NEW DELHI, Oct 24: Listen to great singers, watch renowned performing artists and get inspired by listening to interviews of Mother Teresa, Gandhi and other world leaders at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts here where India’s audio-visual cultural heritage is up for exhibit.
“Our idea is to give a rare material to people and give them a taste of what audio-visual cultural heritage is all about. We have sort of an outreach program of the sudio-visual heritage of this country there are nine institutions which are involved in this exhibition,” says Dipali Khanna, member secretary IGNCA.
The exhibition has brought together hosts of institutions from the public and private sector like All India Radio, Doordarshan, Sangeet Natak Akademi, Archive of Indian Music, NaadSaagar Archives, Archives & Research Centre for Ethnomusicology, School of Cultural Texts & Records, Jadavpur University and Rupayan Sansthan.
“It’s an amazing use of new technology which is available to us. I think this is so important which is being harnessed in this manner to bring together a repository of classical music and dance and so on,” Padma Shree Awardee Anjolie Ela Menon told PTI at the inauguration of the exhibition.
Rare audio and visual recording of renowned artists like Bade Ghulam Ali, Zohar Bai of Agra, Bismillah Khan and many others are sheer pleasure to listen to at the exhibition.
“After all musicians like everybody else are mortal they are not going to last forever. It is so wonderful that so many generations ahead will still be able to listen to the music of the great singers and performers. So I think this exhibition is a huge step and I am very glad that IGNCA has been the one to bring this together in such a very impressive manner,” says Menon.
Famous interviews by All India Radio which has more than 53,000 tapes in its archives is a centrepiece at the exhibition with the young generation lining up to listen to the inspiring speech of great leaders the country has produced like Mahtama Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Rabindranath Tagore, BR Ambedhkar, Sarjoni Naidu, Saradar Vallabh Bhai Patel and so on.
“These are all from our archives which we have collected since our establishment in 1954. We have interviews of prominent personalities and excerpt from plays other music collections. And to store them properly we have digitized all our materials. We are also approaching the market by trying to sell the copies of our collection at a very nominal price to students, scholars and the general public,” said K. Vageesh, Deputy Director General Programme Music and Archives, All India Radio.
All the participants at the exhibit said they felt the inherent need to spread more awareness about the audiovisual heritage of our country that is preserved by the participating institutions.
“It is very important to store our cultural heritage. There is a generation who has forgotten about Gandhi ji and there is a whole generation that’s never heard of Gulam ali Khan, Bhimsen Joshi and others. There are so many great musicians. How can I describe to my grandchildren what Bismillah Khan was? You cannot describe music in words and so to be able to actually listen to it is a great gift,” says Menon.
In order to make these archives accessible to the public, IGNCA with the other institutions who have participated has decided to link up their websites during this exhibition period from October 24 to November 15 at the IGNCA website.
“Many of these websites have already got the material online like Archive of Indian Music (AIM) they take old gramophone recordings and put them online. Initially what we will start is atleast for this exhibition we will have a link of all these materials on our website.” (PTI)
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