The National Film Archive of India didn’t much resemble a place where fairy-tale transformations were likely to occur. A low-slung complex in grubby grey concrete, it dated from the 1990s but looked several decades older. Scowling from behind the trees, it reminded me of a police headquarters, a functional building in which bland but unspeakable horrors were routinely performed. It was studded with warning notices: NO PARKING, NO SMOKING PLEASE, CHILDREN NOT ALLOWED.
In the legal sense, I was not allowed either: I didn’t have an appointment. I had eventually managed to get the NFAI’s director on the phone – a furtive conversation in which it was clear that only some appalling secretarial oversight had enabled me to be connected at all. I had been asked to supply information on the purpose of my project and the films I wished to research, and had received a curt note reminding me of charges liable, which I acknowledged. Silence had then ensued. ‘Just turn up anyway,’ Nandini had advised. ‘They’ll have to let you in.’
They had, but it was unclear to what effect. The other researchers I’d seen at the entrance had melted away. The building had a melancholy out-of-term feel. I wandered the dirty and desolate corridors, trying in vain to find out where I should go.
Eventually I was directed to the film-preservation office. I knocked on the door, then swung it cautiously open. No one home. The room reminded me unpleasantly of a prison cell, windowless, the walls scuffed, a desk crowded high with cardboard files and unruly stacks of A4 paper. A dusty computer sat in a corner, surrounded by piles of VHS tapes.
I took a seat in front of the desk. Twenty-five minutes went by, then another fifteen. No one came in. I went for a walk.
By the time I got back, the office was at least populated; in front of the computer sat a small-framed man with a thin moustache. He looked up impatiently as I knocked. His browser window was open on TripAdvisor.
I explained my project; would it be possible to talk to someone about the history of Indian cinema? A curator, perhaps? I had tried to make an appointment, but had been experiencing some difficulties—
‘There is no one available with expertise in that matter,’ he said tightly.
Was the director available?
‘The director is elsewhere on business.’
Would it at least be possible to view one or two of the early Shakespeare films in the collection? I had travelled a long way, and would be most grateful for any assistance.
‘Which titles does this request concern?’
I showed him my list. He glanced at it for a few seconds and handed it back.
‘We have only the Hamlet, 1954. You may watch that at 2.30 p.m.’
It was now 11.15 a.m. It wasn’t possible to see anything before that? Or another film? I was only in Pune a few days.
He waved his hand irritably.
‘Watch that first film, then you may come back. We talk then about the others. You may use the library in the meantime.’
He swung his chair back towards TripAdvisor. Our interview was over.
Fighting the sense that my expedition down here had been wasted, I tried to see if the library contained anything I hadn’t already discovered back in Mumbai.
It was tough going. The reference books were outdated, and barely listed any Indian Shakespeare movies at all. The only relevant work was western: Kenneth S. Rothwell and Annabelle Henkin Melzer’s Shakespeare on Screen: An International Filmography and Videography from 1990. Inclusive on Europe, Japan and the United States, and impressively open-minded about what it considered ‘Shakespearian’ – including spin-offs such as Hamlet and Eggs, an American short from 1937 – it had a yawning black hole where world cinema should be. Khoon-ka-Khoon, the groundbreaking 1935 Hindi-Urdu version of Hamlet by the great Parsi actor Sohrab Modi – the world’s first sound film of the play – was briefly mentioned, but the only other Indian Shakespeare film was Shakespeare Wallah; not really Indian, not fully about Shakespeare.
The online catalogue wasn’t much better: it contained some of the films on my list, but by no means all. The silent movies I’d read about so eagerly – Khoon-e-Nahak, Dil Farosh – were nowhere to be seen. Neither was Khoon-ka-Khoon. There was Hamlet by the prolific actor-director Kishore Sahu, the one I’d been permitted to watch, but it came from much later (Hindi, 1954, 35 mm, 15 reels, B&W). Nargis’s Romeo and Juliet, the film I’d been hoping more than anything to locate, had also gone awol. I tried again, working methodically through my list. DOCUMENTATION NOT FOUND GO BACK, DOCUMENTATION NOT FOUND GO BACK. Even the computer sounded stressed.
Trying another tack, I trawled through back issues of Filmindia, India’s first movie magazine, founded by the journalist and impresario Baburao Patel in 1935, not long after the talkies arrived. This was more worthwhile: in the March 1948 issue, a few pages away from a colour photograph mourning the recent death of Gandhi, were shots taken on the set of Romeo and Juliet. (The costumes made it look like Disney’s Snow White, Nargis adorned with flowers and sporting a tulle cloak.)
The review of Romeo and Juliet a few issues later was positive, if rather too cap-doffing to the Hollywood film of twelve years earlier. ‘Nargis Proves Equal Of Norma Shearer’, the headline read. ‘Indian Film Version Of Shakespeare’s “Romeo And Juliet” Copies MGM Pattern’. Apparently it had taken a total of two years to film, which had caused some troubling continuity issues. ‘Judged from the standards of modern realistic, psychological plays,’ the reviewer sniffed, ‘it is an old-fashioned melodramatic tear-jerker.’ Of the film itself, other than denunciations of its technique and lighting, there was frustratingly little description.
Filmindia was more helpful when it came to Kishore Sahu’s Hamlet: the cover of the September 1954 issue was a painted portrait of Sahu himself brooding against a vivid blood-red background, skull in hand. Sahu had begun in the golden studio era of the early forties with Bombay Talkies before setting up on his own; this was his biggest picture yet. The publicity agents had obviously been working overtime, judging by the number of tenuous preview stories they had managed to sneak into the magazine. Patel’s regular ‘Bombay Calling’ column was surmounted by an enormous still of the young girl playing Ophelia. ‘Coy and innocent and yet so engagingly sexy,’ it purred.
The girl’s face looked familiar, but it took me a few moments to work out why. It was the same face I’d seen in that pile of photos in Bollywood Bazaar: the actress clutching Raj Kapoor, an expression of infinite forbearance etched on to her features. I’d tucked the photo into the cover of my notebook as a kind of mascot. Her name was Mala Sinha. So this was the Shakespeare she’d been in.
I tapped away on my phone: yes, the same Mala Sinha. She’d become a huge star, acting with everyone from Raj Kapoor to Raaj Kumar, Dev Anand to Biswajit Chatterjee, and for directors including Guru Dutt, Bimal Roy, Yash Chopra – anyone who was anyone in Indian cinema. Playing Ophelia for Kishore Sahu in 1954 had been her breakthrough role.
I opened up a fan site to check when she was born – 1936 – then realised with a start that she was still alive. In the unforgiving language of Mumbai film journalism she was a ‘yesteryear actress’, retired and somewhat reclusive. There wasn’t much background on her. But she was shortly to be honoured with a Phalke award for lifetime achievement. I wondered if there was any way I could locate her. I texted Nasreen, who had helped me get hold of Gulzar. It was worth a punt.
I read on in Filmindia with renewed appetite. The few academic articles that had mentioned Sahu’s Hamlet had written it off as a poor imitation (naturally) of the British version of 1948, produced and directed by Laurence Olivier. Baburao Patel wasn’t much kinder – in fact considerably less. He might have found Mala Sinha ‘engagingly sexy’, but for the film itself he had only scorn. Under the headline ‘Sahu’s “Hamlet” Flops at the Met’, he accused it of ‘slander[ing]’ Shakespeare’s memory, with its ‘stinking selfishness’. Claudius was portrayed as a ‘stupid drunken clown’; Laertes came in for especial criticism, with his ‘callow and silly face
’.
Hamlet sounded rather good; I began to look forward to seeing it.
*
Somewhat to my surprise, when I came back at 2.15 p.m. Kishore Sahu and Hamlet were waiting. I was shown to a screening room, through corridors piled hazardously with canisters of aluminium and bright green plastic.
The room made the film-preservation office look like an operating theatre. It was window-high with more canisters and a tide wrack of DVD boxes. Pushed back against the wall was a huge Steenbeck reel-to-reel editing machine in hospital-blue steel, balanced on which were stacks of old accountancy ledgers. On the table opposite, next to a battered filing cabinet piled with a scree of papers, was a venerable-looking VHS machine. A flat-screen TV was attached to the wall. (This at least appeared to date from the twenty-first century.) On top of everything was a rime of thick, gluey dust. It gave the strong impression of having been burgled, maladroitly, a couple of decades ago.
In the centre of the chaos a chair had been laid on. Trying not to cause an avalanche, I gingerly put down my bag and pulled out the copy of the complete works I’d brought with me (no subtitles, I’d been warned).
After reading so much about how Sahu’s movie was an inferior imitation of Olivier’s, I was thrilled to discover in fact how different it was. Visually, for sure, there were debts: the same noir-ish, tenebrous black-and-white, the same brooding low-angle shots, in fact many of the same sequences – Hamlet sitting alone, clouded in thought, after the wedding banquet at the play’s opening; or forcing his mother on to her bed in Freudian lust. Sahu’s art director, V. Jadhav, had done a fine job replicating Olivier’s crepuscular castle sets and faux-medieval costumes.
But in deeper ways, Hamlet: A Free Adaptation, seemed to me exactly that – free. From the jaunty title music onwards (Sahu had wisely drawn the line at mimicking Walton’s tremulous score), it kept offering sly surprises. One was Sahu himself, who, in contrast to Olivier’s carefully calibrated interiority, made the Prince into a swashbuckling Parsi hero, forever swooping his cloak and flaring his nostrils like a wildcat on the prowl. Whereas Olivier played ‘to be or not to be’ with portentous symbolism, balancing on a rocky promontory overlooking the crashing waves, Sahu’s approach was commendably lacking in fuss: he fingered a dagger to the tolling of the castle bell.
Yet the revelation was Mala Sinha, who in this famously lopsided play was granted almost equal status. Whereas in most versions of Shakespeare’s text, Ophelia warrants something less than 5 per cent of the script, in Sahu’s version she was an unignorable presence, barely off-screen for scenes at a time. We first glimpsed her stepping daintily down a staircase like a wind-up doll, but she soon proved herself more than a match for Sahu’s Prince, turning on him with the incendiary ferocity of Nora in A Doll’s House. She even gained a whole extra scene, a flashback sequence in which she cavorted around a fountain, singing sweetly of love.
The songs were the great innovation. An Indian audience took their presence for granted, but in the hands of composer Ramesh Naidu and lyricist Hasrat Jaipuri, not to mention Sinha’s own sad-sweet voice (unusually, she sang her own songs instead of relying on a playback singer), they attained a poetry that matched the script. I loved the gravediggers’ duet: a perky number heavy on twanging sitar, done to a demented dance sequence worthy of the Marx Brothers. With Sinha’s final song, offered as she gazes into the brook in which she is shortly to end her life, I sensed Hamlet’s narrative arc being subtly recoded. In contrast to Jean Simmons’s simpering girlchild in Olivier’s movie, Sahu and Sinha dared to make Ophelia a strong-willed Bollywood – perhaps even a Hindu – heroine.
The dialogue was peppered with quotations from Urdu classical poets; the translation not drawn directly from Shakespeare, but based on Syed Mehdi Hasan Ahsan’s Khoon-e-Nahak, with nods to Sohrab Modi’s Khoon-ka-Khoon. While these earlier versions – and the Parsi plays they were based on – might have not survived, in a ghostly sense both lived on.
As we headed towards a breakneck version of the fencing match, Sahu bounding up the castle stairs like Errol Flynn, it seemed to me that this was not, as the critics had claimed, a slavish remake of a British classic at all. It was a version in knowing dialogue with its predecessors, both in India and the western tradition. Every Hamlet, it can be argued, is a kind of seance: an encounter with the spectres of everyone who has staged this most famous and haunting of tragedies. Olivier wrestled with the shades of John Gielgud, John Barrymore, Edwin Booth – a whole parade of Princes stretching back to Thomas Betterton in the seventeenth century and even Shakespeare’s own, Richard Burbage. Sahu, though, was one of the few who directly incorporated, not fought, the past. Doing so, he managed to exorcise a few of the old ghosts.
*
‘You managed to see it? They showed it to you?’
It was hard to tell whether P. K. Nair was joking. Propped up on a daybed in the gloom of his apartment, within grabbing reach of a steel crutch, his expressions were unreadable. He seemed fragile, sallow-looking, with fleshy features and a corona of white hair that straggled negligently over his ears and down his neck. When I arrived, he’d pointed to the cotton wool in one ear: a little deaf. But his eyes were alert, and his mind was busy and bright.
Born in 1933, Nair was Indian film history in fleshly form: a one-man memory bank who had made it his life’s mission to rescue the cinematic past from dust and oblivion. As a movie-struck kid in Kerala in the 1940s, he’d sneaked out to attend late-night screenings while his parents were asleep, paying for ‘floor tickets’ on the sand. He’d talked his way into being an assistant on Mother India, and sat at the knee of the great neorealist Bimal Roy. The National Film Archive was his doing: as a researcher and historian, he had begun it almost single-handedly in 1964.
Nair saab was a man around whom legends accrued. It was said that he had watched some films hundreds of times, sitting in the dark with flashlight and notebook; that he had hosted jamboree student screenings of the sections of movies snipped out by the censors for being too rude. He’d spent years rummaging through basements at long-shuttered studios and sweet-talking relatives of their founding fathers to part with precious reels of nitrate. The NFAI had preserved a total of 12,000 titles, 8,000 of them Indian. It was only a slight exaggeration to say that without Nair there would be no Indian film history at all.
‘Today, did they show you the print or the DVD?’
We were talking about Kishore Sahu’s Hamlet.
VHS, I replied.
He nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I am worried about that. The print was not good when we got it. It was a used print, you know, from some distributor, not brand-new. It was the only one we could get. But I don’t know what the condition is like now. I worry these prints are not being looked after.’
I had come to Nair to resolve my questions about the relationship between Shakespeare and early Indian cinema. Despite his dazzling panoply of knowledge, it was dismal going. The earliest Shakespearian film of all, Dil Farosh? Long-lost. Meetha Zehar? Destroyed, perhaps by the studio. Sohrab Modi’s Khoon-ka-Khoon? Now on the most-wanted list. The beguiling photos I had seen of the world’s oldest synchronous-sound Hamlet – Modi agonising in his chair, head in hands; a bearded Ghost wearing enormous white wings, like something out of an avant-garde film by Jean Cocteau – were all that was left. None of these early movies survived.
He registered my look of dejection. ‘You have to understand,’ he said gently, ‘that almost nothing exists from the early time. In the silent period India made nearly fifteen hundred feature films. Of fifteen hundred we have only about nine or ten left, and most of them are incomplete. We have posters, pictures, but the reels …’ He left the sentence hanging. ‘It is a dark period.’
So Sahu’s Hamlet was indeed the earliest Indian Shakespeare in existence? Not even Nargis’s Romeo and Juliet had survived?
Settling himself on the daybed, he tried to explain. ‘When we started in the sixties, maybe only thirty per cent of movies made before
1950 were available. We saved twenty per cent. My priority when I was starting the archive was to find as many early films as I could. I thought, “Oh, the fifties films can wait.” I didn’t give them priority. And by the time I came to the seventies or eighties …’
India was hardly the only country to have experienced the problem: the great Hollywood founder Sam Goldwyn’s silents had been destroyed because the insurance costs were too high, while Universal Pictures washed and recycled old stock to reclaim the expensive silver-nitrate emulsion. It was miraculous that the rediscovered Richard III from 1912, which I’d watched in America, not only survived but had been in a playable condition; to preserve a film that antique requires extraordinary sensitivity and care. In India, Nair aside, such care had been lacking. And the sheer quantity of films made, corner-cutting distribution, poor preservation techniques, the climate: all of it meant that the scale of loss here was immense.
Nair told me of his heartbreaking attempts to secure a copy of Alam Ara, India’s first talkie. He had visited the elderly Ardeshir Irani, its director, and his son Shapoorji in the late sixties. Ardeshir was adamant that there were still three reels in existence, but as Nair was leaving Shapoorji confessed he’d recently got rid of them, stripped of their silver for a few rupees.
‘What is it possible to do?’ he said. ‘Even in the film industry people are not much concerned with the future of the archive.’
Nor was the archive itself especially concerned, it seemed. Since Nair’s retirement in 1991, it had been run by a succession of bureaucrats with little or no background in film. It wasn’t surprising that the current director was away; he was rumoured to have two jobs. The archive’s facilities were poorly maintained, many of its treasures in danger of being lost. Nair had himself moved back from retirement in Kerala to try and limit the damage.
‘I used to take personal care of each and every place in the archive,’ he said, his voice rising. ‘But the people they were getting in just didn’t have the training. All these things I tried to do just vanished.’
Worlds Elsewhere Page 31
