Subasri Krishnan

This Foundation Project that will be implemented by IFA will enable the creation of Facing History and Ourselves* - an audio-visual documentation that is based on the idea of testimony as a mode of creating alternate histories of people and places, which will attempt to problematise the more public, state sponsored narratives. This is a collaboration with the People’s Archive of Rural India - PARI. PARI is both a living journal and an online archive that records and brings to national focus the labour, livelihoods, languages, arts, crafts, histories and cultures of rural India. It makes visible the millions of stories that would otherwise remain largely unseen in mainstream media. Subasri Krishnan is the Principal Investigator for this project.

Subasri Krishnan is a filmmaker and leads the Media Lab at the Indian Institute for Human Settlement (IIHS), an educational institution that works around urban issues. Subasri’s films are on various themes concerning contemporary politics. Her award-winning film titled This or That Particular Person dealt with official identity documents and in that context, the unique identity number or Aadhar. Subasri has worked extensively in Assam. Her film titled What the Fields Remember focussed on the Nellie massacres that took place in Assam in 1983; Sikhirni Mwsanai (Dance of the Butterfly) documented the disappearing live performance music form in Chirang district, Assam; and her forthcoming film Shadow Lines will explore questions of citizenship and nationhood in contemporary Assam.

This project relates to the contemporary history of Assam, which is a very complex one. Assam’s history is rooted in colonialism, the partition of India in 1947, the migrations that ensued and the resulting contestations around social, political, linguistic and ethnic identity. All of this has contributed to a class of people called ‘Irregular Foreigners’ who have languished in detention centres for several years. The situation reached its zenith during the period between 1979 to 1985, when the Anti-Foreigner agitation led by the All Assam Students Union (AASU) demanded that all foreigners (read Bengalis of East Bengal origin) to be expelled from Assam/India. This period witnessed violence in different parts of the State and led to the Nellie massacre of 1983 where around 1800 Bengali speaking Muslim peasants were killed in a period of 6 hours. One of the clauses of the Agreement that was signed thereafter between AASU and the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was that the National Register of Citizens (NRC) list of 1951 would be updated.

While this process was set in motion in 2015, another socio-legal process that began in 1997 began identifying ‘irregular foreigners’ and the setting- up of Foreigners Tribunals all over Assam. These Tribunals have declared over 1038 people (as of 2018) as ‘stateless’ - a category of people who cannot claim their rights under the Constitution as citizens of India. Many of these people and several hundreds more, have spent anywhere between three to nine years in detention centres, with no respite in sight. As many newspaper articles and independent reports brought out by civil society organisations suggest, those who find themselves in the detention centres are poor and from Bengali speaking communities with almost no access to good legal representation. As a result, even before the trial begins, the system is stacked legally, financially as well as socially against them.

This project will document either through video or audio recordings, the lives of ten such ‘stateless’ people who have spent time in detention centres but have now either won their cases in the High/Supreme Court and/or are out on bail. Subasri will engage in a series of personal conversations with them around topics such as home, kinship, friendship, work, their experience of the detention centre (if they choose to speak about it) and their dreams for the future. The project hopes to capture the interiority of their experiences through extensive visual and aural documentation – home spaces, family photographs, objects that surround them – as these articles reveal so much more about family and community histories that public media reports can never aspire to capture. The idea is that this archive of personal testimonies will make a small dent in the public narratives that are put out by the state machinery.

Subasri is best equipped to be the Principal Investigator in this project that IFA is implementing as she has been working consistently in Assam for the past seven years, produced two films about that context and written extensively about it as well. This project is extremely critical at this juncture as it could contribute to a more nuanced understanding of concepts such as ‘çitizen’, ‘foreigner’, and ‘nation-state’, thereby adding to the public discourse and movement that is being built against NRC /CAA(Citizenship Amendment Act) across the country.

The outcome of the project will be the series of audio/video recordings with accompanying descriptive text about the person being interviewed and their family. The deliverables to IFA with the final report will be the audio/video recordings and text. These will also be uploaded on the PARI website.

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees. 

 (*The title for this project has been partially borrowed from the academic Martha Minow’s book Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence.)

This project is part-supported by Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi.