The Spirit of Technologies Past

My Mirror column:

As we hurtle ever faster into a digitised present, some recent films cast an affectionate glance back at the technologies that made us who we are.

Right at the beginning of the recently released Shantilal O Projapoti Rohoshyo, director Pratim D Gupta tells us that his film is about a time “when porn was watched on DVD, news was read in print… and films were made for theatres”. Right from its charming children’s detective story title (the Bangla translates as ‘Shantilal and the Butterfly Mystery’), the film lives and breathes a certain gentle nostalgia. But its special focus is an era that existed until quite recently in India, a time that feels like it’s being elbowed out at top speed by technological transformation. What’s interesting is that the nostalgia is itself framed around an earlier era of technology: the newspaper, the cinema, the photograph.
The film’s deadbeat weather reporter protagonist, Shantilal, with his unquenched desire for a “front page story”; the neighbour who hounds him for a free spot in the matrimonial pages of The Sentinel; the DVD shop guy who urges Bertolucci, Bergman and Buñuel upon a customer who’s waiting for his supply of quality Malaysian erotica – all of these look back fondly to a time before the digital conquest of our lives. But the pirated DVD may be the one to focus on: a signifier of an in-between time. Not before computers, but before news stories began to be broken on Twitter timelines, before Shaadi.com, and before the endless glut of internet porn. It is an era that is not in fact that distant – which is perhaps why it feels so surreal that it is already gone.

Shantilal brings to the fore a theme that has, in fact, underlain many Indian films in the past five or six years: our memories of an analogue era. Ritesh Batra’s 2013 critical and commercial success, The Lunchbox, used a dabbawala mix-up to deliver a tribute to a fast-disappearing world – the Hindi music cassettes Deshpande Aunty still listens to, the Orient fan around which Deshpande Uncle’s stagnant life revolves, the Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi episodes recorded from Doordarshan that Saajan Fernandes watches endlessly in memory of his wife. (Using the voice of Bharati Achrekar as the never-seen Mrs Deshpande was, of course, the perfect meta-textual reference to Doordarshan, on which she was once such a profoundly familiar face.)

If The Lunchbox took a rather melancholy view, Sharat Kataria’s Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015) was a more enthusiastic, even raunchy tribute to the 1990s, featuring Ayushmann Khurrana as the small-town owner of a cassette shop. Some of the most endearing moments of the film’s post-marital romance between Khurrana and Bhumi Pednekar involved the VCR as a therapeutic sexual aid and the playing of songs as messages on a cassette player.

The audio cassette with songs personally picked out and recorded was, of course, the ultimate 1990s romantic gesture. That was the matrix of a more recent 1990s-set romance, the Yash Raj production Meri Pyaari Bindu (2017), also starring Khurrana. In that film, Khurrana plays a Bengali middle class hero (complete with a daaknaam – Bubla), whose largely unrequited love for his neighbour Bindu is tied up with the technology of their adolescence: Ambassador cars, STD-ISD booths, a nascent virtual universe embodied in email addresses such as muqaddarkasikandar1977@hotmail.com.


Video cassettes were crucial to both Nitin Kakkar’s Filmistaan and Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider. Both released in 2014: one set in Pakistan, the other in Kashmir, and both had political messages. Although tonally miles apart, the two films are united by their references to the early Salman Khan films Maine Pyar Kiya and Hum Aapke Hain Koun. Kakkar presents those films, as he does all Hindi cinema, as the great unifier of countries and people divided by Partition. Haider, written by the journalist and author Basharat Peer, adapts Shakespeare’s Hamlet to 1990s Kashmir: a dark and violent place, as searingly sarcastic as it is driven to desperation. In this world, the two Salmans – the original play’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern turned brilliantly into Bhai fans and lookalikes who run a videocassette shop – initially seem like comic relief. But as the film builds to its necessarily tragic climax, it becomes clear that no amount of grainy re-watching of MPK songs can keep Haider (Shahid Kapoor) from seeing the reality of the Salmans – or keep Kashmir from seeing the reality of India.

To return to Shantilal o Projapoti Rohoshyo: it isn’t just a simple tribute to a past era. The protagonists of Pratim Gupta’s not-quite-mystery live on the cusp of the present, and often display an active reluctance to cross over. Shantilal himself doesn’t have Whatsapp, though he does have a mobile phone. The film star in her prime (Paoli Dam, very effective as Nandita) expresses a nostalgia for autograph seekers in an era of selfies, and keeps a corner of her bedroom as a photographic shrine to her past. But she finds her future threatened by a photograph from that past. Old technologies can inspire nostalgia, but our attachment to them may tell us less about those forms than about ourselves.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1 Sep 2019.

The Year of Sex - I

My Mirror column:

Looking back at what sex has meant in 2017, both onscreen and off. The first of a two-part column.

Looking back at Hindi cinema in 2017, it seems to me that the theme of this year was sex. I’m not suggesting at all that we’ve suddenly got it all figured out; no, that we certainly haven’t. In the world outside the screen, the anxieties of politicians and principals alike coalesced around matters sexual – condom advertisements on television were banned as “indecent”, two teenagers were suspended from a school because they were seen hugging…. These anxieties reached ridiculous heights when it came to the silver screen. The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) tried to block Lipstick Under My Burkha for its “lady-orientedness” and delayed the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer, When Harry Met Sejal because its trailer contained the word “intercourse”.

Later in the year, the international award-winner Sexy Durga was rechristened S Durga and then unceremoniously dropped from the Indian Panorama section of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), along with a Marathi film called Nude. A censored version of S Durga was later screened for the jury following a directive from the Kerala High Court.

But such anxiety is a barometer of cultural transformations. It should perhaps come as no surprise, then, that what did manage to reach our screens revealed a society in the midst of unbuttoning – and so intent on the task at hand that it no longer cares if some people are gaping.

The year began with Shlok Sharma’s wonderfully rich and strange debut, Haraamkhor, with a radically nonjudgemental portrait of sexual comingof-age that was buoyed by Shweta Tripathi’s simply stellar turn as the teenaged schoolgirl Sandhya. Less stark but equally significant was Vidya Balan’s thoroughly charming portrayal of the non-posh, non-svelte housewife in Tumhari Sulu. Balan’s channelling of her character’s warm, enthusiastic, sari-clad self into a public persona as radio jockey on a late-night-show gave us a rare model of sexiness based on being comfortable in one’s own skin.

Other female characters speaking of sex and actually acting on their desires appeared in Alankrita Shrivastava’s imperfect but pioneering film Lipstick Under My Burkha. The radicalness of these depictions came from their wrenching frankness about the body’s yearnings, forcing viewers to think about how the possibility of pleasure is suppressed by an overarching social discourse of shame.

Sex and shame were also on the menu in one of the year’s chirpiest films, Shubh Mangal Savdhan, with director RS Prasanna serving up the unspeakable subject of erectile dysfunction with remarkable warmth and wit. Ayushmann Khurana and Bhumi Pednekar followed up their previous pairing as a just-married-and-havingproblems couple in Dum Laga Ke Haisha with an often hilarious turn here, aided in no small measure by Seema Pahwa’s magisterial comic timing and Ali Baba, gufa and Chaalis Chor euphemisms.

Irreverent humour was crucial to another of the year’s most ambitious bad girl films, Simran. In one of the film’s emblematic dialogues, Kangana Ranaut’s Gujarati-American heroine Praful tells a joke. A small girl asks her mother, “What is a boyfriend?” “If you become a good girl, you will get one,” the mother says. “And if I become a bad girl?” the little girl asks. “Then you will get many!” concludes Praful, laughing hysterically. Praful’s guilt-free pursuit of the good life includes a happy hook-up with a stranger at the bar, made even more fun by her abandonment of the proceedings when she discovers he has no protection.

Something particularly pleasing about this year’s crop of films was that it wasn’t only bad girls who made out: whether it was Parineeti Chopra’s Bindu Shankar Narayanan in Meri Pyaari Bindu’s 80s Calcutta, or Anushka Sharma’s rural Punjabi poetess from a century ago in Phillauri, the good-girl-fromgood-family is now allowed to sleep with a lover without being disqualified from niceness.

Sex scenes of charm and intensity also appeared in films that weren’t necessarily ‘about’ sex at all – I think, for instance, of the spontaneous erotic encounter that sets Sandeep Mohan’s quirky road movie Shreelancer off in an atmospheric new direction, or the moving seduction of Rajkummar Rao’s bespectacled hero in a ratty bedroom in Trapped.

Sex in a ratty Mumbai bedroom also made an appearance in Tu Hai Mera Sunday, with Avinash Tiwary’s Rashid as the player who brings home a stream of attractive young women. But Tu Hai Mera Sunday, despite having several unexpurgated discussions of all sorts of things, seemed to me to hold back when it came to sex. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the film judges Rashid or his sexual partners as immoral (in fact it makes a point of having Rashid tell us – and his male buddies -- that these young women are all “decent”), I wondered why it needed to shake love apart from sex. Because sex, then, seems naturally to fall to the bottom, emerging somehow as the inferior of the two.

The question of sex versus love is of course, the great chestnut – and I shall return to it next week.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 31 Dec 2017.

A Mixed-Up Tape

Meri Pyari Bindu’s attempt to merge our nostalgia for old Hindi songs with 1990s adolescence and a Calcutta childhood feels well-intentioned but muddled.

Abhimanyu Roy (urf Abhi urf Bubla) is slain by Bindu Shankar Narayanan the very first time he meets her. Bindu is perched on a pile of old boxes in the ramshackle room on the terrace of the old North Calcutta house her Tamil parents have just moved into. Abhimanyu has been sent to greet the new neighbours with a plate of keema samosas made by his mother. The year is 1983, and they are approximately six years old.

Meri Pyari Bindu traces the Bubla-Bindu relationship over the next two-and-a-half decades, as the six-year-olds grow into Ayushmann Khurana and Parineeti Chopra: he an MBA who effortlessly manages a shift to bestselling writer and she an aspiring singer. The enduring question is the same one asked in a growing number of Hindi film romances over the years, most recently in Karan Johar's Ae Dil Hai Mushkil: Can the best friend who is obliging sidekick, perpetual partner-in-crime and dependable shoulder-to-cry-on cross over into boyfriend territory?

What is meant to set Meri Pyari Bindu (MPB) apart, I suppose, is the nostalgia trip it launches us on. The centrepiece of that nostalgia is a surefire one for almost any one who likely to walk into a cinema hall to watch MPB: Hindi film songs from the 1950s to the 1980s. From the forever seductive ‘Aaiye meherbaan’, sung by Asha Bhonsle for Madhubala’s nightclub singer in the 1958 Howrah Bridge, to Mithun’s tragic romancing of his guitar in the action-packed ‘Yaad aa raha hai tera pyaar’, sung by Bappi Lahiri in the 1982 Disco Dancer, these songs are the soundtrack to a lot of our lives. It is thus perfectly believable that they should be the soundtrack to Bubla’s and Bindu’s, on the romantic fixture of '90s adolescence: the personally-recorded audio cassette, or mixtape.

As someone of the same generation as the film’s protagonists (who spent some of my childhood in Calcutta), I also enjoyed other components of the film’s nostalgia trip: the Ambassador as a space of romance; dumbcharades, powercuts and fests; postcards and STD booths; email addresses like muqaddarkasikandar1977@hotmail.com. But the present -- the grand old North Calcutta house filled with even older furniture, the perfectly-cast crew of overenthusiastic family members who assemble at a moment’s notice to greet the prodigal nephew – feels a tad too picture-perfect, in exactly the Bollywood way we’ve seen in other recent Bengal-set films, eg. Piku, Barfi, Te3n. And really, must there be two Durga Puja moments bookending the film just because we’re in Bengal?

Still, there are some Calcutta scenes where the dialogue is spot-on: like the father of a prospective arranged match for Bubla who insists that his daughter loves books. “Rabindranath is her favourite, of course. Then Satyajit Ray. Then Edin Blyton [sic],” he says before declaring reassuringly, “You come a close fourth,” and proceeding to read aloud a particularly steamy scene from one of Bubla’s novels. Suprotim Sengupta’s script does the dynamic between Bubla’s Bengali parents with a light touch, punctuated by predictable bouts of irritation but never without affection. “I can’t do natural overacting like you,” says his exasperated father to his mother. The one time the parents are allowed to break into Bangla, it is again his father berating his mother for not treating Bubla like an adult: “Jotheshto bodo hoyechhe, ja bhalo bujhbe tai korbe! (He’s grown-up enough, he’ll do what he thinks is right!)”

But the film wants to transcend Bengaliness. So it whisks us away first to Goa and then to Bombay, mentions Bangalore several times, makes the backdrop a ‘national’ one of Hindi film songs and Bigg Boss, and turns the Bengali-Calcuttan hero into a writer of Hindi sex-horror novels. And yet the sweetly bhadra Bubla, with his sweetly bhadra parents, seems absolutely wrong as a writer of abhadra pulp fiction with titles like Chudail ki Choli. Still, I suppose one should appreciate having a cross-community romance where the linguistic or cultural differences don’t seem to matter to anyone (unlike a Two States or a Vicky Donor).

Bindu is weighed down by greater ambition and a much heavier family narrative than Bubla: her army-man father is alcoholic and sour-faced (and of course he is played by Prakash Belawadi, who is becoming a fixture for those characteristics in Hindi movies, from Madras Cafe to Talwar); she gets along much better with her mother, but doesn’t get enough time with her. Parineeti tries zealously, but mostly there isn’t enough in the script to bring her character’s ambition or angst fully to life – and her repeated engagement-breaking just feels like Shuddh Desi Romance redux. The one time Bindu truly moves us is a superb scene where she calls Bubla from an STD booth. One wishes the rest of their romance had that intensity.

As for Bubla, he may seem the more loving one with Bindu, but his comic girlfriend interlude shows us that he’s quite capable of treating a romantic partner badly. Between that and the fact that he channels his romantic angst into a book (rather than losing his marbles — think Ranbir Kapoor in Ae Dil or Rockstar), this might be among the more well-rounded tragic heroes we’ve seen in a popular Hindi film. That’s a win.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 May 2017.