Reparative Listening: Sudarshan Shetty’s Ek Jeevan, Anek

Sudarshan Shetty’s Ek Jeevan, Anek (One Life, Many) opens at dawn as the camera’s gaze listlessly meanders through the alleyways of the Mapusa Municipal Market in Goa where shutters are yet to roll up. Amidst a few solitary figures present in the frame, it catches onto someone treading with a gait that is almost messianic in intensity. He radiates a promise of deliverance, which manifests not through monumental utterance but in his offering of listening. Down the newsstand corner, a stranger starts recounting apocalyptic scenes to him, interweaving figments from folklore and dreams. The camera moves on. 

Produced in 2022—when the world was convalescing from the norm of social isolation necessitated by Covid-19—Shetty’s film pens a testament to awakening and the reparative potential of listening. The film premiered as a part of his ongoing solo show Only Life, Myriad Places (25 August–9 November 2023) at the Ishara Art Foundation in Dubai. The exhibition hosts sculptural installations, prints and acoustic designs, as well as single- and twin-channel video projections. While the works overarchingly speak to the reverberant cultural ecologies between the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, Ek Jeevan, Anek dwells on the oral traditions of listening and retelling through the cross-pollination of the stories of the two distant lands.

A medieval Indian myth of a shapeshifting sage carries the film, coursing through sinuous provocations around identity and selfhood. But, in the context of post-pandemic recuperation, the participatory gesture of storytelling activates this mythical design, which is presented in the film as a mode of coming together. Stories are listened to, improvised, retold and picked up again by characters who unsuspectingly emerge from the crowd amid busy markets. Meanwhile, time progresses and figures metamorphose, while the camera remains listless as ever. 

The contiguity of the stories perpetually grows across the fleeting span of various characters, and Saumyananda Sahi’s reposefully uninterrupted cinematic takes echo that pattern. Though the camera’s movement betrays an inevitable familiarity with the local geography, several anomalous figures punctuate its equanimity. A Hindustani classical performer sings in the middle of a flower market; Sudarshan Shetty walks down the stairs, bleeding from his head; a street band breaks out in front of fruit stalls, among other occurrences. Faint reminiscences from Sahi’s previously shot film, Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon (2018), feature here unintentionally, with a sly sense of pleasure.

The preparedness to listen, as Ek Jeevan, Anek suggests, accrues meaningful social alliances and signals a step towards self-reflexivity. Tina Campt speaks of a politics of adjacency, where sensitising our social, emotional and affective proximities under shared political conditions becomes a modality of collectively working towards repair. The act of listening is foundational in this process, engendering an acoustic community of responsibility and restitution. However, it is not the commandment of words one listens to, but words in their formative vulnerability, thus welcoming transfiguration. A cyclical narrative graph holds Shetty’s film together; everything returns to the state it once was, yet it is now laden with the weight of stories collectively churned in the interim.  

To read about other explorations of Delhi as a city of myriad tales, revisit Annalisa Mansukhani’s essay on Aperture’s issue Delhi: Looking Out/Looking In, Najrin Islam’s reading of Taha Ahmed’s photoseries set in Firoz Shah Kotla and Ankan Kazi’s reflection on the images generated during the anti-CAA protests in Shaheen Bagh.

All image stills from Ek Jeevan, Anek (2022) by Sudarshan Shetty unless specified otherwise. Images courtesy of the artist and Ishara Art Foundation.