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In a country
that has since time immemorial largely relied on the oral tradition
for dissemination of knowledge and information, lack of concern
for documentation may seem natural. Yet in this age of information,
this callousness seems more and more impardonable.
We in the Akademi
are deeply disturbed by the sheer non-availability of documentary
material even on the best of our authors. Even reconstructing
their biodata seems to pose a problem, let alone reconstruct
their lives in detail. Neither their images - still or moving
- nor their voices are readily available; their letters and manuscripts
have been left to white ants and oblivion. It is high time we
turned to documenting their images, voices, the momentous events
that moulded their lives and visions, and the contemporary response
to their creative achievements.
It is this realisation, though late, that has
inspired us to imagine an archive of Indian literature that will
be the seed of a unique Indian literary museum of the future,
a delight to the common reader, the academic's pride, the researcher's
paradise and a sacred centre of pilgrimage to literary historians
in the times to come.
Documenting
the Moment
As a first step towards preserving the memories
of our writers, the Akademi has already produced 13 on eminent writers.
These films strive to capture the  spirit
of their subjects through serious conversations, intimate
chats, images of their everyday life, |
moments of passion and action, reading
from their work, commentaries that narrate their growing up and
responses from careful readers and critics. The film makers have
tried to avoid duplicating everything that can be said in print
and to concentrate on what the camera and the microphone alone
can capture: The authors' moods, tones, poses, the fleeting moments
of joy and pain, the surroundings of their work, the domestic
settings, encounters with the public, the ethos and the texture
of their everyday.
Documentary film on Mulk Raj Anand by Suresh Kohli,
on Gopal Chhotray by Jugal Debarata, Rajendra shah by Naresh
Naik and U.R. Anantha Murthy by Krishna Masadi have been produced.Assignments for complete films on Ale Ahmed
Suroor, Trilochan Shastri, and O.V. Vijayan have been given to
the directors who had earlier shot the footage on them. Work
on audio-cassettes, photographs and manuscript records is in
progress.
Archiving to Preserve
The Archive has already started collecting and
documenting audio and video recordings related to writers and
writing, photographs, portraits, letters, manuscripts and other
souvenirs. The archiving work has been planned as a three stage
project. As part of the first stage, work has already begun,
after careful sorting and selection, to commit the available
material - photographs, manuscripts, film and audio recordings
to a more permanent material - CD ROMs - in order to avoid further
deterioration. Care is being taken to catalogue and make easily
accessible, the vast resource of material already available with
the Sahitya Akademi. The Archives ultimately aims to be the Akademi's
interface to the world, to posterity.
As part of the next stage, the Archives would
try to popularise writers, texts and traditions by releasing
souvenirs like posters and picture postcards.
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