Author:
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: June 13, 2004
Sanjib Sabhapandit makes no bones
about his intentions in his film The Self Triumphs (Juye Poora Xoon): His
work has a purpose, and the audience should know it. Assam and its inflammatory
problems are his concern but how to gather all of these in one fold? That's
where his plot line comes in. Sabhapandit brings them together unabashedly
- large-scale illegal immigration from Bangladesh, unemployment and the
crisis of Assamese identity. "Ethnic Assamese are in a minority in their
own land," he says. "Bangladeshis are everywhere, their labour is cheap.
And this illegal immigration has changed Assam's demography; yet no one
has dared to deal with this subject. I took it up as a challenge."
Then there are the other twin realities
of nature's annual wrath and man's perennial greed. Heavy rains and flooding
erode the land with clockwork regularity ("I once returned to a place where
I knew a village was located. But there wasn't a trace of it; it was gone,"
Sabhapandit told me), and man despoils the rest (in the film the young
protagonist comes to Assam from Rajasthan where he works only to find that
an entire forest has been wiped off the face of the earth.)
It is against a background of land-grabbing,
cattle-lifting, girl-stealing, lay-offs and the river's fury that Sabhapandit
sets his story. Protagonist Manab returns to his village upon a request
from his older, somewhat sickly brother who is facing problems. Even as
he crosses the paddy fields on his way home, he is bewildered by the hundreds
of non-indigenous style thatched huts that have mushroomed along the way.
These hadn't been there before, he thinks.
The young man's return to Assam
is the start of a nightmare. On the night of his arrival, his brother's
house is attacked and torched by suspected land-grabbers/ illegal immigrants,
forcing Manab, his brother Koseswar and the brother's family to flee. Terrorised,
they arrive at the house of Koseswar's father-in-law who gives them, as
a temporary measure, a plot of land he owns on the riverbank to build a
shelter. Koseswar begins the construction of a shack. But the rains crash
down, the waters rise, and one day the raging river smashes the house and
swallows Koseswar.
Manab finds a job in a factory run
by one Mr Jain. Jain wants him to handle - and keep at bay - a hostile
local crowd demanding jobs for local people.
This, then is the actuality in a
scenically gentle Assam. The film leads you through green fields and angry
waters. There are breathtaking shots of a river in spate slicing an embankment
with the ease of a knife moving through soft butter. There are sad shots
of inundations and marshes laid waste, and there are surprising shots of
flood relief camps where men behave as though floods and camps are an everyday
occurrence.
Presenting his film to a largely
Assamese audience - many of who appeared to be hit hard by it - at the
India International Centre last week, Sabhapandit stated that issues such
as those he had treated in the film have stoked passions and provoked "multi-dimensional
anger". The expression of this anger was sometimes logical (such as workers
striking or making demands), sometimes not. In a scene both pitiable and
moving in the film, Manab, furious at the turn of events, lashes out at
the river, beating it again and again with a stick, stoning it. The film
seems to be bathed in a sense of helplessness that is at once political,
economic, social and environmental: no jobs, despoiled land, dilution of
an identity and of the Assamese way as others take over, and a destructive
overdose of water. "The riverbanks are occupied, every other bit of land
is occupied (by illegal immigrants)," exclaims the director. "Natural catastrophes
are taken as givens. What we get is social tension. In our six-year student
agitation against infiltration, students, young people, the media, raised
these issues, made demands. In vain. There were no results."
Sabhapandit spoke about the Illegal
Migrants Detection Tribunal Act in force in Assam whereby it becomes incumbent
- not on the illegal migrant to furnish papers (which they do not have
in any case) - but on he who accuses to prove that the foreigner is in
the country illegally. "Detection and deportation are next to impossible,"
says Sabhapandit.
What then is the solution to what
the director feels is the Central Government's total neglect of this problem?
The film suggests a turning inwards, - hence the title. You have to live
in your own world, the world of your roots (the trunk of a tree, roots
and all, is repeatedly used in the film). Only these roots will give you
the strength to hang on. But in Assam, whose problems have gone to scale,
such an attitude can be taken as simple abdication. Conversely, it could
be regarded - as Sabhapandit would like us to see it - as spiritual maturity.
Either way, the problems multiply.
The Self Triumphs will premiere
at Osian's-Cinefan, the Festival of Asian Cinema which begins in New Delhi
on July 16.
