakesh and Dharamvir Bharati and the two magazines Sarika and Dharamyug were a source of many stories for film-makers like Kumar Shahani and Mani Kaul. I remember reading out stuff from these magazines to them on the steps of the Jehangir Art Gallery. Mani had a fantastic gift for composing a shot and for editing a film - he was a poet of cinema. He was not really into following a script. Shyam Benegal, on the other hand, had a social conscience - I call him the Nehruji of Indian art films! Whenever I teach, I make my students read from James Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce is a master at creating a mise-en-scene. Did you know I worked with Italo Calvino in Turin in 1984? I remember reading Vijaydan Detha's Rajasthani short stories to him.

A. S.: From Phalke to Swaroop to the young film-makers of today. Do you detect any similarities?

K. S.: Differences more than similarities. Fortunately or unfortunately, film-makers from my time had different aspirations. Ab toh sabhi log samjhdar ho gaye hain!