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Remembering an American
A few days after I bumped into Theodore Baskaran, I caught up with, in a curious coincidence, more American interest in Indian cinema.
It was at the inauguration of the Erik Barnouw Public Broadcasting Trust, dedicated to "the healthy growth of television in India by kindling ethical values in the professionals of the new media and persuading them to play a more responsible role for the public good." I wonder to how many from that media, who were present in force to focus on the Minister of Information and Broadcasting, Sushma Swaraj, the late Erik Barnouw meant anything.
At the inauguration, however, they would have caught up with the fact that the Trust, initiated by documentary and television film-maker S. Krishnaswamy (of the Indus Valley to Indira Gandhi panegyric), was in memory of his guru at the Columbia University, New York. And they would have learnt that when a Fulbright Scholarship came Barnouw's way, Krishnaswamy persuaded him to take a look at Indian cinema, the outcome of that year being their co-authoring Indian Film in 1963, one of the first books to look at the social implications of Indian cinema. Till Barnouw died a few months ago, aged 93, he and Krishnaswamy were in touch, updating their third edition.
Throughout his life, Barnouw was strongly committed to value-based public services broadcasting programmes.
It was against this background that he wrote his three-volume History of Broadcasting (in America) and came to be described as "the legendary media historian."
Despite the radio work he did and the films he made, he remained an outspoken critic of the broadcast medium, charging in a hard-hitting book, The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate, that advertisers had too much of an influence on broadcast content.
One programme neither sponsors nor Governments had any influence on was Hiroshima/Nagasaki, August 1945 which Barnouw made in 1969-70.
Appointed head of the Film and Broadcasting Division of the Library of Congress, he had found in its archives a wealth of Japanese newsreels documenting man's inhumanity to man inflicted by the bombs. Finding the documentation sealed from public view by the U.S. Army — presumably for being too horrific — he fought for their release and succeeded in the 1960s. Whereupon he made his best-known film with the material and had audiences everywhere repeating, "Never again''.
That's the kind of broadcasting Barnouw wanted — and that's what the Foundation hopes to open the Indian airwaves to, even if it's just a small window.
S.MUTHIAH
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