A Cinema House in Poona

A Cinema House in Poona

1.

The motion pictures came to Poona with the coming of electricity in 1910. The first cinema house to be set up was the Napier Cinema in the Poona Cantonment. The Napier started showing silent movies to paying audiences in a shed-like structure, probably the first one in Poona.

With time and waxing popularity, the Napier was refurbished by 1919, or thereabouts, into a fairly well-boned neo-Classical building, with timber framing and a stone gable, punctuated with a Baroque-ish front. The Napier was very popular, and is mentioned in several accounts of Poona at the time. One peculiar feature was the screening of (what we today call) serials, short features of interminable stories that attracted the masses to the theatre weekly.

     "Monica also took Mehera to the movies. Once when her ayah, her seven-year-old brother, and Mehera went together to the Napier Theatre (later renamed the West End Cinema), Monica wanted to buy chocolates at the concession stand and pushed some British soldiers out of the way.
     Mehera was flabbergasted. "I'm not going to push a soldier," she thought. "Monica can get away with it; she's a Westerner."
     Most of the movies screened in Poona were American. A serial titled The Broken Coin (1915), starring Grace Cunard and Francis Ford, was a favourite. Every week there was a new episode, but eventually they became tired of it as the story went on forever with no conclusion."
     - 'Mehera-Meher, Volume I: A Divine Romance' by David Fenster; Meher Nazar Publications

Located on a busy thoroughfare, but on an un-demarcated plot, the theatre had, in its immediate neighbourhood a lovely fountain and a bandstand, that was very popular, gathering audiences whenever 'The Napier Cinema Band', which consisted of British (or Indian) army-men stationed in the Cantonment, performed. 

Thank you, Amit Vachcharajani, for this image.

     

"In 1916, the first Poona (Anglo Indian) and the 2nd Poona (the first Indian company) gave a concert at Napier Cinema in aid of the War Fund, raising 100 Rupees. The Rosebuds (in nighties) sang 'Goodnight Mr. Moon' and were encored, before Miss Sawyer (Captain of the 2nd Poona) posed as Britannia in the concluding patriotic pageant.

     -'Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World', edited by Shirleen Robinson and Simon Sleight, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pg. 172

The Napier Cinema became Napier 'talkies' in 1931. Not long after that came the big theatres in Bombay, under the patronage of the great American Studios like the Universal, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Bros. Many old cinema houses were refurbished in this, the Indian Golden Age of Hollywood, and the Napier seems to have undergone a change too. Perhaps under the influence of the Western India Theatre Association and 20th Century Fox (I am speculating), the Napier was blessed with a two storey RCC front and a new name- the West End.

The new building was superimposed on the old gable. You can see the poor gable sticking out of the top of the new building in the photo below. The new West End highlighted its own name twice on the facade, once in large concrete letters inset as the second floor balcony balustrade and the other as a vertical mast along its axis of symmetry, sticking out upwards, and skywards from the building in an Art Deco manner. While not an Art Deco building as such, the new front, with a cantilevered porch, fake arches, and vertical ornament striping its sides fell well within the fashion of the time. The West End shows some proto-Deco flattened ornament, sloping chajjas and a Palladian symmetry. Notice the protruding porch supported on concrete brackets.

This West End was the cinema house of my childhood. Now that I look back, many elements of the old Napier still remained even then, especially the old timber staircase that I remember vividly, painted olive.

2.

The West End Cinema was within spitting distance of the Empire Cinema and the Marz-o-Rin Fast Food Place, famous for its eggy, mayonnaise chicken rolls and sandwiches and guava juice in milk bottles.

The West End marks one site of my misbegotten youth. This was my second school, where I saw all sorts of movies my parents did not approve of. Between the late sixties and the very early eighties, this is where I was indoctrinated in a variety of World Cinema, and force-fed such dire gems as Sssssssnake (Don't say it, hiss it!) (US), 3 Fantastic Supermen (Italy), Fantomas Stikes Back (France) and The Swiss Conspiracy ("My father always told me- son, never lose your head, or your arse goes with it")(Germany/US). I can safely bet that none of you have ever heard of any of these atrocities, much less seen them.

I specifically remember being taken to watch Lost in the Desert (South Africa) as a special school outing during my 2nd or 3rd standard. A horribly traumatic choice for us young-uns (and a reflection on our teachers) considering the terrible, terrible things that happen to the child in the film, including being spat in the eye by a venomous snake, after surviving a plane crash.

The theatre was bounded into a rather large compound, as you can see, that had a low brick boundary that bounders and lowlifes (such as myself) would sun themselves on. On one corner was a marquee that displayed two large posters- one for the feature and another for the matinee. You can see how much these posters would have impacted my innocent self.

And observe the building extending in the rear. That was the site of a genuine 'merican soda-fountain, that we would aim directly for, if we had any money leftover after buying the tickets. A proper Saturday Night Fever experience, a movie I saw here too. My combed back hair dates from this vintage. The West End made me much of who I am today, I am sorry to report.

Later, the fountain became a traffic roundabout and the bandstand vanished.
Later still, in the 1980s, the West End itself was demolished to exploit the real estate value of its compound.

All that remains today is the traffic roundabout.
So it goes.

A Bookshop dies: a paean to Manney’s

A Bookshop dies: a paean to Manney’s

I growed up, like Topsy, in libraries and bookshops.

Besides the British Council Library (Motto: ‘Truth Always Triumphs’) where my father was the librarian, it is the bookshops of Poona that were the long suffering witnesses to the sputters and spurts of my pubescence. One of the most visited was Manney’s Booksellers next to Westend Cinema (English movies, soda fountain) at Camp. And now, it is shutting down.

Bookshops, like Irani Cafes, seem to have a way of doing this, blindsiding your comfortable memories and leaving them frayed and crotchety. Manney’s (the anglicised ‘Mani’s’, after its owners) is (for a short while now) a cavernous bookstore of current bestsellers and oddities and rarities that one can safely get lost in for an afternoon. In its bowels, I graduated from the vast collection of comics (GoldKey and Indrajal) and children’s books (especially the Three Investigators Mystery Series, ghost authored, but hosted by Alfred Hitchcock) to Alistair MacLean's oeuvre of war novels and contemporary thrillers (where I read my first swear words, and was thrilled to learn their spellings) to a completely eclectic set of reading habits, foraging rather than finding new stuff to read.

Manney’s was the first port of call, though not the only one. Around the corner from Manney’s were the Modern Book Stall and the Express Book Stall, both on East Street; while the Utkarsha and Popular were both at the Deccan. Each was different from the other, so visiting them all one after the other, browsing, not necessarily buying, was as ritualistic as temple darshan. Manney’s offered the largest collection, its employees tolerated, yet frowned upon my frequently darkening its doorstep (Free Reading Not Allowed). Manney’s has bookshelves upon bookshelves- travel, the English language, the Classics, novels, books on spirituality, philosophy, cinema, music and uniquely, a section on the military. Presumably it caters to the extended presence of Armed Forces folk in that part of Poona, the Southern Command being nearby, but also the National Defence Academy at Khadakvasla and the Armed Forces Medical College. Then the shelves peter out, un-categorized yet fun to delve into. I have always found that the best bookshops are the ones without direction. But then maybe Manney’s had imprinted on me in my impressionable years.

These are the institutions that landmark your life, that you take for granted will always be there. And yet, after nearly forty years of browsing, I did feel that bookshops like these remained behind the times as the world moved on. It is not that monster bookshops (a huge Landmark store is just across the road) now dominate the book buying scene, nor that online reading and online buying are killing them. It is simply that these single proprietor bookshops never developed a warm relationship with their customers, never created the ambience for an extended stay and never made offers that bibliophiles could never refuse. This standoffish, take-it-or-leave-it attitude lingered on even after the challenges to their former monopolies loomed large.

I have my own Manney’s story: I have mentioned browsing and not buying; one could not afford most books in the shop. Once, in the late eighties, while still in college, voraciously skimming books on rock ‘n roll, I found a freshly minted paperback of ‘20 Years of Rolling Stone: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been’ edited by Jann S. Wenner. Its pristine cover and chewed-off corner delighted and enticed, and equally quickly disappointed as it was way too dear for my collegeboy allowance. I left, feeling all the worse because I had riffled through its pages and it offered everything a rock-philiac would have liked to get jiggy with.

Twenty years later, the book was still there, on the same set of shelves, now yellowed, considerably worse for the wear, thumbed by strangers, never owned. Between the two decades, each time I visited Manney’s, I gave the book a darshan and a wistful caress. God knows, the book is probably still there. I wondered each time: just what kind of turn-over policy did the proprietors have for their old stock?

I do not vouch for this, but I never heard of Manney’s ever having a sale. Now, as the shop-owners have announced, when Manney’s will finally shut shop by the end of March, they will organise a ‘Grand Sale’ with discounts of twenty percent. Twenty percent. Bookshops like the Strand in Bombay offer a discount of twenty percent on All new books, and considerably more on older ones. Life goes on in these bookshops; books keep changing, the shelves are constantly refreshed. The sale events of bookshops like Strand are looked forward to with anticipation; when you can buy books in buckets. Little wonder then a shop like Manney’s, much loved, can also leave you in a state of perplexity.

Its old world charm and old school obduracy notwithstanding, I am sorry to see Manney’s go. The vast space it occupies and the advantage of its location in Poona Camp makes it real-estate to be sought after. I wonder what will replace it though. Cafe Coffee Day? Barista? KFC?

Another bookshop? Naah, unlikely.

Last Day in a Lived-in House

My First Serial Killer

I saw Claude Chabrol's Le Boucher (The Butcher, 1970), I'm not sure, but probably around 1974. I was nine.

I watched this film in blurry black and white on Bombay Doordarshan. This was a time of fledgling programming by Bombay's only television channel, leading to its golden age in the mid-seventies. Foreign films were a weekly staple, as I remember, under the program head of 'Montage'. For me though, looking back now, Chabrol's film was one of many firsts: it was my first introduction to world cinema, it was my first sub-titled film (something I unquestioningly accepted as normal) and it was my first serial killer movie.

Of course, what stood out for me was the last bit. As kids we were all brought up on a bloody diet of killing, murder, bloodshed, what have you... you know the wholesomeness of growing up, none of the namby-pamby stuff.

One scene in the movie stood out, clearly imprinting in my memory. I have recalled it many times since, I must have been pleasantly traumatized by it. A schoolteacher takes a bunch of children out on a picnic to a cave site in the hills. They sit by a stone ledge and open their sandwiches. One little girl open her buttered sandwich and exclaims 'Its raining!' The teacher says 'It's not raining.' The girl cries out 'But its red!' and looks up. A bloody female hand with freshly dripping blood pokes over the ledge. Everyone screams. Oh, how we loved watching this then, a bunch of kids in our neighbor's home (the only television set in the area at that time) and replayed it over and over in our heads and in our games. Drops of blood being an index for murder is a corny cliche today, but for us kids it was an affirmation of our own imaginations and fears.

By this time of course I had had my fill of horror stories and horror movies (only through books and magazines, trawling the depths of Poona's British Council Library, where I practically grew up). A particular favorite was the Encyclopedia of Horror Film and Cinefantastique (full of pictures, both scary and naughty-that's where I discovered King Kong, Godzilla, Dracula, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Vincent Price, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, The House of Wax, the Thing, the Blob, and everything undead), and of course the monthly Films and Filming magazine that I could never get enough of. Watching these actual movies would come much, much later. No, I consumed texts, still images and above all movie posters, lurid marquees in books and magazines and outside on all the cinema theaters I passed everyday in our school-bus on our way to school, fueling fantasies and populating the visual libraries in my head.

Chabrol, of course, I saw for the first and only time time that evening in the mid 70s. I found the scene again today, after nearly 40 years, and in glorious color here. And yes, the scene played put pretty much as I remembered it. Amazing, how I must have internalised the whole thing. A few years later, still a kid, I wrote a murrrderrr ishtory of my own called 'Whatever happened to Aunt Alice?' full of killing and assorted bunkum, where the first clue to a possible doing-in were three drops of blood on a bedsheet. Yes, yes, I did Google the title today to find that it was a film made in 1969, and I must have seen the title somewhere, what did I know? Plagiarism does not exist when you are ten. I must have seen the poster on the right, it has a gory familiarity, the blood is just about right. Also, this just occurred to me: the image of the bloody hand on the DVD box mirrors the hand in Le Boucher. Some amazing triangulation happening here, both inside my head and outside of it.

But of this I am sure of:
when those drops fell on the little girl's open buttered sandwich, I saw them fall in red.