Farmer turned Filmmaker

Bhaurao Karhade, who considers Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali his
cinematic Bible, sold five acres of farmland to make a rustic and gutsy
Marathi film, Khwada.

One of the important turn-of-the-century developments has been the
democratisation of cinema. The steady spread of cine literacy, the
strong influence of moving images combined with an easier access to
technology and emerging online exhibition platforms has meant that
potentially anyone who dreams of making a film can now turn it into a
reality and find an audience for it. Even at the grass roots. Filmmaking
can become a mode of self-expression, of telling a story or highlighting
an issue one feels strongly about. In a nutshell, an empowering tool,
the voice of the voiceless. One such voice rises from the very margins
to go mainstream this week at the movies. Khwada (Obstacle), the Marathi
debut film of Bhaurao Karhade, a farmer from Ahmednagar district,
Maharashtra, finds a commercial release this Dussehra. On the plight of
the migrant shepherd community, the making of the film is as much a tale
of hardships as the theme it deals with. It is a story that needs to be
told.

Till 2010, 30-year-old Karhade had been reaping wheat, millet, sorghum
and onion in his five acres of family farmland in Gawadewadi village in
Ahmednagar. Now, as he himself puts it, he is "harvesting cinema" in
Pune.

Khwada is a significant new addition to the Indian film roster of 2015
that is already brimming over with some remarkable first-timers —
Chaitanya Tamhane's Court, Neeraj Ghaywan's Masaan, Avinash Arun's
Killa, M.Manikandan's Kaaka Muttai, Kanu Behl's Titli, Raam Reddy's
Thithi, Ruchika Oberoi's Island City, Aditya Vikram Sengupta's Asha
Jaoar Majhe among others. What makes Karhade's debut more notable is how
he rose above his underprivileged background, even selling his five
acres of land to make the film, with an investment of Rs. 1.20 crore.

In his semi-literate family — his mother is unlettered, father studied
till third standard and elder brother till fourth standard — Karhade is
a rare graduate. The love for cinema was fuelled by the hardcore Hindi
commercial flicks he saw on Doordarshan: Sooraj Barjatya's Maine Pyaar
Kiya, Ramesh Sippy's Sholay and Indra Kumar's Dil. "By the time I was in
tenth standard, I had made up my mind on becoming a filmmaker," he
recollects. The family, however, wanted him to join the military or the
police. "They still can't understand filmmaking. For them a director is
someone who is a bank, company or society director," he smiles.

Initially Karhade turned to the Film and Television Institute of India
for training, but he didn't clear the exam. So, he went on to do a
course in communication studies at the New Arts, Commerce and Science
College in Ahmednagar. He made two short films after graduating in 2009:
Talab (Addiction) and Vanchit (Deprived). It was in college that he got
introduced to his cinematic Bible: Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, a
film he has seen 32 times. He also got exposed to the international
classics of his other gurus: Vittorio de Sica, Akira Kurosawa and
Federico Fellini.

Khwada is a rough, rustic and gutsy film. Goa-based film critic Sachin
Chatte describes it as "Shyam Benegal's Ankur meets Sergey Dvortsevoy's
Tulpan [a much celebrated Kazakh film on steppe herdsmen]". Says
Mumbai-based filmmaker-editor Bela Negi, "The film is marked by an
organic rawness, there is a relevance to the story and a very
interesting sound design that is bereft of any background music [in a
film that has a lot of tension and drama]." Khwada won the special jury
prize at the 62nd national awards and another for best audiography
(Mahaveer Sabbanwal).

Karhade's own rural upbringing helps bring in an authenticity and
immediacy to the theme. Apart from Shashank Shende and Anil Nagarkar,
all the actors are new, which also adds to the film's realism. According
to Karhade, the inspiration for the film came to him, of all the places,
at a railway station where he had met some farmers from Aurangabad.
"Despite owning 35 acres of land, they had been forced to migrate
because of the famine," he says. Set against the dry landscape of
central Maharashtra, Khwada is about a shepherd family that is forced to
migrate in search of fodder for its flock because the government has
grabbed their land. At its core is a prolonged legal battle: a
shepherd's fight to get his land back from the forest department.
Karhade hopes that he too will get his five acres back some day.

Overcoming obstacles

The film lives up to its title. It has had to face many impediments,
most important of all financial. However, despite his own hardship and
penury, Karhade persisted in making it with passion and commitment. He
began writing the script in 2010 and locked it in 2012. When he couldn't
raise finances from anywhere, Karhade was left with no option but to
coax his mother and brother to sell the land and move to Pune where they
now run a small hotel, Ran Meva, that offers simple village fare to
immigrants and blue collar workers. When the shoot got stalled for lack
of funds, his friend Chandrakant Raut made an additional contribution:
the lead actor sold a truck he owned. Finally, the rest of the film got
shot and was completed in May 2014. The final print was out in January
2015.

Khwada premiered at the Pune International Film Festival in January
where it won the best director award. It was the first time in her life
that Karhade's mother got to watch a film in a theatre. Chandrashekhar
More, one of the leading art directors of the Hindi film industry, has
now come forward to be the presenter of the film. It finally releases
commercially with 200 sub-titled prints across Maharashtra. Karhade
intends to take it to Goa and parts of Madhya Pradesh — Indore and
Gwalior in particular — in the next phase. Eventually, he aims to reach
out to the whole country. Meanwhile, he has already started work on the
next project, which will also be rural-centric, about how our villages
are changing rapidly in the post-globalisation economy. "I hope my films
will make the country more aware about the plight of farmers in
Maharashtra," he says.

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