The colourised version of Naya Daur hit the screen on August 3, 12 days short of 50 years since its significantly timed release on August 15, 1957 - the tenth anniversary of Indian Independence. This was Ravi Chopra’s gift to his father, B R Chopra, who produced and directed the original blockbuster.

“My father wasn’t keen to colourise it at all,” admits Ravi. “But after we completed it, he was so thrilled at the result that he told me, “Toone to meri picture nayi kar di!” He started telling everybody about it. We held a show for the artistes and Dilip (Kumar) uncle insisted that it should be timed so that he could have dinner by 9.30 p.m and leave, but they got so engrossed that they stayed chatting till almost two in the morning!”

The colourising was done by the Florida-based Westwings, who set up a unit especially for them in Goa. “Prasad Labs did the restoration,” explains Ravi.  “Luckily, BR Films has had a tradition of maintaining its master negatives well - we have a department that looks exclusively into this. Westwings showed me a sample of the colourising from a DVD. There were shortcomings that they assured me would disappear once I gave them the master-negative to work from. And they have done it.”

As with all old films, the soundtrack (dialogues, songs and background music) was in the centre of the negative film, and to convert into Dolby Digital the sound and music had also to be split into left and right and matched precisely with the centre-track. Ravi took the help of Aadesh Shrivastava to redo the music in stereophonic sound in synch without removing or changing any of the old music by O P Nayyar.

The obvious question - why Naya Daur among the many films of his father?

Says Ravi candidly, “One reason is that it is my personal favourite from dad’s films - I will be doing Gumrah, Sadhana and Kanoon now in that order. The more important one was the fact that it was an outdoors film that lent itself more to natural tones when we colourise. The original photography by M N Malhotra was brilliant. And finally, I always thought that dad would have made the film even then in colour if he could have afforded it. But budgets for colour films were truly steep then, and it was only BR Films’ second production. So even if Ek Hi Raasta had been a hit, it would have been too big a step.”

About the box-office prospects of Naya Daur today, Ravi feels that any young generation film buff who does watch the film is going to love it and recommend it.

The film told the story of Shanker (Dilip Kumar) who is a village tangewala, his ladylove Rajani (Vyjayantimala) and his estranged cousin brother Krishna (Ajit).

The fight was against Kundan (Jeevan) and his son, who intended to mint money by replacing the human labour in Shanker’s village with electric saws and cars.

Though seemingly a film against progress, Akhtar Mirza’s story highlighted how the era of machines has dehumanised our approach towards human beings. Stepping into the new age (Naya Daur) it asked us to remember that man will be the greatest machine ever made, and that humanity is ageless. Naya Daur remains among the crème-de-la-crème from Chopra’s message films that include BR Films’ first production Ek Hi Raasta, Sadhana, Dhool Ka Phool, Dharamputra, Gumrah, Insaf Ka Tarazu, Nikaah, Tawaif and Baghban in a 52-year innings. Like most masterpieces, Chopra’s film gathered the accolades in sacks even as its box-office collections spelt a naya high of great profits. It was the first-ever film to celebrate its Silver Jubilee at more than one theatre in Mumbai.

As sheer cinema, Naya Daur effortlessly scales into the commercial as well as qualitative Top Ten of everyone connected with it - from Chopra himself to artistes Dilip Kumar, Vyjayantimala, Ajit, Johnny Walker, Jeevan, Chand Usmani, Daisy Irani (then a moppet) and all the technicians including music director O P Nayyar and lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi.

Even in the present daur of space technology and Internet, it retains an evergreen charm that can only come from honest and impassioned filmmaking.