Gabriel Dattatreyan
By Dhruv Taware
Few minutes before the screening of his short film at the TIFA Working Studios, Pune, Dr E Gabriel Dattatreyan was chatting with his audience, university students and teachers, scribbling notes on various Indian films which have portrayed a character of an African origin character in a particular manner, a subject which he is going to explore during his stay in Pune on a year-long project.
An anthropologist, filmmaker and photographer currently teaching in the anthropology department at Goldsmiths, University of London, Dattatreyan is here for a purpose — to research the cinematic cultural connections between India and postcolonial nations in Africa.
“I have been looking at the influx of African students, after liberalisation, as well as of African entrepreneurs and refugees in the last 20-25 years. I have been working closely with migrant colonies, which have a large African presence. Among other things, one of the elements I thought about was the relation between India and Africa through cinema,” says Dattatreyan.
A visual anthropologist, he has, in the past, worked on a collaborative film, Cry out Loud, on the African diaspora living in Delhi putting the camera back into the hands of the community as they explored their daily lives, challenges and the feeling of exclusion. In Pune though, he decided to screen another short experimental film which he has made featuring a walk he took with Hanif, a 22-year-old Somali refugee, who currently lives in the far northern reaches of Oulu in Finland.
A still from his documentary
Their walk through the streets and parks of Oulu explored the latter’s experience as an immigrant in this remote town, how he feels he is being “watched”. In his current project in Pune, with Jason, Dattatreyan is exploring similar themes of migration and identity among refugees. “Jason is a Nigerian student I met in 2012. He came to study film in India and was struggling when I met him, but he was able to find his feet and make his way in the industry. The thing that struck me about his story was how he kept coming back to the inspiration Indian cinema gave him in his childhood. He would watch Indian movies all the time in Lago. To me, his story kind of encapsulates something quite unique and fascinating about this relationship between Indian cinema and African students,” says Dattatreyan.
“There is a new TV series called Powder and in the first episode they show a drug bust where two Nigerians are shown handing over two large packets of drugs to some gangster. I think popular representation can reinforce stereotypes, so there needs to be other representations that are made possible. Like a 2017 Malayalam film called Sudani from Nigeria which has a young Nigerian guy who comes to Kerala to play football and looks at the relationship between this young man and his coach and his family. Such stories needs to be explored,” he says.