Re:Mind

Before the screening, join us for A Conversation with Ashish Avikunthak in the afternoon.

This screening will be introduced by director Ashish Avikunthak and followed by a discussion moderated by Dr Sarah Niazi (King’s College London) and Prof Victor Fan (King’s College London).

Ashish Avikunthak’s cinema always uses the moving image as a mode of philosophy. Devastated is a modern restaging of a dialogue between Lord Krishna and Prince Arjuna from the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita is the arguably the most influential text in Hinduism. It is composed as a dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna before the latter goes to the battlefield with the knowledge that he will likely die. The dialogue addresses questions regarding life and death, individual subjectivity and one’s duty to the family and country, the formation of the body and its relationship with desires, anger, and memories, as well as the inarticulability of the Divine and its relationship with individual souls. The text is the foundation of both Gandhism, which embraces the notion of a caste-less, non-violent, and self-invigorating society and Hindutva or modern Hindu nationalism.

Avikunthak’s film is not a simple adaptation of the Gita. Rather, it is configured as a dialogue among a middle-aged police officer, his wife, and his lover about his job as a state agent who is tasked to kill Muslim men. Moreover, Avikunthak borrows transcripts from the British investigations of Indian nationalists during the colonial period in his staging of the film’s interrogations. He also uses contemporary Hindu nationalists’ online conversations, where passages of the Gita are used to justify violence, caste discrimination, and gender inequity.

The aim of Devastated is not to advocate a specific political position. Rather, it uses the moving image to engage spectators in a thought process that allows them to reflect on their own understandings of some of the agonies and struggles that went through the heads of both executioner and executed, much in the same way Arjuna goes through the same process with Krishna.

– Victor Fan

Content Warning:

• Frontal nudity

• This film contains documentary footage of animal sacrifice rituals. All of the images are heavily filtered and no animals were harmed for the purpose of making the film.