Minding the Gap: Thoughts on Gulabo Sitabo

My Mirror column:

Gulabo Sitabo mines what remains of old Lucknow for visual atmospherics and banter, but both its laughter and its nostalgia come at a cost

A screenshot from the film Gulabo Sitabo (2020)

Twenty minutes into Gulabo Sitabo, the film's septuagenarian protagonist Mirza Chunnan Nawab (Amitabh Bachchan with a prosthetic nose, a cotton-puff beard and a bent back) makes his creaky way up to the room that his rent-witholding tenant Baankey Rastogi (Ayushmann Khurrana) shares with an otherwise all-female household. The family is prepared. The youngest sister lies down immediately, another places a white bandage on her forehead, the third stands by gravely. The mother emerges on cue with an empty atta tin, while Baankey holds up an old blender they could sell to buy food. It's a fine performance, and even the suspicious Mirza is fooled. As he turns to leave, though, a loud ping breaks the melodramatic silence. It's the microwave with the family's actual dinner.

Things are not quite what they seem.

That gap between appearance and reality is the recurring motif of Shoojit Sircar's new film – and not always a consciously adopted one. At first glance, Juhi Chaturvedi's script appears to concern itself with an old nawabi Lucknow, centred on a decaying but still impressive old haveli and its khandaani Muslim inhabitants. But that Lucknow, of inherited feudal grandeur and flowery late-Mughal culture, has been in the grip of slow stasis since at least the mid-1800s, when the British exiled its beloved ruler Wajid Ali Shah, he of the brilliant shairi and thumri and kathak -- not just a connoisseur of the arts but an actual artist. What little survived of that culture through a century under the British has crumbled to nothing in the 70 years since independence. And so the characters that Chaturvedi and Sircar prop up as representatives of that past cannot live up to our imagination of it.

We may want crabby old Mirza and his 94-year-old wife, Fatima Begum (the inimitable Farrukh Jaffar, Bollywood's resident Sharp-Tongued Old Lady from Peepli Live to Photograph) to be all quiet gentility and noblesse oblige. But given that their sole resource is a building they don't have the money to repair, why is it surprising that they are instead skinflint, petty creatures -- one handing out coins as if they mean something, and the other actually exchanging them for tenners?

Amitabh Bachchan as Mirza sells off pilfered odds and ends in a scene from Gulabo Sitabo

Right from the start, the film's constant refrain is that Mirza is laalchi (greedy) and miserly. But there's something pathetic about a man who spends every day trying to redeem paltry rents from ever-dodging tenants, money he doesn't even control when he gets it. It is clearly because he has no money that he is reduced to thievery. So limited is his experience of cash that even calculating the sum of 30,000 rupees is difficult for him – and when the chaatwala pronounces the amount, Mirza falls over in shock. A much larger sum, later in the film, is entirely beyond his comprehension.

Yes, he speaks rather hopefully of the Begum's impending death (and Sircar and Chaturvedi milk every drop of humour from Bachchan's goggle-eyed shock when she recovers from every physical setback). Yes, he confesses to having married the Begum essentially for her haveli. But he has also stayed married to a woman a decade and a half his senior, and looked after her and her house as best he could, receiving little for his pains, his younger and ghar-jamaai status keeping him at semi-attendant level.

Thinking of Mirza as a villain, even a comic villain, or as a greedy heartless sort, seems to me to miss the wood for the trees. And as the film proceeded, it became increasingly clear to me what that wood is -- a whole city full of people on the make, using whatever they can to climb that one rung up the ladder that might insulate them from the vagaries of fortune in the economically vulnerable, socially depleted, politically compromised world that is present-day Lucknow. The small-time lawyer (Brijendra Kala) who thinks he can make a deal on Fatima Manzil with the local mafioso builder, the Department of Archaeology official (Vijay Raaz) who wants to get it declared heritage property, Baankey's girlfriend who ditches him for a richer match, or his sharp younger sister Guddo (Srishti Srivastava), perfectly matter-of-fact about sleeping with a useful contact – they're all in it for what they can get. Strangely, none of them get labelled greedy. 

Waning Moons, a recent PSBT documentary watchable on Vimeo, features two real-life Nawabi descendants, Mirza Nasir Abbas Maliki and his sister Naaz, who describe their father as having lost all their money because of his “seedhapa” (straightness). Naaz, who was never really sent to school, describes an actual haveli roof collapse that destroyed many antiques. But somehow, those selling their antiques for a pittance are greedy -- not those who re-sell them at massive mark-ups?

It is not just the chandeliers of Fatima Manzil that are disappearing. The city that held them up is gone, too. Even the overblown nazaakat that 1950s and 60s Hindi cinema capitalised on -- in Lucknow-set Muslim socials like HS Rawail's Mere Mehboob (1963), poetic romances like Mohammed Sadiq's Chaudhavin ka Chand (1960) or joyfully bantering ones like Subodh Mukherjee's marvellous Paying Guest (1957) – has long disappeared, leaving a shell in its stead.

Abhishek Chaubey's Dedh Ishqiya (2014) played the perfect double game with that fact, creating a dark comedy that seemed to cater to our fantasy of gorgeously-dressed, poetry-spouting old-world romance, only to ruthlessly undercut it. Let it be noted that Gulabo Sitabo's ostensibly gentle comedy about an old Muslim Lucknow, with its gratitude to the Uttar Pradesh Police, UP's Minister of State for Minority Welfare and the ex-Vice President of the BJP's Youth Wing, comes to us in the midst of a pandemic during which Muslims have been constantly attacked by both media and the government. Nostalgia and mockery combine well, not just on screen.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 Jun 2020.

The Hindustani Factor

My Mirror column:

Thinking about Tom Alter while watching Stephen Frears’ new film Victoria and Abdul makes one muse about linguistic connections.

In a great scene in Satyajit Ray's Shatranj ke Khiladi (1977), the somewhat hesitant Captain Weston is persuaded by the British general to whom he works as an assistant to recite something written by the king. The film, based on a short story by Premchand, was set in Lucknow, and “the king”, whom the British were then making plans to divest of his throne, was Nawab Wajid Ali Shah. Richard Attenborough, as the general, displays the perfect mix of bafflement and disdain at the thought of a king who spends his days praying (“Five times a day!” Attenborough remarks in shock), flying kites on his terrace, listening to music, watching dancers, and most mysterious of all, writing poetry. “I'm not a poetry man,” he confesses. “Many soldiers are. But I'm curious to know what it sounds like. I rather like the sound of Hindustani.”

Weston clears his throat discreetly, waiting. “Go on then, out with it,” says the general, with a gesture of faint impatience. “Sadma na pahunche koi mere jism-e-zaad par; ahista phool daalna mere mazaar par. Har chand khaakh mein thha, magar ta-falak gaya; dhokha hai aasmaan ka mere gubaar par,” recites Weston in an impeccable accent, before proffering an equally impeccable English translation -- and his opinion that the king is “really quite gifted, sir”.
Captain Weston must have been a strange part to play for the late Tom Alter. On the one hand, it allowed the white man with a love of Urdu poetry to channel both those aspects of himself on screen. On the other hand, the only way he could do that was as a British colonial army officer, someone whose job it was to help dismantle the very world he so admired.

Alter went on to play a string of colonial Angrez characters in a succession of popular Hindi films, but none of them, to my knowledge, ever displayed alove of Urdu. That attachment to the language was something Alter was forced to place in a different compartment: the theatre. In 1999 or 2000, Alter started working with some Urdu poetry by an old friend called Idraak Bhatti. Then his old FTII friends Uday Chandra and Chander Khanna got involved, one performing Kafka's Metamorphosis and the other with a rendition of Maithili Sharan Gupt's famous Jayadrath Vadh poem, and a production called Trisanga was born. Through the 2000s, in plays staged by the Delhi-based Pierrot's Troupe, Alter enthusiastically played the nationalist leader Maulana Azad, and later the Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib himself. In the last few years, Alter appeared often on Urdu programmes, telling us in impeccable Hindustani that the great Dilip Kumar had once told him that sher-o-shairi was the secret to good acting.

And yet, when Alter died on September 29 this year, very few obituaries placed his facility with the language in the historical context they should have. Alter belonged to the third generation of a family of Presbyterian missionaries who had come to India from Ohio in the mid-19th century. His father was born in Sialkot, but moved this side of the border at Partition. The 1950-born Alter spent his childhood in Mussoorie, Allahabad, Jabalpur, Saharanpur and Rajpur, learning – as did all members of his parents' order – to recite Biblical texts in Urdu and Hindi. With his blue eyes and blond hair, language was simply what allowed Tom Alter to claim his Indianness.

In a rather silly new film called Victoria and Abdul, the fetching Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal), low-level employee of aprison in Agra, is picked to go to England to present the queen with a gold coin issued for her Golden Jubilee in 1887. But the redoubtable, gluttonous Queen Victoria (played to perfection by Judi Dench, for the second time after Mrs. Brown) is portrayed as being thoroughly charmed by the much younger Abdul. Seemingly on the strength of a few faux-philosophical meditations he makes about carpets, she appoints him as her Urdu tutor, and soon becomes adept at writing such lines as: “Apni akalmandi pe rani ko naaz hai [The queen is proud of her intelligence].”

While making much of the age and racial difference, and the frisson that causes in the royal household, the film seems bizarrely blind to the imperial context in which their relationship unfolds. Cringeworthy scenes revealing Victoria's distressing ignorance about the country she rules are compounded by her seemingly un-ironic desire to see the exotic obliging servant play-act as an Oriental sultan in her personal tableaux.

And yet, at the centre of this colonial confection sits the queen's quite believable fascination with this otherness, exemplified in her learning of Urdu. Like Attenborough's gruff general, she rather likes the sound of Hindustani. Victoria is far from being a Tom Alter, or even a Captain Weston, but even in this most brutal colonial abyss, the learning of a language seems to hold out the dim possibility of building a bridge.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Oct 2017.

The Life Poetic

My Mirror column:

The 1957 classic Paying Guest still feels young as it turns 60. But there are things in its frothy shairana universe that now seem almost worthy.

There's a delicious little scene in Paying Guest when the penurious tenant Ramesh (Dev Anand) has returned home to pursue his newly-minted courtship with Shanti (Nutan), who also happens to be the daughter of his landlord. For several seconds, they look deep into each other's eyes, each uttering the other's name in typically soulful lover-ly fashion. "Shanti." "Ramesh." "Shanti?" "Ramesh?" But Ramesh wants more than sweet nothings. "Bolo?" he urges. At which Shanti flutters her eyelashes and says — in the same dulcet tones as before — "Kiraye ke paise laaye? [Did you bring the rent money?]" "Kaisi gair-shairaana baatein karti ho! [What unpoetic things you speak of!]" responds Ramesh, pretending to go off in a huff.

The scene doesn't do very much by way of plot, but it is typical of the sort of bantering courtship, of romance between witty equals, that makes the film such fun. Very little that is gair-shairana -or gair-shararati - is allowed in the Paying Guest universe. The delightful 1957 film was directed by Subodh Mukerji, but its spirit was the product of Nasir Hussain's penmanship. Hussain, for whom this was the second collaboration with good friend Mukerji (the first being Munimji, 1955) - produced with the script and dialogue here a perfect balance between banter and poetry, between sharpness and sweetness. It was this lightness of register would go on to characterise his films as director, starting with Tumsa Nahin Dekha, his directorial debut, which also released in 1957.

Akshay Manwani, in his detailed and thoughtful book on Nasir Hussain's cinema, suggests that it was Husain's writing that allowed Dev Anand to metamorphose into the witty, flirtatious, charming trickster figure that became almost his signature in the latter part of his career. Some of Anand's earlier 1950s films - the noirish ones like Baazi, Jaal, Taxi Driver and House No. 44 -had lent him "a certain brazenness", but as "a man of the streets, a survivor who is at home in the urban underbelly." It was Hussain - with his scripts for Munimji and Paying Guest and later Jab Pyaar Kisise Hota Hai (1961), which he directed as well - who set him free to play the fun-loving young man, dashing and quick-witted and happy to turn his energies to romancing the heroine with an enviable lightness. Manwani goes further, citing the writer and lyricist Javed Akhtar to argue that Husain was responsible for Hindi cinema's departure from the melancholy or dramatic protagonist to the carefree, urbane, contemporary hero (embodied first by Dev Anand and then by Shammi Kapoor from Tumsa Nahi Dekha onwards).

The marvellous silliness of Dev Anand in disguise as an old man - something Husain and Mukerji had had him do with great success in the more intricately plotted Munimji a couple of years before - is one of the harmless pleasures of Paying Guest. Ramesh is a lawyer, with not very much work on his hands but with the gift of the gab, and Anand proves surprisingly good at delivering Husain's witty repartee and make-believe tales, both as the youthful Ramesh and in the doddering Mirza Wajahat avatar which enables him to successfully rent a room from Shanti's watchful father. In the context of Lipstick Under My Burkha's marshalling of our squeamish response to an older woman romancing a young man, one must note that Paying Guest is probably one of the earliest Hindi films to establish the trope of the hero, ostensibly desexualised by age, flirting with the young heroine; here for instance Anand-as-Mirza-Sahab constantly calls Nutan "Aziza" [dear], telling her father that the house feels like his sasural, and pretending to rescue her from the attentions of his own younger avatar.

Watching Paying Guest in 2017, exactly sixty years after it was made, one notes many other things with a sense of wonder and not a little sorrow. There is, first and foremost, the fact that a young professional with a Hindu name thinks nothing of first renting a room in the house of an old Muslim gentleman (where a Hindu father and daughter have been tenants for decades). And when, for the purposes of romantic plot, he needs to dress up as an old man, his first recourse is to conjure up another old Muslim gent. To take a room in the house of Babu Digambarnath, his most innocuous disguise is as Mirza Wajahat.

The second setpiece I enjoyed thoroughly was a public 'debate' between Shanti and her college classmate Chanchal (Shubha Khote), on the subject of whether love or money is more essential to the success of a marriage. Conducted in a combination of prose, recitation and sung couplets, the linguistic pleasures of the debate are really those of baitbaazi - a traditional form of poetic competition that was part of Urdu literary life.

This is, it should be noted, a film set in Lucknow, where Mukerji and Husain had both studied. Perhaps the particular history of that city was responsible for some of the ease of these characterisations - a world of lawyers and students who whether they were Hindu or Muslim, shareef tenants or shareef landlords, men or women, could partake of Urdu repartee. But the film was a hit, and not only in the shairana world of Lucknow. In the India of 1957, it seems, there was nothing here to remark on.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 Aug 2017.

Heritage, after a fashion

Relative Value: The youngest of the Kotwara royalty weaves her way into the family business. 

(My first-ever 'fashion' story, and one that allowed me to meet a director whose work I have admired: Muzaffar Ali. Published in the Mumbai Mirror's 'Relative Value' slot last Sunday.)

The home shared by Muzaffar Ali, his wife Meera and their daughter Sama is very much a reflection of them. Kotwara Farm lies at the end of Rumi Lane, just off the Gurgaon-Faridabad Road, a graceful amalgam of the contemporary and traditional — much like the clothes that emerge from the Kotwara fashion label that Muzaffar and Meera created in 1990, with Sama joining in 2014. Their latest collection at the recently concluded Lakme Fashion Week (Aditi Rao Hydari walked for them) was well received by critics and fashionistas alike. The line was what some described as “Indian with modern touches”.

We meet the family in their plush but comfortable drawing room, off an arched courtyard that would be stately if it weren’t for a slender stone frog that rises, as if to welcome you, one leg raised off the ground. Muzaffar’s quirky artistic touch (paintbrushes embedded in glass doors, leftover tiles crafted into a striking floor) combines with a studied elegance — yet the farm is a relaxed domestic space, with space for a cow called Gomti and Rough Collies called Drogo and Sansa (Sama is a Game of Thrones fan). The house was designed by Meera, who trained as an architect before she accepted a small role in a film Muzaffar was making — and ended up marrying him, six weeks after they met. Muzaffar, a painter, poet and acclaimed director of films such as Gaman, Umrao Jaan and Anjuman, had been married twice already: to art historian Geeti Sen, and then to CPM politician Subhashini Ali (director Shaad Ali, of Bunty Aur Babli and OK Jaanu fame, is their son.)

“My parents had no formal training in fashion. But I guess destiny finds you,” says Sama. In 1989-90, dealing with the setback of an aborted film project in Kashmir (the unreleased 1989 Zooni), Muzaffar moved back to his ancestral home in Uttar Pradesh with Meera. Even as a filmmaker, Muzaffar had been fascinated by how clothes and textiles can constitute a milieu, whether it was the khaki he foisted upon Farooq Sheikh’s taxi driver in Gaman, or the attention he lavished on Rekha’s clothes in Umrao Jaan. “For me, soft furnishings were a tactile experience, a layer which preceded the making of any film. Costume was the outer expression of a character, a situation, a mood,” says Muzaffar.

That interest, honed by his work with American couturier Mary Mcfadden exploring Kashmiri craft traditions during Zooni, now combined with his desire to give something back to the place his ancestors had ruled for centuries. Meera and he decided to develop Kotwara as a centre for handicraft. Since 1990, they have been training local artisans under their Dwar pe Rozi (‘employment at your doorstep’) initiative. Producing jobs for people where they are, the foundation ties into Muzaffar’s early concern with the travails of migration (think Gaman), producing exceptionally skilled embroiderers who give Kotwara clothes their distinctive quality.

“A mechanisation process had set into zardozi and chikan after 1947: cheap patterns, cheap markets, saris with big-big bootas, being sold in Punjab and Delhi,” says Muzaffar. “When we started, in 1990, chikan was at its lowest ebb in workmanship and aesthetics,” Meera agrees. “It took us 7-8 years to improve the quality of work, and to bring the buyer back.” The Alis are in agreement that the contemporary rich need to be educated into being patrons who recognise quality and are willing to pay for it. “Historically, art has always bloomed under the patronage of rulers,” says Sama.

Meera points out that Kotwara has been a trendsetter with silhouettes and reviving South Asian fashions. “In 1990, we brought in angarakhas and peshwas, which people now call anarkalis. When people only wore churidars and salwars, we brought back the chauda pyjama, the wide loose pants which everyone now wears as palazzos. Culottes have come back to India, where it is now called the Pakistani pyjama. But it were the Awadh Nawabs who took the Mughal style of dressing to the highest level: the gharara, sharara, big farshi pyjamas,” she says. Kotwara ventured into zardozi with thread work, creating “evening wear that’s elegant but not blingy”. “How chikan and zardozi have come together through us is itself a new form: let’s call it Kotwara craft,” smiles Muzaffar. “When you’re working with artisans with a regional legacy, your innovations become organic.”

The Alis are justifiably confident of the quality of their work, and between their aristocratic past (Meera just published a coffee-table book called Dining with the Nawabs) and Muzaffar’s association with Bollywood, Kotwara lacks neither for glamour nor cultural capital. The UP Tourism Department is co-sponsoring Muzaffar’s current pet project — reviving Lucknawi thumri and kathak as part of his Wajid Ali Shah festival, whose fourth edition opens on 14 February in Lucknow.

But they seem concerned about not being cutthroat enough for the present. “I’m hoping that Sama can learn the business end of things, because we get taken for a ride very easily,” Meera smiles ruefully. “My mother didn’t want me to get into this. She said, ‘fashion is beautiful, everything around it is ugly’,” laughs Sama.

“I want to add my own touch to their brand. Right now my focus is making Kotwara more contemporary, [to cater to] the many independent young people with well-paying jobs, who can buy a 30,000 rupee item without asking mothers or mothers-in-law. Papa’s too nice. I’m very open. But being nice doesn’t mean being stepped over,” says Sama resolutely. Muzaffar is accepting of his daughter’s vision for their brand and changing times. “Today’s reality is very harsh,” he agrees. “But we agree on being exacting and being human.”

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 12 Feb 2017.

Men Aren't From Mars

In today's Mumbai Mirror, I return to the subject of Tanu Weds Manu Returns. This time, the men:

Tanu Weds Manu's male characters are definitely flawed, but they are also profoundly recognisable.

Last week, I wrote about Tanu Weds Manu Returns, its take on the double-role heroine and how it made me think of Hitchcock's Vertigo. Much newsprint since has been expended on the film. But we've been so busy thinking about the women that no one seems to have bothered to think about the men. 

And yet the men are crucial to Anand L Rai's vision. They were perhaps given more space when Rai first set out to create this world, in 2011. If TWMR spins around Manu Sharma's struggle to decide between two models of womanhood (both embodied by Kangana Ranaut), the pivot of the first film, Tanu Weds Manu, was Tanu's choosing between two models of masculinity. On one hand was her old love Raja Awasthi, a sharp-shooting Lucknow boy with a tongue to match. On the other was Manu Sharma, a suitable boy of the obedient sort who became a doctor because his parents wished it and was now set to marry the same way. 

Jimmy Shergill, arguably the most underrated leading man of our time, effortlessly produced the tough guy exterior and inner vulnerability that made Raja so affecting. Shergill's "introduction" scene was among the quiet marvels of the 2011 film: the Awasthi family is in the midst of the ritual humiliation of displaying their daughter to a prospective groom (Manu) when Raja returns home, carrying fresh scars from some street battle. Embarrassed and angry, his father berates him for being a goonda. Shergill's response captures a superbly specific Indian lihaaz that can still bind our most loutish young men: his eyes flash, but he does not answer back. For what seems like an eternity, as his father speaks, he holds out the bag of samosas, and holds his tongue. 

A minute later, we see another possible reason for Raja's silence: cast in the role of ladkiwala, with a sister who has a slightly deformed left hand, he knows he cannot jeopardise her chances any further than he already has. And then, in a moving statement that marks our surprise nowadays at anyone who isn't pulling rank, Raja tells Manu that he seems like a good man - "Nahi toh kahan aise milte hain London ke aadmi hum Lucknow walon se?" 

Screenplay writer Himanshu Sharma has created characters whose roots extend deep below the visible. Without stating it in so many words, the film makes apparent that the contrast between Raja and Manu isn't only one of temperament (though it is that, too). Both are born into middle class families, but Raja, coming of age in '80s Uttar Pradesh, has arrived (perhaps correctly) at the conclusion that good breeding isn't quite going to cut it in contemporary Lucknow. Manu, whom one imagines as shielded from the cut-and-thrust of the Indian street by good marks and an academic bent, has further removed himself from it by living in London. 

But what was remarkable about the face-off between Raja and Manu was that it reversed the usual hierarchy of masculinities, in which status is determined by who gets the girl. "Getting the girl" has long been the subject of heterosexual male discourse, and every cultural milieu generates informal categories to predict who the getters will be. Siddharth Chowdhury's unabashed novel Day Scholar described one such concept in rather graphic terms: "Just like every door has a dwarpal every ch*t has a ch*tpal. A ch*tpal never gets the ch*t just like the dwarpal never gets to sleep in the master bedroom. Every good girl needs at least one ch*tpal, to run errands for her and listen to her bitch about her mother." Whether one finds the terminology unpalatable, it is clear that the concept has currency. And so, having shown the obliging Manu escort Tanu to the beauty parlour and help her shop for dupattas, as the bride-to-be of another man (Raja, who wouldn't be caught dead doing either), Rai's decision to have Tanu eventually reject Raja's heroic histrionics for Manu's almost boring sweetness was nothing short of radical.

TWMR continues to deal in similar categories. Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, playing the smitten young fellow who provides chauffeur-service when Tanu gets Manu's divorce notice, describes himself with touching self-knowledge as the "kandha", literally "shoulder" -- but is somehow still enraged when his affections aren't reciprocated. And there is Deepak Dobriyal's hysterically funny Pappi, whose misconstruing of Komal's messages reveals yet another example of how easily Indian men, starved for interaction with the opposite sex, confuse friendliness with love. Rai's Raanjhanaa pushed this premise to its utmost, casting Dhanush as the boy who thinks stalking a girl all the way to Delhi reveals the persistence of his "love". 

Rather than the high drama of Raanjhanaa, or even TWM, TWMR goes for a lightness of tone, and I think Rai is better served by it. Among the delights of the new film is the updated Awasthi, performing rituals like a proper Hindu householder though he hasn't found a bride. Shergill has acquired a moustache and lost some of his fire, but his pronouncements retain the cut-the-crap hilarity of old. The mellowness suits him -- and he's certainly more self-aware than the other men in Rai's world. Can the next film be about him, please?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 31 May 2015.

Film review: Maximum

Kabeer Kaushik made an impressive debut in 2005 with the textured Lucknow-set police
drama Sehar (meaning ‘dawn’), featuring Arshad Warsi in a quietly intense performance that ought to have got him many more lead roles. Kaushik’s next two films—the Bobby Deol-starrer Chamku (2008) and the trying-to-be-comic Hum, Tum aur Ghost (2010)—have been forgettable. This week, the director returns to our screens with another police drama. Anyone who’s watched Sehar would have high hopes.

But Maximum disappoints sorely.

Sehar’s 1990s Lucknow was beautifully observed, including a memorably real narrative thread about the Uttar Pradesh cops struggling to deal with mobile phone technology, then newly introduced in India. Maximum takes us to Mumbai in the 2000s, and this world is much less sharply drawn.

Like in Sehar, there is a documentary-like effort to immerse us in a time recently past, but simply having voiceovers stating that “The Mumbai of 2003 was a very different place” is not enough. Despite attempts to capture a sense of place—there are several shots on and from local trains, for instance—Maximum’s Mumbai feels generic.

Like Sehar—and like countless other Hindi films—Maximum is told from the perspective of a police officer trying to make headway in a system that’s rotten to the core. Unlike Arshad Warsi’s Ajay Kumar, though, Sonu Sood’s Pratap Pandit is no newbie cop in the city; he’s an established ‘encounter specialist’—a man who specialises in killing gangsters rather than arresting them. The film follows Pandit from his trigger-happy glory days in 2003 to his decline in 2008, the ups and downs of his personal and professional life playing out against the background of the various nexuses between builders, mafia, politicians and the media that make up contemporary Mumbai.

Several films have been made about encounter cops, using men like Daya Nayak as real-life models. With the deep informal networks that exist between Bollywood and the Mumbai police (something Maximum even gestures to in a dialogue spoken by a starlet called Urvashi), it seems in vain to hope for a perspective in which these men might emerge as anything but heroes. Whether it is the best of the lot—Shimit Amin’s Ab Tak Chhappan (2004)—or the very worst of them—Ram Gopal Varma’s recent Department (2012)—all these films share the uncritical celebration of police excesses. It comes no surprise that Maximum, too, makes its primary encounter cop a hero.

But like Nana Patekar in Ab Tak Chhappan, Sonu Sood’s Pratap Pandit finds himself locked in a self-defeating battle with another encounter specialist, an older officer under whom he once worked, but who is now intent on totting up an encounter ‘score’ higher than Pandit’s. The relationship between Pandit and this other man, Aroon Inamdar, is the first weak link in the film. It doesn’t help that Inamdar is played by Naseeruddin Shah, who brings to the role the absolute disinterest of a man who’s been given no character arc. He’s angry, he’s devious, he’s cutthroat. He just is. We’re never actually shown what is responsible for Inamdar’s hatred of Pandit—and slowly but surely, we stop wanting to find out.

But the larger problem with Maximum is that it touches on too many issues and devises too many subplots, without giving us a clear picture of any of them. It isn’t that Kaushik doesn’t understand some things about Mumbai’s realpolitik. He does. For instance, having a Marathi in charge of the party’s state level organisation and a non-Marathi controlling the Mumbai wing is something the Congress has done for decades in Maharashtra. Kaushik draws on this real-life balancing act between insiders and outsiders to create a credible plot, casting Mohan Agashe and Vinay Pathak respectively as Pradesh chief and Mumbai city chief of an unnamed political party. The insider-outsider dynamic also works to make immigrants from a particular region stick together: the cop, the journalist and the politician build an informal network that is essentially based on their being from Lucknow, and there are nice touches here—like the dialogue between Pandit and the journalist narrator Ashwin (Amit Sadh) about going to La Martiniere.

In general, the dialogues are credible and nicely done, delivering the necessary punches without unnecessary bombast. “Yeh jo police ka dhandha hai usmein bane rehna ke do hi tareeke hain, yah toh top pe raho, ya chup raho. (There are two ways to survive in the police business. Either stay at the top, or keep your mouth shut.)” says Pandit at one point.

The acting is admirably low key, though Vinay Pathak and Neha Dhupia struggle against flat, unevolving characters and sudden twists. Dhupia, cast as Pandit’s loving wife, gets her quota of domestic flirtation—certainly she is a tremendous improvement on Mahima Choudhry’s economics professor girlfriend in Sehar. Sonu Sood as Pandit turns in a memorable performance, as does the tragically underused Rajendra Gupta, who plays Pandit’s English professor father and manages to make one teary with a declamatory scene that would have made a lesser actor look ridiculous. (Couldn’t someone have given him Naseer’s role?)

But any subtlety achieved by the dialogue and the performances is undone by the film’s too-loud background music, the déjà vu-inducing plot, and the absurdly sluggish pace. Hopefully Kaushik’s next film will bring a new sehar.

Published in Firstpost.

Thumris lost and found deptt.: a search for the Gaya thumri

This is the first instalment of Post Facto: my new column for the Sunday Guardian. At 7 o' clock, the conference room in the India International Centre basement was only half full. Any ditherers still deciding if they should stay were arrested by the arrival of a slender sari-clad lady with cropped silver hair, who announced (in impeccable IIC English strewn with equally impeccable Hindi) that Dr Kumud Jha Diwan, soon to begin her lecture-demonstration on 'The Earthy Thumris of Gaya — Revival of a Lost Tradition', was both a scholar-researcher and a thumri singer blessed with "a voice like Rasoolan Devi". Diwan is a striking woman in her 40s. Dressed in a dark sari with just enough zari to be festive, her still-black hair left open but kept carefully off her face, she exuded a combination of managerial efficiency and enthusiastic determination (her manner fell into place nicely when she said she had a PhD in Business Studies). Bustling between the podium and the small low stage, she moved fluently between school-teacherly historical declamation and seductive ada-kari (ada is integral to the courtesanal art of thumri). She also constantly switched languages: English when standing, Hindi as soon as she sat cross-legged on the stage. The thumri lyrics, of course, were in Braj and other Poorabiya dialects. The thumri, said Dr Diwan, reached its creative zenith in 19th Century Lucknow, in the court of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, which sustained such thumri greats as Moizuddeen Khan, harmonium maestro Bhaiya Saheb Ganpat Rao (a Gwalior royal) and legendary kathak dancer Bindadeen Maharaj, of the renowned family of dancers from which Birju Maharaj descends. Apart from being a great patron of the arts, Wajid Ali Shah was himself a rather good poet, and – under the pen name Akhtarpiya — composed many thumris. (The most famous of these is probably Babul Mora Naihar Chooto Jaye, immortalised in filmic form by K.L. Saigal's superbly melancholy rendition of it in Street Singer (1938). The naihar of the song was both the departing bride's natal home, and Lucknow: the beloved home from which the British had exiled the Nawab.) With the splintering of the Awadh court, its poets and musicians got scattered. For many, the obvious thing to do was to follow the Nawab to Metiabruz, a small township near Calcutta, on the banks of the river Hooghly, where a 'second Lucknow' was being created. With the coming of the railway network, said Diwan, the cities of Banaras and Gaya, both of which had many rich patrons of music, became stops for musicians on the way to Calcutta and back. "A golden triangle was established," Diwan said. { The pandas of Gaya, familial priests who facilitate pind daan ceremonies, made enormous fortunes. Their mansions became the sites of night-long musical baithaks

The Lucknow thumri, Diwan told the IIC's Music Appreciation audience, since it was created to accompany the vigorous rhythms of Kathak, tended to follow a fast taal cycle like Teentaal or Ektaal. Because the bol (lyrics) would often be split into syllables by the inherent rhythm of the taal, it became known as bol-baant ki thumri. The thumri of Banaras, made famous by courtesan-singers like Badi Moti Bai, Siddheshwari and Rasoolan, had a slower tempo. With its stylistic emphasis on which bol would be musically highlighted, it became known as the bol-banao thumri. Having demonstrated both styles, Diwan turned her attention to the Gaya thumri, the subject of her Sangeet Natak Akademi research in 2008-9. Gaya is a centre of Hindu pilgrimage, where people come to give pind daan to their ancestors at the famed Vishnupad temple. The pandas of Gaya, familial priests who facilitate these ceremonies, made enormous fortunes. Their mansions became the sites of night-long musical baithaks. Diwan showed a black and white slide of one such soiree: it looked every bit the straitlaced, teetotalling affair she described. "It was a gathering for musicians," said Diwan, "You could sing the same phrase all night long if you wanted." The Gaya ang thumri has an even slower tempo than Banaras, and is known as the thaah ki thumri (Thaah means stoppage). The Gaya thumris were sung by Diwan's co-performer, the marvellous Rajan Sijuar of the Gaya gharana. Gaya-based Sijuar was the quiet foil to Diwan's exuberance, smiling gently even when Diwan suddenly decided to turn him into Exhibit A in her narrative: "Those panda families have so much money you can't imagine... Rajan ji is from one of those families!" She showed pictures of the major figures of Gaya thumri: the unfortunately named Dhela Bai (dhela means pebble) seated fashionably with one leg crossed over the other, the harmonium maestro Soni Maharaj, the legendary singer Ramuji Mishra. She played a rare tape of Ramuji Mishra singing, and bemoaned the shocking fact that Dhela Bai's descendants had destroyed all her recordings because they wished to erase all association with a tawaif ancestor. She raged against the Nagphopha family, who were refusing to give her access to the vast collection of recordings they had. "The Gaya thumri is lost to us," Diwan said many times. "You people must listen to it, so that it can be preserved." Sijuar made no comment.

Sham-e-Awadh: Book Review

Author : Ed by Veena Talwar Oldenburg
Publisher : Penguin
Cost : Indian Rupees 395

Most readers probably expect exactly what this anthology of writings about Lucknow delivers. There are tales of nawabi delicacy and decadence, accounts of British depradations and melancholy twentieth century laments on the decline of everything – architecture, music, dance, language, manners – that had once made the city famous as the repository of cultural refinement. Yet, Sham-e-Awadh leaves you with a feeling of dissatisfaction.

Perhaps the problem with the book is precisely this failure to depart from expectations. Piece after piece goes down the same well-trodden paths, as if what can be said or thought about Lucknow is circumscribed by some pre-existing narrative outline. This is particularly true of the attempts to sum up what has happened to Lucknow in the twentieth century. Veena Talwar Oldenburg herself never seems to look at the present city except to look for survivors from its gentler past. Neither Mrinal Pande’s take on the new political culture forged by Mayawati and Mulayam Singh Yadav, nor Nasima Aziz’s description of the grand double wedding of the sons of magnate Subroto Roy manage to go beyond evoking the predictable shock-and-awe to actually tell us something we don’t already know.

Oldenburg’s elegiac proclivities make the historical sections much more substantial – the eminently readable extract from Flora Annie Steel’s 1897 novel (On The Face of the Waters, set in 1850s Lucknow) is a revelation, as is Carla Petievich’s all-too-brief glimpse into the sexier, more colloquial side of Urdu poetry, rekhti. There are several individual portraits that provide revealing insights into the city – especially Michael Edwardes’ affecting little account of Hazrat Mahal (“the Rebel Begum”), and Saleem Kidwai on Begum Akhtar’s complex relationship with Lucknow.

But even here, the book seems incomplete, since Oldenburg uses her editorial privilege to give us not one but two of her own accounts of Nawabi Lucknow and chooses to include nothing at all from Abdul Halim Sharar, who spent his childhood in the Lucknow of Wajid Ali Shah and produced an account of the city’s life and culture that is unrivalled in its detail. Trisha Gupta

Published in Time Out Delhi and Time Out Mumbai, 2007