Worlds Elsewhere (43 page)

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.'

The nadir had come in January 2003, when a fire ripped through the NFAI vaults. As many as 4,000 priceless reels had gone up in acrid smoke, 450 of them from before the 1950s. The Indian losses were irreplaceable: early talkies in Marathi and Hindi, the first Indian film to win an award at Venice … It was said the fire had started because flammable reels had been stored in unsafe conditions.

‘So many times I brought these things to notice, but they keep on arguing, “Oh, he is now not in the organisation. He is keeping on criticising,” you know. So I thought of stopping that.'

I suddenly realised why it had been so hard to get inside the place. Everyone I had spoken to back in Mumbai agreed the archive was in danger. But what to do about it, that was the issue. India had so many pressing problems …

‘So when you ask am I worried, yes, I am worried,' Nair said. ‘I have real worries.' He seized his crutch and clenched it as if it would break. ‘Every day, as far as I know, some film is getting damaged beyond repair.'

It was after 9 p.m. by the time I got back to the hotel: early by Indian standards, but I couldn't face finding a restaurant outside. There was a café of sorts in the lobby. I dumped my bag on the closest table and, not bothering to glance at the menu, ordered the largest beer they had and a portion of daal and rice. Aside from a fleet of waiters checking their phones, there was just one other diner, a porcine businessman in a striped shirt pecking at his laptop.

It is a hazard of travelling alone that one's emotions become Himalayan extremes: the highs exultant, the lows desperate. But I
reasoned that I had some cause to feel despair. Granted, I had managed to see
Hamlet,
the oldest surviving Shakespeare film in India – but that a movie from the mid-1950s was considered uniquely antique had come as a shock.

By the evanescent standards of my usual trade, theatre, film had always seemed to me almost alarmingly permanent: all you needed to do was hang on to the stuff. But it appeared almost no one, bar P. K. Nair and a few others, wanted to bother. There he was, in his gloomy little room, while films rotted into nothing a few hundred yards away. The thought was incalculably depressing.

No doubt films were being preserved, and the chances of a few lost reels popping up in someone's attic were really rather high. Digitisation made it harder to delete things. India was at the forefront of technology: the wi-fi on the train to Pune had been faster than it was in my London flat. But in its scrambled hurry to modernise, the country seemed sometimes to regard its own past as an impediment. I remembered a line I'd read somewhere. ‘India has a rich past, but a poor history.' It was a cliché, but hard to deny.

I thought back to C. J. Sisson's essay, the point at which I had begun my journey. One of the things he most admired about Parsi theatre was how it resembled Elizabethan drama: its exuberant commercialism, its restless creativity, its bumptious optimism. In Mumbai, he had written, ‘[Shakespeare's] plays … are still alive and in the process of becoming new things, being ever born again.' That was surely true, and true about Bollywood too – but what was also true was that this hunger for invention turned the industry into an inattentive custodian of the old. If you could simply remake a film, why bother to save the original? It was just last year's movie, just cluttering up someone's floor.

But then, as I'd discovered at the Folger library, the Jacobethans hadn't been much good at preservation, either. If the First Folio hadn't been published in 1623, eighteen of Shakespeare's plays would probably never have survived. The overwhelming majority of Renaissance playscripts are in exactly the same condition as India's silent cinema: long since lost in action.

Not quite everything was lost. Back in Mumbai a few days later, on my way to interview another film-maker, I felt my phone buzz.
Nasreen. The text was mysterious: a postal address in Mumbai and a phone number. I was wondering what on earth this signified when the phone buzzed again.
‘MALA SINHA,'
the message read.
‘NO IDEA IF STILL CURRENT. GOOD LUCK
!!!!'

Mala Sinha: the beauty on the film poster clutching Raj Kapoor, the unexpected heroine of Sahu's
Hamlet
– the great screen actress herself. I tried calling from the rickshaw and couldn't get through. Once the phone seemed to be answered, but the line was so poor it was difficult to tell. The voice on the other end – if it was a voice – was a faint susurration in a language I couldn't understand. The whine of the engine, reverberating through my teeth, made me wonder if I was imagining it.

I had a flight to Kolkata booked in a day and a half's time and a diary full of appointments. But the address was only a few miles away, in the upscale district of Bandra. On a whim, I decided to cancel my film-maker and direct the rickshaw to Bandra instead.

Forty minutes later, damp with sweat, I was there. The area had a grand past, judging from the rambling deco-style villas either side of the road. One or two were in fine condition, their cream and sorbet-yellow paintwork spotless, like steamers with matronly lines. Others had been converted into boutiques or business centres. One was in the process of being torn down, presumably to make space for the twin of the brusque new tower to its right.

I went past the address several times before I registered it behind a dark screen of rain trees. Even by the standards of genteel shabbiness unique to Mumbai, the house – a villa that might once have been even grander than its neighbours – looked like a ruin. Mould blackened the exposed plasterwork around the front door and porch. Lines of damp stretched along the frontage in great grey waves. Dark windows gazed blankly out. I'd arrived half a century too late. If this had once been a film star's house, it was now in
Sunset Boulevard
territory. Actually, it wouldn't have made a bad set for
Sunset Boulevard
… I took a few photographs to commemorate my near-brush with stardom.