City: Mumbai
Location: Alliance Française auditorium
Date: Fri, 2012/08/17 – 7:00pm
In partnership with Vikalp Film Archive
KathaLoknath/ reTold by loknath, by Rajula Shah ( 46’)
Amidst everyday human, electronic chatter and traffic noise, a child dreams up the universe. In flashes of lightning, a specter unfolds; the mother’s voice beckons the unborn to the world. Amidst rolling thunder, it wakes up to a myriad tellings of the same tale. One day we will go to Sonpur- Mother tells the child.
The World gets populated. Space is re-consecrated. Time is eternally confused. Illusive historic truth, absurd evidences that spare none, eternally haunt Time until given a place in the story. On the banks of Mahanadi, lives a potter named Loknath. He knows many stories. It begins from before the world was made and goes on till ever after. Nobody knows the whole story. Parts of stories lie hidden in the rubble and ruin of history. None knows where it begins, nor where it ends. And yet it is not as much of a misfortune to not know this, as it is to wonder if there be a story at all.
Loknath enters the landscape of his own telling and becomes Rudrapal; the mythical river whirls into the real river of Loknath’s daily bath; the unborn child wakes up to the ancient tales resonating the womb of a city; the monkey god seeks an adventure to the city fair; stories curl up like caterpillars on the museum plate while the child grows out of a story and into another. Perhaps its possible to look at the blanks in History as the lapse each story fills in the language of its myth and trans-formations. One wonders what a ‘fiction’ has to do with its ‘documentary evidence’. How does one look for the ‘timeless’ in the ‘historical’?
In front of the digital camera, everything that we have known till now as epical, fictional, documentary, poetic, magical and so on, assumes its assigned role in the story of a Loknath. An ancient story tied to its tail, the god with the feet of clay stalks the decrepit age of the museum. An eternity passes. The story gathers moss. The child asks for another story.