Ram playing Sita, hand-cranked cameras and optical illusions. A look at the first few years of film-making in India
The first time Paresh Mokashi shouted ‘action’ on the sets of Harishchandrachi Factory in May this year, 95 years after Dadasaheb Phalke made Raja Harishchandra in 1913, he was assailed by a strange sense of déjà vu. Having spent months researching Phalke, Mokashi wondered what India’s first film-maker must have felt on his first day at the shoot. “It must have been a feeling many times more profound than mine. Ninety-five years later, I was making my first film on the making of that first film. There was an indescribable connection,” says Mokashi, whose maiden work Harishchandrachi Factory is now India’s official entry for the Oscars.

The similarities end right there. Nothing today can possibly compare with the constraints and compulsions that early film-makers had to deal with. They were the first explorers of an unmapped land, equipped with little else than a passion for the medium. “What we had before Phalke was stage cinema. A camera was placed at a theatrical performance and the play was recorded in a single camera position and then shown. Or a scene at the railway station was recorded at one go. Phalke was the first one to place the camera at different angles, cut down scenes in bits and pieces and put it all together as a film,” says P.K. Nair, former director of the National Film Archives of India (NFAI), Pune.

The ingenuity was rarely matched by technology. “The cameras were hand-cranked, so the speed varied according to the interest level of the cameraman. Only natural light was used; all scenes had to be shot outdoors in the day. For a scene inside the house, you had a set without a roof to let light in. The third and biggest problem: no female artists, since cinema was considered the lowest of all professions. Phalke once said that even a prostitute was not ready to face the camera,” says Nair. Anna Salunke, who played Taramati in Raja Harishchandra, did a double role with a difference in 1917 in Phalke’s Lanka Dahan, where he played both Ram and Sita. “It worked well. According to the script, Sita had already been abducted and did not need to be shown in the same frame as Ram,” says Suresh Chabbria, a professor at FTII.

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