Did you know? Pioneer Ardeshir Irani's 'Alam Ara' is also responsible for introducing black marketing of film tickets in India!

By all means, Ardeshir Irani can be regarded as the doyen of Indian cinema. As a visionary, not only did he introduce the concept of the spoken word to the audiences, but he also imbued the cinematic narrative with a sense of rhythm and structure through the template of song and dance. 

It was a viewing of the 1929 Hollywood film Show Boat, a part-talkie film made by Universal Pictures, that stimulated Irani to inaugurate talkie cinema in India and as someone who already had found footing in film distribution and production, he would decide to take the plunge and direct Alam Ara in 1931.

Ardeshir Irani would also usher in many ancillary developments into the budding movie industry in India and interestingly, many of them continue to exist in the ecosystem. Not many would know that Irani, whose long-standing legacy includes many stellar achievements, is also responsible for introducing black marketing of tickets in India! Well, maybe not as directly as we make it seem to be.

As per film historians, the craze around Alam Ara at the time of its release was such that people thronged cinema halls, almost mobbed them, if you will, and tickets remained unavailable for weeks together as riots broke out on the streets. People walking out of a screening were gobsmacked that the film they had watched also talked and this factor alone cast a mesmeric spell on the audiences. And as the excitement reached a new unprecedented level, ticket prices too shot up substantially - reportedly each Alam Ara ticket was originally priced at four Anna's or 25 paise at the box office but the excessive demand resulted in them getting sold at Rs. 5 each, thus introducing the concept of buying tickets in black!

Written, produced, and directed by Ardeshir Irani, Alam Ara was a cinematic adaptation of Joseph David's play of the same name. The film was distributed by Sagar Movietone and first premiered at Irani's own Majestic Cinema in Bombay (now Mumbai) where it ran for eight weeks straight - Alam Ara was also the first film to be screened at the Imperial Cinema of Paharganj, New Delhi.

The cast of Alam Ara includes Master Vithal, Zubeida (who also sang some of the songs), Prithviraj Kapoor, Muhammad Wazir Khan, and others with Firozshah Mistry and B. Irani serving as music composers, Adi M. Irani as the cinematographer, and Ezra Mir as the editor. 

*This small piece has been written on the occasion of Ardeshir Irani's 136th birth anniversary on December 5, 2022*