TWF India Off-Track

Had it not been for the alternative cinema movement in our country, we might never have been aware of the fascinating colours of India, of lifestyles and people, who live on the fringes of society and despite poverty, continue to live within their traditional ethnicity. In one sense, it might fit into the description of investigative journalism on celluloid, focussing on the truths of the marginalised. A Journey with Kakmaras, one such film, is a revelation within a 23-minute. It explores the lives of a little-known nomadic tribe known as the Kakmaras of Bengal, though they are not originally from West Bengal.

Director Dhananjoy Mandal, a low-profile National Award-winning filmmaker, has drawn his inspiration and his source from his own childhood spent on the countryside of Bengal. "I have seen the Kakmaras from very close quarters. I have been wanting to make a film on their lives for more than ten years. But it was difficult to break into their rigid barrier of privacy. They do not permit mainstream to intrude into their lives. Then, much after I began my struggling career in films, I sought them out and decided finally to embark on this project," he says.

Though man has left behind the nomadic way of life about 5000 years ago, there are people across the world who still believe in the gypsy way of life, much though it strips them of any sense of belonging and deprives them of a specific geo-cultural identity. "But you cannot deny them their historical identity," reiterates Dhananjoy.

The name "Kakmara" is derived from the two words ‘kak’, meaning crow and ‘mara’, meaning hunters, together standing for 'crow-hunters.' Interestingly, however,
hunting crows is not their source of living. They kill crows only for their meat. Crows are commonly known as meat-eaters themselves. Crow-meat is a big no-no to any kind of cuisine. The Kakmaras move in groups in search of food.

"The Kakmaras migrated to West Bengal from Andhra Pradesh about 200 years ago, forced to move eastwards by a national disaster. They never went back. Their travels today are confined within the southeastern regions of Midnapore district in West Bengal. It is surprising that though this small tribe of 1500 men, women and children, have been cut off from their original habitat for two centuries, they continue to speak among themselves in dialectical Telugu while they interact with the local people in Bengali. The local inhabitants have named them Kakmaras though they are basically beggars.

The film’s narrative moves with a small nomadic group that arrives at a village to beg for alms. During their stay in a given village, they build temporary shanties out of whatever they can salvage from the debris of the fringes of the village and take shelter there. The men wear red turbans, sling cloth bags from their shoulders and half-dhotis wrapped
lungi style. They mark their foreheads with a long, red bindi, wear bangles on their arms and carry a small knife in one hand. They use the knife both to kill the crows with as well as to tingle the bangles to keep time with their odes to Lord Rama while they go begging from door to door. The villagers, themselves poor, mainly offer them raw rice as alms which they go back to distribute equally among themselves. The women are clad in old and torn saris without the blouse. They cook the rice on earthen pots on a wooden fire. The earthen pots and the wood come from the crematorium of the village they might have taken shelter in at a given point of time. They cook only once a day, at night and soak the leftover rice for the next morning to be taken as brunch or breakfast. They eat out of
leaves torn off trees and bushes and do not have any utensils to speak of except the ones they may have received as alms.

The joy of their life comes from enjoying a meal consisting of crow meat. It gives the lie to the belief that crow meat cannot and should not be eaten by humans under any circumstances because the crow lives off the meat of all living beings. After they have hunted down a crow, the hunter proudly slings the dead crow from his waist, waiting for it to be cooked after the group comes back to the fold.

"They cannot stay in once place for a long time even if they wish to," informs Dhananjoy. "The alms begin to dwindle over time and is insufficient for them to keep body and soul together. Secondly, the crows in the area are too scared to live on in the village and fly away, creating a severe crisis of food among the Kakmaras. They then move on to a new place. They have families but one does not know whether marriage is an institution for them. They are an extremely close community. Says Dhananjoy, “The group I travelled with for my film also had a dog as a pet, which moved along with them, waiting to be fed. The women lead normal lives - begging for alms, nursing children, looking after the old. If the senior-most member cannot go out to beg, the younger people bring him his share of alms to live off,"

The straightforward, simple and honest insight into the lives of an ethnic group that refuses to change with the times, puts across a film that evolves into a statement unto itself, a human document that could well go to enrich the archives of an India we sadly
know very little about.