Film on AI and Adivasi culture screened at IIM-Calcutta and Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute
Times of India | 2 January 2025
KOLKATA: A film on the relationship between artificial intelligence and an Adivasi mother who works in a data labelling centre in a remote village in Jharkhand was screened at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIMC) and Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI).
Titled ‘Humans In The Loop’, the film by Sonal Madhushankar, Ridhima Singh, Gita Guha, Vikas Gupta, Anurag Lugun, Monika Purty, and Anushka Bhadra is among the few contemporary Indian cinema pieces that highlight the relationship between AI, human beings, and nature.
Writer-director Aranya Sahay, an alumnus of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), got the idea from a newspaper article highlighting Adivasi women working as data labellers in Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Telangana. “When I started to understand data labelling, I realised how an algorithm understands the world. To understand the difference between a chair and a table, a labeller assumes the position of a parent and AI assumes that of a child. This perspective opens up the larger question of humanity’s role in the future with AI,” Sahay said.
He found that many tribal women from small towns in Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Telangana are engaged by AI companies to serve as data labellers. “The job entails visual tagging. Access to their phones and the internet has made this job all the more accessible. Travelling through Jharkhand made me realise how colonialism impacted the whole world, with the harshest impact on indigenous communities who were termed savages or criminal tribes. An AI trained on primarily first-world data could lead to the same impact where indigenous knowledge systems are deemed primitive. The film was developed as part of a grant called Museum of Imagined Futures,” he added.
Sahay’s film introduces viewers to the ‘dhuku’ marriage prevalent in Jharkhand that allows a couple to live with each other without getting married. In Jharkhand, the women are called ‘dhukni’. The protagonist of this film is a ‘dhukni’ mother, fighting for custody of her children from a Hindu Rajput man she lived with. This mother takes up the job of a data labeller. Going beyond just being a film about a mother’s fight for her rights, it explores issues like the problems of Western gaze in AI and the conflict between rural and urban life.
Finding an actor in Mumbai to play the protagonist was challenging. Eventually, Sahay cast Sonal Madhushankar, who has a theatre and IT background. “She quit her IT profession, worked as a casting assistant before taking the plunge as an actor. The degree of honesty, consistency, and surrender in her performance is incredible,” the director said.
Reactions at both institutes were positive. “Most students belonged to Gen Z. An Adivasi student spoke of forest rights and the deep connection that Adivasis have with the natural world and how there was a danger of erosion. The screening became a conversation about many things, including how social sciences needed to be an inherent part of Indian management courses,” Sahay added.
SRFTI faculty Putul Mahmood lauded how simply the film conveyed “a profound message”. “It’s the story of a tribal mother and her daughter on one hand. It’s also the story of a woman reclaiming her tribal identity through ‘mothering’ of the ‘child’ that is AI. The tribal mother works in a data labelling centre, where many other tribal women like her engage in the task of data labelling that feeds into creating digital algorithms. The film touches you in a way that’s direct and tender,” Mahmood wrote on social media after the screening.