MUMBAI: When video recording first came to India in 1983, no one was recording Marathi musical plays and music sessions. There is photographical evidence of them, but not entire recordings. At that time, there were almost 150 such musical plays, but they had not been recorded. It was Shailesh Prabhavalkar who started video shooting as the producer, director and online editor, in 1983 when the professional video equipment arrived in India.
Prabhavalkar started shooting mainly programs of Marathi musical theatre and nomadic performing art.
Speaking to Radioandmusic.com, 57 year old Prabhavalkar said, “Since there were no recordings of Marathi musical theatre and tradition folk music in the early 80s, I immediately felt the need to start shooting at the earliest. There were musical plays and one-act plays that were running for as long as 10 years which were left unrecorded. I have recorded almost 50 of those plays using a multi-camera setup and in Standard Definition. Similarly, the Bachchyanmukh Samadhi, the nomadic tribal music has also escaped much attention, the only reason being that those music sessions viz., Shaheeri, Powade, Lavani, Vasudev and Chitragati had not been recorded. Since no one was recording it and archiving it, I took the rights to the content.” He claims to have spent five lakhs for a three hour shoot in the 1980s and so far has spent about eight to ten crore in total recording.
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Along with music sessions, Prabhavalkar has recorded interviews with legendary Marathi musicians like Chandra Shekhar Bhide, Sanjay Dhudkar, Medha Gogate, Prasad Shevde, Pralhad Adpadkar and many more.
Prabhavalkar recorded not only the first full length musical drama ‘Manapman’ which was shot on a multi-camera set up in 1983, but also produced and recorded the autobiographic literature work of the late V.V. Shirwadkar, Kusumgraj, a well known Dnyanpeeth award winner of 1988 on SD video format. It includes extracts from his plays, poems sung by himself and well known personalities from the stage and literature field. Prabhavalkar also wrote and produced ‘Rangashat Suvarnache’, a three hour long programme on the 150 year old history of Marathi musical plays.
At the moment Prabhavalkar holds the global rights to a library of approximately 600 hours of exclusive video programmes on Marathi musical theatre, folk Marathi music and performing arts. In 2003, Prabhavalkar received the Maharashtra Bhushan award for outstanding contribution for performing arts archival on video format. Prabhavalkar is currently in the process of digitising these musical archives which were originally recorded in Standard Definition into High Definition. In addition to digitising the old Marathi musical archives, he also aims to start a brand new Marathi News and Entertainment Satellite channel.
