The World Is What It Is

My Mirror column:

An internationally acclaimed Kannada film offers a funny, sad, insightful take on an India we don't often see on screen.

The most colourful character in Thithi is dead within the first ten minutes of the film. When we meet Century Gowda, thus anointed for managing to live that many years upon this earth, he seems like that familiar village fixture: a gap-toothed old man, capable of nothing except sitting on his haunches and watching the world go by. But Century Gowda is not like most people at his stage of life. Age has not withered him, nor custom staled the infinite variety of taunts that flow from his ancient tongue. "You kids neither study nor graze cattle," he berates a passing posse of uniformed schoolchildren. "No men at home to graze the buffalo?" he jeers at a woman trying to steer the lumbering beasts past him. A hapless looking fellow who scurries by dressed in an incongruous black suit gets a more personalised insult: "Has your wife left you yet?" he calls out. 

But then his nonstop activity comes abruptly to a close. The film pauses for an instant, marking the moment with a shift that is both visual and perceptual. The human world carries on — it is the animals who notice. The camera suddenly gives them to us in close-up — the rooster crowing, the cow mooing, the goat bleating, as if to announce they're alive and well, and that crumpled heap on the ground is not. 

It takes barely a minute, though, to return us to a human perspective. A crowd gathers, the old man's grandson is called, and soon enough an astrologer has been sought out to offer advice on what must be done. Thithi is the word for that funereal feast he ordains. Ere Gowda and Raam Reddy take the ritual markers with which we seek to make our lives intelligible, and craft around them a film that is about the unmarked, everyday business of living. The marking of death is part of the carrying-on of life. 

Yet Thithi is not the sort of film that is about only one thing. If it outlines the generational scaffolding upon which life in the village still stands, it also shows us the cracks that individuals can create in that structure. Century's grandson Thamanna may cleave to the rules of community, but his father Gadappa — Century's son — has long refused to abide by them. 

Played by Ere Gowda's real-life uncle Chennagowda, a wiry man with a shock of wild white hair and a thoughtful gleam in his eye, Gadappa is perhaps the film's most affecting character. We start off being amused, perhaps even a little shocked by his response to the death of his father. "No big deal," he says, striding off into the fields with his usual quarter of local liquor. As Thamanna's harried existence — negotiating with his wife, disciplining his youthful son, running around for a motor mechanic to get the water back into his fields — is juxtaposed with Gadappa's free-floating, alcohol-fuelled wanderings, one wonders if the film is setting up the householder against the ascetic. Is social obligation the glue that keeps things from falling apart, or that which unnecessarily binds us? Is Gadappa the irresponsible wastrel his son treats him as, or does his lack of worldliness makes him a model worth emulating? Even much later in the film, when his 'unfeeling'-ness is partially explained, Gadappa retains an intriguing air. 

Reddy manages to combine an observational documentary style with an almost indulgent affection for every character he places on screen. Women remain largely tangential, though watch out for the marvelous Kamalakka, who accosts a drunken customer with a threat appropriate for anyone you've ever wanted to shake by the collar: "I'll pass your life through a strainer!" Yet for all its pleasurable meandering, Thithi is not plotless. Its seemingly unplanned threads do in fact come together in the end — just not in the dramatic pitch we have been schooled to expect from cinematic resolutions. 

My favourite of these narrative threads involves Gadappa's spontaneous joining-up with a group of sheep-herders. Their surprised but ready acceptance of the old man reminded me a little of another old man who finds himself taken into a nomadic community, albeit under starkly different circumstances: the Marathi film Astu, in which Amruta Subhash's Telugu-speaking nomad finds herself sheltering an aged, confused Mohan Agashe. On an altogether different plane, Chennagowda's adamant refusal to stay in one place made me think of the immortal David Gulpili in Rolf de Heer's devastating Charlie's Country. Of course, Gadappa is rebelling against his own community; while Gulpili's Charlie is rebelling against a whole modern civilisation that has swallowed up the old aboriginal way of life. But like Gulpili, Chennagowda has a twinkling, laconic way of declaring his intentions, and a dogged pursuit of life on his own terms. He may have always wanted to wander, but he will not do so at anyone else's behest. These are spirited old men laying claim to the lands of their forefathers — but doing so in a way that rejects accumulation. 

Thithi is a remarkable, unusual film. Not just because it gives us a set of memorable characters (all non-actors) and etches in almost ethnographic fashion a rural Karnataka milieu, but because it so beautifully balances the event with the non-event, the extraordinary with the ordinary, the gently comic with the deeply sorrowful. A little like life.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5th June 2016.

Picture This: The Marathi Renaissance

My BL Ink column:
Exciting work is emerging once again from the land of Prabhat Studios: films with close ties to the social and cultural ground from which they spring.

A still from Nagraj Manjule's superb first feature, Fandry (2013)

I am no expert on Marathi cinema: I live in Delhi and have never seen a Marathi film in the theatre. I don’t even speak the language (though I love the sharply articulated sound of it). But over the last six years or so, I have seen so many interesting Marathi films at festival screenings that I have no hesitation in agreeing with pronouncements of a renaissance. What seems to me truly wonderful is the variety of films being made, and how close their ties are to the social and cultural ground from which they rise. 

Astu, which I saw last week, is named for a Sanskrit word that translates to ‘so be it’. Directed by the long-time director duo Sunil Sukhtankar and Sumitra Bhave, Astu centres on the transformation of a man’s relationship with the world as a result of Alzheimer’s. Mohan Agashe plays a retired Sanskrit professor who goes from being a sagacious old man to an overgrown child. As he loses his memory, his elder daughter Ira (Irawati Harshe) must deal with a father who no longer behaves like a father. But to find the strength to do so, she must first forgive him. Astu offers a quietly terrifying vision of ageing and life: if the growing defencelessness of the old is a regression to childhood, children’s transition to adulthood seems to make them more brutal.

The film might have worked purely as a fraught family portrait. But Bhave and Sukhtankar are interested in something more ambitious. Against the educated upper- middle-class Marathi family with its intellectualised responses and complex dynamics, they pit a poor Telugu-speaking migrant woman who seems instinctively to know what is needed. If she worries, it is only about how to feed another mouth. The veteran Agashe is great at depicting the professor’s increasingly childlike dependence on the goodness of others — and the immensely talented Amruta Subhash won a National Award as the embodiment of that goodness. The filmmakers also make evocative use of an elephant (which Agashe becomes obsessed with) to move the film into a more mythical register, charging the beast with the symbolic heft of his move from culture to nature.

Despite all these things working for it, the film is not flawless. It feels a little flabby, and its father-daughter conversations about philosophy — Zen or Mahabharat — sound pretentious rather than thought-provoking. The final irritant is harder to articulate: there is something deeply Brahminical about the milieu, the characters and their concerns. Nothing wrong with that — a Brahmin subculture is as legitimate as any other, you might say. But there’s something annoying about the film’s almost ideological equation of Sanskrit with the highest form of knowledge, with god-like-ness. And the fact that Brahmin-ness is constantly played on, but never overtly invoked.

That’s the thing about caste at the upper end of the hierarchy — it is made invisible: we’re all supposed to pretend it doesn’t matter. At the lower end of the hierarchy, no one has the luxury of that pretence. So I’m glad that Marathi cinema is beginning to make room for films that speak of — and from — that predicament, too. Baboo Band Baja, made in 2010, centred on a young boy from a community of bandwalas. The film flagged the question of whether the boy could go to school and hope to move out of the system, or be forced to continue in the family profession. Rajesh Pinjani’s decision to embody the two points of view in the mother and father was effective, if a bit ham-handed.

Nagaraj Manjule’s semi-autobiographical Fandry, released in 2013, deals much more frontally with the caste question, interestingly also via a young boy in a rural setting trying to deal with the conflicting imperatives of his home and school milieus. Sanskrit appears in this film, too, though from a very different angle: Jabya’s classmate Vedant Kulkarni, the studious good boy to whom he and his friends go for notes, has (like the adult Ira in Astu) a Sanskrit teacher for a father. Jabya’s own father, in contrast, cannot even read his son’s secret love letter when he stumbles upon it. Caste is a plain fact of life here, and Manjule doesn’t beat around the bush about it. Early in the film we hear Jabya’s mother say how he’d throw even more tantrums if he were fair-skinned — and she’s not joking. When Jabya gets besotted with his classmate Shalu, it’s apparent her fair-skinned Brahmin-ness is crucial to his desire.

Colour is important to Manjule’s film in other ways. It is beautifully shot, with a palette that echoes his theme. The desiccated landscape of rocks and spiny bushes is bleached of all colour, as drab as the lives Jabya and his family live. Jabya’s desire for bright things — and his fruitless search for a mythical bird — shows his world in aching relief.

Other recent Marathi films that have gotten noticed at the National Awards include Gabhricha Paus (The Damned Rain, 2009) about farmer suicides in Vidarbha; Umesh Kulkarni’s Valu, Vihir and 2012’s Deool (the latter is among the more powerful films I’ve seen about the commercialisation of faith), Sujay Dahake’s 2011 paean to school life, Shala; Paresh Mokashi’s Dadasaheb Phalke biopic Harishchandrachi Factory (2009) and Sandesh Kulkarni’s Masala (2012), inspired by the Chordias, a couple who grew from nothing to become owners of a masala empire. Masala is a Guru without the gloss: unlike that glorification of Dhirubhai Ambani’s questionable tactics, Masala makes business seem both honest and admirable.

A lot of Marathi cinema emerges out of a cross-fertilisation with theatre. One can see the difference from Bollywood in the substantial scripts, the use of actors rather than stars, and an attention to locations. Yes, sometimes the films can be verbose, and when they try to cater to the commercial side of things by adding item songs, they can be tacky as well. But on the whole, this is a world well worth trying to enter.

Published in the Hindu Business Line.