Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone

My Mirror column (10 May 2020):

As India's labouring poor are locked into cities and die tragically in their unaided attempts to get home, Muzaffar Ali's 1978 migrant classic Gaman acquires new layers of meaning.

In an early scene in Gaman, a hesitant Ghulam Hasan (Farooque Shaikh) gets off a train at VT Station and manages to find his way to the jhopadpatti that appears to be his childhood friend Lallulal's (Jalal Agha) Mumbai address. He pauses beside a group of young men chatting by the roadside. “Sunoh bhaiyya,” says Ghulam softly, his tongue still travelling along the slow perlocutionary path of his native UP village. “Woh kya hai ki kya Lallulal Tiwari yahan rehta hai?” 

The retort is quick and stinging, and the word now jumps out at us, an untranslated social footnote that will not be suppressed: “Apun tumko bhaiyya dikhta hai?”

One of the others deigns to direct the lost newcomer to the tin-roofed shanty (“third gali after the municipal toilet”) that the affable Lallu shares with several other men, and Ghulam quickly becomes one of its occupants. But Muzaffar Ali's 1978 directorial debut, a film made three years before his much more famous Umrao Jaan, never lets his viewers forget that this rickety roof over their heads is both temporary and tenuous. Shelter in the big city is so precious a thing that Lallu's labelling of it as his “Taj Mahal” is both a bad joke and thoroughly heartfelt. And the emotion only heightens through the film, as Lallu and his sweetheart Yashodhara (Gita Siddharth, of Garm Hava fame) yearn ever more for a place of their own so they can marry, while even the rented kholi is threatened with demolition.

For Ghulam though, it is the village home he has left behind that calls out to him, in the shape of letters bringing news of his ailing mother and his lonely wife Khairun (Smita Patil), whose face drifts up from his memories and looms large over the cityscape that he learns gradually to traverse. Aided by older men from his native region, so-called bhaiyyas, Ghulam becomes, like Lallu, a taxi driver in Mumbai. The film is full of shots of Shaikh in a taxi, his sad eyes seeing but not quite seeing the urban crowd he is now part of. “Hiyan bheed ka kauno hisaab naahi,” as he tells Lallu wonderingly.

Muzaffar Ali's use of songs is perhaps his most affective talent, and it is powerfully evident here. In the picturisation of the film's magisterial anthem of urban desolation “Seene mein jalan, aankhon mein toofan sa kyun hai/ Is sheher mein har shakhs pareshaan-sa kyun hai? (Why does the heart burn, why is there a storm in my eyes/ Why is everyone troubled in this city?)”, our gaze travels past blocks and blocks of urban housing, and cars seen from above, like unending queues of ants, and we hear Shahryar's line: “Ta-had-e nazar ek bayabaan sa kyun hai?” “Why is there a wilderness as far as the eye can see?”

One of Gaman's achievements as a film about the migrant experience is that the distance between the village and the city feels insurmountable, despite the technologies that bridge the two. That feeling is gestured to in the film's very first shot, when a letter is being laboriously typed with one finger (on a typewriter that, in one of those surreal moments that populate the watching of so much in 2020, bears the brand-name Corona), and the camera moves up from there to the telegraph lines that stretch across a bucolic rural landscape. A great deal of screen time is spent on trains and buses – and at moments of particular emotion, Ali inserts a distant shot of a plane in the sky, like some imagined modern-day pigeon-post of the heart.

Conditions of labour and lack of money make it nearly impossible for the poor migrant to go back home, even when nothing is ostensibly stopping him. In the third month of a shockingly unplanned and heartlessly implemented lockdown, when lakhs of India's working poor are being forcibly kept from going back home, Gaman's final sequence bears a terrible new weight. Farooque Shaikh bundles up his few belongings in his lovely old-style trunk (the objects of the feudal Awadh village were still beautiful) and arrives at VT, hoping to depart as spontaneously as he had arrived. But more than half the money he has saved in a year will go on just the journey home, he thinks, and his feet stop where they are. We leave him standing behind the collapsible gate that enters the platform, locked down in the city while his mind climbs onto the train, over and over.

I'd like to end this column with another moment from Gaman, when Ghulam is actually on a train. He and Lallu are going to meet Yashodhara. They are already late when the train suddenly stops. What happened, asks Ghulam the newbie. Must be an accident, says Lallu. It turns out a man has been killed under the train’s wheels. “The bus would have been faster,” says Lallu. “Yahi gaadi mili thhi marne ke liye! (Did he have to choose this train to die under?)” rues another man. “Patri se hataane ka aur gaadi start karne ka. Passenger log ka kaahe ko time barbaad karne ka (Get him off the tracks and start the train. Why waste the time of passengers?)” says a third voice.

Ghulam looks distraught. “Wait and watch,” says Lalloo. “You’ll get used to it like all of us.”

Watching Gaman in mid-2020, it feels sickeningly clear that all of us are now passengers, whose time can’t be wasted on mourning those the train rolls over. The numbers rise every day.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 May 2020.

Book Review: Lost in translation

This review of a new book on Sahir Ludhianvi and his poetry was commissioned much before the lockdown. It finally appeared in print this week, in India Today magazine's now-restored Leisure Section.

Sahir Ludhianvi was among India’s most talented Urdu poets. After joining the film industry in 1950, he also became one of the most popular. If you’ve grown up with Hindi film music, you’re likely to know many of Sahir’s poems, even if you don’t know they’re his. You might know the multi-religious “Allah tero naam, ishwar tero naam, Sabko sanmati de bhagwaan” from Hum Dono or the critical-nostalgic “Yeh mahalon yeh takhton yeh taajon ki duniya” from Pyaasa. You might have sung one of his immortal love songs, from the irresistible “Yeh raat yeh chaandni phir kahan” (Jaal, 1952) or the wistful “Chalo ik baar phir se ajnabi ban jaaye hum dono” (Gumraah, 1963), all the way to “Kabhi kabhi mere dil mein khayaal aata hai”, an early Sahir poem around which Yash Chopra crafted his 1976 romantic classic Kabhie Kabhie. Nearly 40 years after his death, it is high time that Sahir was attentively translated, analysed, studied.

But Surinder Deol’s Sahir: A Literary Portrait does not deserve to bask in the late lyricist’s reflected glory. Deol, who left India in 1983 to work at the World Bank in Washington, DC, now lives in Maryland. Other than his most recent book, The Urdu Ghazal: A Gift of India’s Composite Culture, he has previously published a novel, a collection of poems and a book-length rendering of Ghalib’s poetry into what he calls “American free verse” (The Treasure, 2014). I have not read these other books. But Deol’s translations of Sahir are lacklustre at best and often distressingly unpoetic. He is painfully literal, and even then, not always accurate. “Sard jhonkon se bhadakte hain badan mein shole,/ Jaan legi yeh barsaat kareeb aa jao” becomes, in Deol’s inexplicable rendition, “Cold flames, hot flames engulf my body,/ This downpour will end my life./ Come up to me!” Meanwhile the crisp simplicity of “Chalo phir aaj usi bewafaa ki baat karein” gets stretched into a torturous “Today, let us talk once again/ about the graceful one/ who lacked constancy”.

In his preface, Prof. Gopi Chand Narang, former president of the Sahitya Akademi, whose book on Ghalib Deol translated in 2017, proclaims Deol’s translations to be “effortless”. But translating Ludhianvi is no easy ride. Deol at least seems to recognise that when he mentions reading Pablo Neruda in English and Coleman Barks’ renditions of Rumi. But these inspirations notwithstanding, Deol remains preoccupied with the dictionary meanings of Sahir’s Urdu usage, with little sense of what sounds poetic in English. So we get a book strewn with such lines as “It is just a demand of my wreckings” or “I want an answer/ from the foggy spoilers/ of my wishes and dreams”.

Deol is no literary scholar: his comments on individual poems are banal and unsatisfying. He is no biographer either, merely compiling a few snippets into an introduction. If you’re looking for a Sahir Ludhianvi biography to read, Akshay Manwani’s The People’s Poet (2014) is still your best bet.

Published in India Today, 6 June 2020.

A Wizard of Song - II

The second part of my Mirror column on Sahir:

Did the great lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi, who would have turned 99 on 8 March, lead a life filled with inconsistencies? 

Sahir Ludhianvi, whose 99^th birth anniversary this column commemorated last week, appears at first glance to have been a bundle of contradictions. He was a great romantic, a man whose depth of feeling cannot be doubted if you listen to his poetry – and yet he remained a confirmed bachelor who did not seem able to sustain a long-term relationship. His love life was a series of brief encounters, a candle that (to adapt the words of poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox) may have burnt at both ends, but did not last the night. He was a Progressive Urdu poet with socialist leanings, but aspired to write lyrics for the highly commercial Hindi film industry. A great friend of Sahir's, Hameed Akhtar, remembered in later life that the young Sahir's repeatedly stated ambition was "Bada songwriter banoonga". He was notorious for disagreements with friends and collaborators that he then refused to climb down from – but he was also renowned for going all out for his friends, and his loyalty to particular people could last forever. 

But if one looks carefully at each of these aspects of Sahir’s life, one might evaluate them differently: not as contradictions inherent to Sahir, but as bearing true witness to the irreparably fractured world in which we live. It is true, for instance, that the young Sahir seems to have fallen in love quite a few times, and perhaps had a little more courage than other young men of his age, declaring his attachments to the objects of his affection – sometimes using the support of the poetic medium he had just begun to master, but sometimes actually managing real meetings with them. Real meetings between young lovers were, in the middle class milieu of late 1930s-early 1940s India, a necessarily clandestine affair, and the social stakes were high.

After one such secret assignation at his college in Ludhiana during the summer vacation, the girl in question was apparently expelled from the college, and Sahir seems to have left as well, though it seems that the college has no written record of expelling him. A poem he wrote in this period of his life encapsulates the frustration and real-world angst of trying to follow through on romance in the stultifying India of arranged marriage: “Jab tumhein mujh se zyada hai zamaane ka khayaal, Phir meri yaad mein yun ashk bahaati kyun ho, Tum mein himmat hai toh duniya se baghaavat kar do, Varna maa-baap jahan kehte hain shaadi kar lo.” Later in life, among other briefer affairs, Sahir conducted a long (and mostly long-distance) romance with Punjabi poetess Amrita Pritam. Amrita was already married when she met him, and stayed so – and unfulfilled longing, as all lovers know, is often the best way to keep romance alive.

On the question of his ego, it is clear from reading Akshay Manwani’s very useful account of his life that Sahir found it difficult to collaborate with people who had egos as big as his. So he worked with the industry’s most feted music directors, but not for long. As early as 1957, for instance, he ended a highly fruitful partnership with SD Burman, that had produced such astounding work as ‘Baazi’, ‘Taxi Driver’, ‘House No. 44, ‘Funtoosh’, ‘Devdas’ and ‘Pyaasa’. That same year, with both of them having produced the brilliant lilting soundtrack of ‘Naya Daur’, another fine music director, OP Nayyar, told BR Chopra that he did not want to work with Sahir any longer.

Sahir went on to work with competent and even good music directors, like N Datta and Ravi, but he continued to have clear ideas about who he could collaborate with. His partnership with the Chopras was lifelong, first with the socially conscious films of BR Chopra, and then the changing oeuvre of Yash Chopra, from such films as ‘Dhool Ka Phool’ and ‘Dharmaputra’ to the romances for which he is better known. Sahir needed to know he came first. When Yash Chopra made ‘Kabhi Kabhie’, for instance, Sahir and his poem came on board first, and Chopra was persuaded by him to drop the commercially more successful Laxmikant-Pyarelal duo in favour of Khaiyyam, whose literary sensibilities Sahir decided were needed for a film about a poet. Sahir’s behaviour throughout his lifetime was perhaps read as mere arrogance, but today it is hard not to see it, at least partially, as a response to an industry that did not value writers. A call made by Sahir to BV Keskar, it seems, may have been responsible for All India Radio’s announcers beginning to mention the lyricist’s name alongside the film and the singer.

The gravest charge of contradictoriness, of course, is that a poet should not want to write for films, and that the idealistic socialism of Sahir’s verse was muddied by being picturised on screen by stars and filmmakers who made a great deal of money. The purists can never be satisfied on this. But Sahir seems to have had no doubt that film songs were the best way to make Indians think as well as feel. The poet who wrote “Hum amn chahte hain, magar zulm ke khilaaf/ Garr jung laazmi hain toh, phir jung hee sahi” was not compromising when he subverted Iqbal’s grandiosity into the vividly sarcastic “Cheen o Arab hamara, Hindustan hamara/ Rehne ko ghar nahi hain, saara jahan hamara”, or crafted the undying call to humanism of “Tu Hindu banega na Musalmaan banega,/ Insaan ki aulaad hai, insaan banega.” He was communicating with his compatriots – in all their glorious and inglorious variety.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Mar 2020. (First part published on 8 Mar 2020)

The Art of the State - II

My Mirror column:

Schools, guns and graffiti in two films about the Indian state: When the Woods Bloom and Newton.

(This is the second of a two-part column. The previous column is here.)

I return this week to my discussion of Amit Masurkar's Newton and D. Bijukumar's Kaadu Pookkunna Neram (When the Woods Bloom, WTWB): very different films that deploy strikingly similar motifs to depict a similar subject. In both, an incident of anonymous violence is followed by the uniformed might of the Indian state descending on a Maoist-controlled adivasi area -- centred, in both cases, on a school. 

In the Malayalam film, the policemen have arrived to stay. "Two rooms will be enough for us," pronounces a senior cop, being magnanimous. "There are only four rooms in the school," replies the teacher. "But even if you wanted to take over the whole building, we could not stop you." The fact that the police sit at the top of this ecosystem becomes even clearer when a sleeping cop wakes up and starts hitting two curious children who have sneaked past him to touch some guns. When the teacher objects, he retorts rudely: "You're here to teach children. Don't try to teach cops!" The teacher keeps quiet, but later stops the cops from using the schoolchildren as free labour. Some of the loveliest scenes in Dr. Biju's film involve the tribal children singing.

The songs they sing are clear and sweet, a world away from the raucous film music that the policemen bring with them. "We are the masters of the forest," run the lyrics of one, its dulcet tones belying the sharp irony of the words as they ring out in a forest that no longer seems theirs. In Masurkar's film, where black humour replaces lyrical melancholy, two tribal children are forced to sing songs to entertain the cops. In both WTWB and Newton, local anger can only be expressed in graffiti -- scrawled on the walls of the sole pucca structure for miles around: the school.

But the sentiment of those messages, let alone the irony of their location, does not seem to be reaching the state, which remains intent on widespread repression — which can only produce greater public anger. Early in WTWB, a truckload of cops is unleashed on a village to search for a single 'terrorist'. In the end, when the protagonist (Indrajith) returns to the police post, he is greeted with surprise - and told that that six Adivasis have been jailed for a month on the non-bailable charge of killing him. Newton, where the police have come only for a day, with the ostensibly benign purpose of holding an election, also underlines the casual terror they wield.

In one silently sarcastic sequence, the cops barge into huts, extracting tribute as they rough up people to make them exercise their 'voluntary' right. Poor adivasi India, it seems, is where the state only shows up to replenish its stocks of fresh-brewed liquor and freshly-killed chicken. Newton takes a lighter approach than Biju's film to deliver the same depressing message - the police do not merely implement the law: they are the law. At least while they have the weapons.

This, too, is a motif both films share. WTWB puts the gun in the hands of a woman and a Maoist, letting us see how contingent power is when she taunts the now-unarmed cop: "You're afraid too,without a gun, isn't it?" Newton's climax, too, depends on a gun changing hands - though here we are under no illusion that it will eventually return to those who are licensed to use it. In this utterly skewed world, if you think you can challenge a police officer, you must either be powerful — or a fool. Which is why the long-serving Loknath ji, having observed Newton Kumar's refusal to kowtow to Aatma Singh, sidles up to him to ask after his political connections.

The chatty, diabetic Loknath ji is the excellent Raghuvir Yadav, who began his cinematic career in Pradip Krishen's Massey Sahib as a lower functionary of the colonial state, and now embodies to perfection this lower functionary of the postcolonial state. Both as the youthful Massey and as the middle-aged Loknath ji, Yadav offers up an everyman character whom we laugh at, but also with. And in so laughing, we also laugh at ourselves.

Loknath ji also offers a humorous indictment of the status language and literature have in today's India. An MA in Hindi sahitya who now advises people to focus on English, which he is teaching himself by watching American slasher comedies on his phone, he combines a deadpan cynicism about our times with a hope that he might still catch up.

But in his desire to write a "jombie story" about a police team that enters a jungle in a Maoist area (and never coming out), Loknath ji also gives us a momentary reprieve from realism, a pleasurable dip into the sensational that reminded me of Lalmohan Babu in Satyajit Ray's Feluda stories. Fiction makes other appearances in the film: as indulgence, as entertainment, as a trap. We hear a policeman reading a novel aloud to his mates, a potentially erotic romance about one Ramju. Less innocuously, in the pre-climactic scene, it is by telling the story of the day aloud that Newton realizes that that is what it is: a story he has been sold.

I have not yet watched Dr. Biju's other films, but I was fascinated to learn that none of the characters in his last five films have names. Masurkar and screenwriter Mayank Tewari are clearly equally cognizant of the significance of naming. Their protagonist has already shed the weight of his caste surname. His new first name rids him of the femininity of 'Nutan', while putting him on par with a famous Englishman - and making us instantly think of gravity. At some fundamental level, naming lies at the core of fiction. The fact that Newton can name himself anew is testament to the power of imagination.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Sun 19 Nov 2017.

Tricks and Treats

My Mirror column:

Carrying on our examination of 1957’s biggest Hindi hits, a look at a film which gave us a new kind of exuberant, prankster hero.

1957 was a remarkable year for Hindi cinema. Last week, I wrote about one of the top ten hits of that year, Paying Guest, directed by Subodh Mukherjee. 1957 was also the year in which Paying Guest’s talented screenplay and dialogue writer, then employed by Filmistan Studio, managed to branch out into film direction.

The writer-turned-director was Nasir Husain, and the film was Tumsa Nahin Dekha, which also found its way into the top ten hits of the year. Husain never looked back, going on to a gloriously successful innings in the film industry, as the maker of hugely successful entertainers like Dil Deke Dekho (1959),Caravan( 1971), Yaadon ki Baaraat (1973) and Zamane Ko Dikhana Hai (1981), as well as the founder of a film family that includes Mansoor Khan (who directed the epoch-marking Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak and Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar) and the actor Aamir Khan.

The story of how Tumsa Nahin Dekha(TND) got made is enjoyably filmi. Tolaram Jalan, primary financier of Filmistan, agreed to fund Husain’s directorial venture, but gave the novice director a shoestring budget — and insisted on him hiring a young heroine called Ameeta, who was Jalan’s protege. Husain, having crafted such a fun new persona for Dev Anand with his scripts for Paying Guest andMunimji, had assumed that the star would be part of his directorial debut. But Anand decided that a starlet like Ameeta didn’t match his stature, and bowed out of the film. That left Husain scrambling for a male hero.

But when his mentor at Filmistan, the legendary S Mukherjee, recommended Raj Kapoor’s younger brother Shammi, Husain wasn’t at all convinced. Shammi had already acted in some nineteen films without finding his feet as a hero. Already suffering the consequences of comparison to his hugely popular elder brother and even more legendary father Prithviraj, Shammi had also made that cardinal error in a patriarchal society: he had married a woman more successful than himself. Even Husain, when persuaded to approach Shammi, decided that if he was going to meet the actor couple, he’d try for the star first. It was only when Geeta Bali turned him down, saying that the heroine’s role wasn’t strong, that Shammi Kapoor got the part. And Hindi film fans got Shammi Kapoor.

Watching Shammi in his ‘introduction song’ in TND, one would be forgiven for imagining that he had always been this way — the ridiculous excess of gesture, the arch glance thrown over his shoulder, the floppy hair, the floppy gait, and the floppy wave of the hand with which he waves away a potential sea of admiring women. But one would be wrong. That Shammi Kapoor persona we know so well came into being with this film. Shammi acquired a new clean-shaven look and a shorter haircut, and an air of exaggerated exuberance that then became his signature style. Nasir Husain wrote two more films which gave Shammi’s new persona full play — Dil Deke Dekho (1959) and Teesri Manzil (1966), the latter directed by Vijay Anand. And Shammi Kapoor became the hero who seemed always drunk on life.

Once you pay attention to Sahir Ludhianvi’s lyrics for the film’s title song — “Raaste khamosh hain, dhadkanein madhosh hain; Piye bin aaj humein chadha hai nasha” — it becomes slowly clear that that idea — of being ‘mast’ without needing to have consumed intoxicants of any sort — lay at the core of this new heroic persona. This was a masculinity that didn’t take the world —or itself — too seriously. The usual terrible things could and often did befall the Nasir Husain hero — a sad childhood, separation from a parent, poverty or unemployment, being unfairly suspected of a crime, or simply being treated badly because his true worth (often implying parentage) had not yet been recognised — but he kept the weight of the world at bay with a combination of silliness and wit. And of course, music. Many Husain protagonists were musicians, and even when they weren’t, as in Paying Guest or TND, he made a point of having them be highly competent amateurs, often setting up scenes in which the hero and the heroine matched their wits — and musical skills — in a performative display of virtuosity.

While this competitive nonk-jhonk was constitutive of the highly enjoyable Nasir Husain model of romance, it is undeniable that his heroes belong to a long tradition of falling ‘in love’ at first glance and then flirting incessantly with the heroine, who rejected his overtures. Such a line as “Nafrat mohabbat ki pehli seedhi hai” (which Husain managed to insert into both Paying Guest and TND), or worse, having a side character like the comical thief in TND say to Shankar “Woh mard hi kya jo biwi ko neecha na dikhaye” are part of an unfortunate cinematic legacy in which the woman cannot be the initiator of romance. She is assumed to be a reluctant participant, all the way until a (usually staged, sometimes real) turn of events proves to her that the maskhara hero is actually 1) ethical, 2) brave and 3) truly invested in her honour.

This persona of the light-hearted prankster was perhaps also meant to upend our expectations of who a hero is. In TND, for instance, Pran — the villainous imposter — sits around looking serious and reading books, while Shammi — the real heir — constantly plays the fool. Nasir Husain had given us the hero as joker. Wholly serious men, henceforth, were going to be a little suspect.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Aug 2017.

A Mixed-Up Tape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 May 2017.

Taking Risks with the Risqué

My Mirror column:

Anaarkali of Aarah pushes Hindi cinema’s take on sexuality and consent in exactly the direction it needs to go — and does so with effervescence and flair.

Two weeks ago, I wrote in these pages about two groups of women who made a living performing for men, while remaining powerfully in control of their own bodies. This week, my subject is a fictional character who shares a great deal with them both: the lavani dancers of Sangeet Bari and the American burlesque artistes profiled in the marvellous League of Exotique Dancers.

Anaarkali Aarahwali – the eponymous protagonist of long-time Hindi journalist Avinash Das's wonderful debut feature -- sings risqué Bhojpuri songs and dances for all-male audiences in the rough-and-ready world of the Bihari small town. Yet she is more profoundly possessed of a sense of self than most 'respectable' women. Between Das and his lyricist Ramkumar Singh, the film has an abundance of earthy wit, letting us inhabit a Bihar that's simultaneously lighter and more acute than anything Prakash Jha has shown us recently.

Das brings to the Hindi screen a hugely popular musical-sexual subculture that travels with the Bihari worker to Delhi and beyond. (Anaarkali's name, for instance, echoes those of real-life singers Tarabai Faizabadi, Sairabano Faizabadi, Fatmabai Faizabadi, several of whom have cut raunchy Bhojpuri albums with suggestive names, a popular title being that of Anaarkali's album in the film: Laal Timatar.) And in the paan-chewing, double-entendre-spewing Anaarkali, writer-director Das and the terrific Swara Bhaskar give us a deeply believable heroine full of joie de vivre, unabashed in her enjoyment of what life has to offer her.

The universe she inhabits may seem shaped by male desire, but Anaar refuses to give men sole rights over desirousness, or indeed, sexualness. Whether she is putting her almost muscular energy on display amid a crowd of cheering men, swaying deliberately down an Aarah street with her dupatta draped just so, or applauding the unexpected musical talent of a boy who's been skulking around her house, Bhaskar's Anaarkali is a woman who wrings sensual delight from everything that she can – but on her own terms. She may carry on a relationship with her musical comrade Rangeela (Pankaj Tripathy, very effective), but he does not control her choices – and he knows it.

With its easy banter and on-again off-again flirtation, Rangeela and Anaar's connection is built on a sense of camaraderie between equals. But what Das's film makes sadly clear is that it is a rare man who can accept a woman who expresses her own wishes while refusing to kowtow to those of others.

The plot is centred on Anaar's confrontation with a local bigwig called VC Dharmendar (Sanjay Mishra) who, having drunk a little too much at one of her shows, climbs on to stage and molests her in full public view. Anaar first tries gamely to keep dancing, but when things go beyond the pale, she wrenches herself away, slaps Dharmendar and abandons the performance.

For Anaar, the event has been horrible – but much worse is to come, because Dharmendar remembers little, and seems to think that he can still woo Anaar into becoming his mistress. From here on, the film comes into its own, with Anaar refusing Dharmendar's sexual overtures – couched first as half-hearted apology and then as romantic entreaty, before transforming, in the blink of an eye, to a threat to her life and liberty if she does not submit. One moment he is trying to wheedle Anaar, calling himself a Devdas wasting away for love of her; the next minute he's having his goons hunt her down on foot in Aarah's backstreets.

But it is not just Dharmendar who yoyos between these ways of seeing. Das's finely-wrought screenplay makes clear how often an attractive woman must deal with men wanting either to worship her, or rub her nose in the dirt. Sex and sexuality is so repressed a topic in India that a woman who revels in her own erotic appeal is treated as a devi (goddess) if she smiles upon a man – but must be denounced as a randi (whore) if she doesn't – or god forbid, if she smiles upon whomsoever she chooses.

Anaar, too, has her share of worshippers: the spellbound shopkeeper who presses free lipsticks upon her in exchange for listening to couplets he's composed for his cross-caste love; the loveable studio agent (Ishtiyak Khan) who helps her out in Delhi (and is called Hiraman Tiwari, in a sweet homage to Raj Kapoor's innocent tangawalla in Teesri Kasam); and finally, the waif Anwar, whom Anaar shelters, and who later becomes her support. But what the film does superbly is to reveal how little it can take for the same man to switch on the other gaze. So the timid, sweet Anwar can begin to display signs of 'manly' control, while Dharmendar's once-abusive henchman is quick to fall at Anaarkali's feet, once she assumes the status of his boss's woman.

It is nearly impossible, in such a skewed world, to escape the alternative handcuffs of worship and control. Anaarkali succeeds, for now, and we applaud happily.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 Mar 2017.

DJs, poets, dramatic desi loves

My Mirror column:

Ae Dil Hai Mushkil falls flat when it aims for high romance. So do any of our old languages of love survive?

In many ways, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil is a fairly standard-issue Karan Johar movie. First, it is a soppy romance about people who’re confused between love and friendship (and trying hard to sacrifice their feelings for the blissfully unknowing beloved) -- think back to Kajol and Shah Rukh Khan in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, or Saif Ali Khan, Preity Zinta and SRK in Kal Ho Na Ho. Second, it contains that classic K-Jo cocktail of oblivious upper-class-ness and self-conscious Indian-ness that emerges in full measure only when the protagonists are ‘abroad’. The first purpose served by this is in the aesthetic-emotional register: supremely well-off, well-dressed desis get to play out their overheated romances in picturesque cold countries. The second purpose is what we might as well call political: it is no accident that Johar has been among Bollywood’s pioneers of desi coolth, given his originary adeptness at turning not just firang locations but firangs themselves into mere backdrops for our Empire-writes-back moments.

Nowadays, Johar seems to have stopped enjoying making British characters stand for the Indian national anthem, and no longer even seems to get off having rude Hindi remarks made in front of foreigners who can’t understand them (admittedly, Kajol managed to make this reverse racism seem very funny in Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham). What ADHM offers instead, is a breezy world-is-our-oyster feel, in which South Asians on private jet vacations can bump into [also South Asian] ex-boyfriends DJ-ing at French discotheques (And just in case you were wondering about such prosaic things as visas, the film throws in two separate mentions of characters having British passports.) The resultant air of bonhomie is aided by the Empire choosing, whenever in doubt, to sing back: the oddly patriotic pleasure of watching white people sway to Hindi/Punjabi songs is amplified particularly in ADHM by having Parisians galvanised by the corny energy of Mohammad Rafi’s 1967 chartbuster An Evening in Paris.

Most of Johar’s romantic messaging is pretty spelt out in the film: such as Alizeh’s rather programmatic declaration, “Pyaar mein junoon hai, dosti mein sukoon hai (Love has madness, friendship has peace)”or her insistent idea (pretty much taken from Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar) that only a broken heart can produce good art. Or the film’s avowed thesis, that unrequited love can be more powerful than a relationship: “you have full control over it... because you don’t have to share it with anyone”. How much any of these statements affects you depends partly on your mood at the moment you watch it spoken on screen, partly on who speaks it (Ranbir does best), and partly on your general propensity for dramebaaz mohabbat.

But it is more interesting to read Ae Dil Hai Mushkil for the things it does not spell out. Many of those filter through to us via language. The film seems, for instance, an expression of Johar’s desire to unite two very different landscapes of romance that I will go out on a limb and suggest he personally inhabits: the thumping rhythms of smoky nightclubs on the one hand, and the mellifluous Urdu that was for years the language of high romance in Hindi films. The film’s dialogue (by Johar and his long-time collaborator Niranjan Iyengar) moves constantly between a conversational Hindi peppered with English words — eg. “Tum mujhe seriously nahi le rahi, lekin yeh mera God’s gift hai” — and a high-faluting Urdu/Hindustani that is largely expressed in dubious ‘philosophical’ statements that neither Anushka Sharma nor Aishwarya Rai can carry off.

Rai, in particular, is saddled with the impossible task of playing what Johar in all seriousness calls a ‘shaaira’. The Urdu word for poetess is one I last heard in the 1994 film Muhafiz, in which too it was used as a self-descriptor – but it came accompanied by the devastating force of Shabana Azmi’s hauteur and pronunciation, and the context was mid-twentieth century Delhi. Having Rai, in a white airport lounge somewhere between London and Vienna, introduce herself as “Main shaaira hoon” elicits a hilarious but apt response from Kapoor’s Ayaan, who assumes that Shaaira is her name. “Main shaaira hoon, mera naam Saba hai,” says Rai, her eyes glinting dangerously.

The moment is, sadly, one of the very few in which the film takes on board the hilarious unbelievability of this uber-posh, uber-glamorous Vienna-based character being an Urdu poet. But at least Saba is meant to be a poet. For Alizeh, a hyperactive London-based dilettante recovering from her break-up with a Sufiyana DJ, the Urdu she speaks makes even less sense. The only way we can make sense of Alizeh’s language (and her 80s film obsession and her kurta-clad entry into clubs) is if we replace her supposed Lucknow origins with Lahore. Given just how much political fracas has been caused by the mere presence of a Pakistani actor (Fawad Khan in a thankless role as the DJ), I suppose it is not surprising that Johar decided to keep Alizeh’s real origins — like her legs —covered up.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30th Oct 2016.

Ram, Lokhon, Sinta. And Sabin.

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Altaf Mazid’s film on the Karbi version of the epic underlines why we need all our many Ramayanas.

It’s not yet Diwali, and the Ramayana season this year already feels more disturbing than festive. First, the Shiv Sena successfully prevented actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui from acting in the annual Ramlila in his hometown Budhana (which is in Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar, a district that was torn apart by Hindu-Muslim riots in 2013). So what if Siddiqui is the town’s most famous export by far and actually wants to return to fulfil a childhood dream? No Muslim had ever acted in the Budhana Ramlila, said the Shiv Sainiks, and there was no way they’d let one start now.

Then, timing it carefully to coincide with Dussehra, the Modi government announced a Ramayana museum with a Rs.151 crore budget. Part of a projected Ramayana tourism circuit, the museum - to be built in Ayodhya – clearly targets the BJP’s Hindutva voters in UP: building a Ram Mandir at the site where the Sangh Parivar demolished the Babri Masjid in 1992 has been part of the BJP’s manifesto for years. While a Ramayana Museum is a wonderful idea in itself, the present project — to be carried out in UP’s most politically sensitive town, in an election year, by a pernicious and culturally insecure government — does not inspire confidence as being anything but a sop to Ram temple enthusiasts.

The Ramayana museum I’d love would be one that lets us marvel at how communities across our vast and varied subcontinent have made the epic their own. Such a museum is unlikely to get built in the near future — but it would have benefited greatly from the knowledge and enthusiasms of Altaf Mazid, the Assamese filmmaker, critic and restorer who died in April this year.

I say this because I recently watched Mazid’s striking 50-minute film Sabin Alun (titled ‘The Broken Song’ in English), about how the Ramayana story is told and lived by the Karbis, an ethnic group in the hill areas of Assam. Although screened as ‘documentary’ (at the 2016 Mumbai International Film Festival and at Delhi’s Open Frame festival organised by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust which also funded the film), Sabin Alun refuses to fit into a pre-established genre. It rolls around playfully between ethnography and storytelling; between serious-minded, unadorned documentation of the epic and a tongue-in-cheek contemporary staging (in which the geeky Ram keeps adjusting his spectacles while the dark-suited Rabon drives Sinta off in a big black car).

Mazid’s film assumes — correctly — that we know the epic inside out. He does not so much describe the Karbi version as draw us into it, demonstrating with quiet beauty and unspoken ease how a story can be entirely retold while still remaining recognizable as the same story. The extent of reimagining is apparent from the very name — of the Karbi story as well as the film. Sabin Alun means ‘Song of Sabin’, and Sabin is what the Karbis call Surpanakha, Ravan’s sister.

It seems both marvellous and fitting that Surpanakha, as Sabin, comes to occupy centre space in the Karbi narrative — rather than being stuck on the periphery as the snub-nosed, dark-skinned villainess so horribly rebuffed by Lakshman that the episode is what triggers Ravan’s revenge, the abduction of Sita. Marvellous, because to those of us raised on upper-caste Hindu tellings of the Ramayana, there is still a shock when we’re made to see the tale from the other side, to perceive our fair-skinned heroes as the arrogant, marauding, misogynist outsiders they are in Sabin’s forest home. Fitting, because as a Karbi woman explains, “Sabin has her nose chopped off, and there is no mention of Sabin. So it is ‘Song of Sabin’.”

Even more than Sabin, it is Sinta — the Karbi Sita — who demands our attention. Of course, there are many other Sitas stronger than the prettily useless version thrust upon us by Tulsidas and Ramanand Sagar — in the Oriya 15th century Vilanka Ramayana, based on the older Adbhuta Ramayana, Sita is the one who finally kills Ravana, having assumed the form of Kali, but lets the world believe that Rama did the deed.

But Sabin Alun gives us a truly earthy Sita (though ironically Sinta is not found in a furrow, but in an egg). In the song sung in the film, we hear Sinta ask her mother for a knife. “And holding it in her hands... Sinta while on a tour... Felled trees big and small... So mighty was she.” Mazid maps these words onto a staging: a modern-day Karbi woman riding angrily off on a tractor. Later, he reiterates the epic’s agricultural basis among the Karbis, by asking an interviewee why Ram, Lokhon and Sinta had to go into the forest. She responds without a moment’s thought: they had to take up farming, and there were no fields like there are now. “So they went to clear the forest... and then they stayed to supervise the farming.”

Perhaps the finest moment of revelation for me, though, was the quietest: an old lady sings of how Lokhon refused to leave Sita when she bade him go to Ram’s rescue. “I am not going, my brother is not dying,” proclaims Lokhon. But Sita is not one to give up so easily. “Oh Lokhon, if you do not go,” she says, “You want to marry me. And this is what you have in your mind.”

The line is delivered in the same drone-like monotone as everything before and after it, and one can only wonder why it is such a shock. It is, after all, a perfectly imaginable dynamic to emerge between a woman and her attractive (temporarily single) brother-in-law. Or perhaps it is too imaginable? There is probably a reason why a man’s relationship with his saali (wife’s younger sister) and a woman’s with her devar (husband’s younger brother) are categorised as ‘joking relationships’ across North India. It takes the matter-of-fact frankness of the Karbi telling to let us see this aspect of the Sita-Lakshman relationship that we have suppressed for years.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23rd Oct 2016.

Everything is Illuminated

This week's Mirror column:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 31st July 2016.