It is a matter of prime cultural concern in
any nation of heritage to preserve its invaluable assets of antiquity and
inherited monuments of fine arts that pass through generations of artistic
brilliance. Traditionally, a culture rich nation plans and
preserves its monuments of immense cultural value with pride, adequate funds
and a sustainable infrastructure. Alas! India has hundreds of so-called
protected monuments, but in fact have none to actually guard and protect them
and prevent unruly defacing of artefacts that once laboriously were sculptured
by efficient hands devoting weary long years.
A population
which does not realise the intrinsic value in cultural terms does not even
object visitors writing their names or of their loved ones indiscriminately on
the walls of our monuments. Our predecessors could not prevent the Portuguese
soldiers from using the statues and carvings of immense historic value and
elegance as targets for shooting practice in the Elephanta Caves without
remorse and defacing cultural treasures on stone preserved for centuries.
The criminal
disintegration and powdering of Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan by Taliban
rebels could not be averted even by a well meaning and civilised world
community. Stealing of deities in stone from the sanctum sanctorum of
celebrated Indian temples for money continues even today. India in fact
is fortunate to get back its famous dancing Bronze Nataraja Statue of Chola era
from the Australian Museum illegally smuggled by cultural traffickers.
India is
replete with examples of events missed in history running to thousands of years
due to our national character not giving due importance to preservation of
invaluable historic cultural works and monuments for varieties of religious and
reasons of cultural conflicts. We owe rediscovery of most of our treasures to
British pathfinders and inquisitive soldiers, be it Ajanta, Ellora or so many
monuments of Buddhist origin.
With
preservation of our historical assets not being our national priority and
character, we already have lost substantial works of wisdom of our ancestors in
Indigenous Medicines, Astronomy, Mathematics and other applied sciences.
But the present scientific tools that enable easy preservation of great
monuments through chemical and mechanical means and digitisation of potential
audio and video materials are being fruitfully utilized the world over.
The information technology with its current scientific leap has immensely
enabled the world community to preserve great works in print through
digitisation instead of managing huge libraries of printed books.
The advent of
new media and possibility of preservation of digitised content in cloud form
has eased archiving process with excellent networking and retrieval
arrangements. Given the wealth of skilled human resource in IT available
in our own country, the delay in archiving assets of audio and video content of
Prasar Bharati is inexplicable.
The sound
archives of All India Radio (AIR) came into existence in April 1954 and can
well be termed as the National Audio Archives of the nation being the treasure
house of precious recordings in more than 53,000 tapes comprising music and
spoken words.
The library has invaluable collection of prayer speeches of Mahatma Gandhi
recorded in 1947 at Sodepur Ashram, Kolkata and in 1948 at Birla House, Delhi
in addition to his famous broadcast from the Broadcasting House, New Delhi on
12.11.1947. All India Radio has recordings of all the Presidents and
Prime Ministers of India besides important voice recordings of eminent
personalities like Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, Constitutional architect, Dr.
B.R. Ambedkar, Bismarc of India, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Nightingale of
India Ms Sarojini Naidu and many others.
The library
is further enriched with numerous radio drama features, documentaries, memorial
lectures and radio autography of eminent personalities from various walks of
life. Although release of archival materials of All India Radio started
in April 2002 under the banner ‘Akashvani Sangeet’, only 76 Albums containing
legends of Hindustani and Carnatic Classical and light music have been released
so far. This despite AIR holding the richest cachet of sound recordings of
almost of all genres of Radio Broadcasting including the rare recordings of
freedom fighters, unforgettable and resounding voices of great maestros like
Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Abdul Karim Khan, Krishna Rao Shankar Pandit, Begum
Akhtar, Siddeshwari Devi, Rasoolan Bai, Ariayakkudi, Chembai Vadyortha
Bhagavatar and others.
On
instrumental music, there are invaluable recordings of Pandit Pannalal Ghosh,
Dwaram Venkataswamy Naidu, Pandit V.G. Jog, T. Chowdiah, Pandit Nikhil Banerjee
and the like preserved for posterity. There are oral histories which
provide direct insight into lives and creative process of great writers and
artists. In the realm of dramatics, the greatest contribution of radio is
Radio play which evolved into an independent creative genre in the hands of
very eminent directors and writers.
As of today,
AIR has been able to digitize only 6,000 hours since 2002 out of a total of
75,000 hours of archival materials available with Prasar Bharati. The
archives have rare collections of speeches by Quaid-I-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah
and sensational addresses during ‘Bangladesh Liberation’ by Bangabandhu Sheikh
Mujeebur Rahman and Ms Indira Gandhi.
Doordarshan
archives started in 2003 involving digital restoration, preservation,
digitisation of the content, creation of meta-data for easy access and
retrieval of archived programmes. The laborious process of cleaning
and finally preserving digitised content in file format through Media Assets
Management (MAM) saving files on Linear Tape Open (LTO-4) format is on for a
very long time.
Doordarshan has digitised programme in 38 subjects to include animation and
puppetry, ballot, documentary series, environment and ecology, fair and
festival, game show, interview and conversation, light music, literature and
poetry, variety entertainment, etc. Out of 21,000 hours of digitised
content, Doordarshan is able to bring out only 77 DVDs so far.
The process of
digitisation is painfully slow with no technical road map, finalised plan for
marketing digitised content as also making free accessibility of speeches by
great national leaders to the world at large as decided by Prasar Bharat
Board.
Other
developed nations which have successfully archived their contents like NHK,
Japan and Deutche Welle, Germany in High Definition have their Central Archives
networked with programme generating facilities dealing with a single or couple
of languages with few dialects. But India suffers from a complex need to
document archival materials available in multiple languages and hundreds of
dialects in stations and kendras spread over the length and breadth of the
nation as also link them up.
Learning
from its experience, Prasar Bharati needs to create meta-data at the time of
programme production itself, secure produced content online and avoid piracy
with a central archive in New Delhi networked with regional centres of rich
cultural content. It would be worthwhile for Prasar Bharati either to
create a vertical for archives or expedite digitisation of its archival content
of historical and monetary value by outsourcing to reputed media houses or
facilities with domain experts without any further delay to save on precious tapes
from open wooden shelves and gunny bags exposed to vagaries of adverse weather
conditions.
While Prasar Bharati Board has conceptually cleared creation of a
well-networked data house on the programmes of AIR and DD stations all over
India, procurement of equipments connected to MAM needs to be compatible.
Piecemeal procurements due to lack of funds should be avoided at all
costs and avert resultant obsolescence of technology. Aggressive strategy
and an action plan to promote products released by AIR and DD could earn huge
dividends and benefit Prasar Bharati monetarily.
The revenue
receipts of DVDs and footage sale of Doordarshan has declined by 70 per cent in
the year 2015. Despite its rich archival content, Prasar Bharati has been
able to earn about only Rs 50 lakh in the last financial year compared to its
revenue of Rs 1.5 crore in 2012.
Fast
tracking of digitisation and archiving of its audio and video content is
workable by an active national level steering committee duly monitored by Prasar
Bharati Board on monthly basis for speedy accomplishment of digitisation of
born content as also legacy content in gramophone records and analogue magnetic
tapes.
Prasar
Bharati does not have a recruitment mechanism and in the absence of a statutory
body, Prasar Bharati Recruitment Board, there is an emergent need to put
dedicated personnel in place to supervise handling of invaluable archival
content with inherent security even if outsourced for digitisation to private
players.
Establishing
an exclusive web portal for AIR and DD archives with a payment gateway for
purchase of archived programmes and expeditiously installing digital kiosks of
Prasar Bharati in airports and railway stations to access its popular archival
content would enable Prasar Bharati Archives self sustain. Prasar Bharati Board
on its part had already cleared development of ‘Leaders of India’ website with
facility to download famous video clippings and sound byte free of cost.
Training of
staff at grass root level with proficient archival procedures would enable
Prasar Bharati to achieve its archival goals in a shorter duration. The nation
could expect speedy action on the archival front especially with an
ex-Secretary of Culture, Jawhar Sircar, CEO who initiated the process and is
leading from the front.
(The views
expressed here are purely personal views of Prasar Bharati principal advisor,
personnel and administration VAM Hussain and
Indiantelevision.com does not necessarily subscribe to them.)
Source
| http://www.indiantelevision.com/television/tv-channels/terrestrial/archival-neglect-150626
