Shahani’s cinematic ode to perhaps the most versatile and also, it is said, perhaps the most ancient musical instrument in the world: the humble bamboo flute. Like Bhavantarana, it brings dance together with stone sculpture, combining classical performance with tribal music to tell a civilisational story of the origins of enunciation. ‘Enunciation… precedes all concepts and the word’, he wrote in 2002 in a short essay titled ‘Film and Philosophy’, and now Shahani enunciates through legends enacted through speech, movement and stone. “Both Kalidasa in India and Rumi in Persia… thought of the bamboo flute as preceding the prana of human existence, that which imbues it with its own being and transmutes it to the Word and the object, unites it with the Beloved other”, he writes. The texts evoke a transformation from the Vedic age to the birth of Vaishnavism, e.g. the confrontation between Indra and Krishna from the Rig Veda. It includes performances by iconic dancers Alarmel Valli and Kelucharan Mahapatra. —Ashish Rajadhyaksha