Barua's Devdas, first of the five versions, in NFAI kitty

PUNE: The National Film Archive of India (NFAI) has received a DVD copy of P C Barua's Devdas, the first talkie adaptation of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's celebrated novel made in 1935 in Bengali. No print of the film is available in the country.
A New Theatres production, the film's only available original negative is deposited with the Bangladesh film archive in Dhaka, which is said to be in a poor condition.All the prints available in India were destroyed in a fire at the studios in Kolkata, decades ago.
A three-member delegation of Bangladesh high commission, led by Martuza Ahmed, secretary of Bangladesh's ministry of information and broadcasting, presented the DVD to NFAI director Prakash Magdum on Monday.
"I learned about the film from historian Amrit Gangar when I took charge of NFAI in February. I got in touch with the director of the Bangladesh film archive and requested him. After efforts and a follow- up, we have received a DVD copy. We have requested them for a duplicate negative too," Magdum said.
There are five versions of Devdas with the archive. "After the Bengali film, Barua remade it in Hindi and Assamese. Other versions are Bimal Roy's Hindi film where Dilip Kumar played the lead, Telugu film made in 1953 where Akkineni Nageshwar Rao played the lead, Sanjay Leela Bhansali's film and Anurag Kashyap's modern take DevD. Barua's film was the missing link," he added.
The film, which is an hour and a 33 minutes-long, starred Barua himself as Devdas, Jamuna Barua, Barua's wife, as Parvati (Paro) and Chandrabati Devi as Chandramukhi. The film has been made in multiple languages including Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Telugu, Tamil, Urdu, Malayalam. Singer-actor K L Saigal played the lead in the Hindi version of Barua's film.
Magdum said P K Nair, founder-director of NFAI, had traced the film in 1970s but could not get the film to NFAI then. "In 2002, the film was borrowed from Bangladesh to be screened at a film festival in Delhi through a diplomatic bag. We plan to increase our outreach and acquire more such films. We want to digitize and restore 1,000 feature-length films and short films now," he said.