‘Namaslay’: Brothers Kanish and Rish Arhant-Sudhir on Seven Years, Rejection and Family

By Elena Vasquez

Brothers Kanish and Rish Arhant-Sudhir spent seven years making their first feature film, "Namaslay" — a horror satire about the appropriation of yoga in the West. Their great aunt plays a character modeled on their own grandmother.

The film, which the duo wrote and directed together, uses family as its foundation. The grandmother character Paati is played by Usha Krishnan and was directly inspired by the brothers' real grandmother, who also helped them pursue the story, the pair explained at the Variety Screening Series.

"I think it's because of this relationship between the grandmother and the granddaughter that we're able to articulate that maybe more sensitively than we had initially," Rish said. "Having these sorts of relationships to skew the script — more blowtorch, less flamethrower — really became instructive."

What does 'Namaslay' target?

The satire's target is exploitation. Rish described the film's dual register: surface comedy over structural critique.

"There's something that's truly slapstick almost about the whole experience, but then there's also something beneath that's kind of sinister," Rish said. "It's a lot of strains of colonialism. There's commoditization that's happening. There is an extraction and then a resale at a premium."

Kanish added a note on craft: identity alone does not carry a film.

"An identity is not a story. It's a part of a character that affects how they interact with a story, and there are a lot of movies that have characters who have various identities that are not palpable at all, but the identity of a character in and of itself is not enough to undergird a narrative," he said.

The takeaway: the brothers frame cultural identity as one element of characterization, not the engine of plot.

How do two directors share a script?

The brothers write by passing drafts back and forth — a system they say keeps the work organic.

"Sometimes when I'm writing my parts, I'm just like, 'All right, I think I've written enough and I don't know what to write next, so I'll just send it to him and then let's see what he comes up with.' Then he passes it back to me and I'm like, 'Oh, what the hell is all this stuff?' And then I want to see where I can take it," Kanish said.

"That helps all of our stories feel very organic because as soon as the first draft is done. It's already been passed back and forth, and it's already been reviewed and hammered upon by both of us at different points," he added.

Rish called the dynamic "always trying to entertain each other."

Who took a chance on them?

After several rounds of rejection, the brothers staffed the film's department heads with their best friends. Doubt, they said, was constant throughout production.

"There were a lot of times in this journey where people would just say, 'You guys can't do this. There's no way that you could ever pull this off,'" Rish said. "All of those possibilities only became realities because the department heads took chances on us."

Kanish framed the arrangement as both professional and personal good fortune: "Even if I didn't know them at all, I would feel so lucky that I'm getting a front-row seat to this precise level of artistry and then it just so happens that we can also have a drink with them outside and be eating this food and be chatting about our lives."

What kept the film alive for seven years?

Financial difficulties and repeated refusals never ended the project. The reason, Kanish said, is structural: two people never quit on the same day.

"There's never ever been a day where both of us have given up, ever and there will never be such a day on our horizon because as long as one person is looking ahead and says, 'The sun will come up,' that's enough for the other person to be like, 'Well, if he thinks it, then I think it as well,'" he said.

In plain terms: mutual persistence, not outside support, carried "Namaslay" to completion — and positions the brothers for whatever they pass back and forth next.