Paramesh Krishnan Nair, known popularly as P.K. Nair, was an Indian film scholar and archivist. Nair was the founder-director of the NFAI who dedicated his life to archiving films for posterity. He started his journey with the NFAI in 1965 as an assistant curator. He travelled all across India to collect film reels, and created a vibrant collection over the many decades he worked with the NFAI.
Some of his important finds are reels from Dadasaheb Phalke’s Kalia Mardan, and Ardeshir Irani’s Alam Ara, the first Indian talking film.
Nair became the first director of the NFAI in 1982 and developed the framework for its functioning.
Though he got some practical training in branches of film making from film makers of Bombay, particularly Mehboob Khan, Bimal Roy and Hrishikesh Mukherjee, he realised that he did not have the ideal qualities to become a filmmaker himself. His interest lay more in the field of academics.
As advised by Jean Bhownagary of Films Division of India, he appeared for an interview at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), was selected and joined the institute in March 1961 in the position of research assistant. While at FTII, he assisted Marie Seton and Professor Satish Bahadur in initiating and conducting the film appreciation classes of FTII. He also conducted early work to establish the film archive set up as a separate wing of FTII. He corresponded with the curators and directors of established film archives in the UK, USA, France, Italy, Poland, Soviet Union and other countries. All of them advised an independent autonomous entity for NFAI and not as a wing of FTII.
Destructive fire and current state of preservation
A huge fire which broke out on January 8, 2003 in the Film and Television Institute of India caused massive destruction in a vault of the NFAI housed on the campus. Nearly, 1,700 nitrate film base prints perished, and 607 films in 5,097 reels were lost in the fire. Among the greatest losses for the Archive were the reels of Dadasaheb Phalke’s films Raja Harishchandra (1913), Lanka Dahan (1917), and Kaliya Mardan (1919).
In March 2019, a report submitted by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India stated that nearly 31,000 reels at the NFAI were reported lost or destroyed.
Recently, the Jayakar Bungalow on the NFAI campus was inaugurated by Prakash Javadekar, Minister of Information and Broadcasting and Environment, Forest and Climate Change. The bungalow will house a digital film library where researchers can access the NFAI’s database.
Picture Credit : Google