Chai is the cornerstone of life in India, especially the ubiquitous little stalls spread across cities, towns and villages It is a hub for conversations — from politics to cinema to local gossip — sometimes leading to fisticuffs and noisy arguments. Shoma A. Chatterji writes about young German social activist Marc Hulser who brings the quintessential chaiwallah alive through his documentary ‘Remembering Mashi’.
It is not common to discover a young German social activist making a short film on an old woman eking out a living out of selling chai in a small corner of Kolkata. But the very young Marc Hulser has done just that. Marco Hulser is a strapping young 30-year-old who was kicked up about making documentary films after his stint in India. After voluntary service in Tamil Nadu, Marco studied Motion Pictures at the Hochschule Darmstadt, which he completed in 2016. During this period, he directed Zusammen Allein, a short film nominated for screening at several festivals. Mid-2015, he began work on his first documentary Masala Chai premiered in Toronto 2017.
Alongside Masala Chai, which explores the lives of five Indian tea-stall owners spread across India, he directed a shorter film called Mashi, the universal Indian term for “aunty” in almost every Indian lingo with slight variations — Maushi in Marathi, Maasi in Gujarati and Mashi in Bengali. According to Marco, who is friendly and warm, “We shot this portrait of Nandarani, also called Mashi, in 2016 but could not complete the project until 2021. The lockdown finally gave us the opportunity to rediscover a small treasure saved on one of our hard drives. The film is all about observing Nandarani following her in her daily routine of preparing chai for locals.” Mashi was completed in 2016.
Says Marco, “Before shooting Masala Chai and Remembering Mashi, I did social service in Tamil Nadu for an NGO which supports fishing villages along the coastline in the South (http://padgom.org/). I worked there for a year and produced some documentaries about several social projects such as water filtering systems, village communities, and schools. I used to live in a village called Vembar which had only a couple of thousand inhabitants. Every morning and evening, before and after work, I visited the local chaiwallah to drink my daily chai. I understood that the tea stall was the centre of communication in Vembar and a place where the whole village came together. At the stall, people would talk about their business while sipping hot chai, and though I couldn’t speak Tamil, I felt like a part of the community. After spending days, hours and minutes at the tea stall, I came up with the idea of shooting Masala Chai. The goal of this film was to indirectly draw an image of the complex layers of Indian society.
Poster of the documentary film ‘Remembering Mashi’
While preparing to shoot for Masala Chai, he and his team wanted to portray several tea makers from different social backgrounds. One of those protagonists was supposed to be Mashi. “As Mashi was not comfortable giving us an interview, we could just cover her daily routine. This way of shooting did not quite fit into the concept of our other protagonists, so we decided to make a separate short film just about her. It reminds us once more that beauty is found in small things, and you do not need much to have a life full of peace and harmony. We are grateful for spending time with Mashi at her tea stall. There is no specific time for tea but there is always time for tea.”
The camera follows Mashi as she closes the door of her shanty to walk to her tea corner, set up the stall, cleans the vessels, lights the stove to make tea. She does not talk much even with her customers who are forever dropping in and has no one to help her. She takes a brief lunch break to take a plate of rice she has cooked on the same stove somewhere between her chores, finishes it off, cleans her cooking utensils and gets back to work. Her silence invests her with a dignity one might not easily associate with so very poor, marginal and side-tracked people like her. Hulser and his team have been able to portray this dignity where she does not beg, does not narrate sob stories or try to garner sympathy but just goes about her work as if nothing else matters.
Her name was Nandarani and she had three kids. She visited one of her daughters who lives in a village outside Kolkata from time to time. She had rented a small room in a flat belonging to a family that lived close to her tea stall. She earned a couple of hundred rupees a day but other than mandatory expenses on food, rent and travel, she saved the rest for her daughters. She spent between 12 and 14 hours a day at the stall and would go to sleep for the rest of the hours.
“When I went to ask after her from my friend Devayudh Sanyal where she had gone, Devayudh and I wanted to find out why her stall was closed. So, we visited shops close to her stall and they told us that she had gone back to her daughter’s village and had passed away there. We were so deeply shocked that we finally finished the editing of the film and renamed it Remembering Mashi.”
His journeys into India has made Marco realise that chai or tea, in any form, style or make, is the cornerstone of life in India and specially the small tea stalls one comes across everywhere – in big cities, in small towns, in villages and even in hamlets. It is a centre for conversations that cover every imaginable subject from politics to cinema to local gossip sometimes even leading to fisticuffs, loud arguments and fights. But come what may, the chaiwallah remains eternal and infinite. Remembering Mashi is a small tribute to all of them.
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Shoma A. Chatterji
Shoma A. Chatterji is a freelance journalist, film scholar and author. She has authored 17 published titles and won the National Award for Best Writing on Cinema, twice. She won the UNFPA-Laadli Media Award, 2010 for ‘commitment to addressing and analysing gender issues’ among many awards.
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