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For some light on our dark side
— Photo: K. Bhagya Prakash `A huge crowd suddenly gathered and started abusing me. I took a few quick shots before escaping on my friend's two-wheeler.'
AS A management student in Coimbatore, filmmaker Gopal Menon made a grand decision. The devastating Coimbatore blasts in 1997 and the murderous riots which followed had shaken him, and the shooting down of 19 people by the men in khaki decided his career. He quit plans to pursue a management career, joined the Delhi-based Other Media Communications, and channelised his energy to document social conflicts. Five years in the field, Menon is today an eye-opener, a probing, investigating cameraman, a social historian of sorts.
Gujarat, the State where humanity has lost its meaning, is Menon's latest battleground. The chilling stories of murder and mayhem unnerved him but steeled his resolve to capture everything on film. "Tapan Bose, a filmmaker and human rights activist, visited Gujarat with M. Vijayan, also a filmmaker. They felt the absence of a comprehensive video documentation of the killings and the aftermath. They asked me to go to Gujarat,'' recalls the 27-year-old filmmaker.
Visiting refugee camps, Menon came face-to-face with the reality he had got so used to in Coimbatore and other riot-hit areas. But Gujarat baffled him. The sufferings, the wailing men and women huddled in grim, nondescript camps made a very sad picture. "I could feel a strong sense of alienation among the people in the camps. Everybody felt that they had no one to turn to." Menon's telling documentary on Gujarat, dubbed Hey Ram! Genocide in the Land of Gandhi, is a stark collation of narratives interspersed with moving images of massacred, mutilated bodies. "I have shown these stills not out of any sense of voyeurism but because I thought it was important to do so,'' Menon says. "Otherwise, people would never have understood the magnitude of the massacres.''
Despite opposition from governments and nosy policemen, Menon has already completed 600-odd screenings of the film in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, and Jallianwalabagh, where an eager crowd of 7,000 stood witness to a historic repeat show. Kolkata alone had 40 screenings.
In Bangalore to organise about 10 screenings at different venues, Menon spoke aloud about the need for democratic discourse. The space for such discourses, he feels, is taken away by vested interests, ultra-nationalists, and sometimes even the State apparatus. No wonder, he has already made plans for a documentary on the strife-torn Nagaland.
Armed only with a Sony VX-2000 digital camera, Menon completed more than 10 hours of footage on Gujarat. Wasn't it a risky proposition? "I know the mobs destroyed property worth Rs. 50 lakh belonging to the press. There is, of course, no space for adventurism,'' says Menon. He should know, particularly after his days in Kashmir.
In Isanpur, Gujarat, where the ancient Hasan Malik dargah was demolished with cranes and bulldozers, Menon sensed danger, a really close one. "A huge crowd suddenly gathered and started abusing me. I took a few quick shots before escaping on my friend, Ajitpal Singh's two-wheeler.''
Menon's documentary is also a story about people who spoke up against the general tide. "A Hindu auto driver told me that he had an accident in 1991, and was given 18 bottles of blood.'' The driver went further: "I do not know whether it was a Hindu's, a Muslim's, or a Harijan's blood. So I say, why are these riots happening?''
Ever on the hunt to capture socially volatile situations and the dark side of humans, Gopal is now busy documenting dalits, a story of 160 million downtrodden people. For Menon, the treatment of the community has been nothing less than racist, "worse than apartheid.'' An observation, he has keenly internalised in the depiction of the State as an illegitimate Almighty. Be it Gujarat or Kashmir, where he shot a film on people who disappeared after interrogation by security forces.
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Life
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Thiruvananthapuram
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