Carrying on with its yeoman service of preserving memorabilia from the ‘Golden Age’ of Indian cinema, the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) has now acquired the personal collection of noted yesteryear actor-director Jaishankar Danve.
A celebrated thespian of the Marathi stage and screen who also worked in Hindi cinema, Danve, who was born in Pune in 1910, was especially memorable in villainous and anti-heroic roles. He was also noted for his skilled stage direction in his illustrious career of more than five decades until his death in 1986. He started out as a stage artiste in Marathi and Urdu theatre, apprenticing with the legendary Bhalji Pendharkar — a cousin of the great V. Shantaram.
The Danve family handed over the collection to NFAI director Prakash Magdum in Kolhapur. Mr. Magdum said, “The priceless collection includes handwritten literary work by Jaishankar Danve, which comprises 14 novels, eight plays and five stories. Besides, we have received around 40 vintage black-and-white photos encased in frames from Danve’s films. These rare photos showcase his versatile body of work on stage and screen, while another album has 250 photos featuring clicks from his films and plays and 51 rare photos of other contemporary actors. In addition to this, there are three albums containing booklets, newspaper clippings, articles, rare handbills, and other publicity material from the 1930s.”
The jewel in this treasure trove is a collection of wigs used by the thespian and a moustache that Danve donned in his 1933 stage adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . Even more fascinating is the fact that Danve starred in this adaptation, which was an Urdu rendition of Hamlet titled ‘ Khune-Naahak ’.
“Danve steadily worked his way up, eventually becoming an assistant director to Pendharkar in the Kolhapur-based Jayprabha Studios in the 1930s. At the time, Kolhapur was a wellspring of creativity and home to several giants of Marathi literature as well as the stage and the screen,” Mr. Magdum said.
Remarking on Danve’s tryst with the Urdu stage, Mr. Magdum said the thespian made his film debut in an Urdu-language film titled Asire Havis in 1935. “He played important parts in Hindi and Urdu cinema during the 30s and 40s in films like Sach Hai (1939), and shared screen space with the legendary father-son duo of Prithviraj Kapoor and Raj Kapoor in Valmiki (1946),” Mr. Magdum said.
Danve, who later made his name as an outstanding character actor, had a prodigious output in cinema and theatre, working in 67 films and 134 plays alongside some of the giants in early Indian cinema. Among his most memorable films are the cinematic version of Baburao Painter’s unforgettable Savkari Pash in 1936, considered one of Marathi cinema’s classics of ‘social realism’.
Painter, another beloved son of Kolhapur, had broken ground with the silent film version of Savkari Pash in 1925, which dealt with the evils of money lending and was an atypical film to audiences fed on mythological and historical epics.
Other famous films in which Danve starred include Pendharkar’s celebrated features like Sasurvas (1946), Meeth Bhakar (1949), Mohityanchi Manjula (1963) and Maratha Tituka Melavava (1964) — which focused on social and political life during Chhatrapati Shivaji’s boyhood in the 1640s. He was also the main antagonist in Dada Konkde’s Andhala Marto Dola (1973).
“It is significant that the Danve family preserved these memories through all these years and I thank them for their kind gesture of donating this collection to the NFAI. This takes us back to the ‘Golden Era’ of Marathi cinema and theatre and will be of great use to film researchers,” Mr. Magdum said.
