Sufi poets, story-telling as performance and non-violence in Indian documentary film

In a context in which inter-communal violence has wracked much of India since the riots of 1992, the pastoralist communities of Kachchh, on the border between India and Pakistan, remained peaceful. In So Heddan So Hoddan (Like Here Like There), multi-award-winning Indian documentary filmmakers, Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar, set out to explore the role of the Sufi poetry of Shah Abdul Bhitai in the lives of pastoralist musicians in this area and its contribution to communal harmony. The filmmakers have worked with documentary for over two decades to validate the knowledges and experiences of marginalized communities, but at the same time their work constantly challenges the power structures and assumptions inherent in the documentary form. Anne Rutherford and Laleen Jayamanne spoke to the filmmakers about how they use documentary, the aesthetic influences on their work, the ways they work with camera, rhythm and editing, the political contexts within which they work and how their film seems to produce a cinematic equivalent of Sufism.