The early protocols of NFAI were initially restrictive. Rules dictated that only those films which had won a National Award would be asked to submit a copy of their print for the archive. Nair, however, had no interest in such hierarchies of taste. Whether it was a Fearless Nadia spectacle or a Girish Kasaravalli film, it was welcome in his archives and to that end, he expanded the scope of NFAI’s repository. He would go on to collect a total of 12,000 films (8,000 of them were Indian) for NFAI.
Nair retired in 1991, but remained involved with his beloved NFAI while he was physically able. In 2016, Nair passed away.
Both Celluloid Man and Nair’s collection of essays, titled Yesterday’s Films for Tomorrow, are reminders of how much of our cinematic heritage we’ve lost to carelessness and greed. One famous story is about Alam Ara (1931). Nair approached Ardeshir Irani, the film’s producer, to procure any surviving material, only to learn that the producer’s son had sold the prints, which were then recycled to extract silver for colored bangles (this incident was most recently given a romanticised spin in Pan Nalin’s film Chhello Show, which has received an Oscar nomination for the best international feature). It wasn’t until the Eighties, when Doordarshan started telecasting movies, that film found a life beyond the theatre and producers were incentivised to make money from their earlier projects. For many films, this development came too late.
