D Ashish Rajadhyaksha metaphoric, signalling their subordination and keeping its own subtly manoeuvred mediation supreme (Tharu 1992). It was as though once the physically present icon, whether human or divine, gave way to to a 'dominant narrative point of view'—and, more important, once the spectator had been placed in the role of the 'transcendent studying subject', the floodgates opened and the mythological rapidly underwent a variety of generic mutations, mainly through the process of keeping intact its moorings in the 'traditional'. Douglas Fairbanks, whose hugely popular Fred Niblo-scripted Mark of Zorro series had already created its indigenous Master Vithal stunt movies that were just this side of the mythological, was to father a famous offspring: M.G. Ramachan-dran, the ultimate son of his particular soil, in his Jupiter Studio films in the 1940s. And the Wadia Movietone, who also took from Fairbanks/Niblo to make their Fearless Nadia stunt movies, shifted their realm of fantasy just slightly to make exotic dramas like Lal-e-Yaman (1933) which billed its lead actor Jal Khambatta as 'India's greatest Shakespearean actor' and claimed the film was inspired by King Lear. The Madan Theatres' Indra Sabha (1932), with its 69 songs, invoked the ancestry of the play—written in 1852 by Syed Aga Hasan Amanat in Wajid Alt Shah's court—while shooting it entirely in a manner adapted from MGM's Ziegfeld Follies. Several noted novelists turned scriptwriters to bring further credence to the 'dominant discourse': one of them, K.M. Munshi, who wrote historicals (Prithvi Vallabh, 1924, remake: 1943 being the most famous), also wrote 'socials' like the Sagar Studios' Vengeance Is Mine (1935) which were then set alongside, e.g., the melodrama Dr. MadhurikalModern Vfife (1935) in which a feminist who will not allow her marriage to distract her from her medical vocation, is eventually reformed into accepting traditional values. But these are asides. The real changes came with what I have called the epic melodrama. The political leanings of Pramathesh Chandra Barua were well established by the time he moved into film as an investor and shareholder in Dhiren Ganguly's British Dominion Films. Barua was the big-game-hunting son of the Maharaja of Gauripur, Assam, an amateur sportsman and art-lover, and graduate of Presidency College, Calcutta. He saw his first films while visiting Europe, apparently those of Rene Clair and Ernst Lubitsch. As befitting his ancestry, Barua joined Chittaranjan Das' Swarajya Party in 1928, i.e. the very year in which the anti-Muslim and anti-tenant Tenancy Bill was passed through the Bengal legislature, and was a member of the Assam legislative assembly between 1928-36. When Barua moved beyond being a mere patron of the cinema, and wanted to make films, he did not leam on the job like his contemporaries: he went to Elstree, England. His most famous film Devdas (1934) adapted the Saratchandra Chatterjee novel, despite his apparent familiarity with the attacks mounted on Saratchandra by the Kallol group. And finally Devdas, which introduced what popular history has always seen in Numbers 25-26