I bumped into Virchand Dharamsey during my research of 3 Sakina Manzil (a play about the 1944 dock explosions) at the library of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai. He guided me to the suitable newspapers and bulletins in an admirably detached manner. Then he shuffled over to his corner and hunched over his notes. Someone told me, “Dharamseybhai is a permanent memorial in the library since 1965. Sometimes the guards lock him inside the library.”
In those days, he would be at the library, daily. Why, I asked him? He replied, “The library has a superb collection and a 200-year-old tradition and lakhs of books.”
Books are his true friends. It made him a scholarly dilettante. This pedantry combined with his innate ability to spot the nooks and crannies has made him a potent force. I recall being stuck with the geography of my little play. On cue, he drew an intricate map of the Masjid Bunder area to indicate nine types of Kutchi settlements who inhabit the 2-3 sq km radius of the city. This was followed by vignettes about Lohanas, Oswals, Bhatias, Khatris, Khojas, Memons — each with regional variations. Plus the Maplahs, the Jews, the Nagoris, the Marathas, the Mahars, the Mathadis and the Kunbis. Mumbai in 1944 sprung to life.
That’s what Dharamseybhai does. He digs out the scraps of history that slip through the cracks. Beneath his personal charm is, an eager and observant, intellectual tourist.
It’s much later I learnt that Masjid Bunder was home for him. His father was a merchant. In the mid forties, from 7 am to 10:30 pm his father would negotiate prices for thousand bags of kopras from Malabar and black peppers. Dharamseybhai was disconnected from that world. He sought solace in reading at the age of three.
At the age of six, he purchased his own books, or accompanied people to museums. Book reading and book watching became an obsession. Life plodded on. In all this, three things transpired in young Dharamsey’s life. “I decided I didn’t want to study.” There was a cessation in the pre-metric years. The family trade hit an all time financial low. Dharasmeybhai needed a vocation.
He worked with books. “I love libraries. I love book stores. I love to see the spines of books in a row of shelves.” Thanks to books he developed a cornucopia of interests. From architecture to anthropology, to arts and craft. He started to order books, professionally. He knew what to order and where to order them from.
He says without an iota of irony, “I became all knowing”. He was Google before Google was born. Twice a year he collaborated on blockbuster projects with research scholars and PhD aspirants. He travelled extensively across North India to Orissa to the coast of Gujarat. The subjects were vast and varied. From craft to ship navigation to the Harappan sites.
Case in point is Dharamseybhai’s monumental work: Bhagwanlal Indraji — the First Indian Archaeologist. Senake Bandaranayake, archaeologist and author of seminal papers on Sri Lankan archaeology and history says in the foreword of the 434-page book, “Virchand Dharamsey’s encyclopaedic survey of the work of Bhagwanlal Indraji (1839-88) is a landmark contribution to the history of the development of archaeology as a modern discipline. It is an astonishing rediscovery of a pioneering scholar and explorer, who was already a well-known figure in epigraphy and numismatics, but whose multidisciplinary vision and field-based research activities as well as originality were hardly known to all but a few specialists, if at all.”
Dharamseybhai says, Bhagwanlal was a schoolboy when he ran away from home after being punished for neglecting his studies. Sleeping under the stars on a rock on the outskirts of his home city of Junagadh, he wakes up one morning to find that he has been lying on a large inscription in a not unfamiliar but unreadable script: this turns out to be the Girnar inscription of the Mauryan emperor Asoka. Bhagwanlal’s commitment to the unravelling of the past, begins.
As you hear about a young Bhagwanlal devising his own method of deciphering Brahmi and making new readings, you realise Dharamseybhai could quite easily be telling his own story. “Bhagwanlal worked for more than 15 years as an unacknowledged assistant to the antiquarian expert Bhau Daji. During the course of his assistantship, Bhagwanlal covers a great deal of archaeological and intellectual territory.” But he has disappeared from the footnotes.
I ask Dharamseybhai about the two decades of hard labour he poured into a magnum opus about “the forgotten assistant”. He replies, “An annotation in the notebooks would be a gross injustice to the memory of Bhagwanlal Indraji. That’s why, I decided to embark on this full-scale biography. My message was clear. Theory is one thing but fieldwork is the real thing. A solid researcher must have the ability to read between the lines and posses a highly evolved critical faculty. Bhagwanlal was such a person.”
This is trademark Dharmseybhai. His essays on the silent cinema era serve the same purpose. They doff their hat about the hardwork of Dwarkadas Sampat as well as technicians like VB Joshi and Gajanan Devare. He was perhaps one of the first to point us to Kanjibhai Rathod, a Dalit who directed nearly 25 films between 1920-1923. His research has dovetailed into innumerable cinema encyclopaedias and film books and continues to do so.
As the shadows of the evening are visible through the window of his Nerul apartment, he shows me one dozen books with personal inscriptions. These are authors who have “officially forgotten” to credit him. But there is no rancour about the plagiarism and leaky research methodology. Instead there are fun stories to share about his glory days as a movie fanatic during the film society movement. A delightful tale about “his friend”, Satyajit Ray. “In those days, my nickname was Pandit Pasolini – the cult Italian filmmaker!”
courtesy : “The Mumbai Mirror” July 31, 2018
