Twisted troubles

Batya Porey Alodon (Stirrings after the cyclone)

A documentary

80 minutes; Oriya with English subtitles

Sponsors: Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti (BGVS),

Unnayan, Action Aid India

Directed by Sumit Chowdhury

Building anew and moving on three years after the Orissa cyclone

Chalo re chalo

Aagey chalo

Ladaiero maidane

Let's march, let's march,

Let's march forward,

On to the battleground

– Oriya chant

Cutting like a jagged blade through the populated Orissa coastline in India's east, the devastating cyclone of October 1999 left immeasurable hopelessness and destruction in its trail. Though storms pass through Orissa's fields and villages annually in September and October, the 1999 cyclone set a modern day standard of human misery: 10,000 dead, by official counts, and many times that number deprived of sustenance and shelter.

Orissa is a harsh land, prone to droughts in the western parts and to cyclones and floods along the eastern coastal belt. Inland, periodic water shortages compounded by the worst kind of extortionist feudal structure mean that many people go hungry to bed, official claims notwithstanding. Along the Bay of Bengal coast, each autumn the eastern portions suffer the brunt of sea-borne natural violence.

But 28-29 October 1999 was different. The 'normal' thresholds of misery and loss were swept away in the pounding of one of the most devastating cyclones on record. Storms raged for three days with peak wind speeds of 280 kilometres per hour. Villagers talked of waves towering 60-70 feet lashing the coast, sweeping away everything 30 kilometres inland. Deltaic rivers remained swollen during those three days, submerging huge tracts in several districts, including the Ersama and Balikuda blocks of Jagatsinghpur district, where about 90 percent of 'official' deaths were recorded.

It is with this troubling legacy that the simultaneously poignant and inspiring film, Batya Porey Alodon (Stirrings after the cyclone), attempts to grapple. Directed by Sumit Chowdhury, the film is as much about documenting loss as it is about recording the reconstruction in Orissa — physical, social and emotional. The storm washed away all that there was, and Chowdhury's film sets out to record the struggle to replace that vacuum with a new and sometimes different order.

The stories told in Batya Porey Alodon play themselves out in recollection and reflection, a device that humanises the otherwise inaccessible loss of missing family members and devastated lives. Renubala Devi, a grieving widow who witnessed her five children being swept away by the charging waves, recounts the day of the disaster. Human tragedy is more chilling in memory. The sequence is an everyday situation: Renubala is stirring the vegetables in the kitchen, and the narrator-interviewer, Rashmi, warns her that the water is boiling over. Renubala proceeds to narrate the most insignificant details. She tied her sari tightly round her waist, she recounts, only to pause and repeat herself a few seconds later. Renubala remembers that her daughter removed the straw from their thatch roof that was lodged between the horns of their bull after the roof caved in. She recounts the minutest details of who said what to whom in the last minutes of her children's lives. Yet despite the grievous loss, there is faith and hope; the mother has found her children in the orphaned Jayanti, Minati and Rashbehari, and a new family is born from the detritus.

The film is structured in three parts, each reflecting a facet of reconstruction. The first narrates the immediate collective struggle to rebuild homes, clear the fields of saline deposit, build embankments to prevent ingress of salt water from the sea and resume agricultural work. The second part presents the Sneh Abhiyan – the struggle to heal the mind. This is the story of the Renubalas, Jayantis and Minatis, mending traumatised minds and reconstructing families from fragments of decimated households. The third part traces the beginning of the protracted struggle of putting together a new and changed community based on 'participatory democracy' and 'community empowerment'.

After the debris had settled and the losses were tallied, survivors formed village reconstruction committees to regulate the distribution of relief under the food for work scheme. In the documentary, we meet a villager whose betel vine has been planted anew by collective effort and another who has rebuilt her house in the traditional model. The narrator, Rashmi, talks with one at work building a village road, and accounts of the reconstruction tasks help the film to maintain a symbiotic relationship between disaster and renewal, life and death.

The democratic aspirations of the villagers even in this earliest phase of rebuilding, though inchoate and halting, are brought into focus. The reconstruction committees emerge spontaneously and are remarkable for their large female membership. At a community meeting in progress, villagers are shown giving voice to their plans for a new life and struggling with their fresh burdens. "Shall we build a road or try to get electricity?" the assembled survivors ponder. "We have to list who will help us?" "Perhaps, the company people [the NGOs working there]". "Forget it, first plant the deep-rooted keya trees. We were saved by clinging to them".

Later, at a village meeting for a social audit of the ongoing food for work programme, villagers voice their other concerns. Obviously, the democratic experiment has its hiccups. There are allegations of misappropriation and misallocation of funds, followed by some justifications. The democratic ethos also finds support amidst a performance of the Kalajatha, a ceremony that has villagers participating until deep into the night. Superstition and unquestioning faith, the enemies of the democratic experiment, are warned away with midnight chants offering a distinctly Oriya form of people's power:

Jago, jago, jago dalito,

Jago, jago, jago abohelito.

Wake up the oppressed,

Wake up the deprived

Shoshon bhitore banchibo na,

Shoshon bhitore na moribo.

We will not live with exploitation,

We will not die of exploitation

The process of dealing with grief, one of the major themes of Batya Porey Alodon, is accomplished in several ways. At a Mamta gruha (abode of affection), orphaned children act out their sorrow for an audience of widows. Volunteers offer another kind of therapy, with Oriya women arriving from all over to assist the traumatised of the Ersama-Balikuda block. At a meeting of a women's micro-credit group, one can glimpse increasing awareness of socio-economic problems. There is a knowledgeable debate about the proper rates of interest and an interest in extending the activities of the group. With assistance from BGVS, villagers hold meetings to plan their futures, and another indoctrination of sorts takes place. "Why do government efforts to rebuild fail?" the BGVS volunteer asks. "They are unaware of local needs". "Why do you have to plan the reconstruction of your village?" "Because it is our lives. We are the toilers". The answers come pat. But is there irony lurking in the answers? What is the difference between Action Aid and BGVS and government agencies? The answer has to be provided by the volunteer herself. "Because we are working for people's planning."

The last sequence is a meeting of the vanguard. 'TJ', a BGVS leader from Kerala, is conducting a class for volunteers. While discussing resource mapping, Rashmi asks a question of TJ. People's planning is just not a technical exercise; it requires social mobilisation. It has been successful in Kerala where there is a strong peasant organisation, but Orissa has no recent history of peasant mobilisation. So what purpose can resource mapping serve? TJ's answer is that resource mapping itself can be an instrument of social mobilisation, allowing villagers to see, graphically, ownership patterns. This heightened awareness, so it goes, will itself act as a catalyst for social mobilisation.

Batya Porey Alodon is a fascinating tale of struggle to rebuild a lost community, only more democratically. The theme of rejuvenation comes through sharply in the film, from the many interviews, reconstruction committee and volunteers meetings and the telling visuals, which show the hope and faith of ordinary people. Renubala, after adopting Jayanti, considers a wedding match for the girl who is now her oldest daughter. She later turns her attention to Minati's desire to learn tailoring. Characters discuss everyday concerns and keep their attention focused on what is before them. Chowdhury's achievement comes through in these scenes of masterly braiding despair and hope. They show that when all is said and done, there remains a life after the storm.