Decades of heat and humidity damaged only known copy of 1948 release, and film was close to being lost forever

It was a masterpiece of India's cinematic golden age, a surreal blend of comedy and dance that told the story of a struggling writer's attempt to break into the movies. But decades of tropical heat and humidity severely damaged the only known copy of Kalpana, and the film was close to being lost forever.

Now it has found an unlikely saviour: Martin Scorsese. The American director's World Cinema Foundation, set up to preserve classics of film history around the globe, plans to start restoring the neglected classic within months.

News that the director of Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas has thrown his weight behind the project provoked delight among south Asian film buffs.

Satish Kaushik, the respected Indian film actor and director, said: "I was really thrilled when Martin Scorsese told me he was interested in all these old Indian dance classics. It's really good news. It's a great opportunity for a new audience in India and elsewhere to see these wonderful works."

Another Indian director, Deepa Mehta, who sits on the board of the WCF, confirmed Scorsese's personal interest and said it was important that such films were not lost. "We have become so overcome by Bollywood that Indian classic films get left by the wayside," Mehta said.

Kalpana, a Hindi-language comedy-drama influenced by modernist trends in Europe, was directed by Uday Shankar, the elder brother of the famous Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar and a pioneer of Indian modern dance.

Released in 1948, the film starred Shankar and used dance, drama and dream sequences to tell the story of a writer pitching a movie to a film producer.

Martin Scorsese at the 67th annual Golden Globe awards. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

"It is a cutting edge film, very forward looking," said film critic and author Anupama Chopra. "It got so badly damaged that most of it was destroyed and they are trying to re-create it before it is totally lost so it can be shown to new audiences."

Despite recent efforts, India risks losing much of its cinematic heritage as original celluloid deteriorates. When Chopra was researching a book on the seminal 1975 Bollywood mega-hit Sholay, she found only one copy of the original screenplay and no trace of the costumes or the original recordings of the songs.

"Until very recently the Hindi film industry has never had any culture of preservation," she said.

Films that have been entirely lost include India's first talkie, Alam Ara (The Light of The World), made in 1931. Contemporary film-makers have also suffered. Mrinal Sen, a leading Indian director, was reported to have declined an offer from the Cannes film festival to hold a retrospective because he had no good quality prints of his major works.

Partial prints of what is left of the original of Kalpana have been duplicated by the National Film Archives of India (NFAI) and are now stored in temperature-controlled vaults in a purpose-built facility near the city of Pune, but Scorsese's foundation hopes to reconstitute the film in its original version for general release.

"Digitalisation and restoration is required," said Vijay Jadav, director of the NFAI. "With anything more than 50 years old, it's a real problem. They have not been looked after and once the film starts deteriorating and the chemical reactions are under way it is very difficult to stop."

The decade after India's independence in 1947 was of huge importance for Indian cinema, he said. "There was enormous growth and huge technical, cinematographic and narrative innovation. Kalpana is absolutely unique."

More than 2,500 titles have been stocked in the Pune facility since it was opened two years ago. They include the first Indian feature film, Raja Harishchandra, directed by Dadasaheb Phalke and released in 1913, and two minutes of a panorama of the city of Calcutta shot in 1896.