project details

About the Project: 

Steeped in the realities of caste, the broom is both a source of livelihood for millions of people and the repository of traditional knowledge. Even so, it stigmatizes entire communities through its associations with pollution and untouchability. Highlighting the humiliation and robust survival of India’s most downtrodden caste groups, whose hopes are at once catalyzed and complicated by the politics of reservations, Jharu-katha works towards a larger envisioning of waste in urban India. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in remote corners of rural Rajasthan and the by-lanes of Jodhpur city, this film on the broom engages in conversation with a wide spectrum of broom-makers. Through the counterpoint

of their voices, the film covers wide ground in opening the contradictory values

and belief-systems of the broom.

Period :

2010-2012

Location : 

Rural Rajasthan