One of the tragedies of Indian film is that (outside of the Bollywood world) many of the master reels of past films have been ignored/lost/destroyed. According

One of the tragedies of Indian film is that (outside of the Bollywood world) many of the master reels of past films have been ignored/lost/destroyed. According to one archivist [1]: "The loss of India’s film heritage has been colossal. Around 1,700 silent films were made in India of which the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) have only five to six complete films and 15 to 20 films in fragments. The film industry in Madras made 124 films and 38 documentaries in the silent era. Only one film survives, Marthanda Verma (1931). By 1950, India had lost 70 to 80 per cent of our films. And we don’t have to go so far back. Gulzar Saheb could not find the original negative of Maachis, a 1995 film. Mani Ratnam has lost many of his original negatives, which people do not realise, still need to be preserved even if you have a digital copy. The only world-class restoration of Indian films have been the restoration of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy that was done by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the Criterion Collection, Uday Shankar’s Kalpana and Ritwik Ghatak’s Titas by Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project." In short, the only parallel cinema that has survived in high quality has been through the efforts of Western enthusiasts. It is consequently a struggle to find good or even passable copies of critically-acclaimed films by Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, etc; though in the last couple of decades, NFDC's Cinemas of India [2] has attempted to rectify this somewhat. [1] https://www.film-foundation.org/2018-kolkata-workshop-telegraph https://www.film-foundation.org/2018-kolkata-workshop-telegr... [2] https://www.cinemasofindia.com/ https://www.cinemasofindia.com/