‘He made films, he made filmmakers.’ How did Jagat Murari do it?

Some years after Jagat Murari died in 2007, his family started sorting out his personal effects at his home in Pune. There were cupboards and trunks stuffed with diaries, documents, reports, scripts and letters – collected over a lifetime of not just making documentaries but also working at such government organisations as the Film and Television Institute of India, the National Film Archive of India and the Directorate of Film Festivals.

Jagat Murari, who had been born in 1924, was a vital part of official Indian cinema policy. Trained as a physicist, with a second masters in cinema from the University of Southern California, Murari joined the Films Division in 1948, making several award-winning documentaries. Between 1961 and 1971, Murari was the principal of the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune.

Murari took over the year the FTII enrolled its first batch of students, “when it was a shaky start-up”, and “built it into a highly coveted film school, a magical place”, his daughter Radha Chadha writes in The Maker of Filmmakers – How Jagat Murari and FTII Changed Indian Cinema Forever (Penguin Random House).

“His alumni became the most significant actors, directors, producers, cinematographers, sound designers and editors of Bollywood and beyond,” Chadha adds. “They spearheaded the Indian New Wave cinema. They kick started regional language cinema. They helped usher television into the country. It was a hell of a story to tell. Yet he never did.”

Murari was also instrumental in setting up the National Film Archive of India and later, the Directorate of Film Festivals, Chadha writes. From making films to preserving them, shepherding students to overseeing the exhibition of their works at film festivals in India and abroad, Murari was for years at the fulcrum of the government’s involvement with cinema.

Chadha’s rigorously researched and engagingly written book is a biography as well as a history – a chronicle of how a recently independent country imagined cinema to be, and how people like Murari put a personal stamp on this vision. The Maker of Filmmakers focuses on the FTII years, recounting Murari’s efforts to shape up the curriculum based on his experiences and the far-reaching impact of his decision to invite established filmmakers as guest lecturers to make up for a shortfall in teaching staff.

“I could not tell his story without that of the Institute,” Chadha writes. “He made the Institute. The Institute made him. The dominant strain of that DNA – both Jagat’s and the Institute’s – was audacity.”

Chadha also recalls many obstacles faced by Murari, such as budget constraints, bureaucratic intransigence and student-led strikes. Murari’s bruising encounters with politicking didn’t just affect his wellbeing but also damaged the institute’s health, Chadha writes.

The Maker of Filmmakers is essential reading for anybody who wants to understand how the FTII built its reputation. Murari’s journey is emblematic of the hopes and disappointments of cosmopolitan Indians who sought a career in public service during the Nehruvian period.

Chadha has worked in advertising and brand consulting. She authored The Cult of The Luxury Brand: Inside Asia’s Love Affair with Luxury and has also been a columnist. In an interview, Chadha discusses the importance of Jagat Murari, her writing process, and the reason she regards her father as a “serial start-up person”. Here are edited excerpts.

How did The Maker of Filmmakers come about?

As a child, I knew my father had a lot of papers. When I started going through them, I realised that they were special, very precious.

He had these old Godrej cupboards, which were packed with stuff. He had trunks of material. He had kept his preparatory notes for the classes he took in direction at FTII. He had recorded many meetings as well. There was also correspondence.

He had started sorting out his papers. He meant to write his autobiography, and he had begun putting his thoughts together, but I guess he left it too late.

As a writer, I was delighted and overwhelmed. It was like a treasure chest. There were crumbs lying around for me to pick up.

The book isn’t just a biography – it’s also about the organisations that Jagat Murari was a part of.

Jagat Murari’s life was multi-pronged. He interacted with almost every film organisation that was part of the Nehruvian structure at the time. I followed his life story and wrote it pretty much in a linear way.

One part of me was that I am his daughter, and I would like to do the book. A larger part of me was, I am holding a part of India’s cinematic history in my hands. There have been a couple of books about FTII, but they are mainly reminiscences by ex-students. There is no overall book on the FTII.

There was also more to it. He was part of Films Division. He started the National Film Archive, the Directorate of Film Festivals. He was lucky to have been there when the government was building up these organisations. This story had to be told.

As soon as I had a sense of the papers, I started interviewing some of the people who were in their nineties. I felt that whether or not I wrote the book, I should do that immediately.

This was in 2013. I came in and out of the interviews, since I had my own work to do. It was only during Covid [in 2020] that I started writing the book.

You enrolled in the Biographers International Organization to write the book. Why was that?

I used to write a column, but this was new for me. I had to learn how to do it. I also had to learn to write about cinema.

An Iranian princess, Sattareh Farman Farmaian, had studied with my father in California. She married another Indian cinema student. She wrote her autobiography [Daughter Of Persia: A Woman’s Journey From Her Father’s Harem Through the Islamic Revolution] with a woman named Dona Munker. Although she doesn’t mention my father, I knew she had tonnes of material.

Dona Munker told me about Biographers International Organization. She took me under her wing. She said, whatever you do, put Orson Welles in the first sentence.

The organisation helped me figure out the thread, the central thesis of this whole mess of a life that spanned 80 years. They gave me guides to follow and reading lists. I thought I needed an education to become a biographer.

The book is rigorously researched, with citations provided for key events. You conducted over a hundred interviews. You also sought out some of the FTII students who went on strike. You are generous in your dealing with them, even though the strikes damaged your father’s professional reputation.

I pick on your word generous – whether the ex-students said good things or bad things about my father, they were generous in their gift of time to me. They needn’t have spoken to me at all.

Many of these interviews were rambling because I had to prod memories that were from decades ago. Sometimes, people spent three hours with me. That is a gift. They needn’t have done that, and I grateful for that part.

I also got the sense that the students were very young, they were in the late teens. They could have been easily led at that stage. They may not have been able to see all that going on behind the scenes. It wasn’t visible to them, and it’s taken a lot of digging to make it visible to me.

One of the things I learnt from my father is that he loved debate. He loved conflicting views. He thought they were the basis of creativity. Without multiple viewpoints and disagreements, creativity would be very bland.

One of the issues with Indian cinema as he saw it was that it was very formula-led. How do you make people who are different from that? If you ask a class of 12 direction students to each one be authentic, you are going to have clashing views. There is no other way – which, in his book, was a good thing.

I don’t think he saw divergent views as a bad thing. But there a lot of other stuff that went on which crossed the moral lines.

There are also revelations about Ritwik Ghatak’s stint at FTII, which is still talked about, or Murari’s involvement in setting up the National Film Archive of India in 1964, which is attributed to PK Nair. Did you intend to set the record straight on certain matters?

I did. Certain myths have solidified to such an extent that I think my book can just make a little dent.

For instance, I was told that Ritwik Ghatak had been at the institute for seven-eight years as the vice-principal. That wasn’t the case. He was there for only five months, but he had been in and out of the institute previously as a guest lecturer. Perhaps his larger-than-life impact created this forever kind of feeling.

Similarly, Jagat Murari built up the archive, but there is no record of that. I really dug into the research for the archive chapter, as well as on the chapter on Ghatak. It’s not me saying so, it’s the papers. Other stuff like the Directorate of Film Festivals is not contested, whereas the other things were.

Readers might reasonably respond that this is what is expected from the book – after all, Jagat Murari is your father.

A reaction will mean that people have read the book.

I have taken a long-term view, which is – if I don’t set the record straight, then who will? It may be contested again today, it may be discussed and debated. I think that's great. It’s typical of what Jagat Murari would have wanted.

Most of the information is there in public records, for whoever wants to make the effort. I thought if I support my assertions well with research that is in the public domain, I have a fair chance of being heard.

Another insight is just how difficult it was to build organisations from scratch, with severely limited resources.

Absolutely. Compared to the casualness with which I can now pick up my phone and watch a film, at that time, you had to somehow get that film into the country from wherever. It was a lot of hard work, but they seemed to do it all without email or that many phone calls.

For my father, the Nehruvian structure was about nation building. It was a deeply felt motivation for him and many of his colleagues – the feeling that I am doing something for the country was strong and deeply felt.

When you subscribe to an overarching motivation, it gives you greater strength and the ability to work harder because you are creating for such a big canvas.

Did your impressions of FTII change over the course of writing the book?

I had previously never thought about it. After writing the book, I realised how much has been done.

When my father was alive, it was mostly about knocking down barriers. It was all about innovation, being at the cutting edge of whatever could be mustered with limited budgets.

Today, it’s reality. The film institute has made its mark in field after field after field. Even if you start just with commercial cinema, every change that has happened has FTII people involved somewhere or the other.

As one of my interviewees told me, there is no film set without an FTII graduate on it. The institute’s mark on art cinema remained and remains until today, and perhaps needs to be amplified even more, if anything.

How did your views on your father’s achievements evolve?

Jagat Murari was creating what we now know as start-ups. He was like an entrepreneur within the bureaucracy. He would be called a serial start-up person today.

I had actually thought of the biography as a management book – part of it was to see if it was a case study that could be taught. Some of the students told me about the tensions between Ghatak and Jagat Murari. He is the manager. He has hired Ghatak. It’s his job to manage him. Whether he is doing it well or not, that is what he is going to be judged by.

He made films, he made filmmakers. He was a leader of organisations. That’s something we recognise today in the private sector. He was creating from nothing because there wasn’t anything to emulate in the Indian context. He referred to the best practices in the French and Soviet film schools.

Cinema is a cumulative affair. Ultimately, the system has to work, but it requires a human being, a visionary or charismatic leader. It is about leadership.