MUBI review: In Shishir Jha’s meditative Dharti Latar Re Horo, Santhalis sing of Adivasi co-existence & displacement

Stills from Shishir Jha's film Dharti Latar Re Horo (Tortoise Under The Earth), on Santhali Adivasis, that has released on MUBI.

It isn’t enough to watch Emmy-winning Vir Das’ explosive monologue act on Two Indias, clap, put a social media post and forget the next day. How many of us really do engage with the Other India? Some of those “Other” come to our homes and workplaces, make our lives run smoothly, yet others’ come as news we see and unsee. We read and watch, and disengage. The lived realities they show us is not ours and we think that doesn’t concern us. It is this latter group, the twice-removed Other, deep in faraway jungles, that a handful of writers and filmmakers — only a handful — train their lens on. Some to appropriate that culture for own good, others (from around those regions) to tell their story because their story and their lives aren’t profitable for commerce (big films and industries). But their lands are. What all we erode in the name of development is what is highlighted in Shishir Jha’s Santhali film, Dharti Latar Re Horo (Tortoise Under the Earth, 2022), which has been released on MUBI.

The film takes us not too far away from Jadugoda, India’s first uranium mines, in East Singhbhum district of Jharkhand, to Turamdih. Uranium mining has been going on since 1980s in Jharkhand, resulting in not just huge displacement of Adivasis, deforestation and destruction of nature, but the radioactive tailing ponds (the uranium wastes, in the mining’s wake, left in manmade ponds) polluting their water, land and air, leaving their children deformed, crippled, diseased and dead.

Jagarnath Baskey in a still from the film.

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In Dharti Latar Re Horo, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad-graduate Jha, who earlier made a short film Te Amo in Cuba (he did a workshop with Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami), trains the lens on the Santhals of Turamdih uranium mines in Talsa village, in the neighbouring Jharkhand — he grew up so close and yet so unaware of their existence. For someone who grew up in Darbhanga unable to finish watching a film on TV owing to “low electricity in Bihar”, Jha has made a slowburn that is a must-watch in one go. Jha trains his lens on the loss and dispossession of the Santhalis seen through a visually poetic and lyrical coming together of myth, memory and mining.

Jha remains a fly on the wall in his docu-fiction throughout. Documentary feature, that has been making India proud globally and taking it to the Oscars, is a new style of filmmaking, but in Jha’s slice-of-life film, the documentary and the storytelling blends so beautifully that it’s difficult to point where one ends and the other begins. These are real people going about their lives, well aware that doom is nigh, the filmmaker’s lens watches from a corner, and once in a while his craft shines through, in his slow pans and sustained shots — a depressed mother talking to herself as the ghost of the daughter appears and disappears just like the thoughts of her; she talks to the plants about her dead daughter, crying because there is no water in homes to water these plants and trees (no less than their own children), the water in the ponds are toxic; the Santhali people going to the village mela, to sing and dance, even as this might be their last mela in their ancestral village; the protagonist looking up at the sun, holding onto an old growth Banyan tree with all his life even as his entire village picks their pots and pans and is made to depart. In one fell swoop, Adivasis like the Baskeys have lost both their future (daughter) and their past (ancestral forest/village). But they still sing. And it is through their song and dance that the subaltern speaks.

Dharti...’s subject reminds of Saurav Vishnu’s short documentary Tailing Pond (2021), narrated by Cynthia Nixon (Sex and the City actor), on Jadugoda. The phlegmatic pace in Dharti... is just Jha listening in to the Santhals over a year. “Cinema is all about time…you capture time.” These Santhals depend on the forest, entire families cycle on low-light highways to fetch some money, but Jha didn’t want to dramatise the story, instead he has let the locals sing of their sadness and their joys.

A still from the film.

Research and stories about the Santhalis, by Christian missionary Paul Olaf Bodding, from a pre-Independence era, and more recently, by doctor turned Sahitya Akademi-awarded writer Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar — his evocative prose, magic realism and kadambi trees — and the folk tale of Earth’s creation story became Jha’s entry point into the larger tribal story.

Similar to that of America’s Lenape and Iroquois people, the folk tells that Earth was beneath water in Ancient times, dug by earthworms, and soil was piled on the back of a great sea turtle that continues to grow until it’s carrying the entire world. Jha’s cinema vérité borrows from the poetic, sews the folk tale tradition, songs, indigenous wisdom with the realities of their lives, the tragedy but also their little joys, and how entwined their lives are with nature, evinced in just one dialogue of Mugli’s, “If we dig, will it hurt the tortoise?” The films, like Kiarostami’s, tell us of the impossibility of really knowing others’ lives even if they tell us their story.

A still from the film.

Jagarnath and Mugli Baskey, who have lost their daughter, are tired of being moved constantly, of tearing down and rebuilding homes and lives, are aware of the poison in the tailing ponds, land, and air, owing to uranium mining, and yet choose to live with it because why must they leave their home. Paramount, in this film, is human dignity. Tortoise Under the Earth is an exploration of a deeply profound co-existence, between tribal communities and the forest that is their traditional home. Here is a people that just doesn’t just keep taking from the forest, they also return to it, fodder, stories and tending care. They know survival is a two-way street and that balance must be maintained at all times, something we city folks could never fathom. Mythological stories of the jungle and a community’s collective memory are what fuels the people’s lives here. The film starts with Sohrai, the thanksgiving ritual at crop-reaping and ends in Baha, when seeds are sown. The film, then, frames the one-year cycle and cultural journey of the Santhals. The film subtly asks of us, whether the human cost is negligible for a nation desirous of becoming a nuclear power?

A still from the film.

The Adivasis, much before any scientific evidence of uranium in these parts, these people knew of its existence.  Because some “magical power” or rather curse resulted in a “mystical illness” causing deformation in children and still births. Turamdih (10-12 km from Jadugoda), where the film is shot, is a new tailing pond near Talsa village. Both the landscape and the human story at the heart of the film are haunting.

A still from the film.

While it is a story of loss, of dispossession and displacement, of degeneration and disaster, Jha keeps the focus on the Santhali life and the protagonist couple. Mining is not shown. Showing it isn’t relevant since the film is about the imapct on the human life. And, so, Jha shows the human life, grieving but also being happy, be distraught but also sing and dance. To displace them from their forest home is to uproot an old growth tree from its root, knowing well it is a recipe for extinction. And if you don’t feel that pain, something inside of you is dead. Empathy doesn’t cost a dime, really. Jha’s film is an empathetic reminder to not forget our Adivasis in our national progress.

A still from the film.

Iranian filmmaker Abbasi Kiarostami once said, “The day Iran will run out of petrol, Iran will be free.” Similarly, once mining leaves the jungles of Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and beyond, will the Adivasi be truly free, will we be able to preserve the Adivasi people and culture — the first and oldest citizens of this nation. Until then, to borrow from Hansda’s book’s title, The Adivasi Will Not Dance.