It was three years ago, whilemaking his fi��lm La Mana(‘Not allowed’) on his mar-riage to a Khasi woman andthe anxieties in the hill tribein general about such mixedmarriages, that fi��lmmakerTarun Bhartiya came face toface with the diffi��culties inprocuring archival footageand relevant images and vi-deos for his subject. “Thereare very few places to go tofor accessing the visual his-tory of the northeast,” hesaid.

A representative of the Sa-sakawa Peace Foundation,Japan, who was attending aseminar in Guwahati withMr. Bhartiya, suggested thathe commenced research onit, and thus the base for theNorth East India Archive was

laid. Come October and thefi��rst of its kind, public, non-commercial audiovisual ar-chive on and in the north-east will be formallyfunctional.

Addressing accessIt will be situated at the De-partment of Mass Media, St.Anthony’s College, Shillong,where students, scholars, re-searchers, fi��lmmaker andfi��lm enthusiasts would beable to access the materialoffl��ine. The archive will alsohave a digital/web platformof its own.

Supported by the Sasaka-wa Peace Foundation, thelaunch will be held at St. An-thony’s College and simulta-neously announced at theYamagata International Doc-umentary Film Festival(YIDFF). To mark the

launch, YIDFF will have aspecial section of fi��lms fromnortheast India this year, tit-led ‘Rustle of spring, whiff�� ofgunpowder: From the NorthEast India Archives’, and cu-rated by Asako Fujioka.

An important component

of the archive will be the ci-nema of the northeast.There are also news reelsand Films Division docu-mentaries, and footage fromearly local cable news chan-nels. “It’s diffi��cult for fi��lm-makers and students to ac-

cess even each other’sfi��lms,” says Nathaniel Nam-pui Majaw, Project Directorof the archive and AssistantProfessor in the Mass MediaDepartment of St. Anthony’sCollege. “We are not evenable to access fi��lms from theStates next door,” said Mr.Bhartiya — a gap that the ar-chive hopes to plug.

Mr. Bhartiya, who is theresearch consultant for theproject, has also gatheredmaterial from sources suchas the Centre of South AsianStudies, University of Cam-bridge, the British Libraryand the National Library ofWales. Veteran Manipurifi��lmmaker Aribam SyamSharma has already pledgedall his fi��lms to the archive.There is one available roll ofthe fi��rst Khasi fi��lm made by aKhasi fi��lmmaker — well-

known historian Hamlet Ba-reh’s Ka Synjuk Riki Lai-phew Syiem, on the 30chiefs who founded Khasisociety. A fi��lm conservationworkshop will be held in De-cember under the tutelageof fi��lmmaker and founder-director of the not-for-profi��tFilm Heritage Foundation,Shivendra Singh Dungarpur.

User-friendlyBesides fi��lms, the archivewill also feature audiovisualmaterial of anthropologicalvalue, like a set of pictures ofindigenous people taken byWelsh Calvinist missionariesfrom late-19th and ear-ly-20th centuries from theNational Library of Wales atAberystwyth. There is also a1919 documentary on tea,and Headhunters, a BBCdocumentary on the Nagas.

“It won’t just be a reposi-tory but [a] properly cata-logued [archive] for easy ac-cess,” said Mr. Bhartiya, anative of Bihar who grew up,married and settled in Shil-long. “Users can interactwith the images and off��ermultiple levels of informa-tion.”

Mr. Majaw concurred,“It’s not just about collectingmaterial and putting it un-der lock and key.” An inte-ractive space has been con-ceptualised for the users.“They can have their own vi-sion, and create their ownnarratives and playlists fromthe material available,” headded.

In preparation for the for-mal start of the archive, anortheast India ArchiveSummit will be held in Shil-long on July 19 and 20.

Soon, fi��rst of its kind audiovisual archive on the northeastShillong will house the non-commercial venture, where users can access cinema, documentaries and anthropological material from October

Welsh missionaries being transported from the Bangladeshplains to Khasi hills by human porters. * SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

Namrata JoshiMumbai