Photography Review: One Step in their Shoes

The Passerby, a photo exhibition of Indian street scenes, shows us the worlds we are walking past. 

(A short review essay I did for India Today magazine, on this gorgeous show, mounted in mid-2022.)

The 23 still images on display in PhotoInk’s garden-set gallery space in Delhi’s Vasant Kunj are a balm for tired eyes. The black and white—and certainly over fifty shades of grey—help recuperate from the nonstop ocular assault of lives lived on multicoloured moving screens. But the healing and stillness The Passerby offers come from some- thing more than form. Street scenes picked from the archives of Raghu Rai, Sooni Taraporevala, Ketaki Sheth and Pablo Bartholomew, these formally stunning photographs paint a portrait of an urban India that’s swiftly passing (if not already past). They range from 1970 to the early 2000s, but the pre-liberalisation era dominates, letting a quiet nostalgia wash over us.

The street scene has historically been among the most popular photographic genres, the PhotoInk brochure points out, and is easier now without a heavy, obtrusive camera: “Everyone with a mobile phone is now a street photographer.”

Everyone could be, yes. But we aren’t. It is striking just how little the glory and grimness of our streets enter the artfully arranged world of Facebook or Instagram. Perhaps it should be no surprise. Street photography needs you to be on foot, and to actually look around as you walk. And while the Indian street remains infinitely more interesting than anything the German philosopher Walter Benjamin imagined when writing of the flaneur in 1930s Paris or Berlin, the upper middle class that controls image-making in our digitally-divided republic has withdrawn indoors. India remains full of street weddings and street-side shrines; the poor—of necessity—still work and sleep and fight and make love in the street.

But between Uber/Ola and app-based delivery, urban white-collar Indians needn’t put foot to asphalt, for taxi, auto-rickshaw or groceries. The few who do either make no images, or pirouette and fetishise.

The Passerby yields many insights into our recent past, and how photographers saw it. For instance, beasts of burden are often juxtaposed with motorised transport. An Ambassador and a bullock cart share in Rai’s majestic 1984 Delhi downpour; a white Fiat faces determinedly away from Taraporevala’s 1977 camel on Marine Drive. These animals have disappeared from city streets, as have these vehicles. Gone, too, is the sidecar-style scooter in which a 1976 Shravan Kumar transports his aged parents (Bartholomew’s ‘Family on a scooter’). Taxi drivers no longer nap with doors ajar; they use the car AC.

But much remains the same. Rai and Bartholomew both capture cart pushers to devastating effect, moving mountains with their bodies. Horses stand in symmetry in Rai’s Turkman Gate, their blinkered gazes evoking that of the purdah-clad woman beside them. Hijras still pose performatively, while few women on the street meet the photographer’s gaze— Sheth’s shy mother and child and Taraporevala’s striking tableau of Kamathipura sex workers both needed women behind the lens.

Given our increasingly enclosed present, The Passerby images are not just a way into the past, but a call to the future— what do we want for our streets, and ourselves?

(The Passerby is on view at PHOTOINK, New Delhi, till June 26)

Published in India Today, May 2022. 

Note: Pablo Bartholomew's photographs, included in the show and discussed above, are not available for view on the PhotoInk gallery website to which I have linked above. 

A child's view of the world through a train ride

This is the sixth column in my ongoing series on trains in Indian cinema. (Periodic reminder for new readers of this blog: I write a weekly column on cinema which appears in TOI Plus, as well as in Bangalore Mirror, Pune Mirror & Mumbai Mirror.)

-- In Gulzar's Kitaab, the railways are a route and a rite of passage for a child trying to find his place in the universe --

There are probably few films in any language that have been titled 'book'. But lest you think a film called Kitaab might be bookish (which in the eyes of many movie-viewers translates to boring), Gulzar's 1977 screen adaptation of Samaresh Basu's story begins in breathless motion. Gusts of black smoke rise into the sky, a train whistles, and the familiar “chooka-chook” of the moving carriage takes over, interspersed with a child's voice. He is making up a chant to match the train's rhythmic sound: Kidhar ja, kidhar ja, kidhar ja? Bhaag chala, bhaag chala, bhaag chala [Where d'you go, where d'you go, where d'you go? Running away, running away, running away].

It is only after this that we see him: Master Raju, ubiquitous and irreplaceable child star of 1970s Hindi cinema, squatting on the train's floor, in the space between two lower berths. Above him, in the upper berths, two children pass a notebook to each other, conducting a silent game of knots and crosses. Even before we know anything of what the film is about, Gulzar has communicated how marvellous train journeys could feel for the middle-class child -- the adults asleep below, while you looked down from the deliciously unsupervised space of the upper berth, the holidays stretching ahead of you. The train journey was a time out of time.

As it turns out, Gulzar is only pointing to that sense of sweet interregnum, secured at both ends by middle-class cushioning, as a contrast. What makes Kitaab memorable is the real-life adventure on which it launches its boy hero – but here, too, the railways are crucial. Bored with school and misunderstood at home, Babla runs away from the city home he shares with his didi (Vidya Sinha) and brother-in-law (in an odd bit of casting, Uttam Kumar!). He gets on the train to go back to his mother in the village. But when shoved out for being ticketless, the 12-year-old suddenly finds himself in the real world he's been so impatient to enter.

In flashback, we see Babla and his best friend Pappu bunking school to wander the city, entranced as much by the street magician as by the halwai making jalebis. Again and again, they try to apprentice themselves to these men, who greet their enthusiasm with mostly indulgent disbelief. On the surface, these scenes evoke laughter: The boys, it seems, will do anything to get out of having to go to school. But the camera's attention to the men's practiced movements and the boys' rapt gazes tell a different story: These artisans are indeed masters of their craft. The children, watching them, grasp that fact instinctively – and any craft so consummately carried out seems worth learning. If classroom education has failed to engage these young minds, Kitaab suggests, it has also not yet infected them with the casteist, classist belief that manual work, no matter how skilled, is unworthy of admiration.

It is people like these that adopt the runaway boy -- the railway engine driver and his assistant, the station's resident midget, and Shreeram Lagoo playing a blind singer of the sort that could once be met on every train in India. Asking very few questions, they simply add him into their lives. The middle class passengers ignore the unclaimed child in their midst, but the engine driver gives him the last of his tiffin, the blind beggar buys him tea and food. The instinctive humanity with which they share what little they have is moving – yet Gulzar doesn't let things turn maudlin. We smile at little things and big ones: The little boy and the dwarf literally sizing each other up; the hackneyed phrases people use for emotions. When someone says “Bechara anaath hai [He's a poor orphan]”, Babla adopts the phrase, trotting it out for a quick dose of sympathy, often to hilarious effect. “Bechara anaath hoon [I'm a poor orphan],” he tells one ticket checker -- just before saying he's headed to meet his mother.

 

Much of the bittersweet pleasure of Kitaab comes from watching the child watch the world go by – and learning from it as he does. And although Babla was curious, observant and sensitive at school and at home, it is the train that offers him a sense of what the world is really like. The network of trains and railway stations is like a pathway through the world, and a microcosm of it. As Babla negotiates his way through this network, he encounters old age and disease, blindness and deformity -- and death. Like a latter-day Siddhartha, the protected middle class boy is confronted with the sight of suffering, and is shaken by it.

Unlike Siddhartha, though, the experience doesn't lead him to renounce the world – but to return to it richer. One could read Kitaab as a cop-out: Issuing a challenge to middle class pieties and normative barriers, but turning back before risk turns to danger. But one can also see it as an expansion of the child's universe, an initiation into life that acknowledges the inevitability of sorrow -- while not undermining the value of the safety net. As the blind train singer puts it, “Gaadi chhutne ka gham mat kariyo, baalak. Station na chhutne paaye [Don't mourn the missed train, child. Just don't let the station get away from you.]”

Published in TOI Plus, and three editions of Mirror -- Pune, Bangalore and Mumbai.

The train ride as a technological fantasy

My TOI Plus/ Mumbai Mirror column:

In popular 1970s Hindi cinema, the train became central to an imagined world of infrastructural achievement and finesse. Sadly, we're still content to live in the dream.

Amitabh Bachchan prepares to get off a train in a screenshot from Parwana (1971)

In the 1960s and 1970s, the train in Indian cinema starts to appear as a space of sophistication and luxury. Whether in 'art films' like Satyajit Ray's Nayak (which I mentioned last week), or a full-on commercial Hindi film like the racy Rajesh Khanna starrer The Train, the upper class railway compartment represents high standards of comfort and hospitality. This is true despite the fact that Ray, ever the realist, has a senior Calcutta executive in Nayak express annoyance that he can't even get a beer on the AC Deluxe Express (precursor of the Poorva Express, the train between Calcutta and Delhi before the Rajdhani Express came along three years later in 1969). (The fellow isn't entirely to blame for hoping, given how much the train pantry car echoes the atmosphere at one of Calcutta's Anglophone clubs, where no evening would flow without alcohol.) He gets a Coke instead, though the waiter only comprehends when told “Coca Cola”. Still, the service on these filmi trains is polite, English-comprehending and very classy -- restaurant-like, in an era when few people ate out often. There is also a degree of fascination with waiting rooms and railway restaurants: places you could only access as a passenger on the long-distance train network. The murders on the Calcutta Mail in The Train hinge on one passenger being seduced away from the coupe by the prospect of a meal at the railway restaurant with a sashaying Nanda.

MK Raghavendra and others have marked that the train in the 1950s and 60s often mapped onto the idea of India – such films as Bimal Roy's 1955 Devdas, whose nationwide journeying hero I have mentioned in another context, but also nationalist films with train songs depicting children: 'Aao bacchon tumhe dikhayein jhaanki Hindustan ki' from Jagriti (1954) and 'Nanha-munna rahi hoon, desh ka sipahi hoon' from Mehboob Khan's Son of India (1962).

It is true that even in those decades, trains were occasionally linked to crime: murder in Shart and smuggling in Aar Paar (both 1954), not to mention the goofy Half Ticket (1962) with Kishore Kumar as the comic hero who becomes an unsuspecting mule for stolen diamonds on a train to Bombay.

But as Akshay Manwani suggested in a 2015 article, it was really in the 1970s, with films like The Train, Shor (1972) and Do Anjaane (1976) that the thriller element begins to dominate Hindi cinema's portrayal of trains. Speed, danger and the accident ally with the sense of danger that comes with being isolated in a train compartment, often miles away from the nearest outpost of the law. You can easily kill a man on a train – or, as in Do Anjaane, push him off it – with no witness, and the police will only arrive much later, in another place. The moving train is a world unto itself.

For me, though, the film that exemplifies this marvellous sense of excitement about trains comes right at the start of decade: the 1971 Parwana, directed by Jyoti Swaroop (who also made Padosan and ought to be much better known). It is perhaps best remembered for Amitabh Bachchan's performance as one of Hindi cinema's earliest jealous lovers: his tall, serious Kumar is scarily believable as the brooding artist whose romantic obsession crosses over into violent vengefulness. But it also displays some unusual detailing for a commercial Hindi film of its time, not just in its liberal characters, but with regard to things like characters' surnames, dates and place-names. The camera often zooms into print on screen, from a wedding cards to a 'No Photography Allowed' sign at Nagpur Airport (yes, cheeky!).

The train-related plot on which the film hinges involves a court case in which the wrong man and the heroine's true love (Navin Nischol) is charged for a murder that Amitabh Bachchan -- the jilted lover and real murderer – apparently could not have committed. Why? Because he was on a train at the time. The film's revelatory flashback sequence – with a stylish Bachchan striding through streets and stations and staircases in his coat, dark glasses and muffler (here the detailing goes for a toss, since this is meant to be Bombay in August) – shows just how he did it (spoiler alert). He used the train – but he also used a plane.

Watching Parwana in the midst of India's horrifyingly mishandled Covid-19 second wave, when the breakdown of our sorely limited health, transport and digital infrastructure is on full display, I was struck by the film's deep belief in functioning infrastructure. Parwana's murder plot is planned and executed flawlessly because -- in the film – trains run exactly on time, flights land and take off smoothly, taxis and public telephones can be found exactly when and where they are needed. The reference to television in a light early scene is as much a part of this vision – remember this is 1971, and TV transmission had not even reached Bombay till 1972.

Parwana, like many Hindi train films of the 1970s, is really a fantasy about technology and infrastructure. Tragically, our tendency to believe in the fantasy of our technological achievements remains alive and well in 2021, at the great human cost of reality.

Published in TOI Plus/ Mumbai Mirror, 16 May 2021

Book Review: UR Ananthamurthy's Avasthe

My piece for Firstpost on a truly great Indian novel.

Politics can make things better, UR Ananthamurthy seems to suggest, but only if its wellspring is a love of the world, not a desire to conquer it. 

Avasthe, by U.R. Ananthamurthy (1978). Translated by Narayan Hegde (2020).
Harper Perennial. 240pp. Rs 499.

UR Ananthamurthy's 1978 Kannada novel Avasthe, in a chiselled new English translation by Narayan Hegde, is presented to us as “an allegory that suits our times even more than the times when it was written”. At least, those are the poet K Satchidanandan's words on the first page of the translated volume, published at the fag end of 2020. And it is true that Ananthamurthy's protagonist Krishnappa Gowda – poor Shudra boy turned revolutionary peasant leader, now immobilised by paralysis and parliamentary politics — spends much of the novel contemplating how best to engage with the corruption of the body politic, represented by defections, money, the backing of industrialists — and an unnamed prime minister with dictatorial desires. 

It is also true, however, that from the absurd heights of 2021, even that disturbing moment in the life of the nation looks immeasurably distant. This is despite the fact that Avasthe unfolds in the long shadow that Indira Gandhi's Emergency cast over Indian democracy. It also describes, in unforgettable and graphic detail, the police state, its violence already institutionalised and banal. One of Krishnappa's mentors is arrested and killed in a fake encounter, and when a youthful Krishnappa protests, he finds himself in jail, suffering excruciating torture. 

What makes that world unrecognisable is that Krishnappa seems authentic even in decline. Edging towards chief ministership, he contemplates his own power with mingled thrill and distaste. He may compromise for his health and to provide some middle-class comforts to his long-suffering wife and child, but he is aware of each step away from his ideals. His rest cure at an urban farmhouse makes Krishnappa feel disconnected, but his roots aren't yet severed. In one of the novel's loveliest moments, his mother brings him tender mango pickle, asking him to identify the particular village tree the fruit was picked from. I felt an inexplicable joy when Krishnappa passed the taste test.

Krishnappa is no uncomplicated hero. When we meet him, he is bedridden and nearly immobile, his legendary rages reduced to ineffectual tears – but still hitting his wife. Yet his capacity for reflection and change gives him a rare appeal. And that capacity is shaped by the people he has been close to. In Ananthamurthy's fluid telling, we hurtle from person to person, bumped along by Krishnappa's stream of consciousness. The first to see something special in him is the memorable Maheshwarayya — a “great pleasure-loving man” who is “also a great ascetic”. Hearing the young Krishnappa sing on the riverbank, Maheshwarayya tells him: “What a dumb boy! All this time you haven't understood who you are, have you?” Giving his stupefied family a talking-to, he arranges for Krishnappa to live in a hostel so that he can continue his education. 

Later, Krishnappa meets Annaji, a leftwing organiser who teaches English as a cover – and for a living. If Maheshwarayya represents a traditional feudal Indian masculinity that exposes the goatherd boy to classical music and Sanskrit poetry, Annaji is his introduction to modernity. He opens Krishnappa's mind to the contradictions of politics – and life. What the two men discuss are the questions of the mid-20th century: What is the relationship of workers to production? What is the role of religion in society? Is romance bourgeois? Does individualism lead to fascism? Krishnappa and Annaji don't just dream of revolution, but argue about what it would mean for ordinary people. All political dispensations are up for criticism, at the level of the village, the party, the country, the world.

Then a rot sets in, its banality revealed in Krishnappa's cringeworthy marriage, and the worshipful Nagesh to whom Krishnappa is dictating his memoirs. Yet now, on his sickbed, he suddenly finds himself able to hear criticism again: from his scathing younger colleague Nagaraj, his old love Gowri, but most of all, himself. “That he can talk contemptuously of the corrupt makes him pleased with himself, but it also worries him that deriving such pleasure has now become a habit with him.”

This self-reflexivity makes Krishnappa endlessly interesting – whether he is remembering the complexity of his filial relationship with “the brahmin Joisa” (his village teacher), the caste politics of his university days, or his response to Annaji's way with women – simultaneously judgemental and jealous.

Such honesty forces the reader to be honest, too. An insistent openness about love and sex, in fact, is at the heart of the novel, with Ananthamurthy displaying a rare ability to parse the politics of sexuality in the Indian context. Again, Krishnappa's strength is to learn as he lives. So, for instance, his early mentor Maheswarayya is described as “so decent towards women of respectable families that he would not look at them” – while also having a fancy for prostitutes. That seeming contradiction resolves itself later, when Annaji tells Krishnappa that seeing women as sacred is part of his feudal upbringing: “Tell me, why is a woman sacred? Because she is someone's property... Those who say she is sacred are themselves wifebeaters, who think women are good only for cooking, for singing and as ornaments.”. It still takes practically a lifetime for Krishnappa to unblock himself, to stop being one of those millions of Indian men who “regard the women who are willing to sleep with them as trash”. But he manages it. By the end, he is able to wish the same to others, with generosity and without judgement.

For me, the crux of this magnificent novel lies in Krishnappa's realisation that politics is inseparable from life, and yet, life is greater than politics. Politics can make things better, Ananthamurthy seems to suggest, but only if its wellspring is a love of the world, not a desire to conquer it. I closed Avasthe with the fervent hope that we may again have politicians who can hear the wind in the bamboos, who can experience sex as something deep rather than shallow, who have old friends that laugh at them. 

Published in Firstpost, 24 Apr 2021.

Why our enduring romance with the railways makes for great cinema

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Awtar Krishna Kaul's 27 Down, which won two National Awards in 1973, remains a visually arresting reflection on India's train journeys 

The connection between films and trains dates back to cinema's origins. One of the Lumiere brothers' first films was of a train arriving at the station in La Ciotat, a small French town near Marseilles. Arrival of a Train, shot in 1895, is central to the mythology of the movies. The claim (made in several film histories) is that early audiences leapt from their chairs in alarm as Lumiere's locomotive seemed to race towards them. Even in soundless, jerky black-and-white, the story goes, the power of the moving pictures was such that people – almost -- couldn't tell them apart from life.

 

In recent times, film historians have cast doubt on this narrative, some pointing to confusion with a later stereoscopic version that Louis Lumiere exhibited in 1934. But what is indubitable is that there was something endlessly watchable about this simplest, single shot of a train. Trains had screen presence.

 

Both the railways and the cinema arrived in India soon after their invention, swiftly becoming integral to our social and cultural life. So it's no surprise that trains are a fixture in our films: The staging ground, as much for crime and thrills as romance and recreation.

 

But perhaps the most devoted train film we've ever had is Awtar Krishna Kaul's 1973 feature, 27 Down. Kaul, who had left his diplomat job to study filmmaking in New York, returned to India in 1970 and became part of the Indian New Wave: A spectrum of directors ranging from Basu Chatterjee to Mani Kaul, beginning to make their mark in an era popularly defined by Bobby and Yaadon Ki Baraat. 27 Down was Kaul's first feature, made with the encouragement of Filmfare editor BK Karanjia, who was then chairing the Film Finance Corporation.

 

Based on a Hindi novel called Atharah Sooraj Ke Paudhe, the film stars a young MK Raina as the ticket-checker protagonist Sanjay, and Rakhee as his girlfriend Shalini. Filmed in atmospheric black and white by cinematographer AK Bir (who had just graduated from FTII at the time and never shot a film before), it won National Awards for Cinematography and Best Hindi Feature -- days after Kaul died tragically in a drowning accident.

 

The film begins with the familiar drone of the Indian Railways announcer: “Number Sattaaees Down platform number teen se jaane ke liye taiyyar hai”, and is shot very substantially on trains and in stations. Often assembling his shots to accompany a meditative monologue, Kaul's work seems closer to the more experimental end of the New Wave. 27 Down starts off ploddingly, in a self-consciously literary voice: “Phir koi pul hai kya? Shaayad pul hi hai [Is it a bridge again? It's probably a bridge],” Sanjay thinks to himself, lying supine on a berth as the train moves. “It feels like I'm constantly crossing bridges...”. But there are playful moments, too. The song Chhuk chhuk chhuk chalti rail, aao bachchon khelein khel adopts the train's rhythm to create a visual and aural paean to it, with shots of the locomotive moving through tunnels juxtaposed with children lining up to form a train.

 

Son of an engine driver, Sanjay's life seems to keep circling back to the railways. Born between two stations, as a child he is insatiably curious about trains. He tries to study art in Bombay, but his father urges upon him the stability of a railway ki naukri. As a ticket checker, Sanjay discovers anew his love of trains. He starts to eat and sleep on trains, even when not on duty. Neighbours, landlords, even his father finds his peripatetic existence strange. “Tumhare liye toh train hi ghar ho gayi hai,” his father writes him.

 

It is on a train that he meets Shalini, who lives alone in a rented room in Kurla and works in the Life Insurance Company of India. It is a railway romance: She takes the train to work, he takes the train as work. When his life plans are again forcibly aborted by his father, Sanjay surrenders himself to the trains again – in metaphor and then in reality.

 

“I wanted a long path, instead I got these iron roads, where the direction is already decided,” Sanjay muses sadly. A minute later he's grateful for the effortlessness of the journey: “Chalti train hi sahara hai [The moving train is my only support].” But then, there's the sense that he isn't really getting anywhere. “Main guzar jaata hoon, aur jagah khadi reh jaati hain [I move past, and places stay where they are].”

 

Then he gets on a train to Banaras, looking to beguile himself with women and wine, his beard getting scragglier. The sequence echoes so many tragic Indian heroes, and yet it feels distinct. He looks at an old man on the train, the old man looks intently back at him, and we imagine (wordlessly, like Sanjay) that he is Shalini's long-lost father who may have become a sadhu in Banaras. In a more conventional melodrama, Sanjay's echoing of Shalini's father's escape from an unchosen domesticity would end in discovery, reunion. Here, it ends in a dream of death.

 

Perhaps what 27 Down's languid melancholy really captures is the duality of the long-distance Indian train ride: You're in a crowd, yet alone; relentlessly moving, but not of your own accord. And yet, the solidity and predictability of India's trains makes them feel like something to believe in. Get on a train, and the country seems to stretch out before you: Distant, but somehow accessible. When Sanjay says, “Mera train aur bheed se vishwas uthh gaya hai [I've lost my faith in crowds and trains]”, we know it's over.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 Apr 2021.

Awtar Krishna Kaul’s 27 Down, which won two National Awards

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/why-our-enduring-romance-with-the-railways-makes-for-great-cinema/articleshow/81893897.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Drives with a View - III

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Continuing our series on films about cabbies, we look at why Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese's 1976 creation, Travis Bickle, seems so eerily prescient today

Halfway through Martin Scorsese's 1976 neo-noir classic Taxi Driver, we hear a campaign speech from a US Presidential candidate. “Walt Whitman, the great American poet, said, ‘I am the man, I suffered, I was there’,” intones the fictitious Charles Palantine. “No more will we fight the wars of the few through the hearts of the many....” Palantine's words, like most dialogue in Paul Schrader's much-mythified script, speak to -- as well as for -- the film's cabdriver hero, Robert De Niro in a career-making performance as the disturbed Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle.

Unlike Palantine and Bickle, Whitman was real. His poem 'Heroes' -- appropriately chosen by Schrader – was written in the voice of the soldier-as-everyman. “Agonies are one of my changes of garments./ I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person,/ My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe...”

Other than this, Schrader's script isn't what one might call poetic. Taxi Driver is a New York film through and through, capturing the city in all its brutal, wry, laconic glory. Unlike many taxi drivers previously discussed in this column series, a cab ride with Travis Bickle rarely involves hearing his voice. Much of Scorsese's masterful tension is based on shots of De Niro's drawn, suspicious face framed in the rearview mirror as he listens to his fellow citizens in the seat behind him – and judges them harshly.

As a cab driver, Bickle is the perfect witness to the world around him. But he does not wish to be a mere witness. He sees the city as “an open sewer full of filth and scum”, a mess that needs to be cleaned up. The post-60s and pre-Giuliani New York of the film is riding high on a wave of freely available sex and drugs, and our hero wishes someone would rein it in. He wants to save it from itself. In one memorable scene, the wannabe Presidential candidate rides Bickle's taxi. When Bickle recognises him, he tells Palantine the city's dirt/immorality needs to be “flushed down the toilet” by whoever comes to power.

“Let me tell you something,” Palantine says earlier, “I have learnt more about America from travelling in taxicabs than in all the limos in the country.” The surround-sound of the campaign lets the film unfold against the backdrop of Palantine's catch-all slogan ‘We are the people’. 

Watching Taxi Driver in 2020 feels strangely prescient: Bickle appears as an early representation of a figure that has come to dominate post-Trump American political discourse; the White everyman who thinks of the country as having gone to the dogs and himself as the morally-superior saviour. As Bickle becomes increasingly unhinged, his monologues in the mirror – bookended by the famous “You talking to me?” line – refer to himself as a hero in the making: “a man who would not take it any more... someone who stood up against the filth”.

Travis Bickle is, in fact, a precursor to much else in the American nightmare of the late 20th and early 21^st century – a mentally ill man gripped by perpetual insomnia; whose sense of anomie and aimlessness leads him to gun violence. If politicians don't seem to want to 'clean up' society, he'll do it himself. But the subtext of what Bickle thinks needs to be 'fixed' is both racist and male chauvinist (though not uncomplicatedly). Meeting a White passenger who wants to murder the wife cheating on him with a “nigger” is followed by Bickle acquiring weapons – from a preppie, White, gun dealer who chooses Bickle over “a jungle bunny in Harlem” because he only deals “high-quality goods to the right people”. Bickle first uses the gun on a Black man who's amateurishly robbing his local cornershop. In one of the film's grimmest scenes, the unfazed Italian shop-owner waves Bickle off and says he'll take care of it. He then takes an iron rod to the thief's body, shouting “The fifth motherfucker this year!”

Another remarkable subplot reveals Bickle's deeply-conflicted relationship with sex and women. The same man who complains about the city's filth – this is a Central New York full of sex shows and prostitution – takes his pristine, almost prissy, date to watch a faux-instructional Swedish porn film. When she proceeds to shut him out afterwards, his interior monologue becomes bizarre and incel-ish: “I realise now how much she's just like the others, cold and distant. And many people are like that. Women for sure. They're like a union.”

The other subplot about sex is Bickle's violent rescuing of Jodie Foster's underage sex worker – a plotline echoed in Schrader's self-directed film Hardcore (1979), in which a young girl runs away from a religious suburban family to become a porn actress, and goes back home in a strangely unconvincing last scene, like Foster's Iris.

What is truly disturbing about Taxi Driver's end, though, is that he is feted for murder. Violence, when committed against 'immoral' people, it seems, makes you a hero. That once-fictional battlefield seems eerily closer to today's reality.

 Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 Dec 2020.

Game of thrones

My Mirror column:

Despite its '70s sarkaari aesthetic (Akbar Hotel's modernist Mughalia and Doordarshan-style songs), Kissa Kursi Ka is a piece of our cinematic past that speaks uncannily to the present.

“Main pratigya karta hoon ki ya toh bhrashtachar ko khatam kar doonga, ya khud khatam ho jaaunga [I swear that I will either wipe out corruption, or be wiped out myself],” announces the nation's supreme leader, thumping his chest in emotion as a roomful of parliamentarians clap obligingly.

Seem familiar? Here's another scene from the same film: the Great Leader is terribly under the weather. He lies in bed, complaining of various sorts of discomfort. His physician can find nothing wrong with him. He asks the Great Leader's private secretary -- who goes by the darkly ironic name of Deshpal -- if the GL has inaugurated anything recently. No, muses Deshpal, but there's something on the schedule. At the very mention of an inauguration, the Great Leader jumps up, cured.

Watching the brilliant Manohar Singh's performance in Kissa Kursi Ka in mid-2019 produces a strange sense of the uncanny. Fact can often feel stranger than fiction, more so when fiction manages to presage fact. In this case, it feels like it's done so by four decades. Kissa Kursi Ka was submitted to the Central Board of Film Certification in April 1975, but it did not see the light of day until 1978, after Emergency had been lifted. (Interestingly, Amrit Nahata made the film while still a Congress MP, though he became a Janta Party member soon after.)

Even if it hadn't had its reels infamously destroyed by Sanjay Gandhi (under the supervision of his yesman VC Shukla), Kissa Kursi Ka wasn't the sort of film that was likely to become a big hit. Now freely available on Youtube, Nahata's political fable has the bizarre quality of seeming even more apt in 2019.

Nahata used the tale of a poor man coached for an electoral win by a small coterie of kingmakers to depict what democracy can look like in a poor country at the mercy of power-hungry politicians. Many scenes are simplistic, but effective. In one, the new President is visited by an industrialist who “wants to solve the problems of the poor.” “Give me 10 crores,” he says, “and I'll set up one factory to make small cars. Another to make toys, to keep the people amused.” Leader Saheb initially balks, but since Garibdas donated five lakhs to his campaign, he is "mortgaged" to him. (The reference to the people's car factory acquired a bizarre layer when the Maruti factory became the site of the film's burning by Sanjay Gandhi).

Later, the transformed Manohar Singh, having gone from Gangu the jamura's grimy ganji to a maroon suit and Meerschaum pipe worthy of the 70s villain, decides that the country must be distracted from his economic failures. He makes a secret visit to the neighbouring kingdom, Andher Nagri, not to make peace but to propose a 15-day war. “Pandrah din ki ek ladaai ho jaye. Tum deshbhakti ka bhaashan dena, hum bhi deshbhakti ka bhaashan denge.... Deshbhakti ka yeh nasha paanch saal toh chalega hi. Our seats will be safe another five years. Then? We'll play another tournament.”

“Janta ko busy rakhna zaroori hai,” agrees primary kingmaker Meera (an unrecognizably youthful Surekha Sikri, enjoying herself to the hilt). The strategy is apparently foolproof enough to succeed even forty years later. Where demonetisation fails, Balakot will work.

To make its point, the darkly comic KKK steps away from the realist path. One of Nahata's favoured techniques is animation: for instance, the kursi throws off the President who's spinning excitedly 

around on it. The chair then delivers a set of eight commandments about how she should be treated: she assumes divinity, demanding worship. Like Mrinal Sen's Chorus, which presciently released a year before Emergency, KKK also uses real footage of marching boots, soldiers at the border and assemblies of protestors.

But the film's most overused form is visual allegory, casting Shabana Azmi as an annoyingly gendered personification of the country's populace. Azmi as the mute “Janta” spends the film in a fetching yellow blouse and green sari with a big Telugu-style bindi, as if she's walked out of her debut film, Shyam Benegal's Ankur (1974). Awakened from slumber by the new leader's promises, Janta is oppressed but hopeful -- only to be crushed each time she takes his new schemes at their word.

Perhaps the most chillingly resonant part of KKK is Ganga Ram's speech in Parliament, addressing members who are losing confidence in his fake promises: “Yaad rakhiye, you have not made me president. The people have. And the people are with me.”

Even as the country collapses around him, the Great Leader remains convinced by his own fictions. “I want to know what I've done that has been so bad for the country,” he whines and then preens. “Every developing country has to go through troubles. My country, too, is on the path to progress... Today we are not poor, backward, weak. Not one person is unemployed today. Everyone has been admitted in the army or police. Our janta is now filled with a new josh, a new swabhimaan. Isliye desh ki janta mere saath hai. Ab aap ko faisla karna hai ki aap kiske saath hain [Now you have to decide, who are you with]?"

The crazed Manohar Singh points at the leader of the opposition, but really, he's looking at all of us.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 April 2019

Under the covers

My Mirror column:

A chilling new film called The Tale unravels one woman’s narrative of her sexual self, and may help us all grapple more honestly with our own.

‘‘We tell each other stories in order to live,” runs the famous line from the American essayist Joan Didion. The line appears early on in Jennifer Fox’s disturbing new autobiographical film, The Tale, when the central character, who is modelled on Fox and shares her name, says it to a classroom full of documentary film students. The film’s Jenny Fox (played by Laura Dern) is a 48-year-old filmmaker and professor of documentary, and, at one level, the sentence is just about her trying to get her students thinking about how they might think about narrative, how we all use stories to give our lives structure. At another level, the Didion quote cuts straight to the heart of what The Tale is about: how we remember things, or how we choose to forget.




In her 1979 book The White Album, in which the line first appeared, Didion carried on: “We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” The Tale, which came out on US television in May and can be seen on streaming services in India, is about Fox’s adult re-examination of the narrative line she imposed upon her own childhood – or certain events in it.

48-year-old Jenny is on her way back home from shooting a documentary about women in India, when she starts to get distressed messages from her mother Nettie (Ellen Burstyn), who has just discovered and read a ‘story’ that Jenny wrote in school. That ‘story’, which Jenny’s writing teacher apparently accepted as a work of the 13-year-old girl’s highly-developed imagination, was about a sexual relationship she had had with a 40-year-old man, a running coach called Bill Ritter who was the lover of a Mrs G, Jenny’s adored riding instructor.



But what the film really wants to emphasise is that the ‘fiction’ lay less in Jenny telling her teacher that she had ‘made it up’, and more in her belief that what had happened to her was not sexual abuse but a “beautiful” experience: a love affair from which she had withdrawn, leaving the older Bill devastated. The Tale makes terrifying use of the power of cinema, to show us how we might deliberately, or subconsciously, misremember things “in order to live” – as when we watch Jenny’s first meeting with Mrs G and Bill, first played by an adolescent actress, and then (after her mother shows her a picture of how she actually looked at 13), by a much younger, chubbier actress.



One of the many subtexts in the film is the passage of time. We encounter it, of course, in the splicing together of the 13-year-old Jenny and the 48-year-old woman, each as stubborn as the other, with the older one trying somehow to defeat the anti-victimhood narrative that her younger self has cultivated for years. But we also encounter it in the adult Jenny’s repeated shrugging away of what happened as part of a time of sexual liberation: “It was the ’70s”. Mrs G and Bill’s extramarital relationship – and the fact that they confided in Jenny – made her feel special, not just because they were adults she admired, but because they were adults who seemingly rejected the social/sexual rules by which her own parents lived. “You see how miserable people look in their little nuclear units? Monogamy, marriage: it’s just killing people,” pronounces Bill to Jenny at one point.


The Tale might be interestingly read as the flipside of another film about a teenager in a sexual relationship with a much older man: Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenaged Girl (2015). While also based on a personal memoir of a real ’70s childhood – Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel set in 1976 San Francisco – The Diary could not be more different. The Diary’s 15-year-old Minnie (Bel Powley) embarks on a sexual affair with her mother’s 35-year-old boyfriend Monroe. But even at its messiest, the sex seems driven by Minnie’s wanting it. And herein lies the rub. Does Minnie misremember?



The Tale does not share Minnie’s or The Diary’s sense of sexual discovery. It is definitely a #MeToo film, in that its existence is enabled by this new moment of sexual politics, when women are finally letting themselves (and each other) speak of abusive, exploitative sexual encounters that have for years been couched as ‘normal’. Instead of The Diary’s joyful (if sometimes confused) sexual abandon, The Tale has the grim feeling of something still being grappled with: how the sexual repression narrative was flipped into a sexual liberation narrative, without women asking enough questions about whose freedoms were actually enabled, and what sorts of things could pass under the radar. As we are finding in India, in our own #MeToo moment, there is no shortage of ‘liberated’ men ‘teaching’ younger women to be free.



It is up to us all to ensure that the sexual freedom we so absolutely need doesn’t end up working, undercover, as yet another form of sexual oppression.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 June 2018.

The dreamlife of angels

My Mirror column:

On the eve of the Hindi writer Mannu Bhandari’s 87th birthday on April 3, a look at two films on which she collaborated with director Basu Chatterjee: Rajnigandha (1974) and Swami (1977).

Basu Chatterjee’s Rajnigandha (1974) was one of my favourite Hindi films long before I learnt that it was based on a famous 1960 short story by Mannu Bhandari, one of Hindi’s most well-known modern writers and an important participant in the Nayi Kahani literary movement of the 1960s. The short story, ‘Yahi Sach Hai’, has also been wonderfully translated into English by Ruth Vanita as ‘This is the Truth’, published as part of Vanita’s 2013 anthology ‘Alone Together’.

Even though it came into the world first, reading ‘Yahi Sach Hai’ for me involved working backwards from the 1974 romantic film I had grown up on. As always when a film colonises one’s imagination first, it is difficult to populate the literary work with people different from those that have impressed themselves on screen. My mind kept wanting to turn the Deepa of Bhandari’s story into the doe-eyed Vidya Sinha, and her Sanjay into the ever-smiling Amol Palekar. The imperative is strong because the cinematic adaptation really seems to ‘get’ Bhandari’s characters, deepening and broadening what we know about them and their context in ways that seem exactly right.

The film makes three fundamental changes. One, Sanjay gets a meatier role, with gossipy colleagues, office politics and a backstory for his wooing of Deepa. Two, Deepa’s old flame Nishith is renamed Naveen, with his “long hair like a poet” becoming “hippie jaise baal” in the case of the film’s Dinesh Thakur. Third, crucially, Deepa’s journey from Kanpur to Calcutta is brilliantly transformed into a Delhi-Bombay trip, with Delhi — and Sanjay — playing charming provincials to Bombay’s — and Naveen’s — sophisticated urbanity. Beyond these, however, Chatterjee remains faithful to the story, presenting us with what remains a rare Hindi film portrayal of a woman choosing between two romantic prospects.

When we meet Deepa, she is awaiting the arrival of her boyfriend Sanjay: a nice, chatty, predictable man who can turn even a romantic gesture like bringing flowers into a ritual: “Once I happened to mention that I like tuberoses very much, so he has made it a rule to bring a whole lot of them every fourth day...” She is totally convinced that Sanjay is her real love and that her teenage attachment to Nishith (Naveen) was an illusion — until she meets him again. The film takes Bhandari’s diary-like structure and transforms it into something breezily cinematic, with long shots of Deepa and Naveen enjoying the freedom of Bombay interspersed with close-ups of Deepa’s luminous face. “Proximity, distance and loneliness work to bring to the fore different emotions as the young female narrator convinces herself she is in love with one or the other man,” writes Vanita in her introduction. “Throughout the story Bhandari uses variants of the words sach, sachmuch (true, truly) as Deepa insists on the lasting truth and reality of states of mind that the reader increasingly perceives as fleeting.”

Recently, I watched another Basu Chatterjee film in which Mannu Bhandari had had an important role to play: 1977’s Swami, starring Shabana Azmi and Girish Karnad. Rajnigandha won a Filmfare award for Best Picture, Swami won it for Best Director, Best Actress and Best Story. The credit for the film’s story went to the long-departed and legendary Bengali writer Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay. But as I watched a youthful, rather frisky Shabana Azmi — Saudamini, better known as Mini — forced to forego a long-time romantic attachment to her childhood acquaintance Naren (Vikram) in favour of marriage to the stable widower Ghanshyam (Girish Karnad), I was suddenly reminded of Rajnigandha. I haven’t read the Sarat Chandra story, but it seemed to me quite remarkable how much the clean-scrubbed smiling face of Sanjay in Rajnigandha resembled the always-radiant, patient Ghanshyam (Karnad) in Swami.

If we stay with that train of thought, then both films turn out to have parallels that go beyond two masculine types —and that seem to me possibly informed by Bhandari’s own particular concerns. The context in which Swami unfolds is very different from Rajnigandha — 19th century Bengal. But Mini, like Deepa, has had the privilege of an education and Naren, as the philosophical interlocutor of her youth, holds out the possibility of freedom to pursue her intellectual interests — just like Naveen and the job he helps her get in Bombay.

In Swami, too, the moment of truth is propelled by the arrival of the heroine’s previous lover, and in a moment of passion, she abandons the gentle stability of the husband she has been trying to accept as love for a remembered excitement that she once defined love as.

In Bhandari’s ‘Yahi Sach Hai’, Deepa gets the job of teaching in a Bombay college, but the letter Nishith writes to inform her of this makes none of the revived romantic overtures she is now expecting. The story ends with Sanjay’s arrival, who, looking at her distraught face, assumes that she hasn’t got the job. She falls into his arms gratefully, not telling him that she in fact has.

But this is more open-ended than the film version, where Deepa declares she doesn’t want the job and Sanjay’s promotion will ensure that her life is the one he creates for her — not the one she might have created for herself. As in Swami, the instability of romantic love and mental companionship is traded for the calm security of marriage.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1st April 2018.

Book Review: Rahi Masoom Raza's Scene 75

Behind the Scene

My review of the remarkable 1978 Hindi novel, Scene 75, recently out in Poonam Saxena's English translation:

SCENE 75 by Rahi Masoom Raza 

Tr. by Poonam Saxena 

HARPER PERENNIAL Rs 399; Pages 224

Sometime in the 1960s, acclaimed Hindi author Rahi Masoom Raza migrated from Ghazipur to Bombay to become a dialogue writer for films. In this slim, memorable novel, Raza combines his two identities, casting an acute eye on the 1970s film industry.

At one level, Scene 75 might be read as a fictional equivalent of Manto's Stars From Another Sky: From lesbian affairs to a domestic help servicing both mother and daughter, there's undeniably titillation here. And yet, Raza isn't quite a predecessor to Madhur Bhandarkar's preachy filmic unmaskings. Scene 75's tone is deadpan: "[E]veryone in the film world is a writer except for the writer himself. Never mind if they can't even speak proper Hindi, they are all writers. From Dilip Kumar to Raaj Kumar, everyone loves to write." Or: "The film got made but was never released because it didn't have a rape scene, it didn't have a fight between Shetty and the hero... there wasn't even a Padma Khanna cabaret number." But Raza's focus isn't filmdom as much as a cut-throat milieu that impels people to invent fake selves.

Bholanath Chopra earns Rs 192 as salary but inflates the figure to 1,092. His wife Rama frequents expensive sari shops, feigning the loss of a wallet at the final moment. Others have new selves thrust upon them: to work for Phandaji, "who was very secular but didn't eat anything that had been touched by a Muslim", the primary protagonist Ali Amjad becomes Gaurishankar Lal 'Krantikari'.

In Poonam Saxena's translation, Raza's prose retains the quicksilver quality of the raconteur, with backstories looping into each other. So Bholanath's quarrel with Rama sets us off on how the Chopras acquired their flat, which leads to Rama's admirer Sarla Midha and how she went from "simple, innocent Sarla" to a wife who "liked other men's wives".

Such juicy digressions, however, do not blunt Raza's sharpness, especially on the topic of communal feeling. "The [Chopras] were an educated family, and educated people know how to hide their bigotry," he writes, before explaining why Rama Chopra, 12-and-a-half when her family was forced to flee Pakistan in 1947, "believed she had every right to hate Muslims." The self-reinforcing fact of ghettoisation was "why no one told Rama that Muslims in India had been killed, just like Hindus in Pakistan." The clarity is even more devastating 40 years later.

Published in India Today, 23 Feb 2018.