Nine years ago, Sapna Bhavnani heard a group of fakirs perform at Susheela Raman concert and was “blown away” by the fact that they were from Sindh. “I hadn’t witnessed anything like that my entire life,” she shares, and says that the first thing she did after returning home was to Google: ‘What is Sindh?’. She spent 9 years looking for the answer, and the journey culminated in her film Sindhustan, a feature-length documentary which premièred at the New York Indian Film Festival on May 9.
Growing up Sindhi
Born and raised in Mumbai, Bhavnani moved to the US at 18 and lived there for 14 years. For most of her life, being Sindhi didn’t mean much beyond a title. Her Pune-born, Sindhi-medium educated mother, embarrassed about being unable to talk to her daughter in English, trained herself to communicate in the language. Her father reserved Sindhi only for his friends. He owned the Blue Nile, Bombay’s famous cabaret bar, where Bhavnani’s first birthday was celebrated.
The only person who spoke to her in Sindhi was her grandmother, who years later proved to be a catalyst for the 60-minute Sindhustan. Like her granddaughter, she had ink on her body. “A pretty big Krishna on her forearm,” recalls Bhavnani, 48, who got tattoos done in the early 90s in America. “Sindhustan is an effort to put two dying art forms — Ajrak from Sindh and Kutch, and Madhubani from India — on the global tattoo scene. [Imagine] some white person sitting in the US getting tattoos in these art forms. That is my goal. Art transcends and can send a message like nothing else. And if you don’t take risks with your art, then you aren’t really making art,” she says.
Bhavnani recalls her visit to India, when she met her grandmother. The latter was “shocked” — not because her granddaughter was inked but rather at her effort to cover herself with her Sindhi-inspired roots in tattoos. That said, her grandmother was delighted that she was going back to her roots as originally, all Sindhis lived in extended tribal families and everyone had “markings”.
Breaking barriers
Apart from Bhavnani, the only other person who appears in the film is her aunt, Sundri Keswani. Sindhustan opens with her cooking and talking about Bhavnani’s childhood, and you see her a few more times during the film making traditional dishes such as Sindhi Kadhi, aloo tuk and dahi vada. She also shares, among other things, her experiences during the Partition when she lived in Ludhiana, close to what became the border.
When the Persians came, they couldn’t pronounce the ‘sa’ in Sindhu so it became Indu. That’s where Indus comes from, and the people who lived around the river Indu became Hindus, and whence Hindustan, explains Bhavnani. “The film is called Sindhustan because that is the correct name. The Muslim Sindhi’s are reaching out to invite me to come as a speaker. You have to break these boundaries, and I know this film will do that. I am very optimistic.”
She adds, “We need to understand how much love there was before this line was drawn,” reiterating that the Sindhi migration was the “largest of a culture in history”.
The language of ink
Bhavnani spent two years just thinking about the story’s format, which is when she remembered the interaction with her grandmother. Although this wasn’t her primary motivation, she thought that the youth would pay attention to a language they could relate to, which was ink. She started interviewing people who had witnessed the Partition, and took these stories to tattoo artist Yogesh Waghmare, based on which they together designed tattos for her legs with visual and typographical representations of the interactions.
Tattooing her legs in a matter of 10 days was “insane and unheard of”, but Bhavnani managed it. Apart from considerations of budgets and schedules, she “didn’t want to walk around like an incomplete piece of art”. Another constant worry was what if too much time went by. In the film’s seven-year journey, they filmed actively for about three-and-a-half years with the final shooting schedule as late as December 2018.
In Sindhustan, Bhavnani consciously avoids showing her face and is largely present on screen through her tattooed legs. “Being a bearer of stories is a responsibility, and I hope I do justice to these stories on my legs,” she says. “I didn’t want [the film] to be about ‘Sapna the stylist’. If you even are a little known in one field, it’s become very common to ‘branch out’, which I didn’t want. Instead of cutting hair, I wanted to cut film. And even though they are connected, I didn’t want one to merge into the other.”
For Bhavnani, getting inked is “embracing art in its truest form. I don’t believe art should be placed in museums or in expensive frames, so you can see it once and forget about it,” she says, adding, “When it is on somebody’s body, it’s free. Everywhere you walk, people can appreciate it.”
Bhavnani, who was also part of the New York Film Academy’s first batch in Mumbai, has directed short films and music videos, which were “never really public, and way ahead of their time, something that has always been a problem with me.”