A Portrait of the Doctor as an Angry Young Man

My Mirror column: the seventh in my series on Indian films about doctors.

What drives doctors to frustration in our cinema, and has that changed from Dr. Kotnis to Kabir Singh?

Amitabh Bachchan (right) as the dhoti-clad Dr. Bhaskar Banerjee
with Rajesh Khanna (left) as his patient and friend Anand Sehgal in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anand (1971)

Over the last six weeks, this column has looked at Indian films with doctor protagonists, beginning with Dr. Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani (1946), which V Shantaram based on Dr. Dwarkanath Kotnis, India's real-life medical missionary to China. In the last 75 years, we've travelled some distance from that uncomplicated patriotic doctor who chose duty to profession and country, over even duty to parents.

There have been, speaking rather broadly, two directions in which Indian cinema has taken doctors. In films like Ganashatru and Ek Doctor Ki Maut, made outside the industry framework, the good doctor remains a professional and patriot of the highest order. In these films, it is Indian society that no longer honours that selfless commitment to medical science. This chronological change is true as well of middle-of-the-road cinema. In Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anuradha (1960), Balraj Sahni's rural doctor slaving away over his research could be imagined stumbling upon some good fortune by film's end. A decade later, none of the rural doctors in Vijay Anand's Tere Mere Sapne (1971) receive recognition or support. Even Dev Anand's 'original research' on a herbal cure for tuberculosis gets him fame only when an American university (Johns Hopkins, correctly) gives him a degree (a much darker version of this international vs national arc appears in Ek Doctor Ki Maut). Even as recently as an Udta Panjab, the good doctor's goodness is wasted on the world around her – ending in tragedy.

There is another cinematic trajectory (sometimes overlapping with the first), where the focus is on the frailties of doctors. Tere Mere Sapne, for instance, offered up one doctor in denial of his own illness, one alcoholic depressive doctor, and one doctor making money off rich patients to take vengeance on an unjust world. Bemisaal a decade later is much darker: the doctor now feels entitled to the good life – and the stakes of 'making money' are his patients' lives.

But some of the most interesting depictions are those that recognise that doctors, just like the rest of us, can have frailties -- even when they are more or less good. In 1971, the same year as Tere Mere Sapne, came Hrishikesh Mukherjee's most famous doctor movie: Anand. If his Anuradha had been routed through the doctor's perfect wife, Anand was routed through the perfect patient. Rajesh Khanna played Anand Sehgal, the sunny patient no-one wants to see die.

The film's narrative as usually understood as Anand's chatty warmth breaking through the hard, serious exterior of Dr. Bhaskar Banerjee (a rather wonderful Amitabh Bachchan). That isn't untrue. But watching the film again, I realised that Anand expands on something I suggested in last week's column: the burden of stoicness placed upon doctors. When we meet Bachchan's Bhaskar, he is a man dispirited by his work: exhausted by having to practice in a country where many doctors are willing to treat the imaginary ailments of the rich for a fee, while mere medicine cannot cure what really ails so many patients – poverty. Bhaskar's exhaustion is often expressed as anger – a sneering contempt for the hypochondriac rich, and a helpless snappish rage in the face of the dying poor. What Anand does first is to recognise that rage as the doctor's anger at himself. But what he does next is to jolt Bhaskar out of that overwhelmed state, to frame the doctor's depressiveness and cynicism as self-indulgent – and insist that he live on the side of life, even while constantly having to look death in the eye.

In mid-2019, Indian cinema gave us another film about an angry doctor. Several films, actually – Sandeep Vanga's Telugu superhit Arjun Reddy was remade in several languages, all retaining the same essential plot, about a doctor who becomes a raging alcoholic – literally -- after his college girlfriend is forced by her family to marry another man. I saw the Hindi version, Kabir Singh, and like several reviewers, was struck by the hero's disturbing sense of ownership over his largely passive girlfriend, who seems only too happy to be owned.

Shahid Kapur as the titular protagonist Kabir Singh in the 2016 film about an alcoholic surgeon with anger issues

 

But what is relevant here is that Arjun/Kabir is portrayed as a brilliant doctor -- a surgeon, no less. The film might be seen to suggest, as incoherently as its hero's rages, that the external world – its rules of caste, gender and class, as well as institutional seniority – is a stifling hierarchy against which our hero 'rebels'. Kabir's uncontrolled anger, even when it hurts or endangers his friends, lovers, strangers or even patients, is greeted with awe much more often than censure. His rule-breaking is applauded, his depressive alcoholism is 'understood', even by women and men he treats badly. Anger is feted as self-expression, flaws are forgiven. Where, oh where, is an Anand to cut this Doctor Saab down to size?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1 Nov 2020

The doctor as sufferer

My Mirror column, sixth in my series on films about doctors:

Based on AJ Cronin’s famous 1937 novel The Citadel, Vijay Anand’s medical melodrama Tere Mere Sapne (1971) casts doctors as the ailing ones

Like several of the films I've written about in recent weeks, Vijay Anand’s Tere Mere Sapne (1971) had as its protagonist not a doctor, but the medical profession itself. And thus, perhaps necessarily, several doctors. The director's brother Dev Anand may have supplied the film's star quotient (as the rather unimaginatively named hero Dr Anand), but within the film's opening ten minutes we meet three other doctors. These are the characters that actually give us the lay of the land

First up is Dr Anand's medical batchmate, who delivers the first line of dialogue in the film: “Jise tum aadarsh kehte ho, usse main paagalpan kehta hoon [What you call principle, I call madness].” He suggests establishing a moneymaking practice in the city together, but the idealistic Anand mocks him for being a businessman instead of a doctor - and leaves for a remote mining village. The second doctor we meet is the ageing Dr Prasad (the marvellous Mahesh Kaul), employed by the mining company for 35 years, but now so ill that he hires younger doctors as ‘assistants’ to work in his stead - while his paranoid wife attempts to keep his illness a secret. The third doctor is also interesting: Dr Prasad’s other assistant, one Dr Jagannath Kothari, played by Vijay Anand himself. A gynaecologist with a fancy degree from London, Jagan now spends most of his waking hours drinking himself into a stupor.

What is common to these very different characters – and what eventually comes to drive our hero as well – is money, or the lack of it. The idealists are led by the old Dr Prasad, who has spent a lifetime in the service of poor mine workers, but without being able to realise his dream of improving the medical facilities in the area. The unruly-haired Dr Jagan, meanwhile, is only on his way to middle age, but already embittered by the bureaucratic and other restrictions that kept a young doctor from rising in a socialist India [these are complaints about the system that continued to appear in later films I’ve written about, like Bemisaal (1981) and Ek Doctor Ki Maut (1989)]. Our hero arrives in the village full of reformist zeal, initially even managing to rouse Jagan out of his alcoholic self-pity - but his honesty and hard work are of no avail either in his career, or when he finds himself up in court against a powerful rich man.

Thus the corruption of the system – and we’re talking 50 years ago – is blamed for Dr Anand’s moral decline. Which is how the film leads us back to the first doctor it showed us, the one who has no compunctions about using his qualifications as a way to mint money. In the second half, it is his network of fashionable city doctors catering to the rich and famous that an angry Dev Anand becomes part of. “Aaj tak mere aadarsh hi meri daulat thhe, lekin aaj se daulat hi mera aadarsh ban jayegi [Till today my principles were my wealth, from now on wealth will be my principle],” he announces to his increasingly distressed wife Nisha (Mumtaz).

There are many things that relegate this film to its time: the paternalistic take on mine workers as easily misguided/corrupted; the dismissal of the village midwife as necessarily knowing less about delivering a baby than any doctor – even one not trained in gynaecology; the portrayal of Dr Prasad as the generous, open-hearted idealist at the mercy of a small-minded, penny-pinching wife.

But despite these, within its melodramatic dialogue-baazi, something still rings true. And again, as in Anuradha, which I wrote about last week, it is only a doctor who can manage to get through to another doctor. This is true of the pre-climactic scenes, featuring Dr Anand’s restoration to the milk of human kindness. But Tere Mere Sapne’s most moving scene might be between the ailing Dr Prasad and Jagan, his black sheep doctor employee. “Does such a capable doctor not recognise his own symptoms?” asks Jagan. And when the old man says he does, but has decided to wait for death, Jagan’s response is: “Yeh ek mareez baat kar raha hai, doctor nahi. [This is a patient speaking, not a doctor.]” This exhorting of the doctor to a special status recurs through the film, as for instance when a famous actress (Hema Malini in a fetching part) tells Dev Anand to cheer up because “if a doctor speaks like this, what will the patient do?”

The doctor in Hindi cinema, it seems, must not only carry the god-like mantle of giver of life, but hide his own emotional travails. The mantle is a veil.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Oct 2020.

How to treat a doctor

My Mirror column: 

As part of the ongoing series about doctors in our cinema, a look at humanitarianism and humility in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's earliest film about a doctor: Anuradha (1960)

Leela Naidu and Balraj Sahni in a still from Anuradha (1960)

Almost exactly twenty years before Bemisal, which I wrote about last week, Hrishikesh Mukherjee directed another film about a doctor. Unlike Bemisal, Anuradha (1960) was about a good doctor, a great doctor, with a humanitarian vision to match his mastery of his profession. Balraj Sahni's Dr. Nirmal Chaudhury is the sort of medical man that Vinod Mehra's reformed avatar tries to become in Bemisal: deeply committed, cycling through his remote rural area, treating zamindar and poor alike – or rather, treating them differently, because he does not charge impoverished patients. Asked where the doctor is to be found, a local responds: “Doctor wahin hoga jahan gandagi hogi, jahan makkhiyan bhinhina rahi hongi, jahan 15-20 mareez baithe khaaen-khaaen kar rahe honge... [A doctor is found where there is dirt, flies buzzing around, and 15-20 patients sitting around coughing...]”

But Mukherjee's concerns in this film are more personal. Sahni's Nirmal is a lovely man who falls for Leela Naidu's Anuradha Roy, a well-off young woman who is not just beautiful but artistically talented, singing and choreographing her own performances (the film's delightful music is by the late Pt. Ravi Shankar). Having wooed and married her, however, Nirmal and she move to the village, and he becomes the classic workaholic husband: out of the house most of the time and preoccupied even when in. 

Sachin Bhowmick's script uses the figure of the distracted doctor to indicate a man who always has bigger things on his mind. Small details suggest this from the start: even when Nirmal is courting Anuradha, he almost misses the start of her show. Where could he be, wonders Anuradha's brother. “Doctors are always late,” says the woman he's with. That line presages what is to come: Leela Naidu's disappointed face as her husband fails to pay her the slightest bit of attention, or even keep his word about the rare promise of time together.

Nirmal is no fool. His passion for medical science apart, he has enough emotional intelligence to notice other men's connection or disconnection from their wives – but apparently not his own. Nirmal's patients include one man who is mocked because he acts out his wife's every illness, his body mimicking the symptoms that his mind so empathises with. (The man who does the mocking is the bus conductor for whom ignoring his wife is mardaangi: even if she throws the kitchen tongs at him.) Another patient never notices that his wife is ill until it is too late, and Nirmal berates him:“If you can't take care of her, why marry?”. But his blindness to his wife's malady is an unspoken analogy for Nirmal's own obliviousness to what ails Anuradha.

What, in fact, does ail Anuradha? Naidu, never much of an actress, with her stilted Hindi delivery, relies on her expressive eyes to portray the profound emptiness of the woman who has lost her music and with it, her identity -- gaining a marriage that offers her none of the companionship it seemed to promise. Her tiredness in the scene in which Sahni returns hours later than promised and goes straight to his home laboratory, intending to spend the rest of the night looking for a cure for a local water-borne infection, presages another put-upon wife's (Shabana Azmi) sorrow and bafflement and frustration with her preoccupied doctor husband (Pankaj Kapur) in Tapan Sinha's Ek Doctor Ki Maut (1990).

The problem, both films seem to suggest, isn't so much the drudgery, which might have been the same for any other woman in any other comparable household. It is the exhaustion that comes from cooking and cleaning and taking care of a man who is entirely oblivious to your presence – and yet expects everything to be in perfect order, so that he can carry out his duties without a hitch. The fact that these duties happen to be to humanity at large helps hide what is equally true – that they serve the doctors' own sense of self. That these blissfully patriarchal husbands happen to be good doctors, I'd argue, is meant to underline their indomitable egos, the unshakeable sense of higher purpose that tars their wives' completely legitimate domestic desires as petty and ungrateful and limited.

These men may start by loving a talented woman as an equal, but the woman inevitably finds herself reduced to being a doctor's wife. Even at the very end of Anuradha, when Mukherjee inserts a nascent women's rights speech -- about the good doctor's sadhana and tapasya being nothing compared to the devotion and penance of “our wives, our mothers, our daughters” -- that speech must come from a senior doctor (Nasir Husain). In Bemisal two decades later, Vinod Mehra's cockily unethical gynaecologist learns his lesson only from his doctor best friend (Amitabh Bachchan). Apparently, it needs a doctor to teach another doctor anything – especially humility.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 Oct 2020.

The Doctor as Anti-Hero

My Mirror column (this is the fourth piece in my series on doctors in our films):

Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Bemisal (1982) can be viewed as a subtle, affecting love triangle, but it is also a rare Indian film about medical malpractice -- and the possibility of atonement.

Bemisal opens with a man in a kurta-pajama cycling between villages, with only a sola topi to protect him from the sun. From the little box affixed to his cycle, one wonders if he is a postman, but the mystery is solved soon: he is a doctor. “The only doctor within a forty mile radius,” as we learn when he gets home for a minute, only to be called away again before he can lunch with his wife.

This vision of the doctor as he should be, or at least could be – a much-needed saviour of the Indian poor – is one of the two faces of the medical profession in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's 1982 film. And ostensibly Vinod Mehra, as Dr. Prashant Chaturvedi, plays both of them.

A Hindi adaptation of the Bengali film Ami Se O Shakha, Bemisal relocates the writer Ashutosh Mukhopadhyay's original tale of friendship and sacrifice in the world of modern-day medical practice – and malpractice. From its opening rural scenes, the film moves swiftly into flashback -- and into what was still recognizable Hindi movie terrain in 1980s: a holiday in Kashmir. It is there, on a promontory looking down at the Dal Lake, that a much younger Prashant and his friend Sudhir Rai (Amitabh Bachchan), both recent medical graduates from Bombay, first encounter a visiting literature professor (AK Hangal) and his daughter, Kavita. Prashant, the son of a magistrate, has his path cut out for him and follows it: he becomes a doctor, marries Kavita (Rakhee), and goes abroad for higher studies in gynaecology. Meanwhile his friend Sudhir, rescued from a life of juvenile crime by Prashant's father, also becomes a doctor, but chooses to stay in India and work in a regular hospital as a child specialist.

The two remain friends despite these varying choices. But the Prashant who returns from the USA is a very different man from the one who left. “Hamaare profession mein aage badhne ke liye raasta seedha nahi hai, tedha hai [The way to get ahead in our profession isn't straight, it's crooked],” he announces to Sudhir and Kavita. “I came back with such a big degree, did I get a job, have I been able to establish my own practice? No, because in our country it is much easier to go from ten lakhs to eleven lakhs than from ten rupees to eleven rupees.” Bemisal is not one of Hrishikesh Mukherjee's finest films, but what he captures here is the sense of entitlement that had already become the tenor of conversation among educated young Indians in the late 1970s and 80s, a growing frustration with bureaucratic hurdles, a feeling that the country owed them – rather than they it. “My father wanted to see me become a big doctor, and I will fulfil his dream -- by hook or by crook,” says Prashant without the slightest irony. He proceeds, again without irony, to sell his father's house to buy a new private nursing home, which starts to rake in money.

This raging financial success, it turns out, isn't sanguine. What Prashant passes off to his wife as his popularity (“teen maheene se advance bookings”) turns out to be a matter of accepting black money and cooking the books. Second, it is the start of the era of Caesarian deliveries and Prashant is shown deliberately encouraging them, even for what could have been regular births -- each operation and hospital stay bringing in additional moolah. (The film also makes a joke of the new fetish: Deven Verma's character, while getting engaged, buttonholes a gynaecologist to book an advance Caesarian delivery for his wife-to-be.) More complicated is the nursing home's role as a site of expensive, often illegal, abortions: here Mukherjee and his screenwriter Sachin Bhowmick falter. The film mixes up what it considers the morally unethical practice of secret abortions for “the unwed daughters of the rich” with the medically unethical – and dangerous -- business of conducting MTPs past the advisable date, for an under-the-table fee.

A case of the latter sort finally leads to the death on the operating table at Prashant's hands – though we never see the young woman. What we are given instead is the agitated figure of Aruna Irani, a receptionist at the nursing home who reports the death because she is still traumatised by a long-ago unplanned pregnancy and unwanted abortion carried out on the instructions of her callous playboy lover.

I said at the start of this column that Vinod Mehra plays both figures: the doctor as hero, and the doctor as antihero. But this is a Hrishikesh Mukherjee film, so of course we also have a second hero – the film's real conscience, Amitabh Bachchan's Dr. Sudhir Rai. A character with greater spine than the poetry-spouting but easily-swayed Prashant, Sudhir seems on the surface to be a standard-issue mainstream Hindi film protagonist: a doctor who sacrifices his medical practice and his quasi-radical views about the class divide to friendship, the personal weighing in over the political.

But then you think about what Sudhir achieves by going to prison in Prashant's stead – bringing a doctor back from the brink of criminality and making him the model for another possible life, lived in an India “where our rotten civilization has not yet reached”. It may be a message quietly delivered, but it seems to me that Hrishikesh Mukherjee did leave doctors with the rather simple question that Amitabh Bachchan asks Vinod Mehra early in the film: “Ek baat bataa, kya tarakki karne ka yahi tareeka hai? [Tell me something, is this the only way to progress?]”

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Oct 2020.

Out of syllabus

My Mirror column, the second in a series on films about doctors:

Ek Doctor Ki Maut's questions about the life of science seem even more urgent three decades later, in the year of the coronavirus

 

The sharpest revelation in Ek Doctor Ki Maut comes sheathed in a conversation that's almost funny. A reputed Kolkata paper has just published the news that the film's titular protagonist, Dr Dipankar Roy (Pankaj Kapur), has created a vaccine for leprosy. The report also mentions that one of the interesting possible side-effects of the new vaccine might be to reverse female sterility. The news causes a stir: Dr Arijit (Vijayendra Ghatge), who is Dipankar's classmate and childhood friend, receives a visit from a senior gynaecologist called Dr Ramanand (Vasant Choudhury). Settling into a chair in Dr Arijit's chamber, Dr Ramanand launches into a tirade against what he considers Dr Dipankar's audacious bluff. How can an ordinary MBBS, a doctor in a government hospital with no private practice or fancy degree – like Ramanand or Arijit – have invented a world-altering vaccine? But Ramanand's suspicions about Dipankar reach their crescendo when he turns to Arijit, volume dropping slightly to convey his absolute horror: “Jaante ho, woh gaana gaata hai?”

An unperturbed Arijit responds first with humour: “Yes, and with a harmonium, too!” But when Ramanand continues to look appalled, he shifts tack, listing great scientists with artistic hobbies: Einstein played the violin, Satyen Bose the esraj, while Dr Homi Bhabha painted. Ramanand is far from convinced. He displays shock that Arijit would equate Dipankar with such certified geniuses – and in the film, that's where the conversation ends.

But the exchange seems to me to encapsulate a great deal about the crisis of education in India, a malaise inextricably entwined with the social and political mess we find ourselves in, 30 years after. What do I mean? Let me draw out the connections. Dr Ramanand, the man who decides to bring Dipankar down, is a reputed gynaecologist, which might lead one to believe he is a man of science. At the very least, as a medical expert, one might expect him to have a professional investment in health. But his reaction to a vaccine that might save millions is not enthusiasm, or even a sceptical intellectual engagement. Rather than the marvellous possibility of medical advancement, he responds only to the source of that advancement. And in his mind, Dipankar ticks none of the boxes by which our system measures achievement: exams, marks, degrees – all ways to fetch a higher price in a marketplace of status.

Ramanand's scorn for Dipankar's musicality further establishes the hierarchical nature of this social-educational marketplace. Sinha doesn't spell it out, but doctors, engineers and now MBAs see themselves tied for top spot in a modern Indian educational caste system – with the arts at the bottom. A doctor interested in music is either miscegenation or proof that he isn't really deserving of his place at the top.

In this stultifying celebration of mediocrity, there is no space for genuine questioning. The film suggests two possible directions in which such an instrumental system can push a seeker of knowledge. He might find his way out of the morass early: so where Arijit set his mind to achieving a first class, Dipankar barely passed. “Kehta thha, syllabus ki kitaabon mein kya rakha hai yaar? Syllabus ke baahar ki duniya hi toh anjaani hai, aur anjaani cheezein hi toh interesting hoti hain.” But too questioning a seeker might also be pushed to the margins, treated not just with suspicion but disbelief, humiliated by those the status quo serves. So when the research Dipankar has conducted in his barebones home-made lab attracts international attention, his health ministry boss does all he can to scotch it, from actively stymying foreign inquiries to transferring Dipankar to a remote rural area.

Pankaj Kapur brings to his turn as Dipankar a vivid passion for his work, both its intellectual joys and its grand scope for social improvement. It's worth noting that the director, cinematic giant Tapan Sinha, studied physics at Patna University and later earned an MSc from Rajabazar Science College, Calcutta, while his son Anindya Sinha is a primatologist at NIAS in Bengaluru, with degrees in botany and cytogenetics. The film features a science-loving journalist called Amulya (a very young Irrfan Khan), who has a PhD but realises he isn't cut out for research and can better serve science by bringing it to public notice – a proxy for the filmmaker? Amulya's journalism, however, cuts both ways, bringing Dipankar acclaim, but also accusations of sensationalism – and already, in 1990, Sinha shows us an editor unwilling to go against the government because “Akhbaar vigyapan pe chaltein hai, vaigyaanik pe nahi”.

Although globalisation and the internet have increased access to information, doing science in India today is possibly more, not less, impeded by political pressures. Ek Doctor Ki Maut remains a memorable film about the scientific life, and it's powerfully resonant in 2020. In one memorable scene, Dipankar tells his long-suffering supportive wife Seema (Shabana Azmi) that the stars often seem to him to berate humans, wasting our time fighting each other on our little planet. “Insaan hone ka itna ghuroor, itna ghamand. Insaan ka dimaag, insaan ki buddhi kitna kucch jaanti hai hamaare baare mein?” In these last 30 years, humans have only to have grown in our hubris, our attempts to harness nature creating forms of resistance we can barely understand.

As we grapple with a new virus, can we start to imagine a science whose questions serve the universe, rather than  instrumental answers that supppsedly serve the human race? Our current goals may just cut the planet short.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 Sep 2020.

The medical missionary

My Mirror column, the first in a series on films about doctors:

V Shantaram’s 1946 film about the legendary Dr Dwarkanath Kotnis sheds an odd light on the contemporary India-China moment and our pandemic year

2020 has been a year of medical heroism. It might be a good time to remember a heroic doctor from a very different period in the history of India and the world: Dr Dwarkanath Kotnis, whose valiant medical service in Communist China from 1938 to 1942 is still enshrined in that country's public memory. On August 28, even as Chinese and Indian soldiers faced off in a border conflict that remains far from being resolved, it was reported that a statue of Dr Kotnis was to be unveiled outside a medical school in North China named after him: the Shijiazhuang Ke Dihua Medical Science Secondary Specialised School. (‘Ke Dihua’ is Kotnis’s Chinese name.)

Kotnis is not often remembered in contemporary India, but barely four years after his death, his life and work were made the subject of a film by the great Indian director V Shantaram. Free on YouTube as well as available to stream on one subscription-based platform for world cinema, Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani makes for interesting viewing for many reasons.

Released in 1946, a year before independence, Shantaram’s film commemorates Kotnis's as the ideal nationalist life: a life led – and lost – in the service of the nation. As one of the rousing patriotic songs from the film’s rather wonderful lilting soundtrack put it: “Jaan dene ka hi naam hai zindagi (Giving up your life is what living is really about)”. A film called The Immortal Tale of Dr Kotnis was clearly not shying away from either myth-making or propaganda.

What is fascinating to me, though, is that Kotnis’s nationalism is presented as what leads the youthful doctor to another country, where he helped their war effort. Heeding a Congress leader’s call for Indians to come to China’s aid during the Second Sino-Japanese War (Mao Zedong had apparently made such a request of Jawaharlal Nehru), the young graduate from Mumbai’s Seth GS Medical College decided to join a five-member medical mission to China in 1938. Watching Shantaram’s film in 2020, it is impossible not to be struck by the way Indian nationalism in the 1940s could be so naturally folded into an internationalist milieu of cooperation between what were then two poor Asian countries in a still-colonised world. (Some villains do exist: fittingly for a post-Second World War Indian film, it’s the Japanese, who are called ‘shaitan’ but shown as buffoons, in the almost classic tradition of the war movie.)

Scripted by the great KA Abbas, Dr Kotnis opens with the handsome young doctor (played by Shantaram himself) returning from Mumbai to announce to his shocked parents that he has just pledged to serve in China. His ageing father, caught off-guard while proudly displaying the clinic he’d had made for young Dwarka in their hometown of Solapur, has a teary turnaround. It’s a remarkable propagandist scene, where Shantaram and Abbas take the figure of the obedient son and finesse the resonant Indian idea of filial duty into duty to the motherland. The sacrifice is dual, because Dwarka’s father too must give up his ‘budhaape ki laathi’. The Hindi phrase about children as the support of one’s old age is propped up by an actual laathi that Dwarka presents to his father – which falls symbolically from the old man’s hand as his son boards the ship to China. The dramatic foreboding has a reason: the father will die without seeing his son again, and Dwarka will never return.

Shantaram cast himself as Kotnis, and the actress Jayashree – who had become his second wife in 1941 – as Kotnis’s assistant Qing Lan (pronounced Ching Lan), whom he married and had a son with. The relationship between them is tenderly depicted, though it doffs its hat quite obviously to both nationalist propaganda and Hindi film romance. For instance, Qing Lan first meets the good doctor disguised as a boy, and there must be some singing and dancing before love can be declared. But it is striking for a mainstream Indian film in the 1940s to have a foreign, Chinese, heroine, who wears trousers and a shirt all through (except a sweetly comic interlude when she attempts to wear a sari during their wedding) and is as deeply devoted to her work as her husband is to his. It helps that Vasant Desai’s lively, memorable soundtrack is so superbly integrated into the narrative: I loved Jayashree’s ‘Main hoon nanhi nayi dulhan’, though it is clearly not a traditional song sung by Chinese brides, and one of the film’s enduring images for me is the sight of the good doctor watching lovingly as his pregnant Chinese wife sings a rousing song to lead the Red Army to its next destination: “Ghulam nahi tu, josh mein aa / Yeh desh hai tere, hosh mein aa”.

The Chinese-Indian relationship and the internationalist iteration of patriotism apart, the film is remarkable for the way that the medical profession is celebrated. Dr Kotnis’s heroism is no less integral to the national war effort than the Red Army general whose camp he joins – he is captured by the Japanese, endangers his own life to create a vaccine for a plague that breaks out among the Chinese population, and succumbs to epilepsy, but after having saved the general from certain death of his bullet wounds. An internationalist nationalism that talks about saving lives, rather than merely laying down one’s own or killing one's enemies: that's propaganda almost worth having.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Sep 2020

Isolated incidents

My Mirror column (3rd May 2020):

Placebo takes a personal deep dive into one of India's premier medical colleges and comes up with a disturbing, affecting vision of where we’re headed.

In 2011, a young filmmaker made a visit to his younger brother Sahil, who was studying to be a doctor at India’s premier medical college, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi. It was the time of the annual college festival, Pulse, and as happens during ‘fest’ season, enthusiasms and emotions were running high. Before the night was over, Sahil had been admitted to hospital, with his right arm so badly damaged that he would not be able to return to the hostel for three months. The twist, though, is what made the tale possible: Abhay, the filmmaker brother, didn’t go home with Sahil. He decided to stay on his brother’s hostel instead, gradually inserting himself in – and his handycam is – into life on the AIIMS campus. And so began the dark, dark cinematic ride that is Placebo.

Free to stream on YouTube, Placebo is a strange and vivid film, combining special effects, hand-drawn black and white animation, found footage and still photographs with Abhay Kumar's footage. The 96 minutes that we finally see on screen apparently draws on 800 hours of footage, and the filmmaker edited 80 different versions before finalising this one. That process sounds terrifying. The film is a little less so – but not by much.

Placebo is a film about many aspects of the Indian present seen through a sharply angled lens: education, privilege, individualism, community, institutional failure and our failures as a society. Kumar starts by pointing to the competition that these students have dealt with to reach these peeling hostel buildings. According to a statistic cited in the film, MIT has an admittance rate of 9 per cent, and Harvard (the university, I'm assuming, not the medical school) has one of 7 per cent. The rate for AIIMS’s is 0.1 per cent.

Kumar’s voiceover repeatedly emphasises the 'brightness' of these students, and they mirror his framing, telling stories that reveal their sense of achievement in having, as we say in North Indian slang, “cracked” the medical entrance. But watching these nerdy young men talk about girls or play music or collapse in laughter after a doobie or a round of bhang pakoras consumed appropriately on Mahashivratri, what one is struck by is precisely how ordinary their desires are. They seem like any other 23-year-olds, with the same fears and desires and anxieties as young men everywhere – just bearing a heavier weight of academic/professional expectation, without the emotional or therapeutic support structure needed to deal with the pressure. Those who break, the film shows, are not helped to mend themselves. The cracks are papered over, and the fragments swept under a carpet.

All that the Indian educational system seems to have given these young men is the heady sensation of entering an elite. The path from AIIMS could take them on to a well-paying career as a doctor, or a powerful position in the Indian civil services, or to more specialised medical research in India, but more desirably in the USA. There is ambition aplenty – but even among the four or five students that Placebo keeps in fairly tight focus, there is no sense of a vocation.

There's Sethi, a fair North Indian chikna hero type who says his greatest desire is to “look good naked” – “like the guy in American Beauty”. He categorises the species called girls into different colours: “There are orange girls, there are green girls”, and the one who got away, “she was so white”. Sethi wants to be confident enough to ask out girls in America. Getting to America is his second ambition after getting to AIIMS.

There's the tall, bespectacled, pudgy-faced Saumya Chopra, who begins his AIIMS life terrified of ragging but becomes the senior who's suspended for two months in 2008 after a Supreme Court judgement makes the authorities crack down on ragging incidents. There's a tangent here that the film doesn't follow, about how our educational culture is so toxic and so isolating that ragging was the only way to forge intergenerational connections.

There's K, the most meditative of the lot, whose self-reflection does not in fact help him deal with his inner demons. “The respect I have for the word doctor is far more than the respect I have for me as a doctor,” K tells Abhay.

Ostensibly at the other end of that spectrum is someone like Saumya, who's only answer to why he wants to be a doctor is “My parents want me to be a doctor.” “What do you want?” asks the filmmaker. “Whatever my parents want,” comes Saumya's reply. “Our life is a debt to our parents... You can't pay it back ever but one must try at least.”

Saumya's words reminded me of another young Indian captured on camera in a documentary: a Durga Vahini leader-in-the-making called Prachi Trivedi, in Nisha Pahuja's superb 2014 film The World Before Her, who says she would do whatever her father wanted, because she was eternally grateful to him for not having aborted her as a female foetus.

This idea that our earthly existence is essentially beholden to our parents feels chilling to me, and will do to many who see human beings as free-standing individuals. Yet the flip side of that individuation is also a chilling aspect of Placebo, and particularly resonant in these solitary, socially distanced times. As K says to the filmmaker: “Even though we have been talking for so many months, you and me, we're isolated, that is a fact.”

It is a bleak vision of humanity, but perhaps also a self-fulfilling one.

It is a bleak vision of humanity, but also a self-fulfilling

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/isolated-incidents/articleshow/75513645.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

It is a bleak vision of humanity, but also a self-fulfilling

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/isolated-incidents/articleshow/75513645.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 May 2020. You can watch the film for free, here.

Art stops at nothing

A short feature for India Today magazine.

Displaying work created during the lockdown, a virtual initiative proves the pandemic won’t stymie art.

As the weeks of India’s coronavirus lockdown dragged into months, many of those privileged enough to isolate started to chafe at the bit. But not artists. Almost all those involved in Art Alive Gallery’s #ArtForHope initiative confess that their working lives are less disrupted than most people’s. Virus or no virus, visual artists are so used to days spent in splendid isolation that they exhibit few signs of cabin fever.

Many of the senior names, Krishen Khanna (b. 1925), Maite Delteil (b. 1933), Sakti Burman (b. 1935), Gopi Gajwani (b. 1938) and Jogen Chowdhury (b.1939), had already retreated from the hubbub of gallery openings and art fairs. They are devoting themselves to work with enviable focus and often childlike enthusiasm. Gajwani, for instance, has been drawing after many years, describing these solitary times with impish humour. In one of his drawings, a man at his window ignores a curious crow and an expectant dog. In another, a man has tied himself into a knot: a large ball of thread that rolls on even as he tries to unravel it. In a third, a painter baulks at the sight of his own easel, like it is a mirror.

Others, too, speak of the lockdown as a time of greater reflection. “As artists, we like our solitude,” painter Jayasri Burman says on the phone. “Yes, first I was confused, I was crying. What is this coronavirus? What will happen? Artistically, I responded as I had during the tsunami and 9/11. I started making abstract drawings. They’re like my private diary. I might show that work some day, but not now.” Burman, who draws on the Indian epics and myths for her jewel-like canvases filled with dreamy women, says she settled down when the Navaratras began. “I painted Durga, who is important to me. Then I came back to my Dharitri, the universe,” she says. Like her goddesses who often shelter other creatures even as they are themselves sheltered, by the multi-headed Shesh Nag, trees filled with birds, or cornucopias of lotuses, her current work is a world map on a sea of blue, protected by mandala-like rings of ducks and fish. “Nature is now protesting. And she decides how she will clean up,” Burman says. “All we can do is maintain harmony and try to improve. Humans need to learn that you cannot take any panga with nature.”

Several artists have responded to the unseeable threat by envisioning the virus. Kolkata-based Chandra Bhattacharya, who speaks of a constant “uneasy feeling” during these months, offers up the image of a man emerging from a tunnel, a flaming blue torch in his hand, the virus blooming, or being conquered?

Debasish Mukherjee’s series of inky blobs with ragged edges seem to suggest the virus is embodied in other human beings: now faceless, now utterly real.

Jogen Chowdhury extends his distinctive visual vocabulary of men and beasts to create drawings in which the human figure cowers in the face of a demonic presence that is all claws and tongues.

But in ‘Corona Vs Man-Man Vs Corona I’, the creature who holds up the virus for examination has turned into a beast himself, ridges running down his back.

US-based Tara Sabharwal, who is recovering from (untested) pneumonia, has been doing ink drawings of “menacingly beautiful cellular creatures in armour, with jelly-like frightened interiors”.

“The way to keep hope alive is to actually feel this moment... It is so heavy, it gets one down. But to run away from it would be to not be able to go to the next step,” says Sabharwal.

SIDEBAR: "THIS IS NOT A WAR"
 

Krishen Khanna is 95 and still paints daily. “It’s like a demon inside me that wants it,” he says on the phone. “I have been through more than one migration, seen how people are forced to live in new situations. And this is not new, pushing people around: think Tughlaq. But this is probably the worst.”

Born in Faisalabad in what is now Pakistani Punjab, Khanna was a schoolboy in England during World War II and his vivid memories of war and Partition offer sobering comparison and perspective.

“The people in charge are still talking of winning the “battle” against coronavirus. As if it is a war. But it is not. This is our overreach. We are the sole generators of this. There is a need for re-examination of the human spirit.”

Published in India Today magazine, 6 June 2020.

The Krishen Khanna sidebar appeared in the same spread, in print. 

Social maladies

My Mirror column:

Two films about contagious infections, in the starkly different milieus of the USA and Kerala, point to the cracks in which a virus can really make a home.

 
Films about pandemics have catapulted to unprecedented fame in the last two months, as people across the globe seek out fictional material that resonates in the age of Covid-19. Two of the better films available to stream online in India are Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 medical thriller Contagion, where a highly infectious fictional new virus makes its way from Hong Kong to the USA, and Aashiq Abu’s 2019 Malayalam film Virus, which depicts how the state of Kerala dealt with the outbreak of the Nipah virus in 2018.

In both films, one is constantly struck by the use of terms that most of us are only beginning to learn – “incubation period”, “treatment protocol”, “index patient”. Both films deal with zoonotic viruses that have entered the human body from animals, and the fear factor derives from the fact that the scientific situation we are dealing with is not just new, but unknown – and therefore extremely difficult to predict. In an early scene in Contagion, the scientist working on a vaccine seems to almost marvel at the novel virus. “It's still changing," she tells the head of the Centre for Disease Control, Dr Ellis Cheever. "It's figuring us out faster than we’re figuring it out.”

“It doesn’t have anything else to do,” says Dr Cheever, looking unimpressed.

It’s a droll little moment in a relentlessly grim film, but you barely register the comment as dry humour because you’re too busy registering it as fact. Contagion makes it very clear that human beings are on the back foot here. Unlike the virus, we have a great deal to do if we’re to protect the species from the deathly microscopic foe – and from ourselves.

For there are two seemingly contradictory facts about human beings that both Virus and Contagion make visible. First, that the virus piggybacks on the existence of community: the fact that human beings live with each other, and don't seem to know quite how to do without. Second, that human beings are quick to suspect each other, and the way the virus can really conquer is if our leaders choose to divide and rule.

Contagion opens with an off-screen cough that may or may not have had the same chilling effect in 2011 that it does now. In 2020, we are more than primed to watch the film’s opening sequence of people going about their closely proximate urban lives as a series of dangerous acts – pressing elevator buttons in public places, clutching the same steel pillar on the metro that a thousand other hands have clutched, sitting next to each other on planes, in stations, at bar counters, in hotel casinos. Kate Winslet, playing an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer called Dr Mears, has the job of contact tracing – finding out who the first American casualty, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), may have met and infected in the days before her death, and thus hoping to prevent the further spread of the virus.

Virus unfolds in a less transnational context, but contact tracing is very much at the centre of the narrative. A medical volunteer called Annu (Parvathy) conducts a painstaking investigation, following up with patients and their friends and family members to try and establish the links between seemingly unconnected cases. She is aided in her task by Kerala’s fairly well-organised administration – the fact that there are tickets given out at government hospital, for instance – and by increasingly ubiquitous technology – the presence of time-stamps on mobile phone photos, for instance. But what is really striking about the film’s depiction of the process is not just Parvathy’s sharp instincts, but her sensitivity.

In fact, sensitivity is what distinguishes the actions of almost all those who populate Aashiq Abu’s film: doctors and nurses most of all, but drivers and attendants, and because this is Kerala, even ministers and bureaucrats.

If Contagion maps all the ways in which an infectious disease can bring out our worst selves as a society – people profiteering off potential fake cures, panicked hoarding of goods that creates grocery store shortages, stampedes and food riots – Virus suggests that it is also possible to combat our fears. The mother of a young man who has died is surprised that Annu is willing to have tea in her house. The ration delivery for her place is now dropped off on the road, with the driver honking before leaving. When a crematorium is chosen for the last rites of Nipah patients, villagers in the vicinity block the road in fear. But a set of volunteers is found to conduct the rites elsewhere. In a revealing conversation, the district magistrate says that enforcing the cremation through the use of police force would have been the easiest thing to do – but the point is to try and do it without. Even the debate about whether it is unsafe to bury the bodies of virus-affected patients is conducted without rancour or religious fervour, and resolved with the scientifically approved solution of deep burial.

As an ill-prepared India waits for whatever is to come in the next few weeks and months, we have a socio-political climate that tragically encourages the well-off to turn away from the poor, while turning Muslims into scapegoats by testing the participants of one ill-advised religious gathering rather than all those that have taken place. Watching Virus makes it clear that we will sink or swim based on our ability to allay each others' fears and suspicions, not stoke them.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 April 2020

Under the influence

My Mirror column:

The under-watched classic Bigger Than Life turns family drama into almost-horror, with prescient warnings against modern medicine and delusional masculinity

 
The first 20 minutes of Bigger Than Life seem to paint a picture of the perfect family man, who’s also a hard-working, pleasant colleague. A schoolteacher in suburban 1950s America, Ed Avery (James Mason in a career-defining performance) is the nice guy you ask to help push your stalled car, the guy who lets the kid in detention go if he can name one Great Lake out of the five, the guy who sprints on to the last bus after school to work a second job at a garage.

But those first 20 minutes also show us that Ed is also the sort of guy who thinks he can handle everything, and do so alone: he hasn’t told his wife about the garage job because she’ll think it’s beneath him, nor mentioned the pains he’s had for six months because he thinks they’re nothing. So it doesn’t seem surprising that when he’s forced to go to hospital after a blackout, his first instinct is to instruct his little son Richie to be “the man around here” and “take care of your mother”.

On the surface, Nicholas Ray’s film is about the dangerous mental side effects of a miracle drug for the body. Ed is diagnosed with a rare inflammation of the arteries, and treated successfully with cortisone – until he starts to take it in excess. The mood swings, paranoia and manic depression that result only reinforce his impaired judgement, making him take still more pills. Screenwriters Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum based the script on an article called ‘Ten Feet Tall’ by Berton Roueché, medical staff writer for The New Yorker, about a real schoolteacher’s experience with high-dosage cortisone. And though this is 1950s America, and patient and doctor are well-acquainted, even friendly, the film clearly indicates how alienating hospitalisation is: the non-stop tests, the solitary confinement, the ghostliness of barium meal, the unrecognisable medical jargon in which you hear your own body described.

But Ray, a director more famous for films such as Rebel Without a Cause and In a Lonely Place, was a man both ahead of his time and able to see into the depths of it. Released in 1956, when much of America was watching the era-defining sitcom Father Knows Best, Bigger Than Life revealed the frightening cracks in that idyllic ’50s family picture. At one level, Ed Avery’s symptoms are those of a mentally ill man, but he can certainly also be viewed as a barely-exaggerated version of the ordinary neighbourhood patriarch, the father who thinks he knows best even when he clearly doesn’t. This is the man insecure about being a “male schoolmarm”, who also has delusions of grandeur about schooling the nation. He insults his wife (“What a shame I couldn’t have married... my intellectual equal!”) and pushes his child beyond breaking point in the name of prepping him for the real world (“If you let it at ‘good enough’ right now, that’s the way you’ll be later on.”).

The film is also a powerful indictment of the pressures of life in a consumerist era, for a man trying to give himself and his family a good life on a single schoolteacher’s salary. The Averys’ house is filled with posters of faraway European holiday destinations, and there are wry, hopeful conversations about vacations and “getting away from it all” – while the camera often focuses on James Mason’s watch, and time and lateness is a frequent topic. The tight budgeting that makes Ed work a secret second job has as its flip side the grandiose display he indulges in when under the influence of the cortisone: hustling his wife into a fancy designer store, being rude to the saleswomen, and insisting on buying her two expensive dresses with a cheque that eventually bounces.

The more unbalanced Ed gets, the more he is convinced that he is the only smart person around. The milkman’s jangling of a bell seems to him deliberately designed to annoy him “because I work with my mind”, the other drivers on the street irritate him, his son and wife disappoint him, and the children he teaches for a living seem to him idiots. “We’re breeding a race of moral midgets,” he declares at a PTA meeting, eliciting mostly gasps of disbelief – but also a couple of votes for future school principal.

Watching Bigger Than Life in 2020, the self-aggrandising family man who thinks the country needs to do away with “all this hogwash about self-expression, permissiveness and emotional security” and focus on inculcating “a sense of duty” feels terrifyingly familiar. He might be your neighbour, your uncle, your father or your boss. And his condition is getting worse, under the influence of a collective drug called nationalism, being doled out for free at a counter near you.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 February 2020.

The care of others

My Mirror column:

Two recent documentaries – Everywhere We Are from Germany and About Love from India – provide thoughtful multiple perspectives on dealing with the illness of a loved one.

Midway through the 2017 German documentary Everywhere We Are, there occurs a totally ordinary conversation between a pair of siblings. “Have you finished eating or do you still want a little bit?” the sister asks. “Still a little bit,” the brother responds. “OK,” she says. Then: “Should I put something behind your neck?” “Come on!” he says, sounding exasperated. The camera moves from her hesitant, concerned face to his almost immobile one. He is sitting up in bed, a small towel covering his bald head. We see the sister's face again as she quickly backs up: “Sorry, it’s too much again.” Sorry, she mutters almost to herself as she pets the family dog, sorry. But as her brother keeps sitting there with a half-eaten meal in front of him, she asks if he is tired, and whether she should take his plate. There is no response. “Yes, no, or maybe?” she persists. “No!” he yells, with a gesture of irritation. “OK,” she says finally. “I’ll leave you alone then.”

In Veronika Kaserer’s quietly observational film, the ordinariness of this scene is bookended by discussions of illness and impending death that are far from ordinary – just before this, for instance, we have seen the sister (Sonja) ask the brother (Heiko) whether there’s anything specific he wants said at his funeral. Dance instructor Heiko Lekutat, 29, has a particularly persistent cancer that forced him to amputate a leg early on, and now threatens to kill him any day. Sonja, his only sister, and their parents Jurgen and Karin, have brought him back from the hospital, “home to die”.

Heiko has fought his disease with fortitude for years: getting an artificial leg, continuing with his dance project. Even at this last stage, he and everyone around him try to keep their spirits up. There are conversations about his good appetite, laughter with visiting friends, and gently wry humour: in one domestic moment, as Heiko is wheeled past the dinner table, he stops at his father’s place and samples a bit from his plate, calling it “a quick stopover”.

Kaserer’s film, which was awarded the Compass-Perspektive-Award 2018 for best film at last year’s Berlinale, runs the risk of being seen as intrusive or exploitative because it focuses on the most painful aspect of life – death. There are not too many close-ups and the film contains more thoughtful conversations than teary ones: this is, after all, a middle class German milieu. But by cutting back and forth between the last days of Heiko’s life and the time soon after his death, Kaserer offers an intimate sense of what it’s like to deal with the loss of a loved one.

There is much to be learnt from the very different ways in which different people respond. The father, Jurgen, who is closest to Heiko, is mostly intent on keeping hope alive and helping Heiko fight: the only time he breaks down on camera is when talking about how apart from the unfairness of such a young person having to die, what he feels “is simply egoistic – that I will miss him so much”. The mother, Karin, is also deeply sad, but her way of strengthening her son involves trying to prepare him for the hereafter. She wants to tell him of her own near-death experience, when she was briefly in a coma. Sonja, the sister, gets her arm tattooed in Heiko’s handwriting, commemorating their siblinghood, and grapples constantly with wanting to help her brother at every turn – while coming up against the fact that illness does not prevent him from wanting his own space. “It is not a good sign if he lets me touch him.”

Heiko is prickly, but he’s far from being a rude patient, at least on camera. But anyone who’s ever taken care of a family member knows that familiarity, certainly in this context, breeds a great deal of contempt. Another recent personal documentary, Archana Phadke’s wonderful About Love, which won the New Talent award at the Sheffield Doc festival in June 2019 before playing at festivals from Mumbai to Dharamshala to Goyang, South Korea, takes us deep into the dynamics of Phadke’s own family. Her crabby octogenarian grandfather is a great “character”, especially on film. But even as you laugh out loud at his unconcerned swearing and almost comic berating of his wife, you remain powerfully aware of what it takes for Phadke’s almost equally aged grandmother to take care of him. Year upon year, feeding and bathing and helping him sleep, the intimate caregiver who enforces the discipline he needs to carry on living receives only abuse in return.

Closeness to someone who is suffering is a strange thing, producing unexpected forms of intimacy and sometimes necessary forms of distance. Phadke’s grandmother has resigned herself to her duties in a marital domestic milieu from which escape is not even imaginable. Sonja’s desire for greater closeness to her dying brother is experienced by him as excessive, making her insecure. Self-preservation is needed in both these cases.

Meanwhile a close friend of Heiko’s says he feels his energies dip when Heiko’s do, and rise when Heiko is feeling better. A possibly Buddhist mentor tells him that though he should not burden Heiko with his own experience, this level of empathy with someone can be seen as a gift. It may not be, he adds, “a gift from a secular perspective”. No modern rational belief system embraces the idea of experiencing pain willingly, not even the imagined pain of another’s body. And yet, how can we ever successfully care for anyone if we don’t at least try to imagine ourselves in their place?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Jan 2020.

Life in the shadow of death

My Mirror column:
Thinking about how AIDS has been represented on the screen, from the USA to France to India, throws up a set of tragic tropes, with one exhilarating exception

The award-winning actor Nahuel Perez Biscaryat in Robin Campillo’s 120 Beats Per Minute 

In May this year, a Tamil film called Sila Samayangalil (Sometimes) was released on Netflix. Directed by Priyadarshan, the film is set in the waiting room of a medical clinic. It gets certain things right, deftly establishing situations and characters.


A salwar-kameez-clad receptionist (Sriya Reddy) arrives insensitively late, given that people have been queuing since 6.30 am, and proceeds to talk on her cellphone. The depersonalised waiting room is typically unwelcoming, with its immovable rows of uncomfortable chairs, its notices about rules and timings, and the annoying automated voice-over in which counter token numbers are announced.



As is so often the case in India, however, that sanitised veneer of bureaucratic efficiency stops short of ensuring a functioning water dispenser, or preventing bribery. Despite a tendency to over-dramatise his actors' responses, Priyadarshan produces a sense of how this shared experience (the lack of drinking water, the collective irritation at the receptionist) shapes this rather motley crew into a community – especially as the seven people who’re waiting realise they’re all here for the results of the same thing: an HIV test.

There are six men and one woman, each with different reasons why they think they might have contracted the virus. Ashok Selvan’s relatively calm Balamurugan volunteers his story first, then Prakash Raj’s petrified Krishnamurthy, and so on – until we, the audience, have been given a whole range of possible ways in which AIDS might spread. By making the talkative Bala a pharmacist, the film takes the easy route to information dissemination, telling rather than showing.


I was struck by how wary Priyadarshan seems to be of his viewers’ moral judgement, how little he trusts them to sympathise or forgive anything that might depart from the monogamous heterosexual norm. Some of the male characters – though by no means all – are allowed a single ‘mistake’, but even so, they judge themselves very harshly.


Others have tragic stories about blood transfusions and saving accident victims. As for the sole woman character, she is visualised as being infected in the most non-agentive way possible – as a victim of anonymous sexual violence.


There is, of course, nothing ‘wrong’ with any of these narratives. All of them gesture to real possibilities where a person might get HIV without having, as the film’s characters repeatedly say, “done anything wrong”. But it is worth noting how studiously a film released two months before the Indian Supreme Court decriminalised consensual gay sex by scrapping the relevant parts of Section 377 avoids the slightest mention of men having sex with men.


I came upon Sometimes last week, when thinking about World AIDS Day, which was instituted in 1988 by the World Health Organisation, and thus celebrated its thirtieth year on December 1. And I couldn’t help but think about how far we are from making a film like 120 BPM – Beats Per Minute, Robin Campillo’s award-winning 2017 film about ACT UP activists and the battle against AIDS in 1980s Paris.

120 BPM, among whose many richly-deserved awards is the Golden Peacock at last year’s IFFI, is both a pulsating account of a political movement and a profoundly affecting personal narrative. Campillo moves with consummate fluency between brilliantly detailed scenes of political agitation and intensely intimate scenes that take in love and sex, friendship and family. And yes, death. For death is what hovers over all the AIDS films that have ever been made, right from the originary 1993 moment of Philadelphia. Its early Hindi ‘adaptation’, Phir Milenge (2004), in which Ron Nyswaner’s protagonist, played by Tom Hanks, was split into two characters, played by Shilpa Shetty and Salman Khan, and Salman died. As did Sanjay Suri in My Brother Nikhil (2005), an early AIDS drama in which Onir managed to give Hindi cinema an openly gay and yet sympathy-worthy protagonist, even if it had to be wrapped up inside Juhi Chawla’s saccharine-sweet sister act for public consumption. At this year’s IFFI, I also watched Yen Tan’s painful 2018 drama, 1985, in which a young Texan man goes home for Christmas but cannot bring himself to tell his family that he is gay, let alone what he really needs to, that he has AIDS.


1985 and My Brother Nikhil have many tropes in common: the ultra-masculine unsympathetic father, the clueless childhood girlfriend who can’t understand why the protagonist won’t reciprocate her love, the devoted monogamous partner – and the close sibling who will be the one to remember the hero after he’s gone.

Young people living under the shadow of death: that is what unites these disparate films. In Sometimes, too, it is the possible death of innocents that the film plays on. The AIDS film repeatedly shows how love in these situations comes with the terrible condition of illness: taking care of the one you love is a literal responsibility.


120 BPM, too, is tragic, with perhaps the most excruciating and moving depiction of slow death by disease that I have seen on film. And yet, somehow, what the film leaves one with is a remembered energy, a sense of endlessly articulate debate and endlessly flamboyant action, stretching from past to future.

In one of 120 BPM’s many stunning moments between the protagonists Nathan and Sean, Nathan describes being 19 and driving from Aix to Marseilles with an older man he has just met. The highway is jam-packed with cars, and Nathan imagines dying there, in a car accident, and their blackened bodies being discovered, and people wondering what they were to each other. It is a strange, dark vision, and yet acutely appropriate to the AIDS film – a vision in which desire and death, anonymity and intimacy, past and future are forever, and tragically, intertwined.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Dec 2018.

Book Review: AIDS Sutra

A book review, for Biblio:  

 

AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories from India.
Edited by Negar Akhavi; with a Foreword by Amartya Sen.
Photographs by Prashant Panjiar.
 

Random House India, New Delhi, in collaboration with Avahan, the India AIDS initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2008, 340 pp., Rs 395. ISBN 978-81-8400-039-9

 

An anthology should be, by definition, varied, but rarely does one come across one whose various parts complement each other with such élan. Aids Sutra contains pieces by sixteen writers of different ages and persuasions, each focusing on a different aspect of the HIV-AIDS epidemic and often, a different part of the country. So, for example, we have Jaspreet Singh’s quietly gutwrenching visit to a Delhi home for children with HIV, Sunil Gangopadhyay’s engaging take on Sonagachhi, replete with anecdotes both historical and autobiographical, Siddhartha Deb’s bleak but superb account of the conditions in which Manipur’s young people take to drugs, or Mukul Kesavan’s thoughtful elucidation of the world of Bangalore’s kothis.

Styles, too, vary enormously. CS Lakshmi’s ‘At Stake, The Body’ chooses anonymity as a haven for the voices of sex workers she inscribes with a kind of collective economy, while Nikita Lalwani’s ‘Mister X Versus Hospital Y’, whose very subject is the right to confidentiality, is anchored around a life story disclosed in a single conversation. In a book such as this, where much of the writing is based on specifically arranged encounters between the authors and the people they’re describing, observations need to be particularly fine-grained, and many of the authors recognize the need to abandon the conceit of objectivity. But there are those who cling to the illusion of old-style ethnography (or old-style documentary) – the narrator as a fly on the wall, seemingly observing people and place without recogiszing how his presence contributes to the nature of the scene, or alters it. William Dalrymple is one of those whose style gives away nothing of himself. The first two pages of his essay on devadasis, ‘The Daughters of Yellama’, for instance, form a stream of dialogue: first one woman speaks, then the other. There is precisely one sentence spoken by the author. But they are responding to some invisible third party. It is as if an interview had been transcribed without the questions asked.

In stark contrast is the piece by Shobhaa De, who takes it upon herself to describe, in admirably frank detail, her response to the discovery that her “children’s driver”, Shankar, had AIDS. She is frank, first of all, in admitting that she knew very little about a man who had worked for her for several years – and how normalized this ‘not knowing’ is for upper middle class people. “People who work in our homes, and who are an integral part of our lives, become almost invisible – their presence reduced to an almost shadowy figure at which we shout daily orders. ‘Go here. Get that. Be back on time… So you need leave? Again? Didn’t you just take a day off last fortnight? Why does there seem to be a weekly emergency in your village? How many times do your cousins die?’ All this is said briskly, everybody is so damn busy, so preoccupied. There are a thousand things to do. Who on earth looks up to notice boils on their driver’s scalp?” She is equally honest in admitting that the discovery forced her to confront a host of inner demons: “I imagined all kinds of unpleasant things. He must have got the virus from visiting prostitutes after this wife left him. Maybe he was gay, and had multiple relationships? Had he tricked his wife into marrying him? …Where was my liberal self when I needed it most?”

Vikram Seth also tells a quasi-personal story, of a poem he once wrote in the voice of a man dying of AIDS. But apart from gesturing to the way in which the fearful voice of the poem’s narrator echoes the ill-informed, panic-stricken reaction Seth remembers from California in the 1980s, the piece remains disappointingly slight – and impersonal. His account of reactions from readers then is interesting for the historical light it casts on the life of the disease. But Seth is so tightly focused on trying – and failing – to reconstruct the moment of the poem’s writing that he refuses the opportunity to meditate on wider questions, personal or political.

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, like De and Seth, elects to tell a story whose origin lies in past personal experience, though in Shanghvi’s case it is not, strictly speaking, his own. ‘Hello Darling’, about a flamboyantly gay filmmaker called Murad, doesn’t do too bad a job of recreating the not-so-far-away world of 90s Bombay, in which Murad’s slick first film about homosexuality was enough to give him “a patina of notoriety” and a lot of press. But his asides about American “bug parties”, or discrimination against HIV positive patients in India – seem tacked on, and even Murad’s story never quite achieves the “darkly nostalgic” tone Shanghvi aims for. Perhaps the problem is Shanghvi’s amateurish prose, teetering perpetually on the brink of purple: “…the greatness he aspired to was one elusive eel. Unable to deal with fate’s tumult, Murad fled to New York… to live his life on high tilt – artistically, independently, hedonistically”, or worse, “Having given filmmaking his best shot, and failing nonetheless, the dark music of HIV played in the background as the echo of salvation”. What does emerge without a doubt, though, is that the stigma – and resultant secrecy – that surrounds HIV cuts across class: a publicly homosexual, glamorous, Page Three figure feels as compelled to keep his positive status secret as a middle-aged Marathi chauffeur.

The most rewarding pieces in the book are those where research is woven into a personal narrative, one that makes visible the layers through which perception is filtered. One such is Amit Chaudhuri’s careful account of the HIV wings of Bombay’s hospitals, and the doctors who run them. Chaudhuri is, as always, simultaneously reflective and detached. His memories of younger days may inform his experience of the city, but with Chaudhuri, memory is not nostalgia. His estimation of Bombay is clear-eyed (and at this moment when the city is the subject of so much impassioned prose, especially welcome): “As I walked with streams of happy people on Perry and Carter Roads, I sensed again this city’s reserves of optimism, which makes it unique among the world’s cities: but was reminded, too, from my own life here, of what I’d forgotten – its infantilism, its susceptibility to charm and excitement, a susceptibility that, in the early 21st century, has its own unforgiving momentum.”

Also clear-eyed is Chaudhuri’s unraveling of the various registers within which the history of AIDS treatment unfolded: partial information from abroad, professional rivalries, increasing but ill-informed media attention, issues of prejudice, sexual morality and secrecy. And at every juncture, he is attentive to the crucial question of class. For instance, visiting hospitals like GT (Gokuldas Tejpal) and JJ (Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy) for the first time, Chaudhuri recognizes that his “not knowing” such landmarks must be placed in the context of a classed urban geography, in which public hospitals do not need to figure for ‘people like us’. More importantly, within the hospital, class matters. Though it may no longer affect access to Anti Retroviral Treatment (ART) (JJ Hospital became the first to offer free ART in 2004, and others have followed), knowledge of and attitudes to healthcare have much to do with levels of class and education. Chaudhuri correctly points out that ART is “incomplete but, as of now, indispensable knowledge [that] partially removes HIV from the hysteria that surrounded it in the eighties and nineties”, but deaths continue to occur even among those who are diagnosed in time, often because working class patients stop the treatment when symptoms recede.

Class and social background are also important variables in Sonia Faleiro’s hard-hitting portrayal of the complex relationship between sex workers and the police. Faleiro’s piece is significant for its twin insights – first, that the police’s relationship with sex workers is not merely one of law enforcement, but of regular economic and sexual exploitation, and second, that it will not do to paint all policemen as agents of evil: they themselves are cogs in a larger, deeply flawed system. “Policemen’s attitudes mirror that (sic) of the society from which they are drawn. If the average policeman comes from a small town or village where people generally equate sex work with promiscuity, disease, and lawlessness, then he will, unless his training teaches him otherwise, carry those sentiments to work. What makes this mirror image dangerous is that the police have the power to act on their bias.” While this means that there are a large number of policemen like Madhav Rao, who tells Faleiro that sex workers are meant to be beaten, chased away (giving her the title of her piece, ‘Maarne ka, bhagane ka’), it does not preclude the possibility of there being others like Ram Naik, for whom the sex workers of the neighbourhood he patrols are the women he knows best.

Kiran Desai’s account of the Kalavanthalu women – a subcaste of “hereditary courtesans and temple dancers famous for their elegant beauty” – breezily builds up an image of a “normal” Andhra village, only to tear it down : “I notice an overabundance of beds”. Her sure-footed descriptions, of brothels with all the stuffiness of a middle class home, and others that are no more than hovels, are interspersed with statistics, local proverbs and all-female banter, expertly but gently rendered: ““And who likes the sex? Any of you girls?” And immediately they all jump on one woman… yelling, “She! She! She! She does!”

There are other pieces well worth reading that I haven’t mentioned for lack of space, and a measured introduction by Amartya Sen that deals with much more than the economics of HIV. The book also contains some exceptional -- albeit badly printed -- photographs by Prashant Panjiar, adding yet another layer to what is already a generous, nuanced introduction to one of the most complex issues of our time.

Published in Biblio: A Review of Books
Vol. XIII, Nos. 11 & 12, Nov - Dec 2008
To see this article as it originally appeared, with photographs, go here.