Documentary work made with and alongside communities in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. These films are the ground the archival and digital work grew out of — the questions about authorship, participation, and whose viewpoint a document carries were worked out here first, on location, before they became questions about infrastructure.
Documents an alternative agriculture and rice cultivation initiative in Radidih, Gumla district, Jharkhand, following efforts to build community-supported markets and entrepreneurship opportunities for Adivasi people in the region.
Click the still to watch here.
Envisioning Development Practice documents three practices across the Adivasi belt of Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand, each built by practitioners who arrived as students on two-year immersions and then stayed: Eka Nari Sangathan, an association of single women convened by Bhavya Chitranshi; Chinhari, a self-sustaining collective of young women built by Swarnima; and organic agriculture work at Ayangraji that began by making a space where the conversation could happen.
None of these produces an outcome that development documentary knows how to count. There is no yield figure, no beneficiary total, no before and after. The film declines to find a substitute for the uncountable and ends without a result, because the practices do not have results in the sense the form expects. There is no narration. The speaking belongs to the people in the situation, and what description the film needs is carried by text on screen rather than by a voice explaining the work from outside it.
Made at the Centre for Development Practice, Ambedkar University Delhi, and archived there as part of the center’s record of its own thinking, it works toward a first person: an account of development written as a we rather than about a them. Some of the material is archive collected by the practitioners themselves.
Directed, produced, and edited by Arpit Gaind. 6 min 58 sec, 2019.
Click the still to watch here.
Follows Chinhari, a group of Adivasi youth in Dhamtari, Chhattisgarh, India, centering on young girls practicing agriculture and forming care groups within the collective.
Click the still to watch here.
On Eka Nari Sangathan, a single women’s association in Emaliguda village, Rayagada district, Odisha, begun by Bhavya Chitranshi and the women of the sangathan. More than an economic self-help group, it is a space where women named “single” for one reason or another share work, labour, and belonging, and shape identities and futures of their own. Made in collaboration with Bhavya Chitranshi, Ashutosh Kumar, and Eka Nari Sangathan, with footage from all of us, and with special thanks to Anup Dhar.
Click the still to watch here.
Documents lac cultivation and livelihoods in Bhanupratappur, Chhattisgarh, following the inoculation process at the center of the region’s lac economy.
Watch on YouTube.
A space for my own photographs, from fieldwork and from the trail. Until then, some of them live on Instagram.
Shorter writing on media, archives, teaching, and fieldwork.
Conversations on media, archives, and the people who make them.
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