In this short by Asha Stuart, get a rare look inside the Siddi tribal villages and explore the cultural diversity of this forgotten community. The Short Film Showcase spotlights exceptional short videos created by filmmakers from around the web and selected by National Geographic editors. The filmmakers created the content presented, and the opinions expressed are their own, not those of National Geographic Partners.
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Documentary filmmaker Asha Stuart was passing through a bus station near Bangalore in 2012 when she made eye contact with a man nearby, who looked like he was of African descent.
They tried to speak to one another, but Stuart only spoke English and the man only spoke Kannada, the official language of Karnataka.
“I could tell he was intrigued by my appearance,” Stuart says. “I was intrigued by him as well.”
Stuart, who is African-American, followed up on her observation. She researched communities in India who she thought may fit the description of the man she met to try and learn more about what brought him to the region. Her search led her to the Siddi people, a group of Indians who,
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