Resources

Aesthetic strategies of the marginalised: political subjectivity in Budhan Stories, Visual Ethnography

This article reflects on a living archive of indigenous film and performance generated by a collective of artists and filmmakers from India’s ‘ex-criminal’ De-notified Tribes (DNTs) in response to an aggressive erasure of their lives and stories in the mainstream imagination. Drawing on this archive, this article examines the making and circulation of films by DNT communities to consolidate a DNT political subject, and interrogates the challenges involved in doing so. Specifically, we interrogate the challenges of visibility for a political subject that is ‘unsettled’, not marked by a relationship to a (home)land but by a history of criminality. We argue that DNT’s entry into citizenship has been predicated on an inbuilt tension between the celebration what makes the community distinct, and indeed criminalised; and a drive towards respectability. This tension articulates in the structure of, the content, the affective life and the aesthetic of their films, generating categories of things that can be said, and things that cannot be spoken. These elements, while in tension, are held together by the aesthetic – in the strategies of sublimation, hyperrealisation, inter-cutting at play in the films.

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Criminalised Tribes and Indigenous Media in India, in Unveiling Hidden Heritage: Narrative, Politics and Agency 

A community arts podcast about health and rights during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Outbreaks: An Indian Pandemic Reader is an interdisciplinary work on the profound and lasting impact of the past and present epidemics/ pandemics on Indian society and features perspectives from history, sociology, anthropology, fi lm and literature besides others. The essays fall under two categories: one, those dealing with historical past or the pre-COVID time and the other addressing the fi rst wave of COVID-19 crisis of 2020-21 which continues to surge globally even this year. The volume opens with some of the major epidemics in colonial past to illustrate the complex interplay of coercion and cooperation, class and race, religious belief, responses to variolation and vaccination in colonial India and fi nally addresses the present COVID-19 crisis offering insights into the social, cultural, political and economic changes which occurred in India after the present outbreak. The contributions of leading scholars, social historians, cultural activists, litterateurs, artists and documentary fi lmmakers would make the volume useful for those interested in the humanities and social sciences.

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Tilche, Alice and Akshay Khanna. 2022

The story, an adaptation of the Hindi short story by Dharamvir Bharti, ‘Village of the Dead’, is told from the perspective of a dog, a dog that roams the streets at night to find half-dead bodies, the bodies of migrants, of slaves, of corona patients that are so hungry and thirsty that they begin eating themselves. It is a story of thresholds, of the threshold between the living and the dead, between humans and non-humans, between humans and slaves, between humans and hungry humans. 

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Tilche, Alice and Akshay Khanna. 2022

The story here is of a particular transformation – of a form of realist theatre that emerged from the struggles of an indigenous community, to an emergent form of film that holds together diverse influences and genres: documentary styles that reference a tradition of Indian realist and political documentaries, activist filmmaking and activist theatre, interviews, performances, songs and poetry. 

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Khanna, Akshay and Alice Tilche. 2022

How does one relate to the ‘injurious’ name, the name that marks us as criminals, as oppressed castes, as queers, as minority religions? Do we pick it up and instil pride in it, do we emphasise our otherness, or do we disavow the name, or indeed disavow our difference itself? Do we embrace sanitised forms of address or hold on to, and reinvigorate our ‘states of injury’ as names of pride?  

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Khanna, Akshay and Alice Tilche. 2022

In this post we consider the challenges of a marginalised group speaking of the plight of other marginalised groups, as artists step out of the community to document the experiences of other DNT groups. We look at how that which could not be spoken becomes expressed through the political voice – and through the creative use of performances and intercutting to produce a rich ethnographic layer, which picks up, reinterprets, transforms and hyper-realises the political voice, setting the stage for the revolutionary voice.

Dakxin Bajrange and Alice Tilche. 2021. Budhan-Podcast: a community arts podcast about health and rights during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Outbreaks: and Indian Pandemic Reader. Madhu Singh (ed). Pencraft International

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