Pune a draughtsman and photographer at an archaeology department of the government. In 1901 he met a German magician and, becoming his disciple, gained considerable skill in serveral illusionist tricks and certainly, an abiding interest in magic. He next went to Lonavala, where in 1894, Raja Ravi Varma had started his famed lithography press to mass-print pictures of popular gods and goddesses (at the request of Sir Madhava Rao, regent and dewanofBaroda and one of his patrons, who urged him to have his works oleographed to meet the enormous demand for them. One of Phaike's first assignments was to do photolitho transfers for the Ravi Varma Press, which later led him to establish his own Phalke's Engraving & Printing Works, where he pioneered three-colour printing. In 1909, finding a new partner to run the press, he went to Germany to acquaint himself with recent three-colour technologies. Returning and updating his equipment, his press (now called the Laxmi Art Printing Works) rose to renown as one of the foremost in the country — and one of only three that did colour printing at all.However he soon fell out with his partner and resigned. It was at this depressing point in his life that he saw the film The Life of Christ. 'I was gripped by a strange spell', he wrote six years later.3 'Could this really happen ?' He saw every film he could and read everything available on the subject of film making. Following a correspondence with the editor of the weekly Bioscope in London, he went to England. There, assisted by an apparently incredulous manager of the Hepworth Company, he bought a Williamson camera, a perforator and some Kodak film. On his return, depending heavily on loans and on money raised by pawning his wife's jewellery, he shot Raja Harishchandra in six months. The film, released first in the Coronation Cinema / at Bombay, ran for 23 days and the Phaike Films Company was a studio in business. Even as he worked, Phaike was aware that he was making some kind of history. This was in part an awareness that 'the art of cinematography is the next stage of photographic art';4 and in more precise political terms : 'While the life of Christ was rolling fast before my eyes I was mentally visualizing the gods Shri Krishna, Shri Ramachandra, their Gokul and Ayodhya... .Could we, the sons of India, ever be able to see Indian images on the screen ?'5 It meant, for him, the need to set up an Indian industry, in line with the nationalist call forswadeshi: 'Many industries could languish and die in the villages and towns of India without anybody noticing, but if my Indian film enterprise had died like this, it would have been a permanent disgrace to the swadeshi movement in the eyes of people in London.16 And thus he wanted to prove to all (i.e., the English) that an Indian working under primitive conditions could make films too : These films whose single copy could bring in incomes worthy of a millionaire were produced in only eight months and that also with hand-driven machines,without a proper studio and with technicians who were so new and inexperienced that they were 48 Numbers 14-15