Imagined Homeland, and other stories
- 3 hours ago
- 6 min read
Ajay Bhardwaj's Film: When the Tide Goes Out. Where ever they went, they enriched the land, made the earth golden, the sweat on their brow nourishing the soil. And, while they forged alliances with the freedom struggle back home, they fought for their rights in their new homeland.
By Amit Sengupta
Snow falls like memory. Incomplete. Unfulfilled. Melting in slow motion. A slow, soundless stream of soliloquy from the winter sky.
It’s like falling in love, the falling of the snow. Unrequited love looking for warmth. He can see ‘the fall’, he can hear the soliloquy – the gaze enters a transparent window of frozen solitude in a frozen landscape. The snow falls like memory. Refusing to melt.
It’s like falling in love.
This love could be for a long lost beloved. The longing remains. Like the gaze across the window of silence.
This love could be for an imagined homeland, a still-remembered migration in the vastness of an unknown sea, looking for an unknown destination, long distance, in search of a new life, food, shelter, livelihood. Perhaps, another home.
So what happens to the original, real, tangible homeland? The ground below the bare, childhood feet?
Roots.
The sound of the hand-pump, gushing out clear, clean, unpolluted water, deep down from the bowels of the earth, the open-to-sky sunshine courtyard in a humble home with faded walls, ancient trees, and a fragrant chameli tree, and old, faded photographs in sepia of ancestors?
The angithi, open fire in a mud chulha, with firewood, and mother’s infinite love, the chimta gently lifting the phulka from the fire, the steaming black saboot urad dal, also called ‘ma ki daal’, delicious as ever, with a drop of homemade ghee or white butter, waiting to be served in a simple steel thali. A glass of chaaj with a drop of sendha namak as inviting as ever.
The flowing fields of crops, oh, the rippling water canals, summer swimming pools of childhood, the flat, endless green landscape, the muddy by-lanes with cycle marks, the sunflowers spread across the landscape searching for the sun, the yellow kaleidoscope of mustard flowers swaying with north wind.
You can smell love in the air. And home. The love for the original homeland.
The search for the original homeland.
The incomplete journey from one home to another, far away, as distant as the distant lands they read in the folk tales, or in the oral tradition of their grandmothers. They can hear the stories all the time, the brave freedom fighters of their homeland, from Bhagat Singh to Udham Singh, who waited for his revenge of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre for decades, till that final movement in that elite auditorium in London, when he walked down the stairs, and shot this white cold-blooded British mass murderer, at point-blank range.
Bhagat Singh was reading Lenin moments before he was hanged clandestinely, due to the fear of mass uprising. He apparently told the guard, wait a while, one revolutionary is communicating with another.
And Udham Singh, a poor orphan, who travelled the world, from the back-breaking African railway lines of the British as wage labourer, to the streets of Europe in swanky cars, as underground revolutionary, distributing propaganda leaflets, etc, searching for the fulfilment of his Jallianwalla dream. And what did, he call himself: Ram Mohammad Singh Azad.
The Ghadar Party of die-hard revolutionaries from Punjab were spread all over Canada, especially in Canada. Immigrants in the US, UK and Canada founded it in 1913 in San Francisco. Udham Singh belonged to these resilient underground and overground collective led by the great sons and daughters of Punjab such as Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna, Lala Har Dayal, Kartar Singh Sarabha, and Vishnu Ganesh Pinger, Darshan Singh Canadian, among others.
Like the revolutionaries and freedom fighters of Bengal, many of them hanged to death by the British -- Master Surya Sen, young Kalpana Dutt, Pritilata Waddedar of the Chittagong Armoury Raid, young Khudiram Bose, Jatin Das, comrade of Bhagat Singh and member of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Associationy, who fasted to death for 63 days in jail, like the great Irish revolutionaries in Ireland.
From Canada to the torture chambers of Andaman Cellular Jail of Kala Pani to Ireland and Punjab, to the brave Bolsheviks of Tsarist Russia, these complex rivers of passion united, like an eternal symphony of struggle, chasing the difficult dream of freedom for their motherland.
Migration, long distance, on sea, was therefore another way to seek revenge against British brutality. It was also a search for life’s basic needs and survival, the will to take risks, the courage to enter unexplored destinations, often controlled by the whites. Their formidable strength of character, their hard work and skills, their persistence of passion, their stoic disregard for compromise, their relentless tenacity to overcome and face all odds, these were women and men made of tempered steel.
Where ever they went, they enriched the land, made the earth golden, the sweat on their brow nourishing the soil. And, while they forged alliances with the freedom struggle back home, they fought for their rights in their new homeland.
The right to live with dignity and equality.
And women led the struggle. As always. Unrecorded, rendered invisible by male history. Forging alliances with other women and other communities, beyond colour, religion, geography, identity.
Homemakers, free in sprit and soul, on the streets in an unknown country with entrenched power dynamics of patriarchy, male narratives, and exploitation, with placards and slogans, demanding their fundamental rights, picketing, barricading, forging alliances with other resistance groups, linking up with civil society, explaining themselves, refusing to compromise, against all odds.
Their faces tell their stoic stories. In simple salwar-kameez, simple women, transcending the simplicity of their situation, creating a shared symphony of struggle.
Filmmaker Ajay Bhardwaj’s slow and steady documentary, simple and complex at the same time, tells their story, and other hidden tales, and travels back and forth, to and fro, from here to there, in the memory-landscape of immigrants, and their invisible protagonists, the fighters, the homemakers, the vanguards, and their incredible resilience.
When the Tide Goes Out (2021), revisits the catalysts of the Candian Farmworkers’ Union (CFU), who were the scaffolding of the movement in the 1980s. The union, born in 1980, comprised the South Asian neighbourhood; the founder-immigrants forged the organisation in Surrey of British Columbia in the late 1970s. It found alliances across the cultural and political fronts, including in Vancouver – fighting an uphill battle against entrenched racism and stark inequality of relations, including in work places, for justice, equality and the rights of immigrant citizens and workers.
The original founders included a fabulous thinker and writer – Sadhu Singh Dhami. With the inspirational icons of the Ghadar Party and the Indian freedom movement as symbols of struggle in the 1930s, Dhami was inspired, like many young revolutionaries, in his teens. That is when he started his first journey into the heady romance and reality of this special kind of struggle in Canada.
Maluka, his memoirs, penned in 1978, enters the first wave of the radical immigrant consciousness, and he knew, as his elders told him: Don’t end up like us with dust in our eyes and fingers and turbans and clothes -- chase enlightenment. Education is the key to liberation.
Reminds of Babasaheb Ambedkar’s call to his people: Organise. Unite. Agitate!
Ajay’s film is patient. Slow and steady. Meticulous. Not only does he resurrect a forgotten narrative through voices from the past, especially of women, he tracks little magazines, documents, texts, archival material, images and silences, the pause and the connecting sentences, the contradictions and complexities, in what is a compelling academic thesis spoken with a certain pronounced lucidity and simplicity, usually lacking in rigorous, detached self-conscious academic studies.
The film has done the rounds in international and Indian film festivals. It has been watched and discussed across multiple academic and film platforms. It has found its niche in the history of world cinema.
Meanwhile, once again, snow falls like memory. Melting in slow motion. A slow, soundless stream of soliloquy from the winter sky. Like unrequited love.
Amit Sengupta is Editor, independentink.in
Stills from the film courtesy Ajay Bhardwaj.