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akshay khanna & Alice Tilche: The Political Voice and The Revolutionary

This is the fourth in our series of blogposts in relation to the Budhan podcast project, a community led initiative that has sought to capture the experiences of some of the most marginalised communities in India during the COVID19 pandemic.

In the previous blogposts we reflected primarily on  Season 1 of our series, at a community speaking of, sometimes enacting their own experience of pain, and at the key role of the aesthetic in offering glimpses of that which cannot be spoken – through hyper-real and melodramatic performances. As an attempt by members of the Chhara DNT community to make sense of its own experience, and bolster its response to the pandemic, a primary audience for Season 1 had been somehow internal. Taking Season 2 as our focus, in this post we consider the challenges of a marginalised group speaking of the plight of other marginalised groups, as artists step out of the community to document the experiences of other DNT groups. We look at how that which could not be spoken becomes expressed through the political voice as marginalised communities make claims (to resources, equality, visibility) in the context of the pandemic.

Materiality of a season

The material conditions of production of season 2 differ substantially from season 1. In season 2, we have a team with greater technical expertise, having worked on ten episodes in lockdown conditions, and now supported by more substantial funding and professional equipment. The actors who had enacted plays, songs and monologues are now standing behind the camera, as directors in their own right. Although theatre performances continue being used, there is a clearer shift towards the realist documentary form – a shift that goes alongside the reimagination of the audience. If in the early episodes the audience was most explicitly the Chhara community itself, and the subject and the audience intermingled in ways that unsettled the mode of audienceship, in Season 2, the subject is more clearly demarcated. The audience is equally sequestered outside of the frame – if not an ‘outside gaze’, in a simple sense, the audience is seated outside the process of the film. The films, in other words are not speaking ‘to one‘s own’, but rather to an abstract audience constituted of diverse positionalities. The narrative voice (whether of the anchor, or of Budhan Theatre (BT) and other performers who take on the role of the anchor in some episodes) is also one that is familiar to the documentary form – the audience is being introduced to the community, their history and struggles. As such, even though the films continued to be made by indigenous film makers, this was a gaze of members of one marginalised community onto others.

We are now also at a different point in the unfolding of the pandemic. Most of the shooting that features in season 2 was done after the first wave of the pandemic had subsided and when it became possible to move out of the confines of closed spaces and neighbourhoods. A lot of the footage is outdoors, in streets, in neighbourhoods and in temporary settlements of nomadic communities. By the time we arrived at the stage of editing, however, India was thrown deep into the devastating second wave of the Delta variant, when the country faced a shortfall of oxygen, vaccines, medicines and wood to burn the dead. In such a situation it was neither possible to base the films simply on the footage already collected, nor was it possible to return to the field. What we have then is the juxtaposition of footage, of interviews and performances shot ‘between waves’, and online interviews carried out as the second wave unfurled. A creative response to this situation can be seen in episode 7 based on the experiences of the Pardhi community in Maharashtra, wherein montages of still photographs are juxtaposed with videos of online interviews, where the smart phone is included in the frame to make the materiality of production visible.

The Political Voice

Episodes of season 2 articulate an explicit political voice. There are clear demands being made, which are easier for the audience to identify. The actors, and the interviewees are composed, their speech is political, their words well-chosen and addressed outwards – the interviewee looking straight into the camera.  In the episodes, we hear about a shift to begging, which as an activity further criminalises the community, putting lives and livelihoods at risk, and that this labour falls entirely on women. We learn about the deepening educational gap given by digital education, about living in poverty, about evictions and resettlements, about (lack of) livelihood and the overall exclusion of these communities from the mechanisms through which humanitarian support was extended by state and civil society alike. These issues are all being articulated as demands rather than laments or complaints with a recognisable aesthetics. We point here to the specificity of the unambiguity of a political voice that makes explicit demands, laying out frameworks of (in)justice and demanding the interlocution of the state. Perhaps it is the case that by this time the dust had settled on the extent of suffering brought about by the neglect of the state in enforcing a lockdown without warning or preparation (see in particular the episode ‘We wanted to go back’, focussed on the suffering of the millions of ‘migrant workers’ who walked thousands of kilometres to get home), the spectacular inefficiency of the state in preparing for the second wave, the extent of death and suffering this caused, and the continuities between this violence and the long history of social and political abjection.

The political voice of the podcast is diverse in its articulation, and the aesthetic difference between its forms is instructive of the complexity of the DNT political subject. The clearest political demands are made from the chair. There are plastic chairs where interviewees sit – chairs placed outside of households, where interviewees sit holding onto their arms, projecting their voices with clarity. The chair is a key symbol of authority, especially in rural India and in poor urban settings, where entire settlements may only have one chair available that is shared for important guests. Elevated from the floor, sitting on a chair also means not sitting on dirt, and is as such loaded with the political connotations of hierarchy and pollution. Demands made from the chair, with a few exceptions, are articulated by men.

Other voices, largely those of women, speak instead from the floor: sitting or squatting on the mud floors of their kitchens, and sometimes on charopais, the woven beds where entire families sleep in the open. Their demands from the floor are more like laments: ‘what can we do sir’, some conclude, addressing the interviewer behind the camera. Their apparent helplessness should however not be mistaken with passivity. In fact, if there is a resignation to one’s condition of abject poverty, a resignation that it will not change, there is also a resolution to do what it takes to survive. During the pandemic, many of the women we see ran entire households on their own, defying lockdown restrictions to beg. If the men made demands from chairs and women laments from the floor, women were the one who actively defied authority as men had to take on more passive roles (for being more easy targets of police retaliation, but also out of a sense of entitlement to ‘better’ work i.e. they would not take up household chores). From the floor, women’s voices conform to societal expectations (reproduced within communities) of a certain passivity attached to their behaviour, that same ‘passivity’ that allows them more easily than men to circumvent the law, even as this exacerbates the risk of social and sexual violence (Episode 4 features archived footage of a mob lynching of a Madari woman accused of ‘child lifting’ and an account of the gang rape and murder of another, for instance). Spoken as monologues (from the chair or the floor), these speeches have what Bakhtin calls the quality of the dialogue – they are addressed to one and in fact multiple audiences. At one level they are addressed to the immediate listener, a member of BT behind the camera asking questions – who, for many of the communities, is also seen as a patron (with political and humanitarian connections). At another level they are addressed to a more abstract authority of the state. This distinction between the chair voice and the floor voice also speaks to the relationship between the signifying voice and vocality outside referential meaning (Weidman 2014), and of the gendered differentiation in the aesthetic deployments of the political voice.

Performance as Ethnographic Layer

The articulation of a political voice reconfigures the function of other elements of the podcast assemblage. As an instance here we focus on the role of theatrical performance. As compared to the role of sublimation, enabling a glimpse of ‘that which cannot be spoken’, performances here play a very different role – that of  re-enacting through hyper-realisation. The first episode of the season focussed on the Bahurupia community of itinerant performers demonstrates this well. The episode features two performances: the first is drawn from the community’s own traditional repertoire, while the second is a performance by one of BT’s lead actors, Ruchika Kodekar. The interview of a Bahurupia community leader and actor, talking about the vanishing art of the community, and the abuses they endure, is intercut with scenes of their community performances enacted for the camera, of (male) actors dressed like monkeys, gurus or women performing characters from modern Hindu epics. This is a stunning interview and framing, with the camera moving between the lead actor wearing full makeup, a side actor who speaks in all seriousness with a bloody eye drawn over a white foundation, and the scene of the performance itself. These scenes from the community are then themselves intercut with Ruchika’s performance, dressed up as Kali Mata (with a blue face, her tongue sticking out, a nose ring and nose chain) performing in the middle of Chharanagar, paraphrasing, offering back to both the community and the viewer another version of the interview:

I am mother

And I am hungry,

My children are also hungry,

My husband (gharwala) is also hungry

Hunger and struggle have very old connections

Ruchika’s performance is intercut with interviews from the community now focussed on the experience of women who, during the pandemic, bore the brunt of earning livelihood for the whole community by begging, subjecting themselves to police violence and the risk of infection. A pregnant woman tells of how she went begging when nine months pregnant, walking for miles, and how she was beaten up by the police. As she recounts her story, Kali Mata echoes it, returning to the public these experiences:

When the pandemic came everything stopped,

There was no work

And no grains of food to eat

I was pregnant at the time

I was hungry

And with me, my children were hungry too

When I asked for food, then I received sticks

After falling down, I had to go back

You entertain yourself with TV and mobile phones

But I am born artist

Yes, a born artist

Which you call Bahurupia

I feed my family by showing my art

But today I am receiving sticks instead of food.

Kali Mata’s performance is filmed in slow motion, with a focus on the actress’ blue face, her facial expressions, her tongue sticking out. At times, when the camera moves back it reveals a small audience around her, gathered from the street where the act is being filmed. The slow-motion choice, (which was in fact the fixing of a technical glitch in which voice and images failed to sync), lends this piece a grave and dramatic style supported by a suspense-kind of background music. The image and words of the deity embodied are in themselves ponderous, as though the cosmic, the mythological had manifested in the mundane. It is beautiful, grotesque, and evokes the terrifying power of the Mother’s justice. The uncanny presence of a street audience, of the everyday, at the corner of the frame makes them all the more so.

In the case of both performances, we see the creative use of intercutting as a technique, a to and fro movement between temporalities in such a way as to create contiguity, meaning and affect within each temporality and beyond their sum. The intercut here produces a rich ethnographic layer, which picks up, reinterprets, transforms and hyper-realises the political voice, setting the stage for the revolutionary voice. It is important here to recognise that this technique lies in continuity with a longer tradition in BT’s theatre practice, which takes real-life stories and re-enacts them both to communities and to power: for communities in order to heal shared experiences of pain and create a movement; to power in order to make claims but also to achieve redemption. The interpretative work of BT theatre is made evident, there is a real that the hyper-real performances directly refer to. In film, through the intercut, these are made adjacent, enmeshed in each other.

The Revolutionary Voice

In the initial episodes of season 2 the documentary form is prevalent and the political voice – although augmented via performances – remains composed. As we move through the series, through the peak of the pandemic in India, we also see a shift from a more respectable voice to an unruly one (khanna 2012, Shankland et al 2011) – one that, paying witness to the sheer dispossession of the participants eventually, calls for a revolution. In episode 9, focussed on one of the most deprived Muslim-DNT communities that we encounter in the series, we are thrown back to the often-appearing theme of the threshold between animal and human. “They treat us like animals”, so the episode is called – a line repeated by different interviewees, alongside descriptions of chronic hunger, backbreaking work and a life confined to the most abject poverty with no possibility of redemption for oneself or the next generation. “Our children are not very smart”, the woman seated on the mud floor of her house declares, having grown up with food for two days out of four. “We have to live under this oppression”. Instead of echoing and augmenting the resigned voices of interviewees through performance, performers intercut their speech with a parallel dialogue calling on those who care to overrule the powerful.

“Those who care about the weak should speak,

We should change the world

It should scream

It should feel that those fighting hunger won’t get tired

The fire in the belly gets into the head

If some food goes into their belly, then there will be victory”

There is a shift in tone and addressivity (Bakhtin). If in the performance of Episode one the actress speaks in the first person as the interviewee, here actors address the audience head on. “Would you not get food and stay quiet? One must speak up”. They speak here almost to a ‘superaddressee’, that third person other than the speaker and the listener who listens sympathetically and understands justly.

References

Bakhtin, Michael. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. M. Holquist (ed.), Austin: University of Texas Press.

Khanna, A. Seeing Citizen Action through an ‘Unruly’ Lens. Development 55, 162–172 (2012).

Khanna, akshay. 2012.  Seeing Citizen Action through an ‘Unruly’ Lens. Development 55, 162–172.

Shankland, Alex, Danny Burns, Naomi Hossain, Akshay Khanna, Patta Scott-Villiers and Mariz Tadros. 2011. Unruly Politics: A manifesto. Brighton: IDS (mimeo).

Weidman, Amanda. 2014. Anthropology and Voice, Annual Review of Anthropology , 43: 1, 37-51

akshay khanna is a Delhi-based Social Anthropologist, International Development Consultant, theatre practitioner and amateur chef, with training in Law and Medical Anthropology and the author of Sexualness (2016, New Text), which tells a story of Queer movements in India, develops a framework to think the sexual from the global south, and introduces Quantum Physics into the study of the sexual.

Alice Tilche is a lecturer in Anthropology and Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research at the intersection of art and activism employs visual, collaborative and arts-based methods to research social transformations – including work on the cultural politics of indigeneity, migration, nationalism and most recently Covid-19. Alice’s book Adivasi Art and Activism: curation in a nationalist age was published with Washington University Press in 2022. Her collaborative film projects including Sundarana (2011), Broken Gods (2019) and Budhan-Podcast (2021) have been selected for a number of international film screenings and festivals.

Cite as: Tilche, Alice and khanna, akshay. 2022. “The Political Voice and The Revolutionary.” Focaalblog, 3 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/10/03/akshay-khanna-alice-tilche-the-political-voice-and-the-revolutionary/

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akshay khanna & Alice Tilche: That which cannot be spoken

This is the third of our series of blogposts in relation to the Budhan Podcast project. In earlier posts we have looked at narrations of collective suffering and the re-embodiments engendered by the shift from theatre to film. In this post we turn our attention to a particular feature of the emergent form of film, that of sublimation. 

A forum theatre1 workshop conducted as part of the project produced two short plays centered on various experiences of the participants, of discrimination based on tribal identity, caste, gender, colour and class. One of these related to a young Chhara man’s experience as a reporter for a television channel. At the beginning we hear his conversation with his father, who had invested in his children’s education so that they did not fall back into the business of bootlegging, which characterises a large part of the economy of Chharanagar. ‘It is most important’, the father says when the protagonist informs him that he has been called for an interview at the channel, ‘that you represent our people. Society and the state think of us only as criminals, as thieves, as those in the daaru (alcohol) business. This must change’. He enters the interview, after negotiating the suspicions of the guard at the door, and being intimidated by aggressive expressions of social capital by upper caste candidates in the waiting room. The idiom through most of this had been humour – miscommunication, caricature, cheeky references to contemporary political moments, luring the audience into the story and marking a mutual unreadability between the characters on stage. The protagonist sits down, nervously, in front of his prospective colleagues and bosses.  

‘What is your name?’, they ask. ‘Govind’, he replies. ‘Yes, we know, we have read your application, but what is your name?’. Here emerges a curious fact – Govind has dropped his surname. He goes simply by the name Govind.

The question ‘what is your name?’ in India is much more than about what one is to be called. It is the first question that one is asked – for it is through one’s surname that one’s caste is ascertained, one’s relative position in the interaction, and thus one’s status and terms of engagement. There is a long history of people, especially those from oppressed castes and tribes strategically changing their names. In the 1970s and 1980s, socialist movements such as the ‘JP movement’, led to people dropping their surnames en masse so as to disable the privilege function of caste. Today’s young generation of Ambedkarites of different caste backgrounds do the same and it is not uncommon to come across students and young professionals fighting formal systems that require a caste name as a prerequisite for entry and recognition. 

On the insistence of the interviewers, Govind lets out that his ‘full name’ is in fact Govind Chhara. He is from Chharanagar, the interviewers confirm, where there is daaru business, and crime. The interviewers seem unconcerned with the fact that Govind’s expertise is in culture, that he himself is an actor and is interested in covering cinema and art. Even as they eventually give him a job, this has a very specific remit – he is to give them stories from within the world of crime. The rest of the play traces his journey through the crime beat, his engagements with the police who assume that he is intimate with petty criminals, the various ways in which his identity comes to define his career in journalism, leading ultimately to a resignation and a hard-hitting monologue about casteism.  

The play had been performed and now it was time for the forum to take over as members of the audience (in this case from the community) are invited to enact other strategies in dealing with the situation that was just been performed on stage. The first person to come on stage to do things differently happened to be Dakxin. Dakxin who sometimes goes by the name Bajrange, and sometimes by Chhara. Who has taken pride in his name and written and spoken eloquently about the art of theft. It is for the art of being invisible that his ancestors had been hired by kings as spies in the colonial era, it is for their art of theft that they formed a critical part of the early resistance to British rule, and were ultimately branded as Criminal Tribes. Dakxin came onto stage to express a completely different persona to that of Govind: confident, emphasising his name, and, knowing how television works, making a case for himself by offering them connections with the real leaders of crime, the big corporate houses.  

‘What was the difference in the strategy we just saw?’, I asked as the Joker, the figure in forum theatre who facilitates discussion between audience and stage. And in the discussion that followed what articulated was a crucial dilemma for not just the DNT movement, but for struggles of most marginalised and despised groups – How does one relate to the ‘injurious’ name, the name that marks us as criminals, as oppressed castes, as queers, as minority religions? Do we pick it up and instil pride in it, do we emphasise our otherness, or do we disavow the name, or indeed disavow our difference itself? Do we embrace sanitised forms of address or hold on to, and reinvigorate our ‘states of injury’ as names of pride?  

There are multiple elements to this dilemma, but in this post we hone in on the imperative of respectability in representation. This, we find, has been an underlying tension in the podcast series. On one hand we see the framing of the Chhara self (and of other DNT communities) as respectable citizens, speaking purely of the violence visited upon DNT communities, demanding witness to their struggles for survival and worthy for that reason of dignity. This is the voice of dignified victimhood structurally expected in the documentary form, especially where film is conceptualised as an antidote to injurious stereotypes. It is the impeccable saree of the widow we encountered in our second blogpost, it is the quantified data on school dropouts in policy briefs, it is the measured tone of activists laying down facts which might speak for themselves. It is the face of the unfairly marginalised evoking a moral economy.  

This, in turn produces the affect, if not the figure, of the somehow justifiably marginalised. This is the other face. This is the face of the women who run the production side of the alcohol business, the young man who chooses to work in the business of bootlegging, or indeed of petty theft. In other contexts, this is the sex worker who refuses to occupy the palatable image of victimhood, the working-class queer who emphasises her sexualness publicly (rather than the desexualised ‘good gay’ that the law is willing to accommodate in the realm of citizenship), it is the Adivasi community that maintains its non-vegetarianism and alcohol consumption in the face of either Gandhian or Hindutva imperative of transformation into upper caste Hindu aspirational forms. The public transcript, to borrow a phrase from James Scott (1990), in other words, effectively, and at times aggressively, pushes a fundamental truth of being into the realm of the hidden transcript. It creates that which cannot be spoken.  

That which cannot be spoken, does not, however, disappear. It insists, it rearticulates. Episode 4 of the first season of the podcast, titled ‘History of pre and post-independence’ was made specifically to commemorate ‘Vimukti Divas’, the 31st of August, the anniversary of the day in 1952, 4 years after India has itself gained independence from British rule, when the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 was finally repealed. This is now celebrated as the actual Independence Day by millions of people from De-notified Tribes. The episode is a melange of historical retellings tracing the political and legal history of DNTs, interviews with community leaders and most remarkably a conversation between two old women recollecting their childhoods and the various shifts in lives and livelihood. This is all mostly in the measured tone of the respectable citizen. The rupture in the episode, however, comes in the form of a compelling rap song, Hun Janmjat Chor Kada Tiya (‘I was not born a criminal’) a collaboration between young men from Chharanagar, and Bhantu musicians from Maharashtra, that brings the history of DNT and nomadic tribes into lyrical manifestation, starting with the period before criminalisation and laying out the various ways in which the promise of post-coloniality, and of citizenship has been denied. In the song we find a striking disjuncture between spoken word and image, as the chorus ‘I am not a criminal’ contrasts with the affect of the song, the anger in its choreography and the unapologetic ‘bad boy’ aesthetic. Here, for the first time in the series we see that other self, one that expresses a pride in being able to feed one’s people through the art of theft, which expresses anger at the failure of the state and the violence meted upon its people, one that expresses a revolutionary impulse without being tamed in to a policy negotiation. Scott’s hidden transcript has ruptured onto the main stage, partly in words, but most effectively as aesthetic. 

This combination of the respectable, measured voice and a revolutionary voice unfettered by the imperatives of palatability emerges throughout the podcast series. This category of that which cannot be spoken is not, of course limited to the question of respectability. We saw in earlier blogposts, something similar with the experience of pain and the melodramatisation necessary for conveying the experience of death and loss during the pandemic. In the context of indigenous film, a similar technique has been discussed in terms of hyper-realisation. Drawing on Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor, Biddle and Lea (2018) for instance conceptualise of a “hyper-real of survivance” that uses art (including practices of artificial intensification and faking with the truth) “to make the real more real, when the real is itself what is at risk, at stake: namely, Indigenous history, language, presence”. It is an “hyper-real of survivance” in contexts of erasure of indigenous life and experience and in the absence of responsible media journalism. The striking recurrence here is the role of aesthetics in the expression of that which cannot be spoken, whether this be through music, through dramatic performances and monologues, through evocative cut-aways, soundtrack, poetry or indeed techniques in camera work and editing.  

Freud’s notion of ‘Sublimation’ is a useful starting point for a theoretical meditation on the relationship between these voices as articulating in the podcasts. We may reframe ‘sublimation’ for our purposes, as a mechanism through which an impulse that is too terrifying, or is culturally ‘inappropriate’ to express, re-articulates in another form that is culturally acceptable. In Freud this process is evidence of maturity, whereby the sexual dimension of an ‘infantile erotic wish’ is dispelled in favour of socially acceptable behaviour (Laplanche and Plantis 431-34, cf Buckner). In Freud, we already see this as one of the ‘origins of artistic activity’ (Freud and Strachey, 1905[1953], p. 238). Rather than an evasion of the impulse, its denial, projection or displacement, here we see its transformation, significantly carrying within it the kernel of the impulse itself. There are multiple critiques of Freud’s theory of course, the most striking of which is perhaps Oswald de Andrade’s notion of anthropofagia, a form of cannibalism, as articulating in his 1928 piece, at the same time as we see the publication of Breton’s Surrealist manifesto. The Brazilian artist does not simply reject or resist the idiom of the coloniser, but rather ‘consumes’ it, transforms it and utilises it (Maddox 2014). What we see here is a resistance to the cleaving of the civilised from the savage, and the inversion of the teleology – the indigenous ‘consume’ the coloniser, just as the idiom of respectability is deployed in the podcasts, and yet transformed by their being engulfed in an aesthetic of hyper-realisation. 

A second frame here is the Lacanian approach seeing the inevitable failure of the Symbolic in articulating the Real. Here we see the Real, which by definition cannot be symbolised, constantly returning to haunt the attempts at representation. This haunting in the podcasts is through ruptures generated by aesthetics, a subtle (and often not so subtle) reminder that the voice of respectable victimhood is a failure of representation that nevertheless indexes that which cannot be spoken. The rap song thus ruptures through the respectability of the symbolic and sustains it as an always incomplete object.  

A final theoretical resonance lies with Deleuze’s meditation on the notion of discourse, where he insists that in Foucault’s Archaeological project, every stratum must be understood to be a relationship between the ‘articulable’ (the realm of word, what can be said, what can be written), and the ‘visible’ (that which can be seen). In modernity the articulable gains primacy, and yet, argues Deleuze, “visibilities…remain irreducible to statements and remain all the more so for developing a passion for the action of statements.” (Deleuze 1988:43) What then is the relationship here, between that which is said and that which is made visible? Deleuze conceptualises ‘two lights’, again in reference to Foucault. “…a first light opens up things and brings forth visibilities as flashes and shimmerings, which are the ‘second light’…” (Deleuze 1988:50). The first light, in other words, is the condition for the second being sensed. It is the visible (here, the aesthetic, the musical, the aural) that allows for the articulable (the words of the respectable marginalised) to be experienced beyond itself. In indigenous film we thus see this strategy of surrounding that which can be said, with the aesthetic of that which cannot, which enables the colonised to consume the coloniser and utilise it, for the Real to rupture through the symbolic, refusing erasure through civility. 

Biddle, Jennifer L. and Lea, Tess. Hyperrealism and Other Indigenous Forms of ‘Faking It with the Truth’, in Visual Anthropology Review, 34 ( 1): 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12148

Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault (trans by Seán Hand) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Freud, Sigmund (1905 [1953]), trans. James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. VII, London: The Hogarth Press. p. 238

Laplanche, Jean. 1997. Aims of the Psychoanalytic Process, JEP: European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 5, Spring-Fall.  

Maddox, John T. 2014. AfroReggae: “Antropofagia,” Sublimation, and Intimate Revolt in the “Favela” Hispania,  97 (3): 463-476

Scott, James C. (1990), Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven: Yale University Press.

akshay khanna is a Delhi-based Social Anthropologist, International Development Consultant, theatre practitioner and amateur chef, with training in Law and Medical Anthropology and the author of Sexualness (2016, New Text), which tells a story of Queer movements in India, develops a framework to think the sexual from the global south, and introduces Quantum Physics into the study of the sexual.

Alice Tilche is a lecturer in Anthropology and Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research at the intersection of art and activism employs visual, collaborative and arts-based methods to research social transformations – including work on the cultural politics of indigeneity, migration, nationalism and most recently Covid-19. Alice’s book Adivasi Art and Activism: curation in a nationalist agewas published with Washington University Press in 2022. Her collaborative film projects including Sundarana (2011), Broken Gods (2019) and Budhan-Podcast (2021) have been selected for a number of international film screenings and festivals.

We very much welcome questions and feedback @ alice.tilche@leicester.ac.uk and xaefis@gmail.com

Cite as: Tilche, Alice and khanna, akshay. 2022. “That which cannot be spoken.” Focaalblog, 5 September. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/09/05/alice-tilche-akshay-khanna-that-which-cannot-be-spoken/

Art and Visual Anthropology, Blog

Alice Tilche & akshay khanna: Embodying emotions in theatre and film

This is the second in our series of blogposts in relation to the Budhan podcast project, a community led initiative that has sought to capture the experiences of some of the most marginalised communities in India during the COVID19 pandemic. In this post we focus on a fundamental transformation engendered through the project – a shift from Budhan Theatre’s (BT) embodied practice of theatre to that of film production.

It is with a heavy heart that Siddharth began rehearsing his first solo performance, a monologue based on an article written by Roxy Gagdekar, on the death of his brother-in-law – a young lawyer and one of the first Corona victims in the Chhara community. We are in the middle of India’s first lockdown: the outer borders of Chharanagar, a primarily Chhara neighbourhood of Ahmedabad, are all shut, with police patrolling entry and exit of people and goods from the community. There is a retreat to the domain of the household and the podcasts delve into to the realm of interiority, physically, affectively and aesthetically. The camera in these episodes, filmed indoors, focusses on details of hands, faces, objects surrounding actors and interviewees.

The room has faded blue pastel walls, a few everyday objects in the blurry background. The frontal camera angle starts by framing the full  body, but as the drama unfolds, it zooms in focussing on the face, the expression of pain, the tears. The performance, which builds up over more than ten minutes is raw, painful, melodramatic. 

“I had promised my father that I would keep my sister happy. But I failed” cries the character when he reaches the hospital to find his brother-in-law dead. “Where did my Umesh go? Leaving me alone. My Umesh” cries the sister beating her chest with her hands. “Sister, sorry. I could not save your Umesh. You believed in me and my network. But I failed this test.” (…) “This coronavirus took all of our happy moments. Even after the death of my brother-in-law, I cannot hug you. I cannot even wipe your tears. Because you, sister, are corona positive…” Free from the tripod, at the height of the melodrama, the camera gets closer and closer, as the actor falls on his knees sobbing in agony, his glasses flung to one corner, hands reaching towards the camera for help. Soft music of plucked violin strings and low tones increases the tension – music designed by the composer to ‘visualise pain’. The episode ends in classic BT theatrical style, no anchor, no finale, leaving the audience uncomfortable, to remain with pain, injustice, and sans resolution.

Siddharth struggled with this performance, he tells us when we interview him about it. It had to be shot over and over again. And this was not just the closeness of the story to his own experience. It was about acting for the camera. As a theatre performer, he would project his voice, unsuited to the lapel mike attached to his t-shirt. Used to an audience, he found it hard to keep the emotional momentum in an empty room with no immediate feedback, the absence of the to and fro of energy that is so crucial to community theatre. “In film, you face the camera instead of the audience”, he explains. “In theatre, you use all the stage, and all of your voice to get your message to the audience (….). In film, if you want to say ‘this is the moon’ you show it. In theatre, you say: ‘this is the moon’ and show audiences by feeling it. It is by feeling what hides in your heart that the audience will understand and open up their imagination”. This is a glimpse into the complexity of the shift from stage to camera, from theatre to podcast – it is not ‘merely’ a change in medium, but about the very nature of the affective exchange, the intersubjective experience of performance, intensified in its affect for the dire conditions the performance mobilises.

The shift to the digital, or more precisely, the expansion of the digital to enclose life itself (khanna 2019), [1] was already under way before the pandemic and must be understood as part of a historical materialist churning of modes and relations of production and consumption, and the conditions of consciousness. The digital enclosure engendered by the pandemic, was preceded in India by the far-reaching implications of demonetisation – a political stunt that involved de-recognition of 90% of the currency in a cash intensive economy that was at the time predominantly informal.[2] Demonetisation made access to a smartphone essential for even the smallest of transactions (Kaur and Walia 2021), accelerated the ‘penetration’ of smartphones and made them perhaps the most significant tool for political manipulation (Farooq 2018) and the production of political subjectivity (khanna 2019). It also caused a shift in the modes of engagement with cultural forms and entertainment, moving away from the television and undermining the viability of theatre even further (Yadav and Srivastava 2020).     

Several of the communities whose stories feature in the series have traditionally made their living out of street performances. The Bahurupi, Nat and Madari tribes for instance, are predominantly nomadic tribes, moving between villages, states and cities, performing street theatre, acrobatics and dance. Movement being a defining feature of their life and livelihood, its de facto criminalisation during COVID lockdowns made these traditional forms of performance impossible, leaving no livelihood option but begging. This invited violence from mainstream society and the police, in a rearticulation of the underlying logic of caste and notions of pollution that structure Indian society (Guru and Sarukkai 2019), whereby these communities faced specific stigma, being seen as carriers of the virus (Behera and Dasani 2020). During the pandemic, with the smartphone becoming the key site for entertainment, the death of traditional forms of entertainment has been accelerated. It is in this broader context that BT’s shift from theatre to film making is of critical importance.

The story here is of a particular transformation – of a form of realist theatre that emerged from the struggles of an indigenous community, to an emergent form of film that holds together diverse influences and genres: documentary styles that reference a tradition of Indian realist and political documentaries, activist filmmaking and activist theatre, interviews, performances, songs and poetry. Since its inception in 1996, BT has performed hundreds of plays on social and political issues: from police brutality, to forced evictions and communal violence. BT’s work is embedded in communities’ struggles with members directly involved in mobilising on rights violation, legal disputes and in providing support to affected groups. During the pandemic, they also organised to distribute food rations, oxygen and medical kits, offering a form of security in the midst of precarity. In this history, theatre and film have always been interwoven. BT’s artistic director, Dakxin Bajrange is also a prolific documentary filmmaker. In 2009, Bajrange set up his own film production company, Nomad Movies, which he describes as a ‘media unit’ of Budhan Theatre, with the shared aim to be a platform for the struggle of different marginalised communities. To him, theatre and film are the same thing.  “It is only a different space”, he says, “one is digital, and one is physical. But otherwise, it is the same thing. It is about speaking about others’ pain as a way to also understand one’s own.” To other members of the group, however, the move from theatre to film marked a fundamental shift in their artistic practice. While the shift to the digital was quite natural a younger, social media savvy generation, for older members it involved a bigger leap both in terms of technology and artistic expression.

As we reflect with performers on the transformation of the theatrical form, we see at least four interrelated elements at play – temporality, space, intersubjectivity and concerns over the politics of spectatorship. In the realist street theatre performed by BT props, lighting and set design were minimised to render truth more real – to focus on the issues at stake. One actor recalls his resistance to the insistence of his teachers at drama school for more elaborate set-design. Instead, he employed minimal use of props and dim lighting to evade audiences’ escape to a fantasy world. His plays are political, he says, about reality rather than fantasy. Being forced to focus on the actors rather than the set, audiences had to engage with their raw bodies, their emotions, their pain. The body and the voice are centred as actors physically occupy a space, the stage, the square to impress their message on the audience, the message of revolution, for example. The synchronous connection of the bodies of actors and the bodies of audiences – so central especially to the street theatre performed by BT – is crucial to the emotive exchange. And it is in this dance of feelings, between performers and audiences, that the element of improvisation also becomes so important.

Compared to the synchronic interplay of the actor and the audience in theatre, in film the relationship with the audience is both deferred to another time, separated from the performance by a series of interventions, of frame, sound, editing and juxtaposition, and presupposed before the performance. The figuration of space and objects is, as well fundamentally transformed. On the one hand the continuous use of space is often replaced by alogical or discontinuous uses of space, with the change of shot as the basic unit of film construction (Sontag 1960: 29). On the other, the props that actors had so carefully avoided in their realist political theatre, became central to the filming process both in the context of filming performances and interviews. The sovereignty of the body comes to be shared with these other technologies, for a body moving in the wrong light would not make it through the lens; the meaning of an interview in which participants narrate their own real-life stories, could be easily lost in a dark frame. In the absence of raw bodies, actors-as-directors found themselves now thinking a lot about those very things that they before cast aside, experimenting with light from different angles to convey truth.

The video-podcast format, and its digital circulation through social media, also changed possibilities for spectatorship, leading to new concerns over censorship. BT plays have always been political, with actors fearlessly performing in front of police stations, at sites of violence. While these performances had their digital afterlives, featuring as part of documentaries or on youtube channels, their reach was limited. With film, people and places became more exposed, with direct repercussions. In Chharanagar, the threat of police violence is real. Making a film focussed on the community, and therefore documenting livelihood activities deemed illegal, could result in a police raid hours after its release. One way to get around this was to fictionalise, yet the material remained embedded in the community. In this respect the podcast production process was, more than the traditional theatre format, subject to a local politics of what can be shared, while responding to external expectations. In some of the episodes the more powerful statements relating to the failure of the state to address the vulnerabilities of communities were edited out for their potential to create problems for those who spoke, but also for the projects’ sponsors in a time where the ability of organisations to receive foreign funds was becoming increasingly curtailed. Filming issues of marginal livelihoods, and more controversial topics to do with the alcohol business, community quarrels, gender politics, restrictions on intimacies and marriage, was also subject to community censorship. As a community within a community, BT had to  account for different sensitivities – those who supported their documentation efforts, and those who resented any ‘negative’ portrayal of the community as non-representative and damaging to their reputation and wellbeing.

That which cannot be said, does not, however, simply disappear. It insists, it rearticulates in other forms and places, in unexpected ways, within the body of the film. This happens through a range of mechanisms including sublimation and aesthetic play. Our next blogpost will look at these rearticulations.

References:

Farooq, Gowhar (2018), “Politics of Fake News: How WhatsApp Became a Potent Propaganda Tool in India”, Media Watch 9 (1): 106-117

Guru, Gopal and Sundar Sarukkai (2019) Experience, caste and the everyday social, New Delhi, India Oxford University Press

Kaur, Sandeep and Nidhi Walia (2021), “Did Demonetisation Help India’s Transition to the Digital Economy?”, IASSI-Quarterly, Vol. 40 Issue 2: 305-318.

Yadav, Mamta and Manish Srivastava (2020), “A Study of Changing Consumer Trends in The Entertainment Industry”, IRE Journals Volume 4 Issue 4 (October) pp. 9-16.

khanna, akshay (2019), “‘Crisis in the Queer Project – political subjectivity in a time of digital enclosure’  atReconference- Rethink, Reimagine, Reboot, Conference organized by CREA, in Kathmandu, April, 2019

Sardana, MMK (2018), ‘Formalising the Indian Economy on the Wings of Demonetisation, GST and Technology’, ISID Discussion Note, DN2018/02, February 2018. accessible at: https://isid.org.in/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/DN1802.pdf 

Behera, M., & Dassani, P. (2021). Livelihood vulnerabilities of tribals during COVID-19: challenges and policy measures. Economic and Political Weekly, 56(11), 19-22

akshay khanna is a Delhi-based Social Anthropologist, International Development Consultant, theatre practitioner and amateur chef, with training in Law and Medical Anthropology and the author of Sexualness (2016, New Text), which tells a story of Queer movements in India, develops a framework to think the sexual from the global south, and introduces Quantum Physics into the study of the sexual.

Alice Tilche is a lecturer in Anthropology and Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research at the intersection of art and activism employs visual, collaborative and arts-based methods to research social transformations – including work on the cultural politics of indigeneity, migration, nationalism and most recently Covid-19. Alice’s book Adivasi Art and Activism: curation in a nationalist age was published with Washington University Press in 2022. Her collaborative film projects including Sundarana (2011), Broken Gods (2019) and Budhan-Podcast (2021) have been selected for a number of international film screenings and festivals.

We very much welcome questions and feedback @ alice.tilche@leicester.ac.uk and xaefis@gmail.com

[1] khanna identifies ‘digital enclosure’ as a process through which political subjectivity comes to be enclosed within the digital, and through which the possibility of its articulation outside of the digital is either foreclosed or made subject to articulations and logics in the digital.

[2] It is estimated that prior to demonetisation the informal economy accounted for 52% of the national GDP and employed about 75% of the workforce (Sardana 2018). A report released by the State Bank of India in late 2021, suggests that the informal economy now accounts for less than 20% of the GDP.

Cite as: Tilche, Alice and Khanna, Akshay. 2022. “Embodying emotions in theatre and film.” Focaalblog, 16 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/06/16/alice-tilche-akshay-khanna-embodying-emotions-in-theatre-and-film/

Art and Visual Anthropology, Blog

Alice Tilche & akshay khanna: The Village of the Dead

“Near Ahmedabad’s civil hospital, 

in a small dilapidated house. 

A dog lives with his wife and their children. 

After two days, the dog returns to his home. 

After seeing him, the wife says: 

“Oh! Look at your face, it is glowing 

First tell me where you have been for two days? 

The dog shakes his tail and tells her with a laugh: 

“Do you know today I ate human flesh, 

And the human was alive”. 

I return to this episode every time, ‘Murdon ka Gaon’ (The Village of the Dead). I watch it once more, working on a translation to Italian for a film screening, moving from the English subtitles while paying attention to the original Bhantu words that by now I mostly understand. I pay attention to the words, the pace of the story, I stop and listen again. Finding words in Italian, my mother tongue, strikes me – the words are more emotive than they sounded in English. They touch me more; perhaps it is also in the slow attentive viewing that I let them touch me. 

The core of the episode is simple: shot in a dark room, four people sit in a closed circle, telling a story, their faces folded into shadows by a candle placed in the middle. The image is dark and grainy, their voices varied but all intensely expressive. Sometimes, we cut to the image of a dog. Dogs sleeping, a dog roaming the streets at night, a dog licking its wounds. We move between close-ups of the faces of the actors and, occasionally, the dog. As I watch the film I am struck by the vivid, yet dark affects it provokes. The simplicity of the images on camera, and the ekphrastic storytelling (Favero 2018) allows you to watch and at the same time imagine the unimaginable – that which, in fact, is too inhuman to be represented. 

The story, an adaptation of the Hindi short story by Dharamvir Bharti, ‘Village of the Dead’, is told from the perspective of a dog, a dog that roams the streets at night to find half-dead bodies, the bodies of migrants, of slaves, of corona patients that are so hungry and thirsty that they begin eating themselves. It is a story of thresholds, of the threshold between the living and the dead, between humans and non-humans, between humans and slaves, between humans and hungry humans. 

Finding the city’s hospital dark and empty we follow the dog wandering towards the highway in search of food. Near the highway, the dog encounters thousands of migrants and their children walking “dhak, dhak, dhak, like machines” – an encounter that evokes the brutal images of the bleeding feet of migrants, walking thousands of kilometres to return home in the face of a lockdown of the country announced with a few hours’ notice, a mass migration estimated to be the largest in the history of the subcontinent. The dog sees a hut perched against some tall buildings, where a boy gasps, barely able to form the word water: “pa… pa … pani”. There is only an old man to listen to him, himself too helpless to help. “I will get relief if you die”, the old man shouts at the boy in an angry tone. The dog continues wandering through hallucinatory scenes of poverty, of hunger, of mothers trying to feed their children, of people who are too helpless to love, of humans that may have been dead but are in fact half-alive, eaten by the dog, then by flies, and who are so hungry and thirsty that they too drink their own blood. After digging its teeth in the flesh of a hungry human: 

“The dog got ashamed. And put his head down 

Because he ate the flesh of a hungry, slave migrant. 

Corona patients and hungry slaves are not humans” 

I find the storytelling format reassuring, about the four people talking softly, intimately – the intimacy of a story read before bedtime. The voice of the narrator, the dog, is soft. Perhaps this is done on purpose, like in many (terrible) folktales, where you are invited to trust, relax, be guided by the narrator to unimagined and terrifying places. This intimacy contrasts with the shocking images that the telling provokes, with the angry voice of the old man who tells the boy that the only relief is death. It contrasts with the reality that, perhaps unlike in folktales, we are presented with following the story. 

This vignette relates to one amongst several disturbing moments from an arts-based research project set in western India, which has sought to document and intervene in one of the most difficult collective experiences in recent human history. It was in May 2020, during the first wave of India’s Covid-19 pandemic, that a collective of indigenous theatre artists associated with Budhan Theatre and belonging to the ‘Denotified’[1] Chhara tribe began an extensive project of documentation of the lockdown and post-lockdown experiences of their communities through film and digital technology. This project had, by early 2022, produced two series of video podcasts in indigenous languages, disseminated through community social media platforms and messaging services such as WhatsApp. The first series filmed during the early days of the pandemic between May and December 2020 focussed inward, at the experiences of pain and loss of their own Chhara community. Starting in January 2021, the second series moves outwards, to document the experiences of other Denotified and Nomadic Tribes in the region and across the country. The third series, underway during this writing, brings the skills and experience developed beyond DNT communities by training young leaders from other marginalised groups in filmmaking.

Episodes in the series address the health, socio-cultural and politico-economic dimensions of the pandemic through multiple art forms that include theatre performances, story-telling, songs and poetry alongside more conventional forms of documentary film making such as interviews, fact sharing and event capture. They cover topics ranging from health and safety measures, changes in death and marriage rituals, precarious livelihoods, the lives of children and the gendered unfurling of the pandemic. The podcasts are an attempt to tell stories of the pandemic that do not find space in mainstream public spheres, to speak to one’s own community in one’s own language, as a companion, a community space in which to make sense of unprecedented suffering where the precarity, disenfranchisement and marginalisation of centuries took on another dimension altogether, where the fault-lines of a post-colonial society, subsumed in the everyday, rose to the gaze as the horrific realities of the reduction of the human to the inhuman. It is in this context that this particular episode serves as something of an index through which to navigate this moment. 

In the episode, the narration of collective suffering, made all the more effective through the absurdist use of the voice of the street dogs, sets the scene for an individual narrative of loss. Following the story told in a scantly lit room, we move to a brightly lit interview setting, with a widow and her son soon after they lost their husband and father to Corona. Sitting in a chair outside her house, dressed in a white ‘good’ sari, the widow speaks calmly. The widow is well held-together, as is her son. They do not cry. They both demonstrate utmost dignity, precisely that which has been denied to them, and which differentiates the dead and the living. As they speak, however, the precarity of their situation becomes clear: the debts they have taken to pay hospital bills, the unpaid school fees, the loss of livelihood. At the end of the interview, still keeping her composure, the widow turns to the camera with her hands joined pleading the government for help. Glimpses of death and its rawness break through the frame of respectability as interspersed with their story is the WhatsApp footage of the husband / father in hospital, intubated, gasping for breath – an image of the physical suffering of the disease that has been invisible from most representations of the pandemic. Contrasting with the composed telling of his story the image takes us back to “the village of the dead” – to that suffering beyond the human which only a dog can recount.

The telling of this story, and the images that it both evokes and presents, is an attempt at disturbing the political order of images and their associated experiences – and the relationships of visibility / invisibility that obliterate certain kinds of suffering and the possibility of its memory. Less than a year after the second wave of the Covid pandemic in India, its sheer horror and the absolute failure of the state to address it, is being aggressively erased. The various elements of the catastrophe, and in multiple registers are being denied – be it in terms of numbers[2], of causation of death and morbidity, of narratives of loss, emotional and spiritual distress – are thus at the risk of being ‘aggressively forgotten’. The project of holding on to experience, of creating portals to memory is thus a complicated affair, bringing together the material conditions for this creation, the emotive and affective challenges of recounting, the historical struggle of some of the most marginalised peoples of the world to articulate an intelligible voice, and the dramatic shifts in the materiality of public spheres, aesthetic and artistic practices in a post-COVID world.

This production of images also forces a reconsideration of the ethical debates around representations of suffering that frame ethical protocols within academia. In the late 1980s, at a time when shocking images of wars and famines became widely broadcasted, medical anthropologists criticised the ‘globalisation of suffering’ through which images become appropriated to appeal to global audiences (Kleinman and Kleinman 1996; see Ong 2019 for more recent debates). Scholars then argued that these iconic images involved a problematic commoditisation, and therefore thinning out, of the experience of suffering. Instead, they called for a kind of moral witnessing that is reflexive, that accounts for local realities by involving local participants in the development of images and interventions. These debates, however, continue tend to be structured by an imagination of the filmmaker, the anthropologist, the researcher, the producer of representations as outsiders, whereas those represented are imagined as objects bereft of agency. At the outset then, the representation of suffering itself comes to be suspect as a form of exploitation, and subject to technologies of taming, of decaffeination, so that representations may be considered and consumed without an engagement with the experience itself. There is thus a crucial misalignment between these ethical preoccupations aimed at protecting the vulnerable and the demand of communities to be heard and seen. The pandemic put indigenous communities in India in the grips of a devastating humanitarian crisis. Their vulnerability was greater because of their inability to enter and become visible in the public sphere.  If we engage with indigenous groups as active consumers and producers of images – through mobile phones, social media and through artistic practices like film and drama – what are the material, or ethical concerns that underly the making of images? What does it mean for a research to be led by the community?

In the following weeks we shall in this series of blogposts, share episodes from the project, alongside reflections on the questions that they force open or complicate, around the changing nature of collaborative research, the transformation of embodied performance into digital objects and processes, the emergence of a new visual and political language around suffering and the place of death in current political formations.

Alice Tilche is a lecturer in Anthropology and Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research at the intersection of art and activism employs visual, collaborative and arts-based methods to research social transformations – including work on the cultural politics of indigeneity, migration, nationalism and most recently Covid-19. Alice’s book Adivasi Art and Activism: curation in a nationalist age was published with Washington University Press in 2022. Her collaborative film projects including Sundarana (2011), Broken Gods (2019) and Budhan-Podcast (2021) have been selected for a number of international film screenings and festivals.

Akshay Khanna is a Delhi-based Social Anthropologist, International Development Consultant, theatre practitioner and amateur chef, with training in Law and Medical Anthropology and the author of Sexualness (2016, New Text), which tells a story of Queer movements in India, develops a framework to think the sexual from the global south, and introduces Quantum Physics into the study of the sexual.

References

Kleinman, Arthur, and Joan Kleinman. “The Appeal of Experience; The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times.” Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 1–23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20027351.

Favero, Paolo. 2018. The present image. Palgrave MacMillan.  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69499-3_5

Ong, Jonathan Corpus. “Toward an Ordinary Ethics of Mediated Humanitarianism: An Agenda for Ethnography.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 22, no. 4 (July 2019): 481–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877919830095.

Notes

[1] ‘Denotified’ refers to tribes were ‘notified’ as born criminals during the British colonial rule under the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act. Despite their denotification five years after India’s independence the stigma of criminality continues to be associated with these groups, depriving them of citizenship rights and entitlements. The population of India’s Denotified and Nomadic is estimated to be around 10 % of India’s total population.

[2] The World Health Organisation estimates that the total number of excess deaths associated with the COVID pandemic in the year 2020 and 2021 is about 47 lakh/4.7million. The Government of India in turn rejects the report and insists that the number is 1/10th of the WHO estimate.

Cite as: Tilche, Alice and Khanna, Akshay. 2022. “The Village of the Dead.” Focaalblog, 31 May. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/05/31/alice-tilche-akshay-khanna-the-village-of-the-dead/