About two decades ago, Anu Malhotra, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and celebrated artist, embarked on some historic journeys to the margins of the subcontinent. What she found would become a national treasure.
Soul Survivors is a finely curated compendium of photographs that Anu took while filming the tribal worlds of the Apatanis (Arunachal Pradesh), Konyaks (Nagaland) and Tibetan nomads (Tibet). These extraordinary photographs are accompanied with short essays by Anu, which form a personal narrative of her observations, experiences and insights. Both have become important archival material, today.
The book is chosen corpus from ‘Soul Survivors’, an extraordinary multi-media exhibition and experience, designed, curated and created by Anu Malhotra that transports one into the tribal universe and its cosmologies. The essays in the book allow an understanding of these cultures through snippets of rare information accompanying the photographs and anecdotes from her travels.
The photographs are intimate, spontaneous moments Anu captured, the visual distillation of lives she witnessed, and a tribute to the spirit of celebration, poetically and beautifully rendered.
Anu’s intention to exhibit and publish Soul Survivors after almost two decades of their filming, is to share with her spectators and readers the relevance of the ways of life that her documentaries, photographs and essays intrinsically encapsulate—a larger philosophy of holistic existence, in harmony with nature and social environments.
Anu says: “I have always sought to capture India’s rich cultural heritage and vibrant living traditions through my films. My mission is to document cultures that are fast disappearing and remind viewers of the importance of sustaining and learning from their traditional wisdom.”
This is the kernel, the abiding sensibility running through all Anu’s work ranging from her travel shows to her path-breaking documentary series. Soul Survivors is an important archive of worlds fast disappearing; a collector’s edition; a tribute to our most valuable legacies, an aesthetic that instructs through beauty—it is the artist’s gift to us to treasure and (be) hold.