All the perfumes of Arabia

My Mirror column:

Uplifting and devastating by turns, Vinod Kamble’s 2019 debut feature Kastoori (The Musk) is the kind of coming-of-age narrative that Indian cinema needs more of.

The first time we see Gopi’s face, he has just set eyes on a filthy public toilet. For most viewers of Vinod Kamble’s Kastoori (The Musk), the sight of that toilet – the next shot – would likely be enough to make us retch. Or at least make us want to bang the door shut and get as far away as we can. Gopi, however, can’t do that. He must step into the cubicle instead, a broom in one hand and a bucket of water in the other, his face impassive as he gets to the cleaning work he does alongside his mother.

As Kamble’s powerful debut feature proceeds, we see his teenaged young protagonist Gopi do all kinds of jobs that remain unofficially yet inescapably ‘reserved’ for Dalits in India, crucial jobs shunned by caste Hindus for their proximity to dirt and the dead. He helps his father bury unclaimed dead bodies for the police department, he assists other young men from the community in cleaning out septic tanks and, finally, assists a doctor who conducts autopsies.

Kastoori, available to view online till August 2 as part of the 2020 edition of the New York Indian Film Festival, derives much of its verisimilitude from Kamble’s own experiences growing up in a Dalit family of sanitation workers in Barshi village in Maharashtra’s Solapur. As with Kamble’s own life, education seems to offer Gopi the only way out of a poverty exacerbated by caste. But as the film makes sadly clear, staying in school is not easy, precisely under these circumstances.

“Dekhti main tere ko, kaise kaam pe nai aata tu [Let me see how you don’t come to work],” says Gopi’s mother angrily, before tearing up his textbook. Gopi is good at school and wants desperately to continue, but she does not have the wherewithal to support him. “Number aane se pet nahi bharta [Good marks won’t fill your stomach],” she scoffs. He has to earn his keep, and that means leaving school if that’s the only way his father’s job can stay in the family.

Poverty-stricken parents pulling a child out of school to join a caste-bound family occupation has been the theme of at least two previous coming-of-age Marathi films with Dalit protagonists. In Rajesh Pinjani's 2012 release Baboo Band Baja (available on a streaming website), a bartanwali and midwife tries to keep her little son in school, but finds herself battling her husband, who believes his son cannot escape a life playing music at funerals, as his grandfather and father did. In Nagaraj Manjule’s pioneering 2013 debut Fandry (the word means ‘pig’), a teenager from a pig-rearing Dalit agricultural family suffers his father's fatalism alternating with drunken rages. “You won’t die if you bunk one more day!” he says the first time we see him speak to his son.

Caste isn’t too sharply foregrounded in Baboo Band Baja, but there are frequent references that suggest it, such as the father’s angry complaint that band-wallas are always made to wait outside, never invited in. Fandry (also on a streaming platform) is much more upfront about caste: the visibility of Jabya’s ‘polluting’ work outside school instantly cancels out the minimal claims to constitutional equality made inside school walls. Kastoori carries on that necessary, painful task of measuring the Indian state’s promises against what society actually offers – and it does so with quiet aplomb.

The same classmates who shake Gopi’s hand when he wins an essay prize (Kamble makes a point by making it a Sanskrit essay) turn against him after they spy him helping clean a septic tank. “Here comes the sweeper, he stinks,” they murmur. “We should tell the teacher.” But Kamble knows that the schoolchildren holding their noses are only one end of the systemic rot – at the other end is the doctor who insists that the sweeper’s schoolgoing son replace his father, and the activist who sees no irony in a child doing the back-end work for a workshop about Dalit children’s education.

Caught between beaten-down alcoholic fathers and hard-scrabble frustrated mothers, youngsters in these films find other allies. Gopi’s lovely grandmother with the quavering voice is one such. Others find support outside the family. In a plot-line that presages Manjule’s massively successful Sairat (2016), when Fandry’s Jabya gets shyly besotted with an upper caste classmate called Shalu, he confides in the local cycle shop owner Chankya (played by Manjule himself). Close friendships between boys are also central to all these films – Kastoori wouldn’t be half as uplifting as it is without the warmth of Gopi’s close friend Aadim, the son of a Qureishi butcher who also understands what it’s like to be perceived as doing ‘unclean’ work.

Inspired by Iranian cinema’s use of children’s stories, debacles abound – a lost schoolbag in Baboo Band Baja, a crushed cycle in Fandry, a trickster selling fake goods in Kastoori -- while the search for beauty abides. The mythical ‘kali chimni’ (black sparrow) for which Jabya roams the woods in Fandry metamorphoses, in Kastoori, into Aadim and Gopi’s saving up to acquire the legendary perfumed substance of the film’s title. But Kamble ends his film on a remarkable note, silently redefining what beauty means. In a visual homage to the stone-throwing last shot of Fandry, that was itself a homage to the last shot of Shyam Benegal’s Ankur, Gopi flings away the bottle of perfume. Because perfumed beauty would be camouflage, and camouflage is not the answer.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 Jul 2020.

Status and the status quo

My Mirror column:

Anubhav Sinha’s fearless Article 15 uses a pacy police procedural to make Indians sit up and pay attention to an aspect of our lives we pretend not to see: caste.

In an early scene in Article 15, a newly anointed IPS officer called Ayan Ranjan is being driven to his first posting when another policeman tells him a story. When Ram returned from his 14-year exile to finally claim his late father’s kingdom, the villages of Ayodhya lit up their homes with diyas in celebration. But one village had lit no lamps. “Why is there no light here?” asked Ram of the villagers. “Our darkness makes your palace shine even brighter,” they replied.

This story is, of course, told in the Ramayana, a part of the origin myth of Diwali, and one among thousands of tendrils of story that curl out of the central vein of the great epic. Its appearance at the beginning of Anubhav Sinha’s film may seem to come apropos of nothing – but in fact we are being led expertly, chillingly, to the underlying darkness that illuminates our palaces.

For it seems no coincidence that this story, about an epic hero’s ascension to the throne, is told to Ayushmann Khurrana’s character, Ayan: a young man about to ascend to a less mythic, but very real position of power. And it also seems no coincidence that the teller is an older colleague, a local man with far greater experience as a policeman, but one who is fated to remain much lower down the bureaucratic hierarchy. Almost none of those who enter the police at a lower level are able to rise through the ranks into the top administrative grades that are automatically handed to those who qualify through the national civil service examination. The Indian Police Service, too, is a kind of caste.

As a St Stephen’s College graduate who only returns from travelling around Europe at his father’s bidding, Ayan is clearly from the upper echelons of what we Indians insist on calling the middle class. He has the educational grounding and the cultural capital needed to clear the civil services examination (which, it is suggested, his old friend Satyendra (Aakash Dabhade) does not). He is also a Brahmin. And now, as the IPS officer in charge of Lalganj, he sits at the top of every possible hierarchy. And hierarchy, with caste at its root, is Sinha’s chosen theme.

By making their protagonist the epitome of privilege, Sinha and his screenwriter Gaurav Solanki demonstrate how hierarchy can be invisible to those who do not suffer its privations. But when that privileged outsider sets out to educate himself, we see how insiders identify themselves and others by their birth-based positions in the pecking order – and how each and every action is governed by a knowledge of those positions. So if the shop is in a Pasi village, then water from it will not be consumed by anyone higher up in the caste hierarchy – i.e. most people. The feisty Dalit woman activist (Sayani Gupta) might get a job cooking midday meals for government schoolchildren, but as soon as her caste becomes known to the eaters, the food is simply thrown away. From sharing a meal to giving a job, from education to marriage to party politics, caste is the invisible filter through which all Indians perceive one another.

Even for those who successfully fight or work their way out of their ascribed positions, it is almost impossible to achieve social equality. The film offers a sharp take on how this is true even within the police force, whose members wield so much institutional power. The most complex character in this regard is that of Jatav ji (played by the ever-brilliant Kumud Mishra), and its most powerfully etched relationship that of Jatav with his colleague Brahmdutt (an equally superb Manoj Pahwa, whose opening line “In fact Brahmdutt Singh, sir” reveals a great deal about him – as does his feeding of stray dogs, which evoked for me the UP chief minister’s feeding of calves).

The point Sinha and Solanki drum in is that our collective belief in hierarchy is still way more powerful than the equality on which our republic is premised. It is civilisational. And more than 70 years since we elected to govern ourselves by a Constitution that declares us all equal, we are still unable to see beyond the filter.

Those at the bottom of the hierarchy are hardest hit by this: as the film’s most promising but least fleshed-out character, the “Daliton ka Robin Hood” Nishad (Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub), puts it, “We sometimes become Harijan, sometimes Bahujan, we just haven’t managed to become plain and simple jan yet, that we might be counted in the Jan Gan Man of the national anthem.”

But those at the top are loath to cede their positions of power, often justifying the status quo in ‘practical’ terms. “Aukaat mein nahi rahengeSir, toh kaam hi nahi kar payenge (If people don’t stay in their place, no work can be done),” says local contractor Anshu Nahariya. Then he adds, “Aukaat joh hum denge wahi hai. Aur jo humko milegi woh hamari hai. Aukaat toh sabki hoti hai na Sir. (Status is what we give them. And what is given to us, that is ours. Of course everyone has a status, Sir.)”

But our philosophical justifications are much worse. “Sab baraabar ho jayenge toh raja kaun banega? (If everyone becomes equal, then who will be king?)” as the driver of the police jeep asks, not quite rhetorically. To live in a country where Article 15 is not just the law, we shall have to become a people no longer seeking a king.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 July 2019.

Gurvinder Singh Interview: "Writing and cinema are completely different"

An edited version of this interview was published in Vantage, the web section of The Caravan on 11 August 2016.

Gurvinder Singh, who trained at the Film and Television Institute of India, is best known for his two feature films. Anhe Ghore Da Daan (Alms for the Blind Horse, 2011) and Chauthi Koot (The Fourth Direction, 2015). Anhe Ghore Da Daan premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and won the special jury award at Abu Dhabi. It also received the National Awards for best direction, cinematography, and best Punjabi film. Singh’s second film has won awards at festivals in Belgrade, Singapore and Mumbai, as well as the National Award for best Punjabi film. A powerfully atmospheric portrait of Punjab in 1984, Chauthi Koot is an adaptation of the short stories ‘Chauthi Koot’ and ‘Main Hun Thik Thak Haan’ by Punjabi writer Waryam Singh Sandhu from his short story collection Chauthi Koot. The film released in cinemas across India last Friday, with English subtitles.

On 5 August 2016, the writer and critic Trisha Gupta met Singh at his parents’ home in Noida. During the conversation, they discussed his interest in Punjab, adapting literature into film, and learning from the late avant garde filmmaker Mani Kaul, the face of parallel cinema in India.

Trisha Gupta: Did you always want to make films set in Punjab? Is that where you grew up?

Gurvinder Singh: When I went to FTII, Punjab was nowhere in the picture for me, though I knew the [spoken] language well. The Punjab I had heard about was the Punjab of Partition. My [paternal] grandfather used to be the manager of a rice mill near Rawalpindi, but he had moved his family to Amritsar. They happened to live in a largely Muslim neighbourhood, and when the riots broke out in 1947, my grandmother escaped with my father—he was two, and took shelter in the Golden Temple. My grandfather returned from Rawalpindi and found the house burnt. Finally he went to the Golden Temple and found his family. There was nothing left, so they kept moving. His brother was in Shimla, so they went there. Then Gwalior, Ganganagar, Assam—wherever, for a job. For five years or so after Partition, they were very unsettled. Finally they came to Delhi and managed to set up a business here.

My maternal grandmother was from Kasur, she used to go to Bulla Shah’s mazaar every day. And my maternal grandfather was from Patti. Kasur and Patti are like Lahore and Amritsar, across the border. Luckily he got a job in Delhi before the Partition, and moved here.

I was born in Rajouri Garden, a gadh of migrant Punjabis. Everybody’s stories were of pre-Partition Punjab. They never lived in East Punjab. We never visited Punjab. I could not even read Punjabi. My reading until FTII had been in English, and literature translated into English from other languages. But then I thought ki film banana hai toh Hindi mein banana hai—If I have to make a film, it has to be in Hindi--and so I should read in Hindi. I had some friends from a Hindi literature background. I started with [the writer] Mohan Rakesh, then a lot of [Saadat Hasan] Manto, Krishna Baldev Vaid, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Agyeya, [Gajanan Madhav] Muktibodh.

Then in the library I came across the name Gurdial Singh, and [his book] Anhey Ghore Da Daan. Punjabi toh mujhe aati nahi thhi [laughs]—I didn’t know Punjabi. I read five-six books of his in Hindi. Gurdial Singh is the most translated Punjabi writer. Suddenly, I thought, this nobody has touched. I have not seen this side of Punjab at all. This kind of character, this kind of issue, this kind of rural Punjab. His descriptions were very Chekhovian: the atmosphere, the mood, the landscape—with great feeling. Anhe Ghore stayed at the back of my mind. I thought if there is one book I want to make a film of, it is this… and I’d never been to Punjab!

TG: Do you think the book’s Punjabi-ness was what struck a chord?

GS: Of course, there was that desire to connect with Punjab—where your roots are, but you’ve never lived. When I met Gurdial Singh, he told me he was teaching in a college in Bhatinda in the [19]70s. And he basically wrote about what he was observing at that time: the thermal power plant was being built, the railway lines, the canals—they had just come up. It was the end of the Nehruvian era of infrastructure.

My other connection to Punjab was music.

TG: Are you a musician as well?

GS: No, no. But music took me to Punjab. As a child I had heard artistes like Asha Singh Mastana, Surinder Kaur (she even sang in Bollywood) who sang jugni, jindwa and heer. The texts are folk, but they were popular radio artistes. They used newer instruments like the harmonium.

Soon after I graduated from FTII, somebody had brought some cassettes from Pakistan, of qissa. And I found a book by Alka Pande on Punjabi folk instruments. After reading it, and doing some more research, I realized there were qissa singers in Indian Punjab, too. So I applied to the India Foundation for the Arts, for a two-year grant to travel with these singers, and document their work.

I followed these dhadis [singers]. When my money ran out, I asked the IFA, and they gave me some more money, so I actually travelled for over four or five years. I was living in Delhi. I was shooting myself. I would just pick up a sound recordist and take my car and go. Sometimes we would go to a mela, or a dargah, or a wedding—they would start at sunset and then go on till sunrise. They take breaks in between, they have tea, they drink also.
One arrangement is of three or four people: the lead singer is the Agu, he always has a tumba or the smaller tumbi; the accompanying singer is the Pichhu; one person on the drum, the dhad; and sometimes one on the algoza. 

TG: The algoza! I've only heard the Manganiyars use it.

GS: Yes. The one these dhadis use is somewhat different. Another arrangement is of sarangi and dhad.
Sufi dhadis are Muslim, and they either tell tales of the Sufi saints, or things like Heer, which are part of the Sufi tradition. Sikh dhadis were also [originally] Muslim, but they converted and now sing about the Sikh warriors.

All the people I was connecting with were from the lower castes. All the qissa walas were Balmikis, Mazhabis. Listeners were mostly peasantry, mostly Sikhs. You know, after the Partition, all the dargahs of Punjab have been managed and kept alive by Hindus and Sikhs.   

TG: So did you make the documentary?

GS: The material was so much that I really didn't know how to compile it. [Laughs] So I decided to focus on one person I was really fond of, with whom I'd spent the most time. His name was Pala, so that's what I called the film.

This is how I discovered Punjab. Suddenly the characters from Anhe Ghore Da Daan started coming alive for me: their anxiety, their relation to caste status.

TG: Caste is the thing that jumps out at you watching the film. We're supposed to think of Punjab as casteless.

GS: Yes, I was also brought face-to- face with caste: the distinction was so strong. The fact that the lower castes have their houses on the periphery of the village and live in dirty conditions, whereas the upper castes live in big mansions... And then the gurdwaras, which one thought were these casteless places— but most villages, had two. The lower castes were technically not prevented from coming into the upper caste gurdwara, but they were second-hand worshippers there. They had no power there. So, they would make a gurdwara of their own.

I read the novel [Anhey Ghore Da Daan] in 1999. And in 2009, I wrote the script. I explored other options in between, but in the end I knew it was this. Although I knew it would be very difficult to find a commercial financier for it: this subject, and that too in Punjabi.

TG: Did you ever think of making it in Hindi?

GS: No. You've seen the film. Can you make those people talk in Hindi!

Eventually it was financed by the NFDC [National Film Development Corporation]. They also partially funded my second film.

TG: What was the reaction to Anhe Ghore Da Daan in Punjab?

GS: I got very diverse reactions: one person saying “I had heard so much about it, but I didn't understand anything; what are you trying to say.” And another person saying, “It is so beautiful, I have seen it five times.” I think the young have been more open to it. Especially for those who want to make films, it has become a learning text. I have received a hundred requests from young aspiring filmmakers in Punjab to assist me. And they are making things inspired by the film. Sometimes copying something from it. Just on their own... some of them are very young, not even out of school yet. 

TG: Are there any film schools in Punjab?

GS: No! Not one. 

TG: Are you in conversation with other filmmakers in Punjab?

GS: No.

TG: Where does the commercial Punjabi film industry operate out of?

GS: Chandigarh and Toronto. And Vancouver. They have approached me now, to fund my films. I might consider, so long as there is no interference.

TG: Your entry into Punjab was music. And that's also part of the Bollywood version of Punjab. Do you think Punjab still has that vibrant culture of music and performance?

GS: The kind of people I was documenting have passed away. It was an oral tradition, and their children did not carry it on. Who wants to learn a qissa by heart to perform for twelve hours? Now the only songs are about daaru and guns.

Earlier the upper castes were not the performers—they were the listeners. But after independence, the industry has been dominated by Jatts: Gurdas Mann, Harbhaja Mann, Babbu Mann, Amarinder Gill, now Diljeet Dosanjh, who is actually very talented. There are one or two exceptions to this Jatt domination, like one singer called Miss Pooja. She is very popular, but little known outside Punjab -- you wouldn't have heard of her. 

Also now, the only way to enter the Punjabi film industry is to establish yourself as a singer.

TG: That is unique, true. Talking of Diljit Dosanjh, did you watch Udta Punjab?

GS: No, not yet. I will take my time and watch it. (grins)

TG: Anhe Ghore dealt with caste, and Chauthi Koot also has a political subject, the Sikh militancy. 

GS: I did not ever want the subject to weigh heavy on the cinematic form. For me the first thing when I was travelling was a childlike desire, that these faces will speak for themselves. I had not heard the kind of Punjabi they spoke, not personally, and not in cinema. It's different – it's more rustic, more rough. There are a lot of puns. Anhe Ghore is set in the south, the cotton growing belt, near Bhatinda.

TG: Malwa.

GS: Yes. Malwa stretches right from Ferozepur to Patiala, it touches Rajasthan. And Chauthi Koot is set on the border, the Manjha, down till Ferozepur and up till Gurdaspur. My Punjabi is more close to the Manjha.

TG: How did you come to make Chauthi Koot?

GS: I knew I wanted to make a film about the insurgency. I had earlier thought of another story of Waryam Singh Sandhu's. It was called 'Bhajjian Baahein' (Broken Arms). It was also very beautiful, about a Hindu grain trader family, and how one member is gunned down by a terrorist. I had taken his permission to make that, in fact. But then he said, I have written more about that period. So, I went and purchased this book [of his stories] from Sahitya Akademi, and immediately I was bowled over by these two stories.

TG: How did you bring the two -- ‘Chauthi Koot’ and ‘Main Hun Thik Thak Haan’ -- together? That is the most striking thing, structurally.

GS: First I thought ki ek hi ka banana hai—just make one. And there was
something very modern about the train story: it was almost like a thriller. You don't know where they are going, who they are.

TG: That is the dominant feel of that section of the film. Was that true of the text as well?

GS: In the text, they are schoolteachers who have been assigned some duty in a school near Amritsar. I felt there was no need to say that. Writing and cinema are completely different—giving information that way in cinema will work against the film.

Anyway, this would have been a half-an- hour film. Then, I thought I would make the story of Joginder and the dog [A character from 'Chauthi Koot' who is told by militants to forcibly silence his dog lest it draw attention to them]. But then it struck me, why not both? Once it came to me, to enclose the Joginder story in the train story, I was thrilled. Because the device also breaks linearity. Anhe Ghore is also non-linear, moving between the city and village. Here, I constructed the connection between the two stories: the man in the train, remembering himself and the woman walking in the dark, and arriving at Joginder's house.

TG: Why did you move away from making documentaries? What is at stake for you in making fiction?

GS: I was not making films about big political issues, which is what documentary is in popular perception. It can be done in documentary, but somehow I felt that in fiction I could foreground the form better. The way the story is being told is an equal knowledge-giver, an equal source of entertainment as what is being told. In documentary, I felt I was painting over a given surface. Fiction allowed me the feeling of an empty canvas.

TG: The fact that you're adapting from literature doesn't limit you?

GS: No. I had complete freedom to remove and add things. For example, in the story, there was no storm. Joginder is taken away by the police, the villagers gather to protest: I had that in the script. But while shooting, the storm happened, and I immediately knew I wanted to use it. The producer asked me, “You really don't want to shoot that section?” I said, “No, I have an alternative, which is more poetic, more cinematic.”  

TG: I had actually put that down as a question about Chauthi Koot: "Was the coming of the monsoon part of the original story?"! Changing something like this while shooting, that takes courage.

GS: Yes, these are bold decisions.

TG: What are your thoughts on the independent cinema movement in India?

GS: It is still in a very nascent stage. I like parts of Court, I like Ship of Theseus. But we have to create a community. Anand Gandhi [who made Ship of Theseus and has founded his own production company] is trying, through his own company, inviting people to make films. He says he wants to change the ecosystem of this industry. It's great that somebody is thinking big. Because others are just struggling. It's not easy to do the second film, even after the first. And I don't even live in Bombay.

TG: I believe you live in Bir, in Himachal.

GS: Yes, a year and a half now. I lived in Bombay for three years, when Mani Kaul was there.  

TG:  What would you say is the most important thing you learnt from him?

GS: Image ka bhoot unhone mere dimaag se nikaal diya—He got me to stop being possessed by the image. Cinema is not a visual medium, he insisted, it is a temporal medium. It is like music, it is time. It may unfold in space, but it is time.The normal way of editing is that as soon as the information is grasped, you cut. But if you make people look at things longer, make them reflect on things after they have grasped the information, they suddenly become aware of the passing time. It works in reverse, too—if you cut before the information has been fully absorbed, then also people become conscious of time: ki dekhne nahi diya poora, samajh mein nahi aaya kya hua—we weren’t able to watch it completely, we didn’t understand what happened. He altered my way of looking through the camera.

And then, sound. The source of the sound image need not be on the screen. You have to create the world beyond the edges of the frame. Anhe Ghore was a complete exercise in that. Now, when I write the script, I think more about the sounds that will layer each shot: from a distance, close by, or something disturbing. Because you can have only one image on screen at a time, but you can have a hundred tracks of sound.

Redemption Songs: Jai Bhim Comrade

Anand Patwardhan’s revelatory, sprawling documentary Jai Bhim Comrade is a remarkable record of the visual and aural history of the contemporary Dalit movement in Maharashtra.

A man stands next to a truck, using a massive pitchfork to unload a mound of garbage from it. The camera pans downward, and we see that he is ankle-deep in garbage, garbage that is strewn indiscriminately across a vast open maidan. This sea of untreated, rotting trash, occasionally rising into little hillocks where the trucks have been unloading their cargo, serves as one of Mumbai's few designated rubbish dumps — and the man we are watching at work is a designated municipal sanitation worker.
 

Yet he is bare-bodied and barefoot, working as hazardously as he has for nearly 20 years: without being made a permanent employee, without being given even the most basic equipment to protect his body from the dangers hidden in the garbage: sharp objects, acidic substances, and the constant threat of infection. For a long time, they did not give us even water to clean ourselves, he says. If our truck broke down, no-one would give us a ride. After they finally created a union, Mumbai's sanitation workers demanded that the municipal corporation supply them with gumboots and rubber gloves. But the corporation has refused, it is fighting the case in court. They have the money to pay the massive fees of big lawyers, says the man softly, but they can't afford to give us gumboots.

The sanitation workers appear for perhaps 10 minutes of Anand Patwardhan's film, but there is something about the sequence that stays with you. The matter-of-fact way in which the workers describe their merciless working lives. The unredeemed grimness of the visuals. The municipal worker who identifies his caste as 'Jai Bhim wala'. And overlaying all of this, a sonorous voice singing "My Raghu went to Mumbai": words and picture and music melding to show us how tenaciously caste still holds our attitudes to labour in its grip.

The work of sanitation in India is still inevitably assigned to Dalits, with both the work and the worker being treated with a palpable disdain that can only stem from deeply-ingrained notions of pollution and purity. Later in the film, watching upper middle class Marathi interviewees couch their distaste for Ambedkar Jayanti celebrations in terms of crowds and dirt, one thinks of the academic Aditya Nigam's disturbing suggestion that modern incarnations of upper caste privilege continue to have a powerful afterlife "precisely because they are no more articulated in the old language of caste", circulating instead in 'modern' discourses of "merit", "efficiency" and "hygiene".

The continuing existence of caste-based discrimination, as well as its consistent disavowal – by savarna elites, by right wing political formations, but also by a tragically blinkered left movement – this is the subject of Jai Bhim Comrade.

It is an epic subject, and in Patwardhan's hands, it receives epic form.

{	The work of sanitation in India is still inevitably assigned to Dalits, with both the work and the worker being treated with a palpable disdain that can only stem from deeply-ingrained notions of pollution and purity.

The narrative begins with the deaths of 10 Dalits in Mumbai's Ramabai Nagar locality in 1997, when the police opened fire on a peaceful gathering of people protesting the desecration of an Ambedkar statue. The brutal killing of innocents, and the impunity with which the police justified their action — even producing doctored video footage to suggest that those mowed down were attempting to set fire to some tankers on the other side of the highway – deeply affected Vilas Ghogre, a Dalit musician and poet.

Ghogre was what in Marathi is called a shahir – a poet for a social cause. He had long been part of Ahavan, the cultural wing of the CPI (Marxist-Leninist), before being expelled from it for "deviations" from the party path. He also happened to be someone whom Anand Patwardhan had worked with closely. No one who has seen Patwardhan's Hamara Shahar (1985) can forget the riveting voice of Ghogre singing 'Katha sunon he logon, vyatha suno he logon' (Listen to this story, people/ Listen to this pain). Patwardhan met Ghogre several more times, recording more of his powerful music on tape, but then lost touch with him. So when, a few days after his visit to Ramabai Nagar, Ghogre tied a blue cloth around his head and hung himself from the ceiling of his hut – leaving behind a scrawled note on the wall that read: "Down with the police action. I salute the martyred sons of Bhim. Hail Ambedkarite unity. Shahir Vilas Ghogre." – Patwardhan was moved and disturbed enough to take his camera and go to Ramabai Nagar. That initial visit was the beginning of a 14-year-long journey, at the end of which Patwardhan had collected over 300 hours of footage.

The 3 hour film he has finally culled out of it is perhaps the closest thing we have to a visual and aural history of the contemporary Dalit movement in Maharashtra. It is first and foremost, a commemoration of the many deaths that have followed the Ramabai Nagar firings: Ghogre, of course, but also Bhagwat Jadhav, a young Dalit Panther leader killed by the Shiv Sena at a protest rally in 1974; Bhai Sangare, a Panther ideologue whose razor-sharp oratory may have caused his death in 1999; the Bhotmanges, killed in Khairlanji in 2006; and many others. So Patwardhan takes us stoically into bereaved Dalit homes, speaking to women who have not allowed themselves to grieve, or men who lament that they have failed to "mentally discard caste". He documents the long-drawn failure of the inquiry commission and the courts to impugn Manohar Kadam, the police inspector who gave orders to fire in Ramabai Nagar.

Patwardhan (second from left) speaks at the VIBGYOR International Film Festival, Thrissur

Patwardhan's quiet interviewing of Ghogre's erstwhile comrades is a clear indictment of the Indian Left's failure to recognise caste – symbolised here in their remarkable comment about his headscarf at the time of death 'not really' being blue, the colour associated with Ambedkarite movements. But even as he tracks the Dalit-led Republican Party of India lurching from one compromised alliance to another (the Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party, even, in a grotesque instance of political erasure, the Shiv Sena and the BJP), Patwardhan seems less interested – or able – to explain how a figure like the radical Dalit poet Namdeo Dhasal, once a Dalit Panther, could elect to join hands with the Hindu right.

But perhaps a search for such an answer is futile. It is valuable enough that Patwardhan shows us a whole host of people who question the holy cows of mainstream Hindu society: the daughters of an Ambedkarite father who speak laughingly of how they have to hide their aetheism from schoolmates; the Dalit leader who gets a still-hesitant crowd to say "Ganapati cha baap kumhaar" (The father of Ganesh is the potter who made him); the golden-voiced Sheetal Sathe of the Kabir Kala Manch whose political choices – the Sambhaji Bhagat songs she sings, the man she has chosen to marry – radically depart from her mother's simple religiosity (but without rancour).

In the 10 days since I saw Jai Bhim Comrade, the newspapers have reported that 27-year-old Sheetal Sathe is now on the run, "wanted by investigating agencies for her alleged Maoist links". Meanwhile the Patna High Court has acquitted 23 persons accused of perpetrating the massacre of 21 Dalits at Bathani Tola in Bhojpur in 1996, citing "defective evidence" (all 23 had been convicted by a sessions court in 2010). In legislative news, the government has proposed increasing the penalties for a 19 year old law that prohibits the hiring of manual scavengers: a tacit acknowledgement of the fact that not a single case has been registered under it so far, while 25 lakh households still depend on the manual removal of 'nightsoil' by Dalits.

In such a world, even Patwardhan's too-pat technique – tripping up random English-speaking people with seemingly sanguine questions – seems entirely justified. "Dalit issue frankly is definitely ameliorated over the past half a decade or so," says one undergraduate Barista-goer. Can you cite any examples, asks Patwardhan. "Oh no," says the boy calmly, "there's no-one like that in my circle."

Published in the Sunday Guardian.

The Politics of Prakash Jha

A critical essay, published in The Caravan, August 2011, tracing the well-known filmmaker's changing political trajectory:

IN PRAKASH JHA'S Raajneeti, a commercial and critical hit from 2010, there’s a pivotal scene in which Nana Patekar — playing Brij Gopal, longtime mentor and strategician to the dynastic political party around whose fortunes the film revolves — arrives in a Dalit neighbourhood. Even as older members of the community greet him with surprise and pleasure, Brij Gopal moves quickly to deliver the announcement he has come to make: the respected but harmless Ram Charittar will be the party’s election candidate from Azad Nagar. As Ram Charittar raises his bewildered gaze to the camera in the midst of a shocked crowd, you cannot but remember the scene in Jha’s 1984 film Damul (Bonded Until Death), where the similarly hapless old Gokul is declared a candidate in the village Panchayat election by the wily landlord Bachcha Singh. As Bachcha Babu leads the assembled members of the Dalit basti in a spontaneous campaign chant of his own creation (“Bolo, ‘Gokul hamara neta hai!’”), it is Gokul’s baffled eyes on which the camera focuses.

This moment of resonance — across a gap of 26 years — would seem to indicate that Prakash Jha’s concerns as a filmmaker have remained constant since the beginning of his career. In some crucial respects, this is true. Jha is often identified — correctly — as someone whose filmmaking career is driven by his interest in Indian politics, specifically the politics of post-1970s Bihar and the changing role of caste. As I write this piece, he is preparing for the 12 August release of his latest film, Aarakshan (Reservation), a drama centred around the controversial issue of caste-based reservations in government jobs and educational institutions, starring Saif Ali Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, Manoj Bajpayee and Deepika Padukone. But Jha’s journey from the village-level machinations of Damul (officially his second full-length feature) to the battle for chief ministership in Raajneeti has not been merely about a straightforward expansion of the canvas. Much has stayed the same: Jha’s penchant for dramatically-shot set pieces; his unerring ear for the cadences of Bihari speech, with the occasional English word inserted with absolute accuracy all the way from Damul’s “Panchayat ka faisla final hoga”; his keen grasp of the deeply masculine worlds of politics, business and crime — and the intersection of all three — in the Hindi heartland. But a great deal has changed.

Let’s look, for example, at the two scenes just mentioned.

In Damul, it is made quite clear that the Brahmins of the village - specifically the landlord Madho Pandey and his family — have monopolised power for years. The village Rajputs, led by the politically ambitious Bachcha Singh, seek to overturn this Brahmin dominance. But this is an electoral democracy, and they know they will never have the numbers if they put up one of their own. So they decide instead to name a puppet Dalit candidate: the well-loved but utterly harmless Dalit elder, Gokul. Madho Pandey discovers what’s happening, orchestrates a backroom deal with Bachcha Singh and unleashes terror on the village Dalits, eventually rigging the election by getting votes cast in their names while they’re held captive in their basti.

In Raajneeti, the political situation is quite different. Here, too, the upper castes—in this case a party run by a Rajput political family—have controlled the state for years. But the desire for political representation now emerges from within the Dalit community, in the form of Sooraj (Ajay Devgn), a kabaddi champion and aspiring youth leader of the urban Dalit constituency, an area significantly named Azad Nagar. It is to scotch Sooraj’s ambitions—that is, a bid for power by a Dalit and not by just another upper caste rival—that Sooraj’s father Ram Charittar is propped up as puppet.

One could argue that Jha’s altered premise accommodates both the tectonic shifts in Dalit and OBC politics that have taken place in the post-Mandal era, as well as the extent to which the upper caste stranglehold on power remains intact. But if one starts to unpack it just a little, the digressions tumble out. Jha’s characterisation of Sooraj leaves a great deal to be desired. For one, it is not clear why winning a couple of kabaddi matches should result in older politicians declaring the young man “Dalit samaaj ka ubharta sooraj”. And it is even less clear what Sooraj himself understands as his political role: what does he intend to do to better the conditions of his constituency? Declamatory moments are aplenty, right from the time when Sooraj is greeted by thunderous applause at a rally where the official party candidate is being announced. But despite Jha’s apparent critique of tokenism (Ram Charittar being made to stand), he appears to be content with the equally hollow symbolism that Sooraj’s candidature represents. This is a man whose sole qualification to represent Azad Nagar seems to be that he’s an insider rather than an outsider; the film’s dialogue constantly reiterates the fact that he is “hamaare beech ka” (“from among us”). (Though Sooraj’s claim to insider-ness is ironically undercut in the mode of the classic feudal family romance when he is revealed to be the illegitimate eldest son of Bharati Pratap — and therefore not Dalit by birth.)

Raajneeti (2010) is a political thriller that draws parallels between the Mahabharata and Indian politics.

Mrityudand (1997) is a commentary on social and gender injustices that plague Bihar. 

But the political implication here — that only an insider can bring about change — is worth noting, especially because in several of Jha’s earlier films it was the outsider who appeared as the natural agent of social and political transformation. Think of Mrityudand (1997), the film with which Jha made his deliberate (and highly successful) entry into mainstream Hindi cinema, or of Gangaajal (2003), in which Jha sought to look at caste politics through the prism of the police.

In Mrityudand, unusually, the outsider is a woman. In a move he has never repeated since, Jha placed three women at the centre of that film’s narrative: the exploited low caste figure of Kanti (Shilpa Shirodkar); the long-suffering Chandravati (Shabana Azmi), branded as baanjh by her husband’s undeclared impotence; and, most importantly, Ketaki (Madhuri Dixit), a young bride married into a thakur household whose fortunes, unbeknownst to her, are threatened from within and without. It is the educated, self-possessed Ketaki who first resists her husband’s drunken demands (with the clap-worthy dialogue that made the film famous: “Aap pati hain, parmeshwar banne ki koshish mat keejiye.”) and then becomes the pillar around whom her family members—and later the harassed women of this fictional Bihari village called Bilaspur—gather and acquire the strength to defy their scheming, sexually exploitative male oppressors. The film is full of women who have been pushed to the edge, but until Ketaki’s arrival, their response is one of resignation, not rebellion. Mrityudand seems to trace Ketaki’s unusual courage to her fairly atypical upbringing—in the few minutes we see her before her marriage, she is shown to be an only child with an adoring father who’s a professor. And in a revealing line uttered by the film’s villains, it is her urban educated background that is held responsible for her troublemaking: “jabse woh town ka madam inke ghar mein aayi hai…”.

In Gangaajal (2003), the outsider protagonist is Amit Kumar (Ajay Devgn), an upright police officer who is posted as Superintendent of Police (SP) to another fictional Bihari village, this one called Tejpur. Tejpur’s reputation as a “rough area”, established in the film’s first few minutes, is further cemented by Amit Kumar’s discovery that everyone and everything there—including the local police—is controlled by the corrupt local politician Sadhu Yadav and his loutish son Sundar. Here, the fact that the outsider has greater courage and integrity than the locals is not attributed to his urban-ness, or his education. He is not beholden to Tejpur’s evil politicians because he has not—unlike, for example, his junior local colleague Bachcha Yadav—reached his position by their dispensation. But apart from this preliminary advantage, he is simply the hero: an incorruptible man who refuses to be cowed by either physical danger to his life or the threat to his job, a police officer who pushes his team to take on the powerful local mafia, but recognises the dangerous consequences of creating a tyrannical and unaccountable police force.

But perhaps we ought not to frame this discussion of Prakash Jha’s protagonists in terms of insiders and outsiders. Some ‘insiders’, bound by ties of family or community, might be more likely to be morally compromised, Jha seems to say — think of the village-wide silence of complicity that meets the inquiry into the murder of a widow and her pregnant daughter at the start of Mrityudand, or the character of Bachcha Yadav in Gangaajal: a conscientous man, but one whose view of the world remains blinkered by loyalty to his jaat-bhais, for far too long.

But surely the crucial prism — one through which all protagonists must inevitably be viewed — is the ethical one. This is not to say that we should see people and events in black and white, but to state that most human actions have an ethical dimension. And in the self-consciously political world of Prakash Jha’s films, where the gulf between the powerful and the powerless is ever-present, the question of ethical responsibility in the exercise of power—especially the use of violence—seems an unavoidable one. Viewed from this perspective, Prakash Jha’s cinema has, over the years, grown steadily bereft of a moral core.

Jha’s first ‘political’ feature, Damul (1984), was part of the realist political cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, funded by the state in the form of the National Film Development Corporation and both aesthetically and ideologically of a piece with Jha’s earliest post-FTII documentaries, like the National Award-winning Faces After Storm about the Biharsharif riots of 1981. Damul describes the cynical machinations of the upper castes to retain their stranglehold on power (social, economic and political), and shows them resorting to violence each time their position is challenged even slightly. The Dalit protagonists of the film, Sanjivna (a very young and wonderfully effective Annu Kapoor) and his wife (Sreela Mazumdar), mutely suffer the consequences of Sanjivna’s father’s one attempted act of rebellion after a lifetime of service to the Brahmin landlord—smuggling a gun into the village to protect the Dalit basti from the impending attack during the election. Sanjivna’s father is killed, Sanjivna is forcibly embroiled in debt and bonded labour and finally falsely implicated in a murder, and the entire Dalit basti is terrorised before there is a single act of violence by a Dalit. In the context of such a skewed balance of power, there can be no doubt where Jha’s sympathies—and the audience’s—were meant to lie.

In Mrityudand, of course, it is women who must rise up against their oppression by men in general and the village’s exploitative villains in particular. Again, there can be no question about where Jha wants to lay the blame, or who he wishes to evoke audience empathy for. If anything, the moral lines are too black and white, with the women either paragons of goodness or victims of circumstance, while Tirpat Singh and his cronies represent unmitigated evil.

Gangaajal muddied the waters, moving beyond the broad-stroke characterisations of Mrityudand to the recognition that power can corrupt even those who are morally and legally in the right — in this case, the police. The film treads a difficult line between emphasising the difficulties faced by individual policemen in a world mired in corruption, and pointing out how they themselves perpetuate the systemic rot. Its fictional rendition of the infamous Bhagalpur blindings of 1979-80 (a connection denied by Jha in interviews, but impossible to ignore) attempts to underline —somewhat literally — Gandhi’s maxim about an eye for an eye making the whole world blind. But while Devgn’s Amit Kumar acknowledges the anarchy unleashed by law-enforcers in the name of preserving order, the film dangerously leaves the task of public accountability to the individual conscience of one man.

With Apaharan (2005), we arrive in a world where the police are not merely pawns in the games played by politicians or the mafia, but themselves initiate acts of crime. Shukla in Apaharan doesn’t just accept money to switch sides or close his eyes to an illegal activity, but is actually crucial in the rise of Ajay Devgn as a kidnapper. But we are not meant to identify with Shukla. What makes Apaharan a departure is Jha’s depiction of Ajay Devgn as the good guy-turned-bad. Devgn plays Ajay Shastri, a young man who aspires to join the police service, but has failed the IPS exams and is unable to make it to the Bihar State Police Service because, we are told, he is neither well-connected enough, nor an SC/ST/OBC candidate who will make it through caste-based reservation. A series of unfortunate incidents, combined with the intransigence of his impractically idealistic father, forces Ajay Shastri into a life of crime. Except that after the very first kidnapping, our hero’s actions seem impelled less by any sort of complusion and more by a sense of wounded pride. Even with this narrative arc, the film could have been compelling if Jha had managed to provide us with some semblance of a reason why we should feel invested in Devgn’s rise and fall. Instead, we are repeatedly offered the strangely hollow premise of a desire for success, for power — with not a glimmer of an explanation for how the once-idealistic wannabe-police officer resolves the moral dilemmas he confronts as a kidnapper of innocent people, with the occasional murder thrown in.

It is with Raajneeti (2010), though, that Jha has truly come full circle from his Damul days. The protagonists of this film, one ventures to suggest, might be the descendants of Damul’s upper caste villains. The scale may have expanded from a single village to a whole state, but the goal they seek to achieve is exactly the same: to keep the reins of power in their own hands. The people — brought in like the extras that they are, in rally after rally — have no role other than to clap, cheer and occasionally weep for these annadaatas of theirs. And no amount of strategic references to the Mahabharata or The Godfather can erase the fact that none of Raajneeti’s protagonists have either any qualms before or remorse after murdering those who challenge their claim to power. And none of them displays any interest in the larger ends that political power might be used to achieve — except to wield more of it. The film takes the Gita’s message about the ends being more important than the means and turns it into a might-is-right dictum: “Raajneeti mein jeet ko maan milta hai”. Even if we understand this as Jha’s truthful take on what politics is really like, it seems more than a little disturbing that there is no ethical centre to this film, no sense that the winners have won an unjust war.

How far Jha seems to have travelled from his first feature, Hip Hip Hurray (1983), a gentle, affecting film all about fighting the good fight. While waiting for a plum job to come through, a young Bombay-trained computer engineer named Sandeep (Raj Kiran) decides to spend the summer working as a sports teacher at a boys’ school in Ranchi. The film tells the story of Sandeep’s patient battle, on the one hand, against teachers who don’t believe sports have any value in the lives of students, and on the other, against difficult adolescents who are too busy affecting machismo to work hard at anything—especially not when urged by a sincere teacher. A Gulzar-scripted film that is perhaps Jha’s only feature to be set in a wholly middle-class milieu, Hip Hip Hurray is an exploration of masculinity—viewed here through the lens of sport and sportsmanship rather than Jha’s more usual one of violence and crime. (At one point, Sandeep even says something about how playing games keeps young boys away from trouble — a nice-enough pop theory of how potentially violent, competitive urges are sublimated into sport.)

The question of justice also lay at the centre of what is arguably Jha’s least-watched feature, Parinati (The Inevitable, 1986), which was screened at the London Film Festival (and which I first saw on Doordarshan, unforgettably, as a child). Based on a Rajasthani folk tale (retold by the writer Vijaydan Detha), Parinati is a film quite different from anything else Jha has ever made, shot beautifully against the dull browns of the Rajasthan desert, punctuated by the vivid reds and yellows of the women’s clothes and the bright whites and pinks of the houses. Evoking a faraway, mythical time, it tells the story of a poor potter and his wife who send their 11-year-old son away with a rich Bania couple who promises to bring him up as a wealthy trader. Once the boy is gone, however, the once-contented couple is infected by a desire for riches, leading them to commit more and more unethical acts—acts which cannot go unpunished. It is a tale almost fable-like in its simplicity, and yet the film is the most suggestive unravelling of a moral universe that I have ever seen. And so now we wait for Prakash Jha to return to creating worlds in which people are not absolved of the consequences of their actions.