The reel life of MS Sathyu - 1

My Mumbai Mirror column for July 12:

In honour of his 90th birthday on July 6, a look back at some of MS Sathyu's notable contributions to Indian cinema: Garm Hava, Bara and Galige

AK Hangal, Balraj Sahni and Farooque Shaikh in MS Sathyu's Garm Hava (1973)

The director Mysore Srinivas Sathyu turned 90 on July 6. We owe to Sathyu what remains Hindi cinema’s most honest, painful appraisal of the early effects of Partition: the 1973 film Garm Hava, which I have written about in a previous instalment of this column. Born in 1930 in the then princely state of Mysore, MS Sathyu graduated from Bangalore’s Central College and moved to Bombay in 1952. There he became associated with the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), staging plays like Aakhri Shama (1969) in collaboration with the poet Kaifi Azmi, with the great Balraj Sahni in the lead as Mirza Ghalib. He entered films as an assistant director on Chetan Anand’s Ladakh-set saga of the Sino-Indian War, Haqeeqat (1964).

Eight years later, Sathyu’s feature debut Garm Hava had him working with Sahni and Azmi again. Azmi and Shama Zaidi (Sathyu’s spouse) crafted a brilliant screenplay, based on an unpublished story by Ismat Chughtai. Set in Agra, the film achieves a fine-grained sense of the everyday ways in which amplifying socio-political divisions push a reasonably well-off Muslim family to misfortune. Sahni delivered an unforgettably moving performance as an ageing shoe-manufacturer adamant not to leave for Pakistan, despite the harsh winds that seem intent upon sweeping him away from home. Garm Hava was Sahni’s last film role, and Farooq Shaikh’s first, as Sahni’s son Sikandar. It is  Sikandar's uncertain future – as an unemployed young man, but also as a young Indian Muslim – that the film ends with.

Sathyu, who lives in Bangalore, hasn’t made many more films. A theatreperson at heart, he has spoken in interviews of being branded a political filmmaker after Garm Hava, and of funding remaining an uphill battle. But two of his other features are currently available to view, both in Kannada with English subtitles. Galige (1994) is playing in the Indian cinema section of an online screening platform, and in honour of Sathyu’s ninetieth birthday, the Bangalore International Centre is screening Bara (1980), free to watch until July 16, with an online conversation with Sathyu scheduled for 5pm today, July 12.

Neither Bara nor Galige have the emotional heft of Garm Hava; it is hard to match either the increasingly prescient texture of that narrative, or the subtlety of the performances by Sahni and Shaikh, as also the fine ensemble cast, including Jalal Agha and Gita Siddharth. But both films offer unusual perspectives on Indian politics and society, in very different styles. Bara (The Arid Earth), adapted from a Kannada story by the great UR Ananthamurthy, is about a young IAS officer called Satisha (Anant Nag) whose attempts to improve conditions in his district are constantly obstructed by bureaucratic and political wrangling.

The idealistic hero was not new, but the corruption was laid out in greater depth than most Indian films in 1980. The chief minister turns out to be conducting a behind-the-scenes battle with a minister from the region, and will not declare the district famine-affected for fear that his rival will take credit for relief. The minister, meanwhile, is in cahoots with a corrupt trader called Gangadharswamy, whose blatantly illegal stocks of grain escape police checks even as small-time traders are jailed for ‘smuggling’ one sack of rice. The most fascinating character is Bhimoji, a local advocate-activist-politician who is Gangadharswamy’s bete noire, as well as being Satisha’s (and our) entry point into the realpolitik that actually governs the place he is supposed to run.

In some respects, Sathyu sanitised the character: removing, for instance, Ananthamurthy’s frank reference to Bhimoji’s pimping before becoming a politician. But the film also gave Bhimoji more complexity than Ananthamurthy’s text (available in a 2016 English translation from Oxford University Press). For example, in both the film and the book, Bhimoji decries Gangadharswamy’s land donations as staged, essentially fake handouts to his own supporters – but the film also depicts Bhimoji’s own ‘counter-occupation’ of the donated land as being staged for local journalists.

 

Another interesting aspect of the adaptation touches on cow protection or gau-raksha, whose shadow upon our politics has grown much darker in these forty years. In the story, one Govindappa appears nervously at Satisha’s office to ask him to chair a reception committee to welcome his Guru, who is coming to inaugurate a cow shelter that will save cows from the drought. Sathyu makes an interesting shift: he makes Satisha’s father a temple-building gau-raksha votary, someone who gets farmers to send their drought-starved cattle to him instead of to the butcher. In the film, the father brings the gau-rakshak to Satisha’s office. In a perspicacious change that seems to presage today’s religio-politics, this character, Govind Rao, is announced as “an MSc in chemistry from Banaras Hindu University”, and displays no nervousness – he has already printed Satisha’s name on the invitation, without asking him.

Other departures from the text, though, flatten the film. Ananthamurthy gave Satisha an interesting angsty self-reflexivity: his “instinct for adventure” matched by his worldliness in marrying “into a family which shared a deep concern for the country’s poverty though without ever experiencing hardship itself”. Satisha’s wife Rekha, with her mixed religious elite background, her Miranda House-JNU education and her aesthetic-historical appreciation of the town’s ruins, is something of a type. Shorn of these details, she seems even more stilted in the film, though she does propose that her husband dig bore wells. Ananthamurthy’s Satisha is ambivalent about his own ethical display; he “was aware that the couple’s humanism might seem greater than it was through the magnifying lens of the humble local people”. Sathyu’s Satisha, with no such doubting interior, manages to humble himself before a local. Like a hero.

The first of a two-part column.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 12 July 2020.