1945 Kankanhalli, India

Nerlige Venkatachar Partha Sarathi
1934
Kankan Halli
Interviewed on 2/4/23
by Rebecca Huang

That was the year 1945. It was the end of the Second World War. So we were living in a small town in rural India. Films were very rare those days. The film companies would come from town to town in a truck; there were no regular theaters. They would come in a vehicle with an electric generator, and they would pitch a big tent and then show the film, so we would all go and watch the film. My first film I remember was in 1945, just when I was about ten or eleven years old. In those days, the movies were all mythological stories, and people would only watch movies which had a god in it or mythology. The films were mostly based on those stories. The first movie I saw was also based on that, a mythological film about a king who always told the truth and was so good that the gods were afraid that he would become a god himself. They were jealous, and so they started to test him. They put him to a lot of tests and the king became a very poor man, but he was still always telling the truth. The gods were pleased and gave him the salvation and made him sort of like a god. That’s the type of story we used to see in those days. The name of the movie is Satya Harishchandra. Satya means fruitful, so it means fruitful king Harishchandra. The film was in Kannada, a regional language.

At ten years of age, we were all awestruck. Living in a small town, seeing a movie on screen, it was something of a great surprise to us, that we believed that they were all real, though it was on a screen. It was all so real for us. And of course, technology was not great those days, but still that was our mindset. We always felt, “Oh my god, things have come to life.” It’s all mythology and we had known the story before, we had read about it in our books, so because of that the whole story was true and real. We totally believed the whole story.

The name of my town – they changed the name of my town later on, but those days it was called Kankan Halli. It is a town with a population of about 5000 people. And these movies would come – they used to have annual carnivals and fairs. All the people from rural villages, they would come and collect, so that’s the time they would also come with a film and project it so that more people could see it. We would watch mostly in open fields. They would pitch tents and we would sit on the ground, no benches or anything. We would bring our own mats and blankets, we would spread it on the floor, and then watch the floor. More affluent people would bring their own chairs.

My brother and sister were with me when we watched the film. My brother was about eight years old and my sister was about twelve. My father was a teacher, and because he was a teacher in that small town, he was well respected, and we would get invited to watch the film, not that we would have to pay for it or anything. Some of the select, important people of the town would be invited, so we as the children were all given free admission to go and watch the film.

Most of the films would be after dusk. We would take our dinner, and then we would go and watch the film, so roughly it would start around six or seven at the night. And these would be long films, they wouldn’t be short films. They would be at least two to three hours long. And Indian films are not considered films until they had about six or seven songs. Music was very much a part of the film. There would be at least six or seven songs and the films would drag on to at least two to two and a half hours.

At that time, the film industry was at its very infancy. They were all black and white films, they were all 35mm reels. One thing I must tell you is that because the films were so long, and the large reels – not for this particular film, but generally when I watched films – the guy at the back in the projector room sometimes would mix up the reels, so he would put the fourth wheel before the third reel, and would realize it and that there was a problem, and then stop the whole thing and then go back to the third reel and put it back in front of the fourth reel. People would start shouting and whizzling – a lot of noise in the theaters. These things I’m talking about are in the 40s and the 50s. By the time I came to Delhi, it was 1954, ten years later. By then, there were regular cinema halls and theaters, more organized and better, and the technology was also much better those days. But I’m talking about the films of the 40s – it was just sort of fun to watch and nothing else. Most of us would know the story already. The film was reproduced in color many years later. It was only the 60s that color was introduced to the movies. So all the earlier movies were reproduced in color later on. And they were definitely better looking and all that.