‘You have to care!’
A theatre educator and activist with a background in documentary, Ritesh
Sharma won
Best Debut Feature in May at the New York Indian Film Festival (NYIFF) for his film Jhini Bini Chadariya (The Brittle Thread), a raw portrait of life in today’s Banaras. Extracts from a phone conversation:
QQ. Why Banaras?
I know the city. I’m from Mughalsarai, on the opposite bank of the Ganga from Banaras. My childhood was spent in railway quarters, where my neighbours were Muslim. I used to call the old lady Dadi. She shielded me from my father’s beatings, like a real grandmother would. There was a Sikh family and a Christian family upstairs. It was literally ‘Hindu Muslim Sikh Isai’; we’d do anything for each other.
Growing up, I spent time doing Nagrik Natak Mandali plays, chatting on the ghats for hours, batiyana, as we call it in Banaras. You couldn’t drink beer in Mughalsarai, everyone knew you!
When I went back to write my script in 2015, a lot was happening in the country, and in Banaras. I started to feel, why is my Dadi scared? Why are my friends afraid?
Q. Your film has a Muslim weaver, a street dancer, an Israeli tourist. Was it always about this mix of people?
Yes. I went to neighbourhoods, recorded weavers, street dancers. I myself stayed in a tourist hostel on Nishadhraj Ghat, also in the film. I started in documentary mode. Gradually, the characters came.
Q. Apart from your
theatre background, you’ve earlier directed two documentaries: The Holy Wives, on devadasis, and Rainbows are Real, on transgenders…. Yes, both theatre and documentary helped me. My actors are from theatre. Also, you’ll notice a lot of long shots. Like in a play, the audience can decide who they want to watch. Also, if you go to closeups right away, you wouldn’t see the space around the characters. You wouldn’t see Banaras. I wanted to keep as much reality as I could: Megha Mathur, a theatre actor from Delhi’s Shri Ram Centre, spent months with real dancers to play Rani. The dance audiences are real. And Adah is played by Sivan Spector, an actual Israeli tourist I met.
Q. You have only one character who is a politician. But the communalisation of politics is there all around, especially in the track about Shadab, the weaver…
I just shot what was happening in Banaras: rallies, speeches. With Shadab, the idea was to get to those people who say ‘I’m not part of the politics, I don’t care’. You have to care! ■
- with Trisha Gupta