Patwardhan Documentary Passionate Plea for Peace

By ASHFAQUE SWAPAN
Special to India-West

A South Asian activist organization, Ekta, recently hosted a retrospective of Patwardhan's films on Oct. 20 and 28 at San Francisco State University where viewers got a chance to sample the breadth of his documentary work which began nearly four decades ago. The nine screened films included his latest 180-minute anti-nuclear film War and Peace, which explores a variety of underlying issues raised by India's nuclear explosions in 1998. Patwardhan, currently teaching a course in Stanford University, was present in person. Further screenings of his films are scheduled in Berkeley, Stanford and Los Angeles.

War and Peace

Filmed and edited by
Anand Patwardhan

A Work in Progress
180 minutes. 2001.

India's nuclear explosions in 1998 shook the world, and was followed by a surge of patriotic euphoria in metropolitan cities. Pakistan soon exploded its own nuclear devices, and the two new entrants of the global nuclear club quickly drew concern from the West, led by the United States.

In an absorbing montage of news footage, interviews with nuclear experts as well as numerous interviews with ordinary people, this film addresses the perils of unbridled jingoism, and at the same time focuses on grassroots attempts to disseminate an alternative viewpoint - a viewpoint that champions a transcendent humanism to foster peace and amity.

As Patwardhan casts an ironic, wry eye on the high-tech religious/ patriotic displays (one fan gushes that Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee should be known as "Atom Bomb Vajpayee") and contrasts it with the mad fervor for all things Western among the Indian elite, he makes his own views clear: He is an implacable opponent of nuclear power, period.

The explosions and the resultant jingoistic euphoria are a function of the frustration and fevered anger of a failed elite, the film argues, backing its argument with vivid images of nationalistic and religious fervor that verge on the surreal.

Patwardhan's camera also takes us to Pokharan and the neighboring area in Rajasthan, as well as to Orissa, where he documents heartbreaking examples of victims of irradiation, and quotes experts who make disquieting remarks about the hazards that the nuclear power plants pose.

India's nuclear explosions were followed almost immediately by nuclear explosions by Pakistan. One of the most affecting sections of the film deals with the film maker's travels in Pakistan. The film maker travels with a number of Indian activists who have joined hands with their counterparts in Pakistan to build and foster people-to-people contacts to combat the disquieting rise of jingoistic hysteria and antipathy towards a neighboring country.

Interviews with many Pakistanis -- starting from intellectuals to ordinary people and schoolchildren -- reveal a heartwarming yearning for friendship and closer neighborly ties which contrast with the saber-rattling of the politicians. Hearing Mahatma Gandhi's favorite song "Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram" being performed by Pakistanis, or hearing a few contrite Pakistani schoolkids say that nuclear weaponization is not such a great idea after all, is particularly powerful.

The film cuts a wider swath as it looks at the historical background of global nuclear armament. Poignant interviews with Hiroshima survivors and revealing chats with U.S. historians of World War II dwell on the dangers of chauvinistic patriotism, and Patwardhan pulls no punches when the film contrasts the U.S. demand for nuclear disarmament with refusing to face up to the horrible consequences of the U.S. dropping of nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

The film ends with images of the World Trade Center being attacked, and Patwardhan's plea seems particularly resonant: Violence begets violence, and what the world needs today is to devise a non-violent method of resolving conflict.