The term ‘Flying Tigers’ belongs to military history. It came to me as a backdrop of the time and the land where my mother had spent her childhood. It had no connection with my lived-in experiences, neither had that kind of history interested me before. As a filmmaker and curator I have been invested in urban cultures, feminist narratives and post-colonial identities. Border lands and military history never engaged me artistically or politically.
But a riddle thrown by my ailing mother before she died landed me at the centre of cultural issues around military endeavours. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s and repeatedly said – ‘Tigers are coming! Close the windows!’ Everyone else thought it was delusional. But my study on the disease confirms that Alzheimer’s patients never make up a new story – they only mix up the chronology, perspective and scale of an event. Measurements such as memory and experience, major and minor, near and distant lose their specificities in the agitated brain of an Alzheimer’s patient. Thus the riddle of the tigers has stayed with me since 2015. While thinking around it, I gradually got interested in memories, both personal and cultural – how they survive, change contour, sometimes remain latent and occasionally surface. Resolving the riddle of the tigers became a way of tracing the life of my mother who lived an apparently quiet and discreet life from 1936 to 2015. And then I came to my ordinary mother’s extraordinary connection with the military initiative of World War II in Assam. A monumental operation by the American army to send military aid from Assam to China across the Himalayas disturbed the wild animals and brought them to the human settlements.
I almost got obsessed with understanding how a little girl had perceived and chose to remember the mighty military operation. As I began to talk with my mother’s siblings it became clear that there were two parallel streams – the excitement of experiencing something wild and the family’s apprehension about the girls going haywire due to sudden changes in demography and social structure. ‘Tigers are coming’ – was the first and ‘Close the windows’ – was the second. My long-term interest in feminist biographies and the construction of women’s memoirs got rekindled in the process.
In 2020 I decided to make a trip to Assam where my mother was born and apparently met the tigers in the 1940s. But I was stopped. The Indian state was executing stringent citizenship laws to eject out the ‘unauthorised’ people. That exercise turned violent and a mini civil war had ensued that came to be known as the Anti NRC (national registration of citizenship) Movement. Many of those, who were marked as ‘unauthorised’ and were facing immediate deportation, were Bengali-speaking people in Assam (which is my mother tongue). Even though they speak a completely different version of Bangla and they broadly belong to the community of Muslim farmers from the coastal land. That makes their affinity with me quite thin. Yet, it was deemed too dangerous for me, with a Bengali name, to visit Assam in 2020. This incident made me aware of the demographic problems in border regions, which are coveted for their wealth of mineral resources. This also foregrounded the problem of ultranationalism in postcolonial countries. When was war?
Every story has multiple sides to it – what was a story of destruction in Assam turned out to be a story of solidarity in Kunming.
Interestingly, around that time I came to Germany to lead an art institution in Cologne. In the year 2021, during a break between pandemic lockdowns, I met You Mi, a German-Chinese media theorist, in a pub in Cologne. As it was the pandemic time, our conversation inevitably turned to illness and mortality. I began to tell my friends my experience as a caregiver during my mother’s last days. I mentioned my mother’s tiger stories and its connection with the American army operation across the Himalayas. You Mi looked stunned. Her parents’ families were living in Kunming, the Chinese end of the operation. She had grown up hearing stories of the people under seize waiting for the American aid to arrive from Assam. Every story has multiple sides to it – what was a story of destruction in Assam turned out to be a story of solidarity in Kunming. But the realisation that shocked me was why I never thought of exploring this story from a Chinese angle. After all, China is the neighbouring country to India (the shared border area in more than 4000 km). But having grown up under colonial education, China has always been the Far East for us.
China’s self-isolation till the end of the 20th century also fuelled the alienation. Additionally, India and China are engaged in a drawn-out military conflict around the Himalayas. Hence it was impossible to even imagine that we could have had a common family legacy, a shared moment in world history. We had to meet in Europe after 80 years to find our common umbilical cord. Sometimes dislocation is necessary to find one’s self.
2021 was already 10 years after the inauguration of the legendary Chongqing-Duisburg cargo train route – the new Silk Road of trade between China and Europe. Different infrastructure, different logistics, different skills, different hybridity and also a different urban culture. Duisburg was close to where You Mi and myself were living during the pandemic. We witnessed the train transporting lifesaving vaccines and equipment both ways. This train changes its track gauge when it leaves China and then again when it enters Europe. Could it be the central strategy for exchanges and solidarity – adjusting the track gauge constantly and still evolving newer ways of interfacing? Thereafter, our respective search for moving goods led You Mi to the Central Asian territories of the old Silk Road and I ended up in Malaszewicze on the Polish-Belarusian border.
Meanwhile, I fell ill with a life-threatening disease. The long months of isolation in hospitals provided enough opportunities to solve the riddle. By now enough clues were collected from diverse sources. While connecting all the dots across time and geographical zones, FLYING TIGERS turned into a project about thresholds. Thresholds between territories, economies, memories and mortalities.
Discovering a family legacy that I was not born into, realising that a colonial upbringing still influences one’s world view, my impatience towards the contemporary trend of a simplistic call for de-colonisation, my disappointment over the emergence of post-colonial ultra-nationalism in India and other Asian countries, my interest in the fragility of women’s memories, my experience of working on multicultural projects in the volatile region of NRW (a post-industrial region in Germany), and then my brush with mortality – have seeped in and coloured the narrative. Thus, researching the background of my mother’s childhood has actually brought me to the summing up point of my own life. Hence this project is widely historical as well as deeply personal. In my earlier works I have never featured myself. That has never been my style. But in this film I feel compelled to place myself as a protagonist – it is a film from my mother to me.
Madhusree Dutta
