Speak, memory

My Mirror column:
 
Ritesh Batra’s Photograph is an underappreciated gem of a film, gleaming with quiet revelations about the stories we tell ourselves.

Ritesh Batra’s Photograph (2019), much like his acclaimed 2013 film The Lunchbox, is based on a particular idea of romance: two people from very different worlds united by happenstance. In both films, that unexpected connection is forged by the big city, the vast anonymous wilderness suddenly letting two people see each other. In The Lunchbox, Batra used a mix-up by Mumbai’s much-feted dabbawalas as the device that brought a neglected housewife in contact with an office-going widower. In Photograph, the unlikely bond that Batra wants to us to believe in, between a street photographer called Rafi and a modest Gujarati girl prepping for her CA exams, is tied to something just as iconic in the city: the Gateway of India.

Yes, perhaps there’s a kernel of reality there. Where, except at the Gateway of India, would a working class Muslim man from a village in Ballia, Uttar Pradesh, living five to a kholi in Mumbai, have a chance to speak to a fair, English-speaking, academically-inclined girl from an upper middle class Hindu family? But for Miloni to have her photo taken by Rafi is one thing; to have her actually respond to a personal request from him days, even weeks later, is quite another. It is in making us believe in their slowly unfurling connection that Batra wins, and in the ever-so-delicate performances he draws from Nawazuddin Siddiqui as the watchful Rafi and Sanya Malhotra as the almost painfully quiet Miloni.

The gulf between them has been described as “cultural”, and I suppose that is one way to put it. But the financial inequality is stark enough to ensure that even a simple transactional moment between them is experienced completely differently by both parties. Miloni can forget to pay the Rs 30 for her instant photo not just because she is distracted, but because the amount is so little as to not even register in her mind. Meanwhile, for Rafi, who counts out even his petty change to send home, one disappeared client can turn a good day into bad.

What Batra does beautifully is to show us these quiet people, both adamant to resist the paths laid out for them. For Rafi, the prospect of marriage is not entirely unattractive, but he thinks pining away for a wife in the village will make him a “softy”. It is soon clear that he resists because he is the sentimental grandson who revisits his childhood in story after story, recognising in his grandmother’s childhood stories the power of fiction (“She made us laugh so much that we wouldn’t even know if the stove had been lit that day”) – and returning her gift now with an elaborate fiction of his own. For Miloni, life so far has been defined by her parents: home to tuition and back, the CA examination, arranged marriage to an eligible boy, America. She is so unused to choosing anything that even the colours of her clothes are of no consequence to her. Spending days with Rafi and his dadi becomes the furthest she has strayed from the straight and narrow.

At the centre of the film is the photograph of Miloni that Rafi takes. But Batra’s style is literary, in the best possible ways, and so it is no coincidence that we don’t ever properly see the picture. The image here is but a prop for stories – for Rafi’s story that he has a fiancée, and later for Miloni’s story of how she and Rafi got together. She makes it up for Dadi’s benefit, as she does her dead parents. But what she sees in it is true: a happier self, now invisible to her, that Rafi’s gaze seems to capture.

There is nostalgia here aplenty – the breeze on the ferry, the old Hindi film song in a kali-peeli taxi on a rainy Bombay night, Campa Cola as the taste of a childhood self. But the quality that felt slightly contrived in The Lunchbox – handwritten notes, the repeated error of the dabba delivery, no mobile phones – has also been smoothed into something more convincing here, something in which the past is not a simple refuge. The pleasure of the ice gola is destroyed by a stomach upset, the old single screen theatre by a rat. The old lady urges Rafi to let go of the past: to forget the mortgaged house, the deprived childhood. In a darker subplot, the story of the man who hung himself in the room where Rafi and his four mates live is told and retold in their drunken sessions: now with humour, now with pathos, but most of all with a kind of desperation – as if telling and retelling the tale might exorcise the ghost of the past.

Perhaps what makes Photograph so rewarding is its recognition that we live in the past and the present simultaneously, and that it isn’t necessarily the end of the story that matters most, but what you remember of it. In the words of Rafi’s marvellous sales pitch to prospective customers: “Saalon baad jab aap yeh photo dekhenge, toh aapko aapke chehre pe yahi dhoop dikhai degi, aapke baalon mein yeh hawa, aur aapke kaanon mein hazaaron logon ki awaazein. Sab chala jayega. Hamesha ke liye sab chala jayega. [“Years later when you look at this photo, you will see this very sunlight on your face, this breeze in your hair, and the voices of thousands of people in your ears. Everything will go. Everything will be gone for ever.”]. Everything will end, but a memory can still be a gift.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Nov 2019

Mr. Bharat in Bandra

My Mirror column:
Watching the new Salman Khan film at Galaxy Cinema makes the national feel local, and vice versa.

The crowd outside Galaxy Cinema, Mumbai (Photo by Trisha Gupta)

As an outsider who writes about Hindi films, a visit to Mumbai always makes me think: is it Mumbai that created Bollywood, or is it Bollywood that makes the city what it is? The answer is, of course, both. Not only is the history of the city entwined with the film industry to which it lends its name, so is its geography.

Arriving a day after Eid, I found myself in the midst of extended festive revelry in Bandra: an actual Eid Mela, but also a large Muslim family crowd out by the seafront. When I remarked on the late night crowd, my Bandra friend pointed around the corner, and said, as Mumbai people do, “Salman’s house is just here,” with that wonderful first-name intimacy that is directly proportional to a star’s stardom.

Going to see Salman Khan emerge onto his balcony is an Eid pilgrimage specific to Mumbai: A combination of filmi fandom and religious festivity now written into urban space. At one remove from that is going to Gaiety-Galaxy to watch a new Salman Khan film release. I decided it was time for Bharat.

The energy outside G7 Multiplex, as the old Bandra cinema is now officially known, was palpable. Several people posed in front of the poster. There were many women in large family groups, but the multiple all-male groups ahead of me led the man doing the manual frisking to reach for my hips on autopilot. It was only when his older colleague yelled that the errant checker realised: Cargo pants do not make a man.

When I bought my ticket online, there were just nine seats left. At the cinema, it was clear that many tickets ‘sold’ hadn't yet reached their final owners. Two middle-aged men, sweaty in shirtsleeves, were advertising their wares: “Bhaaarat, Bhaaarat, Bhaaarat.” The balcony was half-empty, but the cheers that greeted the entry of the 70-year-old Bharat were still loud enough to drown out the dialogue. By the interval, the hall had filled.

Mumbai may be where the popular screen idea of India is created, but the milieu in which that quintessentially Indian hero operates is still North India, and increasingly often, Delhi. Bharat, too, opens with a grand top shot of the Red Fort, and moves into a very stagey Old Delhi, specifically a shop called Hind Ration Stores. Once owned by Bharat’s bua and phuphaji (Ayesha Raza Mishra and Kumud Mishra, fine actors both wasted here), it now belongs to our 70-year-old hero, who is adamant about hanging on to it in the face of redevelopment sharks trying to buy him out. By the end, he lets it go.

Bharat’s reason for clinging to the store – and later, letting it go – is the crux of the film’s emotional narrative. Adapted from 2014’s massive Korean hit Ode to My Father, Ali Abbas Zafar’s film is a sort of Forrest Gump-lite that takes us from 1947 Lahore into present-day Delhi using a voiceover that feels like Historical Highlights for the (Post-)Millennial Viewer. The death of Nehru (turned into a lame Salman joke) segues into a period of high unemployment, allowing for long detours that send Bharat and his best friend Vilayati Khan into an unnamed oil-rich Gulf country and the Merchant Navy. These attempts to connect with the Indian expatriate worker have our hero battling white racism on one hand and conquering the hearts of black sea pirates on the other. We even get to liberalisation, for which, happily and almost surprisingly in our current political climate, Manmohan Singh not only gets credit but is declared a national hero – as are Sachin Tendulkar and, in rather generous spirit, Shah Rukh Khan.

It's interesting how often Salman Khan films seem to engage with national borders and wars, from spy romances like Ek Tha Tiger and Tiger Zinda Hai to Tubelight, which featured the Indo-China war, to Indo-Pak dramas like Bajrangi Bhaijaan. The sole affecting parts of Bharat, too, involve Partition, which forever separates the child Bharat from his father and little sister. It's to enable that lost father (Jackie Shroff in a guest appearance) to return that Hind Ration Stores must continue to exist.

Towards the end of Bharat, we get a televised cross-border unification of families devised by Katrina Kaif's character, who's gone from being a Salma Sultan stand-in on “Desh Darshan” to "creative head" at Zee TV. Despite the corny fakeness of the TV show-within-the-film, the real memories of subcontinental audiences make sure we get teary.

At one point, Bharat drops a bit of global-style Indian wisdom: Any world problem can be sorted with baat-cheet, pyaar and Hindi film songs. Perhaps I'm pessimistic, but as I watched the rows of sad-faced citizens of India and Pakistan on the film's imaginary TV show, holding Hindi and Urdu placards naming long-lost family members, all I could think was that neither side can any longer read the other's script.

Still, if the hero of a top-grossing Hindi film in 2019 manages to leave the ghost of Partition behind, maybe there's hope for the rest of us.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 9 June 2019.

Life, Tamil cinema style

My Mirror column:

What does cinema stand for in Tamil fiction? The second of a multi-part column on films and life in Tamil Nadu.

Last week, as an absolute outsider, I took the liberty – and risk – of speculating on the subject of cinema and Tamil Nadu. Not on the state of cinema in Tamil Nadu –about which I know far too little to say anything of value –but Tamil Nadu as a state of cinema. My route into the subject was Tamil fiction, starting with Perumal Murugan’s novel Current Show.

I ended the previous column on the cusp of a tale being told by the old Watchman in Current Show. The story in question was of how old man Poosariappan came to build the Vijaya Theatre that is the novel’s grim, dark locale. 

Poosari was really rich then—had his own weaving mill. Had a car and driver even then. He was planning to build a grain godown. One day, he sees his daughter-in-law, Sadaiyan’s wife, dressing up to go out. Looking at her, you wouldn’t say she’s from his caste. Fair and round, like a ripe tomato. Poosari couldn’t bear to see this red tomato going out like that—powder on her face, nice clothes... . Before he knew what he was doing, his mouth blurted out: ‘What’s all this dressing-up? Like some cheap night-dancer?’ They say she got really angry. So angry she yelled back, forgetting his age, ‘I’m going to see a film. Know what a cinema theatre is? Ever been inside one?’

Poosariappan felt so slighted by his daughter-in-law’s taunt that he decided to convert his intended grain godown into a cinema theatre. In another variant of the tale, it was Poosari’s mistress in Mallasamudram who gave him the idea –to get back at his daughter-in-law – and the theatre was named Vijaya after her. Another version had Poosari building Vijaya Theatre to get back at his Gounder friend, owner of Krishna Talkies, who had made fun of Poosari for thinking that a theatre was a tent with dancing women in it.

The various origin myths which Murugan stitches together here reveals how deeply cinema has become part of warp and weft of Tamil everyday life, embedded into the existing dynamics of caste, class and gender. The theatre represents sophistication, modernity, but is also redolent with the illicit, the sexual. For a man like Poosari, moneyed but not urbane, a cinema theatre is good business, but it isn’t only that. Becoming a cinema owner seems to stand in for control of recalcitrant women, somehow making a claim to masculinity and caste status by owning a hall in which a minute’s worth of soft porn plays every day. Years later, Poosari has never seen a single film fully, says the Watchman – only that minute of porn.

The cinema also makes its presence felt in several short stories in the mammoth collection The Tamil Story: Through the times, through the tides, edited by Dilip Kumar and translated by Subashree Krishnaswamy. In Prapanchan’s crisply narrated ‘In a Town, Two Men’, an urban landscape of new cinema theatres forms the backdrop of a tale about an unpaid loan. There is a faint whiff of sarcasm that attends this geography; a sense that there might be more cinemas than homes in this universe. “The huts were razed and they built a cinema hall there. No one knew where the hutment dwellers had disappeared. Perhaps they were living inside the cinema hall.”

A very different spin on the idea of living in the cinema theatre is provided by another story in the collection, 'The Saga of Sarosadevi' (1981). Shenbagam Ramaswamy’s story begins with a woman called Bhagyam who is watching a film when the baby in her stomach decides it is time to come out into the universe. “It was the time when actor Sarojadevi was mouthing the song sung by playback singer P Susheela: ‘Thangathile Oru Kuraiyirundalam (Even if there is a flaw in the gold...)’. A stern voice ordered from the back, ‘Sit down, di.’ ‘Move your feet. Make way for this akka. She’s got labour pains.’ Ponnamma had to announce this loudly in the dark of the cinema hall.”

The faceless women in the surrounding seats let Bhagyam and Ponnamma out, though not without some sarcastic grumbling: “Look at her coming to watch a film at the time of labour!” “Such a craze for films, is it?” “Perhaps she thought if she delivers in the cinema hall, she’ll get fame.” But there isn’t enough time to get to the hospital. A midwife is rushed in, and “[b]y the time Sarojadevi and Sivaji Ganesan were united with their child in the film, Bhagyam had given birth to a girl.”

The hapless child is named Sarosadevi (that is how Ponnamma pronounces the name of the heroine) but her time on earth is nasty, brutish and short. Life offers her none of the expansiveness and luxury conjured by her name. One wonders if this might be one of the recurring ways in which the trope of cinema appears in modernist Tamil fiction – to show us a population that dreams of cinema, only to then peel back the curtain and reveal the unvarnished grimness of life?

[To be continued]

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 May 2018.

Big screen, writ larger

My Mirror column:

Life and cinema in Tamil Nadu seem to intersect more than in most places. The first of a multi-part column on a unique cultural universe.

Wellingdon Theatre in Madras screening the film Parthiban Kanavu in the 1960s

Over the century and a bit that it has existed, cinema has successfully established its dominion over most parts of the world. Still, as I found myself wondering for the umpteenth time during a recent visit to Tamil Nadu, is it likely that there exists another corner of the globe as deeply steeped in film?

The way in which this cinematic state is usually marked is by noting the intertwining of the Tamil world of film with that of politics. Dravidian cultural nationalism came of age alongside film production in the state, and since then the relationship between popular cinema and populist politics has been a shaping influence on twentieth century Tamil culture and history. It is an absolutely remarkable fact that the office of Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu has been occupied almost continuously since 1967 by people with a film background (up until the present incumbent). These comprise two screenwriters – CN Annadurai and M Karunanidhi; one actor – MG Ramachandran (MGR); and two actresses – Janaki Ramachandran (VN Janaki) and J Jayalalithaa.What does it mean that Tamils constantly elect their film folk? Is this a love of the big screen writ larger still, upon life itself? It certainly feels like it, and that is what makes Tamil Nadu unique. That constant feedback loop between everyday life and cinema exists all over India, but one senses something qualitatively different about the level at which it works in TN. One of the ways this power is expressed is in the cinema’s lasting colonisation of urban space –or rather in the tribute city-dwellers still seem to willingly pay to the film god. One still cannot turn a corner in any town without encountering a film poster, or more likely three.

The state’s literary sorts have also paid tribute to the cinema in plenty. As a non-Tamil reader, sadly, I must depend on my meagre reading of translations to make this claim. The great Perumal Murugan has an early book called Nizhal Muttram (1993), brought out in V Geetha’s English translation by Tara Books in 2004 under the title Current Show. It revolves around a young man called Sathivel, who works selling cold drinks at a beat-up cinema theatre in an obscure Tamil highway town.


Each chapter of Murugan’s strange, disjointed but striking book begins with an italicised timeline which is almost always connected to the time and place of the theatre. “ Like a giant snake, the queue passages twist and wind their way. It is always dark inside them. Sometime, chips of light get past the queue doors and flee into the theatre.” One particular queue passage is never opened to the public, because it was originally built for those who wanted “Sofa Ticket: Rs 2.00”. As there had never been enough customers for Sofa Tickets, the passage had become the “boys’ room”.

In Murugan’s telling, the cinema theatre emerges as its own universe: its dark interiors an alternative to the harsh sunlight of the everyday world, and its comfortingly repetitive cyclical clock a reprieve from the inevitable onward march of real time. “ In a few minutes the counters will open for the night show. Already, there are crowds at the gate. For a film such as this one, there is no need to worry. The seats fill up, though it has been running for a week already.” Or this, where he details the routines of the players for the successive acts that make up the day’s performance: “ The Betelnut-man lives close to the theatre. He leaves as soon as he shuts down late in the evening. The Teashopman is from Morepalayam, but he has a cycle which he rides home after the interval. He only returns in the afternoon of the next day. The Soda-man prefers to sleep the night at the theatre. He usually asks for his ramshackle cot to be brought out after the interval. He positions it near the stairs.”

The world of Sathi and his companions – some only called ‘Filmreelman’ and ‘Watchman’ – bears some sociological similarity to that of Kannada writer Jayant Kaikini’s story ‘Interval’ that I described in a recent column.

But here the very history and geography of the land can seem built-up of film theatres: The Filmreel-man, for instance, must carry around boxes of MGR films to distribute on a commission basis, traversing a landscape of names that goes from Pallipalayam to Tiruchengode and onwards – “Finish with one town and move to another” with not “a single free day”. In another conversation, the building of a new theatre called Flower King brings on the ancient Watchman’s reminiscences about how the book’s Vijaya Theatre came to be. “There is silence all around, only the rustling sounds of hands moving over posters. Who doesn’t love a tale?” Who doesn’t, indeed?

[To be continued]

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 May 2018.

Book review - No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories

Kannada writer Jayant Kaikini’s evocative stories are infused with the body and soul of Mumbai.

Set in Mumbai, and translated into English, this is an insightful, illuminating, and powerful collection.

In a freewheeling conversation at the end of this superb book, the translator Tejaswini Niranjana tells us that while this book was being envisaged, the writer Jayant Kaikini said to her on WhatsApp: “Do not hang all these stories on the Bombay peg.” She told him to trust her. The result is Kaikini’s No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories, a volume whose wondrous evocation of city life is only aided by the cheeky inclusion of this meta-data.

Kaikini is an extremely well-known figure in the Kannada world, as a writer of short stories, a poet and last but not least, a lyricist for Kannada films (he has won the Filmfare award for Kannada lyrics four times). Now based in Bangalore, Kaikini has previously lived in Mumbai for two decades, working with pharmaceutical companies.

There are other famous Kannada litterateurs who have made Mumbai their home and fictional focus, among them Shantinath Desai and Yashwant Chittal (whose famous 1978 Bombay novel Shikari was also recently translated into English). But Kaikini’s stories seem to breathe the city’s air. Reading them, in Tejaswini Niranjana’s magnificent translation, one feels they simply could not have been written without Mumbai.

Sub-local identities

Part of the reason for this is Kaikini’s obvious spatial immersion in the city, his unerring sense of characters’ lives unfolding not in some generic “Bombay”/”Mumbai”, but in very particular sub-locales. There are several stories here in which Mumbai’s powerful neighbourhood identities are placed upfront. So, for example, in “Opera House”, a cinema sweeper’s sense of local geography illuminates the charms of an increasingly sidelined urban history. “Indranil wove his small world around the Opera House theatre. The night streets, the local trains, the colourful curtains of the rooms of the naachwalis that one could see from Kennedy Bridge, the Anantashram rice-and-fish plate, the round aluminium boxes containing the film reels – these were the small strands of his web.”

Or in “Mogri’s World”, Kaikini delineates with stunning evocativeness what it might be like to grow up in the Shivaji Nagar chawl, or to watch the world go by from inside the Light of India restaurant. Sometimes everything is contained in a one line reference to a place: “The past three days he had got caught in some lafda of a Sindhi fellow in Dombivli.”

Even when a story moves us across the city, Kaikini’s gaze remains located and we always know what speed we’re travelling at. So in “Partner”, Roopak Rathod has his epiphany while gripping the poles of the Murphy Baby hoarding “glistening blue, pink and purple in the weak sunlight near Nana Chowk”. In “Toofan Mail”, we attach ourselves to Toofan and his mother as they walk to the end of Teli Gali, run till Andheri Station, jump into a local train to Dahisar to meet the Toofan Mail. In “Water”, we sit in the back seat as Kunjbihari the driver starts “throwing the taxi into little lanes and alleys” only to get stuck in the torrential rain near Mahim Creek with his two passengers, strangers off a plane.

“Water” is a masterful evocation of how the city reflects itself back – whether it is the view of traffic on the Mahim-Bandra flyover, or the radio song requests that seem to allow communication across the enforced isolation of a crippling breakdown: “For Pankaj, Shweta and Nobin who are stuck at Dadar TT, this special song... Kajra Re”.

Signs and Secrets

Kaikini is powerful and valuable as a documenter, a mapper of the city. But he is much more than that. He is able to make the city resonate with the dreams, hopes and fears of those who live in it. Mumbai’s neighbourhoods and landmarks come to serve as metaphorical markers, animated signs that become keys to the surreal landscape. To Sudhanshu in “Gateway”, the thirty-storied Communication Tower in the distance seems like a giant tomb, with the two big antenna dishes on top like gigantic begging bowls held out.

The title story, “No Presents Please”, effortlessly establishes the mood with its opening reference to the half-finished Ghatkopar Flyover, whose iron spikes Kaikini describes as having trapped bits of the sky. “Below, the vehicles crawled their way through the construction rubble and slowly disappeared. This was the fate of all roads. A man could stop wherever he wanted, but a road?” This is, of course, also the sort of sentence that almost doesn’t need a story attached to it. Kaikini is a poet, and he does aphorism with ease. But as you read on, you are primed to be sensitive to Popat’s sense of being trapped in an identity, by a name that seems to him to leave him nameless.

Sometimes it is a person who becomes a sign, coming to stand in for something in the eyes of the beholder. Seen through Sudhanshu’s tired, questioning eyes, the keychain seller at Kala Ghoda seems like a seer who will answer his life questions. Even this “nameless man with his greying eyebrows” who stands “in two feet of space” is someone for whom Kaikini can conjure up a detailed tender backstory: “when he was a child in the cradle, when he used to be rubbed with oil and then bathed, who competed in school sports, lived different roles”.

In the dream-like world of “Interval”, both Nandu (the battery-torch boy of Malhar Theatre) and Manjari (film-viewer from Mahindrakar Chawl) wordlessly become for each other the beacons of an imagined alternative future. Even when Kaikini enables his two naive protagonists to gently disengage – having made them see, equally wordlessly, that they know nothing about each other – their symbolic importance to each other remains.

There is no dearth here of sociological detail – class, age, gender and caste are sharply observed and sensitively understood. Yet in the end, Kaikini’s Mumbai is a majestic microcosm of humanity, and his stories are concerned with quivering, beautiful examples of how stranger sociality can be meaningful. The locations for these loving exchanges between strangers can range from hospital wards and picture framers’ shops (in the superb “Unframed”) to the tea shop in “A Spare Pair of Legs” at which the village’s naughty boy Chandu encounters the urban working child Popat, one of the “army of brave boys” who “leap from running trains so that not a single peanut fell”, holding the city up on their thin hands like some Govardhan Hill.

Kaikini is often tuned to the saddest, most secret frequencies – the quiz contestant squirming as her father grovels before an oblivious TV show host; the film extra covering her face with her hands as her husband berates her in public for pretending to be shy; the two halves of a couple who’re actually relieved when the other doesn’t come home, because sleep will be undisturbed. He is an antenna, gathering up the city’s dreams and hurt, bewilderment and rage, and transmitting them ever so gently back into the zeitgeist. The result is a gift worth receiving.

Published in Scroll, 25 Mar 2018.

After the Intermission

My Mirror column:

Jayant Kaikini’s brilliant, dreamy Mumbai stories illuminate the city — and the inner lives of its citizens — through the lens of cinema.

At the end of a cinema program,” wrote the French filmmaker and writer Jean Cocteau in 1919, “figures in the crowd outside seem small and lacklustre. We remember an alabaster race of beings as if glowing from within. On the screen, enormous objects become superb. A sort of moonlight sculpts a telephone, a revolver, a hand of cards, an automobile. We believe we are seeing them for the first time.”
Cocteau, who adapted The Beauty and The Beast into a most dreamlike film in 1946, was among the first writers to recognize this fantastical quality of the cinema. Many fiction writers since have been inspired by its larger-than life magic, by its ability to transmute our dreams to reality – and sometimes reality to dreams.

The stories of Jayant Kaikini, published recently in Tejaswini Niranjana’s superb new English translation under the title No Presents Please, offer a wonderful example of such cross-fertilization between the two arts. Kaikini writes in Kannada, but the stories in this collection are set in Mumbai, and the cinema looms large over several of them. If ‘Opera House’ produces a milieu of urban melancholia centred on a once-grand theatre, ‘Toofan Mail’ pierces painfully through the surface sheen of ordinary lives on a film set. In a 1986 story called ‘Interval’, the images on screen seem to speak to each person watching alone in the dark – in this case, most clearly, to Nandkishore Jagtap, alias Nandu, whose journey from Vidarbha to Mumbai has brought him to the position of attendant at the Malhar Theatre in Naupada.

“For the last three years, in this theatre, heroes of different complexions have kept saying to the heroine, ‘Let’s run away somewhere’ four times a day, until the crowded twenty-seventh week. Gazing into the hero’s eyes, smiling coyly, the heroine runs through the fountains and into the upper stalls and disappears...” writes Kaikini. “As the audience floats away into the enchanting world of the film, our hero selects the ceiling fan in the lobby under which he will nap, between the posters, behind the curtains, where the theatre owner’s servants will not find him. When he dozes, a million heroines lose their bodies and minds and names in the glistening screen. In the dark, disembodied, they wander into the hero’s dreams – ‘Here I am!’, ‘Am I not here?’ -they mob him, kiss him, stroke him.”

If the cinema stokes Nandu’s dreams, it also makes new realities seem within his grasp. First, working with the men pasting film posters, he marvels that “they held the actress’s limbs and noses in their hands.” Then, as the battery-torch boy at Malhar Theatre, “[t]he same city which had seemed from the distance of Vidarbha like an unreachable star” now lies in his grip, its fate contained “in the very tickets whose stubs he tore off”. It is also in the cinema that he meets Manjari Sawant of Mahindrakar Chawl, whom he woos with movie tickets to house-full shows and ice creams that he waits in vain for her to share a spoonful of.

Manjari and Nandu, not unexpectedly, make a plan to elope. But Kaikini’s genius lies in the way he shows the moment of elopement unravel. As they stand in the ticket queue, Nandu suddenly feels bereft: “he felt that all his heroes had pushed him into battle without any weapons”. Manjari, too, realizes that her dreams are not the same as Nandu’s. Belying our tawdry expectations, with no filmi gestures, Manjari and Nandu take off in different directions – “[h]aving given each the stimulus to start a new life”. Their coming together is only the interval, not the climax of their lives.

The theme of the interval recurs in a much more recent story, ‘Gateway’ (2003), where its philosophical implications are much sharper. The much married, long unemployed Sudhanshu finds himself at the Gateway of India in adespairing state of mind, addressing a long monologue in his head to ‘Dear Time’: “In a film, after the intermission, all kinds of things can happen. Lost children are found again. Villains beg for forgiveness. Brothers unite. The heroine’s illness goes away. Or those who were found are lost again. Good men become badmaash. The hero dies atop a cliff. No, I don’t want any of this. No shocks, no magic. Just an intermission will do. After that I can watch my own film.”

Freedom can be of many kinds, Kaikini seems to be saying. But the most important kind is the freedom to depart from our own previous narratives.

And for that, we could all do with an interval.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 Mar 2018.

Cinema in the City

My Mirror column:

Watching films in the theatre used to be a sensory experience that extended beyond the screen, tied to rituals of urban life. Now the screen floats free, and so do we.

I made my acquaintance with Trivandrum’s single screen theatres during my first visit to the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in 2011. In Godard’s Own Country (2012), a longform Caravan essay on the IFFK and Kerala’s love of world cinema, I described some of them: “There is Ajanta, dense with the smell of rose petals, and with a pedestal fan that whirrs incessantly; Sreekumar, with a treacherous set of stairs in its balcony; the twinned Dhanya (big) and Remya (small); and Sree Padmanabha, for whom becoming an IFFK venue has been crucial in regaining the respectability it had lost as a softporn theatre in the ’90s. (Sree Padmanabha went all out in 2011, creating a two-minute laser display that played before each festival screening. The effort won it the ‘Best Theatre’ award.).”

I didn’t mention in the 2012 essay why I gravitated to Sree Padmanabha: in the dense warren of streets behind it was the finest, most well-priced Malayali lunch joint in the city, the inimitable Mubarak, serving up unlimited mounds of piping hot rice, veggies and moru curry — to which, with the merest incline of the head, one could add a steady chain of seafood accompaniments: perfectly crisp matthi, spicy squid fry, or the most delectable mussels. By not being held in a private enclosed space like INOX in Panjim, or a government-created auditorium complex like Siri Fort in Delhi, IFFK allowed visiting viewers, like myself, to explore the city through its cinemas, discovering not just their characterful architecture but also eateries near them, just by following my nose — and the crowd.

I also didn’t mention how I first learnt about Sree Padmanabha’s pornographic past. A few days after IFFK, chatting with my Kollam homestay host, I discovered he had actually worked as its manager for several years, helping end its seedy phase! His father’s connection with it was older — he had watched films there his entire childhood, and even now no expedition to Trivandrum was complete without a solo visit to Sree Padmanabha, including a snack and a soft drink.

I haven’t been back to Sree Padmanabha since 2013, but think of it fondly. So I was delighted, on opening Yesterday’s Films for Tomorrow, a newly released book by the late film archivist PK Nair, to discover its prehistory. “It was in the early 1940s, the height of the War period. I must have been hardly eight years old,” writes Nair. “The venue: a tent cinema in Trivandrum’s Putharikandam Maidan, almost the same location as the present Sree Padmanabha theatre. Nearly half the hall was filled with immaculate shining white sand, probably got from the local beach. This was the lowest priced seating, classified as ‘floor’. Just behind was the ‘bench’ class packed with wooden benches, and further behind was the highest class with folding wooden chairs.”

Nair’s nostalgia is jocular and precise, listing the “half-wall” against which floor-sitters vied to rest their backs, the “women's barricades” for “your wife and kids” (the assumed viewer and reader is a man, of course), and the “hawker boys” who roamed freely through the hall, “canvassing aggressively” to sell their beedis and cigarettes, soda or peanuts during the many short intervals (A single projector necessitated five or six breaks between reels).

Given his father’s certified disapproval of cinema (typical of that generation of educated nationalists), Nair took to sneaking out when the family was asleep, begging the doorman at Sree Padmanabha or Chitra to let him in to the last hour of the late night show. “[L]ater I would catch up with what I had missed at a matinee show on the weekend.” “Perhaps such lopsided viewings in repetition enabled me to look at films more objectively and sharpened my critical faculties even as a school kid,” he muses.

Nair’s spare reminiscences reminded me of a more extravagant account of childhood film viewing: the late theatre doyen Habib Tanvir on Raipur’s Big Top theatre. Tanvir, like Nair, watched many films for free; he and his friends would slash the tent with a razor blade and sneak into shows where half the audience’s enjoyment came from the vulgar, funny running commentary provided by the co-owner, Chunnilal: “Oye, what are you standing around for, motherfucker, the villain will kill your heroine. Bastard, make the horse go faster, faster, you idiot!”

Nair and Tanvir’s memoirs reveal how inexorably film-watching was once tied to places and people — the physical experience of the theatre, the particular doorman or commentator, the food you ate after. Now a film can play anytime we want it to, often opening up on a screen that we carry around with us. Watching a film this way no longer leads us into the city; just back into ourselves.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 June 2017.

The Sense of an Ending

My Mirror column:

Regal, one of Delhi’s iconic single-screen theatres, closed down this week. But what exactly is ending with its closure?

Regal Theatre downed its shutters on Thursday. Born in 1932, as the New Delhi Premier Theatre, the hall was the first to come up outside of Shahjahanbad, giving New Delhi a sahabi theatre to match its status as the newly-created capital of British India. Regal came up on property belonging to Sir Sobha Singh, the civil contractor and builder hired to construct much of the new city. Sobha Singh was commercially perspicacious enough to buy up large tracts of land within the emerging capital city, becoming known as “Addha Dilli da maalik”. He was clearly also a man of vision.

Among a host of other buildings, Sir Sobha gave bungalow-lined New Delhi its first apartment complex, naming it Sujan Singh Park after his civil contractor father (and his son, the writer and journalist, Khushwant Singh lived in one of the apartments there until his death in March 2014). The Regal building, with its arched porch, vaulted half-domes and pietra dura mosaic work, was designed by the British architect Walter Sykes George, who also designed Sujan Singh Park and St Stephen's College, among other iconic Delhi buildings.

George and Singh conceptualised the Regal complex as a sort of protomall, containing not just the theatre, but also a panoply of restaurants and shops. It is not a coincidence that the memories of watching films at Regal – of which there has been a veritable flood in the media and on social media – are almost as much about the eating and drinking that accompanied it. People in their fifties, sixties and seventies remember their Regal outings alongside the chhole-bhature at Kwality (the also-iconic restaurant in the same corner block of Connaught Place), or continental fare at Davico's on the top floor of the building. (Davico's was later replaced by Standard Restaurant, where even I have eaten my share of perfect mutton cutlets, up until the late 1990s.) In more recent years, there was the Softy stall, tucked into a sort of alcove next to the cinema.

The multiplex era began in Delhi in 1997, when Anupam Cinema in Saket was bought by Ajay Bijli's PVR group and a new four-screen building built in its stead, creating what we now know as PVR Anupam. Over the last two decades, several of Delhi's best-loved single-screen cinemas – Alankar in Lajpat Nagar, Eros in Jangpura Extension, Savitri in Greater Kailash II, not to mention Odeon, Rivoli and Plaza in Connaught Place – have been converted into multiplexes. Others, like Chanakya or Paras or Kamal, have not survived at all.

Regal was one of the last single-screen theatres that continued to function. This grand old edifice, which started out showing Prithviraj Kapoor plays and Russian ballet to British officers and diplomats, and to which the posher Indian families and postcolonial grandees like Nehru and Radhakrishnan came as a matter of course, seemed like a connection to a more genteel world. So the last day, last show at Regal – like the closure of Chanakya in 2007 – feels like the end of a civilised age. And if you go by everything I've just told you, it certainly is.

But what did Regal signify in the last two or three decades? And to whom? Even as its Connaught Place cohort of halls reinvented themselves as multiplexes and wooed a post-liberalisation elite, Regal started to play desperately lowbrow fare, like Chhupa Rustam in 2001 and Raam Gopal Verma Ki Aag in 2007. My own last memory of Regal is a near-traumatic one from 2003: I cannot quite remember why, but I subjected myself to Guddu Dhanoa's sex-horror film called Hawa, in which Tabu is raped more than once by “the wind” — which has, of course, taken on the ghostly shape of a man.

A cinema is, after all, a business — and films like Hawa were clearly Regal's frank attempt to put bums on seats. The management was quite cognizant that the theatre's technical quality and comfort levels were no longer good enough to attract the class of people who used to come to it until the 1970s, making successes of such films as Shyam Benegal's Nishant and Ankur, Basu Chatterjee's Rajnigandha, or melancholy Amitabh-Jaya romances like Abhimaan or Mili. Those people had better alternatives. The people who came to Regal were those who couldn't afford the 200 and 300 and 400 rupee tickets that multiplexes charge – and that Regal will no doubt charge in its new avatar.

But those who filled up Regal's seats in recent years, keeping it afloat for two or more decades, are not the ones being spoken to. The Delhi Times is filled with upper middle class people who have returned to be present at Regal's grand farewell party, and are happy to pay Rs. 300 in black to let their mothers watch Raj Kapoor's Sangam and reminisce about their youth. There is no mention of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of viewers who could, until yesterday, afford to watch a film in a Connaught Place theatre, and who have been quietly been added to the vast masses that will now no longer be able to go to the cinema.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 April 2017.

The Company of Strangers

My Mirror column:

What we miss out on by watching movies on our laptops, we regain by going to film festivals.

As Durga Puja and Dussehra melt quietly into another trafficky, teen-patti-laden Diwali, the year brings out its hidden trump card: the film festival season that is almost upon us.

First, the hotly-anticipated Mumbai Film Festival — a Bombay-style extravaganza of cutting edge world cinema with indie Indies, conducted under the suitably ‘we-aim-to-confuse’ rubric of MAMI — will run from the 20th to 27th of October. Kolkata has reserved the next slot, conducting its annual international film festival from the 11th to 19th of November.

Then the International Film Festival of India — a smiling sarkari behemoth that goes by the confusing diminutive IFFI — will happen in Panaji, Goa from 20th to 28th November. The year comes to an exciting close with the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) which has announced its dates as being from December 9 to 16.

I started thinking about film festivals last week as I inwardly chastised myself for watching a couple of recent releases that I had missed seeing in the theatre, on my laptop. Being watched on a smaller and smaller screen — be it the television, laptop, tablet, or even the mobile phone — is, of course, the inevitable fate of more and more films these days. Even the most committed film-lovers have started to betray the medium — likely telling themselves, like all betraying lovers, that all relationships must change, and that surely, this is a more intimate experience than the one they had before.

There are several complicated things to think (and say) about our increasing closeness to our increasingly smaller screens.

But a conversation I had today with a playwright and theatre director set me thinking about what not going to the cinema means: more often than not, it means watching the films alone. My play-making friend is convinced that his plays are produced, in the end, in the conversations that take place around them: what your gushing friend said about the director’s last outing, what review you read last night on the play’s Facebook page, what you said to your already-irritated girlfriend as you both walked out dying to get some much-delayed dinner. These are all crucial to what you, months or even years from now, will remember about what you thought of the play.

This is, of course, also true of watching films. The film-watcher who sits down in the dark, cool expanse of the cinema hall is both solitary and aware of others like herself, sitting down to the left and right and behind her. We’re intensely aware of collective laughter, collective derision, and even more, of a collective hush. And that free-floating, un-targeted, nervous web of communication (in which we are enmeshed along with whichever strangers we happened to buy our tickets with) changes the film for us, whether we realise it or not.

Even so, there is a guarded anonymity with which we (post-)moderns enter that experience of stranger sociality. Very few people talk to the person in the next seat about the movie they're watching — unless they already know them.

In a film festival, I think our usual guardedness is exchanged for a particularly deliberate sense of community. Coming to the theatre and lining up in hopeful excitement to get into a screening — the latest Wong Kar-wai, or the unreleased Nawazuddin Siddiqui film made three years ago which faced censor trouble — is a recipe for queue conversations. Especially if you both fail to get in.

I have certainly made acquaintances at film festivals. Most of the time, the pally feeling lasts only for the duration of the screenings. But sometimes, just sometimes, over the course of a week, a film festival partner can begin to feel like your best friend.

The sudden intimacy should not be surprising: we have agreed, after all, to combine forces in that most important of life’s decisions — choosing films.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16 Oct 2016.

Book Review: Museum of Cinema

A review of the biggest book I've ever read. In the year-end issue of the book review journal Biblio:

Project Cinema City

Edited by Madhusree Dutta, Kaushik Bhaumik and Rohan Shivkumar

Foreword by Arjun Appadurai

Design by Sherna Dastur

Tulika Books, New Delhi, in association with Majlis and Goethe Institute, 2013, Rs. 3500 (HB)

If you can imagine a book that combines the experience of an art exhibition, an archive, a seminar and a guided city walk -- all going on at the same time – then you've pretty much imagined Project Cinema City. This book, which won the Printed Book of the Year award at the first edition of the Publishing Next Industry Awards (September 2014), seems to want to redefine what a book might be. It is huge, a massive hardback potha that runs into more than 550 pages, and heavy – larger and heavier than any coffee table book I've seen, and with a hundred times more reading material, too. It is capacious, filled with many kinds of voices. It might be useful to think of them as multiple guides on that walk through the city of cinema: some have gone far ahead of you, and are describing the view from up there; some are telling long and complicated stories (which are fun in parts, but sometimes all you want to do is sit down); some are recording and taking pictures so you can later 'remember' what really happened, and some, inevitably, are talking above your head.

A less bulky (but no less stimulating) volume has previously come out of the Cinema City project and goes by the stylish no-caps name of dates.sites. I reviewed that, too, in these pages (Biblio, Nov-Dec, 2012). But while that was more a compendium of fascinating information that one felt no obligation to read at a stretch from cover to cover, this book is guilt-inducing from the word go. The Contents pages inform us that the book is divided into three sections, all with titles made up of terrifyingly vague buzzwords: 1. 'Mapping Imaginations: Terrains, Locations', 2. 'Performing Labour: Bodies, Networks', and 3. 'Viewing Limits: Narratives, Technologies'. As with most buzzwords that seem to settle and fatten on the meaty intersection of academia and art, there's nothing particularly wrong with each word on its own. But put them all together like this, and most people – I'd venture, even many potential enthusiastic readers of this book – will be longing to sit down.

Also, with apologies to the editors, who presumably thought long and hard about the categories and where each contribution fits, I confess I do not see why Meena Menon's piece on mill workers goes into 'Terrains, Locations' rather than 'Performing Labour', or why Paromita Vohra's piece is in “Performing Labour' rather than 'Terrains, Locations', or why one of the most enjoyable (and readable) things in the book – interviews with women film spectators who live in Bombay-- is divided into three sections. There are also some pieces in here that are not about Bombay, or not about its cinema, and (even if they're fabulous pieces of work) I don't quite see why they're here. I must also mention that after I said I would review this book, I realised that it includes the work of at least three people I'm on friendly terms with. This is the trouble with multi-contributor books. In any case, instead of puzzling over these matters any more, I'm just going to use the space I have here to discuss a few of the pieces I found interesting.

Avijit Mukul Kishore's 'Notes on Technology: At the Time of Going to Press' is a lovely, detailed account of shooting a documentary called Kumar Talkies (dir. Pankaj Rishi Kumar) in the year 1997, which was “a major cusp in the history of film technologies”, with 16mm on its way out and digital video (DV) the new chosen medium. Kishore and Kumar set out to make a film that would marry both forms, and also had some old 8mm home movies they wanted to include. The piece describes the unbelievably complicated journey that followed with more warmth and clarity (and yes, inevitably, some nostalgia) than I've ever read anyone writing about technology with.

'Manufacturing Cinema: Control, Dispute, Workers' Rights', by Shikha Pandey provides a rare longue durée view of the film industry with reference to an aspect of it that we usually hear very little about: unions and the regulation of workers' rights. Pandey's piece is packed with fascinating nuggets about the industry's organisational history, and how the state's policy on popular cinema shaped the industry, creating artificial booms and busts and shaping labour supply in ways that we don't often think about. If you've ever been curious about the number of Bengalis who made their way to Bombay to work in Hindi cinema, for example, you might be interested in the ban on Indian films in East Pakistan in 1962, which led to a decline in Bengali cinema across the border in West Bengal, which in turn was part of the reason for an increased migration of talent from Calcutta to Bombay. For those who've followed the recent attempts by Bollywood screenwriters to organise fr better terms, it might be of interest that the Film Writers Association, formed in 1954 by Qamar Jalalabadi, Ramanand Sagar and Sahir Ludhianvi, was the first film workers' collective to be registered under the Trade Union Act, with a majority of its initial members affiliated to “the communist-led All India Progressive Writers' Association (PWA) and Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA)”.

There are remarkable insights into how cinematic output is influenced by material conditions. Pandey tells us about the government's freeze on building new cinema theatres through the 1960s, and how the ban-induced scarcity of exhibition infrastructure made film producers dependent on exhibitors' whims for bookings. Exhibitors began to demand 'saleable' plots, making demands for particular stars. Payments to stars rose, growing to anywhere between 31% and 50% of the total production budget. When the ban on new theatres was revoked in 1969, Pandey points out, film production exploded: 199 films released in 1970, as compared to 89 in 1969.

Pandey's research into industry organisational practice is revealing. In the 1980s, the apex body for cine workers, the Federation for Western Indian Cine Employees (FWICE), formed in 1958, joined with the apex producers' body to form a Joint Dispute Settlement Committee (JDSC), to solve disputes in the film industry “internally”. Pandey demonstrates how the JDSC defends and maintains the industry's feudal basis, using the discourse of “outsiders” versus “film fraternity” to prevent cine workers from going to court. She also points out how in the 2000s, the secular, non-party affiliated FWICE has been challenged by the rise of a parallel cine workers union, affiliated to the militant right-wing Maharashtra Navanirman Sena. But the scenario is changing with the entry of corporate finance, international studios, and more foreign workers. Having broached this subject, though, the piece leaves us hanging: one wishes there was a more concerted effort to describe the kinds of conflicts that are currently ongoing.

A very different perspective on workers' organisations is provided by Meena Menon's lucidly written, semi-autobiographical account of the mills of Bombay. Menon is persuasive when she argues that much of the feted “spirit” of Bombay -- a hard-working place where public transport ran till late, large numbers of women went to work, and were safe on the streets and trains -- came out of the working class culture at the city's core. Migrant workers, mostly Marathi, built themselves a home in the city through organised networks of community – the gaokari mandals, the bhajan mandals, the khanawals, and of course, the labour unions. Menon's account is important for its succinct synthesising of the city's transformation, from the perspective of what was once an influential leftist working class: one which sees itself as having lost “one generation to the mafia, and the next one to the Shiv Sena.” The Bombay mafia and later, the political class that emerged partly out of it, have of course found representation in mainstream Hindi cinema. So has the police, and its strong connections with both. But an interesting thing that emerges from Menon's piece is the absence of mill workers from the city's cinema – or any depiction of the deep-seated class and familial links between mill workers and mafia members, between mill workers and police.

There is a richness that the intelligent, honest personal memoir is able to achieve, especially with regard to portraying a neighbourhood: a layering in lived time that the research paper, however impeccable, almost never manages. Paromita Vohra's memoir of becoming “permanently temporary” in Andheri East displays her usual flair for puncturing the platitudes that tend to gather around forms of life and community in this country. She manages to wield a sharp scalpel that spares neither the 'safe' middle-class family life, nor visions of the alternative non-bourgeois one. Vohra has a talent for turning anecdotes into symbolic bookends, and she does this very effectively with the Aarey milk booths and subway tunnels of Andheri. Seemingly random stories of encounters she's had over the course of two decades are carefully structured to produce a narrative about what the two Andheris mean in terms of the film world.

There are many, many images in the book: some leaping out at you, some skulking behind the door until you decide to notice them. It is absolutely impossible to do any justice to them here, but I particularly like Sameer Tawde's Slum Cinema photographs and Kalpit Ashar and Mamta Murthy's map-plus-photograph meditation on cine bazaars in Mumbai. There is also a plethora of images from The Calendar Project, under which 33 artists produced 56 date-calendars of different years in the twentieth century, mostly using found images and print from the public culture of that moment in the past.

Perhaps what is eventually most valuable about the book is the way that different parts of it are invisibly, chaotically in conversation with each other. To cite just one example: Bishakha's Datta's astute, thought-provoking essay 'F**kland Road' speaks to Ashar and Murthy's visuals, as well as to the Parsi lady who grew up on Foras Road, and tells a tale of a drunken man outside Silver Talkies who thought she was a sex worker – and so “pinched her chest”.

So long as you don't try to read this book from cover to cover, it's a wonderful mad museum of cinema. A single orderly visit will never be enough.

Published in Biblio.

Book Review: dates.sites, a publication of PROJECT CINEMA CITY

This review was published in the Nov-Dec 2012 issue of Biblio.

dates.sites
Project Cinema City 
Bombay/Mumbai         

Tulika Books, 2012.
Rs. 995 
              

Bombay was where the cinema made its first appearance on the Indian subcontinent, when the Lumiere Brothers’ ‘Living Photographic Pictures in Life-Size Reproductions’ were shown at the Watson’s hotel in Kala Ghoda in 1896. Since that originary moment, the city of Bombay/Mumbai has been irrevocably linked to the cinema -- as an industry that supports thousands of people, as ‘its most adored public institution’ and perhaps most significantly, as the lens through which the city acquires its visual primacy in the imagination of the rest of India (and the world).

One of the outcomes of a artistic-cum-archival project called Project Cinema City conducted by the arts initiative Majlis, dates.sites takes this fundamental connection between the city and cinema as the basis for a decade-by-decade account of events that might constitute a ‘cinematic history’ of 20^th century Bombay/Mumbai. It calls this a “timeline” – a word chosen precisely, Madhusree Dutta tells us, for its 21^st century Facebook-and-Twitter-inflected connotation of stitching things from various sources into a personalised narrative of the self.

At first glance, it is a book that seems straightforward in its aims – a historical ready-reckoner, a vast compendium of facts about the city and its film industry, arranged chronologically. And it is that, at one level. But as you spend more time with it, it begins to reveal itself as a quirkier creature: an artifact in its own right, a space where facts about the transformation of land and labour, law and life in the city can share the page with cinema history, inflected by chatty, opinionated commentary – a list of ‘Archetypal Urban Characters of the 70s’ ends with “Mother of all Indian men: Nirupa Roy in Deewar”; Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth (1982) receives the somewhat catty three word description “Bollywood on Bollywood”.

A page from the book

With a narrative as unconventional as this, there are as many ways to ‘read’ it as there are people. Some might want to dip into it at random, or pick a decade they’re interested in. Someone else might choose to be guided by the cornucopia of images. The visuals in the book are of two kinds. There are found images, often in fragmented form – old photographs, postcards, advertisements, logos, letters and telegrams, magazine images, paintings – and also a series of 100-odd ‘calendars’ created by several artists as a contemporary homage to the long popular history of calendar art in India. Both kinds act as triggers to the imagination, sending the brain off in all sorts of associative directions. Most are anything but illustrative, working instead as a tangential narrative that can open up the text in new ways. On p.19, for instance, there is a series of images of sea and ships – what looks like a picture postcard, a stamped envelope dated 5-9-1972, a technical drawing of a ship. These bear no actual relationship to the early 1900s timeline on that page, but they do somehow alter one’s appreciation of the fact that the foundation of Alexandra Dock was laid in 1905 “to meet rising traffic of goods and traders”. Other images are more strictly historical. For instance, Abeer Gupta’s calendar for 1949, ‘Liberty’, is a faux-advertisement for Liberty Cinema: ‘Showplace of the Nation’, with the Indian flag flying above it and the theatre-front displaying a poster of Mehboob’s Andaz, which was indeed the first film shown at Liberty when it opened in 1949 as the first airconditioned theatre in Bombay that was devoted to Hindi films.

It is a volume that lends itself to randomness. Playing conscientious reviewer, though, I decided to go from beginning to end. I paused often, arrested by a particular constellation of facts or images, but resisted the temptation to skip ahead. As I went through the sequence of events in chronological order, however, I kept finding myself wanting to draw diagrams that would somehow link up events in 2000 with events in 1914, or 1973, on a thematic basis: real estate, or land reclamation, the history of the labour movement or the history of popular performance – or create a map that would somehow contain, in the name of a neighbourhood – say ‘Pila House’, or ‘Girangaon’ – everything that it had ever been.

“A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”

So wrote Italo Calvino in his now-classic Invisible Cities, a book even more strange and wondrous than the one under review. Like the mythical Zaira, “city of memories”, Bombay/Mumbai cannot tell its past; it can only contain it “like the lines of a hand”. dates.sites might be seen as a Calvinoesque effort to make that past visible, by mapping -- in the words of Invisible Cities -- the “relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past”.

Certainly the text is sensitive to space in a way that few historical timelines are. Whether describing communal and caste riots, the newsreels shot after Tilak’s death, or the arrival of migrants to the city, the timeline takes every opportunity it can to double up as a ‘spaceline’. So we learn that from 1904 to 1910, Sunni Tolawalas and Bohra shopkeepers clashed over the route of the Muharram procession in Bhendi Bazaar. We learn that newsreels of Tilak’s funeral procession on 13. 02. 1920 shot it from Crawford Market to Chowpatty. We learn that Tamil migrants to the city in the 1920s mostly worked at construction sites or at tanneries in Dharavi, and later that Sikh refugees after Partition were accommodated in camps in Sion Koliwada and many of them started automobile workshops in the Opera House area, resulting in both areas later developing “a distinct Punjabi flavour”.

The book’s history of cinema in the city – its production as well as its consumption – is equally attentive to local geography. Iconic places might get a whole explanatory paragraph, like in a dictionary: eg. “Pila House—hybridization of Play House—a cluster of theatres staging Parsi theatre plays and Tamasha performances – bordered on the east by red light area of Kamatipura (names after the Telugu-speaking community of masons) , and on the west by migrant courtesans and other entertainment artists at Congress House (named after the office of the Congress Party nearby—is at its peak at the turn of the century.” But it is the visible revelling in anecdote that lifts the book from a staid recounting of facts into a storied, personal, almost gossipy register. So a typescript entry for 1975 reads: “The queue for buying [Sholay] tickets at Minerva Theatre, showing the 70mm print of the film, extends to a bus stop 3 kilometres away”, followed by the ‘handwritten’ note: “prompting the bus stop to be renamed as Sholay stop”.

dates.sites is a real goldmine of stories, allowing itself the luxury of the suggestive anecdote: the sparkling, free-floating detail unbound by the ponderous footnote. The text continually throws up real-life characters whose mythification in urban lore was immortalised by the cinema. The most well-known are mafia dons whose lives have been the source of endless film plots: Karim Lala, Haji Mastan, Varadarajan Mudaliar onwards, down to the post-textile-mills era which saw the rise of Arun Gawli, Arvind Dholakia, Rama Naik and so on. The book also digs up more minor figures, like an Inspector Bhesadia whose crusade against hath bhatties (crude breweries) in Dharavi Creek in the 60s was apparently the inspiration for Amitabh Bachchan’s originary demolition of the illegal liquor den in Zanjeer (1973). (Bachchan, of course, went on to demolish many liquor addas, in other cities as well – I remember the one on the outskirts of Delhi in Trishul.) 

My pick for the most fascinating real life character, though, comes from a much earlier era: “Flamboyant Tamasha artiste” Patthe Bapurao, whose first appearance in the timeline is in 1927, when he visits Ambedkar “flanked by two women dancers dressed in finery” and offers to contribute the proceedings of eight Tamasha shows to the Mahar Satyagraha Fund, a campaign for the entry of Dalits into temples. “Ambedkar rejects the offer on moral grounds.” The second reference to Patthe Bapurao is in 1941, when he “dies in poverty”. It is in this entry that we are told that he was born a Brahmin (Shridhar Krishnaji Kulkarni) and underwent “caste conversion in order to work in Tamasha and … married a Mahar woman”. A biographical film was made on his life by Raja Nene in 1950, and Falkland Road in Pila House was renamed Patthe Bapurao Road after independence. Most tantalizing of all is this tidbit: “His persona influences several significant tragic poet-hero characters in later films such as Devdas, Pyaasa.” Since Devdas was based on a 1917 Bengali novel by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, one must treat the Bapurao connection as a suggestive supplement at most.

But however provisional it might declare itself to be, a timeline is not the sort of text in which arguments can really be incorporated. So an entry for 1933 tells us that “Music director Madhav Lal used Chinese and Japanese singers from Safed Gulli (White Lane) (demarcated area for prostitutes with fairer skin than Indians) to create a ‘Far East ambience’ in Hatimtai”. It has been suggested by other writers that Safed Gali acquired the name not from its prostitutes but from its customers: it emerged to cater to white soldiers. But a timeline, no matter how playful, does not allow the space for both possible interpretations to be included.

On the other hand, a timeline enables unexpected juxtapositions, creating fertile ground for suppressed histories and new thoughts to emerge, just by being on the same page. On p. 118-119 for instance, we learn that comedian Johnny Walker’s “urban actor-character-actor prototype in the tramp mould” and Raj Kapoor’s Awara date to the same year: 1951. Both were responses to Chaplin, sure – but how often do we credit Johnny Walker with creating the Indian tramp persona? Another example connected with the influence of foreign cinema: Italian neo-realist films shown at the first International Film festival of India (1952) are credited with influencing Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen (1953), while on the same spread we learn that Sohrab Modi’s Technicolour extravaganza Jhansi ki Rani (1953) was shot on an ‘imported on rent’ camera by Ernest Heller, cameraman of Gone With the Wind. The juxtaposition of these two facts, which might otherwise have been neatly boxed into two very different histories, produces a vivid sense of the multiplicity of world cinematic style, and how Bombay filmmakers negotiated their places within that world.

Sometimes a juxtaposition serves as comment. For example, AIR’s highhanded attitude to Hindi film music (leading to the rise of Binaca Geetmala on Radio Ceylon from 1953 onwards) is presented without judgement. But then you read of KA Abbas’s daring effort to make a song-less film (Munna) crashing at the box office in 1954, and it is quite clear that the nation-state’s battle against the market can only be a losing one.

Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, both theorists of the urban mass culture that emerged in Europe in the early part of the twentieth century, pioneered the study of cultural fragments and surface phenomena as unconscious revelations of the epoch. “[T]he quotidian landscapes of life – posters on the wall, shop signs, dancing girls, bestsellers, panoramas, the shape, style and circulation of city buses – are all surface representations of the fantasy energy by which the collective perceives the social order,” writes anthropologist Brian Larkin in a wonderful essay on the materiality of cinema theatres in the Nigerian city of Kano. dates.sites is a Benjaminian archive of the materiality of cinema in Bombay/Mumbai. Accessible, joyful and packed with possibility, this is a book every film-lover should have on her shelf.

Published in Biblio.