YOU can look at the 1935 volume of Baburao Patel’s Film India and call it a treasure trove of information. Or ogle at the centre-spread of a 1975 magazine that shows a guitar-strumming Feroz Khan surrounded by a bevy of bikini-clad beauties and call it preserving notoriety for posterity.

Either way, it takes nothing away from the invaluable collection of over 2,000 bound volumes of film magazines down the ages — each volume containing at least 10 issues — housed at Pune’s National Film Archives of India.

From the Miss Nurjehan on the cover of the oldest film magazine at the archive — a 1931 issue of The Cinema — to essays on films in Sound-A Typhoon of Journalism in the ’40s, to gossip on Dharam-Hema in Star&Style of the ’60s to Amitabh Bachchan declaring in the early ’70s ‘I am not marrying Jaya’, you have the entire film industry caught and canned forever.

“It’s the most authentic account of the evolution of contemporary Indian cinema. In fact I would say these journalistic writings were instrumental in altering the perception of cinema in society,’’ says K. Sasidharan, director, NFAI, who reveals that even the publishing houses may not have some of the earliest volumes of their magazines that are preserved at the archives. “Which is why whenever researchers need to know about film culture of a particular era, they come here to leaf through the volumes.”

Not hard to believe. When you see Simi Grewal from a picture in the ’70s sporting blue danglers, you know how Deepika Padukone’s costume designer got her look right for Om Shanti Om. Rajesh Khanna may not have SRK’s six packs but Khan’s checked coat and oversized bow fit perfectly on Khanna in a 1973 publication.

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