Cinema in the City

My Mirror column:

Watching films in the theatre used to be a sensory experience that extended beyond the screen, tied to rituals of urban life. Now the screen floats free, and so do we.

I made my acquaintance with Trivandrum’s single screen theatres during my first visit to the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in 2011. In Godard’s Own Country (2012), a longform Caravan essay on the IFFK and Kerala’s love of world cinema, I described some of them: “There is Ajanta, dense with the smell of rose petals, and with a pedestal fan that whirrs incessantly; Sreekumar, with a treacherous set of stairs in its balcony; the twinned Dhanya (big) and Remya (small); and Sree Padmanabha, for whom becoming an IFFK venue has been crucial in regaining the respectability it had lost as a softporn theatre in the ’90s. (Sree Padmanabha went all out in 2011, creating a two-minute laser display that played before each festival screening. The effort won it the ‘Best Theatre’ award.).”

I didn’t mention in the 2012 essay why I gravitated to Sree Padmanabha: in the dense warren of streets behind it was the finest, most well-priced Malayali lunch joint in the city, the inimitable Mubarak, serving up unlimited mounds of piping hot rice, veggies and moru curry — to which, with the merest incline of the head, one could add a steady chain of seafood accompaniments: perfectly crisp matthi, spicy squid fry, or the most delectable mussels. By not being held in a private enclosed space like INOX in Panjim, or a government-created auditorium complex like Siri Fort in Delhi, IFFK allowed visiting viewers, like myself, to explore the city through its cinemas, discovering not just their characterful architecture but also eateries near them, just by following my nose — and the crowd.

I also didn’t mention how I first learnt about Sree Padmanabha’s pornographic past. A few days after IFFK, chatting with my Kollam homestay host, I discovered he had actually worked as its manager for several years, helping end its seedy phase! His father’s connection with it was older — he had watched films there his entire childhood, and even now no expedition to Trivandrum was complete without a solo visit to Sree Padmanabha, including a snack and a soft drink.

I haven’t been back to Sree Padmanabha since 2013, but think of it fondly. So I was delighted, on opening Yesterday’s Films for Tomorrow, a newly released book by the late film archivist PK Nair, to discover its prehistory. “It was in the early 1940s, the height of the War period. I must have been hardly eight years old,” writes Nair. “The venue: a tent cinema in Trivandrum’s Putharikandam Maidan, almost the same location as the present Sree Padmanabha theatre. Nearly half the hall was filled with immaculate shining white sand, probably got from the local beach. This was the lowest priced seating, classified as ‘floor’. Just behind was the ‘bench’ class packed with wooden benches, and further behind was the highest class with folding wooden chairs.”

Nair’s nostalgia is jocular and precise, listing the “half-wall” against which floor-sitters vied to rest their backs, the “women's barricades” for “your wife and kids” (the assumed viewer and reader is a man, of course), and the “hawker boys” who roamed freely through the hall, “canvassing aggressively” to sell their beedis and cigarettes, soda or peanuts during the many short intervals (A single projector necessitated five or six breaks between reels).

Given his father’s certified disapproval of cinema (typical of that generation of educated nationalists), Nair took to sneaking out when the family was asleep, begging the doorman at Sree Padmanabha or Chitra to let him in to the last hour of the late night show. “[L]ater I would catch up with what I had missed at a matinee show on the weekend.” “Perhaps such lopsided viewings in repetition enabled me to look at films more objectively and sharpened my critical faculties even as a school kid,” he muses.

Nair’s spare reminiscences reminded me of a more extravagant account of childhood film viewing: the late theatre doyen Habib Tanvir on Raipur’s Big Top theatre. Tanvir, like Nair, watched many films for free; he and his friends would slash the tent with a razor blade and sneak into shows where half the audience’s enjoyment came from the vulgar, funny running commentary provided by the co-owner, Chunnilal: “Oye, what are you standing around for, motherfucker, the villain will kill your heroine. Bastard, make the horse go faster, faster, you idiot!”

Nair and Tanvir’s memoirs reveal how inexorably film-watching was once tied to places and people — the physical experience of the theatre, the particular doorman or commentator, the food you ate after. Now a film can play anytime we want it to, often opening up on a screen that we carry around with us. Watching a film this way no longer leads us into the city; just back into ourselves.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 June 2017.

Post Facto - Habib Tanvir’s Naya Theatre: Newness arising from the old

My Sunday Guardian column this fortnight: Habib Tanvir abib Tanvir created the repertory company Naya Theatre along with his wife-to-be Moneeka Misra in 1959 and ran it for the next fifty years. (Their daughter Nageen Tanvir continues to run it.) What was unique about Naya Theatre was that it was created with a group of nacha actors from Tanvir's native Chhattisgarh, who performed in their vivid, physical nacha style in Naya Theatre's productions of Shakespeare, Brecht and Sanskrit classics, as well as fresh interventionist plays written by Habib Saab. Habib Tanvir's account of how he came to work with these actors is as fresh and direct as one could ask for: "when I had come back from Europe in 1958, before beginning Mrichchakatika, I went home to Raipur to meet my family... I heard that there was to be a Nacha on the grounds of the high school where I was educated — Nacha is a Chhattisgarhi form of secular drama. It was to start at nine o'clock. I saw it all night through, which is the usual duration for a Nacha. They presented three or four skits. There was Madan Lal, a great actor. Thakur Ram, another great actor, Babu Das, a very good actor too, Bhulwa Ram, a glorious singer: and what comedians, these fellows, like music hall comedy. They were doingchaprasi nakal, sadhu nakal (take-offs). I was fascinated. I went up to them and said — would you like to come to Delhi and join me in a production?" Of course, even a marvellous stroke of inspiration such as the one above does not automatically translate into a lifetime's body of work. The forced brevity of this interview (given to Seagull Theatre Quarterly in 1996) could suggest a grand beginning leading seamlessly into a legendary career. But Habib Tanvir is not the man to elide the many stumbling blocks to a new theatrical vision. In an appendix to his marvellously frank memoirs — translated from his inimitable colloquial Hindustani to a deliberately unregimented English by Mahmood Farooqi — he offers us glimpses of the ruthless unlearning and slow, rigorous absorption that went into the process. Initially, he says, "I was trying to apply my English training on the village actors — move diagonally, stand, speak, take this position, take that position. I had to unlearn it all. I saw that they couldn't even tell right from left on the stage and had no line sense." But instead of giving up in frustration, as a young man just back from RADA and watching Brecht in Berlin might be expected to do, Habib Tanvir went back to watch Nacha. He realised that what his actors had honed for years was an ability to respond to an audience that invariably surrounded them, to spontaneously shifting their focus to wherever the response was from. In making them change, he would lose their biggest strength. A similar realisation dawned on him with regard to language: that it was by letting the actors perform in their native Chhattisgarhi that they would sound truest and most confident. his ability to observe and learn from his actors, to incorporate into his form what came naturally to them — rather than trying to fit them into some pre-appointed grid — can be called anthropological, in the best possible way. But it was also, at its core, aesthetic — derived from Habib Saab's unstinting joy in the folk forms he adopted. He had spent much of the 1940s working with the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) in Bombay, then a remarkably vibrant space in which writers, actors and musicians like Balraj Sahni, Dina Pathak (then Gandhi) and Shailendra, affiliated loosely or closely with the Communist Party, were producing plays in all languages: creating jatras in Bengali, drawing on tamashain Marathi. The IPTA's openness to existing Indian forms — linguistic, theatrical, musical — was probably a crucial influence on Habib Saab's own. But the memoirs, though incomplete — the first volume of a planned three-volume work — reveal a theatrical sensibility formed as much by a youthful ear for Chhattisgarhi songs and Urdu poetry, and an eye for visual flourish that goes right back to his childhood. We learn of the summer vacation when he first heard dadariya, "a self-composed song which proceeds in terms of questions and answers", outside Luhrakapa village, near Bilaspur. "Good dadariya has a compelling force, and girls are known to elope with their lovers under its spell, therefore it is forbidden to sing it inside the village." We hear how he wept copiously through his first play at Raipur's Kali Bari — but he manages to recall that the curtains "rose up and disappeared" rather than parting sideways as they do now. Describing the silent cinemas of his youth, he paints a fantastic portrait of one Chunnilal who first sold tickets, then entered the hall and provided a hilariously poker-faced commentary throughout the film. Writing about showing old films to students at Pune's Film Institute, Tanvir elucidates his philosophy more lucidly than I ever could: "It is important to know the tradition not because it is holy or deserves worship but because it is only the tradition and the canon that allows us to chart new paths, even if it involves a breaking up of the old." This was a deeply secular man who worked throughout with the religiosity of his actors, drawing on the theatre of their ritual. And yet he never shunned the urban modern person: among his most remarkable statements is that his film reviews for radio in the 40s were based on conversations with taxi drivers who "always had something original to say". "Often, all I did... was to quote them." If only we could all listen like Habib Tanvir did.