A Student of Resistance

My Mumbai Mirror column:

As India's students speak out, it seems worth recalling a film about a student who defied another regime

Sophie Scholl was 21 when she was executed by the Nazi stateCharged with having distributed leaflets co-authored by a non-violent political resistance group called the White Rose, she was guillotined after a trial on 22 February 1943. The 2005 German film Sophie Scholl: The Last Days, directed by Marc Rothermund from a script by Fred Breinersdorfer, dramatises her interrogation, trial and execution. Though perhaps “dramatises” is not the best word for a film so deliberately spare, choosing to rely almost entirely on the historical transcripts left behind by the Gestapo (the Nazi Secret Police) and the “People's Court” -- and thus unfolding, to a great extent, within the confines of an investigator's office and a courtroom.

Calling themselves the White Rose, the student group to which Sophie belonged brought out six different leaflets between June 1942 and February 1943. Distributed mainly in Munich, with copies also appearing in Stuttgart, Cologne, Vienna, Freiburg, Chemnitz, Hamburg and Berlin, the pamphlets warned Germans that Hitler was leading them into the abyss, and called for people to speak out against Nazi terror. “Support the Resistance Movement!” they urged, for “Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and protection of the individual citizen from the arbitrary action of criminal dictator-states”.

Those words from eight decades ago leap off the page in a month in which India has seen massive protests against a new Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAA), which together with the proposed nationwide National Register of Citizens (NRC), introduces religion as a criterion for Indian citizenship for the first time in the history of our republic. Watching Sophie Scholl, it seems no coincidence that the resistance to the CAA and NRC, which has gone far beyond criticism of the letter of the law to a sorely-needed defence of the secular spirit of our Constitution and of our democracy itself, has been spearheaded by students.

The power of Sophie Scholl: The Last Days is in the details – especially as you watch it in 2019 India, where everything from the aesthetic remodelling of middle class fashion to the lines of 'argument' used by Fascist officials in the film are chillingly recognizable from our real-life political situation today. The junior officer of the Third Reich who hustles the film's 21-year-old student heroine into the custody of Investigator Mohr, for instance, has a moustache clearly modelled on Hitler's. Later, as Sophie (Julia Jentsch) is led into her cold prison cell, we hear in the background one of the Fuhrer's numerous speeches to the nation on the radio, his rasping voice rising to the familiar nationalist frenzy as he identifies an internal enemy. “Total war is the demand of the hour,” he proclaims, to loud clapping from his audience. “We must also put an end to the bourgeois attitude which we have also seen in this war. The danger facing us is enormous. The time has come to remove our gloves and use our fists...”.

Many of the arguments levelled by the Nazis against anyone who criticised their government are voiced in the film by Mohr and later, the infamous judge Roland Freisler. Over and over, we hear them berate these students as “parasites” and “spoiled brat[s] who foul [their] own nest[s], while others are dying on the front.” They are painted as ungrateful wretches who do not appreciate that they are only able to be students “thanks to the Fuhrer.” Time and again, too, Sophie's refusal to buckle under pressure drives Mohr off the deep end. “How dare you raise your voice!” he shouts at her, the irony of the statement clearly invisible to him. “The Fuhrer and the German people are protecting you.”

Reading a pamphlet in which Sophie's brother Hans argued that the war needed to be brought to an end and expressed his hatred for “the way we treat the Occupied Territories”, Mohr yells: “This is troop demoralisation and high treason!” The insistence on celebration of the army, and the idea that being critical of militarisation is antinational will sound familiar to anyone who has lived through the last five years of BJP rule.

Some of the film's best moments come when Rothermund focuses on the bafflement of the fascist in the face of openness: familial, but also individual. It is a fascinating fact that Scholl had been, for a time, a member of a Nazi youth group, before she and her brother and his friends began to question what the regime wanted them to believe, based on things they had witnessed on the Eastern Front as well as information they had begun to access – about institutionalised violence against Jews and disabled people, among others. Asked why her father – a known critic of the regime who had served a sentence for describing Hitler as “God's scourge to mankind” – had even let Sophie join the Nazi Girls Organisation, she replies, “Our father never influenced us politically.” “Typical for a democrat,” sneers Mohr, lighting another cigarette. “Why did you join?” Sophie's reply should resonate with all Indians who live with the promise of Acche Din: “I heard that Hitler would lead our country to greatness and prosperity and ensure that everyone had work and food and was free and happy.”

I will leave you with what to me is the film's most important exchange. Mohr insists that what he is doing is only to execute the law of the land. “What can we rely on if not the law?” he says. Sophie's answer seems simple, but it is one all of us need to hear: “On your conscience!”

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Dec 2019

With clipped wings

My Mirror column:

A damaged young woman discovers her strengths in the recent Malayalam film Uyare (Rise).

The new Malayalam film Uyare begins at a college fest somewhere in Kerala. Four or five young women in matching long skirts and kurtis are dancing on stage with unbridled enthusiasm. One in particular catches the eye, her enjoyment is infectious. A young man looks pointedly in her direction, but refuses to catch her eye. Instead he turns from her to the largely male college-going audience, some of whom are taking phone videos of the performance. Lip curled in disdain, he walks out. When she comes out to meet him afterwards, he has nothing to say about her performance, or the prize her group has just won. All he can get out is: “Weren’t you supposed to be wearing something else? Why didn’t you tell me when it changed?”

The boyfriend who can take no pleasure in his girlfriend’s dancing because he is too busy imagining the pleasure other men might derive from it is, unsurprisingly, also the boyfriend who when told she has qualified for pilot training in Mumbai, can only speculate about the girls’ and boys’ hostels being on the same floor at the academy – and the prevalence of late-night parties.

Too many women in India, sadly, will recognise men they know in the suspicious, sour-faced Govind – brothers, fathers, uncles, but also boyfriends and husbands. What makes the film’s internal landscape so effective is its baseline assumption: that the controlling, insecure lover is so common a figure as to be normalised. It doesn’t take long for Pallavi’s friends at the academy to cotton on to the power dynamic of the relationship: a female friend scrolling through Pallavi’s photographs asks if she’s sent Govind the one with a male instructor’s arm around her. “All that power you feel in the sky nosedives when it comes to Govind,” she says to Pallavi – but the acuteness of the observation is somehow blunted into a joke.

Pallavi’s father, too, wonders what she sees in him. But she convinces him otherwise with the story of the adolescent origins of their relationship, when Govind rescued her 14-year-old self from public humiliation. The fact that he was then her school senior seems crucial to his ‘niceness’: he could automatically assume a superior, guiding role. That dynamic is one we have all encountered before, most recently in the much-discussed Kabir Singh, where Kabir’s relationship with his medical college junior Preeti is grounded in a very similar experience of his ‘choosing’ her as the recipient of his attentions.

Unlike Kabir in Kabir Singh, though, Govind is not heroic, or even good at what he does. By making him a loser who can’t find a decent job, Uyare turns audiences against him, while Pallavi, following her dreams, has the author-backed role. Her ambitiousness and positivity are a glaring contrast to his unrelenting pessimism: “No miracles happened,” he says dourly when she asks him how a job interview went. Pallavi’s successes and joys are things that threaten Govind. It seems understandable when she begins to keep her real life from him – and one wants to applaud when she finally speaks up – and wants out. (Spoilers ahead.) Of course, Govind will not give her her freedom. When his suicide threats fail to elicit a reaction, he decides to wound her rather than himself.

Both before and after the acid attack, Manu Ashokan keeps the directorial focus on his aspiring pilot heroine (Parvathy Thiruvothu). But the film is also conscious of the skewed gender dynamics of its Indian middle class universe, from boardroom to courtroom: the ‘humour’ lined with casual sexism, the deeply non-egalitarian assumptions about men and women. The women’s toilet in the pilot-training academy is labelled “Bla bla bla ba bla bla” – in contrast to the men’s toilet’s strong and silent “Bla”. A visitor to the academy, confronted by a pretty woman on the reception committee, assumes she is not a pilot-in-training but a PR woman – and further, that he is free to criticise her outfit for being “cheap”. The judge in the acid attack case is less moved by Pallavi’s present than Govind’s potential future – especially once he offers to marry her. “Why would he offer to marry her if he had committed this crime?” asks Govind's lawyer. In a discursive variation of something notoriously frequent in rape trials, the accused – merely because he is a man – is still imagined as being able to take the survivor “back under his wing” – merely because she is a woman.

The film’s resolution of Pallavi’s pilot dreams – scotched because her vision no longer holds up to the medical standards required – is to make her an air hostess. There’s something fascinating and full-frontal about the acid attack victim claiming a job traditionally defined by physical attractiveness. It doesn’t come easy. When spoilt brat airline  owner Vishal suggests a new role, an angry Pallavi responds with her air hostess ambition, yelling: “You should think twice about making promises to people who lack beauty!” Her anger spurs him to actually examine his thoughtless offer. In some ways, Vishal’s capacity for change is also a reflection of Pallavi’s power.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Oct 2019.

Film review: Seeing Allred

My review of an absorbing and important new documentary on Netflix, for India Today:

Lawyer Gloria Allred (right) with Norma McCorvey ('Jane Roe' in Roe vs. Wade), 1989

Seeing Allred is a fascinating introduction to a figure who ought to be better known outside the USA: the lawyer Gloria Allred. Allred, whose website calls her a “feminist lawyer” and “discrimination attorney”, is known for having battled some of America's most powerful men, across the political and social spectrum. She has represented Paula Jones against Bill Clinton, Summer Zervos against Donald Trump, murder victim Nicole Brown's family in the OJ Simpson trial, and 33 women who accuse the comedian Bill Cosby of sexual misconduct – some of whom appear in the film. Famous Allred targets the documentary doesn't name include Michael Jackson, Tiger Woods, Eddie Murphy, former Congressman Anthony Weiner and former Hewlett Packard CEO Mark Hurd.

However, Allred has also fought many cases away from the limelight, on sexual harassment, child support and workplace discrimination. She has been a long-term advocate of same-sex marriage and equal rights for transgenders. 

Filmmakers Roberta Grossman and Sophie Sartain follow the indefatigable 76-year-old as she meets clients, holds press conferences, appears in court and (very reluctantly) speaks of how her own life experiences – single motherhood, being raped at gunpoint and a back-alley abortion in a pre Roe vs Wade era – have shaped her career.

The film traces Allred's initiation into feminism and the law, including early pathbreaking suits: against a toy store for labelling good as “boys'” and “girls'”, against a fancy restaurant for having a 'women's menu' that didn't show prices, against a clothing store that charged more to alter women's clothes than men's. It also uses archival TV clips to present a colourful record of sexism in American popular culture. On one 80s debate, when Allred says, “We don't think our daughters should have to trade sexual favours in order to get a raise.” Then another female guest cuts in, “Why not, we did. How do you think we got on this show?” [Cue raucous laughter].

A vocal feminist long before it was fashionable, Allred is unpopular – to put it mildly. Critics paint her as publicity-hungry, money-minded, aggressive. But these charges fall away as we watch her meet warmly with dozens of grateful, often emotional clients, and respond calmly to nasty commenters.

What remains controversial is her use of the media as an extension of the courtroom – and sometimes in lieu of it. A 2017 New Yorker profile explained her approach as seeking “to influence the court of public opinion by getting the victim's perspective in the news”.

The feminist principle that victims of sexual assault and harassment must always be believed often conflicts with the legal principle that suspects are innocent until proven guilty. But in a world where women are still far from equal, Allred has no doubt which side needs her more.

A slightly shorter version of this review was published in India Today, 1 Mar 2018.

Heroes of the Unlikely KInd

My Mirror column: 

Jolly LLB 2 is not a great film by any means, but its jollities pack a rare political punch.

Subhash Kapoor’s latest film returns us to a character he first presented on screen in March 2013: the ambitious small-town lawyer whose failure to work the system suddenly ends up pitting him against it. In Jolly LLB 1, Arshad Warsi was Jagdish Tyagi, the guy from Meerut whose ham-handed attempt to get himself some publicity sets him up against Boman Irani’s scheming Rajpal, the sort of high-maintenance Delhi lawyer whose arrival causes a flutter of anticipation to run down the corridors of the court. In Jolly LLB 2, Tyagi (and Warsi) has been unceremoniously replaced by Jagdishwar Mishra, Akshay Kumar playing a Kanpur ka Kanyakubja Brahmin who finds himself doing battle with a slimy Lucknow legal mind called Pramod Mathur (Annu Kapoor).

Warsi’s 2013 Jolly was no saint — in fact, that was crucial to Kapoor’s imagining of an identifiable everyman: someone who didn’t have the luxury of purity, but picked his battles. But Akshay Kumar’s version is less bumbling and way more swag. The new film’s insistence on his being street-smart seems to be centred around the need to preserve something of Kumar’s heroic persona: he is the Kanpuria who can bluff his way into a sweeter deal, the lawyer who doesn’t have any trouble breaking the law, who doesn’t even think twice about lying outright to a needy woman when he thinks his need is greater. Which is fine until we are asked to simultaneously believe in him being a novice in the courtroom: not just when it comes to legal argument, but even in lawyerly etiquette.

Kapoor has never really been bothered by legal niceties like getting the law right. In the 2013 film as well as now, he merrily treats the reopening of a criminal case as a Public Interest Litigation. What he gets right in both films, though, is the depressing state of the Indian judicial system, as encapsulated in the dimly lit courtroom, presided over by the underwhelming and often overwhelmed Saurabh Shukla. The piles of files, the diminutive judge who thinks nothing of hiding under the table, the chaotic haatha-paaii that is constantly threatening to break out under the very nose of Justice — none of this could be further from the old-school Hindi movie adaalat of Awaara or even Damini.

We have had bleaker, more realistic takes on the present-day courtroom in Hansal Mehta’s Shahid and Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court. But Kapoor is going for a different register. For one, he seems interested in holding up the irascible and eccentric Justice Tripathi (Saurabh Shukla recycling his act from the 2013 film) as a sort of metaphor for the judiciary: he is down but not yet out. His rotund frame and preoccupied manner may make him a figure of fun, but when it comes to the crunch, he manages to imbue the proceedings with authority.

But again the tone is uneven. The filmmaker claims a self-conscious departure from the grand histrionics of old by having Justice Tripathi dismissing Jolly’s high drama in his courtroom with a perfunctory “Sunny Deol kyun ban rahe ho?” And yet the film — and Justice Tripathi — seem quite willing to entertain high drama when it comes to the actual case at hand: an investigation into a police ‘encounter’ that wasn’t one.

This sort of choppiness in terms of both characterisation and tone does not prevent Jolly LLB 2 from being a politically courageous film whose broadstrokes humour might just succeed in getting across its message to a large audience. The encounter in the film is unpacked as the custodial murder of an innocent man for the unfortunate mistake of sharing his first name with a terrorist. He is deliberately mis-identified by a corrupt policeman so that the real accused can make good his escape, having paid a tidy sum to the policeman in question.

As in his first film, Kapoor deals here categorically with an all-too-common narrative that crops up in the media only after it is too late, and even then is often addressed with too little conviction: how the rot in the police system prevents justice from being done in the courtroom.

And here Jolly LLB 2 goes even further. It pits the “deshdrohi” terrorist against the policeman who has taken a “matribhoomi ki shapath”, thus reproducing the discourse of ‘anti-national’ versus ‘nationalist’ that the BJP has successfully made the discourse of the country’s drawing rooms and chai shops. But it then uses two powerfully understandable devices — Kashmir and police corruption — to show us how hollow this supposed binary is. The film’s message is so simple as to be obvious: the Muslim is not a terrorist until proven to be so; and the policeman is not a nationalist until proven to be so. But Kapoor must absolutely be applauded for delivering it.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 Feb 2017.

The murderer as hero

My Mumbai Mirror column: 
Rustom's lurid, overblown courtroom drama turns the 1959 Nanavati trial into a showcase for pop-patriotism.

The trial of Commander Kawas Maneckshaw Nanavati for the murder of Prem Ahuja began on the afternoon of September 23, 1959 in the city then called Bombay. The accused was a Parsi naval officer who lived in a Cuffe Parade flat with his British wife Sylvia and their three children. The victim was a wealthy Sindhi bachelor who lived with his unmarried sister Mamie and three servants in the posh Jeevan Jyot Apartments on Nepean Sea Road, Malabar Hill.

Despite their shared upper-class lives, the dead Ahuja became a sordid symbol of the immorality of the rich, while Nanavati emerged as a patriotic hero. As historian Gyan Prakash has shown fascinatingly in his 2010 book Mumbai Fables, the groundswell of popular support for Nanavati was largely engineered by the tabloid Blitz. Editor Russi K Karanjia managed to spin an elite sex-and-murder trial into "a spectacle of patriarchal honor and law in the modern cosmopolitan city". Prakash writes: "In its framing of the story, the rich did not just oppress the poor but threatened the very moral fiber of the nation, which Blitz identified with the armed services."

It is remarkable to what extent the Akshay Kumar-starrer Rustom, which released last week, 57 years after Nanavati's trial began, takes up and amplifies elements of this same narrative to suit our contemporary pop-patriotic zeitgeist. The faux-grand sets and technicolour shipboard sunsets are a vehicle for Akshay Kumar-style nationalism. As decorated naval officer Rustom Pawri, Kumar gets a stylised hero's entry alongside the Indian flag, and dialogues like "Meri uniform meri aadat hai, jaise saans lena, niswarth bhaav se apna farz nibhana... [My uniform is a habit. Like breathing, like selflessly doing my duty...]".

The film entirely fictionalises his battle with man-about-town Vikram Makhija (Arjun Bajwa), taking their rivalry much beyond Makhija having seduced his gullible wife Cynthia (a tearily soft-focus Ileana D'Cruz). It turns out that the upright Pawri sabotaged Makhija's corrupt shenanigans, hatched in conjunction with his own navy superiors. Poor Cynthia, in this version, is a mere pawn in Makhija's payback.

Gyan Prakash claims that in the years the case unfolded, Sylvia's being British "never raised an eyebrow. There was no insinuation (one very likely today) that she lacked the cultural values of India and exhibited the lax morals of Western women". This may have been true of Blitz and its English-language public - a function, perhaps, of the surviving colonial cosmopolitanism that still had hegemonic hold over the city's culture. But the form in which the case was first consumed in popular fictional form -- the 1963 Hindi courtroom drama Yeh Raaste Hain Pyar Ke -- departed from that neutrality.

In it, the guilt-stricken Mrs Nina Sahni is cross-examined by prosecution lawyer Ali Khan (the superb Motilal) precisely about having grown up in Paris, where "women are free to drink and smoke in the company of men other than their husbands", and "even divorce them if they are unhappy". The actress Leela Naidu, half-French in real life and raised in Europe, tries hard to claim 'Indian' values as the sad-faced Nina, her plain white sari draped modestly over her head: "Auraton ke liye main sharaab ko bahut bura samajhti hoon [For women I consider alcohol to be very bad]," she says, insisting she was forced to drink by the late Ashok (Rehman). Her husband Anil (Sunil Dutt) defends her, testifying that he and his wife occupy a happy mid-point between traditional mores and new-fangled freedoms. The lawyer, however, declares Anil mistaken, because his wife "is a highly liberated woman, a hundred yards ahead of our time, as Western women usually are".

While painting her as this fiend of freedom, the film simultaneously makes Nina a non-agent in her sexual life: the villainous Ashok flatters Nina, gets her drunk, and rapes her when she passes out. But the traumatised Nina must still ask her husband's forgiveness -- ostensibly for having put herself in a position to be raped.

Meanwhile the wronged hero (and his father) gain in moral stature from forgiving: "You can find a thousand girls, Anil, but not the mother of [your children] Rita and Pawan," advises Anil's father. But in that old Hindi-movie moral universe, forgiving men are never faced with the prospect of actually taking the 'fallen' woman back: Nina dies inexplicably as soon as Anil is free.

The real-life Kawas and Sylvia had three children, and the filmic Anil and Nina two. Rustom 'modernises' by making the couple child-free. Cynthia is also allowed to feel flattered enough by Vikram's attentions -- and angry enough at her husband's absences -- to embark on an affair. But Vikram's unspeakable villainy -- now not just seducer of innocents, but traitor to the nation, insulter of the uniform -- overshadows her misguidedness. She can live to be forgiven.

Cynthia's Englishness is never remarked upon in Rustom. What it does foreground is the Parsi-ness of Pawri and Bilimoria, the tabloid editor who makes him a cause celebre: Kumud Mishra in a roly-poly, comic, money-grubbing version of the tall, patrician Karanjia. Their Parsi-ness is pitted against the Sindhi-ness of Vikram and his sister. But it steers clear of mentioning the real-life Sindhi lobby that had to be placated before Nanavati's connections could earn him a Governor's pardon from Vijaylakshmi Pandit.

Rustom is tacky and often unintentionally hilarious. The 1963 film's sharp-tongued lawyerly repartee (between Motilal and Ashok Kumar) here becomes an over-the-top exchange between Sachin Khedekar and our hero, who argues his own case. The real-life Mamie Ahuja becomes Priti Makhija — Esha Gupta as a bizarrely excessive version of that era's Nadira-style vamp, complete with cigarette-holder. The machinations of these cardboard characters are of interest only because the Nanavati case still holds our attention.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 August 2016.

The Media and the Mob

My Mirror column today:

Hansal Mehta's Aligarh is both a tragic bio-pic and a finely-wrought critique of our mediatised present.

Aligarh opens on a chilly February night in 2010, in an area called Medical Colony, somewhere in the university town for which the film is named. We can see little in the darkness, but what we hear is a jarring sound: cars honking, distant but persistent. It feels like a warning, a premonition of danger. 

What follows is indeed dangerous. A man is forcibly photographed in the privacy of his own house, and those images are used to humiliate, blackmail and illegally shunt him out of his job. This is what really happened to the unfortunate Dr. Shrinivas Ramachandra Siras, a Reader in Marathi at the linguistics department of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), in 2010. 

A camera crew barged into Siras's house without his permission, and shot video footage of Siras and his male friend, using physical coercion to keep them in the frame. These media persons then called in three AMU faculty members, who were given access to the footage, which they used to charge Siras with "misconduct". Accusing him of having "indulged himself into immoral sexual activity and in contravention of basic moral ethics", AMU instituted a departmental enquiry against Siras. 

Even while the enquiry was pending, the self-appointed moral guardians of the university had pronounced their judgment: Siras was suspended, his electricity and water supply was cut off, and an order was issued giving him seven days to vacate his house. Meanwhile, the footage was leaked to local television channels, and it became difficult for Siras to even find an alternative house to rent. Initially persuaded that tendering an 'apology' would help carry on with his life, the 64-year-old professor eventually found himself having to fight for his job and his dignity in court. He won the case, but died mysteriously and tragically one day before his reinstatement. 

Hansal Mehta's film, at one level, is a straightforward, near-factual recreation of these events. But Apurva Asrani's script (based on an original idea by Ishani Banerjee) brings us much closer to Siras than the newspapers ever did - and it does so, ironically, by using the figure of a reporter. We see the professor almost entirely through the eyes of Deepu Sebastian (played by the excellent Rajkummar Rao). 

Modelled on a real-life reporter who came to have a rapport with the stigmatized professor, Deepu's character works as a bridge between Siras and us. It is Deepu's gradual shift, from seeing Siras as a 'story' to seeing him as a human being, that encourages the film's viewers—including those who may not be comfortable with homosexuality in the abstract—to make space for this person, in the particular. Deepu channels our better selves. 

Aligarh was completed several months ago, yet it speaks powerfully to the India being so cynically crafted in February 2016. What Aligarh defends is not just the right to privacy and freedom of sexuality; it is the freedom of the individual against the condemnation of the mob, and the role the media can play in mediating between the two. 

We live in times in which sections of the media have turned into megaphones for pre-existing political positions, giving up even the pretense of neutrality as they openly manufacture 'news'. These sections of the media speak less and less for the individual, more and more in the voice of the mob - a mob they are simultaneously helping to create. 

The tenor of television in India seems increasingly meant to whip up mass sentiment, rather than encourage a considered appraisal of differing viewpoints. This is not a media that questions its viewers; and even more rarely does it question itself. 

Aligarh offers an acute example of how the media's actions, no matter how damaging they might be to the individuals they drag towards televised mob justice, have come to be accepted as legitimate. When Deepu Sebastian (Rao) asks the AMU committee about the illegitimacy of filming a man's most private moments, the answer he gets is frightening. The issue here is not the camera, he is told -- only what is captured by it. 

In the ongoing cases of students being charged as antinationals, too, we are witness to the chilling process of a trial by media, in which the due process of law, or even the due process of newsgathering, counts for nothing. And if our media has long been unquestioningly parroting the police, we have now reached a stage where the police parrots the media. The self-legitimising circle of mendaciousness is complete. 

But Aligarh reminds us that Deepu, too, is the media. The journalist who resists his colleague's ham-handed intrusiveness, while being dogged in his pursuit of the truth; who asks permission of his interviewees and questions of his own profession; who is able to separate the grain of individual truth from the chaff of rabble-rousing hearsay—this is the media as it should be, the media we desperately need. 

Manoj Bajpayee's affecting portrait of Siras is a portrait of isolation, of the stifling 'morality' of those that would shut the doors of their institutions, their colonies and mohallas against anyone not like themselves. But difference is the lifeblood of democracy. We need our televisions to be windows to the outside - not a chamber of mirrors that closes us in upon ourselves.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 February 2016.

Extra-legal understanding

My Mumbai Mirror column last Sunday: 

Chaitanya Tamhane's debut film Court is a devastating, elegant indictment of our collective present.

If you're a Hindi film viewer, you've been watching the lives of heroes unspool in courtrooms forever. One of my earliest cinematic memories is of Awara, whose high melodrama involves pitting the judge (Prithviraj Kapoor, also the father) against the accused (Raj Kapoor, also the son), with the daughter/lover (Nargis) mediating between them as lawyer. Awara used the court as real and metaphorical stage for a debate that went beyond a particular crime to the social pressures that create "criminals". Basu Chatterjee's Ek Ruka Hua Faisla, a remake of Sidney Lumet's Twelve Angry Men, couldn't be more different in tone, but its interest in tracking a jury's arguments is, like Awara's, concerned with how the social impinges on the legal. ERHF may seem gritty compared to Awara, but Chatterjee's realism clearly didn't stretch very far: jury trials were abolished in India soon after 1959's Nanavati trial, so a 1986 film about one undercuts the plot's very premise.

But then real-life courtrooms have never had much impact on Hindi movie ones. Hundreds of films, with their "mere kaabil dost" and "kanoon jazbaat nahi, saboot dekhta hai", have wrung eloquent oratory and dramatic suspense out of the dry deliberations and incessant waiting that make up the everyday reality of the Indian courtroom. Of course, there are exceptions; I can think of two recent films that have captured the farcicality of the legal process. Feroz Abbas Khan's slightly dated but pitch-black satire Dekh Tamasha Dekh (2014) showed an investigation into whether a poor man killed in an accident was Hindu or Muslim, having the court deliberate, among other things, on the existence of a river. Subhash Gupta's Jolly LLB (2013) took a smalltime lawyer's big ambitions as the basis for a funny but deep-down cynical take on how the law really works.

Chaitanya Tamhane's superb debut, Court, shares something with the films I've just mentioned. Like them, it is cinematically invested in the theatre of the courtroom, as well as with how the social cannot be divorced from the legal in practice. And yet Court is unlike any other film you've seen - or are ever likely to see. The case Tamhane takes as his take-off point is certainly the stuff of farce: a lok shahir, a folk singer called Narayan Kamble, is charged with abetment to suicide because the police decide that a sewage worker who died on the job was actually following an exhortation made in a song written and sung by the accused. But Tamhane's genius lies in taking the ridiculous and treating it seriously, so that what creeps up on you is much more powerful than if it were farce. Nothing is exaggerated to elicit a reaction. Nothing is played for laughs. So calm, unhurried and deliberate is Tamhane's embrace of his location and his characters that one is persuaded, right from beginning to end, that what one is watching is real.

But - and I cannot stress this enough - Court is no documentary. What Tamhane has done is to assemble a team experienced in documentary - editor Rikhav Desai, cinematographer Mrinal Desai, sound designer Anita Kushwaha - and put their clearly immense talent to use in the service of an immaculately-crafted fiction. Right from the start, when we see Kamble (played by real-life social activist Vira Sathidar) emerge from a tuition class he teaches, walk across a courtyard, catch a bus and arrive at the "Wadgaon Massacre Cultural Protest Meet" to perform his songs, the film combines the wide-angled observational approach of documentary with the unwavering narrative focus of fiction. Visually, too, this is true. These initial scenes, like those in the courtroom later, are clearly informed by a sense of the city as live theatre, but even in the widest of shots, and sometimes at a great distance, the camera picks out the sprightly old man in his grey beard and peach kurta.

The Dalit shahir's songs are sharply critical of the political and economic milieu, but while letting us hear some wonderful lines involving large malls and our "Great Fall", Tamhane's film refuses to ride piggyback on this causticity. Its chosen tone is more deceptively gentle. Understanding what happens in the courtroom involves following its principal protagonists outside of it. So we follow Kamble's defence lawyer Vinay Vora to the fancy supermarket in which he does his solitary shopping, and the prosecution lawyer Nutan home on the local train discussing the unaffordability of olive oil. And so on.

These journeys may seem random, but they aren't. Taken together, they constitute Court's astute intervention in that age-old debate about how the law relates to the socio-cultural world within which it is practiced. And here Tamhane reveals a finely-honed sense of both the tragic and the absurd, delivered without comment. The well-off Vora can't speak to a child in a poor, working class area without "Excuse me" and "Thank you". When he suffers public humiliation, we see him weep; but almost immediately after, getting a facial. The judge who refused to hear the case of one poor Mercy Fernandes, because she wore "sleeveless" to court, takes his vacation in a family resort where everyone descends fully clothed into the swimming pool. The widow of the sanitation worker who went unprotected into manholes encounters a safety belt for the first time in Vora's car. Long after the film ends, you will think about how these worlds, kept so starkly apart by barriers of class, language and prejudice, cannot but stare uncomprehendingly at each other when they collide in the courtroom.

Post Facto: Bharatanatyam, ‘sleeveless’ and a threatened museum

My Sunday Guardian column this month: Last month, the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum had to abandon its plans to host the grand finale of the Lakme Fashion Week, after alleged threats from a Maharashtra Navanirman Sena (MNS) leader. The tie-up with a fashion event was part of managing trustee and honorary museum director Tasneem Zakaria Mehta›s attempts to raise money (a fee of Rs. 2 lakh was to be paid for the use of the venue), while giving the museum›s visibility a fillip. Whether one thinks that the idea of a museum being given over to a fashion show for an evening is an exciting innovation or a bizarre mismatch, it is clear that those who actively opposed the event did not see it in the Mumbai Mirror's neutral terms — as "an alternative public space being used for an international event." A museum trustee told the Mirror that the event had to be shifted elsewhere at the last minute because Byculla corporator Samita Naik's husband, Sanjay Naik (also an MNS leader) went to the museum premises and threatened to take another 300 people there to protest against the show. The fashion show episode is only the most recent in the battles between the BMC and Mehta, who have earlier crossed swords over ambitious plans for the museum›s expansion. Last week, things came to head when the BMC (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, which partially funds the museum) unanimously passed a proposal to revoke the agreement between the BMC, Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation and Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH). The current management, which is responsible for creating one of India›s very few exciting museum spaces, was meant to last another five years. It has now been put on six months' notice. Reports quoted Sandeep Deshpande, an MNS group leader who presented the proposal to oust Mehta, as saying: "What culture does she intend to show? Our culture is Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi, Lavni and Kathak; this is what we should be showing to the foreigners, not the culture that these people talk about." When I posted that quote on Twitter, one response I got was "our culture is Bharatanatyam? Who›d have thunk the Hindu right would admit to sexual slavery as its culture." The tweet was referring, snarkily, to the fact that Bharatanatyam as a dance form emerged out of the centuries-old devadasi system, in which young girls were married off to a deity or a temple, effectively becoming bound to provide sexual services for upper-caste men in the community. Snark aside, the ironies of Deshpande's remark are inescapable — and several. First, Bharatanatyam's origin really is tied to what can honestly be described as a Hindu way of life — just not in a way the Hindu right would like to admit. Second, what's on display here from the MNS and its ilk is an incredible historical amnesia, an erasure of the decades of struggle that went into reclaiming Bharatanatyam and sanitising it into an art form that girls "from good families" could practice. Third, that sanitising was a deeply controversial thing, with voices like that of Balasaraswati publicly criticising the way the dance form was stripped of its erotic gestures. And finally, while Bharatanatyam as practiced in the wake of Rukmini Devi Arundale and Kala Kshetra might be de-eroticised, lavani certainly is not. The erotic charge of lavani is integral, both in its lyrics and its dance steps. At one level, I'm glad that the MNS wants to claim these dance forms, or any dance forms, as part of "our culture". But given that this "support" is so uninformed by history, and so kneejerk and hypocritical in its sense of morality, it seems possible that the tables could turn at any moment. Lavani and tamasha were once beyond the pale of Brahminical culture; now they have been appropriated as Maharashtrian culture, so much so that they were made exempt from the ban on bar dancing. Right now, the world of fashion is tagged as Western and upper class, thus immoral. Tomorrow, "our culture" could co-opt it, and label something else immoral. Meanwhile, when pushed to the wall by the moral police, we can end up defending things in their terms. "Anamika's collection was celebrating Indian garments and was not immoral," Mehta was quoted as saying — if it had been Western wear, would it have been less morally upright? Chaitanya Tamhane's unmissable debut feature, Court, trains its steady gaze upon a Mumbai courtroom in which similar culture wars are being played out just below the surface. The charge is one of abetment to suicide, but what is really on trial is a man's refusal to toe the hegemonic cultural line. If a man claims to be a folk singer, a lok shahir, then it is terribly suspicious that he should be a member of any social and political organisations — and oh, downright fraud that he should voice political or economic dissent "in the guise of cultural workshops". Culture here is what a majority endorses — it seems almost its job to mock the minority, whether that be a Catholic lady publicly punished for wearing a "sleeveless" top, or the North Indian migrant who is a figure of fun because he dares propose marriage to a Marathi girl. Culture, in this view, is only culture if it challenges nothing. It must laugh foolishly at its master's jokes, and roll over and die when told to. It must bark at outsiders, but it must never bite its own. Published in the Sunday Guardian.

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.

Film Review: A streak of cynical realism undercuts all of Jolly LLB's jollities

Jolly LLB opens with a hit-and-run accident involving a drunk rich kid in a Land Cruiser and several poor men sleeping on a Delhi pavement. The pavement-dwellers die, a case is filed against the rich kid, but his family hires the sharpest, most hotshot lawyer in town – and gets the boy acquitted. The case is closed. Until a struggling young advocate, newly arrived from a small town, decides to file a PIL to have the case re-opened.

Sounds like a dully predictable tale of good-versus-evil? Certainly there’s no doubt that Jolly LLB is a film with its heart in the right place. But director Subhash Kapoor manages to leaven his conscience-laden tale with a healthy dose of laughter. And crucially, he gives us a protagonist more complicated and believable than, for instance, the unswayable paragon of Ferrari ki Sawaari, a charming but somewhat fairy-tale-ish film that was also about honesty.

Jagdish Tyagi, aka Jolly (Arshad Warsi) is a decent-enough guy, but his small-town simplicity is not something he’s proud of. He’s made the move from Meerut to Delhi because he has ambitions. He wants to be somebody. In fact, he wants to be somebody like Tejinder Rajpal (Boman Irani) — the kind of lawyer whose arrival in court causes a stir. When Jolly decides to file the PIL asking for reinvestigation in the Rahul Deewan case, it isn’t only the public interest that’s on his mind: he knows it’s a quick route to media attention and potential fame. It just so happens that this pits him against his hero Rajpal – and Rajpal’s heroism starts swiftly and surely to unravel.

The rest of the film is about how a novice like Jolly meets the multiple challenges thrown his way by a riled Rajpal: challenges not just of the head, but also of the heart. What makes Jolly LLB more than a standard-issue David vs Goliath story is that it understands the difficulties of retaining a moral compass in a world which seems to reward cleverness, not honesty. For the small-time lawyer whose ‘desk’ is a rickety table outside the District Court (with his typewriter chained to it for fear even that be stolen), the stakes are low and the temptations great. Is it surprising that such a man should measure even his own defeats by degrees of nuksaan and faayda?

Kapoor’s last film, Phans Gaye Re Obama (2010), a quirky tale of a recession-hit gang of dacoits, was spread needlessly thin across a convoluted plot and too many characters. Jolly LLB – barring some utterly out-of-synch songs and an uninteresting romance track involving Amrita Rao – sticks assuredly with its main plotline: the unconnected rookie lawyer, a minnow trying to fight the biggest fish in the pond—and having to figure out if he’s going to take the bait.

Warsi and Irani, the consummate performers they are, keep us more than engaged in the twists and turns of the battle. But the character who really brings the courtroom to life is Saurabh Shukla’s eccentric Justice Tripathi—not averse to asking for the odd favour, but sharply aware of where the buck stops, a man who can be a stickler for the rules but can also bend them when it seems absolutely necessary.

When Kapoor does move our gaze away from the central courtroom drama, it is to cast a gently satirical eye on the absurd ironies of the surrounding reality. There is the great scene where a havaldar known as Guruji (Sanjay Mishra) sits down to auction posts at different police stations, with the "upar se order” being only that the bidding start at 20 lakhs and the post go to a “clean image wala afsar”. There is the police bodyguard who arrives, on court orders, to ensure Jolly’s security—a doddering old man who can barely bear the weight of his rifle. There is the unremarked, completely realistic moment when it is made clear that even to fight the good fight, you must pay a couple of bribes—but chalo, you can do it at a discount rate.

There is pleasure in watching the underdog win, and the film does not deny us that. But when Boman Irani’s raging Rajpal shakes his fist and declares he’ll be back, there is something about this film that makes him more believable than we’d like. There’s a streak of cynical realism that undercuts all of Jolly LLB's jollities.

Published on Firstpost.