My Mirror column: the fourth column in my series on the Hindi hits of 1957
V Shantaram's Do Aankhen Barah Haath (1957) used a prison reform experiment to think about freedom - and that message still bears repeating.
The titling of V Shantaram’s Do Aankhen Barah Haath involves a series of hand-prints being made. Each time a hand is lifted off the screen, it leaves adark impression – and a printed title appears at its centre. The hand-prints obviously make a reference to the film’s name – literally ‘Two Eyes, Twelve Hands’. But whose hands are we speaking of, and why do they matter?
Shantaram lets the mystery linger for a little while, even as he takes us directly into his milieu, opening with a sequence of theatrical excess that involves a jailer kicking prisoners. The symbolic humiliation of placing bootclad feet violently on the back of another human being is particularly great in an Indian context where the feet are believed to be the most impure part of the body – you are brought up to apologise if your feet touch someone by mistake, and you only touch another’s feet voluntarily as a way of emphasising your social inferiority in relation to the other person.
After this temporary focus on feet, Shantaram slowly and deliberately returns us to hands. Hands are, by their very nature, a stand-in for action – and in the case of the criminal offenders whom Shantaram places at the centre of his film, those actions are violent ones. When the junior prison official Adinath (played by Shantaram himself) gets permission to launch an experiment in prison reform, he chooses six men convicted of particularly grisly crimes. He uses the cinematic medium to great effect as they are introduced, overlaying the almost comical excess of these gruff, hefty men with their own memories – memories in which they used their hands to take lives. Now those same powerful hands, Adinath decides, are to be put to honest labour. The man who once lifted a boulder to murder his wife is told to build a dam with enormous stones; another who had committed his crime with an axe is told to clear the shrubs with one.
Hand-prints, of course, are also tied to personal identification, in a context of assumed illiteracy as well as one of modern policing. By the mid-20th century, fingerprinting had been around as a technique of criminal forensics for at least fifty years, and Shantaram plays with the way that humans had internalised that knowledge. When Adinath, trying to establish a rapport with the men, asks their names, they respond by silently making hand impressions on a piece of paper. “If we run away, it is our handprints that you will find useful to trace us – not our names,” says one. It is as if we were to introduce ourselves with our Aadhaar numbers.
Shantaram in 1957 was already a veteran, with the founding of Prabhat Film Company and pioneering films like Manoos, Kunku and Shevari behind him. For Do Aankhen, he chose to depart from the technicolour seductiveness of Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje (a dance-heavy drama which had been the third biggest Hindi hit of 1955) for an almost Expressionist black and white. Do Aankhen unfolds at a deliberate pace, with dramatically staged set pieces and several weepy moments.
But alongside the high drama is a goofy brand of humour, exemplified for instance in the scene where the six men, all hulking moustachioed brutes, prop up a dismantled barbed wire fence so as to view an attractive woman safely from behind it. It is as if the charms of Champa, a toy-seller played by Shantaram’s third wife Sandhya, are such that they prefer to lock themselves up.
The scene may be comic, but it is in fact of a piece with the film’s view of masculinity, of violence – and of freedom itself. The large patch of barren land where the convicts settle is named Azaad Nagar – Freedom Town. On their very first night there, they find themselves so discomfited by the prospect of sleeping in an unlocked room that they chain their feet together, weighing the chains down with their agricultural implements.
Months later, in what is the final test of their reformation, they promise Adinath that they are capable of selling their fresh-grown vegetables in the local sabzi mandi without being roused to violence. When they get there, however, the low prices they are selling at make them the target of the local middleman and his goons, who attack them in full public view.
Shantaram pegs his climax on the men’s transformation from brutish hulks – who had been quick to snatch another’s food when hungry, or react to perceived injustice with the threat of violence – to mute sufferers even in the face of one-sided beatings. This is a film made ten years after Indian independence, and it sends out a message about ahimsa that is strongly in synch with the Gandhian position on non-violence. The true exercise of collective freedom involves curtailing our baser instincts – not setting our worst selves free to roam. It is a lesson we could all do with in Modi’s India.
After this temporary focus on feet, Shantaram slowly and deliberately returns us to hands. Hands are, by their very nature, a stand-in for action – and in the case of the criminal offenders whom Shantaram places at the centre of his film, those actions are violent ones. When the junior prison official Adinath (played by Shantaram himself) gets permission to launch an experiment in prison reform, he chooses six men convicted of particularly grisly crimes. He uses the cinematic medium to great effect as they are introduced, overlaying the almost comical excess of these gruff, hefty men with their own memories – memories in which they used their hands to take lives. Now those same powerful hands, Adinath decides, are to be put to honest labour. The man who once lifted a boulder to murder his wife is told to build a dam with enormous stones; another who had committed his crime with an axe is told to clear the shrubs with one.
Hand-prints, of course, are also tied to personal identification, in a context of assumed illiteracy as well as one of modern policing. By the mid-20th century, fingerprinting had been around as a technique of criminal forensics for at least fifty years, and Shantaram plays with the way that humans had internalised that knowledge. When Adinath, trying to establish a rapport with the men, asks their names, they respond by silently making hand impressions on a piece of paper. “If we run away, it is our handprints that you will find useful to trace us – not our names,” says one. It is as if we were to introduce ourselves with our Aadhaar numbers.
Shantaram in 1957 was already a veteran, with the founding of Prabhat Film Company and pioneering films like Manoos, Kunku and Shevari behind him. For Do Aankhen, he chose to depart from the technicolour seductiveness of Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje (a dance-heavy drama which had been the third biggest Hindi hit of 1955) for an almost Expressionist black and white. Do Aankhen unfolds at a deliberate pace, with dramatically staged set pieces and several weepy moments.
But alongside the high drama is a goofy brand of humour, exemplified for instance in the scene where the six men, all hulking moustachioed brutes, prop up a dismantled barbed wire fence so as to view an attractive woman safely from behind it. It is as if the charms of Champa, a toy-seller played by Shantaram’s third wife Sandhya, are such that they prefer to lock themselves up.
The scene may be comic, but it is in fact of a piece with the film’s view of masculinity, of violence – and of freedom itself. The large patch of barren land where the convicts settle is named Azaad Nagar – Freedom Town. On their very first night there, they find themselves so discomfited by the prospect of sleeping in an unlocked room that they chain their feet together, weighing the chains down with their agricultural implements.
Months later, in what is the final test of their reformation, they promise Adinath that they are capable of selling their fresh-grown vegetables in the local sabzi mandi without being roused to violence. When they get there, however, the low prices they are selling at make them the target of the local middleman and his goons, who attack them in full public view.
Shantaram pegs his climax on the men’s transformation from brutish hulks – who had been quick to snatch another’s food when hungry, or react to perceived injustice with the threat of violence – to mute sufferers even in the face of one-sided beatings. This is a film made ten years after Indian independence, and it sends out a message about ahimsa that is strongly in synch with the Gandhian position on non-violence. The true exercise of collective freedom involves curtailing our baser instincts – not setting our worst selves free to roam. It is a lesson we could all do with in Modi’s India.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 Aug 2017.
No comments:
Post a Comment