Collaboration against ethnography: How colonial history shaped the making of an ethnographic film

Abstract

What happens when a commitment to collaborative ethnographic filmmaking runs up against a community's ambivalence towards its own history? This paper provides an ethnohistorical account of the making of the film Please Don't Beat Me, Sir!, exploring how colonial-era "police ethnographies" and contemporary communal politics shape the collaborative endeavor. The film was made in collaboration with Budhan Theatre, an activist theater troupe from the Chhara community in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, Gujarat. The Chhara are one of more than 198 communities labeled as "Criminal Tribes" by the British, a colonial legacy that still informs their interactions with the police. Inspired by the work of Jean Rouch, the film makes use of experimental ethnographic and cinematic techniques. These participation frameworks allowed the members of Budhan Theatre and their families to shape the structure and content of the film itself, a process sometimes at odds with the film's ethnographic intent.

Desiring Bollywood: Re‐Staging Racism, Exploring Difference

“…As the scene developed through improvisation, it became clear that its inclusion didn't need to be instrumental to the narrative but, rather, could offer something more nuanced: an exploration of the kind of everyday encounter African nationals living in Khirki face. Participation in a scene like this offered, as Friedman (2013, 392) writes regarding improvisational, shared cinema, “a space within which the film's subjects (both on‐screen and off) can negotiate the manner of their own cultural representation.” In this case, the film's subjects were, with the exception of Jason, not present. Rather, it was a cast of Mozambican, Nigerian, and Indian amateur actors based in Pune who were negotiating the cultural representations of others, based on their own understandings of the encounter and its context.…”