Ambivalent Subjects: State Entanglements and Observational Filmmaking in A RIFLE AND A BAG
by Vidhya Elango
This essay is published as part of the Youth Critics Initiative II a collaborative program between the 24th Reel Asian Film Festival and TACLA.
No Cut Film Collective’s A RIFLE AND A BAG navigates the contradictions between individual lives and their entanglements with the state, its style at once urging viewers to sit with these contradictions, while generating questions about the ethics, purpose, and responsibilities of documentary film.
Shot over the course of 3 years in 2017- 2019, RIFLE centres on Somi, her husband, Sukhram, and their two young sons. The couple, both members of the Gond ethnic group (an Indigenous Adivasi group), are ex-Naxalites. Considered one of the largest threats to national security by the Indian state, the Naxalites are a Maoist insurgent group particularly active in Central India and the Northeast, and among Adivasi peoples who were dispossessed from their traditional lands through the creation of the state (Roy 2010). The family lives in the state of Maharashtra, in a settlement of fellow ex-Naxalites who turned themselves into the police in hopes of a more stable future for themselves and their children.
The documentary takes an observational, almost ethnographic approach and is visually stunning. There are lush, verdant wide shots of the jungle, the settlement, the moon. You see water drip down a corrugated tin roof, cattle being herded across a river, mist-filled early mornings, dark and peaceful. These are interspersed with shots of family life, love, and care: Somi’s second son rocking in his cradle, Sukhram bathing him in a shallow metal tub, cooking over an outdoor hearth, chatting with a friend over a fire. Ever present is the ambient noise of settlement life: birds chirping, water running, crackling fires, conversation in the Gondi language.
Given the beauty of the shots, I couldn’t help but mourn a bit for the lost experience of the movie theatre, to me a quasi-sacred space where my brain might have shut off just a little more, where the sensory pleasure of RIFLE would have been immersive. Rather, every minute, it seemed, I had a question about some factual detail in the film. Where’s Chhattisgarh? (next to Maharastra) What language are they speaking? (Gondi, a minority Dravidian language, related to Tamil and my mother tongue, Telugu, but not to Hindi) When were the Naxalites formed? What’s their history? (1967; it’s too difficult to explain in a parenthetical). With the online format of the Reel Asian Film Festival, it was difficult to stop myself from pausing the film and Googling the answers to my questions. While these questions would likely still have run through my head, they would have had to be sidelined, letting me take in the film as it is presented to us.
Still, as I watched, in bed, on my laptop, I ached with wistfulness, the sweet soundscapes and slowness of the scenes lulling me into a sense of intimacy with this family I had little in common with. Yet, this sense is jarred every few scenes, the filmmakers drawing a stark boundary between public life in wider Indian society and private life in the ex-Naxalite settlement. In the latter, we get those gorgeous, aurally rich shots, but the former seems to take place mostly in rooms in institutions — schools, government offices, doctor’s offices, between whitewashed walls, harsh fluorescent lighting, conversations in Hindi. In the public sphere, authorities are rarely, if ever seen. The camera is deliberately focused on the family in close shots, while the voice of the clerk or doctor or teacher floats out, disembodied. This stylistic dichotomy between public and private serves to underscore the contradictions between Somi’s past as a Naxalite and her family’s current attempts to embed themselves into wider Indian society through the unreliable help of the state.
For example, much of the reason for these institutional visits is the couple’s oldest son, Dadu, and his challenges accessing education. To be eligible for school, he needs a “tribal caste” certificate from his father to prove that he is actually a member of a Scheduled Tribe (members of Scheduled Tribes such as the Gonds are able to access several affirmative action-like schemes in Indian education). While Somi has hers, Sukhram’s certificate is in his hometown in Chhattisgarh and a trip to retrieve it would put his life in danger due to his defection. Throughout the film, the family is shown going from appointment to appointment with various government clerks, repeatedly explaining their situation. Finally, Dadu is allowed to go to school on a provisional basis, but officials warn that he will eventually need his father’s certificate, leaving the family in a suffocating situation that is left unresolved by the end of the film.
These encounters with the state, or rather, agents of the state, are frustrating and patronizing. The film’s subjects are acutely aware of the reasons for their mistreatment by both the government and wider Indian society — their marginalized status as Adivasis, compounded by their past involvement with the Naxalites. In one late-night campfire conversation, Somi states dispassionately: “Even if the police say they want to help us, they don’t really do anything. Even if the Naxalites are cutting us open and we call the police, they won’t come. Our life is our responsibility”. Despite government promises that they will “educate [ex-Naxalite’s] children and give them jobs”, they’re on their own.
Given Somi’s (and others’) critiques of the state, through the film, I wondered constantly as to why she left the Naxalites. We read between the lines that life with the Naxalites, in the jungle, with a gun, is unstable, one that does not afford education or prosperity to children, but we do not hear Somi’s reasons for leaving — or for joining — articulated clearly until the last few scenes of the film. In one of these scenes, one of the most tender of the entire film, Somi sits with Dadu on a rock by the river telling him about her past as a Naxalite.
“Do you know how to use a gun?” she asks her son, as if reading him a bedtime story. She explains that they joined “for the land, to save the jungle. To save the gold and silver”. Squirmy, not looking at her, it doesn’t look like Dadu’s listening, but he is. “Tell me more,” he asks, prompting her to explain her work as a soldier, holding meetings with villagers, teaching them songs and dances. “The poor should be governing the country … your father and I went to make it happen with a gun”, she tells him. She’s proud still, you can tell.
By contrast, in one striking scene during his brief time at school, we see Dadu with his classmates learning a pro-India, nationalist song, the children chanting in unison about how they want to be soldiers for the nation. “Who will be a soldier for India?”, the teacher calls. “We, we, we”, the children chant back. Ideologically, this could not be farther away from Somi’s roots as a Naxalite, as an insurgent. Rather, Dadu has to pledge allegiance to a neoliberal Indian state — to integrate into wider society is to be indoctrinated into Hindutva, it seems.
This scene made me deeply uncomfortable but was also among the most legible to me. My mind furiously connected the dots from this show of banal nationalism (Billig 1995) to the rise of right-wing Hindu nationalism in India and the concomitant surge in Islamaphobic state violence, to recent uprisings in India — the largest protests in human history — against neoliberal agricultural reforms which disadvantage small scale farmers, and back again to what I imagined were Somi and Sukhran’s reasons for joining the Naxalites in the first place — savage exploitation of poor people and their land for the profit of a small few, facilitated by the state. In a film of juxtapositions, this scene was the most shocking, laying bare the contradictions between the family’s past, limbo-like present, and awaited future.
Somi holds these contradictions through the film — her still-present political convictions, her family’s dependence on the state and its bureaucracy, her distaste for police, her desire for her son to grow up a citizen of India, to get a good job. She is ambivalent about her choice to leave, and deeply anxious about the future and her children’s place in the Indian state. Through the film’s careful juxtaposition of scenes, we are left with an understanding of how structural forces have impressed themselves upon Somi’s life, from her childhood, to her time with the Naxals, to her current situation.
The audience’s understanding is hard-won: the film is nearly bereft of explicit contextualization on the political situation, save a few sentences on who the Naxalites are in the opening slides. Rather, the film’s observational approach demands that the audience derive meaning about the complicated, likely unfamiliar historical and political context through the slow layering of scenes, which acquaints the viewer with the family: the tender moments between mother and child, the neighbourhood conversations and daily chores, and the frustrating appointments with government clerks.
Little bits of information are carefully, intentionally meted out through the film, like when a friend recounts how he had to flee his brother-in-law’s place in a rush for fear of a Naxalite attack, or when Sukhram explains how the police offered to fake his caste certificate if he gave up information. Like children hanging around the adults past bedtime at the tail end of a party, we gain a slow, if incomplete understanding of the political situation through stories and conversations.
The lack of explanation, in many ways, feels like a function of how the film was shot. The filmmakers noted in the Q&A that the family spoke mostly to each other in Gondi, which none of the filmmakers spoke. Somi and Sukhran are fluent in Hindi but that language, the national language, is reserved for institutional environments — government buildings, schools. For the filmmakers to ask them to disrupt this diglossia, to speak Hindi amongst themselves for the sake of the camera, would have been to impose an artificiality on their interactions, the public rudely intruding on the private.
Thus, the filmmakers only really understood the full meanings of their footage in post-production, after everything had been translated and subtitled by a third party. During filming, they were guessing, rolling the cameras when they suspected that something significant was happening, based on their relationship with the subjects and universal cues of emotion. We are similarly naive, filling in the blanks from the cues and information that we do have. Perhaps we can’t understand the context as sharply as we’d like until the film has ended and we’ve Googled and read an essay or two, but we understand, like the filmmakers, in broad strokes, broad emotions, what’s at stake for Somi, her anxieties and hopeful vigour surrounding the future, her complicated ambivalence to her past.
I don’t mean to suggest that the filmmakers were passive witnesses to what was happening on any given day — they didn’t just shoot everything and stitch it together in post. They “triggered” certain scenes and worked with Somi on scene ideas (but of course, didn’t understand the full significance of the dialogue until later). The fly on the wall feeling that we get as viewers is purposeful, creating a connection that is intimate but not invasive. In its craft, the film manages to evade many of the common criticisms of ethnographic film (Shankar 2020), perhaps owing to Somi’s ongoing input and the fact that the filmmakers spent significant chunks of time in the settlement, not always filming. It isn’t primitivizing, nor does it portray its subjects as premodern or helpless victims — they are complicated, full people who are navigating their way through what they know to be unfair structures.
Yet, given the film’s often Western audience (the film showed at several film festivals, most of which were in Europe, though some were in Asia), a Western gaze is necessarily implicit — I wonder if a film with Somi as its subject would still be well received had she not defected, if a brown woman with a gun might seem threatening to a Western liberal audience. The filmmakers warn against romanticizing the Naxalites in the Q&A, forcing me to ask — is it Somi’s very ambivalence that makes her attractive as the film’s protagonist? Perhaps I am being cynical, posing questions that I know don’t have a real answer. Still, though these questions linger in my mind, I think that RIFLE, through its thoughtful craft, succeeds in its complicated, lyrical portrait of a family.
Toward the end of the process of writing this review, I came to realize that my hang-ups and circular thoughts around the documentary’s observational style were simply my hang-ups regarding ethnographic research transposed onto a different site. As a researcher, I struggle with the fact that all research is extractive, that anthropology (which I am trained in) very often feels like a neocolonial enterprise which traffics in “sentimental empiricism” (Jobson 2019: 266). Yet, it simultaneously feels very lazy to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to find no use in anthropology — or observational film. This tension that I feel, which haunts my academic life — and apparently, my film viewing — is not unique, nor is it new. Stuart Hall, in 1996, posed the following:
“Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s name is the point of cultural studies? At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we’ve been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. And if you don’t feel that as one tension in the work that you’re doing, theory has let you off the hook. ”
Hall reminds us that this tension is necessary, perhaps even generative. Reviewing RIFLE compelled me to think through my ambivalence around ethnographic film and, therefore social science research in general, producing a set of questions — is documentary necessarily produced with a Western gaze, embedded in Western aesthetics? What could it look like outside of this? What is the material benefit for Somi, or any subject, to make their story legible for an audience? How do I express my appreciation for a work’s formal triumphs while keeping its creators accountable? These questions — which resist easy answers — serve at the very least as guides, paths forward for my thinking in the future. My ambivalence must be kept accountable, too, after all.
References:
Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London: Sage.
Hall, S. (1996). New ethnicities. In: Chen K and Morley D (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, pp.441–449.
Jobson, R. C. (2020). The case for letting anthropology burn: Sociocultural anthropology in 2019. American Anthropologist, 122(2), 259–271.
Roy, A. (2010, March 27). Gandhi, but with guns: Part One. The Guardian. Retrieved from: theguardian.com/books/2010/mar/27/arundhati-roy-india-tribal-maoists-1.
Shankar, A. (2020). Primitivism and Race in Ethnographic Film: A Decolonial Re-visioning. In Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology. Retrieved from: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0245.xml?
Vidhya Elango (she/her) is a second-gen South Indian kid from Toronto’s ethnoburbs. She is a master’s student in linguistics at the University of Toronto, where she researches the language practices of racialized youth in the GTA, and currently serves as a lead curator for the Block by Block project at the Toronto Ward Museum. You can usually find her biking around the city or inhaling hot takes on Twitter at @vidhyeah.
