Darkness and death in the Indian Jungle

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The pitch-black vision of Aravind Adiga's Booker Prize-winning 2008 novel about class finds new audiences with a streaming film adaptation.

The White Tiger, currently the most watched film on a major streaming platform in India, features a protagonist born at the bottom of the country's social pyramid (not counting gender). Balram Halwai belongs to what Aravind Adiga, in the bestselling 2008 novel on which the film is based, calls “the Darkness”. “India is two countries in one: An India of Light, and an India of Darkness,” says Balram in the book, going on to elaborate a geographical basis for the divide, centred on water. Wherever the river Ganga flows, he says, that area is the Darkness – while every place in India that is near the ocean is well-off, in the Light.

 

Adiga names Balram's village Laxmangarh, and refers to Dhanbad and Gaya as the nearby towns, the places where men from the village go to seek work, or catch trains to cities further away: Calcutta, Delhi. But of course each time Balram speaks of the Darkness, the term conjures up something more than mere location. It encapsulates the desperate poverty that is the norm in a village like Laxmangarh, the entrenched hierarchy that makes sure that the backbreaking labour of men like Balram's father feeds the bellies of men like Ashok's father.

 

Ashok -- whose car Balram drives, and whose life choices he judges every day, even as he also aspires to them. “Rich men are born with opportunities they can waste,” says Balram scathingly of his master, who does very little about his oft-stated desire to change the future of India. The America-returned son of Laxmangarh's most exploitative landlord (nicknamed the Stork), Ashok is far too good for his own good. He has married his Indian-American girlfriend Pinky, who isn't of his caste, and who might even be Christian -- and his egalitarian ways do not sit well with his position atop the hierarchy. He is constantly trying to prevent Balram from opening doors for him, trying to make him sit next to him on a sofa, and generally experimenting with the radical idea of the servant's humanity.

 

Two weeks ago in this space, I wrote about another film in which, too, a US-returned Indian employer breaks the rules about how to behave with our servants. The exemplary hope of Rohena Gera's finely wrought narrative is that a man might actually fall in love with his domestic help.

 

In Ramin Bahrani's cinematic adaptation of his old friend Adiga's novel, the erotic and emotional charge of the master-servant relationship remains beneath the surface. But watching Balram attach himself to Ashok like a faithful puppy -- thrilled to be able to serve him well and distraught when his overtures are rejected -- one has no doubt that the charge exists. When a distraught Pinky abandons ship, Balram and Ashok are thrown back even more upon each other, creating unprecedented closeness – and thus also unprecedented distaste. In one remarkable scene, Balram goes instantaneously from cradling the drunken Ashok to slapping him, with some glee, when he passes out. It's a short journey, it seems, from worriedly trying to revive his master with nimbu pani to sprawling on his couch and drinking his whiskey.

 

Adiga articulated that strange intimacy well, and Bahrani excels in this section. In Pinky's absence, Balram determines to “be a wife” to his master – which apparently involves not letting him drink, and keeping his spirits up. But then Ashok's elder brother arrives to take charge of him, and brings rejection in his wake. Ashok goes from being grateful for Balram's company to swatting him away. Suddenly the servant's advice is too stupid, his attentions too cloying. A similar fluctuation happens with others, too; whenever an employer needs the servant, he is wooed and flattered, embraced, called a part of the family.

 

The grateful servant preens, at first. But this is intimacy conducted on one person's terms. And so the servant, powerless though he is, slowly discovers the weapons of the weak. In The White Tiger, Balram goes from being what the coarse-tongued caretaker of the building's netherworld of a basement calls his master's 'faithful dog', to a faithless cheat who realises he must take what he can get. The dehati chuha, the country mouse, learns the ways of the city. But even those petty ways – picking up other paying customers, invoicing fake repairs, siphoning off petrol -- are a fraction of what would be needed to actually bring the servant anywhere near the level of the master.

 

And so intimacy is corroded by duplicitousness. “Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love? Or do we love them, behind a facade of loathing?” muses Balram. Adiga/Bahrani's is a much darker vision of cross-class relationships than Rohena Gera's. That's the thing, though – Sir imagines bridging India's vast social gap with love, The White Tiger with crime. For the vast majority of India, both options remain fantasies.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Sun 31 Jan, 2021.

A love that breaks class barriers

My Mumbai Mirror column:

An unlikely relationship reaches across social boundaries in Rohena Gera's understated romance Sir.

It may seem difficult to recall in the cold light of the present, but cross-class romance once warmed the hearts of Hindi film audiences. The poor boy who won the heart of the rich girl (and the wrath of her family), was a staple of the single-screen era. Even then, the rich hero-poor heroine equation was less frequent -- and for that fantasy to extend to the master-servant relationship was rarer still. Rohena Gera's lovely film Sir, completed in 2018 and released online earlier this month, tries to turn that dream into reality.

Ratna (Tilottama Shome) works as the live-in domestic help for Ashwin (Vivek Gomber), who is due to get married to his girlfriend Sabina. When the wedding – and the relationship – suddenly falls through, the quiet Ashwin finds himself being hectored from all quarters. His overweening mother wants him to reconsider, his father seems to assume he can't handle his part in the family business and his friends want to steer him into dating again. Increasingly isolated, he begins to notice the unobtrusive warmth of Ratna's presence. She comes from a space of experience far removed from Ashwin's upper class Mumbai universe – a poor rural family, a hurried marriage, early widowhood with its attendant social and economic fallout -- but her halting words are both genuine and wise. The gulf between them is huge, but Sir manages to make us believe in the possibility that it might just be bridgeable.

The America-returned Ashwin has never been anything but polite to Ratna. But as his appreciation of her grows, he baulks more and more at the rudeness of those around him. Gera's deft script and direction is aided by the wonderful understated performances she draws from both Shome and Gomber, Shome in particular delivering scenes of great devastation with a quiet wallop – such as when a boutique manager responds to Ratna's entry by yelling for the watchman, or Ashwin's party guest makes a scene over her spilt wine. Gera makes clear that nothing said or done to Ratna is out of the ordinary; it is what the servant-keeping classes in India mete out unthinkingly. From Ashwin's businessman father dissing his construction workers to the neighbour who insults her child's ayah (Geetanjali Kulkarni in a great supporting role) rather than chastise the child, the film throws into relief Indians' constant othering of those less privileged than us. It is upper middle class common sense to think of servants as 'lazy' or 'cheats' or inept, 'morons' who need to be kept in check with low salaries, stark boundaries and harsh punishments. The more we want to exploit the poor, the more it suits us to think of them as less than human.

 

It is against this usual wall of invisibility that Ashwin's gestures – that would be common courtesy if Ratna were not a servant – stand out as excessive. It isn't just in his class that they attract attention, but also in hers. Offering to wait for a servant to finish eating, asking if she needs a ride home -- these are acts so unthinkable on an employer's part that they arouse the mockery and suspicion of other servants. And for Ratna, made vulnerable by both class and gender, they can lead to social extinction.

 

And yet, it is in Ashwin's spontaneous crossing of that wall, his apparently unconscious transcendence of the very boundaries society wishes us to guard, that the possibility of any real relationship lies. Because even as Ratna fears the weight of social censure, she demands the respect of social acknowledgement. “Main ganwaar hoon [I may be a country bumpkin],” she tells Ashwin, “Lekin main aapki rakhail ban ke nahi rahoongi [But I won't live here as your mistress].”

 

In Zoya Akhtar's powerful segment of the 2018 anthology film Lust Stories, another quietly efficient domestic help (Bhumi Pednekar) finds herself taking care of her young male employer (Neil Bhoopalam). The intimacy between them feels far from furtive, and the banter that accompanies such frank, lusty sex holds at least the glimmer of equality. But that distant promise is shattered when Bhoopalam's middle-class parents arrive, with a suitable girl in tow. In front of his parents and prospective in-laws, the good middle-class boy behaves impeccably – which is to say he betrays not the barest hint of his real relationship with the maid.

But perhaps that's the point. When something only exists behind closed doors, is it ever really real?

 

In contrast, it is Ashwin's insistence that he isn't afraid of what people might say that makes his attraction to Ratna so heartwarming. It may seem utopian, but that's why it feels like love.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Jan 2021.