FTII: Glory, ruin and recovery

This book traces the first two decades of a unique Indian institution — a government-funded school for training young Indians (and some foreigners) in the art and craft of cinema.

- TALMIZ AHMAD

This story of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) is told here through the biography of its second principal, Jagat Murari, who, in its first decade, took the institution to its greatest heights.

The author, Radha Chadha, is Murari’s daughter. She has shaped her narrative by using a treasure trove of journals, official papers, news reports and photographs that Murari left behind in three packed cupboards. She has given life to these documents by interviewing more than a hundred people over the last 10 years — students, teachers, officials, journalists — who have given firsthand accounts of their life at the institute.

After over a decade as a documentary filmmaker, Murari came to the institute in 1961 and became its head a year later. This was in every sense a pioneering venture — no such institute existed in India and those working in the film industry usually had no formal training. Ms Chadha describes her father as “an idealistic man consumed by a passion to create the school of his dreams” as he painstakingly developed the syllabus, appointed faculty, and acquired expensive facilities for the diverse courses.

The students who joined in this early period had hardly any knowledge of cinema. Murari’s instruction to his students was simple; they had “to think in original terms and give full expression to their individual personalities” and develop their own “directorial style”.

The students enthusiastically devoured films such as