Class and inequality are a real presence in India, completely not bettered: Irfana Majumdar

The film is based on certain incidents that happened in her childhood. She grew up while moving from one small town to the other while my grandfather, who was in the IPS, was transferred.

The idea came about suddenly in a way, through personal circumstances. My grandmother passed away in January of 2016. She lived in the ancestral house of my grandfather, built by his own grandfather. After her death the extended family decided that the house should be sold. This house was connected to me and our family in many ways. It was not the house where my mother grew up but a similar home. It was a bungalow in the cantonment where they moved after my grandfather’s retirement. It was the house that I spent my childhood days in. It was where I grew up in a way. It symbolized my grandparents’ lifestyle, the way of life in India.

My mother said that we must make a film in the house before we lose it. She had written a short story for children called Shankar’s Fairies. It’s a very different tale but had the seed of the film.

In terms of Shankar, the house help, and in terms of this idea of imagination and stories being at the heart of what makes a childhood and its memories so vivid.

I have never really worried about being true to something. The incidents were powerful because my mother remembered them for so many years. Once they entered the script, we felt totally free to tweak them according to the narrative we were trying to create. These were memories of her entire childhood, but we are looking at 2-3 months in a child’s life in the film. We strung them together in a certain way, found ways that they could lead to each other.

In a way it is connected to the work I have done in theatre and documentaries. It was about looking back at a time that was important where there is a change or understanding starting to take shape.

In documentaries, for instance, you have a vision, but you also have a lot of material and see what it reveals. In theatre we do a lot of devised work where we create stuff, work with actors, and then put it all together.

In a way it was like that. It was like I was taking all this stuff, finding what it meant. It was there that my voice was important, and it came in. You could do anything with that material in a way. You could make 100 completely different films.

It is freeing. I love documentaries but I like the imagination, the freedom with creativity. It wouldn’t have worked as a documentary because we don’t have footage from that time. When we were doing pre-production in the house, I had this idea of having it as an immersive theatre experience. People come to the house and see the characters in person. But we were really caught up with the idea of a film and to create this feeling of being back in a certain time and witnessing things happening then was important. Which is why the medium.

In a way it’s about the fact that everything is a story, and we choose to tell ourselves the stories we want to about everything that is happening around us. Children are ones who can tell the most wild, fantastical stories. Some adults can retain a glimmer of it, like Shankar.

My mother would have been ten at that time, the girl in the film is nine years old. The film is based on material spread over a period of ten years. For us that particular year was important. It would situate it in a context that would resonate with people and add a certain dimension to it.

The first time you realize something is very important. All of us have discovered something at certain points in our lives. We don’t think about those times. We just accept that we don’t like this, or that we are against this kind of inequality, but we don’t remember the specific moment where we might have noticed something. I wanted that to be important. That we see this little girl herself notice a certain thing. Even if she doesn’t articulate it totally to herself. The intellectual processing happens later.

We discussed the script in depth for many months. After the first draft of the screenplay was written, we spent many hours every day going through every scene and dissecting it, what were the themes, how the characters were being revealed, how were we placing the different elements and layers, what was important to emphasize. We worked on it a lot and then the final screenplay was written. I decided to trust the work that had already gone into the script. So then during the shoot I tried to use my intuition more. I felt that all the groundwork was there, so when I saw a scene, I let myself sense if it was true to that and working in the moment.

It’s a way of life. The anglicized idea, there’s a nursery, a nanny. Parents and children are separate and interact in certain ways. The person who is with the child and must answer its questions, comfort them and provide security when they need, is the person that the child feels comfortable going to. It didn’t really happen to me. My parents and I were quite close, and we didn’t live this kind of lifestyle at all but I have seen it a lot. It’s part of my mother’s experiences, it’s part of the system. So many people grew up like this.

This is what we were trying to go for, in a way, with all the adults in the film. They have these two aspects—as part of a larger context that they are conditioned by. So many ideas are there because of the upbringing. But, at the same, they all have their individual personalities and characters. Only person outside of it is the child who is not yet fully formed. The little girl is seeing all this. Who will she become? We don’t know yet.

Unfortunately, we are struggling with so many of the same issues. In fact, even more with certain issues. Class and inequality are as much a real presence in India, completely not bettered. We have a huge class and the same dynamics. The manifestations may have changed a bit because of the changes in political climate over the years. Even if it was 1962, you will see the same conversations even today. I don’t think India has found the solution or resolved any of them. In fact, we are deeper into the mire... One thing we don’t have is the idealism of a new India, but we are not as naïve. Everything is more complicated.

It was a five-year process of editing it in a certain way. In 2019 I did my first edit myself because I wanted to understand the footage and material better before working with someone else. That’s the cut I submitted to the Work-In-Progress lab at NFDC Film Bazaar in 2019. In early 2020 we worked with a German editor for a short time but because of the pandemic we couldn’t continue together. Because I had been away from the film, I again made a new edit and then we worked with Tanushree Das. It wasn’t from a scratch although she brought a lot to the project and came up with certain crucial ideas. I had thought a lot about the rhythm and the pacing and played around a lot with the footage.

The production design was mostly done by my mother, and we were lucky in that we shot in my grandmother’s house. We were able to use a lot of things that were already present although we had to recreate 1962. We were able to use a lot of embroidered things, the chinaware. We already had a rich pool of things to draw from. Basically, we prepared the entire house, redesigned it totally. Because we didn’t that much about making a film, we probably did much more than we needed to. We re-did the whole house than just sections we filmed. But it gave us a lot of freedom because we could choose to shoot anywhere. It took us a few months. We moved into the house in January and shot in September. The whole while we recreated the house. The house sold a month after the film shoot ended.

It has been something she has been close to. I don’t know if I was able to recreate that with my leap of imagination. I am sure that some things turned totally different from what she remembered. But she is very good in going with a new idea. When a finished product is its own thing, a complete work of art, then you don’t have to connect it so much with whatever inspiration it drew from. You just see it, in itself, for what it is.