The idea for his first feature film, The Head Hunter, took root in the State where Nilanjan Datta grew up — Arunachal Pradesh. “I used to see old tribal men in the market place in Itanagar,” the Assamese recollects. “The non-tribals used to detest them and make fun of their costumes.” It is this civilisational clash that he chose as the theme of the first film in the Wancho tribal language and only the third film to come out of Arunachal Pradesh. The Wancho tribe lives in the Patkai hills of the Longding district of Arunachal Pradesh. The film helps bring this largely unknown language and culture into focus. It won the best film award in the Wancho language at the National Film Awards of 2015.
This discovery of obscure cultures and languages is one of the more interesting aspects of the National Awards, which is largely drowned in controversies year after year. This year, besides Wancho, films in Bodo, Khasi, Maithili and Kurukh were also on view. In 2011, Byari in Beary language, spoken in Karnataka and parts of Kerala, won the best feature film award.
Ethnographic worksThese films may not score high either in the entertainment department or in the art and craft of cinema. Most of them are devoid of technical flourishes and are anthropological and ethnographic in nature. Yarwng in Kokborok, which brought the first National Award to Tripura back in 2010, is an example. Made by a Malayali priest from Kottayam, Father Joseph Pulinthanath, who had been living in the Northeast for more than three decades, the film was about the inhabitants of the the once-prosperous Raima valley of Tripura who were forced to leave when the valley was submerged as a result of the construction of a dam on the Gumti river in 1976.
The Head Hunter has a similar theme. It speaks of how the road to development can cause a tribal to lose his way home; about how intrusions in the name of progress displace tribals. “Development is necessary but at what cost? Do we uproot them from their ethnicities and then modernise them,” asks Nilanjan. The conflict is represented in the film between an old tribal and a young educated government officer.
Nilanjan catches the daily rhythms and rituals of the Wanchos. There have been many misconceptions about them which he wanted to clear, he says. The tribe of headhunters has been misunderstood as wild, violent and dangerous even though the practice of human headhunting was abolished in 1991 through the efforts of the government and the missionaries in the region. Nilanjan attempts to bring out their humane side and their relationship with nature. He calls it a film about the present encountering a lost past.
Nilanjan found a lot of the Wancho youngsters working at the Mumbai international airport, in beauty parlours, and spas. Two of those girls, Nina Wangsu and Akom Arangham, helped as language instructors for the film. The young lead, Mrigendra Narayan Konwar, is an Assamese actor trained at the National School of Drama. The old Wancho man, Nokshaa Saham, is not an actor; he was chosen when tribal villagers were auditioned for the role.
Edpa Kana (Going home), a 26-minute Kurukh language film (spoken in the Oraon tribe) is about a tribal steel plant engineer who finds himself caught between modernity and orthodoxy. It won the best audiography award in the non-features section. Its director, Niranjan Kujur, was a student of direction and screenplay writing at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute. This is Niranajan’s second film in Kurukh after a 17-minute fictional short film titled Pahada (Mathematics tables). The first fictional film in the tribal language, made as an institute project, focussed on the impact of Naxalism on the education of children in the hinterland. In the film, a tribal child is unable to focus on learning mathematics tables because of the distracting sound of guns around him.
Niranjan, who was born in Lohardaga district and grew up in Ranchi, always wanted to make a film in his mother tongue Kurukh and cast his own family members in his first film. He says he wants to keep making films in his mother tongue because he is not fluent in it himself. “Our whole generation has been brought up in Hindi and English because it is a sign of having arrived,” he says. According to him, cinema will help give the dialect the right push and identity.
This has also been the aim of actress Neetu Chandra, the producer of Mithila Makhaan , the Maithili language winner this year. Besides Bhojpuri, Maithili, Magahi and Angika are the other languages spoken in Bihar, her home State, and they are slowly dying. “My idea is to restore the languages, scripts and the rich culture. And the film is the best way forward,” she says. Her other aim was to dispel the negative notions about Bihar and its people. “Without ever being there people imagine the worse; they have these wild assumptions about Biharis,” she says. Shot in the U.S., Canada, Nepal and India, the film is about how NRIs can come back to their roots and work wonders for the local community.
Taking films to a larger audienceDespite the National Award, most of these films get largely confined to the festival circuit. The commercial possibilities are limited. Chandra’s maiden venture Deswa , the first Bhojpuri film in over 50 years to have been chosen for the Indian Panorama at IFFI Goa, could never find a release in Bihar. But Mithila Makhaan has opened new windows. People are searching for the previous film online. “There is a curiosity for our work now,” says Chandra. Nilanjan is hoping the Arunachal government will take note of his film and help disseminate it in the Northeast. And, hopefully, the mandatory showcasing on DD will take it to a larger audience in the country.
namrata.joshi@thehindu.co.in
