A Punjab state of mind

My Mirror column, on the film you must watch in theatres this week:

Chauthi Koot unfolds as an atmospheric, deliberately elliptical journey into 1984 Punjab. But it keeps you on edge.

There are few parts of India so powerfully embedded in the popular cinematic imagination as Punjab. This mythical Bollywood Punjab is all mustard fields and aloo parathas, brimming with bubbly girls whose hands in marriage must be won by boring a heart-shaped hole through some Punjabi patriarch's rough-and-tough exterior.

In recent years, there have been occasional departures from this image: Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana (2012) unpicked the smooth surface of the rural Punjabi family to reveal something charmingly bumpy and dysfunctional; earlier this year Udta Punjab produced a nerve-jangling portrait of the prosperous state as wracked by drug addiction. Outside the mainstream Hindi cinema context, Anup Singh's beautifully shot Qissa (2015) offered an unsettling window into Punjabi masculinity, potentially tying it to the trauma of Partition.

Men on the train: a still from Chauthi Koot

Another vision of Punjab can be seen in theatres this week, in Chauthi Koot (The Fourth Direction). Having premiered in the Un Certain Regard category at Cannes last year and won the National Award for Best Punjabi Film, Chauthi Koot is the second feature film directed by Gurvinder Singh, whose bleak but atmospheric portrait of rural Punjab, Anhey Ghore Da Daan (Alms for a Blind Horse, 2011), won awards internationally as well as in India. Based on a novel by the famous Punjabi writer Gurdial Singh, Anhe Ghore followed the fortunes of a lower-caste family of landless farm workers in a Punjab that had reached the fag-end of the Nehruvian era with many of its inhabitants left out of the state's fabled progress into modernity. Chauthi Koot also draws on the work of a well-known Punjabi writer, Waryam Singh Sandhu, combining two of his short stories to craft a tense, absorbing take on the Punjab of the 1980s, when the Sikh militant movement for a separate state of Khalistan was at its peak.

Singh's exceptionally assured filmmaking makes no attempt to take on the violence head-on, instead circling around the horrific moment of crisis in 1984 when militants holed up in the Golden Temple in Amritsar were gunned down by the army, bringing the confrontation between Indira Gandhi's government and the militancy to a head. The closest we get to Operation Bluestar is a BBC radio broadcast ("Rama Pandey se Hindi mein samachar suniye"). Yet so carefully calibrated is the film's feeling of constriction that right from the start, when we see two men on a bus, waiting to get off, we are drawn into their anxiety.

They walk at a frenetic pace through a crowded gali lined with shops, almost run through a wedding procession, and climb the stairs to a railway station, but as soon as they look out over the platform, we know that they are too late. They wait. They watch as uniformed men walk around the station, getting their boots polished till they gleam. They watch as the train trundles in, and men draped in shawls get off, bundles in their hands. And we watch with them, on tenterhooks, having absorbed the slow menace in the air.

The genius of Singh's film is that we don't actually know what we're waiting for. But it doesn't matter, because we're hooked, watching. And watching this film, unlike the process of watching Hollywood-style suspense, does not involve speed. So we have time, somehow, to look at the poster of Amjad Khan as Gabbar Singh selling glucose biscuits, or the Campa Cola sign that glows dully in red and white, the same colours as the station's plaster arch. And yet the pace does not slack. With every unexplained urgent request, every unannotated new presence, we push our imaginations to work: who are these men? Why are they in such a rush? Who are the strangers already sitting in the compartment? Why did the guard let them in and not these two?

Let me not, however, make it seem that watching Chauthi Koot is like watching some detective story. Because Singh's cinematic technique, redolent as it is of mystery, has little interest in resolutions of the sort we are used to. One of the most striking ways in which he demonstrates this is when halfway through the first narrative, he decides to introduce another. It is framed as what we might ordinarily call a flashback: one of the men on the train remembers something that happened a few months ago. But Singh refuses to stick the narrative rules of cinema -- one man's memory leads us into another man's life, producing an elliptical account that might puzzle viewers who are adamant on knowing how we know what we know.

In the courtyard: a still from Chauthi Koot

The second narrative, involving a family who find themselves endangered by their dog's natural instincts, brings us face to face with both militants and police. But again, the tensest moments are not those in which either militant or police violence seems imminent. The film reaches its acme in the relationship between man and dog, forcing us to complicate any easy notions of innocence and victimhood.

But a simple moral resolution is not Singh's style. There are no villains, no heroes. In collaboration with Satya Rai Nagpaul's arresting cinematography and Susmit Bob Nath's brilliant sound design, he makes every lined and unlined face on screen form part of this Punjab that but for him, we would never see. And yet, for me the film's most transporting sequence was a storm — during which 'nothing' happens. In an interview, Singh told me that while filming, he replaced a crucial bit of drama in the script with the storm. This is pure cinematic magic, where images and sounds that have no obvious connection come together to create the film — in our minds.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7th August 2016. 

Everything is Illuminated

This week's Mirror column:

Are there more stoners on the Hindi film screen? A short history of filmi drugs, from old-fashioned to uber-cool  

Nawazuddin Siddiqui's Faisal in GoW is one of Anurag Kashyap's many pot-smoking protagonists

Earlier this year, we had much brouhaha about showing drug use on screen, in the context of Abhishek Chaubey's Udta Punjab. Producer Anurag Kashyap came out swinging against the CBFC, and when Udta Punjab finally released (with just one cut), many people, including myself, noted that its tragic portrait of drug-addled youth and a corrupt state couldn't possibly be seen as encouraging drugs.

The week after Udta, Kashyap released another film, this one directed by himself. Raman Raghav 2.0 was publicised as a portrait of a serial killer. Which it is. But it is equally a portrait of a killer cop, played by Masaan actor Vicky Kaushal. And drugs are crucial to Raghav's character: driving his violence, while also providing a crutch that helps him live with its effects. The introductory nightclub sequence, cut to Varun Grover's marvelous lyrical wordplay about qatl-e-aam, has a psychedelic quality that could rival any of Udta's blazingly coked-up scenes. And unlike in Udta, these scenes in RR2.0 aren't swaddled in a thick layer of anti-drugs messaging. But no-one batted an eyelid.

Not that I wanted them to. Kaushal's coke-fuelled murderous cop can't possibly be perceived a dangerous role model. But there is no doubt that this is a different sort of character from the sort that Hindi movies used to allow in the drug-consuming department.

Through the '70s and '80s, drugs were what the villain's evil empire was built on, along with illicit daru and adulterated dawai. An occasional hero might take on a drug cartel, sometimes for a personal reason: Charas (1976) had Dharmendra falling for Hema Malini's hapless drug mule; Janbaaz (1986) had Feroz Khan avenging the drugged death of his girlfriend (Sridevi); the sparky Jalwa (1987) had Naseeruddin Shah as a cop fighting brown sugar traffickers after his younger brother died injecting it.

Very few Hindi films had protagonists who used drugs. If they did, you knew they had to die for their sins: the hippie Janice/Jasbir of Hare Rama Hare Krishna (1971), icon of cool though Zeenat Aman and 'Dum Maro Dum' made her, had to commit suicide for shame. That strand of moral comeuppance is still around: think of Madhur Bhandarkar's Fashion (2008), in which Kangana Ranaut's reigning supermodel Shonali loses her job and later her life to her addiction, although heroine Meghna (Priyanka Chopra) is allowed to reform herself. And as late as 2011, we had a film like Dum Maro Dum rejigging the old Hindi film villain, with Aditya Pancholi as the white-suited Lorsa Biscuita, whose benevolent industrialist is a front for secret druglord.

Abhay Deol in Kashyap's Dev D (2009) drowns his sorrows in drink and drugs

More recently, though, marijuana-smokers have begun to appear on the Hindi film screen. Anurag Kashyap might have heralded the change, with dopehead heroes as dissimilar as Abhay Deol's Dev D and Nawazuddin Siddiqui's Faisal (in Gangs of Wasseypur 2). He also possibly gave us Hindi cinema's first female smoker-up: Jesse Randhawa's sari-wearing college lecturer in Gulaal, who lights up while laughing about her “bahut buri aadat”.


The new comfort-level with stoners has opened up space for a film like Go Goa Gone, a silly but funny comedy in which a Goa rave produces an outbreak of zombies. Even in a film as harrowing as Udta, the relaxing effect of drugs is allowed a moment: a syringe planted in Diljit Dosanjh's neck brings down his guard enough to voice his feelings to Kareena Kapoor. But the good-drug vs bad-drug line remains zealously guarded. Kashyap himself seems to recognize more serious drug use as part of a dark, dystopic inner world: in his unreleased first film Paanch (2003), for instance, to which the teenage-gang-gone-wrong in Bejoy Nambiar's Shaitan (2011) paid homage. Even last week's shallow and annoying M Cream, which centres on four rich Delhi brats setting out for the hills in search of a legendary hash—and ostensibly finding themselves, crafts its single moment of drama around Imaad Shah's charsi hero Figaro preventing his silly friend Maggie from shooting up.

The idea of marijuana as harmless and happy-making is making its way into the cool new family film: Shandaar turns not eating meat on Tuesdays into an extended gag involving magic mushrooms, while Kapoor and Sons has a grandfather (Rishi Kapoor) sharing a joint with his warring grandsons.

Jesse Randhawa as Anuja in Gulaal (2009) may have been Hindi cinema's first female pot-smoker

But any conversation about drug consumption in Hindi films should really include the narcotic that Indian civilization has sanctioned since time immemorial: bhang. Unlike cannabis rolled into cigarettes, whose popularity comes via a firang route, bhang is made by grinding cannabis leaves into paste and eaten (see Shrilal Shukla's classic novel Raag Darbaari for a paean to the process). Sometimes mixed into sweets (or milky thandai on Holi), bhang is not just socially licensed but ritually encouraged. And while they may be new to dope-smoking, our films have always treated bhang as a gentle inducement to hilarity. think of Rajesh Khanna and Mumtaz singing Jai Jai Shiv Shankar as they careen down temple steps, or Amitabh Bachchan breaking into the rambunctious Khaike Paan Banaraswala in Don, or my all-time favourite: the bhang pakodas in Angoor which make Aruna Irani amorously giggly and Deven Verma imagine a toad to accompany his rendition of Preetam Aan Milo.


Unfortunately, barring 2012's charming Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana (in which the family in question isn't exactly 'cool', but the script's use of cannabis undeniably is), bhang seems to have exited the Hindi film universe. Maybe the cool people think it's too old-fashoned. Around the 2011 release of Don 2, Shah Rukh Khan was asked if he enjoys bhang on Holi. “Apart from smoking,” said SRK, “aur koi buri aadat abhi tak nahi hai mujh mein.” As someone who is a fan of its entirely legal (and smokeless) joys, I must confess to being devastated. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 31st July 2016.

The Straight Dope

My Mirror column. 

Udta Punjab may not always fly as high as it wants to, but its portrait of the drug-fuelled state steps fearlessly off the edge. 

There's a moment in Udta Punjab when one of the film's primary characters, an otherwise easygoing young cop, suddenly decides he can no longer be a willing cog-in-the-wheel of the terrible drug chariot rolling through the state, crushing people in plain sight. 

Before his companions guarding the naka know what's hit them, Sartaj has cracked open the headlights of a truck carrying the latest illegal consignment and bashed up its driver instead of letting him through. When his boss manages to get him back under control, he takes Sartaj aside and says to him, deadpan: "You beat up the man, I can deal with that. But why damage the truck?" 

That line of dialogue is a pithy pointer to the tragic state of Punjab today, where the gainers guard a corrupt system — like that truck — at the cost of a vast population. Cheap drugs have made inroads into the smallest hamlets, eating through the innards of a once-prosperous state. From the political big man to the small-time operator, the gainers worship at the altar of money, closing their eyes to the human wreckage piling up behind the throne. 

Sudip Sharma, who wrote the superb and harrowing NH10, joins forces with director Abhishek Chaubey to write this ambitious but not completely successful script. Unlike NH10, which channels our fear of the other, creating a chillingly believable war in which the battlelines are drawn by patriarchy, Udta Punjab asks us to suspend our disbelief as its disparate characters unite across barriers of class, language and experience, against drugs. 

The quietly winsome Punjabi star Diljit Dosanjh plays Sartaj Singh, a policeman who has no problems being on the take until he's shocked and then taunted into a change of heart by a personal situation — and by Kareena Kapoor's saintly but sharp-tongued activist-doctor Preet. Alia Bhatt plays an unnamed Bihari migrant labourer whose attempt to use drug money to engineer her way out of her circumstances goes terribly awry. And finally, but most importantly, we have Shahid Kapoor as the seriously unstable Tommy Singh, a rockstar whose highs and lows as a performer are no longer extricable from his highs and lows as a coke addict. 

There is nothing wrong with the characters per se. In fact, Sharma and Chaubey make a wise choice by deciding to keep the focus on each character's personal battle with drugs—the only one who seems to be acting purely out of the goodness of her heart, Kareena's Dr Preet, is the least fleshed-out (though Kareena isn't terrible, and she even has some sweet scenes with the effortlessly effective Dosanjh). 

But I found it hard to believe in the ease of the romantic alliance between the highly qualified Preet and the largely uneducated Sartaj—perhaps if we'd had more time with these people, it would have seemed less convenient, less pat? Bhatt dives enthusiastically into her harrowing role, but despite her valiant efforts at Bhojpuri, neither her body language nor her accent allowed me to believe she was anything but Alia Bhatt in brownface. As for her character's hockey-playing past, I wish it had had more play—it's certainly easier to imagine Bhatt as an aspiring rural sports star than as a landless labourer used to working in the fields. Who knows, I may even have believed in a rockstar falling for her. 

Shahid Kapoor gets the best written role, but he also puts body and soul into it. His Tommy Singh is the film's crazed, throbbing heart: careening wildly through both his concerts and his life, and dragging us willingly with him. It is Tommy — and the darkness of his life in the spotlight — that gives Udta Punjab that edge of madness, of devil-may-care-ness, that is so threatening to the powers-that-be. And certainly there is an unapologetic use of gaalis and cusswords -- not the only thing about the film that seems Tarantinoesque. 

But other than the lyrics of a song like Chitta Ve —dedicated to the 'White One'—you'd be hard put to find something in Udta Punjab that could be construed as "glorifying" drug use. But while Chaubey is obviously gifted in his ability to make narrative use of songs (think of Dil Toh Bachcha Hai Ji in his marvellous first film Ishqiya), songs in our cinema do sometimes have a tendency to become breakaway units, declaring their independence from the film that houses them. 

On the whole, Chaubey's film makes it absolutely clear which side of the fence it's on, showing us a whole gamut of utterly depressing examples of people and families gutted by addiction: in homes, in jails, in hospitals and de-addiction centres, and most scarily, in the thousands of empty sheds and barns and brick shelters across the state in which young men and boys lie about, shooting up all day. 

It is the smaller characters that make Sharma and Chaubey's script really speak—from Sartaj's sharp-eyed boss Jujhaar Singh, who counts himself amongst the gainers, to the creepy rapist (Vansh Bhardwaj) who takes selfies with his drugged victim before injecting himself with another dose of something. 

Udta Punjab isn't a perfect film, perhaps not even a great one. But it has an unstoppable energy, and a fierce honesty of purpose that almost always manages to stop short of preachiness. That's worth a great deal.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19th June, 2016.