A short note on Ardeshir Irani

Khan Bahadur Ardeshir Marwan  Irani (5 December 1886 – 14 October 1969). He is remembered for starting the earliest cinema theatres in Bombay. Popularly known as Ardeshir Irani, he was a writer, director, producer, actor, film distributor, film showman and cinematographer in the silent and sound eras of early Indian cinema. He was renowned for making films in Hindi, Telugu, English, German, Indonesian, Persian, Urdu and Tamil. He was a successful tycoon who owned film theatres, a gramophone agency, and a car agency.

 

Ardeshir Irani was born on 5 December 1886 in Poona, Bombay Presidency. In 1905, Irani became the Indian representative of Universal Studios and he ran Alexander Cinema in Bombay with Abdulally Esoofally for over forty years. At Alexander Cinema Ardeshir Irani learnt the rules of  filmmaking.  In 1917, Irani entered the field of film production and produced his first silent feature film, Nala Dayamanti, which released in 1920.

 

At age  forty, Irani was an established filmmaker. Ardeshir Irani became the ‘father’ of the Indian talkie films. He created history with his sound feature film, ‘Alam Ara’ released on 14 March 1931. Ardeshir Irani  is also accredited with making the first Indian English feature film, ‘Noor Jahan’ (1934). He completed his hat-trick of fame when he made Indiia’s  first colour feature film, Kisan Kanya (1937).

 

His contribution is not limited to giving voice to the silent cinema and colour to black-and-white films. He gave a new courageous outlook to filmmaking in India and provided such a wide range of choice for stories in films that till date, there are films being made which have a theme relating to one of the one hundred fifty-eight films made by Irani.

 

Irani made one hundred fifty-eight films in a long and illustrious career of twenty-five years, between the First and Second World Wars. He made his last film, Pujari, in 1945. He introduced a number of new actors to Indian Cinema, including Prithviraj Kapoor and Mehboob Khan.