The context of power, the power of context

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The brilliant web series I May Destroy You opens up all the conversations we need to have on sexual assault, and its commitment to context illuminates a great deal about the contemporary moment

In a world where writing is unironically referred to as ‘content’, like some pre-flavoured filling for your social media sandwich, Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You (IMDY) feels not just rare but exceptional. The 12-episode series is actively genre-repellent. The awe-inspiring Coel, who is the show’s writer, co-director and lead actor, takes us on a semi-autobiographical journey through a Black millennial London world akin to her own, filling each riveting episode with enough emotional and intellectual energy for a whole show.

Coel plays Arabella Essiedu, a young British woman of Ghanaian heritage whose sharp Twitter voice made for a hit first book. But when we meet Bella, she has just spent a publisher-sponsored writing retreat in the arms of a dreamy-eyed Italian drug dealing lover. While pulling an all-nighter to produce a draft for her deadline, she takes a break to meet friends at a bar. The next morning, having delivered up a manuscript she can barely remember writing, she finds herself with a bleeding cut on her forehead and the choppy memory of a white man’s face.

IMDY has been described as a show about a woman processing the deeply disorienting effects of a sexual assault that she doesn't really remember. And it is very much that, with Bella's tale of slow recollection, relapse, recognition and eventual recovery offering us one of the most fine-grained accounts of what it's really like to live through something like this.

But it is also a show about a lot of other things: things not often seen on screen, things that have certainly never been treated with the sort of multiple POV complexity that Coel's writing achieves here. IMDY is such a powerful intervention because it embeds what others might have seen as an isolated sexual assault in a brilliantly thick description of its context. That context is illuminated by a nuanced politics of race, class, gender and sexuality, and yet the sociological irradiates without overdetermining, always allowing another possible reading, acknowledging the reasons for suspicion while pushing us to dislodge our fixities.

For instance, Bella is black, and all she really remembers of the man who raped her is that he's white. The show doesn't flag this, or at least not obviously – but IMDY is a powerful engagement with the politics of race in an ostensibly egalitarian society. There is, for instance, the flashback depiction of how white teachers in a mixed-race school instantly respond to a white girl charging a black male classmate with rape: “White girl tears have great currency,” says a younger version of Bella's friend Terry. Now, in adulthood, Bella's circle of friends is almost all Black and non-posh: an exclusivity that could be self-defence. That fear of white or brown or upper-middle class often turns out to be at least partially justified: the white girl who brings Bella into a vegan NGO turns out to have earned a commission on her Blackness, the Cambridge-educated South Asian boy gaslights his way out of an act no less horrific for being supremely common: stealthing (removing a condom secretly during sex).

For the non-Black viewer, watching the show often has the quality of being invited into a closely-guarded circle, offering much-needed perspective on what it's like to be Black in a society where white people still have cultural hegemony. Yet, and this is crucial: there is none of the ridiculous unidimensionality that plagues so much politically correct writing in our times. Being a Black person in IMDY is no more a guarantor of moral certitude than it is in real life. So within these twelve episodes, a Black man cheats on his Black wife with a secret girlfriend – also Black; another Black man forcibly humps his Grindr date – also Black; a publisher that Bella imagines solidarity with because of her being Black, proves just how instrumental the use of racial identity politics can be.

I've used the racial lens until now because it is one Coel foregrounds, her character's most strongly felt identity from which she must partially break in order to forge a sense of unity with other women. But the sharpness of IMDY is its ability to see that all solidarities are partial, often only extended until it suits someone to extend them. Coel's characterisation and subplots indict the gaslighters and victim-shamers – the Italian lover who blames Bella for carelessness when her drink is spiked, or the Black policeman who can't quite see beyond his heterosexual judgement of Grindr sex. But what makes the show so unusual and compelling is Coel's insistence on letting no-one rest in perpetual victimhood, to constantly show how the wheels turn, depending on context. So for instance, someone who is in a racial or sexual minority might still be able to have a certain gendered power over someone else – like Bella's best friend Kwame not telling a woman he sleeps with as an experiment that he is actually gay.

Equally significantly, IMDY unpacks the disturbing effects of call-out culture in real life: the addictive high of social media validation; the exhibitionism and distraction that allows people to not focus on the work they really need to do on themselves; and most of all, the unreflective high moral ground that can sometimes make the wokest people the most insensitive, because black and white allows for no forgiveness.

 

In the India of 2020, where we all seem terrifyingly keen to tag people as either victims or exploiters; where the display of fake victimhood has become the toxic malaise that defines our society, from our topmost political leadership to publishing to Bollywood; where even the best-intentioned wokeness often seems to merely insert itself into our centuries-old culture of hypocrisy, in effect overturning nothing – in this world, I May Destroy You might be the best thing you can watch to challenge your preconceptions.

 Published in Mumbai Mirror, 6 Sep 2020.

Fear Eats the Soul

My Mirror column:

Kamal Haasan's Hey Ram, released twenty years ago this February, is a complex, unresolved film about India's unresolved inner life. 

A man returns to the Calcutta building in which his wife was raped and murdered in a riot. He stands in the street, looking up at their old balcony, and she appears there, beckoning him as she used to. When he climbs up the stairs, the new occupant mistakes the name he mentions for that of the person he is looking for. 

Mr. Nair: “All the tenants here are new. What's the name again?”

Saket Ram: “Saket Ram.”

Mr. Nair: “When did you see him last?”

Saket Ram: “Whom?”

Mr. Nair: “Saket Ram.”

Saket Ram: “A year ago, exactly.”

Mr. Nair: “A year ago there was a massacre. Many of the people in this building died. Maybe your friend also... Sorry.

Saket Ram: “It's alright.”

Mr. Nair: “What was your relationship to this Saket Ram?”

Saket Ram: “Like that of the body to the soul. We were very good friends.”

It is a moment typical of Hey Ram: the visuals dense with imagery, the dialogue packed with associations, a certain excess that seems ready to leap off the screen. Our Tamil protagonist's lovely Bengali first wife Aparna -- played by Rani Mukherjee, her character's name a nod to Sharmila Tagore as Apu's wife in Satyajit Ray's Apur Sansar, a cinematic emblem of perfect young marital domesticity and early death -- is dead. But she haunts her living husband, appearing everywhere – in the balcony of what was her own home, but also writhing in a pool of blood in his new wife's bathroom, or smiling in the faces of other women, or assuming the form of a goddess. Meanwhile, Saket Ram (Kamal Haasan, his character carrying the old poetic name for Ayodhya) lives through the trauma of Aparna's death, but in his acquiescence to Mr. Nair's words, we hear a tacit acknowledgement that perhaps he is not quite alive. Did Saket Ram's soul die with Aparna that Direct Action Day, leaving his body to wander the streets, available for possession by more devious spirits?

It seems no coincidence that Haasan's Saket Ram first encounters the film's other Ram in those very Calcutta streets, in a moment that has the two men literally mirroring each other, in name and in gesture. But Saket Ram is a man in trauma, speaking of surrendering to the police to confess about the Muslim men he has just killed, only one of them the actual rapist and murderer of his wife: he carries the stains, literally, on his white kurta. Shriram Abhyankar (Atul Kulkarni) is a RSS-influenced Hindu fundamentalist, who has covered over an old wound with a new skin of pure hatred. “There is no punishment for doing one's duty. If killing is a crime then so is war, isn't it?” asks Abhyankar. And when Ram protests that he is a mere civilian, Abhyankar counters smoothly: “This is civil war.”

And it is certainly no coincidence that the film's other reference to body and soul is when Abhyankar, finding himself paralysed waist downwards in a riding accident, tells Ram that he must now “be his body” and carry out their mission of assassinating Gandhi, whom Abhyankar and his ilk believe a traitor to the so-called Hindu cause, because of Gandhi's sustained support to the idea that the Muslims have as legitimate a claim to live in India as the majority community does.

Haasan's film is among the most detailed filmic depictions we have of the Hindutva mindset -- not just the admiration for Hitler and the distaste for Gandhi, but how that maps onto an eroticised masculinity in which violence and nationalism come together with a reworked Hindu renunciatory ideal. But there is great confusion in this mindset. In one of the film's most honest, most complicated scenes, Ram imbibes an opium drink given to him by Abhyankar, and it is in that opium-induced haze that he both finally feels the stirrings of sexual attraction to his new young wife Mythili, and agrees, in effect, to leave her side. When he makes love to her, he fantasises about a giant gun. To become a warrior for Hindutva, Ram must take a pledge to “renounce bondage and relationships”. We see him touch, in one seamless gesture, the picture of his unseen dead mother and the map of India, both of which he can only love as abstractions – and leave the house, abandoning for his grand masculine mission all the real, maternal figures he knows, including the newly-pregnant Mythili (Sita to match Ram).

In a directorial sleight-of-hand that makes fine use of both melodrama and coincidence, Haasan ensures that this would-be Godse suddenly finds himself being defended from suspicious Muslims somewhere near Jama Masjid by his trusted old Muslim friend Amjad (Shah Rukh Khan) – and then, in a matter of minutes, defending Amjad and all the other Muslims holed up in the nicely-named Azad Soda Factory.

There is a great deal more that can be said about Hey Ram, but let me end here on the note that Amjad does. In a dying declaration to the police trying to identify the armed Hindu assailant whose entry into the curfew-bound Jama Masjid area set off the bloodbath, Amjad is asked if he had ever seen Bhairav before. Bhairav is the name Ram had assumed on that excursion, and also the name of Lord Shiva's destructive form. “I have never seen that animal before,” says Amjad. “I only know Ram, my brother. He saved my life.”

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23 Feb 2020.

In the name of a cause

Second part of my two-part Mirror column on Delhi Crime:

Almost unconsciously, Delhi Crime puts its finger on the disconnect between the police and the public. (The second of a two-part column)

The worst written character in Delhi Crime is not one of the rapists. Richie Mehta's fictional depiction of the December 16, 2012 gang-rape gives the six men a rationale. Jai Singh, the driver of the bus as well as of the crime, gets to speak of his own motivations, however misguided. He had become 'unstable' after his wife died, unable to bear the sight of happy couples. 

As for the five younger men (including his own brother), they saw him as their leader, whose uncontrollable temper they knew not to get in the way of. Mehta and his co-scriptwriters resist the temptation to vilify them, instead giving us a remarkably sympathetic sense of their milieu – their poverty, the instability of their working lives, their attachment to their mothers and to family honour, so much so that they would rather be arrested quietly than face a public shaming. 

A long monologue by the series' bespectacled philosopher-cop, Sudhir Kumar (Gopal Dutt Tiwari, superb), offers a decent pop-psychological explanation for their actions: socio-economic deprivation set against a growing consumer culture, deep-rooted patriarchal assumptions about women running amok in a swiftly changing urban environment, in the absence of either sex education or gender equality.

But Delhi Crime affords no such explanation to the protestors. It doesn't help that the character who represents an entire city in tumult is the daughter of the DCP in charge of the case: a protected, spoilt, clueless teenager with the irritatingly alliterative name of Chandni Chaturvedi. Yashaswini Dayama is a good actor (she plays the funky teenage neighbour in both Phobia and Made in Heaven) but she cannot save this character, made up of so many stereotypes as to be downright unsympathetic. 

Chandni hates Delhi. She has grown up in it, but doesn't feel of it. She spends all her time glued to various screens. She is so alienated from her surroundings that her mother Vartika (the show's DCP protagonist) has requested two weeks' time in which to show her “the good side of Delhi” so that she stops clamouring to go off to firang lands for college.

To make Chandni stand in for the thousands of people who came out on to the streets that fateful December, to march and shout and weep and stand in solidarity with Jyoti Singh and with each other, is to not only support an establishmentarian politics that reads public criticism as a rejection of the city/country, but also to be utterly clueless about what the Nirbhaya protests meant. This cluelessness lies, unfortunately, at the very foundation of Delhi Crime. 

The show's dismissive, cynical attitude to protest emerges first in the way that Vartika eyerolls at a knot of students beginning to assemble outside Vasant Vihar Police Station. “Yeh lo, in students ko extracurricular activity mil gayi. They'll sit, soak in the sunshine, in the name of a cause. If they're lucky, they'll get on to TV. Aur is sab mein hamari lag jayegi,” says Shefali Shah's character to her subordinate Bhupender. “Yeh log itni jaldi signboards kaise banwa lete hain?” Bhupender responds on cue. Then the two of them chortle, as if they've made the funniest joke in the world. But really, if this is how disconnected the police are from the public they serve, then the joke is on them.

In another giveaway moment, an unnamed young policewoman working to deal with the gathering crowds at India Gate says to her colleague Neeti (Rasika Dugal), “Ek case ke liye itna sab? Ho kya gaya hai yaar?” The scene ties the quiet gravity of Neeti's response to an accident of circumstance: Neeti just happens to be in personal contact with the survivor. If she hadn't had that chance, the series suggests, she might well have been as baffled as the other young policewoman, untouched by the fervour that had taken hold of thousands of people her age, and her gender.

In turning the Nirbhaya case into a police procedural, the  makers of Delhi Crime have somehow missed the incredible power of that moment in our national life. The heightened public response that the show seems only to comprehend as a measure of the heinousness of the rape, the baffling crowd that must be dispersed as it gets 'dangerously' close to the PMO on a day when there are preparations to receive the Russian president at Hyderabad House, was not about “just one case”. True, there was something extraordinary about the violence, but there have been equally terrible rapes before and since (a point the show makes, again in bafflement).

But there was much more about the case that made it the symbolic epicentre of a vast spontaneous uprising, the spark that set a tinderbox city on fire: the young lower middle class physiotherapy student from a Hindi-speaking family who'd gone out to watch an English film, in one of the city's recently built malls, with a boy who may or may not have been her boyfriend. 

Each of those who protested that bleak, cold December drew from the not-yet-dead Jyoti Singh courage to wage our collective ongoing battles. We congregated in the streets to demand the equal rights to life and love and freedom that our cities will not award us without a fight. If we soaked in any sunshine, it was of our own making.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 April 2019.

(Read the first part of this column here.)

A blinkered vision

First part of my two-part Mirror column on Delhi Crime:

Delhi Crime's retelling of the 'Nirbhaya' investigation is gripping. But it sees things so completely through police eyes that it can sometimes feel deliberately blind.

For me, the most revealing moment in Delhi Crime arrived a day or so into the Netflix series’ recreation of how the Delhi Police apprehended the six men later charged in the December 16, 2012 rape case. In director Richie Mehta’s screen version, a man called Banke Lal arrives at the Vasant Vihar police station to tell the cops that at about 8.30 pm on December 16, a little before the rape took place, he had boarded a similar white bus from Munirka Bus Stand, been attacked and robbed of his phone and wallet by the six men on board, and thrown out of the bus near the IIT overpass.

“Had I landed on my head, I’d be dead,” says Banke Lal.

“Why didn’t you report it that night?” asks Vartika Chaturvedi, the senior cop in charge of the case, played by Shefali Shah.

“Who would I have complained to? I was asking everyone for help, no one listened,” Banke Lal replies. “I managed to borrow a phone from a passing auto driver and called my brother, who told me to come home. I figured, what would the cops do? It was only when I saw the news that I realised that this had to be the same gang.”

The sequence ends with Chaturvedi thanking Banke Lal for coming to them and asking for another case to be filed against the same suspects. She then goes out of the room, leans against a wall as her right-hand man Bhupender (Rajesh Tailang) wonders if there might be other victims to be found.

“If he had made a complaint that same night, maybe we could have prevented this,” responds Chaturvedi.

“We don't know that,” says Bhupender. “Ismein hamari kya galti hai?”

“Try saying that to Deepika,” says Chaturvedi, half swallowing her words.

As I watched the sequence, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that we live in a country in which a citizen who has just been robbed, beaten up and thrown off a bus can respond to his predicament with “What could the police have done in this?” It seemed to me to offer an involuntary glimpse of something the show appears to take entirely for granted: that we as a citizenry have so little faith in our police force that we don’t go to them for help, even when we’re victims of an act of targeted violence and robbery, bang in the middle of the country’s capital.

Then, as I sat down to write this column, reliving my own memories of December 2012, as all Indian women who watch it will do, I remembered that there had indeed been such an incident. A man had been robbed on the night of the gang rape, by the very same men, aboard the very same bus.

It didn't take much looking up online to find reports. What I found in them was distressing. The Times of India reported on December 23, 2012, that three constables from the Hauz Khas police station had been suspended for their failure of duty when approached on December 16 by one Ramadhar Singh, who had been picked up “from RK Puram Sector 4 by the six gang rape accused, and robbed and dumped near IIT”.

The report continued: “The three cops were on patrol duty around 8.15pm when they were approached by Ramadhar. He had told them that he was robbed and that he had lost his mobile and, hence, cannot call 100. The cops, however, told them they were from the Hauz Khas police station and he needs to go to Vasant Vihar to register a case. They neither sent out a wireless message to track the bus nor had they informed Vasant Vihar cops about the incident,” said a source.”

I describe this incident in such detail not to make the point that the heinous gangrape that would end up making Delhi the notorious site of frenzied international attention was preventable. That may be true, or it may not. The “what if” that it becomes on the show is easily voiced — and almost as easily dismissed. Richie Mehta’s version is so insistent on showing Delhi Police in good light that he simply erases the inconvenient truth that the victim of the robbery did in fact try to report it and was turned away by cops. It then absolves the police of even the glimmer of responsibility by making his female cop protagonist have a moment of guilt, that can, however, be painted as emotional, even irrational — since in Mehta’s version the onus is on the citizen who didn’t come to the police earlier.

In many ways, this is transparently the position the show takes: it makes the police the put-upon heroes, under-appreciated figures whose valiant efforts to fight crime while being enormously understaffed and under-budgeted are not appreciated by a thankless citizenry. All we ever see are good cops being treated badly. The DCP who hasn’t gone home for three nights is taunted by a judge as being someone who spends her time at parties and has probably never been to a crime scene. Children in a posh South Delhi school regurgitate their parents’ assumptions about the cops being corrupt. In a less monied class, too, Bhupender tells Vartika that he hides his job from any prospective in-laws he’s meeting because “no one wants either a dosti or dushmani with the police”.

Vartika chastises Bhupender for not seeing that a family that doesn’t respect his job will not “protect his daughter”. But the larger issue, the fact of why a city of 20 million people has a relationship with its police force that is one of “Best if we never have to deal with them” rather than “They will help us get justice”, is never really discussed. When we get unwitting glimpses of the reasons why — such as when some constables on duty taunt and torture the not-yet-convicted suspected rapists, driving three of them to attempt suicide — it is not treated as an abuse of power, but simply as something strategically unfortunate that happens.

But surely if the police in Delhi and in the rest of India are assumed by the man on the street — and even more so, by the woman on the street — to be not just professionally incompetent, but a power-seeking, corrupt and potentially malign class of people that is best avoided, there must be some reason why. Surely the answer cannot be the one Mehta provides by ventriloquising the ex-police commissioner Neeraj Kumar, who is a consultant on Delhi Crime: that it’s every other constituency who’s wrong — the politicians, the media, the judiciary, ordinary people, students — and the police who are right.

(To be continued next week)

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

TV review: Thin within

A review of the new TV series Dietland, for India Today magazine. (You can stream it in India on Amazon Prime).

Alicia 'Plum' Kettle is an overweight young white woman in Brooklyn, plodding heavily through her unhappy present while keeping her inner life afloat with dreams of a thinner future. While the imaginary Alicia struts sveltely in a perfect red dress, the real-life Plum (Joy Nash), clad invariably in shapeless black, moves in a ceaseless loop between her friend Steven's coffee shop, her "sad apartment" and waist-watchers meetings led by an annoying skinny woman who calls eating a "bad habit".

Dietland is at its painful best when depicting what life as a fat person can feel like: the casual rudeness, the non-stop judgement, the angst about body image engulfing all aspects of selfhood. Obesity isn't just Plum's greatest stumbling block, it's the sole subject of her aspirations. All other goals -- career, love-life, just life-life -- are placed on hold while she saves for a gastric band surgery to free her "thin person within".

Like the 2015 Sarai Walker novel its based on, the series refuses to offer psychological reasons for fatness. "One of the things I push back against in Dietland," Walker said in 2016, "is that fat is an outer representation of some kind of inner trauma." Instead, it looks outwards, placing its heroine in the midst of a multi-pronged female fightback against constricting beauty standards.

Plum's job is answering sad letters that teenage girls address to Kitty Montgomery (Julianna Margulies), manager-editor of teen zine Daisy Chain. Plum's replies to catch the attention of Julia (Tamara Tunie), who wants to subvert "the dissatisfaction industrial complex" from inside the belly of the beast: the Beauty Closet she runs in Daisy Chain's basement. Initiated into an anti-diet self-realisation programme by the philanthropist daughter of a dead diet guru, Plum goes off anti-depressants to find herself hallucinating about sex with a man-tiger. Meanwhile, a vigilante group called Jennifer is murdering rapists, while targeting Fashion Week because it "fosters rape culture".

If that sounds like a lot, it is. Dietland has many things going for it, a heroine on the cusp of transformation, engaging feminist politics, striking women characters, but it also has too much going on. The constant segues from its bitchy Devil Wears Prada tenor -- into loopy animation, lush NatGeo-inspired fantasy, violent masked murders -- can feel choppy. Plum's unusual path, though, might successfully cut a wide swathe through the stock gender tropes of pop culture.

Published in India Today, 20 July 2018.

Seeing each other home

My Mirror column:

Ghar, released 40 years ago, is usually remembered for its delightful songs, but it remains a most unusual treatment of love in cinema.

There are three good reasons to remember Ghar this week. One, the film was released on 9 February 1978, which means it just turned 40. Two, the late Vinod Mehra, who starred in it opposite Rekha, would have turned 73 on 13 February. And three, we’re just emerging from Valentine’s Day which, even if it’s meant to sell flowers and soppy cards, makes it a good time to talk about a film that takes love seriously.

Ghar opens in a setting that was once a fixture of popular Bombay cinema: the opulent two-storied mansion with the grand staircase and the vast dining table, at which the businessman father sits, absorbed in a newspaper. But almost as soon as Vinod Mehra, playing the young protagonist Vikas Chandra, comes downstairs to join Madan Puri at breakfast, it becomes apparent that Manik Chatterjee’s 1978 film is going to fill this familiar world with rather less familiar things.

The first sign of this is the quietly cinematic way Chatterjee captures the distance between father and son. Mehra sits down at the place laid for him, quite far from Puri. A neatly-clad servant brings him toast. Puri passes him the butter dish – not by leaning across the table, but via the servant who carries it between father and son in a tray. Screenwriter Dinesh Thakur’s dialogue, too, experiments with realistic pauses and an economy unusual for a Hindi film of the time: in response to his father’s questions about arranging his marriage, Mehra responds with a half-hearted “Papa main... abhi kya...”, trailing off into silence.

The film goes on to sketch the contrast between Vikas’s home and that of his girlfriend (Rekha). The easy intimacy of Aarti’s home underscores the echoing silence between Vikas and his father. When the doorbell rings at Aarti’s, it is her mother who answers, and Vikas is nearly hit in the eye by a ball from Aarti’s little brother Raghu.

Aarti’s, too, is a single-parent home, but her bespectacled sooti-sari-wearing mother, whom she calls “Mamma”, laughs easily with her daughter’s boyfriend. That relaxed, intimate vibe isn’t ruptured even by Raghu’s cheeky sasural jokes.

The mood of banter extends into Vikas’s office, where the film serves up another rare character in the shape of Prema Narain: a female colleague who is aclose friend to the hero without being a vamp or a threat. Her flirtatious chatter – introduced to Aarti as Vikas’s “would-be wife”, she immediately names herself as the “could-be” – is never misconstrued by either him or Aarti.

Ghar offers a rare Hindi film example of the love marriage achieved without drama. The expected objections from Vikas’s father count for little when our hero has a job and makes up his mind.

The court registry marriage, with the carload of colleagues and the friendly boss as a father figure, is followed by a period of domestic bliss, achieved first in a borrowed house and then finally a rented flat of their own.

The second thing that makes Ghar’s portrayal of these newlyweds rare for Hindi cinema is the warm sexual intimacy that is gestured to: the relationship seems friendly and loving, and Aarti’s participation in it extends happily beyond the coy refusals and sidelong glances that were afforded to many heroines of the time.

It probably helps that the white kurta-pajama-clad Vinod Mehra with dishevelled morning hair can make even puffing cigarette smoke into Rekha’s face seem like a charming romantic gesture.

But what makes the film truly remarkable, of course, is the traumatic event that ruptures this cosy togetherness. After a late night show at the cinema – the film is Loafer – the couple are walking home when a gang of drunken louts descend on them. Unlike in the many versions of this scene that Hindi films have shown us, four armed men overpower the hero easily: Vikas is beaten up badly and Aarti gang-raped.

The scenes showing Aarti under observation in hospital are perhaps the film’s weakest – Rekha’s unseeing eyes as she turns her head and seems to look past Vikas, her repeated attempts at suicide are realistically conceived but badly executed. Thakur’s screenplay also elides the difficult terrain of the police case. But it deserves applause for its focus on the pressures an incident like this places on even the strongest relationship. The rape is front page news, and that media exposure – even forty years ago – makes the couple profoundly vulnerable. Concern-trolling neighbours, stupefied awkward colleagues, and callously gossiping strangers all take their toll, especially on Vikas.

With Aarti, his reaction to the rape has been one of grave sorrow and loving concern. But so entrenched is the social construction of sexual purity that Aarti now needs to be convinced of his love, over and over. The film marks the shift of body language beautifully – the traumatised Aarti suddenly seems like a child, afraid, in need of hand-holding. But the more patient and loving Vikas is to her, the more disconcerted she becomes. She tells him not to pity her. Then she accuses him of being excessively loving to make up for the fact that what happened happened to her and not him. These are difficult conversations. He snaps. He slaps her.

Neither Ghar nor its hero is flawless. But there’s something warm and honest and courageous about both that makes one want to look beyond their failings. And that, one might say, is what love is about.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 Feb 2018.

The Religion of Women

What can Mehboob Khan's Mother India, the biggest Hindi hit of 1957 and our first entry to the Oscars in 1958, tell us about our ideals of Indian womanhood?

Mehboob Khan's Mother India was not just the most successful film of 1957, but a social epic that became, from the 1960s to the 1980s, one of India's most successful cultural exports ever, watched and re-watched in cinemas and homes across the Middle East and Africa by people who didn't necessarily know Hindi, becoming in many ways the most emblematic 'Indian' film of all time.

In 1958 it was India's first official entry to the Oscars, and apparently came rather close to winning, losing out in the Best Foreign Film category to Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria by a single vote.

This, despite the fact that the film's visual style was powerfully influenced by Soviet socialist iconography – think of the many memorable tableaux in which Nargis (as the film's heroine Radha) is framed with a plough, or with her two sons and sheaves of wheat – and the fascinating fact that Mehboob's insignia of hammer and sickle was removed from the print sent for Oscar nomination. The film was also banned in Turkey as a 'Communist' film.
What is indubitable is that Mehboob's grand, melodramatic, technicolour vision of an unlettered Indian woman raising two sons against terrible odds managed to speak a wide range of audiences. Perhaps it is just in the nature of popular Indian cinema to be able to combine a host of messages: Mehboob's identifiably Marxist insignia of hammer and sickle, as the film scholar Rosie Thomas has pointed out, appeared on the screen next to an Urdu couplet that translates to 'Man proposes, God disposes'.

Certainly, for Indian audiences, Nargis's status in Mother India as the exemplary mother and wife is undeniably constructed by her association with the archetypes of mythical Hindu femininity. She is named Radha while her husband (Raaj Kumar) is called Shyamu, their post-marriage courtship evoking the eternal romantic pairing of Krishna and his gopi lover Radha. After Shyamu is disabled and abandons the family in a fit of depression, Radha is left alone to raise her two young sons. There are strong allusions here to Sita's epic tribulations – her abandonment by an ethical but weakened husband, a trial by fire, as well as an unspoken evocation of the villainous Ravana in the lecherous moneylender Sukhi Lala, against whose overtures Radha must defend her chastity. The film's more overt religious references are to Lakshmi – the goddess of wealth, to whom Sukhi Lala compares the poverty-stricken, half-starving Radha in a crucial ironic scene – and to the 'devi', whom Radha beseeches for help against Sukhi Lala and who, in the tradition of Hindi cinema's depiction of faith, gives her a sign that strengthens her fading resolve.

But more central to Mother India is its construction of Indian womanhood. Radha is the exemplary daughter-in-law who presses her mother-in-law's feet as well as her husband's, who quietly eats the few morsels left after her husband and sons have eaten, who doesn't only cook and clean and take care of the cattle but labours alongside her man in the fields, and voluntarily surrenders her jewelry in the family's time of need. But over the course of the film, we watch this shy bride who barely opens her mouth in front of her mother-in-law or her husband transform into a mother who can beat up her grown sons – or even kill them.

What unites the self-sacrificing femininity in the earlier half of the film with the ethical vision of motherhood shown later is the film's unequivocal embrace of a model of female sexual virtue at the cost of all else. As one of the film's immortal songs 'Duniya mein hum aayein hain toh jeena hi padega' goes, “Aurat hai woh aurat jise duniya ki sharam hai,/Sansaar mein bas laaj hi naari ka dharam hai.”. Trying to translate these sentences is difficult precisely because the words 'sharam' and 'laaj' -- literally shyness, bashfulness – are here used to denote the much more complex idea of honour. A woman's only religion in this world, the song says, is to safeguard honour.


The climactic confrontation between Radha and her son Birju (Sunil Dutt) is the outcome of precisely this belief: faced with a choice between saving her son's life and saving the 'honour' of a young woman of the village (Sukhi Lala's daughter Rupa, whom Birju has abducted as payback), Radha chooses to kill her own son. “Main beta de sakti hoon, laaj nahi de sakti [I can lose a son, but not honour],” she declares. The dialogue is about Rupa's (and the village's) 'laaj', but gestures equally to the originary moment when Radha chose her chastity over Sukhi Lala's offers of food and money, despite the fact that she had lost one child to starvation and might have lost the other two, too.

Mother India's conclusion can be read as a spirited defense of young women's sexual honour by an older woman, even against the depredations of her own son. This may seem worth celebrating in a world in which the patriarchal norm is probably that which appears in the final segment of an NH10, where Deepti Naval's character is the most patriarchal and violent in her defense of her family and caste 'honour'. And yet somehow there seems to be a continuum between the premium placed on chastity by Mother India in 1957, and the policing of honour we see around us in 2017.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Sep 2017.

Revenge, Served Cold

My Mirror column:

Sridevi's return to the screen as an avenging mother offers us a chance to think about the female vigilante film in Hindi cinema.

The 1970s in Hollywood inaugurated the era of the female vigilante film, in which the rape-revenge narrative was the most powerfully recurring one. Films like Abel Ferrara's Ms 45 (1981), the Sondra Lock-Clint Eastwood film Sudden Impact (1983), the Farrah Fawcett starrer Extremities (1986), among many others, were about a woman protagonist avenging a sexual crime whose perpetrators both society and the law had failed to punish.
A particular subset of this genre centres on an older woman who steps in to mete out vigilante justice on behalf of a younger or defenceless victim. An early Hollywood film in this genre, involving an elder sister and a teenaged younger sister -- Lipstick (1976) -- inspired BR Chopra's Insaaf ka Taraazu (1980), which cast Zeenat Aman and a childlike Padmini Kolhapure as a pair of stereotypically 'modern' sisters who find the world ranged against them -- and on the side of Raj Babbar's skin-crawlingly creepy admirer-rapist. Ravi Udyawar's Mom is the latest film in this sub-genre.

The last few years have seen Bollywood return to the avenging woman protagonist. In the wake of the widespread protests after the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh in December 2012, mainstream film producers seem to have finally decided this was a theme whose resonance they could monetise. Industry writers also clearly find the female vigilante slot useful, especially when tossing up comeback vehicles for heroines whose formidable acting chops aren't enough to keep them in male-dominated Bollywood.

So in August 2014, we got Pradip Sarkar's Mardaani, marking the return of Rani Mukherjee as a cop named Shivani Shivaji Roy who is provoked to violence by the abduction of an orphaned girl she has semi-adopted. In April 2017, we got Ashtar Syed's Maatr, with Raveena Tandon turning bloodthirsty avenger after her daughter is sexually assaulted and dies. And now, in July, we have Mom, in which Sridevi returns to the Hindi screen for the first time since English Vinglish (2012), again with a plot driven by an ungrateful daughter.

In a non-coincidence of the Bollywood kind, Sridevi's Devaki Sabarwal is an ethical schoolteacher pitted against Delhi's 'Pata hai mera baap kaun hai' louts - just like Raveena's Vidya in Maatr. Given the ubiquitousness of sexual violence in India across class, caste and region, it is remarkable how limited the Hindi film imagination of it is (barring notable exceptions like the superb Anaarkali of Aarah, or the more uneven Parched). One fixed node in that imagination is the youthful upper middle class victim; another is Delhi. Within Delhi, too, there are two points upon which Bollywood scriptwriters seem to converge: the farmhouse and the car.

The first imagined location for male predators in Mom is a farmhouse, as it was in Maatr and in another recent film about sexual assault in Delhi: Shoojit Sarkar's Pink (2016). But it is the car with windows rolled up, circling the streets of the capital, that offers a bone-chilling depiction of how sexual violence takes place, in plain sight. In Pink, as well as in Nicholas Kharkongor's Delhi-set drama Mantra (2016), we are allowed into the car; in Mom, we are kept terrifyingly out. Of course the car is not just a site of violence but also a mode of escape and an instrument of revenge: think of Navdeep Singh's NH10, in which the car amplifies Anushka Sharma's sense of siege - but can also conquer it.

Mom ticks off a host of other predictable Delhi types: men with no redeeming qualities like the spoilt schoolboy rapist, his drug-taking playboy cousin, a security guard who's a Bihari or Eastern UP migrant (the talented Pitobash Tripath, wasted here). Sridevi's husband Anand (Adnan Siddiqui) and daughter Arya (a Kareena Kapoor-lookalike called Sajal Ali) are pretty but merely decorative. The only pleasurable character is a Daryaganj detective, and this is because Nawazuddin Siddiqui sinks his teeth into a slim role to prove he can still surprise us with unheroicness. Udyawar tries with his locations, filming on the Delhi Metro, in a Mehrauli stepwell and a suitably upscale art gallery, but the Sabarwals' home has an unlived servantless poshness that simply doesn't cut it, especially for a family in which the woman works and is a hands-on mother of two.

Motherhood is the film's titular theme. As with Maatr and Mardaani (and Drishyam, in which Tabu is the cop-mother engineering violence), it is maternal protective instinct that is churned into cold-blooded revenge. Here all the strict biology teacher wants is to have her brattish stepdaughter call her 'Mom' rather than Ma'am. Of course we know of Sridevi's personal status as real-life stepmother to Boney Kapoor's children. And Udyawar doesn't spare the mythic references: naming her Devaki after Krishna's loving mother, or citing Draupadi as the original Indian avenger.

Mom does offer glimpses of fun on the femininity front: a criminal who makes her own poison from something ostensibly healthful; men obsessing over other men while a woman drives off under their noses. But the film is weighed down by a trite, obvious sense of righteousness.

Vigilante politics aside, it left me longing for a little of the legendary Sridevi lightness.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16 July 2017.

The murderer as hero

My Mumbai Mirror column: 
Rustom's lurid, overblown courtroom drama turns the 1959 Nanavati trial into a showcase for pop-patriotism.

The trial of Commander Kawas Maneckshaw Nanavati for the murder of Prem Ahuja began on the afternoon of September 23, 1959 in the city then called Bombay. The accused was a Parsi naval officer who lived in a Cuffe Parade flat with his British wife Sylvia and their three children. The victim was a wealthy Sindhi bachelor who lived with his unmarried sister Mamie and three servants in the posh Jeevan Jyot Apartments on Nepean Sea Road, Malabar Hill.

Despite their shared upper-class lives, the dead Ahuja became a sordid symbol of the immorality of the rich, while Nanavati emerged as a patriotic hero. As historian Gyan Prakash has shown fascinatingly in his 2010 book Mumbai Fables, the groundswell of popular support for Nanavati was largely engineered by the tabloid Blitz. Editor Russi K Karanjia managed to spin an elite sex-and-murder trial into "a spectacle of patriarchal honor and law in the modern cosmopolitan city". Prakash writes: "In its framing of the story, the rich did not just oppress the poor but threatened the very moral fiber of the nation, which Blitz identified with the armed services."

It is remarkable to what extent the Akshay Kumar-starrer Rustom, which released last week, 57 years after Nanavati's trial began, takes up and amplifies elements of this same narrative to suit our contemporary pop-patriotic zeitgeist. The faux-grand sets and technicolour shipboard sunsets are a vehicle for Akshay Kumar-style nationalism. As decorated naval officer Rustom Pawri, Kumar gets a stylised hero's entry alongside the Indian flag, and dialogues like "Meri uniform meri aadat hai, jaise saans lena, niswarth bhaav se apna farz nibhana... [My uniform is a habit. Like breathing, like selflessly doing my duty...]".

The film entirely fictionalises his battle with man-about-town Vikram Makhija (Arjun Bajwa), taking their rivalry much beyond Makhija having seduced his gullible wife Cynthia (a tearily soft-focus Ileana D'Cruz). It turns out that the upright Pawri sabotaged Makhija's corrupt shenanigans, hatched in conjunction with his own navy superiors. Poor Cynthia, in this version, is a mere pawn in Makhija's payback.

Gyan Prakash claims that in the years the case unfolded, Sylvia's being British "never raised an eyebrow. There was no insinuation (one very likely today) that she lacked the cultural values of India and exhibited the lax morals of Western women". This may have been true of Blitz and its English-language public - a function, perhaps, of the surviving colonial cosmopolitanism that still had hegemonic hold over the city's culture. But the form in which the case was first consumed in popular fictional form -- the 1963 Hindi courtroom drama Yeh Raaste Hain Pyar Ke -- departed from that neutrality.

In it, the guilt-stricken Mrs Nina Sahni is cross-examined by prosecution lawyer Ali Khan (the superb Motilal) precisely about having grown up in Paris, where "women are free to drink and smoke in the company of men other than their husbands", and "even divorce them if they are unhappy". The actress Leela Naidu, half-French in real life and raised in Europe, tries hard to claim 'Indian' values as the sad-faced Nina, her plain white sari draped modestly over her head: "Auraton ke liye main sharaab ko bahut bura samajhti hoon [For women I consider alcohol to be very bad]," she says, insisting she was forced to drink by the late Ashok (Rehman). Her husband Anil (Sunil Dutt) defends her, testifying that he and his wife occupy a happy mid-point between traditional mores and new-fangled freedoms. The lawyer, however, declares Anil mistaken, because his wife "is a highly liberated woman, a hundred yards ahead of our time, as Western women usually are".

While painting her as this fiend of freedom, the film simultaneously makes Nina a non-agent in her sexual life: the villainous Ashok flatters Nina, gets her drunk, and rapes her when she passes out. But the traumatised Nina must still ask her husband's forgiveness -- ostensibly for having put herself in a position to be raped.

Meanwhile the wronged hero (and his father) gain in moral stature from forgiving: "You can find a thousand girls, Anil, but not the mother of [your children] Rita and Pawan," advises Anil's father. But in that old Hindi-movie moral universe, forgiving men are never faced with the prospect of actually taking the 'fallen' woman back: Nina dies inexplicably as soon as Anil is free.

The real-life Kawas and Sylvia had three children, and the filmic Anil and Nina two. Rustom 'modernises' by making the couple child-free. Cynthia is also allowed to feel flattered enough by Vikram's attentions -- and angry enough at her husband's absences -- to embark on an affair. But Vikram's unspeakable villainy -- now not just seducer of innocents, but traitor to the nation, insulter of the uniform -- overshadows her misguidedness. She can live to be forgiven.

Cynthia's Englishness is never remarked upon in Rustom. What it does foreground is the Parsi-ness of Pawri and Bilimoria, the tabloid editor who makes him a cause celebre: Kumud Mishra in a roly-poly, comic, money-grubbing version of the tall, patrician Karanjia. Their Parsi-ness is pitted against the Sindhi-ness of Vikram and his sister. But it steers clear of mentioning the real-life Sindhi lobby that had to be placated before Nanavati's connections could earn him a Governor's pardon from Vijaylakshmi Pandit.

Rustom is tacky and often unintentionally hilarious. The 1963 film's sharp-tongued lawyerly repartee (between Motilal and Ashok Kumar) here becomes an over-the-top exchange between Sachin Khedekar and our hero, who argues his own case. The real-life Mamie Ahuja becomes Priti Makhija — Esha Gupta as a bizarrely excessive version of that era's Nadira-style vamp, complete with cigarette-holder. The machinations of these cardboard characters are of interest only because the Nanavati case still holds our attention.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 August 2016.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

Even as India's Daughter reveals our wilful myopia, it certainly suffers its own blind spots.

In December 2012, for the first time in my 25 years in Delhi, I heard the streets of my city resound with slogans for a cause that had never before gained political centrestage: women's equality. The largely leaderless crowds who gathered at India Gate, or marched in many Delhi neighbourhoods, were demanding not just justice for 'Nirbhaya' (as the then-unnamed survivor of a particularly brutal gang rape had been dubbed by the Indian media), but security and freedom for all Indian women. Certainly, there is a tension between those two demands - to keep women safe, in the eyes of many Indian men, is to keep them home. But many men and boys who had come out 'for Nirbhaya' also found themselves having to listen, perhaps for the first time, to female voices raised in unison for "baap se bhi, bhai se bhi, khap se bhi aazaadi". 

While the crowds grew larger, the government - both the UPA government at the centre and Sheila Dixit's government in Delhi - seemed paralysed. Dixit appeared on television, seemingly quite unable to comprehend the extent of public anger. When the government did act, it did so in the most oppressive manner possible: the Delhi police (controlled by the Centre) violently dispersed peaceful protestors with water cannons and lathis. Next, nine metro stations in Central Delhi were shut down, with the express purpose of not allowing protestors to reach India Gate. Far from quietening things down, these moves pushed the city further into ferment. 

At the time, I remember thinking of the government reaction as tragic and bizarre, focused as it was on trying to obstruct the protests, rather than engage with protestors. Two and half years later, a BBC documentary made about that 2012 moment has been met by a new Central government with exactly the same ostrich-like response: slapping a ban on the film, rather than engaging with it. Venkaiah Naidu calling the film "an international conspiracy to defame India" or Meenakshi Lekhi lamenting the fact that "this will certainly affect tourism": these remarks make it amply, ridiculously clear that the political establishment is not interested in actually tackling the problem of rape culture in India - only in making sure it doesn't get us international bad press. 

Like thousands of people who may not otherwise have watched Leslee Udwin's film, I was incited to do so by the government's stance. But it is the feminist voices that have come out so strongly against the film that have surprised me. 

Sure, it isn't a particularly good film. Udwin certainly doesn't provide the big-picture analysis that her oft-repeated claim about two years of reporting might lead you to expect. Some of the criticism that has been levelled at the film makes sense to me. It is true, for instance. that naming the film India's Daughter feels like an unthinking reiteration of the kind of language that Indian patriarchy so often uses: "Hamari bahu-betiyan", or "maan-samman ke liye tarasti hamari maa-behenon," as Narendra Modi said in his inaugural address-these phrases assume that the citizen being addressed is male. The emotive pull of India's Daughter lies really in the invisible attendant discourse in which 'we' fail to protect 'our daughters'. 

It is also true that the film's USP is its interview with Mukesh Singh, one of the six men arrested for the gang-rape. Singh, who claims to have only driven the bus, makes a series of statements about why rape happens. "A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy. Boy and girl are not equal. Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night, doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes. About 20 per cent of girls are good." He also explained to Udwin why this particular rape took the excessively gruesome form it did: "When being raped, [a woman] shouldn't fight back. She should just be silent and allow the rape. Then they'd have dropped her off after 'doing her', and only hit the boy." 

There is nothing here-either in the "taali ek haath se nahi bajti" sort of sentiment, or in the chilling matter-of-factness with which Singh makes clear that rape is a way of 'teaching a lesson' to women who refuse to stay in their place - that we have not heard before. On the other hand, we need constant reminders of just how commonplace these views are. The defense lawyers describing women as "diamonds" (which will be taken out by "dogs" if you put them out on the street), "flowers", and "food" (also not to be put "on the streets") may not represent "Indian culture", but they aren't alien to it either. By arguing that the documentary is providing a platform for these men to air "hate speech" against women, we seem to be assuming that such speech isn't already in circulation around us. Highlighting it, as Udwin does, does not seem to me to legitimise it but instead to return us to a much-needed conversation. 

It is the filmmaker's prerogative to choose what to focus on, and Udwin has chosen to build on the juxtaposition between the circumstances of the alleged rapists and that of their victim. The film's underlying thread makes these represent the two faces of post-liberalisation India: a girl who was born into poverty but was in the process of using education to draw herself and her family out of it, and young men from deprived rural backgrounds who never received any. It is a powerful narrative, of new hope crushed by age-old hopelessness, and it was certainly part of the reason why so many millions identified so deeply with the figure of Nirbhaya. 

But Udwin's focus on education as the solution, aided by the words of Sheila Dixit (who inever once pushed on her own government's misguided response to the protests) and Justice Leila Seth, makes it seem that most rapes in India are being committed by poor, uneducated men. What the film is guilty of is a lack of wider context for rape in India. As Rukmini Srinivasan has argued in her analysis of rape statistics, 97.7 per cent of all sexual violence in India, as per the DHS survey used in the UN Women database, is perpetrated by husbands. Stranger rape forms a very small proportion of reported rapes. By dwelling on the December 16 case without ever gesturing to its lack of representativeness, Udwin's film ends up having value only as the tragic tale of one life.