I never met my Nana as he passed on in a few months after I was born. I don’t know if he had a chance to see me.

All I know and heard about Narayan Rao Kulkarni, my maternal grandfather was through my mother, her brothers. I have a very very vague memory of Kalanidhi Photo Studio itself. Soon it was gone and decadence began.

It seemed like an end of an era as grief and regret was highly palpable. None in the family could hold on to the extraordinary legacy he had left behind. It was a terrible fall from pinnacle and grace for Kalanidhi Studio as museum pieces started vanishing, the family which lived in the same premises had to move to a very small one room space.

Yet my younger uncle did manage to hold on to whatever he could. The siblings were estranged so we had no clue what he had been able to save. Narayan Rao Kulkarni was like the pivotal centripetal force and with him gone, it is but natural, things just flew apart.

It was thanks to the internet, I managed to connect to them after finding my cousin through LinkedIn. They had moved to Bangalore. It was during our first visit there that I actually saw what was left behind of the glorious legacy I had heard about. The collection was stunning with portraits of the stalwarts, studio assignments, heritage clicks and much more. It needed to be saved as it had documented an important socio-political cultural era between 1920s to 1970.

It took some more years before my uncle entrusted me with the responsibility of doing something about it as conditions of negatives and prints were deteriorating fast.

It took me another year to find courage to take a leap of faith to undertake this humongous archival work after interacting with many experts including Romila Thapar.

I have moved cities to be able to do this work. I often find myself standing at his place, being a maverick like him. He was a museum and art collector too so his works certainly deserve to be preserved, restored and digitised for posterity. His extraordinary work might help future historians, photographers and researchers.

Hence the endeavour to piece all together – his journeys, his works and his experiences. I want to know my Nana through this journey of archiving.