SUNEIL SANZGIRI

Interview

SUNEIL SANZGIRI

suneil portrait

Suneil Sanzgiri

Interview

BY

Devika Girish

An interview with the Indian American artist filmmaker.

Barobar Jagtana: Three Films by Suneil Sanzgiri streams now on Metrograph At Home.

There are moments in the films of Suneil Sanzgiri when the boundaries of time and space dissolve. A wrinkled hand pointed at a laptop screen in America plunges us into an exquisitely rendered 3D home in Goa, India; audio from a contemporary speech by a young activist dissonantly illustrates archival images of Dalit leader B.R. Ambedkar. These moments put me in mind of Agha Shahid Ali’s In Search of Evanescence, in which the Kashmiri poet describes encountering an exit leading to a town named Calcutta while driving through Ohio. The sign makes him want to take that route, just so he could say, “India always exists / off the turnpikes / of America;” so he could invoke, while in the Midwest, the familiar sensations of driving across Calcutta’s famous Howrah Bridge, with the river Ganges flowing below. Like Ali, Sanzgiri turns the dislocation of an immigrant—the perpetual feeling of being elsewhere—into a generative force, a ground zero for building new realities. 

That twinge of a phantom limb runs throughout Sanzgiri’s work, which includes a trilogy of short films, Barobar Jagtana, and a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum that opened last October, called Here the Earth Grows Gold. (Both quote significantly from Ali’s poetry.) But this is not just the nostalgic yearning of a second-generation immigrant. For Sanzgiri, who was born in Texas to an Indian father and an American mother, the animating question is: What does it mean to be connected to faraway people and places through the debris of colonialism? All three films in the trilogy—At Home but Not at Home (2019), Letter From Your Far-Off Country (2020), and Golden Jubilee (2021)—start with interviews with Sanzgiri’s father, before building out a genealogy of artists, thinkers, and radicals united by liberation struggles present and past. 

Images of Goa, the birthplace of Sanzgiri’s father and a Portuguese colony until 1961, lead us into those of Angola and Mozambique; the memories of a relative, a card-carrying member of India’s Communist party, thread through scenes from Muslim women’s demonstrations and anti-caste activism in India; and the writings of Stuart Hall, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Yashica Dutt, and more weave together in a rich, intellectual web, brought to life by Sanzgiri’s free-form digital trickery and audiovisual juxtapositions. As if in protest of a world riven by borders and their violence, these films give shape to a thrillingly borderless heterotopia, where disparate forces can join to dream up something new—call it solidarity. 

Sanzgiri and I met up last week in New York City for a chat about Barobar Jagtana, which is available to stream on Metrograph At Home. We also discussed the perils and possibilities of diasporic art; and refusal as a political tool. It is a pressing issue for Sanzgiri—last week, he withdrew his new work from the 2024 Berlinale in support of the Strike Germany campaign, which protests the suppression of pro-Palestinian speech in Germany.—Devika Girish

DEVIKA GIRISH: Before we get into the films, I wanted to talk about the tattoos you and I got a couple of weeks ago. We went out for lunch and then made an impromptu trip to a shop. The tattoo you got is a great entry point into your work.

SUNEIL SANZGIRI: Yeah! The tattoo is an illustration of a lotus flower within a circle, which is actually an “O.” It’s the “O” in the title of a literary journal called Lotus, which was dedicated to Afro-Asian solidarity writing and involved a lot of poets, like Mahmoud Darwish and Faiz Ahmad Faiz. It was published in the early ’70s and came out of liberation struggles around the world. 

In At Home but Not at Home, I make reference to the Bandung Conference of 1955, which was one of the early Afro-Asian solidarity meetings. It brought together representatives of over half of the world’s population. It was trying to carve out a space in between the global powers of the US and Soviet Union. But it’s also a space of many contradictions. It opens up this question that At Home but Not at Home explores, about the links between Goa and places like Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau, which were all Portuguese colonies. 

I see this question of Afro-Asian solidarity, or cross-continental solidarity, as also in line with the larger question of the diaspora. How can one be in solidarity with a place where they are not currently? And what is one’s responsibility, not just as an artist, but as someone whose ancestors come from a continuum of struggle? 

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Letter From Your Far-Off Country (2020)

DG: The most powerful aspect of your work, for me, is how you trouble the idea of diaspora. I often struggle with works made by diasporic artists in the West, because they can collapse the complexity of race and the contradictions of nationalism—the ways in which decolonial movements in countries like India culminated in a nationalism that has now become toxic. Your films have made me rethink that position, however, and see how art made from the position of the diaspora can be liberatory precisely because it can operate outside of the boundaries of the nation. 

SS: Yeah, there’s a lot to be suspicious of in diasporic filmmaking that becomes a trope or a cliché: “I’m torn between my home and my motherland.” It’s almost a joke at this point.

DG: And that approach often ends up defining itself against whiteness or Western-ness in ways that can be reductive. You, on the other hand, are tackling Western imperialism, but also the chauvinism of caste in India—the complexity on either side of that chasm of belonging.

SS: Caste is essential to working against the tokenization of “brownness.” My family is upper caste, so de-Brahminization is something I think about a lot. Being in the diaspora, one has to be anti-caste. And it takes just as much unlearning as internalized white supremacy does. I grew up in Texas, so I have to unlearn my proximity to whiteness just as much as my proximity to caste. That’s primarily what Letter From Your Far-Off Country engages with. A lot of Dalit people would say, “You Brahmins, upper-caste people, were our oppressors, even if you were also oppressed by the British.” So understanding that struggle is not linear, and struggle is not the same for everyone is important. 

To go back to your question about whether the diaspora has any sort of power, I absolutely think it does, because it moves us away from the center. Édouard Glissant’s notion of diaspora is a constant unfolding, a constant moving outwards. It’s an expansion. Whereas the nation state tries to collapse and co-opt identity—like in Israel, in India, in China.

DG: Ethno-states.

SS: Yes, ethno-nationalism. Diaspora has the power to work against the nation state. However, at the same time, it also has the power to reproduce the exact same structures. You see that with the Howdy Modi rally in Texas, or with the Ram Mandir billboard that was put up in Times Square. When people talk about decolonization in the subcontinent now, it means something completely different from what it did in 1961, when Goa was liberated, or 1947, when India achieved independence. What you have now is a perversion of the word “decolonization” by those in power, from the Bharatiya Janata Party, which says we must decolonize our own history to mean—

DG: De-Islamicize our history.

SS: Exactly. There’s a line from Agha Shahid Ali’s poem Farewell that features in my show at the Brooklyn Museum: “Your history gets in the way of my memory.” That’s a through line in these works: How is history weaponized? How is memory erased? 

DG: Picking up on the thread of memory—your work is very personal. At Home but Not At Home and Golden Jubilee both feature interviews with your father. And Letter From Your Far-Off Country is a missive to a relative, who was a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and an anti-caste activist. Why is the personal, the biographical, a generative starting point for you? 

SS: I think it’s because I made this work for me, especially At Home but Not at Home. I didn’t think anyone was ever going to see it. I didn’t have any luck at film festivals with my other work, which I don’t show anymore. This was the first film that I felt compelled to make; it just flowed out. I didn’t have any images to start with, so a lot of the film is made of appropriated footage. I had commissioned a drone videographer to film images in Goa and I interviewed my father. I was also collecting this assemblage of material that I’d found online or from Parallel Cinema. 

The first image that you see in At Home is this broken or glitched 360-degree image: all these bodies and faces enmeshed together in a grotesque pile, and the gap between a face and a landscape starts to disappear, or a limb and a vehicle. It was an image that spoke to a feeling I was having of homesickness for a place I had not actually been to yet. I was questioning the ways in which technology collapses distance and time, and how images can be utilized to bring us closer.

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Golden Jubilee (2021)

DG: It’s also a way of reimagining kinship. You start with blood relations, like your father or uncle, but then fan out these lineages and bring together people who are kin in different ways. Your films question what it means to inherit something from—or owe something to—someone else.

I want to talk about the theme of refusal in your work. Your films cite artists who have deployed their art or their position in the art world as a form of refusal. For example, in Letter From Your Far-Off Country, there’s footage of Shabana Azmi, a major actress of Hindi cinema, who spoke out at the International Film Festival of India in 1989 about the political murder of Safdar Hashmi, the Indian communist playwright and activist. But increasingly these days we’re seeing how refusal within the art world gets absorbed by the art world. Even how your film, which features video of Azmi’s speech, travels to festivals is perhaps an example of the art world’s reproduction of its own critique. 

SS: Yeah, this is a question a lot of us are grappling with right now. A lot of us, but not all of us. 

DG: If it were all of us, it would not be difficult. [Laughs]

SS: Yeah, if it was all of us, it would not be a refusal. I think we’re at a very particular juncture right now. There is power in removing oneself from an institution, even if just to say, I refuse to be complicit in condoning, or art-washing, or helping to fund a genocide. But at the same time, institutions are able to declare which conversations are allowed to be had and which are not. One has to measure oneself about what one is willing to give up in order to achieve a certain goal. The Brooklyn Museum, for example, is an institution that still houses the remains of colonial plunder. I’ve made a statement about that explicitly in my show. The reason I still accepted that space is because of the response I’ve gotten from the public—strangers, everyone from the security guards who work there to tourists, have reached out to me and told me how much the work means to them. People from various diasporas, from the Caribbean to Palestine, who bring their own struggles to the work. 

Which is to say that I know what I want people to get out of this work, and who I want my audience to be, and it’s not the market. I will allow myself to enter certain spaces if it serves the ultimate goal of reaching the audience for whom I make this work. This is why we’ve become good friends and are talking right now—we met through this work. However, we shouldn’t allow any institutions to have a monopoly over how our art gets seen, or to designate which conversations can happen and when.

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Letter From Your Far-Off Country (2020)

DG: I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of art in times of crisis. In the last few months, stills from the film Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege, by Abdallah Al-Khatib, have been circulating on social media. It was made during the starvation siege placed on Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee district in Syria, by the Assad regime between 2013 and 2015. The stills that have been circulating show children speaking to the camera about their dreams, saying things like “I dream of eating sugar,” or “I dream of seeing my father again.” I had seen these stills, but I had an opportunity to actually watch the film at a festival a few months ago. And it made me realize how the experience of movie-watching was specific—it allowed me to access beauty and pain outside of the matrix of action. 

Films cannot replace political action or organizing. But this movie allowed me access to something else that I’ve been trying to name. I had a similar feeling while watching your films—in your use of images of oceans, of Amirtha Kidambi’s music, and of digital technologies to blur our sense of space. It’s effective because it’s beautiful. It adds something to the experience of engaging in political action that I feel is absolutely necessary. I don’t know how to name that feeling… it’s “vibes.”

SS: It’s affect, right? Jackie Wang has this text called Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect, which is about taking Freud’s notion of the oceanic and applying it to the idea of Communist desire and yearning that moves us toward action. Because it’s so beautiful, it’s not agitprop. I do make agitprop, also, but this is something else. It’s haunting. It burns. It accesses a place that you might not even know existed. A friend said that hearing Konkani spoken in my films gave her visceral flashbacks to her grandmother speaking Marathi, which is a related language. 

DG: I think you hit the nail on the head—it’s yearning. I’m also thinking of Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism, which is about how political affinity often arises from base impulses, like desire and fantasy. Works of art create spaces where we can experience ideological goals and convictions as embodied desires. I think that’s why your work is so invested in beauty. You want time to still and people to—

SS: To feel.

DG: Yeah, with their bodies.

SS: And to go back to your question about refusal—refusing this world and building something else is central to the role animation plays in my work. I think about animation in the sense of poiesis, something life-giving. You’re able to create things that defy the laws of physics, that don’t have to exist within the same constraints that the rest of this world does. And if we can create images that are not confined to the world that has been produced for us, we can engender worlds that are produced by us. That’s something I think about: the role that we play, as artists, in exiting this world that has been created for us and building something else, whether that’s film festivals or art institutions. 

This world does not have to be the way it is. We always have agency. You always have the option to say no. Some people have more options than others, which is very real. But at the same time, we have to act. We have to act with our hearts, knowing that another world is possible, that Palestine will be free, that Kashmir will be free, that the Congo will be free, that Haiti will be free, that Puerto Rico will be free. And refusing small things does help us build toward that world. 

DG: Refusing small things is sometimes just building that muscle to refuse the large thing. Rehearsing the revolution, as John Berger might say.

SS: Exactly!

Devika Girish is the Editor of Film Comment and a Talks programmer at the New York Film Festival.

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Suneil Sanzgiri and Devika Girish in the Metrograph Bookstore