Delhiite Rajesh Jala on his Children of the Pyre that has won the best documentary award in MontrealThis is Manikarnika — the busiest cremation ground in India. Here people come with the hope of dying quietly and attaining nirvana. Here, ironically, a clutch of children comes face to face with death everyday. They make a living here, they play games here. Young feet quietly scurry through pyres glinting in the dark and young hands search bodies to steal shrouds. This is where Delhi-based filmmaker Rajesh S. Jala spent days and nights with his camera and those kids, filming the documentary Children of the Pyre. In the crowded halls of Montreal and Pusan film festivals where Children of the Pyre was screened — at the former, it won the Best Documentary Award — the 74-minute film had a chilling effect from the very first shot. As drum beats pound, orange flames flickering from a pyre fill the dark screen and a shadow scampers across, tightly clutching a shroud. The camera zooms in to disclose the face of 11-year-old Gagan. Dressed in faded clothes, his face deprived of innocence, he is one of Jala’s seven protagonists. They are all 9-to-15-year-olds, who sell shrouds stolen from the bodies at Manikarnika. “The seven of them are representatives of several others across India,” says Jala, 39. The filmmaker knows every little detail of the children who were complete strangers until two years ago, when he first visited Varanasi with the intention of making a film in the city. “The place lures filmmakers,” smiles Jala, who spent more than a month walking by the ghats and through the narrow lanes. He finally reached Manikarnika to film the life of a widow, but it was the children who caught his attention. “They belong to the Dom community and are considered untouchable. They work here to earn a few rupees and I was convinced that I had to film them,” says Jala, who had earlier made the film Floating Lamp of the Shadow Valley about the nine-year-old boatman Arif in his hometown Kashmir. A few months later, Jala returned to Varanasi with his crew. “We were stationed there 24x7,” he says. Even though the inhabitants of Manikarnika were initially unsure of his intentions and conscious of the camera, soon the ice was broken. So, in his narrative he pans from children fighting for shrouds to sell them in the market, to them facing the angry relatives of the dead. In some lighthearted moments, Gagan enjoys a dance with girls during the Navratri festival and Ravi shares details of a romance. However, the humour gives way to dissonance, for even their games revolve around the dead — in one shot, they perform a mock cremation of an abandoned body. While Jala awaits the premiere here at the International Film Festival of India in Goa in November, before that he travels to Germany for the Leipzig International Film Festival. But there won’t be any more films until he establishes a trust to rehabilitate the children of Manikarnika. “I want the kids out of there and in school,” says Jala, as he plans another trip to Varanasi — this time to show the children their own tale that has given them recognition worldwide.
