/ARTS WEEKLY/ INDIA: Hard-Hitting Documentary Reveals Hidden Apartheid

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Rahul Goswami

BERLIN, Nov 18 2003 (IPS) - Minutes into ‘Behind The Open Door’ we see a woman, a ragged broom in one hand and a small metal board in the other, reaching across into a filthy dark recess at the foot of a brick house. From it, she is scraping out into a bin a slurry formed from human faeces.

The metal plate she uses to scrape out the excreta is covered with newspaper, as protection from the filth, but the liquid spatters over her hands and wrists nonetheless, and flecks the ‘sari’ she wears. She scrapes out as much as she can into the battered metal bin, then she places the bin on her head, and walks to the next house.

This is Patna, the capital of the eastern Indian state of Bihar, circa now. The woman is one of the subjects of the documentary, ‘Behind The Open Door’, which is directed by Berlin-based filmmaker Falko Zubairi.

The film is an honest, at times wrenching, effort at depicting the lives of a large section of the Indian populace – the ‘dalits’, untouchables and outcastes – one that has been ignored by the modern Indian state and its institutions of democracy.

Zubairi’s effort is a brave one, for the issues that surround the section of South Asian society known as ‘scavengers’ are kept away from the public eye by a combination of state neglect and blatant upper-caste manoeuvring.

What made the filmmaker – whose background is the theatre, who is a film theorist and academician, and who describes himself as a product of the left political movement – choose such a subject?

”I saw what we did as part of understanding globalisation,” Zubairi told IPS. ”What I found both curious and disturbing was that officially, it is as if they do not exist. Yet when we interviewed scavengers in (the western state of) Gujarat, in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (in north India) they often told us ‘this life is gone’.”

‘Behind The Open Door’ has employed straightforward editing to catch the establishment’s lies. When the film team spoke to a city official in Patna, he earnestly informed them that while the scavengers were indeed an oppressed section of society, their condition has changed and they now lived in clean and sanitary surroundings.

The film then cuts to a point of view that is alongside a sewage canal. The water is black with filth and decomposed matter. Some pigs warily make their way through it. Along the canal’s banks are wretched shanties, in which live the scavengers of Patna.

Sweepers and scavengers, though they perform essential tasks for city dwellers in Indian cities, remain an utterly neglected section of the population of the metropolis. Their work is traditionally regarded as ‘degrading’ and ‘defiled’ by upper castes and society tends to keep them at a distance, despite their ubiquity and the importance of the work they do.

”They stand at the very bottom of the social ladder,” said Dr Bindeshwar Pathak, the founder of the non-government organisation, Sulabh International, which has been responsible for the public sanitation revolution in Indian cities because of its low-cost toilet design.

”They are compelled, on the ground of ‘untouchability’, to do scavenging or sweeping or to remove any carcass – the ‘compulsion’ includes the threat of social or economic boycott,” explained Pathak. ”It was untouchability and the practice of social discrimination amongst the Hindus that was largely responsible for conversion to another faith, but the scourge of untouchability never really left those who converted.”

Zubairi said that he found this scourge reflected in not only the lives of those he and his film team interviewed and filmed, but also amongst those who viewed ‘Behind The Open Door’ at its Sep. 19 premiere in Berlin.

”At the premiere I found that the talk about India and by Indians was about the American green card, about information technology, cooking, spirituality, business,” he recalled. ”But there was no talk about social issues. There was denial about it, as if it didn’t exist.”

He said he confronted the same in India, on location. ” ‘Why as a foreigner are you interested?’,” he recalled being asked. But Zubairi is not as foreign as all that – the Indianness in him comes from that part of his family which has roots in Meerut, a town in northern India.

The most powerful voice, and the most powerful presence, in ‘Behind The Open Door’ belongs to Martin Macwan, a dalit activist and lawyer in the state of Gujarat who set up the Navsarjan Trust and has been working to rid his community and country of the dehumanising practice.

Macwan’s work to combat the hidden apartheid against dalits has won him the Kennedy Human Rights Award for 2000 and the 2001 International Activist Award.

In ‘Behind The Open Door’ Macwan is scathing in his condemnation of the system that allows such casteist apartheid to continue. The Indian government has banned the system of the manual cleaning of human faeces and made its practice a punishable offence under the Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993.

Yet Macwan has pointed out that the government ”is the largest agency that employs and pays over a million scavengers in the country through its various organs to manually handle human waste”.

For Zubairi, the acute physical risk of what India’s dalits are forced to endure daily hit home during filming. While shooting, his cameraman, Andreas Gockel, was laid low by an infection for four months.

The film’s subjects however cannot afford to fall ill – in the metropolis of Mumbai for example they have neither the security of employment, nor any help at times of illness, incapacity due to accident or retirement.

”The message is not just India or scavengers,” Zubairi said, ”It is that people at the bottom of the social structure think the same. Even if the caste system is abolished, the class system will replace it. So who takes care of those at the bottom?”