Bhagwan Das Garga


Bhagwan Das Garga, also known as B. D. Garga, was an Indian documentary filmmaker and film historian.
Bhagwan Das Garga was born on 14 November, 1924. He was enrolled to study for a medical career, but this pursuit was interrupted by the occasion of the Quit India Movement in 1942. He decided, around 1943, at the behest of K.A. Abbas, to devote himself to a career in the arts. This is also when he wrote his first piece as a writer on film for Abbas’ publication, Sargam. He then studied Cinematography at St. Xavier’s College, Bombay, later working under noted Indian film director and auteur, V. Shantaram. He started his career as a documentary filmmaker with Storm Over Kashmir, before participating in a diverse set of filmic projects and settings across Europe. He also contributed as Asst. Director to Abbas’ Indo-Soviet co-production film, Pardesi at Mosfilm Studios in Moscow. Upon his return to India, he helped found the National Film Archive of India in 1964. He was also a frequent visiting lecturer at the then-newly founded Film and Television Institute of India, along with being a member at the Film Advisory Board.
He wrote and contributed to various leading cinema journals across India and abroad. He also participated extensively in the effort to compile Encyclopaedia Americana and also, the encyclopedia of Soviet Film. Around this time, he availed of an opportunity to conduct extensive research on Indian cinema in order to produce a film anthology to commemorate its golden jubilee, 50 Years of Indian Cinema.
In 1967, he was appointed one of the experts on the UNESCO Committee of the History of World Cinema. This led then to the legendary 1969 exhibition – the first of its kind in Cinematheque Francaise – where he helped Henri Langlois organize a retrospective of the history of Indian cinema. In latter years, he preserved correspondence with Langlois and inherited from him a set of principles regarding the preservation of film that came ultimately to define his work. In subsequent years, Garga was invited by UNESCO to attend roundtable conferences on cinema and television in such venues and festivals as Mannheim, Venice, Beirut, Budapest, Montreal and Locarno. Garga preserved simultaneously a career as an active filmmaker in these years. In 1992, he shifted to Goa with Donnabelle, his collaborator and wife, to embark on a career as a writer.
This resulted in the seminal, 1996 compilation, So Many Cinemas, which in its title and through its general scale, identifies the history of cinema in India as a plural, multi-tentacled, giant organism. This was followed by 2005’s Art of Cinema, a compilation of his writings that this present archive most closely resembles, and 2007’s From Raj to Swaraj: The History of Documentary Film in India, which won the National Film Award for Best Book on Cinema. He repeated this feat with 2011’s Silent Cinema in India: A Pictorial Journey.
B.D. Garga passed away on 18 July, 2011 in Patiala, Punjab.
The sequel to Silent Cinema in India, a book entitled, The Sunshine Years, about the history of the talkies and studio system in the country, is a work-in- progress.
Garga’s seven-decade long career resulted in close to fifty documentary films, a substantial body of work as a critic, close to five books on cinema, collaborations with noted national and international figures in film and culture, several national and international awards, and recognition, by a community of peers that includes such figures as Kevin Brownlow, as a figure whose work is especially relevant to film history.

Life

Garga grew up in Lahore and developed an interest in photography as a teenager. He published some of his photographs in the magazine Illustrated Weekly of India. In 1943, he went to Mumbai and worked in the Indian film industry for the director V. Shantaram, where he learned the film craft. There he met the journalist and film critic K. A. Abbas, who encouraged him to write an article on the history of Indian cinema for Abbas' original magazine Sargam.
In 1948, Garga shot his first of more than 50 documentaries, which he also wrote and produced. His cinematic interest led him to Europe in 1953, where he studied film-making at the Ealing Studios and established contacts with the British Film Institute and the Cinémathèque française. Henri Langlois was a lifelong friend of his, and after Langlois's death in 1977 he wrote the obituary in the magazine Filmfare, in which he praised him as the greatest promoter of world cinema. During his five-year period in Europe, Garga also traveled to the Soviet Union and supported Abbas at the Mosfilm studios working on the Soviet-Soviet filming trip over three seas. He also co-operated with film historians and archivists.
Garga's research and writing was about film; his research on Indian film history culminated in the first film anthology on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Indian film. Garga was a member of the expert UNESCO committee on the history of international film. In 1969, he organized the first retrospective of Indian cinema with the Cinémathèque française. He was a member of the Film Advisory Board of India and a founding member of the National Film Archive of India in Pune. He also published essays on various aspects of Indian cinema, according to the NFDC magazine Cinema in India. The state Indian film promotion honored him for the 75th anniversary of Indian film in 1988 with a prize for his contribution to the growth of the national film industry. Garga was a jury member of national and international film festivals.
In 1992 Garga moved with his wife from Mumbai to Goa. At the Mumbai International Film Festival in 1996, he was awarded the V. Shantaram Award for his work in the documentary film. For his book From Raj to Swaraj: The Non-Fiction Film in India on the history of the Indian documentary, he received a National Film Award for the best Indian book on Film of the Year in 2007. Garga sold his unique private collection of about 3000 film memorabilia shortly before his death for 20 million rupees to the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts in New Delhi. His last book, Silent Cinema, in India: A Pictorial Journey was released in 2012 and was also awarded the National Film Award.

Filmography