Film Festival: Mise en City

An essay on the Urban Lens festival, published in Open magazine. 

A vibrant new film festival portrays the multiplicity of claims on Indian cities, the freedoms they enable and the burdens that still weigh them down

UNTIL THE MIDDLE of the 20th century, the Indian city was viewed with deep ambivalence by many of our most influential thinkers. If, as Mahatma Gandhi put it, the future of India lay in her villages, urban life was a strange new blip on the horizon, the city a den of new vices in which anything could happen.

But the breakdown of pre-existing social norms—the very thing that made the city potentially anarchic—was also what made it potentially revolutionary. The city became a true home to the accoutrements of industrial modernity: factory labour, public transport, urban forms of mass entertainment—ensuring that people who had been kept apart by centuries of socially-enforced codes were now forced to jostle against each other.

As new classes and communities laid claim to the shared spaces of the city, they looked to the promise of modernity and democracy made by the new nation. As more women came out to work—and sometimes play—they slowly but surely challenged the assumed male control of the public sphere. An urban working class acquired a consciousness of its identity. Castes that had been deprived of most rights in the village made a concerted effort to get justice in the city. And yet none of these claims, or identities, was formed without a struggle.

In more recent times, the city has become the site of new movements for recognition and freedom—fighting for the liberty of sexual orientation, or against new forms of late capitalist ‘development’—as well as the locus of powerful attempts to polarise and/or crush them.

This glorious multiplicity of claims to the city—and via the city, to fuller citizenship—were put on view in cinematic form at the recent Urban Lens Film Festival. Organised by the Bengaluru-based Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), the festival’s third edition this year followed up its annual Bengaluru screenings with a packed weekend in Delhi. A refreshing mix of films by established names and upcoming directors, the fare was largely non-fiction (although a couple of animated films and a semi-fiction one made it in). And while some well- known filmmakers—Harun Farocki and Fatih Akin—represented the rest of the world, the festival kept its focus on the Indian city.

Caste made its appearance early on, with two student films. Not Caste in Stone (2014), directed by a group of students from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) is a thoughtful encounter with how the city can simultaneously reduce the stifling grip of caste, as well as create new avenues for it to express itself. The 31-minute film is structured around an anecdotal history of Mumbai’s Tamil- speaking communities, mapped onto the city’s geography. While most upper- caste Tamil migrants settled in Matunga, at least 25,000 families from Tirunelveli district arrived in Dharavi and went to work in tanneries run by Muslim traders. Matunga, despite being the best known site of Mumbai’s Tamilian cultural presence, remained off-limits to Dharavi’s Tamil population, especially in terms of access to temples. Despite this reinforcing of caste divisions, the city is seen by many Dharavi residents as offering a degree of freedom unavailable in rural areas. “Apun Schedule hai... Indiaaazaad ho gaya, hamara samaj toh aazaad nahin hua (We are ‘Scheduled’… India got freedom, but our society didn’t gain freedom),” says Kanakraj. “Bambai mein aazaad hai... Lad ke bhi dikhaya idhar (In Mumbai we’re free... Here we fought and showed them).”

The carving out of a caste identity in the city, the film suggests, initially involved the establishment of civic associations like the Adi-Dravida Sangh. But also crucial was an actual space that could mark the community’s location in Mumbai—and this, inevitably, was a temple. Battles over temple entry were waged and won in Matunga, too, but the creation of ‘their own temple’ in Dharavi seems to offer a more permanent, visible articulation of collective identity.

Meanwhile, with B-22 (2014), set and shot in Delhi’s Budh Vihar locality, student filmmakers Shilpi Saluja and Akshika Chandna of Sri Aurobindo College of Arts and Communication (SACAC) offer us a gentle slice-of-life that addresses caste more indirectly. The film’s protagonist, Manju, who literally guides us through her neighbourhood, brings home the intersections of caste with class and gender: the violence of one is tied to the violence of the other.

If B-22 is poker-faced about the depressing water situation in a Delhi slum, the brilliantly designed film Good Morning Mumbai (2011) uses animation and humour to draw attention to Mumbai’s sanitation issues. Remarkably, this too is a student film. With their charming, funny little fiction about a poor jhuggi- dweller’s tortuous quest for a peaceful place to take a shit, National Institute of Design students Rajesh Thakare and Troy Vasanth C flag the issue of Mumbai’s abysmal lack of toilets. The beauty of the drawings partially leavens the squalor of the world being evoked, while the superb soundtrack—juxtaposing a DJ on the radio with an oily minister, toilet sounds and the local bhai—roots us back in an unfortunate reality.

Civic worries are also at the heart of Usha Rao and Gautam Sonti’s Our Metropolis (2014), which takes the construction of the Metro in Bengaluru as the central thread of a lament about the future of Indian urbanity. Shot between 2008 and 2013, the film tracks a rather vast swathe of ominous developments in the creation of a ‘global city’ that seems to care little about most of those who live in it.

A much more specific tack on the ‘global city’—specifically its bulldozing of rights in the service of big business— is taken by Rahul Roy’s The Factory (2015), which traces the Maruti Suzuki case, in which 147 workers of India’s largest automobile manufacturing unit were jailed for years, without bail, on charges of destroying company property and murdering a senior manager. Roy’s engrossing film combines his observational style with an investigative element, providing chilling details that make apparent how baldly fabricated the case is.

The prosecution’s four star witnesses for instance, ‘saw’ the accused workers engaging in violence—in perfect alphabetical order. As against the Maruti establishment’s horror story of worker violence, the workers have a completely different narrative: the entire incident, they say, was a conspiracy by the company management aimed at eliminating the lone manager who had helped get the Maruti Union registered (Awanish Kumar Dev) and simultaneously ridding the company of actively unionised workers. Bouncers in Maruti workers’ uniforms were the ones who started the rioting and set fire to the room in which they had locked Dev.

Roy also goes beyond the case, tracing the history of Maruti in India, and allows us to enter the increasingly constricted world of the industrial worker. His unpacking of life on the factory floor makes for depressing viewing. Worker after worker, from among the 2,500 men dismissed by Maruti Suzuki, provides Roy with details of the organised fashion in which the company had begun to squeeze those labouring at its lowest echelons: reducing the number of ‘relievers’ assigned to each group of workers, doing away with toilet breaks, firing men after they had served their apprenticeship period so that they could hire new ones at lower rates. When Maruti workers—faced with impossible time pressure, humiliating punishments and harsh pay cuts (a single day of absence cost a worker Rs 2,000: a fourth of his monthly variable pay, and a full eighth of his total salary) —sought to unionise and strike work for their demands, the management came down even more heavily on them.

Roy’s film captures the terrible sense of attrition a long-drawn court case can produce, especially under conditions of poverty and political corruption. When he draws the viewer’s eye to the guns and lathis in the hands of security guards and policemen, it is hard not to see these men—likely from similar backgrounds as the workers they’re escorting—as hired guns acting on behalf of a state that is acting on behalf of the corporation. Hope is in short supply.

A comparable sense of the city as a stultifying space which has belied its promises of equality and liberty emerges in Ruchir Joshi’s much more amorphous My Rio, My Tokio. Although as different in style and intent from The Factory as perhaps possible, My Rio... shares with it and Our Metropolis a dull, throbbing anger about the state of things in our cities. Joshi’s series of what he calls ‘video-poems’ about Kolkata takes in a disparate set of things that sometimes seem like events (the death of CPM leader Jyoti Basu, the horrendous Stephen Court fire) and sometimes not (women dancing during Durga Puja, a conversation about Fashion Week).

AT TIMES, THE particular quality of a city emerges unbidden, unplanned from the kind of films made about it. If the Mumbai films at Urban Lens—from Paromita Vohra’s joyful dissection of a stereotype in Where’s Sandra? to Mira Nair’s portrait of cabaret dancers in India Cabaret—displayed a quirky indefatigability, the Kolkata films had an air of melancholy, an insistence on poetry in the midst of death and decay.

A memorable Bangla poem called Nishir Dak (‘Night’s Call’) by the historian Sumanta Banerjee threads together Ruchir Joshi’s ramblings across the city in time and space. The poem itself makes reference to other cultural pasts: the playwright Bijon Bhattacharya’s work on the Bengal famine, Ritwik Ghatak’s cinematic masterpiece Subarnarekha and its brilliant leitmotif phrase ‘Bibhotso moja’: ‘horrific fun’. My Rio also cites Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a Mohiner Ghoraguli song and other poems. Poetry is writ large across a film by another non-Bengali Kolkatan resident, Joshy Joseph, which offers a lyrical tribute to the city’s indomitable spirit via portraits of two men—a retired footballer and coach called PK Banerjee and a poet-filmmaker called Goutam Sen, who was making a film about Banerjee when he succumbed to cancer. The third Kolkata film at Urban Lens, Debalina Majumder’s Taar Cheye Se Anek Aaro is very different from these—a tender fictional portrait of two young women in love, interspersed with real footage of people discussing homosexuality— but it, too, relies more on songs and lyrics than almost all the rest of the films shown. “You can’t run away from text if you’re dealing with Calcutta,” said Joshi during the discussion.

Sometimes, rarely, a filmmaker might want to run not from words but from images. With a city like Delhi, whose iconic monumentality lends itself to having its ‘sights’ ticked off by so many Bollywood films, this fear is all too real. Humaira Bilkis’ Maine Dilli Nahi Dekha (another student film from SACAC) steers clear of this repetitive Delhi: visiting the Adhchini Dargah of Mai Sahiba instead of that of her more famous son Nizamuddin Auliya, bantering with shopkeepers in Chittaranjan Park rather than Chandni Chowk. In one lovely little scene, Bilkis’ camera lingers on a child’s drawing book. “The Taj Mahal,” says the young artist. “Have you seen it?” she asks. “No.” “Then?” “I copied it from my brother’s drawing.”

Those who work with images, like those who work with words, can never cease from quotation. But whatever else our cities may or may not provide, they are an inexhaustible stream of words and images for filmmakers to dip into and bring their nets out gleaming with fresh catch.

Filming the Factory

My BL Ink column this month:

Two engrossing documentaries — a German film from 1995 and an Indian one from 2015 — make for a bleak but thoughtful engagement with the figure of the factory worker

Harun Farocki’s 1995 film Workers Leaving the Factory is named for that originary moment of cinema from 1895, of men and women leaving the Lumière factory in Lyons. The original footage was shot by the Lumière brothers to demonstrate that cinema could capture movement. But Farocki, in his characteristic style, entered into a sustained engagement with the subject. After a year-long effort to track as many variants as he could of this theme — workers leaving their workplace — he produced an essayistic assemblage of archival footage that is both haunting and playful.

One of the first things Farocki’s film does is to show us several clips of workers coming out of factories. In almost all, the speed with which they emerge is extraordinary. Often they are actually running, as if they would rather be anywhere other than the factory.

The strike features occasionally. In an American film by DW Griffith, the confrontation between workers and capitalists assumes the face of civil war. An excerpt from a Soviet film contains an exchange in song, a rhythmic face-off between striking workers and the factory supervisor that’s almost gentle by contrast: “You’ve got us the piece of bread, but where is the whole loaf?”

Farocki points out that the moment when workers are leaving the factory produces, as at no other time, the feeling of a multitude: because of the simultaneity of their dismissal, and the compression produced by the exits. The film moves between images that suggest the oppressive squeezing of workers, and the potential power of their collectivity.

“Where the first camera once first stood, there are now hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras,” says the voice-over in Workers Leaving the Factory. The technology of film has taken its place on the side of capital.

“Most narrative films begin after work is over,” the voice-over continues in this vein. “Whenever possible, film has moved hastily away from factories.”

Farocki’s film (free to watch on Vimeo) was recently shown at Delhi’s Max Mueller Bhavan alongside a recent Indian documentary called The Factory, directed by the filmmaker Rahul Roy. The juxtaposition threw up interesting conjunctions, not least the fact that Roy never got to shoot inside the factory of his title.

The reason for this is not complicated. Roy’s film is a meticulously researched, disturbing account of the Maruti Suzuki case, in which 147 workers from the automobile company’s factory in Manesar, Haryana, were arrested and imprisoned without bail for several years, on charges that include arson and the murder of a human resources manager called Avanish Kumar Dev. Thirty-six are still in jail.

The Factory is told entirely through the eyes of workers. The many dismissed workers Roy speaks to suggest a grave miscarriage of justice by the Maruti establishment, aided by the full might of the state: public prosecutor KPS Tulsi was paid ₹5.5 crore for this one case. The workers say that Dev’s death was caused by hired bouncers. It was, they believe, a conspiracy to do away with the one member of management who had helped them organise, while simultaneously framing them and demonising the union.

Harun Farocki’s film contains footage of a strike by English car workers in 1956. “The workers’ disputes are far less violent than those carried out in the name of the workers,” says the voice-over.

Roy started shooting a year after the incident, on July 18, 2013. He presents, without comment, the disproportionate increases in salaries that framed the growing divide between labour and management. In 2007 a senior permanent worker at the Maruti factory earned ₹2.8 lakh annually. By 2013, he earns ₹3 lakh. Meanwhile, in 2007, the CEO earned ₹47.3 lakh. By 2010, he earned ₹2.45 crore.

The film goes on to paint a depressing picture, of a management increasingly distant from workers, while intent on applying the greatest possible pressure on them.

Not allowed to film inside the factory, Roy melds archival footage and conversations with fired workers to recreate life on a production floor where a new car was readied every 45 seconds.

Every group of workers in an automated assembly line is usually provided with one reliever, a worker who can take over if another worker needs to go to the toilet or drink water or simply take a few minutes’ break.

If earlier there was one ‘reliever’ for every 10 men, at Maruti it became one for every 25. Often if a worker was absent, the reliever might be made to take his place, leaving the group without a reliever.

A worker’s absence was penalised with harsh pay cuts — the minimum cut for one day was ₹2,000, which was a fourth of a worker’s monthly variable pay. If a man missed four days, he would lose his entire variable pay, which was half his salary.

Lunch breaks and even toilet breaks were strictly policed. Mistakes on this punishing assembly line resulted in not just verbal ticking-off and written complaints, but also humiliating physical punishments.

“It is a common characteristic of all capitalist production...” wrote Marx, “that the worker does not make use of the working conditions. The working conditions make use of the worker, but it takes machinery to give this reversal a technically concrete form.” The rhythm of production on a conveyor belt, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, means that the article being worked on comes into the worker’s range of action without his volition, and moves away from him just as arbitrarily. In working with machines (wrote Benjamin), workers learn to coordinate “their own movements with the uniformly constant movements of an automaton.”

“Workers changing shift in the film Metropolis. Uniform dress and equal step,” announces the voice-over in Harun Farocki’s film, as we watch that classic 1927 visual of bodies marching in unison through the hellish corridors of Fritz Lang’s imagined dystopia. Heads drooping, movements robotically coordinated but painfully slow: these are human beings with their humanity leached out of them.

If this vision of the future has not come to pass, it seems to me, it has not been for lack of trying.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, 9 April 2016

The Strength of the Pack

Today's Mumbai Mirror column: 

A sparkling new adaptation of The Jungle Book is a chance to take a fresh look at Kipling.

The latest version of The Jungle Book hit Indian screens on April 8, a week ahead of the US. The fact that we get first dibs on the film, however, is about the only concession to 'Indian-ness' here. (I'm not counting the fact that the only actor on screen is a 12-year-old Indian-origin New Yorker called Neel Sethi.) 

Perhaps my brain has been permanently warped by The Jungle Book I grew up on (a lovely hardback with Disney images), but it seems to me a bit absurd to expect Indian-ness from something originally written by a white man in 1895, filmed in English as early as 1942 (by Alexander Korda), and successfully Disney-fied in 1967. 

What we think of when we think of The Jungle Book is Mowgli, a thin brown boy making the forest his own, accompanied by Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther. But Kipling's Jungle Book was actually several tales, first published serially in newspapers, and only some featured Mowgli. And even those didn't necessarily follow from each other: they had to be stitched into a single narrative. 

In some ways, it was the films that did this work. Korda spent most of his dramatic energy on Mowgli's ambivalent relationship to human society - in Kipling's memorable phrase, the "man-village". It was Walt Disney who created The Jungle Book most of the world now knows: the tale of Mowgli's battle with Shere Khan the tiger, encounters with the Bandar-log and Kaa the snake providing adventurous sidelights. 

Jon Favreau's version, in glorious live action 3D, remains largely faithful to the 1967 Disney film, though it darkens the tone and ups the pace considerably. It is Shere Khan who bookends this version, snarling and sneering to terrifying effect in the voice of Idris Elba, and asking the question that is at some level, at the moral centre of the Jungle Book: "How many lives is a man-cub worth?" Favreau gives the angry, embittered man-eater of the previous film a sharper identity as a tyrant, a power-hungry creature who wraps his unlawful activities in a cloak of hypocrisy and violence: "You did not respond to reason, so now you will know fear." 

On the other hand— not driving Mowgli out of the jungle but trapping him into self-doubt—is Kaa the snake: "Don't you know what you are?" 

And what is Mowgli - this creature who cannot ever be a wolf, no matter how much he tries, but who is too free, too wild to inhabit the world of men?
The idea of a feral child has long fascinated us. Romulus and Remus, mythical founders of Rome, were raised by a she-wolf, and famous cases of wolf-men have been the subject of films by European auteurs like Truffaut and Herzog. 

The appeal of Kipling's tale is that it reverses the perspective to that of the jungle: so not wolf-child, but man-cub. Instead of a return to human society, Kipling imagines what it would be like to be taught the ways of the wilderness. And what has made his text persuasive for generations of children is the richness of his conviction that the wilderness has ways. The Law of the Jungle seems, if anything, more clear, more just, and infinitely more navigable than the changeable codes of human societies. The idea of a Water Truce that would allow all animals to access the river in dry season, or the resounding call to togetherness in "The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack": these explain why The Jungle Book's evocation of loyalty, honesty and codes of honour were a huge influence on Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the Boy Scouts. 

Sure, Kipling was a British imperialist in whose eyes there was no possible equivalence between brown people and white ones. But our response to that doesn't have to be a bar on reading him. It's much more profitable to read him critically but carefully, to read him and marvel at his ear for language, and his eye for the Indian world he grew up in. For one thing, he could often be funny. Here he is talking about small boys in Indian villages being sent out to graze the herds: "The very cattle that would trample a white man to death allow themselves to be banged and bullied and shouted at by children that hardly come up to their noses." And here he is making a snarky comparison between human dispute settlement and the jungle version: "One of the beauties of Jungle Law is that punishment settles all scores. There is no nagging afterward." 

If we are to insist on mapping the Jungle Book onto Kipling's real-life surroundings, then the "man-village" would have to be the British, and the jungle representative of Indians. But then we would need to account for the fact that Kipling's man-village, although armed with the ultimate weapon ("the red flower", i.e. fire), is prone to fear and exaggeration. It is the jungle folk who are heroes - not just because they live simply and keep their word, but because they are able to take a man-cub in.

Regardless of whether it challenges or confirms colonial stereotypes, much of the power of the Jungle Book lies in Mowgli's learning how he can belong to the jungle, yet not fear the things that come naturally to him as a man. What Mowgli offers, eventually, is a model of accepting the different parts of oneself.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 April 2016.

A Very Jagged Little Pill

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

A choppily-directed, gimmicky film about gender roles, Ki and Ka shows how far we have to travel. 

The smoothest radical statement in the otherwise bumpy Ki & Ka comes right at the beginning. The single, successful corporate career-wali Kia (Kareena Kapoor) is attending a wedding. Having looked wistfully at the groom and bride (some desire for coupledom is acknowledged in that lingering glance), swigged some whiskey at an uncleji's urging and refused an enthusiastic dance companion with a too-loud reference to having her period, she gets on the phone to someone. "I'm at my friend's shaadi. The last day of her life as an independent human being," she declares in mock-mourning. "Because after this she is going to become a khamba." 

After decades of Hindi film romance in which (after the requisite paeans to kaajal and zulfein) a man's search for True Love ends in finding a female pillar of support, Balki's new film has an undeniably fun premise. In Kia, we finally have a heroine who balks at being the wind beneath anyone's wings - she's clear she's going to do the flying herself. 

Unfortunately, that's where the newness ends. The film decides that to enable Kia to "achieve her dreams", she needs a partner who can be that wonderful, invisible, supportive presence in the life of every successful high-flier - a wife. And Balki thinks he's serving up something terribly revolutionary by making Kia's 'wife' - read 'non-ambitious support structure' - a man. 

But Ki & Ka is so intent on the assumption that a non-careerist man is an unbelievable oddity that Kabir (Arjun Kapoor) must have his present-day choices explained by past trauma. So we learn that his housewife mother died young, unappreciated by his brash and enormously rich father. 

What the film tells us is that Kabir thinks his mother was an artist, and he wants to be like her, creating a home -- rather than climbing a stressful corporate ladder whose final rung is inevitable early death in an expensive nursing home. 

What it doesn't tell us -- but makes screechingly apparent -- is that his wanting to be a house-husband is as much about emulating his mother as the standard-issue son's desire to undercut the father. Which might be read as a very masculine rite of passage. 

Balki's other target, it seems at first, is the whole mainstream definition of success: Kabir's wooing of Kia involves mocking her corporate ambitions and suggesting that these external criteria of 'Vice-President' and 'CEO' and lots of money may not necessarily make one a contented, happy person. But his bracing critique apparently doesn't mean he's looking for someone who shares his world view. Nor that he's going to try and help his partner shed such constricting ambitions. Nope, it just means he's going to be the backroom boy egging her on! And oh, before you cast any doubts on Kabir's own capabilities in the corporate direction, Balki makes sure we know he's an "IIM-B" graduate: because you know, we can only respect someone for non-competitiveness if they've won the competition. 

If the film's supposed critique of the corporate rat race is rather muddled, so is its challenge to gender stereotypes. First of all, Balki's script is so jittery about his hero's nurturing of his 'feminine' side that he provides ceaseless markers of 'manliness' to counteract it -- Kabir loves whiskey, Kabir loves women, Kabir can fight like Dharmendra. Then, Kia and her mother (the sweet but quite wooden Swaroop Sampat) going to work while Kabir keeps home, is meant to be the film's central provocation to the existing gendered division of labour. But in fact, the film is so embedded in a received gender dynamic that its 'role-reversal' actually reinforces the idea of a complete separation of spheres. According to Ki and Ka's vision of the world, a successful career means no time to look after one's own diet, let alone one's ageing parents. And conversely, taking care of a home must be a full-time job, where all that's allowed to stimulate your brain is diet plans and books about bread. 

But why assume -- as Swaroop Sampat's tiresome climactic monologue does - that the only way to resolve our living arrangements is a total division between the home and the world? Why is it necessary that only person's work is in the public domain, while the other remains singlehandedly responsible for the private domain? Why can't men and women both contribute to the home, both from within and without? Someone who has never had to clean their bathrooms or cook their own meals can never appreciate the work that goes into keeping a home running. And conversely, someone who has never had to deal with an impossible deadline or a tiring daily commute is unlikely to understand those stresses. 

The film dimly recognises that the crux of the problem is the visibility and invisibility of different kinds of labour. But it fails to acknowledge the main reason for that difference: money. Only work outside the home gets economic recognition and confers social status. And those who do not earn it must deal, in one way or another, with the insidious accusation of freeloading. The solution to this does not lie in switching who does what, but in encouraging both genders to do their share of both. And in the meanwhile, giving domestic unpaid labour a little of the respect it is due -- without needing it to be done by a man giving a Ted-X talk.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 March 2016.

When the Spirit Moves You

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

Fifty years after Bimal Roy's death, his gorgeously-filmed Madhumati still haunts Hindi cinema.

Simultaneously derided and applauded as Bimal Roy's most commercially successful film, Madhumati (1958) has a plot that combines two of Hindi cinema's most abidingly popular narratives. The first of these is the educated city-dwelling babu falling in love with a simple village girl (an early example of that storyline was Raj Kapoor's 1949 hit Barsaat, written by Ramanand Sagar). The second is reincarnation: a plot theme which Madhumati is said to have inaugurated in Hindi cinema - though Kamal Amrohi's Mahal, which released the same year as Barsaat, also had the hero arriving in an old house for the first time and coming to believe that he is the reincarnation of someone who had once been associated with the place in a previous life. 

Bimal Roy certainly took some inspiration from Mahal, but Madhumati - based on a script written by, of all people, Ritwik Ghatak - is much more comfortable with the reincarnation theme than Mahal was, not shying away from it in favour of scientific explanations. The ghost here really exists. 

Roy shoots the house with painterly ghostliness -- the doors that seem to swing open by themselves, the slowly swaying chandelier, the shadow of the old chowkidar's stooping frame as he climbs the stairs is grotesquely enlarged. 

Paintings - present and absent - are in fact a crucial element of Madhumati's realisation of the unseen. The first thing that Dilip Kumar says on entering the empty haveli is "Wasn't there a painting hanging on the wall here?" Later, like with Ashok Kumar in Mahal, it is a painting that helps brings the past back to him. Unlike in Mahal, though, the painting is not of our hero, but by him. I'll come back later to why this seems of some consequence. 

Ghatak's script echoes what I once described (in a 2011 essay called 'Tagore for Beginners') as a classic Tagore narrative, and what might be a classic Bengali one: the urban young man who arrives at a small provincial outpost, his head full of a modernity that seems to cut him off from his surroundings. In Tapan Sinha's 1960 film version of one of Tagore's most famous ghost stories, Khudito Pashan (The Hunger of Stones), for instance, Soumitra Chatterjee plays a young revenue collector in a remote area who is ostensibly too rational to listen to the locals, and ends up being haunted by a beautiful phantom. 

A man becoming besotted with a spirit is perhaps one of the oldest ghost story tropes, extending across the world to Japan—I'm thinking of one of my favourite supernatural films, Kenji Mizoguchi's marvellous The Tale of Ugetsu. 

But Madhumati is not set in a timeless past. Between Ghatak and Roy, it is not surprising that the script features quite a specific politico-historical structure: a tribal hill milieu in which we're told that a rebellion against the feudal-capitalist landlords has been crushed brutally in the past. The decadent, exploitative zamindar at the top of the social hierarchy is challenged by the educated young Nehruvian socialist hero. The young hero works for the zamindar's timber company and thus represents the same extractive interests, but his relationship to the locals is one of attempted egalitarianism. 

In Madhumati this relationship between the new, modernising world and the old one is not one of proselytisation. Instead it's in what I'm going to call the 'Discovery of India' mode: conjuring up an urban, rational viewer only to let the hero experience the inescapable sweep of the land that surrounds him: through its natural beauty, its music and dance, its beliefs. 

The Dilip Kumar we meet first is a typical shehri babu: hurrying his hapless chauffeur along the rain-lashed mountain road, acting irritable when a landslide blocks the path, and only very reluctantly walking up to the old haveli to take shelter. But once inside, this city-slicker who was least interested in anything except reaching his destination, finds himself gripped by the old house. The house seems to pause time, and allow us to enter another time. 

The Dilip Kumar of that previous time is a much more open, curious sort. He arrives in the same hills walking, not being driven. As he pauses to take in the sights and sounds, so do we. Painting emerges as his way of documenting this world: he draws the trees and plants and hills, but also the merry-go-round at the local mela. Finally he requests a sitting with local belle -- and it is while painting her that love happens. 

The painting reappears in the narrative after Madhu has disappeared: the image is now a ghostly surrogate for the missing girl, even seeming to come alive with jealous rage when her lover is distracted from the thought of her. It is also a form of evidence on whose basis Dilip Kumar persuades a real-life double of Vyjayanthimala -- a modern young woman called Madhavi who is coincidentally holidaying in the region - to enact the part of Madhu, prompting the murderer (a superbly effective Pran) to confess. (That particular part of the plot was used without credit in Farah Khan's Om Shanti Om, leading to Bimal Roy's daughter Rinki Bhattacharya filing a complaint). 

Unlike, say, Hitchcock's Vertigo, where the hero's obsession with a face is such that he manages to fall 'in love' with a different person bearing the same features, Madhumati suggests a more binding union of souls. The sophisticated "Miss Madhavi" may reproduce Madhu's seductive 'Bichhua' in a proscenium performance of "Santhal dance" for "poor schoolchildren", but she cannot embody the untainted folk spirit.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 Mar 2016.

Book Review: Everything is Illuminated

A review of Vivek Shanbhag's Ghachar Ghochar, published in BL Ink:

Vivek Shanbhag’s craft is so good that it’s practically invisible. His novel is a disconcerting, deeply affecting read about the decay of one family’s moral certainty.

To all outward appearance, Ghachar Ghochar is a novel of domesticity, of familial tyrannies. But it opens (and closes) in a space outside the home. It is as if it is only from that distance that the story might have a chance of being told, of escaping the suffocating clutches of the home in which it is unfolding. So we meet our unnamed narrator in the “airy, spacious, high-ceilinged” Coffee House.

Spaces matter to Shanbhag. He is adept at illustrating how they shape our social selves; function as mirrors for our internal landscapes. Coffee House, for instance, is not “one of your low-lit bars with people crammed around tables”, but a place which “makes you feel cultured, sophisticated” if you drink in it. Sitting there, the narrator watches a couple have a public break-up, and is reminded of a long-ago relationship with a woman that he had once broken off within these walls. The Coffee House section also doffs its hat to an older, less cluttered Bangalore — a quick gesture that is one of Shanbhag’s few concessions to obvious big-picture-ness.

The theme continues as the narrative comes into its own: the generous two-storey house in which the narrator and his family now live is contrasted with the cramped space in which he grew up: “four small rooms, one behind the other, like train compartments”. The move from one house to the other is the spatial counterpart to the family’s sudden rise up the social ladder.

“Everything we’d brought from the old house appeared more worn, even unrecognisable in this new place,” observes the narrator. But it is not only objects that have been displaced. The people, too, seem to have lost their moorings. The architecture of the old house created a certain camaraderie that is all but lost in the new house, where everyone has a room to themselves. Where every decision earlier had to be made as a collective one, the family now has enough money “to buy things without asking for permission or informing anyone or even thinking about it.”

But in Shanbhag’s telling, these changes, that could have led to an increase in individual freedom, lead instead to dissolution, to a state of normlessness that the 19th century French sociologist Emile Durkheim called anomie. “Appa’s hold on the rest of us slipped. And to be honest, we lost hold of ourselves, too.” The small-time salesman with his painstakingly accounted-for labour is replaced at the helm of the family by his younger brother, and by a business that makes much more money in a much less transparent fashion. As the existing relationships between them break down, so do the values that had held the family together. The weight of new money is too much to bear.

And yet the family does hold together. In some terrifying way, it is all that it does. In one of the book’s most devastating moments, the narrator voices a seemingly bland, throwaway thought that later seems resonant with meaning. Referring to his new wife Anita, who has just been openly critical of the family’s dubious behaviour, he says, “I didn’t know how to make her see the relationships in our family from the inside. There was no other way to comprehend them.” It is an ominous thought in this political moment, but it is tempting to think of the family here as a metaphor for the nation, and this new compass that no longer measures right and wrong — only insiders and outsiders.

Given its powerful metaphoric qualities and its moral heft, it is tempting to read Ghachar Ghochar as a parable of post-liberalisation India. But while parable it may be, this is not a simple book. Shanbhag has produced a text so immaculately crafted that its craft is invisible, until you go looking for it — and discover that what you thought were asides were actually clues placed there strategically for you to discover. It is a book that draws you in with a deceptively chatty air, and before you know it, you have become privy to its chilling confidences.

Srinath Perur’s stellar translation from the Kannada both preserves the gentle observational quality of Shanbhag’s prose, and allows his aphoristic brilliance to shine through. The storyteller’s skill is such that you might be enticed into hurtling through — but there is much here worth lingering for.

I was especially moved by Shanbhag’s portrait of an arranged marriage, sweeping us up with its potential for tenderness, and the heady, erotic sensation of surrender. And while the book has been justly feted as a portrait of family and class dynamics, it is also a perspicacious account of our relationship to work. The lower middle-class family’s everyday involvement with the work of the breadwinner (which Shanbhag, in an interview with this writer, singled out as the germ of the story) and the inseparable relationship between work and self-respect — these are powerful themes, and the novel deals with them memorably.

There is something unsparing about Shanbhag’s novel. Like Anita, it is a voice from the inside, and it insists on telling the truth, no matter how uncomfortable that telling may make us.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, March 26, 2016.