An archive of expressions: On Saroj Khan

My Mirror column for July 5:

The late Saroj Khan created a new kind of dancing body on the Hindi film screen, but she also embodied a link to a history of dance – and of cinema. 

(Images courtesy Ahmedabad Mirror, taken by the photographer Dayanita Singh in the early 1990s)

Saroj Khan, who died on Friday aged 71, has been described in obituaries as a “veteran Bollywood choreographer”. That is an identity she certainly owned. But it doesn’t capture the breadth and depth of her connection to the Hindi film industry, or indeed her role in creating the field she dominated for so long.

Born Nirmala Nagpal in 1948, Khan began as a child actor. Her origin story, which she relates in Nidhi Tuli’s superb 2012 Public Service Broadcasting Trust documentary The Saroj Khan Story (free on YouTube), was as filmi as she clearly was herself. As a toddler, she would dance with her own shadow on the wall. The doctor her worried mother consulted had connections with moviedom, and proposed that a dancing child might be a bankable asset. Her parents, Partition migrants from Karachi, needed the money. The screen name Saroj was to avoid social censure.

Tuli’s film is richly layered, tapping into the enchantment of cinema but never losing sight of its trials. Terrific stories compress several registers of film history. My favourite is one in which Saroj and child star Baby Naaz come down from Maganlal Dresswalla’s shop in their infant Radha-Krishna costumes (for the 1953 film Aagosh), and an old couple bow down to them in devotion. Khan takes a childish delight in the memory. But when we watch her sending her grandchildren off to school, their boringly normal childhood contrasts sharply with hers. “We have an age na, where we are not required as a child star, neither grown-up. That was my age at 10, I was lost,” she tells Tuli. For Khan, 10 was an age of decision-making: “Good friends were there, they told me, why don’t you become a group dancer?” Her dancer friend Sheela laughs at how she’d help Saroj escape punishment for her frequent lateness. A schoolgirlish memory, and yet the two little girls putting on makeup under the Filmistan stairs were at work, not at school. At stake was a job, and a family of five with no other income.

What makes Saroj Khan’s narrative powerful, of course, is that her skill and dedication transformed her from the anonymous girl at the edge of the screen to the one directing the performance. Her life also feels like a link to a fast-receding past, as rich as it was messy. Noticing that she was talented enough to pick up the heroine’s moves, the legendary dance director B Sohanlal made her his assistant. If that gloriously open-ended world allowed a 12-year-old group dancer to become assistant to her 43-year-old boss, it also allowed him to ‘marry’ her at 13. Saroj became a mother at 14. She remained Sohanlal’s assistant from 1962 to 1973, having another child with him before finally parting ways, and remarrying in 1975.

In interviews, Khan described vividly how she learnt that she could not just execute Sohanlal’s directions, but compose her own. Half a century has passed, but each word and gesture was a bodily memory. Khan’s talent was acknowledged by everyone from Vyjayanthimala, the great dancing star of the 1950s and ’60s, to the many directors who had seen her in action. Still, there was nothing automatic about her progress up the ranks in an industry in which only men became dance-directors. Her future in the industry was so insecure that during her years with Sohanlal, she did a nursing course and worked at KEM Hospital, learnt typing to be a receptionist at Glaxo, and even “became a make-up man”, as she puts it, inadvertently pointing to another sphere then exclusively male.

It was after years of C-grade films that Khan finally found acclaim, with dance numbers picturised on Sridevi, in films like Mr. India (1987) and Chandni (1989), and on Madhuri Dixit, in a series of films beginning with Tezaab (1988). Famously, the Filmfare Awards instituted an award for choreography, giving the first honour to Saroj Khan for Tezaab. Kangana Ranaut, paying tribute to Saroj Khan’s contribution to that cinematic era, has been quoted as saying: “Back then when you speak about a superstar actress, you meant a dancer actress. You didn’t mean anything else.” Ranaut is right, but what she doesn’t say is that Saroj Khan was part of the transformation that created the dancer actress. Dance had been part of Hindi cinema from the start, but barring a few (largely South Indian) actresses with classical training, the heroine didn't need to dance. The vamp was enough. But watching Helen had been a guilty pleasure, watching Madhuri was increasingly not.

Paromita Vohra, in a brilliant essay in the book tiltpauseshift: Dance Ecologies in India, has argued that ‘Ek Do Teen’ marks a turning point in the history of Hindi film dance because “a clear heroine figure [appeared for the first time] in a dance that is chiefly sexy, and presented sexiness with a robust, bodily series of steps”. Saroj Khan’s visibility – she went on to win eight Filmfare awards and three National awards for choreography – made Hindi film viewers see that “the body of the dancing heroine contained also the body of the choreographer”. “In doing this,” writes Vohra, “she gathered the ghosts of many forgotten worlds of dance – which had found their way into the darkened corners of Bollywood studios as dance teachers, musicians and extras – into her being, bringing these worlds to a professional place again.”

The history of dance in 20th century India was a history of invisibilisation. A national culture 'cleansed' of its links to tawaifs and devadasis demanded the erasure of sexualness from Indian-style dance, at least on screen. Saroj Khan, beginning as the short-haired Westernised dancer, eventually became an archive of sensual Indian dance on screen.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 Jul 2020.

Note: Linking here to two of my previous pieces on the history of dance in India: a feature essay on tawaifs and how dance was taken from them -- 'Bring on the Dancing Girls' -- and a review of Anna Morcom's book Courtesans, Bar Girls and Dancing Boys: The Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance 

The Catholic Dress: Bombay to Goa and Back

My Shelf Life column for TVOF:
 
The dress-wearing Catholic girl was an object of Indian male fantasy, but as Jane Borges’ Bombay Balchão makes clear, the reality was more complex than the stereotype

At the beginning of her just-published debut novel Bombay Balchão, the Mumbai-based journalist Jane Borges sets us down in the Catholic neighbourhood of Cavel on Christmas Eve 1945. Before we hear the midnight mass, we hear of Karen Coutinho, whose tailor Francis (“from John D'Souza and Sons”) has made her “a long yellow silk gown, which swept the road as she walked to church”, and of her husband Alfred, who is glad that his wife’s gold lace mantilla covers her “heavily powdered face and the crimson lips she had painted with cheap lipstick”. And we hear, almost simultaneously, of the Hindus on Dr D' Lima Street who “sneakily peered from the gaps between the iron rods of their windows, gawking at the dressy Christian women”. 

Borges doesn't dwell on her wartime setting, but a 2017 piece on 'aunty chic' by Cheryl-Ann Coutto published on Scroll points out that knee-length skirts were a wartime trend for economic reasons. “There was rationing, food coupons, there was less food, less cloth and so the hemlines too were shortish,” an 80-year-old Elettra Gomes tells Coutto. “Then after the war ended, Christian Dior came out with calf-length swirling full skirts and tiny cinched waists [this lavish, ultra-feminine aesthetic... became known as the New Look]”.

But even if the length of Karen Coutinho's gown could have been seen as a legitimate post-war luxury, Bombay Balchão makes it clear that she was up against other forms of moral censure: such as the local Hindu patriarch accusing Christians of having “sold their souls to the gori chamdi” (white skin) by dressing like Europeans--at a time when the Gandhian campaign for Khadi was at its acme.

A still from the film Baaton Baaton Mein.

The real source of censure, however, lay far deeper than nationalism or economy. Bombay's Catholic women – whether the East Indians, as the original Catholic inhabitants of Bombay and Salcette called themselves, or the Goans who came to the city later–were invariably marked by the wearing of dresses. 
 
By exposing the legs to view, and simply by fitting around the female upper body, the dress seems to have sparked the sexual imaginations of generations of Indian men whose own wives and daughters were never without the protective drape of the pallu or the dupatta. Borges writes, “In the darkness, numbed by furious lovemaking, (the Hindu man) would latch on to his wife's waist, and in between suckling her breasts ask if she would wear one of those dresses, just for him. She would agree coyly, but as an afterthought dredge up the same feeling her husband had exposed in front of the family when he saw the Christian women strut on the roads.” That particular Hindu male fantasy made its way firmly into Hindi cinema via such depictions of Catholic girlhood as Raj Kapoor's Bobby and Basu Chatterjee's Baaton Baaton Mein, and lasted well into the 1980s, when Salman Khan made that 'secret' dress-wearing request of his long-haired, 'traditionally Indian' heroine Bhagyashree in the epoch-defining Maine Pyar Kiya (1989).

“For repressed Maharashtrians and Indians like me, Jesus Christ, this was where heaven began!” declared the late Kiran Nagarkar in Paromita Vohra's charming short film Where’s Sandra?, which addresses the precise question of what the office-going Bandra girl represented to the rest of the city. One of the real 'Sandras from Bandra' that Vohra tracks down makes the crucial point that the Christian girl was the object of Indian male fantasy also because women from most other urban Indian communities weren't allowed to go out to work. The Christian secretary in the form-fitting dress became embedded in the collective Indian psyche, with even such pillars of the Goan community as cartoonist Mario Miranda essentially reinforcing the stereotype with his polka-dotted Miss Fonseca.

The dress-wearing Goan Christian secretary was immortalised by cartoonist Mario Miranda in the busty figure of Miss Fonseca.

Of course, the stereotype of the Christian girl as open in her morals didn't quite fit the facts. Bombay Balchao is full of Catholic boys bemoaning their fate while the Catholic girls they're dating scratch them for trying to sneak a kiss. In Vohra's film, too, the late poet and professor Eunice D'Souza argues with efficiency that the Christian family and school-going milieu could be as orthodox as the non-Christian ones, policing female sexuality with just as much middle class paranoia. Dress-wearing was no marker of (im)morality. 

Not all Christians wore dresses, either. For instance, the Portuguese insistence “that converts adapt to the European style of dressing” led to such innovations as the pano bhaju, which Borges calls a “middle ground” created by orthodox Brahmin women. Now 'traditional' when dancing to sad Konkani love songs called mando, this particular Goan Christian outfit consists of a sarong-like lower garment (pano), worn with a loose gold-embroidered blouse (bhaju) and a stole called the tuvalo. The hybridity is India at its best: the pano draws on the South Indian lungi/mundu/veshti, the bhaju is Portuguese, while the gold thread work owes something to the Mughals. 

One of the pleasures of Borges' book is its mini-ethnography of Bombay's different Christian communities. The Goans and East Indians express disdain for the Mangaloreans as calculating, not so comfortable with English, not good dancers or good at Western music. The Mangaloreans, meanwhile, saw the Goan absorption of Westernised mores as a cop-out, too easy a surrender to their colonial masters. Mangalorean rebelliousness, not surprisingly, was expressed most vividly in their women's clothes: the community may have converted to Christianity, but the women still wore their heavily embroidered sarees and jasmine venis (floral garlands) in their buns – rather than floral dresses and bouffants.

Beyond Bombay, too, the dress-clad Christian working girl was the focus of Hindu male anxiety: think of the Anglo-Indian Edith, who becomes the heroine Arati's office colleague and then friend in Satyajit Ray's Mahanagar. For the two Calcutta women, lipstick marks a bond between them. For the Hindu husband waiting edgily at home, the same lipstick becomes emblematic of the 'corruption' of his wife. Clearly, as non-Christian women ventured tentatively into the workforce, the dress-wearing Christian girl was now a terrible threat. For on what women wear, as always, the whole burden of civilisation comes to rest. 

Thankfully, as Vohra suggests, Sandra the stereotypical good-time girl doesn't have a reason to exist anymore. Because we all a have a bit of Sandra in us now. Something to think about each time you wear a dress – and can even let the camera see you in it, unlike Bhagyashree.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 9 Dec 2019.

The World On A Reel

From the unsettlingly intimate portrait to the panoramic film essay, the new Indian documentary no longer bludgeons its way to viewership.


IT IS THE fourth of January in Lachen village, north Sikkim, 10,000 feet above sea level. Jigme waits for the storm. “Shortly everything will be covered in snow. You will hear the ant breathe,” he says.” And sure enough, as we continue to watch Arghya Basu’s Death, Life, etc, we are transported from the many-tongued babel of Losar (the Buddhist New Year) to the unimaginable stillness of a man walking through fields of snow. We hear the ant breathe.

The power of documentary has long been misunderstood to be something akin to that of a drumroll: beat the drum loud enough and your message will reach its audience. But, in fact, its power lies in the conjuring up of alternate worlds – worlds no less real for being put on screen. The real attraction of documentary films may be that they give the viewer access to images she may not otherwise see – or if she sees, may not ordinarily look at. Sometimes this may be true despite the drumroll. As Satyajit Ray said of Sukhdev’s India ’67 (one of several films commissioned by the Films Division to commemorate the 20th year of India’s independence), “I like it, but not for its broad and percussive contrasts of poverty and influence, beauty and squalor, modernity and primitivity – however well shot and cut they might be. I like it for its details – for the black beetle that crawls along the hot sand, for the street dog that pees on the parked bicycle, for the bead of perspiration that dangles on the nose tip of the begrimed musician.”

Documentary has always been at the cutting edge of cinema’s relationship with the real. But if an older generation of documentary filmmakers were certain that they had a handle on reality, the current crop is equally certain that they don’t. Director after director speaks of the need to put oneself in the frame, of “transparent filmmaking”. While there is an unswerving admission that the filmmaker’s presence alters the quality of interactions, both in life and on film, there’s also a keen sense that the personalised narrative has somehow acquired a greater claim to truth in a world full of faceless information. The “subjective documentary” can range from the meditative, free-ranging cinematic essay (aka Death, Life, etc) to scrutinising the filmmaker- subject relationship (like Shyamal Karmakar’s I’m the Very Beautiful, an unsettlingly intimate but transformative account of the filmmaker’s on- and offscreen relationship with a singer called Ranu). The cinema, Godard said, is not an art which films life: it is something between art and life. The filmmakers profiled here are all striving towards finding their particular place in the middle.

1. ANTI-EXOTICA
ARGHYA BASU'S CINEMATIC ESSAYS CAPTURE NEW WORLDS WITHIN THE OLD

Still from Listener’s Tale : Mahakala smiles

"He who writes the story seldom knows the tale it spins. Everyone except him has a tale when finally it relents,” reads one of the inter-titles in Arghya Basu’s film, Listener’s Tale (2007). The film’s title, too, is meant to underline Basu’s belief that the author is not so much a creator as a transmitter – he or she is a listener more than a teller. But the 38-year-old filmmaker has no illusions about being able to represent ‘the truth’. (He quotes Mircea Eliade: a true story in one place can be a false tale in another.) All he wants is to use the cinematic apparatus to explore the world. “The camera opens up a different mode of enquiry,” he argues. “It’s a machine. Like a microscope or a telescope, the world seen through it is a different world.”
Certainly, the world as it appears through Basu’s lens is both starker and more lyrical than it might seem in everyday life. Lichens turn ghostly grey on rocks, smoky clouds cover the mountains, tales of a blood pact between the Lepchas and the Bhutias “at the junction of epochs” create a Sikkim haunted by history. But just as you’re settling in for a beautifully executed slice of exotica, the music becomes electronic. Wires stretch taut across a city shrouded in mist, and shots of Gangtok town are overlaid with the tinny engaged tone of telephones. A self-declared “anthropological filmmaker” with an interest in the relationship of art to history, myth and philosophy, Basu’s Listener’s Tale (2007) and Death, Life, etc (2008) create a stunning Sikkimese landscape in which the bare bones of trees are as crucial as the lines of television antennas. “Are those beliefs that have survived for centuries more true, or the modernity that threatens to efface everything? I don’t know. But I think it’s a problem to keep chronologising. Things co-exist.”

Basu, who teaches at Pune’s Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), is inspired by cinematic giants like Godard and Cocteau. He is driven not by a desire for documentation but by the poetry of the image. “I don’t want to be part of this myth of the real that documentary perpetuates. I want a cinema that will create memory.” Amid the excitement about fresh work in documentary in India, Basu sounds a note of caution – or several. He accepts that more documentaries are being made – even being watched – but worries about where we’re headed. “Finance doesn’t only encourage, it is also an auto-censor. The foreign funders coming to India want only “current affairs”. There’s not enough critical interest in life itself.” Other funders promote what he disparagingly calls “keyhole cinema”, demanding a certain intimacy with the subject. “When you’re paid for telling ‘the truth’, what kind of truth will you tell?”

2. SPEAKING FABLES
RAJULA SHAH'S UNSCRIPTED VERITÉ STYLE DOESN’T CLOSE DOORS ON FICTION

Rajula Shah’s journey has been what she calls a “reverse” one. Her immersion in the world of cinema at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), where “everything is geared towards making features”, led to a diploma film about a small town couple called Do Hafte Guzarte Do Hafte Nahi Lagte (2000). “But even while working with fiction, I had the experience of non-fiction – working with actors, thinking about what they bring to the film, or even myself, my role.” And now, as she works in nonfiction she is constantly assailed by its fictional elements. “People perform for the camera.”

Not that the 35-year-old from Bhopal is uncomfortable with the blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction. She is completely aware of herself as threading together the film narratives she creates, sometimes as sutradhar and sometimes as a character. But she’d rather think of it as a dialogue with her artistic subjects. “It’s interesting to see where I come in [for the people I’m filming], and where I go out.” Often, she gets people talking to her by acting the idiot. Like during Sabad Nirantar (2008), which takes a cinema verité approach to the popular living tradition of Kabir poetry in Madhya Pradesh, “I would often ask stupid questions, like ‘If God is inside you, then why light this joss-stick?’”

In her first film, Beyond the Wheel (2005), Shah explored the worlds of three women potters – one in Kutch, one in Manipur and one in Bhopal. “I was interested in the prohibition that exists on women handling the potter’s wheel, and I found that all three had evolved their own embodied responses.” If Sara Ibrahim had devised a complicated arrangement of bowls in place of the wheel, Nilmani Devi substituted the wheel with her body, running around the object she’s making.

Shah’s persistence led her, in Sabad Nirantar, to work backwards from established folk performers like Prahlad Singh Tippaniya to agricultural labourers whose relationship to the music went deeper than the aesthetic. She’s now exploring the possibility of future fictions. “I’m interested in how a story develops over time. So why not?”

3. MIRRORED LENS 
NISHTHA JAIN'S FILMS QUESTION THE IMAGEMAKING PROCESS – INCLUDING HER OWN


Nishtha Jain likes looking at people. But more than that, she likes to look at herself looking at people. From exploring the photographic fantasy portraits people create for themselves in her first film, City of Photos (2005), to viewing the city through the eyes of security guards and ragpickers in her recent At My Doorstep (2009), her work has been about questions of image-making and agency. “I’m interested in people sidelined by the mainstream media,” says Jain, “But I’m not giving people agency by filming them, only recognising the agency they already have.”

The Mumbai-based director’s much-talked-about Lakshmi and Me (2008) has been her most challenging work on these lines, telling the story of her relationship with 29-year-old Lakshmi, who works part-time as a maid in her house. “I started filming Lakshmi because I was attracted to the strong sense of self of this girl who’s been working since she was 10,” says Jain, “Later I began to feel that the film’s true subject was not Lakshmi, but her relationship with me. I wanted to tell her story but I also wanted to think about taken-for-granted hierarchies, between employer and domestic help. I could not honestly exclude myself from the frame.” Jain insists, however, that the film was “subjective, not personal”. She acknowledges that a single-person narrative draws audiences in more easily. “It’s more dramatic. Viewers remarked on how good an ‘actress’ Lakshmi was!” But Jain doesn’t want a repeat yet. In At My Doorstep, she ‘zooms out’ on a similar question, of people who seem invisible to the elite. “But it’s less intense, more poetic, more impressionistic.” In the end, it’s the kind of story you feel you want to tell. “You must feel passionate to stay with it for a long time.”

4. TEASING INSIGHTS
PAROMITA VOHRA'S EYE FOR THE ABSURD HAS TURNED DOCUMENTARY UPSIDE-DOWN


Paromita Vohra is not just a maker of documentaries, she’s a fan. “I’d rather watch an Indian documentary than an Indian fiction film any day,” she pronounces. “The skill and the ideation levels are so high. And in India, there is very little ‘formatting’ of the kind that has taken place in Western documentary.” It wasn’t always like this. Mumbai- based and self-taught, Vohra remembers starting out when the primary received idea of the documentary was the social issue film. “I struggled to find a different language, to make the kind of film I wanted to see.”

Preaching, Vohra was clear, wouldn’t help her in her desire to get fence-sitting audiences to reevaluate their stock ideas. So she set out to create films that would. Her now-classic Unlimited Girls (2002), which takes viewers on a hilarious but often scathing journey through feminist organisations, marital homes and college fests, has been shown at many festivals but more importantly to Vohra, now gets used as a teaching aid. “I met this woman from a [Hindi-medium] college in Lucknow, and she said they use it to trigger discussion. I said, but it’s in English! And she said, oh, we just pause and translate. It works beautifully.”

Now eight films old, Vohra takes both pride and pleasure in subverting documentary’s “tendency to be high-minded”. She believes films work primarily in a sensory way. “If I make you feel a certain way for a while, I might get you to think differently. I make performance pieces. I refuse people the comfort of their preconceptions.” Vohra’s eye for the absurd surprises those who enter documentary screenings with their most serious faces on. People find themselves giggling at the bizarre explanations men in Q2P (2006) give for why there are less women’s toilets, or laughing out loud in Unlimited Girls when girls in a college choreography insist they’re equal to the boys “but it’s the pompoms that are most important”. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t also thinking. That keeps Vohra happy.

5. ORDINARY LOVES 
SOURAV SARANGI'S FILMS ARE INVESTED WITH PATIENCE AND GREAT CURIOSITY

Documentary is about reality,” says Sourav Sarangi. “Not a reality show.” There is a sudden sharp undertow to Sarangi’s otherwise mild manner as he says this. One immediately wonders if it stems from a reluctant intimacy with the rehearsed realities of television, a medium in which he has worked intermittently since 1988 – as an editor, as a director of tele-films and as head of the popular Bengali channel Aakash Bangla. For the 1964-born FTII graduate whose film Bilal (2008) has been shown at over 40 film festivals worldwide and won eight awards, his television self has always been the shadowy doppelganger, the life choice that wasn’t quite a choice. “We could dream of cinema, but after leaving campus we had to first ensure survival,” he says wryly.

Later, some of these dreamers formed a cooperative, with whose support Sarangi embarked on his first film, Tusu Katha (1996). Tusu is a festival in the tribal-dominated areas of West Bengal and Jharkhand. Determined not to simply recreate “local colour”, he attended the ritual four times in four different places. “The women sing and dance, but it’s not a performance,” says Sarangi. While he set out to “explore the rapture of life among people who don’t have the luxury of celebration”, Sarangi knew Tusu wasn’t characteristic of everyday life, so he kept going back through the year.

This unhurried pace, this loving embrace of the ordinary, characterises Sarangi’s second film Bhangon (Erosion) (2006) as well. With each film, he tries to understand something unfamiliar. Bhangon is about people who live along the Padma river, while Bilal is the result of his year-long relationship with a three-year-old and his blind parents Shamim and Jharna. “When I first saw Bilal, he was eight months old. I watched him communicate with me visually and with his mother through touch. I was amazed. He was living simultaneously in two worlds: the sighted and the non-visual.”

That sense of wonder makes Bilal very different in tone from the sob-fest you might expect. The dingy room in which the family lives, the high level of noise, the shockingly normalised violence: none of these are papered over. There are moments when the helplessness seems palpable, and others full of quiet irony, such as when Shamim, having been forced to shut down his phone booth, contemplates other livelihoods, says, “A damp room is all you need to grow mushrooms”. But like in life, desperation co-exists with joy. The film is a layered portrait of a child, a family and a neighbourhood. “It’s not a guided tour I’m taking the audience on,” says Sarangi. “A film isn’t complete till it’s seen by another person.”

Published in Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 40, Dated October 10, 2009

The Politics of Toilets

In her fascinating 'ethno-sociology' of the artisans of Varanasi, academic Nita Kumar writes, "Men often told me that one aspect of the overall friendliness and convenience of the city was that they could urinate wherever they liked. This, I realized after months of unwilling observation, was not an exaggeration." Hilarity apart, Kumar's wry observation points to a serious - and largely unaddressed - issue: public access to toilets.

And this is the subject of Bombay-based documentary filmmaker Paromita Vohra's quixotically titled film, 'Q2P'. The film uses the question, 'Who has to queue to pee?' to make visible the connection between the pleasures of roaming the city streets and access to public toilet facilities. It is a connection that has been largely ignored even by those who recognize that women's access to public space is a crucial part of the campaign for gender equality. Men, as we all know, can go anywhere, anytime.

The film focuses on Mumbai, placing the abysmal state of the city's toilets within the larger glittering vision of its future, in which there is no place for the poor - except as users of a mass rapid transit system that would remove them from the city as soon as the day's work is over.

In its quest for an accessible, clean, women's toilet, the film takes us through a variety of locales and into conversations with different groups of urban women. We travel to Bombay Municipal Corporation schools, where toilet facilities are often non-existent, or so bad that girls and teachers (90 per cent of whom are women) try their best to avoid using them. They drink no liquids all day and often suffer from stomachaches and urinary infections. Then we visit a beauty-training institute where the girls first giggle and insist they've never needed to use a public toilet ("Aisi naubat hi nahi aayi"), but finally admit they're too embarrassed to search for one if they do feel the need.

Vohra talks to men in a small Udupi restaurant, who speculate obligingly - and to hilarious effect - on the reasons why there's only a toilet for men behind the restaurant, and why there are few women's toilets in the city in general. Because women's loos take more space, suggests one, while another dwells at length on the polluting effects of women using the toilet: they have to sit, so close to the ground, you see... And what would happen if women were to start doing what men do all the time - pee in public, anywhere, everywhere, asks the filmmaker. The answer is only half a joke: "Kya hoga? Tehelka!" ("What will happen? Pandemonium!")

She takes us to one public toilet after another, the camera moving from the promise of a 'ladies' sign to the disappointment of discovering that the whole complex is, in fact, in use by men. You don't really blame them, these men who emerge into the morning light, still dripping from a bath, tightening insecure towels round their waists in the face of an unexpected camera. Using a public toilet for your daily ablutions shouldn't be an act that bespeaks privilege. And yet, in the crazy world of the Indian city, isn't that exactly what it is?

The film also makes a detour to Delhi, which also allows for a brief meditation on the division of the city into two - earlier a colonial separation, now concretized into an NDMC-MCD (New Delhi Municipal Corporation-Municipal Corporation of Delhi) divide. The 42.78 square kilometer NDMC area, which has the most wonderful well-maintained public toilets, is occupied by the city's (and in this case, the country's) VVIPs. It is, in the remarkable words of one NDMC official, "the drawing room of the country". But if one part of the city is the drawing room, what - the film asks - does that make the other part?

Away from these 'drawing rooms', large parts of the population live in slums or on the pavement, without access to toilets in their homes, or even to affordable public toilets that have anything like a good sewage system, running water or ventilation. They must perforce carry out these activities in public.

This is hardly new. The use of public spaces in India for washing, changing, urination and defecation has long attracted the attention of the outside observer. For one 19th century lady traveler, it was "a perpetual source of wonder and amusement to see the unembarrassed ease with which employments of a most personal nature are carried on in the most crowded streets." And the venerable V S Naipaul observed in 1968 that "Indians defecate everywhere...They never look for cover."

But neither the lack of embarrassment assumed by these commentators, nor historian Dipesh Chakrabarty's more recent reading of these uses of public space as "a refusal to become citizens of an ideal bourgeois order" takes into account the fact that, for the people concerned, no better option exists.

A more grounded academic position is taken by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, who says that "shitting in public is a serious humiliation" - something done under duress. He talks of a project that built hundreds of toilet blocks in Pune and Mumbai - under the combined auspices of Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers, an NGO, and National Slum Dwellers Federation and Mahila Milan, an association of slum and pavement women - since 2000. Appadurai argues that participation of the community (especially women) in the design, construction and maintenance of toilets, as well as the innovative Toilet Festivals (Sandas Melas) help "resituate this private act of suffering and humiliation", making it the scene of "technical innovation, collective celebration and carnivalesque play with...officialdom".

While Vohra's film makes no mention of the project, it does take us into a Mumbai slum, where we are introduced to Raju Bhai, who builds private toilets. "Everyone wants a 'real' home, with a separate drawing room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom," he says. "If all of this is impossible, at least slum-dwellers can have their own bathroom." Whatever we might think of the long-term implications of constructing these unauthorized toilets in unauthorized structures, listening to his grateful (female) clients does raise an uncomfortable question: does the very principle of community toilets deny the fact that everyone should be able to have a toilet at home?

These are difficult questions, and have no easy answers. But it is clear that toilets do provide a prism through which to look at the inequalities of caste, class and gender that underlie the Indian city. Pushing toilets to the forefront of public discussion might be one way in which to bring these inequalities to light. And 'Q2P' certainly demonstrates that without this happening, the risks and pleasures of what Kumar's Banarasi interlocutors call "ghumna phirna" (walking about) will continue to remain the preserve of men.

November 26, 2006
Women's Feature Service