tapati chowdhurie reports on a 3D project involving Tagore as film director and Nobel Prize recipient

LOOKING back, 1913 was a landmark for two reasons: Rabindranath Tagore was honoured with the Nobel Prize – a first for the country — and Indian cinema was born. To commemorate the occasion, Professor Karl Bardosh, of New York University&’s Kanbar Institute of Film and Television, is in Kolkata for 3D project that is a mixture of fact and fantasy. Producer, writer and director, he and Leonard Retel Helmrich, director of photography, Prashant Shah, consulting producer, and Bela Attila Kovas, a 3D modelling artist, are on the way to making Natir Puja and a feature film, Burnt Offerings, a biopic.
Tagore had staged Natir Puja at Santiniketan in 1926 and the following year he staged it at the Jorasanko Thakurbari. Present at that performance was BN Sircar , film producer and founder of New Theatres, who expressed his wish of filming it with Tagore directing. The music was by Dinendranath Tagore. Natir Puja (The Court Dancer) was the only film Tagore ever directed. Unfortunately, New Theatres was destroyed by fire in 1933.
In his film, Bardosh has the poet-director looking at the embers destroying the frames of his precious footage, while in the background can be seen the highlight of his life — receiving the Nobel Prize for Gitanjali in 1913.
Bharatanatyam dancer Sutapa Awon Pradhan reworked Natir Puja and performed it on stage in 2011, during the poet&’s 150th birth anniversary. Bardosh&’s remake will be shaped into a 3D cultural educational film. It shows New Theatres on fire, with Tagore walking through the place. Suddenly the rolls of burning film morph into snakes slithering over blue rocks. Then Tagore recites a poem from the Gitanjali, “Beautiful is thy wristlet decked with starry gems, but thy sword, O Lord of Thunder, is wrought with uttermost beauty, terrible to behold or think of.” A huge Garuda crashes through the windows and floats in midair, like a firebird holding in its talons a gold-plated sword decorated with precious gems. After which a burning frame reveals a melting picture from a scene in the 1932 film – that of Tagore as Upali, the Buddhist monk, in Natir Puja.
The film will include footage, photographed in 3D, of Sutapa Awon Pradhan&’s company travelling to the USA and performing Natir Puja in several cities, as also a larger narrative of how the Gitanjali earned Tagore the Nobel Prize in 1913. Pictures of Rothenstein and Yeats emerge from the fire consuming Tagore&’s film, leading to flashback scenes in London and India — for the first time, London exteriors taken from archival footage will be converted into 3D – that will recall Tagore&’s meeting “remarkable men” like Gandhi and Einstein.
Strereoscope, the Burbank-based state-of-the-art 3D company, has expressed an interest in joining the team to co-produce the film. Natir Puja and Burnt Offerings should start production soon.
 Natir Puja is based on a Buddhist legend penned 2,500 years ago in the Pali sacred book, Avadha Shatak, and portrays the exchange between Upali and Srimati, a lowly court dancer, who accepts the sage&’s invitation to lead a celebration on the Budhha&’s birthday with a prayer dance. This is vehemently opposed by the Queen Mother, a most tormented character, who would follow the Buddha until she lost her husband and a son when they renounced wealth and power for a humble and non-violent way of life. So she now sides with her stepson and current king, Ajatasatru, a follower of the violent philosophy of the Buddha&’s enemy, Devadatta, which favours the power of the ruling classes. The story of Srimati is one of supreme sacrifice in her devotion to the Lord Buddha.