National film archive collects amateur movies to map cultural heritage

Ajerky video shows a sari-clad woman in her 50s seated cross-legged on a carpet with a bow-stringed instrument resting on her lap.

- Mohua.Das

The camera pans around what looks like a traditional Rajasthani living room before zooming into her left hand moving gracefully along the fret and her right hand bowing a raag. This domestic scene shot on an 8mm handheld camera sometime in the late ’70s is both ordinary and exceptional at once.

The familiar tropes of a classic home movie is what make it ordinary while a family film captured on an amateur camera is made exceptional by the esraj, an instrument that’s almost obsolete today and its player, a middle-class woman —together, an uncommon combination at the time. This footage of astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar’s mother on a typical day in their Jodhpur home has recently been preserved as an archival artifact at the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) in Pune.