Feature-length documentary on nomadic camel-herding family shows how industrialisation is threatening their traditional way of life
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Five hundred years. That’s how long the Fakirani Jats – a community in Kutch, India – have been grazing their animals. But as Under the Open Sky points out, this nomadic way of living is rapidly being erased by the twin threats of industrialisation and privatisation of land.
An unflinching portrayal of the life of Ahmed and his family, Under the Open Sky does not shy away from reality. Squabbling between family members over chores offers a refreshing and honest insight into their dynamics. In one scene, Ahmed makes guttural noises to move his 70-strong herd of camels around. In the next, his young children are helping a goat give birth, wiping down and holding the newborn kid.
Instead of phone screens and typical forms of entertainment, the object of children’s play are the animals around them – baby camels, cattle, goats – and the barren landscape around them as they draw pictures in desert sand.
The family earns around $150 a month selling camel milk, with the product sold to local buyers as they travel between towns.
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Throughout all of these scenes, the film takes on a fly-on-the-wall style approach, never feeling intrusive but capturing moments of monumental importance for the camel-herding family. Much of the film is rendered like this – in still, quiet scenes – allowing for the actions to take centre stage and show the family’s dedication to their nomadic life.
For example, Ahmed takes on the laborious task of shearing a camel with a small pair of scissors, a process that takes hours. Camels are washed with protective medicine; milked carefully. Lone camels are carefully herded back to the main group to ensure no animal gets left behind as the family travels across the landscape.
Ultimately, there is an unspoken respect shared by Ahmed and his family of these animals. As Ahmed says himself, ‘there is always something to do – our work never ends.’
Such dedication, though, is brought to its testing limits. For Ahmed and his family, as well as other nomadic families, a serious concern is raised over the fact that sheep, goats and camels do no have allocated grazing land – unlike buffalos and cow. Instead, wind turbines have been built on land. As such, nomadic families raise concerns that privatisation will strip away the last of any free land their animals can use. This poses a significant threat for the estimated 20 million pastoralists who depend on India’s forests and grasslands to graze animals.
There is also concern that the government will sell land to mining companies, even though nomadic families have relied on such spaces for their livelihoods for thousands of years. There is a clear trade-off: sell to the private companies, but be left with a landscape so barren and empty that no farmer can use it. From the perspective of nomadic farmers like Ahmed and his family, it is becoming painfully clear which choice the Indian government wants to make.
But it’s not just privatisation that Ahmed has to worry about. The sudden ill health of his camels leads to huge medical expenses that force the family to take out pricy loans. And as the herd succumbs to pneumonia, Ahmed is left with no choice but to pivot his career to selling sand instead. A quiet resilience blooms from this scenario: we see Ahmed and his family scoop sand with large metal buckets into carts, clinging to whatever parts of their nomadic life remain.
In the film’s final scene, a herd passes behind a landscape of towering wind farms. If there was a single image to summarise Under the Open Sky, it would be this: the tensions between a traditional way of life, and the modernisation slowly encroaching upon it.
