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Saba Dewan with Sabina Gadihoke

Introducing Saba Dewan

Having a look at all of Saba’s work again, was quite an amazing journey for me. It became a way of tracking what has happened in the documentary movement in this country over the last twenty years. If you look at her body of work, I think they are very significant because they are actually marking out all the changes that have happened. The other very interesting thing that is happening with her films is that they are also looking at a certain trajectory of the women’s movement and the way in which issues have actually changed over the last few years.

I know that there are some formalistic issues that will come out today, issues to do with the form of the documentary, issues to do with representation, with gender, sexuality and performance and these are very key issues that Saba’s films actually address.

Saba Dewan studied filmmaking at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre ’85-’87 and at that time the only documentaries that were screened were Films Division documentaries, in a large way. The reason I am saying this is because I’m giving you a certain context: to put her work into that context. When we started in Jamia there were really no documentaries for us to watch. We didn’t have the privilege and the access that you have today with documentary. We were hungry for whatever came our way, but I have to say that we were very lucky to have teachers and mentors there who actually allowed us to experiment.

Saba and Rahul (together they have made some of their early films and share a filmmaking history together) started their careers where the only references around us were films of protest. This was a moment in documentary where there was only one kind of film made and that was the film of protest.

So I remember all of us watching Anand Patwardhan’s ‘Bombay Hamara Shahar’ and being quite struck by the film, there was Tapan Bose and Suhasini’s films, films made by Manjira Datta and Meera Dewan. These were the references around us at that time and this was the only way to make a documentary. So the content was the most important thing, you were reacting to a crisis in the state, you were reacting to issues that you saw around you and those were the kinds of films you made.

Their first two films, ‘Dharamyudh’ and ‘Nasoor’, were actually reacting to a very fraught communal politics of that time. The ‘80’s were also a time when the only funding for documentary began to be from international agencies and NGO’s and I remember they made these two long series, one of which was on women and agriculture called ‘Invisible Hands Unheard Voices’. I call those monumental films because they were this endless series of films and it required them to travel all over the country. I think something very important came out of that interaction at the grassroots and that politics and going all over the country and I hope we will pick up on that when we get into our questions.

In 1994, Saba and Rahul made a very different film. I am talking of  ‘Khel’, one of my personal favorites, which to my mind has not been given enough attention.  ‘Khel’ , which means play, explored the psychic and inner worlds of women that had chosen a spiritual path. It was a film about women who were working outside of normative roles, women ascetics, women wanderers, women of the forest, Yogini’s: there were many different names for these women. It was also looking for a certain kind of a forgotten history and in that sense I think  ‘Khel’  is a very interesting film because it links up with her later trilogy, where you are also hunting for some kind of an erased history, so in that sense there are similarities between  ‘Khel’  and the trilogy.

Her trilogy ‘The Other Song’ has got the first prize at the International Film Festival at Pusan, 2009. It is an extremely skilled film about the forgotten tawaif, the woman courtesan. But two films that actually became part of this journey before this film were ‘Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi’ and ‘Naach’ that led up to the other song. In some ways if The other song is posing the question “What happened to the tawaif?”. These two films are actually the contemporary answer to that question and yet they raise many more issues.

In 1999, she made ‘Bundelkhand Express’ about a labour train that would pick up workers and children from impoverished areas in Southern UP, and take them in search of work. In 2001, she turned the camera on herself with an intensely personal film, ‘Sita’s Family’ that picks up some of the strains of inner worlds and exploring subjectivity that had actually started in  ‘Khel’ .

It’s a very significant film because it’s a first person film in a history of documentary in India where the autobiographical voice has always been a very submerged one. For various reasons filmmakers have been very reticent, till recently, to actually talk about themselves and to turn the camera at themselves. It’s also a very important film because for a very long time, for similar reasons, non-fiction film was far more comfortable with exploring external realities out there and not looking at subjectivity and inner worlds and interiority. It’s also a significant film because it is articulating silences about what cannot be spoken of, within ones most intimate experiences, which is the family. And yet it is not a self-indulgent film, because it is one that is imbedded in a larger politics.

There are patterns that I see in Saba’s body of work, concerns about gender and sexuality, an interest in looking at women on the margins, most of her films focus on a search for lost histories, many of them are structured around a journey, sometimes exterior sometimes interior. These journeys are never romantic or nostalgic, they are always very fraught journeys, sometimes pleasurable, sometimes painful and yet they are always very transformative in the kinds of insights they offer to us about our presence.

Sabina Gadihoke: Let us start with some of the early advocacy films you were making, ‘Dharamyudha’, ‘Nasood’, it was a particular moment of documentary filmmaking and how did that contribute to your work?

Saba Dewan: ‘Dharamyudha’ was actually one of the very first films that we made that came out when we had just graduated from Jamia. As has been the case with many of my films, I have shot them maybe five years before and then I edit them many many years down the line.

The first film I actually shot was ‘Nasoor’, but I couldn’t get a hang of ‘Nasoor’, I couldn’t figure out what to do with it, so ‘Nasoor’ was left on the backburner and ‘Dharamyudha’ followed the course.

At that time it seemed like such innocent times, because the Babri Masjid was still there, it was very much a disputed structure. Vishwa Hindu Parishad was seen as part of a lunatic fringe, perhaps they still are (hopefully) but they were an obscure group trying to find a foothold.

What we did was follow these VHP leaders in their little hate campaigns, through the Kasbahs and the little towns of UP. I think we had a great advantage at that time, both of us were 24 and perhaps we didn’t look particularly serious, or maybe we were thought of as too young and came across as impressionable. So we traveled everywhere with them and ‘Dharamyudha’ got done. Of course it wouldn’t have been done without the kind of support that MCRC provided for the making.

After that Rahul and I got involved in making a lot of these films for Jamia, we were the resident producers there and also the resident travelers. There was a huge project that came through from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research to document women’s role in agriculture.

We were told of a conference that we had to attend on the impact of technology on the women workers in the agricultural sector and both of us were completely horrified! We couldn’t think of anything more tedious, boring and here we were basking in the glow of ‘Dharamyudha’ and then to women’s role in agriculture.. just shows our limitations (in terms of lack of knowledge) The point is, as films alone, those are immensely forgettable.

We made a whole series of films out of those. We just kept shooting and we traveled all over the country for that one year. As far as films are concerned I don’t think they merit much discussion, but yes they did very significant things. This was my first foray in rural India and for all my feminism (the level at which I understood and engaged in at that time) I had absolutely no clue I realized. I had no clue what women in rural India faced. What were the issues of landless women, what were the issues of women engaged in subsistence economies, in tribal areas or the rice growing economies? I think it was this thing of throwing these two kids into the wild and we just went along, we had a wonderful mentor at that time, not a filmmaker, Veena Mazumdar who is a Dion of the women’s movement and who guided us along. I think the echoes of those journeys then can be seen in my later films. Because there are certain areas that I was to visit over and over and over again, say the Bundelkhand area, where I have done a lot of my work.

Bharat Jan Vigyan Jatha was yet another thing where they had these four Jathas from different parts of the country and they would converge in Bhopal to mark the anniversary of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. We traveled with one such Jatha from Srinagar to Bhopal and had a lot of fun, but made a terrible film. But again we learnt a lot. It was a real preparation for us in terms of evolving a sort of political understanding of the many many realities around us and to realise that there were multiple realities and one was always sifting through them. Of course also culturally it helped getting a sense of the huge country that lay before us.

The next film, ‘Khel’  1994, marks a very sharp departure from this kind of filmmaking. I was struck by the similarities with a film like ‘’ ‘Eyes of Stone’ ‘’, which was a very significant film at that time, that all of us had watched. It was one of the early films that were actually out of the political mode of protest kind of film that we had been used to. Both films in some way are actually exploring a certain kind of a feminist subjectivity, which a normative psychoanalysis or a rational science cannot explain.

So here we are moving away from the terrain of the rational, which we are kind of used to with our women in agriculture or even a film like ‘Dharamyudha’ or ‘Nasoor’. You’ve got facts, your telling those facts and that’s it. But  ‘Khel’  is straddling this very interesting slippery ground where what is fact and what is not fact is all blurred. I am not talking about just in terms of the content, but also in the way its been shot.

Talk about that journey and what it is that you were trying to do with  ‘Khel’ .

‘Khel’  actually came to me at a point when I was thoroughly bored of the work that I had been doing. I had been working from’88 to ‘94, which is a good six years and I could list out many pages in my resume if I had to enlist all the films that I had done till that point in time – I don’t even remember them.

There were loads and loads of advocacy films, educational ones, all kinds of films that Rahul and I worked on. I stand by them because I think they all helped. We got to know what was bad through our own work. It was an exercise, by doing shoddy work you got to know what to avoid what not to do. That’s all very well in hindsight but at that point of time I was deeply distressed as to where I was headed for and what I was doing as a filmmaker.

And it is very interesting because  ‘Khel’  was very very different from ‘ ‘Eyes of Stone’ ‘, but ‘ ‘Eyes of Stone’ ‘ really was the catalyst, because I saw it in ‘92 and I was completely bowled over by it. I had never seen a film like that. And it depressed me beyond reason, I mean I was completely depressed because I looked at my own body of work and it made me think and gave me that push.

I saw something that was so so wonderful, it was absolutely stunning. I have used it occasionally and I’ve taught script writing and iv still used it and I’m still struck by what an amazing film it is.

It set me thinking about re-questioning my own positions. I was doing a film at that time on domestic violence and it was pretty much like the kind of things I had done. Three case studies, one woman from the urban, one from a rural sphere, one upper class, one middle one lower and you had an argument worked out, all segments were covered and points were being made. Not surprisingly this was funded by the Department of Women and Child.

The film got made and nothing to speak home about. But one of the women took us on her own journey, she didn’t feature in the film on domestic violence but she was this woman I had met in Bandha as part of the other advocacy work I used to do with Mahila Samka. She was called Shanthi and had a history of domestic violence and abuse and all of that. I thought I’d shoot with her to be a part of this film.

We went there and I realized to my horror that Shanthi, who I thought I knew rather well, because I met her over a couple of films that I had done in that area, just refused to be filmed. She just sat there. Now of course if I were shooting with her today, I would have shot with her anyway. I would have just sat with her and shot that but I didn’t because I didn’t know better: I wanted action, I wanted interview, I wanted her to explain to me. What had happened? I wanted that story; I wanted that story of domestic violence. I didn’t know better that there were other ways of telling the story and there were other aspects of this story, and that maybe this was an exercise in deducing things that I was doing with Shanthi as a filmmaker.

So I came back and I was very annoyed with her but something about her and the few days that I had shot with her kept bothering me after I went back. And subsequently of course, I just got hooked about what was happening there.  It was not a story just about domestic violence I think. No story is. There are always so many layers, these are very complex terrains: and that is how  ‘Khel’  started,

It started by looking at a woman and her whole attempt to keep a certain space within herself autonomous, and the repeated intrusions and violent violations of that space. From there it grew into a journey of looking into this Yogini cult and I didn’t even know about that! Also documentaries are a lot about luck. These are things that I couldn’t have possibly planned, I was not so bright to think like that.

Shanthi happened, so as luck would happen, and she had this whole history of actually wanting to be a Yogini, or a priestess, to Baram Dev, whom she said she had dedicated herself to since childhood. She didn’t want marriage, she was forced into marriage so it was kind of a Mirabai story, or so I thought.

Then I started looking at the other kinds of female spiritual experiences and got interested in the Yoginis. Yoginis in the Sanskrit texts led me to these Yogini temples which were in Bundelkhand, and which I didn’t know about. It was all working out so wonderfully, because there were the Yogini temples and no one knew that and there were some scholars that had done work on them and mapped them out.

I had been working as part of my earlier work on women and agriculture with coal tribal women who are from this whole Banda region and for once I sat down and I said tell me all about it. In Sanskrit texts you had references to these Yogini’s as the forest dweller. It was really fascinating because I was talking to these Mahila Samakhya people who said they don’t want to encourage superstition amongst them because I kept talking about possession and what it is all about and how they are seen in the women’s world view and in a religious context and so on.

And so in bits and pieces the film came together and there was so much I didn’t know and I didn’t understand: so it wasn’t like ‘ ‘Eyes of Stone’ ‘. ‘ ‘Eyes of Stone’ ‘ is looking at a classic thing in terms of working within the theory of oppression and looking at the woman and the way she has created herself.  ‘Khel’  I don’t think does that because there are so many things about peoples’ experiences that cannot be understood or explained fully ever.

I think as a filmmaker what interests me is just to have a glimpse of that. Perhaps to start finding some parallels at an emotional level and to experience them. If I can convey that at some level, that feeling – through an image or a sound, that is where my skills as the filmmaker come in. Not necessarily being able to explain it, because I’m not probably equipped to do that at times.

I’m not sure that you didn’t know how to explain but perhaps you realized through  ‘Khel’  that something’s couldn’t be explained through this rational framework. There are some of these subjective experiences that cannot be explained away by History or Genealogy, in a rationalist kind of way.

Why was I choosing to move away from this neat happy world that I had of funded films? I was considered a very good filmmaker within that circuit. Watching a film like ‘ ‘Eyes of Stone’ ‘ made me realized how unfounded my claims to that could be. It was a really big shock because I had come out from film school and had done rather well for myself, or so I thought.

Six of seven years down the line I was in a lot of distress and emotionally I was not doing very great. At the same time I was also trying to understand the emotional world of Shanthi. Just as my world could not be explained away in terms of an – Oh poor thing she had visions of grandeur about herself in terms of filmmaking and it didn’t quite work out – because it was obviously more complicated than that and there were of course many other issues which even I didn’t know.

The fact that I couldn’t be so sure about myself, with all the therapy and everything in the world that there was for me within the rationalist mould. None of that could convince me about giving all the answers, so how could I say that about x y or z?

What to my mind the great work of  ‘Khel’  was that it was able to translate some of the things you are saying at the level of form. I think there was a very interesting thing that was done with form in  ‘Khel’ . I am talking of this whole business of exploring – the non-rational world, the world of subjectivity, the world of interiority that you then pick up in ‘Sita’s Family’ later, a film that turns at yourself. I think some of those attempts are being made very early on in  ‘Khel’ , so I want you to talk a little about that.

For instance in  ‘Khel’ , for the first time I am seeing, which is not in ‘ ‘Eyes of Stone’  actually, the use of constructed sequences, which was not being done in documentary at all, so I just want you to little bit dwell on that.

There is no comparison between ‘ ‘Eyes of Stone’ ‘ and  ‘Khel’ . ‘Eyes of Stone’  is a wonderful film and  ‘Khel’ : in terms of form has two very different approaches.

‘Eyes of Stone’  comes from the classical American observational approach: my work has never been observational in that sense. I use verité lot, but there is always my own subjectivity that has fore grounded those films. I use a lot of ethnographies, but again those ethnographies are tampered with my own ethnography somewhere, making that negotiation obvious. So  ‘Khel’  in that sense is a mélange because I didn’t know ‘o’ for observational and ‘r’ for reflexive at that time in my career.

I hadn’t read about all that. Rahul and I were just discovering grammar for ourselves, or maybe because we didn’t know any grammar we were very free of the language of cinema and we could break the rules. For instance, in order to go into the world of the Yoginis, there are some images that have been used in the film, which I will never do now and I have never done again because they are grammatically all wrong.

These kind of hallucinations are constructed images which if I were to do today, I would think if I could just root them or pin them into some reality so that there is still some kind of an echo of that reality. But I didn’t have such constraints of knowing better for  ‘Khel’  and so they were used and I think they worked to some extent.

We also used a narration with constructed images and a lot of music that I had only seen that in Films Division. I then thought to myself O God! In my whole act of redeeming myself as a filmmaker, will I end up making a Films Division film?

But I think it did work because somewhere it was just the point of that moment and the way things were happening to us and there was so much that overtook us at that point. We had this really great energy, of ourselves as filmmakers seeking, and of the women that we were meeting, I always believe that  ‘Khel’  is a very tripped out film.

The next film is a fun film, a wonderful feel good film, about a group of adolescent girls being taken for a trek out of their immediate surroundings. I was struck by how skillfully it’s able to do something that is very difficult in documentary. It takes you through this range of emotions so at one moment it is fun and then suddenly there is a thread of eroticism somewhere and then suddenly there’s a dark moment in the film. So was ‘Barf’ just a film about a trek?

When I was making ‘Barf’ actually I was back in territory that I knew best, it was an NGO funded film. I was absolutely broke after  ‘Khel’  and it was in the making for three years where this very minor part of it got funded but for the rest of it, I needed the money.

Action India approached me and said that they have an adolescent girl program and would you like to document it. But at that time I knew better, so I agreed, but on my own terms and I said lets make a real film out of it.

They worked with these working class girls in these so called re-settlement colonies of Delhi, which were more like working class ghettos that were created during emergencies where working class people were uprooted from main parts of the city and put on the outskirts. So the film was looking at issues of gender, sexuality and class.

I was researching with them for a long long time. That I do. I think I invest a lot on research always. I also procrastinate shooting a lot, but I really enjoy it. It is also a process of just being with the subject and absorbing it at many levels, reading, talking to people and all of that.

‘Barf’ was at a level about trekking because literally these girls hadn’t gone out anywhere. I had a series of workshops with them, as part of my research and I remember asking them what they would like to do if they had a day free (they were cooking, cleaning, looking after younger siblings and spending the entire day as stand by’s for their mothers) and almost all the girls said we would just play, up in the snow fields. This kind of struck me a very Bollywood Yash Chopra image, playing in these snow-capped mountains and to me this was the essence of desire, young female desire.

I just wanted to capture a glimpse of that desire that gets fettered up or chained up so early in life and before we can even savor it or enjoy that sexuality.. What is this image of playing in the snow? There is a child there, but it is also a strong fantasy.

So I came up with the idea of the trek because that’s what excited the filmmaker in me. I was in a way creating a verite situation for myself. I was just throwing the girls and myself into a situation that none of us knew, although we knew each other very well. So yes it was exciting cinematically and it had a lot of possibilities and a negotiation of a reality because none of us knew what was going to happen. It also became a metaphor; snow was the metaphor of reaching out for your desire.

You use different kinds of strategies while making your films, so there is a little bit of observational, there’s constructiveness, there’s verite and there’s all of that working with your films. This is more of a question about scriptwriting. Still, there are these moments in documentary that you can go on scripting forever and yet there is this other unexpected moment, which is always so wonderful about documentaries.

In a film like ‘Barf’, how much of it had you scripted? How much of  ‘Barf’ could you tell would happen? How much of those unexpected moments did you anticipate and how much, as a filmmaker did you actually set up? When I say set up I don’t mean actually stage them, but as a filmmaker did you hope to precipitate a certain reaction?

Scripting for films always depends on the kinds of films. The genres that I have worked with, have always been selected in terms of the way a story was unfolding with me. For a film like Barf, which was exercise in verité, I couldn’t script it. What I did know was that I knew all the girls very well and I knew what to expect from them  in Delhi- but I dint know what to expect from them during the journey. I had no idea about how it would unfold.

There were so many surprises, some of the great enthusiasts for this trip were one of the first ones to sit down and bawl. I wanted to join them and bawl myself because had I known how difficult it is to shoot a trek for ten days! You walk for fifteen kilometers lugging all that equipment, I wouldn’t have thought of it.

Poor Ashish, the sound recordist had to walk with that boom and keep pace with everyone and I remember one night, he declared that he will never shoot on a mountain again, it was really the toughest film physically that we had shot.

So there was not much I could have anticipated or scripted. All I knew is that I had these expectations – a set of issues that I wanted to explore with the girls, as I knew their life stories. There were ways in which I wanted to pose these questions but I couldn’t even decide on the space that I could pose these questions, or what would be a good time, these were the things I could not predict. I had not been there myself and I couldn’t afford a reckie for the trek.

Even within ‘The Other Song’ we see a very skillful use of ethnographies, oral histories photographs, voices, recordings and it is an extremely well structured well put together highly controlled film. But here, there are those unexpected moments that are wonderful.

In some ways that‘s the film you probably started with when you were making  ‘Khel’ , it was almost that time when the film was conceived and it took eight years in the making. I want you to talk a little about that journey that you went through before you actually completed the final film.

When I finished  ‘Khel’  I was interested in looking at these feminine spaces, which I can’t say are autonomous. That’s a romantic notion and an ahistorical notion and I don’t think I subscribe to that. They do stand on the margins of patriarchy, always negotiating this very thin possibility of a certain autonomy of experience and it’s always a struggle. I was interested at that time at looking at the tawaifs.

Maybe its because I was also brought up in an all girls school, I have also gone to a coed school and college, but the all girls school was one of the happiest moments of my life. So I liked exploring the possibility of all women spaces, beyond the romantic or celebratory notion. They give immense possibilities to us as women to explore power dynamics between women. If the men are out of it, how the women negotiate things and what the flow of power is like.

The other song was something that was in my head. At that time I got a small grant to do a research on HIV aids and women in prostitution – that was not a film, it was more of a research report. It was there that I met a few women from tawaif backgrounds.

I came to it after I finished ‘Sita’s Family’ and I felt the time was right for me to do it. I gave in proposals for the research and got the grants for it in 2002. The issue that I was looking at was the relationship between the art of the tawaif and her sexuality.

What are the issues related to the sexuality of the tawaif? How is it constructed? Is there something about that sexuality that is represented in the art? Do the arts reflect something? Are they showing us something?

If ‘Barf’ was punishing physically, ‘The Other Song’ was very difficult in other ways. No one wanted to speak to me. I thought I was very good with people and negotiating spaces and creating new spaces. But here they had so much history of being stigmatized, why would they want anyone to come at their doorsteps and say I want to talk to you.

So it was just the act of building a trust and getting them to talk to you and then getting them to agree to being filmed that took very long.

There is this very interesting way in which the characters move in and out of each film. Shammi, for instance first appears in Delhi- Bombay- Delhi and then appears in Naach and then Naach in turn introduces you to what will come in ‘The Other Song’ because it’s already touching upon the world of a courtesan. So it is kind of leading clues that give off on what is coming up.

In some ways the courtesan is one of the most over represented characters we see today, even when we look at Bombay fictional cinema. We already know what the courtesan is, although I do know that it’s a lost history and erased history, but we already know what the courtesan is.

So you are dealing with an area where there is also an over representation of the city of Benares, which is probably the most photographed city in India. As a filmmaker you are already coming against a block as you are looking at something that people already have a notion of. So in terms of representation, was there a particular way you were looking at to represent this world, differently, or otherwise.

I think the issue of representation is something I carried with me much more in the initial part of my research. Once I was within this world, I formed these friendships and relationships with a lot of the women who were in this film. Then this issue was non-existent because the women I was negotiating with and the lives they were leading had references to Hindi films only in terms of certain things, in their repertoire for instance and the singing of Hindi film songs or the readymade clichés that they give to newcomers (I had not wanted to do this, I am a victim of circumstance, all this bullshit was borrowed straight from Bollywood and given to unsuspecting journalists) beyond that there was no other allusion to the Bombay film industry in the fiber of their life. Their life doesn’t figure in the Bombay films, and that shows that there has been no study on ethnography and working with them.

So I didn’t have to think about the terms of how to represent the tawaifs. I didn’t have to bother about that because they are what they are. Even in the photographs that I have, there is hardly any resemblance of these women with their straight proud looks, with say, Rekha. So they automatically took care of that issue, with their own persona.

Benares however, was an issue. Every time I would shoot the ghats, there would be two or three foreign crews also shooting. In fact I have used a shot in the film in which there is someone else shooting and I capture that in my shot. Yes that did bother me but therefore I was looking at parts of Benares that are not explored so much. A musicians Benares, but a more humble one. Which is why I don’t have Azans in my film, they are an easy marker.

I tried to cover areas where population is largely more of Muslim musicians, and these are not the crumbling beautiful havelis of Benares. In the film I have consciously chosen to show a side of Benares that is not often seen. It was also a way in which I was rupturing the whole text of Benares the great Hindu city. The tawaif is always present in the great narratives of Benares, there is no escaping that.

What I did do was focus on how I am looking at the courtesan now. In the history of Benares, the Tawaif has been moved from a Bai to a Devi and she’s been cleansed out and we have Khumris which even respectable gents an ladies listen to in a drawing room.

But these are the same women who sang songs that nobody wants to hear now. In that sense the history of Benares is being looked at in different ways.

The voice-over again is also playing a very interesting role. Going back to  ‘Khel’ , it is not a voice of certainty; it’s a very interesting way in which the voice is weaving in many things. I want you to talk a little about the scripting and here I mean, in terms of the voice over.

I was not sure about how I would frame it because the film took so long to be made; it saw four editors go through it. I would run out of inspiration, run out of money and so on. It was very difficult for me to crack this one.

When you talk of representation, it was not Bollywood representation that I was grappling with. It was simply that I had some very interesting characters who said very nice things and they are very strong and engaging, but is that enough? All those issues would literally block me out.

At that point of time what was coming through was ethnography and Benares and looking at it, it really looked like I was making something for Discovery. At that time there was no voice over, and I was loath to use voice over because I hate writing narrations.

I was so liberated in Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi or in Naach where I know there is no scope for a voice over because of the way in which I have shot it.

I think somewhere in the film I was trying to get myself out, getting my material speak for itself. The point is that I didn’t want a voice over. The story that was coming to me was the history: why did the tradition die the way it did. That was the point I was trying to look at ways of saying.

I already had this story of about Rasoolun Bai, as part my of research way back when I was just starting the film. A friend of mine at Jadavpur University, who teaches English Literature there and is also an archivist, had spent a lot of time and found the original version for me.

I knew that there were so many songs that have been sanitized and been changed as they have gone along. Some of it is a very natural process and it’s very organic, but some of these had politics attached to it, it was a deliberate attempt. Once that came about there was no escaping the voice over, I had to do it.

Once I decided to the voice over the other stuff of telling the story of cultural nationalism and all of that came in. I wrote many drafts where I first started with an attempt to do a third person ambiguous thing where it is not very clear if it’s the filmmaker or someone else, because I do feel very embarrassed and very shy.

But slowly there was no running away from the fact that I was the one searching for it. I was the one who was all hooked up about this so I had to talk about it. But it did end up sounding terribly self-conscious and dreadful. That’s when this conversation thing came up.

Over these years, what has sustained me, between finding the inspiration and money to do films is all these wonderful conversations with my friends and a lot of wonderful people who became my friends along the way. All kinds of people, who I didn’t know before and who have really enriched this project.

In the voice over, we are constantly negotiating different realities, and therefore addressing different people. When I started off, I was thinking of it as a device, it was serving me well as a filmmaker. But when I started writing, I started enjoying myself and I started looking at it as if I was having a conversation with the tawaif.

This essentially becomes a film of lost desire or negotiating a very difficult arena of feminist history. It is also a look at my history as a middle class woman and the histories of the other. It’s a very thorny terrain because we haven’t at many times alluded with morality and we are constructing the other in many ways – the other of the other actually, the woman herself is the other.

It eventually became a dialogue between a middle class woman and a tawaif, looking at two sets of histories. The demise of the tawaif then coincides with the emergence of the middle class woman.

In many ways ‘Sita’s Family’ came trudging back into this film and in ‘The Other Song’, Sita comes back to the film.

How important is it for you to implicate yourself in your films?

There is no running away from yourself, in any film. Even if it is a film on something like a clean water project. All those films in some way are reflecting us, in those points, and where we are. I firmly believe that every film is a clue to the soul of the filmmaker.

In my own films, it’s not a conscious film where I deliberately say that I have to be in the film, because I already am in the film in terms of the way in which I do it. There are films like Barf and Naach or Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi where my obvious presence is not there but since (that is the problem that my camera person and my sound recordist always had) I talk so much with my subjects where I have these conversations going on so many times, that I’m there. My presence is very much there and I am acting like a certain catalyst for those moments to even happen. Also the encounters between the subject and the camera are in many ways documented in the film.

In films like  ‘Khel’, ‘Sita’s Family’ or ‘The Other Song’, I am present in a very obvious sense of an “I” but it is not as though I am absent in the other films.

Audience: Is there a definitive idea of the other or is that such a vague notion?

The other is very much built into power structures. We are constantly “othering” others at various levels. People who are not like us, who don’t come from the same class or the same background, become the other. Within patriarchy the woman becomes the other of the man.

It is the process where there is “us” and we define what is normative and then there is the “other” who defines what is different and what is exotic. Usually the other tends to be stereotyped because we cannot understand them completely, so we take easy ways in which we can try to understand them and put notions of understanding on them. That is the classic process of othering.

So the tawaif is the other of the other: she cannot belong to us because her sexuality is not that which patriarchy upholds, as being normal, for women. So she becomes the other.

We need to have that humility that there are spaces that need to be understood and validate those spaces as that is the only way in which there would be journeys to understand and negotiate those spaces, respectfully. Otherwise we end up putting people in blocks and saying: I understand them because they have these certain popular characteristics.

Documentary as a mode till recently was meant to do just that: to package everything for you and remove all complexity. In some ways when you are making films about real people and their multiple realities, how can u possibly in a box explain it all?

It is only when you admit that there are spaces of ambiguity and spaces of not knowing, maybe someone else will transverse those spaces. Otherwise if you have reduced everything to a readers digest form of knowing everything, there’s nothing left to know.

In tawaif households, young boys are brought up to be errand boys for their sisters or aunts or mothers. Boys are a very neglected lot in classic tawaif families. It is really an inversion; they are denied education which most of the girls get. They are given no skills, but the girls do get them.

One of the biggest traditional debates in feminist film theory had been that of the gays. The question of objectification, commodifiaction, this is an argument that is being used constantly especially in terms of sex workers. Yet in Naach, there is a very interesting way in which this objectification is being turned on its head because what we are looking at in the film is not the women so much as all those men out there.

In terms of the issues of objectification, and the male gaze, that is a very obvious one that I had to deal with and negotiate with if I was working on performance and tawaif sexuality. The opportunity to explore that came to me through Naach where, when I started looking at the performance I realized what was happening on stage.

The performance can be divided into two parts, where till twelve at night they have these group dances, in which these girls dance in groups and after that they have these acts where one or two girls do an act.

What was very entertaining was the act that was happening in front of us and not on the stage and so we were always shooting from the stage. I chose to do that because I realized that this is where I could see the way these men are reacting. Not just visually, although they are having a good time and they are drunk. But the point is that the girls are as much looking at them as they are looking at the girls.

What was very important for me and also what was very fundamentally linked to the construction of the concept of work desire and sexuality within tawaif sexuality is the notion of love and the game of love.

The girls talk about this whole aspect of playing a game, so there’s this whole thing of being in control and therefore looking at the men who are not in control. The girls are the ones who are constantly looking at the men and I thought it was very fascinating, given those discussions and the way those men were.

There would be a parallel performance going on every evening. These girls and the men reaction to them, sometimes the performances of the men would be more interesting because there were new guys in the audience.

The first time we went we were only allowed to shoot from the point of view of the audience simply because if we are on stage their performance gets ruined. I remember one of the days, the audience hadn’t come in (they start trickling in by ten, but the girls start coming in at eight) that the manager realized the vast potential we held as added attraction to the act on stage, because people were very interested in looking at the camera and at being shot. That was the new act up there.

There was Rahul and Ashish on stage and I would be hovering in the wings and signaling and I also did move around a lot on stage.

Is it a very comfortable thing to work with your partner? Documentary is so predicated on having great synergy with the person you are working with, especially in a verité sequence like this. So how does that work?

I think we are both very important to each other’s work, and working with Rahul as my camera is a very important contribution to our work. Now we joke that we we’ve known each other longer than our parents have known us, we’ve known each other since we were eighteen.

Seems like a cliché but like it is with all old partnerships, we know what the other person is thinking and we are also interested in what the other person is thinking. We also happen to be very good friends so that is important because we talk a lot and there is a way in which he knows what I am thinking and what I want.

I have also become very lazy and I haven’t worked with other camera people so I don’t know if I will be able to shoot a lot of what I have been able to shoot for many of my films. If one day Rahul decided he wanted a better-paid job, I have no idea what I would do.

Working with a partner, the synergy is wonderful, but there are also many reasons why one must not ever work with your partner. And that’s why  ‘Khel’  was the last film we co-directed because for a woman I had a chip on my shoulder: I am a woman and therefore you don’t take me seriously. It was very important to be taken seriously, because you’re young and you’re trying to assert yourself and you’re not very sure as a filmmaker.

Now even Rahul had the same insecurities, but he would get taken seriously because he was a man. We both were figuring things out, he was the same as me in the lack of knowledge but he would still get taken more seriously because he was a man. That would create a lot of problems, which you would end up taking out on your partner. In that light we decided that it was best to go our ways and our interest became different.

We are a straight couple but I am always interested in women and he is always interested in men, and so I am sure that eventually there would have been a parting in ways. And our styles are very different.

(Screening: ‘Sita’s family’)

The issue that I am trying to raise with this film is that somewhere within a history of documentary, documentary got associated with the rational world of fact and the exterior world. Fiction then became the realm to explore subjectivity. In this light ‘Sita’s Family’ is a very important film because it’s a film that is not only talking about yourself where you are turning the camera on yourself for the first time, but there is also this attempt to actually explore very subjective experiences, for instance this case of a crisis that you were perhaps going through.

It’s the way in which you are talking about this subjective experience and particularly there is a way in which you shot it. The question I want to know about Sita’s family is what made you turn that camera at yourself? Because this is a film where you are actually talking about own experience. And also is this is a film only about yourself?

‘Sita’s Family’ came into being not as “Sita’s” family but as the history of the middle class woman and women’s reform. Right after  ‘Khel’  I became interested in looking at tawaifs. At that point I was just tentatively researching for it, and I realized that there were reels of information on it. I then found a certain it was linkage because there was a history of the middle class woman that was emerging in the research at the same time when the history of the tawaifs was strained.

That it would be around my own family is not something I consciously thought of. My mother is a great teller of stories so through my childhood I had listened to stories of my grandmother and various other people and we used to enjoy listening to her so there was this potential of telling this story. However I had not realized that the history of the middle class woman and where I am coming from today, in a more interesting way was to come out was through my family.

In my films there are all these ideas that circle in my head at various periods. So there was this time after ‘Bundelkhand Express’, which was not very good for me. Fraught with personal distress I was forced to look internally to find answers and understand myself better. So all these issues with relationships and my mother and so on came up and I think it was very important for me to have a closure, to be able to not only understand my mother at an intellectual level but to also accept her emotionally because that alone would liberate me. Once I began to take these first steps towards that, the process of healing began.

I was out of work for almost two or three years and nothing else interested me. I only spent time looking at myself, so I became a very obvious subject. Now when I look back at it, it seems like it was part of therapy and self-healing, but I didn’t think it was conscious at that time.

I think that even when you are thinking about yourself, you are actually embedding that story among a much larger history where it is not only a about yourself.

That I have to attribute to my robust middle class training where you cannot be so self indulgent and there has to be some utilitarian purpose to everything. That has been the whole problem of the documentary also right? In a country like India, we are a poor country, so this whole thing of the building of the nation state comes up, where all art has to have some purpose. So the poor documentary has to be burdened with purpose only.

Similarly with us also, there has to be a purpose to my delving with cinema. It is also more interesting, I know about myself and there is only so much about myself that you would be interested in. I am not coming alone, none of us do, and we are what we are because of the histories we carry. These histories are implicated in all kinds of complicated social structures and it’s all very interesting – I mean I am very interested in finding out the micro and the macro and looking at the larger structure and figuring out how the individual fits into it.

So ‘Sita’s Family’ is about myself but it is also a history of the middle class woman, and the double burden that they carry. On another level, it is also about questioning this facile thing of the belief that all women are bonded (sakhi sakhi) because you have to move beyond those clichés to be able to have a better understanding even in the women’s movement.

This whole mother daughter relationship is a very central theme, in many of your films and that fractured edge is always there in many of your films. But coming to the point you made on film being a healing process, I am wondering about the role the camera would play in a film like this. There is an incredible climax and we know that the camera always intervenes but what role did the camera play in a sequence like that.

The camera happened to play a role similar to that in the making of a home video. In the last sequence between my mother, sister and I, there was no one else there, except poor old Rahul. And he was already an insider, the fact that who was handling the camera made all the difference. I really don’t know how it would have turned out if it was someone else dong the camera. They were all very comfortable because, he is the son in law of the family.

Although people left to themselves, love performances and there was also my AD and my Sound Recordist and still I think I was the most self conscious, it shows when I face the camera. I just can’t deal with the camera on myself.

My family was clearly reveling, at times, they would have the waterworks on (rona aa raha tha, kahaniyen yaad aa rahi thi) they were clearly enjoying themselves.

I was just being a bit fastidious actually; I think it was very important for this particular family, I mean my mother’s family. It has been brought up with a very frightening combination of a communist mother and an Arya Samaji father which means that emotions is an indulgence. They thought emotion was a very irrelevant thing. In that sense, it was a very brave of them.

I have come from a very different generation culturally, where it is possible to share yourself with others but still protect yourself: we learn those boundaries. But for my mothers generation it is not so, so when I say performance, I mean that it was the first time they were actually sitting and grieving.

What they ought to have done many years back they were actually doing now. There is also a certain amount of liberation in that grieving.

What now? From here where do you go?

I was taking a break most of last year and for the first time as a filmmaker I traveled with my film and showed it around. No I am doing something that I have never done before and which I am very frightened about: I am writing. I am planning to do some work on these journeys with the performers, with the tawaifs. These films are there but they are just part of the experience. Usually with documentaries, we all do a lot of research, but then we move on also, from film to film. But maybe for once I have become unduly attached to my material and so I am writing a book on it now.

26 February 2010, Conversations on documentary practice, Persistence Resistance 2010