From Maa Bhumi, your first feature film, whose subject was the peasant uprising in Telangana, to Parikrama (Circumambulation), your latest, with Paar (Crossing), Raahgir (Wayfarers), and others coming in between, you have repeatedly depicted the desperate condition of marginalised people. Not only their woes, but also their resilience, even defiance. Why this repeated emphasis on this particular theme?

From my childhood I have been an indefatigable traveller, and I am thankful to my parents who took me to villages to spend our vacations, especially to the tribal regions in Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, and Maharashtra. There I watched the deprived and the struggling, and their fightback. But I would not use the word “marginalised” in my context. The eminent historian Ranajit Guha, whom I deeply revere and who was the “pope” of the subaltern school of history, preferred the word “marginalised”. But I avoid this term. The word somehow conveys a sense of “minority”. Yet, when you count the really “marginalised” in our country—the landless peasants, Dalits, Adivasis, tribal people, retrenched workers, helpless youths employed on contractual basis under humiliating conditions—the “marginalised” turn into something “sizeable” or “substantial”. And, if you add to their ranks the lower middle class, despairing over their lives every day in urban centres, the so called “marginalised” could even turn into the ravaged “majority”!

Do you know what drew me to impoverished villages and tribal people? It was their daily, second-to-second communion with nature. I was also inspired by books like Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, D.D. Kosambi’s Myth and Reality, Basayana’s Bhakti poems, the dohas of Kabir, and songs of Lalan. These brought me close to the people of the soil and their intense attachment to Mother Earth. This intimacy was destroyed by economic “development”—the rampant construction of giant dams and plants, resulting in the affluence of a minuscule section and bringing calamity upon many.

Please do not forget what our common friend, the great novelist Günter Grass, said in his first reaction after visiting India: “A few islands of obscene, obnoxious luxuries surrounded on all sides by teeming hungry millions. And these islanders are so smug, so myopic! They refuse to accept what surrounds them.” In Parikrama, I have concentrated on such millions surrounding us, people who have been rendered homeless and penniless by the greatest environmental catastrophe in India, the Narmada Valley Project. This catastrophe has also caused the most massive displacement of the poorest in our country: hundreds of villages have been inundated and 25 million have been uprooted.   

We need to recall that this project has a history going back to more than 50 years. It was conceived and executed primarily by Congress governments in the States and at the Centre. The present dispensation raised the overall height. Even in 1990, I observed the protests in full swing near the confluence of the Narmada and Kaveri. But when I visited in 2007, the place had gone under water with countless tribal villages.  

Ghose during the shooting of Parikrama with the actor Chitrangada Singh. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

Why did you choose the 12-year-old Lala as the living commentator of this tragedy? You did not invoke the names of either Arundhati Roy, who wrote an article on this subject in this magazine in 1999 [May-June issue] and Medha Patkar, who emerged as a heroic embodiment of resistance?

I do not have to stress my respect for these two individuals. I was not making a documentary on the Narmada movement. I was making a feature film rooted in actuality. I had an essentially human story to tell, and this boy, who had suffered it all—displacement, separation from parents, helpless toil as a salesboy in pilgrimage centres—turned out to be cut out for my purpose. Of course, we trained him, but what he presented was mind-blowing. I still wonder how Aryan Badkul—that’s his name—from Indore performed this feat. From his initial reluctance to his gradual cooperation, he was inimitable, so restrained even in his frightening disclosures. His chilling words “Gaon nahin, sirf pani aur pani, hamara Nasib” [No village, only water and water, our fate]” echoed exactly what I had envisaged. I wanted to focus on the monumental tragedy, and there he was, Badkul, to voice my critique and underline my emotional engagement. It was simply a godsend.

Interestingly, the Italian director Alessandro [the other protagonist] who came to focus on the Narmada as the river of reverence and the endless “parikrama” of pilgrims along its banks received a severe jolt when he experienced the reality of this phenomenal disaster. He changed his track and decided to focus on the disaster. He rewrote his script, and in a moment of suppressed rage burst out, “You Indians are too tolerant. You have turned a river of reverence, more ancient than even the Holy Ganges, into a river of criminal sacrilege.” That was the tragic message that he and my film articulated.

That indictment is like a choric comment, almost Sophoclean in character. But you, and Alessandro, did show several scenes of devoted pilgrims, chanting mantras and proceeding peacefully towards the mouth of Narmada, Amarkantak.   

That was deliberately done. You must have noted that the devotees were marching in a very orderly manner. They were not shouting ear-splitting slogans, raising clenched fists, or breaking shops, which fanatics in the cow belt did to collect water from the Ganges some days ago. We wanted to show that the true, tranquil nature of deep-layered devotion has absolutely nothing to do with fulmination against another faith, smashing religious sites of the “other”, or hate speech. We wanted to emphasise the tradition of Kabir, Lalan, and the Paramhansa in our present-day reality.

But I must admit that I was inspired by two remarkable personalities: Dara Shikoh, who translated the Upanishads into Persian with the help of Sanskrit scholars and wrote Majma Ul e Baharein [Mingling of Two Oceans], which was a comparative study of Islam and the Upanishads; and Professor Debiprosad Chattopadhyay, whose classic Lokayat focussed on the materialist heritage of Indian philosophy and the subaltern spiritual ethos.

A still from Ghose’s Moner Manush, based on the life of Lalan Fakir. Ghose says Lalan’s songs are a source of inspiration for him. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives

How did you spot this Lala, who holds the film together with his simple Hindi and depth of emotion?

I had to depend on my friends at the Indore Natya Akademy. They searched for the right ones, selected about 12, and we chose Lala though he had not topped the audition list. He did not want to give up his daily dhanda selling odd merchandise. His dream was to collect enough money so that he could build a new shelter for his parents, who had been washed away in the deluge. He said that many others like himself had chosen this path, and they all nurtured the same dream. We told him that we would contribute as much as we could to fulfil his desire.

That scene in Paar where Shabana Azmi and Nasiruddin Shah try desperately to herd the pigs together in order to cross the river and earn a few paise. The three renowned poets who were judges at the Venice Film Festival in 1984, Rafael Alberti, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Günter Grass, applauded this scene as “atem-beraubened”, “breath-capturing”. You were honoured with the Unesco Award in Venice and Nasiuruddin received the Best Actor Award. The river scene in Padmanadir Majhi [The Boatman of the Padma], hundreds of boats floating on the river in the darkness, lamps flickering on them, was simply magical. And again in this film, Narmada in so many moods: gushing, gurgling, crashing, turbulent, still and placid after the deluge. Did not the maestro himself—Satyajit Ray—once ask where you learnt this consummate art?

No, I did not learn from anyone. I was simply fascinated by the visual tradition. And classics like John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. I don’t want to boast, but Manik da [Ray] did ask, “Goutam, how do you accomplish this?” I kept humbly silent.  

You referred to Paar and Padmanadir Majhi. I shall add Teesta, on which I focussed in my documentary on Sikkim. I must say rivers exert an irresistible pull on me. The riverine landscape is simply fascinating. That is why I chose Narmada. All these rivers have turned into an integral part of my visual imagination, my camera literally revels when I confront them. Manik da was well aware of this trait, or weakness, in me.     

And now, my last question. In the last scene of Parikrama, Lala, standing on the deck of the trawler, is full of excitement and impatience because he believes that he is approaching a hill where his family had taken shelter to escape the onslaught of water. But before he reaches the shore, he screams “Ma”. The sound wells up and the film ends. Why didn’t you end with a scene of union?

Because that would have violated the tragic tenor of the film. I just could not depend on a rounded finale. It had to be open-ended, ambivalent, and uncertain, in order to sustain the inherent cinematic tension. Simply put, I wanted to focus on the truth of cruel separation, on the breakage of bonds caused by the river, and not on any deceptive reparation.

If I may recall another open-ended and uncertain ending, think of the last unforgettable moment of Ray’s Charulata. In the last scene, Charu and her husband, Sailen, estranged by then, try to touch each other’s fingers, but the fingers do not touch. I think creative texts have to be ambivalent and open-ended. The reader of Rabindranath’s novella [Nastaneerh, or Broken Nest, on which Charulata is based] and the viewer of Ray’s film or my Parikrama cannot accept a facile, harmonious termination, for that would result in the collapse of the cinematic aesthetic. 

Somehow, while making this film I was haunted by Alexander Pushkin’s evocative line “Everything is a sacrifice to your memory”. For the millions who lost everything in the Narmada Valley, their only refuge after their sacrifice is memory.

Let me end with a grim warning. The Western world has stopped constructing gigantic dams, now it is our turn. We have to halt this pernicious programme in the Himalayas and stop blocking the flow of rivers from Kashmir to Arunachal. We cannot and must not reduce everything to the level of mournful memory.