Kotla Producer's statement

STATEMENT

The exploration of urban life has recently emerged as a key area of study within the social sciences. This interest has been sparked by the growing complexity of the effects of globalisation upon previously isolated urban spaces. Within this context, of particular significance is the meaning of locality and neighbourhood in a time of transnational flows. How do people make meanings regarding belonging and place at such a time of dislocation and change? This film seeks to explore these issues through focusing on a specific neighbourhood of Delhi, and upon a specific group of people who live there. The film is a collaboration between a filmmaker (Simon Wilmot) and an anthropologist (Sanjay Srivastava) and reflects their joint interests in the aesthetics of urban spaces and the production of meaning that attaches to them. The locality chosen is one where Srivastava has worked over a number of years and has developed rapport with the key characters whose lives are explored.

The film engages with metropolitan meanings in India through wandering the streets, footpaths, courtyards, bedrooms and sitting rooms of the ‘urban village’ of Kotla Mubarakpur. Through focusing on the family of Sarita and Raman Bhardwaj, their friends, and, neighbours, it explores the ways in which the texture of urban spaces in woven into ideas of belonging, intimacy, friendship, ambition, and the desire to be ‘here’ but also somewhere else. In the process, it constitutes locality as a series of performances.

The film will appeal to a wide range of audiences. Firstly, it will be of interest to those studying urban cultures. Anthropologists, sociologists, and those interested in globalisation and urbanization will find it interesting for the connections it makes between the local and the global, and its focus on the politics of gender and intimacy. Its exploration of the social meaning of space will also resonate with the current interest in the topic. Finally, it will also have a viewership outside the university in as much as its central concerns – belonging, intimacy, desire, and keeping and losing control – are of universal interest.