Ashish Avikunthak’s new film examines humans’ capacity for violence
Morality and mortality preoccupy Ashish Avikunthak, as do religiosity and spirituality, temporality and spatiality, and a host of other metaphysical concerns. The iconoclast filmmaker has been exploring the dualities and varying hues of these themes in his cinema for over a quarter century. His 15th film, Vidhvastha (Devastated), had its world premiere earlier this year at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. In it, Avikunthak deconstructs his preoccupations and much more through characters engaged in dialectics. However, instead of arriving at any ‘truth’, their conversations perpetuate dissonance, thereby annihilating any semblance of rationality. “I am merely rupturing the relationality between image and meaning that is generally taken for granted in narrative cinema,” the filmmaker opines as we talk shortly after the film’s launch, “that every conversation or dialogue will have a teleological impact on the narrative of the film. I am definitely shattering this epistemic association.”
Vidhvastha is a commentarial film that examines the double life of a middle-aged Hindu policeman (Mainak Dasgupta) in India. In separate confrontational conversations with his wife (Sanghamitra Deb) and lover (Debleena Sen), he opens up about his work as a state-designated ‘sacrificial assistant’ tasked with the extrajudicial killings of Muslim men. Elsewhere in the wee hours of a sleeping city, the protagonist’s alter ego, Arjuna (the third of five Pandava brothers from the Hindu epic the Mahabharata), seeks the counsel of Lord Krishna, who instructs him to execute his duty as a warrior (Kshatriya) without human considerations of attachment and grief. This enacted commentary forms a parallel narrative thread, drawing from the Samkhya Yoga section (Chapter 2, Verses 1–38) of the Bhagavad Gita, in which Lord Krishna advises Arjuna to look beyond the dualities of life and death. He explains the immutability of the soul and the ephemeral nature of bodily existence, and influences Arjuna to fight against his near and dear ones.
The Bhagavad Gita is not just one of the most important philosophical treatises of Hinduism; it also has a wide spectrum of interpretations. More than 200 translations and commentaries have been written, most of which have been published in the last couple of centuries. Avikunthak came across the Gita as a teenager, attending lectures by Swami Chinmayananda, Swami Parthasarathy and others who would regularly visit his hometown, Kolkata (then Calcutta). Over the years, he has read many translations and commentaries. “It has been a significant text in my spiritual journey. However, when I came across [politician, social reformer and Dalit leader] Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar’s thoughts on the Gita, it unlocked a radical interpretation for me, which is the focus of this film,” says Avikunthak.
Criticising the logic of the discourse in the Gita, Ambedkar mounted a brilliant rebuttal in ‘Essays on the Bhagwat Gita: Philosophic Defence of Counter-Revolution: Krishna and His Gita’, written in 1927. In it, he forcefully argues that the Gita provides a metaphysical exoneration of violence, and the guidance that Lord Krishna gives Arjuna justifies violence in Hinduism. Ambedkar demolishes Lord Krishna’s argument that the world is perishable and man is mortal; therefore, it’s ok to kill your friends and relatives because they are essentially souls and will be reborn again. He was of the opinion that the Gita not only justifies caste violence in India but also provides spiritual and religious rationality for perpetuating caste oppression. Avikunthak too makes his stance clear on the revered Hindu text: “In twentieth-century India, the Gita has been used by nationalists like [independence activist] Bal Gangadhar Tilak to instigate political action against the British, whereas Vinayak Damodar Savarkar [who developed the Hindu nationalist Hindutva movement] interpreted this section of the Gita to use violent means for independence. On the other hand, for Mahatma Gandhi, Samkhya Yoga epitomised selfless action, nonattachment and ethical duty. Whereas Nathuram Godse used the Gita to justify his assassination of Gandhi. So who is right? I leave that for you to decide, but with an addendum that the Bhagavad Gita had a great influence on Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi leader who is largely known for being a chief architect of the Holocaust.”
The pathological universe of Vidhvastha oscillates between the policeman’s religious justification of his killings and scenes of ritualistic animal sacrifice, part of the Tantric worship of the Goddess, raising questions about the hierarchy of violence and the nature of divinity – with no easy answers. The animal sacrifice footage was shot during the autumnal Kali Puja in a village where hundreds of goats and sheep are ritually sacrificed. These images are rendered through varying filters: now negative, now prismatic fragments. Their kaleidoscopic impact creates disorienting perspectives. Avikunthak extends his penchant for unsettling the viewer with enacted excerpts from the CIA’s Kubark manual, which describes methods of counterintelligence interrogation (electric shock, threats and fear, sensory deprivation and isolation) used widely from the 1960s to the 1990s. These techniques have been employed in many instances in India, not just against terrorists and Maoists but also against petty criminals. The subjects are also grilled with a series of illogical and unrelated questions, to destabilise them. This often leads to a distortion of identity, causing them to break down. Whereas in some cases, enduring mental and physical torture strengthens their resolve not to submit, evoking in these subjects a feeling of being in the hands of inferiors. Avikunthak draws parallels here with the juxtaposition of various modes of ritual self-mortification. “Numerous body mortification rituals like hook swinging, rolling over fire, walking on fire, jumping on swords, and nailing are undertaken during local festivals that predate organised religions like Hinduism or Buddhism. These are primarily non Brahmanical and are practised by lower-caste groups that have been subjected to denigration since the advent of the caste system. I have been shooting these rituals for many years. In Vidhvastha, I have sutured them. They act like a meta-narrative injunction.”
The perverse desire for self-harm, and masochism, manifests itself in the sexual desires of the policeman’s wife and lover. Their fantasies for violent sex or rape run morally divergent from their condemnation of the protagonist’s act of killing. Avikunthak rigorously dissects the duality and hypocrisy in the beliefs and actions of each character. For instance, the policeman asserts to his wife that, being from the upper-caste Kshatriya clan, it is imperative for him to follow a vegetarian diet; but we see him devouring meat. Avikunthak furthers the bizarreness by occasionally interspersing the narrative with the classical performance of an Odissi dancer in internal and external locations. He justifies these interjections: “I am trying to suggest that someone might be very well versed in fine arts but can still be ideologically aligned with violence, in the same way that someone can be a vegetarian but still be a murderer. Hitler, as you know, was a vegetarian. He is a good example of such a dichotomous existence.”
Vidhvastha, through its complex and probing discourses, grittily examines the nature of violence in its diverse forms. The material for the conversations that the encounter specialist has with the women was mined from various Hindutva online forums over the past decade, with the rise of social-media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, where rightwing handles openly advocate violence against Muslims. “In these calls for the annihilation of Muslims from India, I discovered that justifications were often rooted in Hindu religiosity, both Puranic and Tantric. I have incorporated those rationalities into the film’s dialogical structure,” explains the filmmaker. But by exterminating the ‘other’, can man escape self-annihilation? The protagonist thinks otherwise. He shares with his wife, “I do not kill. I extinguish myself daily, bit by bit.” Avikunthak sums up his film in three words: “Violence begets violence.”
