Somewhere in the vague distance, I heard a voice shout out, ‘Roll camera!’ It could have been street noise.
Ramlochan meets William Jones for the first time. He is supposed to be intimidated and impressed by the man and the setting. I, however, feel neither. All I feel is the need to tell the man in the wig and jacket that I must be sent to his country to spread the knowledge of an ancient nation. I feel a good need to shake him by the collar and state that I am that person and no one else—certainly not any of those pompous, parroting Brahmans who pass themselves off as scholars discussing the exact number of asuras that died fighting the Goddess Chandi. But there is a stronger feeling: the desire to be fêted by the world and by those who truly value knowledge. Below that, the way the foundations of a building hold up its floors, lies another feeling, making itself felt like heartburn: to be in the place where it’s not impossible to touch women with skin as white as salt.
‘Don’t act! I don’t want acting. I want architecture! And for that you must stop acting, Herr Chatterjee. You read the script. So can we please stick to it! Okay, another take. Ready? I want you, Herr Chatterjee, to look into Jones’s eye shiftily. Hold back the beginnings of a smile. Look at him the way a child looks at his father in army uniform for the first time. Okay, positions. Roll camera!’
I saw Richter and me and the other actors in the black and white of my eye. There was going to be a halo powdered all around Sir Williams’s face looking on to the small multitude of scholars before him. He was to choose, in a cherry-pluck, one of them to teach him Sanskrit. Among the crowd, I would stand out as the only person without the caste marks—and still, in his magnanimity, the English scholar would choose me. That choice would be translated in a medium-shot on my face, a title card explaining who I was, my face explaining what I wished.
But as shooting continued, I grew increasingly uneasy with my Ramlochan. There were only three scenes to be shot in the entire shot with me in them. Later that evening, things came to a flashpoint. It was the scene when William Jones discovers that his Pandit is planning to sacrifice a child for the purpose of mastering a new science. Lang wanted Jones to drive sense into Ramlochan, making him give up his diabolical plan, with a momentous ray of light falling on my face inside my hut-room.
‘I want the change to be fast,’ he said, clearly with a detailed picture in mind. ‘I want you to move as fast as good can change to evil.’ He clapped his hands sharply to emphasize the point he was making.
The studio was hotter than the outside and the lights were making the Monocle sweat enough for his eyeglass to mist up from time to time. He kept rubbing away the moisture with an impeccably white handkerchief. But what started worrying everyone was that his normal aristocratic look had begun to change into something more dishevelled. There was a moment before the child-sacrifice scene that I noticed Paul shuffling over to Thea, who had arrived at some point, exchanging looks and words. It bothered me that Lang, in particular, and everyone, in general, were treating me as a child. Ramlochan was completely in their hands and the palpable feeling that I got was that there was a tussle under way between them and me.
Takes flew like garbage birds, picking on each scene and then shooed away until another take. The mumblings between Lang, Thea and Otto grew. Even as a man following a fixed script, placed inside the eighteenth-century and growing wary of not being able to think the way the Pandit was really supposed to think, I realized that there was something going deeply wrong. The film was turning out to be a joke. Despite my complete lack of reputation at that point, I feared for my reputation. I spoke about this to Charu at the Dilkhusha over mutton cutlets.
People were gently noticing me, with my unwigged hair cropped to a widow’s mop. Certainly the regulars who had stopped noticing me since The Black Hole of Calcutta were now looking at me again, trying to place me, if not acknowledge me.
‘Charu, how do you think the bioscope’s going?’ I asked before glugging down some water so that I could listen to his response without any interruptions.
‘Oh, this is an experience, Abani. I really sometimes wonder what would happen if our bioscopes were shown to regular audiences in Berlin, London, Paris, Chicago, New York.’ And then he repeated ‘Berlin’ again without realizing it. ‘All the places where performances are going hand in hand with the latest technologies, the latest tastes. Well, this is the big break, Abani. Don’t worry about the takes. That’s how Lang works with everyone.’
‘What do you think about Lang?’
‘Oh,’ he said with a knowing double-shrug, ‘he’s different all right. Not at all like the Madhu Basus and the Jyotish Banerjis of the world. But that’s the whole point. What he’s capturing on film is distilled movement. I can’t wait to see him on the cutting table.’
Clearly, Charu was not in any way perturbed by the way Lang conducted the making of the bioscope.
‘Tell me something. You’ve seen any of his other films?’
Charu hollered for some water. He had bitten into a chilli. An answer was delayed for a while, as he sucked in air by the windful, hanging out his tongue to dry after each downpour of water. Breathing heavily, he finally said, ‘Tea?’
‘Sure. Have you seen any of Lang’s movies?’
‘No. But Franz Osten has.’
‘Who’s Franz Osten now? The man you met in London during that art course?’
‘That’s right. Osten’s the brother of Peter Ostermayr the producer. Osten is getting into the bioscope business full-time and had mentioned something about the “Austrian Lang” to look out for. When he learnt that I was going to work with Lang, Osten got all excited and wrote to me about how he had immensely enjoyed his Dr Mabuse the Gambler recently. An “incredible document of our time”—his words, not mine. And this isn’t official yet, but with Lang making The Scholar of Calcutta here, Osten is already getting ready to make his own India feature. I smell a trend. And guess whose name I’ve recommended?’
He chuckled merrily, almost like a child, making me forget that he had been choking on his food just a few moments ago.
‘I recommended you! I told him that Lang’s got you in his feature. He’s keen. But Abani, stick to the script, will you?’ he added in case I had lost my powers of understanding.
‘Listen Charu, maybe it’s nothing to worry about and it’ll be sorted out in the cutting room, but I’ll be honest with you. Lang’s idea of the film is all wrong. It’s silly. And I know you’ll think that just because I’m playing Ramlochan I’m saying this, but the Pandit’s is the real story.’ It was true. The more I thought about Ramlochan, the more I thought of my own condition. A man surrounded by the rabble and being mistaken for one of the rabble. I knew that there was a tuning fork that was ringing both of us, pretender and pretended, in the same pitch. The Pandit could not but be the real story. Anything else would be horrifying. Empty and horrifying for me.
Charu looked up, emitting a wan smile.
‘Abani, listen. Correct me if I’m wrong: you’ve been out of the pictures for five years now. You remember how Lalji treated you? Not to mention the whole bioscope industry? You really want to throw it all away? For you to start nitpicking again … I don’t know. What can I say? We’re talking here about a rising European director. You are the only Indian actor he’s chosen. For god’s sake, Abani, why can’t you take your costume off like other actors after a day’s shoot? You have just another day’s shoot a week later.’
‘That’s how I play a character, Charu. That’s what I do, that’s what I’ve done, for all bioscopes since Prahlad.’
Charu let out a wet guffaw. Squeezed it through his lips.
‘Okay Ramlochan Pandit. I can’t argue with that. So you’re not drinking for a month either, eh?’
‘Ramlochan isn’t a Brahman, Charu. And I would certainly be drinking if I was as frustrated as he was living under the shadow of a fool who’s a leech to boot,’ I said, a glass of Haig flashing in my head.
Silence. I could see that Char
u was getting impatient and upset.
‘Charu, who is this Fritz Lang?’
I don’t know why I asked him that question. The waiter had just plonked our change in a white plate pillowed with mouri and Charu took a sprinkleful with his fingers and threw back a pile into his mouth. After a few rounds of mastication, he pushed his chair back, stood up and replied as if I had asked him the time.
‘I told you, Abani. He’s a European director. What else can I say? You know, if you weren’t interested, you could have told me right at the start …’
I squeezed out of the chair. My eighteenth-century dhuti, which looked not a stitch different from a twentieth-century dhuti, may have planned on getting hitched to the chair leg. But I have always had a way of dealing with obtrusive furniture. I shift them around.
The Cabinet of Kalibari
He wasn’t whistling. It was more like a clucking sound. Actually, it wasn’t even that. It was more like a finger running across the teeth of a comb, cutting the air into strips, while each stick that made a tooth snapped back into total attention.
‘Oh, it’s a dog,’ Lang said with all the alarm that he could muster.
The mongrel had been trotting a few feet behind us and had finally crept up to the source of the sound that had got him interested. Unlike most street dogs, there was a firmness about this one, both in terms of body and character. It was grungy, rather than mangy, and the complete absence of abscesses or any flea-ravaged patches betrayed a pedigree that did not have its source in this part of town.
‘He must have heard you making that sound.’
‘What sound?’
‘The sound you were just making.’
‘Oh, this?’ he said, before letting out another volley of wet clicks. He cracked open a smile, closed it as quickly and started walking briskly, this time picking up the pace a bit to gauge the dog’s level of curiosity.
‘It’s from Peer Gynt, a piece called “In the Hall of the Mountain King” by the Norwegian composer Grieg. I used to whistle this tune all the time when I first started shaving. It was quite the rage in Europe.’
Lang obviously couldn’t whistle. The dog followed us for a while, leaving us when its attention got swayed by a woman ladling out a mish-mash of leftovers on the side of the street.
The Monocle had a flushed look about his face since we had left the Great Eastern and ventured out into the early evening parts of the city that he wanted ‘a feel of’. There was less than a week left for shooting to be over and I, with no more scenes to look forward to—and the only one who actually lived in the part of the city that Lang was interested in having a look at—had volunteered to be his guide. Even Lang had looked up at me when I responded to this vague wish of his.
‘If you’re all right with it, I could take you to the Kalighat temple. It’s not too far from here. That’s if you want to go to the … how should I put it …?’
‘You mean in the thick of it, eh? Yes. Absolutely. Palney will arrange a car for Friday. We have only two shoots in the morning. How does that sound, Herr Chatterjee? A temple we shall visit.’
‘It would be my pleasure, Herr Lang,’ I had said with a smile that befits a man seeking the world and getting to be part of a local town tour, a town in which he lives.
As you may well be asking, why had I gone out of my way and offered to escort Lang around town when I had begun to suspect that he was a charlatan scooping up the exotic the way Robert Flaherty did in his pictures, to serve his clientele back in Europe and America, a philistine who had no understanding of the powers of bioscope acting? There was a real reason for my forwardness, my servility, if you will. And it was the arrival of an envelope at home that finally convinced me that I had to act if I was to get my due.
It was a manila envelope. I used to once get envelopes of various sizes every single day. Useless notices, fawning letters, business missives and the occasional erotic declaration. (Shombhu-mama’s letters had stopped long ago.) They would be penknifed open by my secretary, Swapan, and the bulk of it never came anywhere close to my eyes. But for some years now the mail had dried up. Even the anonymous hate mails that would come till three years ago, the ones that promised dire consequences if ‘a pervert like you continues to live in the locality’, didn’t bother me any more.
So when Abala, the last of her kind in the Chatterjee household, walked up to where I was sitting and announced that I had a letter, I sat up, putting away The Statesman, in which a notice had made me chuckle more than once that evening. The small notice had read: ‘Died William Jones (b. 1879) of enteric fever. Mourned by his family and colleagues at the British India Steam Navigation Company. He served as chief engineer and his last ship was the Gazana.’ Chuckling, I had silently wished Paul Richter a long life before making the effort to reach for the dark-tinged small bottle before me.
Abala interrupted my time with The Statesman. The envelope only had my name on it, the ‘Abanindranath’ written with a greater flourish than the ‘Chatterjee’. I turned to see whether there was the sender’s name on the back. There was no name. Only a large ‘8’ scrawled in the same ink as my name in front. It covered about an eighth of the space, beaming out from its bottom-left corner. There was no confusion about what the ‘8’—that twisted garland signifying the Bengali number four—stood for. It was the same stand-alone, smooth-bottomed figure that I had once seen on the back of Shombhu-mama’s shirt. The ‘8’ stood stable, with extreme ease, never worrying for a moment that it may roll over the finite space of paper and become a ∞. It was the Char Murti insignia. This, after the authorities had passed the Goonda Act only a year ago.
I hadn’t seen the penknife for years. In fact, I didn’t care if there still was a penknife at all. But it was pretty obvious by now that one of those gangs pretending to be part of the anti-Britishwalas—and thought to have been either hounded out by the authorities or sucked in by the cross-legged Congress Party—had sniffed out the news that I was involved in a European bioscope production. They must have sent a threatening letter, the kind that usually says, ‘Make a contribution for your Motherland or face the consequences.’
Remembering the death of Jarasandha, the poor man who was ripped right down his middle from one orifice to the other for no fault of his, I tore the flap at a point and then pulled my finger down the envelope’s barely resisting spine. Something was folded inside. It wasn’t a letter. Instead, it was a hand-coloured print.
As far as I could make out, it was a crude, modern rendition of a Radha–Krishna tableau, the kind sold on the pavements alongside those racy Bat-tala publications. I poured another round of the vile but helpful fluid into my mouth. Everything was garish about the picture. The besotted Radha had her head resting on the delicate shoulder of Krishna ever-so-slightly as the blue-skinned deity blew into his flute. There was nothing remotely erotic or divine about the picture. It was just a gaudy print conveying nothing but two iconic lovers in the most maudlin manner possible. Another belle, a flat-bellied gopi, was approaching the couple with a plate in her hand from the corner of the frame. Everything suggested a standard Radha–Krishna picture, something that I could pass on to Abala for her pleasure rather than crumple and lob into a corner behind me for her to sweep away the next morning.
But then I noticed it. Krishna and his small-breasted, tight-bloused lady friend sitting in the middle of a setting that was not their usual landscape. Instead of the usual cow lolling about with a mango tree and a small pond as backdrop, there was a sheep grazing in the foreground. Also, the paramours were seated not on a swing or under a tree in a standardized, mythical village but on a wooden bench outside a European-style cottage. To complete the picture of total dislocation, there was the tiniest of bridges spanning a gurgling brook on which the approaching gopi was positioned. In the background, there were snow-capped hills and pine forests and rooftops with chimneys and sloping thatches. It was Radha–Krishna in Switzerland.
I turned the picture around to read the accompanyi
ng message. There wasn’t any. I picked up the ruptured envelope and inside, tucked away like a child hiding from marauding captors waiting to scrub him clean, there was a newspaper cutting dated 6 September 1918. Another quick swig and I read the piece of paper. The headline, in three decks, blotted print and diminishing size, read: ‘Mr F.E. Langford. Well-known Artist Leaves for England.’
I kept reading this unsolicited cutting.
‘Lacking encouragement and patronage, Indian artists cannot raise the standard of indigenous painting in a manner commensurate with the undoubted ability that exists among many of the younger school,’ says Mr F.E. Langford, the well-known artist, who is leaving Calcutta for Liverpool on Wednesday. Mr Langford served Messrs. Johnston & Hoffman as an artist between the years 1908 and 1911, moving to Bombay in 1912 to practise upon his own account.
Born in Murree, he studied at the Charles School of Art, Ahmednagar, and won a scholarship to the prestigious South Kensington College of Art, in London. A number of his works were included in Academy exhibitions at a very early stage of his professional career. It is not generally known that during his earlier studies he explored the realms of stereoscopic photography, and though for various reasons he did not pursue his interest in this sphere, some effects of his early training are considered to have played on his mature works.
Mr Langford has executed the portraits of many Indian noblemen, that involved fairly extensive travel over the northern part of the country, and paintings based on Indian mythological studies. In recent years, he accompanied the Italian scholar F.D. Ascoli to venture into the Sunderbans, and his love of this marshland region resulted in three large landscapes which were exhibited in London. But among Indians the desire for possession of landscape works is almost negligible and during his experience, Mr Langford has received only one commission for a scenic canvas.
Bioscope Man Page 23