Prachee Bajania

Prachee Bajania is an independent filmmaker based in Dhrangadhra, Gujarat. She did her Post Graduate Diploma in Film and Video Communication from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. She has taught at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore and Ahmedabad University. Prachee has produced over ten films so far. She is currently pursuing a Post Graduate Diploma in Direction and Screenplay Writing at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune.

This grant will enable Prachee to make a feature-length non-fiction film to build an image of the Mughal princess Zeb-un-Nissa – daughter of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb – through a study of her poetry, her depiction in Mughal miniatures and the remains of her palace in Aurangabad. Unlike any other royal figure of the Mughal dynasty, Zeb-un-Nissa remains an enigma in Indian history. Rebel, poet, conspirator, prisoner and a woman who defied societal conventions and remained single - her complex personality has been a point of curiosity and attention for historians and artists, albeit with little insight into her life enveloped in mystery. Prachee will build on the layered history of the Zenana Mahal – first a harem, then an arts college, and now a forgotten monument in ruins – where the princess spent a considerable amount of time. She intends to explore the ruins cinematically, juxtaposed with oral histories, memories of people who spent their formative years in the building as arts students, to create an experimental cinematic depiction of Zeb-un-Nissa rather than a historically authentic one.

Relegated to the confines of the harem for life, Zeb-un-Nissa took to poetry under the nom de plume 'Makhfi' - the hidden one in Persian - with a sense of irony. Replete with carefully crafted metaphors of nature to voice her dissent in the face of adversity, her ghazals are eloquent testimonies of her defiant persona. According to Prachee, Zeb-un-Nissa is relevant today because her poetry is subversive. While on one hand, it evokes a sense of intense pain, love, loss and longing – all movingly coded in the cyclic transformation of nature; on the other, it refers to solitude as if it was the weapon of the wise. Prachee argues that the palace wings at Aurangabad are a metaphor for her words, for her poetry resonates with the arrangement of the Zenana and the desires of the women of her time.

Through available archival material and anecdotal accounts, Prachee will create an image of Zeb-un-Nissa through her poetry and locate her in the current environment of loss, neglect and selective amnesia. Shrouded in the haze of history, her poetry is the only direct window into the immured life of the princess whose offence was too damning for history to account for. Prachee will conduct extensive interviews with historians working on Quila-e-ark in Aurangabad and explore the local cultural histories of the region, particularly the history of poetry to investigate how it places Zeb-un-Nissa in its context. She will interview poets and students of the Fine Arts College from 1972 to 2000 when the college functioned out of Zenana Mahal. She will also go through the daily accounts of Aurangzeb’s court at the Telangana State Central Library in Hyderabad as part of her primary research.

She will study the representations of women in Mughal miniatures alongside the imaginary portrayals of Zeb-un-Nissa by modern artists like Abdur Rahman Chughtai and Abanindranath Tagore, and transform them into cinematic sequences juxtaposed with images from her palace and the sound of her poetry. She will reconstruct the layered historical journey of the Zenana Mahal not just as a monument but as a character lamenting its imminent and untimely collapse. Prachee will question the disowning of the monument by the government authorities which has left it vulnerable to decay and encroachment in an increasingly polarised environment. 

Through  Zeb-un-Nissa’s poetry, Prachee will explore the circumstances in which she wrote and relate it to the current feminist discourse in India. She will use her poetry as an alternative window into the past and try to glean narratives that have been pushed to the margins of the discourse. She will ask whether Zenana Mahal is neglected and left to die an unceremonious death because it was built by a Muslim emperor widely reviled and maligned as a religious zealot, iconoclast and a someone who hated Hinduism.

The outcome of this project will be the film. The Grantee’s deliverable to IFA with the final reports will be the film and audiovisual documentation of interviews with historians as well as the English translation of Zeb-un-Nissa’s poems.

This grant is made possible with support from Titan Company Limited.