The Remembered Village

My Mirror column (7 June 2020):

A young filmmaker's atmospheric Maithili debut refracts the experience of his family's village home through layers of distance and memory.

Using an old house as the central motif for a film is not a new idea. Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s fine directorial debut Musafir (1957), an under-watched film that I discussed in an earlier edition of this column, made a house and its neighbourhood the common factor in a narrative about three separate sets of tenants. The French director Alain Resnais, better known for spare, intense films like Hiroshima Mon Amour and Night and Fog, used an outlandish 18th century chateau in the Ardennes Forest as the unifying setting for his era-jumping tripartite 1983 film Life Is a Bed of Roses (currently streaming online). More recently, the Ukrainian director Dar Gai’s dubiously named Teen Aur Aadha (2017) built a composite narrative around a 50-year-old Mumbai building in which there had been a school and a brothel as well as families. People leave, houses remain. Some memories don't need a house to dwell in: it can be a car. The Yellow Rolls-Royce, a somewhat overblown, star-studded 1965 film with everyone from Rex Harrison to Shirley MacLaine, had three very different lives linked only by the eponymous car. It was based on a play by Terence Rattigan, who apparently took the idea from a post-war German film called In Those Days, directed by Helmut Käutner, which used the seven lives of a car built in 1933 and dismantled in 1947 to comment on the Nazi era.

But Gamak Ghar doesn’t really remind you of other films. It reminds you of other houses.

Streaming on an online platform for another day, 23-year-old Achal Mishra's debut feature is a quiet love letter to his grandparents' village home in Madhopur, Bihar. Mishra uses a three-part structure, beginning in 1998 and ending in 2019, and the house does allow us to see its owners grow older, change, move away and return. But Mishra is not interested in plot.

His set is the actual house that he visited twice a year as a child, but whose role in even the family’s ceremonial life began to decrease as the grandparents died. His characters – if you can call them that – are fictionalised versions of his own extended family, played by a mixed cast garnered from amongst existing local actors and acquaintances who had not acted before. And his narrative interest is a socio-economic transition that is specific to his own upper caste Maithil Brahmin family as well as familiar to many, many migrant families across India whose connections with the village have grown irreversibly distant, especially in the decades since liberalisation.

What makes Gamak Ghar unusual is its single-minded interest in capturing a certain experience of time and space. Mishra has, in a recent interview, mentioned the writer Amit Chaudhuri as one of his sources of inspiration, and one can see why. From its very first frames, the film refuses even a glimmer of drama for stillness, displaying a conviction that art can lie in the observation and recreation of sensory detail. So we see the piles of Malda mangoes from the family orchard, and the curds set in an array of flat earthen pots. We observe how people look through a mosquito net, we watch the smoke rising from an agarbatti. We remember rooms lit at night by a hurricane lamp, and recall how tuneless the singing can often be during a religious ritual.

There is almost nothing flashily cinematic here, though an occasional filmic reference gets made – most obviously when a conversation about one of the brothers moving to Delhi is followed by a stunningly beautiful shot of a train viewed through a field of snowy-white kaash flowers, a la Pather Panchali, evoking and portending Apu’s move to the city later in Ray’s Apu Trilogy. There are rapt faces bathed in the glow of a TV screen, and the lone female cousin who, when asked “Sunny Deol or Salman Khan”, says a categorical no to watching a Salman film on the VCR.

And as the film traverses the last two decades, the nods to change are everywhere. We watch as the large wooden bed on which the men played cards in the balcony is replaced by wooden chairs over the years, and then dull brown plastic ones; we note the gradual shift from community feasts laid out on the floor – where everyone knew exactly how much someone was eating and could make fun of them for their appetite – to meals served on chairs apart from each other, and finally, meals eaten by each brother alone in a bedroom.

Evocative and nostalgia-inducing as these sights and sounds are, I was glad that Mishra seems simultaneously able to suggest that this world we have lost – or are in the process of losing – was held up by all sorts of hierarchies and rigidities that we took for granted. In the rosy remembered time of family togetherness in the 1990s, for instance, the women cooked vast meals and looked after the children, while the men played cards and demanded to know whether the food was ready. The daughter-in-law who covers her head with a ghoonghat all through the first segment has become a confident Delhi woman a decade later, leaving her hair open.

But she still joins her sisters-in-law to chop vegetables for the family dinner. The links with the past aren't quite broken yet. At the end, the roof is being dismantled -- but it is part of a house renovation, to host a new child's initiation ceremony. Gamak Ghar isn’t meant to be a sociological or anthropological record, and yet it is that thing we rarely produce in India: a self-conscious cinematic document.

Published in Mumbai Mirror,  7 Jun 2020. 

Homing in, zooming out

My Mirror column:

Among 1957’s biggest Hindi hits was Musafir, a triptych of tales about a house and its succession of tenants, which inaugurated the career of Hrishikesh Mukherjee.

"Laakh laakh makaan, aur inmein rehne wale karoron insaan. In karoron insaanon ke sukh-dukh, hansne-rone ke maun-darshak -- yehi makaan (Lakh of houses, and crores of people who live in them. And the mute witnesses to these people's joys and sorrows –these very houses),” runs Balraj Sahni's voiceover as the camera pans across a cityscape, finally settling on one such makaan as the setting of this particular story.

What I just described is the opening sequence of Musafir, a triptych of tales about three different families, connected only by the house they rent in succession. The third film in my series of columns on the top Hindi hits of 1957, Musafir was the tenth highest box office grosser that year, and has several points of interest about it. For one, it was the directorial debut of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, who had come to Bombay from Calcutta with Bimal Roy in 1950. Mukherjee had worked as Roy’s editor at New Theatres for five years, and in making the journey to Bombay at 27, he joined a group of young Bengali men with various kinds of cinematic ambitions. These included the actor Nazir Husain, writer Nabendu Ghosh, assistant director Asit Sen and dialogue writer Pal Mahendra. The second bit of trivia that makes Musafir interesting also relates to a young Bengali man — Mukherjee shares writing credits on the film’s script with the filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak.

From where we stand now, the raw, powerful Ghatak of Subarnarekha or Titash Ekti Nadir Naam and the warm, gentle Mukherjee of situational comedies like Chupke Chupke may seem to represent two unbridgeable poles of the Indian cinematic universe. But in the late 50s the world was young, the lines between the artistic worlds of Calcutta and Bombay, and those of 'art' and 'entertainment' were still permeable. Thus the man who would become one of the cinematic trinity of grandly ambitious Bangla high art wasn't so distant from the man who would come to stand for the mild-mannered, middle class Hindi comedy of manners. The year after Musafir, 1958, two films released – one was Bimal Roy's marvellous Nehruvian-era ghost story, Madhumati, which was written by Ghatak, and the other was Ghatak's own directorial venture, Ajantrik, in which it is another inanimate object – a car rather than a house – that is at the centre of the human stories Ghatak chooses to tell.

Musafir itself combines Mukherjee's lightness of touch and prodigious talent for characterisation with Ghatak's flair for the melancholy and for the recurring motif. Most of the film unfolds, as was Mukherjee's wont, within the four walls of a house. But Musafir also contains the sense of a streetscape – we view the house first from the chai shop window, and the chatty tea-delivery-boy (Mohan Choti) appears in each narrative. In fact it is he, along with the genially repetitive landlord (David), the gossipy Munni ki Ma, and the friendly neighbourhood drunk Pagla Babu, who stitches the film's three parts into a sociological urban whole.

Like Subodh Mukherjee's Paying Guest, which I wrote about two weeks ago, Mukherjee's first film deals with what was then a relatively new urban world, increasingly unmoored from feudal certitudes. The tenants who are anonymous until they aren't, family units whose legitimacy cannot be vouched for by foreknowledge, village elders or caste networks; nosy neighbours (like Munni ki Ma) who make it their business to establish the traditional 'rightness' of those who have moved into the area. In the first segment here, for instance, Suchitra Sen plays a new bride who yearns to be accepted by her in-laws despite her runaway marriage. The possibility of a nuclear family unit is one she rejects instinctively as inferior to the real thing.

Mukherjee's interest in these new populations, free-floating in space but not quite ready to give up on their connections to community, family, tradition – remained a persistent theme in his films in later years. Tenants, landlords and the negotiation of neighbourhood rules are central to his comedy Biwi Aur Makaaan (1965), and also to the Jaya Bhaduri-Amitabh Bachchan starrer Mili (1975). Both Mili and Bawarchi also begin by visually laying out the neighbourhood, and then using a voiceover to zero in on the one home whose internal dynamics we are to have the privilege of witnessing.

In Musafir, these dynamics seem to involve older men who, despite their 'good' intentions towards their families, are such sticklers for discipline/rules/

rationality/tradition that they end up tyrannising wives and daughters, as well as any non-conformist younger men – the young man who marries without parental permission in the first story; the jobless Bhanu (a very youthful Kishore Kumar) in the middle segment, who can't stop playing the fool; or the heart-stopping Dilip Kumar as the violin-playing tragic alcoholic of the last segment (clearly inspired by O'Henry's 'The Last Leaf'). The lawyer brother of Usha Kiron, or Nazir Hussain as the irascible father with money trouble, and Suchitra Sen's father-in-law in the first segment are all men determined to to be merciless, grown-up patriarchs who must be humoured like children – and one can see in their caricaturish excess the roots of Utpal Dutt's character in Golmaal, or Om Prakash's Jijaji in Chupke Chupke. 

Musafir has some rough edges, and its tonal shifts from tragic to comic are not always successful. But it is an interesting film, if only for the many ways in which it foreshadows Mukherjee's future filmmaking career.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Aug 2017