Jai Arjun Singh's Blog, page 72

The goonda as political commando - on Tigmanshu Dhulia's Bullett Raja

[Did a shorter version of this review for Business Standard]


“Halka paani ya bhadkeela?” is the question with which the friendship between Raja Mishra (Saif Ali Khan) and Rudra (Jimmy Shergill) begins. The setting is a wedding party and Rudra is asking Raja if he is fine with the soft drink he has just been offered or if he wants something flashier, more potent. Raja opts for the latter, and he certainly gets it over the course of this noisy film. After a few hours of bonding over liquor, banter and an item girl, the two men expertly fight off an attack on the wedding house, and so their fate is sealed: they are subsequently drawn into the politics and mafia wars of the UP heartland. It is as if the simple act of drinking “bhadkeela paani” has engendered events that turn a regular, job-seeking boy into a superhero, a goonda or a “political commando” (depending on your perspective). Even as Raja and Rudra retain their goofiness and basic likability, the stakes will keep rising for them.
The opening credits of Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Bullett Raja are all about colour and flash and dhishum and dhishkiyaon, and that’s mostly what the film turns out to be too. Much has already been said about Dhulia, a director of grounded hinterland stories with well-written characters, making a no-holds-barred commercial film, a “potboiler”. Normally I’m wary of such classifications, but after watching Bullett Raja I had to concede the point. This is a clear homage to the mainstream Hindi film of the 1970s and 80s. There is a Sholay reference early on (“Hamesha do kyon hote hain?” – “Why are there always two?” – grumbles a head villain whose men have been vanquished by Raja and Rudra), and the very presence of Gulshan Grover, Chunky Pandey and Raj Babbar (all of whom are reasonably well used, with Pandey hamming it up from behind red-tinted glasses) is a reminder of less sophisticated masala movies from times past. Bullett Raja reaches for the tone of those films without trying to be a cheeky, post-modern commentary on them; there is even a scene – filmed straight, without irony – involving the death of a loved one and the hero swearing vengeance through the flames of a funeral pyre.
Is it a good potboiler though? I’m not so sure. Though entertaining enough in patches, this is also an uneven, unfocused film, with too much going on at the same time. Characters flit in and out of sight, there are promising but not fully realised roles for Ravi Kishan and Vidyut Jamwal (as men who are, in different ways, Raja’s nemeses), and Sonakshi Sinha’s Mitali – the love interest – is no more than a random presence (though perhaps this too is a nod to the functional part heroines played in 1980s action movies). Some scene transitions are jarring, there are discontinuities and gaps in character development, the action sequences are confusing and go by before one can register what is happening. (Martial-arts star Jamwaldoes have a couple of good fight scenes, though one of them – a prolonged one involving a stealth attack on a gang of dacoits – plays more as a personal setpiece for him, having little to do with the main narrative.)
Equally random are the film’s superficial excursions into political correctness, as in a scene involving a bellboy of Marathi origin and a little lesson about national unity. But then, Bullett Raja does unexpectedly become something of an India primer in its second half, first moving to Bombay for a bump-and-grind song in a posh pub, a view of skyscrapers and a glimpse of a film shoot involving Emraan Hashmi; then to Calcutta where Saif and Sonakshi romance against picturesque backdrops including Howrah Bridge and try to convince her sweet Bangla family of the seriousness of their relationship. In between, there is a trip to the Chambal Valley where we meet dakus (or baaghis) who dream of seeing Bipasha Basu dance while also dreaming of education and a better way of life for their children.
The world shown here then is one where modernity and older, more primal ways of life feed off each other. Feudal lines of power are very much in place, people in high positions spend time in jail purely for convenience and continue fixing deals – using Skype – while in their prison clothes; they speak in the salty dialects of their home town but nonchalantly break into English when you least expect it; meetings involving smartly dressed businessmen and politicians with their laptops take place in what seems the middle of a jungle. In this setting, it is always wise to touch the feet of hitmen, though you might – despite obligatory nods to piety and tradition – casually swat away a prasad-offering pandit who is interrupting an important conversation. And people, regardless of their origins, can be many things. Raja’s father, proud of their Brahmin ancestry, doesn’t want him to work in a hotel, washing other people’s jhootha dishes – but later we are reminded that “Brahmin rootha toh Ravana”. There are elderly men who are set in their hopelessly corrupt lifestyles (“Iss umar mein toh kaam badal nahin sakte” muses a businessman), and there are younger people who have more options available to them.
All this might have added up to subtle commentary on the many faces, divides and possibilities of a society, but that isn’t the kind of film Bullett Raja is trying to be. There is an inevitable reference in the Chambal scene to Dhulia’s Paan Singh Tomar, which was a much more restrained film about a man crossing over to the other side of the law and being unable to cross back. In a way, Bullett Rajais Paan Singh Lite or Paan Singh Happy. Escape and escapism are real possibilities here; they have to be, because a more commercial movie-making tradition requires the hero to be a survivor, so that an apparently tragic climax can later be revealed as something else altogether. Raja tells us at the very beginning that he has spent his life doing “aafat se aashiqui”. Expect him to do more of the same if there is a sequel, and to continue being as bullet-resistant as ever.

[A post about Dhulia's Paan Singh Tomar is here]

Haathi ras - on an elephant trail

[From my Business Standard column, and a sort of extension of this post about animals in films]

“Just think – in India, you would be worshipped,” says William Gull, the royal doctor, to Joseph Merrick, a patient so severely deformed that he is mockingly known as the Elephant Man. The scene, depicting a fictional meeting between two real-life people in London in the late 1880s, is from one of my favourite books, the graphic novel From Hell . Gull is consoling the unhappy social outcast Merrick with a reference to Ganesha the elephant-headed God, but there is also a dark subtext, in the linking of a benevolent, twinkling, pleasingly rotund deity – the remover of obstacles – with a “mission” that leads to a long trail of blood in the streets of the East End. When Gull seeks the Elephant Man’s blessings later in the story, he is embarking on a very macabre act, one that most Ganesha-worshippers would decidedly not approve of!

Which may be a reminder that elephants can mean very different things to different people. (So can Gods, of course, and elephant-Gods.) A famous manifestation of an elephant as a blank slate is in the parable about a group of blind men, each with a very different idea of what the animal must look like. There is also Jose Saramago’s novel The Elephant’s Journey , in which an Indian elephant makes a long, dangerous journey from Portugal to Austria in the 16th century, becoming a symbol of what is possible, and inviting a range of perspectives from various observers.
A few days ago I attended a talk by the writer and academic Rachel Dwyer, about elephants in Indian cinema. Using stills and clips, Dwyer touched not just on relatively objective elephant depictions in such films as the 1937 Elephant Boy (originally shot as a documentary, later re-edited into a narrative-driven feature) but also on such filmi archetypes as the “moral elephant” (the one pursing bad guy Pran through the jungles in the 1955 film Munimji ) and the “secular elephant” – as in the ending of Haathi Mere Saathi , where the dead body of the elephant Ramu is taken on a sort of multi-religion pilgrimage, past a mandir, a masjid and a church.
Many of us tend to patronise films like Haathi Mere Saathi these days. We laugh, or cringe, at some of the cheesier animal depictions from old Hindi cinema, such as the revenge-seeking dog Moti in Teri Meherbaniyan(sample of such mockery in this old piece), the resourceful, infant-rescuing hawk in Dharam Veer (But as Dwyer pointed out, there is also something immediate and moving about scenes like the one where a number of animals, including tigers, emerge from their cages to mourn Ramu’s death and there is a remarkable series of close-ups of animal and human faces. In this light, perhaps the most interesting part of the post-talk discussion was the idea that the use of animals in Indian art was rooted in a closeness to the pastoral way of life, where (as one attendee put it) “touching the skin of an animal” was a natural, desirable sensory experience, and where observing animals became a way for humans to understand or articulate their own feelings and relationships.
The only real way for humans to emotionally relate to an animal is by anthropomorphising, and we see this in our traditional storytelling forms that stress the interconnectedness of life, such as the Jataka Tales, about the Buddha’s animal forms, or the myths about Vishnu’s avatars, which blur the lines between God, human and animal. There may have been a natural transition from these forms of oral and written storytelling to the heightened emotions of Sanskrit and Parsi theatre, and thence to the distinct forms of expression in commercial cinema. 

And in this context, it is notable how a film like Haathi Mere Saathi – which, on the face of it, is just lightweight entertainment for children – stresses the importance of animals in the ideal of a “Pyaar ki Duniya” (the name given to the private zoo established by the Rajesh Khanna character) and even shows a distrust of sterile modernity, as represented by the big, flashy car that breaks down and has to be pushed by elephants in the film’s title song. As Dwyer pointed out, Ramu displays many of the emotions from the Indian tradition of navrasa, including shringaar (aesthetic appeal), karuna (compassion) and haasya (laughter). Elephants can be even bigger and more capacious than they first appear.

[Also see: this post about the birth of Ganesha and the bathroom battle; this one about elephant-headed transcribers in Ekta Kapoor's Mahabharata, and this one about Temple Grandin's book Animals in Translation. And some elephant photos from a Sri Lanka trip]

Milky ways - the many faces of the Hindi-movie maa

[Here's the full text of the essay I did for Zubaan's anthology about motherhood. The book has plenty more in it, of course, including excellent pieces by Anita Roy, Manju Kapur, Shashi Deshpande and others. Look out for it - gift, spread the word etc.
 
Note: the "Motherly vignettes" section was meant to be a stand-alone thing, published either as a box or in different font, to mark it from the rest of the text, and perhaps to mirror the detours and interludes so often present in mainstream Hindi cinema. Didn't work out that way, but I've included it here]

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Around the age of 14 I took what was meant to be a temporary break from Hindi cinema, and ended up staying away for over a decade. Years of relishing masala movies may have resulted in a form of dyspepsia – there had been too many overwrought emotions, too much dhishoom dhishoom, too much of the strictly regimented quantities of Drama and Action and Tragedy and Romance and Comedy that existed in almost every mainstream Hindi film of the time. Besides, I had developed a love for Old Hollywood, which would become a gateway to world cinema, and satellite TV had started making it possible to indulge such interests.

One of my catalysts for escape was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho , a film that is – among many other things – about a strange young man’s special relationship with his equally strange mother. I won’t bother with spoiler alerts for such a well-known pop-cultural artefact, so briefly: Norman Bates poisons his mom, preserves her body, walks around in her clothes and has conversations with himself in her voice. In his off-time, he murders young women as they shower.
None of this was a secret to me when I first saw the film, since a certain Psycho lore existed in my family. Years in advance, I had heard jokes about “mummification” from my own mummy – apparently, in the early 60s, her school-going brother had returned from a movie-hall and informed their startled mother that he wished to keep her body in a sitting position in the living room after she passed on.
Hitchcock’s film had a big effect on the way I watched and thought about movies, but I must admit that my own relationship with my mother was squarer than Norman’s. We quarrelled occasionally, but always in our own voices, and taxidermy did not obtrude upon our lives. Looking back, though, I think we could be described as unconventional in the context of the society we lived in. I was a single child, she was recently divorced, we had been through a lot together and were very close. But we were both – then, as now – private people, and so the relationship always respected personal space. We didn’t spend much time on small talk, we tended to stay in our own rooms for large parts of the day (and this is how it remains, as I type these words in my shabby freelancer’s “office” in her flat). Yet I always shared the really important stuff with her, and I never thought this was unusual until I heard stories about all the things my friends – even the ones from the seemingly cool, cosmopolitan families – routinely hid from their parents: about girlfriends, or bunking college, or their first cigarette.
Some of this may help explain why I was feeling detached from the emotional excesses of Hindi cinema in my early teens. In his book on Deewaar, the historian Vinay Lal notes, “No more important or poignant relationship exists in Indian society than that between mother and son, and the Hindi film best exemplifies the significance of this nexus.” That may be so, but I can say with my hand on my heart (or “mother-swear”, if you prefer) that even at age 14, I found little to relate to in Hindi-film depictions of mothers.
Can you blame me though? Here, off the top of my head (and with only some basic research to confirm that I hadn’t dreamt up these wondrous things), are some of my movie memories from around the time I left the mandir of Hindi cinema:
* In the remarkably bad JamaiRaja , Hema Malini is a wealthy tyrant who makes life difficult for her son-in-law. Some of this is played for comedy, but the film clearly disapproves of the idea of a woman as the head of the house. Cosmic balance is restored only when the saas gets her comeuppance and asks the damaad’s forgiveness. Of course, he graciously clasps her joint hands and asks her not to embarrass him; that’s the hero’s privilege.
* In Sanjog , when she loses the little boy she had thought of as a son, Jaya Prada glides about in a white sari, holding a piece of wood wrapped in cloth and singing a song with the refrain “Zoo zoo zoo zoo zoo”. This song still plays incessantly in one of the darker rooms of my memory palace; I shudder whenever I recall the tune.
* In Aulad , the ubiquitous Jaya Prada is Yashoda who battles another woman (named, what else, Devaki) for custody of the bawling Baby Guddu, while obligatory Y-chromosome Jeetendra stands around looking smug and noble at the same time.
* In her short-lived comeback in Aandhiyan , a middle-aged Mumtaz dances with her screen son in a cringe-inducingly affected display of parental hipness. “Mother and son made a lovely love feeling with their dance and song (sic),” goes a comment on the YouTube video of the song “Duniya Mein Tere Siva”. Also: “I like the perfect matching mother and son love chemistry behind the song, it is a eternal blood equation (sic).” The quality of these comments is indistinguishable from the quality of the film they extol.
* And in Doodh kaKarz , a woman breastfeeding her child is so moved by the sight of a hungry cobra nearby that she squeezes a few drops of milk out and puts it in a bowl for him. The snake looks disgusted but sips some of the milk anyway. Naturally, this incident becomes the metaphorical umbilical cord that attaches him to this new maa for life.
As one dire memory begets another, the title of that last film reminds me that two words were in common currency in 1980s Hindi cinema: “doodh” and “khoon”. Milk and blood. Since these twin fluids were central to every hyper-dramatic narrative about family honour and revenge, our movie halls (or video rooms, since few sensible people I knew spent money on theatre tickets at the time) resounded with some mix of the following proclamations:
“Maa ka doodh piya hai toh baahar nikal!” (“If you have drunk your mother’s milk, come out!”)
“Yeh tumhara apna khoon hai.” (“He is your own blood.”)
“Main tera khoon pee jaaoonga.” (“I will drink your blood.”)
Both liquids were treated as equally nourishing; both were, in different ways, symbols of the hero’s vitality. I have no recollection of the two words being used together in a sentence, but it would not amaze me to come across a scene from a 1980s relic where the hero says: “Kuttay! Maine apni maa ka doodh piya hai. Ab tera khoon piyoonga.” (“Dog! I have drunk my mother’s milk, now I will drink your blood.”) It would suggest a rite of passage consistent with our expectations of the über-macho lead: as a child you drink mother’s milk, but you’re all grown up now and bad man’s blood is more intoxicating than fake Johnnie Walker.
Narcissists, angry young men and deadly guitars
All this is a complicated way of saying that I do not, broadly speaking, hold the 1980s in high esteem. But that decade is a soft target. Casting the net much wider, here’s a proposal: mainstream Hindi cinema has never had a sustained tradition of interesting mothers.
This is, of course, a generalisation; there have been exceptions in major films. Looming over every larger-than-life mother portrayal is Mother India, which invented (or at least highlighted) many of the things we think of as clichés today: the mother as metaphor for nation/land/nourishing source; the mother as righteous avenging angel, ready to shred her own heart and shoot her wayward son if it is for the Greater Good. Despite the self-conscious weightiness of this film’s narrative, it is - mostly - possible to see its central character Radha as an individual first and only then as a symbol.
But a basic problem is that for much of her history, the Hindi-film mother has been a cipher – someone with no real personality of her own, existing mainly as the prism through which we view the male lead. Much like the sisters whose function was to be raped and to commit suicide in a certain type of movie, the mother was a pretext for the playing out of the hero’s emotions and actions.
Anyone well acquainted with Hindi cinema knows that one of its dominant personalities has been the narcissistic leading man. (Note: the films themselves don’t intend him to be seen thus.) This quality is usually linked to the persona of the star-actor playing the role, and so it can take many forms: the jolly hero/tragic hero/romantic hero/anti-hero who ambles, trudges or swaggers through the world knowing full well that he is its centre of attention. (Presumably he never grew out of the maa ka laadla mould.) So here is Raj Kapoor’s little tramp smiling bravely through his hardships, and here is the studied tragic grandiosity of Dilip Kumar, and here is Dev Anand’s splendid conceit (visible in all the films he made from the mid-1960s on) that every woman from age 15 upwards wants only to fall into his arms. In later decades, this narcissism would be manifest in the leading man as the vigilante superhero.
A maa can easily become a foil for such personalities – our film history is dotted with sympathetic but ineffectual mothers. Though often played by accomplished character actors such as Achala Sachdev and Leela Mishra, these women were rarely central to the movies in question. If you have only a dim memory of Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa, for example, you might forget that the self-pitying poet (one of the most doggedly masochistic heroes in our cinema) has a mother too – she is a marginalised figure, watching with some perplexity as he wanders the streets waiting for life to deal him its next blow. And her death adds to the garland of sorrows that he so willingly carries around his neck.
While Dutt made a career out of not smiling, the protagonist of Raj Kapoor’s bloated Mera Naam Joker earned his livelihood by making people laugh. Essentially, however, Raju the clown is as much of a sympathy-seeker as the poet in the gutter is. Mera Naam Joker includes a magnificently maudlin scene where the joker continues with his act (“The show must go on!” growls circus-master Dharmendra) just a few minutes after learning that his mother has died. As he smiles heroically through his pain, his friends watching backstage wipe their tears – cues for the film’s viewer to do the same.
Speaking of Raj Kapoor, I often wonder what impression Russian movie-watchers must have of Indian men and their mother fetishes. If Kapoor was the most popular Hindi-film star in the former Soviet Union, an improbable second was Mithun Chakraborty, the stature of whose 1982 film Disco Dancer in that part of the world is among the profoundest cinematic mysteries. (Possibly apocryphal stories are still told about how Indian visitors to the USSR in the Iron Curtain days could clear borders by warbling “Jimmy Jimmy” whereupon stern guards would drop their rifles and wave them through.)
Among Disco Dancer’s many pleasures is the most thrilling mother-related dialogue in a Hindi film. Even today, I would walk many a harsh mile to hear the following words echoing through a movie hall: “Issko guitar phobia ho gaya hai. Guitar ne isske maa ko maara.” (“He has developed guitar phobia. A guitar killed his mother.”)
This demands some elucidation. Jimmy (Mithun) has become so popular that his disco-dancing rivals scheme to electrocute him with a 5000-volt current. But his widowed maa, having just finished her daily puja for his continued health and success, learns about this fiendish saazish. She reaches the venue in time to grab the tampered guitar before Jimmy does, which results in the most electrifying death scene of a Hindi-movie mother you’ll ever see.
The subtext to this surreal moment is that the hero is emasculated by the removal of his mother. As one inadvertently Oedipal plot synopsis I have read puts it, “After his mother's death Jimmy finds himself unable to perform. Will he be able to recover from the tragedy and start performing again?” (Note the contrast with Mera Naam Joker’s Raju, who does indeed “perform” just a few seconds after his loss – but no one doubts that he is now a hollow shell of a person.)
As these scenes and countless others indicate, Hindi cinema loves dead moms. In the same year as Disco Dancer, there was an overhyped “acting battle” between Dilip Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan in Shakti. It played out through the film, but never as intensely as in the scene where the mutinous son tries to reach out to his policeman dad in the room where the dead body of Sheetal (wife and mother to the two men) lies. In the context of the narrative, the mother’s corpse becomes the final frontier for a clash of ideologies and life experiences.
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I’m surprised at how long it has taken me to arrive at Bachchan, given that all my early movie-watching centred on him – and also given that no other major Hindi-film personality has been as strongly associated with filial relationships. But perhaps I’ve been trying to repress a memory. One of the last things I saw before forsaking Bollywood in 1991 was this scene from the fantasy film Ajooba. Bachchan (makeup doing little to conceal that he was playing half his age) brings an old woman to the seaside where a dolphin is splashing about, beaming and making the sounds that dolphins will. With sonly fondness in his eyes and a scant regard for taxonomical accuracy, AB says: “Yeh machli meri maa hai.” (“This fish is my mother.”)
This could be a version of post-modern irony, for Bachchan had come a long way from the star-making films in which he played son to the long-suffering Nirupa Roy. Unlike the “mother” in Ajooba, Roy was a land mammal, but she seemed always to have a personal lake of tears to splash about in at short notice.
Was that too irreverent? (Am I failing the test of the good Indian boy whose eyes must lower at the very mention of “maa”?) Well, respect should ideally be earned. The mothers played by Roy are good examples of the ciphers I mentioned earlier, and though she often got substantial screen time, I don’t think it was put to much good use.
Consider an early scene in Prakash Mehra’s Muqaddar ka Sikander. When the orphan Sikander recovers Roy’s stolen purse for her, she expresses a wish to be his new mother: “Beta, ab se main tumhari maa hoon.” “Sach, maa? Tum bahut achi ho, maa,” (“Really, mother? You are very nice, mother”) he replies. Having rushed through these lines, they then exit the frame together in the jerky fast-forward style of the silent era’s Keystone Kops. There is a reason for the haste: the audience wants to see the adult Sikander (Bachchan), so the preamble must be dispensed with. But the result is the trivialising of an important relationship – we are simply told that they are now mother and son, and that’s that. It’s a good example of character development scrubbing the shoes of the star system.
Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony is another movie very dear to my heart (and a genuine classic of popular storytelling), but it would be a stretch to claim that Roy’s Bharati (you know, the woman who simultaneously receives blood from her three grown-up sons) is a fleshed-out person. Medically speaking, she scarcely appears human at all: in the first minutes of the film we learn that Bharati is suffering from life-threatening tuberculosis; a while later, she carelessly loses her eyesight and the TB is never again mentioned; years pass and here she is, distributing flowers, haphazardly stumbling in and out of the lives of the three heroes; eventually her sight is restored by a Sai Baba statue.
But it is well-nigh impossible to write about Bachchan and his mothers without reference to Yash Chopra’ sDeewaar (and to an extent, the same director’s Trishul). Deewaar is to Hindi cinema what the James Cagney-starrer White Heat (“Made it, Ma! Top of the world!”) was to Hollywood: the most quoted and parodied of all mother-son movies. In no small part this is because the film was a fulcrum for one of our most iconic movie personalities, the angry young man Vijay.
Speaking for myself, childhood memory and countless spoofs on music channels had turned Deewaarinto a montage of famous images and dialogues: Bachchan brooding outside the temple; a dramatic pealing of bells and a prolonged death scene; Shashi Kapoor bleating “Bhai” and, with nostrils flaring self-righteously, the famous line “Mere Paas Maa Hai.” But when I saw it as an adult, I was surprised by how powerful the film still was, and how its most effective scenes were the quieter ones. One scene that sticks with me is when the mother – Sumitra Devi – is unwell and the fugitive Vijay can’t see her because police have been posted around the hospital. He waits in a van while his girlfriend goes to check on the level of security. She returns, tells him things aren’t looking good; and Vijay (who is wearing dark glasses – a chilling touch in this night-time scene) says in a deadpan voice, his face a blank slate, “Aur main apne maa tak nahin pahunch sakta hoon.” (“And I can’t even reach my mother.”) There is no overt attempt at pathos or irony (how many other Indian actors of the time would have played the scene this way?), just the stoicism of a man who knows that the walls are closing in.
In another scene Vijay hesitantly calls his mother on the phone, arranges to meet her at the temple, then tries to say something more but can’t get the words out and puts the receiver down instead. The film’s power draws as much from these discerning beats of silence as from its flaming Salim-Javed dialogue. However, little of that power comes directly from the mother’s character. Sumitra Devi is defined by her two sons, and to my eyes at least, there is something perfunctory and insipid even about the moral strength she shows.
There is a tendency, when we assess Hindi cinema, to make sweeping statements about similar types of movies. Frequently, I hear that Deewaar and Trishul are the same film because both are built around the theme of a son trying to erase his mother’s sufferings by rising in the world – even literally, by signing deed papers for new skyscrapers, the constructions she once worked on as a labourer (Vijay, like James Cagney, is trying to make it to “the top”). But there are key differences in the central character’s motivations in the two movies, and I would argue that Deewaar is the superior film overall because it is more tightly constructed.
However, Trishulscores in one important regard: it is one of the few Bachchan films where the mother has a personality. Cynically speaking, this could be because she dies early in the film and isn’t required to hold the stage for three hours, but I think it has a lot to do with the performance of Waheeda Rehman – an actress who made a career of illuminating mediocre movies with her presence.
“Tu mere saath rahega munne,” sings this mother, who has been abandoned by her lover – the song will echo through the movie and fuel her son’s actions. “Main tujhe rehem ke saaye mein na palne doongi” (“I will not raise you under the shade of sympathy”), she tells her little boy as she lets him toil alongside her, “Zindagani ki kadi dhoop mein jalne doongi / Taake tap tap ke tu faulad bane / maa ki audlad bane.” She wants him to burn in the sun so he becomes as hard as steel. He has to earn his credentials if he wants the right to be called her son.
With a lesser performer in the role, this could have been hackneyed stuff (in any case the basic premise is at least as old as Raj Kapoor’s Awaara), but Rehman makes it dignified and compelling, giving it a psychological dimension that is lacking in all those Nirupa Roy roles. It’s a reminder that an excellent performer can, to some extent at least, redeem an unremarkable part. (I would make a similar case for Durga Khote in Mughal-e Azam, which – on paper at least – was a film about two imperial male egos in opposition.)
Motherly vignettes (and an absence)
In discussing these films, I’ve probably revealed my ambivalence towards popular Hindi cinema. One problem for someone who tries to engage with these films is that even the best of them tend to be disjointed; a critic is often required to approach a movie as a collection of parts rather than as a unified whole. Perhaps it would be fair then to admit that there have been certain “mother moments” that worked for me on their own terms, independently of the overall quality of the films.
One of them occurred in – of all things – a Manoj Kumar film. Kumar was famous for his motherland-obsession, demonstrated in a series of “patriotic” films that often exploited their heroines. (See Hema Malini writhing in the rain in Kranti, or Saira Banu in Purab aur Paschim, subject to the controlling male gaze that insists a woman must be covered up – after the hero and the audience has had a good eyeful, of course.) But one of his rare non-patriotism-themed films contains a weirdly compelling representation of the mother-as-an-absent-presence. The film is the 1972 Shor, about a boy so traumatised by his mother’s death that he loses his speech, and the song is the plaintive Laxmikant-Pyarelal composition “Ek Pyaar ka Nagma Hai”.
In too many Hindi movies of that time, ethereal music is played out to banal images, but this sequence makes at least a theoretical nod to creativity. The visuals take the shape of a shared dream-memory involving the father, the little boy and the mother when she was alive; the setting is a beach and the composite elements include a violin, a drifting, symbolism-laden bunch of balloons, and Nanda. Mirror imagery is used: almost every time we see the mother or the boy, we also see their blurred reflections occupying half the screen; occasionally, the lens focus is tinkered with to make both images merge into each other or disappear altogether. Even though the setting is ostensibly a happy and “realist” one, Nanda is thus rendered a distant, ghostly figure.
I’m not saying this is done with anything resembling sophistication – it is at best an ambitious concept, shoddily executed; you can sense the director and cinematographer constrained by the available technology. But the basic idea does come through: what we are seeing is a merging of past and present, and the dislocation felt by a motherless child.
[While on absent mothers, a quick aside on Sholay. Ramesh Sippy’s iconic film was heavily inspired by the look of the American and Italian Westerns, but it also deviated from the Hindi-film idiom in one significant way: in the absence of a mother-child relationship. The only real mother figure in the story, Basanti’s sceptical maasi, becomes a target of mirth in one of the film’s drollest scenes. Most notably, the two leads Veeru and Jai (played by Dharmendra and Bachchan) are orphans who have only ever had each other. We tend to take Sholay for granted today, but it’s surprising, when you think about it, that the leading men of a Hindi movie of the time should so summarily lack any maternal figure, real or adopted.]
In Vijay Anand’s thriller Jewel Thief, a clever deception is perpetrated on the viewer. Early on, Vinay (Dev Anand) is told that Shalu (Vyjayantimala) is pining because she has been abandoned by her fiancé. This provides a set-up for the song “Rula ke Gaya Sapna Mera”, where Vinay hears Shalu singing late at night; we see her dressed in white, weeping quietly; the lyrics mourn her loss; our expectations from seeing Dev Anand and Vyjayantimala together in this romantic setting lead us to assume that what is being lamented is a broken love affair. But later, we learn that though Shalu’s tears were genuine, she was really crying for a little boy who has been kidnapped (this is, strictly speaking, her much younger brother, but the relationship is closer to that of a mother and son, and the song was an expression if it). It’s a rare example of a Hindi-movie song sequence being used to mislead, and changing its meaning when you revisit it.
There is also a lovely little scene in a non-mainstream Hindi film, Sudhir Mishra’s Dharavi . Cab-driver Rajkaran, his wife and little son are struggling to make ends meet as one mishap follows another. Rajkaran’s old mother has come to visit them in the city and one night, after a series of events that leaves the family bone-tired and mentally exhausted, there is a brief shot of two pairs of sons and mothers, with the former curled up with their heads in the latter’s laps – the grown-up Rajkaran is in the same near-foetal pose as his little boy. It’s the sort of image that captures a relationship more eloquently than pages of over-expository script.
Breaking the weepie mould: new directions
One of the funniest mothers in a Hindi film was someone who appeared only in a photograph – the madcap 1962 comedy Half Ticket has a scene where the protagonist Vijay (no relation to the Angry Young Man) speaks to a picture of his tuberculosis-afflicted mother. TB-afflicted mothers are usually no laughing matter in Hindi cinema, but this is a Kishore Kumar film, and thus it is that a close-up of the mother’s photo reveals ... Kishore Kumar in drag. This could be a little nod to Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers playing women in Ealing Studio comedies of the 50s, or it could be a case of pre-figuring (since the story will hinge on Kumar posing as a child). Either way, it is a rare instance in old cinema of a mother being treated with light-hearted irreverence.
But as mentioned earlier, the more characteristic mother treatment has been one of deification – which, ironically, results in diminishment. When the maternal figure is put on a pedestal, you don’t see her as someone with flaws, whimsies, or heaven forbid, an interior life. (One of Indian cinema’s starkest treatments of this theme was in Satyajit Ray’s 1960 film Devi , with the 14-year-old Sharmila Tagore as a bride whose world turns upside down when her childlike father-in-law proclaims her a reincarnation of the Mother Goddess.) And so, if there has been a shift in mother portrayals in recent times, it has hinged on a willingness to humanise.
Around the late 1980s, a certain sort of “liberal” movie mum had come into being. I remember nodding in appreciation at the scene in Maine Pyaar Kiya where Prem (Salman Khan) discusses prospective girlfriends with his mom (played by the always-likeable Reema Lagoo). Still, when it came to the crunch, you wouldn’t expect these seemingly broad-minded women to do anything that would seriously shake the patriarchal tradition. In her younger days Farida Jalal was among the feistiest of the actresses who somehow never became A-grade stars, but by the time she played Kajol’s mother in Dilwale Dulhaniya le Jaayenge, she had settled into the role of the woman who can feel for young love – and be a friend and confidant to her daughter – while also knowing, through personal experience, that women in her social setup “don’t even have the right to make promises”. The two young lovers in this film can be united only when the heart of the stern father melts.
Such representations – mothers as upholders of “traditional values”, even when those values are detrimental to the interests of women – are not going away any time soon, and why would they, if cinema is to be a part-mirror to society? An amusing motif in the 2011 film No One Killed Jessica was a middle-aged mother as a figure hiding behind the curtain (literally “in pardah”), listening to the men’s conversations and speaking up only to petulantly demand the return of her son (who is on the lam, having cold-bloodedly murdered a young woman). It seems caricatured at first, but when you remember the details of the real-life Jessica Lal-Manu Sharma case that the film is based on, there is nothing surprising about it .
But it is also true that in the multiplex era of the last decade, mother representations – especially in films with urban settings – have been more varied than they were in the past. (Would it be going too far to say “truer to life”? I do feel that the best contemporary Hindi films are shaped by directors and screenwriters who know their milieus and characters very well, and have a greater willingness to tackle individual complexity than many of their predecessors did.)
Thus, Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na featured a terrific performance by Ratna Pathak Shah as Savitri Rathore, a wisecracking mom whose banter with her dead husband’s wall-portrait marks a 180-degree twist on every maudlin wall-portrait scene from movies of an earlier time. (Remember the weepy monologues that went “Munna ab BA Pass ho gaya hai. Aaj agar aap hamaare saath hote, aap itne khush hote”?) One gets the sense that unlike her mythological namesake, this Savitri is relieved that she no longer has to put up with her husband’s three-dimensional presence! Then there is the Kirron Kher character in Dostana, much more orthodox to begin with: a jokily over-the-top song sequence, “Maa da laadla bigad gaya”, portrays her dismay about the possibility that her son is homosexual, and she is even shown performing witchery to “cure” him. But she does eventually come around, gifting bangles to her “daughter-in-law” and wondering if traditional Indian rituals might accommodate something as alien as gay marriage. These scenes are played for laughs (and in any case, the son isn’t really gay), but they do briefly touch on very real cultural conflicts and on the ways in which parents from conservative backgrounds often have to change to keep up with the times.
With the aid of nuanced scripts, thoughtful casting and good performances, other small bridges have been crossed in recent years. Taare Zameen Par – the story of a dyslexic child – contains an uncontrived depiction of the emotional bond between mother and child (as well as the beautiful song “Maa”). At age 64, Bachchan acquired one of his most entertaining screen moms, the then 94-year-old Zohra Segal, in R Balki’s Cheeni Kum. A few years after that, the somewhat gimmicky decision to cast him as a Progeria-afflicted child in Paa meant he could play son to Vidya Balan, who was less than half his age. There is quiet dignity in this portrayal of a single working mother, though the film did kowtow to tradition (and to the ideal of the romantic couple) by ensuring that she is reunited with her former lover at the end.
One of the last Hindi films I saw before writing this piece – another Balan-starrer, the thriller Kahaani – has as its protagonist a heavily pregnant woman alone in the city, searching for her missing husband. This makes for an interesting psychological study because the quality of the film’s suspense (and the effect of the twist in its tail) depends on our accumulating feelings – sympathy, admiration – for this mother-to-be, laced with the mild suspicion that we mustn’t take everything about her at face value. I wasn’t surprised to discover that some people felt a little betrayed (read: emotionally manipulated) by the ending, which reveals that Vidya Bagchi wasn’t pregnant after all – the revelation flies in the face of everything Hindi cinema has taught us about the sanctity of motherhood.
****
Given Vinay Lal’s observation about the centrality of the mother-son relationship in Indian society, it is perhaps inevitable that our films have a much more slender tradition of mother-daughter relationships. Going by all the gossip over the decades about dominating moms accompanying their starlet daughters to movie sets, the real-life stories may have been spicier than anything depicted on screen. And in fact, one of the scariest scenes from any Hindi film of the last decade involves just such a portrayal.
It occurs in Zoya Akhtar’s excellent Luck by Chance , a self-reflective commentary on the nature of stardom in Hindi cinema. The young rose Nikki Walia (Isha Sharvani) is doing one of those cutesy photo shoot-cum-interviews that entail completing sentences like “My favourite colour is ____.” At one point her mother Neena (Dimple Kapadia in an outstanding late-career performance), a former movie star herself, barges into the room and peremptorily begins giving instructions. We see Nikki’s expression (we have already noted how cowered she is by her mother’s presence) and feel a little sorry for her. “Neena-ji, can we have a photo of both of you?” the reporter asks. Neena-ji looks flattered but says no, she isn’t in a state fit to be photographed – why don’t you shoot Nikki against that wall, she says, pointing somewhere off-screen, and then sashaying off.
A few seconds later the shoot continues. “Your favourite person _____?” Nikki is asked. We get a full shot of the wall behind her – it is covered end to end with a colossal photo of Neena from her early days. “My mother,” Nikki replies mechanically.
The younger Kapadia in that photo is breathtakingly beautiful, but as a depiction of a child swallowed up by a parent’s personality, this brief shot is just as terrifying to my eyes as the closing scene of Psycho, with Norman Bates staring out at the camera, speaking to us in his mother’s voice – for all practical purposes, back in the womb. Luck by Chance contains other scenes suggesting that the predatorial Neena is bent on putting her daughter through everything she herself had experienced in the big bad industry. Do these scenes get additional power from the viewer’s non-diagetic knowledge that in real life, Dimple Kapadia herself entered the film industry at a disturbingly early age? You decide. Still, with the history of mainstream Hindi cinema being what it is, we should be grateful for this newfound variety, for stronger character development, and for at least some maternal representations that aren’t drenched in sentimentalism.
We’ve always had the noble, self-sacrificing and marginalised mothers and we’ll continue to have them – in cinema, as in life. So here’s to a few more of the other sorts: more Neena-jis, more sardonic Savitris, a few moms like the hard-drinking salon-owner in Vicky Donor , not-really-mothers like Vidya Bagchi – and even, if it ever comes to that, a desi Mrs Bates staring unblinkingly from her chair, asking her son to please go to the kitchen and make her some chai instead of ogling at chaalu young women through the peephole.

A comfort cushion

Had a decent time at Tehelka's THiNK fest in Goa last week, but the unexpected
personal highlight was the acquisition of... this cushion cover.







The
illustration on it was done by Sudeep Chaudhuri for the cover of the
year-end Tehelka special I co-edited with Nisha Susan in 2008 (later published
in book form by Hachette), and I remember how delighted I was when I
first saw the picture all those years ago: Foxie was just a few months
old at the time, and it was a lovely coincidence that the dog in the
illustration resembled her so much - the posture, the long limbs, even
the red collar she wore as a pup. (The resemblance became more
pronounced subsequently, with her illness and emaciation.) It is still a
source of strange, irrational comfort that a book with my name on it
has this picture on the cover.



[More on the anthology here, for anyone interested. And here is one of the stories, ]

Aspiration, then and now - from Naukri to Fukrey

[Did this column for Democratic World magazine]



The other day, I was watching the 1954 Bimal Roy film Naukri ,
with the young Kishore Kumar in an uncharacteristically solemn role as a job-seeking
naujavaan named Ratan, who travels from his village to the
big city (Calcutta) but encounters disappointment at nearly every turn. The
film contains many plot elements we might think of as clichés of a cinematic
past - the beloved sister suffering from TB, the widowed mother, the arrival of
a letter bearing exam results, the long journey that begins with tearful
farewells and a bullock-cart ride to the railway station. But these were understandable
concerns of the “social” cinema of the post-Independence decade, when so many
films were about young people from modest backgrounds entering a new world and trying
to take the tide at its flood.







The
main markers of that new world were a naukri or job (which
often went to less deserving people with “connections”); a much-coveted makaan
or house of one’s own (the first song in the film is “Chhota sa Ghar Hoga”,
where Ratan dreams about having a small house under the clouds, with a golden
throne for his mother); and the ladki, girlfriend or wife
(often the girl in the window across the lane, essentially inaccessible until
job and accommodation have both been secured). There was tremendous idealism
and hope, which sometimes went sour and turned into equally strong cynicism.




Understandably,
male bonding featured strongly in this universe too. In Calcutta, Ratan boards
in the ominously named “bekaari block” in a small hotel, a space he shares with
other unemployed men who have been here longer than he has. One lovely scene
has him humming a song to himself about his joblessness, while writing a letter
in his room; soon, heads pop up from behind the partition and the other
boarders start singing – humorously but also poignantly – about their travails. One of them, played by the then-young character actor Iftekhar, warbles
“Main collector na banu aur na banunga officer / Apna baabu hi bana lo mukhe,
bekaar hoon main”. (“I couldn’t become a collector and won’t become an officer
/ At least give me a job as your assistant or baabu.”)




Watching
that scene, I was reminded that more than 20 years later, the same Iftekhar
played a man in a position of privilege in Deewaar : the rich
businessman-cum-smuggler who gets his shoes polished by a little boy on the
footpath, a scene that sets the stage for the classic Bachchan line “Main aaj
bhi phenke huye paise nahin uthaata.” (“Even today, I don’t pick up money that
has been tossed at me.”) In the fantasy world where movies can converse with
each other across time, it is conceivable that the two men are the same person:
that the frustrated youngster of Naukri found a way to
operate outside the law until he achieved everything he couldn’t achieve
honestly, eventually arriving at a position from where he could guide the next
generation through equally dubious routes.




Social
aspiration – the need to move up in the world, to bridge the divide between
want and privilege – has always been an important theme in Indian films, and
how could it not be, in a society where the gap between the advantaged and the
disadvantaged is always so large. The theme has taken on various shades in very
different types of cinema: from social realism of the Naukri
kind to black comedy (as in Satyajit Ray’s Jana Aranya,
about an innocent man drawn ever deeper into a vortex of amorality) to Angry
Young Man dramas inspired by the mythological epics, and even comedies that conceal serious themes
beneath a frothy exterior.




Given
the changes in Indian society in the past two decades (especially after
economic liberalisation) and the concurrent changes in our cinema, it is
tempting to think that the world depicted 60 years ago in films like Naukri
has faded. That is nonsense, of course. And even if mainstream Hindi films
tend not to venture into villages these days, the basic emotions and internal
struggles experienced by the characters in those stories are still very much in
place.




For
instance, one of our best films of the past decade, Dibakar Banerjee's Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! , was not about the village-city dichotomy – it was
about a subtler divide within Delhi itself, what getting to wear fashionable
clothes to an exclusive hotel or mall can mean to someone who grew up in a
cramped house in a poor neighborhood. The narrative, about a West Delhi boy who
grows up to become a master thief, understands the spiraling nature of class
aspiration and upward mobility, and the tricks of survival in a dog-eat-dog
world where the kindly, “God-fearing” family man who befriends you and
encourages his little son to call you “maama” might have a dagger ready to
plunge into your back.




Many
old films like Guru Dutt’s Baazi and Raj Kapoor’s Awaara
featured street naifs being led into an impossibly lavish world but (just about) retaining their
personal integrity; not becoming “corrupted” by wealth. Some of this idealism
has vanished in our own times, where films like Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!
and Special 26 are founded on a more complex sense of social
justice: in an inherently unfair world, they suggest, it is okay for the
underprivileged person to reach out and grab what he can. But there are also
some fine films about youngsters who choose to stay on the “right” path, or who
momentarily get swayed into doing something underhanded but gather themselves
just in time.




One
of my favourite recent examples of a good-hearted, well-observed film about
aspiration was Mrighdeep Singh Lamba's Fukrey , about four boys dreaming of a bright
future. Here, the main goal is admission to a good, smart college, and given the premise Fukrey
could so easily have been an Indian version of American horny-teen films from
the 80s - a desi Porky's - but even when two of the boys talk about the hot girls they will find
in college, the film isn't gratuitous about it: the scene is more about fearfully
approaching a strange new world, wondering if they will gain acceptance (and it
is reminiscent of a girl from a conservative background in Oye Lucky!
Lucky Oye! watching short-skirted college-goers with a mixture of
envy and distaste). When these boys mispronounce words (“negotion” for
“negotiation”) or say “voilin” when they mean “guitar”, or when one of them
tries to be “cool” by pretending he knows what a French kiss is, the film isn’t
mocking them: it invites us to see where they come from and where they want to be. When
they are temporarily seduced by the dark side, getting a chance to peddle a
drug that fetches an unimaginable Rs 3,000 per goli (“Mere maheene ka ration!”),
we can see that this is potentially a magic pill, the panacea for all their problems
– it allows us to empathise.



But throughout, we recognise their capacity for intelligence and decency too. Scenes
like the one where the Sikh boy Lali prays in a gurudwara, asking for admission
to college and even giving God a list of his specific requirements, may be played
for humour (a little kid watching him cheekily says “Roll number bhi likhwa
de!”), but they have a sense of character and circumstance built into them. Lali
speaks in slang, wears torn jeans and a colourful T-shirt and is very evidently
a teen of the new millennium, but at this moment he evokes the Ratan of
Naukri, smiling and keeping his spirits high as he walks
from one door to another, running his fingers over the “No Vacancy” signs.



[Extended posts on Naukri and Special 26 are here and here]

Dog, giraffe, cat, bear: beastly scenes in four MAMI films

[Free-flowing post; meaning-seekers, abstain]




When
watching a rush of unrelated films in a short span of time (as I did at the
MAMI festival last month) and without needing to write structured things about them, I sometimes find whimsical ways of relating the
films to each other, or “arranging” motifs in my head. One thing that
struck me was the use of animals in some of the films I saw: animals as sentient
creatures in their own right, or as symbols, or pretexts for our understanding
of human characters or events; different ways of showing animal perspectives
and asking us to consider if they mean anything in themselves, or if they
constitute a variant on the Kuleshov experiment, where shots of a
blank-expressioned actor were intercut with various objects, so that the viewer
imposed his own feelings on them. Anyway, here are fragmented notes on four films:




1)
In the last post, I mentioned the very sweet dog – named “Boy” by his human – in
Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain. On one level Boy is a symbol, a commentary on Panahi’s
real-life situation as an artist denied freedom. Much the same way as the screenwriter
in the film’s first half must keep Boy shielded from the outside world – and
the animal follows him around everywhere – Panahi is forbidden to air his ideas
(and yet his ideas and fictional creations don’t stop pursuing him, demanding
every moment of his time). 



But
within the narrative, Boy is also a creature capable of feeling – intelligent
and alert, and very much alive. As he tails the screenwriter
around the villa, tennis ball in mouth, the bond between them
is evident. And these qualities contrast with the horrible TV
images shown in the film of other dogs being brutalized by the Iran authorities
– animals in various stages of torture, dead or dying, barely recognisable any
more as creatures that were once capable of showing and receiving love. One thing
that so distinguishes dogs from most other species – and a foundation of the
long and mutually beneficial hominid-canine relationship – is their eagerness
to make and maintain eye contact with humans. Psychologically, it helps if
there is a certain amount of visible white in a dog’s eyes, and the
dog in Closed Curtain has one of the most expressive,
“human-like” gazes I have ever seen in an animal. (Casting here is as important
to the film’s effect as it is with the human roles, and I imagine it was as
carefully done.)






2)
The giraffes in the good-natured film Giraffada are another
matter. Early in the story we meet a boy, Ziad, who feels a deep connect with
two giraffes in a Palestinian West Bank zoo, but the affection is not
reciprocated in equal terms: the film doesn’t depict the giraffes as meaningfully
interacting with the humans around them (and some of this has to do with our
own perceptions of these outlandish, extra-terrestrial-like creatures, which make for funny Facebook profile pictures when you get a riddle wrong: it is
hard to relate to them in the manner that one might with dogs, and they certainly
don’t make eye contact with us in the same way). After the male giraffe dies,
we see the bereaved female wandering about her quarters, craning her neck about
as she (presumably) searches for her mate. It is a touching sight, but her
loss is not presented in overly sentimental terms - there is no romanticising about
giraffes mating for life, like some birds and animals do. Her dead boyfriend
can be replaced by another male, hence the plot of the film: Ziad’s veterinarian
father must put himself and his family in danger by smuggling another male
giraffe in from an Israeli zoo.




The trials of this new male giraffe (named Romeo) reminded me a little of Jose Saramago’s
The Elephant’s Journey – a book about another long,
hazardous journey and about impossible-seeming things that may become possible. Like
Saramago’s elephant, Romeo the giraffe is a blank slate that can stand for
different things to different people. One basic yet effective shot catches the
film’s attempt to set the wonders of daily life (and of life
itself) against grand ideas about nationhood or religion. As Romeo lumbers
through the West Bank in the film’s final stretch, he passes a prayer-house
where a group of men are doing the Sajdah. At the precise moment that they
raise their heads after bending their foreheads to the floor, the giraffe
passes the window in front of them, and the sight is so astonishing that they
stay frozen in place and forget to continue the rest of their prayer routine.
Temporarily at least, the Grand Design has taken a backseat to the here and
now, to the possibilities of the real world.




3)
An early scene in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (full
disclosure: I only saw half the film since I had to leave for an urgent appointment) centres on a cat, who has
rather inconveniently become the responsibility of the film’s protagonist. And as
Llewyn travels in an NY underground train, the cat slung over his shoulder, there is an
unusual sequence: the cat is gazing out the window and we get a series of
images of stations gliding past that obviously represent its perspective (Llewyn
himself is facing in the other direction).




All
that the camera appears to be doing here is impassively recording what the animal
sees – there is no attempt to imbue the visuals with meaning, to be funny or
droll or cute, or to suggest that the images mean anything to the cat. The
whole thing has a touch of whimsy or randomness (and whimsy is very important
to the Coen Brothers’ universe), though some incidental meaning emerges when
the cat – probably dazed and panic-stricken by the rush of images – slips out of Llewyn’s hands
and runs down the length of the compartment before he catches up with it again.




4)
And a film where the animal in the title never appears, though humans
have taken its place by the end. Denis Côté’s Vic + Flo Saw a Bear
finishes with an intensely unpleasant, difficult-to-watch-and-listen-to scene where the two protagonists (former
convicts and lesbian lovers) are ensnared in a pair of cruel, sharp-toothed
bear-traps. Throughout the film, the line between civilisation and the jungle
has been made indistinct: Vic and Flo are trying to start a new life, but we
never really learn what terrible things they may have done in the past, and if
redemption is a realistic possibility for them. Do they even seek it, or are
they wild beasts trying to escape the trappings of human society and return to
the natural world?



And by the end, that line may have been completely erased. The
two women are reduced to the state of the culled dogs in Panahi’s film – their howls come to sound more like involuntary bodily
reactions than as expressions of thinking, feeling personalities, with the
result that even as we shudder at their fate, it becomes difficult to relate to
them. A sentimental viewer might say the scene invites us to reflect on the horrors
that humans routinely put animals through, but I think the film is more detached
and nihilistic than that. Nature is unspeakably cruel, it says, and nature
includes human beings with the traps they construct, for themselves and for
others – the mechanical contraptions as well as the emotional ones.




[Related
posts: on animals in Teri Meherbaniyan and Mon Oncle; on Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation. And two other posts about MAMI films: Qissa and Closed Curtain]

In defence of the song sequence - an essay

[Enjoyed writing this essay for Himal magazine’s special issue on South Asian cinema. Wish I’d had twice the word length though, since there were so many other films and songs I would have liked to mention - including more mainstream ones. Hope to expand on this piece sometime soon]



-----------------------


One of my most vivid memories of watching Hindi films in the 1980s – inevitably at home, on a video-cassette player – was that almost each time a song came on, someone would get up to press the “fast-forward” button. Or we would let the scene play out but it would be treated as a breather, allowing us to see to other things for five minutes: one of us might take a bathroom break, another would go and check on the food cooking on the stove.

I should add that this was a generally poor time for Hindi-film music, and the movies I mainly watched as a child were revenge-and-violence sagas where music played only a perfunctory role. Many of the songs were tuneless and their picturisation mostly uninspired. Our viewing habits did change a little when melody (some of it admittedly plagiarized) crept back into Hindi cinema in the late 1980s, with teen romances like Qayamat se Qayamat Tak and Maine Pyaar Kiya. But in general, songs were treated as fillers.


Thinking about it, perhaps this attitude wasn’t restricted to that period - perhaps it has always been part of the wider snobbery directed at popular Hindi cinema, even by viewers who enjoy watching it as a guilty pleasure. There is a telling scene in the 1974 film Rajnigandha , a gentle, thoughtful entry in the so-called Middle Cinema, which occupied a niche between the high-voltage drama of mainstream movies and the stark minimalism of “art films”. In the scene in question, the talkative Sanjay (Amol Palekar), having carelessly entered a movie hall long after the film started, wastes little time in getting up again for some fresh air when a song sequence begins on the screen in front of him. "Lo, gaana shuru ho gaya," he chuckles, "Main zara baahar ghoom kar aata hoon." ("Oh look, a song, I’ll go out and walk around for a bit.")

Given how cramped and squalid-looking the hall shown in that scene is – this being decades before the arrival in India of posh mall-multiplexes – you can almost sympathise with Sanjay’s desire to escape. (This was one reason why most of my early movie-watching was done in the comfort of home.) Yet there is an irony here: Rajnigandha itself made very delicate use of songs, which are integral to the story and to a psychological understanding of the principal character. The film is about a woman named Deepa (Vidya Sinha) who finds herself torn between her current romantic relationship – a happy but occasionally monotonous one– and the idealistic memory of an ex-boyfriend Naveen, with whom her path crosses again. Her inner state of mind, and the film’s central theme, finds beautiful expression in the song “Kai Baar Yun”, which includes the lyrics "Kai baar yun hi dekha hai / Yeh jo mann ki seema-rekha hai / Mann todne lagta hai / Anjanee pyaas ke peeche / Anjanee aas ke peeche / Mann daudne lagta hai..."  (“It often happens / that the mind breaks its own boundaries / and starts thirsting after the unknown…”.) The scene has Deepa and Naveen travelling through Bombay in a cab together: he is being polite and distanced, but she throws surreptitious glances his way, clearly wondering about what her life would have been like if they had stayed together. (The fact that the song is in the voice of a male singer adds a note of whimsy and allows us to wonder about the feelings of the otherwise inscrutable Naveen, a question that will again arise near the end of the film.) Any viewer who missed this sequence because they decided to step outside the hall - or fast-forward a video cassette - would have missed a vital part of the film.

It should be mentioned that this scene is – by the standards of the mainstream Hindi movie –a restrained one. There is no lip-synching by the actors, no dancing around trees; the song, which simply plays on the soundtrack while Deepa and Naveen ride together, serves as commentary and interior monologue. But anyone who has grown up watching Hindi films has seen hundreds of far more flamboyant song sequences. Music, and the way it is presented on the screen, are an integral part of this cinema.

And why not, for a great song – where rhythm, lyrics and singing combine to optimum effect – can reach emotional depths and express poetic truths in ways that conventional narrative cannot. Similarly, a well-filmed musical sequence can work within the context of a movie to deepen our attitudes to the characters and situations. In fact, it can be argued that the history of form in the popular Hindi film is inseparable from the history of the song sequence. Very often, directors and cinematographers have experimented with stylistic flourishes in musical sequences – perhaps because these scenes tend to be inherently non-realist – while holding themselves back when it comes to the more prosaic passages. Consequently, at times it is like the film has temporarily entered a magical realm, moving beyond the commonplace of routine, plot-oriented storytelling. To take just one among countless possible examples of such visual inventiveness, the 1968 film Aashirwad has a famous number, “Rail Gaadi”, sung by Ashok Kumar in a rapid-fire style that has often led the song to be categorised as proto-rap music. But equally effective is the use of super-fast zooms in the scene: during the quickest sections of the song, the camera goes from a medium shot of the actor to an extreme close up and back in the time it takes to snap your fingers. The visuals (which are very unusual for a Hindi movie of this vintage) are mimicking, or trying to keep pace with, the music, adding urgency to the moment, and enabling us to relate to and participate in the children's growing excitement.



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Unfortunately, the very use of the song in popular Hindi cinema – its disruption of narrative, its apparent lack of “logic” – often invites derision from those who have narrowly defined views about realism in art. The most literal-minded questions run along the lines: how have the actors’ voices magically changed to those of professional playback singers? Where has the background music come from if they are singing in a garden? But to ask such questions mockingly is to forget not just the origins of Hindi cinema – in the multilayered tropes of Parsi and Sanskrit theatre – but also the very nature of film as a medium grounded in artifice and stylisation, so closely associated with the magic show in its early years. (As the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid said to me once, there is something fundamentally irrational about walking into a darkened hall, sitting amongst hundreds of strangers and watching images flashing before your eyes at 24 frames per second.) In any case, there are many possible modes of cinematic expression. At one extreme is kitchen-sink realism – so spare that even a feature film can be made to look like a stark documentary – and at another extreme is great stylisation, or the expression of emotions through hyper-drama. Both modes, and the many others in between, are equally valid as artistic choices; what should concern the critic is not the mode itself but how well it is executed to realise the internal world of the film.

Popular Hindi cinema has derived its episodic, occasionally disjointed structures from a long tradition in theatre, literature and the other arts. In becoming obsessed with psychological realism and logical continuity, we sometimes forget that art has traditionally never been expected to conform to such parameters. Even someone of Shakespeare’s stature (to take an example of an artist who is universally respected today, even though he was anything but “highbrow” in his own time) inserted bawdy comic asides in his profoundest tragedies: consider the brief role of the porter, rambling on about urination as an effect of drinking too much, at a key point in Macbeth when the drama is about to reach its highest ebb (the murder of King Duncan just having been committed, the body about to be discovered). For the Elizabethan viewer, such passages must have served an important function as breathers – as brief, tension-alleviating changes of tone – but they also work at a literary level, as reminders of one of life’s most essential truths, that deep tragedy and absurdist comedy can exist in the same frame.

In a stylised film, it is entirely valid for a song sequence to be a stand-alone piece of performance art that punctuates two conventional narrative scenes. In such a case, the song itself may clearly be non-realist, being “sung” in an outdoor setting without any visible musical accompaniment, and in the voices of seasoned singers rather than the actors. But depending on the quality of its constituent elements – such as the music, lyrics, performance and cinematography, and how well they come together – such a sequence can work brilliantly on its own terms. There are also the sequences that are explicitly presented as dreams or fantasies – a famous example being a 10-minute-long dream scene in Raj Kapoor’s 1951 Awaara . This partly Dali-esque sequence – in which the film’s hero Raj confronts the key people in his life, his lover and his adopted father – is so well conceived and shot that only the most strait-laced viewer, blind to cinema’s qualities as a visual medium, would fast-forward it. But it also serves an important symbolic function, introducing lyricism into a prose work and subtly commenting on the larger themes within the film: as the writer and Hindi-film scholar Rachel Dwyer observed, “The sequence condenses the film’s themes into a dream about love, religion, women, motherhood, punishment, and crime, and shows how Hindi film enacts these in songs”. It is organic to the film.

One reason why the traditional Hindi-movie song sequence can do with some defending today is that there have been big shifts in Hindi cinema in recent years. Some of the most high-profile directors – such as Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee, whose films are critically praised but also reach good-sized audiences in multiplexes or through the DVD circuit – have been using music in increasingly varied ways. Thus, Banerjee’s Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! , or Kashyap’s Black Friday and Gangs of Wasseypur , have brilliant, pulsating soundtracks, but they are used as accompaniments and commentaries to the film’s action; they are not part of the narrative diagesis. In recent times there have also been stimulating examples of familiar old songs being reworked to subversive new ends: in Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitan, a trippy version of the beloved romantic song “Khoya Khoya Chand” plays out during a violent action sequence shot partly in slow motion. This is a conceit that might not have made sense on paper, but on screen it perfectly fits the film’s hallucinatory mood.

During a conversation last year, Banerjee told me he felt the modified international cut of his film Shanghai was better than the version released in India, because the song sequences in the former were more minimalistic. For instance, the Indian version has a rambunctious song titled “Bharat Mata ki Jai”, which features a group of street revelers singing and dancing, and one of the film’s protagonists Jaggu (Emraan Hashmi) joining them. In the sparer international cut, the full song does not unfold on screen, and more importantly Jaggu never joins in. The director was right about the stripped-down version being better, but that is largely because of the type of film Shanghai is. In its look and feel, it is very unlike the mainstream Hindi movie to begin with – it is cooler, more grounded in the contemporary Western sense. And given that the dance is actually happening within the narrative (it isn’t a fantasy), it would be out of character for Jaggu (presented as a somewhat diffident person) to participate in it.

However, it would be short-sighted to suggest that music should only be used in this minimalistic way. With Hindi cinema trying to break free from the shackles of the past and find new directions (a commendable pursuit in itself), there has been an increased self-consciousness about the “silliness” of the earlier type of song sequence, and a championing of the idea that music should always “carry the narrative forward”. But one should be open to the possibility that there are many ways of carrying a narrative forward: after all, even an apparently conventional romantic song sequence can enhance a story or take the place of dialogue scenes simply by recording the growing closeness between two lovers, by poetically indicating that their hearts and minds are becoming attuned to each other.

In fact, the song sequence (not just the song) in Hindi cinema can perform so many varied functions that one is in danger of running out of space trying to list them all. But perhaps the point will be partly served with two examples from the work of directors who are not associated with the most “commercial” cinema, but who still had a basic love for (and lack of self-consciousness about) the classic song sequence. In their work, one can see genuine thought and skill going into these scenes, to make them one of a piece with the film, and as commentaries on character and story.

A notable instance of songs performing a clear-cut narrative function occurs in the under-seen 1966 film Biwi aur Makaan , directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, one of the most popular of the “Middle Cinema” filmmakers. This marvelously crafted musical-comedy didn’t do well at the box office, but it is historically important, being the first of many fruitful collaborations between Mukherjee and the poet-lyricist Gulzar (who would go on to become an important director himself). Biwi aur Makaan – about five friends looking for accommodation in the big city and eventually forced into a masquerade where two of them have to pretend to be women – has songs that often take the place of dialogue. Hemant Kumar’s music brings together conflicting idioms, notes and emotions in the same number – for instance, the song “Bas Mujkho Mohabbat Ho Gayi Hai” (“I have fallen in love”) has one of the friends, Shekhar, mooning over a girl while the others try to bring him to his senses. Thus, while Shekhar sings sorrowful, unrequited-lover lyrics, the others plead, scold and cajole; their chorus “Ab kya hoga, yaaron kya hoga” (“What will happen now?”) provides the counterpoint to his song so that we have a symphony of clashing moods.

This establishes a pleasing duality, helps us appreciate the personalities of all the friends, and also adds to the narrative tension. Though the genuineness of poor Shekhar’s feelings are never in question, we also know why his friends are so paranoid and what is at stake, and our own emotions vacillate with the ones being depicted on screen. In mainstream Hindi cinema one is used to seeing “dramatic” tracks alternating with “comic” tracks (a bit like the inebriated porter and the murdered king in Macbeth), but in this case both modes operate simultaneously, as if to acknowledge that one man’s tragedy can be another man’s comedy and the two things can flow together: the tone shifts effortlessly from the melancholy to the ridiculous to the hysterical, and even the two “cross-dressers” begin to acquire shades of the maternal/sisterly figures they are pretending to be. There is more nuance, insight into character, and artistic rigour in this apparently lightweight sequence in a “fun” movie than there is in many films that flaunt their seriousness of intent for everyone to marvel at.

There can also be subtler dimensions to a song sequence, dimensions that only someone who comes to a film with a willingness to appreciate the medium’s own language will grasp. Take the “Bachpan ke Din” (“Childhood Days”) sequence from the 1959 Bimal Roy film Sujata. If you simply listen to the song, you’ll think it is a happy, lilting number sung by two sisters as they recall their carefree childhood – and you wouldn’t be wrong. But watch the sequence as it plays out in the film, and new shades of meaning are revealed.

One sister, Rama, initiates the song by playing it on the piano, while the other, Sujata, hums along, and there are parallels in their movements and gestures: Rama spreads her dupatta playfully across her face, and a second later Sujata matches the gesture with the garments she is removing from a clothesline. But though the sisters’ voices merge and they are clearly tuned in to each other’s feelings, they never share the frame – Rama is indoors throughout while Sujata is on the terrace above the piano room. And this tells us some things about these characters and their story. The unusual composition is visual shorthand for the fact that there is an invisible line separating their lives and that Sujata isn’t, strictly speaking, part of the family. A low-caste “untouchable” by birth, she has been raised by Rama’s parents, whose affection for her has been tempered over the years by their consciousness of social mores and restraints, so that Sujata has grown up yearning to hear them call her “hamaari beti” (“she is our daughter”) rather than the more formal and defensive “hamaari beti jaisi” (“she is like a daughter to us”).

Thus, in the song that introduces the grown-up versions of the sisters (this is the first time we see Sujata and Rama as adults), the real daughter is firmly ensconced inside the house, clearly at ease with her setting, while Sujata – whose demeanour is more reticent – is in an open space, underlining her outsider status. The scene also provides our first view of something that runs through the film: the association of Sujata with the natural world, or the outdoors. Much of her time is spent in the garden and the greenhouse, tending to plants, and we are reminded that she is a child of nature, her true origins unknown, rather than an unqualified, legitimate member of the household (in the “Bachpan ke Din” sequence she literally has no roof over her head, but for the sky). This expert use of space and framing is as important to this film’s mise-en-scene (and the creation of its world) as any of the dramatic scenes.

On the face of it, the two scenes mentioned above – along with hundreds of others – might appear to be merely enjoyable interludes – the sort of distraction that may easily be shrugged aside by the viewer hankering after “serious” cinema. Observed more closely, they are vital and narrative-enriching, and important cogs in the unique storytelling engine that is the mainstream Hindi film.



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[A related post: the Lavani dance sequence in Aashirwad]

Short notes from the Mumbai festival: Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain

“I’m sure it’s the right address,” the woman says, “No other house looks like this one.” She is searching for her sister who, she has been told, hid in this beachside villa two nights ago. But the door has now been opened by a stout, middle-aged man (the director Jafar Panahi, playing Jafar Panahi) who knows nothing about the missing girl.


This is a scene late in Panahi’s new meta-film Closed Curtain , a work that might puzzle anyone who doesn't know the Iranian director’s back-story: the ban on his movie-making, the house arrest, his continuing fugitive attempts to practice his art, and to do so by making films that explicitly comment on his own situation. His last movie – with its poignantly ironical title This is Not a Film – was shot partly on iPhone and featured him talking to the camera about the projects he has in his head, projects he is no longer permitted to bring to cinematic life. Closed Curtain, by contrast, begins by appearing to be a narrative film (about a screenwriter and his impossibly cute dog) – for a few scenes it is as if Panahi has succeeded in realising one of the visions he discussed in This is Not a Film.


But around the halfway point we are reminded again that nothing in this director’s life and work fall within the bounds of “normalcy” any longer. The narrative is interrupted, the fourth wall is, almost literally, torn down: Panahi enters the house that has been the scene of the action so far; he takes down curtains, revealing wall-posters of his own previous films; the effect is a little reminiscent of the ruptures and interruptions in Ingmar Bergman’s The Passion of Anna . The characters we saw in the conventional-narrative section of the film – the screenwriter, his dog, two people seeking shelter from the authorities – stop functioning as elements of a coherent story and begin to move in and out of our line of vision, seeming less like real people and more like phantoms (perhaps ghostly manifestations of half-structured ideas in the mind of a writer-director who lives in chains). Other people come in and interact with Panahi, but again we are unsure whether they are “real” or visitations from another half-imagined story.

These intersecting narratives touch on similar matters: being in hiding with the things that are most important to you, trying to get your work done, or simply living your life, with the constant threat of someone bursting in and taking everything away. The writer in the “regular” narrative must cover all his windows with black curtains, because dogs are considered unclean by the regime he lives under; the writer-director Panahi in the meta-narrative doesn't have the freedom or resources to tell his story properly, or to engage with the world while telling it, which means there are metaphorical black curtains around his mind.



As Panahi and his fictional characters move in orbit around each other, other questions arise too. We often romanticise highbrow art as an essentially closed process – being principally about the relationship between the artist and his creations, like the literary writer who says “I write primarily for myself” – but does art have any value, or purpose, if it cannot (at least to a limited degree) be shared? And then, if it does reach the outside world, can the relationship be strictly one-sided? What happens when the world begins to intrude on it, deconstruct it, or even demand that it conforms to certain standards, values or rules?

All of which means that Closed Curtain is a self-conscious, self-referential film, but given its context it is also a deeply moving self-conscious film, an artist's cry of defiance. In terms of form, it is an abstract and "difficult" work, but it is also a plea for greater openness - for doors to be unbarred, for curtains to be removed. And the woman in that scene mentioned above is dead right on one front: if this secluded villa is a metaphor for Panahi’s current cinema (or for the mind striving to produce that cinema), it is true that no other house looks anything like it.

MAMI diary: Partition and partitions in Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost

At the MAMI film festival in Mumbai earlier this week, an old dilemma raised its head: should I stick around for the Q&A sessions that follow some of the screenings? As a journalist, such discussions – with their back-stories and insights into the creative process – can be invigorating, or at least useful at the level of information-gathering; but as a critic who hasn’t yet had enough time to absorb the film and write honestly about what he saw and felt, it can be a little problematic hearing the director and crew speak about what they were trying to do. It can create white noise, or even sway one’s feelings. (In my early days in literary journalism, it sometimes happened that I read and disliked a book, then met the author and not only found him extremely likable but also, through conversation, came to understand and even empathise with what he had been trying to do. At the end of such a meeting, even if I retained my basic view of the book, I might easily feel guilty for having been over-harsh in the review.)


Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I had an unusually satisfying experience with Anup Singh’s Punjabi film Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost at MAMI. First, I loved the film itself, despite the physical discomfort of sitting in the second row and having to crane my neck and strain my eyes. Second, the post-screening chat – which featured the director as well as the actors Tilottama Shome (excellent in a pivotal role), Tisca Chopra and Rasika Dugal – was intelligent and engaging, and some of the things Singh spoke about (in response to audience questions) touched on and confirmed my own fragmented thoughts. 



For instance, I was unsurprised to learn that Ritwik Ghatak was one of his heroes, because I had wondered about this while watching the film. Like Ghatak’s entire body of work, Qissa is deeply invested not just in Partition – the sundering of a nation in 1947, creating paranoias, ghosts and demons that have haunted thousands of families over the decades – but in partitions more generally: the many levels on which we create boundaries, separating ourselves, defining various types of “others”. (As Singh pointed out, Ghatak once asked “Who is not a refugee?”)

[A very minor alert here. Strictly speaking, what follows isn’t a spoiler, since it is revealed within the first 15-20 minutes of the film – and if you’re attentive, you might guess it even during the opening credits, which have photos of the main characters. But part of the effect of the film for me was the subtle way in which things play out and come into clearer relief in these early scenes.]

The Qissa synopsis I had read beforehand was reticent about the plot, saying only that the film was about a Sikh man named Umber (Irrfan Khan) and his family, whose lives change when he marries his youngest child Kanwar to a lower-caste girl. But the story really hinges on the fact that Umber – dismayed by a proliferation of female children – decides to raise his fourth girl as a boy. 

 

“Decides” may be the wrong word, actually: it is more as if, by some mystical process, this simply happens: that Umber convinces himself the lie is true. His wife Meher (Chopra) is unhappy, but the family mostly carries on as if nothing is amiss. Other people – distant relatives, elders in the community, a teacher who instructs the “boy” in manly things like kasrat – seem either not to know about the child’s real sex, or turn a blind eye to what is going on. (One scene in particular, when the 12-year-old Kanwar tells her father that she is bleeding, and Umber responds by hugging her and exclaiming “My son is growing up so fast!”, is chilling.) Kanwar (Shome) grows up understandably confused but also eager to please, to be a good son – but when circumstances lead to her wedding to another girl and Umber’s patriarchal fervour takes an even uglier turn, the conflicts escalate.

Qissa begins with the spectre of Partition, but its canvas widens to encompass the gender divide, the line between the human and the spirit worlds, between sanity and insanity (I thought of Bishan in Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh”, lying under the barbed wire at the India-Pakistan border, and the question of whether he is madder than the world around him). This dilution of themes may be problematic for some viewers (an audience member told Anup Singh that he thought it was two different films in one) and the film undeniably has many balls in the air, but I think there are important links between these themes too. Many people who suffered the worst of Partition became living ghosts in the sense that they were petrified in the past, unable to let go or to look ahead. And for someone like Umber Singh – a proud alpha-male who sees himself as the king of his crumbling castle – this situation is made even more complicated because he can view the future only in terms of having a male child who can carry his line forward; each successive birth of a girl is like a slap on the face for a man who needs some sense of permanent identity and rootedness. As his frustrations and insecurities grow, the political becomes personal, and his family is affected in many overlapping ways.


This is a stately, well paced film, with lovely background music that draws on folk tunes (the lyrics are by Madan Gopal Singh, who also helped translate the original, English dialogues into Punjabi). There are many beautiful widescreen outdoor compositions, including some set in the desert (sitting with the screen just above me, I often had to turn my head a full 90 degrees to look at one thing, then another, and was reminded that even this awkward experience is preferable to the one of watching a good-looking film for the first time on a small YouTube screen) – but there are also claustrophobic nighttime scenes in Umber Singh’s house, where the very air is thick and oppressive; you can almost feel what might be going on in this man’s tormented, fixated mind and the effect his actions are having on his wife and daughters. 



For all the vividness of these images though, there is a pleasingly hazy quality to the narrative, a haziness that has the texture of myth and legend. As the director pointed out during the discussion, many stories we hear about Partition begin on a strictly factual note, with remembrances of things experienced by relatives or friends, but then veer off into the realm of speculation and imagination, which may be the only way to deal with such grim matters. Qissa has that ghostly quality, very appropriate to its subject, and for me its allegorical and magic realist elements worked just fine.


The lead performances are excellent too, and I thought there was something to be said about the casting; you might not think of Tisca Chopra and Tilottama Shome as being a convincing mother and daughter, but watching them here I couldn’t help seeing a distinct facial resemblance. In fact, Shome mentioned during the discussion that she thought Singh was making a big mistake by casting her, a short-statured Bengali woman, as a Punjabi girl who has to live her life as a man. “I came to the role with my usual stereotypes of what masculinity should be,” she said, “but Anup told me, don’t worry about being ‘a man’, just focus on being a good son to Umber.” She also said Singh had asked her to watch the old Dilip Kumar films Tarana and Aan for cues on how to play the role. It took her some time to figure out what her director wanted her to discover in those performances (“at first I thought it was because Dilip-saab had these very deliberate gestures, and I wondered if there was something specifically masculine about that”) but later she realised that Singh wanted her to “find” Kumar’s way of smiling – even in difficult situations – in those films. In the larger picture, Kanwar’s story may be a sad, grim one (when she is liberated from the pretence, she finds she doesn’t like wearing women’s clothes because they have become like “scorpions” for her), but that didn’t mean the actor playing her had to look sullen.

****

I found the Dilip Kumar anecdote interesting, because it suggested a director who could make unusual connections and leaps of imagination, draw inspiration from a variety of sources. When I spoke with Singh afterwards, he told me that he watched all kinds of films enthusiastically. “I am a big fan of Guru Dutt and Kenji Mizoguchi,” he said (and here I thought of the lonely ghosts in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu).

During the Q&A session, in defence of his film’s structure and its supernatural elements, he had mentioned that Indian storytelling had always adopted very different methods from the cool, psychological realism of contemporary Western narratives: in traditional Indian storytelling, there have been tales within tales, the idea of closure has not been very important, there is room for whimsy, for one mood blending into another. I asked him later if his interest in such narrative methods extended to the forms used in popular Indian cinema. “I love mainstream Hindi cinema, it has been so much a part of my growing up,” he replied. “But I have a caveat. I feel popular cinema has played with Indian storytelling traditions but also misused them at times. We have many hierarchies as a society – in terms of class, gender and so on – and transgressions have always been important in our storytelling, going back centuries. There have always been narratives that critique the prevailing traditions and assumptions. However, when storytelling is used simply to reaffirm the status quo – which is what popular cinema often does – I think that’s a problem.”

Examining the status quo – and how lives are affected when change occurs – is a central concern for him. “I have lived a life of fragments myself,” he said, “I felt much within me was scattered, and Ghatak’s cinema gave me an insight into my own scattering. I have also been interested in the making of new ‘refugees’ in our times, notions about nationhood, about families and genders: what is a man, what is a woman? And how our views of such things are proscribed and limited, leading to immense inner violence and unnecessary separations.


"When our old traditions are being challenged, we tend to hold on to the past and we take out our frustrations on those who are closest to us, as Umber does in the film. In the opening scene, his first words are 'Listen to my story'. And by the end, the man has realised his culpability, realised how his actions have ruined so many lives. It is very much a story about a changing world, where new ways of thinking and living exist, and where people who are set in the old ways have to deal with this."





****

[Qissa, which has been co-produced by NFDC, should get a commercial release next year, and will be out on DVD soon after that]

P.S. And returning to the question with which I began this post: this boy, with whom I saw Asghar Farhadi’s The Past , would have answered with a very firm “No”. As soon as the film ended and the director walked up on stage, our venerable critic gathered his notes, leapt out of his seat and made a mad scramble for the exit. That’s purity of purpose for you.

Notes from MAMI: Partition and partitions in Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost

At the MAMI film festival in Mumbai earlier this week, an old dilemma raised its head: should I stick around for the Q&A sessions that follow some of the screenings? As a journalist, such discussions – with their back-stories and insights into the creative process – can be invigorating, or at least useful at the level of information-gathering; but as a critic who hasn’t yet had enough time to absorb the film and write honestly about what he saw and felt, it can be a little problematic hearing the director and crew speak about what they were trying to do. It can create white noise, or even sway one’s feelings. (In my early days in literary journalism, it sometimes happened that I read and disliked a book, then met the author and not only found him extremely likable but also, through conversation, came to understand and even empathise with what he had been trying to do. At the end of such a meeting, even if I retained my basic view of the book, I might easily feel guilty for having been over-harsh in the review.)


Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I had an unusually satisfying experience with Anup Singh’s Punjabi film Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost at MAMI. First, I loved the film itself, despite the physical discomfort of sitting in the second row and having to crane my neck and strain my eyes. Second, the post-screening chat – which featured the director as well as the actors Tilottama Shome (excellent in a pivotal role), Tisca Chopra and Rasika Dugal – was intelligent and engaging, and some of the things Singh spoke about (in response to audience questions) touched on and confirmed my own fragmented thoughts. 



For instance, I was unsurprised to learn that Ritwik Ghatak was one of his heroes, because I had wondered about this while watching the film. Like Ghatak’s entire body of work, Qissa is deeply invested not just in Partition – the sundering of a nation in 1947, creating paranoias, ghosts and demons that have haunted thousands of families over the decades – but in partitions more generally: the many levels on which we create boundaries, separating ourselves, defining various types of “others”. (As Singh pointed out, Ghatak once asked “Who is not a refugee?”)

[A very minor alert here. Strictly speaking, what follows isn’t a spoiler, since it is revealed within the first 15-20 minutes of the film – and if you’re attentive, you might guess it even during the opening credits, which have photos of the main characters. But part of the effect of the film for me was the subtle way in which things play out and come into clearer relief in these early scenes.]

The Qissa synopsis I had read beforehand was reticent about the plot, saying only that the film was about a Sikh man named Umber (Irrfan Khan) and his family, whose lives change when he marries his youngest child Kanwar to a lower-caste girl. But the story really hinges on the fact that Umber – dismayed by a proliferation of female children – decides to raise his fourth girl as a boy. 

 

“Decides” may be the wrong word, actually: it is more as if, by some mystical process, this simply happens: that Umber convinces himself the lie is true. His wife Meher (Chopra) is unhappy, but the family mostly carries on as if nothing is amiss. Other people – distant relatives, elders in the community, a teacher who instructs the “boy” in manly things like kasrat – seem either not to know about the child’s real sex, or turn a blind eye to what is going on. (One scene in particular, when the 12-year-old Kanwar tells her father that she is bleeding, and Umber responds by hugging her and exclaiming “My son is growing up so fast!”, is chilling.) Kanwar (Shome) grows up understandably confused but also eager to please, to be a good son – but when circumstances lead to her wedding to another girl and Umber’s patriarchal fervour takes an even uglier turn, the conflicts escalate.

Qissa begins with the spectre of Partition, but its canvas widens to encompass the gender divide, the line between the human and the spirit worlds, between sanity and insanity (I thought of Bishan in Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh”, lying under the barbed wire at the India-Pakistan border, and the question of whether he is madder than the world around him). This dilution of themes may be problematic for some viewers (an audience member told Anup Singh that he thought it was two different films in one) and the film undeniably has many balls in the air, but I think there are important links between these themes too. Many people who suffered the worst of Partition became living ghosts in the sense that they were petrified in the past, unable to let go or to look ahead. And for someone like Umber Singh – a proud alpha-male who sees himself as the king of his crumbling castle – this situation is made even more complicated because he can view the future only in terms of having a male child who can carry his line forward; each successive birth of a girl is like a slap on the face for a man who needs some sense of permanent identity and rootedness. As his frustrations and insecurities grow, the political becomes personal, and his family is affected in many overlapping ways.


This is a stately, well paced film, with lovely background music that draws on folk tunes (the lyrics are by Madan Gopal Singh, who also helped translate the original, English dialogues into Punjabi). There are many beautiful widescreen outdoor compositions, including some set in the desert (sitting with the screen just above me, I often had to turn my head a full 90 degrees to look at one thing, then another, and was reminded that even this awkward experience is preferable to the one of watching a good-looking film for the first time on a small YouTube screen) – but there are also claustrophobic nighttime scenes in Umber Singh’s house, where the very air is thick and oppressive; you can almost feel what might be going on in this man’s tormented, fixated mind and the effect his actions are having on his wife and daughters. 



For all the vividness of these images though, there is a pleasingly hazy quality to the narrative, a haziness that has the texture of myth and legend. As the director pointed out during the discussion, many stories we hear about Partition begin on a strictly factual note, with remembrances of things experienced by relatives or friends, but then veer off into the realm of speculation and imagination, which may be the only way to deal with such grim matters. Qissa has that ghostly quality, very appropriate to its subject, and for me its allegorical and magic realist elements worked just fine.


The lead performances are excellent too, and I thought there was something to be said about the casting; you might not think of Tisca Chopra and Tilottama Shome as being a convincing mother and daughter, but watching them here I couldn’t help seeing a distinct facial resemblance. In fact, Shome mentioned during the discussion that she thought Singh was making a big mistake by casting her, a short-statured Bengali woman, as a Punjabi girl who has to live her life as a man. “I came to the role with my usual stereotypes of what masculinity should be,” she said, “but Anup told me, don’t worry about being ‘a man’, just focus on being a good son to Umber.” She also said Singh had asked her to watch the old Dilip Kumar films Tarana and Aan for cues on how to play the role. It took her some time to figure out what her director wanted her to discover in those performances (“at first I thought it was because Dilip-saab had these very deliberate gestures, and I wondered if there was something specifically masculine about that”) but later she realised that Singh wanted her to “find” Kumar’s way of smiling – even in difficult situations – in those films. In the larger picture, Kanwar’s story may be a sad, grim one (when she is liberated from the pretence, she finds she doesn’t like wearing women’s clothes because they have become like “scorpions” for her), but that didn’t mean the actor playing her had to look sullen.

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I found the Dilip Kumar anecdote interesting, because it suggested a director who could make unusual connections and leaps of imagination, draw inspiration from a variety of sources. When I spoke with Singh afterwards, he told me that he watched all kinds of films enthusiastically. “I am a big fan of Guru Dutt and Kenji Mizoguchi,” he said (and here I thought of the lonely ghosts in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu).

During the Q&A session, in defence of his film’s structure and its supernatural elements, he had mentioned that Indian storytelling had always adopted very different methods from the cool, psychological realism of contemporary Western narratives: in traditional Indian storytelling, there have been tales within tales, the idea of closure has not been very important, there is room for whimsy, for one mood blending into another. I asked him later if his interest in such narrative methods extended to the forms used in popular Indian cinema. “I love mainstream Hindi cinema, it has been so much a part of my growing up,” he replied. “But I have a caveat. I feel popular cinema has played with Indian storytelling traditions but also misused them at times. We have many hierarchies as a society – in terms of class, gender and so on – and transgressions have always been important in our storytelling, going back centuries. There have always been narratives that critique the prevailing traditions and assumptions. However, when storytelling is used simply to reaffirm the status quo – which is what popular cinema often does – I think that’s a problem.”

Examining the status quo – and how lives are affected when change occurs – is a central concern for him. “I have lived a life of fragments myself,” he said, “I felt much within me was scattered, and Ghatak’s cinema gave me an insight into my own scattering. I have also been interested in the making of new ‘refugees’ in our times, notions about nationhood, about families and genders: what is a man, what is a woman? And how our views of such things are proscribed and limited, leading to immense inner violence and unnecessary separations.


"When our old traditions are being challenged, we tend to hold on to the past and we take out our frustrations on those who are closest to us, as Umber does in the film. In the opening scene, his first words are 'Listen to my story'. And by the end, the man has realised his culpability, realised how his actions have ruined so many lives. It is very much a story about a changing world, where new ways of thinking and living exist, and where people who are set in the old ways have to deal with this."





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[Qissa, which has been co-produced by NFDC, should get a commercial release next year, and will be out on DVD soon after that]

P.S. And returning to the question with which I began this post: this boy, with whom I saw Asghar Farhadi’s The Past , would have answered with a very firm “No”. As soon as the film ended and the director walked up on stage, our venerable critic gathered his notes, leapt out of his seat and made a mad scramble for the exit. That’s purity of purpose for you.