The paper discusses my ongoing research with the Konda Reddis, an adivasi group in south India that was initiated in early 2000. From 2007, I started video recording the ethnographic process hoping to make an ethnographic film. As time went by, the video recordings and the many photographs taken during each stay of fieldwork aided in providing an important continuity to the social relationship between the Konda Reddis and me, and the coming together of us, through the construction of anthropological knowledge on the Konda Reddis. The videos and photographs filled in for the absence of everyday in-person interaction between each fieldwork, it cushioned the time-gaps and stored memory of not just interaction but content of conversation. Between 2012-14, we (Konda Reddis and the researcher) decided to use video as a medium of communication with the government development agent given the constraints of physical meetings with government officials. The idea of the 'video caravan' (Mummidi, 2021) was to record Konda Reddis' views on the government resettlement policy, from the hills to the plains. The 'video caravan' took recordings of the group discussions and opinions and screened them across villages, further collecting responses from the viewers both in the hills and colonies in the plains. The video was also played to the government development Officer and his response played back to the people. In the process, the video aided not just as a record of memory retention and retrival, but as an important facilitator of engaged collaboration. It provided an active medium for the Konda Reddis to engage collaboratively with the researcher in the construction of anthropological knowledge. It provided scope for reflexive understanding through tracing different opinions across space, people and time.
