About
Pots of Millet, Faces of Gold: Transformation is the first in a series of experimental ethnographic films that draw from Richard K. Wolf’s research with the Kota people of South India over the past 35 years. The series title alludes to the dual orientation in Kota ritual and everyday life toward death and divinity: dried millet plays a central role in multi-day secondary mortuary ceremonies, while gold-colored offerings are pasted in the shape of a face on the ancient pillars of Kota temples. As an indigenous community with a population of fewer than 2,500, the Kotas have, in their own telling, weathered periods of enormous loss—death through disease, the trauma of forced migration, and disruptions in transmission of traditional knowledge. The Kotas recognize their own long, fragile history. Indeed, the roots of the Kota language predate the separation of the Tamil and Malayalam languages more than 2,000 years ago. Today, as modern Indians, the Kotas are largely a village-based, peasant society, though their members also include professionals and workers in major Indian cities.
This first film is presented as a time capsule, addressed to Kota people 100 years in the future and narrated in Kota by Wolf’s Kota collaborator Duryodana, whose narration connects the on-screen action to both himself and to Wolf. The Kotas have long been known in the ethnographic record for their roles as craftspeople and musicians serving other communities in the Nilgiri Hills. Wolf’s research, however, has focused on the more elaborate artistic and ritual activity by and for members of the Kota community themselves.
The film thematizes music and the transformation of materials, bodies, and spiritual entities, moving from making pottery and musical instruments to their use in multiday mortuary ceremonies. Incorporating Wolf’s own footage in multiple formats transferred to film, as well as anthropologist David G. Mandelbaum’s archival movie footage and cylinder recordings from 1938, the film provides striking impressions of village life over time, viewed from the perspectives of researchers and the Kotas themselves.