Bioscope Man The

As Calcutta’s star begins to fade with the capital of His Majesty’s India shifting to Delhi Abani Chatterjee’s is on the rise. He is well on his way to becoming the country’s first silent-screen star. But just as he is about to find fame and adulation absurd personal disaster—a recurrent phenomenon in the Chatterjee household—strikes and Abani becomes a pariah in the world of the bioscope. In a city recently stripped of power and prestige and in a family house that is in disrepair Abani spins himself into a cocoon of solitude and denial a talent he has inherited from both his parents. In 1920 German director Fritz Lang comes calling to make his ‘India film’ on the great eighteenth-century Orientalist Sir William Jones. When Abani is offered a role he convinces Lang to make a bioscope on Pandit Ramlochan Sharma Jones’s Sanskrit tutor instead. Naturally Abani plays the lead. The result is The Pandit and the Englishman a film that mirrors the vocabulary of Abani’s life hinting at the dangers of presence and turning away the virtues of lying and self-deception the deranging allure of fame and impossible affections. Afterwards Abani Chatterjee writes a long letter in which he tells his story. Witty at times dark and always entertaining The Bioscope Man is that story.