Today at Brown

The world premiere of Songs of a Sorrowful Man, a documentary co-directed and co-produced by Professor of Anthropology Lina Fruzzetti, launched the University’s Year of India events on Oct. 1.

The film was an apt beginning for the year-long series of lectures, academic panels, and performances representing “the start of a much deeper relationship with India,” Dean of Faculty Rajiv Vohra said in his introductory remarks. Showcasing the life and work of Dukhushyam Chitrakar, a renowned artist, Sufi mystic, and keeper of knowledge in Naya village, West Bengal, the film is at once definitively Bengali and globally relevant. Likewise, the Year of India provides an opportunity not only to learn about India, but also to discover “what learning from India can teach us all about global change and world history,” said Watson Institute director Michael Kennedy.

A collaboration among Fruzzetti, Wesleyan professor Akos Ostor, and Dhirubhai Ambani Institute professor Aditi Nath Sarkar, Songs provides an intimate portrait of a community of Bengali patuas, artists skilled in the craft of singing stories to accompany painted scrolls. In recent years, the patua community in Naya has felt pressure from urbanization and from conservative Muslim communities advocating a “purer” form of Islam, Fruzzetti said. The film shows how one man’s humanistic perspectives on religion and art have helped the community maintain its art form in a rapidly changing world.

Muslim patuas have long painted scrolls and sung songs about Hindu deities, Dukhushyam recounts in the film, frequently breaking into sung parables to illustrate his points. “No religion is bad,” he explains in the film. “They’re all the same thing.”

Dukhushyam’s philosophy of tolerance embraces both continuity and change. Concerned that the village patuas were neglecting the musical dimension of the tradition, Dukhushyam reinvigorated his heritage by doing something unprecedented: training women in the art of the patuas. His was a vision that “cut across convention,” said Ostor in the panel discussion following the film screening.

Dukhushyam’s spirituality takes viewers “light years beyond” colonial understandings of Hinduism and Islam as discrete, mutually opposed entities, said Associate Professor of Religious Studies Donna Wulff. His holistic approach to the divine suggests that the perceived rift between Hindus and Muslims does not reflect the realities of several local contexts, she said.

Vazira F-Y Zamindar, assistant professor of history, viewed Dukhushyam and Naya village as testaments to how local people have moved beyond concepts of identity constructed in the colonial era. In Naya village, “the presumed boundaries of religious identity are shorn open,” she said, adding that these “fluid, in-flux communities,” not elite edicts or sacred texts, provide the most insight into religious practices.

Lina Fruzzetti: Moving past traditional religious boundaries. Spurred by an audience question, the panelists sought to define the relevance of this visual ethnography to the study of South Asia and the broader study of global processes. For Zamindar, the film provoked the question, “How do we hold onto these more fluid, more dynamic, more tolerant versions of Sufi Islam?”

Ultimately, the film reveals the human capacity to “live with difference,” Fruzzetti said, asserting that “the film’s message far exceeds the village.”

That an audience in Rhode Island can animatedly discuss a film about West Bengal is evidence of the film’s resonance, Ostor said. Though Dukhushyam lacked formal education, his ecumenical philosophy could provide useful insights for intellectuals and policymakers alike. “I wish our politicians would have this kind of wisdom,” Ostor said.