Projecting Tambaku Chaakila Oob Ali. Reflections towards a versatile archive of political cinemas

The sarai reader’s call for “projections” sparked articulating reflections on the first encounters with the material Yugantar film prints that had not been available for viewing until 2011 and the film prints ‘changing hands’ - from Deepa Dhanraj’s private cellar in Bangalore to a German institution via a German, UK based academic.

How does one re-project Tambaku Chaakila Oob Ali in order to throw forward its radical collaborative practice and the labour struggles it presents? Are there specific constellations in the present – urgencies, stagnations, a search for radicality – that are conducive to the surfacing of past moments? How does one write with history not as its author, not as a story of rescue, but working with the demands that diverse pasts make on us through the spaces of the possible they imagined and created? What might be the material demands of a scratched 16mm print?
 
Tambaku Chaakila Oob Ali is here thought as affiliated with different kinds of political cinemas. As a feminist collective’s film, a collaborative film, a consciousness-raising film, a film on violence against women, a film on solidarity, on organising, on unionising, on leaderships, on how to give evidence to injustice and on how to address the testimonial as a collective’s voice. Tambaku is reflected on as a pioneering factory film, as a collective process and as screen presence that evokes relations between time, work, labour,  subjecthood, solidarity and how to organise and mobilize. Tambaku as a political and cinematic event, as feminist documentary filmmaking in India that extended film-political language and redresses archives of feminist film practice in Europe.  A feminist Third Cinema.