Tinctoria (2025) MAMI Select Short Film Review: Singling Out the Stain of Shame From the Stain of Indigo

Amrita Bagchi’s recent short film, “Tinctoria” (a part of the four-film constellation of MAMI Select: Filmed on iPhone program), is not just an expression of the debilitating generational trauma or an imagining of class relations and their steady sustenance from the nineteenth century to the modern time. But with Vikramaditya Motwane as a mentor, Bagchi offers the film as an exploration of the nature of History, one which is sometimes faithful and other times blatantly treacherous. In documenting the genesis of a pigment, the short film effectively challenges the stifling tendency of prioritising the palatable ‘aesthetic’ by alienating the ‘repulsive’ political root. As the narrative unfolds, we realise that ‘the stain of indigo’ (the title appeared in Mahatma Gandhi’s My Experiments with Truth) metaphorically corresponds to the indelible stain on the collective memory, left by the shameful history of indigo slavery.

In the present day, Raka Sinha, a new age, elite fashion designer and pro slavery apologist, returns to her ancestral site, a nineteenth-century abandoned indigo factory which belonged to her great-grandfather. As she prepares to flag off a modern exhibition of her new collection, inspired by the dye of indigo, she channels her complacency in smugly speaking of her ancestors’ achievements in harboring bonded laborers for the indigo plantation. Raka recounts how ‘History’ has remembered and remained faithful to her great-grandfather ‘Rai Bahadur,’ while casually adding its betrayal in the act, obliterating all traces of the workers from public memory as a footnote. According to Raka, the Raibahadur’s act of establishing an indigo factory in a village that was doomed to slink into oblivion anyway points to his indisputable heroism.

All drunk on the trend of sustainability, the fashion show turned art installation turns into a haunting site for Raka’s subconscious. The space around her begins to twist and turn, implode and explode curiously. At one point, she finds herself entangled in a mesh of indigo fibres from which she is rescued by her intern. As she tries to make sense of the trick that her mind just pulled on her, she finds herself in yet another mirage soon enough. The walls of the toilet that she occupies fall off, and she finds herself in a dark room. There is not one soul in the room– just the blaring screen of a computer that constantly flashes mysterious numbers and an ancient photograph.

Parallel to the above-mentioned horror is the horror for people working under this woman. A modern age resurrection of her forefather, Raka, prioritizes getting a dormant fountain into action by cutting off the drinking water supply of her workers. As Raka herself grows thirsty, we witness her lock herself in the toilet and try to drink water from a jet spray. When the jet spray does not work, she lifts the lid off the toilet seat in desperation and instinctively thinks of drinking the water. However, her consciousness erupts, and she quells the primal thought with a retching sound. It is pertinent to note that Raka’s ancestor was a ‘Rai Bahadur,’ a ‘title of honour’ bestowed by the British government in India to individuals for outstanding service to the Empire.

A lengthy study on disgust by Arijeet Mandal, Assistant Professor of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, observes that “a special look at disgust only comes within the context of a colonial Other.” Whether it’s a conscious choice on the part of the filmmaker or not, the close ties between the two are undeniable in the film. The scene in the toilet is a contemplative portrayal of disgust, an aversive emotion of the upper class to ‘other’ the exploited classes.

As Raka’s personal guilt is slowly but steadily paving the way for a very public exposure, the disgust too is dislocating its position and directing the gaze towards this repulsive minion of the ruling class. What emerges is not just a disgust for Raka’s action in the toilet for what it is, but a moral disgust against her class position and its tool of apathy. The scene offers the opportunity to present the idea of ‘aestheticization of politics,’ where Raka, a fashion designer, is dismissive of the politics of the pigment and wants to sell a visually arresting product without considering the socio-political structures that give birth to it.

In the film, Bagchi cleverly chucks us into a troubled private history: our position as a spectator turns Raka’s guilt into exposed shame. History works itself out before us in interesting ways. In exploring the self-justifying contortions of the mind of the central figure, the film prises open and unburies what her guilt has hidden away. There’s a point in the film where the woman is suggested by her crew member to issue an apology for the historical atrocities committed by her ancestors. An apologist excelling in furtiveness, Raka, in turn, flippantly suggests fitting a memorial somewhere in the schedule and adds: “Everyone will get their own candles and automatically feel guilty, and I won’t even need to say sorry.” This utterance not only holds special importance in the story world, but it is a direct address to us.

Historically, the mention of slavery has evoked a singular feeling: shame. As spectators of both the exhibition and the film, viewers are drawn into a cleverly crafted world, designed to make them collectively feel responsible for it. Then, a collective evocation of History would never bring to light what the personal is privy to. It would alienate the spectators and make everything beyond the screen memory inaccessible to them. The burden, therefore, is less on the heir. However, what she tries to suppress forcefully buoys up with greater force: the exact numbers and names of her ancestors’ workers who perished in the Indigo Drought. The ghosts of the workers are permanent memory stains of her guilty mind.

The film has something of the strangeness of the futuristic horror of a Black Mirror episode, overlapping with historical horror. Its ramifications and implied thematic concerns, however, stretch far beyond scratching the surface of a trauma; it enters into the realm of the haunting caused by the repressed shame of a mind that is not traumatised but justifies inflicting trauma. The vaguely contemporary but possibly futuristic setting nonetheless makes the evocation of horror precise. Evidently, the grand sweep of Indigo literature in Bengali provides a footing on which Bagchi weaves her complex fabric.