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ShareMass, e-mailed New Year's greetings can be, to put it mildly, rather treacle-sweet, mundane. But this one has me sit up, with a start.
The rider to the usual happy-happy stuff is the disturbing news that old films in the National Film Archives of India (NFAI) in Pune are being sold as "junk". Apparently, the acting director of NFAI "could not stand theirdirty smell"!
So, out they went, as if all these reels of moments, emotions and bits of life captured on celluloid in a long-gone past were nothing more than just a bunch of sticky, old smelly socks.Heritage hasn't really had much of a chance in our country.
Historical ruins that would be the pride of most countries with much shorter histories than ours easily become urinals. We whitewash heritage buildings with élan. Anything that smells of yesterday or yesteryear is so, well, yesterday. The old stones don't speak to us.
Cinema does, however, speak to us. We are a movie-mad country. Cinema halls and small screens are alive with the sound of filmi music, as are radios, ipods and cell phones: it's in the air, 24/7. We, many of us that is, take our fashion and lifestyle cues, if not moral compasses from Indian cinema. Habitués of the multiplexes, even the chattering classes consume each new release like teenagers once used to devour Mills and Boon books.
Yet, most of us care two hoots about our long and rich cinematic history, much less about its memorabilia and relics. These are disappearing into the quicksand of irretrievable memory. Although cinema came to India much the same time as it did in Europe and in the United States, we still don't have a museum to preserve and showcase our cinematic memorabilia.
I know that private organisations are planning museums of the moving image but it is, sadly, too late: we have already lost so much. And if our man in Pune continues to throw out "junk", as my informer tells me, we will have even less left. As it is a fire in the Archives six years ago destroyed the pre-1950 nitrate-based collection of archival film footage.
India can boast a rich harvest of silent movies. But would you believe that the NFAI has barely a handful of films from the silent era in its collection. PK Nair, the former director of NFAI, who built up much of the archival film in Pune during his 27 years there, once told me that footage of our silent films could be found in Europe and elsewhere.
Imagine lost to us, probably forever, are films with such delicious titles as Cinema Girl, Wildcat of Bombay (with the incomparable Sulochana), Bombay Girl and Typist. Just a few posters or stills remain as mute testimony to the fact that these films did once exist.
What is even more shocking is the fact that lost as well is India's first talkie.
There is no print of Alam-Ara, a period fantasy. Produced and directed by Ardeshir Marwan Irani in 1931 at his studio -- Imperial Movietone located near Kennedy bridge in Mumbai -- the film also heralded the beginning of Indian film music.
It was a milestone in Indian cinema because until then the silent films were not very different from films being produced elsewhere. With sound, and even moreimportant, songs, Indian cinema came into its own, falling back on its theatrical traditional form.
Alas none of the songs of Alam-Ara have survived. Nor have far most artefacts of our cinematic legacy. The stunning and sui generis sheesh mahal of Mughal-e-Azam where Madhubala's memorable dance sequence takes place was taken apart some years ago.
There was no place to keep it. Nor was there any final resting place for Raj Kapoor's magnificent set for the surreal long sequence in Awara when the protagonist tries to reach heaven.
It's time to reclaim our cinematic heritage. Ironically, NFAI was built on the land where the pioneering Prabhat Studios once stood.
The writer is author of The Kapoors: The First Family of Indian Cinema
