The threat to indigenous languages is not distant any longer. It is here, and it is real. Words are being forgotten, native speakers are moving out, and with them are vanishing traditional knowledge systems and unique ways of seeing the world. Nihaarika Negi’s Kinnauri film ‘Tenfa’ is a gentle reminder of this loss.
The short (30 minutes), which had its world premiere at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA) in April, follows three generations of Kinnauri women — a midwife, a grandmother, and a teenage girl — on a trek through tribal Kinnaur to look for a herb that can save a new mother’s life, guided only by the fragments of a folk song.
Half-Kinnauri, half-Punjabi, Negi had never been to her paternal home in Himachal until a project on climate change came along in 2022. Once there, the Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist-filmmaker engaged with the locals and travelled to remote villages, rendered unlivable due to recurring landslides in areas where hydroelectric projects had come up. She listened to stories of her paternal aunt’s treks to these villages as a certified midwife.
A Berlinale Talents alumnus, Negi says it was in that moment that ‘Tenfa’ emerged. “Visiting Kandar, which is an hour-and-a-half trek on an extremely narrow path, I wondered, if a woman is pregnant in that village and there is a complication with the birth, how do you get access to medical care?”
The film came to life from conversations like these. Through the lens of a character based on the life of her bua (played by Negi’s chachi in the film), who is on a mission to save a haemorrhaging mother, the film explores how one begins to experience the loss the land has faced.
The midwife teams up with an 85-year-old grandmother and her teenage granddaughter to find the medicinal herb. But how do they find it? The clues lie in a folk song — its meaning half-remembered, half-forgotten. The young girl turns to social media, sharing the song and crowdsourcing its meaning from the wider Kinnauri community. In finding the herb, they not only save a life, but forge an unexpected bond — reconnecting with a shared inheritance of land, language, and care.
The film traverses treacherous mountain paths, rivers turned into streams, dam sites that look like apparitions, deforested stretches, and hundreds of wooden logs neatly stacked up as a shocking cost of development in the fragile Himalayas.
Interestingly, the film’s name itself is a stark reminder of what is at stake. To modern-day Kinnauris, ‘tenfa’ means a gift, but the real meaning is so deep that it is surprising the word even exists. ‘Tenfa’ stands for a gift given or received in the form of a medicinal plant. A symbol of gratitude, love, and care for the community and the environment.
Negi says that like the finding of the herb, the film was a participatory effort. From the actors to the crew, all were locals. “Right from the beginning, we were showing them the script and getting feedback, checking if we had misunderstood anything about the space or the culture.”
Her co-producers, Asawari Jagushte and Varsha Panikar from Star Hopper Studio, say entire villages came together to make this film — mothers, daughters, grandmothers, local artisans, musicians, poets, young people, and climate workers, all working in concert with a small film team. “They reminded us, again and again, that you cannot tell the stories of a tribe without them as partners, both in front of and behind the camera.”
The film was shot in Negi’s hometown of Sungra, nearby Nichar, and a dam site, Rarang. Since its premiere in April, the film has had several screenings in Kinnaur, Indian cities such as Mumbai, Delhi and Chandigarh, and at a micro cinema in LA.
Nihaarika Negi says the film came to life from conversations with locals.
As a child, Negi was always moving around the country with her government-employed father. “We were raised with the mindset that progress is moving forward. And forward usually means away from your town or village to a bigger town, to a bigger country, to learn English, to go to a better school, have a job outside.” And that’s what she was doing for most of her 20s and early 30s. “But in the process, I also realised that beyond a point, if you are not connected to your own heritage, and there is a void there, there is only so much you can offer to the world.”
This approach has seeped into her practice as a multidisciplinary artist, where she tries to see if there is “a community or a space with a story that can be developed in collaboration with people or artists from different disciplines”. Like her project ‘Dance Like a Mother’, which was showcased at the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa in 2017. Involving various sets of parents, including her own, it is a piece about the ways in which people end up becoming their parents or versions of them.
Up next from her oeuvre is ‘Birds of a Feather’, her first feature film, a satire about three siblings who return to the ancestral home to their dying father. An experimental theatre director, he has given instructions to perform his life’s regrets as a play in order to determine who gets his estate.
For now, however, Nihaarika Negi is keenly listening to the conversations ‘Tenfa’ is engendering and exploring the paths leading home.