Glossing over it

My Mirror column:

The real-life story of Anand Kumar and his free coaching is incredible, but Super 30 feels like a missed opportunity.

A still from Super 30, directed by Vikas Bahl. 

“Kya baat hai bhai, ki film hamaari aa rahi hai toh sab log lag jaate hain? [What's going on, bhai: is everyone piling on to me because a film is coming out?]” asked the renowned engineering coach Anand Kumar during a video interview to BBC's Hindi correspondent Saroj Singh in January this year. The biopic he was referring to released last week, but it answers few questions -- not even Kumar's own.

Directed by Vikas Bahl (known for Queen and for the serious #MeToo charges against him that led to the dissolution of Phantom Pictures in 2018), Super 30 stars Hrithik Roshan as the Patna-based Kumar, who shot to national fame a decade ago, when all thirty students in his Super 30 class 'cracked' what might be the world's most competitive entrance examination: the Joint Entrance Examination to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT JEE).

Every year since 2002, Anand Kumar has selected thirty students from underprivileged families for his free coaching, also providing them free lodging in Patna and home-cooked meals. How Kumar arrived at this vocation is a fascinating tale. In the early 1990s, Kumar's handwritten submission to a UK journal of mathematics was followed by an offer of admission from the University of Cambridge. The backward caste son of a poor postal clerk, Kumar couldn't arrange the money. Then his father died, and he spent some years in penury before finally hitting his stride as a teacher. The idea of using his abilities to improve the lives of talented poor students like himself came later, and their continued success has been his, too.

It isn't unusual for Bollywood (or for that matter, any commercial film industry) to pick a big star to play a real-life hero. Many recent biopics have done it: Farhan Akhtar as Milkha Singh, Priyanka Chopra as the boxer Mary Kom. Others have cast a known face who's also a good actor: Nawazuddin Siddiqui has appeared as Urdu writer Manto, Shiv Sena politician Bal Thackeray and everyman road-building hero Dashrath Manjhi, while Irrfan Khan was superb as the runner-turned-dacoit Paan Singh Tomar.

But there seems to me something about Super 30 that outdoes these previous instances. I do not refer only to the blackface that Bollywood unabashedly carries out in the name of make-up, literally covering the taller, more muscular Roshan's fair skin and light eyes with an artistic tan. I mean also the way that Bahl's film covers over the facts of Anand Kumar's life.

What's strange is that the facts of Kumar's life are already full of drama. Interviewing Anand Kumar for his 2013 book A Matter of Rats: A short biography of Patna, the US-based writer Amitava Kumar wrote, “When Anand describes the events... you watch his tale of woe unfold as if in a black-and-white Hindi film possibly made by Raj Kapoor.” The fact that his father's sudden death took place by choking, that the streets around their house were flooded by rain, that he had to put his unconscious father on an abandoned vegetable cart to wheel him to a clinic – all this is in Amitava Kumar's book. But in the film, there is no choking, no flooding, and Anand has a bicycle. The film depicts the papad-selling business that his mother and he supported themselves on, but there is no mention of the fact that the postal department sent Anand 50,000 rupees after his father's death, or the fact that he needed to stay on in Patna to support a family that included a grandmother and a disabled uncle. It almost feels like the facts are too extreme for the film.

Instead, Bahl's version wishes to distract us with not one but all of the following: a youthful love interest who marries another man (Mrunal Thakur, from Love Sonia); a hard-drinking journalist who makes confusing interventions; an overly villainous coaching competitor (Aditya Shrivastava); a buffoonish politician (Pankaj Tripathi). Worse, it gives us a whole first batch of Super 30 students, some with 30-second backstories that could be potentially devastating – the manual scavenger, the construction labourer, the girl with the alcoholic father -- but not one gets a real personality. The camera is so focused on Roshan's as-ever exaggerated performance that the kids don't have a chance.

Attempts have, in fact, been made on Anand Kumar's life. But the film makes these about overly chatty hitmen, and the last episode – where his coaching competitor plans to blow up an entire hospital in order to wipe out the Super 30 – has the students turning Kumar's science formulae into a bizarre combination of religion and magic. A Vedic chant about vidya is the aural backdrop to an elaborate game of smoke and mirrors to outwit armed goons. Meanwhile the villain warns: “It should look like a Naxal attack, no-one should suspect that it is meant to kill Anand Kumar, otherwise he'll become a martyr.”

The BBC interview is filled with allegations it thinks are controversial. How many students does Kumar take on in his (paid) Ramanujan classes? What fees do those students pay? Why does he not reveal the names of each year's Super 30 students until the IIT JEE list is out? Kumar answers them all, though he sounds victimised.

The film, meanwhile, refuses to even engage with the last decade of Kumar's life, involving the complexities that come after the Happy Ever After. We dearly want our heroes to be saints, and we are happy to erase their real selves to achieve that.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 July 2019.

How the other half sees

My Mirror column:

Women filmmakers were a quiet revelation at this year’s International Film Festival of India, offering an alternative view of the world: the second of a two-part column.

Ioana Uricaru’s taut debut feature Lemonade stars Malina Manovici as Mara, a Romanian woman trying to move to the USA with her son

The work of women directors, I wrote last Sunday, seemed particularly strong at this year’s IFFI. The Bollywood based programming at the festival showed some cognizance of this, too, featuring a conversation with three women who have directed Hindi films: Meghna Gulzar (Talvar, Raazi), Gauri Shinde (English Vinglish, Dear Zindagi), and Leena Yadav (Parched, Shabd). The festival also screened Raazi, among the most fascinating films to come out of Mumbai in 2018. Reema Kagti’s hockey historical Gold was part of the open-air screenings of recent sports films in Hindi, while the 1993 classic Rudaali was shown as a tribute to its director Kalpana Lajmi, who passed away this year.


But it was women filmmakers from the rest of the world that I decided to focus on. Having begun the festival with Nico, 1988, Susanna Nicchiarelli's acute reimagining of the last two years of the life of the late singer Christa Päffgen, it seemed appropriate to catch the festival’s other biopic of a female performer: Emily Atef’s Three Days in Quiberon. Although also set in the 1980s, and similarly structured, focusing on three days in the life of German actress Romy Schneider a year before her death, Atef’s approach could not be more different from Nicchiarelli’s.

Three Days is a polite, measured affair that uses black and white cinematography to achieve an even greater distance from its characters. And yet the predicaments of both women being portrayed are strikingly similar, almost to the point of cliché. Both shot to fame early, with their looks and private lives garnering more media attention than their talent, as happens so tragically often with young women. We see them both in later life, chafing against the milieu that has made them who they are – but also trapped them in a kind of freeze-frame. If Päffgen is frustrated with journalists ignoring her current music, refusing to see her beyond the three songs she sang with the Velvet Underground, Schneider is distressed at still being seen, at 42, through the lens of a 15-year-old character she once played.


Both women feel imprisoned by their beauty. But while Päffgen has finally escaped that particular cage with the almost deliberate use of heroin, Schneider’s drinking problem (throughout the film, she is at a detox retreat whose no-alcohol rule she breaks hungrily) has not yet led to the loss of her looks – a fact that may help explain why Atef shows us a woman desperately unhappy, trapped forever in the flattering, invasive gaze of the camera.


The most bizarre thing in common between Päffgen and Schneider is the French actor Alain Delon, who had affairs with both women, and was the father of Päffgen's son Ari. Which brings us to a more significant fact: both women were single mothers, torn between their unstable, overly public lives and their dreams of mundane, stable domesticity.


In fact, the depiction of women bringing up children by themselves is what unites several of the female-helmed films at IFFI. Men are absent from these domestic worlds for reasons as disparate as the films. In Beatriz Seigner’s affecting Los Silencios (which I wrote about last week and which has since won a Special Mention award at IFFI), the protagonist Amparo has lost her husband to the Colombian civil war. We watch her having to stretch herself across the gender divide: the only job she finds is as a loader of fish at the harbour; at home she must offer her little son enough company to prevent him from seeking out unsuitable male role models.


Another kind of migration lies at the core of Ioana Uricaru’s excellent and harrowing debut, Lemonade, about a Romanian single mother trying to stay in the United States on the strength of a nursing degree and marriage to an American man who was until recently her patient. Here the demands placed on the woman are not about transcending her gender, but reducing her to it. No matter what she does, her personhood is irrevocably tied to her sex.


From Iceland comes another fine film featuring border-crossing and single mothers: Ísold Uggadóttir's And Breathe Normally. Uggadóttir makes the child the bridge between mutually suspicious adults – and then the border guard from Iceland and the illegal immigrant from Guinea Bissau turn out to have more in common than they realise.

In other films, the father is the one who travels while the mother is left behind with the kids. Thrown back upon their limited resources, these mother-child relationships are less well-adjusted. In Shireen Seno’s dreamily evocative if self-indulgent memorialising of a solitary 80s childhood, Nervous Translation, the absent Filipino husband works in the Gulf, and the wife guards her privacy fiercely enough to become annoyed when the child listens to her father’s recorded cassette-letters. Camilla Strøm Henriksen's somewhat overwrought Norwegian debut Phoenix also maps a fraught mother-daughter relationship, drawing an affecting performance from Ylva Thedin Bjørkaas as a teenager who wrongly imagines her absent musician father will rescue her. “I travel the world and I play music,” he tells his girlfriend. “Steady relationships aren’t my thing,” he tells his daughter.


“Have you never had a man who’s said, ‘Quit the show business’?” the surprised journalist asks Romy Schneider in Three Days in Quiberon. “No, I’ve never had a man like that,” she responds. Perhaps the lesson from these films is a different one: the women waiting for men to return, resolve, or rescue them will wait forever.
We must make our own worlds.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 Dec 2018.

Screening the World

A personal report from this year’s edition of IFFI: the first of a two-part column.

A still from Beatriz Seigner's haunting new film Los Silencios (The Silences)

I write this column from the middle of the International Film Festival of India, the 49th edition of which is currently on in Panjim, Goa. The festival got under way with its usual quota of frustrating glitches — the shiny new interface for online ticket booking worked smoothly for about a day before giving many users (including myself) trouble; the stated categories of manual ticket booking counters were defied in practice (e.g. numbers of non-media people, even students in film school T-shirts, insisted on standing in the media ticketing queue); the redemption of online bookings on Day One was limited to a single counter, effectively punishing those who’d actually made bookings online. That has thankfully changed, and the young people working the ticketing machinery at Inox, Maquinez Palace and Kala Academy are getting slightly better at it with each day, thus making the queues move faster.

The festival’s programming this year appears to have surrendered more space than usual to Bombay filmdom. Two of these sessions have been dominated by filmi families: producer Boney Kapoor appeared with his and Sridevi’s daughter Jahnvi, who made her debut with Dhadak this year, while David Dhawan will have a session today called Dha-One with his son Varun Dhawan. Singer Arijit Singh, lyricist Prasoon Joshi and actor Kriti Sanon have also had sessions at the festival. These sessions are apparently intended to lure in Bollywood fans who have little interest in the world cinema or regional Indian fare that the IFFI is meant to showcase. But it’s not clear to me what the festival is doing to bridge the gap between Kriti Sanon watchers and arthouse cinema watchers. Merely bunging both categories of people into the same venue only rubs everyone the wrong way. And it’s not about dissing popular cinema: I’m a Hindi film buff, but I don’t see why one particular industry gets so much play on what ought to be an equal platform for all our many cinemas.

For any serious film festival goer, though, the main business of the day remains the choosing of the next day’s films. Many are here to catch Indian Panorama screenings at Inox Screen 2. Others might be tempted by a chance to see the late Vinod Khanna on the big screen (A well-chosen mix of his films features Achanak, Dayavan and Lekin, though Mere Apne would have been even nicer), or watch a (very small and predictable) selection of Ingmar Bergman classics, timed to commemorate his birth centenary this year.


The greater proportion of screenings, happily, remains recent international cinema. Beyond the fiction features in the International Competition section, there is the non-competitive World Panorama section, also consisting of international films made in the last year. The Festival Kaleidoscope section presents films made this year by the world’s most eminent filmmakers — this is where you go to catch Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Palme d’Or-winning moving through occasionally mawkish tale of fictive kinship, Shoplifters, or agent provocateur Gaspar Noe’s frenetic dance-and-drugs cocktail Climax, or the Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest leisurely three-hour outing, The Wild Pear Tree.


For me personally, this year’s festival has been a revelation for the number of female directors whose superb work I’ve encountered for the first time. The very first film I saw was Susanna Nicchiarelli’s Nico, 1988, a portrait of German singer Christa Päffgen, who shot to fame for singing briefly with the Velvet Underground and later had a son with legendary French actor Alain Delon. Nicchiarelli’s film is equal parts melancholy and fierce, like its heroine. I knew nothing about Nico or her music, but Danish actress Trine Dyrholm makes Paffgen’s dark, heroin-fuelled energy a thing of beauty — even as Nico revels in having aged beyond the prime age of physical attractiveness: “I was never happy when I was beautiful.” It is a bravura performance: what we get is a woman who seems gloriously intense but also casually deranged, seemingly unseeing of the risks people around her take to enable her life. Her preoccupation with herself, the bubble in which she seems to live, is only really punctured by her tenderness for her teenaged son.

Another of my favourites so far has been Beatriz Seigner’s Los Silencios (The Silences). The film opens with a small boat edging slowly towards a jetty, in an inky darkness where water merges into sky. A mother and her two children — a girl and a boy — embark. As Seigner’s film proceeds, we learn that they are “migrants requesting refugee status”, a family fleeing the violence of the Colombian civil war and looking to settle down on this Brazilian island rather too fittingly called La Isla de la Fantasia.


The island is both surrounded by water and built upon it, and the atmosphere is hauntingly evocative: the draughty wooden houses standing on stilts, the women looking out of the square windows in their slatted wooden walls, the row boats gliding silently between them, the rain outside and the hearth fires within. Seigner, whose previous film Bollywood Dream tracked the Hindi film ambitions of three young Brazilian women, has produced here a slow, immersive work of beauty. The simplicity of its approach to its political context did not seem to me to take away from the film in any way. The warmth and attentiveness with which the camera treats both place and people — letting us absorb not just the faces of the central characters but also people who appear briefly, like the boy with one leg —seemed to me emblematic of a politics we need much more of: a humanising politics which sees each missing person as a person.

(To be continued next week)

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Nov 2018.

A half-told tale

My Mirror column:

Nandita Das’s ambitious biopic of Saadat Hasan Manto feels like a showreel of what could have been.

Many Indian film heroes have drunk themselves to death over a lost love. Manto might be the first one to do so over a lost city. Bombay was not the place of his birth, but Manto thought of the city as both muse and workplace. Its streets spawned many of his strongest stories and its film industry gave him both livelihood and community.

He was clearly profoundly shaken by Partition, writing several stories about how the new boundaries around nations and religions were also carving up human beings. Still, given Manto’s strong attachment to Bombay, his departure remains somewhat inexplicable — and it appears as such in Nandita Das’s biographical film about him.

Das’s ambitious tapestry of a script weaves Manto’s fiction in and out of the life he may have lived. So some of his most well-known Partition stories — ‘Khol Do’, ‘Thanda Gosht’ — are interwoven with moments when the communal divide inserts itself between Manto (Nawazuddin Siddiqui, for once a bit out of his depth) and his best friend, the actor Shyam Chaddha (the sadly wooden Tahir Raj Bhasin). We also hear, at a filmi party, the jibe that Bombay Talkies — the film studio where Manto worked — had “too many Muslims” in its employ.

More interestingly, in a scene set on the eve of Partition, we see Manto witness a conversation in a Bombay shoe shop where his wife Safia is shopping. “Mera toh watan Bhendi Bazaar hai. Main isse chhod kar Grant Road na jaaoon, aur tu mujhe Karachi bhej raha hai?” Manto hasn’t said the words himself, but the idea of the locality as stand-in for the nation has been introduced — allowing us to think of it later, when Manto’s nostalgia and sense of exile moulds itself around a city rather than a country.

In real life, Manto wrote scathingly and prophetically about the directions in which Pakistan’s politics would go. But the film fails to establish why he never felt at home in Pakistan — barring glimpses of his obscenity trial and a single scene based on one of Manto’s ‘Letters to Uncle Sam’ (lit up by Neeraj Kabi’s performance), there is little of his political bite on screen. Instead Das focuses excessively on Manto’s rather performative mourning. Like a dramatic lover trying to forget a past relationship, he refuses to even open letters from Bombay written by friends like Shyam and Ismat Chughtai. When a policeman rifles through his desk and says rudely, “I believe you write many things, where is it all?”, Manto’s retort is to hand him a scrap of paper. “Ismein toh Bambai ka pata likha hai,” says the Lahore cop. “Wahin toh hai sab kucch,” mutters Nawaz’s Manto. A cinematically stereotypical descent into lovesick madness follows, with Nawaz pricking up his ears and saying he hears a melody that Shyam used to sing.

Das’s film succumbs to another familiar filmi motif: muftkhor drinking partners whose appearance foreshadows the hero’s decline. These hangers-on, who serve to insulate the hero from self-realisation in films as disparate as Muhafiz / In Custody (also about a writer in free fall) and Guide, are here concentrated into the single figure of Shaad (Shashank Arora). But even the talented Arora cannot breathe life into this one-note character, whose only brief appears to be to provide Manto company as he drinks more, and more darkly.

Another of the film’s themes — because it was one of Manto’s longstanding fascinations — is the sex worker. The film opens, for instance, with one of his finest stories: ‘Ten Rupees’, in which a young girl is taken out by three older male clients. The scenario has the whiff of doom, but Manto does something unexpected: he preserves Sarita’s marvellous state of innocence till the story’s end, depositing us and our fears at the edge of a precipice. In another fictional segue, we see Tillotama Shome as a sex worker pushed to the brink by her pimp (Paresh Rawal).

The segments enacting Manto’s fictions contain the film’s better performances (Ranveer Shorey, Divya Dutta, Vinod Nagpal). But their near-pulpy high drama throws into relief the dullness of the rest of the film. Das tempts the cultural-historical junkies among us with a period recreation of a mythical Bombay in which Progressive Urdu writers mingled with film folk. But the interactions are flat; the characters —Krishen Chander, Ismat, Himanshu Rai, Ashok Kumar — cardboard cutouts. Only one, Ila Arun as the courtesan-turned-filmmaker Jaddan Bai (Nargis’s mother), has any spark. The only other interactions that achieve any immersiveness are those between Manto and his wife Safia (the excellent Rasika Dugal).

Given that so much of Das’s dialogue is provided to her by her inimitable protagonist, it is a shock when it falls flat. Even Manto’s sharpest barbs — “Agar aap mere afsaanon ko bardaasht nahi kar sakte, toh woh isliye ki zamaana hi na-kaabil-e-bardaasht hai (If you can’t tolerate my stories, it is because the age is an intolerable one)” or “Accha toh tum bhi tarakkipasandon ki tarah is daur mein bhi optimistic rehna chahte ho? (Oh, so you’re like those Progressives who want to stay optimistic even in this era?)” — fail to offer the non-Manto-knowing viewer a bridge between our times and his. Like Toba Tek Singh, Manto remains stuck in a no-man’s-land.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30 Sep 2018.

A Saleable Stardom

My Mirror column yesterday:

A sanitised film on MS Dhoni packages our yearning for heroes into a marketable sense of self-worth.

In 2012, a British magazine called SportsPro ranked Mahendra Singh Dhoni No 16 in their list of the world’s 50 most marketable athletes based on age, home market, charisma, crossover appeal and value for money (boxer Mary Kom at No 38 is the only other Indian in the list). In April 2013, the cover of Business Today magazine portrayed the Indian cricket captain as the Hindu god Vishnu. A blue-skinned Dhoni gazed out at us beatifically, his multiple arms bearing no iconic conch, discus, mace or lotus, but instead a selection of the many brands he helps advertise, from Lays chips to Boost energy drink. “God of Big Deals”, read the headline.

That controversial cover got Dhoni legally embroiled on the charge of 'hurting religious sentiments'. Criminal proceedings in the case were finally quashed by the Supreme Court only in September 2016, a month ago.

All through these years, however, Dhoni has reigned supreme in the realm of endorsements--and not without reason. There is no Indian story more saleable than that of a lower middle class boy becoming an enormously successful sportsman, and apparently achieving this with sheer talent and grit. Dhoni may not have quite started in rags, but he has certainly risen to riches. And Neeraj Pandey's recent film, MS Dhoni: The Untold Story, is clearly keen to ride that wave.

Several arguments have unfolded over whether it is or isn't a biopic -- does it truthfully depict Dhoni's life, goes the question. Those who believe that Pandey whitewashes his subject have cited several erasures: the film's total ignoring of Dhoni's (apparently estranged) elder brother Narendra Singh Dhoni, who has been with the BJP and is now an SP politician in Ranchi; the portrayal of him as someone who has only ever had two romantic entanglements (one girl sadly dies, the second he marries), and the removal of all things unseemly or colourful in the cricketer's public life, including the Vishnu avatar case.

There is no doubt that the film forms part of the cricketer's tightly-controlled crafting of a public self-image. This image is public in the way that all of us who are on social media will recognise – i.e., it deliberately includes those glimpses of the 'private' that we think will add to our appeal, and leaves out anything that might be perceived as unsavoury. In the case of the particular form of myth-making that is Bollywood, certain well-known real-life details are elided to create a more heroic hero and a more romantic romance, eg. the fact that Dhoni and his wife Sakshi actually knew each other from childhood is deleted from the film's telling of their relationship.

What the film is interested in doing is to paint the glorious arc of Dhoni's journey as a potential India story. The time and space are crucial to that narrative: the fact that the film’s star is born in the dim sky of Ranchi, in the ordinarily dysfunctional wasteland of what was then Bihar – and ends up (or rather, is still in orbit) in the extraordinarily glitzy new constellation that is post-T20 cricket. As the cricketer makes the slow move from the local sports shop owner to a gazillion nationwide advertising endorsements, from playing school matches whose existence is conveyed to the town population by a small boy on a bicycle to World Cup matches that receive practically nonstop media coverage, this is a liberalisation story if ever there was one.

The film gives us glimpses of much-needed specificity here: the Bihar cricket association head (Kumud Mishra, superb) making a wryly accurate crack about the reason that no young Biharis are being 'discovered' is that the state's adults care more about politics than cricket, or the terrible state of the Ranchi-Dumdum highway becoming a stumbling block for Dhoni's career. And yet the constituents of his supposedly inspiring ascent -- plush hotel rooms and lion-filled safari vacations -- are dull as ditchwater.

Meanwhile, the spaces of the past, which ought to have been more characterful – such as the railway quarters that Dhoni the ticket-checker shared with three other railway employees in Kharagpur – seem flat, at best sincerely documented. The camera jerks uneasily around the box-like bedroom, the tiny kitchen, the Indian-style toilet, as one imagines Dhoni might do if he were taken there today: not quite sure how to inhabit such a space any more. A large chunk of the film unfolds in railway stations, government offices and small-town government colonies, but the sense of atmosphere seemed sorely missing.

Other than Sushant Singh Rajput's quietly impressive turn as Dhoni, the thing that kept the film watchable for me was Dilip Jha's dialogue, from the faintly-Bengali-accented speech of young Mahi's school coach Banerjee Sir to the nicely-done Bihari inflections of most of Dhoni's friends and family. (I particularly loved the fishseller who resists Mrs. Banerjee's bargaining with a plaintively accurate “Kaise posayega Boudi?”)

This is a disappointing film in several respects, and yet there is no doubt that most Indians who enter the cinema will find themselves deeply moved. As we watch Dhoni's old friends and dogged supporters, teachers, even past rivals take a personal pride in his performance on the world stage, we realise how many people's efforts can go into the making of one. In a country so hungry for heroes, letting us feel that we helped create them is a sure-shot recipe for success.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 9th Oct 2016.

The Long and Winding Road

My Mirror column last Sunday: 

Ketan Mehta's fictionalisation of a truly unusual hero has moments of power and beauty, but it does not stand half as tall as the man's real life. Still, Manjhi The Mountain Man is a compelling parable for our times.

In the year 1960, in a village near Gaya in Bihar, a poor Dalit man from one of the country's most deprived communities - a Musahar - took his hammer and chisel and began to break a path through a mountain. The road he had chosen was not just long and hard; it was so difficult as to seem impossible. People mocked him as a fool and a madman, his family grew first tired and then embittered by his singleminded pursuit. But Dashrath Manjhi, for that was the man's name, stayed the course. After 22 arduous years, he achieved what he had set out to do. He broke through the mountain.

So incredible is Manjhi's story that it would seem ridiculous if it weren't actually true: a man labouring alone, for over two decades, succeeding in reducing the travel time between his village of Gehlore and the closest town of Wazirganj from 75km to 2km. It was this believe-it-or-not quality that drew the attention of Ketan Mehta.

Mehta has made four biopics: Sardar (1993), about Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Mangal Pandey: The Rising(2005), about the Purabiya soldier who is credited with having fired the first shot in what grew into the revolt of 1857, Rang Rasiya (2014), about the enormously popular painter Raja Ravi Varma, and now Manjhi The Mountain Man. Of these, Sardar, based on a script by playwright Vijay Tendulkar and starring such accomplished actors as Paresh Rawal, Benjamin Gilani and Annu Kapoor, was made in the intimate, realist style associated with what is probably Mehta's most acclaimed film, Mirch Masala (1987). With both Mangal Pandey and Rang Rasiya, however, Mehta's preference has been for something on a much grander scale: taking the bare historical outline of a man's life and filling it with as much colour and drama and romance as it can hold.

It is in this larger-than-life mode that he has chosen, now, to tell the tale of Dashrath Manjhi. And as one watches the astounding Nawazuddin Siddiqui pull out every trick in the book to turn what is really a desperately sad tale into a kind of inspiring marathon, one wonders whether a more small-scale approach may not have worked better.

Admittedly, it is not an easy task to have taken on. What seems so remarkable as a two-line tale is also evidence of what must have been an exceptionally lonely life—unglamorous, repetitive, and full of back-breaking solitary labour. How is something like this to be made into a film with adequate drama?

What Mehta and his scriptwriters decide to do is to set Manjhi's narrative against the sweep of post-independence Indian history. There are moments at which this decision seems like a stroke of genius, such as early in the film, when the runaway Manjhi returns to the village after seven years working in the coal mines, to hear that untouchability has been legally abolished. Siddiqui makes completely believable the scene where Manjhi, already maverick enough to actually believe the newspapers, gives the zamindar (Tigmanshu Dhulia) and his henchmen happy hugs, which they accept in baffled silence - until they recognise him as the Musahar boy who had escaped their clutches so long ago.

The brutal reality of caste in the Indian village is something Mehta has approached in at least two different registers in his earlier work: the cheeky fable of Bhavni Bhavai and the soaring battlecry of Mirch Masala. The violence visited upon Dalit women and men in Mountain Man is not so different from that of NFDC films of an earlier era -- but somehow Mehta's attempt to leaven these horrific episodes with song and laughter doesn't quite work. This is a filmmaker straining to make a contemporary real-life hero into the subject of an old-style melodrama, but failing.

By the time the film decides to have Manjhi be caught in a Naxalite shootout, be photographed with a distracted, self-obsessed Indira Gandhi (Deepa Sahi in a cameo as ridiculously fake as her wig), and later, set out to walk all the way to Delhi to meet her (ostensibly because he doesn't have the train fare), the sweep of history begins to seem more comic than tragic.

The part of the drama that did work for me almost entirely is the relationship between Manjhi and his wife Phagunia, notwithstanding Mehta's cringe worthy literal interpretation of a Dalit couple's "earthy" eroticism. Played with a faltering accent but unwavering warmth by Radhika Apte, Phagunia leaves an impression both as the vivacious young woman Dashrath falls for (only to realise that she was betrothed to him as a child) and as the spirited, practical wife of a man who is clearly not very worldly.

But even here, the film lets itself down, bathing Dashrath's memories of his wife in unnecessary bathos and truly unnecessary dream-waterfalls. It is only because Siddiqui can make you believe anything that you do not laugh at his semi-hallucinatory exchanges, with his beloved wife or with a mountain.

The surreal core of Dashrath Manjhi's life was the relationship of a man with a mountain. Focusing on that personification of the elements - a man turning a silent stony outcrop into the outlet for his most intimate emotions - could have made for a singular film. There are snatches of that film in Mountain Man, but I so wish Mehta had looked inwards rather than outwards.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23 Aug 2015.

There's a myth about Mary

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

A big-budget film simplifies Mary Kom's story more than some of us would like. But then Hindi cinema, like Hollywood, is not in the business of realism. It is in the business of myth-making.

Omung Kumar's Mary Kom was discussed threadbare before anyone actually watched the film. The trailer released in end-July was shared by thousands. But detractors were many, too. The first objection was that Manipur-born Mary was played by Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra, her Punjabi features ineffectively masked by prosthetics. One piece suggested four actresses from India's northeast as more realistic choices.

The second charge was that big-budget Bollywood would cannibalise Mary's life, reducing complexities to broad strokes. Irate opinion pieces fed on (and into) a desire for ‘authenticity’ voiced widely on social media. A well-known documentary filmmaker said on Facebook that she had approached Mary Kom for a documentary in 2010, that Mary was “very excited”, but “the only language the [media] agency spoke was money”. The documentary didn't get made. The filmmaker seemed to lament Mary's decision, writing, “I just hope for her, that she made money out of this film and not just her media agency. Well, for good or for bad, at least she’ll be a household name and maybe become an inspiration for other female boxers.” One typical commenter on the thread wrote: “Characters like Milkha Singh and Mary Kom are stars in themselves, so u dont need another star to tell their story. Their name is enough. I still can’t comprehend how could both... allowed them to make films which seems like a cinematic extension of high gloss virgin plastic.” (sic)

I’m really glad the Indian media has outlets able to list actresses from the Northeast, and that there are so many people taking up online cudgels on behalf of a woman who has put the region in the spotlight. But wouldn't it be nice if all these angry people acknowledged that Mary Kom's life story belongs first and foremost, to herself? And if Kom has chosen to have it turned into a Sanjay Leela Bhansali film rather than a documentary, aren't we being presumptuous in suggesting that she shouldn't have?

Documentaries are crucial to my film-viewing life, and there are two fascinating ones on Mary Kom just on Youtube. But whether we like it or not, even the most acclaimed documentary would earn Kom a fraction of the money or bandwidth that this film will. Millions more Indians will hear of Mary Kom than of a documentary, and Chopra is crucial here. Mary Kom knows that. Having fought her way up from obscurity even as she rose through the world boxing ranks, Kom understands the power of fame. And given the absurdly unstarry treatment of non-cricketing sportspersons by Indian authorities (something documented with increasing and surprising frequency by Hindi films from Paan Singh Tomar to Chak De India), surely Mary and Milkha are best equipped to judge whether they need “another star” to tell their story.

Omung Kumar’s choppy film, though it fails to explain Mary's fascination with boxing, does capture her hunger for celebrity. A scene where Mary cooks a Manipuri meal for a visiting Delhi/Mumbai journalist prefigures current media stories of Mary’s down-home friendship with Priyanka Chopra. Later we see her treasure her medals, and paste clippings about herself in a scrapbook. Mary Kom may be a legend in Manipur, but she wants to be a legend across India. And she knows that there is no better way of ensuring that than to become the subject of a Bollywood myth.

Hindi films have been banned in Manipur since 2000 by the insurgent group Revolutionary Peoples Front, who see them as part of mainland India's expansionist strategy. But such a ban means little in the internet era. And many Manipuris, like Mary, seem happy with the moment in the Bollywood sun. “So what if they haven’t used a Manipuri actress, the story is ours. We should be proud as Indians,” said Mary's coach to IBNLive. “As a child, I watched so many movies and could never have dreamt that one day a film would be made on me,” Mary told Delhi Times. “I liked Amitabh Bachchan sir's boxing in Sholay film.” No wonder she seemed pleased as punch when an admiring Bachchan launched her autobiography Unbreakable last December.

We need to acknowledge that Hindi cinema, like Hollywood, is not in the business of realism. It is in the business of myth-making. Its myths can be dangerous, but they can also be powerfully affecting. No doubt there is a flattening of Manipur's socio-political context in Mary Kom, and of Mary's persona. Her fierce interest in girly things, almost as fierce as her boxing; the fact that her fashionableness involves a rise from ragged poverty; her deep Christian belief; the powerful links between sport and poverty in an underdeveloped region -- these are left tragically unexplored. But the film offers up a rare female icon: an almost impossible heroine who is both feminine and a fighter, managing motherhood while also fulfilling her career dreams.

But in a world where Mangte Chungneijang Mary Kom can get to the national list only by shortening herself to MC Mary Kom, Bollywood’s simplifications are merely a symptom. The malaise runs much deeper.

Film Review: Shahid

Hansal Mehta’s biopic Shahid released last week, two and a half years after the still-unsolved death of the 33-year-old criminal defense lawyer who earned a reputation representing people accused in terror cases. It’s just about clinging on to the cinemas this week, despite having been released at the same time as Akshay Kumar’s Boss and losing its core audience in Mumbai to the Mumbai Film Festival which also kicked off last Friday. The fact that it’s still around for audiences to see is perhaps a fitting real life parallel to the story of a classic underdog. In a mere seven years of practice, Shahid Azmi secured 17 acquittals in matters that included the Ghatkopar bus bombing case of 2002, the Malegaon blast case of 2006, the Aurangabad arms haul case of 2006, the Mumbai train blasts of 2006, and most famously, the Mumbai terror attacks of 2008.

To those whom he saved from being sacrificed at the altar of an inept but bloodthirsty state, Azmi was certainly something of a hero. But Mehta’s film is scrupulously unheroic, choosing the messiness of real life over the clean arc of drama. Mehta’s directorial style echoes Azmi’s own commitment to a truth in which thoughtless actions produce victims, rather than villainy producing heroes. Azmi’s unglamorous courtroom victories repeatedly make the evidentiary triumph over the rhetorical. In the words of Rajkumar Yadav’s superbly convincing Shahid, “I’m as opposed as you are to terrorism, but that doesn’t mean that we can put innocent people in jail without any evidence.”


But perhaps what really made Azmi’s story compelling was his triumph over himself. Shahid’s impressiveness lay in the distance he had come from his own beginnings – and in never forgetting what that journey had been like. At the age of 14, deeply affected by the Bombay riots of 1992, he had briefly joined a militant training camp in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. At 16, Azmi was arrested under TADA, or the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act. Later, he was charged with conspiring against the state, specifically with plotting the assassinations of Farooq Abdullah and Bal Thackeray, and placed in Delhi’s Tihar Jail. He was acquitted of all charges in 2001, but by then he had spent over seven years in jail.

The film does not turn Azmi into a saint. His fallibility is shown in the depiction of his early years, including his time in jail with Omar Shaikh, who was serving time for the 1994 kidnappings of foreign tourists in Kashmir. But somehow, knowing that he could just as easily have been swayed by the sword as by the pen, gives Azmi’s eventual choice greater impact. It is clear that Azmi’s work was not simply a career for him. It was a vocation.

The poor Muslim men whose cases he took up mirrored his own experience. Mehta’s film makes the connections without underlining them too heavily. While Azmi had been arrested under TADA, which became defunct in 1998, his clients were frequently arrested under POTA (the Prevention of Terrorism Act) or MCOCA (the Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act) – all of these legislations allowed confessions in police custody (notoriously extracted through torture or deceit) to be made admissible in court.
Unlike regular criminal lawyers whose professional ethics require them to defend clients regardless of their guilt or innocence, the film suggests that Azmi worked on a personal ethic: he only took on clients he believed to be innocent. 


Mehta’s depiction of Azmi’s life derives much of its power from economy. Apurva Asrani’s editing (he also has partial writing credits) produces a narrative full of sharp cuts, where we must often fill in the blanks. In one of the best examples of this, we see Shahid propose marriage to his client Mariam, a divorcee with a child. She expresses utter shock, picks up her stuff and leave. In the next scene we see them together, very much a couple — leaving us to make up our own version of the interim period. Yet the film doesn’t feel choppy. The quality Mehta strives for — and achieves — is gritty documentary made up of snapshots, rather than orchestrated epic. In one of the film’s earliest scenes, we see a young Shahid run out of his house in Govandi. He emerges into the smoky dimly, tubelit street only to almost collide with the terrible figure of a man ablaze. It is a shocking moment and a cinematic one; the burning man sets the screen aflame. But instead of trying to chill us with the power of choreographed communal violence as so many films do (Earth, Kai Po Che to name two of many), it jolts us. Much like Shahid himself, we find ourselves very suddenly in a militant training camp. Again, the Kashmiri locale might have felt epic if Anuj Dhawan’s camera didn’t focus on the snow: it’s not pure white, but a dirty brown. 


Later, Mehta shears the judicial process of all the grandeur that Hindi films have traditionally accorded it. Even the recent Jolly LLB did not cut itself off completely from the dramatic confrontation of the big fish and the small fish, though it sought to undercut the court’s aura of justice with biting satire. What makes Shahid unique is its deliberate curtailment of both drama and humour. Instead we get a courtroom where life-and-death decisions are taken while lawyers squabble, cutting into each others’ dialogue to create inaudible moments. The police produce blatantly manufactured evidence; witnesses lie baldly, but seemingly without real malice. 


Shahid Azmi’s legal practice was devoted to defending people who he believed had been put into jail as scapegoats. The perpetrators of despicable acts of terror were still at large, “drinking in an AC room, plotting their next move”, while these ordinary people had been flung behind bars, as he says at one point, only because their names were not “Mathew, Donald, Suresh or More”. 


Names do have a strange power. The root of the word Shahid comes from Arabic and in Urdu, it has split into two pronunciations: 'shaahid' meaning ‘witness’ and ‘shaheed’ meaning ‘martyr’. Shahid Azmi was both.

This review was first published on Firstpost.

Paan Singh Tomar: Not just another daku film

A young army jawaan returns two days late from his leave. Army discipline requires that he be punished, so he is told to pick up his luggage and run ten times round the ground. This is the sort of scene that would normally be evidence of the hero’s gruelling training, or perhaps the injustice of his lot. In Tigmanshu Dhulia’s film, though, our hero finishes his rounds so fast and so effortlessly that his commanding officer refuses to believe he’s actually done them. Do another ten, then, he says, looking on as the lanky young man from Morena runs merrily around the ground ten more times without the slightest sign of exhaustion. “It’s the first time I’ve seen anyone actually enjoying a punishment,” says the incredulous officer.

This is but the first of the wonderful anecdotes out of which Tigmanshu Dhulia has crafted Paan Singh Tomar: the tale of a man who first earned fame as a steeplechase champion and then, in a strange twist of fate, notoriety as a dreaded dacoit. Dhulia first encountered the tragic story of Tomar while in Chambal on the sets of Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen(1994), for which he was Casting Director. Now, 18 years and four feature films later, he has finally managed to bring Tomar’s story to the screen.

The ravines on either side of the Chambal river – Chambal ki ghaati – are legendary for having sheltered a steady stream of dacoits, men who may have been villains in the eyes of the state but who often cultivated a Robin Hood aura and laid out an alternative model of justice, terrorising the rich and impressing the poor. Sultana Daku, who was captured by the British in the 1920s, was the subject of many folk songs and one of the most famous nautankis ever (and in the 70s a pale shadow of a film). There was also Daku Man Singh, unchallenged from 1939 until his death at the hands of Gurkha troops in 1955; he, too, was the hero of a nautanki (and of a 1971 Babubhai Mistry film starring Dara Singh). In fact, Hindi cinema is replete with dakus – sometimes playing the most villainous of villains – most famously Gabbar Singh in Sholay (1975) – but sometimes emerging as more complicated figures evoking audience sympathy: think of Dilip Kumar in Ganga Jamuna (1961), Sunil Dutt in Mother India (1957) or Mujhe Jeene Do (1963), or even Vinod Khanna’s star-making role in Mera Gaon Mera Desh (1971).

What Dhulia does with Paan Singh Tomar, though, is to thwart any filmi expectations you might have. There are no fiery tilaks, no pagdis, no dishonoured sisters, not even an item number in the daku’s lair. Tomar’s tale is so vivid and strange that Dhulia needs only to stick close to life to create the most marvelous fiction. And this he does with impeccable felicity.

Opening in 1980 when a stuttering local journalist (the dependable Brijendra Kala) manages to get an interview – the privilege of an audience, really – with the feared Paan Singh, the film moves swiftly into flashback. It is superbly structured, the first half recreating how the young Bengal Engineers recruit grew into an international level athlete, and the second showing the irrevocable transformation of a soldier and sportsman into a bandit.

Dhulia’s brilliance is in making it clear that Paan Singh does not, in either case, actively set out to become what he does; it is circumstances that drive him. Poverty sends him into the army; a simple hunger for unlimited rations drives him into the Sports section; humiliation at the hands of the very state that he has served pushes him to rebel against it.

And yet Dhulia’s tale is by no means about coincidences. It is as if the seeds of a man’s many possible futures lie dormant within him, waiting for a combination of historical accident and individual action to bring them to fruition. In one of the very first scenes, for example, we see a suspicious superior officer ask Paan Singh if he or his family have ever had any run-ins with the law. “Ham ka hamaare mama tak ka nahi hua hai,” says Paan Singh, with a straightforward pride that his lineage will not let him hide. “The police never manage to catch [us].”

It is the greatest strength of this biopic that it comes as close as it is possible to come to showing us, as if from within, the simplicity – almost inevitability – of every decision taken by a man whose life, seen from without, seems utterly contrarian.

Like its central character, the film’s cinematography is unflashily evocative, moving between the calm, verdant green of the army cantonment (Dhulia and his cinematographer Aseem Mishra shot in Roorkee, where Paan Singh actually served) and the dry, dusty browns of the Northern Madhya Pradesh villages and ravines. There is much pleasure to be derived from the visual detailing – the hundreds of flies buzzing around the petha in a sweet shop, the man shaking with fearful tears under a barber’s caress, the cows released at the opportune moment of a raid on a village in the hope that the police will not fire, for fear for commiting the sin of gau hatya – but the real masterstroke of this film is the dialogue, written by the director himself.

Tigmanshu Dhulia’s magisterial control over the cadences of North Indian speech has been admired ever since his debut Haasil (2003), a love story set amidst the nasty campus politics of his own home town, Allahabad. His 2011 offering Sahib Bibi aur Gangster did a fantastic job with dialogue, too. Here in PST, he is both at his sharpest and his most uncompromising — providing one-liners like “Beehad mein baaghi hote hain, dakait parliament mein milte hain” that will get the claps, but sticking to the harsh ‘haigo’s and soft ‘hamaai’s of an undiluted Morena-Bhind dialect.

There is some predictability built into a film like this, where you already know what happens, and the post-interval section does drag a little bit occasionally. But this is a film that you should watch not just because it is a rare treat to have a Hindi film director treat this subject with the complexity and intelligence it deserves. You should watch it simply to witness the marvellous Irrfan Khan sink his teeth into the role of a lifetime, essaying with moving simplicity the baffled rage of peacable masculinity driven inexorably to violence.

First published in Firstpost.

Why J Edgar is a must-watch this weekend

My review of J. Edgar, for Firspost:



Clint Eastwood’s biopic of J Edgar Hoover is a remarkably ambitious film. It is ambitious not just because of the long time period it spans — from 1919, when a 24-year-old Hoover was put in charge of a new division under the Department of Justice to investigate the programmes of radical groups, until 1972, when his death ended a controversial 37-year-long career as the director of the FBI — but because it seeks to lay bare a life that was all about secrets.

On the one hand there are the secrets of other people’s lives: dirty linen that Hoover dug out on everyone he considered a possible ‘public enemy’, creating a growing stash of files that became the unspoken basis of his tenacious hold on power. On the other is Hoover’s own closely-guarded private life, especially the nature of his close relationship with long-time colleague, FBI Associate Director Clyde Tolson, the subject of much speculation during Hoover’s life.

Oddly, Eastwood’s film seems more at ease when dealing with Hoover’s largely undocumented home life than when mapping the more public highs (or lows) of his long career. It provides a coolly efficient precis of Hoover’s professional life, tracking both his investigative triumphs (like the dogged pursuit of the kidnapper of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son, after which kidnapping became a Federal offence) and his most egregious moments: gloating over Robert Kennedy because he had acquired a recording of his brother (JFK) having sex with a woman described as “an East German Communist”; or dictating a bizarre anonymous letter to Martin Luther King, the discovery of whose sexual indiscretions he believes will prevent King from accepting the Nobel Prize. But it does not ever tell us what to think of him.

Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, best known for another biopic, Milk, seems much more confident when illuminating, with a series of suggestive, finely etched scenes, the personal life of a man who lived with his mother till his 40s, never married and publicly scorned homosexuality, while sustaining a lifelong relationship with another man.

Black’s screenplay introduces the 24-year-old J Edgar as a rather unfortunate young man, his yearning to be taken seriously making him an object of mockery for the older secretaries at the Department of Justice where he works. Leonardo di Caprio shows us just how far he’s come from the golden boy of Titanic, brilliantly embodying not just the socially awkward bluster of the young upstart but the pomposity and smarminess of the older man.

As Hoover rises to the position of power he craved, he dismisses everyone who doesn’t fit his standards of “education, physical fitness and above all, loyalty”, while surrounding himself with those he can completely trust. The young secretary he picks for a proposal of marriage, Helen Gandy (superbly underplayed by Naomi Watts), refuses the romance but agrees to be his personal secretary, and remains by his side all his life. Then there’s the tall, dashing Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, of the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network), with whom Hoover is clearly taken, right from the first meeting where he congratulates him on his suit (“a custom cut from Garfinkle’s department store,” says Tolson, calmly accepting the compliment as his due). Some of the film’s best scenes are the ones where the emotional heft of their relationship is suddenly revealed, almost surprising Hoover himself: like the moment when Tolson, asked to be his Number Two man, accepts only on the condition that “we never miss a lunch or a dinner together”. “I would have it no other way,” responds Edgar, and suddenly it’s a solemn moment, as close to a romantic confession as the two can get.

On the whole, Eastwood and Black imagine the Hoover-Tolson relationship as one whose deep-down intensity is never allowed to bubble up to the surface, and certainly not permitted physical expression. In all the years of companionable lunching and vacationing together, there is but a single tortured kiss – and it gets Tolson a sock in the jaw from the outraged Hoover, a man brought up by a rather terrifying mother (the marvellous Judi Dench), who “would rather have a dead son than a daffodil”. The other moment when homosexuality is actually discussed in the film is much less dramatic, but perhaps more revealing of the disjuncture between Hoover and Tolson’s approach to their sexuality. An incredulous Hoover, having got the information that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt may be having an affair with a woman, tells Tolson the news. He is still laughing raucously at the thought when Tolson silences him with a cocked eyebrow.

Several liberal reviewers in the US have been disturbed by the film’s non-judgmental approach to Hoover’s career, coupled with the humanising of the man that lies at the core of Black’s screenplay. With a subject as divisive as J Edgar Hoover, it isn’t surprising that many have seen Eastwood’s non-invasive laying out of the facts as a political cop-out. I wouldn’t go quite as far. One does not need to editorialise in order to see the stifling world of J Edgar as a prequel to the world in which many people in the US (and thus to an unfortunate extent, all of us) now live: a world obsessed with security, paranoid about unseen threats from within and without, and where we are willing to sacrifice personal liberty for a perceived sense of safety.

(Published in Firstpost)