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3
 There
can seldom have been a more unpromising subject for a film or
a book than Chachaji, and yet he became the hero of a celebrated
documentary film, "Chachaji, My Poor Relation: A Memoir by
Ved Mehta." He also became the hero of this book, which is,
among other things, an account of the making of that film. Indeed,
he has become, in a sense, a metaphor for the whole of India in
all its splendid contradictions.
Mr. Mehta and an Anglo-American filming team—led by a Tasmanian-born
Canadian producer—travelled to India, where they were soon
joined by the producer's wife, a great-great-grandniece of William
Wordsworth. The team spent a month filming Chachaji, an eighty-three-year-old
man who weighed eighty-nine pounds and was a messenger-clerk for
the Pharmacy of Prosperity in New Delhi. (He was the author's
second cousin; the nickname Chachaji means "respected uncle.")
They recorded the doings of Chachaji: how he lived by his wits,
working eight hours a day for sixty cents, and cadging meals,
money, and (to preserve his dignity as a clean-shaven gentleman)
razor blades from his better-off relations.
 They
followed Chachaji through his typical day—performing his
ablutions, waiting in queues, battling bazaar crowds, and bucking
bureaucracy. They were also able to capture on film Chachaji's
red-letter days of attending a family wedding, of going on a journey
to his village, of bathing in the Ganges—a penitential act
of salvation for Hindus. Chachaji, as the object of all this attention,
was nothing if not unconcerned; even when throngs were frantically
showing off in front of the camera or threatening to destroy it
in some burst of pious indignation, he stoically trudged on with
a dead-pan expression worthy of Buster Keaton, at most saying,
"Never mind. Let it be." Chachaji never caught on to
what a moving picture was—he had never seen one—and
throughout the filming he talked about the shots as "the
photographs."
The documentary film that the team eventually made was broadcast,
among other places, on PBS and the BBC, and was awarded the duPont
Columbia Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism—the
citation commending the film for "its delicacy, its humor,
its reflection of a whole nation." It was acclaimed "an
extraordinary memoir" by the Christian Science Monitor and
"a classic" by The New York Times.
Since this book is both about the making of a documentary film
and about Chachaji, it depicts a confrontation, by turns poignant,
frenzied, and funny, between two utterly different ways of life—the
Western and the Eastern, the modern and the traditional. Writing
with ironic detachment, Mr. Mehta brings his distinctive skill
as a storyteller to this saga while further exploring themes that
have preoccupied him for most of his life.
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