Ashish Avikunthak by Arun A.K.

Ashish Avikunthak Viewers often find my cinema daunting, but I’m glad to know my work resonated with you. I’m sure you have a lot of questions for me; however, such is the nature of my work that there are no easy answers. It is up to the viewers to form their interpretations. Nevertheless, I’ll try my best to provide satisfactory explanations.

Arun A.K. Let me begin with this: Your films are very conspicuous in their exploration of Hinduism, ancient philosophy, mythology, traditions, and rituals associated with the religion. These are some of the themes that run through your oeuvre. Are you very religious, and do you believe in the existence of god or multiple gods (as is the case in Hinduism)?

AA To answer your last question, first: Yes, I do believe in the idea of God, but let me explain. I come from a Punjabi family that migrated to Calcutta after the India–Pakistan partition. My mother and father were raised as refugees in displaced families in North India—in Delhi, Dehradun, and Bareilly. My father was born in Mardan, Pakistan, which is a well-known Gandharan Buddhist archaeological site close to the border to Afghanistan. My mother is from Lahore, Pakistan. Although my parents are both upper-caste Punjabis, they have distinct religious sensibilities. My father comes from a staunch Arya Samaj family. Arya Samaj is a nineteenth-century monotheistic, anti-Brahmanical, Vedic, anti-idol-worship Hindu reformist sect. On the other hand, my mother comes from a Punjabi religious sect that follows pantheistic Sanatana Hinduism—venerating Krishna, Rama, Devi, and millions of other gods. My mother has been managing a community Krishna temple in Calcutta for over thirty years. My father doesn’t enter temples—he has never entered a temple in his life—but my mother manages one, although both are practicing Hindus. I’m narrating this from my biography to give you an example of the heterogeneity of Hinduism.

I grew up in an upper-middle-class, upper-caste Hindu family, where a strict and substantial engagement with religion was adhered to. We visited temples frequently and conducted Arya Samaj-style havans (fire rituals) every other week. My home was a typical Hindu domestic space but also modern; I was sent to a Catholic school in Calcutta. Even though I lived in Bengal during the 1970s and ’80s in times of communism, religious sensibilities in Bengal’s capital, Calcutta, were always open. Community pujas were regular parts of our lives—Durga puja, Kali puja, Saraswati puja, and others. I would participate in these actively, not so much as someone particularly religiously devout, but to be part of that vibrating cultural world.

AAK Did you see yourself more as a cultural Hindu than a religious Hindu?

AA Hinduism, unlike Abrahamic religions, is more of a social ethos, a cultural tradition, rather than a set of conventional practices. It doesn’t follow a rigid structure. Hinduism, as a term, is essentially a misnomer because it is a congregation of multiple heterogeneous traditions which emerged, merged, and even moved away from each other over the course of two to three millenniums. The answer to the question of what constitutes Hinduism requires a sound historical, theoretical, and political understanding.

Even though I come from a family uprooted by the partition of India, we never imbibed hatred against Muslims. Ours was a tradition where we respected all forms of religiosity. I was raised, and still live in, a part of Calcutta near a refugee neighborhood. After the partition, multiple waves of refugees moved in from East Pakistan (1947 and after) and then from Bangladesh (1971 and after). Partition stories from all these places would infiltrate my life. But again, very importantly, hatred was never felt or even talked about in my family. Later, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, I got involved with political work and was closely associated with the environmental movement, Narmada Bachao Andolan. Eventually, in 1991, I reached Bombay in order to study, and I lived there until 1999.

AAK Interestingly, you didn’t study film but social work and archeology. I believe you completed your post-graduation course in Pune.

AA Yes. Before that, I did my bachelor’s degree in social work at Bombay University’s College of Social Work. After that, I went to Pune in 1994 to pursue my master’s in archaeology. That’s another story. In 1992, I was working as a social worker in Bombay when the Babri Masjid was demolished, leading to the greatest post-partition riots all over India, and Bombay was the center of it. I saw violence and hatred so intimately that it’s difficult for me to talk about even now.

The Bombay riots took place during December 1992 and again a month later, in January 1993. I nearly missed getting killed during the serial blasts—I reached the Bombay Stock Exchange just three minutes after the explosion happened there on March 12, 1993. The neighborhoods I had covered as a social worker were devastated by communal riots. I saw violence closer than most people at the age of twenty would want to witness. And it transformed my political sensibility.

By this time, I was also an avid cinephile. Unlike your generation, we did not have DVDs or online resources; we had to go to the cinema to watch films. Have you heard of Nandan Film Centre in Calcutta? It was one of India’s first state-funded cinemas. When I was seventeen and eighteen, I got to see the films of Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, Satyajit Ray, and many others there, on a big screen and almost for free. This had a long-lasting impact on me. If you move away from the world of Bollywood and get into this kind of cinema, it can have a powerful effect on a person’s psyche.

AAK True. Especially at that impressionable age. My foray into world cinema also happened in my late teens and led me to become a cinephile.

AA One of my most remarkable experiences was attending the International Film Festival of India in 1990 in Calcutta, where I saw the first retrospective of Krzysztof Kies’lowski in India. I had a chance to see Camera Buff, Blind Chance, A Short Film About Love, and A Short Film About Killing long before he made the Three Colors trilogy. By 1993 in Bombay, I had watched many films while studying social work, and doing political work, which was my main preoccupation. Soon my bachelor’s degree in social work was completed, and a friend of mine suggested that, as a cinephile, I should move to Pune, where I could watch some amazing classics at the National Film Archive of India and the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). The reason I enrolled into the archaeology program of Deccan College, Pune, was purely because it was relatively easy to get admission into archaeology. But very soon, I got deeply engrossed in the course as it opened up a world I wasn’t familiar with earlier. Incidentally, learning a lot about our ancient roots and historical traditions aided my political work.

AAK So, you’ve witnessed the rise of religious polarization from very close quarters. In the past couple of decades, Hindutva, which is a Hindu nationalist ideology, has been gradually hijacking Hinduism. Can Hindutva and Hinduism ever coexist?

AA The riots after the Babri Masjid demolition showed me what Hindutva was becoming, and we can see what it has transformed into now. One thing that we need to understand is that Hindutva is a theology of hatred. It is about hating the “other,” especially Muslims—but its hatred has now expanded to include Dalits, communists, Maoists, intellectuals, and anyone who challenges its authority. Scholars and thinkers who have written about Hindutva categorize it as a form of fascism. One of the key elements of fascism is its expansive idea of hatred. You start hating everyone who doesn’t toe your line. The thing with hate and love is that they both are expansive and capacious. I saw closely in the early ’90s that Hindutva consciously and deliberately perpetuates an expansive theology of hatred.

We’re seeing the world’s major religions morphing in large part into fundamentalist ideologies. That’s why I decided it was imperative for me to intervene—because Hinduism was morphing into Hindutva, similar to how Islam transformed into a fundamentalist Islam—Taliban or ISIS. Another example is how Zionism is now mistaken for Judaism. If you go into the scholarship of Zionism and Judaism, there’s an apparent distinction between what it means to be a Jew and what it means to be a Zionist. So, I must clearly distinguish between a Hindutva subject and a Hindu being.

AAK How are these concerns reflected in your work?

AA My first film, Et Cetera, was deeply existentialist. And between the time I made Kalighat Fetish in 1999 and Vakratunda Swaha in 2010, I became very interested in what I call “cinema of religiosity.” For me, filmmaking is a political process. I’m thinking through my films. I strongly feel that if we do not find alternative ways of engaging with Hinduism, the Hindutva ideology will usurp our heterogeneity. So I’m trying to engage with the philosophical and theological idea of heterogeneous Hinduism, which I believe must be firmly recovered from Hindutva.

I should mention, as someone from a Hindu upper-class, urban, English-educated background (and now I’m even more privileged because I live in America), I’m very aware of my elitist genealogy. My engagement with the cinema of religiosity is from the location I inhabit.

AAK What do you mean by “cinema of religiosity”?

AA Cinema of religiosity is about the productive possibilities of modernity and religion. It is about the effective preoccupation with religion—not religion as a set of cultural practices that defines a community, but religion as a ritual practice. I’m not thinking like an anthropologist here but as a practitioner. Religion as a means of comprehending the meaning of existence—not in the framework of existential philosophy as espoused by Sartre or Camus, but something emerging from a religious core.

My films attempt to comprehend the meaning of ritual as a practitioner. The personal and the political are epistemological conduits with obvious rhetorical valence through which I am coming to terms with my own religiosity. I would say my films are attempts to reconfigure the importance of ritual within the religious framework. In that sense, they could be taken as liturgical texts, cinematic contemplations on the sacred within the framework of religion. I am not concerned with the sociological. I am not concerned with the political or the personal—those are incidental, rhetorical devices that frame the film’s diegesis. My films are an iteration of religiosity.

AAK Does this idea of religiosity come from the perspective of cultural excavation?

AA In contemporary modernity, cultural excavation is an inevitable process to resuscitate the present. If you become a little sensitive to cultural degradation, cultural excavation becomes inescapable. For the middle class, culture is not imperative. We are immune to the effect of culture; culture, for us, is what we are given. Earlier it was Bollywood, 24-7 television, and now social media. We lap it unconsciously and uncritically. The problem is that the popular is not profound, but it is very powerful. And it is this power that penetrates our consciousness. And if you become a little sensitive that this onslaught is too insidious, then you have to search for your own means to survive or escape it.

India is such a rich cultural space that the only recourse to escape this assault on the senses is to delve into the past. The past then becomes a refuge from contemporary popular culture. This has been my strategy. Cultural excavation is more of a journey to the past, which is why you go to Ajanta and Ellora Caves. I must emphasize this is not a revisionist journey. I am not uncritically hauling the past into the present. It’s a journey in the present through the past. In archaeology, we emphasize that the meaning we make of the past is contextualized within the contemporary. The cultural excavation then, archaeologically speaking, is that the meaning of the past is constructed in the present. It is localized in the present. It cannot escape the present, ever. We cannot escape the contemporary. Therefore, I cannot escape the postcolonial; I cannot escape the modern. Although I am standing in the postcolonial and the modern, I am reaching out to the past. I am communicating with my past.

AAK Let’s explore your engagement with religiosity a bit more. There seems to be a preoccupation with enlightenment in your work. So, do you feel there might be a path toward enlightenment, moksha, or whatever people call it? Do you believe it can be attained through conscious efforts?

AA The idea of enlightenment has a diverse genealogy. The English language term has an indelible relationship with the post-Renaissance emergence of scientific temperament in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. In India, moksha has roots in Hinduism and Buddhism. If you study the debates between the Hindu and Buddhist theorists of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries CE on the meaning of moksha, they have divergent ideas. In Hinduism, we have the Upanishadic and Vedantic ideas of moksha, which my film Katho Upanishad (2011) explores. Then we have a distinct concept of moksha within the Tantric practices. Here I am specifically referring to the world of Kashmir Shaivism, which emerged between the eighth and eleventh centuries CE in Kashmir. Their conceptualization of enlightenment, or being one with Brahman (universal consciousness), is unlike the Upanishadic notion.

Now to answer your first question—yes, I believe there could be an ontological practice to attain enlightenment. But what does it mean to be enlightened? I think there are three steps to enlightenment. First is the knowledge we gain by learning and listening to a guru. The second is to realize what we have learned. And the third and most important, but more ephemeral, is to experience enlightenment. So, yes, I believe in the knowledge of what enlightenment is, and I have spent nearly thirty years learning and thinking about it. But, if you ask me whether I am realized, then I don’t think so. Furthermore, realization is not equivalent to experience.

Each of the three steps—knowledge, realization, and experience—is progressively monumentally difficult and progressively ephemeral. You would not even hear of individuals who are realized souls, as we call them in Indian theology. Beings who have experienced enlightenment, you would not even know of them. Like any other practice, the religious practice requires years and years of training to reach a certain level of mastery—Yogic, Vedantic, or Tantric. When we think of enlightenment, you and I are just like the audience in a World Cup football stadium, because to be a World Cup player requires years and years of practice. However, in Kashmir Shaivism, there’s a unique notion, that enlightenment is possible through the grace of the goddess if one is lucky. These beliefs are not mere pontifications; I believe in them.

AAK Your films delve deep into the entirety of the subject of enlightenment and your interest in it is very evident, which led me to presume you strongly believe in moksha. So, do you hope to one day at least reach the second stage, if not the third stage?

AA One can’t hope. We must do our work; if something happens, one is fortunate. I think of my cinema as a sadhana [devotion], which can be defined as a concerted, disciplined, and committed process. Especially in Indian religiosity, that process is driven by a systematic theory of practice ensconced within a rigorous history of method.

Recently, I was interviewed on the podcast Audiogyan by Kedar Nimka and he gave a beautiful example of Kumar Gandharva’s public performance. Often audiences would make a farmaayish [request], which Kumar Gandharva, and other great singers like Kishori Amonkar, would outright reject because singing for them was a sadhana that they chose to perform in public. For me, my cinema is a similar practice. Often people complain that I make challenging films. My argument is that I have chosen cinema as my means of sadhana. I’m merely sharing my process with you. It is up to the audience to engage and connect with my work. It is between you and the film. I’m nowhere in the picture.

AAK Just to let you know, I am an atheist and don’t believe in enlightenment/moksha. But yes, I find the whole concept fascinating, and I have an open mind when anyone talks to me about it, like you’ve been talking about it. Apart from Hinduism, is there any other religion that fascinates you that you might want to explore in your cinema?

AA I think all religions and cultures are fascinating. I’m now going to put on my anthropological hat. Religion is a very dense and intense form of cultural practice compared to other cultural practices—music, the food we eat, the clothes we wear. And I’m interested, as an anthropologist, as a human being, to read and know about other religious discourses. For instance, now that you have asked me, I’m deeply influenced and have spent many years studying Japanese Zen Buddhism, the Chinese Daoist form. Nowadays, I’ve been spending a lot of time reading about the South American shamanistic religious discourses. However, I want to engage with what I am, from an ethical perspective.

AAK Got it. So, you don’t have that desire to explore other religious discourses in your films.

AA I think it’s not about desire but ethics. I don’t believe I have the privilege to engage with Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or Zen; that’s not my being. I’m an outsider to that world. As an anthropologist, I’m profoundly aware of the relationship between the other and the othered. I have had political issues with colonial Indologists engaging with Hinduism and India because they eventually were judgmental and righteous, often colored by Victorian puritanism. They were perennial outsiders trying to objectify Hinduism and radically othered it. As an outsider, I would also be othering Islam, Zen, Peruvian shamanism, or even Christianity (even though I have spent all my schooling in Catholic institutions). I would then occupy an analogous position to a colonial Indologist.

For instance, you live in Powai, Mumbai. Do you know that Warli and Katkari tribes have lived just across Powai Lake for at least half a millennium? From Powai to the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in north Mumbai is a tribal cultural, social, and sacred landscape, which we have occupied as urban dwellers. I worked closely in these areas as a social worker between 1993–94. I’m trying to suggest that it is very easy to imbibe colonial forms of oppression. I’m very wary of that. Hence, I feel it’s essential to engage with my own cultural subjectivity. But, I need again to underscore my upper-caste, upper-class elitist background because that is the world I occupy, and I want to understand and engage with it critically. That’s what I do in my cinema and my writings on archaeology.

Returning to what we were discussing before—what exactly is enlightenment? What are these practices? What you see in my cinema cannot be inferred as conclusive. These practices are primarily invocatory because I do not claim to have understood anything. At best, what you see in films like Kalighat Fetish, Vakratunda Swaha, or The Kali of Emergency (2016), are invocations of my engagement with my world, which is basically about a non-Bengali from Calcutta also living in America and trying to merge with my own reading and writing. It’s a thinking-through process which is not definitive in any sense.

AAK I think you’ve elaborated on your life and the philosophy behind your work at great length. It helps in grasping your perspective. So, let’s veer our discussion towards slightly technical aspects of your filmmaking. Not only are most of your films shot on analog, you enhance their vintage appeal by retaining grain, noise, and scratches in the finished images. I find this fascinating as your work takes me on a nostalgia trip.

In Kalighat Fetish, the shots featuring the character who plays the Goddess Kali are juxtaposed with random shots of people at a beach. Are all the shots of people at the beach from the same day of shooting Vakratunda Swaha, which also contains many such frames?

AA Yes, you’re right. When I made Et Cetera, a body of four single-shot films, we were shooting on celluloid (16 mm), which meant working within a confined time.

AAK I believe you shot seven films back then.

AA From 1995 to 1997, I shot seven single-shot footages, out of which four you see in Et Cetera. You see the fragments of the others in Dancing Othello (2002)—the sequence in the marketplace—and in Kalighat Fetish and Vakratunda Swaha.

AAK So, is one supposed to infer some meaning between the juxtapositions? Or is it that since you shot that footage, you thought of using it wherever possible?

AA I will leave that to you to infer your own meaning. I can tell you how I made it. While working, I had this footage which I was editing with Neeraj Voralia, a friend who studied at FTII and is now a well-known editor who has edited many Bollywood films. Kalighat Fetish was edited on a Steenbeck, a flatbed analog editing machine. The big difference between a digital editing software like Final Cut Pro and Steenbeck is that the footage, which takes only a few seconds to edit on the former, can take an hour or two on a flatbed because you need to rewind and then put it together, and so on.

AAK So, why choose that?

AA The only way to edit film during those years was on a nonlinear editing machine. Most of my movies are not scripted, and the early films don’t even have dialogue. I would shoot as and when an idea stoked me, and I had saved enough money. Then, my editor and I would sit and watch the footage on a Steenbeck for two to three days. Once the editing process began, the form would slowly emerge. So, it’s tough for me to explain why a particular shot was used because it’s a very intuitive way of putting together frames. I think the moment I explain why an image was used, I would be untrue to myself because I really don’t know and don’t even wish to know.

For me, filmmaking is a profoundly intuitive process. As I mentioned before, it is a kind of sadhana. Hindustani classical music is based on improvisation within a formal structure, especially within the genres of Khayal or Dhrupad tradition. I’m doing something similar in my films. Cinema has a formal structure. I would argue that it is essentially a temporal structure. It has specific rules that are very rigid. At the same time, there is scope for improvisation, to think out of the box, and that is what I love about cinema. I could choose footage from Girgaon Chowpatty beach and suture it with footage shot in Calcutta, and these seamlessly merge into a singular form, which for the audience elicits multiple meanings.

AAK I was intrigued by the final sequence of Katho Upanishad and Vakratunda Swaha, where the principal characters are seen walking toward a tracking camera on a highway divider, whereas the vehicles on both sides are moving in reverse.

AA Vakratunda Swaha, Dancing Othello, and End Note (2005) are 16 mm films and have mostly been shot on expired negatives. Ideally, film negative should be exposed within two to three years from its manufacturing date to produce a pristine image. But I’m interested in creating degraded images, which you see in almost all my 16 mm films. When I came to the US in 1999, I started buying expired film negatives on eBay. I also bought an old 16 mm French camera called Beaulieu R16, which was used to shoot some parts of Vakratunda Swaha. Beaulieu was manufactured in the early ’60s and is closely associated with cinéma vérité and direct cinema movements. It’s a portable film camera. I consider it one of the most fascinating pieces of cinematic equipment ever made. The specialty of Beaulieu is that it could shoot in reverse. There are very few cameras worldwide that can shoot 76 BOMB 161

in reverse. So, when the person in Vakratunda Swaha walks backward, the camera runs in reverse. And when you project this image, we see the person walking forward, and the world around him goes backward.

AAK Your latest film, Glossary of Non-Human Love, is perhaps your most ambiguous experiment. It explores sixty-four themes, which is a key figure in Tantra. Do you want to share any thoughts on Tantra, Yoginis, and so on?

AA The film has a very simple premise. It attempts to think through the concept of nonhuman. Just imagine that there is an electricity outage while you are on your laptop. You won’t be able to work or talk to me. That’s a powerful agency in your life. Another great example of nonhuman is a house key. If we lose it, suddenly, the missing key changes our life. Or it could be gods; it could be Yoginis; it could be anything that can have an impact on us. Nonhuman is a term that has been used in anthropological and humanistic literature for many years.

A large corpus of Tantric literature deals with varying kinds of non-humans—anthropomorphic animals, divine objects, forgotten spirits, old souls, haunting ghosts, furious demonic figures, and many others. In this film, I’m focusing on the idea of nonhuman love. What is the meaning of love for nonhumans? The film begins with a proposition that we are in a world parallel to our current universe. It’s like our world, but it may or may not be in the future or even the past. Here humans have been possessed by artificial intelligence that could be in the form of Yoginis, aliens, or anything you want to imagine. But despite possessing humans, they have not been able to eliminate the idea of love. The film is a glossary of their idea of love. It has sixty-four visual definitions of words I’ve chosen—affection, disaffection, ecstasy, and others. Again, it’s a glossary; there’s nothing else in the film.