Metaphor for lost times

Neha Kirpal

From his first piece written around 1943 for KA Abbas’ publication, Sargam, Bhagwan Das Garga came to be known as India’s pioneering film historian and archivist. A new online archive dedicated to his life and work is now simultaneously becoming a chronicle of India’s rich cinematic heritage. The Garga Archive consists of a collection of his articles published in magazines that are now defunct, unpublished pieces, his rare correspondence with filmmakers, archivists, historians and cultural activists, along with a gallery of exclusive photographs and uploads of digital copies of his films.

The variety has been churned out because of the efforts of Garga’s frequent collaborator, his wife Donnabelle Garga. It has been curated, organised and maintained by Lightcube, a New Delhi-based film collective. “The archive is almost like a conduit or tour guide into an era long past through which to view film culture in India, an abstraction so far. In a sense, Garga is a kind of metaphor for an era,” says curator Anuj Malhotra. 

Born in 1924, Garga studied cinematography at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, later working under noted Indian film director and auteur, V Shantaram. He started his career as a documentary filmmaker with Storm Over Kashmir (1948). Garga’s research on Indian film history culminated in the first film anthology tracing the evolution of Indian cinema. Consisting of 115 film stills and rare of ictures, the documentary, Glimpses of Indian Cinema, was shown throughout the country in 1963 to mark the golden jubilee year of Indian cinema.

In 1964, he helped found the National Film Archive of India. In 1967, Garga was appointed one of the experts on the Unesco Committee of the History of World Cinema. This led to the legendary 1969 exhibition — the first of its kind at the Cinémathèque Française — where he helped Henri Langlois (French film archivist) organise a retrospective of Indian films in Paris.

In 1996, he compiled a book called So Many Cinemas, which identifies the history of cinema in India as a plural, multi-tentacled, giant organism. This was followed by Art of Cinema in 2005, a compilation of his writings, and From Raj to Swaraj: The History of Documentary Film in India in 2007. The latter won the National Film Award for Best Book on Cinema. He repeated this feat with Silent Cinema in India: A Pictorial Journey in 2011. 

It is in this rich backdrop that The Garga Archives hopes to develop into a collection of his articles, articles about him, a gallery of rare photographs and correspondences. It would be completed over the next two years, in six cycles, with the publication of a reservoir of articles, rare images, correspondences and films.