The Garga archives
Bhagwan Das Garga exercised a global modernity that began to ferment in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of empire colonialism. He would come to inhabit an era energised by the dissolution of an ancient order and the pursuit of another that may exist in its lieu. The two or three decades after the end of World War-II were possessed by tremendous entropy all over the world, but this was especially true for contexts that desired to heal the residual scars of colonialism. The various constituents of the age were, therefore, embroiled in an existential and pragmatic investigation of what may come to define the new contemporary, the new citizen, and through these, the new nation itself.
The first respondents to this query — contemporaries of Garga who existed across fields like architecture, science, policy, design, government and the arts — sought influence from sources near and afar. They gleaned lessons of solidarity, mobilisation, systemisation and organisation from contexts away from home, but were also prepared to excavate their own milieus for aesthetic, spiritual, environmental and thematic truths. Theirs was thus a novel conception of modernity: an amorphous amalgam that can seem anachronistic within a present-day discourse that’s founded upon virulent binaries. Its conception of the world did not rest upon a paradigm of this or that, but instead, of this and that as well — a way of thinking that does not erect a false distinction between the inward and the outward, but imagines these as porous stations; one as a means to arrive at the other.
Garga, who would become renowned all over the world as a film historian and a preservationist later in life, began his career as a curious dabbler, a persistent amateur; in essence, a non-specialist. Born in unpartitioned Punjab in 1924, his professional journey commenced with the submission of a few photographs to The Illustrated Weekly of India. His political activities in Lahore resulted in his expulsion from the city, which led him to turn towards Bombay, the other major centre of film production then. In the early 1940s, he apprenticed with V Shantaram, a seminal figure of early Indian cinema, before initiating a lifelong alliance with left-aligned journalist and filmmaker KA Abbas. His encouragement inaugurated Garga’s career as a film historian, when he submitted a brief historical compendium of Indian cinema to Sargam, a magazine published and edited by Abbas. Later, Garga would attempt to rally the Press against the Censor Board’s refusal to grant Abbas’ ‘A Tale of Four Cities’ a ‘U’ certification, an act which Abbas anticipated would “...remain one of the memorable episodes in the struggle for freeing the creative film-makers from the stranglehold of bureaucratic, unenlightened and reactionary censorship”.
At the same time, Garga initiated work on ‘Storm Over Kashmir’ (1948), the first of the 50 documentary films he produced. In 1953, Garga, forever the curious onlooker, started a research engagement at the Ealing Film Studios and the National Film Theatre in London, a larger project that allowed his paths to intersect with famed documentary filmmakers like Joris Ivens, Basil Wright and Thorold Dickenson, among various others.
When Abbas contacted him to join the 1957 Indo-Soviet co-production, ‘Across Three Seas’ (‘Pardesi’), Garga gained access to the immense circle of historians, exhibitionists, critics and producers in Soviet Russia, which, according to a retrospective survey of Garga’s career, “welcomed him with open arms”. He engineered an invitation to a clandestine screening of the ‘Ivan the Terrible, Part II’, the forbidden sequel to Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘Ivan the Terrible, Part I’ (1944), which was banned by the Soviet state and put out of circulation.
Later, Garga, who had taken secret descriptive notes during the screening, compiled them into a rare report on the film for Sight and Sound. The review, six spreads long and replete with photographs, is said to have caused the authorial censure around the film to thaw: the ban was lifted and the film was approved for wider exhibition outside of Soviet Russia. However, the epoch of Garga’s career in Europe arrived with the extensive 1968 survey of 50 years of Indian cinema that he organised alongside the legendary Henri Langlois (who, as Garga would himself acknowledge later, was one of his two cinephilic idols along with Georges Sadoul).
Garga’s trysts with a fledgling, transnational, post-war network of cineastes — his ‘forays into the unknown’, in the words of a collaborator — would help him inherit various diagrams and methods that he could install in his practice back home. This was, of course, prototypical of the post-Independence modernist from the subcontinent; a figure eager to imbibe, like wet clay, impressions from a kaleidoscopic ‘away’ to then distill them into discernible patterns when back ‘home’. Even as a young aspiring filmmaker active in the 1950s’ Bombay, Garga is said to have received ‘unofficial donations’ of film ephemera (lobby cards or promotional posters; intimations of a film on the anvil) from yesteryear producers, but it is in the 1980s when he began to cultivate a concrete existence as an archivist of the history of Indian film.
In the early 1960s, he embarked on the production of two self-financed documentaries on Indian cinema: ‘Glimpses of Indian Cinema’ (1963) and ‘Creative Artists of India: Satyajit Ray’ (1964). The former was produced as a commemorative plaque to mark the 50th year of Indian cinema, and the latter featured a collage of behind-the-scene impressions gathered by Garga from Ray’s production of ‘Mahanagar’ (1963). Apparently, the filmmaker enjoyed Garga’s rough-cut of the film so much that he agreed to provide the commentary for the film himself; later, it would premiere at the London Film Festival.
This initiated correspondence between Ray and Garga wasn’t merely symptomatic of a time of interdisciplinary porosity (Garga’s archives are filled with exchanges with figures as diverse as Krishna Riboud, Abbas, Lotte Eisner and Charles Correa), but of a keen desire within the keepers of Indian cinema to canonise its narrative. Over the next few decades, until his death in 2011, Garga became a vociferous chronicler of the events, figures, institutions and epochs that populate the historiography of a national cinema.
However, his approach extended beyond mere indexation; his thorough scouring of the orbital flotsam of cinema history in the shape of bureaucratic records, committee reports, gossip columns, popular film magazines, newspaper advertisements and anecdotal evidence allowed him to construct a private history of Indian cinema that is analytical and observed, but also, deduced and speculative.
In 1996, Garga compiled his evaluations into ‘So Many Cinemas’, still considered, alongside ‘Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema’ (1994), ‘From Rajahs and Yogis to Gandhi and Beyond’ (2008), ‘Visions of Development’ (2016) and ‘Bombay Hustle’ (2020), a seminal account of the history of film in the country. Garga also authored ‘From Raj to Swaraj’ (2007) and ‘Silent Cinema in India: A Pictorial Journey’ (2011) before he passed away at the age of 86 in Patiala. His last book, a coffee table format survey of the pre-studio years of Indian cinema, remains unpublished.
It is essential that I end this piece with an ode to Donnabelle, BD Garga’s wife and his chief collaborator. The books that he compiled and produced in the final two years of his life would most likely not have been possible without her elaborate research, organisational skill and an astute attention to design.
Archives tend to manufacture their own silences, and these do not always demand remedy, but in the case of an intimation of the life of BD Garga, it would be unbecoming to exclude a celebration of the labour of Donnabelle, who not only worked alongside him as a perpetual ally when he was alive, but also after his passing to ensure a sustenance of their legacy as preservationists. She was instrumental in the setting up of The Garga Archives, a digital museum devoted to the life and work of BD Garga. It is perhaps sufficient to say that if the work they produced was borne from the eyes that BD Garga possessed, it were the hands of Donnabelle Garga that nurtured it into actual being.
She passed away on February 22, 2021.
— The writer is curator, The Garga Archives (garga-archives.com)
