Photography Review: One Step in their Shoes

The Passerby, a photo exhibition of Indian street scenes, shows us the worlds we are walking past. 

(A short review essay I did for India Today magazine, on this gorgeous show, mounted in mid-2022.)

The 23 still images on display in PhotoInk’s garden-set gallery space in Delhi’s Vasant Kunj are a balm for tired eyes. The black and white—and certainly over fifty shades of grey—help recuperate from the nonstop ocular assault of lives lived on multicoloured moving screens. But the healing and stillness The Passerby offers come from some- thing more than form. Street scenes picked from the archives of Raghu Rai, Sooni Taraporevala, Ketaki Sheth and Pablo Bartholomew, these formally stunning photographs paint a portrait of an urban India that’s swiftly passing (if not already past). They range from 1970 to the early 2000s, but the pre-liberalisation era dominates, letting a quiet nostalgia wash over us.

The street scene has historically been among the most popular photographic genres, the PhotoInk brochure points out, and is easier now without a heavy, obtrusive camera: “Everyone with a mobile phone is now a street photographer.”

Everyone could be, yes. But we aren’t. It is striking just how little the glory and grimness of our streets enter the artfully arranged world of Facebook or Instagram. Perhaps it should be no surprise. Street photography needs you to be on foot, and to actually look around as you walk. And while the Indian street remains infinitely more interesting than anything the German philosopher Walter Benjamin imagined when writing of the flaneur in 1930s Paris or Berlin, the upper middle class that controls image-making in our digitally-divided republic has withdrawn indoors. India remains full of street weddings and street-side shrines; the poor—of necessity—still work and sleep and fight and make love in the street.

But between Uber/Ola and app-based delivery, urban white-collar Indians needn’t put foot to asphalt, for taxi, auto-rickshaw or groceries. The few who do either make no images, or pirouette and fetishise.

The Passerby yields many insights into our recent past, and how photographers saw it. For instance, beasts of burden are often juxtaposed with motorised transport. An Ambassador and a bullock cart share in Rai’s majestic 1984 Delhi downpour; a white Fiat faces determinedly away from Taraporevala’s 1977 camel on Marine Drive. These animals have disappeared from city streets, as have these vehicles. Gone, too, is the sidecar-style scooter in which a 1976 Shravan Kumar transports his aged parents (Bartholomew’s ‘Family on a scooter’). Taxi drivers no longer nap with doors ajar; they use the car AC.

But much remains the same. Rai and Bartholomew both capture cart pushers to devastating effect, moving mountains with their bodies. Horses stand in symmetry in Rai’s Turkman Gate, their blinkered gazes evoking that of the purdah-clad woman beside them. Hijras still pose performatively, while few women on the street meet the photographer’s gaze— Sheth’s shy mother and child and Taraporevala’s striking tableau of Kamathipura sex workers both needed women behind the lens.

Given our increasingly enclosed present, The Passerby images are not just a way into the past, but a call to the future— what do we want for our streets, and ourselves?

(The Passerby is on view at PHOTOINK, New Delhi, till June 26)

Published in India Today, May 2022. 

Note: Pablo Bartholomew's photographs, included in the show and discussed above, are not available for view on the PhotoInk gallery website to which I have linked above. 

No connection home

(This was my Mirror column on 11 August 2019, six days after the Indian government announced the abrogation of Article 370, stripped Jammu and Kashmir of statehood, and bifurcated the region into two Union Territories -- while simultaneously plunging it into a total communications shutdown that continues indefinitely.)

The innocent Kashmiri child saved from a vengeful, violent future may still work for a Hindi film audience. But is it a delusional hope?

In Aijaaz Khan's Hamid, a CRPF soldier finds himself in an ongoing conversation with a little Kashmiri boy. One day, Hamid calls from outside when Abhay is on his way to disperse an ongoing protest. “I hope you're not with the stone-pelters! Go home!” Abhay yells into the phone. “I don't throw stones,” says Hamid. “Abbu used to say, you throw stones, they will shoot. And stones can't compete with bullets.” “Your Abbu made perfect sense,” the soldier agrees approvingly. “And Abbu also said, only Allah has the right to take away life, no one else,” the child patters on. “Tell me, have you ever taken a life?” The soldier's pleased expression crumbles.

Hamid, which won the National Award for Best Urdu Film last week (and can be streamed online), is built on a one-line premise: when the seven-year-old Hamid connects to Abhay, he thinks he's on the phone with Allah. Why does Hamid so badly want to speak to Allah? To urge him to send back his father, who disappeared a year ago -- and who he has been told is now with Allah.

The film uses the cuteness of its child protagonist in manipulative ways, draws out its one-line premise to excess, and often feels stilted in its performances. But in scenes like the one I described above, it opens up the possibility of conversation. The innocence of the child asking the question forces the adult to take a moment to confront his guilt – instead of responding, as Abhay does the rest of the time, with a torrent of thoughtless anger. In a time when all questions asked by Kashmiris seem only to elicit taunting counter-questions, when both grief and grievance is sought to be angrily bulldozed into compliance, such a cinematic moment is of great value.

The child protagonist is not a new device through which to view a conflict zone, and the effects do not need to be childish or cloying. Think of the marvellous clear-eyedness of Andrei Tarkovsky 1962 classic Ivan's Childhood, of Ziad Doueiri's atmospheric debut West Beirut (1999), Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi's moving Turtles Can Fly (2004) or Yosef Baraki's underwatched Kabul-set film Mina Walking (2015). But Indian cinema hasn't really got there yet, certainly not with regard to Kashmir.

The best we seem to manage is the child poised on the precipice of losing his innocence – which in the case of Kashmir, seems to invariably involve losing him to a violent movement for Azadi. In 2008, Santhosh Sivan directed a film called Tahaan, also named for its child protagonist, and when I went back to watch it this week (it is also available online), I was amazed by how much it shared with Hamid. Sivan's film, like Khan's, centres on a young boy with a missing father, and a grieving mother who hasn't yet given up, but whose finances and hopes are fast dwindling. Unlike in Hamid, the object of Tahaan's cinematic quest isn't directly his father, the 8-year-old spends the film trying to get back his donkey from a merchant (played, interestingly, by Anupam Kher). But like Hamid, Tahaan contains scenes in which the protagonist's mother makes a harrowing journey to identify what might be her husband's corpse, and later, joins a silent assembly of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (the APDP is a real UN-backed human rights organisation founded by Praveena Ahangar).

Sivan's English title for Tahaan was The Child With a Grenade, and his child actor spends a lot of the film being roped into transporting -- and almost throwing -- a bomb. There was a deep disingenuousness to that film, especially the way it staves off the threat of violence to produce an immediate, miraculous justice. Tahaan's delusional ending made it a political travesty in the name of a fable.

Ten years later, Hamid and his mother have given up hope of his father's return. But the film's depiction of their calm acceptance of this terrible injustice may be another sort of delusion.

Talha Arshad Reshi, who plays Hamid, has won the National Award for Best Child Artiste (along with three others). But the total communication shutdown since Monday's announcement of revocation of Article 370 and bifurcation of J&K has meant that Aijaz Khan has been unable to share the news of the awards with Reshi.

In July 2016, during one of the worst shutdowns (after Burhan Wani's death), a ScoopWhoop reporter asked six children in Kashmir what they thought of when they thought of India. 

“India is police who beats boys. I hate India,” said one. “India is a cunning country. They oppress us. If it would have been our own country they wouldn’t have killed so many people. We don’t like to be with India,” said another. “India is tyrant. India kills people and disappears them. I want free Kashmir. I don’t want to be with India or with Pakistan. I am afraid to go out. Policemen can do anything to me. I can’t trust them. They can kill me. I rarely study. And I can’t play outside. Who should I play with? The Indian army men on the street?” said a third.

No Hamid is likely to talk to Abhay. Even if his phone connects again.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 11 Aug 2019.

Who's that on the phone?

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Director Anurag Kashyap's thought-provoking new thriller, Ugly, paints a chilling picture of the world we live in, and technology is the throbbing, ticking time-bomb at its heart.

The prize scene in Anurag Kashyap's Ugly -- the scene people were still discussing as they walked out of the theatre, despite all the harrowing things that came after -- is a conversation about mobile phones. A posse of Mumbai policemen are grilling two men because a third man (whom they were chasing on foot) came in front of a car and died. The first man explains that they were looking for a little girl who had disappeared from a parked car. The other man says, "I went in the other direction, and I was asking this guy if he'd seen her when his phone began to ring, and my friend's face started flashing on the screen, with the words 'Papa calling'..." 

"'Papa calling!'" the inspector interjects scornfully. How is it possible for a phone to show a picture of the caller, he wants to know. He is disbelieving and caustic, and when the harried men try to humour him by explaining as painstakingly and clearly as possible, he is insulted. Do they think he doesn't know that mobile phones have cameras, huh? 

Girish Kulkarni's watchful, fine-grained performance as the cop who switches constantly between performing high status and low, between kowtowing to his boss and rubbing his suspects' noses in the dust, will hopefully establish the actor -- the pivot of such superb, distinctive Marathi films as Deool and Masala -- in Hindi cinema, too. 

Director Anurag Kashyap gets Kulkarni to play the scene for laughs. But it's the kind of nervous giggle that emerges when you're holding your body taut on the edge of your seat: we know we can't afford to laugh at a cop, no matter how technologically illiterate he may seem. Meanwhile, the repeated phrase 'Papa calling' achieves a kind of talismanic power: you can see how it might seem ridiculous to Kulkarni's sort of cop, imbued with the luxuries of class privilege in terms of both technology and language, and yet, in the context of a kidnapping, it has a desperate urgency. 

What Kashyap does with the smart phone here is nothing short of masterful: he makes technology the focus not just of this scene, but of the film as a whole. If there is a recurring motif in Ugly, it is the phone call. 

Kabeer Kaushik's under-watched Sehar, released a decade ago in 2005, was perhaps the first Hindi crime drama to place the mobile phone squarely at its centre. Kaushik's tightly-scripted tale of the Lucknow police's effort to hit out at organised crime was set in the mid-90s, and actually narrated in the voice of the cellular expert they hired to help them conquer the newly-arrived technology that the gangs they were tracking had already acquired. The cell phone expert in mid-90s Lucknow was a mild-mannered college professor with a salt and pepper beard, played memorably as always by Pankaj Kapur. 

Ten years down the line, Tiwariji has been replaced -- the technology expert is now in-house, and a young woman rather than an older man. Policewoman Upadhyay wears the corporate-professional uniform of collared pinstripe shirt tucked into trousers, her hair in a neat bun and her eyes behind black-rimmed spectacles. (This shift of gender is particularly interesting, given that in Sehar, Tiwariji's aversion to the guns that surrounded him when he started working with the police was incorporated into the film's dominant narrative about masculinity). 
But the technology itself has changed much more than the figure of the expert. Ugly's world is the thoroughly wired one we now live in: a tangled web of I-phones, phone-tapping, recording devices, cyber cafes, credit card numbers and internet-based calling devices. 
Unlike in Sehar, where the technology was an artefact for narrative and historical use, in Ugly it is both that and something more profound. It is a marker of class. It is a part of one's identity. And yet it is also an enabler of anonymity. Everyone can be traced to his or her device, but not every transaction can be traced to a person. 
The cell phone, that appears so frequently now in the discourse of safety as an invincibility shield, is so quickly separated from the kidnapped child that you have to wonder how we believe it to be some sort of prosthetic limb. A man can call his friend from the ether of the internet, and use a recorded voice to be someone else. Husbands can track their wives' phone calls. A brother can blackmail his sister, so long as he can disguise his voice. 

We think we use these devices to speak to each other, Kashyap seems to suggest, and yet these devices stand between us as much as they bring us together. It is a powerfully unsettling thought.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

Calling Up a Time

Screen presence: Patanga (1949) and Queen (2014)

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

Landlines to mobiles: The phone has evolved, but its cinematic effect remains strong as ever.

The telephone must be one of the most beloved cinematic devices. Think of the countless films in which the hero/heroine (and we, the audience) hears a murder, or a mysterious voice, after which the line is cut off, leaving them (and us) on tenterhooks. Or think of how the phone became indispensable to filmi love. It lets on-screen lovers conduct secret love lives, pulling landlines into bedrooms, hiding cordless phones under pillows to wait for the late-night call, setting up assignations rife with possibilities for identity confusion. 

In some ways, the experience of using a telephone was akin to the experience of cinema itself. In the words of the cultural theorist Iain Chambers: "Like the city and the cinema, and so many other institutions of modernity, [the telephone] allowed you to be somewhere you were not. Perhaps it allowed you to be someone you were not or someone you hadn't known you were yet." 

Filmmakers loved the telephone because it allowed you to play around with two components of the film medium, the visual and the aural. Between two people having a phone conversation, sound is necessarily present, but the image can be absent or obscured. Or at least, different from what the person on the other side imagines. 

In Hindi films, the telephone has run the gamut from the charming silliness of long-distance romance - Shamshad Begam's 'Mere piya gaye Rangoon, wahan se kiya hai telephoon' for Patanga (1949) - to excitement, even danger - 'Aaj ki raat koi aane ko hai' in Anamika (1973), featuring Helen, a hoodlum and a telephone booth in the rain - until the sound of the phone is itself sexualised ('Telephone dhun mein hasne wali', Hindustani (1997). 

But some of the most effective filmic uses of the telephone have been in domestic space. 

A film I wrote about recently, Kora Kagaz (1973), uses the telephone astutely, both to amplify its themes and direct its plot. The relationship between the inexperienced husband and wife (Vijay Anand's Sukesh and Jaya Bhaduri's Archana) is already splintering when the telephone arrives to drive a deeper wedge between them. An expensive proposition for an underpaid college teacher in the 1970s, it works, first and foremost, as a symbol of class. Archana's busybody of a mother decides her daughter needs a telephone, and she will pay for it if her son-in-law can't afford it. 

The film plays out the installation itself - the digging up of a road, the laying of lines, the decision over where the instrument will be placed in the house - as an upheaval in the household. Later, the phone becomes the embodiment of the unbroken link between Archana and her natal family. But director Anil Ganguly's finest touch is to turn the instrument's persistent tring-tring into an alarm bell of sorts, its shrill ring rupturing the peace of Archana's marital home. 

In accordance with lived reality, the landline in cinema has been replaced by the cellphone. An early cinematic tribute to the cellphone was Kabir Kaushik's Sehar (2005), with its droll subplot about a bumbling professor (Pankaj Kapoor) hired to help the UP Police figure out the new mobile phone technology that gangs are already using. A more recent example is Dedh Ishqiya, where Arshad Warsi woos Huma Qureishi with iPhone banter. 

Some films feature mobiles more than others. But three recent films have been noticeable for their absence. The first is Dekh Tamasha Dekh, which I wrote about last week, is a cleverly absurdist take on the politicisation of religion, and one doesn't want to hold it to dull realist standards. But really, if a film releases in 2014 and doesn't set itself up as a period piece, it cannot show us a world full of landlines and payphones. It is impossible to take seriously now a climax that depends on the cutting off of phone lines. 

The second cellphone-less film is last year's runaway indie hit, The Lunchbox, in which a neglected housewife and a lonely widower make a chance connection. Through the film, the two characters communicate through a mis-delivered lunchbox. The whole plot is dependent on the absence of instantaneous communication. 

The frisson lies precisely in the chanciness, in the will-he, won't-she quality of the message deliveries. A mobile does appear once, but this world of cassette players, neighbourhood shoutouts and handwritten notes is really held out to us as a world without cellphones. But it works, because we are willing entrants into this deliberate romanticisation of an older style of communication. The whole film seems, in fact, a nostalgic tribute to a phenomenon that only existed in the landline world: the cross-connection. 

The third film is Ankhon Dekhi, whose domestic conversations and crises could be described as a throwback to the'80s (there is some resonance with Humlog). But the gathering on the old Delhi terrace has pink-frosted cake. Still, you don't quite miss the cellphones until you see that Bauji's travel agency has computers on every desk. After that, the landline-only house feels contrived. Doubtless, the rift between brothers - based partly on their refusal to call each other - is more convincing without cellphones. But once the thought's in your head, it doesn't leave you: how can they not have mobiles? 

By way of contrast, a recent rift in another Hindi film, between Rajkummar's Vijay and Kangana's Rani in Queen, feels so much more believable because the cellphone is integrally woven into it: the selfie she sends him by mistake, her not taking his calls, his appalled enumerating of his missed calls echo what is now the stuff of our everyday life. A contemporary world imagined without the cellphone, it appears, can no longer ring true.

Post Facto -- Unpacking The Lunchbox

My Sunday Guardian column yesterday:

Some time before The Lunchbox released, I heard two film journalists chatting. "Arrey haan, kab aa rahi hai woh Tiffinbox?" said one. Uproarious laughter followed. "Tiffinbox nahi, Lunchbox, Lunchbox!"

Two weeks later, Ritesh Batra's debut feature about a tentative romance between an ageing clerk and an unhappy housewife opened in India. Buoyed by the backing of Karan Johar as co-distributor and a publicity budget nearly thrice its production cost, the film got a great box-office response. The Twitterati anointed it our Oscar hopeful. But the official selectors failed to follow their lead, and the film became the eye of a storm.

That uproarious laughter came back to me then. It seemed to point to something crucial about the place Batra's wistful film occupies in the zeitgeist. After all, it does have a Hindi name: Dabba. But I haven't seen anyone call it anything but The Lunchbox. This isn't just about the fact that those who can afford to go watch 'Hindi movies' in a theatre are increasingly those we call 'English-speaking', but that plays a role. As does the fact that the Indian social media praise follows this dabba's international route: Cannes, Toronto, Telluride. And might that film-festival success itself owe something to the fact that much of the film is voiced in English, making for a minimally-subtitled film that has a Bandra clerk talk of baingan as "my favourite aubergine"?

Don't get me wrong: The Lunchbox is a lovely little film. But it does tick all the boxes that might appeal to festival audiences: quaint Asian urbanism (Mumbai trains, dabba delivery), Indian home-cooking, romance. It provides local colour, without being demandingly untranslatable.

As British writer Tim Parks recently argued: "[H]owever willing and cosmopolitan a jury may be, a novel that truly comes from a different culture, written for that culture in that culture's language, is a difficult creature to approach... When prizes go to foreign books, they tend to come from authors who are consciously writing toward an international public." The Booker International has gone to books not written in English just once in five times; the IMPAC award only seven times out of 18. But as Parks makes clear, this is not only about language. It's about serving up a culture for Western consumption: "The prize process sucks foreign writers into our tradition. The genuinely exotic is replaced by a palatable exoticism constructed for a global liberal community capable of granting the desired celebrity."

If this is true of the literary marketplace, it's even more true of that category called world cinema. Most Indian films are too 'genuinely exotic' to translate, not just for the reasons usually offered – our love of song and dance – but because our histrionics are pitched higher than anything a Western audience can deal with. But The Lunchbox translates perfectly. It's meant to. Its characters experience sorrow and fear and suspicion and love, but they never confront each other. They have their emotional crises silently. And there are no songs, unless you count the '90s Hindi film numbers that play serendipitously in the lives of both characters, or the dabbawalas singing Gyanoba Mauli Tukaram Tukaram, a Marathi bhakti song to which no subtitles are provided. The dabbawallas' song is Indian atmospherics. It doesn't need to translate.

It's in this context, I speculate, that "tiffinbox" seems so funny. The word "tiffin" is officially English, but the English no longer use it themselves. Outside of India (and British ex-colonies like Malaysia and Singapore), "tiffinbox" is as un-understandable as dabba. But calling that familiar stainless steel container by its everyday Indian name is what comes naturally to most of us. Do we laugh to cover over our subconscious embarrassment? How easily we could have made that mistake ourselves, revealing our untranslated inner selves.

And yet, The Lunchbox does not only cater to its world audience. Yes, it knowingly manipulates the now-global cachet of Bombay dabbawallas. But it is also an affectionate caressing of Indian middle class memory. The time is not mentioned, but it feels like the 1990s. The dabba delivery mistake is not discovered until the husband returns home. In fact the dabba mix-up evokes the old romance of the cross-connection. Neither Ila nor Fernandes has a mobile phone, and in turning that lack into the basis of a letter-writing relationship, the film urges us to think about the intimate pleasures we have so quickly lost. (It is no coincidence that Ila's husband, who does have a cellphone, is too absorbed in it to even register his wife.)

Our nostalgia for a pre-liberalisation India is also stoked by beloved '80s Doordarshan references: if Saajan Fernandes wallows in his wife's video recordings of Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi, the masterful casting of Bharti Achrekar instantly evokes the heartwarming Wagle ki Duniya. As the upstairs Deshpande Aunty who never appears on screen, Achrekar's chatty conversation is not just a reassuring presence in Ila's lonely life but offers the Indian viewer of a certain age the delight of recognition. There are silly, unspoken jokes that only a Hindi movie watcher would get: like the ridiculous incongruity of Irffan's grave Saajan Fernandes being linked to the hangdog Sanjay Dutt, when Ila asks Aunty to play an audio cassette of Saajan.

The Lunchbox turns out to be a rather rare sort of dabba – a desi meal meant for export, but with enough layers for Indian audiences, too.

Published in The Sunday Guardian.