The Reel Life of MS Sathyu - II

My Mirror column (a sequel to last week's piece):

In honour of his 90th birthday earlier this month, a look back at MS Sathyu's under-watched 1994 film Galige, currently streaming online.

At the very start of Garm Hava, Balraj Sahni's Salim Mirza waves goodbye to a train at the station and sits himself down in a horse-drawn cart. The Agra of the 1940s is small enough for the tangawalla to be acquainted with each customer. Who have you dropped off this time, he asks. “My elder sister,” says Mirza, adding a gloomy metaphorical remark about how thriving trees are getting cut down in this wind. Yes, agrees the tangawalla, those who refuse to uproot themselves will dry up. Then he adds a Hafeez Jalandhari couplet, rendered in its most charming street avatar: “Wafaaon ke badle jafa kar riya hai/ Main kya kar riya hun, tu kya kar riya hai?” (I'd translate that as “You torment me in exchange for my loyalty/What am I doing, and what are you doing?”)

What's remarkable is the spectrum of moods that the sequence encompasses. There is the sombre farewell, the meditative remark, the deep sense of living through a eventful time -- and yet all of it is leavened by the comfortable chatter of the everyday, by casual acquaintances who make up one's sense of home, and an ear for humour in the minor key that keeps one from dipping into the doldrums. Galige, which Sathyu directed in 1994, attempts to create the same kind of energy.

The film has two narrative threads, both with immense potential for melodrama -- but Sathyu staves off all maudlinness. Currently playing in the Indian section of an international film streaming platform, Galige centres around a young Bangalorean woman named Nithya. She lives alone in a rented house and has a job in the HMT factory, riding a two-wheeler to work each day. One day, the orphanage where she was raised calls her. An old couple has arrived from a North Karnataka village to claim her as their long-lost granddaughter.

Now this is a theme that doesn't just animate popular cinema in India, it forms the matrix for it: the family separated by a calamity and reunited at the end, the pauper who is really a prince, the enemies who are really biological brothers. Whether as the basis of a comedy of errors (think of every single double role film you know), or the underlying theme of the family melodrama from Waqt to Trishul, or even when ostensibly subjected to questioning by the plot -- as in Awara's nature vs. nurture debate, or Yash Chopra's unsuccessful but fascinating Dharamputra, in which a Muslim orphan grows up to be a Hindu fundamentalist, blood ties are assumed to be the ties that bind.

But unlike the hundreds of film orphans we have all grown up on, Nithya does not hanker for a family. She is guarded, unsure if she wants to be co-opted into an identity she has thus far escaped. The orphanage manager's reminder that she was brought in by a fakir, on the other hand, makes the wannabe grandmother baulk: what if she's actually a Muslim? They part company – but on her way back home, Nithya feels bad for the stranded old couple and decides to invite them to stay with her for a while.

A still from Galige (1994)

What Sathyu does is quietly subversive at many levels. By making the young female character financially independent, and the old couple needier than her, he shows how easily existing power equations of age and gender can be reversed. The 'family' becomes something chosen, contingent on mutual desire and supportiveness, rather than a unquestionable given. Within this new space of equivalence, the young woman makes her own decisions, refusing to kowtow to either neighbourly gossip or 'grandparental' interference. She looks out for the old people, and enjoys their companionship, but feels no obligation to live by their rules. The old couple, for their part, learn that their opinions are simply that – their opinions.

Galige's other subplot is even more surprising – the Khalistan movement, and the fate of a reformed terrorist. Girl does meet boy, even in an MS Sathyu film, and Nithya meets hers in a thoroughly charming Antakshari scene on a train. As a girl without a family, she is perfectly comfortable with a boy without a past. And by bringing a Punjabi boy into a relationship with a local girl, of course, Sathyu plays on Bangalore's insider-outsider tensions. In the film, though, the locals' suspicions turn out to have some basis in fact – not all unknown pasts are equally benign.

There are many other moments when the film touches on the question of identity – Nithya's Japanese boss at the HMT factory, the Sikh dhaba owner or the play within the film where Ekalavya's birth becomes the cause of his tragic fate, while Guru Dronacharya shifts all blame onto him: “How can you hold me responsible for your low birth?” In an early aside, the film's resident commentator, one Narhari, asks the rhetorical question: “Do we lack temples, mosques, churches, gurdwara here? Must slap Urban Ceiling on gods – only so many temples per god.” Nithya herself speaks often of not needing to have a religion, of being free to believe in people.

All the threads of Galige don't necessarily come together. The music can feel tacked-on, as can some of the attempts at comedy, and the Punjab segment has the rushed quality of nightmare. The film's uneven tapestry benefits from being woven of low-intensity conversations, like the Bangalore in which it unfolds. In one lovely odd little moment, a drunken Narhari sings a Kannada song by the poet Rajaratnam to a companion in a prison cell: “If you wish to live, escape from this world. Create your own, forget this one.” Words to live by, now more than ever.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Jul 2020

The reel life of MS Sathyu - 1

My Mumbai Mirror column for July 12:

In honour of his 90th birthday on July 6, a look back at some of MS Sathyu's notable contributions to Indian cinema: Garm Hava, Bara and Galige

AK Hangal, Balraj Sahni and Farooque Shaikh in MS Sathyu's Garm Hava (1973)

The director Mysore Srinivas Sathyu turned 90 on July 6. We owe to Sathyu what remains Hindi cinema’s most honest, painful appraisal of the early effects of Partition: the 1973 film Garm Hava, which I have written about in a previous instalment of this column. Born in 1930 in the then princely state of Mysore, MS Sathyu graduated from Bangalore’s Central College and moved to Bombay in 1952. There he became associated with the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), staging plays like Aakhri Shama (1969) in collaboration with the poet Kaifi Azmi, with the great Balraj Sahni in the lead as Mirza Ghalib. He entered films as an assistant director on Chetan Anand’s Ladakh-set saga of the Sino-Indian War, Haqeeqat (1964).

Eight years later, Sathyu’s feature debut Garm Hava had him working with Sahni and Azmi again. Azmi and Shama Zaidi (Sathyu’s spouse) crafted a brilliant screenplay, based on an unpublished story by Ismat Chughtai. Set in Agra, the film achieves a fine-grained sense of the everyday ways in which amplifying socio-political divisions push a reasonably well-off Muslim family to misfortune. Sahni delivered an unforgettably moving performance as an ageing shoe-manufacturer adamant not to leave for Pakistan, despite the harsh winds that seem intent upon sweeping him away from home. Garm Hava was Sahni’s last film role, and Farooq Shaikh’s first, as Sahni’s son Sikandar. It is  Sikandar's uncertain future – as an unemployed young man, but also as a young Indian Muslim – that the film ends with.

Sathyu, who lives in Bangalore, hasn’t made many more films. A theatreperson at heart, he has spoken in interviews of being branded a political filmmaker after Garm Hava, and of funding remaining an uphill battle. But two of his other features are currently available to view, both in Kannada with English subtitles. Galige (1994) is playing in the Indian cinema section of an online screening platform, and in honour of Sathyu’s ninetieth birthday, the Bangalore International Centre is screening Bara (1980), free to watch until July 16, with an online conversation with Sathyu scheduled for 5pm today, July 12.

Neither Bara nor Galige have the emotional heft of Garm Hava; it is hard to match either the increasingly prescient texture of that narrative, or the subtlety of the performances by Sahni and Shaikh, as also the fine ensemble cast, including Jalal Agha and Gita Siddharth. But both films offer unusual perspectives on Indian politics and society, in very different styles. Bara (The Arid Earth), adapted from a Kannada story by the great UR Ananthamurthy, is about a young IAS officer called Satisha (Anant Nag) whose attempts to improve conditions in his district are constantly obstructed by bureaucratic and political wrangling.

The idealistic hero was not new, but the corruption was laid out in greater depth than most Indian films in 1980. The chief minister turns out to be conducting a behind-the-scenes battle with a minister from the region, and will not declare the district famine-affected for fear that his rival will take credit for relief. The minister, meanwhile, is in cahoots with a corrupt trader called Gangadharswamy, whose blatantly illegal stocks of grain escape police checks even as small-time traders are jailed for ‘smuggling’ one sack of rice. The most fascinating character is Bhimoji, a local advocate-activist-politician who is Gangadharswamy’s bete noire, as well as being Satisha’s (and our) entry point into the realpolitik that actually governs the place he is supposed to run.

In some respects, Sathyu sanitised the character: removing, for instance, Ananthamurthy’s frank reference to Bhimoji’s pimping before becoming a politician. But the film also gave Bhimoji more complexity than Ananthamurthy’s text (available in a 2016 English translation from Oxford University Press). For example, in both the film and the book, Bhimoji decries Gangadharswamy’s land donations as staged, essentially fake handouts to his own supporters – but the film also depicts Bhimoji’s own ‘counter-occupation’ of the donated land as being staged for local journalists.

 

Another interesting aspect of the adaptation touches on cow protection or gau-raksha, whose shadow upon our politics has grown much darker in these forty years. In the story, one Govindappa appears nervously at Satisha’s office to ask him to chair a reception committee to welcome his Guru, who is coming to inaugurate a cow shelter that will save cows from the drought. Sathyu makes an interesting shift: he makes Satisha’s father a temple-building gau-raksha votary, someone who gets farmers to send their drought-starved cattle to him instead of to the butcher. In the film, the father brings the gau-rakshak to Satisha’s office. In a perspicacious change that seems to presage today’s religio-politics, this character, Govind Rao, is announced as “an MSc in chemistry from Banaras Hindu University”, and displays no nervousness – he has already printed Satisha’s name on the invitation, without asking him.

Other departures from the text, though, flatten the film. Ananthamurthy gave Satisha an interesting angsty self-reflexivity: his “instinct for adventure” matched by his worldliness in marrying “into a family which shared a deep concern for the country’s poverty though without ever experiencing hardship itself”. Satisha’s wife Rekha, with her mixed religious elite background, her Miranda House-JNU education and her aesthetic-historical appreciation of the town’s ruins, is something of a type. Shorn of these details, she seems even more stilted in the film, though she does propose that her husband dig bore wells. Ananthamurthy’s Satisha is ambivalent about his own ethical display; he “was aware that the couple’s humanism might seem greater than it was through the magnifying lens of the humble local people”. Sathyu’s Satisha, with no such doubting interior, manages to humble himself before a local. Like a hero.

The first of a two-part column.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 12 July 2020.

Picture This: Walking in Sathyu's Shoes?

The March edition of Picture This, my monthly BLink column: 

Four decades after Garm Hava comes a lively documentary on the Agra shoe trade. But In Their Shoes steers clear of any reference to actual leather production.

Early in MS Sathyu’s Garm Hava, Balraj Sahni boards a tanga from the railway station, where he’s just seen off some more relatives moving to Pakistan. The tangewalla, in the way of the small town, is familiar with Salim Mirza and his possible routes: ‘Haveli ya karkhana (home or factory),’ he asks. As they trot through town to Mirza’s shoe-manufacturing unit, the tangewalla says conversationally, “Our Hindu brothers here are good, no matter what happens they won’t touch leather work!” The same, apparently, cannot be said of the Hindu refugees from across the border: “Je toh dhandhe ke peechhe dharam ka bhi lihaaj nahi karein hain bhaiya (So intent are they on business that they’ve stopped attending to religion, brother).” A day will come, predicts the tangewalla, when they’ll own this Tikonia Bazaar.

Body and sole: Part of a montage, this still from In Their Shoes shows a worker carrying his wares; followed soon after by barefoot namaazis holding their shoes

Garm Hava is set in Agra in 1947, in the aftermath of Partition. But since it was made in 1973, its writers had the advantage of hindsight: by the ’60s, shoe trade in the city had passed into the hands of Punjabis relocated from Karachi and Lahore. Screenwriter Shama Zaidi (also Sathyu’s wife) began the script from conversations with Urdu novelist Ismat Chughtai about relatives and friends leaving for Pakistan. But it was co-writer Kaifi Azmi’s experience with shoe-manufacturing workers in Kanpur that produced the film’s nuanced portrait of how economy is interlaced with community. Salim Mirza runs one of several Muslim-owned shoe karkhanas, with workers who are either Muslim or Jatav: communities placed beyond the pale of ‘polluting’ by religion and caste respectively. When Mirza must vacate his family haveli, it is allotted to a Sindhi refugee businessman.

Four decades after Garm Hava comes a lively documentary on the Agra shoe trade, made by the grandson of one of those refugees the tangewalla might have spoken of. Atul Sabharwal, who debuted as a director in Bollywood with 2013’s family-and-real-estate saga Aurangzeb, sets out here to map the contours of the business that his father quietly discouraged him from entering. In Their Shoes is straightforwardly structured, with shots of Agra and its shoe karkhanas interspersed with talking heads, most of them old hands, acquaintances of the elder Sabharwal. The filmmaker doesn’t hide his ease of access: again and again, his father Om Prakash appears in the frame, introducing him to shop-owners: “Bachcha, ek documentary bana raha hai... Poochhna hai Atul toh poochh le Uncle se.

Sabharwal displays both a sustained interest in the big picture and a sympathetic concern with the personal histories of his protagonists. Through businessmen, small and large, and to a lesser extent the artisans, the film manages to provide an inside view of how a trade is passed on through generations: from fathers to sons, and from ustads to shagirds. Rather than the dullness and chafing you might expect at the lack of choice, what most second-generation traders communicate is the sense of belonging, adulthood and, dare I say, fun that the business offered them as young men. Stylistically, there’s little quirkiness, though I enjoyed the small touches: archival photographs of bazaars and family business documents, and one montage using a striking visual match between workers carrying shoes and namaazis carrying shoes, barefoot across the Jama Masjid.

The film also does a fine job of contextualising the ups and downs of the shoe trade in Agra, both geographically and historically. It shows, for instance, how exports to the USSR and the Eastern Bloc countries became a mainstay and then led to losses as the Ruble crashed; and, more recently, how the post-liberalisation lifting of a longtime ban on leather export pushed leather prices through the roof, paving the way for Chinese synthetic leather-substitutes in a massive way. Relevant footage from Garm Hava makes a split-second appearance, unremarked, while the voiceover has an elderly gentleman describing how small-time shoe traders would take a basket full of shoes around the mandi (wholesale market). But while we’re told the gleeful post-Partition anecdote of a Bania trader who went from handling leather gingerly in a towel to sorting out leather pieces by hand, the Garm Hava tangewalla’s apposite comment does not make it to the documentary.

The elder Sabharwal offers up a charming origin myth for leather work in Agra. The wholesale market for shoes, Heeng ki Mandi, where his shop is, was once the Mughal market for asafoetida. Heeng arrived from Iran, on camel-back, having been pounded and packed in calf-leather pouches. When the heeng was unpacked, the leather was discarded. Slowly, shoes began to be made from it. This narrative may have some truth to it. And one can see the appeal of tracing a grubby business like leatherwork back to the time of Akbar, with all the romance of camel caravans, Iranian heeng and handmade shoes that took a kaarigar (artisan) a week to make. But for me, it also points to the biggest absence in the film: the making of leather.

There is one fleeting mention of tanneries, in the context of a ban on them for polluting the Yamuna. Else, the 90-minute film stays away from any reference to leather production. It is as if the filmmaker sat down and decided that anything to do with cattle, animal skins, Muslims and Dalits might be too controversial, or need viewers with strong stomachs.

Perhaps he’s right. Certainly, it would seem so from Vikram Seth’s memorable fictional guided tour of the Brahmpur shoe trade in A Suitable Boy. Whether it is the desperate poverty and insanitary working conditions of Ravidaspur’s Jatav shoe-makers, or the posher CLFC (Cawnpore Leather and Footwear Company) tannery where the genteel Lata Mehra and her mother nearly choke from the smell, Seth makes it clear this is not an easy milieu. Even though Haresh Khanna is “quick to explain to Lata’s mother” that the hides were from ‘fallen animals’, not slaughtered ones, and also that “they did not accept hides from Muslim slaughterhouses”, the stench of ‘dirty work’ seems to hang in the air. I wish Sabharwal had taken on some of that undeserved, lingering disdain.

Published in the Hindu Business Line.

An ill wind: Revisiting Garm Hava

Last Sunday's Mirror column:

Newly restored, MS Sathyu's iconic film about post-partition times resonates more than ever in our polarised present.

A restored version of Garm Hava released yesterday under the PVR Director's Rare banner. It is nowhere near as wide a release as this 1973 film deserves, but if it is playing anywhere near you, go watch it. Because Garm Hava remains, nearly forty years after it was made, the most affecting, nuanced film we have yet produced about the experience of Partition.

It is by no means a flawless film, but this column isn't about that. There are too many reasons why you should watch it. Garm Hava is not just MS Sathyu's first feature as director, but also Farooque Shaikh's first film role - and Balraj Sahni's last. Sahni, who delivers an exceptionally subtle performance as an ageing shoe manufacturer called Salim Mirza, is the pivot around whom the film revolves.

Based on an unpublished short story by Ismat Chughtai, the screenplay (co-authored by the poet Kaifi Azmi and the screenwriter Shama Zaidi, who is also Sathyu's wife) steers Mirza through the bitter months of 1948, as his quiet determination to stay on in the place of his birth receives one body blow after another.

"Full-grown trees are being cut down in the wind," muses Mirza to a tangawallah, as he returns from having seen off yet another branch of his family that is moving across the border. "It is a scorching wind," responds the horse-cart driver, "Those who do not uproot themselves will wither away."

The film is set in Agra, but shot through by the idea of Pakistan. But 'Pakistan' here is an empty signifier, denoting nothing except departure. From the very first scene, where Mirza sees off a train, with a hand gesture somewhere between benediction and goodbye, we are inserted into a world in which people are either leaving, or thinking about it - and if they are not, then there's someone telling them they ought to.

One of the leavers is Salim Mirza's elder brother, Halim Mirza, whose doublespeak is captured with economy by Sathyu's technique: splicing moments from his rabble-rousing 'nationalist' speeches, denouncing as cowards those Muslims who have "abandoned their heritage" by going to Pakistan, with him telling his wife that there is no room left for Muslims in India. It is clear that he is as opportunistic as the Muslim Leaguers he condemns. Another Pakistan-bound character is the duplicitous Fakhruddin, though not before switching loyalties from the League to the Congress, and placing as many obstacles in Salim Mirza's path as possible.

But the film does not for a moment suggest that all those who left for Pakistan were somehow opportunistic, or cowardly. Garm Hava is astute enough to show us multiple points of view. When the business seems impossible to revive, Mirza's elder son succumbs to the chance of greater opportunity in a Muslim-majority country.

Salim Mirza may hold out against going, but Garm Hava produces a powerful sense of how difficult it had become to stay.

The same picture is painted by a book called In Freedom's Shade, a recent exemplary translation of Azadi ki Chhaon Mein, Begum Anis Kidwai's enormously thought-provoking memoir of the immediate post-Partition years. Kidwai's encounters were largely with a poorer class of Muslims than the Mirzas, people who had even less economic ballast to keep them where they were. They are either people in camps who have fled their homes with few belongings, or poor peasants from the villages around Delhi. But what Garm Hava shares with Azadi ki Chhaon Mein is its depiction of how little the formal assurances of the secular state were backed by people's lived experience. What Gandhi and Nehru promised (and tried to do) was one thing, and what state functionaries did was quite another. Again and again, Kidwai encounters poor, uneducated Muslims who have been told by officials - senior army men, thanedars, patwaris - that they must leave, because the Indian government can no longer be held responsible for their safety.

Like Azadi..., and unlike the corpse-filled trains that have become numbingly overused shorthand for Partition, Garm Hava doesn't want to shock us with our history of violence. (The only physical attack in the film is a brick that hits Mirza during a minor riot; even the blaze that engulfs his karkhana is barely shown, though Sathyu has recently suggested that he might have done these scenes differently if he had the budget.) 

What it shows us instead is how enmeshed religious identity is in the socio-economic climate -- right from this foundational moment of our nationhood. The baniya moneylender and the bank both refuses Mirza a loan, since Muslims may go off to Pakistan, leaving behind unpaid debts. The family haveli, registered in the name of his brother Halim, is seized by the Custodian of Enemy Property, and goes to a Sindhi businessman (AK Hangal in an unusual role). Meanwhile, prospective landlords turn Mirza away with that phrase we have so often heard thereafter: "We don't take non-vegetarian tenants." Even young Sikandar (Farooque Shaikh) must deal with job interviewers who make unsolicited suggestions that he might do better in Pakistan.

Sathyu's decision to keep these landlords and interviewers invisible is an interesting one. One wonders whether it is meant to insert us, his viewers, uncomfortably into the place of these interlocutors. And then one wonders why more films in this country don't set out to make us uncomfortable, just once in a while. God knows, we need it.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16 Nov 2014.