Epidemics and Indian Cinema: A Story of an Enigmatic Film

1. Epidemics and Indian Cinema: A Story of an Enigmatic Film Arrival of motion pictures in India (1896) and the plague epidemic Incidentally, the very first arrival and the projection of the motion pictures in Bombay / Mumbai on 7 July 1896 had nearly coincided with the bubonic plague epidemic. When on that rainy day of July, Lumiere Brothers’ representative Marius Sestier had presented the three-in-one Cinematographe (camera, projector, and printer) at Bombay’s Watson’s Hotel (building still extant), the potential bubonic plague pandemic was round the corner. By September 1896, it went on to attack the city ferociously, and soon, 20,000 people had fled it; the city’s population had halved to 450,000 people from 846,000. The 1896 plague pandemic is said to have lasted for thirty long years, by which time Dadasaheb Phalke had already made his first silent feature film Raja Harishchandra (1913). About the 1896 Bombay Plague, as it is still known as, though we find some reports and photographs in print media, no motion pictures on or about it could be traced. In a Watson’s Hotel room, on that evening of July, Mr. Sestier had shown six short ‘living photographic pictures in life-sized reproductions’ by Messrs Lumiere Brothers made in France on their Cinematographe. The Mumbai shows were repeated, and one of the advertisements published in the Times of India of 9th July 1896, had announced the following programme: Of the six Lumiere Brothers’ shorts, one was the Arrival of a Train, as if it had come all the way from La Ciotat railway station in France to Mumbai’s Watson’s Hotel built in the late 1860s. Here is the film made 125 years ago:

2. The Plague Epidemic / Pandemic It was the third major plague pandemic that had begun in Yunnan, China in 1855 and spread to all inhabited continents, ultimately leading to over 12 million deaths in British India and China, with about 10 million killed in India alone. The initial outbreak affected Bombay but soon spread further to Poona (Pune) and Karachi, reaching Calcutta / Kolkata the following year. Colonial government actions to control and treat the plague outbreak were extensive, but generally ineffective and harsh in the first stages. A campaign of quarantines, isolation camps, travel restrictions, demolition and disinfection of buildings was pursued, leading to massive resistance which forced colonial authorities to revise their epidemic control policy. Several international plague commissions operated in India in the first years of the epidemic, including commissions from Russia, Austria, Germany, Italy and the Institute Pasteur. The latter made a major contribution through Paul-Louis Simond’s discovery of the implication of the rat’s flea in the transmission and spread of the disease. The photographic record of the outbreak in India is international and covers a range of topics, including anti- plague measures, clinical symptoms, and the depiction of plague hospitals. (Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, the University of Cambridge) Plague and the Marathi film 22nd June 1897 In 1979, this plague epidemic became the context for a Marathi film 22nd June 1897 directed by Jayoo and Nachiket Patwardhan. The film, while woven around the bubonic plague raging in Poona / Pune (148 km from Bombay) narrates the story of the Chapekar Brothers (Damodar and Balkrishna) who assassinated the merciless British officer Charles Walter Rand, Assistant Collector of Pune and Chairman of the Special Plague Committee, Pune and British Army Officer Lieutenant Charles Egerton Ayerst. The date of assassination was 22nd June 1897.