Mining the Mother Lode

My Mirror column today:

Is there a new kind of Hindi film mother? Or have they become so complicated that they transcend the category?

In Vishal Bhardwaj's film Haider, Tabu plays Ghazala, the mother of Haider (Shahid Kapoor) 

We recently watched in shock and awe as Swaroop Sampat -- playing Kareena Kapoor's mother in Ki Aur Ka -- responded to her on-screen daughter Kia's declaration that she's found the man she wants to marry with the teasing remark, “Sex ho gaya na? Important before commitment.” 

Hindi cinema, it would seem, has truly arrived in the age of the New Movie Mother. Even the lower middle class mother these days – think of the winsome Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015) – can be shown being cheerfully forthright about her progeny's sexual well-being. We have clearly left far behind us those anxious matajis who wept or threatened their way through their offsprings' romantic adventures. Nowadays, like Sampat in Ki Aur Ka, they might just be embarking on one of their own.

So is the filmi mother – that all-too-familiar weepy figure who sacrificed herself for her children (mostly her son, the hero) and thus was seen to almost deserve her quota of emotional blackmail – gone for ever? Not counting Tanvi Azmi's nasty Radhabai in Bajirao Mastani (since despite all appearances to the contrary, it was meant to represent an 18^th century family), it seems to me that the last really bitchy, clingy mother we saw on the Hindi film screen might have been Amrita Singh in 2 States – that was two whole years ago, and Singh's Kavita was so loud, shallow and son-obsessed that we were clearly meant to have no sympathy with her. In any case, even in that film, the mantle of new Indian motherhood was redeemed by Revathy, playing the frosty but civilized (read TamBrahm) foil to Amrita Singh's gross North Indian stereotype.

It's not that our films have stopped having martinets and manipulators. But their aims – and their modus operandi – are different from those of a previous generation of on-screen mothers. In just the last year and a bit, we've had Ratna Pathak Shah rejig (her real-life mother) Dina Pathak's unusual role as the disciplinarian matriarch in the Disney remake of Hrishikesh Mukherjee's classic Khubsoorat, while the bizarre Shandaar gave us a particularly evil Mummyji duo, in the shape of Sushma Seth and her horrible daughter Nikki Aneja Walia. 

In less of a caricature mode, Shakun Batra's 2012 directorial debut Ek Main Aur Ekk Tucast Pathak Shah as the mother of the hapless Imran Khan, who needs all the courage he can muster to get out of the straitjacketed life she has planned for him. More recently, Zoya Akhtar's Dil Dhadakne Do depicted a whole generation of the Delhi business elite as heartless creatures for whom their sons and daughters as nothing but pawns in their financial gameplans. These are mothers trying their hardest to keep their children under their thumb – but they seem cold and controlling rather than needy and scheming. And the driving force of their actions is the maintenance of money.

A most interesting repertoire of recent maternal roles has been Dimple Kapadia's. In Luck By Chance (2009), she was fantastic as the over-the-hill star Neena Walia, who now lives to launch her debutante daughter Nikki (Isha Shervani). In Dabangg (2010), she was the classic Hindi film mother, the most important thing in her son's emotional life – but with a twist: she had married a man other than his father. Imtiaz Ali's Cocktail (2012) gave her a more caricatureish role – the Lajpat Nagar mummyji transplanted to her son's cool London milieu, who misreads his love life completely – but Kapadia made her desire for a bahu seem deeply felt. Recently, she added much-needed spark to Homi Adajania's distressingly dull Finding Fanny (2014). As the well-endowed, easily flattered Rosie, who lives almost peaceably with her widowed daughter-in-law (Deepika Padukone), Kapadia created an engaging mother who spends years preserving her dead son's secrets and her own – but manages finally to shed these burdens and get on with her own life.

This new kind of maternal figure is one whose love of her children does not preclude a new, palpable sense of herself. She might be a working, independent, single mother like Sampat, for whom the template is probably Ratna Pathak Shah's feisty Savitri Rathore in the 2008 comic hit Jaane Tu... Ya Ja Jaane Na, trying her best to raise her son as a thoughtful feminist, away from the shadow of his patrilineal family. 

Or she might be a much more tragic, romantic character, like the intensely sexual mothers brought luminously to life by Tabu -- in Haider and then Fitoor. These characters, of course, come to us from Western literature: Haider's Ghazala is a gloriously realised version of Shakespeare's Queen Gertrude -- profoundly attached to her son Haider/Hamlet, but unable (and unwilling?) to let motherhood subsume her sexual identity, while Fitoor's Begum is a heavily sensual version of Dickens' Miss Havisham – a woman who pours her life-long bitterness into a poisonous brew that warps the young people around her. 

Deepti Naval plays a frightening version of this warped maternal figure in the powerfulNH10 (2015) a woman who fully embodies the patriarchal system that has produced her, to the extent that she can sacrifice her children to it.

We may have (thankfully) moved away from the self-sacrificing mother. But the dangerously non-maternal version remains an extreme case. What is more likely to come to populate our screens is a figure like Pathak Shah in Kapoor And Sons: loving but also chafing at her burdens, trying but failing to keep her fears and frustrations in check, letting her deepest emotions create havoc between her own children. This is the flawed mother we know well, and it is nice, finally, to be able to meet her on screen.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

Film Review: In Dabangg 2, Salman stuck to old tics, Fevicol se

My review of Dabangg 2, published in Firstpost.

Everyone in India knows at least one little brat whose every antic is deemed cho-chweet by his doting parents and grandparents, no matter how pointless or ridiculous or annoying it might seem to the rest of the world. Salman Khan is that brat writ large.

And for some reason, a disproportionately large section of the Hindi cinema-going audience has taken it upon themselves to play his adoring family. They clap if he so much as stands up, they thrill to his unsophisticated dance moves, they giggle with abandon when he makes silly faces. In the face of such a loyal loving khaandaan, who could possibly summon up the courage to suggest that the brat isn’t really that cute?

Who will risk death-by-comments by suggesting that while the floppy-haired boy-lover of Maine Pyaar Kiya vintage might have been reasonably thought of as attractive, with more than a whiff of vulnerability, it is hard to feel the same way about the nudge-nudge wink-wink persona of the thick-necked, thick-skinned 47-year old of Dabangg 2, whose tears seem like they had to be squeezed out of him with a wringer?

Dabangg 2  manages to  give the audience the good time that it seeks, in an idiom and humour that is staunchly located in Eastern UP

Not me. Instead, let me speculate about what the figure of Chulbul Pandey does for Salman Khan. The first thing to note is that he doesn’t quite sleepwalk through this particular role as he did through a Bodyguard or aReady (and consequently, that we don’t either). Perhaps those are just particularly lazy films—films where rather than creating a character for Salman Khan to play, there’s simply a kind of Salman-shaped hole in the middle of the film, which he knows he can fill by wriggling into it any which way. The only recent Salman Khan film where there was something like a role written for him was Ek Tha Tiger, where the presence of Katrina Kaif seemed to bring out a tenderly romantic side of Salman that no one had seen for years.

In Dabangg 2, it certainly isn’t love that makes the world go round. Chulbul Pandey’s idea of romantic love—more or less in line with the recent Khiladi 786’s idea of marriage as a union of earners and spenders—is letting his wife buy a shiny new sari with his money. “Hum aa gaye hain. Loot macha lo,” says our hero with generous swagger.

Abhinav Kashyap’s masterstroke with Dabangg (2010) was to create in Chulbul Pandey the kind of hero we’ve been used to seeing from the beginning of Hindi cinema up, until the 1980s—a hero with a past. Like practically every Amitabh Bachchan character in the 70s and 80s, Chulbul Pandey’s anger and rebelliousness was explained not solely by his adult life but by the traumas of his childhood. Having watched the child Chulbul’s complex relationship with his mother (Dimple Kapadia), and his consequent anger at his stepfather (Vinod Khanna) and stepbrother (Arbaaz Khan) gave the adult Chulbul’s violent rages and sentimental outbursts something like depth, an emotional quotient higher than a merely professional present would have done.

Sadly, the current film – a sequel crafted not by Abhinav Kashyap, but by Arbaaz Khan, who is Salman Khan’s brother – is left only with the present.

Chulbul Pandey, having finally made peace with his father and brother, has moved to Kanpur, and is now a happily married husband and expectant father. The villain of the previous film, Chedi Singh (Sonu Sood), has been replaced by a new bad man, Bachcha Bhaiya (Prakash Raj), who comes with two younger brothers called Chunni and Genda. (Deepak Dobriyal’s Genda must be singled out here as providing his characteristic touches of brilliance to the oft-repeated role of the lecherous small-town goon. His lines are good and he delivers them even better: witness the careful calibration between menace and patronisingness in “Arrey Aunty, maar kahan rahein hain, abhi toh hum batiya rahein hain”.) And Pandey has a new boss: the wonderful Manoj Pahwa biting greedily into a rare meaty role as the gluttonous SP Anand Mathur.

Despite this surface change of locale and introduction of new characters, there’s nothing new or unpredictable about Dabangg 2. The earlier film had set a fresh benchmark, creating the fearless cop whose status as hero was not compromised but in fact cemented as identifiable by his happily unabashed bribe-taking. This one carries on in that now-glorious tradition of “ab itni seva karte hain toh thoda mewa toh kha hi sakte hain”.

Dabangg 2 is a sort of sequel-lite: banking more or less entirely on its audience’s enjoyment in the return of an already established character, with both they and he happy to revel in his already established tics.

What Dabangg 2 does manage to do is to give that audience the good time that it seeks, in an idiom and humour that is staunchly located in Eastern UP. For instance, I thoroughly enjoyed the songs: the recycling of the familiar in a Gilori bina chatni kaise bani, the sweetness of Tore naina bade dagabaaz re and the beautiful brash hybridity of Chipka le saiyan Fevicol se.

Kareena Kapoor’s plushness in Fevicol se seems even more of a mismatch for the hoarse and unsophisticated pleasures of Mamta Sharma’s voice than Malaika’s was for Munni – but perhaps it’s the kind of deliberate mismatch that plays to different desires simultaneously.

Sonakshi Sinha, being the wife, only gets to display her gleaming fleshy back, while remaining otherwise fully clothed in saris and full-sleeved blouses. But in this universe, in which it is deemed perfectly natural for two brothers, both happily married, to celebrate by going to a kotha together, it’s a pretty remarkable thing that the wife gets to match steps with a kothewali at all.

This is a film that knows and reflects its world. And while it isn’t out to change it by any means, it wants to make sure the image in the mirror is the nicest possible.