Past Present

When 29-year-old Krishna Saraswati decided to turn director with the 85-minute feature film The Legend of Shiva and Parvati he decided there would be few better stories than that of his parents’ lives. With good reason. The Stuttgart-based Indo-German film-maker is the product of a mixed-race marriage. His father was a well-known sadhu in Himachal Pradesh and his German mother,a flower child,who came to India three decades back,looking for enlightenment. “I felt that more than the story of how my parents met,it was the emotions that brought them together that needed to be explored,” explains Saraswati,who is in Delhi for the screening of his film at a two-day film festival Global Calling at the Max Mueller Bhawan. The festival includes other films like Fiction by Spandan Banerjee and a series of nine films from the Asian Hot Shots festival,Berlin,among others.

Saraswati’s film,which was first screened last year at the German film festival at Heidelberg,traces his journey to Himachal Pradesh,where he interviews sages who knew his father. There are images in the film from old family albums that show his mother,Renate and his father in India and Germany. Even Saraswati’s uncle,also a hippie in the 70s,features in the film. Incidentally,after Renate came to India in 1975 she changed her name to Parvati.

“I was born in the Himalayas,but my mother and I soon moved to Germany because my dad would beat her up regularly. So I hardly spent any time with him,” he says. Saraswati met his father for the first time at the age of 14,when he visited India with his mother. Over the years he had many unanswered questions about India and his parents’ relationship. “I did not know what being a sadhu meant or what it entailed,but I knew he was someone many people looked up to. I always thought he was magical,” he says.

Saraswati began shooting for the film in April 2006,a year after his mother,who was suffering from cancer,passed away. Saraswati had not decided on a name for his film,but it came to him over the course of the shooting. “People I met told me that they considered my parents’ marriage a reincarnation of the bond between Shiva and Parvati. I had not heard these names before. So I researched further,till I knew more. I thought it was quite apt,” says Saraswati,