Travels, Songs and Displacements

Abstract

This article analyzes a set of translocal documentary films by always-on-the-move filmmakers who attempt to connect place-based struggles against exploitative development projects. These films stitch together recorded footage from various locales/places to bring out the commonalities and shared patterns among them, thereby creating translocal/transplace alliances interrogating the dominant development discourse. In some of these works, train journeys between two places become a way of connecting to the past and renewing erstwhile translocal ties. I examine the links between aesthetic strategies of depicting movement in the documentaries, and their political critique of the displacement and forced migration of indigenous communities in the wake of exogenous developmental interventions. While each documentary film highlights “movement,” the formal elements that achieve this vary from songs narrating journeys to expressive montages with multilayered soundtracks. Engaging in a discussion of Kora Rajee, which remembers and redeploys indigenous historical experiences of travel of the Oraon tribe, I explore how critiques of development can be approached by attending to the changing cultural-politics of tribal identities and their representation through documentaries.