Dadasaheb Phalke

Come into a tent on a Bombay (Mumbai) maidan — one of the canvas "picture palaces" that have sprung up on the open grounds of Girgaon, smelling of kerosene, crowd and trampled grass. It is the Christmas season of 1910, by the showman's own later telling. On a bedsheet-sized screen at the far end, a miracle is in progress: photographs are moving. The film is The Life of Christ, a French production, and the audience watches the Nativity, the miracles, the Crucifixion flicker past in silver and shadow.

Somewhere in the cheap seats sits a forty-year-old Marathi printer in a dhoti and coat. His name is long — Dhundiraj Govind Phalke — and his luck is short. He has just walked out of the printing company he built, after a quarrel with the money men; he has buried one wife and a child in a plague; he has been, in rough order, an art student, a photographer, a stage magician, a draughtsman and a maker of picture blocks for other men's presses. He is, by any sensible reckoning, finished.

But watch him watching. While Christ walks on water, something else entirely is happening behind this man's eyes. He will describe it himself, seven years later: while the life of Christ rolled fast before his physical eyes, he was mentally visualising the gods — Shri Krishna, Shri Ramchandra, their Gokul and Ayodhya. If a European could put his god on a screen and make a tent full of strangers weep, why was there no Indian god up there? Why were the sons of India always the audience, never the makers?

You have been in this seat. Everyone who has ever watched somebody else's product, somebody else's demo, somebody else's country doing the thing, and felt the itch turn into a vow — we could do this; I could do this — has been in this tent. Most people let the feeling die by Tuesday. This man went home, could not sleep, and began going back night after night until the strain of staring at flickering screens damaged his eyes and a doctor had to rescue his sight. Half-blind, middle-aged, unemployed, he then pawned what little his household had and set out to conjure an industry out of a bedsheet and a beam of light.

India would come to call him Dadasaheb Phalke — "respected elder brother" — the father of Indian cinema. Here is how a failed printer lit the match, who actually kept the flame burning (her name was Saraswatibai, and she has waited a century for her paragraph), and why the ending of this story shames and redeems us at once.

The Life

A note on sources first, because even a life this recent has soft edges. Much of what we know comes from Phalke himself — a series of articles he wrote for the Marathi journal Navyug in 1917–18, part memoir, part manifesto — supplemented by trade papers, family memories and the patient reconstructions of film historians. Memoirs written by showmen are performances too: Phalke remembered the fateful tent screening as Christmas 1910, while historians tracing Bombay's actual screening schedules place The Life of Christ at the America-India Picture Palace around Easter, April 1911. The box-office legends of his hit years grew in the telling. This chapter keeps his own version in the foreground, since it is a primary document of how the founder saw his founding, and flags the disputed edges as they come.

He was born on 30 April 1870 in Trimbak (Tryambakeshwar), the temple town at the source of the Godāvarī near Nashik, into a Chitpavan Brahmin family of priests. His father, Govindshastri, was a Sanskrit scholar who moved the family to Bombay to teach; the boy grew up between ritual and the colonial city, in a household where the epics were not stories but the family trade. The family trade did not take. In 1885, at fifteen, he entered the Sir J. J. School of Art to learn drawing; from there he went to the Kala Bhavan at Baroda, the technical school of a reform-minded princely state, where through the 1890s he absorbed painting, architectural draughtsmanship, photography, lithography — and, on the side, stage magic, which he later performed professionally. Keep that in view: before he ever touched a movie camera, Phalke had spent twenty years mastering every single craft that cinema is assembled from. No one in India was better prepared for an art that did not yet exist.

The preparation came at a price the ledgers do not show. He set up as a photographer in Godhra in Gujarat, and the business died with the great plague at the turn of the century — and the plague took his first wife and their child too. A widower at thirty, he remarried in 1902: a young woman born Girija Karandikar, renamed, in the Maharashtrian custom of the day, Saraswatibai. The name — the goddess of arts and learning — would prove almost comically apt. He found work as a draughtsman, and then in the orbit of Raja Ravi Varma, the painter whose press at Lonavala printed the god-pictures — cheap colour lithographs of Lakshmi, Saraswati, Shivaji — that were papering the walls of every Indian home. How closely Phalke worked with the great man himself is debated; that he worked in that world of mass-produced divine images is certain, and it matters. Ravi Varma had put the gods into every house. The logical next step was to make them move.

Phalke tried respectability first. In 1908 he co-founded the Laxmi Art Printing Works, travelled to Germany for colour-printing machinery, and built the firm into a success — whereupon he quarrelled with his financier partners over control and, in the pattern that would rule his whole life, walked out with his pride intact and his pockets empty. He was forty, twice bankrupted by fate and once by principle. Then came the tent, the vision, and the obsession: two months of watching every film showing in Bombay, night after night, studying the trick until the eye-strain brought on a cataract and, as the family tradition tells it, nearly cost him his sight — an ophthalmologist, Dr Prabhakar, saved his eyes with treatment and spectacles. Friends concluded he had gone mad. One, at least, lent him money — against his life-insurance policies; the household's remaining security, including Saraswatibai's jewellery, went to the pawnbroker as the venture swallowed everything, and we will return to what she thought of that, because it is the hinge of the story.

On 1 February 1912 he sailed for London — a five-week gamble on a country he had never seen. He carried an introduction to the editor of the trade weekly The Bioscope, a Mr Cabourn, who, instead of laughing at the middle-aged Indian who proposed to found a film industry single-handed, introduced him to Cecil Hepworth, one of Britain's leading film-makers. Hepworth let him spend about a week at his Walton studios watching everything. Phalke bought a Williamson camera for £50, a perforator, a printing machine and Kodak raw stock, and sailed home. Within weeks of landing he had founded Phalke Films, turned a bungalow compound on Dadar Main Road into a studio with a glass-walled shooting room, and begun teaching a scratch crew — and his own family — every job in a film unit. The result, eighteen months after the tent, was Raja Harishchandra, and everything that section below will tell.

The decade that followed was triumph; the two after it, a long lesson in what industries do to founders. The hits of 1913–19 made him famous and made money — mostly for others; the war cut off film stock and finance, and in 1918 he merged his concern into the Hindustan Cinema Films Company with five businessmen as partners. The artist-versus-investors quarrels resumed almost at once. He walked out in 1920, announced his retirement, wrote a satirical play, Rangbhoomi, that flopped expensively; came back on salary to the company he had founded; walked out and came back again, his pay cut at each return; made his last silent spectacle, Setubandhan, just as sound arrived and made silents unsaleable. The talkies — from 1931 — belonged to younger men and to singing stars. At sixty-five he was given one chance at a sound film, Gangavataran (1937), financed from Kolhapur; it took two years, cost a fortune, and failed. He retired to Nashik, to a house he named Hind Cinema Janak — "father of Indian cinema" — and there, poor, embittered and largely forgotten by the industry then booming in Bombay, he died on 16 February 1944. The trade papers gave the founder a few lines.

The Great Work

The tent and the vow. Begin with his own words, from Navyug in 1917, because few founding documents of any industry are this candid: "While the life of Christ was rolling fast before my physical eyes, I was mentally visualising the gods, Shri Krishna, Shri Ramchandra, their Gokul and Ayodhya… Could we, the sons of India, ever be able to see Indian images on the screen?" Notice what the vision actually was. Not "moving pictures are a good business" — others in India had seen that; the Lumière shows had reached Bombay as early as July 1896, and Indians were already filming wrestlers, processions and stage scenes. Phalke's idea was different and bigger: that cinema was a national art waiting to be claimed, and that its Indian form should carry Indian gods and Indian stories, made by Indian hands with Indian money. He said so in plain terms in his essays, in the language of the swadeshi movement — the campaign, red-hot since 1905, to replace British goods with Indian-made ones: his films were swadeshi, he wrote, in capital, ownership, employees and stories. Gandhi (chapter 193) was at that moment turning swadeshi into a politics of the spinning wheel; Phalke, his exact contemporary — born eight months after him, thirty miles of Marathi country apart in spirit — turned it into a technology of the projector. One spun cloth; the other spun light.

The jewellery and the darkroom. Now the paragraph this book owes, because the standard telling gets the shape of the founding wrong. It says: Phalke mortgaged his wife's jewellery. Pause on the grammar of that sentence — the man is the subject, the wife's gold is the object. Here is what the record actually shows. Saraswatibai Phalke agreed to stake her ornaments — a Maharashtrian woman's only independent property, her insurance against widowhood, which she had already once watched a plague make real for another woman — on her husband's scheme to photograph gods. Then she went to work in it. In the Dadar compound she learned to mix developing chemicals, and night after night, in a darkroom improvised from the household, she developed and printed the day's footage and helped perforate raw stock — precision work, done by hand, on which every frame depended; get it wrong and the day's shooting was garbage. By day she held reflectors, kept accounts, managed continuity of an operation run out of her own house, and cooked for the whole unit — a crew and cast that memoirs put at sixty, seventy, at its height over a hundred people, many of whom lived on the premises like a joint family with a film studio attached. She has a strong claim to be India's first film technician, its first laboratory chief, its first line producer and its first studio caterer simultaneously; she is credited on nothing. When you read, later in this book, of the Bombay film world's dynasties and empires, remember that the entire industry began as a marriage — and that this book has shown you such a partnership before, in Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule (chapters 174, 176), another Maharashtrian couple who built an institution the age said was impossible, with the wife doing transformative work the record nearly lost.

A cook cast as a queen. Raja Harishchandra itself was made against a wall of refusals. Phalke advertised for actors; for the heroine, Queen Taramati, no woman would come — not actresses, for there were none; not respectable women, for whom performance meant ruin; not even, the story goes, the dancing-girls and courtesans he approached, who considered films beneath them. His solution has become the industry's favourite founding joke with a sting in it: he found a slender young cook and waiter in a Grant Road tea-shop, Anna Salunke, hired him away for a few rupees more a month, and cast him as the queen. India's first screen heroine was a man. The film — about 3,700 feet of it, four reels, roughly forty minutes — took six months and twenty-seven days to shoot, with Phalke as writer, director, production designer, make-up man, editor and processor, his son Bhalchandra playing the little prince, and the glass-walled studio catching the Bombay light. It premiered for an invited audience at the Olympia theatre on 21 April 1913 and opened publicly on 3 May 1913 at the Coronation Cinematograph, Girgaon — the date India now celebrates as the birthday of its cinema. One honest line here: a year earlier, in May 1912, Shree Pundalik, a filmed stage play made by Dadasaheb Torne with a British cameraman and processed in London, had played the same Coronation; historians still argue over titles, but by the ordinary tests — an original production, shot, processed and owned end to end — Raja Harishchandra stands as the first fully Indian feature film. And consider what story he chose to tell first. Harishchandra — the king of the ancient Śunaḥśepa cycle (chapter 8) — gives up his kingdom, his wife, his son and finally himself rather than break his word. Of all the tales in the treasury, India's cinema opened with a dharma-parable about a man who would not lie told through a machine built for illusions. The founder knew exactly what he was doing; this whole book smiles at the choice.

The first women on the screen. The wall of refusals cracked within months. For his second feature, Mohini Bhasmasur (released January 1914) — the delicious myth of the demon who wins the power to burn anyone he touches and is tricked by Vishnu's enchantress Mohini into touching his own head — Phalke persuaded a stage actress named Durgabai Kamat to play Parvati, and her young daughter Kamalabai Gokhale to play Mohini herself. A mother and daughter, walking together through a door every "respectable" voice said must stay shut: they were the first women ever to act in an Indian film, and Durgabai, a woman separated from her husband and supporting her child by her art, had the least social protection and the most to lose. Their names deserve to sit beside Saraswatibai's in this chapter's ledger of uncredited founders, because an industry that today runs on its actresses began with two women nobody would applaud. Satyavan Savitri followed in 1914 — another tale of a wife who argues death itself into submission; Phalke's camera loved formidable women even when society would not supply them.

Lanka on fire. Then came the spectacle years, when Phalke the magician took over from Phalke the missionary. He had performed conjuring professionally; now he did it at twenty-four frames a second — stop-tricks, double exposures, reverse motion, miniatures. In Lanka Dahan (1917), Hanumān — whom you last saw leaping the ocean in Vālmīki's poem — grows gigantic, is set alight, and burns Rāvaṇa's golden city, while Anna Salunke, the promoted cook, played both Rama and Sita, Indian cinema's first double role. The film was a delirium: audiences reportedly removed their footwear in the cinema as if at a temple, and the takings at one Bombay house — ₹32,000 in ten days is the figure the memoirs give — arrived in coin, carried off, the legend insists, in gunny bags on bullock carts. Label that a legend lovingly polished; the underlying truth, that mythological films had become a mass devotional-commercial phenomenon, is solid. Shri Krishna Janma (1918) and Kaliya Mardan (1919) crowned the run, with Phalke's seven-year-old daughter Mandakini playing the child Krishna — the industry's first child star, a girl playing God — subduing the serpent Kāliya in trick sequences that still delight film students. Between 1913 and 1937 Phalke would make around ninety-five features and twenty-seven shorts; almost all are lost, and of Raja Harishchandra itself only the first and last reels survive.

The founder the factory outgrew. The last panel is the hardest, and the most instructive. The 1918 merger into Hindustan Cinema Films gave Phalke financing and gave his financiers Phalke — a genius who despised budgets, answerable to partners who could read one. The contract itself tells you who held power: a fifteen-year term, with ruinous penalties if the working partner left early. He left anyway, twice, and each return cost him salary and standing; the company found it could make profitable mythologicals with the men he had trained, which is the most brutal compliment an organization ever pays its founder. Sound finished the argument. The talkie arrived in 1931 with Alam Ara, and the silent grammar Phalke had invented for India became, almost overnight, a dead language. His one talkie, Gangavataran (1937), made for Kolhapur Cinetone in his late sixties, sank without trace. The industry his match-flame had lit was by then releasing more than a hundred and fifty films a year and had no seat for him. He wrote begging letters, was granted small charities, and died in Nashik in February 1944 in poverty and near-total obscurity — the father of an industry that had, for all practical purposes, forgotten his address.

Before & After

Backward first. Phalke did not conjure Indian cinema from nothing; he plugged a new machine into the oldest circuits this book has traced. The stories were the epics you have already read — Harishchandra from the Śunaḥśepa cycle (chapter 8), Hanumān from Vālmīki (chapter 12) — and the habit of watching them was already ancient: Śrīmanta Śaṅkaradeva (chapter 126) had built devotional theatre in Assam four centuries earlier, and the Rāmlīlā tradition that grew around Tulsīdās's telling (chapter 140) had made north India an annual open-air cinema of the sacred long before electricity. Phalke's own visual grammar came straight from Raja Ravi Varma's lithographs — the gods' poses, costumes and pastel heavens moved from the printed page to the screen almost frame for frame. And his career shape — the technical self-education abroad, the swadeshi conviction that India must own its own modern industries — places him squarely in the lineage of Jamsetji Tata (chapter 179), except that Tata built with capital and Phalke against it.

Forward, the thread is simply everything. The Gandhi chapter (193) gave you Gandhi, born months before Phalke: the two great swadeshi projects of that generation, the political and the cinematic, ran in parallel — and it is one of history's jokes that the movement's moral engine distrusted films while the films made the gods, and later the nation, visible to the masses the movement needed. Devika Rani and the studio era, Raj Kapoor and Nargis carrying Indian film to the world — those names lie along the road this book now travels, for from this chapter on, the reader's India has a soundtrack and a screen. The line runs to Satyajit Ray (chapter 239), who took Indian cinema from the gods to the village lane and won the world's respect, and to Lata Mangeshkar (chapter 248), whose voice became the industry's very air — and both of their careers were crowned with the award that bears Phalke's name. The global rhyme is exact: France had the Lumières and the magician Méliès, America had its nickelodeon hustlers — every film culture began with conjurers and gamblers. Only India's began with a bankrupt printer photographing dharma; and only India's founder-myth has a queen played by a cook and a laboratory run by a wife.

Why It Still Matters

Start with the raw scale, because it is Phalke's most measurable monument. India today is the largest producer of feature films on earth, and has been for decades — between one and a half and two thousand features in a typical recent year, in more than twenty languages, out-producing Hollywood several times over, with billions of cinema admissions. Bollywood is only the most famous province of it; the Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali and Marathi industries are empires in their own right. Every one of them descends from the glass-walled shed in Dadar. So do the deep habits of Indian cinema that a first-time foreign viewer still notices: the comfort with myth and miracle, the actor worshipped like an avatar, the film release as festival. When the televised Ramayana emptied Indian streets in 1987–88, and when mythological blockbusters still top the charts in the 2020s, the tent in Girgaon is simply continuing.

Then there is the arc of the man himself, which India has turned into an institution of repentance. In 1969, for the centenary of his birth, the Government of India created the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, given at the National Film Awards for lifetime contribution to Indian cinema — the industry's equivalent of the Bharat Ratna. Its first recipient, in 1969, was Devika Rani, the pioneering actress and studio chief; since then the roll-call — Satyajit Ray, Lata Mangeshkar, Raj Kapoor, and the greats of every regional cinema — has made the name of the forgotten man the highest honour his heirs can imagine. A postage stamp followed in 1971; in 2009, the delightful Marathi film Harishchandrachi Factory retold the founding and went to the Oscars as India's official entry. There is a real lesson in this, and it is not a soft one: industries and nations habitually devour their pioneers and canonize them afterwards, and the only question worth asking is what we owe the Phalkes among us before the award ceremony. And there is a second, quieter repair still in progress — the slow writing of Saraswatibai back into the story, in histories, in the 2009 film, in this chapter. The world's largest film industry was founded by a couple. Half the founder died in 1944. The other half deserves better than a footnote, and is finally getting it.

Over to You

Phalke insisted on swadeshi cinema — Indian capital, Indian hands, Indian stories — and turned down Cecil Hepworth's offer of a salaried studio career in England. Was that patriotism, stubbornness or sound strategy? What would Indian cinema look like today if he had said yes?

Saraswatibai's jewellery funded the founding, and her darkroom nights sustained it. Is "the founder's wife" a category history should retire — should we simply say Indian cinema had two founders — or does renaming her a co-founder impose today's language on a partnership that understood itself differently?

No woman would appear in Raja Harishchandra, so a cook played the queen; a year later Durgabai and Kamalabai broke the barrier at real social cost. Who does more for change: the outsider who ignores a taboo, or the insider who absorbs the punishment for breaking it?

The industry that ignored the dying Phalke now venerates his name. Is a posthumous award genuine repair, cheap conscience-laundering, or something in between — and does honouring the name discharge the debt, or advertise it?

Where to Go Next

Start with the source: watch what survives. The first and last reels of Raja Harishchandra (1913) and a nearly complete Kaliya Mardan (1919) are preserved by the National Film Archive of India and circulate freely online — silent, hand-cranked, and startlingly alive; watch seven-year-old Mandakini's Krishna wink at the camera and a century collapses.

A modern way in: Harishchandrachi Factory (2009, dir. Paresh Mokashi; Marathi with subtitles) — a warm, funny, scrupulously affectionate retelling of the founding, and the rare biopic that gives Saraswatibai her due; India's official Oscar entry that year. Pair it with Bapu Watve's short biography Dadasaheb Phalke, the Father of Indian Cinema (National Book Trust) for the record behind the charm.

The thread forward: From the man who put Rama on a screen, to a man who tried to put God into politics and then into human evolution itself. In chapter 195, a Cambridge classicist turned bomb-trial defendant walks out of a British jail transformed, retreats to French Pondicherry, and spends forty years mapping the ascent of consciousness: Sri Aurobindo.