For Bay Area South Asian film buffs, the past few weeks have been a particular treat. Films from South Asia had a very strong presence in the 13th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival March 2-9, and in addition UC Berkeley's Center for South Asia Studies in association with South Asian students hosted a retrospective of South Asian films March 10-12.

The film festival in San Francisco, sponsored by National Asian American Telecommunications Association, featured over 110 films and videos from 12 countries.

For serious South Asian film buffs, the film festival was a Godsend: Viewers had a rare opportunity to see films that fail to make the commercial circuit for obvious reasons. The diverse presentation included an off-beat award winning feature film, English August, based on Upamanyu Chatterjee's novel, and a powerful video documentary on South Asian cab drivers in New York, Taxi-vala/ Auto-biography. (Reviews of both films follow). The screened films and videos are, of course, a world apart from Bollywood potboilers that proliferate in Indian stores

Indian commercial cinema, given its mammoth budgets and pressing need to recoup profits, is strait-jacketed in an all-too familiar formula of gaudy costumes, shrill acting and shallow story-line smothered in music and fantasy.

But the audio visual medium is also a particularly potent vehicle for social commentary, whether through fiction or documentaries and committed film and video directors are taking incisive looks at South Asian society, but given the distance, one does not always have access in the U.S. to these exciting forays.

NAATA sponsors deserve praise for making their presentation more inclusive. A sad fact remains that South Asia is all too often a footnote in the mainstream American consciousness of Asia, but NAATA's film festival was a heartwarming exception.

This year's South Asian fare, which included a feature film from India, video films by expatriate South Asian film makers, a series of probing documentaries from a street fighting Bangladeshi alternative filmmaking group, Protishabda, offered viewers a sample of some of the interesting work being done by South Asians.

ENGLISH, AUGUST
Directed by Dev Benegal. Tropicfilm, 1994.

Director Dev Benegal's first feature film, after a series of acclaimed documentaries, is based on Upamanyu Chatterjee's debut novel of the same name.

An official selection in 1994 film festivals in Mannheim and Toronto and winner of an award in Italy's Turin film festival and silver Grand Prix at the festival of three continents in Nantes, France, the film premiered in North America at the NAATA festival.

Chatterjee's novel is an acid, irreverent account of the travails of an urban transplant in the heart of rural India.

Meet Agastya Sen, the product of India's Anglicized elite, a Bengali who reads "Pather Panchali" -- a Bengali classic on which Satyajit Ray based his magnificent film -- in English, to his father's disgust.

In the brave new world of contemporary India, the metropolitan cities have produced a Westernized elite which, if anything, is even more I alienated than the desi minions of the British Raj of a bygone era.

Twenty-something Agastya (August to his friends) is as hip as they come. He likes to smoke pot, peppers his mostly English conversations lavishly with four-letter words, listens to Bob Dylan and jazz, reads Marcus Aurelius and sports T-shirts and jeans.

Sen joins the Indian Administrative Service, India's elite corps of bureaucrats, and is bundled off to Madna, a rural backwater in Andhra Pradesh.

The film looks at Madna through Agastya's eyes, lampooning the quaint bureaucratic customs, the hierarchical, entrenched pecking order, and a host of characters who are eccentric people in a bewildering, foreign world.

This is not a film for the faint hearted. The film is just as uncompromising as the novel to conventions of a neat narrative with a beginning, middle and an end. Sen has a shocking penchant for profanity, and the story meanders, apparently aimlessly, punctuated by constant flashbacks, as it takes a hard look at contemporary India, unshackled from the British for over five decades, yet presenting a stark picture of an urban elite even more estranged from its own country than before.

As Sen muddles through Madna, finding solace in pot, booze, and obsessive sexual fantasies, drawing support from Pink Floyd, Miles Davis, Queen and Bach, the viewer does more than look at Madna through Sen's eyes. It also looks at Sen, and his friend Mandy, the epitome of a new, hedonist generation, rootless and self-absorbed. When a plaintive old-time freedom fighter fumes about the lack of values, all it can earn from Sen and its ilk is amused condescension.

Repeated flashbacks bring nostalgic images of Sen's near and dear ones, who hover about his consciousness like ghosts, and Sen, through his many experiences in Madna, still remains largely untouched, because the chasm between the two worlds are too great.

The most refreshing aspect about the film is its dogged realism. The ambiance of small town India is evoked with remarkable exactitude, right from the interior of a government rest-house to the cattle strewn small streets lined with little stores.

Benegal, who has studied film making in New York University, is now collaborating with Amitav Ghosh on a film on Ahmad ibn Majid, Vasco da Gama's legendary Arab navigator, and a film based on noted writer Mahasweta Devi's work in collaboration with Shabana Azmi.

With this film, Benegal joins the ranks of select Indian filmmakers who take their craft seriously. While others weave maudlin superficial tales of glitz and glamor, Benegal's is perhaps a higher calling: To use this most modern and complex of contemporary art forms to fashion an honest and substantive artistic document of enduring value that does more than entertain, it offers an incisive glimpse into the Indian human condition.

TAXI-VALA/AUTO-BIOGRAPHY.
Directed by Vivek Renjen Bald.
Mistaken Identity Productions, 1994.

The son of an Australian father and a Punjabi mother, Vivek Renjen Bald meets a Pakistani cab driver in a New York cab. He is from Lahore, Bald is excited to find out, because so is Bald's mother. Bald tries to speak in broken Urdu, trying to establish a link.

It was this cultural link that inspired Bald to go out with his video camera and make this powerful 48-minute documentary.

Bald, who has grown up in California, has never quite identified with the United States, which to him represented "greed, hypocrisy and violence."

"I chose India, America's polar opposite," Bald says in the documentary. He thought "all I had to do was to get back to India). "

The Pakistani cab driver, on the other hand, had left Pakistan to come to the United States to search for a better life.

"Truth is, we are chasing opposite sides of the same myth. There is no magic India, no miracle America.''

Bald's documentary is a perceptive, probing look at a recent addition to the diverse mosaic of the South Asian community in the U.S.: South Asian cab drivers in New York.

Between montages of New York city streets seen through a cab, South Asians talk about their fears and hopes, dreams and challenges.

It's a very different picture from the stereotypical desk comfortable, educated and ensconced in suburbia, worrying about the glass ceiling and his kid's chances of making it to the ivy league.

These immigrants are out in the mean streets every day coping with racist cops and thugs, eking out a living and adjusting to a far greater culture shock than their English-educated compatriots.

The power of the film lies in the issues it raises. The film is more than a string of interviews. Bald's voice-overs, sincere and poignant, raise questions about walls within the South Asian community. Bald, with his militant leftist, feminist, multicultural values, is not always comfortable about what he sees or hears, and here the lines of communication remain tenuous.

He wraps up his film with the increasing militancy of South Asian cab drivers, who are agitating against harassment, and puts it in the context of the historic global struggle of people of color, and asks: "So whose American dream is this, anyway?"

(Reprinted from India West, March 1995)