MARALUVA DAARI (PATH OF RETURN)
Film • Hybrid Documentary • 23 mins • Kannada • More-than-Human • Anthropocene • Design Project and Thesis
Maraluva Daari interweaves mythology, ecology and storytelling into a tale where more-than-humans in the Anthropocene ask if a path of return can be found.
The hybrid documentary observes defiant, unintended nature in urban India and makes meaning of it through an imagined poetic conversation between two female characters from the Hindu epic Ramayana who were turned into non-humans. It reimagines agency with their self-reflexive dialogue, and offers a deeply local, decolonial prism for thinking about interdependence and challenging human superiority. It delves into the world-making and world-changing potential of narrative practices which harness vernacular tales to demystify the discourse around the Anthropocene by focusing on regionally relevant dimensions of worldviews and local linguistic, literary and ecological contexts. It emerged from
a design project exploring language, narratives and storytelling, funded by the
NID Ford Foundation Grant for Socially Responsive Design.
TIMELINE
ROLE
ROLE
SPONSOR
MENTORS
COLLABORATORS
TOOLS AND SOFTWARE
OUTCOMES
EXHIBITS AND SCREENINGS
April 2023 - Nov 2024
Director, Co-writer, Editor, Sound Designer, Title Designer, Colourist
NID Ford Foundation Grant for Socially Responsive Design
Dr Shilpa Das, Savyasachi Anju Prabir
Amal Zen [Director of Photography], Arpana HS [Writer]
Da Vinci Resolve, Adobe Audition
Film -request access- Trailer
Thesis Document -request access-
Paper and Film exhibition:
Language, Narratives and a Planet Lost in Translation: Reclaiming Diverse Ways of Knowing and Being in the Anthropocene through Film
LimitNoLimit Art and Design Research Conference, ENSci Paris 2024
Conference Paper and Presentation:
Decolonising the Anthropocene Discourse with Language and Reimagined Mythology
International Conference on Sustainable Design Practices, NIFT Kangra 2023
Conference Paper:
A Path of Return: Decolonising the more-than-human Anthropocene through self-reflexive mythology, language and reimagined narratives
Design Research Society Conference, Boston 2024
LimitNoLimit Art and Design Research Conference, ENSci Paris // January 2024
Lamakaan, Hyderabad // 10 January 2025
Shared Ecologies, New Delhi // 16 May 2025
GALLERY
Stills from the film, its production and screenings
GLIMPSES OF THE PROCESS
INCEPTION
This design project I undertook during my graduation semesters at NID explored the potential of a non-anthropocentric, more-than-human approach in storytelling. In the workshop Awaken the Sleeping Giants, supported by ProHelvetia, Swiss Arts Council, I first encountered the terms Third Nature and Anthropocene. The latter, in particular, left me captivated. Could a word really save us? Was it capable of encapsulating the pace and scale at which humans are changing the planet? What might be its shortcomings and merits in changing the way we looked at the world? What roles do language, narrative, and storytelling play in this regard?
I crafted these inquiries into my proposal for the Ford Foundation grant, which would become the guide for the design outcome of my project, with the intention of a broader positioning of this work within the larger frameworks of transition design and pluriversal design.
RESEARCH
Several resources, including books, films, essays, exhibitions and multimedia works informed my understanding and position on concerned themes. I engaged with them these throughout the duration of the project, and my thesis is a repository of these references. My learning curve was a steep but enjoyable one. Some books which stayed with me are Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, Anna Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World, and Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble.
Field observations in the city of Bangalore profoundly influenced the tone, treatment and visuals of the film. The urban environment, designed and built, becomes a thriving live exhibit of more-than-human lifeforms which defy human control and domination. The primary research phase also involved interviewing and conversing with several experts across disciplines.
RECCE, GATHERING MATERIAL AND SENSEMAKING
Recce trips around the city were not just fascinating from a research point of view, but also humbling for someone who had lived in cities all her life. I began to curate a gallery of the intersections of human and non-human life and activities, documenting them through photos, drawings and journalling. My film's Director of Photography, Amal Zen, and I spent two months collecting relevant material.
While the research phases provided a strong basis for what our subjects could be, the city always surprised us. The mindset we built enabled us to notice signs of the Anthropocene right around where we lived—turkeys on rooftops, puppies in abandoned plots of land turned dumping yards, moss growing under water pipes on my building’s terrace, and so on. To remind myself of the film’s purpose and essence, I kept revisiting the quotes I had included in my proposal. I knew that each shot was connected to them in a direct or remote way, but sometimes struggled to see how they would form a whole larger than the sum of its parts.
WEAVING A REGIONAL TAPESTRY OF THE ANTHROPOCENE
While my attempts at writing a story to contextualise the visual material for my film yielded interesting results, my intuition told me that only a local language could bring the nuance necessary for a rooted regional story. This brought about the collaboration with Kannada writer Arpana HS to craft a narrative story which would bring the visuals to life. We brainstormed together over several days and gathered references including AK Ramanujan's poem, ‘Aa Hakki Bekaadare,’ and the prologue to Kuvempu,'s book, ‘Malegalalli Madhumagalu.’
After ideating on multiple concepts, we decided to work on an idea inspired by a narrative trope in Indian folktales, epics and myths of a human being cursed, usually by a god or an authority, to become a non-human– a tree, a river, a bird, a demon, and so on– and the condition of the curse being lifted would usually be a brush with the divine– a benevolent god or sage. The inherent implication of a hierarchy, both in terms of how the authority who curses the character is almost always male, and how the transformation into a non-human is seen as a demotion or a burden, intrigued us.
The phases of going from this concept to a complex, artistic story, the process of working with a writer, recording the voiceover in a studio, editing the film, sound design, colour grading, coming up with the film's name and title design are all documented in detail in my thesis document. While the outcome of the project is a short documentary film, this document maps the transformations in my practice through engagement with this subject over a period of ten months. Through personal reflections and academic writing, it conveys a young designer’s insights on exploring a complex systemic subject through practice-based research.
SYNTHESIS
Maraluva Daari presents us with a premise, setting and conversation which chart a means to navigate the Anthropocene. The film invites the audience to engage with more-than-human characters, without imposing ventriloquised views on plants and animals. Instead, it works with extant storytelling frameworks and mythology to craft a reinterpreted tale. The visuals swerve away from the talking characters and humans, focusing on the larger phenomena they are referring to. The conversation between Sita and Ahalya is one of solidarity and companionship, through which they compare notes on their distressing surroundings, self-reflexively contemplate on their own stories and choices, begin to appreciate the stories told by the signs of nature’s resilience, and come to infer that being a witness is not a curse or a burden, but a significant and meaningful role.
PROJECT JOURNALS
REFLECTIONS
Working on a scale larger and over a duration longer than ever before was a rewarding as well as exacting process. Emerging on the other side of the countless hours spent researching and being inspired by the stories of change and resilience that inspired this film, I came to love films again. It led me to rediscover the possibilities and passion that drew me towards communication design in the first place. In many ways, this project was a journey of return.
FURTHER IMPLICATIONS
In film and design practice in particular, one of the challenges is the prevalence of sustainability discourse and exposure fatigue in the media and society. How can films and design find new ways to communicate the same messages that we innately know but often ignore or forget? How can they avoid repeating the clichés and stereotypes that often accompany sustainability narratives? Another challenge is the human-centric nature of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that frame the global agenda for sustainability. How can films and design incorporate other perspectives and values that are not based on human needs and interests, such as those of non-human animals, plants, ecosystems, and future generations? How can they foster a sense of interconnectedness and interdependence among all forms of life on Earth? These are some of the questions that could guide future research and practice in this field. It is my hope that my thesis document also serves as a repository of resources for anyone who might want to explore the theme of the Anthropocene and urge them to develop their own practice along these lines at this crucial juncture of our planet’s history.