Flight into the wild

My Mirror column:

An evocative new film melds classic Western motifs with a vision of the Chambal wilderness, using a gang of 1970s dacoits to ask existential questions

A group of armed men arrive in a village to commit a robbery. They are on foot, their leader using a megaphone to announce who they are (“Je baaghi Maan Singh ko gang haigo”), why they are here, and what they would like the locals to do (the women and children to go indoors, the men to stay where they are). Then they walk into a wedding, round up the guests, and slide into a bag the several glittering gold sets laid out by the local jeweller for his daughter’s dowry. When the father of the bride starts to sink to the ground, Maan Singh sits the tubby little man down and announces that no jewels are to be taken off the bride’s body. Then, with impeccable gravity, he makes his incredulous deputy Vakila (Ranvir Shorey) hand over 101 rupees to the weeping girl.

This scene from Abhishek Chaubey’s Sonchiriya contains much tongue-in-cheek humour: the procession of dacoits that mimics an electoral campaign, the wedding gift delivered earnestly while looting. And Manoj Bajpayee, playing another ‘Maan Singh’ 25 years after his career-inaugurating performance in Bandit Queen, revels in creating characters who can keep us guessing. But Chaubey and his screenwriter Sudeep Sharma (they last collaborated on Udta Punjab) are also using the scene to communicate something that lies at the core of their film: that dakus have a dharam.

That thought isn’t, of course, something spectacularly new. Our memories may have been addled by Sholay overkill, but the uber-villainous Gabbar Singh is really not typical of how dacoits have been popularly seen in India. Pre-colonial bandits like Sultana Daku were immortalised in folk songs and nautankis, and that tradition carried on into Hindi cinema, too: think of Dilip Kumar in Ganga Jamuna (1961), or Sunil Dutt in Mother India (1957) or the underwatched Mujhe Jeene Do (1963). The historical dacoit on whose life Sonchiriya builds its fictional tale, one Malkhan Singh, was one of the last of these admired baaghis, a hero in Chambal because of certain moral codes. As described recently by photographer Prashant Panjiar, who spent some months photographing him for a book in the early 1980s, “he wouldn’t drink or let his men drink, he was a champion of the poor and made temples, and his gang wouldn’t misbehave with women”. More recently, Tigmanshu Dhulia’s superb biopic of Paan Singh Tomar told the stranger-than-fiction tale of a man who is driven to the army by poverty, becomes a great sportsman, and then pushed by humiliation to turn against the state he once represented.

Sonchiriya, though, is more invested than Paan Singh Tomar in paying cinematic tribute to some of the classic tropes of the Western: most obviously, the revenge narrative with a wronged man in pursuit of others, and the damsels-in-distress who must be rescued along the way. What I found exciting, though, is that these fictional characters and tropes inhabit a fully realised Indian universe that feels sociologically and linguistically bang-on. The cyclical Gujjar-Thakur battles of the Chambal region, and the historical entry of the Mallahs, once a caste of boatmen, into the gang wars; an arid rural landscape whose harsh dusty expanses feel part of its unforgiving poverty; a feudal world where women are merely the currency of male honour, set off against a heartfelt belief in local goddess shrines: all these the film evokes, if sometimes only glancingly.

It is gloriously shot and lit, with set-pieces that range from a shootout on a lamp-lit Diwali night to a woman singing on a boat on the Chambal river, evoking an almost mythical sense of heroes in exile. The ravines are put to great strategic effect in the action scenes, but also help to make Maan Singh and his not-so-merry men appear like the lone survivors of a disappearing world. Mostly we see the men walking tall on the outcrops (a heroic sort of framing which, to be fair, the filmmaker makes self-conscious reference in another scene featuring the lighting of a beedi); it is only when we first encounter a woman that the camera lowers itself into a gorge.

That scene, in which Bhumi Pednekar’s Indumati pulls down her ghoonghat before aiming a gun at the strange men who have appeared above, was one of many that drew informed sniggers from a largely male audience in a South Delhi multiplex. “Jeth lage hai uska,” went the snarky response in this case, gesturing to the fact that North Indian upper caste women veil themselves before their husband’s elder brothers. Earlier, when the youthful Thakur ‘hero’ Lakhna (played, interestingly, by Sushant Singh Rajput), steps back in fear at something he sees, a voice from the back said loudly: “Ghabra gayo?”. “Rajput hai,” sniggered his companion. 

Not all the laughter was sociological: when a brilliant delivery of “Bhaiyon aur behenon” by Manoj Bajpayee lifted the film out of its Emergency era setting, the whole hall erupted in chuckles. But Chaubey’s humour can be too dark for his audience: when the final familial crisis unfolded under a sign for ‘Parivar Niyojan’, I might have been the only one laughing.

I have mixed feelings about the film’s use of little girls as symbols of curse and benediction. But it is in turning the landscape into a symbolic terrain that Sonchiriya achieves something haunting. Varun Grover’s lyrics for ‘Saanp Khavega’ use snakes, mice and vultures to conjure a bloody cycle of life, in which each species will meet its match. If the maggoty snake at the film's start foretells death, a fortuitous escape from a gharial is a sign of long life. But like the golden bird of the title, the Great Indian Bustard, freedom in the ravines is both threatened and elusive.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Mar, 2019.

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.

Sujit Saraf: "Indians are cutthroat. [But] people in India are merely reacting to their environment, just as people abroad are."

THE CONFESSION OF SULTANA DAKU
Sujit Saraf
Penguin India
296 pp; Rs 399

Sujit Saraf, 39, is a space scientist who has worked at NASA. He is also the author of The Peacock Throne (2007). Saraf was schooled in Darjeeling and Delhi and studied engineering at IIT Delhi and the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Palo Alto with his American wife and their two children. He spoke to Trisha Gupta about Indians, politics and his new novel, The Confession of Sultana Daku.

You once said in an interview that people in Delhi may not be conscious of it, but just being a Dilliwala gives you a sense of relevance, even if you’re just a speck in the larger scheme of things.

I’ve lived in Delhi for seven years – school, IIT and later when I was teaching. But I am not a Dilliwala. I grew up in a small town, and Delhi was the first big city that I ever saw. And like every other country bumpkin, when I first arrived in Delhi, I was certainly very conscious of the fact that this was the capital of India – and the Prime Minister, the Parliament – these are within a mile of you. There is this certain air of power that non-Dilliwallas associate with Dilliwalas. And Dilliwalas don’t care. They take it for granted. And a certain arrogance creeps into their attitude or their speech, which they may not know the reason for – but I think it has something to do with being in the capital.

Would you say both your books are about people trying to acquire power?

Since I have spent a lot of time in India and a lot of time abroad, I am very conscious of how aggressive and cutthroat Indians are. How in any line for a bus, say, they will cut across and find a seat. I, of course, grew up in that environment, so I myself would do that. Then, after I had lived abroad for a few years, I became soft. (laughs) I’d come back to India and I’d be shocked. I’d be horrified, and I’d be contemptuous – ki kaise log hain. Then over the years, it hit me that people in India are merely reacting to their environment, just as people abroad are. Because there are ten people and five seats, they behave in this manner. The moment you double the number of seats or halve the number of people, this behaviour will change. Because I have seen similar behaviour in the most rarefied Western environments, when faced with a temporary shortage. That’s what The Peacock Throne was about – people in a society where the pie is very small, and people are doing what they can to get by, and to get a bigger piece of the pie. It was about the exercise of power in India where everyone is trying to exercise power over everyone else – to the extent possible. Of course, birth, wealth, luck and looks aid some people. But my villains are not people I dislike, and I have no heroes. My villains are victims too, and my victims are villains, when they get an opportunity. In The Peacock Throne, my people were small-time power-brokers, councillors in Chandni Chowk, MLAs, perhaps MPs: people who are concerned with the pursuit of petty power. That was the life they knew how to lead. Even the Bangladeshi boy abandoned by his parents – someone whom you would certainly consider a victim – does what he can to oppress, given the opportunity. He is a victim only because he hasn’t yet found a victim of his own. And the same goes for oppressors – they become vistims when someone more powerful comes along. It was, in my opinion, an amoral novel, not an immoral one. Of course, my characters do what would be considered immoral things. But when I first show a prostitute, she is beating the hell out of a customer. While the madam of the brothel isn’t exactly powerful – she is a victim too… so I was neither sympathizing with my victims not condemning my villains.

Unfortunately most reviewers seem to think that there are no good people in this novel, there is no place for romance, for tender relationships. They seemed to think, here’s this guy who lives in sunny California and this is his way of saying, ‘Look at this screwed up place. But in reality I thought what I was saying was, ‘Look at these people behaving how all human beings would, in similar circumstances’.

And with The Confession of Sultana Daku, did you set out to write a political book?

Now, anything written about three people is political. To that extent I suppose this is political, too. But one comment I do make in this novel – simply by not making it – is about nationalism. Sultana lived through the period from 1919 to 1924. Those are periods of political ferment: particularly the period of non-cooperation. So you would imagine that there would be a lot of talk of India versus the British. But there isn’t. There is a lot of talk of bhantu versus bania versus thakur, with the white man fully accepted as the natural master. Which in my opinion was the attitude of the vast majority of Indians. Sure, there were politically conscious Indians, and Gandhi had his educated followers, but the vast majority of people who followed him did so for the wrong reasons: they felt he could cure them by touching them, and so on.

Sultana’s enemies are not white people, they are banias and thakurs. Freddy is not, for Sultana, not a white colonial oppressor, he is simply a policeman trying to capture a daku – whose victims are thakurs and banias – other Indians. Also, he may have been sustaining an empire which is colonial, but this is not about a white man oppressing black or brown people. Of course towards the end of the novel, Sultana gives a speech to Freddy Young saying, ‘I am doing Gandhi’s work’. You are not meant to believe him entirely, of course.

But we have with the advantage of hindsight, projected nationalism onto that age. Inspite of the mass mobilization that Gandhi carried out, only a few million Indians truly understood the idea of an “India” in the 1920s. There is, in Sultana’s world, no such thing as India, there is no United Provinces – his country is Rohilkhand, which as far as he is concerned, should be ruled by bhantus – not banias and not thakurs and not even Gandhi. In the end, Sultana says to Freddy, after Gandhiji has kicked you out, we, bhantus, will kick Gandhiji out – because he is a bania. While white people are rulers, they are fully acceptable. Towards the end of the novel, Sultana even tells him, ‘I can talk to you like this, I cannot talk to a bania or thakur – they are enemies’.

How did you zero in on Sultana as a character?

While researching another novel, I came across two stray references to a daku named Sultana, who terrorised banias and thakurs, and was hanged. And when he was captured, Freddy Young was jeered by shopkeepers and by people, ki Sultana ko pakad liya. Within some ten years of his death, some three nautankis about him came into being. And in those he became a patriotic Robin Hood figure, while Freddy Young – who was an extremely competent police officer – became a colonialist oppressor. He appears as a fat white fool constantly saying, “Aur whiskey lao”. He was responsible for some 100 murders and rapes, and they recovered some 1.5 lakhs of property from his camp in 1924. So he was a ferocious daku. But in the nautankis, he is transformed into a golden-hearted guy who steals from the rich and gives to the poor. This fascinated me.

Why did you choose to write this novel as a first person narrative?

I didn’t want to have him be this fictitious Robin Hood, but nor did I want to paint an entirely unsympathetic character. So I had him tell his own story in the hope that he would come across as a sympathetic character.

Every human being, if you look deeply enough at his life, has extenuating circumstances. Or at least something that’ll soften the ferocity of his crime. In Sultana’s case, the extenuating circumstance is that he is a poor bhantu. Sultana was born in a jail and taught by everything in his background that he is a thief. Since 1871, the government passed a Criminal Tribes Act, who now number 25 million (2.5 crore) and designated them criminals. There is a passage in the novel where his grandfather tells him that all these gora sahibs come all the way from vilayat just to put you in jail? It was a cultural thing, but the British government institutionalised it.

Of course he is a chor – he may say he is a patriot – but I don’t want you to think too badly of him. And when I tell you a full story, you are more likely to sympathise with me. But his story is full of lies, exaggerations, and contradictions. He is full of the idea of bhantu blood, for example – but in the end he says, ‘Perhaps I am not so different from a bania’.

Although I am very conscious that my readers are much more likely to believe Samuel Pearce than Sultana: because you [the reader] are much more like Samuel Pearce culturally, than Sultana. You speak English, for one thing. But I didn’t want to make Pearce into a modern liberal. So of course, you don’t share Pearce’s prejudices, the prejudices of his age: like when he says there is no way a bhantu can be reformed, because there is crime in his blood. But when Sultana talks of how bullets went through him, miracles like that, you will dismiss him. The emotion that you are meant to sympathise with is Sultana’s – but the facts, mostly, are Pearce’s.

A biographical question: how do you reconcile your two careers? When did you start writing fiction?

Well, I have been thinking of myself as a novelist for many years. The world didn’t agree. I wrote a novel called Limbo in 1990, when I was still a student at IIT. I graduated in 1991. The novel was eventually published in 1994. It was your standard autobiographical book – it has a little boy growing up, that’s me. I wrote a very large number of books, some complete, some not. My computer is full of manuscripts in various stages of progress!

Basically, my official life pays the bills. If they paid me to be a novelist, I would be a novelist full-time…

You write novels in English, but plays in Hindi. Why?

Yes, that is true. So here’s the deal. I have always had deep misgivings about Indian writing in English, especially with the idea of an Indian novel with characters who would in real life be speaking in some other language having to speak in English (though I grew up reading the Rushdies and Amitav Ghoshes and so on, and admired them) So in Sultana’s case, for example, I devised this character, Pearce, who is transcribing Sultana’s words. It was a contrivance to avoid having Sultana speaking directly to us in English. At other times, one just writes dialogue in English and asks the reader to assume that this is spoken in Hindi. Hopefully if I use simple enough language and throw in a few Indian idioms, then you can convince yourself that actually, he is speaking in Hindi and the conversation is being reported to you in English. But in a play, when you have the characters actually having to mouth dialogues in English – the suspension of disbelief required is too much. Though my last two plays have been set where I live, so they have been in English.

So it’s not about your different relationships with these two languages?

I am reasonably fluent in Hindi, though perhaps a little more fluent in English. But it is not a matter of not knowing the Hindi word for something. The question is, does such a word even exist? A word that may be in common use in English may have a Hindi equivalent so arcane that even Hindi speakers don’t really use it. A dictionary word, if you know what I mean. So then I end up using a phrase, rather than the word – even if I know it.

I have actually written more in Hindi than in English. I’ve written novels in Hindi, too. I am not primarily an English writer or anything. It’s just that there is no Hindi literary market that I know of. There is a market for Manoj Pocket Books, cheesy romances, soft porn kind of stuff – an extension of Grihashobha, recipes for tarah tarah ke pakvaan, Bunai Visheshank and so on… But I can’t imagine a market for serious literature – like Sultana Daku, it’s a book I intend seriously. It’s not a frivolous thing.

Have you ever actually approached a Hindi publisher?

I have contacted Rajkamal once, about publishing a collection of my Hindi plays. They showed some mild interest, and then they didn’t. The conversation petered out.

Does your theatre company (in California) perform your plays?
Well, yes. Mostly we perform plays written by me. Though I once commissioned someone to stage one of the Sultana nautankis for my group: an expert on nautanki.

It is not a sophisticated genre. The presentation is atrocious. And it’s not theatrical, even. They just stand and sing. But the music is beautiful. When a nautanki person reads the script, he or she can tell how – in what meter (and associated tune) – certain sections need to be sung. It has non-musical portions, too: vahan likha hoga 'vartalap'.

And I believe in the 1920s and 1930s, the nautanki was extremely popular in the region where Sultana lived – though it was called saangeet, or swaang. And the most popular saangeet was called Nautanki Shehzadi, which I have Sultana watch in my novel. That particular saangeet became so popular that the entire genre became called Nautanki. But it is a genre full of comic relief. It is not meant to be taken seriously in terms of plot. It is innocent of nuance. (laughs)

But there must have been something that appealed to you about the nautankis, enough to make you want to stage one?

Well, like Sultana says at one point in the book, ‘What I have told you about my life that is what people will remember’. And whatever people remember becomes the truth. What is history? There may be police records that show otherwise, but if those who remembered Sultana saw him as a sweet Robin Hood, then that’s it. So I liked those nautankis because they represent that kind of truth about Sultana.

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 48 Dated December 05, 2009