CMCS: Saacha (The Loom)
Director: Anjali Monteiro, K.P. Jayasankar
Duration: 00:48:28; Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1; Hue: 37.064; Saturation: 0.136; Lightness: 0.254; Volume: 0.233; Cuts per Minute: 8.912; Words per Minute: 110.673
Summary: Directed by Anjali Monteiro and K. P. Jayasankar. 49 Mins, English and Marathi versions.
Saacha is about a poet, a painter and a city. The poet is Narayan Surve, and the painter Sudhir Patwardhan. The city is the city of Mumbai (a.k.a. Bombay), the birth place of the Indian textile industry and the industrial working class. Both the protagonists have been a part of the left cultural movement in the city. Weaving together poetry and paintings with accounts of the artists and memories of the city, the film explores the modes and politics of representation, the relevance of art in the contemporary social milieu, the decline of the urban working class in an age of structural adjustment, the dilemmas of the left and the trade union movement and the changing face of a huge metropolis.
Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar are Professors at the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Both of them are involved in media production, teaching and research. Jointly they have won twenty-three national and international awards for their documentaries. They have several papers in the area of media and cultural studies and are visiting faculty to media and design institutions in India and abroad. They are both actively involved in ‘Vikalp‘, a collective of documentary filmmakers campaigning for freedom of expression. They are also associated with various media and voluntary organisations.
Song: On the heights of Mumbai is Malabar Hill... On the heights of Mumbai is Malabar Hill and the settlements of Kuber enjoy their fortunes over there... the settlements of Kuber enjoy their fortunes over there... the settlements of Kuber enjoy their fortunes over there... Here the poor run around daily... work hard and eat whatever they get... Here the poor run around daily... work hard and eat whatever they get... trains, cars, planes, tangas....
Shots of CST station and all the working class people going to their offices are shown... workers working in a cotton factory.
Narayan Surve: My father came down the Sahyadri ghats with a quilt over his shoulder and stood at your doorstep with nothing but his labour. It was only my mother who knew when he came and left. I was born one night in the decrepit hunchback shack. On payday he stormed into the house wild with drunken frenzy while mother huddled into a corner cowering with fear. He was very fond of us... yet never once missed a day in your service... O city, working day and night. It was here in Chinchpokli that my mother abandoned me by the roadside, near a dustbin when I was 3-4 months old.
Narayan Surve: I have no clue why she did it... Along that road came a millworker from the spinning department of India Woollen Mills... Gangaram Kushaji Surve Who used to come working from Mahim to Mahalakshmi for his 7 am shift and he heard my cries, he brought me home to his wife Kashibai and persuaded her to adopt me. He told me all this when I was 10 or 12 years old... he told me about how he found me and how I looked... he jokingly told me that I had a big belly and thin... there is a Marathi saying that a person has a pot belly and rickety legs... you were like that he said.
Narayan Surve: He put me in school and gave me his surname, he called me Narayan- Narayan Gangaram Surve. Nothing could be more remarkable than giving a destitute child his own name... he gave me a name... he guessed my age... and you could get into school like that in those days... he put me in a municipal school in Mahim and whatever age he cited became my age, the caste he specified became my caste...the address he gave me became my address and they were my parents. I would say I was fortunate to have forged a relationship with the working class thus.
TV_protest songs
TV_protest songs
Song:Handcarts are moving and there is a chaos among the porters. Grant Road, Gokhale Road, Sandhurst Road... Princess road there are so many such roads which are not counted... there are so many such roads which are not counted... there are so many such roads which are not counted... and there are no distance between hath nakas and it's surrounded by the crazy Arabian Sea... and there are no distance between hath nakas and it's surrounded by the crazy Arabian Sea.
Sudhir Patwardhan: I came to Bombay in 73... I came with a specific purpose of becoming an artist and... but coming toBombay and just being exposed to hugeness of things and the number of people and that really started me off on the kind of work that I did. When I came to Bombay and started looking around for the... and a first fruitful image that I kind of started working on was the image of workers that I used to encounter in the train... as I was making drawings of these working class figures... I was projecting my... myself...my... my own anger and frustration... whatever but this confrontation with another person who had a life that was different from mine belonged to a class that was different from mine.
Sudhir Patwardhan: I did not really know... at first hand what this life was... I was, as looking at it but as...and I was drawn to it but that is not the life I had led. For example the painting of a screaming woman or a worker which essentially can... are still expressionist in that sense... you know they are basically about the artist's emotion. It kind of... you know ... made me concious that I must observe more objectively and I must drawback the projection that I am making on to that figure. This set of paintings which was from 76-77 onwards upto 80, which are kind of single working class figures in a specific environment. This is the first set of painting in which Bombay as a city makes it's appearance in my work.
Song: Be it a servant or owner... be it a leader or public... everybody has bent down before us... what is king or soldiers... Be it a servant or owner... be it a leader or public... everybody has bent down before us... what is king or soldiers... Listen... listen O king this massage has many advantages... Listen... listen O king this massage has many advantages... It's one medicine of a lac problems... why not try?... why are you scared... why are you scared...If your head is spinning or your heart sinks... come to me dear, why are you scared... why are you scared.
Narayan Surve: Mumbai is a city consisting of seven islands originally inhabited by fisherfolk. Later, the British came in... these seven islands came together, theycalled it Bombay or whatever and after the islands came together... how did the textile industry come here... the reasons for which are proximity to the sea... which made it humid and is necessary for cotton. Then they started a railway line in Mumbai, all this paved way for the first mills in Mumbai... these are the origins of the working class.there are so many such roads which are not counted... and there are no distance between hath nakas and it's surrounded by the crazy Arabian Sea... there are so many such roads which are not counted... and there are no distance between hath nakas and it's surrounded by the crazy Arabian Sea...
Narayan Surve: I carried a tiffin bok to the mill since childhood... I was cast the way a smith forges a hammer... I learnt my ropes working on a loom... learnt on an occasion to go on strike. Here by the sea, my father died struggling for his last breath... I was hired then by a wheezing foreman, who put me on his loom. The strange twist is that when I was 10 or 12 my parents gave me ten rupees and went away to retire in their village in Konkan and I was orphaned once again. As I have written in one of my poems... I had no home nor relatives but as much of land as I could walk on and shopshed, the footpaths, for free. once again the footpaths invited me Life and poetry: how they relate to each other, then I did odd jobs living on the streets.
footpath
Narayan Surve: In those days, one thing was good that people were more caring, women would call me and give me food... this is the love of the workers... this is the warmth of the workers which goes unwritten in book or untold, it needs to be experienced.
Song: Are not scared of the authorities.
Narayan Surve: I will tell you a funny incident- I was living in Mahim, I just had a brief and vest on my body and went with my friends to swim in Mahim beach, in those days, I'd steal onions from there- really.
Tv_protest song
Mahim beach
Narayan Surve: We went to swim in the sea... there is a mosque in Mahim... behind the asjid was a Fakir... here and there, they were also useless... they used to come and my single day. We were 5-6 boys we removed our clothes and kept them under the stone so that they dont fly with the wind and when we were busy swimming...a wandering fakir took away our clothes. The other children ran home for their clothes but I didn't have anything, no house
I was dazed and I ran away and hid inside the mosque... in the mosque there is a tomb... I sat behind the tomb... just like that... naked. A Muslim gentleman came to pray and while praying they have a system of getting a towel with them.
Narayan Surve: After spreading the towel he would sit and pray to Allah. He must have heard me breathing heavily in fear from behind the tomb. He stopped in mid prayer and called me out. I raised my hand, he left his prayer aside came out and abused me "Why are you hiding here? Arre ! Stand up , you are naked? this is not a good thing from where are you?" he questioned me and ultimately gave me his prayer towel. That was my first award... I wrapped myself in the towel and ran away... that indeed is life
Narayan Surve: The blue sea, like an inkpot upset... by a naughty child brings back... Old memories and I cry, the child in me sobs. At the dock, wading in the water... I heard the footfalls where dark sweaty legs unloaded the goods. Hearing the muezzin's call, I got gooseflesh. The fakirs and maulvis sent me scurrying home... it is people like me, builders of your grand edifice who add to your glory day after day,O city.
Narayan Surve: I worked in Century mills as a child worker in noght shifts. In those days the mills had many looms, just like today. In the spinning department, a worker would man 300-400 spindles. In those days, I would work as a doffer boy, once those spindles were full one had to quickly remove them, one by one in a basket replace the spindle and so on. Then I came in contact with the trade unions, the movement was strong... there was only one major union at that time... the All India Trade Union Congress.
Narayan Surve: Through this union I developed my perspective, I always believed that one should read people... read the conditions in which they live and if you have time left, then read books. I believe that books may lie but not reality, with all these inputs, I came into the left movement .
Song: he shut it and taking everything came on the roads to fight for their rights. come associates we should support him... He left the Loom... he left the loom... he shut it and taking everything came on the roads to fight for their rights. come associates we should support him.
Narayan Surve: On my first strike I met Marx so,At the centre of the procession, I held his banner on my shoulder, Janki Aunty said Do you recognise him? this is our Marcus baba. He was born in Germany and wrote a sackful of books and passed away in England. You know, for a wandering sage all lands are the same. Like you, he too had four kids... Right at my first strike I met Marx so.
Song: taking everything came on the roads to fight for their rights. come associates we should support him...
TV_protest songs
Narayan Surve: Just the other day, he stood listening to my speech at a gate meeting.I said- "Now we alone are the heroes of history and of all the biographies to come too". He was the one who clapped loudly then, laughing spotaneously, he came forward,put his arm around my shoulder and said" So do you write poems or what? Great! I, too, liked Goethe"
Song: 3-4 bottlewalahs came... the number of those striken by disease increased and TB, Asthma cough...
Narayan Surve: This entire area from Mahim to Tardeo... from Byculla to Deisle Road these were working class areas.There was a workers theater movement... working class writers, folk theatre... A rich working class cultural world! in those days.
Narayan Surve:This was before 1960, in all these areas there would be massive public meetings on various issues- national struggle, wages, bonus, protest against atrocities... huge meetings of workers. I've listened to Babasaheb Ambedkar's Nare Park speech... Com.Dange, the greatest leader in those days.I've heard him on several ocassions, i was his follower and I used to be impressed by his ideas which were simple and clear. thus, the working class was involved in social, cultural and political spheres and I was also a part of it. There was a kind of spiritedness to all this, once I went underground... the police came to arrest me because of my political activity.The workers hid me in a room and a couple of them stood outside to tell them that they knew nothing.
Narayan Surve: This spiritedness made me decide... workerss, these are my heroes. The struggle for daily bread is an everyday question, at times outside the door, at times inside. I'm a worker, a flaming sword... listen you intellectuals! I'm going to commit a crime. I've suffered, witnessed, explored a bit... the sweet ache of my world lies in it.I've messed up, missedout and learnt new stuff... the way i live, that's the way I'm in words. I haven't arrived alone; the epoch's with me... beware; this is the beginnig of the storm. I'm a worker, a shining sword... listen you intellectuals! a crime is about to happen.
Song: he shut it and taking everything came on the roads to fight for their rights. come associates we should support him... The worker left the Loom... the worker left the loom... he shut it and taking everything came on the roads to fight for their rights. come associates we should support him... He left the Loom... he left the loom... he shut it and taking everything came on the roads to fight for their rights. come associates we should support him.
In a struggle one has to take two steps forward and two steps backward, some leaders didn't take this into account. Once they had the backing of the workerssome of them took full advantage of their trust which led to a prolonged mill strike and hada disastrous impact on the industry.The working class in India is half-farmer, half-worker, when there is a strike he returns to his village. in a strike that lasted over 20 months when all the strikers returned to their farms then who was left to fight? There were changes in the International market as well, the capitalist class took advantage of all this.
Sudhir Patwardhan: There is some kind of need to broaden ones understanding of Marxism and some understanding of what class meant. I think already by the 80's the idea of the working class as a heroic inerator of a tradition which was meant to lead to the emancipation of all, was already taken up beating at... and had to kind of readjust to what one was understanding by these things. I would kind of say that this initial transition from a period where I saw myself as a spokesmen... when I was projecting myself into these workers it was as if I was speaking on their behalf. You know... it wqas a rehearsal of actually using them to talk about myself from there to a position of an observer.
Sudhir Patwardhan: This was a transition that has concious... that was happening to me. The city, train and street play is three major works which to my mind were the most successful in that period... are about many figures, many people coming in relationships to each other and the artist as a mediator whose observing these relationships and what I was actually formally doing was using multiple perspectives and organising the space with multiple perspectives which allowed each figure or group of figures its own autonomy as well as the possibility of relating to other people... this was what I was concerned with.
Narayan Surve: I'll lift the whole limitless universe on my shoulders... I'll lift the whole limitless universe on my shoulders and untie the knots of all space and time. The world's teeming masses play at my door... The world's teeming masses play at my door
and I'll toss up the solar system. I'll tie up the elephants at my door... I'll tie up the elephants at my door and fill up the pitchers with nectar... the wind spins in my courtyard and the heavens steeples twist. I'll straighten up the bent sky... I'll straighten up the bent sky and punish the one who punished it. Thus I am the Brahma... Thus I am the Brahma, the fulcrum of the universe.
Narayan Surve: Without a home that I can call my own.
Sudhir Patawardhan: I was coming from this idea of the working class as a heroic image. The city as a context of this struggle and also some amount of self doubt about all these things and my own development of withdrawing the kind of projection, an idealisation and transfering those energies towards structuring the work but immediately after this period I started feeling two kind of pulls: on one hand the need to continue with a strong structure which could hold a lot of tension and on the other hand the need to engulf the experience of the city itself was so overpowering... moving in the trains everyday, seeing accidents, seeing things happen which you would'nt want to some thing about... react against but which your totally helpless against.
Sudhir Patwardhan: And the whole experience is so overpowering that I was feeling a need to bring in everything into my work and there are 3-4 paintings in that period which infact i dont think are very successful, precisely because of this reason that... they are interesting because they allow the city to flood into the work. For example: the accident on May Day or there is a painting of the Kurla overbridge in the hill where the whole city is kind of... you know... everything that I am looking at is brought in... what I was unable to really give to these paintings was the kind of structure that I was able to give to the work that immediately preceded these and therefore... I dont think that I really was understanding my relationship with this.
Sudhir Patwardhan: With this overpowering city.
Song: Masanwati, Mahachari, Chandanwadi, Sonapur,etc are famed everywhere...
in every corner.
Sudhir Patwardhan: This conflict between two pulls kind of split my work into two strands and now that I shifted my residence to Thane from Central Bombay sometime around 78 or so. The experience of a much wider space, open space and less crowded area was part of my daily experience, so these elements were given expression in works like town and nullah which are large and complexly kind of structured paintings and but in these paintings what I was lacking was the feeling that I was involving myself directly in people's lives. To atone for that in a sense I began to make heads... small heads... each one of which was establishing a close relationship with someone I had seen or some aspect of some persons life... face or whatever.
Song:This generation is facing difficulties... difficulties has been given the metaphor of rains.Annabhau Sathe says those who fight it will be victorious... Annabhau Sathe says those who fight it will be victorious
Narayan Surve: We wander in your streets, squares and bazaars; sometimes as citizens, householders,at times as loafers.These streets carry the festival of lights into the heart of the night... These streets carry the festival of lights into the heart of the night balancing two seperate worlds with all their splendour.The crowds move ahead but where?... The crowds move ahead but where? A traveller amongst them I too move, but where? We know only two roads, one which leads to the factory and the other which leads to the crematorium.
Sudhir Patwardhan: In my view any representation... representational work... you know there are three... I mean roughly speaking there are three elements that go into a work like this and first of course is observation, what you see around you and your need to depict what you see along with this is the conventions that you will use to depict what you see. Those conventions will affect how much you can infact see, what you will see, what you will edit out. The second aspect is the mark that you make on the canvas, the expression... the kind of emotional charge that you can give to your activity on the canvas.It has to be charged with emotion which could be tender, it could be... loving it could be anger but it can't be a dead mark and the third aspect as I said earlier is structure which is very important... which is the kind of rhythm and the pattern of feeling and thought that your work has. It is the context in which both observation and expression... get their meaning.
Sudhir Patwardhan: Now, what was happening in my work was that I was not able to bring all these three together what I think I have been able to do in paintings of the early 80's. I was unable to see the city and the life of the people in one single... one single frame... not that it has to be reduced to one frame but it has to have the complexity to be included in one.. the frame itself, the structure has to have that complexity.Now, that was not kind of happening, so one of the things that I decided to do was to somehow try to recapture the pure pleasure of painting, my first reason to start doing landscapes in an area called Pokharan here was this. The split between the three that I said could be healed atleast between two areas... when I began to do these works another aspect of my kind of involvemen with being a socially committed artist came to the fore and that was what does your work mean.
Sudhir Patwardhan:To people who are the subject of your work... I had been painting workers and common people in the street... now, what did my paintings mean? could they mean something to them was a question that always troubled me and usually the answer had not been very... very supportive. The response was not what one could get from another painter or from your own class you know so that ultimately you were speaking to each other about another class. When I started doing these landscapes in Pokharan, I thought was a... third possibility of being neither a spokesman nor an observer but being a participant in a community as an artist was opening out to me because immediately when I started this, of course small children would come and sit around you... you know... ask questions... what you are... and they would contribute a lot.
Sudhir Patwardhan: I had considered earlier also, how an artist committed to a left ideology
could become in some senses participant with the class that he is representing and it was always linked to projecting some kind of ideological content... you know, about struggle, about classes, about emancipation. Now I wanted my work at that time not to have any of this content butclearly to explore how these people visually appropriate their surrounding. When I was painting there as... as thinking about how these people are reacting to it visually and whether my working there is in some senses contributing to their experience of their reality and things like that when one chap suddenly asked me Why I was coming and painting this locality... probably go and sell it outside and make money.
Sudhir Patwardhan: So, this... definitely... kind of... puts you in a spot because that is exactly what actually you will be doing. So, this person asked me how much would you sell it for ? and I didn't have the heart to tell him the actual price of this and I kind of reduced it by a few thousand and said a couple of thousand and maybe things like that also was quite a bit for him. All that an artist is doing is in that sense is mediated through the agenda of the art world and the artist is willingly accepting the agenda's that the art world is setting for him... you know and for me the question of relevance of my work to the people that are around me and whose experience I share for living in the same kind of surroundings, the same city, the same town whatever.
Sudhir Patwardhan: I think there is a need to relate outside the art world to society at large.
Narayan Surve: To reassure oneself everyday and live; it's getting tough... how far does one console oneself it's getting tough, I soothe and put the howling heart to sleep, though I see the grain sack stuffed with saw dust to stop; it's tough.Live and let live... Live and let live. So I live every day, it's getting tough.To deny one's existence;it's getting tough.I understand and convince myself... I understand and convince myself but even after that I dont fall in line. A lit matchstick wont fall into the godown,to guarantee this; it's geting tough... A lit matchstick wont fall into the godown,to guarantee this; it's geting tough.
Monsoon
Mumbai
Narayan Surve
Saacha is about a poet, a painter and a city. The poet is Narayan Surve, and the painter Sudhir Patwardhan. The city is the city of Mumbai (a.k.a. Bombay), the birth place of the Indian textile industry and the industrial working class. Both the protagonists have been a part of the left cultural movement in the city. Weaving together poetry and paintings with accounts of the artists and memories of the city, the film explores the modes and politics of representation, the relevance of art in the contemporary social milieu, the decline of the urban working class in an age of structural adjustment, the dilemmas of the left and the trade union movement and the changing face of a huge metropolis.
Sudhir Patwardhan
Sudhir Patwardhan: One particular incident... a flooding in the locality where we stayed... broughtthis whole question of depicting the people... the struggle of the people to live their lives... to the fore as able to transfer this experience into an authentic image but they are restricted in a sense... you know... the images to some extent are heroicbecause of the situation in which they are but they do not have the kind of historical sense... you know... this is about particular people in particular places and now it is no longer possible to make that kind of a statement about... for me it was not possible and I was exploring ways in which one could infact... withoutthe aid of... aid or without the kind of moral and psychological backing of an ideology which could... place the struggles in a kind of grand narrative without this mount in the 90's.
Sudhir Patwardhan: Could one still talk about people in a grand way... one of the experiences that I drew on and this is the experience of crowds and right from the period when I had come to Bombay... the experience of crowds had been very important and in a positive sense. I had always experienced being in a crowd as in some sense, an exhilerating feeling climbing up the bridge on the railway platform. For example getting in and out of a train, the sense of common purpose that drives this mass of people to do and to move in one direction where each individual... each individual exists on his own and yet is part of a large community. So that is the sense that I wanted to be able to get in my work and this is the closest these set of paintings of crowds is the closest that I have got to in recent years to making any kind of larger statement.
Narayan Surve: In my opinion, our left movement has not read our country correctly!This is a country based on the caste system... it has it's own history, it's cultural movements. it was in this country that Buddha told his followers " Go fortth with your staff, blanket and begging bowl whoever serves you food, take what you need and give the rest away: it was said in this country.This indeed is Socialism, Marx comes much later. So if one wants to bring socialism to our country, one has to understand it's history but infact, when questions of individual aspirations arose. When each one began staking a claim to history... then the trouble started.
Narayan Surve: These ghettos, tenements divided by community, red bulbs on the doors. In the evenings, the noisy throngs swarming around the zoo at the centre.In these rusted, hunger-charred, gloomy precincts of Vandevadi, came in the tongas, horses were felled I stood holding the horseshoe box "Come, catch the rope... yes, pull hard... scared?Are you a brahmin's son or what ?We're workers; hold the horse!Ya, thats good my little horse shoer". Yakoob horseshoer laughed loudly, the horse got up shaking off the dust." Some dark tobacco for me, for you a jalebi and the secod horse was downed. Yakoob died in the riots; no blood ties.
Narayan Surve: Yakoob died in the riots; no blood ties... Yakoob died in the riots; no blood ties still I couldn't stop crying. When the bier was lifted, I added my voice to the funeral chant 'Milad-e-Kalma' that day I wrote on a blank page of my mind " Oh, Narayan, these are the ways of the world of the unclothed remember all the signs".The rightist forces want cultural nationalism which is to say, kill Muslims and Christians this isn't cultural nationalism, this is Hindu nationalism. Those who haven't sacrificed anything for the country are in power as a writer, I am ashamed. after all, we've beenin the battle since 1942. One really wonders what's happening! no sacrifices at all and they are in power.They make atom bombs and want to replace Dr.Ambedkar's secular constitution with the laws of Manu. I'm entitled to this political judgement as a writer because it's my country.
Sudhir Patwardhan : For me the early years were, the city was a site of certain kind of class strata... and that is the context in which I was painting my workers... so it was a stage for something happening... After the textile strike and after the prolonged kind of... I had some friends working in the unions at that time and the general kind of loss of faith and loss of confidence that creaped in throughout the TU movement made the city itself kind of unfocused perceptually that there were cities and cities within cities and there is not necessarily something connecting all this as there was earlier and therefore the idea of, the concept of a grand structure, a grand narrative... could not be sustained.
Narayan Surve: Previously in this working class area, there were never 18 storeyed buildings. Now there are 12 and 15 storeyed buildings and who lives there? Not workers, but outsiders. You will see at Elphinstone, huge bomb like structures, they got the land free and these structures came up... all such kinds of changes.. I've written that we're going to change the world, I 've written this in my poems. At times, I wonder: Narayan is all you've written false ? ".it's not false- a poet sees desire, dreams as well as reality."Not a brahmin, nor a hindu, i am of no sect" Keshavsut- Aworking class poet wrote this 100 years ago.Today, we are taking the same movement ahead but it's structure is flawed hence, this situation! It's not that the working class has no future.
Narayan Surve: Only the working class can change the future for it has nothing to lose.
While selling their wares they brought the sun to the market... While selling their wares they brought the sun to the market. Those who stood forsaken their homes stood staring. How will it do to sit quietly at this hour? Soon, they dragged even the hand to the market... Soon, they dragged even the hand to the market.How will it do to sit with folded hands now? So, I got up, went out into the open whispered into the ears of the factories, We've got to march ahead now... We've got to march ahead now.
Song:The mountains and the farms are my sojourn, how I love them... coming after a hard days work, how much more can I slog... coming after a hard days work, how much more can I slog... coming after a hard days work, how much more can I slog... The mountains and the farms are my sojourn, how I love them... coming after a hard days work, how much more can I slog... The mountains and the farms are my sojourn, how I love them... coming after a hard days work, how much more can I slog... how much load of bricks can I bear... how can I climb up with the sack of grains... how much can the pot overflow... how much can the pot overflow... how can I keep cribbing what good will this cribbing be.
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