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Millenials and Gen Z often use the term multi-hyphenate for someone, especially a celebrity who is proficient in several skills. While there are many personalities of multiple talents both in India and abroad, one artiste whose name immediately comes to mind is the late and unparalleled Dadasaheb Phalke. Known to everyone by his moniker of ‘Father of Indian cinema,’ Phalke lead an interesting life that was beset with struggles, failures and unprecedented achievements.
Born as Dhundiraj Govind Phalke in 1870, in the Trimbak city of Nashik, Maharashtra, Phalke belonged to a Brahmin Marathi family, where his father was a well-known Sanskrit scholar and his mother was a homemaker. Professionally, his father was a priest, and together they were a family of nine people, with three sons and four daughters.
Despite being born into the British India, Phalke’s family seemed sufficiently well-off, with Dadasaheb managing not only to do his matriculation, but enrolling into prestigious schools such as Sir JJ School of Art. Phalke was only 15 when he enrolled into Mumbai’s oldest art institute and completed a year of drawing course, and ended up getting married to a girl from his community next year. Unfortunately, that marriage couldn’t last his lifetime as he lost both his partner and child to plague.
Apart from his one year training in drawing, Phalke also enrolled himself for lessons in oil painting and watercolour painting at Kala Bhavan a little later. This is where he also gained knowledge about architecture as well as photography. Around that time, Phalke got himself a camera and so began his experimentations with photography and printing. Around the mid 1890s, Phalke began his short-lived career as a professional photographer, clicking portraits and making family albums. But the business did not bloom and he relocated from Godhra to Baroda. There he is said to have met a German illusionist by the name of Carl Hertz, from whom he learned some ‘magic’ that also involved a few techniques of trick photography, all skills which Phalke ultimately ended up using in his films.
In early 1900s, Phalke married again, this time to a woman called Girija, aka Saraswati. Saraswati and Phalke went on to have a long working marriage where they even ended up collaborating professionally. Not many know, but Phalke also worked with Archaeological Survey of India as a draftsman, but job dissatisfaction led him to leave it and start up a printing press in Lonavala. The printing press, Laxmi Art Printing Works, closely collaborated with the late great painter Raja Ravi Verma.
Phalke’s brush in with moving pictures did not happen until 1911, when he had long left the printing press owing to differences. The films Amazing Animals and French director Alice Guy-Blache’s The Life of Christ left a deep impact on Phalke, who had begun envisioning what it would be like to have similar Indian deities take up the screen and appear to mere mortals in their human forms. The thought seemed both simple and revolutionary, and so Phalke began focusing on making his first full-length feature, completely home-grown, and even visited London for research. He found his film company, Phalke Films Company, in 1912 and after toiling for almost eight months, the country got its first silent moving picture in Raja Harishchandra. Phalke wrote, directed and produced the feature while his wife Saraswati helped with costume designing and food catering. His eldest son Bhalchandra playedan important role, making it a complete family affair.
Raja Harishchandra was a success, bringing in money to Phalke’s company and boosting him to further his passion of cinema. Thus, the foundation of Indian cinema as we now know it was laid in 1913, more than three decades before India achieved its independence from British Raj. To make a movie under colonialism, have it be a success, work on it from ground zero and practically introduce a new art to his fellow citizens is a unique triumph for one man with limited technology at his disposal.
Dadasaheb Phalke went on to make a reported 27 short films, and over 90 full-length movies in his career as a filmmaker of nearly two decades. Some of his other well-known works are Lanka Dahan, Shri Krishna Janma and Satyavan Savitri among others. After living a rich, full life of passions and hardships, Phalke breathed his last on February 16, 1944. More than two decades after his demise, the Indian government announced the Dadasaheb Phalke Awards in 1969, conferred to those for their significant contribution to arts and cinema.
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