Taking Risks with the Risqué

My Mirror column:

Anaarkali of Aarah pushes Hindi cinema’s take on sexuality and consent in exactly the direction it needs to go — and does so with effervescence and flair.

Two weeks ago, I wrote in these pages about two groups of women who made a living performing for men, while remaining powerfully in control of their own bodies. This week, my subject is a fictional character who shares a great deal with them both: the lavani dancers of Sangeet Bari and the American burlesque artistes profiled in the marvellous League of Exotique Dancers.

Anaarkali Aarahwali – the eponymous protagonist of long-time Hindi journalist Avinash Das's wonderful debut feature -- sings risqué Bhojpuri songs and dances for all-male audiences in the rough-and-ready world of the Bihari small town. Yet she is more profoundly possessed of a sense of self than most 'respectable' women. Between Das and his lyricist Ramkumar Singh, the film has an abundance of earthy wit, letting us inhabit a Bihar that's simultaneously lighter and more acute than anything Prakash Jha has shown us recently.

Das brings to the Hindi screen a hugely popular musical-sexual subculture that travels with the Bihari worker to Delhi and beyond. (Anaarkali's name, for instance, echoes those of real-life singers Tarabai Faizabadi, Sairabano Faizabadi, Fatmabai Faizabadi, several of whom have cut raunchy Bhojpuri albums with suggestive names, a popular title being that of Anaarkali's album in the film: Laal Timatar.) And in the paan-chewing, double-entendre-spewing Anaarkali, writer-director Das and the terrific Swara Bhaskar give us a deeply believable heroine full of joie de vivre, unabashed in her enjoyment of what life has to offer her.

The universe she inhabits may seem shaped by male desire, but Anaar refuses to give men sole rights over desirousness, or indeed, sexualness. Whether she is putting her almost muscular energy on display amid a crowd of cheering men, swaying deliberately down an Aarah street with her dupatta draped just so, or applauding the unexpected musical talent of a boy who's been skulking around her house, Bhaskar's Anaarkali is a woman who wrings sensual delight from everything that she can – but on her own terms. She may carry on a relationship with her musical comrade Rangeela (Pankaj Tripathy, very effective), but he does not control her choices – and he knows it.

With its easy banter and on-again off-again flirtation, Rangeela and Anaar's connection is built on a sense of camaraderie between equals. But what Das's film makes sadly clear is that it is a rare man who can accept a woman who expresses her own wishes while refusing to kowtow to those of others.

The plot is centred on Anaar's confrontation with a local bigwig called VC Dharmendar (Sanjay Mishra) who, having drunk a little too much at one of her shows, climbs on to stage and molests her in full public view. Anaar first tries gamely to keep dancing, but when things go beyond the pale, she wrenches herself away, slaps Dharmendar and abandons the performance.

For Anaar, the event has been horrible – but much worse is to come, because Dharmendar remembers little, and seems to think that he can still woo Anaar into becoming his mistress. From here on, the film comes into its own, with Anaar refusing Dharmendar's sexual overtures – couched first as half-hearted apology and then as romantic entreaty, before transforming, in the blink of an eye, to a threat to her life and liberty if she does not submit. One moment he is trying to wheedle Anaar, calling himself a Devdas wasting away for love of her; the next minute he's having his goons hunt her down on foot in Aarah's backstreets.

But it is not just Dharmendar who yoyos between these ways of seeing. Das's finely-wrought screenplay makes clear how often an attractive woman must deal with men wanting either to worship her, or rub her nose in the dirt. Sex and sexuality is so repressed a topic in India that a woman who revels in her own erotic appeal is treated as a devi (goddess) if she smiles upon a man – but must be denounced as a randi (whore) if she doesn't – or god forbid, if she smiles upon whomsoever she chooses.

Anaar, too, has her share of worshippers: the spellbound shopkeeper who presses free lipsticks upon her in exchange for listening to couplets he's composed for his cross-caste love; the loveable studio agent (Ishtiyak Khan) who helps her out in Delhi (and is called Hiraman Tiwari, in a sweet homage to Raj Kapoor's innocent tangawalla in Teesri Kasam); and finally, the waif Anwar, whom Anaar shelters, and who later becomes her support. But what the film does superbly is to reveal how little it can take for the same man to switch on the other gaze. So the timid, sweet Anwar can begin to display signs of 'manly' control, while Dharmendar's once-abusive henchman is quick to fall at Anaarkali's feet, once she assumes the status of his boss's woman.

It is nearly impossible, in such a skewed world, to escape the alternative handcuffs of worship and control. Anaarkali succeeds, for now, and we applaud happily.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 Mar 2017.

Rajat Kapoor's filmi foolscape

Starting this month, I'll be writing a weekly column on Hindi cinema for the Mumbai Mirror. The first one -- on the tragicomic films of Rajat Kapoor -- appeared yesterday.

Rajat Kapoor's brilliant new film Ankhon Dekhi (2014) is about a man who decides one day that he has been living life all wrong. From now on, he announces, he will no longer trust other people's versions of reality. That world was a hazy photocopy. Based on the evidence of his own senses, reality begins to come sharply, often painfully into focus. 

I see Ankhon Dekhi as the third of a series that Kapoor began with Raghu Romeo (2003) and followed up with Mithya (2008). All three films are finely wrought tragicomedies: drolly funny, always thoughtful and often startling meditations on the nature of reality. And at the centre of each one is a fool. A fool, not in the common understanding of the term, but in the Shakespearian sense of the seeming simpleton who speaks and acts without fear, and thus seems to arrive at a truer understanding of the world. 

Vijay Raaz's Raghu in Raghu Romeo seems, at first glance, a besotted fan who cannot seem to tell life from television. Or does he just not want to? Perhaps real life, as his soliloquies remind us, is just too cruel. While the "Nita ji" of his television daydreams is the receptacle of all worldly goodness: she who cannot hate. When a hilarious turn of events forces him to confront the reality of the waspish actress who embodies his adored Nita, Raghu remains reluctant. 

Eventually he concedes that the object of his worship may appear to be 'Reshma, television actress' "from the outside," but there's a Nita ji hidden inside her. "Aapke andar koi Nitaji chhipi baithi hain," he insists to a stupefied Reshma. "Aur jo aapke andar hain woh aap toh dekh nahi paate. Lekin main dekh paa raha hoon. (And what is inside you, you can't see. But I can.)" 

That mismatch between the visible and invisible self, the gulf that appears on the 'outside' and what might exist 'inside', is another of Kapoor's persistent themes. At one level, it flags yet again his interest in performance as reality, opening up the never-ending question of what constitutes identity. Fatso (2012), one of Kapoor's flawed efforts, used a comic supernatural device to explore that idea - a young man who has died manages to come back to 'life' by taking over the body of his fat friend.But to return to the fool: Ranvir Shorey's VK in Mithya is another stellar instance. A bit-part actor with very little talent but a profound belief in the life of the artiste, VK puts his heart and soul into every role he gets, obsessing over whether his 'expression' was right even when he's playing the corpse in an action scene. 

What Kapoor's clever script does is to take this hungry performer and give him the role of a lifetime. But it's not a film or a play in which VK must take his greatest test as an actor - it's real life. In what is in many ways a droll tribute to Don, VK is the lookalike simpleton sent to replace the mafia don Raje Bhai.

But Kapoor is concerned with much more than plot, or the pleasure human beings always seem to take in doubles. 

If VK is the fool who picks out the police boss in the identification parade, he is also the fool who cannot seem to stem his natural affection even when it puts his life in danger. Then, in a tribute to the classic Hindi film twist, VK hits his head and loses his memory. 

Now he is truly a fool: the powerless pawn who believes he actually is a don. And yet there is a way in which his emotions are true -- truer perhaps than those of the dead man he has replaced, as Raje Bhai's wife and children seem to instinctively recognize. 

Ankhon Dekhi steps away from the cinematic meta-ness of the previous two films into an immaculately un-filmi Old Delhi milieu. The overwhelming noise of the lower-middle-class life - what Bauji calls "wohi kaain-kaain, chik-chik, bak-bak" -- was evoked in Raghu Romeo, too, and the harried mother has remained more or less the same from Surekha Sikri to the superb Seema Pahwa (Hum Log's Badki fits perfectly into this world, which sometimes feels like an updated, keenly funny version of Hum Log's '80s joint family.) 

But unlike Raghu, who sought solace in fiction, Bauji's epiphany drives him further towards fact. He demands "pramaan", not "anumaan". But no abstract mathematical or scientific truth will do. Experience is the only acceptable proof. 

Bauji's new principle of sensory truth turns him first into a figure of fun, then worry, then threat -- and then hero-worship. His insistence can expose the profound limits of his experience - as when he refuses to book tickets to Amsterdam because he's never been there, and his travel agency boss angrily demands to know where he has been. Bauji hangs his head. As Rafey Mahmood's camera frames him with tragic irony against the luridly fake fall colours of the travel agency poster, he has to admit he has been nowhere. Yes, he is a frog in a well. But it is his well, and he insists on getting to know it. "Sab kucch yahin hai, aankhen khol ke dekh lo," says the placard Bauji starts holding up at junctions. 

"Everything is here, open your eyes and look." That is the crazy, transformative truth of Ankhon Dekhi: when you have the eyes to see, everything can be beautiful. That way lies new experience, and the fool goes fearlessly forth towards it.