Imagine you were alive but everyone believed you were dead.  The state did not recognize your rights to property.  The judicial system could not process your claims because of your deceased status — no matter that you were standing right in front of its clerks.  Your existence was non-existent.  As a surreal allegory, this story has rich metaphors, but as a true story, something that actually happened to an Indian man named Lal Bihari several years ago, the existential questions proved irresistible to filmmaker Sabrina Dhawan.

“This was not a man who was expected to have a great deal of passion; he was voiceless and powerless.  It intrigued me that in fighting his death, he comes alive.”

Bihari’s story is a fascinating odyssey that went on for years and included his staging mock funerals for himself and demanding widow compensation for his wife in order to bring attention to the corruption and bribery of some Indian bureaucracies. (Bihari’s nephews, it turns out, had paid off an official to swindle him out of his land by faking his death.) 

“He would actually rise from his ‘grave’ [at these funerals] and shout, ‘I’m alive, I’m alive,’” says Dhawan with laughter and dismay in her voice. 

There are elements of humor to this story, dark though they may be, but Bihari’s quest actually led to real social change in the country, including the formation of the “Dead People’s Association,” which helped repair the crooked systems that were “killing people off.”  And while India as a country is not rife with fraud, Bihari’s quixotic tale is one that made universal sense to Dhawan.

“I’m very compelled by class,” she says.  “I’m also curious about the nexus between tradition and modernization as it affects class.” 

Her homeland, which has been a crucible of both rapid modernization and traditional values, has proven to be a perfect mine for Dhawan, and one she is not finished with.  As the screenwriter for the Golden Globe-nominated film Monsoon Wedding, directed by Mira Nair (Vanity Fair, Mississippi Masala), Dhawan feels the interplay between progress and tradition represents a contemporary and international dilemma. 

“In India, America is considered an extraordinarily liberal, glamorous place.  It’s considered terribly progressive — even that you are given a phase of life called adolescence in which to rebel is inconceivable in India.  But when I arrived in the United States and traveled, I realized that parts of the country are much more conservative than India.” 

America’s current grappling with the “values debate,” is reminiscent of Dhawan’s “nexus” of interest, and she see the parallels. 

“I can understand the appeal of certain traditional values.  I miss India’s sense of community here.  There’s just not the same level of intimacy in America.  In India, people are always there to help raise children, and you would never see old people walking by themselves to buy their groceries as I do in New York.  That breaks my heart.” 

Of course, in reflecting on Bihari’s crisis, the question of being subject to unchallenged power is also a major complaint of Dhawan’s.  “I imagine we will have to find a way to deal with things in a context of tradition,” she muses. 

Such notions are not that elusive — Sabrina Dhawan’s films have already begun imagining them.