In a humble apartment in Habsiguda, in a little corner that looks out to the balcony, you will find National Award winner Pasupuleti Purnachandra Rao, surrounded by hundreds of books.
He says with a chuckle, “This is my little world.” Next to him in a bright red box, is the shining Swarna Kamal, an accolade that he won for his book Silent Cinema, which was recognised as the Best Book on Cinema at the 62nd National Film Awards.
The first Telanganite to have won the Swarna Kamal, Purnachandra’s book talks about the early days of cinema, before the talkies. Spanning 35 years, from 1895 to 1930, Silent Cinema, a Telugu book, is a scholarly approach to cinema, one that involved a lot of research but more importantly, Purnachandra’s love for cinema.
Speaking about how his tryst with cinema started, he says, “Right from my early days, I have been in love with films, and it’s not just regional films but the international ones. The book covers the works of Lumiere brothers to the beginning of the talkies era.”
The FTII graduate in Film Appreciation, who has also been a theatre activist, realised very late that he could actually chronicle the bygone era of silent cinema. “When I joined FTII, I would spend my days borrowing films from the National Film Archive, Pune. Later, when digitised films in CDs arrived, I was baffled with how easily they were available. Then I started buying CDs. Today, I own thousands of film CDs. That’s when I thought, if I have read up so much about international films why not pen it down in my mother tongue for the film directors and young film enthusiasts here to know more about cinema?”
Currently, he is working on a compilation of English plays that will hopefully be sent to the Oxford University for publication. Many film directors and Tollywood personalities like Dasari Narayana Rao have read his book and appreciated it. And yet, when you ask him when will the next part of his book, covering the later years of cinema, come out, Purnachandra says with a sigh, “I won’t be writing the next part. It’s mainly because of the publishers here.
They are the reason why Telugu literature is dying. I wasn’t told about the number of copies of my book that was published; and at a meager 10 per cent per book, I was told all 1,000 copies were sold out and was sent a cheque of Rs 27,000. But if you check now, the books are still available. So clearly, the numbers are wrong.” He adds to say, “I’m an old man (he is 67). And it doesn’t matter if I publish more books or not. But this is a problem that many young writers will face.”
