The collections of late B D Garga are being curated into a digital archive

At a gathering of film historians in Venice in 1964, an India delegate felt uneasy because none of the urgent matters discussed seemed relevant to the situation back home where film research was still new. When someone asked him to acquaint them with the state of cinema in the country, he delivered an impassioned speech, stating how the Lumiere Cinématographe had come to Bombay mere months after its Europe debut and introducing “Phalke’s genius for the fantastic” as being “on a par with Georges Méliès’”. The art form’s continued affinity to theatrical conventions was worth studying, he pointed out. Despite India being one of the largest producers of films in the world, he concluded, Europeans had ignored its cinema just as they had done with Japanese cinema in the past. It resulted in a flurry of requests for screening films from the region.

The man in question, film critic and filmmaker Bhagwan Das Garga, took up the most compelling of these — an invitation from revered archivist Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque Française to host a retrospective in 1968. Over a month, they screened 51 feature films and almost as many documentaries there. All the press, ranging from the right-wing Le Figaro to the left-wing Combat had covered the event, while the Indian press, the historian rued, had not written “as much as a line”. This may be said of Garga’s career as a whole too. While he is not known to all, his writings have been textbook repositories for cineastes.

Parts of his priceless collection — letters, photographs and notes — are now being digitised by a Delhi-based cultural organisation, Lightcube. The group’s co-founder, Anuj Malhotra, had interacted professionally with Garga while working on the design of a book, and after the writer passed away in 2011, his wife Donnabelle, who had meticulously preserved his vast stock of memorabilia, was looking for help to sort through it. Like so many historians, he collected and saved things more carefully than he catalogued or inventoried them. Some artefacts were parcelled off to the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) and the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute. Malhotra, having operated an online magazine earlier, offered to curate some into an online archive. Garga is said to have felt something akin to separation anxiety for any resources he had procured or been sent. “He saved everything.”

Snippets from the life of B D Garga, who was an ambassador of sorts for Indian films abroad

 

There is an analog-era unhurriedness about the project that began last year, and will expand in phases: two “cycles” have been completed and the first of four more is afoot. Malhotra says these follow the chronology of Garga’s career and offer clues to the person he was.  

If Garga’s writings, carried in Indian and international publications, were intimate and lucid, it is because he had a ringside view and authority on the art as a filmmaker himself. Born in Punjab in 1924, Garga had a fascination for images, first still and later moving. After picking up photography as a teen, he abandoned the study of medicine to pursue filmmaking. Starting with Storm over Kashmir, which documented the conditions in the state in 1948, he made a total of 50 films both independently and for public institutions like the Films Division. On the occasion of Indian cinema completing 50 years, he famously recorded an anthology, Glimpses of Indian Cinema (1963). He was important also for having chosen as documentary subjects artists such as Amrita Sher-Gil and Satyajit Ray.

Garga’s life as historian took shape simultaneously. It began in 1949 when journalist-filmmaker Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, one of Garga’s mentors, commissioned him to write a column on cinema history for his Urdu journal Sargam. It led to him seeking and being sought by surviving practitioners of the elusive silent and early talkie eras, among them Ardeshir Irani and Sulochana who generously shared stories and rare images. It is what ultimately allowed the writer to publish a most comprehensive account of Indian cinema in 1996 titled So Many Cinemas.

He was an ambassador of sorts for Indian films abroad. While spending time in Soviet Russia as part of the team making Pardesi, a late 1950s Indo-Soviet co-production, he befriended Sergei Eisenstein’s wife and was gifted a page of writing and some sketches of the late master. Garga was also among the few who watched the second part of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible when it was still banned. A Russian translation of Garga’s book on Indian filmmaking had sold 50,000 copies and he was already known there. 

Lightcube plans to take the archive offline too, engaging with people in various cities through screenings and talks. Kolkata is next. Archiving an artiste as prolific as Garga is both challenging and expensive, and Malhotra hopes the tours will raise awareness and funds. Eventually, some of Garga’s films will be made available too. “There might not be much of an audience for this content yet,” says Malhotra. “The website is not really bound by urgent utility. The whole purpose is to preserve for later use, for later generations, for posterity.” It is the calling of a historian.