Creative Archives: Producing, Preserving and Showcasing Transnational India Film Heritage

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Hindi films and the experiences of watching them are an inextricable aspect of the South Asian diaspora in the UK. Literature on the cinema-going experience of South Asian diasporic communities in the UK highlights the crucial role that film screenings, specialised cinemas and other sites of cultural aggregation had in community building. Within this broad context, the earlier Multilingual Euro-Bollywood project placed the UK and the English language as liminal creative spaces for Indian cinema to be distributed organically across Europe and reach broader audiences.From the project, it emerged that the UK is still (certainly linguistically) a "stop over" for the cultural transfer and distribution of Indian cinema to other European countries. In this light, this project centres around the recently acquired Cinema Museum London's Indian cinemas collection currently held at DMU. The unique publicity material in this collection dates from the 1948, year immediately post-independence, and is a tangible and untold testimony of the global success and economic growth of Indian creative industries in the UK. The strategic loan of the collection by the Cinema Museum London to DMU is due to the presence of a large South Asian demographic in the Midlands, and the possibility of developing a regional hub for the preservation and public engagement with Indian film heritage in the UK.Thus, "Creative Archives", will use the DMU Indian cinema collection and digital storytelling to involve the community to engage, beyond the mere experience of film viewing, with other multilingual mediatic experiences that constitute Indian film culture. By engaging with the publicity material held in the collection, "Creative Archives" will showcase Indian film heritage through a variety of on-line and off-line activities to re-memorialize identities, values and commemorate the 75th anniversary of Indian independence. Preserving this heritage is important to enable the engagement of the present generation with their past. The diasporic Indian nation is evoked not just through the production aspects of films' artistic materials (how they foreground a narrative moment of the national Hindi cinema), but also in the affective values triggered by the consumption of the film ephemera during the planned community engagement activities; these artefacts are central for embodying social moments where the notion of 'India', and 'national culture' are preserved, transferred or articulated in the UK.