The Procedural Is Political

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

Neerja's heroism flows from 'farz', something we have lately forgotten how to honour, in cinema and in public life.

Neerja released in the middle of February. I avoided watching it for weeks. I was worried I'd go the cinema and get hit by more of the chest-thumping nationalism currently bombarding us off-screen. Or at least injected with a saccharine-sweet version of it. 

I was wrong. Neerja -- starring Sonam Kapoor as the late Neerja Bhanot, a Pan Am flight attendant who was killed by terrorists during a hijack in September 1986 -- is about heroism, not nationalism. It's about helping other human beings, not caring whether they belong to the same community/race/country as you. 

In Madhvani's vision, Neerja tries her level best to safeguard all passengers on her flight. If American passport-holders seem the most vulnerable at one point, she tries her best to shield them; when it is children who need her, she goes to their aid. 

In this regard, Neerja's impetus is different from another recent film about an unlikely Indian hero -- Airlift. The two films are premised on strikingly similar scenarios - a group of ordinary people placed in a precarious predicament while outside their country of citizenship, with one among them catapulted by circumstances to a position of leadership. 

But Airlift's protagonist takes the initiative to save these helpless people because they are his countrymen. In fact, Raja Menon makes Akshay Kumar's heroism turn on the emotional tug of something called 'the nation', while in fact mocking the procedural inefficiencies and powerlessness of that entity called 'the state'. 

Ram Madhvani's film, in contrast, makes its heroism flow from something very ordinary; something we have lately forgotten how to honour, both in our cinema and in our public life: duty. And duty in Neerja is not to an abstraction called the nation, but simply to the responsibilities of your job, to correct procedure. And beyond that, to all human life. 

Duty isn't too fashionable an idea these days. Unlike in the days when Hindi cinema was filled with stern-faced police officers doing their duty to their vardi by handcuffing their brothers, farz isn't a word we hear very often now. The law-abiding Nehruvian hero of a previous era had already been placed in a dilemma in the 70s and 80s, by pitting his duty to the law against his duty to family - that division lies, in some sense, at the core of most justifications for corruption. 

But in our post-liberalisation times, the idea of simply doing one's job has come to be associated with being boring, playing by the rules rather than thinking 'out of the box'. Perhaps it isn't entirely a coincidence that a film that seeks to recuperate the meaning of 'farz', to rescue it from its stodgy, stick-in-the-mud associations and turn it into something worthy of our greatest admiration, is about an event from the 1980s. 

Madhvani builds up his protagonist's believability carefully. Why would an up-and-coming model, already appearing not just on TV advertisements but also on big hoardings for bridal-wear and on the back covers of magazines, stick with a job with terrible timings and a rather fraught social standing? 

Shabana Azmi, in an outstanding turn as Neerja's pillar-of-support Punjabi housewife mother, often asks her daughter the same question. The only answer we hear Sonam Kapoor give in the film is the near-banal "I love my job". But by offering us brilliantly-timed glimpses of Bhanot's ugly (and thankfully short-lived) arranged marriage, the film's writers Saiwyn Qadras and Sanyukta Shaikh Chawla produce a powerful sense of what else might have driven this young woman. 

To take your work seriously, Neerja implies, is crucial to achieving independence and identity— no matter whether that work is seen as work by others. In one telling scene, we listen to a nasty letter from Neerja's husband, about how no "izzatdaar" (honourable) father would get his daughter to work as a model, and we are forced to think of how often female flight attendants deal with disrespectful male passengers, even today. 

But the stand-out dialogue about duty in Neerja comes when the 22-year-old flight attendant's insistence on serving water and a snack to the hungry, thirsty passengers on board earns her the wrath of the armed hijackers. As one of them tries to physically stop her, she looks straight into his eyes and says, "Sir, main sirf apna kaam kar rahi hoon. Apna farz nibha rahi hoon. Jaise aap nibha rahe ho. (Sir, I'm only doing my job. I'm doing my duty. Just like you are.)" 

Something truly remarkable happens in this scene. An act of dull, everyday labour is suddenly lit up with the radiance of something extraordinary — and simultaneously, the violent act of the terrorist-hijacker is, for one infinitesimal moment, charged with a sense of duty. However reprehensible his means might be, Neerja manages to suggest, the terrorist's ultimate goal is one he considers moral. 

In a film that otherwise displays little doubt about its heroes and villains, this is a rare moment of rupture, a chink in the wall. But dialogue can only take place across such a chink. It is only by insisting on humanising those who seek to dehumanise us that any war can ever truly be brought to an end.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

Double the Silliness: on watching Prem Ratan Dhan Payo

My column for Mumbai Mirror last Sunday: 

Sooraj Barjatya's ‘Prem Ratan Dhan Payo’ gives us all the things Hindi movies have always wanted from a true blue double role. And from a Salman Khan film.

   

A couple of days before I watched Prem Ratan Dhan Payo, the flipping of channels landed me in the middle of a 1972 hit called Raja Jani. In it, Dharmendra is an alcoholic called Raja who is pretending to be a rajkumar, partly so that he can convince the ageing rajmata (Durga Khote) that Hema Malini, a girl called Shanno, whom he picked up from the street, is actually her long-lost granddaughter, the princess Ratna. Since Shanno – unbeknownst even to herself – actually is Ratna, there is no double role here. But much of the fun of Raja Jani lies in watching Hema Malini go from being a feisty, foul-mouthed street performer with a dagger ever at the ready, to the self-possessed Rajkumari Ratna, of bejewelled robes and regal bearing.

The double role in Hindi cinema invariably involves two very different personality types – Ram Aur Shyam, Seeta Aur Geeta, Chaalbaaz – allowing the hero or heroine to exhibit their acting chops. But adding an imposter angle to the double role usually allows for another kind of viewing pleasure – the masquerade of class. It isn't only Hindi films that revel in such transformations, of course. Mark Twain's The Prince and The Pauper, published in 1881, was about just such a temporary switch, and Audrey Hepburn wooed her way into hearts by playing this double act one at a time – in Roman Holiday (1953), she was a princess disguised as a commoner, and in My Fair Lady (1964), she was a Cockney flower girl schooled into poise.

But Hindi films have a particular set of tropes in this regard. The person being replaced is always powerful – a member of royalty or a mafia don – and usually a taciturn, distant type, while the person stepping in is always moonphat and slightly stupid, with a golden heart. We also like to make the masquerading imposter an actual performer: Shanno in Raja Jani was a street dancer; Amitabh in the original Don sang for his supper; even Ranvir Shorey in Mithya (Rajat Kapur's savvy spin on Don) was a struggling actor.

Prem Ratan gives us all of these – there's a solid double role (with two Salmans, no less), a solid imposter narrative (with a kingdom and a rajkumari at stake), and a solid class angle, with the rich Salman a prince and the poor Salman a Ramlila performer from Ayodhya. Sooraj Barjatya is of course keen to play on all things Salman. So the film is crafted to fit his ‘Prem’ persona, that particular combination of heart and brawn with not too much brain that dates back as far as Barjatya's own Maine Pyaar Kiya (1989), and which was crucial to other huge Salman-Sooraj hits like Hum Aapke Hain Kaun and Hum Saath Saath Hain. It is also helpfully up-to-date with his more recent hit Bajrangi Bhaijaan – if he played a Hanuman bhakt in that, he is a Ram bhakt here. The wonderfully subversive nalli-nihari song of Kabir Khan's film is here replaced by a song in praise of barfi and sundry other mithai. Barjatya's vegetarianism runs so deep that even when the impostor Salman fries up some real food on the sly, what his “secret dhaba” serves up is Veg Korma, Tandoori Chhola and Butter Bhindi.

Salman, I must grant, is supremely entertaining – both as the new-age yuvraj who plugs his headphones in and falls asleep in his horse-drawn carriage so as to be catapulted off a cliff and out of the movie for the most part, and as the actor-imposter who takes it upon himself to woo back everyone the real yuvraj has managed to alienate over the years, including the tragically mistreated half-sisters (Swara Bhaskar and Aashika Bhatia), the misguided younger brother (Neil Nitin Mukesh), and even the miffed fiance (Sonam Kapoor).

As for the film, it is exactly what you expect from Sooraj Barjatya – a generously weepy dose of family love, combined with natkhat-Naarad style humour (think jokes about the yuvraj skinny-dipping as a child) and a super-coy heroine. The chemistry is what can be expected under the circumstances, suffice it to say that Barjatya trots out again the old MPK trope of the short dress worn in secret for the lover, and he murders Mughal-e-Azam by having Sonam lay herself down on a bed of flowers and demand that Salman write on her back with a feather.

The raajkumari is a spectacularly fluffy creature, but with a heart of gold, as Barjatya heroines are wont to be. The fact that this heart of gold consists in her descending – literally from a helicopter – to dole out relief supplies to ‘her’ people, is something I can barely describe with a straight face, but then this is clearly how the noble rich behave. There are moments of stunning misogyny, as when the philandering late maharaja is cast as a victim of his squabbling wives: “Auraton ke jhagdon ne jaise maharaj ka dil hi tod diya”. But from an actor-filmmaker team whose interviews are all about every family needing a patriarch, I expected nothing more. So in fact, I ended up being surprised when the swabhimani step-sisters are offered their share of the kingdom (of course, they do not accept), and even more surprised by the final scene, when the heroine isn’t packed off with the wrong Salman. But replay that scene in your head again, and you will hear the word ‘gift’ very loudly indeed.

But all this somehow seemed quite by the way while I was watching the film. I watched Prem Ratan for the crazed camera angles, the secret fort passages with flickering flames, the fencing maharajas and collapsing sheesh mahals. Barjatya's dialogue makes heavy weather of childhood, but he does manage to provide something like a return to it.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Nov 2015

The big, bad Indian wedding

Today's Mirror column:

Even as we (and much of our cinema) continue to bask in the reflected revelry of the band-baaja-baaraat, a few films are beginning to suggest that something is rotten in the state of the shaadi.

When we first meet the eponymous heroine of Dolly ki Doli, she seems sweet as saccharine, pushing her Jat boyfriend away with convincing good-girl-ness as he moves in for a kiss, even as she bats her eyelashes jauntily and eggs him on to confront her ex-army dad. Within twenty minutes or less, the full family drama has unfolded, the shaadi has taken place, and the groom and his parents are waking groggily up to a house emptied of all its valuables. Because Dolly is not what she seems - she may tailor herself perfectly to play the part of the sundar susheel agyakari bride, mildly tweaked to fit different families, but she is actually on the Delhi Police 'Wanted' list under the tag of 'Looteri Dulhan'. 

The film starts well but gets repetitive, Sonam Kapoor tries but really just isn't capable of providing interiority for a complicated character like this one, and there are liberal loopholes in the plot. But what I'm interested in here is the fact of why the idea of a bride-who-wasn't feels like such a particularly good one. 

Nearly a hundred years after Margaret Mitchell created Scarlett O'Hara, there's still something powerfully subversive about a girl smart enough to reel in the boys hook, line and sinker, simply by letting them think they're smarter. But what makes Dolly's triumphs so astonishingly satisfying is watching her sheath her claws as the ostensibly obedient, repressed creature a good bahu is meant to be, only to let it rip at the mummyjis when the time comes. And unlike real life, or a saas-bahu serial, there isn't half a lifetime to wait: in every case, payback time is just the morning after. 

But wait, they haven't done anything to Dolly, so what is she paying them back for? Aren't these boys and their families just innocent dupes? Ah, therein lies the rub. The success of Dolly ki Doli, like Habib Faisal's Daawat-e-Ishq (2014), depends on it being commonly understood that marriage in India is a market, and a market loaded so heavily and unfairly in favour of the bride-takers that the bride-givers are being driven to illegalities. 

Daawat-e-Ishq established the unpleasantness of Indian bride-takers with its very first scene: the sour-faced mother-in-law-to-be demanding unpayable amounts of dowry, even as the grotesquely out-of-line son quizzes his prospective bride (Parineeti Chopra) about her sexual experience. 

To our great joy, Chopra's feisty Gullu kicks that lot out of her house, and several other arranged marriage parties. But when a boy she's actually in love with turns out to be no better than the rest, Gullu decides that hereon, she's going to be the one doing the duping. This leads up to the film's most entertaining sequence, as the lower middle class mall salesgirl and her law clerk father (Anupam Kher) pretend to be a Dubai-returned heiress and her millionaire dad - fictitious prize bait, in effect, for greedy dowry-seekers. 

Faisal's film succumbed to a love story as its resolution, pitting the angry-at-the-world Gullu against the genuinely in-love-with-her Taru (Aditya Roy Kapur) and forcing Gullu to melt. Dolly ki Doli doesn't do that, but it does serve up a half-baked back-story about having been stood up by a bridegroom as part-explanation for Dolly's life as a trickster. There is a faint echo here of Queen, another film from last year where being ditched at the wedding mandap ends up being the trigger for a till-then-innocent young woman to turn her life around. 

Queen is probably the most well-conceived of these films, perhaps because it doesn't set out to have a sting in its tail -- and so we're not disappointed when all Kangana Ranaut's Rani does to her prospective mother-in-law is to tell her she isn't coming along to join the stuffy life of her stuffy household anytime soon. 

Dolly, unfortunately, is made to mouth much more radical sounding lines as "I'd rather be in a real jail than in your shaadi ka jail", which Sonam Kapoor doesn't quite make believable, even when the film steers successfully clear of a romantic cop-out ending. 

Daawat-e-Ishq deprived us of an individual villain in the end, by gifting Gullu a young wealthy man who loves her for herself. But like in Dolly, there was some uncomfortable laughter in the cinema as people watched their money-grabbing, son-inflating, bride-taker selves held up to ridicule. Whatever one thinks of the ethics of Gullu and Dolly, Hindi cinema is onto a malaise that's real. And laughter might be what makes the medicine go down.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Jan 2015.