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Original print of Indias first talkie Alam Ara,released in 1931,was lost in a fire but the machine that created it still lives
When Indias first talkie Alam Ara was released in 1931,it was an instant hit,so much so that the police had to be called in to control the crowds that gathered to watch the all talking,singing and dancing film. Contemporary audience,unfortunately,would not be granted the pleasure of watching this milestone in Indias cinematic history,when the last surviving prints of the film were destroyed in a fire at Punes National Film Archives of India in 2003. That is why,when businessman Nalin Sampat discovered what he did at the back of his old film processing lab,he instantly knew that he had found something of great importance. What Sampat found while cleaning up India Cine Labs,was the machine used to make the original prints of Alam Ara ,lying unattended and cobwebbed in a dimly-lit back room.
My grandfather,Dwarkadas Sampat,who founded Kohinoor Film Company,had been a filmmaker of the silent era and was a good friend of (Ardeshir) Irani,who had made Alam Ara, says Sampat.
Dwarkadas,one of the pioneers of the Indian film industry,and a contemporary of another luminary from Indias silent film era,Dadasaheb Phalke,became famous for his covertly political film Bhakt Vidur. Unfortunately,his studio in Dadar caught fire and all the negatives were destroyed. Later,my father Ramdas Dwarkadas Sampat bought this lab from Irani and got into the business of film processing. Irani had shot the film on the same studio and when Ramdas bought the processing lab from him,the machine came with the premises and continued to be in use until quite recently. We used this machine until as recently as five years ago, says Sampat,In fact,Im sure if we tried to use it now,it would work just fine.
India Cine Labs was used to process some landmark films in the Indian history,including the award-winning Shyamachi Aai by Acharya Aapte. We got a lot of work from the Indian governments films division and have processed documentary films,besides feature films in Hindi and regional languages like Gujarati,Marathi and Oriya, explains the 69-year-old businessman. Right now the lab is not being used because Sampat says that theres no longer any scope for processing films the old-fashioned way. Everyone is shooting with digital cameras these days and anyway,most of the film work is happening in the suburbs.
Now that Sampat has found this piece of Indian cinematic history in his backroom,hes not sure what to do with it. Ideally,he would like to hand it over to the care of a museum. But we dont trust the Indian government, avers his son Jvalant Sampat,They dont have a good track record as far as taking care of valuable artefacts is concerned. Look at what happened to the Tagores Nobel medal. It would be best if a foreign museum expressed interest in preserving this machine,because Im sure theyll take better care of it than we can,and anyway,its an important part of the worlds cinema heritage. In fact,were not even averse to handing it to a private collector,wholl be responsible enough to give it the care that it needs.
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