Avinash Lohana (MUMBAI MIRROR; July 17, 2017)

Roshmilla Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; February 26, 2014)

Mirror had reported that the country’s first National Museum for Indian Cinema would open on February 22. But it could not keep its date with history. According to a source, on the day the article appeared, February 18, a call from Centre informed the museum officials that they'd have to postpone the inauguration.

The Information & Broadcasting Minister, Manish Tewari, was to do the honours. The source says that the last-minute change in plans could have been prompted by political upheavals in Delhi with the Telegana Bill getting passed in Parliament on February 18.

Project coordinator Anil Kumar confirmed that the museum is yet to open. “We are ready and waiting for a fresh date to be set,” he said.

The museum is housed inside the heritage bungalow, Gulshan Mahal, at Mumbai’s Peddar Road. In one of the nine halls, there is a 3-D replica of a set from India’s first full-length feature, Raja Harishchandra, first screened for the public on May 3, 1913, at Girgaon’s Coronation Cinema. The museum was initially slated to open on May 3, 2013, but wasn't ready then.

Roshmilla Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; February 18, 2014)

The paint is fresh but the Victorian style Gothic bungalow with its antique tiles, sparkling chandelier and stained glass windows dates back to the 19th century. After years of being shut, Peerbhoy Khalakdina’s home will open its doors to visitors from this weekend. On February 22, Information & Broadcasting Minister, Manish Tewari, will inaugurate the country's first National Museum for Indian Cinema.

The museum’s curator, film scholar and historian Amrit Gangar, can talk endlessly not only about the memorabilia spread across the nine rooms of Gulshal Mahal, but also the bungalow itself. “It was originally called Gulshan Abad and its main entrance offered a spectacular view of the sea,” he says.

The estate passed down from to the merchant son Jairazbhoy Peerbhoy and then his elder grandson, Noormohamad Jairazbhoy. When he died early without heirs, it came into the possession of his younger brother Cassamally Jairazbhoy.

Cassamally’s third wife, Khurshid Rajabally, landscaped the five aces of woods into Chinese and Japanese gardens where mehfils were hosted. “Their musicologist son, Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy, made documentaries on Indian music. His mother filmed the Haj pilgrimage which is one of the earliest documentaries made by an Indian woman. So it was apt that after serving briefly as a hospital for soldiers of the Second War War and the Jai Hind College, Gulshan Mahal, post Independence, housed the office of the Documentary Films of India and later the Films Division,” says Gangar.

In 1976, when Films Division shifted to a modern building within the premises, the heritage bungalow only opened to the occasional film shoots, like Munnabhai MBBS till a Museum Advisory Committee, lead by filmmaker Shyam Benegal, decided it was the perfect place a museum tracing the evolution of Indian cinema from the silent era to the talkies, from the studio system to star system.

“The museum is not Bollywood-centric, there is equal emphasis on the pioneers and stalwarts of every regional film zone, from Bengal to down South, through the North to the North-East,” says coordinator Anil Kumar, asserting the idea is to recreate and relive our cinema through a collection of equipment, photographs, hand-written shooting scripts, lobby cards, interactive computer-aided displays, CDs and DVDs and much more.

The design and display is the handiwork of Kolkata’s National Council of Science Museum. The Bengal touch is evident in a scroll or ‘pata chitra’ that has pride of place in the central hall, introducing visitors to the “notion of motion”. “The word ‘chitrapat’ comes from ‘pata chitra’,” informs Gangar.
 
He points to a a replica of the Shambarik Kharolika or ‘magic lantern’, one of the earliest projector known. “There’s also the Thaumatrope, Praxinoscope, Zeotrope and Phenakistoscope, early animation toys which used the persistence of vision principle to create an illusion of motion. Children can play with them and understand the basic principle of motion pictures,” he reasons. 

Other landmarks of our cinematic history, like the Delhi Durbar of 1911, is represented through a panel, while a three-dimensional tabulaeu of French cinematographers, Auguste and Lous Lumiere recreates “the miracle of the century”-- a screening of six of their films, including Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat, at Mumbai’s Watson Hotel on July 7, 1986.

“Unfortunately, many of our earlier films, including first talkie Alam Ara, and Indrasabha which had 69 songs, are lost, but we have a recording from Nitin Bose’s Dhoop Chhaon, the Hindi remake of the Bengali Bhagya Chakra, the first Hindi film to use playback. There are also gramophone disc recordings of KL Saigal and other greats,” promises Gangar.

Anil Kumar adds that while there is plenty of equipment on show, and lots of literature and photographs, they need to acquire more costumes, jewellery and film props. “May be once they see the museum, families of filmmakers will donate from their private collection,” he says.

A three-storey building that'll come up next to Gulshan Mahal in two years will house a second museum with more gallery space, a curio shop and a food court. “Till then there's this one and an old Films Division studio which has been renovated into a multi-purpose hall for seminars, workshops and exhibitions. Films and documenatries can also screened in a 250-seater auditorium.”

Gangar rues that many young cinegoers haven't heard of Raja Harishchandra : “We have a 3-D replica of a set from India's first full-length feature screened for the public on May 3, 1913, at Girgoan’s Coronation Cinema. We had planned to open the museum exactly 100 years later, on May 3, 2013. We’re late by nine months but the finally India will have its first National museum on Indian cinema.”

Professor Rosie Thomas’ book, Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies, pays homage to Indian B- films made between 1903 and 1993.KAREENA N GIANANI explores Thomas’ fascination with an arm Hindi cinema often rubbished by mainstream filmmakers
Kaereena N Gianani (MID-DAY; February 9, 2014)

As she speaks, Rosie Thomas, Professor of Film, University of Westminster, excitedly shifts about quite a bit on the couch, gesticulating, her eyebrows almost ready to take off playfully. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise — after all, she is speaking about a 30- year- long fascination in her academic career.

Thomas’ recently- released book, Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies, chronicles the under- discussed yet significant culture of B-movies in India between 1930-1993. It also delves into underlying themes of Indian cinema and how actors, production values and budgets might have changed, but themes have lasted over decades.

Thomas mainly worked on her book between 2005 and 2012, but she says the Hindi cinema bug bit her three decades ago. Back then, she was studying Anthropology at The London School Of Economics, UK. When it came to choosing a topic for her PhD, her professors pronounced her crazy (informally, of course, but vehemently). “I announced that I am going to India for a PhD on Hindi cinema. Unlike now, Hindi cinema was quite obscure in the UK.” Thomas spent 18 months in Pune and Mumbai (then Bombay) and hung out with the film fraternity to understand the ethos of the film industry. “I was lucky to have been introduced to actor Smita Patil and Mohan’s Segal’s daughter, Uma.” She smiles and recalls those days spent diving into old dialogue books and cassettes, and watching two-three films every week.

“Over time, I realised I was imbibing the culture — for instance, to understand what how did secular motifs emerge in Manmohan Desai’s films, I sat during scripting. He drew the Hindu, Muslim and Catholic characters on a blackboard with different coloured chalks and spent hours etching them out,” she remembers. The professor says she is aware that she came across as an “eccentric, white woman” fascinated by the unknown in a land far away. “But that suited the anthropologist in me just fine.” Thomas says she also paid great attention to how Hindi films were financed, black money et al, and began working with trade pundits. She sat for the Friday screenings and over time, could predict the film’s fate just as well as the authors of the trade guide.

In 2005, Thomas decided to take her work on Hindi cinema ahead. “I wanted to explore the aesthetics of the B-films in Hindi cinema. There’s a lot of snobbery about not watching them, but everyone knew what they were all about.”

Thomas, however, had more interesting reasons behind her decision. “Not many people know that Raja Harishchandra (1913) may not have been the first Hindi film at all. Hiralal Sen had released a two hour film, Ali Baba in 1903 in Calcutta. The film has been burnt down now. So, the first celluloid hero of Hindi cinema was not a prince but a poor woodcutter, and few even know it,” she says.

At a time when the world was enamoured with Bollywood, Thomas wanted to go back in time and unearth a different tale. “My book tells a multi-stranded story in the history of Indian cinema,” says Thomas. “No one knows of the landmarks these B-films boast of — in 1925, for instance, Homi Wadia’s Gul-e-Bakavali was the first hit silent film of the country, a year before Thief Of Baghdad .” Thomas says she is not awarding B- films any certificate of artistic brilliance. “However, I do think that they deserve their share of recognition because they experimented boldly with special effects, while the ‘elite’ filmmakers were not. Also, mainstream filmmakers often pride themselves for giving the audience a secular fare, which isn’t true — the Islamic culture was alive in B-films in the late 1930s even when the mainstream films were not so inclusive. Look at Arabian Nights, Fearless Nadia — that’s secular in the true sense.”

Thomas concentrated on the work of Homi Wadia, Nanabhai Bhatt (Mahesh Bhatt’s father) and Kekubhai Desai (Manmohan Desai’s father) — the three biggies of the B- film industry in Bombay. “I think their work is not widely discussed because, as always, history is written by the winners,” feels Thomas. Their part of the history, she argues, is even more significant because we just celebrated 100 years of Indian cinema.

Is there a contemporary parallel to mainstream Hindi cinema today, like the B- films once were? She bursts into laughter and says, “Why do you think I asked Mahesh Bhatt to launch my book — he is the perfect example of roping in the likes of Emraan Hashmi, making masala films on not-very-high budgets and getting it right with the masses,” she says.

In her book, Thomas also speaks of the logic of mainstream Hindi cinema. “I have tried to show how Agneepath is related to Khalnayak, which is related to Deewar and that, to Mother India . The basic Indian ethos remains unchanged in the cinema.”

Thomas is not done with B films yet — her next book is solely dedicated to the lives of Homi Wadia and Fearless Nadia. “ They had no pretensions on being ‘ artistes’ but their cinematic journeys were fascinating, and I’d like to chart that,” says Thomas.