A book as unusual as dates.sites: Project Cinema City: Bombay/Mumbai is best described through the words of Madhushree Datta, who came up with the concept and authored the text. “This volume presents a timeline of the city of Bombay/Mumbai in the 20th century, anchored to its most adored public institution — cinema.”
The book, thus, “is divided into sections by decades, and the decades in turn are divided by a series of calendars designed by visual artists, filmmakers and designers.” But even that isn’t enough to tell you how extraordinarily this volume has been produced, how sumptuously it has been designed. Where most histories of Bombay cinema begin with Dadasaheb Phalke and Raja Harishchandra , made in 1913, dates.sites goes back to 1897, when, we’re told, the “first motor car arrives in Bombay (three years after its invention in the west),” and “the Health Department undertakes drastic measures to control the [plague] epidemic: forced evacuation, razing bamboo huts, police searches, isolation and detention.”
These nuggets of text — and all text is nugget-sized — appear in a column bisecting the page, and behind the words is a faded photograph. The facing page is a sea of white, with just a photograph of waves in the middle. (It makes sense, therefore, to mention Shilpa Gupta, who did the design and graphics with Dutta.) The oddest, most fascinating visual elements crop up on the pages — old two-and three-
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
And coursing through these images is a scrupulous listing of events — how, in 1901, newsreel footage of the Second Boer War was released at Novelty Theatre; that, in 1933, film songs as independent entertainment began when Vinayakrao Patwardhan starred in the film Madhuri ; that, in the 1930s, female stars were paid at least twice what the male leads were paid (this fact is circled, as if by pen); how, in 1942, profits in the film business increased as the number of films produced dropped significantly, due to the imposition of restrictions on length (11,000 feet) owing to raw-stock shortage, given that most of the film stock was going towards producing war propaganda films for the British government; how, in the 1950s, the Bombay State Prohibition Act gave rise to the “generic Christians of loose morals in Hindi cinema,” while also initiating the trend of naming comedians after liquor brands like Johnny Walker...
Occasionally, there’s the acknowledgement of the narratives on other cities: “Calcutta in Ritwik Ghatak’s
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
A more frightening change is suggested by the 1975 calendar from Trojan Horse Rubbers and Condoms, which features the caption: “Why cry over spilt milk?” The visual is the famous Raja Ravi Varma painting of Vishwamitra refusing to accept Menaka’s gift of the infant Shakuntala. Amidst guffaws over the juxtaposition and the creativity, we are reminded that such an ad, today, would tear the country apart.
Dates.Sites
Project Cinema City Bombay/Mumbai: Madhusree Dutta; Tulika Books, 35 A/1, Shahpur Jat, New Delhi-110049. Rs. 995.
( Baradwaj Rangan is a deputy editor with The Hindu )