Educating Stanley

My op-ed piece in the Indian Express:

Where Hindi teachers are always khadoos

Amole Gupte's Stanley ka Dabba, released last week, is a quiet gem of a film about a child who gets picked on because he doesn't bring his own lunchbox to school. He gets picked on, oddly, not by his classmates -- who're all rather fond of him and his stories and happy to share their dabbas -- but by the Hindi teacher, Babubhai Varma aka Khadoos, who doesn't bring his own lunch either and preys on others'.

The film uses the ostensibly shared tiffinlessness marvellously, to reveal the gulf between Stanley and Varma -one a child trying to make the best of his circumstances, the other an adult shamelessly exploiting both the kindness of other adults and the powerlessness of children.

In terms of understanding a child's world, Stanley ka Dabba is a remarkable film. It is only because we see him through children's eyes, for example, that Varma's tragicomic gluttony, his near-insane obsession with the kids' dabbas, his dogin-the-manger-ish desire to punish Stanley, seem to belong not to caricature but to fable.

There is something else in this film that seems to belong to the world of fable, though -and this is a spoiler -which is the explanation for why Stanley has no dabba. It turns out that he is an orphan, left to the care of an evil chacha who makes him serve and wash dishes in his small-time eatery, in exchange for a place to live. The film's final half-hour, with Stanley saying an adoring good night to photos of his parents before he goes to sleep on a counter in the dhaba, prep the viewer for the child labour statistics at the end of the film.

It may seem churlish to criticise a film made with such unequivocally good intentions, but I was struck by Stanley ka Dabba's crude attempt to gain the sympathy of a presumed middle-class, primarily English-speaking audience, by creating a child character who goes to a good convent school and recites English poems, just like us. It's only once that is done that he can be a conduit for a child labour narrative: a fascinating reversal of all those Hindi films until the 1990s in which the poor hero with whom the bulk of the audience identified, turned out, in the end, to be a rich man's lost heir.

One shouldn't be surprised, either, that a film emerging out of workshops that director Amole Gupte held with the children of the Holy Family School in Mumbai should have the English teacher Rosy ma'am as the sensitive one and the villainous Varma as Hindi teacher. Film critic Raja Sen, in his review of Stanley, notes that "Hindi teachers have a tough life, appearing intimidating to their students by default, by dint of the scale of sheer listlessness their subject provokes", eventually turning "grouchy and irritable". Varma, he goes on to say, "is strange even by Hindi teacher standards".

The "strangeness" of Hindi teachers, I would suggest, is unique to the English-medium world in which we increasingly bubble-wrap our children: a world in which the Hindi teacher is doubly condemned -first by teaching a subject that is dismissed as irrelevant, and second by being someone not necessarily fluent in English.

Last month's Bollywood release for children, a superhero film called Zokkomon, has city boy Kunal (Darsheel Safary, also orphaned and left to the care of an evil chacha!) arriving in a village school where all it takes to establish that all the teachers are idiots is for one of them, the bucktoothed Tinnu Anand, to mispronounce a sentence in English. It's revealing to set Stanley ka Dabba and Zokkomon against a remarkable children's film made in 1977: Gulzar's Kitaab. It, too, is about a middle-class boy of a certain age, who gets into trouble at school and spends much of the film wandering the world, or at least the city, by himself.


But there the similarities end. Stanley's wanderings are those of a good boy -either to preserve his dignity by not going to school dabba-less, or to get to a concert audition. Kunal in Zokkomon is abandoned in the city by his chacha and only survives by befriending a young woman called Kittu didi with whom he leads a kind of fantasy-holiday-life.

We have left behind forever the world of Kitaab, a world in which the middle-class child thought it was exhilarating to run away from a regulated middle-class life. No one who has watched Master Raju hugging his knees in joy atop a moving train as the engine driver sings, "Dhanno ki ankhon mein raat ka surma", can ever forget the thrill of it. There was danger in Kitaab, too, and eventual return - but the world outside the middle-class bubble was still something to be explored and understood. Not merely to be protected from.

Published in the Indian Express, May 21, 2011.

Mangalore mistakes

This isn't about liberal freedoms so much as gender -- and class

Why has the debate occasioned by the incident of violence against women in Mangalore been labelled a debate about “pub culture”, when it is clearly about something else? When Pravin Valke, founding member of the Sri Rama Sene, which led the attacks, is quoted specifically as saying that drinking is fine so long as men are the ones doing it (“Bars and pubs should be for men only”), there’s no misconstruing what he means. Or which half of society he seeks to regulate. (“Why should girls go to pubs? Are they going to serve their future husbands alcohol? Should they not be learning to make chapatis?”— Valke again.) So we need to abandon the misleading “pub culture” tag and start addressing the real issue. 

Which, it appears, is much less about the general unhealthiness or amorality of consuming alcohol (however much Anbumani Ramadoss may wish to deflect our thoughts in that direction) than it is about the outrage large numbers of men in this country feel about the perceived emergence of a class of women, Indian in blood and colour, but so shockingly Western in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect as to think nothing of bonding over a beer, in public, with men who are not even their husbands (with apologies to Lord Macaulay). As Pramod Muthalik, president of the Sri Rama Sene, put it, “We took steps to protect our Hindu culture and punished girls who were attempting to destroy that tradition by going to pubs. We will not tolerate anybody who steps out of this code of decency.”

A cursory reading of the newspapers reveals two broad kinds of critical response to the Mangalore attacks. The first kind defends a woman’s ability to go to a pub and drink as an individual right. It draws on a notion of freedom, of a woman’s right to live as she chooses, which becomes tied up with the idea of a progressive society. Such a defence can sometimes take off in somewhat absurd directions, such as when Ramadoss’s declaration that India will not progress if pub culture continues is countered by Page Three nightlife aficionados pointing out that developed countries have far more developed pub cultures than ours, thus turning the public consumption of alcohol into an index of socio-economic advancement. In either case, such a response is not concerned with actually engaging those who associate women going out and drinking with a lack of morals and a loss of tradition. 

The second type of response takes the other side’s appeal to Hindu tradition more seriously, and seeks therefore to defend the consumption of alcohol by women as traditional. This kind of response ranges all the way from representatives of Mangalorean citizens’ groups pointing to a local tradition of women drinking, at least among the large fishing and toddy tapping communities, to a newspaper columnist describing how much ancient Indian women liked their liquor (including Sita’s preference for a particular sura called maireya). The appeal to a plural, multifarious, open-ended tradition is doomed to failure, if only because the last two hundred years of our history have worked to cement the move towards a singular, usually proscriptive one, which can be recognised as a “tradition” by the state, and in whose name outrage can be voiced. So while one might want to hold on to the hope that the Sri Rama Sene might be struck dumb if actually confronted with real-life Mangalorean grandmothers defending their right to toddy, the well-researched “traditionalist” argument is unlikely to actually help defuse the simmering moral conflict that seems to affect so much of Indian society today.

So what might a more helpful sort of response be? What are we, as urban, educated, self-professedly socially liberal people to do when confronted with situation after situation in which it seems that the lives we live are somehow out of joint with the country next door? Whether it’s the Delhi cops who book a (married) couple on obscenity charges for kissing in a metro station, or the villagers of Ghadi Chaukhandi near Noida’s Sector 71 who continue to express their outrage about “couples coming in cars... and doing disgusting things next to our homes” even as they defend their sons against rape charges, there is something going on which demands a more thoughtful engagement with class-based moral divides than we have seen so far. There is no question that some people’s violent attempt to bring into existence their version of a morally cleansed society is abhorrent and must not be tolerated. But it might be worth pondering over why it is the “liberated” woman’s body that ends up bearing the burden of festering class resentments in post-globalisation India. While defending our freedoms as women and as citizens to the bitter end, I suggest we start paying attention to the undercurrents of class that inflect so many of our urban interactions — interactions otherwise framed in terms of tradition, morality and especially, gender.

Published in the Indian Express, 5 February 2009.

A house full of TVs: thoughts on Oye Lucky Lucky Oye

An edited version of this was published in the Indian Express, Dec 6, 2008.

India's fault lines, explored in a film about a Delhi thief.

Fifteen minutes into Dibakar Banerjee’s new film, a bunch of lower middle class Delhi boys are beating up a private school kid whose one refrain is a pleading “Jaan de bhai, extra class hai”. They don’t stop. But at one point, the gangly teenaged sardar pauses in his pummelling to make the padhaaku kid answer a crucial question, “Yeh greeting card mein likha kya hota hai?”

The greeting card is just one of the motifs that Banerjee uses, brilliantly, to allude to the fault lines of class and language upon which the shaky foundations of post-liberalisation India rest. Having figured out that there’s something about greeting cards that makes girls happy, the turban-clad young Lucky makes a pilgrimage to the nearest Archies Gallery, shyly wooing the franchise owner’s daughter by taking her for a ride “from Tilak Nagar to Rajouri” on a “borrowed” motorcycle. Lucky’s bid for the girl’s affections is foiled by a smarmy waiter (and the fact that the card he’s brought her reads “Get Well Soon”) but the greeting card appears repeatedly in the film as an object of desire – and as an object that symbolizes desire.

For Oye Lucky Lucky Oye is, more than any Hindi film till date, a film about the cycles of desire set into motion by the shiny new world of malls and Mercedes which lies just across the road from the ration ki dukaan. Across the road, and tantalizingly behind the glass – as the achingly apt lyrics of one song go, “Jugni charhdi AC car, jugni rehndi sheeshe paar”. But what is seemingly beyond one’s reach is not necessarily so. As Lucky says belligerently, having expressed some new outlandish aspiration to his friends, “Kyon? Main nahi kar sakta kya?”

But clearly, the path to the good life, for someone like Lucky, isn’t exactly made accessible by treading the straight and narrow. And so Lucky is a thief. He’s the most charming thief you’ve ever met, saying namaste to unsuspecting old Chaijis before driving off with their son’s cars and persuading young girls that the music system he’s carrying away is being replaced with an even better one by Papa.

Cars, music systems, colour tvs, carved furniture, framed pictures: these are the objects that Lucky steals, time and again. Partly the stealing is a lark, a response to the dare – “Main nahi kar sakta kya?” It’s also a passport – the only one he can get – to the murky yet luminous lives of Delhi’s rich: as the song declares, “ABCD chahida mainu, DVD vi chahida mainu…” (In one of the film’s most audacious early scenes, asked to organize a car as a “gift” to a politician’s bratty son, Lucky drives away from a posh wedding with a guest’s shiny red Merc. But when the brat expects him to play submissive chauffeur, and he’s refused entry to a discotheque the brat has just entered, an enraged Lucky charges into the hotel boutique and acquires two identical black velveteen suits for himself and his friend Bangaali – and sure enough, now there’s no problem walking in. The scene is funny, but also a sadly accurate depiction of the entirely taken-for-granted “what you wear is what you are” class politics upon which the everyday life of our cities is founded.) Finally, the objects Lucky steals aren’t merely a way to make money. Stacked in ever-increasing piles in his flat, those TVs and music systems create a claustrophobic mise en scene of middle class consumption gone crazy: a strange excess that somehow simultaneously stands in for the security of home.

Despite its unerring eye for our disparities, Oye Lucky admirably takes no moral high ground. Every character has a context, a location, a reason for being who they are. The women, particularly, are superbly observed studies in class and morality: the slinkily-clad, foul-mouthed Dolly, who dances in parties for a living but keeps a vrat every Tuesday; her quiet college-going sister Sonal, who “doesn’t touch Dolly” when she comes home drunk, but happily goes on holiday with her burglar boyfriend. Best of all, the gaze is reversed often enough to prevent any easy identification with one character: if the giggling South Delhi schoolgirls in the café make Sonal uncomfortably conscious of her lack of coolth, her disapproval of their short skirts is unequivocal (another angle on “what you wear is what you are”).

The film’s subtle but clear message is that the ostensibly legal, respectable world isn’t all benign, just as the illegal world isn’t unmitigated evil. The smooth-talking Dr. Handa is the perfect personification of Bangaali’s warning: “In gentry wale logon se bach ke rahiyo, yeh bolte English hain, karte desi.” Amid the careless blacks and whites with which so many urban commentators paint large swathes of our cities, Oye Lucky provides a caressing, careful shade of gray.

An edited version of this was published in the Indian Express, Dec 6, 2008.