Remember the Ross London wooden camera that Dulquer Salmaan, enacting the part of Ramaswamy aka Gemini Ganesan, uses in Mahanati to take Savitri’s first portfolio pictures? That camera was sourced from Hyderabad-based vintage camera collector Faisal Ali Khan.
Khan, in turn, had picked up that and six other cameras from a garage near the erstwhile Gemini Studios, in Chennai, seven years ago. The wooden camera, made in UK in 1890, was well in use in Gemini Studios in the 1940s & 50s, and cost Khan ₹25,000. Khan won’t vouch that this is the same camera used by Gemini Ganesan, because, “I don’t have documents to prove who used it in the studio and how.”
Dulquer Salmaan in Mahanati
He got a call from someone in Chennai who tipped him off about a number of old cameras lying unattended in a garage. “The wooden camera, its cover and stand were all lying in different corners. I assembled them,” he tells us and shows how the camera is operated. Its large aperture, shutter and the early generation tripod harks back to a time when cameras were a luxury. Unlike today where a company introduces new models every few months, things didn’t change rapidly at the turn of the 20th century. Cameras manufactured in the West made inroads into India a decade or two later and were used for years.
Industrial revolution
Khan has more than 740 cameras (he last counted them in 2010), carefully stored in four warehouses in Hyderabad. He began collecting antiques 20 years ago. His grandfather had collected watches, his father had a fascination for books and pens, and he took a liking to things that were manufactured in the early years of industrial revolution — typewriters by Remington (some dating back to 1920; the orange one used by Samantha in the film was also sourced from Khan), cycle lamps and bells, LP records, spool decks, gramophones, sewing machines and more.
Many cameras in his collection are in working condition. He shows us a box camera, cameras used for motion pictures in the 1950s and 60s, one of the earliest Nikon SLRs and several others. His collection is enough for a viewer to understand the evolution of cameras, the medium and large format film cameras over the decades. In his collection are 120-year-old lenses.
Around 30-35 cameras, a few typewriters and gramophones from Khan’s collection were used in Mahanati and he says, “I was initially sceptical if they would be handled well. But my cameras and typewriters were like celebrities on the sets and got special treatment.” Producer Priyanka Dutt learnt about his vintage collection through a common friend’s social media post, and the rest followed.
For Khan, the fascination lies in learning the stories behind the antiques. He has bought several antiques from Hyderabad’s Old City, Chennai’s Moor market, Crawford market in Mumbai, and abroad, particularly flea markets in the UK. Each item he’s purchased teaches him a little more about the evolution of the articles and of the lives of people who used them. “These cameras and typewriters tell us about the professionalism of the users. Unlike the digital era, they couldn’t preview images on the monitor and delete them. The same goes for journalists who used typewriters. They couldn’t afford to make mistakes,” he says.
Does Khan plan to open a private museum? As of now, Khan, who works as an interior design consultant, is happy keeping the antiques as his private collection.
