Filming: A Love Story

by Tabish Khair

Set primarily in India and spanning the twentieth century, Filming tells a series of stories, including that of one-time prostitute Durga, who is persuaded to give away her young son, Ashok, and that of Saleem, the son of a prostitute and two-times star of the silver screen. As these stories - narrated by a writer who relates the details of other people's lives but is evasive about his own; a daughter who has inherited her father's hand-me-down version of their family history; and a scholar who deals in words but learns to read between the lines - intertwine and overlap, they combine to create a novel that is simultaneously about the small details and the bigger picture. Weaving together major historical events - including Partition, the assassination of Gandhi, the rise of photography and the Bombay film industry, and the development of barbed wire - with the everyday moments that make up the main fabric of our lives, Filming is a novel that is always more than the sum of its parts.

401 pages, Hardcover

First published June 5, 2007

About the author

Tabish Khair was born and educated in Bihar, India. He worked in Delhi as a Staff Reporter until his late twenties and is now a professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. Winner of the All India Poetry Prize, his novels have been shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize (Hong Kong), the Hindu Best Fiction Prize and the Crossword Vodafone Literature Awards (India), the Encore Award (UK) and for translation prizes in Denmark and France.

Reviews

[Varsha Tiwary · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Tabish Khair’s 2007 book “Filming” set in the period from 1928 to 1948; the dividends of hate and of cynical “othering” of the Muslims translate into an easy land-grab and a booming business in barbed wires for the rich financer and cause destruction of life, livelihood, and creative dreams for the victims, the members of a film-studio.

Throughout the book the intimate, matter-of-fact portrayals of ugly cultural truths—how caste, community and religious prejudice flavor all interactions even in the city and how power flows along these lines—give the reader little jolts of truth because these are not antiquated exotica for us, but everyday business, just the way they were a century ago. Is the revival of self-congratulatory, hate-celebrating public ugliness any surprise then?

No matter how fervently we pursue our little individual dreams, they bloom or wither to the extent the larger dreams of a nation and society make dreaming possible or impossible. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the twenties and thirties to be precise, Bombay was a cosmopolitan city that attracted all kinds of dreamers—“a mix of Bohemian artistes and artists from traditional backgrounds, at that moment united by the dream of revolution and art, independence and success..”. But in the 1940’s that dream got corroded, consumed, eaten up by hatred. As the author puts it, “the fused light of our dreams struck the prism of 1947 and refracted into the orange and yellow of Hinduism, the green of Islam, the red of violence, the blue of disappointed hope and the indigo and violet of subtle unredeemable differences.” The country became free and partitioned. People became Hindus and Muslims first. Only half-chewed grotesque remains; half-remembered stories to remind of the glory that once was.

Tabish Khair’s book relates the interlinked stories of one such group of dreamers who set up the “Rajkunwar Studio”. They comprise several Muslims and Hindus, including a brahmin, a thakur, a Sikh and one fascinating woman. The dream that dominates their lives is that of the moving image—the play of light and shadow, the merging of illusion and reality. To make this dream happen, cold bargains are made, deceptions glossed over, old identities shed, which is possible in Bombay, the city of dreams, in a village called Dallam on the Bombay-Pune highway. For a while, they flourish until their dream collides with the grim reality of finding finance for a dream-project at the time when the nation is going through birth pangs. In the rising tide of communal tension which they keep ignoring, the protagonists—who the villagers see as a morally depraved, godless community of heathens—find themselves surrounded and targeted.

What happens to them in the end? Should a person choose love? Or should they stick to the dream? Should they choose a nation based on their religion or should they just choose to live? And who can judge whom for these choices? And what of the cynical politics that forces such choices on ordinary human beings?

The story is told from multiple viewpoints and the reading experience is of a narrative unfolding from various angles. The numbering is aptly in reels and rasas, not in chapters and sections. The narrator of this book is an immigrant Indian scholar, who in search of an easy research project, reaches out to an ageing urdu speaking man in Denmark, who was a movie scriptwriter in 1920’s and thirties Bombay. The narrative technique used is like nested dolls or an intricate tapestry. The bold threads comprise of what the researcher thinks and interprets from the disjointed and rambling stories that the scriptwriter tells him about the filming of a little-known movie “Akhiri Raat” by the Rajkunwar studio. The researcher-narrator is not entirely convinced by the scriptwriter’s version so he explores another narrator— a lady gynecologist in Gaya in India who holds a key to the protagonists. The author takes breathtaking narrative leaps from one point of view to another but because we are so deep in the mind of the characters, the trust placed on the reader is tested as well as proved.

Several layers open up as we follow the four main characters and little story patterns emerge within the main design. And the dilemmas of the characters have striking relevance to the state of the nation today. The reader comes to intimately understand the motivations of these people : Rajkunwar, Hari, Bhuvneshwari, Saleem; who are trying to can the movie before the situation worsens. They are already surrounded by the mob but keep denying it as each of them has a dream to hold onto in there.

We also gain insight into the fractured thought process—at once macho and cowardly, righteous and unsure; always in need of fuelling himself with the power of disgust and hate to hold himself together—of the nationalist leader who leads the mob surrounding the studio. In a movie studio, a place where people could easily shed old identities and pick up new ones; just as they could create new selves with a change of costumes on the silver-screen and make image and shadow become real; they find their identities reduced to just the fact of their names or foreskins, and a barbed wire is stretched not just across the nation but across souls.

The dull facts of movie-making history become vivid when studded in this engrossing tale as the author takes us on the trajectory of a dream from the silent era when a bioscope wallah in a bullock-cart roams the rural countryside to the later glamour of glittering evenings full of theme parties even as the rest of the country reels under war-time rationing; to the time just after partition when Gandhiji is assassinated. The cinematic prose and haunting imagery reveals how the moviemakers’ dream is defined, impacted, and in the end destroyed as it moves alongside the socio-political dream of freedom which takes root and blooms majestically in the 1920’s, from Home rule to Poorna swaraj; and gets gradually blighted by the growing shadow of communal hatred, partition, and then the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.

Impressive as the theme and the scope is, one never reads or is taken in by a book because of the large canvas. One reads it for the little intimate moments strung together by a narrative logic that makes the reader soar above the little stories of the character's lives without losing sight of any detail. Khair’s prose excels in these closely observed, intimate to the Indian landscape details: birds and trees (peepul, heddi, amha, naral, palas) and summer-storms; food and ceremonies and gestures. In no other book written by an Indian writer in English would you find such visceral descriptions of how the loo wails in the afternoons, of that moment of time between dusk and night called Godhuli,_the cow-dust hour, visible only in the Indian countryside, the bleakness and complete absence of possibility that defines small towns, sugarcane juice that looks like trapped dirty sunshine, and how it was to work in a Bombay mill—in cramped, cotton fabric ridden grey rooms reverberating with noisy machinery—windows closed so the precious fabric wouldn’t get soiled; or know of the little known card games played by mill-workers; or the extraordinary pull of a bioscope-wallah in rural Bihar; the ordinary pleasures of a village bahrupiya, the guy with multiple makeups and mannerisms; and the caste and privilege rules that defined (and define) interactions in rural Bihar the era of whip-wielding Thakurs. Above all the book makes the reader experience how othering operates, and what othering feels like to a Muslim, a person just like any of the others in the group and just as much in love with films, or an ageing Muslim guard innocently confident that no one here would ever harm him. What happens when a group of people are made to feel that there is no future for them anymore in the city they loved, in the land they loved. That there is nothing for them except “stones and screams in the night.”

The strange thing about great fiction is, it has the ability to become uncannily relevant, speaking to us over time like an oracle. When it was written thirteen years back, it might have been seen as a cracking story from the dead and buried past to a reader like me—a privileged middle-class reader with her lofty imperviousness as well as easy denial of prejudice, because she is not that way—has become frighteningly relevant today for all of us as we see the shadow of politics of hate relentlessly lengthening over our small dreams.

Just as it happened between 1922 and 1948 a century ago.

[Ninni · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is a beautiful love story as well as an introduction to a quirky part of Indian film history. As in all of Khair's work, the settings and characters are vivid and engaging.

[Poonam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had few similarities with Tabish Khair's other book about thugs. One, same story is told by connecting several narratives by different voices. Phansa, Tabish's birth place in Bihar?, again finds a mention.

[Manish Seth · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent Book about a lost era and tracing the advent of cinema in India.