Post Facto - Name, Place, Religion, Thing: Understanding Kai Po Che’s Gujarat

Decided I have more to say about Kai Po Che. So here's my Sunday Guardian column:

(My previous piece, written for the Indian Express, is here.)

Kai Po Che, Abhishek Kapoor's film about three young men coming of age in Ahmedabad circa 2002, has become the subject of an avid debate that seems to centre on how it adapts Chetan Bhagat's 2008 novel The 3 Mistakes of My Life. But somehow the fascinating questions of what the film version leaves out, adds or changes have been subjugated to the seemingly all-important one of how these decisions relate to Bhagat's changing political agenda with respect to Gujarat.

Bhagat's alleged attempts to curry favour with Narendra Modi, though thoroughly depressing if true, seem unworthy of the attention they're getting. I have written elsewhere about why I think the changes from book to film (Bhagat is just one of four scriptwriters) make Kai Po Che a more powerful indictment of Gujarat's polarised society than the book was. By having one of the central characters actually enter into the madness of communal murder, the film forces us to engage with the possibility of violence as something within ourselves — rather than something that only certified villains are capable of.

It also seems clear to me that this film is more effective in reaching out to its audience—and potentially changing people's minds—than an imagined filmic naming and shaming of Modi could ever be. Why this is so is a complex question, and I shall return to it. But allow me first to speculate a little about a related question: why does the film feel so much better-etched than the book?

Many critics, including myself, have felt that Bhagat's characters – Govind Patel, Ishaan Bhat and Omi Shastri – seem more fleshed-out and well... characterful in the film than in his book. Of course, this is partly about wonderful actors, but might it also be because the film allows these people to be who they are at the most fundamental level – that of language? In The 3 Mistakes of My Life, these very middling middle class young men from Ahmedabad — one the son of a single mother who runs a small khakra-dhokla business, another the son of a local purohit — are made to speak in a slangy, American-inflected English that seems completely off-kilter: "Screw that, you were out of form, man," says Omi to Ish; "F**k your statistics, man," says Ish to Govind. And when the characters speak plain, unembellished prose, they sound unidiomatic to the point of being jarring: "No marble player ever became great," says Ishaan to the young Ali. Compare the flat dull thud of that sentence to the marvelously resonant version of it in the film: "Goti khel ke tu kya ukhaad lega?".

My point is not that the mixed-up, polyglot universe of our cities cannot be translated—after all, the film gives us these conversations in Hindi, where they might in the real world take place largely in Gujarati – but that it takes a special talent to be able to recreate it in English. That talent is not one Bhagat seems to have. Or perhaps his decision is a deliberate attempt to fuse identification with aspiration. Perhaps his dialogue for his characters is based not on how they might actually speak, but on his astute sense of how they — and his readers — might want to? Whichever it is, watching Kai Po Che, it is hard not to feel (as someone once said about Gopal Gandhi's translation of A Suitable Boy into Hindi) that it has been translated back into the original.

There are other changes that ground the narrative more firmly in its locale. The film does away with a free trip to Australia that felt more like a cricket fan's wish-fulfilment than any possible reality for three guys running a local sports shop. It excises political conversations that seem too wordy and too sensitive to actually be conducted. It replaces the Govind-Vidya romantic birthday-with-fancy-cake with a garba moment that has both sexual frisson and charming gawkiness.

The film also does away with the somewhat artifical gambit of having Govind be an agnostic, through whose narratorial voice religiosity is questioned and clunkily debated. Instead it lays out a world whose everyday Hinduness is remarkable for being unremarked, just as it often is in Indian life: the Ganesh statue on the dashboard, the instinctive gesture of touching new ground to one's forehead, or writing Om to inaugurate a new blackboard.

But this last might also be the most profound expression of the Hindu matrix within which Kai Po Che operates. Unlike a Firaaq or a Parzania (one superbly elegant, the other hamhanded), this is a Gujarat through Hindu eyes: the friends set up their coaching-centre-cum-shop in a temple complex, knowing that non-Hindu customers are unlikely; Ali, the cricketing prodigy whom Ishaan befriends, is their only window into a Muslim milieu. But — and here I return to why it might reach out to its audience — the film does not judge them for it. They are creatures of their milieu. If Kai Po Che's segregated universe has a message for us, it is not to applaud the fractured society it mirrors. It is to force us to see what exists – and grieve for how it came to be.

Read the whole piece on the Sunday Guardian site.

Framing the Divide: Kai Po Che and the politics of Gujarat

An opinion piece I did for today's Indian Express. 

Abhishek Kapoor’s recent film Kai Po Che, like the Chetan Bhagat novel on which it is based, revolves around the lives of three young men in Ahmedabad between 2000 and 2002. In both book and film, the personal trials of Govind Patel, Ishaan Bhat and Omi Shastri — and Ishaan’s young cricketing protege Ali — are tied to larger events that have shaped the history of our collective present: the 2001 Bhuj earthquake, India’s fabled cricketing comeback against Australia at Eden Gardens in 2001, the Godhra train burning incident of 2002 and the widespread communal killings that followed.

Revealing the power of Hindi cinema as compared to popular fiction in English (even a small multiplex hit versus a best-selling novel by India’s highest-selling English novelist), the film’s release — timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Gujarat killings — has led to a flurry of editorial commentary that takes more notice of Bhagat’s fictional politics than has probably ever been taken before.

The film, and Chetan Bhagat, have been accused of whitewashing Gujarat 2002, by excising those parts of The 3 Mistakes of My Life that might displease Narendra Modi, now the BJP’s unofficial prime ministerial candidate. These commentators argue that Kai Po Che is a feel-good Bollywood spectacle, that it steers clear of the damning references to the “Hindu party” that litter the book, that it rewrites state-sponsored killings into local-level, near-spontaneous vendetta, and lastly, that it provides justification for the post-Godhra violence by having a central character, Omi, lose both his parents in Godhra, rather than just a nephew.

Having watched the film and read the book, I must confess to being baffled by the conclusions these commentators have come to. To me, the film (whose script, it should be stressed, is the result of Bhagat’s collaboration with Pubali Chaudhari, Supratik Sen and director Abhishek Kapoor) is not just less clunky and better characterised than the book, but arguably also a more effective and affective comment on the politics of Gujarat.

In both book and film, for instance, the 2001 earthquake is shown as having a personal impact on the lives of the characters: when the new mall in Navrangpura, in which the three friends have staked a massive amount of borrowed money as deposit on the plush sports shop of their dreams, collapses before it can be completed. In both narratives, Govind is particularly destroyed, not just because the sum seems an impossibly large one to earn back, but because the risk he took has become the cause of their ruination, challenging his self-image as the one with a head for business. But the film adds new things. Before the quake, we see Bittoo Mama, Omi’s uncle and an up-and-coming politician of the Hindu chauvinist party, express reluctance to lend the boys the money for the shop deposit — because the mall owner is Muslim. And after the quake, the distribution of aid is shown as completely demarcated along community lines: so much so that when Ishaan tries to get Ali and his Juhapura neighbours access to the relief camp, he and his closest friend Omi nearly come to blows. These additions — sharp and cinematic moments that take the place of the long-winded political arguments in Bhagat’s book — establish the tragically polarised state of Gujarati society more powerfully than any political speechifying ever could.

Another thing the film does better than the book is to make a distinction that all too many secular commentators often fail to, between people who are religious, even orthodox, and those for whom a religious identity is the basis of socio-political action. Omi’s father is a deeply religious man, the priest of the local temple, but he is shown as clearly refusing to ally himself with Bittoo’s Hindu political party, and as being extremely reluctant to go to Ayodhya.

The “Hindu party” is certainly not excised from the film; in fact, its organised role in the post-Godhra attacking of Muslim neighbourhoods is personified in Bittoo Mama, who is if anything a more lethal figure here than he was in the book — armed not with a clumsy old-fashioned trishul, as in the book, but with a sleek, contemporary gun. He is not overwrought, drunken, debilitated by his son’s death (for it is Omi’s cousin, not nephew, who dies in the book), but completely in control, placing gleaming swords in the hands of those more easily swayed and propelling them towards murder.

But the most crucial thing that these critics fail to mention is how the film transforms the character of Omi, and through his altered fate, its addressing of the events of 2002. If Omi is emblematic of the slightly aimless, unemployed young man swayed by Hindutva because it gives him an easy, faux sense of belonging to a community, the film forces us to confront the fatal path down which that blindness can lead. The young man whose confused longing for a Hindu-majoritarian politics made him a sacrificial victim in the book, becomes in Kai Po Che the person responsible for violence. Omi’s complicity points to the dangers of our own. If this is a feel-good spectacle, let us by all means have more.