A Kite for Sore Eyes

My Mumbai Mirror column:

In Hardik Mehta's Amdavad Ma Famous and Prashant Bhargava's Patang, a city's universal passion for kites leaps off the screen in all its infectious energy and deeply immersive spirit

A still from Amdavad Ma Famous (2015), Hardik Mehta's award-winning documentary about the kite-flying festival of Uttarayana that takes place on 14 January in Ahmedabad.

 
“Ek din tum patang ka shauq kar loge, toh zindagi ke saatth saal tak woh shauq poora nahi hoyega [If you get into flying kites even for a day, you'll stay addicted for the next 60 years],” says an old Muslim cleric in Amdavad Ma Famous. “Yeh shauq aisa hai, bahut terrible shauq!” In case the maulana's words haven't convinced you, filmmaker and editor Hardik Mehta cuts from him to the sight of an old woman on a terrace – white sari, white hair in a loose bun, possibly older than the cleric – flying a kite with gusto.

Mehta's glorious 2015 short documentary, which won a host of awards across the world and was declared Best Non-Fiction Film at India's 63^rd National Film Awards, was set and shot during the festival of Uttarayan in Ahmedabad, when the whole city gathers on its rooftops to fly kites. The pivotal character is a young boy called Zaid Khedawalla, whose enthusiasm for the sport borders on the obsessive. Uttarayan is another name for Makar Sankranti, which falls on January 14 or 15 every year, based on the solar calendar. In the days leading up to the festival, Zaid wakes up very early in the morning to scout his neighbourhood for fallen kites. “By 10 am or so, he has gathered enough kites for the day,” says his father, laughing.

The fact that Zaid skips school to fly kites all day is a recurring theme in the film. His father tries to get him to go to class. The maulana tries to get the boys off the roof off the mosque. Mushtaq, caretaker of a bank building in the film's chosen neighbourhood of Astodia, tries to shoo them away, even locking up the terrace on some days. But Zaid, like thousands of other young boys in the city, is incorrigible. “You don't listen to your father, Zaid?” asks the filmmaker. “I do try,” grins Zaid. “But these kites are just too much fun.”

It is one of several charming moments in an utterly charming film. Mehta captures these boys in all their manic energy, but also locates them within the colour and chaos and community of a whole city abuzz with the same zeal – street markets selling varieties of kites, manjha-walas sharpening the thread with ground glass, ancillary products springing up to protect bike-riders from the sharp kite threads that criss-cross the streets at this time. Zaid's father later confesses that he was just as crazy about kites when he was Zaid's age. The crabby Mushtaq, who responds to someone calling the boys artists (“kalakaar”) by labelling them the face of the devil instead, is seen later in the film flying kites himself. When quizzed, his reply is hilarious: “I only fly the kites that have fallen on my terrace”.

Mehta's marvellous aides – he has a truly talented sound designer in Manoj M Goswami, and Alokananda Dasgupta has created a brilliantly uplifting soundtrack – help him make all sorts of other visual and aural connections. When Mushtaq speaks of the kites as bringing out the boys' “wild side”, Mehta cuts to monkeys clambering up and down the terraces, almost exactly in step with the boys. Dasgupta's soundtrack punctuates the bouncy ascent of all sorts of people – large, old, creaky – up roof ladders.

That heartwarming inclusiveness was also very much the point of Prashant Bhargava's lovely 2011 feature Patang, in which an Ahmedabad native, now settled in Delhi, returns to the city after many years during Uttarayan, bringing with him a teenaged daughter through whose fresh eyes we see Ahmedabad's old city. Patang contained one of Nawazuddin Siddiqui's earliest full-fledged performances, as the Ahmedabad-based nephew who bristles at his uncle's sudden descent upon the old family home.

But what is it about kites – other than the obvious and overdone fetishised idea of India as colour – that makes them cinema-worthy? Speaking to the legendary critic, the late Roger Ebert, about his film, Bhargava (who also died, tragically young, in 2015) said, “In India, kite flying transcends boundaries. Rich or poor, Hindu or Muslim, young or old — together they look toward the sky with wonder, thoughts and doubts forgotten. Kite flying is meditation in its simplest form.”

I recently came across a definition of meditation in another film, Matthew Vaughn's 2005 Layer Cake, that makes sense in this context. A man with a passion for high-quality guns says to Daniel Craig's high-stakes drug dealer character: “Meditation is concentrating the front of the mind with a mundane task so the rest of the mind can find peace.”

As you watch the myriad faces in Mehta's film, intensely concentrated on the kite in hand, eyes lifted to the heavens, it suddenly seems entirely clear why these fluttering bits of paper have captured the human imagination for centuries. And we have kites to thank for something else – at least they're not guns.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 Jan 2021

Heart of darkness

My Mirror column:

With Mukkabaaz, Anurag Kashyap has gone where many might fear to tread, crafting a picture of present day North India whose zingy energy doesn't quite hide its depressing core.

The marvellous Jimmy Shergill as Bhagwan Das Mishra in Mukkabaaz

It would be a mistake to go into Mukkabaaz expecting a sports film. The hero might be desperate to win a boxing championship, but his real battles are not in the ring. For the talented small fish trying to make his way up from the bottom, the entire Indian food chain seems to consist of big fish that want to be fed – or they'll gobble him up. Director Anurag Kashyap seems so keen for us to understand this that he makes his Shravan Kumar pretty much invincible as a boxer: the self-proclaimed Mike Tyson of Uttar Pradesh knows he can beat all his opponents – and after a while, so do we.

So while the film's many boxing scenes are painstakingly crafted: taut, grimy, often gripping, all the drama in Mukkabaaz lies outside them. And the stage for it to unfold are the bylanes of Bareilly: a town that seems to have truly arrived in the country's cinematic imagination, with Kashyap close on the heels of 2017's Bareilly ki Barfi and Babumoshai Bandookbaaz. With Mukkabaaz the fictive possibilities of the contemporary UP small town are exploited in the best way -- by hewing as close to the headlines as its characters' realities will allow, and then digging underneath them for unvarnished truths that aren't seen as fit to print.

Much of the unprintable is spoken by the man who can only be called the film's villain: the superb Jimmy Shergill as the boxing-coach-cum-bahubali who plays God in this universe, acting under the deliberate name of Bhagwan Das Mishra. And much of it revolves around caste. “Sauda toh kar nahi rahe,” says Bhagwan in one scene. “Brahmin hain, aadesh dete hain. [I'm not making a deal here. I'm a Brahmin, I give orders.]” At another crucial juncture, he proposes that Shravan drinks his urine, calling it “amrit”.

Elsewhere, he humiliates a rival coach (Ravi Kissen, doing justice to a rare interesting role) with the pointed question “Sanjay Kumar what? Brahman ho, Kshatriya ho, Kayastha ho, kya?” And when Kumar straightforwardly states his caste as “That fourth jaat that you're unable to even name: Harijan”, Bhagwan makes sure to rub his face in it by calling for a separate water container for the Dalit. Shergill's menacing gaze through rose-tinted spectacles in this scene is a remarkable visual touch: the English metaphor for a too-optimistic view of the world is turned on its head.

Certainly this is not an optimistic film. It almost makes us believe that it is, by handing us an old-style unreconstructed love-at-first-sight narrative between a sad-eyed struggling hero we can root for – the brilliant Vineet Kumar Singh, who is also the originator of the script – as well as a heroine whose muteness thankfully doesn't ever prevent her from having her say (Zoya Hussain, also superb). That illusion is aided by conducting us through their courtship and Shravan's career with Kashyap's usual dizzying energy, with much of the action cut to an immersive, subversive soundtrack and clap-worthy lines crafted out of the everyday wit that the North Indian town uses to cope with its dysfunction. This must be the only film in which boxing moves have appeared on screen marvellously in tandem with hiphop at one point and the murkis in a gentle, almost Hindustani classical song at another. But this is an adrenalin high, not meant to be sustainable. This is a world that is, after all, controlled by Bhagwan, who is, in some ways, another version of the petty, power-hungry sarkaari sports official who unmystifyingly recurs in Indian films about sporting underdogs: think of Girish Kulkarni's character in Dangal, or Zakir Hussain's devious Dev in 2016's Saala Khadoos.

But the reason why Jimmy Shergill's Bhagwan seems more frightening than those men is that he represents the dark heart of the New India – which is unfortunately just an emboldened, lawless version of the old.

In an era when a film like Padmavat(i), with what appears to be its overt celebration of 'Rajput' valour and barely-disguised vilification of the meateating Muslim as uncivilised, somehow manages to be identified with courageous filmmaking, Kashyap's fearlessness makes one want to cheer. Mukkabaaz's fictional depiction of how gau-raksha and the spectre of beef are used to shut down inconvenient voices is both chilling and entirely credible. There is also another long-drawn sequence in which caste plays an overt role, and here it is an OBC character – a Yadav, to be precise – who decides to rub Shravan's nose in the dirt because he thinks he is Rajput. Kashyap's script leaves a deliberate loophole on the question of Shravan's 'real' caste.

Whatever one one thinks of this script decision, or of the fact that the Yadav character's attempt at caste payback earns him only nasty humiliation, Mukkabaaz deals with our darkest selves, head on. 

This is a world where the most soaring dreams must be dreamt without recourse to the rules of justice or fair play. Dysfunction is assumed, and incorporated into plans. Whether it is expressed in a don harassing a family by sending a henchman to keep cutting off their (permanent) illegal electricity connection (the “katiya” that was at the centre of the documentary Katiyabaaz), or in strategizing how to defeat an opponent whom one knows full well is on steroids but cannot report because the system will not listen, Mukkabaaz depicts a world beyond the hope of law. And in this world, to win can mean losing.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Jan 2018.

A Place in the Crowd

My Mirror column:

A new film looks at our striving for space in the city — and the solidarities that might help us find it.

Those of us who live in cities spend most of our time being unhappy in them, and about them. Tu Hai Mera Sunday sets out to show us how we might reverse that, if we try. It’s a goal worth striving for — the happiness, as well as the idea of a film that tries to spark city-love in us — and Milind Dhaimade manages to take us with him much of the way.

It's true that the premise is a little too obviously metaphoric: a group of middle class Mumbaikars are aching to play their Sunday football game, but suddenly find all their options closed off. The search for a space where they can play together provides the literal and emotional underpinning of Dhaimade's narrative. And since his intentions are clearly warm and fuzzy, one probably shouldn't grudge him the by-the-numbers representativeness of the all-male gang he places at the film’s centre. There’s one Muslim (Avinash Tiwary), one Goan Christian (Vishal Malhotra), one Parsi (Nakul Bhalla), one Gujarati Hindu (Jay Upadhyay) — and a fifth (Barun Sobti), whom we assume to be Hindu and North Indian precisely because he is presented as unmarked by community or region to the point where he can be coded merely as “accha aadmi”.

The way to watch this film is to stop being cynical, and summon up instead that moment of wonder you have in the Mumbai local or the Delhi metro, when you look around you and see yourself as part of the marvellous mixture that is our urbanity: the sabzi-chopping working women heading to the end of the line, the graceful Gujarati matriarchs with their seedha palla saris, the burkha-wearing young woman on the way home from college, the salwar-kameez-clad officemates venting about their terrible boss. It doesn’t happen often, true, but surely you’ve had those moments, too — in which strangers come together for purposes great or small, and make the city seem, for that infinitesimal instant, a place we all inhabit together.

Dhaimade chooses sport as his unifier across community and to a lesser extent, across class, age and gender — and frankly, it isn't a bad narrative device through which to examine both the possibilities and the limits of our togetherness. It seems quite believable that the Muslim man about- town Rashid, who could never marry his Hindu sweetheart, can have two Hindus (and Parsis and Christians) as football buddies. Or that Gujju family man Jayesh, running from his family, might spend his Sundays with a bunch of unattached younger men. Or even that Arjun, the self-proclaimed “accha aadmi”, might woo a potential love interest by taking her aged dad off her hands and into his football game every Sunday.

But the film is juggling many things, and so at some point the football is abandoned in mid-air, while we follow each of our protagonists into their particular struggles. Some of these individual tracks are spelt out as romantic — such as the sweetly winsome one between Barun Sobti’s Arjun and Shahana Goswami’s hard-to-impress Kavi, or the awkward but heartfelt rescue attempt by Nakul Bhalla’s Mehernosh when his colleague is being mistreated by their asshole boss. Others contain unspoken questions, and are the more interesting because of that: like the connection between the very single Rashid and his mother-of-two neighbour (the sparkly-eyed Rasika Dugal); or Dominic, so used to his mother’s anxiety and his brother’s antagonism that he finds himself confused by the easy warmth of his brother’s new girlfriend.

Spatially, too, the film alternates between private or domestic spaces where class particularities are invariably more marked — the posher variety of cafe that keeps unground coffee beans on the table, a chawl where loud quarrels are the norm, a joint family home overrun with children and rituals — and the sort of gathering-places that would make up an ideal Habermasian public sphere: a city beach, a relaxed Irani cafe, a train station, a dive bar.

Dhaimade's film makes quite clear his attachment to these free or at least not-too-expensive public spaces, sites that also represent the culture of a pre-liberalisation era.

There is nothing wrong, exactly, about such a desire; many middle class people share it, which is why the closure of a Samovar in Bombay or a Volga in Delhi is greeted with a flood of nostalgic reminiscences. But perhaps we ought to look unequal access in the eye: an Arjun can choose to go to the Irani cafe or the expensive new one, a Rashid or a Jayesh Bhai, not so much. And there is something striking and sad about the fact that the search for space in Mumbai must eventually land the characters — and the film — in Goa.

Still, this is fiction, after all, and several happy endings are provided. One of them makes what is, I suppose, a practical suggestion: find a terrace from which to gaze out at the city skyline, and the height might make it seem less oppressive. But well, as Shahana Goswami's character tells us, even to access a building rooftop like that you need to know the name of someone who actually lives there.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Oct 2017. 

Men on the Ropes

My Mirror column: 

Dangal grapples with wrestling’s tradition of masculinity — and Indianness.

On the simplest level, the tale told in Dangal is an inspiring, heartfelt one — of women entering an arena traditionally reserved for men and not just surviving but making a mark. The two young women whose journey the film tracks — Gita Phogat and Babita Kumari — are a beacon not just of bodily discipline, but of the struggle against mindsets. Their lives are a window through which we catch a glimpse of a possible new world: the world as it might look if girls in North India were treated the same as boys.

At another level, though, Nitesh Tiwari’s film (not unlike Ali Abbas Zafar’s Salman-Khan-starrer Sultan earlier this year) is a carefully calibrated engagement with masculinity, femininity and nationalism (not necessarily in that order). And it is no coincidence, it seems to me, that the chosen site of that engagement is wrestling.

With links to royal patronage and feudal elite sponsorship, writes the anthropologist Joseph S. Alter in his study of wrestling culture in North India, wrestling has a long history in this part of the world. And although wrestlers earn prize money at the regional, state and national levels, it is not the professional sporting academies but the informal local akharas — public institutions often run on gifts, neighbourhood chanda collection and charitable donations — that feed the widespread popular interest in wrestling.

Both the wrestling films I am speaking of have taken on board the sport’s in-between, possibly ambivalent status —as something local and deep-rooted and organically Indian, but also tragically undervalued by the very national custodians of sport who should be propping it up. In both the fictional (Sultan) and non-fictional (Dangal) narrative, of course, the assumption is that this indigenous sporting tradition will finally acquire value by being showcased on the world stage.

Onwards to masculinity. “Wrestling in India (pahalwani) is a sport engaged in exclusively by men who are extremely concerned with the nature of their masculinity,” writes Alter. Any woman who has ever tried to enter an akhara (a gymnasium in which pahalwans practice) knows that it is well-nigh impossible to be allowed in, even just to watch. Just last July, at a small but reputed akhara in Shivajinagar in Bangalore, I was curtly told to stand outside, while my male companion — as much of an outsider there as I was — traipsed happily in. (Dangal’s titling images of real-life young wrestlers — large, serious-faced boys in langots — are thus a rare equal-opportunity sight.)

The point, however, is that keeping women out of the akhara is not just a regular form of gender injustice; it is entwined with traditional beliefs that have shaped wrestling in the subcontinent. This is a culture of masculine excess, simultaneously bombastic and threatened, driven by an obsession with celibacy, disciplined self-control and the retention of semen — all only achievable by steering clear of the poisonous temptations represented by women. As one old pahalwan says to Aamir Khan’s Mahavir Singh Phogat when he seeks training at the akhara for his daughters, “Is umar mein paap karvaayega ke?” The ideological links with certain traditions of Hindu asceticism should be clear. 

Less obvious — but more fascinating — is how wrestling is seen by its practitioners as a form of self-perfection in the service of the nation, and the way that self-construction might connect to Gandhi’s pushing of the celibacy ideal as part of nation-building.

So it should not surprise us that in what is arguably the most bombastically hypernationalist year independent India has yet seen, the Hindi film industry has given us not one but two films about wrestling. What’s interesting is that both Sultan and Dangal chose to engage with the figure of the female wrestler, rather a rare species in real life. In both, the women bear the burden of their father’s ambitions — and they come out shining, so long as they keep their sexuality at bay.

In Sultan, the educated daughter (Anushka Sharma) returns to the village to represent her father’s akhara and increase its status; she does very well in her appointed task, until love, marriage, and an ill-timed pregnancy comes in the way of her winning a world title. In Dangal’s retelling of the Phogat sisters’ lives, it is their ex-wrestler father Mahavir who makes the decision for them. Among the most emotive scenes in the film’s first half is the way the girls are coaxed and coached out of girly-ness. In what feels like a radical role reversal for a man who is otherwise a standard-issue rural Haryanvi father with traditional expectations for women, Mahavir practically forces his daughters to wear shirts and shorts, wakes them up at five every morning for a gruelling fitness routine, and in a gutwrenching scene, has the barber chop off their hair.

The plot of Dangal’s second half, in fact, turns on Gita’s becoming distracted from her appointed purpose in the world — wrestling — by relaxing into the ordinary femininity that was wrested from her as a child. Growing her hair, watching romantic Bollywood films, and generally acquiring a consciousness of herself as a woman is apparently enough to make her lose her edge as a wrestler.

Perhaps it would be incorrect to call Dangal a defense of celibacy, but certainly its deep suspicion of femininity owes something to wrestling’s particular history of (un)sexuality.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Dec 2016.

A Saleable Stardom

My Mirror column yesterday:

A sanitised film on MS Dhoni packages our yearning for heroes into a marketable sense of self-worth.

In 2012, a British magazine called SportsPro ranked Mahendra Singh Dhoni No 16 in their list of the world’s 50 most marketable athletes based on age, home market, charisma, crossover appeal and value for money (boxer Mary Kom at No 38 is the only other Indian in the list). In April 2013, the cover of Business Today magazine portrayed the Indian cricket captain as the Hindu god Vishnu. A blue-skinned Dhoni gazed out at us beatifically, his multiple arms bearing no iconic conch, discus, mace or lotus, but instead a selection of the many brands he helps advertise, from Lays chips to Boost energy drink. “God of Big Deals”, read the headline.

That controversial cover got Dhoni legally embroiled on the charge of 'hurting religious sentiments'. Criminal proceedings in the case were finally quashed by the Supreme Court only in September 2016, a month ago.

All through these years, however, Dhoni has reigned supreme in the realm of endorsements--and not without reason. There is no Indian story more saleable than that of a lower middle class boy becoming an enormously successful sportsman, and apparently achieving this with sheer talent and grit. Dhoni may not have quite started in rags, but he has certainly risen to riches. And Neeraj Pandey's recent film, MS Dhoni: The Untold Story, is clearly keen to ride that wave.

Several arguments have unfolded over whether it is or isn't a biopic -- does it truthfully depict Dhoni's life, goes the question. Those who believe that Pandey whitewashes his subject have cited several erasures: the film's total ignoring of Dhoni's (apparently estranged) elder brother Narendra Singh Dhoni, who has been with the BJP and is now an SP politician in Ranchi; the portrayal of him as someone who has only ever had two romantic entanglements (one girl sadly dies, the second he marries), and the removal of all things unseemly or colourful in the cricketer's public life, including the Vishnu avatar case.

There is no doubt that the film forms part of the cricketer's tightly-controlled crafting of a public self-image. This image is public in the way that all of us who are on social media will recognise – i.e., it deliberately includes those glimpses of the 'private' that we think will add to our appeal, and leaves out anything that might be perceived as unsavoury. In the case of the particular form of myth-making that is Bollywood, certain well-known real-life details are elided to create a more heroic hero and a more romantic romance, eg. the fact that Dhoni and his wife Sakshi actually knew each other from childhood is deleted from the film's telling of their relationship.

What the film is interested in doing is to paint the glorious arc of Dhoni's journey as a potential India story. The time and space are crucial to that narrative: the fact that the film’s star is born in the dim sky of Ranchi, in the ordinarily dysfunctional wasteland of what was then Bihar – and ends up (or rather, is still in orbit) in the extraordinarily glitzy new constellation that is post-T20 cricket. As the cricketer makes the slow move from the local sports shop owner to a gazillion nationwide advertising endorsements, from playing school matches whose existence is conveyed to the town population by a small boy on a bicycle to World Cup matches that receive practically nonstop media coverage, this is a liberalisation story if ever there was one.

The film gives us glimpses of much-needed specificity here: the Bihar cricket association head (Kumud Mishra, superb) making a wryly accurate crack about the reason that no young Biharis are being 'discovered' is that the state's adults care more about politics than cricket, or the terrible state of the Ranchi-Dumdum highway becoming a stumbling block for Dhoni's career. And yet the constituents of his supposedly inspiring ascent -- plush hotel rooms and lion-filled safari vacations -- are dull as ditchwater.

Meanwhile, the spaces of the past, which ought to have been more characterful – such as the railway quarters that Dhoni the ticket-checker shared with three other railway employees in Kharagpur – seem flat, at best sincerely documented. The camera jerks uneasily around the box-like bedroom, the tiny kitchen, the Indian-style toilet, as one imagines Dhoni might do if he were taken there today: not quite sure how to inhabit such a space any more. A large chunk of the film unfolds in railway stations, government offices and small-town government colonies, but the sense of atmosphere seemed sorely missing.

Other than Sushant Singh Rajput's quietly impressive turn as Dhoni, the thing that kept the film watchable for me was Dilip Jha's dialogue, from the faintly-Bengali-accented speech of young Mahi's school coach Banerjee Sir to the nicely-done Bihari inflections of most of Dhoni's friends and family. (I particularly loved the fishseller who resists Mrs. Banerjee's bargaining with a plaintively accurate “Kaise posayega Boudi?”)

This is a disappointing film in several respects, and yet there is no doubt that most Indians who enter the cinema will find themselves deeply moved. As we watch Dhoni's old friends and dogged supporters, teachers, even past rivals take a personal pride in his performance on the world stage, we realise how many people's efforts can go into the making of one. In a country so hungry for heroes, letting us feel that we helped create them is a sure-shot recipe for success.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 9th Oct 2016.

Wrestling with shadows

My Mirror column:

Sultan is a vehicle crafted for the Salman Khan persona. Our responses to it will be inescapably shaped by that.

A still from Sultan, starring Anushka Sharma and Salman Khan

There's a moment in Sultan when Salman Khan, as the film's eponymous prize wrestler Sultan Ali Khan, after a series of spectacularly bare-faced product-placements doubling up as fictional advertisements, faces the camera and pronounces that he's done enough: “Pehelwan hoon, actor nahi. [I'm a wrestler, not an actor]” It's a scene only Salman Khan can pull off – highlighting his brawny image in the guise of self-deprecation; cocking a snook at critics who might dare suggest that acting isn't his strongest suit, while laughing all the way to the bank.

Ali Abbas Zafar's film about a celebrated wrestler's fall and rise has provided Khan with yet another opportunity to play a variation on his own myth. Given the “bachcha hai, maaf kar do” remarks that greet the 50-year-old superstar's every real-life crime and misdemeanour, the film's presentation of Salman's character -- as hot-headed but pure of heart, eminently fallible but eventually forgiveable, channelling emotion into violence -- feels rather too close for comfort.

Sultan is the prototype of the childish man, whom we must not just absolve but actually applaud for his childishness: “Mera pyaar pakka hai, jaise tera bachpana saccha hai (My love is strong, just as your childishness is true),” says Sultan's estranged wife Aarfa (an impressive Anushka Sharma) as she accepts him back.

Aarfa, on paper, is a textbook 'women's empowerment' character: a sharp talker with impressive wrestling moves and more impressive ambitions. The only daughter of the village pehelwan (Kumud Mishra), Aarfa gets an education in Delhi, but returns to carry on her father's legacy, to represent his Jaanbaaz Akhara to the world. And even as Sultan remains stuck at the standard-issue combination of stalking and relentless hopefulness that is apparently to be accepted as the Indian male's repertoire of wooing tactics, Aarfa departs from the Hindi film heroine's usual imagined response. No coy surrender for her. What we get instead is an impassioned speech about how falling in love with someone is based on admiring them in some way -- and Sultan's clowning doesn't quite cut it. There is a subtext here about love between equals. And yet the film steers clear of making its man-wrestling heroine ever wrestle its hero.

Because this is a film that has carefully calibrated how far it wants to travel up this path. So Aarfa's perfectly justified pronouncement is treated by Sultan as an insult -- and a challenge. It is what incites him to become a wrestler. But while his unprecedented success earns him Aarfa's admiration and love, his return gift to her is an unplanned pregnancy which puts an end to her World Championship dreams. Hindi film viewers have seen pregnancy come in the way of a female athlete's career before, in the biopic Mary Kom. But unlike there, or the recent Ki and Ka, flawed as both films were, Ali Abbas Zafar's narrative has no interest in its heroine's response. So caught up is it with Sultan's point of view that Aarfa isn't given even a single line through which we might imagine how it might feel to crush her ambitions underfoot on her husband's victory march. It is to Anushka Sharma's credit that she manages to make her teary smile (as she watches her husband celebrate the impending arrival) radiate something more complicated than joy.

And of course, it can't be motherhood that she has any ambivalence about, so the film creates a way for her to be the stubborn match to Sultan while also displaying her womanliness. It is not that Aarfa isn't a believable character, sadly, she is. So I suppose my frustration must be explained by Sultan's response to a journalist who asks why his wife left him: “Lugaiyan paida hi ladaai karne ke liye hoti hain.”

The second half of Sultan, which drops the inane gags for a succession of dramatic wrestling matches, is much more watchable than the first, though it does lay on the Salman body-building and sacrifice stuff a bit thick. But then that's true of the film as a whole. For instance, the recurring trope of Sultan as turning himself into a saand, a bull who cannot be broken. Those words are actually used to describe him by his coach (a believably cynical Randeep Hooda). The theme is underlined by the portrayal of Sultan as a man who achieves the impossible twice, out of stubbornness – or to put it exactly, bull-headedness. But what's interesting is how the visual imagery reiterates this idea of Sultan as a bull: not wild, but a strong beast of burden. Sultan's first attempt to train himself involves strapping himself to a wooden plough and dragging it through the fields; later he pulls a tractor, and a cart.

There's some heavily-underlined dialogue about the kisaan and the pehelwaan to add to this. And a dose of present-day patriotism is thrown in, with Parikshit Sahni's mild criticism of his English-speaking son's generation for thinking everything imported is cool. The son-of-the-soil as the underdog who trumps the firangs (white and black, though the final defending champion is of course, white) is a crowdpleasing theme if ever there was one – though of course his desi wrestling style only becomes a buzzword when he's forced to abandon its rules for a televised freestyle contest. As Zafar manages to make his Haryanvi Muslim protagonist say at a moment when he seems at a loss for words: 'Bharat mata ki jai'.  

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 July 2016.

Reeling in the Boxing Ring

My Mirror column last Sunday:

Saala Khadoos reframes a story we know from many sports films: the coach plagued by controversy takes on an unlikely candidate and trains him or her to success. The most well-known example of this narrative in recent decades is probably Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning 2004 film starring Hilary Swank as a Missouri waitress who becomes a prize-winning boxer under training from a crusty old coach (Eastwood himself). The sports film is relatively new in Hindi cinema, but we, too, have had this narrative appear in Chak De India (2007), in which Shah Rukh Khan plays a discredited (Muslim) hockey captain who regains nationalist credibility by coaching an underdog Indian women's hockey team to a World Cup victory.

Unlike Swank's character in Million Dollar Baby (or Priyanka Chopra's in 2015's Mary Kom), in Saala Khadoos it is not Madhi (Ritika Singh) who hankers after the idea of being a boxer. It is an otherwise dismissive boxing coach Adi Tomar (Madhavan) who zones in on her as an unpolished diamond, one he's certain will shine if he can hone her natural talent.

A former boxer who's been 'demoted' from Delhi to Chennai by long-time rival Dev (Zakir Hussain), who is now head honcho of the women's selection team, Adi is a jaded character who stands around delivering cynical comebacks even as the results of trial bouts are being clearly overturned by nepotism right before his eyes. Madhi - the loyal younger sister of the boxer being passed over - attacks the selection committee in a rage, letting fly a series of punches and kicks before she is dragged away. Something about Madhi's energy intrigues Adi, and he offers to train her, but she only agrees to show up for four hours a day when he promises to pay her an allowance of 500 rupees a day.

The dynamic here -- the reluctant wild child pupil and the committed, mature coach -- is one of the interesting things about Sudha Kongara's screenplay, especially because Madhavan's Adi is by no means the calm level-headed guy in other parts of his life. When we first meet him, he is in bed with a married woman. (When accused of this by the snooping Dev, he announces - quite rightly - that it is no business of theirs). Minutes after, told he is being transferred on a fictitious sexual harassment charge, he completely loses it, grabbing Dev's crotch in a graphic display of violent anger. With the uncontrollable Madhi, he plays the disciplined foil. Yet it's apparent that his connection with her is one that is founded on a certain identification, the recognition of a younger self in this youthful, slightly crazed creature who has not been broken in.

Saala Khadoos makes Dev a peg on which to hang pretty much all the problems that assail sports, particularly women's sports, in India -- third-rate facilities; inept, power-hungry trainers; corruption and nepotism; and sexual harassment. Thankfully Hussain is talented enough to make us believe entirely in this wholly nasty character.

Mumtaz Sorcar as Lux (short for Luxmi), the older sister who has been struggling to box her way into a police job for years cuts an interesting figure - unusual as her choice of boxing is, she doesn't have that fire in the belly, and is upstaged completely by Madhi when Madhi starts to take boxing seriously.

Kongara extracts affecting performances from her actors, but the film is often overblown and needlessly loud. And her constant use of musical sequences to do the storytelling leaves us feeling less for the characters than we might otherwise have done. Yet we stay with Madhi till that final scene in the ring that we all know is coming.

What is it about boxing that makes it so powerful as a cinematic subject? It has certainly been the most often-seen sport in American films, from as early as 1931, with King Vidor's The Champ, through Martin Ritt's The Great White Hope (1970), about a black boxer, and Martin Scorcese's classic Raging Bull (1980), down to David O. Russell's The Fighter (2000), about two brothers who're boxers. And of course there was Sylvester Stallone's immensely successful Rocky series, which traversed almost three decades. The most memorable boxing film in my book, though, is the Italian classic Rocco and His Brothers, with Luchino Visconti directing the incandescent Alain Delon.

The cinematic figure of the boxer, drawing from many real life stories, is often someone who rises from poverty through grit and determination. Hindi films, have used this particular trope to varying success - think of Ghulam, which adapted On the Waterfront, or more recently Bombay Velvet, where a miscast Ranbir Kapoor wins many a bloody prize fight. Saala Khadoos is as uneven as these. And yet we will stay on to cheer till the end.

Paan Singh Tomar: Not just another daku film

A young army jawaan returns two days late from his leave. Army discipline requires that he be punished, so he is told to pick up his luggage and run ten times round the ground. This is the sort of scene that would normally be evidence of the hero’s gruelling training, or perhaps the injustice of his lot. In Tigmanshu Dhulia’s film, though, our hero finishes his rounds so fast and so effortlessly that his commanding officer refuses to believe he’s actually done them. Do another ten, then, he says, looking on as the lanky young man from Morena runs merrily around the ground ten more times without the slightest sign of exhaustion. “It’s the first time I’ve seen anyone actually enjoying a punishment,” says the incredulous officer.

This is but the first of the wonderful anecdotes out of which Tigmanshu Dhulia has crafted Paan Singh Tomar: the tale of a man who first earned fame as a steeplechase champion and then, in a strange twist of fate, notoriety as a dreaded dacoit. Dhulia first encountered the tragic story of Tomar while in Chambal on the sets of Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen(1994), for which he was Casting Director. Now, 18 years and four feature films later, he has finally managed to bring Tomar’s story to the screen.

The ravines on either side of the Chambal river – Chambal ki ghaati – are legendary for having sheltered a steady stream of dacoits, men who may have been villains in the eyes of the state but who often cultivated a Robin Hood aura and laid out an alternative model of justice, terrorising the rich and impressing the poor. Sultana Daku, who was captured by the British in the 1920s, was the subject of many folk songs and one of the most famous nautankis ever (and in the 70s a pale shadow of a film). There was also Daku Man Singh, unchallenged from 1939 until his death at the hands of Gurkha troops in 1955; he, too, was the hero of a nautanki (and of a 1971 Babubhai Mistry film starring Dara Singh). In fact, Hindi cinema is replete with dakus – sometimes playing the most villainous of villains – most famously Gabbar Singh in Sholay (1975) – but sometimes emerging as more complicated figures evoking audience sympathy: think of Dilip Kumar in Ganga Jamuna (1961), Sunil Dutt in Mother India (1957) or Mujhe Jeene Do (1963), or even Vinod Khanna’s star-making role in Mera Gaon Mera Desh (1971).

What Dhulia does with Paan Singh Tomar, though, is to thwart any filmi expectations you might have. There are no fiery tilaks, no pagdis, no dishonoured sisters, not even an item number in the daku’s lair. Tomar’s tale is so vivid and strange that Dhulia needs only to stick close to life to create the most marvelous fiction. And this he does with impeccable felicity.

Opening in 1980 when a stuttering local journalist (the dependable Brijendra Kala) manages to get an interview – the privilege of an audience, really – with the feared Paan Singh, the film moves swiftly into flashback. It is superbly structured, the first half recreating how the young Bengal Engineers recruit grew into an international level athlete, and the second showing the irrevocable transformation of a soldier and sportsman into a bandit.

Dhulia’s brilliance is in making it clear that Paan Singh does not, in either case, actively set out to become what he does; it is circumstances that drive him. Poverty sends him into the army; a simple hunger for unlimited rations drives him into the Sports section; humiliation at the hands of the very state that he has served pushes him to rebel against it.

And yet Dhulia’s tale is by no means about coincidences. It is as if the seeds of a man’s many possible futures lie dormant within him, waiting for a combination of historical accident and individual action to bring them to fruition. In one of the very first scenes, for example, we see a suspicious superior officer ask Paan Singh if he or his family have ever had any run-ins with the law. “Ham ka hamaare mama tak ka nahi hua hai,” says Paan Singh, with a straightforward pride that his lineage will not let him hide. “The police never manage to catch [us].”

It is the greatest strength of this biopic that it comes as close as it is possible to come to showing us, as if from within, the simplicity – almost inevitability – of every decision taken by a man whose life, seen from without, seems utterly contrarian.

Like its central character, the film’s cinematography is unflashily evocative, moving between the calm, verdant green of the army cantonment (Dhulia and his cinematographer Aseem Mishra shot in Roorkee, where Paan Singh actually served) and the dry, dusty browns of the Northern Madhya Pradesh villages and ravines. There is much pleasure to be derived from the visual detailing – the hundreds of flies buzzing around the petha in a sweet shop, the man shaking with fearful tears under a barber’s caress, the cows released at the opportune moment of a raid on a village in the hope that the police will not fire, for fear for commiting the sin of gau hatya – but the real masterstroke of this film is the dialogue, written by the director himself.

Tigmanshu Dhulia’s magisterial control over the cadences of North Indian speech has been admired ever since his debut Haasil (2003), a love story set amidst the nasty campus politics of his own home town, Allahabad. His 2011 offering Sahib Bibi aur Gangster did a fantastic job with dialogue, too. Here in PST, he is both at his sharpest and his most uncompromising — providing one-liners like “Beehad mein baaghi hote hain, dakait parliament mein milte hain” that will get the claps, but sticking to the harsh ‘haigo’s and soft ‘hamaai’s of an undiluted Morena-Bhind dialect.

There is some predictability built into a film like this, where you already know what happens, and the post-interval section does drag a little bit occasionally. But this is a film that you should watch not just because it is a rare treat to have a Hindi film director treat this subject with the complexity and intelligence it deserves. You should watch it simply to witness the marvellous Irrfan Khan sink his teeth into the role of a lifetime, essaying with moving simplicity the baffled rage of peacable masculinity driven inexorably to violence.

First published in Firstpost.