Source : Time Out Mumbai ISSUE 20 Friday, May 28, 2010
Nostalgia is a complicated business in Kesang Tseten’s We Homes Chaps, reports Nandini Ramnath
The term “boarding school” invariably has an elitist connotation in India. In no small measure, that’s because of the reputation of such institutions as Doon and Mayo. Doon’s pre-eminence in the Indian schooling system has made it the subject of a ten-part documentary series by social anthropologist David MacDougall, called Doon School Chronicles. Kesang Tseten sets his sights much lower in We Homes Chaps, but the result is no less revealing.
Tseten’s acclaimed documentary is about his alma mater, Dr Graham’s Homes, in Kalimpong in West Bengal. The Homes, as the students call the institution, were as far removed from Doon as Kalimpong is from Dehra Dun. Before it became gentrified some years ago, the Homes were filled with students from marginal communities, underprivileged backgrounds or families in distress. The documentary was shot during the school’s centennial celebrations in 2000. Tseten assembled a group of his classmates and got them to revisit their memories of their schooling years as well as re-examine their relationship with the institution that shaped them.
The Homes were set up in 1900 by Scottish missionary Dr John Anderson Graham to help underprivileged Anglo-Indian children whose British fathers had abandoned them. Over the years, the school-cum-orphanage took in children from various ethnic backgrounds, including Tibetans, Lepchas and Khasis. Seen from a distance, the school presents a pretty picture, but the reminiscences of its students complicate the picture. “The film says something about reality and images,” said 56-year-old Tseten, who lives in Kathmandu. “The boarding school looks terrific, there are nice-looking kids, the location is beautiful… the emotions come out despite the images.”
The poignant flashbacks are not of cruel teachers or sadistic hostel wardens. In between revisiting their old haunts, his friends confront a rush of emotions and, in remarkably candid and often teary-eyed accounts, speak of abandonment, isolation, confusion and rootlessness. “It was like a confession,” Tseten said, whose parents had come to India from Tibet. “There was a sense of reaching back to a point where all of us felt humiliated and weak, of trying to find out how we felt when we were young.”
Several students were too poor to go home for the holidays, and depended on the kindness of strangers who took them in for the vacation. Others struggled to reconcile academic pressures with the knowledge of a missing parent. Many doughty students ended up surviving their traumas. “Some people said, you guys have done very well for yourselves,” Tseten said. “When I look back on it, I realised that it’s actually true.”
Among the films Tseten looked at before making We Homes Chaps was Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March, in which the American filmmaker sets to retrace the footsteps of William Sherman, the American Civil War general who served in the Union Army. Instead, McElwee ends up exploring his own love life. Tseten had been pondering the many meanings of nostalgia for a while before he made We Homes Chaps, and the reunion presented him with the perfect opportunity to explore his thoughts on the subject. “The richest material often comes out of your own autobiography,” Tseten said.
His deep emotional connection with his school seemed to escape the comprehension of his Swiss wife and his friends in the West. “They don’t seem to have the same relationship with institutions as we do in an Indian context,” observed Tseten, who has previously directed On the Road with the Red God: Machhendranath. “Maybe it has to do with the role of an institution as some kind of a saviour, and the gap between where the kid is coming from and where he ends up.”
Tseten shot the film over 10 days, using Ranjan Palit and Reena Mohan as cinematographers. The shoot was a working holiday of sorts for the filmmaker. “I was conscious of the fact that I was making a film, but I also partook in the heightened emotion,” he said. “The consciousness of making a film diminishes when the reality of what you’re trying to do is so alive. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.”
Was the documentary heavy-going at any point? “It was emotional but not heavy,” said Tseten. “There had been many unresolved things, and it was like a lot of cobwebs had been cleared up. How often do we get a chance to reflect on ourselves?”
To order a copy of this and other films by Kesang Tseten, see http://www.ucfilms.in/