The train ride as a technological fantasy

My TOI Plus/ Mumbai Mirror column:

In popular 1970s Hindi cinema, the train became central to an imagined world of infrastructural achievement and finesse. Sadly, we're still content to live in the dream.

Amitabh Bachchan prepares to get off a train in a screenshot from Parwana (1971)

In the 1960s and 1970s, the train in Indian cinema starts to appear as a space of sophistication and luxury. Whether in 'art films' like Satyajit Ray's Nayak (which I mentioned last week), or a full-on commercial Hindi film like the racy Rajesh Khanna starrer The Train, the upper class railway compartment represents high standards of comfort and hospitality. This is true despite the fact that Ray, ever the realist, has a senior Calcutta executive in Nayak express annoyance that he can't even get a beer on the AC Deluxe Express (precursor of the Poorva Express, the train between Calcutta and Delhi before the Rajdhani Express came along three years later in 1969). (The fellow isn't entirely to blame for hoping, given how much the train pantry car echoes the atmosphere at one of Calcutta's Anglophone clubs, where no evening would flow without alcohol.) He gets a Coke instead, though the waiter only comprehends when told “Coca Cola”. Still, the service on these filmi trains is polite, English-comprehending and very classy -- restaurant-like, in an era when few people ate out often. There is also a degree of fascination with waiting rooms and railway restaurants: places you could only access as a passenger on the long-distance train network. The murders on the Calcutta Mail in The Train hinge on one passenger being seduced away from the coupe by the prospect of a meal at the railway restaurant with a sashaying Nanda.

MK Raghavendra and others have marked that the train in the 1950s and 60s often mapped onto the idea of India – such films as Bimal Roy's 1955 Devdas, whose nationwide journeying hero I have mentioned in another context, but also nationalist films with train songs depicting children: 'Aao bacchon tumhe dikhayein jhaanki Hindustan ki' from Jagriti (1954) and 'Nanha-munna rahi hoon, desh ka sipahi hoon' from Mehboob Khan's Son of India (1962).

It is true that even in those decades, trains were occasionally linked to crime: murder in Shart and smuggling in Aar Paar (both 1954), not to mention the goofy Half Ticket (1962) with Kishore Kumar as the comic hero who becomes an unsuspecting mule for stolen diamonds on a train to Bombay.

But as Akshay Manwani suggested in a 2015 article, it was really in the 1970s, with films like The Train, Shor (1972) and Do Anjaane (1976) that the thriller element begins to dominate Hindi cinema's portrayal of trains. Speed, danger and the accident ally with the sense of danger that comes with being isolated in a train compartment, often miles away from the nearest outpost of the law. You can easily kill a man on a train – or, as in Do Anjaane, push him off it – with no witness, and the police will only arrive much later, in another place. The moving train is a world unto itself.

For me, though, the film that exemplifies this marvellous sense of excitement about trains comes right at the start of decade: the 1971 Parwana, directed by Jyoti Swaroop (who also made Padosan and ought to be much better known). It is perhaps best remembered for Amitabh Bachchan's performance as one of Hindi cinema's earliest jealous lovers: his tall, serious Kumar is scarily believable as the brooding artist whose romantic obsession crosses over into violent vengefulness. But it also displays some unusual detailing for a commercial Hindi film of its time, not just in its liberal characters, but with regard to things like characters' surnames, dates and place-names. The camera often zooms into print on screen, from a wedding cards to a 'No Photography Allowed' sign at Nagpur Airport (yes, cheeky!).

The train-related plot on which the film hinges involves a court case in which the wrong man and the heroine's true love (Navin Nischol) is charged for a murder that Amitabh Bachchan -- the jilted lover and real murderer – apparently could not have committed. Why? Because he was on a train at the time. The film's revelatory flashback sequence – with a stylish Bachchan striding through streets and stations and staircases in his coat, dark glasses and muffler (here the detailing goes for a toss, since this is meant to be Bombay in August) – shows just how he did it (spoiler alert). He used the train – but he also used a plane.

Watching Parwana in the midst of India's horrifyingly mishandled Covid-19 second wave, when the breakdown of our sorely limited health, transport and digital infrastructure is on full display, I was struck by the film's deep belief in functioning infrastructure. Parwana's murder plot is planned and executed flawlessly because -- in the film – trains run exactly on time, flights land and take off smoothly, taxis and public telephones can be found exactly when and where they are needed. The reference to television in a light early scene is as much a part of this vision – remember this is 1971, and TV transmission had not even reached Bombay till 1972.

Parwana, like many Hindi train films of the 1970s, is really a fantasy about technology and infrastructure. Tragically, our tendency to believe in the fantasy of our technological achievements remains alive and well in 2021, at the great human cost of reality.

Published in TOI Plus/ Mumbai Mirror, 16 May 2021

When silent films speak of a lost past

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The discovery of a treasure trove of forgotten nitrate films from the early 1900s is the inspiration for a magical documentary

Sometimes a film feels like an epiphany. Watching Bill Morrison's Dawson City: Frozen Time, currently streaming on an international film platform, had that sort of effect on me. It tells the strange and wondrous tale of how nearly 400 silent films from the early 1900s, managed to survive in the permafrost of what had once been a small-town swimming pool -- emerging from the ground in the 1970s, to finally find their place in the history of humanity.

Technically a documentary, Morrison's film is an exquisite assemblage of facts and footage so artfully and lovingly crafted that it feels like an epic. That epic quality comes from two historic elements – the Canadian gold rush, which originally brought Dawson City into being, and the invention of cinema, which created these thousands of feet worth of early film images, only to abandon them. What Morrison captures, without ever spelling it out explicitly, is the way the treasure trove -- known as the Dawson City Film Find -- offers up a conjoined history of these two lost worlds: A forgotten town and a forgotten technology.

And yet both the town and the technology were, a century and a quarter ago, part of the crucible of modernity. Morrison begins with the fact that film originated in an explosive, nitrate cellulose. The Kodak company turned it into nitrate film by adding camphor to it and then coating it with plastic emulsion. But nitrate film, on which all early cinema was stored, remained highly inflammable, and the documentary shows, over and over again, that the history of early cinema is also a history of fire. From Thomas Alva Edison's film manufacturing plant exploding, to the Solax Film Company Fire in 1919, from the repeated burning down of Dawson City's film theatres, down to the 1967 warehouse fire in which the National Film Board of Canada lost its entire nitrate film collection, the sense of tragic loss comes to be replaced by a sense of inevitability.

The film is also a deep dive into Dawson: Now a small town with a tiny population of 1300-odd people (as of 2011), but once the site of a remarkable moment in world history. Gold was discovered near here on August 17, 1896, at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers near the boundary with the US state of Alaska. Over the next three years, thousands of prospectors made the extremely difficult journey to this freezing-cold terrain, often crossing snow-covered passes on foot, hoping, literally, to strike gold. During the height of the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898, Dawson City’s population exceeded 30,000.

Naturally, entrepreneurs of all sorts arrived, hoping to ‘mine the miners’, as Morrison puts it. Fred Trump opened a brothel called the Arctic Hotel and Restaurant in the nearby town of Whitehorse -- the origin, says Morrison, of the Trump family fortune. Casinos were the other gig in town, as you might expect from a place full of men on the make. An athletics association building came up, with boxing matches organised for a largely male audience. Soon, there were not one but three theatres screening films.

But as the more accessible mines began to be exhausted, and gold was discovered some distance away in Nome, Alaska, the city of Dawson emptied out, becoming a quarter of its size in a year. Films continued to come to Dawson, but they often took two or three years after their first release, to arrive. The town was at the end of a film distribution line, and the distributors didn't want to pay for their passage back. The films were already old news. So they ended up being stored in Dawson. As the years passed, and the town's buildings started running out of space, thousands of old silent film reels were burnt, or simply disposed of in the Yukon river. A small section remained -- and the rest is history: A history whose incredible details you should watch the film for.

Yet Morrison's film is no mere history book on screen. What he does is a marvel in terms of film form. He uses still images -- including photographs taken during the Gold Rush by a photographer called Eric Hegg, which have their own magical history of survival and recovery -- as well as newspaper articles, printed posters and archival letters. He uses newsreels from Pathe and Fox. And he combs all of this archival visual material for Dawson history, from an early instance of baseball match fixing to a real-life Hollywood murder with a Dawson connection. And of course, Dawson's connections with early cinema. But he goes far beyond using the footage as factual archive; he uses the reels from the Dawson Film Find, their edges marked by decades of water damage, to craft a magical visual history of their time. A sentence like “The years and decades passed Dawson by” is illustrated with shots of silent film heroines sleeping, as if waiting to be awakened by the kiss of some fairytale prince. We watch entranced as a series of unidentified film characters gamble, or wrestle with their lovers, or wait outside doors, eavesdropping. It feels like we're eavesdropping too, on history.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 Mar 2021

Shelf Life: Run of the Mill

The July edition of my 'Shelf Life' column on clothes viewed through the prism of literature, for the website 'The Voice of Fashion':

A reading of literary works set in and around the Industrial Revolution which remain relevant today, showing that no technological innovation is by itself any guarantee of social betterment

 Power loom weaving in a cotton mill in Lancashire England, ca. 1835. Engraving with modern watercolour. (Shutterstock)

As any school textbook will tell you, the Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the mid-1700s. Production became increasingly mechanised, accelerating a process of economic change that altered the very character of society. What the textbooks don't stress enough is how much of the technological innovation that drove the Industrial Revolution was in textiles. John Kay's flying shuttle, patented 1733, allowed wider cloth to be woven faster. The greater demand for yarn was met by James Hargreaves's 1764 spinning jenny, where one person could work many spindles, and Richard Arkwright’s 1769 water frame, with spindles operated by water rather than manually. Both were supplanted by Samuel Crompton's 1779 spinning mule, which spun thread strong enough for Britain to finally start producing cheap calico cloth. Then came Edmund Cartwright's vertical power loom in 1785.

Combined with Britain's colonial status, these innovations meant that by the 1830s, 85 per cent of the world's raw cotton was being processed in the mills of Lancashire. Manchester and the surrounding mill towns began to draw researchers and writers concerned about the new working class. Benjamin Disraeli, later Britain's Prime Minister, wrote a novel called Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), in which an upper class character travels to the industrial north to see working class conditions. The popular Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell set her first book Mary Barton (1848) in Manchester: a romance between her working class heroine and a mill-owner's son. In Gaskell's North and South (1854), we see workers’ troubles and early strikes through the eyes of a heroine who clashes with a cotton mill owner, only to eventually marry him.

Real-life romance in the mill town could sometimes expand on the novelist's imagination.

Friedrich Engels, born into a German textile dynasty that had made its fortune from linen yard bleaching, mechanised lace-making and silk ribbon manufacture, came to Manchester because his father had a thread factory there. Expected to learn the textile business, Engels instead produced The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), establishing in horrific detail how early industrialisation had actually worsened workers' lives. Low wages and terrible living conditions led to much higher mortality from disease in Manchester than in the surrounding countryside. Karl Marx's reading of the book helped forge the intellectual partnership of a lifetime – and Marx and Engels' critique of capitalism.

But Manchester is also where Engels forged a long-term partnership with Mary Burns, then a worker in his father's factory. Rachel Holmes' delightful 2014 biography of Marx's daughter, the feminist and trade unionist Eleanor Marx, describes Mary Burns' role in Engels' life as “directive and Socratic”: “Engels took Mary to bed; Mary took Engels to the tenements and to the heart of the Irish immigrant community of Manchester... [explaining] the conditions of factory and domestic workers.”

Among the sharpest fictional takes on the textile industry came almost a century later, in 1951, when Roger MacDougall's superb play, The Man in the White Suit, was turned into a Ealing Studio comedy by his cousin Alexander McKendrick. Starring the great British actor Alec Guinness, The Man in the White Suit is a cynical comedy, with its cynicism extending all the way across capitalist society.

The film opens with a younger textile mill owner called Michael Corland romancing Daphne, the daughter of an older and richer mill owner called Birnley, with purely monetary desires. Guinness plays Sidney Stratton, a misunderstood scientific genius who takes yard jobs in one textile mill after another so that he can stealthily use the labs. When Sidney devises an artificial fabric that will last forever and repels dirt, Daphne convinces her father to test it. But when word gets out, the mill-owners gang up to prevent what they see as a calamity for business. “The spinning jenny and the mechanical loom increased output,” says one captain of industry. “This'll finish it!”

Sidney somehow escapes their clutches and is trying to reach the newspapers, but is stopped by his old worker friends: the unions, too, are dead against a fabric whose production has an inbuilt time limit. Even these socialist workers, aware enough to describe themselves as “flotsam floating on the high tide of profit”, cannot actually imagine a world beyond the short-term goals of capitalist production. If obsolescence is not built into the things workers produce, then things will last forever; demand will dry up – and so will jobs.

A still from The Man in the White Suit, an Ealing Studio adaptation of Roger MacDougall's play

The Man in the White Suit is even more relevant today, when late capitalism's need to artificially inflate demand ensures greater inbuilt obsolescence. It is more so because technological innovation is constantly being thrown at us as a panacea, without enough attention paid to the politics that surrounds that technology: think, in post-2014 India, of the discourse around the digital, in relation to demonetisation, lockdown relief or Covid-tracking apps.

Just as with the textile industry at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, technological innovation is not by itself any guarantee of social betterment. Who has access to that technology, who controls it, and to whose benefit – that is what determines whether it is good for the human race: whether, in fact, technology will mean progress.

Published on The Voice of Fashion, 16 July 2020.

Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone

My Mirror column (10 May 2020):

As India's labouring poor are locked into cities and die tragically in their unaided attempts to get home, Muzaffar Ali's 1978 migrant classic Gaman acquires new layers of meaning.

In an early scene in Gaman, a hesitant Ghulam Hasan (Farooque Shaikh) gets off a train at VT Station and manages to find his way to the jhopadpatti that appears to be his childhood friend Lallulal's (Jalal Agha) Mumbai address. He pauses beside a group of young men chatting by the roadside. “Sunoh bhaiyya,” says Ghulam softly, his tongue still travelling along the slow perlocutionary path of his native UP village. “Woh kya hai ki kya Lallulal Tiwari yahan rehta hai?” 

The retort is quick and stinging, and the word now jumps out at us, an untranslated social footnote that will not be suppressed: “Apun tumko bhaiyya dikhta hai?”

One of the others deigns to direct the lost newcomer to the tin-roofed shanty (“third gali after the municipal toilet”) that the affable Lallu shares with several other men, and Ghulam quickly becomes one of its occupants. But Muzaffar Ali's 1978 directorial debut, a film made three years before his much more famous Umrao Jaan, never lets his viewers forget that this rickety roof over their heads is both temporary and tenuous. Shelter in the big city is so precious a thing that Lallu's labelling of it as his “Taj Mahal” is both a bad joke and thoroughly heartfelt. And the emotion only heightens through the film, as Lallu and his sweetheart Yashodhara (Gita Siddharth, of Garm Hava fame) yearn ever more for a place of their own so they can marry, while even the rented kholi is threatened with demolition.

For Ghulam though, it is the village home he has left behind that calls out to him, in the shape of letters bringing news of his ailing mother and his lonely wife Khairun (Smita Patil), whose face drifts up from his memories and looms large over the cityscape that he learns gradually to traverse. Aided by older men from his native region, so-called bhaiyyas, Ghulam becomes, like Lallu, a taxi driver in Mumbai. The film is full of shots of Shaikh in a taxi, his sad eyes seeing but not quite seeing the urban crowd he is now part of. “Hiyan bheed ka kauno hisaab naahi,” as he tells Lallu wonderingly.

Muzaffar Ali's use of songs is perhaps his most affective talent, and it is powerfully evident here. In the picturisation of the film's magisterial anthem of urban desolation “Seene mein jalan, aankhon mein toofan sa kyun hai/ Is sheher mein har shakhs pareshaan-sa kyun hai? (Why does the heart burn, why is there a storm in my eyes/ Why is everyone troubled in this city?)”, our gaze travels past blocks and blocks of urban housing, and cars seen from above, like unending queues of ants, and we hear Shahryar's line: “Ta-had-e nazar ek bayabaan sa kyun hai?” “Why is there a wilderness as far as the eye can see?”

One of Gaman's achievements as a film about the migrant experience is that the distance between the village and the city feels insurmountable, despite the technologies that bridge the two. That feeling is gestured to in the film's very first shot, when a letter is being laboriously typed with one finger (on a typewriter that, in one of those surreal moments that populate the watching of so much in 2020, bears the brand-name Corona), and the camera moves up from there to the telegraph lines that stretch across a bucolic rural landscape. A great deal of screen time is spent on trains and buses – and at moments of particular emotion, Ali inserts a distant shot of a plane in the sky, like some imagined modern-day pigeon-post of the heart.

Conditions of labour and lack of money make it nearly impossible for the poor migrant to go back home, even when nothing is ostensibly stopping him. In the third month of a shockingly unplanned and heartlessly implemented lockdown, when lakhs of India's working poor are being forcibly kept from going back home, Gaman's final sequence bears a terrible new weight. Farooque Shaikh bundles up his few belongings in his lovely old-style trunk (the objects of the feudal Awadh village were still beautiful) and arrives at VT, hoping to depart as spontaneously as he had arrived. But more than half the money he has saved in a year will go on just the journey home, he thinks, and his feet stop where they are. We leave him standing behind the collapsible gate that enters the platform, locked down in the city while his mind climbs onto the train, over and over.

I'd like to end this column with another moment from Gaman, when Ghulam is actually on a train. He and Lallu are going to meet Yashodhara. They are already late when the train suddenly stops. What happened, asks Ghulam the newbie. Must be an accident, says Lallu. It turns out a man has been killed under the train’s wheels. “The bus would have been faster,” says Lallu. “Yahi gaadi mili thhi marne ke liye! (Did he have to choose this train to die under?)” rues another man. “Patri se hataane ka aur gaadi start karne ka. Passenger log ka kaahe ko time barbaad karne ka (Get him off the tracks and start the train. Why waste the time of passengers?)” says a third voice.

Ghulam looks distraught. “Wait and watch,” says Lalloo. “You’ll get used to it like all of us.”

Watching Gaman in mid-2020, it feels sickeningly clear that all of us are now passengers, whose time can’t be wasted on mourning those the train rolls over. The numbers rise every day.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 May 2020.

The dream machine - II

My Mirror column:

What might we learn about our relationship with machines from Ritwik Ghatak’s classic Ajantrik and Buddhadev Dasgupta’s recent Urojahaj – with a detour through Naya Daur? The second of a two-part column

In last week’s column, I suggested that there might be something to be learnt from comparing two Indian films made 60 years apart, each about a man besotted with a machine – Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s most recent feature, Urojahaj (The Flight), and Ritwik Ghatak’s 1957 arthouse classic Ajantrik. 

In Urojahaj, the protagonist is a happily married man with a child, and his attachment to the broken-down Second World War plane he finds in the forest comes across as selfish. The mechanic’s quest for something so impractical can only be individualistic. The plane is an obsession that takes Bachhu Mondol away from those he loves. And as he hears more tales from ghosts of betrayed humans, he begins to be suspicious of those that love him: in one sadly revealing moment, when his wife tells him the police are looking for him, he actually asks her if it is she who has reported his discovery of the plane.


In Ajantrik, in contrast, the taxi driver hero Bimal has no-one else to love. The battered taxi seems to fill up the space in Bimal's heart where a person might have been. When Bimal speaks of Jagaddal, it is as a trusty companion – and when the car collapses, he sees it as betrayal.(“Even if I give you my all, I can't win your favour?”) His hunger for human company may be inarticulate, but when he encounters a young woman who has been cheated by her lover, something buried deep within the usually misanthropic Bimal bubbles up to the surface. When Jagaddal appears not to cooperate in his mission to help her, Bimal delivers a well-aimed kick to its engine. That unprecedented moment of anger kickstarts the process that will eventually bring the machine to its knees – and it might be said to stem from Bimal's frustrated effort to assist another human being.

Despite their differences, the close relationship between man and machine in both films seems to turn on excluding the rest of humanity. The same year as Ghatak made Ajantrik, the Hindi film industry also produced a hugely popular narrative about man and machine. Released on August 15, 1957, BR Chopra’s Naya Daur ('The New Age') starred Dilip Kumar as Shankar, a tangawalla who becomes the focal point of a battle between the horse-cart drivers of his village and the evil capitalist son of the village’s feudal landlord. The legendary climactic race between Shankar, straining at the reins of his horse-drawn cart, and the villainous Kundan at the wheel of his bus was staged such that the underdog would win. 

But even within Naya Daur’s wishful dream universe, laced with the labour-capitalist bhai-bhai rhetoric that was often as far as Hindi cinema socialism went, Shankar’s victory could only be presented as a one-time thing, a reprieve. The film was intended only to give us pause as we hurtled into the machine age, to consider the fate of the masses who would be left behind if we were not careful.

Ajantrik seems to occupy a mindspace so different that is scarcely recognisable as belonging to the same cultural landscape. Instead of a race between a tanga and a bus, Ghatak has his taxi compete with a train. The creaky, decrepit Jagaddal cannot win. But that does not lead us to anything so simple as a win or a loss for technology. Driving too fast on a curving hilly road to catch up with the train, Bimal must draw back from the edge in the nick of time – and the moment when he does is also the moment when he finally sees the world in which both taxi and train have arrived: disruptions, but here to stay.

What Ghatak shows us through Bimal’s eyes is a festive gathering of the Oraons: women singing with flowers in their hair, bare-chested men with drums, dancing in unison. There is something about Bimal’s gaze that seems to see but not see, the marvellous sight of the human body moving to a rhythm that has existed long before the rhythm of the machine. And yet, as the Oraon man who pushes the broken-down jalopy to Ranchi Station says to his sweetheart, it is the train from this station that takes “our people to Assam and Bhutan, to work in the tea gardens”. A single machine may die, Ghatak seems to suggest, but the machine is here to stay. 

Ajantrik extended the concept of pathetic fallacy from nature to the machine. But the human hero of 1957 still saw his favourite machine in human terms, giving his car a name and human attributes; a sense of life and death; even a kind of burial, at the scrap dealer’s. Sixty years later, at the end of Urojahaj, it is the human hero whose life and death are in balance. Bachhu Mondol, running from the irrationality of a tyrannical state, speeds through the forest and out onto what looks like a runway, and the camera pans over the ground, rising higher as if looking on from high. What Bachhu sees is what a plane would see, if it could. The man in search of freedom now models himself on the machine.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Sep 2019

The dream machine

My Mirror column:
In Buddhadev Dasgupta’s thought-provoking new film, a man obsessed with a plane starts talking to ghosts, making one think of another machine-loving madman in Ritwik Ghatak’s 1957 classic, Ajantrik

In Buddhadev Dasgupta's evocative new film Urojahaj (The Flight), a motor mechanic called Bachhu Mondol (Chandan Roy Sanyal) discovers an old plane abandoned in a forest near his village, and becomes obsessed with the idea of making it fly. He spends hours with the plane, repairing and repainting and dreaming. And most of all, talking to ghosts – the only other human beings to frequent the clearing where it lies hidden.

When it turns out to be a Japanese fighter plane that may have crashed there during the Second World War, one of the ghosts asks Bachhu, does he intend to go to war with the plane?

“I'm rebuilding this plane. I'm making it a new thing. It won’t remember killing people, or war,” says Bachhu immediately.

“Then what will it remember?” asks the she-ghost.

“The sky,” says Bachhu.

The mechanic’s idea of the plane as having a memory – and also being able to forget – is one of the gorgeously poetic ways in which the filmmaker conveys to us that at least for Bachhu, the machine is half-human. There are many other occasions in Urojahaj when the plane’s power over Bachhu is coded this way. “You’re dressing up the plane so much,” another ghost giggles. “Are you going to marry it?” Decrepit though it is, the machine has so completely captured Bachhu’s attention that even his wife starts to wonder if it is her soutan, the rival love of her husband’s life. Bachhu keeps assuring her of his love, but she is not convinced. “You don’t love me any more, else why would you go to the plane every night?” she asks him. And later, “What does the plane give you that I don’t?”

Urojahaj (2018) is Dasgupta's 17th feature film, the latest in a long and distinguished career that has established him as one of India’s internationally known auteurs, his films regularly screened and awarded at top-tier festivals like Venice and Cannes. Sadly, we live in a country in which films like Dasgupta’s barely make it to cinemas. But Urojahaj is a film well worth your time, and worth thinking about at many levels.

For one, the depth of Bachhu’s preoccupation with the plane instantly brings to mind another film about a man’s attachment to a machine directed by a Bengali filmmaker: Ritwik Ghatak's Ajantrik, made an astounding six decades ago. Released in 1957, Ajantrik was the second film made by Ghatak, maverick member of the trio of great Bengali auteurs along with Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen. Known in the West alternately as The Mechanical Man and The Pathetic Fallacy, the film starred the well-known Bengali actor Kali Banerjee as a taxi driver who treats his dilapidated Chevrolet jalopy more lovingly than a human companion. Banerjee’s Bimal names the car Jagaddal, and talks to it at opportune moments.

“Thirsty, Jagaddal? Yes, you're panting, wait,” he might say, pouring water into the radiator on a hot day. Or “Sorry, Jagaddal, you'll have to make do with patches for now. I’ll buy you a shiny new hood when I’ve saved some money, I promise.”

Friends and acquaintances snigger about Bimal's excessive attachment to the car – “Private matter? Is the car your lady?” – but he is unperturbed, even turning up in a starched white dhuti-panjabi the day he decides to get Jaggadal photographed. But having shown us Bimal dressed as a coy bridegroom, Ghatak joyfully juggles the car’s imagined gender and age. “Amar Jagaddal baagher bachcha (My Jagaddal is a tiger cub),” announces Bimal proudly in the very next scene. “They envy him, naturally. What young man wouldn’t envy an old man with such stamina?” Soon enough, we also see Jagaddal's number plate, which reads ‘BRO 117’.

In contrast to Urojahaj’s fairly even fable-like quality, Ajantrik alternates between physical comedy, meditative observation and a surprising emotional heft. There is early laughter when Jagaddal splutters and bubbles and honks in response to Bimal, making the film a precursor of such Hollywood creations as Herbie, the Volkswagen Beetle of The Love Bug (1968). But for the lonely Bimal, Jagaddal is his most constant companion, about whom he is quite openly sentimental. “He earns me two rupees a day, no matter what. He’s been with me since my mother died,” he tells the little boy who works in the garage.

On another level, Bimal’s trips with Jagaddal are a way for us to travel through rural Chhotanagpur, a 1950s landscape in which female faces are disproportionately limited to line-drawn advertisements for Baidyanath and Dabur Amla Kesh Tel. It is no wonder that a bejewelled Bengali bride who boards the taxi draws Bimal’s attention. He does not chastise her even when she switches from a romantic, almost aesthetic appreciation of the ruin – how lovely the sky looks through a hole in Jagaddal’s canopy – to a pragmatic, modernist disdain for it: “What a rotten car!”

Ghatak may seem merely to be gesturing to what Urojahaj makes explicit: that a man’s attentions cannot be successfully divided between a machine and a woman. But perhaps there is much more there.

(To be continued next week)

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Sep 2019.

The Lord of Light: Robert Richardson

A short Q&A with renowned cinematographer Robert Richardson, for India Today. 

Photo credit: Yasir Iqbal, India Today

Robert Richardson, 63, has won the Academy Award for cinematography three times, for JFK (1991), The Aviator (2004) and Hugo (2011). He received a Lifetime Achievement award from the American Society of Cinematographers in March. We caught up with him on a brief visit to Delhi. 

Q: You’ve been a cinematographer for nearly four decades. The technology has changed a fair bit. Has what makes a good cinematographer changed? 
The techniques have changed. The speed of film altered first. In the studio system, with highlighting, to trying to do no lighting, yet having slow speed so you had to do lighting. And then you moved into digital, which had a higher speed, so lighting started to disappear altogether. It’s more about shading than lighting. Composition altered. You got the handheld shot. All changes created by technology.

Q. Almost all ‘films’ are now shot in the digital format. Do you see this more as a loss or a gain?
I could take both those perspectives. Film has been developed for years as a way to capture human skin tone more naturally. It has a softer resonance. But digital’s moving into a larger space of comfort, a wider range of capture. Also, you have to use less light to achieve the look.

Q. So would one argument for the digital format be about being closer to life, more natural? 
That’s where they’ve gone. But, in a film, you’re telling a story. Even a writer can’t do that in a ‘natural’ manner. Why should a cinematographer?

Q. You’ve had close working partnerships with great directors like Oliver Stone, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese. Have you ever been tempted to direct? 
I’ve been tempted. But it didn’t fall into the well.

Q. Do you have a favourite film among your own? 
I can never do the favourite film thing! There’s films I don’t like. But the ones I do love, all happened for different reasons: Salvador was my first film, Platoon my most emotional, JFK was what I wanted to move forward to. Between The Aviator and A Private War, how can one be judged better?

Q. You’ve often shot on a grand scale, but you became a cinematographer after watching more intimate work: Sven Nyqvist on Ingmar Bergman’s films, and Nestor Almendros on Eric Rohmer’s films. Does scale matter to you, personally?
Scale is a complicated thing. When you do something on a very large scale, say, a tentpole film like World War Z, that has a more commercial aspect: you have to move within studio requirements. But with, say, A Private War, or Wall Street, the studio makes no demands. A powerful director who can keep control, that’s more important than a film’s scale.

Q. What’s it like to shoot in India? 
I have shot here before. Eat, Pray, Love, and commercials: Microsoft, and now Absolut. Today was 114 degrees F! But I love the concern, the movement. It’s chaotic. The chaos is what’s beautiful.

Published in India Today, 24 June 2019 issue.

Hot, Pink: What The Magenta Line Is Like

I took my first ride on Delhi's newest and shiniest Metro line, thanks to Brown Paper Bag.

The man who boards at Janakpuri West has two bags: one a black laptop backpack, the other an off-white jhola. He plonks them down, props them against each other, and takes a relieved swig of some virulently orange drink. I squint at the bottle as best I can without being obvious; I'm almost sure it's called “Daiquiri.” Then my view is obscured by a man who sits down right next to me, as if he needs an anchor in the gleaming sea of empty seats. I sit for two minutes, then move to the end of the row.

It is 5.30 on a Monday evening, and I am on the newest stretch of the Delhi Metro. Running from Janakpuri West to Botanical Garden, the Magenta Line is the latest addition to the network inaugurated on Christmas day almost sixteen years ago. I remember how it felt to take the Red Line from Tis Hazari to Shahdara in that last week of 2002: families pooling at the bottom of the escalators, their nervous excitement adding to the festivity, as if the city were prepping for a picnic. Those air-conditioned trains gliding in and out of stations without so much as a whistle were, for many Delhi inhabitants, our first excursion into technological modernity.

The Delhi Metro rider of 2018 is a much more seasoned creature: edging past others to get into lifts where there are no escalators, alert to which side the train doors will open, perfectly comfortable telling an errant male rider to leave the women's compartment. Technological sophistication has reached new levels. The new line connects to IGI Terminal 1, making it a much cheaper way to catch a domestic flight than the underused and overpriced Airport Express Line, which takes Rs 60 from New Delhi Railway Station to T3. The speed at which we whoosh out of the long tunnel between Palam and Sadar Bazaar Cantonment makes a Mahipalpur bus on the road below look like it's dawdling. I must confess to a momentary anxiety: the Magenta line is, after all, driverless. No one else seems concerned in the slightest.

Yet a new route can still lead to some confusion, and curiosity. A woman in a mismatched churidar-kurta gets on at Kalkaji Mandir, where the Magenta Line connects to the Violet Line via a long covered walkway. As the train crosses Nehru Enclave, something strikes her. She looks up, searching for the familiar band with a blinking light marking where we are. It isn't there. Instead there's a new square screen, on which the current station's name appears and disappears. All very fancy, but much less stable than the printed line map. Finally she turns to the balding man two seats away from her, “Excuse me, yeh Munirka jayegi?” He shakes his head for no. She clucks in some consternation, and stays standing all the way to the next stop.

The Daiquiri drinker, meanwhile, is swaying contentedly to his headphones when he gets a call. He laughs sheepishly into his cellphone: “Maine nayi line li thhi, socha dekhoon kaisi hai. Thhoda aur time lagega, haan...”. He isn't the only one out on a joyride: the North Eastern family from Dabri Mor turns their chubby baby's face up against the glass each time we emerge into the daylight, the view successfully distracting him from trying to chew on his father's wallet.

At Dashrathpuri station, an ad for a pimple-removal cream (Acne to Flawless Face) seemed to presage the five young women of acne-prone age who got on, standing in a little security huddle close to the door, as if they're afraid to miss their stop. At RK Puram, home of mid-level bureaucrats, is another demographically appropriate advertisement. 'Hair Transplant Now Easy On Your Pocket', it reads, above an photograph of a man's head, bald but for the hair spelling out the letters 'EMI'.

The train continues on its way, a microcosm of the city. IIT Delhi (where a controversy is raging about the station being sponsored by the coaching institute FIITJEE) yields some laptop-wielding young men. Before Hauz Khas, two women move to the door as if in unison, their differences of age and style erased as they pat their hair into shape, twins in the Metro looking-glass.

Hauz Khas is the interchange for the Yellow Line, and the train fills up, emptying again by the time we cross Greater Kailash and through the orderly expanse of Jamia: the MA Ansari Auditorium, the Urdu Department. The India Art Fair will finally have its own station: Okhla NSIC.

The industrial wasteland of Okhla gives way to some of Delhi's last surviving open spaces. As we cross what's left of the Yamuna, a fetid smell creeps into the train. Past Kalindi Kunj, the old floodplain is parcelled into neat little vegetable patches. But the green cover is deceptive. The canal runs poison. At Okhla Bird Sanctuary, I look into the haze, trying to spot a single sign of avian life. None. Then a sparrow cheeps, right next to me. It's the ringtone of the man getting out. I stay on the train. You never know -- there might be birds at Botanical Garden.


Trisha Gupta is an independent writer and critic. She writes a weekly column on Indian cinema for the Mumbai Mirror, and other pieces on films, books, art, photography and the city for other publications. She blogs at Chhotahazri.

Published in BPB Delhi, 18 June 2018.

Book Review: Anjum Hasan's A Day in the Life

A Question of Belonging

Hamish Hamilton, 2018. 256 pages. 

Anjum Hasan's writing has never lacked craft or perspective. The 14 stories in A Day in the Life, Hasan's sixth book, surpass her own exacting standards.

The tenor might be meditative, but the prose is light-footed, spry, often droll, sometimes downright wicked. In 'Sisters', a woman shrunk by sickness starts to see the healthy as ogres: "They are huge, they dominate the skyline, they eat up the bandwidth". Sometimes a character swings between optimism and despair, grand resistance and quiet accommodation. "There were no new ideas to be found in the city so I retired last year to this small town," begins the narrator of 'The Stranger', before letting an air of meta-resignation take over: "A whole population's worth of people with reduced hopes, happy to cut their coats according to their own cloths."

Whether the protagonists feel at home or (more often) out of place, the places themselves are evoked with detail and tenderness. In 'The Legend of Lutfan Mian', we savour a two-day walk to Banaras in a 19th century Indian landscape about to reframed by trains and the telegraph. Shillong, the town of Hasan's childhood and setting of her first novel Lunatic in My Head, features here in the nostalgic but acute 'A Question of Style', while Delhi --  Okhla Gaon -- makes a surprise appearance in the melancholy but arresting 'Little Granny's Song'.

At their heart, Hasan's tales are investigations of the question of belonging. Her characters might inhabit a dense web of locality, like the protagonists of 'Nur' who must map the don Mushtaq Bhai's house in relation to the Arabic College, or the Islami Nikah Centre as being "where Salim's sister's wedding was fixed", but from which someone can be suddenly airlifted into an imagined Dubai. Or they might live in an impervious middle-class bubble, like Jaan in 'Sisters', or Gulfam in 'Yellow Rose', who wants to be an android in a post-apocalyptic society but is stuck with Bangalore, and sometimes forced to go to "Bengaluru".

Hasan understands this upper middle class person with a tenuous grip on the world. Gulfam arranges her life so that "week by week, she saw a little less of the outdoor world of heat and dust that did not respond to a click or a swipe". The retired Mr Murthy in 'I Am Very Angry' is unable to "wholeheartedly like his fellow in the old way anymore".

But Hasan's understanding is not indulgence. We are all implicated. "Each of us, the guiltily innocent, has his own means of getting away from the news," begins 'Elite'. The headlines press in -- urgent, destructive -- and often it needs nature to offer a reprieve.

Published in India Today, 13 Apr 2018.

Greed is (Now) Good

My piece for the Indian Express Eye's Diwali issue on money.

Once, bad guys had all the cash. But like the audience, contemporary Hindi cinema has learnt to listen respectfully when money does the talking.

Raj Kapoor and Nadira in the magisterial Shree 420

What can one say about the changing status of money in Hindi films? First off, I suppose, that there’s more of it on screen than there used to be. Unlike the largely well-off heroes of today, the protagonists of so many 1950s and ’60s classics were either born into poverty, or had it thrust upon them — their heroism was often about earning enough to survive, and trying to stay honest while they did so. This was true whether the film was set in the village or the city. The characters played by Nargis in Mother India, Dilip Kumar in Naya Daur or Guru Dutt in Pyaasa were all about maintaining their moral fibre despite all manner of tragedies. Money would not, could not sway them from their scruples — which might involve the defence of chastity, community, or artistic integrity. Another kind of hero was allowed to be more fallible, and we watched as he struggled to keep his conscience in a world jingling with monetary temptation: think of Dev Anand in Baazi (1951), House No. 44 (1955), Guide (1965) or Jewel Thief (1967), or Raj Kapoor in Awara (1951) or Shree 420 (1955).

It is not surprising that in both categories, those who already had money were usually villains, feudal or capitalist: the lecherous baniya Sukhilala, unmoved by the sufferings of Nargis and her children; the crooked city-returned Kundan (Jeevan) in Naya Daur, so keen to capitalise on technology that he would destroy a whole village economy; the publisher Ghosh (Rehman) in Pyaasa, so avid in his pursuit of profit that he conspires to have a man locked up and declared dead. As long as the Hindi film hero was a struggler, the rich man was likely to be a source of corruption, or conflict, or both — think of Seth Sonachand in Shree 420, who tries his best to turn the honest Raj to crime by means of the glittering Nadira, whose character is literally named Maya: illusion.

When it was playing things lighter, popular Hindi cinema sold an alternative fantasy to its largely working-class audiences: here the hero who was poor would eventually luck out, either by discovering that he was high-born and thus an heir to great wealth, or by getting the pretty rich girl anyway. But, usually, unless he was the father of the hero or the heroine (and sometimes even then), the big man in the palatial Hindi film home was always guilty until proven innocent, slimy until proven straight. In that cinematic universe, even villains conceded that money was always ill-gotten: “Daulat ka pedh jab bhi ugta hai, paap ki zameen mein hi ugta hai (The tree of wealth always grows in the soil of sin),” as Amjad Khan declared in Kaalia (1981).

The Amitabh Bachchan era marked a partial shift in this valorising of mehnat ki mazdoori. To be sure, Bachchan did carry on a certain kind of socialist film tradition as the labouring hero battling crooked capitalists — Coolie (1983) is perhaps the most memorable example. But he also embodied the intense disillusionment of the 1970s and ’80s, lending his baritone to a growing rage against a world in which the straight and narrow was beginning to seem a path to eternal poverty. Still, the Bachchan hero’s pursuit of wealth was never just about the good life — he might seem coolly stylish, even shaukeen, but the money was really meant to plug the gaping emotional hole in his soul. In Trishul (1978), for instance, his creation of a business empire is really about destroying the man who once abandoned his pregnant mother; in Deewar (1975), his quest for riches is a way of avenging the poverty of his childhood. But as that film’s classic Salim-Javed dialogue made abundantly clear to the millions who grew up on it, money couldn’t buy you love. “Aaj mere paas buildingey hai, property hai, bank balance hai, bangla hai, gaadi hai. Kya hai, kya hai tumhare paas?” demands a belligerent Bachchan of his honest policeman brother (Shashi Kapoor), only to be crushed by the retort “Mere paas Maa hai.” The very vocabulary of trade was a tainted one: as Nirupa Roy says plaintively to Bachchan in the same film: “Tu bahut bada saudagar hai re, lekin apni maa ko khareedne ki koshish mat kar. (You’re a big businessman, but don’t try to buy your mother.)”

The years after liberalisation have changed our cinema a great deal, as they have changed us. From clapping for the self-made Bachchan hero who refuses phenke huye paise in Deewaar or rises in rage in Trishul at the idea that his ambitions might stem from having come into his baap dada ki daulat, we have reached a stage where we can smile indulgently at Ranbir Kapoor when he introduces himself to Konkona Sensharma in Wake Up Sid (2009) with “Main? Main apne dad ke paise kharch karta hoon (Me? I spend my dad’s money).”

It is now alright to have money, as well as to aspire to it. And the making of money need no longer be couched as serving some emotional need — the ends can often justify the means. In Mani Ratnam’s Guru (2007), the capitalist who smuggles in machine parts and manipulates the stock market — a screen character rather closely allied to the real-life Dhirubhai Ambani — is no longer the villain but the hero. More recently, in Raees (2016), a liquor-selling ganglord is presented to us as the heroic outcome of an entrepreneurial society where the independent single mother — an updated Nirupa Roy character — is now one who teaches her son that no business is too small, and no religion is bigger than business. “Hamare liye koi koi bhi dhandha chhota nahi hota, aur dhandhe se bada koi dharam nahi hota.”

Such money-making baniya heroes are still infrequent. Barring the steady trickle of small-town/middle class films, Bollywood seems to reflect the wide disparity created by money in the new India. On the one hand are the likes of Saif Ali Khan, Ranbir Kapoor or the newly-arrived Barun Sobti playing the haves, whose search for selfhood involves looking beyond money (Chef, Tamasha, Tu Hai Mera Sunday). The other features the have-nots, for whom money would remain out of reach if they stayed honest, must either win world-scale lotteries as Emraan Hashmi-style confidence men, or steal, as in Oye Lucky Lucky Oye or Simran, or — as in the Anurag Kashyap gangster film — sell their souls into violent crime.

Published in the Indian Express, 15 October 2017.

New lamps for old

Watching BR Chopra’s Naya Daur in Narendra Modi’s New India can produce a strange resonance — even as we look at it across the gulf of sixty years.

Dilip Kumar as the labouring Shankar in Naya Daur (1955)

1957's third biggest Hindi hit might never have got made if BR Chopra had listened to Mehboob Khan. As actor Dilip Kumar tells the tale in his 2014 autobiography: "Mehboob Sahab read the story and found no meat in it for entertainment. He told Chopra Sahab it could be made into a fine documentary on the doomsday awaiting the labour force in the country once machines replaced them but, as a feature film, it was not a great idea."

The younger man listened carefully — he had, after all, gone to solicit the senior filmmaker's opinion —but made up his mind to go ahead with the film if Dilip Kumar agreed to come on board. Yash Chopra, BR's younger brother and then working as his assistant, remembered how that almost didn't happen, because Dilip Kumar was committed to working on a film by Gyan Mukherjee. But when that film fell through, Dilip Kumar said yes promptly — and then spent a month doing story sittings in his shack in Juhu with producer-director BR Chopra and the film's writer Akhtar Mirza.

Most people remember Naya Daur for staging the confrontation between man and machine in a climactic race between a bus and a horse-drawn tonga. But how was such a battle to be made believable? Dilip Kumar writes that he was himself unconvinced by the original idea that the bus was to be beaten "by some kind of manipulation". As Yash Chopra remembered it, it was the thespian who first gave writer Akhtar Mirza the idea of the horse-cart taking a short-cut to get to its destination — "something that was logical and convincing".

There is something charming about how the universe of popular Hindi cinema perceives and produces its own internal logic — and when it abandons it. In Naya Daur, for instance, the village, while standing in for the country, has no farmers. The on-screen populace is divided between tonga-drivers and karkhana-walas, men who work as woodcutters and carpenters in the wood-production unit owned by the kindly local landlord (Nazir Hussain).

Hussain's departure on a pilgrimage to Banaras leaves the village open to the heartless machinations of his city-returned son Kundan (Jeevan), who brings in first a wood-cutting machine that robs the sawmill workers of their jobs, and then a bus that takes away the business of the tonga-drivers. In the era of demonetisation and Digital India, sixty years after Naya Daur first released, there is something distinctly sinister about watching the thin-lipped Jeevan pronounce his decisions the sole route to progress and development, even as the technology he brings in rides roughshod over the lives of the labouring poor.

Dilip Kumar's delightful portrayal of the film's protagonist Shankar, too, shares this on again-off again approach to logic. Shankar is somehow both shy and flirtatious, hot-blooded and calm. He seems wonderfully logical in his arguments with the crooked Kundan, or his sister's father-in-law-to-be, but becomes totally beholden to fate when it comes to resolving the love triangle in which he, his friend Krishna (the future popular villain Ajit in an important early role) and his sweetheart Rajni (Vyjayanthimala) find themselves.

Since it is obviously not an option to simply ask the girl which of the men she would prefer to marry, the two friends arrange instead to gamble on fate — if Rajni places white flowers in the Shiva temple the next morning, she is Shankar's, and if the flowers in her pooja thali are yellow marigolds, she is Krishna's. Naya Daur may come off as a sort of socialist musical (its iconic song is the infectiously choreographed 'Saathi Haath Badhana', with lines of villagers digging the earth in unison). But it is embedded in a deeply religious milieu —the temple atop a hill, with its massive statue of Shiva, is the locale for both intense romantic moments and the sort of monologue between the hero and God that later became a fixture of Hindi cinema.

And yet, this faith — the powerful sense of a superior being who can be appealed to for the things that really matter — does not blind the film or its hero to how religion can be used for cynical purposes. The most remarkable instance of this in the film is when Kundan and his devious accomplice, the greedy village Brahmin, secretly conceal a statue of a goddess along the road that Shankar and the villagers are constructing for the race. When the trusting villagers stop digging to fold their hands in prayer, we hear the villains intone, "Yahan mandir avashya banega", it is hard not to feel a chill go down one's spine. Naya Daur had heroes capable of circumventing the cynical appropriation of religion and of technology. The ordinary people of New India might not be so lucky.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Sep 2017.

Picture This: Signs of the Times

My BL Ink column: on watching Naseeb in demonetized India.

I watched Manmohan Desai’s 1981 hit Naseeb, and it spoke strangely to the world we live in.

Kader Khan and Amjad Khan as paired villains in Naseeb (here being quizzed by uber-villain Amrish Puri, who is not visible in the image)

This week, for no reason, I had a sudden craving to watch Naseeb. It is a film I’d definitely seen in childhood. But all I remembered were the songs: Hema Malini crooning ‘Mere Naseeb Mein Tu Hai Ki Nahi’ to an already besotted Amitabh Bachchan; Reena Roy twirling with impeccable tragic swag to ‘Zindagi Imtehaan Leti Hai’; Rishi Kapoor’s hilarious ‘Chal Mere Bhai’ night-walk trying to get Bachchan off his drunken high horse — as well as an actual equestrian statue; and the requisite pre-climactic dress-up song: the wonderful ‘Dhoom Machaake Jayenge’, in which Bachchan and Hema finessed the flamenco into the perfect villain’s den dance, while Rishi did a rather sweet Chaplin impersonation.

Sometimes one doesn’t know why a particular old film beckons. I certainly didn’t have a reason to watch Naseeb. But as I sat embarrassingly glued to YouTube in the middle of the day, a few things about why my subconscious so wanted the comfort of Naseeb began to click into place.

First things first. Naseeb is a Manmohan Desai film, made four years after Amar Akbar Anthony, and clearly intended to replicate the specificity of that magic. Like almost all Desai films in that era, it is a multi-starrer with a labyrinthine plot whose many tentacles allow for the incorporation of as many heroes, heroines and comedy sequences as ridiculously villainous villains.

One of the assured pleasures of watching mainstream Hindi cinema in the ’80s was, of course, predicting who would play what — or better yet, predicting the arc of the character’s on-screen life based on our recognition of the actor. So when, in the film’s opening moments, we saw Kader Khan (an established villain, apart from being the film’s dialogue writer) and Amjad Khan (whose very entry into Hindi cinema was as the immortally evil Gabbar Singh of Sholay) as supposedly ordinary men, pretending to be close friends of Namdev (Pran) and Jaggi (Jagdish Raj), our guard went up right away. No good, even the smallest child in the cinema knew, could come of having Amjad as a friend. And as expected, none does.

Within the film’s first 15 minutes, a lottery ticket has been won, one good man murdered for it and a second falsely implicated in his death — while the certified villains we identified at a glance have taken the money and transformed themselves from lowlife criminals into hi-fi seths, whose shiny suits and Black Dog-stocked bars carry no traces of their original sin.

Perhaps it was these villains I really wanted to see again. As we crawl through the daily indignities of the Modi era — in which at a FICCI event in central Delhi, a Niti Aayog bureaucrat was heard telling an audience of suits to encourage digital payments among their “servants” — perhaps I simply wanted to be allowed again the comfort of a world in which everyone already knew that big men in suits are guilty until proven innocent, slimy until proven straight. And the fact of having risen up from the street — Amjad’s Damu starts as a smalltime photographer, Kader’s Raghu as a tangewalla — did not make them honest men. In Naseeb, they give the falsely implicated Namdev’s little boy a waiter’s job in the hotel built from their ill-gotten gains, and keep trying to stop him from educating his younger brother. They do, in other words, exactly what the big men of our time are doing: patronising the poor, closing off their options, while all the while telling them it’s for their own good.

The other thing which the Desai film serves up with heart-imploding ease is the lost world of bhai-bhai secularism. Unlike Amar Akbar Anthony, where brothers separated at birth are raised in three different religious traditions, Naseeb gives us all-Hindu heroes and a single Christian heroine. But Desai is a master craftsman — he takes the smallest tokens and builds from them a highly emotive multi-religious climax. Three signet rings worn by Namdev — one each from Islam, Christianity and Hinduism — allow each religion’s God to punish at least one of the villains, as well as functioning as pulleys that eventually save our heroes’ lives.

The three different rings with religious insignia that Pran wears in Naseeb (and that save lives)

That combination of the religious-emotional register and a kind of faux-scientific jugaad marks the film in general. There is a fascination with distances and the use of technology to bridge both time and distance. A 20-year-old photograph is produced as proof of the real murderer. A telephone is used by a villain to stage a fake dying confession that implicates Namdev. A telescope is used by one of the heroines (the forgotten Kim Yashpal) to lipread what the villains are saying across the street. The camera is constantly swooping down from a height — sometimes from the perspective of a killer (Shakti Kapoor trying to shoot Amjad from a hilltop, through layers of glass) and sometimes a rescuer (Shatrughan Sinha’s view of a boat on the Thames, on which Hema Malini is being harassed).

Something about all of this reminded me of Mr Modi’s hologrammed appearances, and a recent much-touted speech he gave at a UP rally, via the phone. We are supposed to have grown up, as a country and as a cinema audience. But sandwiched between (real) counterfeit currency, (false) rumours of notes with chips implanted in them, and non-calibrated non-working ATMs, it’s clear we haven’t left the Manmohan Desai universe. Only the secular bhaichara, sadly, now needs our nostalgia.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, 16 Dec 2016.

The Trappings of Technology

My Mirror column:

Two great films about unemployed men and machines confront us with the alienations of our time.

A white British man sits in front of a computer. Even as he strives to keep his attention focused and his eyes from glazing over, the desktop gets hunghangs . The online form he's been trying for ages to fill is now suspended in the ether — information refusing to flow either this way or that. When the 59-year-old Dan demands to know what's happened, the younger black man who's been helping him out tells him the screen is frozen. “It's frozen?” yells Dan in frustration. “Well, can you defrost it?”

A wave of laughter runs through the packed hall at Panjim's Kala Academy as the scene above unfolds as part of the International Film Festival of India's screening of Ken Loach's brilliant new film I, Daniel Blake last on Friday evening. But it is nervous laughter. As I giggle with the rest of the IFFI audience, I wonder if the edge of discomfort is created by the incongruous use of the word 'defrost'. What are we to make of it, this 20th century technological moment that is now completely embedded in our language — and yet already feels near-obsolescent when used to refer to the cool new machines of our era?

That vast empty space that lies between refrigeration technology and the internet — the old machine age and the new — was also made starkly visible in an Indian film I watched a couple of weeks ago at a much smaller film festival up in Dharamshala: Mangesh Joshi's absolutely marvellous debut feature, Lathe Joshi. 

Like the eponymous Daniel Blake (played by the wonderfully restrained British actor Dave Johns), Lathe Joshi is a man being robbed of a living, a person in the present being forcibly relegated to the past. If Loach's protagonist is a joiner without a job (“I'm a carpenter. Much more dangerous,” he tells a child who asks if he's a pirate), Mangesh Joshi's hapless hero is a lathe machine worker who cannot bring himself to tell his family that he no longer has a factory to go to. Chittaranjan Giri is simply superb as the grave-eyed man for whom a machine has shaped not just his life but his very identity: “Is it 'Lathe' Joshi?” asks his aged ex-employer much to Joshi's delight, when asked whether he can be visited on his sick-bed.

But even Joshi's world is divided into machines that love him back and machines that don't. Like Blake, whose confusion at the dehumanising technology of the ironically-named British 'welfare' state is as strong as his connection to his old box of “good quality hand tools”, Joshi must deal not just with machines in the domestic sphere, but with the new sort of industrial machine: one that has replaced him instead of functioning as his ally. Loach's film gives a greater degree of loving attention to the artisanal, moving between an angry, argumentative register and an immersive happy one. I, Daniel Blake, like its protagonist, is insistent on showing us how the handwritten CV, the hand-turned wooden toy, and hand-crafted electrical repairs can still give human beings perfect service and plenty of individually-tailored joy, if only we weren't being forcibly tunnelled into the airless crevices of a bureaucratic tech-spertise state.

Given the atomised, anonymised dystopia of the British present, perhaps Loach's evocation of an unblemished lost alternative is unavoidable. The Marathi film, on the other hand, must engage more complicatedly with the improvements still being brought about by the everyday incorporation of technology into our lives. The arrival of a mixer-grinder can still raise the efficiency of an Indian woman's life by several notches; the connectivity of mobile phones, computers and cars is able to produce a standard of convenience and comfort that isn't just glamorous.

But in kinship with another recent film, Ruchika Oberoi's Island City, Mangesh Joshi's film forces us to think about where we might be headed. The dying factory owner that Lathe Joshi goes to meet is quietly cognizant of his fate as a human being in the present era: “I am alive, only thanks to these machines,” he says resignedly. Finally, the grandmother's chanting machine and the internet pooja may seem funny, but they are incredible examples of how technology has inserted itself into the spaces between our supposed inner selves and our notion of the divine. Our spiritual happiness, too, is now beholden to technology.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27th Nov 2016.