Ranchi, Feb. 20: National award winning filmmaker duo Biju Toppo and Meghnath Bhattacharya are now hopeful of completing a dream project - a documentary on the life and work of late Ram Dayal Munda (1939-2011), the iconic tribal scholar and musician.
On Monday, Meghnath and Biju will be winging off to the US, and between February 26 and March 1 go to New York as well as Pennsylvania, Chicago, Minnesota and Syracuse Universities, to fill in the pieces of Munda's distinguished stint in America.
Meghnath and Biju, who will get logistic help from admirers of the accomplished tribal scholar in the US for the project, feel the film will be a must-watch for future generations.
The Ranchi-based directors feel Jharkhand youngsters know little about the man who came from a humble tribal village, Diuri, in Ranchi district, and went on to become a policy maker at the UN Working Group on Indigenous People at Geneva and the UN Forum of Indigenous Issues in New York.
A Padmashree recipient and a former Rajya Sabha member, Munda, a scholar and regional music exponent, also helped form a social-political campaign to provide an intellectual base to the statehood movement for tribals, which finally led to the formation of Jharkhand.
"After Munda received the Sangeet Natak Akademi award in 2007, I told him that we would make a film on him and he brushed aside the suggestion, laughing," Meghnath said. "But, Munda appeared in two of our films, Gadi Lohardaga Mail and Iron is Hot," Biju added, speaking about their acclaimed films, the second of which earned the duo a national award.
About their Munda biopic, the duo feel though they have many clippings of the tribal icon and his work here, the documentary has been hanging fire as the American part of his life is yet to be covered.
After completing his masters in anthropology from Ranchi University in 1963, Munda went to Chicago University, where he obtained his PhD in 1970. Later, he taught at Minnesota University and had been a visiting professor at Syracuse University.
"This part of his life is important as the civil rights movement of the US and native activists there inspired him and strengthened his commitment towards political emancipation of indigenous people back home," Meghanth explained.
Munda returned to Ranchi in 1982 to set up the department of tribal and regional languages at Ranchi University and subsequently became the varsity vice chancellor in 1985. Though he retired in 1999, he continued to work for music, academics and uplift of tribals till his last.
Meghnath lamented very few youngsters also knew about Jaipal Singh, a Munda tribal man who captained the Indian field hockey team to clinch gold in the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam.
