Farrukh Dhondy | Can docus lead to justice? Will Trolley Times have an impact?

“O Bachchoo the poets are enchanted

With the song of the nightingale

You always took it for granted

That your musical assumptions fail

To detect in these avian twitters

Any patterns of melody

These sounds of our blue sky’s litters

Emanating from tree to tree…”

From Bundgobi Desserts, by Bachchoo

“Punjabi farmers call the trailer fixed behind a tractor a ‘trolley’.” Thus spake filmmaker Gurvinder Singh, addressing one of the many audiences for his documentary film Trolley Times on tour in Britain.

The documentary records the mass movement of farmers protesting against the Indian government’s three laws which they claimed would impoverish some and force others into penury. It’s called TROLLEY TIMES, the name of the news sheet that the farmers produced during their mass movement two to three years ago.

Gurvinder tells his audiences that he is a feature filmmaker (he has won several international awards for these) but felt impelled by the farmers’ protest to record it. Trolley Times is not a news report on the nationwide strike, concentrating on the mainly Sikh gathering of farmers and their supporters from Punjab and Haryana who gathered at the gates of Delhi and organised a peaceful march and tractor procession through the Indian capital.

Neither is it a “balanced” BBC documentary. In the week of Trolley Times’ tour of Britain, the BBC transmitted the final episode of a three-part documentary on the British miners’ strike in 1984. Apart from the actual footage of the striking miners and the police assault on them, it also featured reminiscent interviews with miners who had been on that strike, others who had opposed it and even the policemen who had suppressed it. There was footage of Margaret Thatcher, the then Prime Minister whose policies of closing mines caused the strike, and some interviews with surviving advisers who had worked to smash it.

Gurvinder calls Trolley Times a “documentary” and I suppose, gentle reader, that any observational piece, which relentlessly records the gathered thousands, the encampment for months outside Delhi, the arguments, speeches, contentions straight-to-camera of the strikers and their relatives, of hundreds of women in the encampment and in the villages from which the strikers came, can claim to be such.

But this is not in any sense a straightforward observational documentary, though it observes diligently. Neither is it an investigative documentary which examines exhaustively the issues involved.

It is an edifice of idiosyncratic art -- its subject? -- a record of what happened and with and to whom. And yes, it forges a narrative. After an exhaustive record of all that I have said above that it contains, we get to a plot.

Several youths returning on the tractors from the Delhi protest lose their way. They encounter the police and ask them for directions home. The police offer their advice and, climbing onto the tractors as guides, lead them to a police station and arrest the lot. They transfer them from one police station to another, charge them with all forms of affray and incarcerate them finally in Delhi’s Tihar Jail.

Gurvinder’s camera moves to Mogo in Punjab, the village from which these youths come. The bewildered, infuriated and despairing reactions of their relatives and the entire village, who treat the unjustly imprisoned youth as their own, are meticulously recorded.

And yes, the film concludes with the triumphant reception the village prepares for the youths on their release. Decorated tractors, festive clothing, a throng of every man, woman and child in the village, garlands and saffron scarves greet the youths. See the conquering heroes come, sound the trumpets, beat the drum?

Trolley Times was first exhibited at the Mumbai documentary film festival. While other political films were reviewed in the national press, this one was not. Having seen on screen the evidence of an entire community of agriculturalists who succeeded through protest in the suspension, if not defeat, of the legalised intentions of the present government, I wonder why no report or review of its content was featured. Any ideas?

Trolley Times was screened in Birmingham last week at the headquarters of the city’s Indian Worker’s Association. It met with a hostile reaction from the audience of mostly Maoists and Stalinists who expected a tactical activist piece and were instead witnesses to an idiosyncratic, artistic, historical record.

The audience at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) were much more absorbedly attentive. They asked perceptive questions about whether the film would have an impact on the coming Indian general election. Gurvinder Singh quoted one of his cinematic heroes, Ritwik Ghatak, who said films don’t change the world -- politics do.

In recent weeks, the UK’s ITV Channel broadcast a documentary outlining the thirty-year-old scandal in which hundreds of sub-postmasters were falsely charged with swindling the Post Office. These charges and prosecutions were prompted by a severe malfunction in accounting by the Post Office’ s computer system called Horizon, supplied by the Japanese multinational Fujitsu.

These victims were falsely charged with financial fraud. They were ruined. Some committed suicide, others were jailed and yet others became bankrupt. It was the most egregious case of injustice in modern Britain.

The documentary was widely watched and has directly led to the pillorying of the officials responsible for covering up the Horizon malfunction. Even Hedgie Sunak says that he is passing a law annulling the guilty sentences and offering compensation.

Can documentaries force politicians to side, even belatedly, with justice?