Apart from being a powerful medium for political commentary, a documentary film also lends itself to storytelling of a more personal nature. Vikalp, a collective of filmmakers, is screening two such films at Jnanapravaha today: Ardra Swaroop’s Nethar produced by Films Division, and Tahireh Lal’s diploma film made at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, These Old Frames . Both films tell the story of granddaughters revisiting the stories of their grandfathers.
‘Grow culture of viewing’
“We mainly screen independent documentaries and short films that are difficult to come by in mainstream screening spaces. Our mandate is to grow a culture of viewing and discussing a variety of cinema,” says film editor Jabeen Merchant, one of the curators at Vikalp@Jnanapravaha. Her fellow curators are filmmakers Afrah Shafiq, Paromita Vohra and Paroma Sadhana.
Swaroop’s film Nethar takes its title from the Kashmiri word for marriage. It took shape in the context of a family wedding she attended in Ajmer.
It was the first time that she met most of her paternal family. Since that was an ideal setting to learn about her cultural roots, Swaroop also took her camera along.
“It is a documentation of one Kashmiri family, their journey from Kashmir to Rajasthan, their culture, history and memories. It is all about the family's subjective experience. Like many other families in Kashmir, my family too had beautiful houses and peaceful lives there. The 1947 raid by the Kabalis created chaos and terror. My grandfather, Pandit Amarnath Swaroop, came to Rajasthan in 1952. The rest of the family, his wife and seven children, joined him in 1957. After living in several places in Rajasthan, they finally settled down in Ajmer in 1962.”
Displaced from Srinagar, her grandfather travelled all over the country in search of employment to sustain the family. Before he eventually landed a government job as a social welfare officer in Rajasthan, he earned his living as an astrologer. He passed away in 2006.
Filming her cousin’s wedding at the ancestral home in Ajmer gave Swaroop the opportunity to discover stories she had never heard before.
She also filmed in Gwalior, since that is the city where her cousin's bride was from.
Documentary enthusiasts would be interested in the fact that she is the daughter of Kamal Swaroop who directed the cult Om Dar Ba Dar (1988). Her father features in Nethar . Apart from him, she also drew inspiration from Martin Scorsese’s film Italianamerican (1974) which is about his parents talking about the experience of being Italian immigrants in New York.
Lal’s film is also built around the story of her grandfather. However, her material and process are somewhat different from Swaroop’s. Hers is a 15-minute film that uses archival footage from home movies shot by her maternal grandfather SB Vijaykumar and her father Vinay Lal. The footage she found did not have any sound. As she worked with the material, and began to talk to other people in the family about her grandfather, she added dialogue and narration.
Footage of politicians
Lal was unreachable for comment but the curators pointed out that her film includes some footage of political leaders filmed at very close quarters. This leads them to infer that her grandfather probably held a senior position in the Government.
Lal's website says that mining personal stories aided her understanding of how her grandfather “created his own identity in a free India”. Later in life, he had to sell the camera that was so dear to him because the family went through a financial crisis.
Like Swaroop, Lal too is interested in exploring how the story of one family can be used to understand a bigger historical picture of a certain time period, however subjective it may be.
Nethar and These Old Frames will be screened at Jnanapravaha today at 6.30 pm.
(The author is a freelance writer)
