James Cameron's Avatar opened the distinct possibility that technology is about to make its conquest of cinema complete, even possibly making actors redundant, a possibility no one could have foreseen when the last big change happened — the advent of sound in cinema. And that happened to Indian Cinema 80 years ago.
When the Lumiere Brothers who had invented cinema in 1895 chose India as the first destination to show off their invention, they did not realise what a prescient act that was.
Appropriately, the show was held in the Watson Hotel (now a heritage building) in the year 1896. A short and hazy film showing passengers departing a train. Over the first decade of the new century, India had warmly welcomed silent films like Flash Gordon and Spy Smasher.
The first talkie, Jazz Singer, had arrived at the end of the decade but it was still a long way to go before the talkies appeared regularly. By 1914, India had woken up to mythological movies — Raja Harishchandra unleashed regular production in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. Interestingly, there was no way linguistic identity could be established in silent movies, but going by the stars, one could do so.
For instance, one of the silent movies had the entire troupe of Gubbi Veeranna, the famous actor director of Kannada stage. However, the Indian silent movie suffered from a great impediment. No music.
And then music came. The year was 1931, the film was Alam Ara, opening on March 14 in Majestic cinema house in Bombay and three months later in Elgin, Bangalore, the only cinema house built in the year Lumiere Brothers brought cinema to India — in 1896.
I was lucky to participate in the Golden Jubilee of Alam Ara.
It was November 6, 1981, and the Film Federation of India had organised a grand function at Akashavani Theatre, Bombay. There was a band outside serenading the great oldies of the Indian screen as the big stars arrived — Surendra (remember Anmol Ghadi?), Gohar Bai (an actress who transited from the silent era to talkie), Kedar Sharma, A R Kardar, Sardar Akhtar, Jairaj and Trilok Kapur, all of whom are now no more. The curtain opened to reveal Zubeida sitting in a wheelchair. Now paralysed, the first heroine of the talkies looked radiant as she was given a standing ovation.
Alam Ara was months in the making. The technicians were unfamiliar with sound. In fact, it was our own Sarvotham Badami, who had trained as an automobile engineer, who unpacked and set up the newly-arrived sound equipment for Alam Ara.
But cameras had no blimps — the whirring sound drowning out dialogues. So cameras were wrapped in blankets. And the temporary studio was not soundproof and so the shooting was confined to nights to avoid daytime noises.
To add to the discomfort, there was a railway track, which meant stopping the recording every time a train passed.
There were no booms; microphones were hidden in all kinds of places. Often, actors had to huddle around a hidden low fidelity microphone, resulting in self-conscious performances and stagy dialogue delivery. Hence, long takes from a single point were common.
Songs were done in a single shot as playback singing was to come only in 1935 with Nitin Bose's Dhoop Chaon. Inevitably, there were a lot of trials and errors leading to wastage of precious film. Many films were abandoned. That Alam Ara triumphed speaks volumes for those involved.
Apart from Sarvotham Badami from Karnataka, the doyen L V Prasad from the South was involved as an actor, as was Prithviraj Kapoor. Zubeida, the heroine, was a princess, daughter of the Nawab of Sachin. Both her sisters were actresses while her mother Fatima Begum later became famous as the first woman director.
In days when all female roles were played by men dressed as women, the fact that Zubeida, coming from an aristocratic background, should act as the heroine of the first sound film of India was indeed epochal.
In the decade of the 1930s, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Malayalam, Marathi, Guajarati and Punjabi quickly followed. Initially, almost all the films made in the Indian languages had religious themes. For instance, the film that followed Alam Ara was Indra Sabha which had all of 70 songs. Music never abandoned Indian Cinema while in the West it was just one of several genres of cinema. There is no parallel in World Cinema to India's love of music and the genius for adopting it a million ways to cinematic situations.
Name the situation and there is a song. In a sense, India presaged the international video release in vogue today. In terms of the variety of genres as well, India soon overtook the rest of the World. For instance, the inclination towards religious films had myriad sub genres. It could be based on the great epics of India like the Ramayana and Mahabharata or in a purely localised deity like Devi Karumariayamma. In between, there are any number of variants including contemporary religious fantasies somewhat akin to
The Exorcist!
The double digit production had reached three digits by 1947 (283 films) and since then the production graph has been steadily rising, now almost touching four digits! It is mind boggling to hazard a guess at the number of songs we have logged in the Indian film industry from films of all languages in the last 80 years!
In thus making music an inviolable part of an Indian film for all time, Alam Ara became truly a landmark film when it was released in 1931. It had seven songs, one of which, a wandering minstrel's number, De de khuda ke naam par pyare, not only became hugely popular but pioneered the use of commentating chorus, a device adopted in several later films.
Today, Indian films, driven by Indian songs, have spread and continue to spread to all nations in the world from Suriman in Latin America in the West to Bali in the East with each country opting for one genre or the other, just as it does with its favourite actors.
If it is Shahrukh Khan and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge in Germany, it is still Nargis and O Mere lal aja of Mother India in the little villages around Urubamba in Peru! It has even crated a subgenre of music called the Indi Pop in Thessaloniki, the Macedonian part of Greece!
Indian Cinema has thus served as the soft face of India to the world for decades. Perhaps, that is the greatest tribute one can pay to Indian Cinema at its 80th year.
When the Lumiere Brothers who had invented cinema in 1895 chose India as the first destination to show off their invention, they did not realise what a prescient act that was.
Appropriately, the show was held in the Watson Hotel (now a heritage building) in the year 1896. A short and hazy film showing passengers departing a train. Over the first decade of the new century, India had warmly welcomed silent films like Flash Gordon and Spy Smasher.
The first talkie, Jazz Singer, had arrived at the end of the decade but it was still a long way to go before the talkies appeared regularly. By 1914, India had woken up to mythological movies — Raja Harishchandra unleashed regular production in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. Interestingly, there was no way linguistic identity could be established in silent movies, but going by the stars, one could do so.
For instance, one of the silent movies had the entire troupe of Gubbi Veeranna, the famous actor director of Kannada stage. However, the Indian silent movie suffered from a great impediment. No music.
And then music came. The year was 1931, the film was Alam Ara, opening on March 14 in Majestic cinema house in Bombay and three months later in Elgin, Bangalore, the only cinema house built in the year Lumiere Brothers brought cinema to India — in 1896.
I was lucky to participate in the Golden Jubilee of Alam Ara.
It was November 6, 1981, and the Film Federation of India had organised a grand function at Akashavani Theatre, Bombay. There was a band outside serenading the great oldies of the Indian screen as the big stars arrived — Surendra (remember Anmol Ghadi?), Gohar Bai (an actress who transited from the silent era to talkie), Kedar Sharma, A R Kardar, Sardar Akhtar, Jairaj and Trilok Kapur, all of whom are now no more. The curtain opened to reveal Zubeida sitting in a wheelchair. Now paralysed, the first heroine of the talkies looked radiant as she was given a standing ovation.
Alam Ara was months in the making. The technicians were unfamiliar with sound. In fact, it was our own Sarvotham Badami, who had trained as an automobile engineer, who unpacked and set up the newly-arrived sound equipment for Alam Ara.
But cameras had no blimps — the whirring sound drowning out dialogues. So cameras were wrapped in blankets. And the temporary studio was not soundproof and so the shooting was confined to nights to avoid daytime noises.
To add to the discomfort, there was a railway track, which meant stopping the recording every time a train passed.
There were no booms; microphones were hidden in all kinds of places. Often, actors had to huddle around a hidden low fidelity microphone, resulting in self-conscious performances and stagy dialogue delivery. Hence, long takes from a single point were common.
Songs were done in a single shot as playback singing was to come only in 1935 with Nitin Bose's Dhoop Chaon. Inevitably, there were a lot of trials and errors leading to wastage of precious film. Many films were abandoned. That Alam Ara triumphed speaks volumes for those involved.
Apart from Sarvotham Badami from Karnataka, the doyen L V Prasad from the South was involved as an actor, as was Prithviraj Kapoor. Zubeida, the heroine, was a princess, daughter of the Nawab of Sachin. Both her sisters were actresses while her mother Fatima Begum later became famous as the first woman director.
In days when all female roles were played by men dressed as women, the fact that Zubeida, coming from an aristocratic background, should act as the heroine of the first sound film of India was indeed epochal.
In the decade of the 1930s, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Malayalam, Marathi, Guajarati and Punjabi quickly followed. Initially, almost all the films made in the Indian languages had religious themes. For instance, the film that followed Alam Ara was Indra Sabha which had all of 70 songs. Music never abandoned Indian Cinema while in the West it was just one of several genres of cinema. There is no parallel in World Cinema to India's love of music and the genius for adopting it a million ways to cinematic situations.
Name the situation and there is a song. In a sense, India presaged the international video release in vogue today. In terms of the variety of genres as well, India soon overtook the rest of the World. For instance, the inclination towards religious films had myriad sub genres. It could be based on the great epics of India like the Ramayana and Mahabharata or in a purely localised deity like Devi Karumariayamma. In between, there are any number of variants including contemporary religious fantasies somewhat akin to
The Exorcist!
The double digit production had reached three digits by 1947 (283 films) and since then the production graph has been steadily rising, now almost touching four digits! It is mind boggling to hazard a guess at the number of songs we have logged in the Indian film industry from films of all languages in the last 80 years!
In thus making music an inviolable part of an Indian film for all time, Alam Ara became truly a landmark film when it was released in 1931. It had seven songs, one of which, a wandering minstrel's number, De de khuda ke naam par pyare, not only became hugely popular but pioneered the use of commentating chorus, a device adopted in several later films.
Today, Indian films, driven by Indian songs, have spread and continue to spread to all nations in the world from Suriman in Latin America in the West to Bali in the East with each country opting for one genre or the other, just as it does with its favourite actors.
If it is Shahrukh Khan and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge in Germany, it is still Nargis and O Mere lal aja of Mother India in the little villages around Urubamba in Peru! It has even crated a subgenre of music called the Indi Pop in Thessaloniki, the Macedonian part of Greece!
Indian Cinema has thus served as the soft face of India to the world for decades. Perhaps, that is the greatest tribute one can pay to Indian Cinema at its 80th year.