The Spirit of Technologies Past

My Mirror column:

As we hurtle ever faster into a digitised present, some recent films cast an affectionate glance back at the technologies that made us who we are.

Right at the beginning of the recently released Shantilal O Projapoti Rohoshyo, director Pratim D Gupta tells us that his film is about a time “when porn was watched on DVD, news was read in print… and films were made for theatres”. Right from its charming children’s detective story title (the Bangla translates as ‘Shantilal and the Butterfly Mystery’), the film lives and breathes a certain gentle nostalgia. But its special focus is an era that existed until quite recently in India, a time that feels like it’s being elbowed out at top speed by technological transformation. What’s interesting is that the nostalgia is itself framed around an earlier era of technology: the newspaper, the cinema, the photograph.
The film’s deadbeat weather reporter protagonist, Shantilal, with his unquenched desire for a “front page story”; the neighbour who hounds him for a free spot in the matrimonial pages of The Sentinel; the DVD shop guy who urges Bertolucci, Bergman and Buñuel upon a customer who’s waiting for his supply of quality Malaysian erotica – all of these look back fondly to a time before the digital conquest of our lives. But the pirated DVD may be the one to focus on: a signifier of an in-between time. Not before computers, but before news stories began to be broken on Twitter timelines, before Shaadi.com, and before the endless glut of internet porn. It is an era that is not in fact that distant – which is perhaps why it feels so surreal that it is already gone.

Shantilal brings to the fore a theme that has, in fact, underlain many Indian films in the past five or six years: our memories of an analogue era. Ritesh Batra’s 2013 critical and commercial success, The Lunchbox, used a dabbawala mix-up to deliver a tribute to a fast-disappearing world – the Hindi music cassettes Deshpande Aunty still listens to, the Orient fan around which Deshpande Uncle’s stagnant life revolves, the Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi episodes recorded from Doordarshan that Saajan Fernandes watches endlessly in memory of his wife. (Using the voice of Bharati Achrekar as the never-seen Mrs Deshpande was, of course, the perfect meta-textual reference to Doordarshan, on which she was once such a profoundly familiar face.)

If The Lunchbox took a rather melancholy view, Sharat Kataria’s Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015) was a more enthusiastic, even raunchy tribute to the 1990s, featuring Ayushmann Khurrana as the small-town owner of a cassette shop. Some of the most endearing moments of the film’s post-marital romance between Khurrana and Bhumi Pednekar involved the VCR as a therapeutic sexual aid and the playing of songs as messages on a cassette player.

The audio cassette with songs personally picked out and recorded was, of course, the ultimate 1990s romantic gesture. That was the matrix of a more recent 1990s-set romance, the Yash Raj production Meri Pyaari Bindu (2017), also starring Khurrana. In that film, Khurrana plays a Bengali middle class hero (complete with a daaknaam – Bubla), whose largely unrequited love for his neighbour Bindu is tied up with the technology of their adolescence: Ambassador cars, STD-ISD booths, a nascent virtual universe embodied in email addresses such as muqaddarkasikandar1977@hotmail.com.


Video cassettes were crucial to both Nitin Kakkar’s Filmistaan and Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider. Both released in 2014: one set in Pakistan, the other in Kashmir, and both had political messages. Although tonally miles apart, the two films are united by their references to the early Salman Khan films Maine Pyar Kiya and Hum Aapke Hain Koun. Kakkar presents those films, as he does all Hindi cinema, as the great unifier of countries and people divided by Partition. Haider, written by the journalist and author Basharat Peer, adapts Shakespeare’s Hamlet to 1990s Kashmir: a dark and violent place, as searingly sarcastic as it is driven to desperation. In this world, the two Salmans – the original play’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern turned brilliantly into Bhai fans and lookalikes who run a videocassette shop – initially seem like comic relief. But as the film builds to its necessarily tragic climax, it becomes clear that no amount of grainy re-watching of MPK songs can keep Haider (Shahid Kapoor) from seeing the reality of the Salmans – or keep Kashmir from seeing the reality of India.

To return to Shantilal o Projapoti Rohoshyo: it isn’t just a simple tribute to a past era. The protagonists of Pratim Gupta’s not-quite-mystery live on the cusp of the present, and often display an active reluctance to cross over. Shantilal himself doesn’t have Whatsapp, though he does have a mobile phone. The film star in her prime (Paoli Dam, very effective as Nandita) expresses a nostalgia for autograph seekers in an era of selfies, and keeps a corner of her bedroom as a photographic shrine to her past. But she finds her future threatened by a photograph from that past. Old technologies can inspire nostalgia, but our attachment to them may tell us less about those forms than about ourselves.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1 Sep 2019.

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.

All that glitters isn't gold

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

Fitoor reduces Great Expectations to a glossy bauble dangling from a thin thread of Kashmir.

Portrait of the artist as a muscled man: Aditya Roy Kapur in Fitoor 

Among the Dickens novels thrust upon Indian schoolchildren, Great Expectations was perhaps the one I liked least. The book's dramatic opening, with a petrified young Pip helping out the on-the-run convict Magwitch, was certainly memorable, as was Miss Havisham and the eerie atmosphere of decay that surrounded her. But I never understood Pip's fascination for Estella: the rich, spoilt, pretty girl who doled out her company as a favour, and the poor boy who remained enraptured, long after he had ceased to be a boy. Her being rich wasn't the problem for me; it was that she seemed such a creature of surface: all fancy clothes and frippery, with not a glimmer of intelligence or feeling to back up her childish hauteur. Why, I always wondered, would someone find that interesting? And if they did, why should I find that someone interesting? 

Still, when I heard of an Indian adaptation of Great Expectations, I imagined it was precisely the Pip-Estella relationship - if you can call so one-sided a thing a relationship - that would be its focus. After all, the poor little boy obsessed with the rich little girl has been a staple of Hindi film romance - think Awara, or Muqaddar ka Sikandar. 

And so it was. Abhishek Kapoor's Fitoor, set in a Kashmir of fifteen years ago, places his characters at the requisite unbridgeable social distance, and leads us squarely into the childhood romance we recognise. The dreamy-eyed Noor, called to the big house as apprentice to a carpenter—his fond Junaid Jeeju—becomes immediately besotted with the apple-cheeked young Firdaus. Encountering the young boy staring goggle-eyed at her, Firdaus's first words to him are a pert injunction. "Aankhein neeche," she commands, even as she holds his gaze and stares right back. A moment later, it is she who lowers her eyes -- not out of bashfulness, but to look condescendingly at the hole in Noor's tatty shoes. 

It is a sharp scene, accurately presaging the inequalities to come. In fact, Fitoor's childhood sections, nicely inhabited by a thin little Mohammad Abrar and a plump little Tunisha Sharma, are the film's most convincing. Abrar, in particular, does both jaunty and crestfallen well, making you believe in his helpless infatuation with this snotty princess, desirable precisely because she represents a world he can barely imagine. 

But before you know it, the children have grown up, and lost any personality they might have once had. The most imperious thing about Firdaus is now Katrina Kaif's flaming red hair, while Aditya Roy Kapur's muscle-laden Noor practices art as a bare-bodied sport. It is left to Anay Goswamy's cinematography to produce such enchantment as he can: grand interiors that are gloomy even when lit with chandeliers, gorgeous snow-bedecked exteriors that produce a timeless, aestheticised, frozen Kashmir—so what if part of it is Poland. 

In stark opposition to the political punch of Haider, which was the last film Bollywood set in that part of the world, Fitoor reduces an explosive, complicated political milieu to a meaningless gimmick. A single death in a single bomb blast stands in for everything that's happened in Kashmir in 15 years. None of the characters are affected by their strife-torn locale, except for a mindless marshalling of the rightwing slogan "Doodh mangoge toh kheer denge, Kashmir mangoge toh cheer denge". Though perhaps it isn't mindless: Firdaus' marital alliance with a Pakistani man suggests a muddled Kashmir allegory. 

The palace that serves as home to Tabu -- Miss Havisham as a hookah-smoking, highly strung Hazrat Begum—is all carpets and ghazals, an updated Muslim social universe that could have been set anywhere, so long as Tabu spoke her Urdu. Katrina Kaif is a blunt instrument at the best of times, but it seems particularly unfair to set her up next to an actress whose every word is a quivering arrow. Despite a confusing bunch of flashbacks (involving the ethereal Aditi Rao Hydari dubbed in Tabu's voice), Tabu makes Hazrat the film's sole motor. Moving between petulant, melancholy and sinister, even the waning Hazrat radiates more aura than the shimmering Firdaus. 

The great themes of Great Expectations - class hierarchy and social advancement - are ostensibly present in Fitoor, too. If Pip neglects old friends to become a gentleman for Estella, Noor is quick to reject his roots for the glittering world of Delhi's art parties. For Pip, the discovery that his secret benefactor was not Miss Havisham but the convict Magwitch destroyed his delusions of grandeur. Noor, making the same discovery, shows only anger—no remorse. 

Where Dickens made us scrutinise "the happiness of money" in the cold light of day, Kapoor and his co-screenwriter Supratik Sen seem unable to rid their eyes of the dazzle. Our hero goes from Srinagar artisan to global sensation in a matter of months, and never bats an eyelid at a world where a single painting sells for Rs 3 crore while a talented woodworker is kept waiting for two thousand. 

On a scholarship called 'Art for Freedom' (which is both residency and gallery contract), he causes a sensation with his anodyne depictions of a wounded Kashmir. But asked his views on aazaadi, all he can say is, "Itni aazaadi kaafi nahi? Zinda hoon, saans le raha hoon..." and tell us he craves a return to "the way things were". It isn't just Fitoor's camerawork that's all smoke and mirrors. But like Noor, perhaps surface gloss is all we deserve.

Sons and Lovers, Redux

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

Vishal Bhardwaj's takes on Shakespeare have produced female figures of rare frankness and sexual vitality, but their power is shaped by a constricting masculine world. Haider is no exception.

With his adaptation of Hamlet into Haider, Vishal Bhardwaj completes his supremely ambitious trilogy of Shakespeare tragedies reimagined in Indian contexts. Since this is not a review, all I'll say here is that Haider shares with the two previous films in the trilogy -- 2004's Maqbool and 2006's Omkara -- Bhardwaj's now-trademark accomplishments: stunning frames composed with an eye for beauty that does not preclude terror, pitch-dark humour, and consummate detailing, including an unerring ear for the cadences of both speech and music in each milieu he chooses to evoke. 

Of course, all this detailing would come to nought if Bharadwaj were not able to make Shakespeare's four-hundred-year-old characters seem to emerge organically from his fully-realized contemporary settings. But he does. And he does so by sticking close to the bone of the most elemental fears and passions. What struck me particularly, as I watched Haider, was that Bhardwaj's interpretations of Shakespeare all come to centre on sexual jealousy. In Omkara, the emphasis does not need to be created: Othello's climactic conflict was already about jealousy. Like Othello's suspicion of his wife Desdemona, Omi's niggling doubt about Dolly grows from a speck into a dark cloud that engulfs their whole universe. But in Maqbool and now in Haider, it is Bhardwaj's rejigging that makes jealousy the prime motive force. 

But unlike in most popular cinema, in India and beyond, the jealous rages of men do not erupt over women who are playthings. If anything, their frank expressions of preference make Bhardwaj's women rare. In both Maqbool and Omkara, Nimmi (Tabu) and Dolly (Kareena) must compel their tongue-tied lovers to confess their attraction - and do something about it. [Another Bhardwaj heroine, Priyanka Chopra's Sweety in Kaminey, had to literally draw the words out of the stuttering Guddu (Shahid Kapoor)]. Left to themselves, Bhardwaj suggests, Irffan's Maqbool may well have remained Abbaji's loyal right hand man; Ajay Devgn's awkward Omkara may never have picked up the courage to express his love to the white-as-milk Dolly. These men may embody physical power, but the sexual agency is all women's. As Tabu's Nimmi -- a vision of loveliness in white brocade -- taunts Irrfan's brooding Maqbool in an early scene, "Darpoke ho tum. Hamaare ishq mein gal jaoge, lekin chhoone ki himmat nahi..." 

By turning the Lady Macbeth character into Duncan's unhappy mistress, Bhardwaj made Maqbool a chilling examination of sexual power. On the one hand, we see, in Nimmi's acceptance of Abbaji's sexual obeisance, a sense of queenliness. She is bound by many things, but the most powerful man in Mumbai is her captive. She is the only person in the film -- other than a foolhardy police officer -- to call the don by his first name, Jahangir. And yet Nimmi is a profoundly vulnerable character, a woman with a million unfulfilled mannats, forced to sleep with a paunchy old man who disgusts her. So her craving for romance is expressed in desperate ways: stepping on a thorn to get Maqbool to bathe her foot, making him say "meri jaan" to her on a Hindi movie cliff at pistol-point, making him search for her lost earring in the dirt by firelight. 

With Haider, Tabu reprises the part of a woman whose unfulfilledness in her marriage sets in motion -- if unwittingly -- a cycle of destruction. Ghazala -- Bhardwaj's take on Hamlet's mother Gertrude -- takes the devotion that comes to her from men as natural, whether her brother-in-law playing the fool to amuse her, or her son Haider, her relationship with whom contains a visible strain of possessiveness. In both films, Tabu plays to perfection the woman of sexual vitality. (In both Maqbool and Haider, the only other female character is an innocent young girl in love.) 

Ghazala is not as morally compromised in the matter of her husband's death as Nimmi was. But Haider, like Hamlet, believes for most of the narrative that she knowingly brought it about. Her compulsions, though not entirely clear, do seem to stem from her desire for sexual fulfilment. And Bhardwaj knows what this means for most of his audience. It is no coincidence that he gives Ghazala a line where she says she will be the villain no matter what she does. And yet Haider, as a film, does not make her the villain of the piece. 

And in this, in their recognition of Gertrude's sexual vitality as something that does not necessarily make her villain, Haider follows in the footsteps of those feminist literary critics who first pointed out that Gertrude's attachment to Claudius was clearly a weakness of the flesh, not of the intellect. "The character of Hamlet's mother has not received the specific critical attention it deserves," began Carolyn Heilbrun in a path-breaking 1957 essay which went to challenge the longtime portrayal of Gertrude as weak, silly, vacillating, sheeplike and shallow. Male critics, wrote Heilbrun, found it impossible to imagine that a woman over 45 could arouse or experience sexual passion, so they ignored what the Ghost, Hamlet, and Gertrude herself tell us in the play, insisting on turning her "frailty" into something more than an admission of sexual need. 

Ghazala is not frail, and she has much more influence in this narrative than Gertrude did. The (masculine) revenge motive remains crucial, but Bhardwaj effectively robs it of pivotal status: "intekaam se sirf intekaam paida hota hai". And yet the sacrificial ending he gives us seems to suggest an identification of woman and motherland that left me somewhat discomfited.