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Dadasaheb Phalke and the Birth of Indian Cinema
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entrepreneurs in all walks of life. It was in this climate of an all-inclusive
swadeshi movement that inspired Phalke to make “films on Indian subjects by
the Indians, for the Indians.” Phalke, in his forties, left a comfortable government
job to attempt a new career of which he had no knowledge, beyond an
all-consuming passion and a motivation reflective of the super-charged times.
The self-taught Phalke even refused lucrative offers by London-based producers
to work in the U.K., at a princely sum of 300 pounds a month, following
the enthusiastic reception of his first set of films on a screening visit to London
in 1917. He had instead opted to struggle with an unpredictable career at home,
attempting to nurture and establish what he then saw as a still-fledgling
swadeshi (Indian) film industry. Perhaps it was this uncompromising equating
of swadeshi with Indian-only stories and storytelling styles that Phalke’s
choice of feature film subjects never went beyond the epic and Sanskrit drama
sources, even when popular taste had begun veering towards other themes
and genres, like the Parsi theater-inspired fantasy films, or family socials
and comedies inspired by Shakespearean dramas and European films, this
despite the fact that Phalke had played few minor Shakespearean characters
in his earlier tryst with professional theater as a student actor. Also, given
the unavailability of female actors agreeing to act onscreen, Phalke preferred
casting young Indian boys in women’s parts (as was prevalent in many local
Indian dance and theater traditions), instead of casting British, Anglo-Indian,
or Western actresses with Indian screen names as Indian characters, as was
common in Indian films of the silent era.
Phalke’s selections and motivations went far beyond the personal. He saw
the establishment of an Indian film industry as a pioneer’s responsibility,
even if it came at the cost of his survival, sanity, and financial security. He was
driven by a firm and spirited conviction that “the Indian people would get an
occasion to see Indian images on the screen and people abroad would get a
true picture of India.”
The Phalke Film Shastra
Phalke’s idea of swadeshi was not limited to telling Indian stories with an
Indian-only cast and crew. It was also about re-introducing his creative fraternity
and successors to the traditional Indian style of storytelling and performance,
and its appreciation as postulated in the Nātyaśāstra (the Indian
classical Sanskrit text on drama). Despite a decline in public performances of
Sanskrit-language dramas in the medieval century, critics and commentators
consistently engaged with the Nātyaśāstra as a dramatic treatise.
Phalke’s exhaustive oeuvre of more than one hundred films sourced all
its stories from the puranas, the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and the Sanskrit