King of India sheds light on these migrant child performers who commute to Kolkata every day from the suburbs, exploring the story of the lives of children who are consciously and by design, exploited by their parents to eke out an apology of a livelihood sans schooling, medical care and adequate nutrition. Raja’s parents, Ratan and Radha, are originally from a Chhattisgarh village. They claim to have originated from the hereditary clan of wayside performers called Nats.

"Nats are traditional performers — singers, actors, dancers, acrobats, all rolled into one. Entertainers extraordinaire, they spend their nights in the tents and their days in the big city where there is a ready audience for their entertaining skills. This film is about one of the Nat families living in these tents in conditions that even the most primitive municipality should not approve of," informs Sinha.

Incidentally, Sinha is a leading Indian documentary filmmaker. He has won some of the topmost and most prestigious awards in the world for his films — in Leipzig, Bilbao, New York and Japan. His last two films, Journeyings and Conversations and King of India were in the Joris Evans Competition at the IDFA (Amsterdam). These are the only films from India ever to have been selected for the main competition section at the IDFA. He also won the prestigious Hoso-Bunka Foundation TV Documentary Competition in 2001. He won the National Award (President’s Award) eight times, five times as director and three times as producer.

"I began planning this film when I spotted these kids while shooting Journeyings and Crossings. They formed part of my film but I wanted to come back and make a complete film on their lives and the distanced world they live in, deprived of the minimum needs of childhood. I focussed on Ratan Singh and his family comprising wife Radha, two sons and four daughters," he elaborates.

The Singh family belongs to the remote Chhattisgarh region and takes pride in tracing its ancestry back to virile Rajputs. Today the ‘Nats’ have been reduced to penury for want of a paying street audience backed by their desperate need to produce a line of kids to keep the housefires burning. They are now placed outside any recognised caste system and are considered to be untouchables (the lowliest of the lowly). While medieval Rajputs, the clan they claim to have descended from, were fearless warriors, Ratan Singh and others of his ‘Nat’ fraternity earn their living as wayside performers.

The film offers a panoramic view of the dredges of poverty Ratan Singh lives in with his family. He lives off the earnings of his children. Most of his time is spent on putting make-up on their faces with indigenously prepared black kohl for eyes, moustache, etc, some garish red paint for lipstick and rouge and talcum powder for the face. The rest of his time is spent drinking and dancing away to merriment, singing old Hindi film songs and taking pride in his ancestry. The wife pitches in cooking and cleaning as the debts begin to mount. When asked why they do not send their kids to school, Ratan Singh says they cannot afford to adding, ‘besides, what will they gain from schooling?" he asks. A while later, Radha smiles and says, "We are smart people you see? Our children earn a lot so instead of our spending money on education that will hardly bring in Rs 6000 per month, without education, they can bring in much more every day." But her daughter-in-law Julie repeats that she wants to send her son Kishore Kumar (named after the playback singer) to school because "he will be able to read and write and keep hisaab-kitaab and maintain accounts and will not be cheated."

The cinematographic space of the film remains focussed on the children while they perform the same tricks, sing the same songs, till, with Toofan’s marriage to Julie, their feats add new items like tightrope walking, swaying, jumping and the rest, now with one of the younger girls Reshma, who has grown up fast and is the lead performer. Janaki is married off to a boy from the same trade, when Jyotsna is the chief performer, along with Raja. Radha, however, is thrown out of her home when Julie steps in and is blamed for having left the family reeling under heavy debts. Ranjan Palit’s camera sweeps across pavements of Kolkata and its suburbs, along railway tracks, on and under bridges, offering glimpses of the children’s daily life as they share food among themselves, or fight with each other, while the oldest looks after the rest, and Julie takes the collection plate around.

They do their marketing with small change from their collection. The pace is dynamic and the six-year span shows the children grow up as the little grandson begins his tricks before his parents move away with him to settle separately. Without taking sides, and centering his text on the children and the influence of Hindi cinema on their lives, Sinha’s King of India makes its own powerful statement.