But before he slipped away from the terrace, the Monocle theatrically pointed at the banner that the organizers had strung up above the doorway:
‘A GAL A DAY! WELCOME FRITZ LANGE!’
‘Well, that’s the most inviting welcome I will ever receive anywhere. But where are the gals?’ Lang said deadpan, a moment before the gathered worthies erupted into one dusty guffaw. My eyes were on Thea van Harbou towering next to a suited-booted Lalji. Once again I failed to join in the laughter. I was thinking of Durga. At the onset of my return to the bioscopes, I found myself afflicted with the worst possible problem that an actor can possibly have: bad timing.
Back home later that afternoon, I couldn’t stop thinking of Thea. But in the new face, I kept seeing the old one. Thea and Durga looked nothing like each other. One had hair that was yellow as a mustard field and tied into a tight bun. The other had hair as black as any daughter-in-law from Nabakrishna Deb’s family. One spoke English in an accent that would have not been out of place in any viceregal party. The other, I had heard speak only in heavy Bengali or, as was the case during scenes, not at all. And yet there was something more than the alabaster skin that brought the two together.
Thea was Lang’s second wife. His first wife had allegedly found the Monocle in the arms of Thea one evening and had left him. Lang and Thea had been together ever since. I, for one, could see the virtue of being enmeshed in tall, white arms.
The drinks had left me with a dull head-throb. It wasn’t quite an ache, but since no one has ever given the condition I was in a different name, I can only recall it as a headache. I sat down with my Haig and folded the script to the page where I made an appearance, somewhere deep inside the bundle. I was Pandit Ramlochan, the Sanskrit tutor of the great eighteenth-century Orientalist scholar Sir William Jones. The bioscope was about William Jones, his years in India, his decision to leave the successful and comfortable confines of London to undertake the task of reminding a forgetful country of its glorious past. But at the same time, it was about a man who, seeking an alibi for the failures in his personal life, finds the alibi, but to no avail.
The script of The Scholar of Calcutta was littered with detailed stage directions. It was almost as if Lang and Thea were not going to leave anything to chance or the whims of the actors. The script was full of typewritten lines like ‘He moves next to the lamp and peers into the paper’; ‘The look is more of a growl than a stare’; ‘The hand is shown in close-up, so the crumpling must be done extra slowly’. As I kept reading, it became apparent to me that the camera and the sets were going to be the real actors in this bioscope.
Even the scene in which Richter as Jones staggers out of the Asiatic Society after a rousing reception to his groundbreaking paper on Sanskrit phonetics and fights the desire to throw himself into the river is more about what he feels rather than what he does. According to the script, the viewer sees a nor’wester raging, and Jones nearly blown into the Hugli. All because his wife, the patient Anne Maria, grows impatient with his life of scholarship and her own in a strange land.
Charu told me that what had drawn Lang and Thea to the story (written by an unknown Austrian lady by the name of Astrid Schenkl, who had studied Sanskrit in India and mysteriously disappeared while visiting Allahabad some eight years ago) was not only the matter of a European scholar losing himself in a world that he was trying to understand, but also the situation of the local Pandit, his tutor, who was thought by the rest of his peer group to be part of a secret cult. The fact that William Jones seeks out this Pandit, a non-Brahman in a world of Brahmans, to be his tutor makes the story a tale of twin souls, a fable about two conservative outlaws, both of whom are condemned to hanker after something they can never consider their own, and in the process neglect what is rightfully theirs. This ‘explanation’, typed out in double space unlike the rest of the script which was in single space, was on a smaller piece of paper, tied by a string right at the end.
‘He’s been working on this project ever since he completed the feature Spiders,’ Charu explained. ‘He calls it his attempt to capture the “Expressionism of the Asiatic”.’
The more I read the script the more I realized that there was something awkward about it, something forcibly glued and yet not sticking. And yet, the real story, the real bioscope, stared at me as I held the slab of papers in my hand while resting my legs on the cane chair in my living room. For Pandit Ramlochan, it seemed to me, could be played—even within the tight prison that was the overwritten script—as a complex man fuelled by ambition and wracked by the guilt of being envious of a lesser, more fêted man. Dare I say, even at that stage and even with no guilt of envy harboured inside me, I saw the Pandit in me. Or perhaps, it was the other way round.
And yet, Lang had turned Ramlochan into a footstool of a character.
The Haig fuelled my thoughts farther afield. A shadow from the only light in the room was falling on the wall calendar depicting Kali in between the seated figures of Ramakrishna and Sharada. The three of them were shorn of their divinity and had the look of people in a hair-oil advertisement more at home on a Shyambazar billboard than on the wall of my room.
What was I to do? Creep up to the Monocle and tell him that his bioscope required a significant change of perspective? Tell him that the real story was not about the Englishman who wanted to unlock the past of a civilization but about the Pandit who was doomed to live his life out in an intellectual desert and only desired to move to a place where he would be finally appreciated by people like himself? Tell him that I saw myself in the man and the man in me?
But then, still young and with fireflies in my brain, I would rather have been consigned to the jatra than be mistaken as someone pleading for the role of my life. I grant you that when a man returns from an island-prison to the world that is not cordoned off, there is a sense of desperation that makes him willing to overlook acts of embarrassment that may be required to be committed. But my years in the wilderness hadn’t quite purged me of that other, older desperation to protect myself from appearing like a complete fool before people, especially people like Lang. So under the shadow falling on the Ramakrishna–Kali–Sharada calendar, on which a lizard had now parked itself, I decided that I would hold my tongue. And to make me refrain from constantly returning to the thought of how holleringly obvious it was to make the story revolve around Pandit Ramlochan—and not around Sir William Jones—I pushed myself to think about Durga. Or was it Thea von Harbou?
‘Paul, I need you to turn away from the camera when you hear the news of the new church being built. You don’t like the idea of a church being built with the money of thieves and people whom you despise. So your body must show the contempt you feel for all of them.’
I was sitting through the shoots most days. The action inside the studio was going on at breakneck speed, and I grudgingly admired Lang’s stubbornness each time he crushed a long-stemmed cigarette and shouted ‘Cut’ and wanted a re-shoot and got it. I also understood why the Monocle had the habit of gridlocking his fingers. Behind the camera, it was either Carl Hoffman or Lang himself turning the handle. Unlike Shombhu-mama or the others at Alochhaya, neither of them counted out loud. But what Lang did was bob his head, as if goading on what was being performed in front of the camera to get inside the box. And with his left hand having nothing to do during these longish moments, it would fidget about as if with a life of its own. So Lang’s clasping of fingers became understandable when he was not filming. The hands needed rest.
A day before my first scene, Richter invited me over to his hotel for a drink or two. We were only some hours away from becoming William Jones and Pandit Ramlochan and our bodies, the German insisted, needed to get used to each other.
‘His Dr Mabuse was absolutely fantastical. It’s about this man who controls minds and cheats, seduces and enthrals people with his powers. The sets, Herr Chatterjee! Oh, you should see the nightclub set that Otto designed. The walls tilt in and heave out around a gambling table a
nd Lang plays the accordion with our eyes.’
Paul Richter’s eyes shone like a pair of reflected spotlights as he sped on. He had played a playboy duped by the evil Mabuse in the film. Every time he spoke of the man who played Dr Mabuse, his voice dipped in veneration. ‘Herr Klein-Rogge, oh … I don’t know that a man can have such eyes. He had the same glaring, boring-into-the-air look throughout the shoot as he has in the film. Lang took two hours to shoot the playing cards scene to get the light falling just right on his eyes.’
Richter was slightly less enthusiastic about the mythological The Nibelungen, the last two-part feature that Lang had made before diving headlong into The Scholar of Calcutta. But the lack of hyperbole this time arose not so much out of aesthetic preference as out of awkwardness to gush on about a feature in which Richter himself played the lead role.
‘Lang shot the scene in which I slay the dragon in a Zeppelin hangar that had been converted into a thirteenth-century forest,’ he said, looking beyond a hoarding advertising Silver Clouds cigarettes.
Silver Clouds weren’t bad at all. They tasted like trapped air before a thunderstorm—a quality endowed, I would learn, to the tobacco after a careful double-roasting. Rona, in his continuing attempts to be a sophisticate-husband, had switched from our regular brand to Silver Clouds, and I had tried them a few times. Launched as Gandhi Cigarettes, these were the country’s first ‘nationalist’ cigarettes and were gaining more and more smokers for being healthier than other brands. Instead of being touched by the gesture, Gandhi wrote a whining article in Young India objecting to his name being used to sell cigarettes.
I have a strong feeling that this objection was because of the frustrating failure of a three-week fast that he thought would magically patch up the growing problems between Hindus and Muslims. This was a man who was worse than a bioscope starlet. If things didn’t turn out the way he wanted them to, he would sulk and go on a fast. So the brand name ‘Gandhi Cigarettes’ was dropped and a new name given. It’s another matter that the company had to fold up a few years later because of the change in nomenclature. Names still mattered a lot. I remember reading Pothan Joseph later in the Bombay Chronicle: ‘Sales dropped and it melted like clouds in the silver sky.’
Silver Clouds was, however, still alive when I was on the balcony with Paul Richter that evening.
‘Herr Chatterjee, can I ask you a personal question?’ Richter turned around, leaning against the balcony wall. ‘Do you think a German blacked up can play the role of an Indian? I mean, however good an actor he may be and with the necessary knowledge of Indian behaviour, can he convince the audience that he’s an Indian?’
Aah! Richter was talking of the powers of convincing people and the need to be authentic.
‘Mr Richter, what do you see in that cigarette hoarding there?’
‘A man holding a cigarette … and the line “Every dark moment can have a … silver …” does it say “cloud”?’
‘Yes, it does. It’s advertising Silver Clouds cigarettes. They’re not too expensive and are overwhelmingly smoked by Bengali gentlemen. The lower classes smoke cheaper cigarettes, while the English smoke Pall Malls.’
Richter blew a smoke ring that floated away in the hope that it would one day encircle the city below us.
‘And so?’
‘Well, that man on the billboard, does he look like me or like you? Do you think he’s a Bengali, Richter?’
He turned around, took a good long look at the man illuminated by street light. The face was long, white, the beginnings of a dinner jacket peeping out around the shoulder region. His hair was fashioned in the style of Fairbanks, screeched to perfect combness, the billboard artist suggesting reflected light by a few streaks of white in the curve of black. The words next to his face, suggesting that his cigarette was his only true friend, were curled and a little fussy, almost effeminate in their effect. But the man’s face was clearly that of a Charles, Peter, Edward or Albert—not that of Harish, Syed, Dijendra or Prabir.
‘I must say that’s the most Anglo-Saxon Bengali I’ve ever seen,’ Richter said with a smile. His white shirt fluffed up in the evening breeze, making him look like a cricketer at the Eden Gardens in mid-run-up.
‘If that European man on the billboard there can do his job, I don’t see why any other European can’t, with some deft makeup, pull it off as a screen Hindu.’
I, in my white shirt and brown trousers, remembered my stint as John Zepheniah Holwell, powder-dabbed and breeched, with a wig heavy with strands of manly blond curls straddling over my crow’s nest hair. But more importantly, I recalled seeing myself as Holwell on the screen, as much of an Englishman as the Silver Clouds man was a Bengali. Had the people watching those climactic scenes fidgeted slightly in their seats, discomforted by the fact that it was Abani Chatterjee and not an Anglo playing the survivor of the Black Hole of Calcutta? Had they caught on to the fact that they were being fooled by bioscope actors with make-up? I don’t think so.
‘Ha! Well put, Herr Chatterjee. I ask because Lang seems to agree with you. It’s only with you that he has made the exception.’
That was true. Till that moment I hadn’t realized that, barring the scores of one-rupee extras, I was the only Indian in the cast. All the other characters in The Scholar of Calcutta were being played by consonant-munching Germans—not only William and Anna Maria Jones and the other Europeans, but also the Brahmans of Nadia, Raja Nabakrishna Deb, Pandit Ramlochan’s helper Putu, and at least eight more non-firingis.
‘Palney had suggested getting a few local actors apart from you. It would, he said, make the film “genuine”. Lang simply rejected the idea. I guess he has his reasons.’
With my mouth lined with a last drink, I left Richter to his devices, but not before I had picked up the fanciful phrase ‘Auf wiedersehn’. In the backseat of a Studebaker, I looked at the streets outside. It was late and the electric lights made the city look like a running bioscope. We circled half around the place where the Holwell Monument, that giant non-Shaivite phallus at the corner of Dalhousie Square, had stood during my grandfather Bholanath Chatterjee’s time. The driver and I then rolled along wide-screen surroundings with pastel coloured buildings that seemed always freshly painted. I heard a click the instant we entered Boro Bazar, the entry point into the inchoate. Instead of the seaside silence of Chowringhee, the old Black Town announced itself with night loudness. If it wasn’t the sound of splashing water or snatches of a quarrel, there were the less subtle sounds of entangled and maddened dogs.
Just as the car turned a corner—for here was a particular stretch that was only made up of corners—the Klaxon horn erupted. Whether the man lit up by the arc lights of the Studebaker was shaking from the after-effects of a bone-crumbling hooter or because of the amount of alcohol he had consumed could not be confirmed. The driver had proceeded to stick his head out and spill forth a volley of words that referred to the man’s pedigree and incestuous behaviour. But under the canopy of the car, I simply saw his face. It was bursting with a white light of its own and staring back at me.
‘Gggghnaaaaaaaaa …’ was the sound that erupted from his mouth, before he gnarled himself up again and shouted, ‘The English are here! The English are here! Can anyone hear me? The English are here!’
I shook myself forward from my seat and barked at the driver in front.
‘Just drive! Just get us out of here!’
With the arc lights falling one last time on the illuminated man in a white panjabi and dhuti and a thrice-wound garland of white flowers round his right wrist, the car quietly turned, sidestepping him. He was rooted to the ground even as he followed the car with his hub-cap eyes.
‘Can anyone …’ he had started again as his face receded through the window. But he was cut off by another burst of the Klaxon that left Boro Bazaar and its blackness jangling for minutes. I had crossed over to Lang’s ‘Asiatic side’. And this was where the city was, by civic and sensual order, supposed to provide me solace
and an untrammelled feeling of belonging. Some twenty minutes later, I closed my eyes, no longer required to be in that day or hanker for tomorrow.
Ten minutes on the set, it became clear that Fritz Lang’s bioscope was not going to be like those directed by Dhirendra Ganguli, Shishir Bhaduri and the other yodellers. As soon as I stepped out of the make-up room after getting myself into a greying dhuti and strapping on a gamchha across my shoulder, I was awash with a peculiar kind of happiness. After half a decade of not being allowed to be anyone else, I had almost forgotten what it was to step inside another skin, into a place where Abani Chatterjee disappeared.
I was Pandit Ramlochan Sharma. There had initially been a suggestion that I get my head shaved, leaving only a horse-tail strand of a tiki at the back. Then I reminded Lang that Ramlochan was no Brahman and my unshorn head would visually make me stand out from the Brahmans—played, of course, by shaved Germans whose heads were domes of skin bouncing off the powerful set lights. So I kept my hair, on which another longer pile was added.
In my heavy make-up, I was in my early sixties and I felt it. A head-rush of arrogance, like the first cigarette of the morning, greeted me as I walked towards the pool of light a few metres away from Lang and the camera. Otto Hunte was walking up and down the phalanx of arc lights, directing and redirecting positions.
‘Ready?’ the Monocle asked me with his hand resting on the camera handle. He could have been a zamindar, hand on elegant cane, posing before a slick-haired photographer.
Already, the machines, the railings, the criss-crossings that held up every part of the set had vanished. As I sat down at my position, next to a blacked-up Brahman and in front of a sweating William Jones, I was already thinking of how to impress the Englishman with my understanding of Kalidas and other gems from the Sanskrit language. The desire to catch his attention made the camera, the lights, the Monocle all sizzle and disappear. I was Pandit Ramlochan Sharma inside a courtroom in the company of people I despised.
Bioscope Man Page 22