The tireless Henri Langlois of Indian cinema

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Anyone who loves world cinema — or for that matter just cinema — knows about P.K. Nair, who founded the National Film Archive of Pune way back in 1961. Now leading a sedate, retired life at the age of 80, he never misses a film festival in Mumbai, and sits shyly in the foyer of the Inox or the Fun Republic, to be escorted into the auditorium by his phalanx of admirers.
The admirers are led by the early graduates of the Film Insitute of India, now big names on the showtown roster. Indeed, some of us film enthusiasts then at the St Xavier’s College, also owe a repayable debt to him. Whenever a group of us would land up at the archive in Pune, he would facilitate screenings of whichever film we wanted to see in the mini-auditorium of the institute, be it the classics of Segei Eisenstein’s or the rule-breaking savlos by Germany’s Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Moreover, Nair saab, as we would all call him, would organise overnight lodging for us neophytes cinephiles at the institute’s guest house. Any film lover was welcome to his hospitality.
So, why am I telling you about him today? It’s simply because of the inside news that Nair saab was tipped to be the winner of the uber prestigeous Dadasaheb Phalke Award. Senior Film Institute graduates were rooting for him, but then the award committee couldn’t decide on a vote which led to a tie between Nair and Sharmila Tagore. If my sources are to be believed — and they always are — the solution to the tie, was to give it to the stalwart, Pran, the third name on the list of finalists. This is not to say that Pran, now 93, was an incorrect choice. Yesteryear’s super villain, in fact, deserved the Phalke Award years ago.
Meanwhile, Nair saab leaves shortly for various venues like Kiev in Ukraine and the Sorbonne University in Paris, where he will be feted for his lifelong work in preserving films from all over the globe at the Pune archive.
And May 3 will also mark the theatrical release of the two-and-a-half-hour documentary titled The Celluloid Man, a tribute to the archivist, by Film Institute graduate Shivendra Singh Dungarpur. That a documentary is to be released at several
cities is an occasion, since such real life biographies rarely find an outlet for public viewing.
I previewed it recently and was struck by the deeply emotional responses to Nair saab by a wide spectrum of film personalities ranging from Dilip Kumar, Shabana Azmi and Jaya Bachchan to Shyam Benegal, Ashutosh Gowariker and Rajkumar Hirani. Good to see gratitude being expressed to a man who deserves it and how!