How indigenous filmmaker Chhatrapal Ninawe made Ghaath, a rare Adivasi thriller, and fought to save it

Actor Milind Shinde as Raghunath in a still from Chhatrapal Ninawe's Ghaath/Ambush.

Among Hindi cinema’s several meme-worthy iconic dialogues is Ramadhir Singh (Tigmanshu Dhulia) telling his son JP Singh (Satyakam Anand) in Gangs of Wasseypur (GoW, 2012), “tumse na ho payega (you’re not cut out for it)”. Little did Nagpur-based Chhatrapal Ninawe know that Anurag Kashyap’s watching his amateur film would land the lead of his film, Satyakam Anand, a role in Kashyap’s epoch-defining cult franchise but it would also bring Ninawe to Mumbai in 2010. Ninawe was inspired by Robert Rodriguez and his first film El Mariachi (1992), made independently on $7,000, away from mainstream Hollywood/Los Angeles, on the Mexican border. “That story inspired me and we made a film on Rs 10 lakh, shot in guerrilla style,” he says, but that film was never realised, it was “too bold an attempt”.

“My idea was how El Mariachi happened, you make a film on a low budget, you show to people, if they say it is a good script and good material, it can then be remade, because it is already made. We were going to pitch for crowdfunding. But we were not aware whether it was a practical idea, whether it was doable in India, remakes don’t happen this way in Mumbai or in any industry. It was wishful thinking on our part,” he says.

At 25, Ninawe, an Ahmedabad MBA graduate, must have looked himself in the mirror and said, “this management life…tumse na ho payega” and returned to his hometown Nagpur. He urged people to get him filmmaking books from the US. “I became a filmmaker by reading books and experimenting with the camera. I shot some wedding videos, documentaries, short films (his three-minute short film about farmer suicide, A Cheque of Death, 2008, was awarded by Filmaka India). I was from Vidarbha, I felt the issue up close. It was appreciated and that gave me confidence to make another film,” he says.

Ninawe tried his hands at editing, cinematography, post-production supervising and writing in the Marathi film industry, “I did ‘Specification Writing’, where the producer describes a story to you and you write it for him, those kinds of jobs. I wanted to have an all-round experience in the industry. After a certain point, I wanted to make my own film,” says Ninawe, now 42, who went to his roots for his next story, Ghaath (Ambush).

Marathi actor Jitendra Joshi in a still from Ghaath/Ambush.

What was to follow would be a long, tenuous journey. While the film travels to a handful of festivals, will any OTT platform pick the film up remains a question with no easy answers.

Ghaath comes in the league of Indian films about indigenous people — the people of the forest and the fight for their “jal (water), jungle (forest), jameen (land)”. From Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, KA Abbas, Govind Nihalani, Goutam Ghose, Sudhir Mishra to Devashish Makhija, filmmakers have dwelt on the Naxalite question. Ghaath, however, is unique because it is one of those rare films where an indigenous filmmaker is telling the Adivasi story, albeit fictionalised. Ninawe hails from the Halba community. So, neither is his story appropriated nor the revolution borrowed. However, there is a certain degree of separation even for him. He is a city-dweller with Adivasi roots from a place near the one he shot in, on the Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh border.

The ghaath of the film’s title has two meanings in Hindi and Marathi: betrayal and ambush. The central emotion of the film is trust. Ghaath/Ambush premiered in the Panorama section of Berlinale 2023, travelled to MAMI Mumbai Film Festival (though not in competition), International Film Festival of Kerala, and to Ajanta-Ellora International Film Festival this weekend. It was a show of trust that the Berlin Film Festival re-invited the film last year after the film was retracted in 2021. Such miracles rarely happen.

A still from Ghaath/Ambush.

In 2017, a chance meeting brought Manish Mundra’s independent filmmaking production company Drishyam Films on board. Then they took it to another studio (name withheld by the filmmaker owing to legal reasons). By end-2019, the film was edited. The pandemic would be only the first of the many roadblocks that would stall the film. An application to the 2020 NFDC Film Lab resulted in the film winning the DI Prasad Labs award. It was invited for a premiere at Berlinale 2021. But at the end moment, the other studio backing the film sent a legal notice retracting it from the festival, without citing any concrete reasons. The film got stuck for 15 months. “I had no clue what was going on. I had many questions but there was no communication,” says Ninawe, who, after much resilience for over a year, had a breakdown and took to social media to voice his angst. His only worry was that his film doesn’t die before it’s even born.

A vocal Ninawe is grateful to the media, filmmakers and cinephiles who amplified his voice. “They turned me, a common man, into someone whose voice can be heard. It wasn’t very easy for me to go public and say things, it takes a lot of courage, I’m not activist or a politician, I’m a filmmaker, but I had no other way.”

Eventually when he found out, it was about “a legal complication and a commercial issue between two business partners, Drishyam Films and the other studio…a complicated deal of three films, including mine. It was not corporate censorship…nothing to do with my film or me. The studio didn’t ask me to cut any part. They were very clear about it.”

“But I can’t be crying over a small thing. If a marriage goes wrong, doesn’t mean the people in it are wrong. My ultimate goal is that my well-intentioned film should reach people, not get buried.” In September 2022, Shiladitya Bora of Platoon One Films came as “the final piece in the puzzle”, a saviour who solved the entire matter and ensured the film reaches Berlin.

Actor Jitendra Joshi (left) and director Chhatrapal Ninawe at Berlinale, 2023. (Photo ©Berlinale)

After the media coverage, Berlinale sent them another premiere invitation, for 2023, in solidarity, thanks to Michael Stütz, the head of Berlinale Panorama — it was a historic step. “Such miracles usually don’t happen,” says Ninawe, a 2022 Berlinale Talent, whose determination to fight for his film was sealed after a ‘Motivation for Change’ session.

The 2-hour, 6-minute gripping film, which unspools in a non-linear format and going into the past, “is about…a Naxalite, who’s living in a town as a mill labourer, he’s in hiding. Gradually we find out, he’s trying to chase a police Jeep, trailing an officer who supposedly killed his brother, who was the leader of their Naxalite group, working between Red Corridor and government-controlled area, on the border. The leader, disgruntled, disappointed by the movement, had wanted to surrender.”

Ghaath reminds of Vetrimaaran’s Asuran (2019), thematically, of trust and betrayal, but also visually in a couple of scenes. The rawness, of the landscape and emotions. One, in particular, is reminiscent of Asuran’s beginning scenes, an aerial shot, a police Jeep driving on a dirt road as Manju Warrier’s Pachaiyammal and her brother run to hide in the forest. Both have the obvious similarity of how innocents are stuck between the system and their marginality, the Adivasi and the Dalit, respectively, in the two films. The moment they choose to fight back; they are branded the devil.

A still from Ghaath/Ambush.

Ghaath’s DOP Udit Khurana, a 2023 Berlinale Talent, does a spectacular lens job, from the hanging moody blues on a huge lake, the long stretches of a dam, entries into deep, labyrinthine forested pockets, the thrill and fear of night-time scenes, making the characters’ conundrum, un-moored-ness, disappointments, deceits and betrayals palpable in the atmospheric frames. Both Jitendra Joshi (Godavari, will be seen in Janhvi Kapoor-starrer Ulajh) and Milind Shinde vie for your attention. The writing of the section where a humane cop (Joshi), symbolic of the power centre, bonding with a literal outlier, the aboriginal Perku (Janardan Kadam), like two lost childhood friends on a summer holiday in an orchard, is so refreshing to watch. There’s also how a militant hopes for a normal life, for love. And even though a sense of the ominous hangs through the film, it rises and shines in the little moments when the twain meets, in the extraordinary display of trust, albeit short-lived, between ordinary strangers.

The slow burn film is set in the 2008-10 years in Gondia district of Maharashtra, on the border with Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. For authenticity, it was shot close to the Naxal area, in the government-permitted area called Itiadoh Dam, in Rawanwadi, 20-30 km from the Red Corridor.

The film — intelligible for the Hindi-speaking audience — has been shot in the local dialect, jhaadi boli (jhaad patti, jhaad pradesh means dense forest), it’s a dialect of Marathi. And mixed with Hindi and tribal words from MP and Chhattisgarh…the confluence of dialects is a reality of all border areas.

While the Gond is a predominant tribe in the tribal population of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh, says Ninawe, he doesn’t mention any particular tribe in the film, which represents an inter-tribal reality, of all tribal people as a whole. “I have seen Naxalites when I was 10 years old, in the same area where we shot. I used to visit my aunt’s place, in a nearby village, when I visited my grandparents during vacations. Our ancestors were from that area. So, when I wanted to make a film, I wanted to make one about jungles, the issues there…stories from my place, stories that I know very well. Stories from that area never come out, do not reach the silver screen,” he says.

The Gondia area was cleared after the 2008 Operation Green Hunt. “Naxalite influence is completely zero in the area.” “Coal belt and tribal areas overlap usually. But in the film, I did not consider coal or mining as the point of conflict. Like it is in Chandrapur, there are no mines in this area. The main conflict, even if you see historically, is of land. Go back to the Mughal era, and study the tribal areas. The main tribal people do not believe in giving revenue for the land to anybody. The land is theirs. They didn’t give to the Mughals, protested against it with the Britishers, take Birsa Munda’s example. This land is ours. That’s the concept. That’s the conflict. Modern government taxes the land, on crops. The conflict starts from there.”

The point that the film upholds is that “human life is more important than ideology any day”. The tribal people are caught in between. The dilemma for the tribals is to stay alive and in doing that who do you side with: Naxals or the State? Ninawe, a centrist liberal of sorts, says, “We need to question things in a Socratic way (systematic doubt and questioning of another to elicit a clear expression of a truth). My film doesn’t take sides. The only side I have taken is of indigenous people, the tribal people living in that area.” This reminds us of a recent dialogue from Makhija’s Manoj Bajpayee-starrer Adivasi manhunt Joram, in which a tribal man asks the police officer, “Which uniform to trust?” — the police's/CRPF's or the revolutionary's (Naxals). Trust is the central emotion of the film. “The first character has a relationship with an informant. Maoist’s relationship with a lady, or the friendship between the aboriginal man and policeman. There is relationship of trust between these people. People’s trust is very important in such areas of insurgencies. In (Chhatrapati) Shivaji’s time also, because of the trust, it was possible to wage the guerrilla war,” says Ninawe.

A still from Ghaath/Ambush.

Writing thrillers excites the filmmaker, who makes an appearance in his own film. He feels a story told in an interesting way engages more. “Achhi kahani batana hai, achhi film banana hai (I want to tell a good story, make a good film). It is the ‘what happens next?’ aspect that keeps you hooked. You can tell a very romantic film in a thriller format. That’s my style,” he says. For visual references for his films, the self-taught filmmaker — who is learning by hit and trial not just the craft but also how craftiness surrounds the business of it — watched Terrence Malick’s Thin Red Line (1998), Idris Elba-starrer war drama Beasts of No Nation (2015), Ken Loach’s Irish war drama The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006). And for inspiration, he goes back to Akira Kurosawa, to Shohei Imamura’s raw style of shooting in the serial killer thriller Vengeance is Mine (1979) and Sumitra Bhave and Sunil Sukthankar’s “Iranian” Marathi dramas.

Ghaath presents in a thriller format a compendium of disparate characters: a woman living alone with her mother. An aboriginal living alone, in deep forest, on an island…“these are helpless people, they do not have weapons”. The film’s protagonists are “a Maoist, a policeman, and a radical ultra-Left person but their sidekicks are very simple,” the filmmaker chimes in.

Ninawe’s debut feature developed in a unique way from a short film initially. Barring four actors: Jitendra Joshi, Milind Shinde, Suruchi Adarkar, Janardan Kadam, the rest actors are from Vidarbha. “Suruchi went to meet and speak to the tribal girls and came back to ask whether she can put a green contact lens because these girls had green eyes. I wanted to work with Milind Shinde. And Jitendra’s character, the policeman from Mumbai, in the film is also an outsider. Dhananjay Mandaokar (the brother) comes from the region…a lot of the story developed with his inputs. Films and filmmaking in that area is a rarity. So, whether a Bombay filmmaker goes into these interiors to interpret a local’s story his way or a local guy makes, films about such areas should get made. The city gaze would, of course, be there, and, in fact, it should be there…problem arises when only the one-sided external gaze is shown in these films. If one sees, even RRR is a tribal film but his perspective is different. The tribals appear exotic. They are not exotic, they are normal people like us, they wear dhoti kurta and look like villagers,” says Ninawe, “I have seen their life from very close, I have observed my relatives’ lives, too. I have roots in the Gondia district. But even though I am a tribal myself, I was raised in a city, where my friends were from across the classes. I had no knowledge or understanding of caste differences until my engineering examination, that’s when one has to write their caste.”

Janardan Kadam's Perku being eerily playful in a still from Ghaath/Ambush.

Caste raised its head in the making of his film, too. Kadam's Perku (the zombie from Zombivli, 2022), who plays the aboriginal in , told Ninawe that though he’s from Bombay but he doesn’t get work because he’s a Dalit. Ninawe, who talks straight, said he’d get the role if he’s good. Kadam’s audition, like his act in the film, was sensational. And, perhaps, that’s why inclusive representation is crucial in our films and the film industry. Trust drives this film in more ways than one.