09/08/2024
ANGWAL
By Farrukh Dhondy
Prolific Writer and Former C4 Commissioning Editor FARRUKH DHONDY reviews ANGWAL
(Among Farrukh Dhody’s screenplays are Bandit Queen, Split Wide Open, The Rising -Mangal Pande, Red Mercury, Exitz and Kisna. As Channel 4’s Commissioning Editor for Multicultural programmes, he created several landmark series like The Ramayana.)
A N G W A L
Farrukh Dhondy
Angwal, a poetic, scenic, melodic , nostalgic documentary by writer and broadcaster Lalit Mohan Joshi takes us to the state of Uttarakhand and specifically to the Kumaon region nestling in the Himalayas.
The scenery is breathtaking and can be undisputedly labelled one of the most beautiful places of its sort on our planet.
While capturing the spectacular landscape in breathtaking cinematographic sequences, the story of Kumaon, as told by one of its voluntary emigrants or exiles and the people he interviews, unfolds through its idiosyncratic cuisine – with ‘tea’ as no other part of the world knows it – and through the testimony and memories of its contemporary writers and poets. Those who remain behind.
And that sad or nostalgic last phrase introduces one of the themes of Lalit’s sojourn into the place where he was born and went to school before, presumably, like the bulk of his generation, leaving the mountains, the customs, the festivals, the music and venturing into the plains of India or elsewhere. Lalit himself ends up in Britain where he works for many years as a reporter and broadcaster for the BBC.
Angwal is about his nostalgic return.
Through the bulk of his journey Lalit interviews poets and writers and elicits from them memories of the great Charu Chandra Pande among others. Charu was a poet, musician, story writer, teacher and, from the testimony of the interviewees, a perpetually curious and ultimately generous artist and human being. We hear his verses and his music and brief anecdotes about his life.
Lalit’s nostalgia takes us to his ancestral home, from whose first floor veranda he points to the village school he attended in his boyhood. He tells us of the family awaiting their uncle’s arrival from the same veranda and subsequently takes us to the almost vanished ruins of his uncle’s house.
Growing up in deeply ritualistic India himself, this reviewer is intimately acquainted with the religious ceremonials of the Hindu, Muslim, Zoroastrian, Christian, Jain and Buddhist faiths. And of course one acknowledges that though the Gods and Prophets of these religions are the same through the subcontinent, the rituals, ceremonies and festivals celebrating their existence, their anniversaries and their deeds, differ from region to region of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Angwal takes us into the curious Uttarakhandi ceremony of ‘Jagar’ peculiar to Lalit’s homeland. In celebrating Jagar, participants in the ceremony are reputed to be spiritually ‘possessed’ . The Kumaoni poet Der Singh Pukhbaria gives us an enlightening discourse on the meaning and function of Jagar. One lives and learns?
The tragedy of Kumaon and perhaps the whole of Uttarakhand, from the decades of the last century to today, is the desertion of this beautiful land by the young who emigrate to seek education, employment and lives in richer, busier environments more connected to the ways and means of the contemporary world.
The poet Tribhuvan Giri introduces us to this theme and presents its tragic dimension at the conclusion of Angwal.
Are there any ways that this tragic trend can be reversed? Lalit doesn’t concentrate on the possible factors that could stop this human landslide, though, in this reviewer’s humble opinion, it is certainly possible that the overdue breakaway of Uttarakhand as a State from Uttar Pradesh will give it autonomy, making transformative local development possible.
And then of course there is the still-one-generation-deep birth of global communication and AI technologies whose presence one can only hope will, in some way, envigorate this beautiful corner of the world and enable it to spawn a succession of thriving, vibrant generations.
