The history of the Taj Mahal has a serendipitous echo in our times. Should the mausoleum be thrown open to puja or denied namaaz? As the debate around its cultural location heats up, the appearing of the film Shiraz casts a light on the monument as a beacon of love.
Recent interest in the silent film has been a boon to film archives languishing in different parts of the world. After the stupendous success of Napoléon (1927), the five and a half hour magnum opus by Abel Gance that was meticulously restored and set to music by Carl Davis, interest in the silent era has revived.
The grand historical
Screened for a single evening at New Delhi’s Siri Fort auditorium, Shiraz is another marvel of cinematic resurrection, where the restoration of the film actually took longer than the making of the original. From our vantage point, the film demonstrates a transnational scope and ambition seldom seen today.
Twenty-eight-year-old Himanshu Rai was a law student at Inner Temple, London, when he met playwright Niranjan Pal. Son of freedom fighter Bipin Chandra Pal, Niranjan wrote The Light of Asia and Shiraz, both of which were performed on stage in England.
Rai invited both Pal and Franz Osten to India, seeking a collaboration with the UFA Studios in Germany. Until his international co-productions were halted by the rise of Hitler, Rai worked with Osten and German cameraman Josef Wirsching, in a transnational, multilingual co-operation.
Osten entered the Indian film industry through the grand historical — his first three films were the Light of Asia on Gautam Buddha (1925), Shiraz (1928) and Prapancha Pasha or A Throw of Dice (1929). After the landmark Achhut Kannya (1936), he was to slip into the Bombay commercial film, with Bhabhi , Nirmala , Kangan, his last films in 1938-39.
What is perhaps of lasting interest in Shiraz is not so much the authenticity of the story of a simple potter, Shiraz, as the ‘designer’ of the Taj, as the “Indic Orientalism” that the film represents. The converging of European and Indian aesthetics in the period between the World Wars had manifold sources, and drew on talented émigrés in the fields of cinema, writing, publishing and art.
Walter Kaufmann, émigré musicologist and composer who gave All India Radio its signature tune, lived in Bombay for 12 years and composed the musical score for Indian films like Prem Nagar (1940). Osten, who didn’t know a word of Hindi, compensated with the detailing and scope of his grand canvas. Much of Shiraz is shot outdoors, lending it a contemporary verisimilitude, say, in the presentation of the Indian potter’s hut, the interiors of the Agra Fort, or the death by elephant scene — a spectacular vision of 17th century India.
In 1929, Himanshu Rai was to make A Throw of Dice, billed as a ‘Romance of India’, which shares many characteristics with Shiraz , especially in its dramatic editing and mix of Indian and Western orchestration. Anoushka Shankar, who has written the score for Shiraz and performs live with eight musicians, fulfils this requirement impeccably.
Shankar’s score has the flair and energy of her own times. She threads together a score for the keyboards, allowing for a colonial flavour, as well as a joyous, energetic rendition of Raag Desh, especially apt for the shared vision of the Taj between Emperor Shah Jahan and artisan Shiraz.
Kismet connection
Even at the risk of packing in more verve than the somewhat enervated Khurram (Charu Roy) on screen inspires, or indeed the somewhat limpid romance between Khurram and Selima (Mumtaz Mahal played by Enakshi Rama Rao), the vigour of Sanju Srivastava’s tabla does much to complement Osten’s racy editing. Shiraz is fascinating not only as one of the few Indian films of the silent era to have been meticulously restored (the number of such surviving films is only 1% of the films produced until 1930), but also because it seems to stand in the triad of aesthetic and technological concerns between the budding nationalism, and the colonial and European constructions of India.
Viewing Shiraz and The Throw of Dice, which came two years later, from the prism of a cross-cultural Orientalism fostered by Osten and Himanshu Rai lends the film an entirely different genealogy. Travelling extensively in cosmopolitan Europe and America, Rai would have been well aware of Hollywood extravaganzas led by Cecil B. DeMille’s productions, the Ballet Russes under Sergei Diaghilev, and their elaborate engagement with Orientalism.
The precursors to these spectacles were the immensely popular Orientalist paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Frederick Goodall and Lawrence Alma-Tadema that featured intricate scenes of apparent lassitude in over-decorated interiors.
The spate of Orient-inspired Hollywood films that precedes Shiraz include Kismet (1920), The Sheik (1921), which catapulted Rudolf Valentino to fame, followed by Salomé (1923), as well as the more India-specific The Indian Tomb (1921). Shiraz , with its fast pace, ease of narrative and mode of storytelling, fosters a kind of Orientalist view that was already acceptable in the West.
The costumes of the women characters, for instance, owe much to the harems in the paintings of Alma Tadema or Salomé.
“The Orient... seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe,” Edward Said wrote in Orientalism . Himanshu Rai’s Shiraz , with its staging of a fiction around the making of the Taj, brings India squarely into this discourse.
Nearly a hundred years later, it invites an understanding of how we see and represent ourselves, in which past and present gain a mutual valence.
Gayatri Sinha is an art critic and curator who, while preoccupied with her art website www.criticalcollective.in, is also contemplating a book on the Middle Ages
