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Dadasaheb Phalke and the Birth of Indian Cinema
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Dhundiraj Govind Phalke.
Photo courtesy of NFAI
Phalke’s father, Dajishastri Phalke, was an equally inflexible man of principles.
Summanwar writes:
Daji was a renowned Sanskrit scholar. He was a puranic (a scholar
of Indian history and religious myths) and a Vedasampana shastri
(a master of the oldest Hindu religious texts, the Vedas). And it
was because of this that Dhundiraj and his brother Bapu knew the
Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bhagavad Gita (one of the holiest
Hindu scriptures) and the Vedas by heart—a fact that surprised his
friends in later years. But for the Phalkes it was commonplace; their
family performed all the Hindu rites except those connected with
death. . . . The lullabies that Dhundiraj’s mother and grandmother
sang to him were in fact musical narrations of the great Hindu epics.
It was no wonder that by the age of seven he could recite good parts
of them by heart, in Sanskrit. At some level, he seemed to interpret
life itself through these epics, a fact that is almost incomprehensible
to most people today. Lord Rama and Lord Krishna were not mere
household names but dominant influences in Dhundiraj’s life. They
were to greatly impact his work in later years.