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Home , Dadasaheb Phalke, Pundalik

CHAPTER THREE

RAMA

In the era of fi lm started on 7 July 1896, only eight months aft er the fi rst screening of movies in Berlin. A representative of the Lumière brothers organized this first film show in (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy: 1–3). Th e fi rst Indian to produce and show fi lms was Harischandra Sakharam Bhatvadekar who showed a fi lm in the same city of a wrestling match in 1897 shot one year earlier. Bhatvadekar later produced more fi lms and became very successful; when he died he had amassed ‘quite a fortune’ (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy: 6–7). Th e devout Brahman Hindu Dhundiraj Govind Phalke (1870–1944), also known as Dadasaheb Phalke , went to the American-Indian Cinema in Mumbai at Christmas 1910 to see The Life of Christ. It is not very clear which Jesus fi lm is meant here, but in section 1.2 of Chapter Two it was suggested that it was probably one of the versions of The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ, produced by Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nonguet .1 Phalke stated later: While the Life of Christ was rolling fast before my eyes I was mentally visualizing the gods, Shri , Shri Ramachandra, their Gokul and Ayodhya. . . . Could we, the sons of India, ever be able to see Indian images on the screen? (Rajadhyaksha: 48) So, it is no exaggeration to conclude that the Jesus fi lms initiated the production of religious feature fi lms by the Indians themselves, in particular the so-called mythologicals, a genre which according to Rachel Dwyer depicts tales of gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines mostly from the large repository of Hindu myths, which are largely found in the , and the Sanskrit epics, the and the . Th e early mythological genre drew on a wide range of the modern and

1 I am relying here on the information given in Barnouw and Krishnaswamy’s Indian Film (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy: 9 and 11), but there is a less probable pos- sibility that it was The Life of Christ made by the French fi lmmakers Alice Guy , Victor Jasset and George Hatot in 1906. But the information provided by Barnouw and Krishnaswamy suggests that it was the movie by Zecca and Nonguet . 80 chapter three

the traditional to create its own distinctive hybrid style, with strong con- nections to 19th-century Indian popular and middlebrow public culture as well as with other forms of cinema that were emerging at the same time in other places in the world. (Dwyer 2006a: 15) Phalke was not, however, the fi rst person to produce a religious film in India, since R.G. Torney and N.G. Chitre released the fi lm Pundalik on 18 May 1912, about Pundalik, a Hindu holy man completely devoted to the god (Dwyer 2006a: 63–64; Gokarn: 8–9). Although certainly a religious picture, Pundalik is not regarded as a mythological but as a devotional. Dwyer defi nes devotionals as fi lms about spiritual devotees (bhaktas and sants), drawing on India’s rich premodern traditions. (Dwyer 2006a: 63) Dwyer adds, however: Gokarn . . . notes that the generic defi nition of the devotional is not clear. Like other cinematic genres in India, the mixing or hybridity factor makes it hard to ascribe a fi lm fi rmly to one category or another. Some may class mythologicals as devotionals as there is some overlap, especially with later fi lms. (Dwyer 2006a: 63, see also Gokarn: 3) Th e mythologicals and devotionals became popular all over the Indian subcontinent and are still produced in almost every important language of the country.2 Nearly one year later, on 3 May 1913, Dada Saheb Phalke released his fi rst fi lm, Raja Harischandra (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy: 1–3; Dwyer 2006a: 22–23), about a good king who had to fl ee his palace with his consort and son because of a sage’s anger. appears in order to save them and the family is restored to the throne. Th e feature lasts 15 minutes. Phalke ’s second and third features were both released in 1914. His next feature, Dahan (Lanka Aflame) was the fi rst fi lm in history to deal with . It premiered in 1917 and it is said that ‘when Rama appeared on the screen . . . men and women in the audience prostrated themselves before the screen’ (Barnouw and Krish- naswamy: 15). Th e same thing happened when Krishna appeared on

2 David Bordwell and Kristin Th ompson qualify the mythological and the devotional as fi lm genres belonging to cinema (Bordwell and Th ompson: 94), but there are also mythologicals and devotionals in other Indian languages including, for example, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi or Bengali. According to Dwyer, mythologicals even stood at the beginning of a pan-Indian non-regional style (Dwyer 2006a: 61).