Kabir Khan's upcoming web series tells the story of the foot soldiers and captains of Subhash Chandra's Bose's INA, a script he has nurtured over 20 years. He thinks there couldn't be a better time to release it
Aastha Atray Banan (MID-DAY; January 12, 2020)

It was 1999, and director Kabir Khan was 25. It was an exciting time, he says, as he readied for the journey of a lifetime. He was setting off on a road trip from Singapore, through Malaysia and Burma, back to India. What made it better was that his co-travellers included, Captain Lakshmi Sahgal and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, both aged 86 and former veterans of Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army (INA). Formed in Singapore in 1942, the INA, led by Bose, aimed to march to Delhi and oust the British. Khan admits his obsession with what was locally referred to as the Azad Hind Fauj. "I was just a few years out of film school then and I got the opportunity to travel with them for my documentary, The Forgotten Army. This was the first time since World War II, that they were retracing the route the Fauj had taken. It was also the first time anyone from the INA was going back to Burma. It was special for them. As for me, I was being told the story by those who were part of history," Khan says on the eve of the launch of his Amazon Original show. The five-part series chronicles the story of Lieutenant Sodhi and his army of men and women fighting for Indian independence.

His interest in the Fauj ensured he didn't forget that he had long wanted to turn the documentary into a feature. But he knew, it was an ambitious project. It took him 20 years to recreate it in a fictionalised format. "The story never left me. The reason I don't make sequels is that once I have made a movie, the story is done. With this one, I felt, it needed a larger canvas. It was a promise I had made to Captain Sahgal and Captain Dhillon. When I made the transition to features, this was the first script I wrote. It kept growing inside me, and the research was internalised in the form of this goldmine of information that I had heard from them," says the two-time National Award winner.

Every day of those three months he spent with the two veterans, now deceased, is etched in his memory, even as they were being watched by the Burmese administration and intelligence. Almost every scene in The Forgotten Army is based on true events, as narrated to Khan. He recalls a time when Dhillon and Sahgal insisted on locating a cave in the jungles of Burma, where they had taken refuge. This was 1944. It was at a place called Mount Popa, and it was their last station. "Captain Sahgal would joke that her husband, Prem Singh Sahgal, who was instrumental in the army, would have named his child Popa [if he had his way]. Their home in Lucknow is named Popa."

They wanted to find the cave that they had operated from. By then they had been reduced to a guerrilla outfit. The three looked for four days, and on the fifth, they met with success. "We went in. Captain Sahgal had told me that her husband had placed a Buddha idol in the middle [of the cave]. And sure enough, there it was. I get goosebumps when I think about it even now."

The story, he says, is about the foot soldiers. Khan, a student of Jamia Millia Islamia and a history buff reflects on India's current climate when he says, "It's important that we watch a story of true patriots at this time. One of the main characters in the story says, 'to be able to fight for the INA, nobody is going to ask you if you are Indian enough, or ask for documentation. You just need to know you are Indian, and that's enough'."


Subhash Chandra Bose reviewing soldiers of the Indian National Army in 1944. Pic/ Getty Images

A recorded discussion lost: Michelangelo Antonioni and Akira Kurosawa with Satyajit Ray during their visit to India in 1977

Stalwart filmmakers Shyam Benegal and Sai Paranjpye rue the rigid unaccountability of Doordarshan, which has resulted in the loss of priceless documentary footage, exclusive interviews and several serials
Khalid Mohamed (MUMBAI MIRROR; July 3, 2019)

Even as the hallowed Doordarshan has announced recruitment for 89 vacancies in its English news channel, beyond priceless footage has gone missing or has been cavalierly erased.

No official in the public service broadcaster initiated by the government of India on September 15, 1959, has an answer to the missing documentary footage, exclusive interviews and several of its commissioned TV serials.

Filmmaker and writer Sai Paranjpye (left), who incidentally was among one of the first six women to be recruited as a producer at DD in New Delhi, states, “For years, I went blue in the face asking officials—senior and junior—to locate four of my programmes. I should have persisted for an answer. Admittedly, now I’ve become lackadaisical because of the who-cares! attitude about the disappearance of its treasure trove.”

Gone missing are Paranjpye’s documentaries on Captain Lakshmi Sahgal, revolutionary of the independence movement, on movie-hoarding painters including bytes from M F Husain, a human-interest story The Little Tea Shop on a feisty woman running a dhaba single-handedly on the Delhi-Agra highway, and a portrait of the revered composer and singer Pankaj Mullick.

According to a source in the capital, a 1980s documentary on the proposed statehood of Gorkhaland featuring the first teleinterview of the leader of the Gorkha National Liberation Front, Subhash Ghisingh, and the then West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu, is untraceable.

A programme on Tamil Nadu politics including an interview with Jayalalithaa after the passing away in 1987 of the state’s chief minister M G Ramachandran, is either inaccessible or has been binned.

The same fate has befallen the original video-tapes of the two-part documentary Footprints Across India on the global media baron Rupert Murdoch’s visit to India in the 1990s, as well as a bold account on the dacoits of the Chambal Valley.

These, in fact, form just a miniscule part of the missing DD footage. A majority of the official as well as independent producers and directors are no longer living. Most of the surviving filmmakers contacted shared the view, “Why re-open wounds? Over the decades, the various chiefs of Doordarshan have pinned the blame on their predecessors.”

Clearly, the lapse –unintentional or not-—is part of a larger issue of lost content in the history of broadcasting. Besides DD, the All-India Radio and Films Division, have remained rigidly unaccountable. From personal experience, I can recall that shortly after the imposition of the Emergency, the International Film Festival of India had hosted the legendary Akira Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni and Elia Kazan. A round-table discussion between them and Satyajit Ray was recorded by columnist Amita Malik, simultaneously for DD and AIR. And it has been confirmed that those were erased since there was a shortage of recording tapes. A producer at DD is lored to have recorded another programme over the valuable interview.

Malik, during her lifetime, would often lament that her exclusive with the iconic actor Marlon Brando, interviewed during his UNICEF-sponsored visit to India circa 1967, was also wiped out.

There is no news either of the tapes of interviews with the legendary actors Jeanne Moreau from France and that of Vanessa Redgrave from Britain – in the course of their visits to the International Film Festival of India.

On the sports front, archived tapes of the tied 1987 Ahmedabad test between India and Pakistan are one among the many disappearing chronicles. The match was singularly important, showing Sunil Gavaskar as the first cricketer to cross the 10,000-run mark.

On being quizzed about this, Gavaskar had described the incident as “unfortunate” adding that perhaps in the 1980s technology wasn’t as advanced, leading to the loss of an incalculable number of files, tapes and papers. “At least from now on, they should ensure that they archive stuff properly,” he had suggested.

In response, a Doordarshan official had stated that of late tapes are being digitised to ensure there is a back-up support in case a tape has to be re-used. Seemingly, earlier there wasn’t an option. In the absence of “proper guidelines, it was easy to overwrite a tape.” Easy? The word speaks for itself.

Filmmaker Shyam Benegal (left), who has consistently demanded the need for preservation of documented footage, states candidly, “It’s a crying shame really. Supposedly DD is required to hand over its material to the National Film Archive of India in Pune. How many have been handed over is a mystery. The archive is meant to store and preserve our national heritage of cinema and TV series. Clearly, the archive has never been looked after or given any priority.”

Although some episodes of Benegal’s seminal series Bharat Ek Khoj (right) (1988)– based on Jawaharlal Nehru’s book Discovery of India --have been officially uploaded on YouTube, the original tapes shot on 35 mm gauge have disappeared. “The storage facilities at the archive are awful,” Benegal remarks. “I am clueless about how many of the 53 episodes are still surviving.”

His documentaries revolving around the subject of the various forms of music like rhythm and melody were given to the archive but are no longer accessible. Moreover, the auteur’s documentaries on the sarod maestro Ali Akbar Khan, and the sitar wizards Ravi Shankar and Abdul Halim Jaffer Khan, have either perished or are mouldering in the cans somewhere.

Any salvaging operations possible? To that, Benegal ripostes, “None that I can think of. Except to raise the consciousness that it’s never too late to start preserving filmed material.”

And he makes the point, that it’s not only the national film heritage which has been squandered over time. What about our books, which should have been looked after? Where have all the original parchments gone? We must have lost out, he contends, on at least a millennium of our literature.

To encapsulate the topic, Benegal has a one-liner. And that is, “Whatever token attempts have been made, they have amounted to zilch.”


Also gone missing is Sai Paranjpye’s documentary on Captain Lakshmi Sahgal (seen above with Subhash Chandra Bose), revolutionary of the independence movement