Fear Eats the Soul

My Mirror column:

Kamal Haasan's Hey Ram, released twenty years ago this February, is a complex, unresolved film about India's unresolved inner life. 

A man returns to the Calcutta building in which his wife was raped and murdered in a riot. He stands in the street, looking up at their old balcony, and she appears there, beckoning him as she used to. When he climbs up the stairs, the new occupant mistakes the name he mentions for that of the person he is looking for. 

Mr. Nair: “All the tenants here are new. What's the name again?”

Saket Ram: “Saket Ram.”

Mr. Nair: “When did you see him last?”

Saket Ram: “Whom?”

Mr. Nair: “Saket Ram.”

Saket Ram: “A year ago, exactly.”

Mr. Nair: “A year ago there was a massacre. Many of the people in this building died. Maybe your friend also... Sorry.

Saket Ram: “It's alright.”

Mr. Nair: “What was your relationship to this Saket Ram?”

Saket Ram: “Like that of the body to the soul. We were very good friends.”

It is a moment typical of Hey Ram: the visuals dense with imagery, the dialogue packed with associations, a certain excess that seems ready to leap off the screen. Our Tamil protagonist's lovely Bengali first wife Aparna -- played by Rani Mukherjee, her character's name a nod to Sharmila Tagore as Apu's wife in Satyajit Ray's Apur Sansar, a cinematic emblem of perfect young marital domesticity and early death -- is dead. But she haunts her living husband, appearing everywhere – in the balcony of what was her own home, but also writhing in a pool of blood in his new wife's bathroom, or smiling in the faces of other women, or assuming the form of a goddess. Meanwhile, Saket Ram (Kamal Haasan, his character carrying the old poetic name for Ayodhya) lives through the trauma of Aparna's death, but in his acquiescence to Mr. Nair's words, we hear a tacit acknowledgement that perhaps he is not quite alive. Did Saket Ram's soul die with Aparna that Direct Action Day, leaving his body to wander the streets, available for possession by more devious spirits?

It seems no coincidence that Haasan's Saket Ram first encounters the film's other Ram in those very Calcutta streets, in a moment that has the two men literally mirroring each other, in name and in gesture. But Saket Ram is a man in trauma, speaking of surrendering to the police to confess about the Muslim men he has just killed, only one of them the actual rapist and murderer of his wife: he carries the stains, literally, on his white kurta. Shriram Abhyankar (Atul Kulkarni) is a RSS-influenced Hindu fundamentalist, who has covered over an old wound with a new skin of pure hatred. “There is no punishment for doing one's duty. If killing is a crime then so is war, isn't it?” asks Abhyankar. And when Ram protests that he is a mere civilian, Abhyankar counters smoothly: “This is civil war.”

And it is certainly no coincidence that the film's other reference to body and soul is when Abhyankar, finding himself paralysed waist downwards in a riding accident, tells Ram that he must now “be his body” and carry out their mission of assassinating Gandhi, whom Abhyankar and his ilk believe a traitor to the so-called Hindu cause, because of Gandhi's sustained support to the idea that the Muslims have as legitimate a claim to live in India as the majority community does.

Haasan's film is among the most detailed filmic depictions we have of the Hindutva mindset -- not just the admiration for Hitler and the distaste for Gandhi, but how that maps onto an eroticised masculinity in which violence and nationalism come together with a reworked Hindu renunciatory ideal. But there is great confusion in this mindset. In one of the film's most honest, most complicated scenes, Ram imbibes an opium drink given to him by Abhyankar, and it is in that opium-induced haze that he both finally feels the stirrings of sexual attraction to his new young wife Mythili, and agrees, in effect, to leave her side. When he makes love to her, he fantasises about a giant gun. To become a warrior for Hindutva, Ram must take a pledge to “renounce bondage and relationships”. We see him touch, in one seamless gesture, the picture of his unseen dead mother and the map of India, both of which he can only love as abstractions – and leave the house, abandoning for his grand masculine mission all the real, maternal figures he knows, including the newly-pregnant Mythili (Sita to match Ram).

In a directorial sleight-of-hand that makes fine use of both melodrama and coincidence, Haasan ensures that this would-be Godse suddenly finds himself being defended from suspicious Muslims somewhere near Jama Masjid by his trusted old Muslim friend Amjad (Shah Rukh Khan) – and then, in a matter of minutes, defending Amjad and all the other Muslims holed up in the nicely-named Azad Soda Factory.

There is a great deal more that can be said about Hey Ram, but let me end here on the note that Amjad does. In a dying declaration to the police trying to identify the armed Hindu assailant whose entry into the curfew-bound Jama Masjid area set off the bloodbath, Amjad is asked if he had ever seen Bhairav before. Bhairav is the name Ram had assumed on that excursion, and also the name of Lord Shiva's destructive form. “I have never seen that animal before,” says Amjad. “I only know Ram, my brother. He saved my life.”

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23 Feb 2020.

Educational Hiccups

My Mirror column:

Hichki talks of schools being places of learning not just for students, but for teachers and parents as well. This is a lesson we aren’t ready to accept in practice.

Schools are revealing places. They are institutionalised locales in which a modern-day society passes down the norms and values it wishes its younger generations to absorb. The task of socialising children into adulthood, which in smaller-scale pre-modern social units was carried out by the family and the community, is something that now takes place in the structured but often more anonymous setting of the school.

Some of this is at the formal, pedagogical level – through textbooks, syllabi, rules of eligibility for students and codes of conduct binding on both teachers and students. At the more informal level, the classroom is a social laboratory: a place in which the biases, hierarchies and faultlines that exist in the adult world outside can either be allowed to perpetuate themselves unhindered, or be called out for their divisiveness and illogicality.

The recent Hichki, starring Rani Mukherjee as a teacher who attempts to do the latter, is a somewhat unusual film for Bollywood. Popular Hindi cinema has traditionally dealt with social questions by telling a story about how they impinge on one particular individual, the heroine or hero, while Hichki, set in a fictitious 'posh' Mumbai school called St. Notker's, places a class full of teenagers centrestage, allowing a fine ensemble cast to get its space in the sun.

There have, of course, been precedents for this sort of narrative: as far back as the team of convicts in V Shantaram's Do Aankhen Barah Haath (1957) and as recent as the women's hockey team in Chak De India. Like Hichki, those films balance the screen-time afforded to the group with an equal focus on a guru-like protagonist who has made their progress a personal goal – Shantaram as the reform-oriented prison warden, or Shahrukh Khan as the national hockey coach. And the guru has problems of his own: if Chak De's Kabir Khan had an unjust corruption charge hanging over his head, Mukherjee's character Naina Mathur is an overqualified teacher who's been rejected by every school she's applied at because she has Tourette's Syndrome: an untreatable condition that results in her making involuntary disruptive sounds during many of her social interactions: sounds that most people find impossible to get beyond.

When Naina finally lands a job, it's because no-one else wants it. The Hindi-speaking working class teens she is brought in to instruct are not the usual St. Notker's kids. They are government school kids who've been admitted to the private elite school under legal duress when the government school was shut and its land turned into a playground for the St. Notker's (the metaphorical implications of this plotline are astounding). Described alternately as “bastiwale bachche” and “municipal garbage”, Hichki's “Class 9F” is a broadstrokes fictional stand-in for the real life underprivileged kids brought into elite schools across the country by the Right to Education Act of 2009, which ensures that a specific number of seats in government-aided private schools are left open for children from a lower income bracket.
The 'F for Failure' implication in the name 9F is a little sledgehammer, as is much of the film. But Hichki is a rare attempt in popular cinema to engage with a legislation that needs a great deal of political will to implement – but that might determine whether our best-equipped schools are going to be part of the social revolutions we need, or only zealously guard their privilege (like Neeraj Kabi does as the dedicated but classist teacher in Hichki).


If one way to think of mainstream Hindi cinema is as a barometer of the popular, then Hichki has an uncanny finger on the pulse of the nation: the film released on March 23, 2018, featuring a leaked exam paper as part of the climactic plot, and by end-March, a national scandal had erupted around the leaking of the CBSE's Class X Maths and Economics papers.


Finally, I have nothing against a script that wants to educate Indian audiences about a little-understood condition that probably afflicts a huge number of people. But it's worth pointing out that the equivalence the film suggests – between Naina's physical disability and the socio-economic disability that 9F students are battling – is one more example of the class-based spoonfeeding Bollywood now does so much of. I think here of two fine films that have dealt with class in the schoolroom – Stanley ka Dabba and Hindi Medium. Stanley is based on the subliminal premise that the sympathy of a middle-class, primarily English-speaking audience can only be gained by a child character who goes to a good convent and recites English poems: only then might we care if he turns out to be a child labourer. In Hindi Medium, we apparently need Irrfan Khan and his upper middle class family to playact at poverty as our route to Deepak Dobriyal's real travails and hopes for his child's education.


It appears then that for Indian multiplex audiences, even the poor child seeking an education becomes worth assisting only when some upper middle class person makes it a life goal.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Apr 2018.

Not the Usual Suspects

This week's Mumbai Mirror column: 

Thoughts on cops and the everyman, on the cop as everywoman: from 'Singham' to 'Drishyam' via 'Mardaani'

Tabu as IG Meera Deshmukh, with her posse of policemen, in Drishyam

Drishyam is by no means a great film. It's not even a particularly good film. Several performances and locales leave much to be desired. But having not been previously exposed to any of the previous versions - neither the 2013 Malayalam film of the same name, starring Mohanlal, nor the Japanese or Korean films that were more faithful renditions of the original inspiration, a Japanese novel called The Devotion of Suspect X - I found it watchable. It has a plot (which is already more than one can say for most big-budget Hindi releases), it has some suspense, and even posits something like an ethical dilemma. 

But this is not a review. Readers trying to decide if they should watch Drishyam are unlikely to find this piece helpful. What I want to think about is Drishyam's depiction of the police. The first interesting fact here is that the film casts Ajay Devgn - the very man who has made a career out of playing an outlandish supersize cop in Rohit Shetty films like Singham and Singham Returns - as the supposed everyman, a guy who finds himself in a tight spot, ranged against the police. Had Devgn been a little bit more in touch with his acting self (and I'm convinced he used to have one), he could have had some fun with this rolereversal, especially since even the location is the same as those films: a Marathi-fied Goa. It's a pity he's now so used to sleepwalking his way through the larger-than-life muscleman parts that he can no longer seem to convey either vulnerability or middle-class-ness with any degree of conviction. 

Second attention-grabbing tactic: Drishyam makes its tough cop a woman. The figure who must match Devgn's moves, play the cat to his mouse, is played by Tabu. It's not that Tabu hasn't played a cop before - I can think offhand of Fanaa (2006), where she had a small but effective role as an anti-terrorist bureau agent. But as IG Meera Deshmukh, she must marshal a different combination of attributes. There is an obvious comparison to be made here, between Meera Deshmukh and the last policewoman heroine we've seen on the Hindi film screen, Shivani Shivaji Roy, in last August's Mardaani. On the surface, they aren't similar at all. Rani Mukherjee's Shivani, as I had noted in these pages at the time, always appears in masculine garb: either in uniform or in loose collared shirts and trousers, with her hair tied back and her fists ready to hand out a punch or two. Tabu's Meera, in contrast, makes her 'entry' in near slow-motion, clad in an uber-flattering uniform that clings to her curves, and for much of the film's latter half, appears in fashionable churidar-kurtas and perfectly draped saris, her lovely auburn hair flowing loose even while she supervises the 'interrogation' of Devgn and his family by a violent junior. Meera, unlike Shivani, doesn't like to get her hands dirty. 

But there's one way in which both these characters mirror each other: their 'feminine' instincts are written into the roles in the most obvious fashion. If the childless Shivani Shivaji Roy, for all her mardaangi, is accused by male colleagues of taking things "too personally", and proves it by being pushed over the emotional edge by the abduction of an orphaned girl with whom she has a nurturing, quasi-filial relationship, Meera Deshmukh is more straightforwardly cast in the maternal mould. Her actions, which might be unforgiveable as a police officer, are meant to be condoned as those of a mother. And eventually, it is a failed mother that her character is judged. 

Outside this though, Tabu remains the unexamined Bollywood supercop: "Hum policewalon ko aadmi ke baat karne se pata chal jaata hai ki woh sach bol raha hai ya jhooth," she declares in one of the film's more dangerous ideological moments. And beyond the major characters, Drishyam offers a glimpse of a darker vision of the police. The film's small town of Pondolem, despite having flattened Goa's mix of communities into a Hindu milieu (complete with a Swamiji and a satsang in Panjim), comes across as rather idyllic. From the start, the only unpleasantness in town is created by the police. The bullish, corrupt Gaitonde (wonderfully played by Kamlesh Sawant) doesn't ever pay his bills at the eatery he frequents, and has illegally locked up a young man for defaulting on a loan payment to a company owned by Gaitonde's cousin. Most of Devgn's early exchanges with Gaitonde and his more amenable senior point out how unfortunate it is that the public fears policemen instead of trusting them. 

Charmy Harikrishnan's helpful comparison of the Hindi film with the Malayalam version points out that [spoiler alert] "Mohanlal protects his family precisely because he knows the boy is a police offer's son and the entire police force will come after them." This "grave mistrust between the ordinary man and the police" which, as Harikrishnan correctly points out, is "blurred" in the Hindi film. Thinking about this reminded me of another recent Malayalam film in which a policeman's family is the focus, albeit from the very different perspective of a policeman's son becoming witness to a murder. That film, Rajeev Ravi's superb, haunting Njan Steve Lopez (2014), suggests that Malayali filmmakers recognize the chilling fact that the police in this country often function as just another gang of thugs -- and are willing to engage with it with some complexity. Hindi filmmakers, still so abjectly tied to heroes and villains, could really learn a lesson or two.

Published in Mumbai Mirror

2014: The Year of Sheroes

My Mumbai Mirror column, 28 Dec 2014. 

Hindi cinema this year gave its female actors a chance to spread out. Some punched, while others pulled no punches. What matters is that as the audience, we agreed to clap for both.

Madhuri Dixit in Dedh Ishqiya (2014)

The Hindi film industry has been hero-dominated for so many decades now that it's hard to believe that its earliest decades were all about the heroines: Sulochana, Fearless Nadia, Devika Rani. But 2014 might go down in history as the year that Bombay cinema came back round to the idea that there could be hits without heroes. 

This was made possible, in some measure, by the return of Hindi cinema's last generation of big-ticket heroines. It's fabulous that at least some of these utterly deserving divas are landing age-appropriate roles in films designed to showcase their particular charms. 2012 already saw Sridevi bring a lump to every throat in the room as the guileless housewife on a journey of self-discovery in English Vinglish. 2014 marked the glorious comeback of Madhuri Dixit, who played the poetically-minded Begum Para with the perfect air of seductive mystery in January's Dedh Ishqiya, and later in the year, played off her once arch-competitor Juhi Chawla (with Chawla playing against type) in the somewhat anti-climactic Gulab Gang.  

This year also saw a more recent returnee - Rani Mukherjee came back from a longish sabbatical with the immensely watchable, cheer-eliciting Mardaani. Priyanka Chopra had her own no-heroes movie: Mary Kom. The two films couldn't be more dissimilar in theme - a punchy cop drama set in Mumbai and Delhi, and a biopic of the stocky Manipuri woman who is India's most famous boxer - but in very different ways, these were films in which female audiences derived much pleasure from watching the woman on screen emerge victorious from physical battles. Mary Kom's initial attraction to boxing is linked to beating up badly behaved boys; Shivani Roy loves shocking male rowdies with some rowdyisms of her own, and plays gleefully to the gallery as she does so. 

Rani Mukherjee in Mardaani, 2014.

Interestingly, though, both films felt the need to play up their protagonists' nurturing side - a part-explanatory, part-compensatory move to balance out all that unfeminine punching we see them do. Mukherjee's character in Mardaani, a no-bullshit female cop with the ringing name of Shivani Shivaji Roy, is given no children of her own. But she and her doctor husband play adoptive parents to a young niece, and she is moved to eradicate a ring of child traffickers because they've abducted an orphaned girl with whom she has a quasi-maternal relationship. 

Motherhood was also played up in the movie version of MC Mary Kom's life, with Mary shown risking her coach's disfavour when she decides to get married and then have children, all at the peak of her hard-won boxing career. Produced by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Omung Kumar's film devotes an inordinate amount of screen-time to showing Mary being a hands-on mom: singing her twins to sleep, nursing them to health, and so on - one can't avoid the sneaking feeling that it's all in aid of preventing audiences judging her when she does decide to return to her career, while the kids still very young. (It was lovely, though, to see a man on the Hindi film screen play a hands-on dad as competently and believably as Darshan Kumar did as Onler Kom.) 

The parade of rough-talking women continued with Kangana Ranaut's strange and over-the-top outing in and as Revolver Rani (RR). A Tarantino-inspired take on a female Chambal dacoit some two decades after Phoolan Devi and Bandit Queen, RR could have been great but was tragically uneven in tone. Later in the year, we got Richa Chadda in the depressingly awful Tamanchey: another trigger-happy female gangster, like Ranaut in RR, ready to junk it all for marriage and motherhood. 

But Ranaut's film of the year -- and everyone's favourite 'woman-centric' movie -- was Queen. Vikas Bahl's surprise hit had Ranaut deliver a terrific stream-of-consciousness performance as sheltered Delhi girl Rani who, jilted at the mandap, makes the wonderful transition from panic-stricken to determined to carefree. 

Kangana Ranaut (right) in Queen, 2014

The foreign trip as transformatory ritual isn't new (think Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara), and Rani is perhaps a younger version of Sridevi in English Vinglish—but the film wins points for a host of other things, from giggly female friendship to joyful drunken spree to first exploratory kiss with a stranger, and most importantly, Rani's non-vengeful but firm rejection of her baffled groom. Queen opened up the universe a little more. 

Two other films delivered freedom to their female protagonists in surprising guises: Alia Bhatt as the poor little rich girl who finds liberation via abduction in Highway, and Parineeti Chopra as the oddball science geek who runs away from home -- to China! -- in the under-appreciated and charming Hasee Toh Phasee. 

Vidya Balan in Bobby Jasoos, 2014

My pick for independent woman character of the year, though, is probably Vidya Balan's Hyderabadi detective in the comic mystery caper Bobby Jasoos. Perhaps because there's nothing grand or heroic about her loose-plait-and-dupatta persona. She loves her family, but will risk their ire to fulfill her dream of her own detective agency. Since she's not in the realm of myth, she neither beats up any men nor has to prove her femininity. But when personable young men open car doors for her, they encounter a brisk dismissal: "Mereko aata hai gaadi ka darwaza kholna." For me, that's more than enough.

How to be a Leading Lady

Yesterday's Mumbai Mirror column:

Two new films this week offer compelling portraits of women in power. But must gender roles be copied rather than changed? If we can't beat them, must we join them?

Something interesting is going on at the cinema this week. Two wonderfully dissimilar films -- one a mainstream Bollywood production house attempting a songless policier, the other trying to undercut documentary's dull image with colourful characters and music -- give centre stage to women in positions of authority. Pradeep Sarkar's pacey crime drama Mardaani stars Rani Mukerji as a Mumbai Crime Branch cop, while Deepti Kakkar and Fahad Mustafa's documentary Katiyabaaz is staged as a face-off between Loha Singh, the power thief of the film's title, and Ritu Maheshwari, an IAS officer trying to reform the dysfunctional Kanpur Electricity Supply Company (KESCO). 

Considering it's a Yash Raj production and a star vehicle for the Chopra family's new bahu, Mardaani has generated rather little buzz. Perhaps that's unsurprising: it's a hero-less film and contemporary Bollywood -- and our male-dominated box office - clearly rations out bhaav along gender lines. But the title has also put off many members of the film's would-be audience, who are annoyed by the idea that a woman's strength must necessarily be couched as her masculine side. 

Mukerji has defended the title, implying that we should read it not as literal but literary, since it's taken from Subhadra Kumari Chauhan's poem about the valiant queen Lakshmibai, who famously rode into battle against the British in 1857: "Khoob ladi mardaani woh toh Jhansi wali rani thhi". Mukerji spent her childhood in Jhansi, and her father (filmmaker Ram Mukerji) liked reading the poem to her, whether or not he actually named her after it. 

But there's no getting away from the gendered signals sent out by the title, and watching the film, it's clear that the name is no coincidence. Shivani Shivaji Roy can hand out slaps and cuss words as easily as any man in the force, and she revels in the street display of physical power. Her clothes make no concessions to femininity, not even a kurta. She is either in uniform, or in trousers and collared shirts - and not fitted women's shirts that emphasise her curves. Roy's no-nonsense look is sans make-up. Her hair, though long, is always tied back. She's shown in a sari once. But that opening scene is also the one that establishes her comradely rapport with her all-male team. And how do we know she's one of the boys? Because she's happy to make their kind of jokes: their (male) boss's mood is off, it seems, because his wife yelled at him for forgetting to take her "anniversary shopping". It's as if entering into masculine repartee about ordinary 'wives' is the only way to signal that she isn't one. 

Since the film insists on gender reversal rather than parity, we are not surprised to find that our heroine is partnered by a Bengali doctor husband as inconsequential and vulnerable as countless policemen's' wives and girlfriends from Shool to Seher (let's not even talk about Singham). And though the film nods at Shivani's nurturing side by having her bring up an orphaned niece, she doesn't have children of her own. 

Contrast this with the real-life Ritu Maheshwari, the bureaucrat of Katiyabaaz, who's shown to have two young children and never wears anything but colourful saris. We learn almost nothing about her husband, but neither her domestic life nor her professional one shows any signs of gender role reversal. What also fascinated me about Maheshwari's authority is that it does not depend on her creating a rapport with the men who work under her, but seemingly the opposite -- maintaining a distance. 

Perhaps this has less to do with these women as archetypes of female power and more with the different spheres in which they operate. Both are state functionaries. But for Mukerji's policewoman, the law is an ass. It is something whose limitations must be overcome to provide vigilante justice; while for the bureaucrat, the only means she has at her disposal are legal ones. It is not by swearing like a man that Maheshwari earns respect, but by keeping her voice down and insisting on decorum. In one remarkable scene, a shouting male MLA trying to browbeat Maheshwari is made to leave her office. 

But in the long term, the even-tempered Maheshwari is transferred, while the male MLA wins the election, and presumably retains a hand in Kanpur's dysfunctional political present. Meanwhile Shivani Roy, though she wins her particular battle (a case of child sex trafficking), has to deal with male colleagues' accusations of taking things "too personally". Another time, she's told that she achieves more when keeping her cool: "jab tum shaant rehti ho". 

Political mobilisation in both films is shown to be manipulated rather than representative. I was struck by the honesty of Mardaani's recognition that in the wrong political hands, even the discourse of women's safety (on which the film is itself riding) can be twisted to harass innocent people. All men are not evil, and all women are not innocent. But even this film doesn't seem to understand that if vigilante justice is so dangerous in one instance, it cannot be assumed to be the solution in another. Self-defence is one thing. But is female violence now the only answer to male violence? I completely understand the urge to clap, but I do wish we had something better to clap for.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Sun 24 August, 2014.

Film Review: Aiyyaa

Aiyyaa is an ambitious film. Director Sachin Kundalkar self-consciously attempts a sensual magic realism, a half-dream, half-reality world with a film-crazed heroine at its centre.

When we first see Rani Mukherjee’s Meenaxi, she is wearing a white and blue dress of a certain vintage and large sunglasses with white frames, and dancing to a Vividh Bharti prastuti which is somehow not just one song but a medley of 80s greatest hits. Tejaab! Mera Balma! Mr. India! Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak! says the announcer, following up with “Sridevi, Madhuri aur Juhi, kabhi aise toh kabhi yunhi”, a line delivered in a deadpan radio voice that somehow also manages to contain the barest hint of lascivious enjoyment. Then Rani’s fretful dream is interrupted by the arrival of two stinking garbage trucks, and we supposedly wake with her into reality.

But it turns out reality is a Vividh Bharti prastuti, too. Now it is her goggle-eyed younger brother Nana reading out a matrimonial ad put out for Meenaxi by her adoring if slightly nutty Aai: “Brahman parivaar ki ladki, umra 22 sharmeeli (shayad mawaali likhna tha!)”, and a crazed grandmother zooming around the house on a wheelchair. And soon enough the deadpan All India Radio voice is back, announcing an “Ashleel Geetmala” (“Obscene Song Programme”) whose first offering of the day is Emosanal Atyachar requested by “Pune se Nana Deshpande aur unke chaar kutte”…

There’s a fair amount of oddball cleverness here, what with Emosanal Atyachar being the biggest song from Dev D, which was directed by Anurag Kashyap whose AKFPL is a co-producer for Aiyyaa, and then the radio reference to Nana’s “ati-uttejit mataji aur ati-visarjit pitaji” —ati-visarjit translates to “deeply immersed”, and the father happens to be called Ganesh—a god immersed literally, in water, every year. Or the voiceover that tells us that the grandmother’s shiny gold teeth have been set aside for Meenaxi to inherit.

But it takes very little for oddball cleverness to teeter over into madness. It begins early, when Meenaxi gets herself a job as a librarian in a beautiful old Pune art institute, sharing her gorgeous wood-panelled “office ambience” with a crazed, buck-toothed, hot pants-and-leather-boots-clad character called Maina.

The nasal-voiced, oversexed, John-Abraham-obsessed Maina is bizarrely over-the-top – so much so that I spent a long time telling myself that she was meant to be a figment of Meenaxi’s fevered imagination: the suppressed sexuality of the good Brahmin girl emerging into the film’s dreamworld in this grotesque person form. But unfortunately the film refuses to indulge its fantasy all the way through (as you will see when you get to the end and discover that Maina must, sadly, be understood to be as human as Meenaxi).

And then there’s the film central premise: Meenaxi’s obsession with the arrogantly good-looking, deliberately scruffy art student Suriya (Prithviraj). Lust-at-first-sight is not an emotion that has hitherto been allowed to the Hindi movie heroine, and Aiyyaa’s unapologetic embrace of female sensual (rather than exactly sexual) fantasies is heartwarming. Rani as Meenaxi, torn between the reality of the practical but humdrum “husband material” Madhav, and the dreamworld represented by the attractive but impossible Suriya—red-eyed, taciturn and South Indian to boot—perfectly embodies a certain kind of everywoman whose troubles are not new, but whose secret fantasies have not been allowed onto our screens before.

But this idea, that could have provided fun and frisson in equal measure, is killed by tedious, repetitive execution. It’s enjoyable the first time we see Meenaxi close her eyes and inhale blissfully when the majestically unseeing Suriya passes her by, leaving behind a cloud of apparently heavenly body odour. It’s sort of entertaining the second time, perhaps even the third time – but when it gets to be pretty much all she ever does, whether in a song-haze which is supposed to gesture to dream-time, or in ostensibly real-world-time, it gets a bit much.

The sensory overload is unrelenting and incoherent – filmi dreams that don’t connect up in any way with Meenaxi’s daytime behaviour, blue paint thrown on canvas and  dissolving into constantly into water, a series of ‘fantasy’ song sequences stitched together by overacted ‘humour’. And the drug-acquiring interlude – with the brother and sister arriving under a flyover inexplicably in their nightclothes, apparently set off by Meenaxi’s belief that her man’s fragrance might be caused by his consumption of an expensive narcotic substance – takes the film’s magic realist ambitions into desperately unmagical terrain.

There is still much here that is interesting and artful. Rani Mukherjee does over-the-top more believably than almost any other contemporary Hindi film actress, and she succeeds in making Meenaxi both enjoyably fantastic and attractively real. No film has probably ever captured with as much humour-pathos as Aiyyaa the unintentional but unremitting rushing of the lower-middle-class Indian girl into marriage—“Sagai ke baare mein tum sagaai ke baad sochna,” says Meenaxi’s mother in complete seriousness—or admitted that the same girl’s object of fantasy, even when it is the forbidden flesh of the “dark” South Indian, exists eventually within the framework of marriage.

But it’s not at all clear that the grandmother’s fantasies of flight transferred onto her granddaughter—“Hawa mein tairti plastic ki khali thaili hai Meenaxi! Ud gayi!”—are consistent with any of this. I understand that there is dream and there is reality, and sometimes one is the other. But the trouble with Aiyyaa is that it doesn’t know when to wake up.

Published in Firstpost.