Dispatch from Dharamshala – 2

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Films about animals at this year's edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival had powerful things to say about the state of our humanity 

The monkey as metaphor: a still from Prateek Vats's film Eeb Allay Ooo

You can never watch all the films at a film festival. What you can do is to make your choices, whether based on frontbencher commitment (read high-intensity googling of film titles) or a more backbencher attitude (what the lady in the loo queue seems excited about) and hope that the darkness of the auditorium will end up illuminating something you haven't quite seen before.
 

One of the things this year's DIFF threw into focus for me was age and ageing. There's no single model of the good life, but observing old people throws up possibilities to aspire to – or guard against. Archana Phadke's stunning documentary portrait of her grandparents and her parents, About Love, is as brutal as it is affectionate, letting us see these long-term relationships as the simultaneous safety nets and shackles they are. The bent, ancient fisherman of Kazuhiro Soda's Inland Sea smiles wryly about how the years can sneak up on you: “I thought I was still 50 or 60, turned out I had turned 90.” 

The other theme that seemed to me to emerge serendipitously from DIFF 2019 was animals. Zooming in on the non-human seemed, in film after film, to be a way of opening up the human condition. Sometimes the association felt subtle, like the gleaming night hauls of fish in Inland Sea that the old man disentangles from his net and tosses into the boat's watery hold, so they might live a little longer. The persistent slippery toughness of their bodies, leaping for life even at death's door, struck me as akin to their captor. 

Elsewhere, the weight of the beastly allegory seemed too much for the narrative to bear. The acclaimed Malayali director Lijo Jose Pelissery was at DIFF with his latest, Jallikattu, in which a buffalo due for slaughter runs amok, destroying plantations and shops in its wake. As the village men set off in pursuit, armed with nothing but ropes and their egos, it becomes clear that the film is only ostensibly about the buffalo.  

Pelissery's last two films, Angamaly Diaries and Ee Ma Yau,  demonstrated a talent for richly orchestrated set pieces, but Jallikattu feels more like a runaway display of that ability than a controlled experiment. For most of the film's running time, we watch men with flaming torches tramp through acres of hilly woodland and splash through streams, yelling, leaping, tearing at each other, with increasingly less rational cause. The buffalo seems almost forgotten as long-held internecine rivalries bubble up. The energy of the crowd is both majoritarian and masculine – “We will take it! There are more of us!” The thrill of the hunt, the performative frenzy of competition, the adrenaline and the testosterone – these, Jallikattu drills into us, are what drive humanity at its basest. And somehow, humanity at its most primitive is signified by animality. 

“Even now, with us here, this place belongs to animals,” says a goggle-eyed old man in Jallikattu. The sentiment is echoed at one point in Prateek Vats's stellar feature debut, Eeb Allay Ooo!, when Mahinder the monkey repeller of seven generations declares to the befuddled new recruit Anjani (Shardul Bhardwaj) that he has been asked to help train: “This is the neighbourhood of Raisina, traditionally ruled by monkeys.”  

But neither Pellisery nor Vats seem actually interested in our relationship with the animal world. What Vats's film does brilliantly is to use the monkey as metaphor, creating a multifarious web of associations that traverse the distance between animal and god – but elude the human. The bonnet macaque monkeys of Lutyens' Delhi, as elsewhere in India, have exploded as a population partly because they are worshipped and fed as a form of Hanuman – and as a bit of video footage in the films repeats, “The gods become pests.” 

Combining real locations and non-actors with a sharp script and a core of trained actors, Eeb Allay Ooo! follows the travails of a Bihari migrant who is hired to shoo away monkeys from the national capital's most grandly symbolic architectural corridor. There are several interwoven strands that combine to make this such a scathing indictment of the state of the nation: the humour of a young man's masculinity seemingly pitted against monkeys, the deeply unfair conditions of contractual labour, the absurdity of bureaucratic rules that defeat all of Anjani's innovations on the job. Meanwhile, the performative masculinity of the state at both the lowest level: Anjani's security guard brother-in-law being forced to wield a rifle that he can barely carry – and the highest: the Republic Day parade – emerge as equally farcical. 

It is only when the man pretends to be an animal – in a man-sized monkey costume, in blackface imitation of the lion-tailed macaques of Karnataka's R-Day tableau – that he manages to scatter the monkeys. We watch him wander through the streets, a modern-day Hanuman in his own sad Ramleela. 

His success is because the monkeys cannot tell the difference between a real langur and a fake one. Mahinder's real death at a mob's hands goes unmourned. Meanwhile, towards the film's end, the real rifle ends up in a costume tailor's shop, its value as limited to the performative as the fake costume. When, in the last scene, the jobless Anjani joins the parade of Hanuman impersonators, we know acche din has made monkeys of us all.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Nov 2019. 

An Extraordinary Election

My Mirror column:

Three years after AAP won a historic mandate in Delhi is a good time to watch Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla’s documentary on Kejriwal and the rise of his party.

On 10 February 2015, the Aam Aadmi Party won the Delhi elections with an unprecedented 67 out of 70 seats, forming a state government that is still going strong. The barrage of repetitive messaging nowadays, on television and on social media, makes it difficult for anything or anyone in the public eye to remain fresh for too long.

Arvind Kejriwal has certainly suffered from our jadedness. But three years after the AAP’s historic win, watching Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla’s gripping documentary An Insignificant Man makes clear just how remarkable an achievement the AAP is.

Ranka and Shukla’s film (free to watch online) quickly places on record certain landmark moments: Kejriwal’s decision to leave his job as a tax official and become an activist, his participation in the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement, and the formation of the party in November 2012. Then it takes us through the AAP’s first campaign, for the Delhi elections of December 2013.

History seen in retrospect can seem inevitable. But in 2013, for a party of political outsiders barely a year old, to fight an election in the nation’s capital, defeating the three-time-incumbent Congress Chief Minister Sheila Dixit while matching a rising BJP, seemed like a fool’s errand. Over and over, Ranka and Shukla zero in on this fact of Kejriwal’s being an outsider not just to politics, but to power as we have come to imagine it in post-independence India.

Early in the film, for instance, at a campaign meeting, a volunteer tells Kejriwal he’ll give up his job at Barclays Bank to help fight the election. Watching “such a small man – duble patle aadmi – exposing such powerful people, sahi mein bahut josh aa jata hai [one really feels inspired],” the man says. The implicit contrast with Narendra Modi’s strong man image – physically symbolised in the vision of his 56-inch chest – could not be more striking.

But as the film also makes amply clear, Kejriwal’s size and body language belies the strength of his opinions and the clarity of his political strategy. In one tense moment, an AAP candidate called Akhilesh has received two stitches for a head injury caused by being beaten up by the goons of a rival political party in the presence of the police. AAP volunteers say they did not fight back, only tried to protect themselves – and also protested outside the police station. “Don’t ever protest outside a police station,” says Kejriwal immediately. “That’s their battleground. Ours is amid the people. We have to pull them towards ours, not get drawn into theirs.” The unspoken metaphor is a profoundly Indian one: a kabaddi game.

In another great scene, Kejriwal meets a volunteer whose project is to get a thousand girls married off, free of cost. Kejriwal’s response is immediate. “First we suck the blood of the poor, then we make donations,” he laughs. “Say we get a thousand girls married. What if we increase their income instead?”

It is interesting that he does not take on the fact of gender frontally. He does not say to this man, “I don’t believe that getting girls married off is the solution to their lives.” Instead he challenges the wider approach of “daan-dakshina”: “Sure, systemic change is long-term work, but someone has to do it,” he smiles broadly. “On charity work, count me out... Jahan pe ladna-katna-marna hai, main aapke saath khada hoon.” In a society where most Indians are not about to support the idea of their daughters staying single, Kejriwal’s response struck me as shrewdly political – yet one that I don’t have trouble getting behind.

The AAP campaign places electricity and water charges – perhaps for the first time ever – at the centre of an election. Allegations of corruption against Dixit’s government are many, but the film zeroes in one particular Dixit letter that Kejriwal acquires a copy of, which prevented the 2010 head of DERC, Delhi’s electricity board, from reducing electricity prices for consumers. We watch as AAP’s core poll promises (700 litres of free water to each family, and the reduction of electricity bills by half) are deliberated within the party, challenged even by well-wishers. (They have since been met.)

The film tracks the difficulties of battling such entrenched interests. A long-time anti-corruption activist, a feisty young candidate called Santosh, whose work threatens the local powersthat-be, is knocked off her scooter by a car and dies in hospital. (Her death remains unsolved.) Then, right before the election, a video clip surfaces purportedly showing AAP candidate Shazia Ilmi agreeing to do a favour in return for money – the journalist who released it, Anuranjan Jha, later accepted it was “edited”.

Despite all this, an election in which the India Today ORG-MARG poll predicted only 6 seats for AAP ended with them getting 28. The BJP got 32 instead of the predicted 41, but decided to let AAP form a government, which ended up being dissolved by Kejriwal in two months on the issue of the stalled Lokpal Bill. It took until February 2015 for AAP to come back to power, with a much stronger mandate that has since made the party the focus of concerted, vindictive action by the Centre, with the office of the LG being used to block key Delhi government policies, including anti-corruption measures.

The film also reminds us of a political moment already almost impossible to remember, when a Sheila Dixit could dismiss a Kejriwal with the barest of courtesy. “What is Arvind Kejriwal’s status, except that he keeps talking about himself?” scoffs Dixit at one point. Even on election eve, she remains imperiously scornful, “Don’t speak to me of Kejriwal. Woh ek kahani thhi, khatam ho gayi. [That was a story, it has ended.]”

Whatever happens to the AAP in the future, at least that statement is not true.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 11 Feb 2018.

New lamps for old

Watching BR Chopra’s Naya Daur in Narendra Modi’s New India can produce a strange resonance — even as we look at it across the gulf of sixty years.

Dilip Kumar as the labouring Shankar in Naya Daur (1955)

1957's third biggest Hindi hit might never have got made if BR Chopra had listened to Mehboob Khan. As actor Dilip Kumar tells the tale in his 2014 autobiography: "Mehboob Sahab read the story and found no meat in it for entertainment. He told Chopra Sahab it could be made into a fine documentary on the doomsday awaiting the labour force in the country once machines replaced them but, as a feature film, it was not a great idea."

The younger man listened carefully — he had, after all, gone to solicit the senior filmmaker's opinion —but made up his mind to go ahead with the film if Dilip Kumar agreed to come on board. Yash Chopra, BR's younger brother and then working as his assistant, remembered how that almost didn't happen, because Dilip Kumar was committed to working on a film by Gyan Mukherjee. But when that film fell through, Dilip Kumar said yes promptly — and then spent a month doing story sittings in his shack in Juhu with producer-director BR Chopra and the film's writer Akhtar Mirza.

Most people remember Naya Daur for staging the confrontation between man and machine in a climactic race between a bus and a horse-drawn tonga. But how was such a battle to be made believable? Dilip Kumar writes that he was himself unconvinced by the original idea that the bus was to be beaten "by some kind of manipulation". As Yash Chopra remembered it, it was the thespian who first gave writer Akhtar Mirza the idea of the horse-cart taking a short-cut to get to its destination — "something that was logical and convincing".

There is something charming about how the universe of popular Hindi cinema perceives and produces its own internal logic — and when it abandons it. In Naya Daur, for instance, the village, while standing in for the country, has no farmers. The on-screen populace is divided between tonga-drivers and karkhana-walas, men who work as woodcutters and carpenters in the wood-production unit owned by the kindly local landlord (Nazir Hussain).

Hussain's departure on a pilgrimage to Banaras leaves the village open to the heartless machinations of his city-returned son Kundan (Jeevan), who brings in first a wood-cutting machine that robs the sawmill workers of their jobs, and then a bus that takes away the business of the tonga-drivers. In the era of demonetisation and Digital India, sixty years after Naya Daur first released, there is something distinctly sinister about watching the thin-lipped Jeevan pronounce his decisions the sole route to progress and development, even as the technology he brings in rides roughshod over the lives of the labouring poor.

Dilip Kumar's delightful portrayal of the film's protagonist Shankar, too, shares this on again-off again approach to logic. Shankar is somehow both shy and flirtatious, hot-blooded and calm. He seems wonderfully logical in his arguments with the crooked Kundan, or his sister's father-in-law-to-be, but becomes totally beholden to fate when it comes to resolving the love triangle in which he, his friend Krishna (the future popular villain Ajit in an important early role) and his sweetheart Rajni (Vyjayanthimala) find themselves.

Since it is obviously not an option to simply ask the girl which of the men she would prefer to marry, the two friends arrange instead to gamble on fate — if Rajni places white flowers in the Shiva temple the next morning, she is Shankar's, and if the flowers in her pooja thali are yellow marigolds, she is Krishna's. Naya Daur may come off as a sort of socialist musical (its iconic song is the infectiously choreographed 'Saathi Haath Badhana', with lines of villagers digging the earth in unison). But it is embedded in a deeply religious milieu —the temple atop a hill, with its massive statue of Shiva, is the locale for both intense romantic moments and the sort of monologue between the hero and God that later became a fixture of Hindi cinema.

And yet, this faith — the powerful sense of a superior being who can be appealed to for the things that really matter — does not blind the film or its hero to how religion can be used for cynical purposes. The most remarkable instance of this in the film is when Kundan and his devious accomplice, the greedy village Brahmin, secretly conceal a statue of a goddess along the road that Shankar and the villagers are constructing for the race. When the trusting villagers stop digging to fold their hands in prayer, we hear the villains intone, "Yahan mandir avashya banega", it is hard not to feel a chill go down one's spine. Naya Daur had heroes capable of circumventing the cynical appropriation of religion and of technology. The ordinary people of New India might not be so lucky.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Sep 2017.

Will it dawn on us?

My Mirror column:

Watching a 1950s film with Sahir Ludhianvi’s utopian lyrics involves mapping the grave distance we have travelled away from that utopia.

Last week, feeling utterly saddened by the state of the nation – recurring incidents of mob violence against Dalits and Muslims in the name of defending the cow, and a jingoistic nationalism that treats any criticism of the government or of India as an unpalatable betrayal – I found myself humming the words of a Sahir Ludhianvi song: “Woh subah kabhi toh aayegi, woh subah kabhi toh aayegi; In kaali sadiyon ke sar se, jab raat ka aanchal dhalkega; Jab dukh ke baadal pighlenge, jab sukh ka saagar chhalkega...” [In my tragically inadequate translation: ‘That dawn will come someday, that dawn will come someday; When these dark ages will shrug off the veil of night; When these clouds of sorrow will melt, and the ocean of joy brim over...’].

I remembered the song being from a Raj Kapoor film called Phir Subah Hogi, but I hadn’t watched it since my childhood. So I found myself on YouTube, discovering that it was a film directed in 1958 by Ramesh Saigal, with a plot based very loosely on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Kapoor plays Ram Mehra, a penniless law student in love with a poor girl called Sohni (Mala Sinha) who, in a bid to redeem a watch he has pawned, ends up unintentionally murdering the villainous pawnbroker.

Kapoor’s Ram is a dreamy-eyed do-gooder who wanders the streets of Bombay dressed in the classic blazer-and-trousers uniform of the 1950s Hindi film hero, coming to the aid of exhausted cart-pullers and injured children alike. The film contains many of the tropes of the 1950s film: the poor but khuddaar hero, his mother (here an unseen figure in the village) who does all she can to support his education, a city full of cold, calculating rich men without a conscience in sight.

Another familiar 1950s trope is that of the hero’s best friend, provider of companionship and comic relief. That figure here is the impeccable Rehman, who in one of those effortless nods to Hindu-Muslim friendship that characterised so many films of that era, plays a Muslim by the name of Rehman.

The film is full of soulful socialist angst, and nothing embodies it more than Ludhianvi’s lyrics. Among the finest Progressive poets to have ever composed for Hindi cinema, Ludhianvi outdoes himself here. Apart from the melancholic-utopian title song, the film offers two stellar examples of his style of critique – pointed, but with an undercurrent of humour.

In the first, Ram, ejected from his tenement for non-payment of rent, tries to find a place for the night. His journey from park bench to pavement is accompanied by a sardonic take on a nation that boasts of inroads into China and the Arab world while its educated youth – and its labourers – are homeless: “Chino-Arab hamara, Hindustan hamara/Rehne ko ghar nahi hai, saara jahan hamara.”

The song’s gentle delivery belies its sarcasm: “Patla hai haal apna, lekin lahu hai gaadha; Faulaad se bana hai, har naujawan hamara; Miljul ke is vatan ko, aisa sajayenge hum, Hairat se munh takega, Sara jahan hamara [Our state is pretty thin, but our blood is thick; Each of our young people is made of iron; Together we will decorate the country, so much that the whole world will look on in amazement.’]”

Later, as Ram’s romantic and other desires are crushed by a cruel world, he half-stumbles into a posh party – another classic Hindi film trope – and begins to sing “Aasmaan pe hai khuda, aur zameen pe hum; Aajkal woh is taraf dekhta hai kam. Aajkal kisi ko woh tokta nahi, chahe kucch bhi keejiye, rokta nahin; Ho rahi hai lootmaar, phat rahein hain bam... Zindagi hai apne apne bazuon ke dum. [God is up in the sky, we’re on the ground; These days, he doesn’t look this way much. He doesn’t interfere with anyone these days, you can do anything, he won’t stop you; There’s looting and bombs exploding... Life is a matter of might is right.]”

Call me a sad-eyed left-liberal, but I was comforted by the film’s secular-socialist vision – and struck by how much Ludhianvi’s words resonated with my present-day political desires. He bursts the balloon of an inflated nationalism, and offers a language in which to mourn an India in which packs of Hindutvavadi goons roam free, picking on defenceless Dalits and Muslims.

Imagine my surprise, then, on discovering that LK Advani and AB Vajpayee went to watch this film at Imperial Cinema after the Jan Sangh had received a particularly bad drubbing in the 1958 Delhi municipal elections – and that Advani often reminisces about how they returned certain that their political fortunes would also see a new dawn.

It is possible that good fiction and poetry is simply so capacious that we can all find our desires echoed in them. But given the BJP’s talent for appropriating, misreading and parodying our finest nationalist symbols – from Gandhi to Ambedkar to Nehru’s tryst with destiny speech – it feels like the truth lies elsewhere.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 July 2017.

Insiders, Outsiders: Ghare Baire

My Mumbai Mirror column today: 

Satyajit Ray's film adaptation of Tagore's 1916 novel brings to life the dangers of nationalism, then and now.



Over the last week, as the BJP government gave its most lawless supporters free rein to harangue and harass anyone who dare question their party line on 'nationalism', I have thought often of Tagore. If you think Tagore was a nature-loving, poetry-spouting sort, writing paeans to the ineffable spirit and teaching young people to think about history, literature and the arts in a tree-filled setting - well, yes, he was that. But unlike what the newly-emboldened tribe of JNU-bashers (Chetan, Chandan, et al) would have us believe, sensitivity sharpens the brain. 

Reading Tagore on nationalism is startling. He is uncannily clear-eyed about an ideology still bearing poisonous fruit, a hundred years after he critiqued it. 

In the 1916 essay 'Nationalism in India', he wrote: "I am not against one nation in particular, but against the general idea of all nations. What is the Nation? It is the aspect of a whole people as an organised power. This organisation incessantly keeps up the insistence of the population on becoming strong and efficient... thereby man's power of sacrifice is diverted from his ultimate object, which is moral, to the maintenance of this organisation, which is mechanical. Yet in this he feels all the satisfaction of moral exaltation and therefore becomes supremely dangerous to humanity." All those currently abusing and beating up people in the Nation's name are certainly experiencing moral exaltation--while they grow ever more dangerous to humanity. 

But this is a column about cinema, and it is a film that I am here to recommend. In 1984, Satyajit Ray adapted Tagore's novel Ghare Baire, also published in 1916, for the screen. The Home and the World is often relegated to Ray's minor works. Perhaps it is too much of a chamber piece for a political period drama, and perhaps the acting is occasionally stilted. But Ghare Baire is a film of rare political complexity, made rarer by its accessibility. 

Relationships between the three primary characters unfold against the backdrop of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal. The serious Nikhil (played by Victor Banerjee) is the educated zamindar, a believer in companionate marriage, who urges his wife not just to get lessons from a memsahib, but to step out of purdah. Only if she is free to meet other men, says Nikhil, will her love for him pass the test. His wife Bimala (Swatilekha) is first reluctant to break out of her traditional role, and later overwhelmed by the choices such freedom offers. Finally, there is Sandip (Soumitra Chatterjee), Nikhil's college-mate and a charismatic orator who wants to use the zamindar's house as a base for nationalist mobilisation. 

It might have seemed a simplistic device - one character for, one against, and the third temporarily swayed - were the characters not so well-etched. With Sandip, Tagore is able to portray all the attractions of nationalism - and its horrific dangers. The first of these is that nationalism celebrates an immediacy of feeling over rational thought, 'natural' intuition over argument. Having been introduced to Bimala, Sandip asks her opinion of his rousing speech. "I haven't had much time to think about it," she says shyly. "But that's why I want to know what you *feel*," declares Sandip. "Leave the thinking to him!" 

Bimala concedes that hearing the assembled crowd chant Vande Mataram gave her goosebumps. "And so it should," says Sandip. "But do you know your husband doesn't believe in our mantra?" Nikhil's reply is perhaps the film's most memorable line of dialogue: "But I do not believe in any sort of intoxicant." 

Tagore is also scarily prescient about how turning the nation into an imagined figure called Bharat Mata allows people to do anything at all in the name of "worshipping her": "Ja korchhe shob-i ma-er jonno (Everything they're doing is for the mother)," says Nikhil drily. Young boys under the spell of Swadeshi hurl stones at a harmless old memsahib, rob innocents, even murder. When poor Muslim tradesmen refuse to heed the Swadeshi call because their economic survival depends on cheap British goods, Sandip's nationalism is quick to adopt both underhand and violent tactics, eventually leading to a communal riot. 

"Do the traders in the haat not belong to the nation?" asks Nikhil in anger when a group of angry young Hindu men try to coerce him into banning British goods in his zamindari area. "There are Muslims in this country, this is a historical fact." Tagore's 1916 essay had also pointed out the hypocrisy of claiming to forge a political unity called the nation while society remained so starkly divided: "The very people who are upholding these ideals are themselves the most conservative in their social practice. Nationalists say, for example, look at Switzerland, where, in spite of race differences, the peoples have solidified into a nation. Yet, remember that in Switzerland the races can mingle, they can intermarry, because they are of the same blood. In India there is no common birthright. And when we talk of Western Nationality we forget that the nations there do not have that physical repulsion, one for the other, that we have between different castes." 

Sandip's high-minded speeches pay lip service to Hindu-Muslim unity -- after all, Swadeshi arose in the wake of Lord Curzon's division of Bengal. Yet his politics, on the ground, involves the unashamed oppression of poor Muslims. The manipulation of the majoritarian mind, the cynical polarisation of people by demagogues -- the scenario enacted in Ghare Baire is chillingly familiar. It seems unbelievable that we have been living this narrative for at least a century -- and still cannot not see through the fog.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Feb 2016.

Picture This: Chasing Politics

Last Saturday's BLink column: 

Following Shazia Ilmi through the 2013 Delhi assembly election, a new documentary offers a glimpse into the struggles of the Aam Aadmi Party. 

Lalit Vachani’s 2015 documentary An Ordinary Election, shot in the run-up to the 2013 Delhi assembly elections, tracks politician Shazia Ilmi’s campaign in south Delhi’s RK Puram constituency. Screened last week in Mumbai, Kolkata and at least three different venues in the Capital, the film attracted an audience largely comprising activists, journalists and academics. While Vachani could not have predicted it, the fact that Ilmi left the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in May 2014 and joined the BJP in January 2015 (after losing the RK Puram seat narrowly to the BJP contender) forms an overarching frame for the way we view the film. And given that the much-publicised exit of Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan from the AAP Executive Council was taking place the week Vachani chose to screen his film, many saw it as a prescient comment on the AAP’s present.

From the start, when we see Ilmi alone in a seemingly empty room, being recorded for TV even as she is recorded for Vachani’s film, it is clear that she is a creature of the camera. As The Economic Timesrecognised in a 2011 profile of her, “being on TV is Ilmi’s core competence.” Having worked as a political correspondent and news anchor for 15 years, Ilmi “is not flustered by rudeness, can shout as loudly as necessary to gain the anchor’s attention, speaks fast and without gaps so that others can’t sneak in parallel commentary, appears to have a cultivated disregard for punditry, and has the rare capacity to smile beatifically for the entire duration of the debate.”

We have had more occasions to watch Ilmi in action since, and Vachani shows her putting these impressive abilities to use on the campaign trail, continuing to hold the beatific smile while being told by a Vasant Vihar uncle that she should have stayed a journalist, or hearing the news of her electoral defeat. In a Q&A after one Delhi screening, Vachani said that he considered tracking at least one other candidate, perhaps from another party, but for various reasons, including budgetary constraints, decided to stick with Ilmi, whom he knew from her student days at Jamia Millia Islamia. (Vachani now teaches courses on documentary at the University of Göttingen, Germany.) But while he makes good use of his unfettered access to Ilmi, and her ease before the camera, he spends equal time talking to her three different campaign managers and volunteers, providing a rare picture of AAP from the inside out — a point I shall return to.

A documentary doesn’t have to lay out its arguments like a thesis does, which can be a strength. But the two axes along which Vachani’s interests lie seemed clear to me: religion and class. Religion is perhaps the more obvious one, given that Ilmi, whose name identifies her as Muslim, was standing from a constituency where only 4.5 per cent of the population is Muslim. AAP’s choice was a rejection of vote bank politics, and Ilmi repeatedly appeals to voters to see her as ‘just a citizen’ rather than a ‘Muslim face’. What the film also catches, though, is Ilmi’s cleverly multifarious presentation of self, in which references to biryani (cooked by one of her poorer constituents) sit side by side with remarks that project a subliminal Hindu worldview: “Jab bahut zyada adharm badh jaata hai, toh safai ke tareeke hote hain”. In one revealing scene, she does not contradict a temple priest who says, “Brahmin prasann honge toh bhagwan prasann honge (If Brahmins are pleased, god will be pleased too)”. When she then leans over to whisper in his ear, “My mother-in-law is Brahmin,” it is difficult not to think of it as political opportunism, especially in the light of Ilmi’s future actions.

As for class, the film shows Ilmi traversing the constituency of RK Puram, which consists of middle-class government quarters, jhuggis, as well as posh colonies. She is self-possessed and gracious wherever she goes, though her appeals to middle and upper middle-class voters rang truer for me than her attempts to learn Tamil from Tamil-speaking slum-dwellers, which evoked an Indira Gandhi style of politics. What is harder to pinpoint — and yet crystal-clear as you watch the film — is how class operates as a dividing line within the party, causing invisible fractures that eventually break the campaign, damaging Ilmi’s chances. We see the removal of two campaign managers. The first, Omendra Bharat, an IIT graduate and an inspired orator, is replaced by Siddharth (no last name), another computer engineer, who lasts until a TV sting shows him willing to accept donations without receipts. (The sting was later dismissed as manufactured.) Anjana Mehta, who replaces Siddharth, comes across as a much-more English-speaking figure, who dismisses both Omendra and Siddharth as “pontificating” rather than working, and casts aspersions on their loyalty. Vachani captures the anger of several volunteers who believe that these decisions were taken undemocratically, including Mohanji, who stops working in protest, only to return once Ilmi leaves.

One revealing disagreement breaks out over why Ilmi should be called ‘Ma’am’ rather than by her first name. Gender, of course, is the elephant in the room. Ilmi talks of men’s inability to deal with a woman as boss. Omendra’s carload of campaigners is entirely male and North Indian, while Siddharh is quoted as unselfconsciously saying that whatever money he spends on AAP, “it’s still cheaper than dating girls”. AAP’s brilliantly energetic 2015 campaign revealed a party so astute about class as to successfully make it the unifying election plank so many have failed at. Watching Vachani’s film, though, one worries that it cannot prevent itself from being riven by it.

Published in the Hindu Business Line.

Post Facto -- Mufflers, jhadoos, onions and metros: symbolic politics in our time

My Sunday Guardian column this month:

On 10th February 2015, as news began to come in of the AAP win in Delhi, Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp were flooded with jokes. The best of these one-liners drew on symbols: the ordinary muffler weighing heavy on the bespoke pinstripe suit, or the jhadoo's clean sweep: "Modi wants a Swachh Bharat. AAP has the broom".

Of course, politics everywhere throws up symbols. But the Delhi elections turned bitter symbolic battles into smart, vibrant politics. The muffler made him seem like a chowkidar, went the sharply classist refrain in 2013. But the more Kejriwal-mockers made fun of his ever-present muffler, the more he clung to it. And eventually some clever young things in AAP turned the name "Mufflerman" into a kind of indigenous Dilli superhero — complete with T-shirts. As for the jhadoo, rarely has there been an Indian election in which the allotted symbol of a political party has assumed such far-reaching metaphorical meaning. The AAP jhadoo is now so profoundly linked to the party's "clean up the system" discourse that the anti-corruption message seems inextricable from the visual cue for cleaning up.

And yet the thing about images is that they can signify different things to different people, and mean many things at the same time. Days before the election, I happened to hear one of the city's cultural czarinas talking about how the visual matters in every field. Her example, but naturally, came from her driver, who had apparently said that Arvind Kejriwal and his message resonated with him to a great extent, but he could not bring himself to vote for AAP because its symbol – the broom – seemed to him to represent everything he had managed to leave behind. The visual association, in other words, was powerful enough to negate the effect of an otherwise convincing verbal campaign.

I don't know anything about the driver's background, but it seems unlikely that he was responding to the broom's valence as an instrument for cleaning. He was identifying it with those who usually wield it – not as a political weapon, but as a necessary act of earning their livelihood. Such are the powerful ways in which caste lives on in this country. Jhadoo dena remains an indelible Indian shorthand for manual labour in general, and polluting labour in particular. Those who followed the anti-reservation campaigns of a few years ago would remember students in front of AIIMS, would-be doctors who would eventually have to render service to human bodies in advanced stages of decay, protesting against the terrible fate that threatened them by sweeping the streets with brooms. And on 10th February this year, there was a WhatsApp joke doing the rounds: "Zadu wala becomes CM. Chay wala becomes PM. We Graduate, Engineers & MBA thinking of how to catch train at 8.37 AM & PM".

The Delhi election has been a turning point in many ways, but the real cleansing of our minds will need something more than empty Swachch Bharat slogans.

What is clear, though, is in a country so sharply fractured by class, symbols can go either way. While being a chaiwala's son definitely helped Modi win the votes of the poor in May 2014, it is not that aspect of him that appeals to "Graduate, Engineers and MBA" – though it seems that a ten lakh rupee suit might have swung too far in the opposite direction. And if the jhadoo's power is its everydayness, its familiarity, its emblematic connection with the poorest, then it also stands to be rejected for those very reasons — by that steadily increasing section of the population that aspires to something less every day, less basic, less poor.

Two other anecdotes might make the point better. The first is from a heritage walk I went on the day after the election. It was a young, upper middle class crowd, but for once, politics was on everyone's mind. The AAP enthusiasts may have been slightly more vocal, but I managed to overhear two twenty-somethings confirm their hopes of a BJP win. "The other night I saw a whole TV programme about the price of onions," sniggered the young man. "Imagine what will happen if AAP wins!" The price of onions, while it thankfully still has enough weight to swing the electoral taraazu, is something these young people think of as ridiculous.

The second anecdote is from the last day of campaigning. I was taking the metro from RK Ashram Marg towards Connaught Place when I saw a burly forty-ish Sikh man loudly accosting a group of AAP volunteers with caps. Apparently he'd seen one of them hawk and spit on the platform. I couldn't tell who the chastised volunteer was, but a whole host of his colleagues were apologising profusely: "He didn't know the rules, he's from outside, in fact he's from Andhra. But of course he shouldn't have done it. Humne samjha diya hai..." Sardarji, however, was not to be placated so easily. "You people want to run Delhi!" he raged. "But this is the respect you show to the metro. How will you ever make it a world class city!"

Whether it's onions or the metro, no symbol can ever represent any reality fully. But some symbols aren't interested in reality. What they want to do is to present an image whose grandeur people might aspire to — like a naam-wala suit, or a shiny new metro. The power of such symbols lies precisely in their distance from the real. In the politics of symbols, then, we must choose whether we want to be represented by our aspirations or our realities. Might our leaps not be more successful if we start with the ground beneath our feet?

First published in the Sunday Guardian.