Freeing Films

My Mirror column:

A delightful new online film festival to mark South Asian Women's Day defines feminism as “a politics based on principles of equity, equality, justice and peace”

A still from If You Dare Desire (2017), directed by Debalina.

Anantha Ramanan's short film Ticket Please (Sri Lanka, 2018) begins with an older woman preparing a younger man, who might be her son, on how to get to a particular part of town. “The bus conductor speaks Sinhala only,” she says, speaking from the kitchen where she is washing something at the sink. “Give ten rupees exactly. It's very difficult to get the balance from him... If the conductor asks you again whether you have paid, say “Dhunna”. Dhunna means “I have given”.” Before he leaves the house, she instructs him to carry a newspaper in English, saying it will help. I felt a mild sense of irritation. Wasn't the older lady overdoing the multiple instructions, I wondered? And why force the young fellow to pretend to be something he's not? But from the second the young man got to the bus stop, I started to realise that she had been right. Sometimes when you don't fit in, it just makes it easier to pretend that you do.

The young man in Ticket Please is marked by his inability to understand Sinhala; his being a Tamil speaker is cause for irritation. And yet the strapping young bus conductor, so impatient with him for not knowing Sinhala, is only indulgent and excited when an Indian passenger gets on – speaking bad Hindi, gushing about Salman Khan and singing 'Tujhe dekha toh yeh jaana sanam'.

Linguistic politics in Sri Lanka may not seem, on the surface, to have much to do with feminism. But what is feminism really about? Ticket Please seemed to me to make the point quietly but clearly -- it isn't our differences from each other that are the problem, it's whether we've been brought up to regard that difference as either threatening or inferior.

Organised by well-known documentarian Reena Mohan, Aanchal Kapur of the Kriti Film Club and Sangat (a network begun by veteran feminist Kamla Bhasin in 1998), the exciting new South Asian Feminist Film Festival expands the meaning of feminism to make us think about difference and equality in a variety of South Asian contexts. Among the host of wonderful films and panel discussions at the festival (streaming free on http://www.doculive.in/ until 30 November) are Prateek Vats' brilliant debut feature Eeb Allay Ooo!, Vaishali Sinha's Ask the Sexpert (2017), Saba Dewan's Sita's Family (2002), the Ektara Collective's Chanda ke Joote (2011) and Nirmal Chander's Dreaming Taj Mahal (2010).

A good film festival always lets you connect the dots in expected and unexpected ways. From linguistic differences made visible on a busride, I moved to gender difference made visible on a metro ride in Please Mind the Gap (2018), a wonderful short film directed by Mitali Trivedi and Gagandeep Singh. An affectionate documentary portrait of transman Anshuman Chauhan as he negotiates the Delhi Metro, Please Mind the Gap never rubs in its metaphors. Anshuman is an effortlessly engaging subject, though, bringing his wry, laughter-filled gaze to bear upon everything he speaks of. In one early conversation, for instance, he maps his personal sense of space onto the world of public transport with a marvellous lightness. “I instinctually create a gap and maintain it,” he tells the filmmakers, going on to describe how he keeps a distance from everyone, men and women, choosing for himself the space between metro compartments, where the wall has his back, as it were. “Kisi se touch nahi hoge”.

But no matter how much he may want not to be touched, or even just to pass unseen, it isn't always easy. Men who have mistaken him for a man jump up apologetically when they see his face and think they have accidentally touched a woman. Security queues, public toilets, the metro's own Ladies compartment -- every space seems insistent on compartmentalising by gender.

In If You Dare Desire (2017), Debalina's fictional telling of the lives of real-life couple Swapna and Sucheta, their difference is less visible on their bodies -- but that doesn't make it easier. Swapna and Sucheta committed suicide by consuming pesticide together in Nandigram, West Bengal, in 2011, with Swapna leaving behind a six-page suicide note. As the film puts it, “Only this much is fact in the film. The rest, fiction.” The poetic urban interlude Debalina creates for the two young women is no idyll, but it allows us to see how it might have been for them if they had escaped to the city, how it probably is for the many South Asian women whose love seems invisible to the heterosexual worlds they inhabit. Until it becomes visible, is instantly interpreted as difference, and that difference as grave and present danger.

But sometimes when you don't fit in, you can no longer pretend that you do. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Nov 2020. 

Shelf Life: Out of Vaidehi's Closet

My Shelf Life column for October 2020:

The link between clothes, sexual attractiveness and power is incestuous and can be unnerving. Kannada writer Vaidehi’s stories literally disrobe it.

Vaidehi's stories shocked me when I first read them. I don't mean in the manner that the 1945-born writer has apparently “sometimes shocked Kannada intellectuals”, by publicly declaring such things as 'The kitchen is my guru, that's where I have learnt many lessons'. The incongruity there, as a critic cited by editor-translator Tejaswini Niranjana in her introduction to Vaidehi's Gulabi Talkies and Other Stories (2006) points out, lay in one of modern Kannada's most successful writers speaking like a 'full-time grihini or housewife'. And yet, what Vaidehi was doing by adopting such a public stance was precisely why her fiction jumped out at me: she was forcing the (male-dominated, genteel, largely upper caste) world of Kannada letters to engage with the world of women as she knew it. She refused to be co-opted into literariness as they knew it. 

Since the late 19th century, women have been writing fiction about women's lives, not just in Kannada, but in Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Hindi and more. So Vaidehi, also Janaki Srinavasa Murthy, born 1945, married to KL Srinivasa Murthy at 23, and mother of two daughters, wasn't the first. But her words lift the ceaseless labour of women's lives out of the domestic space and onto the page with a ringing clarity. Somehow, the closer she sticks to the materiality of these circumscribed, cyclical lives – food and rituals, weddings and babies, illness and mortality – the more starkly we see their political, even philosophical ramifications. As she puts it: “What is important to us [women] is not whether the world is truth or lie. But work, work and more work.”

A still from the film Gulabi Talkies (2008), adapted from Vaidehi's short story by the director Girish Kasaravalli.

Among the material objects that recur in Vaidehi's stories are clothes. At one end of the spectrum is what is ritually and socially prescribed for women: the red saris encumbent on shaven-headed Brahmin widows; the gold jewels to measure a bride’s status. At the other are clothes as markers of individuality, the body as a canvas on which fashion can paint new identities.

But what was fashion in this India of sleepy villages and one-street towns, where the age-old injunctions of caste and age and community controlled so much of what people wore? In the title story Gulabi Talkies the opening of a local cinema triggers new dreams: “Day by day the bangle shop began to stock various kinds of face powder and other cosmetics...the seamstress struggled to tune her skills to the new fashions and her creations were passed off as fashionable, causing a commotion in the world of clothing which crossed over into the speech and gait of women...”.

The fashions of Vaidehi's tales may seem basic to us – but oh, how women wanted them. And how willing they were to suffer the consequences, because fashion felt like freedom. In ‘Remembering Ammachi’, for instance, the child narrator helps the grown-up Ammachi pleat her sari pallu “so that both its borders could be seen”. They set out for a neighbour's puja, but are barred by Venkappaya, who has arrogated to himself a status somewhere between adoptive brother and future husband. “How coquettishly you're going to town,” he rages. “That pallu has been pleated in such a way as to show both the breasts.”

Kannada writer Janaki Srinavasa Murthy, also known as Vaidehi. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The poorer the women are, the more meagre their aspirations – and the more excruciating their non-fulfilment. In Tale of a Theft, the hungry Bachchamma thinks of the prohibitive price of glass bangles while sitting next to women covered in gold. In Vanimai, the titular central character is a woman with mottled, flat feet whose “biggest dream was to own a pair of slippers”. This is nothing short of radical in a milieu where a man called Narasimha can tell Vanimai’s elders never to buy her slippers, declaring with perfect assurance: “Those who use footwear are either the prostitutes of Bombay or the mistresses of the town. Not decent people...” 

The spectre of the whore, in fact, is ever-present in these tales. Whether it's Narasimha taunting Vanimai or Venkapayya deliberately ruining Ammachi's secretly-tailored back-button sari blouse, being fashionable makes women attractive – too attractive. 

The late Nirad C. Chaudhuri, one of our most politically incorrect writers, once speculated that Indian women have historically had so little free contact with men that they dress only to compete with each other, that is they are acquisitive and overdressed. “It follows from this tradition,” wrote Chaudhuri in 1976, that “a woman in “very smart or piquant dress”... “must be fair prey”. To prove his point he recounted two anecdotes, in both of which “lower-class” men associate being well-dressed with sluttiness. 

But of course it isn't only poorer men, or even only men, who tar women for wearing certain clothes. In Vaidehi's Chandale, watching Beena “climbing up the compound in her short skirt” makes the older Rami “want to scream”. In a stunning image, the nervous housewife suddenly imagines the carefree teenager “winking at [her son Satisha] in the style of a Mumbai prostitute”. So obvious is the link between clothes and sexual attractiveness, and between sexual attractiveness and power, that it is all we can do to suppress it in those we believe don’t deserve power. Mostly, that’s other people. Sometimes, it includes ourselves.

Banner: A book cover of Gulabi Talkies and Other Stories (2006)' a still from the film Gulabi Talkies. (2008)

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 23 Oct 2020.

In Vino Veritas -- II

My Mirror column:

In Sanal Kumar Sasidharan's An Off-Day Game (2015), a drunken day unmasks a society intoxicated with its own sense of power.

Four men gather for a day of drinking in Sanal Kumar Sasidharan's harrowing An Off-Day Game (Ozhivudivasathe Kali, 2015).

Last week's column on The Mosquito Philosophy was about what truths might emerge when a group of men get together to drink. This week, too, my subject is a film about an all-male drinking session – An Off-Day Game (Ozhivudivasathe Kali) directed by Sanal Kumar Sasidharan. Sasidharan is best known outside Kerala for his internationally award-winning film Sexy Durga (2017); An Off-Day Game won him the 2015 Kerala State Film Award for Best Film and is currently streaming on two platforms.

and is currently streaming on two platforms.

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/in-vino-veritas-ii/articleshow/79345533.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

The film is adapted from Unni R's Malayalam short story 'Holiday Fun', available in J Devika's wonderful English translation as part of the collection One Hell of a Lover (Westland 2019). Barely nine pages long, Unni's tale begins with a reference to Boccaccio's 14th century Italian classic in which seven women and three men gather in a remote villa to escape the plague-stricken city of Florence - an interesting aside in a pandemic year. “They were like refugees from the plague in The Decameron,” writes Unni. “Only, they were escaping the monotony of work, the four of them... gathered in Room No 70 of Nandavanam Lodge, that Sunday, as usual, around a bottle of liquor.”

Unlike Unni, though, Sasidharan does not launch straight into the action. Instead, as he would do two years later in Sexy Durga, he begins his film with a semi-documentary prelude: footage from a real-life by-election in Kerala, where we see red Communist flags challenged by a rising wave of saffron BJP ones. We also see a Kathakali dance performance as part of the election campaign: this is a state where art and politics are allowed to cross-fertilise each other. It is from the assembled crowd at a rally that the camera first picks out two of our protagonists, following them as they join the other two at a little bend in a stream: a picturesque spot for daytime drinking. Another man driving by is tempted to join them, and a plan is made for another drunken assignation on Election Day.

The electoral backdrop serves Sasidharan well, allowing the film to fit in both India's official dry day rules, that bar the sale of liquor on polling days, and the simultaneously ubiquitous unofficial fact that liquor changes hands during almost all Indian elections: as a bribe, or more categorically in exchange for votes. It also works beautifully as a way of working up to the conversations between his characters – and to the 'game' of the film's title, in which four players pick chits labelled 'King', “Minister', 'Police' and 'Thief', and the one who's picked 'Police' must then guess who the 'Thief' is.

But plenty happens before the game unfolds. Unni's story has an early paragraph laying out the quality of the men's weekends in Nandavanam Lodge: “The usual criticism of the government, the rant about bedroom squabbles, the description of the body of the young girl one brushed against in the street or on the bus...”. Among Sasidharan's achievements is the way he takes this bare-bones description and gives it flesh, adding dialogue, characters and subplots that make his film into the terrific, terrifying slow-burn watch that it is. There is no woman actually present in Unni's scenario, for instance -- but Geetha in An Off-Day Game is crucial. Right from the moment that the men arrive at the lodge, she is the cynosure of all eyes, and not in a good way. She tries her hardest to just do her job: preparing a meal for her boss's visitors. But being the sole woman in a remote location with an increasingly drunken group of men, as we will see, isn't quite conducive to just doing one's job.

The relationship of each character to their 'job' is, at a deeper level altogether, the subject of Sasidharan's film. Much before the 'game' plots each man into a 'professional' role, the film has begun the perspicacious process of observing how even within a circle of friends, every man is supremely conscious of social status – his own and that of the others. “The kind of places this Brahmin fellow digs out,” says one man as they approach the lodge. “He always howls when he sees the jungle,” says another. What may have felt like gentle ribbing turns darker and darker as the film proceeds, especially as everyone presses first the woman and then Dasa into unwanted tasks. “You need me to pluck a jackfruit and now kill a rooster,” says Dasa.

As befitting a film set in Kerala, politics is the matrix of all things – the idea of democracy, for instance, is the context for a sharp argument about the man-woman relationship, and an anecdotal history of Emergency for a discussion of the 'duties' of citizens: “the cops did cops' job, the scavengers did scavengers' job, the army men did army jobs...”. Caste, or its modern-day version, serves an authoritarian society perfectly: no-one is meant to challenge their socially-ordained roles.

Some of Sasidharan's long scenes are pure genius, and the long takes and the stunning forest soundscape create an atmosphere of menace that is unerring in both its sense of beauty and danger.

The 'game' may feel a little contrived, but the conversational fluidity the film achieves is astounding. Under the influence of alcohol, everything is laid bare. In vino veritas.

This is the second part of a two-part column. The first part is here.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Nov 2020.

 

Shelf Life: The Hand-Me-Downs

My Shelf Life column for May 2020.

Other people’s clothes can be prickly things, fulfilling neither the wearer’s desire nor the giver’s expectation of gratitude.

In Vinod Kumar Shukla's magnificent 1979 novel Naukar ki Kameez, a low-level desk employee in a government office is forced to do duty at the big boss's home. In his spare, masterful style, Shukla condenses his narrator's class-ridden predicament into a single object: a shirt. The sahib's first servant, we are told, wore ill-fitting clothes, obviously belonging to someone larger than him. So a thick white shirt was stitched for him. But the servant didn't last. His replacement, too, was fired soon. The shirt, like the position, now lies empty, awaiting someone who can fit into it. “Naukar ki kameez ek saancha tha, jisse adarsh naukaron ki pehchaan hoti,” writes Shukla: 'The servant's shirt was a mould, which would help identify the ideal servant'.

In an unsettling episode, Shukla's naive young narrator Santu is tricked into visiting the big boss's home, and physically held down until his own “bush-shirt” has been exchanged for the servant's waiting white kameez. Forced to wear it home, Santu returns the next day in his own clothes. When made to take his boss's wife shopping or conduct other semi-domestic duties, he goes along reluctantly. He doesn't see how else to keep his job. His resistance condenses into not wearing the servant's shirt.

The attempt to preserve one's self while being compelled to wear someone else's clothes is also the theme of the Hyderabadi writer Wajida Tabassum's famous story 'Utran' ('Cast-Offs'), translated by Sayeeda S. Hameed and Sughra Mehdi for Parwaaz, a now-classic volume of Urdu short stories by women. 'Utran' features a servant, too – but Chamki is the epitome of insubordination from the very first scene in which we meet her, as a seven-year-old who wants to exchange dupattas with her much richer playmate and 'become sisters'.
Her mother Anna Bi is wet-nurse to an aristocratic family, and so Chamki receives all of Shahzadi Pasha's innumerable cast-offs. But where Shahzadi's hand-me-downs leave Anna Bi thrilled and grateful, the one-way traffic only makes Chamki angrier: “Ammini! I am prettier than Bi Pasha. Then why doesn't she wear my cast-offs?”

 It is no surprise that the single saffron-coloured outfit that the mistress has tailored for Chamki, though it is of cheaper material than Shahzadi would ever wear, becomes the girl's favourite. Those clothes “elevate her to the heavens”, giving her a heady confidence that leads to the story's denouement.

And yet, there can also be confidence in wearing someone's old clothes. Upendranath Ashk's 1961 Hindi story 'The Ambassador' demonstrates this perfectly. It begins with a man arriving at the narrator's well-appointed bungalow in “a dirty shirt with no buttons, a loose coat full of holes, baggy trousers patched and torn, and boots that seemed worn down by centuries of use.” The houseboy is chasing the stranger away when he stretches out his hand, says “Hello, Bakshi” and advises the narrator, in perfect English, to fire his impolite servant.

By the end of Ashk's tale, the narrator's old roommate – for that is who he is – has eaten a sumptuous meal, wiped his dirty hands on his tattered clothes and demanded a set of clean old ones. As he walks away with them thrown casually over his arm, the narrator is struck that he hasn't even said 'thank you'.

Is this what makes old clothes so fraught? Those who receive them might use them, they might even be glad to have them. But the giver's demand for gratitude, wanting to be thanked for a 'gift' that the receiver knows to be mere surplus: that can cause heartburn.

And yet, clothes are often so powerfully desired that someone else's clothes can also become fetishised, objects of illicit passion. In Saadat Hasan Manto's story 'Kali Shalwar', a prostitute down on her luck tells her new lover that she really wants a new black shalwar for Muharram. When he actually brings her one, Sultana is very happy. It is just like the satin one her friend Anwari recently got made. Then she realises it is the same one.

Published in 1942 in the Lahore-based journal Adab-i-Latif, its frank portrayal of the margins of polite society got it banned for obscenity. But in fact the story displays Manto's characteristic combination of deceptively casual plotting and rare emotional subtlety.

If coveting a black shalwar brings Sultana quiet sorrow, coveting a dead sister's wedding trousseau brings grand gothic tragedy in Henry James' 1868 story 'The Romance of Certain Old Clothes'. Two New England sisters find themselves, as the daughters of 19th century gentry apparently often did, vying for the same man. One marries him, but dies soon after giving birth. The second, Rosalind, promptly inveigles herself into the widower's life, becoming the new Mrs. Lloyd. It is interesting that James seems to judge her less for wanting her dead sister's husband than for desiring her locked-away wardrobe. Of course, like a good gothic tale, when Rosalind opens the forbidden trunk, her sister's spirit finds a way to punish her. 

Aspiring for more can seem ungrateful. The sahib of Shukla's novel knew what he was doing: scotching desire. “I would never give my own shirt to the servant,” he tells his head clerk. “The tastes we know, they should never know. If they do, they will be ungrateful.”

Seen through the eyes of those who rule, even old clothes can disrupt status quo.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 21 May 2020.

Status of women, women of status

My Mirror column: 

Thappad's single slap shakes the foundations of one marriage, but exposes the imbalances upon which most Indian families are built

Pavail Gulati and Taapsee Pannu play husband and wife in Anubhav Sinha’s thought-provoking film Thappad

Described in a sentence, the premise of Thappad seems rather all or nothing: a man slaps his wife once, and she decides to leave him. “Will a slap decide whether a couple can stay together or not?” was the response from the director of Baaghi 3. The actions of Thappad's heroine Amrita (Taapsee Pannu) look particularly outré in a country where domestic violence is not. Our last National Family Health Survey (2015-16) indicates that 31 per cent of India’s married women experience physical, sexual or emotional violence by their spouses - and 52 per cent women think it’s all right for a man to hit his wife.

Anubhav Sinha is that rare Indian filmmaker who’s gone from crafting money-spinners to slapping audiences in the face with ugly reflections of ourselves. His recent subjects of choice are all ones that New India would rather keep ‘in the family’ – i.e. things we don't like to talk about until people actually die, and even then the problem isn't us. In Mulk, it was the nationally normalised injustice of treating the Muslim community as guilty until proven innocent. In Article 15, it was the unconscionable continuance of caste hierarchies. In Thappad, Sinha targets the misuse of power often found closest home: gender. The aimed-for confrontation with the self here takes place within a two-person context: a marriage. But Sinha and his co-writer Mrunmayee Lagoo display a keen awareness that in this country even more than others, heterosexual domestic partnerships are part of an intricate web of familial, social and professional relationships. And that web is suspended in a matrix that’s invariably patriarchal.

With that in mind, let me re-describe the premise of Thappad. Confronted with a professional crisis while hosting a private party at his home, Vikram (Pavail Gulati) loses his temper at his wife Amrita and slaps her, in front of the assembled guests: his bosses as well as the couple’s family, friends and neighbours. Amrita, an educated upper middle class woman who has chosen not to pursue a career in favour of being a devoted wife to Vikram, finds herself unable to forget, forgive, ‘move on’. It doesn’t help that Vikram is entirely unable to see Amrita’s shock and humiliation – and unable to comprehend what he does see. It definitely doesn’t help that he assumes his wife’s forgiveness, even as he explains instead of apologising. “Saara gussa tum hi pe nikal gaya [All the anger tumbled out onto you],” is all he can manage before turning the marital conversation back to his only real preoccupation: himself.

The film is largely well cast and acted, with adeptly-written scenes that prevent characters from seeming like ideological messengers, even when delivering that usually bludgeoning thing: a climactic monologue. There are clever little touches, like Vikram complaining unendingly about feeling hard done by at work - “Vahan rehna hi nahi jahan value nahi hai [Who wants to stay on where you have no value?]” - while remaining tone-deaf to Amrita’s silences. What emerges, with empathy and without drama, is the patriarchal context that normalises the ‘working’ husband’s dependence on the ‘non-working’ wife - while invisibilising her labour, both physical and emotional. The wife is a full-time companion, hostess and cheerleader; manager of their upper middle class household, primary caregiver to him and his ageing mother and any potential children. But her husband doesn’t notice when her foot is hurt – so of course he doesn’t notice when her heart is.

Demanding empathy, support and sacrifice from their female partners while giving none back is simply the norm for men, and women have previously had no choice but to live with it. “Thoda bardaasht karna seekhna chahiye auraton ko,” says Amrita’s mother-in-law, not unkindly. “Aap khush hain bardaasht kar ke?” is Amrita’s counter-question. “Mere bachche khush hain,” the older woman replies.

Subjugating personal desires to the ‘larger’ cause of “family” is something women learn subliminally, becoming agents of our own submission. It is this acceptance that Thappad pushes back against: the notion that women should be content to derive satisfaction from satisfying others, not set out to find their own. “We know how to keep our families together,” says Vikram. “Hamare yahan ladkiyan chhoti chhoti baaton pe nahi jaati ghar chhod ke.” The totemic power of “ghar” is also the binding agent in the film's other relationships. Amrita's father (a superb Kumud Mishra) seems the gentle, supportive dad every girl needs, and a considerate husband. But the film makes him – and therefore us – come to see that his wife never had the freedom he did. She may not have been barred from pursuing her musical talents, as Amrita isn’t from dancing, but the household always took precedence over self-development. In other marriages, coupledom takes precedence over self-respect.

Divorce remains stigmatised in India (think Mohan Bhagwat), and so Amrita’s unshakeable resolve, however quiet, has raised hackles. As the film lets one of its own characters point out, if all women who’ve been slapped once by their husbands started leaving their marriages, the majority of Indian families would not be ‘together’. But like a before-her-time Preity Zinta insisting on being able to respect her man in Kya Kehna, Amrita isn’t most women. And Thappad is powerful because it isn’t programmatic. It doesn’t lay down the law about what you as a woman should do. It only lays out the possibilities for what you could.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Mar 2020.

The Art of the State - II

My Mirror column:

Schools, guns and graffiti in two films about the Indian state: When the Woods Bloom and Newton.

(This is the second of a two-part column. The previous column is here.)

I return this week to my discussion of Amit Masurkar's Newton and D. Bijukumar's Kaadu Pookkunna Neram (When the Woods Bloom, WTWB): very different films that deploy strikingly similar motifs to depict a similar subject. In both, an incident of anonymous violence is followed by the uniformed might of the Indian state descending on a Maoist-controlled adivasi area -- centred, in both cases, on a school. 

In the Malayalam film, the policemen have arrived to stay. "Two rooms will be enough for us," pronounces a senior cop, being magnanimous. "There are only four rooms in the school," replies the teacher. "But even if you wanted to take over the whole building, we could not stop you." The fact that the police sit at the top of this ecosystem becomes even clearer when a sleeping cop wakes up and starts hitting two curious children who have sneaked past him to touch some guns. When the teacher objects, he retorts rudely: "You're here to teach children. Don't try to teach cops!" The teacher keeps quiet, but later stops the cops from using the schoolchildren as free labour. Some of the loveliest scenes in Dr. Biju's film involve the tribal children singing.

The songs they sing are clear and sweet, a world away from the raucous film music that the policemen bring with them. "We are the masters of the forest," run the lyrics of one, its dulcet tones belying the sharp irony of the words as they ring out in a forest that no longer seems theirs. In Masurkar's film, where black humour replaces lyrical melancholy, two tribal children are forced to sing songs to entertain the cops. In both WTWB and Newton, local anger can only be expressed in graffiti -- scrawled on the walls of the sole pucca structure for miles around: the school.

But the sentiment of those messages, let alone the irony of their location, does not seem to be reaching the state, which remains intent on widespread repression — which can only produce greater public anger. Early in WTWB, a truckload of cops is unleashed on a village to search for a single 'terrorist'. In the end, when the protagonist (Indrajith) returns to the police post, he is greeted with surprise - and told that that six Adivasis have been jailed for a month on the non-bailable charge of killing him. Newton, where the police have come only for a day, with the ostensibly benign purpose of holding an election, also underlines the casual terror they wield.

In one silently sarcastic sequence, the cops barge into huts, extracting tribute as they rough up people to make them exercise their 'voluntary' right. Poor adivasi India, it seems, is where the state only shows up to replenish its stocks of fresh-brewed liquor and freshly-killed chicken. Newton takes a lighter approach than Biju's film to deliver the same depressing message - the police do not merely implement the law: they are the law. At least while they have the weapons.

This, too, is a motif both films share. WTWB puts the gun in the hands of a woman and a Maoist, letting us see how contingent power is when she taunts the now-unarmed cop: "You're afraid too,without a gun, isn't it?" Newton's climax, too, depends on a gun changing hands - though here we are under no illusion that it will eventually return to those who are licensed to use it. In this utterly skewed world, if you think you can challenge a police officer, you must either be powerful — or a fool. Which is why the long-serving Loknath ji, having observed Newton Kumar's refusal to kowtow to Aatma Singh, sidles up to him to ask after his political connections.

The chatty, diabetic Loknath ji is the excellent Raghuvir Yadav, who began his cinematic career in Pradip Krishen's Massey Sahib as a lower functionary of the colonial state, and now embodies to perfection this lower functionary of the postcolonial state. Both as the youthful Massey and as the middle-aged Loknath ji, Yadav offers up an everyman character whom we laugh at, but also with. And in so laughing, we also laugh at ourselves.

Loknath ji also offers a humorous indictment of the status language and literature have in today's India. An MA in Hindi sahitya who now advises people to focus on English, which he is teaching himself by watching American slasher comedies on his phone, he combines a deadpan cynicism about our times with a hope that he might still catch up.

But in his desire to write a "jombie story" about a police team that enters a jungle in a Maoist area (and never coming out), Loknath ji also gives us a momentary reprieve from realism, a pleasurable dip into the sensational that reminded me of Lalmohan Babu in Satyajit Ray's Feluda stories. Fiction makes other appearances in the film: as indulgence, as entertainment, as a trap. We hear a policeman reading a novel aloud to his mates, a potentially erotic romance about one Ramju. Less innocuously, in the pre-climactic scene, it is by telling the story of the day aloud that Newton realizes that that is what it is: a story he has been sold.

I have not yet watched Dr. Biju's other films, but I was fascinated to learn that none of the characters in his last five films have names. Masurkar and screenwriter Mayank Tewari are clearly equally cognizant of the significance of naming. Their protagonist has already shed the weight of his caste surname. His new first name rids him of the femininity of 'Nutan', while putting him on par with a famous Englishman - and making us instantly think of gravity. At some fundamental level, naming lies at the core of fiction. The fact that Newton can name himself anew is testament to the power of imagination.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Sun 19 Nov 2017.

Framing Kashmir

My piece on Witness, in Mint Lounge:

A magnificent new photography book offers a fine-grained, harrowing engagement with Kashmir's last 30 years.

Witness: Kashmir 1986-2016 / Nine Photographers (Yaarbal, 440 pages, Rs. 3,400)

In a recent interview, Donald R. Winslow, a veteran US photojournalist and former editor of News Photographer magazine, rued what he called the “philosophical devaluation” of photojournalism. “It used to be about the vision of the photographer you were sending...,” Winslow told The New York Times. “Now, we’re willing to accept whatever we can afford to buy from somebody who’s already there. It’s not about the caliber of the journalism or photography.”

The question of location is certainly fundamental—just not necessarily in the way Winslow presumes in his classic view from the metropole. The 200 photographs that make up the magnificent new photo book Witness: Kashmir 1986-2016/Nine Photographers were all taken in Kashmir, shot by “somebody who’s already there”. Barring one, the nine photographers grew up in Kashmir, and continue to live there or at least visit frequently. Their work, then, is precisely the opposite of the outsider who jets into the conflict zone to get a great picture: It is a fine-grained, long-time engagement with the world around them, a turbulent world of which they are themselves part.

In a world where “photographers, their subjects and spectators all share the recognition that what they are witnessing is intolerable”, as film-maker and writer Sanjay Kak suggests in his introduction, photography becomes the exercise of a civic skill. The stunning archive of images in Witness is, thus, an excavation of Kashmiri public memory, of the sort that almost never gets seen outside the state. Along with Kak’s detailed, thoughtful profiles of the photographers, these photographs leave us in no doubt about what it is like to live and work in Kashmir—what it has been like for 30 years. As the pot of memories is stirred, the photographers’ own experiences of violence rise to the surface: a schoolmate found dead one morning, a teenaged brother lost to a cause, frightening encounters with the army or police.

For many of the photographers, the camera was a personal response to the harrowing times they grew up in. “In those days, when you left in the morning, you didn’t know if you would come home in the evening. I thought if I get a press card, it might save my life,” Javed Dar said at the book’s Delhi launch in February. Dar smiled broadly, but it was no joke. And what began as a strategic tactic— the press card as a way to stand out from the crowd in a landscape strewn with army and police barriers—transformed into something more deeply felt. “Pictures gave me something. When I go out with my camera I still do feel strong and powerful, like a soldier with a gun,” photographer Dar Yasin told Kak.

Of course, the life of the Kashmiri press photographer is inextricably entwined with the threat of violence. Meraj Uddin, the most senior photographer in the book, speaks of the death of a photojournalist (in a bomb attack ) in whose honour Srinagar’s Press Colony was renamed Mushtaq Ali Enclave. “Vulnerable as individuals, photographers in Srinagar began to move around in groups, with no fewer than three cars, a practice that is visible to this day,” writes Kak. Risk is the photographer’s currency, and it is normalized to the point of becoming an initiation ritual.

Soon after his arrival in Srinagar in 2009, when Sumit Dayal, who was brought up in Nepal, got beaten up by a crowd calling him “CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force) ka aadmi”, his photojournalist friends received the news with equanimity, and that brand of mordant humour one hears often in Kashmir. “Welcome to the club. Now you are officially a Kashmiri photographer,” Dar Yasin told Dayal. “What you also need is a beating from the other side, from the CRPF. Then you’ll be a full man, a photojournalist.”

Photography in Kashmir has emerged in a cultural context where there is almost no local film-making, and little space for art. Witness opens up a much needed conversation about Kashmir, including the role of creative and intellectual practice in a place so embattled. Not all the images here refer directly to the conflict. But whether we are looking at a child at an Eid sacrifice, or a watchful migrant worker bundled up in plastic during the 2014 flood, violence can never be far from our minds. In Kak’s words: “There will be blood, but in what way will you confront it on the page?”

                                                                                ***

Kuka Parray with his Ikhwan militia

Meraj Uddin, b. 1959

The doyen of Kashmiri photojournalists, by 1990 he was the first port of call for all journalists visiting the state. His images act as an archive: a beret-wearing Yasin Malik at a 1986 rally for Palestine; the open-mouthed body of Neelkanth Ganjoo, a Kashmiri Pandit judge assassinated in 1989 (possibly for sentencing Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front founder Maqbool Bhat to death); and, in the image here, the militant-turned-counterinsurgent Kuka Parray, posing with his infamous pro-government militia, the Ikhwan.

Village boys at Yusmarg -- Javeed Shah

Javeed Shah, b. 1967

To newspaper readers, Shah’s photographs are familiar from his years at The Indian Express and, later, Mint. Shah often composes a picture along a diagonal axis, like the one here, which makes clear how different life is for boys and girls in Kashmir. His flair for colour can sometimes produce something disturbingly elemental: His image of a watermelon, bleeding red pulp on to the tarmac after the 2006 blast at Naaz Cinema, is pure documentation and metaphor.

Funeral at Pehlipora -- Dar Yasin, @AP Images

Dar Yasin, b. 1973

Yasin has worked with Associated Press for a decade; his images must feed the relentless maw of the news cycle. “He likes to think of himself as doing a job, one that he simply wants to do well,” writes Kak. And yet, as his Witness images reveal, Yasin’s work can always be read for more. The stone-throwers he captures in dramatic mid-leap have blank, masked faces—sharply juxtaposed with the angry gaze of the boy pockmarked with pellet-gun injuries. In the image above, the crimson blankets that swathe dead militants’ bodies lend their funerals a mythic air, evoking blood but also royalty and martyrdom.

Paramilitary soldier kicks boy -- Javed Dar

Javed Dar, b. 1975

In 1992, when he was 17, Dar had a narrow escape from the army. The trauma aged his father overnight. In 2015, when Dar’s son Danish (then 17) was hit by a bullet in the leg, the shadow of the past reappeared. The image here is an example of how the constant brutalizing presence of armed men in uniform haunts Dar’s images, often seeming like automatons with their helmeted anonymity and synchronized stride. Other pictures depict violence and ruin in painterly ways: the smoke billowing behind a sad-faced woman in 2012’s After The Fire, or the blood being scooped off a Srinagar street in 2013 in After Killing Of Policeman.

Shattered glass -- Altaf Qadri

Altaf Qadri, b. 1976

A staff photographer with Associated Press since 2008, Qadri’s pictures in Witness are often composed radially, with the eye being led inwards. In Washing Of Muharram Wounds, a disparate circle is united by bloodied hands; in Funeral After A Staged Encounter, we see older men reaching out to a grieving boy at the centre; in Grave Of A Militant Commander, pheran-clad men guard the periphery while a thorny branch descends, as if to shield the grave. In the image above, the radial motif is upfront: Everyday life in Kashmir must be viewed through cracks in the windscreen, guarded by a baffled man in uniform.

Abandoned Pandit home, Rainawari, Srinagar -- Sumit Dayal

Sumit Dayal, b. 1981

Brought up in Kathmandu and trained at New York’s International Center for Photography, Dayal’s beginnings as a photographer in Kashmir could not have been more different from those of the others in this book. His images, too, locate themselves less squarely in the political domain and more in the interstices of personal and collective memory. Since 2009, when he visited Srinagar after 17 years, Dayal’s desire to recapture the Kashmir of his childhood memories has taken new shape, expressed increasingly in work with “found” photographs: from private collections, bureaucratic files, local studio pictures, as well as his own family albums. But the theme of home abides.

Showkat Nanda, b. 1982

Nanda was 7 when police firing in Baramulla killed his teenaged cousin Parvez. Months later, in March 1990, Nanda’s 16-year-old brother Sajad joined the Jammu and Kashmir Students Liberation Front. He died in an accident while crossing the Line of Control, and Kak’s conversations with Nanda in the book elicit the family’s stored-up grief: a fiery speech Sajad once crafted; a poem their headmaster-father wrote about losing a son to a cause. Much of his work appears rooted in that personal loss: There’s a series on young boys on the run, a series on stone-throwers, another on women whose sons and husbands have disappeared.

Police Announcement -- Syed Shahryar

Syed Shahriyar, b. 1992

“Why would I choose to have five pictures of the flood and five of Muharram in Shahriyar’s images?” asked Kak at the Witness launch. “Because I can see there is a pause—he is figuring something out for himself.” Shahriyar is a Shia, and his studied black and white Muharram images, often of women in the stillness and contemplation of grief, mark a deliberate departure from the usual goriness of Muharram depictions. Several other photographs underline the crucial place of image-making in the new Kashmir: cameraphones at a militant’s funeral, or during a police announcement, wielded as tiny weapons of the everyday.

Azaan Shah, b. 1997

The youngest to be included in ‘Witness’, Shah lives with his parents and elder sister in Fatehkadal and likes to think of himself as a photographer of Srinagar’s streets. “I want to show only one thing well, and that is downtown,” he told Kak in the book. But even as he stalks the downtown neighbourhoods of Zainakadal, Bohrikadal, Alikadal and Jamia Masjid (seen in picture), he usually overlooks the protest image for the street that is shut down, or the stillness of a lone figure against a background. The most dramatic things in his pictures are the shadows.

Published in Mint Lounge, 11 Mar 2017.

Sons and Lovers, Redux

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

Vishal Bhardwaj's takes on Shakespeare have produced female figures of rare frankness and sexual vitality, but their power is shaped by a constricting masculine world. Haider is no exception.

With his adaptation of Hamlet into Haider, Vishal Bhardwaj completes his supremely ambitious trilogy of Shakespeare tragedies reimagined in Indian contexts. Since this is not a review, all I'll say here is that Haider shares with the two previous films in the trilogy -- 2004's Maqbool and 2006's Omkara -- Bhardwaj's now-trademark accomplishments: stunning frames composed with an eye for beauty that does not preclude terror, pitch-dark humour, and consummate detailing, including an unerring ear for the cadences of both speech and music in each milieu he chooses to evoke. 

Of course, all this detailing would come to nought if Bharadwaj were not able to make Shakespeare's four-hundred-year-old characters seem to emerge organically from his fully-realized contemporary settings. But he does. And he does so by sticking close to the bone of the most elemental fears and passions. What struck me particularly, as I watched Haider, was that Bhardwaj's interpretations of Shakespeare all come to centre on sexual jealousy. In Omkara, the emphasis does not need to be created: Othello's climactic conflict was already about jealousy. Like Othello's suspicion of his wife Desdemona, Omi's niggling doubt about Dolly grows from a speck into a dark cloud that engulfs their whole universe. But in Maqbool and now in Haider, it is Bhardwaj's rejigging that makes jealousy the prime motive force. 

But unlike in most popular cinema, in India and beyond, the jealous rages of men do not erupt over women who are playthings. If anything, their frank expressions of preference make Bhardwaj's women rare. In both Maqbool and Omkara, Nimmi (Tabu) and Dolly (Kareena) must compel their tongue-tied lovers to confess their attraction - and do something about it. [Another Bhardwaj heroine, Priyanka Chopra's Sweety in Kaminey, had to literally draw the words out of the stuttering Guddu (Shahid Kapoor)]. Left to themselves, Bhardwaj suggests, Irffan's Maqbool may well have remained Abbaji's loyal right hand man; Ajay Devgn's awkward Omkara may never have picked up the courage to express his love to the white-as-milk Dolly. These men may embody physical power, but the sexual agency is all women's. As Tabu's Nimmi -- a vision of loveliness in white brocade -- taunts Irrfan's brooding Maqbool in an early scene, "Darpoke ho tum. Hamaare ishq mein gal jaoge, lekin chhoone ki himmat nahi..." 

By turning the Lady Macbeth character into Duncan's unhappy mistress, Bhardwaj made Maqbool a chilling examination of sexual power. On the one hand, we see, in Nimmi's acceptance of Abbaji's sexual obeisance, a sense of queenliness. She is bound by many things, but the most powerful man in Mumbai is her captive. She is the only person in the film -- other than a foolhardy police officer -- to call the don by his first name, Jahangir. And yet Nimmi is a profoundly vulnerable character, a woman with a million unfulfilled mannats, forced to sleep with a paunchy old man who disgusts her. So her craving for romance is expressed in desperate ways: stepping on a thorn to get Maqbool to bathe her foot, making him say "meri jaan" to her on a Hindi movie cliff at pistol-point, making him search for her lost earring in the dirt by firelight. 

With Haider, Tabu reprises the part of a woman whose unfulfilledness in her marriage sets in motion -- if unwittingly -- a cycle of destruction. Ghazala -- Bhardwaj's take on Hamlet's mother Gertrude -- takes the devotion that comes to her from men as natural, whether her brother-in-law playing the fool to amuse her, or her son Haider, her relationship with whom contains a visible strain of possessiveness. In both films, Tabu plays to perfection the woman of sexual vitality. (In both Maqbool and Haider, the only other female character is an innocent young girl in love.) 

Ghazala is not as morally compromised in the matter of her husband's death as Nimmi was. But Haider, like Hamlet, believes for most of the narrative that she knowingly brought it about. Her compulsions, though not entirely clear, do seem to stem from her desire for sexual fulfilment. And Bhardwaj knows what this means for most of his audience. It is no coincidence that he gives Ghazala a line where she says she will be the villain no matter what she does. And yet Haider, as a film, does not make her the villain of the piece. 

And in this, in their recognition of Gertrude's sexual vitality as something that does not necessarily make her villain, Haider follows in the footsteps of those feminist literary critics who first pointed out that Gertrude's attachment to Claudius was clearly a weakness of the flesh, not of the intellect. "The character of Hamlet's mother has not received the specific critical attention it deserves," began Carolyn Heilbrun in a path-breaking 1957 essay which went to challenge the longtime portrayal of Gertrude as weak, silly, vacillating, sheeplike and shallow. Male critics, wrote Heilbrun, found it impossible to imagine that a woman over 45 could arouse or experience sexual passion, so they ignored what the Ghost, Hamlet, and Gertrude herself tell us in the play, insisting on turning her "frailty" into something more than an admission of sexual need. 

Ghazala is not frail, and she has much more influence in this narrative than Gertrude did. The (masculine) revenge motive remains crucial, but Bhardwaj effectively robs it of pivotal status: "intekaam se sirf intekaam paida hota hai". And yet the sacrificial ending he gives us seems to suggest an identification of woman and motherland that left me somewhat discomfited.

How to be a Leading Lady

Yesterday's Mumbai Mirror column:

Two new films this week offer compelling portraits of women in power. But must gender roles be copied rather than changed? If we can't beat them, must we join them?

Something interesting is going on at the cinema this week. Two wonderfully dissimilar films -- one a mainstream Bollywood production house attempting a songless policier, the other trying to undercut documentary's dull image with colourful characters and music -- give centre stage to women in positions of authority. Pradeep Sarkar's pacey crime drama Mardaani stars Rani Mukerji as a Mumbai Crime Branch cop, while Deepti Kakkar and Fahad Mustafa's documentary Katiyabaaz is staged as a face-off between Loha Singh, the power thief of the film's title, and Ritu Maheshwari, an IAS officer trying to reform the dysfunctional Kanpur Electricity Supply Company (KESCO). 

Considering it's a Yash Raj production and a star vehicle for the Chopra family's new bahu, Mardaani has generated rather little buzz. Perhaps that's unsurprising: it's a hero-less film and contemporary Bollywood -- and our male-dominated box office - clearly rations out bhaav along gender lines. But the title has also put off many members of the film's would-be audience, who are annoyed by the idea that a woman's strength must necessarily be couched as her masculine side. 

Mukerji has defended the title, implying that we should read it not as literal but literary, since it's taken from Subhadra Kumari Chauhan's poem about the valiant queen Lakshmibai, who famously rode into battle against the British in 1857: "Khoob ladi mardaani woh toh Jhansi wali rani thhi". Mukerji spent her childhood in Jhansi, and her father (filmmaker Ram Mukerji) liked reading the poem to her, whether or not he actually named her after it. 

But there's no getting away from the gendered signals sent out by the title, and watching the film, it's clear that the name is no coincidence. Shivani Shivaji Roy can hand out slaps and cuss words as easily as any man in the force, and she revels in the street display of physical power. Her clothes make no concessions to femininity, not even a kurta. She is either in uniform, or in trousers and collared shirts - and not fitted women's shirts that emphasise her curves. Roy's no-nonsense look is sans make-up. Her hair, though long, is always tied back. She's shown in a sari once. But that opening scene is also the one that establishes her comradely rapport with her all-male team. And how do we know she's one of the boys? Because she's happy to make their kind of jokes: their (male) boss's mood is off, it seems, because his wife yelled at him for forgetting to take her "anniversary shopping". It's as if entering into masculine repartee about ordinary 'wives' is the only way to signal that she isn't one. 

Since the film insists on gender reversal rather than parity, we are not surprised to find that our heroine is partnered by a Bengali doctor husband as inconsequential and vulnerable as countless policemen's' wives and girlfriends from Shool to Seher (let's not even talk about Singham). And though the film nods at Shivani's nurturing side by having her bring up an orphaned niece, she doesn't have children of her own. 

Contrast this with the real-life Ritu Maheshwari, the bureaucrat of Katiyabaaz, who's shown to have two young children and never wears anything but colourful saris. We learn almost nothing about her husband, but neither her domestic life nor her professional one shows any signs of gender role reversal. What also fascinated me about Maheshwari's authority is that it does not depend on her creating a rapport with the men who work under her, but seemingly the opposite -- maintaining a distance. 

Perhaps this has less to do with these women as archetypes of female power and more with the different spheres in which they operate. Both are state functionaries. But for Mukerji's policewoman, the law is an ass. It is something whose limitations must be overcome to provide vigilante justice; while for the bureaucrat, the only means she has at her disposal are legal ones. It is not by swearing like a man that Maheshwari earns respect, but by keeping her voice down and insisting on decorum. In one remarkable scene, a shouting male MLA trying to browbeat Maheshwari is made to leave her office. 

But in the long term, the even-tempered Maheshwari is transferred, while the male MLA wins the election, and presumably retains a hand in Kanpur's dysfunctional political present. Meanwhile Shivani Roy, though she wins her particular battle (a case of child sex trafficking), has to deal with male colleagues' accusations of taking things "too personally". Another time, she's told that she achieves more when keeping her cool: "jab tum shaant rehti ho". 

Political mobilisation in both films is shown to be manipulated rather than representative. I was struck by the honesty of Mardaani's recognition that in the wrong political hands, even the discourse of women's safety (on which the film is itself riding) can be twisted to harass innocent people. All men are not evil, and all women are not innocent. But even this film doesn't seem to understand that if vigilante justice is so dangerous in one instance, it cannot be assumed to be the solution in another. Self-defence is one thing. But is female violence now the only answer to male violence? I completely understand the urge to clap, but I do wish we had something better to clap for.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Sun 24 August, 2014.