Fighting pollution with Ganga’s beauty

GURUGRAM: Reclaim. That is what the dancer-composer duo of Swapna Maini and her husband Sai Ganesh Nagpal have set out to do. First, with ‘Vande Mataram: A Dance Tribute’, a film that found a special finalist mention at the National Awards last year, and now, with ‘Ganga: River Eternal’.
In ‘Vande Mataram’, the idea was to make people reconnect with a phrase that had become increasingly charged politically.In ‘Ganga: River Eternal’, the filmmakers try and recreate the links to a past that may hold the key to present-day environmental concerns. The short documentary, showcasing the river in its many forms, is set to semi-classical music composed by Sai and choreographed by Saraswati Nagpal. Swapna is a trained Kathak dancer herself. “After we screen our film in the festival circuit – Dallas, Toronto and the UK, we will release it by the end of this year,” said Swapna.
The film does not bring up pollution — a conscious decision. “There are a lot of documentaries on the poor state of the river. We decided we have to invoke something positive. We need to remember how beautiful the river could be,” said Sai. And that is where inspiration for the film came from. “I have always had an interest in Sanskrit and our Vedic heritage. Our rivers are worshipped as goddesses. Our cultural past, where nature and spirituality were linked, could teach us ways to approach the environmental issues we face now,” he added.
So they went scouting for locations that would best capture the river, “from the Kumbh Mela to the Himalayan foothills,” Swapna said. The shoot started in March last year and was wrapped up in December. And there was a lot they had to work around. “When we were at Shivpuri, in the Himalayan foothills, we saw the pugmarks of a leopard at 4am — just before the shoot was about to begin. We wiped them off quickly before that could scare away our dancers,” she said.