Shaheen was previously a multimedia producer at The Caravan Magazine in New Delhi. His work spans intimate portrait films, experimental essays, and engages thoughts on memory and identity. He is a graduate of the DocNomads documentary filmmaking programme based in Lisbon, Budapest, and Brussels.

Ahmed’s project for the grant, Between Ruhānī and Jismānī: Living, Sensorial Archives of Lakshadweep Islands will explore aspects of the Sufi cosmos and spiritual imagination in the region’s collective memory, rendered through a series of experimental docufiction films. Working collaboratively with writers, researchers, collectors, and collectives from the islands, the project will map and locate the ‘imaginal’ pasts of the islanders that persist as living, sensorial archives, in the form of oral traditions, Sufi rituals, and performative practices. Drawing on the medieval Andalusian Islamic philosopher and mystic, Ibn al-Arabi’s concept of khayāl (imagination), the project situates dreams as the imaginal realm between our corporeal and spiritual existence, allowing abstract meanings to take on concrete form. In the traditional narratives of Lakshadweep, the imaginal is seamlessly integrated into the tangible forms of performance, rituals, and routines.

It is from this understanding of the imaginal that Ahmed will undertake intensive field research and audio-visual practice across several islands of the Lakshadweep to collect and record stories, legends, and dreams from islanders. Some of these, such as the maala/maala pattu (a form of ballad retelling of the past in the Lakshadweep Islands and Malabar Coast) will be creatively re-enacted and performed by those associated with its production, circulation, and preservation. These materials will form the basis for a script that Ahmed will develop in collaboration with writers from the region, which together with images and sounds recorded during the fieldwork, will result in four, twenty-minute episodes of a series of docufiction films. The project will also aim to workshop these materials with small groups of young people in order to foster independent projects from the islanders in future years.

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