27 July 2020

All the perfumes of Arabia

My Mirror column:

Uplifting and devastating by turns, Vinod Kamble’s 2019 debut feature
Kastoori (The Musk) is the kind of coming-of-age narrative that Indian cinema needs more of.



The first time we see Gopi’s face, he has just set eyes on a filthy public toilet. For most viewers of Vinod Kamble’s Kastoori (The Musk), the sight of that toilet – the next shot – would likely be enough to make us retch. Or at least make us want to bang the door shut and get as far away as we can. Gopi, however, can’t do that. He must step into the cubicle instead, a broom in one hand and a bucket of water in the other, his face impassive as he gets to the cleaning work he does alongside his mother.

As Kamble’s powerful debut feature proceeds, we see his teenaged young protagonist Gopi do all kinds of jobs that remain unofficially yet inescapably ‘reserved’ for Dalits in India, crucial jobs shunned by caste Hindus for their proximity to dirt and the dead. He helps his father bury unclaimed dead bodies for the police department, he assists other young men from the community in cleaning out septic tanks and, finally, assists a doctor who conducts autopsies.

Kastoori, available to view online till August 2 as part of the 2020 edition of the New York Indian Film Festival, derives much of its verisimilitude from Kamble’s own experiences growing up in a Dalit family of sanitation workers in Barshi village in Maharashtra’s Solapur. As with Kamble’s own life, education seems to offer Gopi the only way out of a poverty exacerbated by caste. But as the film makes sadly clear, staying in school is not easy, precisely under these circumstances.

Dekhti main tere ko, kaise kaam pe nai aata tu [Let me see how you don’t come to work],” says Gopi’s mother angrily, before tearing up his textbook. Gopi is good at school and wants desperately to continue, but she does not have the wherewithal to support him. “Number aane se pet nahi bharta [Good marks won’t fill your stomach],” she scoffs. He has to earn his keep, and that means leaving school if that’s the only way his father’s job can stay in the family.

Poverty-stricken parents pulling a child out of school to join a caste-bound family occupation has been the theme of at least two previous coming-of-age Marathi films with Dalit protagonists. In Rajesh Pinjani's 2012 release Baboo Band Baja (available on a streaming website), a bartanwali and midwife tries to keep her little son in school, but finds herself battling her husband, who believes his son cannot escape a life playing music at funerals, as his grandfather and father did. In Nagaraj Manjule’s pioneering 2013 debut Fandry (the word means ‘pig’), a teenager from a pig-rearing Dalit agricultural family suffers his father's fatalism alternating with drunken rages. “You won’t die if you bunk one more day!” he says the first time we see him speak to his son.

Caste isn’t too sharply foregrounded in Baboo Band Baja, but there are frequent references that suggest it, such as the father’s angry complaint that band-wallas are always made to wait outside, never invited in. Fandry (also on a streaming platform) is much more upfront about caste: the visibility of Jabya’s ‘polluting’ work outside school instantly cancels out the minimal claims to constitutional equality made inside school walls. Kastoori carries on that necessary, painful task of measuring the Indian state’s promises against what society actually offers – and it does so with quiet aplomb.

The same classmates who shake Gopi’s hand when he wins an essay prize (Kamble makes a point by making it a Sanskrit essay) turn against him after they spy him helping clean a septic tank. “Here comes the sweeper, he stinks,” they murmur. “We should tell the teacher.” But Kamble knows that the schoolchildren holding their noses are only one end of the systemic rot – at the other end is the doctor who insists that the sweeper’s schoolgoing son replace his father, and the activist who sees no irony in a child doing the back-end work for a workshop about Dalit children’s education.


Caught between beaten-down alcoholic fathers and hard-scrabble frustrated mothers, youngsters in these films find other allies. Gopi’s lovely grandmother with the quavering voice is one such. Others find support outside the family. In a plot-line that presages Manjule’s massively successful Sairat (2016), when Fandry’s Jabya gets shyly besotted with an upper caste classmate called Shalu, he confides in the local cycle shop owner Chankya (played by Manjule himself). Close friendships between boys are also central to all these films – Kastoori wouldn’t be half as uplifting as it is without the warmth of Gopi’s close friend Aadim, the son of a Qureishi butcher who also understands what it’s like to be perceived as doing ‘unclean’ work.

Inspired by Iranian cinema’s use of children’s stories, debacles abound – a lost schoolbag in Baboo Band Baja, a crushed cycle in Fandry, a trickster selling fake goods in Kastoori -- while the search for beauty abides. The mythical ‘kali chimni’ (black sparrow) for which Jabya roams the woods in Fandry metamorphoses, in Kastoori, into Aadim and Gopi’s saving up to acquire the legendary perfumed substance of the film’s title. But Kamble ends his film on a remarkable note, silently redefining what beauty means. In a visual homage to the stone-throwing last shot of Fandry, that was itself a homage to the last shot of Shyam Benegal’s Ankur, Gopi flings away the bottle of perfume. Because perfumed beauty would be camouflage, and camouflage is not the answer.

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