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SITA’S FAMILY
A film by Saba Dewan
Produced by Public Service Broadcasting Trust
Hindi, Punjabi and English with English sub-titles, 60mins
A portrait not simply of family dynamics, but of the spaces that women must continually negotiate between the home and the world
Saba Dewan’s new film is a searching and moving journey through the generations of women in her family. The film is so biographical and so personal, so close to the bone and so revealing of mothers and daughters and of the particular mothers and daughters involved, that it seems absurd to call it a ‘documentary’. And yet, the film reaches through the personal to the universal, providing a portrait not simply of family dynamics, but of the spaces that women must continually negotiate between the home and the world.
The eponymous Sita was the filmmaker’s grandmother, a freedom fighter, political activist and part of the struggle for women’s rights. When she died (after a strenuous election campaign for Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party), she was a sitting member of the Rajya Sabha. Her very active life and her genuine and unending social concerns left a huge impression on her growing children, four of whom were girls. One of them, Manorama, decided that she was going to be like her mother, out in the world, active and committed. The youngest daughter says, equally vehemently, that she never wanted to be her mother, that she would always place her children first.
Sita’s daughters and son meet at their childhood home and through their conversations, memories and reminiscences, we get a finely nuanced and shaded oral portrait of the woman who bore and raised them during the heady days of the freedom struggle. Sita was sent to jail for her part in the Quit India movement and her two youngest children were allowed to live there with her. They also saw their father arrested, but it was the arrest and incarceration of their mother that left the lasting impression. At the same time as the memories sketch out a life of political activism, another picture is also created, about Sita’s life at home, her centrality to the family where she was the ‘axis’ upon which everything turned.
While Sita is the ghost that haunts the film, the film’s pivot is Manorama, journalist, mother of the filmmaker and grandmother. It is her life that is the bridge between the memory of the political activism of her mother and the immediate, personal concerns of her daughters. There are many emotional moments in the film and the camera does not shy away from the tears that are shed, gently and quietly.
Manorama is a remarkable woman and her daughters carry and share the burden of her charisma and determination. Though she hobbles up the stairs, Manorama’s back is metaphorically strong. She makes no apologies about the way she has lived her life. As one of her daughters says, she has given her girls a room with a view, a gift more precious than her constant presence in their childhood. At the end of the film, when mother and daughters try to understand what they have done to and for each other, Manorama asks the younger women how, as women, they have judged (and cherished) her in the way that they have, never having made the same demands of their father or having asked of him what they ask of her.
For me, this is THE moment of the film: how do we look at our mothers when we have become adults ourselves, where do we place their strengths and their weaknesses, and ours in relation to theirs, how do we judge their public commitments and their private lives, are we bound to see them always, first as our mothers and only second as the women that they have struggled to become. What is the significance of their lives in a context of their own? These are some of the questions that Sita’s Family raises and tries to answer.
For further information, contact : Saba Dewan
A-19 Gulmohur Park
New Delhi 110 049
aakar@del3.vsnl.net.in |
