Why you can't watch these films while cooking

My Mumbai Mirror/TOI Plus column:

A bouquet of independent films at the 2021 New York Indian Film Festival doesn't leave us smelling of roses, but takes a wry, gentle and honest look at our lives today

A still from Arun Karthick's wake-up call of a film, Nasir (2020).

What do you want to see on your screen? What you watch on your television screen, your computer screen or your phone screen is inextricably connected to what you're willing to play on the most important screen of all – the mind's eye.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic struck India last year, those who can work from home and still earn a living have been the lucky ones. But we have been robbed of what was once our daily life. As our live interactions with the outside world recede into the distance, those who have access to a screen of any sort spend more and more time on it. And yet, simultaneously, the degree of attention people give to what's on the screen in front of them, seems to decrease every day – and I don't just mean their long-distance girlfriends.

We all know people who watch only foreign TV shows, or only old movies, or only comedy these days, because the Indian here and now seems too grim to engage with. That desire to screen out the darker parts of Indian reality extends from the middle class consumer to media producers: I was recently told that international funders are very keen on fresh documentary content from India, but it needs to be light and preferably humorous. I speak anecdotally here, but I know more and more people who keep a film or a web series running on a phone or tablet screen beside them, while they proceed with the work of the day – sometimes on another screen. I suppose it's no different from keeping the television on for company, as people of an older generation have done for years. But it means that the 'content' you're watching shouldn't need your full attention. And what does that mean for how you engage with the world?

The films playing as part of the New York Indian Film Festival 2021, however, demand your full attention – and they're worth it. The festival is being held virtually for the second year running, and this year a substantial chunk of the programming is available to view in India. Online tickets to the NYIFF films are available to purchase on the Movie Saints platform till June 13, and streaming until June 20, along with specially-curated interviews and discussions with many of the filmmakers, actors and producers.

The festival line-up includes some of the best films I've seen to come out of India in the last year or so. Several of these are short films - a category tragically under-represented online, with almost no opportunities for a sustainable, commercial-release format, despite the massive jump in OTT viewership in India. 

Pratik Thakare's superb short film Salana Jalsa (Annual Day) is subtle yet completely absorbing.

There is, for instance, Pratik Thakare's debut short Salana Jalsa, made as his dissertation project at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, which is a stunning exploration of young people straining towards art – and towards their true selves. Set during an Annual Day function at a Marathi-speaking school in suburban Maharashtra, Salana Jalsa moves fluidly and beautifully among its three primary characters, each of them trying to make themselves heard or seen or just treated a little bit better -- in a world where they're expected to merely tick a box, and no one appears to notice if they don't quite fit in it. I could say that it’s about an aspiring poet, a girl who wants to do Western dance rather than Indian, and a boy who is bullied because he's fat. But Thakare's characters have unexpected arcs, and his atmospheric framing and soundscape make the school experience come alive.

Another of the superb shorts is the Bengali film Tasher Ghawr. Director Sudipto Roy, screenwriter Sahana Dutta and actor Swastika Mukherjee together create a portrait of the quirky housewife next door that you're unlikely to forget. Cleverly staged as a conversational monologue with the viewer, the film is about a woman stuck at home during lockdown. It is chatty and quirky and funny – until it isn't. She complains, as so many middle class housewives do, about her husband being home every day now – and we smile at first. But then we see him, the faceless man sprawled on a sofa, yelling for his breakfast, storming out of the house because of a stray seed in his apple juice, or whispering on the phone to his secret girlfriend. And then we start to see her, the dreamy-eyed kooky lady who talks to the mice – and we begin to see what makes the crazy ladies around us crazy.

Among the features, I was charmed by the Telugu film Mail, about the computer's arrival in an Indian village in 2006. “You can write a letter to anybody in the world,” the dubious cyber guru announces to his first wide-eyed shishya. Of course, in the absence of any further teaching, the student's Gmail inbox remains empty, while the teacher receives a daily quarter of alcohol in return for fifteen minutes with the sacred machine. Uday Gurrala's film has an affectionate eye for the absurd, making us laugh at our responses to new technology, while capturing the visual joys of the Telangana rural landscape.

The most unmissable film in the festival, though, is the Tamil feature Nasir. Arun Karthick's film about a sari shop salesman, which won the NETPAC award at Rotterdam last year, is a warm, gentle telling of our current political predicament. If it doesn't change you, then nothing will.

For that to happen, though, you'll have to pay attention.

Published in TOI Plus/Mumbai Mirror, 12 June 2021.

How cinema uses the horror of train accidents to tell a story

My TOI Plus column: the last in my series on trains in Indian cinema.

 

Through Indian film history, trains have often delivered not just the thrill of danger, but all the terrifying finality of death.  

A screenshot from Do Anjaane (1976), in which the train holds the key to trauma -- and to release

Over the last few weeks, this column has touched on some superbly-realised visions of the Indian railways as bringing people together, including Gulzar's Kitaab, Satyajit Ray's Nayak and Sonar Kella, and most recently, Shyam Benegal's 1986 television series Yatra. But perhaps one reason why trains appear so frequently in cinema is that their visual and aural power can be harnessed as metaphors for both one kind of experience and its opposite. Trains may often produce a sense of comfort, continuity and kinship with strangers. But they are equally capable of evoking fear, horror and a sense of rupture. The railway accident is not just about physical trauma, but the terrible finality of endings.

The metaphor-laden vision of the train accident - the train as something that causes death – appears in Indian cinema as early as 1936. Achhut Kanya, made by the German director Franz Osten for Himanshu Rai's studio Bombay Talkies, featured established star (and Rai's wife) Devika Rani as the 'untouchable' heroine Kasturi, whose relationship with the Brahmin hero (Ashok Kumar, then an industry newbie) ends in tragedy on the railway tracks. An annotation on the archival film website cine.ma describes Achhut Kanya as “[a] circular story told in flashback, in which eternal repetition is only interrupted with death in the form of the relentlessly linear railway engine”.

The film uses the train in multiple ways. It begins, for instance, with a husband and wife in a car, who are stopped at a railway crossing by a guard who insists that the hour before the train arrives, is a time of ghosts. Soon after, the couple find a little shrine to Kasturi nearby, and a local ascetic tells them the story of how she lived and died here – ie, the story of the film. Kasturi was the daughter of a railway crossing guard, and an early scene evokes her childish pride in her father's power to stop the train by waving the red flag. Stilted though the staging seems 85 years later, there's an undeniable pathos to the fact that the same railway guard's daughter dies trying to stop the train. One could extend that thought: If the train represents modernity, the 'achhut' girl's belief in it - and in her hold over it - fails her miserably.

The figure of the approaching train continues to be an agent of death, as I have written in previous weeks, in the films of Bimal Roy and Satyajit Ray. More than the accident, it is the possibility of suicide that appears in these narratives and many others throughout the middle decades of the 20^th century. Over and over again, young people driven to hopelessness by the harsh, relentless city, find themselves walking towards the train tracks, or climbing the stairs to a railway bridge to fling themselves off it.

By the 1970s, as I've argued earlier, the association between trains and violence becomes an increasingly common motif, at least in Hindi films. Trains conjure up both the excitement of speed and the horror of accidental death, making them a thriller staple. The technological fantasy suggested by a film like Parwana reached a kind of acme (or nadir) in The Burning Train (1980), an action thriller-disaster film about the creation and sabotage of “the fastest train in India”. But the violent train scene from that decade that has stayed with me from watching it as a child is Dulal Guha's Do Anjaane (1976), in which the duplicitous Prem Chopra pushes his friend (Amitabh Bachchan) off a moving train, to aid his romance with his friend's ambitious wife (Rekha).

Watching Do Anjaane again this week (while trying to ignore its deeply misogynistic take on women's ambitions), I found that the film is actually built around train-related trauma. It starts with a rather smug Bachchan drinking and driving alone. Suddenly, out of the darkness, a train approaches. It seems to be coming right at him. He lets out a scream and swerves wildly, hitting a tree. As he is revived after the accident, we learn that he had lost his memory from the previous trauma of his brush with death. The encounter with another speeding train triggers its return six years later – and leads to a complex revenge plot, in which that murder attempt is recreated for a Bengali film called Raater Train ('The Night Train').

In 2007, Sriram Raghavan made a thriller called Johnny Gaddaar, crammed with cinematic references, including a long quotation, from Parwana: The train scene. Like Bachchan in that film, Neil Nitin Mukesh in Johnny Gaddaar commits a crime whose success depends on getting on and off trains, cars and planes. But in Johnny Gaddaar, the crime itself involves treacherously pushing his friend Shiva off a train - unlike Parwana, but like Do Anjaane.

 

After Shiva's disfigured corpse is found, the gang wonders how a strong man like him was physically overpowered and killed. Or was he killed at all? In the 1957 classic Pyaasa, a beggar's disfigured corpse on the train tracks is taken for the hero Vijay (Guru Dutt), letting him stage his demise. No-one cites Do Anjaane or Pyaasa in JG. But first the murderer's fear and then the others' suspicion that Shiva isn't actually dead suggest a long film-steeped history -- for the characters, and the filmmaker.

Sometimes, as in Achhut Kanya, the train feels like destiny – you rush towards it, imploringly, but it does not stop. And sometimes you manage to turn away at the very last instant -- as with Kishore Kumar in Naukri, or the incredible Pyaasa scene where the world-weary Vijay ponders the train tracks, but then crosses over safely, unlike the ill-fated beggar behind him. The train passes, only the wind stings your cheeks, and it feels like fate has not yet come for you. 

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 6 Jun 2021 and TOI Plus, 5 Jun 2021.

What Paava Kadhaigal tells us about pride and honour

My Mirror column:

A new Tamil anthology film makes a flawed but genuine attempt to grapple with the tragic effects of our national preoccupation -- ‘family honour’.

At the very end of Love Panna Uttranum, Vignesh Shivan's segment in the newly-released Tamil anthology film Paava Kadhaigal (‘Sinful Tales’), there is a textual postscript that tells us what happened to the characters after the film ends. One of the lines reads: “Veerasimman managed to escape from the village and went to live with his daughter in Paris”. I scoffed at it mentally when I read it. Because Veerasimman is the terrible casteist father from whom his daughters must escape if they are to live anything resembling free lives.

 

Love Panna Uttranum has many problems, not the least of which is the director's inability to handle the vast tonal shifts he’s going for, leaving his audience swinging between high tragedy and low comedy. But as the compendium's four tales about 'honour' drew to a close, I realised that Shivan's postscript wasn't as inaccurate as I'd thought: It is South Asian fathers (and often mothers) who need to find a way to escape the vice-like grip of patriarchy and caste; from social chains that bind them so tightly that they can no longer feel the blood running in their veins -- literally. If they break the codes of caste, community and gender, it seems that their children are no longer their children.

 

As I watched Paava Kadhaigal's various sets of parents harden their hearts against their offspring -- and worse, try to control their lives -- I kept thinking of the old Kahlil Gibran poem from his bestselling work The Prophet. “Your children are not your children,” it goes. “They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you. And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.” The cool kids probably don't read Gibran any more, but it remains desperately resonant in the India of 2021, where our politicians know we'll eat out of their hands if they cater to our meanest, most controlling instincts -- especially with regard to our daughters. Ergo, the 'love jihad' bogey, recently given legal form.

 

This particular film happens to deal with Tamilian families. But parents across South Asia cling ferociously to the idea that their children are nothing but miniature versions of themselves; robotic agents put on earth only to carry out their bidding – or actually, the bidding of that ogre called society. Individual freedom can only seem an impossible dream when you've internalised the social order completely, and we see it in some of the most affecting films of recent years, from Nagraj Manjule's searing 2016 Marathi hit Sairat  to the ringing refrain that Pakistani-Norwegian filmmaker Iram Haq made the title of her harrowing 2017 film, What Will People Say?.

 

But treating these parents as embodiments of evil -- as at least two of the segments here do -- is not useful. It seems to me crucial to look at the moments which even these narratives leave open, moments at which we see their vulnerabilities and the horrific double binds they seem to find themselves in. Paava Kadhaigal's first narrative, Thangam, directed by Sudha Kongara, puts the harshest lines in a mother's mouth when she tells her son Sathaar (a wonderful Kalidas Jayaram), who identifies as a woman and is saving for a sex change operation, to die so that his sisters can live 'normal' lives, ie find suitable boys to marry. In the last segment, Vetri Maaran's Oor Iravu, too, we see the real and depressing effects on the rural siblings of a courageous young woman (Sai Pallavi) who has chosen to marry her Dalit partner and migrate to the city. “After you eloped, Dad pulled us out of college,” says one younger sister to her when they meet two years later. Another sister's husband apparently left her when he heard there was a half-Dalit baby joining the family he had clearly married into for its unblemished upper-caste status. The younger brother, meanwhile, is publicly mocked for his sister's elopement to the extent that he drops out of college.

 

The third segment, directed by Gautham Menon, in which a young girl is raped, deals with the bogey of honour in a different context -- that of actual sexual violence. But here, too, the most interesting thing attempted by the film is the mother, whose traditional ideas of sexual purity as something that women must safeguard “like a temple”, push her brain in frightening directions.

 

Menon's short film feels muddled, though, in its attempt at showing us all sorts of different reactions. The brother's idea of vengeance and the mother's of penitence and surrender to fate, contrast with the father's shame as a failed protector, before finally embracing his vulnerability enough to allow the daughter to move on.

 

The most frightening character in the film, brought to unforgettable life by the marvellous Prakash Raj, is the father who steels himself against his favourite daughter. “She chose you over all of us, and I carried on as if she'd never been born,” he tells her husband with a muted bitterness. And yet it is this same father's attachment to the daughter that leads to tragedy. As he says to Sai Pallavi's Sumathi as the film draws to its excruciating close, “If I could let you go, I would.”

We really need that Gibran poem.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Jan 2021

A Portrait of the Doctor as an Angry Young Man

My Mirror column: the seventh in my series on Indian films about doctors.

What drives doctors to frustration in our cinema, and has that changed from Dr. Kotnis to Kabir Singh?

Amitabh Bachchan (right) as the dhoti-clad Dr. Bhaskar Banerjee
with Rajesh Khanna (left) as his patient and friend Anand Sehgal in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anand (1971)

Over the last six weeks, this column has looked at Indian films with doctor protagonists, beginning with Dr. Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani (1946), which V Shantaram based on Dr. Dwarkanath Kotnis, India's real-life medical missionary to China. In the last 75 years, we've travelled some distance from that uncomplicated patriotic doctor who chose duty to profession and country, over even duty to parents.

There have been, speaking rather broadly, two directions in which Indian cinema has taken doctors. In films like Ganashatru and Ek Doctor Ki Maut, made outside the industry framework, the good doctor remains a professional and patriot of the highest order. In these films, it is Indian society that no longer honours that selfless commitment to medical science. This chronological change is true as well of middle-of-the-road cinema. In Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anuradha (1960), Balraj Sahni's rural doctor slaving away over his research could be imagined stumbling upon some good fortune by film's end. A decade later, none of the rural doctors in Vijay Anand's Tere Mere Sapne (1971) receive recognition or support. Even Dev Anand's 'original research' on a herbal cure for tuberculosis gets him fame only when an American university (Johns Hopkins, correctly) gives him a degree (a much darker version of this international vs national arc appears in Ek Doctor Ki Maut). Even as recently as an Udta Panjab, the good doctor's goodness is wasted on the world around her – ending in tragedy.

There is another cinematic trajectory (sometimes overlapping with the first), where the focus is on the frailties of doctors. Tere Mere Sapne, for instance, offered up one doctor in denial of his own illness, one alcoholic depressive doctor, and one doctor making money off rich patients to take vengeance on an unjust world. Bemisaal a decade later is much darker: the doctor now feels entitled to the good life – and the stakes of 'making money' are his patients' lives.

But some of the most interesting depictions are those that recognise that doctors, just like the rest of us, can have frailties -- even when they are more or less good. In 1971, the same year as Tere Mere Sapne, came Hrishikesh Mukherjee's most famous doctor movie: Anand. If his Anuradha had been routed through the doctor's perfect wife, Anand was routed through the perfect patient. Rajesh Khanna played Anand Sehgal, the sunny patient no-one wants to see die.

The film's narrative as usually understood as Anand's chatty warmth breaking through the hard, serious exterior of Dr. Bhaskar Banerjee (a rather wonderful Amitabh Bachchan). That isn't untrue. But watching the film again, I realised that Anand expands on something I suggested in last week's column: the burden of stoicness placed upon doctors. When we meet Bachchan's Bhaskar, he is a man dispirited by his work: exhausted by having to practice in a country where many doctors are willing to treat the imaginary ailments of the rich for a fee, while mere medicine cannot cure what really ails so many patients – poverty. Bhaskar's exhaustion is often expressed as anger – a sneering contempt for the hypochondriac rich, and a helpless snappish rage in the face of the dying poor. What Anand does first is to recognise that rage as the doctor's anger at himself. But what he does next is to jolt Bhaskar out of that overwhelmed state, to frame the doctor's depressiveness and cynicism as self-indulgent – and insist that he live on the side of life, even while constantly having to look death in the eye.

In mid-2019, Indian cinema gave us another film about an angry doctor. Several films, actually – Sandeep Vanga's Telugu superhit Arjun Reddy was remade in several languages, all retaining the same essential plot, about a doctor who becomes a raging alcoholic – literally -- after his college girlfriend is forced by her family to marry another man. I saw the Hindi version, Kabir Singh, and like several reviewers, was struck by the hero's disturbing sense of ownership over his largely passive girlfriend, who seems only too happy to be owned.

Shahid Kapur as the titular protagonist Kabir Singh in the 2016 film about an alcoholic surgeon with anger issues

 

But what is relevant here is that Arjun/Kabir is portrayed as a brilliant doctor -- a surgeon, no less. The film might be seen to suggest, as incoherently as its hero's rages, that the external world – its rules of caste, gender and class, as well as institutional seniority – is a stifling hierarchy against which our hero 'rebels'. Kabir's uncontrolled anger, even when it hurts or endangers his friends, lovers, strangers or even patients, is greeted with awe much more often than censure. His rule-breaking is applauded, his depressive alcoholism is 'understood', even by women and men he treats badly. Anger is feted as self-expression, flaws are forgiven. Where, oh where, is an Anand to cut this Doctor Saab down to size?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1 Nov 2020

How to treat a doctor

My Mirror column: 

As part of the ongoing series about doctors in our cinema, a look at humanitarianism and humility in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's earliest film about a doctor: Anuradha (1960)

Leela Naidu and Balraj Sahni in a still from Anuradha (1960)

Almost exactly twenty years before Bemisal, which I wrote about last week, Hrishikesh Mukherjee directed another film about a doctor. Unlike Bemisal, Anuradha (1960) was about a good doctor, a great doctor, with a humanitarian vision to match his mastery of his profession. Balraj Sahni's Dr. Nirmal Chaudhury is the sort of medical man that Vinod Mehra's reformed avatar tries to become in Bemisal: deeply committed, cycling through his remote rural area, treating zamindar and poor alike – or rather, treating them differently, because he does not charge impoverished patients. Asked where the doctor is to be found, a local responds: “Doctor wahin hoga jahan gandagi hogi, jahan makkhiyan bhinhina rahi hongi, jahan 15-20 mareez baithe khaaen-khaaen kar rahe honge... [A doctor is found where there is dirt, flies buzzing around, and 15-20 patients sitting around coughing...]”

But Mukherjee's concerns in this film are more personal. Sahni's Nirmal is a lovely man who falls for Leela Naidu's Anuradha Roy, a well-off young woman who is not just beautiful but artistically talented, singing and choreographing her own performances (the film's delightful music is by the late Pt. Ravi Shankar). Having wooed and married her, however, Nirmal and she move to the village, and he becomes the classic workaholic husband: out of the house most of the time and preoccupied even when in. 

Sachin Bhowmick's script uses the figure of the distracted doctor to indicate a man who always has bigger things on his mind. Small details suggest this from the start: even when Nirmal is courting Anuradha, he almost misses the start of her show. Where could he be, wonders Anuradha's brother. “Doctors are always late,” says the woman he's with. That line presages what is to come: Leela Naidu's disappointed face as her husband fails to pay her the slightest bit of attention, or even keep his word about the rare promise of time together.

Nirmal is no fool. His passion for medical science apart, he has enough emotional intelligence to notice other men's connection or disconnection from their wives – but apparently not his own. Nirmal's patients include one man who is mocked because he acts out his wife's every illness, his body mimicking the symptoms that his mind so empathises with. (The man who does the mocking is the bus conductor for whom ignoring his wife is mardaangi: even if she throws the kitchen tongs at him.) Another patient never notices that his wife is ill until it is too late, and Nirmal berates him:“If you can't take care of her, why marry?”. But his blindness to his wife's malady is an unspoken analogy for Nirmal's own obliviousness to what ails Anuradha.

What, in fact, does ail Anuradha? Naidu, never much of an actress, with her stilted Hindi delivery, relies on her expressive eyes to portray the profound emptiness of the woman who has lost her music and with it, her identity -- gaining a marriage that offers her none of the companionship it seemed to promise. Her tiredness in the scene in which Sahni returns hours later than promised and goes straight to his home laboratory, intending to spend the rest of the night looking for a cure for a local water-borne infection, presages another put-upon wife's (Shabana Azmi) sorrow and bafflement and frustration with her preoccupied doctor husband (Pankaj Kapur) in Tapan Sinha's Ek Doctor Ki Maut (1990).

The problem, both films seem to suggest, isn't so much the drudgery, which might have been the same for any other woman in any other comparable household. It is the exhaustion that comes from cooking and cleaning and taking care of a man who is entirely oblivious to your presence – and yet expects everything to be in perfect order, so that he can carry out his duties without a hitch. The fact that these duties happen to be to humanity at large helps hide what is equally true – that they serve the doctors' own sense of self. That these blissfully patriarchal husbands happen to be good doctors, I'd argue, is meant to underline their indomitable egos, the unshakeable sense of higher purpose that tars their wives' completely legitimate domestic desires as petty and ungrateful and limited.

These men may start by loving a talented woman as an equal, but the woman inevitably finds herself reduced to being a doctor's wife. Even at the very end of Anuradha, when Mukherjee inserts a nascent women's rights speech -- about the good doctor's sadhana and tapasya being nothing compared to the devotion and penance of “our wives, our mothers, our daughters” -- that speech must come from a senior doctor (Nasir Husain). In Bemisal two decades later, Vinod Mehra's cockily unethical gynaecologist learns his lesson only from his doctor best friend (Amitabh Bachchan). Apparently, it needs a doctor to teach another doctor anything – especially humility.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 Oct 2020.

The Doctor as Anti-Hero

My Mirror column (this is the fourth piece in my series on doctors in our films):

Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Bemisal (1982) can be viewed as a subtle, affecting love triangle, but it is also a rare Indian film about medical malpractice -- and the possibility of atonement.

Bemisal opens with a man in a kurta-pajama cycling between villages, with only a sola topi to protect him from the sun. From the little box affixed to his cycle, one wonders if he is a postman, but the mystery is solved soon: he is a doctor. “The only doctor within a forty mile radius,” as we learn when he gets home for a minute, only to be called away again before he can lunch with his wife.

This vision of the doctor as he should be, or at least could be – a much-needed saviour of the Indian poor – is one of the two faces of the medical profession in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's 1982 film. And ostensibly Vinod Mehra, as Dr. Prashant Chaturvedi, plays both of them.

A Hindi adaptation of the Bengali film Ami Se O Shakha, Bemisal relocates the writer Ashutosh Mukhopadhyay's original tale of friendship and sacrifice in the world of modern-day medical practice – and malpractice. From its opening rural scenes, the film moves swiftly into flashback -- and into what was still recognizable Hindi movie terrain in 1980s: a holiday in Kashmir. It is there, on a promontory looking down at the Dal Lake, that a much younger Prashant and his friend Sudhir Rai (Amitabh Bachchan), both recent medical graduates from Bombay, first encounter a visiting literature professor (AK Hangal) and his daughter, Kavita. Prashant, the son of a magistrate, has his path cut out for him and follows it: he becomes a doctor, marries Kavita (Rakhee), and goes abroad for higher studies in gynaecology. Meanwhile his friend Sudhir, rescued from a life of juvenile crime by Prashant's father, also becomes a doctor, but chooses to stay in India and work in a regular hospital as a child specialist.

The two remain friends despite these varying choices. But the Prashant who returns from the USA is a very different man from the one who left. “Hamaare profession mein aage badhne ke liye raasta seedha nahi hai, tedha hai [The way to get ahead in our profession isn't straight, it's crooked],” he announces to Sudhir and Kavita. “I came back with such a big degree, did I get a job, have I been able to establish my own practice? No, because in our country it is much easier to go from ten lakhs to eleven lakhs than from ten rupees to eleven rupees.” Bemisal is not one of Hrishikesh Mukherjee's finest films, but what he captures here is the sense of entitlement that had already become the tenor of conversation among educated young Indians in the late 1970s and 80s, a growing frustration with bureaucratic hurdles, a feeling that the country owed them – rather than they it. “My father wanted to see me become a big doctor, and I will fulfil his dream -- by hook or by crook,” says Prashant without the slightest irony. He proceeds, again without irony, to sell his father's house to buy a new private nursing home, which starts to rake in money.

This raging financial success, it turns out, isn't sanguine. What Prashant passes off to his wife as his popularity (“teen maheene se advance bookings”) turns out to be a matter of accepting black money and cooking the books. Second, it is the start of the era of Caesarian deliveries and Prashant is shown deliberately encouraging them, even for what could have been regular births -- each operation and hospital stay bringing in additional moolah. (The film also makes a joke of the new fetish: Deven Verma's character, while getting engaged, buttonholes a gynaecologist to book an advance Caesarian delivery for his wife-to-be.) More complicated is the nursing home's role as a site of expensive, often illegal, abortions: here Mukherjee and his screenwriter Sachin Bhowmick falter. The film mixes up what it considers the morally unethical practice of secret abortions for “the unwed daughters of the rich” with the medically unethical – and dangerous -- business of conducting MTPs past the advisable date, for an under-the-table fee.

A case of the latter sort finally leads to the death on the operating table at Prashant's hands – though we never see the young woman. What we are given instead is the agitated figure of Aruna Irani, a receptionist at the nursing home who reports the death because she is still traumatised by a long-ago unplanned pregnancy and unwanted abortion carried out on the instructions of her callous playboy lover.

I said at the start of this column that Vinod Mehra plays both figures: the doctor as hero, and the doctor as antihero. But this is a Hrishikesh Mukherjee film, so of course we also have a second hero – the film's real conscience, Amitabh Bachchan's Dr. Sudhir Rai. A character with greater spine than the poetry-spouting but easily-swayed Prashant, Sudhir seems on the surface to be a standard-issue mainstream Hindi film protagonist: a doctor who sacrifices his medical practice and his quasi-radical views about the class divide to friendship, the personal weighing in over the political.

But then you think about what Sudhir achieves by going to prison in Prashant's stead – bringing a doctor back from the brink of criminality and making him the model for another possible life, lived in an India “where our rotten civilization has not yet reached”. It may be a message quietly delivered, but it seems to me that Hrishikesh Mukherjee did leave doctors with the rather simple question that Amitabh Bachchan asks Vinod Mehra early in the film: “Ek baat bataa, kya tarakki karne ka yahi tareeka hai? [Tell me something, is this the only way to progress?]”

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Oct 2020.

The people versus science

A respected doctor becomes the target of public anger in the uncannily resonant Ganashatru, Satyajit Ray’s 1989 take on the classic Ibsen play An Enemy of the People (1882)

 

In 1989, the filmmaker Satyajit Ray adapted into Bengali one of Henrik Ibsen’s most famous plays, written a century ago in 1882: An Enemy of the People. The original Norwegian text was about a doctor who discovers bacteria contamination in the public baths for which he is medical officer. When he tries to expose the public health hazard, he finds the spa town's powers-that-be arraigned against him - including the mayor, his own brother.

Ganashatru turns the 19th century Scandinavian town into an imaginary 20th century Indian one, while retaining the dramatic device of having brother oppose brother in public: Dr Ashoke Gupta (Soumitra Chatterjee) is pitted against his younger brother Nishith (Dhritiman Chatterjee, no relation), who is head of the municipality. But the change that makes Ray’s 1989 adaptation feel truly Indian – and uncannily prescient 30 years later – is his replacement of Ibsen’s public baths with a popular temple whose bacteria-filled water is directly consumed by thousands each day – as charanaamrit.

The Norwegian play’s Dr Stockmann finds himself under attack for trying to reveal an unsavoury truth that might cost the town its prosperity. But for the good doctor of Ray’s film, the stakes are even higher. Ibsen’s play pitted a potential health disaster against a public panic - and a righteously superior whistleblower against a corrupt cabal of media and bureaucrats. Ganashatru takes that kernel - of one man trying to tell an unpopular truth to a resistant public - and expands it into a full-blown science versus religion debate.

Except, of course, that there isn’t a debate. Hearing that the doctor has tested water samples for bacteria, the local industrialist Bhargava (who set up the temple, and the private hospital that employs Dr Gupta) shows up with a small vial of temple water. “This charanaamrita, and all charanaamrita, is free from germs,” he pronounces, speaking in English for emphasis in the midst of his Hindi-accented Bangla. “Aapni ki jaanen? Ki tulshi pata-e joler shob dosh kete jaaye? [Do you know? Ki all impurities in water are removed by tulsi patta?] It's a rhetorical question, it seems, because Bhargava has no doubt of the answer. “You won't know this, Dr Gupta,” he sneers at the stunned physician. “But Hindus have known it for thousands of years.”

‘Hindus', apparently against all lab-based evidence, 'know' that the water of Chandipur, and particularly the Gangajal-mixed water that temple devotees drink, “cannot be polluted”, so “Dr Gupta is making a mistake”. The local newspaper, having first commissioned the doctor to write about the lab's report, turns tail when it receives seventeen letters from readers – and a not-so-veiled threat to its existence from Nishith and Bhargava. Publication thus prevented, Dr Gupta plans a public lecture. A local theatre troupe pastes posters around town. A large audience assembles - but so do the turncoat editor and publisher and the poisonous Nishith.

What unfolds seems to shock our protagonist, who keeps saying he is only doing his duty as a doctor, that all he wants is for people to hear the facts so that they can make an informed decision, and that surely 'public opinion' - “janamat” - cannot be determined by editors and politicians in advance, to such an extent that they suppress any opinions they believe will be unpopular. But Dr Ashoke Gupta, if he lived in the India of 2020, would not be shocked. For anyone who lives in today's India, there is something completely commonplace about the independent-spirited doctor first being threatened, sought to be suppressed - and when that fails, discredited. While he tries to speak, his brother takes the microphone and asks if he is a Hindu. Suddenly, instead of water and sewage pipelines, the subject is the doctor not having ever worshipped at the Tripureshwar temple – so that whatever he now says is “against the temple”.

And there we have it, all the tragedy of our real-life present already distilled in this admittedly somewhat theatrical fiction from 1989: that faith takes precedence over science; that facts can be disregarded if they go against faith, especially if the source of those facts is somehow not to your taste; the keenness to preserve the image of the ideal city even at the cost of its actual well-being; the nexus between religion, politics, money and the media – and already, even in the left-ruled small town West Bengal of 1989, the quickness with which the needle of suspicion could turn upon a non-religious man.

But Ray's film is also plagued by his own predilections: he makes the doctor a hero. Unlike Ibsen’s protagonist, whose lack of humility and personal excesses ensure that he ends up fighting his battle alone, Ganashatru's Dr Ashoke Gupta isn't lonely for long. By the film's final scene, he not only has the unequivocal support of his wife and daughter, but of some kind of resistance - led by the “educated young students” of the theatre troupe and an ethical journalist who's left his job to report the farce of the public meeting to all the national papers. Hearing the sound of his name on the lips of the students marching towards his besieged house, Soumitra Chatterjee appears on the verge of tears. Watching the unreal optimism of Ray's 1989 ending in 2020, I felt on the verge of tears myself – but not of joy.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 Oct 2020

Out of syllabus

My Mirror column, the second in a series on films about doctors:

Ek Doctor Ki Maut's questions about the life of science seem even more urgent three decades later, in the year of the coronavirus

 

The sharpest revelation in Ek Doctor Ki Maut comes sheathed in a conversation that's almost funny. A reputed Kolkata paper has just published the news that the film's titular protagonist, Dr Dipankar Roy (Pankaj Kapur), has created a vaccine for leprosy. The report also mentions that one of the interesting possible side-effects of the new vaccine might be to reverse female sterility. The news causes a stir: Dr Arijit (Vijayendra Ghatge), who is Dipankar's classmate and childhood friend, receives a visit from a senior gynaecologist called Dr Ramanand (Vasant Choudhury). Settling into a chair in Dr Arijit's chamber, Dr Ramanand launches into a tirade against what he considers Dr Dipankar's audacious bluff. How can an ordinary MBBS, a doctor in a government hospital with no private practice or fancy degree – like Ramanand or Arijit – have invented a world-altering vaccine? But Ramanand's suspicions about Dipankar reach their crescendo when he turns to Arijit, volume dropping slightly to convey his absolute horror: “Jaante ho, woh gaana gaata hai?”

An unperturbed Arijit responds first with humour: “Yes, and with a harmonium, too!” But when Ramanand continues to look appalled, he shifts tack, listing great scientists with artistic hobbies: Einstein played the violin, Satyen Bose the esraj, while Dr Homi Bhabha painted. Ramanand is far from convinced. He displays shock that Arijit would equate Dipankar with such certified geniuses – and in the film, that's where the conversation ends.

But the exchange seems to me to encapsulate a great deal about the crisis of education in India, a malaise inextricably entwined with the social and political mess we find ourselves in, 30 years after. What do I mean? Let me draw out the connections. Dr Ramanand, the man who decides to bring Dipankar down, is a reputed gynaecologist, which might lead one to believe he is a man of science. At the very least, as a medical expert, one might expect him to have a professional investment in health. But his reaction to a vaccine that might save millions is not enthusiasm, or even a sceptical intellectual engagement. Rather than the marvellous possibility of medical advancement, he responds only to the source of that advancement. And in his mind, Dipankar ticks none of the boxes by which our system measures achievement: exams, marks, degrees – all ways to fetch a higher price in a marketplace of status.

Ramanand's scorn for Dipankar's musicality further establishes the hierarchical nature of this social-educational marketplace. Sinha doesn't spell it out, but doctors, engineers and now MBAs see themselves tied for top spot in a modern Indian educational caste system – with the arts at the bottom. A doctor interested in music is either miscegenation or proof that he isn't really deserving of his place at the top.

In this stultifying celebration of mediocrity, there is no space for genuine questioning. The film suggests two possible directions in which such an instrumental system can push a seeker of knowledge. He might find his way out of the morass early: so where Arijit set his mind to achieving a first class, Dipankar barely passed. “Kehta thha, syllabus ki kitaabon mein kya rakha hai yaar? Syllabus ke baahar ki duniya hi toh anjaani hai, aur anjaani cheezein hi toh interesting hoti hain.” But too questioning a seeker might also be pushed to the margins, treated not just with suspicion but disbelief, humiliated by those the status quo serves. So when the research Dipankar has conducted in his barebones home-made lab attracts international attention, his health ministry boss does all he can to scotch it, from actively stymying foreign inquiries to transferring Dipankar to a remote rural area.

Pankaj Kapur brings to his turn as Dipankar a vivid passion for his work, both its intellectual joys and its grand scope for social improvement. It's worth noting that the director, cinematic giant Tapan Sinha, studied physics at Patna University and later earned an MSc from Rajabazar Science College, Calcutta, while his son Anindya Sinha is a primatologist at NIAS in Bengaluru, with degrees in botany and cytogenetics. The film features a science-loving journalist called Amulya (a very young Irrfan Khan), who has a PhD but realises he isn't cut out for research and can better serve science by bringing it to public notice – a proxy for the filmmaker? Amulya's journalism, however, cuts both ways, bringing Dipankar acclaim, but also accusations of sensationalism – and already, in 1990, Sinha shows us an editor unwilling to go against the government because “Akhbaar vigyapan pe chaltein hai, vaigyaanik pe nahi”.

Although globalisation and the internet have increased access to information, doing science in India today is possibly more, not less, impeded by political pressures. Ek Doctor Ki Maut remains a memorable film about the scientific life, and it's powerfully resonant in 2020. In one memorable scene, Dipankar tells his long-suffering supportive wife Seema (Shabana Azmi) that the stars often seem to him to berate humans, wasting our time fighting each other on our little planet. “Insaan hone ka itna ghuroor, itna ghamand. Insaan ka dimaag, insaan ki buddhi kitna kucch jaanti hai hamaare baare mein?” In these last 30 years, humans have only to have grown in our hubris, our attempts to harness nature creating forms of resistance we can barely understand.

As we grapple with a new virus, can we start to imagine a science whose questions serve the universe, rather than  instrumental answers that supppsedly serve the human race? Our current goals may just cut the planet short.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 Sep 2020.

Far from the feudal

My Mirror column (14 Jun 2020):

Has Indian cinema gained or lost something as filmmakers become increasingly distanced from the village?

Recently, while on a video call with a novelist friend, I mentioned writing a series of columns on Indian films about the migrant experience, including Muzaffar Ali's Gaman (1978), in which Farooque Shaikh played a young man who has to leave his Uttar Pradesh village to become a taxi driver in what was then Bombay. “Gaman is a good film,” conceded my friend, a less forgiving film viewer than me. “But it presented the local raja as this very nice man, and then I realized the filmmaker is talking about himself!” I said, well, it was the 1970s, so more likely a fictionalisation of the filmmaker's father – one degree of separation. And my friend and I laughed.

But it is indeed true that the village in which the film is shot was (and was shown to be) Kotwara, District Kheri, UP – the place that Muzaffar Ali's ancestors have ruled for generations. So when Farooque Shaikh's on-screen mother tells her on-screen daughter-in-law Smita Patil that “Raja Sahab vilayat jaane se pehle gale lagaaein aur kahein, 'Aap mere bade bhai hain',” that expansive gesture of personalised generosity was how the film chose to characterise the area's ruling feudal family – the family to which the filmmaker himself belonged. The straitened circumstances of the Farooque Shaikh character, meanwhile, were blamed on an upper caste landlord who had established himself as a middleman.

Why does any of this matter? Well, it matters because Gaman is one of the rare films made in India to deal sensitively with the pressures of migration; to depict the way large swathes of rural India have become unsustainable for their inhabitants, pushing people out into our cities, where they must then live depleted lives in crowded, often forcibly unsanitary circumstances, away from loved ones – until that life, too, is made unsustainable by an unprecedented state-created crisis like the Covid-19 lockdown. Beginning with an ethnographic eye – the women and children of the village, sitting silent and watchful, overlaid with Hira Devi Mishra's unforgettable rendition of Ras Ke Bhare Tore Nain, or a little later, what looks like wonderful documentary footage of the local Muharram celebrations, Gaman used a more mainstream fictional narrative – including some very fine songs -- to get its viewers to feel for the poor rural migrant.

So it seemed important that Gaman's creator came from the top of that rural hierarchy. It was Muzaffar Ali's feudal background that actually connected him with the village – and later took him back there to found a designer clothing line that employs local artisans. Ali was never going to be a poor villager, but he had clearly met several, and was able to generate the creative compassion needed to tell their story. Once I started to think about it, all the films I'd been writing about these past few weeks felt like they needed to be seen again through the lens – pardon the pun -- of their creators.

Three and a half decades before Gaman, the migrant's story had been told in Bimal Roy's classic Do Bigha Zamin, which drew on a Tagore poem about a dispossessed peasant to create a film with a strongly socialist IPTA-inspired worldview, including a joyful immersion in India's folk traditions of music and dance. The callous zamindar who drives Do Bigha Zamin's peasant protagonist Shambhu to ruin was, of course, among many such villainous depictions of the time, including Pran as the lecherous, drunken Ugranarayan in Roy's own beautifully rendered supernatural romance, Madhumati. Was it of consequence that Bimal Roy came from a landowning family in Suapur, in former East Bengal? Was Ugranarayan informed, as Roy's daughter Rinki Roy Bhattacharya has suggested, by Roy's real-life uncle Jogeshchandra, whose indolent feudal lifestyle the lifelong teetotaller Roy clearly wished to keep at bay?

Such biographical questions may seem altogether too specific, and given our paucity of personal archives, necessarily speculative. But what I'm trying to get at is the fact that there was, in both theses cases, a connection with the village that allowed for the rural character to emerge on screen. Balraj Sahni, who played the peasant-turned-rickshawalla in DBZ, was so aware of his being urban that he spent a lot of time with a rickshawala who was a migrant. But when one actually reads about Sahni's life -- for instance, the Communist leader PC Joshi describing how Sahni's parents insisted on keeping a buffalo for fresh milk in their house in 1950s Bombay -- one realises that the connections between the urban and the rural in that India were still stronger than we can dream of.

In a book of interviews called Rendezvous With Hindi Cinema (2019), the director Dibakar Banerjee makes the point sharply. “Earlier, there was some kind of a connection. It's a paradox, that connect was feudalism. Feudal families would send their children to study in colleges in Bombay or Delhi. But they'd go back for vacation and see the real, poor, feudal India, where they would be the lords,” he says, speculating for instance about the powerfully anti-feudal films of Shyam Benegal. “But the present generation of filmmakers is even more cut off from rural India, poor India,” Banerjee says.

It is hard to disagree with the fact that even the alternative, non-Bollywood cinema of the last decade is almost entirely urban. There are rare exceptions, but they prove the rule, like a Peepli Live (2010), where the village's desperation for visibility is tied to its appearance on screen -- but as the locale for a media circus. For a more recent film set entirely in a North Indian village, I can only think of Gamak Ghar – which proves the point, too, because it is the young urban filmmaker memorialising the village his parents left behind. Our films may be further from the feudal than they once were, but it looks like they are also further from the rural.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 Jun 2020.

The Rules of the Game

My Mirror column:
 
A neighbourhood chess tournament provides both setting and metaphor in the Ektara Collective’s sharp and delightful indie Turup (Checkmate), currently free to stream online. 

“Unless, like Thelma and Louise, you plunge off the side of a canyon, there is no escaping the everyday,” wrote Geoff Dyer in his marvellously idiosyncratic sort-of biography of DH Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage (1997). “To be free is not the result of a moment’s decisive action but a project to be constantly renewed,” he added. “There are intervals of repose but there will never come a moment of definitive rest where you can give up because you have turned freedom into a permanent condition. Freedom is always precarious.”

Dyer’s riffs on freedom and the everyday came back to me this week as I watched, for the second time, a lovely film called Turup (Checkmate), made in 2017 by an unusual group of filmmakers who call themselves the Ektara Collective. Turup is currently free to stream online in the ‘Viewing Room’ set up by the organisers of the Dharamshala International Film Festival and addresses both the precariousness of our freedoms and the mundane, unglamorous, repetitive settings in which we must fight for them.

Set in the Bhopal neighbourhood of Chakki Chauraha, the film uses a public neighbourhood chess-board as narrative and metaphorical anchor for its fine-grained take on a set of interlocked lives. It is very much a feature film, with a script, characters, and often sharp turns of dialogue –but it has a documentary-style sensitivity to its chosen milieu, attending carefully to the faces, spaces and sounds that bring it to life.

Some of Turup’s attention to the everyday is about catching playful moments of enjoyment. A man pauses to watch a woman he likes tying up her hair. A child hides some ber where an old man can find them. One young man cajoles another into betting on a chess game he’s not even party to. More often, though, what the film places under its observational microscope are aspects of Indian daily life that too often go unnoticed.  An upper caste man tells a little girl to move away from her spot at a public chessboard with a wordless gesture of caste distancing, adding that she should take “her pieces” with her. An upper middle class woman fails to recognise the sweeper who cleans the street outside her house. A husband thinks nothing of conducting large financial transactions from a marital ‘joint’ account without consulting his wife. A younger brother invites a potential groom’s family home to ‘see’ his elder sister because he disapproves of her choice of romantic partner.

That quasi-anthropological gaze, defamiliarising the familiar, forcing us to look at the inequities to which we usually turn a blind eye, is one part of what makes the film powerfully political. The other thing I think Turup gets right is how the local, the personal and the everyday are inextricably wound up with wider social, public and historical currents flowing through the country and shaping our times. Like a well-executed piece of ethnography, the film’s focus is small – one urban neighbourhood – but its socio-political canvas is large. It also manages to gesture to the ways in which our ‘local’ reality is now in constant conversation with mass media (Though I am less optimistic than Turup’s makers about the relative reach and effect of newspaper journalism and bigotry-filled WhatsApp forwards).

Made three years ago, the film is attuned to the rising tide of rightwing Hindu majoritarianism that now threatens to drown out all other political voices. At several points in the film, we see the mobilising of men – especially those who are unemployed, poor or in whatever way insecure — around the totem of the endangered cow mother, and the endangered Hindu daughter. The bogey of ‘love jihad’ is the apposite bedrock of Turup’s plot, revealing gender as the fault line along which fictional ‘us’ and ‘them’ narratives can most easily be spun. “Apni ladkiyon ko kaaboo mein nahi rakh paye toh izzat gawaayenge,” says one man. “Nahi maan rahi hai? Arrey toh manwaao,” says another, talking of a girl who is resisting a forced arranged marriage in favour of studying further and eventually marrying the man of her choice. A young Dalit man is shown as susceptible to such gendered messaging, especially when religion is thrown into the mix – but the film also reveals how caste is often the limit of Hindutva’s imagined solidarities. The same young man, who thinks he’s being enjoined to be part of a movement for dharam raksha, finds himself being urged to sacrifice a morning’s work to ‘help out’ with a blocked septic tank.

Turup offers no large victories. What it holds out are small incremental achievements in what the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci would have called a War of Position, a process in which cultural activities and social interactions are the locales in which people can begin to imagine new ways of being. The young Dalit man refuses the work for which his caste is seen to make him automatically ‘qualified’. A woman starts to claw back some power in her marriage by re-establishing some professional self-worth. An upper caste local bigwig finds himself losing a final to the young ‘outsider’.

The wresting of freedom, as Dyer suggested, is part of the daily grind. But it is also a game in a continuing tournament.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 Apr 2020.

Fictional motherlands, real relationships

My Mirror column:

Some recent fictions illustrate how totalitarianism thrives on turning on real people into mythical enemies – and pitting an attachment to family and friends against the love of an imaginary nation

A still from the 2019 film Jojo Rabbit

A third of the way through the sadly aborted Leila, the series’ protagonist Shalini (Huma Qureshi) finally manages to trace her lost daughter to a school that looks like a prison. Her fake ID gets her past the gun-toting security-men into a cavernous grey interior, where stiffly-dupatta-ed girls are learning the call-and-response of new nationhood. “Hum kaun hain?” demands the teacher. “Aryavarta ke nanhe sipaahi!” comes the response. As Shalini’s anxious gaze travels along the children and finds Leila’s familiar features, her face uncreases into a joyful smile. Almost unconsciously, her feet begin to move towards the child she thought she might never see again.

But is this really the same child as the one who was abducted from her parents’ arms, only two years before? “My name is not Leila, my name is Vijaya,” the little girl says to a stunned Shalini. She pronounces the words carefully, like she’s learnt them by rote. The scene’s emotional kicker comes when a big car draws up, with a woman in it that Shalini knows well from a previous life, and Vijaya runs to embrace her – this time, with an unrehearsed “Mummy”. But as the finale of Leila makes indubitably clear, that woman is only a placeholder. The entity that has really replaced Shalini is so powerful that there is no way a mere human even try to compete - the nation-state. To quote the slightly dubious gendering chosen by Leila’s makers, “Tum meri maa nahi ho. Aryavarta meri maa hai.”

The idea of a nationalism that pits children against their parents is one that has appeared in another Indian webseries, Ghoul, where the ultimate betrayal of a parent is committed by an adult protagonist who has tragically learnt to trust the nation-state over and above family. I was reminded of these shows this week, as I watched Taika Waititi’s 2019 film Jojo Rabbit, currently free to stream, in which a single mother (Scarlett Johansson) has to deal with her only child being indoctrinated by a state she isn't exactly enamoured of.

Instead of a chilling dystopian future, though, Jojo Rabbit takes us on a madcap fantasy ride into the past. Ten-year-old Johannes Betzler is as cuddly a protagonist as you could ask for. He is also an incipient Nazi, who spends a lot of time talking to his imaginary best friend Adolf: a goofball version of Hitler who's alternately sulky and encouraging. Right from the opening sequence, which splices its fictional boy hero's frenzied self-motivation for a Jungvolk training weekend with historical black and white footage of Hitler's screaming youthful fans to the Beatles iconic anthem I Wanna Hold Your Hand, you know this film isn't traditional fare. Jojo's repeated 'Heil Hitlers', getting louder and crazier as he bursts out of his front door and careens in faux-aeroplane mode through his small-town streets, aren’t scary so much as ridiculous. The same could be said of the cast of characters that have assembled to turn the town's little boys into men and little girls into women – the hipflask-swigging Captain K, demoted from active wartime service by the avoidable loss of an eye, and the pudding-faced Fraulein Rahm, who seems a little young to have had “eighteen children for Germany”.

Waititi ups the tenor of ridiculousness even further when it comes to Nazi indoctrination against Jews. The descriptions proffered by the camp leaders, complete with chalk sketches, reminded me of Roald Dahl's checklist for witches in The Witches. Jews look deceptively like human beings, but they have horns under their hair and scales on their bodies and they smell like Brussels sprouts.

But of course, the film's whole point is that Jojo – like the entire brainwashed German nation -- believes in this mythology. So when, in a nice doffing-of-the-hat to Anne Frank, a teenaged Jewish girl turns out to be hiding behind the wall of his dead sister’s room, Jojo is baffled when she doesn’t fit the criteria. In return for keeping her secret, Jojo demands of Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) a detailed insider's account of Jewishness, taking notes as she speaks. Their evolving relationship lets us walk the tightrope fantasy does, between wish-fulfilment and danger. An illustrated ‘expose’ full of ‘facts' about Jews, fictitious letters from a boyfriend who may or may not exist – these are the flip side of a real world in which Elsa can only survive if she can successfully parade her dead classmate’s papers.But it is in Jojo’s relationship with his mother Rosie that the film's heart lies. Johansson is pitch-perfect as the single mum who can blacken her face and turn into an imaginary ‘Daddy’ to indulge her little boy’s demand for his missing father – but who also refuses to let him avert his eyes from the bodies of ‘traitors’ strung up in the town square. She is happy to let him be part of the masquerade of Nazi boyhood, but draws the line at a real gun. Jojo Rabbit, like Rosie, knows the magical power of fiction, but also knows exactly when reality counts.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 Apr 2020.

Social maladies

My Mirror column:

Two films about contagious infections, in the starkly different milieus of the USA and Kerala, point to the cracks in which a virus can really make a home.

 
Films about pandemics have catapulted to unprecedented fame in the last two months, as people across the globe seek out fictional material that resonates in the age of Covid-19. Two of the better films available to stream online in India are Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 medical thriller Contagion, where a highly infectious fictional new virus makes its way from Hong Kong to the USA, and Aashiq Abu’s 2019 Malayalam film Virus, which depicts how the state of Kerala dealt with the outbreak of the Nipah virus in 2018.

In both films, one is constantly struck by the use of terms that most of us are only beginning to learn – “incubation period”, “treatment protocol”, “index patient”. Both films deal with zoonotic viruses that have entered the human body from animals, and the fear factor derives from the fact that the scientific situation we are dealing with is not just new, but unknown – and therefore extremely difficult to predict. In an early scene in Contagion, the scientist working on a vaccine seems to almost marvel at the novel virus. “It's still changing," she tells the head of the Centre for Disease Control, Dr Ellis Cheever. "It's figuring us out faster than we’re figuring it out.”

“It doesn’t have anything else to do,” says Dr Cheever, looking unimpressed.

It’s a droll little moment in a relentlessly grim film, but you barely register the comment as dry humour because you’re too busy registering it as fact. Contagion makes it very clear that human beings are on the back foot here. Unlike the virus, we have a great deal to do if we’re to protect the species from the deathly microscopic foe – and from ourselves.

For there are two seemingly contradictory facts about human beings that both Virus and Contagion make visible. First, that the virus piggybacks on the existence of community: the fact that human beings live with each other, and don't seem to know quite how to do without. Second, that human beings are quick to suspect each other, and the way the virus can really conquer is if our leaders choose to divide and rule.

Contagion opens with an off-screen cough that may or may not have had the same chilling effect in 2011 that it does now. In 2020, we are more than primed to watch the film’s opening sequence of people going about their closely proximate urban lives as a series of dangerous acts – pressing elevator buttons in public places, clutching the same steel pillar on the metro that a thousand other hands have clutched, sitting next to each other on planes, in stations, at bar counters, in hotel casinos. Kate Winslet, playing an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer called Dr Mears, has the job of contact tracing – finding out who the first American casualty, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), may have met and infected in the days before her death, and thus hoping to prevent the further spread of the virus.

Virus unfolds in a less transnational context, but contact tracing is very much at the centre of the narrative. A medical volunteer called Annu (Parvathy) conducts a painstaking investigation, following up with patients and their friends and family members to try and establish the links between seemingly unconnected cases. She is aided in her task by Kerala’s fairly well-organised administration – the fact that there are tickets given out at government hospital, for instance – and by increasingly ubiquitous technology – the presence of time-stamps on mobile phone photos, for instance. But what is really striking about the film’s depiction of the process is not just Parvathy’s sharp instincts, but her sensitivity.

In fact, sensitivity is what distinguishes the actions of almost all those who populate Aashiq Abu’s film: doctors and nurses most of all, but drivers and attendants, and because this is Kerala, even ministers and bureaucrats.

If Contagion maps all the ways in which an infectious disease can bring out our worst selves as a society – people profiteering off potential fake cures, panicked hoarding of goods that creates grocery store shortages, stampedes and food riots – Virus suggests that it is also possible to combat our fears. The mother of a young man who has died is surprised that Annu is willing to have tea in her house. The ration delivery for her place is now dropped off on the road, with the driver honking before leaving. When a crematorium is chosen for the last rites of Nipah patients, villagers in the vicinity block the road in fear. But a set of volunteers is found to conduct the rites elsewhere. In a revealing conversation, the district magistrate says that enforcing the cremation through the use of police force would have been the easiest thing to do – but the point is to try and do it without. Even the debate about whether it is unsafe to bury the bodies of virus-affected patients is conducted without rancour or religious fervour, and resolved with the scientifically approved solution of deep burial.

As an ill-prepared India waits for whatever is to come in the next few weeks and months, we have a socio-political climate that tragically encourages the well-off to turn away from the poor, while turning Muslims into scapegoats by testing the participants of one ill-advised religious gathering rather than all those that have taken place. Watching Virus makes it clear that we will sink or swim based on our ability to allay each others' fears and suspicions, not stoke them.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 April 2020