Ram Ke Naam maker Anand Patwardhan’s historic personal turn in Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam

The film, after a festival run and awards — Best Editing Award at the prestigious IDFA 2023 (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, where his Vivek/Reason, 2018, won the Best Feature-Length Documentary) — screens today at 6.30 pm at Little Theatre, National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA), Mumbai.

Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, the film whose title is the Sanskrit phrase from the Maha Upanishad, takes you back in time — in pre-independent India. The veteran non-fiction filmmaker’s search of lost time through his family’s and his nation’s history hopes to thwart the erosion of our collective memory, and should be a mandatory watch in schools and colleges. The film stands on a universalist idea that competes with dominant, exclusivist notions of caste. The upper-caste Patwardhan grew up in a casteless household, in a different time. Alongside India’s metamorphic change over the past decades, Patwardhan’s films are indicative of his own political journey from Left revolutionary social justice to Gandhian non-violence and BR Ambedkar’s anti-caste philosophy. The World is Family epitomises that.

Achyut Patwardhan in the centre, in black coat. (Photo courtesy Anand Patwardhan)

To borrow from French philosopher Simone Weil’s book Gravity and Grace, published posthumously, “It is better to say I’m suffering than this landscape is ugly”. Personal tragedies move even the stone-hearted but communal tragedy — as the world has been seeing with the Palestinian and Sudanese genocides, Manipur violence, Congo ethnic cleansing — no longer ruffles feathers.

Anand Patwardhan with his parents Wasudev and Nirmala Patwardhan. (Photo: Simantini Dhuru)

The World is Family begins in 1999, with Patwardhan’s parents, Balu (Wasudev) and Nirmala on a morning walk. Patwardhan’s voiceover tells us that his mum, 12 years younger than his papa — who had a speech defect in the wake of a heart surgery and encephalitis — made the latter promise that he wouldn’t die before her. He kept the promise.

As a fly on the white-washed wall of an old house with tall ceilings, watching Patwardhan’s delightfully adorable parents, in the film, go about their day, with Kumar Gandharva and Mallikarjun Mansur revving up the cassette player, made me a little envious of him. His brimming with life-force father who exclaims that he doesn’t need to exercise laughing for he’s “laughed all my way through life”, telling a funny story now and then, and a mother who’d scorn his camera-wielding son with her savage retorts and let him in on politicians’ secrets she was privy to growing up. She narrates how she met Mahatma Gandhi (a photo of hers with Gandhiji hangs in Nehru Museum), who gifted her his handkerchief, which she took to Sindh but Partition took away her precious treasure. The power of personal history/narratives trumps every other form of storytelling.

Anand's uncles Purushottam Patwardhan (left) and Achyut Patwardhan. (Photo courtesy Anand Patwardhan).

Patwardhan grew up in a family of freedom fighters. Most prominently, and little written about, were his two eldest uncles: Rau (Purushottam) and Achyut Patwardhan, one a Gandhian and the other a revolutionary, respectively. Achyut (who founded the Sahyadri Schools later, based on J Krishnamurti’s philosophy) and Aruna Asaf Ali rebelled against the British shoulder to shoulder. When Gandhiji announced the Salt movement (the civil disobedience defying the British Salt Tax in 1930), both Rau and Achyut wrote to each other about joining the national movement. The other uncles in the family met these two brothers in Ratnagiri and Yerawada jails. Rau would start a union in a sugar factory for the labours and shelter BR Ambedkar who wrote Thoughts on Pakistan at his house. Anand’s father was the only member of the family who didn’t go to jail against the British. His  grandmother went to jail, too.

On his father’s side, Anand comes from a family of not-too-well-to-do Konkan Brahmins of Ahmednagar. And, so, one rule in the house was that “No one could claim anything as personal property. The biggest crime was to say this is mine and you can’t have it. That’s how we learnt sharing almost instinctively,” Patwardhan’s voice tells us in the film.

His mother Nirmala, who’d teach young girls the Japanese art of Raku blazing at her home, studied art in 1944 at Kala Bhavan in Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan, in West Bengal and grew up to be an eminent ceramist traversing the globe with her pottery. Here was a mother who, immersed in her craft, wasn’t just moulding pots but also a young mind — “just the right amount of pressure, not too much, not too little” — into learning the importance of space, self-reliance and freedom of expression, as little Anand studied in boarding school.

It was during the 1942 movement that Balu went to Karachi, where Anand’s parents love story began. Nirmala was born in Hyderabad in Pakistan. In 2003, Anand went to Karachi, as part of a people-to-people peace movement, during former Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s tenure. At the time, people on either side of the border, as seen in the footages, chanted “Not war, we want peace.”

Partition separated Anand’s mother’s family from their Muslim friends. In 2003, he went to see his mother’s ancestral house Maitri, where Jawaharlal Nehru had stayed and it was turned into the Abbasi Hospital later. He met his maternal grandfather’s friend’s daughter, whose stories from Partition was how “Human beings can be most unkind. No animal can be like that. Strange as it may seem now, they were Hindus and we were Muslims, but that nobody seems to even mention it,” she says in the film.

The film also features freedom fighter Dr GG Parikh, a champion for communal harmony, saying: “Quit India’s conception was not narrow nationalism, but an offer for cooperation for free India. Quit India slogan was coined by Yusuf Meherally. We remember everyone, why don’t we remember him?”

“The story of Muslims who fought for unity and harmony have been written out of history.” The film features a character of whose existence a majority of us is unaware of: Allah Baksh, chief minister of Sindh, who was murdered by the Muslim League. In his book Muslims Against Partition of India (2015), historian Shamsul Islam recounts how the British allowed only Muslim elites to vote on Partition, who opted for Pakistan. Thousands of working class Muslims, who had no say, were mobilised in 1942 by secular leaders like Allah Baksh and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan against Partition.

Among the moving segments of the film is Patwardhan speaking to the target audience: schoolchildren, clearing the misconstrued air about blaming Gandhi for Partition. Patwardhan, in a grandfatherly way, tells the young minds that Gandhi rejected the idea when Nehru presented it as the sole option after the riots. “Partition was a very depressing moment for him.”

Among the heartbreaking moments in the film was to watch Patwardhan, camera in hand, letting the filmmaker in him take precedence over the son when shooting the last moments and funeral rites of his parents. Perhaps, at that moment, stepping into his alter ego helped the son to grapple with his monumental grief.

This rare film, bookended by his father’s laughter, is an elegy not just for his parents and uncles and the likes of them — actors of history no history books wrote about — but also to the values on which a free nation was founded upon. A throwback to a time when everyone was family and homes were thrown open to embrace strangers. The personal and political segues so seamlessly into each other that it is difficult to pinpoint where one ends and the other begins. One imbues the other, like two tributaries flowing parallelly and meeting the river. Editing is, perhaps, the most difficult, and least appreciated, job in filmmaking. The precision of what to keep and how much makes or breaks a film. The task of balancing the subjectivity while remaining objective remains all the more difficult. And, thus, it befits that the film grabbed the editing award for Patwardhan at the best documentary festival in the world.

And, unlike the raw, gritty, grainy feel of his previous documentaries, the polished nostalgia-evoking visual finesse of The World is Family, a compendium of vintage sepia-hued family photographs and video footages that Anand shot over two decades, is the work of colourist Sidharth Meer of BridgePostWorks.

The World is Family subtly portrays how our parents, their worldview, the environment we grow in shape our thoughts but in the end only the discerning individuals, and not carbon copies, can leave their distinctive mark on the world. There’s a covert irony of the meaning of the word “family”. In the Sanskrit phrase, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, which translates to the whole world is family, and not “one” family, as many modern translators put it, because then all differences and diversity will have to leave the room. Family can be a happy place and a contested ground. The other derivative meaning of the word “family” that is now commonly rejected is the root of the word which traces itself to the Latin familia, according to A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890): “Familia is frequently used to signify only the slaves belonging to a head of a family…Slaves who belonged to the same familia were called, with respect to this relation, familiars.” That’s a food for thought for another day, another article.

For now, nothing describes Patwardhan’s lifelong endeavour better than what Milan Kundera wrote, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”