Monique Threatt, Head of IUB Libraries Media Services, invited guest blogger Oliver Brafield—a passionate enthusiast of Hindi Cinema—to share his insights in this blog post.
The private collection of renowned author and documentary film-maker Nasreen Munni Kabir is now available for IU Bloomington faculty, staff, and students to view online in a resource called Hindi Cinema: Histories of Film-making. This exciting site features a wealth of interviews and actuality footage, enriched by on-set photographs taken by Peter Chappell and popular film posters sourced from the British Film Institute.
‘Dixit, Madhuri and Khan, Saroj [photograph]’. Material sourced from the private collection of Peter Chappell.
For those studying Hindi cinema, Kabir has collected and created the primary sources that she wishes she could have accessed when she started researching. Kabir’s private collection is packed with actuality and interview footage created for her well-known documentaries, such as Movie Mahal and How to Make a Bollywood Movie. As well as Kabir’s work as an interviewer, she has written extensively about Hindi Cinema and has subtitled many Hindi films into English. Kabir brought the first ever Indian film to the UK’s Channel 4: Sholay, which airedin 1982. ‘The response was amazing,’ says Kabir, ‘we got hundreds of letters, lots of phone calls.’
‘Bhansali, Sanjay Leela on Devdas set with Dixit, Madhuri, and Rai, Aishwarya’. Material sourced from the private collection of Peter Chappell.
Kabir interviewed leading lights of Indian film for her documentaries, shedding light on the creative processes and personalities that contributed to the shaping of the ‘Golden Age’ of Hindi cinema and beyond. The list of interviewees is long: actors and directors such as Dev Anand, Shabna Azmi, Nadira, Bindu, Tanuja Chandra, Shammi Kapoor, Sharmila Tagore, Manmohan Desai, Ramesh Sippy and Mani Kaul; lyricists and composers such as Gulzar, Javed Akhtar, Naushad Ali, Laxmikant-Pyarelal and AR Rahman; and choreographers such as Vaibhavi Merchant, Saroj Khan and PL Raj. In any documentary, only a fraction of an interview can make the final cut, whereas this resource features eighty interviews in full – unedited – produced between 1986 and 2011. Some of these interviews have never been available before in their entirety and offer a unique research opportunity.
‘If I had that kind of a research material available when I started off, I would have been really very, very happy, and it would have advanced my studies enormously’ – Nasreen Munni Kabir
As well as interviews, this resource also presents behind-the-scenes actuality footage of interviewees at work. You can watch AR Rahman and Javed Akhtar joking in the recording studio and demonstrating their process for creating music and lyrics; or watch director and stunt-expert Mahendra Verma preparing a set for a stunt involving a motorbike jump from a balcony.
Taken together, the footage across this resource covers widespread aspects of film-making, including the role of gender and the celebrated work of prominent women; the development of Hindi cinema across the twentieth century; the idiosyncrasies and conventions of Hindi film-making; and specific aspects of craft, from acting styles and choreography, to costume and set design.
‘Naushad [photograph, 1]’. Material sourced from the private collection of Peter Chappell.
Alongside the primary sources, the Hindi Cinema resource includes contextual essays, an overview of the collection and key biographies, which can act as handy reference points or an introduction for anyone new to this study. Essay topics include:
- The ‘Golden Age’ of Hindi Cinema
- Methodologies for Using Interviews for Research: a case study on Women in Hindi Cinema
- The History of Film Censorship in India
- The Role of Music and Song in Hindi Cinema
As for Kabir’s own hopes of how her collection will contribute to academia, she says: ‘the heart of film making is through the interviews and through the experience of those who make those films. So I think those interviews… open the door to many subjects. And hopefully, students will find many ways of approaching the study of Indian film’.
‘Bhansali, Sanjay Leela on Devdas set with Khan, Shah Rukh and Dixit, Madhuri [photograph]’. Material sourced from the private collection of Peter Chappell.
References
All quotes from Nasreen Munni Kabir, ‘An Introduction to the Interviews’ in Hindi Cinema: Histories of Film-making (2024), https://www.hindicinema.amdigital.co.uk
About the author
Oliver Brafield is an Academic Engagement Associate at AM, a publisher of bespoke, online primary source resources. He enjoys connecting librarians, faculty and students to relevant primary sources and asking them all about their work. He graduated with a master’s degree in history, specialising in music and gender.
This blog post is part of an ongoing series drawing attention to library collections related to marginalized or underrepresented populations, communities, and individuals.
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