The plot of the film
is on the Himalayan foothills. There, an 80-year-old woman and a 19-year-old
girl are two of the seven remaining inhabitants of an abandoned village. The
genesis of the film is Srishti’s observations of her ancestral village of
Uttarakhand. A specific subtlety can be seen in those villages of Himalayan
foothills - the effects of rural to urban migration. Uttarakhand has 1000 empty
villages, Srishti mentioned, that is a huge number.
This urban migration
concept is not new, but then it is ‘in your face’ in Uttarakhand, way visible
and tactile. When Srishti started researching about the film in 2015, there
were only seven people remaining in that village. She grew up listening to
stories from her parents about how families after families are leaving the
village, for greener pastures of cities. The abandonment she had seen created a
distinct imprint on her to make this experience into something concrete. “I
started spending time with these few people who were remaining in the village
and I met the main characters who struck a chord for me to tell their story
because they were very interesting - the circumstances they were living in -
the perspective that they were bringing in. So I decided to go about spending
time researching and working with them. And that’s how the story began. That’s
how in some ways the story chose me because it comes from my own ancestral
village,” says Srishti.
Srishti intuitively
knew that a film on migration must be made, then she met Leela Devi, the
protagonist. Srishti found her fascinating, she was over 70 years old and she
was living alone in a big rundown stone and mud house, the house itself may be
more than 100 years old. Her daughter lives in the city, she had lost one child
and her husband: and everybody else, all her neighbors had migrated to the
cities. She was pretty unique as a story herself in terms of how she was so old
and unwilling to move out of that village. It’s been 60 years she has been in
this village, before that she was in her village, before marriage, which is
nearby. Her identity was her village.
She was a farmer all
her life but because of her old age and dearth of people, she stopped farming.
That was very upsetting for her, as if she has lost the vitality that she is
not productive anymore. But still she did not want to leave the village,
because if she leaves, she will lose her identity.
“If you’ve seen the
film, you will realize that the things she had to say were very poetic. She was
a magnetic personality, a great storyteller with a feisty spirit - apart from
the fact that she lived alone in this house, without any neighbors: that was
very brave of her to continue living life like that. She was really the reason
that I was compelled that there was a film with her. She was happy for me to
film her life. It was a great friendship that I found in Leela Devi,” Srishti
observes.
Life is harsh in the mountains. Leela Devi
is a widow, a senior citizen, without any social support. She gets a small
pension money from the government that comes to her Post Office account in the
adjacent village. She, with her Ration Card and Below Poverty Line status can
hardly sustain herself. She cannot go to the next town to buy vegetables, it is
not available in her uninhabited village. “I remember when I used to go to the
town close by and she would look at me and she’d be like, can you buy me some
tomatoes? As a person living alone, there was no support system in terms of
civil society or the government for an old person to be living like this,”
mentions Srishti.
Medical services are
an hour away from her village. Most of the villagers depend on public
transport, it took them more than two hours one way. One is remote, even from
the health services, and in such a condition, aging Leela Devi was living
alone.
The film, ‘Ek Tha
Gaon’ is a film on migration. Film maker Srishti has also made some interesting
observations on Goa’s reverse migration. She opines that though a bunch of
people are coming to Goa and opening up either guest houses or establishments,
there is a lag of integration to bring the agricultural and farming aspect back
to life. She sees a lot of empty fields here and in her mind, it is a big loss
for the community and sustenance.
“When people stop
being farmers or their lifestyle is not dependent on farming and that their
livelihood is not coming from farming, they stop looking at land in a nurturing
way, because their livelihood is maybe coming from working in a hotel, or a
hospitality industry. The farmland that would be right next to your house but
you’re not going to think about the right kind of plants to retain water
tables, to make sure that some kind of insects don’t or pesticides don’t take
over the land. So that kind of connection gets broken. If you were a farmer,
you would constantly think about the health of the land, and you would
constantly act to make sure to give back the health to the land and protect the
land and the fertility. If there are many farmers then it contributes to a
larger micro-climate, a larger landmass that would be healthier, and is taken
care by human beings involved because simply they’re a farmer. If you are not
thinking about the health of the land, that’s one loss I see when reverse
migration happens. With the reverse migration, the occupation or the livelihood
they bring back is never so connected with the ecosystem. That’s a major loss,
I feel.” Srishti rues.
When the outsiders
come and settle in either Uttarakhand or in Goa, there is no guarantee that
those outsiders will work closely with the community. She observes that though
there are exceptions, but for the majority, she feels it is a conflict of
insider and outsider, everywhere. For a filmmaker like her, she would like to
make films with and for the people with an empathetic gaze, to show the inner
conflicts through her lens. “I do think there are stories here in Goa, that’s
something I’m very interested in, to show how people live in their ecosystems
and what are the narratives that come out of it. So for me, people in Goa
living with their water bodies and living with their oceans and living with
their mangroves, they are beautiful stories. But I need to go slow. I need to
have those deeper connections with people and go out slowly to understand
whether there is a story that Goans would want to tell and whether I could be
the person to tell that story for them. I believe I take a longer time to
become friends with people to genuinely be able to tell stories of communities
and individuals,” she says.
She is particularly
interested in people’s relationship with their landscapes, their narratives and
the stories that come out of that relationship, as her subjects. She focuses on
a modern understanding of the immediate environment, and also digs what one
might be losing through their aspirations. She says, “My work is to emotionally
touch people with these kinds of stories. And then hopefully, it will propel
people to take action.”