A rich treasure of oral history is now on NFAI website

8,000 minutes of audio interviews available online

Coinciding with the 151st birth anniversary of the father of Indian cinema, Dadasaheb Phalke, the Pune-based National Film Archive of India (NFAI) has published a rich treasure of audio recordings in the public domain.

About 8,000 minutes of interviews of veteran film artists from the Indian film industry are now made available on the NFAI website.

Starting from the silent era of Indian cinema, these are the fascinating tales of journeys of actors, technicians, producers, directors and studio owners.

Conducted mostly in the 1980s, these interviews were recorded as part of the Oral History Project of NFAI’s Research Programme and features long interviews of pioneering film personalities, narrating the experiences about their lives, stories, and anecdotes from the world of cinema.

“We are delighted to make available this vast treasure of audio recordings which constitutes a rich reference material for anyone who is interested in studying Indian cinema. One of the main objectives of NFAI is to disseminate knowledge about Indian cinema and I am glad that these voices from the past can now be heard across the world,” said Prakash Magdum, Director NFAI.

There are 53 interviews with the audio recording of about 8,000 minutes duration of film artists conducted in five languages- Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, English and Bengali.

The artists include Who’s Who of the Indian film industry including J. B. H. Wadia, Akkineni Nageshwar Rao, Vijay Bhatt, P Bhanumathi, SD Subbulakshmi, MK Radha, P Leela, C Honnappa Bhagvathar, Zunzarrao Pawar, Dada Salvi, Chandrakant Gokhale, RM Krishnaswamy, SV Venkatraman, R Ramamurthy, KS Prakash, V Gopalakrishnan, R B Lakshmidevi, Shahu Modak, E Mohammed, V V Bapat, Vivek, Vishnupant Jog, Nanasaheb Sathe, Ganpatrao Bondre, Nilu Phule, Sharad Talwalkar, Shobha Sen, Surykant Mandhare, Chittaranjan Kolhatkar and Soumitra Chatterjee apart from others.

The longest interview in the series is of veteran Bengali actor Soumitra Chatterjee taken by Anasua Roy Chaudhary with a duration of 584 minutes. These long interviews not only throw light on the personal journey of these artists but also give an in-depth account of the changes in the Indian film industry over a long period of time.

One of the major highlights of the Oral History Project of NFAI is the interviews of several old associates of D.G.Phalke who closely worked with the father of Indian cinema.

These artists, coming from diverse backgrounds, entered the film industry at its nascent stage and went on to do bit roles in Phalke’s Hindustan Cinema Film Company.

India's first child artist and Dadasaheb Phalke‘s daughter Mandakini Phalke nee Athavale is extensively interviewed where she speaks about working as child Krishna in Kaliya Mardan (1919).

Several of these silent era artists including Ganpatrao Tambat, Sahdevrao Tapkire, Baburao Patil, Narayan Tambat, Haribhau Lonare, and Vasant Shinde worked in Phalke’s studio in various capacities. They share their intimate experiences of working with Phalke in the process throwing light on the humane side of Phalke as well as his craft of film making.

The Oral History Project of NFAI was started back in 1983, where the interviews were recorded on audio cassettes only. Later, with the shift in technology, this project was converted into the Audio-Visual History Project in 2008, where a film/video was recorded interspersed with clippings from related films and other visual material like photos, posters, etc. to illustrate the interview.