Light of Asia. Xxxxxx Xxxxxxxxx in Asian Art. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 1988 Indian Sculpture. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 1999 “Possible Indian Representations of Bhaishajyaguru”, Journal of Bengal Art 4: 153–158. 2006 “Two Sinhalese Bronze Bodhisattva Images in the Xxxxxx Xxxxx Museum”, in X.X.X Xxxxxxxx & X. Xxxxx (eds.), Xxxxxxxx: Festschrift X.X. Xxxx, pp. 183–189. Berlin: Xxxxxxx. 2011 (ed.) The Elegant Image: Bronzes from the Indian Subcontinent in the Siddharth K. Bhansala Collection. Mumbai; New Orleans: Marg Publications. Paranavitana, S. 1943 Epigraphia Zeylanica: Being Lithic and Other Inscriptions of Ceylon, vol. IV (1934–1941). London: Oxford University Press. 1971 Art of the Ancient Sinhalese. Colombo: Lake House. Pelliot, P. 1920a Les grottes de Touen-Houang: Peintures et Sculptures bouddhiques des époques des Wei, des T’ang et des Song. Tome Second, Grottes 31 à 72. Paris: Librairie Xxxx Xxxxxxxx. 1920b Les grottes de Touen-Houang: Peintures et Sculptures bouddhiques des époques des Wei, des T’ang et des Song. Tome Troisième, Grottes 72 à 111. Paris: Librairie Xxxx Xxxxxxxx. Xxxxxx, X.
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Light of Asia. While I have argued that Light of Asia was a relative success in the British market based on its long run in London, the film only ever found exhibition in one venue— London’s Philharmonic Hall. This limited distribution further suggests the narrow and somewhat unintuitive ways in which audiences understood the film. Rai saw his film as part of a genre of mythological and biblical films. But the way the Philharmonic Hall exhibited the film help to redefine its generic categorization. Rai marketed the film as a reverent depiction of Indian mythology; his British audiences came to see the film as a depiction of contemporary India. Exhibitors at the Philharmonic Hall further reinforced this perception, exhibiting the film as a kind of travelogue. Travelogues—a term coined by filmmaker and adventurer Xxxxxx Xxxxxx—had their heyday in the era of silent films, born in the era of the touring lecture series of the 113 “The Black Watch,” Kine Weekly (25 July 1929), 43. nineteenth century. 114 A natural progression from lecturers’ photographic slides, silent films became a new way for speakers to illustrate their lectures at the turn of the century.115 According to film scholar Xxx Xxxxxxx, the film represented merely a moving backdrop to the lecture, “the verbal discourse simultaneously assuring the temporal and geographical continuity accompanied by continuous communication with the audience.”116 Over time the practice of using films to illustrate lectures became just one form of exhibiting travelogues, which would also “be shown as brief segments in a variety format of mixed genres” with short travel films often finding their way into longer nightly film programs, and as footage in fictions films, “with travel providing the background for fictional action.”117 Such films would directly influence what would later become the documentary film movement.118 At the time of Light of Asia’s release, travelogues were a common form of film entertainment that offered audiences the promise of journeying to foreign places, especially around the empire. Gunning argues that “in the modern era the very concept of travel becomes intricately bound up with the production of images.”119 According to Gunning, travelogues grew out of the same modern impulse for spectacle that drove the 114 Xxxxxxx X. Xxxxxx, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 42. 115 Xxx Xxxxxxx, “’The Whole World Within Reach’: Travel Images without Borders,” in Xxx...
Light of Asia itself has an ambivalent relationship to its generic link to travelogues. The film opens with the promise of the ersatz world travel that defined the travelogue. One of the opening titles informs the audience, “Every winter large numbers of European tourists are attracted to romantic India—land of many wonders and many contrasts.” Over the next several minutes the audience takes on the view of these tourists, as the camera moves them from Benares—“one of the oldest cities in the world—looked upon by Hindoos as the Holy of Holies”—to Jumma-Musjid, “the largest place of worship in the world.” The camera whisks audiences from streets overtaken with elephants and camels to those where streetcars and automobiles zip by. They see men bathing in the river, scan across a temple courtyard, and enter a local marketplace. Once inside the market place, the audience stumbles on the British tourists, who actually disrupt the sense of ‘reality’ in the film. The audience now sees the tourists from the perspective of a salesman inside a booth at the bazaar. Now instead of watching Indian people moving throughout the market, the audience watches the tourists watching 141 “A Film of India,” The Times, 6 January 1926, 10. 142 “With the Prince in India,” The Scotsman 20 May 1922, 9 others. Instead of watching the charmed snakes or dancing bear, the audience watches the tourists consuming these images. The tourists, not India, become the spectacle. They become the audience’s surrogates in the film and alert the audience that the film is not, in fact, a documentary but a work of fiction. The story spun by the holy man is for the entertainment of tourists, not for the enlightenment of the audience. Yet the tourists are inadequate stand-ins. The film audience has an obvious advantage over those diegetic tourists. While the latter must be content to listen to the sage’s story, the film audience watches it unfold across the screen. No contemporary reviews even mention their appearance in the film. In insisting on the travelogue qualities of the film, the tourists became the least ‘real’ part of the film. The tourists are the works of fiction. The “all-Indian” parts of the film became, for audiences who classified the film as a travelogue, a ‘real’ reflection of India. Light of Asia’s exhibition, then, recast the film as a modern-day travelogue by promising glimpses at ‘real’ Indian and exhibiting the film in conjunction with a live lecturer, even as Rai’s explanations of the film an...
