In my land, all the infants witness flower of blood
Now in my land, children don’t imagine themselves chasing butterflies
The youth don’t just sit under a tree and recite poems of love
All the men and women don’t imagine a future of comfort…
How many days have passed, how many months and years
I haven’t seen a dream of my own
I just see an engulfing darkness
The sight of clouds playing with the sky doesn’t give me ease
I am witnessing just a sun getting submerged in black…
These are excerpts from a poem by a United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) rebel recited in Mukul Haloi’s maiden feature-length documentary Tales From Our Childhood.
The film is like poetry on screen — beautiful, measured frames with their own gentle flow and cadence. As against the lyricism of the form, the subject Haloi deals with is far from musical and mild — growing up in 90s Assam surrounded by turmoil and violence; when the might of the state clashed with the fervour of the local revolutionaries demanding their right to self-determination, when ULFA was heading an armed rebellion for independence from India. It was a war in which none can claim to have come out a clear winner, a battle that hasn’t been fully contained yet.
Resurgent views
A graduate in film direction from Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, Haloi was awarded the Early Career Fellowship by Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai to make the film. After playing at the Melbourne International Film Festival 2018, it had its international premiere on August 13, at ARKIPEL — Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival.
Haloi, who has also shot and edited the film, travels to the times of insurgency through recollection and reflection. A childhood friend dons a uniform borrowed from a dead ULFA rebel’s family. Another shares the entries from her old diary. A group of friends rehearses a play from the times of the unrest. His mother talks of the family’s own close encounters with fear and uncertainty, about the complicity of the village residents in the struggle, either as participants or supporters. Through all this, Haloi’s camera is a perennial fly on the wall. “Whenever we meet, we invariably go back to those times,” he says.
The memories are dominated by violence, death and disappearances. The stories are about blackouts and midnight knocks on the door, about curfews and explosions, bombs and bullets, ambushes, crackdowns and encounters. They are chilling and stark in the matter-of-fact manner in which they are recounted. Like the poem, these stories are also underlined with an overwhelming sense of loss and bleakness. The narrative acquires a distinct shape through the fragmented nature of memories, their intrinsic disorder, disconnect and lack of linearity.
Ceasing fire
Originally from Nalbari in Assam, Haloi shot the film between December 2016 and September 2017 in his own village as well as in Digboi, Dibrugarh and Guwahati. The landscape is pastoral, verdant, and tranquil, but harbouring tension and an unspoken fear.
There is something distinctly disquieting in Haloi’s quiet imagery, and an urgency even in the unhurried pace. “There’s this rhythm of life in Assam in which the army intrusion looked bizarre,” Haloi says.
He says he has not dredged out memories to seek resolutions or closures. The ceasing of conflict, the seeming normalcy of the present feels more ominous than a clear signal of peace. Then there is a larger confusion a friend speaks of. Whose blood was shed for our good, he asks: both the army and ULFA have killed innocents and we have never been able to understand who the enemy was. Mothers still worry when their kids don’t return home by 10 at night and the questions remain unanswered.
namrata.joshi@thehindu.co.in
