A child's view of the world through a train ride

This is the sixth column in my ongoing series on trains in Indian cinema. (Periodic reminder for new readers of this blog: I write a weekly column on cinema which appears in TOI Plus, as well as in Bangalore Mirror, Pune Mirror & Mumbai Mirror.)

-- In Gulzar's Kitaab, the railways are a route and a rite of passage for a child trying to find his place in the universe --

There are probably few films in any language that have been titled 'book'. But lest you think a film called Kitaab might be bookish (which in the eyes of many movie-viewers translates to boring), Gulzar's 1977 screen adaptation of Samaresh Basu's story begins in breathless motion. Gusts of black smoke rise into the sky, a train whistles, and the familiar “chooka-chook” of the moving carriage takes over, interspersed with a child's voice. He is making up a chant to match the train's rhythmic sound: Kidhar ja, kidhar ja, kidhar ja? Bhaag chala, bhaag chala, bhaag chala [Where d'you go, where d'you go, where d'you go? Running away, running away, running away].

It is only after this that we see him: Master Raju, ubiquitous and irreplaceable child star of 1970s Hindi cinema, squatting on the train's floor, in the space between two lower berths. Above him, in the upper berths, two children pass a notebook to each other, conducting a silent game of knots and crosses. Even before we know anything of what the film is about, Gulzar has communicated how marvellous train journeys could feel for the middle-class child -- the adults asleep below, while you looked down from the deliciously unsupervised space of the upper berth, the holidays stretching ahead of you. The train journey was a time out of time.

As it turns out, Gulzar is only pointing to that sense of sweet interregnum, secured at both ends by middle-class cushioning, as a contrast. What makes Kitaab memorable is the real-life adventure on which it launches its boy hero – but here, too, the railways are crucial. Bored with school and misunderstood at home, Babla runs away from the city home he shares with his didi (Vidya Sinha) and brother-in-law (in an odd bit of casting, Uttam Kumar!). He gets on the train to go back to his mother in the village. But when shoved out for being ticketless, the 12-year-old suddenly finds himself in the real world he's been so impatient to enter.

In flashback, we see Babla and his best friend Pappu bunking school to wander the city, entranced as much by the street magician as by the halwai making jalebis. Again and again, they try to apprentice themselves to these men, who greet their enthusiasm with mostly indulgent disbelief. On the surface, these scenes evoke laughter: The boys, it seems, will do anything to get out of having to go to school. But the camera's attention to the men's practiced movements and the boys' rapt gazes tell a different story: These artisans are indeed masters of their craft. The children, watching them, grasp that fact instinctively – and any craft so consummately carried out seems worth learning. If classroom education has failed to engage these young minds, Kitaab suggests, it has also not yet infected them with the casteist, classist belief that manual work, no matter how skilled, is unworthy of admiration.

It is people like these that adopt the runaway boy -- the railway engine driver and his assistant, the station's resident midget, and Shreeram Lagoo playing a blind singer of the sort that could once be met on every train in India. Asking very few questions, they simply add him into their lives. The middle class passengers ignore the unclaimed child in their midst, but the engine driver gives him the last of his tiffin, the blind beggar buys him tea and food. The instinctive humanity with which they share what little they have is moving – yet Gulzar doesn't let things turn maudlin. We smile at little things and big ones: The little boy and the dwarf literally sizing each other up; the hackneyed phrases people use for emotions. When someone says “Bechara anaath hai [He's a poor orphan]”, Babla adopts the phrase, trotting it out for a quick dose of sympathy, often to hilarious effect. “Bechara anaath hoon [I'm a poor orphan],” he tells one ticket checker -- just before saying he's headed to meet his mother.

 

Much of the bittersweet pleasure of Kitaab comes from watching the child watch the world go by – and learning from it as he does. And although Babla was curious, observant and sensitive at school and at home, it is the train that offers him a sense of what the world is really like. The network of trains and railway stations is like a pathway through the world, and a microcosm of it. As Babla negotiates his way through this network, he encounters old age and disease, blindness and deformity -- and death. Like a latter-day Siddhartha, the protected middle class boy is confronted with the sight of suffering, and is shaken by it.

Unlike Siddhartha, though, the experience doesn't lead him to renounce the world – but to return to it richer. One could read Kitaab as a cop-out: Issuing a challenge to middle class pieties and normative barriers, but turning back before risk turns to danger. But one can also see it as an expansion of the child's universe, an initiation into life that acknowledges the inevitability of sorrow -- while not undermining the value of the safety net. As the blind train singer puts it, “Gaadi chhutne ka gham mat kariyo, baalak. Station na chhutne paaye [Don't mourn the missed train, child. Just don't let the station get away from you.]”

Published in TOI Plus, and three editions of Mirror -- Pune, Bangalore and Mumbai.

Educating Stanley

My op-ed piece in the Indian Express:

Where Hindi teachers are always khadoos

Amole Gupte's Stanley ka Dabba, released last week, is a quiet gem of a film about a child who gets picked on because he doesn't bring his own lunchbox to school. He gets picked on, oddly, not by his classmates -- who're all rather fond of him and his stories and happy to share their dabbas -- but by the Hindi teacher, Babubhai Varma aka Khadoos, who doesn't bring his own lunch either and preys on others'.

The film uses the ostensibly shared tiffinlessness marvellously, to reveal the gulf between Stanley and Varma -one a child trying to make the best of his circumstances, the other an adult shamelessly exploiting both the kindness of other adults and the powerlessness of children.

In terms of understanding a child's world, Stanley ka Dabba is a remarkable film. It is only because we see him through children's eyes, for example, that Varma's tragicomic gluttony, his near-insane obsession with the kids' dabbas, his dogin-the-manger-ish desire to punish Stanley, seem to belong not to caricature but to fable.

There is something else in this film that seems to belong to the world of fable, though -and this is a spoiler -which is the explanation for why Stanley has no dabba. It turns out that he is an orphan, left to the care of an evil chacha who makes him serve and wash dishes in his small-time eatery, in exchange for a place to live. The film's final half-hour, with Stanley saying an adoring good night to photos of his parents before he goes to sleep on a counter in the dhaba, prep the viewer for the child labour statistics at the end of the film.

It may seem churlish to criticise a film made with such unequivocally good intentions, but I was struck by Stanley ka Dabba's crude attempt to gain the sympathy of a presumed middle-class, primarily English-speaking audience, by creating a child character who goes to a good convent school and recites English poems, just like us. It's only once that is done that he can be a conduit for a child labour narrative: a fascinating reversal of all those Hindi films until the 1990s in which the poor hero with whom the bulk of the audience identified, turned out, in the end, to be a rich man's lost heir.

One shouldn't be surprised, either, that a film emerging out of workshops that director Amole Gupte held with the children of the Holy Family School in Mumbai should have the English teacher Rosy ma'am as the sensitive one and the villainous Varma as Hindi teacher. Film critic Raja Sen, in his review of Stanley, notes that "Hindi teachers have a tough life, appearing intimidating to their students by default, by dint of the scale of sheer listlessness their subject provokes", eventually turning "grouchy and irritable". Varma, he goes on to say, "is strange even by Hindi teacher standards".

The "strangeness" of Hindi teachers, I would suggest, is unique to the English-medium world in which we increasingly bubble-wrap our children: a world in which the Hindi teacher is doubly condemned -first by teaching a subject that is dismissed as irrelevant, and second by being someone not necessarily fluent in English.

Last month's Bollywood release for children, a superhero film called Zokkomon, has city boy Kunal (Darsheel Safary, also orphaned and left to the care of an evil chacha!) arriving in a village school where all it takes to establish that all the teachers are idiots is for one of them, the bucktoothed Tinnu Anand, to mispronounce a sentence in English. It's revealing to set Stanley ka Dabba and Zokkomon against a remarkable children's film made in 1977: Gulzar's Kitaab. It, too, is about a middle-class boy of a certain age, who gets into trouble at school and spends much of the film wandering the world, or at least the city, by himself.


But there the similarities end. Stanley's wanderings are those of a good boy -either to preserve his dignity by not going to school dabba-less, or to get to a concert audition. Kunal in Zokkomon is abandoned in the city by his chacha and only survives by befriending a young woman called Kittu didi with whom he leads a kind of fantasy-holiday-life.

We have left behind forever the world of Kitaab, a world in which the middle-class child thought it was exhilarating to run away from a regulated middle-class life. No one who has watched Master Raju hugging his knees in joy atop a moving train as the engine driver sings, "Dhanno ki ankhon mein raat ka surma", can ever forget the thrill of it. There was danger in Kitaab, too, and eventual return - but the world outside the middle-class bubble was still something to be explored and understood. Not merely to be protected from.

Published in the Indian Express, May 21, 2011.