Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

What does it mean to hand over the camera to an Indigenous ‘community’ and its methodological impact on what gets represented and how one represents it? This essay tries to mark the moments that emerged with the Ho Adivasi in Jharkhand in which film became an act of becoming. Hence, I argue for the film as a question of creation and aesthetics - a question of politics. Jayar tries to reclaim the freedom of practical imagination through creativity and uses the camera to decolonize the methodology of knowing the Adivasi. Jayar is the name of the film that was co-created in 2017-18 as part of the action-research project during my MPhil (2015-18). The name Jayar was given to the Ho community after the first screening of the film in the village. In Ho language, Jayar means the burial stone after death. Self-creation by this logic is a question of coping with the colonial transformations and the modern nationalist erasure of Adivasi. The paper investigates the theorizing of culture as a dialogue between aspirations and sedimented traditions. The essay, in this logic, argues for decolonizing the methodology of ‘knowing’ the Indigenous people. The paper’s objective is to look at the range of discourse that shapes the distribution, reception, and, most importantly, community media production. It unpacks the local cultures’ intersection with the regional histories of media production. In unpacking these practices, the essay attempts to challenge the ideas that view media as a neutral production site and Indigenous people as exotic objects.