(Ashish Avikuntak talks about Aapothkalin Trikalika)

The characters in the film ‘Aapothkalin Trikalika’ (2016) walk the streets and dance on terraces wearing  masks of the goddess often without clothes. What would happen  if the goddess became human and tried to make sense  of the modern world. During social and political turmoil,  it turns out  she’s  just as much  at a loss  as the rest of us. Avikunthak describes the  film as ‘a  filmic philosophical essay’. I am trying  to present  a parallel idea of  diverse, sectarian form of Hinduism, he adds. 

  1. Is  ‘Aapothkalin Trikalika’ shot on celluloid? In this age of digital cinema, why did you shoot this film on celluloid?

The film was shot on 16mm. The reason is very simple. I started filming this project in 2009, when the digital invasion was not yet formidable. 35mm and 16mm was still the preferred medium of making cinema. I was not a believer of video, so began the project on 16mm. This film took nearly 3 years to shoot, another 4 years to edit and do the sound work. In the meanwhile, I shot three films – Katho Upanishad (2011), Rati Chakravyuh (2013) and Kalkimanthankatha (2015). Rati Chakravyuh was entirely a digital film, whereas the other two were hybrid films. I used both 16mm and digital cinematography cameras to shoot. Katho Upanishad was shot in 4K digital cinematopgraphy with Red camera along with super16, whereas majority of Kalkimanthankatha was shot on super16 along with some parts in digital Canon 5D. 

  1. How has been the shift between celluloid and digital effected your filmmaking practice?

Between 2009 and 2016 there has been a vast transformation of the filmmaking process, all across the world. When I began this film, celluloid was still the technological appropriate practice for image capture. There were many brilliant, yet cheap labs in India, still processing and printing large amount of celluloid. Arriflex and Aaton were still manufacturing cinema cameras. Kodak and Fuji were still producing celluloid films. But by 2016, the filmmaking landscape saw a decisive technological shift. Fuji stopped the production of celluloid films in 2013. Arriflex and Aaton stopped making cinema cameras in 2012. Slowly one by one, film processing laboratories all across the world closed shop. For instances, there were nearly a dozen film processing labs in India in 2009 and now only 1 laboratory in Bombay processes and prints film. The world of film projection also saw a tectonic shift. In the last ten years, digital projection has completely ousted celluloid projection. From small run down cinema theaters in mofussil towns in India to prestigious film festivals at Cannes and Venice, digital 2K or 4K have become the norm. 35mm projection have become obsolete. So, today even if a film is shot on celluloid, its final projection is digital. Most of my new films are been shot in digital cameras. I still shoot on 16mm, as there are a couple of films that I am working are on celluloid. For me the choice to work on celluloid is a preference for a theory of practice, rather than technological ability to make or project images. 

  1. The concept of cinema has undergone drastic change. Boundaries between traditional art forms are erased.  Fresh convergence and synergies between media are taking place. 

Yes, that is indeed true. Cinema’s forms, content have been constantly changing. But the significant transformation in the last decade has been the radical shift from analogue to the digital means of consumption and exhibition of cinema. As I have spoken above, the digitalization of cinema transformed the practice of the production, however the more far-reaching transmutation has occurred in the exhibition and the consumption of cinema. In the analogue times, cinema was only consumed as 35mm or 16mm projection in large auditoriums with hundreds of audience simultaneously. It was an event in which multitudes experienced the cinema as a collective activity.  With the rise of the video technology, television flourished and experience of cinema became a familial activity. The communitarian experience of the film was fragmented into an experience within a cloistered space – living room or a bed room. With the rise of digital technology, the cinematic experience has been furthered disintegrated. Now cinema is consumed with the confines of just an individual’s eye-balls – laptop or a phone or a tablet. This progressive dissolution of audience has vastly transformed the experience of watching cinema. Audiences are not consuming a cinematic experience as a singular event in a dark room. It has become a disjointed experience. Majority of cinema today is consumed episodically on a personal device. It’s no more a communitarian event but rather an individual incident. The shift of a cinematic experience from an event to an incident has given birth to multiple forms of moving images that exploit the episodic and the incidental nature of the experience. A large amount of media content are now designed for such a fragmentary consumption – Netflix series are great examples of this form. You can say that the experience of cinema has become more like reading a book, because the audience today at will can disrupt their cinematic experience. The consumer can fragment, interrupt or desist from an experience at will. This ecology and logic of exhibition (and not production) has given birth to multiple formats that was not common in the analogue times – the short films (very common on YouTube), the episodic very long films (very common on Netflix like Sacred Games). 

  1. Even the screening place has changed. In the age of multiplexes, your films are screened at art galleries like, Chatterjee & Lal at Mumbai, etc.  

In the case of the art world, the emergence of moving images occurred with the proliferation of video technology in the 1970s. Genealogically, this form of moving images was located in art practice traditions rather than cinema. The logic of cinema was subverted and moving images were subsumed as part of a sculpting and an installation tradition, either in the form of an image in a monitor or projected by video and projectors. These were shown in a white-cube rather than a black box with a penchant for multiple channel projections. Most of these moving images were non-narrative, formally and structurally nearer to post war avant-garde cinema practices in America and Europe than narrative cinema in seen in auditoriums. There was a clear distinction between these forms. However, with the abundance of digital cinema practices, the forms have blurred. Filmmaking became cheaper and affordable, correspondingly the fidelity of portable digital projections became equal of those in the auditoriums. Slowly white cube of the galleries was transformed into black boxes. The screening of my films in a gallery like Chatterjee & Lal is a product of this transformation. 

  1. Bhagawat Gita says, “For the protection of the good and to annihilate the miscreants, as well as for the establishment of dharma, I myself appear, age after age”.  I don’t know whether you are influenced by these words while thinking about the film. 

It is intriguing for me to note that you invoke Gita in the context of Aapothkalin Trikalika.  Bhagwat Gita is an idiosyncratic text. It was considered by most Indian sectarian practitioner as a marginal text, and was not a popular text in ancient India. For instance, over the course of last millennium, there are less than a dozen commentaries as compared to more than hundred translations and commentary in the last century! Bhagwat Gita as a singular text that exemplified Hinduism only gained prominence with the rise of Indian nationalism during the Independence movement. By early 20th century, it metamorphosed into the metatext of modern Hindu revivalism. Scholars have argued, and I would say conclusively, that its popularity to contemporary Hinduism was propelled by English translation of the book in 1785. The colonial authority legitimized the validity of Bhagwat Gita as the particular text of Hindu theology as it was an apparent mimesis of their own Christian Bible. This was the time of Warren Hastings, when there was anxious quest by colonial occupants for a conclusive epistemological universe to govern the newly subjugated people. It is during his time that Manusmriti emerged as the conclusive juridical text whereas Bhagwat Gita emerged as the spiritual textbook. It is important to underscore that Bengal in 18th century was largely a tantric world and texts like Gita and Upanishads were largely the preoccupancy of the Brahmanical elite who were the religious and cultural informants of the new rulers.  With the rise of the Indian independence movement, Bhagwat Gita was appropriated by all sections of the nationalists – from Gandhi, Tilak to right wing ideologues. 

  1. So are your saying that Bhagawat Gita is a modern book?

No. I am saying that its supposedly primordial prominence as an essential book of Hinduism is product of colonial modernity. Bhagwat Gita was a marginal text that was principal to a particular sect of elite Hindus (Bengali Vaishnava Brahmins) who had gained access to the colonial governmentality. Subsequently, it was catapulted into prominence by early modern nationalists who as Partha Chatterjee has prudently shown was a product of a derivative western discourse.  Bhagwat Gita snuggly nestles into this imagination as it provides a singular discursive key to a highly complex and variegated universe. This is exacerbated it by the highly succinct semantics of this book that allows alarmingly variant interpretation. For instance, this book was called the bible both by the pacifist Gandhi and the Nazi fascist Heinrich Himmler. In fact, Himmler who was the orchestrer and creator of the Holucaust 

used the logic in Bhagwat Gita to justify the annihilation of Jews. 

Bhagwat Gita is a text that is not merely a Hindu text. It is specifically a book that is central to Vashinava theology. It is a text that’s attempts to synthesize that varying strands of Hinduism, but from a primarily a Vaishnava perspective. Aapothkalin Trikalika is not influenced by this text in any sense, even in the context of the verses that you suggest. As a matter of fact, my earlier film Kalkimanthankatha can be understood in the context of these verses. It’s a film that begins with the search of Kalki, the tenth and the film avatar of Vishnu. An avatar who is supposed to arrive during the age of Kali – Kaliyug, to “annihilate the miscreants, as well as for the establishment of dharma.” But this avatar of Vishnu as he is yet to arrive, almost like Godot of Samuel Beckett, that the first of Kalkimanthankatha is adapted from. On the other hand Aapothkalin Trikalika is firmly located in a Tantric ontology.  

  1. In India, a revival process is taking place in the field of religion. Even in Kerala, a State known for its ‘progressiveness’, lot of new temples are constructed.  Same way, number of ruined temples are revived.  There are lot of temples for local gods / goddesses in Kerala. Here puja is performed not by Brahmins. During the festivals, low-caste people transform into God and perform in front of the people. This is called Theyyam (God).  These low-caste people are otherwise not treated equal to higher caste people in real life.  This is purely Dravidian in its character.  But now there is a tendency to connect these local Gods with Sanskrit and Brahmanism.  In this way, they are trying to erase indigenous culture. 

Religion is a dynamic cultural process. It is always in motion. In the case of what we call Hinduism, these process of iteration, erasure, reappearance, reinvention, reconfiguration, invagination is a perpetual part of its identity. Hinduism is a misnomer. It is not a singular religion or thought, it is a conglomeration of ideas, practices, cultures and concepts, often in conflict with each other. Colonial Indologists and subsequently nationalist historians and now fundamentalist historians have often painted a picture of a static, unchanging, primordial Hinduism. They have underscored the divergence and variegation but have attempted to encapsulate in a larger armature. This is far from true. Hinduism is a religion often in conflict within its own constituencies. The example that you have given in Kerala is not unusual. As a matter of fact, this revival, reappearance, and reconfiguration is the central to its theological ontology. With the rise of modernity, especially its modes of representation – print (newspapers, journals, calendar art), cinema (early Indian cinema was deeply religious), television (religious serials, tele-preaching in the style of Ramdev Baba and Asaram Baba), and now social media has been dynamically churning the social, cultural and moral ontology of modern Hinduism. The character of what we think of an ancient, primeval and primordial religion, is actually deeply modern. Pre-modern Hinduism was a composite of sectarian practices highly localized and compartmentalized within its own geographic and linguistic niches. Contemporary modern Hinduism is moving towards a political, cultural homogeneity, best exemplified by Hindutva ideology. This political-religious movement is gradually strangling the heterogeneity of sectarian Hinduism. So it is no surprise that Gods and Goddess of the non-Brahmanical are seeing a powerful resurgence not just in Kerala, but also in Bengal and other parts. This has to be understood as a simmering conflict in the being of modern Hinduism. So there is nothing indigenous in a primordial sense, it’s a process on constant churning and reorganization.  The erasure that you talk about is also a construction. And this creation is also a form or expurgation. It is not just the new demolishing the old, it is also peculiarly the old restructuring the new. Hindutva is the former, where the new is virulently demolishing the old, in the process conducting what is essentially an act of modernity.

  1. In this context I would like to ask you something.  You have been using lot of myths, rituals in your films. In this film you are presenting the Gods and Goddesses directly. How do you look at this?

I see my films as a cinematic intervention of the later – here the ancient is embattling the modern. I see my work in a long tradition of commentarial practices in Indian tradition, where the ancient in the form of religiosity, rituals and the sacred is invoked to challenge the present, wrestle with the contemporary in search of an invigorating understanding of being. This is not mere reinterpretation, or retelling or reimagination or reinvention. My practice is itself act of religiosity, devotion and consecration. I think of my work in the lines of sculptors who make temple idols, or artists who drew paintings of divinities or the ritualists who presides over ceremonies. More recently, Raja Ravi Verma and Dadasaheb Phalke who infused modern technologies like lithography and cinema respectively with Indian religiosity.  We are all enforcing the contemporary with the ancient. We are all suturing the present with the past. A past which is ephemeral and endangered. A past that is being politically and culturally eradicated. My quest is to not merely to excavated this past, but to enliven it into our present consciousness. In short, through my films I am invaginating the modern with the ancient. 

  1. There was lot of references to nudity and sex of Gods and Goddesses orally in your earlier films. In this film, you show the Gods and Goddesses in various forms.  They walk naked, wearing mask of Kali. You show one of the naked female and her genitals in various positions.   

Nudity in the history of cinema has most often been represented as the “sexed body”. This is the depiction of the human body that has overt sexual connotations.  These sexed bodies are shown in filmic narratives involved in an erotic or in a sexual act. These are concupiscent figures that are charged with the carnal and lustful desires – both amorous and violent.  In Indian cinema where a sanctimonious censorship regime has prohibited the portrayal of nude bodies, the sexed body appears as the “risqué body” – sexually provocative, seductive and lurid. In this cultural ecology, the nude body is unequivocally represented and consumed as the sexed body. With the rise of the pornographic industry the consanguinity between the nude body as the sexed body has been sealed. In my films, I disrupt and rupture this relationship between the nude body and the sexed body. 

In my films nudity, sexuality or sensuality emanates from an entirely distinctive ideological, historical and philosophical domain. It is specifically located in a pre-modern Indian (Hindu, Buddhist and Jain) iconographic representation of the human body that is conspicuous in sculptural and pictorial traditions. Here the nude body unambiguously exemplifies the divine at its profound and banal at its inconsequential. I, very especially invoke this iconography of the nude body in Aapothkalin Trikalika.  The nude body for me is the pure body, the pristine body, the primeval body and the primordial body. The ideological connotation of the pure, the pristine, the primeval, and the primordial are deeply located in the religious worldview that has been expressed in the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions. The divine nude is seen at the its earliest in Indian iconographic record in the second century BCE especially in the context of the Yaksha and Yakshi figures that populate the various Buddhist sculptural traditions in particular the Amravati and the Mathura School of Art. Subsequently the iconography of the divine nude is seen throughout Indian subcontinent irrespective of religious beliefs. Divine figures, heavenly figure, and even royal figures are shown naked to symbolize their magisterial immaculateness. 

  1. Nudity in your film reminded me A K Ramanujan’s observations while he was discussing about folklore: He has written: The gods in the Puranas and the heroes in the epics have bodies without bodily functions: they are not supposed to sweat, urinate, defecate, or pass wind. They do not blink their eyes nor do their feet touch the ground. But in folk traditions, they have bodies, they are embodied, localised, domesticated. 

In Aapothkalin Trikalika, I invoke a very distinctive connotation of the divine nude – the ascetic nude. The ascetic as the nude figure is seen at the earliest in depiction of Buddha. In its most profound form we see the ascetic as the nude body in the Digambara Jain traditions. Within the Hindu tradition, Kali epitomizes such a divine ascetic nude goddess. Here the nakedness represents nonattachment towards corporeal desires and yearnings. The nude Kali symbolizes her virtuousness, her dispassion and her enlightenment. Here nude is anything but concupiscent. The ascetic nude is the most esoteric representation of divine. In Aapothkalin Trikalika, I willfully create a universe in which only Gods walk naked. This nakedness is not visceral, physical or corporeal, it is numinous and spiritual. In the world of men only Gods can be naked. This nudity is sacred. 

Nudity in this film, or generally in my work is not aggressive interventions to challenge taboos or perform a political rhetoric of confrontation. Nudity, sexuality or sensuality in my films is not invoked to antagonize or provoke conservative social-sexual mores that is predominant in contemporary representations, cinematic or otherwise. The nude body occurs in my film as countervailing iconographic antidote to the political violence that the philosophical narrative of the film is an articulating. By summoning the nude as divine, I am underscoring the primeval origin of the human body. I am unequivocally suggesting that in cinematic narrative the nude body is not necessary the sexed body – it can also be the divine body, the ascetic body. 

  1. At the end of the film, the Gods and Godesses walk to the edge of a terrace and four of them climb the wall and jump from the rooftop.  But the fifth one is not jumping. Immediately you cut the scene to a sequence where a person wearing a mask of an animal killing chicken brutally.  I remember same kind of butchery scene in Nirakar Chaya. 

You are right about the resemblance of the last scene in Aapothkalin Trikalika with thatin Nirakar Chayya. They were both shot in the same fish market in south Calcutta, near my house. However, there is a huge phenomenological difference. In Nirakar Chayya the chicken is being butchered whereas in Aapothkalin Trikalika the chicken is brought to life. In this film, the butchery sequence is shot in reverse. And that is an ontological altering fact. There is a double play in this shot. Although, the camera captures the disembowelment of the chicken, but the fact it is shown in the reverse transforms the meaning. I don’t think it is important for me to interpret what it means, that is for you to decide, along with the disappearances of the divinities when they jump from the terrace.  

  1. I understand that you were born in Punjab and with family migrated to Kolkata. Please elaborate.   

No, I was not born in Punjab. I belong to a post-partition Punjabi family. Both my parents’ families came to India after partition. My father’s family is from the town of Mardan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa previously known as the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and my mother’s family hails from Lahore. My father’s family settled in Dehradun and the Bareilly. My mother grew in refugee colonies of north Delhi. My father studied Pharmacy at BITS, Pillani and got a job in the outskirts of Calcutta in 1969 in a multi-national pharmacy company. I was born in Jabalpur, in a Military Hospital where my uncle and aunt were army doctors in 1972, and lived in Calcutta till 1991 till the end of my high school. 

  1.  Life in Kolkata, studies, etc. and influence of Kolkata, the great city.  

Calcutta unmistakably has had a profound impact in my life. For me this is my home. I was raised in the southern fringes of the colonial city, which in the decades after partition were largely inhabited by refugee families from East Bengal. It was a very cosmopolitan world, where my identity as a non-Bengali was reaffirmed regularly, but slowly the rich political, social, cultural life of Calcutta seeped into my consciousness. By the time I was in my high school, I was watching serious films in Nandan, plays in Academy of Fine Arts and slowly got involved with political and social work, that included volunteering with Missionary of Charities to getting involved with SFI. But eventually I was drawn to non-party political voluntary groups, which can be categorized as Marxist environmentalists. These groups were hugely critical of the statist CPI(M) and were involved in environmental politics in Bengal, with a strong Marxist ideological bulwark. This was the 1989, and I got involved with fishermen rights in Sundarbans area, and Save the Western Ghats March led by Thomas Kochery from Kerala. 

  1.  Your association with social activities groups like Narmada Bachao Andolan.  

It was during the mobilization of one of the biggest anti-dam, tribal gathering in India at Harsud, (MP) rally in 1990 that I heard of Narmad Bachao Andolan. This was the final year of my high school, and like most of my peers, I had decided to apply to go to US for my undergraduate degree. In 1991, I even got admission to a University in Wisconsin with scholarship, but decide to decline the offer and go to Bombay so that I could work with NBA. At the same time I enrolled myself for a degree in Social Work from Bombay University. From 1991-94, I worked almost as a fulltime activist for NBA. For me working in the NBA was like fighting for the second independence movement. I came from a partition-affected family – a victim of forced displacement, who lived in a neighborhood with refugees from East Bengal. I was deeply trouble by the Indian state’s forcible displacement of the most vulnerable and disenfranchised citizens of India – the tribal and the working agrarian classes.  For me then to be involved in a political struggle that protested and resisted forced displacement by a draconian state was a life-affirming political choice. I began my work with NBA during the Manibelli Satyagarha of 1991 when the inhabitants of the first village to be displaced by the Sardar Sarovar Dam decided not to move away and rather drown in the rising water of the river. During the next three years I was involved in many NBA actions, I was beaten up by police, hospitalized and arrested a few times. I consider this as one of my most significant times of my life, as I gathered huge experience at a very short time about the political realities on Indian society and nation – its deep entrenched inequalities, its oppressive tentacles, its debilitating repression and most importantly I realized that India after independence has become more powerfully destructive and continued the colonial forms of domination, but in new forms. I learned an old political song during my times in the NBA that succinctly describes the postcolonial predicament I lived in: “Gore haakim gayo re bhaiya, aageya haakim kale! Badel gayi hai chabi lekin badle nahi hai taale!” [The white rulers have gone, but the black masters have come instead! The keys have changed but the locks remain the same!]

  1.  Migration to USA and USA experience.   

I went to the US as a house-husband following my then wife who had joined Stanford University to do her PhD in Linguistics. A year later I also got scholarship to do my PhD at Stanford in Cultural and Social Anthropology. I did research on the history and politics of archaeology in India. Eventually I did a deep ethnography of Archaeological Survey of India as it produced knowledge and artifacts about the Harappan civilization in western India. After my PhD, I got a job as a Lecturer in Yale University teaching Anthropology, Films Studies and South Asian Studies. Now, I am Associate Professor of Films at University of Rhode Island. US have been a transformative experience it opened up my life to new possibilities and gave it a global approach. I recognized the limits of been global and cosmopolitan and realized the inadequacies of western civilization.

  1. Your entry into the field of cinema. What attracted you to cinema?   

I come from a family of cinephiles. My parents have been going to cinema hall since they were young to watch cinema, and they took us when we were infants. In Calcutta we lived in a neighborhood, which had many single screen theater in less than couple of kilometers. So my earliest memories of my life have been of watching films. But these were popular films. I got introduced to the world of serious cinema in Class 10 when I saw Ray and Ghatak in Nandan cinema complex in Calcutta. I was hooked. A year later in 1990 when the IFFI was held in Calcutta, I saw nearly 30 films in 5 days. Of them was a retrospective of Krzysztof Kieślowski. This blew my mind. During my days as an activist with the NBA in Bombay I was member of Screen Unit a film society that was run by Amrit Gangar. Here, for the first time in my life, I watched some of the most important films of my life including those by Andrei Tarkovsky. During these years I also watched films at the IFFI in Bombay in 1995, Delhi in 1996 and also attend the MIFF in 1994 and 1996. By 1994, I was very disillusioned by NBA and Social Work and decided to move to Pune on the advise of Amrit Gangar. He told me that along with doing a degree in Pune University I could watch films everyday at FTII and NFAI. And that is what I did. From 1994-96, I lived in Pune while doing an MA in Archaeology; I would bicycle 10 km everyday back and forth from my hotel to FTII to watch films. That opened my life and it was then I decided to make films. I made my first film in 1995 with friends who were studying at the FTII.

  1. You have been making films using your student stipend. In this context you have once said that “people buy cars, I make films”.  Recently you have made five feature films between 2011 and 2017. How do you find funding for your films?   

For me making cinema is my life. It is a  form of Sadhana. It is not a vocation or a profession or even an artistic inclination. It is a deep sense of spiritual practice. So I have given everything to cinema. Whatever I have earned I have used in making films. I saved my fellowship stipend that I got while a student at Stanford University to make my early short films and my first feature film. Then after I started working as a University Professor after my PhD, I earned more and therefore created more savings. And I used that to make my films. Also, two thing happened around 2011 – first was that cinema production radically changed from celluloid to digital. I could now make films at half the cost. Secondly, I met a producer of independent films from Germany – Kristina Konrad, who believed in my vision and my madness. She supported me in doing the postproduction of four of my films during this period – Rati Chakrayuh, Kalkimanthakatha, Aapothkalin Trikalika and Virndavani Vairagya. From early in my life, I was very crystal clear that the money I earn will not go into increasing my privilege or wealth in the form of owning property or cars and other forms of commodities. After using money for my existence whatever is saved is used in the making of my films.

  1. How do you screen your films?

My films are unusual and complex and they defy form, style and genre therefore it is very difficult to find the normal places to screen them. My films have mostly been screened in galleries, museums, film festivals and universities. Also, I have been lucky that there are few people in the world who believe in my work and are committed to screening these films. So my galleriest in Bombay – Mortimeer Chatterjee and Tara Lal have been massively supportive along with Projjal Dutta of Aicaon Gallery in New York and Prateek and Priyanka Raka of Experimenter Gallery in Calcutta. All these galleries have supported me and continue to show my works.