The year 2019 will mark 50 years of the passing away of Ardeshir Irani (pictured), the maker of India’s first talkie film Alam Ara (1931) (poster pictured) (see "Underexposed filmmaker,” Parsiana, May 7, 2018). In conversation with Parsiana, noted film critic
Rafique Baghdadi narrated the excitement that the film generated when released eight decades ago. He shared a copy of an article titled "When Indian cinema talked,” he wrote in a souvenir brought out during an International Film Festival in Bombay in the 1980s.
The first distributors of the film, Select Pictures Circuit of Bangalore, had to purchase new portable equipment and "organized a party to go around South India and Ceylon,” noted the article. Baghdadi quoted T. S. Mahadeo, the sound operator of the film as stating "the first Indian talkie arrived in Madras with its party of three persons and luggage of three pieces — the projector, the amplifier and the speaker. Such was the excitement generated by the film that "the Railways gave (them) permission to travel second (class)” at lower fares than other passengers. The first shows secured a "princely ovation and a hero’s send off,” Mahadeo noted. A guard at Trichy Junction delayed a train "as they (were) talkie people;” a theater owner in Salem stayed by the projection equipment to guard it; restaurant owners in Tumkur did not charge the distribution team for their food and drinks.
When the sound failed during a screening at Kumbakonam, the theater proprietor offered to return the ticket price. The audience refused to take the money back. "At the end of the (resumed) show, members of the screening party were carried on their shoulders to the bazaar, fed hot idli sambhar and garlanded profusely,” Baghdadi noted. Could not the characters be made to speak in Telugu? asked the one bemused proprietor of a Nellore cinema, about the Hindustani film!
