Preserving Vanraj Bhatia’s legacy

From awards and letters to original handwritten music scores, an ongoing project archives veteran composer Vanraj Bhatia’s works

In India’s prolific entertainment industry, with all its remakes, remixes and plagiarised ‘tributes’, where do you look if you want to find the originals — the building blocks of our popular culture? It’s not easy, especially since preserving cultural heritage hasn’t featured much on our radar. “India is currently the largest and most diverse film producing nation in the world, making close to 2,000 films a year in 36 languages, but our record of film preservation is abysmal. We made 1,338 silent films, of which just about 29 survive, many only in fragments. Our first talkie Alam Ara (1931) is lost, as are most of the first talkies in other languages. By the 1950s, we had lost almost 70% of our film heritage, and we continue to lose more every day,” says Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, National Award-winning filmmaker, archivist and founder-director of Film Heritage Foundation (FHF) in Mumbai.