The doctor as sufferer

My Mirror column, sixth in my series on films about doctors:

Based on AJ Cronin’s famous 1937 novel The Citadel, Vijay Anand’s medical melodrama Tere Mere Sapne (1971) casts doctors as the ailing ones

Like several of the films I've written about in recent weeks, Vijay Anand’s Tere Mere Sapne (1971) had as its protagonist not a doctor, but the medical profession itself. And thus, perhaps necessarily, several doctors. The director's brother Dev Anand may have supplied the film's star quotient (as the rather unimaginatively named hero Dr Anand), but within the film's opening ten minutes we meet three other doctors. These are the characters that actually give us the lay of the land

First up is Dr Anand's medical batchmate, who delivers the first line of dialogue in the film: “Jise tum aadarsh kehte ho, usse main paagalpan kehta hoon [What you call principle, I call madness].” He suggests establishing a moneymaking practice in the city together, but the idealistic Anand mocks him for being a businessman instead of a doctor - and leaves for a remote mining village. The second doctor we meet is the ageing Dr Prasad (the marvellous Mahesh Kaul), employed by the mining company for 35 years, but now so ill that he hires younger doctors as ‘assistants’ to work in his stead - while his paranoid wife attempts to keep his illness a secret. The third doctor is also interesting: Dr Prasad’s other assistant, one Dr Jagannath Kothari, played by Vijay Anand himself. A gynaecologist with a fancy degree from London, Jagan now spends most of his waking hours drinking himself into a stupor.

What is common to these very different characters – and what eventually comes to drive our hero as well – is money, or the lack of it. The idealists are led by the old Dr Prasad, who has spent a lifetime in the service of poor mine workers, but without being able to realise his dream of improving the medical facilities in the area. The unruly-haired Dr Jagan, meanwhile, is only on his way to middle age, but already embittered by the bureaucratic and other restrictions that kept a young doctor from rising in a socialist India [these are complaints about the system that continued to appear in later films I’ve written about, like Bemisaal (1981) and Ek Doctor Ki Maut (1989)]. Our hero arrives in the village full of reformist zeal, initially even managing to rouse Jagan out of his alcoholic self-pity - but his honesty and hard work are of no avail either in his career, or when he finds himself up in court against a powerful rich man.

Thus the corruption of the system – and we’re talking 50 years ago – is blamed for Dr Anand’s moral decline. Which is how the film leads us back to the first doctor it showed us, the one who has no compunctions about using his qualifications as a way to mint money. In the second half, it is his network of fashionable city doctors catering to the rich and famous that an angry Dev Anand becomes part of. “Aaj tak mere aadarsh hi meri daulat thhe, lekin aaj se daulat hi mera aadarsh ban jayegi [Till today my principles were my wealth, from now on wealth will be my principle],” he announces to his increasingly distressed wife Nisha (Mumtaz).

There are many things that relegate this film to its time: the paternalistic take on mine workers as easily misguided/corrupted; the dismissal of the village midwife as necessarily knowing less about delivering a baby than any doctor – even one not trained in gynaecology; the portrayal of Dr Prasad as the generous, open-hearted idealist at the mercy of a small-minded, penny-pinching wife.

But despite these, within its melodramatic dialogue-baazi, something still rings true. And again, as in Anuradha, which I wrote about last week, it is only a doctor who can manage to get through to another doctor. This is true of the pre-climactic scenes, featuring Dr Anand’s restoration to the milk of human kindness. But Tere Mere Sapne’s most moving scene might be between the ailing Dr Prasad and Jagan, his black sheep doctor employee. “Does such a capable doctor not recognise his own symptoms?” asks Jagan. And when the old man says he does, but has decided to wait for death, Jagan’s response is: “Yeh ek mareez baat kar raha hai, doctor nahi. [This is a patient speaking, not a doctor.]” This exhorting of the doctor to a special status recurs through the film, as for instance when a famous actress (Hema Malini in a fetching part) tells Dev Anand to cheer up because “if a doctor speaks like this, what will the patient do?”

The doctor in Hindi cinema, it seems, must not only carry the god-like mantle of giver of life, but hide his own emotional travails. The mantle is a veil.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Oct 2020.

Out of syllabus

My Mirror column, the second in a series on films about doctors:

Ek Doctor Ki Maut's questions about the life of science seem even more urgent three decades later, in the year of the coronavirus

 

The sharpest revelation in Ek Doctor Ki Maut comes sheathed in a conversation that's almost funny. A reputed Kolkata paper has just published the news that the film's titular protagonist, Dr Dipankar Roy (Pankaj Kapur), has created a vaccine for leprosy. The report also mentions that one of the interesting possible side-effects of the new vaccine might be to reverse female sterility. The news causes a stir: Dr Arijit (Vijayendra Ghatge), who is Dipankar's classmate and childhood friend, receives a visit from a senior gynaecologist called Dr Ramanand (Vasant Choudhury). Settling into a chair in Dr Arijit's chamber, Dr Ramanand launches into a tirade against what he considers Dr Dipankar's audacious bluff. How can an ordinary MBBS, a doctor in a government hospital with no private practice or fancy degree – like Ramanand or Arijit – have invented a world-altering vaccine? But Ramanand's suspicions about Dipankar reach their crescendo when he turns to Arijit, volume dropping slightly to convey his absolute horror: “Jaante ho, woh gaana gaata hai?”

An unperturbed Arijit responds first with humour: “Yes, and with a harmonium, too!” But when Ramanand continues to look appalled, he shifts tack, listing great scientists with artistic hobbies: Einstein played the violin, Satyen Bose the esraj, while Dr Homi Bhabha painted. Ramanand is far from convinced. He displays shock that Arijit would equate Dipankar with such certified geniuses – and in the film, that's where the conversation ends.

But the exchange seems to me to encapsulate a great deal about the crisis of education in India, a malaise inextricably entwined with the social and political mess we find ourselves in, 30 years after. What do I mean? Let me draw out the connections. Dr Ramanand, the man who decides to bring Dipankar down, is a reputed gynaecologist, which might lead one to believe he is a man of science. At the very least, as a medical expert, one might expect him to have a professional investment in health. But his reaction to a vaccine that might save millions is not enthusiasm, or even a sceptical intellectual engagement. Rather than the marvellous possibility of medical advancement, he responds only to the source of that advancement. And in his mind, Dipankar ticks none of the boxes by which our system measures achievement: exams, marks, degrees – all ways to fetch a higher price in a marketplace of status.

Ramanand's scorn for Dipankar's musicality further establishes the hierarchical nature of this social-educational marketplace. Sinha doesn't spell it out, but doctors, engineers and now MBAs see themselves tied for top spot in a modern Indian educational caste system – with the arts at the bottom. A doctor interested in music is either miscegenation or proof that he isn't really deserving of his place at the top.

In this stultifying celebration of mediocrity, there is no space for genuine questioning. The film suggests two possible directions in which such an instrumental system can push a seeker of knowledge. He might find his way out of the morass early: so where Arijit set his mind to achieving a first class, Dipankar barely passed. “Kehta thha, syllabus ki kitaabon mein kya rakha hai yaar? Syllabus ke baahar ki duniya hi toh anjaani hai, aur anjaani cheezein hi toh interesting hoti hain.” But too questioning a seeker might also be pushed to the margins, treated not just with suspicion but disbelief, humiliated by those the status quo serves. So when the research Dipankar has conducted in his barebones home-made lab attracts international attention, his health ministry boss does all he can to scotch it, from actively stymying foreign inquiries to transferring Dipankar to a remote rural area.

Pankaj Kapur brings to his turn as Dipankar a vivid passion for his work, both its intellectual joys and its grand scope for social improvement. It's worth noting that the director, cinematic giant Tapan Sinha, studied physics at Patna University and later earned an MSc from Rajabazar Science College, Calcutta, while his son Anindya Sinha is a primatologist at NIAS in Bengaluru, with degrees in botany and cytogenetics. The film features a science-loving journalist called Amulya (a very young Irrfan Khan), who has a PhD but realises he isn't cut out for research and can better serve science by bringing it to public notice – a proxy for the filmmaker? Amulya's journalism, however, cuts both ways, bringing Dipankar acclaim, but also accusations of sensationalism – and already, in 1990, Sinha shows us an editor unwilling to go against the government because “Akhbaar vigyapan pe chaltein hai, vaigyaanik pe nahi”.

Although globalisation and the internet have increased access to information, doing science in India today is possibly more, not less, impeded by political pressures. Ek Doctor Ki Maut remains a memorable film about the scientific life, and it's powerfully resonant in 2020. In one memorable scene, Dipankar tells his long-suffering supportive wife Seema (Shabana Azmi) that the stars often seem to him to berate humans, wasting our time fighting each other on our little planet. “Insaan hone ka itna ghuroor, itna ghamand. Insaan ka dimaag, insaan ki buddhi kitna kucch jaanti hai hamaare baare mein?” In these last 30 years, humans have only to have grown in our hubris, our attempts to harness nature creating forms of resistance we can barely understand.

As we grapple with a new virus, can we start to imagine a science whose questions serve the universe, rather than  instrumental answers that supppsedly serve the human race? Our current goals may just cut the planet short.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 Sep 2020.

A Dormant Volcano

My Mirror column:

Mrinal Sen's Chorus, 25 years after it was made, is a chilling reminder of how long India has spent making strides in the fake solutions department -- while letting the real problems fester.

Utpal Dutt in a still from Chorus 

Between 1970 and 1973, the late Mrinal Sen made three explicitly political films that together came to be known as the Calcutta Trilogy. Speaking to his biographer Dipankar Mukhopadhyay, Sen later said, “After Bhuvan Shome I found the smell of gunpowder in Calcutta's air something I could neither dismiss nor avoid.” Interview, Calcutta 71 and Padatik were almost documentary in their realism, with the Naxal-riven Calcutta of the 1970s brought to the screen with real footage of bomb blasts, firings and demonstrations.

Chorus, too, was concerned with the state of the nation, but it took a different aesthetic tack. Right from the opening scene, when Robi Ghosh appeared seated on a high white throne amid a circle of white-clad sages, it was clear that Sen had made a conscious departure from his previous work. Then Ghosh, already a recognisable comedian, broke into a kirtan, a Vaishnava-style devotional song, its deceptively genial rhythms carrying a chillingly sardonic message. “Once upon a time a king sat in his court and said to his wise men, show me a land where there is no want. Replied the pandits promptly, if there were no want, then there would be no God.” The song ends with the darkest line, “Abhaab rochen jini, tini shoktimaan [He who creates want, is the powerful one]”.

From this profound and cynical vision of religion and religiosity, we descend to another fictional milieu – a grand palace with a revolving surveillance camera atop it, within which a suited-booted man is handling two telephones in order to keep the crowd at the gates under control. As happens often in the Calcutta Trilogy films, words flash upon the screen. “SITUATIONS VACANT. USE PRESCRIBED FORMS TO APPLY. FORMS RS. 2”. 

Back inside the building, we hear the cigarette-holding executive in a tie and shirtsleeves calmly order large numbers of extra forms to be printed, “Accha, chakri dite na paren, form to dite paren [Accha, you may not have jobs to give, but you can give forms]... And we're earning money from them anyway.” Cut to Utpal Dutt, playing a senior bureaucrat in a Mrinal Sen film for the second time after Bhuvan Shome, though the tenor of the role could not be more different. He seems urbane and benevolent, even reasonable, until he is informed that the crowd is getting restive. Then the camera captures his shrieking transformation in ruthless close-up: “What is security doing? Control!” We hear the sound of marching boots in the distance, an effect that recurs through the film as a symbol of state repression.

Then we see a serpentine queue, in a white expanse outside what looks a lot like the Reserve Bank of India building, with a disembodied voice on the megaphone announcing that the counter will only open at the allocated time of 10am. A wave of disappointment runs through the queue. The murmurs are followed by a sarcastic commenter singling out an oldish gentleman for having lined up. The jostling spirals out of control. Grenades are thrown. The old man falls, his glasses crashing to the floor. The word “Attention” repeats on the megaphone, sounding more and more like “Tension”.

A journalist has appeared to capture the chaos, clicking away, even climbing up and down for better angles. What Sen produces here is an early cinematic indictment of the news media. The journalist witnesses the scene, never intervening. When a man in the queue asks if all law and order has been abandoned in the country, he replies casually: “There's a war on. How can there be law and order? This isn't a game of cricket, is it?”

He does record three different characters at the scene – the old man, a young rural man, and a young college-going woman -- whom the film then follows into the arenas of their individual lives, adapting the documentary form interestingly. The film has other threads running in parallel, all a little surreal. In one, a crafty village pradhan called Chhana Mondol manages to hide his corruption and his rice-smuggling from the powers-that-be, and tells his beholden job-seeking nephew to literally go underground. In another, a millworker called Mukherjee becomes a traitor to his union, drunkenly declaring that it is his administration now.

Meanwhile, having received 30,000 applications for 100 vacancies, the bureaucrats holed up in their fortress start to imagine a countrywide conspiracy to overthrow them. Utpal Dutt's character calls in the police, who randomly start to harass 150 of the job applicants. “We are seated on a volcano. We must do something to survive. But we need some kind of excuse, a provocation.” Dutt yells. “Why the hell don't they provoke us?”

The inspirations for Chorus were many, including an actual queue of over a thousand people Sen witnessed in Dalhousie Square in Calcutta. Sen's fantasy of a tyrannical state disconnected from a jobless people left even his regular audiences baffled, though it won several National Awards and prizes at Moscow and Berlin. In a truly remarkable instance of life imitating art, the Emergency was declared less than a year after Chorus released.

Sen was prescient. But nothing ended with the Emergency. Twenty-five years later, our queues of job seekers remain as desperate. Only the megaphones have grown louder.  

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Feb 2019

Book review: The Revenge of the Non-vegetarian

A book review for Scroll:

Upamanyu Chatterjee’s new novel is a minimalist study of revenge (and features Agastya Sen’s father). 

Speaking Tiger Books, June 2018. 128 pp, Rs. 350.

Upamanyu Chatterjee’s most recent book, The Revenge of the Non-vegetarian, is a sharp departure from his previous work – in the best ways. His earlier predilection for excess has been pared down into something almost unrecognisable: a tautly told tale which prizes control rather than the lack of restraint, its humour confident enough to be buried below the surface instead of being perpetually paraded for laughs. At the age of 59, exactly thirty years after the publication of his first (and best-known) novel, Chatterjee might finally have stopped needing to shock.

His debut, English, August (1988) was an India book that got off on the idea of not being one. Its bored, horny young IAS officer protagonist Agastya Sen, having been forced out of his tiny Westernised urban pond into the terrifyingly unfamiliar ocean that is the Rest Of India, responds with deliberate flippancy to everything the respectable middle class world would have him take seriously. Sample dialogue: “I’d much rather act in a porn film than be a bureaucrat. But I suppose one has to live”.

Inside Agastya’s brain, everything is either sexual or scatological. So his cook’s surprise at being asked to bring milk is “as though Agastya asked for his wife’s cunt”; when asked what his name means by the District Collector, he wants to say it is Sanskrit for “one who shits only one turd every morning”, and so on. Several of Chatterjee’s later books, like The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000), and Weight Loss: A Comedy of Sexual and Spiritual Degradation (2006), continued to cultivate this quality of deliberate affront to decorum, and circle around the world of Indian bureaucracy.

The father of principles

With The Revenge of the Non-Vegetarian, Chatterjee returns – again – to the figure of the city-bred Indian bureaucrat posted in a remote small town. Only this time, the protagonist is not Agastya Sen but his father Madhusudan Sen, ICS. The senior Mr Sen first appeared in English, August, writing serious advice-filled letters to his dissolute, incorrigibly cynical son. In Non-Vegetarian, we meet him at at an earlier stage of his life: he is the newly appointed Sub Divisional Magistrate of Batia, in the period just after independence.

He leads the recognisably dull life of the bureaucrat in a provincial posting, surrounded by punkhahs, peons and other eavesdropping functionaries. His daily stimulation, such as it is, consists of the walk back from the magistrate’s court to his Civil Lines bungalow, followed by a glass of Cutty Sark whiskey and a single Gold Flake cigarette. Unlike his future son, however, Madhusudan Sen is the opposite of dissolute, cynical, or confused.

Chatterjee’s crisp telling cannot be accused of something so florid as nostalgia – and yet there is a lingering sense here of a finer, uncorrupted past. At this previous point in the history of the nation-state, Chatterjee seems to suggest, the very same conditions that produced an Agastya could (and did) produce the principled pillar of bureaucracy, upright and correct.

The meating point

But Sen does have desires that he is unafraid to voice. Soon after his arrival in Batia, when he learns that his official residence on Temple Road is part of an unofficial no-meat zone because of its geographical proximity to the town’s resident vegetarian deity, he devises a complex arrangement to get himself a non-veg meal every evening.

If Madhusudan Sen is “both cautious and intelligent”, a highly educated man with a commitment to justice, a servant of the people, the other figure who occupies centre-stage in this 124-page novella might be seen as his social, intellectual and moral opposite. Sadly, Basant Kumar Bal, servant to the six-member Dalvi family, is not someone whose interiority we learn much about. At one point in the book, we are told that Bal “did not wonder what was going on in the world beyond [the walls], whether anyone remembered him. He was not that kind of human being.”

Chatterjee does allow Bal one monologue that might gain him our understanding, if not our empathy – and that understanding is routed through Madhusudan Sen’s. Fittingly, it is about the eating of meat. “They always ate well,” says Bal of his late employers. “They had non-vegetarian almost every day, saab, goat or chicken or fish or egg. They ate like rakshasas themselves and always left only two pieces of meat in the pot, one each for the sister-in-law and her daughter.”

The desire for meat is all the sahib has in common with the servant, the judge with the accused. It is a delicious premise, and one that Chatterjee manages to manoeuvre perfectly towards a wicked, satisfying conclusion. Like a well-made mutton curry, this is a book whose pleasures are dependent on the attention you give it. Don’t eat while you read.

To see this review as it was first published online: see Scroll, 4 Aug 2018.

Lifted Loosely from Life

My Mirror column today:

True heroes behind Airlift are more super than its star, but babus aren't really the stuff blockbusters are made of.

Raja Krishna Menon's Airlift, which depicts the evacuation of 1,76,000 Indians from Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion, is a rare film to emerge from the Hindi film industry. For one, it is a period film about an event that took place quite recently - 25 years ago is not long in historical time - and yet has been almost completely forgotten. Second, it is a film that tugs at patriotic heartstrings without having to unite us against an enemy: its best bits depict the panic of a population stuck in another country's war. And third, despite its narrative celebration of one man's heroism (backed by casting a major Bollywood star like Akshay Kumar), the screenplay crafted by Raja Menon, Suresh Nair, Ritesh Shah and Rahul Nangia is never bombastic. This in itself, in these times of fist-pumping jingoism, is something to be thankful for.

But Airlift plays fast and loose with the facts. In a detailed 2011 interview with the Indian Foreign Affairs Journal (IFAJ), K.P. Fabian, who was head of the Gulf Division of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) during the First Gulf War, has described the complicated logistics of the actual evacuation, demanding multi-level cooperation between Indian ministries, diplomats in Kuwait, Iraq and Jordan, and the governments of these countries. He talks of how a Cabinet Sub-Committee was formed, consisting of representatives of External Affairs, Civil Aviation, Finance and Defence Ministries, and headed by IK Gujral, then India's Minister of External Affairs. "[T]hanks to the excellent rapport between the MEA and Civil Aviation Ministry, we did not waste time in routine writing of notes," Fabian has said. "For example, if there was a message from our Embassy in Amman that there were four thousand evacuees, all that I had to do was to make a call to the Secretary or the Joint Secretary concerned in the Civil Aviation Ministry. I could be sure that the necessary number of planes would leave in hours."

This account could not be more at odds with the film's version of events, in which the Indian government's efforts are minimal, and spearheaded by a lone bureaucrat who isn't even in the Gulf Division. The mild-mannered Sanjeev Kohli (nicely played by Kumud Mishra) just happens to pick up the phone when Ranjit Katyal calls the MEA.

Of course, an interview in the Foreign Affairs Journal is likely to credit the bureaucracy over other agencies. But KP Fabian's extraordinarily fine-grained account of an operation that took place 21 years before the interview suggests that he and other bureaucrats did have a much greater role to play in getting those hundreds of Air India flights off the ground than the film would have us believe. Gujral, too, took a strong interest, his Kuwait visit 12 days after the invasion even becoming a way for some Indian citizens to return. It seems rather grudging, then, for Airlift to depict the relevant minister as stalling for days, the whole MEA taking no interest in what has mysteriously become Kohli's cause.

The film does not entirely deny its fictiveness. It states, for instance, that the character of Ranjit Katyal (played by Akshay Kumar) is an amalgam of two real-life businessmen in Kuwait who were part of the effort: Mathunny Mathews and Harbhajan Vedi. Director Raja Menon has gone on record to explain why he did not make the much-better known Mathews, locally legendary by the name 'Toyota Sunny', the primary model for his character.

"As I have not lived in Kerala, I can't make a Malayalam film. From the first draft it was a Hindi film and for that I picked the North Indian character." Unsurprising though this choice may appear at first glance, it also seems a pity, because recent interviews with Mathews' family members (in the wake of Airlift's release) make it clear that the film's narrative draws a great deal on Mathews' real-life efforts. Setting up a camp for Indians in the premises of a school, for instance, or planning for the movement from Kuwait to Jordan: these were real things Mathews did.

But the film loses out on the specificity of Mathews' experience. The communication Mathews kept up with the Indian authorities, for instance, was not on landline phones but on HAM radio. The hundreds of private buses used to ferry people to Amman - seen many times in the film without explanation - could only be organised by Mathews' effective negotiating, in which his auto industry experience was crucial. The cinematic need for a heroic figure is understandable, but why flatten real details to create a generic one?

The film also makes it seem that the Indian Mission in Kuwait upped and left to save themselves. In fact, Saddam Hussein had made it a condition of safe Indian evacuation that all high-ranking diplomats should first leave Kuwait. The only senior bureaucrat left was the head of the Tea Board, Ashoke Kumar Sengupta. Made Officer-in-Charge of the Indian Mission from August 20 to November 7, 1990, Sengupta became an unlikely hero. His task was to handle the paperwork and selection of candidates to go to Amman, dealing with everything from requests to store personal gold to women faking pregnancies to get priority. Sengupta is another real-life hero whose story the film ignores.

The makers of Airlift have been unapologetic, saying that a fiction feature cannot be tied to facts. Menon has said that the film for him is about "[Katyal's] journey and his realization that finally it (India) is home". But given how little "India" does to help him and his fellow-refugees, the film's rousing patriotic climax seems truly fictitious.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 31 Jan 2016.

How to be a Leading Lady

Yesterday's Mumbai Mirror column:

Two new films this week offer compelling portraits of women in power. But must gender roles be copied rather than changed? If we can't beat them, must we join them?

Something interesting is going on at the cinema this week. Two wonderfully dissimilar films -- one a mainstream Bollywood production house attempting a songless policier, the other trying to undercut documentary's dull image with colourful characters and music -- give centre stage to women in positions of authority. Pradeep Sarkar's pacey crime drama Mardaani stars Rani Mukerji as a Mumbai Crime Branch cop, while Deepti Kakkar and Fahad Mustafa's documentary Katiyabaaz is staged as a face-off between Loha Singh, the power thief of the film's title, and Ritu Maheshwari, an IAS officer trying to reform the dysfunctional Kanpur Electricity Supply Company (KESCO). 

Considering it's a Yash Raj production and a star vehicle for the Chopra family's new bahu, Mardaani has generated rather little buzz. Perhaps that's unsurprising: it's a hero-less film and contemporary Bollywood -- and our male-dominated box office - clearly rations out bhaav along gender lines. But the title has also put off many members of the film's would-be audience, who are annoyed by the idea that a woman's strength must necessarily be couched as her masculine side. 

Mukerji has defended the title, implying that we should read it not as literal but literary, since it's taken from Subhadra Kumari Chauhan's poem about the valiant queen Lakshmibai, who famously rode into battle against the British in 1857: "Khoob ladi mardaani woh toh Jhansi wali rani thhi". Mukerji spent her childhood in Jhansi, and her father (filmmaker Ram Mukerji) liked reading the poem to her, whether or not he actually named her after it. 

But there's no getting away from the gendered signals sent out by the title, and watching the film, it's clear that the name is no coincidence. Shivani Shivaji Roy can hand out slaps and cuss words as easily as any man in the force, and she revels in the street display of physical power. Her clothes make no concessions to femininity, not even a kurta. She is either in uniform, or in trousers and collared shirts - and not fitted women's shirts that emphasise her curves. Roy's no-nonsense look is sans make-up. Her hair, though long, is always tied back. She's shown in a sari once. But that opening scene is also the one that establishes her comradely rapport with her all-male team. And how do we know she's one of the boys? Because she's happy to make their kind of jokes: their (male) boss's mood is off, it seems, because his wife yelled at him for forgetting to take her "anniversary shopping". It's as if entering into masculine repartee about ordinary 'wives' is the only way to signal that she isn't one. 

Since the film insists on gender reversal rather than parity, we are not surprised to find that our heroine is partnered by a Bengali doctor husband as inconsequential and vulnerable as countless policemen's' wives and girlfriends from Shool to Seher (let's not even talk about Singham). And though the film nods at Shivani's nurturing side by having her bring up an orphaned niece, she doesn't have children of her own. 

Contrast this with the real-life Ritu Maheshwari, the bureaucrat of Katiyabaaz, who's shown to have two young children and never wears anything but colourful saris. We learn almost nothing about her husband, but neither her domestic life nor her professional one shows any signs of gender role reversal. What also fascinated me about Maheshwari's authority is that it does not depend on her creating a rapport with the men who work under her, but seemingly the opposite -- maintaining a distance. 

Perhaps this has less to do with these women as archetypes of female power and more with the different spheres in which they operate. Both are state functionaries. But for Mukerji's policewoman, the law is an ass. It is something whose limitations must be overcome to provide vigilante justice; while for the bureaucrat, the only means she has at her disposal are legal ones. It is not by swearing like a man that Maheshwari earns respect, but by keeping her voice down and insisting on decorum. In one remarkable scene, a shouting male MLA trying to browbeat Maheshwari is made to leave her office. 

But in the long term, the even-tempered Maheshwari is transferred, while the male MLA wins the election, and presumably retains a hand in Kanpur's dysfunctional political present. Meanwhile Shivani Roy, though she wins her particular battle (a case of child sex trafficking), has to deal with male colleagues' accusations of taking things "too personally". Another time, she's told that she achieves more when keeping her cool: "jab tum shaant rehti ho". 

Political mobilisation in both films is shown to be manipulated rather than representative. I was struck by the honesty of Mardaani's recognition that in the wrong political hands, even the discourse of women's safety (on which the film is itself riding) can be twisted to harass innocent people. All men are not evil, and all women are not innocent. But even this film doesn't seem to understand that if vigilante justice is so dangerous in one instance, it cannot be assumed to be the solution in another. Self-defence is one thing. But is female violence now the only answer to male violence? I completely understand the urge to clap, but I do wish we had something better to clap for.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Sun 24 August, 2014.