Tryst With Beauty:
With Angwal Lalit Mohan Joshi has hit the documentary jackpot–a single film that is personal, poetic, social, political, historical, anthropological, and shot at a location that is so gorgeous, the heart skips a beat every time the camera goes into landscape mode.
Angwal (Embrace) takes Joshi to his birthplace, Kumaon, “like a criminal” he says at some point, because he also abandoned it like so many others; this mass migration leading to the decline of the region. But that comes much later; first there is the poetry in the Kumaoni language left behind by members of his family –mainly his uncles Shyamacharandutt Pant and Ramdutt Pant–and other poets, strangely and unfairly, little known outside Uttarakhand.
These poets, inspired by the beauty of the Himalayas, forests and rivers, not just captured the majesty of nature (like Rangoli Agarwal and her team of cinematographers does), but also the day-to-day life of the people of Kumaon. Shekhar Pathak, Historian and Editor of Pahar magazine, one of the many interviewed by Joshi, gives wonderful insights into the writings of these poets so steeped in the soil of their kavya bhoomi.
The families of some of the poets carefully preserved their work, and a lot of it was later compiled and published. Joshi was lucky to get some incisive interviews with families, scholars and other contemporary poets like Tribhuvan Giri, Diva Bhatt, Dev Singh Pokharia, who put the poetry and the culture of Kumaon into perspective.
The erudite Shekhar Pathak says that Lokratna Pant ‘Gumani’ should be considered the first poet of the Hindustani language or Khadi Boli; Bhartendu Harishchandra is accorded that honour, even though he was born after Gumani’s death.
If the poets like Gauri Datt Pande ‘Gaurda’ and Girish Tiwari ‘Girda’ wrote about major social issues of their time, the freedom movement, bonded labour, the problems of widows, deforestation, the ritual of Jagar typical of the Uttarakhand hills, men leaving their homes to join the army, and the tragedy of migration that has left the villages of Kumaon desolate, there are also charming poems about the Burunsh flower that covers the forests in cheerful red, the Ghat (watermill),the district’s fondness for tea and potatoes.
Today, Uttarakhand is in the news for landslides, floods and ecological disasters, but once Almora was Kumaon’s intellectual capital that offered the country writers, scholars and leaders.
Joshi has used the recitation of some poems and has others set to music, so that Angwal is an excellent introduction to the poetry and history of Kumaon. As he discovers various facets of Kumaoni life today, the film is also an emotional homecoming for Joshi, who visits the dilapidated remains of the homes of his paternal and maternal grandparents, and recalls his growing up amidst the misty loveliness of the hills. There is a touch of melancholy in his reminiscences, but life and work took him to London, where he worked with the BBC for many years, and is Director/Editor at South Asian Cinema Foundation. If he had not left his village, he would not have been able to give Kumaon –and the world of cinema — the gift of Angwal.
