Abstract
Probably India’s best-known documentary film-maker Anand Patwardhan, for close to four decades now, has been raking the country’s political consciousness through his films, which delve into the crux of India’s social and political lives. In this piece, the editors have put together, with Patwardhan’s permission, his writings from his blog (
These are important social commentaries of our times.
Sheetal Sathe and the Kabir Kala Manch
It was July 11, 2007, the tenth anniversary of one of the darkest chapters in the long history of Maharashtra’s atrocities against Dalits. Ten years ago the residents of Ramabai Colony in Ghatkoper had woken up to find that someone had placed a garland of footwear on their statue of Dr. Ambedkar. Anger simmered and a few score residents poured onto the adjacent Eastern Express Highway to protest the desecration. The protesters were unarmed but smashed the windows of some stationary cars. Within minutes a platoon of the Special Reserve Police SRP arrived and without any warning opened fire on the protesters. Then for good measure, they took aim at the colony itself. Men, women and children, many of them bystanders watching from the ‘safety’ of their own homes, were killed. Ten died on the spot, one a few years later, after his family had spent their meager resources trying to save him.
I became more than a mere horrified citizen when four days later, Vilas Ghogre, poet and singer, hung himself in protest in his hut in nearby Mulund. Vilas had visited Ramabai Colony in the aftermath of the firing and was unable to bear his grief. Vilas’s music and poetry I had loved and recorded over many years, and his song runs through my 1985 documentary on the homeless ‘Bombay Our City’.
I tried to understand why Vilas, an Ambedkarite who had become a Marxist, had committed suicide. And why at the moment of his death he reasserted his Dalit rather than his Marxist identity by tying a blue scarf on his forehead and writing a chalk message ‘Long live Ambedkarite Unity’ on his blackboard (yes, in his tiny room in Mulund, an entire wall was an old discarded school blackboard).
The journey eventually took me 14 years as I explored class and caste and followed the legal cases against the police and their counter-cases against the victims of the firing. I also ended up following other poet-musicians like Vilas who used their art for emancipation.
The 10th year of the journey brought me back to Ramabai Colony where an all day commemoration was in progress to honour the victims and martyrs of Ramabai and Khairlanji. At Khairlanji village in 2006 four members of Bhaiyyalal Bhotmange’s family had been butchered, his wife and daughter stripped and raped before being killed. The killer mob comprised of fellow villagers from middle castes. Out of over 80 accused, those connected to powerful parties were acquitted. Six got the death penalty, later commuted to life. The court ruled that the Prevention of Atrocities Act did not apply here and that no one had been raped or molested. Rape had not even been investigated though bodies had been found naked. When Dalits across Maharashtra protested against the massacre huge repression followed leading to deaths and thousands of arrests. The Home Minister described the protests as ‘Maoist inspired’. Three years later the government gave Khairlanji an award for being a model of peace and amity (‘Tantamukti Gaon’). With half its Dalit population murdered, it was the peace of the grave.
On 11 July 2007 the sense of outrage and injustice was palpable at Ramabai Colony. Many musicians performed that day. But the most electric of all was a young group from Pune, the Kabir Kala Manch (KKM). As Sheetal Sathe’s strong, clear voice rang out, the words piercing the hearts and minds of even the most jaded, I knew right away that the legacy of Vilas Ghogre would never die, it would expand and encompass, for it was a living, felt need.
I began to follow the KKM. We filmed at their work place, an office lent to them by a socialist sympathizer and in their slum home near Mahatma Phule’s memorial house. We spoke with Sheetal’s mother, an amazing woman in her own right, who despite her religious faith in the ‘goddess’ tolerated and even approved the growing rational consciousness of the children she had worked hard to educate. We filmed their public performances in the city and countryside. We filmed them lending musical support to a diverse range of activist movements that had taken on the venality of the system, from Medha Patkar’s non-violent peoples’ movements to their own Mahatma Phule-inspired movement for inter-caste marriage.
But as atrocities like Khailanji repeated themselves with unfailing regularity, I began to sense KKM’s songs becoming more militant. Ambedkar was now interwoven with Marx and I marvelled at how potent the combination was in the hands of young believers who challenged the selling out of an older generation that had settled for crumbs from the high table. Despite this gradual change nothing about the KKM was dogmatic. They tolerated my hodge podge Gandhian, Ambedkarite, socialist ideas. They were always open to debate, discussion, reformulation and they were internally democratic. So much so that even in performance, while Sachin was the published poet and Sheetal and her brother Sagar were accomplished musicians, the group saw to it that everyone got a chance to sing, to write, to perform.
Our film was taking a long time to complete. Occasionally KKM saw bits and pieces of it on the edit table and we would discuss caste and class. They knew from the film that Vilas Ghogre had been expelled from his Marxist group because upper class/caste Marxists in charge had failed to grasp the conditions of his life. Young and impressionable as the KKM was, I saw them performing in public in working class neighborhoods, holding study circles with youth and adults, always questioning, always letting a hundred flowers bloom.
In 2011, I lost contact with the group. None of my calls were being answered. When I went to Pune in June to meet Sheetal’s mother, I understood the reason why. Deepak Dengle of the KKM had been arrested by the Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) and was being accused of being a member of a banned Naxalite (Maoist) party that was waging war against the Indian State. The police had begun a witch-hunt. In fear, KKM members ceased their public activities and went underground. When I met Sheetal’s mother she reaffirmed that her children did not believe in violence and had promised to fight only with ‘the song and the drum’.
Police-planted articles began to appear in the media. The accusations against KKM drew on ‘confessions’ obtained in police custody like the one by Deepak Dengle alleging that KKM was present at a meeting that Maoists had conducted. Deepak subsequently withdrew his statement stating that it was obtained under torture. Deepak spent over a year and a half in jail. He was recently released on bail after Justice Thipsay of the Bombay High Court held that even under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), mere membership of a banned outfit could not constitute grounds for detention, that an actual crime or the intention to commit this would have to be proved. I met Deepak last month after he was released and he described how acid was used on his back at the torture stage and how his family was threatened.
In 2012 we had formed a Kabir Kala Manch Defense Committee (KKMDC). The latter portion of my film
We feared for the lives of underground members of the KKM. Once someone is branded a Naxalite, death by ‘encounter’ becomes possible. We met the Chief Minister of Maharashtra and showed excerpts of the film to let him understand who the KKM was. Later a delegation met the Home Minister who informed us that the charges against the KKM were not serious and advised us to encourage them to surface.
Finally last month we were overjoyed when our lawyer friend Mihir Desai informed us that two KKM members Sheetal Sathe and Sachin Mali had made contact and did indeed want to come over-ground and face the consequences in court. To prevent the police from claiming that they had ‘caught’ them, we had to ensure that their surfacing took place in a very public location where the media would already be present. We chose the State Assembly which was in session.
Prakash Ambedkar, grandson of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, Prakash Reddy and Bhalchanra Kango of the CPI and three members of our Defence Committee were present as Sheetal and Sachin spoke to the media outside the Assembly hall and sang a song declaring that their action was not a ‘surrender’ as they had done no wrong, but a ‘satyagraha’ for the freedom of expression.
The police at the Assembly had no idea who these people were! Finally the ATS was contacted and arrived a few hours later to collect their quarry. That evening we met the Chief Minister who promised to prevent the torture of the two activists. In court the next day Sheetal, who is 6 months pregnant, was sent directly into judicial custody (where torture does not usually take place but where nutritious food is a rarity) while Sachin was remanded to ATS questioning for two weeks. We learnt that although Sachin was not allowed to sleep for almost 3 days, which does constitute a form of torture, no bodily torture was done. I am sure this is because of the public pressure that has been sustained—the Times of India reported that the ATS switched off its fax machine because of the volume of the letters pouring in—in support of the KKM. The police on their part are countering with articles in the mainstream media loudly proclaiming that Sachin and Sheetal are indeed Naxalites.
Are they really Naxalites? I see them as fiery idealists who are fighting to make our society just and equitable. Does that clearly distinguish them from Naxalites? Perhaps not, and this is why the ATS and the State is confused. To me the distinction lies in the fact that the only weapons Sachin and Sheetal have chosen to fight with are poetry and song.
Even if in the worst-case scenario, it is concluded that they had made contact with a banned organization, what bewilders me is the question of what the State wants from them now. They gave themselves up. They have expressed the desire to sing freely again within the bounds of democracy. There are other members from their group that are still underground, who are obviously watching to see what the State does. What is the message the State is sending them? That it prefers to brand them as Naxalites? To push them into the forest rather than allow them safe passage?
The other day Sheetal’s bail application was refused despite her pregnancy. Neither she nor Sachin are accused of any act of violence. Are people who gave themselves up voluntarily, going to run away? Why did the ATS oppose bail? The only possible explanation for such behaviour is that there is now Central government money to be made by those that prove they have a Naxal problem. Will civil society sit back and watch?
(A month after this article was written Sagar Gorkhe and Ramesh Gaichor from the Kabir Kala Manch came out of hiding, sang in public, and were arrested by the ATS. Three months later Sheetal Sathe who was about to deliver a baby was released on bail. After two years awaiting trial, Sachin Mali, Sagar Gorkhe and Ramesh Gaichor remain in jail. Their bail has been twice rejected by Justice Joshi of the Bombay High Court. The Kabir Kala Manch Defence Committee is filing an appeal in the Supreme Court.)
‘‘Source: Excerpt from Anand Patwardhan’s blogpiece ‘Why we Defend the Kabir Kala Manch’, written in 2013,
Our democracy, like another it attempts to emulate, takes one step forward, two steps back. A victim of paranoia like the one it emulates, it is destroying its own founding principles by emphasizing ‘order’ while sacrificing the law. Without the guiding hand of a civil society conscious of its rights, it may well fall on its face as it did during the dark days of the Emergency.
In April 2013 when Sheetal Sathe and Sachin Mali of the Kabir Kala Manch did a satyagraha for freedom of expression and gave themselves up outside the State Assembly to an Anti Terrorist Squad that had supposedly been hunting for them for 2 years, it seemed to have established a healthy precedent. Within a month, encouraged by the fact that under intense public scrutiny no torture of the arrested took place, Ramesh Gaichor and Sagar Gorkhe of the KKM surfaced from hiding and gave themselves up to the authorities expecting that the due process of law would restore their freedom of expression.
The KKM is a Pune based cultural troupe largely composed of working class Dalit poets and artistes. Two years ago they went underground after one of their members Deepak Dengle was arrested and tortured into giving a ‘confession’ by the ATS. The ATS implicated him and many others under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) as persons associated with a banned Naxalite party. It may be recalled that the ATS notoriously got similar ‘confessions’ from Muslims who admitted to bombing their own mosque at Malegaon. When terrorists belonging to the Hindu faith later owned up to the bombing, the ATS was left with not just egg on its face, but the blood of innocents. Torture, at the very least, is an unreliable method of investigation.
After a KKM Defence Committee was formed by members of a civil society that had begun to learn about and appreciate the cultural and political contributions of the KKM, things began to change and the media started to take positive notice. Finally in March 2013, Justice Abhay Thipsay of the Bombay High Court gave a landmark judgment granting bail to 6 accused under the UAPA, which included KKM member Deepak Dengle. The judgment pointed out that while no case had been made out that the accused were Naxalites, even assuming they were, merely belonging to a banned organization did not constitute a crime unless an actual crime had been committed or contemplated. The Thipsay judgment followed logically from a Supreme Court judgment upholding the principle that even under the UAPA, which criminalizes membership of a banned outfit, a distinction had to be made between active and inactive members. These judgments were a shot in the arm for those who argued that even in difficult times, one must not criminalize expression and thought.
Back in April we learned that Sheetal of the KKM was 6 months pregnant. Thankfully rather than be subjected to third degree in police custody, she was remanded to judicial custody right away. The government prosecutor in open court said that they were not asking for her police custody, as they did not want to risk harming her baby! Does one need more proof of what is considered routine in police custody?
Since then 2 months have elapsed. In the sessions court Sheetal’s bail hearing kept getting delayed. When it finally took place bail was rejected. Bail is generally denied to those who might run away. Sheetal and the KKM came out of hiding voluntarily and are hardly a security risk. Yet her baby may now be born in jail.
It is nobody’s case that the KKM participated in violence but there are two possibilities. One is that they were mistaken as Naxalites because of the militancy of their songs. The other is that at some point they were attracted by the Naxalite ideology but changed their minds and decided to come overground to face the consequences. It is the latter possibility that prevents their release. The government does have a surrender policy in place where Naxalites, even those with a violent past, are given financial rewards in return for turning State’s witness and helping in the war against Naxalism. Such people are relocated at government expense and given ‘protection’ but are regarded as mercenaries and often lose self-respect. The KKM chose a third, more honorable path, one that the government has never conceived of. They stoutly deny any wrongdoing and they refuse to turn into ‘approvers’ of the system. They merely express the desire to live an open life within the bounds of democracy. Will they be granted this space?
Meanwhile in court and in the media the atmosphere has dramatically changed. The massacre in Chhattisgarh carried out by Naxalites has seen to that. Horrific as the event was, the undifferentiated use of State violence in the tribal belt and the use of draconian measures in court together with the blanket tarring of all dissidents can only aggravate the situation. Naxalites are undeniably fighting for, and with, the most oppressed sections of this land. It is their hearts and minds that must be won. Increased State repression will do just the opposite. Attempting to restore Order while abandoning the rule of Law will do exactly what the USA led bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan did to ‘restore democracy’ in those countries.
‘‘Source: Excerpt from Anand Patwardhan’s blogpiece ‘Homeland Security’, written in 2013,
Patwardhan’s Speech at the Malhar Festival, St Xavier’s College (Mumbai) in 2014
I speak before you today in place of the designated speaker, Sheetal Sathe. It is not that Sheetal Sathe could not come on stage today because she or her baby fell ill. It is not that she had nothing to say. It is not that she was afraid to say what she had to say. And it is not that she did not come because she doubted the sincerity of those who had invited her.
It is precisely because she treasures the love and respect shown to her by the students who had invited her to speak and sing at this year’s Malhar festival that Sheetal Sathe has chosen not to allow the organizers of this festival and all the people gathered here to be exposed to the ugly threats of disruption that have been issued against them in case she spoke and sang here today.
Let it be known far and wide who exactly has issued these threats. These threats have not been issued by a court of law or by the police, or by any instrument of the State or national government. Sheetal Sathe is out on bail precisely because an Indian high court ruled that her liberty did not have to be curtailed while she was undergoing trial to establish her innocence. The court has not taken away her freedom of speech or her right to sing. The court has not sought to officially stifle her voice or the voice of the millions of oppressed and stigmatized people that she sings about.
An extra-constitutional body that threatens the very fabric of our secular democracy has issued this threat. There are many such extra-constitutional bodies that are growing in power today. Such bodies have many names and many duties. Some decide what books the people of India should read. Some decide what films we should see. Some decide what speeches and songs we should hear. There are many self-appointed censors, but make no mistake, they belong to one single family with one single ideology and one set of beliefs. These beliefs have been inculcated from a very young and impressionable age. I will not list all these beliefs except to point out that apart from asserting that the aeroplane and rocket science was invented thousands of years ago in the Vedic era of Brahminism which they call the golden era, it includes an abiding faith in the Manusmriti, an ancient Brahminic law code that deprived Dalits and women of their most basic human rights and permitted untold atrocities upon all those who challenged it.
Today this ideology comes before us in a new disguise of nationalism. It is draped in the flag of India—the very tricolour that it loudly denounced at the time of Independence when its followers insisted on hoisting an orange flag of Hindutva instead. They also refused to sing ‘
Apart from nationalism there is another even more seductive disguise that has recently fired the lust of India’s elite and middle classes. It is the disguise of ‘development’. This development lust has trumped even the tricolour for it says, ‘So what if the world’s oil and water is rapidly depleting? So what if there is pollution, global warming and the threat of tsunami and nuclear disaster? Why should we protect India’s air, water, forests, land and ore from the multinationals who wish to grab it?’
They are ready to sell our sovereignty for the short-term gain of a few, as long as they are allowed to make a hologram of the national flag. They then proceed to promote our most primitive, racist and exploitative cultural and economic traditions while making suitable noises about modernity and development.
How do you and I resist? Make no mistake. This is an ideology that brooks no dissent. Today is yet another sad day for India’s democracy. It is a day when an extra Constitutional power backed by a ruling political party has issued a threat against a college run for over a century by Christians. Yes, that is the bottom-line. That is what makes St. Xaviers College and, in particular, its principled principal, a specially vulnerable target.
Both Sheetal Sathe and I, on behalf of the Kabir Kala Manch Defence Committee, want to put on record that the only reason that she is not on stage today is not out of fear of those who issued the threat, but out of deep appreciation for the courage and integrity of St. Xaviers College, Mumbai and its dynamic principal, Father Mascerenhas. There are many who criticized Father Mascerenhas for having advised his students to question the model of ‘development’ that the embedded media was foisting upon us during the lead up to the last elections. Amongst these illustrious paper tigers is a Nobel laureate whom I will not name.
To his credit, Father Mascerenhas is not a coward. He did not tell Sheetal Sathe not to perform today, but merely warned us of the threat that had been issued against the Malhar festival. Sheetal Sathe and the KKMDC do not wish to jeopardize this festival. But we wish to put on record that we will never be silenced. And we want the public to know who exactly has issued this particular threat. The threat has been issued by the Akhil Bharati Vidyarthi Parishad (APVP) the youth wing of a political party that came to power by telling the people of India that it no longer stands for the divisive, communal and casteist politics that it had been associated with in the past.
You may judge for yourselves whether this is the case. It is the second time that the ABVP has attacked the Kabir Kala Manch. Last year, after Film Institute students in Pune had organized a screening of our film ‘
You have to understand the real reason why groups like the ABVP hate groups like the KKM. It has nothing to do with nationalism or Naxalism. It is because their visions of India are diametrically opposed. The Kabir Kala Manch believes in a pluralistic India where caste, religion and race is replaced by the recognition that we are all human beings first who deserve justice, peace and true democracy. The ideologues of Hindutva, no matter how big a national flag they wrap around themselves, have always had a completely different agenda.
‘‘Source: Excerpt from Anand Patwardhan’s blogpiece ‘Another Sad Day for Democracy’,
Narmada Bachao Andolan and the Supreme Court Decision
In an astonishing 2:1 split decision, the Supreme Court ruled that work on the Sardar Sarovar dam could resume despite the fact that there is little sign of alternative land being available for those displaced by the dam. Indeed in the six years that the matter was argued in court, the mountain of evidence painstakingly collected by the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) should have proved beyond doubt that the dam project represents costs that are unacceptable in both financial and human terms.
The facts scream out at anyone who is interested in even a cursory appraisal. When the project was first approved, it was claimed that there would be a 2:1 ratio of benefits as opposed to costs. At this first stage of claim making, the dam and its irrigation canals were estimated to cost Rs 4,600 crores. By 1988 this was revised to Rs 6,400 crores. Today, the official estimated cost (which leaves out of reckoning all that is inconvenient) of the project has increased to Rs 18,000 crores. Have the benefits increased in similar fashion? Not even the greatest proponents of the project dare to claim this. In fact it has been shown that the amount of water available in the river has decreased due to siltation and so, if anything, the estimated benefits need to be downwardly revised. So it turns out that the cost-benefit ratio, that very essential piece of arithmetic that must precede the sanction for any development scheme, is completely skewed in favour of costs rather than benefits. Never mind the additional circumstances that the benefits largely accrue to an already well-off section of society (big farmers, industrialists and urban entrepreneurs for whom every artificial lake is an opportunity for water sports and holiday resorts) while the costs are borne by the weakest sections.
The Narmada project was conceived in the 1960s when large dams were seen as temples of modernity, necessary for kick-starting a nation’s progress towards industrialisation and prosperity. By the 1980s, negative aspects of large dams in many parts of the world began to be documented—the fact that siltation drastically reduces the life span of such dams; the often insurmountable problem of rehabilitating oustees; the submergence of natural forests which can never be suitably replaced by monocultural afforestation, and the innumerable issues that those who author major changes to nature’s design never seem to consider, to the detriment of the generations that follow.
Two decades on, in the first year of the new century, there is virtual international consensus that large dams must be rethought. Not so, say two of the learned judges of the Supreme Court. ‘The petitioner has not been able to point out a single instance where the construction of a dam has, on the whole, had an adverse environmental impact.’
Which world do they live in? Even if NBA lawyers concentrated on the terms of reference allowed to them by the court and argued mainly on the issue of rehabilitation and the non-availability of alternate land, national and international literature is hardly silent on the issue of the environmental hazards of large dams.
What can the NBA do now? In a sense, having appealed to the courts in the first place, it would appear to be morally bound to accept the judgment and allow work on the dam to resume without further opposition. After all, had the judgment gone in its favour and the project scrapped, would it not have demanded compliance from the relevant authorities? This is an appealing argument to all those who believe that we already live in a democracy where there are equal opportunities for all, where the weak and the strong are truly equal in the eyes of the law, and that this case too was fought on a level playing field. It is not as if the rich and the powerful have always benefited from our legal system, that rich murderers have invariably got away scot free where the less powerful might have hung. It may be the rule but there are exceptions when the justice system of this land has actually meted out justice without regard for the position of the parties concerned. Unfortunately, even these exceptional instances are diminishing rapidly in the face of globalisation.
The Bhopal gas case, where Union Carbide was let off with pitiful penalties, and the Enron case, where corruption was condoned and even rewarded, are two cases where highly paid lawyers and political pressures combined to engender patently unjust judgments with epochal repercussions.
So should we still pretend that all is well? Should the lack of study or the lack of courage of a few people be reason for irreversible measures that hurt the fabric of our system? Will citizens of this nation who rise up and say: ‘We do not trust your judgment your lordships’ be hauled up for contempt? And what of the contempt shown by the court towards the poorest of this land and to those who champion their cause?
This sounds like sedition. Like a call to arms, except that the leadership of the NBA does not believe in armed struggle. The NBA has fought by putting its own life on the line, not by endangering the lives of others. For six years it put its faith in the justice system of this land. Today that system has failed.
With all legal avenues closed, in the months to come, the cry of ‘Jal Samarpan’ (sacrifice by drowning) is bound to ring out once more. Already the valley is preparing itself for sacrifice. Already activists and their supporters can be heard saying that there is no alternative. Already the media is once more poised, like vultures hoping for the worst, so it has a good story. And if this time the worst does come to pass and we lose the best this land has to offer in terms of courage and humanity, who will have gained?
Will this land be shamed into dismantling its unjust system of privilege and denial? Will future generations remember the martyrdom and carry on the fight? Did Mahatma Gandhi’s martyrdom bring about the society he dreamed of? Did Che Guevara spark the Revolution he lived and died for? At best they became icons whose posters are as ubiquitous as their ideals stay unimplemented.
If Prabhakaran can inspire so many to become human bombs, it is easy to see how people can be inspired to take their own lives without the guilt of killing others. But sacrifice is something we can admire the courage of, without admiring its wisdom. However glorious it may be, death is still escape. It is harder to live for a cause than to die for it, to continue the fight despite the humiliation of innumerable defeats.
‘‘Source: Excerpt from Anand Patwardhan’s blogpiece ‘Judgement and After’, written in 2000,
The Camera of Resistance
Alex Napier 1
‘Who stands to gain and who stands to lose…?’ (Medha Patkar)
The high dam established its place in the iconography of technological modernism between the two world wars; its fusion of monumentality, functional form, and power (electricity supplanted irrigation in the urban–industrial imagination) offered emblematic possibilities too obvious to ignore. In the immediate postwar decades, large-scale, multi-purpose hydro engineering projects were touted worldwide as vectors of environmental mastery and social progress. The power dam was not conceived as a discrete entity, but rather as a node in an extensive, potentially integrated system of throughputs and reciprocal conversions of water, energy, crop yields, industry, money, which could be quantitatively modeled and measured (user-fees, acre-feet, kilowatt-hours). It was precisely this multi-functional technical rationality which excited modernist admiration.
Today, the shadow-side of such techno-environmental gigantism and ambitious social engineering has become more visible, the voices of its casualties and critics more audible. Unanticipated ecological reactions and modes of deterioration mocked the planners’ prospectus, while the hidden social content of high cost/high risk technostructures—the specific forms of domination and dependency, enrichment and impoverishment they entail—became blatantly apparent. We are perhaps now entering the lengthening twilight of the mammoth hydro-complex; if so, the megadam era is closing with a grandiose flourish on the Yangtze and Narmada rivers. It is the Narmada Valley, in western India, which provides the setting for Patwardhan’s most recent documentary.
A Narmada Diary is a ‘sporadic/video-record’ of five years of popular resistance to the Narmada Valley Development Scheme, a gargantuan hydro-electric and agro-industrial harnessing of the Narmada river, a project deemed ‘vital to India’s prosperity’. This is the largest hydraulic-engineering plan yet devised (1 super dam, 29 great dams, 135 medium and 3000 smaller dams, vast irrigation/canalization), embracing 40 million people. Its central hinge is the Sardar Sarovar high dam in Gujarat, whose headwater reservoir and associated canalisation will displace over half a million locals—a great swathe of riparian fishers, farmers, and forest-dwellers, now summoned to ‘make a sacrifice for the nation’.
Beginning in December 1990, Dhuru and Patwardhan diarized the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada Movement), a local struggle which attained global resonance in 1992–93, precipitating a policy crisis for the World Bank—resolved only by the termination of its funding, ostensibly at the Indian Government’s request (India is historically the Bank’s biggest customer!). The subsequent hunger strikes and voluntary commitments of movement activists to self-sacrificial drowning in the face of the continuing obduracy of the Indian and state governments reinforced the image of a powerfully rooted, resourceful and courageous movement. Through this local case, the participant camera documents the resistance of the indigenous communities of the rural poor of India to a technocratically designed, exclusionary, and coercively implemented form of development, which positions them as objects.
The opening and closing ‘entries’ in the Diary are symmetrical; official government documentary footage extolling the irresistible benefits of a hydro-engineered and electrified rural future (‘Speed and Technology’) is counterposed to images of the seemingly timeless harvest festival of Holi, celebrated in March 1994 at the village of Domkheri, threatened with imminent submergence by the rising headwaters of the dam. Linear, progressive, industrial time confronts cyclical, ritual, agrarian time. But in their closing reprise of the traditional ceremony, Dhuru and Patwardhan let us see what we can now more fully understand: the body-painted, head-dressed adivasi dancers confront and burn their demons, singling out the newest, greatest malignity of all, the Sardar Sarovar dam itself. Their ritual dance is a configuration of actuality, of living collective experience, open to history. Resistance has been integrated, innovatively, into the everyday activity, language and rites of the people of this region—overwhelmingly adivasis long scorned as ‘tribals’, descendants of the pre Aryan, aboriginal inhabitants of India. Subjugated, yet not fully assimilated, by Brahminical Hinduism and caste society, the adivasis now face environmental expropriation. They are superfluous to the re-engineered social geography of the Narmada valley.
To both belong to and appropriate this threatened human environment it is essential to walk. A filigree of tracks and pathways—from home to field, village to village, hillside to riverbank—orders the nexus of figures and landscape. We see no one cycling, no bullock carts (indeed, significantly little livestock other than poultry). Everyone walks everywhere, whether viewed in silhouette or in depth as individuals, files, or groups, the motif of walking figures signifies inhabitation of the environment. The film-makers, like Medha Patkar, the indomitable NBA organizer, have discovered the indispensability of tireless engagement in a pedestrian way of life (low ‘Speed’, low ‘Technology’) as a condition of entry into the rhythms, meanings and concerns of this world. As we pedestrianise our vision, we reinterpret the procession and marches in nearby regional towns or in larger cities as incursion of this rural tempo and motility into the more hectic, accelerated, industrialized urban space. Even on water, the boatmen walk. The simple punt is the most common means of transport—though a lyrical intermezzo, aboard an elegant, low-slung, lateen-rigged skiff, bears us effortlessly into a suspended, tropical sunset. So accustomed have we become to the walker’s appropriation of locality that it comes as a shock when, almost at the end of the film, a chauffeur-driven motorcade draws up at the dam site to unload a contingent of government, party and business bigwigs, intent on reinforcing their claim to the place. What could be more fitting than to commemorate the last rites of Chinanbhai Patel, former Chief Minister and avatar of Gujarat’s industrialisation, here at this spot and to immerse his ashes beneath the dam he promoted? As the dignitaries vow to fulfil his dream, the drivers discreetly guard the vehicles.
Time is not neutral in this conflict. There is a compelling urgently dictated by a struggle conducted against ongoing dam construction and the consequent drowning of fields, trees, temples, villages, accented with each successive monsoon season. Delay and procrastination serve the government. The diary form acknowledges this reality.
Dhuru and Patwardhan are filming an already solidly established andolan (movement): the work of movement-building is not their focus (there are sidelong and backward glimpses), nor do they define the movement within a historical narration. What concerns them most is to capture the idioms, repertoire and meanings of resistant protest as it is enacted, spoken, sung and danced, individually and collectively—a political ethnography of insurgency. Scrupulous attention is paid to the particularities of action and speech—and to the sensitive membrane joining/separating them. Meetings, marches, evictions, confrontations with authorities, delegations to the alien city world, celebration of success, sharings in grief—all are explored in episodes, vignettes, interviews, composed and edited to release spaces of disclosure, an intimate microscopy of political struggle.
The NBA originated as an organization to assert the claims of displaces, but was driven to extend its area of resistance into comprehensive opposition to the development scheme by a characteristic logic of movement radicalization: the critical unmasking of official rhetoric and the identification of real interests. Not only were resettlement and compensation arrangements palpably defective, but the project was contestable in terms of its economics, social inequity, environmental impacts, implications for human rights and public health.
Emergent movements are frequently personified. Medha Patkar, the articulate, impassioned, and dedicated NBA organizer and spokeswoman, was quickly identified as the catalyst of radicalization. In Narmada Diary, her intellectual, moral, and personal strength informs every frame in which she appears. Yet the film-makers show that these qualities are diffused throughout the movement. Villagers interviewed after the Kevadia rally (March 1993) demonstrate the sinewy power of situated, local knowledge, with their succinct resume of the interplay between economic, political and ecological changes in the Narmada valley (the stuff of several academic publications is presented in a few pithy observations). A young woman, volunteering for samarpan (self-immolation in the rising waters), explains herself with a reasoned dignity, made more memorable as the interview is shot nocturnally, clandestinely, unlit, while a police crackdown seeks out the activists. Sonibai and Punya, bereaved parents of Remal Vasave, a teenager shot by police enforcing a land survey, speak unflinchingly to the camera of their unbroken commitment to the andolan, as they share a funerary drink, meal and smoke with friends and relatives. After the meal, Sonibai rises, moves to the open doorway, shrouding her head and face with her sari—the film cuts to a silent dam, its sluices closed.
The andolan has deployed the weapons of the weak, notably an ability to play upon the several registers of protest legitimation which mark India’s multi-layered political culture. Utilizing a precarious constitutional legality, aware of the institutional realities of coercion and corruption, the NBA has symbolically positioned itself through its highly manifest adherence to the norm of nonviolence (the Gandhian filiation vividly imaged in the tying of protesters’ hands). Self-understanding, solidarity, and determination are renewed communicatively in a vernacular of music, song, and dance which accompanies the events of the struggle.
The resistant musicality is seized on by Dhuru and Patwardhan, integrated into their syntax to orchestrate tempo, rhythm, movement, mood. The kinetic synthesis achieved, present throughout the film can be illustrated by one episode of dynamically fluent camera work and editing: the police operation to evacuate Manibeli village. From the opening shot (police lorries move in), through initial compliance (stripped household frames; personal effects stowed for removal)—both accompanied by voice-over—we are led to a pivotal moment of collective defiance. Two musicians emerge from the throng, sounding a tocsin of resistance: the first, an elderly man, not well fed, straining backward to offset the weight of a hugely proportioned drum, advances toward the camera, from mid-shot to close-up, until his instrument almost fills the frame. An unforgettable image. We then cut in to a carnivalesque finale of communal overwhelming of police by dancing villagers: the camera tracks slowly round as it recedes inwards to reveal the rotating circle of dancers holding hands—at its centre a bemused, captive policeman. The sequence is resolved with images of re-established bucolic routine (crops, washing of clothes). Through the andolan’s mobilization of the plural idioms of protest—formal and informal, customary and modern, local and national—adivasi collective identity is both validated and redefined.
What of the movement’s adversaries? Their voicings, gestures, actions too allowed expressive space. A first spokesman reviews the conflict with patriarchal sublimity: ‘a bride cries when going to her husband’s home. The parents also cry, but they know she must go. It’s natural—once they are there, they’ll settle down.’ Others advance more ‘modern’ tropes hypostasizing progress and the common good: ‘There is a compulsion for development…’ ‘I am a businessman…’ (not entirely true, we find). And, when the gloves are off, a predictably sinister discourse reveals itself—the same Regional Chief of the Ruling Congress Party whom we first encounter prating about ‘development….’ (the camera eloquently panning to disclose the immaculate lawn and villa which are its fruits), reappears after the ransacking of the NBA offices, his menacing enmity undisguised: ‘This dog bites, don’t go near it.’ And yet, despite such moments—including a strangely uncontrolled press conference with Kamal Nath, Indian Environment Minister, whose weariness and under-briefing are palpable—we sense that the ‘power behind the dam’, targeted by Medha Patkar, remains elusive, a hydra frustratingly difficult to grapple with.
The sensibility materialized in this emplaced, participatory film-making is profoundly humanist and democratic. Subject matter, technical means, aesthetic choices cohere. Take the use of director’s voice-over—non-didactic, interrogative, pared down, refusing the dissimulations of objectivistic neutrality and the banalities of indulgent self-referentiality. This is not the voice of commentary, rather that of communicative action. Similarly, the hand-held camera (video: circulating medium for contemporary social actors) seeks interactive relation with its subjects. Whether squatting, sitting, standing, or on the move, interviewees are engaged as individuals and co-equals. A man who has lost everything to the rising waters, seen over his shoulder as he stands beneath a flowering tree, terminates his own interview: ‘It would have been better to have died—that is all I have to say.’ With this he walks away, abandoning the frame to the blossoming foliage and the man-made lake.
The dam is not neglected as a protagonist, appearing at varying stages of construction. It is seen most usually from above or at an oblique angle, it’s verticality and curvilinear monumentality de-emphasised, the image-cliché denied. Scale is often manipulated by foregrounding of protesters and villagers (though never the dam workers, who may have been inaccessible to the film-makers). We view it through perimeter fencing. Its unseen presence looms. In one powerful interview with displaces, filmed under an overcast sky, we hear the sound of distant thunder. As we listen more attentively to the persistent rumbling, a disturbing suspicion dawns: not monsoon thunder, but the steady roar of the dam water is providing a sonic commentary on these accounts of expulsion.
These figurations of the dam prompt reconsideration of the opposing documentary interests and styles on display in Narmada Diary. In the Indian Government footage (from A Village Smiles etc.), the large-scale hydro-engineering project is represented as a gift from government to people, the dam, power-line, and irrigation canal as unambiguous, universal vectors of a better life. Even those up rooted and resettled can expect benefits. ‘How fertile this land is in Gujarat’s Hareswar!’ intones the government spokeswoman before her uneasy, intimidated audience of displaces. ‘Very fertile!’ the echo comes back. ‘Father Chandrya, are you sorry to shift?’—‘No, No!’ A triangular positioning is set up between Sardar Sarovar (a fetish-form of ineluctable progress), the Government (initiates, guardians, and administrators of the fetish’s powers), and a recipient total population. This regime-documentary style, a late offspring of the ‘pylon aesthetics’ films of the 30s and 40s, is indentured to the same technological romanticism, which elides environmental mastery with social liberation. Its rhetoric of reconciliation is designed to mediate reception of Sardar Sarovar’s awesome scale and generative productivity by interpreting them into the register of typified, individual ‘human experience’. Emotionalised monumentality remains integral to this rhetoric.
Dhuru and Patwardhan’s mobile, ‘barefoot’ camera de-centres and desublimates the dam, questions its promises—‘PLANNED ECOLOGICAL HARMONY AMONGST MEN, WATER, LAND, AND VEGETATION’ proclaims a dam site signboard—through the discordant, oppositional presence of the NBA. The andolan’s refusal of recipient subjection exposes the megadam fetish and its minions to profane interrogation. As we watch, listen, and mentally assemble the materials of the Narmada Diary, a sophisticated political ecology of the mammoth hydro-complex is thematized: a critical knowledge, whether spoken in everyday demotic or the technical vocabulary of submissions to Government, the Supreme Court, or World Bank. Not ‘harmony’, but social polarization and hazardous ecological destabilization are imprinted into Sardar Sarovar’s gigantism. ‘Before Sardar Sarovar our hills had no roads. This year the roads came and forests were cut down. Now it’ll be hotter, illness will spread.’ ‘You can’t eat or drink electricity….’ Agro industrial recomposition of the countryside and swelling urbanisation—‘sugarcane fields and flush toilets in the cities’, as Medha Patkar observes—will offer little comfort to the rural poor. Government research studies, implementation procedures, and bureaucratic carapacing are probed. Cumulatively, Sardar Sarovar is demystified not only as environmental, but also political, technology.
In choosing to follow the NBA’s critical resistance to Sardar Sarovar, Dhuru and Patwardhan are not concerned merely with the outcome of a particular contest over the uses of the Narmada river, nor even with the wider issue of the social ecology of capital-intensive development. They are engaging with India’s stereotypes of collective identity and social relations; sedimented mythic, epic, religious and political constructions of purity, hierarchy, difference, otherness. One disdainful shrug of the shoulder in a Bombay hotel lobby can convey the actuality of encoded social distance. The incident, trivial in itself, occurs in an episode of grotesque incongruities and futile pursuit. NBA delegates seeking an interview with Lewis Preston, the World Bank Director, on a visit to India in the wake of the funding crisis, track him down to a fashion show apparently laid on in his and Mrs. Preston’s honour. Demanding admittance, the andolan’s representatives find their way barred by an immaculately coiffured, silk-suited dandy, whose veneer of urbane sophistication crumbles in the mere proximity of these rustic adivasis. He turns on his heels, breaking off contact—Duhru and Patwardhan accept the gift, focus their camera on the impeccably cut shoulder-line and trouser length of the receding suit. While the delegates fail to corner Preston, they so catch a phantasmagoric glimpse of Bombay’s top models doing their bit for India’s fashion industry.
Patwardhan’s work to date seems to pursue a circuitous yet consistent exploration of the varieties and perplexities of political subjectivity and identity in contemporary India. The ‘tribal’ identities—as India’s conquered, subordinated, backward ‘others’—are now being contested by adivasis themselves, their histories recovered, their self-understandings and claims redefined. Adivasis are not lining fossils, nor ethnic curios, but contemporary social actors who can contribute greatly to the democratizing forces in Indian public life.
In today’s grand masque of resistance, there are many dancers. But autonomous movements expressing the needs of hitherto despised, marginalized, or oppressed social groups, their interests in recognition and social justice, can still be distinguished from coalitions of re-sentiment and spurious victimhood. There are ‘identities’ and ‘identities’….. The NBA, in its site-specific resistance, has confronted the technologies of power in India—from the power dam, which will not benefit them, to the ‘power behind the dam’, those organized to command technologically transformed nature. Alternative—equitable and sustainable—relations in society. At a time when both languages and agencies of emancipatory politics are so contested, so fractured, the modesty of the observant witness may be this documentary’s subtlest gesture.
‘‘Source: Excerpt from Anand Patwardhan’s blogpiece ‘The Camera of Resistance’,
M. F. Husain’s Saraswati
Phase 1: 1996
Dyaneshwar Nadkarni, a well-known Mumbai art critic, publishes a book on Husain which includes a drawing of the goddess Saraswati. It is not a ‘nude’ in the sense of being realistic or sensuous but a stylised line drawing done 20 years ago. In the mid-1970s when the whole ethos of the nation was much less communal, Husain could hardly have imagined he was hurting anybody. It is a recognised convention in Indian art to depict the naked form and plenty of artists have done so over the ages. Even in 1996, with the Sena–BJP alliance in power, the Saraswati still did not obviously strike Nadkarni as being offensive. Today, there are political forces waiting to cash in on just such a situation. In Madhya Pradesh, a pro-Hindutva magazine reproduced the ‘nude’ Saraswati as an example of the blasphemous acts of the ‘Muslim’ Husain. The attack immediately struck a responsive chord. The Hindu psyche has been bred on stories of the ‘Muslim rape of the Motherland’ and it was easy for the Sangh Parivar to whip up a national campaign that culminated in the Bajrang Dal setting fire to Husain’s paintings (none of them ‘offensive’) in Ahmedabad. The vandals were never punished. Husain, terrified as well as mortified, apologised for any sentiments he may have inadvertently hurt, and the matter rested.
Phase 2: 1998
A gallery in Delhi held an exhibition of ‘radical art’ and included a lithograph by Husain done in the early 1980s called ‘Sita Rescued’. This work was previously exhibited by none other than the Bharat Bhavan, Madhya Pradesh, where Husain was honoured with the Kalidas Samman. The work depicts Hanuman and Sita and being a two-dimensional lithograph without shadows or shading, only a pervert or a dedicated seeker of trouble would describe it as ‘nude’ or provocative. But provoke it did. A disgruntled Delhi artist whose own work had been rejected by the gallery brought it to the notice of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. Although the litho had already been removed, the VHP stormed the gallery and injured artist Jatin Das who had requested them to be temperate.
Soon photos of the offending litho mysteriously appeared in the national press leading to the Bajrang Dai’s attack on Husain’s house in Mumbai. Public sympathy for Husain is muted as many think that the artist has deliberately offended Hindu sentiments by painting the goddesses in the nude even after being warned not to do so. Very few news reports have bothered to inform the public about when these works were done and how they came into the public eye.
If anyone is guilty of offending Hindu sentiments surely it is those who chose to give mass circulation and a prurient context to works which would otherwise have remained in relative obscurity. Gods and goddesses are part of religion but they are also part of mythology and folklore. Should all artists, through history, who have painted or sculpted these forms in their natural state be purged, punished and banned? Or, only the Muslim ones?
Neither Husain, nor any other artist controls the destiny of the thousands of works they may have done in their careers. Who knows how much more ammunition remains in the hands of those who are bent on twisting art and religion into a murderous political weapon.
There is a sinister pattern to all this. Last week, Shiv Sainiks disrupted the performance of the ghazal singer Ghulam Ali on the grounds that he was a Pakistani and Pakistan supports terrorism. They didn’t think it was important to know whether Ghulam Ali supports terrorism. What is shocking today is not only that M F Husain is attacked for works he did two decades ago but that the top leadership of the ruling party of Maharashtra has expressed its open support to a clearly criminal act of vandalism. Indeed an editorial in the Shiv Sena mouthpiece Saamna, states in so many words that not only should we hail the Bajrang Dal for breaking into Husain’s house, but we should join in breaking the fingers that dare to paint insulting images of our gods and goddesses. Not just fingers, we should smash in the head that dared to even think of such a sacrilege.
The editorial in Saamna is reminiscent of its headlines and editorials that openly bayed for the blood of Muslims in December 1992 and January 1993. No one was prepared to bell the cat then and Mr Thackeray and his ilk never got sent to jail despite the rabid hate-mongering they did while they were yet to gain power. Now they are in power and their allies rule the country. Who will dare bell the cat? Who will dare speak out?
I do not know M F Husain. Nor do I know Ghulam Ali. I speak not for them but for myself and for all Indians who know that intolerance is a persona that Hitler once donned.
‘‘Source: Excerpt from Anand Patwardhan’s blogpiece ‘Climate of Intolerance’, written in 1998,