Indian Documentary: Peripheral Visions
Peripheral Visions: SRIDALA SWAMI
For documentaries to remain relevant beyond the narrow margins of time that define ‘news’, they must engage with not just events but something else: what this ‘something else’ is that any given filmmaker chooses defines her location or perspective. In this second part of the ongoing series on the Indian documentary and independent cinemas, Sanjay Kak and Kavita Joshi both give us a perspective from the peripheries, with Kak writing about his film on Kashmir, Jashn-e-Azadi and Joshi writing about her films on the Manipuri women’s protest against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) – Tales From The Margins – and on Irom Sharmila.
These essays couldn’t have come at a more relevant time. I have often felt that our cinema does not give us a view sufficiently wide enough to include the peripheries. Our vision is always flattened out into easy clichés or distorted by a mainstream narrative of nationhood. This is apparent to anybody who is reading or watching the news today in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks. It is also revealing that so much energy is rarely expended when the subject is, say, the North East or a place that is not ‘mainstream’ India.
Who or what is an Indian? Can we continue to ask this question 60 years after independence or do we know all the answers? Do they change from place to place? And what do we do if someone’s answer is different from ours?
Kashmir and Manipur are two of the most volatile places in the country today. Daily life is these places is something unimaginable for someone living in Mumbai or Delhi or Bangalore, though every once in a while these cities have an inkling of what it must be like, if they stopped to think about it. Indeed, daily life must always have been an odd and difficult thing in these places: a strange balance between keeping one’s head down and getting on with the business of living and trying to understand what ‘belonging’ means when borders, ethnicity and identity are all fluid or disputed.
What these essays do is ask these questions, keeping always in mind the process of the filmmakers’ interest in their subject. As always, the filmmakers’ awareness of their methods of representation is central. The films themselves do not make for comfortable viewing; they are not meant to. This time we have included clips from both films, since without them some portions of the essays will be hard to engage with. My own impressions on watching Sanjay Kak’s film are here.
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