Jayan Cherian Part 1: ‘Hindu Siddis are found only in India’s Konkan region; re-enslaved by upper caste landowners’

Filmmaker Jayan K Cherian; stills from his latest film 'Rhythm of Dammam', on the Siddi Community of Yellapur in Uttara Kannada (north Karnataka).

The stunningly shot and evocative Rhythm of Dammam, in Siddi Bhasha, is the first fictional feature ever to be made on the Indian Siddi community that traces its ancestry to Africa. In the film, the pre-teen Jayaram, who lives in Karnataka’s Yellapura, is afflicted by his dead grandfather’s visions, as his impoverished family fights over supposed buried treasure. But Jayaram is a chosen one, the visitations will lead him to discover his community’s origin and sea-bound journey to India centuries ago, as slaves, and their continued oppression by upper-caste landowners.

Born in small-town Kerala, New York-based filmmaker Jayan K Cherian’s first brush with race happened in the US where he went for higher studies. “All of a sudden, in America, I became a nigger, a black man, an accented Indian, a brown-skin guy. White people — albeit not all — have their prejudices and stereotypes, they put you in a bracket of what you look like. And it is cyclical. In 1555, the Roman Catholic Church burned the epics of the Aztecs and started the Mexican Inquisition, some years later, the Portuguese started the Inquisition in Goa, ruled by Bishop Menezes, this is recent history. Xenophobia is always present, in all communities and across classes. And we [Indians] have our own baggage, too. When I’d talk about racism, oppression, xenophobia, homophobia and gender oppression, my White friends would interject: ‘You people are caste oppressors’,” says the 58-year-old filmmaker whose latest film Rhythm of Dammam premiered at the just-concluded 55th International Film Festival of India (IFFI), Goa, and is one of the only two Indian films in the International competition segment of the 29th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), from December 13-20.

In the first segment of a two-part interview, Cherian, who stayed with the community in Yellapur over five years since 2016-17, talks about the Siddi community and the making of the film. Edited excerpts:

ALSO READ: Jayan Cherian Part 2: ‘Censorship is a colonial law, it has no place in a democracy’

A still from 'Rhythm Of Dammam'.

Did your own brushes with racism in the US trigger an ethnological interest in race and in training the lens on the group of African Indians — the Siddi community?

During college in America, and in New York City, I’ve been watching the Black Power movement, following African literature, from Amiri Baraka to Maya Angelou, and different social, literary and poetic movements. At the time, I was interested in Indian people who came from Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Suriname. Their forefathers were indentured servants in indigo plantations and opium factories, who were brought by the British. You can see that people’s flow in Amitav Ghosh’s book (Sea of Poppies, 2008). The indentured servants flow to Africa, Europe and Latin America. But that is not really migration. That is human trafficking. Most of these Hindu workers were offered jobs in Kolkata and put in ships that landed in Latin America. That started in 1835, during the time, the British queen was banning slavery in the colonies. So, they wanted to replace the slaves with indentured servants. The French were the first to draft a treaty (French Treaty of Commerce of 1860). But even when the British abolished slavery in 1835, slave trade continued in Portuguese Goa and ended there only in 1865. I stumbled upon an article in the British Library on the huge slave flow from Africa to India. The Siddi community [descendants of the Bantu tribe of East Africa] is spread all over Asia: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and more. The Siddi community in Pakistan are Islamised and dissolved into the population. But in India, there’s a huge, solid and layered history, as there’s different levels of African presence.

Tell us more…

In Deccan, for more than 600 years, the dominant power was [wielded by] African mercenaries, they are called the Moors [North African Muslims]. They were the kings and generals. In north India, Razia Sultan’s trusted soldier was Jamal-ud-din Yaqut, who was African [an Abyssinian slave]. Later, in the 1500s, a dominant, colossal figure in Deccan was Malik Ambar [served as Peshwa of Ahmadnagar], who was born in Ethiopia, with the name Chapu. He was sold as a little boy in a slave market in Baghdad and was bought by a Gujarati merchant and brought to Ahmadnagar. A brilliant warrior, who became the army chief, he defeated the Mughals and Jahangir hated him. The Hyderabad Nizam have Siddi warriors recruited into his force. That is different kind of Siddis. Then we come to the Siddis [in the Konkan region], the chattel slaves bought from the nomadic Bantu tribes of Africa. They were captured by Arab slave catchers, brought to Mozambique port and exported through the Spaniard and Portuguese ships. Most of the Portuguese ships would anchor in Goa. The captain of the ship, an Arab, was named Syed [meaning noble man/master]. And the root for the word Siddi comes from the word Syedi, meaning the property of Syed. In Pakistan, they are called Sheedi.

A still from 'Rhythm Of Dammam'.

So, the Siddis in the Konkan belt are former slaves?

Slavery continued in Portuguese Goa, as the rich native landlords brought them as manual labours, to work the fields, but also as entertainers, musicians, and sexual objects. There is a very interesting study about the Yellapura [in Karnataka] area. Around 46 per cent of genetic pool (converted within two-three generations) comes from the Brahmin landlords, for over 150 years. This is a crazy number. There are different Siddi groups in India. Gujarati Siddis are predominantly Muslim Siddis. They have a greater connection to Africa because of trade relations and speak a Gujarati creole, but are still marginalised in the Gir forest. In Uttara Kannada (north Karnataka), there’s a peculiar history. In the 1840s, the Portuguese Goan Catholics started court of inquisitions. The Goan inquisition forced local landlords, majorly Brahmins, to convert to Christianity or give up their properties (including slaves). The missionary Francis Xavier, who despised Hindu religion and called it pagan practice, aggressively converted a lot of poor fishermen. The inquisitors would monitor if anyone practised Hindu rites, they would trial and burn them. That’s why the Gowda Saraswat Brahmins ran away to Mangalore (Karnataka) and Cochin (Kerala). A lot of slaves, too, escaped to the Konkan forests. In the next wave, the great plague of Goa [Chorão Epidemic] meant a lot of slave dens were unattended, so more slaves escaped into the forests. In 1865, when the King of Portugal officially banned slavery, the remaining liberated slaves joined the others in the Konkan forest and started their own communes, tamed the wild and cultivated their own food, like in Brazil or the Maroons (African descendants) in the swamps of North Carolina. The Uttara Kannada district landlords, the Brahmin Hegde and Hebbar, got them to clear the forest land and make it arable, thereby re-enslaving them, with intergenerational debts, like farmers anywhere else in India. All the sugarcane and areca plantations in the Konkan belt owned by Brahmins have been cleared/cultivated by the Siddis. In that process, these former slaves were converted as Hindu.

A still from 'Rhythm Of Dammam'.

The Siddis of Konkan are all Hindu?

They are a very unique population. Hindu Siddis are found only in the Konkan region, nowhere else in the world. The former slaves imitated the Brahmins [Bhat/Bhatt] and their rituals. The Siddis adopted Hindu names like: Jairam, Yashoda, Ganapati. Slaves who worked for Christian landlords were converted to Christianity. Chattel slaves were bought by Bijapur Sultan, too, and converted into Muslims. You will find them all in the Konkan region and in the same families, there will be a Christian, a Hindu and a Muslim member. My Siddi friend’s great grandfather was originally Qasim who was bought and sold in Goa to the Portuguese who changed his name to Bastu (Portuguese for Sebastian) and, later, his Brahmin landlord renamed him as Ganapati.

Among the Siddis, the Hindu Siddi community is the most backward. The church helps the Christian Siddis to access education and jobs. The first Hindu Siddi to have graduated from the community is Shantaram Siddi, who’s the Karnataka MLC, and he joined the RSS-affiliated Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram. He makes a cameo in Rhythm of Dammam.

The language of the film has both Konkani and Kannada. Is Siddi Bhasha a mix of both?

In Yellapur, you can see the people speaking Marathi, Konkani, Siddi Bhasha and several others. There is cultural intersectionality because this place is on the border. And Siddi Bhasha is actually Konkani Kannada with a lot of Sanskrit words in it, because of the Brahmin landlords, since the Hindu Siddis don’t have any interaction with outside people. They imitate the Brahmins. Their marriage parties have vegetarian menu and are catered by Brahmins, because the landlords won’t eat at their marriage parties if the Siddis cook. And the Brahmins won’t sit and eat with the Siddis. They have a special area to eat.

A still from 'Rhythm Of Dammam'.

The film starts with the grandfather’s death, Hindu death rituals like Shraadh and Pitru Aradhana are shown. Like gods, their ancestors are shown to have a special place in their homes.

They have a room for their [dead] elders. These ancestors have a continuous presence in their life. For every family decision and event (marriage, funerals), they go talk to them. One person in the family is an oracle, who speaks to the ancestors. That connects them to Bantu people and African tradition. Besides the ancestor worship and the Dammam music, connecting the Siddis to the African Bantus. Their original religion, language and everything taken away from them, they are only left with their music and their Dammam, a small drum. It is this music which brings all Siddis, across religions, to come together, at an annual carnival (in the first week of April), where they jointly worship Siddinaas and dance to the music of Dammam, as if from a muscle memory, an intergenerational memory. This music is used for celebration, mourning, speaking to ancestors, as well as a healing tool. Rhythm of Damam is celebration of their spirit.

It was a prolonged sequence in the film, the rituals followed by the dance. Was it an aesthetic call to shoot it in one long take?

They start at 6 am and end at 6 am the next day, 24 hours of rituals, and they start to dance by evening until next day morning. That’s why the lingering length of that shot [in the film]. The long episodal dance comes in waves, they are in a shamanic trance, going back to their tribal roots. The camera kept rolling, I couldn’t cut. It was a challenge to shoot. Two Dammams take place and the entire film is shaped in between the two. One is the barah din or twelfth day ceremony [after the elder’s death] and the other is the healing ceremony of the boy Jayaram. That is his initiation, as he puts on the face paint. He rejected this outer world or this conditioning. That is their resistance. A kind of coming-of-age declaration, as he starts to play the Dammam.

A still from 'Rhythm Of Dammam'.

In his dream, Jayaram sees his now-dead grandfather and ancestors because of the muscle memory that connects the Siddis to their cultural roots in Africa?

Yeah. But there is some other psychiatric twist into that. There is an African American psychiatrist by the name Dr Joy DeGruy and she had a diagnosis. She wrote a book called Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (2005), where she addressed why the males in present-day African American community is drawn to more criminality, addiction and laziness, and all kind of traumatic symptoms. She found this psychiatric disorder as a syndrome stemming from the intergenerational slave trauma. I drew that material from her work and uses it as a tool to tell the past of the boy. The boy grows out of his innocence, talks about his African past with pride, the magical elements from the grandfather, his uncle mentions a black panther god and the Bantu chief in Africa. But his cousin, who’s a rapper and is quite profane, debunks these stories to tell the boy that, ‘We [the later descendants] are just slaves. [Our forefathers] were put on a boat and sold in the market.’ That’s the trigger for Jayaram, who looks at the murals and pictures of slavery [mounted on the wall of the uncle’s house]. This kind of dissonance creates some kind of psychiatric effect on him. The visions, delusions and flashbacks he gets of his dead grandfather is a muscle memory. Delusion is part of the psychosis. Post-traumatic slave syndrome is a real diagnosis. I use it as a storytelling vehicle to connect all these things in my film.

Tell us about the cast. Are they all non-actors?

The old man, the grandfather figure, Parasuram Siddi, is around 80 years old. He was one of the pioneer theatre persons from that community. And his two daughters are professional actors. One is Girija Siddi, who went to NSD (National School of Drama), where she teaches. She plays Jayaram’s mother in the film. Prashant Siddi, the father of the boy, is a prominent Kannada actor. He’s done more than 50 films. The Havyaka Brahmin landlord, KG Krishnamurthy, is also a prominent Kannada actor. But majority of the people are non-professional actors. However, every Siddi person has a very high artistic propensity, it’s in their blood.

A still from 'Rhythm Of Dammam'.

Which ethnographic filmmakers have inspired you?

Ethnography is an anthropological term, is an orientalist Western word. Many ethnographers study the tribal people. Many documentary films do the same, too. Earlier films like Nanook of the North (1922; world’s first documentary film) show the White man exoticising the eskimoes. That is the history of ethnography. So, the word is problematic. I’m just not documenting them like documentaries do. I take a fictional narrative and superimpose on that the cultural and historical aspects, using documentary subjects in a fictional space. My specialty is blurring the borders of the genres.

In filmmakers’ pantheon, we have gods such as Marcel Duchamp and Maya Deren who, in the 1940s, went to Haiti and spent years to document the Voudoun (or Voodoo) practice, the so-called black magic. That is the subaltern religion, which is oppressed people’s religion, which they secretly practise in any former-slave communities. You can see the same in Yellapura, too. In Haiti, all Haitian people, former slaves, are Catholics. But behind the Catholic altar they worship the Virgin Mary, behind that there’s a voodoo deity. People wrongly think voodoo is black magic. It is actually a fallen religion. It is an ancient African nature worship. Often the masters/oppressors (White men) are afraid of voodoo because they think these people practise it to kill the masters. That’s what they fear.

You aren’t a Dalit but you made Papilio Buddha (2013), you aren’t a Siddi either, though you made Rhythm of Dammam with the Siddis. How do you respond to cultural appropriation?

As a filmmaker, I perceive film as a fine art and it is my primary medium of expression. When I’m telling a story, like in Rhythm of Dammam, it is not Siddi people’s authentic story because I’m not Siddi but this is my representation of their reality and this is my story.

I’m a diasporic person, and like Jayaram, in a certain sense, I’m displaced, too, albeit a privileged or willing displacement, but the Siddis exercise agency, too, through their rituals and the carnival — it is the carnivalesque, borrowing (Russian literary critic-philosopher) Mikhail Bakhtin’s coined word (whose playful spirit mocks/subverts authority/power and liberates the assumptions of the dominant).

In the film, I try to explore the spirit of the Siddi people, their imaginations and their myth. And I only focus on the intergenerational trauma of the human trafficking [slave trade] that happened centuries ago, and the present-day social, class and caste location of these people. For me, the politics of camera is itself intrinsically ethnographic. You are invading others’ privacy. There is an invasion. It is a gun in a way. When we switch on a camera onto other people who become the subject, the camera is going to be the dominant symbol of power. I’m aware of the subject-power relationship very much.

Is it difficult finding distributors in India?

I’m looking for a distributor. I want to show this film. This film is my most benign film. I have no explicit content or anything. I would love my work to reach people. The only reason I chose to show it here (IFFI, Goa) is because of the Konkan people’s proximity to this place. These Siddi people, who are all daily-wagers, came and saw the film for the first time. Next is IFFK. I’m actively looking for the distributors, OTTs, festival circuit and more. So, any distributor wants to have the film, please give my number (smiles).