Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, a medieval Sufi poet, is an iconic figure whose poems are sung in Kachchh and across the border in Sindh (now in Pakistan). Umar Haji Suleiman is a self taught Sufi scholar. Mustafa Jatt sings the Bheths of Bhitai, accompanied by Usman Jatt, a truck driver, who plays one of the last surviving Surandos in the region. Set in Abdasa, in Kachchh, Gujarat, the film explores the life worlds of the three cousins and the Fakirani Jat community, a legacy of diversity. As pastoral ways of living have given way to settlement, borders and industrialisation, the older generation struggles to keep alive the rich syncretic legacy of Shah Bhitai, that celebrates diversity and non-difference, suffering and transcendence, transience and survival. These marginal visions of negotiating difference in creative ways resist cultural politics based on tight notions of nation-state and national culture; they open up the windows of the national imaginary.
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