Bollywood loves its past in the least demanding way possible. It remixes an old song, borrows a title, places a younger star in an older star’s silhouette and calls the result homage. Actual preservation—the patient, expensive work of rescuing negatives, repairing sound and reconstructing a film’s intended image—receives a fraction of the attention. That imbalance tells us something unflattering about an industry more interested in monetising memory than maintaining it.
The restoration of Shyam Benegal’s Manthan is the corrective I wish the industry would study. The Film Heritage Foundation’s account of the project explains how surviving film and sound elements were used, while its broader restoration programme makes the alarming point that scanning and digital clean-up are not substitutes for full preservation. This is not nostalgia for its own sake. It is cultural maintenance.
A film is not preserved because a clip survives
Streaming has created the illusion that everything is available forever. Search a title, find a compressed upload, and the problem appears solved. But a film can be online and still be effectively lost: wrong aspect ratio, damaged colour, missing frames, distorted sound or no reliable source element for future work. The abundance of copies masks the decay of originals. We have mistaken access to debris for preservation of the work.
Manthan is especially appropriate because its history challenges the mythology of cinema as a gift bestowed by glamorous families. Hundreds of thousands of dairy farmers helped finance it through small contributions. The film’s cooperative subject was mirrored by its production. At a moment when star vehicles are announced with family trees attached, the survival of a collectively backed film feels almost subversive.
Benegal’s work does not flatter audiences with easy heroes. It examines idealism, caste, power, resistance and the difficulty of creating institutions in a village where every reform rearranges someone’s authority. That complexity remains alive. A restoration allows viewers to encounter it as cinema rather than homework: faces, landscapes, sound and texture restored to expressive force. The classics endure not because professors command us to admire them, but because proper presentation lets them compete for attention.
The theatrical response to restored films should puncture the industry’s assumption that audiences care only for novelty. Viewers will attend older cinema when exhibition becomes an event and the print respects them. The problem is not that young Indians hate black-and-white or deliberate pacing. It is that distributors offer classics sporadically, market them apologetically and schedule them as though attendance were an eccentric favour.
Bollywood’s remake habit is creative laziness
Remakes are not inherently inferior. Cinema has always retold stories, and a new adaptation can discover another social context or visual language. What irritates me is the industrial remake: a recognisable title purchased to reduce marketing risk, then sanded into generic spectacle. The original’s memory becomes a sales asset while its craft is ignored. This is inheritance stripped for parts.
Nepotism compounds the problem. When access is concentrated among a small set of families, remakes become convenient launch platforms. Familiar intellectual property cushions unfamiliar talent, and publicity presents lineage as anticipation. Some star children are capable; surname alone neither proves nor disproves ability. But an industry repeatedly financing the well-connected while claiming it cannot afford restoration has revealed its priorities. Risk is tolerated lavishly when the beneficiary has the correct parents.
Preservation, by contrast, redistributes attention. It brings actors, technicians, regional traditions and filmmaking movements back into circulation without requiring contemporary celebrity endorsement. Restoring a Kannada, Malayalam, Manipuri, Odia or Hindi classic expands the canon beyond the version of “Indian cinema” produced by Mumbai publicity. It reminds audiences that our film history was always more diverse than the award-show montage.
This matters for current filmmakers. You cannot build an original cinema culture when creators know the past mainly through references recycled by other popular films. Restoration provides access to framing, editing, performance styles and political arguments in their proper form. Film schools need these works, but so do commercial directors. The cure for derivative cinema is not a seminar scolding audiences. It is making the breadth of cinema pleasurable and available.
The state and studios both have obligations
Private foundations cannot carry the entire archive. The government holds collections, institutions and regulatory power. It should fund climate-controlled storage, cataloguing, skilled conservation and transparent digitisation. Budgets must cover maintenance, not merely glamorous launches. An archive is not completed when a minister inaugurates a building. Film stock continues to deteriorate after the ribbon is cut.
Rights are another obstacle. Ownership histories can be tangled, especially when companies dissolved or estates divided. The state should create a practical legal route for preservation copies even when commercial rights remain disputed. Saving a negative does not require settling every future licensing question first. Waiting for perfect paperwork is an elegant way to lose the object under dispute.
Studios and producers should be required—or at minimum strongly incentivised—to deposit preservation materials with a qualified archive. They have benefited from public affection and, often, public infrastructure. Treating negatives as warehouse clutter until commercial reuse becomes attractive is irresponsible. Corporate anniversary videos are not film heritage policy.
Exhibitors also have a role. A regular restoration strand across major cinema chains could build an audience through predictable scheduling. One weekend each month, supported by thoughtful introductions and school or college partnerships, would do more than occasional celebrity premieres. Pricing should invite younger viewers rather than treating a classic as a luxury artefact. The goal is to return films to public life.
Preservation is not embalming
Some people hear “heritage” and imagine respectable boredom. I hear argument. Older films contain politics, prejudices, daring and contradictions. Restoring them does not require declaring every frame morally perfect. It allows viewers to confront how India saw itself at different moments. A culture confident enough to preserve uncomfortable work is healthier than one that edits the past into a brand campaign.
Restoration choices should therefore be broad. Famous films attract money, but obscurity can signal urgency rather than unimportance. Regional cinema, documentaries, experimental work, early women filmmakers and neglected popular genres all require attention. A canon formed solely by surviving box-office reputation will reproduce the power structures that caused other films to disappear.
Credits matter as well. Restored releases should identify cinematographers, editors, designers, sound workers and laboratory teams prominently. Bollywood’s star obsession has erased too many collaborators from public memory. Preservation can repair not only an image but the record of who made it. This is another reason I prefer restoration culture to remake culture: one expands authorship while the other often concentrates it.
Manthan survives because people treated it as more than content. Farmers believed cinema could represent social change; filmmakers believed form could hold political complexity; restorers believed damaged material deserved exacting labour. That chain of seriousness is moving. It also exposes the shallowness of an industry that spends crores recreating a song while the film containing the original may decay.
I do not want Bollywood to stop revisiting the past. I want it to revisit the past honestly. Restore before remixing. Screen before remaking. Teach audiences why a work mattered before converting its title into a franchise. The classics do not need worship, and they certainly do not need a star child posed beside them for relevance. They need cool storage, skilled hands, legal clarity and a projector.
If the industry cannot provide those things while congratulating itself on a century of cinematic glory, the glory is mostly branding. Manthan demonstrates another possibility: preservation as living public culture, capable of filling theatres and renewing debate. I would take one carefully restored film over ten algorithmically familiar remakes. The former gives us our history back. The latter usually gives us the trailer we already saw twenty years ago.
