The Photographs of Chachaji

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.