Island Live - At Her Doorstep
Nishtha Jain, an acclaimed filmmaker from Bombay and this year’s festival guest joins us for a small conversation about her latest film At My Doorstep, a documentary about people, labor, working class relationships and money flows.
Ms. Jain, with your permission I would like to begin with the obvious question: what motivated you to start working on this film, how did it all begin?
The film began with the idea of taking a closer look at people who bring daily services/goods to our homes. While the filming happened in fits and starts over a period of two years due to problems in obtaining permissions to shoot in my housing society and the additional problem of vanishing protagonists, the film has finally completed and has achieved what it set out to.
The purpose was to enter the parallel world of garbage collectors, domestic workers, delivery boys and watchmen—all those who labor long hours in difficult conditions to make our middle and upper class lives in the city of Bombay more comfortable. These providers of services and goods are often faceless and nameless. They are, like many of the people who enjoy their services, mainly migrants, but their presence here is more sharply defined by the lack of survival options back home. The middle class residents, both as individuals and in their collective avatar of the ‘housing society committees’ behave like feudal lords, continuing a modern form of slavery in the cities. Of course it doesn’t help that these workers, adding up to several millions, continue to be treated as part the unorganized workforce by the government and therefore their salary structure, leave, benefits or working conditions are not governed by any rules and regulations. Nothing else explains why they should bear with such a harsh situation. They are left to cope with the hostile mega city on their own.
While the subject matter that you have described and dealt with in your film is certainly nothing new, it is nevertheless tremendously important in the sense that representations of the working class had lately almost disappeared from film screens.
The theme is not new. In fact it comprised the grand old narrative of Hindi cinema back in the 50s and 60s, dealt sensitively in films by directors like Raj Kapoor, Shombhu Mitra and K A Abbas. In Shri 420 we see Bombaythrough the eyes of an educated villager struggling to find work in
Bombay. He’s pre-warned about Bombaybeing ‘the city where buildings are made of concrete and hearts of stone’. Unable to find honest work he stumbles on to the more treacherous but quick road to success.
And in Jagte Raho a whole housing society maniacally chases a ‘thief’, actually a hapless villager who’s wandered into the building looking for water to quench his thirst. As the ‘thief’ desperately looks for cover in various apartments, he experiences at close quarters the decadent, immoral, corrupt and even criminal face of its middle class residents. Such themes today have been replaced by family dramas, jingoism and now unabashed celebration of middle class decadence. The working class itself has vanished from the face of popular Indian cinema, not because their stories have changed but simply because they have become unfashionable.
After seeing the film, your way of approaching the working class appears as perhaps the only possible way to engage with the subject. All we get is an unrelenting focus on the individual, his/her daily working routine and personal background; a wider sense of social schematics, a political and historical context is established only between the lines but thus appears all the more sincere and engaged …
In my film At My Doorstep I concentrate on the unrelenting, quotidian routine of workers in my housing society. Their lives are as unglamorous as their work. Their work is so ‘ordinary’ that we often take it for granted, it becomes crucial only in its absence. The film alludes to the grand old narrative and thus helps to alleviate and subvert the prosaic. This layer is further enhanced through the scenes where the poet-watchman Ghayal (the ‘injured one’) narrates his personal story in the form of a film script. He’s the typical suffering hero rendered impotent by his social and economic circumstances. But his education, perhaps owing to his Brahman caste origin, comes to his rescue. He’s able to write and this provides him with the necessary escape from his pathetic reality. Sentimentality abounds in his writing but so do the reasons for it. His family has perhaps seen better days. He expects ‘decency’ from his employers and often loses his job as he’s not able to comply with their unfair ways.While the workforce servicing any housing society is large, I focus on a few people who come to my doorstep and people I have come to know personally over the last few years. Sonu, another watchman, a reticent 20 year old, dreams of joining the armed forces and studies in his spare time; Ravi, the garbage collector, who along with his beautiful young wife Seema, has given up on his studies, wears a brave face despite the several negativities surrounding his work and life; Dharmendra, the adolescent, energetic laundry boy, doesn’t want his family back in the village to know the kind of work he does in the city. Reshma, the gaunt 34-year old cook, is the most surprising candidate to begin the journey to resistance; and of course there’s Ghayal the poet-watchman, who still dreams of one day making it in the world of literature or perhaps even films.
Nevertheless it would perhaps be too simple to say that all you do in your film is passively observe the people at your doorstep…
The film is not a mere life-goes-on kind of passive observation piece but by it’s mere filming stirs a hornet’s nest and captures the beginning of resistance, setting the tone for the future.
One morning the colony wakes up to a strike by maids, confused and chaotic but a beginning nonetheless. The collective spirit of the women is seen in contrast to aloneness of the men. Ghayal is often seen traveling in empty night trains to his far-flung suburb. Sonu, like other watchmen, is often spotted sitting alone for long spells on the building rooftop, framed against the backdrop of the big city. The men are alone in their individual predicaments, while women, in this instance, are attempting to pave the way for the future.
Jurij Meden
