The Men in the Tree

In 1993, Lalit Vachani made The Boy in the Branch, a short documentary about the induction of children into the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist paramilitary organisation in India. In The Men in the Tree, he revisits the people and places of that film.

The boys are all men now and the RSS, despite negative press about its attacks on religious minorities, has gained influence in the intervening years, even capturing political power in the late 1990s. In candid interviews, the participants reminisce about their time training at an RSS branch in Nagpur. Through their accounts, we discover the organisation’s beliefs and modes of operation: its paranoid construction of a phantom enemy of the Hindus, perennial war-readiness, dissemination of fake information and constant fear of inter-religious marriage. But in the interviewees’ changing fortunes and circumstances, we also sense a tension between their dedication to the cause and the desire to move on with life.

The Men in the Tree doesn’t sensationalise its subject and instead conceives it as a human-interest story. Juxtaposing exchanges with RSS members with testimonies by its critics and renegades, the film makes its standpoint clear, but in doing so, it does not caricature the interviewees themselves, who come across as rational, well-rounded individuals. As the film shows, there lies the horror.

– Srikanth Srinivasan

• 

• 

•