Prantik Narayan Basu is an Indian screenwriter, cinematographer, editor and film director. A graduate in Film Direction from the Film and Television Institute of India, Basu saw his short film Sakhisona screened at BFI London, Mumbai and Rotterdam, where it won the Tiger Award for Best Short Film. His film Rang Mahal (Palace of Colors) was screened at Berlin, IDFA, Signes de Nuit Thailand, Concorto Film Festival, DMZ Docs, Nomadica Bologna, Arthouse Asia and the Bilbao International Documentary and Short Film Festival.

Prantik Narayan Basu sat down with Filmatique for an exclusive conversation as part of Talents 2020.

FILMATIQUE: Thank you for sharing your films. Rang Mahal (Palace of Colors) was quite mesmerizing – dreamlike and seductive. To me, in its fairy-tale, mythic and non-human aspects, Sakhisona in a way created a database, a lexicon, for Rang Mahal. I would like to begin our conversation with the architecture of myth, history and geography in Rang Mahal. How did you build it? What was the process that led you there?

PRANTIK NARAYAN BASU: Thank you. I like the reference to architecture. I often think about it as films unfold themselves in time and space. My film practice is very closely tied to myths and folklore. Myths and folklore work like a time capsule, an entry point into a history of anecdotes, and they give us access to a society’s system of values. I love reading and listening to them, and as a filmmaker I always enjoy sharing the things I love.

These timeless stories are not only structural marvels; they are also far more progressive than today’s forms of storytelling. The creation myths in Rang Mahal, for example, speak of a harmonious coexistence of humans and nature in which humans are not at the center of the narrative. Our popular-culture outlook has placed humans at the center of every narrative. I believe cinema has the capacity to go beyond this and create different narrative possibilities within a different frame of reference.

The Khori Dungri, or chalk-stone hill, that we see in the film was formed over years of erosion and sedimentation. The local people use its pigments to repair and decorate the cracks in the walls of their homes. Like the rocks in their many different hues, the Santhali creation myth exists in thousands of different versions. I asked some of the locals, and they told me that because these myths are passed down orally, they change with every telling and retelling. I was fascinated by the idea of the same story existing in different versions. Using this as the aural layer, I began to build the visual layer with the rocks, the hills, the trees and the village, sometimes connecting directly with the story, and sometimes leaving it open-ended so that viewers could create their own version.

FLMTQ: I like this idea of erosion when I think about the gradually expanding mode of your film. By expanding, I mean the film’s fairy-tale, mythic mode of storytelling, which is not ethnographic or documentary in style. It is very vivid, very contemporary and enveloping. What’s more, the topography of the place becomes part of the whole, and the place tells its own temporal stories.

My question starts from an essay by Ashis Nandy, “A Landscape of Secret and Incommunicable Selves,” on the colonial project of rational enlightenment. According to its own hierarchical norms, this project held that the myths, superstitions and folklore of the colonized were apolitical, ahistorical and irrational.

Your films, however, blend folklore with history. And this is, of course, history, because it tells how people live and how they have lived. It tells what they believe and how they have built their lives. Can you tell us how you arrived at the idea that folklore and oral storytelling are the history of all the people, or the generations of people, living in rural areas? How is history constructed in ways we don’t think about, or that we don’t see as textbook or official history?

PNB: If we take the ritual on its own terms, the Santhals see it as a kind of repair, in both the literal and the figurative sense. They also regard these myths, told again and again during the days of the Sohrai (a late harvest festival), as microcosms. In Rang Mahal, for example, the story of Thakur Jivi tells us that God created the animals first, and that humans entered the picture later. The Santhals are acutely aware of their status as a surplus on the planet, and they live in a harmonious relationship with their environment. For them, a tree is not just a tree, and a pond is not just a simple hole in the ground for storing water: they are bound up with family values.

For far too long, we have convinced ourselves that we know what the concept of “development” means from the Adivasi (Indigenous) point of view. In this context, it is important to mention the Pathalgadi (stone slab) movement, since many Adivasi villages in India have declared themselves “self-governing areas.” The relevant sections of the Indian Constitution that grant them the right to self-government have been inscribed on large stone slabs, usually placed right at the entrance to the village. Ironically, a community that had no written language until recent years was, even as we speak, writing its own history. And let us hope that one day the world will come to realize that there are belief systems different from ours, possibly more rational and more sustainable in the long run.

FLMTQ: This is an urgently needed idea, and I think it has been lost to an incredible degree in this late-capitalist, extractivist world. Many environmental justice movements are trying to find new solutions and are searching for a post-human future. It is a matter of quite literally going to Indigenous communities and asking them how they have lived. Because they live in unity, in a non-exploitative way with non-human elements, and they don’t see themselves as separate from them.

Now the knowledge of Indigenous communities has begun to be taken into account, whereas before it was considered very marginal and insignificant by the mainstream, and even by the independent worlds of art, film and literature. So how do you approach a community without looking at it through the eyes of a sociologist, and without portraying its people as primitive or treating them paternalistically? Because that is so often the reductive view of tribal communities in different parts of the world. In light of all this, what is your approach?

PNB: The first approach is, of course, awareness. I grew up in a suburban setting, and I can’t claim to fully understand these issues. The dynamics of their relationship with nature are very complex. The best I could do was not to behave like a colonizer with my tool, that is, my camera. Because I have been working very closely with the community for some time (first on Sakhisona, and then on another documentary that is now in post-production), a certain sense of friendship has grown between us. My main stance was not to intrude on their privacy or to interrogate them, which, in my view, would have been counterproductive. When we approach a community as a cumulative subject and enter a space with our camera, we adopt an attitude that leaves no room for any fluid interaction. This can be seen in the archival portraits I used as a counterpoint in the film. I used not the people themselves as subjects, but only their voices, which are so rarely heard in mainstream films. I find it problematic to stop people in front of the camera and film their facial features. That is why I chose to film from a certain distance and to present the world I wanted to convey as it is. I think this helped me build a closer intimacy with them than before, and to understand their world as they see it.

FLMTQ: Speaking of entering a way of life from which we could learn so much, I found the soundscape you created and your sound design quite captivating. You used folklore and a narrator’s voice, but there was such emphasis on the sounds of the trees, the birds and the insects, that constant sonic texture, and such continual attention to fine detail. It might sound like mere noise to us, but it is actually a language in its own right. Was this something you consciously set out to capture?

PNB: This is something my sound designer Ananda Gupta and I discussed at length and arrived at after a great deal of trial and error. Having natural sounds play a crucial role alongside the narrator’s voice was part of our plan, but we decided on the extent of their impact during the shoot. The voices of Balika Hembram and Sanjay Tudu carry a certain poetry and the intimacy of telling a story to a friend. This allowed us to drift into dreams and to imagine an almost radio-play-like soundscape for the story being told. Here, however, we used visuals that were sometimes complementary and sometimes contrasting. Put simply, you could say we approached it as if we were playing a game.

FLMTQ: So you are working on a feature-length documentary. Is that your next project?

PNB: Yes. I have just finished the edits, and as soon as the lockdown ends we will complete the sound design and color grading. It will be called Bela, and it is about a group of dancers who appeared in my previous film. It will also be an observational portrait of a small village of the same name, in which we will see the rhythms and rituals of their art and their work, and the ambiguous threshold between the two.

I have finished the screenplay for Dengue, which will be my first fiction feature, and we have received support from the Hubert Bals Fund of the International Film Festival Rotterdam. It is the story of two men who meet by chance during a sudden summer rain, and of their relationship, which turns into a passionate love affair. I developed the project at the PJLF Three Rivers Residency in Italy, and we plan to start shooting next year.

Interview by: Ritika Biswas Guest Curator, Filmatique

Translation: Murat Müftüoğlu