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Disquiet in the land
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Amar Kanwar's films, A Season Outside and The Night of Prophecy, which were screened at the Earth Summit, South Africa, and at the International Art Festival, Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany, are unambiguous in their perception that all is not well with the nation.
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Amar Kawar: `There are too many reasons to be violent.' — Photo: V. Sreenivasa Murthy
THE NATION today is doing two things to meet one objective: galvanising itself against Pakistan over Kashmir and suppressing the many resistances within its geography — to secure itself as a unified political and cultural entity. Amar Kanwar's documentaries, A Season Outside and The Night of Prophecy, are a record of the homogenising impulse of a country betraying its anxiety for hegemony.
The documentaries, screened at the Max Mueller Bhavan last week, come when there is an explosion of the documentary film, and like the many in the last five years, explore the making/unmaking of the Indian nation. Take, for instance, the fearless footages on the North-East, Kashmir, earthquake, nuclear testing, Ayodhya, and the Gujarat riots that unravel the many legitimacies that make up the nation. Mr. Kanwar's documentaries carry on this task of unravelling, rather forthrightly, even if one of the documentaries, The Night of Prophecy, locates the disquiet in culture, poetry.
The Delhi-based Kanwar has been engaging with issues around ecology, politics, art, and philosophy. He has won the Golden Gate, the Golden Conch and the Golden Orange Awards at film festivals in San Francisco, Mumbai, and at the 36th Antalya International Documentary Film Festivals for his film, A Season Outside. The film is a philosophical precept. "Who is outside and who is inside depends on how one is looking at oneself at the White Line painted at the Wagah Gate to keep two peoples at bay," says Mr. Kanwar.
It opens with an eerie shot: red searchlights on the pitch-dark Indo-Pak border look for intruders on lush green fields populated by noisy bats. The following bright morning is only seemingly lively because the farmers you see on both sides working together are not expected to cross the Line.
From Wagah, the film moves on to Punjab's interiors, to the Sikh community. We see festivities around the rise of the Khalsa Pant, and in the praise of the sword and Guru Gobind Singh. Then, an explicit shot of the Golden Temple, and excesses of the security forces, references to Bhindranwale, and the anti-Sikh riots. It is the Khalsa Pant that in a way completes the frame on the community. "The Pant symbolises the transformation of a pacifist community into a militant one. In modern times (1980s), it is not difficult to understand why the Sikh community took to arms and why Punjab became a test of the nation's unity," Mr. Kanwar observes.
The journey to the hilly terrains of Himachal brings us to the "non-violent people" in the Tibetan refugees. The narrator, the director himself, is now in conversation with a monk on the philosophical underpinnings of non-violence. The monk takes us back to the Mahatma, who, in some ways, inspired the Tibetan people. We return to Wagah. The daily aggressive parade celebrates separation even as it is supposed to celebrate togetherness. Mr. Kanwar points out how people on both sides laugh and jeer at each other when the parade gets underway. Utterly masculine, and carried out with an air of vengeance, the parade is by now a ritual performance.
Wagah is the frame within which the film travels through different "regions" — Partition and the persisting divide, Punjab, and then Tibet exploring violence and non-violence in the precincts of the nation. Mr. Kanwar agrees: "I am looking at how violence and non-violence come about. Why one is chosen over the other? I think the nation traverses these dilemmas." The Night of Prophecy is a poetic grasp of freedom — of communities seeking class, caste, and ethnic freedoms. We will never know, when the film opens, who is the man on the stone slab singing of how caste discriminates. The scene dramatically shifts to Mumbai. The camera moves blindingly fast and contrasts with the purposelessness of life on a stone slab. We come to a shack under Dadar bridge. We don't know which is better — life on the stone slab or life under a bridge. But when we read the words of the son talking about his prostitute mother, we know there is no choice to be made. Vehicles thunder on and around the bridge even as the Dalit mother's body is there for the asking.
An old man somewhere in rural Maharashtra cannot write. But he has composed more than 6,000 poems and is asking, in between lapses of memory, why someone took away one's harvest only because one belonged to the wrong caste.
The poetry turns revolutionary as we move to Telangana, Andhra Pradesh. The bard, Gaddar, is exhorting the lower castes to free themselves from bondage.
In Nagaland, the words intensify. We see memorials, testimonies of a Naga culture. The choirs and the schoolteacher's poem lend expression to this distinct ethnicity. The poem, read out rightly in solitude, recalls the loss of loved ones. The camera returns to the Dadar bridge. The two expressions of freedom at work — class and ethnicity — alert us to the different cultural latitudes that make up the country. Mr. Kanwar observes: "The poetry is about different freedoms. It is also an anticipation of what that freedom should look like."
We arrive in Kashmir to words of moderation and militancy. The shot begins with the plight of the Pandits, and then shifts to Kashmiri Muslim graves being cleaned. The camera gets bolder. A Muslim boy plays cricket in a graveyard. This is freedom and un-freedom. You play, but on the graves of lost brethren. The ravaged valley — houses scarred by a million bullets — contrasted with the wasted lake, Dal: the images are powerful.
The end, an instance of stunning photography, is where it has to be: a man in a boat with coal fire rows to nowhere in Kashmir's cold. The close-up of the man reveals an intense hopelessness. From where would freedom come? That may have been true of the other freedoms as well.
Mr. Kanwar's documentaries are an unambiguous commentary on the politics of freedom. He tells you that the freedom has everything to do with the nation. "I think I am re-looking the nation. Where it is heading? What is its present? What are its tensions?" He makes an interesting observation to a query on the means to realise freedom within the nation: "There are too many reasons to be violent that there is not too much to worry about non-violence."
Fighting censorship
INDIAN DOCUMENTARY filmmakers are facing a crisis. While they have been asked to submit censor certificates to ensure entries in the forthcoming film festival in Mumbai, foreign filmmakers have been asked to submit only a self-certificate. The Indian filmmakers have described the regulation by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting as "discriminatory".
Amar Kanwar said nearly 140 documentary filmmakers in the country have lodged their protest against the regulation, pointing out that there was no such regulation in the earlier festivals.
Mr. Kanwar said negotiations were on with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to get the clause on censorship revoked, failing which the filmmakers have planned a series of strategies including call for a national boycott of the Mumbai film festival, persuading international filmmakers not to screen their films, holding an alternative film festival, and conducting a symposium on censorship on the days of the Mumbai fest. While the filmmakers have not formed a formal association yet, effort is on to build informal groupings in important cities in the country.
Last week's meeting in the city was co-ordinated by filmmaker Deepa Dhanraj. She observed that while documentary films could be screened in other spaces, film festivals afforded an opportunity to put across alternative perceptions on politics and culture with greater visibility. She observed that the campaign against censorship held significance in the wake of the Bombay High Court's positive judgment on the public screening of War and Peace by Anand Patwardhan.
Filmmakers and film buffs in Bangalore plan to hold informal meetings in the coming days to highlight the issue.
For more information contact Ms. Deepa Dhanraj on 5534964 or on e-mail manadc@vsnl.com.
PRASHANTH G.N.
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