Dadasaheb Phalke
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Contents |
His life and times
A brief biography
April 30, 2023: The Indian Express
Born as Dhundiraj Govind Phalke in 1870, in the Trimbak city of Nashik, Maharashtra, Phalke belonged to a Brahmin Marathi family, where his father was a well-known Sanskrit scholar and his mother was a homemaker. Professionally, his father was a priest, and together they were a family of nine people, with three sons and four daughters.
Despite being born into the British India, Phalke’s family seemed sufficiently well-off, with Dadasaheb managing not only to do his matriculation, but enrolling into prestigious schools such as Sir JJ School of Art. Phalke was only 15 when he enrolled into Mumbai’s oldest art institute and completed a year of drawing course, and ended up getting married to a girl from his community next year. Unfortunately, that marriage couldn’t last his lifetime as he lost both his partner and child to plague.
Apart from his one year training in drawing, Phalke also enrolled himself for lessons in oil painting and watercolour painting at Kala Bhavan a little later. This is where he also gained knowledge about architecture as well as photography. Around that time, Phalke got himself a camera and so began his experimentations with photography and printing. Around the mid 1890s, Phalke began his short-lived career as a professional photographer, clicking portraits and making family albums. But the business did not bloom and he relocated from Godhra to Baroda. There he is said to have met a German illusionist by the name of Carl Hertz, from whom he learned some ‘magic’ that also involved a few techniques of trick photography, all skills which Phalke ultimately ended up using in his films.
In early 1900s, Phalke married again, this time to a woman called Girija, aka Saraswati. Saraswati and Phalke went on to have a long working marriage where they even ended up collaborating professionally. Not many know, but Phalke also worked with Archaeological Survey of India as a draftsman, but job dissatisfaction led him to leave it and start up a printing press in Lonavala. The printing press, Laxmi Art Printing Works, closely collaborated with the late great painter Raja Ravi Verma.
Phalke’s brush in with moving pictures did not happen until 1911, when he had long left the printing press owing to differences. The films Amazing Animals and French director Alice Guy-Blache’s The Life of Christ left a deep impact on Phalke, who had begun envisioning what it would be like to have similar Indian deities take up the screen and appear to mere mortals in their human forms. The thought seemed both simple and revolutionary, and so Phalke began focusing on making his first full-length feature, completely home-grown, and even visited London for research. He found his film company, Phalke Films Company, in 1912 and after toiling for almost eight months, the country got its first silent moving picture in Raja Harishchandra. Phalke wrote, directed and produced the feature while his wife Saraswati helped with costume designing and food catering. His eldest son Bhalchandra playedan important role, making it a complete family affair.
Raja Harishchandra was a success, bringing in money to Phalke’s company and boosting him to further his passion of cinema. Thus, the foundation of Indian cinema as we now know it was laid in 1913, more than three decades before India achieved its independence from British Raj. To make a movie under colonialism, have it be a success, work on it from ground zero and practically introduce a new art to his fellow citizens is a unique triumph for one man with limited technology at his disposal.
Dadasaheb Phalke went on to make a reported 27 short films, and over 90 full-length movies in his career as a filmmaker of nearly two decades. Some of his other well-known works are Lanka Dahan, Shri Krishna Janma and Satyavan Savitri among others. After living a rich, full life of passions and hardships, Phalke breathed his last on February 16, 1944. More than two decades after his demise, the Indian government announced the Dadasaheb Phalke Awards in 1969, conferred to those for their significant contribution to arts and cinema.
His legacy lives on
Oral history project/ 2021
Prakash Magdum, April 30, 2021: The Times of India
From: Prakash Magdum, April 30, 2021: The Times of India
Cinema is one of the marvels of the 20th century, said Satyajit Ray. The invention of images moving on the screen gave a new dimension to storytelling. When the Lumière brothers projected these images in a dark hall in Paris in 1895, the viewers were excited. They had seen nothing like it before. Next year, these silent visuals were screened in Watson hotel in Bombay and there was a sense of bewilderment among the audience. Few years later, Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, a trained photographer and magician took fancy to this latest invention and dreamt of telling Indian stories on the silver screen.
He gained knowledge and got trained in London in film-making to make the first feature-length film in India, Raja Harishchandra in 1913. Thereafter, he shifted to his hometown Nasik and put together a motley of people from different backgrounds to form a film company. This was at a time when this new medium of cinema was looked down with contempt and people refused to come forward to work in films. Phalke then successfully convinced friends, relatives and people around him to do a variety of jobs in his company.
It is these very people whom I discovered in the vaults of National Film Archive of India sometime last year. When the entire world was busy grappling with the Covid pandemic, the voices of old men who had worked with Phalke came alive in the archive. As part of Oral History project of NFAI, several of the old cinema artists had shared their experiences and these recordings were done in 1980s. A huge task of digitising about 8,000 minutes of the audio interviews was undertaken. The interviews were mostly in Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Bengali apart from English.
It is interesting to listen to these old voices reminiscing about the silent era of Indian cinema. These people, coming from different backgrounds who had nothing to do with art, joined Phalke’s company and under his tutelage became artists. With family professions as varied as farmer, potter, ironsmith, barber, pot maker, coppersmith, wrestler etc these people entered the film industry to earn a living. Most of them were not much educated. With strict discipline, Phalke moulded them into performers. These recordings reveal the humane side of Phalke apart from throwing light on his craft.
Sahdevrao Tapkire joined Phalke’s film company and did many side-roles and acted in mob scenes. When he realised he neither had physique nor flair for acting, Tapkire focussed his energy on learning makeup. There was no independent discipline of makeup in those days and no way to learn it. Phalke taught him the basics and Tapkire picked up the techniques by observing on the sets. “Keep this in mind and show me something new every day,” Tapkire remembers Phalke telling him. Eventually, Tapkire joined the Gemini Studio of SS Vasan during World War II and ended up doing makeup for many Tamil, Telugu and Hindi films including iconic Chandralekha.
Narayan Tambat was the classmate of Neelkanth, Phalke’s son and joined his film company as assistant storekeeper. He remembers, “Everyone was equal in Phalke’s company. There was no class difference. Even though Phalke was short-tempered, he was a visionary. He was passionate about making the film industry a noble and progressive profession and didn’t care about profits or losses.”
Another artist from Nasik, Haribhau Lonare joined Phalke’s company for Setubandhan. Coming from a profession of brickmaking, Lonare remembers Phalke as a disciplinarian: “He would first showcase whatever is needed from actors and then insist on us following his orders.”
Not many know that veteran Marathi comedy actor Vasant Shinde entered the film industry while working with Phalke. He grinded out in every department in the studio be it painting, carpentry, stores, editing and laboratory before getting minor roles. Phalke would pick up subjects from Hindu epics just before the festivals and make films in about 8-10 days so that the release could be coincided with these festivals. “He literally taught everybody the tricks of the trade and we all are reaping the benefits of it today,” says Shinde in his interview.
Oral history is a very important tool in studying history. These are the tales coming directly from the people who closely worked with Phalke. These stories of Phalke’s struggles and victories along with his persona provide a glimpse into how he shaped India’s nascent film industry. NFAI would put all these recordings in public domain for the benefit of film researchers. When the 150th birth anniversary celebrations of Dadasaheb Phalke are coming to an end today, it would surely be a befitting tribute to the father of Indian cinema.
The writer is Director, National Film Archive of India
