What if you were told that Priyanka Chopra is not the first Indian actor to go to Hollywood and record English music, but that this feat was achieved in the ’70s by singer, songwriter and actor, Asha Putli? How about the revelation that Helen was in fact not India’s first ‘item girl’? It was actually Azurie Annette, an erotic dancer in the Indian film industry who eventually migrated to Pakistan and started her own dance school after Partition. Or that before Dadasaheb Phalke, there was Ramchandra Gopal Torne. But since his film was shot and edited by a British man, it wasn’t considered to be Indian.
These are just a few of the stories about pre-Independent Indian cinema that the Indian Memory Project’s ongoing Instagram series ‘Cinema Citizens’ has in store for its followers. The weekly posts will continue till Independence day in August. “Each story is a movie,” says Anusha Yadav, founder of the self-funded digital archive, who was inspired to start the series two years ago. Filmmaker Navdeep Singh, during a light-hearted conversation at that time, suggested that Yadav “make an archive on Bollywood”.
Cinematic discoveries
Taking this exchange a little too seriously, Yadav began researching with the goal of actually making a Bollywood family tree. The deep dive eventually brought to light Jaddan Bai — the first post in the ‘Cinema Citizens’ series — an actor, singer, music composer and one of the first three women to own a film studio. Bai also groomed her daughter, Nargis to become one of Indian cinema’s biggest stars. “Women had more power [then, and cinema] was more collaborative,” Yadav opines. “If you did well, you could have a say.” This was also partially true because of the fact that being in the film industry was widely looked down upon by society. “Good Indian girls did not go and act in movies,” says Yadav. There were also communal discriminations that actors faced before 1947; a lot of them having to adopt Hindu names just to be accepted. Most notably among them was Meena Kumari whose birth name was Mahjabeen Bano.
Given these shortcomings of the industry back in the day — some of it still prevalent today — the quality of films made was of utmost importance. “People from different walks of life like theatre, music and writers would kind of mix together, which you don’t see now unless someone is interested in buying your rights,” says the founder. “It happened quite organically then. It was more about quality, and quality meant profit at that time.”
Yadav intends to make a book out of the ‘Cinema Citizens’ series but is content with it being exclusively on Instagram for now. “It works because it drives attention to The Memory Project itself,” says Yadav. It is also a good way to remind viewers of an erstwhile era, one that we rarely think about in the context of cinema. In Yadav’s words, “You find in some ways history repeating itself, history being challenged – those are the joys of archiving and research.”
Follow Cinema Citizens @indianmemoryproject on Instagram. You can also help fund the project by becoming a patron atindianmemoryproject.com/support.com
