Dear Friends:

PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research) cordially invites you to the Mumbai premiere of the documentary film "Words on Water", followed by a discussion with director SANJAY KAK.

This film screening is part of our week-long PUKAR Monsoon Symposium, from 19-26 July 2003. "Words on Water" (85 minutes, 2002, English/Hindi) is writted and directed by Sanjay Kak, edited by Sameera Jain and Reena Mohan, with photography by Sanjay Kak and Ranjan Palit, location sound by Samina Mishra, and music composed and sung by Rahul Ram, Amit Kilam and Asheem Chakravarty.

Date: FRIDAY 25 JULY 2003 6.00 P.M. to 8.00 P.M.

At: PUKAR c/o Aragon Services 4th Floor, Kitab Mahal Dr Dadabhai Naoroji Road Mumbai 400001

Kitab Mahal is next to New Excelsior Cinema, and is near VT Station. Entrance to Kitab Mahal is from the New Book Company on Dadabhai Naoroji Road. Lift is available to the third floor.

ABOUT THE FILM

For almost twenty years, the banks of the Narmada River in central India have been the site of a remarkable struggle for human dignity. Faced with the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people by a gargantuan series of thirty dams, and the abject failure by the Indian government to resettle the displaced, the Narmada valley has thrown up a unique people's movement. "Words on Water" is a film that explores the contemporary contours of this resistance, as the struggle to save the Narmada -- the Narmada Bachao Andolan -- faces its most critical reverse, a verdict from the highest court of the land, which places the establishment's seal of the approval on the Sardar Sarovar dam, a colossal misadventure with multiple, irreversible consequences.

"Words on Water" is about the transaction between power and powerlessness in the most populous democracy in the world, in a clash that is at once both intensely traditional and urgently modern. For the struggle over the dam contains within it many of the contradictions of Indian society. The contestation over scarce resources, the debate on the model of development chosen, and the nature of society itself, which allows the powerful to cannibalize those lower down in the hierarchies of caste and class, and pass it off as development. Inevitably, the Narmada valley has also become a testing ground for the new mantra of globalization, as international capital comes sweeping in, looking for new opportunities (and unrestrained profits) in the pockets of the impoverished Developing World. The valley boasts of India's first privatized hydro project, the Maheshwar Dam, although resistance by the people has already driven off investor after investor.

But more than anything else, at a time when violence rages like a bush fire across the parched surface of Indian democracy, when resistance movements in the tribal margins of Indian society have steadily taken to the gun, the struggle in the Narmada valley continues to take its cues from the Gandhian notions of ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagraha (the force of truth). So ultimately this is not just a film about the decimation (by drowning) of the poor, the deceit of a political class, or the complicity of a powerful social class, which stands to gain by the centralization of natural resources. Words on Water is about sustained resistance, a non-violent, even joyous, defiance, which empowers you to struggle for your rights, yet saves you from the ultimate humiliation of violence, in which the resistance gets re-made in the image of its oppressor.

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

SANJAY KAK is an independent documentary film-maker whose film, in the forest hangs a bridge (1999), won the Golden Lotus for Best Documentary Film at the 1999 National Film Awards in India. The film also won the Asian Gaze Award at the Pusan Short Film Festival, Korea. His recent work includes One Weapon (1997), a video about democracy in the 50th year of Indian independence, and Harvest of Rain (1995), made in association with the Centre for Science & Environment, New Delhi.

His films on the theme of migration, looking at people of Indian origin in the fringes of the city of London, This Land, My Land, Eng-Land! (1993), and in post-apartheid South Africa, A House and a Home (1993) have been widely screened at documentary festivals. He has also produced and directed Cambodia: Angkor Remembered (1990), a reflection on the monument and its place in Khmer society.

Born in Pune, India in 1958, Sanjay Kak attended St Stephen's College, Delhi and the Delhi School of Economics where he read Economics and Sociology. His early training in film was as writer/researcher on a shoestring black and white popular science series for Indian television. His first independent documentary Kinnaur Ke Log (1983) was an account of a year in the life of a Himalayan shepherd boy, followed by Savdhan! Bacche Khel Rahe Hain (Caution! Children at Play, 1984) is about the remedial uses of drama in the therapy of disabled children. His video Geeli Mitti (The Wet Earth) was awarded the Silver Lotus at the 1985 National Film Awards in India.

In 1986 he helped found Octave Communications, a New Delhi based production company, which he still runs. To support his interest in the documentary film Sanjay has also worked extensively in television, where his work includes the seven-part travelogue Pradakshina: Journey Down the Ganga (1985-86). Between 1985-87 he also directed a series of Hindi language news documentaries for India's national television Doordarshan, including Punjab: Doosra Adhyaya (Punjab: Chapter Two), and Kiski Ganga? (Whose River Is It?). Sanjay lives in New Delhi where he is active in the documentary film movement.

_____

PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research) P.O. Box 5627, Dadar, Mumbai 400014, INDIA

E-Mail mailto:secretariat@pukar.org.in Phone +91 (022) 2207 7779, +91 98200 45529, +91 98204 04010 Web Site http://www.pukar.org.in