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.

Not Khubsoorat enough

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Khubsoorat was a delicious samosa of a film, crisp on the outside, but stuffed with wit and wisdom. Shashanka Ghosh's version gives us just the flaky samosa shell.

In what is now forever relegated to being the 'old' Khubsoorat (1980), Hrishikesh Mukherjee established a memorable milieu, and then used the time-honoured device of an outsider's arrival to shake it all up. The new Khubsoorat, directed by Shashanka Ghosh, uses the same device -- but it makes so many changes to characters and plot that it isn't clear why it needed to be cast as a remake at all. 

So I'm not comparing the two films to decide which is better. Suffice it to say that I think Mukherjee's Khubsoorat was indeed a beauty: a crisp samosa of a film, perfectly flaky on the outside, and yet stuffed with such wit and wisdom that a whole philosophy of life was conveyed, in a manner light as air. Ghosh's Khubsoorat isn't content with the ordinary world and everyday problems of the original film. He wants to make something grander, complete with regal paraphernalia and a truly tragic back story. But this new Disney fairytale version ends up giving us only the shell of the samosa: flaky without and largely empty within. 

What I find interesting is how the two films reflect the times to which they belong. In the 1980 film, the taur-tareeke of the Gupta khaandaan are established early on -- as is the khaandaan's everyday struggle to live up to them. Almost everyone is slightly late for breakfast, except the little granddaughter, who gets brownie points both for arriving before the appointed hour of 8.30am and instructing the adults not to speak 'chilla chilla ke'. All this cannot possibly be in aid of the adorable Ashok Kumar, whom we have already met, mowing his lawn in a dhoti-kurta and smiling at the sight of his blooming hyacinths. No, the person everyone's afraid of is the redoubtable Dina Pathak, whose disciplinary behaviour is extreme but somehow entirely believable. 

The 2014 version has a matriarch in charge, too -- played by Dina Pathak's real-life daughter Ratna Pathak Shah - but the family has been depleted to a nuclear-level son and daughter. And since a Baniya family (even well-off professionals like the Guptas), would be too ordinary, we now get the Rathores. And not just any Rathores, but erstwhile royals. But all this shaan-o-shaukat - sandstone palace, antique decor, and a massive staff - can only be maintained by recourse to business. So the Rajputs make their money buying up forts to make heritage hotels. I find it interesting that caste was never mentioned in the old film, but here it is both foregrounded (in the constant repetition of the Rathore name) and undercut by a real anxiety (an older royal invites our princeling hero Vikram to shooting practice with a jibe about whether all the business has made him a "poora baniya", incapable of such pursuits.) 

In the original film, the rebellion against Dina Pathak's "military discipline" was fostered by Manju (Rekha), unmarried younger sister of the Gupta family's recent bahu Anju. The elder sister's marriage happened without her even meeting her husband, and the film did not dwell on the matter except playfully. The romance between Manju and Inder (Rakesh Roshan, the Gupta brother who is appropriately next in line to be married) is not portrayed as rebelliousness, either. But then in that film, the romance isn't even central to the plot. What is important is the household and its ability to allow for the happiness of each member. 

There is no Anju in 2014, and our hero has no older siblings either. Our heroine Mili (Sonam) does not enter the Rathore home through personal ties, but professional ones. Like Rekha in the old film, she is undaunted, but her reasons are different. As a physiotherapist with a magic touch, Dr Mrinalini Chakravarty has earned fame by tending to the new rich and famous. To her who fixes the cricks in Dhoni's neck, it is implied, the raja of Sambhalgarh is no great shakes. 

But while our forthright 1980 heroine didn't have a career (in her milieu, there was no question of demanding one), she had a highly literate wit and an exceptional understanding of people. Instead of that wicked sense of fun, we now have a heroine whose primary way of making us laugh is to bump into things, fall clumsily into the hero's arms, get drunk with the domestic staff (interesting touch, this), get kidnapped and be rescued. Playing prize bimbette is apparently what's now called a "spontaneous personality". 

The cheerful informality of Rekha's bin-ma-ka household is replaced by Punjabiness as explanation for Sonam's. Dina Pathak's reason for being a martinet was that she knew her family's weaknesses -- her heart patient husband's unhealthy eating habits, her sons' weakness for cards -- and wanted to protect them from themselves. And she had some good rules, too, which seem scarcely imaginable in any contemporary film: such as 'whoever makes the mess must clean it up'. The Guptas have two full-time servants, but Ashok Kumar mows the lawn himself. 

Ratna Pathak's Rani-sa has no such believable interiority. Her absurd crustiness is justified by a tragedy so massive that we can never really trust it happened. And as soon as the tragedy is partly reversed, she changes entirely. The work that character and psychology did so subtly in Mukherjee's film is reduced, in Ghosh's version, to the power of circumstance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this ends in caricature.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.