A silhouette of a once affluent Hiralal, sitting by the river, trying to drown his sorrows in alcohol…. His accidental walking into the household kitchen to discover his wife eating leftovers for dinner.
Scenes from Hiralal, a 2018 Bengali-language biopic directed by Arun Roy, of a forgotten Indian cinema luminary – Hiralal Sen, reminding one of the fragile and fickle nature of film business.
On 28 December 1895 the world’s first movie Lumieres’ 50-second film The Arrival of a Train created waves in Paris. Seventeen years later, in 1913, Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra opened in Bombay to create history as India’s first feature film.
However, the first Indian to actually make movies was a filmmaker Bengal’s Hiralal Sen, who had released a full-length feature film Alibaba O Challish Chor in 1903, almost a decade before Phalke. Though credited with also having made India’s first advertising film and first political documentaries, little is known about this pioneer.
Born in a wealthy family in present day Bangladesh, Sen fell in love with photography during his college days in Calcutta. He became fixated with movies as the medium of the future when a certain Professor Stevenson staged a show at Star Theatre called The Flower of Persia in 1898. Mesmerised, he immediately made his first film A Dancing Scene based on that opera.
The Lumiere brothers combined film recording and projection into a single device, creating the world’s first motion pictures. Learning of this innovation, the bioscope, Sen spent (then) a princely sum of Rs 5,000 to buy a cinematograph machine including projection equipment from England. He also bought the Urban Bioscope, a film projector development Company in London.
The theatre scene then was changing tides led by artiste Amarendra Dutta of Classic Theatre who asked Sen to shoot song and dance sequences with the actors of his plays. Sen infused bioscope with theatre — a confluence of moving images and story, a step closer to films.
Volume of work forced Sen and his brother Motilal to set up a film production company called the Royal Bioscope Company, India’s first movie company. After a fall out with Dutta, he started travelling movie shows in Bengal and churned out documentaries, advertisements and films on public life, nature, political events. In 1903, he filmed the popular Alibaba O Challish Chor.
In 1904 Sen made a film of public rally opposing Lord Curzon’s plan to divide Bengal. Widely considered India’s first political documentary, he recorded the huge rally placing the camera on top of the treasury for impact.
When George V came to Delhi in 1911, he withstood competition with four of the best cameramen from England and beat them by being the first to release the Visit Film of Delhi Durbar with a wider coverage. Sen also shot India’s first ever two product commercials that were way ahead of his time, ‘Jabakusum hair oil’ and Edward’s anti-malaria drug.
Sen had his share of challenges. He lacked modern facilities and business acumen. He fell on hard times eventually leading to a fallout with his brother and causing the company to fold up. He then joined London Bioscope owned by Kumarshankar Gupta, ironically, a former employee of Royal Bioscope Company.
On October 24, 1917, a fire in a north Kolkata godown where all Sen’s 40 films were stored, destroyed his life’s work. Ailing from throat cancer and on the verge of insolvency, he died a broken and unhappy man, aged just 51.
His life and accomplishments largely undocumented, he only lives in a few books and notes of researchers and academics. A century later, he still awaits his rightful place in India’s cinematic history.