Warp & Weft of History: Mishal Husain's Broken Threads

I read the BBC presenter's Mishal Husain's family history and then interviewed her about it for this India Today piece:

British journalist Mishal Husain’s Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence is a rare mix of research and storytelling, making it a great read for anyone who wants to understand the history of South Asia’s present.

Mishal Husain’s Broken Threads begins with the actual frayed threads of a sari from her grandparents’ wedding. A cousin uses its brocade border on a shawl, and gives it to Husain as a wedding present. Beyond this, though, the book contains surprisingly few object histories, for a family memoir in an age of Instagrammable nostalgia. It quickly becomes clear that Husain, a well-known BBC journalist, wasn’t just looking for a place to inscribe her own memories. She had access to her grandparents’ memories: “I had the books written by one grandparent (Shahid), an unpublished memoir left by another (Mumtaz), some audio tapes recording my grandmother Tahirah, and a 97-year-old sibling of Mary’s to talk to,” Husain says in an email interview. The book’s structure stemmed from this: Chapters 1-4 are devoted, in succession, to her grandparents Mary, Mumtaz, Shahid and Tahirah. 

But the real achievement of Broken Threads lies in contextualising each grandparent’s individual trajectory. “I realised early on that I needed to begin a few decades before, going back into the 19th century and the period before and after 1857,” says Husain. “I turned it into history as well as memoir because I didn’t feel I could understand these individuals without understanding their times.” We hear about Mary’s childhood, for instance, only after Husain has described the arrival of Europeans in India. But instead of a generic history of the East India Company, Husain focuses on what is relevant to explain Mary Quinn, daughter of Mariamma and Francis Quinn: the relationships between Indian women and European men which led to the emergence of the Anglo-Indian community. 

She does something similar with each grandparent, tapping into histories of communities, professions, ways of being. Writing about her grandfathers Mumtaz and Shahid enables her — and us — to dive into the modern South Asian histories of medicine and the army. As context for her grandmother Tahirah, who grew up in Aligarh, Husain provides a deft account of Syed Ahmad Khan and his awakening to the need for Western education for Muslims, who after 1857 had fallen into a state of nostalgia for the past and resistance to the future. 

What brings all these threads together is the British colonial frame. As Husain puts it, she “felt the environment into which Shahid, Tahirah, Mumtaz and Mary were born, between 1911 and 1922, had been shaped by prior events and the entrenchment of British power”. “They grew up seeing New Delhi being built as a grand capital...and I don’t think they envisaged that era ending in their lifetimes,” she tells india today. This may have been particularly true of Shahid, “who had a ringside seat to the circle of power in Delhi for the 18-month run-up to Independence and who wrote about that period, making clear his dim view of Lord Mountbatten.” There is something deeply tragic about this portrait of her grandparents as part of a colonial elite in a united South Asia, who didn’t feel at home anywhere after Independence and Partition. 

Husain seems to share Shahid’s sense of disappointment. “As a journalist working primarily on the UK,” she says, writing Broken Threads made her return often to “a dispiriting reality: how did a nation with such an established democracy, developed institutions, and a system of checks and balances, not do better in its ending of Empire?” 

That the book is written for a British audience is apparent in both the language — a great-grandmother’s “white dupatta scarf ”— and references —“Babur, a near contemporary of Henry VIII”. And yet, the rare mix of research and storytelling makes this a great read for anyone who wants to understand the history of South Asia’s present. The political divides of the 1930s and ’40s emerge more intimately than in most academic histories: Nehru and Jinnah being disturbed by Gandhi’s use of religious symbolism, or Mohammad Ali Jauhar, of Khilafat Movement fame, saying, “Nationalism divides, but faith binds.” 

It is disturbing to see the present-day resonances, Husain agrees, “in how much of what drove decision-making in 1947 — or has happened since — remains, whether it’s the insecurity minority communities can experience, or the role of the military in governance.” But I felt also a great distance from the past, in ordinary people’s identification with something greater than the self. When Shahid is en route to England for military training, his cousin Shaukat writes to him: “Remember that this poor, disorganised, half-fed country is your native land.... Bring back to its shores the accumulated experience of other people.” I do not know if many ordinary South Asians today feel such idealism.

Published in India Today magazine, 4 Nov 2024 edition, in print. Also online here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

The freedom of the spirit, dead or alive

My Mumbai Mirror column:

An unexpected death opens up surprising new directions for life in Umesh Bist's deftly-balanced new film.

Umesh Bist's new film may ride on the suggestion of quirky lightness – even the title, Pagglait, is an affectionate UP word for madcap -- but at its heart lies an absence. At the simplest level, the absence is of a person. A young man called Aastik, sole earning member of a joint family of five, has suddenly died -- leaving his parents bereft, his young wife widowed and all of them in financial trouble. The secondary form of absence, around which Bist really builds his narrative, is the absence of love. Aastik's wife of five months (the talented Sanya Malhotra) can't seem to grieve her loss. Is she just in shock? Or did she feel nothing for her late husband? Worse, did he feel nothing for her?

To build a film around this dual vacuum is a difficult task, but Bist pulls it off. Right from the very first shot -- a cycle-rickshaw driver shifting his weight from one buttock to another as he transports a heavy load of mattresses – the film balances a gentle, languorous gaze with mild, deadpan humour. He gets perfectly right, for instance, the air of melancholia in a house where a death has occurred -- the dark room, hushed voices and sombre faces. But he also catches the whiff of absurdity that is attached to conventional mourning: Having to field calls from relatives whose names you don't even remember, or the excessive weeping on the part of people who consider themselves close. The widowed daughter-in-law is expected to have cried herself into a stupor, but all she can think of is whether she can get a Pepsi instead of chai. The obligatory forms of mourning death can make a simple desire for continued life seem oddly obscene. But is it? That train of thought culminates in a memorable sequence where the eating of golgappas is intercut with the dead man's last rites.

These tonal shifts aren't easy, and Bist adds additional plot twists that offer a window into the dead man's secret life. (I won't go into them here, but suffice it to say that they touch on both love and money.)

Pagglait is also a fine addition to the growing body of Hindi films set in the north Indian small town, with a keen sense of familial dysfunction. Endowed with a stellar ensemble cast that includes Raghuvir Yadav, Sheeba Chaddha and Ashutosh Rana, the film catches much that's dire about the middle class extended family. This is less a world of angry recriminations than petty jealousies and long-held grudges. If the men judge each other for (the lack of) monetary success, the women compete in the domain of husbands and children. And while the women might have had to kowtow to men most of their lives, their words can drip with scorn. The barbs are quietly delivered, but go straight for the jugular. “Jo cheez khud ke paas nahi hoti, woh doosre ke paas bhi acchi nahi lagti [What one doesn't have oneself doesn't look good even when someone else has it],” says a husband-adoring sister-in-law to another who appears to be separated. “Pajaame se naada nikala nahi jaata, baatein badi-badi [Can't take the drawstring out of a pair of pyjamas, but talking big anyway],” a wife scoffs at her husband.
While the older adults conduct these hoary old battles, the younger lot are forging new arenas. There are plenty of indications of Bist's optimism. The widowed Sandhya's best friend, who quietly shows up to stay for the 13 days of mourning, is a young Muslim woman; the late husband's younger brother is happy to take English lessons from his bhabhi; the feisty 14-year-old girl visiting from out of town easily lords it over her 13-year-old male cousin. Even in relationships between women, the conventional path of jealousy and competition is sought to be replaced by the potential for understanding. There are no villains and vamps here, only people doing the best they can under the circumstances.

Pagglait works interestingly as a companion piece to the 2019 film Aise Hee, the marvellous feature debut from the writer-director Kislay (he goes by a single name) which won awards at MAMI and Busan, among other festivals. Both films are about women for whom the event of widowhood comes as unexpected liberation – not something they've yearned for, perhaps, but a vista that suddenly opens up before them. Whether you've been married for 52 years or five months, it seems, the absence of a man can sometimes be the only way for women to realise who they are.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 Mar 2021.

Book Review: A Bit of Everything

A fine new novel I reviewed for Scroll, about Kashmir and much else:

 In ‘A Bit of Everything’, author Sandeep Raina travels with questions of memories and victimhood.

About ten pages into Sandeep Raina’s novel, the Kashmiri Pandit protagonist is asked if he would like to watch a film about the history of the concentration camp he is visiting. Rahul Razdan has just arrived in Europe after six despairing years in Delhi, and walking around Dachau has already filled his mind with thoughts of his homeland. Something about the Austrian stranger’s innocuous question jolts the usually subdued young professor out of melancholia into sudden rage. “I have seen it all, I have felt it, I have been the film. Why would I want to see it all again?” he snaps.

A Bit of Everything is punctuated by incandescent moments like this one, where the light – and heat – from a still-smouldering bit of memory suddenly illuminates the drab, papered-over present, sometimes threatening to set it on fire. But such sparks are rare, because they are dangerous. Most people, most of the time, prefer to view the past nostalgically, and Rahul is no different. In the nostalgic mode, too, the mental analogy is with a film – but a film one watches over and over because one yearns to inhabit it again. 

“The past could be recalled easily, it could be comforting. He could rely on it. He could replay his fondest memories. Sitting here in a cold lounge on a cold leather sofa, he could recall a summer garden, a breezy afternoon, a book aglow under a winter candle, the smell of a wooden bukhari, warm toes in woollen socks, the scent of apples in straw boxes, pine-needle charcoal smoking in a kangri, Doora’s fluttering sari. The past could be relived as he wanted. The problem was with the present.”

A Bit of Everything, by Sandeep Raina. Westland, 2020.

A slow souring

Raina understands the workings of memory from the inside out. His book is a self-reflexive take on how we craft the narratives of our lives: as individuals, as families, as communities, as nations. It is no coincidence that Raina’s fictional narrator, the mild-mannered Rahul, has the rare ability to accept himself – his bafflement, his grief, his anger – without denying others his empathy. That empathetic quality is particularly valuable in a paean to a lost Kashmiri Pandit homeland, because the granular personal memory of that loss is too often dissolved into a politically expedient history of collective Hindu victimhood.

After they were forced to leave the increasingly communalised valley in the early 1990s, the Pandits’ painful and legitimate grievances have been sucked more and more into a narrative not of their making. The community is now a crucial pawn in the Sangh Parivar’s game of whataboutery, a game which politicians benefit from keeping alive.

We live with Rahul and the others the wrenching violence of the Pandit experience, of having been uprooted from the only home they had ever known, with little notice and few avenues for return. But their fear and hurt and befuddlement is not marshalled into some easy post-facto rationalisation. Raina’s protagonists refuse to play the static parts assigned to them in that never-ending majoritarian game: Pandits are not perpetually wounded victims, Muslims are not perpetually ungrateful traitors. (Even those from the “forces’ families” are allowed complicated inner lives by Raina – though he makes it clear that India’s defence establishment is its own social category in Kashmir.)

Instead, Raina’s narrative burden is the slow souring of once-warm relationships – and like his professorial narrator, he takes it seriously. If he revels in the sights and smells and sounds of his beloved house and garden, painting a often-idyllic picture of the sleepy small town of Varmull (I had to google to realise it’s the Baramulla of news reports), Rahul is equally punctilious about recording the fault-lines beneath the surface. The cross-community connections of Tashkent Street are real, but they contain within them the seeds of discord.

On Tashkent Street

So, for instance, we learn that Rahul and Doora build their “Haseen House” on a spur of the fields belonging to Doora’s family. It’s a detail, but one that helps understand how historical resentments brew: Pandits own all the arable land for miles, while it is poorer Muslims like Firoz and his brother who know how to cultivate it.

Rahul’s relationship to Firoze lies at the core of the novel: their bonding over the garden; Rahul’s awkward silence when Firoze takes the blame for a theft that his brother may or may not have committed; his attempt to compensate by teaching Firoze English literature for free. The inequality once tempered by neighbourly attachment becomes unbridgeable as social distrust deepens.

Then there’s the story of Kris, originally Krishna, who lives in one of the derelict houses on Jadeed Street where most of Varmull’s Dalits lived, “no one knew since when”. After his father dies cleaning a gutter, he comes to work in Rahul and Doora’s house at 13, hoping to acquire some education alongside his domestic duties. But Doora catches him pilfering and sends him away, launching him on a series of adventures in religion. First disallowed into the temple on Gosain Hill, then offered a new name and a Koran but barred from the mosque as “napaak” (impure), the Dalit boy finally becomes a Christian at 14.

Tashkent Street enables unlikely connections, but also watches them with suspicion. If the relationship between Kris and the poor Pandit girl Ragnee raises eyebrows, so does the fact of Firoze’s and Asha Dhar’s mother becoming friends over their daughters’ weddings – and the Ramayan. “I can’t understand the trittam-krittam, trit-pit Hindi they speak in the show, and no one at home tells me anything,” says Firoze’s mother to her son to explain why she goes to Asha Dhar’s house to watch the Hindu epic on Doordarshan every Sunday. 

“Mother, focus on your Pashto, not your Hindi,” laughs Firoze, while telling Rahul privately that it’s the Dhars’ cooking she can’t stay away from. Asha Dhar’s husband Pt Dhar, too, is unhappy with the friendship, which brings the Khan family – including their younger son Manzoor – into unnecessary proximity with his teenaged daughters.

Coming home

Over and over, Raina catches cultural and linguistic undercurrents that are the waves of the future: Iqbal Bano playing at a Pandit wedding before being turned off for its Pakistani-ness; Arun Dhar averting his eyes when asked about his friend Manzoor, or Pt Dhar dropping his voice to a whisper when he talks about his son-in-law’s “Shankhi” leanings so that the shopkeeper can’t hear him, or telling Rahul that he should say “poshte” because Muslims say “mubarakh”.

Raina’s radar may be stronger in Varmull, but it is alert to signals of contradiction even in Delhi and London – the intra-Muslim divide between Pashto-speakers and others; his Babri-destroying cousin Chaman who assures Doora that Rahul won’t fall into bad habits abroad, while winking at him and talking about marrying a mem; the Trinidadian Hindus who toast “Raoul” with beef doner kababs and whiskey while enlisting his services as a pandit for their planned Sanatan temple in Tooting.

Rahul’s final return – to India and to Kashmir – is the only unconvincing part of the book, perhaps because Raina’s attempt to unravel all the knots of the past at once feels more like wish-fulfilment than reality. But this is still a book to be read for its closely observed, deeply felt sense of Kashmir: a world seen from the inside, and then sadly, painfully, from afar. 

In this, A Bit of Everything is the complementary opposite of Madhuri Vijay’s award-winning 2019 novel The Far Field, in which we travel into Kashmir alongside a privileged young woman for whom the place is just a name. It is her slow and revelatory transition, from clueless to tragically embroiled, that helps forge ours.

Unlike Shalini, whose understanding grows as she embeds herself in Kashmir, Rahul begins to understand many things as he is removed from them, once he is no longer a “god of education” in Varmull. Distance and time help recalibrate the familiar.

The British section of the book is powerfully evocative, offering a rare glimpse of the South Asian immigrant experience in all its trials and excitements. As someone who studied in England at an age and time close to the fictional Rahul, I found much that felt deeply recognisable: the insufferable white academic who generously “simplifies” his name for the brown person (while not even thinking to ask how to pronounce yours), the sad, desperate search for ingredients to cook your own food, and the unexpected intimacies with other brown people.

Sometimes these connections with strangers feel stronger than with one’s known people, like Rahul and the man who sells Kashmiri noon chai on a London street. In a world governed by whiteness, brown skin can stretch to cover the bones of class and caste, religion and nation. The differences magnified in the sameness of Varmull can shrink to nothingness in London. That, too, is a revelation.

Published in Scroll, 30 Jan 2021.

A Kite for Sore Eyes

My Mumbai Mirror column:

In Hardik Mehta's Amdavad Ma Famous and Prashant Bhargava's Patang, a city's universal passion for kites leaps off the screen in all its infectious energy and deeply immersive spirit

A still from Amdavad Ma Famous (2015), Hardik Mehta's award-winning documentary about the kite-flying festival of Uttarayana that takes place on 14 January in Ahmedabad.

 
“Ek din tum patang ka shauq kar loge, toh zindagi ke saatth saal tak woh shauq poora nahi hoyega [If you get into flying kites even for a day, you'll stay addicted for the next 60 years],” says an old Muslim cleric in Amdavad Ma Famous. “Yeh shauq aisa hai, bahut terrible shauq!” In case the maulana's words haven't convinced you, filmmaker and editor Hardik Mehta cuts from him to the sight of an old woman on a terrace – white sari, white hair in a loose bun, possibly older than the cleric – flying a kite with gusto.

Mehta's glorious 2015 short documentary, which won a host of awards across the world and was declared Best Non-Fiction Film at India's 63^rd National Film Awards, was set and shot during the festival of Uttarayan in Ahmedabad, when the whole city gathers on its rooftops to fly kites. The pivotal character is a young boy called Zaid Khedawalla, whose enthusiasm for the sport borders on the obsessive. Uttarayan is another name for Makar Sankranti, which falls on January 14 or 15 every year, based on the solar calendar. In the days leading up to the festival, Zaid wakes up very early in the morning to scout his neighbourhood for fallen kites. “By 10 am or so, he has gathered enough kites for the day,” says his father, laughing.

The fact that Zaid skips school to fly kites all day is a recurring theme in the film. His father tries to get him to go to class. The maulana tries to get the boys off the roof off the mosque. Mushtaq, caretaker of a bank building in the film's chosen neighbourhood of Astodia, tries to shoo them away, even locking up the terrace on some days. But Zaid, like thousands of other young boys in the city, is incorrigible. “You don't listen to your father, Zaid?” asks the filmmaker. “I do try,” grins Zaid. “But these kites are just too much fun.”

It is one of several charming moments in an utterly charming film. Mehta captures these boys in all their manic energy, but also locates them within the colour and chaos and community of a whole city abuzz with the same zeal – street markets selling varieties of kites, manjha-walas sharpening the thread with ground glass, ancillary products springing up to protect bike-riders from the sharp kite threads that criss-cross the streets at this time. Zaid's father later confesses that he was just as crazy about kites when he was Zaid's age. The crabby Mushtaq, who responds to someone calling the boys artists (“kalakaar”) by labelling them the face of the devil instead, is seen later in the film flying kites himself. When quizzed, his reply is hilarious: “I only fly the kites that have fallen on my terrace”.

Mehta's marvellous aides – he has a truly talented sound designer in Manoj M Goswami, and Alokananda Dasgupta has created a brilliantly uplifting soundtrack – help him make all sorts of other visual and aural connections. When Mushtaq speaks of the kites as bringing out the boys' “wild side”, Mehta cuts to monkeys clambering up and down the terraces, almost exactly in step with the boys. Dasgupta's soundtrack punctuates the bouncy ascent of all sorts of people – large, old, creaky – up roof ladders.

That heartwarming inclusiveness was also very much the point of Prashant Bhargava's lovely 2011 feature Patang, in which an Ahmedabad native, now settled in Delhi, returns to the city after many years during Uttarayan, bringing with him a teenaged daughter through whose fresh eyes we see Ahmedabad's old city. Patang contained one of Nawazuddin Siddiqui's earliest full-fledged performances, as the Ahmedabad-based nephew who bristles at his uncle's sudden descent upon the old family home.

But what is it about kites – other than the obvious and overdone fetishised idea of India as colour – that makes them cinema-worthy? Speaking to the legendary critic, the late Roger Ebert, about his film, Bhargava (who also died, tragically young, in 2015) said, “In India, kite flying transcends boundaries. Rich or poor, Hindu or Muslim, young or old — together they look toward the sky with wonder, thoughts and doubts forgotten. Kite flying is meditation in its simplest form.”

I recently came across a definition of meditation in another film, Matthew Vaughn's 2005 Layer Cake, that makes sense in this context. A man with a passion for high-quality guns says to Daniel Craig's high-stakes drug dealer character: “Meditation is concentrating the front of the mind with a mundane task so the rest of the mind can find peace.”

As you watch the myriad faces in Mehta's film, intensely concentrated on the kite in hand, eyes lifted to the heavens, it suddenly seems entirely clear why these fluttering bits of paper have captured the human imagination for centuries. And we have kites to thank for something else – at least they're not guns.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 Jan 2021

Book Review: Desire and Despoliation

A book review for Firstpost:

A recent English translation brings Shivani's 1978 novel 'Bhairavi' to new readers

Bhairavi: The Runaway begins in medias res, with the protagonist slowly coming back to consciousness in a room she does not recognise, surrounded by strangers whose presence terrifies her. An “old hag” with a man's dhoti wrapped around “her enormous stomach” and her bare breasts are “covered in blood-red sandalwood paste”; a younger woman with a face “as black as that of an African”; an ash-smeared naked sadhu with bloodshot eyes and half-grey, half golden dreadlocks — these are characters that might throw anyone off. Certainly our heroine Chandan, a conventionally pretty, fair young woman whom we are to understand is 'from a good family', is scared as well as repelled.

Chandan's experience has the sensory overload of a nightmare: the semi-nakedness of those around her, the stale smell of chewing tobacco on the sanyasin's breath, the cave-like room filled with smoke, and occupied by rudraksha beads, marijuana chillums, a skull or two, and a live pet snake. And yet, what begins as a petrifying glimpse of otherness soon starts to feel arresting, even beautiful. Maya Didi has a sagging but once voluptuous body and a radiant face that “must have ensnared many men in its youth”; the “black girl” Charan has a laugh that “lit up her whole face”'; the guru's “divine face” is “like a light tearing into a room”. This ability to stay with what was initially frightening, to allow one's gaze to be transformed — perhaps this was the gift Shivani's writing gave her readers.

Shivani was the pen name under which the writer Gaura Pant wrote from the 1960s to the 1990s, her fiction often first appearing in serialised form in Hindi magazines. Bhairavi was her fourth novel, published in instalments in Saptahik Hindustan and then as a book in 1978. Shivani was hugely popular, but as far as I am aware, only some of her short stories have hitherto been translated into English: Trust and other stories (Calcutta, Writers Workshop, 1985); Krishnakali and other stories (Trans. by Masooma Ali, Rupa & Co., 1995) and Apradhini: Women Without Men (Trans. by Ira Pande, HarperCollins, 2011). (Ira Pande is Shivani's daughter, who has also written a deeply personal biography of her mother called Diddi, 2005). Priyanka Sarkar, Bhairavi's English translator, suggests in her introduction that the reason Shivani wasn't as feted as her contemporaries because “she was seen as a writer of 'love stories' and not a chronicler of society”. Other than Bhairavi, I have only ever read Apradhini, but based on what I know about the Indian, specifically Hindi, literary universe, I'd extend Sarkar's point even further. Shivani was probably not feted by the Hindi establishment precisely because she was popular, particularly popular with women — and not with literary-minded ones.

Reading Bhairavi: The Runaway revealed the possible reasons for that vast popularity. First, the story is fast-paced. Second, the central characters are all women. Men, whether fathers, husbands, lovers or sons, are often absent, and when they do appear, they're fairly one-dimensional figures whose sole purpose seems to be to drive the plot forward. Third, there's a racy, almost overripe quality to the narrative — a sort of Indian Gothic that combines two of this country's abiding concerns: mothers worrying about their daughters, and a deep-rooted fascination with ascetics.

What brings these two disparate threads together? A preoccupation with sex and sexuality — all the more powerful for being almost unspoken.

So on the one hand, we are told the backstory of Chandan, which is linked to the further backstory of her mother Rajrajeshwari — both revolving around the need to keep young women's sexuality in check, lest they lose their prized virginity and become unmarriageable. On the other hand we are plunged into the world of the Aghori ascetic, seeing through Chandan's eyes this storied space of Shiv-bhakt sadhus whose austerities, like those of other sects with an affinity to Tantrism, involve rituals that would be considered shocking by most ordinary Hindus. The 'ideal' Aghori embraces what others consider taboo — living off the cremation ground, drinking not only liquor but urine, consuming not just flesh but human corpses, and having intercourse with a female partner who is preferably infertile — the withholding of semen and the non-reproductiveness of the act being crucial. As the anthropologist Jonathan Parry argues in his classic study Death in Banaras, the Aghori route to siddhi (supernatural powers) not just allows meat-eating and intoxicants and sex, but makes them the very stuff of their sadhana (ritual practice).“For the tantrics, that which binds you — desire — is also what will set you free,” writes Madhavi Menon in her delightful book Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India.

Bhairavi offers the fascinated lay reader a glimpse of this tabooed universe, but Shivani was no anthropologist, and her Aghoris don't stick to the rules. Yes, the guru and his prime disciple Maya Didi do wander the cremation ground in search of enlightenment, seeking to attain mastery over life by surrounding themselves with death. But Shivani's narrative cannot go the whole hog. She makes their relationship non-sexual — or rather, unconsummated: Charan describes seeing them once at the cremation ground, “sitting across each other like a snake couple”, with Maya saying to the guru: “You are my only Shiva, Guru, and I am your Shiva Shakti”. Somehow, by keeping any actual sex out of it, Shivani manages to turn the relationship into something filled with sexual-romantic energy, even danger: a classic double bind that would be recognisable to all her readers.

Meanwhile, in the ordinary world, marriage continues to rule the roost, offering the only legitimate space for sexuality — if you're very lucky, some happiness is a possibility. But even marriage cannot protect women from the constant fear of sexual despoliation: Bhairavi has not one but two moments when (the fear of) rape becomes the motor of the plot. A woman can go from the grihasth (domestic) universe to the world of supposed renunciates, Shivani suggests implicitly, but she won't ever be free of this fear — if not on her own behalf, then on behalf of younger women. That's a bleak thought: one can only hope it's a little less true in 2020 than it was in 1978.

Bhairavi: The Runaway | By Shivani | Translated by Priyanka Sarkar

Simon and Schuster/Yoda Press, 2020 | 139 pages

This review was published in Firstpost, 27 Nov 2020.

 

 

In the dark of the night

My Mirror column:

The absorbing Raat Akeli Hai stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui as a UP cop learning a little about himself as he unravels a web of murderous intrigue

Radhika Apte in a still from the atmospheric new murder mystery Raat Akeli Hai

The shaadi ka ghar has been a favoured backdrop for the dramatic unfolding of countless Hindi film romances, but it’s likely never been the setting for a murder mystery. Nor has the ubiquitous wedding video been turned into evidence for a police investigation before. Honey Trehan’s slow-burn directorial debut Raat Akeli Hai does both things with delicious conviction, giving us an atmospheric whodunit that feels deeply embedded in the dystopic state of Uttar Pradesh. What makes the film even more satisfying is that Trehan – a long-time casting director who has done films with Vishal Bhardwaj, Meghna Gulzar and Abhishek Chaubey – casts Nawazuddin Siddiqui as his detective hero, and places his unmarriedness centrestage.

Saddled with the near-giggleworthy name of Jatil (literally ‘complex’) Yadav, Siddiqui’s plain-speaking Kanpuriya cop is introduced as a man with some complexes of his own. We first set eyes on him in a photograph that his mother (the effortlessly watchable Ila Arun) is trotting out at a wedding, attempting to convince a female guest that her son is an eligible match. The fair-skinned young woman has her spangly sari draped over a spaghetti strap blouse, but her views on skin colour remain hopelessly unreconstructed. “Rang saaf nahi hai (His complexion isn't clear),” she says, dismissing Jatil at a glance. “Par mann saaf hai (But his heart is),” says Arun, turning away only to be accosted by her embarrassed and angry son.

But while we might sympathise with the fact that Jatil’s dark skin makes him an inferior candidate in a world where Ajay Devgn is the exception that proves the rule, his own views on women reveal a rather muddy mann. “Did you see the clothes she was wearing?” he says to his mother. “I just want a susheel girl.” As the film unfolds, however, Jatil’s socially-learned disgust for the sexually independent woman (“Tumhare jaisi aurat ko apne paas phatakne bhi na dein”) clashes often with his simultaneous attraction to what he acknowledges as courage and honesty.

And no wonder, given the rarity of a “saaf mann” in RAH's grim world. In a scenario with several shades of last year’s Hollywood crime comedy Knives Out, Jatil is called upon to investigate the murder of the patriarch of a well-off family whose members seem not to like each other very much, and who might all have had motives to kill him. Knives Out hid its sharp politics under parodic excess. Here Trehan and cinematographer Pankaj Kumar (Haider, Tumbadd) create a brilliantly atmospheric web of oppressive rooms and half-lit corridors to match a much darker milieu that feels true to present-day North India: corrupt, power-hungry, sexually exploitative and two-faced. When our hero gets there, the terrace and balconies are still lit up for the wedding that has just taken place, of the widowed dead man to his much younger mistress. And the sight of the new wife Radha (Radhika Apte, looking the part but never completely inhabiting it), still in her wedding finery, sitting in her upstairs room with a ghunghat half covering her face, is very much part of the filmi marriage fantasy (from Mother India to Kabhi Kabhie to Tanu Weds Manu) that RAH both evokes and toys with.

What Trehan and his exceptional screenwriter Smita Singh do with elan is to make that image of the marriageable woman the film's recurring subtext. The dogged small-town detective whose Achilles’ Heel is attractive women has been with us at least since Polanski’s Chinatown. Here the mirage-like quality of Siddiqui’s first sight of Radha also reminds one of Manorama Six Feet Under, Navdeep Singh’s 2007 adaptation of Chinatown. But while our cop hero may have a soft spot for the supposed femme fatale, almost everyone else (in the family and beyond) has already decided that she must be the murderess. “Woh ladies rijha rahi hai aapko (She's seducing you),” Siddiqui's colleague says knowingly. When Siddiqui protests that she barely gives him the time of day, the colleague pounces on him with the sort of unsustainable circular logic that otherwise rational men single women out for: “That's exactly it! That's how women seduce you, by not giving you attention.”

The slow accretion of words and images creates a dark picture of this skewed world, in which women are damned if they don't – and certainly damned if they do. From Siddiqui's “duffer” colleague to the dead man's feckless but good looking “hero-type” heir, every man in town is out to make a sanskaari match, while secretly lusting after women whose attraction is precisely that they're not 'wife material'. “Baazaaru se gharelu hone ka safar kitna kathin hai aapko maloom hai?” asks the politician Munna Raja (Aditya Srivastava). And yet the gharelu women, who've won the supposed big prize of marriage and respectability, can end up more patriarchal than the men, resorting to ever-lower measures to guard their practically nonexistent turf.

Faced with this intriguing cocktail of lust and revenge, our UP policeman hero presents himself as “not such a low-level man”. Jatil's striving for moral fibre is real, and yet it is also clear that he must operate within the system as it currently exists. And that system is one where the extra-legal has become the norm, where it is a public secret that only a saffron-hued MLA can risk owning a tannery, and an inconvenient cop is as easily 'encountered' as an out-of-favour gangster. In this post-procedure world, even being a stickler for truth can now mean finding extra-legal ways to uncover it. Whether it's marriage or murder, the show must go on. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 Aug 2020.

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 smells of others

My Mirror column:

Nicholas Kharkongor's Delhi-set dramedy Axone traces some of the fault lines that mark the urban Indian melting pot.

Growing up between cultures, I learnt long ago that smell was most people’s strongest, most intimate sense – and thus the one that lent itself most easily to kneejerk reactions, especially with relation to food. Members of my family’s staunchly vegetarian side, North Indian Jains of the not-even-egg variety, have sat me down as a child to tell me how difficult they found it to keep their own food down while having their nostrils assailed by the fried fish smells wafting down from a tenant’s house.

Nicholas Kharkongor’s film Axone, recently released on an online platform, is named for the strong-smelling fermented soya bean paste that forms a necessary ingredient in many traditional northeastern dishes. Often spelled akhuni, axone has a distinctive smell that you can’t ignore – which makes it a useful metaphorical marker of difference. And differences that cannot be ignored make for a strange but potent cocktail of attraction and repulsion.

That mixture of attraction and repulsion appears sharply in the film, in the alternately lascivious and judgemental gaze that Delhi folk turn upon the young northeasterners in their midst – being judged by the women for wearing ‘Western’ clothes and having boyfriends, while being the object of the men’s unsolicited attentions. But that attraction and repulsion also plays out, perhaps unintendedly, in Axone’s own cinematic form. The film plays out the food/smell motif against a tenant-landlord scenario in one of those urban villages in Delhi that thrum with the sounds of many languages, focusing on a group of friends from the Northeast who have to make an akhuni-flavoured pork curry for a last-minute wedding feast. That food-and-wedding narrative, though, feels like a mere sweetener, an attractive hook on which to hang a script full of bitter – abeit necessary – pills. Kharkongor's central concern is the racism, sexual predatoriness and aggression that migrants from the Northeast are forced to suffer in Delhi (and most other Indian cities). But what he does is to take that disturbing narrative and plonk it down in a Delhi-set middle class comedy that has become a Bollywood subgenre from Do Dooni Chaar and Vicky Donor to Queen to Badhaai Ho.

So alongside the central group of friends, we get a fairly detailed glimpse of the landlord's family: the hard-nosed landlady (Dolly Ahluwalia doing a version of her alcohol-swigging Punjabi grandmother from Vicky Donor), her layabout son-in-law (Vinay Pathak) and her overenthusiastic grandson, the curly-haired Shiv (Rohan Joshi). Shiv's multiple machinations and largely well-meaning mistakes form some of the film's warmer bits of comedy, but his father and grandmother's characters feel derivative and ungrounded. Still, there is something to be said for the fact that the homogenous lower-middle-class Punjabi milieu, a staple of so many previous Delhi films, has finally been extended to a whistle-stop tour of the very real admixture of so many Delhi neighbourhoods like Humayunpur, where locals rent out parts of their properties to people from across India and beyond.

Axone gently impresses upon us that everyone judges each other, using community and skin colour and language to make easy categorisations. If the Hindi-speaking landlords claim not to be able to tell northeastern faces apart, or remember their names, then the Nepali girl, too, can't get her head around her African neighbour's name – and the African neighbour, in turn, makes an assumption about her based on her looks. And the whole group of northeastern friends keep their distance from the landlord’s son, whose interest in them is very much a curious fascination with the coolness their clothes, their English-speaking-ness, their music represent for him.

Kharkongor’s real sympathies, though, lie with Chanbi, Upasana, Zorem and Bendang (played by Lin Laishram, Sayani Gupta, Tenzing Dalha and Lanuakum Ao), each of whom is dealing with their own troubles. Even here, however, his script constantly points out how their relationships with each other, and with themselves, are inflected by the politics of identity and belonging. These include some small observations that shape the plot – like the perceived difference between being Nepali and being northeastern, and other observations that don’t quite go the distance – like the fake American accent or the Bollywood lyrics that are needed to get by in a world in which those languages have bigger markets. But whether it be the northeastern man who feels emasculated by racist North Indian violence, or the northeastern woman exhausted by nonstop sexual slurs and harassment, Axone brings home the trauma and injustice of the migrant northeastern experience as perhaps no Hindi film has before.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Jun 2020.

Far from the feudal

My Mirror column (14 Jun 2020):

Has Indian cinema gained or lost something as filmmakers become increasingly distanced from the village?

Recently, while on a video call with a novelist friend, I mentioned writing a series of columns on Indian films about the migrant experience, including Muzaffar Ali's Gaman (1978), in which Farooque Shaikh played a young man who has to leave his Uttar Pradesh village to become a taxi driver in what was then Bombay. “Gaman is a good film,” conceded my friend, a less forgiving film viewer than me. “But it presented the local raja as this very nice man, and then I realized the filmmaker is talking about himself!” I said, well, it was the 1970s, so more likely a fictionalisation of the filmmaker's father – one degree of separation. And my friend and I laughed.

But it is indeed true that the village in which the film is shot was (and was shown to be) Kotwara, District Kheri, UP – the place that Muzaffar Ali's ancestors have ruled for generations. So when Farooque Shaikh's on-screen mother tells her on-screen daughter-in-law Smita Patil that “Raja Sahab vilayat jaane se pehle gale lagaaein aur kahein, 'Aap mere bade bhai hain',” that expansive gesture of personalised generosity was how the film chose to characterise the area's ruling feudal family – the family to which the filmmaker himself belonged. The straitened circumstances of the Farooque Shaikh character, meanwhile, were blamed on an upper caste landlord who had established himself as a middleman.

Why does any of this matter? Well, it matters because Gaman is one of the rare films made in India to deal sensitively with the pressures of migration; to depict the way large swathes of rural India have become unsustainable for their inhabitants, pushing people out into our cities, where they must then live depleted lives in crowded, often forcibly unsanitary circumstances, away from loved ones – until that life, too, is made unsustainable by an unprecedented state-created crisis like the Covid-19 lockdown. Beginning with an ethnographic eye – the women and children of the village, sitting silent and watchful, overlaid with Hira Devi Mishra's unforgettable rendition of Ras Ke Bhare Tore Nain, or a little later, what looks like wonderful documentary footage of the local Muharram celebrations, Gaman used a more mainstream fictional narrative – including some very fine songs -- to get its viewers to feel for the poor rural migrant.

So it seemed important that Gaman's creator came from the top of that rural hierarchy. It was Muzaffar Ali's feudal background that actually connected him with the village – and later took him back there to found a designer clothing line that employs local artisans. Ali was never going to be a poor villager, but he had clearly met several, and was able to generate the creative compassion needed to tell their story. Once I started to think about it, all the films I'd been writing about these past few weeks felt like they needed to be seen again through the lens – pardon the pun -- of their creators.

Three and a half decades before Gaman, the migrant's story had been told in Bimal Roy's classic Do Bigha Zamin, which drew on a Tagore poem about a dispossessed peasant to create a film with a strongly socialist IPTA-inspired worldview, including a joyful immersion in India's folk traditions of music and dance. The callous zamindar who drives Do Bigha Zamin's peasant protagonist Shambhu to ruin was, of course, among many such villainous depictions of the time, including Pran as the lecherous, drunken Ugranarayan in Roy's own beautifully rendered supernatural romance, Madhumati. Was it of consequence that Bimal Roy came from a landowning family in Suapur, in former East Bengal? Was Ugranarayan informed, as Roy's daughter Rinki Roy Bhattacharya has suggested, by Roy's real-life uncle Jogeshchandra, whose indolent feudal lifestyle the lifelong teetotaller Roy clearly wished to keep at bay?

Such biographical questions may seem altogether too specific, and given our paucity of personal archives, necessarily speculative. But what I'm trying to get at is the fact that there was, in both theses cases, a connection with the village that allowed for the rural character to emerge on screen. Balraj Sahni, who played the peasant-turned-rickshawalla in DBZ, was so aware of his being urban that he spent a lot of time with a rickshawala who was a migrant. But when one actually reads about Sahni's life -- for instance, the Communist leader PC Joshi describing how Sahni's parents insisted on keeping a buffalo for fresh milk in their house in 1950s Bombay -- one realises that the connections between the urban and the rural in that India were still stronger than we can dream of.

In a book of interviews called Rendezvous With Hindi Cinema (2019), the director Dibakar Banerjee makes the point sharply. “Earlier, there was some kind of a connection. It's a paradox, that connect was feudalism. Feudal families would send their children to study in colleges in Bombay or Delhi. But they'd go back for vacation and see the real, poor, feudal India, where they would be the lords,” he says, speculating for instance about the powerfully anti-feudal films of Shyam Benegal. “But the present generation of filmmakers is even more cut off from rural India, poor India,” Banerjee says.

It is hard to disagree with the fact that even the alternative, non-Bollywood cinema of the last decade is almost entirely urban. There are rare exceptions, but they prove the rule, like a Peepli Live (2010), where the village's desperation for visibility is tied to its appearance on screen -- but as the locale for a media circus. For a more recent film set entirely in a North Indian village, I can only think of Gamak Ghar – which proves the point, too, because it is the young urban filmmaker memorialising the village his parents left behind. Our films may be further from the feudal than they once were, but it looks like they are also further from the rural.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 Jun 2020.

The Remembered Village

My Mirror column (7 June 2020):

A young filmmaker's atmospheric Maithili debut refracts the experience of his family's village home through layers of distance and memory.

Using an old house as the central motif for a film is not a new idea. Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s fine directorial debut Musafir (1957), an under-watched film that I discussed in an earlier edition of this column, made a house and its neighbourhood the common factor in a narrative about three separate sets of tenants. The French director Alain Resnais, better known for spare, intense films like Hiroshima Mon Amour and Night and Fog, used an outlandish 18th century chateau in the Ardennes Forest as the unifying setting for his era-jumping tripartite 1983 film Life Is a Bed of Roses (currently streaming online). More recently, the Ukrainian director Dar Gai’s dubiously named Teen Aur Aadha (2017) built a composite narrative around a 50-year-old Mumbai building in which there had been a school and a brothel as well as families. People leave, houses remain. Some memories don't need a house to dwell in: it can be a car. The Yellow Rolls-Royce, a somewhat overblown, star-studded 1965 film with everyone from Rex Harrison to Shirley MacLaine, had three very different lives linked only by the eponymous car. It was based on a play by Terence Rattigan, who apparently took the idea from a post-war German film called In Those Days, directed by Helmut Käutner, which used the seven lives of a car built in 1933 and dismantled in 1947 to comment on the Nazi era.

But Gamak Ghar doesn’t really remind you of other films. It reminds you of other houses.

Streaming on an online platform for another day, 23-year-old Achal Mishra's debut feature is a quiet love letter to his grandparents' village home in Madhopur, Bihar. Mishra uses a three-part structure, beginning in 1998 and ending in 2019, and the house does allow us to see its owners grow older, change, move away and return. But Mishra is not interested in plot.

His set is the actual house that he visited twice a year as a child, but whose role in even the family’s ceremonial life began to decrease as the grandparents died. His characters – if you can call them that – are fictionalised versions of his own extended family, played by a mixed cast garnered from amongst existing local actors and acquaintances who had not acted before. And his narrative interest is a socio-economic transition that is specific to his own upper caste Maithil Brahmin family as well as familiar to many, many migrant families across India whose connections with the village have grown irreversibly distant, especially in the decades since liberalisation.

What makes Gamak Ghar unusual is its single-minded interest in capturing a certain experience of time and space. Mishra has, in a recent interview, mentioned the writer Amit Chaudhuri as one of his sources of inspiration, and one can see why. From its very first frames, the film refuses even a glimmer of drama for stillness, displaying a conviction that art can lie in the observation and recreation of sensory detail. So we see the piles of Malda mangoes from the family orchard, and the curds set in an array of flat earthen pots. We observe how people look through a mosquito net, we watch the smoke rising from an agarbatti. We remember rooms lit at night by a hurricane lamp, and recall how tuneless the singing can often be during a religious ritual.

There is almost nothing flashily cinematic here, though an occasional filmic reference gets made – most obviously when a conversation about one of the brothers moving to Delhi is followed by a stunningly beautiful shot of a train viewed through a field of snowy-white kaash flowers, a la Pather Panchali, evoking and portending Apu’s move to the city later in Ray’s Apu Trilogy. There are rapt faces bathed in the glow of a TV screen, and the lone female cousin who, when asked “Sunny Deol or Salman Khan”, says a categorical no to watching a Salman film on the VCR.

And as the film traverses the last two decades, the nods to change are everywhere. We watch as the large wooden bed on which the men played cards in the balcony is replaced by wooden chairs over the years, and then dull brown plastic ones; we note the gradual shift from community feasts laid out on the floor – where everyone knew exactly how much someone was eating and could make fun of them for their appetite – to meals served on chairs apart from each other, and finally, meals eaten by each brother alone in a bedroom.

Evocative and nostalgia-inducing as these sights and sounds are, I was glad that Mishra seems simultaneously able to suggest that this world we have lost – or are in the process of losing – was held up by all sorts of hierarchies and rigidities that we took for granted. In the rosy remembered time of family togetherness in the 1990s, for instance, the women cooked vast meals and looked after the children, while the men played cards and demanded to know whether the food was ready. The daughter-in-law who covers her head with a ghoonghat all through the first segment has become a confident Delhi woman a decade later, leaving her hair open.

But she still joins her sisters-in-law to chop vegetables for the family dinner. The links with the past aren't quite broken yet. At the end, the roof is being dismantled -- but it is part of a house renovation, to host a new child's initiation ceremony. Gamak Ghar isn’t meant to be a sociological or anthropological record, and yet it is that thing we rarely produce in India: a self-conscious cinematic document.

Published in Mumbai Mirror,  7 Jun 2020. 

Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone

My Mirror column (10 May 2020):

As India's labouring poor are locked into cities and die tragically in their unaided attempts to get home, Muzaffar Ali's 1978 migrant classic Gaman acquires new layers of meaning.

In an early scene in Gaman, a hesitant Ghulam Hasan (Farooque Shaikh) gets off a train at VT Station and manages to find his way to the jhopadpatti that appears to be his childhood friend Lallulal's (Jalal Agha) Mumbai address. He pauses beside a group of young men chatting by the roadside. “Sunoh bhaiyya,” says Ghulam softly, his tongue still travelling along the slow perlocutionary path of his native UP village. “Woh kya hai ki kya Lallulal Tiwari yahan rehta hai?” 

The retort is quick and stinging, and the word now jumps out at us, an untranslated social footnote that will not be suppressed: “Apun tumko bhaiyya dikhta hai?”

One of the others deigns to direct the lost newcomer to the tin-roofed shanty (“third gali after the municipal toilet”) that the affable Lallu shares with several other men, and Ghulam quickly becomes one of its occupants. But Muzaffar Ali's 1978 directorial debut, a film made three years before his much more famous Umrao Jaan, never lets his viewers forget that this rickety roof over their heads is both temporary and tenuous. Shelter in the big city is so precious a thing that Lallu's labelling of it as his “Taj Mahal” is both a bad joke and thoroughly heartfelt. And the emotion only heightens through the film, as Lallu and his sweetheart Yashodhara (Gita Siddharth, of Garm Hava fame) yearn ever more for a place of their own so they can marry, while even the rented kholi is threatened with demolition.

For Ghulam though, it is the village home he has left behind that calls out to him, in the shape of letters bringing news of his ailing mother and his lonely wife Khairun (Smita Patil), whose face drifts up from his memories and looms large over the cityscape that he learns gradually to traverse. Aided by older men from his native region, so-called bhaiyyas, Ghulam becomes, like Lallu, a taxi driver in Mumbai. The film is full of shots of Shaikh in a taxi, his sad eyes seeing but not quite seeing the urban crowd he is now part of. “Hiyan bheed ka kauno hisaab naahi,” as he tells Lallu wonderingly.

Muzaffar Ali's use of songs is perhaps his most affective talent, and it is powerfully evident here. In the picturisation of the film's magisterial anthem of urban desolation “Seene mein jalan, aankhon mein toofan sa kyun hai/ Is sheher mein har shakhs pareshaan-sa kyun hai? (Why does the heart burn, why is there a storm in my eyes/ Why is everyone troubled in this city?)”, our gaze travels past blocks and blocks of urban housing, and cars seen from above, like unending queues of ants, and we hear Shahryar's line: “Ta-had-e nazar ek bayabaan sa kyun hai?” “Why is there a wilderness as far as the eye can see?”

One of Gaman's achievements as a film about the migrant experience is that the distance between the village and the city feels insurmountable, despite the technologies that bridge the two. That feeling is gestured to in the film's very first shot, when a letter is being laboriously typed with one finger (on a typewriter that, in one of those surreal moments that populate the watching of so much in 2020, bears the brand-name Corona), and the camera moves up from there to the telegraph lines that stretch across a bucolic rural landscape. A great deal of screen time is spent on trains and buses – and at moments of particular emotion, Ali inserts a distant shot of a plane in the sky, like some imagined modern-day pigeon-post of the heart.

Conditions of labour and lack of money make it nearly impossible for the poor migrant to go back home, even when nothing is ostensibly stopping him. In the third month of a shockingly unplanned and heartlessly implemented lockdown, when lakhs of India's working poor are being forcibly kept from going back home, Gaman's final sequence bears a terrible new weight. Farooque Shaikh bundles up his few belongings in his lovely old-style trunk (the objects of the feudal Awadh village were still beautiful) and arrives at VT, hoping to depart as spontaneously as he had arrived. But more than half the money he has saved in a year will go on just the journey home, he thinks, and his feet stop where they are. We leave him standing behind the collapsible gate that enters the platform, locked down in the city while his mind climbs onto the train, over and over.

I'd like to end this column with another moment from Gaman, when Ghulam is actually on a train. He and Lallu are going to meet Yashodhara. They are already late when the train suddenly stops. What happened, asks Ghulam the newbie. Must be an accident, says Lallu. It turns out a man has been killed under the train’s wheels. “The bus would have been faster,” says Lallu. “Yahi gaadi mili thhi marne ke liye! (Did he have to choose this train to die under?)” rues another man. “Patri se hataane ka aur gaadi start karne ka. Passenger log ka kaahe ko time barbaad karne ka (Get him off the tracks and start the train. Why waste the time of passengers?)” says a third voice.

Ghulam looks distraught. “Wait and watch,” says Lalloo. “You’ll get used to it like all of us.”

Watching Gaman in mid-2020, it feels sickeningly clear that all of us are now passengers, whose time can’t be wasted on mourning those the train rolls over. The numbers rise every day.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 May 2020.