Filming the forest and why our relationship with it is complicated

My Mirror column:

The jungle still sustains millions in India. What does indie cinema make of the conflict that takes place when modernity vies for their minds and hearts?

Radhika Apte and Girish Kulkarni in the fine short film The Kill (2016), dir. Anay Tarnekar

I have spent the last week in a village near Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh. Living with a local Gond family in a rural homestay that abuts the forest, I've had some occasion to contemplate not just the differences between city and village, but between village and jungle. The human move from hunting and gathering to cultivation, ie, from the nomadic life to the settled, agricultural one, is usually seen as an advancement for the species, and urban life is perceived as a step up from the rural. In this view of the world, the index of human development is the extent of our conquest of nature.

The idea that human beings could live in sync with the natural world, could choose to depend on the wilderness, seems either romantic or revolutionary. Of course, you might say that the key word here is 'choose' -- when humans are forced to live at nature's mercy, it can often mean fear and suffering.

That sense of mystery and majesty is what still makes the forest such a powerful place. For thousands who live on the forest's edge, or in tiny parcels of land carved out of the wilderness through the labour of generations, the jungle can simultaneously be worthy of worship – and something they are trying to separate themselves from. Being 'jungli' has never been respectable in the eyes of mainstream society, but most such communities' lives are still tied to the forest, not just economically but culturally as well.

Given how strong the jungle's hold is over large numbers of Indians, IT has featured rather minimally in our cinema. Pradip Krishen's under-watched Electric Moon (1992), written in collaboration with Krishen's then-partner Arundhati Roy, took a swipe at the entire Indian wildlife set-up. Set in a fictitious Indian national park, it featured a family of Anglicised ex-royals who successfully sell foreign tourists a package of Oriental tradition and ferocious wildlife, both half-fiction. 

A still from Pradip Krishen's acerbic comedy Electric Moon (1992), set in a wildlife resort

 
The next Indian indie I can recall that was set in a wildlife reserve is Ashvin Kumar's stilted 2009 feature The Forest. Despite its grave flaws, I mention it here because it unconsciously mirrors modern urban civilisation's deeply-conflicted relationship with the jungle. An urban couple (Nandana Dev Sen and Ankur Vikal) arrive in a jungle for some quality time, only to encounter the wife's belligerent ex-boyfriend (Javed Jaffery, playing a cop) -- and a vengeful, man-eating leopard. Kumar's direction hinges on portraying the jungle as a place of menace: Spiders preying on insects, haunted temples, a weird saadhvi, and a leopard that really has it in for humans. But this jungli B-grade horror movie comes with a 'Save the Leopard' postscript: The leopard in question turned maneater when injured by a poacher.

I didn't mind Kumar's idea of the jungle as bringing out the city men's masculine competitiveness, testing their testosterone, as it were. “We can go out tonight, if you want, hunting-shunting, yaar,” proposes Jaffery to his ex-rival Vikal. “Centuries of instinct right here, in your balls.” More interesting is Vikal's opening voiceover, suggesting something supernatural about the forest: “I have come to believe we were summoned. That we answered some primeval call. And that nothing that happened that night was either chance or coincidence.”

Kumar's film doesn't deliver on that promise of enchantment. But entering the jungle can often suspend one's sense of modern-day reality, a feeling most clearly embodied in animals whose raw physical presence can still reduce human beings to our most elemental fears. Anay Tarnekar's taut short fiction, The Kill (2016) captures it spectacularly.

Currently available on a streaming platform for curated arthouse and classic cinema, The Kill casts the adept Marathi actor Girish Kulkarni as a poor adivasi man called Gopal who spends his nights gambling away his wife's meagre earnings -- and his days following a tiger. Tarnekar successfully captures not just the feel of the jungle and the great beast's leisurely, loping gait, but the grave, hushed awe with which Gopal treats him. And yet there is also an intimacy there. “Balasaheb,” scoffs his wife (Radhika Apte), referring to her husband's name for the tiger. “What is he, your uncle?” But a statue of a tiger finds place in the family shrine.

The film does not mention it, but the tiger (and sometimes also the leopard) has long been revered as a deity by communities that share a landscape with it. The people of the Sunderbans, the mangrove-covered islands that are home to the largest population of tigers in South Asia, believe in a greedy, man-eating deity called Dokkhin Rai, who is half-Brahmin sage, half tiger-demon. In the North East, the Garos wear a necklace of tiger claws for protection, while the Mishmis see the tiger as their brother. In the forests of western India (where Tarnekar's film is set), the tiger is worshipped by many adivasi communities under the name Waghoba or Waghjai or Wagheshwar, with many beliefs and rituals believed to protect both humans and their livestock. In the Gond home from which I write this column, the domestic shrine has no tiger god – but the man of the house, an ex-forest guard, keeps the tiger as a totem on his motorbike.

But as modernity beckons, it often asks people to sacrifice their old gods. Tarnekar's film ends in tragedy. The death of one's gods is a kind of death, too.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 Mar 2021.

Who's that on the phone?

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Director Anurag Kashyap's thought-provoking new thriller, Ugly, paints a chilling picture of the world we live in, and technology is the throbbing, ticking time-bomb at its heart.

The prize scene in Anurag Kashyap's Ugly -- the scene people were still discussing as they walked out of the theatre, despite all the harrowing things that came after -- is a conversation about mobile phones. A posse of Mumbai policemen are grilling two men because a third man (whom they were chasing on foot) came in front of a car and died. The first man explains that they were looking for a little girl who had disappeared from a parked car. The other man says, "I went in the other direction, and I was asking this guy if he'd seen her when his phone began to ring, and my friend's face started flashing on the screen, with the words 'Papa calling'..." 

"'Papa calling!'" the inspector interjects scornfully. How is it possible for a phone to show a picture of the caller, he wants to know. He is disbelieving and caustic, and when the harried men try to humour him by explaining as painstakingly and clearly as possible, he is insulted. Do they think he doesn't know that mobile phones have cameras, huh? 

Girish Kulkarni's watchful, fine-grained performance as the cop who switches constantly between performing high status and low, between kowtowing to his boss and rubbing his suspects' noses in the dust, will hopefully establish the actor -- the pivot of such superb, distinctive Marathi films as Deool and Masala -- in Hindi cinema, too. 

Director Anurag Kashyap gets Kulkarni to play the scene for laughs. But it's the kind of nervous giggle that emerges when you're holding your body taut on the edge of your seat: we know we can't afford to laugh at a cop, no matter how technologically illiterate he may seem. Meanwhile, the repeated phrase 'Papa calling' achieves a kind of talismanic power: you can see how it might seem ridiculous to Kulkarni's sort of cop, imbued with the luxuries of class privilege in terms of both technology and language, and yet, in the context of a kidnapping, it has a desperate urgency. 

What Kashyap does with the smart phone here is nothing short of masterful: he makes technology the focus not just of this scene, but of the film as a whole. If there is a recurring motif in Ugly, it is the phone call. 

Kabeer Kaushik's under-watched Sehar, released a decade ago in 2005, was perhaps the first Hindi crime drama to place the mobile phone squarely at its centre. Kaushik's tightly-scripted tale of the Lucknow police's effort to hit out at organised crime was set in the mid-90s, and actually narrated in the voice of the cellular expert they hired to help them conquer the newly-arrived technology that the gangs they were tracking had already acquired. The cell phone expert in mid-90s Lucknow was a mild-mannered college professor with a salt and pepper beard, played memorably as always by Pankaj Kapur. 

Ten years down the line, Tiwariji has been replaced -- the technology expert is now in-house, and a young woman rather than an older man. Policewoman Upadhyay wears the corporate-professional uniform of collared pinstripe shirt tucked into trousers, her hair in a neat bun and her eyes behind black-rimmed spectacles. (This shift of gender is particularly interesting, given that in Sehar, Tiwariji's aversion to the guns that surrounded him when he started working with the police was incorporated into the film's dominant narrative about masculinity). 
But the technology itself has changed much more than the figure of the expert. Ugly's world is the thoroughly wired one we now live in: a tangled web of I-phones, phone-tapping, recording devices, cyber cafes, credit card numbers and internet-based calling devices. 
Unlike in Sehar, where the technology was an artefact for narrative and historical use, in Ugly it is both that and something more profound. It is a marker of class. It is a part of one's identity. And yet it is also an enabler of anonymity. Everyone can be traced to his or her device, but not every transaction can be traced to a person. 
The cell phone, that appears so frequently now in the discourse of safety as an invincibility shield, is so quickly separated from the kidnapped child that you have to wonder how we believe it to be some sort of prosthetic limb. A man can call his friend from the ether of the internet, and use a recorded voice to be someone else. Husbands can track their wives' phone calls. A brother can blackmail his sister, so long as he can disguise his voice. 

We think we use these devices to speak to each other, Kashyap seems to suggest, and yet these devices stand between us as much as they bring us together. It is a powerfully unsettling thought.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.