Fictional motherlands, real relationships

My Mirror column:

Some recent fictions illustrate how totalitarianism thrives on turning on real people into mythical enemies – and pitting an attachment to family and friends against the love of an imaginary nation

A still from the 2019 film Jojo Rabbit

A third of the way through the sadly aborted Leila, the series’ protagonist Shalini (Huma Qureshi) finally manages to trace her lost daughter to a school that looks like a prison. Her fake ID gets her past the gun-toting security-men into a cavernous grey interior, where stiffly-dupatta-ed girls are learning the call-and-response of new nationhood. “Hum kaun hain?” demands the teacher. “Aryavarta ke nanhe sipaahi!” comes the response. As Shalini’s anxious gaze travels along the children and finds Leila’s familiar features, her face uncreases into a joyful smile. Almost unconsciously, her feet begin to move towards the child she thought she might never see again.

But is this really the same child as the one who was abducted from her parents’ arms, only two years before? “My name is not Leila, my name is Vijaya,” the little girl says to a stunned Shalini. She pronounces the words carefully, like she’s learnt them by rote. The scene’s emotional kicker comes when a big car draws up, with a woman in it that Shalini knows well from a previous life, and Vijaya runs to embrace her – this time, with an unrehearsed “Mummy”. But as the finale of Leila makes indubitably clear, that woman is only a placeholder. The entity that has really replaced Shalini is so powerful that there is no way a mere human even try to compete - the nation-state. To quote the slightly dubious gendering chosen by Leila’s makers, “Tum meri maa nahi ho. Aryavarta meri maa hai.”

The idea of a nationalism that pits children against their parents is one that has appeared in another Indian webseries, Ghoul, where the ultimate betrayal of a parent is committed by an adult protagonist who has tragically learnt to trust the nation-state over and above family. I was reminded of these shows this week, as I watched Taika Waititi’s 2019 film Jojo Rabbit, currently free to stream, in which a single mother (Scarlett Johansson) has to deal with her only child being indoctrinated by a state she isn't exactly enamoured of.

Instead of a chilling dystopian future, though, Jojo Rabbit takes us on a madcap fantasy ride into the past. Ten-year-old Johannes Betzler is as cuddly a protagonist as you could ask for. He is also an incipient Nazi, who spends a lot of time talking to his imaginary best friend Adolf: a goofball version of Hitler who's alternately sulky and encouraging. Right from the opening sequence, which splices its fictional boy hero's frenzied self-motivation for a Jungvolk training weekend with historical black and white footage of Hitler's screaming youthful fans to the Beatles iconic anthem I Wanna Hold Your Hand, you know this film isn't traditional fare. Jojo's repeated 'Heil Hitlers', getting louder and crazier as he bursts out of his front door and careens in faux-aeroplane mode through his small-town streets, aren’t scary so much as ridiculous. The same could be said of the cast of characters that have assembled to turn the town's little boys into men and little girls into women – the hipflask-swigging Captain K, demoted from active wartime service by the avoidable loss of an eye, and the pudding-faced Fraulein Rahm, who seems a little young to have had “eighteen children for Germany”.

Waititi ups the tenor of ridiculousness even further when it comes to Nazi indoctrination against Jews. The descriptions proffered by the camp leaders, complete with chalk sketches, reminded me of Roald Dahl's checklist for witches in The Witches. Jews look deceptively like human beings, but they have horns under their hair and scales on their bodies and they smell like Brussels sprouts.

But of course, the film's whole point is that Jojo – like the entire brainwashed German nation -- believes in this mythology. So when, in a nice doffing-of-the-hat to Anne Frank, a teenaged Jewish girl turns out to be hiding behind the wall of his dead sister’s room, Jojo is baffled when she doesn’t fit the criteria. In return for keeping her secret, Jojo demands of Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) a detailed insider's account of Jewishness, taking notes as she speaks. Their evolving relationship lets us walk the tightrope fantasy does, between wish-fulfilment and danger. An illustrated ‘expose’ full of ‘facts' about Jews, fictitious letters from a boyfriend who may or may not exist – these are the flip side of a real world in which Elsa can only survive if she can successfully parade her dead classmate’s papers.But it is in Jojo’s relationship with his mother Rosie that the film's heart lies. Johansson is pitch-perfect as the single mum who can blacken her face and turn into an imaginary ‘Daddy’ to indulge her little boy’s demand for his missing father – but who also refuses to let him avert his eyes from the bodies of ‘traitors’ strung up in the town square. She is happy to let him be part of the masquerade of Nazi boyhood, but draws the line at a real gun. Jojo Rabbit, like Rosie, knows the magical power of fiction, but also knows exactly when reality counts.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 Apr 2020.