My Mirror column:
A neighbourhood chess tournament provides both setting and metaphor in the Ektara Collective’s sharp and delightful indie Turup (Checkmate), currently free to stream online.
“Unless, like Thelma and Louise, you plunge off the side of a canyon, there is no escaping the everyday,” wrote Geoff Dyer in his marvellously idiosyncratic sort-of biography of DH Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage (1997). “To be free is not the result of a moment’s decisive action but a project to be constantly renewed,” he added. “There are intervals of repose but there will never come a moment of definitive rest where you can give up because you have turned freedom into a permanent condition. Freedom is always precarious.”
Dyer’s riffs on freedom and the everyday came back to me this week as I watched, for the second time, a lovely film called Turup (Checkmate), made in 2017 by an unusual group of filmmakers who call themselves the Ektara Collective. Turup is currently free to stream online in the ‘Viewing Room’ set up by the organisers of the Dharamshala International Film Festival and addresses both the precariousness of our freedoms and the mundane, unglamorous, repetitive settings in which we must fight for them.
Set in the Bhopal neighbourhood of Chakki Chauraha, the film uses a public neighbourhood chess-board as narrative and metaphorical anchor for its fine-grained take on a set of interlocked lives. It is very much a feature film, with a script, characters, and often sharp turns of dialogue –but it has a documentary-style sensitivity to its chosen milieu, attending carefully to the faces, spaces and sounds that bring it to life.
Some of Turup’s attention to the everyday is about catching playful moments of enjoyment. A man pauses to watch a woman he likes tying up her hair. A child hides some ber where an old man can find them. One young man cajoles another into betting on a chess game he’s not even party to. More often, though, what the film places under its observational microscope are aspects of Indian daily life that too often go unnoticed. An upper caste man tells a little girl to move away from her spot at a public chessboard with a wordless gesture of caste distancing, adding that she should take “her pieces” with her. An upper middle class woman fails to recognise the sweeper who cleans the street outside her house. A husband thinks nothing of conducting large financial transactions from a marital ‘joint’ account without consulting his wife. A younger brother invites a potential groom’s family home to ‘see’ his elder sister because he disapproves of her choice of romantic partner.
That quasi-anthropological gaze, defamiliarising the familiar, forcing us to look at the inequities to which we usually turn a blind eye, is one part of what makes the film powerfully political. The other thing I think Turup gets right is how the local, the personal and the everyday are inextricably wound up with wider social, public and historical currents flowing through the country and shaping our times. Like a well-executed piece of ethnography, the film’s focus is small – one urban neighbourhood – but its socio-political canvas is large. It also manages to gesture to the ways in which our ‘local’ reality is now in constant conversation with mass media (Though I am less optimistic than Turup’s makers about the relative reach and effect of newspaper journalism and bigotry-filled WhatsApp forwards).
Made three years ago, the film is attuned to the rising tide of rightwing Hindu majoritarianism that now threatens to drown out all other political voices. At several points in the film, we see the mobilising of men – especially those who are unemployed, poor or in whatever way insecure — around the totem of the endangered cow mother, and the endangered Hindu daughter. The bogey of ‘love jihad’ is the apposite bedrock of Turup’s plot, revealing gender as the fault line along which fictional ‘us’ and ‘them’ narratives can most easily be spun. “Apni ladkiyon ko kaaboo mein nahi rakh paye toh izzat gawaayenge,” says one man. “Nahi maan rahi hai? Arrey toh manwaao,” says another, talking of a girl who is resisting a forced arranged marriage in favour of studying further and eventually marrying the man of her choice. A young Dalit man is shown as susceptible to such gendered messaging, especially when religion is thrown into the mix – but the film also reveals how caste is often the limit of Hindutva’s imagined solidarities. The same young man, who thinks he’s being enjoined to be part of a movement for dharam raksha, finds himself being urged to sacrifice a morning’s work to ‘help out’ with a blocked septic tank.
Turup offers no large victories. What it holds out are small incremental achievements in what the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci would have called a War of Position, a process in which cultural activities and social interactions are the locales in which people can begin to imagine new ways of being. The young Dalit man refuses the work for which his caste is seen to make him automatically ‘qualified’. A woman starts to claw back some power in her marriage by re-establishing some professional self-worth. An upper caste local bigwig finds himself losing a final to the young ‘outsider’.
The wresting of freedom, as Dyer suggested, is part of the daily grind. But it is also a game in a continuing tournament.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 Apr 2020.
A neighbourhood chess tournament provides both setting and metaphor in the Ektara Collective’s sharp and delightful indie Turup (Checkmate), currently free to stream online.
“Unless, like Thelma and Louise, you plunge off the side of a canyon, there is no escaping the everyday,” wrote Geoff Dyer in his marvellously idiosyncratic sort-of biography of DH Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage (1997). “To be free is not the result of a moment’s decisive action but a project to be constantly renewed,” he added. “There are intervals of repose but there will never come a moment of definitive rest where you can give up because you have turned freedom into a permanent condition. Freedom is always precarious.”
Dyer’s riffs on freedom and the everyday came back to me this week as I watched, for the second time, a lovely film called Turup (Checkmate), made in 2017 by an unusual group of filmmakers who call themselves the Ektara Collective. Turup is currently free to stream online in the ‘Viewing Room’ set up by the organisers of the Dharamshala International Film Festival and addresses both the precariousness of our freedoms and the mundane, unglamorous, repetitive settings in which we must fight for them.
Set in the Bhopal neighbourhood of Chakki Chauraha, the film uses a public neighbourhood chess-board as narrative and metaphorical anchor for its fine-grained take on a set of interlocked lives. It is very much a feature film, with a script, characters, and often sharp turns of dialogue –but it has a documentary-style sensitivity to its chosen milieu, attending carefully to the faces, spaces and sounds that bring it to life.
Some of Turup’s attention to the everyday is about catching playful moments of enjoyment. A man pauses to watch a woman he likes tying up her hair. A child hides some ber where an old man can find them. One young man cajoles another into betting on a chess game he’s not even party to. More often, though, what the film places under its observational microscope are aspects of Indian daily life that too often go unnoticed. An upper caste man tells a little girl to move away from her spot at a public chessboard with a wordless gesture of caste distancing, adding that she should take “her pieces” with her. An upper middle class woman fails to recognise the sweeper who cleans the street outside her house. A husband thinks nothing of conducting large financial transactions from a marital ‘joint’ account without consulting his wife. A younger brother invites a potential groom’s family home to ‘see’ his elder sister because he disapproves of her choice of romantic partner.
That quasi-anthropological gaze, defamiliarising the familiar, forcing us to look at the inequities to which we usually turn a blind eye, is one part of what makes the film powerfully political. The other thing I think Turup gets right is how the local, the personal and the everyday are inextricably wound up with wider social, public and historical currents flowing through the country and shaping our times. Like a well-executed piece of ethnography, the film’s focus is small – one urban neighbourhood – but its socio-political canvas is large. It also manages to gesture to the ways in which our ‘local’ reality is now in constant conversation with mass media (Though I am less optimistic than Turup’s makers about the relative reach and effect of newspaper journalism and bigotry-filled WhatsApp forwards).
Made three years ago, the film is attuned to the rising tide of rightwing Hindu majoritarianism that now threatens to drown out all other political voices. At several points in the film, we see the mobilising of men – especially those who are unemployed, poor or in whatever way insecure — around the totem of the endangered cow mother, and the endangered Hindu daughter. The bogey of ‘love jihad’ is the apposite bedrock of Turup’s plot, revealing gender as the fault line along which fictional ‘us’ and ‘them’ narratives can most easily be spun. “Apni ladkiyon ko kaaboo mein nahi rakh paye toh izzat gawaayenge,” says one man. “Nahi maan rahi hai? Arrey toh manwaao,” says another, talking of a girl who is resisting a forced arranged marriage in favour of studying further and eventually marrying the man of her choice. A young Dalit man is shown as susceptible to such gendered messaging, especially when religion is thrown into the mix – but the film also reveals how caste is often the limit of Hindutva’s imagined solidarities. The same young man, who thinks he’s being enjoined to be part of a movement for dharam raksha, finds himself being urged to sacrifice a morning’s work to ‘help out’ with a blocked septic tank.
Turup offers no large victories. What it holds out are small incremental achievements in what the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci would have called a War of Position, a process in which cultural activities and social interactions are the locales in which people can begin to imagine new ways of being. The young Dalit man refuses the work for which his caste is seen to make him automatically ‘qualified’. A woman starts to claw back some power in her marriage by re-establishing some professional self-worth. An upper caste local bigwig finds himself losing a final to the young ‘outsider’.
The wresting of freedom, as Dyer suggested, is part of the daily grind. But it is also a game in a continuing tournament.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 Apr 2020.
2 comments:
Enjoyed this review, Trisha. I haven't seen the film yet. In fact, I haven't checked out the Viewing Room films. Must do that. Hope all is well with you.
Hi Banno, so glad, and thank you for leaving a comment... Been forever since I heard anything from you. :) I hope you did manage to watch some of the DIFF Viewing Room films... Turup is no longer on there, but there is plenty else.
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