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India’s pioneering film archivist and film scholar PK Nair, who won the epithet ‘celluloid man’ for his impeccable body of work as the founder of the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), has passed away. Indian film fraternity members mourned the demise of the “beloved son of cinema”.

Born in 1933 in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, Nair’s interest in films began with 1940s Tamil mythological dramas such as Ananthasayanam and Bhakta Prahlada. His stint with the NFAI started in 1965 as assistant curator; 17 years later, in 1982, he became the director.

Paramesh Krishnan Nair, better known as PK Nair, joined the Film and Television Institute in Pune as a Research Assistant in 1961. Celluloid Man is a 2012 documentary film directed by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur that explores the life and work of P. K. Nair, the guardian of Indian cinema.

Nair, the grand old man of film archiving in India, was not only responsible for the existence of exhaustive archives in India, his contribution in preserving exquisite films such as Raja Harishchandra (1913), Achhut Kanya (1936) and Uday Shankar’s Kalpana (1948) is significant. Nair had collected over 12,000 films, of which 4,000 were foreign language films.

Members of the film fraternity paid condolences, hailing Nair for his work in preserving the country’s rich cinematic history.