Death in Banaras

My Mirror column:

Shubhashish Bhutiani's Mukti Bhawan treats a potentially grand theme with a sensibility that is both gentle and droll.

Anyone who has been to Banaras has encountered death. There is no other place in India, likely in the world, where death is thus placed centre stage. That primacy is mapped geographically onto the city: the smoking pyres of Manikarnika Ghat occupy a central chunk of the city’s riverfront. But even if the visitor isn’t hovering purposefully around Manikarnika, not a day passes in Banaras without seeing a corpse being carried off to its final resting place, held aloft by a set of briskly striding mourners chanting Ram Nam Satya Hai (‘God’s name is truth’).

Death in Banaras is both ubiquitous and part of life, because every day new people arrive in the city, hoping that their lives will end there. To die in Kaashi, Hindus have long believed, is the best death possible, because it frees the soul from the cycle of life and rebirth. As the saying goes, Kaashyaam maranam muktih – ‘Death in Kaashi is Liberation’.

As the scholar Diana L Eck points out in her brilliant book Banaras: City of Light, there are several categories of people who want to die in Banaras. There are the hundreds of yogis and renouncers who practice their austerities here. There are the thousands of ordinary people who come for Kaashivasa (“to live in Kaashi”), retirees of both genders and many widows, settling down in neighbourhoods associated with different regions: the Bengalis in Bangali Tola, the Maharashtrians near Rama Ghat and Panchaganga Ghat, the Tamilians around Hanuman Ghat, and so on. And finally there are those ill or very old people who arrive in the nick of time, for what is called Kaashi Laabh: the Benefit of Kaashi. For them there are hospices like Kaashi Laabh Mukti Bhawan, where guests may stay only fifteen days – if they haven’t managed to check out of this world into the next by then, they must vacate. The attitude to death in Banaras, then, is both otherworldly and stunningly practical. Death in other places is something that arrives unannounced, to be staved off as long as possible. Not in Kaashi. “Death, which elsewhere is feared, here is welcomed as a long-expected guest,” writes Eck. It is this remarkable philosophical reversal that Shubhashish Bhutiani puts at the centre of his directorial debut, Mukti Bhawan.

Bhutiani’s script revolves around a 70-something man (Lalit Behl, last seen in his real-life son Kanu Behl’s film Titli) who decides one morning that he is ready to die, and insists that his son Rajiv (Adil Hussain) take leave from work to accompany him to Banaras and check into Mukti Bhawan. The film isn’t really interested in plot, or even particularly in the social or religious underpinnings I’ve just mentioned. What it sets out to do – and for the most part, achieves – is to capture the drollness of it all, and the strange sort of power that an outer world can exert on our inner one.

The film’s other focus is relationships – the husband and wife may squabble, but they also seem to recognise that the squabbling binds them. The old man who is crotchety and inflexible with his son is charming and supportive with his granddaughter. She reciprocates his trust – when he asks, before leaving home, if she will come to see him, she jokes, “Kahan? Banaras? Ya...?” raising her eyes upwards to heaven. In the taxi on the way there, the old man admonishes the driver for driving rashly: “Banaras pahunchne se pehle hi kahin oopar mat pahuncha dena.”

With moments like this, even before we arrive in Banaras, Bhutiani establishes a tone that is somehow warm without being mawkish, funny without ridiculing. It is a supremely rare tone in Indian cinema, especially when the context is religious and the subject is death. We have seen death in Banaras powerfully on the Indian screen before, in very different registers. In Masaan, we saw it at its most unexpected, the cruel and unnecessary deaths of a young man and ayoung woman. In Satyajit Ray’s Aparajito, perhaps its most famous instance, Harihar collapses and dies suddenly on the ghats, and the camera cuts to a flock of birds taking off into a darkening sky. Mukti Bhawan does something very different, refusing drama and the assumed ‘gravity’ of death in favour of a slow dawning of recognition.

That recognition, the film suggests, is as much about this world as the next. To die at peace, one must first fully embrace life. And so Daya’s demands for the preoccupied Rajiv’s attention might also be a way of making him focus on the here and now: salt in the food, milk in the morning. Preparing to leave the body involves first consciously cultivating it: yoga, kapaal bhaati, massage, but also through what it ingests (Daya toys with a fruit diet), or watching how it behaves on bhaang. In a superb late scene, we see how making oneself laugh and clap can alter one’s emotional state: it’s about making the body work on the mind, rather than vice versa.

My only real quarrel with the film is that Bhutiani’s too-serene frames of the river and ghats, with the city’s sounds overlaid with Tajdar Junaid’s meditative soundtrack, made me miss the raucous, full-blooded chaos I remember as Banaras. But then these are cities of the mind, and who knows: the experience of Mukti Bhawan may alter my next trip.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 9 April 2017.

Bringing out the Bubbly - I

My Mumbai Mirror column on Jan 11, 2016:

2015 was a pretty good year for Indian cinema. Our columnist tots up some of the films that made it so.

Having taken a break for the last week of last year and the first week of this one, I thought I might escape the list-making frenzy that usually grips columnists like me around this time. But even on holiday, I had so many people asking me for recommendations— friends, relatives, even strangers who'd just learnt what I do — that I have succumbed.

So, without further ado, here's the first of my two-part column on my top picks of 2015's film releases. In no particular order:

Dum Laga Ke Haisha -- Sharat Kataria's second feature (after 10 ML Love, his frothy adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream to a bustling shaadi ka ghar) is a small-town family drama of the sort that's on its way to becoming a new Bollywood cliche. But Dum Laga Ke Haisha departs from previous such films in two remarkable ways: one, it's set in 1995, and two, the heroine is a fat girl. 

The first is done superbly: Kataria's surefooted grasp of his milieu is strengthened by Meenal Agarwal's wonderful production design and Anu Malik's nostalgia-inducing music, leading us by the hand into this remembered world of shopkeepers, shakhas and cassette players. The second aspect ends up being less satisfying: debutant Bhumi Pednekar impresses as the cheerful, unselfconscious Sandhya, but the film, like Ayushmann Khurana's Prem Prakash, seems unable to see beyond her size.

Also, Kataria is a little too influenced by mentor Rajat Kapur's marvellous Aankhon Dekhi, often channelling the public bickering and tearful squabbles of that film, and even re-casting prime players like Seema Pahwa and Sanjay Mishra. Despite these issues, though, Dum Laga Ke Haisha remains among the year's most charming films.

Titli -- Kataria also helped debut director Kanu Behl write this rather more alternative family drama. Set in the depressingly anonymous galis of a not quite up-and-coming Delhi ("past the Mother Dairy, behind the nala", says Titli, when asked where he lives), Behl's film is a searing indictment of our familial pieties. As I wrote when the film released in October, "This is the great Indian family turned inside out, revealing not just the ugly seams but the stuffing."

Titli turns violence into something banal - but also unmasks the banality of lower middle class life as its own kind of violence. Behl draws astounding performances from his actors: Shashank Arora as the eponymous Titli, Shivani Raghuvanshi as his reluctant but defiant bride Neelu, Kanu's own father Lalit Behl as Titli's father, and most chilling of all, Ranvir Shorey as Titli's elder brother, a man caught in a web of brutality and despair. A tautly edited portrait of class and criminality, Titli captures the claustrophobia of a society in which dreams seem attainable only for the very few. Behl is a director to watch out for.

Tanu Weds Manu Returns -- Director Anand L. Rai made a lot of people very happy with his return to the repartee-filled world of the Kanpur mohalla, in which the infamous Tanuja Trivedi (Kangana Ranut) had once caused such a stir by choosing the America-returned sweet but boring doctor (Madhavan) over her dashing beau Raja Awasthi (Jimmy Sheirgill). But what really made TWMR sparkle was Rai's decision to inject into this milieu that old Hindi movie staple: a double role. Ranaut topped her own return as the attractive but irresponsible Tanu with a newly minted persona as Datto, a heartmeltingly youthful Haryanvi hockey player who plays no games in real life.

TWMR had many other highlights —fhe return of Deepak Dobriyal, possibly the funniest actor now working in Hindi cinema, as Manu's ridiculous friend Pappi; Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub as the shaatir Rampuria tenant easily reeled in by Tanu's charms; and of course, Sheirgill as the updated Awasthi, having gained a moochh and lost some of his fire, but still able to make his loutish UP man exterior speak of inner depths with the flash of an eye. But the real hero of the film is Himanshu Sharma's script, marrying old-school Hindi movie tropes to a sharply contemporary wit, creating a film that will likely be watched many times over by its fans.

Masaan -- Neeraj Ghaywan's film announces another of the debut filmmakers who made 2015 such a special year for Indian cinema. Set in present-day Banaras, Varun Grover's script weaves together the lives of several people dealing with distressing circumstances into a moving melange. A young woman eager to embark on her sexual adulthood is dealt a nasty blow by a venal hypocritical system; an old man finds himself preying on a child's talents to salvage his own situation; a young man finds unlikely happiness only to have it snatched from him. Most people who watched Masaan found themselves swept up, and moved by its very real struggles. But there have been those who have taken issue with its many coincidences. To me, it seems that the reason Masaan works so well is that it melds a closely observed realist eye with the sort of emotionally satisfying arc that has long given Hindi films their special flavour.

Note: This list is heavily tilted towards cinema in Hindi, with only a couple of exceptions. 

[The rest of my Best of 2015 list appears in the next post]

The Age of Discovery

My Mirror column this week:

Two films based on women's memoirs of their teenage years offer rich, nuanced accounts of sexuality, selfhood and what it means to be grown-up

Among the things that made Masaan's opening sequence so memorable was Richa Chadda's striking depiction of a young woman yearning to begin her sexual life. We watch her hungry eyes as she watches a porn video, and then see her stride purposefully towards the sexual rendezvous that will change her life. Devi has shrugged off the cloak of morality that makes female sexuality a burden, and yet her youthful eagerness comes without coyness or giggles.

 

The frankness of Devi's sexual exploration made Masaan most unusual, especially in the Indian context. But even Masaan focused less on that process of exploration and more on its wider social ramifications. And Devi is a fully grown young woman. What would be truly remarkable would be to see the world through the eyes of a young girl (and not in the thoroughly exploitative manner of Ram Gopal Varma's Nishabd).

 

Marielle Heller's directorial debut The Diary of a Teenage Girl does exactly that, though in San Francisco, circa 1976. Based on an autobiographical graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, Heller's film casts the marvelous Bel Powley as Minnie Goetz, a 15-year-old schoolgirl who embarks on an affair with Monroe, a 35-year-old man who also happens to be her mother's (Kristen Wiig) boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgård).

 

Given the undeniable controversiality of this plot, the film is remarkable for the freedom it gives Minnie. Heller has been very clear, in interviews, that her interest in Gloeckner's book (she has earlier adapted and performed it as a play) arose from the fact that there are so few honest representations of young female desire. “The media has endlessly told teenage girls that boys are the only ones who are going to want sex. Girls are going to be the ones that don’t want it. Girls are going to want to withhold it until they decide that they are willing to give it to the guy,” Heller has said. “What if you’re a teenage girl who wants to have sex?

 

She might be 15 and a virgin when The Diary begins, but it is very clear that Minnie's wanting is at the very centre of this narrative. And what makes the film so powerful is her joyous, unabashed sense of discovery – as well as her unaffected confession of her changing feelings. She might be dreamy-eyed to start with, and confused in the middle, but she is also the one with the sharpest view of things as they unfurl. 

The Diary of a Teenage Girl makes for an interesting companion piece to An Education (2009), another exploration of a relationship between a teenaged girl and a middle-aged man, also based on a real-life autobiographical account (journalist Lynn Barber's bestselling memoir) and directed by a woman: the Danish director Lone Scherfig.

 

Jenny Mellor, the 16-year-old at the centre of An Education, couldn't be more different from Minnie Goetz, at least on the surface. Minnie retains her child-like teariness and her shapeless dungarees, showing no external signs of her sexual awakening (even provoking her mother into suggesting that she might take a greater interest in boys). Jenny's (Carey Mulligan) encounter with the charming David (Peter Sarsgaard), in contrast, soon results in a visible shift to adulthood: she starts to put her hair up and dress in fashionably grown-up clothes, and warns David against baby talk when they have sex for the first time: “Treat me like I'm a grown-up”. In fact Jenny's hunger is really for adulthood itself, rather than sex per se. It is her desire for beautiful things -- classical music concerts, glamorous restaurants and trips to Paris – that draws her to David, and simultaneously allows her to cast a cool, appraising eye at the dullness and poverty of the adult lives she sees around her: her poor, boring, money-grubbing parents, her closed-minded headmistress, even her fiercely hopeful English teacher.

 

Minnie doesn't do well at school, but she knows she is artistically talented. Jenny is the provincial girl with high culture aspirations—her grades might be perfect, but her sense of self is much more halting.

 

But much of the difference in the two narratives is also caused by the difference of social settings: in 1961 Britain, a middle class girl's confession of crisis is met by cups of tea and stern, solid advice; in 1976 San Francisco, it can devolve swiftly into a whirlwind of parties, sex and drugs.

 

Interestingly, in both films, the parents who discover an ongoing relationship between a teenage daughter and a much older man think of marriage as the next step. The difference is that in An Education, Jenny takes it seriously as an option, quick to exchange her dream of an Oxford education for the marital short-cut. In The Diary, set only fifteen years later, Kristen Wiig's angry proposal that Monroe marry Minnie elicits only disdain from the teenager (while the 35-year-old seems relieved, even happy, at this possible resolution).

 

What both films share, in fact, is a portrayal of adulthood as a layered, complex state in which people can continue to be both vulnerable and confused. Whether it is the surface sophistication of a David, which hides a hollow interior, or Monroe's drug-induced confession of neediness, or whether it is the profound gullibility of the parental figures in both films, it is the adults in either film who remain strangely infantile – and Minnie and Jenny who grow up.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29th Nov 2015.

A River Runs Through It

Yesterday's Mirror column:

Masaan brings to life a Banaras of sweetness and power, melding the ache of the old with the shock of the new.

Masaan ticks many of the boxes people might think of when they think of Banaras. There is a retired Sanskrit teacher, and a drunken dom raja. There is the pulsating excitement of Durga Puja, and the quiet tableau of life along the ghats. But this Banaras is neither the sweetened Yash Raj variety that leavened the teariness of Pradip Sarkar's Laaga Chunari Mein Daag (2007), nor the relentlessly dialoguebaaz version that enlivened the first half of Aanand L Rai's Raanjhana (2013). Rai and his scriptwriter Himanshu Sharma might be said to have specialised in a self-referential, sardonic, streetsmart Banaras - opening their film with Kundan (Dhanush) remembering his first sight of Zoya (Sonam) in childhood as "Banaras's first gift to me", or having Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub wistfully declare, "Mohalle ke laundon ka pyaar aksar doctor aur engineer utha ke le jaate hain" only to have our hero Kundan retort with "Murari, yeh Banaras hai. Agar launda sala yahan bhi haar gaya, toh jeetega kahan?" The masculine energy of the city that the film channelled was perhaps best summed up in the song "Banarasiya", in which Irshad Kamil punned on the word for a denizen of Banaras and the fact of becoming a pleasure-seeker, a lover: "bana rasiya". 

For Masaan, director Neeraj Ghaywan and scriptwriter Varun Grover adopt a very different tone. Here Banaras is not a label to be tossed around for pleasure, or invoked for drama. Grover and Ghaywan are talented enough to deposit us smack bang in the middle of everything that makes the city unique, and alternate wordlessly yet powerfully, between the grand narratives that Banaras makes so effortlessly possible and the small-town self it clings to with such tenacity. 

"Chhoti jagah, chhoti soch," mutters Richa Chaddha's Devi in a moment of disgust at the place she must call home, a place where the Banarasiya hero might take his pleasure, but which can only stifle spirited, curious young women like her. For Devi, Banaras holds no romance. It is a North Indian small town like any other, complete with stultifying sexual morality and venal corruption, and even the internet cannot offer freedom from its terrible lack of anonymity. The virtual world opens up a window - but leads down an abyss. 

In the film's second narrative thread, too, the city shackles its inhabitants. It is the internet - Facebook, to be precise - that enables an otherwise unlikely encounter, bringing the son of a corpse-burning dom into contact with the poetry-reciting daughter of a well-off Baniya family. The astoundingly talented Vicky Kaushal plays Deepak with a haunting mixture of passion and resignation. In what is possibly Deepak's most memorable scene (and there are many) with the charming Shalu (Shweta Tripathi, superbly underplayed), she asks him playfully why he hasn't taken her home, and makes several chirpy attempts to guess where he lives. Unable to deal with her light-hearted banter about a geography that for him is laden with unwanted meaning, Deepak explodes into cruelty. 

The motifs of stagnation and escape, of crossing over and staying put, recur through the film in other forms. Grover makes marvellous use of the Hindi poet Dushyant Kumar's lines, "Tu kisi rail si guzarti hai, main pul sa thartharata hoon" ("You pass by like some train, I tremble like a bridge") to produce an all-new love song. The train passing in the distance comes a little closer when our protagonists take jobs in the railways - and yet, as the railway babu (played wonderfully by Pankaj Tripathi) points out, of the trains that come to the station, only 28 stop. 64 just pass by. 

What flows through everything is the Ganga, churning the lives of all the film's characters into a single swirling stream. It is upon its banks, by the raging fires of Manikarnika, that they must embrace death, and from its murky waters that they must draw a renewed desire for life. 

In what is perhaps the film's most underrated thread, a precocious little boy called Jhonta (the winsome Nikhil Sahni) tries to help his blustering Guruji (Sanjay Mishra, in his finest turn since Ankhon Dekhi) by literally diving into the depths. And here, too, the river offers something like resolution. 

It is fitting, then, that when the film does leave Banaras, it is not to go too far away: not London or New York, nor even Delhi or Bombay. It is to the Sangam in Allahabad - the point where the Ganga meets the Yamuna and the hidden, mythical Saraswati. And the Sangam proves worthy of the name. 

Masaan is beautifully conceived, and lyrically shot by cinematographer Avinash Arun (who directed one of the best films of recent years, the Konkan-set Killa. I have two complaints about the film: one about a figure of unrelieved evil, and the second that there is one grand plot twist too many: I felt a bit manipulated. But to have made a film about a city and a river as overdetermined as Banaras and the Ganga, to have taken something so heavily laden with meaning and made it seem fresh, is a huge achievement. To have done so while also making us weep, for our past and our present and our future, is an unmitigated triumph.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.