Legendary Indian film archivist P. K. Nair was the founder of the National Film Archive (NFAI) of India and guardian of Indian cinema.
A life long passion
Widely regarded as the custodian of the country’s celluloid heritage, Mr. Nair was instrumental in archiving several landmark Indian films and opening the floodgates to the treasures of world cinema to students at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII).
Mr. Nair, a science graduate from the University of Kerala, was enraptured by cinema after watching K. Subrahmanyam’s Prahlada (1941) and Ananthasayanam (1942) in a tent theatre in Thiruvananthapuram.
Since then, battling family opposition, he resolved to carve out a career in films and came to Mumbai after his graduation. He soon realised that film research and studies were his metier rather than direction.
He joined the FTII as a research assistant in 1961 and essayed a key role in designing the Film Appreciation Course, along with eminent Film Professor Satish Bahadur and the legendary film art critic and biographer Marie Seton. He was appointed assistant curator at the NFAI in 1965 and continued to helm the course of the institute by building an extensive archive right from scratch.
His passion for collecting films, at a time when preserving and archiving were alien ideas in the world’s largest film-producing nation, resulted in shaping the NFAI into a formidable entity that it is today.
“It is deeply saddening. No one before him had shown any interest in preserving cinema. And it is more remarkable that he is single-handedly responsible for conserving India’s rich cinematic heritage. I only hope he has transmitted some of his passion to the younger generation,” eminent director Shyam Benegal told The Hindu.
Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra and Kaliya Mardan; Bombay Talkies’ films such as Jeevan Naiya, Bandhan, Kangan, Achhut Kanya and Kismat; S.S. Vasan’s Chandralekha and Uday Shankar’s Kalpana were some films rescued and preserved by Mr. Nair from among the 1,700-odd works produced during India’s silent film era.
Taking cinema to students
He was instrumental in introducing to film students the work of the masters of world cinema like Bresson, Bergman, Kurosawa, Andrej Wajda, Miklos Jansco, De Sica, Fellini and Antonioni.
“He was a man whose contribution is without parallel in the 100 years of Indian cinema. He was responsible for the creation of a culture in which students and historians could study and analyse great cinema. We are indebted to the great legacy he has left us,” director Govind Nihlani said. By the time Mr. Nair retired as NFAI Director in 1991, he had acquired 12,000 films for the archive, of which 8,000 were Indian.
Mr. Benegal reminisced about Mr. Nair’s tenacity and single-minded dedication as a film collector as he travelled the country, scouring for lost cinema reels in the oddest of places.
“He created this [the NFAI] archive on the basis of exchange of films and his extensive correspondence with eminent film curators all over the world — from the U.S., Europe and the former Soviet Union … he gave them our films which their archives coveted and acquired what he thought our archive must possess,” Mr. Benegal said.
Mr. Nair was a man who lived his work: who legendarily screened and watched films from the late to the wee hours, and was never to be found in the theatre without his small torch and a notebook in which he meticulously recorded, reel by reel, the content and condition of every single film print. He didn’t let his personal taste influence his collecting and he wasn’t above making quick overnight copies of loaned international prints to serve the larger cause: as he says with a twinkle in his eye, “a true archivist should have the immunity to overcome such legalities”. Nair combined this indefatigable, almost childlike enthusiasm for the cinema with a seriousness that daunted the frivolous student and unfailingly encouraged the genuinely interested.
Mr. Nair was a man so in love with the cinema that he could imagine nothing better than to be able to share that love with young people just starting to discover its treasures, as well as with various different publics. Nair drew to his weekly NFAI public screenings by mailing invitations to addresses picked at random from the directory. But Dungarpur’s film is also a portrait of an era. Perhaps PK Nair’s life would be much more solitary if he were an archivist now, when students have digital access to classics that an earlier generation could only watch by Nair’s grace.
The other set of stories tell of Nair’s memorable acquisitions, with filmmakers and ex-students acting as his eyes and ears all across India. Mrinal Sen describes stumbling upon the reels of Kalipada Das’s silent Jamai Babu while shooting Akaler Sandhane; Adoor Gopalakrishnan remembers how the second Malayali film made, Marthanda Varma, was discovered; Nair himself tells us about finding Dadasaheb Phalke’s Kalia Mardan, even as he stands outside the unattractive shopping centre that has replaced Phalke’s house. The nine Indian silent films now extant were singlehandedly salvaged by him. In a country where 1,700 silents were made in 36 years, nine may seem like nothing. But without Nair Saab, we might not have even those.
Perhaps there can never be another PK Nair. But we don’t even seem to understand how much we need one.
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, film archivist and founder of the Film Heritage Foundation, who regarded Mr. Nair as his “guru”, chronicled the pioneering archivist’s life in the 2012 award-winning documentary Celluloid Man.
Celluloid Man is a 2012 documentary film directed by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur that explores the life and work Indian film archivist P. K. Nair.
Celluloid Man has been screened at 50 film festivals – one of the few Indian films to have been selected for such a high number of festivals. The film has won two National Awards at the 60th National Film Awards, including Best Biographical Film and Best Editing for Irene Dhar Malik. The film was released in India on 3 May 2013 to coincide with the centenary of Indian cinema.
@Sources:
The Hindu
The Sunday Guardian
Wikipedia
