How the first feature film on the Siddi community was made

Jayan Cherian’s Rhythm of Dammam has several firsts to its credit. It’s the first fictional feature to be set among the Indian Siddi community that traces its ancestry to Africa and the first in the Siddi Konkani dialect spoken by the section of the community that lives in northern Karnataka. Many members of cast have never acted before, let alone have their history, cultural practices and contemporary concerns explored in fiction.

Cherian’s exploration of the marginalised group revolves around 12-year-old Jayaram, who lives in Yellapur in Karnataka. After the death of Jayaram’s grandfather, a spat breaks out in his family about supposedly buried treasure. Jayaram is plagued by visions of his grandfather, which lead him to discover his community’s journey to India centuries ago through maritime trade routes, its historic enslavement and its continued oppression by upper-caste landowners.

After being premiered at the International Film Festival of India (November 20-28), Rhythm of Dammam will be shown at the International Film Festival of Kerala (December 13-20) in the International Competition section.

The movie’s title refers to the community dance called “dammam”, accompanied by intense percussion, which is performed at important rituals and festivities.

Dammam and other cultural forms “articulate and unite the aspirations and common identities of African Indians, a people who gather as a result of their particular and varied history as a displaced people and to elaborate on their culture and transmit some of its practices to the next generation”, American academic Pashington Obeng notes in his contribution to the anthology Sidis and Scholars – Essays on African Indians, edited by Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy and Edward A Alpers (2004).

Rhythm of Dammam has two extended sequences of the Siddis warming up to folk songs and then dissolving into an energetic whirl of limbs and feet. “When the dance begins, it’s like a frenzy, so you can’t shoot it through traditional methods,” Cherian explained. Rather than staging the dance in a choreographed manner, Cherian followed the entire set of rituals that precedes such occasions. The dances flowed organically, with the Siddis working themselves up into the mood rather than dancing on cue, he explained.

“You can’t use your imagination to violate their beliefs or myths,” Cherian said. The film too resulted from nearly eight years of observation.

Cherian has previously directed Papilio Buddha (2013) and Ka Bodyscapes (2016). The 58-year-old poet and filmmaker spent his childhood and adolescence in Kerala before settling in New York City. While in college, Cherian got interested in the history of human trafficking, the persistence of slavery despite official bans, and the slave trade in the Indian Ocean. While some people from the African continent were brought to India as slaves, other came as mercenaries and merchants.

Classified as a Scheduled Tribe only as recently in 2003, the Siddis follow Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. The Siddis in Karnataka were thought to escaped bondage in Goa, Cherian said. There are also Siddi communities in Maharashtra and Gujarat with different trajectories.

Cherian first visited the Siddi community in Yellapur in Karnataka in 2016. “I started to develop connections within the community,” he said. In 2018, he rented a house in Yellapur to spend more time with the Siddis and understand their histories better.

“I found Chinmaya Siddi, who plays Jayaram in the film, when he was a six-year-old – my script grew up with him,” Cherian said. The cast includes Prashant Siddi, who is an actor in the Kannada film industry, and the theatre artist and singer Girija Siddi.

There have been anthropological studies about the Siddis as well as ethnomusicological scholarship on their performing traditions. There have also been a few documentaries about the community, notably by the American academic Beheroze Shroff.

Cherian too amassed a wealth of information on the Siddis, from their folk heroes to the manner in which they have been subjugated over the decades. Jayaram’s experience speaks to Cherian’s understanding of inter-generational trauma – the knowledge of how the community’s violent history ricochets through the generations into the present.

Rather than adding to the corpus of documentaries on the community, Cherian chose to make a feature film. “This is what I have been doing in my other films, exploring periods of contemporary history by superimposing fiction on documentary subjects,” he said. “The Siddis don’t have a documented history, so it is hard to understand and know the community’s imagination of themselves.”

Most communities survive by holding on their collective imagination, but in the case of the Siddis, who have spent centuries in India, the links with their likely origins have been “deleted”, Cherian added.

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