FILMATIQUE: Thank you for sharing your films. Rang Mahal (Palace of Colours) was quite mesmeric to watch—dreamy and alluring in its meditation. To me Sakhisona laid out the lexicon in some ways for Rang Mahal in terms of its fabulistic, mythical and nonhuman aspects. I'd like to start with the architecture of myth, history and land in Rang Mahal—how did you construct it? What was your process going into that?
PRANTIK NARAYAN BASU: The pleasure is mine. I like the reference to architecture, as films too are movements in time and space. My practice has been closely associated with myths and folklore. They work as a time capsule, an access to the anecdotal history that gives us an entry to the ethos of a community. I love reading/listening to them, and as a filmmaker, I always like to share what I love.
Most of these timeless tales are not only a structural marvel, but way more progressive than many of our contemporary narratives. For instance, the creation myths in Rang Mahal speak of a harmonious co-existence of nature and human, where the human is not at the center of the narrative. Our popular viewing culture has put humans at the center of every narrative. Cinema, I believe, is capable of going beyond this to envisage the narrative possibility of an altered frame of reference.
Khori Dungri, or the chalk stone hill that we see in the film is formed through years of erosion and sedimentation. Its pigments are used by the locals to mend and adorn the cracks on the walls of their houses. Like those rocks that come in various hues, there are myriad versions of the Santhali creation myth. I asked some people from the community and they revealed that since these myths pass on orally, they vary in their telling and retelling. I was fascinated by this idea, of having various versions of the same story. While this became the aural layer, I started to build upon the image layer with rocks, hills, trees and the village, sometimes in direct relation to the story, and sometimes leaving it open-ended for the viewer to interpret their own version.
FLMTQ: I like this notion of erosion, as I was thinking about the quite accretional mode of your film—accretional in the sense that the film is layering the fabulistic and the mythical, but doing so not in an ethnographic or documentary way. It was very lived, very present and immersive. And it was also being layered with the topography of the space, and the space itself telling its own stories of temporality.
My question here arises from an essay by Ashis Nandy, "The Landscape of Clandestine and Incommunicable Selves," which talks about the colonial project of rational enlightenment. This project deemed the myths, superstitions, and folklore of the colonized as apolitical or ahistorical, as not rational according to their notions of hierarchies.
Whereas your films meld folklore and history—of course this is history, it's how people are living and have lived. It's how they believe and how they construct their lives. Can you tell me how you came to that thinking in terms of folklore and oral storytelling as the history of an entire people, or entire generations of people who live in rural nonhuman places? How history is constructed in a way that we don’t think about or consider as textbook history or state history?
PNB: So, if we just consider the ritual in itself, the Santhals look at this as a kind of repair, both literal and metaphorical. The fact that these myths are retold on the festival days of Sohrai (a late harvest festival) also points towards myths as microcosms. For instance, the Thakur Jivi story in Rang Mahal points out clearly that the deity created animals first and only then did humans enter the picture. Santhals are extremely self-aware about their status as interlopers on this planet, and that also shows in their harmonious relationship with the environment. For them, a tree is not just a tree, nor is a pond a mere hole on land in which to store water; they are associated with more familial values.
For too long, we have convinced ourselves that we know what 'development' means in the Adivasi (indigenous) context. In this regard, it is important to mention the Pathalgadi (stone slab) movement, wherein many Adivasi villages in India have declared themselves 'self-rule zones.' The sections of the Constitution of India that give them the right to self-rule are inscribed onto large stone slabs, often placed right at the village entrance. Ironically, a community that had no written language until recent years is writing their own history as we speak, and we can only hope that one day the world will sensitize itself enough to recognize that belief systems other than our own exist, and are probably wiser and more sustainable in the long run.