That '80s Show: Katha Sagar

Benjamin Gilani and Supriya Pathak in 'Sannata'

A long piece I did for Caravan magazine, about an almost-forgotten TV series, Doordarshan and India in the '80s: 

   If you watched television in India in the mid-1980s, you might remember seeing a half-hour episode of a Hindi series in which an impressionable young man is spooked out of his wits by a delightfully wicked Pallavi Joshi in twin plaits and spectacles. Or one with Saeed Jaffrey as a cheery dhaba owner betrayed by his fetching young wife? Waheeda Rehman as a Goan landlady acquiring a taste for feni in her old age? A thoughtless Benjamin Gilani loving and leaving an achingly young Supriya Pathak?

If any of these rings a bell, you’ve probably watched some part of Katha Sagar, a hugely popular series that aired on Doordarshan in 1986. The TV series was released in February as a DVD box set by Reliance Home Video and Cinevistaas Ltd (the original producers, then called Cinevista Communications). To watch Katha Sagar today is to get a glimpse into another country, a pre-liberalisation India whose urban middle class was a very different creature from the one it is today. These eight DVDs are part of a potential archive, not just of Doordarshan’s early adventures in programming, but of an entire era.   

Established in 1982 by Prem Kishen, son of Hindi film actors Prem Nath and Bina Rai and himself an ex-actor, Cinevista spent three years producing corporate and advertising films. In 1985, when Doordarshan invited private producers to submit tenders for serials, Prem Kishen was one of the first seven to apply. His proposal, to adapt 21 internationally renowned short stories as 28 half-hour television episodes (eventually expanded to 37 stories over 44 episodes), would become Katha Sagar.

Looking back from within the highly saturated media landscape we now inhabit, the single-channel, bureaucratic media universe into which Katha Sagar emerged seems almost inconceivably bare. Yet it was also a tremendously exciting space. The possibilities for a new mass medium in a third world country seemed immense. Indian officialdom was just beginning to conceive of television as more than a tool for literacy, and to expand the state’s pedagogical ambitions to include, for instance, the broadcasting of high culture...

Read the whole article on the Caravan site.

Teen Behenein

Kundan Shah brings home an ugly truth with sensitivity.

It is supremely difficult to make a film hold an audience's interest when everyone already knows what happens in the end. Kundan Shah's unreleased film Teen Behenein (2005) succeeds in doing exactly this.

Shah's gut-wrenching subject is the suicide of three sisters whose family cannot provide adequate dowries for them to get married. There have been many such tragic cases in towns ranging from Agra to Bhilai to Palghat, where three or four sisters have committed suicide collectively, because they saw no other way forward for themselves or their families. The particular real-life instance that was Shah's starting point for the film took place in Kanpur on 4th February 1988. It was an event that made national headlines at the time, partly because of a haunting UNI photograph that showed the bodies of the three unfortunate girls as they were discovered: a black and white newsprint image of them hanging in a row from the ceiling of their room.*

But of course it soon became old news. As do the hundreds and thousands of young women who die in this country year after year – ostensibly by their own hands, but in reality led unswervingly to their deaths by a horrifically blinkered society in which the defining imaginary of a good life for a woman is still marriage, at any cost.

At the most elementary level, then, Teen Behenein is important because it reminds us of these young women, of countless lives snuffed out before they have really even begun. But as Shekhar Hattangadi, the film's Associate Director, points out, the film is neither a documentary, nor a docu-drama. The only thing factual about the film is the starting – or should one call it ending? – premise, the suicide itself. Everything else – the characters, the events, the specificity of the space they inhabit – is a richly imagined fiction.

Written by Kundan Shah in collaboration with Nilay Upadhyay and Sai Kabir, Teen Behenein is an intricately plotted account of the last day in the sisters' lives. When the film opens, the three girls are alone in the house, (their parents and younger brother have gone to an out-of-town wedding), and are preparing to commit the act they have been contemplating for days. Everything is ready, and the nooses are almost around their necks, when the doorbell rings. It's a neighbour, come to inform them of a phone call from their Bua, their father's sister of whom they are all very fond, asking to speak to them urgently. It turns out that she is passing through Kanpur that day, and plans to come and have lunch with them before she catches a train for somewhere else. Assailed by the vision of Bua having to deal with the discovery of their bodies, they decide to postpone the act till after she has come and gone. And wouldn't it be fittingly lovely, they think, to meet their favourite aunt once before they die? So their earlier chilling preparations are set aside, and instead they start to make preparations to cook their aunt a special lunch.

Using plot devices such as this, Shah succeeds in keeping alive a sense of hope, while never letting us forget the grimness of the realities that circumscribe the girls's lives. The film's use of visual metaphors is a little ham-handed: the dingy lower middle-class flat in which the girls are holed up all the time stands in for the hemmed-in lives they lead; the terrace to which they escape for light and air and solitude is meant to conjure up the possibility of freedom; there's even a fledgling bird whose rescue forms a minor subplot. The male characters are caricatureish, too – the 'sympathetic' neighbour who takes every opportunity to place his hand on Lata's shoulders, the matchmaking busybody who lists their father's failings, the Phuphaji who refuses to take women's words seriously.

But Shah does a fine job with his three main characters, whose sharply-etched (and beautifully acted) relationships with each other and with the world form the film's core. There is the grave, responsible Lata (Amrita Subhash), whose position as the eldest has given her a deep sense of psychological identification with her parents, but who retains a childlike innocence. There is the middle sister, the amicable, non-confrontational Nisha (Shiju Kataria), who has grown up supporting Lata in her every decision and cannot quite imagine opposing her in this one. And there is the youngest, Chhoti (Kadambari Kadam) – feisty, outspoken, not one to take things lying down, but torn between her sense of injustice and kinship with her sisters.

This is a low-budget film with low-budget production values, and occasionally has a theatrical quality. But don't go in expecting to be blown away by how it looks, and you're much more likely to be transported by how it feels.

Published in the Sunday Guardian, Oct 23, 2011.

*The photo I'm referring to is here. 

Film Review: Mumbai Cutting

Bombay Eleven

Read the Tehelka piece here. And the longer version below.

Bombay has always been the metropolis of choice for Hindi cinema. As any self-respecting Indian film-goer could tell you, when watching a Hindi film, if the locale was urban, it was safe to assume that it was Bombay. Strangely, though, films set in Bombay weren’t always interested in the specificity of the city. Film scholar M. Madhava Prasad suggests that this may have been because ‘Bambai’ was always invoked in opposition to the village, as “the generic metropolitan other”. While other cities were too specific, Bombay somehow managed to be “Bombay plus The City”. But having to bear this burden of symbolic city-ness meant that it was only in the 1970s, with a film like Deewar, that Bombay came into its own on screen, with identifiable locales, language and street culture.

Since then, of course, there’s been no looking back. The fetishization of “Bambaiya” speech, specifically through films set in the underworld, has been the cinematic obsession of our times. The gritty realist gangster flick created by Ram Gopal Varma continues to thrive, while giving rise to comic riffs that play on our underworld fascination, like the Munnabhai films. Varma and his Factory have also been responsible for a series of tributes to Bombay as the city of cinematic dreams: Rangeela, Mast, Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon, Naach. More recently, films like Life in a Metro have sought to rediscover a “middle class” Mumbai of office romance and failing marriages.

Mumbai Cutting makes this showcasing of Mumbai a self-conscious venture. Produced by Niyati Shah of White Cloud Films, the film consists of eleven shorts, with Mumbai as the common thread. Several films seek to capture something quintessentially Bombay by recourse to public hangouts: bars, cafes, clubs. Ayush Raina’s Bombay High revolves around the kind of seedy neighbourhood bar that probably doesn’t exist in any other Indian city – where small time gangsters share space with an after-office group that includes women. The only thing identifiably Bombay about Jahnu Barua’s badly-named Anjane Dost is an Irani Café that’s seems meant to serve as both locale and premise: but surely the meeting between strangers can happen in any city, anywhere in the world? Then we have Rahul Dholakia’s stylishly-shot Bombay Mumbai Same Shit, with Jimmy Shergill as a rich brat whose nocturnal wanderings weave the nightclub and the pavement together.

The two women directors, Revathi and Ruchi Narain, place women at the centre of their narratives. In Revathi’s tightly-edited Parcel, Mumbai appears as a series of insurmountable hurdles to a Bangladeshi woman en route to the Middle East – Sonali Kulkarni in a stellar performance. Narain’s quirky, part-animated Jo Palti Nahi Woh Rickshaw Kya shows an NRI woman’s relationship to Mumbai’s pleasures – and dangers – as mediated by auto-rickshaw rides.

Despite the genuine effort to depict different locations and social classes, several shorts end up recycling Mumbai clichés – mafia, the monsoon and local trains – without doing much with them. Sudhir Mishra’s The Ball has a child witness the gang murder of a man during an evening cricket match. Shot predictably in the thick of the city’s Muslim neighbourhoods (under the JJ flyover, going towards Bhendi Bazaar), the film never transcends its gimmicky opening. Manish Jha’s And it Rained, about two people brought together by the Mumbai monsoon is ambitiously dialogue-less, depending instead on Euphoria’s Jiya jaye na track, but ends up feeling like a music video. Kundan Shah’s Hero (also without dialogue) does better with its take on the daily battle to get on the local train: Deepak Dobriyal (of Omkara fame) plays the flagging commuter with an exaggerated Buster Keatonesque comic automaton-like quality that nearly works.

But for the large majority of Hindi film buffs, Bombay is not a lived space whose traffic lights and nakabandis we negotiate every day. It’s the mythical Bombay of mafia dons and glamorous starlets that we’ve seen on screen all our lives. So while some of these latter shorts are extremely watchable, the two that really succeed are the ones that set out, self-consciously, to play with the Bombay of popular lore and filmic memory.

The first is Anurag Kashyap’s Pramod Bhai 23, which does a brilliant job of showing you this mythical Bombay as it lives in the mind and heart of a 12-year-old juvenile delinquent. Mushtaq lives in a world defined by knowing someone who knows someone who knows Chhota Rajan, a world marked by traffic light encounters with a lady in dark glasses who’s definitely “Karan Arjun ki Ma”. The second is Rituparno Ghosh’s Urge, a gentle tongue-in-cheek look at Bombay’s place in the popular Indian imagination. The humour owes a lot to the self-referential treatment – the family seems straight out of a TV serial (clues are provided: the mother whines about having to give up her “last two serials”), and the Stardust-reading police inspector is clearly inspired to play detective by watching Bombay films. It is this ability to view the city bifocally, to see how the mythical Bombay feeds off the real one (and vice versa) that makes Mumbai Cutting a true benchmark in the long line of Mumbai films.

(An edited version of this article appeared in Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 34, Dated Aug 30, 2008)