Songs to film by

With his new documentary Brief Life of Insects, which will be screened at the upcoming Mumbai International Film Festival, Tarun Bhartiya explores what folk music really is. It is part of his series Songs To Live By.

In his anecdotal book, Cinema and I, filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak while praising the documentary form of filmmaking had stated, “In the truly creative sense, the documentary is an attitude”. Filmmaker Tarun Bhartiya’s work certainly resonates with that statement. His attitude to filming India’s Northeast, the place where he belongs, is not only political, but also poetic. Over a span of 20 years, Tarun has made documentaries and collaborated with several filmmakers (and political activists). But with his recent offering, Brief Life of Insects, which will be screened at the 14th Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF), Tarun will ask you to believe it is a departure of sorts from his previous oeuvre. Brief Life is a 23-minute documentary following the life of farmers in Umpohwin, a Bhoi village on the Assam-Meghalaya border in India.

“Whenever I used to travel in the interiors of Meghalaya, one of the things that used to strike me was how the music in the villages was so different from the folk music that they put up on stage on occasions like Republic Day, etc., where people dress up and dance it is almost like an imagination of an outsider of what folk culture should be,” Tarun says. This became the crux of his cycle of six documentaries Songs to Live By (of which Brief Life is a part).

An image of a red truck opens the film and then we are walking along with a group of men. A man lights his beedi, and we are told that this day is in February 2015. A man comes up close to the camera and shakes hands with the cameraperson (we see the hand). We see a sign of mutual respect and are placed comfortably into the film (feeling almost invited along with the filmmakers). In Tarun’s approach there’s no brooding on the landscape, he takes us directly to the people, and their life. He doesn’t ponder around or beyond the hills.

“Brief Life was quite an accident,” he says. “I had gone to shoot something else, and I was standing and shooting agricultural activity, when I found the people there were singing. I wasn’t prepared.” So Tarun shot as much as he could and the film opens when he goes back after two months to document them again. However, when they are asked to sing the song, they don’t remember it anymore. The film is also an attempt at displaying the intricate diversity prevalent in the smaller pockets of the country. “The language they speak in the film is Mongtung, which by and large can be classified as Khasi, but people living in Shillong will not be able to make (it) out,” he adds. “There is an obsession with numbers, of putting smaller groups under one single identity which is actually killing our diversity.”

In a note he writes, “As the paddy is pounded, a rhythm emerges inviting a song. Albinus Kharkongor, Umpohwin’s master of rhyme and verse, steps in and takes over. The simple rhythm belies the vast topical territory that Albinus sings. The village’s existing corpus of lyrical anecdotes get taken over by his irreverent wit and improvisation. Longings are cloaked, oppressors are made fun of, dinner is slipped through clumsy fingers and edible roots makes one fart. The language swings from the local dialect to pidgin to one that is plainly imagined.”

Through the songs that they sing, Tarun explains that the viewer “will get a strong sense of history of that place, which goes against the grain of what they think is the tribal culture”.

In the film, Tarun has tried to capture an unsentimental image of “people beyond the hills”. But in a world where cultures are getting homogenised, the question “what is folk ” could change its tense and ring hollow.

On January 31, 9.30 am at J.B.Hall, Films Division, Peddar Road

On documentary films in India: Tarun confesses his attraction to the form is because of the freedom that he gets and he points to the culture of documentary filmmaking culture in the country: “There is something called the Indian documentary that has emerged, and it has developed its own diversity. So you have a group of interesting people like Amar Kanwar, Sanjay Kak, Anand Patwardhan and then you have really experimental documentaries; all of this has happened because in India, documentaries have gone beyond the usual funding strategies, and various other reasons. The independent documentary culture has opened possibilities for a lot of people to make documentaries.” And Tarun firmly believes “a mainstream Bollywood film cannot afford to have as much diversity as the documentary” and therefore “this is the best time to be a documentary filmmaker”.