During a profoundly poignant moment in Anand Patwardhan’s Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, a gentle sense of intrusion crawls in. I almost felt like I should not be looking. Patwardhan’s unmistakable appeal, though, is hard to escape. In his quietest, most personal film thus far, the filmmaker turns his lens on his ageing parents. Dinner table conversations, anniversaries and evening walks metamorphose into precious pieces of oral history, sewn into India’s turbulent past and struggle for independence.

Home is where the heart is in Patwardhan’s documentary. A son’s tender gaze is unfailing and the parents, Nirmala and Wasudev (Balu) Patwardhan, are his most charming subjects. The kindness and ease in their companionship lingers even when they are not in the frame. It follows you after the film’s 96-minute run. They embrace the eventualities of age and time; when maladies approach, they gracefully greet them. Nirmala, however, beseeches Balu to do one thing—he cannot go before her. He keeps his word.

When the room is thick with loss and departure, Patwardhan’s camera does not tremble. As his unsparing documentaries War and Peace, Jai Bhim Comrade and Reason took birth, he returned to this deeply personal footage only after a decade. The outcome is a bittersweet symphony of grief and preservation that makes you ache, smile and weep. You are homesick.

Patwardhan’s films find a way to stir sensibilities in cogent and simple ways. But simple his quest is not; has never been. Each film is a document of the time and a triumph over countless struggles for bringing it to the screens.

The film borrows its name from the Sanskrit phrase reiterating collective well-being and global harmony.

A universalist idea that competes with dominant and exclusivist notions of caste, it has been warped by the current regime. The film rejects and reclaims it. Active participants in the freedom struggle, Patwardhan’s family members reminisce about Gandhi, Ambedkar and Nehru. “I am the only one in the family who never went to jail,” his father chuckles.

We spoke to Patwardhan ahead of the screening at the NCPA. Excerpts from the conversation.

ON Stage: The prism of your films, even when political, has always been personal. But this film’s intimate and winsome quality is unlike any. Since the film is born out of moments you wanted to preserve for yourself, when did it turn into something to be shared with the world?

Anand Patwardhan: The title alone, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, reflects a core belief I had grown up with—that the world is, or should be, family. This film initially started as a home movie triggered by the realisation that my parents were getting old. I wanted to preserve their memory for myself. I also talked to other relatives. Slowly, it turned into oral history that included eye-witness accounts of India’s freedom struggle. But my two eldest uncles, who were most active in the movement, had already passed away.

All my films are personal in that they started not because I wanted to be a filmmaker but because something was troubling me to the point that I wanted to do something about it. I did not want to draw attention to myself but let my camera and recorder transport images and sounds from one stream of society to another. India is a very class- and caste dominated society where people live in impenetrable bubbles. So, my early films were forcing the elite to look at the realities of the working class and offering the latter a chance to look at our elite without the rose-tinted glasses that Bollywood may offer.

In the next phase, when religious sectarianism attacked our country—only to intensify over the last few decades—I turned my lens to fighting religious and caste hatred using the technique of cross fertilisation, which is letting different sections of our caste-divided society speak to and hear each other and themselves. This was a time when outrageous things were said by a few people and by documenting and exposing this, people could be embarrassed or shocked into introspection. Today, we have almost passed that stage. This highlights the dangers of mere observational cinema—one that can be read differently by different people. Realising this, I never took the chance as people could misinterpret what the filmmaker meant. But at the same time, I wanted to persuade people with evidence, not bludgeon them. So, I made sure my facts were correct and organised my evidence as cogently as a lawyer would. The audience was then the judge.

OS: It took you a decade to start editing the film after the demise of your parents. Do you think films can be a culmination of our grief? 

AP: Yes, the home movie shooting ended when my parents passed away and I rarely looked at the footage. Between 1998 and 2018 I made three long documentaries, and the home movie was on the back burner. Eventually, isolation during the pandemic led me to look at the footage again and edit it.

OS: In a time where historical facts are being erased, fabricated and forgotten, what place of significance do reliable oral histories occupy? 

AP: It was the knowledge that history was being rewritten that finally made me decide that this home movie could serve a useful purpose, as it was a first hand account of the very period that our present rulers wish to wipe out and replace with performative nationalism.

OS: To fight and defend the work, one imagines, is the burden of the documentary filmmaker. After five decades, does it get too heavy? 

AP: It has been 53 years since I made my first film, and no, it has never been a burden. I enjoy what I do, and it keeps me sane and free from the despondency that would otherwise have engulfed me.

OS: Indian documentaries have received an exceptional response in the last few years. We would like to know your thoughts on the current documentary scenario and its future.

AP: Many good Indian documentaries have made a mark globally and that is to be welcomed. But real progress will happen only when there are many more places to screen our films within India. There is really no commercial reason that such films are not shown in cinemas and on OTT platforms. It is political fear that prevents a breakthrough.