The Reel Life of MS Sathyu - II

My Mirror column (a sequel to last week's piece):

In honour of his 90th birthday earlier this month, a look back at MS Sathyu's under-watched 1994 film Galige, currently streaming online.

At the very start of Garm Hava, Balraj Sahni's Salim Mirza waves goodbye to a train at the station and sits himself down in a horse-drawn cart. The Agra of the 1940s is small enough for the tangawalla to be acquainted with each customer. Who have you dropped off this time, he asks. “My elder sister,” says Mirza, adding a gloomy metaphorical remark about how thriving trees are getting cut down in this wind. Yes, agrees the tangawalla, those who refuse to uproot themselves will dry up. Then he adds a Hafeez Jalandhari couplet, rendered in its most charming street avatar: “Wafaaon ke badle jafa kar riya hai/ Main kya kar riya hun, tu kya kar riya hai?” (I'd translate that as “You torment me in exchange for my loyalty/What am I doing, and what are you doing?”)

What's remarkable is the spectrum of moods that the sequence encompasses. There is the sombre farewell, the meditative remark, the deep sense of living through a eventful time -- and yet all of it is leavened by the comfortable chatter of the everyday, by casual acquaintances who make up one's sense of home, and an ear for humour in the minor key that keeps one from dipping into the doldrums. Galige, which Sathyu directed in 1994, attempts to create the same kind of energy.

The film has two narrative threads, both with immense potential for melodrama -- but Sathyu staves off all maudlinness. Currently playing in the Indian section of an international film streaming platform, Galige centres around a young Bangalorean woman named Nithya. She lives alone in a rented house and has a job in the HMT factory, riding a two-wheeler to work each day. One day, the orphanage where she was raised calls her. An old couple has arrived from a North Karnataka village to claim her as their long-lost granddaughter.

Now this is a theme that doesn't just animate popular cinema in India, it forms the matrix for it: the family separated by a calamity and reunited at the end, the pauper who is really a prince, the enemies who are really biological brothers. Whether as the basis of a comedy of errors (think of every single double role film you know), or the underlying theme of the family melodrama from Waqt to Trishul, or even when ostensibly subjected to questioning by the plot -- as in Awara's nature vs. nurture debate, or Yash Chopra's unsuccessful but fascinating Dharamputra, in which a Muslim orphan grows up to be a Hindu fundamentalist, blood ties are assumed to be the ties that bind.

But unlike the hundreds of film orphans we have all grown up on, Nithya does not hanker for a family. She is guarded, unsure if she wants to be co-opted into an identity she has thus far escaped. The orphanage manager's reminder that she was brought in by a fakir, on the other hand, makes the wannabe grandmother baulk: what if she's actually a Muslim? They part company – but on her way back home, Nithya feels bad for the stranded old couple and decides to invite them to stay with her for a while.

A still from Galige (1994)

What Sathyu does is quietly subversive at many levels. By making the young female character financially independent, and the old couple needier than her, he shows how easily existing power equations of age and gender can be reversed. The 'family' becomes something chosen, contingent on mutual desire and supportiveness, rather than a unquestionable given. Within this new space of equivalence, the young woman makes her own decisions, refusing to kowtow to either neighbourly gossip or 'grandparental' interference. She looks out for the old people, and enjoys their companionship, but feels no obligation to live by their rules. The old couple, for their part, learn that their opinions are simply that – their opinions.

Galige's other subplot is even more surprising – the Khalistan movement, and the fate of a reformed terrorist. Girl does meet boy, even in an MS Sathyu film, and Nithya meets hers in a thoroughly charming Antakshari scene on a train. As a girl without a family, she is perfectly comfortable with a boy without a past. And by bringing a Punjabi boy into a relationship with a local girl, of course, Sathyu plays on Bangalore's insider-outsider tensions. In the film, though, the locals' suspicions turn out to have some basis in fact – not all unknown pasts are equally benign.

There are many other moments when the film touches on the question of identity – Nithya's Japanese boss at the HMT factory, the Sikh dhaba owner or the play within the film where Ekalavya's birth becomes the cause of his tragic fate, while Guru Dronacharya shifts all blame onto him: “How can you hold me responsible for your low birth?” In an early aside, the film's resident commentator, one Narhari, asks the rhetorical question: “Do we lack temples, mosques, churches, gurdwara here? Must slap Urban Ceiling on gods – only so many temples per god.” Nithya herself speaks often of not needing to have a religion, of being free to believe in people.

All the threads of Galige don't necessarily come together. The music can feel tacked-on, as can some of the attempts at comedy, and the Punjab segment has the rushed quality of nightmare. The film's uneven tapestry benefits from being woven of low-intensity conversations, like the Bangalore in which it unfolds. In one lovely odd little moment, a drunken Narhari sings a Kannada song by the poet Rajaratnam to a companion in a prison cell: “If you wish to live, escape from this world. Create your own, forget this one.” Words to live by, now more than ever.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Jul 2020