All the perfumes of Arabia

My Mirror column:

Uplifting and devastating by turns, Vinod Kamble’s 2019 debut feature Kastoori (The Musk) is the kind of coming-of-age narrative that Indian cinema needs more of.

The first time we see Gopi’s face, he has just set eyes on a filthy public toilet. For most viewers of Vinod Kamble’s Kastoori (The Musk), the sight of that toilet – the next shot – would likely be enough to make us retch. Or at least make us want to bang the door shut and get as far away as we can. Gopi, however, can’t do that. He must step into the cubicle instead, a broom in one hand and a bucket of water in the other, his face impassive as he gets to the cleaning work he does alongside his mother.

As Kamble’s powerful debut feature proceeds, we see his teenaged young protagonist Gopi do all kinds of jobs that remain unofficially yet inescapably ‘reserved’ for Dalits in India, crucial jobs shunned by caste Hindus for their proximity to dirt and the dead. He helps his father bury unclaimed dead bodies for the police department, he assists other young men from the community in cleaning out septic tanks and, finally, assists a doctor who conducts autopsies.

Kastoori, available to view online till August 2 as part of the 2020 edition of the New York Indian Film Festival, derives much of its verisimilitude from Kamble’s own experiences growing up in a Dalit family of sanitation workers in Barshi village in Maharashtra’s Solapur. As with Kamble’s own life, education seems to offer Gopi the only way out of a poverty exacerbated by caste. But as the film makes sadly clear, staying in school is not easy, precisely under these circumstances.

“Dekhti main tere ko, kaise kaam pe nai aata tu [Let me see how you don’t come to work],” says Gopi’s mother angrily, before tearing up his textbook. Gopi is good at school and wants desperately to continue, but she does not have the wherewithal to support him. “Number aane se pet nahi bharta [Good marks won’t fill your stomach],” she scoffs. He has to earn his keep, and that means leaving school if that’s the only way his father’s job can stay in the family.

Poverty-stricken parents pulling a child out of school to join a caste-bound family occupation has been the theme of at least two previous coming-of-age Marathi films with Dalit protagonists. In Rajesh Pinjani's 2012 release Baboo Band Baja (available on a streaming website), a bartanwali and midwife tries to keep her little son in school, but finds herself battling her husband, who believes his son cannot escape a life playing music at funerals, as his grandfather and father did. In Nagaraj Manjule’s pioneering 2013 debut Fandry (the word means ‘pig’), a teenager from a pig-rearing Dalit agricultural family suffers his father's fatalism alternating with drunken rages. “You won’t die if you bunk one more day!” he says the first time we see him speak to his son.

Caste isn’t too sharply foregrounded in Baboo Band Baja, but there are frequent references that suggest it, such as the father’s angry complaint that band-wallas are always made to wait outside, never invited in. Fandry (also on a streaming platform) is much more upfront about caste: the visibility of Jabya’s ‘polluting’ work outside school instantly cancels out the minimal claims to constitutional equality made inside school walls. Kastoori carries on that necessary, painful task of measuring the Indian state’s promises against what society actually offers – and it does so with quiet aplomb.

The same classmates who shake Gopi’s hand when he wins an essay prize (Kamble makes a point by making it a Sanskrit essay) turn against him after they spy him helping clean a septic tank. “Here comes the sweeper, he stinks,” they murmur. “We should tell the teacher.” But Kamble knows that the schoolchildren holding their noses are only one end of the systemic rot – at the other end is the doctor who insists that the sweeper’s schoolgoing son replace his father, and the activist who sees no irony in a child doing the back-end work for a workshop about Dalit children’s education.

Caught between beaten-down alcoholic fathers and hard-scrabble frustrated mothers, youngsters in these films find other allies. Gopi’s lovely grandmother with the quavering voice is one such. Others find support outside the family. In a plot-line that presages Manjule’s massively successful Sairat (2016), when Fandry’s Jabya gets shyly besotted with an upper caste classmate called Shalu, he confides in the local cycle shop owner Chankya (played by Manjule himself). Close friendships between boys are also central to all these films – Kastoori wouldn’t be half as uplifting as it is without the warmth of Gopi’s close friend Aadim, the son of a Qureishi butcher who also understands what it’s like to be perceived as doing ‘unclean’ work.

Inspired by Iranian cinema’s use of children’s stories, debacles abound – a lost schoolbag in Baboo Band Baja, a crushed cycle in Fandry, a trickster selling fake goods in Kastoori -- while the search for beauty abides. The mythical ‘kali chimni’ (black sparrow) for which Jabya roams the woods in Fandry metamorphoses, in Kastoori, into Aadim and Gopi’s saving up to acquire the legendary perfumed substance of the film’s title. But Kamble ends his film on a remarkable note, silently redefining what beauty means. In a visual homage to the stone-throwing last shot of Fandry, that was itself a homage to the last shot of Shyam Benegal’s Ankur, Gopi flings away the bottle of perfume. Because perfumed beauty would be camouflage, and camouflage is not the answer.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 Jul 2020.

A Patriarchal Narrative

My Mirror column:

Films S Durga and Nude show a reality where Indian women can be either sexual individuals or mothers and sisters — not both. The second of a two-part column.

S Durga opens with a religious procession. The sequence is fairly long and shot in an observational documentary style. Men in flaming vermilion mundus are fastening each other’s garments tightly around their waists. Their brown torsos are bare but for several necklaces around their necks. As the drum beat rises to a crescendo, some of the younger men start to go into a trance. We watch as they suspend themselves from heavy iron hooks. The hooks are attached to orange metal frames, so that these young men now dangle before the goddess, like carcasses from cranes.


The Garudan Thookkam procession is an annual ritual recreation of a myth in which the insatiable Goddess Kali/Durga was placated by the blood of a wounded Garuda. From the sacrificial fervour of these spread-eagled young ‘garudas’, the film cuts to an empty highway at night. A few cars zip by. A woman in a salwar-kameez waits by the roadside, nervously examining her phone for messages. A pair of men draw up on a motorbike. One gets off and urges the other, Kabeer, not to waste any time. Then he and the bike are gone, and Kabeer and the young woman, as yet unnamed, set off. They try to flag down a bus, but fail. The dark road stretches out endlessly before them.


Two drunken men in a car see the couple walking, slow down and ask them where they want to go. The railway station, says Kabeer. The men offer them a ride. The couple hesitate for an instant, but their choices are limited. They get in the back seat.


Almost instantly, the man in the front seat turns the spotlight on them — literally — with a torch and a suggestive question: “What’s the plan for tonight?” Then, getting no answer, a second question — brasher, more direct: “What’s this girl to you?” “Friend,” says Kabeer quickly. “Oh, friend, aa? Some people say ‘sister’ at night,” says the man, continuing to look the woman up and down. “What’s your name, Chechi?” he demands of her. Durga starts to cough. “Drink, sister,” the man insists, trying to thrust a bottle upon her.

Director Sanal Sasidharan has taken a profoundly simple idea and turned it into a full-length film that keeps you on tenterhooks for much of its running time. Every word, every gesture made by the men in the car (and the other men who join them as the film progresses) is couched as protection but feels like a sexual threat. Their repeated use of the word ‘Chechi’ — ‘elder sister’ in Malayalam — to address the cowering, increasingly weepy woman at their mercy is thus painfully ironic. But it is no surprise.

The inability of so many Indian men to see a woman simply as a human being is something that constantly assails us, in films as in life. What makes the Hindi-speaking Durga the target of so much unwelcome attention is not just her momentary vulnerability. It is that she has stepped out of her home, her community, and that leaves her — in the eyes of these men — unprotected. Yes, she is with a man, but a man who has not been chosen for her by society. By exercising free choice in the sex-and-romance department, as in the ‘Nirbhaya’ case and so many others, the woman has apparently lost her right to be respected.
Because in this entrenched patriarchal narrative, women can either be sexual individuals or they can be mothers and sisters — not both.

Last week, in the first part of this column, I tried to show how Ravi Jadhav’s Nude also works with this impossible binary that women are forced into. The only way Yamuna’s son feels able to respect his mother is through some notion of her sexual chastity. Her courage in leaving an abusive marriage and her lifelong focus on fulfilling his desires at the cost of her own mean nothing to him, as soon as he can tar her as being sexual. If this were a radicalism test, I might say that Jadhav takes the easy way out by making Yamuna so deeply invested in her own chastity, even as she works as a nude model for art students. But that is also what makes Yamuna so believably tragic — she has internalised patriarchy’s lessons accurately: she knows that to be respected as a mother, she must never be seen as a sexual subject.

Some might find Nude’s final scene unnecessary or distasteful, but it is the culmination — and converse — of this double bind. Years after Yamuna’s passing, her estranged son enters an exhibition. The huge nude painting before him has an instantaneous effect on him — that of arousal. And then, with a sickening thud, he realises that it is a painting of his mother.

The problem, Jadhav’s film suggests, is not in Yamuna’s quiet claiming of sexual agency by being painted. The problem, as in S Durga, is in the gaze. If a woman shows any sign of sexual-ness, it is assumed she is there to turn men on. And suffer the consequences.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Jun 2018.

Worship, motherhood, lust

My Mirror column:

A close look at two of last year’s most ‘controversial’ films – S Durga and Nude – reveals the same demons in the mirror. The first of a two-part column.

At first glance, there seems little in common between S Durga and Nude. The first, a Malayalam film directed by Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, is a surreal, often chilling road movie, featuring a couple who’re forced to hitch a ride with a carful of men somewhere in Kerala. The second, a Marathi film directed by Ravi Jadhav, is about a poor, illiterate woman who takes up a job as a nude model at the JJ School of Art in Mumbai.

When both films were barred at the last minute from the Indian Panorama screenings at last year’s International Film Festival of India in Goa, I hadn’t seen either. What seemed to unify them, then, was the mere fact that their titles – S Durga had been called Sexy Durga until the CBFC insisted on tweaking the name – spoke of the body. This May, though, both films were screened at the Habitat Film Festival in Delhi. And as I watched them, in close proximity to each other, some similarities swam to the surface.

One should start with the disclaimer that in terms of treatment, the two films couldn’t be more different. Sexy Durga had no bound script. The film was improvised during a 20-day low-budget shoot, from an idea that had been with Sasidharan from after the December 2012 gang rape in Delhi. “We did not have high-end equipment and we used to tie the cameraman [Prathap Joseph] to the vehicle,” he told The Week. Jadhav, meanwhile, worked from a screenplay by Sachin Kundalkar, a novelist and filmmaker himself. Nude is carefully plotted -- although it seems to me to fluctuate between a preexisting set of emotional/cinematic cliches and a desire to confront the certainties of our gaze. But of that, more later.

Jadhav’s film opens in a village, where Yamuna (Kalyanee Mulay) is suffering both insult and injury in her marriage. Her husband is carrying on a full-fledged affair with another woman. When his assault and public humiliation reach unbearable limits and he starts to rob her of even the meagre income she earns from rolling bidis, Yamuna decides to take her young son and run away. She arrives in Mumbai, seeking shelter under the roof of a woman she calls Chandra Akka (Chhaya Kadam).

Yamuna’s early days in the city are finely etched – the initial timidity with which she approaches the feisty Chandra as well as strangers, the exhaustion of walking the streets asking for work and the slow, dramatic uncovering of the secret of Chandra’s job. Mulay’s mobile, expressive face is put to marvellous use as she transitions from shock to moral censure to acceptance -- and eventually, the courage to follow Chandra into the art classroom and shed her clothes for money.

Rather than starting with a dogged ideological defence of nudity – couched either as personal freedom or as aesthetic choice – the film offers the potentially resistant viewer a way in, through empathy with Yamuna. The film’s portrayal of her -- first as blameless battered wife and then as self-sacrificing mother –makes it impossible to cast moral aspersions on her choice.

The really interesting metamorphosis is still to come. Slowly, Yamuna transitions -- from the hapless woman who is only doing this job to educate her son to someone who now treats herself and her body with the same dignity with which this new world of artists treat her.

But dignified distance is one thing and sensual self-control another. It is only as Mulay’s Yamuna begins to acquire a quiet new confidence, sometimes sneaking admiring glances at the students’ depictions of her body, that we remember that Kundalkar’s screenplay has thoughtfully provided us an early glimpse of her potential sensuality: the film’s first scene, where she leaves the clothes she is washing by the riverside and leaps into the water, watching from the sidelines in frank yearning as another woman revelled in her husband’s attentions.

Whatever her inner desires, though, Yamuna in her public persona allows herself no pleasures. She guards her chastity fiercely, as she assumes she must. Her primary sense of self remains tied to motherhood. As her son acquires more expensive tastes -- for cigarettes, the cinema and art school -- she takes up private modelling assignments to cater to his growing monetary demands.

The aching gulf between Yamuna’s fluid, ever more sensual presence on canvas and her tightly wound-up persona in daily life is something the film suggests visually, but does not push enough. But this, I want to suggest, is the crux of the problem both Nude and S Durga are trying to grapple with: when might we accept women as sexual beings without tarring them as “available”? Can Indian women ever escape the stifling double-bind of worship and lust?

(The second part of this column is here.)

This Dappled Light

My Mirror column:

Konkona Sen Sharma’s directorial debut eschews high drama for a gentle chiaroscuro of abandon and watchfulness.

The blue Ambassador that transports a Calcutta family into the semi-rural wilderness of 1970s McCluskieganj places Konkona Sen Sharma’s directorial debut in a longstanding tradition of Bengali holiday fictions. One of the earliest parts of India to be colonised and enter into capitalist time, Bengal’s employed white collar denizens treat the chhuti (vacation) with almost as much reverence as the chakri (office job).

So although the dialogue is mostly in English (a fact that fits Sen Sharma’s smoking-drinking-Auld-Lang-Syne-singing assemblage of Anglophone Calcuttans perfectly), A Death in the Gunj clearly draws on the particular historical relationship between the middle-class Bengali vacationer escaping the urban chaos of Calcutta and the unspoilt nearby hinterland of not-too-distant locations in Orissa and Bihar (now partly Jharkhand). Many of Satyajit Ray’s short stories – and several of Saradindu’s Byomkesh Bakshi ones – used journeys to these milieus to presage the unfurling of a mystery. Leaving the city for the jungle or some remote rural outpost, as is seen in so many of these stories, is a fictional trope that enables the emergence of suppressed selves.

Sen Sharma’s film, unlike in the above instances, makes her cinematic travellers a family group: complete with an eight-year-old child, a slightly slutty cousin and a poor relation who is a rather pretty boy. In a beautifully observed set of vignettes, we see how the dynamics of power, class, sex and age are at work within the family, often being set into motion by the arrival of non-familial male visitors – Ranvir Shorey’s belligerently charming Vikram, and Jim Sarbh’s mild-mannered Brian. 

Vikram, in particular, is the catalyst for many reactions. Kalki Koechlin’s Mimi amps up her sexiness in an ever-so-carelessly careful way around him, the older woman of the house (Tanuja) is somewhat flattered by his gift-giving, and even the married Bonnie (Tilottama Shome) can feel mildly slighted by his attention to Mimi. More crucially, though, Vikram embodies a certain masculine aggression: something to which Nandu (Gulshan Devaiah) responds by wanting to match up to him, to prove he’s just as fearless – while the gentler Shutu’s reaction is to retreat into his shell.

Shutu – played to perfection by Vikrant Massey – is the emotional centre of the film. He’s the poor sensitive cousin who spends much of his time with his notebook, sketching frogs and making private lists of words he likes beginning with ‘e’, when he is not hanging out with the actual child in the group, Tani. He is 23 and has just lost a father and failed an exam, but his vulnerability seems to work like some kind of taunt to the older men, who couch their bullying of him as some kind of initiation ritual that will force him to “toughen up”.

I recently watched another film about a troubled young man at the cusp of adulthood – the Marathi film Kaasav (Turtle), directed by Sumitra Bhave and Sunil Sukthankar, which won a National Award for Best Feature last year. Kaasav’s plot, such as it is, feels much more contrived: a young man in bermuda shorts and a backpack tries to slit his wrists, is rescued, escapes from the hospital and coincidentally washes up at the doorstep of an older woman (Irawati Harshe) who is just in the process of recovering from her own experience of suicidal depression.

A painfully repetitive pattern of brattish behaviour on the part of the young man and selfless acceptance on the part of the older woman ensues, made somewhat watchable by the presence of a beautifully calming Konkan coastline and a rather sweet child who offers the innocence quotient. The film is wonderfully well-intentioned and finally leads us out of the impasse by making the protagonist recognise something of his own strength.

Unlike the sanitised, asexual matrix of pure humanity within which Kaasav operates, A Death in the Gunj offers a fleshed out universe of characters, none of whom are evil – yet we are forced to grapple with their darker sides. Along with the companionable lightness and warmth that the family offers, it can also force its less forceful members into preconceived slots, too quick to judge, too preoccupied to pay attention, neglecting to give them the space they might need to be – or become – themselves. 

A woman who really wants to accompany a search party is left behind because she is perceived as too emotionally fraught to be taken – while a man who really does not want to go along is hijacked into the expedition. Sen Sharma’s film is full of moments like these, making us watch as people ignore each other’s needs, or worse, blithely use another person to fulfil their own. Watching it is an exercise in sensitive observation; its particular tragedies may unfold in the slow time of a long-ago vacation, but they could so easily be our own.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 June 2017.

Best of 2016: Part II

My Mirror column:

The second part of my year-end list of my favourite Indian films from 2016.

Carrying on from last week's column: here are six more films that I particularly enjoyed last year.

In no particular order, they are:

6. Waiting – In Anu Menon's affecting hospital drama, two unlikely people are brought together by the shared frustration of having a loved one beyond their reach. Naseeruddin Shah is reliably good as Shiv, an ageing professor who is the epitome of softspoken rationality — except when he's not. But it is Kalki Koechlin as Tara who surprises. As a sharp young woman suddenly faced with the potential loss of the man she has just married, Tara's yo-yoing between anger, vulnerability and sassiness is at the film's heart. Shot in an upscale Kochi hospital that somehow lends itself to cinematographer Neha Parti Matiyani's clean lines and bright close-ups, Waiting serves up grief and angst without letting go of humour. (I particularly enjoyed the mild comic relief served up by Rajeev Ravindranathan as the too-helpful colleague).

7. Sairat – Among the frequenters of film festivals, there are still many who cannot but view the slow-mo set pieces and addictive songs of Nagraj Manjule's hugely successful film as somehow a betrayal of the hopes he sparked with his 2014 debut Fandry. But if Fandry's placing of its dreamy-eyed child hero in an unremittingly realist cinematic milieu earned it critical acclaim, Sairat's astute, sparkly retelling of the same tale —a cross-caste romance in a rural Maharashtra educational setting — won not just fame for its actors, huge profits and massive audiences, but an unimaginable level of exposure for both Marathi cinema and the film's difficult subject. Manjule gloriously subverts India's grim social reality with our love for filmi romance — and vice versa. A film not to be missed.

8. Chauthi Koot – Gurvinder Singh's arresting adaptation of two short stories by Waryam Singh Sandhu offers us a tense, sometimes sinister Punjab that's almost unrecognizable as the one regularly celebrated in Bollywood's song-filled sarson-da-sagas. But though the stories he adapts are set during the 1980s militancy and their central themes — gun-toting men intent on silencing a harmless dog, or train conductors unwilling to take people of a certain community on board — are certainly 'political', Singh's rendering of them is anything but heavy-handed. Trained under the late experimental filmmaker Mani Kaul, Singh is much less invested in plot or narrative resolution than he is in the atmospheric, painstaking exploration of a place and people — and of cinema itself. A film which will reward the attentive viewer.

9. Island City – A tonally ambitious film which pitches itself somewhere between sly humour and a pessimistic take on late capitalism, debut director Ruchika Oberoi's triptych of tales about people and machines can feel quite trippy at times. Each segment is anchored in a fine performance. In the first, Vinay Pathak puts in an eerily convincing turn as the obedient corporate slave sent unwittingly on a dangerous path. The second has Amruta Subhash walking a thin line between relief and guilt as a housewife whose oppressive husband's hospitalisation finally frees her to live her own life — and sublimate her desires in a fictional ideal man. The imagined ideal man reappears in the third segment, this time not via the television, but through letters received by Tannishtha Chatterjee's lonely worker. An occasional sliver of abruptness notwithstanding, Oberoi crafts a darkly acerbic comment on our increasingly alienated lives that's well worth watching.

10. Kapoor and Sons: The dysfunctional family is practically an indie staple in the West, but in Indian cinema it is still a rare enough occurrence to make Shakun Batra's film seem remarkable. While nowhere near as devastating as say, Kanu Behl's Titli (2015), Kapoor and Sons manages to take more risks with what it serves up as family foibles than similar recent films like Dil Dhadakne Do, Shandaar and Khoobsurat. Batra's ability to juggle the buried resentments and the goofy jokes is further buoyed by a truly superb ensemble cast: Rajat Kapoor and Ratna Pathak Shah outstripping the youngsters (Sidharth Malhotra, Fawad Khan and Alia Bhatt), and themselves being a little bit overtaken by the infectiously cheerful Rishi Kapoor as the family's indefatigable raunchy patriarch.

11. Thithi: A great deal of worldwide acclaim has come the way of this remarkable film, and all of it is justified. Set and shot in the very particular landscape of rural Karnataka, Raam Reddy and screenwriter Ere Gowda's delightful debut combines an observational documentary style with a fairly large involved set of characters (who are almost all played by non-actors from the region). Things may appear to be unfolding with all the natural ease of everyday life — but make no mistake, this is a carefully thought-through portrait of family and community, age and youth, freedom and responsibility, death and life. Don't let some imagined notion of rural Karnataka or a reluctance to engage with subtitles put you off it.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Jan 2017.

The Trappings of Technology

My Mirror column:

Two great films about unemployed men and machines confront us with the alienations of our time.

A white British man sits in front of a computer. Even as he strives to keep his attention focused and his eyes from glazing over, the desktop gets hunghangs . The online form he's been trying for ages to fill is now suspended in the ether — information refusing to flow either this way or that. When the 59-year-old Dan demands to know what's happened, the younger black man who's been helping him out tells him the screen is frozen. “It's frozen?” yells Dan in frustration. “Well, can you defrost it?”

A wave of laughter runs through the packed hall at Panjim's Kala Academy as the scene above unfolds as part of the International Film Festival of India's screening of Ken Loach's brilliant new film I, Daniel Blake last on Friday evening. But it is nervous laughter. As I giggle with the rest of the IFFI audience, I wonder if the edge of discomfort is created by the incongruous use of the word 'defrost'. What are we to make of it, this 20th century technological moment that is now completely embedded in our language — and yet already feels near-obsolescent when used to refer to the cool new machines of our era?

That vast empty space that lies between refrigeration technology and the internet — the old machine age and the new — was also made starkly visible in an Indian film I watched a couple of weeks ago at a much smaller film festival up in Dharamshala: Mangesh Joshi's absolutely marvellous debut feature, Lathe Joshi. 

Like the eponymous Daniel Blake (played by the wonderfully restrained British actor Dave Johns), Lathe Joshi is a man being robbed of a living, a person in the present being forcibly relegated to the past. If Loach's protagonist is a joiner without a job (“I'm a carpenter. Much more dangerous,” he tells a child who asks if he's a pirate), Mangesh Joshi's hapless hero is a lathe machine worker who cannot bring himself to tell his family that he no longer has a factory to go to. Chittaranjan Giri is simply superb as the grave-eyed man for whom a machine has shaped not just his life but his very identity: “Is it 'Lathe' Joshi?” asks his aged ex-employer much to Joshi's delight, when asked whether he can be visited on his sick-bed.

But even Joshi's world is divided into machines that love him back and machines that don't. Like Blake, whose confusion at the dehumanising technology of the ironically-named British 'welfare' state is as strong as his connection to his old box of “good quality hand tools”, Joshi must deal not just with machines in the domestic sphere, but with the new sort of industrial machine: one that has replaced him instead of functioning as his ally. Loach's film gives a greater degree of loving attention to the artisanal, moving between an angry, argumentative register and an immersive happy one. I, Daniel Blake, like its protagonist, is insistent on showing us how the handwritten CV, the hand-turned wooden toy, and hand-crafted electrical repairs can still give human beings perfect service and plenty of individually-tailored joy, if only we weren't being forcibly tunnelled into the airless crevices of a bureaucratic tech-spertise state.

Given the atomised, anonymised dystopia of the British present, perhaps Loach's evocation of an unblemished lost alternative is unavoidable. The Marathi film, on the other hand, must engage more complicatedly with the improvements still being brought about by the everyday incorporation of technology into our lives. The arrival of a mixer-grinder can still raise the efficiency of an Indian woman's life by several notches; the connectivity of mobile phones, computers and cars is able to produce a standard of convenience and comfort that isn't just glamorous.

But in kinship with another recent film, Ruchika Oberoi's Island City, Mangesh Joshi's film forces us to think about where we might be headed. The dying factory owner that Lathe Joshi goes to meet is quietly cognizant of his fate as a human being in the present era: “I am alive, only thanks to these machines,” he says resignedly. Finally, the grandmother's chanting machine and the internet pooja may seem funny, but they are incredible examples of how technology has inserted itself into the spaces between our supposed inner selves and our notion of the divine. Our spiritual happiness, too, is now beholden to technology.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27th Nov 2016.

The Untamed Heart of India

My Mirror column for 22 May, 2016:

Sairat delivers both a compelling tribute and an astutely-aimed punch to decades of Indian film romance.

At a tense moment in Nagraj Manjule's Sairat, a middle-aged garage-owner (whom the film's youthful couple have called on for help) turns on them with a wan exhaustion at the prospect of what they want from him. "Movies and real life aren't the same thing," he says with a gesture of helplessness. "What your parents teach you, and what you do..." 

It is one of the sharpest moments in Manjule's consummately-executed film: simultaneously embedded in the on-screen lives of its characters, while also addressing the dense, criss-crossing matrix of filmi and real that constitutes our relationship to romance. Manjule, whose powerful first feature Fandry was a 2014 festival favourite, has taken a remarkable leap from that recognizable realist aesthetic into something gloriously hybrid: young love, complete with songs both slow-mo and zingy, into which reality seeps darkly. That's the thing that makes Sairat so clever. Through it, Manjule is speaking to us in both capacities — as a country of wannabe-lovers, a people who celebrate the idea of romance in every film we make a hit — and as a country of real-life haters, a people that responds with practiced violence whenever some poor delusional souls actually decide to take that idea to heart. 

So much of the sparky, filmi appeal of Sairat lies in the fact that its protagonists—brilliant first-time actors Akash Thosar and Rinku Rajguru, playing the teenage lovers Prashant 'Parshya' Kale and Archana 'Archie' Patil—refuse to play by the rules of "real life", which for most people in India is the same as "what your parents teach you". And yet Manjule makes it very clear that their gumption is foolhardy; that real life will have its way. Right from the opening, when Prashant sweeps his flailing village cricket team to effortless victory, we are made unmistakeably aware of the hierarchies that shape this world: the Dalit boy can win a cricket match, but the trophy will be awarded by the local political boss, a Patil (who turns out to be Archana's father). 

Later in the film, there's a remarkable scene when this caste hierarchy easily overturns another of the hierarchical pieties ostensibly honoured by Hindu tradition: respect for one's guru. Patil's son and heir—literally called Prince—is asked his name by an irritated teacher who sees him talking on the phone in class. He doesn't answer. He slaps the teacher. In another schoolyard scene, Prashant is being roughed up by Archana's cousin Mangya for no good reason. He is pinned to the ground, holding onto Mangya's collar—but still holding off on hitting him back. The words we hear Prashant say reveal both his anger and his fear: "You may be a Patil but I'll beat you up." 

Hindi cinema used to specialise in star-crossed lovers, but they were either shown to belong to two equal and opposite clans (this is the tradition in which we might place Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, or more recently, Ramleela)—or two different religions (most recently, think Ishaqzaade). If they had unequal social statuses, it was always class. Of course there are some exceptions — Love Sex Aur Dhokha, and more recently Masaan (which also contains a Facebook-search scene very like the one in Sairat)—but caste on the whole is that which dare not speak its name. Unlike the zillions of other life-and-death romances that Indian cinema has given us, Sairat takes caste head-on. 

And yet the reason it has been able to reach out to so many people—the film is reportedly hitting the 60 crore mark, the highest ever for a Marathi film—is that it delivers its unvarnished truths alongside all the things people go to the movies for: laughter, suspense, drama, music. The songs are particularly lovely, and memorably picturised, putting the green depths of stepwells and the verdant shadows of sugarcane and banana-groves believably to work as romantic oases in the arid landscape of Sholapur.

The cinema also appears as fantasy outside of the songs: a sleeping Prashant sees Archana tiptoe out of her house and walk down to his, in the middle of the night, in a spangly off-shoulder dress. As she demands to be kissed, Prashant panics. "You'll wake everyone!" And then we see that he already has. As his family alternately giggles and grumbles their way back to sleep, the camera pans to show us the small poster above him: filmstar Alia Bhatt in the same dress. 

And when love actually happens, the lovers' fantasy is the same one we've seen at least since Maine Pyar Kiya—"You'll go to work," says Archie to Parshya, as they gaze into each other's eyes. "I'll do the cooking." But unlike a Maine Pyar Kiya, when these two do run away and set up house together, the fantasy is brought to life in a very real slum, with the all-too-real stink of garbage. Without making a big deal of it, Manjule gently reverses gender roles. The boy tries going to work and getting the girl to shop and cook, but she has no idea how to. So she gets the factory job, he does the cooking. 

At their most vulnerable—having arrived in the city but with nowhere to go and no-one to help—Manjule's young lovers must spend the night in public places, scarcely sleeping from discomfort and fear. After such a night, the bright light of day is welcome —but almost too harsh. So they go to the cinema, in whose dark embrace they find a few hours of solace. It is a marvellous scene. Manjule's protagonists may find an undisturbed peace in the cinema. But he has ensured that his audience does not.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22nd May 2016.

Twins from a Temple Town

My Mirror column for 8 May 2016:

Two recent Marathi films use a very similar set of ingredients to create different portraits of Pandharpur.

Films with a sense of place are always a joy. I recently watched two Marathi films — Ringan and Elizabeth Ekadashi — set in the pilgrim town of Pandharpur. Like much recent Marathi cinema, following in the footsteps of Iranian cinema in particular and neo-realist cinema in general, both featured child actors in central roles. 

Elizabeth Ekadashi, directed by Paresh Mokashi (whose earlier Harishchandrachi Factory was India's entry to the Oscars that year), was 2014's National Award winner for Best Children's Film. The plot combines a children's adventure story with a heartwarming moral lesson: a schoolgoing brother-sister pair from Pandharpur (Shrirang Mahajan and Sayali Bhandarkavathekar) decide to set up a stall during Ashadhi Ekadashi (the height of pilgrim season). Their plan is to earn a bit of money, defying their single mother's strict instructions — but only to help her repay a debt. 

Elizabeth Ekadashi opens with the ritual bathing of the idol in a Pandharpur temple, intercut with the equally tender bathing of a bicycle. The bicycle, it turns out, is called Elizabeth — the children's most treasured possession, not just because it reminds them of their late father, from whom it was a gift, but because it allows them access to the town in a way they could not have had without it. Mokashi's film uses the children's natural energy to help develop a lively sense of space —mapping the back terrace of their neighbour's house which offers them a secret escape route, following the kids as they sprint through the web of narrow lanes, allowing us to experience the swelling crowds and festive madness through their dazzled eyes, all the while emphasising the smallness of a town in which a child can barely avoid being recognized. 

That town, as the film shows irrefutably, is pivoted around the temple to Lord Vitthala, an avatar of Vishnu. Yet apart from naming his child-hero Dnyanesh, after the thirteenth century saint associated with Pandharpur, Mokashi steers largely clear of the religious aspect of his locale. Dnyanesh, in fact, sings kirtans in praise of science, anointing Newton and Einstein as gods. 

Makarand Mane's debut feature Ringan (The Quest), which is this year's National Award winner for Best Marathi film, is very different in its emphasis. A farmer, aging before his time, makes the journey to Pandharpur with his little boy because three successive years of drought have driven them to bankruptcy. The premise itself suggests the hope of divine intervention. "The one we're going to visit now, he will certainly help us," says the farmer to his tired, irritable son, who just wants to turn around and go back home. 

But their time in Pandharpur starts badly. In a plot twist clearly inspired by De Sica's neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves, a man steals the scooter, cellphone and money that are literally the duo's last possessions. The police are unhelpful, and father and son end up in the beggars' queue outside the temple. Here Mane's film, in contrast to Mokashi's, directly raises the question of belief, by placing the distressed farmer in conversation first with a spiritual figure on the ghats, and then in a bitter monologue addressed to a old stone statue of Vitthala that he finds lying on the street. 

Mane's ethical landscape is a little too heavily underlined, but his canvas is painted with a deliberate beauty. As long as things are going badly, the camera pans the dusty browns of Maharashtra's drought-ridden regions, coming to rest on the rough stone walls, the drab khaki uniforms, crusty ground and dry bhakri. A change is his characters' fortunes is visually marked by colour - literally heaps of gulaal: scarlet, pink, vermilion - and by the soothing, quenching sight of water. 

Ringan's silent moments are affecting, but its overarching message is cloying. Bicycle Thieves inspires the climax, too — the poor man pushed to the brink of disaster being tempted into abandoning his honesty, and his tragic fall from good faith being witnessed by his little son. There is little newness here, but Mane achieves something special with his actors — the lined face of Shashank Shende, which relaxes into a grin only when he sees one on the face of the adorable curly-haired Abdu (Sahil Joshi). 

There is a bicycle in Ringan, too — a gift to little Abdu from his father. As in Elizabeth Ekadashi, the bicycle allows the child to explore the town, and us to see it through his bewildered eyes. 

Children and bicycles, an adult with an unpaid debt, a posse of pilgrims and the temptation of easy money — the building blocks of Mokashi and Mane's films are strikingly similar. Even the sex workers of Pandharpur appear in both, seen through the eyes of children. If Mokashi makes a gently subversive joke about the way they're usually treated, Mane creates a more convoluted plot-line that involves Abdu's uncomprehending quest for his dead mother. That, too, is the quest of the film's title. I only wish its resolution had been less mawkish.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 May 2016.

Of homes and prisons

My Mirror column last Sunday:

Jabbar Patel's 1981 film Subah (made as Umbartha in Marathi) is a flawed but intriguing feminist portrait of a woman torn between domesticity and a larger social vocation, struggling to find her space.

15th August seems an appropriate day to remember what remains one of Indian cinema's most direct attempts to grapple with a woman's freedom. Jabbar Patel's 1981 Hindi film Subah ('Morning'), made simultaneously in Marathi as Umbartha ('Threshold'), was based on an autobiographical novel called Beghar ('Homeless') by the Marathi writer and music critic Shanta Nisal, and adapted for the screen by Vijay Tendulkar, the eminent playwright.

Tendulkar died in 2008, Shanta Nisal in 2013. But the person who really breathed life into the film - Smita Patil -- died within five years of its release. Patil's striking performance as the unhappy daughter-in-law of a well-off family who decides to take up a job as Superintendent of a home for destitute women brought her a Filmfare Award for Best Actress. Watching the film, one is struck by the transition Patil makes from ghar ki bahu to home superintendent. In the film's early scenes, shot in the pleasant green environs of a comfortable bungalow, Jabbar Patel manages to make it clear that Sulabha/Savitri's role in her household is pretty much redundant. Her lawyer husband (Girish Karnad) goes to work, her social worker mother-in-law heads off to one of her many meetings, and her childless sister-in-law busies herself with Patil's screen child, Rani. We see Savitri float about the house listlessly, as if not quite awake.

By contrast, once running the mahilashram, she is almost always drawn up to her full height, walking with a sense of purpose. Instead of the earlier diffidence, with the actress often framed waiting behind doors, or solitary in windows, Savitri's new body language suggests someone much more certain of herself, even when under attack.

Some of this confidence comes, whether we like it or not, from having been given authority over a number of women who have none. The film occasionally indicates its consciousness of power and hierarchy, and our honourable protagonist's own position in it. One of the film's few humorous moments is Savitri's arrival at the ashram, where she is stopped at the gate by a taunting guard and a large lady who later turns out to be self-designated 'head inmate'. "Jawaan hai (She's young)," sneers the woman, while the guard replies, "Jawaan hi aati hain (It's always young ones who come)." It is only when Savitri writes her name in the register that she is recognized as the new "Behenji", and the two begin to bow and scrape.

Appalled at how bad things are at the home, Savitri spends much of her first months unravelling a tangled skein in which every person accuses another of some wrong-doing. There is simple financial corruption. There's indiscipline, with the women bullying each other and having catfights. There are tales of husbands who no longer want them, or whom they refuse to return to. Some inmates have been abused or raped, by a husband, a tutor, or strangers.

But most of all, there is the issue of how the women inside the home are perceived by the outside world - the local MLA thinks it his right to have a 'girl' sent to him on demand at night; the departed superintendent is rumoured to have supplied women to a local merchant's house parties. One girl is accused of having an illicit relationship outside the home, another manages to part with sexual favours for cash while accompanying Savitri to the market. In what might be the film's most surprising track, two female inmates are 'caught' kissing and a media storm breaks out over the lesbian activity in the ashram. The smell of sex is everywhere, and it is either a taint or a threat. Patil's character is upright and even sympathetic to the women, but horrified by what she seems to see as their sexual dissolution (with regard to the lesbian couple, she suggests psychiatric treatment, but is overruled by the powers-that-be, who turn them out on the street).

There is an ironic mirroring here of another Indian New Wave film, Shyam Benegal's wickedly funny Mandi (1983), in which the 'home' the women inhabit is a brothel, threatened with closure by a thin-lipped figure called Shanti Devi (Gita Siddharth) who with her hypocrisy, sanctimony and political clout could have walked right out of Subah.

Nisal and Tendulkar's narrative is caught in the classic old-style double bind with regard to women's sexuality - women can only have what is perceived to be a full life if they are desired by men, but desiring men makes them weak. This is suggested not only of the destitute women in the ashram, but of Patil's own character.

This link between Savitri's own circumstances and those of the ashram women is both the most interesting thing about the film, and the least delved into. Her husband, while trying to live up to some ideals, sees sex as a need that must be fulfilled, no matter what - leading to the film's denouement. But more memorable is the sequence where Savitri wants to take this job in a faraway place, and her husband - the advocate, pleads her case with the family. It is wonderfully ironic: Subhash is ostensibly representing his wife's cause to his mother, but his mother's primary response is to ask whether he is willing to let her go. "Grahasth hokar sanyaasi banna padega," she pronounces in a not-so-veiled reference to marital sex. Will he give his "ijaazat", permission?

Watching it in 2015, it is difficult not to think of the recent Dil Dhadakne Do, where Rahul Bose's unconscious reference to having 'allowed' his wife to work brings on Farhan Akhtar's ire. But still not the wife's own. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16th Aug 2015.

Extra-legal understanding

My Mumbai Mirror column last Sunday: 

Chaitanya Tamhane's debut film Court is a devastating, elegant indictment of our collective present.

If you're a Hindi film viewer, you've been watching the lives of heroes unspool in courtrooms forever. One of my earliest cinematic memories is of Awara, whose high melodrama involves pitting the judge (Prithviraj Kapoor, also the father) against the accused (Raj Kapoor, also the son), with the daughter/lover (Nargis) mediating between them as lawyer. Awara used the court as real and metaphorical stage for a debate that went beyond a particular crime to the social pressures that create "criminals". Basu Chatterjee's Ek Ruka Hua Faisla, a remake of Sidney Lumet's Twelve Angry Men, couldn't be more different in tone, but its interest in tracking a jury's arguments is, like Awara's, concerned with how the social impinges on the legal. ERHF may seem gritty compared to Awara, but Chatterjee's realism clearly didn't stretch very far: jury trials were abolished in India soon after 1959's Nanavati trial, so a 1986 film about one undercuts the plot's very premise.

But then real-life courtrooms have never had much impact on Hindi movie ones. Hundreds of films, with their "mere kaabil dost" and "kanoon jazbaat nahi, saboot dekhta hai", have wrung eloquent oratory and dramatic suspense out of the dry deliberations and incessant waiting that make up the everyday reality of the Indian courtroom. Of course, there are exceptions; I can think of two recent films that have captured the farcicality of the legal process. Feroz Abbas Khan's slightly dated but pitch-black satire Dekh Tamasha Dekh (2014) showed an investigation into whether a poor man killed in an accident was Hindu or Muslim, having the court deliberate, among other things, on the existence of a river. Subhash Gupta's Jolly LLB (2013) took a smalltime lawyer's big ambitions as the basis for a funny but deep-down cynical take on how the law really works.

Chaitanya Tamhane's superb debut, Court, shares something with the films I've just mentioned. Like them, it is cinematically invested in the theatre of the courtroom, as well as with how the social cannot be divorced from the legal in practice. And yet Court is unlike any other film you've seen - or are ever likely to see. The case Tamhane takes as his take-off point is certainly the stuff of farce: a lok shahir, a folk singer called Narayan Kamble, is charged with abetment to suicide because the police decide that a sewage worker who died on the job was actually following an exhortation made in a song written and sung by the accused. But Tamhane's genius lies in taking the ridiculous and treating it seriously, so that what creeps up on you is much more powerful than if it were farce. Nothing is exaggerated to elicit a reaction. Nothing is played for laughs. So calm, unhurried and deliberate is Tamhane's embrace of his location and his characters that one is persuaded, right from beginning to end, that what one is watching is real.

But - and I cannot stress this enough - Court is no documentary. What Tamhane has done is to assemble a team experienced in documentary - editor Rikhav Desai, cinematographer Mrinal Desai, sound designer Anita Kushwaha - and put their clearly immense talent to use in the service of an immaculately-crafted fiction. Right from the start, when we see Kamble (played by real-life social activist Vira Sathidar) emerge from a tuition class he teaches, walk across a courtyard, catch a bus and arrive at the "Wadgaon Massacre Cultural Protest Meet" to perform his songs, the film combines the wide-angled observational approach of documentary with the unwavering narrative focus of fiction. Visually, too, this is true. These initial scenes, like those in the courtroom later, are clearly informed by a sense of the city as live theatre, but even in the widest of shots, and sometimes at a great distance, the camera picks out the sprightly old man in his grey beard and peach kurta.

The Dalit shahir's songs are sharply critical of the political and economic milieu, but while letting us hear some wonderful lines involving large malls and our "Great Fall", Tamhane's film refuses to ride piggyback on this causticity. Its chosen tone is more deceptively gentle. Understanding what happens in the courtroom involves following its principal protagonists outside of it. So we follow Kamble's defence lawyer Vinay Vora to the fancy supermarket in which he does his solitary shopping, and the prosecution lawyer Nutan home on the local train discussing the unaffordability of olive oil. And so on.

These journeys may seem random, but they aren't. Taken together, they constitute Court's astute intervention in that age-old debate about how the law relates to the socio-cultural world within which it is practiced. And here Tamhane reveals a finely-honed sense of both the tragic and the absurd, delivered without comment. The well-off Vora can't speak to a child in a poor, working class area without "Excuse me" and "Thank you". When he suffers public humiliation, we see him weep; but almost immediately after, getting a facial. The judge who refused to hear the case of one poor Mercy Fernandes, because she wore "sleeveless" to court, takes his vacation in a family resort where everyone descends fully clothed into the swimming pool. The widow of the sanitation worker who went unprotected into manholes encounters a safety belt for the first time in Vora's car. Long after the film ends, you will think about how these worlds, kept so starkly apart by barriers of class, language and prejudice, cannot but stare uncomprehendingly at each other when they collide in the courtroom.

Sex and the Single Man

My Mirror column today:

Harshvardhan Kulkarni's indulgent but refreshingly forthright film Hunterrr opens a much-needed window onto the lustful Indian man. But the catch is, where there's a hunter, there must be prey.

Watching Hunterrr made me think about two things. One is sex, which is what the movie proclaims it's about. The other is childhood. (For Hunterrr, they're necessarily connected, but we'll get to that soon enough.)

Let me begin with the childhood part. Hunterrr surprised me with its desire to start its story -- the tale of Mandar Ponkshe, middle class Marathi man in his mid-to-late-30s – in his long-ago childhood. Because the hero's childhood is among the forgotten tropes of Hindi cinema as we once knew it. It has more or less disappeared from our lives, along with identical twins, cabaret dancers and self-sacrificing mothers.

In recent years, I can only think of a few commercial Hindi films that have used the hero's childhood as a device. My favourite of the lot is Dibakar Banerjee's unerringly brilliant Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, where Abhay Deol's adult life of theft and skulduggery is shown as the narrative consequence of a childhood experienced as one of emotional and material lack. The West Delhi childhood sections, with the wonderful Manjot Singh as the young Lucky, set the tone for the film's powerful evocation of Lucky's vulnerability and class resentment.

But more widely watched is Dabanng, with its obvious homage to the angry child of the Bachchan era (even if he grows up to be Salman Khan). Most recently, as I noted in this column, there was Shamitabh, whose deliberately meta-filmi tribute to our national cinema obsession involved a long initial section in which the hero's film-obsession is tracked through childhood and adolescence. (That first half-hour was easily the best part of Shamitabh.) Dhanush seems to attract films with expansive portrayals of adolescence – Raanjhana (2013) also sought to explain his character's grown-up obsession (in that case, with Sonam Kapoor's Zoya) with a long childhood sequence.

Director Harshvardhan Kulkarni also goes to childhood to explain a specific obsession of his hero: sex. But his treatment shares nothing with the Ma-and-melodrama memories that have been the stuff of traditional Hindi cinema childhoods—parents, for instance, barely figure. Instead, it feels akin to the critically-acclaimed realist Marathi cinema of recent years, in which childhood seems to have acquired a rare pride of place. Contemporary Marathi films as different in tone and intent as Vihir, Shala, Baboo Band Baaja, Fandry and Killa have centred on children's relationships with each other, and with the world. Usually rural and small-town in their settings, several of these films seem to draw on their writers' and directors' personal memories of childhood. But in them, children are the primary protagonists; they don't grow up to become the hero and his friends.

So it's interesting to find Kulkarni combining these two cinematic approaches to childhood. Narrated in the voice of Mandar's bada bhai, a plump softie called Dilip who is fondly and forever known as Yusuf, Hunterrr's childhood sections are perhaps its most disarming. The vision of long summer holidays in a village, with the three cousins plunging into ponds and ignoring the weary harangues of grandmothers, is filled out with superbly convincing juvenile pissing competitions and and banter about wives soaping husbands' backs.

In another interlude, we see the young Mandar, having failed to get Agneepath tickets, skulking past the house-full main theatre to a side screen, where he is initiated into the joys of Hawas ki Rani. There's a hilarious classroom scene just after, in which he learns which of his classmates underwent the same rite of passage. But not all of this rampant boyhood sexuality is quite as innocuous. It is apparently no great distance from salivating over Hawas ki Rani to feeling up women in a marketplace.

Whether making a film like Hunterrr, in which it is the hero and not the villain who does such things, must automatically to be viewed as 'problematic', is a question that needs another column— but let me say that not all cinematic depictions of reality need be understood as celebrations of it.

For me, it was actually refreshing to see a fleshed-out, honest portrayal of the lustful Indian man we all know. But while joining the likes of Band Baaja Baaraat and Shuddh Desi Romance in moving happily away from the mammoth hypocrisy in which a sugary 'pure' love used to inhabit an imaginary stratosphere far removed from 'dirty' sex, Hunterrr continues to perpetuate another sort of myth. The women in this film are only interested in sex as a route to love, unless they're married – in which case they seem fabulously hard-nosed about wanting only sex. I have to concede that this doesn't seem all that unbelievable, but one does come away with the feeling that if Kulkarni had even half as much interest in understanding them as he does in Mandar, he might have ended up with least one exception.

As it stands, what we have is one scene in which the brilliant Radhika Apte, playing the arranged marriage prospect that Mandar has set his heart on, finally learns of his life as a scorer. As Mandar (Gulshan Devaiah, also superb) makes his hesitant confession, Apte's Trupti, with shining eyes, sketches their future life in an open marriage. Mandar can't believe his luck. But then Trupthi turns out to have been testing him, only to reject him out of hand. And then, in one of Hunterrr's unending sleights of hand, the whole conversation turns out to have been in Mandar's imagination.

I'm waiting for the day when we have a Hindi film in which a Trupti can actually imagine that open marriage – not as male fantasy, but her own.