Dilip Kumar exemplified an idea of India we've lost

My Mirror/TOI Plus column dedicated to the actor Dilip Kumar, who passed on this week:

Born in Peshawar and brought to Bombay, he was the true child of a country that revelled in its linguistic and regional variety, rather than craving to homogenise it.

Like the country it claims to represent, the public culture of Bollywood has a tendency towards hagiography. We like to anoint heroes, inflating even their minor talents into grand achievements, and painting an unrealistically spotless picture of their greatness. Bhakti leaves no room for considered evaluation of a person’s strengths and flaws, or even for placing someone in the context of his time, looking at how he may have responded to his professional and historical milieu. It is as if we have never got our heads around the relationship between the individual and society: Either the individual’s achievements are credited entirely to his being from x community or y institution, or else he is pronounced sui generis in some unbelievable way.

The actorly legend of Dilip Kumar is no different. The stories of his dedication abound - of his being a ‘method actor’ before Marlon Brando, or learning to play the sitar in reality from Ustad Abdul Halim Jaffar Khan for the 1960 film Kohinoor, or refusing the role that eventually went to Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia. Some of these narratives say less about Dilip Kumar than about the Indian desire to lay claim to an actor who was the equal, nay superior, of anyone Hollywood could throw at us.

That path of global comparison, though, feels to me like a red herring - not because Dilip Kumar was not a fine actor, but because the style he developed was so specifically Indian. He may have been understated, using a mixture of gently caustic dialogues and brooding silences and dropping his booming voice to a whisper in the throes of love or pain, but there was never any doubting the intense ebb and flow of emotion under that surface. Dilip Kumar was drama – just conducted with dignity.

Still, it is true that he was among the first Indian leading men to step away from our previously theatrical histrionics – and I mean theatrical here quite literally; the exaggerated gestures and loud oratory were characteristic of the spectacular Parsi Urdu theatre, from which early Bombay cinema emerged. Actors like Motilal and Ashok Kumar were his predecessors in this change. Ashok Kumar, in fact, was the first actor he met at Bombay Talkies, telling him to “just do what you would do in the situation if you were really in it” – and young Yousuf took the big star’s naturalistic instructions to heart.

Despite a rocky start with the lost 1944 film Jwar Bhata (in which the outspoken FilmIndia critic Baburao Patel called him “the new anaemic hero” whose “appearance on the screen creates both laughter and disappointment”), by 1947, Dilip Kumar had made the screen his own.   

But to me, what made Dilip Sahab a true legend (and he was always called Dilip Kumar Sahab, making the PM’s condolence tweet calling him “Dilip Kumar ji” sound strangely off) was not his acting, or even his perfectionist attention to detail, or even his undeniable mastery of both voice and language. Though that last quality was shaping, both of him and the film industry he strode like a colossus for decades. Born in Peshawar in 1922 and brought to Bombay as a toddler by his fruit-merchant father, Dilip Kumar was a true child of that polyglot city -- and of an India that revelled in its regional and linguistic variety rather than craving to homogenise it.

Other than his renowned flair for Urdu (he told a young Tom Alter that the secret of good acting was “sher-o-shairi”), he was fluent in Hindi/Hindustani, Pashto, Punjabi, Marathi, English, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindko, Persian and the Awadhi and Bhojpuri dialects. You can watch the words roll off his tongue in old YouTube interviews, or read the many remembrances in which he made people feel deeply at home by speaking, literally, in their language. For 10 years from 1960 on, a special train ran annually from Bombay to Poona on which people bought tickets for the sheer pleasure of travelling with Dilip Kumar – but it seemed he took enormous joy in it too, talking to people in Tamil, Telugu, Konkani and all of the languages mentioned above. 

Which brings me back to the qualities that really seem to define Dilip Kumar: His warmth and integrity and feeling for people, across the bounds of religion and background and age. You didn’t need to know him personally to be able to see the strength of his relationships. It is enough, for instance, to read Rishi Kapoor talk about his father Raj Kapoor’s lifelong camaraderie with “Yousuf Uncle” - extending from their shared Pashto-speaking childhood to the superb playing-off of their personas in the hit love triangle Andaaz (1949), through the many schemes they hatched to raise funds for national causes, all the way to Dilip Kumar addressing an unconscious Raj Kapoor in his hospital bed just before Kapoor passed away in 1988 – as filmi as it gets, and yet real and deeply felt.

It is enough, also, to watch Dilip Kumar reach out, mid-speech on stage and hold the hand of the much younger Shah Rukh Khan, turning what might have been just another filmi commemoration into something memorable and intergenerational and true. Or Dharmendra, visiting for his birthday a few years ago, clasping his hands with a fraternal love you could not stage – or cradling the late thespian’s head after his death, tweeting “Maalik mere pyaare bhai ko Jannat naseeb kare”.

Dilip Kumar came of an age in a film industry that was, as anthropologist William Mazzarella points out, then in a rare period of organic synch with the nation-state. If filmmakers between the ’30s and early ’60s seemed to voice the hope and popular enthusiasm of the new nation, the nation could also see itself in the cinema. In 1955, the chair of a Sangeet Natak Akademi seminar could welcome Prime Minister Nehru as “the Director of one of the greatest films in history – the film of New India’s destiny…”.

Dilip Kumar was a great admirer of Nehru, whom he called Panditji, like so many of his generation. In his memoir, he speaks fondly of Nehru singling him out on a rare visit to a film set, and in later years, giving his 1961 film Ganga Jumna a hearing against decisions by Nehru’s own information and broadcasting minister BV Keskar. Screenwriter Salim Khan, writing at the end of Dilip Sahab’s memoir, makes the fascinating argument that the legendary pauses in his dialogue delivery were modelled on Nehru’s Hindi speeches, where the pauses were because he was translating from English in his head.

In 1962, Nehru only had to say the word for Dilip Kumar to agree to campaign for the Congress Party, for the great VK Krishna Menon. Kumar later served for a year as Sheriff of Bombay and as a nominated INC member to the Rajya Sabha from Maharashtra from 2000 to 2006. This was also a man whom Pakistan had awarded the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, leading Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray to cast public aspersions on his nationalism. And yet Dilip Kumar’s book makes a point of mentioning not only his hurt, but also the Thackerays’ later invitations to him and his wife Saira Banu.

In his grace and his depth of feeling, for India and the cross-subcontinental culture he spoke for, Yousuf Khan had few equals. Dilip Kumar exemplified an era, and his life and character seem to sum up what was best about it. He could only have emerged in a time and a place where we believed in stitching things together – not tearing them apart. Long may his memory live.

Published in TOI Plus/Mumbai Mirror, 10 July 2021.

Poetry in stealth mode

My Mirror column:

Fifty years after its release, Saat Hindustani feels both like a time capsule and a swinging pendulum: showing what has changed forever, and what we seem doomed to repeat. 

(The second of a two-part column.)

Last Sunday, a week after Amitabh Bachchan’s 77^th birthday, I wrote about his first film as an actor, Saat Hindustani, and how he landed that role. KA Abbas, who wrote and directed his debut, has written of how the tall, thin Amitabh matched his personal imagination of the character, who was modelled on an old Aligarh mate of his.

But watching the film, one has a sense that there was more to the casting. As the real-life son of a poet, Amitabh had cultivated the art of recitation. He was likely better equipped to play one than most debutante actors. His father Harivansh Rai Bachchan was a highly-regarded Hindi poet from Allahabad. Saat Hindustani's fictional Anwar Ali was an Urdu poet from a little further east: Ranchi, a city then in Bihar and now in Jharkhand.

The idea of poetry is crucial to the film. Syeda Hameed, co-editor of Abbas’s voluminous writings, has pointed to his abiding relationships with poets, and the importance of lyrics in his films. “The best poets of the 1960s and ’70s wrote for Abbas’s films, and that too for very little money: Ali Sardar Jafri, Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri and Prem Dhawan, to name a few,” Hameed writes. The lyrics of Saat Hindustani were by Kaifi Azmi, and it was Azmi’s words that Amitabh spoke on screen as the sensual, lanky Anwar Ali.

Quite early in the narrative, six of the seven Hindustanis board a train headed to Goa to provide secret support to the Goan freedom struggle. A young and purposeful Amitabh shuts the compartment window as instructed, then turns to his companions with a marvellous air of having something to say, and declaims:

“Aandhi aye ya toofaan koi gham nahi,

Hai abhi aakhiri imtehan saathiyon.

Ek taraf maut hai, ek taraf zindagi,

Beech se le chalo kaarwaan saathiyon.”

A half-smile flutters at the corner of his lips, and he looks pleased as punch. It was at that moment that I realised that although this was an ensemble cast, Amitabh was as close to being the film’s hero as possible. But what an unusual hero he was. The youngest and tallest of the assembled men – but also the one least capable of handling a gun, the one who hopes there will be no killing involved, who goes into shock when the security of the mission demands that a spy actually be eliminated. Weeping, Anwar actually has to be held back and comforted by the kindly Jogender (played, in Abbas’s anti-stereotype casting scheme, by Utpal Dutt). Traditional masculinity dies a quick death.

There are times in Saat Hindustani when the nazaakat of the North Indian gentleman-poet is served up for mockery – such as the laughter when Amitabh turns to the group and complains that the truck driver who has just dropped them off on the Goa border is “namakool” because he has just turned around and driven off “without even saying khuda hafiz”.

But later, captured by the Portuguese, Anwar is tortured and taunted by a faintly comic interrogator who has been informed of the young fellow’s diary: “Achha toh tum poet hai, kya kehta hai use, shaayar?” Hands and legs tied, Amitabh narrows his eyes disdainfully. “Hamare mulk mein har shaks shaayar hai.”

Abbas knew, though, that that mulk of poets, of possible empathetic connections across communities, was already threatened. In one scene set in the late 1960s present, an older Anwar Ali hears his house has been burnt down by anti-Urdu fanatics. Like his creator KA Abbas, who could simultaneously laugh at “jaw-breaking” Hindi and see it as a language a Tamilian Dalit might use as a way of entering the nation, the optimistic Anwar Ali immediately wants to write to his old comrade-in-arms, the Hindi campaigner Sharma. But his hope for civility is quickly dashed when his wife points him to a virulently anti-Muslim editorial by Sharma, directing all Urdu speakers to Pakistan.

In his more considered moments, Abbas presents an unusually calibrated idea of what constitutes leadership – and what courage might mean. The Gandhian model of non-violent resistance, satyagrah, is of course at the film’s muddled heart. But there’s more here than non-violence. For one, there is a clarity of goals, over and above a declared ideological arsenal of means: one man can be murdered if it means saving the lives of seven. For another, neither action nor leadership is to be trumpeted. No one is appointed to a position of permanent captaincy; members of the team are its “commanders” turn by turn. 

And crucially, what has to be done is done, preferably without announcement. When the selected men set out from the satyagrah camp, their departure is not flagged, they simply melt away. What will everyone at camp think of us, they ask their trainer. “That you are cowards who have run away,” he responds. "But the mission will succeed."

In that world, it was preferable to be thought of as a coward and succeed, than proclaim one’s heroism from the rooftops and fail. The past truly was another country.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 Oct 2019.

 

A half-told tale

My Mirror column:

Nandita Das’s ambitious biopic of Saadat Hasan Manto feels like a showreel of what could have been.

Many Indian film heroes have drunk themselves to death over a lost love. Manto might be the first one to do so over a lost city. Bombay was not the place of his birth, but Manto thought of the city as both muse and workplace. Its streets spawned many of his strongest stories and its film industry gave him both livelihood and community.

He was clearly profoundly shaken by Partition, writing several stories about how the new boundaries around nations and religions were also carving up human beings. Still, given Manto’s strong attachment to Bombay, his departure remains somewhat inexplicable — and it appears as such in Nandita Das’s biographical film about him.

Das’s ambitious tapestry of a script weaves Manto’s fiction in and out of the life he may have lived. So some of his most well-known Partition stories — ‘Khol Do’, ‘Thanda Gosht’ — are interwoven with moments when the communal divide inserts itself between Manto (Nawazuddin Siddiqui, for once a bit out of his depth) and his best friend, the actor Shyam Chaddha (the sadly wooden Tahir Raj Bhasin). We also hear, at a filmi party, the jibe that Bombay Talkies — the film studio where Manto worked — had “too many Muslims” in its employ.

More interestingly, in a scene set on the eve of Partition, we see Manto witness a conversation in a Bombay shoe shop where his wife Safia is shopping. “Mera toh watan Bhendi Bazaar hai. Main isse chhod kar Grant Road na jaaoon, aur tu mujhe Karachi bhej raha hai?” Manto hasn’t said the words himself, but the idea of the locality as stand-in for the nation has been introduced — allowing us to think of it later, when Manto’s nostalgia and sense of exile moulds itself around a city rather than a country.

In real life, Manto wrote scathingly and prophetically about the directions in which Pakistan’s politics would go. But the film fails to establish why he never felt at home in Pakistan — barring glimpses of his obscenity trial and a single scene based on one of Manto’s ‘Letters to Uncle Sam’ (lit up by Neeraj Kabi’s performance), there is little of his political bite on screen. Instead Das focuses excessively on Manto’s rather performative mourning. Like a dramatic lover trying to forget a past relationship, he refuses to even open letters from Bombay written by friends like Shyam and Ismat Chughtai. When a policeman rifles through his desk and says rudely, “I believe you write many things, where is it all?”, Manto’s retort is to hand him a scrap of paper. “Ismein toh Bambai ka pata likha hai,” says the Lahore cop. “Wahin toh hai sab kucch,” mutters Nawaz’s Manto. A cinematically stereotypical descent into lovesick madness follows, with Nawaz pricking up his ears and saying he hears a melody that Shyam used to sing.

Das’s film succumbs to another familiar filmi motif: muftkhor drinking partners whose appearance foreshadows the hero’s decline. These hangers-on, who serve to insulate the hero from self-realisation in films as disparate as Muhafiz / In Custody (also about a writer in free fall) and Guide, are here concentrated into the single figure of Shaad (Shashank Arora). But even the talented Arora cannot breathe life into this one-note character, whose only brief appears to be to provide Manto company as he drinks more, and more darkly.

Another of the film’s themes — because it was one of Manto’s longstanding fascinations — is the sex worker. The film opens, for instance, with one of his finest stories: ‘Ten Rupees’, in which a young girl is taken out by three older male clients. The scenario has the whiff of doom, but Manto does something unexpected: he preserves Sarita’s marvellous state of innocence till the story’s end, depositing us and our fears at the edge of a precipice. In another fictional segue, we see Tillotama Shome as a sex worker pushed to the brink by her pimp (Paresh Rawal).

The segments enacting Manto’s fictions contain the film’s better performances (Ranveer Shorey, Divya Dutta, Vinod Nagpal). But their near-pulpy high drama throws into relief the dullness of the rest of the film. Das tempts the cultural-historical junkies among us with a period recreation of a mythical Bombay in which Progressive Urdu writers mingled with film folk. But the interactions are flat; the characters —Krishen Chander, Ismat, Himanshu Rai, Ashok Kumar — cardboard cutouts. Only one, Ila Arun as the courtesan-turned-filmmaker Jaddan Bai (Nargis’s mother), has any spark. The only other interactions that achieve any immersiveness are those between Manto and his wife Safia (the excellent Rasika Dugal).

Given that so much of Das’s dialogue is provided to her by her inimitable protagonist, it is a shock when it falls flat. Even Manto’s sharpest barbs — “Agar aap mere afsaanon ko bardaasht nahi kar sakte, toh woh isliye ki zamaana hi na-kaabil-e-bardaasht hai (If you can’t tolerate my stories, it is because the age is an intolerable one)” or “Accha toh tum bhi tarakkipasandon ki tarah is daur mein bhi optimistic rehna chahte ho? (Oh, so you’re like those Progressives who want to stay optimistic even in this era?)” — fail to offer the non-Manto-knowing viewer a bridge between our times and his. Like Toba Tek Singh, Manto remains stuck in a no-man’s-land.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30 Sep 2018.

Book Review: Jasmine Days

With his new novel ‘Jasmine Days’, Benyamin once again skilfully presents fiction as fact.

The Malayalam author’s new novel is told in the voice of a young Pakistani woman in an unnamed Middle Eastern country.

Juggernaut Books, 2018. 280pp.

Benyamin is a reader’s writer. His fiction aims to make the reader believe that it is fact; to believe that the narrator was “really there”. His style is a particularly good example of what the critic James Wood in his book How Fiction Works calls “Flaubertian realism”, in which the voice of the narrator is writerly in terms of how much she notices, but simultaneously not writerly “because he is not expending any labour to put it down on the page”.

In at least two of Benyamin’s novels that have so far been translated from Malayalam to English, this is achieved by effacing anything that might be described as literary style – by creating a non-literary narrator. So Goat Days is told in the voice of a poor Malayali Muslim man who arrives in Saudi Arabia to earn money, but ends up becoming a slave for a goat farmer somewhere in the desert. Jasmine Days is told in the remarkably forthright voice of Sameera, a young Pakistani woman who works as a radio jockey in an unnamed Middle Eastern country.

The truth-claim made by both novels is amplified by presenting themselves as autobiographical narratives, personal histories that have fallen into the author’s lap. So Goat Days has an “Author’s Note” that begins: “One day, my friend Sunil told me a story about a person called Najeeb. I thought it to be one of the typical sob-stories from the Gulf.” Upon meeting Najeeb, however, Benyamin explains, he grew deeply affected by the recounting of his experience, and “couldn’t fight the urge to write about it”.

In the case of Jasmine Days, Benyamin goes a step further to establish authenticity in the eyes of his readers. His name appears as author on the front cover, but inside, we are told that the book we’re holding is Benyamin’s translation of Sameera Parvin’s A Spring Without Fragrance, originally written in Arabic. In a “Translator’s Note” appended to the main narrative, Benyamin says it is “by accident that this book ended up in [his] hands”, and that he only gained the rights to “translate” this manuscript into Malayalam when he agreed to “ghostwrite” another novel for another writer: Al Arabian Novel Factory (this is the actual name of Benyamin’s next novel). For those of us reading the book in English, of course, there is another layer of meaning created by the fact that what we have here really is a translation: Shahnaz Habib’s translation into English from Benyamin’s Malayalam.

The book’s ability to persuade us of its authenticity beyond language also feeds into – and emerges out of – the multivocality of its milieu. This is a Malayalam novel in which neither the locale nor the main characters are Malayali. Benyamin does not name the country, but it is well-known that he lived and worked in Bahrain for many years before moving back to Kerala. He chooses to introduce his Malayali readership to the Middle Eastern migrant life through the eyes of a Pakistani young woman. Right from the start, when Malayalis do appear in the book, Benyamin’s reversal of the gaze forces his readers into self-reflexivity. For instance, Sameera’s use of the term “Malayalam Mafia” for her colleagues who are “experts in speaking exclusively in Malayalam, without using even a single word from Hindi or English, so that the rest of us might not even guess what they were saying” is Benyamin holding up a mirror gently to his countrymen, showing them quite how insular they can seem to others.

As the book proceeds, one begins to realise that this is very much part of Benyamin’s project: his fiction pushes his readers to enter worlds they might close off in real life; to meet people they might live cheek by jowl with, but never befriend. Sameera’s daily life unfolds in two primary locales: home and work. Her conservative joint family setup is headed by her father’s eldest brother, known to her as Taya and the larger Pakistani community in the city as Ashraf Sahib. “A job for someone, a job dispute back in the village, suspicion about a wife....”: favour-seekers come to Taya Ghar with all kinds of problems, and “[l]ike a zamindar, Taya would sit in a chair in the middle and listen.” Taya Ghar represents all the good and the bad things about feudal patriarchy: there is place here for everyone with a need, but how that need is dealt with is determined by ever-present hierarchies of age, caste and gender: visitors like Baluchi Barber and Chamar Chacha have one status, Sameera’s father has another, her Sippy Aunty and her Aisha Bhupoma yet another.

The many characters in Taya Ghar allow Benyamin another kind of multivocality. One of Sameera’s favourite visitors, Kareem Chacha, declares that love makes women angels, and that they should therefore be allowed to choose their own husbands. But meanwhile, the women of Taya Ghar have all had arranged marriages: they are expected never to go anywhere alone, even to the souk. Facebook is off-limits as well: “The men of the house called it the ticket booth for the train to hell. But apparently those tickets only took women to hell.”

But generational change is afoot: the youngest female member of the household, the school-going Farhana, is conducting a secret life on her mobile phone. Sameera, too, negotiates for her independence within the family and community context, but her style is more upfront than Farhana’s:

“By the age of twelve I had learnt to return ma’s fierce glances and respond with twelve words for every word she spoke. By the time I was in college, I had learned to ignore her scolding and retreat into my room with my cellphone. Remember how you guys used to call me, secretly and not-so-secretly, a harami chhokri? That was me, not just outside but also inside the house. I did not waste too much obedience on my dada and dadi, or chachas, mamus and mamis. I can even say proudly that my family grudgingly learnt to respect me for expressing my opinions to anyone’s face, for charming my way into getting what I wanted.”

As her adopted country plunges into political turmoil, an ill-informed Sameera walks both real and virtual paths to educate herself on the issues at stake: the ills of the monarchy, the historical conflict between Sunnis and Shias, debates over censorship and the freedom of the press, battles over ideological purity when the state tries to wean its citizens away from protest by offering subsidies. Her friendship with a male, Shia, Arabic-speaking colleague, forged over a secret music group and virtual visits to each other’s homes in a Facebook game called City Villa, becomes increasingly fraught with controversy. As the political temperature rises, she finds herself torn between her family’s (and community’s) pragmatic establishmentarian loyalties – and her growing empathy with the Arab protestors.

The immersive quality of Goat Days was based on our identification with a solitary protagonist, a single, hellish locale, and the struggle to escape it. Jasmine Days has more locales, many more characters and a much more complex political landscape. But what Benyamin pulls off again is Sameera’s voice: the almost spoken-word simplicity with which this landscape is rendered makes it hard not to listen.

Published in Scroll, 8 Sep 2018.

*A longish piece I wrote in 2015 about how being published in English translation is changing things for literature in other Indian languages is here. (One of the writers I interviewed for that piece was Benyamin.)

State secrets, secret states

My Mirror column:

Raazi successfully inserts itself into existing Bollywood narratives — on Indo-Pak ties, Muslims, nationalism and womanhood — and makes subtle departures from them.

Bollywood’s fascination with the Indo-Pak relationship has tended to produce two kinds of cross-border narratives. The first is the nationalist we-will-go-across-and-kill-the-terrorists plot, the standard elements of which are intelligence agencies, secret identities, and wish-fulfilment — and given that we’re talking of India and Pakistan, increasingly coded in the Hindi film universe as Hindu and Muslim, that wish-fulfilment can involve both revenge and romance. I’m talking here of films like Ek Tha Tiger, Agent Vinod, Baby and Phantom. The second type of Indo-Pak film builds on the baseline assumption that individual citizens of both countries are capable of forging a warm human connection, despite all the obstacles placed in their way by politics, religion and highly-policed state borders.

As I noted in these pages in 2016, this second kind of Indo-Pak film has frequently involved a very specific plot device: in which a primary character is stuck on the wrong side of the border, and must be rescued or helped to return to the right side. Veer-Zaara might be the epic romantic version of this (though we must acknowledge the complicating presence here of Gadar: Ek Prem Katha). In recent years, the romantic cross-border rescue plot has been replaced by other comic variants: Nitin Kakkar’s 2014 film Filmistaan centres on a goofy Indian abductee with a Hindi cinema obsession; in 2015’s Bajrangi Bhaijaan, it is a mute Pakistani child who is mistakenly left on the Indian side; in 2016’s Happy Bhag Jayegi, Diana Penty’s runaway bride from the Indian side of Punjab finds herself in the hands of a genteel bunch of Pakistanis.

Meghna Gulzar’s Raazi — a spy thriller set against the backdrop of the 1971 Indo-Pak war — ticks many boxes that would seem to place it in the first category. What makes the film hard to classify purely as a nationalist wishfulfilment narrative is that it is based on Calling Sehmat, Harinder Sikka’s retelling of the real-life story of a Kashmiri woman who married a Pakistani army officer with the express purpose of gathering classified information for Indian intelligence agencies.

What makes the film even more interesting is that elements of the second Indo-Pak narrative are mixed in with the first kind — the human connection, as well as the eventual cross-border rescue. The plot is as follows: a Kashmiri man (Rajit Kapur), who has earned the trust of aPakistani brigadier by supplying him with nearly-true but harmless Indian information, decides that winning the Bangladesh war requires an Indian secret agent working out of Pakistan. He would do the job himself, but he is dying of a “tumour” (the use of this unspecific term for a terminal illness may seem odd now but propels the film correctly into a ’70s universe). So, he decides to send his college-going daughter, Sehmat, instead, after arranging for her to receive a crash course as an Indian secret agent.

The marriage of Sehmat (a wonderfully well-cast Alia Bhatt) to the Pakistani brigadier’s son (Vicky Kaushal in a small but effective role) is one of the film’s core set pieces, both visually and symbolically. The heroine’s innate, almost unquestioning devotion to her father is both an entirely believable South Asian emotion and an unspoken stand-in for her loyalty to the nation. The marriage works as metaphor at another level, too: the beti leaving her babul’s home for her sasural here is also leaving her country for the enemy nation. And if one might be allowed the privilege of a gender-related speculation here, the deep otherness of Sehmat’s new home can be read as a subversive coded comment on the otherness of all sasurals for all new bahus.

The bahu-as-spy is a perfect set-up in terms of the film’s action, too. The doll-like figure of Alia Bhatt, with her porcelain beauty, works perfectly as the unsuspected mole planted into the most intimate inner circle of the Pakistani military establishment. Her lessons in surveillance, signalling, code language, shooting are, of course, essential to her success as a secret agent, and to watch the soft-hearted young woman, who would once risk her life to save a squirrel and couldn’t stand the sight of blood, transform into a ruthless creature with nerves of steel gives Raazi some of its most thrilling moments. But what stayed with me long after the film is the image of the sweetly-smiling dulhan at her father-in-law’s breakfast table, eavesdropping on conversations he has with his army officer sons, or gaining access to senior army officers’ homes through their wives and children to gather intelligence. The female spy is so fetishised precisely because the seductive and nurturing aspects of femininity are placed secretly in the service of cold strategy — and yet in the end, that larger cause is to be understood as an undeniable good.

The most significant ways in which Raazi subverts the Hindutva zeitgeist are also the simplest. In a cinematic milieu in which the burkha-clad female silhouette has either been a source of comic disguise (for heroes and heroines alike) or a symbol of oppressed Muslim womanhood who needs to be liberated, there is something quietly radical about a heroine in a mauve burkha. This is a burkha-clad figure who needs no saving, and her stealth and determination are harnessed to a nationalist cause. That this is a Kashmiri girl is, of course, no accident — from Kajol in Fanaa (2006) to the child in Bajrangi Bhaijaan to Haider, Bollywood returns repeatedly to Kashmiri femininity as the test site for nationalism. Sehmat passes the India test, with flying colours, but the film’s coda allows for something like love across enemy nations — based on a respect for each other’s nationalism. It is a fascinating new spin on the idea that we are essentially alike.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 June 2018.

Girls, Interrupted

My Mirror column:

Two disturbing 2017 films — one set amidst Norwegian Pakistanis, the other among Russian Jews — present gripping portraits of young women fighting to not be sacrificed at the altar of community.

A teenager brought up in Norway is suddenly transplanted to a Pakistani small town and finds herself the subject of prurient attention. “Why have you come here?” hiss her headscarf-wearing new classmates. Aware that she is on display, the new arrival tamely offers up what she thinks is the good-girl response expected of her: “I’ve come to learn about my parents’ culture”. But what’s flung back at her is a stinging accusation: “Not your parents’ culture! Your culture!”

It is a relatively minor moment in what is a film full of harrowing scenes. But that misrecognition goes to the heart of Iram Haq’s What Will People Say: What happens when your parents’ culture doesn’t feel like your own? One answer – a wrenching, difficult one – is that sometimes, then, your parents don’t feel like your own.
 
Haq’s film stars Ekavali Khanna and Adil Hussain as Pakistani immigrants who are happy to educate their daughter Nisha (the affecting Maria Mozhdah) and even imagine a career for her – until they come to suspect that she is leading the life of the Norwegian teenager: dancing, drinking, dating. At home, she obeys when told to wear a jacket over a revealing blouse; she serves snacks to the aunties; she pretends her texting exchanges are all about school work. But Nisha is indeed leading that life, just secretly. All hell breaks loose when her father discovers a boy in her room.

The film paints a depressing picture of the Pakistani community in exile, but it doesn’t ring false. If you’ve grown up in South Asia, you don’t need to be told that Haq based her film on a traumatic episode from her own Pakistani-Norwegian childhood to be convinced by Adil Hussain’s finely wrought transformation from loving, indulgent father to uncontrollably violent patriarch. The father who proudly displayed his academically bright daughter now feels only burning shame on her behalf: “Sab log hum par hans rahe hain.”

The community’s solution is to send her ‘home’ — to a country she has never lived in. Under the tutelage of her stern Phuphi (the always effective Sheeba Chaddha), Nisha learns to roll rotis, drape a dupatta and keep her head down. But the sexual awakening that was sought to be crushed in Norway happens instead in Pakistan, with worse effects. Now the only way to deal with such a wayward daughter is to marry her off, to trade her freedom in for the family’s honour.

Haq’s film was shown at the Dharamshala Film Festival in early November.

At the International Film Festival of India a few weeks later, I saw a stunning Russian film called Closeness in which, too, a young woman is sought to be clamped into conformity. Set in the late 1990s in the filmmaker’s hometown of Nalchik in the Northern Caucasus, Kantemir Balagov’s film won the International Critics’ Prize for best film in Un Certain Regard at Cannes. It centres on the tomboyish Ilana (the superb Darya Zhovner), who likes nothing better than helping her mechanic father fix cars. But as in Haq’s film, a young woman of a certain age must start behaving a certain way, and it is her mother who lays down those rules. In a celebratory family scene with strong echoes of WWPS, a sulky Ilana is made to change her overalls for a dress and help her mother in the kitchen.

Ilana is also carrying on a clandestine affair with a boy from the town’s Kabardian community, which has a tense relationship with the Jewish community to which she belongs. Where Haq largely uses marked shifts in body language to register the contradictions of her heroine’s life, Balagov unsettles us by alternating between the raw, barely-lit seediness of Ilana’s secret backstreet life and the family’s domestic interiors, whose rich rusts and deep greens have the dramatic shadows of a Caravaggio painting.

Nalchik’s Jews are different from Norway’s Pakistanis, but Ilana’s clash with her parents resonates strongly with Nisha’s. In one exceptional scene, Ilana’s mother instructs her angrily, “You won’t be with him. He’s not from our tribe.” Ilana’s response is fierce and wordless — she puts her hand to her mouth and produces a long ululation, mocking her mother’s use of the word ‘tribe’. Unlike WWPS, the crisis in Closeness is not bought on by Ilana’s sexuality – but her insistence on displaying proof it certainly causes the sensation she intends it to.

These are not films that will be viewed as similar, and indeed they are far apart in pitch and tenor. But both produce for us the disturbing figure of the young woman forced to recognise that she is not quite as human as her brothers; that her social value lies not in what she might desire —but only in who can be made to desire her.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 Dec 2017.

Familial Fault Lines

My Mirror column:

Arshad Khan’s documentary memoir Abu bravely opens up a personal and familial history, touching on issues of cultural alienation, religion and sexuality.

"Migration is the hardest thing in the world. That, and coming out.” So says Montreal-based filmmaker Arshad Khan in the voice-over for his remarkably courageous autobiographical documentary Abu, which was screened yesterday as part of the sixth edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF). The 81-minute film, whose title is simply the Urdu word for father, is Khan’s attempt to grapple with his complex relationship with his late father: a Pakistani Muslim man who migrated to Canada in the 1980s and never really came to terms with his son being gay.

Abu’s unexpurgated deep dive into difficult issues draws on an astounding archive of VHS home videos taken during family gatherings in Pakistan, placing those grainy recordings of picnics and parties and weddings in conjunction with more recent iPhone and Flip-cam footage, as well as interviews that Khan shot with his mother, father and elder sister. “My family happens to be obscenely well documented. My father loved photography and he loved technology and documentation. We have photos from as far back as the 1930s,” Khan said in his statement to DIFF. This intensely personal — and often just intense — real-life footage is interspersed with other kinds of audio-visual material that leavens it with a much-needed playfulness, even humour. So, for instance, the religious certitude of his father’s dream — in which the old gentleman learns that he must visit the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and make a Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca before his death, which the dream prophesied would happen at 3am — acquires a totally different register when Khan turns the dream’s constituents into a cheerful animated sequence.

At other times in the film, we move seamlessly from Khan’s recounting of some fraught personal moment into a classic Hindi film song. For members of Abu’s subcontinental audience, at least, these are transitions that provide momentary relief from documentary realism (as we allow ourselves the guilty pleasure of humming along with Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman in Guide) – while also enabling that familiar amplification of emotion that popular Hindi cinema has always offered space for. The lyrics of the Guide song “Aaj phir jeene ki tamanna hai, aaj phir marne ka irada hai [Today I wish to live again, today I’ve decided to die again]” do assume new meaning when placed in the midst of a voice-over-led documentary about a gay man who’s describing the terrible self-hate he underwent for years as a teenager and young adult in Canada.

Watching Abu, I was reminded of a film made by another Pakistani Muslim man about another Pakistani Muslim migrant father: Ayub Khan-Din’s East is East. First performed as a play in 1996, East is East became a hugely successful 1999 feature film, with the late Om Puri putting in a spectacular turn as the baffled, angry, violent George Khan. Like the real-life Arshad, who wants nothing more desperately than to fit into the largely-white Canadian universe into which migration has catapulted him, George Khan’s British-born children – the product of George’s relationship with his British wife Ella – resent their father’s insistence on trying to make them fit his notion of good Pakistanis.

Although East is East is set in England in the early 1970s, and Abu unfolds in Pakistan and Canada from the 1980s to the 2000s, it is remarkable how similar the themes are. The fictional George presses his reluctant children to attend namaz at the local mosque, practically kidnaps his youngest son into a circumcision and tries his hardest to marry his elder sons off to suitable Pakistani girls without once conferring with them: one of them, Nazeer, abandons his bride on the wedding day and is later revealed to be living with his male partner. Arshad’s father, in a different time and country, responds to his suspicions about his son’s sexuality by turning rides in the family car into forced listening sessions for Islamic discourses about the evils of homosexuality, in which gay sex is only a step away from paedophilia, and not that distant from bestiality.

Unlike George Khan, though, religion seems to have given Arshad Khan’s parents a real sense of support, as economic migrants adrift in a culturally alien milieu. Meanwhile Arshad himself seems to have some fondness for the world his parents left behind. Unlike George’s daughter Mina (the stellar Archie Panjabi), whose rendition of 'Inhi Logon Ne' with a floor wiper and a dupatta is entirely comic, a subversive send-up of the Meena Kumari performance, Arshad’s incorporation of Pakeezah footage comes with fond nostalgic memories of his mother secretly dancing to Pakeezah songs on the record player – and footage of her actually dancing in a family gathering.

But the thing that makes Abu, like East is East, truly significant is an ability to see beyond simple ideas of villains and victims. These are parental figures that may seem cold-hearted and cruel to their children, but what these films so heartbreakingly make us see is that they are themselves vulnerable.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Sun 5 Nov, 2017.

DJs, poets, dramatic desi loves

My Mirror column:

Ae Dil Hai Mushkil falls flat when it aims for high romance. So do any of our old languages of love survive?

In many ways, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil is a fairly standard-issue Karan Johar movie. First, it is a soppy romance about people who’re confused between love and friendship (and trying hard to sacrifice their feelings for the blissfully unknowing beloved) -- think back to Kajol and Shah Rukh Khan in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, or Saif Ali Khan, Preity Zinta and SRK in Kal Ho Na Ho. Second, it contains that classic K-Jo cocktail of oblivious upper-class-ness and self-conscious Indian-ness that emerges in full measure only when the protagonists are ‘abroad’. The first purpose served by this is in the aesthetic-emotional register: supremely well-off, well-dressed desis get to play out their overheated romances in picturesque cold countries. The second purpose is what we might as well call political: it is no accident that Johar has been among Bollywood’s pioneers of desi coolth, given his originary adeptness at turning not just firang locations but firangs themselves into mere backdrops for our Empire-writes-back moments.

Nowadays, Johar seems to have stopped enjoying making British characters stand for the Indian national anthem, and no longer even seems to get off having rude Hindi remarks made in front of foreigners who can’t understand them (admittedly, Kajol managed to make this reverse racism seem very funny in Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham). What ADHM offers instead, is a breezy world-is-our-oyster feel, in which South Asians on private jet vacations can bump into [also South Asian] ex-boyfriends DJ-ing at French discotheques (And just in case you were wondering about such prosaic things as visas, the film throws in two separate mentions of characters having British passports.) The resultant air of bonhomie is aided by the Empire choosing, whenever in doubt, to sing back: the oddly patriotic pleasure of watching white people sway to Hindi/Punjabi songs is amplified particularly in ADHM by having Parisians galvanised by the corny energy of Mohammad Rafi’s 1967 chartbuster An Evening in Paris.

Most of Johar’s romantic messaging is pretty spelt out in the film: such as Alizeh’s rather programmatic declaration, “Pyaar mein junoon hai, dosti mein sukoon hai (Love has madness, friendship has peace)”or her insistent idea (pretty much taken from Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar) that only a broken heart can produce good art. Or the film’s avowed thesis, that unrequited love can be more powerful than a relationship: “you have full control over it... because you don’t have to share it with anyone”. How much any of these statements affects you depends partly on your mood at the moment you watch it spoken on screen, partly on who speaks it (Ranbir does best), and partly on your general propensity for dramebaaz mohabbat.

But it is more interesting to read Ae Dil Hai Mushkil for the things it does not spell out. Many of those filter through to us via language. The film seems, for instance, an expression of Johar’s desire to unite two very different landscapes of romance that I will go out on a limb and suggest he personally inhabits: the thumping rhythms of smoky nightclubs on the one hand, and the mellifluous Urdu that was for years the language of high romance in Hindi films. The film’s dialogue (by Johar and his long-time collaborator Niranjan Iyengar) moves constantly between a conversational Hindi peppered with English words — eg. “Tum mujhe seriously nahi le rahi, lekin yeh mera God’s gift hai” — and a high-faluting Urdu/Hindustani that is largely expressed in dubious ‘philosophical’ statements that neither Anushka Sharma nor Aishwarya Rai can carry off.

Rai, in particular, is saddled with the impossible task of playing what Johar in all seriousness calls a ‘shaaira’. The Urdu word for poetess is one I last heard in the 1994 film Muhafiz, in which too it was used as a self-descriptor – but it came accompanied by the devastating force of Shabana Azmi’s hauteur and pronunciation, and the context was mid-twentieth century Delhi. Having Rai, in a white airport lounge somewhere between London and Vienna, introduce herself as “Main shaaira hoon” elicits a hilarious but apt response from Kapoor’s Ayaan, who assumes that Shaaira is her name. “Main shaaira hoon, mera naam Saba hai,” says Rai, her eyes glinting dangerously.

The moment is, sadly, one of the very few in which the film takes on board the hilarious unbelievability of this uber-posh, uber-glamorous Vienna-based character being an Urdu poet. But at least Saba is meant to be a poet. For Alizeh, a hyperactive London-based dilettante recovering from her break-up with a Sufiyana DJ, the Urdu she speaks makes even less sense. The only way we can make sense of Alizeh’s language (and her 80s film obsession and her kurta-clad entry into clubs) is if we replace her supposed Lucknow origins with Lahore. Given just how much political fracas has been caused by the mere presence of a Pakistani actor (Fawad Khan in a thankless role as the DJ), I suppose it is not surprising that Johar decided to keep Alizeh’s real origins — like her legs —covered up.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30th Oct 2016.

Borderline Conditions

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Watching Happy Bhaag Jayegi is an enjoyable way to think about the Indo-Pak relationship in Hindi cinema.

Somewhere in Amritsar, a wedding is in full swing. The bridegroom (Jimmy Shergill) has arrived in all his glittering regalia, and is halfway through a hardworkingly rehearsed solo dance performance, glancing intermittently for approval at his gorgeous bride-to-be, Harpreet alias Happy (Diana Penty). She is laughing a lot, and it looks rather as if she is laughing at him. By the end of the song, our suspicions — and the faint glimmer of them in the dulha's rather thick head — are confirmed: the dulhan has disappeared.

The runaway bride is a recurring motif in contemporary Hindi movie comedy, appearing in variants as different as the 2011 Salman Khan-Asin starrer Ready and 2013's Shuddh Desi Romance. But although this is the comic premise with which Happy Bhag Jayegi begins (and from which it takes its name), the film's more significant humorous track draws on a different Bollywood subgenre: the cross-border comedy.

Penty's long-limbed, moonhphat Happy ends up, by a stroke of bad luck, in a getaway vehicle that leads her not to her lover's embrace, but to Pakistan. The morning after her truck-ride, she wakes up in a grand mansion belonging to a father-and-son politician duo. Played by Javed Sheikh and Abhay Deol, the Ahmeds are known to their loyalists and hangers-on—meaning apparently all of Lahore—as "Janaab Senior" and "Janaab Junior".

The rest of the film involves the hapless Janaab Junior (Deol) trying to restore Happy to her layabout Amritsari beloved, Guddu (Ali Zafar). With the aid of his faithful family retainers—Mamu and Iffat Bi, right out of an '80s Pakistani teleserial, his fierce and aristocratic fiance Zoya (Momal Sheikh) and a wonderfully crackpot policeman by the name of Usman Afridi (Piyush Mishra), Janaab Junior (Deol) must contrive to keep Happy out of sight of his domineering father (Sheikh) — while subverting attempts at abduction by her jilted groom Bagga (Shergill, marvellous in a tweaked version of his stood-up-at-the-mandap character from the Tanu Weds Manu films). The writing is nowhere near as funny as screenwriter Himanshu Sharma's TWM, and Penty is inconceivable as a paratha-making Punjaban, but the film remains an enjoyable bit of silliness.

Watching Happy made me realize that Bollywood's cross-border plots devolve into two broad kinds. One is the nationalist we-will-go-across-and-kill-the-terrorists plot, usually containing RAW and ISI agents, secret identities, and wish-fulfilment of both the revenge and romance variety: think of Baby, Ek Thha Tiger, Agent Vinod and Phantom among others. The other kind tends to be grounded in the idea of people from both countries being able to establish a warm human connection, despite the obstacles placed in their way by politics, religion and highly-policed state borders.

Interestingly, this second plot often plays out through a specific narrative. That narrative involves a character being stuck on the wrong side of the border — and having to be rescued or helped to return to the right side. The grand romantic version of this is probably the Yash Chopra love story Veer Zaara, in which the Indian stuck in Pakistan is the film's hero — Shah Rukh Khan as Squadron Leader Veer Pratap Singh — and he's stuck not just in Pakistan but a Pakistani prison.

Recent variations have sidestepped the romance for something different. Nitin Kakkar's 2014 Filmistaan centred on an aspiring Indian actor who is mistakenly abducted by terrorists and finds himself tied up in a Pakistani village. The huge 2015 hit Bajrangi Bhaijaan made the person stuck in the wrong country a child — and she is imprisoned not by the state or by other people, but by her lack of language. She is mute, and so cannot tell the good Hindustanis that she comes from Pakistan.

By having their protagonists unable to tell that they're not in India, these films underline our cross-national similarities. "Yeh Pakistan hai?" Filmistaan's abducted Sunny (Sharib Hashmi) inquires of his burly captor (Kumud Mishra) in disbelief — there's little about the desert village he's in that suggests he's in another country. In Bajrangi Bhaijaan, it is the adults around the mute child who can't imagine that she might not be Indian.

Happy, too, falls into this category. "Main Pakistan mein hoon?" asks a shell-shocked Diana Penty, having been so far unable to tell that her unwilling hosts are Lahori. Later in the film, unsuspecting uncles accept Happy as a visiting cousin from Karachi, and we tour a Lahore that combines strolling camels, park joggers and laughter clubs like any north Indian city.

But twinned with similarity comes difference. In Bajrangi Bhaijaan, it was an overly simplified version of 'Pakistani' culture: burkha-clad women, non-vegetarian food, etc. In Happy, it's a highfaluting register of Urdu that is milked for laughs: Piyush Mishra induces many giggles as he speaks of refraining from maikashi (drinking), inquires if this is Guddu's nasheman (nest) and recommends a qailulah (an afternoon nap) to Bagga.
  
The leg-pulling isn't one-sided: if the film's Pakistani elite is feudal, pompous and thinks nothing of calling in the army and police to solve personal problems, the Urdu-uncomprehending (if reluctantly impressed) Punjabi listeners are loud, boorish and lawless. And yet everyone's really quite good at heart. In these times of high-decibel nationalist nastiness, Happy's gentle ribbing seems welcome.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Aug 2016.

Mere saamne wali sarhad par: thoughts on Aisi Taisi Democracy

My piece on the political comedy show 'Aisi Taisi Democracy', published in the Footprints section of the Pakistani newspaper, Dawn. 

I’d almost given up on stand-up comedy, to be honest. The first couple of shows I went to, while at graduate school in New York City, largely passed over my head. I’d like to think the reason wasn’t that I have no sense of humour, but that the humour was firmly rooted in the specific culture and politics of mid-2000s America — and I wasn’t.

When I returned to India, it seemed that stand-up was beginning to be a thing here, too. So I gave it another try. But the comics I heard in Delhi, circa 2007-08, seemed neither sharp nor funny. They had precisely the opposite problem from the Americans I’d heard before — they weren’t rooted enough in contemporary India.

Aisi Taisi Democracy (ATD) doesn’t have that problem. A three-person act made up of Sanjay Rajoura, Varun Grover and Rahul Ram, ATD’s brand of often caustic, unabashedly political humour, delivered in a linguistic mix that is 80 per cent Hindi/Hindustani and maybe 20pc English, is anything but derivative. Rajoura, 42, lives in Delhi and is a full-time comic. Grover, 35, is based in Bombay, where he used to write for television and now does lyrics and scripts for films. Ram, well-known as the lead vocalist and bass guitarist of the band Indian Ocean, came on board last year, when Rajoura and Grover had agreed to combine their acts. “Because Rahul Ram agreed, we had to become more organised. We had a big musician now, so we had to give the show due respect,” Grover told me, characteristically poker-faced. The trio first performed together in Gurgaon last July, and has now done 12 shows across India, playing to full houses everywhere.

Nandini Nair, writing in The Caravan in 2010, pointed out that the Indian-American stand-up comedy scene was dogged by “[j]okes about ‘cheap’ parents, rebirth, recycling, computers, mispronounced names, Indian male ugliness, Indian female beauty, and traffic at home”, highlighting “the homogeneity of the group”. There is indeed a thin line between an appeal to familiarity and a rehashing of stereotype. Humour must be site-specific, and certainly ATD represents a particular subset of urban India. There are references to the Mumbai metro and TGIF; there are swipes at Facebook posts about Father’s Day.

Both Rajoura and Grover, however, bring with them a richness of experience that refuses some flattened idea of the Indian metropolis as unconnected to the hinterland. This is immanent humour, emerging from lives lived at many levels, and often producing almost affectionate insider jokes. If Rajoura draws on his decade-long career as a software engineer to poke fun at the hierarchies and frustrations of the corporate world, Grover’s years growing up in Lucknow and Banaras throw up laugh-out-loud takes on small-town cybercafes and Uttar Pradesh train toilets. Rajoura’s solo acts in the past have focused hilariously on his Jat family background, though the ATD show in Delhi reserved most of its community-centric jokes for Komal Trilok Singh’s opening act, which dwelt lovingly on Sardars/Punjabis (“Other people have sex. We have chicken.”).

The choice of language is crucial, and I was glad to learn that performing in south Mumbai and Bangalore haven’t forced ATD to abandon their wonderful idiomatic Hindi. “We tried translating ourselves into English in Bangalore,” says Grover, “But halfway through the show, we knew the flow wasn’t as good. Never again, we decided.”

What makes ATD stand out, though, are the unapologetic take-downs — and biting send-ups — of contemporary politics. Narendra Modi’s fashion sense, Arvind Kejriwal’s quarrelsomeness, the Ambanis’ philanthropy and our ridiculous defensiveness about Bharatiya sanskriti are all suitably skewered. The songs — performed by Ram, but written by Rajoura and Grover — tick some more political boxes, though with fewer imaginative sparks. A take-off on ‘Barbie Doll’ is called, what else, ‘Babri Doll’. Pakistan comes in for some ribbing, too, mostly aimed at the rocky history of the country’s democracy and the figure of the Pakistan-based terrorist.

“Stand-up is very lucrative in India right now, and if you’re not doing political comedy, then you will make more money, since then you can be invited anywhere,” said Grover. “Taking the risk of offending some people — that’s a gamble few take.” Grover characterised ATD’s politics as anti-establishment, “whether it’s the Indian establishment, the American or the Pakistani”. He continued, “Pakistanis have a great sense of humour — or perhaps just better material for making fun of? I enjoy two Pakistani shows, Hum Sab Umeed Say Hain and Loose Talk. Maybe 20pc of the humour doesn’t reach us, but the rest is common. Our success may be at different levels, but in our failures, we are very similar. And we are here to point out our failures.”

ATD can certainly marshal subcontinental unanimity on our unending supply of corrupt politicians, prying relatives and badly-behaved children. But the ATD song Mere saamne wali sarhad par, kehtein hain ki dushman rehta hai has already elicited a critical Pakistani rejoinder, ‘Aisi Taisi Hypocrisy’, urging Indians to swap easily-made bhai-chara promises for a more honest estimation of popular views on either side. The Pakistani response does cotton on to what might be ATD’s weakest link — that we aren’t as divorced from our politicians as we might want to believe. Perhaps in this respect, ATD could still up their game a bit. And perhaps Pakistan needs to up theirs, too: shouldn’t ‘Aisi Taisi Hypocrisy’ be a full-fledged show?

Published in Dawn, September 22nd, 2015

Not Losing Our Religion

My Mirror column today: 

The success of 'Bajrangi Bhaijaan' is a testament to our faith — in uncomplicated national myths, and in miracles.

It might seem up-to-the-minute, with a song about selfies and a narrative arc involving YouTube (courtesy Nawazuddin Siddiqui, doing a brilliant reprising of his Peepli Live turn as a TV news stringer). But Bajrangi Bhaijaan is a masterclass in old-style Hindi movie melodrama: slightly stupid golden-hearted hero, ridiculously winsome little mute girl, and that lost-child-of-unknown-religion plot that we warm to subliminally, from watching all those Manmohan Desai movies. At least one important political commentator has written a ridiculous piece that professes to expose the film's "unreal" aspects and then attacks it for a premise it does not profess (that India and Pakistan are the same). 

If you went into this film seeking "realistic" depictions of society or state on either side of the border - or of how the border itself operates - well, you might as well stop reading now. What Kabir Khan's film does - and does with some aplomb - is to produce an Indo-Pak narrative that speaks simultaneously to the worst and the best in both our countries. It does this by stripping down to the bare essentials - and weaving around them a film with enough broad-strokes to keep the laziest viewer in on things, and yet with enough sly detail to surprise you if you're falling asleep. 

The essentials, to make things even easier, are presented to us as binaries: India, Pakistan; Hindu, Muslim; veg, non-veg; saviour, spy; good, evil. None of these binaries is as clear-cut as the film makes out. But this simplistic mapping of the world - made a little more believable by being presented through the eyes of a man we're told isn't the brightest, but is "dil ka saaf" - makes possible an equally simple unravelling of kattar positions. 

So Indianness is represented by Hinduness, which is represented by the Hanuman-bhakt son of an ex-shaakha-pramukh (the second time this year that we've had a Hindi film hero shown trying to toe the RSS line and not quite succeeding - the first was Ayushmann Khurana in the wonderful Dum Laga Ke Haisha). Pavan Kumar Chaturvedi, affectionately known as Bajrangi after his favourite god, is Brahmin, vegetarian, asexual and generally vice-less, and Salman Khan plays him as a combination of goodness and stupidity that brings to mind a long list of anaari Hindi film heroes (think Ishwar). Meanwhile Pakistan is represented by a Kashmiri family in which the father has fought in the Pakistani army, but the grandfather remembers being taken to Delhi's Nizamuddin Dargah as a child. The family's devout Muslimness does not preclude a belief in Sufi shrines - it is a visit to a dargah that precipitates the child getting lost and being found, and even the discovery of her religious identity. 

The binary most clearly enunciated - and clearly dealt with - is the veg/non-veg one. The same smell, of meat cooking, that makes Pavan sniff suspiciously is so attractive to little Shahida that she follows it to the "Mohammedan" neighbours' house - and is happily being fed when Pavan discovers her. He drags her away, but what's fabulous is what happens next: an outing where Pavan can eat veg food, and the child can eat her fill of meat. The infectious Chicken song, couched as a tribute to "Chaudhary Dhaba" - "Aadha hai non-veg, Aur veg hai aadha, Spasht kijiye, kya hai iraada" - is as good a philosophical position as you can find on how to live successfully with others. There's some good-humoured mockery of upper-caste purity-pollution notions -"Thodi biryani bukhari, Thodi phir nalli nihari, Le aao aaj dharam bhrasht ho jaaye", followed by a funny but firm admonishment to those who might marshal culinary choices into divisive politics - "Sabhi ek plate mein adjust ho jaaye," go Mayur Puri's wonderful lyrics. 

The matter of the child's fair skin, too, is dealt with in this good-humoured way: showing up the ridiculousness of people's community-based stereotypes, but without being snide about it. Pavan's assumption that she must be Brahmin is based, he says, on how "gori" she is. When she reveals her meat-eating side, he decides she can't be Brahmin (never heard of Kashmir Pandits, or Bengalis, has he?). So, thinks Mr Genius, she must be Kshatriya: they're fair, and legit non-vegetarians. 

There are several themes which Bajrangi Bhaijaan shares with another recent film about an Indo-Pak encounter, Nitin Kakkar's Filmistaan (2014). One is cricket, another is the border. It's interesting how similar the Bajrangi scene of the child celebrating the Pakistani cricket win is to Filmistaan's scene of Sunny's joy at the Indian victory: both the spontaneous joy, and the irrational, violent anger it evokes in those of the other country. 

The border we see several times, and each time in a different register. First up is the bureaucratic border, policed by firm but human officials, who try to help but cannot bend the law. Next is the military border, manned by men with guns - but undercut by men making money. And last is the border as pure metaphor: a geographical point at which people gather to see themselves mirrored in the eyes of those on the other side. 

In fact, it is only in this respect that the film suggests that Indians and Pakistanis are alike- as human beings. Otherwise, Pavan's arrival in and journey through Pakistan is almost a version of PK's in an alien universe: an isolated desert landing, early encounters with unsympathetic, disbelieving residents, and a series of culture shocks involving religion and cross-dressing. What makes the film work, in fact, is its deliberate, almost mythical magnification of our differences - and a mythically pure human connection forged across them. Let's not think too much about Pakistan being represented as helplessly bezubaan, while India is the moonhphat saviour.