How Benegal turned an '80s train ride into a journey of self-discoveries

For my weekly column in Mirror/TOI Plus, the seventh piece in a series on trains in Indian cinema: 

Shyam Benegal's thought-provoking television series Yatra gave the Indian Railways a stellar role, as the thread that stitches the country together

 

Yatra, the 15-episode series telecast on Doordarshan in 1986, may be the most dedicated depiction of the Indian train journey on screen. Directed by Shyam Benegal, the profoundly memorable show was based on a screenplay by his longtime screenwriter Shama Zaidi and theatre director and playwright Sunil Shanbag. It was sponsored by the Indian Railways, which gave Benegal the use of a 10-bogey train for the 50-day shoot.

Benegal decided to have the show unfold – consecutively -- on two of the longest journeys you could make by rail in India at the time: On the Himsagar Express, which ran from Kanyakumari, at the southernmost tip of India, to Jammu in the north; and the Tripura Express, which ran from west to east, from Jaisalmer to Guwahati. We begin the journey with the Himsagar Express, in Kanyakumari, where Lance Naik Gopalan Nair -- Om Puri playing a Malayali armyman posted in Jammu -- misses his train. Gopalan and his wife's frenetic taxi ride to catch up with the train at the next station (and when they miss it there, the next one) is one of many delightful narratorial devices in Yatra -- among other things, enabling Benegal's brilliant cinematographer Jehangir Chowdhury to shoot the train from the outside.

  

Inside, on the moving train, we meet a cast of characters as varied as the country -- many of them revealing to us an aspect of the country's troubles, small or large. The telling is gentle, but the stories are powerful. An old Marathi couple who have just lost their daughter to dowry murder find themselves taking care of a young Punjabi woman (a marvellous Neena Gupta) who is escaping ill-treatment by her mother-in-law and trying to get to her natal home in Jalandhar before she delivers a baby. A theatre troupe that has just lost a crucial actor to Bombay is trying to get the play back on track before getting to Delhi for a performance scheduled at the National School of Drama. An ageing, unwell Hindu ascetic is being accompanied to Jammu by his devoted disciple (played by the wonderful Mohan Gokhale) because he wants to see the Himalayas one last time. A Muslim husband who has been wanting his doctor wife to give up her medical practice finds himself unexpectedly affected by helping her deliver a baby.

As a child of the 1980s, I remember being entranced by Yatra, recognising its difference from the cinematic content around me without being able to name that difference. The beautifully-captured train journey allows you to travel vicariously through the country. And many of the things that Benegal brought into the narrative were not things that found space in mainstream, popular culture. As the train moves from the Andhra region towards the jungles of Madhya Pradesh, for instance, we are introduced to an activist for minimum wages for adivasi labourers who has attracted the ire of landlords in Nellore district. Now a whisteblower on the run, Venugopal is taking some documents to Delhi – but there's a bunch of goons who know he is on the train. Even to a child who knew nothing of the world, it was somehow clear that these goons – perfectly ordinary looking, mostly unspeaking, not particularly large or muscular – were more dangerous than the henchmen the villain sent out in Hindi cinema. Even today, it is chilling to watch the scene where Venugopal gets dragged out of the train while everyone else is distracted by a theft.

There is a lovely unpredictability to Yatra's narrative, however, in which such moments of gravity and fear can segue into humour and joy – and sometimes the opposite. And as often happens when you spend some time together, people you might have dismissed at first glance begin to seem human, vulnerable, perhaps even worthy of admiration. Benegal achieves some of this empathy through Om Puri's Gopalan, who serves as a conscientious but opinionated narrator. Thus the ailing swamiji, whom Gopalan thinks is all talk, turns out to have once fought in Subhash Bose's Indian National Army. The theatre troupe, whom the Armyman dismisses as having no serious work, is actually the only group of people who are working throughout the train ride. Their frazzled stage manager (the dependably superb Harish Patel) seems like a drunken buffoon who can't possibly be coached to act – but after an accident brings him to his senses, the whole compartment watches him transform into Ashwatthama.

But as in life, so on the Indian Railways: Everyone has their own journey to complete. The characters get on the train, learn something of each other's lives, and then part when their destinations arrive. Yet something meaningful is often forged in that fortuitous intersection of time and space. A young man heading to a job interview becomes besotted by a pretty young co-passenger, wooing her silently in the presence of her oblivious parents while making up verbose dream sequences with her in his head. The Marathi couple are so clearly taking care of the pregnant Neena Gupta that the railway doctor and others constantly mistake them for her parents. Later, Om Puri's Gopalan, trying to follow up with the railway authorities on the disappeared Venugopal, is asked the same question. “Aapke koi rishtedaar thhe?” Puri pauses, and his silence contains multitudes. “No,” he responds quietly. “We only met on the train.”

Published in Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune Mirror/TOI Plus, 30/29 May 2021.

The faults in our stars - II

The second part of a two-part Mumbai Mirror column (published in August 2020).

What Indian Matchmaking doesn’t tell us about arranged marriage, and popular Hindi cinema increasingly does.

A scene from Motichoor Chaknachoor, where Nawazuddin Siddiqui reprises his 'permission' scene from GoW in a new context

One of the unaddressed problems with Indian Matchmaking, as I suggested last week, is that it seeks to club too many disparate worlds under Sima Aunty’s umbrella – leaving some out in the wind and weather. But if you think about it, many of the candidates with whom Sima Taparia has the least success – Aparna the opinionated lawyer, Nadia the hopeful dance trainer, Vyasar the good-humoured schoolteacher, Rupam the divorced single mother – are Indians in the West, for whom she is but one of a bouquet of options. Taparia’s claim of custom-made choices may seem a great option to these people bruised by past relationships and the dating game, but they also know can always go back to meeting people online or off-: to non-Indian matchmaking, if you like. This is true even when they want a partner from a particular community: Rupam, for instance, manages to find a Sikh American man on Bumble who fits better with her familial priorities than Taparia’s prospects. Also, though the explosion in dating apps and marriage websites is kept rather obviously to the sidelines of IM’s India-set narratives, the reality is that Pradhyuman in Mumbai and Ankita in Delhi, too, have many options besides the mythified personal matchmaker.

Taparia’s inability to match most of her clients on the show ends up making her look foolish, even redundant. But it’s a set-up designed to fail. No lone matchmaker, no matter how well-networked, can possibly provide the range and variety of prospects needed to cater to IM's selection of clients: so distant in location, age, social and educational background. It’s no accident that the only success on IM is the engagement of Akshay, whose mother is the real mover on both marital deadline and choice of bride. And while the show doesn’t vocalise it, the way Akshay and Radhika’s families greet each other with “Jai Shree Krishna” suggests membership of the same religious sub-community.

In Mundhra’s 2017 film on arranged marriages, A Suitable Girl, all three young women she tracks get married: two within their communities, and the third to someone off Shadi.com, only after failing for years to find a match within her caste. Meanwhile, other than Rupam’s dad wanting only a Sikh husband for her (interesting, given that her sister's husband is African American), IM mostly elides the biggest factor in real-life Indian matchmaking: caste and community. The ‘reality show’ also leaves out an even more ubiquitous vector of Indian arranged marriages: money.

These realities that reality TV apparently can't deal with appear constantly in our filmi fiction. The Hindi film and OTT industry has, in recent years, revelled in weddings as sites of ugly social revelations. From Mira Nair's 2001 Monsoon Wedding (MW), to Bittoo Sharma and Shruti Kakkar in 2010’s Band Baja Baraat to the rather posher Tara Khanna and Karan Mehra in 2019's hit OTT series Made in Heaven (MiH), our fictional content is positively chock-a-block with the planning of weddings. Weddings, as anyone who's organised one knows, are not just logistical nightmares but sites of social drama. Runaway brides have been with us since DDLJ, but there have many more since (MW, Tanu Weds Manu, Three Idiots, Shuddh Desi Romance to name just a few). More recent crises have included secretly gay grooms (MiH, also Shubh Mangal Zyada Savdhan), cross-cultural wedding negotiations (Vicky Donor, 2 States), an immature groupie bride who sleeps with a celebrity right before her suhaag raat and an uber-genteel IAS groom emerging as cowardly dowry-seeker (both MiH).

In many of these depictions, comedy works to make the medicine go down. At least two films -- Habib Faisal’s Daawat-e-Ishq (2014) and Dolly Ki Doli (2015) -- have featured trickster-brides who dupe the men lining up to marry them. What screenwriters likely depend on to make these heroines remain likeable is the commonly understood fact that marriage in India is a market, and a market loaded so unfairly in favour of the boy’s side that the girls are being driven to illegalities.

That Indian weddings are social and financial negotiations is becoming clearer and clearer in Hindi films -- and any deceptions at the time of signing can later make the contract radd. In Bala (2019), the Tiktok-famous bride (Yami Gautam) marries Ayushmann Khurrana for 'love', but when she learns his floppy hair comes off at night, her love turns to be skin-deep, too. In Motichoor Chaknachoor, Athiya Shetty’s tall, fair Annie (urf Anita) believes Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Pushpinder is employed in Dubai. When it turns out, post-shadi, that the Dubai job is long gone, Annie’s only reason for marrying – Pushpinder or anyone else – crumbles, and suddenly she can only ses that he's shorter than her, and darker.

Motichoor has been much berated for its political incorrectness. Indeed, the fat-shaming of Pushpinder’s (Nawazuddin) first marital prospect feels like a horribly unfortunate throwback to our Tuntun-obsessed childhoods, and there’s an exasperated slap he delivers that he never verbally apologises for, but his non-verbal attempts to make up for it felt more persuasive to me than Thappad’s. And I was as impressed as Annie by his dowry-rejecting stance. 

But what’s refreshing about these comic plots is that they’re honest about Indian marriages, showing them as exactly the fat-shaming, skin-colour-obsessed, dowry-driven transactions that they are -- but also as the inescapable structure within which most Indians must seek whatever agency they hope to have. Even the conventionally attractive and wonderfully sassy Annie in Motichoor doesn’t feel free to actually refuse an arranged marriage – so her only leverage is in rejecting rishtas. And with no other way to see the world, she decides a foreign-located husband might as well be her ticket to ride. Age, looks, jobs and dowries are openly treated as chips to bargain with -- but how else is one to play if arranged marriage is the only game in town?

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30 Aug 2020.

The big, bad Indian wedding

Today's Mirror column:

Even as we (and much of our cinema) continue to bask in the reflected revelry of the band-baaja-baaraat, a few films are beginning to suggest that something is rotten in the state of the shaadi.

When we first meet the eponymous heroine of Dolly ki Doli, she seems sweet as saccharine, pushing her Jat boyfriend away with convincing good-girl-ness as he moves in for a kiss, even as she bats her eyelashes jauntily and eggs him on to confront her ex-army dad. Within twenty minutes or less, the full family drama has unfolded, the shaadi has taken place, and the groom and his parents are waking groggily up to a house emptied of all its valuables. Because Dolly is not what she seems - she may tailor herself perfectly to play the part of the sundar susheel agyakari bride, mildly tweaked to fit different families, but she is actually on the Delhi Police 'Wanted' list under the tag of 'Looteri Dulhan'. 

The film starts well but gets repetitive, Sonam Kapoor tries but really just isn't capable of providing interiority for a complicated character like this one, and there are liberal loopholes in the plot. But what I'm interested in here is the fact of why the idea of a bride-who-wasn't feels like such a particularly good one. 

Nearly a hundred years after Margaret Mitchell created Scarlett O'Hara, there's still something powerfully subversive about a girl smart enough to reel in the boys hook, line and sinker, simply by letting them think they're smarter. But what makes Dolly's triumphs so astonishingly satisfying is watching her sheath her claws as the ostensibly obedient, repressed creature a good bahu is meant to be, only to let it rip at the mummyjis when the time comes. And unlike real life, or a saas-bahu serial, there isn't half a lifetime to wait: in every case, payback time is just the morning after. 

But wait, they haven't done anything to Dolly, so what is she paying them back for? Aren't these boys and their families just innocent dupes? Ah, therein lies the rub. The success of Dolly ki Doli, like Habib Faisal's Daawat-e-Ishq (2014), depends on it being commonly understood that marriage in India is a market, and a market loaded so heavily and unfairly in favour of the bride-takers that the bride-givers are being driven to illegalities. 

Daawat-e-Ishq established the unpleasantness of Indian bride-takers with its very first scene: the sour-faced mother-in-law-to-be demanding unpayable amounts of dowry, even as the grotesquely out-of-line son quizzes his prospective bride (Parineeti Chopra) about her sexual experience. 

To our great joy, Chopra's feisty Gullu kicks that lot out of her house, and several other arranged marriage parties. But when a boy she's actually in love with turns out to be no better than the rest, Gullu decides that hereon, she's going to be the one doing the duping. This leads up to the film's most entertaining sequence, as the lower middle class mall salesgirl and her law clerk father (Anupam Kher) pretend to be a Dubai-returned heiress and her millionaire dad - fictitious prize bait, in effect, for greedy dowry-seekers. 

Faisal's film succumbed to a love story as its resolution, pitting the angry-at-the-world Gullu against the genuinely in-love-with-her Taru (Aditya Roy Kapur) and forcing Gullu to melt. Dolly ki Doli doesn't do that, but it does serve up a half-baked back-story about having been stood up by a bridegroom as part-explanation for Dolly's life as a trickster. There is a faint echo here of Queen, another film from last year where being ditched at the wedding mandap ends up being the trigger for a till-then-innocent young woman to turn her life around. 

Queen is probably the most well-conceived of these films, perhaps because it doesn't set out to have a sting in its tail -- and so we're not disappointed when all Kangana Ranaut's Rani does to her prospective mother-in-law is to tell her she isn't coming along to join the stuffy life of her stuffy household anytime soon. 

Dolly, unfortunately, is made to mouth much more radical sounding lines as "I'd rather be in a real jail than in your shaadi ka jail", which Sonam Kapoor doesn't quite make believable, even when the film steers successfully clear of a romantic cop-out ending. 

Daawat-e-Ishq deprived us of an individual villain in the end, by gifting Gullu a young wealthy man who loves her for herself. But like in Dolly, there was some uncomfortable laughter in the cinema as people watched their money-grabbing, son-inflating, bride-taker selves held up to ridicule. Whatever one thinks of the ethics of Gullu and Dolly, Hindi cinema is onto a malaise that's real. And laughter might be what makes the medicine go down.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Jan 2015.

Of Dowries and Denouements

Yesterday's Mumbai Mirror column:

Dowry had almost vanished from our cinema, even as it continues to rock real lives. Daawat-e-Ishq takes on a messily difficult subject, and despite many misses, hits upon some inconvenient truths.

Parineeti Chopra and Anupam Kher pretending to be Dubai-returned millionaires in Habib Faisal's Daawat-e-Ishq 

The trailers of Daawat-e-Ishq were intent on making us believe it was a film about food and love. The film, on the other hand, is intent on making us believe that it is a film about dowry. Depending on how sympathetic you are to the imagined pressures on a fine filmmaker like Habib Faisal (and how susceptible you are to the imagined pleasures of a fine biryani), you might accept Daawat-e-Ishq as both these things -- or neither. 

If you intend to watch the film, this paragraph contains spoilers. Parineeti Chopra stars as Gulrez "Gullu" Kadir, a Hyderabadi "school topper" who works as a shoe salegirl and dreams of training in the US as a shoe designer. Gullu and her court clerk father (a marvellously subtle Anupam Kher) spend the film's first hour or so dealing with the humiliating dowry demands of largely unsuitable boys. Then Gullu devises a two-birds-with-one-stone scheme, with which she will both fulfil her American dream and take revenge on the male species. Father and daughter assume fake identities as Dubai-based millionaires, and head to Lucknow to find a rich bakra whom Gullu will first marry and then file a dowry harassment case against, under Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code. But the lamb to the slaughter is restaurant-owner Tariq "Taru" Haider, a rather winsome fellow who turns out not to be the money-minded brat they'd set out to phansao... you get the drift. 

In the much-maligned 1980s, when filmmakers did decide to make a film about dowry, at least they didn't beat around the bush. Anwar Pasha's Dulha Bikta Hai (1982), for instance, cast a woebegone Raj Babbar as a cash-strapped elder brother who marries off two sisters without dowries by pretending that he will marry the sisters of both grooms. When the hapless girls are turned out of their marital homes, Babbar must raise money by selling himself as a groom. It is a heavy-handed drama with a bizarre denouement, but as with many other 1980s films, DBH does not shy away from depicting the nastiness and violence of the Indian family. One sasur maligns his daughter-in-law's morals and beats her up with a cane; another mother-in-law is actually shown trying to set the daughter-in-law on fire. Of course, we were as invested in happy endings then as now, but filmmakers seemed to trust us with digesting some brutal stuff along the way.

This seems no longer to be the case, at least not in mainstream Bollywood. Think back to the Hindi movie weddings you've watched in the last few years. Even if one sets aside love marriages, where let's assume dowry plays no role, we've had quite a variety of views of arranged marriages, from wedding planners (Band Baaja Baaraat) to the paid fake baraati (Shuddh Desi Romance). Intentionally or not, these films provide a pretty good sense of the economics of weddings. But dowry almost never comes up. (I'm not counting the ridiculous -- eg. Humpty Sharma ki Dulhaniya, with an entire plot driven by Alia Bhatt's quest for a Rs 5 lakh wedding lehnga.) 

Before Daawat-e-Ishq, I can think of one film this year that dealt with dowry: coincidentally another Alia Bhatt starrer, Two States. There Bhatt got to do a bit of grandstanding as the feisty TamBrahm who shows the money-minded Punjabis how not to behave. I'm all for showing down dowry-seekers, but making it seem that dowry figures only among rapacious Punjabis belies the fact that dowry harassment cases are high (and rising) all across India, including Tamil Nadu. (In 2013 alone, Tamil Nadu recorded 118 dowry deaths, and 6,008 women in the state filed harassment petitions against their spouses with district collectors, police and dowry prohibition officers, under the Dowry Prohibition Act.) 

Daawat-e-Ishq doesn't have that problem. As a new-age Muslim social (the second this year, after the charming Bobby Jasoos), it seems keen to both create a recognizably Muslim universe and simultaneously have it pass as pan-religious. So, for instance, we have a whole film about dowry among Muslims -- like BJ, D-e-I chooses not to have non-Muslim characters -- without any mention of meher: the mandatory gift of money or property given to the bride by the groom in a Muslim wedding. The meher can be a token amount, or it can be a significant sum, but either way, director Habib Faisal appears to want not to distract audiences with such complicated facts. 

One wishes Faisal, whose previous work includes the middle class comic gem Do Dooni Chaar and the flawed but memorable Ishaqzaade, wasn't trying so hard to be uncomplicated. Because the dowry issue isn't. For one, dowry takers and dowry-givers aren't as clearly separable from each other as we'd like -- as Dulha Bikta Hai's 'exchange' solution showed, the same family might be a chest-thumping recipient for their son, and revert to supplication when it comes to their daughter. All of society is in on the game. 

Daawat-e-Ishq tries to take a more consciously woman-centric position, grounded in a view of our society as skewed against women. The film's understanding of 498A is muddled, and tragically misinforms its audience. But by showing the frustrated ladkiwale consciously choosing to abuse a legal provision created to safeguard women against domestic violence (including but not limited to dowry-related harassment), it unwittingly reveals how the law is often treated as another weapon in the sad battlefield of Indian marriage.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Sep 2014