Aesthetic strategies of the criminalised: political subjectivity in Budhan Stories

Abstract

This article reflects on a living archive of indigenous film and performance generated by a collective of artists and filmmakers from India’s ‘ex-criminal’ De-notified Tribes (DNTs) in response to an aggressive erasure of their lives and stories in the mainstream imagination. Drawing on this archive, this article examines the making and circulation of films by DNT communities to consolidate a DNT political subject, and interrogates the challenges involved in doing so. Specifically, we interrogate the challenges of visibility for a political subject that is ‘unsettled’, not marked by a relationship to a (home)land but by a history of criminality. We argue that DNT’s entry into citizenship has been predicated on an inbuilt tension between the celebration what makes the community distinct, and indeed criminalised; and a drive towards respectability. This tension articulates in the structure of, the content, the affective life and the aesthetic of their films, generating categories of things that can be said, and things that cannot be spoken. These elements, while in tension, are held together by the aesthetic – in the strategies of sublimation, hyperrealisation, inter-cutting at play in the films.