A still from ‘Swaha: In the Name of Fire’
The film, which won best director at Shanghai International Film Festival in 2024, is set in Gaya, Bihar, and follows a mother from the Musahar community. “Magahi has close to 20 million speakers, but we lack a cultural phenomenon like cinema. The Malayalam film industry (35 million speakers) earns more than Rs 10,000 crore a year.
Khanjan Kishore Nath’s Karbi-language feature ‘Kangbo A Loti (The Lost Path)’ is about a young militant sent to a remote village. If I had made the same film in another language, it would have lost an important part of its essence,” Nath said.
“In the past three or four years, we found many films made in small, lesser-used languages coming into the top 10, surpassing mainstream films,” Premendra Mazumder, film critic and senior member of FIPRESCI-India, said. Improved access to film education has certainly helped, he said. These films are niche and so is the audience — mainly film students, critics, and industry insiders,” he said. “A film must come from the soil it is set in, and for ‘Swaha’, that soil speaks Magahi,” Sharma said. Film critic and FIPRESCI-India member Latika Padgaonkar said this trend serves as a counterweight to homogenised state identities. But beneath that, there are dialects,” Padgaonkar said. Magahi has nothing like this,” Sharma said. “Without government support, it’s very difficult to bring a film in such a rare language to a wider audience. ” Nath recalled a screening of his film in Delhi earlier this year, when 20 Karbi residents came to him and said they had never before experienced a feature-length film in their language. “Seeing Karbi audiences, especially students, connect with their own culture on screen has been deeply encouraging as we prepare for our mid-October release,” he said.
This formed the bedrock of FIPRESCI-India’s national festival network, set up with National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), Federation of Film Societies of India in Kolkata, NFAI in Pune, and other cultural centres. “Many film schools are coming up in small towns. Students from remote areas study at national institutes like FTII, return to their hometowns and make films about their world, their communities, their lives,” he explained. “People watching Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan films are not the same people watching these films. For director Abhilash Sharma, setting ‘Swaha: In the Name of Fire’ in the Magahi language was never in doubt. “Magahi has a music of its own… When the character of Swaha sings, it sounds like a gust of wind; when she cries, it feels like fire in a forest. That texture could only come from Magahi. It draws directly from Nath’s upbringing in Karbi Anglong, Assam. “Telling this story in Karbi was not simply a creative choice; it was essential to its authenticity. “When we think of a big state, we tend to think of its dominant language… “Language gives you to show the diversity of India that we otherwise may not know. However, filmmakers choosing local languages face structural hurdles, such as economic disparity between regions.