Adivasi filmmakers are reclaiming their stories: From Santhali cinema to digital archives

Adapted from a Santhali folktale, Angen follows Sukku, a flute player whose music enchants a goddess living in the spirit world. Drawn into her realm through water, a portal between the human and spiritual worlds, Sukku later realises he no longer belongs there and begins searching for his village. Through metaphor, the film shows how, as urbanisation expands, forests disappear, natural spaces shrink, and even spiritual spaces begin to vanish.

Storytelling is one such art where it matters who is telling the story. Santhal stories have often been written only in Santhali. Sometimes, the works may have found mention in Bengali or Hindi or Oriya.

“Our greatest challenge is not the lack of stories but the lack of opportunities to narrate our own reality. For decades, the little that we have been represented has been distorted stereotypes and external perspectives,” says Santhal filmmaker Shristy Marandi. “Filmmaking is a medium through which communities can exercise agency over the representation and preservation of their own cultural histories,” she adds.

Her documentary Palimpsest (2025) received a Special Jury Mention at the 8th National Short Film Competition during Samvaad 2025 in Jamshedpur. It documents Dasai, a Santhal festival that unfolds alongside West Bengal’s Durga Puja season. The 43-minute film layers memory and ritual through hypnotic dances of Santhal men adorned as women, the rhythmic pulse of drums and trance-like invocations of ancestral spirits, the Bongas. As elders recall forgotten origins and youth question its relevance, the film becomes both a mirror and elegy — a meditation on what it means to remember, reinvent and reclaim a culture standing at the crossroads of tradition and modernity.

“By documenting Dasai and the cultural practices surrounding it, I wanted to create an accessible visual archive and used as a starting point for further research and intergenerational learning,” says Marandi.

The connection between memory and lived experience is central to cinema produced by many Adivasi filmmakers. One such example is Oraon filmmaker Biju Toppo. He is among the first Adivasi filmmakers to use the camera to counter the community’s misrepresentation in the mainstream media. For the new generation of Adivasi filmmakers to run, experienced ones like Toppo had to walk.

Toppo graduated in 1994 and co-founded Akhra, a Ranchi-based production house documenting the lives and struggles of Adivasis, with filmmaker-activist Meghnath in 1996. The only formal visual training he received was a 15-day filmmaking course at Patna’s Notre Dame Communication Centre in 1995. “I realised there is power in the camera; there is power in storytelling,” he says.

His landmark documentary Shaheed Jo Anjaan Rahe (1996) focused on the 1985 massacre of 14 tribals, including former MP and activist Father Antony Murmu, in Jharkhand’s Sahibganj district. He has since won three National Film Awards for documentaries — Iron is Hot (2007), Ek Ropa Dhan (2010) and Naachi se Baanchi (2017).

“I was a student when the Netarhat Andolan (tribal resistance movement) began in the early 1990s. The Jharkhand Andolan was at its peak. The ‘Jal, Jangal, Jameen’ (water, forest,land) chants never left the space. Gradually, I understood what’s happening. I understood whose story I will tell when I pick up a camera. I started documenting displacement, environmental pollution and exploitation of Adivasis,” says Toppo. He is currently working on a film based on a concept by Kurukh writer Mahadev Toppo that explores the intersection of film, literature and art.
Nandini Tank, assistant professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Christ University, Bengaluru, talks about the challenges that come with translation and oral histories among tribal communities. “The stories passed down orally are not simply repeated word for word; they are remembered, interpreted and retold by each storyteller. Oral narratives from tribals present a unique challenge: because they depend entirely on generational memory,” she says.

“As researchers, we have traditionally relied on British archives, elite historical records and non-tribal ethnographies to understand tribal cultures in India,” she adds.

It is, therefore, important that films such as Angen, Palimpsest and Naachi Se Baanchi serve as digital archives.