Mining the Mother Lode

My Mirror column today:

Is there a new kind of Hindi film mother? Or have they become so complicated that they transcend the category?

In Vishal Bhardwaj's film Haider, Tabu plays Ghazala, the mother of Haider (Shahid Kapoor) 

We recently watched in shock and awe as Swaroop Sampat -- playing Kareena Kapoor's mother in Ki Aur Ka -- responded to her on-screen daughter Kia's declaration that she's found the man she wants to marry with the teasing remark, “Sex ho gaya na? Important before commitment.” 

Hindi cinema, it would seem, has truly arrived in the age of the New Movie Mother. Even the lower middle class mother these days – think of the winsome Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015) – can be shown being cheerfully forthright about her progeny's sexual well-being. We have clearly left far behind us those anxious matajis who wept or threatened their way through their offsprings' romantic adventures. Nowadays, like Sampat in Ki Aur Ka, they might just be embarking on one of their own.

So is the filmi mother – that all-too-familiar weepy figure who sacrificed herself for her children (mostly her son, the hero) and thus was seen to almost deserve her quota of emotional blackmail – gone for ever? Not counting Tanvi Azmi's nasty Radhabai in Bajirao Mastani (since despite all appearances to the contrary, it was meant to represent an 18^th century family), it seems to me that the last really bitchy, clingy mother we saw on the Hindi film screen might have been Amrita Singh in 2 States – that was two whole years ago, and Singh's Kavita was so loud, shallow and son-obsessed that we were clearly meant to have no sympathy with her. In any case, even in that film, the mantle of new Indian motherhood was redeemed by Revathy, playing the frosty but civilized (read TamBrahm) foil to Amrita Singh's gross North Indian stereotype.

It's not that our films have stopped having martinets and manipulators. But their aims – and their modus operandi – are different from those of a previous generation of on-screen mothers. In just the last year and a bit, we've had Ratna Pathak Shah rejig (her real-life mother) Dina Pathak's unusual role as the disciplinarian matriarch in the Disney remake of Hrishikesh Mukherjee's classic Khubsoorat, while the bizarre Shandaar gave us a particularly evil Mummyji duo, in the shape of Sushma Seth and her horrible daughter Nikki Aneja Walia. 

In less of a caricature mode, Shakun Batra's 2012 directorial debut Ek Main Aur Ekk Tucast Pathak Shah as the mother of the hapless Imran Khan, who needs all the courage he can muster to get out of the straitjacketed life she has planned for him. More recently, Zoya Akhtar's Dil Dhadakne Do depicted a whole generation of the Delhi business elite as heartless creatures for whom their sons and daughters as nothing but pawns in their financial gameplans. These are mothers trying their hardest to keep their children under their thumb – but they seem cold and controlling rather than needy and scheming. And the driving force of their actions is the maintenance of money.

A most interesting repertoire of recent maternal roles has been Dimple Kapadia's. In Luck By Chance (2009), she was fantastic as the over-the-hill star Neena Walia, who now lives to launch her debutante daughter Nikki (Isha Shervani). In Dabangg (2010), she was the classic Hindi film mother, the most important thing in her son's emotional life – but with a twist: she had married a man other than his father. Imtiaz Ali's Cocktail (2012) gave her a more caricatureish role – the Lajpat Nagar mummyji transplanted to her son's cool London milieu, who misreads his love life completely – but Kapadia made her desire for a bahu seem deeply felt. Recently, she added much-needed spark to Homi Adajania's distressingly dull Finding Fanny (2014). As the well-endowed, easily flattered Rosie, who lives almost peaceably with her widowed daughter-in-law (Deepika Padukone), Kapadia created an engaging mother who spends years preserving her dead son's secrets and her own – but manages finally to shed these burdens and get on with her own life.

This new kind of maternal figure is one whose love of her children does not preclude a new, palpable sense of herself. She might be a working, independent, single mother like Sampat, for whom the template is probably Ratna Pathak Shah's feisty Savitri Rathore in the 2008 comic hit Jaane Tu... Ya Ja Jaane Na, trying her best to raise her son as a thoughtful feminist, away from the shadow of his patrilineal family. 

Or she might be a much more tragic, romantic character, like the intensely sexual mothers brought luminously to life by Tabu -- in Haider and then Fitoor. These characters, of course, come to us from Western literature: Haider's Ghazala is a gloriously realised version of Shakespeare's Queen Gertrude -- profoundly attached to her son Haider/Hamlet, but unable (and unwilling?) to let motherhood subsume her sexual identity, while Fitoor's Begum is a heavily sensual version of Dickens' Miss Havisham – a woman who pours her life-long bitterness into a poisonous brew that warps the young people around her. 

Deepti Naval plays a frightening version of this warped maternal figure in the powerfulNH10 (2015) a woman who fully embodies the patriarchal system that has produced her, to the extent that she can sacrifice her children to it.

We may have (thankfully) moved away from the self-sacrificing mother. But the dangerously non-maternal version remains an extreme case. What is more likely to come to populate our screens is a figure like Pathak Shah in Kapoor And Sons: loving but also chafing at her burdens, trying but failing to keep her fears and frustrations in check, letting her deepest emotions create havoc between her own children. This is the flawed mother we know well, and it is nice, finally, to be able to meet her on screen.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

Koffee with Karan writ large: thoughts on Shaandaar

My Mirror column last Sunday:

Shaandaar strains to be a madcap comedy, but ends up as an overlong, demented Bollywood home video.

Sushma Seth as the grandmother in Shaandaar

Once upon a time, people made home movies. Over the last century, anyone privileged enough to own the appropriate recording device - a slide projector, a still camera, a video camera, whatever - has been carefully preserving their Kashmiri honeymoons and their family picnics, their children's childhood and then their grown-up children's weddings.

These holiday slide-shows and wedding albums, however, were thrust upon you as entertainment only if you were part of the family, or at least knew some of the people in question. In the new version of life-that-is-Facebook, you're accosted on a daily basis by the gorgeous vacations and perfectly choreographed weddings and cutesy-pie children of pretty much anyone you've ever met at a party, even if the party was six years ago.

But Bollywood, as always, can do better than life. So Bollywood now makes its own home videos. And we buy tickets to watch.

Starring Shahid Kapoor as uber-charming wedding planner Jagjinder Joginder (JJ), Shahid's sister Sanah Kapoor as the plump bride-to-be (BTB) Isha and their father Pankaj Kapoor as the father of the bride (FTB), Vikas Bahl's Shaandaar feels very much like a new filmi family announcing itself. Under the veneer of their new names (and new acronyms laid on by the film's shaandaar humour), these people are all pretty much playing themselves.

Also part of the khandaan is Alia Bhatt, playing her usual funky-little-girl self, speaking truth to power (meaning evil family members) and swimming in waterfalls at midnight when she isn't initiating her lovers into childish joys, like peeling Fevicol off their fingers. The film begins with a long fairy tale animation sequence that suggests our heroine is a little witch (so firang-inspired is this script that this is indicated by her love of owls and frogs, and not sleeping at night.)

She even gets to keep her own name, a fact which seems deliberately intended to mess with our minds by having Alia be Alia in every way, except also being a trivia-nerd. An Alia "interested in everything", churning out factoids about everything from motorcycle engines to how you can tell male frogs from female ones, is clearly meant to kill the abiding joke about her not being able to name the President of India on an infamous episode of Koffee With Karan.

That Koffee with Karan backstory is not just an aside, because in what is possibly the film's most pointless sequence, Karan Johar actually appears. Like everyone else I've just mentioned, he too is playing himself: the film's 'Mehndi with Karan' has him conducting his famous hamper-wala faux-quiz for the BTB and her six-pack Sindhi groom, where for some reason he hands out all the marks to Isha for her doormat-like adoration of a nasty male chauvinist.

Hopefully it is apparent why Shaandaar feels like a particularly long, overindulgent home video. It also comes complete with a crazed family matriarch (Sushma Seth, who proves that at least somebody's enjoying herself, even as she's killed off halfway through the proceedings), a hyper-grand Angrez castle ("just like K3G", and we must give full credit to Johar for letting his past be the butt of humour), and several grandly choreographed songs appropriate to a film that's advertised as "India's first destination wedding movie".

But all this grandeur, to give the filmmakers their due, isn't meant to be taken seriously. We know this because: 1) the perfectly-turned-out wedding party don't just eat Eggs Benedict as they might have done in a film like Aisha, they attend an operatic performance about it; 2) the Mafioso-style Sindhi samdhi is called Fundwani, and comes with a gold (not golden) gun; 3) the serious matter of not eating non-veg on Tuesdays turns into an extended gag/ song involving magic mushrooms - which leads to the plot's only 'important' revelation, which, it turns out, isn't going to be treated as important, because what we're all really here to do is to send up everything that Hindi movies have ever considered important.

So the revelation about our heroine being an illegitimate child is followed by Alia musing out loud about how cool that is: "Main naajayaz hoon! Yeh toh adoption se bhi better hai." And in the deliberately ridiculous climactic scene, after Shahid Kapoor has announced to the villainous samdhis that "Police ne tumhe chaaron taraf se gher liya hai," he waves aside their bafflement by saying, "Dialogue, dialogue." Alia then comes up alongside and says she wants a dialogue, too - and since she is the heroine, she gets to make giggly delivery, apropos of nothing, of: "Ek chutki sindoor ki keemat tum kya samjhoge, Ramesh Babu".

The giggles, unfortunately, are all up there on screen. Episodes of Koffee with Karan have long had this quality - the feeling that these jokes might indeed seem funny if we, like everyone on the show, had grown up in the extended Bollywood family.

But given that we haven't, Shaandaar feels instead like an endless parade of juvenilia, and worse. These are the hip grandchildren of Hindi cinema, taking their poor old dadi's trip. And yet, despite all the coolth they claim to bring to the table, is there nothing more substantial they can do than make fun of old Hindi movies? Dadi is dead, long live dadi.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Oct 2105.