Hindus for Human Rights members recently attended the Sydney screening of Anand Patwardhan’s documentary, The World is Family, as part of the Antenna documentary film festival. Devleena Ghosh of HfHR ANZ shares her thoughts on the film below.

The World is Family - Anand Patwardhan

Patwardhan is the creator of many radical, innovative and thought-provoking documentaries. His Raam ke Naam (In the name of God, 1992) was a prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism in India (the Babri Masjid was destroyed a few months after the film was released). Vivek (Reason, 2018) masterfully depicted the rise of right-wing Hindu extremism through the lens of politically motivated killings in the new century. These documentaries trace the history of an India transforming and moving into a future where the precepts of its Constitution seem increasingly irrelevant.

The World is Family is somewhat of a departure for Patwardhan in that it tells the story of the nation through those of his own family. The title comes from a Sanskrit phrase (Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam) and is often quoted by progressive Indians as the best way to manage India’s multi-religious, multi-lingual and multi-cultural polity. Patwardhan’s parents and extended family were involved in India’s independence struggle and the film articulates with eloquence the ideals which inspired them, using an effective imbrication of archival footage, interviews and auto-ethnography, His father, Balu, in spite of a speech impediment brought on by sickness, comes across as a contented man and his easy laughter contrasts with the cutting humour and incisive intellect of his wife Nirmala who learnt the art of pottery at Shantiniketan and became one of the foremost potters in the country. Patwardhan also films his own visits to Pakistan as part of a group devoted to India-Pakistan amity. The cordiality and warmth of his parents’ Pakistani friends, comrades and relatives emphasise the humanity and connection that persist across the subcontinental divide. The ease with which fake news blaming the ‘other’ is created and disseminated is displayed in some modern vignettes, such as those with school children in rural India.

Patwardhan’s personal and affectionate homage to the ideals of India’s freedom struggle depicts, with care and attention, a world we have lost. In the film, the past is a different country, a location where the personal and the universal, the local and the global are intricately woven. And in a period where subcontinental history is being re-written and over-written and during a year in which crucial elections have been held in Pakistan and are due to be held in India, it is an indispensable narrative of another India: one envisaged by the writers of the Constitution in which respect, amity and equity, rather than religious ethno-nationalism, were the necessary underpinnings of a postcolonial nation. The film maker was present to take questions from the audience and was his usual incisive and articulate self. In spite of the vicissitudes that he and his work have undergone in his home country, he, like Seamus Heaney, thinks that hope and history will eventually rhyme The World is Family is essential viewing for anyone interested in history, politics and hope.

Devleena Ghosh, (HfHR ANZ)  is an Honorary Professor in the School of Communications in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sydney.