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Documenting human power

The Hyderabad Film Club screened Madurai-based documentary film-maker Amudhan's films recently

Amudhan

For half an hour you watch on the screen a middle aged woman doing nothing else but collecting the human shit on a narrow long street abutting, well, a temple. And all the while she is also answering the hundred small questions the person behind the camera keeps asking. It's `dirty' work, yes, but when you film this rather common, accepted reality, concentrating only on the `doing' of it with such persistence, you intend something else than merely nauseating and shocking whoever would be your audience. This is like going close to the person, befriending and knowing him or her a little from inside. For the subalterns subjects, the trapped ones too, modern media is a difficult question. Is it a little glory as others watch you getting filmed? Or it's another routine, futile exercise — somebody writes, somebody makes a film. Why should that be interesting to anyone? And what difference would it make? Or would it? For the filmmaker these days it becomes really difficult sometimes, like one of them asking, "So, it's like an advertisement after all?"

Amudhan, an independent and largely self-taught documentary filmmaker from Madurai, has a way of handling such situations and making it honest. He simply retains much of their questioning. Strongly influenced by the dalit movements and the attendant discourses taking place in Tamil Nadu in the last decade and a half, Amudhan's strength as filmmaker lies in his capacity to shun extraneous activist talk and analysis and look at the issues direct in face.

Amudhan has been making films for ten years now, but it's with Shit (2003) that he really drew wide attention: best film at One Billion Eyes - Indian Documentary Festival, Chennai (2005), National Jury Award at Mumbai International Film Festival (2005) and Best Documentary Film at VIBGYOR Documentary and Short Film Festival (2006).

Mayanakurippugal (meaning Note from the Crematorium (2005)) has many brilliantly shot passages that leave a lasting impression. The understanding of the dead body as impure and the cremation as polluting has made the crematorium an exclusive domain of the untouchable dalits for Amudhan lovingly captures the professionalism and the casual non-discriminative care with which the 20 or odd dalit undertakers at the Municipal crematorium in Madurai handle the corpses arriving there. Seruppu (chappal), Amudhan's latest work is much larger in scope and longer. It's about the double-crossed Arundhatiyars of Dharmanathapuram slum right in the middle of Tiruchi town. This group of Arundhatiyars converted en masse to Christianity some three generations ago. But that did not rid them of their untouchable status. The conversion has also denied them the benefits of reservations in education and employment and other benefits, which the Hindu Scheduled Castes get. Earlier, their livelihood came from a lowly but assured monopoly over making leather chappals. In the last sequence of the film a young man walks through the adjacent traditional graveyards of Hindu and Christian Arundhatiyars describing the artificial boundaries separating them despite the common outcaste status. It's a sequence reverberating with symbolism.

Amudhan's next film is on the sex workers of Krishnagiri, one of the poorest districts in Tamil Nadu. "Why Krishnagiri?" Amudhan himself asks the question before you could, "Because it doesn't have any glorified or vilified tradition of prostitution like many famous places in Tamil Nadu. It's a new phenomenon and very sad. How does it happen, I would like to know and reveal that!"

SUMANASPATI

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