Every campus has a special spot. It’s usually an in-between kind of place, undesignated and seemingly without a purpose, but to which students invariably gravitate when there is not much happening. It’s a place to rendezvous and converse, complain and gossip, daydream and make plans. In time, as generations of students come and go, the accumulated weight of human memory lends this place a mythical quality. It becomes a symbol, and it is to this symbol that students turn when they, as a community, are faced with a crisis. In the Film and Television Institute of India, this place is a tree. The students call it ‘The Wisdom Tree.’
Finding myself under the Wisdom Tree one afternoon, in search of answers to the FTII crisis, I run into batchmates and friends Swapnil Ninawe and Gyan Gaurav. They are both Direction students from the now infamous 2008 batch.
It is common for film schools around the world to have delayed graduates since the final year project, usually a lengthy diploma film, is susceptible to inordinate delays. But in FTII, a paucity of infrastructure and equipment means numerous workflow bottlenecks, that need little to get out of hand. Hence, it takes routinely five years to fully graduate from the three year FTII course. In the case of the 2008 batch, it has taken a record seven and counting. It’s no surprise then, that these two share an easy camaraderie forged over many seasons of tea and conversation; and in sitting down with them in the leafy glade of the FTII canteen, I’ve caught them in their natural habitat.
Protests that doesn’t seem to end
Now in its fifth month, >the strike that began on June 11 continues despite protest marches and public meetings, ministry talks, and midnight raids.
Photo: Sanket Wankhede. Forced to open a dialogue with the students recently, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry seems largely to have used the talks as a delaying tactic, counting on the strike to end out of student fatigue. The >latest meeting on October 20 has left the students feeling ‘dejected’ and convinced of the ‘callous nature of the government’ towards FTII.
Meanwhile, 12 students are facing arrest after their anticipatory bail was rejected by a lower court on the charges of forcibly confining and ‘mentally torturing’ the institute’s director, Prashant Pathrabe. The students have now resolved to continue their strike and pressurise the government by taking their protest to the International Film Festival of India — organised by the I&B Ministry — in Goa next month.
The day before I met with Gyan and Swapnil, this strike was described to me by faculty member and alumnus, Lalit Tewari, as the ‘mother of all FTII strikes’. “Never before have they so directly fought the state and its cultural agenda,” he had said. What has kept this going?
“Everyone is sacrificing something. It’s that willingness to sacrifice, be it time or money or opportunity, that has fuelled this into going ahead,” says Swapnil.
Gyan says, “There is a lot at stake for people here. But somehow they believe that what they are doing is beyond just themselves. That this needs to be protected and if we don’t question now, we will lose this place.”
The nation is by now abreast of the basic facts. We know that the student strike began in response to the appointment, as the Chairman of the institute, of Gajendra Chauhan; known to TV audiences as the actor who played the embodiment of wisdom, Yudhishtir, in B.R. Chopra’s ‘90s epic Mahabharatha , and to single-screen theatre, soft-porn audiences as the protagonist of films such as Khuli Khidki , which Wikipedia describes as “the story of an (sic) handsome chap and his masculine instincts that brings atomy (sic) changes in him after his love relationship.”
Photo: Bhagya Prakash K. We also know that in selecting him as chairman of FTII and sticking to the decision, the I&B Ministry is steadfastly defending his place in the same cohort as R.K. Laxman, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Girish Karnad, Mrinal Sen, and U.R. Ananthamurthy.
We have also learnt subsequently that the student strike is > not just about Mr. Chauhan’s appointment , but actually a set of them — Anagha Ghaisas, Narendra Pathak, Pranjal Saikia and Rahul Solapurkar, who have been nominated to the reconstituted, eight-member FTII society and who, were their appointments to go through, will have much say in matters both administrative and academic at the premier film institute. If you hadn’t heard of them before, you weren’t alone. Neither had the film fraternity.
We’ve learnt for instance that Anagha Ghaisas, a RSS loyalist and documentary film maker whose filmography includes Shri Narendra Modi - Gatha Asamanya Netrutva Ki (A Tale of Extraordinary Leadership), has had to suffer the embarrassment of a court observation which said [she] does not have technical knowledge regarding making of a film and even does not know the difference between fiction and documentary.”
We’ve also for instance learnt about Narendra Pathak, whose nomination under the ‘person of eminence’ category seemingly rests on his past work as the chief of the Maharashtra unit of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and whose previous known connection with FTII comes from when the >ABVP thrashed FTII students during his tenure because they were about to screen Jai Bheem Comrade -- a film about contemporary Dalit activism against caste injustice.
Incidentally, in the kind irony that only real life can produce, the ABVP violence on that day was directed not just at the FTII students, but also members of the Dalit cultural group Kabir Kala Manch (KKM), whom you may have heard of because of the Marathi film Court -- which, according to many, may be our best effort in decades, at winning the foreign language film category at the Oscars this time around. KKM provided the inspiration for Court , which is a film about how voices of dissent are silenced in our country.
I ask Swapnil how his parents reacted to the strike. “Don’t get too involved. Stay on the periphery.” That was their initial advice to him, Swapnil says. What changed their minds was >the treatment of the students at the hands of the administration and the police. “It was so uncalled for. One night they are watching a Marathi news channel and Anagha Ghaisas comes on and says that all these students need is a good beating. That we need to be taught a lesson. Who talks like this?” What parents failed to understand was why their kids were being branded as anti-nationals. What’s so threatening about a bunch of film students that they attract police action, they asked in public forums.
Support for the students have often come from unlikely sources. Like the two people who offered them emergency housing when they were facing the prospect of being turned out of the campus. One, a nun and former FTII aspirant who offered them church facilities. The second, the son of a former security guard who on the instructions of his father turned up at a press conference to offer the students a couple of rooms at his chawl . Support has also come from the more quotidian sources closer to the campus; like the local tapri owner who offered the students muscle support if the police came calling at midnight again, or the panwala who bought up dozens of copies of Outlook Magazine (when it featured a cover story on the strike) to inform his customers about the issue.
Support for the students have often come from unlikely sources. Seen here is actor Rajat Kapoor addressing the students. Photo: PTI Swapnil and Gyan tell me the story of Rakesh Shukla, a direction and screenplay student from the 2009 batch. Shukla ji , as the 36-year-old is known on campus, broke his arm during the Delhi protest march when he tripped over the bandobast rope on Parliament Street following a crowd surge from behind. Later, under general anaesthesia on the operating table, this former UPSC aspirant from Behrai in UP, who finds inspiration in Ritwik Ghatak’s mis-en-scènes, puzzled the surgeon operating on him. Throughout the three-hour operation the semi-conscious Shukla- ji , kept muttering ‘Ghatak-Ghatak’ like a mantra. “And the surgeon, he is like who is Ghatak? So it’s explained to him that Shukla ji is a film student and a hardcore Ritwik Ghatak fan and so he learns about the whole FTII issue and about the protests. As a result, the surgeon gets him a discount on the plates that are inserted (to mend the broken arm) and so instead of the Rs. 30,000, Shuklaji had to pay only Rs. 18,000. Stories like these have happened with all of us.” says Swapnil.
The importance of this support, for the students, lies not in their materiality but rather in the spirit in which it is offered. Empathy from strangers who are not stakeholders in the strike, has added to the psychological resources of the students. It validates their cause and tells them that they are not alone in this fight.
The birth of a strike at GBM
The General Body Meeting is the fundamental democratic process within the student body. It is through a GBM that they deal with issues that concern them on the campus. Anyone can call one and the attendance may range from a few people to technically the entire student body. The elected representatives act primarily as moderators. They have no veto powers and cannot act unilaterally.
The issues that these GBMs typically deal with are the kind of quotidian concerns common to campuses anywhere; from solving a stray dog menace to improving the mess food. Once in a while, it may even include something bigger, like a campaign against the cutting down of trees on campus. In each case, the basic principle of these meetings is to build consensus before a plan of action is implemented. If fundamental differences of opinion remain, then the issue carries over into future meetings until a consensus is reached.
These GBMs, which were a small part of the FTII students’ life, has over the past four months, transformed entirely by becoming the heart and conscience of a resistance. It is here, over meetings routinely lasting several hours and attended by large numbers, that the students have built consensus over the strike. It also became the place where they reaffirmed each other and their cause.
One in particular stands out. Swapnil recalls the meeting conducted by Fareeda Mehta, film director and FTII alumnus, in the week after the meeting with Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. “She said forget strategy and all that. Just each one speak about what he or she holds dear about this institute. Why this issue bothers them and how it affects them. There were over 80 people in that GBM. Everyone spoke. People we’ve never heard speak in a public forum spoke. There were issues of language. People were falling short of words. People had tears rolling down their cheeks. But everyone came forward and spoke. It was like everyone was opening their hearts up. This happened for 14 hours and everyone stayed put and listened.”
If the GBM provided the heart, the hands provided the voice. If you were to walk into FTII today you would see that the campus — from its walls to its roads — have been turned into a powerful canvas of protest. From graffiti and paintings, to wall murals and sculptures, art came to provide the expressive force of the protest on campus.
Photo: Reuters Despite strike, students continue to learn
Gyan recalls the observation Sambhaji Bhagat, the Dalit activist and balladeer, made about the protest art during his visit to the campus, “He said ‘it’s so beautiful to come and see you guys paint and colour and write. You guys have a powerful tool. I have seen students agitating in commerce and science colleges, and at some point they will say, what now? To which someone will say lets throw stones or something.’ They don’t necessarily know how to translate their anger into something constructive. We didn’t either before we came here.”
During the strike, with the classes at a halt, the students decided to keep themselves occupied in other ways. Lectures and seminars. Poetry and music. Film screenings under the Wisdom Tree. And workshops. Lots of workshops. Including one conducted by a doctor from the Institute of Naturopathy, who lectured the students on fasting; how to prepare the body for it, the scientific benefits of it, the socio-cultural history of it and Gandhi’s thoughts on it. This in preparation for the hunger strike. “By the end of it, everyone was so charged up that by evening it became common to hear people say ‘I’m not eating in the mess. I have started eating fruits and drinking lots of water,” says Swapnil laughing.
Swapnil says that the experience of the strike has in his mind recast the larger societal role of the filmmaker as a court jester — who through his art and humour, talks truth to power. But talking truth to power takes courage. Aren’t the students afraid? Gyan says, “It’s not like we are not afraid. We are afraid. When we were in Delhi and we were facing 200 cops, I was scared. I was at the rope. I knew that the first blow will be on me. I was very scared, but I had to do it.”
What is it really , that these students are fighting for?
Despite all the media coverage the FTII strike has got, the nation has still been left with a few questions. Like, who are these students really? Is it simply that FTII catalyses an environment that produces rebels without much of a cause? Is this strike one such example of it? In a sentence, what is it really , that these students are fighting for?
FTII’s quirky admission process reproduces India’s cultural heterogeneity on campus. The process is agnostic of language proficiency of any kind, least of all English. It does not believe in relevant experience either. You could be applying at age 40 after having spent the last 15 years being a doctor, say. If anything, that only makes you interesting. The result is that homogeneity of any kind, whether class or culture or training, is banished right at the gate. The hostel rooming policy consciously avoids sameness of specialisation and background. Swapnil says it is very common to find mismatched roommates, say for example a Malayali editing student living with a cinematography student from Bhopal. “Now imagine. The Mallu guy can’t speak Hindi and the northerner can’t speak Malyalam and they both know only rudimentary English. By the third year, they’ll be the best of friends.” It happens all the time, he says.
Add to this the fact that the first year has the common foundational course in which everyone learns everything. From editing to cinematography to direction, the foundational component, critical to the holistic pedagogical approach of FTII, (the defence of which has itself been the source of protests in the mid-90s) is designed to produce a fully-rounded film maker.
The reason, according to Ajithkumar B and Rajeev Ravi — both national award winners as editor and cinematographer respectively — that FTII produces the best technical specialists in the industry; someone like, say, a Resool Pookutty. It’s a tight schedule that keeps the first-years busy from 10 am to 10 pm. It’s the year where you are made to dive off the deep end, and the most baffling component of your day comes at the very end with what is called the General Screenings.
Every evening during the academic year, the campus holds film viewings that are open to everyone on campus, and are mandatory for the first years. Over the course of a year, the students are exposed to every kind of cinematic form and visual grammar that has found expression in the medium from the time of its invention; across time and film cultures, from the better known to the obscure, these include films only a serious film scholar would know. And because the medium is cinema, the exposure is not just to the full expressive range of an art form, but also to its anthropological content — the way people live and see the world across cultures and at different times in history.
Photo: Paul Noronha Picture then the combined effect of all of this on the Hindi-only speaking boy, who since his day began has had to communicate with his Malayali roommate through hand signals, followed by a day’s worth of a multi-variable technical course, who now at the end of that day, is struggling to catch the fast moving English subtitles of an obscure Hungarian film. In a visual language completely alien to his Bollywood sensibility and set in a socio-cultural context that is far removed from his native town, just off the national highway on the outskirts of Bhopal. Imagine this happening to him every night over a year. “His worldview until then has been cocooned. He comes here and learns of a larger world and the walls in his mind therefore break down,” says Rupak Das, ex-student and until recently, direction faculty at FTII. What breaks down is also any previous monochromatic renderings of the world and what is gained is a de-centering of one’s own perspective. Gyan says, “When you come here, you come with your own baggage. You think you are a hot-shot because you got into the nation’s premier film institute. But instead you are humbled. You learn that you are nothing. That you know nothing of the world.”
The combined experiences of this first year, act like an anthropological intervention. You gain perspective and in the hole that remains, where once your own convictions stood, is the space made for the next phase of your learning — an experimentation with your own identity. Faculty member Lalit says, “the critical engagement with cinema begins in the second year. That’s when the larger political engagement with the world begins. The zeitgeist of the place enters them and they begin piecing together the socio-cultural context of the cinema they have just seen.” Says Swapnil, “we finish learning how a film is made in the first year. But (learning) how do you see this world? How do you look at things? Discovering that aberration in your lens that lets you perceive events in your universe in a certain way, that becomes the most important learning.”
By this time the only mode left to the student is to question and find the answers for himself. ”The greatest threat you can be is when you start questioning yourself. Most of the time we question others. We ask, how dareyou raise your voice instead of stopping to think and question ourselves and giving the person a benefit of doubt. We are not taught to entertain doubt by our education system,” says Gyan. But they learn it here and through that seeding of doubt they begin to find the aberration in their lens. Says Lalit, “The striking students here are trying to find their socio-political vision. Where they stand vis-a-vis their own identity and voices and artistic vision. At any given time, roughly half the students are in this state.”
This well established zeitgeist of FTII is located in the need to question, debate and recognize the plurality of human experience. It has been passed on from seniors to juniors, across generations. Every protest and strike in FTII, since the first one in 1968, over issues big and small, has at some fundamental level a concern with protecting this ethic. Says Rupak, “the students are bound together by a collective dream. It seeps into the consciousness here. FTII pass-outs become the cinematic conscience of this country. It’s something they can’t help. And they have also always been the moral keepers and guardians of FTII. This place is our ghar, sasural and ma, altogether.”
The creative expression that has came out of the strike, is not merely the listing of demands and the declaration of resolve. The graffitied walls and the banners also wear totems of a larger idea of art and its place in a society. Take for instance the white banner seen in so many news pictures of the protest, which in red lettering states ‘we shall fight, we shall win’ under the names ‘John, Ghatak, Tarkovsky’.
These are three legendary film makers who serve as symbols not just for their cinematic accomplishments, but also because their individual lives essayed a larger role for cinema in a society; as a tool for socio-political engagement through the voicing of social truths and marginalised experiences.
Photo: Reuters The students see this in the Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak’s 1960 film Meghe Dhaka Tara set in a refugee camp outside Calcutta with the Partition of Bengal as a backdrop. They see this in the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1962 film, Ivan’s Childhood about a 12-year-old orphan caught in the midst of the Second World War. And they see it, perhaps most poignantly, in Malayali director John Abraham’s Amma Ariyan . A gold medalist from FTII who, along with his friends, travelled door-to-door, from village-to-village, performing plays on street corners and to beating drums raising money for a ‘people’s cinema’, that sought to be free of the limitations imposed by the needs of the box-office. The result was Abraham’s greatest (and last) film that rewrote the then established conventions of cinema – Amma Ariyan ; about the incidents following the death of a young Naxalite, upon whose demise his friends travel back to his village, to inform his mother of the death of her only son.
Why do we need an FTII?
When the question is asked, as it was this time, and as it has been increasingly asked since the market imperative entered our collective consciousness in 1991, about whether the government should be spending our money on a film institute such as the FTII? In order to answer it, we must decide first on another related question. What role do we see in our society for the artist beyond the terms of reference provided us by commerce and industry? Because FTII is in essence an art school, as opposed that is to a trade school. It is built around the idea that cinema is an art form and that it must be engaged with as such, in order to produce artists who happen to work in the cinematic medium. Artists. As opposed to technicians.
The difference is an important one. A technician is a specialist whose training need not go beyond the technical aspects of his craft. A technician concerns himself with only the ‘how’ of his craft. An artist on the other hand is a more troublesome objective. For her the questions proliferate beyond the ‘how’ to the more expansive ‘what’ and the ‘why’. The training needs a more holistic and deeper engagement - with the craft, with the world, and ultimately with the self, to produce an individual, resolute in her individuality, tooled with a larger vision, both for herself and the world that she inhabits.
FTII does this for its students. It is the reason why they fight so hard to protect it. Because the fact is that despite its tortuous and innumerable problems, FTII still remains a place where anyone, from anywhere, regardless of the size of their pocket and what they did before, can come and find themselves.
It is certainly true of Swapnil who was a well paid area manager for Indian Oil, who decided in his late 20s that he needed more from life and now, having spent more than 7 years in FTII and with his struggle as a nameless film director just beginning, can feel nothing but gratitude for the place.
It is true of Gyan, who ran away from home to come to FTII to find the social engagement he didn’t find in economics. And it is true of the 26-year-old Abhijeet Khuman, a TV student from Gujarat and a former social media campaigner for Modi, who felt the need to serve in the hunger strike because scripting a bar conversation between Osho and a Jihadi, that no one in his class quite understood, was more fulfilling than his engineering degree.
At a time when difference — of culture, faith, food — is being met increasingly with violence instead of debate, the need for the above becomes even more urgent. How then should we respond to the students of FTII, who having found themselves caught in a cultural war not of their own making, responded in the only way they know how - with the art of questioning and debate? How do we value those among us who stand up and question under the Wisdom Tree?
As the Ghatak fan Shukla ji says, “We need to question. This is such a time that the need is to question. Through the medium of our art, through the medium of ourselves, till such time as we can.”
