45 Years Exploring India! ‘I’ve Learned Many Things being in Mluru”- BBC TV Producer Adam Clapham
45 Years Exploring India! ‘I’ve Learned Many Things being in Mangaluru”- Director and British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) TV Producer Adam Clapham, during an interaction with Media Persons at Mangaluru Pres Club. Adam has been living in a Village near Katpadi-Udupi, on the banks of a river, close to the sea, which he calls it as “Nadigrama’, in a three bed-room tiled and artistic home, and he has written a book on this Village named “A Village in South India” which will be released on 28 January 2019 in UK. Illustrations in this book are done by Environmentalist Dinesh Holla, Mangaluru
Mangaluru: During an interaction with media persons at Mangaluru Press Club on Tuesday, 22 January 2019, Adam Clapham, who for twenty years had bee the Director and producer for BBC Television, briefed about his new Book “A Village in South India”, which will be released in UK on 28 January 2019. Acknowledging a few people responsible in writing this book, Adam said, “It is the people of “Nadigrama” village who deserve the credit for this book. It was they who opened their hearts to tell me how they live, work, celebrate, grieve, marry and die. I could not have recorded their stories without the patience and persistence on my assistant Naveen Crasta ( who was also present during the press meet, hailing from Mangaluru, and has been living with Adam in Nadigrama since 15 years ) who, unlike me, speaks all the local languages fluently and was therefore able to explain what the villagers really wanted me to know about them”.
“I must especially thank Ms Prema, who spent many hours between harvesting, milking and caring for her beloved cows ensuring that I really understood the joys and sorrows, the ins and outs, of a village life. My thanks are also to environmentalist Dinesh Holla from Mangaluru who had helped with illustrations in my book, and also to The Hindu newspaper for excerpts which I quote from several of its news stories. Apart from Nadigrama I have also spent time in Mangaluru, and there is lot to learn from this City. People are friendly, courteous and that’s the reason I am very reluctant to go back to my hometown. I love India and I love Nadigrama, a home away from my Home” added Adam Clapham.
About the Book “A VILLAGE IN SOUTH INDIA” it has a wonderful portrait of life led in a small rural village in India, named Nadigrama, a name kept by Adam. It will be an easy read travel book for tourists and first-time visitors to the country, and a documentary maker’s eye for detail and an insider’s knowledge of this vibrant and colourful world, Illustrated with drawings by acclaimed local artist and environmentalist, Dinesh Holla of Mangaluru. The cacophony of noise, the smells and the colours described in “A Village in South India” are brought vividly to life by this TV producer, and long time Indian village resident, Adam Clapham.
According to Adam, there are over six hundred thousand villages in India and a quarter of a million of them are home to fewer than five hundred people. Mostly it is an existence of back-breaking drudgery for pitiful financial reward. And yet it is a world full of vitality and joy, filled with the excitement of festivals such as Navaratri and Dasara, weddings, fireworks and fun. The everyday life in the village is far from easy, where the prices of life’s essentials rise far more quickly than the wages of most of the people who live there. Yet these villagers are out-going and cheerful, stoic about the few bad times and bursting with joy and laughter when all is well with the world.
This is also a world which survives on the money sent back from those of the community who have left it for the big cities or to jet across the seas to seek their fortunes in the Gulf. They will return to their villages for marriage and for the birth of their children, to mourn the deaths of their relatives and eventually, maybe, to die there themselves. Without these salaried young exiles sending money home the village communities would be in a far worse position. And it is this village community that is explored and detailed to bring alive the joys and sorrows of this extraordinary life.
Regarding, Adam Clapham he has settled down in the Udupi district of Karnataka, having spent more than four decades exploring India and producing documentary films about the country for the BBC and Channel Four. Adam was awarded an Imperial Relations Trust Bursary in 1971 to examine the role of broadcasting in the development of South Asia with a special focus on India. He made a major study of Film Division’s documentary policy and visited the SITE experiment, designed to provide television programmes to remote rural areas by satellite. After visiting radio stations in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Adam reported on the exploitation of propaganda in the political coverage of the Bangladesh war. His report also highlighted UNESCO’s concerns about the neglect of educational infrastructure and broadcasting communications in the predominantly remote rural areas of the country.
In 1972, Adam was appointed Executive Producer of BBC Television’s prestigious weekly documentary series, “Man Alive”. He commissioned two major documentaries on India for the series- “Bombay Superstar”-A profile of Rajesh Khanna 1973, and “Indian Summer”-The British who stayed on at ‘Ooty,’ the Nilgiris hill station. 1973. In 1980 Adam was awarded a Leverhulme fellowship to follow up the findings of his earlier bursary. Two years later the BBC appointed Adam Clapham as the supervising producer of its coverage of the Festival of India 1982 in London, to work directly with the festival’s director, Mrs Pupul Jayakar. Films by Satayjit Ray and Mrinal Sen were broadcast on British television for the first time and Adam specially commissioned a film on the pottery horses of Pudukkottai, Tamil Nadu: Indian crafts were a key element of the festival.
However, the main event in the BBC’s celebration of the 1982 Festival of India was a one-hour documentary produced by Adam entitled ‘From Our Delhi Correspondent’ in which Mark Tully reported from Gujarat on the huge strides India was making in both industrial and human development. Simultaneously, at the invitation of the government of India and with the assistance of the British Council, Mark and Adam toured the Indian cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata, screening many of the outstanding documentary films that the BBC had recently produced in India.
When Channel Four was launched in the UK, Adam left the BBC to set up his own independent company, Griffin Productions. These are the films he produced about India:- “The Village By The Sea”: A six-part dramatisation of Anita Desai’s novel for BBC Television and Bayerische Rundfunk (German television); Channel Four India Specials: Two current affairs documentary reports: “The Assassination of a Prime Minister 1984”; and “India’s new Prime Minister- Rajiv Gandhi’s first major interview as Prime Minister for Channel Four, 1985”.
Bombay Hotel – The Taj Mahal Hotel Mumbai. One-hour documentary for BBC Television. 1985; India’s Maharajas Newly discovered archive film from India’s royal palaces with reminiscences from former Indian princes and their families. Two major documentaries, written and reported by Charles Allen and co-produced with BBC Television. Also shown in the United States by National Geographic Television. “Shiva’s Disciples”- A 50-minute documentary, portraying the dance and drama of rural Kerala. Commissioned from Simon Kurien, a first-time Indian director. The film was narrated by Sir Richard Attenborough for BBC Television 1985. Kalakshetra, Devotion to Dance. A fifty minute World About Us, a special tribute to Rukmini Devi Arundale. In 2008, at the invitation of M.V. Kamath, Director of Manipal Institute of Communications, Adam gave a series of themed lectures on television production and direction.
Adam is the author of a non-fiction book which reflects his love of India, “Beware Falling Coconuts”. It was published by Rupa in 2007 at an inauguration in Mangaluru chaired by M.V. Kamath, the Director of Manipal Institute of Communications. He has also written “As Nature Intended”, published by Heinemann and “Blood on the Carpet”, his memoir about British broadcasting, was published by Quartet in 2011. Adam was recently commissioned by The Hindu to write a major profile of the writer and broadcaster Sir Mark Tully’s to celebrate his 80th birthday.
Adam has produced a number of television programmes and films including Doomsday Gun (1994) starring Frank Langella and Alan Arkin. Apart from awarded an Imperial Relations Trust bursary to study media in India and he was a recipient of Leverhulme scholarship for research in Sri Lanka. He has written “As Nature Intended” (with Robin Constable), an illustrated history of the nudists, and “Beware Falling Coconuts”. Adam, an indophile along the lines of Mark Tully, lives in a beach house near Udupi. He is the son of industrialist and former president of the Confederation of British Industry Sir Michael Clapham who died in 2002.
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