The year 2019 will mark 50 years of the passing away of Ardeshir Irani (pictured), the maker of India’s first talkie film Alam Ara (1931) (poster pictured) (see "Underexposed filmmaker,” Parsiana, May 7, 2018). In conversation with Parsiana, noted film critic Rafique Baghdadi narrated the excitement that the film generated when released eight decades ago. He shared a copy of an article titled "When Indian cinema talked,” he wrote in a souvenir brought out during an International Film Festival in Bombay in the 1980s.
The first distributors of the film, Select Pictures Circuit of Bangalore, had to purchase new portable......