Asian Ethnology 83-2 | article Folkloric Filmmaking Tricksters, Retelling, and Meaningful Violence in Hazarika’s Kothanodi (2015)

Aashima Rana, Michael Hinds

Download PDF

The Assamese film Kothanodi (2015) radically demonstrates how film adapts to folklore, rather than the other way around. It actively contributes to the folkloric tradition, notably through its commitment to establishing a thoroughly material sense of premodern Assamese life. This grounds the representation of its folkloric narratives in a tangible ecology, bringing the grain of lived experience to material that might otherwise appear to be fantastical. If things horrify in Kothanodi, they do so out of recognition rather than shock. If the film features tricksterish phenomena, as in its account of a woman giving birth to an ouṭeṅgā, known in English as elephant apple, it also incorporates such tricksterism into its own methods, querying its own representation of reality and productively disturbing its audience. Similarly, violence takes many forms in the film. It can be customary and ancestral, superstitious or avaricious, intergenerationally transgressive or simply malicious. The audience is left uncertain how to decode all of it, other than to acknowledge that such material contains more truths and problems than might initially be realized. Such an adept appropriation of folkloric uncertainty into cinema not only captured an international audience for Kothanodi but also engendered the emergence of further interpretive routes, especially within online fan communities. Rather than reading Kothanodi as the auteurist product of its director Bhaskar Hazarika, it can instead be seen as part of an ongoing folkloric enterprise, an expression of the practical magic of a folkloric aesthetic.