A Dormant Volcano

My Mirror column:

Mrinal Sen's Chorus, 25 years after it was made, is a chilling reminder of how long India has spent making strides in the fake solutions department -- while letting the real problems fester.

Utpal Dutt in a still from Chorus 

Between 1970 and 1973, the late Mrinal Sen made three explicitly political films that together came to be known as the Calcutta Trilogy. Speaking to his biographer Dipankar Mukhopadhyay, Sen later said, “After Bhuvan Shome I found the smell of gunpowder in Calcutta's air something I could neither dismiss nor avoid.” Interview, Calcutta 71 and Padatik were almost documentary in their realism, with the Naxal-riven Calcutta of the 1970s brought to the screen with real footage of bomb blasts, firings and demonstrations.

Chorus, too, was concerned with the state of the nation, but it took a different aesthetic tack. Right from the opening scene, when Robi Ghosh appeared seated on a high white throne amid a circle of white-clad sages, it was clear that Sen had made a conscious departure from his previous work. Then Ghosh, already a recognisable comedian, broke into a kirtan, a Vaishnava-style devotional song, its deceptively genial rhythms carrying a chillingly sardonic message. “Once upon a time a king sat in his court and said to his wise men, show me a land where there is no want. Replied the pandits promptly, if there were no want, then there would be no God.” The song ends with the darkest line, “Abhaab rochen jini, tini shoktimaan [He who creates want, is the powerful one]”.

From this profound and cynical vision of religion and religiosity, we descend to another fictional milieu – a grand palace with a revolving surveillance camera atop it, within which a suited-booted man is handling two telephones in order to keep the crowd at the gates under control. As happens often in the Calcutta Trilogy films, words flash upon the screen. “SITUATIONS VACANT. USE PRESCRIBED FORMS TO APPLY. FORMS RS. 2”. 

Back inside the building, we hear the cigarette-holding executive in a tie and shirtsleeves calmly order large numbers of extra forms to be printed, “Accha, chakri dite na paren, form to dite paren [Accha, you may not have jobs to give, but you can give forms]... And we're earning money from them anyway.” Cut to Utpal Dutt, playing a senior bureaucrat in a Mrinal Sen film for the second time after Bhuvan Shome, though the tenor of the role could not be more different. He seems urbane and benevolent, even reasonable, until he is informed that the crowd is getting restive. Then the camera captures his shrieking transformation in ruthless close-up: “What is security doing? Control!” We hear the sound of marching boots in the distance, an effect that recurs through the film as a symbol of state repression.

Then we see a serpentine queue, in a white expanse outside what looks a lot like the Reserve Bank of India building, with a disembodied voice on the megaphone announcing that the counter will only open at the allocated time of 10am. A wave of disappointment runs through the queue. The murmurs are followed by a sarcastic commenter singling out an oldish gentleman for having lined up. The jostling spirals out of control. Grenades are thrown. The old man falls, his glasses crashing to the floor. The word “Attention” repeats on the megaphone, sounding more and more like “Tension”.

A journalist has appeared to capture the chaos, clicking away, even climbing up and down for better angles. What Sen produces here is an early cinematic indictment of the news media. The journalist witnesses the scene, never intervening. When a man in the queue asks if all law and order has been abandoned in the country, he replies casually: “There's a war on. How can there be law and order? This isn't a game of cricket, is it?”

He does record three different characters at the scene – the old man, a young rural man, and a young college-going woman -- whom the film then follows into the arenas of their individual lives, adapting the documentary form interestingly. The film has other threads running in parallel, all a little surreal. In one, a crafty village pradhan called Chhana Mondol manages to hide his corruption and his rice-smuggling from the powers-that-be, and tells his beholden job-seeking nephew to literally go underground. In another, a millworker called Mukherjee becomes a traitor to his union, drunkenly declaring that it is his administration now.

Meanwhile, having received 30,000 applications for 100 vacancies, the bureaucrats holed up in their fortress start to imagine a countrywide conspiracy to overthrow them. Utpal Dutt's character calls in the police, who randomly start to harass 150 of the job applicants. “We are seated on a volcano. We must do something to survive. But we need some kind of excuse, a provocation.” Dutt yells. “Why the hell don't they provoke us?”

The inspirations for Chorus were many, including an actual queue of over a thousand people Sen witnessed in Dalhousie Square in Calcutta. Sen's fantasy of a tyrannical state disconnected from a jobless people left even his regular audiences baffled, though it won several National Awards and prizes at Moscow and Berlin. In a truly remarkable instance of life imitating art, the Emergency was declared less than a year after Chorus released.

Sen was prescient. But nothing ended with the Emergency. Twenty-five years later, our queues of job seekers remain as desperate. Only the megaphones have grown louder.  

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Feb 2019

The Art of the State

My Mirror column:

What two films might tell us about Maoists, violence and how different the state looks depending on which end of the stick you’ve got. (Part 1 of a two-part column.)

In May this year, at the Habitat Film Festival in Delhi, I saw a Malayalam film called When the Woods Bloom, directed by Bijukumar Damodaran, also called Dr Biju. Having now watched Amit Masurkar’s Newton, I am struck by the extent to which two such different filmmakers, with such widely disparate sensibilities and backgrounds, chose the same motifs to approach their chosen subject: what life is like in those parts of India where Maoists have gained some leverage in their ongoing battles against the state.
What are these motifs? For starters: the jungle, the school, the gun. The action in both films takes place almost entirely inside a forest: in Newton, the location is Chhattisgarh, in When the Woods Bloom, it is Kerala. In both, an armed posse of policemen arrives at a ‘remote’ jungle outpost where the only sign of human habitation is a school building. The site where the state once marked its presence under the benign sign of education now becomes the location where it stakes its monopoly on power. And power, as Mao Zedong famously said, flows from the barrel of a gun.

But let us begin at the beginning. It seems remarkable to me that both Biju and Masurkar begin their narratives with an incident of anonymous violence. When the Woods Bloom opens with an unidentified group of people overpowering a guard at his post. Newton begins with a candidate called Mangal Netam giving a campaign speech whose vision of adivasi children with “a laptop in their right hand, a mobile phone in their left” inspires wry laughter even among the mixed urban film festival audience I recently watched the film with. Soon after, though, the politician is shot by unidentified assailants, and our disbelief acquires a jagged edge. Our cynicism from the sidelines is now asked to choose a side.


It is in contrast to these anonymous guerrilla warriors that both films first present their picture of an armed, uniformed constabulary. In Dr Biju’s film, we see a busload of policemen on a long journey to their new posting: one watches something on his mobile phone, another falls off to sleep. They are ordinary young men with ordinary desires – and this humanising is crucial when one of them (Indrajith Sukumaran) emerges as our protagonist. Masurkar and his screenwriter Mayank Tewari, too, have an ordinary young man as the pivot of their film — but Newton Kumar is not in uniform and he does not have a gun. He represents the Indian state not by laying claim to its monopoly on violence, but by helping to enable that great participatory ritual by which that state is ideally brought into being: a free, fair election.

But of course, in these less-than-ideal circumstances, the conduct of this basic democratic process threatens constantly to turn undemocratic. For the Maoists, the election is as much a symbol of the Indian state as the army or the police. What the film demonstrates is how violence and suspicion on either side produces a tragic vicious cycle, because Newton and his scanty Election Commission team — including the marvellous Raghuvir Yadav as the long-serving Loknath ji, and Anjali Patil as Malko, the local adivasi BDO — can only carry out their ostensibly peaceable mission under the heavily armed auspices of the Central Reserve Police Force. In one of the film’s quotable lines, “Jhande aur dande se hi toh desh banta hai.”


Embodying the state in that militarised avatar is Pankaj Tripathi’s Aatma Singh, in a performance that matches Rajkummar Rao’s superb turn as Newton, move for move. The experienced cop produces a calibrated mix of menace and machismo that is designed to defeat the rookie officer’s seemingly unstoppable zeal. But every rhetorical move Aatma Singh makes is met by Newton with a counter-dose of literalness. So when Aatma says: “Main likh ke deta hoon, koi nahi aayega vote dene [I can write it down for you, no one will come to vote]”, Newton’s response is to take him at his word, holding out a pen and saying, “Sure, write it down.” Later, when Aatma tries to prevent Malko from accompanying them, Newton’s response is once again to keep repeating his rulebook position — “She is a member of the team, she will come with us”.


In When the Woods Bloom, the confrontation between the cop and the suspected Maoist (Rima Kallingal) is based on a set of binaries — state-nonstate, man-woman, civilisation-wilderness, ‘legitimate’ versus ‘illegitimate’ violence – that Biju wishes to turn on its head. Watching that reversal can be powerful. But Newton seems to me to have an edge over Dr Biju’s film because it refuses to deal in binaries at all.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 12 Nov 2017.

The second part of this piece is here.

Film Review: Chakravyuh

My review of Prakash Jha's new film, for Firstpost. 

Prakash Jha’s filmmaking career, right from the village-level caste politics of Damul (Bonded Until Death, 1984) to the caste reservation-based drama Aarakshan (2011), has been driven by his interest in Indian politics. His most recent film is no different.

With Chakravyuh, however, Jha moves away from his two long-term preoccupations – the politics of post-1970s Bihar and the changing role of caste in Indian socio-political life – to a different space, both in geographical and social terms.

Set in the tribal-dominated interior regions of Madhya Pradesh where Maoist insurgents are waging a guerrilla war against the forces of the Indian state, Chakravyuh is Jha’s effort to place a rather complex contemporary problem before Hindi film viewers.

Jha and his long-time screenplay writer Anjum Rajabali have chosen a classic way in which to do this: by creating characters who represent and personify the different viewpoints. So there is Arjun Rampal as a fiery and honest young police officer called Adil Khan, who upsets his also-police-officer wife Riya (Esha Gupta) by volunteering for a posting to a hardcore Naxal area which he is determined to “clean up”.

When the film opens, Khan has just successfully arrested an old Naxal ideologue called Govind Suryavanshi (Om Puri). But his biggest challenge is a Naxal leader called Rajan (Manoj Bajpayee), under whose leadership the Naxals have managed to capture significant areas of forest. Raja has two lieutenants, of whom one is female: a woman named Juhi (Anjali Patil, seen earlier this year in Delhi in a Day).

Surrounding this central core of characters is a raft of politicians and bureaucrats and businessmen – including Kabir Bedi as a bearded NRI industrialist called Mahanta who is clearly meant to be a stand-in for Vedanta.

The acting is decent on the whole (barring Esha Gupta’s impossibly fake urbanity), but none of these characters come wholly to life. As with so many “issue-based” films, they end up being mere pegs to hang an ideology on. They aren’t exactly caricatures, but their absolute consistency makes them flat. Their political positions are so clearly laid out – and they seem so utterly inflexible – that they come across as types than fully fleshed-out human beings.

Where the narrative does show some spark is in putting at its core not a relationship of enmity – the almost personal confrontation between Adil Khan and Rajan, for instance – but a friendship. The friendship in question is admittedly a fraught one: between Adil and his closest college buddy, Kabir (Abhay Deol) who left the police academy in disgrace, and has made no contact with his old friend in the intervening years.

But the complicated push and pull of a friendship, as anyone who has ever watched Namak Haram knows, makes for a far more engaging ground on which to stage a battle than the all-out war that is waged between enemies.

As in Namak Haram, where Rajesh Khanna infiltrated a trade union to help out his friend the industrialist (Amitabh Bachchan), Abhay Deol’s Kabir infiltrates the Naxal camp to help his friend Adil the police officer. Deol has the most interesting role in the film, and he more or less does justice to it. The filmmakers seem to deliberately keep his character a blank slate: seven years ago, we’re told, he was a close friend of Adil’s, but all we know about the present-day Kabir is what he tells us himself. And he doesn’t tell us much – not even his last name.

All we have by way of back-story is the event that led to his dismissal from the police academy, which gives us a character whose primary identifying traits are an inchoate sense of rebellion against injustice and a refusal to kowtow to authority. These, as should be apparent even without spoilers, fit exactly into the role Kabir will perform in this film.

In other words, there are no surprises, even here. But then perhaps Jha’s aim is neither nuance nor surprise. What he wants to do is to set up the broad contours of the debate: to show us why vast numbers of poor people in this country have felt it necessary to take up a violent path that leads to a stand-off with the state.

Jha’s films have always displayed a keen grasp of how the worlds of politics, business and crime intersect in the Hindi heartland, and Chakravyuh does a very competent job of showing us how this sort of unholy alliance, in the country’s most mineral-rich and least ‘developed’ regions, is leading inexorably to popular alienation and increasingly, bloodshed.

Jha’s usually unerring ear for dialogue – especially for the cadences of Bihari speech, with the occasional English word thrown in – falters here, with Esha Gupta given such sterling lines as “Jesus Christ, ek monster create kar diya tumne” and Manoj Bajpai and Anjali Patil’s excessive accents distracting unhelpfully from their performances.

The Sameera Reddy item song – Kunda Khol – feels tagged on and therefore terribly tacky, but Jha’s talent for dramatically-shot set pieces is very much in place. From picturesque marches through the jungle to aerial machine gun attacks conducted from a helicopter, Chakravyuh is full of nicely plotted, superbly-realized big screen action.

Considering the enormously bumpy terrain it takes on, Chakravyuh is a surprisingly smooth ride. Perhaps it is sometimes too smooth – but at least its simplifications are never cringe-worthy.

Published in Firstpost.