Peacenik with a Camera | TVE Asia Pacific (TVEAP): Moving images moving people

15 April 2002

Peacenik with a Camera

Mention to anyone that the Mumbai-based director Anand Patwardhan has just completed a three-hour documentary on the anti-nuclear movement, and there is a look of incredulity. Can someone, in this age of sound bites, inflict three hours on viewers - and get away with it? That's longer than most feature films these days

But Anand has achieved the near-impossible: his latest film War and Peace keeps one engrossed for its entire duration. And the length doesn't seem to deter film juries either: in the few months since it was released, it has picked up three awards. It recently won the $2,000 Best Film Award as well as the international jury's award in the Mumbai International Film Festival. Only days earlier, he had bagged the Grand Prize at the EarthVision Global Environmental Film Festival in Tokyo

This film travels from India, which most recently tested its nuclear devices in May 1998, and its neighbouring nuclear-rival Pakistan, to Japan and the United States. Patwardhan highlights the chasm between the response of the people and the political class and religious zealots. In the two South Asian countries, said to be potentially the world's most dangerous nuclear arena (Pakistan tested its own weapons within days of India's tests), common folk have no animosity towards each other, while the politicians and clerics spew venom.

This review and the interview that follows are by Darryl D'Monte, a Mumbai-based journalist and environmentalist who is also President of the International Federation of Environmental Journalists (IFEJ).

In Pakistan, Patwardhan ventures with his camera into the bylanes of cities. People greet him like a long-lost brother and invite him home. When the director tells his host how happy he is to have received such hospitality, his host replies that it is an even bigger honour for himself. Such exchanges are juxtaposed against the news media coverage that suggests that the two countries are at the point of pressing the nuclear trigger.

He then journeys to Japan, where he visits Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the first and only cities so far to experience full-scale nuclear explosions -- and relives the pain of the hibakusha, the long-suffering victims of the 1945 bombing. Some Japanese peaceniks visit India to build a peace movement. Understandably, they still break down when they recount the anguish of August 1945. Once again, Patwardhan is able to communicate through emotion how people across the globe can empathise and join hands for a common cause.

In the US, by contrast, the defence establishment is arming itself with nuclear warheads against perceived enemies or the so-called 'rouge states'. Patwardhan employs the same metaphors he invented in Father, Son and Holy War (1995), where he examines the tenuous links within India between patriarchy, religious bigotry and war-mongering. Just as the peace movement observes no borders, neither does belligerence: the symbols are inescapable, irrespective of the country. In the US, nuclear missiles raise their ugly heads; in India, Hindu fundamentalists celebrate the nation's pride after testing its devices, no matter that the people are mired in poverty.

Patwardhan has accomplished a veritable tour-de-force of an epic, which takes him across continents in quest of essential truths. He has also travelled a long way metaphorically, from his down-to-earth concerns such as the plight of slum dwellers (Bombay, Our City, 1985), to three films about communal conflicts, and his celluloid Narmada odyssey, documenting the struggle against the controversial dam in western India. By any standards, War and Peace is a world class film that holds a global appeal and a universal message.

Patwardhan has no illusions that it will be shown on Indian (or Pakistani) television networks. Most of his productions were considered 'too hot to handle' by India's state-owned national television. Even when he won the Indian government's national awards previously, which then makes it mandatory for the nation-wide Doordarshan network to screen the film, he had to petition court to enforce this right. This time, he will not bother to get his film censored, but will instead screen it across India and abroad to bolster the anti-nuclear movement. He is very much an activist film-maker who uses his camera just as others wield words. The act of film-making itself becomes a political statement.

War and Peace - synopsis

Filmed over three tumultuous years in India, Pakistan, Japan and the USA following the 1998 nuclear tests - WAR & PEACE/ JANG AUR AMAN is an epic documentary journey of peace activism in the face of global militarism and war.

Divided into six compelling chapters, the film is framed by the murder of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, an act whose portent and poignancy remains undiminished half a century later. For the film-maker, whose family was immersed in the non-violent Gandhian movement, the sub-continent's trajectory towards unabashed militarism is explored with sorrow, though there are joyful moments of courage and resistance. Amongst these is a visit to the "enemy country" of Pakistan, where contrary to expectations, Indian delegates are showered by affection, not only by their Pakistani counterparts in the peace movement, but by ordinary citizens.

Examining the costs being extracted from citizens in the name of "national security", from the plight of residents living near the nuclear test site to the horrendous effects of uranium mining on local indigenous populations, it becomes abundantly clear that contrary to a myth first created by the USA, there is no such thing as the "peaceful atom".

An extraordinary visit by Japanese survivors of the Atom Bomb to India and Pakistan following the nuclear tests, leads to a re-examination of events that led to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Was it "necessary"? American historians who gathered the facts five decades later and attempted to present them at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC, were amazed to find their voices suppressed by a nation that did not want to know.

WAR & PEACE/JANG AUR AMAN slips seamlessly from a description of home made jingoism to focus on how an aggressive United States has become a role model, its doctrine of "Might is Right" only too well absorbed by aspiring Third World elites. As we enter the 21st century, war has become perennial, enemies are re-invented, economies are inextricably tied to the production and sale of weapons and in the moral wastelands of the world, memories of Gandhi seems like a mirage that never was, created by our thirst for peace and our very distance from it.

"Environmental issues, human rights and social justice are interconnected" - Anand Patwardhan

Anand Patwardhan

Anand Patwardhan Anand Patwardhan has been making political documentaries for nearly three decades pursuing diverse and controversial issues that are at the crux of social and political life in India. Many of his films were at one time or another banned by state television channels in India and became the subject of litigation by Patwardhan who successfully challenged the censorship rulings in court.

Patwardhan received a B.A. in English Literature from Bombay University in 1970 and earned a Master's degree in Communications from McGill University in 1982. Patwardhan has been an activist ever since he was a student -- having participated in the anti- Vietnam War movement; being a volunteer in Caesar Chavez United Farm Worker's Union; working in Kishore Bharati, a rural development and education project in central India; and participating in the Bihar anti-corruption movement in 1974-75 and in the civil liberties and democratic rights movement during and after the 1975-77 Emergency. Since then, he has been active in movements for housing rights of the urban poor, for communal harmony, the environment, and movements against the Narmada Dam, against unjust, unsustainable development, and against nuclear testing in South Asia.

Were you prompted to make this film only after India's tests in 1998?
Yes. Prior to May 1998 , I was anti-nuke, but never imagined the issue would become so personal.

Does this film revisit concerns you expressed in Father, Son & Holy War -- like the connection between virility and nuclear power?
The obvious phallic symbolism of missiles and bombs apart, you can see the machismo in the general nuclear discourse. Of course having made a film about this already I didn't want to explicitly repeat the analogies, but they are there if you want to look.

And does it mark a progression in your concerns regarding the environment --beginning with Mumbai city, the Narmada dam and the declining catch of fishermen?
For me, environmental issues and issues of human rights and social justice have always been interconnected. Even when we made Narmada Diary and the fishing film, they didn't start out as environmental films but were about the daily lives of people. The environment is an integral part of all that. With the new film, the main motivation was an ethical distaste of those who promote war and jingoism.

How do you feel a film like this can strengthen the people-to-people contact between India and Pakistan, particularly if it is rather unlikely to be shown on state-owned or private television channels?
I will of course keep battling for TV outlets, but the film is being used by the peace movement and I hope this continues to widen its outreach.

Do you view film-making itself as activism, and do you have any problems retaining your objectivity in such situations?
I believe in being upfront about my views. This I feel is less manipulative than pretending to be "objective". Nobody is objective. Some people disguise their viewpoint. I don't. But I am prepared to vouch for the factual veracity of the arguments I have made in the film.

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Peacenik with a Camera: Mention to anyone that the Mumbai-based director Anand Patwardhan has just completed a three-hour documentary on the anti-nuclear movement, and there is a look of incredulity. Can someone, in this age of sound bites, inflict three hours on viewers - and get away with it? That's longer than most feature films these days!