In Little’s opinion, Holwell was clearly an unreliable witness to the whole incident. The survivor of the Black Hole had, according to the scholar, creatively tampered with the truth in an attempt to pass himself off as a hero. Considering that Holwell went on to become acting Governor of Bengal, the ploy seemed to have paid off quite handsomely. Little’s article had come out only four years before, and India-watchers in London had become agitated—a rather complex word that covers the various sub-feelings of being irritated, surprised and aghast to the point of disbelief—over this bit of revisionism. In India, most people hadn’t even heard about the radical article, let alone the small ruckus that it caused in England.
A letter was sent to Little and permission was sought to make a fictitious account of the contentious event that occurred on June 20, 1756. A line from him, Lalji figured, would make the bioscope even more authentic. There was just the small matter of getting him to not mind the fact that in our fictionalized depiction of the historical event we would actually show 146 whited-up, European-seeming bodies crammed in a very small closed space—and the minor but necessary inclusion of a lady in the climactic scene. J.H. Little was a Liberal. So perhaps he would require some sort of incentive to lend his trust and support.
Shooting began with the scene in which Shiraj-ud-Daula gets the news that both the English and the French have started to build armed fortifications in a territory that he, as Nawab of Bengal, was given to rule after the death of his predecessor, Alivardi Khan. Even as the camera—with Shombhu-mama still turning the camera handle—was sucking the story in, telegraphic messages were stuttering between London and this city. Little, as we had feared, was adamant that his premise not be overturned even in a bioscope dramatization, which Lalji tried to explain was just an imaginative depiction of the Black Hole incident and not a historical documentation or recreation.
Eight days went by deciding on what constitutes a bioscope recreation and a bioscope dramatization. The uneven, twirling and inebriated type of telegrams were all kept inside a green file marked ‘Little Black Hole’ in Lalji’s office. After a longish meeting that also involved what must have been an expensive overseas telephone call, and through which nerves were getting frayed sooner than they could be repaired, it was agreed that at no point in the motion picture should there be any mention of a fixed number of Europeans in the blighted room. (The title that would have read ‘145 shahebs and 1 mem all crammed inside on a blisteringly hot night!’ was junked.)
But when Little finally got to know (admittedly, a little late in the day) that we also had an Englishwoman as prisoner inside our Black Hole, he sent a terse telegraph: ‘NO STOP NEVER STOP WONT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH BIOSCOP STOP’.
At that point even Lalji, ever composed and controlled, thought that he had made a blunder by getting in touch with Little in the first place. This would now inevitably lead to a ruckus even before the bioscope was finished. Just when he was about to politely ensure that the Englishman’s involvement in the feature was cancelled, a message from London came three days after the explosive telegram from Little. This hinted, as much as a telegram can hint at things, that the scholar was willing to come to a compromise.
‘HEARD OUT BIOSCOP SOURCES HERE STOP WILLING TO MAKE MINOR RPT MINOR CHANGES TO SCRIPT’
It took less than a week to renegotiate the ‘terms of consultancy and quasi-historical approval’. Little ended up with £30 more in his kitty for willing to have his name and quote in the publicity material of The Black Hole of Calcutta, or Survival of the Fittest. That was, incidentally, a 15 per cent increase on his original fee.
It was a good thing that Little agreed because with his blessings and endorsement The Black Hole of Calcutta became the talk of the town, it drew crowds from all over the city and beyond like no other performance—theatre or bioscope—had ever drawn before, or indeed would for some years. Bholanath Chandra’s approving words in the reviews and on the flyers and posters helped, of course, by getting the bhadralok crowd interested. But, only the Englishman J.H. Little—an English scholar who, naturally, knew history in the way that only English scholars do—would draw them to The Black Hole like beggars to a zamindar’s wedding. However, it was also clear to us that what really made everyone flock to the Alochhaya theatre, and to all the other bioscope theatres across the country which had bought prints of the feature, was something else altogether: the presence of one mem among 145 men in the dungeon.
Dinesh Boral would later write accurately in his autobiography, My Silent Years: ‘Shooting was hell. There was no way anyone could speak in the heat. Even though the routine had always been to mouth something that one felt was apt for the scene despite it being a silent film, it was just too much of an effort. Horen was the only one anyone could hear speaking out loudly, commanding us, sometimes individually, but mostly as living pieces of furniture, brandishing his tapered megaphone at anyone who needed instructions. And everyone on the field of Tala—which pretended to be the vast expanse of Laldighi—did need instructions galore.
‘So in the heat, we faced the camera—one camera changing positions constantly, with the sweat-drenched Ashok Ray behind it—and acted, pretending to shout, scream, moan and speak without uttering a word. It’s hard to decide which of the two made the heat really unbearable—the sunlight beating down on us like non-stop yellow sheet lightning with no gaps in between or the huge mirrors that magnified this light and directed it on to our bodies already toasting inside the costumes. The makeup came off too soon and I think you could see it in The Black Hole’s tremendous battle sequence.’
Initially, it had been decided that we would hire a large contingent of the 125 extras who were required to play the role of the European soldiers from the Anglo-Indian community. But just before word was about to be sent out through the media of The Statesman and a few handouts at places like the Carlton, there was a change of plan. Fair and sturdy Bengalis were found and the make-up artists applied just the right amount of foundation, talcum and finely grained lacto calamine (for the palish pink hue) for them to look like shahebs—which they did only remotely even in black and white. (The silly trick of applying just foundation and topping their heads with blond wigs would not do if standards were to be set.) More than a few of them looked rather odd, like photographic negatives walking about.
It was the prison scene, of course, that the crowds actually paid good money to come and see. We knew even while making the long scene that this was going to be the point on which the whole bioscope would hinge. Out of the mammoth, till then unheard-of one and a half hours of the motion picture, a whole forty minutes were devoted to this scene. It started with the European prisoners being hoarded into the black, cobbly-walled cell. It ended with the dramatic survival of a few. But the real story within the story of The Black Hole as a whole and the prison scene in particular was undoubtedly the passionate—and illicit—love story between the two strangers, John Zepheniah Holwell and Mary Carey, one of the few women who had been left behind in the city when it was overrun by Nawab Shiraj-ud-Daula’s forces.
Durga, who played Mary, was uncomfortable before the scene. She was to partially bare herself not only in front of the people around her on the sets but also before an unending stream of people whose character, identity and proclivity towards tastefulness she would never know. Sounding almost like a flesh-and-blood version of J.H. Little’s exclamatory telegraphic messages, Durga had shown signs of acute nervousness by spluttering before the day of shooting approached.
‘You know Alochhaya would not do anything that isn’t artful,’ I had told her one day when she was on the verge of chewing up her lower lip.
‘You have no idea about the risks that I face, playing an Englishman who is considered a rogue by the whole country,’ I went on. ‘But you know why I’m risking it? I’m risking it, Durga, because this will be big. I just know it, and these are not Lalji’s words. I just know it.’
I can never be sure whether it was my small pep talk or L
alji’s clever ploy that made her give in: Lalji had been the source and at the forefront of rumours doing the rounds in Alochhaya about the studio seriously considering someone else—some Nadia from Bombay—for the coveted role of Mary Carey. But who should take the credit is inconsequential. Durga agreed. Which, you must admit, was brave of her. For not only would she have to reveal more of her body than any other woman in Indian bioscopes had ever done, she would have to do this pretending that she was an eighteenth-century European woman too busy fighting for her life to think about her modesty.
It was a very crowded space that Durga and I entered. She was wrapped in a loose bedcover underneath which she wore a white dress that she had practised peeling off several times alone in her room as well as a few times in the trusted company of another Alochhaya regular, Bimala. I was told that she had had two large gins before coming out of her room with makeup and costume. If the gin helped, it hadn’t hidden her discomfiture totally.
The awkward, slightly ridiculous, fact that there were a large number of people who didn’t have to do anything but writhe about in an extremely close space was eclipsed by the more overwhelming fact that I would be in intimate physical contact with Durga. We were to be so close, so intermingled in body and limb, that I felt unsure where the pretending would end, where the loss of control begin. A man with a powder puff gave me one final powder puff and a quick flurry of dabs of thickened water faking as sweat. The powder and the water miraculously refrained from mixing and as the mirror flitted away, I caught a dour-looking old-style Englishman scowling back at me with visible derision.
There are many things that a good actor can pretend at with great conviction. Love, hate, funniness, physical pain and being unloved—these being the basic five. (Relief, thankfully, was a theatre device, and if required to be recreated in a bioscope was effectively taken care of by a pair of wide eyes and a mopping of the forehead with a white handkerchief or clothes-end.) With talent and practice these five pretend-emotions could be conjured up to inhabit the face and the rest of the body like jewellery on women. But acting is not only about conjuring up emotions and gestures that wouldn’t otherwise exist. It’s also about directing the flow of existing feelings, like cupping running water and redirecting into the mouth for the purpose of drinking.
Inside the narrow set, illuminated by spotlights carefully placed to stretch individual shadows to their physical limits and make them sprawl on each other, I was expected to display physical discomfort. It didn’t help at all that Durga looked beautiful. She just stood there, diffident and a little vulnerable, at the edge next to the camera, waiting for the shot to be shot.
Long shot of a room with one gate. The gate is a row of stripes through which one can see a slow but constant movement. The source of the faint light is inside the room but it can’t be seen. The movement is a slow churning of pale matter made extra visible in the surrounding darkness. That the room has a high ceiling can be made out by the fact that the moving pale matter inside is a high heap that continues beyond the height of the barred entrance.
A medium shot of three guards sitting on a stone platform and nodding. There are three lances resting diagonally against the wall in the corner where they are seated, at the end of a long passage. This passage is lit up by a lamp placed in a niche midway between the ground and the ceiling.
One guard scratches himself in his sleep. All three have their shirts unbuttoned and their head clothes as little mounds beside them.
Close-up of the padlock hanging from the gate. The lock is big. Behind the barred gate, one notices a shuffling form. It is actually many forms. One can focus on a hand. That soon turns into a hairless chest. Which turns into a part of a face that could be a mouth. A mouth that could be a foot. A foot that becomes a chest. Which soon turns into a hand. And so on.
Medium aerial shot inside the room. One looks down on a hillock of bodies. The figures in the middle are less active than the ones at the edges. But the movement is more brisk, less slow, now that one is inside the room. The walls are black and shiny. It could be slime. The mass of bodies is white and shining. It could also be mould. Faces can be seen. One face is contorted and appears to be just a head with no body attached to it. Another has its eyes rolled up with only the whites showing and its mouths open. The huddle and the heap do not look Asiatic at all.
Medium shot of a pair of small barred windows looking out into scratchy, hazy night.
Long shot of a tall window set high into the wall opposite the gate. The jumble of mass of bodies is moving between the window and the gate.
A few faces can be seen below the window. These faces are breathing slowly.
On the other side, next to the gate, a body comes into view. It presses out from the inside of the giant white dough, pressing itself on to the bars of the gate. It belongs to a large man. His white shirt is unbuttoned and is translucent with sweat. His thinning hair and drooping moustache are drenched and pasted to his skin as if he has been baptized and pulled out of the water only a moment ago.
John Holwell had reached the mouth of the cell once before in the last eight hours. It seemed like hours, but it probably was minutes since he had last faced the bars and negotiated frantically in bad Hindustani with the guard who insisted on speaking to him in bad English. But since the transaction involved the procurement of drinking water, and neither of the two men on either side of the gate knew the right word for water in each other’s language—John had said ‘penni’ when the guard had expected him to say ‘wetter’—it took a full twenty minutes to get the message across.
‘Paani, tell him to get paani,’ croaked an emerging face from behind John Holwell. It was Tyler, one of the carpenters from Writers’ Row. The guard shrugged on hearing the request, looked sideways, then, extracting a promise of a grand thousand rupees immediately after the firingi’s release, disappeared and returned a full quarter hour later with a large thimbleful of water. By that time, John’s coordinates in the room had changed. His back was now touching the area where the metal bars ended and the damp but hot stone wall began. He had, however, somehow managed to keep his eyes glued on the entrance. He called out when the guard with his thimble came into view.
‘Here man, here. Paani, paani, please.’
Announcing the nature of the transaction about to be under way was a mistake. He should have used his reason and made that extra effort to show his face fully. Instead, he had shouted out to the guard. Not too many inside the cell were as ignorant of Hindustani as John was. What followed was a small mayhem in reaction to the word ‘paani’.
The two small grilled windows next to each other near the ceiling on the other side of the room had no one looking in through them. But if someone had, he would have seen very little in the one stop short of pitch darkness below. Instead, he would have registered the slow moan—a slimy polyphony, really—change to open cries of desperation and some flickering animal sounds. And his eyes would have smarted with the fumes that emanate when a crowd of bodies cling to each other, without proper desire or volition, but without complaint or disgust either, crunching and sliding the flesh and bones, the hair and sweat.
With a great effort, John bent his body into a half crouch–half stretch position in order to take the thimble-thing between his fingers. His mouth was too far from the bars to accept the water straight from the guard. In the crowd, and with three separate instalments of contortions to mediate, his hands were as steady as those of a drunkard loading a rifle. Only a few drops of the precious fluid remained in the receptacle, most of the palmful amount having fallen on the nearby bodies.
Through the hours that followed, John slipped in and out of an overheated and constricting consciousness. At one point, he found himself next to a man who was propped up by his own body on one side and someone else’s on the other. The man’s fingers held a tricorn cap up to the level of his chest. In the inadequate light it looked as if the man’s heart, bone and tissue had been scooped ou
t of his chest, leaving a neat, quiet hole. But it was, John saw after a long spell of disorientation, only the man’s blue hat, turned black in the darkness, against his spectral white shirt. John only realized that the man with the hat had either passed out or was dead when the figure dropped away from his vision like a set of old clothes the moment he moved and stopped supporting his weight.
‘Only if General Drake hadn’t been so, so very stupid,’ John said to himself closing his eyes. He pressed his eyes until he started seeing pinpricks of swirling colour. Perhaps, being outraged at Governor Drake’s action against that scoundrel Omichand would help him through this hell.
No one messes with one of the most powerful natives in Bengal. And Drake had done just that. Omichand was a fat ball of grease who would happily sell his mother if that meant making a profit. But he was the richest man in Calcutta. And that kind of wealth brings power that can be transmutated into security, more wealth and even a lease of life. It was this Omichand that Drake had decided in his very finite wisdom to throw in jail. In fact, if John—as magistrate—remembered correctly, Drake had thrown the man into this very cell! People of Omichand’s stature do business by remembering, like elephants, the behaviour of the men they do business with. And Drake had thrown him in prison.
Bioscope Man Page 15