What Paava Kadhaigal tells us about pride and honour

My Mirror column:

A new Tamil anthology film makes a flawed but genuine attempt to grapple with the tragic effects of our national preoccupation -- ‘family honour’.

At the very end of Love Panna Uttranum, Vignesh Shivan's segment in the newly-released Tamil anthology film Paava Kadhaigal (‘Sinful Tales’), there is a textual postscript that tells us what happened to the characters after the film ends. One of the lines reads: “Veerasimman managed to escape from the village and went to live with his daughter in Paris”. I scoffed at it mentally when I read it. Because Veerasimman is the terrible casteist father from whom his daughters must escape if they are to live anything resembling free lives.

 

Love Panna Uttranum has many problems, not the least of which is the director's inability to handle the vast tonal shifts he’s going for, leaving his audience swinging between high tragedy and low comedy. But as the compendium's four tales about 'honour' drew to a close, I realised that Shivan's postscript wasn't as inaccurate as I'd thought: It is South Asian fathers (and often mothers) who need to find a way to escape the vice-like grip of patriarchy and caste; from social chains that bind them so tightly that they can no longer feel the blood running in their veins -- literally. If they break the codes of caste, community and gender, it seems that their children are no longer their children.

 

As I watched Paava Kadhaigal's various sets of parents harden their hearts against their offspring -- and worse, try to control their lives -- I kept thinking of the old Kahlil Gibran poem from his bestselling work The Prophet. “Your children are not your children,” it goes. “They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you. And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.” The cool kids probably don't read Gibran any more, but it remains desperately resonant in the India of 2021, where our politicians know we'll eat out of their hands if they cater to our meanest, most controlling instincts -- especially with regard to our daughters. Ergo, the 'love jihad' bogey, recently given legal form.

 

This particular film happens to deal with Tamilian families. But parents across South Asia cling ferociously to the idea that their children are nothing but miniature versions of themselves; robotic agents put on earth only to carry out their bidding – or actually, the bidding of that ogre called society. Individual freedom can only seem an impossible dream when you've internalised the social order completely, and we see it in some of the most affecting films of recent years, from Nagraj Manjule's searing 2016 Marathi hit Sairat  to the ringing refrain that Pakistani-Norwegian filmmaker Iram Haq made the title of her harrowing 2017 film, What Will People Say?.

 

But treating these parents as embodiments of evil -- as at least two of the segments here do -- is not useful. It seems to me crucial to look at the moments which even these narratives leave open, moments at which we see their vulnerabilities and the horrific double binds they seem to find themselves in. Paava Kadhaigal's first narrative, Thangam, directed by Sudha Kongara, puts the harshest lines in a mother's mouth when she tells her son Sathaar (a wonderful Kalidas Jayaram), who identifies as a woman and is saving for a sex change operation, to die so that his sisters can live 'normal' lives, ie find suitable boys to marry. In the last segment, Vetri Maaran's Oor Iravu, too, we see the real and depressing effects on the rural siblings of a courageous young woman (Sai Pallavi) who has chosen to marry her Dalit partner and migrate to the city. “After you eloped, Dad pulled us out of college,” says one younger sister to her when they meet two years later. Another sister's husband apparently left her when he heard there was a half-Dalit baby joining the family he had clearly married into for its unblemished upper-caste status. The younger brother, meanwhile, is publicly mocked for his sister's elopement to the extent that he drops out of college.

 

The third segment, directed by Gautham Menon, in which a young girl is raped, deals with the bogey of honour in a different context -- that of actual sexual violence. But here, too, the most interesting thing attempted by the film is the mother, whose traditional ideas of sexual purity as something that women must safeguard “like a temple”, push her brain in frightening directions.

 

Menon's short film feels muddled, though, in its attempt at showing us all sorts of different reactions. The brother's idea of vengeance and the mother's of penitence and surrender to fate, contrast with the father's shame as a failed protector, before finally embracing his vulnerability enough to allow the daughter to move on.

 

The most frightening character in the film, brought to unforgettable life by the marvellous Prakash Raj, is the father who steels himself against his favourite daughter. “She chose you over all of us, and I carried on as if she'd never been born,” he tells her husband with a muted bitterness. And yet it is this same father's attachment to the daughter that leads to tragedy. As he says to Sai Pallavi's Sumathi as the film draws to its excruciating close, “If I could let you go, I would.”

We really need that Gibran poem.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Jan 2021

Status of women, women of status

My Mirror column: 

Thappad's single slap shakes the foundations of one marriage, but exposes the imbalances upon which most Indian families are built

Pavail Gulati and Taapsee Pannu play husband and wife in Anubhav Sinha’s thought-provoking film Thappad

Described in a sentence, the premise of Thappad seems rather all or nothing: a man slaps his wife once, and she decides to leave him. “Will a slap decide whether a couple can stay together or not?” was the response from the director of Baaghi 3. The actions of Thappad's heroine Amrita (Taapsee Pannu) look particularly outré in a country where domestic violence is not. Our last National Family Health Survey (2015-16) indicates that 31 per cent of India’s married women experience physical, sexual or emotional violence by their spouses - and 52 per cent women think it’s all right for a man to hit his wife.

Anubhav Sinha is that rare Indian filmmaker who’s gone from crafting money-spinners to slapping audiences in the face with ugly reflections of ourselves. His recent subjects of choice are all ones that New India would rather keep ‘in the family’ – i.e. things we don't like to talk about until people actually die, and even then the problem isn't us. In Mulk, it was the nationally normalised injustice of treating the Muslim community as guilty until proven innocent. In Article 15, it was the unconscionable continuance of caste hierarchies. In Thappad, Sinha targets the misuse of power often found closest home: gender. The aimed-for confrontation with the self here takes place within a two-person context: a marriage. But Sinha and his co-writer Mrunmayee Lagoo display a keen awareness that in this country even more than others, heterosexual domestic partnerships are part of an intricate web of familial, social and professional relationships. And that web is suspended in a matrix that’s invariably patriarchal.

With that in mind, let me re-describe the premise of Thappad. Confronted with a professional crisis while hosting a private party at his home, Vikram (Pavail Gulati) loses his temper at his wife Amrita and slaps her, in front of the assembled guests: his bosses as well as the couple’s family, friends and neighbours. Amrita, an educated upper middle class woman who has chosen not to pursue a career in favour of being a devoted wife to Vikram, finds herself unable to forget, forgive, ‘move on’. It doesn’t help that Vikram is entirely unable to see Amrita’s shock and humiliation – and unable to comprehend what he does see. It definitely doesn’t help that he assumes his wife’s forgiveness, even as he explains instead of apologising. “Saara gussa tum hi pe nikal gaya [All the anger tumbled out onto you],” is all he can manage before turning the marital conversation back to his only real preoccupation: himself.

The film is largely well cast and acted, with adeptly-written scenes that prevent characters from seeming like ideological messengers, even when delivering that usually bludgeoning thing: a climactic monologue. There are clever little touches, like Vikram complaining unendingly about feeling hard done by at work - “Vahan rehna hi nahi jahan value nahi hai [Who wants to stay on where you have no value?]” - while remaining tone-deaf to Amrita’s silences. What emerges, with empathy and without drama, is the patriarchal context that normalises the ‘working’ husband’s dependence on the ‘non-working’ wife - while invisibilising her labour, both physical and emotional. The wife is a full-time companion, hostess and cheerleader; manager of their upper middle class household, primary caregiver to him and his ageing mother and any potential children. But her husband doesn’t notice when her foot is hurt – so of course he doesn’t notice when her heart is.

Demanding empathy, support and sacrifice from their female partners while giving none back is simply the norm for men, and women have previously had no choice but to live with it. “Thoda bardaasht karna seekhna chahiye auraton ko,” says Amrita’s mother-in-law, not unkindly. “Aap khush hain bardaasht kar ke?” is Amrita’s counter-question. “Mere bachche khush hain,” the older woman replies.

Subjugating personal desires to the ‘larger’ cause of “family” is something women learn subliminally, becoming agents of our own submission. It is this acceptance that Thappad pushes back against: the notion that women should be content to derive satisfaction from satisfying others, not set out to find their own. “We know how to keep our families together,” says Vikram. “Hamare yahan ladkiyan chhoti chhoti baaton pe nahi jaati ghar chhod ke.” The totemic power of “ghar” is also the binding agent in the film's other relationships. Amrita's father (a superb Kumud Mishra) seems the gentle, supportive dad every girl needs, and a considerate husband. But the film makes him – and therefore us – come to see that his wife never had the freedom he did. She may not have been barred from pursuing her musical talents, as Amrita isn’t from dancing, but the household always took precedence over self-development. In other marriages, coupledom takes precedence over self-respect.

Divorce remains stigmatised in India (think Mohan Bhagwat), and so Amrita’s unshakeable resolve, however quiet, has raised hackles. As the film lets one of its own characters point out, if all women who’ve been slapped once by their husbands started leaving their marriages, the majority of Indian families would not be ‘together’. But like a before-her-time Preity Zinta insisting on being able to respect her man in Kya Kehna, Amrita isn’t most women. And Thappad is powerful because it isn’t programmatic. It doesn’t lay down the law about what you as a woman should do. It only lays out the possibilities for what you could.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Mar 2020.

Fire in the Belly

My Mirror column:

The demolition of RK Studios last week marked the end of an era. That era began with Aag, released 71 years ago this August

Raj Kapoor’s first film under the RK Films banner, released on August 6, 1948, wasn’t a commercial success. Perhaps with good reason, for it was in many ways a raw work, an early and rather theatrical expression of the sensibility of the man who would come to be known as India’s ‘great showman’. But Aag (Fire) also contained several elements that would often recur in Raj Kapoor’s early films: melodious, soulful songs, grandly choreographed stage sequences, a hero out to forge his own path in the world, and Nargis.

I watched Aag as a child, under the encouraging influence of my Nani and her RK-loving sisters. But although it features an adorable ten-year-old Shashi Kapoor daydreaming in history class (and at one point, even putting on a show of Bilwa Mangal, complete with a fake moustache), Aag really isn’t a film meant for ten year olds. All I remembered of it all these years was its opening scene. The just-married hero enters the room where his new bride is seated on the bed, bejewelled and veiled. There is some banter on his part about her ghoonghat getting longer; she laughs bashfully in response. We see him approach her, slowly working up to unveiling her face as traditional Hindu suhaag raat heroes must. He does, she lifts her eyes shyly to look at him for the first time – and lets out a scream. The reversal that Raj Kapoor engineers here is memorable – making all the verbal build-up about the woman's face, while it is the man’s face, burnt by fire, in which the story lies. Between that perfect bit of cinematic deceit and the almost gothic horror quality of the scene, Aag’s remains one of Hindi cinema’s most interesting suhaag raat scenes.

A ten-year-old Shashi Kapoor, as a child actor in Raj Kapoor's directorial debut Aag

Watching the film last week, though, I was struck by other things. The genteel hero estranged from his father, who leaves his comfortable home and is penniless in the big city, first appears in incipient form in Aag. The figure who would grow into the Raj Kapoor tramp archetype in later films like Shree 420 and Awara is seen in Aag in a short sequence that is a turning point in the narrative. The film’s runaway protagonist Kewal Khanna (Kapoor) walks into an apparently empty theatre, delivers a teary soliloquy about having left home, and is instantly embraced as friend and partner by the theatre’s owner Rajan (Prem Nath), who has been sitting silently through Kewal’s monologue and is impressed by his passion, for life and for theatre.

Kewal’s speech is interesting, because it is essentially a call for the young Indian to be allowed to decide his own future rather than follow in the footsteps of family. What makes it more interesting, though, are the possible biographical extrapolations. Like the fictional Kewal Khanna, Prithviraj Kapoor had been a young man from a bourgeois Punjabi family who failed his first year law exam and decided to leave Peshawar for Bombay to start a new life on the stage. But unlike in Aag, where the angel who invests in Kewal’s future is a theatre owner who’s male and Hindu, the 22-year-old Prithviraj was picked out of a line of extras at Ardeshir Irani’s Imperial Studios by Ermeline, the Jewish star of Bombay’s then silent film industry. Struck by Prithviraj’s physique and Greek-god good looks, Ermeline decided she had found the hero of her next film, Cinema Girl. Prithviraj never returned to the extras queue.

The story of Prithviraj’s entry into the world of acting, as Madhu Jain tells it in her wonderful book The Kapoors, is filled with supportive collaborators and encouraging mentors like Ermeline, Ardeshir Irani, Sohrab Modi, KA Abbas and various others from the IPTA (the Indian People’s Theatre Association). Earlier, during his undergraduate years, his theatre dreams had been nurtured by his professor’s wife from Peshawar’s King Edwards College, an Englishwoman called Norah Richards. To this delightfully mixed world of the colonial Indian city, Prithviraj Kapoor eventually added his own contribution in 1944: Prithvi Theatres.

Raj Kapoor, as Prithviraj’s eldest son, necessarily underwent an apprenticeship in the theatre. But the elder Kapoor was a hard taskmaster, instinctively socialist in his staunch egalitarian treatment of all troupe members – rather than the feudal Indian father who might spoil his own children or give them more. He was apparently worried that Raj was naalayak; Jain suggests that those who knew him believe he wanted Raj to “have a proper education, followed by a proper job”, though he had himself rejected that path. 

Odd as it may seem, then, the anguish of Aag’s hero was not just that of Prithviraj’s battle against his father – but also of Raj against his.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 Aug 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.

Redeeming Men

My Mirror column:

The Malayalam film Kumbalangi Nights, now streaming on Amazon Prime, casts a warmly human look at not-so-eligible men -- while undercutting the ones we usually lionise.

Soubin Shahir, Shane Nigam and Sreenath Bhasi as brothers in Kumbalangi Nights

There's a scene midway through Kumbalangi Nights when an abashed son-in-law apologizes if he's put his mother-in-law to too much trouble by mentioning that he hasn't eaten pooris for a while. Then, still smiling under his perfectly trimmed moustache, Shammy pulls the protesting old lady to sit down in the chair next to him, calling out to his wife to serve her mother a poori. In a few minutes, the three women of the family are sitting down with him at the dining table. “In future, we should all eat together like this,” declares Shammy expansively.

In almost any other Indian film, such a scene would be a picture of domestic bliss. An educated, modern Indian family man, fondly requesting a treat from his new mother-in-law, and making sure that he eats his dinner not before but alongside the “three hapless women” he has taken charge of by marriage. But in Madhu C. Narayanan's directorial debut, we see the layers that would ordinarily be covered over. When Shammy – played masterfully by popular Malayalam star Fahadh Faasil – calls out for the poori, the film cuts to his wife and sister-in-law in the kitchen, making us note who is actually doing the cooking. We see the two women turn to each other, as they do often in the film, their eye movements and gestures an often silent commentary on the tension that actually animates life with Shammy.

Syam Pushkaran's script offers clues to Shammy's dangerousness right from the time we are introduced to him. He is the new occupant who has the neighbourhood children afraid of playing football near his house; the new husband who makes his wife nervous; the young man whose response to an older man's cooking for him is to mock him for time spent in the kitchen. Pushkaran's dialogue is brilliantly subtle, every unpleasant remark delivered with a smile, twisting the knife even he seems to be passing the butter. And so perfect is Faasil's delivery of it that it seems utterly believable when the film's simpler, more transparent characters take his statements at face value. In one superb scene, Bobby and his brother Saji come to Shammy's barber shop to ask for his sister-in-law Baby's hand in marriage. Shammy mocks the proposal with such finesse that Saji can't even see what's hit him. But we do.

“Cheta, this Ramayana was written by a forest-dweller, right?” says Shammy, which Saji takes as suggesting that anyone is capable of anything: his unemployed brother Bobby may yet get a job that makes him husband-material. But in fact it is proof only of Shammy's disdain. And that disdain extends beyond the poor Christian family of fishermen that thinks it is his equal; it extends to the law that allows women the freedom to decide their own fates: “Mr. Saji, you know, a girl can marry any scoundrel she wants. Unfortunately that's the law of the land.”

When the film begins, we see Bobby and Saji through the disappointed eyes of their youngest brother Franky, who has returned from school just in time for their father's death anniversary. But even as the schoolboy cooks a fish curry and waits for their fourth brother, Bony, to get home and eat together, Bobby and Saji have begun their usual brawl. It is a household of men – unkempt, unemployed and entirely unmotivated to any activities beyond drinking and fighting.

But by pitting Shammy's outward respectability, his perfect clean-cut exterior, against the dishevelled, largely unemployed bunch of layabouts that make up this family, Kumbalangi Nights achieves something quite remarkable. It shows us that men can redeem themselves, even those who seem beyond that hope. Sometimes the agents of that redemption are women, the promise of love and family, the softening -- if also demanding -- influence of children. But sometimes – as the remarkable arc with Saji and the therapist suggests -- the agent of redemption can be grief itself. Sometimes women refuse to be mothers, and men learn take care of each other.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 July 2019.

In the Family Way

My Mirror column:

Films about parental figures — real and imagined — made revealing viewing at the Dharamshala International Film Festival.

Actor Manoj Bajpayee occupies the front row at the 2018 edition of DIFF, which took place in November at the Tibetan Children's Village school in McLeodganj

The seventh edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF), which ran from November 1 to 4, was full of films about parent-child relationships. It wasn’t a consciously chosen theme. “As in previous editions, a pattern emerged organically from the choices we made,” wrote DIFF’s directors Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam in their festival brochure.

Deliberate or not, even just the names of the films on this year’s schedule made for a recurring motif. In many conversations at the fest, the multi-generational, multi-linear Taiwanese drama Father to Son was mistaken for Of Fathers and Sons, a documentary based on exiled Syrian filmmaker Talal Derki’s two years shooting with a radical Islamist family in a north Syrian village. The Sri Lankan debut feature House of My Fathers added to the confusion.

Beyond the films whose titles declared themselves, however, there was Ee.Ma.Yau, Lijo Pellissery’s brilliant satirical drama about a Malayali Catholic man trying to arrange the grand funeral he promised his fisherman father, and the spare, rather too studied The Red Phallus, Tashi Gyeltshen’s symbolic unpacking of patriarchy in rural Bhutan through the tale of an atsara (a traditional clown) and his unhappy teenaged daughter. Dominic Sangma’s debut feature Ma.Ama, which I didn’t get to watch, ‘resurrects’ the filmmaker’s late mother (and casts his real-life father as the 85-year-old Philip Sangma, who has waited 30 years to be reunited with his dead wife).

The non-fiction films, too, gravitated towards this filial theme: Avni Rai’s documentary about her father, Raghu Rai: An Unframed Portrait, is as much about his photography as their relationship, while the fascinating, blackly funny The Beksinskis: A Sound and Picture Album (2017) reconstructs the complicated relationship between a famous Polish painter Zdzislaw and his radio journalist son Tomek, drawing on 300 hours of private video footage that extends from the period before Tomek’s birth till after his death. (The Beksinskis were also the subject of a more traditional biopic in 2016: Jan P Matuszynski’s feature The Last Family, which I saw at IFFI last year, didn’t have the advantage of ironic self-examination made for more harrowing viewing.)

Stills from Namdev Bhau: In Search of Silence & Hamid, respectively the opening and closing films at DIFF 2018.

What was uncanny to me, though, was something else: the fact that in so many of the other films, child protagonists created a cross-generational bond with an older adult — often in lieu of a parent. In the Ukrainian filmmaker Dar Gai’s road movie Namdev Bhau: In Search of Silence, the festival’s opening film, a Mumbai chauffeur frustrated with the cacophony of the city sets out a solo trip to Ladakh’s Silent Valley, only to find himself in the insistent company of a twelve-year-old boy travelling mysteriously alone in Ladakh. The boy’s ceaseless confident chatter contrasts starkly with the silences of Devashish Makhija’s Bhonsle, in which a retired Marathi constable takes a fearful Bihari child under his wing.



Makhija’s Mumbai, all shadowy corridors and low-lit, barely-furnished rooms, couldn’t be more different from Dar Gai’s picture-postcard mountain vistas. Even when the locale is comparable, the effects are far apart. Namdev Bhau’s chawl always looks bright, the sunlight as inescapable as the chatter of Namdev’s family and neighbours, while Manoj Bajpayee’s Bhonsle occupies what must be the most silent chawl ever seen on the Hindi film screen: a place where even make-or-break fights about chauvinistic community claims on the city don’t spill over beyond the few carefully chosen protagonists. Stagey as that often felt, and despite the predictable turning of its sole female character into fodder for competing masculinities, I was far more moved by the connection between Virat Vaibhav’s petrified Lalu and the taciturn but fair Bhonsle than by Dar Gai’s too-neat, emotionally manipulative conclusion.

Child actor Virat Vaibhav in a still from Devashish Makhija's disturbing Bhonsle (2018)

Emotional manipulation and tidy coincidences also reigned in DIFF’s closing film, Aijaz Khan’s drama Hamid, set in Kashmir. An eight-year-old boy whose father has joined the state’s growing list of ‘‘disappeared persons” tries to phone Allah to send his father back, and ends up calling a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) man called Abhay stationed in Kashmir. Abhay’s initial dismissal of it a prank is jettisoned by Hamid’s touching faith. The angry, aggressive Abhay is quite far from being God. But, as the film cloyingly suggests, the goodness of adults might be a function of children’s faith in them.

A still from the sassy, satisfying 'children's film' Cross My Heart (2017, dir. Luc Picard). 

I was more wholehearted charmed by the Canadian film Cross My Heart, in which a girl threatened with the prospect of herself and her beloved little brother being split up into different foster homes abducts an old lady. Director Luc Picard cleverly makes twelve-year-old Manon’s act unfold against the 1970 October crisis, when political kidnappings by the Quebec Liberation Front had won some victories for Quebecois autonomy. But what makes the film moving is the imminent breakdown of the family and Manon’s heartfelt, if childish, desire to create a replacement for it — complete with a surrogate grandmother. What the children require of their baffled abductee is to read aloud bedtime stories — and make them a Mickey Mouse costume.

Fictive kinship, in most of these films, serves as a bridge across social and political barriers: the Bhaiyya-Marathi divide in Mumbai, the Kashmiris and the Indian state, and the English-French division in Canada. Perhaps the family — even in the imagination — does still have the power to summon our best selves.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 11 Nov 2018.

Home is where the hearth is

My Mirror column:

Carrying on from last week: how the chef film appeals to our corniest instincts, bringing fathers and sons together while serving up bite-sized doses of life philosophy.

The chef movie has emerged as a popular cinematic lens on family and fatherhood. Last week, while watching Jon Favreau’s 2014 film Chef alongside Raja Krishna Menon’s 2017 Hindi remake of it, I thought about the fact that while male chefs might have achieved near-acceptability in the West, in the Indian middle-class setting, there is still a great deal of resistance to men choosing to cook for a living.

Menon’s adaptation tries to take this fact on board, supplementing Favreau’s nuclear father-son equation with a third generational angle that’s much more fraught with social censure. Saif Ali Khan’s Roshan Kalra, we are told, became a chef entirely against his father’s wishes. Running away from his Old Delhi home at fifteen, he went first to Amritsar — where he scraped together a living as a boy-of-all-work in a local eatery — and then to the US, where he rose to become a well-known chef at an Indian restaurant.

Roshan’s attempt to reconnect with his son Ary (Svar Kamble) also becomes a way to rebuild his own relationship with his estranged Bauji. It isn’t a bad idea per se, and Indian theatre doyen Ram Gopal Bajaj is a fascinating choice of actor to play Roshan’s embittered, lonely father. But though Roshan is supposed to be introducing Ary to the chhole bhature he grew up on, he seems as much of a tourist in Chandni Chowk as his son — while Bajaj’s prickly isolation hits a much deeper, harsher note than the rest of the film.

No such tonal disjuncture afflicts the similar return-to-roots narrative of Anwar Rasheed’s Ustad Hotel. A popular Malayalam drama from 2012, the film starred Dulquer Salmaan as its hero Faizi. As with Roshan in Chef, Faizi’s choice of career is not what his father Abdul (Siddique) wants for him. Having paid for Faizi’s expensive Swiss education, Abdul is shocked to learn that his only son and heir has trained not in hotel management but as a chef. Humiliated and deprived by his father of the passport he needs to take up his foreign job as a chef, Faizi goes off to stay with his grandfather Karim (Thilakan) who runs a small but famed biryani joint in Calicut.

Ustad Hotel is wonderfully comfortable with its orthodox, often patriarchal Kerala Muslim setting, in which for instance, the birth of three daughters in the effort to produce a son incites wry laughter, not external condemnation. That comfort in its own skin extends into the film’s grasp of its social milieu, which ups the believability of the father-son battle. Rather than being a simple gendered rejection of cooking as a woman’s job, it turns out that Abdul’s angst comes from his own biography. Having grown up a cook’s son, he is now a self-made businessman. The perceived social stigma of his father’s profession is not yet a distant memory — and his son’s decision seems to mock his struggle.

And yet, becoming a chef in a fancy foreign restaurant has a certain cachet. But in all these films, from Favreau’s to Menon’s to Ustad Hotel, the lure of that position threatens to distance the protagonist not just from his roots but from the very purpose of cooking: giving people joy.

That tussle between the imaginary high-status job and the down-home eatery is also at the centre of another chef-centred film featuring a father and son conflict: David Kaplan’s 2010 indie drama Today’s Special. If Faizi in Ustad Hotel finds himself waging a war against a five-star hotel to keep his grandfather’s eatery from closing down, Samir in Today’s Special becomes unexpectedly attached to his father’s dowdy old Indian restaurant in Queens.

Today’s Special isn’t a great or even a good film. But despite a by-the-numbers romance and exaggerated gesture-laden performances from the supporting cast, it’s hard to resist the charm of food-as-philosophy. Corny as it is, this is what makes both Ustad Hotel and Today’s Special so watchable. The grandfather-grandson pair in Ustad Hotel find their match in Samir’s chance encounter with a flamboyant New York cabbie called Akbar. Akbar (Naseeruddin Shah thoroughly enjoying himself) converts the over-cautious Samir (Aasif Mandvi) to spontaneous cooking with the aid of lines like “A man who measures life never knows his own measure”. And again, in both these films, snobbery is decried and labour applauded as experience. If Samir finds himself making deliveries by bicycle, grandfather Karim turns young Faizi’s ‘book knowledge’ on its head, gently but firmly nudging him to work at every level of the business, from cleaning tables to carrying rice sacks.
It isn’t as if our heroes don’t resist. A tense Samir once snaps at Akbar, “I’m a chef. I don’t need to learn how to cook from a cab driver.” But he returns quickly, shamefaced, just like Faizi in the rice bag scene. In these times of prioritising poshness, these films are lovely lessons in dressing it down.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 Aug 2018.

Feeding the soul

My Mirror column:

Food seems to bring out feelings. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that films about chefs are films about family and fatherhood. The first of a multi-part column.

Sometime in 2011, an award-winning Italian photographer called Alessio Mamo decided to travel through Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, taking pictures for what he called The Hunger Project.
Last Sunday, when Mamo’s pictures showed up on the World Press Photo’s Instagram page, they were met with outrage. Here were real poor, underfed people, posing before tables laden with fake food. Mamo’s explanation — that he meant to make “western people think, in a provocative way, about the waste of food” — does not excuse his bizarre insensitivity. The attempt to shock by displaying malnourished Indian bodies has led to allegations of ‘poverty porn’. But the more widespread anger is triggered by the fakeness of the food. Making hungry people dream of lavish meals with no intention of actually satisfying that longing seems deliberately cruel.

Thinking about the controversy made me think about how deeply food is wound up with our emotions. Hunger is the purest physical sensation, but it is also the strongest metaphor for a sense of deprivation -- just as the act of feeding someone is often a stand-in for love and care. Almost all over the world, almost all of the time, it is women who do that cooking and feeding. Meals are the most crucial part of the invisible, unpaid labour that keeps the household going. But of course cooking can only get its moment in the sun once it is taken out of the domestic arena, and when men who wouldn’t lift a finger in their own kitchen are willing to lay claim to it as a terrain.

Worldwide, as well as in India, any celebrated chef is invariably a man. Yet a man’s association with cooking isn’t something we can take for granted. It remains something that demands thinking through, making a big deal about. Further, being associated with a traditionally ‘feminine’ activity seems to push restaurant kitchen culture in the direction of an overcompensatory machismo.

So it’s interesting to find that films about chefs are so often about finding a balance between what's often understood as masculine and feminine, between worldly ambition and the nurturing of family. Jon Favreau’s 2014 film Chef, for instance, centres around a well-known Los Angeles chef called Carl (played by Favreau himself), whose public meltdown in response to a nasty review goes viral on Twitter. Having lost his job, he ends up on an unanticipated trip to Miami with his ex-wife and ten-year-old son Percy — and finds himself starting anew by opening a food truck.

Many elements of the plot aren’t new: the road trip, the father-and-son bonding, a man trying to reinvent himself after a midlife crisis. But putting food and cooking at the centre of this cinematic journey allows Favreau to wax gently philosophical about what we really need to nourish our souls. The battle between Carl and his restaurant owner boss Riva (Dustin Hoffman) speaks of how catering to a known market can kill all creativity, making you feel distant even from a job you love in theory. The road trip is another classic trope in a world of deadening capitalist routine – moving into unfamiliar surroundings to re-familiarise yourself with your feelings.


It’s in rejigging the beat-up old truck, though, that the film really hits its stride. There is something here about actual physical labour, about father and son working side by side, that feels wonderfully real. What’s nice is that it isn’t just about being able to summon up strength — something that might be seen as the displayable test of masculinity. Here, instead, we have a forty-year-old man initiating his ten-year-old son into a thoughtful work ethic. Clearing out the old doesn’t always mean acquiring shiny new stuff, Carl suggests to Percy: it can often mean the slow and laborious process of saving what can still be used, and the drudgery of actually cleaning it. The unglamorous stuff needs to be done, even if it’s not what goes into the social media pictures.


Favreau’s film was officially remade last year in India by Raja Krishna Menon, starring Saif Ali Khan in Favreau’s role. Rather than the overweight Carl, who has a hilariously deadpan verbal contest with his father-in-law about who’s dropped more pounds recently, Saif’s Roshan Kalra is super-fit — but with anger issues, expressed in actually punching a customer in the US restaurant where he works. His return to India is spearheaded by losing his job as well as adesire to see his son Ary, who lives with Roshan’s estranged wife Radha in Kochi.


That seems believable. What doesn’t is the food truck — especially Menon’s attempt to relocate the father-son bonding over work into an Indian upper middle-class scenario. The ethic of dignity of labour is practically impossible to translate into a world in which all cooking and cleaning around a child like Ary is done by servants.


In Favreau’s film, the labour we see – even under Hollywood conditions and with the fetishising of such things as the chef’s knife – feels undoubtedly like work. In Menon’s film, neither father nor son can make us believe that it is anything but play.

(To be continued next week)

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 July 2018.

A Muted Sharpness

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The brilliant Jaya Bhaduri, who turned 70 earlier this month, once specialised in being the thinking man’s girl-next-door.

Utpal Dutt and Jaya Bhaduri in her Hindi film debut, Guddi (1971)

Some years ago, on a long taxi ride with a bunch of near millennials, the conversation veered around to Jaya Bachchan, nee Bhaduri, and I found myself in the shocking position of having to defend something I had always assumed was beyond doubt: Jaya’s actorly brilliance. This was despite the fact that by the 1980s, when films first started percolating into my consciousness, she’d already done her decade of top-notch performances, married Amitabh Bachchan, and given up her career for motherhood. But through my childhood and teenage years, if a film of Jaya Bhaduri’s was on television, or in the video rental parlour, it was always watched. And there was never any doubt that Jaya would make it worth watching.

In particular, my mother (not an easy-to-please viewer) had a soft spot for Jaya – and I’ve only recently begun to see that that admiration may have extended beyond her acting to a (subconscious) identification with her screen persona. If my mother was a North Indian girl growing up in Calcutta, Jaya Bhaduri was a Bengali girl from Jabalpur, and there was a recognisable set of elements that made up the bright girl-next-door aesthetic. This included tasteful, unfussy cotton saris, draped perfectly over well-fitted (but never too revealing) blouses; the thick straight black hair worn in a loose long plait, or a bun at the nape of the neck (unlike the fashionably bouffant-crowned Sharmila Tagore, or the more free-flowing hairstyles adopted by a Neetu Singh or a Zeenat Aman), the kaajal, bindi, large hoop earrings – and sometimes even spectacles!

Jaya Bhaduri, who turned 70 this April, made her screen debut in Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (1963), as part of a fine ensemble cast, playing the hero Anil Chatterjee’s teenaged sister. That very particular mid-twentieth century Indian image of youthful femininity: the school-going girl on the cusp of womanhood, enthusiastically learning to wear a sari and cook the family meal, clearly struck a chord with both viewers and directors. In the 1971 Bangla film Dhanyee Meye, she played Uttam Kumar’s sister-in-law. Though by then she had graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India as a gold medalist, Bhaduri’s first Hindi film role –the title character of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Guddi (1971) – also had her playing a teenager, this time one besotted with films in general and Dharmendra in particular. So did her second: as the tomboyish child-bride Mrinmoyee in Uphaar, the Barjatya Productions version of Tagore’s short story ‘Samapti’ (filmed by Ray on Aparna Sen as part of his Teen Kanya triptych).

In Gulzar’s Parichay and Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Bawarchi, both 1972 releases, or later Chupke Chupke (1975), she remained the innocent young woman coming of age in the middle class family setting – whether as Didi to a gang of children, or the younger sister whose marriage is to be fixed. In Basu Chatterjee’s heart-warming Piya ka Ghar (1973), Jaya was the shy young bride catapulted into a crowded Bombay chawl by arranged marriage. Here the family setting was the new sasural: a loving but boisterous home full of card games and theatre rehearsals, cricket and silly jokes.
Another commonality in many of these early roles was her status as the favourite of a father/elder brother figure: Sanjeev Kumar in Parichay, Rajesh Khanna in Bawarchi, Raja Paranjape as her tauji Gauri Shankar in Piya ka Ghar, and later AK Hangal in the sensitive marital drama Kora Kagaz.


In all these depictions of girlhood, however, Jaya’s shyness encoded a certain sexual innocence, a quiet reserve that did not ever involve being coy or silly. This meant she could also be feisty or tomboyish or self-willed, like in Guddi or Uphaar, while always conveying something I can only call character. Whatever she did, we knew that deep down, she was a good girl. It’s that inner quality of non-frivolity that allowed her to so convincingly inhabit the streetsmart role of the memorable “chakku-chhuriyan tez kara lo” girl in Zanjeer (1973). Even when she is first being bought off as a witness by the villain’s henchmen and says something coolly cynical like “For this much money I could turn dumb for a lifetime,” we do not quite believe in her essential badness.

And of course the film makes sure she changes over to the right side of the law quickly, as well as moving from her street performer self to an appropriately sari-clad love interest for the policeman hero – Amitabh Bachchan, whose career as Hindi cinema’s ‘angry young man’ first took off with Zanjeer, and whom Jaya Bhaduri married in June 1973, the year of Zanjeer’s release. Whether Bachchan ever acknowledges it, he was the struggler who married a supremely talented actress at the peak of her powers – and within less than a decade, her career had ended while his, legendarily, carries on into the present.

That real-life narrative is not unusual for India, of course. What perhaps makes Jaya Bhaduri’s case remarkable is that there are at least two films in which she acted out versions of sympathetic fans imagined to be her real life: Abhimaan, in which marital tensions emerge from precisely the sort of unequal fame that Jaya and Amitabh had, and most bizarrely Silsila, in which a version of the love triangle of Rekha-Jaya-Amitabh played out on screen, and after which Jaya stopped acting for decades — only returning to the public eye as the mother figure of Hazaar Chaurasi ki Maa and more depressingly, K3G. Even her political persona has wife-and-mother written all over it. Perhaps some day someone in Bollywood will pluck up the courage to cast her in a version of the rest of her life.


Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Apr 2018.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Apr 2018.

Death in Banaras

My Mirror column:

Shubhashish Bhutiani's Mukti Bhawan treats a potentially grand theme with a sensibility that is both gentle and droll.

Anyone who has been to Banaras has encountered death. There is no other place in India, likely in the world, where death is thus placed centre stage. That primacy is mapped geographically onto the city: the smoking pyres of Manikarnika Ghat occupy a central chunk of the city’s riverfront. But even if the visitor isn’t hovering purposefully around Manikarnika, not a day passes in Banaras without seeing a corpse being carried off to its final resting place, held aloft by a set of briskly striding mourners chanting Ram Nam Satya Hai (‘God’s name is truth’).

Death in Banaras is both ubiquitous and part of life, because every day new people arrive in the city, hoping that their lives will end there. To die in Kaashi, Hindus have long believed, is the best death possible, because it frees the soul from the cycle of life and rebirth. As the saying goes, Kaashyaam maranam muktih – ‘Death in Kaashi is Liberation’.

As the scholar Diana L Eck points out in her brilliant book Banaras: City of Light, there are several categories of people who want to die in Banaras. There are the hundreds of yogis and renouncers who practice their austerities here. There are the thousands of ordinary people who come for Kaashivasa (“to live in Kaashi”), retirees of both genders and many widows, settling down in neighbourhoods associated with different regions: the Bengalis in Bangali Tola, the Maharashtrians near Rama Ghat and Panchaganga Ghat, the Tamilians around Hanuman Ghat, and so on. And finally there are those ill or very old people who arrive in the nick of time, for what is called Kaashi Laabh: the Benefit of Kaashi. For them there are hospices like Kaashi Laabh Mukti Bhawan, where guests may stay only fifteen days – if they haven’t managed to check out of this world into the next by then, they must vacate. The attitude to death in Banaras, then, is both otherworldly and stunningly practical. Death in other places is something that arrives unannounced, to be staved off as long as possible. Not in Kaashi. “Death, which elsewhere is feared, here is welcomed as a long-expected guest,” writes Eck. It is this remarkable philosophical reversal that Shubhashish Bhutiani puts at the centre of his directorial debut, Mukti Bhawan.

Bhutiani’s script revolves around a 70-something man (Lalit Behl, last seen in his real-life son Kanu Behl’s film Titli) who decides one morning that he is ready to die, and insists that his son Rajiv (Adil Hussain) take leave from work to accompany him to Banaras and check into Mukti Bhawan. The film isn’t really interested in plot, or even particularly in the social or religious underpinnings I’ve just mentioned. What it sets out to do – and for the most part, achieves – is to capture the drollness of it all, and the strange sort of power that an outer world can exert on our inner one.

The film’s other focus is relationships – the husband and wife may squabble, but they also seem to recognise that the squabbling binds them. The old man who is crotchety and inflexible with his son is charming and supportive with his granddaughter. She reciprocates his trust – when he asks, before leaving home, if she will come to see him, she jokes, “Kahan? Banaras? Ya...?” raising her eyes upwards to heaven. In the taxi on the way there, the old man admonishes the driver for driving rashly: “Banaras pahunchne se pehle hi kahin oopar mat pahuncha dena.”

With moments like this, even before we arrive in Banaras, Bhutiani establishes a tone that is somehow warm without being mawkish, funny without ridiculing. It is a supremely rare tone in Indian cinema, especially when the context is religious and the subject is death. We have seen death in Banaras powerfully on the Indian screen before, in very different registers. In Masaan, we saw it at its most unexpected, the cruel and unnecessary deaths of a young man and ayoung woman. In Satyajit Ray’s Aparajito, perhaps its most famous instance, Harihar collapses and dies suddenly on the ghats, and the camera cuts to a flock of birds taking off into a darkening sky. Mukti Bhawan does something very different, refusing drama and the assumed ‘gravity’ of death in favour of a slow dawning of recognition.

That recognition, the film suggests, is as much about this world as the next. To die at peace, one must first fully embrace life. And so Daya’s demands for the preoccupied Rajiv’s attention might also be a way of making him focus on the here and now: salt in the food, milk in the morning. Preparing to leave the body involves first consciously cultivating it: yoga, kapaal bhaati, massage, but also through what it ingests (Daya toys with a fruit diet), or watching how it behaves on bhaang. In a superb late scene, we see how making oneself laugh and clap can alter one’s emotional state: it’s about making the body work on the mind, rather than vice versa.

My only real quarrel with the film is that Bhutiani’s too-serene frames of the river and ghats, with the city’s sounds overlaid with Tajdar Junaid’s meditative soundtrack, made me miss the raucous, full-blooded chaos I remember as Banaras. But then these are cities of the mind, and who knows: the experience of Mukti Bhawan may alter my next trip.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 9 April 2017.