In December 2018 I was interviewed for a television series about Indian documentary film of the pre-independence era. The reason
why a popular music scholar was posing as a film historian was because my first academic job was as a researcher
on the AHRC-funded project Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire, which involved me viewing, cataloguing and analysing film collections held by the BFI and the Imperial War
Museum.
The
resultant two-part television series, India
on Film, was recently broadcast by Channel News Asia, who have made the
programmes available via this link. They do an excellent job of bringing the
early documentaries to life, and I am rightfully outshone by scholars who have
spent their working lives studying India and/or film.
