Documentary Film Screening and Discussion, with Ajay Bhardwaj

When the Tide Goes Out (117 min, Dir. Ajay Bhardwaj 2021) unravels the little-known history of radical political cultures of the South Asian diaspora in British Columbia in the long sixties. It combines a rich archive of cultural production with oral history interviews, offering a counterpoint to singular histories of ethno-religious diasporic communities. By foregrounding border-crossing, a key characteristic of the long sixties, it invokes the nearly forgotten cross-ethnic and cross-racial solidarities forged in the labour and cultural movement, where artists and activists of many Left-wing streams participated. Ruminating over their lives and activism four decades later, this generation of organizers and cultural activists slowly recalls the presence of gender inequality and sexism across the activism spectrum. While South Asian women carried the burden of both outside and domestic work, they were also the ones to experience sexism and were doubly discriminated when contending with the ‘social shame’ of protesting or speaking out against family violence and abuse. The interiority of women’s lives and the gendered experience of activism and organizing are missing from the archive and memory culture of the movement. The film becomes an endeavour to address this absence and to reshape the movement’s collective memory while examining social tensions within and without. It provides a sense of how immigrants struggled to make a home by fighting racism, class, and gender inequalities in which women experienced double discrimination.

Ajay Bhardwaj is a filmmaker and scholar whose work meditates on the relationship between aesthetic and subversive, art and identity, and history and memory. In his long stint as a documentary filmmaker, he explored the northwestern state of Punjab in India for a decade. This phase culminated in his Punjab trilogy—a set of documentaries located at the intersection of Dalit religiosity, performance traditions, and memories of partition. Bhardwaj is a recipient of the Public Scholars Award at the University of British Columbia, where he recently completed his PhD on South Asian Left-wing cultural activism in British Columbia.

The screening will be followed by a panel commentary on the film, and a discussion of South Asian diasporic cultural, labour and feminist organising in the GTA, Canada and beyond , in their historical and contemporary contexts.

Divyani Motla, Editorial Board member of the Jamhoor collective, a left media organization in Toronto focusing on South Asia, and a PhD candidate in the Department of History in a collaborative program with the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto.

Navjot Salaria, worker-activist and organiser with the Naujawan Support Network in the GTA, mobilising against wage theft of migrant and international student workers, and advocating for just immigration policies and working conditions.

Haroon Khalid, co-founder, with Anam Zakaria, of Qissa.org, a storytelling platform that documents, archives, and exhibits oral histories of immigrants to Canada. See their upcoming Qissa Festival Celebrating Newcomer and Refugee Writers: https://qissa.org/.

Chair and Moderator: Anup Grewal, Assistant Professor in the Historical and Cultural Studies Department, UTSC.