"Hindi filmmakers should go back to the drawing board": Interview with Manoj Bajpayee

A wide-ranging interview with the celebrated Hindi film and OTT actor Manoj Bajpayee, published in Frontline in May 2024.

The team of The Fable was jumping up and down—for joy and for Instagram—in the mid century modernist foyer of Berlin’s Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts) building. Manoj Bajpayee, 54, stood graciously for the first few photographs, and then sat down a little to the left of where his 34-year-old director Raam Reddy and team continued their youthful photo shoot. Even at rest, Bajpayee exuded a kind of coiled nervous energy—quiet, unfailingly polite, but also watchful.  

Meeting the Mumbai-based actor in Berlin, on the fringes of the Berlin Film Festival where his film The Fable was premiering, felt unusual and yet oddly fitting. Born in 1969 to a farming family in rural Champaran, Bajpayee’s journey to becoming Hindi cinema’s best known ‘alternative hero’ has been nothing if not unusual. Rejected more than once by the National School of Drama, Bajpayee conquered his disappointment by finding work with Delhi’s theatre stalwarts like Barry John and N.K. Sharma, with whom he founded the Act One troupe in 1990. The route to cinema was not easy either. Bajpayee’s first film was Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen (1994), which premiered at Cannes and was India’s entry to the Oscars that year. But his minor role as the dacoit Man Singh did not get him any new work. What it did, though, was lodge his performance in the mind of Ram Gopal Verma, who when he met Bajpayee two years later, promised him a role in his next film, a gangster drama set in Mumbai. This, of course, was the era-defining Satya (1998), with Bajpayee’s Bhikhu Mhatre at its incandescent core. 

Fine turns in films like Shool, Kaun, Zubeidaa, Aks, and Pinjar followed. While it has not always been a smooth ride, Bajpayee has successfully stayed the course. In 2024, he is really everywhere, appearing in OTT offerings, in theatres and in film festivals. Bajpayee’s recent roles have run the gamut in terms of power and social position: a middle class lawyer in Sirf Ek Banda Kaafi Hai, a troubled business scion in Gulmohar, a semi-feudal plantation owner in The Fable, a dispossessed adivasi in Joram, and to top it off, a double role as both abusive, womanising husband and clingy, put-upon lover in Killer Soup. Clearly, this is an actor at the peak of his prowess.

Excerpts from an interview:

You were an Amitabh Bachchan fan but began your career in parallel cinema—Bandit Queen, Drohkaal—and were part of creating a more realistic mainstream cinema, Satya onwards. How would you evaluate the state of Hindi cinema today, especially given OTT platforms and the pandemic? 

I think Hindi cinema had reached a good place—experimenting, entertaining but also not compromising on art. So many films—Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, Gangs of Wasseypur, Special 26 and many others achieved this mix. Then Covid came and people got out of the habit of going to the theatre. They aren’t completely back yet. During the pandemic, audiences got a chance to explore the new medium [OTT] that had come into their households. Now that option of watching on your phone is always there. Post pandemic, the Hindi mainstream is confused. I see a desperate attempt to entertain that was not there before. Earlier, creators came from a place of conviction. Now they don’t know what will convince the audience to come out of their homes and spend the kind of money needed.

Thus the tilt towards spectacle? 

That is the Marvel effect! It was there before too, but it is much more now. Producers seem to feel that people need an extravaganza to come to the theatre. 

Is that true? 

I don’t think so. The success of Kantara, or a small film like 12th Fail, or the huge critical acclaim for a film like Joram… give me hope. Hindi filmmakers should go back to the drawing board. Before COVID-19, we were doing everything right: women-led films were doing well, films were engaging as well as entertaining… But now the fear of failing is such that there is a push towards extravaganzas. I think we just need to look at Amitabh Bachchan’s films. Larger than life characters, yes, often rags to riches plots, the triumph of good over evil. But the hero was a coolie, or an orphan, or a police inspector who was non-corrupt, or an unwanted child who becomes a multi-millionaire. People related and clapped for him. Replace Marvel-style films with this; you’d save a lot of money on VFX. 

But Hindi cinema no longer tells stories about poor people, they are not the paying audience… 

But the same audience is watching a Telugu film where the protagonist is from a poor background. They are watching Kantara in the non-Kannada circuit and making it successful. Kantara’s story is like a lok katha, with a hero from a village. If we take the lead from there, I think we will find clarity. 

By “from there” what do you mean? 

South India. I do not mean imitate them, but take a cue from them. Heroes should look like us, talk about the problems that the common man is facing. Very few Indians actually make it to the civil services, but when you make something like 12th Fail, the level of identification is huge. The Marvel model might make money once or twice, but that is not a long-lasting solution. I have no problem with larger-than-life films. But stories should be rooted in our society. Because people want hope, and you can’t give them hope by showing life on Mars. 

Has OTT helped or hindered? 

OTT has opened up possibilities for storytelling. You can make things with good intentions and find an audience. Take Sirf Ek Bandaa Kaafi Hai. A regular lawyer fighting for a minor, fearful that someone might come out of any gali and kill him. It became a streaming phenomenon overnight. So audiences are looking for relatable characters, stories that offer excitement—and hope. 

Sirf Ek Bandaa... is based on a real-life sexual assault case against Asaram Bapu. But are things getting more difficult, the stories that can be told?

The censor situation was as brutal 20 years ago. But filmmakers are intelligent people. You can’t sit down and say you can’t make a film. You are a creative person, right? Then you will find a way. Among just my films, think of Sirf Ek Bandaa… or Gulmohar—that “family film” speaks of so many things so cleverly. Or Joram, about a tribal man who is displaced… and Joram has a U/A certificate. 

Could these be exceptions? 

One can be an exception, not five. I think cinema and theatre has gone through changes and challenges in any decade, and always come out on top. 

Theatre was where you began as an actor. Do you miss it? 

I miss it. So much that I tried going back to it. But theatre does not give you crutches—no takes, editing, background music, or sound. What you see with your naked eyes is the truth. It is an actor’s medium, but the actor has to be completely prepared. I was not. I would have to completely stop working in cinema for a time, to work on myself and be ready for theatre. 

Is that something you might do? 

Yes, I might. 

What is it you miss about theatre? The audience? 

The audience used to be a blur. It was as if nothing else existed. The stage was my safest space in the world. That is what I miss. 

Is the film set not like that?

The film set, you can’t really own it. There are too many factors that own it. 

Do you still watch theatre? 

Yes, I do. Whenever I am free and there is a play by friends—Makarand Deshpande or Danish Husain, so many people—I go to Prithvi Theatre. 

Do you prepare for a role by seeking out real people who resemble your character? 

I have met lakhs of people, thousands of them very closely, from all strata of society. From a village to a Paharganj basti to a Vasant Vihar palace, life has taken me everywhere. Everything is stored in the hard drive of my brain. So no.

I may not have grown up as a rich businessman’s son, but playing Arun Batra in Gulmohar or playing Dev in The Fable was not hard. These people are all around me, I know how they think. What was hard was Zubeidaa. To play a prince is a whole different mindset. I still remember [Shyam] Benegal telling me, “You don’t know anything about poverty. You are raja and they are praja. And you are not an exploiter. Don’t complicate matters too much. From the moment you open your eyes, you have only known this.” 

Do filmmakers write roles for you now?

When you’re dealing with Raam Reddy or Devashish Makhija or Kanu Behl, these are very creatively committed people. They do not write roles for anybody. But if those roles suit me, they do give me scripts to read. There I can compliment myself, I have never led a closed life—and I think they also feel that if Manoj Bajpayee comes on board, he doesn’t go away easily.

Are there roles you want to play? Any historical figures, maybe? 

Oh no, I don’t want to do biopics. See, you need an Attenborough to make a Gandhi. And then Attenborough needs to give Ben Kingsley the time to prepare. We do not give our biopics that commitment of time, money, and energy. Also some shades of grey are needed, which Indian biopics don’t offer. The only biopic I have done is Aligarh. I based the character of Dr Siras on a one-minute interview clip with Barkha Dutt. It was almost nothing to go by. But people who knew Siras told me, “He was just like how you showed him.” 

Does acting ever seem scary to you, its power?

I think acting affects people, though only up to a point. Dev’s journey in The Fable makes people realise the void they unknowingly carry. Siras’ plight in Aligarh affects people because it is hard to see a person trapped in his own house. We relate to it, because we are all the time invaded. 

Have you had that Dilip Kumar experience, of being too close to the character? 

It happened with Shool. But I was very young then. I did not know how to switch off and switch on. But even now, am I ever totally off? How many bruises I carry, I will only know at the end of my life. Until then I am enjoying myself! Maybe my moodiness is also the effect of playing all these characters so deeply. But I love acting. If I love the perks, I have to love the bruises. 

Has acting ever felt strange to you, the combination of intensely feeling something internally but having to perform it externally?

Acting is like stripping yourself in front of everyone. If you are ready for that, then come into this business. But yes, it’s amazing there are many actors like me—people who prefer to be quiet, very shy in many ways—who suddenly feel completely comfortable when the camera is on. It excites me, what art can do to an artist. 

Do you feel like each role teaches you something new? 

Yes. Each role’s humanity affects me. Also, don’t forget that the script is written material. You are finding new meaning as you go through every line, repeatedly.

Are you a reader? 

I am a reader, but not a voracious one. Because I do not have time. I read my scripts on flights. 

Have scripts become more professional? 

They have. When I entered the industry, there was only narration. People looked at me strangely if I asked for a script. Then people started giving me a page. Then ten pages. Now you see professional bound scripts. I ask for them in Devanagari, I am from Hindi medium. To read Hindi in Roman is impossible for me. 

You would be an exception, since most Hindi film scripts are originally written in English, and most actors and even directors are increasingly only English-speaking. Does this disconnect not link to the lack of rooted stories? 

Definitely. Look at all the filmmakers who’ve made an impact, from Vishal Bhardwaj to Rakeysh Mehra to Hansal Mehta to Anurag Kashyap to Devashish Makhija: all of them write in Hindi, though they studied in English-medium. I’m glad you asked me this. If you’re from north India, and coming into this industry, Hindi should be something you practice. Sure, we need English, absolutely, it’s empowering. But the lack of Hindi is a handicap. I sometimes see on a talk show, people making fun of a [Hindi] word that some actor has used. I think, how can you do that? You are making fun of yourselves. And I tell my 13-year-old daughter, sit with me, work on your Hindi, you’ll be at a huge advantage. She gets irritated, but it will have an impact. Especially since she is very active in theatre in school, and she wants to act. We are heading towards a situation in this industry where knowing Hindi will be the exception.

Published in Frontline magazine, May 12, 2024.

On the Indian documentary Nocturnes, shot in Arunachal Pradesh, which won an award at Sundance Film Festival 2024

My review of Anirban Datta and Anupama Srinivasan's documentary Nocturnes. 

Nocturnes won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Craft at the Sundance Film Festival a few hours after my piece was published on Moneycontrol.com, on 27 January 2024.

A still from the Sundance-award-winning Indian documentary Nocturnes.

We hear them before we see them -- a faint but persistent rustling in the darkness, which turns out to be the fluttering of a million little wings. And when we first see the moths, they seem tiny, insignificant. Why, we wonder, would two human beings spend so much time and effort on them? A few moments later, though, we see the two researchers again. This time, walking along a forest path, dwarfed almost entirely by the dark green tree canopy that takes up most of the frame, it is humans who seem insignificant, just a speck on the surface of the earth. 

Of such glorious visual revelations is Nocturnes made. Directed by long-time Delhi-based non-fiction filmmakers Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan, the 2024 documentary which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, USA earlier this week was shot on location in the misty mountainous forests of Arunachal Pradesh. This is not Datta and Srinivasan’s first work in the Northeast: their previous collaboration, Flickering Lights, which won the top prize for cinematography at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2023, was about electrification -- or the lack of it -- in a village in Manipur. 

Anirban Datta, one of Nocturnes'
two directors

 Nocturnes, unlike FL, approaches science not   through pragmatics or politics but as a source of   wonder. We follow Mansi Mungee, an Indian   entomologist in her 30s, as she traverses the   forests of the Eastern Himalayas in search of the   hawk moth. She is accompanied by Gendan   “Bicki” Marphew, a young man from the local   Bugun community who works part-time as her   photographer-assistant. Sometimes other   collaborators appear, too, but the point of view   remains very much Mansi’s. As she and Bicki scout out locations, we learn about the practicalities she must keep in mind: the specific elevation or height above sea level; the presence of old-growth trees; the existence of a forest clearing to enable light from the moth screen to travel some distance -- but also some natural limits to that clearing, so that the moths that show up can be assumed to have come from a single elevation. 

Anupama Srinivasan, one of Nocturnes' 
two directors

Sukanta Majumdar’s impeccable location sound brings the forest to life, overlaid by Nainita Desai’s almost eerie musical compositions complementing our sense of visual discovery. But the work of science is not glamorous, and Yael Bitton’s editing stays close to the precision and slowness and often repetitive labour of the process: recording, measuring, comparing, evaluating. We get a real sense of the long hours spent waiting, with little control over the outcome of their labours. Night upon night, the researcher and her assistant are awake into the wee hours, their headlamps and hoods abuzz with winged visitors -- hoping that their little island of light will attract at least some of the specific creatures that they are here to study. But there are no guarantees of anything, and in these moments, scientific work begins to echo the practice of faith. 

At one point, when Mansi sketches out the route along which she intends to map the population of hawk moths, and explains to her assistants that they need to take two hundred photographs at each point on it, one of them stops her. “How long will this take?” he asks. Mansi’s reply is immediate: “However long. Four months, five months, two years -- whatever it takes, we’ll do it.” That commitment to a timeline without end feels like deep romance, especially in a world that thinks it needs everything faster and wants nothing forever. 

Several recent Indian documentaries have gained worldwide attention by training their lenses on the subcontinent’s infinitely various natural world and the relationships we have with some particular aspect of it. Kartiki Gonsalves’ The Elephant Whisperers (2022) won an Academy Award for its portrait of the man-animal bond through one couple and an elephant in Mudumalai, Rahul Jain’s Invisible Demons (2022) mapped the apocalyptic state of Delhi’s polluted air, while Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes (2022) achieved a brilliant mix of the poetic and political with its mordant portrait of two Delhi-based brothers who run a hospital for injured kites. 

Nocturnes is a quieter, smaller film than both the latter, the filmmakers having chosen a milieu with less scope for ecological handwringing or socio-political critique. But neither does it resort to crowd-pleasing appeals of the orphaned baby elephant variety. It just nudges us to slow down and look -- at gossamer spider webs trembling in the weak morning light, a caterpillar looping itself along the strength of a slender branch, the mist unfurling over a dark forested valley, and most often, at its mysterious world of whirring creatures that sometimes live only a few days, but whose ancestors have been on the planet since before the dinosaurs. Like its researcher protagonist, it hides a deep existential investment in its subject under an implacable workaday front. 

The film’s least successful moments, for me, are those when its almost meditative focus on time and labour and the eternal ‘show’ of nature is punctured by overt moments of ‘tell’: Mansi verbalising her enchantment with the species she studies, or asking existential questions to which science may not have any answers: “Why are moths so variegated in colour and pattern? Why do they thrive in these remote forests?” It would also have been interesting to see a little more of the indigenous Bugun and Shertukpen communities, who are thanked in the credits as “the guardians of this forest”. But that would have been a different film, and for now, this one is quite enough.

First published in Moneycontrol on 27 Jan, 2024.

Making Waves at MoMA

A short essay I wrote for India Today on a festival of contemporary Indian cinema at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2022. 

'Making Waves: A New Generation of Indian Independent Filmmakers' is the largest Indian festival at MoMA since 2009, and is intended to showcase small-budget but artistically ambitious and accomplished films 

 

 

(CLICK THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE) 

Published in India Today, 19 Sep 2022.

Why you can't watch these films while cooking

My Mumbai Mirror/TOI Plus column:

A bouquet of independent films at the 2021 New York Indian Film Festival doesn't leave us smelling of roses, but takes a wry, gentle and honest look at our lives today

A still from Arun Karthick's wake-up call of a film, Nasir (2020).

What do you want to see on your screen? What you watch on your television screen, your computer screen or your phone screen is inextricably connected to what you're willing to play on the most important screen of all – the mind's eye.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic struck India last year, those who can work from home and still earn a living have been the lucky ones. But we have been robbed of what was once our daily life. As our live interactions with the outside world recede into the distance, those who have access to a screen of any sort spend more and more time on it. And yet, simultaneously, the degree of attention people give to what's on the screen in front of them, seems to decrease every day – and I don't just mean their long-distance girlfriends.

We all know people who watch only foreign TV shows, or only old movies, or only comedy these days, because the Indian here and now seems too grim to engage with. That desire to screen out the darker parts of Indian reality extends from the middle class consumer to media producers: I was recently told that international funders are very keen on fresh documentary content from India, but it needs to be light and preferably humorous. I speak anecdotally here, but I know more and more people who keep a film or a web series running on a phone or tablet screen beside them, while they proceed with the work of the day – sometimes on another screen. I suppose it's no different from keeping the television on for company, as people of an older generation have done for years. But it means that the 'content' you're watching shouldn't need your full attention. And what does that mean for how you engage with the world?

The films playing as part of the New York Indian Film Festival 2021, however, demand your full attention – and they're worth it. The festival is being held virtually for the second year running, and this year a substantial chunk of the programming is available to view in India. Online tickets to the NYIFF films are available to purchase on the Movie Saints platform till June 13, and streaming until June 20, along with specially-curated interviews and discussions with many of the filmmakers, actors and producers.

The festival line-up includes some of the best films I've seen to come out of India in the last year or so. Several of these are short films - a category tragically under-represented online, with almost no opportunities for a sustainable, commercial-release format, despite the massive jump in OTT viewership in India. 

Pratik Thakare's superb short film Salana Jalsa (Annual Day) is subtle yet completely absorbing.

There is, for instance, Pratik Thakare's debut short Salana Jalsa, made as his dissertation project at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, which is a stunning exploration of young people straining towards art – and towards their true selves. Set during an Annual Day function at a Marathi-speaking school in suburban Maharashtra, Salana Jalsa moves fluidly and beautifully among its three primary characters, each of them trying to make themselves heard or seen or just treated a little bit better -- in a world where they're expected to merely tick a box, and no one appears to notice if they don't quite fit in it. I could say that it’s about an aspiring poet, a girl who wants to do Western dance rather than Indian, and a boy who is bullied because he's fat. But Thakare's characters have unexpected arcs, and his atmospheric framing and soundscape make the school experience come alive.

Another of the superb shorts is the Bengali film Tasher Ghawr. Director Sudipto Roy, screenwriter Sahana Dutta and actor Swastika Mukherjee together create a portrait of the quirky housewife next door that you're unlikely to forget. Cleverly staged as a conversational monologue with the viewer, the film is about a woman stuck at home during lockdown. It is chatty and quirky and funny – until it isn't. She complains, as so many middle class housewives do, about her husband being home every day now – and we smile at first. But then we see him, the faceless man sprawled on a sofa, yelling for his breakfast, storming out of the house because of a stray seed in his apple juice, or whispering on the phone to his secret girlfriend. And then we start to see her, the dreamy-eyed kooky lady who talks to the mice – and we begin to see what makes the crazy ladies around us crazy.

Among the features, I was charmed by the Telugu film Mail, about the computer's arrival in an Indian village in 2006. “You can write a letter to anybody in the world,” the dubious cyber guru announces to his first wide-eyed shishya. Of course, in the absence of any further teaching, the student's Gmail inbox remains empty, while the teacher receives a daily quarter of alcohol in return for fifteen minutes with the sacred machine. Uday Gurrala's film has an affectionate eye for the absurd, making us laugh at our responses to new technology, while capturing the visual joys of the Telangana rural landscape.

The most unmissable film in the festival, though, is the Tamil feature Nasir. Arun Karthick's film about a sari shop salesman, which won the NETPAC award at Rotterdam last year, is a warm, gentle telling of our current political predicament. If it doesn't change you, then nothing will.

For that to happen, though, you'll have to pay attention.

Published in TOI Plus/Mumbai Mirror, 12 June 2021.

A child's view of the world through a train ride

This is the sixth column in my ongoing series on trains in Indian cinema. (Periodic reminder for new readers of this blog: I write a weekly column on cinema which appears in TOI Plus, as well as in Bangalore Mirror, Pune Mirror & Mumbai Mirror.)

-- In Gulzar's Kitaab, the railways are a route and a rite of passage for a child trying to find his place in the universe --

There are probably few films in any language that have been titled 'book'. But lest you think a film called Kitaab might be bookish (which in the eyes of many movie-viewers translates to boring), Gulzar's 1977 screen adaptation of Samaresh Basu's story begins in breathless motion. Gusts of black smoke rise into the sky, a train whistles, and the familiar “chooka-chook” of the moving carriage takes over, interspersed with a child's voice. He is making up a chant to match the train's rhythmic sound: Kidhar ja, kidhar ja, kidhar ja? Bhaag chala, bhaag chala, bhaag chala [Where d'you go, where d'you go, where d'you go? Running away, running away, running away].

It is only after this that we see him: Master Raju, ubiquitous and irreplaceable child star of 1970s Hindi cinema, squatting on the train's floor, in the space between two lower berths. Above him, in the upper berths, two children pass a notebook to each other, conducting a silent game of knots and crosses. Even before we know anything of what the film is about, Gulzar has communicated how marvellous train journeys could feel for the middle-class child -- the adults asleep below, while you looked down from the deliciously unsupervised space of the upper berth, the holidays stretching ahead of you. The train journey was a time out of time.

As it turns out, Gulzar is only pointing to that sense of sweet interregnum, secured at both ends by middle-class cushioning, as a contrast. What makes Kitaab memorable is the real-life adventure on which it launches its boy hero – but here, too, the railways are crucial. Bored with school and misunderstood at home, Babla runs away from the city home he shares with his didi (Vidya Sinha) and brother-in-law (in an odd bit of casting, Uttam Kumar!). He gets on the train to go back to his mother in the village. But when shoved out for being ticketless, the 12-year-old suddenly finds himself in the real world he's been so impatient to enter.

In flashback, we see Babla and his best friend Pappu bunking school to wander the city, entranced as much by the street magician as by the halwai making jalebis. Again and again, they try to apprentice themselves to these men, who greet their enthusiasm with mostly indulgent disbelief. On the surface, these scenes evoke laughter: The boys, it seems, will do anything to get out of having to go to school. But the camera's attention to the men's practiced movements and the boys' rapt gazes tell a different story: These artisans are indeed masters of their craft. The children, watching them, grasp that fact instinctively – and any craft so consummately carried out seems worth learning. If classroom education has failed to engage these young minds, Kitaab suggests, it has also not yet infected them with the casteist, classist belief that manual work, no matter how skilled, is unworthy of admiration.

It is people like these that adopt the runaway boy -- the railway engine driver and his assistant, the station's resident midget, and Shreeram Lagoo playing a blind singer of the sort that could once be met on every train in India. Asking very few questions, they simply add him into their lives. The middle class passengers ignore the unclaimed child in their midst, but the engine driver gives him the last of his tiffin, the blind beggar buys him tea and food. The instinctive humanity with which they share what little they have is moving – yet Gulzar doesn't let things turn maudlin. We smile at little things and big ones: The little boy and the dwarf literally sizing each other up; the hackneyed phrases people use for emotions. When someone says “Bechara anaath hai [He's a poor orphan]”, Babla adopts the phrase, trotting it out for a quick dose of sympathy, often to hilarious effect. “Bechara anaath hoon [I'm a poor orphan],” he tells one ticket checker -- just before saying he's headed to meet his mother.

 

Much of the bittersweet pleasure of Kitaab comes from watching the child watch the world go by – and learning from it as he does. And although Babla was curious, observant and sensitive at school and at home, it is the train that offers him a sense of what the world is really like. The network of trains and railway stations is like a pathway through the world, and a microcosm of it. As Babla negotiates his way through this network, he encounters old age and disease, blindness and deformity -- and death. Like a latter-day Siddhartha, the protected middle class boy is confronted with the sight of suffering, and is shaken by it.

Unlike Siddhartha, though, the experience doesn't lead him to renounce the world – but to return to it richer. One could read Kitaab as a cop-out: Issuing a challenge to middle class pieties and normative barriers, but turning back before risk turns to danger. But one can also see it as an expansion of the child's universe, an initiation into life that acknowledges the inevitability of sorrow -- while not undermining the value of the safety net. As the blind train singer puts it, “Gaadi chhutne ka gham mat kariyo, baalak. Station na chhutne paaye [Don't mourn the missed train, child. Just don't let the station get away from you.]”

Published in TOI Plus, and three editions of Mirror -- Pune, Bangalore and Mumbai.

Satyajit Ray’s world of trains

My column for Mirror/TOI Plus, the fourth in my series on trains in Indian cinema:

On the filmmaker’s birth centenary, a look at how the train is a motif in many of his films, including the Apu Trilogy, Nayak and Sonar Kella

A still from Satyajit Ray's Nayak (1966), starring Sharmila Tagore and Uttam Kumar.

Satyajit Ray, whose 100^th birth anniversary was May 2, is associated with one of the most famous train sequences in all of cinema: The children, Apu and Durga in Pather Panchali, standing in a field of fluffy, white kaash flowers, listening for an oncoming train. I've always thought that what makes that sequence unforgettable is the rural Bengali landscape ruptured by the sound of the machine before the sight of it. The children hear the train's vibration in a pillar before the great beast rumbles past.

The train remained a motif throughout the Apu Trilogy, acquiring more layers of darkness with each film. What Ray had originally framed as the link between the village and the city became, in Aparajito, a marker of the distance between the two, and then in Apur Sansar, a site of potential death.

The eternal train scene in Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray's 1955 debut feature

But there are two other films in which Ray put the train to less melancholic use. The first of these was Nayak, released on May 6, 1966, in which he cast real-life Bengali matinee idol Uttam Kumar as a film star called Arindam Mukherjee. When we meet Arindam, there are two items about him in the day's papers: One, a National Award he's being given in Delhi, and two, a brawl in which he was involved the night before. It's a succinct if simplistic summary of the film actor's life -- popularity and critical achievement, but alongside infamy.

Some mention is made of Arindam having left it too late to get a seat on a plane, and Ray thus successfully places his famed and shamed hero on a long train ride that exposes him to a microcosm of the Indian upper middle class – which, 55 years ago, was snootier about film stars than it is now. From the corporate head honcho who sniffs at the brawl to the old gentleman who disapproves of films on principle, the train isn't exactly filled with Arindam fans.

But what really feels completely unreal in 2021 is the degree of unguarded interaction that the train affords between the film star and his public. Arindam is kind to little girls, signs some autographs, and then gets drunk in a train toilet. When he stumbles back to his compartment, the upper middle class housewife in it is humane enough – and female enough – to help him to bed rather than, say, take a picture of his disarray. Even the snarky journalist (Sharmila Tagore) that Arindam ends up confiding in over a long pantry car conversation, decides he is deserving of her humanity and tears up her notes. The train serves, in many ways, as a filter – Arindam is on display and yet somehow he isn't quite out in the open.

On the sets of Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress), 1974.

But by far the most sprightly use of the train in Ray's cinema is in Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress), the first film adaptation to feature his famously-popular detective, Feluda. Released in 1974, the whole film practically unfolds as a series of overlapping train journeys.

The very beginning of the adventure in Calcutta involves Feluda, played by the late Soumitra Chatterjee (who died after a battle with Covid in November 2020), silently removing from his bookshelf a hardbound copy of the Railway Timetable for November 1973. On the other side of events, we are introduced to the film's villains by being shown their names on a railway reservation chart: M Bose (Lower) and A Barman (Upper). Bose and Barman are hot on the trail of the originary set of train travellers – a six-year-old child constantly making crayon sketches of a past birth, and a parapsychologist taking him to Rajasthan in the hope of identifying the golden fortress of his drawings.

The train is also where Feluda and his nephew Topshe first meet the man who will become the third member of their trio: The mystery writer Lalmohan Ganguly alias Jatayu. He boards their compartment at Kanpur station with his red 'Japani suitcase... imported', and proceeds to speak several sentences in rather grandiloquent Hindi before realising that his companions are Bengalis, too.

It is a remarkably orderly world that Ray maps out, in which precise calculations can be made based on train timings. If a set of people hasn’t arrived at Jodhpur in the morning, they can be assumed to arrive by the evening train instead. And if the expected villains haven't shown up on the day they should have, Feluda speculates that they may have failed to get a train booking.

Trains in The Golden Fortress are the route to excitement, transporting these parties of Bengalis into the 'dacoit-infested country' of western Rajasthan. But trains are also the possible way back to order and civilisation: In one pre-climactic moment, Feluda offers Lalmohan Babu the option of getting off at Pokhran, from where he can catch a train back, rather than proceeding to Jaisalmer with them.

In one of Sonar Kella's most memorable scenes, the intrepid Bengalis get on camel-back, and try to wave a train down across the desert. It's the one time in the film that Feluda's plan doesn't succeed. The train keeps on going.

Published in Mumbai Mirror (9 May 2021) & in TOI Plus (8 May 2021).

A lifeline, but also a harbinger of doom

The third column in my series on trains in Indian cinema, for Mirror/TOI Plus:

In the cinema of Bimal Roy, the train is often a site of unfolding tragedy

Fiction necessarily derives its motifs from reality. There’s a reason why the road movie is a thing in Hollywood, while it barely existed in India until quite recently. Trains, on the other hand, have been integral to our cinema as sites of romance, drama and - more often than you might expect – sorrow.

When Sanjay of 27 Down launched himself on an endless train ride to combat his melancholia, he was following in the footsteps of Indian cinema's original tragic romantic hero, Devdas. The original Bengali novel, published by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1917, has been adapted for the screen many times. The classic, in my opinion, remains the 1955 Bimal Roy version, starring Dilip Kumar and Suchitra Sen as Devdas and Paro: Childhood friends whose romantic union as adults is prevented by their caste-minded, convention-bound families -- and by their own stubborn, childish miscommunication. Paro anchors herself in the duties of her arranged marriage, while Devdas' anchorlessness is depicted in his constant wandering. We see him sometimes dramatically departing for Calcutta in a horse-drawn carriage, then almost immediately returning. Later, having turned alcoholic, he wanders the village shooting birds with an air gun. Bimal Roy makes elegant cinematic use of several modes of transport: The unending bullock-cart ride at night, or the beautifully conjoined shots where Paro is urged to ascend into her wedding palanquin just as Devdas is being urged to descend from his – at the house of the tawaif, Chandramukhi. But it is the train sequence that is iconic, with our still-youthful but sunken-eyed hero lolling about in his compartment as the train transports him across the country.

Trains possibly work best for Devdas' character because they let him move while having to expend no energy. And he never seems to actually get off the train, though we see the names of stations that mark the country's biggest cities, other than Calcutta, where he started: Delhi, Madras, Bombay, Lahore. (It's interesting that Roy puts Lahore in there, because it marks the setting of his film as before Independence and Partition. It's even more interesting when one watches the 1935 PC Baruah version of Devdas and finds that the train sequence there has a similarly aimless Devdas traversing a slightly different geography: Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, Banaras.)

The spoilt son of a rich zamindar, Devdas naturally travels first class, accompanied by a trusty feudal retainer. Poor old Dharamdas retires to some less comfortable class of compartment by night, leaving Devdas his privacy – but also leaving him vulnerable to being lured back to drink by his thoughtless friend, Chuni Babu. In one of Roy's much-applauded visual juxtapositions, the train's engine is stoked by a shovelful of coal just as Devdas' cycle of self-pity receives fresh alcoholic fuel.

The train appears in many of Bimal Roy's other films. In Do Bigha Zamin (1953), the railway is the link between the city and the village, as it must be. But it is also the site of dramatic meetings and equally dramatic separations. When Shambhu sets out for Calcutta to try and earn money, he discovers his little son has secretly stowed himself away on the train. Later, when Parvati sets out on another train to search for Shambhu, she is separated from her travelling companion Ramu – to tragic effect. Madhumati (1958), which begins with a car journey disrupted by a landslide, ends with a train accident. There are a few tense moments before we see that it is to be the site of a happy reunion.

It is in Naukri (1955) that Roy puts the tragic potential of trains to full use. The film's job-seeking hero Ratan (played by Kishore Kumar, before he was relegated to purely comic roles) tries to keep his spirits up - and there is at least one bit of silly humour on a train ride, where he gets on without knowing the name of the firm that has offered him a job.

But in the city, Ratan finds himself living with a bunch of similarly jobless young men, placed in a section of a lodge called 'Bekar Block'. It is in this dispirited world that we first see the train as a harbinger of doom. Three suicides are attempted in the film, all of them by unemployed young men throwing themselves on the railway tracks. In Naukri, two out of these three young men are saved.

Still, I couldn't help but think of an odd little scene in Do Bigha Zamin, where Shambhu is listening to two men on the train pontificate about how we need to return to India's villages to save our people. “Each and every one will die!” comes a loud voice from behind them. It turns out to be a man selling a pesticide to kill bed bugs. But there's something rather dark about the scene's humour, given how Do Bigha Zamin turns out. Even as they take you closer to something, trains in Bimal Roy's cinema always foretell possible tragedy.

Published in Mirror (2 May 2021) & in TOI Plus (1 May 2021)

Why our enduring romance with the railways makes for great cinema

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Awtar Krishna Kaul's 27 Down, which won two National Awards in 1973, remains a visually arresting reflection on India's train journeys 

The connection between films and trains dates back to cinema's origins. One of the Lumiere brothers' first films was of a train arriving at the station in La Ciotat, a small French town near Marseilles. Arrival of a Train, shot in 1895, is central to the mythology of the movies. The claim (made in several film histories) is that early audiences leapt from their chairs in alarm as Lumiere's locomotive seemed to race towards them. Even in soundless, jerky black-and-white, the story goes, the power of the moving pictures was such that people – almost -- couldn't tell them apart from life.

 

In recent times, film historians have cast doubt on this narrative, some pointing to confusion with a later stereoscopic version that Louis Lumiere exhibited in 1934. But what is indubitable is that there was something endlessly watchable about this simplest, single shot of a train. Trains had screen presence.

 

Both the railways and the cinema arrived in India soon after their invention, swiftly becoming integral to our social and cultural life. So it's no surprise that trains are a fixture in our films: The staging ground, as much for crime and thrills as romance and recreation.

 

But perhaps the most devoted train film we've ever had is Awtar Krishna Kaul's 1973 feature, 27 Down. Kaul, who had left his diplomat job to study filmmaking in New York, returned to India in 1970 and became part of the Indian New Wave: A spectrum of directors ranging from Basu Chatterjee to Mani Kaul, beginning to make their mark in an era popularly defined by Bobby and Yaadon Ki Baraat. 27 Down was Kaul's first feature, made with the encouragement of Filmfare editor BK Karanjia, who was then chairing the Film Finance Corporation.

 

Based on a Hindi novel called Atharah Sooraj Ke Paudhe, the film stars a young MK Raina as the ticket-checker protagonist Sanjay, and Rakhee as his girlfriend Shalini. Filmed in atmospheric black and white by cinematographer AK Bir (who had just graduated from FTII at the time and never shot a film before), it won National Awards for Cinematography and Best Hindi Feature -- days after Kaul died tragically in a drowning accident.

 

The film begins with the familiar drone of the Indian Railways announcer: “Number Sattaaees Down platform number teen se jaane ke liye taiyyar hai”, and is shot very substantially on trains and in stations. Often assembling his shots to accompany a meditative monologue, Kaul's work seems closer to the more experimental end of the New Wave. 27 Down starts off ploddingly, in a self-consciously literary voice: “Phir koi pul hai kya? Shaayad pul hi hai [Is it a bridge again? It's probably a bridge],” Sanjay thinks to himself, lying supine on a berth as the train moves. “It feels like I'm constantly crossing bridges...”. But there are playful moments, too. The song Chhuk chhuk chhuk chalti rail, aao bachchon khelein khel adopts the train's rhythm to create a visual and aural paean to it, with shots of the locomotive moving through tunnels juxtaposed with children lining up to form a train.

 

Son of an engine driver, Sanjay's life seems to keep circling back to the railways. Born between two stations, as a child he is insatiably curious about trains. He tries to study art in Bombay, but his father urges upon him the stability of a railway ki naukri. As a ticket checker, Sanjay discovers anew his love of trains. He starts to eat and sleep on trains, even when not on duty. Neighbours, landlords, even his father finds his peripatetic existence strange. “Tumhare liye toh train hi ghar ho gayi hai,” his father writes him.

 

It is on a train that he meets Shalini, who lives alone in a rented room in Kurla and works in the Life Insurance Company of India. It is a railway romance: She takes the train to work, he takes the train as work. When his life plans are again forcibly aborted by his father, Sanjay surrenders himself to the trains again – in metaphor and then in reality.

 

“I wanted a long path, instead I got these iron roads, where the direction is already decided,” Sanjay muses sadly. A minute later he's grateful for the effortlessness of the journey: “Chalti train hi sahara hai [The moving train is my only support].” But then, there's the sense that he isn't really getting anywhere. “Main guzar jaata hoon, aur jagah khadi reh jaati hain [I move past, and places stay where they are].”

 

Then he gets on a train to Banaras, looking to beguile himself with women and wine, his beard getting scragglier. The sequence echoes so many tragic Indian heroes, and yet it feels distinct. He looks at an old man on the train, the old man looks intently back at him, and we imagine (wordlessly, like Sanjay) that he is Shalini's long-lost father who may have become a sadhu in Banaras. In a more conventional melodrama, Sanjay's echoing of Shalini's father's escape from an unchosen domesticity would end in discovery, reunion. Here, it ends in a dream of death.

 

Perhaps what 27 Down's languid melancholy really captures is the duality of the long-distance Indian train ride: You're in a crowd, yet alone; relentlessly moving, but not of your own accord. And yet, the solidity and predictability of India's trains makes them feel like something to believe in. Get on a train, and the country seems to stretch out before you: Distant, but somehow accessible. When Sanjay says, “Mera train aur bheed se vishwas uthh gaya hai [I've lost my faith in crowds and trains]”, we know it's over.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 Apr 2021.

Awtar Krishna Kaul’s 27 Down, which won two National Awards

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