The article looks at Mukul Kumar’s journey as a dancer, filmmaker, and spiritual practitioner, briefly tracing how his early exploration of movement and sadhana led him to develop his method ‘The Empty Bridge’, before focusing on his film 'The Farming Land'. The piece examines how the film uses movement to explore identity as something shaped by conditioning, inheritance, and the body, drawing on influences like Maya Deren and Andrei Tarkovsky, while emphasising Kumar’s preference for simple, symbolic storytelling that allows emotion and meaning to emerge without over-explanation.
At sixteen, author, dancer & filmmaker Mukul Kumar was at an international arts festival performing his first solo physical theatre piece when he attended a Butoh workshop. “I had already been immersed in my own research. I was exploring what the body truly wants to express, honestly and without pretence. I was completely devoted to that inquiry,” he notes. Alongside this, his sadhana journey had already begun, and the realizations from that practice were becoming inseparable from his artistic path, which later became his book 'AM I ME?'.
In his latest film, ‘The Farming Land’, that method becomes a tale of identity, how it is shaped through conditioning, parenting, and inherited behaviour, and the ways those patterns get stored in the body and then released through movement. We see it through a man who interacts with a child who helps him shed those imposed layers, birthing himself anew.
“Movement has always been my first languag. When the idea for the film came to me, it arrived naturally as a movement. I chose to convey it through dance because the body does not lie. It speaks a vocabulary beyond words — free, ever-creating, beyond labels. It is like someone reciting naked connotations, poetry unwrapped from language. That truthfulness is what draws me again and again.”Mukul Kumar
Mukul found himself drawn toward parallel and arthouse cinema at a very young age. “It resonated with something primordial within me,” he notes. Through his dance training, he was introduced to world cinema, which opened up new sensibilities for him. He names Maya Deren as an “enduring touchstone,” especially for her treatment of the body and movement. Andrei Tarkovsky is another important influence who redefined his understanding of what cinema could be. “His orchestration of time, his sculpting of space, his approach to the frame as a living, breathing field of symbols—all of it mirrored a way of perceiving that I already carried within,” he recalls. The "tenderness & metaphysical gravity" of Middle Eastern Cinema and the intimacy of Kamal Swaroop, Mani Kaul, and Satyajit Ray all fed into his expression.
Visual art, for the filmmaker, comes from poetry, which is in the very state of being. “Some think in words, others in sound. For me, thinking has always unfolded in the sensations coursing through my body, in the kinetic intelligence of movement,” he shares. So when The Farming Land came to him, “it arrived already layered — already carrying within it the textures, the images, the embodied language I would need to express it,” he notes.
“We are all born to bloom. But within us, there are seeds we never chose. Seeds that were planted without our consent — through cycles of conditioning, through inherited patterns, through the silent inheritance of our parents, our environment, the world into which we were dropped. And these seeds grow inside us. They become thorns. They become baggage.”Mukul Kumar
No generation has ever worked on themselves as much as we do. We’ve learned to pathologise all that is wrong with us and therapy-speak ourselves into transformation, which is an ambitious but evasive quest. Any answers that do grace us come from Lynchian abstractions, tacit hints of poetry and songwriting that, in comedian Theo Von’s words, “is always an inch away from what it’s trying to say”.
Mukul, too, shares that instinct for symbolism. It is how he sees the world, and even when he shares his vision, like in The Farming Land, it’s rooted in simplicity without intellectualising. "Even in my poetry, you will notice the same quality,” he shares. "The language is simple. I do not labour over vocabulary or ornamentation. It flows. And I think that honesty — that refusal to overcomplicate — is what allows the symbols to breathe and the emotion to reach the viewer without obstruction."
Follow Mukul here.
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