A Historian on a Film Set

Courtesy of Gyan Prakash A clapper board of the film “Bombay Velvet”.

On July 28, I flew to Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, to join the filmmaker Anurag Kashyap,  the actors Ranbir Kapoor and Anushka Sharma, and a massive crew making the movie “Bombay  Velvet.” In 2004, drawing on my research on the history of Mumbai, I had written the outline for a retro film noir  aimed at capturing the momentous transformation of Mumbai’s milieu of jazz clubs and industrial society in the 1960s. I had seen and admired Mr. Kashyap’s first film, “Paanch,” a dark tale set in Mumbai that has never been released commercially but was screened at Princeton University. I told my story to him because he had a reputation as an independent-minded and talented scriptwriter and director. When I finished, he said, “Like James Ellroy! Great! We’ll make it.”

This initial burst of enthusiasm was what John le Carré, writing in The New Yorker about his experience with the filming of one of his novels, described as the “First Flush.” It was followed, as in the case of Mr. le Carré, with the “Big Unexplained Silence.” Year after year, month after month, I badgered Mr. Kashyap, but things never seemed to be falling into place. I was certain that only he had the sensibility to make a dark film of the kind that I had in mind, despite the fact that most of his own films â€" like “Black Friday,” on the 1993 bombings in Mumbai â€" were not finding distribution. When I arrived in Mumbai in the summer of 2008, he suggested that I write a script to get things going.  Write a screenplay? I immediately bought books on screenwriting and read and reread well-known screenplays. And I did write a script, several times over.

Then, in 2009, fortune smiled on Mr. Kashyap. His film “Dev D” was a critical and commercial hit. Further successes followed, including the two-part “Gangs of Wasseypur.” He was now the filmmaker everyone wanted to work with. “Bombay Velvet” rose from the dead.  Mr. Kashyap rewrote my script into a final, more cinematic version.  Mr. Kapoor and Ms. Sharma signed on.

A sterling cast of supporting actors, an ace cinematographer, an accomplished composer, a sound designer, production and costume experts, and an army of young, enthusiastic assistant directors came on board.  The Indian news media enthusiastically reported that Karan Johar, a successful producer, filmmaker and television host, was to play an unsympathetic character.  Fox Star Studios stepped in as co-producers. “Bombay Velvet” was seen as a huge leap for Bollywood and Mr. Kashyap, who has been called India’s Tarantino and Wong Kar-wai.

When I reached the filming location, everything seemed chaotic to my uninitiated eye as the set was being readied. The cinematographer and his staff were rigging cameras; the lighting people were manipulating lights and reflectors; the sound designer was sitting before his console and directing the operator with the boom microphone; the art directors and costume designers were making sure that the look was right; and assistant directors, the line producer, the location manager and other production staff on walkie-talkies were coordinating myriad details.

Claudio Onorati/EPA Director Anurag Kashyap at the Rome Film Festival in Italy, on Oct. 24, 2007.

Mr. Kashyap strolled in wearing a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, carrying an iPad, seemingly unaffected by the hubbub. The first assistant director shouted: “Silence! Roll camera! Roll sound! Action!” Everything became still.  Only the actors moved and spoke. Mr. Kashyap peered into two video monitors connected to the cameras and watched the actors perform.  After about 30 seconds, he shouted, “Cut!” The stillness broke, and everyone was moving again.

To see all this set in operation in Colombo for my story was thrilling.  But it also made me aware of the two very different places writing and filmmaking come from. As a writer, you draw on your materials - collections of documents and photographs, research notes and a sense of the historical milieu. As a historian, I am all the more aware that although writing also involves creativity and invention, the fidelity to sources and attention to scholarly discourse impose sobriety on your interpretation.  Filmmaking, on the other hand, is pure invention, a fabrication of verisimilitude through manipulation of light, sound, space, objects, action and dialogue. Recreating Mumbai, then Bombay, of the 1960s entailed a skillful deployment of period cars, appropriate set design and costumes, location and action. But everything was pure artifice.

“Bombay Velvet” brought the two different worlds together, not least in dressing up contemporary Colombo as 1960s Mumbai. The research on how the Island City looked 50 years ago was evident in the set designer’s expert and swift transformation of the street. The location seemed authentic because Colombo’s architecture, also influenced by British colonialism,  Mumbai’s late 19th-century built environment. When the camera rolled, traffic was blocked and onlookers were huddled outside the camera’s eye. This would have been impossible in Mumbai, where you can’t stop traffic for hours and prevent a crowd from surrounding movie stars.  Everyone in Colombo â€" the authorities, the police, the onlookersâ€" cooperated to allow the shooting to proceed smoothly.

The only exceptions were four-legged. The shooting was abruptly stopped once when two dogs decided it was call and response time. Assistant directors and production assistants were dispatched to locate and silence them.

The project of simulating history was not without hazards. A nonsmoking actor, forced to puff on cigarettes in take after take, broke into a fit of coughing. Old cars behaved like old cars. With actors ready and cameras rolling, a vintage Ford Falcon sputtered to a halt. Pandemonium broke out. Harried assistants went in search of the mechanic who finally coaxed it back to life. As the Falcon moved into the carefully constructed 1960s Bombay set, the historian in me was satisfied.

Watching one scene on the monitor, I remarked to Mr. Kashyap that the frame was beautiful and evoked the urban desolation of Edward Hopper’s famous painting of a New York City diner, “Nighthawks.” “You’re an academic, you look for art, you analyze,” he laughed. “I’m concerned with the scene.”

I found a kindred spirit in my predisposition toward scrutiny and analysis in a Sri Lankan choir director who was helping in the filming of a church scene.  He found something off in the way the choir was singing and insisted on its correction. “It is no different in history. You as a historian should know. As Marx demonstrated, history also develops according to laws,” he said. He offered that he was a Marxist, actually a Trotskyite. When I quoted a famous line from Trotsky, he was thrilled. “Are you also a Marxist?” Before I could answer, the choir scene was ready for a retake.

Mr. Kashyap jokingly cautioned his assistants that an academic was in the house. But I wasn’t there as a fact checker.  For me, the interesting thing was not to evaluate the film’s representation of history but to watch how filmmaking brought into focus the artifice of the historian’s storytelling.  The illusion that the historian’s seamless evolutionary narrative is a direct reflection of reality was broken as scenes were shot out of chronological order.

Seeing events situated spatially among objects and carefully dressed locations and actors forced reflections on the historian’s obsession with time at the expense of space. As an actor fussed over the exact shape of his eyebrows and asked for a few strands to be removed, I wondered why historians don’t worry more about the appearances their protagonists projected.

My academic hat, though respectfully acknowledged, also made my presence inconspicuous. One day at the end of a long shoot, I took a ride back to the hotel in a van full of assistant directors and assistants, all young women hoping to use their experience on “Bombay Velvet” to become independent filmmakers one day.  Unconstrained by my presence, they engaged in a high-octane exchange about the day’s proceedings and a playful dissection of the director’s idiosyncrasies.

After 12 days at the shoot, I prepared to leave, reluctantly. The filming was to continue until the first week of September, but I had to return to Mumbai and then get back to teaching at Princeton. At the end of a shot on my last day, I said goodbye to Mr. Kashyap. He rose from his chair and did a little war dance. “The academic is leaving. Now we can do what we want!” Then he hugged me and asked, “When are you back?”. I promised to return for the second round of shooting in March.

Gyan Prakash teaches history at Princeton University and is the author of “Mumbai Fables.”