IFFK 2024 'Swaha' review: An arresting spiritual take on the tyranny of fate of Bihar’s Musahars

Sonalli Sharmisstha in a still from 'Swaha (In The Name of Fire)'.

Last year, the boundary wall of our residential complex collapsed, killing four masons — migrant daily wagers who had come to Delhi NCR from Bihar and West Bengal to provide two square meals for their families back home. Some months later, two Bengali-speaking manual scavengers died cleaning a septic tank in a neighbouring colony. Every other day, cocooned in our apartments in big cities, we rarely spare a thought about daily wagers, whose existence is only known to the world at their death. They remain mere numbers, like dots in the constellation — inconsequential speck of dust. The image of migrant workers walking back to their villages, for miles on bruised foot, as the country went into a pandemic-triggered lockdown is still vivid in our minds.

Abhilash Sharma, in his sophomore film, Swaha (In the Name of Fire), zooms into the life of a Dalit labourer — belonging to the oppressed rat-catcher caste of Musahars — in the remote outskirts of Bihar’s Manorva village. After a world premiere in Shanghai International Film Festival, where the director and the actor picked up awards, Swaha had its India premiere at the 29th International Film Festival of Kerala (December 13-20), and a screening at the Kolkata International Film Festival.

Sharma, who’d previously made a Bhojpuri film Achal Rahe Suhaag (2012), a modern retelling of the Savitri-Satyavan myth, changes visual, tonal and textural gear in his second film but carries forward the trope of a wife in search of her husband, who is dead or alive she knows not.

A still from 'Swaha (In The Name of Fire)'.

The spectral composition of Swaha (In the Name of Fire), stunningly shot in black and white by cinematographer Devendra Golatkar, is a difficult film to watch. An ominous pall of gloom descends on to the sparse, cold and unrelenting landscape of the film which unfolds in a village in Bihar as a Kafkaesque nightmare. It is a slow burn. The action has happened already and the film is a look back at the events leading up to it. The beginning sets the tone of what’s to come. As the opening credits roll, the camera snakes its way through rock-cut caves, entering darkness, capturing a female-figured goddess carved on the boulders.

A still from 'Swaha (In The Name of Fire)'.

The 99-minute film opens with an unclaimed body outside a railway station. A couple of scenes later, the camera shifts to remote outskirts of Bihar’s Manorva village, and pans on to a sparse terrain in the countryside, of hills in the distance, empty fields with hardly a soul in sight, swines grazing in a forest patch on a densely foggy morning. In the middle of this nothingness stands a lone hut, where lives Rukhiya (Sonalli Sharmisstha) who’s trying to lull her infant son, bawling in hunger. Her husband Phekan (Satya Ranjan) returns with a dead rat, which he roasts and eats. She will take a few morsels of it later. But what do they feed their child? Her body isn’t making any milk. Phekan tells Rukhiya that the village festivities are on (kirtan singing at temples in the backdrop adds to the irony and to the haunting world-building), and the upper-caste villagers want them (the Dalits, the Musahars) to vanish overnight, out of their sight. Here, in the film, are two individuals, there’s no sense of any community, of Musahars. Each will be on their on, literally.

Satya Ranjan in a still from 'Swaha (In The Name of Fire)'.

Phekan goes away, in search for any job that would buy his child some milk. The choice of names is interesting: Phekan, or that which is thrown away (the invisibilised Musahars are treated as untouchables, literally the discarded ones from society, leading hidden lives on the margins, like rats) and Rukhiya is the rough, dried, wrenched-out soul. Both, albeit resilient and resistant, are trapped and flogged by the double whammy of hydra-headed caste and poverty. The abandoned Rukhiya further bears the brunt of gender stereotypes, of being called a witch and stones pelted at her. The world is inherently a violent one.

Phekan goes to a brick kiln, but the queue to get work is long. His journey to the city for work unfolds in stark vignettes of exploitation and deceit, leaving him disillusioned, and culminates in a violent clash. The overall bleakness is cut by Phekan’s fleeting moments of hope — delivering newspapers, pounding sesame at a sweetmeat shop — but even these are overshadowed by betrayal, false accusations, and a frenzied mob.

A still from 'Swaha (In The Name of Fire)'.

The same fire that swallows up forests also refines gold. The protagonists have to face many kinds of fire in Swaha, from the fire of hunger pangs to the fire of a mob culture to a literal fire at the end. Director Sharma brings to Swaha, in subtext and visual imagery, themes of religions, Buddhism in particular, from themes of compassion, sacrifice, redemption, retribution, forgiveness and a newfound purpose, to the image of Rukhiya seated beneath a Banyan tree, like Buddha awaiting enlightenment. In Hinduism and Buddhism, swaha (hail) indicates and auspicious ending, it’s an interjection that is said at the end of mantras — from marriage to cremation — to indicate their completion, and Swaha is also a minor goddess (wife of Agni) who presides over burnt offerings. Sharma toys with the idea of creator versus creation, a mother and the child she can neither sacrifice nor provide for.

A still from 'Swaha (In The Name of Fire)'.

If folk songs bolster the film’s rootedness in Magadhi culture, Sharma’s choice of language for the film is poignant, too. The last time I saw a popular actor speak Magahi on screen was Waheeda Rehman in Satyajit Ray’s Abhijan (1962). Magahi was what Gautama Buddha spoke in, too. The ancient Magahi dialect lies in that liminal space between the more popular and rustic Bhojpuri (western Bihar) and the sweeter Maithili (eastern Bihar). The dialect, like all sub-dialects of Hindi — just like the subjects of this film, the Musahars — is marginalised and invisibilised (subsumed in the national refrain for a singular, majoritarian language).

A still from 'Swaha (In The Name of Fire)'.

Intentions are well-placed in the visually and aurally striking Swaha and its bleak world. But where Phekan’s track soars in its subtle exposition of how greater forces doubly crush the nobodies, Rukhiya’s track — that ‘only through suffering can one attain liberation’ — gets a bit melodramatic and overwhelming. Them being victims trumps every other aspect of their lives.