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Documenting reality under a tarpaulin sky

Looking into the future: Ajay T.G with the children of the school started by him in the Dabrapara slum.

At a recent press conference in Delhi, Bhilai-based independent filmmaker Ajay T.G. was the cynosure of all eyes. Imprisoned for 93 days on sedition charges under the draconian Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act (CSPSA) and accused of being a Naxalite, Ajay was released on August 5 on conditional bail, as the police was unable to produce a charge-sheet in court against him within the stipulated 90 days.

“I believe in the Indian Constitution,” said an emotional Ajay surrounded by the press and members of the Committee for the Release of Ajay TG who had campaigned for his release. He seemed restless, as was his two year-old son Aman. Once he was ensconced in his father’s lap, on the podium, they both relaxed. Aman doesn’t let his father out of his sight these days. There was a screening of Ajay’s film on eminent rights activist Dr. Binayak Sen, General Secretary People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), Chhattisgarh, in prison for over a year now, under the same Act.

In an interview, the 43-year-old filmmaker gave a glimpse of his universe and of his urge to dignify lives deemed insignificant, by ‘seeing’ them — Dashrath the ageing blacksmith whose hammer is no match for the belching lungs of Bhilai Steel Plant; Mangtu the Dalit, with a lifetime of organic knowledge but labeled an illiterate fool by a lettered society; the labouring women of the Chhattisgarh Mahila Mukti Morcha who speak out on Women’s Day; construction worker Chanda’s daughter whose death inspired him to start a school in a slum. Excerpts:

I belong to a village in Trichur district in Kerala. My father, one of eight siblings, was a beedi worker. He went wherever work took him — from Kerala to Sri Lanka and back. In 1969 he shifted to Bhilai where his brother ran a hotel. The Bhilai Steel Plant (BSP) was taking shape. My father started a small poultry business. In 1979, when I had completed my 10th class, he asked me to join him.

Bhilai was a foreign land, with a totally different language and culture! But I picked up Hindi in school.

Still, my writing skills continued to be weak. I failed my first year B.A exams even though I had answered every question correctly, while students who had studied from kunjis (guidebooks) sailed through.

That changed my attitude to studies, to learning and to life.

I started learning by myself. I read Malayalam and Hindi literature, painted, and explored photography with relatives’ cameras, facing their ire if something went wrong!

I learnt from the culture and seedhapan (simplicity) of Chhattisgarh’s villages, with open spaces so unlike Kerala. People spoke of their experiences, the changes in their lives.

I would discuss issues with my father, a Communist. I also joined the All-India Youth Federation.

I observed life around me constantly.

Absolutely. In 1979, Bhilai was a small city — not too many cars; largely two wheelers and mostly bicycles.

In 1985-86, construction activities boomed. Salaries rose. After a jump wage labour stopped at Rs. 35-40 a day. Even two years ago, people were working for Rs. 50 a day.

The disparity between BSP employees, the private sector, government staff and contract labour, which was not that apparent earlier, became glaringly visible.

Market prices soared. In 1990 we closed down our poultry. It was unviable. I did not even have one or two rupees to renew my membership of the CPI!

Briefly, I worked as liaison agent for a Kolkata company. I carried cigarettes in my briefcase to soften BSP officers into placing orders with my employers. In 1993 at BSP, I ran into social anthropologist, Prof. Jonathan Parry, from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was in Bhilai to study the impact of industrialisation vis-À-vis caste and kinship ties. I became his research assistant. What was a one-year association continues and we are planning a collaborative book.

It’s what I had always wanted. Since visuals were needed, I started taking photographs with a second hand camera given by John.

I read up on photography and learnt on the job, wanting to do the best I knew I was capable of.

But the research job was temporary and financial insecurity omnipresent. In 1996 I enrolled for an animation and graphic design course in Bangalore.

Call it luck! In 1999, back in Bhilai after the course, John’s wife Margaret made me project coordinator in a European Union-India cross-cultural project to image social changes.

Under the project’s Jan Darshan programme, several of us enrolled as trainees and learnt to make documentary films.

Certain developments made me wonder about the meaning of documenting.

We were to make a film on our families. As cameraperson I helped a colleague who wanted to focus on her father, with ideas. Thereafter, the trainees shunned me. My colleagues felt that I put reality on view, exposed shameful family secrets.

The girl’s film had a mention that on her birth, one of five daughters, her father did not eat for three days. Today, those very daughters care for their parents, not the pampered son.

Another trainee blanked out her father, who ran a roadside tea shop, in her family saga.

Exactly! Jan Darshan had tried to equip individuals who could not afford a Pune Film institute course, to learn. But once they started learning, what a sea change there was in their attitudes! Loneliness enveloped me.

Yet, my experiences taught me the power of the medium. They brought a powerful change within me.

During our research, John and I had met Chanda, a construction worker from Dabrapara slum. In 2005, she earned Rs. 35 daily with which she fed her husband, immobilised in an accident, and five children.

When Chanda’s 14-year-old daughter Lakshmi — a lively girl who wanted nothing more than to study — died of cancer, victim of initial medical callousness, I decided to act. Too often people had asked John and me how our questions would improve their lives.

In Chanda’s courtyard, I started a “bal angan” for out-of-school children — 28 out of 33 such children from 35 homes, were girls. Local women volunteered in shifts from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tyre swings and clay toys made up the play equipment.

One day, I left some slates behind. Days later, the children pestered one of our volunteers Damini to teach them to read and write! At their insistence I found out about a bridge course to enable them to go to school.

Of 16 regular children, many had only one meal a day and were malnourished. Academic friends like John and Murli Natarajan funded a glass of milk and a meal for them.

Alongside I started teaching photography to girls above 12.

Precisely — in a week they had learnt about the frame and appropriate lighting. Initially they clicked each other in fancy poses but soon started photographing their surroundings — women, children, construction work.

Next I taught them to handle the video camera. They assisted me in filming Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha’s functions on child labour issues.

When I told them to make a two-minute film, without dialogues, they started off with saas-bahu-Bollywood plots but chose an issue close to their lives — our brothers go to school, why not us? The film was screened in the slum and distributed in other places too.

Enthused, the girls wanted to make a film on their mothers’ plight and on the scourge of liquor.

That is when I was arrested by the police….

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