In search of Dadasaheb

Is a filmmaker who dabbles in fictions and fantasies a bit like Brahma, the Creator, who was once accused of being a liar? Is there more magic in theatre than in cinema? After all, when you film a Dostoevsky story featuring Russian bridges and canals, you have to aim for verisimilitude - to show things as they really are in that country - whereas a stage production of the same thing will be stylised, and the viewer has to exercise his mind. If, like the director Kamal Swaroop, you grew up in a small town, your only reference points will be the local pul and canals around you.

These are just some of the questions raised in Swaroop's cerebral new film Rangbhoomi, which won the National Award for best non-feature film earlier this year. Free-flowing and structurally intricate, this is not always an easy work to sit through - especially if you happen to be sitting (as I was) on the sort of Siri Fort auditorium chair that is constantly threatening to loosen all its springs and send you plummeting down the dark, sloping aisle. My attention, I have to admit, wandered during the screening, but images from the film continued spooling through my mind for days afterward.

Rangbhoomi is about a phase in the life of Dadasaheb Phalke - the "father of Indian cinema" - when he went to live in Benaras and wrote a play titled Rangbhoomi. But it is equally about Swaroop's own efforts to understand those years. Thus, it is a film about its own making, a comment on the relationship between a creator and his creation. And it does notable things with form. Visual juxtapositions run through the narrative: there is an early shot of Swaroop sitting in front of a blown-up black-and-white photograph of Phalke and his unit, almost part of the frame himself; later, the director and his young team read from the text of Phalke's play, with the camera placing them against different backdrops in Benaras (perhaps the very places where Phalke wrote and envisioned his drama) and one image dissolving into the next.

Many of these scenes are about how the old intersects with the new. Shots of sadhus giving counsel to their followers on cellphones while sitting on the ghat are set against grainy, jerky black and white images from mythological films made a hundred years ago. Phalke's 1919 Kaliya Mardan is projected from a glossy new Mac laptop. The film's baby Krishna sits amidst the coils of the giant snake Kaliya while seemingly dressed in a striped kurta-pyjama; Vishnu sits on Shesha, chatting merrily to Lakshmi, a makeshift sudarshan chakra slipping off his finger. Here is evidence of primitive motion-picture technology as magic, bringing ancient stories alive.

In a sense, Benaras is the perfect city for such ruminations. Past and present are in constant communion with each other here… and yet, for Swaroop and his team, getting information about things that happened just 90 years ago is a difficult matter. Rangbhoomi is a constant reminder of the ravages of time. An old man says he used to have magazines that published stories by Narayan Hari Apte (one of Phalke's associates) but that a flood washed everything away. ("Kuch varsh poorva," says the man, when he really means over 20 years ago, and one senses he has lost track of the passage of time.) At a rundown archive, young people are discouraged from going through ancient files containing newspapers and journals. In a dimly lit store room, a chance discovery or two is made (and there is a nice shot of impossibly old, barely preserved parchments being flipped, each looking like the craggy surface of a just-discovered planet), but mostly this is needle-in-a-haystack terrain; a reminder that this country, which is so proud of its (real and imagined) past, is so bad at documenting its history. The development of moving pictures and screens has reached a point where little boys, playing near the ghats in Benaras, might watch bits of a cricket match on a cellphone - and yet there is little surviving documentation about someone as important as Phalke.

This is what makes Swaroop's obsession - which has also resulted in a book titled Tracing Phalke - so worthy of praise. He is apparently planning a biographical film about Phalke now - one that is likely to be more linear - and I think Rangbhoomi might be more accessible when seen as an accompaniment to that film (perhaps a DVD supplement) than as a stand-alone.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer