Domestic Concerns,Transnational Fields

Abstract

This article ethnographically explores two recent documentary films by Raintree Films, a Mumbai-based filmmaking team consisting of director Nishtha Jain and writer/producer Smriti Nevatia. Lakshmi and Me (2008) and At My Doorstep (2009) self-reflexively critique inequality in Indian society by investigating the relationship between members of the filmmakers’ relatively privileged class and their domestic servants. Both films aim to create critical self-awareness in lower and upper class viewers alike, and ultimately to foster inclusive spaces of imagination and debate in the context of deeply ingrained practices of inequality only exacerbated by the exclusionary neoliberal logic. Although similar in politics and topic, the two films vary widely in the conditions of their production, their narrative form and mode of address, and in their routes and degrees of success along international and local itineraries. These differences, I argue, reflect iterative attempts by the filmmakers to realize their critical intentions while confronting the constraints of the postcolonial, transnational field in which they work and engaging in what Hamid Naficy, describing diasporic filmmaking in the West, has termed an “interstitial mode of production” (Naficy, 2001). That they face similar practical, representational, and political dilemmas to those that shape diasporic filmmaking while working “at home” speaks to the complexities of urban, upper class cultural production and citizenship in contemporary India.