Bapu Trust organized a three-day film festival on the 3rd, 4th and 5th of December 2004 at the National Film Archive of India at Prabhat Road, Pune. Open Spaces facilitated this workshop for Bapu Trust. The film festival explored various issues surrounding mental health, each of the three days dealing with a separate concern. The festival was titled ‘Reel Madness’ and was jointly funded by ICSSR / IDPAD (Indo-Dutch Programme for Alternative Development) and Action Aid India.

Mr. Subhash Avate, the IG of Police, Maharashtra State Human Rights Commission, inaugurated the festival by releasing a T-shirt especially designed to illustrate the superficially constructed meanings of sanity and insanity.

Dr. Bhargavi Davar, the Director of Bapu Trust, welcomed Mr. Avate. She also spoke about the organization Bapu Trust, and the identity of “Bapu”, the woman in whose memory it was founded.

Bapu was a very gifted and learned poet and spiritualist who lived in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. She was labeled by her family and society as mentally ill. In spite of belonging to a wealthy and influential family, she lived most of her life alone and abandoned by her family. Dr. Davar, one of Bapu’s children is the director and the founder member of the organization. She voiced strong opinions about the medical practices surrounding mental health and institutionalization, demanding a more ethical and humane mental health care system, based on user consent. Explaining the philosophy of Bapu Trust, she defined mental health as not just a symptom free condition but a sense of being deeply connected with one’s inner source of creativity, joy, freedom and spirituality. She stressed on the socially constructed demarcation between sanity and insanity, creativity and madness, challenging the very notion of the latter.

Mr. Avate gave his valuable insights about the applicability of human rights to all conditions and persons and the role of the State Human Rights Commission in Maharashtra.

The first day of the festival dealt with the interconnections between unequal gender roles within a patriarchal society and mental health. It has been a longstanding interest at Bapu to explore the experiences of women who suffer from systemic humiliation in a patriarchal society as a result of which they experience a different social reality. This strongly impacts their emotional health. Women are socialized to prioritize other’s emotional needs over their own, even at the cost of their own developmental needs. They are often victims of violence and abuse from childhood.

The film, ‘Main Zindaa Hoon’ directed by Sudhir Mishra was screened to illustrate this point. The theme of the movie dealt with the trap of exploitation that most conventional, middle class families subject their women to. The film showed how women have no status within families without male protectors even if they are financially independent.

The theme for the second day was related to institutionalization. It was aimed to bring out the custodial nature of mental health institutions where care is restricted to giving medications and shock treatments. Chaining, solitary confinement and lock up are some other degrading treatments that persons with mental illness face. Also the fact that there has not been much of a choice for carers other than these institutions was highlighted.

‘Iris’ directed by Richard Eyre showed the challenges faced by an aged carer for his equally aged wife suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. This is the true story of Iris Murdoch, the well known writer. It is an institution he turns to, when it goes beyond his strength, both mental and physical, to take care of his wife.

‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ directed by Milos Foreman demonstrated the horrors of a mental health institution in all its sharpness. Being one of the first movies to challenge psychiatry and mental health care in general, it forms a classic entry point to the history of the anti-psychiatric movement in the west.

The day also saw the staging of a 20-minute play titled ‘Hum Sub Kamala Hain’. Mr. Yogendra Mane, the director of the play is an active member of a theatrical group in the city known as the Artist’s Initiative, which is an attempt to bring together artists to create socially committed art to address various social issues. ‘Hum Sab Kamala Hain’ was a play about a homeless woman wandering on the streets and the different ways in which she is treated by pedestrians, policemen and the mental health authorities. It shows how the fate awaiting such persons is filled with cruelty and negligence.

The speaker for the second day was Ratnaboli Roy, the Director of a mental health initiative in Calcutta known as ‘Anjali’. She shared with the audience the face of institutionalization, as it exists in India today and what it does to people who undergo this treatment. Her presentation involved a detailed description of Anjali, its work, aims and vision as also two small films on mental health care systems in West Bengal. Most mental hospitals are designed and look like prisons and what happens inside most of the times is also a total violation of human rights and dignity for the users. An overwhelming ambience of stigma about mentally ill people is reflected in the hospital set-ups, in the attitude of doctors and other hospital staff and in the abandonment of psychiatric users by their families.

The third and the last day of the festival explored issues of traditional practices and faith healing. Bapu Trust is conducting a study in the area of traditional healing for the last one year. We believe that traditional healing practices have restorative benefits for persons suffering from emotional pain. For women, they constitute a space and a method of voicing and coping with their otherwise stigmatized problems. While acknowledging that cultural practices may be healing, we don’t support any human rights violations that happen to persons undergoing faith healing.

The film on which the last day of the festival began was ‘Debi’, directed by Satyajit Ray. It showed the event of how a traditional Bengali bride was forcefully ascribed the role of a spiritual healer by her father-in-law, the patriarchal head of the family. The protagonist gradually begins to believe in this new role and as a result is denied her earthly relationships due to its status, which now puts her on a pedestal separated from her husband and other family members. Although she mourns this loss, she feels powerless to oppose her father-in-law and what she feels is the will of god.

The afternoon session began with the screening of the documentary, ‘Eyes of Stone’ directed by Nilita Vachchani. The documentary explored the different symbolic interpretations of health and illness in rural Rajasthan. The central character of the film is possessed / made to fall ill due to an evil eye of a witch. The film documents the process of her exorcism and how she regains her health. The film also explores her negotiations with her social and interpersonal problems using deity possession as a tool. Her sense of being refreshed and rejuvenated, ready to go back joyfully into her family life once again, following deity possession is also evident.

The speaker for the day was Dr. Arshiya Sattar, coordinator of Open Space, who made a presentation on the interconnections between righteously angry women and goddesses. She took the instance of Sita and Draupadi and how their expression of anger turned them from docile domesticated wives to goddesses. She went on to talk of Kannagi, the heroine of the 4th century Tamil epic, ‘Silappatikaram’, [‘The song of the ankle bracelet’], who, angry with the city of Madurai for wrongly accusing her husband and putting him to death, burnt it down.

The day ended in a short discussion on the various mediating views possible between the two extreme positions of a modernist, reformist on the one hand; the position held by Satyajit Ray who warns us that succumbing to such faith could lead to madness and that of the other, contending that there is a fundamental therapeutic value to traditional, cultural spaces providing personal agency for those who use them.

The discussion also veered towards the Freudian context within which ‘Debi’ was made and the latent sexuality felt by her father-in-law towards her. He exalts her to the position of a goddess in order to cope with his own tabooed feelings, subliming his sexual attraction to her into spirituality and to make her sexuality inaccessible to others, including her husband, as also protecting her from the other male gazes within the family.

Around 800 people attended the film festival from Pune city.

Deepra Dandekar
Madhura Lohokare
January, 2005
wamhc@vsnl.net; info@camhindia.org