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As Gandhi refashioned the world of protest, another man was reinventing storytelling.On Dadsaheb Phalke, Talk of the Town (2008)
The next time you escape into a larger-than-life story, riotous with colour and sound, think of Dadasaheb Phalke.
Our film industry, the peacock-hued behemoth that has a nation of over a billion in thrall, a dreaming creature with star-dust eyes; it’s impossible to say what shape this outsized carnival would have taken today had Phalke, a man with outrageous ambition, not come along.
On 3 May 1913, India’s very first film – Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra – made its debut to a ravenously appreciative Mumbai audience. And the rest, as inherited wisdom says, is history.
(This story is from The Quint’s archives and was first published on 3 May 2016. It is being republished to mark Dadasaheb Phalke’s birth anniversary)
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