Channel 4, the fourth PSB TV channel in the UK, was set up in 1982. As part of its remit, the new channel was required to make programmes that explored new forms of presentation and which were designed to attract audiences seen as ‘under-served’ by the then current programming on BBC and ITV. Programmes targeting the significant South Asian audience in the UK were essential and the new channel became known for screening Indian films (and later films from Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh). Ironically, while many South Asian families enjoyed Indian films on videotape from the corner shop (which replaced visits to cinemas showing Indian films in the 1970s) Channel 4’s film programmes introduced the films via subtitling to a wider UK audience and supported them with printed booklets introducing Indian Cinema and the films being shown. Tragically, Channel 4’s remit was forced to change (another Thatcher legacy) in the early 1990s but one of the few survivors has been the channel’s commitment to South Asian cinemas. Every year the channel still shows recent South Asian films in a short season. This year there have been eight films shown during September. They are screened at around 1.00 am or later when most of the audience is in bed, but they are also on the All4 catch-up platform and that’s where I found The World is Family.
Anand Patwardhan (born 1950) is a documentary filmmaker I have long admired having watched just a small selection of his films over the last forty years or so. He is a true independent creating documentaries completely under his own control and tackling political and social issues mostly shunned by the mainstream film industry and the Indian media generally. See for instance his film Jai Bhim Comrade (India 2011) which focuses on the the treatment of the Dalits (once termed ‘Untouchables’) by the Indian authorities and local communities. His latest film is a little different in that it begins as a form of personal history and from it I learned a lot more about him and his background. The impetus for the film was seemingly a desire to document his own family history before his parents died. When he had finished shooting and his parents had died he put the footage away and made three long documentaries over the next ten years. He returned to the family material during lockdown and realised that the footage also told a story about the struggle for Indian independence in the 1940s and the catastrophe created by Partition. In 2023, when it was first screened at Toronto IFF it was seen as a statement against the regressive regime of Narendra Modi, the BJP and the ideology of Hindutva – the spread of Hindu supremacy and oppression of Muslims.
Patwardhan’s father Balu lost his own father when he was a child and he grew up in an extended Brahmin family in Poona which included his two uncles, Rau and Achyut. These two would become important figures in the independence struggle from the 1920s. Balu married Nirmala, twelve years younger, when she was still a teenager. She was from a Hindu family in Sind and had attended Santinektikan, the school set up by Tagore in rural Bengal which I had learned about some time ago because it was also the school attended by Satyajit Ray. There she developed a love of pottery and began her training to become a ceramicist with an international reputation. Still a schoolgirl, she met Gandhi and through him became part of the independence struggle like Balu. Patwardhan tells his family’s story through informal interviews with his parents as well as other surviving friends and relatives. In 2003, with his mother, Anand visits her former home in Hyderabad in Sindh, now in Pakistan, as part of an Indian-Pakistani group calling for peace between the two nations divided by Partition. Alongside this footage shot by Patwardhan himself and Simantini Dhuru (so Anand appears onscreen alongside his parents) he places newsreel footage and archive photographs, some in stunning quality.
Patwardhan shoots footage of both of his parents literally in their last days. Some audiences might find this too intrusive or clear-eyed but it is powerful footage which has both a personal concern to preserve every aspect of his parents’ love for each other and their humanity and a desire to use this personal testimony to underpin his anger about what has happened since the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque at Ayodhya in 1992, the rise in communalist violence and the not unconnected rise of Modi and the influence of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh – the Hindu Nationalist Organisation widely thought to be responsible for inciting attacks on Muslim communities in India). One of the most moving sequences shows Balu in his early nineties being carried out of his house and walking assisted and with a frame to the polling station to vote in what I assume was the 2009 general election. Balu has a speech impediment as a result of various medical conditions and so the film carries subtitles even for the English spoken in the family – several of the other people interviewed speak in other Indian languages so the subtitles are throughout. In another sequence Anand speaks to a group of young boys, quizzing them after an incident of stone-throwing as part of a communalist protest. He asks them if they have been taught about Partition and the independence struggle (they haven’t) and then about who started the disturbance. “The Muslims” says a Hindu boy. “Did you see them?”, “No, but it says so in the papers.” “Do you always believe what it says in the papers?” It could be argued that Patwardhan confuses the boys with his questions and there are also critics who say the film doesn’t tell the whole story about Gandhi and the Peace marches. But Patwardhan is open about the fact that his family have wealth despite their difficulties as children. They are from the Hindu élites, but marked by Partition. Essentially they have been socialists and supporters of the peace movement who sided with Congress against the British in the 1930s and 40s.
Anand Patwardhan generally works outside the mainstream film industry showing his films, often to large crowds, in communal spaces. Occasionally they have been shown on television in India, including by the main public broadcaster Doordarshan, but this has taken up a lot of time and legal work to overcome attempts at censorship. This film too will face attempts to suppress it in India. It’s important that as many people as possible get to see it as this is arguably his most accessible film, running only 96 minutes (Patwardhan’s previous documentaries have sometimes been twice as long). The family interactions are very moving – and sometimes very amusing, Balu has not lost his sense of humour and Nirmala has a drier wit. There is a very good interview at TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) where the film was first screened in 2023 and Patwardhan explains what he hoped to do.
The film’s title is a translation of the Sanskrit phrase ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’ which is a contested term in that I believe Modi has tried to use it to describe his own approach. If you live in the UK, The World is Family is still available on Film 4 for the next three weeks. Find it here: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-world-is-family Elsewhere the film is still being screened in festivals and is widely reported in Indian press and TV after individual screenings. Wherever you are do try to see it. Here’s the trailer from TIFF:
itp Global Film 