PS Vinothraj: Filmmaker Profile

PS Vinothraj, whose last film Pebbles was selected as the Indian entry for the 94th Oscars, premiered The Adamant Girl at the Berlin Film Festival 2024. Like Pebbles, it makes astonishing use of Tamil Nadu’s unique light, sounds, landscape and even animals.

PS Vinothraj burst onto the indie cinema scene when his directorial debut Koozhangal (Pebbles) won the Tiger award, the top prize at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam in 2021. Late that year, it was India' entry to the Academy Awards. In February 2024, his second feature Kottukkaali (The Adamant Girl) premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, and all five screenings across the city were sold out. 

When I meet Vinothraj in person, he is all smiles after a wonderfully engaged post-screening discussion with the audience at Arsenal, one of Berlin’s many thriving arthouse cinemas. At his hotel in Mitte two days later, with his co-producer Kalai Arasu as our interpreter, it becomes clear that the smiles are part of his persona.

Vinothraj wears his experience lightly, but the 35-year-old’s journey into filmmaking has taken unimaginable grit and clarity. Compelled to drop out of school in Class IV, he worked as a child labourer in a Madurai flower market and a Tiruppur singlet factory before landing a job at a Chennai DVD shop, where he started watching three world cinema DVDs a day. The aesthetic of Vinothraj’s films—long takes, minimal background music, no songs, zero melodrama—may have been shaped by this immersion.

He beams when I mention the late Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, whose 1998 Palm D’or winner Eternity and a Day he has called his favourite film. His favourite filmmaker, he says, is Tony Gatlif, French director of many films on the Roma community. A picture of Gatlif, a 70-something man with grey hair and a warm smile, is Vinothraj’s phone wallpaper. Gatlif’s films and Eternity and a Day are “travelling films”, which Vinothraj says “will always be my inspiration”. But while admiring these European masters, his cinematic material is drawn from his immediate surroundings, both physical and socio-political. Formally, too, he makes astonishing use of Tamil Nadu’s unique light, sounds, landscape and even animals: a stray puppy, a sacrificial rooster, a mute but recalcitrant bull.

Pebbles featured an angry alcoholic called Ganapathy (stunningly played by Karuththadaiyan) who drags his son Velu (Chellapandi) out of school, so that they can go fetch his wife from her natal village 13 km away. Vinothraj mapped their journey, much of it on foot, onto a barren landscape of searing white heat that echoed Ganapathy’s relentless rage. Nothing really ‘happens’ during the 75-minute film (too short for an interval, which prevented a theatrical release in Tamil Nadu); it is about the mundaneness of this violence. But you cannot but be gripped by the father-son dynamic, with the child’s reaction to his father swinging between fear and subversion, and often settling for a watchful silence.

Silence is also the only weapon left to Meena in The Adamant Girl—if one can call it a weapon. Malayalam actor Anna Ben brings to the titular character a sense of mental fatigue combined with the last dregs of physical resistance. Meena is often in frame, in a moving vehicle. But she stays unmoving, even in her expression—except in one shot where she walks free, in her mind’s eye. And she speaks only one sentence in 100 minutes. We learn early in the film that she is ‘promised’ in marriage to Pandi (played with scarily believable aggression by popular Tamil actor Soori) but is in love with a boy she met in college.

Having failed to talk her out of it, both families decide to take Meena to a shrine where the ghost of her lover will be exorcised out of her. Her silence, Vinothraj told me, is because “the film starts after she has tried everything else”; one imagines the arguing and yelling and weeping that went before. Thinking about it later, I wonder if having a mostly silent protagonist also aids in Vinothraj’s quest, as he put it to me, to make films “that keep you visually engaged, that keep your attention despite whatever language barrier may exist.”
In other words, pure cinema.

Kottukkaali certainly is. It begins with a woman bathing, fully-clothed, at a public tap. Before seeing her face, we have felt her tears. Walking back home in the pre-dawn light, she passes by a covered bike and a buffalo, both somehow evoking the must-always-be-clothed bodies of women. Vinothraj takes us quietly by the hand into this cloaked world of women’s sadness, from Meena’s crying mother to Meena, whose tears have run dry. Parallel to it, often its cause, is the world of men’s anger, represented here by Pandi, his throat coated with a white lime paste because he is so hoarse from shouting.

Many have read the film as feminist, and it is. But Vinothraj’s clarity about everything that’s wrong with this universe does not preclude a profound understanding of everyone in it. “The film is about the internal war between Pandi and Meena. Neither of them is bad,” he told me, going on to explain how even minor characters fit into his cinematic vision. “The small boy in the rickshaw is like Pandi in childhood, a good boy. The little girl who drags the bull away is how Meena would have been in her childhood. Meenakshi was the ancient queen of Madurai. Pandi, Pandian, is also a historical king. So in my backstory, right from childhood, they’ve been ‘the king’ and ‘the queen’. Pandi would have felt responsible for Meena.”

Fictional backstories aside, his scripts often draw on things that have happened to people he knows. For Kottukkaali, his sisters contributed a lot of what became the women’s dialogue. “Everyone is very supportive (of my process). In fact, they joke: ‘Don’t get into any other trouble, or he’ll make another film!’”

His films, too, show a close-knit community where people look out for each other. But they also reveal a deeply patriarchal society: its rituals, its alcoholism, the lack of freedom for women, verbal and physical violence by men. Does he ever worry about the critical gaze he turns on a society he knows so intimately, exposing it to an international audience? “There are positive things in each culture, but also a few (negative) things that need to be addressed. As a responsible artist, it is my job to send a message across, so that these things will stop,” says Vinothraj. “There are no heroes and villains, only the social situation that is creating the conflict.”

First published in Moneycontrol, 10 Mar 2024. 

Do you know who wrote your favourite film?

My TOI Plus/ Mumbai Mirror column for Sun 25 July:

Writers barely get the credit they deserve — a new book on women screenwriters in Bollywood illuminates a hazy corner of the glittering silver screen

Screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz ('Mank') and director Orson Welles, whose real-life collaboration and battle over writing credit for Citizen Kane is the subject of David Fincher's 2020 film Mank.

“Film is thought of as a director’s medium,” the great Billy Wilder once said, “because the director creates the end product that appears on the screen. It’s that stupid auteur theory again, that the director is the author of the film. But what does the director shoot — the telephone book?”

Wilder, a Jew who managed to escape Nazi Germany for the US in 1933, became famous as the director of Hollywood classics as various as Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. It’s no surprise, though, that he started as a screenwriter, his films forever filled with unforgettable characters and memorable lines.

The full version of the Wilder quote above ends with a sentence that dates him (perhaps even more than his mention of the telephone directory): “Writers became much more important when sound came in, but they’ve had to put up a valiant fight to get the credit they deserve.”

Cinema has now been around for over a century, and the first ‘talking picture’ was The Jazz Singer in 1927 — but most screenwriters still don’t get the credit they deserve, even when the film is a grand success. 
Last year, in a rare reframing of film history, David Fincher — known for directing The Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network and Gone Girl, himself as much an auteur as Hollywood has ever had — devoted a whole film to a screenwriter who had to fight for credit for what’s often listed as the greatest American movie of all time – Citizen Kane (1941).

Until Fincher’s Mank (2020), most people who had heard of Citizen Kane (CK) saw it as a film ‘made’ by Orson Welles — not ‘written by Herman Mankiewicz’. Of course, Welles will remain a legend, as he should. But at least a larger cross-section of film-goers now know something about the sharp ex-New Yorker who first created the story of a newspaper magnate rising to power by manipulating public opinion during a war.

Within the smaller community of film nerds, the story of how Welles and Mankiewicz came together — and fell apart — in the making of CK has been talked about for much longer. Around CK’s release in 1941, the director and the screenwriter became embroiled in an ugly battle, with Welles eventually giving Mank shared credit for the Oscar-winning screenplay. In 1971, the influential film critic Pauline Kael wrote a 50,000 word essay foregrounding Mankiewicz’s script contribution as much greater than Welles’ — but Kael’s take, too, has since been challenged, drawing on the many drafts of the CK script in the archive.

The relationship between screenwriter and director need not always be this conflicted. The creative collaboration between them is often the bedrock of great filmmaking, with people sometimes establishing working partnerships that last for years. And yet, as film lovers or enthusiasts, we know far too little about the writers responsible even for what we might consider our favourite films.

Scripting Bollywood: Published by Women Unlimited, New Delhi, 2021. 300pp. 

Anubha Yadav’s stellar new book Scripting Bollywood: Candid Conversations with Women Who Write Hindi Cinema (Women Unlimited, 2021) is a great step in the right direction. The lacuna she addresses is two-fold. One, the writer’s job in Indian cinema has been even more invisibilised than in other film industries, for many reasons, discussed at length in my 2011 longform piece "Death by Dialogue". A primary one, as the screenwriter Anjum Rajabali rues (in his Foreword to Yadav’s book) is that” filmmakers as well as audiences in India treated cinema as an extension of pre-existing narrative performing art forms”, like tamasha, sangeet natak and Urdu theatre, so for decades, the best we had by way of a script was the director breaking down the story into incidents and getting dialogue written for the characters. More often than not, Hindi cinema was created on the studio floor, with the writer or writers being drafted into a highly informal set of collaborations, where someone might or might not be credited for ‘story’ and a writer was credited at best for dialogues, often because those had to be written in Hindustani/Hindi, which was often not the director’s mother tongue.

Now add to this already non-formalised working milieu, where the contributions of writers are barely documented, the possibility that that writer is a woman — and imagine how much power or influence she might be able to wield. That is the second reason why Yadav’s book is so important — she addresses a gap in the archive that we have barely begun to sketch the contours of.  

Yadav’s suggestive first chapter draws on new scholarly research as well as doing some independent detective work to open up the historical conversation about the women whose names we do know: Fatma Begum (who was also the mother of India’s first talking star Zubeida), Jaddan Bai (also the mother of Nargis), the utterly fascinating Protima Dasgupta (who collaborated with her sister-in-law Begum Para, making her a star) and the slightly better known Ismat Chughtai (who collaborated with her husband Shahid Latif). All these women performed multiple roles, often creating their own film companies with family members to try and achieve greater creative control.

The rest of Yadav’s book is devoted to long, thoughtful conversations with 14 contemporary female screenwriters, from veterans like Shama Zaidi — associated with such classics as Garm Hava, Shatranj Ke Khilari, Umrao Jaan and a host of Shyam Benegal films — and Kamna Chandra (Prem Rog, Chandni) all the way down to Juhi Chaturvedi (Vicky Donor, Piku, October and Gulabo Sitabo). Collectively, these writers represent the whole gamut of what might be called Hindi cinema, and sometimes extend beyond it — like Zaidi’s work with Satyajit Ray, or the younger writers branching into web series, like Sanyuktha Chawla Shaikh’s work on Delhi Crime, or Devika Bhagat’s on Four More Shots Please.

Almost every interview is studded with insights into not just each individual’s working process, but also the multiple ways in which films get made. Urmi Juvekar talks about the power of listening to the script (after it is written) to give it final shape, while Sooni Taraporewala talks of learning through the process of doing commissioned work (Salaam Bombay, Such A Long Journey, Ambedkar).

The nature of each collaboration is different, too — while Zaidi has worked primarily with three filmmakers, Muzaffar Ali, Shyam Benegal and her husband MS Sathyu, Chaturvedi’s work thus far has been with the director Shoojit Sircar. Sabrina Dhawan, who wrote Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, has also been an integral part of many Vishal Bhardwaj films. Reading Dhawan’s account of how she rewrote Vidya Balan’s character Krishna in Ishqiya to be the one that was playing the two men (rather than merely responding to them as in the draft Bhardwaj and Abhishek Chaubey brought her), or Urmi Juvekar’s candid but careful account of working with Dibakar Banerjee for four films before Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! ended their collaboration, even the most sceptical film-goer might start to pay a little more attention to screenwriters.

The story of Mank is instructive about the inevitable push and pull of the writer-director relationship. David Fincher was the one who read Kael’s essay and suggested Mank as a protagonist to his ex-journalist father Jack Fincher. But in a 2020 interview, David described his father’s first draft as “an anti-auteurist take” and “kind of a takedown of Welles”. “What the script really needed to talk about was the notion of enforced collaboration…" Fincher told the interviewer.

A writer is unlikely to get her idea on film without a director, but most directors need a script to work from, too. And so the process of collaboration carries on: complicated, sometimes fraught, but almost always indispensable to the making of cinema.

Published in TOI Plus/ Mumbai Mirror, 24/25 July 2021. 

Book Review: Krishna learns to let go the Hindu way in this bestseller

Part popular romance, part spiritual melodrama, 'Krishnayan' by Gujarati writer Kaajal Oza Vaidya adds some real women to India’s mythological matrix 

Krishnayan by Kaajal Oza Vaidya, translated from the Gujarati by Subha Pande,
Eka-Westland, 272 pages, ₹499

The most remarkable thing about Indic civilisation might be the uninterrupted lifespan of its beliefs. Most Hindu gods and goddesses were already being worshipped in South Asia when the Greeks were building temples to Zeus and Athena, or when Jupiter and Diana ruled ancient Roman hearts. But while the Greek and Roman gods have been long superseded by the Semitic religions, ours live on. Deities like Shiva, Vishnu, Ganesh, Karthik and Durga, and divine epic heroes like Ram and Krishna remain a vivid presence for religious Hindus. Mythology is still the matrix for modern Indian life.

But as a cynical politics digs its claws into people's beliefs, that matrix is turned into a never-ending maelstrom of offense-taking and offense-giving. On Saraswati Puja this February, for instance, right-wing Indian Twitter trended demands for the arrest of a Dalit activist for having insulting the Hindu goddess of learning by referring to her as 'exploited' by Brahma. According to the myth, Lord Brahma, creator of the universe, fell in love with Saraswati after he made her. Philosophical-metaphorical readings (an artist besotted with his own creation), or anthropological ones (the fact that incest figures in most ancient creation myths) stand no chance in belligerent social media battles, where the dominant narrative frame is men avenging women's 'honour'.

Of course, such 'dishonouring' drives both our epics: the abduction of Sita in the Ramayana, the stripping of Draupadi in the Mahabharata. But while the plots may turn on women, the male characters receive greater attention. Relationships between them—Krishna and Sudama, Krishna and Arjun, Arjun and Karna, Ram and Lakshman, even Ram and Hanuman—have formed popular models of friendship, fraternal love and loyalty. Most literary retellings, too, have been through the eyes of a male character: Bhima in MT Vasudevan Nair’s famous Malayalam novel Randaamoozham, Karna in Shivaji Sawant's Marathi classic Mrintyunjay, and Yudhishtira, Bhishma and Abhimanyu in Aditya Iyengar's The Thirteenth Day (2015).

A female perspective on our epics has only begun to appear in recent decades, mostly in fiction by women. Draupadi got pride of place in Pratibha Ray's award-winning 1993 Oriya novel Yajnaseni and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's 2008 novel The Palace of Illusions. Sita got some play in the graphic novel Sita's Ramayana and Nina Paley's film Sita Sings the Blues. Lesser female characters are now getting their due in popular English-language fiction: for example, Aditi Banerjee's The Curse of Gandhari, and Kavita Kane's series of books centred on Ahalya, Surpanakha, Sita's sister and Karna's wife.

Kaajal Oza Vaidya's hugely popular novel Krishnayan, which has sold over 200,000 copies in Gujarati since its publication in 2006, is an important addition to this literature, using the figure of Krishna to explore aspects of the man-woman relationship.

Recently translated into English by Subha Pande, Vaidya's narrative starts where the usual telling of Krishna's life stops. What is traditionally called Krishna Leela, literally Krishna's play, is a set of stories about the birth, childhood and adolescence of the Yadava chieftain, with such set themes as the naughty baby Krishna stealing butter from the milkmaids of Gokul, or his youthful flute-playing assignations with Radha.

Krishnayan, by contrast, opens with Krishna awaiting death, reminiscing about his life. And in Vaidya's unusually frank telling, what emerges as significant as he waits for Gandhari's curse to take effect are his bonds with women. There are four primary ones: Rukmini, his intelligent, stately senior queen, his consort in the administration of Dwarka; Satyabhama, his younger queen, childish but captivating; Draupadi, loyal wife to the five Pandava brothers, but still carrying a special attachment to Krishna—and Radha, the childhood sweetheart he hasn't seen in decades, now not just a married woman and a mother, but a mother-in-law.

Vaidya's narrative can feel laboured, and her dialogue borders on florid, at least in Pande's translation. Here, for instance, is Rukmini, “The fire raging in my heart is trying to tell me that he is waiting to answer all my questions.” And here is Arjun on the eve of the war: “I have a lot to say and yet nothing to say. I am dumbfounded. I am hit by thousands of thoughts at times and sometimes, I just can't think. I am going through a strange period of indecision.”

But Krishnayan's fictional premise is as layered as any present-day polyamorous situation, and Vaidya has all the depth of the Mahabharata behind her as she moves deftly across characters and revisits familiar dramatic situations: the ethics of game of dice, or how the five Pandavas deal with their shared connection to Draupadi. She explores each of Krishna's loves for what makes it unique – intellectual partnership, sexual allure, emotional understanding, a shared history – and goes refreshingly beyond him, to these women's relationships with each other.

But for all the empathy with which she writes about women, Vaidya remains staunchly invested in an essential separation of the genders. The Krishna of Krishnayan is an adept lover, loving husband and devoted friend—but he remains a man. In some of Vaidya's most emotional scenes, Krishna claims limitations in gendered terms, applauding women for their greater capacity for selflessness. “While I have only been contemplating seeking moksha and preparing myself for it, these two dearly loved women [Draupadi and Rukmini] have... come forward to liberate me from the cycle of life. Only women can do this. Only a woman can control heart and mind and fulfil her moral duties... And only she has the magnanimity to accept a co-wife and give true meaning to the word life-partner, Krishna thought...”.

It probably helps that Vaidya's Krishna isn't a god in the way we usually understand gods. He may know what is predestined—the Mahabharata war, the end of the Yadava race, or his own death—but he is powerless in the face of it. Rather than an uber-manipulator who's playing everyone else, this is a Krishna almost surprised to find that he, too, is caught in in a web of expectations and desires. “Why is everyone surrendering their selves to me? Unacceptance would be immoral, but where would I take them with me even if I accept? I will have to break these shackles of attachment.”

Full of intense exchanges on desire and ownership, mind and body, attachment and the atma, Krishnayan is a sort of manual for letting go. And if you can deal with its somewhat repetitive melodramatic style, it helps thicken the most famous Indian plot of all. It adds some real women to our mythological matrix.

Published in Mint Lounge, 29 Mar 2021.

Book Review: A Gujarati literary legend finds a home in English

Celebrated Gujarati writer Dhumketu doesn’t get his due in the latest translation of his work

Gaurishankar Govardhanram Joshi (1892-1965), who wrote as Dhumketu, was a pioneering short story writer in Gujarati. (Wikipedia)

“The short story is not the miniature form of the novel... The novel says whatever it wants. The short story, by rousing the imagination and emotions, only alludes to or provides a spark of whatever it wants to say.” These words, in the original Gujarati, appeared in the 1926 introduction to Tankha (Sparks), the first collection of short stories by the Gujarati writer Dhumketu, the nom de plume of Gaurishankar Govardhanram Joshi (1892-1965). Nearly a hundred years later, you can finally read them in English, in Jenny Bhatt's translated volume Ratno Dholi: The Best Stories of Dhumketu.

Bhatt, a Gujarat-born writer and podcaster now based in the US, has clearly thought long and hard about the shape of the book. Taking seriously the burden of responsibility that comes with representing the pioneering Gujarati author to the contemporary English-speaking world, she has picked one story from each of his 24 published collections, plus two of her own favourites. The book certainly displays his range.

It begins with what is perhaps Dhumketu's most anthologised tale, The Post Office, in which a postmaster who once mocked an old man ends up haunted by his ghost. The ending teeters on the edge of the Gothic, making one think of the Russian short story giant, Nikolai Gogol, with its use of the supernatural to invoke a moral justice that social reality rarely seems to grant us. Dhumketu isn't writing ghost stories, but there is often a suggestion that deeply felt hurt or expectation leaves its imprint in the universe even after death—often in the minds of those who caused or ignored it.

In The Post Office, old Coachman Ali's lifelong wait for his daughter Mariam's letter only makes sense to the postmaster when he is anxious about his own daughter. In Svarjogi, an old shehnai player summons the painfully despondent notes of Raga Jogiya only on the death anniversary of his son—who had played them in life. In Ratno Dholi, a village drummer who thoughtlessly drives his lover to suicide ends up imagining her dancing to his dhol for the rest of his life.

Not unexpectedly for a writer born in the 19th century, Dhumketu was also drawn to historical romance as a genre, writing several novels set in the ancient India of the Guptas and Chalukyas. His historical fiction is represented here by Tears of the Soul, which retells the legendary story of Amrapali, a woman condemned by her democratic city state Vaishali to become a nagarvadhu (courtesan, literally “wife of the city”). If such a beauty was to accept any one man as a husband, went male logic, there would be civil war.

Although he turns a critical spotlight onto male-made laws, Dhumketu's real condemnation of Amrapali's predicament is tied to applauding her sacrifice as a mother. In some other stories, too, Dhumketu is revealed as very much a man of his time. Female deservingness is often premised on sexlessness, most sharply in When a Devi Ma Becomes a Woman, the Gorky-inspired tale of a hostel-wali deeply admired by her male hostellers—until it turns out that she is human enough to respond to the odd sexual overture.

But Dhumketu certainly emerges as a sympathetic observer of the unfairness of women's lives. In the tale of two Kamalas in A Memorable Day, the matter is treated as one of luck: one woman finds herself forced to sell her body, while the other has a like-minded partner and a tasteful home. In The Noble Daughters-in-law, the widowed bahu of a rich household is shooed out, and finds herself sheltering in the home of another unhappy daughter-in-law. There is the hint of attachment between the two women, including a kiss on the cheek, before the story ends in a dramatic double suicide that made me think of Deepa Mehta's 1996 film Fire, and of so many lesbian loves that end in similar tragedy in India.

Women are also embedded in social hierarchies of caste and class, and suffer their consequences. In The Gold Necklace, Dhumketu reverses the traditional social hierarchy between wife and mistress. Caste appears frequently, as descriptor and motor of plot: the vagharin, whose low social status taints a man who helps her; the gohil and kaamdaar who prop up the colonial-feudal structure of the Gujarati village; Brahminness mentioned by characters to establish their gentility in many stories, including the comical The New Poet.

Ratno Dholi: The Best Stories of Dhumketu, translated from the Gujarati by Jenny Bhatt, published by HarperCollins India, 324 pages, ₹399.

Dhumketu is no radical, but these stories show an abiding interest in marginalised figures—the penitent criminal in Kailas and The Prisoner of Andaman, the disabled person in Mungo Gungo, the sick low-caste woman Sarju in Unknown Helpers, or the ekla ram, a man who chooses to distance himself from the village's social norms, like Makno Bharthi in The Worst of the Worst.

Some of these solitary souls immerse themselves in art or music: Ratno the dhol-player, the shehnai player of Svarjogi, the sarangi player of My Homes, or even the literary young man of A Happy Delusion. When he writes about these musicians, or even about the aesthetic domesticity of the housewife Kamala in A Memorable Day, Dhumketu is both generous and appreciative.

Fittingly for a writer, perhaps, he displays greater ambivalence when describing literary ambitions. The aspirational poet or writer, especially, gets a drubbing, whether the clerk Bhogilal of Ebb and Flow, the highfalutin train passenger of The New Poet, or the intently focused but talentless Manmohan of A Happy Delusion.

Bhatt's dedication aside, her translations leave much to be desired. Her literal renditions of the original leave us repeatedly in the grip of florid, often archaic language (“Then, because they had not heard such melodious, sweet, alluring, rising and falling music in years, an illicitly joyful passion grew in the soul of thousands” or “Her memory did not endure anywhere now except during the rare occasions of general small talk”), not to mention constantly tripping up against such formations as “slowly-slowly” or “From downstairs, a melodious, bird-like voice came”.

However deliberate Bhatt's approach might be, the English feels jarring; the sentences marred by roundaboutness and redundancy. “What if this amusement was flowing due to his writing?" thinks one character, while a policeman tells a woman “to be careful with [her] tongue when speaking”. Very occasionally one gets a glimpse of what I imagine is Dhumketu's idiomatic Gujarati, such as in Old Custom, New Approach, where a man complains sardonically about modern bureaucracy: “Letters speak with letters. People avoid other people, this is called administration.”

One hopes someday he will receive a better interpreter. In the meanwhile, this is a valuable addition to your Indian classics bookshelf.

Published in Mint Lounge, 5 Jan 2021.

The freedom of the spirit, dead or alive

My Mumbai Mirror column:

An unexpected death opens up surprising new directions for life in Umesh Bist's deftly-balanced new film.

Umesh Bist's new film may ride on the suggestion of quirky lightness – even the title, Pagglait, is an affectionate UP word for madcap -- but at its heart lies an absence. At the simplest level, the absence is of a person. A young man called Aastik, sole earning member of a joint family of five, has suddenly died -- leaving his parents bereft, his young wife widowed and all of them in financial trouble. The secondary form of absence, around which Bist really builds his narrative, is the absence of love. Aastik's wife of five months (the talented Sanya Malhotra) can't seem to grieve her loss. Is she just in shock? Or did she feel nothing for her late husband? Worse, did he feel nothing for her?

To build a film around this dual vacuum is a difficult task, but Bist pulls it off. Right from the very first shot -- a cycle-rickshaw driver shifting his weight from one buttock to another as he transports a heavy load of mattresses – the film balances a gentle, languorous gaze with mild, deadpan humour. He gets perfectly right, for instance, the air of melancholia in a house where a death has occurred -- the dark room, hushed voices and sombre faces. But he also catches the whiff of absurdity that is attached to conventional mourning: Having to field calls from relatives whose names you don't even remember, or the excessive weeping on the part of people who consider themselves close. The widowed daughter-in-law is expected to have cried herself into a stupor, but all she can think of is whether she can get a Pepsi instead of chai. The obligatory forms of mourning death can make a simple desire for continued life seem oddly obscene. But is it? That train of thought culminates in a memorable sequence where the eating of golgappas is intercut with the dead man's last rites.

These tonal shifts aren't easy, and Bist adds additional plot twists that offer a window into the dead man's secret life. (I won't go into them here, but suffice it to say that they touch on both love and money.)

Pagglait is also a fine addition to the growing body of Hindi films set in the north Indian small town, with a keen sense of familial dysfunction. Endowed with a stellar ensemble cast that includes Raghuvir Yadav, Sheeba Chaddha and Ashutosh Rana, the film catches much that's dire about the middle class extended family. This is less a world of angry recriminations than petty jealousies and long-held grudges. If the men judge each other for (the lack of) monetary success, the women compete in the domain of husbands and children. And while the women might have had to kowtow to men most of their lives, their words can drip with scorn. The barbs are quietly delivered, but go straight for the jugular. “Jo cheez khud ke paas nahi hoti, woh doosre ke paas bhi acchi nahi lagti [What one doesn't have oneself doesn't look good even when someone else has it],” says a husband-adoring sister-in-law to another who appears to be separated. “Pajaame se naada nikala nahi jaata, baatein badi-badi [Can't take the drawstring out of a pair of pyjamas, but talking big anyway],” a wife scoffs at her husband.
While the older adults conduct these hoary old battles, the younger lot are forging new arenas. There are plenty of indications of Bist's optimism. The widowed Sandhya's best friend, who quietly shows up to stay for the 13 days of mourning, is a young Muslim woman; the late husband's younger brother is happy to take English lessons from his bhabhi; the feisty 14-year-old girl visiting from out of town easily lords it over her 13-year-old male cousin. Even in relationships between women, the conventional path of jealousy and competition is sought to be replaced by the potential for understanding. There are no villains and vamps here, only people doing the best they can under the circumstances.

Pagglait works interestingly as a companion piece to the 2019 film Aise Hee, the marvellous feature debut from the writer-director Kislay (he goes by a single name) which won awards at MAMI and Busan, among other festivals. Both films are about women for whom the event of widowhood comes as unexpected liberation – not something they've yearned for, perhaps, but a vista that suddenly opens up before them. Whether you've been married for 52 years or five months, it seems, the absence of a man can sometimes be the only way for women to realise who they are.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 Mar 2021.

Not quite queens of all they survey

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Bombay Begums may not have top-notch storytelling, but at least it's willing to let its female characters be richly, complicatedly human.

With Bombay Begums, writer-director Alankrita Srivastava re-opens a conversation she helped kick off in 2017 with her film Lipstick Under My Burkha: A discussion about what Indian women want, and mostly don't get. If  Lipstick turned an unprecedented spotlight onto the lives and desires of four Bhopal women,  Bombay Begums features five in Mumbai, aged 14 to 49, cutting across class, educational background and (in Srivastava's usual non-sequitur) religion.

In today's India, though, wherever there's conversation, there's also controversy. Soon after Bombay Begums released on March 8, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights threatened to go to court against the OTT platform broadcasting the six-part series for the “inappropriate portrayal” of minors. The statutory body was referring to the 14-year-old protagonist, Shai – played by Aadhya Anand, whose precociously verbose voiceover almost makes the series impossible to watch – who is shown once smoking a cigarette, and once snorting coke and kissing an older boy at a party. We could discuss the ethics of that depiction till kingdom come, although the show makes it clear that the coke-addled making out was dangerous, while treating the one-time cigarette with the lightness it deserves, and incorporating a sharp criticism of the critics (a housing society that uses smoking as the 'moral' ground to turn away a single, female tenant).

What's more interesting -- though not unexpected – is that Bombay Begums has polarised audiences far beyond this 'official' controversy. What people are debating on social media is whether these women are complex, identifiable victims of a patriarchal world -- or selfish, oversexed and immoral.

The latter viewpoint isn't surprising, because these women are complicated and desirous in a way that female protagonists on the Hindi film screen rarely are, even in 2021. Three of them operate in a cutthroat corporate universe, and Srivastava and co-writer Bornila Chatterjee do a good job of setting up the possibilities for friction between these characters. Rani Irani (Pooja Bhatt) plays the powerhouse CEO of the fictitious Royal Bank of Bombay. Once a Kanpur bank teller, her rough edges and raw hunger still make her a study in contrast to her urbane, somewhat inscrutable IIM-educated deputy Fatima Warsi (Shahana Goswami, delivering a layered performance that lifts her sections of the show out of choppy mediocrity). Far below them both in the hierarchy is the overconfident but often stupid Ayesha Agarwal, a 23-year-old trying to break away from her smalltown middle-class background (Plabita Borthakur, talented enough to make us believe in her character's confusions). The fourth is the aforementioned Shai, Rani's sulky stepdaughter, pining for her dead mother while grappling with puberty problems: Periods that won't start, breasts that won't grow, secret crushes that don't reciprocate. The fifth is the class outlier -- a bar dancer who had to turn to sex work when the city's dance bars were shut down 14 years ago. Lily (the superb Amruta Subhash) yearns for a good education for her son.

What unites these women is that they want many things, and desire can slip them up – or make them ruthless. Rani wants to be a spectacular CEO, and a great mother and Karwa Chauth-observing wife, but can she? Fatima wants the skyrocketing career alongside the happy marriage and the baby, but it isn't easy with a husband whose priorities are different (Vivek Gomber, whose character gets more interesting as the series progresses). Ayesha thinks she knows what she wants – but opportunities turn out to have costs. Lily's ambitions for her son can make her turn to blackmail. Shai is willing to fake it till she makes it, pretending she's grown-up – but it's a risky game. And all five want love, which makes them wind up in the messiest situations.

The series is well-plotted, and many of the actors are talented. But it often feels rushed, and the situations seem contrived to achieve certain results. Characters arrive with one-line backstories that don't translate onto the screen – like Rani's Kanpur past, or Ayesha's being from Indore but already having an ex-boyfriend in Mumbai who she's been 'hooking up' with post-break-up, or Fatima's being Muslim, a fact which is literally used only to give us one shot of her performing namaaz in a moment of tragedy. The dialogue is often clunky -- “You're not developed enough for us to take your picture,” says Shai's annoying classmate -- and always ridiculously expository. “Survival is a battle for every woman,” says Rani. “Women can have it all, no?” says Fatima. "I'm not untouchable. I want respect," says Lily.

As for the ludicrous voiceover, the less said the better. Sample sentence: “Sometimes it seems like the stars are within reach... and my body is full of delight and anticipation”. Or “I think women who love are more lonely than those who don't love”.

Yet there is greater honesty and complexity here than most Hindi cinema and OTT work have given us, especially with regard to women's relationship with sex and love, and with each other in the context of #MeToo. Women can be selfish, oversexed and immoral, because they're human – while also being victims of patriarchy. Good women can find themselves on the wrong side, believing the wrong men. Smart, powerful women can find themselves sold into silence. The greater the stake you own, the more the system binds you. These are all crucial lessons. But let's hope the next season will be more show, less tell.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Mar 2021.

Good girls, bad ghosts and goddesses

My Mumbai Mirror column

Bulbbul reworks ideas from several Bengali film classics to craft a superhuman response to women's depressingly human troubles.

When Anvita Dutt's Bulbbul came out last July, several critics applauded producer Anushka Sharma and her brother Karnesh for their trilogy of films placing the ghost story in the service of feminist goals. The first of these, Anshai Lal's Phillauri (2017), featured Sharma as an early 20^th century ghost who haunts the present in the hope of being recognised as the author of Punjabi poems that everyone thought were written by her male lover. The second, Prosit Roy's Pari (2018), with a plot featuring the impregnation of women by spirits called ifrits, and the murder of the resultant half-demonic children by vigilantes, was an allegorical response to the violence of rape and forced abortion. Both were interesting ideas, but neither was executed to any real degree of competence.

Bulbbul, set in late 19^th century Bengal, might be the best realised of the three. The film is named for its protagonist, who is named for the chirpy, red-tufted bird (usually spelled bulbul, without the extra 'b'). It is no coincidence that Bulbbul is a child bride who metamorphoses from climbing trees to being the senior daughter-in-law of an oppressively grand zamindar family -- and then, in her magical afterlife, to climbing trees again.

Visually rich, almost to the point of excess, the film alternates between a glowing, blood-red enchanted forest (a bit foreign-looking, of which more later) and a gloomy, minimally styled zamindar mansion which Dutt chooses to keep underpopulated – no children, practically no servants.

While riding the global wave of 21^st century Gothic popular culture, the film is dense with Indian literary and cinematic references which are ultimately also sociological. For instance, the theme of the Indian wife's relationship with a young brother-in-law, often easier to talk to than an older, forbiddingly grave husband, has been with us long enough to be enshrined in our jokes and popular culture; a common consequence of the patriarchal system of adult men marrying virginal girls. That intimate devar-bhabhi dynamic was perhaps most vividly captured in Tagore's 1901 novella Nashto Nir (The Broken Nest), possibly based on Tagore's own early life, which Satyajit Ray transposed onto the screen in Charulata. The Soumitra Chatterjee-Madhabi Mukherjee relationship in Charulata is echoed here by Bulbbul and her brother-in-law Satya, going from hide and seek to writerly collaboration. What the sister-in-law Binodini tells Bulbbul's husband Indranil bitchily is not untrue: Bulbbul and Satya have grown up together, and are close in a way that Bulbbul and Indranil can never be. Meanwhile Binodini herself -- married off to Indranil's halfwit brother Mahendra, but in a sexual arrangement with Indranil -- is eventually widowed, in another Tagorean reference: The duplicitous, unfulfilled widow Binodini of Chokher Bali.

But Bulbbul also reminded me, complicatedly, of another Ray film. Devi (1960), adapted from Prabhat Mukhopadhyaya's story The Goddess, also centres on a child bride who may or may not have acquired power over life and death. The 17-year-old Doyamoyee (played by Sharmila Tagore under Ray's magisterial direction), beloved of her twenty-something college-going husband (Soumitra), but also a favourite of her deeply religious father-in-law, suddenly finds herself anointed as an avatar of Goddess Durga, after the father-in-law sees her thus in a dream.

 

 

Bulbbul, set in the same Shakta Bengali milieu, where female energy is worshipped as Durga and Kali, draws on that association. Mahendra's murder on Durga Puja explicitly suggests that Bulbbul's first effective use of her shakti is tied to the mother goddess. The film's iconography, too, partially echoes the familiar Durga-Kali one: Long, open tresses and an enigmatic smile. “Not a churail, but a devi,” says Dr Sudip, and the film's dead men had all been abusive, thus flipping our perception of Bulbbul's power from possible evil to a form of violent justice.

 

Watching Devi again, though, I was struck by how deeply Ray investigates the power of belief, especially the young woman's own conflicted sense of self. Perhaps the most complex scene in this regard is the one where Doya refuses to run away when she has a chance, because she has half-begun to believe in the divinity thrust upon her. And yet, even in this belief, her primary response is fear – any power she has is not in her control. “Ebhaabe choley gele tomaar jyano omongol hoye? [What if leaving this way brings you bad luck?],” she asks her husband, terrified.

 

The husband understands and takes her back, raging later to his professor in Calcutta, that “she is only 17”. He is a sympathetic character, and yet – he is an adult married to a teenager who just happens to have come of age sexually. In one of Devi's most moving moments, Doya clings to her little nephew when he is placed in her lap after ages – she accepts the task of curing him as a young woman who misses a child, but she is judged as a goddess.

 

I recently re-watched Pedro Almodovar's 2006 masterpiece Volver, also about women, male sexual violence and the possibility of a female ghost returning to finish incomplete business on earth (‘Volver’ means 'return' in Spanish). But Volver's sensibility is very different from Devi or Bulbbul; some of its magnificent easy charm lies in the idea of a ghost who bakes, helps out who hairdressing and cares for the sick and aged – as women do. 

 

Earlier in Volver, the heroine is in the middle of hiding one horrible man's dead body when another man spies an incriminating spot of blood on her neck. “Oh, women's troubles,” she says, waving him away. As long as men are the prime cause of women's troubles, I thought to myself, there will be blood.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 Feb 2021

Earlier in Volver, the heroine is in the middle of hiding on

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A Short Film with a Long Story

My Mumbai Mirror column:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 Feb 2021.

What sells in the media hasn’t changed in 40 years

My Mumbai Mirror column:

In Mrinal Sen’s 1982 film Chaalchitra, the filmmaker turns his astute gaze upon the smokescreen that is the business of news in a capitalist world.

In 1982, Jyoti Basu, who was then the chief minister of West Bengal, watched Mrinal Sen's newly-completed film Kharij (‘The Case is Closed’), about a middle class family's attempts to pass the buck when their under-aged servant boy dies of carbon monoxide poisoning. 

 

“The film is excellent, but it is too grim to be popular,” Basu had apparently said.

Sen didn't make only grim films, but he knew perfectly well what Jyoti babu meant. In 1981, a year before this incident, the great actor Utpal Dutt had played a newspaper editor in Sen's film Chaalchitra (‘The Kaleidoscope’). In a crucial establishing sequence, the pipe-smoking Dutt tells an idealistic young job seeker Dipu (Anjan Dutta) to come back in two days with an “intimate study” of his “middle class milieu”. His only instruction is to keep the tone light, because the piece must sell.

 

The big boss testing the potential employee is also the man-of-the-world lecturing the ingenue. Already, 40 years ago, in Sen's sharp-eyed vision, we see the media being clearly understood (by those who run it) in terms of the political limits placed on it by those who buy it – ie, the middle class.

 

When Dipu walks into the editor's grand office, he is hoping to escape a dull job elsewhere and clearly has a positive, perhaps even idealistic, image of the media. Asked to name an article he enjoyed reading in the paper in the recent past, Dipu enthusiastically mentions a feature about rickshaw wallahs. The editor is unmoved. “Yes, that piece gained some popularity,” he replies. “People are eating it up.”

 

“See, we've got to feed the public,” he says matter-of-factly to the young man who is his son's classmate. “Some sell potatoes, some bananas, some sell words. And we, we sell news. The whole goddamn world is one big shopping centre. And we're all pedlars.”

 

Chaalchitra didn't sell well, either in the commercial Bengali cinema market or in the film festival universe where Sen's films often found their niche. But it is an interesting film, not least for the historical reason that it is the only one of Sen's 25-odd films as a director, to be written by him. Dipankar Mukhopadhyay, in his biography of Sen, describes how the idea of it took shape. The incident Mukhopadhyaya describes as a creative trigger is oddly tangential to the film at hand. An old man arrived at Sen's doorstep one day, claiming to be his school friend from the village. Sen, who had come to Calcutta in 1940, couldn't remember the man's face or their acquaintance. But seeing that he had brought children with him, Sen finally feigned recognition. Still, when the family departed after having spent some time with Sen, he felt irritation that they had wasted his evening.

 

What the incident seems to have evoked for Sen is the distance he had travelled away from his roots. Two years before Chaalchitra, the filmmaker had acquired a car and moved to a posher locality. Chaalchitra was perhaps his last engagement with the lower middle class milieu he had left behind – and it is discomfiting in its honesty about the protagonist's decision to cut that cord.

 

Dipu spends the film searching for a 'story' amid the mundane details of his everyday life, a story that will get him the job. But although tensions erupt often, people seem keener to resolve them than to make them flare up further. The occupants of his chawl-like building in Shyambazar squabble over their dirty, mossy courtyard, but also get together to scrub it clean in a fit of anger. When one of the poorer old women in the building steals coal from Dipu's mother's bin, Dipu's mother takes care to safeguard it – but without a hue and cry about the theft. Even a fake astrologer that Dipu first thinks might make for an expose seems, upon reflection, a poor man in need of an income. Everything he observes has a flip side, a legitimate reason.

When he comes up with a story about the inescapable smoke from coal ovens in the city, the editor is excited – but wants to remove the flip side. Rather than question why the country's lower middle class still cooks with such fuel (the fact that gas ovens were -- and are-- too expensive), the editor believes what will sell with the middle class 'public' is a story about polluted air; the poison that they are forced to breathe. Does Dipu want to be a communist, or does he want the salary?

 

Earlier, in a remarkably edited sequence, Sen reveals how the same city that seemed so harsh when you're a poor man trying to hail a taxi in an emergency, turns into a tableaux of pleasures, seen from the back seat of a car.

 

The film ends with the arrival of the gas cylinder. It is only for Dipu's family, though -- leaving the rest of the building, the city, the country to continue in its haze of smoke. It's much thicker now.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 Feb 2021.