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Plot of Gold
The life story of Dakxin Chhara, who belongs to a tribe that the British ignorantly labelled as “criminal,” is as gripping as his first feature film, Sameer.
I first heard of Dakxin in late 2003, on one of my frequent trips to Ahmedabad. I had finished most of the filming for Final Solution, my film about the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat, but I kept returning to the city for short patch shoots in order to fill holes that I saw in the various rough cuts.
I learnt that Dakxin had been jailed for about two weeks—for the crime of performing political street plays in Ahmedabad with his troupe, Budhan Theatre, which he founded in 1998 with the blessings of Mahasweta Devi. In the first few years, its plays focused on custodial deaths of members of denotified tribes, a group to which Dakxin belonged. But, after 2002, the troupe began performing street plays about religious harmony as well. All this had caught the police’s eye and, in June 2003, they tried to frame him under Sections 324 and 326. In 2008, the court dismissed the charges against him.
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