With the passing of Virchand Dharamsey, Indian cinema has lost more than its foremost film researcher. It has also lost a large part of its early history, which had survived only in his extraordinary mind, and nowhere else.
Dharamsey’s work as a researcher was legendary. I first heard of him in the 1990s from Hussainibhai, whose musty Aladdin’s cave of movie ephemera on Grant Road in Bombay I sometimes frequented in search of B-movie monsters and the like. Hussainibhai’s sons always spoke of Dharamsey with awe, as someone who knew the forgotten faces of the past by sight and often helped them identify obscure stills.
I would learn later that Dharamsey had spent many years hunting down artefacts of the silent era, from old magazines and publicity material to the only available film script from the period. He had even traced figures from that time and recorded their interviews. Through this painstaking labour, he had mapped silent cinema anew and gained fresh insights into its origins and development. Some of his findings had been published in a definitive filmography of the silent period, as well as entries in the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema.
In the ’90s, I had a taste for trash, and very little interest in early cinema. All that changed one day when I met Dharamsey at Hussainibhai’s. Curious about his reputation, I cast a sidelong glance at the booklets he was inspecting and was surprised to notice Art Deco motifs I did not associate with Hindi cinema. We talk briefly about the designs and he returned to his work. But I could not stop thinking about the images, which eventually set me off on a journey researching the design styles of Hindi cinema.
Years later, when I was writing a book on Indian film posters, I remembered Dharamsey and approached him at the Asiatic Library to seek his guidance. We sat on a sofa under the marble statues of 19th-century worthies and talked about my project. Disappointingly, he had little information to offer, or perhaps none he cared to share with me. I found his manner offhand, I remember, and did not linger there for long.
That was the extent of my acquaintance with Dharamsey till this February, when I was re-introduced to him. He was 88 now, around my father’s age. He had been shooting a formal interview all day and was perhaps thirsting for a drink and some actual conversation. We ended up at one of his old haunts, Mocambo, where over beer and fries, I discovered how wrong I had been in my earlier estimation of him.
Far from being guarded, Dharamsey was very forthcoming in our conversation. From his archaeological and anthropological field work, the conversation turned to cinema, and he generously shared his insights on everything from the pre-Raphaelite influence on Indian art to the innovations of the Gujarati silent-film director Manilal Joshi and the political cinema of the period.
His conversational style had mellowed but was still occasionally combative. A contrarian at heart, he liked a good argument, and there was nothing he enjoyed more than busting myths and challenging received wisdom. The one thing he truly respected was original research. Faced with evidence that doorbells had been rung and archives scoured, he would fall silent and absorb the information quietly. I came to cherish that brief silence: it was all the validation one could ever need.
It was close to midnight by the time we stepped out of Mocambo into the Mumbai night. We had been talking for four hours; Dharamsey for around 10, counting the oral history he had recorded earlier in the day. I had the feeling he was a ghost now in the Fort streets and drinking dives of his prime and desperately wanted to defer the return to reality. But the Ola to Nerul was waiting, and he had to leave before the clock struck 12.
That was the last I saw him. In the weeks that followed, however, our conversation continued over messages and exchanged articles. He would call to clarify some point, and each time, what began as a brief chat would become an extended journey into film history. He had the entire terrain of Indian silent cinema mapped out in his mind, and could confidently pick up any thread to guide you through the labyrinth. You let time rewind a century and followed him into the maze.
To talk to Dharamsey was to be faced with an unwavering commitment to the search for knowledge. He told me he had dropped out of school and learned everything he knew from devouring tomes on history and archaeology. In the fifties, like many others in his generation, he became a self-taught modernist, reading Joyce and Proust, and playing an active role in the Film Society movement. I would learn that he had steadfastly refused to take up a regular job for most of his life, and worked instead as a researcher and interlocutor for visiting foreign scholars, all to dedicate himself to his intellectual quest.
He was just as uncompromising in his approach to research. Not for him the bloated myths and shallow journalism that passed for film history in India. A true historian had to ask the basic questions: How could Phalke be the founder of Indian cinema, working out of Nashik? Who were the filmmakers who truly established the infrastructure and aesthetic style of Bombay cinema? All academic theorising was meaningless, if it was not backed by empirical facts. Dharamsey had worked in archaeology, and he applied that discipline’s methods to his research, studying the shards of the cinematic past closely and inferring the structures to which they had once belonged.
It was not all science for him, however. As one of his collaborators, the film scholar Kaushik Bhaumik told me, Dharamsey drew on all his lived experience in his work. His upbringing in a Kutchi household, his experience of local communities and commercial networks, his feeling for Gujarati culture, and his knowledge of Bombay’s streets and sites of cinema, all became part of the narrative. He was, to adapt Manto’s famous phrase, a chalta phirta archive.
For all the richness and singularity of Dharamsey’s vision, very little of it was translated into print. He had always struggled to express himself in the English language, he said: a friend had even told him his thoughts were something else, and his writing, rubbish. This sense of inadequacy led him to work with a series of collaborators over the years. Some served as loyal amanuenses; others, less ethical, took credit for his work.
The slowness of the collaborative process was another issue. For the last 10-12 years of his life, he had been working on a book titled The Archaeology of Early Indian Cinema, which would assemble his research in all its complexity. Around five chapters were done, he told me, and despaired of the rest being ever completed. Neither of us said it, but there was a clear awareness that time was running out for him.
The book will surely be released someday. Whatever shape it appears in, finished or unfinished, it will be an important landmark in Indian film history. But as Kaushik Bhaumik points out, there are many things embodied within the researcher’s person – ideas and memories born from one’s lived experience; connections drawn and never spoken aloud – that are lost when the body of the researcher dies. Dharamsey may have left behind some kind of map to the maze, but we will have to find the paths on our own. His passing is a tragedy for Indian cinema and leaves me personally with a deep sense of loss.
Rajesh Devraj is the author of The Art of Bollywood (2010). He is working on a biography of the silent-film pioneer Baburao Painter.