Multi-media exhibition ‘Intermediations: Curating a People's Archive’, 21-28 February 2023, Open Palm Court, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi.
This collaborative multi-media exhibition is an invitation to revisit and reflect upon the popular practice of cinematic archiving in India. So, first and foremost, it is a celebration of some not-so famous collectors and their collections. More often than not, these collections result from lifetimes of persistent picking, routine care, meticulous preservation and constant transfer of memory from one media surface to another, creating in the process a large body of curated catalogues and databases.
Secondly, if popular cinema, film journalism and radio have been driven by divergent impulses of profit, entertainment, pedagogy and control, what do the convergent and divergent censorship histories of these media tell us? What are the creative gains and losses of the journey of a story or a song from a performative, oral practice to the printed page to the screen and back as illustrated comic books and song-story-dialogue books found on the pavements outside cinema halls? How does a song or dialogue sound or read without the benefit of its audio-visual referent?
The practice of playing and publishing antyakshari, parody, notations or swarlipi can be traced back to the beginnings of film journalism in the 1920s, and it persists all through the last century. Similarly, the literature-cinema interface in South Asia is deeper than documented or researched so far in adaptation studies. While we contemplate the failure of a Premchand in the 1930s or the success of his contemporary Sudarshan or Gulshan Nanda later, we must also ask why do we find so much of satire on film making, film-going and film-listening as a popular practice? What is the tone and tenor of lampooning around official policies and popular practices? How has film music been credited and presented on gramophone covers?
Musical instruments and machines such as harmonium, gramophone and radio appear on the screen quite early on, and become accompaniments and conduits of popular music beyond screen. Yet, harmonium gets ceremoniously exiled from colonial All India Radio, to be rehabilitated decades later in the 1970s, inspite of its ubiquitous presence on one hand, and widespread protestations on the other. A similar treatment is meted out to film content on radio during 1952-1957, before the unprecedented popularity of Radio Ceylon (Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation) forces Akashvani to launch its Vividh Bharati channel.
Who were these listeners in the subcontinent and beyond and how did they affect this historic turnaround? From where were the farmaishein or requests sent to radio stations? By co-curating songs with broadcasters in daily, weekly and yearly packages they created historic programmes such as Geetmala as they made parallel lyrical-musical-aural stars in a Lata Mangeshkar, Madan Mohan, Shailendra, Raja Mehndi Ali Khan or Ameen Sayani. Little wonder that we hear about so many of them in the autobiographies and memoirs of the late Gopal Sharma’s Awaz ki Duniya Ke Dosto... and Manohar Mahajan’s Yadein Radio Ceylon Ki. How does this moment connect with commercial broadcasting and programming practices of the FM era?
This curation is a trailer from an ocean of traces of practices from the last century, increasingly visible on YouTube, and if you so wish, easily delivered on your mobile via WhatsApp. Apart from select printed pages blown up as panels, you will see films, hear podcasts and radio recordings, and may choose to participate in live conversations with scholars, broadcasters, listeners and collectors in the evenings on the odd dates between the 21st and 28th February.
