Yamuna Gently Weeps(Documentary Review)
(Guys, this is a small review/analysis of a documentary on a slum demolition in Delhi on the banks of the river Yamuna, titled Yamuna Gently Weeps.
I met with the film’s director and shared his views, so would like to express my views on the documentary and also try and push the cause that it supports.)
(From an Outlook book review)
MAY 9, 2004—one day before the Lok Sabha general elections. Houses of 1,50,000 poor men, women, and children, residing at the Yamuna Pushta slum of Delhi for almost 40 years, were bulldozed and razed to the ground. Nothing remained. Only 20 per cent of the evicted persons were relocated, and that too to a barren place 40 km away, while 80 per cent left to the mercy of streets from where they could be picked up any moment with the charge of vagrancy by the police. The ostensible reasons for eviction: encroachment of Yamuna-bed and pollution of the river. Real reasons: judiciary-politicians-land mafia nexus, destruction of a vote bank, removal of the eye-sores (the poor), greed for the prime-land, Shanghai-zation.
May 12, 2006—two years later. Bulldozers were about to demolish unauthorised bungalows and shopping centres of the affluent and the mighty. Urgently and promptly, the government and the opposition political parties huddled together to pass in the Lok Sabha a bill that “proposed a one-year moratorium from punitive action against unauthorised development in the national capital” to prevent “unnecessary hardship and harassment to the citizens of Delhi.”
What is the lesson? In India we have two kinds of verdicts, laws, and systems of governance—one for the poor and the other for the rich. Excoriating the hapless slum-dwellers, the Supreme Court stated: “Poverty could not be an excuse for living in slums. Nobody forced you to come to Delhi.” Ruzbeh makes it clear that “migration in India is not out of choice; it is a matter of life and death
Of all the rules in the book of documentary film making, YGW hasn’t left a single one out. A classical Indian instrumental sitar based BGM, slow motions set to the bet of a beating heart, a humanistic capture of underprivileged life, a political overview, inputs from the affected and influential authorities, issues as they exist in their brutal form, a toned down approach to tackle a searing problem.
In spite of all of this and more, the film is a humble attempt at capturing a gradually but alarmingly growing monster, the ever expanding slums.
The film runs well over an hour, and rightly involves the uninitiated viewer to the issues in a well researched script. The voice over does sound very public service documentary, but after the initial tuning, one gets intrigued by the banality and acute chronic hue of the problem.
The achievement of the film is to envelope the goings-on from the view of an insider, someone who knows what he is talking about.
Apart from adopting an activist and socially conscious approach, the film logically concludes its stand. It includes many a interviews of politicians, NGO activists, independent researchers and surveyors, which present a richly textured picture of the situation as it stands. What one may read might be highly congruous to the director’s views, but it comes after a well-thought out and introspected analysis, something which the film successfully inspires.
You can also check out the book by Ruzbeh N. Bharucha, Yamuna Gently Weeps: A Journey into the Yamuna Pushta Slum Demolitions.
Tushar Shukla
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Dear Tushar,
I saw the film “Yamuna Gently Weeps” on net.
It was in the Indo-American Film Festival, Atlanta USA.
There I also saw a wondeful kids film “Jhum Jham Jhum”. It is from India. and this was declared winner. You can see the wen site link- www.iafs.us/AIAFF
thanks for the link, Sanjay.
happy to know that finally someone knew about the film!