It was originally called A Band Apart, after the Jean-Luc Godard movie, but the present title of Renjith Kuzhur’s documentary suits the subject matter far better.
18 Feet refers to the distance that the Dalits of Vadama village in Kerala’s Thrissur district were supposed to keep from the Namboodiri Brahmins in the days when untouchability was openly practised. Nobody actually took a scale to measure this distance. It could have been eight feet or 80, but that is immaterial. The very existence of such an abhorrent practice is seared into the hearts of the lowest of the castes. Little wonder, then, that when an elderly man recalls the past, and the time when his pregnant wife had to clear cow dung from her neighbour’s home for money to buy lunch, his voices trembles and he begins to weep.
Tears also stream down the face of his son, Remesh, who was the one in his wife’s belly. Remesh weeps on another occasion when he recalls how upper caste children derogatorily referred to his people by their caste names. There were other people crying in the room that day – Kuzhur, and his sound recordist.
Emotions run high during the 77-minute Films Division production, which was premiered at the Mumbai International Film Festival on January 30. Apart from the persistence of memory, 18 Feet also reveals the persistence of caste prejudice in the country’s most literate state. The film follows the folk music group Karinthalakkootam, which is led by Remesh. The group performs folk and community songs that can be found among the Dalit Pulayar and Pariah sub-castes. They rarely create fresh material, instead choosing to perform music that has echoed through the generations.
Remesh hopes to evoke a sense of community pride in a performance tradition dismissed as “drunken burlesque” by upper castes, he says in the film. In mapping Remesh’s quest, Kuzhur uncovers memories of less equitable times and reveals how these memories continue to influence the present generation. The band members were reluctant to discuss issues around caste and identity, and it took the filmmaker several months to get them to open up.
A Nair by caste, Kuzhur is from the same village as the band members. The co-founder of Karinthalakkootam, Madhavan, is a friend of Kuzhur’s uncle. The 33-year-old filmmaker had helped the band collect information on musical traditions from the elders of the community for a project initiated by the state-run Kerala Folklore Akademi in Thrissur several years ago. He started filming the music group over four years ago, after spending many months getting to know them better and making them comfortable in front of the camera.
It took Kuzhur a while to shift the conversation from music to caste. “They started opening up very late, only two years ago,” said Kuzhur, an editing graduate from the Film and Television Institute of India. The documentary has been culled out of 500 hours of material, which began to take shape only when the band members began talking about their experiences as Dalits. A lot of ground had been covered by then: Remesh’s domestic life, his efforts to build a new home, footage of the performances. “There was confusion about whether I should focus on their lives or the history of their music,” Kuzhur said. “When I structured the film around caste identity, the rest was easy.”
18 Feet initially suggests itself as an account of underdogs using music to gain acceptance and popularity. At a concert, Karinthakalkootam’s members perform their catchy percussive music as Remesh belts out songs in a firm and sonorous voice, and the crowds can barely sit still in their seats.
The documentary gradually reveals layers of complexity. A band member discloses his inferiority complex about his dark skin. Preparations for an inter-caste wedding get underway. Remesh’s life story reveals a lifetime of striving and suffering. An employee of the Kerala State Road Transport Corporation, he sings on the side and lives in a humble house that leaks during the monsoon and can barely contain his family, comprising his wife and two children.
Despite their modest circumstances, the band appears to be doing well for itself. They perform widely, have cut CDs of their music, are accorded appreciation and awards, and get invited to a world music festival in Sarawak in Malaysia, where their folk tunes bring the multi-racial crowds to their feet.
Once again, appearances are deceptive. The musicians were paid the equivalent of Rs 5,000 apiece for their performance, Kuzhur said, and they ran up a debt of Rs 50,000 because they had to buy new clothes to make themselves presentable for the global music tourist crowd.
The caste issue emerged only later, but it was waiting to happen. Remesh’s mission to preserve his unique culture and knowledge is inseparable from his insistence on identifying himself as a Dalit. “This is intangible, and everybody knows it is a bad thing,” Kuzhur said. “Nobody will talk about it on both sides, but the caste issue is there on everybody’s minds.”
During the journey of confession, Kuzhur dispensed with the conventional requirement of objectivity between filmmaker and subject. The intimate and immersive shooting style brings us close to Karinthalakkootam’s members, especially Remesh, and Kuzhur’s affection for them is unmistakable. “I was experimenting with the form of documentary with emotion,” he said. Why can’t documentaries have emotions, like fiction?”
One of his influences was Dutch director Leonard Retel Helmrich’s documentary Position Among the Stars, a close look at three generations of a family living in Jakarta. “My film is more about emotion than information,” said Kuzhur, who has edited Sanju Surendra’s National Award-winning Kapila, which is about Koodiyatam performer Kapila Venu and is also being shown at MIFF. “The band members are my heroes, and I want to be close to them. I did not want the distance that is usually found in an observational documentary.”
