'Slaves of the Empire': Capturing an Unknown Slice of Subaltern History

Rajesh James holds a doctorate on the unlikely subject of Christopher Nolan, the British-American filmmaker; teaches English in a Kochi college; has written a sprawling, somewhat unfocussed book on a long line of Indian documentary filmmakers; and directed at least one significant documentary mixing realistic with absurdist elements on a migrant Tamil-speaking community of dhobis (washermen and their families) settled for generations in Fort Kochi, an island town in Kerala steeped in many colonial histories, from Portuguese to Dutch to English.

James (39) was in Calcutta recently to show his Slaves of the Empire (Malayalam, Tamil, with subtitles in English, b/w, digital, 51 minutes) at the Kolkata People라이브 바카라 Film Festival, a scrupulously independent initiative held successfully for the past eleven years without any help from government agencies, corporates or NGOs. It is a talking point in the city and beyond as to how a festival of this sort with a marked pro-people focus can be organised in these dark days with just contributions from those who come to see the films.

Perhaps, the singlemost striking feature of James’ film is the rippling muscularity of the images showing the dhobis at work, or at play. They tellingly evoke the daily grind the washermen face with great courage and, arguably, hope for the future. Brave families fill the screen, shown adjusting as best they can among people who speak a language and espouse cultural practices different from their own. Their daily trial of attending to mounds of clothes that come to them stained by blood and filth of all kinds would dishearten a lesser people, but not these noble subalterns who have devised varied strategies to rise above their ‘lowly’ station in life. They uplift themselves not just by drinking once their work is over, but singing hit numbers from box-office runaways, or arguing full-throatedly for Thalaiva Rajnikanth which brings to them, it would seem, a certain Tamil pride in, and a yearning for a home from which they have been exiled for generations.

But if Selvaraj, one of the four characters who give life to the narrative more than the others, spends his hard-earned money on printing posters announcing the arrival of the latest film of the Tamil super-hero or on observing his birthday in the best way he can, others like Rajasekharan or Rajan are heard taking up cudgels for local heroes like Mammooty or Mohanlal. Inevitably, the occasional verbal confrontations produce more heat than light, only to conclude on a happy note over a glass of hard liquor. In a way, the spectacle is both grand and pathetic; it is as comic as it is sad; alienation and adjustment going hand in hand with each other.

Socrates said he had nothing to teach anybody. Could he have meant that the precious little we know has been taught us by Life라이브 바카라 ups and downs; losses and gains; many trials of the body and the occasional peace of the heart? Each of James’ four central characters, caught in the hurly-burly of their daily existence – Rajan, Pratti, Rajasekharan and Selvaraj – is a picture of hard work and exemplary endurance. Images of beating hundreds of varying items of apparel or those of household use against hard raised platforms, all the while immersed in an endless flow of water and detergents, are reminiscent of the choreography of mythic figures blessed with supernatural powers. These extended images of monstrous amounts of will and strength stick to the mind as surely as a less vivid but nonetheless infectious glimpse of an old man who has left his best days behind him long ago, yet still cleans other people라이브 바카라 muck with the same devotion as may have been the case with him in his salad days.

A hymn to nostalgia; a critique of the hard present; and a continuing prayer for an idyll that never was and perhaps will never be, Slaves of the Empire is visually intriguing and aesthetically provocative as it goes about documentarising, as opposed to documenting, a hitherto largely unknown slice of subaltern history embracing two neighbouring southern States. At a time, such as the present, when many families belonging to the so-called upper castes appear not to admit that Dalits, like those we see in the film, have to contend with their histories of hurt and humiliation, only much of it still unwritten, James’ film comes as a rare whiff of fresh air to drive out the choking suffocation caused by lies, deceptions and betrayals authored by the former. As an example, a dhobi in the film talks of the Brahmin who would dip his washed clothes in water after they had been cleansed and delivered to him. This hinting at hierarchical adherence to irrational and hurtful notions around untouchability lies just below the skin of the film.

This visual history of a deprived community always in demand in a larger society preoccupied with the obsession of asprishyata, is a fit case for study by clinical psychologists no less than those working in the field of cultural anthropology. Again, it is possible that in the echoes produced by coarse or fancy clothes being thrashed against hard surfaces, teachers of film studies will hear the plaintive wails of a people yearning for a lost home that they can best attain by reconciling themselves to a new home, however imperfect. In a sense, however far-fetched, one can hear Ghatak라이브 바카라 mournful voice here; refugees know best that to survive in new or alien surroundings, they must adjust as best they can, or go under.

Rajesh James appears to be committed to telling his chosen story well, a story ranging from the heartrending to the hilarious, by taking recourse to engaging formal and visual qualities, but also involving himself in the aesthetics of the black-and-white. These days, not too many documentarians seem prepared to grapple with challenges born of innovative, modern approaches to this youngest art form, instigated by memories of the past. Says James: “Embracing the aesthetics of a bygone era, Slaves of the Empire is primarily envisioned as a monochromatic cinematic attempt, captured in digital format with a classic 3:4 aspect ratio. In doing so, it pays a heartfelt tribute to the centenary of the 16mm film stock라이브 바카라 inception, which was introduced as a less expensive alternative to 35mm.”

In a different context, the writer Ruskin Bond has observed: “The past feeds into the present.” Bond was putting in words what Man has always known since the advent of Time and Life. In a manner of speaking, James splices his interest in the history of film stock even as he works in the digital format to his involvement in the telling of the history of an essential but ignored community; a group of Tamil indentured labourers in existence since Dutch colonial times in what is now called Kerala. In a sense, two histories - cinema history and the history of a people addicted no less to cinema than to alcohol, or their profession – are made to merge to create an exercise that succeeds as much as art, as it does as a human document of love, loss, life, death, and the indomitable will not to forget.

If the closing frames of a film, regardless of genre, tell us anything, it is that having told his story, the director knows (or doesn’t know) how to bring down the curtain. The last shots of Slaves of the Empire provide a valuable lesson on how best a socio-historical documentary of this kind could be profitably ended. These shots practically amount to a summing-up of the director라이브 바카라 attitude to caste, class, gender, the inevitability of conflict between loyalties, and the final craving for a plot of one라이브 바카라 own measuring so many feet by so many. The implications of the series of long shots with which the film ends, have as much to do with the socio-cultural as with the individual-collective.

Selvaraj, the diehard Rajni fan, is shown walking down Lily Street, an upper-class area noted for its extant Dutch-era architecture and home to posh pubs and restaurants; Rajan, shown earlier in a mock-fight with his wife to the amusement of their grown-up sons, is shown on Calavathy Road with Che라이브 바카라 familiar beret-portrait stenciled on the wall; Rajasekharan, the philosophical type immersed in the history of his community, is seen going by the Dutch cemetery, a relic of the past; and finally, Pratti (meaning “the queen”) in Jew Town, evoking a lost, fabled past. They may be considered as folk heroes of a kind, symbolic of Fort Kochi라이브 바카라 troubled past producing wealth and power for foreign invaders at the expense of generations of displaced natives catering to colonial needs. At the end of the day, James’ “chosen four” are seen holding in their hands packets of washed and ironed clothes to be delivered to middle and upper-class patrons; the materially deprived and emotionally vulnerable in perennial service to the polite and the privileged. Generations have come and gone, the bugle of change has been repeatedly sounded, but the scarred status of the working families of dhobikhana has yet to be attended to.

The director points to the irony, clothed in both cruelty and mirth, that is to be discerned in the naming of the four on whom the narrative largely rests. Even though each of them is to be counted as a victim of a kind of modern-day slavery – unspecified hours of back-breaking labour for unimpressive remuneration – they have the idea of kingship (raj/raja) embossed on their names: Selvaraj, Rajan, Rajasekharan, Pratti (queen). In this connection, given the present times when varied imagined ‘sins’ are being laid at the door of the Moghuls, the four unfortunately-named can draw comfort from the example of Humayun, meaning the “lucky one”, who had a short reign marked by military defeats; a short life; and is practically lost to history.

(Vidyarthy Chatterjee writes on cinema, society, politics. He is the author of Despair and Defiance- the Worker in Indian Cinema.)