Paper short abstract:

The blurring of lines between fiction, personal and artistic responses, Mani Kaul's SIDDHESHWARI defied any genre, which is at once a monograph, a document as well as poetic articulation, almost a painting. Yet, it involves archiving of a cultural idiom that is an ongoing gesture - rather than a framed text.

Paper long abstract:

A film is not just a directed, edited document, but becomes a fluid text which transgresses and transverses the boundaries and genre. Mani Kaul's SIDDHESHWARI is fiction, document, a painting, personalized biography - where the focus of the film is not a person, which is merely an occasion to access the inner spaces of - space, time, identity, affect. The film traces a cultural geography of Benaras, Music traditions, family as a socio-cultural unit - while breaking the myth and reclaiming the personal and the individual.