Educational Hiccups

My Mirror column:

Hichki talks of schools being places of learning not just for students, but for teachers and parents as well. This is a lesson we aren’t ready to accept in practice.

Schools are revealing places. They are institutionalised locales in which a modern-day society passes down the norms and values it wishes its younger generations to absorb. The task of socialising children into adulthood, which in smaller-scale pre-modern social units was carried out by the family and the community, is something that now takes place in the structured but often more anonymous setting of the school.

Some of this is at the formal, pedagogical level – through textbooks, syllabi, rules of eligibility for students and codes of conduct binding on both teachers and students. At the more informal level, the classroom is a social laboratory: a place in which the biases, hierarchies and faultlines that exist in the adult world outside can either be allowed to perpetuate themselves unhindered, or be called out for their divisiveness and illogicality.

The recent Hichki, starring Rani Mukherjee as a teacher who attempts to do the latter, is a somewhat unusual film for Bollywood. Popular Hindi cinema has traditionally dealt with social questions by telling a story about how they impinge on one particular individual, the heroine or hero, while Hichki, set in a fictitious 'posh' Mumbai school called St. Notker's, places a class full of teenagers centrestage, allowing a fine ensemble cast to get its space in the sun.

There have, of course, been precedents for this sort of narrative: as far back as the team of convicts in V Shantaram's Do Aankhen Barah Haath (1957) and as recent as the women's hockey team in Chak De India. Like Hichki, those films balance the screen-time afforded to the group with an equal focus on a guru-like protagonist who has made their progress a personal goal – Shantaram as the reform-oriented prison warden, or Shahrukh Khan as the national hockey coach. And the guru has problems of his own: if Chak De's Kabir Khan had an unjust corruption charge hanging over his head, Mukherjee's character Naina Mathur is an overqualified teacher who's been rejected by every school she's applied at because she has Tourette's Syndrome: an untreatable condition that results in her making involuntary disruptive sounds during many of her social interactions: sounds that most people find impossible to get beyond.

When Naina finally lands a job, it's because no-one else wants it. The Hindi-speaking working class teens she is brought in to instruct are not the usual St. Notker's kids. They are government school kids who've been admitted to the private elite school under legal duress when the government school was shut and its land turned into a playground for the St. Notker's (the metaphorical implications of this plotline are astounding). Described alternately as “bastiwale bachche” and “municipal garbage”, Hichki's “Class 9F” is a broadstrokes fictional stand-in for the real life underprivileged kids brought into elite schools across the country by the Right to Education Act of 2009, which ensures that a specific number of seats in government-aided private schools are left open for children from a lower income bracket.
The 'F for Failure' implication in the name 9F is a little sledgehammer, as is much of the film. But Hichki is a rare attempt in popular cinema to engage with a legislation that needs a great deal of political will to implement – but that might determine whether our best-equipped schools are going to be part of the social revolutions we need, or only zealously guard their privilege (like Neeraj Kabi does as the dedicated but classist teacher in Hichki).


If one way to think of mainstream Hindi cinema is as a barometer of the popular, then Hichki has an uncanny finger on the pulse of the nation: the film released on March 23, 2018, featuring a leaked exam paper as part of the climactic plot, and by end-March, a national scandal had erupted around the leaking of the CBSE's Class X Maths and Economics papers.


Finally, I have nothing against a script that wants to educate Indian audiences about a little-understood condition that probably afflicts a huge number of people. But it's worth pointing out that the equivalence the film suggests – between Naina's physical disability and the socio-economic disability that 9F students are battling – is one more example of the class-based spoonfeeding Bollywood now does so much of. I think here of two fine films that have dealt with class in the schoolroom – Stanley ka Dabba and Hindi Medium. Stanley is based on the subliminal premise that the sympathy of a middle-class, primarily English-speaking audience can only be gained by a child character who goes to a good convent and recites English poems: only then might we care if he turns out to be a child labourer. In Hindi Medium, we apparently need Irrfan Khan and his upper middle class family to playact at poverty as our route to Deepak Dobriyal's real travails and hopes for his child's education.


It appears then that for Indian multiplex audiences, even the poor child seeking an education becomes worth assisting only when some upper middle class person makes it a life goal.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Apr 2018.

Blood on our hands

My Mirror column: the fourth column in my series on the Hindi hits of 1957

V Shantaram's Do Aankhen Barah Haath (1957) used a prison reform experiment to think about freedom - and that message still bears repeating.

The titling of V Shantaram’s Do Aankhen Barah Haath involves a series of hand-prints being made. Each time a hand is lifted off the screen, it leaves adark impression – and a printed title appears at its centre. The hand-prints obviously make a reference to the film’s name – literally ‘Two Eyes, Twelve Hands’. But whose hands are we speaking of, and why do they matter?

Shantaram lets the mystery linger for a little while, even as he takes us directly into his milieu, opening with a sequence of theatrical excess that involves a jailer kicking prisoners. The symbolic humiliation of placing bootclad feet violently on the back of another human being is particularly great in an Indian context where the feet are believed to be the most impure part of the body – you are brought up to apologise if your feet touch someone by mistake, and you only touch another’s feet voluntarily as a way of emphasising your social inferiority in relation to the other person.

After this temporary focus on feet, Shantaram slowly and deliberately returns us to hands. Hands are, by their very nature, a stand-in for action – and in the case of the criminal offenders whom Shantaram places at the centre of his film, those actions are violent ones. When the junior prison official Adinath (played by Shantaram himself) gets permission to launch an experiment in prison reform, he chooses six men convicted of particularly grisly crimes. He uses the cinematic medium to great effect as they are introduced, overlaying the almost comical excess of these gruff, hefty men with their own memories – memories in which they used their hands to take lives. Now those same powerful hands, Adinath decides, are to be put to honest labour. The man who once lifted a boulder to murder his wife is told to build a dam with enormous stones; another who had committed his crime with an axe is told to clear the shrubs with one.

Hand-prints, of course, are also tied to personal identification, in a context of assumed illiteracy as well as one of modern policing. By the mid-20th century, fingerprinting had been around as a technique of criminal forensics for at least fifty years, and Shantaram plays with the way that humans had internalised that knowledge. When Adinath, trying to establish a rapport with the men, asks their names, they respond by silently making hand impressions on a piece of paper. “If we run away, it is our handprints that you will find useful to trace us – not our names,” says one. It is as if we were to introduce ourselves with our Aadhaar numbers.

Shantaram in 1957 was already a veteran, with the founding of Prabhat Film Company and pioneering films like Manoos, Kunku and Shevari behind him. For Do Aankhen, he chose to depart from the technicolour seductiveness of Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje (a dance-heavy drama which had been the third biggest Hindi hit of 1955) for an almost Expressionist black and white. Do Aankhen unfolds at a deliberate pace, with dramatically staged set pieces and several weepy moments.

But alongside the high drama is a goofy brand of humour, exemplified for instance in the scene where the six men, all hulking moustachioed brutes, prop up a dismantled barbed wire fence so as to view an attractive woman safely from behind it. It is as if the charms of Champa, a toy-seller played by Shantaram’s third wife Sandhya, are such that they prefer to lock themselves up.

The scene may be comic, but it is in fact of a piece with the film’s view of masculinity, of violence – and of freedom itself. The large patch of barren land where the convicts settle is named Azaad Nagar – Freedom Town. On their very first night there, they find themselves so discomfited by the prospect of sleeping in an unlocked room that they chain their feet together, weighing the chains down with their agricultural implements.

Months later, in what is the final test of their reformation, they promise Adinath that they are capable of selling their fresh-grown vegetables in the local sabzi mandi without being roused to violence. When they get there, however, the low prices they are selling at make them the target of the local middleman and his goons, who attack them in full public view.

Shantaram pegs his climax on the men’s transformation from brutish hulks – who had been quick to snatch another’s food when hungry, or react to perceived injustice with the threat of violence – to mute sufferers even in the face of one-sided beatings. This is a film made ten years after Indian independence, and it sends out a message about ahimsa that is strongly in synch with the Gandhian position on non-violence. The true exercise of collective freedom involves curtailing our baser instincts – not setting our worst selves free to roam. It is a lesson we could all do with in Modi’s India.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 Aug 2017.