Some films come together without an obvious storyline at the outset. For award-winning documentary film-maker, Anand Patwardhan, his recent documentary film ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’ (The World is Family, 2023); did not start out as a film in his imagination, but as a video documentation of his parents’ lives and family gatherings.
“With ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’, which started out as me recording my parents and families’ lives since the 1990s for personal use, I first discovered that there was a film waiting to be made, that overlapped my experience of family with my relatives’ fight for freedom and unity, during this period,” Anand said, during the recently held MOG Sundays talk at the Museum of Goa, Pilerne.
Anand screened the 96 minute documentary film, which won the Best Documentary award at The New York Indian Film Festival, 2024, at the Museum of Goa, which was followed by a lively interaction with the audience, who were curious about his editing techniques.
A compelling blend of political and personal narratives, the film documents Anand’s parents, Wasudev Hari Patwardhan and Nirmala Dialdas Patwardhan, in their old age – sharing their life stories, showcasing their tight familial bond and navigating growing health issues, with archival data depicting families’ involvement in India’s freedom struggle also woven into the narrative.
Mumbai-based Anand, whose previous documentary films like ‘Ram Ke Naam’, ‘War and Peace’, among others, have won critical acclaim, revealed that his style of filmmaking is not conventional, as he does not always conceptualise a script to initiate the process, stating that “the film’s script, in the form of commentary and narration, emerges at the very end. My films are theoretically fleshed out during the editing process.”
Although he had previously understood there was more to his parents’ histories, it was only when he started interviewing his relatives after his parents’ demises to fill in the gaps in the stories they shared, and while going through the footage during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, that the film’s storyline began to fall into place.
“Before conceptualising ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’, I had only a broad idea of my families’ involvement in the freedom struggle. Through piecing information together from interviews I had with my relatives, I learnt that my father’s brothers, Rau and Achyut Patwardhan, were Gandhian socialists and underground revolutionaries, respectively, who contributed to the freedom struggle,” he said.
“My maternal grandfather, Bhai Pratap Dialdas, who was based in Karachi, regularly hosted India’s leaders in the independence movement. All these concepts eventually fell into place to create the film,” Anand added.
The film’s dual focus on establishing the common ground between his close bonds with his parents and his families’ previously not well-known fight against British colonialism to unite India as a family, is what led him to name the film ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’ – the world is family, he maintained.
