The documentary is underpinned with two definite aspects:
• Firstly, to bring the voices of the common women of Bow Barracks, Kolkata to the forefront. The documentary involves seven women who belong to different age groups and are associated/were associated with different professions. Some of them are nostalgic about their long forgotten past, some of them still fight hard to keep their cultures and traditions alive through food, dance and fashion, some of them are least bothered about their glorious past and are more concerned with the struggles of the present, and some of them are suffering from severe ‘historical dementia’ for whom the present is all about agonies.
• Secondly, through these voices the documentary also looks forward to interrogate and dismantle the ways through which the newspaper articles, movies and the existing documentaries have stereotyped and misrepresented the Anglo-Indians of Bow Barracks. They have either been socio-culturally exoticized as a charming community full of happiness, prosperity and glory or have been anti-socially portrayed as a community inflicted with sexual violence, drug abuse and alcoholism. Even there are some Anglo-Indians (preferably the elite ones) in Kolkata who openly denies to accept the residents of the Bow Barracks as Anglo-Indians at all and calls it a ‘Christian slum’ (personal interactions during my field work) and their reasons bear a strong racial undertone.
Keeping these two aspects at the backdrop, the documentary initiates with a brief history about the origin and the position of Anglo-Indian women in Bow Barracks. Then it gradually moves towards the experiential narratives of the earlier and the current women residents of Barracks. The documentary concludes in the South Park Street Cemetery that metaphorically represents the ‘almost dead’ socio-cultural history of the Anglo-Indian community of Kolkata in general and Bow Barracks in particular.
2 июл 2018
