Cast: Poonam Dhakal, Ramju Jha, Amit Avichal and Kaori Takeochi Cinematography: Sameer Mahajan & S. Chokalingam Sound Mixing: Tarun Sharma Editing : Vibhuti Nath Jha Produced and Directed by: Praveen Kumar Format: DV Cam Length: 59 minutes

Synopsis

In Madhubani, people struggle against trying circumstances to eke out a living. Many have taken to painting to survive. They paint the traditional motives (erstwhile painted on cow dung textured walls of huts and closely associated with ritual ) unto paper. These paintings are then sold in markets in India and abroad. While many painters repeat certain traditional motives other artists boldly expand the scope to include contemporary themes. The film is about these painters, their circumstances, their inspirations and their works. The film grows to completion by a criss-crossing of narratives stitched together by sights and songs of the milieu that births these artists. The central line of the film is the Khobbar ritual in which a newly married couple spends three days and nights in the painted Khobbar Ghar before they may consummate their marriage. This vigil over desire provides the film with a mysterious energy...

Naina Jogin began many years back while casually rummaging through a stack of Madhubani paintings at the Bihar cottage emporium in New Delhi. I was curious about these paintings. I was surprised by these images that had grown in the backyard of my own neighborhood and somehow seemed also to have a resonance. I had felt then that there was a potential film, but I was far from being ready for it.

To put it in the language of a tale I visited Madhubani one fine morning in 2002, but in fact it was a rattling over night journey blasted by some inane video film in the bus. Apart from a couple of non-descript hoardings with Mithila paintings on the way there was nothing that I could notice that showed I was entering the region renowned for this art. There were more toddy shops, ponds and lakes then I had seen anywhere else, a solitary painting shop in the hotel was bare and dark, although its dirty restaurant had Mithila paintings full up on the walls.

I took a rickshaw to the only painter's address I had. Inside the house I found most of the women were painting, silently working on paper, on saris and threading sujani on layered cloth. It was an extended family with couple of famous Madhubani artist in it. The mill of the sundry house activities called on them, they attended to it and returned to the paintings. Yes, there was one middle aged man painting too.

The next few days I spent moving from house to house across a few villages and also in the streets of Madhubani town discovering the hidden painting home based industry. I must have carefully looked at several hundred paintings; women and men would file in with stacks of painting thinking I may be a buyer. I was familiar with the motifs and the main narratives from my readings. Most of them looked hastily done copies of each other. I felt a sense of redundancy and disappointment-these were available in Delhi as well. A pang of apprehension crept in thinking that the paintings had traversed the economic journey into a creative dead end. It was further accentuated by the knowing that the greats of the first wave like Ganga Devi, Sita Devi, Jagdmaba Devi and a few others of that generation had either stopped painting or were no more. I wondered if the displacement of the image from the wall to the paper had been a good idea! Was the creative energy dismayed at the departure of the images from the sanctity of the Kohbar walls? Was the spirit lost to the market forces?

With some more bumpy rides on rickshaws, this gloomy foreboding began crumbling! As I persisted on with my research; I began encountering painters of lesser pedigrees who were striving hard to push out of the limits imposed by the ethnic market and traditions of wall paintings. They were recomposing aesthetically styles and motifs from tradition to their own individual histories. They were dialoguing with modern times and its complexities, often with a political overtone. The 'modern', the 'pop', 'kitsch' and the 'abstract' could be seen reflecting in these works, which essentially remained Mithila/Madhubani. It was interesting to see a reverse flow of art styles into the contemporary.

There were many 'histories' present in these paintings and some were politically opposed to each other. Alongside, there were myriad traditions of the 'folk.' There was also the on goings of the daily life- the dingy 'textile office' that regulates the crafts in the area and many other smaller individual niggles.. I knew that the film could ill-afford to ignore these underlying currents. I was spurred and daunted by the prospect of doing a film that would have to speak in 'multiple voices' both, in style and substance.

The production aspects were well taken care of, or at least seemed lesser of the bothers. In both the schedules we had major problems with the camera but it got sorted out magically. Sameer had the smile and Choko had high BP! I was making a film after years and there were many considerations of aesthetics and of categories that were raising their head. Was this an ethnographic film? Or an anthropological film? Was is to be in the vogue of cinema verite or montage or observational or participatory? Would I use fiction, if so in what way so that it was not just utilitarian or descriptive? How would I approach a subject that has so many streams running through it and that too for millenniums? A lot of the issues still hang but the film is made and I am happy that I made it with a sense of freedom, without succumbing to the cause of a category.

Reality never confines itself to the script; it extends beyond and before as far as you may wish to see. There is a tension of unpredictability in the creating of the documentary, there is something like the 'Zen' principle that operates between pushing for what one desires and accepting that which comes up involuntarily. Urmila Devi lost all the attractive verve that she had while talking to me during my research. Now she almost did not want to talk. Something was pressing her emotions deeply and I had to reckon with it. Her mother was upset with her and had gone off to another village. After some unsuccessful attempts at approaching the subjects that had got her excitedly talking in the past I gave up. We got into our jeep and went along with her to her mother's village. The breeze and the openness of the moving sights released her. And she sang the soulful song Jaan re Jaan. She had entered another patch of hard living between my research and shoot. Apart from the mother issue, there were other more serious troubles she had. The interviews never happened as I had desired, but she provided the film a palpable feel of the hard life without saying much, without evoking pity and with dignity.

Gopal Shah, the painter by the road side is full of anecdotes, but the camera for him was to record him at 'work' and not his anecdotes. I had to accept this first with anguish. He loosened up some what but maintained that the camera was for taking 'photos'. I decided to let this come up alongside seeing his 'work'. In the process the influences on his work which seemingly peripheral but critical got explored.

One fine day, while Sameer was getting the camera ready for a shot, I took a walk to a pond about 50 yards away. I fished out a drowning baby; surely he would have died in another few seconds. He came out all bloated and was promptly rotated on a potter's wheel so that he could throw up the water. The whole village thanked me, having appeared as god incarnate. I mused with Sameer that if the boy had died, we would have been made devil incarnate and it would have been the end of the film. I was very lucky that the boy had good lungs and was able to show his toes to me above water in time, we carried on shooting with many blessings and unfettered co-operation. Surprisingly the boy digested all the water in his belly!

I had decided to play out the Kohbar (the nuptial chamber) for various reasons, but mostly because I wanted to achieve the meaning of the space as I had understood. The experience of the images and its transcending occurred in an erotic space; the newly wed along with the Bidhikari (usually a young married woman), were surrounded by abstract symbols and various figures across three nights and four days. They watched it or were watched over by the images in a state of fatigue and fasting and in the flicker of lamp light. It meant getting actors and putting up a set. We found an auditorium to erect the set, however the keeper would not let us use the toilet! As with respect to the actors it was a hard search, film actors were out of the question. Even though I had great rapport going with the families, none of the young girls would agree to go through the sindoor daan for the film, even if it was a fake doing. I tried looking at play groups in the region and the answer was the same. Finally, I crossed the border and went into the curfew stricken monarchy of Nepal to screen test a couple of girls whose folk dance I had seen on a local video. They agreed a week before the set was ready. They had never really faced camera before, but were very conversant with the Kohbar and were able stage artists.

By now we had got used to eating food cooked in Dalda smuggled from Nepal! The mud wall on the set was wet with fresh clay and was being subjected to 14 gas lights round the clock. Few phone calls to a set designer in Mumbai helped to put things in place. Six Madhubani artists painted the walls up feet by feet as it started to dry up. The painter friends and their families all turned out in their best for playing out the sundry other presences and the multitude that were needed to make a marriage look really real. The painters and artists often watched the slow process with interest; ensuring details were in place and enjoying the abundance of tea, thanks to the spot boy from Madhubani who in fact works in Famous studios. For three days and nights we were in a cine-trance shooting the nuptial chamber unraveling the complexity of portrayal of a triangular presence in the Kohbar!

There are stories and considerations lurking behind each scene in the film and behind the many that got excluded from the film. There are tales that came up after the shoot and events after the film was made that had me fully consumed, and I must add that it was at times very painful. I know that the Kachabchiya painter Swarup Lal Paswan is very unwell and very old and his life will not change very much even if people will get to know him now. However, he has changed the way people will look at Madhubani paintings. And I believe that such possibilities exist beyond the expected. In a sense that is what I have tried to get into the film.

Praveen Kumar is a graduate in Economics from Delhi University (1985) following which he did a Diploma in Film Direction from VARAN, Paris (1987). He subsequently worked with educational TV in New Delhi, producing short videos on various issues before directing the documentary Unto the Fold in 1996. It was screened at several International film Festivals including at Mannheim and Cinema du Reel. Naina Jogin (The Ascetic Eye) is his latest work.

For more details on the film, contact Praveen Kumar at pkfar@mtnl.net.in.