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.

In the Family Way

My Mirror column:

Films about parental figures — real and imagined — made revealing viewing at the Dharamshala International Film Festival.

Actor Manoj Bajpayee occupies the front row at the 2018 edition of DIFF, which took place in November at the Tibetan Children's Village school in McLeodganj

The seventh edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF), which ran from November 1 to 4, was full of films about parent-child relationships. It wasn’t a consciously chosen theme. “As in previous editions, a pattern emerged organically from the choices we made,” wrote DIFF’s directors Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam in their festival brochure.

Deliberate or not, even just the names of the films on this year’s schedule made for a recurring motif. In many conversations at the fest, the multi-generational, multi-linear Taiwanese drama Father to Son was mistaken for Of Fathers and Sons, a documentary based on exiled Syrian filmmaker Talal Derki’s two years shooting with a radical Islamist family in a north Syrian village. The Sri Lankan debut feature House of My Fathers added to the confusion.

Beyond the films whose titles declared themselves, however, there was Ee.Ma.Yau, Lijo Pellissery’s brilliant satirical drama about a Malayali Catholic man trying to arrange the grand funeral he promised his fisherman father, and the spare, rather too studied The Red Phallus, Tashi Gyeltshen’s symbolic unpacking of patriarchy in rural Bhutan through the tale of an atsara (a traditional clown) and his unhappy teenaged daughter. Dominic Sangma’s debut feature Ma.Ama, which I didn’t get to watch, ‘resurrects’ the filmmaker’s late mother (and casts his real-life father as the 85-year-old Philip Sangma, who has waited 30 years to be reunited with his dead wife).

The non-fiction films, too, gravitated towards this filial theme: Avni Rai’s documentary about her father, Raghu Rai: An Unframed Portrait, is as much about his photography as their relationship, while the fascinating, blackly funny The Beksinskis: A Sound and Picture Album (2017) reconstructs the complicated relationship between a famous Polish painter Zdzislaw and his radio journalist son Tomek, drawing on 300 hours of private video footage that extends from the period before Tomek’s birth till after his death. (The Beksinskis were also the subject of a more traditional biopic in 2016: Jan P Matuszynski’s feature The Last Family, which I saw at IFFI last year, didn’t have the advantage of ironic self-examination made for more harrowing viewing.)

Stills from Namdev Bhau: In Search of Silence & Hamid, respectively the opening and closing films at DIFF 2018.

What was uncanny to me, though, was something else: the fact that in so many of the other films, child protagonists created a cross-generational bond with an older adult — often in lieu of a parent. In the Ukrainian filmmaker Dar Gai’s road movie Namdev Bhau: In Search of Silence, the festival’s opening film, a Mumbai chauffeur frustrated with the cacophony of the city sets out a solo trip to Ladakh’s Silent Valley, only to find himself in the insistent company of a twelve-year-old boy travelling mysteriously alone in Ladakh. The boy’s ceaseless confident chatter contrasts starkly with the silences of Devashish Makhija’s Bhonsle, in which a retired Marathi constable takes a fearful Bihari child under his wing.



Makhija’s Mumbai, all shadowy corridors and low-lit, barely-furnished rooms, couldn’t be more different from Dar Gai’s picture-postcard mountain vistas. Even when the locale is comparable, the effects are far apart. Namdev Bhau’s chawl always looks bright, the sunlight as inescapable as the chatter of Namdev’s family and neighbours, while Manoj Bajpayee’s Bhonsle occupies what must be the most silent chawl ever seen on the Hindi film screen: a place where even make-or-break fights about chauvinistic community claims on the city don’t spill over beyond the few carefully chosen protagonists. Stagey as that often felt, and despite the predictable turning of its sole female character into fodder for competing masculinities, I was far more moved by the connection between Virat Vaibhav’s petrified Lalu and the taciturn but fair Bhonsle than by Dar Gai’s too-neat, emotionally manipulative conclusion.

Child actor Virat Vaibhav in a still from Devashish Makhija's disturbing Bhonsle (2018)

Emotional manipulation and tidy coincidences also reigned in DIFF’s closing film, Aijaz Khan’s drama Hamid, set in Kashmir. An eight-year-old boy whose father has joined the state’s growing list of ‘‘disappeared persons” tries to phone Allah to send his father back, and ends up calling a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) man called Abhay stationed in Kashmir. Abhay’s initial dismissal of it a prank is jettisoned by Hamid’s touching faith. The angry, aggressive Abhay is quite far from being God. But, as the film cloyingly suggests, the goodness of adults might be a function of children’s faith in them.

A still from the sassy, satisfying 'children's film' Cross My Heart (2017, dir. Luc Picard). 

I was more wholehearted charmed by the Canadian film Cross My Heart, in which a girl threatened with the prospect of herself and her beloved little brother being split up into different foster homes abducts an old lady. Director Luc Picard cleverly makes twelve-year-old Manon’s act unfold against the 1970 October crisis, when political kidnappings by the Quebec Liberation Front had won some victories for Quebecois autonomy. But what makes the film moving is the imminent breakdown of the family and Manon’s heartfelt, if childish, desire to create a replacement for it — complete with a surrogate grandmother. What the children require of their baffled abductee is to read aloud bedtime stories — and make them a Mickey Mouse costume.

Fictive kinship, in most of these films, serves as a bridge across social and political barriers: the Bhaiyya-Marathi divide in Mumbai, the Kashmiris and the Indian state, and the English-French division in Canada. Perhaps the family — even in the imagination — does still have the power to summon our best selves.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 11 Nov 2018.