The movie Nasir: victim of a pogrom in Tamilnadu, India

We went yesterday to Rotterdam to see a movie at the IFFR, the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Filmmaker Arun Kartick is from Coimbatore, the second largest town after Chennai in southeast India. Among the vast majority of Tamil Hindus, there are some pockets of Muslims quarters. The movie Nasir follows a day in the life of Nasir, a man working in a shop, selling clothes. It is a very slow and quiet going movie with shooting from short distance. We see a sleeping man, hear the call to prayer from the mosque, the man performs his ablutions, where there are pictures of his hands, feet, water. Short details of the prayer. He gets tea, water at the pump of the community, waiting in a row. He goes to the shop, where the Hindu gods are shown in their shining lights. For our perception perhaps clear Indian kitsch. Working people and customers in the shops are mostly Hindus (red sign on the face), sometimes we hear the sound of alarming and shocking sermons by preachers, most Hindus who plead for a Muslim-free and clean Mother India.

The large theatre in Rotterdam was fully packed for the movie. After the show, filmmaker Arun Kartick was interviewed by a lady from the IFFR organization who is responsible for the South Asian movies at IFFR.
At lunch time, Nasir goes back home for a nap. He meets an older friend who just returned from Abu Dhabi, had earned some good money and maybe will have a good job opportunity for Nasir. Back at the shop, Nasir goes to a dormitory for students, to bring jackets they ordered. That is a very different world and he is basically only neglected by the students, with the exception of one. He comes back to the shop and returns home quite late, when it is already dark. Streets are empty in his quarter of the town. But then at once as a surprise, a mob of Hindus come in the narrow street, from a side street, yelling anti-Muslim threats, asking for a clean Hindu Mother India and the killing of all Muslims. Nasir remains lying on the ground, dead, after this one minute orgy of violence.

We had contact before with Saumyananda Sahi, called Somo, because he was the photography director for the movie, but there was no opportunity to see him in person here. For people like us, not knowing where the movie would end, it was a somewhat uncertain adventure. Looking in so much detail at the day of the life of this man (his wife left early in the morning, neatly dressed, with a bus to meet some family in another town), it was from the beginning clear that there were problems between Hindus and Muslims, although we saw them behaving quite normal in actual encounters and Nasir functioned quite normal in a pretty large shop, with some 6-8 people serving clients. The attackers came out of the unknown and had also no clear faces. They were anonymous, like a disaster of nature coming without showing a human face.
I was thinking about the parade and the violence of the FPI in the big towns of Indonesia, where individuality is not shown and people only become member of a group. The movie is very beautiful in images, but also left us uncertain about the origin and background of religious violence: as if it comes out of another world, has nothing to do with the daily reality of people living together in a calm and normal way. Like an earthquake, a typhoon, hot a human action.