In a voiceover of a five-minute animation film titled Shubh-Vivah, Nina Sabnani narrates, “When a daughter is born, it’s no time for a song. The birth of a girl is a bad patch of luck.” The film’s imagery is based on paintings by Madhubani artist Lalita Devi and portray the social evil: dowry. Currently a professor at the Industrial Design Centre at IIT-Bombay, Sabnani made this film way back in 1984 as a student at National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad. “At NID, we were encouraged to document the rich crafts and work with artisans as collaborators. I suppose the seeds of intent were planted then,” says the filmmaker and researcher, who has gone on to work with Gujarat’s embroidery artisans, Rajasthan’s Kaavad storytellers and Bhil artists from Madhya Pradesh, among others, in the last two decades.
These collaborations have resulted in documentaries, animation films and books that weave narratives, retell stories of India’s arts and crafts and attempt to conserve them in the process. “Through these engagements I learnt that it is not the indigenous crafts that need to be saved, but that we have a lot to learn from them,” she says. This evening, Sabnani will share her experiences in a talk titled ‘Animating Voices: A Place for Collaborative Storytelling’ as part of Conversations with Chai, a lecture-series initiated by the Tyeb Mehta Foundation.
A joint effort
Sabnani will also show some of her films and discuss the process behind them. “In any kind of collaboration, the process is as important as the outcome, because so much of what is realised depends on the way we work together,” she says. One of her long-standing collaborations has been with Rajasthan’s Kaavad artists – a community of storytellers who use portable wooden shrines to retell old legends. She spent years with them for her doctoral research on this oral storytelling tradition. It led to the animation-live action film Baat Wahi Hai (It’s The Same Story, 2011), among other works.
In Tanko Bole Chhe (The Stitches Speak, 2009), Sabnani animates the art of appliqué and embroideries of Kutch artisans to reveal how it articulates their responses to life, whether it’s an earthquake or kite-flying. Meanwhile, Hum Chitra Banate Hai (We Make Images), an animated short that won the National Award in 2016, narrates an origin myth of Bhil art of Madhya Pradesh. Its making involved a detailed process of scanning the paintings and converting them into moving images.
“I could not have made these films if it were not for the existing technologies and software at my disposal. It is not that the technology makes the work go faster; it just pushes the work further into spaces we could never imagine,” she observes.
What’s next?
Sabnani will also share a work-in-progress animation experiment with Mumbai-based artist Shrilekha Sikander. Currently the filmmaker is seeking funding for her next project with Kantha embroidery artisans from West Bengal. “The reason I want to work with them is because they address the issues of sustainability and have questions about the future of their craft. It’s not like other crafts do not have this problem, but the women in this community are concerned themselves and I would like to amplify these voices.”
Animating Voices: A Place for Collaborative Storytelling will be held today at 6.30 p.m. at Gallery MMB, Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai, K Dubash Marg, Kala Ghoda.