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After Dadasaheb Phalke, who is considered the Grand Old Man of Indian cinema, if there was one filmmaker who could lay claim upon the label of a ‘cine-pioneer,’ it has to be Shantaram Rajaram Vankudre, popularly known as V. Shantaram. From Netaji Phalkar (1927) to Jhanjhar (1987), in a career spanning 60 years, he directed 40 films — many of them bilinguals. In the process, he introduced features like trolley shot, the jump-cut, the long single-shot scenes and many other artistic innovations.
Not just that. Here was a filmmaker who tackled themes as radical as feminism, communalism and prostitution in India’s pre-Independence era, at a time when talkies were barely making their presence felt.
And yet, as his daughter Madhura Pandit Jasraj, whose biography The Man who Changed Indian Cinema presents an admirer’s portrait of her father, puts it, Shantaram is not even remembered at the most prestigious film festivals. She feels he was not given his due even in 2013, which marked 100 years from the year Phalke established his cinematic factory and laid the road for future filmmakers.
I spoke to Madhura on this, and she feels that “the average cine-goer’s memory of Indian cinema starts with Raj Kapoor.” After talking to her, and revisiting Shantaram’s cinema, I was left with this question: why is it easy for Shantaram’s legacy to be ignored even as the works of other legends such as Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt are remembered and celebrated year after year?
My memory of Shantaram’s cinema stretches back to the first time I observed the dying jailor in the Bharat Vyas song 'Ae Maalik Tere Bande Hum', from Do Aankhen Barah Haath . Unkempt, sick and tired, his head bleeding, he lies on his death-bed as Champa (Sandhya), a neighbourhood toy-seller gifted with the voice of a balladeer, sings a prayer, not for his life but for a peaceable death (“ taaki haste hue nikle dum ”). The reformist jailer in the film thus becomes a victim of his own idealism, and creates a voice of conscience in six hardened criminals he has saved from death sentence through a unique open-prison experiment.
Do Aankhen Barah Haath , the film through which Shantaram's popularity reached its zenith, was his 30th film. By this time, he had transformed himself from a struggling performance artist to a polymath. And, by tackling issues concerning the toiling masses, he set the stage for latter-day masters like Bimal Roy and Hrishikesh Mukherjee.
My introduction to Shantaram’s reformist cinema was through a book called 100 Bollywood Films by film scholar Rachel Dwyer. It was through this book that I came to know about the existence of his pre-Independence cinema. On reading the synopsis of Duniya Na Maane (1937), I could not help but marvel at the courage of the filmmaker who could conceive a strong woman character such as Nirmala (Shanta Apte), who brings about a change of heart in her old ‘husband’, to whom she has been married off through deceit. So much so that the man, overcome by guilt, frees her from the bondage and accepts her as his daughter towards the end.
Experiments in film
He was someone who was unafraid to experiment. Taking inspiration from Variety , a German film, Shantaram took India’s first trolley shot for his mythological Chandrasena (1935). The arrangement consisted of four bicycles, with wooden planks attached to them placed on rails which could be moved horizontally and vertically.
When it came to making a talkie, his Ayodhyecha Raja came close on the heels of India’s first talkie Alam Ara .
Shantaram’s bold decision of using an untested Camex audio camera almost failed. Madhura says that unlike Alam Ara , in which the sound was recorded using the same recorder as the picture, Ayodhyecha Raja had sound and the picture recorded separately. The interlocking mechanism developed a snag due to which a considerable portion of the movie had to be re-shot. However, the movie proved to be almost as big a hit as Alam Ara , running in Majestic, the theatre owned by none other than Ardeshir Irani ( Alam Ara ’s director) himself.
Shantaram’s first attempt at making a colour movie is also worth mentioning. After Shantaram finished shooting and editing Sairandhri , there arose an issue of processing the colour reel. He travelled to Germany to find out ways to process the reel. But those efforts were in vain, as he discovered he had not used the correct colour filter.
Sairandhri bombed, resulting in a considerable loss of funds for the filmmaker. However, it also created many firsts — India’s first colour movie and the first movie for which gramophone records were cut. But in the absence of any surviving reel, it is Kisan Kanya that is acknowledged now as India’s first colour movie.
Shantaram had learnt from the failure, though. He would, in later years, come up with a dazzling display of technicolour art in films such as Navrang and Jhanak-Jhanak Paayal Baaje .
I asked Ms. Dwyer through e-mail whether Shantaram’s legacy had acquired a certain obsolescence. She felt that it was true that he was not remembered in the same way as Raj Kapoor or Guru Dutt. However, she felt, it was also true that only ardent cinephiles were interested in pre-Independence cinema in general.
One of the reasons, she says, could be that there was a big shift from his movies of the ’30s and the ’40s to the later ones, in terms of the cast, film crew, and themes. This could have been responsible for public amnesia about his earlier work. More importantly, she says, that though the problems issues highlighted in Shantaram’s films (like women’s empowerment and bringing religious amity) are still important today, they will have to be dealt with in a different way.
Shantaram, just like Phalke and his own mentor Baburao Painter, hailed from the present-day Maharashtra. Though he made bilinguals, (films in both in Marathi and Hindi), many of his works do come across as more Marathi than Hindi, perhaps one reason he is know better in Marathi circles.
'No special neglect'
Marathi Director Paresh Mokashi, whose’s film Harishchandrachi Factory showed Phalke’s struggles in making India’s first feature film, says people interested in names like such as Shantaram and Baburao Painter will always be in a minority. I don’t think Shantaram has got any special neglect,” he says.
Mokashi says that Shantaram is still considered the “most prominent filmmaker” in the Marathi film circles. About Phalke, he asks: “Other than the national award named after him, what do people know about Mr. Phalke? Nothing. But ask them about Raj Kapoor’s films, affairs, the heroines and the conversation brightens up. And even this class is shrinking. The young generation may know him as Ranbir Kapoor’s grandfather, but they don’t have much information about him now. It will gradually decrease.”
National Award-winning film critic and scholar M.K. Raghavendra, whose book 50 Indian Film Classics features some pre-Independence films, including Shantaram’s Aadmi , says it is the “contextual significance” of a movie that makes it important.
He says “popular cinema” in “public memory” begins in 1947, not only in the case of film-makers but also stars. “The only star from before 1947 still remembered is Ashok Kumar but he is remembered for his later character roles. Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand are all from after 1947.”
Stuck in reformism
Shantaram's most important films were, Raghavendra says, from the “reformist era” of before 1947 and that “he failed to reinvent himself after 1947.”
“His important films are Aadmi , and Duniya Na Mane and not Pinjra , Navrang or Do Ankhen Barah Haath .”
He defines “reformism” here in very specific terms. “‘Reformism’ owed [itself] to the social reform movements of the 19th and early 20th century and had to do with a sense of inferiority of the Indian vis-à-vis the colonizer. This has been dealt with by Ashis Nandy in The Intimate Enemy .”
He says Hindi cinema after 1947 came to be seen as “national cinema” and that may be responsible for the public memory with regard to films. “ Awaara and Mother India deal with issues important to the independent nation — like state authority [in the shape of the judge and the courtroom] and agrarianism, respectively, and this is not true of Navrang or Do Ankhen Barah Haath .”
It is something of a sad irony that at the time of an information explosion, when we have more access to forming accurate, multi-dimensional memories of the past, we allow ourselves to miss out on a cine-pioneering ancestor.
