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Humanity must have a way of manifesting itself on those who practise it — in an honest smile, in a joke told to someone who had not laughed in months, in the simple act of consideration.
After Rakesh Sharma, one of the most renowned documentary filmmakers in India, travelled a long distance to meet a survivor of sexual violence, his immediate reaction to her refusal was acceptance. He was making his most noted work, Final Solution, in the aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat riots, speaking to survivors of targeted localities, their attackers in the neighbourhood, those in sympathy, and those in anger.
The woman was among the many who were sexually assaulted during the Gujarat riots, in which thousands of Muslims were killed, attacked, and abused, allegedly by Hindu mobs. The survivor later volunteered to speak to Rakesh and be filmed, when he was visiting her home with others and told her a joke that made her laugh. He didn't know it then, but years later she would tell him it was the first time she had laughed after the attack. She must have sensed in him the humanity that she was seldom treated with.
Rakesh shares the story in a conversation with TNM at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK), where he was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award. “I was extremely apprehensive about talking to victims of sexual violence,” Rakesh says. “I was a young Hindu male in my 30s – their perpetrators were young Hindu males. But this aspect had to be in the film, it was a new strategy used by the group, to unleash sexual violence on Muslim women. Historically this tool has been used against a certain group of people who had to be subjugated. But it was the first time in India that rape as a tool of violence was used on a mass scale. Secondly, [Hindu] women were complicit in it. Survivor after survivor told me that the women would catch hold of them when they tried to escape and hand them back to the men,” Rakesh says.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was then the Chief Minister of Gujarat, leading the BJP government that was accused of condoning the attack. It took place in the days following the Godhra train fire, in which 58 Hindu pilgrims died — a tragedy that the Gujarat government and Hindutva mobs blamed on Muslim groups. Rakesh’s documentary goes back and forth between the survivors of an attack and the perpetrators of the very same attack, and others in the locality who take sides and give opinions.
Predictably, the film was banned by the Central Board of Film Certification, at the time headed by actor and BJP supporter Anupam Kher. However, the ban was revoked within months, without a single cut, after a Special Committee, including Anupam and filmmaker Shyam Benegal, reexamined the film.
“I began my career with fiction, working with Shyam Benegal. But when he told me I was ready to make feature films, I felt I didn't know about life and didn’t have stories to tell. I decided to make a few documentaries to learn,” Rakesh says.
He worked on some good projects but realised, he says, that funding came with “strings attached,” and it was not his cup of tea. Filmmaking itself was a prisoner of capital at that point, he says.
He took a break from filmmaking, triggered by the Bombay riots of 1992. "When there was such a fire in my backyard (it was very close to where I was staying), I couldn't be just a filmmaker. In any case I had decided to quit. So I actually ran a relief camp in Jogeswari for about a year. We did Red Cross kind of work, providing milk, blankets and kerosene."
For eight years after that he worked in the corporate world, including being in the founding team of Channel V. At the end of it he had saved enough to make a few documentaries with the then new Digital Video (DV) camera. In early 2002, he had just made Aftershocks, about the corporate exploitation of a disaster, when the Gujarat riots broke out. Rakesh knew then he had to use all his skills and abilities as a filmmaker to make his intervention, and not be a relief worker. "It was my attempt at intervention and a forewarning that I was shouting from rooftops that if we don't check this kind of politics, this is going to destroy the social fabric and we have seen what happened after that in the last 23 years since then," he says.
He is not disappointed or disillusioned that despite the best of his efforts, and others like him, the BJP continued to win not just in Gujarat but formed the Union government thrice afterward. He had no illusions, and at the best of times films can only ask questions, he says.
"The best thing we can hope for as a filmmaker is to create a work which engages people emotionally and mentally. I know that Final Solution did work like that for many people. Over the years, thousands have come back to me and talked about it. But I have always felt that films can only be a limited intervention. As a filmmaker, all I could do was place a film as a tool in the hands of grassroot activists and anti communal warriors. I have made sure that they all got the film,” Rakesh says.
He distributed the film as much as he could, held public screenings and later put it up on the internet. People responded to his appeals by making copies of their own and distributing it further. The censor board ban in July 2004 — news of which came as a "gift" on his birthday — did not surprise him, or affect the distribution. Rakesh says he was prepared for it and spent all the money that the film had won at the Berlinale Film Festival on distribution.
Months later the ban was lifted and the film went on to win the National Award in the non-feature category. Rakesh became a recognised figure, which meant making the sequel to Final Solution — shot through the years — has not been easy. But he has his methods.
To be a documentary filmmaker, recording evidence against the interests of the powerful, required him not just to be good at his craft but also to be smart about dealing with people. Rakesh is thorough in his preparations. He would, on the face of trouble, think on his feet and turn from polite to aggressive, judging what would work with certain people. He made arrangements with his friends on when to expect his call everyday and when to come looking for him if there was no word.
He has been careful with the sequel, Final Solution Revisited, which will be released next year. It is a mini feature series, in which he tells the story of the years that passed after the Gujarat riots, in three feature films. Glimpses of the films were screened at the IDSFFK on August 26. Survivors talk about their situation, perpetrators in hidden cameras admit to their crimes cheerfully, while adding they had wanted to kill more.
The visuals — the rubble and remains of what were once homes bursting with life — bear a disturbing semblance to the images of Gaza today, torn by Israeli attacks of the last two years. The universal echoes are upsetting. Rakesh nods.
"The kind of otherisation that we are looking at [in India now] for the past two decades, the caste inequalities, we have seen that in America in the early 20th century. Black people did not have even the right to vote. The choice of the title, Final Solution, was also very deliberate. It was the Nazi coinage, saying that the final solution for the Jewish problem was their extermination. The fascists in this country are inspired by Nazism and Hitler and this is their final solution, to subjugate a religion."
Babu Bajrangi's words in the sequel echo the thought — “sentence me to death but send me out for two days before the execution, so I can kill the remaining thousands of Muslims before coming back to die.”
Humanity must have a way of manifesting itself, just as the lack of it does.
In Final Solution, the rustic voice of an unseen singer is in the background as Rakesh’s camera scans through a relief camp and the streets of destruction.
Where to go, whom to ask? Where is humanity?
Why is it the way it is? Why does today still echo yesterday?
Why these burnt homes, why this shadow of death?
Why these daggers and swords? Why this blood and gore?
Where to go, whom to ask? Where is humanity?