Sisters under their skins

My Mirror column:

Last week’s release Love Sonia, Tabrez Noorani’s cinematic exposé of India’s role in the international sex trade, makes for an interesting juxtaposition to Tikli and Laxmi Bomb.

The two women at the heart of Tikli and Laxmi Bomb, which I wrote about last week, differ in age, background, language, priorities — but are united by a common fate and an understanding of what they’re up against. It is after Putul and Laxmi begin to trust each other that they can forge a larger sisterhood of sex workers. Writer-director Aditya Kripalani’s programmatic zeal can feel cinematically clunky, but his core political premise is irreproachable: the world is run by men and women can only resist if they come together.

Kripalani’s film wants us to recognise sex work as a form of labour, currently carried out under drastically unfair and unsafe working conditions. His dream is a sex workers’ revolution: a krantikari sisterhood that offers both a safety net and entrepreneurial improvements.

At first sight, Tabrez Noorani’s Love Sonia, released last Friday, seems to share Kripalani’s themes: sex work and sisterhood. But it approaches prostitution from the opposite end. Rather than adult women who are making a choice (albeit in straitened circumstances), Love Sonia is concerned with the trafficking of children and young women into the national and international sex trade. In another contrast to Tikli and Laxmi Bomb, the sisters in Love Sonia are biological ones — and the film is about their wrenching separation rather than their coming together. In a plot that underlines Noorani’s focus on unfreedom, an indebted farmer somewhere in the Mumbai hinterland sells Preeti, the fairer of his teenaged daughters, into the flesh trade. The other daughter, Sonia (an affecting Mrunal Thakur), tries desperately to trace her. When that fails, she follows Preeti to Mumbai, but ends up a prisoner in a brothel herself.

The brothels of Mumbai have long been the site of both tragedy and villainy in Hindi cinema, and the Love Sonia version is just as depressing as what we’ve seen before. The claustrophobic small rooms, the blue painted doors, the flimsy partitions, the very young faces with painted red lips all evoke Mary Ellen Marks’ Falkland Road images from the 1970s. But with Sonia’s first cowering view of it, as she slinks past half-naked bodies heaving in dank rooms, Noorani turns this world into something almost biblically sinful, a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah. This vision of the brothel is underscored when one of its long-time inhabitants, the slightly unstable Rashmi (Freida Pinto), tells Sonia her family would have done her “kriya-karam” (her last rites) long ago. “Ab toh bas iss narak ka maja le le (Now you may as well enjoy the pleasures of this hell),” Rashmi says.

Hell has its gatekeepers. In an update of sorts on Sadashiv Amrapurkar’s legendary Maharani in Mahesh Bhatt’s 1991 Sadak, we have Manoj Bajpayee as the brothel owner Faisal, a terrifying presence who swings between quiet cajoling and violent, abusive rage. There is a pattern to Noorani’s male characters. Whether it is the girls’ father (Adil Hussain) at the family level, the village level patriarch Dada Thakur (Anupam Kher in a nicely underplayed but supremely creepy performance), or Faisal as the self-appointed father-figure of the brothel, each of these men claims to be shielding women from what lies beyond. “Baahar yeh jo jaanwar type ki duniya hai, kaun bacha raha hai tujhe usse (Who do you think is saving you from the beasts that make up the world outside)?” Faisal once yells at Sonia. But in fact these men are themselves the source of danger, their protectiveness a mere front for exploitation.

But let us return to sisterhood — and the pressures upon it. What lights up Sonia’s journey is her love for the sister she’s always taken care of. But we also see the dark shadow cast by competition. The widely accepted idea that Preeti is prettier affects Sonia’s belief in her own attractiveness. In one harrowing scene, the spectre of jealousy becomes a wall between the sisters.

Even more complicated are the teenaged Sonia’s relationships with older women in the brothel. The madam Madhuri (Richa Chaddha in a fine performance) and Rashmi both try to win Sonia’s trust, even as they collude with Faisal to break her spirit. But the strings they try to pull also reveal their own status as puppets. Sex is the only bribe they can offer; their seductiveness is a weapon of the weak. Noorani’s is a tragic vision of how women operate in a world so totally governed by men.

The saddest comment Love Sonia makes on the sisterhood theme, though, is when it shows us how women judge each other by the standards men have set. When Rashmi tries to position herself as a surrogate sister, a stand-in for the absent Preeti, Sonia is appalled that her innocent sibling might be equated with a woman she clearly sees as ‘fallen’. “Tumhare jaise bilkul nahi hai woh,” she cries. The madonna and the whore are tragically real stereotypes — even among sex workers.

Some might argue that Noorani ends on a more hopeful note than that. Indeed, some broken bonds between women are revived, and some transformative new ones forged. And yet, it is hard not to read the tragic ends of specific female characters in terms of that disturbingly familiar Hindi movie trope: the fallen woman might atone for her sins, but she would never escape her fate.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23 Sep 2018.

Mean Streets

My Mirror column:

A promising film about sex workers strives to be bleakly documentary while also taking the revolutionary road — and loses its way.

Aditya Kripalani’s film Tikli and Laxmi Bomb, currently streaming on Netflix, has many promising things about it. Based on Kripalani’s own 2015 book, the plot revolves around a group of Mumbai-based sex workers who come together to carry out what they call a ‘revolution against men’ — not by stopping the work they do, but by eliminating the middlemen who control their business.

Just by giving centre stage to a group of sex workers, Kripalani turns away from the long-standing cinematic tradition in which the prostitute/ tawaif/ dancing girl could really only be one of two things: a heartless two-timing vamp, or the golden-hearted receptacle of the hero’s pity and desire. Other than Shyam Benegal’s still unsurpassed Mandi, in which the occupants of a brothel find ways of dealing with the ire of ‘respectable’ society, even Hindi cinema’s non-titillating attempts to give the sex worker a voice have never been able to do without a ‘good guy’, a hero through whose eyes we might view these women sympathetically.

Whether it be Guru Dutt’s idealistic poet ‘accepting’ Waheeda Rehman’s Gulab in Pyaasa, Chandramukhi in all the versions of Devdas, or Rekha in Umrao Jaan, all the way down to Rahul Bose’s encounter with the streetwalker Kareena Kapoor in Chameli and Aamir Khan’s police inspector Shekhawat falling for Rosie (Kareena again) in Talaash, the sex worker has been a figure of romantic fantasy. Her existence on the Hindi film screen has remained about being fascinating to men — if not sexually, then as an object of curiosity.

So it is valuable that Kripalani makes the film’s pivotal relationship one between two women. Putul AKA Tikli (Chitrangada Chakraborty) is young and new to Mumbai’s streets, showing up on the scene with enough spark to reignite the fortyish Laxmi’s (Vibhavari Deshpande) fading hopes. Some of the ways in which the contrast between them is gestured to are perhaps too obvious, like Putul’s high heels, tight jeans and glamorously open hair versus Laxmi’s unchangingly loose, dark-coloured collared shirts at work and aunty-style nighties to sleep in. But both actresses are wonderful, bringing to life both the initial friction between the jaded, no-nonsense Laxmi and the fun-loving, talkative Tikli and their gradual path to friendship.

The fact that Kripalani’s film does not adopt a male point of view is reinforced by having women in many of the technical positions: art direction, cinematography, assistant direction, costume design and editing. It presents these women as sexual beings when they present themselves that way — when Tikli sashays down a hotel corridor, or when Shari lehraos a sari aanchal. When and if the camera dehumanises a woman, it is done very obviously through the eyes of a leering man.

“Andhera apna dost hai,” Laxmi tells Tikli early on, and the film is indeed shot in various degrees of darkness — in alleys, parks, seedy bars, even seedier living rooms and the interiors of cars — punctuated occasionally by neon lighting, as in AT’s auto which ferries the women to work. Something about Laxmi’s harshly tube-lit cubby hole of a room, with almost no furniture and a fading Prabhat Studio poster on the roughly plastered wall, reminded me of the rented rooms in which the dancers lived in Mira Nair’s affecting 1985 documentary India Cabaret.

The bareness of the locations and the handheld, almost jerky, camerawork underline the bareness and rootlessness of these lives. And the style does work, to the extent that the film shows us sex work as the unglamorous drudgery — the work — that it is. It also allows us to move from watching these women treat the police station casually, as a place they’re so used to that they can sit around after a ‘raid’ boredly taking selfies, to being suddenly jolted into the exploitative violence of this ‘workplace’. The normalisation of sex work as labour is matched by the normalisation of its potential violence.

But there is a strange disjuncture between this documentary realism and the heroic, almost epic narrative of the war that the ‘Tikli and Laxmi Gang’ sets out to wage against patriarchy. That melodramatic, almost filmi register appears particularly in the characterisation of Putul and Laxmi: in their tragic backstories, their action sequences, their grandiose plans. There is a Rang de Basanti reference in the dialogue that makes a wink-wink acknowledgement of this aspect, but the film remains tonally disjointed.


The very first scene had shown us Laxmi (Deshpande) waking up to find that the wrist she’d tried to slit at night has only bled painfully, without resulting in her death. “Failure even at suicide,” she mutters in disgust, placing the scene somewhere between tragedy and farce. Sadly, the film never quite figures out which it wants to be.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16 Sep 2018.