The train ride as a technological fantasy

My TOI Plus/ Mumbai Mirror column:

In popular 1970s Hindi cinema, the train became central to an imagined world of infrastructural achievement and finesse. Sadly, we're still content to live in the dream.

Amitabh Bachchan prepares to get off a train in a screenshot from Parwana (1971)

In the 1960s and 1970s, the train in Indian cinema starts to appear as a space of sophistication and luxury. Whether in 'art films' like Satyajit Ray's Nayak (which I mentioned last week), or a full-on commercial Hindi film like the racy Rajesh Khanna starrer The Train, the upper class railway compartment represents high standards of comfort and hospitality. This is true despite the fact that Ray, ever the realist, has a senior Calcutta executive in Nayak express annoyance that he can't even get a beer on the AC Deluxe Express (precursor of the Poorva Express, the train between Calcutta and Delhi before the Rajdhani Express came along three years later in 1969). (The fellow isn't entirely to blame for hoping, given how much the train pantry car echoes the atmosphere at one of Calcutta's Anglophone clubs, where no evening would flow without alcohol.) He gets a Coke instead, though the waiter only comprehends when told “Coca Cola”. Still, the service on these filmi trains is polite, English-comprehending and very classy -- restaurant-like, in an era when few people ate out often. There is also a degree of fascination with waiting rooms and railway restaurants: places you could only access as a passenger on the long-distance train network. The murders on the Calcutta Mail in The Train hinge on one passenger being seduced away from the coupe by the prospect of a meal at the railway restaurant with a sashaying Nanda.

MK Raghavendra and others have marked that the train in the 1950s and 60s often mapped onto the idea of India – such films as Bimal Roy's 1955 Devdas, whose nationwide journeying hero I have mentioned in another context, but also nationalist films with train songs depicting children: 'Aao bacchon tumhe dikhayein jhaanki Hindustan ki' from Jagriti (1954) and 'Nanha-munna rahi hoon, desh ka sipahi hoon' from Mehboob Khan's Son of India (1962).

It is true that even in those decades, trains were occasionally linked to crime: murder in Shart and smuggling in Aar Paar (both 1954), not to mention the goofy Half Ticket (1962) with Kishore Kumar as the comic hero who becomes an unsuspecting mule for stolen diamonds on a train to Bombay.

But as Akshay Manwani suggested in a 2015 article, it was really in the 1970s, with films like The Train, Shor (1972) and Do Anjaane (1976) that the thriller element begins to dominate Hindi cinema's portrayal of trains. Speed, danger and the accident ally with the sense of danger that comes with being isolated in a train compartment, often miles away from the nearest outpost of the law. You can easily kill a man on a train – or, as in Do Anjaane, push him off it – with no witness, and the police will only arrive much later, in another place. The moving train is a world unto itself.

For me, though, the film that exemplifies this marvellous sense of excitement about trains comes right at the start of decade: the 1971 Parwana, directed by Jyoti Swaroop (who also made Padosan and ought to be much better known). It is perhaps best remembered for Amitabh Bachchan's performance as one of Hindi cinema's earliest jealous lovers: his tall, serious Kumar is scarily believable as the brooding artist whose romantic obsession crosses over into violent vengefulness. But it also displays some unusual detailing for a commercial Hindi film of its time, not just in its liberal characters, but with regard to things like characters' surnames, dates and place-names. The camera often zooms into print on screen, from a wedding cards to a 'No Photography Allowed' sign at Nagpur Airport (yes, cheeky!).

The train-related plot on which the film hinges involves a court case in which the wrong man and the heroine's true love (Navin Nischol) is charged for a murder that Amitabh Bachchan -- the jilted lover and real murderer – apparently could not have committed. Why? Because he was on a train at the time. The film's revelatory flashback sequence – with a stylish Bachchan striding through streets and stations and staircases in his coat, dark glasses and muffler (here the detailing goes for a toss, since this is meant to be Bombay in August) – shows just how he did it (spoiler alert). He used the train – but he also used a plane.

Watching Parwana in the midst of India's horrifyingly mishandled Covid-19 second wave, when the breakdown of our sorely limited health, transport and digital infrastructure is on full display, I was struck by the film's deep belief in functioning infrastructure. Parwana's murder plot is planned and executed flawlessly because -- in the film – trains run exactly on time, flights land and take off smoothly, taxis and public telephones can be found exactly when and where they are needed. The reference to television in a light early scene is as much a part of this vision – remember this is 1971, and TV transmission had not even reached Bombay till 1972.

Parwana, like many Hindi train films of the 1970s, is really a fantasy about technology and infrastructure. Tragically, our tendency to believe in the fantasy of our technological achievements remains alive and well in 2021, at the great human cost of reality.

Published in TOI Plus/ Mumbai Mirror, 16 May 2021

The medical missionary

My Mirror column, the first in a series on films about doctors:

V Shantaram’s 1946 film about the legendary Dr Dwarkanath Kotnis sheds an odd light on the contemporary India-China moment and our pandemic year

2020 has been a year of medical heroism. It might be a good time to remember a heroic doctor from a very different period in the history of India and the world: Dr Dwarkanath Kotnis, whose valiant medical service in Communist China from 1938 to 1942 is still enshrined in that country's public memory. On August 28, even as Chinese and Indian soldiers faced off in a border conflict that remains far from being resolved, it was reported that a statue of Dr Kotnis was to be unveiled outside a medical school in North China named after him: the Shijiazhuang Ke Dihua Medical Science Secondary Specialised School. (‘Ke Dihua’ is Kotnis’s Chinese name.)

Kotnis is not often remembered in contemporary India, but barely four years after his death, his life and work were made the subject of a film by the great Indian director V Shantaram. Free on YouTube as well as available to stream on one subscription-based platform for world cinema, Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani makes for interesting viewing for many reasons.

Released in 1946, a year before independence, Shantaram’s film commemorates Kotnis's as the ideal nationalist life: a life led – and lost – in the service of the nation. As one of the rousing patriotic songs from the film’s rather wonderful lilting soundtrack put it: “Jaan dene ka hi naam hai zindagi (Giving up your life is what living is really about)”. A film called The Immortal Tale of Dr Kotnis was clearly not shying away from either myth-making or propaganda.

What is fascinating to me, though, is that Kotnis’s nationalism is presented as what leads the youthful doctor to another country, where he helped their war effort. Heeding a Congress leader’s call for Indians to come to China’s aid during the Second Sino-Japanese War (Mao Zedong had apparently made such a request of Jawaharlal Nehru), the young graduate from Mumbai’s Seth GS Medical College decided to join a five-member medical mission to China in 1938. Watching Shantaram’s film in 2020, it is impossible not to be struck by the way Indian nationalism in the 1940s could be so naturally folded into an internationalist milieu of cooperation between what were then two poor Asian countries in a still-colonised world. (Some villains do exist: fittingly for a post-Second World War Indian film, it’s the Japanese, who are called ‘shaitan’ but shown as buffoons, in the almost classic tradition of the war movie.)

Scripted by the great KA Abbas, Dr Kotnis opens with the handsome young doctor (played by Shantaram himself) returning from Mumbai to announce to his shocked parents that he has just pledged to serve in China. His ageing father, caught off-guard while proudly displaying the clinic he’d had made for young Dwarka in their hometown of Solapur, has a teary turnaround. It’s a remarkable propagandist scene, where Shantaram and Abbas take the figure of the obedient son and finesse the resonant Indian idea of filial duty into duty to the motherland. The sacrifice is dual, because Dwarka’s father too must give up his ‘budhaape ki laathi’. The Hindi phrase about children as the support of one’s old age is propped up by an actual laathi that Dwarka presents to his father – which falls symbolically from the old man’s hand as his son boards the ship to China. The dramatic foreboding has a reason: the father will die without seeing his son again, and Dwarka will never return.

Shantaram cast himself as Kotnis, and the actress Jayashree – who had become his second wife in 1941 – as Kotnis’s assistant Qing Lan (pronounced Ching Lan), whom he married and had a son with. The relationship between them is tenderly depicted, though it doffs its hat quite obviously to both nationalist propaganda and Hindi film romance. For instance, Qing Lan first meets the good doctor disguised as a boy, and there must be some singing and dancing before love can be declared. But it is striking for a mainstream Indian film in the 1940s to have a foreign, Chinese, heroine, who wears trousers and a shirt all through (except a sweetly comic interlude when she attempts to wear a sari during their wedding) and is as deeply devoted to her work as her husband is to his. It helps that Vasant Desai’s lively, memorable soundtrack is so superbly integrated into the narrative: I loved Jayashree’s ‘Main hoon nanhi nayi dulhan’, though it is clearly not a traditional song sung by Chinese brides, and one of the film’s enduring images for me is the sight of the good doctor watching lovingly as his pregnant Chinese wife sings a rousing song to lead the Red Army to its next destination: “Ghulam nahi tu, josh mein aa / Yeh desh hai tere, hosh mein aa”.

The Chinese-Indian relationship and the internationalist iteration of patriotism apart, the film is remarkable for the way that the medical profession is celebrated. Dr Kotnis’s heroism is no less integral to the national war effort than the Red Army general whose camp he joins – he is captured by the Japanese, endangers his own life to create a vaccine for a plague that breaks out among the Chinese population, and succumbs to epilepsy, but after having saved the general from certain death of his bullet wounds. An internationalist nationalism that talks about saving lives, rather than merely laying down one’s own or killing one's enemies: that's propaganda almost worth having.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Sep 2020

Shelf Life: High Heels, Parkar-Polka and Other Dressing Dilemmas

My Shelf Life column for June 2020:

Clothes mark the lines between modest and modish in theatre actor Vandana Mishra’s memoir, translated from Marathi by Jerry Pinto

Thespian Vandana Mishra, née Sushila Lotlikar, was born on January 26, 1927, years before her birthday became known as India's Republic Day. Some of the loveliest parts of her vivid memoir, I, the Salt Doll, unfold in a time before that – her 1930s childhood in a chawl, her initiation into 1940s Bombay theatre. In her recounting, from the very start, her life seems like a stream flowing alongside many others, into the vast sea that was India.

The Mumbai of Mishra’s childhood held open the doors to that India, in all its glorious variety. And clothes were crucial to parsing that city. The Parsi ladies little Sushila admired in their “georgette saris and blouses without sleeves”, were clearly marked off from her teachers at the Lamington Road Municipality Boys and Girls School, who all wore nine-yard sarees – but “differently from the Saraswats”. Dr. Saibai Ranade, her mother's gynaecologist employer, wears the more modern five-yard sari, always in pastel shades: yellow, blue or pink. The girls wore frocks when very young, but shifted to “parkar-polka: a blouse and long skirt” in the fifth standard. Girls' clothes changed again at puberty: “By the time a girl was 14 or 15, she would move from parkar-polka and would be swaddled in saris forever after.”

Clothes in Mishra’s telling always mark the categories people are born into – gender, age, caste, community. But they must not mark you, the individual. If anything, they are a way of not standing out. Her municipal school has no uniform, but she says that “you couldn't tell the rich kids from the poor ones”. There is remembered beauty in the collective sight of clothing: the chawl's young women dancing in their parkar-polkas are like “a series of yellow, green and jamun-purple fountains...” But individual clothing is rarely mentioned. If it is, it must have a purpose beyond vanity. Her Aai's (Marathi for mother) silk sari is worn for ritual purity. Young Sushila's own outfits get mentioned only when marking a first: her first parkar-polka, “Dharwadi khunn with a broad border”, and her first sari, “pink with a green border”, bought for two rupees.

Two rupees was standard for an ordinary (cotton) saree, as against fourteen for a long-lasting “but flashy” georgette one. Flashiness was a constant danger—one that the middle-class girl-child internalised early. Sushila once tells a classmate's mother she is wearing too much powder. She gets slapped for rudeness, but the school's Pathan guard comes to her rescue. That moral front against make-up, in which little Sushila and the Pathan are on the same side, is a funny story. But it presages the book's repeated emphasis on modesty, on not dressing up, not attracting attention. It is boundary work that only gets exacerbated when the middle-class Marathi girl finds herself in a space meant for professionally dressing up: the theatre. 

Mishra came from a Konkani family of Saraswat Brahmins. When she was two, her accountant father died suddenly. Sushila's Aai – clearly a remarkable woman – refused to stay in the village, shave her head or stop educating her daughters. The family returned to Bombay. Aai did a midwifery course, and began educating three children on her nurse's salary. Then tragedy struck again: a horrible acid attack which kept Aai three months in hospital. Once home, she needed care. With her elder sister in Pune training to be a nurse, and her elder brother about to matriculate, it was Sushila who left school.

There is a powerful simplicity to the way Mishra describes these momentous events. One wonders if there was an equal simplicity to life itself. During her Aai's recovery, for instance, neighbours simply take over the family's upkeep, like others did when her father died. The family then scrapes by on savings, until an opportunity knocks: the chance to join Parshwanath Altekar's Little Theatre Group, at ₹30 a month.

Within months, on Nov 1, 1942, Sushila was asked to fill in for an actress who had stalked out, and found herself in a Mama Warerkar play. She was a hit, and soon became an actress of some repute on the Gujarati stage, and later, in the city's Marwadi theatre.

Suddenly, she is accosted everywhere: an admiring tailor offers to make her four blouses for free; a shoe-man offers her sandals. These are good working men. But there is also the local lech-cum-astrologer who offers to build her career, wooing her with an “expensive sari”. In the narrative of middle-class self-preservation, Sushila must throw that 'gift' in his face. She does.

But the real turnaround comes when she begins to wear high-heeled sandals “which made a tick-tock sound”. The chawl's caretaker tells her mother she is “walking around with a lot of pride”. Her mother warns her, she switches to Kolhapuri slippers, and simplicity is enforced.

In Krishna Sobti's autobiographical Hindi novel A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There, another young middle-class woman born in the 1920s is forced to abandon her education midway. Sobti's narrator recalls quarrelling with her hostel roommate over her high-heeled sandals “clacking about at night”. But in the book's last scene, as she walks to a job interview, it is “the click of her heels” on the asphalt that bolsters her confidence. Sometimes it is nice to feel like you stand out.

This column was first published in The Voice of Fashion, 18 Jun 2020.

Fictional motherlands, real relationships

My Mirror column:

Some recent fictions illustrate how totalitarianism thrives on turning on real people into mythical enemies – and pitting an attachment to family and friends against the love of an imaginary nation

A still from the 2019 film Jojo Rabbit

A third of the way through the sadly aborted Leila, the series’ protagonist Shalini (Huma Qureshi) finally manages to trace her lost daughter to a school that looks like a prison. Her fake ID gets her past the gun-toting security-men into a cavernous grey interior, where stiffly-dupatta-ed girls are learning the call-and-response of new nationhood. “Hum kaun hain?” demands the teacher. “Aryavarta ke nanhe sipaahi!” comes the response. As Shalini’s anxious gaze travels along the children and finds Leila’s familiar features, her face uncreases into a joyful smile. Almost unconsciously, her feet begin to move towards the child she thought she might never see again.

But is this really the same child as the one who was abducted from her parents’ arms, only two years before? “My name is not Leila, my name is Vijaya,” the little girl says to a stunned Shalini. She pronounces the words carefully, like she’s learnt them by rote. The scene’s emotional kicker comes when a big car draws up, with a woman in it that Shalini knows well from a previous life, and Vijaya runs to embrace her – this time, with an unrehearsed “Mummy”. But as the finale of Leila makes indubitably clear, that woman is only a placeholder. The entity that has really replaced Shalini is so powerful that there is no way a mere human even try to compete - the nation-state. To quote the slightly dubious gendering chosen by Leila’s makers, “Tum meri maa nahi ho. Aryavarta meri maa hai.”

The idea of a nationalism that pits children against their parents is one that has appeared in another Indian webseries, Ghoul, where the ultimate betrayal of a parent is committed by an adult protagonist who has tragically learnt to trust the nation-state over and above family. I was reminded of these shows this week, as I watched Taika Waititi’s 2019 film Jojo Rabbit, currently free to stream, in which a single mother (Scarlett Johansson) has to deal with her only child being indoctrinated by a state she isn't exactly enamoured of.

Instead of a chilling dystopian future, though, Jojo Rabbit takes us on a madcap fantasy ride into the past. Ten-year-old Johannes Betzler is as cuddly a protagonist as you could ask for. He is also an incipient Nazi, who spends a lot of time talking to his imaginary best friend Adolf: a goofball version of Hitler who's alternately sulky and encouraging. Right from the opening sequence, which splices its fictional boy hero's frenzied self-motivation for a Jungvolk training weekend with historical black and white footage of Hitler's screaming youthful fans to the Beatles iconic anthem I Wanna Hold Your Hand, you know this film isn't traditional fare. Jojo's repeated 'Heil Hitlers', getting louder and crazier as he bursts out of his front door and careens in faux-aeroplane mode through his small-town streets, aren’t scary so much as ridiculous. The same could be said of the cast of characters that have assembled to turn the town's little boys into men and little girls into women – the hipflask-swigging Captain K, demoted from active wartime service by the avoidable loss of an eye, and the pudding-faced Fraulein Rahm, who seems a little young to have had “eighteen children for Germany”.

Waititi ups the tenor of ridiculousness even further when it comes to Nazi indoctrination against Jews. The descriptions proffered by the camp leaders, complete with chalk sketches, reminded me of Roald Dahl's checklist for witches in The Witches. Jews look deceptively like human beings, but they have horns under their hair and scales on their bodies and they smell like Brussels sprouts.

But of course, the film's whole point is that Jojo – like the entire brainwashed German nation -- believes in this mythology. So when, in a nice doffing-of-the-hat to Anne Frank, a teenaged Jewish girl turns out to be hiding behind the wall of his dead sister’s room, Jojo is baffled when she doesn’t fit the criteria. In return for keeping her secret, Jojo demands of Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) a detailed insider's account of Jewishness, taking notes as she speaks. Their evolving relationship lets us walk the tightrope fantasy does, between wish-fulfilment and danger. An illustrated ‘expose’ full of ‘facts' about Jews, fictitious letters from a boyfriend who may or may not exist – these are the flip side of a real world in which Elsa can only survive if she can successfully parade her dead classmate’s papers.But it is in Jojo’s relationship with his mother Rosie that the film's heart lies. Johansson is pitch-perfect as the single mum who can blacken her face and turn into an imaginary ‘Daddy’ to indulge her little boy’s demand for his missing father – but who also refuses to let him avert his eyes from the bodies of ‘traitors’ strung up in the town square. She is happy to let him be part of the masquerade of Nazi boyhood, but draws the line at a real gun. Jojo Rabbit, like Rosie, knows the magical power of fiction, but also knows exactly when reality counts.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 Apr 2020.

Fear Eats the Soul

My Mirror column:

Kamal Haasan's Hey Ram, released twenty years ago this February, is a complex, unresolved film about India's unresolved inner life. 

A man returns to the Calcutta building in which his wife was raped and murdered in a riot. He stands in the street, looking up at their old balcony, and she appears there, beckoning him as she used to. When he climbs up the stairs, the new occupant mistakes the name he mentions for that of the person he is looking for. 

Mr. Nair: “All the tenants here are new. What's the name again?”

Saket Ram: “Saket Ram.”

Mr. Nair: “When did you see him last?”

Saket Ram: “Whom?”

Mr. Nair: “Saket Ram.”

Saket Ram: “A year ago, exactly.”

Mr. Nair: “A year ago there was a massacre. Many of the people in this building died. Maybe your friend also... Sorry.

Saket Ram: “It's alright.”

Mr. Nair: “What was your relationship to this Saket Ram?”

Saket Ram: “Like that of the body to the soul. We were very good friends.”

It is a moment typical of Hey Ram: the visuals dense with imagery, the dialogue packed with associations, a certain excess that seems ready to leap off the screen. Our Tamil protagonist's lovely Bengali first wife Aparna -- played by Rani Mukherjee, her character's name a nod to Sharmila Tagore as Apu's wife in Satyajit Ray's Apur Sansar, a cinematic emblem of perfect young marital domesticity and early death -- is dead. But she haunts her living husband, appearing everywhere – in the balcony of what was her own home, but also writhing in a pool of blood in his new wife's bathroom, or smiling in the faces of other women, or assuming the form of a goddess. Meanwhile, Saket Ram (Kamal Haasan, his character carrying the old poetic name for Ayodhya) lives through the trauma of Aparna's death, but in his acquiescence to Mr. Nair's words, we hear a tacit acknowledgement that perhaps he is not quite alive. Did Saket Ram's soul die with Aparna that Direct Action Day, leaving his body to wander the streets, available for possession by more devious spirits?

It seems no coincidence that Haasan's Saket Ram first encounters the film's other Ram in those very Calcutta streets, in a moment that has the two men literally mirroring each other, in name and in gesture. But Saket Ram is a man in trauma, speaking of surrendering to the police to confess about the Muslim men he has just killed, only one of them the actual rapist and murderer of his wife: he carries the stains, literally, on his white kurta. Shriram Abhyankar (Atul Kulkarni) is a RSS-influenced Hindu fundamentalist, who has covered over an old wound with a new skin of pure hatred. “There is no punishment for doing one's duty. If killing is a crime then so is war, isn't it?” asks Abhyankar. And when Ram protests that he is a mere civilian, Abhyankar counters smoothly: “This is civil war.”

And it is certainly no coincidence that the film's other reference to body and soul is when Abhyankar, finding himself paralysed waist downwards in a riding accident, tells Ram that he must now “be his body” and carry out their mission of assassinating Gandhi, whom Abhyankar and his ilk believe a traitor to the so-called Hindu cause, because of Gandhi's sustained support to the idea that the Muslims have as legitimate a claim to live in India as the majority community does.

Haasan's film is among the most detailed filmic depictions we have of the Hindutva mindset -- not just the admiration for Hitler and the distaste for Gandhi, but how that maps onto an eroticised masculinity in which violence and nationalism come together with a reworked Hindu renunciatory ideal. But there is great confusion in this mindset. In one of the film's most honest, most complicated scenes, Ram imbibes an opium drink given to him by Abhyankar, and it is in that opium-induced haze that he both finally feels the stirrings of sexual attraction to his new young wife Mythili, and agrees, in effect, to leave her side. When he makes love to her, he fantasises about a giant gun. To become a warrior for Hindutva, Ram must take a pledge to “renounce bondage and relationships”. We see him touch, in one seamless gesture, the picture of his unseen dead mother and the map of India, both of which he can only love as abstractions – and leave the house, abandoning for his grand masculine mission all the real, maternal figures he knows, including the newly-pregnant Mythili (Sita to match Ram).

In a directorial sleight-of-hand that makes fine use of both melodrama and coincidence, Haasan ensures that this would-be Godse suddenly finds himself being defended from suspicious Muslims somewhere near Jama Masjid by his trusted old Muslim friend Amjad (Shah Rukh Khan) – and then, in a matter of minutes, defending Amjad and all the other Muslims holed up in the nicely-named Azad Soda Factory.

There is a great deal more that can be said about Hey Ram, but let me end here on the note that Amjad does. In a dying declaration to the police trying to identify the armed Hindu assailant whose entry into the curfew-bound Jama Masjid area set off the bloodbath, Amjad is asked if he had ever seen Bhairav before. Bhairav is the name Ram had assumed on that excursion, and also the name of Lord Shiva's destructive form. “I have never seen that animal before,” says Amjad. “I only know Ram, my brother. He saved my life.”

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23 Feb 2020.

Countries of the Mind

Solitary young immigrant men traverse Parisian streets in Na

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/countries-of-the-mind/articleshowprint/72623618.cms?prtpage=1?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

My Mirror column:

Solitary young immigrant men traverse Parisian streets in Nadav Lapid's Synonyms and Jérémy Clapin's I Lost My Body, two of 2019's most befuddling, memorable films. 

A still from Synonyms (2019)

The opening sequence of Nadav Lapid's Synonyms bursts with a strange, irrepressible energy. A 20-something man charges through Paris, the camera capturing his long-legged strides and his thumping footsteps. He arrives in a grand old building, finds a key hidden under a corner of carpet, and enters a vast, rather beautiful apartment -- with not a scrap of furniture. Seemingly unsurprised, he is in the bathtub when he hears a sound. He runs out, nude and slippery, onto the polished wooden floors, to discover that his possessions – clothes, sleeping bag, money – have disappeared. He races downstairs looking for the thief, banging on the doors of other apartments. No one answers. He comes back to the apartment, still without his clothes, and settles back into the bathtub, seemingly prepared to freeze to death. The next thing he knows, he is waking up in a large clean bed, having been adopted by the young bourgeois couple downstairs. His rescuers Emile and Caroline – children of rich industrialists who have pretensions to the arts – feed him and clothe him, giving him money and a phone and a particularly memorable mustard yellow coat in return for the pleasure of his amusing, sometimes outlandish company. Stripped quite literally of his past, Yoav – for that is the name of Lapid's Israeli protagonist – resurrected in a new identity.

Synonyms, which won the Golden Bear at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival and was screened in India at both MAMI and IFFI, is a film about a man who wishes to shed his old skin, an Israeli man insistent that he will not speak Hebrew, who walks the streets of his new city with a Larousse dictionary under his arm, reciting synonyms from the language he thinks will grant him entry into a new nation.

Lapid's film, apparently at least partly autobiographical, is filled with anger against in-your-face Israeli militaristic nationalism. But as Yoav gradually realises that France isn't quite the haven of liberty, equality and fraternity that he has imagined, it also indicts nationalism of the French variety – with its insistence on linguistic blending in, its closet anti-Semitism, its citizenship classes that involve learning the words of La Marseillaise: “Let us march! Let us march! So that impure blood irrigates our fields!”.

Still from the award-winning animated film I Lost My Body (2019)

I found myself thinking about Synonyms as I watched another 2019 film about a young immigrant wandering the streets of Paris, this time a Moroccan pizza delivery boy called Naoufel. Jérémy Clapin's stunningly crafted I Lost My Body – the first animated feature film to receive the top prize at the Critics' Week section at Cannes, and now available to stream online -- has even grander ambitions than Lapid's film. It opens with a severed hand coming to life and making its way out of a medical laboratory. Surely this must be horror, you think – and I Lost My Body does have its tense, borderline macabre moments: a body-less hand suddenly wringing a pigeon's neck, or clicking an abandoned cigarette lighter into flame in self-defense against a pack of subway rats. But even as we watch the hand creeping and crawling and dancing its way across rooftops and drains, over pianos and under trains, it takes on a personality of its own. We begin to identify with its search – for its missing body, for itself. We do not tremble when the hand approaches a gurgling baby, placing a fallen pacifier back in the baby's mouth, and then laying itself down to be held in the baby's sleepy grip.

Perhaps our comfort has something to do with what we see in the film's parallel narrative, about the film's human protagonist, Naoufel. Bespectacled, shy and slight of build, Naoufel sometimes seems like the opposite of Yoav in Synonyms. And yet they share many things: an irredeemable homelessness, an emptiness that seems to express itself in a need to attach themselves to something or someone, and a painful preoccupation with the past, with a country of memory. Their responses to trauma are quite different. Yoav is constantly vocalising, telling outrageous stories about his past in Israel, once even presenting them to his writerly friend Emile in an extravagant gesture of generosity. Naoufel is painfully quiet, seeming to relive certain moments of his childhood over and over. If Yoav recites new words from a dictionary, Naoufel listens to old tape recordings of his parents. And the hand – the hand remembers trying to catch a fly.

A hand separated from its owner, a tongue separated from its language – these are strange but powerful metaphors for alienation. We might want desperately to leave our pasts behind, but the body remembers.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Dec 15, 2019.

Dispatch from Dharamshala – 2

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Films about animals at this year's edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival had powerful things to say about the state of our humanity 

The monkey as metaphor: a still from Prateek Vats's film Eeb Allay Ooo

You can never watch all the films at a film festival. What you can do is to make your choices, whether based on frontbencher commitment (read high-intensity googling of film titles) or a more backbencher attitude (what the lady in the loo queue seems excited about) and hope that the darkness of the auditorium will end up illuminating something you haven't quite seen before.
 

One of the things this year's DIFF threw into focus for me was age and ageing. There's no single model of the good life, but observing old people throws up possibilities to aspire to – or guard against. Archana Phadke's stunning documentary portrait of her grandparents and her parents, About Love, is as brutal as it is affectionate, letting us see these long-term relationships as the simultaneous safety nets and shackles they are. The bent, ancient fisherman of Kazuhiro Soda's Inland Sea smiles wryly about how the years can sneak up on you: “I thought I was still 50 or 60, turned out I had turned 90.” 

The other theme that seemed to me to emerge serendipitously from DIFF 2019 was animals. Zooming in on the non-human seemed, in film after film, to be a way of opening up the human condition. Sometimes the association felt subtle, like the gleaming night hauls of fish in Inland Sea that the old man disentangles from his net and tosses into the boat's watery hold, so they might live a little longer. The persistent slippery toughness of their bodies, leaping for life even at death's door, struck me as akin to their captor. 

Elsewhere, the weight of the beastly allegory seemed too much for the narrative to bear. The acclaimed Malayali director Lijo Jose Pelissery was at DIFF with his latest, Jallikattu, in which a buffalo due for slaughter runs amok, destroying plantations and shops in its wake. As the village men set off in pursuit, armed with nothing but ropes and their egos, it becomes clear that the film is only ostensibly about the buffalo.  

Pelissery's last two films, Angamaly Diaries and Ee Ma Yau,  demonstrated a talent for richly orchestrated set pieces, but Jallikattu feels more like a runaway display of that ability than a controlled experiment. For most of the film's running time, we watch men with flaming torches tramp through acres of hilly woodland and splash through streams, yelling, leaping, tearing at each other, with increasingly less rational cause. The buffalo seems almost forgotten as long-held internecine rivalries bubble up. The energy of the crowd is both majoritarian and masculine – “We will take it! There are more of us!” The thrill of the hunt, the performative frenzy of competition, the adrenaline and the testosterone – these, Jallikattu drills into us, are what drive humanity at its basest. And somehow, humanity at its most primitive is signified by animality. 

“Even now, with us here, this place belongs to animals,” says a goggle-eyed old man in Jallikattu. The sentiment is echoed at one point in Prateek Vats's stellar feature debut, Eeb Allay Ooo!, when Mahinder the monkey repeller of seven generations declares to the befuddled new recruit Anjani (Shardul Bhardwaj) that he has been asked to help train: “This is the neighbourhood of Raisina, traditionally ruled by monkeys.”  

But neither Pellisery nor Vats seem actually interested in our relationship with the animal world. What Vats's film does brilliantly is to use the monkey as metaphor, creating a multifarious web of associations that traverse the distance between animal and god – but elude the human. The bonnet macaque monkeys of Lutyens' Delhi, as elsewhere in India, have exploded as a population partly because they are worshipped and fed as a form of Hanuman – and as a bit of video footage in the films repeats, “The gods become pests.” 

Combining real locations and non-actors with a sharp script and a core of trained actors, Eeb Allay Ooo! follows the travails of a Bihari migrant who is hired to shoo away monkeys from the national capital's most grandly symbolic architectural corridor. There are several interwoven strands that combine to make this such a scathing indictment of the state of the nation: the humour of a young man's masculinity seemingly pitted against monkeys, the deeply unfair conditions of contractual labour, the absurdity of bureaucratic rules that defeat all of Anjani's innovations on the job. Meanwhile, the performative masculinity of the state at both the lowest level: Anjani's security guard brother-in-law being forced to wield a rifle that he can barely carry – and the highest: the Republic Day parade – emerge as equally farcical. 

It is only when the man pretends to be an animal – in a man-sized monkey costume, in blackface imitation of the lion-tailed macaques of Karnataka's R-Day tableau – that he manages to scatter the monkeys. We watch him wander through the streets, a modern-day Hanuman in his own sad Ramleela. 

His success is because the monkeys cannot tell the difference between a real langur and a fake one. Mahinder's real death at a mob's hands goes unmourned. Meanwhile, towards the film's end, the real rifle ends up in a costume tailor's shop, its value as limited to the performative as the fake costume. When, in the last scene, the jobless Anjani joins the parade of Hanuman impersonators, we know acche din has made monkeys of us all.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Nov 2019. 

Poetry in stealth mode

My Mirror column:

Fifty years after its release, Saat Hindustani feels both like a time capsule and a swinging pendulum: showing what has changed forever, and what we seem doomed to repeat. 

(The second of a two-part column.)

Last Sunday, a week after Amitabh Bachchan’s 77^th birthday, I wrote about his first film as an actor, Saat Hindustani, and how he landed that role. KA Abbas, who wrote and directed his debut, has written of how the tall, thin Amitabh matched his personal imagination of the character, who was modelled on an old Aligarh mate of his.

But watching the film, one has a sense that there was more to the casting. As the real-life son of a poet, Amitabh had cultivated the art of recitation. He was likely better equipped to play one than most debutante actors. His father Harivansh Rai Bachchan was a highly-regarded Hindi poet from Allahabad. Saat Hindustani's fictional Anwar Ali was an Urdu poet from a little further east: Ranchi, a city then in Bihar and now in Jharkhand.

The idea of poetry is crucial to the film. Syeda Hameed, co-editor of Abbas’s voluminous writings, has pointed to his abiding relationships with poets, and the importance of lyrics in his films. “The best poets of the 1960s and ’70s wrote for Abbas’s films, and that too for very little money: Ali Sardar Jafri, Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri and Prem Dhawan, to name a few,” Hameed writes. The lyrics of Saat Hindustani were by Kaifi Azmi, and it was Azmi’s words that Amitabh spoke on screen as the sensual, lanky Anwar Ali.

Quite early in the narrative, six of the seven Hindustanis board a train headed to Goa to provide secret support to the Goan freedom struggle. A young and purposeful Amitabh shuts the compartment window as instructed, then turns to his companions with a marvellous air of having something to say, and declaims:

“Aandhi aye ya toofaan koi gham nahi,

Hai abhi aakhiri imtehan saathiyon.

Ek taraf maut hai, ek taraf zindagi,

Beech se le chalo kaarwaan saathiyon.”

A half-smile flutters at the corner of his lips, and he looks pleased as punch. It was at that moment that I realised that although this was an ensemble cast, Amitabh was as close to being the film’s hero as possible. But what an unusual hero he was. The youngest and tallest of the assembled men – but also the one least capable of handling a gun, the one who hopes there will be no killing involved, who goes into shock when the security of the mission demands that a spy actually be eliminated. Weeping, Anwar actually has to be held back and comforted by the kindly Jogender (played, in Abbas’s anti-stereotype casting scheme, by Utpal Dutt). Traditional masculinity dies a quick death.

There are times in Saat Hindustani when the nazaakat of the North Indian gentleman-poet is served up for mockery – such as the laughter when Amitabh turns to the group and complains that the truck driver who has just dropped them off on the Goa border is “namakool” because he has just turned around and driven off “without even saying khuda hafiz”.

But later, captured by the Portuguese, Anwar is tortured and taunted by a faintly comic interrogator who has been informed of the young fellow’s diary: “Achha toh tum poet hai, kya kehta hai use, shaayar?” Hands and legs tied, Amitabh narrows his eyes disdainfully. “Hamare mulk mein har shaks shaayar hai.”

Abbas knew, though, that that mulk of poets, of possible empathetic connections across communities, was already threatened. In one scene set in the late 1960s present, an older Anwar Ali hears his house has been burnt down by anti-Urdu fanatics. Like his creator KA Abbas, who could simultaneously laugh at “jaw-breaking” Hindi and see it as a language a Tamilian Dalit might use as a way of entering the nation, the optimistic Anwar Ali immediately wants to write to his old comrade-in-arms, the Hindi campaigner Sharma. But his hope for civility is quickly dashed when his wife points him to a virulently anti-Muslim editorial by Sharma, directing all Urdu speakers to Pakistan.

In his more considered moments, Abbas presents an unusually calibrated idea of what constitutes leadership – and what courage might mean. The Gandhian model of non-violent resistance, satyagrah, is of course at the film’s muddled heart. But there’s more here than non-violence. For one, there is a clarity of goals, over and above a declared ideological arsenal of means: one man can be murdered if it means saving the lives of seven. For another, neither action nor leadership is to be trumpeted. No one is appointed to a position of permanent captaincy; members of the team are its “commanders” turn by turn. 

And crucially, what has to be done is done, preferably without announcement. When the selected men set out from the satyagrah camp, their departure is not flagged, they simply melt away. What will everyone at camp think of us, they ask their trainer. “That you are cowards who have run away,” he responds. "But the mission will succeed."

In that world, it was preferable to be thought of as a coward and succeed, than proclaim one’s heroism from the rooftops and fail. The past truly was another country.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 Oct 2019.

 

The seventh satyagrahi

My Mirror column:

A look back at KA Abbas’s Saat Hindustani (1969), in the 50^th year of its release, must begin with its most famous participant

On October 11, 1942, in the city then called Allahabad, a child was born to a Hindi poet and his wife. The Quit India movement, launched by Gandhi with his ‘Do or Die’ speech on August 8, was in full swing. Despite the immediate arrest of the Congress leadership, mass protests took place all over the country. These were not always successfully non-violent: police stations, railway stations, railway and telegraph lines and other symbols of colonial government were attacked. The British cracked down, making some 100,000 arrests and killing hundreds of civilians. Born into that mood of national revolt, the boy was named Inquilab: revolution.

The story goes that it was another Hindi poet, Sumitrananandan Pant, who later suggested the name Amitabh. And Dr Harivansh Rai ‘Bachchan’ decided that his poetic pseudonym – not the family name of Srivastava – would be his children’s last name. On November 7, 1969, the 27-year-old Amitabh Bachchan made his screen debut, in a film about another nationalist revolt: Saat Hindustani.

Saat Hindustani, scripted and directed by the indefatigable KA Abbas, is by no means a great film. Abbas was a great screenwriter, responsible for much of Raj Kapoor’s seminal work from Shree 420 and Awara to Mera Naam Joker and Bobby, as well as such diverse scripts as Jagte Raho and  Achanak, a film on the Nanavati case, which Gulzar directed. But his own direction could leave something to be desired, even in such fascinating projects as Gyara Hazaar Ladkiyan (1962), dedicated to urban working women, or Bambai Raat Ki Baahon Mein (1967), in which an aam aadmi journalist tries to hold out against corruption. Saat Hindustani is more ham-handed than these. And yet, like all Abbas’s films, it has a certain inexorable honesty, unusual in his time and our own.

The film is about the liberation of Goa from Portuguese rule. The plot contrivances are almost silly: a young woman called Maria, admitting herself for a heart surgery, insists the doctor wait a week. She makes a nurse write telegrams to six men, each from a different community and part of the country, urging them to come to Goa. As she dictates each of their addresses from memory, we cut to each man in the present, and then from each man’s memory into their collective past: the month and a half they spent together on a mission. The bulk of the film involves six men crossing into Portuguese-controlled Goan territory where, together with Maria, they hope to hoist the Indian flag at various places, inviting possible arrest and torture.

Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai are here turned into seven satyagrahis. Their modus operandi is non-violent resistance, and their ideology is nationalism (actual footage of a Nehru speech appears). Abbas’s casting, too, was crucial to his Hindustani project: as he later described it, he “wanted to prove... that there was no particular Hindu or Muslim, Tamilian, Maharashtrian or Bengali ethnic type”. To that end, he would transform “the smart and sophisticated and versatile Jalal Agha into the Maharashtrian powada singer”. His assistant “Madhukar, who hails from Meerut, would be a Tamilian; Sharma (Brahmin by caste) would also undergo a similar transformation; and Utpal Dutt, the cigar-chewing admiral, would be the tractor-driving Punjabi farmer” called Joginder. The Malayalam hero Madhu, fresh from the national success of Chemmeen, played “the sensitive Bengali” – a Mohun Bagan Club football player called Subodh. The Goan Christian Maria was played by Shahnaz Vahanvaty.

The two characters left to cast were a Hindi fanatic and an Urdu fanatic respectively. “Jalal one day brought with him his friend Anwar Ali (brother of the comedian Mehmood), in whose eyes I saw the Jana Sanghi fanaticism. So I decided to make him the Swayam Sevak who hates Urdu and speaks jaw-breaking Hindi,” wrote Abbas in an essay collected in the posthumous volume Bread Beauty Revolution.

The final character was an Urdu wallah, a man who when we meet him in the present, is getting his associate Mr Sinha to read out a letter from his son because he cannot read Devanagri. He was to be a poet from Bihar – whom Abbas named Anwar Ali – and who, he decided, “had to be thin, also corresponding to the thin image of my friend, the late Asrarul Haque ‘Majaz’”.

When a young man was recommended for the role, Abbas apparently looked at his photograph and asked that the fellow come and see him in person. “On the third day, punctually at 6 pm, a tall young man arrived who looked taller because of the churidar pajama and Jawahar jacket that he was wearing.”

After being told the story, he first asked after the Punjabi’s role. But then, told of Abbas’s cross-casting policy, he grew excited and said he would like the Muslim role “specially because he is under a cloud of suspicion” that is only removed at the end.

It was after offering him the standard fee of five thousand rupees that Abbas realised that the young man had actually arrived from Calcutta, and had apparently resigned his job to do so. “I was astonished. ‘You mean to say that you resigned a job of sixteen hundred rupees a month, just on the chance of getting this role! Suppose we can’t give the role to you?’ He said, ‘One has to take such chances’ with such conviction that I said, ‘The role is yours.’”

(To be continued next week.)

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Oct 2019.

Blue-sky filmmaking

My Mirror column:

The late Mrinal Sen’s career took off with a 1959 film, Neel Akasher Neechey, a rare portrait of a Chinese protagonist in Indian cinema.

Mrinal Sen’s directorial career started with a hiccup. Raat Bhore, starring Uttam Kumar and Sabitri Chatterjee as the lead pair, was released the same year as Sen’s contemporary Satyajit Ray released Pather Panchali (1955). But while Pather Panchali made Ray the immediate toast of the town (and the world), Raat Bhore sank at the box office and was panned by the critics.

In 1959, however, Mrinal Sen made a second film, Neel Akasher Neechey, and this one gained him both popular approval and acclaim from high places. Even here, though, Sen was not the first choice as director. The singer-composer Hemanta Mukherjee (known to Hindi film-viewers as Hemant Kumar) was starting his own film production house and initially approached Sen only to write the script. It was only later, when he had disagreements with the director he had chosen, that Hemanta decided to offer the job to Sen.

Based on a piece called ‘Cheeni Feriwalla’ from the famous Hindi writer Mahadevi Varma’s book Smriti ki Rekhayein (Lines of Memory), the film traces the unexpected connection that develops between an itinerant Chinese peddler and a Bengali housewife who is an active participant in Gandhi's Civil Disobedience Movement. The treatment of the central relationship tugs unabashedly at heart-strings – Mrinal Sen later looked back at it as embarrassingly sentimental. But the thematic content is interesting even today.

Neel Akasher Neechey opens in the Kolkata of 1930, and in bringing that historical-political context to life with shots of newspaper headlines, nationalist speeches, and street-corner protests, Sen shows glimpses of the full-frontal political filmmaking that he would later be identified with. The first time we see our protagonist, Kali Banerjee as Wang Lu, he is but a blip on a screen dominated by a horde of schoolboys chanting, “The policeman’s stick, we don't fear it!” The city is in the grip of nationalist fervour, and the Chinese street seller is caught unawares. But the policeman who grabs him also lets him go almost immediately, recognising an outsider even as they both speak in Hindustani – as Calcuttans used to call the hybrid Hindi of the city’s streets, a lingua franca likely shaped by the Bengali speaker’s inability to handle the high genderedness of Khari Boli Hindi, and spoken by the polyglot city of Biharis and Anglo-Indians and Armenians and yes, the Chinese.

Among the first interactions the film shows between Wang and the locals is another troupe of children following him in the streets, yelling, “Here comes the Chinaman, he’ll take you away!” The scene offers up the first of the urban myths that seem to follow the foreigner in India. One little girl tries to stop the other kids, but even her childish sweetness is based on the belief that if you call a Chinaman a Chinaman, you’ll turn into one yourself, conjuring up what is to her clearly a horrifying vision (“Chinaman ke Chinaman bolle, shobai Chinaman hoye jabe”). Another weird Chinaman myth is provided by a household help called Haran, who claims they save their ill-gotten gains as gold teeth.

The exchange between Wang and the little girl evokes another important film of the period, Kabuliwala, which was made in Bengali in 1957 and in Hindi in 1961. Based on Tagore’s 1892 short story, it was also centred on a man from a distant country who walks the streets of Calcutta selling things. And sure enough, this is borne out by what happens next. Where the Afghan Kabuliwala saw his far-away daughter in the figure of little Mini, Sen’s lonely Chinese-silk-seller begins to see his long-lost sister in Basanti, the Bengali bhadramahila whose colloquial use of “bhai” Wang hears literally.

The sister-brother theme is, of course, one that has particular resonance in Bengali cinema, from Pather Panchali’s Durga and Apu to Ritwik Ghatak's Subarnarekha and Meghe Dhaka Tara. But here Sen uses it to a broader effect, suggesting a bond of kinship across class and language and country. He even brings in the rakhi-tying that was adopted by Bengal’s Swadeshi movement to produce a ritual bond between communities.

Calcutta’s Chinatown appeared in several big Hindi films of the period, notably Howrah Bridge (1958) and Chinatown (1962), both made by Shakti Samanta. But it served primarily as a setting for illegalities, with the depiction of the Chinese community stopping at Helen singing ‘Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu’ and Madan Puri as a Chinese villain named John Chang. In Neel Akasher Neechey, that depiction feels more substantial: the Tiretta Bazar ghetto where Wang lives, the Chinese temple where he once prays, the dhaba where a mix of locals and Chinese men eat, the latter eating their rice with chopsticks from a bowl. Together with a running stereotype of all Chinamen being involved in the opium trade, Sen creates a vivid picture of life in Calcutta as a Chinese alien.

And yet, in what might be the film’s most wonderful exchange, when the Swadeshi khadi-wearing woman tries to tell the Chinese man she doesn’t wear foreign stuff, he insists he is not a foreigner: “Eyes not blue, not foreigner, Chinaman!” Released in the era of Panchsheel, the film’s unspoken message of Indians and Chinese as being on the same side of a colonial divide was much appreciated by Nehru, who told Sen: “You have done a great service to the nation.”

It is a sad comment on how little faith our state has in our people that declining Sino-Indian relations after 1962 led the same film to be banned, albeit briefly.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Jan 2018.