It was the classic Indian films of the 1950s such as Raj Kapoor’s Awara and Guru Dutt’s Kaagaz ke Phool, which he was introduced to by his grandfather, that made Shivendra Singh Dungarpur fall in love with cinema when he was a boy growing up in the 70s.
Today, Dungarpur, a filmmaker based in Mumbai, fears that India’s rich cinema heritage – those beautiful old movies and many other classics that have brought joy to him and millions of other people – are at risk of being lost forever if urgent steps are not taken to preserve and restore them.
In an effort to prevent such a tragedy, Dungarpur set up the Film Heritage Foundation earlier this year, an organisation that aims to preserve and restore films and raise awareness about the importance of these priceless prints.
Many of these movies have already been lost, including the country’s first sound movie, Alam Ara from 1931, directed by Ardeshir Irani, and India’s first release in colour, Sairandhri, 1933, directed by V Shantaram.
Assessing the loss
“I realised that so much damage has been done,” says Dungarpur, who belongs to a royal family in Rajasthan. He is best known for making a documentary called Celluloid Man, about P K Nair, the founder of the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) and a major source of inspiration for him. “By 1950 we had lost nearly 80 per cent of our films. We made about 1,700 silent films – only five or six complete films survive. It’s that drastic.”
India, which last year celebrated 100 years of Indian cinema, produces 1,000 films a year in more than 20 languages – yet there are only about 5,000 Indian films in the National Film Archive of India, located in Pune, he points out.
Original article by Rebecca Bundhun
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Film Heritage Foundation founder talks about urgent need to preserve India’s cinematic history
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