Inside, Outside

My Mirror column on Phobia:

Pawan Kripalani's smart new horror movie goes the psychological route, but stops a bit short of its political possibilities.

Pawan Kripalani's new film, Phobia, casts the talented Radhika Apte as a young woman who develops a psychological condition called agoraphobia, finding it harder and harder to leave the confines of her home. 

When we first meet Apte's character, an artist called Mehak, she is the centre of attention. A show of her art work has just opened at a gallery, and she is surrounded by friends and acquaintances, chatting and telling ghost stories and generally being the cynosure of all eyes. Within the blink of an eye, though, the mood has changed. Mehak looks into the distance, thinks she sees something strange, then realizes what she 'saw' is no longer there. She is disoriented enough to leave her own opening night abruptly. But worse is to come. 

After having dropped off her friend and admirer Shaan (Satyajit Mishra), she dozes off in the cab, and (in a clear reference to the Uber rape case of December 2014), comes to only to find the taxi driver in the back seat, trying to force himself on her. The film does not dwell on the incident, except to make clear that this attempted rape forms the trigger for Mehak's ailment: her increasingly irrational fear of the outside world. 

A female character's descent into madness has been the subject of a lot of powerful films, from Gaslight to Repulsion to Black Swan, to John Cassavetes' astounding A Woman Under the Influence and Todd Haynes' disturbing Safe. Like several of these films, Phobia suggests that its protagonist's affliction has something of a sexual undertow. But for some reason, Kripalani doesn't put this aspect of things in the spotlight. 

What we get instead is a true-blue scary movie, which has the tropes of a traditional horror flick -- spooky spiders, eerily silent cats, bathtubs and broken mirrors, lamps that crackle and drains that make strange sounds. Phobia is an effective piece of apartment horror. 

Mehak's growing irrational behaviour starts to create problems for her family, and she temporarily shifts out of the house she shares with her sister and little nephew into a Malad apartment owned by Shaan's friend. The place is furnished but empty, since the tenant, a girl called Jiah, has seemingly skipped town, leaving all her belongings behind. In classic horror movie fashion, Mehak starts to see and hear things in the flat, while reading Jiah's (conveniently detailed) diary and gradually becoming convinced that Jiah is dead and her unhappy spirit is wandering around. The agoraphobia now becomes merely a plot device to keep Mehak indoors. 

Having started off in an art gallery, Phobia then shifts to the interior of a moving taxi, followed by an open road, and finally the interiors of two successive houses, from which Mehak's (and the film's) only forays into the outside are virtual. 'Agora' is the Greek term for marketplace, and agoraphobia means 'fear of public spaces'. 

But it was fascinating to me that the 'virtual therapy' device through which a therapist twice tries to get a panic-stricken Mehak to 'pretend-travel' beyond the four walls of her house takes her, both times, into a virtual mall—as if shopping is necessarily therapeutic for women. Of course, the mall is also an increasingly popular setting for horror films (Kripalani's own previous outing was called Darr at the Mall). The director--whose first film was Ragini MMS — also expertly uses CCTV footage to add to the ever-present question: did it happen or did she imagine it? 

Phobia does many interesting things, and does most of them well. The camerawork and editing keep you on your toes, and the actors -- not just Apte, but also Satyadeep Mishra and Yashaswini Dayama as Mehak's cheeky young neighbour Nikki -- are very good. But as I started looking up agoraphobia, I began to wonder why a film that had decided to take this as its premise didn't do more with it. Because it turns out, the ailment affects many more women than men. 

In the United States, 90% of those with severe agoraphobia are women, and 70% of those with mild symptoms are women, too. Women agoraphobes are twice as likely to experience general anxiety, and three times as likely to have panic attacks. The figures are similar for other countries. Feminist approaches to agoraphobia suggest that the disease needs to be seen in a social context: the fact that women are socialised to think of public spaces as threatening, and often learn to police their own behaviour in public, placing restrictions on their own mobility out of a fear of men. 

The converse of a fear of the outdoors is, of course, a greater attachment to and identification with the home than displayed by most men. The scholars Gelfond (1991) and Fodor (1992) have argued that it might be worthwhile to look at agoraphobic women as representing one end of a continuum -- i.e., as sharing many forms of behaviour with large sections of the adult female population. In being unable to claim her rightful place in public space, Seidenberg and De Crow (1983) have suggested, the agoraphobic woman is a "living and acting metaphor, making a statement, registering a protest, effecting a sit-in strike". 

Phobia could certainly have been a more chilling indictment.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 May 2016

Picture This: That Working Class Fan

My BL_Ink column from yesterday:

In the grainy darkness, the young man’s face is lit up only by an eerie green light — and by his memories of the video theatres in which he spent his childhood. A ticket was ₹10, and every night of the week had a genre allotted to it: Mondays were for action, Tuesdays for romance, Wednesdays might be horror. “You got to see new films, old films, and even very old films. But even watching films we had already seen was fun for us,” he chortles. “Before Rajinikanth could say his dialogue, we would say it for him.”

The young man is Sagairaj, he is a film buff and Rajinikanth fan, and a few minutes into Jagannathan Krishnan’s remarkable 2010 documentary Videokaaran (roughly translatable as Video-fellow, or Video-wallah), we learn that he grew up to run a video parlour himself.

But since the demolition of Mumbai’s Rahul Nagar Video in 2006, and the general crackdown on semi-legal video theatres like it, neither Sagai nor his friends watch movies much. “People here earn ₹10 a day, some earn ₹50. They’re not going to go to multiplexes!” He mentions a local single-screen cinema where tickets are ₹80. “How is a man like that going to take his family to the theatre? Film has been snatched out of his hands.”

For much of the 20th century, cinema was among the few pleasures that the poor man in India could afford. (And I say ‘man’ deliberately here, because women did not — could not — go to theatres anywhere near as much as men could and did.) The film industry — whether Tamil, Telugu or Hindi — needed the urban poor to watch its films. And the strongest connection between that audience and the industry were its stars.

Film scholar Sara Dickey, who worked on fan clubs in Tamil Nadu, has argued that the masculine hero in south India is always depicted as sharing “either the attributes or the desires of the urban poor”. Figures as far apart in time as MG Ramachandran, Sivaji Ganesan, Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan, who have successfully cultivated distinct images, reveal a remarkable degree of overlap in the characteristics for which they are praised by their fan club members: generosity, compassion, humility, “the heart of a child”, strength and virility and talent in the dramatic arts. Crucially, the star is believed to feel concern for his (lower-class) fans, to recognise their “deserving but less influential” status. As the famous Rajinikanth song in Basha goes, “I am the heart that feels, I am the friend of the poor. I will always be the friend of the poor.”

Sushma Veerappa’s When Shankar Nag Comes Asking (2012), another documentary that explores film fandom as a way to understand urban male working-class culture, offers glimpses of how this belief in the star’s “good nature” and welcoming behaviour is circulated by fans. Veerappa’s film focuses on auto drivers in Bangalore, and their particular adoration of the late director-actor Shankar Nag, who legendarily played an auto driver in the superhit film Auto Raja (1980). Among the central characters in Veerappa’s film is Ramanna, an autorickshaw driver who is also president of the auto drivers’ section of the Kannada Protection Front. A film buff who came to Bangalore with dreams of becoming an actor, Ramanna remembers that he once chased after Shankar Nag and his brother Anant’s car: “Anant Nag remained in the car, but Shankar Nag stepped out. A real gentleman.”

Rajinikanth too, famously played an auto driver in Basha, immortalised by the song Naan autokaaran(I’m an auto-wallah). Early in Videokaaran, we see a conversation between several young men dissolve into an only half-jokey competition between Amitabh fans and Rajinikanth fans. Rajini’s entry speeds up the movie, says Sagai; with Amitabh, it’s not like that, you have to wait for him to open his mouth, for the dialogue. But the real basis on which Rajini wins the argument is that there aren’t fan clubs for Amitabh like there are for Rajini. Rajini gives out ‘messages’ that his fans take seriously, like when he told autowallahs to always stop and give pregnant women a free ride. “Even those who don’t listen to their families, listen to Rajini.” You can see how the wheel of fandom turns full circle: it is Rajinikanth’s relationship with his fans, his perceived ability to influence their behaviour that makes them even more devoted fans.

What is striking about Sagairaj’s relationship with the stars is its quicksilver quality. One moment he is talking about Rajini being responsible for his interest in being a kriya yogi, a deep sense of spiritual connection that dates back to his troubled childhood: “As a child, I had problems with my family. Whenever I saw Rajinikanth movies, I got strength.” The next moment, he is describing how all the actors “enter into him” when he’s picked up by a cop and wants to pretend to be badly hurt so the cop will let him go. Here, the channelling of his heroes is purely instrumental.

In Sagairaj’s relationship with cinema, you see an intimacy that people usually only have with gods they truly believe in: they’re close enough to dismiss occasionally.

But the world upon which Videokaaran casts its brief but compelling light has largely disappeared. The god of cinema no longer needs the poor. So the poor have been robbed of cinema, and even of video theatres. Television is a poor return gift.

Published in the Hindu Business Line.

Book Review: Those Pricey Thakur Girls

Anuja Chauhan’s third novel — starring a father and mother, a houseful of daughters, and a nicely bumpy romance between Daughter No. 4 and the tall, dark, handsome and difficult hero — has the unmistakeable whiff of a desi riff on Pride and Prejudice.

But though much of its action unfolds in the not-very-worldly, literally walled-in world of the Thakur family’s Hailey Road bungalow — paradise, as Chauhan throws in lightly, comes from the Persian pairi-diza, walled garden — Those Pricey Thakur Girls is a breezy, witty, thoroughly entertaining portrait of a time and a city. And whatever the pleasingly predictable plot might seem to lack in the 'serious realism' department is more than made up for by the book’s cornucopia of effortlessly accurate linguistic and sociological detail: a sharply remembered 1980s Delhi — a world of electric blue Marutis and inter-school western music competitions, in which fashionable Modern School girls had their mothers embroider pansies on their home-stitched peasant tops.

When we meet D-for-Debjani Thakur, fourth of the alphabetically named daughters of Justice (retd) Laxmi Narayan Thakur, she has just managed to pass three rounds of countrywide auditions to bag, at the ripe old age of 23, the massively coveted position of English newsreader on DeshDarpan, India’s one and only television channel. An early setpiece of a scene in which all family members present — Judge Laxmi, Mrs Mamta, their youngest daughter E-for-Eshwari and the girls’ well-intentioned but doltish cousin (his alphabetical position remains unstated, but yes, he is G-for-Gulgul) — pile fondly into the khandani Ambassador to see Debjani off at DD’s gates is enough to reveal Chauhan’s firm grasp of her milieu. She has down pat the bizarre but utterly believable cossetedness of this world, where the local dhobi’s entire family rises to wave to Baby as she departs for her first job in a sari pressed expressly for the occasion by the dhobi, and where the Bengali Market chaatwala declares the golguppas free because he saw Baby read on TV. And even as we shake our heads in recognition at the semi-feudal indulgences of this Lutyens’ Delhi of 20 years ago, Chauhan is up and running again, turning her gently mocking gaze upon everything from the Stephanian monopoly on the use of the term “college” to the countrywide obsession with “good English” which allows smarmy DD newsreader Amitabh Bose to sustain an elevated opinion of himself based on nothing but his pronunciation, while making a nice old man like Balkishen Bau the butt of jokes.

But while Chauhan displays an unremitting ear for the subtle gradations of class, she is never so simplistic as to make privilege (or the lack of it), map neatly onto the sympatheticness of her characters. So while the insecurities of Daughter No. 2, B-for-Binni, B-for-behenji, are partly explained by the fact that she was deprived of the glamorous childhood of her sisters by being sent away “to the village” for several formative years, that does not absolve her of blame for her wheeling-dealing, land-grabbing tendencies.

Some of Chauhan’s characters may be drawn with deliberately exaggerated strokes — from the oh-so-recognisable figure of A-for-Anjini, the flirtatious, good-looking sister who is the family’s self-appointed beautification expert, to the unfortunate Chachiji whose husband’s philandering with the maid has driven her to despair and totkas — but the portraits never seem to lack detail. The scenes between Debjani and Anjini, for instance, are a marvelously humorous capturing of a passive-aggressive sisterly relationship: Anji didi will go out of her way to help tart Dabbu up for her big day, but she’ll make sure to let her know that she, the elder by several years, fits perfectly into Dabbu’s jeans. And she’ll be singing Georgy Girl under her breath.

If Chauhan’s chosen backdrop was cricket for The Zoya Factor and politics for The Battle for Bittora, her milieu here is the media. It is a mediascape that would seem pretty much unrecognisable to the contemporary Indian teenager — a world in which a DD newsreader becomes an overnight national celebrity because the whole country watched her read the news, but that sole channel of news is entirely controlled by the government.

Chauhan has said in an interview that her daughters, who are 15 and 17, “seem quite into this whole ’80s thing”, and certainly her book plays on the curiosity value of this oh-so-bygone era: the single TV channel, the trunk calls, the Best-of-Hollywood video lending library, the kids fighting over whether the new VCR will be used to re-watch Masoom or A Nightmare on Elm Street.

But if there is something a little retro about many things — including the marriageability-obsession of even such a fashionable, educated bunch of women as occupy the Hailey Road household — Chauhan carefully positions her basketball-playing, tomboyish Eshwari character as the identifiable one, the one who bridges the girly-girl universe of her sisters’ generation and the co-ed-with-a-vengeance tenor of her emerging one. It is the new unshockability of Eshu that allows us to move smoothly from the rakish, Mills-and-Booneish flirtations of Dylan Singh Shekhawat to the calm recreation of “sonnets” written to Gitika Govil’s Golden Globes on the Modern School toilet walls: “Gitika Govil ke mammay mahaan/Unpe tika hai Hindustan”.

In sum, Anuja Chauhan has done such a stellar job of capturing priceyness and diceyness in her chosen era that one itches to know what those things will feel like in the next one. I am thoroughly looking forward to the sequel.

Published in the Asian Age, 24 Mar 2013.