A Short Film with a Long Story

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Karishma Dev Dube's memorable 'Bittu', about two little girls, their friendship and a fateful day, makes it to the 2021 Academy Awards shortlist for Live Action Short Films

Last week, even as India's official entry to the 2021 Oscars -- Lijo Jose Pellissery's much-talked-about Malayalam drama Jallikattu -- dropped out of the fray in the Best International Feature category, a 17-minute film by a young Indian filmmaker slipped quietly into the final shortlist in the Live Action Short Film category. Set and shot in Koti village in Uttarakhand's Dehradun district, Karishma Dev Dube's Bittu is a fictional reimagining of the accidental poisoning at a Bihar school that killed 22 children in 2013.

Bittu's entry into the Oscar race owes nothing to Indian officialdom. In 2020, after a great run at prestigious film festivals like Telluride, BFI and Palm Springs, Dube – then a graduate student at New York University -- entered her film for the 47^th Student Academy Awards. Bittu competed with 1,474 entries from 328 educational institutions worldwide to win a Silver medal. That win also made it eligible to compete for the Oscars this year, where it was up against 174 films in its category. Having made it to the current shortlist of ten, Bittu now awaits the announcement of the final five from which the eventual winner will be selected in April.

I first watched Bittu in November 2020, when it was screened online as part of the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF)'s line-up of shorts. At DIFF 2020, I was also in conversation with the film's cinematographer, Shreya Dev Dube, who has worked on Ronny Sen's Cat Sticks and Mira Nair's A Suitable Boy, and happens to be Karishma's older sister. One of the first things I remember asking Shreya about is the almost 'documentary' quality of Bittu's memorable opening sequence, in which the two eight-year-old protagonists, Bittu and Chand, perform snatches from Bhojpuri songs.

Speaking to Karishma on the phone this week, I found myself remarking again at the wonderfully natural performances the film draws from its child actors, particularly Rani Kumari and Renu Kumari, who play the two friends at its core.

Shot over six days in February 2019 as her NYU thesis project, Dube's film has been much longer in the making. She first started writing it in 2014 from what she calls “a place of anger”, not just at the systemic negligence that leads to tragedies of this sort (“It's happened before and it's happened since,” as she put it), but at the kind of unquestioning relationship to authority that is expected of children in India, especially in a rural school setting. She set it aside for some time to make Devi, her second year NYU film, about a young woman who disrupts her upper middle class domestic set-up in Delhi by pursuing an attraction to the household maid.

When she returned to the school poisoning, she found herself writing the script as much around the two girls as around the tragedy. Two substantial filmmaking grants – the first of which, the inaugural Black Family Prize, enabled her to come to India and work to raise more money via a Kickstarter campaign – helped her make the film the way she wanted to. That included working with the children for two and half months in pre-production.

Gender and sexuality isn't foregrounded in Bittu as it was in Devi, but Dube mentions visualising Bittu as a bit of a non-conformist, a girl who doesn't quite fit her traditional gender role: something that the more feminine Chand, for instance, does perfectly. There's also something disturbing about a crowd of adult men tossing coins at two little girls to perform quite raunchy adult numbers with their own gendered politics. “College ki ladkiyan/ maarti hain dhakka, Nahi diya mukka, toh kehti hain chhakka,” goes one, which Bittu embellishes in her unique fashion by pretending to bowl a cricket ball. Chhakka means six, but it's also Hindi slang for a gay/transsexual man. The film's English subtitles correctly press home that latter association, but you do lose some texture in translation. Does Bittu's sporty gesture reveal a gap between the words she uses and what she understands? Or does her gap-toothed grin suggest that she knows why the men are laughing?

As this first scene suggests, Dube's film is subtle, lively and full of layers. It's shot in Uttarakhand, in a classroom full of largely local children, but the two girls at the centre are the children of Bihari migrant labourers who come to work in these hills. The other cast is also a mix: the schoolteacher is played by a professional actor, Saurabh Saraswat (who was so marvellous in Kranti Kanade's underwatched film CRD), but the principal is played – wonderfully -- by Krishna Negi, whom Dube met because her daughter happens to run a local beauty parlour.

Arriving in Uttarakhand with “a pretty fixed script”, Dube managed to find two girls who brilliantly fitted her Bittu and Chand. In her fictional Uttarakhand setting, she found a real connection to Bihar, where the original incident took place. Serendipity has worked in Dube's favour thus far. As Bittu advances in the Oscar race, we can all hope it will continue to.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 Feb 2021.

A Kite for Sore Eyes

My Mumbai Mirror column:

In Hardik Mehta's Amdavad Ma Famous and Prashant Bhargava's Patang, a city's universal passion for kites leaps off the screen in all its infectious energy and deeply immersive spirit

A still from Amdavad Ma Famous (2015), Hardik Mehta's award-winning documentary about the kite-flying festival of Uttarayana that takes place on 14 January in Ahmedabad.

 
“Ek din tum patang ka shauq kar loge, toh zindagi ke saatth saal tak woh shauq poora nahi hoyega [If you get into flying kites even for a day, you'll stay addicted for the next 60 years],” says an old Muslim cleric in Amdavad Ma Famous. “Yeh shauq aisa hai, bahut terrible shauq!” In case the maulana's words haven't convinced you, filmmaker and editor Hardik Mehta cuts from him to the sight of an old woman on a terrace – white sari, white hair in a loose bun, possibly older than the cleric – flying a kite with gusto.

Mehta's glorious 2015 short documentary, which won a host of awards across the world and was declared Best Non-Fiction Film at India's 63^rd National Film Awards, was set and shot during the festival of Uttarayan in Ahmedabad, when the whole city gathers on its rooftops to fly kites. The pivotal character is a young boy called Zaid Khedawalla, whose enthusiasm for the sport borders on the obsessive. Uttarayan is another name for Makar Sankranti, which falls on January 14 or 15 every year, based on the solar calendar. In the days leading up to the festival, Zaid wakes up very early in the morning to scout his neighbourhood for fallen kites. “By 10 am or so, he has gathered enough kites for the day,” says his father, laughing.

The fact that Zaid skips school to fly kites all day is a recurring theme in the film. His father tries to get him to go to class. The maulana tries to get the boys off the roof off the mosque. Mushtaq, caretaker of a bank building in the film's chosen neighbourhood of Astodia, tries to shoo them away, even locking up the terrace on some days. But Zaid, like thousands of other young boys in the city, is incorrigible. “You don't listen to your father, Zaid?” asks the filmmaker. “I do try,” grins Zaid. “But these kites are just too much fun.”

It is one of several charming moments in an utterly charming film. Mehta captures these boys in all their manic energy, but also locates them within the colour and chaos and community of a whole city abuzz with the same zeal – street markets selling varieties of kites, manjha-walas sharpening the thread with ground glass, ancillary products springing up to protect bike-riders from the sharp kite threads that criss-cross the streets at this time. Zaid's father later confesses that he was just as crazy about kites when he was Zaid's age. The crabby Mushtaq, who responds to someone calling the boys artists (“kalakaar”) by labelling them the face of the devil instead, is seen later in the film flying kites himself. When quizzed, his reply is hilarious: “I only fly the kites that have fallen on my terrace”.

Mehta's marvellous aides – he has a truly talented sound designer in Manoj M Goswami, and Alokananda Dasgupta has created a brilliantly uplifting soundtrack – help him make all sorts of other visual and aural connections. When Mushtaq speaks of the kites as bringing out the boys' “wild side”, Mehta cuts to monkeys clambering up and down the terraces, almost exactly in step with the boys. Dasgupta's soundtrack punctuates the bouncy ascent of all sorts of people – large, old, creaky – up roof ladders.

That heartwarming inclusiveness was also very much the point of Prashant Bhargava's lovely 2011 feature Patang, in which an Ahmedabad native, now settled in Delhi, returns to the city after many years during Uttarayan, bringing with him a teenaged daughter through whose fresh eyes we see Ahmedabad's old city. Patang contained one of Nawazuddin Siddiqui's earliest full-fledged performances, as the Ahmedabad-based nephew who bristles at his uncle's sudden descent upon the old family home.

But what is it about kites – other than the obvious and overdone fetishised idea of India as colour – that makes them cinema-worthy? Speaking to the legendary critic, the late Roger Ebert, about his film, Bhargava (who also died, tragically young, in 2015) said, “In India, kite flying transcends boundaries. Rich or poor, Hindu or Muslim, young or old — together they look toward the sky with wonder, thoughts and doubts forgotten. Kite flying is meditation in its simplest form.”

I recently came across a definition of meditation in another film, Matthew Vaughn's 2005 Layer Cake, that makes sense in this context. A man with a passion for high-quality guns says to Daniel Craig's high-stakes drug dealer character: “Meditation is concentrating the front of the mind with a mundane task so the rest of the mind can find peace.”

As you watch the myriad faces in Mehta's film, intensely concentrated on the kite in hand, eyes lifted to the heavens, it suddenly seems entirely clear why these fluttering bits of paper have captured the human imagination for centuries. And we have kites to thank for something else – at least they're not guns.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 Jan 2021

All the perfumes of Arabia

My Mirror column:

Uplifting and devastating by turns, Vinod Kamble’s 2019 debut feature Kastoori (The Musk) is the kind of coming-of-age narrative that Indian cinema needs more of.

The first time we see Gopi’s face, he has just set eyes on a filthy public toilet. For most viewers of Vinod Kamble’s Kastoori (The Musk), the sight of that toilet – the next shot – would likely be enough to make us retch. Or at least make us want to bang the door shut and get as far away as we can. Gopi, however, can’t do that. He must step into the cubicle instead, a broom in one hand and a bucket of water in the other, his face impassive as he gets to the cleaning work he does alongside his mother.

As Kamble’s powerful debut feature proceeds, we see his teenaged young protagonist Gopi do all kinds of jobs that remain unofficially yet inescapably ‘reserved’ for Dalits in India, crucial jobs shunned by caste Hindus for their proximity to dirt and the dead. He helps his father bury unclaimed dead bodies for the police department, he assists other young men from the community in cleaning out septic tanks and, finally, assists a doctor who conducts autopsies.

Kastoori, available to view online till August 2 as part of the 2020 edition of the New York Indian Film Festival, derives much of its verisimilitude from Kamble’s own experiences growing up in a Dalit family of sanitation workers in Barshi village in Maharashtra’s Solapur. As with Kamble’s own life, education seems to offer Gopi the only way out of a poverty exacerbated by caste. But as the film makes sadly clear, staying in school is not easy, precisely under these circumstances.

“Dekhti main tere ko, kaise kaam pe nai aata tu [Let me see how you don’t come to work],” says Gopi’s mother angrily, before tearing up his textbook. Gopi is good at school and wants desperately to continue, but she does not have the wherewithal to support him. “Number aane se pet nahi bharta [Good marks won’t fill your stomach],” she scoffs. He has to earn his keep, and that means leaving school if that’s the only way his father’s job can stay in the family.

Poverty-stricken parents pulling a child out of school to join a caste-bound family occupation has been the theme of at least two previous coming-of-age Marathi films with Dalit protagonists. In Rajesh Pinjani's 2012 release Baboo Band Baja (available on a streaming website), a bartanwali and midwife tries to keep her little son in school, but finds herself battling her husband, who believes his son cannot escape a life playing music at funerals, as his grandfather and father did. In Nagaraj Manjule’s pioneering 2013 debut Fandry (the word means ‘pig’), a teenager from a pig-rearing Dalit agricultural family suffers his father's fatalism alternating with drunken rages. “You won’t die if you bunk one more day!” he says the first time we see him speak to his son.

Caste isn’t too sharply foregrounded in Baboo Band Baja, but there are frequent references that suggest it, such as the father’s angry complaint that band-wallas are always made to wait outside, never invited in. Fandry (also on a streaming platform) is much more upfront about caste: the visibility of Jabya’s ‘polluting’ work outside school instantly cancels out the minimal claims to constitutional equality made inside school walls. Kastoori carries on that necessary, painful task of measuring the Indian state’s promises against what society actually offers – and it does so with quiet aplomb.

The same classmates who shake Gopi’s hand when he wins an essay prize (Kamble makes a point by making it a Sanskrit essay) turn against him after they spy him helping clean a septic tank. “Here comes the sweeper, he stinks,” they murmur. “We should tell the teacher.” But Kamble knows that the schoolchildren holding their noses are only one end of the systemic rot – at the other end is the doctor who insists that the sweeper’s schoolgoing son replace his father, and the activist who sees no irony in a child doing the back-end work for a workshop about Dalit children’s education.

Caught between beaten-down alcoholic fathers and hard-scrabble frustrated mothers, youngsters in these films find other allies. Gopi’s lovely grandmother with the quavering voice is one such. Others find support outside the family. In a plot-line that presages Manjule’s massively successful Sairat (2016), when Fandry’s Jabya gets shyly besotted with an upper caste classmate called Shalu, he confides in the local cycle shop owner Chankya (played by Manjule himself). Close friendships between boys are also central to all these films – Kastoori wouldn’t be half as uplifting as it is without the warmth of Gopi’s close friend Aadim, the son of a Qureishi butcher who also understands what it’s like to be perceived as doing ‘unclean’ work.

Inspired by Iranian cinema’s use of children’s stories, debacles abound – a lost schoolbag in Baboo Band Baja, a crushed cycle in Fandry, a trickster selling fake goods in Kastoori -- while the search for beauty abides. The mythical ‘kali chimni’ (black sparrow) for which Jabya roams the woods in Fandry metamorphoses, in Kastoori, into Aadim and Gopi’s saving up to acquire the legendary perfumed substance of the film’s title. But Kamble ends his film on a remarkable note, silently redefining what beauty means. In a visual homage to the stone-throwing last shot of Fandry, that was itself a homage to the last shot of Shyam Benegal’s Ankur, Gopi flings away the bottle of perfume. Because perfumed beauty would be camouflage, and camouflage is not the answer.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 Jul 2020.

An archive of expressions: On Saroj Khan

My Mirror column for July 5:

The late Saroj Khan created a new kind of dancing body on the Hindi film screen, but she also embodied a link to a history of dance – and of cinema. 

(Images courtesy Ahmedabad Mirror, taken by the photographer Dayanita Singh in the early 1990s)

Saroj Khan, who died on Friday aged 71, has been described in obituaries as a “veteran Bollywood choreographer”. That is an identity she certainly owned. But it doesn’t capture the breadth and depth of her connection to the Hindi film industry, or indeed her role in creating the field she dominated for so long.

Born Nirmala Nagpal in 1948, Khan began as a child actor. Her origin story, which she relates in Nidhi Tuli’s superb 2012 Public Service Broadcasting Trust documentary The Saroj Khan Story (free on YouTube), was as filmi as she clearly was herself. As a toddler, she would dance with her own shadow on the wall. The doctor her worried mother consulted had connections with moviedom, and proposed that a dancing child might be a bankable asset. Her parents, Partition migrants from Karachi, needed the money. The screen name Saroj was to avoid social censure.

Tuli’s film is richly layered, tapping into the enchantment of cinema but never losing sight of its trials. Terrific stories compress several registers of film history. My favourite is one in which Saroj and child star Baby Naaz come down from Maganlal Dresswalla’s shop in their infant Radha-Krishna costumes (for the 1953 film Aagosh), and an old couple bow down to them in devotion. Khan takes a childish delight in the memory. But when we watch her sending her grandchildren off to school, their boringly normal childhood contrasts sharply with hers. “We have an age na, where we are not required as a child star, neither grown-up. That was my age at 10, I was lost,” she tells Tuli. For Khan, 10 was an age of decision-making: “Good friends were there, they told me, why don’t you become a group dancer?” Her dancer friend Sheela laughs at how she’d help Saroj escape punishment for her frequent lateness. A schoolgirlish memory, and yet the two little girls putting on makeup under the Filmistan stairs were at work, not at school. At stake was a job, and a family of five with no other income.

What makes Saroj Khan’s narrative powerful, of course, is that her skill and dedication transformed her from the anonymous girl at the edge of the screen to the one directing the performance. Her life also feels like a link to a fast-receding past, as rich as it was messy. Noticing that she was talented enough to pick up the heroine’s moves, the legendary dance director B Sohanlal made her his assistant. If that gloriously open-ended world allowed a 12-year-old group dancer to become assistant to her 43-year-old boss, it also allowed him to ‘marry’ her at 13. Saroj became a mother at 14. She remained Sohanlal’s assistant from 1962 to 1973, having another child with him before finally parting ways, and remarrying in 1975.

In interviews, Khan described vividly how she learnt that she could not just execute Sohanlal’s directions, but compose her own. Half a century has passed, but each word and gesture was a bodily memory. Khan’s talent was acknowledged by everyone from Vyjayanthimala, the great dancing star of the 1950s and ’60s, to the many directors who had seen her in action. Still, there was nothing automatic about her progress up the ranks in an industry in which only men became dance-directors. Her future in the industry was so insecure that during her years with Sohanlal, she did a nursing course and worked at KEM Hospital, learnt typing to be a receptionist at Glaxo, and even “became a make-up man”, as she puts it, inadvertently pointing to another sphere then exclusively male.

It was after years of C-grade films that Khan finally found acclaim, with dance numbers picturised on Sridevi, in films like Mr. India (1987) and Chandni (1989), and on Madhuri Dixit, in a series of films beginning with Tezaab (1988). Famously, the Filmfare Awards instituted an award for choreography, giving the first honour to Saroj Khan for Tezaab. Kangana Ranaut, paying tribute to Saroj Khan’s contribution to that cinematic era, has been quoted as saying: “Back then when you speak about a superstar actress, you meant a dancer actress. You didn’t mean anything else.” Ranaut is right, but what she doesn’t say is that Saroj Khan was part of the transformation that created the dancer actress. Dance had been part of Hindi cinema from the start, but barring a few (largely South Indian) actresses with classical training, the heroine didn't need to dance. The vamp was enough. But watching Helen had been a guilty pleasure, watching Madhuri was increasingly not.

Paromita Vohra, in a brilliant essay in the book tiltpauseshift: Dance Ecologies in India, has argued that ‘Ek Do Teen’ marks a turning point in the history of Hindi film dance because “a clear heroine figure [appeared for the first time] in a dance that is chiefly sexy, and presented sexiness with a robust, bodily series of steps”. Saroj Khan’s visibility – she went on to win eight Filmfare awards and three National awards for choreography – made Hindi film viewers see that “the body of the dancing heroine contained also the body of the choreographer”. “In doing this,” writes Vohra, “she gathered the ghosts of many forgotten worlds of dance – which had found their way into the darkened corners of Bollywood studios as dance teachers, musicians and extras – into her being, bringing these worlds to a professional place again.”

The history of dance in 20th century India was a history of invisibilisation. A national culture 'cleansed' of its links to tawaifs and devadasis demanded the erasure of sexualness from Indian-style dance, at least on screen. Saroj Khan, beginning as the short-haired Westernised dancer, eventually became an archive of sensual Indian dance on screen.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 Jul 2020.

Note: Linking here to two of my previous pieces on the history of dance in India: a feature essay on tawaifs and how dance was taken from them -- 'Bring on the Dancing Girls' -- and a review of Anna Morcom's book Courtesans, Bar Girls and Dancing Boys: The Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance 

The Remembered Village

My Mirror column (7 June 2020):

A young filmmaker's atmospheric Maithili debut refracts the experience of his family's village home through layers of distance and memory.

Using an old house as the central motif for a film is not a new idea. Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s fine directorial debut Musafir (1957), an under-watched film that I discussed in an earlier edition of this column, made a house and its neighbourhood the common factor in a narrative about three separate sets of tenants. The French director Alain Resnais, better known for spare, intense films like Hiroshima Mon Amour and Night and Fog, used an outlandish 18th century chateau in the Ardennes Forest as the unifying setting for his era-jumping tripartite 1983 film Life Is a Bed of Roses (currently streaming online). More recently, the Ukrainian director Dar Gai’s dubiously named Teen Aur Aadha (2017) built a composite narrative around a 50-year-old Mumbai building in which there had been a school and a brothel as well as families. People leave, houses remain. Some memories don't need a house to dwell in: it can be a car. The Yellow Rolls-Royce, a somewhat overblown, star-studded 1965 film with everyone from Rex Harrison to Shirley MacLaine, had three very different lives linked only by the eponymous car. It was based on a play by Terence Rattigan, who apparently took the idea from a post-war German film called In Those Days, directed by Helmut Käutner, which used the seven lives of a car built in 1933 and dismantled in 1947 to comment on the Nazi era.

But Gamak Ghar doesn’t really remind you of other films. It reminds you of other houses.

Streaming on an online platform for another day, 23-year-old Achal Mishra's debut feature is a quiet love letter to his grandparents' village home in Madhopur, Bihar. Mishra uses a three-part structure, beginning in 1998 and ending in 2019, and the house does allow us to see its owners grow older, change, move away and return. But Mishra is not interested in plot.

His set is the actual house that he visited twice a year as a child, but whose role in even the family’s ceremonial life began to decrease as the grandparents died. His characters – if you can call them that – are fictionalised versions of his own extended family, played by a mixed cast garnered from amongst existing local actors and acquaintances who had not acted before. And his narrative interest is a socio-economic transition that is specific to his own upper caste Maithil Brahmin family as well as familiar to many, many migrant families across India whose connections with the village have grown irreversibly distant, especially in the decades since liberalisation.

What makes Gamak Ghar unusual is its single-minded interest in capturing a certain experience of time and space. Mishra has, in a recent interview, mentioned the writer Amit Chaudhuri as one of his sources of inspiration, and one can see why. From its very first frames, the film refuses even a glimmer of drama for stillness, displaying a conviction that art can lie in the observation and recreation of sensory detail. So we see the piles of Malda mangoes from the family orchard, and the curds set in an array of flat earthen pots. We observe how people look through a mosquito net, we watch the smoke rising from an agarbatti. We remember rooms lit at night by a hurricane lamp, and recall how tuneless the singing can often be during a religious ritual.

There is almost nothing flashily cinematic here, though an occasional filmic reference gets made – most obviously when a conversation about one of the brothers moving to Delhi is followed by a stunningly beautiful shot of a train viewed through a field of snowy-white kaash flowers, a la Pather Panchali, evoking and portending Apu’s move to the city later in Ray’s Apu Trilogy. There are rapt faces bathed in the glow of a TV screen, and the lone female cousin who, when asked “Sunny Deol or Salman Khan”, says a categorical no to watching a Salman film on the VCR.

And as the film traverses the last two decades, the nods to change are everywhere. We watch as the large wooden bed on which the men played cards in the balcony is replaced by wooden chairs over the years, and then dull brown plastic ones; we note the gradual shift from community feasts laid out on the floor – where everyone knew exactly how much someone was eating and could make fun of them for their appetite – to meals served on chairs apart from each other, and finally, meals eaten by each brother alone in a bedroom.

Evocative and nostalgia-inducing as these sights and sounds are, I was glad that Mishra seems simultaneously able to suggest that this world we have lost – or are in the process of losing – was held up by all sorts of hierarchies and rigidities that we took for granted. In the rosy remembered time of family togetherness in the 1990s, for instance, the women cooked vast meals and looked after the children, while the men played cards and demanded to know whether the food was ready. The daughter-in-law who covers her head with a ghoonghat all through the first segment has become a confident Delhi woman a decade later, leaving her hair open.

But she still joins her sisters-in-law to chop vegetables for the family dinner. The links with the past aren't quite broken yet. At the end, the roof is being dismantled -- but it is part of a house renovation, to host a new child's initiation ceremony. Gamak Ghar isn’t meant to be a sociological or anthropological record, and yet it is that thing we rarely produce in India: a self-conscious cinematic document.

Published in Mumbai Mirror,  7 Jun 2020. 

Fictional motherlands, real relationships

My Mirror column:

Some recent fictions illustrate how totalitarianism thrives on turning on real people into mythical enemies – and pitting an attachment to family and friends against the love of an imaginary nation

A still from the 2019 film Jojo Rabbit

A third of the way through the sadly aborted Leila, the series’ protagonist Shalini (Huma Qureshi) finally manages to trace her lost daughter to a school that looks like a prison. Her fake ID gets her past the gun-toting security-men into a cavernous grey interior, where stiffly-dupatta-ed girls are learning the call-and-response of new nationhood. “Hum kaun hain?” demands the teacher. “Aryavarta ke nanhe sipaahi!” comes the response. As Shalini’s anxious gaze travels along the children and finds Leila’s familiar features, her face uncreases into a joyful smile. Almost unconsciously, her feet begin to move towards the child she thought she might never see again.

But is this really the same child as the one who was abducted from her parents’ arms, only two years before? “My name is not Leila, my name is Vijaya,” the little girl says to a stunned Shalini. She pronounces the words carefully, like she’s learnt them by rote. The scene’s emotional kicker comes when a big car draws up, with a woman in it that Shalini knows well from a previous life, and Vijaya runs to embrace her – this time, with an unrehearsed “Mummy”. But as the finale of Leila makes indubitably clear, that woman is only a placeholder. The entity that has really replaced Shalini is so powerful that there is no way a mere human even try to compete - the nation-state. To quote the slightly dubious gendering chosen by Leila’s makers, “Tum meri maa nahi ho. Aryavarta meri maa hai.”

The idea of a nationalism that pits children against their parents is one that has appeared in another Indian webseries, Ghoul, where the ultimate betrayal of a parent is committed by an adult protagonist who has tragically learnt to trust the nation-state over and above family. I was reminded of these shows this week, as I watched Taika Waititi’s 2019 film Jojo Rabbit, currently free to stream, in which a single mother (Scarlett Johansson) has to deal with her only child being indoctrinated by a state she isn't exactly enamoured of.

Instead of a chilling dystopian future, though, Jojo Rabbit takes us on a madcap fantasy ride into the past. Ten-year-old Johannes Betzler is as cuddly a protagonist as you could ask for. He is also an incipient Nazi, who spends a lot of time talking to his imaginary best friend Adolf: a goofball version of Hitler who's alternately sulky and encouraging. Right from the opening sequence, which splices its fictional boy hero's frenzied self-motivation for a Jungvolk training weekend with historical black and white footage of Hitler's screaming youthful fans to the Beatles iconic anthem I Wanna Hold Your Hand, you know this film isn't traditional fare. Jojo's repeated 'Heil Hitlers', getting louder and crazier as he bursts out of his front door and careens in faux-aeroplane mode through his small-town streets, aren’t scary so much as ridiculous. The same could be said of the cast of characters that have assembled to turn the town's little boys into men and little girls into women – the hipflask-swigging Captain K, demoted from active wartime service by the avoidable loss of an eye, and the pudding-faced Fraulein Rahm, who seems a little young to have had “eighteen children for Germany”.

Waititi ups the tenor of ridiculousness even further when it comes to Nazi indoctrination against Jews. The descriptions proffered by the camp leaders, complete with chalk sketches, reminded me of Roald Dahl's checklist for witches in The Witches. Jews look deceptively like human beings, but they have horns under their hair and scales on their bodies and they smell like Brussels sprouts.

But of course, the film's whole point is that Jojo – like the entire brainwashed German nation -- believes in this mythology. So when, in a nice doffing-of-the-hat to Anne Frank, a teenaged Jewish girl turns out to be hiding behind the wall of his dead sister’s room, Jojo is baffled when she doesn’t fit the criteria. In return for keeping her secret, Jojo demands of Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) a detailed insider's account of Jewishness, taking notes as she speaks. Their evolving relationship lets us walk the tightrope fantasy does, between wish-fulfilment and danger. An illustrated ‘expose’ full of ‘facts' about Jews, fictitious letters from a boyfriend who may or may not exist – these are the flip side of a real world in which Elsa can only survive if she can successfully parade her dead classmate’s papers.But it is in Jojo’s relationship with his mother Rosie that the film's heart lies. Johansson is pitch-perfect as the single mum who can blacken her face and turn into an imaginary ‘Daddy’ to indulge her little boy’s demand for his missing father – but who also refuses to let him avert his eyes from the bodies of ‘traitors’ strung up in the town square. She is happy to let him be part of the masquerade of Nazi boyhood, but draws the line at a real gun. Jojo Rabbit, like Rosie, knows the magical power of fiction, but also knows exactly when reality counts.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 Apr 2020.

An influential girlhood

My Mirror column:

A capacious new film version of Louisa May Alcott’s classic coming-of-age tale will make you identify with the Little Women of the 19th century

Beth, Jo, Megan and Amy in a still from the new Little Women, directed by Greta Gerwig.

In Greta Gerwig’s deliciously satisfying film adaptation of Little Women, the heroine Jo March starts to write a novel about herself and her sisters because she is no longer happy working on her more marketable stories of duels and dungeons. Her sister Beth likes it best of all her writings, but the publisher, a “Mr Dashwood”, is only persuaded to publish the book by the excited curiosity of his daughters.

In real life, though, it was a publisher called Thomas Niles who asked Louisa May Alcott to consider taking a break from producing such sensational thrillers as The Abbot’s Ghost, or Maurice Treherne’s Temptation, and write a “girls’ story”. Alcott’s initial response – perhaps unsurprising for someone whose fictional alter ego was the simultaneously bookish and tomboyish Jo – was an irritable entry in her diary: “Never liked girls, or knew many, except my sisters.” But Louisa May Alcott was a professional writer, practically the sole earning member of a family that had always been cash-strapped. She obliged the publisher, and Little Women was born.

And so we have the remarkable historical fact that a girl who had spent her entire girlhood liking “boys’ games and work and manners” (“I can't get over my disappointment in not being a boy,” Jo March tells her prettier, more feminine elder sister Meg early in the book) became the most widely-read chronicler of female adolescence in the modern English-speaking world. Little Women, first published in 1868, became a literary sensation, and its central figure Jo March became an inspiration to generations of young women – especially young women with artistic aspirations.

“I am sure she has influenced many girls, for she is not like most ‘real’ authors, either dead or inaccessibly famous; nor, like many artists in books, is she set apart by sensitivity or suffering or general superlativity; nor is she, like most authors in novels, male,” pointed out the great writer Ursula Le Guin, calling Jo “as close as a sister and common as grass”.

Gerwig’s screen version, with Saoirse Ronan’s achingly acute Jo at its centre, is powerfully concerned with how the girl who scribbled all night in the attic of her mid-19^th century Massachusetts family home became the writer crafting stories for a living in the attic of a Manhattan boarding house. As with all adaptations, Gerwig's reveals her own preoccupations – her previous directorial effort Ladybird, a coming-of-age tale about awakening ambition and desire set in early 21^st century California, also starred Ronan as a young woman caught between wanting to be someone and just wanting. “I'm so sorry I wanted more,” Ronan's Ladybird bursts out at her mother in one angry emotional scene. In Little Women, the relationship between Jo and her mother (Laura Dern, somewhat unconvincing as the too-good-to-be-true 'Marmie') is less fraught, but her frustration has a similar ring to it. “I'm so sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for!” Ronan's Jo exclaims, asking Dern why the world won't give women's souls and minds their due, rather than just their hearts.

Little Women is brilliant at delineating the travails of the single woman trying to make her own path, in a world in which few women have yet done so. Many of the reasons for Jo's false starts as a writer – the mistaking of the market's approval for success, the lack of clarity about what her talents might be good for – are about not having creative models.

But where Gerwig scores is in giving late 21^st century viewers a sense of what it was like to be a not-wealthy woman in a 19^th century society. Her superlative cast fleshes out all the possible paths: the feisty, opinionated woman who could perhaps live by her wits (but under a male pseudonym); the quiet one with musical talent but not enough confidence to play for anyone but family; the one pretty enough to get to a ball but weak enough to let richer girls give her pet names; the realist who knows that her talents won't be enough to get her the life she wants. Between the drily unpredictable Aunt March (Meryl Streep channelling her inner Maggi Smith marvellously) and the pugnacious Amy (Florence Pugh making it hard to dismiss a character I grew up annoyed with), the film proffers a hard-headed economic context for the age-old romantic fictions written by men. No matter what their talents and abilities, women in Alcott's era were socially barred from improving their finances by almost any means other than marriage. Consequently, marriage may have been a romantic proposition for men, as the brutally frank Amy says to Laurie, but it was an economic decision for women.

Marriage was an economic decision in fiction, too. Alcott never married herself, and her intention was to have Jo stay single (remember, this is the same Jo who proposed that Meg run away from her own wedding). “[B]ut so many enthusiastic young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didn’t dare refuse & out of perversity went & made a funny match for her,” Alcott wrote to a friend. Alcott paired Jo off with a stout, 40-year-old German professor called Friedrich Bhaer. The new film version has Friedrich stay accented and slightly awkward – but makes him young and handsome. I guess Gerwig decided Jo wanted more – and now she could have it.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16 February 2020.

Countries of the Mind

Solitary young immigrant men traverse Parisian streets in Na

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/countries-of-the-mind/articleshowprint/72623618.cms?prtpage=1?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

My Mirror column:

Solitary young immigrant men traverse Parisian streets in Nadav Lapid's Synonyms and Jérémy Clapin's I Lost My Body, two of 2019's most befuddling, memorable films. 

A still from Synonyms (2019)

The opening sequence of Nadav Lapid's Synonyms bursts with a strange, irrepressible energy. A 20-something man charges through Paris, the camera capturing his long-legged strides and his thumping footsteps. He arrives in a grand old building, finds a key hidden under a corner of carpet, and enters a vast, rather beautiful apartment -- with not a scrap of furniture. Seemingly unsurprised, he is in the bathtub when he hears a sound. He runs out, nude and slippery, onto the polished wooden floors, to discover that his possessions – clothes, sleeping bag, money – have disappeared. He races downstairs looking for the thief, banging on the doors of other apartments. No one answers. He comes back to the apartment, still without his clothes, and settles back into the bathtub, seemingly prepared to freeze to death. The next thing he knows, he is waking up in a large clean bed, having been adopted by the young bourgeois couple downstairs. His rescuers Emile and Caroline – children of rich industrialists who have pretensions to the arts – feed him and clothe him, giving him money and a phone and a particularly memorable mustard yellow coat in return for the pleasure of his amusing, sometimes outlandish company. Stripped quite literally of his past, Yoav – for that is the name of Lapid's Israeli protagonist – resurrected in a new identity.

Synonyms, which won the Golden Bear at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival and was screened in India at both MAMI and IFFI, is a film about a man who wishes to shed his old skin, an Israeli man insistent that he will not speak Hebrew, who walks the streets of his new city with a Larousse dictionary under his arm, reciting synonyms from the language he thinks will grant him entry into a new nation.

Lapid's film, apparently at least partly autobiographical, is filled with anger against in-your-face Israeli militaristic nationalism. But as Yoav gradually realises that France isn't quite the haven of liberty, equality and fraternity that he has imagined, it also indicts nationalism of the French variety – with its insistence on linguistic blending in, its closet anti-Semitism, its citizenship classes that involve learning the words of La Marseillaise: “Let us march! Let us march! So that impure blood irrigates our fields!”.

Still from the award-winning animated film I Lost My Body (2019)

I found myself thinking about Synonyms as I watched another 2019 film about a young immigrant wandering the streets of Paris, this time a Moroccan pizza delivery boy called Naoufel. Jérémy Clapin's stunningly crafted I Lost My Body – the first animated feature film to receive the top prize at the Critics' Week section at Cannes, and now available to stream online -- has even grander ambitions than Lapid's film. It opens with a severed hand coming to life and making its way out of a medical laboratory. Surely this must be horror, you think – and I Lost My Body does have its tense, borderline macabre moments: a body-less hand suddenly wringing a pigeon's neck, or clicking an abandoned cigarette lighter into flame in self-defense against a pack of subway rats. But even as we watch the hand creeping and crawling and dancing its way across rooftops and drains, over pianos and under trains, it takes on a personality of its own. We begin to identify with its search – for its missing body, for itself. We do not tremble when the hand approaches a gurgling baby, placing a fallen pacifier back in the baby's mouth, and then laying itself down to be held in the baby's sleepy grip.

Perhaps our comfort has something to do with what we see in the film's parallel narrative, about the film's human protagonist, Naoufel. Bespectacled, shy and slight of build, Naoufel sometimes seems like the opposite of Yoav in Synonyms. And yet they share many things: an irredeemable homelessness, an emptiness that seems to express itself in a need to attach themselves to something or someone, and a painful preoccupation with the past, with a country of memory. Their responses to trauma are quite different. Yoav is constantly vocalising, telling outrageous stories about his past in Israel, once even presenting them to his writerly friend Emile in an extravagant gesture of generosity. Naoufel is painfully quiet, seeming to relive certain moments of his childhood over and over. If Yoav recites new words from a dictionary, Naoufel listens to old tape recordings of his parents. And the hand – the hand remembers trying to catch a fly.

A hand separated from its owner, a tongue separated from its language – these are strange but powerful metaphors for alienation. We might want desperately to leave our pasts behind, but the body remembers.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Dec 15, 2019.

Learning of love

My Mirror column:

From Francois Truffaut’s Les Mistons to Shlok Sharma’s Haraamkhor, what propels so many writers and filmmakers to turn the child’s gaze upon adults in the throes of desire?

“Jouve’s sister was unbearably beautiful,” begins the voiceover of François Truffaut’s Les Mistons (The Brats), as Bernadette Lafont cycles through the historic streets of De Nimes – her slim, leggy frame suspended effortlessly over her bicycle, her skirt billowing in the breeze, such a vision of lightness that she seems barely to touch the ground. What we watch is five boys watching this young woman. The eponymous “brats” of the film’s title follow Bernadette everywhere, first with their eyes and then by actually stalking her, alone or with her lover Gerard.

 

Truffaut, a film critic who had made his first short Une Visite in 1954, thought of Les Mistons (1957) as his “first real film”. Certainly, it already contains many themes he would continue to explore over his cinematic career – women as objects of desire that seem to mystify men, a certain realist poetry of everyday life, the unexpected rupture presented by death. What interests me most, though, is the theme of adult behaviour – in particular, sexual passion or what Truffaut's narrator calls amour – as seen through the eyes of children. The boys in the film are arrested by this young woman’s beauty, transfixed by the stirrings of a desire they do not even understand, and irritated by the fact of the lovers without quite knowing why.
 
When she leaves her bicycle to swim in a shaded grove, they gather round to sniff it like little puppies, one of them even delivering a slow-motion kiss on the seat where her posterior has recently rested. Categorised only as “unbearable”, the one-sided attraction they feel mutates into something else: “Too young to love Bernadette, we decided to hate and torment her.”

 

The child on the cusp of adolescence becoming smitten for the first time has been the subject of many books and films over the years. In LP Hartley’s 1953 classic The Go-Between, which Joseph Losey made into a famous 1971 film starring Julie Christie, the young narrator Leo recalls the shaping summer of his childhood in which he first felt attraction. “My sister is very beautiful,” his friend Marcus tells him one day, and after that, “for a time my idea of [Marian] as a person was confused and even eclipsed by the abstract idea of beauty that she represented.” Once Leo helps Marian dry her hair, and Hartley describes the immersiveness of the experience evocatively: “I was the bathing suit on which her hair was spread: I was her drying hair, I was the wind that dried it.”

When Marian embarks on a secret, torrid, socially unsuitable affair with a local farmer called Ted Burgess, Leo finds himself turned into their messenger. The child enables the adult relationship. But jealous, torn between his desire to please Marian and his own inarticulate feeling for her, and childishly blind to what is really at stake, he is also the one that brings it to its tragic end.

 

The Go-Between, with its sun-kissed sexual innocence and stark coming of age, is likely to have been among the inspirations for Atonement, Ian McEwan’s wonderful novel, which was adapted into the Joe Wright film. Like Leo, the 13-year-old Briony is responsible for the betrayal that drives apart the two adults she is close to, based on her childish misunderstanding of a charged sexual moment she witnesses between the socially transgressive lovers.
 
Paresh Kamdar’s under-watched, atmospheric film Khargosh (2009) has a very similar story to The Go-Between. The child protagonist Bantu becomes a go-between for his older friend Avneesh, and slowly finds himself enraptured by the girl Avneesh is besotted with, whom the film nicknames Mrityu (Death).
 
More recently, we have had Shlok Sharma’s Haraamkhor, whose take on exploratory sexual urges is several shades darker, and perhaps more layered than any of these other films. For one, Haraamkhor contains two levels of watching and watchers. An adolescent schoolgirl (superbly played by Shweta Tripathi) in a dusty North Indian town becomes morbidly attracted to her maths tuition teacher (a scarily believable Nawazuddin Siddiqui) after she spies on him having sex with his wife. But the 15-year-old Sandhya has her own set of stalkers: two younger boys in the same tuition class, one of whom thinks he is in love with her. The film steers us between these different gazes, refusing to let us rest easy. One moment, we wait with baited breath with Sandhya in an abortion clinic – but then almost immediately find ourselves confronted by her childish exuberance as she licks an ice-cream and ribs her lover-teacher-exploiter about what he’s going to tell his wife. We begin by giggling as the two boys hatch plans for Sandhya to see Kamal naked, because if a man and a woman see each other naked, “toh unki shaadi pakki”. But as the film draws to its denouement, the dusty haze and windmills gather into a terrible, tragic downpour, childish naivete leading somehow inexorably into life-altering errors.

Perhaps, in the end, that is what makes the child’s-eye view so terrifying. Examined through the frank gazes of children, the lives of adults don’t seem that foolproof any more.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Dec 2019

Speak, memory

My Mirror column:
 
Ritesh Batra’s Photograph is an underappreciated gem of a film, gleaming with quiet revelations about the stories we tell ourselves.

Ritesh Batra’s Photograph (2019), much like his acclaimed 2013 film The Lunchbox, is based on a particular idea of romance: two people from very different worlds united by happenstance. In both films, that unexpected connection is forged by the big city, the vast anonymous wilderness suddenly letting two people see each other. In The Lunchbox, Batra used a mix-up by Mumbai’s much-feted dabbawalas as the device that brought a neglected housewife in contact with an office-going widower. In Photograph, the unlikely bond that Batra wants to us to believe in, between a street photographer called Rafi and a modest Gujarati girl prepping for her CA exams, is tied to something just as iconic in the city: the Gateway of India.

Yes, perhaps there’s a kernel of reality there. Where, except at the Gateway of India, would a working class Muslim man from a village in Ballia, Uttar Pradesh, living five to a kholi in Mumbai, have a chance to speak to a fair, English-speaking, academically-inclined girl from an upper middle class Hindu family? But for Miloni to have her photo taken by Rafi is one thing; to have her actually respond to a personal request from him days, even weeks later, is quite another. It is in making us believe in their slowly unfurling connection that Batra wins, and in the ever-so-delicate performances he draws from Nawazuddin Siddiqui as the watchful Rafi and Sanya Malhotra as the almost painfully quiet Miloni.

The gulf between them has been described as “cultural”, and I suppose that is one way to put it. But the financial inequality is stark enough to ensure that even a simple transactional moment between them is experienced completely differently by both parties. Miloni can forget to pay the Rs 30 for her instant photo not just because she is distracted, but because the amount is so little as to not even register in her mind. Meanwhile, for Rafi, who counts out even his petty change to send home, one disappeared client can turn a good day into bad.

What Batra does beautifully is to show us these quiet people, both adamant to resist the paths laid out for them. For Rafi, the prospect of marriage is not entirely unattractive, but he thinks pining away for a wife in the village will make him a “softy”. It is soon clear that he resists because he is the sentimental grandson who revisits his childhood in story after story, recognising in his grandmother’s childhood stories the power of fiction (“She made us laugh so much that we wouldn’t even know if the stove had been lit that day”) – and returning her gift now with an elaborate fiction of his own. For Miloni, life so far has been defined by her parents: home to tuition and back, the CA examination, arranged marriage to an eligible boy, America. She is so unused to choosing anything that even the colours of her clothes are of no consequence to her. Spending days with Rafi and his dadi becomes the furthest she has strayed from the straight and narrow.

At the centre of the film is the photograph of Miloni that Rafi takes. But Batra’s style is literary, in the best possible ways, and so it is no coincidence that we don’t ever properly see the picture. The image here is but a prop for stories – for Rafi’s story that he has a fiancée, and later for Miloni’s story of how she and Rafi got together. She makes it up for Dadi’s benefit, as she does her dead parents. But what she sees in it is true: a happier self, now invisible to her, that Rafi’s gaze seems to capture.

There is nostalgia here aplenty – the breeze on the ferry, the old Hindi film song in a kali-peeli taxi on a rainy Bombay night, Campa Cola as the taste of a childhood self. But the quality that felt slightly contrived in The Lunchbox – handwritten notes, the repeated error of the dabba delivery, no mobile phones – has also been smoothed into something more convincing here, something in which the past is not a simple refuge. The pleasure of the ice gola is destroyed by a stomach upset, the old single screen theatre by a rat. The old lady urges Rafi to let go of the past: to forget the mortgaged house, the deprived childhood. In a darker subplot, the story of the man who hung himself in the room where Rafi and his four mates live is told and retold in their drunken sessions: now with humour, now with pathos, but most of all with a kind of desperation – as if telling and retelling the tale might exorcise the ghost of the past.

Perhaps what makes Photograph so rewarding is its recognition that we live in the past and the present simultaneously, and that it isn’t necessarily the end of the story that matters most, but what you remember of it. In the words of Rafi’s marvellous sales pitch to prospective customers: “Saalon baad jab aap yeh photo dekhenge, toh aapko aapke chehre pe yahi dhoop dikhai degi, aapke baalon mein yeh hawa, aur aapke kaanon mein hazaaron logon ki awaazein. Sab chala jayega. Hamesha ke liye sab chala jayega. [“Years later when you look at this photo, you will see this very sunlight on your face, this breeze in your hair, and the voices of thousands of people in your ears. Everything will go. Everything will be gone for ever.”]. Everything will end, but a memory can still be a gift.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Nov 2019

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.