Phad is a traditional narrative painting from Rajasthan, India, created on hand-spun cloth and used in ritual performance by Bhopa priest-singers. Depicting the epics of folk deities such as Pabuji and Devnarayan, Phad paintings function as mobile visual texts that are activated through oral storytelling and song. Produced with natural mineral pigments and governed by strict iconographic conventions, Phad resists static display, emphasizing portability, performance, and communal memory. As a living tradition, it continues to mediate between devotion, history, and storytelling.
Creators: Kaashvi Jain & Aaryaman Sharma
Screened at FilmIt India
Phad Art
Documentary Video Films on Five Tribal Groups is a curated government/educational video playlist that presents short documentary films focusing on socio-economic conditions and educational perspectives of selected tribal communities in India. The collection foregrounds everyday life, schooling, livelihoods, and community dynamics among Indigenous groups as recorded through state or institutional audiovisual projects. It details the lives and experiences of Bhils of Madhya Pradesh, Riangs of Tripura, Gaddis of Himachal Pradesh, Kadars of Kerala, and Agarias of Gujarat.
​
​
Films Division of India. Documentary Video Films on Five Tribal Groups. YouTube playlist. Accessed 17th July, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUgLcpnv1Yie_8lzHB4dj_GCiZTOH8hv1
This resource aggregates short documentary films documenting Indigenous life in Jharkhand, with particular attention to the Gond, Ho, Birjia, Mal Pahariya, Lohra, Korwa, Sauriya Paharia, Karmali communities. The films emphasise lived experience: agricultural labour, forest relations, oral traditions, music, ritual, and political assertion, often privileging proximity and regional specificity over polished narrative voice-over. Unlike state-produced ethnographic documentaries, these works emerge from local or regional documentary practices, allowing for more situated representations of Indigenous lifeworlds.
​
Within Neither/Nor, this collection is significant not only for its visual documentation of Jharkhand’s tribal communities, but also for how it challenges homogenised representations of “Adivasi” identity. By situating multiple communities within a single regional archive, the resource allows for comparison across languages, cultural forms, and histories of resistance, while foregrounding Indigenous presence as contemporary, political, and evolving rather than static or folkloric.
​
​
​
Trijharkhand. Documentary Films on Jharkhand’s Tribal Communities. Regional documentary resource. Accessed 17 July, 2025. https://www.trijharkhand.in/en/documentary-films