Himanshu Rai: The Light of India

A young boy crawls through a pile of poo and emerges brown and slimy to break through a crowd and get an autograph of his favourite movie star. Urchins are rounded up off the streets of Bombay and have acid poured into their eyes to convert them into professional & pitiable beggars. Indian exotica – of course. Cutting edge and original – hardly.

There has always been a western market for Indian exotica: the colours and the aridity, the heat and dust, the poverty and the opulence, the crass and the wise, the land of contrasts that is India. Before Danny Boyle, before Shyam Benegal, even before Merchant-Ivory and Bimal Roy, there was one Indian who was peddling Indian fare to the cinema audiences of Europe. He belonged to a time so far back, that the era itself lends itself to some nostalgic sepia-toning of its own.

Himanshu Rai was a pioneer in another sense too. He was the first India businessman to actively scout and deploy western talent in his productions. His first cinematographer was Franz Osten of Germany who worked with Rai on his blockbusters – Achut Kanya and Jeevan Naiya. But we are getting ahead of the story.

Rai was trained as a lawyer in Calcutta and London. As a student of Gurudev Tagore, Himanshu Rai had been deeply influenced by the passion plays of Christ. The dramatizations, the pathos, the play as a vehicle for cultural dissemination deeply influenced Rai and he decided he want to do the same with Indian mythology. Rai met Osten in Germany and they started their productive collaboration in 1925. Their first film was Prem Sanyas, also titled Light of Asia or Die Leuchte Asiens in German. The story of Gautama Buddha was not very well received by Americans who perhaps with their "Can Do" spirit and rags to riches tales had no appetite for watching a prince become a pauper. However the film had a great run in Europe where audiences were enthralled by an India where legend and reality were not yet torn apart. Rai cast himself as Gautama Buddha. Interestingly, the set decoration for Prem Sanyas was done by Devika Rani, the future wife of Himanshu Rai. Devika Rani herself was a grand-niece of Rabindranath Tagore and a trained architect and designer. They were to marry 4 years later in 1929.

Encouraged by the success of Prem Sanyas, Himanshu Rai continued with his heady mix of mythology and Indiana to narrate the tales of Shah Jahan in Shiraz (1928), Mahabharata in Prapancha Pash (1929) and finally Karma (1933), an ancient Romeo and Juliet about young lovers caught in midst of two warring kingdoms. Karma marked Devika Rani’s debut as a heroine. Today Karma is remembered for two facts – one, it has the longest recorded kiss in Hindi film history with a smooch running for four minutes (Emraan Hashmi – are you listening). Second – it was perhaps the first movie in the world where the heroine sang (this was before dubbing theatres and playback singing) in two different languages, Devika Rani showing the range of her upbringing and education.

By the mid-thirties, Nazi clouds began to blow over Europe. Rai and Devika Rani returned to India in 1934 and the same year set up Bombay Talkies. Franz Osten and other technicians relocated to India, and amidst world class facilities (Imported equipment, school for staff members and child actors, hygienic canteen and in-house hospital) created a stream of movies. The greatest of these was Achut Kanya in 1936. Before this, Bombay Talkies released Jeevan Naiya in the same year about the life of the nautch girls. Jeevan Naiya introduced to Indian movies, its first studio independent superstar – Ashok Kumar. Ashok Kumar was actually working a lab assistant in Bombay Talkies when Rai had some problems with his hero Najam-ul-Husain. Depending on which search engine you use, Rai either suspected Husain of romantic liaisons with Devika Rani or Husain fell ill. Either way, Ashok Kumar went on to work in a number of huge blockbusters with Bombay Talkies including the iconic Kismet in 1942.

Himanshu Rai’s last blockbuster was Kangan starring Ashok Kumar and Leela Chitnis. This was released in 1939 to great reviews and commercial success. Himanshu Rai died the next year, aged only 48. Bombay Talkies continued to produce movies through the forties despite differences between Sashadhar Mukherjee (Himanshu Rai’s partner) and Devika Rani. Ashok Kumar left Bombay Talkies to set up Filmistan in the mid-forties but did return for one last smash – Mahal in 1949. This was to be its last hurrah and Bombay Talkies closed down in the mid-fifties.

Himanshu Rai was a pioneer in a very fundamental sense. He scouted and deployed foreign talent; he broke away from the mythology oriented tales to narrate stories of everyday life; he made socially disruptive movies like Achut Kanya. He was a benevolent businessman in the mould of the Tatas with schools and hospitals for his staff and personally looking into the hygiene standards in the studio canteen. Bombay Talkies was listed on the stock exchange, made handsome profits and paid out dividends. His legacy lives on in the way stories in our movies reflect the current age, in the way Kamal Hassan sits for hours with a western makeup artist to transform himself into a suitcase or whatever or in the way movie production houses have corporatized themselves. But most of all, his legacy will be the great movies of Bombay Talkies, especially Kismet (1942) which gave us all the Bollywoodian tropes of anti-hero, lost and found formula, fall and redemption and finally the natural and unaffected style of acting.