The Eyes of the Beholder

My Mirror column:

On watching Mirch Masala 30 years after Smita Patil’s death, and being struck by the film’s complicated relationship with the male gaze.

Smita Patil died in Mumbai on December 13, 1986. She was 31 and had just given birth to the child we now know as Prateik Babbar. My mother, I remember, was as saddened as one can be by the death of someone one does not know personally. I was a child, but even I had grasped the power of Patil's screen presence, and experienced the loss vicariously, through my parents and my masi, who was the same age as Patil and had been a theatre actor herself.

30 years after her demise, Patil's incandescent energy still lights up the screen like no one else. How, one wonders, can this tremendous vitality be gone forever? There have been other great actresses on the Indian screen, and there will be more. But there is something about Patil that ensures that even if she appears in the corner of the frame, it is her smouldering presence that catches your attention and holds it.

Watching Ketan Mehta's Mirch Masala again recently, I realised that the film is practically shaped around this quality of Patil's. Early on, when the moustachioed Subedar (Naseeruddin Shah producing a strange performative excess as a man drunk on his own power) rides his merry men and horses into a gaggle of women, all of them flee in terror, except one. Thus, the Subedar's eye is drawn to Sonbai, and so is ours.

Patil seems born to play the woman who stands her ground when others run around shrieking. Not only does she return the Subedar's frank stare with the cool, steady glance of one used to being admired, but also gives the big man some lip: “In this village, only human beings drink on this side of the water. Animals drink over there.”

The Subedar's men are ready to run her down for this, but he stops them. He gives Sonbai a long look, and asks cockily: “Can this animal get some water to drink here?” “To drink water like a human being, you have to first spread your hands,” answers Sonbai. The phrase she uses, “Haath phailaana”, is a commonly used Hindi expression for displaying neediness, and when the Subedar cups his hands before her, there is indeed a limited reversal of roles. Watching the Subedar gulp down the entire contents of her smaller pitcher, Sonbai curls her lip into a haughty smile that exudes sexual power.

Mehta's film is set in a world in which all power rests in male hands, making sexuality the only possible way for women to wrest some. Mirch Masala refers to Sonbai's sexuality often. The village seth, complaining about Sonbai's husband not being at work again, makes a bawdy joke -- “Saari raat jagaati hogi susri, subah marad ki aankh kaise khulegi? [This dame must keep him awake all night, how can the man's eyes open in the morning?]”. Sonbai takes it in her stride, as she does the unsolicited evaluations that come her way. “Is soney mein ratti bhar bhi milavat nahi [This gold has not an ounce of impurity in it],” says one man as she walks past, his eyes applauding the long, loping gait produced by the weight she invariably carries. The Subedar's gaze, too, fetishizes the physical exertions of the labouring woman. He watches her hungrily through his hand-held durbeen (telescope), as she washes clothes by the water's edge.

The gaze, of course, is the very premise of the film -- the Subedar's eyes closing in pleasure as he is shaved by a barber, and the way his head still turns as Sonbai walks past in the distance; the repeated use of the telescope and the magnifying glass, visual devices of modernity that strip the world of its mystery. In a late scene, the village Mukhi (Suresh Oberoi, in a performance that won him a Best Supporting Actor National Award) is asked by the Subedar whether Sonbai hasn't ever caught his eye. “Nazar par bhi nazar rakhni padti hai [One has to keep an eye on one's gaze as well],” answers the Mukhi pointedly. The film's end, too, is a symbolic attack on the rapacious gazes of men.

And yet, does not Mehta's film itself focus needlessly on Patil's shapely bare back, encased in a backless choli, but often left exposed to the Subedar's gaze – and ours? The tendency to present Patil as an overtly sexual being was there right from Benegal's Manthan (1976), in which Patil as the feisty Bindu, a rural Gujarati woman out talking to Girish Karnad's dapper young vet, suddenly sits down by a water spout and starts rubbing her legs with a pumice stone. That line of sight, so to speak, reached its acme in the controversial pavement bathing sequence in Rabindra Dharmraj's Chakra (1981).

Towards the end of Mirch Masala, the village women, now afraid for their own safety, begin to blame Sonbai for having attracted attention. “Galti tere roop mein hai [The fault is in your form],” says an old Dina Pathak.

Quick comes Sonbai's tart retort, “Uske dekhne mein nahi? [And not in his looking?]”

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 Dec 2016.  

The Long and Winding Road

My Mirror column last Sunday: 

Ketan Mehta's fictionalisation of a truly unusual hero has moments of power and beauty, but it does not stand half as tall as the man's real life. Still, Manjhi The Mountain Man is a compelling parable for our times.

In the year 1960, in a village near Gaya in Bihar, a poor Dalit man from one of the country's most deprived communities - a Musahar - took his hammer and chisel and began to break a path through a mountain. The road he had chosen was not just long and hard; it was so difficult as to seem impossible. People mocked him as a fool and a madman, his family grew first tired and then embittered by his singleminded pursuit. But Dashrath Manjhi, for that was the man's name, stayed the course. After 22 arduous years, he achieved what he had set out to do. He broke through the mountain.

So incredible is Manjhi's story that it would seem ridiculous if it weren't actually true: a man labouring alone, for over two decades, succeeding in reducing the travel time between his village of Gehlore and the closest town of Wazirganj from 75km to 2km. It was this believe-it-or-not quality that drew the attention of Ketan Mehta.

Mehta has made four biopics: Sardar (1993), about Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Mangal Pandey: The Rising(2005), about the Purabiya soldier who is credited with having fired the first shot in what grew into the revolt of 1857, Rang Rasiya (2014), about the enormously popular painter Raja Ravi Varma, and now Manjhi The Mountain Man. Of these, Sardar, based on a script by playwright Vijay Tendulkar and starring such accomplished actors as Paresh Rawal, Benjamin Gilani and Annu Kapoor, was made in the intimate, realist style associated with what is probably Mehta's most acclaimed film, Mirch Masala (1987). With both Mangal Pandey and Rang Rasiya, however, Mehta's preference has been for something on a much grander scale: taking the bare historical outline of a man's life and filling it with as much colour and drama and romance as it can hold.

It is in this larger-than-life mode that he has chosen, now, to tell the tale of Dashrath Manjhi. And as one watches the astounding Nawazuddin Siddiqui pull out every trick in the book to turn what is really a desperately sad tale into a kind of inspiring marathon, one wonders whether a more small-scale approach may not have worked better.

Admittedly, it is not an easy task to have taken on. What seems so remarkable as a two-line tale is also evidence of what must have been an exceptionally lonely life—unglamorous, repetitive, and full of back-breaking solitary labour. How is something like this to be made into a film with adequate drama?

What Mehta and his scriptwriters decide to do is to set Manjhi's narrative against the sweep of post-independence Indian history. There are moments at which this decision seems like a stroke of genius, such as early in the film, when the runaway Manjhi returns to the village after seven years working in the coal mines, to hear that untouchability has been legally abolished. Siddiqui makes completely believable the scene where Manjhi, already maverick enough to actually believe the newspapers, gives the zamindar (Tigmanshu Dhulia) and his henchmen happy hugs, which they accept in baffled silence - until they recognise him as the Musahar boy who had escaped their clutches so long ago.

The brutal reality of caste in the Indian village is something Mehta has approached in at least two different registers in his earlier work: the cheeky fable of Bhavni Bhavai and the soaring battlecry of Mirch Masala. The violence visited upon Dalit women and men in Mountain Man is not so different from that of NFDC films of an earlier era -- but somehow Mehta's attempt to leaven these horrific episodes with song and laughter doesn't quite work. This is a filmmaker straining to make a contemporary real-life hero into the subject of an old-style melodrama, but failing.

By the time the film decides to have Manjhi be caught in a Naxalite shootout, be photographed with a distracted, self-obsessed Indira Gandhi (Deepa Sahi in a cameo as ridiculously fake as her wig), and later, set out to walk all the way to Delhi to meet her (ostensibly because he doesn't have the train fare), the sweep of history begins to seem more comic than tragic.

The part of the drama that did work for me almost entirely is the relationship between Manjhi and his wife Phagunia, notwithstanding Mehta's cringe worthy literal interpretation of a Dalit couple's "earthy" eroticism. Played with a faltering accent but unwavering warmth by Radhika Apte, Phagunia leaves an impression both as the vivacious young woman Dashrath falls for (only to realise that she was betrothed to him as a child) and as the spirited, practical wife of a man who is clearly not very worldly.

But even here, the film lets itself down, bathing Dashrath's memories of his wife in unnecessary bathos and truly unnecessary dream-waterfalls. It is only because Siddiqui can make you believe anything that you do not laugh at his semi-hallucinatory exchanges, with his beloved wife or with a mountain.

The surreal core of Dashrath Manjhi's life was the relationship of a man with a mountain. Focusing on that personification of the elements - a man turning a silent stony outcrop into the outlet for his most intimate emotions - could have made for a singular film. There are snatches of that film in Mountain Man, but I so wish Mehta had looked inwards rather than outwards.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23 Aug 2015.