Far from the feudal

My Mirror column (14 Jun 2020):

Has Indian cinema gained or lost something as filmmakers become increasingly distanced from the village?

Recently, while on a video call with a novelist friend, I mentioned writing a series of columns on Indian films about the migrant experience, including Muzaffar Ali's Gaman (1978), in which Farooque Shaikh played a young man who has to leave his Uttar Pradesh village to become a taxi driver in what was then Bombay. “Gaman is a good film,” conceded my friend, a less forgiving film viewer than me. “But it presented the local raja as this very nice man, and then I realized the filmmaker is talking about himself!” I said, well, it was the 1970s, so more likely a fictionalisation of the filmmaker's father – one degree of separation. And my friend and I laughed.

But it is indeed true that the village in which the film is shot was (and was shown to be) Kotwara, District Kheri, UP – the place that Muzaffar Ali's ancestors have ruled for generations. So when Farooque Shaikh's on-screen mother tells her on-screen daughter-in-law Smita Patil that “Raja Sahab vilayat jaane se pehle gale lagaaein aur kahein, 'Aap mere bade bhai hain',” that expansive gesture of personalised generosity was how the film chose to characterise the area's ruling feudal family – the family to which the filmmaker himself belonged. The straitened circumstances of the Farooque Shaikh character, meanwhile, were blamed on an upper caste landlord who had established himself as a middleman.

Why does any of this matter? Well, it matters because Gaman is one of the rare films made in India to deal sensitively with the pressures of migration; to depict the way large swathes of rural India have become unsustainable for their inhabitants, pushing people out into our cities, where they must then live depleted lives in crowded, often forcibly unsanitary circumstances, away from loved ones – until that life, too, is made unsustainable by an unprecedented state-created crisis like the Covid-19 lockdown. Beginning with an ethnographic eye – the women and children of the village, sitting silent and watchful, overlaid with Hira Devi Mishra's unforgettable rendition of Ras Ke Bhare Tore Nain, or a little later, what looks like wonderful documentary footage of the local Muharram celebrations, Gaman used a more mainstream fictional narrative – including some very fine songs -- to get its viewers to feel for the poor rural migrant.

So it seemed important that Gaman's creator came from the top of that rural hierarchy. It was Muzaffar Ali's feudal background that actually connected him with the village – and later took him back there to found a designer clothing line that employs local artisans. Ali was never going to be a poor villager, but he had clearly met several, and was able to generate the creative compassion needed to tell their story. Once I started to think about it, all the films I'd been writing about these past few weeks felt like they needed to be seen again through the lens – pardon the pun -- of their creators.

Three and a half decades before Gaman, the migrant's story had been told in Bimal Roy's classic Do Bigha Zamin, which drew on a Tagore poem about a dispossessed peasant to create a film with a strongly socialist IPTA-inspired worldview, including a joyful immersion in India's folk traditions of music and dance. The callous zamindar who drives Do Bigha Zamin's peasant protagonist Shambhu to ruin was, of course, among many such villainous depictions of the time, including Pran as the lecherous, drunken Ugranarayan in Roy's own beautifully rendered supernatural romance, Madhumati. Was it of consequence that Bimal Roy came from a landowning family in Suapur, in former East Bengal? Was Ugranarayan informed, as Roy's daughter Rinki Roy Bhattacharya has suggested, by Roy's real-life uncle Jogeshchandra, whose indolent feudal lifestyle the lifelong teetotaller Roy clearly wished to keep at bay?

Such biographical questions may seem altogether too specific, and given our paucity of personal archives, necessarily speculative. But what I'm trying to get at is the fact that there was, in both theses cases, a connection with the village that allowed for the rural character to emerge on screen. Balraj Sahni, who played the peasant-turned-rickshawalla in DBZ, was so aware of his being urban that he spent a lot of time with a rickshawala who was a migrant. But when one actually reads about Sahni's life -- for instance, the Communist leader PC Joshi describing how Sahni's parents insisted on keeping a buffalo for fresh milk in their house in 1950s Bombay -- one realises that the connections between the urban and the rural in that India were still stronger than we can dream of.

In a book of interviews called Rendezvous With Hindi Cinema (2019), the director Dibakar Banerjee makes the point sharply. “Earlier, there was some kind of a connection. It's a paradox, that connect was feudalism. Feudal families would send their children to study in colleges in Bombay or Delhi. But they'd go back for vacation and see the real, poor, feudal India, where they would be the lords,” he says, speculating for instance about the powerfully anti-feudal films of Shyam Benegal. “But the present generation of filmmakers is even more cut off from rural India, poor India,” Banerjee says.

It is hard to disagree with the fact that even the alternative, non-Bollywood cinema of the last decade is almost entirely urban. There are rare exceptions, but they prove the rule, like a Peepli Live (2010), where the village's desperation for visibility is tied to its appearance on screen -- but as the locale for a media circus. For a more recent film set entirely in a North Indian village, I can only think of Gamak Ghar – which proves the point, too, because it is the young urban filmmaker memorialising the village his parents left behind. Our films may be further from the feudal than they once were, but it looks like they are also further from the rural.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 Jun 2020.

The ghosts among us

My Mumbai Mirror column:

A new anthology film about the supernatural is a mixed bag, but it does try to point Hindi film horror in consciously critical directions.

A still from Dibakar Banerjee's segment in the new anthology film Ghost Stories.

After first coming together to pay homage to the cinema in Bombay Talkies (2013), and the self-explanatorily titled Lust Stories (2018), the once-unlikely foursome of Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee and Karan Johar are back with a new anthology film: Ghost Stories.

The films vary widely, not just in setting and tone, but in quality. Anurag Kashyap's contribution, starring an awkwardly gangly sari-clad Sobhita Dhulipala as a woman who is both an expectant mother and a surrogate maternal figure to her little nephew, didn't work for me at all (spoilers ahead) despite the effectiveness of the scowling child. The possibility of an uncanny relationship between external visual depictions and real-life transformations – think everything from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray to MR James 1904 classic ghost story 'The Mezzotint' – has always fascinated me, and it is of course also the basis of certain long-held ideas of magic, such as voodoo. So Kashyap's use of the child's drawing, his repeated scratching-out, and his apparently innate sense of his own power, was for me the most gripping part of the story. But the film stirs in all sorts of other elements – nightmares, superstitions, silent men, shouting mothers, half-human states, crows' eggs, and a whole room full of creepy dolls. If all these ingredients were meant to be a recipe for chills, the dilution leaves us baffled and lukewarm.

Zoya Akhtar's film wins big by casting the brilliant Surekha Sikri as a bedridden old lady attended on by a lackadaisical young replacement nurse (Jahnvi Kapoor). As always with Akhtar's films (including her segment about a maid and her master in Lust Stories), there is an attentiveness to space: the multiple empty rooms that the youthful Sameera dashes through with a token agarbatti, the echoing sound of children's laughter from the stairwell when she answers the doorbell to find no-one there. It's a talent particularly useful in crafting fear, if Akhtar were interested. But she isn't, not really.

What she seems keen on is a juxtaposition of youth and age, sharpness and shutdown– and things aren't as simple as they seem. Sameera's briskness as she cleans up Mrs. Malik is matched by her frequent distractedness. Mrs. Malik, meanwhile, drifts in and out of consciousness, but recites from Wordsworth's apposite 'Intimations of Immortality' with tinny perfection: “Turn wheresoe'er I may,/ By night or day./ The things which I have seen I now can see no more.” And knows more about the fruitlessness of waiting for someone than Sameera can.

Genre fiction and film – especially of the scary variety – has long been a vehicle for social commentary. The man-made monster at the centre of the still-popular Frankenstein – a book first published anonymously by a ridiculously young Mary Shelley in 1818 – is an early (and eerily prescient) warning against technological intervention in human life. Twentieth century horror, especially the zombie movie, has been powerfully shaped by George Romero's cult classic The Night of the Living Dead (1968), the first of his triad of 'Dead' films: Dawn of the Dead, set in a shopping mall, and Day of the Dead (1985). Romero onwards, the slow-moving, cannibalistic zombie – a creature whose bite turns the bitten person into a zombie herself -- has more often than not been a powerful metaphor for the horrific things that ail society: racial prejudice, consumerism, militarism, classism. That tradition continues down to Jordan Peele's Us (2019).

Karan Johar's film isn't scary, despite his newly-married heroine walking us endlessly through the candle-lit expanse of her husband's family mansion (going for a cross between K3G and Trikaal) in search of a ghostly grandmother. The only effective presence is that of the forbidding housekeeper Shanti, who guards Dadi's room in a manner clearly inspired by Mrs. Danvers' guarding of Rebecca's in the Du Maurier novel (and Hitchcock film). Johar has moments that invite critical examination: such as the friend who declares the family as “totally legit” based on “community mein izzat” and “thriving business”, forcing us to think about how such an aura of social legitimacy survives the violence pushed under the floorboards. (But you'd do better to watch Parasites.)

There is, happily, a zombie film in the quartet. It is Dibakar Banerjee's, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the sharpest of the four – politically, but also in filmmaking terms. Sukant Goel plays a bored, exhausted sarkari official who arrives in a remote village to report on a government school – to find a ravaged, half-burnt settlement where the only living humans appear to be two children. The zombies from the bigger village have eaten everyone from the smaller village, and will eat everyone except those who turn on their own kind. If you speak up, you attract the attention of the creatures. If you join the feasting, you will save your skin – but be blinded for life. Watch it -- and try not to be blind.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 Jan 2020.

Lust, with much caution

My Mirror column:

A film compendium of four tales promises to unbutton our lustful selves on the Hindi screen, but remains tied up in all sorts of knots.

There’s something a trifle odd about Lust Stories. The film, which premiered on Netflix on June 15, is made up of four stand-alone segments by four different directors — but all united in pursuit of a single theme. The directors are the same as in 2013’s Bombay Talkies: Anurag Kashyap, Karan Johar, Dibakar Banerjee and Zoya Akhtar. There, the unifying theme across segments was the power of cinema. Here, ostensibly, it’s lust.


But here’s the thing: it’s not clear to me that these four tales are really about lust at all. Sex, maybe. Sexual satisfaction, sexual deprivation, sexual confusion, sexual jealousy — all of these are dealt with. And while these might seem to be spin-offs of lust, they do not in themselves constitute it. Whether unabashed or guilt-ridden, lust is a full-bodied, carnal thing. But there is very little sense here of that experience, of coveting and deriving sexual pleasure from another person’s body.

The first segment, directed by Anurag Kashyap, stars Radhika Apte as a married college lecturer called Kalindi, who drunkenly hooks up with her student Tejas (Aakash Thosar, the hero of Sairat) and cannot quite handle the ramifications of the act. Kalindi starts by assuming that the younger, less English-speaking and less sexually experienced Tejas will become besotted with her. But as things begin to pan out rather differently, she gets embroiled in a tangled web not quite of her own weaving.


Apte’s on-the-verge performance is fun to watch: her believable air of manic excess lifts the segment above what otherwise might have felt like a mockery of a character. But we never get the vibe of lust from Tejas and Kalindi, or from Kashyap’s direction. It seems as if both have ticked the mental boxes marked ‘adventure’, ‘older woman’, and ‘younger man’ without the relationship producing the slightest bit of on-screen frisson. There’s only social awkwardness, confused power play and avery predictable jealousy that assumes, if anything, romantic form rather than sexual: the feeling of betrayal comes from having had the same song played to another potential lover.
The second segment is a finely wrought one and Zoya Akhtar’s opening sequence does come close to a portrait of mutual lustfulness. The master and the maid we meet mid-coitus look exhilarated. In that moment of pleasure at least, the hierarchies of who must serve and who must be serviced are apparently transcended. Bhumi Pednekar’s superb Sudha is neither put-upon nor coy, and to be lusted after by her upper middle class employer gives her a little licence, social leeway she would not otherwise have. But the intimacy of lust has clear limits, Akhtar seems to suggest, as she delivers Sudha and us, within just a few minutes, from the edge of an illusory domestic fantasy back into the ‘real world’ of marital alliances — where lust is trained to toe the line of social and economic order. What we experience with any degree of depth is not Sudha’s (or her employer Ajit’s) desire, but its erasure into an almost inevitable sense of melancholy.

The third segment, directed by Dibakar Banerjee, deals in another kind of socially censured attraction, that between a man and his best friend’s wife. Again, though, the scenario Banerjee sets up is by no means one of frenetic, passionate or even zestful attraction. In fact, when we meet Reena (Manisha Koirala in a perfectly cast and perfectly pitched performance) and Sudhir (Jaideep Ahlawat), the vibe between them is so comfortable as to make them seem like a long-time couple. They have tea together in a lawn, they lie in bed reading and chatting without any sign of sexual frisson — so much so that when it turns out they’re having an affair, it’s a surprise.

I’m not suggesting that lustful sex must be signposted as something unadulterated by other emotions, separate from loving sex, but surely what Banerjee’s film is concerned with is the breakdown of a marital relationship and the need for emotional intimacy and connection as much as to be physically desired? Both the times that we see sex here, there are tears in one person’s eyes. This is scarcely lustful sex. It might be comfort sex or pity sex, or even intense emotional sex, which is fine. But why then suggest we’re watching a film about lust?

The last segment, directed by Karan Johar, changes the tone of the film. From the realist, often sombre relationship dramas created by the other three directors, Johar transports us into his universe of campy, comic excess. But he addresses the question of lust more directly. An all-girls’ school serves as the setting for a romp with a programmatic message about female pleasure. His characters are ridiculous but entertaining. There’s Neha Dhupia as the cleavage-revealing, divorcee sex goddess teacher (slyly named Rekha); Kiara Advani as Megha, her younger colleague, a virginal-looking bride with non-virginal desires she is keen to fulfil; and Vicky Kaushal as her besotted and good-looking but hopelessly bad-in-bed husband.

Looking at the hilariously performative, uber-vocal female masturbation scene(s) in Johar’s segment and earlier in Veere di Wedding, it looks like broad comedy is the register in which Bollywood has decided to present us with the female orgasm. That’s a good enough place to start. It might, however, be a bit of a tragic joke that so many of these lustful heterosexual women are lusting after vibrators — not men.


Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1 July 2018.

Sunny Side Down

My Mirror column yesterday:

Kanu Behl's superb 'Titli' marks the debut of a filmmaker who is unflinching in a way we rarely see.

There's a moment in Titli when a gun emerges from a mithai ka dabba, and one is accosted by the thought that there could be no better way to conceal a weapon. That standard-issue yellow-and-red cardboard box, so familiar and so familial a constituent of North Indian life that it could never be an object of suspicion, seems to me to function as a perfect metonym for what the film is doing at every level -- toying with our expectations, constantly and without prelude. 

First, the name. Titli means butterfly, a word whose automatic association with gardens and spring and flowers in bloom conjures up a natural idyll -- an imagined paradise which couldn't be further removed from the grim urban underbelly the film in fact inhabits (there is more than one reference to feeling caught in a narak, hell). The Hindi word, moreover, is a feminine noun, with a particularly bouncy, childlike quality, and there is something sweetly incongruous about naming a young man that. It is also protean -- with a name like Titli, you think, how bad can he be? And that question does, in some ways, animate our watching of the film, down to the very end. 

Then there are the characters: Kanu Behl's exemplary cast of lower middle class Delhi folk might lull us, in the first few moments, into believing that what we have here is another of those colourful, dysfunctional, lower middle class North Indian families that the Hindi film industry is fast turning into some sort of budget comic formula. But you learn fairly soon that this is no mild, easily digestible form of dysfunction, no collection of quirks that might be milked for wry humour or even affectionate laughter. This is the great Indian family turned inside out, revealing not just the ugly seams but the stuffing. 

Titli (Shashank Arora in a remarkable debut role) lives with his father and two elder brothers in a depressing little gali house "past the Mother Dairy, behind the nala", somewhere Jamna-paar (meaning in one of the Delhi colonies that lie beyond the Yamuna, in the direction of Noida). The interior has a sense of unrelieved gloom, a burnt-out quality that also has something to do with the lack of female presence. The mother is long-dead. Only the eldest brother Vikram (Ranvir Shorey in a stunning performance that gave me goosebumps) is married. But his wife Sangeeta (incredibly effective in her couple of scenes) has already left the house with their little daughter Shilpi. During the course of the film, another woman is persuaded to enter the space as a new bride. Neelu (Shivani Raghuvanshi, superb) comes with a dining table as dowry, gesturing both to the yearning for family togetherness and the gaping hole that sits in its place. 

What Behl's film does most powerfully is to charge the banality of lower middle class life with the shock of violence. The brothers refer to the car-jackings they do as "kaam" (work), wrapping the blood and gore of it in a coat of chilling everydayness. So comfortably do they adopt the skin of "normal" domesticity that we are surprised every time. But Titli can surprise us even in reverse - the hand-breaking scene might be the most tender act of violence I've ever seen. 

Behl and Sharat Kataria's screenplay seems to me to distil the world into two categories of people. Some, for whom the status quo is working well, have no desire to rock the boat: The corrupt policeman, the smarmy builder. As Prince says to placate Titli, "Jo jaise chal raha hai, woh chalne do". So those who hold the reins of power are loath to let them go, while others are caught in a criss-crossing web they can barely see. Titli seems the only one who can see it clearly, this cycle of poverty and violence, brutality and despair -- and his desperate bid to escape from its clutches forms the film's narrative core. 

The unwavering focus of Titli's desire is a parking lot in a new mall, which he hopes will be a permanent source of income, a way out of criminality. The half-built mall in which the film opens sets the tone for the film's other theme -- money. Titli's is a world in which money seems to come so easily to some, and so very tortuously to others. Some people print five-hundred-rupee wedding cards, while others must scrounge for years together to save three lakhs. 

Director Kanu Behl has worked with Dibakar Banerjee on Oye Lucky Lucky Oye (OLLO) and Love Sex aur Dhokha (which he co-wrote with Banerjee). Titli seems in conversation with Banerjee's oeuvre in interesting ways. This Delhi-under-construction, with its dreams dominated by real estate, has much in common with the world of Banerjee's own debut, Khosla ka Ghosla. But of course, instead of that film's gentle middle class protagonists - "decent people" who only get sucked into criminality because the evil guy screws them over -- what we have here is closer to OLLO's view of the world: "gentry jo boltein English hai, kartein desi". In fact, the gentry in Titli, such as it is, is one step up from even OLLO: they order sherwanis in one breath while doling out murder contracts in the next. Here it is the poor who are sucked into criminality, the poor for whom even escape involves betrayal. It is not a sunny view -- but the shadows do contain the possibility of redemption.

Published in Mumbai Mirror

Much too fast and furious

My Mirror column on Sunday:

Dibakar Banerjee's contemporary spin on a 1940s Bengali sleuth is packed full of grungy period detail, but detective Byomkesh Bakshy doesn't look like he can save the world. Not at this speed, at any rate.

The pleasures of detective stories are – or ought to be – two-fold. There is the pleasure of being rowed gently into a world in which secrets lurk beneath the surface of the everyday. And then there is the pleasure of watching a single mind, invariably a mind sharper than most people's, lower a net into these seemingly unruffled waters and fish those secrets out of the depths. Dibakar Banerjee's new film offers plenty of the first kind, having populated its 1940s Calcutta canvas with so many secrets that it feels like watching a particularly atmospheric painting come to life. But Banerjee's Byomkesh feels too callow and too hurried to afford us the second kind: not so much because he nets the wrong fish, but because he hurtles through this storied world without letting us savour what he does uncover.

Bengalis, who were colonized earlier (and more effectively) than most of the rest of India, acquired a taste for detective fiction early. Priyanath Mukhopadhyay, a retired policeman, began recounting his experiences in the Darogar Daptar (The Inspector's Office) series in 1892, around the same time as Arthur Conan Doyle began writing his first stories. Mukhopadhyay's popular series didn't draw from Doyle, but Holmes and Watson certainly had an influence on other Bengali writers of crime fiction, giving rise to many a cerebral detective who solved crimes with the aid of a not-as-clever associate who happened to be a writer. One of these was Sharadindu Bandopadhyay, whose Byomkesh Bakshi first made his appearance in print in the 1930s, accompanied by his writer friend Ajit. The alliteratively-named detective was a dhuti-wearing middle class Bengali man of his time, with a domestic life involving a wife and a child, and a world that extended only till Cuttack and Munger and Dhaka – quite different from Satyajit Ray's rather more cosmopolitan Feluda, a bachelor who spoke fluent English and bore the Anglicised name of Pradosh Mitter (rather than Mitra), and whose travels took him to much farther-flung destinations like Jaisalmer, Ajanta, Kathmandu, Gangtok, places that Satyajit Ray had been to himself. But while Feluda's adventures were always child-friendly, full of antique smuggling and kidnapping, Byomkesh mysteries could often involve crimes of lust and passion and revenge.

Another reason why Byomkesh has endured is that he has been incarnated in many avatars outside the pages of Sharadindu's 32 and a half stories. He has been given audio-visual form by directors as disparate as Satyajit Ray, who cast Uttam Kumar as Byomkesh in the famously disappointing film Chiriyakhana; Basu Chatterjee, who turned Byomkesh into a national household name with his Rajit-Kapoor-starring series on Doordarshan in the early 1990s; Anjan Dutt, who launched his first Byomkesh film in Bangla with the young TV actor Abir Chatterjee in 2010; and Rituparno Ghosh, whose Satyanweshi, starring Kahaani director Sujoy Ghosh as Byomkesh, had to be completed by his crew after Ghosh died unexpectedly while still working on it.

Dibakar Banerjee's Byomkesh, then, is only the latest in a long line of cinematic interpretations. It is fitting, in a way, that Byomkesh should finally find a home on the Bombay film screen, because Sharadindu Bandhopadhyay worked for nearly fifteen years as a scriptwriter with Bombay Talkies, Filmistan and other studios. On the other hand, it does feel slightly odd to watch this picture-perfect world of dhuti-clad Bengalis called Something-Babu having to read Yugantar in Hindi and saying such things as “same-to-same”-- not to mention the jarring dissonance produced by Sneha Khanwalkar's deliberately anachronistic musical score.

There is much period detail that starts off feeling marvellous and on-the-ball—such as the smoky streets of North Calcutta's old Chinatown, festooned with Chinese New Year banners and strings of Chinese sausages, or the way the competitive, education-obsessed, bhadralok milieu is established with effortless accuracy by characters being remembered by their university gold medals, whether two years or 20 have passed since they were awarded. But then, in swift succession, Banerjee flings at us a Burma-born actress who goes by the annoyingly Hindi heartland stage-name of Angoori Devi, a comic Sardar taxi driver, two dumb Bhagalpuri pehelwan guards to provide the Hindustani quotient, a pack of Chinese druglords and a ridiculously fake Japanese villain strutting about with a samurai sword -- and the film began to feel like a mithai too stuffed with mewa to taste anything at all. 

Every possible constituent of Calcutta's 1940s mix is ticked off, except perhaps the Armenians. But by trying to splice together deaths by sword and deaths by strychnine, nationalist party politics and British policemen and the Chinese opium trade and the Japanese bombing of Calcutta, the film refuses to let one properly soak in the smells and sights of any one of these. Each time Nikos Andriatsakis's supremely atmospheric cinematography deposited us at the dark edge of a galli, with opium addicts stumbling out, I craved to be let into the opium den, to see it for myself. But that never happened. Meanwhile Watanabe's house looked like a facade only present for him to prance about in the garden. I enjoyed much of the spectacle of what I do understand is meant to be a genre film, but I felt nothing for any of the central characters -- and less for any of the peripheral ones, even when they died thankless deaths.

As Dibakar Banerjee put it so beautifully in an introduction he wrote to a Puffin edition of three Byomkesh stories in 2012, being Byomkesh was always about doing the right thing. But there was something deliciously gradual, small-scale, sometimes even mofussil about the Byomkesh stories that I remember, which has been replaced here with an action hero out to save the world. It feels like a delusion of grandeur. I hope he'll come back to ground level.  

Picture This: Poster Girl

My BLink column this month:

Whether they’re swiped or free or paid for, there’s something about film posters that I’ve always loved... they capture something essential about the film, in a medium so different.

Recently, a friend asked me if I had ever stolen books. It was a casual question, but clearly also a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down to test just how low I lay in the good girl stakes. Well, I had to confess I’ve never stolen a book. Then, searching for a chink in the boring middle-class moral carapace that clearly covers me, I came up with the only things I’ve ever stolen: food from a college pantry — and film posters.

Regardless of whether they’re swiped or free or paid for, there’s something about film posters that I’ve always loved. Maybe it’s the way in which they capture something essential about a film, in a medium so different from it. No matter how much one might love a film, it unfolds in time, and at its own pace. Imagine running a film nonstop in your living room as the background to your life! But the poster which picks out one moment from a film, arresting that flow of time that defines the medium — that can stay on my wall forever, and each time I look at it, it is possible to have it evoke the series of moments of which it is a part. So many of my favourite posters are often based on a single film still.

For years I had, above my bed, a poster of Matir Moina (The Clay Bird), the late Tareque Masud’s lyrical portrait of a childhood unravelling in the build-up to the Bangladesh War of Liberation. Two young boys in a classroom in skullcaps. One of them is Anu, the film’s protagonist, sent away to a madrasa by his increasingly inflexible, increasingly orthodox father. The other is the sole friend he makes there, the jeered-at ‘mad boy’, Rokon. In the image on the poster, Anu has his mouth open, as if to speak, while Rokon watches him, as if waiting for the tentativeness to dissipate. I haven’t seen the film since 2002, but the image has kept alive in my mind the nervous hesitation of Anu’s first few days at the madrasa — the melancholy, the cramped sleeping spaces, the strict teachers, the mocking classmates.

Another poster on my wall, whisked away from outside some film festival, is a lovely one of Wong Kar Wai’s Days of Being Wild. I used to be a fan, and could probably still summon something of my old enthusiasm for Chungking Express, Fallen Angels and Happy Together — despite the unmitigated disaster that was My Blueberry Nights. But I’ve never watched Days of Being Wild. It’s as if the poster has sated my curiosity. The bluish-green tint to it, juxtaposed sharply with the bright red Chinese characters bunched together in the centre; the strangely flattened clock that seems to suggest that time (for being wild?) is running out — the whole thing has a stylised melancholy so typical of Wong Kar Wai’s aesthetic in the ’90s, that it makes me feel like I’ve watched the film.

The mainstream Hindi film poster, no longer painted, has little to separate it from the mainstream Hollywood poster: they share the generic, claustrophobic effect produced when all the ‘designer’ is doing is fitting in the film’s big faces. There are, of course, occasional posters which do more with photographs, if they use them at all. I remember admiring the ones for Dev D, which used a psychedelic palette of bottle green, dark pink and blood red, and tweaked images of the actors into mind-altering forms. There was Mahie Gill reproduced several times to create a butterfly; Abhay Deol’s face morphed out of recognition, with aviators and giant lips; a green Deol viewed through a pink vodka bottle. There was another (my favourite) where Gill and Deol’s profiles were superimposed so that they seemed to share a single eye. It sounds monstrous, but in fact it succeeded in conjuring up a strange sense of stillness, of the merging of souls.

Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhokha was another film with strongly conceptual posters. They used the acronym LSD strategically, also producing psychedelic images, each with a scarlet heart placed at the centre. In one, the ‘heart’ was made up of two pairs of entwined feet, suggesting sex. In another, it was a pincushion, suggesting pain. (Caused by the dhokha, naturally.)

But what I think makes for the most marvellous posters, really, is text used either alone, or in conjunction with images. Dev D’s posters incorporated some phrases from the film’s songs: ‘Emotional Atyachar’ appeared bookended by the bandwallas who played it, ‘Ek Hulchul’ emerged in a spiral of smoke from Chanda’s (Kalki Koechlin’s) smouldering cigarette. But very little use is made of typography even in these designs. The only recent example of a recent poster with attention to type that I can remember offhand is English Vinglish, which did the obvious well, by placing a Devanagari ‘ga’ and ‘sha’ in place of ‘g’ and ‘sh’, effectively highlighting both the Indianness of the title and the film’s linguistic theme.

The master of the typographic poster was, of course, Satyajit Ray. Each was more striking than the last. The all-black Joi Baba Felunath poster had no images at all; just the film’s title in plump geometric white, the Bangla letter ‘la’ holding a pistol, from which a shower of sparks emerges to create the only triangle of colour on the page. Shatranj ke Khiladi, using English, created a typeface whose heavy, leaden bottoms evoked the form of the chess piece. The most unforgettable is probably Ray’s poster for Devi (The Goddess), where the eerie energy of Sharmila Tagore’s face, half in shadow and half in blazing light, is echoed by a typescript that seems aflame. The word ‘devi’, in Bangla, forms the crimson outline of a temple. Someday soon, perhaps, I’ll see a new poster as good as that in a cinema — something really worth stealing.

The Last Renaissance Man: The Reinvention of Pradip Krishen

Pradip Krishen's fascinating journey from academia to film, from film to forest. And desert. 

From my long profile in the February issue of The Caravan.

Pradip Krishen in his study. (Photograph by Arati Kumar-Rao. See the whole set here.)

IT WAS A LITTLE PAST 5 AM as we drove out from Jaisalmer into the alternately sandy and rocky terrain of the Desert National Park, a 3,162 square-kilometre swathe of the Thar Desert in western Rajasthan. We were heading specifically for a large dune that goes by the evocative name of Gaja Matha—“elephant head”. For the first time in four days, Pradip Krishen reserved the front seat of the Innova for himself. He had to direct the driver, he said, and proceeded to do so silently, with several elegant turns of the wrist. Just as the driver began to enjoy speeding through the smoky pre-dawn darkness, Krishen uttered a gentle but firm injunction: “Thoda haule le lo, chinkara vagairah aa jaate hain” (Take it slow, there might be chinkaras). Reluctantly, the driver decelerated, lulling the other four still-drowsy passengers back into a potential return to slumber. Krishen, though, remained thoroughly awake. Within minutes, he brought us to a stop with a quiet exclamation: “Was that a hedgehog?”

We drove back a few hundred metres. Sure enough, there was a sad, not-very-spiny ball of quills, rolled up in the middle of the road. Krishen and the rest of us got out for a look: Mithva, Krishen’s younger daughter, accompanying her father into the desert for the first time; Arati Kumar-Rao, a freelance photojournalist working with Krishen; Nishikant Jadhav, a retired Indian Forest Service officer whom Krishen affectionately calls his “Tree Guru”; and myself.

“He’ll go to hedgehog heaven,” said Mithva, as tender an animal-lover as her father.

“The great insectivore hunting ground in the sky,” said Krishen.

“The insects are already here,” Kumar-Rao said. 

It was a strangely affecting sight: the thin, sticky trickle of blood, and the insects lining up to devour the creature who would once have devoured them.

Back in the car, Krishen and Kumar-Rao described how long it had taken them to arrive at the Rajasthani name—just the name—for the specific habitat we were driving out to see. The sandy desert is self-mulching: a top layer of dry sand protects a lower layer of wet sand, providing enough moisture for plants to grow and a whole ecosystem to emerge, creating what might be called the “jungle of the desert”. Krishen and Kumar-Rao spent many trips asking local people what they called these sorts of areas with vegetation. They received answers ranging from the banal and slightly baffled—“registan?” (desert?)—to place-names, like Gaja Matha. Between themselves, they had begun to refer to it as the “SBK habitat”, using an acronym derived from the three plant species most commonly found in the sandy Thar: a spidery herb called seenio; bui, or desert cotton; and a large thin-stemmed bush called kheemp. The coinage had almost stuck when a 19th-century reference—James Tod’s two-volume classic Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan—finally gave them the term they were looking for: roee. Suddenly, the word was everywhere they looked. “Yes, going into the roee means going into the jungle,” our Jaisalmer hotel owner affirmed. “Hmm. You never mentioned it when I asked last year,” Krishen said, slightly disgruntled. That persistent trial-and-error approach to research—eclectic reading plus the pursuit of local knowledge, all the while also devising his own ordering system—exemplifies Krishen’s work.

In the Innova headed toward the roee, we grew collectively still, arrested by the grandeur of dawn breaking over the desert. Krishen’s voice interrupted my own reverie. “When you’re shooting a film,” he said, “there’s a moment at dawn that’s ephemeral. And if you have two or three dawn shots, you need to get matching dawns—a cloudy dawn can’t be followed by a clear one. But the classic is what we used to call RFD, Rosy-Fingered Dawn. Which, of course, is from the Odyssey …”

Like all good storytellers, Krishen is adept at using little sparks from his past to illuminate the present. Once at work, however, that leisurely digressiveness is replaced by a sharper focus. On each pre-dawn trip, we walked the dunes for hours, with Krishen, Kumar-Rao and Jadhav stopping to look at—and photograph—not just lizards and birds and gerbils, not just big trees and shrubs, but also the most minuscule grasses. They knelt, they hunched, they lay flat on the ground to examine everything from the roots of a shrub where a lizard had taken up residence, to the fuzz growing on an old cowpat. There was great passion here, an exhilaration and intensity difficult to describe. Yet there was also an immense sense of calm, an immersion in the present that took the form of an unhurried attention to landscape.

Barren expanses, which the locals called thal, were interspersed with the roee—stretches of vegetation that, even to my untrained eye, transformed the desert from a dry nothingness into a world secretly throbbing with life. Krishen was mostly happy for us to tramp along peacefully as he pointed out the flatter plains, or pediments, that are the oldest parts of the desert, and educated me about common plants like the khejri (“this is where you get the sangri from”). But in an instant his voice would drop to a hush, and everyone would suddenly start whispering dramatically: “Egyptian! Egyptian!” A sighting, as it turned out, of a raptor called the Egyptian vulture.

                                                                                     ***

AN UNFAILING SPOTTER OF SPECIES, Pradip Krishen is a bit of a species unto himself. A highly regarded naturalist and ecological gardener, he is the author of Trees of Delhi (2006), one of India’s most popular books on an ecological subject, and he has just published another—an equally exhaustive yet supremely readable guide to the Jungle Trees of Central India. In an earlier life, Krishen was a highly regarded filmmaker. He directed Massey Sahib (1985), In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989) and Electric Moon (1992)—all, to different degrees, cult films for a generation of writers, directors and discerning movie-goers.

After Electric Moon, however, Krishen stopped making films and went into a hibernation of sorts. When he re-emerged into the public eye after a little over a decade, it turned out that he had spent much of that time teaching himself about trees. Almost simultaneously, he had been teaching others: leading walks into Delhi’s wooded tracts, helping protect the heritage environs of the city’s Sunder Nursery from being cloven by a flyover, and trying to create a microhabitat there. Krishen’s explorations extended into Rishikesh, with a “Wildflowers in the Rain” walk at a friend’s resort, and to Pachmarhi, in Madhya Pradesh.

Krishen’s success remains astounding to most people. “He’s an amateur who outdistances the professionals,” said Amita Baviskar, who has, as a sociologist and activist, long engaged with environmental concerns herself. Krishen has also pretty much invented the shape of the profile he now inhabits. As the documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak, who started his career working with Krishen, put it: “How many people do we know who are amateur tree biologists and photographers and writers? Essentially, no one.”

                                                                                     ***

IN APRIL 2013, I travelled with Krishen from Delhi to Jodhpur, where his most recent project has unfolded in the shadow of what might be India’s best-preserved medieval fortress: the 15th-century Mehrangarh fort. In 2005, the Mehrangarh Museum Trust (MMT) invited Krishen to “green” the fort’s surrounding area, then an eroded, rocky wasteland dominated by the invasive Mexican species Prosopis juliflora—the mesquite, or vilayati keekar—also known by the rather appropriate local name of baavlia, “the mad one”. “Maybe [the MMT] had in mind something like a garden,” Krishen told me during one of our several interviews, on the road and in Delhi. What they got instead is an ambitious ecological restoration project on a scale unprecedented in India. Krishen has spent the last seven years trying to return the area to what it might have been like five or six centuries ago, before it was inhabited by people—and before the late 1930s, when Maharaja Umaid Singh of Jodhpur, in a well-intentioned bid to provide the subjects of his desert kingdom with a source of greenery, scattered the seeds of Prosopis juliflora across it from an aeroplane. A year before the MMT invited Krishen to Mehrangarh, the trust, which is headed by Jodhpur’s former maharaja, Gaj Singh, asked him to resuscitate a moat filled with old stone rubble at the 12th-century Nagaur Fort, about 138 kilometres north-east of the city. Based on his own research and the guidance of the late Dr MM Bhandari, a botanical doyen of the Thar desert, Krishen sowed a nursery of plants native to the Nagauri desert. “It just flourished,” he said. 

…

Read the rest of this profile on the Caravan website: here.

Film Review: Bombay Talkies

 

Bombay Talkies is made up of four short films created by four different Hindi film directors as a tribute to the power of cinema in India. The first film, directed by Karan Johar, is perhaps the one least obviously ‘about cinema’.

Yes, Gayatri (Rani Mukherjee) is the editor of a filmi gossip mag called Mumbai Masala, her television news anchor husband Dev (Randeep Hooda) is a Hindi film music aficionado with a “special room” that’s a shrine to old songs, and Avinash (Saqib Saleem) – the new intern in Gayatri’s office – often climbs up on a railway overbridge to listen to a little street child sing “Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh”. But really, this is a tale about truth and love and sex and selfhood, and Johar leavens a clichéd gay coming-out narrative (which does exist) with more brutal honesty than one could have hoped for.

Of course, since this is still Johar, his ‘ordinary people’ are all rather too fetching – but he gets many things right. The actors are perfectly cast, and we’re right there with them from the word go. There’s the early shot where the husband and wife, dressing for work, look into the same mirror. Rani’s Gayatri is dressed to kill, her low-slung sari blouse revealing a shapely back. She looks longingly into the mirror, no longer at herself but at her husband, but he barely seems to see her. In the next scene we see her walk into her office and become the cynosure of all eyes. That appreciative glance that comes her way from a male colleague now seems to us her due.

The other thing Johar nails is the casual sexual banter upon which Avinash’s relationship with Gayatri is forged. A milieu in which a newly-arrived intern can greet the boss-woman with a remark like “Gale mein mangalsutra, aankhon mein kamasutra” may seem a little much, but it taps into the deliberate sluttiness so often cultivated in the new liberal workplace, with sexuality played up partly for laughs and partly to establish coolness.

But it is the little girl on the railway bridge who’s the scene stealer. There is something so intensely pure and true about the quality of her voice as she breaks into “Lag Ja Gale” that one is willing to buy completely into her later dialogue about honesty, however trite. And here Johar cottons onto something that really does exemplify Hindi cinema: the undeniable pull of the song lyric, the sense one so often gets of it’s being the truest thing you’ve ever heard, even if – perhaps especially when? – it comes wrapped in a cloud of emotional excess of the sort that is no longer allowed.

A child and a song also lie at the heart of Zoya Akhtar’s offering: a little boy who is obsessed with “Sheila ki Jawani”. But not in the way you think. This is a boy who gets a persistent furrow in his brow when he’s pushed onto the football field by his unseeing bully of a father (Ranvir Shorey), a boy who likes nothing better than gazing lovingly into the classroom in which his female schoolmates are being taught to dance. When his favourite Katrina Kaif – whom he really only knows as Sheila – comes on television, she seems to be speaking directly to him. Follow your dreams, she says, but keep them secret from those you know will be unsupportive. It is a narrative that brings to mind the wonderful 1997 Belgian film Ma Vie En Rose (My Life in Pink). It is marvellous to see a story like this – unfolding all around us and yet an absolute taboo topic for discussion in most Indian families – finally being told on the Hindi film screen. Akhtar draws superb performances from her child actors (particularly the dreamy-eyed, little Naman Jain), and their conversations are studded with lines whose casualness sometimes belies their eerie profundity. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” the little boy asks his elder sister. “Nothing,” she says. “Nothing?” he asks again. “Nothing. But I want to travel the whole world.” “Oh, so you want to be an air hostess?” “No,” says the girl, “I want to be a passenger.”

Anurag Kashyap’s film was the one by which I was disappointed. The premise is pleasurably cinematic: a young man from Allahabad comes all the way to Mumbai to make Amitabh Bachchan taste his mother’s murabba (sweet pickle) on his dying father’s bidding. He waits for days outside the Bachchan bungalow (the aptly-named Pratiksha) befriending the watchmen, the omelette-seller and the Amitabh-impersonator alike – but fails to meet the star. So far, so realist. What Kashyap does next – allowing the young Vijay, as the hopeful Ilahabadi is named, to actually meet Bachchan (and Bachchan another chance to trot out his carefully cultivated benevolent persona) – seemed to entirely dilute the until then powerfully documentary effect – and affect – of the film. There is a quicksilver change of tone attempted here (and later in the train sequence), jolting us deliberately between high tragedy and comedy. But it ends up neither here nor there.

The standout film, by far, is Dibakar Banerjee’s masterful reworking of a famous Satyajit Ray short story called ‘Patol Babu Film Star’. Banerjee takes only the central premise of the original: a very ordinary man who once had a passion for the theatre suddenly finds himself picked to do a scene in a film. Instead of Patol, the 52-year-old Bengali middle class man in a Calcutta of fifty years ago, though, we get Purandar, a 30-something Nawazuddin Siddiqui; a jobless family man in a present-day Bombay chawl. Right from the first scenes – Purandar lying unblinkingly awake much before his phone alarm rings out at dawn with a plaintive ‘Jaago’ and the sound of a cock crowing, the presence of a pet emu in his cramped little home – the film establishes a strange, surreal mood. That surreality is fully realized by the centrepiece of a scene in which he tries to prepare for his shot in the film: we see Nawazuddin from a great distance, surrounded by the gleaming, tall, white buildings of some fancy highrise, rehearsing the dialogues he has spent his whole life learning and will never need. And then, at the moment of greatest turmoil, he finds himself talking to his dead father, in whose theatre troupe he had once acted.

It is pure pleasure to watch the great Sadashiv Amrapurkar berate his (cinematic) son from beyond the grave – as my father said as he watched the film with me this morning, no-one is better at taana maarna than Amrapurkar. Siddiqui, of course, is superb – and the layers of cinematic meta-ness here are wonderful, as Bollywood’s latest poster-boy for acting plays the anonymous struggler he so recently was.

What Banerjee’s film achieves is a powerfully real sense of why the cinema feels like a vehicle of fate. The man of the crowd, picked out seemingly at random, might suddenly find himself illuminated – and yet it is entirely ephemeral. As the camera zooms out from Purandar’s room, he is back to being one of the tens of thousands of little people – framed ever so briefly in a flash of light, before being returned to the anonymity of the crowd.

This review was published in Firstpost.

Film Review: English Vinglish

My review of English-Vinglish:

“My wife, she was born to make laddoos!” says the grinning husband to the white boy who’s being inducted into the family. The white boy, whose name is Kevin, has just taken his first-ever bite of a moist, delicious little globe of motichur goodness produced by the aforementioned wife, Shashi, and he looks suitably overwhelmed with delight. Then the camera moves across to Shashi, and that single fluid moment, as we watch her face silently transform from happy to tremulous to brave, encapsulates everything that the film wants to show us.

What Gauri Shinde’s debut film insists on showing us is so deliberately unspectacular, so quiet and dull and taken-for-granted, that when we see it in real life (and we see it all the time), we merely avert our eyes. It is the predicament of the person whose personhood is summarily dismissed by a refusal to value the work they do—casually, perhaps without malice—but resulting in no less cruelty than if it were intentional.

Because English-Vinglish, despite its name, is not just about English. English here is a placeholder. Being fluent in English, in the sadly skewed universe of contemporary India, automatically codes you as modern, fashionable, worthy of respect. Not being fluent in it relegates you to the back room: a second-class citizen unworthy of display.

Dibakar Banerjee’s films – Oye Lucky most of all, but also Pitobash Tripathy’s character in Shanghai­ ­– have given us what are perhaps Hindi cinema’s most nuanced commentaries on English as a marker of social class. What Shinde does in English-Vinglish is very different, not just because her style involves broader strokes and a happier, more feel-good mood— but because the domain she chooses to set her film in is the family.

Shashi is, first and foremost, a wife and mother, and Shinde’s masterstroke is to create a character whose fears and conflicts and insecurities are almost never a consequence of direct assaults made by the wider social world. Her experience of the world comes to her filtered through her husband and children.

So it is Shashi’s own daughter who is embarrassed and angry at Shashi’s inability to understand her classmate’s English-speaking mother—the classmate’s mother seems, at worst, oblivious. It is the same daughter who sulks for hours because Shashi speaks to her teacher in Hindi while the Malayali Christian teacher himself seems quite charmed by this woman who unselfconsciously talks to him about banana chips and wants to know if her daughter is not just a good student but also a popular one. The loyal clients she’s built up for her high-quality home-made laddoos are glad to have a friendly chat when she makes her delivery rounds in person. It is her husband’s lackadaisical dismissal of her excitement about the day’s sales that silences her.

So it makes complete sense when Shashi, at the film’s end, describes her view of family as a little world within the wider world, a space in which you ought to be held safe from the judgements and cruelties of the wider world. It is as close to a statement of worldview as a Hindi film heroine has ever been allowed to come, and whether you think of it as beautifully hopeful, or sadly, simplistically delusional, it is unlikely that you will come away unmoved.

Because in the deliberate simplicity of its canvas—and its protagonist—lies the strength of Gauri Shinde’s film. By refusing to situate the vexed question of English in a larger socio-political context, by focusing its attention on the home, it does simplify the issue—but it also holds up a mirror to what must be the most mundane, most neglected aspects of our social lives: how we treat our mothers.

And yet, the reason why English-Vinglish is so successful is because it is careful not to underline its chosen subject too heavily. Shashi is not above the occasional well-aimed barb—“Oh, main bhool gayi, important baatein toh sirf English mein hi hoti hain na?”—but her deepest wounds are ones she hugs tightly to herself. Our sense of Shashi’s intense privacy, her shyness, helps the film steer clear of melodrama, and lends itself rather beautifully to the few moments when she does open up. It seems entirely fitting that she speaks her heart out only to a man who does not understand her words.

That besotted Frenchman (Mehdi Nebbou) is one of the people in Shashi’s English class, a cheerfully updated version of Mind Your Language that provides the film with most of its lighter moments, via a slightly caricatured but affectionately drawn collection of immigrants—a Pakistani cab driver, a Tamilian techie, a Spanish-speaking nanny, a young Chinese girl, a largely silent African man—all struggling to improve their English.

The New York segment is necessarily shot with the eyes of the dazzled outsider—all skyscrapers and downtown views— but Shinde also manages to fill it with nicely-observed moments that anyone who has ever negotiated the terrifying newness of any (Western) city will immediately identify with: the minor but life-altering trials—and triumphs—of making Metrocards work, finding your way to an interview, placing an order in a café without holding up the queue.

But eventually, it is Sridevi, with her trademark winsome girlishness of old now beautifully balanced by a new quiet dignity, who makes us experience each of these triumphs as her own. Go, cheer her on.

Published in Firstpost, here.