Time after time

Anand Patwardhan and Simanthini Dhuru's 1995 documentary, A Narmada Diary, takes a fascinating look at forms of tribal resistance against mass-scale industrialization.

The object of tribal ire in the film is the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the river Narmada, a project that displaced thousands and stole traditional means of livelihood.

London's Tate Modern recently held a retrospective of Patwardhan's socially conscious films. It says the following of A Narmada Diary:

The opening and closing ‘entries’ in the Diary are symmetrical; official government documentary footage extolling the irresistible benefits of a hydro-engineered and electrified rural future (‘Speed and Technology’) is counterposed to images of the seemingly timeless harvest festival of Holi, celebrated in March 1994 at the village of Domkheri, threatened with imminent submergence by the rising headwaters of the dam. Linear, progressive, industrial time confronts cyclical, ritual, agrarian time. But in their closing reprise of the traditional ceremony, Patwardhan and co-director Simantini Dhuru let us see what we can now more fully understand: the body-painted, head-dressed adivasi dancers confront and burn their demons, singling out the newest, greatest malignity of all, the Sardar Sarovar dam itself. Their ritual dance is a configuration of actuality, of living collective experience, open to history. Resistance has been integrated, innovatively, into the everyday activity, language and rites of the people of this region – overwhelmingly adivasis, long scorned as ‘tribals’, are descendants of the pre Aryan, aboriginal inhabitants of India.

What interests me is the kernel of the film--the collision of two temporal paradigms. Truly, as the blurb above reminds us, "industrial" or technological time has, with the help of all the apparatus of capitalism and industrialization, gained immeasurable advantage over the other time, illogically defamed as anachronistic. Yet, as the tribal resistance demonstrates, time's "other" isn't unworldly at all; rather, it is infused with elements of real, day-to-day living.