Warp & Weft of History: Mishal Husain's Broken Threads

I read the BBC presenter's Mishal Husain's family history and then interviewed her about it for this India Today piece:

British journalist Mishal Husain’s Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence is a rare mix of research and storytelling, making it a great read for anyone who wants to understand the history of South Asia’s present.

Mishal Husain’s Broken Threads begins with the actual frayed threads of a sari from her grandparents’ wedding. A cousin uses its brocade border on a shawl, and gives it to Husain as a wedding present. Beyond this, though, the book contains surprisingly few object histories, for a family memoir in an age of Instagrammable nostalgia. It quickly becomes clear that Husain, a well-known BBC journalist, wasn’t just looking for a place to inscribe her own memories. She had access to her grandparents’ memories: “I had the books written by one grandparent (Shahid), an unpublished memoir left by another (Mumtaz), some audio tapes recording my grandmother Tahirah, and a 97-year-old sibling of Mary’s to talk to,” Husain says in an email interview. The book’s structure stemmed from this: Chapters 1-4 are devoted, in succession, to her grandparents Mary, Mumtaz, Shahid and Tahirah. 

But the real achievement of Broken Threads lies in contextualising each grandparent’s individual trajectory. “I realised early on that I needed to begin a few decades before, going back into the 19th century and the period before and after 1857,” says Husain. “I turned it into history as well as memoir because I didn’t feel I could understand these individuals without understanding their times.” We hear about Mary’s childhood, for instance, only after Husain has described the arrival of Europeans in India. But instead of a generic history of the East India Company, Husain focuses on what is relevant to explain Mary Quinn, daughter of Mariamma and Francis Quinn: the relationships between Indian women and European men which led to the emergence of the Anglo-Indian community. 

She does something similar with each grandparent, tapping into histories of communities, professions, ways of being. Writing about her grandfathers Mumtaz and Shahid enables her — and us — to dive into the modern South Asian histories of medicine and the army. As context for her grandmother Tahirah, who grew up in Aligarh, Husain provides a deft account of Syed Ahmad Khan and his awakening to the need for Western education for Muslims, who after 1857 had fallen into a state of nostalgia for the past and resistance to the future. 

What brings all these threads together is the British colonial frame. As Husain puts it, she “felt the environment into which Shahid, Tahirah, Mumtaz and Mary were born, between 1911 and 1922, had been shaped by prior events and the entrenchment of British power”. “They grew up seeing New Delhi being built as a grand capital...and I don’t think they envisaged that era ending in their lifetimes,” she tells india today. This may have been particularly true of Shahid, “who had a ringside seat to the circle of power in Delhi for the 18-month run-up to Independence and who wrote about that period, making clear his dim view of Lord Mountbatten.” There is something deeply tragic about this portrait of her grandparents as part of a colonial elite in a united South Asia, who didn’t feel at home anywhere after Independence and Partition. 

Husain seems to share Shahid’s sense of disappointment. “As a journalist working primarily on the UK,” she says, writing Broken Threads made her return often to “a dispiriting reality: how did a nation with such an established democracy, developed institutions, and a system of checks and balances, not do better in its ending of Empire?” 

That the book is written for a British audience is apparent in both the language — a great-grandmother’s “white dupatta scarf ”— and references —“Babur, a near contemporary of Henry VIII”. And yet, the rare mix of research and storytelling makes this a great read for anyone who wants to understand the history of South Asia’s present. The political divides of the 1930s and ’40s emerge more intimately than in most academic histories: Nehru and Jinnah being disturbed by Gandhi’s use of religious symbolism, or Mohammad Ali Jauhar, of Khilafat Movement fame, saying, “Nationalism divides, but faith binds.” 

It is disturbing to see the present-day resonances, Husain agrees, “in how much of what drove decision-making in 1947 — or has happened since — remains, whether it’s the insecurity minority communities can experience, or the role of the military in governance.” But I felt also a great distance from the past, in ordinary people’s identification with something greater than the self. When Shahid is en route to England for military training, his cousin Shaukat writes to him: “Remember that this poor, disorganised, half-fed country is your native land.... Bring back to its shores the accumulated experience of other people.” I do not know if many ordinary South Asians today feel such idealism.

Published in India Today magazine, 4 Nov 2024 edition, in print. Also online here.

Drives with a view - II

My Mirror column:

Two Iranian films -  Jafar Panahi's 2015 Taxi Tehran and Abbas Kiarostami's 2002 Ten - use the taxi ride as a space for confession, comment and confrontation.

Early in Jafar Panahi’s 2015 Iranian docufiction Taxi Tehran, two passengers in a taxi get into an argument about the death penalty. “If they hang two people, the others would see,” says the man in favour. The woman argues against, saying that people mustn’t be hanged for such minor crimes committed out of need. “After China, we have the most executions in the world,” she points out. The more coherently the woman argues, though, the more rudely the man jeers at her. “You don't know jackshit,” he says at one point, accusing her of living in a world of fiction because she is a teacher – someone who he thinks reads too many books and spends her days with children.

Children in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, of course, have been the chosen carriers of filmic truth – especially in Panahi’s own film career, right from his 1995 debut The White Balloon and his 1997 feature The Mirror (which shares with Taxi Tehran the docufiction device of having an actor engage in conversations with real people). Taxi Tehran also contains a precociously sharp child – the director’s niece, who films everything on her mobile camera. Between showing us the articulate female passenger and the whipsmart little girl, it’s more than clear that Panahi intends us to laugh at the man’s words.

But the car is, in Taxi Tehran, very much a space of dialogue; a place where unusual exchanges can take place. Taxi Tehran was the third film Panahi shot illegally after the Iranian state banned him from making films, and it won him the Silver Bear at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival. In the film Panahi turns his vehicle into a faux-taxi, picking up strangers, family members and acquaintances from all over the city and dropping them off at their destinations. Except we learn soon enough that some of these exchanges are staged – and in the finest Panahi tradition, it’s often difficult to say which ones.

The film is strewn with references to the ubiquity of the camera in our lives. From the niece who wants to make a film in a month and has already recorded a real-life crisis in the lives of some acquaintances, to the neighbour who brings Panahi footage from a security camera to describe something terrible that happened to him, to the state placing a political prisoner's visiting mother in a room with cameras, life seems increasingly something that unfolds on screen rather than off it.

But Taxi Tehran feels like an update on an older Iranian film which was also set entirely inside a car driven by one person – Abbas Kiarostami's Ten (2002). In the unforgettable first segment of that Palm d'Or-nominated film, a young boy shouts at his divorced mother for a long length of time as she drives him through the city. We don’t see the driver – played by the actress Mania Akbari – for the first few minutes, instead experiencing the claustrophobia inside the car build with the child’s terrifyingly adult remarks. “That makes three sentences and they’re all rubbish,” he shouts, or “I can't live with you because you are a selfish woman,” or “You'll never know how to talk and you’ll never be anything” - all of which make it seem like he is ventriloquising his father, from whom she has got a divorce. The boy constantly instructs his mother to “say it calmly” or “don't shout in the street”, while himself plugging his ears against her voice and yelling louder to drown her out.

Like in Taxi Tehran and in the two films about taxis that I discussed last week (World Taxi and Night on Earth), the car in Ten is an unspoken site of confession. Or sometimes, a refuge. When the driver’s seven-year-old complains that she starts talking as soon as they get in the car, she retorts unselfconsciously that there’s no privacy at home – the home she shares with the new husband she's so happy to have acquired.

Driving around the city seems to allow for long, frank exchanges, even with women passengers she doesn't know well. A sex worker whose face we never see insists that wives are also in a kind of trade with their husbands. “You’re the wholesalers, we’re the retailers,” she scoffs. Another woman who has lost a fiancé to a rival contender talks of another kind of exchange, the one we conduct with God. “Before, praying seemed ridiculous,” she says softly. “I used to say, you pray to force God to give you things.” But both she and the car’s driver now find themselves deriving a semblance of peace from their visits to a mausoleum.

If the content of Ten’s conversations reveals a society politically and legally skewed against woman, the form, too, has something to offer. Male drivers often block Akbari’s path, she has to keep demanding right of way. So there’s some quiet courage to be drawn from the penultimate segment in which her young son returns, and inquires about first and fifth gears. If he thinks his mother can teach him about driving, perhaps that’s not a bad start.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Dec 2020.

In vino veritas – I

My Mirror column:

Jayaprakash Radhakrishnan’s deceptively simple film The Mosquito Philosophy (2019) leaves you asking, who really are the suckers?

A drinking session becomes a place for revelations in The Mosquito Philosophy (2019).

About ten minutes into Jayaprakash Radhakrishnan's sort-of-mumblecore Tamil film The Mosquito Philosophy (2019), a man complains to his friend that the liquor shop overcharged him, but no-one in the crowd supported his case against the cheating shopkeeper. “Do they have no self-respect or guts?” Suresh mutters. “Well, it is to gain self-respect and guts that we drink!” laughs his friend JP (played by Radhakrishnan himself). “Don't expect anything from the men in a liquor shop until they're high!”

It feels like a throwaway line, just a bit of humour. But as we get deeper into the nightlong drinking session that is the film's chosen milieu, we are made to realise that alcohol does serve that purpose, among others. In fact, The Mosquito Philosophy feels almost inspired by that old Latin proverb, In vino veritas - In wine, there is truth. As an English poet called Abraham Fraunce put it as far back in 1592: “Wine moderately taken maketh men joyfull; he is also naked; for, in vino veritas: drunkards tell all, and sometimes more then all.”

The four men have met because Suresh has some news that deserves a celebration. The only single one in their group, he’s finally decided to get married. But he is just a little cagey about telling his friends, and it soon becomes clear why: he has sworn for years that he would only have a love marriage. Now, at forty, he has made a decision to accept an arranged marriage prospect. It's all to make his mother happy, he insists – and then it turns out that the girl chosen by his mother is fifteen years his junior.

What makes the film successful is its quality of creeping up on you, rather than bombarding you with the things it wants you to think about. The predictable wife jokes at the start ease the viewer gently into a familiar middle class Indian milieu dominated by them. “Oh don't worry, no wife thinks her husband's friends can ever be a good influence,” says JP, and over the course of the film, each man in turn gets mocked for being afraid of his spouse. “Suresh, that's life after marriage,” the friends say to the soon-to-be-married man when one of them rushes back home to eat because his wife hasn't given him permission to be out for dinner.

JP seems the best adjusted of the men with respect to his wife – she is in and out of the room while his friends drink, and even joins in the conversation occasionally. But he has also asked his friends over for a drinking session without first checking with her - if he asks her first, he chuckles to Suresh, she is likely to refuse. Again, it's a throwaway moment – but it finds a larger echo when we hear over the course of the evening that JP followed his wife around for nine months before she agreed to marry him. What he describes as a college romance, a drunken Suresh now points out, could well be understood as stalking – JP simple didn't take no for an answer.

Is there is something worrying about a world in which husbands must ask their wives' "permission" to go have a drink or hang out with their friends? Yes, but there is also something worrying about a world in which a twenty-four-year old woman finds herself in the position of accepting an arranged marriage with a not-particularly-attractive man over fifteen years her senior. There is something particularly sad about the fact that a man who isn't even married already feels put upon, not excited, when his fiance calls him to make weekend plans. 

"Truth is like fire, it glows and burns," Suresh quotes the artist Gustav Klimt as having once said. The scalding truth of this society is that men and women continue to look at each other as separate species, each brought up to perceive the other as a creature that needs to be tricked into captivity -- not lived with in mutually defined freedom. It is no coincidence that even the alcoholic haze that lets home truths be spoken is closed off to one gender. 

(The first part of a two-part column. The second part is here.)

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Nov 2020.

Short of nothing

My Mirror column for Sun 8 Nov:

Among the hundred-odd films screening till tonight in the online edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival are a variety of accomplished shorts – Indian, foreign, fiction, documentary, animation.

Aditi Bhande's devastating Ghaziabad-set short film Did You Do It? traces one building's waste as it leaches into the surroundings

There are many exceptional films in this year's Dharamshala International Film Festival, but this column focuses on the shorts: films under 30 minutes. Some of the ones I really liked include:

1) Sudhamayee -- Megha Acharya's observational film is composed of family vignettes that may seem artless, but speak volumes. The film starts with a woman describing how she ended up becoming the primary caregiver for her father: her brother declared he was “scared of hospitals” and couldn't “bear to see those things.” “As if, we like seeing those tubes. We don't,” he voice trails off. There is a momentary lull in the conversation, as though the two women are absorbing these facts of life: the ugliness and pain of hospitals, but also the easily declared inability of so many men to perform the labour that surrounds illness and death. Or any domestic labour at all. As if on cue, a man emerges from the bedroom, retreating when he sees the women. The women, in turn, immediately rise with their plates - the man's entry is a sign that time for real conversation is over, and everyday labour must resume now. Again, later, when the couple discuss the woman's promotion sending her elsewhere, she knows she cannot. The man remains, as always, oblivious.

Sudarshan Suresh's brilliant 17-minute fiction is a chilling comment on who loses and who gains from the spectre of "love jihad"

 

2) Mizaru -- A young couple in a Mumbai park become a target for a group of unemployed men, but no-one comes to their aid. It is the sort of incident that is stiflingly familiar to any young person who has ever conducted a romance in India. By zoning in on it in film, Mizaru makes us question what we apparently don't in life: what have the couple done to deserve this treatment? Ah, they have displayed physical affection for each other. And since anything sexual in India is automatically shameful, they can be publicly humiliated by a bunch of louts. As self-appointed guardians of Hindu morality, the men feel entitled to bully them in every possible way. We live in a country in which the villains are confident that their actions will find support from society (the members of a laughter club in the park) and the state (the cops who show up and seem quite happy to have been delivered up some easy victims). Shot in one remarkable fluid take, Sudarshan Suresh's 17 min fiction is a searing indictment of everything that is wrong with India.

3) Did You Do It? -- This disturbing, largely dialogue-less film manages to be somehow programmatic and a mood piece. It begins with a characteristically North Indian dust-storm. The strange menacing half-light, the distant flocks of birds, the persistent slapping sound of the rain may have no diegetic purpose, but the aandhi is dark, slow and harrowing, just like the journey the film sets out to trace: a single day's worth of garbage emerging from an apartment complex in Ghaziabad and leaching inexorably back into our water, earth, air.

Aditi Bhande's Did You Do It? forces us to look at the processes we Indians so expertly turn away from in reality: the unsegregated dumping of garbage, the rising mountains of plastic, the barefoot young workers who do the irreplaceable work of clearing our surroundings, the stinking lorries, the overflowing landfills, and the ridiculous vision of middle class citizens in denial, marching against the municipality. Winner of the Best Editing award for Student Documentary at the Dadasaheb Phalke Film Festival 2020, Bhande is remarkably adept at delivering the facts as a quiet punch to the gut. “The water here has high levels of iron, nitrate, fluoride and aluminium,” reads a subtitle, going on to enumerate the diseases caused by such minerals in water, the depleting ground water levels, the pumping of semi-treated water back into the Hindon river. On screen, water continues to flow down the drain.

Vividly shot, with superb sound, the film constantly unravels our increasingly delusional expectations from nature and the natural. The deceptively attractive rushing sound of water takes us not a river but to the swirling pool of the sewage plant; the green piles of bhindi look poisonously greener in the unearthly tubelit glow of the street market. This film made me restart my lapsed composting bin. It might be the wake-up call you need, too.

Other shorts at DIFF that deserve more than a mention: Stray Dogs Come Out at Night, in which we meet a Pakistani sex worker; Irani Bag, a clever 8-minute essay on the purpose women's bags serve in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema; Anonymous, which movingly maps the stark realities of the Indian construction site; and the stunningly animated dystopia of Wade, in which a group of human scavengers navigate a flooded future Kolkata.

If you think an immersive film necessarily means an hour and half of plotted drama, try these out.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Nov 2020.

The Lives of Others

Watching Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 murder mystery, in a post-COVID world 

“The movies make us into voyeurs. We sit in the dark, watching other people's lives. It is the bargain the cinema strikes with us, although most films are too well-behaved to mention it,” wrote the hugely popular film critic Roger Ebert in his 1999 review of the film Peeping Tom. Michael Powell's film caused great outrage upon its release in 1960, and Ebert speculated — nearly 40 years later — that it was because it broke that unspoken contract between the audience and the filmmaker. By making its protagonist a serial killer who liked to film his victims in the throes of death, Peeping Tom forced viewers to contend with the violence of our own scopophilia, the pleasure we derive from looking.

Six years before Peeping Tom, another British director had made a film about the pleasure of looking, featuring a news photographer instead of a film studio focus-puller. But Alfred Hitchcock was too clever to make his audiences too uncomfortable. The kernel of Rear Window (1954) lay in a 1942 Cornell Woolrich short story called 'It Had To Be Murder', where the temporarily laid-up narrator's view of the windows across from his own leads him to suspect a murder. “I could have constructed a timetable of [my neighbours'] comings and goings, their daily habits and activities. Sure, I suppose it was a little bit like prying, could even have been mistaken for the fevered concentration of a Peeping Tom,” concedes Woolrich's narrator, before quickly denying any intentional voyeurism. “That wasn’t my fault, that wasn’t the idea.”

Hitchcock's hero doesn't get let off so easily. Within the film's first few minutes, his no-nonsense nurse Stella berates him as a 'window shopper' who spends his days looking at newly married couples and “bikini bombshells”. Stella has no doubt that spying on other people is a modern-day evil: “We've become a race of Peeping Toms. They used to poke your eyes out for that sort of thing, with a red-hot poker...” . But Hitchcock, along with his superb screenwriter John Michael Hayes', transforms the original story to make his hero a professional viewer of the world — and his film all about looking.

LB Jefferies, better known as Jeff (James Stewart) is a globe-trotting photographer who's fractured his leg on a particularly adventurous shoot. When the film opens, he has been holed up in his New York apartment for five weeks, with nothing better to do than look out of his rear window. While he converts these telling glimpses of his neighbours into stories — and in Hitchcock's unspoken self-referential extension, into cinematic fictions complete with a plot — Jeff himself is never seen. Or at least, he tries his best to ensure that he isn't: wheeling his chair back, keeping his lights off, even hiding at opportune moments. Not really the usual style of a cinematic hero.

There is all sorts of genius in this Hitchcock treatment, starting with the fact that Jeff thinks of himself as being of generally superior intellect to others in his locality. He does have an interest in the outside world, but usually it is reserved for distant places that impinge on his consciousness only in some headline-making way — when his editor calls to propose a trip to Kashmir because the “place is about to go up in flames”, Jeff's excited response is “Didn't I tell you that's the next place to watch?”. His immediate vicinity he thinks of as dull, lulling us into that assumption — and also making us feel a little guilty about the voyeuristic gaze that seeks excitement.

Dullness appears to be a problem both for those outside relationships and those in them. One single female neighbour — Jeff calls her Miss Lonelyheart — often drinks herself to sleep. But her efforts to date are ill-fated, too: we watch one much-awaited young man thrust himself on her as soon as the front door is closed. Another single woman — Stella's 'bikini bombshell', named 'Miss Torso' by our hero — has no shortage of male admirers, but none of them looks worth having. A single male songwriter above Miss Torso seems equally starved for love.

Meanwhile the couples lead lives of sweetly boring domesticity, or else bitter conflict — the sort that can lead to murder. Our hero himself has a girlfriend most men would have killed for, Grace Kelly as a model called Lisa Fremont who appears on the covers of magazines, but he isn't happy either. He thinks she isn't cut out for marriage to someone like him, who spends weeks on the road in rough places. “If she was only ordinary,” Jeff whines to Stella. We're meant to see that Lisa's Park Avenue perfection and high fashionista status is dull as ditchwater to Jeff: once he even asks what her cocktail companion was wearing, only to ruthlessly mock her reply.

Alfred Hitchcock lets Jeff tell many an uncle joke about nagging wives and the sad fate of husbands. But Rear Window can also be seen as undercutting Jeff's rather comfortable narrative: the rough-and-ready adventurer remains tied to his chair till film's end, while the exquisitely-turned-out Lisa does all the mystery-solving legwork, even putting herself at risk. Lisa's physical fearlessness is what finally impresses Jeff — he seems to think he's kindled her sense of adventure. And of course, Jeff's fracture literally bars him from legwork. Even so, his reliance entirely on visual tricks is fascinating: even when the murderer walks into his room, all Jeff can think of as a weapon is a battery-operated flashlight to blind him temporarily. And it's definitely possible to read Rear Window in a way that sees Jeff's immobility as emasculation, and emasculation as marriage — Hitchcock's hero ends the film with both legs in a cast and firmly embedded in traditional coupledom.

Rear Window is a ridiculously apposite watch for a post-COVID world, where travel for travel's sake seems to have gone, well, out the window. For one, Lisa's attitude turns the perfect side-eye upon Jeff's grandstanding travel stories. Other aspects of the film ring even truer in an era in which rising authoritarianism and the ubiquity of social media, combined with pandemic-enforced isolation, is pushing us more and more into the once socially dubious roles of the lurker, the invisible spectator in the dark. On our screens and off them, stalking and surveillance have greater currency than ever before. Stella's “homespun wisdom” — from a 1939 Reader's Digest — seems almost poetic in its appropriateness: “What people ought to do is get outside their own houses and look in for a change.”

Published in Firstpost, 25 Oct 2020

The faults in our stars - II

The second part of a two-part Mumbai Mirror column (published in August 2020).

What Indian Matchmaking doesn’t tell us about arranged marriage, and popular Hindi cinema increasingly does.

A scene from Motichoor Chaknachoor, where Nawazuddin Siddiqui reprises his 'permission' scene from GoW in a new context

One of the unaddressed problems with Indian Matchmaking, as I suggested last week, is that it seeks to club too many disparate worlds under Sima Aunty’s umbrella – leaving some out in the wind and weather. But if you think about it, many of the candidates with whom Sima Taparia has the least success – Aparna the opinionated lawyer, Nadia the hopeful dance trainer, Vyasar the good-humoured schoolteacher, Rupam the divorced single mother – are Indians in the West, for whom she is but one of a bouquet of options. Taparia’s claim of custom-made choices may seem a great option to these people bruised by past relationships and the dating game, but they also know can always go back to meeting people online or off-: to non-Indian matchmaking, if you like. This is true even when they want a partner from a particular community: Rupam, for instance, manages to find a Sikh American man on Bumble who fits better with her familial priorities than Taparia’s prospects. Also, though the explosion in dating apps and marriage websites is kept rather obviously to the sidelines of IM’s India-set narratives, the reality is that Pradhyuman in Mumbai and Ankita in Delhi, too, have many options besides the mythified personal matchmaker.

Taparia’s inability to match most of her clients on the show ends up making her look foolish, even redundant. But it’s a set-up designed to fail. No lone matchmaker, no matter how well-networked, can possibly provide the range and variety of prospects needed to cater to IM's selection of clients: so distant in location, age, social and educational background. It’s no accident that the only success on IM is the engagement of Akshay, whose mother is the real mover on both marital deadline and choice of bride. And while the show doesn’t vocalise it, the way Akshay and Radhika’s families greet each other with “Jai Shree Krishna” suggests membership of the same religious sub-community.

In Mundhra’s 2017 film on arranged marriages, A Suitable Girl, all three young women she tracks get married: two within their communities, and the third to someone off Shadi.com, only after failing for years to find a match within her caste. Meanwhile, other than Rupam’s dad wanting only a Sikh husband for her (interesting, given that her sister's husband is African American), IM mostly elides the biggest factor in real-life Indian matchmaking: caste and community. The ‘reality show’ also leaves out an even more ubiquitous vector of Indian arranged marriages: money.

These realities that reality TV apparently can't deal with appear constantly in our filmi fiction. The Hindi film and OTT industry has, in recent years, revelled in weddings as sites of ugly social revelations. From Mira Nair's 2001 Monsoon Wedding (MW), to Bittoo Sharma and Shruti Kakkar in 2010’s Band Baja Baraat to the rather posher Tara Khanna and Karan Mehra in 2019's hit OTT series Made in Heaven (MiH), our fictional content is positively chock-a-block with the planning of weddings. Weddings, as anyone who's organised one knows, are not just logistical nightmares but sites of social drama. Runaway brides have been with us since DDLJ, but there have many more since (MW, Tanu Weds Manu, Three Idiots, Shuddh Desi Romance to name just a few). More recent crises have included secretly gay grooms (MiH, also Shubh Mangal Zyada Savdhan), cross-cultural wedding negotiations (Vicky Donor, 2 States), an immature groupie bride who sleeps with a celebrity right before her suhaag raat and an uber-genteel IAS groom emerging as cowardly dowry-seeker (both MiH).

In many of these depictions, comedy works to make the medicine go down. At least two films -- Habib Faisal’s Daawat-e-Ishq (2014) and Dolly Ki Doli (2015) -- have featured trickster-brides who dupe the men lining up to marry them. What screenwriters likely depend on to make these heroines remain likeable is the commonly understood fact that marriage in India is a market, and a market loaded so unfairly in favour of the boy’s side that the girls are being driven to illegalities.

That Indian weddings are social and financial negotiations is becoming clearer and clearer in Hindi films -- and any deceptions at the time of signing can later make the contract radd. In Bala (2019), the Tiktok-famous bride (Yami Gautam) marries Ayushmann Khurrana for 'love', but when she learns his floppy hair comes off at night, her love turns to be skin-deep, too. In Motichoor Chaknachoor, Athiya Shetty’s tall, fair Annie (urf Anita) believes Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Pushpinder is employed in Dubai. When it turns out, post-shadi, that the Dubai job is long gone, Annie’s only reason for marrying – Pushpinder or anyone else – crumbles, and suddenly she can only ses that he's shorter than her, and darker.

Motichoor has been much berated for its political incorrectness. Indeed, the fat-shaming of Pushpinder’s (Nawazuddin) first marital prospect feels like a horribly unfortunate throwback to our Tuntun-obsessed childhoods, and there’s an exasperated slap he delivers that he never verbally apologises for, but his non-verbal attempts to make up for it felt more persuasive to me than Thappad’s. And I was as impressed as Annie by his dowry-rejecting stance. 

But what’s refreshing about these comic plots is that they’re honest about Indian marriages, showing them as exactly the fat-shaming, skin-colour-obsessed, dowry-driven transactions that they are -- but also as the inescapable structure within which most Indians must seek whatever agency they hope to have. Even the conventionally attractive and wonderfully sassy Annie in Motichoor doesn’t feel free to actually refuse an arranged marriage – so her only leverage is in rejecting rishtas. And with no other way to see the world, she decides a foreign-located husband might as well be her ticket to ride. Age, looks, jobs and dowries are openly treated as chips to bargain with -- but how else is one to play if arranged marriage is the only game in town?

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30 Aug 2020.

The faults in our stars - I

My Mumbai Mirror column: the first of a two-part column.

What can Indian Matchmaking -- and other recent takes on the arranging of marriages -- teach us about ourselves? 

A still from A Suitable Girl, the 2017 documentary made by Smriti Mundhra, who has directed Indian Matchmaking

It's been exactly a month since the reality show Indian Matchmaking (IM) took social media by storm. Indian-centric content, even when it's on international streaming platforms, rarely attracts non-desi audiences. IM broke through. Several non-Indian friends and acquaintances on my Facebook and Twitter timelines seemed as hooked to watching matchmaker Sima Taparia from Mumbai attempt to find suitable marital partners for her clients in India and the diaspora -- deploying not only her own social knowledge and networks, but also a battery of face readers, astrologers and life coaches. That realisation, that the rest of the world was watching 'us' with a mix of horror and fascination, was probably what resulted in Indian viewers displaying so much anxiety about the show's portrayal of realities that no Indian can be unaware of. The most obvious of these social facts is that marriage in India remains first and foremost a kinship alliance between families, and that therefore what must be 'matched' -- much before any individual preferences come into play -- is the caste and socio-economic background of the two people concerned. A second social fact: the patriarchal, patrilocal norms of North Indian upper caste society mean that the girl must be the one who leaves her family for her husband's home – by extension, leaving her existing life for a new one. As Taparia puts in early in the show, “In India, there is marriage and there is love marriage.”

Taparia, with her lines about fate and the alignment of the stars, has become an easy-to-mock target, the subject of many a Sima Aunty meme -- while at least two of the women she fails to find matches for, the Houston-based Aparna and the Delhi-based Ankita, have emerged as underdog heroines, being increasingly interviewed and feted for holding firm against Taparia and another matchmaker called Geeta, who labelled them “inflexible” and “negative”.

Watching the show, though, I felt like Taparia's clients were really a bit of a double act. The India-based families were all from traditional North Indian business communities, like Taparia herself, and seemed within her sociological comfort zone -- while the US-based diasporic candidates represented a much wider spectrum of professions and backgrounds – Guyanese, Sikh, Sindhi and Tamil Americans from Houston to Chicago, including lawyers, a motivational speaker and writer, a dance trainer, even a public school teacher.

Naturally, these two sets of clients had very different requirements and expectations. Someone like Akshay, the younger scion of a Mumbai-based business family who was only marrying because of his mother's insistence that 25 was way past marital age, may have mouthed a few platitudes about wanting a mental match with his partner, but anyone who watches the show can tell that any prospective wife for him would first have to meet his mother's requirements – in order to be able to effectively replicate her. Taparia's job in this scenario is finding a suitable daughter-in-law to fit into a large business-oriented joint family – which is a rather different requirement from finding someone who fits the psychological and professional expectations of an independent mid-career professional like Aparna.

As Taparia says early on, “In India you have to see the caste, the height, the age, and the horoscope.” How the system usually works is expressed in a rather revealing sentence from the father of one candidate: “Pradhyuman ki dedh sal ke andar dedh sau file aa chuki hai”. The subtitles call them “offers”, but the way Pradhyuman's father puts it -- “Pradhyuman has received 150 files in one and a half years” -- really tells you what Indian matchmaking usually feels like: a bureaucratic process, no less competitive and standardised than a job application. It's Taparia, in fact, who tries to bring a new personal touch into this database-driven arranged marriage scenario. But it isn't easy to get rid of the old.

Indian Matchmaking's director Smriti Mundhra (daughter of the late Jag Mundhra, who alternated between US-based exploitation films and women-centric Indian films like Kamla and Bawander) has known Sima Taparia for some years now, and has filmed her in more vulnerable circumstances. In her 2017 documentary debut A Suitable Girl, made over seven years, Mundhra tracked Taparia's real-life quest for a groom for her own daughter Ritu. An MBA whom we watch engage in a spontaneous appreciation of the merits of Macro versus Micro Economics with another female client of her mother's, Ritu is often silent on camera while her mother speaks avidly of her marriage. But she also speaks candidly to the filmmaker about knowing that she must marry soon. She does reject many candidates before agreeing to wed Aditya, who apart from meeting her parents' economic and caste criteria, has an MBA like herself and “is witty”.

The second young woman in A Suitable Girl is Dipti Admane, who works as a pre-primary school teacher. Touching 30, her inability to find a suitable match despite years of scouring the newspaper matrimonials has propelled her and her parents to the edge of depression. Commentators on Indian Matchmaking have singled out Nadia and Vinay's first-date discovery of a shared dislike of ketchup as a flimsy hook upon which to hang a potential relationship. The 'boy' who comes to see Dipti remains utterly silent while his mother makes sure Dipti can run a house and calls her job “good time-pass”. But all an excited Dipti marks after their departure is that he likes sweet lime juice -- like she does -- and that his birthday is the same as hers.

The second part of this column will appear next week.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16 Aug 2020

In the dark of the night

My Mirror column:

The absorbing Raat Akeli Hai stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui as a UP cop learning a little about himself as he unravels a web of murderous intrigue

Radhika Apte in a still from the atmospheric new murder mystery Raat Akeli Hai

The shaadi ka ghar has been a favoured backdrop for the dramatic unfolding of countless Hindi film romances, but it’s likely never been the setting for a murder mystery. Nor has the ubiquitous wedding video been turned into evidence for a police investigation before. Honey Trehan’s slow-burn directorial debut Raat Akeli Hai does both things with delicious conviction, giving us an atmospheric whodunit that feels deeply embedded in the dystopic state of Uttar Pradesh. What makes the film even more satisfying is that Trehan – a long-time casting director who has done films with Vishal Bhardwaj, Meghna Gulzar and Abhishek Chaubey – casts Nawazuddin Siddiqui as his detective hero, and places his unmarriedness centrestage.

Saddled with the near-giggleworthy name of Jatil (literally ‘complex’) Yadav, Siddiqui’s plain-speaking Kanpuriya cop is introduced as a man with some complexes of his own. We first set eyes on him in a photograph that his mother (the effortlessly watchable Ila Arun) is trotting out at a wedding, attempting to convince a female guest that her son is an eligible match. The fair-skinned young woman has her spangly sari draped over a spaghetti strap blouse, but her views on skin colour remain hopelessly unreconstructed. “Rang saaf nahi hai (His complexion isn't clear),” she says, dismissing Jatil at a glance. “Par mann saaf hai (But his heart is),” says Arun, turning away only to be accosted by her embarrassed and angry son.

But while we might sympathise with the fact that Jatil’s dark skin makes him an inferior candidate in a world where Ajay Devgn is the exception that proves the rule, his own views on women reveal a rather muddy mann. “Did you see the clothes she was wearing?” he says to his mother. “I just want a susheel girl.” As the film unfolds, however, Jatil’s socially-learned disgust for the sexually independent woman (“Tumhare jaisi aurat ko apne paas phatakne bhi na dein”) clashes often with his simultaneous attraction to what he acknowledges as courage and honesty.

And no wonder, given the rarity of a “saaf mann” in RAH's grim world. In a scenario with several shades of last year’s Hollywood crime comedy Knives Out, Jatil is called upon to investigate the murder of the patriarch of a well-off family whose members seem not to like each other very much, and who might all have had motives to kill him. Knives Out hid its sharp politics under parodic excess. Here Trehan and cinematographer Pankaj Kumar (Haider, Tumbadd) create a brilliantly atmospheric web of oppressive rooms and half-lit corridors to match a much darker milieu that feels true to present-day North India: corrupt, power-hungry, sexually exploitative and two-faced. When our hero gets there, the terrace and balconies are still lit up for the wedding that has just taken place, of the widowed dead man to his much younger mistress. And the sight of the new wife Radha (Radhika Apte, looking the part but never completely inhabiting it), still in her wedding finery, sitting in her upstairs room with a ghunghat half covering her face, is very much part of the filmi marriage fantasy (from Mother India to Kabhi Kabhie to Tanu Weds Manu) that RAH both evokes and toys with.

What Trehan and his exceptional screenwriter Smita Singh do with elan is to make that image of the marriageable woman the film's recurring subtext. The dogged small-town detective whose Achilles’ Heel is attractive women has been with us at least since Polanski’s Chinatown. Here the mirage-like quality of Siddiqui’s first sight of Radha also reminds one of Manorama Six Feet Under, Navdeep Singh’s 2007 adaptation of Chinatown. But while our cop hero may have a soft spot for the supposed femme fatale, almost everyone else (in the family and beyond) has already decided that she must be the murderess. “Woh ladies rijha rahi hai aapko (She's seducing you),” Siddiqui's colleague says knowingly. When Siddiqui protests that she barely gives him the time of day, the colleague pounces on him with the sort of unsustainable circular logic that otherwise rational men single women out for: “That's exactly it! That's how women seduce you, by not giving you attention.”

The slow accretion of words and images creates a dark picture of this skewed world, in which women are damned if they don't – and certainly damned if they do. From Siddiqui's “duffer” colleague to the dead man's feckless but good looking “hero-type” heir, every man in town is out to make a sanskaari match, while secretly lusting after women whose attraction is precisely that they're not 'wife material'. “Baazaaru se gharelu hone ka safar kitna kathin hai aapko maloom hai?” asks the politician Munna Raja (Aditya Srivastava). And yet the gharelu women, who've won the supposed big prize of marriage and respectability, can end up more patriarchal than the men, resorting to ever-lower measures to guard their practically nonexistent turf.

Faced with this intriguing cocktail of lust and revenge, our UP policeman hero presents himself as “not such a low-level man”. Jatil's striving for moral fibre is real, and yet it is also clear that he must operate within the system as it currently exists. And that system is one where the extra-legal has become the norm, where it is a public secret that only a saffron-hued MLA can risk owning a tannery, and an inconvenient cop is as easily 'encountered' as an out-of-favour gangster. In this post-procedure world, even being a stickler for truth can now mean finding extra-legal ways to uncover it. Whether it's marriage or murder, the show must go on. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 Aug 2020.

The Rules of the Game

My Mirror column:
 
A neighbourhood chess tournament provides both setting and metaphor in the Ektara Collective’s sharp and delightful indie Turup (Checkmate), currently free to stream online. 

“Unless, like Thelma and Louise, you plunge off the side of a canyon, there is no escaping the everyday,” wrote Geoff Dyer in his marvellously idiosyncratic sort-of biography of DH Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage (1997). “To be free is not the result of a moment’s decisive action but a project to be constantly renewed,” he added. “There are intervals of repose but there will never come a moment of definitive rest where you can give up because you have turned freedom into a permanent condition. Freedom is always precarious.”

Dyer’s riffs on freedom and the everyday came back to me this week as I watched, for the second time, a lovely film called Turup (Checkmate), made in 2017 by an unusual group of filmmakers who call themselves the Ektara Collective. Turup is currently free to stream online in the ‘Viewing Room’ set up by the organisers of the Dharamshala International Film Festival and addresses both the precariousness of our freedoms and the mundane, unglamorous, repetitive settings in which we must fight for them.

Set in the Bhopal neighbourhood of Chakki Chauraha, the film uses a public neighbourhood chess-board as narrative and metaphorical anchor for its fine-grained take on a set of interlocked lives. It is very much a feature film, with a script, characters, and often sharp turns of dialogue –but it has a documentary-style sensitivity to its chosen milieu, attending carefully to the faces, spaces and sounds that bring it to life.

Some of Turup’s attention to the everyday is about catching playful moments of enjoyment. A man pauses to watch a woman he likes tying up her hair. A child hides some ber where an old man can find them. One young man cajoles another into betting on a chess game he’s not even party to. More often, though, what the film places under its observational microscope are aspects of Indian daily life that too often go unnoticed.  An upper caste man tells a little girl to move away from her spot at a public chessboard with a wordless gesture of caste distancing, adding that she should take “her pieces” with her. An upper middle class woman fails to recognise the sweeper who cleans the street outside her house. A husband thinks nothing of conducting large financial transactions from a marital ‘joint’ account without consulting his wife. A younger brother invites a potential groom’s family home to ‘see’ his elder sister because he disapproves of her choice of romantic partner.

That quasi-anthropological gaze, defamiliarising the familiar, forcing us to look at the inequities to which we usually turn a blind eye, is one part of what makes the film powerfully political. The other thing I think Turup gets right is how the local, the personal and the everyday are inextricably wound up with wider social, public and historical currents flowing through the country and shaping our times. Like a well-executed piece of ethnography, the film’s focus is small – one urban neighbourhood – but its socio-political canvas is large. It also manages to gesture to the ways in which our ‘local’ reality is now in constant conversation with mass media (Though I am less optimistic than Turup’s makers about the relative reach and effect of newspaper journalism and bigotry-filled WhatsApp forwards).

Made three years ago, the film is attuned to the rising tide of rightwing Hindu majoritarianism that now threatens to drown out all other political voices. At several points in the film, we see the mobilising of men – especially those who are unemployed, poor or in whatever way insecure — around the totem of the endangered cow mother, and the endangered Hindu daughter. The bogey of ‘love jihad’ is the apposite bedrock of Turup’s plot, revealing gender as the fault line along which fictional ‘us’ and ‘them’ narratives can most easily be spun. “Apni ladkiyon ko kaaboo mein nahi rakh paye toh izzat gawaayenge,” says one man. “Nahi maan rahi hai? Arrey toh manwaao,” says another, talking of a girl who is resisting a forced arranged marriage in favour of studying further and eventually marrying the man of her choice. A young Dalit man is shown as susceptible to such gendered messaging, especially when religion is thrown into the mix – but the film also reveals how caste is often the limit of Hindutva’s imagined solidarities. The same young man, who thinks he’s being enjoined to be part of a movement for dharam raksha, finds himself being urged to sacrifice a morning’s work to ‘help out’ with a blocked septic tank.

Turup offers no large victories. What it holds out are small incremental achievements in what the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci would have called a War of Position, a process in which cultural activities and social interactions are the locales in which people can begin to imagine new ways of being. The young Dalit man refuses the work for which his caste is seen to make him automatically ‘qualified’. A woman starts to claw back some power in her marriage by re-establishing some professional self-worth. An upper caste local bigwig finds himself losing a final to the young ‘outsider’.

The wresting of freedom, as Dyer suggested, is part of the daily grind. But it is also a game in a continuing tournament.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 Apr 2020.

Home viewing in times of quarantine

My Mirror column:

Everything I watch these days seems to be speaking to the current moment. One theme that jumps out at me, film upon film, is our relationship to the idea of home

It’s the third week of lockdown in India, and quarantine is having an odd effect on my film viewing. I don't know if it’s me, or the universe conspiring in some strange serendipity, but almost everything I watch these days seems to be speaking to the current moment. One theme that jumps out at me, film upon film, is our relationship to the idea of home. Home is a place where you feel safe – until you don’t. The other day, on a popular streaming platform, I stumbled upon Darren Aronofsky’s much-discussed (and frequently dissed) Mother! (stylised as mother!), a film I had missed when it came out in 2017. In the talky aftermath of the film’s release, Aronofsky went to some lengths to ‘explain’ his spooky, eventually grisly film as a Biblical allegory for the rape and torment of ‘Mother Earth’ by ‘God’, while other characters stand in for Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel.

I have to confess that the Judaeo-Christian analyses baffled me, because I found Mother! entirely intelligible (all right, not entirely!) as a film about domesticity and its dangers. Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence play a couple living in a large and glorious old house. He spends all his time as writers often do, failing to write, while she cooks and cleans and continues the laborious process of restoring the unfinished house. Lawrence is an unbelievable combination of picture-perfect and extremely hands-on: her flowing hair piled into an artfully messy bun as she mixes new shades of wall paint, or conjures up meals that her husband pronounces “perfect” while making polite noises about how she didn’t have to make so many things. The dynamic between them is strained; her obsession with a private paradise is clearly not sparking his creativity. The more she tries to create the perfect space in which the two of them can live happily ever after, the more avidly he tries to invite the outside world in.

The first to arrive is a man who claims to be a great fan of the man’s previous book. Then his wife, his squabbling sons, and then more and more strangers arrive, until the house is overrun. As the ‘guests’ go from admiring and raucous to irresponsible and downright dangerous, the film walks a brilliant tightrope between possible ways in which we might see this. Is the woman overly anxious, closed off and selfish and the man generous, open, free-flowing? Or is he the selfish one, and she the victim? A pandemic that has us all panicking at the idea of strangers in our homes seemed to me to throw Mother! into a whole new light.

Then the night before last, on another streaming platform, I watched a Japanese film called Domains, directed by Natsuka Kusano. The 2019 film is a marvellous formal experiment that likely isn’t for everyone. A mild-mannered policeman reads out the confession of a woman called Aki who has drowned her old friend’s little daughter. From there, we move on to a series of scenes in which three actors – playing the woman, her friend and her friend’s husband – repeatedly rehearse the lines for what might be the film. Except, of course, this is the film.

For some two and a half hours, we almost never leave the bare room in which the actors sit. When we do, what we see is a near-empty city: roads almost free of traffic, a strangely quiet metro.

A more uncanny resonance with our time comes from the characters’ preoccupation with creating a space in which they feel safe. “Nodoka seemed stifled to maintain the comfort of the house. Naoto, on the other hand, treasured his home so much that he seemed to be keeping everyone out except his family,” remembers Aki. The ‘domain' created by the couple and their daughter is, for Aki, a rival to the one she shared with Nodoka in childhood, a magical “kingdom of chairs and sheets” that only the two of them could enter.

The husband, Naoto, on the other hand, feels visibly threatened by Aki’s being so at home with his wife. When he tells Aki to stop coming over because his daughter has caught a fever in her excitement, Aki responds angrily: “So you think I'm some kind of virus, don’t you?”

Naoto regulates everything, from his wife’s smoking to the humidity and temperature of the house. “I do want to feel safe. I need to protect my family,” he says peevishly. And yet, safe is exactly what they are not in the end. Control can backfire, just as much as openness.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 12 Apr 2020

Status of women, women of status

My Mirror column: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Mar 2020.

Unsuitable arrangements

My Mirror column:

Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan mainstreams same-sex love and battles the insistence on marriage with wit and warmth.

Hailing an auto rickshaw the other day, I found myself thrust into an ongoing conversation. “He has no problems,” said the 50-something driver, waving goodbye to another autowallah. "His children are married. I have to make plans.” Did his son and daughter want to get married yet, I asked, and might they have partners in mind? The driver was surprised, then miffed: “If they decide, we’ll have nothing further to do with them. And if the marriage runs into problems, it’ll be their lookout!”

Arranging the marriages of their progeny, whether male or female, is the great universal burden of the South Asian parent. Romantic love is something we only celebrate in song and cinema; marriage is meant to ensure social and individual reproduction, and it is non-negotiable. “Shaadi toh karni hi hogi,” as the auto driver said, peering curiously into the mirror at me, “aur samaaj ke andar ho toh behtar.”

It is into this universe that a film like Shubh Mangal Zyaada Savdhan drops like a little grenade, exploding the smooth heteronormative shell of arranged marriage.

Many Hindi film heroes have refused particular girls, but Aman Tripathi (Jitendra Kumar) wants a boy. The boy is, by his very gender, unsuitable. And as unsuitable boys do in Hindi films from DDLJ onwards, Kartik (Ayushmann Khurrana) must win the family over.

The plot is slender: Aman goes home for a family wedding, taking Kartik along as a friend – but after his relationship with Kartik becomes known, finds himself being forced into marriage instead. The subplots also involve arranged marriages – people desperately pushing for them, people trying to dodge them, people realising they aren’t happy in them. In almost the very first scene, the boys help one young woman (Bhumi Pednekar) elope. Meanwhile, Aman’s cousin Goggle is desperate to be married, even though the marriage market places her at the very bottom of the ladder, giving her ‘options’ that make her feel terrible about herself. Then there’s the hilarious (but perfectly believable) Kusum, Aman’s suitable bride, who turns out to have some unsuitable marital desires of her own. And finally there’s Aman’s parents’ marriage, with Shankar (Gajraj Rao) and Sunaina’s (Neena Gupta) accusations ending in the rare admission that it hasn’t been all that great.

All of this may seem like serious stuff, but Hitesh Kewalya (who adapted the 2013 erectile dysfunction comedy Kalyana Samayal Saadham from Tamil into the 2017 Hindi hit Shubh Mangal Savdhan) writes and directs SMZS with an in-your-face honesty and a zany energy that makes it hard to be bored.

Last year, Shelly Chopra Dhar and writer Ghazal Dhaliwal did something similar for lesbian love, putting a timorous Sonam Kapur to the test of resisting an arranged marriage. But Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga had only half the madness of SMZS – and double the tears.

Kewalya’s film doesn’t shy away from things; it externalises them into a deadpan excess. “First floor ki ladkiyan sabse pehle patti hain, saare Dilli ke ladke jaante hain,” goes one great line. “Kangan aur beta ek hain (These bangles are my son),” says Sunaina, handing Kusum (Pankhuri Awasthy) the traditional gold bangles that promise a girl entry into North Indian family heaven. And while its dialogues perfectly capture the escalating madness of the Indian joint family quarrel, some of the film’s best moments come when it chooses actions over words.

So when Professor Shankar Tripathi (Gajraj Rao) stumbles onto the facts of his son’s sexuality, he responds by actually throwing up. He doesn’t make a long speech about gay sex grossing him out: he simply pukes. There’s something about this as a cinematic device that both allows us to see how starkly he experiences this – and also lets us laugh at him. Rao’s bodily responses make for some more hysterically funny sequences: the hosepipe scene, for instance, or his dancing face-off with Kartik. Another character with a hilarious bodily tic is Kusum, whose performance as the blushing bride involves a fake tinkling laugh on cue.

SMZS is unabashed about its case for the freedom of sexuality, and it uses anything at hand to prop up its argument – new rights in Indian law, humanity, common sense, filmi melodrama, and in one very entertaining thread, science. After the hypothalamus and oxytocin have been pressed into argument, the kaali gobhis (black cauliflowers) that form a crazy projectile backdrop to the film become a metaphor for the foolhardiness of trying to interfere with nature. The social arrangements Indians insist on making for their children, Kewalya seems to say, are unnatural too.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1 Mar 2020.

An influential girlhood

My Mirror column:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16 February 2020.

Love, Lies and Videotape

My Mirror column:
 
How Francois Truffaut, who'd have been 88 this February, created an on-screen alter ego from 1959 to 1979, weaving happily between life and fiction

Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel in Love on the Run (1979), the last of Francois Truffaut's Doinel films.

There's a quick moment in Francois Truffaut's Love on the Run (1979) where the film's hero Antoine Doinel (a middle-aged but still childish version of the alter ego character Truffaut introduced with his first feature The 400 Blows) tells his son Alphonse that he must practice the violin. “What will happen if I don't?” asks the long-haired little boy. “You'll end up as a music critic,” says Antoine, poker-faced.

The filmmaker who arguably founded the French New Wave isn't undignified enough to milk the line for laughs. We hear it, we move on. But we do so knowing that Truffaut has made one of his frequent joking references to his own life – and as often the case with Truffaut, we don't quite know who the joke is on. Because Francois Truffaut, who was born 88 years ago this month -- on February 6, 1932 -- began his career in cinema as a critic.

After a troubled childhood that landed him in a reformatory, much like Antoine Doinel, Truffaut had come to the notice of legendary film critic Andre Bazin. Over eight years in the pages of the journal Cahiers du Cinema, he grew into an influential voice, critiquing the commercial French cinema of the time. Truffaut wanted people to stop thinking of good cinema as derived from literature or tied too strongly to a script. He called for much greater freedom, new technology such as the handheld camera, and improvisation that allowed for the visual qualities of cinema to be foregrounded.

Oddly for someone trying to emphasise the cinematic over the literary, Truffaut's references remained bookish. His famous “auteur theory” is essentially the claim that the director is the “author” (French: 'auteur') of a film just as the writer is of a book, his sensibility expressed by means of “the camera-pen” (French: 'le camera-stylo'). His filmic alter ego Antoine makes a shrine to the great French writer Balzac in his room as an adolescent. In Love on the Run, the last of the Antoine films, he works as a proofreader, having published one novel and speaking of writing another.

In another Truffaut film, The Man Who Loved Women (1977), the hero Bertrand seeks inspiration for writing an erotic autobiography in other memoirs. “How do you write about yourself? How did others do it?” he asks, coming to the conclusion that there are no rules: for any author, “his writing is as personal to him as his fingerprints”. Love on the Run, made two years later, is also full of conversations about fiction and autobiography, often scorning what might be seen as Truffaut's own artistic project by way of criticising Antoine's. “I'm not smart,” says Antoine's wife Christine, “but I know this: writing to settle old scores isn't art.” Another long and funny sequence involves Antoine's childhood girlfriend Colette (the relationship depicted in the short Antoine and Colette) becoming curious about his literary avatar. Having spied him after many years just as he's divorcing Christine, Colette buys his first novel, and quickly sees that Antoine's 'fiction' is really the story of his life, rewritten to show himself in a better light. Confronted, Antoine agrees mournfully.

“You write well,” says Colette, “But you will never be a real writer until you write something that is pure fiction.” Antoine jumps up excitedly and tells her the plot of his planned second novel, or rather its wonderfully romantic beginning, in which a man picks up the pieces of a torn-up photograph from the floor of a phone booth and “falls madly in love” with the unknown woman whose face is in it. But even as Antoine -- the thin, nerdy-looking actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, who played him in all the five films (as well as acting in other films by Truffaut and Godard) – insists with a certain nervous energy that this is his imagination, what Truffaut puts on screen is Léaud as Antoine glueing together the image of Sabine, the woman we have already met in Love on the Run as his current girlfriend.

Depending on how you're feeling – in general about men, and in particular about male artists who cannibalise their own lives for art – it is possible to view the Antoine Doinel films as a charming piece of whimsy that entertained several viewers over several decades, or as an indulgent ride that no one except Truffaut should have been forced to go on, at least not after Antoine and Colette. Whichever side you pick, Love on the Run is a fascinating cinematic document: one of the world's most influential filmmakers dipping in and out of clips of his own previous films, to continue the fictional story of a character he created out of his own life, played by the same actor and many of the same co-actors as in clips. In one such clip, from The 400 Blows, we watch the 12-year-old Antoine buttonholed by a psychologist. “Your parents say you're a liar,” she says. The boy wriggles his shoulders, as if shrugging off the weight of that accusation. “Well, I lie sometimes,” he says. “Because if I told the truth, they wouldn't believe me. So I lie.”

Fiction always wins, at least in theory.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 9 February 2020.