Who's that on the phone?

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Director Anurag Kashyap's thought-provoking new thriller, Ugly, paints a chilling picture of the world we live in, and technology is the throbbing, ticking time-bomb at its heart.

The prize scene in Anurag Kashyap's Ugly -- the scene people were still discussing as they walked out of the theatre, despite all the harrowing things that came after -- is a conversation about mobile phones. A posse of Mumbai policemen are grilling two men because a third man (whom they were chasing on foot) came in front of a car and died. The first man explains that they were looking for a little girl who had disappeared from a parked car. The other man says, "I went in the other direction, and I was asking this guy if he'd seen her when his phone began to ring, and my friend's face started flashing on the screen, with the words 'Papa calling'..." 

"'Papa calling!'" the inspector interjects scornfully. How is it possible for a phone to show a picture of the caller, he wants to know. He is disbelieving and caustic, and when the harried men try to humour him by explaining as painstakingly and clearly as possible, he is insulted. Do they think he doesn't know that mobile phones have cameras, huh? 

Girish Kulkarni's watchful, fine-grained performance as the cop who switches constantly between performing high status and low, between kowtowing to his boss and rubbing his suspects' noses in the dust, will hopefully establish the actor -- the pivot of such superb, distinctive Marathi films as Deool and Masala -- in Hindi cinema, too. 

Director Anurag Kashyap gets Kulkarni to play the scene for laughs. But it's the kind of nervous giggle that emerges when you're holding your body taut on the edge of your seat: we know we can't afford to laugh at a cop, no matter how technologically illiterate he may seem. Meanwhile, the repeated phrase 'Papa calling' achieves a kind of talismanic power: you can see how it might seem ridiculous to Kulkarni's sort of cop, imbued with the luxuries of class privilege in terms of both technology and language, and yet, in the context of a kidnapping, it has a desperate urgency. 

What Kashyap does with the smart phone here is nothing short of masterful: he makes technology the focus not just of this scene, but of the film as a whole. If there is a recurring motif in Ugly, it is the phone call. 

Kabeer Kaushik's under-watched Sehar, released a decade ago in 2005, was perhaps the first Hindi crime drama to place the mobile phone squarely at its centre. Kaushik's tightly-scripted tale of the Lucknow police's effort to hit out at organised crime was set in the mid-90s, and actually narrated in the voice of the cellular expert they hired to help them conquer the newly-arrived technology that the gangs they were tracking had already acquired. The cell phone expert in mid-90s Lucknow was a mild-mannered college professor with a salt and pepper beard, played memorably as always by Pankaj Kapur. 

Ten years down the line, Tiwariji has been replaced -- the technology expert is now in-house, and a young woman rather than an older man. Policewoman Upadhyay wears the corporate-professional uniform of collared pinstripe shirt tucked into trousers, her hair in a neat bun and her eyes behind black-rimmed spectacles. (This shift of gender is particularly interesting, given that in Sehar, Tiwariji's aversion to the guns that surrounded him when he started working with the police was incorporated into the film's dominant narrative about masculinity). 
But the technology itself has changed much more than the figure of the expert. Ugly's world is the thoroughly wired one we now live in: a tangled web of I-phones, phone-tapping, recording devices, cyber cafes, credit card numbers and internet-based calling devices. 
Unlike in Sehar, where the technology was an artefact for narrative and historical use, in Ugly it is both that and something more profound. It is a marker of class. It is a part of one's identity. And yet it is also an enabler of anonymity. Everyone can be traced to his or her device, but not every transaction can be traced to a person. 
The cell phone, that appears so frequently now in the discourse of safety as an invincibility shield, is so quickly separated from the kidnapped child that you have to wonder how we believe it to be some sort of prosthetic limb. A man can call his friend from the ether of the internet, and use a recorded voice to be someone else. Husbands can track their wives' phone calls. A brother can blackmail his sister, so long as he can disguise his voice. 

We think we use these devices to speak to each other, Kashyap seems to suggest, and yet these devices stand between us as much as they bring us together. It is a powerfully unsettling thought.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

Picture This: Remote Controlled

My BL_Ink column today:

Filmistaan isn’t half-bad. But it reminded me of a Bangladeshi film, also featuring a remote village, and the media as the central theme

Among the funniest sequences in Nitin Kakkar’s Filmistaan is one where the abducted Sunny Arora persuades his Islamic fundamentalist kidnappers to perform for the camera. The kidnappers hope that the evidence of an abduction — even if that of a single Indian aam aadmi, instead of the intended many Americans — will gain them some bargaining power. But none of them know how to actually operate a video camera. After some blaming and shaming among the group members for not having acquired prior training in this clearly important skill, Sunny speaks up: if the gentlemen don’t mind, he could do the recording?

The next thing we know, the unwilling abductee has become the very willing star of his first real film appearance. But after several rounds of ‘Rolling’, ‘Action’ and ‘Cut’, Sunny decides it isn’t him who should have the speaking part; the burly, kohl-eyed Mehmood Bhai, delivering his threat to Sunny’s life, is much more likely to create the desired cinematic impact. And so Sunny directs, and Mehmood Bhai acts.

Comic tone notwithstanding, the film is threaded through by a sense of mutual incomprehension between Sunny and Mehmood Bhai that constantly threatens to turn violent. Much of that incomprehension is because neither can grasp the other’s attitude to cinema. Sunny’s total adoration is evenly matched by Mehmood’s pure hatred. It is one of the film’s failings that we hear about that adoration in so much detail, and practically nothing about the hatred.

Filmistaan’s desert village has a faux-timeless, elemental quality that’s definitely bumped up by Kakkar’s decision to portray it as nearly media-free. There’s no television, no mobile phones, no computers or internet — even the radio (on which this particular bunch of Pakistanis listen to World Cup commentary) arrives aboard a colourfully decorated truck. All there is, rather too conveniently fitted to the film’s romantic aims, is a khatara VCD/DVD player on which a pirated version of Maine Pyar Kiya is played to a captive audience seated on the sands.

Filmistaan isn’t half-bad. But it reminded me of a Bangladeshi film I watched six months ago at the International Film Festival of Kerala, also featuring a remote village, and the media as the central theme. And Mostofa Sarwar Farooki’s film is way better.

Television, as Farooki’s film is called, gives us a much more sympathetic figure to represent the Islamist perspective. The village’s chairman shaheb, a doleful old man who reads a newspaper specially covered up for him, has banned the villagers from watching television, since according to his reading of the Hadith, the depiction of any human image is haram. But when a Hindu family acquires a TV set, he cannot bar them. He froths and fumes as almost everyone in the village proceeds to go stand outside the house, requesting mirrors to be placed for their viewing benefit.

Running alongside this central narrative is a whole set of other events, all of which involve media forms of one kind or another. The chairman’s son Sulaiman is in love with a young woman named Kohinoor, and since it is hard for them to meet, a cell phone — and later Skype — forms the ideal vehicle for their budding romance. When we first see Kohinoor, she is speaking to her father from a cybercafé, and later enters an adjoining photo studio to meet her lover secretly. The cell phone and computer, like the romance, are kept secret from the chairman, but all hell breaks loose after the old man discovers her amid the Muslims watching TV at the Hindu family’s house.

The television is seized and thrown in the river, but when villagers start to cross the river to watch TV, the chairman’s men come up with an inventive solution, what they call a halal TV. A live theatrical performance is staged inside a massive TV-shaped box. But then the chairman, passing by, bowls his last googly: if the role of Akbar is played by Sattar, then that’s a lie. “But that’s imagination,” says his man Jabbar. “Imagination is very bad. It can take you to terrible places!” says the chairman, putting an end to the show.

All through the film, people are framed in windows and doors, seen through the slats of windows or parted curtains, as they might be on a TV screen. There are other marvellous ways in which Farooki evokes the television as metaphor for imagination. In one great scene, a man tells a woman that he has a private television on which he can imagine her, and on that television they have set up home together. The make-what-you-will-of-this tone here is an example of Farooki’s ability to weave a tragicomic tapestry, where recognising the absurdity of something/someone does not preclude sympathy for it/them. In the moving climactic scene (let me not give it away), the chairman is forced to confront the fact that the television as a form — or the imagination as a medium — is not deterministic. It is a powerful comment on what the media can mean.

And yet this is too optimistic a conclusion. Because if cinema and television can be essential to opening up the imagination, they are also avenues of colonising it.

Calling Up a Time

Screen presence: Patanga (1949) and Queen (2014)

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

Landlines to mobiles: The phone has evolved, but its cinematic effect remains strong as ever.

The telephone must be one of the most beloved cinematic devices. Think of the countless films in which the hero/heroine (and we, the audience) hears a murder, or a mysterious voice, after which the line is cut off, leaving them (and us) on tenterhooks. Or think of how the phone became indispensable to filmi love. It lets on-screen lovers conduct secret love lives, pulling landlines into bedrooms, hiding cordless phones under pillows to wait for the late-night call, setting up assignations rife with possibilities for identity confusion. 

In some ways, the experience of using a telephone was akin to the experience of cinema itself. In the words of the cultural theorist Iain Chambers: "Like the city and the cinema, and so many other institutions of modernity, [the telephone] allowed you to be somewhere you were not. Perhaps it allowed you to be someone you were not or someone you hadn't known you were yet." 

Filmmakers loved the telephone because it allowed you to play around with two components of the film medium, the visual and the aural. Between two people having a phone conversation, sound is necessarily present, but the image can be absent or obscured. Or at least, different from what the person on the other side imagines. 

In Hindi films, the telephone has run the gamut from the charming silliness of long-distance romance - Shamshad Begam's 'Mere piya gaye Rangoon, wahan se kiya hai telephoon' for Patanga (1949) - to excitement, even danger - 'Aaj ki raat koi aane ko hai' in Anamika (1973), featuring Helen, a hoodlum and a telephone booth in the rain - until the sound of the phone is itself sexualised ('Telephone dhun mein hasne wali', Hindustani (1997). 

But some of the most effective filmic uses of the telephone have been in domestic space. 

A film I wrote about recently, Kora Kagaz (1973), uses the telephone astutely, both to amplify its themes and direct its plot. The relationship between the inexperienced husband and wife (Vijay Anand's Sukesh and Jaya Bhaduri's Archana) is already splintering when the telephone arrives to drive a deeper wedge between them. An expensive proposition for an underpaid college teacher in the 1970s, it works, first and foremost, as a symbol of class. Archana's busybody of a mother decides her daughter needs a telephone, and she will pay for it if her son-in-law can't afford it. 

The film plays out the installation itself - the digging up of a road, the laying of lines, the decision over where the instrument will be placed in the house - as an upheaval in the household. Later, the phone becomes the embodiment of the unbroken link between Archana and her natal family. But director Anil Ganguly's finest touch is to turn the instrument's persistent tring-tring into an alarm bell of sorts, its shrill ring rupturing the peace of Archana's marital home. 

In accordance with lived reality, the landline in cinema has been replaced by the cellphone. An early cinematic tribute to the cellphone was Kabir Kaushik's Sehar (2005), with its droll subplot about a bumbling professor (Pankaj Kapoor) hired to help the UP Police figure out the new mobile phone technology that gangs are already using. A more recent example is Dedh Ishqiya, where Arshad Warsi woos Huma Qureishi with iPhone banter. 

Some films feature mobiles more than others. But three recent films have been noticeable for their absence. The first is Dekh Tamasha Dekh, which I wrote about last week, is a cleverly absurdist take on the politicisation of religion, and one doesn't want to hold it to dull realist standards. But really, if a film releases in 2014 and doesn't set itself up as a period piece, it cannot show us a world full of landlines and payphones. It is impossible to take seriously now a climax that depends on the cutting off of phone lines. 

The second cellphone-less film is last year's runaway indie hit, The Lunchbox, in which a neglected housewife and a lonely widower make a chance connection. Through the film, the two characters communicate through a mis-delivered lunchbox. The whole plot is dependent on the absence of instantaneous communication. 

The frisson lies precisely in the chanciness, in the will-he, won't-she quality of the message deliveries. A mobile does appear once, but this world of cassette players, neighbourhood shoutouts and handwritten notes is really held out to us as a world without cellphones. But it works, because we are willing entrants into this deliberate romanticisation of an older style of communication. The whole film seems, in fact, a nostalgic tribute to a phenomenon that only existed in the landline world: the cross-connection. 

The third film is Ankhon Dekhi, whose domestic conversations and crises could be described as a throwback to the'80s (there is some resonance with Humlog). But the gathering on the old Delhi terrace has pink-frosted cake. Still, you don't quite miss the cellphones until you see that Bauji's travel agency has computers on every desk. After that, the landline-only house feels contrived. Doubtless, the rift between brothers - based partly on their refusal to call each other - is more convincing without cellphones. But once the thought's in your head, it doesn't leave you: how can they not have mobiles? 

By way of contrast, a recent rift in another Hindi film, between Rajkummar's Vijay and Kangana's Rani in Queen, feels so much more believable because the cellphone is integrally woven into it: the selfie she sends him by mistake, her not taking his calls, his appalled enumerating of his missed calls echo what is now the stuff of our everyday life. A contemporary world imagined without the cellphone, it appears, can no longer ring true.

Post Facto -- Unpacking The Lunchbox

My Sunday Guardian column yesterday:

Some time before The Lunchbox released, I heard two film journalists chatting. "Arrey haan, kab aa rahi hai woh Tiffinbox?" said one. Uproarious laughter followed. "Tiffinbox nahi, Lunchbox, Lunchbox!"

Two weeks later, Ritesh Batra's debut feature about a tentative romance between an ageing clerk and an unhappy housewife opened in India. Buoyed by the backing of Karan Johar as co-distributor and a publicity budget nearly thrice its production cost, the film got a great box-office response. The Twitterati anointed it our Oscar hopeful. But the official selectors failed to follow their lead, and the film became the eye of a storm.

That uproarious laughter came back to me then. It seemed to point to something crucial about the place Batra's wistful film occupies in the zeitgeist. After all, it does have a Hindi name: Dabba. But I haven't seen anyone call it anything but The Lunchbox. This isn't just about the fact that those who can afford to go watch 'Hindi movies' in a theatre are increasingly those we call 'English-speaking', but that plays a role. As does the fact that the Indian social media praise follows this dabba's international route: Cannes, Toronto, Telluride. And might that film-festival success itself owe something to the fact that much of the film is voiced in English, making for a minimally-subtitled film that has a Bandra clerk talk of baingan as "my favourite aubergine"?

Don't get me wrong: The Lunchbox is a lovely little film. But it does tick all the boxes that might appeal to festival audiences: quaint Asian urbanism (Mumbai trains, dabba delivery), Indian home-cooking, romance. It provides local colour, without being demandingly untranslatable.

As British writer Tim Parks recently argued: "[H]owever willing and cosmopolitan a jury may be, a novel that truly comes from a different culture, written for that culture in that culture's language, is a difficult creature to approach... When prizes go to foreign books, they tend to come from authors who are consciously writing toward an international public." The Booker International has gone to books not written in English just once in five times; the IMPAC award only seven times out of 18. But as Parks makes clear, this is not only about language. It's about serving up a culture for Western consumption: "The prize process sucks foreign writers into our tradition. The genuinely exotic is replaced by a palatable exoticism constructed for a global liberal community capable of granting the desired celebrity."

If this is true of the literary marketplace, it's even more true of that category called world cinema. Most Indian films are too 'genuinely exotic' to translate, not just for the reasons usually offered – our love of song and dance – but because our histrionics are pitched higher than anything a Western audience can deal with. But The Lunchbox translates perfectly. It's meant to. Its characters experience sorrow and fear and suspicion and love, but they never confront each other. They have their emotional crises silently. And there are no songs, unless you count the '90s Hindi film numbers that play serendipitously in the lives of both characters, or the dabbawalas singing Gyanoba Mauli Tukaram Tukaram, a Marathi bhakti song to which no subtitles are provided. The dabbawallas' song is Indian atmospherics. It doesn't need to translate.

It's in this context, I speculate, that "tiffinbox" seems so funny. The word "tiffin" is officially English, but the English no longer use it themselves. Outside of India (and British ex-colonies like Malaysia and Singapore), "tiffinbox" is as un-understandable as dabba. But calling that familiar stainless steel container by its everyday Indian name is what comes naturally to most of us. Do we laugh to cover over our subconscious embarrassment? How easily we could have made that mistake ourselves, revealing our untranslated inner selves.

And yet, The Lunchbox does not only cater to its world audience. Yes, it knowingly manipulates the now-global cachet of Bombay dabbawallas. But it is also an affectionate caressing of Indian middle class memory. The time is not mentioned, but it feels like the 1990s. The dabba delivery mistake is not discovered until the husband returns home. In fact the dabba mix-up evokes the old romance of the cross-connection. Neither Ila nor Fernandes has a mobile phone, and in turning that lack into the basis of a letter-writing relationship, the film urges us to think about the intimate pleasures we have so quickly lost. (It is no coincidence that Ila's husband, who does have a cellphone, is too absorbed in it to even register his wife.)

Our nostalgia for a pre-liberalisation India is also stoked by beloved '80s Doordarshan references: if Saajan Fernandes wallows in his wife's video recordings of Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi, the masterful casting of Bharti Achrekar instantly evokes the heartwarming Wagle ki Duniya. As the upstairs Deshpande Aunty who never appears on screen, Achrekar's chatty conversation is not just a reassuring presence in Ila's lonely life but offers the Indian viewer of a certain age the delight of recognition. There are silly, unspoken jokes that only a Hindi movie watcher would get: like the ridiculous incongruity of Irffan's grave Saajan Fernandes being linked to the hangdog Sanjay Dutt, when Ila asks Aunty to play an audio cassette of Saajan.

The Lunchbox turns out to be a rather rare sort of dabba – a desi meal meant for export, but with enough layers for Indian audiences, too.

Published in The Sunday Guardian.

Life in a Dream: Project Cinema City

Project Cinema City excavates quirky connections between the Hindi film industry and the city of Bombay.



Recently, at a Rajesh Khanna retrospective at Delhi’s Siri Fort Auditorium, I sat next to a woman and her young—perhaps seven-year-old—daughter. The child watched a film about 36 years older than her—it was Aradhana—with a raptness that was rather lovely, only interrupting occasionally to confirm with her mother her sense of what had just taken place on screen: “Ab usko pata chal gaya ki woh uski maa hai? (Now he’s found out that she’s his mother?)” When the lights came on, she realised the three-hour-film had ended—and there hadn’t been an interval. “Par humne mall mein toh khaaya hi nahi! (But we didn’t even eat anything in the mall),” she exclaimed. “Beta, yeh mall nahin hai (My dear, this is not a mall),” laughed her mother, catching my eye. “Baahar jaake khayenge, chalo (We’ll eat outside, let’s go).”

Wandering through the multifarious attractions of Project Cinema City—a show curated by Madhusree Dutta that emerges out of four years of interdisciplinary research on the production and reception of cinema in urban space by the arts initiative Majlis and KRVIA (the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture)—my thoughts returned to that little girl, for whom the experience of cinema in the city is so completely mediated by the idea of the mall. As one fragment in a massive file kept on the show’s Table of Miscellany reads: ‘Why Go Out? (When there’s a multiplex inside)’.

The multiplex is just one of the sites of cinema in this file, which is a collection of maps and photographs and snatches of conversation about the Mumbai film industry threaded together by Hansa Thapliyal’s wryly matter-of-fact commentary. (Sample: in the section Photo Studios, documenting people posing with filmstars as backdrops: ‘Perhaps following the known codes of payment in the film industry, it costs more to be photographed with the men.’) The file provides a superb introduction to the exhibition, sharing with it an encyclopaedic sensibility that is alternately serious and playful. Browsing through it, you might encounter spot boy Bhaiyalal N Patel telling you what you need to do to create an artificial Juhu beach for a film set, or find yourself looking at studio versions of the locales that you’ve seen in so many Hindi films: ‘the den’, ‘the village’, ‘police station and lock-up’, ‘Krishna Cottage’. You might also find, in the Bar Dancers section, this unannotated poignant timeline of a woman’s life:

2002 Permanent dancer in beer bar
2005 Jobless due to ban on beer bars
2006 Casual and freelance sex worker

Organised by the National Gallery of Modern Art and Ministry of Culture to commemorate 100 years of Indian cinema, Project Cinema City brings together more than 20 artists, designers, technicians and architects in a collaborative show that excavates the connections between the Hindi film industry and the city of Bombay/Bambai/Mumbai, which is both the real-life site of its birth and the imaginary locale where so many of its narratives unfold.

The traits of urban modernity—anonymity, artifice, technology, speed—are echoed in our experience of cinema. Project Cinema City contains several art works that draw on these connections, inviting us to enter a space of fantasy that’s as much about the excitement and frisson of the city as it is about the pleasures of the cinematic. The first of these is a collaborative audio-visual piece that involves a series of women talking of the experience of watching films. One woman talks of how she missed out on a family expedition to the first air-conditioned theatre (Liberty) to show a Hindi film, yet another reminisces about the women of the family doing ‘full-make-up’ in the cinema bathroom so that they were actually late for the movie.

The most marvellous work is documentary filmmaker Paromita Vohra’s So Near yet So Far, composed of three different kinds of phone boxes—a switchboard-era box with various lines for operators, a yellow coin-operated pay phone, and a small red plastic-dial telephone—each of which provides instructions to connect to various kinds of soundtracks. On the switchboard phone, you can listen to fragments of interviews with real-life operators, as well as a text by Baburao Patel which reads like the memoir of an office secretary. The yellow pay phone provides a more workaday, cheerful introduction to what it calls ‘long-distance love’: pressing 3 for Babli will bring you a song that goes “Babli tero mobile, wah re teri ismile (Babli your mobile, and wow, your smile)”, while pressing another number leads you to an exhausted man coming up against the recorded female voice of a BSNL broadband complaint system.

Vohra’s work encourages laughter—the red telephone for example, comes with a written direction in Bambaiyya Hindi ‘Saala phone nahin chala toh ek phatka dene ka (If the bloody phone doesn’t work, give it one whack)’—but it is also a beautifully thought out meditation on the telephone’s role in romance. Once thwacked, the red phone, for instance, conjures up the excitement, urgency and danger of the phone booth and the cross-connection. Partly it’s the use of the Aaj ki Raat soundtrack from the film Anamika (1973), which originally accompanied a vivid, aestheticised picturisation that involves Helen being sexually attacked in a phone booth. But partly it’s just that the exhibit’s sense of mystery and interactivity replicates the delicious sensation of picking up a telephone receiver and finding yourself connected to an unseen world.

Another such interactive work is Archana Hande’s Of Panorama, an exercycle on which the viewer perches to find a life-size image of herself projected onto a series of outdoor backdrops that change and move as you push the pedals. What the photo studio does in still form is here achieved in mobile form, enabling the viewer to actually enter a fantasy world, some of whose frames seem adapted from Hande’s own earlier part-animated artwork for All Is Fair in Magic White, a quirky 2009 show which drew unexpected connections between our dreams of clean cities and our fair-and-lovely obsession.

A lot of space is taken up by a collaborative work called Cinema City Live. This consists of an intricate arrangement of large grey PVC pipes where the mouth of each pipe works as a viewfinder for an image. It’s obvious that the network of pipes is meant to represent the real-life network of places and people that is the film industry. But somehow the piece fails to draw you in.

Some of the more famous names from the art world—Pushpamala N and Atul Dodiya —have contributed more traditional pieces. Dodiya’s disappointingly flat 14 Stations consists of large signboards for stations on Mumbai’s Central Railway line, each anointed by a Hindi film villain of old: so Rehman ponders above Chinchpokli, a young Shatrughan Sinha gets Parel, while Dadar goes to Ajit. The associations between the place and the persona aren’t obvious, at least not to a non-Mumbai denizen—and the work itself, while fun to look at, seems a trifle pointless. The effect is made even more grating by a wall text that has to inform us that the opaque patches of red on the signboards are a gesture to Mumbai’s recent history of violence in public spaces.

Pushpamala N, on the other hand, gives us a performance photography piece that’s a fitting sequel to her 1996–98 work Phantom Lady or Kismet. The current work, Return of the Phantom Lady or Sinful City, again features Pushpamala as Fearless Nadia in a mask and cape, this time rescuing an orphaned girl from a rather impressive top-hatted villain. The photographs take their heroine—and us—through a range of Mumbai locales, new and old and in-between. In one image, three villains in silhouette on a parapet aim their guns at our escaping heroine in a hilarious tableaux set against a new glass building and a construction site strewn with trucks and bulldozers. In another, the Phantom Lady awaits the arrival of the top-hatted villain in a derelict old theatre. The desired effect may be an obvious one, but there is something charming about the way the image achieves a kind of perfect blend of fantasy and realism: the real cinema theatre as a site of fantasy—off-screen.

 Shreyas Karle’s Vastusangrahalaya ki Dukaan, which describes itself as a ‘speculative museum of cinema at a time of post-cinema’, is another version of fantasy-made-real. Karle takes what he calls ‘fetishes foregrounded by Bollywood’ and casts them as sculptural objects. So there is Hands Up, which playfully gestures to a feedback loop between the performativity of real-life Mumbai goons and their on-screen avatars. There’s a multiple place-of-worship locket, and the bottle of Ma ka Doodh (mother’s milk), with a fictitious history: ‘MK Milk, which proved to be a big hit till the Censor Board and GOI decided to ban it…’

Karle’s work has a jokey charm, but draws on a familiar mode of nudge-nudge-wink-wink engagement with Hindi cinema. Only its sculptural form sets it apart from The Calendar Project, a kind of homage to popular calendar art. The calendars, created by different artists, vary in the quality of their wit but add a plethora of visual detail to the show. An imagined 1953 calendar ad for walking sticks features Gandhi (obviously), but also includes a small photo of Gandhi with Charlie Chaplin with the legend ‘the great stick figures of our times?’, while Sashikant Thavudoz’s faux ad for a possibly fictitious tonic—‘Aapko chahiye City Life (You need City Life)’—makes quietly strategic use of a bindi-wearing Rekha as the wife waiting for you at home.

The pleasures of Cinema City, as is probably apparent, are often the pleasures of nostalgia. While there’s a strong archival sensibility at work, the historical gets treated with a wink and smile. It never appears as an object of criticism. The accompanying book-length timeline (though I’ve only glanced through it) may avoid such pitfalls by dint of sheer exhaustiveness, but the art reveals a tendency to romanticise the past, both of the city and of cinema. “Nowadays the hero and the villain are the same colour,” complains an old poster painter. There is the clearly-displayed love-affair with early technology (panorama, telephone, old ads, older films) and the suspicion of the transformations that are altering our experience of the urban (Pushpamala’s construction sites as a place of villainy, the multiplex seen only as a space that insulates us from the ‘real’ city). It’s important to look at our past selves with affection. But coming out of Cinema City, the present seems like a foreign country. The present, though, is all we have. If she’d hated the multiplex, where would the little girl go?

Read the piece on the Open site here.

(Project Cinema City is on at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi until 23 September 2012.)