I love encountering Dehradun and Mussoorie in Hindi movies. It is supposed to be this wonderful place where the climate is always exotically cool, and depending on the movie, a destination for the glamorous and rich (Teesri Manzil) or the pure of heart (I can’t think of a movie like that right now) who run through verdant fields. Dehradun is a very nice place, but its not quite the stuff of movie imagination.

The Library Bazar, Mussoorie. Probably from 1917. 10 cm x 15 cm, Chromolithograph (Courtesy Priya Paul Collection and Tasveer Ghar)

I’ve always wondered how it got its reputation. And a few months ago I got the chance to find out. I was asked by Tasveer Ghar, a digital network of popular culture, to write an essay based on materials donated by collector Priya Paul. The collection itself is an embarrassment of riches, but my heart skipped a beat when I saw picture postcards from Mussoorie and Dehradun. Yellow with age, almost a hundred years old, with images of places I have known since I first learned that places have names.

The results of my exploration are up at the Tasveer Ghar site.

I spent an afternoon at the Taipei train station with my i-phone. It was a slow, leisurely afternoon for me, but not for the people who had places to go. I love having the luxury of being stationary in a place where everyone else is compelled to move.

This is a little animation I made using my i-phone, a gag software called Hipstamatic and FCP. The music is by Kevin McLeod of Incompetech.com.

We have a new name for the film, it used to be called, ‘Hooch and Hamlet in Chharanagar,’ now its called ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ Kerim redid thewebsite, after we had a couple of our designers fall through. And I finally got around to cutting a trailer.

Scenes from an immigrant’s workers rights I went to yesterday in Taipei.  The theme this year was domestic workers, who want the right to a day off.  David on Formosa has a blog post about the march and immigrant workers in Taiwan.

Every time I see labor contractors in the Foreign Affairs office, they give me the heebie jeebies, they seem like a cross between pimps and petty landlords scared to death of losing their petty privileges, so it was great to attend something where immigrant workers could articulate their concerns.

The visual theme for the protest was slippers, since the Chinese word for slippers 拖鞋, shares its first character to mean ‘delay,’ as in ‘dragging your feet.’  The event ended with the Council of Labor Affairs being pelted with slippers. Me and my friends were in the front of the crowd, the wrong place to be if a crowd is going to be throwing slippers!

This is the first video I shot using the Flip. It was a pain editing it on FCP, and I pretty much had to do it blind, unless I wanted to spend hours rendering it to preview things. I marked in and out points on the audio track and picked an in point on the video and let the chips fall where they may.  Its not the greatest video ever, but it did get done in a couple of hours.

Dude,

I can’t even begin to tell you about all that is wrong with the Hindu references in your article. For starters, there is no such thing as a Hindu Fakir (its an Orientalist Colonial invention) and Shakti iliterally means energy, not fertility (except in  the concupiscent Western imaginarium).  Happy to send you a reading list in the interest of journalistic accuracy.

cheers

A regular reader of this miserable rag

Posted via web from Shashwati’s posterous

NYT story

The Bench from Shashwati Talukdar on Vimeo.

A little video I made with friends Olga Humphrey and John Plenge.

Posted via email from Shashwati’s posterous

Here is a review I did for Dhvani magazine. They have an interview with the author, Shilpa Agarwal. Also look for an interview with the delightful Manjula Padmanabhan. Welcome your comments on the following:

‘Haunting Bombay’ is a supernatural thriller/mystery and a coming of age story. Pinky is a precocious thirteen year old orphan, who lives with her grandmother and extended family. One day, Pinky opens a forbidden door and unleashes a ghost, the vengeful spirit of a dead infant. Subsequently, a fierce haunting ensues and forces the entire family to deal with all that is corroding their souls; all the secrets and prejudices that lurk under the veneer of respectable families living on Malabar Hill.

Its an intricate and complex narrative. Ghosts lurk, grandmothers hobble around being tough matriarchs, and adults in general behave quite badly. There is a huge cast of characters in this extended household, which includes all the servants and the neighbors. And all of them get their arc and back stories. A tall order for any book. It makes for a jam packed narrative which keeps you turning the page to find out what happens next.

Haunting Bombay is smart genre fiction. It follows the imperatives of its genre, with its particular requirment of plot and character. However, it does so with a consciousness of the intellectual work that has gone into the questions that interest the author. And indeed Agarwal acknowledges sources as diverse as Ashis Nandy and Richard Burton. The book explores, very explicitly the postcolonial condition and how class and gender inflect relationships in post-independent India. Some of this exploration is achieved through meticulous research into the materiality of the characters’ lives. We find out details like how the first train service started from Bombay to Thane, and that Cherry Blossom shoe polish was the brand of choice in post-independent India. Sometimes these details are woven seamless into the narrative and sometimes they feel a little more self-conscious. But a lot of care has been taken with these details, and a lot of the pleasure of the book is in these minutiae of everyday life. One trusts the author about things like the cake delivery man on a bicycle, with a tin trunk full of cakes made by an enterprising family in Dharavi. In a sense, a ghost story/thriller is the perfect vehicle for the author’s project. It performs an archeological operation into the psyche of modern India. It may not always do so very effectively, but its exciting that it is being tried.
Another reason to celebrate ‘Haunting Bombay’ is that popular fiction in English, set in India is finally finding a place. There is popular fiction in Hindi and other languages, but the offerings in English have never been that plentiful. The expansion of a popular idiom means that Indian writing in English need not expire on the segregated and rarefied shores of Booker Prize winning High Art. It can finally be a multi-dimensional enterprise. We have our Rushdies and Mistrys, we need our Chandlers and Stephen Kings.

We encounter some Buddhist nuns helping
the farm next door with their peanut harvest.

The dog steals a work glove. Everyone thinks this rudeness is hilarious.

The nuns reward the dog with mango pudding.

“mmmmm mango…!”

Damn Buddhists! plotting to spoil someone elses’ dog next.

“Slumdog Star for Sale” scream the headlines of a British tabloid, News of the World. Across the Atlantic a New York Times reader suggests:

The best thing that could happen to these poor little kids–Rubina and the little boy–would be for them to be adopted out of their terrible family situations…..

There are other people whose hearts bleed even more:

…..If I had the money, I would buy her in a heartbeat. I watched the movie Saturday and my goal in life is to now travel the world and adopt one child from all of the poorest countries. Too bad I can’t have them all.

A documentary critic proclaims:

As horrific and shocking as it is, (the) news……should — most unfortunately — come as no overwhelming surprise.

Presumably because the poor sell their kids into sexual slavery all the time (Note: sexual slavery is immediately assumed) She goes on to suggest we watch ‘Born Into Brothels’ and ‘Highway Courtesan’ to get the Indian perspective.

Piecing the story together, it seems that the tabloid entrapped the family by posing as an Arab couple (being Arab increases the pathology, get it?), and offered to adopt Rubina and pay $300,000 to the family. This exchange took place via a translator since Rubina’s father doesn’t actually speak English. Rubina’s parents are divorced and the relationship between her parents is far from cordial. The mother wants custody of her daughter, the papers say after the film came out, but it could be an ongoing conflict, we don’t know.

There are a couple of interesting things in this story, firstly everyone is outraged at the father for considering adoption. This is hardly unusual, poor people have often given up their kids up to foster care for a time (the example of filmmaker Stan Brakhage comes to mind, he was in an orphanage for a while), and in India, its not unusual for kids to grow up in places other than their parents house – I lived with my aunt for a while, and my brother grew up at my grandparents place. The ideal of the soccer mom based nuclear family is quite recent. Yes, I get it, the proposed exchange of money is what really bothers people and everyone is sickened by the avariciousness of the family. Now if most people look into their family histories, they’re sure to find that uncle who took everything the other siblings should have inherited a fair share of. Yes, its terrible that people are greedy and criminal, but its hardly the province of the poor. So I wish people would take their outrage to where it belongs – a grossly unjust world where some countries are far richer than they deserve to be, and some people have the luxury of taking the moral high ground without every having to interact with the poor.

Finally, I am just outraged that a tabloid would go in and entrap this family to look as bad as possible, and even more outraged that they would do it to a poor, ill-educated family that does not have the means to fight back. But somehow the newspaper reports have glossed over that fact. I am even more sickened by all the well-meaning bleeding hearts who want to take away poor children away from their families. But we’ve seen that before – in Australia with mixed race and Aboriginal children, in Canada with Native American children, in India with the children of so called Thugs (actually they were forcibly sterilized as well) and Criminal Tribes.

Here is what we sent out to all the people who have been so supportive and kind over the course of making this film. You can sign up for our quarterly updates on our website.

HAPPY YEAR OF THE OX!

Over the summer we returned to Chharanagar to record the film sound track, Shashwati edited the 200 hours of footage down to a 3 hour rough cut, together with Henry Schwarz we started a 501(c)3 non-profit to help support India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes, and Kerim wrote an academic paper about the documentary films of Dakxin Chhara. More recently we have been working on the final 90 min cut of the film which we hope to have done by the end of March. If all goes well, postproduction should be done by the end of the year.

RETURN TO CHHARANAGAR

Each time we return to Chharanagar it feels more and more like home. Yet, at the same time, we are made acutely conscious of how rapidly the world we have captured on film has changed while we were away. Some changes were heartbreaking, others were heartening, even inspiring. Because of our focus on audio recording, this trip was a bit different from previous ones. In the past we’ve spent almost all of our time there talking to the actors and their families. This time, however, we wanted to capture the local sounds and extensive musical talent within the community to make a sound track that gives a sense of place. One of our inspirations is this video for M.I.A.’s song, Bird Flu, which we feel captures something important about what it is like to be in such an urban space. (Just saw Slumdog Millionaire and they use M.I.A’s music for a similar effect.)

Since neither of us are particularly talented musically, we looked for some help. We were very lucky to find an excellent musician who not only has experience working on film scores (he’s worked together with Shashwati on other film projects), but who also has experience traveling and working in India. John Plenge doesn’t speak Hindi, but he does speak “music,” and having him there allowed us to explore Chharanagar in a whole new way.

Working with John, we met wedding bands, a dubbing artist who sings vocals for the Gujarati film industry, and heard folk songs sung by women at weddings. I’m not trained in ethnomusicology, but I was struck by how this musical project transformed our experience of the community. Music is always a part of life there, being blasted out of rooftop speakers every day for some wedding, festival, or just because. But not being particularly knowledgeable about music I never would have explored this aspect of life there if it hadn’t been for John.

Another world opened up for us through the participation of John’s assistant, his teenage son John Adam. John Adam was a big hit with the younger members of the community who immediately befriended him. Usually shy and reserved when talking to us, all that disappeared when they were with John Adam. Our last day in Chharangar was “friendship day” but because John and John Adam had to leave early, Shashwati and I had to accept all the friendship bracelets the children had made for John Adam. We were happy to accept, even though we knew it wasn’t really meant for us.

Sadly, our good feelings about being back in Ahmedabad were shattered by the explosion of 21 terrorist bombs around the city while we were there. Although we were safely on the outskirts of the city, we were worried by the possibility of communal violence in retribution for the attacks. Luckily, that did not happen (just as it did not happen after the recent violence in Bombay). Instead, people simply went on with their lives, determined not to be cowed by terror. After a day off to see if it was safe or not, we too returned to work. For anyone who wants to better understand the history of communal violence in Gujarat, I highly recommend Martha Nussbaum’s book, “The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future.”

You can also download a podcast of her lecture on the topic at the University of Chicago’s website.

CARVING A STORY OUT OF VIDEO TAPE

Over the past five years we shot over two hundred hours of tape, all of which Shashwati transcribed, color coded, and cataloged. It may seem like a lot, but unlike a fiction film, where you know the story before you shoot, documentary filmmakers can only have an inkling of where the real drama will lie. Shashwati began by cutting together dozens of individual scenes, each of which holds together on its own, but doesn’t necessarily have a place in the larger story we want to tell. We then reviewed these scenes together and discussed how they would work to tell a story. This was the initial three hour cut we brought with us to Chharanagar. We deliberately kept as much in this version as possible because we wanted to make sure that the film subjects had a chance to respond to each of the scenes in case there were any they felt strongly about, one way or another. In fact, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive, and the only request was that we have more about the effect of the theater on the lives of the actors, something we asked about in our followup interviews while we were there.

Now the biggest task is to take what is now a three and a half hour film and carve out of it a story which is both dramatically engaging, informative, and easy for the audience to follow. The last task is especially difficult considering the large number of characters in the film. Our solution has been to adopt a somewhat traditional three-act structure in which Budhan Theatre itself is the main protagonist – actualized in the lives and struggles of its various members and their families. I don’t want to give too much away, but Shashwati and I are very excited about this structure and hope to have a new cut of the film soon.

A HELPING HAND

In addition to collaborating closely with the community during the production and editing of the film, we also wanted to make sure that once the film is out there is a way for audience members touched by the story to become involved in the community. With help from our co-producer, Henry Schwarz, we founded a 501(c)3 non-profit whose goal is to help India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes. Because we are new to the non-profit world we decided to start small. We have limited our current activities to supporting the Chharanagar library run by Budhan Theatre. This library is much more than a library; its a community center and an informal school as well. But its first and foremost a library – and a very good one at that! It houses a large collection of (mostly donated) books in three languages: English, Hindi, and Gujarati. Each book has been carefully cataloged and given a call number! It costs about US$1000 per year to maintain and we have already successfully raised enough money to keep it running through the end of 2009. Our goal now is to create a more long term solution for funding the library by getting 5 to 20 people to pledge between $50 and $200 a year on an ongoing basis. If you’d like to become a library sponsor, please sign up here:

http://vimukta.org/donate/sponsor

More information about the library (including pictures and video) on the Vimukta website:

http://vimukta.org/2008/09/02/more-than-a-library/

Once we have the library funding secured we hope to expand our program to do other things. Our first priority is to set up a scholarship program for girls. If anyone has experience working with girl’s education in the developing world or underprivileged communities, please contact us.

FUTURE PLANS

We have a lot in store for the next year. We hope to completely redesign our website, choose a new name for the film, upload trailers to the internet, finish work on a book of portraits Kerim shot while in Chharanagar, and begin marketing our film to potential distributors. List members will be the first to know of these developments.

Best wishes for the new year!

Kerim & Shashwati
http://fournineandahalf.com/