My Daughter Joined a Cult director: 'If it helps people be more cautious, it would be a great win'

Director Naman Saraiya ’s My Daughter Joined a Cult is not just a godman’s rise and fall story. The experiences and trauma of Nithyananda ’s former devotees take the centre stage in the new docu-series. The discovery+ and VICE Studios project has three episodes, which consist of fugitive and rape-accused Nithyananda’s speeches, survivors’ and journalists’ points of view and news clips. Excerpts from the interview: There are so many godmen in India, so why did you choose to make a docu-series revolving around Nithyananda? If you look at the situation across right now, in terms of series that exist, it is invariably about serial killers or cult leaders who are convicted, arrested or dead. And in India, the immediately excessively popular ones who are convicted of crimes against women and all sorts of crimes are Ram Rahim Singh Insan and Asaram Bapu. Nithyananda is an alleged criminal. You can’t even say that he is a criminal because trials are pending. So it was challenging. It’s an active ongoing investigation and we have to tread carefully… like you can’t be creating public narratives that can sway so to say hearings and all, so that is challenging… to navigate stories. That was I guess one of the key factors and the other is that he had become such a pop culture phenomenon like with the memes. There was no concrete, cohesive collection of information that highlighted the spectrum of his alleged crimes. I felt it was an exciting opportunity to be able to visually piece that together.

How much time did you give to this project? More than a year. I feel like if it was a personal or independently commissioned project, I would easily lose three years to it. But a studio and network were involved, there was a legal process, clearances and rights. I got on board early April last year. I delivered everything by February of this year. Former devotees shared their experiences with you. Was it difficult to get them on board? I had a core team of four people. My assistant directors and researchers were multilingual. So that was a big aspect of being able to communicate with people who perhaps don’t speak in Hindi or English or Gujarati. My associate director, Shashank Rajaram, also speaks in Tamil. He was in charge of two to three Tamil key speakers and building a bond with them. A lot of their stories are already public. Like I said, it wasn’t all there in one place. It was all scattered information about this guy and his alleged crimes. Jansi Rani’s case perhaps was the most powerful interview and moving stories in the series. She’s been on a mission to get justice for her daughter’s death that allegedly happened in his ashram. It’s like a power structure game. He probably had all resources at his disposable to be able to close this case. Who knows? It’s all speculation. Jansi Rani was more than willing. In fact, it was such a humbling experience to meet with her. Even though I don’t speak in Tamil, she would always involve me in the conversation. She was so forthcoming, showed pictures of her daughter. The process with devotees was that some were more than willing to speak because they wanted a platform. With some, it was like to forego their past or you know like not fall into that trap again. They had left it behind and didn’t want to recall the past. For instance, Sarah Landry and Jordan who are primary in the third episode, it took a long time to convince them because they don’t have an active cases against him. Whereas there were others who had got into legal battles with Nithyananda or police cases and stuff. The only thing that I would have liked more was to have cops. But since it’s an active ongoing investigation and cases, authorities cannot give you an official statement. You can’t have an anonymous cop. But there was one woman whose name was withheld in the docu-series. Yes, she was very supportive. She was someone who left most recently from amongst the people whom we knew. So obviously she had seen a lot of events that we were covering firsthand either as a visitor to the ashram or as someone who lived there. She brought a lot of credibility and accountability, and verified a lot of the events for us. Knowing that someone like her supported us and was willing to appear albeit anonymously, it empowered us and gave more strength to go forward. Social media played a huge role in Nithyananda’s popularity. His Facebook page still has 1.1 million followers. Did you get any hate messages from his followers? No, strangely. I was expecting a lot of trolls. But surprisingly I didn’t. Not yet. Maybe people just want to hate on the networks and studios, and not the creators anymore. What message do you want to give to your viewers through your docu-series? If I’ll be giving out messages then I’ll be a cult leader myself (laughs). If people could be more rational and critical and I guess check on their own fallacies and hypocritical behavior. If it helps them question their own beliefs and choices, I think that would be a good win to start with. I am not saying that this can change the country and make everyone denounce godmen and all. That would be extreme. It may work for some people, but if it helps people be more cautious, that would be a great win. Natalia Ningthoujam is a Manipur-based journalist. She knows how to smoothly switch from being a fan to a writer whenever needed. She tweets at @nattynick.

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