Post Facto: The Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing

My Sunday Guardian column this month:

The late Hindi writer Upendranath Ashk

The late Hindi writer Upendranath Ashk has a great story called 'The Dal Eaters'. First published in 1955, 'Daliye' only came to my notice earlier this year when I read Hats and Doctors, a selection of Ashk's short stories in Daisy Rockwell's impeccable translation. 'The Dal Eaters' is about North Indian tourists in Kashmir. Early on, two little girls on a bus from Pathankot to Srinagar "shriek" and "squawk" until the narrator caustically suggests they be enrolled in a school to nurture their musical genius. "That's what I think too," says Mr. Bhalla, oblivious to the sarcasm, "but right now they just get their education from the movie theatre nearby."

Setting his story in the tourist economy of 1950s Kashmir allows Ashk to do something literature does far too infrequently – talk about money. Mr. Bhalla's remark about the 'free coaching' his daughters receive from the cinema is of a piece with the scathing characterisation of the Bhallas as misers and freeloaders. 'Daliye', the story's title, is the contemptuous Kashmiri term for tourists like the Bhallas — "people who take pleasure in the paradise of Kashmir while eating only tandoori rotis that come with free dal." "If only tourists like them started coming here, who would buy all these Kashmiri almonds and walnuts, peaches and apricots, apples and pears, shawls, woodcuts and papier mache?" wonders Mr. Chopra.

The monetary theme is established right at the story's start, when Mr. Chopra, strolling along on the banks of the Lidder in Pahalgam, introduces the narrator to his brother-in-law. "He's a very famous artist from Delhi," [says Chopra], "his pictures should be in the President's Mansion, but he doesn't even care, he just makes them and hands them out to his friends. But believe you me, whoever has a painting of his in his hands has a fortune worth thousands of rupees." Of course we've come a very long way since 1955 with regard to the monetisation of art – and with regard to the sums of money that might be considered a fortune. But the sensibility which judges art primarily – even only – in terms of money is immediately and unsettlingly recognizable as being alive and well in our times.

I refer, of course, to the way in which the idea of writing transformed in the Indian public eye from something quiet, dull and penurious to the source of a potential jackpot (codeword: Arundhati Roy). That conversation — with the slow gleam dawning in a great-uncle's eye — is one many of us have encountered at the extended family gathering, and Mira Nair cottoned onto it perfectly in Monsoon Wedding. But it goes deep into the childhood psyche, this stuff. In New York in the mid-2000s, I went to an opening at one of the only two galleries that showed South Asian art then, and found one wall covered with the artistic outpourings of the offspring of potential (NRI) art investors, the result of a workshop that had been conducted that day. On the verge of being charmed by a rarefied space like an art gallery having allowed itself to become the site of a home-style proud-parent display, I went closer. And discovered that the little squiggles on each crayon mess weren't just 'signatures': they were 'signatures' accompanied by an imaginary price tag, each and every 'price' ending in several zeroes.

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Another novel I recently read, John Lanchester's excellent 2012 novel Capital, is an insightful unravelling of the world wide web of money via a truly superb slice of London life on a fictional street. In December 2006, when the novel begins, real estate prices have risen so spectacularly that everyone who owns a house on Pepys Road is now rich. Some of these are people like Roger and Arabella Yount, who up until Roger's pre-Christmas-2006 bonus fiasco were the sort of people "who could unthinkingly afford a £3.5 million house" — and even after said fiasco, remained the sort of people who think nothing of buying a new table to spruce up a bedroom to make the house they're having to sell "more saleable".

But Lanchester also gives us people like Matya, the Younts' lovely Hungarian nanny, and Zbigniew, the Polish plumber, who Matya decides is much more right for her than the really rich man of her fantasies because he'll know what it's like to lose a £30 Oystercard. The book also counts among its central characters a hugely talented young Senegalese footballer whose only capital is his long, loping football stride, and a "performance and installation artist and all-round art-world legend" whose "anonymity was his most interesting artefact".

Ashk's dal-eaters, who scrounge on hotels and food, grossly underpay the shikarawallas and never pay the poor tour guides at all, are described as people who own their own fifty-thousand-rupee homes in Delhi's Patel Nagar. These were well-off people oblivious to the poverty of others, but also seemingly oblivious to their own wealth. In the world of Capital, the richest of the rich – like Arabella Yount – are so used to being rich that they remain oblivious even to their own impending poverty.

Film Review: Rajjo

The idea of Rajjo — a deliberate throwback to the courtesan film, one of Hindi cinema’s most beloved genres — is all very well. Even if the supremely literate tawaif of the sh’er-o-shairi and courtly manners and mores has long been dead, the business of women making a living by dancing, singing, and providing sexual services to male patrons is far from over. While the tragic tawaif with a heart of gold was replaced by the ill-fated bar dancer as long back as Chandni Bar (2001) and the beer bar has since become a fixture of Hindi film space, there have been few truly interesting spins on the theme. Only Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D and Reema Kagti’s Talaash come to mind, which goes to show there is always space for a cinematic re-imagining of the kotha. 

But the creators of Rajjo are too lazy or too unimaginative to produce the slightest morsel of newness. Or truth. Instead, they serve up a truly terrible rehash of all the possible brothel-based movies you’ve ever seen. Like in all those films through the ‘80s, Baaghi and Sadak and so on, the youthful, untainted hero falls in love with the poor prostitute and sets out to rescue her – by marriage, naturally. Director Vishwas Patil makes this completely unreconstructed narrative worse with supposedly contemporary side characters and subplots that pull in too many directions. 

It doesn’t help that Rajjo is full of contradictory impulses in the art direction department. We go from an oddly realistic middle class Marathi home where our hero Chandu (Paras Arora) lives with his father and mother and sweet little sister, to a completely filmi brothel labelled “Rooh Manzil“. At Rooh Manzil, the downstairs is straight out of Pakeezah: girls in colourful churidars dancing to the beat of a tabla. But upstairs is a massive half-lit hall, empty but for billowing diaphanous pink curtains. The strange time-travel feeling carries on as Kangana Ranaut appears on screen, in the eponymous title role of Rajjo. Dressed in a thigh revealing sharara, Ranaut’s uber-athletic movements couldn’t be further away from the slow sinuousness of Meena Kumari’s Sahibjaan. 

Patil’s film can’t seem to make up its mind whether it wants to be purely retro or place its brothel within the universe of contemporary Mumbai. There’s Dalip Tahil as a dark-glasses-and-sherwani-clad fixer, embroiled in romantic tussles within the kotha and financial schemes without. There’s also an alcoholic ex inspector wracked by the guilt of having killed innocents in encounters. Mahesh Manjrekar is wonderfully convincing as Begum, the hijra owner of the brothel. Patil’s most obvious attempt at contemporaneity is the real estate angle, with a distressingly repetitive Prakash Raj and his fat, oily henchman pushing through a fake housing scheme to cover up real plans for a mall to replace the kotha. The other moment where real estate figures in the film is so ridiculous that one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry: Rajjo’s childhood memory of being brought from the village and sold into sex work by her elder sister for a few thousand rupees – apparently to help the sister buy a flat in Mumbai! 

The film’s idea of escape for Rajjo and Chandu is equally ridiculous – having failed to find shelter in the city, they move to a hillside village where an NGO runs a residential school for adivasi children. This allows them to set up home, complete with parrot and rangoli, in one of those adorable little huts that Hindi cinema’s runaway lovers have taken refuge in from time immemorial. It also lets Rajjo wander about with herds of goats in pastoral surroundings, while poor Chandu the Brahmin boy (no match for a young Salman or Aamir Khan when it comes to muscles) tries to labour for a living, then teach, then set up a Chinese food cart which for some reason involves a gigantic bank loan that Chandu accepts joyfully, apparently without looking at the interest rates. It really doesn’t help that Paras Arora’s Chandu looks about fifteen, and there is not the slightest sign of chemistry between him and Ranaut. 

Things change for the better as Rajjo‘s dancing talents are discovered, and she begins a new life as dance teacher to the adivasi schoolchildren. But Hande Bhau (Prakash Raj) can’t wait to get his grubby paws on her. The second half of the film is a mishmash of Hande Bhau’s multi-pronged attempts at evil – blackmail, forgery, trickery and intimidation – to force the hapless Rajjo to become the ‘devi‘ of his new ‘dance bar’. 

There is certainly a film to be made about our deep ambivalence about dance, a film that would challenge the middle class perception of dance as somehow unacceptably sexual, innately tainted by the presence of the (female) body. We see a tiny glimpse of that film in Rajjo‘s spirited monologue to Hande Bhau, about how her parents gave birth to a kalakaar not a randi, about how rhythm entered her soul from the breezes of her village. But Patil and his team are too muddled to produce that imaginative critique. Dance here must be shorn of sensuality to be acceptable; become something adivasi children have to learn from a city-fled bar dancer. And yet in the climactic scene when Rajjo dances with her students for famous dance guru Jankidevi (Jaya Prada), she must appear in the white bodice and diaphanous dhoti of the Amar Chitra Katha woman. Irony eats the soul.

Published on Firstpost.

OUT OF THE BODY: On Devdutt Pattanaik's Sita

My piece on Devdutt Pattanaik's latest book, for Mint Lounge.

Sita: An Illustrated Retelling of the Ramayana joins an increasing tribe of books of Indian epics retold. Devdutt Pattanaik, the author of many books on Indian myth (Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata; Myth=Mithya: A Handbook of Hindu Mythology; The Pregnant King), here seems to be making a contribution to two growing sub-genres: the graphic book, and the retelling through women’s eyes. But unlike Amruta Patil's brilliant, jewel-like Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean, or the striking images of Samhita Arni and Moyna Chitrakar's Sita’s Ramayana, Pattanaik doesn’t seem invested in the visual. And while ostensibly structured around Sita’s life, it is stuffed with too much else to feel consistently like her story: Hanuman often seems more of a presence.

Pattanaik does offer more detail about women’s worlds than most versions of the Ramayan: the child Sita entering the kitchen, or Sita and her sisters as newly-arrived brides in Ayodhya spending “all day and all night listening to tales of the sons told by their adoring mothers”. He tries to bring relationships between women to the fore: Anasuya welcoming Sita into womanhood with a garland, a garment and a pot of cream—symbols of shringara (adornment), or Mandodari barring Ravana’s way, taunting him to wait for Sita to come to him willingly. “Only Sita understood what Mandodari had done; she had protected her own station in the palace while ensuring another woman’s freedom”.

Sita—An Illustrated Retelling of the Ramayan: Penguin, 328 pages, Rs499

Pattanaik stresses the remarkable fact that has puzzled readers and writers for centuries—that Ravana, having taken the hapless Sita from her forest hut, does not force himself upon her. Unlike Greek and Roman mythology, in which it is unremarkable for Zeus/Jupiter to rape Leda, Europa, and several others, Ravana woos Sita with stories and gifts and songs. He becomes, in other words, the most persistent lover. But Sita is unmoved. “This is not love,” she says to his sister Trijata. “He just wants to possess me.” Then Pattanaik puts in Sita’s mouth these transcendental words: “I am not my body. I will never ever be violated.”

It is a hope we have all nurtured: to cease to be identified only with our bodies. But Pattanaik’s insistence on Sita’s status as goddess (“I cannot be abandoned by anyone”) elides the fact that neither Sita’s world—nor, sadly, our own—is prepared to do women any such favours. Throughout the Ramayan, the married woman’s embrace of another man is heavily punished even when unintentional (the classic case being Ahilya’s of Indra, who has taken the form of Ahilya’s husband Gautama). And anyway, as the supremely tragic example of Sita shows, being “pure of thought and body” cannot protect any woman from having her reputation besmirched. Reputation is everything, and it is not in a woman’s hands. Ram declares that he has fought a war, but only to restore the honour of his family name; Sita is nothing but “grit in [his] eye”, for she has chosen to live under another man’s roof rather than kill herself. There, in a nutshell, is the tragedy of patriarchy: to keep “honour” alive, women must die. Men, meanwhile, are expected to acquire the wives of the men they slay, and considered honourable when they “accept” them as wives, rather than take them by force.

But while Pattanaik points to the killing of Tadaka by Ram as signalling the epic’s “acceptance of male violence against women”, he seems not to acknowledge the violence done to Sita by Ram’s spurning of her. In allowing Ram the privilege of splitting into the man who loves his wife, and the king who must reject his queen, Pattanaik allows “honour” in by the back door.

Eventually, if the Ramayan has been “criticized by feminists” and “deconstructed by academicians”, there are real reasons for it. In any case, Pattanaik’s categories seem sweeping and not useful. When he refers to the “Ram of academics” versus “Ram of devotees”, or “Western thought” versus “traditional Indian thought”, he means a certain kind of rationalist who-what-where history, while ignoring reams of philosophy, anthropology and religious studies, much of it “Western”, that has been crucial to studying Indian myth. Oddly, Pattanaik’s own book is strewn with distracting factoid “boxes” that draw on this work—providing alternative folk recensions and narrative variations of the sort that Paula Richman has spent a career gathering, mythic analysis of the Wendy Doniger variety. One is left wondering why he feels the need to diss the bricks of which his house is built. Pattanaik sees the richness and complexity thrown up by the living text, and then places it disdainfully in his supplementary narrative, as if he fears causing offence to some imaginary unquestioning devotee.

Published in Mint Lounge.

Post Facto - Blind Spot: distilling the essence of middle class aesthetics

My Sunday Guardian column for 27th October:

	he label "middle class" is frequently deemed sufficient as a descriptor for many things in India – neighbourhoods, morality, home decor. An ongoing exhibition called Blind Spot seeks to simultaneously challenge and concretise that descriptor as far as the home decor goes. Not only is there a middle class home decor, the show argues, but there are seven subsets of it. Based on a research project conducted between 2011 and 2012, the exhibition organised by Outset India and Weiden & Kennedy describes itself as using "photographs, cultural references and interactive data to bring to life seven contemporary sensibilities, each complete with their visual and verbal vocabularies." Researchers apparently drew on conversations with designers and design bloggers as well as visits to private residences in 13 Indian cities including Madurai, Lucknow, Bhopal, Kolkata and Ahmedabad to come up with these seven sensibilities: 'Natural', 'Cute', 'Decent', 'Traditional', 'Royal', 'Jazzy' and 'Executive'. Each of these characterises a room (sometimes two rooms) in the independent New Delhi bungalow where Blind Spot is on show: House No. 24, Jor Bagh. "The study concentrates on the universal threads that run through the home decor choices of middle class families with household income between 3 and 8 lakhs across India," says the Blind Spot website. Even in its current dilapidated state, though, House No. 24, Jor Bagh is grander than all the houses that the exhibition draws on. Its size, its garden, its very location on leafy Lodhi Road, in the heart of Lutyens' Delhi and practically across the road from Lodhi Garden, makes it anything but middle class. This fact gives the whole exhibition an oddly displaced quality, so that the objects, whether they've been placed in the 'Cute', 'Royal', 'Executive' or any other bracket, begin to seem less like embodiments of those sensibilities and more like a large and diverse gathering of 'Slightly Pitiable'. Perhaps I am being too hasty. There are things here to be noticed. Especially if you have grown up middle class in India, the show is full of deeply familiar things, many of them stylistic tics that only emerge noticeably as such when someone – the outsider — draws attention to them. 'Natural', for instance, contains both a real potted cactus and several kinds of artificial flowers, both real cane moodas and a fake plastic-woven durrie. There are even flowers painted on little ceramic achaar pots and a clock with a landscape as the background to the dial. Is this a scathing comment on Indian middle class ideas of the natural, a suggestion that its members are so distant from the natural world that they cannot even distinguish any more between that and manmade approximations of it?
	djoining the 'Natural' room is the 'Cute' room, and clearly this is a deliberate decision, because there is much that makes the two categories hard to separate from each other. Between the two rooms hangs a plastic toy eagle flapping its wings. Other exhibits that are 'Cute' but seem on the border of 'Natural' are a coffee mug with an anthropomorphic zebra on it and a mini-dustbin with 'Smiley Flowers' printed on it. Each category also has a wall inscribed with words that have emered from conversations about that central idea and what it signifies to informants. Worryingly, "being in love" and "romantic" are descriptors that appear in the list of words under 'Cute'. The association of teddy bears (of which there are several in this room) with romance is clearly not exclusive to the Indian middle classes, but there is something faintly eerie about an aesthetic dominated by teddies and babies being the only one of the seven categories here that contains the word "romantic". 'Royal' is perhaps the most easy to classify – heavy sofas almost always upholstered in rich reds and deep maroons, gilt carved furniture, ornate mirrors. "This is about being ostentatious. It aims to demonstrate prosperity to the world at large. It is articulated through pieces that are grand, heavy and delicately detailed," reads the exhibition handout. 'Jazzy' is possibly the most fictitious category here. Though it is described as an "individualistic expression that is a loud and proud proclamation of status", the stuff placed under 'jazzy' seems to me to be united only by its multicoloured-ness. Having a multicoloured rubber bathroom wiper does not seem to me to erase the profound unjazziness of owning a rubber bathroom wiper at all. An interesting category is 'Decent'. The white and blue rubber chappals, the Nataraj pencils, the black plastic-covered diary and the clipboard on which so many of us wrote exams work perfectly to evoke this category, as does the Godrej almirah and the tube of Colgate in the bathroom. I've almost always thought of the Indian obsession with brands as a post-liberalisation thing, so I was struck by the fact that so many of these objects were actually branded. But these brands express a lack of choice. 'Decent' is described as "sober, respectable, yet welcoming" — but what the rooms feels like is the opposite of 'Royal' and 'Jazzy'. In contemporary India, it seems, to be merely 'Decent' expresses a lack of prosperity, and certainly a lack of status.

TRUTH AND THEATRE: On photography

My essay in Open, drawing on two photo exhibitions: 'Studio Suhag' and 'My Life is My Message'. 

The wonderful 1982 Hindi film Shriman Shrimati is about a middle-aged couple (Rakhee Gulzar and Sanjeev Kumar) who go about the country solving domestic problems in middle-class households caught on the horns of a tradition-modernity dilemma. The film has a marvellous opening sequence that showcases one such dilemma -- via a photograph.

The feisty, trouser-wearing, ‘modern’ Aruna (played by Sarika) and the charming, sari-clad, ‘traditional’ Veena (Deepti Naval) are childhood friends. One day, Aruna (a rich man’s daughter who owns a camera with a tripod) decides it would be fun to photograph herself and Veena wearing each other’s clothes. A reluctant Veena is cajoled into posing in Aruna’s pants and sleeveless top, while Aruna is photographed looking demure in Veena’s cotton sari. The photographs duly find their way to prospective grooms who, misled by the play-acting images, marry the ‘wrong’ girls. Great unhappiness ensues.

Shriman Shrimati can be read as a barometer of the anxieties of 1980s’ India: how to ‘contain’ the transgressive modernity of women and channel it in directions perceived as socially legitimate. These anxieties are still with us, though perhaps in new forms. But what I want to draw attention to is the photo mix-up because it highlights a different kind of anxiety, one that cuts to the very foundation of how we understand photography’s role in the world: do photographs simply capture reality, or do they create it?

A recent exhibition of photographs titled Studio Suhag at Delhi’s Art Heritage Gallery provoked just this question. The pictures were taken by Suresh Punjabi at his little photo studio in the town of Nagda, Madhya Pradesh, between the early 1970s and late 1980s, and are all portraits in black-and-white shot against one of the backdrops offered by Studio Suhag. Visual anthropologist Christopher Pinney, who curated the show, first met the photographer in late 1982 when he arrived in Nagda to do fieldwork. Pinney has been back nearly every year since, and some of Punjabi’s images feature in his 1997 book Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. The recent exhibition was occasioned, in part, by a storm that destroyed much of Punjabi’s neatly-ordered archive of negatives, leading Pinney to salvage what he could.

An image from Suresh Punjabi's 'Studio Suhag'

Many of Punjabi’s customers wanted what he calls ‘banking-vanking’ photos: standard front-facing half-length portraits shot for ration cards and bank loan applications. But many other clients were unmarried young men and women, and Punjabi divides the pictures he took of them into two categories: ‘bhejna’ (Hindi for ‘to send’) and ‘istyle’ (style). ‘Bhejna’ images are commissioned pictures to be sent out to families of prospective partners, while ‘istyle’ images refer, in Pinney’s words, ‘to a genre of portraiture made for the theatrical pleasure of the customer’. What happened in the case of Shriman Shrimati was not just a mix-up between two girls; it was a mix-up of ‘istyle’ and ‘bhejna’.

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An image meant for ‘bhejna’, Pinney writes (in Artisan Camera, the beautifully produced though somewhat hurriedly edited hardback volume from Tara Books that accompanies the exhibition), must manifest the sitter’s beauty or handsomeness, but it ‘must not have too much ‘glamour’ or be too ‘theatrical’. There must be ‘nothing that would indicate that a prospective bride is ‘zyada advans’ (excessively advanced), because such girls ‘will cause trouble for their in-laws’.

The zyada advans picture in Shriman Shrimati snags the hapless Deepti Naval a zyada advans husband, but the photograph of the girl in Studio Suhag gazing adoringly at a bunch of fakely luscious grapes was unlikely to get her married. Nor was the young man who cast himself as a sort of Devdas figure—with his head laid on his arm and a glassful of ‘whisky’ poured from an open bottle of coloured water—likely to have been looking for a wife. Lovelorn drunkenness might be a heroic trait in Hindi cinema, but not in prospective marital partners.

It is unsurprising to me that most of the ‘istyle’ images, involving the overt staging of identities, feature men. Cinema is clearly a popular source of inspiration.

The young man in white flared pants and dark sunglasses is indubitably channelling an 80s Amitabh Bachchan, as is the one with a flower in his lapel, holding the receiver to one ear while placing a leather-booted foot on the telephone table. Other men are content to partake of cinema’s glamour by association: one is photographed with a camera slung over his shoulder, flipping through a film magazine; another hides his eyes behind dark glasses, even as Sanjeev Kumar’s eyes smile brightly at us from the cover of the Mayapuri he is reading.

There are plenty of women in the Studio Suhag images, but most of them appear with husbands in photos affirming their conjugal bonds, or with babies, or with a brother on the occasion of Rakshabandhan. The few women photographed solo look almost ‘natural’ in comparison with the men, until you realise that two different women are posing in the same ‘Kashmiri belle’ jewellery popularised by Hindi movies like Kashmir ki Kali: really long jhumkas and ornate hathphool, a kind of jewelled tracery covering the hands. Like the telephone, the ‘whisky’ bottle and the magazine, the jewellery turns out to be only a prop.

When you dress in your best clothes for the camera, and put forward your most serious/most attractive/most youthful self, you are always already performing, presenting a persona. Is the bandmaster who poses in his own uniform that different from the young fellow who wears a neckerchief and sticks a cigarette in his mouth? Can a distinction really be sustained between what Pinney calls ‘truthful solemnisation’ (of what already exists) and ‘potentially deceitful theatricalisation’ (the photo-as-makeover or actualised fantasy)? That is the question with which Studio Suhag confronts us.

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One sort of answer to that question is offered by the show that ran parallel to Studio Suhag at Art Heritage: My Life Is My Message. The photographer, Shivaraju BS, has a remarkable backstory—he is a policeman in Bangalore who started taking photographs after being exposed to contemporary art at the art collective 1. Shanthi Road. Cop Shiva, as he calls himself, is, in his own words, “fascinated with the idea of masquerade and the roles people play in public and private”.

The photographs here are a documentation of two men who impersonate icons: Vidyasagar, who dresses up every day as the late Tamil matinee idol MGR, and a teacher named Bagadehalli Basavaraju, who regularly incarnates the Father of the Nation. Vidyasagar stages himself carefully as MGR; Basavaraju, in white loincloth, round spectacles and a stick, appears to be doing the same. But the attempt is not to pass off as Gandhi, like an actor in some film. The painstakingly applied silver facepaint gives him a strangely otherworldly quality; a Brechtian manner of drawing attention to the performance and the gulf that separates Gandhi from us.

An image from Cop Shiva's 'My Life is My Message'

Writing about the circulation of national images, theorist Partha Chatterjee once contrasted the romantic proximity of historical ‘inhabiting’ (potentially offered up by photographic detail) with the decontextualised sacredness of the icon—more often than not shorn of detail so as to appear timeless. Cop Shiva’s images of Bagadehalli are superb because they destroy such easy binaries. 

The silver-faced impersonator draws his audience in with the appeal of the iconic Gandhi image, but consciously unsettles our expectations of timelessness. This is not done cheaply through the simple use of shock, which would be easy enough to do with a figure like Gandhi (think of him downing whisky in a dance bar or with his feet up on a corporate desk). 

What we get instead is a marvel of complexity. In one image, a middle-aged man in a veshti folds his hands in a prayerful namaskar, while several schoolgirls around him seem distracted and unconvinced. In another, he ploughs a field with a pair of bulls, looking both more and less convincingly representative of the rural India he so tirelessly championed. In yet another, Gandhi seems to ride towards us at the head of a group of motorcyclists, until we notice that Bagadehalli is the only one on a cycle—our only non-fossil-fuel vehicle. Is the cycle in front because it’s going to win? Or does its presence simply point to the inescapable fact that Gandhi’s greatest bugbear—speed—has already won the race for modernity?

What is remarkable about these images is their ability to evoke something much more complicated than history, or even nostalgia.

‘This performance of a past for the present,’ writes Pinney, ‘always introduces something new.’ The ‘theatricalisation’ here is foregrounded. There is no question of it being ‘potentially deceitful’. Instead, in the best tradition of fiction, it produces a new kind of truth.

Published in Open magazine.

Film Review: Shahid

Hansal Mehta’s biopic Shahid released last week, two and a half years after the still-unsolved death of the 33-year-old criminal defense lawyer who earned a reputation representing people accused in terror cases. It’s just about clinging on to the cinemas this week, despite having been released at the same time as Akshay Kumar’s Boss and losing its core audience in Mumbai to the Mumbai Film Festival which also kicked off last Friday. The fact that it’s still around for audiences to see is perhaps a fitting real life parallel to the story of a classic underdog. In a mere seven years of practice, Shahid Azmi secured 17 acquittals in matters that included the Ghatkopar bus bombing case of 2002, the Malegaon blast case of 2006, the Aurangabad arms haul case of 2006, the Mumbai train blasts of 2006, and most famously, the Mumbai terror attacks of 2008.

To those whom he saved from being sacrificed at the altar of an inept but bloodthirsty state, Azmi was certainly something of a hero. But Mehta’s film is scrupulously unheroic, choosing the messiness of real life over the clean arc of drama. Mehta’s directorial style echoes Azmi’s own commitment to a truth in which thoughtless actions produce victims, rather than villainy producing heroes. Azmi’s unglamorous courtroom victories repeatedly make the evidentiary triumph over the rhetorical. In the words of Rajkumar Yadav’s superbly convincing Shahid, “I’m as opposed as you are to terrorism, but that doesn’t mean that we can put innocent people in jail without any evidence.”


But perhaps what really made Azmi’s story compelling was his triumph over himself. Shahid’s impressiveness lay in the distance he had come from his own beginnings – and in never forgetting what that journey had been like. At the age of 14, deeply affected by the Bombay riots of 1992, he had briefly joined a militant training camp in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. At 16, Azmi was arrested under TADA, or the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act. Later, he was charged with conspiring against the state, specifically with plotting the assassinations of Farooq Abdullah and Bal Thackeray, and placed in Delhi’s Tihar Jail. He was acquitted of all charges in 2001, but by then he had spent over seven years in jail.

The film does not turn Azmi into a saint. His fallibility is shown in the depiction of his early years, including his time in jail with Omar Shaikh, who was serving time for the 1994 kidnappings of foreign tourists in Kashmir. But somehow, knowing that he could just as easily have been swayed by the sword as by the pen, gives Azmi’s eventual choice greater impact. It is clear that Azmi’s work was not simply a career for him. It was a vocation.

The poor Muslim men whose cases he took up mirrored his own experience. Mehta’s film makes the connections without underlining them too heavily. While Azmi had been arrested under TADA, which became defunct in 1998, his clients were frequently arrested under POTA (the Prevention of Terrorism Act) or MCOCA (the Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act) – all of these legislations allowed confessions in police custody (notoriously extracted through torture or deceit) to be made admissible in court.
Unlike regular criminal lawyers whose professional ethics require them to defend clients regardless of their guilt or innocence, the film suggests that Azmi worked on a personal ethic: he only took on clients he believed to be innocent. 


Mehta’s depiction of Azmi’s life derives much of its power from economy. Apurva Asrani’s editing (he also has partial writing credits) produces a narrative full of sharp cuts, where we must often fill in the blanks. In one of the best examples of this, we see Shahid propose marriage to his client Mariam, a divorcee with a child. She expresses utter shock, picks up her stuff and leave. In the next scene we see them together, very much a couple — leaving us to make up our own version of the interim period. Yet the film doesn’t feel choppy. The quality Mehta strives for — and achieves — is gritty documentary made up of snapshots, rather than orchestrated epic. In one of the film’s earliest scenes, we see a young Shahid run out of his house in Govandi. He emerges into the smoky dimly, tubelit street only to almost collide with the terrible figure of a man ablaze. It is a shocking moment and a cinematic one; the burning man sets the screen aflame. But instead of trying to chill us with the power of choreographed communal violence as so many films do (Earth, Kai Po Che to name two of many), it jolts us. Much like Shahid himself, we find ourselves very suddenly in a militant training camp. Again, the Kashmiri locale might have felt epic if Anuj Dhawan’s camera didn’t focus on the snow: it’s not pure white, but a dirty brown. 


Later, Mehta shears the judicial process of all the grandeur that Hindi films have traditionally accorded it. Even the recent Jolly LLB did not cut itself off completely from the dramatic confrontation of the big fish and the small fish, though it sought to undercut the court’s aura of justice with biting satire. What makes Shahid unique is its deliberate curtailment of both drama and humour. Instead we get a courtroom where life-and-death decisions are taken while lawyers squabble, cutting into each others’ dialogue to create inaudible moments. The police produce blatantly manufactured evidence; witnesses lie baldly, but seemingly without real malice. 


Shahid Azmi’s legal practice was devoted to defending people who he believed had been put into jail as scapegoats. The perpetrators of despicable acts of terror were still at large, “drinking in an AC room, plotting their next move”, while these ordinary people had been flung behind bars, as he says at one point, only because their names were not “Mathew, Donald, Suresh or More”. 


Names do have a strange power. The root of the word Shahid comes from Arabic and in Urdu, it has split into two pronunciations: 'shaahid' meaning ‘witness’ and ‘shaheed’ meaning ‘martyr’. Shahid Azmi was both.

This review was first published on Firstpost.