Pyasa Premnagar- Shaali Shaikh
from the collection, Ek Dozen Paani.
Produced by Aagaz, Akansha Sewa Sangh, CAMP and anthropologist Nikhil Anand.
Mumbai 2008.
In Mumbai we witness the passage of water from rain to sea via lakes, watersheds, pipes, pumps, pots, human and animal bodies, drains and sewers. These hidden passages describe a unique social, chemical and political structure, a map of ourselves in the modern world.
More than many of us, residents in the bastis of Mumbai spend time arranging this substance, its leaks and sources. Working together since March 2008, we have been thinking through questions of citizenship and distribution by looking at how residents form relationships with water and its infrastructures: including official water supply, the rains, alternative plumbing, ground water, nallas, and so on.
As the name of the film suggests, water has several narrative flows. The films have been made with the youth groups shooting on their own, bringing their footage into a collective pool, and writing over images in analytical, diarisitic or essay styles. These twelve stories speak of water’s time and place, of leaky systems and subterranean flows, of struggle and/over imagination.