Posts about FILMMAKERS NOTE on What the Fields

Remember
FILMMAKERS NOTE
My rst memory of the Nellie massacre is a faint one. I was 8-years old and lived in Tinsukia, Assam briey.
Apart from the name Nellie, that somehow managed to implant itself in my memory, I have no recollection of
anything else. It may have been because there were actually no conversations around it or maybe my memory
was storing the name and the place for some other time. I will never know. After that, I never ever heard about
the massacre, until I chanced upon Teresa Rahmans article in Tehelka in 2006. That piece went into detail the
horrors of what had happened on 18th February, 1983 and how the survivors were still waiting for justice. This
time, I tried to nd out more about what had happened, but except for a few online pieces, here and there,
there wasnt anything much that had been written on Nellie at the time. A few people I spoke to did help me
with pointing towards academic articles and books on Assam, but it was as if Nellie had ceased to be part of
peoples conversation, except as a footnote or guest appearance in the list of places where mass violence had
taken place in India.
I eventually forgot about Nellie, and moved on to make other lms. Shut. Forgotten. In June 2013, I read this
wonderful piece by Jaspreet Singh in the New York Times about his memory of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, and
the importance and complexity of memorialization. Reading this piece, in a strange way, brought back the
Nellie massacres to my mind, and questions around why our collective memories choose to remember some
events and obliterate others? How are our collective memories of public events shaped? And why were Nellie
massacres never part of our collective memories?
I started work on What the Fields Remember in October 2013, and from February 2014-February 2015, I made
four trips to Assam as part of my research and lming. I met survivors from various villages and the town of
Nellie. Some refused to speak to me, as they did not want to revisit a past they had managed to bury and
move on. Some were more than forthcoming and were still waiting for an acknowledgement from the State and
citizens of India a belated apology, among other things. And with a very few, I began a tenuous relationship,
each relating to one another from our private universes, and over a period of time, building a relationship and
this I believe is the privilege and gift of documentary lmmaking. One of them (Sirajuddin Ahmed), was
dismissive of me the rst time I met him along with Amit Mahanti (the cinematographer and editor of the lm).
He was wary and watchful to begin with, but never judgmental and always helpful even though he didnt
particularly see the point of the lm being made after all these years. But we managed to strike some kind of a
comradeship, and he even agreed to be interviewed in front of the camera, on his own terms and time. His
questions to me, and of the world, ended up shaping the lm to a large extent as it stands today.
I wanted to make the lm as a way to engage with my questions and dilemmas around the idea of collective
memory and amnesia and what we choose to memorialize. But somewhere along the way, the lm changed.
Whose memory and amnesia was I talking about? Mine and of those who inhabit the world and class I do? We
may have forgotten, but for the people who went through what happened on 18th February, there was no
forgetting. They live with it even today, some more private than the others. And they know that justice is not a
word that will ever be part of their vocabulary. The lm, in some ways, had morphed into a different kind of
memory-making.

I decided not to focus too much on the larger political events that had shaped the survivors personal histories,
not because it is not important, but because every time the question of justice for the survivors of the Nellie
massacre comes up, Assams complex political history becomes the smokescreen. It is as if the complexity of
the times and justice were/are mutually exclusive.
I then decided to make the lm entirely through account of the survivors of the Nellie massacre. I chose to
focus my lens on Abdul Khayer and Sirajuddin Ahmeds personal histories and their ideas of memory, violence,
justice, politics and hopefully through their narratives, the larger ideas of collective memory and amnesia have
also come through.
SUBASRI KRISHNAN