As his parents cross a road in their walking shoes and sticks in hand, passing witty remarks, Anand Patwardhan watches from behind his camera, recording what he thought were home videos of moments from their lives. He didn’t know, and neither did his parents, that one day Anand would use these visuals in a documentary about them, about the extended family, about their role in the history of the country, beginning with the freedom struggle no less. Years after his parents passed away, as Anand began looking through the footage and editing it, he realised that there was an oral history here that was now being rewritten by those in power.
Anand, a filmmaker known for his documentaries that are often anti-establishment and bare the truth of happenings, from riots to attacks on minorities, Dalits and the environment, found links between his family history and that of the country. The documentary that emerged, The World is Family (Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam), was screened at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK) being held in Thiruvananthapuram last week.
“All the stories about the past are now being created or filtered by the ruling RSS/BJP (Rashtriya Swayamsevakh Sangh / Bharatiya Janata Party). It will change the official history of this country unless there are corrective voices. As my family were amongst those who were both eyewitnesses as well as participants in the freedom struggle, there is a first person narrative that counters the propaganda that's currently being forced on the country,” Anand tells TNM in an interview, sitting at an office in the Kairali theatre complex in Thiruvananthapuram.
Four years ago, Anand had walked into the same theatre, holding a court order that allowed him to screen his film Reason there, after the BJP-led Union government initially denied permission. The people of Kerala have always welcomed Anand and his often controversial films – controversial because they expose those in power or the powerful – when they don’t find space in many parts of the country. Films from Prisoners of Conscience (1978) and Ram Ke Naam (1992) to Jai Bhim Comrade (2011) and Reason (2018) sometimes came as reminders, sometimes as foretellers of what’s to come (Ram Ke Naam preceded the Babri Masjid demolition), and many times were predictably banned.
Unsurprisingly, it was a full house at Kairali theatre minutes before The World is Family was to begin. Anand, introducing his film, said that it was about his family – video footage he began recording in order to preserve for himself the memory of his parents, but later realised there was something in it that would be interesting to a larger audience.
After the introduction of Nirmala and Wasudev (Balu) Patwardharn – his mother and father – the film slips through the days into the black-and-white era of grandparents and uncles through family albums and gritty archival video. The photo of an awfully young Nirmala by the side of Mahatma Gandhi, his arm around her, is almost too familiar because of the many photos you have seen of the Father of Nation in the company of his young followers.
Nirmala is unrecognisable as the pretty girl (she was still a teenager) looking coy, a world away from the unafraid older woman and seasoned artist that Anand begins the film with. She was studying then at Rabindranath Tagore's Shantiniketan, where she’d become friends with Ira Chaudhary, who features in the documentary and shares anecdotes about the old days. Both of them would go on to become reputed ceramists.
On Anand’s father’s side, two of his uncles, Rau kaka and Achyut kaka, were closely associated with the freedom struggle. Balu, Anand’s father, says with his trademark laugh that he was the only one in the family who did not go to jail.
“Only by talking to one of my uncles and to my parents was I able to get the larger picture. Unfortunately, my two eldest uncles (Rau and Achyut) who were the most active in the freedom struggle were no more. So there are no interviews with them. But people are talking about them,” he says.
Achyut does appear briefly in the film thanks to silent visuals that Nirmala had shot of him in Madras in the 1980s on her VHS camcorder.
Nirmala, ‘the funny mum’ as Anand often describes her, at one point laments that he is focusing on his paternal uncles but not about her family. She was not to know then that Anand would talk about his maternal family. He and his camera would travel to Sindh in Pakistan, where Nirmala's home had been, before Partition. “I have been to Pakistan five times. We used to cross the border as part of the Pakistan India Peoples Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD). It is a movement of citizens in India and Pakistan who are fighting against war and nuclear weapons. We exchange visits whenever we get visas. The first time I went I was making an anti-nuclear film, which eventually became the documentary War and Peace,” Anand says.
Clearly, the family habit of getting involved in political movements has not skipped a generation. Anand and his films have always been political, from the Emergency, through the Babri Masjid demolition, the Narmada movement, the anti-nuclear movement, and Rohith Vemula’s death.
The new film will also act as as intervention, for history is being rewritten, Anand says, even as we speak. “History is being rewritten by the people in power, namely the RSS and the BJP, forces that never fought for India's independence. They were actually collaborators with the British. If you read your history, you will know that they supported the British even in the 1942 [Quit India] Movement. Even earlier, the only leader that espoused the Hindutva ideology that went to jail against the British was VD Savarkar, but even he badly betrayed the cause. After he was sent to the Andamans cellular jail, he wrote seven mercy petitions begging the British to set him free, promising them that he would forever remain loyal to them. After coming out of jail, he never spoke against the British,” Anand says.
The election results of 2024 – where the BJP could not get a majority of its own and had to form a government with allies – give more than a tiny hope, Anand says. “Given that these elections were fixed in multiple ways, I'm not only talking about EVM fixing, although EVM fixing is also probable as the percentage of votes cast mysteriously increased many days after polling. The biggest level of fixing was that only one party had money during these elections. Those in power destroyed the money power of the entire opposition. They also put opposition people in jail. In many recent state elections, they even bought over people who had won elections against them. They just gave them money to switch sides. It makes a laughing stock of the electoral process. In spite of all that, what happened in this election – that the BJP did not get a majority on its own – is quite amazing.”
Without mentioning the BJP or the powers of the day in his documentary, Anand manages to include stark reminders of their absence from the freedom struggle simply by sticking to the narrative of his own relatives.
Nirmala’s association with Gandhi extended to the point of his trying to dissuade her from marriage, thinking she was underage. Nirmala and Balu got married only days before Gandhi’s assassination. On the day he was killed, she shut herself in her room and cried for hours. She had, she reveals in the documentary, a handkerchief hand-spun by Bapu, that she lost during the chaos of Partition.
Nirmala narrates another disturbing anecdote from the time, when she landed in Bengal in the midst of riots and rode in a car. The driver, she says, at one point rubbed her leg and she bent down to look, wondering if she had made a bad decision by getting into the car. But then the driver told her that he had to do that so she would look down and not see the dead bodies on the tram tracks they had just passed.
Amid the daring stories of Independence and Partition, Anand somehow weaves in amusing exchanges between his aging parents – cheating while playing cards or complaining about a locked door – and you have to admire their sense of humour, the tranquil attitudes they preserved through all of it. When Nirmala complains about Anand filming her before she combed her hair, he says it is not for a beauty contest and she retorts that it should not be sent for an ugly contest either. Both the parents have in-your-face witty comebacks, a quality Anand has inherited, for in his films he manages to stitch in lighter moments that sit well with the gravity of his subjects.
Even though Anand began shooting his parents a little late in life – his father’s speech had already been affected due to ailments – he did not stop until they passed away in 2008 (Nirmala) and 2010 (Balu). You recall then a promise that Nirmala casually gets out of Balu at the beginning of the film – she may be 12 years younger, but he was not to die before her. Balu managed to keep his word to her, staying alive till 94.