Ruchika Negi, Amit Mahanti
A still from Every Time You Tell A Story. Courtesy of Ruchika Negi and Amit Mahanti.
How do you tell a story whose words are a song, a stone, an image, or a symbol? A story that is woven into a shawl, woven through time itself?
Every Time You Tell A Story by Ruchika Negi and Amit Mahanti offers an interpretation of history, a way of understanding the shifts that Tsungkotepsu, the shawl-making tradition, has experienced when confronted with the certitudes of history — early colonial anthropology, new religion, and assimilation within the Indian State. The film explores the tension between historical currents and oral, visual knowledge systems like Tsungkotepsu, while also reflecting on the politics of gaze and representation that the Naga people and their cultures have encountered over time. How do the stories that have written themselves onto the fabric of the shawl through these histories continue to resonate today?
This film screening has been curated under Living Cultures, MAP’s public programming theme for the quarter. Through this theme, we explore the practices and evolution of cultures: shaping identity, and representing beliefs, but also reimagined and revived by new encounters and changing contexts.
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