On Dadasaheb Phalke's Kaliya Mardan

From a grove of trees by a river, a child bearing a crown of peacock feathers emerges skipping and dancing, silhouetted against the sky and trailed by a claque of impassioned women. The group advances to the foreground of the frame, where the women entreat the cherub to play his flute. Shaking his head vehemently, Krishna waves his flute around his head like a scimitar. Finally he consents, and as he lifts his musical wand to his lips, the lilting sound of the flute comes cresting over the tabla on the soundtrack. 

Delirious with joy, the women pick up the child and carry him to a small clearing, where they set him down on a pedestal. As he plays, they scamper out of the frame and return each carrying a tree branch, with which they begin to play dandiya, swiftly interchanging positions around Krishna’s still centre. In their trancelike state, they do not notice when Krishna jumps out and disappears. It is as though the flautist’s music has pervaded the entire universe; the creator disappears into his own creation.

This is an enthralling sequence from Kaliya Mardan (1919), the only work by the first genius of Indian cinema, Dadasaheb Phalke (1870-1944) that survives in something close to its entirety. Between 1913, when Phalke made what is now considered the first Indian feature film (Raja Harishchandra) and 1934, when sound in cinema became the norm and “movies” became “talkies”, over 1300 silent films were made in India. 

Regrettably, only a few scraps of this vast corpus still exist (India’s National Film Archive was established only in 1964), and so Kaliya Mardan might also be seen as a master key to this era. In harnessing the wonder and magic of the new technology of the moving image to the willing suspension of disbelief rooted in the thicket of divine myths and legends stored in the imaginations of the Indian audience, cinema in its early years in India, in the words of the film critic Chidananda Das Gupta, actually used science in a way that “reinforced faith and blurred the distinction between myth and fact.” 

By removing actors from the orbit of the audience, and speeding up storytelling with cuts and other kinds of montage, the new cinema could scale up the make-believe of theatre a hundredfold while still drinking deeply from the technical repertoire and mudras of dance, music, literature and the visual arts. Phalke’s advertisement for Raja Harishchandra gives some sense of the wonder of this new super-form: “A performance with 57,000 photographs. A picture two miles long. All for three annas.” 

That is why, although it was by some distance the oldest film on show at the International Film Festival of India in 2024, Kaliya Mardan still felt in many ways like the most novel. The film is rapt in its own leela, as the women are in Krishna’s music. We sense we are watching not just a great artist, but an entire medium discovering its own expressive power. Except for short captions inserted periodically into the story, the form has no need for words (although its effect is greatly intensified by sound, which in the IFFI screening was provided by a live orchestra). When talk came into the movies a few years later, cinema immediately became lazier. Even today, we can readily recognize cinema’s own version of a resource curse. The surfeit of words, images, and music, all planted upon stars who sometimes play nothing and no one but themselves, underwhelms rather than overpowers.

In Kaliya Mardan, Phalke also introduced to Indian cinema one of its first stars: his seven-year-old daughter Mandakini, who plays Krishna with great panache. The film’s opening sequence has no narrative content at all, as little Krishna, sparkling with mischief and delight, makes eyes at the camera and emotes for the pure joy of emoting, taking us on a rapid tour of the navarasa, the nine emotions central to Indian dramatic theory. 

Then we are led through a series of legendary episodes in the life of the child Krishna, culminating 40 minutes later in a great setpiece. The giant serpent Kaliya has devastated the waters of the Yamuna with poison and ravaged the life of Vrindavan. Only a solitary tree survives by the riverbank. A long shot shows Krishna approaching the tree and sizing up his task, a tiny figure in the bottom corner of the frame. 

Then he slowly climbs the tree and plunges into the river – a journey inventively and economically shown by Phalke against a background of black cloth, with Krishna exiting one frame with his head last and appearing in the next with his feet first – as the villagers cry out in fear and dread. Down “below” he is enfolded by the coils of the snake, even as up above, the villagers decide he has been killed and run away to mourn their beloved child.

But when they return to the riverside for a final despairing round, they see Krishna rising out of the water, both victorious and winsome, atop the arched head of the snake. Both the story and the medium have come together in a beautiful embrace to stage a miracle.

You can watch the entire film here.