My Mirror column (17 May 2020):
As we are schooled ever more to view India's labouring poor as an undifferentiated mass, Kamal K.M.'s I.D. and Geethu Mohandas's Liar's Dice help us see our co-citizens in their individual humanity.
“A painter came to this house. I did not even ask his name. I mean, who does, right?”
The young female protagonist who says these words in the thought-provoking 2012 film I.D. is speaking to a male friend, who has to strain to understand what she’s on about – and not just because they’re in the midst of a raucous party. “I don't get you,” he responds at one point. Even to Charu (Geetanjali Thapa), her own words feel like the verbal equivalent of a shrug. There is a niggling sense that she could have done better – but following close behind is an attempt to reassure herself, that her lack of interest in the working class man who came to her upper middle class apartment wasn’t out of the ordinary.
The opening scenes of Kamal KM’s astutely crafted film have already established Charu as an ordinary member of her class and gender. She is a migrant, too, but that status does not mark her. Having moved to Mumbai recently from her home state of Sikkim, she shares a rather nice three bedroom apartment in Andheri with two other women her age. We hear her telling a friend on the phone that she has already booked a new car, though we know she’s still at the interview stage for a telecom marketing job. Meanwhile, through the glass walls of her bedroom, we see a city brimming with construction and labour. One man leads a buffalo through the streets, another kneels on the road to repair his auto, yet another carts eggs on a bicycle. Two urchins make a possibly obscene gesture as a young woman in a form-fitting dress climbs into her car.
When a man arrives to repaint a wall in the house, Charu lets him in, a little grudgingly, asking only one question: how much time will the work take? She is not exactly rude, but she displays the wariness that the upper middle class, likely upper caste Indian woman has internalised about the poor or lower middle class man. When the painter squats beside her to help her pick up some broken glass, she is standoffish. She does not offer him water until he asks. When she hears a thud, her first instinct is to tiptoe out of her bedroom looking for signs of violence, as if she fears a dacoity or worse. So distant does she feel from this stranger's humanity that she can't bring herself to touch him to revive him. She doesn't even think to sprinkle water on his face. Instead her only instinct is to call for help – the aunty downstairs that she has never before spoken to, the old security guard whom she has never before accompanied to the roof where he has to go each time the building lift misbehaves.
But
the painter has fallen unconscious in her presence, and Charu is now
the only person who can take him to a hospital, pay the bill, file a
police report. She begins to feel compelled to find out who the man is,
so she can inform someone who knew him. From inquiring after this
nameless man at the labourers’ naka near her home, to following the
contractor home when he stops taking her calls, to following a possible
lead to the desperately filthy lanes of the Mankhurd slum he might
possibly have lived in, Charu becomes our route into the beeping,
blinking city whose SOS signals she – like all of us reading this paper –
have learnt to keep switched off.
I.D. is about how extraordinary circumstances force one
woman out of her ordinary privileged cocoon, from suspicion to empathy.
Another woman is forced out of a different cocoon in Liar’s Dice
(2013), India’s official entry to the Oscars that year. Also starring
Geetanjali Thapa and produced by JAR Pictures (in association with whom
the Kochi-based Collective Phase One produced I.D.), Geethu
Mohandas’s pensively framed road movie views the migrant labourer in the
city from the other end of the telescope. Thapa won a National Award
for her role as
Kamala, a barely-literate woman who leaves her Himachali village to
search for her construction worker husband who hasn’t answered his phone
for five months. Mohandas makes us painfully aware of the dangers the
outside world poses to a woman like Kamala, forcing her to rely on a
stranger. The limping, unkempt Nawazuddin (played with relish by
Nawazuddin Siddiqui) has a taciturn, unreliable presence: himself a
possible threat that Kamala must bet on. The film could have been better
written, and banks
too much on a cherubic child actor (Manya Gupta) and a baby goat for
charm and watchability. It also turns a predictable cinematic gaze on
Old Delhi, all rickshaws and dingy hotel rooms bookended by picturesque
shots of street performers and the Jama Masjid.
But it works as a companion piece to I.D., both films bringing into focus the India we consider normal – in which a man can simply disappear, with no-one held responsible for what happened to him. As even our existing labour laws are suspended in state after state, with governments using the pandemic as a cover for less regulation and oversight of working conditions, the lives of our nameless, faceless co-citizens are being pushed ever more out of sight. I.D. and Liar’s Dice give us a rare chance to start seeing.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 May 2020
As we are schooled ever more to view India's labouring poor as an undifferentiated mass, Kamal K.M.'s I.D. and Geethu Mohandas's Liar's Dice help us see our co-citizens in their individual humanity.
 |
| A still from Kamal K.M.'s film I.D., in which an upper middle class migrant is forced to think about the life of a poorer one |
“A painter came to this house. I did not even ask his name. I mean, who does, right?”
The young female protagonist who says these words in the thought-provoking 2012 film I.D. is speaking to a male friend, who has to strain to understand what she’s on about – and not just because they’re in the midst of a raucous party. “I don't get you,” he responds at one point. Even to Charu (Geetanjali Thapa), her own words feel like the verbal equivalent of a shrug. There is a niggling sense that she could have done better – but following close behind is an attempt to reassure herself, that her lack of interest in the working class man who came to her upper middle class apartment wasn’t out of the ordinary.
The opening scenes of Kamal KM’s astutely crafted film have already established Charu as an ordinary member of her class and gender. She is a migrant, too, but that status does not mark her. Having moved to Mumbai recently from her home state of Sikkim, she shares a rather nice three bedroom apartment in Andheri with two other women her age. We hear her telling a friend on the phone that she has already booked a new car, though we know she’s still at the interview stage for a telecom marketing job. Meanwhile, through the glass walls of her bedroom, we see a city brimming with construction and labour. One man leads a buffalo through the streets, another kneels on the road to repair his auto, yet another carts eggs on a bicycle. Two urchins make a possibly obscene gesture as a young woman in a form-fitting dress climbs into her car.
When a man arrives to repaint a wall in the house, Charu lets him in, a little grudgingly, asking only one question: how much time will the work take? She is not exactly rude, but she displays the wariness that the upper middle class, likely upper caste Indian woman has internalised about the poor or lower middle class man. When the painter squats beside her to help her pick up some broken glass, she is standoffish. She does not offer him water until he asks. When she hears a thud, her first instinct is to tiptoe out of her bedroom looking for signs of violence, as if she fears a dacoity or worse. So distant does she feel from this stranger's humanity that she can't bring herself to touch him to revive him. She doesn't even think to sprinkle water on his face. Instead her only instinct is to call for help – the aunty downstairs that she has never before spoken to, the old security guard whom she has never before accompanied to the roof where he has to go each time the building lift misbehaves.
 |
| Gitanjali Thapa sets out to trace an unknown man's identity in I.D. |
 |
| A still from Liar's Dice, India's official entry to the Oscars in 2013. |
But it works as a companion piece to I.D., both films bringing into focus the India we consider normal – in which a man can simply disappear, with no-one held responsible for what happened to him. As even our existing labour laws are suspended in state after state, with governments using the pandemic as a cover for less regulation and oversight of working conditions, the lives of our nameless, faceless co-citizens are being pushed ever more out of sight. I.D. and Liar’s Dice give us a rare chance to start seeing.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 May 2020
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