This prison.
That fool.
The pinpricks had dissolved into the darkness of his closed eyes. Opening them again, John hoped that the general had been cut to ribbons on the steps of the council building by the Nawab’s men.
The last two days had not prepared anyone now languishing in the cell for all that finally happened. Not for the cowardly departure of Manningham and Frankland on the Dodaldy. Not for the swarm of indigo-wrapped heads breaching the fort. Not for the dark, billowing smoke that signalled the destruction of Black Town. And definitely not for this room packed with more than one hundred able-bodied Europeans swaying between life and death and gasping to get out of this unintended, suffocating embrace.
But what John at that moment was really unprepared for was the appearance of Mary Carey next to him, with one of her breasts and half her body pressed on to the bars in front.
John had been aware of Mary’s existence ever since he was introduced to her by her husband, Peter, a shipmate who doubled as a transport manager for the company. Peter was married to his job and had consequently risen up the ranks as such men sometimes do. John had helped him just a bit, guided by a tucked-away feeling that this would allow himself to be presented to Peter’s young wife in a good light. No one had really asked for any explanation why John Holwell, magistrate of Calcutta, would take a special interest in the career of a young ex-sailor from Winchester. Even if they had asked for such an explanation, perhaps fuelled by spirits stronger than bourbon (which, incidentally, had been boycotted since the war in Europe), he would not have told them that he took a special interest in Peter Carey because he took a special interest in Mary Carey.
The question of how Mary had found herself in the cell with him and more than a hundred other men was swept away from John’s expanding mind when he saw Mary bending her neck down. When she rose back again, she had gathered one of John’s shirt sleeves between her dark lips. With her left breast positioned between two bars of the locked gate, she pressed the cloth with her lips which started to sparkle—or so John imagined—with newly discovered moisture. It was only after she had done pressing with her lips that she bit into the sweat-drenched cloth with her teeth.
If Mary had behaved in any similar manner a few days ago, she would have probably earned a different reputation from the one that she had—the devoted wife of Peter Carey. Tongues would have wagged, fans would have fluttered extra briskly. But on that hellish night inside a room that the English had built, in which their own people now found themselves heaped upon each other like cabbage left to rot, no one said a word about Mary Carey sucking and biting out the sweat from John Zepheniah Holwell’s left sleeve. They were too busy surviving or perishing in what Mary’s saviour would soon go on to immortalize as the Black Hole of Calcutta.
From the State of Grace
Overnight, Durga and I were forever joined together in some never-decaying couplehood. Only a few months earlier, the public had made a similar connection between Jibananda and Shanti after Anandamath. But with Black Hole, Abani and Durga had become more than bioscoped sweethearts. Mary and John had given out the signal that there was more to amorous attraction than glances, glimpses, gestures or even passionate kisses. There were no distributors those days, but theatres lined up to buy prints of Black Hole—European, Bengali and Anglo theatres.
And then they started showing the picture across the country and beyond. The Europeans and the Anglos lapped up the account of the survival of John Zepheniah Holwell and Mary Carey. The rest cut straight through the chase and stared at the more elemental side of the story as depicted by the giant, visual, more-real-than-real activities of two bodies thrown together in a cauldron seething with humanity. This was Oriental reality cleverly played out in a story about Europeans. With The Black Hole, the bioscope had discovered senses beyond just the visual.
In all this, I attained a stature that can only be described as something born of a mix of worship and envy. Durga, on her part, found herself swimming in a sea of male adoration that cut across race and colour. This, I would later recognize in others as stardom. But in those glorious early days, there was no word for it, not here, not in Europe, not in America.
No one, least of all Lalji Hemraj, was in doubt about what had brought the vast crowds to pay for and watch The Black Hole of Calcutta. But the reviews, each reviewer trying to show how clever he was in discovering and savouring nuances in the bioscope that the others had missed, hailed it as a ‘bold’, ‘unflinching’, ‘educative’ spectacle that ‘has made the bioscope take that unthinkable leap from a plaything to our age’s true form of dramatic art’.
(It is true that unless you have actually seen The Black Hole—and I’m glad that you have—it can sound like a production that romanticizes the Europeans who were locked up in an English guardhouse by the Nawab’s men. But if you want to, you can also see it as a nationalist bioscope. Though not, I must emphasize, a crude, one-dimensional patriotic flicker like Hiralal Sen’s agit-prop shorts or the even more cloying nationalist bioscopes that were simply mythologicals in disguise. Our production was subtle, sophisticated—equivocal, if you must, but is that not a quality to admire in art?
For one must understand that my John Zepheniah Holwell, a man who had come across the seven seas as a surgeon’s mate, was a native-hating lout with a groin of steel but a heart of gold. In our bioscope, while he has no qualms kicking one of his servants to near-death because the poor chap’s caught staring at one of his master’s lady guests, and in another scene he is shown forcing himself on a nautch girl, he also has, after all, a ‘civilizationing’ mission in mind. Like all the other Englishmen who braved the journey to our teeming tropical lands.)
As for our moments inside the Black Hole, the crowds that came to see it cheered every moment of our torment and pleasure, in glorious black and white detail. However, the loudest cheers and heaviest torrents of coin-throwing were unleashed each time Mary Carey bucked and shook next to me in the simulated death-heat.
The air inside bioscope theatres showing The Black Hole across the land was found to be heavy with sweat, cigarette smoke and something intangible after each show. The doors leading in and out of the halls were kept open extra long in between shows for the next audience to walk into a tolerably comfortable theatre. In the safety of the bioscope one witnessed, for a rupee or less, an event that was not natural even in the scheme of motion pictures make-believe.
And if my memory serves me right, when Lalji Hemraj Haridas shook me proudly by my twenty-three-year-old shoulders in the middle of a small gathering to celebrate the runaway success of The Black Hole of Calcutta, or Survival of the Fittest, he invented a word that would outlive my ridiculously short glory days.
‘You’ll now be shining as bright as a star, Abani. You’re a star,’ he said smiling a gleaming caterpillar smile that must have been at least two feet wide and nine reels long.
It was pure coincidence that the year The Black Hole was released also saw a dramatic change in a large section of the population.
Till then, there had been only a few oddballs here and there who, finding nothing better to do, indulged in activities that they called ‘nationalistic’. How going on and on about a figure wrapped in a sari that was supposed to represent the country in fetters could be helpful in any manner eluded the rest of us. These oddballs were mostly oily-haired students who suddenly found themselves charged with an energy that came from nowhere and settled inside them like sediment gunk. They changed their attire, spewed slogans and catchphrases (instead of the traditional banalities directed at female and effeminate passers-by) and made noises about changing the world. At the bottom of this pile was the bhadralok loafer criminal class, breeding young people who were more terrified of becoming middle-aged and then old than living out their lives under an English administration. Infiltrating into this pile of flotsam were the pure and simple thugs, thieves and criminals. For them, ‘nationalism’ was an opportunity for expanding their busine
ss and getting themselves a new sympathetic image. ‘Movement’ clearly suggests motion. But the ‘Independence Movement’ was a stagnant mosquito-breeding pool that suddenly formed when many gutters coalesced.
This was boom time for ‘freedom fighters’ who were criminals with ambition. As for the rest of us—indifferent enough not to be caught in any slipstream of loyalty or revolt—it didn’t matter one bit who was in charge as long as the trams worked, the roads were cleaned, the oil bills didn’t jump, the weekend food appeared on the table and the bioscopes ran from the first reel to the last.
All this changed a few months after The Black Hole came out in early December 1918. No one was allowed to be indifferent any more. Fence-sitting, a very different activity from being indifferent, also could result in fatal impalement. The Black Hole, I must reiterate, had nothing to do with this change.
It was slightly odd that the papers reported the upsetting incident that actually pushed things off the precipice more than a month and a half after it had taken place. (The biggest news in the papers around that time was not even about India—the killing of two dangerous communists, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, in faraway Germany.) It was in the last week of May 1919 that we learnt that a large gathering of people had been fired upon in Amritsar on April 13. Children and women were among the dead. Why the authorities had decided to open fire on the crowd was not mentioned in any of the reports. I had even picked up the Jugantar for details. None were provided.
At the Carlton, even the Anglos had become less raucous after the massacre in Punjab. Amritsar may have been as far away from our city as Belgian Congo was, but the place got closer all of a sudden. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that the earth stopped spinning. Indeed, life went on and nothing ground to a halt. As summer approached, people still bathed next to tubewells and ruptured pipelines, building up the lather as if it could be the last time they would encounter water.
Carriages still trotted up and down Esplanade, the horses automatically trotting faster when they sensed an automobile nearby. Marriages proceeded as planned, functions were hosted with the usual banal pomp (potted plants on the dais still being mandatory), lectures were attended at universities and at the Asiatic Society with necessary gravitas.
People still drank, laughed aloud, cut vegetables (the vegetables making the barely audible hiss of dying that vegetables make when put to the blade). Experienced customers still haggled; irate mothers still slapped their children; couples still quietly copulated in the other room. But everyone did whatever they did with one difference. No one could quite put their finger on this difference simply because nobody noticed it. However, there it was, a change that comes with the knowledge that people not completely unlike oneself have been permanently removed in a cool, efficient manner.
June onwards, the crowds increased to a serious torrent. More picture palaces were showing The Black Hole and there were also special screenings in certain theatres across the country. A German bioscope company had bought prints and was running the film in three theatres in Berlin and Paris. Here at home, it was running to packed shows, the usual catcalls and suction sounds mimicking kisses during the climactic prison scene had been replaced by raucous shouts of ‘son of a pig’ and other more loosely constructed expressions of easy contempt and safe rage. An earlier scene showing the European forces being cut down by the Nawab’s men were greeted with enthusiastic whistles and showers of coins directed at the screen.
‘Didn’t I tell you, eh? Everyone loves nationalism these days,’ Lalji had chuckled as Ram Bahadur and others collected coins of various denominations from the front of the screen after each show.
I attended a few screenings alone and witnessed the transformation first hand. People who earlier seemed capable of finding happiness only through a good oil-massage were now shouting expletives at a giant white face that resembled mine on the screen. When Mary Carey was dragged into the prison and became the sole lissome element in a tumble of bodies, the crowd hooted with barely hidden hormonal happiness. There was something that had been set loose the year after The Black Hole made me a star.
The movie became the first feature in the country to have four shows throughout the day seven days a week. Another projectionist, five more men at the ticket counters and half a dozen additional hands were added to the Alochhaya alone to keep up with the sheer jump in demand. At this point, Lalji was negotiating the purchase of two new theatres, one of them being Minerva, which had an Anglo-Indian and European clientele.
Piggybacking on The Black Hole was an Anandamath revival. So there it was—Durga and I as two couples, coming from two diametrically opposite worlds and yet conjoined by images being spurted out from the same machine.
The first couple was the estranged and then reunited husband–wife pair who used a very public struggle to repair private disaster; the second, two people with nothing in common barring their firingi stock, thrown into a tight space and finding out that between lust and love there lies an escape clause. I admit that 1919 was the most interesting year of my life. But I wouldn’t know that till much later, would I?
In that whirligig, however, there was always the worry that the authorities would now find something objectionable in The Black Hole. Even though special banners, showcards and publicity material had been made for theatres outside our part of town, specifically for English and Anglo consumption—‘A Tale of Extraordinary Courage and Daring in the Face of Native Savagery!’, ‘The Two Whom the Black Hole Could Not Consume’, ‘A Love That No Prison Could Contain’—we were worried. After all, it would have been foolish not to expect that the bulk of the audience response would escape the notice of the authorities. Even the papers had started mentioning The Black Hole and ‘the tyranny of the Empire’ in the same paragraphs. We had to be extra careful about the shows in the Anglo theatres. For that was where misunderstandings were likely to start.
A complaint did pop up against The Black Hole, Anandamath and, fortunately, bioscopes in general. It was in the form of a newspaper letter that was later picked up and given editorial space by The Statesman. The first irate letter was published in Sandhya, and its content would be echoed in a tirade during a protest gathering outside the Chitpur mosque. The letter was signed by a certain Shamsul Haq.
Dear Sir,
I think there is much evil that has been depicted in the moving picture The Black Hole of Calcutta, or The Survival of the Fittest. For one, it shows Muslims of this country as bloodthirsty barbarians who take great pleasure in torturing and killing Europeans, including their women and children. This is, to put it mildly, scandalous. The Muslim community bears not the slightest ill-will against the English Government or the Crown and continues to be loyal subjects of the latter. The other picture Anandamath is perhaps less direct in its anti-Mussalman message, although no less damaging.
For another, the depiction of the female body in all bioscopes, especially those dealing with Hindu mythologies and legends and portraying European ladies, is leading to an increase in immoral and lascivious behaviour throughout our society. I ask the Government in its capacity to control and contain these degenerate bioscopes. For the sake of our women and youth, this ‘entertainment’ should be stopped immediately.
I read about the Chitpur gathering in a small news item in The Statesman the very next day and was not surprised to read that one of the speakers had been an ‘S. Haq from Metiaburz’.
On the same day that Mr Haq’s letter appeared in Sandhya, there was another letter in another newspaper whose name I can’t recall. I showed it to Bikash, who by that time had become a bona fide intellectual flirting with the idea of representing the proletariat despite not quite giving up his aspirational ways. I figured that he had already seen the letter. But it turned out that he hadn’t as he never read ‘any of those papers catering to the bourgeoisie’. While he stirred his infusion and I sipped my late-afternoon milky brew, he read the letter in the corner of the large chattering hall opposite the fair edific
e of the Presidency College.
The tone of the letter writer was agitated. At the same time it was firm in the way that observations that can’t ever be refuted are. The letter itself had nothing to do with the bioscope or with the monumental nuisance of somebody’s sensibilities being hurt. It just pointed out what it thought to be a writer’s stupidity.
Dear Sir,
It would seem to me that Mr J.J. Gambraith’s article, ‘Nationality and the War, with Reference to the Ethnology of Europe’ that appeared on these pages is the product of the kind of thinking that is delusional at best, propaganda at worst. In his quasi-scholarly tone, he has written that the main difference between the Celtic and Teutonic races is that in the latter there is ‘all the horror of disgusting and blood-embraced barbarism, the drunkenness of carnage, the disinterested taste … for destruction and death’; while in the former there is ‘a profound sense of justice, a great height of personal pride’. I find this laughable and flying completely in the face of reality, especially since Mr Gambraith’s nonsensical ideas were aired at a time when the world now knows what has taken place at the Jallianwala Bagh.
Mr Gambraith writes that the Celts ‘seem possessed by habits of kindness and a warm sympathy with the weak’. The Lt. Governor of Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, and his henchman Gen. Dyer, if I understand correctly by their surnames, both come from Celtic stock. Both of them have conspired to gun down and kill innocent people on Baishakhi Day in Amritsar and for Mr Gambraith to then insist that it is the Teuton, and not the Celt, who is ‘revolting by his purposeless brutality, by a love of evil that only gives him skill and strength in the service of hatred and injury’ is indeed laughable even as it is subsumed by tragedy.
Bioscope Man Page 16