Digant Gautam remembers his unpleasant brush with casteism in Barmer district, in the Thar desert of Rajasthan, while shooting his maiden directorial venture, a 15 minute short called Gadho . The story of an old man losing his only companion, a pet donkey, Gautam wanted his film to be “documentary-like”, rooted in reality than fiction. So he wanted to cast someone from the small Balotra town, where he was shooting, for the lead.
The search for a local, non-actor led him to a tailor, who promptly accepted the offer; till he was taken to a Bhil community cottage for the shoot. “Such is the societal segregation that he wouldn’t enter the house of someone who belonged to what he considered a ‘lowly’ community. Some upper caste people considered for the role would refuse to touch the donkey. Some from the lower castes were not allowed to fetch water from the local well [in the film scenes],” says Gautam.
Ultimately, he travelled almost 120 kilometres from the location to Kali Beri near Jodhpur to meet Ganpat Ram from the Bhat community. He agreed to the role and stayed on with the crew for six days for the shoot. All he wanted, apart from the fees, was his hookah, tambaku (tobacco), and a pair of brand new jootis (footwear). Mohammad Yasin, a local painter-turned-filmmaker became Gautam’s guide and line producer of sorts. Even Ram’s character’s donkey, called Ablak, was sourced locally, from the Rabari community. Ablak even gets his name on the credits roll!
Beast of burden
Gautam is happy that the film could evolve organically in this manner, from the terra firma. But Gadho is now set for the world stage. Produced by Story People, it is the only Indian film to have been selected in the International Competition category at the 35th Busan International Short Film Festival. It also played at the International Competition at the 45th Athens International Film + Video Festival 2018.
The old man goes about selling tea from a roadside shop, uses the donkey to tow water and other supplies yet constantly taunts the voiceless creature. He calls him obstinate, useless, someone who can never become a horse. But that’s the way he is. It’s how he expresses his care for Ablak.
For Gautam, the Haryana-Delhi boy who moved to direction after being a cinematographer for long, the terrain of the film is a character unto itself — the vast expanses of sand paralleling the stretch of monotony in the old man’s life. He went to Barmer with a basic plot outline, with cameraman Ravinder Kumar and executive producer Dinesh Gautam for company. The three of them stayed there for 15 days just to absorb the place and meet its residents. “One had to be responsive even to nature, the weather, the storm,” says Gautam.
In absentia
They had to be enterprising in other ways as well. In the absence of a sound expert, Gautam used a lapel mike and zoom to record the dialogue himself. Though the sound design was done in post-production, Gautam retained the original recorded dialogue. “If we would have dubbed it, the local dialect and flavour would have been lost,” he says.
Be it Tungrus at Hot Docs or Gadho at Busan, human-animal relationships seem to be a sure win for Indian shorts these days. Gadho , at its heart,is essentially a fable about companionship, how we tend take it for granted and discover its value only in its absence.
When the donkey disappears he is left with a huge void. “It’s not the story so much as the treatment and emotions that are the key,” says Gautam. So, despite the locational specificity, the story is universal. What really matters for Gautam, who is now working towards his first feature film Katha, is to be able to express “minute details of every day life on screen”.
namrata.joshi@thehindu.co.in
