New Delhi, Aug. 18: The first talkie Devdas is home, capping a 30-year-old cross-border quest that seemed to mirror the protagonist's pangs of love and longing.
India has acquired a print of the 1935 film by director P.C. Barua after three decades of negotiations with Bangladesh. The Bengali film adaptation of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's classic, starring Barua himself in the title role, was also made in Hindi and Assamese later by the director.
"Getting this film back is a landmark achievement. We've had 30 years of talks with Bangladesh as we had lost all prints of the film in India," said Prakash Magdum, director of the National Film Archive of India (NFAI).
Many prints of the film, belonging to the erstwhile New Theatre in Calcutta, were believed to have been destroyed in fires between 1950 and 1955.But one was discovered in the neighbouring country in the 1980s, acquired by the Bangladesh Film Archive.
A three-member Bangla delegation, led by information secretary Martuza Ahmed, recently handed over a DVD of the film to NFAI boss Magdum in Pune, where the archive is located. In exchange, the Bangla team was given a DVD of Dadasaheb Phalke's Raja Harishchandra, India's first full-length feature film made in 1913.
Devdas, a tragic story of a feudal scion who destroys himself but refuses to take a stand and marry the woman he loves, has been adapted into at least nine Indian films so far, including the 1955 classic by Bimal Roy, featuring Dilip Kumar, Vyjayanthimala and Suchitra Sen, and the 2009 version by Sanjay Leela Bhansali starring Shah Rukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai and Madhuri Dixit.
Five of these films are now preserved at the NFAI.
But Barua's Devdas wasn't the first to chronicle the story of Devdas on celluloid. Director Naresh Mitra had done so in 1928, seven years before Barua's talkie, but the silent film's prints have been lost. Both films were made in the lifetime of Sarat Chandra, who died in 1936.
While the Centre patted itself for having acquired the latest copy, many experts said successive governments had adopted a lackadaisical attitude towards film preservation.
"It is sad prints are first lost in accidents and governments have to beg other countries to hand them over later," critic and film historian Bhawana Somaaya said. "The truth is documentation of films, an important part of our culture and heritage, hasn't been taken seriously enough, though this country is obsessed with films."
India has already lost the original print of its first-ever talkie film, Alam Ara of 1931. Sources say poor maintenance may wipe out 60 others, including Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zamin (1953) , Raj Kapoor's Awara (1951) and Ritwik Ghatak's Ajantrik (1958).
"Among an estimated 1,700 silent films made early on, only five to six survive. While over 1,700 films are made now in over 32 languages every year, most people aren't aware India has an endangered cinematic legacy," said an official of Mumbai's Film Heritage Foundation.
