Images of the ‘other’ in India

In post-colonial India, the genre of the documentary has been intrinsically tied up with the discourse of development. In the 1950s and 60s, film, television and radio were regarded as catalysts of modernisation, which would involve mass ‘re-education’ through the media, leading to a modern, rational, materialist, democratic culture.

In this discourse of development, ‘tradition’ was constructed as the main enemy; development strategies aspired towards marketing a new set of discourses related to the body, the family, the population, production techniques and the institutions of the State (Monteiro and Jayasankar, 1994). This opened up a space for various ‘experts’, ‘to insert themselves as an “us” (who are middle class/urban/literate), “using” media artefacts to transform a “them” (who are poor/rural/illiterate)’ (Jayasankar and Monteiro, 2000). Documentary filmmakers, under the aegis of the state controlled Films Division, celebrated the promise of modernisation.1 There was little space for dissenting voices and marginal(ised) visions. The dominant format was that of the all-knowing off-screen (usually male) narrator, whose voice flowed on, seamlessly and ubiquitously from beginning to end. These films, shown in cinema theatres all over the country, were mandatory before the main feature – a time used by many in the audience to smoke or eat popcorn!

With the arrival of television, which became a widely dispersed medium in the 1980s, the trend was to broadcast these films as fillers between entertainment programmes or during non-prime time slots. Thus, from the 1950s through the 70s, most Indian documentaries were sponsored by the State or, in a few cases, by the corporate sector. The independent filmmaker was beholden to the State for his/her survival.2 This undoubtedly had implications for the range of issues tackled. By and large, with a few exceptions, Films Division documentaries tended to stick to ‘safe’ subjects like art and culture and to the accepted modes of representation.

The ‘independent’ documentaries

It is only from the mid-seventies, that one sees the gradual rise of the documentary film, which is independent of State patronage (Pendakur 1995). Low budget and made with meagre technical resources, many of these films raised a critique of the dominant politico-economic system. They were not the best in terms of film craft, their modes of distribution were limited, and they were screened largely for interested groups, in community or educational settings. With access to video becoming widespread in the 1980s, there was a boom in independent documentary production and participatory video. Several movements in conflict with the State’s agenda have begun to use video.

Many of the documentaries made in the 1980s tended to look at issues in black and white terms. The film maker became, as it were, a mediating entity who is located outside the relationships of power that (s)he is ‘representing’. Accordingly, sympathetic urban middle class viewers could unambiguously position themselves on the side of ‘the people’, without having to implicate themselves in these processes. The ‘unsympathetic’ could dismiss these films as ‘biased’ rhetoric. In the process, such films set up a clear-cut dichotomy between the ‘good (poor) guys’ and the ‘bad (elite) guys’. The filmmaker becomes an intrepid detective, who reveals these machinations to the public. In many cases the filmmaker’s presence, his/her witnessing the event, is documented (often in cinema vérité, news journalistic fashion) for the general public to see.

Power flows in this genre of film tend to be two-dimensional, with all oppression stemming from identifiable power sources (the elite, the State, the big business...), impinging on people, who are constituted as homogenous cohesive communities, who are always ‘right’, and thus, imbuing political questions with a moral ring. By allying him/herself with the ‘people’, the filmmaker escapes the onus of reflexivity. In most cases, the notion of documentary film as an indexical representation of a given world, and as ‘evidence’, remained unquestioned.

The problem with media representations that work with clearly demarcated categories of oppressor and oppressed is that the average urban viewer (usually already a sympathiser of the cause being espoused by the film) tends not to feel implicated by any of the above categories. It is interesting that in a study conducted by one of the authors in a working class locality in Goa, public awareness messages on television, e.g. on the status of women, which were targeted at specifically at the ‘masses’ by policy planners, were seen as not intended for them by the viewers themselves (Monteiro, 1998). The general tendency was to relay these messages to someone else, ‘more backward’, in need of the emancipatory potential of these messages! At the heart of these relaying processes is a dividing practice (Foucault, 1986), originally employed by the sender, in turn redeployed by the ‘targets’ to invent an ‘other’ to whom these messages could be eternally transmitted, to a no man’s land, for nobody. In effect, the potential of the medium to subvert constituted identities of the viewer (and the filmmaker) goes unutilised. The flows of power inherent in these constitutive practices remain unquestioned.

The decade of the 1990s have witnessed dramatic changes in the media scenario in the Indian subcontinent. Globalisation has brought, in its wake, a proliferation of trans-national satellite networks and a variety of programme genres hitherto unknown in the country. On the one hand, news channels are churning out investigative reports that appropriate the form and content of the documentary as radical ‘evidence’. On the other the sheer boom of visual texts further marginalises the alternative documentary filmmaker. The paucity of broadcasting possibilities within the country tends to push many ‘independent’ documentary filmmakers into a dependence on international television markets for support. The market demand is generally for images from the South that present the other as exotic, oppressed or disaster-ridden. There are pressures, often unacknowledged, to conform to film languages and styles acceptable to international markets.

With all these changes, one also sees the rise of a more reflexive style of documentary film making, where the act of representing the world itself becomes central to the film’s narrative. The space from which the narrative is constructed and the process of construction opens out to the viewer, problematising the relationship between the filmmaker and the subjects and the relationship between the narrative/filmmaker and the viewer (Jayasankar and Monteiro, forthcoming). The conventions of realism, when used, are interrupted and brought into question. This reflexive mode involves formal strategies that question the ‘materiality of the cinematic signifier’ (Wollen, cited in Nichols 1991: 65). It has arisen in the context of movements (feminist, civil liberties, revolutionary struggles and so on) that question the ‘materiality of social practice’ (Wollen, cited in Nichols, 1991: 65). The earlier focus on representing others has, in many cases, been replaced with a turning of the cinematic gaze on oneself and on issues that impinge on one’s life. While some films in this genre seem to work at the level of fashionable navel-gazing, inventing new modes of objectification, there are others, which are able to pull off the attempt to make the personal political. In the Indian context, some of the themes explored by such films are gender relations of power, sexuality and identity, multi-culturalism and globalisation, to name a few.3

Reflections on story making

It is in this context, that we discuss one of our early attempts to grapple with the issue of representing the other. Kahankar: Ahankar could be considered as falling into the genre of ‘ethnographic film’.4 Ethnographic film is closely tied up with the project of anthropology, which Jean Rouch describes as ‘the eldest daughter of colonialism’ (cited in Winston 1993:51), thus foregrounding the inherent relationship of power that informs any encounter between the anthropologist and the other. The ‘linguistic turn’ within post-colonial ethnography, which positions the ethnographer as an author constructing narratives, problematises the relationship between the ethnographer and his/her subjects. In recent ethnographic work, various modes of foregrounding the voices of the other and reflexively interrogating the authorial presence have been explored.

Kahankar: Ahankar (Story Maker: Story Taker) brings together two parallel narratives. The indigenous peoples in India (known as Adivasis), have generally been represented in the media as curios, to be paraded at ‘Festivals of India’ abroad, or as objects of welfare, concern and legislation. Underlying this representation is a perspective that views them as colourful and exotic, ignorant and backward and above all, superstitious. When we thought of ‘documenting’ the stories and paintings of the ‘Warlis’, a community of Adivasis who live close to Bombay, we were concerned about issues of representation and wanted it also to be a film about ‘us’ and our notions of ‘them’. Hence, the film shuttles between two narratives: the stories/paintings which explore the histories and world-view of the Warlis and archival material from the 1830s to the present, which documents the construction of the ‘Warli’ in the discourses of colonial administrators, policy makers, anthropologists, missionaries and others.

A brief historical note would help contextualise some of the themes and stories in the film. The Thane district, inhabited by the Adivasi communities of Warlis, Katkaris, Mahadeo Kolis and Konkanas, has had a chequered history, colonised successively by the Portuguese, the Marathas and the British. The inhabitants of these hilly tracts were primarily hunters and gatherers. The concept of land ownership, as in many other tribal societies, was non-existent. In the 19th century, the British introduced land survey and settlement operations, in the process converting land into a commodity. This led to large-scale in-migration of ‘outsiders’- moneylenders, traders and liquor vendors, which set in motion a process of expropriation and land alienation. The colonial state took over the forests, which were hitherto community resources, thereby endangering the very survival of Adivasis who were dependent on the forests for their subsistence. Their customary practices such as collection of fuel wood and minor forest produce were dubbed as illegal. At the same time, commercial exploitation of the forests was encouraged, causing extensive ecological damage, a situation that continues to the present day.

Around the same period, the colonial government imposed restrictions on the tapping of toddy from palm trees. To Adivasi communities all over the country, toddy was not only food, but had ritual social functions. With the imposition of a tax and the excise restrictions related to its tapping, toddy was slowly replaced by cheap distilled alcohol. The liquor vendors who migrated to these areas amassed tremendous wealth from this trade, leading to widespread indebtedness and large-scale alienation of tribal land. The Adivasis have, by and large, been reduced to wage labour in the orchards and farms of the settlers. There are also ‘factories’ that produce rubber gloves and balloons, employing Adivasi children and women. The film includes two stories that explore this troubled history of expropriation. In the story of the rat (discussed later) the protagonist, who starts off with a thorn in its tail, is able to appropriate ever-increasing wealth. The story of Jum, the god of death tells of how Jum comes to earth in the form of a liquor vendor, bringing death to the Adivasis.

Traditionally, the Warli women paint murals on mud walls for marriages. These murals are called Cauks (a square, literally). They show the goddess of vegetation, Palghata in the central square, flanked by a smaller Devcauk. In the 1960s, these paintings were ‘discovered’ by outside art dealers and gradually men have started painting the Cauks on paper, for sale in big cities and abroad.

The Warlis also have a rich and vibrant story telling tradition. These stories are told by the Thalawala, the village storyteller. Stories are also narrated in other contexts, for instance among cowherds, by parents to children. Women do not indulge in story telling, in public, lest they be branded as witches. Knowledge is the prerogative of the male and women subvert this power by telling stories surreptitiously. Many of these stories make fun of the male order of things. The film also includes a few of these stories (See Box 1).

Our collaborators in this project were the Kashtakari Sanghatana, a left-wing, non-party political organisation, that has been working with the Adivasis, in Thane district of Maharashtra, since 1980, taking up issues related to land, forest, health, indebtedness, wages and cultural identity.

With the spread of universal formal education and a rationality that views their cultural practices as inferior and primitive, the younger generation of Adivasis is becoming alienated from its cultural roots. Many traditional forms of cultural expression are gradually becoming extinct. It is in this context that Kashtakari Sanghatana felt the need to compile the stories of the Warlis and promote various modes of disseminating them. With the help of a local artist to illustrate the stories in the Warli painting ‘idiom’, Kashtakari Sanghatana has generated a body of work that it uses in its workshops with Adivasi youth. These profound and universal stories reveal an alternate, subaltern ‘history’. The stories chosen for the film foreground various relations of power, between the Adivasi and the ‘outsider’, between men and women.

A crucial thematic the film explores is the notion of ownership/authorship of material wealth /cultural artefacts. It was the absence of a regime of private property among the Warlis and other indigenous peoples in the country that led to the expropriation of their land and later their cultural wealth. The story telling traditions point to a different way of conceptualising time and space as non-linear and unreified. One of the stories in the film narrates the ‘journey’ of a rat. The rat starts with a thorn in its tail. He requests a woman to remove the thorn with her sickle. In the process, the tip of his tail breaks off. In compensation he demands the woman’s sickle. He lends the sickle to basket makers. The sickle breaks and he gets the baskets. Thus continues his relentless journey of expropriation and accumulation of wealth, ending in his taking away the Adivasi’s wife. While making Kahankar: Ahankar, there were moments when the authors felt acutely conscious of their position as rats with a camera!

The title story of the film, Kahankar: Ahankar, on the other hand, is a metaphor for the empowering potential of alternative discourses, of story telling. The Kahankar (Story maker) and Ahankar (Story taker) go off to the forest. They are so engrossed in their stories that they die of hunger. Some villagers from a nearby village come across their bodies and bury them. The wives of Kahankar and Ahankar come looking for them and discover their graves. They devise a way of distinguishing between the remains of their husbands. When immersed in water, the bones of the Kahankar, who gave of his stories, float. The bones of the Ahankar, heavy with the weight of stories, sink. While acknowledging the relationship of power that enables the authors to ‘document’ these stories, a process that is perhaps inherent in any act of ethnographic representation, the film Kahankar: Ahankar also attempts to explore their subversive potential. It inhabits the uneasy space between story makers and story takers.

1. See Pendakur 1995 and Barnouw & Krishnaswamy 1980, for more details about Films Division.

2. Refer to Barnouw & Krishnaswamy 1980, pp. 194-6, for an account of how Films Division effectively hindered the development of independent documentary production, creating a situation, where all documentary producers were dependent on its patronage.

3. An earlier version of the first two sections of this article appeared in Seminar, 466 (June 1998) under the title ‘The Film-maker as Activist’.

4. Kahankar: Ahankar (Story Maker: Story Taker), 38 mins. directed by K.P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro, produced by Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, in collaboration with Kashtakari Sanghatana, 1995. The stories have been compiled by Shiraz Bulsara and Pradeep Prabhu and painted by Bhimsen Kondya Koti.

References

Barnouw, E. and S. Krishnaswamy (1980). Indian Film. Oxford: OUP.

Foucault, M.(1986). Afterword: The Subject and Power. In: Dreyfus, H.L. and Rabinow, P (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Sussex, Harvester Press.

Jayasankar K.P. and A. Monteiro (2000). Media, Power and Identity: Critical Media Education for Students of Social Work. In: The Indian Journal of Social Work, 61 (2): 240-254.

Jayasankar K.P. and A. Monteiro (forthcoming). Documentary and Ethnographic Film. In: International Encyclopaedia of Social and Behavioural Sciences. Oxford, Elsevier Science.

Monteiro, A. and K.P. Jayasankar (1994). The Spectator-Indian: An Exploratory Study on the Reception of News. In: Cultural Studies, 8(1): 162-182.

Monteiro, A. (1998). Official Television and Unofficial Fabrications of the Self: The Spectator as Subject. In: Nandy, A. (ed.), The Secret Politics of Our Desires. Oxford, OUP.

Monteiro, A. and K.P. Jayasankar (1998 a). ‘The Film-maker as Activist’. In: Seminar, 466: 99 (June 1998).

Nichols, B. (1991). Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

Pendakur, M. (1995). Cinema of Resistance- Recent Trends in Indian Documentary Film, Paper presented at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.

Winston, B. (1993). The Documentary Film as Scientific Inscription. In: Renov, M. (ed.) Theorizing Documentary. London, Routledge.

K. P. Jayasankar is Reader (Production) and Anjali Monteiro is Professor and Head, Unit for Media and Communications, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Both of them are involved in media production, teaching and research. Jointly they have won ten national and international awards for their videos. These include the Prix Futura Berlin 1995 Asia Prize for Identity - The Construction of Selfhood and a Special Mention of the Jury at the Mumbai International Film Festival 1996 for Kahankar: Ahankar.