While attending a theatre festival in the Bavarian village of Oberammergau, the young Indian solicitor Himanshu Rai felt inspired to create cinematic chroni­cles on world religions set in the Indian milieu. A significant difference between Rai and his predecessor Dhundiraj Govind Phalke – who, almost a decade earlier was also enticed by a similar re­ligious depiction (Alice Guy’s La Vie du Christ, 1906) and made India’s first feature-length film, Raja Harishchan­dra (1913) – was that Rai envisioned an international co-production. At the festi­val, he had met the director Franz Osten, marking the onset of a decade-and-a-half-long collaboration that resulted in three major silent co-productions – Prem sanyas, Shiraz (1928) and Prapancha Pash (A Throw of Dice, 1929) – and 16 Hindi-language sound films, which Osten directed for Rai’s pioneering Bom­bay Talkies studio in the 1930s.

Prem sanyas, which broadly trans­lates to “renunciation of love”, was re­leased under the more widely appealing title The Light of Asia. Based on the eponymous English poem from 1879 by Sir Edwin Arnold, the screen adaptation by playwright Niranjan Pal relates the epic story of Prince Siddhartha Gauta­ma, who renounced worldly pleasures in pursuit of salvation and became the founder of Buddhism in the 6th century BC. Rai portrayed the lead character of Gautama elegantly, accompanied by the talented teenage Anglo-Indian actress Seeta Devi (née Renée Smith) as Princess Gopa, and supported by the members of the Indian Players Company, an ama­teur acting troupe.

Filmed at several architecturally pic­turesque locations across colonial India, including Bodh Gaya, where Buddha attained enlightenment, the silent fea­ture aims to strike a palpable balance between exotic Orientalism and philo­sophical authenticity, captured through the cinematography of Josef Wirsching and Wilhelm Kiermeier and narrated by elaborate intertitles. Apart from being one of India’s first international co-pro­ductions, the film was also the country’s maiden and notably successful interna­tional release, despite feeble domestic reception.

Sreya Chatterjee