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Dadasaheb Phalke and
the Birth of Indian Cinema
2
I will make films on selected portions from old Sanskrit plays and new
Marathi plays, on manners and customs in different regions of India,
on genuine Indian humor, on holy places and pilgrimages, on social
functions as well as on scientific and educational subjects. . . . Moving
pictures are a means of entertainment; but are in addition an excellent
means for spreading knowledge.
—Dadasaheb Phalke
Cinema came to India within six months of its landmark first “paid”
showcase in public with ten short films by Auguste Marie Louis
Nicolas and Louis Jean Lumière at the Le Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris
on December 28, 1895. On July 7, 1896, the Lumière Brothers screened six of
those films at Bombay’s Watson Hotel. The films were subsequently shown
in Calcutta and Madras, the largest metropolitan cities in the eastern and
southern parts of the Indian subcontinent.
Local creativity and entrepreneurship immediately engaged with the new
opportunity, starting with Hiralal Sen in Calcutta (in 1898) and Harishchandra
Sakharam Bhatwadekar in Mumbai, who made the first-ever Indian film,
The Wrestlers (1899). This was a recording of a wrestling match in Mumbai.
Documentary was therefore the first Indian movie genre—pioneered by the
prolific Sen and Bhatwadekar, and nurtured by the contributions of their
enterprising Indian successors, European professional filmmakers, and amateur
British officials keen on recording their experiences of India.
The Indian experience of movie making, as a recording-on-film activity,
began almost coincidentally with the birth of world cinema. Its first feature—
or story—film, Pundalik (Sage Pundalik), was released a decade later, on May
18, 1912, made by Ramchandra Gopal Torney, who was from the western
Indian state of Maharashtra. It gave birth to the Indian silent era’s second
major film genre—the devotional film. These were primarily biographical
films, usually about a local seer or a saint-poet. Pundalik’s pioneer status has
been renegotiated over time, with critics and historians arguing that it was
only a photographic recording of a stage play and not a properly shot film. The