The NCPA is home to one of the finest collections of archival recordings of Indian and Western music, dance, soliloquies, plays and artiste interviews. A look back on the journey that started in 1970 and what it holds in store for the future.

By Aishwarya Bodke 

The sound of Vilayat Khan’s sitar and the earthy resonance of Allarakha’s tabla is sheltered lovingly in what was the first edifice at the NCPA on its sprawling campus at Nariman Point. Robust as ever, it is here that exclusive recordings of M.S. Subbulakshmi, Birju Maharaj and Gangubai Hangal reside. An unassuming set of rooms above the Little Theatre that one would ordinarily walk past, oblivious to the wealth of artistry on the other side of the door, they contain the NCPA’s preservation vaults. With rare archival recordings of Indian classical and folk music, dance, drama, film and photographic material, the vaults are a treasure trove for a future that is not robbed of the past.

Walk into the vaults and an immediate sense of a bygone world of cultural icons surrounds you. What first arrests your attention are the 16mm and 35mm film reels of The Apu Trilogy, which were given to the NCPA by Satyajit Ray. Next to them sits another work of Ray’s, Bala, an NCPA production and documentary on Bharatanatyam exponent T. Balasaraswati. With the historic audio recording of tabla maestro Ahmed Jan Thirakwa in 1970, the archival process at the NCPA commenced, paving the way for a series of recordings in the coming years. The vast library of musical greats includes Begum Akhtar, Bismillah Khan, Ali Akbar Khan, Girija Devi, Shobha Gurtu, T. N. Krishnan, Lalgudi Jayaraman and a host of other icons. Video recordings of stalwarts of dance, such as Kelucharan Mohapatra, Mrinalini Sarabhai and Sonal Mansingh are carefully stored as well. Videos of plays, interviews and workshops are also part of the archives as is the opera The Barber of Seville. In the collection is a staging of P.L. Deshpande’s Ek Zunj Varyashi and its 100th performance celebration in 1991, which also features speeches by Sharad Joshi. The series Meet the Artiste features Ravi Shankar interviewing Zakir Hussain.

Archiving was a priority of Dr. Jamshed Bhabha and the NCPA in order to preserve for posterity the finest performances and maintain the legacy of great masters. The reason we can listen to Grace Moore and Louis Armstrong today is because their music was preserved by someone. Many of the classics by Ray, Charlie Chaplin and Fritz Lang would have been lost forever had they not been recovered, restored and preserved. Considered one of the greatest films of all time, Lang’s Metropolis remained partially lost for 80 years until the missing scenes were found in the archive of a museum in Argentina in 2008.

Dr. Bhabha’s vision found fitting expertise in Dr. Narayan Menon, the NCPA’s first Executive Director. A musicologist and the former Director General of All India Radio, he steered the mission of archiving with great erudition and commitment. His pre-eminent knowledge of Indian music was crucial to how the recordings were carried out. When the Little Theatre was commissioned, it was acoustically designed as a sound recording studio for Indian music. This was done so that the artistes do not have to perform in a studio but can do so on the stage, often in the presence of a limited but all-important audience.

The Technical Head at the NCPA, Nayan Kale, recollects the days when he joined the organisation. Dr. Menon used to get the best performers to come down to the city. He would sit in on recordings too. He tells us, “Dr. Menon would ask them for a special performance, in contrast to what they played to people in concerts regularly. One which deserves to be preserved for posterity. They always obliged.”

The two preservation vaults are where all the alchemy is stored and looked after—one for audio and film and the other for photographic material. This meticulously designed repository has double walls for thermal insulation, lined with aluminium foil and painted with special paints to make the brick walls impervious to weather conditions. All this is necessary to ensure that they maintain the internationally recommended temperature between 21 and 23 degrees and relative humidity between 45 and 50 per cent.

The recordings were done on archival magnetic tapes. This was the analogue age when spool tape recorders were in use. The videos were in U-Matic form, which is an analogue recording video cassette format. This fine quality of recording material ensured that even the ever-so-slight harkat was duly captured.

As the world adapted to the dawn of the digital era, the NCPA began the cumbersome process of transferring audio and video recordings into alternative media like hard disk, DVD and CD. An agonising element of this process is that the transfer has to be in real time. If the taped material is two hours long, it will take two hours to transfer. D.B. Biswas, then Joint Executive Director who also designed the preservation vaults, led the project with great attention and care.

Kale shares an interesting story. The NCPA’s Nagra tape recorders had stopped working and could not be repaired anywhere in India. That is when the Nagra Company came to the rescue, “The NCPA has been one of our best customers,” they said. They manufactured two tape recorders, especially for the NCPA, years after they had been discontinued. These are the very last Nagra recorders ever produced.

These archives are not just a window to the past but also a manual for the future. It is of utmost importance that they are overseen and catalogued regularly. A computerised database is also maintained for cross reference queries. The arduous responsibility, one that never ends as performances, masterclasses and workshops continue to be recorded and archived, is shouldered by Suresh Dhebe, under the supervision of Kale. With a beaming smile, Dhebe will manoeuvre through the archives for you. Having tended to them for decades, he will avidly mention dates of performances without a glance at the database. While Dhebe manages the digitisation process, the records also need constant updating and a meticulous system of indexing. The extensive library of recordings through the decades has been thoroughly catalogued by Virendra Singh, Executive – Information Technology, NCPA.

Apart from the recordings done on campus, the NCPA also acquired a mobile recording van equipped with air-conditioning and portable tape recorders. The late ethnomusicologist and folklorist Komal Kothari arranged folk music performances in rural areas of Rajasthan. The van also travelled through the rural hinterland of Gujarat and Maharashtra. This was done so that folk music could be documented in all its glory at its place of origin instead of a studio environment.

Another goal of the NCPA’s archival programme was to clean, restore and preserve music available on 78rpm gramophone discs, audio cassettes and spools. Private collectors and connoisseurs would offer their collections of rare music to the organisation. The NCPA was able to restore—to a reasonable level—the music of the masters who were unable to record for the archives, including Bal Gandharva, Allauddin Khan, Pannalal Ghosh and many others.

The raison d’être of the NCPA’s archival efforts is altruistic dissemination. Making these musical gems accessible for everyone, especially the generations to come, could not have been compromised.

The story goes that years after the demise of Thirakwa, his family reached out to the NCPA in the midst of a financial emergency. His exquisite tabla solos were accompanied by interviews with Nikhil Ghosh about his gharana. The family requested for this archival recording to be made public on a commercial basis, which would then reap royalties. The NCPA had to politely decline because the purpose of the archives, as promised to the artistes, was preservation and education. Although support was extended to the family, the recording remained in the archives. It is believed that when Vilayat Khan— initially weary of participating—heard of this, he was convinced of the noble intentions behind the initiative and agreed to record his music.

The question of mercenary gains was addressed when the NCPA tied up with Sony Music Entertainment in 2011 to release in the public arena a part of the archives—the first set of 15 original recordings titled Masterworks from the NCPA Archives. The unique compositions were made available in physical formats such as CDs and LPs and also for download and streaming. The royalties from the sale were promised to be ploughed back into the preservation and archiving work. Rephrasing JRD Tata’s words, Chairman Khushroo N. Suntook had said, “What comes from music must go back into music many times over.”

It is with this objective that the NCPA continues its archival endeavours. To augment the dissemination of the treasures of the archives, the Indian Music department introduced guided listening sessions in the form of Nad Ninad: From the Archives. Open to all and free of charge, the most recent of these saw an eight-part series on the artistry of Vilayat Khan. They covered contributions of his forefathers, his role in the development of gayaki ang on the sitar, his reminiscences with actual demonstrations of several ragas including Raga Bihag, Sanjh Saravali and his compositions in Raga Bhairavi, among others. These sessions have also been painstakingly taken to Jaipur and Nashik for further dissemination.

The archives have been welcoming students, artistes, foreign visitors, critics and academics for years. One can easily access the NCPA archives by following a simple procedure. The catalogues can be browsed by visiting the NCPA Library or clicking on the link mentioned at the end. After filling out a brief form,  a suitable appointment is scheduled, subject to the availability of the studio.

With the advancement in technology and dramatic changes in the means to access music today, the role of archives also undergoes changes. The NCPA’s archival efforts continue even today with comprehensive documentation of the artistes performing here. The colossal storehouse of Indian classical music documentation includes the annual festivals Aadi Anant, Bandish, Sama’a: The Mystic Ecstasy, a festival of Sufi music, and the Guru in Residence sessions with Hindustani music exponent Ajoy Chakrabarty. The diverse collection also features Naseeruddin Shah’s Manto, Ismat … Haazir Hain (2019), Puccini’s opera Tosca (2010) and a host of Parsi plays.

It is important for this treasure to reach more people to truly realise its purpose. The archive is not an end in itself, but an extension of our continued cultural expression.

The full catalogue of NCPA archives can be accessed online now. Please visit: https://www.ncpamumbai.com/ncpa-music-library . To visit the NCPA to access the archives, please fill the form below or call 66223737 for assistance. An online form is also available on the link mentioned above.

This article was originally published in the June 2025 issue of ON Stage.