NEW DELHI: In a treat for film lovers, a new book provides a rare insight to India’s cinema history from the pre-Independence period including snippets of some lost movies and forgotten stars.
Comprising posters and clippings from film magazines, song booklets and advertisements from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s, “Filmi Jagat, A Scrapbook: Shared Universe of Early Hindi Cinema” produces a unique and fragmented history of movies.
The collected material in the book is reproduced in entirety from a photo album maintained by a person named Mangaldas V Lohana. Published by Niyogi, the book has three illustrated essays by authors Kaushik Bhaumik, Debashree Mukherjee and Rahaab Allana.
Most of the pages bear the stamp with Lohana’s name. Among the gems, is an image of reformer Lakhmidas Rowji Tairsee who had passed away in 1939; stills from films of national uplift that were the order of social reformist cinematic fare being churned out in large numbers by the Bombay studios during this period – Bombay Talkies’ “Naya Sansar,” Hindustan Cinetone’s “Apni Nagaria,” reformist comedy “Kunwara Baap” and an adaptation of Tolstoy’s “Resurrection” called “Yeh Duniya Kya Hai?” among others.
According to authors, Lohana represented a new generation of Indians, who, in the very act of putting together his collage of film stills and the emotions expressed therein, pointed towards a seismic shift in public values among the Indian educated middle classes in the period under consideration.
Culled from mass-produced print objects, “Filmi Jagat” is an intimate work that melds the immediacy of a private diary and the reflective distance of a carefully curated photo album.
“Lohana’s scrapbook represents days, months, even years of careful collection of film-related materials. The collector exhibits a particular order of mania, a mania that stems from a passion for the movies coupled with a keen understanding of the utter ephemerality of the cinematic experience,” says Mukherjee.
The book features snippets of several lost movies like “Apni Nagaria,” “Kunwara Baap,” “Yeh Duniya Kya Hai,” and “Tasveer.”
In his essay, Allana presents 19th century specimens as well as film stills and lobby cards from the 1950s-80s, briefly examining the evolving fashions of visual autobiography.
Veteran filmmaker Shyam Benegal says the book’s many abstract dimensions have the capability of unlocking a vast complex of wistful memories from that shared attic where our collective past is stored.
“This book is a serendipitous treasure trove that will reveal itself to those who connect with its contents … and its curious intersection with the everyday person poised in front of the silver screen,” he writes in the book’s foreword. The authors say Lohana created the scrapbook at a time when South Asian cityscapes were getting increasingly saturated by multiple media, from print advertising to film billboards.
“However, the very idiosyncrasies evident in ‘Filmi Jagat’ demonstrates how this multiplication of visual stimuli did not numb consumers’ senses but prodded some to actively make sense of this new imagistic world,” says Mukherjee. -PTI
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