my Rohingya film ; Our Journey to Future‟s Past ..

90+ mins

Treatment/ Synopsis/ Idee/ Methodology/ Et al

Abstract

“As we sit here, one human being is being displaced every two seconds; 44,000 every day; and three million
from one year to the next. “
Okoth Obbo, UNHCR, Kutupalong

Our efforts more than ever must rise above mere

philanthropy, giving aid to refugees. It, stakeholders on
the ground feel, needs to be directed towards capacity
building, of both the migrant and host communities. In
the absence of durable political solutions to the problem
of forced migration, perhaps this is the only way one can
ensure sustainability, affiliations among neighbours
forced of inclemency. This in brief is the project. To
impact sustainable growth of relationships economic and
compassionate, largely at a communal level as well as
increasingly personal between the 17, 000 Rohingya and
whatever is left of my benign countrymen. This film is
about the inmates, and passer-by of refugee camps in the
Northern states of India; Jammu, Delhi, Haryana and
Rajasthan as well as in Bengal where the Rohingya live
in small household clusters, but not limited to them
alone.

With the backdrop of refugee producing machines that modern nations have become, it is also about those
people who having come in contact with the Rohingya have become aware of their own statelessness, as
human beings. Those lawyers, doctors, aid workers, coordinators, trainers, educators, activists, community
leaders who are the vanguard of our society in defending the „right of life with dignity‟ for the Rohingya; their
struggle with the mobocracy that rules India at present is also a part of this film.

South Asian Human Rights Documentation Centre which is archiving and educating, organising advocacy for
rights initiatives for the Rohingya and Development and Justice Initiative an agency coordinating the national
effort for them have promised me their working support.

A Note on Structure

“Becoming is beautiful”
Aristotle

Like my earlier works this film is proposed as an impact project that aspires as its object, large populations. It
supposes that the use of particular structures in the development of the overall narrative allows for greater
certainty for representation of the reality out there. Though charges of objectivism cannot be ruled out in
such a method, as a critique of our own societies its efficacy, even necessity I have often felt in what I’ve
often aspired my films to be in the end; Critical anthropology.

Rondo or Rondeau is a musical form in which the principal theme alternates with contrasting digressions to
arrive at a greater affect. With transport of all the compositional elements into wider dispersal and eventual
return each time the relationship within the elements are intensified in this form. Whole worlds are thus
sucked in like the dreams of a neurotic. The more varied the refrain greater is the pleasure of synthesis.
Perhaps, it is the principle of Montage; where an expectation elevated to impossibility inflames our desire
for it and places it within the realm of reason. This could be a beginning point to imagine the overall
structure of the film, a perfect way to delineate the impact I want to present, will to power as art. However,
being a documentation of reality and afraid of its own positivism leeway for reality to creep inside and
determine for itself the actual ordering of the film
needs to be always left.

Style

A thin line separating us from base propaganda,

the style of the film, promise of its authenticity,
must be quotidian, almost ‘Direct’, with room for

more conversations than well intentioned explanations, moralism. Visually however, it should be able to
document lives always as a part of a larger process which, rather than the characters themselves, are shot
intimately, however, made up of minute details of behaviours, patterns, oracles perhaps. Only in this actual
event of nonchalance, that we anyways are in, can minute intensely personal details of singular tragedies
assume importance. The language of the film should alternate amongst the various languages locally spoken
in various parts of the subcontinent where the Rohingya has built settlements and a variation of Bangla/
Bengali that the Rohingya though swear they have already forgotten, speak amongst themselves. Music, the
graphic art that promises to be in the background as well as sound as news items, as incidence or as slogans
however needs to be a repository of the larger nexus of the historical development of circumstances and will
actually serve as commentary. The entire film has to be adequately subtitled in English and titled both in
Bangla and English in the same frame.

Content

In this age of territoriality with stringent borders and stricter controls over populations the natural principle of
drift for survival has suffered more than ever. What seems plausible even for the weed and the weasel is no
longer a distant possibility for us human beings. The refugee situation for people forced into migration thus
has been rendered a future become past, in which, with loss of loved ones and the last of ones reserves, with
house razed, and none to ask for clemency, ‘daya’, rehabilitation, even hardened souls become slag. From
being able to find no other cause for one‟s misfortune save being of a particular community, out of horror of
their own accidental self which they anyways cannot escape, erase, under the conditions at hand, families
perish from desolation.

Being poor and distant from the ideological centres of Islam, which anyways was spread in the region by the
Sufis, traditional religious customs were rarely binding upon the Rohingya in Rakhine, however, in northern
India they are being influenced by the host community to adopt them, just as the Indian state is enforcing laws
that are neither concomitant on their neighbours nor natural to them.in view of such situations perhaps Hannah
Arendt had once opined that the refugee is a peculiar child of modern history who are put in concentration
camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends. Every individual step outside impositions,
restrictions laid down by the community, state, history, time which exacts its price for its support and aid,
which the refugee takes, every fresh dose of moralism which (s)he adheres from repression and transformation
of conditions of life therein is of cardinal importance for this film.

For example, Arman 4 years born in Bangladesh and Irfan 2 years in India were running diarrhoea while their
mother pregnant again couldn‟t find reasons for her misfortune. Lust was so compelling to victims of terror,
so natural was its necessity for a withered ego that even our confidence man, the community leader,
jummedar, Nurul Amin thought it unwise to issue caution against the rights of the creator. Instead of
institution of liberal rational values, being stripped of them refugee life in our world is endangered to
withdraw behind a veil. I want to see the community emerging from behind this veil of woe into history like
„We Refugees’ from the 1947 Indian partition have been able to do ourselves. For this the memory of
displacement, I believe, has to be retained culturally.

Hence I wish to seize these days of turning cinder when having no pennies left a father finds himself thus, and
on those when having repatriated his long lost son with other members of the family even while living in
squalor, hunger and disease, he feels secure and loved. Commit to memory those evenings when at last having
no recourse left, a daughter turns her dying mother out of doors for her child of fourteen to have a baby, ill-
conceived of rape. As well as those in which she has some recluse in activities outside this burden. I want to
peer and reflect on those faces turned skywards without comprehension, smiling in grief, breaking down from
happiness, ecstatic from pain, anguished over this unchanging world, but not them alone. Bear witness to
those hardened cheeks and cheeky jowls, battles and swindles that form a part of a refugee‟s every encounter
with the world outside his hut and even those within him. I want to hold onto the weapons of the weak with
those who wield them. See an ersatz of life itself, of a condition increasingly becoming general, and hold it
back to life.

As for the Rohingya, migrant labour across river Naf, great defenders of the east in the Second World War,
left in the lurch by postcolonial history: they no longer wish to be refugees but can‟t help for want of, beside
other means, papers, Long Term Visas which their other neighbours, Afghan and Tibetan migrants, enjoy in
India till their repatriation to Myanmar; which seems a distant possibility due to the presence of fear and of
downright dishonest conditions that Myanmar lays down for the citizenship of the Muslims of Arakan. These
conditions were enforced by a totalitarian regime in 1982 in show of impunity to international opinion but
efforts after 2012 by elected governments even could not assure the Rohingya of its goodwill towards them. In
complete oblivion of the duties of governance xenophobia fuelled by greed has ran amok with a population
which has been systematically stripped of all its powers for generations. Can they be expected to return like
the Chins have been able to only time will tell. For our part this film will try to highlight India‟s amenability
to non refoulement, as seen not only in Dharmashala from where the Dalai Lama runs a government in exile
but as a general attitude present amongst the people themselves contrary to the present dispensation of the
Union government and the ideological support for it in some parts of the country

And this I want to impact by the beginning of next year when governments after being re-elected through
general elections in Bangladesh and India shall bring in new measures concerning the refugees in the region,
overwhelmingly Rohingya.

A Possible choice of characters (and their ages).

The lives of Irfan, (4) and Arman, (2) born in two different nations away from Arakan is set for a battle with
death which opens up its mouth every moment and lets their flesh grow a little longer. Indian, Bangladeshi,
Rohingya, what is their country? ...Sri Ravi Nair, (62) petitioner, for the rights of life and liberty of the
Rohingya in India, with penchant for hyperbole and alliteration, is an educator by choice, and rights
campaign organiser by proclivity.…. Fazal Abdali, (28) dreamer, junior advocate, has moved the court for
release of 61 Rohingya interred in the North Eastern states of Assam, Manipur, Tripura and Bengal where
debate around the refugee condition is rife for the National Register of Citizens which is set to turn more
than 4 million people in the region stateless is being instituted there…….Ali Jowar, (22) student of Delhi
University, my linkman to the Burmah Office of The National Archives of India, where deeply nestled lie the
history of Modern Arakan and the answer to his riddle, his identity ‘Rohingya’...Shofika, (32), mother of two,
a firebrand community leader at the refugee camp in Nuh, Haryana…..Mukhiya, (58) village headman of the
host community, provides aid but expects total subservience from the Refugees…. Nur Begum, (40) and her
adopted orphan Roshenara, (4) …..Ananya Chatterjee Chakraborty, (50) human rights filmmaker and valiant
defender of the refugees, as chairman of West Bengal Commission for Protection of Child Rights she failed to
secure local government support for the interred children in Bengal’s prisons but refused to divulge
Rohingya prisoners’ details with the Central Minister to prevent their deportation…… Rajeev Dhavan, (70)
senior advocate for National Human Rights Commission who stood against the government’s plea of
deportation at the Supreme Court….. Hosen Gaji, (25) political mobiliser of the host community in Bengal
housing 300 Rohingya……Mithun Das, (32) specialises in smuggling in people across the India Bangladesh
border….. Nasreen, (12) illegal migrant, interred in Juvenile Justice Home in Bengal….. Inspector Akbar Khan,
Detective department whose job is to keep tabs on all that happens at the refugee camps in his
locality……Nurul Amin, (28) Community leader, representative of UNHCR, our confidence man in Jaipur
responsible for handling all police matters of the Rohingya there….. Zubeid (60)….dying on the sidewalk, and
the vitriolic campaign by the Hindutva activists that promises to be ever more strident with the approach of
the elections in March April 2019 against Muslim refugees generally in the country and in particular in
Jammu, where the bigger camps are housed …...a pretty spectacle edge…….

Situations

Refugee life is about staring, at an alien cultural space and feeling less assured every moment. Apart from
penury, starvation, diarrhoea, ill treatment by all and sundry, law and lowlife, it is also about a will to emerge
thru all this by the skin of one’s teeth. This creates a set of similar situations almost prototypal, a struggle for
the everyday. It is about repeated attempts to fight this battle for survival with little at hand save a
herculean will. Self-assertion, as little as can be imagined in the face of such momentous odds, at flight from
or in leadership of community, and having lost all either way, return to desolation, like Haraprasad does (in
the last of Ritwik Kumar Ghatak’s partition trilogy, the Bangla classic Subarnorekha.(1966)). But this can
change as it has often in the past, every time in history in its own way. We will have to document this amidst
the general human drama of births and deaths, love, marriages, exploitation, resistance and if possible
retribution, even by way of lampooning of totalitarianism, over a longer period in the host country itself. And
in it like our forefathers look for the intransitive in this overturning world. That which is greater than, fear,
grief, even war; we must be prepared to look at it from the viewpoint by the sidewalk where life is spent in
long queues for vaccination, verification, dole but not that alone. We shall also have to keep up with the
larger global events which every moment gifts them a new glimmer of hope, forcing changes on them.

So just as we’ll have to see how the new ideological resistance to granting of safe havens in India or triumph
over it affects campsites in northern parts of the country we’ll also have to see how realities are differently
perceived in other states and what refugees and their benefactors do under which set of compulsions. A
veritable measure of the task was handed over to us in our recce across Rajasthan when we learnt that the
campsite we were supposed to visit, to see how the host and migrant communities intermingled during the
practice of rohas, rite of daytime starvation as practised universally in Islam, had gone up in flames and most
of the people there had lost everything that they had. Having abandoned our plans at a reasoned approach
we had to take the way events took us. Much more cannot be said in this work with populations, hence,
without risk of soothsaying. In short it can be said that whatever affects the life of the refugees in India for
the greater part of the coming nine months shall be our situation where we follow these differently oriented
individuals while they live their life and change.

Theme: Identity

Such is our want of prevarication on the issue of which stories we love that even from times immemorial we
imagined our tragedies as sacrifice, gift of the goat, raucous acts; hence this film will toe the line assuming a
positive bias. It will try to piece together a narrative where veritably we see the Rohingya in a harmonious
entente with their neighbours. Else it will unmask the wisdom of those ancient words, that Indra, the king of
Gods is said to have sung to Rohitashya, son of the pious king, Harishchandra, meant for sacrifice to appease
the lord.
“Wandering one findeth honey,
Wandering the sweet Udumbara fruit,
Consider the pre-eminence of the sun,
Who wearieth never of wandering. ”
Aitareya Brahmana, Rgveda

Problems of having a fixed treatment for works with populations

Since this is a documentation of real events in which we have been able to arrive and enframe here we can
only provide a rough idea of what we can expect and how that expected sequence of events will be met.
However, it will not only be our utter failure as filmmakers but also of our liaison with the local masses if the
limitations of our imagination are not surpassed every moment by reality, whose essence we will forever
strive to capture and anyways fail to do so in all its nuances.

Rajasthan Experience 1 (May 2018).

When we were planning our visit to the Rohingya settlements in Rajasthan, campaign against their stay in the
country was in full swing in which heads of states were involved in petitions for their deportation at the
Supreme Court of India, but as we arrived there we saw that the court had ordered a complete stay on all such
proceedings. Summer in the desert would be hot we guessed but over fifty degrees Celsius plus that all our
senses would be numbed in a peculiar way demanding only respite we realised after we acclimatised, by that
hour our hastily assembled gear showed signs of rebuttal. Much more awaited us when local guide Rohingya
Nurul Amin announced that the object of our visit campsite Chamdani 1, home to 57 households had burnt
down in the afternoon. We expected adisaster but found that perhaps, their bodies being their only abode
people in the campsite were unfazed, they were more concerned about the dole and as the heat became
unbearable coolers for relief, conviction on our notion of the future‟s past we found. The refugee returns to the
end of his means even before they can be reproduced by him hence we realised the need for capacity building,
the necessity of the wisdom of Okoth Obbo, earlier written off, perhaps as ‟hopeless sadness of
assimilationists‟. It was everywhere, even in the annals of my family, and all the while I had been running in
circles; ‘Hyacharam myacharam’ in the Rohingya tongue.
Expected (sample) Voiceover

A bespectacled voice:

“The Lord had given and the Lord had taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Joab 1.21.

Experiences from the last century have been witness to so many deaths under similar conditions that inspite of
their severe plight that the Rohingya continue to survive almost in affirmation of the rights of the creator have
been cause for surprise to many recent commentators. We who have emerged through similar historical turns
of being chosen as the truly sacred, that is destined to be executed, have not been amused however….
Comforting the Mourners; a tragedy in three acts…. Act One!”

(GONG)

Voice of Ali Jowar:

“There has been little reported about suicides in our camps, we know how to run, we believe there is a
refugiuum, a Pierre Claver, where the words of poets and philosophers are law, sacrosanct in the sense that it
needs be,….. we are naive, there is no outside,…. Columbus,….. it has been razed so many times……. Will
we bleat the Vedas? Unlikely.”

artwork: Anupam Roy, text: Dipanjan Choudhury