– Kush Badhwar
Shravan Katikaneni is a film editor who self-produced and directed the documentary Chronicles of a Temple Painter (2014) about the Hindu temple painter Papalal who adopted a Muslim girl after the 2007 bomb blasts at Gokul Chat Centre, Hyderabad. Mana Kaloji (Our Kaloji) (2013) is a biographical documentary produced by the Kaloji Foundation for Kaloji’s centenary celebrations and is directed by S. Amarnath. In conversation with each of the filmmakers, we look at how existing media figures in conception of a film or the imagination of its maker and how such media is negotiated in access and use in the making of a film.
How did you first come across Papalal’s story?
Shravan Katikaneni: I first read about Papalal, a guy who is fighting many criminal cases against him, in the Telugu newspaper Eenadu. Reading it intrigued me, disturbed me and made me angry. After I read his story, I then tried browsing about him online. I found some blogs and I also saw two or three videos where his wife was waiting for him outside jail as he was being released. This is where I actually saw him for the first time. I saw Papalal get emotional about his situation and I also got emotional. It was a very cinematic experience, because I hadn’t met him, to see all this about him I began to feel heavily for him very suddenly.
Meeting Papalal and his family spanned two ends of the spectrum. One was that they were cordial with me, because I told him I was a documentary maker and I said I was interested in drawing help for him. He narrated his stories to me, the incidents he described were quite painful. As he related these stories to me, he would add “this was shot by this channel”. That’s when I realised the story I read was a reprint, raising his story again in an effort to help him. His story had actually been heavily covered in the Hyderabadi media subsequent to the Gokul Chat Centre bomb blasts in 2007, but I had missed the story the first time around.
The other side of the spectrum was that he was scared about my involvement because media coverage had already not helped him. Initially, he assumed that the more coverage he received, the more easily his cases would be solved. Instead, he found himself on the news blaming community leaders or government departments who were not doing anything for him, which, in fact, back-fired. Of course, even if media outlets knew it would not help him, they would still print it or telecast it. As a result, he received calls from community elders, both Muslims and Hindus, had received threats and also had been attacked. While there was some amount of skepticism towards me initially, his situation was at the same place it was two years prior, which gave us an opportunity to sit and talk.
When I was listening to him, I was imagining the incidents one after the other, what must have gone through his mind and, now that I had seen his family, how they must have felt. I thought legal cases might not shed much light on his personal issues, his situation would just be inside the courts and people would not know he exists in order to give him financial support. The way he’s been fighting all the odds, it’s been close to seven years and it’s still going on. If a film is made, I thought, his story can be heard in all corners, which would sensitise people. I thought I’d make an investigative film, wherein I’d get all these interviews and juxtapose them with his story. That was the initial idea, but it didn’t take off the way I wanted.
I took a note of all the news channels Papalal mentioned, then I went and met them for these videos. It was a very laborious process and I realised access is not so easy. Some of them didn’t want to share; some of them were tired of telecasting it again and again and they didn’t want anymore hard disk space to be used by his story so they deleted it; some of them claimed to have explosive footage, but wanted to reap their own benefits from it; some of them wanted to know more about me and since I’m not a journalist, it was tough to convince them. In the end I could only get hold of a few videos. The images that were in my mind began to fade out and what was left was only him, his family and his paintings. The investigative film faded out and a different film started to emerge. I decided I’ll focus more on their personal story about their family ties. That’s where the crux lies. Through his bonding with his adopted daughter, he’s deriving so much energy and strength that he’s fighting the people around him, whoever they might be, Hindus, Muslims and the whole neighbourhood. That’s when it turned out to be what it is now. It’s become a more intimate film.
How have you used the material you had access to?
Shravan Katikaneni: When I went to his place and saw the TV, it was put in a very unusual place. His TV is not at eye-level or slightly above, it’s way above, like how we watch in the movies. He was telling me one of his experiences when he saw his own interview while lying on the bed. The way he was articulating it was that he saw himself becoming a hero. For two reasons – one was that the media was projecting him that way, the second was this way of installing his television and the way he, his family and his neighbours were watching him for the first time in this interview. Because television played such an intense role in his life, the news in particular, I thought it has to be used. So I decided to use the television as an element which recurs and which tells his story or adds to his narration. Whenever he speaks about his story, I use this element to help me tell the story. It comes on and off and the story keeps moving forward.
One of the stories, the Hyderabad Deccan, is a channel I created for the film. I had to dramatise it, because I wasn’t getting permission to use the original footage. So I made these actors say what the actual news report was saying. By recreating, I was getting into the news mode of telling a story. Apart from being a film maker, I was acting like a journalist, a news reporter inside the film. I used the home videos I shot of him which played in the background. The people are not actually the people from human rights commission, that’s why I didn’t give their names. But if you see the real video which is available online, they identify themselves. I used them to convey information, which I thought really worked, because you wouldn’t bother whether it’s a real person or not. Since it’s on the news, you believe them.
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How did your film on the poet Kaloji come to be?
S. Amarnath: The filmmaker B. Narsing Rao approached me on behalf of the Kaloji Foundation, asking whether I would like to choose from some footage available to give to a television channel so that they will have something to air on the occasion of his birthday, the centenary celebrations of Kaloji’s birth. Since the foundation had been generating and archiving Kaloji material for about ten years, I think, and very little audio-visual content exists in the public domain where one can see Kaloji speak or talk or walk, the idea was to provide some footage so they could air it between programs, small thirty second or one minute bites. It was only after I saw the footage, in which Kaloji seemed so vulnerable, that I convinced Mr. Rao that I could make an interesting film that goes beyond celebrating a personality. I myself was surprised that the film came to an hour’s length.
What material were you given to work with?
S. Amarnath: I was given four pieces of material. One was an interview that Dr. Gujja Bhiksham, the writer, researcher and water conservationist, undertook with Kaloji in about 1993. In this interview, Bhiksham almost corners Kaloji into answering certain questions in such a way that Kaloji comes out as a human figure rather than a god, which such personalities can often be portrayed as. In a book published by the foundation, Bhiksham talks about why he did the interview the way he did – he’s talking to this independent, free soul and trying to demystify his personality rather than celebrate the artist, clapping and forgetting about him. I completely identified with his process and formed a strong relationship with the interview in making this film.
The second was an interview that the Kaloji Foundation asked the journalist Punna Krishnamurthy to undertake with Kaloji’s wife Rukmini Bai and his grandson Santosh in about 2003, after Kaloji had passed away, to get a sense of what his life was like. In the interview Krishnamurthy is driven by a brief to extract information about the life of Kaloji from Rukmini Bai which I was able to use to create a dialogue between the two interviews.
The third material I was given was from a film called Prajakavi Kaloji by Premraj, which is an informative or educative film that celebrates Kaloji’s life. It was most likely a Doordarshan film from the 1990’s, if I’m not mistaken. The fourth is a VHS tape shot at the book release function of Naa Godava, one of Kaloji’s most celebrated books, in which the former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao makes a speech in which he seems like a student or disciple in front of Kaloji. Since I primarily had interviews, I weave in these last two to get away from just talking heads, but also use them to build Kaloji up as a big personality or celebrated intellectual which deconstructs itself as the film proceeds.
How have you used the material you had access to?
S. Amarnath: The material I was given wasn’t flowery or beautifully shot. If I had done it, I wouldn’t have done it in that way, but the very fact that it’s not my material and I’m still using it I think there’s a lot of freedom in that, at least I enjoyed it. The whole process of capturing the way you want, conceiving, scripting, shooting and bringing it to the editing table, there’s a burden you carry from the process of capturing. Here, there was a lack of choice, but there’s a lot of freedom, an un-burdening of choice.
I was very much aware of the formats each was shot on, because a lot of things had changed between each material. Rukmini Bai’s interview was a little more polished, a little more clear because it was on Mini-DV, Bhiksham’s is on Hi-8 and Premraj’s film and the Narasimha Rao speech were both on VHS. So, there were three kinds of material that I was seeing lapses of time between. For me, I was trying to create conversations between people who existed in different times. One was Kaloji – twenty years back, Rukmini – almost ten years back, and the third is us – sitting now and also being involved in the conversation.
There’s a perception, when you look back at older formats, that they’re bad, out-dated in terms of quality and unusable as material, which is also why we are moving towards digitisation and all kinds of cleaning. I took the opposite approach in acknowledging the aesthetic possibilities in these apparently inferior formats. I try to contextualise Bhiksham’s interview as one that’s personal, intimate and non-professional, not shot by a television or cinema crew. It was just by a person. It could be by anybody, like you or me, who takes out their mobile phone and records a conversation with someone. I even establish Bhiksham, and later, while he is adjusting the camera, I retain a blue frame that appears. There was a huge fight around this blue frame with my editor and the producers. They thought I should get rid of it because it looks like a mistake. But I was clear what I was doing, I was keeping it in to give an idea of the scale of Bhiksham’s interview and also to pay a small tribute to an older format.