Virtually Masterful: Raja Ravi Varma on Google Arts and Culture

A piece for the latest issue of India Today, on a new Raja Ravi Varma exhibition -- online.

In Reena Mohan’s 1992 documentary about Kamlabai Gokhale, there’s a moment when the remarkably lively nonagenarian actor remembers Dadasaheb Phalke, the father of Indian cinema, whose 1913 mythological Mohini Bhasmasur made Gokhale one of the first Indian women to appear on screen. Her gaze settles contentedly on an image she has clearly held in her mind for nearly 80 years. “Black sherwani, pagri on his head, spectacles,” she says. “He was like someone in a Ravi Varma painting. It made you happy to see him.”

Raja Ravi Varma may well be the only Indian artist to have achieved such instant recall, and retained it for a century and a half. Born in 1848 into a family close to the Travancore royals, he was already a household name in Gokhale’s turn-of-the-century childhood. Starting as a portraitist to princes, Varma’s printing press made his work wildly popular in reproduction. His chromolithographs of Hindu deities and his scenes from the epics and myths became calendar art and advertisements. Millions were happy to see them.

On April 29 this year, Ravi Varma’s 172nd birth anniversary, Google Arts and Culture unveiled a massive digital retrospective of his work, with over 700 images and videos. Although many of these were already online, the Google exhibit offers higher resolution images and new kinds of access by grouping works from across museums into thematic ‘stories’, creating a display that caters to a wide range of visitors.

You can choose, for instance, to go on a photographic tour of the Kilimanoor Palace in Kerala, Varma’s home. You can attend to his realistic detailing of jewellery, or look at plants in his images. You can focus on a particular painting, like ‘The Bombay Songstress’—displayed here with a brief musical clip from the classical singer Anjanibai Malpekar, who may have been its subject. You can go beyond Varma to works stylistically inspired by him, in portraiture or in popular advertising, where his style was copied as standard form. You can watch a video about designer khadi saris that duplicate Varma paintings. You can run a search for all the green images, or all the yellow ones. The ‘Art Transfer’ feature turns your photos into artworks, while ‘Art Projector’ can bring a work into your living room. “We aim to develop technology that lowers some of the barriers to accessing culture, and is playful and engaging,” Simon Rein, program manager at Google Arts and Culture, told me on email. “People who know and love Ravi Varma’s work already will have plenty to find when reading the stories and zooming into his masterpieces. But for everyone else, browsing by colour, to take your example, might just be the starting point to discover the beauty of his art for the first time.”

Google names nine partner organisations for this online exhibition, of whom the most important appear to be the Ganesh Shivaswamy Foundation, with eight stories, and the Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation, with 20. Each individual image is usefully annotated, but curatorial text across stories is marred by repetition, contradiction, non-standardised spelling and even typos. 

For instance, a panel in one story reads: “Repeated demand for copies of his paintings led Sir Madhava Rao, the diwan of Travancore, to suggest that Varma have some of his paintings reproduced as prints. Although paintings were earlier sent to Europe, mainly Germany, to be lithographed... Ravi Varma chose to set up his own printing press in Maharashtra in 1894 instead.” Another story narrates the same thing differently, and with alternate spellings: “It was the repeated demand for copies of his paintings which led to the suggestion by Dewan Sir Tanjavur Madhava Row that Ravi Varma send some of his paintings to Europe to have them oleographed.”

Elsewhere, the facts get confusing: “The Ravi Varma Fine Art Lithographic Press was set up in first in Ghatkopar and eventually in Lonavala”, we read in ‘The Gods Came Home’. But another story on the press states equally categorically that “The Ravi Varma Fine Art Lithographic Press was set up in Girgaum, Bombay, and commenced its operations.” These may seem like quibbles, but they represent a wider tendency, especially rife online. Google Arts and Culture wants its India-specific exhibitions to match those in the world’s great brick-and-mortar museums, more editorial oversight is needed.

 

SIDEBAR:

Three more Google Arts and Culture Themes Relating to India

Women in India: Unheard Stories is a marvellously thoughtful response to the skewed coverage of women in the media. Online exhibits range from "Inspirational Firsts' like Dr. Rakhmabai, the first practicing woman doctor in India to present-day women scientists, from depictions of the female body in Indian temple art to stories about women artists

Crafted in India, created in collaboration with the Dastkari Haat Samiti and others, is a rare virtual engagement with the stunning variety of artisanal skills that still survive in India. With videos that take you from a wood-carving town in UP to an Assamese organisation making paper from rhino and elephant dung, this is the best kind of travel, and not just in Covid-19 times.

The brilliant Indian Railways exhibit caters as much to history and engineering nerds as to wannabe virtual travellers, introducing you to station-masters and historic architecture as well allowing you to travel famous Indian railway routes in 360 degree glory.

Published in India Today, Sat 27 June 2020. 

The page as it appears in print below:

Gulabo Sitabo mines what remains of old Lucknow for visual a

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/minding-the-gap/articleshow/76668202.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Gulabo Sitabo mines what remains of old Lucknow for visual a

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/minding-the-gap/articleshow/76668202.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Arresting the Moving Image

Yesterday's Mirror column: 

The Film Heritage Foundation and the painstaking work of storing and restoring India's cinematic past.

Dhundhiraj Govind (Dadasaheb) Phalke, maker of the first Indian film, examines a strip of celluloid

On May 3,1913, when Raja Harishchandra first opened to an excited Bombay public at Coronation Cinema in Girgaon, Dhundiraj Govind Phalke established his claim to the title 'Father of Indian Cinema'. Over the next 36 years, some 1700 silent films were made in India. Of these, only five to six complete films and 10-12 film fragments survive in the National Film Archive of India (NFAI). Even Raja Harishchandra itself doesn't survive in toto. What we have are the first and last reels of a four-reel film -- and that, too, Phalke's 1917 remake of his original 1913 effort. 

The Madras film industry contributed 124 fiction films and 38 documentaries to the Indian silent era. Only one survives. In a darkened auditorium in Jawaharlal Nehru University's School of Arts and Aesthetics yesterday, I watched a couple of minutes of it. The audience was full of people who study and write about cinema, but the unabashed lovers' kiss in that 84-year-old clip still caught many by surprise. 

The fact that you can now watch the whole of Marthanda Varma (1931) online for free is the spectacular result of two allied processes of film archiving. One is the gathering, restoration and conservation of actual celluloid negatives. The other is the archiving of films in the digital medium: public-access online archives like the marvellous indiancine.ma, which aims to be the largest collectively annotated archive of Indian films: an encyclopaedic resource for researchers and film fans. And while the digital may seem like the future, it is not our most permanent record of the past. But more on that later. 

Both these processes are, unfortunately, still in their early stages in India. Filmmaker and archivist Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, whose documentary Celluloid Man (2013) was a deeply affectionate portrait of the octogenarian NFAI archivist PK Nair, estimates that by 1950, "India had already lost 70 to 80 per cent of our films, including our first sound film, Alam Ara." Dungarpur now runs the Film Heritage Foundation, acquiring as many film prints as he can from a country-wide network of antique-dealers he laughingly calls "refined kabadiwallahs". 

Theatrical prints he acquires are checked, cleaned, played and then stored in the Foundation's climate-controlled vault. But ideally, a film should be restored not from a print, but from an original camera negative (the film on which the original camera image is captured), a master positive (the first positive print made from the original camera negative), or a dupe negative (created from an original master positive). 

These, however, are hard to come by. And for many Indian films, may have been lost forever. Dungarpur's presentation at JNU was studded with anecdotes about the work of an archivist in India - some happy discoveries, but most of them heartbreaking losses. 

The causes of our present situation are multiple. There is the inflammability of the older nitrate film, leading to many infamous fires in film warehouses and labs: as far back as the Ranjit Movietone fire in the 1940s and as recent as the FTII fire in 2002. There is the general Indian apathy towards preservation of anything. For years, people in possession of old, unsuccessful or rusting cans of film knew only one way to make any money from them, which was to sell them to scrap dealers, who would strip the film reel for the silver content. There is the oft-repeated tale of filmmakers' descendants destroying pieces of our common heritage, if not wilfully, then under financial pressure. If PK Nair recounts how Ardeshir Irani's son Shapurji confessed to selling three reels of Alam Ara's camera negative for the silver, Dungarpur has his story of filmmaker Debaki Bose's son in Kolkata, who 'explained' to him that he had left the original camera negatives of his father's Ratnadeep (1951) out in the wind and weather for thirty years because he "didn't have space". 

Among Dungerpur's pet peeves is the fact that the move to the digital has blinded people to the fact that a CD or DVD has a life of 3-5 years, while celluloid, as a format, has a proven "life of 126 years and counting". "But no Indian labs engaged in restoration have photochemical facilities," he says ruefully. "Basic digital scanning and cleaning, done cheaply, is seen as the restoration!" 

Dungarpur's Film Heritage Foundation (FHF) is the second Indian film archive (after the NFAI) to be a member of La Federation Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF): an international network of archives which can be approached for versions of a film under restoration, if any are stored in another country. 

At one level, FHF could be seen as a rival to NFAI. But a private initiative like Dungarpur's, while less hamstrung by the lack of autonomy and funding issues that afflict NFAI, will take time to earn the trust of India's film fraternity. Dungarpur admits there have been instances when film families who have been in talks with him have eventually donated their collections to the NFAI. 

While the state may not be, as film scholar Ashish Rajadhyaksha pointed out, either the best equipped or the most interested agency for the preservation of popular cinema (given its anti-cinema history), it is still the go-to place for many. Dungarpur is clear that he wants to collaborate rather than compete with the NFAI, and he is right. But in a country still far from understanding that film is an irreplaceable part of our cultural history, may a million archives bloom.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Sep 2015.

Cinemascope: Harishchandrachi Factory; Ra.One

Manufacturing joy
HARISHCHANDRACHI FACTORY
Director: Paresh Mokashi
Starring: Nandu Madhav, Vibhawari Deshpande, Atharva Karve
***1/2

Dhundiraj Govind Phalke's life would be considered a remarkable one even if he was not credited with having made the first-ever Indian motion picture. The son of a Sanskrit pandit from Trimbakeshwar, Phalke was a young man with an unquenchable thirst for the new. At 15, he went to Bombay to study at the JJ School of Art. After several more years at Baroda's Kala Bhawan, he started a small photography studio in Godhra. Soon after this, he apprenticed himself to a German magician called Carl Hertz, who had been employed by the Lumiere Brothers. He then worked as a draftsman with the Archaeological Survey of India before entering the printing business: specialising in lithographs and oleographs, working for artist Raja Ravi Varma, even visiting Germany to learn more about the technology.

Sometime around now, Phalke watched his first moving picture, The Life of Christ. Struck by the possibility of making an Indian film where it would be Indian gods who flickered into life on screen, he sold his stake in the printing press and embarked on what was to be his most ambitious project yet. Harishchandrachi Factory focuses on this section of Phalke's life, showing us a man both eccentric and driven. Marathi theatre director Paresh Mokashi gives us a film whose finely-tuned sense of the tragicomic is reminiscent of Chaplin and Jacques Tati. Phalke is introduced in a black top hat doing magic tricks for delighted children, only to actually disappear when an angry debtor shows up. We laugh, but there's a sense that we could cry instead. We see a grieving wife and neighbours and prepare for the worst, but they're mourning a cupboard Phalke has sold off. Even his temporary blindness in 1912 is not off-limits for laughter: as Phalke lies there with eyes bandaged, someone says with mock gravity, "Your eyes will get cured – what shall we do about your mind?"

Mokashi extracts superb performances from his cast, especially Nandu Madhav as the irrepressible Phalke, Vibhavari Deshpande as his wife, and the child actors. The 'period feel' goes much beyond the slightly low-grade costumes and sets: one comes away thinking about modernity's transformation of everything, from technology to caste and the marital relationship.

(Harishchandrachi Factory is playing at PVR Director's Cut in New Delhi this week).

A bad Hollywood film
RA.ONE
Director: Anubhav Sinha
Starring: Shah Rukh Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal
*

The best thing about Ra.One, depending on the different people I've asked, is a) the kid (Armaan Verma): though truthfully, it's not him but his large Beatle-ish mop of hair; b) the spectacle of Bombay's VT Station cracking up into magnificent ruin, with accompanying sound effects; or c) Kareena Kapoor as a crazed automaton under the control of the evil villain, driving a Bombay local train towards certain death for its passengers and herself. No-one – not even the kids at whom the film is ostensibly targeted – seems in the slightest bit arrested by the epic battle between Ra.One and G.One – between the forces of evil and good – that is supposed to be the crux of this film.

The plot, for what it's worth, centres on a geeky South Indian dad (played by Shah Rukh Khan as a caricature that's worse than even his Om Shanti Om act), who designs a video game with a supremely powerful villain because his son Prateek thinks villains are cooler than heroes. The video-game villain (Ra.One) plays his first game with Prateek (who, in his badness obsession, calls himself Lucifer), is irritated at having been almost beaten and comes out of the video game to kill Lucifer in real life. Poor nerdy dad and his nerdy Chinese colleague die quick and pointless deaths, while the irritating kid has barely shed a tear for the dad who was too uncool for him when he gets a much cooler substitute: the video-game hero, G.One.

Unfortunately, though, there can be no substitute for feeling. And in this film, we feel nothing at all. When Shah Rukh Khan dies, we're too busy wondering how he gets put in a coffin only to emerge as asthi in a pot. Emotions probably run higher in an actual video game.

Nor does the film imbue its virtual world with any depth. The final video game encounter is the most underwhelming I've seen, while the Ra.One–Raavan connection is utterly banal (how much more Rakeysh Mehra did with Raavan in the flawed but fascinating Aks). The closest connection this film has to Indian mythology is a children's birthday party overrun, for some inexplicable reason, by women in skimpy green outfits and gold jewellery who look straight out of Amar Chitra Katha.

Watch Ra.One if you don't mind sitting through a series of pointless cameos (a ridiculous Priyanka Chopra defending her modesty in a red dress, Sanjay Dutt just so we can hear the word Khalnayak, and Rajinikanth as Chitti the robot – to compensate for the horrific South Indian treatment earlier?) to watch a lot of things being blown to smithereens.

Published in the Sunday Guardian.

The New Dadaist

Published in Tehelka magazine:

India's entry to the 2010 Oscars is a charming portrait of the father of Indian films. 

That cinema in India owes a great deal to one Dadasaheb Phalke, most of us are dimly aware. The Indian Government’s award for “lifetime contribution to cinema” is named after him. But very few people in Phalke’s film-mad country know more about the man. So when Marathi playwright and theatre director Paresh Mokashi read Bapu Vatave’s biography of Phalke in 2005, he decided it was a story waiting to be told. And since it was Phalke, it had to be told on screen, not on stage.

Harishchandrachi Factory tells how Phalke came to make his (and India’s) first feature film, Raja Harishchandra (1913), giving us a Phalke more charmingly eccentric than we could ever have imagined for ourselves. “But he had to have been that,” says Mokashi. “Imagine, as a Sanskrit pandit’s son in the 1890s, going off to the JJ School of Art, setting up a photo studio, or apprenticing with a German magician!”

The 40-year-old Mokashi, with a string of immensely successful plays behind him (Mukkam Post Bombilwadi [2003] ran for 460 shows), is known for his vivid brand of sharp, situational comedy. “To treat a serious subject with humour is no joke,” he says, deadpan. So in his film serious things happen, but are handled with a lightness that evokes Chaplin and Jacques Tati, as well as Shankar Nag’s televisation of RK Narayan’s Malgudi Days. We laugh, but there’s a sense that we could cry instead. Our first glimpse of Phalke is in a black top hat, doing magic for a delighted bunch of kids – only to do a real-life disappearing trick as an irate debtor arrives. His return home to a grieving wife and neighbours creates foreboding – before we realise they’re mourning a cupboard he’s sold to fund his new obsession. Even his temporary blindness in 1912 is not allowed to remain tragic: as Phalke lies there with eyes bandaged, someone says with mock gravity, “Your eyes will get cured – what shall we do about your mind?”

Before the success of Harishchandrachi Factory – it’s won awards in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, and is India’s entry for the Oscars – someone might have asked Mokashi that question. Starting as an actor with Pune’s Theatre Academy, he spent years adapting a Berlin-based realist children’s theatre movement called GRIPS to the Maharashtrian context. He then moved to Mumbai and struggled until 1999, when playwright Ramu Ramanathan and Sanjana Kapoor insisted he stage one of his plays at the Prithvi Festival. In 2005, having become a bankable theatre name, Mokashi decided to make a film. Suddenly, funding dried up.

“A Marathi film with no stars, no songs: I don’t blame them!” says Mokashi, who mortgaged his ancestral home to fund the film, Phalke-style. His cast and crew (all theatre people) swear by him. Disagreements happened – when he decided to use a still frame, or when he urged his actors to underplay scenes they saw as “dramatic” – but Mokashi stood firm. Vibhawari Deshpande, who plays Phalke’s wife Saraswati, describes Mokashi as “scientific, sensitive without being emotional, and totally sure of himself.” Sounds like Phalke.

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 45 Dated November 14, 2009