The Pain of Others: a short review essay on Somnath Hore

Somnath Hore was a great artist of collective hope and hardship, but his abiding legacy is to make us feel each human tragedy as our own.

(My India Today review of a Somnath Hore retrospective 'Birth of a White Rose', held at the Kiran Nader Museum of Art in the summer of 2022. To see some images from the exhibition, click here.)

What makes someone become an artist? Somnath Hore, who would have been 101 this summer, was first moved to draw in December 1942 by a moment of violence: the Japanese bombing of a village called Patia in what is now Bangladesh. Hore was then a B.Sc. student at City College in Calcutta, but World War II evacuation had forced him to return to his Chittagong home. The ghastly sight of Patia’s dead and wounded seemed to demand recording in some way, and it was images to which the young man turned.

In Calcutta, he had begun to design posters for the Communist Party, but it was Chittagong that really put Hore on his political and artistic path. Two things happened in 1943: the Bengal famine began, and Hore met Chittaprosad. Six years Hore’s senior and also from Chittagong, Chittaprosad was already a prolific artist documenting the lives of Bengal’s rural poor. As a man-made colonial tragedy killed millions around them, Chittaprosad encouraged Hore to draw portraits of the hungry, sick and dying. “From morning to evening I used to accompany him on his rounds,” Hore wrote later. “He initiated me into directly sketching the people I saw on streets and hospitals.”

In 1945, Hore enrolled for formal art training at the Government College of Art and Craft. In 1946, the Communist party sent him off to Tebhaga in North Bengal, where he created a diary-like documentation of the massive peasant protests. It was a tumultuous decade, moving between politics and art while having to make a living by teaching school students art. When the government again banned the Communist party, he went underground. It was not until 1957-58 that Hore got his diploma, and left Calcutta and politics to become a lecturer at the future Delhi College of Art.

The show at Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art is superb; its gravitas undimmed by ill-advised curatorial versifying: sample “He witnessed as a child a world not so fair,/ Disparities between rich and poor had no compare....” 

It’s clear that Hore experimented with form and material through his six decades of art-making. It’s also clear how much his lifelong sensibility was sculpted by the tragic events of his youth. Over and over, you see him depict the suffering human body. Until the 1950s, he also depicts the magical charge of hope produced when these same bodies come together—to plant seeds, flags, ideas. But the stunning realism of the early woodcuts and linocuts gives way to abstraction, and a greater economy of the line. His figures are all concave stomachs, stick-like limbs and begging hands. 

They transition into the jagged, torn, blistered bodies of his bronze phase (animals, too, show effects of violence), and an almost meditative late style, using pulped paper. Here the lacerated body is conceived as texture rather than as line: white on white, paper scored, torn and moulded back into paper. The pain of others remained, forever, under his skin.  

(Birth of a White Rose is on at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, until June 30, 2022.) 

Book Review: A Bit of Everything

A fine new novel I reviewed for Scroll, about Kashmir and much else:

 In ‘A Bit of Everything’, author Sandeep Raina travels with questions of memories and victimhood.

About ten pages into Sandeep Raina’s novel, the Kashmiri Pandit protagonist is asked if he would like to watch a film about the history of the concentration camp he is visiting. Rahul Razdan has just arrived in Europe after six despairing years in Delhi, and walking around Dachau has already filled his mind with thoughts of his homeland. Something about the Austrian stranger’s innocuous question jolts the usually subdued young professor out of melancholia into sudden rage. “I have seen it all, I have felt it, I have been the film. Why would I want to see it all again?” he snaps.

A Bit of Everything is punctuated by incandescent moments like this one, where the light – and heat – from a still-smouldering bit of memory suddenly illuminates the drab, papered-over present, sometimes threatening to set it on fire. But such sparks are rare, because they are dangerous. Most people, most of the time, prefer to view the past nostalgically, and Rahul is no different. In the nostalgic mode, too, the mental analogy is with a film – but a film one watches over and over because one yearns to inhabit it again. 

“The past could be recalled easily, it could be comforting. He could rely on it. He could replay his fondest memories. Sitting here in a cold lounge on a cold leather sofa, he could recall a summer garden, a breezy afternoon, a book aglow under a winter candle, the smell of a wooden bukhari, warm toes in woollen socks, the scent of apples in straw boxes, pine-needle charcoal smoking in a kangri, Doora’s fluttering sari. The past could be relived as he wanted. The problem was with the present.”

A Bit of Everything, by Sandeep Raina. Westland, 2020.

A slow souring

Raina understands the workings of memory from the inside out. His book is a self-reflexive take on how we craft the narratives of our lives: as individuals, as families, as communities, as nations. It is no coincidence that Raina’s fictional narrator, the mild-mannered Rahul, has the rare ability to accept himself – his bafflement, his grief, his anger – without denying others his empathy. That empathetic quality is particularly valuable in a paean to a lost Kashmiri Pandit homeland, because the granular personal memory of that loss is too often dissolved into a politically expedient history of collective Hindu victimhood.

After they were forced to leave the increasingly communalised valley in the early 1990s, the Pandits’ painful and legitimate grievances have been sucked more and more into a narrative not of their making. The community is now a crucial pawn in the Sangh Parivar’s game of whataboutery, a game which politicians benefit from keeping alive.

We live with Rahul and the others the wrenching violence of the Pandit experience, of having been uprooted from the only home they had ever known, with little notice and few avenues for return. But their fear and hurt and befuddlement is not marshalled into some easy post-facto rationalisation. Raina’s protagonists refuse to play the static parts assigned to them in that never-ending majoritarian game: Pandits are not perpetually wounded victims, Muslims are not perpetually ungrateful traitors. (Even those from the “forces’ families” are allowed complicated inner lives by Raina – though he makes it clear that India’s defence establishment is its own social category in Kashmir.)

Instead, Raina’s narrative burden is the slow souring of once-warm relationships – and like his professorial narrator, he takes it seriously. If he revels in the sights and smells and sounds of his beloved house and garden, painting a often-idyllic picture of the sleepy small town of Varmull (I had to google to realise it’s the Baramulla of news reports), Rahul is equally punctilious about recording the fault-lines beneath the surface. The cross-community connections of Tashkent Street are real, but they contain within them the seeds of discord.

On Tashkent Street

So, for instance, we learn that Rahul and Doora build their “Haseen House” on a spur of the fields belonging to Doora’s family. It’s a detail, but one that helps understand how historical resentments brew: Pandits own all the arable land for miles, while it is poorer Muslims like Firoz and his brother who know how to cultivate it.

Rahul’s relationship to Firoze lies at the core of the novel: their bonding over the garden; Rahul’s awkward silence when Firoze takes the blame for a theft that his brother may or may not have committed; his attempt to compensate by teaching Firoze English literature for free. The inequality once tempered by neighbourly attachment becomes unbridgeable as social distrust deepens.

Then there’s the story of Kris, originally Krishna, who lives in one of the derelict houses on Jadeed Street where most of Varmull’s Dalits lived, “no one knew since when”. After his father dies cleaning a gutter, he comes to work in Rahul and Doora’s house at 13, hoping to acquire some education alongside his domestic duties. But Doora catches him pilfering and sends him away, launching him on a series of adventures in religion. First disallowed into the temple on Gosain Hill, then offered a new name and a Koran but barred from the mosque as “napaak” (impure), the Dalit boy finally becomes a Christian at 14.

Tashkent Street enables unlikely connections, but also watches them with suspicion. If the relationship between Kris and the poor Pandit girl Ragnee raises eyebrows, so does the fact of Firoze’s and Asha Dhar’s mother becoming friends over their daughters’ weddings – and the Ramayan. “I can’t understand the trittam-krittam, trit-pit Hindi they speak in the show, and no one at home tells me anything,” says Firoze’s mother to her son to explain why she goes to Asha Dhar’s house to watch the Hindu epic on Doordarshan every Sunday. 

“Mother, focus on your Pashto, not your Hindi,” laughs Firoze, while telling Rahul privately that it’s the Dhars’ cooking she can’t stay away from. Asha Dhar’s husband Pt Dhar, too, is unhappy with the friendship, which brings the Khan family – including their younger son Manzoor – into unnecessary proximity with his teenaged daughters.

Coming home

Over and over, Raina catches cultural and linguistic undercurrents that are the waves of the future: Iqbal Bano playing at a Pandit wedding before being turned off for its Pakistani-ness; Arun Dhar averting his eyes when asked about his friend Manzoor, or Pt Dhar dropping his voice to a whisper when he talks about his son-in-law’s “Shankhi” leanings so that the shopkeeper can’t hear him, or telling Rahul that he should say “poshte” because Muslims say “mubarakh”.

Raina’s radar may be stronger in Varmull, but it is alert to signals of contradiction even in Delhi and London – the intra-Muslim divide between Pashto-speakers and others; his Babri-destroying cousin Chaman who assures Doora that Rahul won’t fall into bad habits abroad, while winking at him and talking about marrying a mem; the Trinidadian Hindus who toast “Raoul” with beef doner kababs and whiskey while enlisting his services as a pandit for their planned Sanatan temple in Tooting.

Rahul’s final return – to India and to Kashmir – is the only unconvincing part of the book, perhaps because Raina’s attempt to unravel all the knots of the past at once feels more like wish-fulfilment than reality. But this is still a book to be read for its closely observed, deeply felt sense of Kashmir: a world seen from the inside, and then sadly, painfully, from afar. 

In this, A Bit of Everything is the complementary opposite of Madhuri Vijay’s award-winning 2019 novel The Far Field, in which we travel into Kashmir alongside a privileged young woman for whom the place is just a name. It is her slow and revelatory transition, from clueless to tragically embroiled, that helps forge ours.

Unlike Shalini, whose understanding grows as she embeds herself in Kashmir, Rahul begins to understand many things as he is removed from them, once he is no longer a “god of education” in Varmull. Distance and time help recalibrate the familiar.

The British section of the book is powerfully evocative, offering a rare glimpse of the South Asian immigrant experience in all its trials and excitements. As someone who studied in England at an age and time close to the fictional Rahul, I found much that felt deeply recognisable: the insufferable white academic who generously “simplifies” his name for the brown person (while not even thinking to ask how to pronounce yours), the sad, desperate search for ingredients to cook your own food, and the unexpected intimacies with other brown people.

Sometimes these connections with strangers feel stronger than with one’s known people, like Rahul and the man who sells Kashmiri noon chai on a London street. In a world governed by whiteness, brown skin can stretch to cover the bones of class and caste, religion and nation. The differences magnified in the sameness of Varmull can shrink to nothingness in London. That, too, is a revelation.

Published in Scroll, 30 Jan 2021.

What Paava Kadhaigal tells us about pride and honour

My Mirror column:

A new Tamil anthology film makes a flawed but genuine attempt to grapple with the tragic effects of our national preoccupation -- ‘family honour’.

At the very end of Love Panna Uttranum, Vignesh Shivan's segment in the newly-released Tamil anthology film Paava Kadhaigal (‘Sinful Tales’), there is a textual postscript that tells us what happened to the characters after the film ends. One of the lines reads: “Veerasimman managed to escape from the village and went to live with his daughter in Paris”. I scoffed at it mentally when I read it. Because Veerasimman is the terrible casteist father from whom his daughters must escape if they are to live anything resembling free lives.

 

Love Panna Uttranum has many problems, not the least of which is the director's inability to handle the vast tonal shifts he’s going for, leaving his audience swinging between high tragedy and low comedy. But as the compendium's four tales about 'honour' drew to a close, I realised that Shivan's postscript wasn't as inaccurate as I'd thought: It is South Asian fathers (and often mothers) who need to find a way to escape the vice-like grip of patriarchy and caste; from social chains that bind them so tightly that they can no longer feel the blood running in their veins -- literally. If they break the codes of caste, community and gender, it seems that their children are no longer their children.

 

As I watched Paava Kadhaigal's various sets of parents harden their hearts against their offspring -- and worse, try to control their lives -- I kept thinking of the old Kahlil Gibran poem from his bestselling work The Prophet. “Your children are not your children,” it goes. “They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you. And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.” The cool kids probably don't read Gibran any more, but it remains desperately resonant in the India of 2021, where our politicians know we'll eat out of their hands if they cater to our meanest, most controlling instincts -- especially with regard to our daughters. Ergo, the 'love jihad' bogey, recently given legal form.

 

This particular film happens to deal with Tamilian families. But parents across South Asia cling ferociously to the idea that their children are nothing but miniature versions of themselves; robotic agents put on earth only to carry out their bidding – or actually, the bidding of that ogre called society. Individual freedom can only seem an impossible dream when you've internalised the social order completely, and we see it in some of the most affecting films of recent years, from Nagraj Manjule's searing 2016 Marathi hit Sairat  to the ringing refrain that Pakistani-Norwegian filmmaker Iram Haq made the title of her harrowing 2017 film, What Will People Say?.

 

But treating these parents as embodiments of evil -- as at least two of the segments here do -- is not useful. It seems to me crucial to look at the moments which even these narratives leave open, moments at which we see their vulnerabilities and the horrific double binds they seem to find themselves in. Paava Kadhaigal's first narrative, Thangam, directed by Sudha Kongara, puts the harshest lines in a mother's mouth when she tells her son Sathaar (a wonderful Kalidas Jayaram), who identifies as a woman and is saving for a sex change operation, to die so that his sisters can live 'normal' lives, ie find suitable boys to marry. In the last segment, Vetri Maaran's Oor Iravu, too, we see the real and depressing effects on the rural siblings of a courageous young woman (Sai Pallavi) who has chosen to marry her Dalit partner and migrate to the city. “After you eloped, Dad pulled us out of college,” says one younger sister to her when they meet two years later. Another sister's husband apparently left her when he heard there was a half-Dalit baby joining the family he had clearly married into for its unblemished upper-caste status. The younger brother, meanwhile, is publicly mocked for his sister's elopement to the extent that he drops out of college.

 

The third segment, directed by Gautham Menon, in which a young girl is raped, deals with the bogey of honour in a different context -- that of actual sexual violence. But here, too, the most interesting thing attempted by the film is the mother, whose traditional ideas of sexual purity as something that women must safeguard “like a temple”, push her brain in frightening directions.

 

Menon's short film feels muddled, though, in its attempt at showing us all sorts of different reactions. The brother's idea of vengeance and the mother's of penitence and surrender to fate, contrast with the father's shame as a failed protector, before finally embracing his vulnerability enough to allow the daughter to move on.

 

The most frightening character in the film, brought to unforgettable life by the marvellous Prakash Raj, is the father who steels himself against his favourite daughter. “She chose you over all of us, and I carried on as if she'd never been born,” he tells her husband with a muted bitterness. And yet it is this same father's attachment to the daughter that leads to tragedy. As he says to Sai Pallavi's Sumathi as the film draws to its excruciating close, “If I could let you go, I would.”

We really need that Gibran poem.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Jan 2021

Drives with a View - III

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Continuing our series on films about cabbies, we look at why Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese's 1976 creation, Travis Bickle, seems so eerily prescient today

Halfway through Martin Scorsese's 1976 neo-noir classic Taxi Driver, we hear a campaign speech from a US Presidential candidate. “Walt Whitman, the great American poet, said, ‘I am the man, I suffered, I was there’,” intones the fictitious Charles Palantine. “No more will we fight the wars of the few through the hearts of the many....” Palantine's words, like most dialogue in Paul Schrader's much-mythified script, speak to -- as well as for -- the film's cabdriver hero, Robert De Niro in a career-making performance as the disturbed Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle.

Unlike Palantine and Bickle, Whitman was real. His poem 'Heroes' -- appropriately chosen by Schrader – was written in the voice of the soldier-as-everyman. “Agonies are one of my changes of garments./ I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person,/ My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe...”

Other than this, Schrader's script isn't what one might call poetic. Taxi Driver is a New York film through and through, capturing the city in all its brutal, wry, laconic glory. Unlike many taxi drivers previously discussed in this column series, a cab ride with Travis Bickle rarely involves hearing his voice. Much of Scorsese's masterful tension is based on shots of De Niro's drawn, suspicious face framed in the rearview mirror as he listens to his fellow citizens in the seat behind him – and judges them harshly.

As a cab driver, Bickle is the perfect witness to the world around him. But he does not wish to be a mere witness. He sees the city as “an open sewer full of filth and scum”, a mess that needs to be cleaned up. The post-60s and pre-Giuliani New York of the film is riding high on a wave of freely available sex and drugs, and our hero wishes someone would rein it in. He wants to save it from itself. In one memorable scene, the wannabe Presidential candidate rides Bickle's taxi. When Bickle recognises him, he tells Palantine the city's dirt/immorality needs to be “flushed down the toilet” by whoever comes to power.

“Let me tell you something,” Palantine says earlier, “I have learnt more about America from travelling in taxicabs than in all the limos in the country.” The surround-sound of the campaign lets the film unfold against the backdrop of Palantine's catch-all slogan ‘We are the people’. 

Watching Taxi Driver in 2020 feels strangely prescient: Bickle appears as an early representation of a figure that has come to dominate post-Trump American political discourse; the White everyman who thinks of the country as having gone to the dogs and himself as the morally-superior saviour. As Bickle becomes increasingly unhinged, his monologues in the mirror – bookended by the famous “You talking to me?” line – refer to himself as a hero in the making: “a man who would not take it any more... someone who stood up against the filth”.

Travis Bickle is, in fact, a precursor to much else in the American nightmare of the late 20th and early 21^st century – a mentally ill man gripped by perpetual insomnia; whose sense of anomie and aimlessness leads him to gun violence. If politicians don't seem to want to 'clean up' society, he'll do it himself. But the subtext of what Bickle thinks needs to be 'fixed' is both racist and male chauvinist (though not uncomplicatedly). Meeting a White passenger who wants to murder the wife cheating on him with a “nigger” is followed by Bickle acquiring weapons – from a preppie, White, gun dealer who chooses Bickle over “a jungle bunny in Harlem” because he only deals “high-quality goods to the right people”. Bickle first uses the gun on a Black man who's amateurishly robbing his local cornershop. In one of the film's grimmest scenes, the unfazed Italian shop-owner waves Bickle off and says he'll take care of it. He then takes an iron rod to the thief's body, shouting “The fifth motherfucker this year!”

Another remarkable subplot reveals Bickle's deeply-conflicted relationship with sex and women. The same man who complains about the city's filth – this is a Central New York full of sex shows and prostitution – takes his pristine, almost prissy, date to watch a faux-instructional Swedish porn film. When she proceeds to shut him out afterwards, his interior monologue becomes bizarre and incel-ish: “I realise now how much she's just like the others, cold and distant. And many people are like that. Women for sure. They're like a union.”

The other subplot about sex is Bickle's violent rescuing of Jodie Foster's underage sex worker – a plotline echoed in Schrader's self-directed film Hardcore (1979), in which a young girl runs away from a religious suburban family to become a porn actress, and goes back home in a strangely unconvincing last scene, like Foster's Iris.

What is truly disturbing about Taxi Driver's end, though, is that he is feted for murder. Violence, when committed against 'immoral' people, it seems, makes you a hero. That once-fictional battlefield seems eerily closer to today's reality.

 Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 Dec 2020.

In Vino Veritas -- II

My Mirror column:

In Sanal Kumar Sasidharan's An Off-Day Game (2015), a drunken day unmasks a society intoxicated with its own sense of power.

Four men gather for a day of drinking in Sanal Kumar Sasidharan's harrowing An Off-Day Game (Ozhivudivasathe Kali, 2015).

Last week's column on The Mosquito Philosophy was about what truths might emerge when a group of men get together to drink. This week, too, my subject is a film about an all-male drinking session – An Off-Day Game (Ozhivudivasathe Kali) directed by Sanal Kumar Sasidharan. Sasidharan is best known outside Kerala for his internationally award-winning film Sexy Durga (2017); An Off-Day Game won him the 2015 Kerala State Film Award for Best Film and is currently streaming on two platforms.

and is currently streaming on two platforms.

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/in-vino-veritas-ii/articleshow/79345533.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

The film is adapted from Unni R's Malayalam short story 'Holiday Fun', available in J Devika's wonderful English translation as part of the collection One Hell of a Lover (Westland 2019). Barely nine pages long, Unni's tale begins with a reference to Boccaccio's 14th century Italian classic in which seven women and three men gather in a remote villa to escape the plague-stricken city of Florence - an interesting aside in a pandemic year. “They were like refugees from the plague in The Decameron,” writes Unni. “Only, they were escaping the monotony of work, the four of them... gathered in Room No 70 of Nandavanam Lodge, that Sunday, as usual, around a bottle of liquor.”

Unlike Unni, though, Sasidharan does not launch straight into the action. Instead, as he would do two years later in Sexy Durga, he begins his film with a semi-documentary prelude: footage from a real-life by-election in Kerala, where we see red Communist flags challenged by a rising wave of saffron BJP ones. We also see a Kathakali dance performance as part of the election campaign: this is a state where art and politics are allowed to cross-fertilise each other. It is from the assembled crowd at a rally that the camera first picks out two of our protagonists, following them as they join the other two at a little bend in a stream: a picturesque spot for daytime drinking. Another man driving by is tempted to join them, and a plan is made for another drunken assignation on Election Day.

The electoral backdrop serves Sasidharan well, allowing the film to fit in both India's official dry day rules, that bar the sale of liquor on polling days, and the simultaneously ubiquitous unofficial fact that liquor changes hands during almost all Indian elections: as a bribe, or more categorically in exchange for votes. It also works beautifully as a way of working up to the conversations between his characters – and to the 'game' of the film's title, in which four players pick chits labelled 'King', “Minister', 'Police' and 'Thief', and the one who's picked 'Police' must then guess who the 'Thief' is.

But plenty happens before the game unfolds. Unni's story has an early paragraph laying out the quality of the men's weekends in Nandavanam Lodge: “The usual criticism of the government, the rant about bedroom squabbles, the description of the body of the young girl one brushed against in the street or on the bus...”. Among Sasidharan's achievements is the way he takes this bare-bones description and gives it flesh, adding dialogue, characters and subplots that make his film into the terrific, terrifying slow-burn watch that it is. There is no woman actually present in Unni's scenario, for instance -- but Geetha in An Off-Day Game is crucial. Right from the moment that the men arrive at the lodge, she is the cynosure of all eyes, and not in a good way. She tries her hardest to just do her job: preparing a meal for her boss's visitors. But being the sole woman in a remote location with an increasingly drunken group of men, as we will see, isn't quite conducive to just doing one's job.

The relationship of each character to their 'job' is, at a deeper level altogether, the subject of Sasidharan's film. Much before the 'game' plots each man into a 'professional' role, the film has begun the perspicacious process of observing how even within a circle of friends, every man is supremely conscious of social status – his own and that of the others. “The kind of places this Brahmin fellow digs out,” says one man as they approach the lodge. “He always howls when he sees the jungle,” says another. What may have felt like gentle ribbing turns darker and darker as the film proceeds, especially as everyone presses first the woman and then Dasa into unwanted tasks. “You need me to pluck a jackfruit and now kill a rooster,” says Dasa.

As befitting a film set in Kerala, politics is the matrix of all things – the idea of democracy, for instance, is the context for a sharp argument about the man-woman relationship, and an anecdotal history of Emergency for a discussion of the 'duties' of citizens: “the cops did cops' job, the scavengers did scavengers' job, the army men did army jobs...”. Caste, or its modern-day version, serves an authoritarian society perfectly: no-one is meant to challenge their socially-ordained roles.

Some of Sasidharan's long scenes are pure genius, and the long takes and the stunning forest soundscape create an atmosphere of menace that is unerring in both its sense of beauty and danger.

The 'game' may feel a little contrived, but the conversational fluidity the film achieves is astounding. Under the influence of alcohol, everything is laid bare. In vino veritas.

This is the second part of a two-part column. The first part is here.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Nov 2020.

 

Short of nothing

My Mirror column for Sun 8 Nov:

Among the hundred-odd films screening till tonight in the online edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival are a variety of accomplished shorts – Indian, foreign, fiction, documentary, animation.

Aditi Bhande's devastating Ghaziabad-set short film Did You Do It? traces one building's waste as it leaches into the surroundings

There are many exceptional films in this year's Dharamshala International Film Festival, but this column focuses on the shorts: films under 30 minutes. Some of the ones I really liked include:

1) Sudhamayee -- Megha Acharya's observational film is composed of family vignettes that may seem artless, but speak volumes. The film starts with a woman describing how she ended up becoming the primary caregiver for her father: her brother declared he was “scared of hospitals” and couldn't “bear to see those things.” “As if, we like seeing those tubes. We don't,” he voice trails off. There is a momentary lull in the conversation, as though the two women are absorbing these facts of life: the ugliness and pain of hospitals, but also the easily declared inability of so many men to perform the labour that surrounds illness and death. Or any domestic labour at all. As if on cue, a man emerges from the bedroom, retreating when he sees the women. The women, in turn, immediately rise with their plates - the man's entry is a sign that time for real conversation is over, and everyday labour must resume now. Again, later, when the couple discuss the woman's promotion sending her elsewhere, she knows she cannot. The man remains, as always, oblivious.

Sudarshan Suresh's brilliant 17-minute fiction is a chilling comment on who loses and who gains from the spectre of "love jihad"

 

2) Mizaru -- A young couple in a Mumbai park become a target for a group of unemployed men, but no-one comes to their aid. It is the sort of incident that is stiflingly familiar to any young person who has ever conducted a romance in India. By zoning in on it in film, Mizaru makes us question what we apparently don't in life: what have the couple done to deserve this treatment? Ah, they have displayed physical affection for each other. And since anything sexual in India is automatically shameful, they can be publicly humiliated by a bunch of louts. As self-appointed guardians of Hindu morality, the men feel entitled to bully them in every possible way. We live in a country in which the villains are confident that their actions will find support from society (the members of a laughter club in the park) and the state (the cops who show up and seem quite happy to have been delivered up some easy victims). Shot in one remarkable fluid take, Sudarshan Suresh's 17 min fiction is a searing indictment of everything that is wrong with India.

3) Did You Do It? -- This disturbing, largely dialogue-less film manages to be somehow programmatic and a mood piece. It begins with a characteristically North Indian dust-storm. The strange menacing half-light, the distant flocks of birds, the persistent slapping sound of the rain may have no diegetic purpose, but the aandhi is dark, slow and harrowing, just like the journey the film sets out to trace: a single day's worth of garbage emerging from an apartment complex in Ghaziabad and leaching inexorably back into our water, earth, air.

Aditi Bhande's Did You Do It? forces us to look at the processes we Indians so expertly turn away from in reality: the unsegregated dumping of garbage, the rising mountains of plastic, the barefoot young workers who do the irreplaceable work of clearing our surroundings, the stinking lorries, the overflowing landfills, and the ridiculous vision of middle class citizens in denial, marching against the municipality. Winner of the Best Editing award for Student Documentary at the Dadasaheb Phalke Film Festival 2020, Bhande is remarkably adept at delivering the facts as a quiet punch to the gut. “The water here has high levels of iron, nitrate, fluoride and aluminium,” reads a subtitle, going on to enumerate the diseases caused by such minerals in water, the depleting ground water levels, the pumping of semi-treated water back into the Hindon river. On screen, water continues to flow down the drain.

Vividly shot, with superb sound, the film constantly unravels our increasingly delusional expectations from nature and the natural. The deceptively attractive rushing sound of water takes us not a river but to the swirling pool of the sewage plant; the green piles of bhindi look poisonously greener in the unearthly tubelit glow of the street market. This film made me restart my lapsed composting bin. It might be the wake-up call you need, too.

Other shorts at DIFF that deserve more than a mention: Stray Dogs Come Out at Night, in which we meet a Pakistani sex worker; Irani Bag, a clever 8-minute essay on the purpose women's bags serve in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema; Anonymous, which movingly maps the stark realities of the Indian construction site; and the stunningly animated dystopia of Wade, in which a group of human scavengers navigate a flooded future Kolkata.

If you think an immersive film necessarily means an hour and half of plotted drama, try these out.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Nov 2020.

Cut to the chase

My Mirror column:

A new crop of Indian short films brims with droll humour, sharp ideas and unusual juxtapositions

A young man wants a Western-style commode in Devvrat Mishra's short film Number Two

Leisure can sometimes make one lazy. When one has the luxury of time, utilising it to the fullest can be a challenge. What’s true of life is also true of film. Especially in a film culture as verbose as ours, where the narrative dictum of ‘show, don’t tell’ is more frequently observed in its breach, the tautness of a short film feels like a welcome change. The form – defined by the Academy Awards as “an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all credits” – imposes a certain economy on the storytelling, while also being more playful with form. Indian short films, long starved of distribution channels, are beginning to find place on OTT platforms like MUBI India and MovieSaints, apart from YouTube.

Reflecting the state of the country, the current crop of shorts ranges in tenor from parodic takedown to darkly dramatic. The Wolf of Chawl Street (2017), written and directed by Pranav Bhasin, takes the form of a faux-documentary about a Banksy-inspired Indian street artist called Luv, who claims responsibility for the countrywide declarations of modern love on our ancient and medieval monuments. By scrawling or spray-painting “Rohan Luvz Lolita”(or innumerable other couples’ names) on a wall of the Red Fort, the ‘artist’ not only immortalises those lovers, for a fee, but also manages to include his takhallus: “Luvz”. Apart from sending up a certain kind of rags to riches slumdog narrative (think Gully Boy), the film has a kind of droll humour that works more than scathing criticism: the ‘interview’ with Luvz’s mother, for instance, where she says she was worried about him because he just spent time drawing, ticking none of the recognisable markers of dysfunctional male adulthood: “Woh sharaab bhi nahi peeta thha, toh uski shaadi kaise karne ka?”

Devvrat Mishra’s Number Two, also about a directionless young man who isn’t well-off, couldn’t be more different in tone. Mishra’s camera does not so much follow the film’s teenaged protagonist as let him show us his Lucknow – a city of often garbage-strewn streets, faded pillars and peeling posters, where he goes to school in his faded blue uniform, comes back and irons clothes, which he then delivers to people’s homes. This is a city still slow enough to make a bicycle ride seem fast, with a night dark enough for glowing ice cream carts to seem like islands of imagination. Ritik, awkward adolescent of the toothbrush moustache and unrequited crushes, is quietly besotted with a girl he has never addressed in words, not even when she stands across the ice cream cart from him. His laborious writing of a letter to her – in English – seems of a piece with his desire for the broken WC someone has left outside: the unfulfillable promise of posh modernity. The West, for so many Indians, is a career: a hard one.

Shazia Iqbal’s wonderfully crafted 2018 short Bebaak, award-winner at MIFF, examines westernisation from a different vantage point. A sharp young architecture student called Fatin (Sara Hashmi) finds herself battling her instincts when faced with a conservative cleric (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) whose misogyny comes clothed – literally – in the language of religion. The film’s most haunting moment is not in the battle of nerves between the two. It is the two little madarsa girls who speak in the same breath of how women must wear the hijab to avoid being possessed by djinns – and of their own giggly desire to become English-medium because “English wale scarf nahi pehente”.

Even when not announcing their politics upfront, Indian short filmmakers seem to be responding with more immediacy to the country than most feature filmmakers are. Shubhashish Bhutiani’s Kush (2013), which won Best Short in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival, points to the present by looking back to the day of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984. A female teacher must make sure that her class gets home safe from a school trip – but one little boy on her bus is Sikh. In an instant, the harmless child becomes a target for the majoritarian mob; for grown men, agents of ‘the law’, go from being protectors to hunters looking for prey. Such a story offers great scope for drama, or even surreal excess – think of Dibakar Banerjee’s segment in a recent ensemble of shorts, Ghost Stories, where the zombie genre allows us to perceive another cop at the head of a newly cannibalistic world – but Bhutiani keeps things simple.

Necrophagy of another sort is at the centre of Prasanth Vijay’s 2013 short Amguleechaalitham (Manipulated by Fingers), in which two young men find themselves addicted to the consumption of a rather bizarre delicacy, one that demands greater and greater physical sacrifice. It is a strange, strange film, and yet unpretentious enough in style to make you stay and wonder: does desire feed on us rather than we on it?

Abhiroop Basu's 11-minute film Meal takes cinematic tension to its limits

The last of the shorts I want to mention here is also about eating: Abhirup Basu’s multiple award-winning Meal, which came out in February 2020 and runs a harrowing 11 minutes without dialogue. Spatially, Meal is a perfectly designed film. Its four characters occupy four rooms, with two adjacent spaces often framed at the same time, a real-life split screen. But there’s no internal symmetry: things are awry, and how. The juxtapositions are deeply unsettling: the family sitting down to eat at a Rexine-covered table on the left, a filthy washroom to the right. Basu strews the screen with clues – a pregnant belly, a bruised face, a bloody gauze bandage, a hissing pressure cooker, a broken clock, a torn sticker – but leaves us to connect the dots how we will. The smaller the canvas, it seems, the sharper the etching.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Sep 2020.

Home viewing in times of quarantine

My Mirror column:

Everything I watch these days seems to be speaking to the current moment. One theme that jumps out at me, film upon film, is our relationship to the idea of home

It’s the third week of lockdown in India, and quarantine is having an odd effect on my film viewing. I don't know if it’s me, or the universe conspiring in some strange serendipity, but almost everything I watch these days seems to be speaking to the current moment. One theme that jumps out at me, film upon film, is our relationship to the idea of home. Home is a place where you feel safe – until you don’t. The other day, on a popular streaming platform, I stumbled upon Darren Aronofsky’s much-discussed (and frequently dissed) Mother! (stylised as mother!), a film I had missed when it came out in 2017. In the talky aftermath of the film’s release, Aronofsky went to some lengths to ‘explain’ his spooky, eventually grisly film as a Biblical allegory for the rape and torment of ‘Mother Earth’ by ‘God’, while other characters stand in for Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel.

I have to confess that the Judaeo-Christian analyses baffled me, because I found Mother! entirely intelligible (all right, not entirely!) as a film about domesticity and its dangers. Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence play a couple living in a large and glorious old house. He spends all his time as writers often do, failing to write, while she cooks and cleans and continues the laborious process of restoring the unfinished house. Lawrence is an unbelievable combination of picture-perfect and extremely hands-on: her flowing hair piled into an artfully messy bun as she mixes new shades of wall paint, or conjures up meals that her husband pronounces “perfect” while making polite noises about how she didn’t have to make so many things. The dynamic between them is strained; her obsession with a private paradise is clearly not sparking his creativity. The more she tries to create the perfect space in which the two of them can live happily ever after, the more avidly he tries to invite the outside world in.

The first to arrive is a man who claims to be a great fan of the man’s previous book. Then his wife, his squabbling sons, and then more and more strangers arrive, until the house is overrun. As the ‘guests’ go from admiring and raucous to irresponsible and downright dangerous, the film walks a brilliant tightrope between possible ways in which we might see this. Is the woman overly anxious, closed off and selfish and the man generous, open, free-flowing? Or is he the selfish one, and she the victim? A pandemic that has us all panicking at the idea of strangers in our homes seemed to me to throw Mother! into a whole new light.

Then the night before last, on another streaming platform, I watched a Japanese film called Domains, directed by Natsuka Kusano. The 2019 film is a marvellous formal experiment that likely isn’t for everyone. A mild-mannered policeman reads out the confession of a woman called Aki who has drowned her old friend’s little daughter. From there, we move on to a series of scenes in which three actors – playing the woman, her friend and her friend’s husband – repeatedly rehearse the lines for what might be the film. Except, of course, this is the film.

For some two and a half hours, we almost never leave the bare room in which the actors sit. When we do, what we see is a near-empty city: roads almost free of traffic, a strangely quiet metro.

A more uncanny resonance with our time comes from the characters’ preoccupation with creating a space in which they feel safe. “Nodoka seemed stifled to maintain the comfort of the house. Naoto, on the other hand, treasured his home so much that he seemed to be keeping everyone out except his family,” remembers Aki. The ‘domain' created by the couple and their daughter is, for Aki, a rival to the one she shared with Nodoka in childhood, a magical “kingdom of chairs and sheets” that only the two of them could enter.

The husband, Naoto, on the other hand, feels visibly threatened by Aki’s being so at home with his wife. When he tells Aki to stop coming over because his daughter has caught a fever in her excitement, Aki responds angrily: “So you think I'm some kind of virus, don’t you?”

Naoto regulates everything, from his wife’s smoking to the humidity and temperature of the house. “I do want to feel safe. I need to protect my family,” he says peevishly. And yet, safe is exactly what they are not in the end. Control can backfire, just as much as openness.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 12 Apr 2020

Do weep for Salim the lame

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro won two National Awards in 1989. Thirty years later, its fierce indictment of the working class Muslim experience emerges as chillingly prescient -- right down to the police.

There are many things in Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro that would have been recognizable to the mainstream Hindi film audience in 1989. There's the family thrown upon difficult times when the father loses his long-time job; the mother who takes on small-time tailoring work to augment the household income; the sweet-faced, dearly beloved younger sister who is 'of marriageable age'; the hero's turn to illegality placing him in conflict with his law-abiding father – as well as the remembered, almost hallowed figure of his elder brother. Also, as in so many commercial films, the hero is the leader of a trio, with him and his bumchums going everywhere together; and his love interest is a tawaif at the nearby brothel.

But Saeed Mirza's award-winning film – it won National Awards for Best Film and Best Cinematography in 1989– also contains a great deal that would have felt unfamiliar to Hindi film watchers. Or at least unfamiliar on screen, though perhaps deeply familiar from life. For instance, though the film doesn't actually take us into the mills of Bombay, it evokes the socio-economic world that existed around them, and the stark instability of Indian working class life in the late '80s. Salim's father has lost his job after decades of service, and is sitting at home, unable to find another. His son Javed, an electrician at a factory, is dead; killed in a tragic labour accident. Salim, the less academically inclined son, dropped out of school early on, because the family didn't have enough money to educate both sons. There is no mention of their younger sister Anis having been sent to school at all – though her suitor Aslam raises local hackles by pushing for the education of girls from the community.

The dialogue between Salim and Aslam is, in many ways, at the core of the tale Mirza wants to tell about poor urban Muslims. Salim and his mates, who are essentially all illiterate, have fallen early into a life of small-time crime: collecting hafta from local tailors and shopkeepers, conducting small and occasionally larger thefts, and acting as henchmen for local big men. Their fantasies of school and college are just that, fantasies -- as made memorable in a scene where Peera and Ahmad (played by theatre director Makarand Deshpande and filmmaker Ashutosh Gowarikar) perform a hilarious little spontaneous skit about how they imagine college girls and boys behave with each other.

Meanwhile the studious Aslam cannot find a job except as a poorly paid proofreader, because his MA was in Urdu literature. As he says, “Urdu zabaan ka istemaal hi kucch kam ho gaya hai.” Salim, appalled at his salary, initially rejects Aslam as a husband for his sister. His own ambitions are much grander: he and his friends dream of becoming as rich and well-connected as the local toughs who have risen to run illegal empires. As we watch Salim guiltily leave Aslam's book-filled room, we see little children unloading boxes. In fact Mirza's film, which thanks “the residents of Dongri, Do Tanki, Nagpada and Bachoo-Ki-Wadi”, is filled with working children in the background.

But it's Aslam's defense of Muslim girls' education that brings local men angrily to his doorstep. Salim shoos them away, but then asks Aslam why he's going against their religion. The ensuing conversation is a powerful one. Through Aslam, Saeed Mirza indicts Muslims for letting fear and ignorance keep them in a vicious cycle, while using Salim's experience to underline the poor urban Muslim's harsh experience of life in post-independence India: “Aa ke dekho, kaise log Musalman log ko nafrat karte hain! Kachra samajhte unko. Daraate hain, hamesha khallaas karne ka baat karte hain.”

Mirza's perspective on the causes of Hindu-Muslim violence, from Partition to the Bhiwandi riots that form the backdrop to the film, is simple -- and tragically, still entirely valid. “Why did this Partition stuff happen?” asks Salim. “So that powerful people on both sides could have a hissa to rule over,” responds Aslam. Later, a filmmaker who shows up in the area to screen his documentary on the Bhiwandi riots makes the distraction argument -- that high communal feeling and the threat of violence only serve to keep people from asking why they don't have education, food, shelter.

Shockingly, thirty years after Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro, we have elected a government that has made such deliberate distraction their full-time occupation. But only one side is being successfully distracted. One hopes they will open their eyes, before it is too late.

Mirza's film does not depict police brutality, but it doesn't shy away from referencing the systemic communalisation of the system. Early on, we see a police officer on the phone. “Yes, it's a Muslim area, but we'll control it, sir,” he says easily. “Maar-maar ke khaal kheench lenge. They only understand the language of the stick. And if there is a problem, we'll impose Section 144.” A little later, we see another cop catch hold of Salim and his friends, heading home late, while Section 144 is officially still imposed in their area. “Are you planning a riot?” says the cop. “Nahi sahib. Aap hain na,” he responds, almost bantering. In December 2019, after all that has happened in Jamia, Aligarh, Lucknow and Mangalore – and possibly many other places whose news is still to reach us – it is impossible to summon up a laugh.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Dec 2019.

Poetry in stealth mode

My Mirror column:

Fifty years after its release, Saat Hindustani feels both like a time capsule and a swinging pendulum: showing what has changed forever, and what we seem doomed to repeat. 

(The second of a two-part column.)

Last Sunday, a week after Amitabh Bachchan’s 77^th birthday, I wrote about his first film as an actor, Saat Hindustani, and how he landed that role. KA Abbas, who wrote and directed his debut, has written of how the tall, thin Amitabh matched his personal imagination of the character, who was modelled on an old Aligarh mate of his.

But watching the film, one has a sense that there was more to the casting. As the real-life son of a poet, Amitabh had cultivated the art of recitation. He was likely better equipped to play one than most debutante actors. His father Harivansh Rai Bachchan was a highly-regarded Hindi poet from Allahabad. Saat Hindustani's fictional Anwar Ali was an Urdu poet from a little further east: Ranchi, a city then in Bihar and now in Jharkhand.

The idea of poetry is crucial to the film. Syeda Hameed, co-editor of Abbas’s voluminous writings, has pointed to his abiding relationships with poets, and the importance of lyrics in his films. “The best poets of the 1960s and ’70s wrote for Abbas’s films, and that too for very little money: Ali Sardar Jafri, Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri and Prem Dhawan, to name a few,” Hameed writes. The lyrics of Saat Hindustani were by Kaifi Azmi, and it was Azmi’s words that Amitabh spoke on screen as the sensual, lanky Anwar Ali.

Quite early in the narrative, six of the seven Hindustanis board a train headed to Goa to provide secret support to the Goan freedom struggle. A young and purposeful Amitabh shuts the compartment window as instructed, then turns to his companions with a marvellous air of having something to say, and declaims:

“Aandhi aye ya toofaan koi gham nahi,

Hai abhi aakhiri imtehan saathiyon.

Ek taraf maut hai, ek taraf zindagi,

Beech se le chalo kaarwaan saathiyon.”

A half-smile flutters at the corner of his lips, and he looks pleased as punch. It was at that moment that I realised that although this was an ensemble cast, Amitabh was as close to being the film’s hero as possible. But what an unusual hero he was. The youngest and tallest of the assembled men – but also the one least capable of handling a gun, the one who hopes there will be no killing involved, who goes into shock when the security of the mission demands that a spy actually be eliminated. Weeping, Anwar actually has to be held back and comforted by the kindly Jogender (played, in Abbas’s anti-stereotype casting scheme, by Utpal Dutt). Traditional masculinity dies a quick death.

There are times in Saat Hindustani when the nazaakat of the North Indian gentleman-poet is served up for mockery – such as the laughter when Amitabh turns to the group and complains that the truck driver who has just dropped them off on the Goa border is “namakool” because he has just turned around and driven off “without even saying khuda hafiz”.

But later, captured by the Portuguese, Anwar is tortured and taunted by a faintly comic interrogator who has been informed of the young fellow’s diary: “Achha toh tum poet hai, kya kehta hai use, shaayar?” Hands and legs tied, Amitabh narrows his eyes disdainfully. “Hamare mulk mein har shaks shaayar hai.”

Abbas knew, though, that that mulk of poets, of possible empathetic connections across communities, was already threatened. In one scene set in the late 1960s present, an older Anwar Ali hears his house has been burnt down by anti-Urdu fanatics. Like his creator KA Abbas, who could simultaneously laugh at “jaw-breaking” Hindi and see it as a language a Tamilian Dalit might use as a way of entering the nation, the optimistic Anwar Ali immediately wants to write to his old comrade-in-arms, the Hindi campaigner Sharma. But his hope for civility is quickly dashed when his wife points him to a virulently anti-Muslim editorial by Sharma, directing all Urdu speakers to Pakistan.

In his more considered moments, Abbas presents an unusually calibrated idea of what constitutes leadership – and what courage might mean. The Gandhian model of non-violent resistance, satyagrah, is of course at the film’s muddled heart. But there’s more here than non-violence. For one, there is a clarity of goals, over and above a declared ideological arsenal of means: one man can be murdered if it means saving the lives of seven. For another, neither action nor leadership is to be trumpeted. No one is appointed to a position of permanent captaincy; members of the team are its “commanders” turn by turn. 

And crucially, what has to be done is done, preferably without announcement. When the selected men set out from the satyagrah camp, their departure is not flagged, they simply melt away. What will everyone at camp think of us, they ask their trainer. “That you are cowards who have run away,” he responds. "But the mission will succeed."

In that world, it was preferable to be thought of as a coward and succeed, than proclaim one’s heroism from the rooftops and fail. The past truly was another country.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 Oct 2019.

 

With clipped wings

My Mirror column:

A damaged young woman discovers her strengths in the recent Malayalam film Uyare (Rise).

The new Malayalam film Uyare begins at a college fest somewhere in Kerala. Four or five young women in matching long skirts and kurtis are dancing on stage with unbridled enthusiasm. One in particular catches the eye, her enjoyment is infectious. A young man looks pointedly in her direction, but refuses to catch her eye. Instead he turns from her to the largely male college-going audience, some of whom are taking phone videos of the performance. Lip curled in disdain, he walks out. When she comes out to meet him afterwards, he has nothing to say about her performance, or the prize her group has just won. All he can get out is: “Weren’t you supposed to be wearing something else? Why didn’t you tell me when it changed?”

The boyfriend who can take no pleasure in his girlfriend’s dancing because he is too busy imagining the pleasure other men might derive from it is, unsurprisingly, also the boyfriend who when told she has qualified for pilot training in Mumbai, can only speculate about the girls’ and boys’ hostels being on the same floor at the academy – and the prevalence of late-night parties.

Too many women in India, sadly, will recognise men they know in the suspicious, sour-faced Govind – brothers, fathers, uncles, but also boyfriends and husbands. What makes the film’s internal landscape so effective is its baseline assumption: that the controlling, insecure lover is so common a figure as to be normalised. It doesn’t take long for Pallavi’s friends at the academy to cotton on to the power dynamic of the relationship: a female friend scrolling through Pallavi’s photographs asks if she’s sent Govind the one with a male instructor’s arm around her. “All that power you feel in the sky nosedives when it comes to Govind,” she says to Pallavi – but the acuteness of the observation is somehow blunted into a joke.

Pallavi’s father, too, wonders what she sees in him. But she convinces him otherwise with the story of the adolescent origins of their relationship, when Govind rescued her 14-year-old self from public humiliation. The fact that he was then her school senior seems crucial to his ‘niceness’: he could automatically assume a superior, guiding role. That dynamic is one we have all encountered before, most recently in the much-discussed Kabir Singh, where Kabir’s relationship with his medical college junior Preeti is grounded in a very similar experience of his ‘choosing’ her as the recipient of his attentions.

Unlike Kabir in Kabir Singh, though, Govind is not heroic, or even good at what he does. By making him a loser who can’t find a decent job, Uyare turns audiences against him, while Pallavi, following her dreams, has the author-backed role. Her ambitiousness and positivity are a glaring contrast to his unrelenting pessimism: “No miracles happened,” he says dourly when she asks him how a job interview went. Pallavi’s successes and joys are things that threaten Govind. It seems understandable when she begins to keep her real life from him – and one wants to applaud when she finally speaks up – and wants out. (Spoilers ahead.) Of course, Govind will not give her her freedom. When his suicide threats fail to elicit a reaction, he decides to wound her rather than himself.

Both before and after the acid attack, Manu Ashokan keeps the directorial focus on his aspiring pilot heroine (Parvathy Thiruvothu). But the film is also conscious of the skewed gender dynamics of its Indian middle class universe, from boardroom to courtroom: the ‘humour’ lined with casual sexism, the deeply non-egalitarian assumptions about men and women. The women’s toilet in the pilot-training academy is labelled “Bla bla bla ba bla bla” – in contrast to the men’s toilet’s strong and silent “Bla”. A visitor to the academy, confronted by a pretty woman on the reception committee, assumes she is not a pilot-in-training but a PR woman – and further, that he is free to criticise her outfit for being “cheap”. The judge in the acid attack case is less moved by Pallavi’s present than Govind’s potential future – especially once he offers to marry her. “Why would he offer to marry her if he had committed this crime?” asks Govind's lawyer. In a discursive variation of something notoriously frequent in rape trials, the accused – merely because he is a man – is still imagined as being able to take the survivor “back under his wing” – merely because she is a woman.

The film’s resolution of Pallavi’s pilot dreams – scotched because her vision no longer holds up to the medical standards required – is to make her an air hostess. There’s something fascinating and full-frontal about the acid attack victim claiming a job traditionally defined by physical attractiveness. It doesn’t come easy. When spoilt brat airline  owner Vishal suggests a new role, an angry Pallavi responds with her air hostess ambition, yelling: “You should think twice about making promises to people who lack beauty!” Her anger spurs him to actually examine his thoughtless offer. In some ways, Vishal’s capacity for change is also a reflection of Pallavi’s power.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Oct 2019.

No connection home

(This was my Mirror column on 11 August 2019, six days after the Indian government announced the abrogation of Article 370, stripped Jammu and Kashmir of statehood, and bifurcated the region into two Union Territories -- while simultaneously plunging it into a total communications shutdown that continues indefinitely.)

The innocent Kashmiri child saved from a vengeful, violent future may still work for a Hindi film audience. But is it a delusional hope?

In Aijaaz Khan's Hamid, a CRPF soldier finds himself in an ongoing conversation with a little Kashmiri boy. One day, Hamid calls from outside when Abhay is on his way to disperse an ongoing protest. “I hope you're not with the stone-pelters! Go home!” Abhay yells into the phone. “I don't throw stones,” says Hamid. “Abbu used to say, you throw stones, they will shoot. And stones can't compete with bullets.” “Your Abbu made perfect sense,” the soldier agrees approvingly. “And Abbu also said, only Allah has the right to take away life, no one else,” the child patters on. “Tell me, have you ever taken a life?” The soldier's pleased expression crumbles.

Hamid, which won the National Award for Best Urdu Film last week (and can be streamed online), is built on a one-line premise: when the seven-year-old Hamid connects to Abhay, he thinks he's on the phone with Allah. Why does Hamid so badly want to speak to Allah? To urge him to send back his father, who disappeared a year ago -- and who he has been told is now with Allah.

The film uses the cuteness of its child protagonist in manipulative ways, draws out its one-line premise to excess, and often feels stilted in its performances. But in scenes like the one I described above, it opens up the possibility of conversation. The innocence of the child asking the question forces the adult to take a moment to confront his guilt – instead of responding, as Abhay does the rest of the time, with a torrent of thoughtless anger. In a time when all questions asked by Kashmiris seem only to elicit taunting counter-questions, when both grief and grievance is sought to be angrily bulldozed into compliance, such a cinematic moment is of great value.

The child protagonist is not a new device through which to view a conflict zone, and the effects do not need to be childish or cloying. Think of the marvellous clear-eyedness of Andrei Tarkovsky 1962 classic Ivan's Childhood, of Ziad Doueiri's atmospheric debut West Beirut (1999), Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi's moving Turtles Can Fly (2004) or Yosef Baraki's underwatched Kabul-set film Mina Walking (2015). But Indian cinema hasn't really got there yet, certainly not with regard to Kashmir.

The best we seem to manage is the child poised on the precipice of losing his innocence – which in the case of Kashmir, seems to invariably involve losing him to a violent movement for Azadi. In 2008, Santhosh Sivan directed a film called Tahaan, also named for its child protagonist, and when I went back to watch it this week (it is also available online), I was amazed by how much it shared with Hamid. Sivan's film, like Khan's, centres on a young boy with a missing father, and a grieving mother who hasn't yet given up, but whose finances and hopes are fast dwindling. Unlike in Hamid, the object of Tahaan's cinematic quest isn't directly his father, the 8-year-old spends the film trying to get back his donkey from a merchant (played, interestingly, by Anupam Kher). But like Hamid, Tahaan contains scenes in which the protagonist's mother makes a harrowing journey to identify what might be her husband's corpse, and later, joins a silent assembly of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (the APDP is a real UN-backed human rights organisation founded by Praveena Ahangar).

Sivan's English title for Tahaan was The Child With a Grenade, and his child actor spends a lot of the film being roped into transporting -- and almost throwing -- a bomb. There was a deep disingenuousness to that film, especially the way it staves off the threat of violence to produce an immediate, miraculous justice. Tahaan's delusional ending made it a political travesty in the name of a fable.

Ten years later, Hamid and his mother have given up hope of his father's return. But the film's depiction of their calm acceptance of this terrible injustice may be another sort of delusion.

Talha Arshad Reshi, who plays Hamid, has won the National Award for Best Child Artiste (along with three others). But the total communication shutdown since Monday's announcement of revocation of Article 370 and bifurcation of J&K has meant that Aijaz Khan has been unable to share the news of the awards with Reshi.

In July 2016, during one of the worst shutdowns (after Burhan Wani's death), a ScoopWhoop reporter asked six children in Kashmir what they thought of when they thought of India. 

“India is police who beats boys. I hate India,” said one. “India is a cunning country. They oppress us. If it would have been our own country they wouldn’t have killed so many people. We don’t like to be with India,” said another. “India is tyrant. India kills people and disappears them. I want free Kashmir. I don’t want to be with India or with Pakistan. I am afraid to go out. Policemen can do anything to me. I can’t trust them. They can kill me. I rarely study. And I can’t play outside. Who should I play with? The Indian army men on the street?” said a third.

No Hamid is likely to talk to Abhay. Even if his phone connects again.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 11 Aug 2019.