Superb recreation of a lost world
Chandak Sengoopta

Filming: A Love Story
by Tabish Khair Picador. Pages 399. £16.99.

Many tried in the late 19th century to set pictures in motion, but the cinema, as we know it, began only with the demonstration of the Cin`E9matographe by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumi`E8re at a Paris caf`E9 in 1895. Within months, the brothers had dispatched representatives to demonstrate their invention all over the world. Bombay was one of the earliest cities to be visited and the new technology proved an immediate hit. The big cities quickly got movie theatres and travelling exhibitors fanned out across the land, showing films in makeshift tents. Gradually, a huge film industry developed in Bombay, which remains the biggest in the world and produces around 1,000 films a year.

Tabish Khair’s superb novel is not, however, about that behemoth. It begins in the days of the tent theatres, and although its narrative stretches to the present, the focus is on pre-Bollywood days. The film-mad postal clerk Harihar, his wife Durga and their son Ashok travel around the country in the 1920s showing two-reel silent films to rural audiences. On one trip, they encounter the younger son of a rich landowner who, while in college in Calcutta, took to the performing arts. His traditional family had stopped it but the old dreams come rushing back when Harihar visits with his films.

A deal is struck: Harihar and Durga sign away their son to the landowner’s family. In return, he sets up a studio near Bombay, where Harihar directs his own films. A host of new characters enter, including Saleem, a Muslim actor who tastes some success in Harihar’s talkies and (perhaps) dies during an attack on the studio by Hindu fundamentalist thugs.

The film industry was one of the few places in India where Hindus and Muslims worked in perfect amity. But as independence approached, relations soured. Khair entwines Harihar’s story with the tragedy of Partition and the resulting mayhem. The events are presented through the recollections of Rizwan Hussein Batin, an elderly scriptwriter who had worked with Harihar, then left for Pakistan, and who now lives with his wife in Copenhagen.

The film historian who interviews Batin soon begins to feel that the scriptwriter’s memory is suspiciously precise. He knows far more about Harihar and others than he ought. Suspense is built with enormous skill, the reader being enlightened and then befuddled until, at the very end, the mystery is resolved with teasing subtlety.

Most readers will cherish Filming for its magical evocation of the cinema’s beginnings. Indian movie aficionados will delight in decoding the sly allusions to famous films (Amar Akbar Anthony, 36 Chowringhee Lane, perhaps even Pather Panchali) in the names of characters and places. But this is not just a novel about movies. It shows how the dream-world of cinema, for all its distance from everyday reality, is perpetually vulnerable to the nightmares of history. Elegantly structured and taut with understated passion, Filming is a brilliant recreation of the lost world of early cinema and the continuing tragedy of religious hatred. Although set in an India that has now vanished, its delights as well as its message should find admiring readers everywhere.— By arrangement with The Independent

(Chandak Sengoopta teaches history at Birkbeck College, London; he is working on a book about Satyajit Ray)

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