Proposal 7: "Bodoland - Shades of Loss" by DEBJANI MUKHERJEE

In Assam, one of India's north-eastern states, political strife and insurgency has existed for decades, leading to large scale loss of human lives. This film deals with the loss such political maelstrom entails: whether it's the men who disappear, the women who lose their sons and husbands, or the sons who cannot ever return home. 


The film tells the poignant story of the women who struggle to deal with huge personal tragedies caused by a political maelstrom where they are only hapless victims. But it is interwoven with the story of young David, who having lost his father to political violence, secretly yearns to return home, but cannot. David travels to Bodoland to visit home, and the journey brings out a rush a memories, of ghosts past and present, putting in context the political situation in Bodoland and the personal stories of loss and longing that is part of their emotional landscape. 

BIO NOTE: 

Trained in film direction from the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute in Calcutta,  Debjani went on to get a degree in Communications Studies from the University of Leeds, UK. Thereafter, she worked for the School of Art and  Design, University of Ulster, Belfast, as a Research Associate in their Visual Ethnography/ Interactive Documentary programme, a collaborative EU funded new media project. Prior to leaving for Europe, she has worked in television and made documentaries for Doordarshan, India’s national network. In the past two years, she made documentaries for NHK, Japan and is currently producing and directing an environmental documentary for the Department of Tourism, Government of Assam.

Trailers of the proposed documentary:

• bodoland: shades of loss
• shades of loss: the way we live

SYNOPSIS:

In western Assam in India, along the north bank of the mighty Brahmaputra river, lies Bodoland, where the trail of the two-decade long insurgency is littered with the blood of thousands, and we are still counting. As the arc of violence widens to include more of the dead and injured, a sense of insurmountable tragedy prevails, reverberating with the pain of loss and longing. People disappear, lives hang in limbo, and young boys leave home never to return.

Leading difficult lives under extraordinary circumstances, the story of the lives of the people who live in this region hold up a mirror to the maelstrom of events that surround them, events that have shaped and changed their lives irrevocably. The film will try and hold up a mirror to how lives are torn apart by militancy, posing them with a dilemma – as to how to negotiate their journey through the fraught political space of their homeland.

Women like Anurani, Helena and Anupama, whose husbands have disappeared or been killed by militants, try to somehow rebuild their shattered lives for the sake of their children and move on to a semblance of normalcy. Normalcy – as we understand and take for granted – is something difficult to achieve under the circumstances, but it is a battle these women fight every day of their lives.

At the other end of the spectrum is David, Anupama’s son, who responds to the dilemma by leaving home. Rather than live under the shadow of guns or join a militant group, he prefers to disown and disregard the reality of his origin. Suffering from discontinuity and distortion regarding the social, cultural and human ambience he grew up in, he looks for a distorted identity unknowingly, one that will take him far away from his homeland – but, ironically, it is this, which makes him vulnerable. His homeland no longer belongs to him, and he finds himself in an existential disorder. In fact, it is through David's journey to his homeland, that the incendiary political situation in Bodoland is brought into sharp relief, where the political and the personal emotional landscape of its inhabitants collide and collapse into each other, with tragic consequences. 

TREATMENT:

On the face of it, the story of Bodoland is about a divided community, waging a fratricidal war against each other. But it also offers many pathways and windows through which to examine concerns such as the other India, still mired in battling issues of ‘freedom’ and ‘sovereignty’, of changing identities and notions of belonging.

In the film, what happens to the characters in their lives and also within the interiority of their own minds, the jumble of fears, insecurities, conflicts, ambitions, and what is happening around them is equally important. The narrative has to negotiate moving between sections that deal with very individual moments of triumph and despair, and broader ones that deal with the fraught political situation in the state, interspersed with the even larger issue of human rights, sovereignty, poverty and ignorance.

In the formal expression and exploration of Bodoland, and the characters that people that space, the idea will be to make sense of the world that is put together on screen, in fleshing out a ‘life’ that may be familiar or unfamiliar. It will be the characters’ ‘voices’ that will articulate their lives, trying to explain, make sense of it all, trying to put together the pieces of the jigsaw for us. Perhaps a free flowing exploratory style that also combines talking head segments with spontaneous moments will be appropriate to understand existing perspectives and derive new ones from the material presented.

Structurally, the pivot of the narrative is David and his mother Anupama – what is happening to them, what is happening around them, and how they control, manipulate or succumb to what happens to them. It will adopt a free-flowing style, a blending of the observational, and stylistic and interpretative mode – for exposition of the characters and their situation with reference to their historical compulsion. This approach enables the film to take an authorship stance, to probe into the particular situation of Bodoland and the lives of these two individuals, caught in the conflict.

Unfolding as a narrative that moves back and forward in time and space interspersed with other first person accounts of victims of militancy in the region, the mode of editing creates the juxtapositions, contrasts and contradictions that is the soul of the narrative, keeping the trajectory of the story of bloodied and traumatised Bodoland in clear focus, exemplified by the people who live in it. But it would also be important to ensure that it is not just about the storyline, and the viewer also gets to see something beyond the obvious ‘life’ that has been created on screen, and feels a part of a person or situation, even if it has no semblance to the ‘life’ one is familiar with.

•            The narrative starts off with Anurani Rabha recounting the night when her husband never came home. A sub-inspector with the police, he was killed in an ambush by Bodo militants. It is the abruptness of his death that Anurani has not come to terms with, the suddenness with which he left her, and the brutal end that he met with. Her husband’s memory is a constant in her life, and all that she wants is a semblance of a normal life so that she is able to raise her daughter and give her an education.

•        Bodoland in western Assam, is the centre-point of the two-decade long Bodo insurgency, and now, a battleground between two Bodo militant groups engaged in a two-pronged war – one with the Indian government, and the other, a fratricidal war against each other, which threatens to wipe out the Bodo population. Issues of land, place, language, culture, identity and mythologies of ancestry and belonging generate a lot of confusion, turmoil and mayhem across the entire northeastern region of India, and Bodoland is a case in point, a deadly cocktail of violence and bloodshed.
•           David is traveling to Kokrajhar, after a gap of some years. His home is Kokrajhar in Bodoland, where his mother still lives. But he rarely visits home, and when he does, it is only for a day or two.  The road to Kokrajhar is flanked by green on either sides, and the fog of a winter morning creates a dream-like atmosphere, like the road to some promised land. But David says he doesn’t like going home.

•       As he looks out of the speeding car, David remembers the story told by his 120 year-old great grandmother. When she was young, more than a hundred years ago, there was a big earthquake in the region. It was so massive that it shook the earth, the ground gave way, cracking in a hundred different places, and all the various types of insects that lived beneath the ground came up, and started eating up all the trees and plants, destroying everything, leaving the land barren.
•        This memory serves a perfect metaphor to present day Bodoland. As David’s voice recounts his grandmother’s story, the streets of Kokrajhar buzzes with a strange nervous energy. Army and paramilitary patrol the streets, alert and on edge, their AK-47’s and 57’s slung over their shoulder. People go over their daily lives, crowding atop buses, haggling over fish, rickshaws filled with giggling schoolchildren, but the army keeps a close watch, the flag atop the newly constructed Bodoland Legislative Council flutters nervously, and menacing graffiti fills all available wall space.