Tambaku Chaakila Oob Ali (Brasas de tabaco)

sinopsis

Tambaku Chaakila Oob Aali traces the history and strike actions of the all women trade union of over 3000 tobacco workers in Nipani (Karnataka). It was made in collaboration with female tobacco factory workers. The film documents, re-enacts and takes forward one of the largest movements of unorganised labour of its time and context which sparked unionising processes across Karnataka and Maharashtra throughout the 1980s. Attracted by the power of these large scale strike actions provoked by women workers and following the spirit of mobilising for the left labour and the women’s movement the Yugantar film collective embarked on their 2nd film. The collective spent four months with the women tobacco factory workers in Nipani, listening to their accounts of exploitative working conditions, discussing strategies for unionising and concrete steps to broaden solidarities across factories for massive strike actions. Through this collaboration, the film team was able to film circumstances inside factories hitherto unrepresented in film as they followed the women workers’ leads as to what, where and how their actions should be recorded. The film collective developed a loose script through the workers’ narratives. Yugantar’s continuous commitment to the complexity of political friendships and how to ‘stand with’ provoked a then pioneering collaborative filmmaking practice embodied in large scale re-enactments of protests, a voice-over as pluriverse testimony and the production of the first screen presence of working class women on screen organising and ‘speaking to power’. This film is a powerful example of a feminist third cinema, a factory film, also called a ‘strike manual’ by current union activists.

about the collective

Yugantar is considered India’s first feminist film collective. Founded by Deepa Dhanraj, Abha Baiya, Navroze Contractor and Meera Rao in 1980 the collective developed four films together with existing or ensuing women’s groups: with domestic workers in Pune (Molkarin, 1981), female factory workers in Nipani (Tambaku Chaakila Oob Aali / Tobacco Embers, 1982), with Stree Shakhti Sanghatana, a feminist research and activist collective in Hyderabad (Idi Katha Maatramena / is this just a story?, 1983) and with members of the Chipko environmental movement (Sudesha, 1983).

The revolutionary energy on university campuses at the time, civil liberty and radical left movements, land right struggles and an overall sense of possibilities and burst of creative activism that came with the emergence of the autonomous women’s movement during the post-Emergency period sparked the foundation of the collective in 1979/80. The collective’s name carrying the air of radical historical transformation – Yugantar/ Change to a New Era.

Yugantar’s film works are also amongst the pioneers of state independent documentary filmmaking in India that established itself increasingly during the 1980s and 90s and thus need to be addressed as part of a nascent movement of independent political documentary in India. The acknowledgment of Yugantar’s work is vital in order to stress the undisputable importance of women filmmaker’s particular approach and the impact of feminist discourse on innovations in documentary practices and aesthetics within the Indian context and beyond.

Today we might view Yugantar’s films as living and continuously reactivated documents, as part of a continuously metabolising feminist archive that takes its place in the Now and in the future.