SHILLONG: After the film 1987 which captures the strange friendship between a non-tribal tailor and a Khasi youth at the height of the communal violence of the late 1980s, Wanphrang Diengdoh has come up with his second film, “Where the Clouds End.”
The film which will be screened on Friday at the Don Bosco Youth Centre at 4.30 pm is an attempt to understand the struggle for Khasi identity by looking at the different strands of cultural interface that the Khasi society has gone through, beginning with colonialism, postcolonial struggles for political autonomy, and present day politics of development.
A review of the film by Papori Bora says, “The film seems to be asking, why the struggle for Khasi identity is linked to the fear of the outsider, the ‘dkhar.’
The film shows how any identity needs an ‘other’ to define itself. Bora says, “To prove oneself to be a Khasi or a pure Khasi one has to prove that one is not a dkhar, an outsider, hence the resort to the language of race, purity of race, which logically links to the question of controlling Khasi women’s sexuality, by regulating their desire to marry non-Khasis or “outsiders.”
Wanphrang has taken a bold step of enquiring into the language or race which while it is seen as problematic when acted by others – the Nido Tania episode being a case in point, is accepted when practised insidiously in the North Eastern backyards. Race is always exclusive and at the best of times chauvinistic but the problem with Khasi society is that it is a matriliny where men exercise control of Khasi women and “outsiders.”
However, like any other film that is made without a deeper understanding of gender conflicts within Khasi society, “Where the clouds end’ looks at Khasi matriliny from one spectrum only – that of a non-tribal man married into a Khasi family and how difficult the process of social integration is for the entire family. Going by the reviews this film too misses out the subtleties of gender discrimination in a society where women ostensibly “enjoy a privileged status,” as some less insightful scholars would opine.
