I Am Grass

Directed By Abhishek Indrekar

An artist from one of India’s “ex-criminal tribes” marches through the streets and subway trains of Boston in winter. The camera tracks his boots, entering his point of view — a stream of interwoven memories, historical images, and present sights. Memories of poetry, of street theatre performances back home, a mirror-figure of a young boy, now a long-dead ancestor, caught behind barbed wire, images from the personal and community past, as well as from the artist’s immediate surroundings all rush together, populating the present moment of living abroad.  

In most ways that count in this world, the speaker’s community of Chhara people does not exist. The British colonial government passed the Criminal Tribes Act in 1871, and tied nomadic people together from all over India via a bureaucratic fiction--the label “born criminals.” They kept these nomadic people in open jails until 1952 when they opened the gates under a new fiction: DNTs/“Denotified Tribes.” Then, in the eyes of everyone but the thirteen police stations surrounding Chharanagar, the Chhara people ceased to exist; except in rumors and scary stories, except at rickshaw/taxi stands when drivers refuse to take riders to their home. Yet, through improvised, experimental street theater, through spontaneous poetry play, through remembering our invisibilized past, Chhara people grow. The speaker says, “We are grass. I am grass.”