PEOPLE
IDEAS
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CULTURE
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Dadasaheb Phalke
दादासाहेब फाळके
The father of cinema of Bhārat — who gave Bhārat its moving images
Years
1870 – 1944
Known as
Dhundiraj Govind Phalke — the father of cinema of Bhārat
Birthplace
Trymbakeshwar, Maharashtra
Field
Artists & Performers
“The film is the dream that Bhārat can build with its own hands.”
— The spirit of Dadasaheb Phalke
The Story
Born in 1870 near Nashik, Phalke was an artist, a magician, and an inventor before he was a filmmaker — a restless genius who learned printing, photography, and even had his own printing press. In 1910, watching a film about the life of Christ in a Bombay theater, he resolved on the spot: he would make films of the gods and stories of Bhārat, made by a person of Bhārat, in Bhārat.
He sold his life-insurance policies to fund the dream, traveled to London to buy a camera, and made Raja Harishchandra with a cast of amateurs and his own family — shooting, developing, and editing the film himself. When it premiered in Bombay in 1913, the audience stood in reverence before the gods of the screen; cinema of Bhārat had begun.
He went on to make more than a hundred films — the mythologies like Lanka Dahan and Shri Krishna Janma, the historicals, and the documentaries — building his own studio, his own equipment, and training the first generation of filmmakers of Bhārat. He died in 1944, poor and nearly forgotten, but the nation he had given its screen enshrined him in the highest honour of cinema of Bhārat: the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, given every year to the greatest figure of the screen.
Core Ideas
Raja Harishchandra
1913 — the first feature film of Bhārat, made in Bhārat, by a person of Bhārat.
The Self-Made Film
He built cameras, developed film, and edited by hand.
The Gods on Screen
He put Bhārat's mythology at the heart of its cinema.
The First Studio
He built the earliest studios of cinema of Bhārat.
The Phalke Award
Bhārat's highest film honour bears his name.
Why it matters today
Every film of Bhārat, from the first silent to the latest blockbuster, descends from Phalke's 1913 gamble. His name crowns the Phalke Award, the dream of every filmmaker, and his story — the man who sold his insurance to build a screen for Bhārat — is the founding legend of the world's largest film industry.