A Throw of Dice (Prapancha Pash) (review)

India reached German romanticists such as Herder, Schiller, Schlegel, and Goethe through translations of William Jones’s 1789 version of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, an epic poem from the fourth or fifth century CE. Whereas British orientalism accompanied the enumerative modalities of direct political rule, Germany’s India was born of traditions of aestheticism resistant to British empiricism.¹ Over a century later, in the new medium of film, these internally variable modes of describing the East provided fertile grounds for collaboration between the German director Franz Osten and the Anglophone Indian actor-producer Himansu Rai. Working with Emelka Films and Ufa, Osten and Rai coproduced a trilogy set in India that combined the abstractions of orientalist fantasies with ethnographic attention to detail, providing what a reviewer of the time called a fascinating “cultural document.” BFI National Archive has digitally restored A Throw of Dice (1929), arguably the best of the three Indo-German films, with a haunting new score by the British Asian composer Nitin Sawhney, who most recently wrote the music for Mira Nair’s Namesake (2006) and PlayStation 3’s Heavenly Sword (2007).

BFI’s restoration of a silent Indian film with an experimental score is an exciting development for lovers of music and of cinema, and the audio-visual pairing of Sawhney with Rai seems as inevitable as it is innovative. Both represent a fluency with Indian and Western cultural traditions, though their enabling contexts vary greatly. Until the outbreak of the Second World War, Himansu Rai’s ambitions were international in scope. The son of a wealthy Indian family affiliated with theater, Rai was practicing law in London when he began collaborating on plays with Niranjan Pal, soon to be scriptwriter for the Rai-Osten trilogy consisting of Light of Asia (1925), a film based on the Buddha’s life, Shiraz (1928), a fictional tale about the Taj Mahal, and A Throw of Dice, loosely inspired by the story of gambling kings from the Indian epic The Mahabharatha. Despite colonial constraints, Rai’s personal finances and high connections allowed him to launch lavish international coproductions that drew on the resources of Indian princes and royal palaces. As it happened, Rai did not profit from these films, because they were presold to Ufa and British Instructional Films. Additionally, the articulation of a majestic yet mystic India was more popular with audiences in Europe than in India. Rai had to establish his domestic credentials when he set up Bombay Talkies, focusing on India after the European market disappeared under the restrictions of war.

The BFI restoration may prove that the Rai-Osten ventures can find a new audience today, among consumers with cosmopolitan tastes in film and music, fostered at least in part by colonialism’s vast territorial footprint. The proof lies in the successful tour of the restored print of A Throw of Dice to international sites—including London’s Barbican Theater, the Civic Theatre in Auckland, New Zealand, and Millenium Park, Chicago—accompanied by local orchestras playing Sawhney’s score alongside an eclectic group of vocalists from India, Britain, and Portugal. While the DVD cannot capture the live immediacy of this experience—much as we have lost the context of the film’s reception during its premiere at the Universum Cinema in Berlin or, indeed, a sense of its place among the lost Indian silent films—the rarity of this kind of a DVD, the clarity of its restoration, and the bonus feature of an interview with Sawhney make it a valuable product. Despite the collaborative nature of A Throw of Dice, the DVD makes effaced traces of silent Indian film authorship available to wider audiences.

A Throw of Dice tells the story of King Ranjit’s evil designs to unseat King Sohat from his throne and from his beloved’s affections. The film opens with Ranjit and Sohat on a hunting expedition, where...