Book Review: Anuja Chauhan's 'Club You To Death'

Decided to update the blog in the new year, with pieces I've written in the interim. This is a book review I did for Scroll in 2021 and hadn't put up here. Some of you might still find it of interest, especially since ACP Bhavani Singh's career continues with Anuja Chauhan's more recent book, The Fast and the Dead (Oct 2023).

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Anuja Chauhan’s new novel may be a whodunnit, but its people are its pleasure, as usual

In ‘Club You To Death’, the popular writer with a perfect ear for conversation uses crime as a vehicle to portray the ‘beautiful people’ of Delhi society.

Early in Those Pricey Thakur Girls, Anuja Chauhan’s thoroughly enjoyable novel set in 1980s Delhi, there’s a scene where the retired Justice LN Thakur and family pile into the khandaani Ambassador to see off their daughter Debjani aka Dabbu for her first day as a newsreader at DeshDarpan (an obvious fictional stand-in for Doordarshan). Chauhan’s latest book, set in present-day Delhi, opens with a charming display of similar familial intimacy, squabbling but deeply affectionate: the retired Brigadier Balbir Dogra and family, four generations “stuffed into a rattling, eight-year-old Maruti Swift”, head off to play Tambola.

The similarities don’t end there. In Thakur Girls, Debjani’s glamorous job (DD newsreaders were then the acme of fashion) had the family dhobi excited to iron her sari and the Bengali Market chaatwala refusing to charge for golguppas because he had seen “Baby” on TV. In Club You To Death, the fetching young lawyer Akash “Kashi” Dogra is flaunted proudly as a customer by his Nizamuddin street barber, plays cards with the drivers parked under his house and chats affably about politics with old security guards who call him Kashi Baba.

The feudal quotient is a smidgeon less – it is 2021, after all – and Chauhan has moved a teeny tiny bit leftward in the transition from Hailey Road to Nizamuddin, making her new protagonist a jhuggi-defending lawyer. But Kashi enjoys much the same cosy relationship with the world as Dabbu did. He’s just woke enough to express some discomfort with it.

The privileged insiders

With his rented shared barsati and JNU-trained activist-architect girlfriend, Kashi Dogra may think he’s stepped away from privilege. And maybe he has travelled some distance from studying at the Doon School and dating a rich industrialist’s daughter. But Chauhan is too smart a writer to let even her likeable hero rest on such self-congratulatory laurels. When Kashi judges someone for having made up a new name and identity, Chauhan is quick to have another character reflect privately “that it is only people with great privilege who can afford to think like this”.

In this obliviousness, ironically, Kashi is following in his father’s footsteps. Brigadier Dogra belongs to that class of people that’s more than comfortably off, with their children attending the best schools (often the same schools they themselves went to), swinging the best jobs (sporting the old school tie does no harm) and generally getting a much better shot at success than 99% of the rest of the population. But they remain convinced they’re not the elite, because – as Brigadier Dogra splutters “Elite people go to five-stars and seven-stars”.

The Dogras? They go to the club.

Anuja Chauhan’s heroes and heroines have always come from the tiny sub-section of India that’s privileged enough to measure its privilege in memberships rather than money. So it’s perfectly fitting that her new novel is set in an institution emblematic of that class: a club that sounds a lot like the Delhi Gymkhana, dealing with a political milieu that sounds a lot like the present.

Speaking the language

As always, Chauhan knows her characters inside-out, turning out pitch-perfect comic set-pieces where pretty much everyone comes in for some needling, from pompous military heroes to poor little rich girls from The Vasant Valley School. But almost everyone also gets a degree of understanding. It helps that Chauhan is adept at dialogue, rendering each character in a suitably Englished version of their specific Hindi-mixed lingo, endowed with just a little extra colour and cusswords.

“It’s my own fault! I was the one who had bete-ka-bukhaar, and kept hankering for a son in spite of having such lovely daughters!” says a posh Punjabi mother berating her loser of a son. “I wanted to tell him ki listen, behenchod, we have a huge-ass CSR wing and we do a lot!” rants an heiress defending herself against the charge of being rich and oblivious. “Banerjee, apne saand ko baandh [Tie up that bull of yours],” says the friendly male who’s text-warning a woman about her boyfriend’s seductive ex.

Ever the old advertising hand, Chauhan constantly ups the linguistic absurdity quotient in delicious little ways: old Brigadier Dogra insisting on calling his wife Mala-D; a line of sculpted semi-precious stone lingams being called Shiv-Bling, or a potential scandal involving an army hero getting hashtagged as “Fauji nikla Mauji! Hawji Hawji!”

The perfect outsider
In a gleeful departure from her previous work, though, Club You To Death serves up murder as the main course – of course, with a breathy little romance to make the medicine go down. The setting offers plenty of scope for political intrigue, classist snark and just plain gossip, and Chauhan sets to work with relish, plotting the crime onto all its possible social and cultural axes. For starters, the murder is committed on the day of the club elections, one of those sorts of events that occupies mindspace in a proportion inversely related to the power at stake.

The rival candidates, both insiders, seem equally keen on winning. But could either – the retired military hero or the classy female entrepreneur – really want the job enough to kill for it? Or is the murderer just trying to pin the blame on one of them?

Second, there’s the victim, with his own secrets. Was the dead Zumba instructor a self-made Robin Hood, or a devious social climber? Was he playing his rich clients, or were they playing him?

And finally, there’s the wider socio-political context: such unsavoury news doesn’t bode well for a club already in the bad books of Delhi’s new rulers (not least for its connections to the old ones). As new rivalries and old secrets tumble out of the DTC closet, the citadel of Lutyens’ Delhi privilege begins to seem rather doddering and vulnerable. It’s a clever trick – especially when we wonder if it’s just true.

Either way, having crafted this perfect insider atmosphere, Chauhan places the case (and us) in the hands of the perfect outsider. A policeman who’s upper caste and English-speaking but not quite Club Class, ACP Bhavani Singh is somehow observant enough to imagine other people’s compulsions, be they of caste, class, gender or something else. Instead of the Singham-variety cop “who makes the criminals piss their pants”, Bhavani makes “all the crooks leap up grinning, and ask him how his granddaughters are.”

Stolidly incorruptible, staunchly non-violent and persuasively gender-sensitive, the old Delhi Police officer feels even more like a form of wish-fulfilment than Chauhan’s dishy romantic heroes. So, of course, we dearly want to believe he might exist. Much of the pleasure of Club You To Death comes from watching the amicable old policeman piece the case together quietly, his “little grey cells” keen enough not to draw attention to himself.

Under the radar, as Chauhan well knows, is the best way to fly.

Published in Scroll, 10 April 2021.

Book Review: UR Ananthamurthy's Avasthe

My piece for Firstpost on a truly great Indian novel.

Politics can make things better, UR Ananthamurthy seems to suggest, but only if its wellspring is a love of the world, not a desire to conquer it. 

Avasthe, by U.R. Ananthamurthy (1978). Translated by Narayan Hegde (2020).
Harper Perennial. 240pp. Rs 499.

UR Ananthamurthy's 1978 Kannada novel Avasthe, in a chiselled new English translation by Narayan Hegde, is presented to us as “an allegory that suits our times even more than the times when it was written”. At least, those are the poet K Satchidanandan's words on the first page of the translated volume, published at the fag end of 2020. And it is true that Ananthamurthy's protagonist Krishnappa Gowda – poor Shudra boy turned revolutionary peasant leader, now immobilised by paralysis and parliamentary politics — spends much of the novel contemplating how best to engage with the corruption of the body politic, represented by defections, money, the backing of industrialists — and an unnamed prime minister with dictatorial desires. 

It is also true, however, that from the absurd heights of 2021, even that disturbing moment in the life of the nation looks immeasurably distant. This is despite the fact that Avasthe unfolds in the long shadow that Indira Gandhi's Emergency cast over Indian democracy. It also describes, in unforgettable and graphic detail, the police state, its violence already institutionalised and banal. One of Krishnappa's mentors is arrested and killed in a fake encounter, and when a youthful Krishnappa protests, he finds himself in jail, suffering excruciating torture. 

What makes that world unrecognisable is that Krishnappa seems authentic even in decline. Edging towards chief ministership, he contemplates his own power with mingled thrill and distaste. He may compromise for his health and to provide some middle-class comforts to his long-suffering wife and child, but he is aware of each step away from his ideals. His rest cure at an urban farmhouse makes Krishnappa feel disconnected, but his roots aren't yet severed. In one of the novel's loveliest moments, his mother brings him tender mango pickle, asking him to identify the particular village tree the fruit was picked from. I felt an inexplicable joy when Krishnappa passed the taste test.

Krishnappa is no uncomplicated hero. When we meet him, he is bedridden and nearly immobile, his legendary rages reduced to ineffectual tears – but still hitting his wife. Yet his capacity for reflection and change gives him a rare appeal. And that capacity is shaped by the people he has been close to. In Ananthamurthy's fluid telling, we hurtle from person to person, bumped along by Krishnappa's stream of consciousness. The first to see something special in him is the memorable Maheshwarayya — a “great pleasure-loving man” who is “also a great ascetic”. Hearing the young Krishnappa sing on the riverbank, Maheshwarayya tells him: “What a dumb boy! All this time you haven't understood who you are, have you?” Giving his stupefied family a talking-to, he arranges for Krishnappa to live in a hostel so that he can continue his education. 

Later, Krishnappa meets Annaji, a leftwing organiser who teaches English as a cover – and for a living. If Maheshwarayya represents a traditional feudal Indian masculinity that exposes the goatherd boy to classical music and Sanskrit poetry, Annaji is his introduction to modernity. He opens Krishnappa's mind to the contradictions of politics – and life. What the two men discuss are the questions of the mid-20th century: What is the relationship of workers to production? What is the role of religion in society? Is romance bourgeois? Does individualism lead to fascism? Krishnappa and Annaji don't just dream of revolution, but argue about what it would mean for ordinary people. All political dispensations are up for criticism, at the level of the village, the party, the country, the world.

Then a rot sets in, its banality revealed in Krishnappa's cringeworthy marriage, and the worshipful Nagesh to whom Krishnappa is dictating his memoirs. Yet now, on his sickbed, he suddenly finds himself able to hear criticism again: from his scathing younger colleague Nagaraj, his old love Gowri, but most of all, himself. “That he can talk contemptuously of the corrupt makes him pleased with himself, but it also worries him that deriving such pleasure has now become a habit with him.”

This self-reflexivity makes Krishnappa endlessly interesting – whether he is remembering the complexity of his filial relationship with “the brahmin Joisa” (his village teacher), the caste politics of his university days, or his response to Annaji's way with women – simultaneously judgemental and jealous.

Such honesty forces the reader to be honest, too. An insistent openness about love and sex, in fact, is at the heart of the novel, with Ananthamurthy displaying a rare ability to parse the politics of sexuality in the Indian context. Again, Krishnappa's strength is to learn as he lives. So, for instance, his early mentor Maheswarayya is described as “so decent towards women of respectable families that he would not look at them” – while also having a fancy for prostitutes. That seeming contradiction resolves itself later, when Annaji tells Krishnappa that seeing women as sacred is part of his feudal upbringing: “Tell me, why is a woman sacred? Because she is someone's property... Those who say she is sacred are themselves wifebeaters, who think women are good only for cooking, for singing and as ornaments.”. It still takes practically a lifetime for Krishnappa to unblock himself, to stop being one of those millions of Indian men who “regard the women who are willing to sleep with them as trash”. But he manages it. By the end, he is able to wish the same to others, with generosity and without judgement.

For me, the crux of this magnificent novel lies in Krishnappa's realisation that politics is inseparable from life, and yet, life is greater than politics. Politics can make things better, Ananthamurthy seems to suggest, but only if its wellspring is a love of the world, not a desire to conquer it. I closed Avasthe with the fervent hope that we may again have politicians who can hear the wind in the bamboos, who can experience sex as something deep rather than shallow, who have old friends that laugh at them. 

Published in Firstpost, 24 Apr 2021.

In Vino Veritas -- II

My Mirror column:

In Sanal Kumar Sasidharan's An Off-Day Game (2015), a drunken day unmasks a society intoxicated with its own sense of power.

Four men gather for a day of drinking in Sanal Kumar Sasidharan's harrowing An Off-Day Game (Ozhivudivasathe Kali, 2015).

Last week's column on The Mosquito Philosophy was about what truths might emerge when a group of men get together to drink. This week, too, my subject is a film about an all-male drinking session – An Off-Day Game (Ozhivudivasathe Kali) directed by Sanal Kumar Sasidharan. Sasidharan is best known outside Kerala for his internationally award-winning film Sexy Durga (2017); An Off-Day Game won him the 2015 Kerala State Film Award for Best Film and is currently streaming on two platforms.

and is currently streaming on two platforms.

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/in-vino-veritas-ii/articleshow/79345533.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

The film is adapted from Unni R's Malayalam short story 'Holiday Fun', available in J Devika's wonderful English translation as part of the collection One Hell of a Lover (Westland 2019). Barely nine pages long, Unni's tale begins with a reference to Boccaccio's 14th century Italian classic in which seven women and three men gather in a remote villa to escape the plague-stricken city of Florence - an interesting aside in a pandemic year. “They were like refugees from the plague in The Decameron,” writes Unni. “Only, they were escaping the monotony of work, the four of them... gathered in Room No 70 of Nandavanam Lodge, that Sunday, as usual, around a bottle of liquor.”

Unlike Unni, though, Sasidharan does not launch straight into the action. Instead, as he would do two years later in Sexy Durga, he begins his film with a semi-documentary prelude: footage from a real-life by-election in Kerala, where we see red Communist flags challenged by a rising wave of saffron BJP ones. We also see a Kathakali dance performance as part of the election campaign: this is a state where art and politics are allowed to cross-fertilise each other. It is from the assembled crowd at a rally that the camera first picks out two of our protagonists, following them as they join the other two at a little bend in a stream: a picturesque spot for daytime drinking. Another man driving by is tempted to join them, and a plan is made for another drunken assignation on Election Day.

The electoral backdrop serves Sasidharan well, allowing the film to fit in both India's official dry day rules, that bar the sale of liquor on polling days, and the simultaneously ubiquitous unofficial fact that liquor changes hands during almost all Indian elections: as a bribe, or more categorically in exchange for votes. It also works beautifully as a way of working up to the conversations between his characters – and to the 'game' of the film's title, in which four players pick chits labelled 'King', “Minister', 'Police' and 'Thief', and the one who's picked 'Police' must then guess who the 'Thief' is.

But plenty happens before the game unfolds. Unni's story has an early paragraph laying out the quality of the men's weekends in Nandavanam Lodge: “The usual criticism of the government, the rant about bedroom squabbles, the description of the body of the young girl one brushed against in the street or on the bus...”. Among Sasidharan's achievements is the way he takes this bare-bones description and gives it flesh, adding dialogue, characters and subplots that make his film into the terrific, terrifying slow-burn watch that it is. There is no woman actually present in Unni's scenario, for instance -- but Geetha in An Off-Day Game is crucial. Right from the moment that the men arrive at the lodge, she is the cynosure of all eyes, and not in a good way. She tries her hardest to just do her job: preparing a meal for her boss's visitors. But being the sole woman in a remote location with an increasingly drunken group of men, as we will see, isn't quite conducive to just doing one's job.

The relationship of each character to their 'job' is, at a deeper level altogether, the subject of Sasidharan's film. Much before the 'game' plots each man into a 'professional' role, the film has begun the perspicacious process of observing how even within a circle of friends, every man is supremely conscious of social status – his own and that of the others. “The kind of places this Brahmin fellow digs out,” says one man as they approach the lodge. “He always howls when he sees the jungle,” says another. What may have felt like gentle ribbing turns darker and darker as the film proceeds, especially as everyone presses first the woman and then Dasa into unwanted tasks. “You need me to pluck a jackfruit and now kill a rooster,” says Dasa.

As befitting a film set in Kerala, politics is the matrix of all things – the idea of democracy, for instance, is the context for a sharp argument about the man-woman relationship, and an anecdotal history of Emergency for a discussion of the 'duties' of citizens: “the cops did cops' job, the scavengers did scavengers' job, the army men did army jobs...”. Caste, or its modern-day version, serves an authoritarian society perfectly: no-one is meant to challenge their socially-ordained roles.

Some of Sasidharan's long scenes are pure genius, and the long takes and the stunning forest soundscape create an atmosphere of menace that is unerring in both its sense of beauty and danger.

The 'game' may feel a little contrived, but the conversational fluidity the film achieves is astounding. Under the influence of alcohol, everything is laid bare. In vino veritas.

This is the second part of a two-part column. The first part is here.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Nov 2020.

 

In the dark of the night

My Mirror column:

The absorbing Raat Akeli Hai stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui as a UP cop learning a little about himself as he unravels a web of murderous intrigue

Radhika Apte in a still from the atmospheric new murder mystery Raat Akeli Hai

The shaadi ka ghar has been a favoured backdrop for the dramatic unfolding of countless Hindi film romances, but it’s likely never been the setting for a murder mystery. Nor has the ubiquitous wedding video been turned into evidence for a police investigation before. Honey Trehan’s slow-burn directorial debut Raat Akeli Hai does both things with delicious conviction, giving us an atmospheric whodunit that feels deeply embedded in the dystopic state of Uttar Pradesh. What makes the film even more satisfying is that Trehan – a long-time casting director who has done films with Vishal Bhardwaj, Meghna Gulzar and Abhishek Chaubey – casts Nawazuddin Siddiqui as his detective hero, and places his unmarriedness centrestage.

Saddled with the near-giggleworthy name of Jatil (literally ‘complex’) Yadav, Siddiqui’s plain-speaking Kanpuriya cop is introduced as a man with some complexes of his own. We first set eyes on him in a photograph that his mother (the effortlessly watchable Ila Arun) is trotting out at a wedding, attempting to convince a female guest that her son is an eligible match. The fair-skinned young woman has her spangly sari draped over a spaghetti strap blouse, but her views on skin colour remain hopelessly unreconstructed. “Rang saaf nahi hai (His complexion isn't clear),” she says, dismissing Jatil at a glance. “Par mann saaf hai (But his heart is),” says Arun, turning away only to be accosted by her embarrassed and angry son.

But while we might sympathise with the fact that Jatil’s dark skin makes him an inferior candidate in a world where Ajay Devgn is the exception that proves the rule, his own views on women reveal a rather muddy mann. “Did you see the clothes she was wearing?” he says to his mother. “I just want a susheel girl.” As the film unfolds, however, Jatil’s socially-learned disgust for the sexually independent woman (“Tumhare jaisi aurat ko apne paas phatakne bhi na dein”) clashes often with his simultaneous attraction to what he acknowledges as courage and honesty.

And no wonder, given the rarity of a “saaf mann” in RAH's grim world. In a scenario with several shades of last year’s Hollywood crime comedy Knives Out, Jatil is called upon to investigate the murder of the patriarch of a well-off family whose members seem not to like each other very much, and who might all have had motives to kill him. Knives Out hid its sharp politics under parodic excess. Here Trehan and cinematographer Pankaj Kumar (Haider, Tumbadd) create a brilliantly atmospheric web of oppressive rooms and half-lit corridors to match a much darker milieu that feels true to present-day North India: corrupt, power-hungry, sexually exploitative and two-faced. When our hero gets there, the terrace and balconies are still lit up for the wedding that has just taken place, of the widowed dead man to his much younger mistress. And the sight of the new wife Radha (Radhika Apte, looking the part but never completely inhabiting it), still in her wedding finery, sitting in her upstairs room with a ghunghat half covering her face, is very much part of the filmi marriage fantasy (from Mother India to Kabhi Kabhie to Tanu Weds Manu) that RAH both evokes and toys with.

What Trehan and his exceptional screenwriter Smita Singh do with elan is to make that image of the marriageable woman the film's recurring subtext. The dogged small-town detective whose Achilles’ Heel is attractive women has been with us at least since Polanski’s Chinatown. Here the mirage-like quality of Siddiqui’s first sight of Radha also reminds one of Manorama Six Feet Under, Navdeep Singh’s 2007 adaptation of Chinatown. But while our cop hero may have a soft spot for the supposed femme fatale, almost everyone else (in the family and beyond) has already decided that she must be the murderess. “Woh ladies rijha rahi hai aapko (She's seducing you),” Siddiqui's colleague says knowingly. When Siddiqui protests that she barely gives him the time of day, the colleague pounces on him with the sort of unsustainable circular logic that otherwise rational men single women out for: “That's exactly it! That's how women seduce you, by not giving you attention.”

The slow accretion of words and images creates a dark picture of this skewed world, in which women are damned if they don't – and certainly damned if they do. From Siddiqui's “duffer” colleague to the dead man's feckless but good looking “hero-type” heir, every man in town is out to make a sanskaari match, while secretly lusting after women whose attraction is precisely that they're not 'wife material'. “Baazaaru se gharelu hone ka safar kitna kathin hai aapko maloom hai?” asks the politician Munna Raja (Aditya Srivastava). And yet the gharelu women, who've won the supposed big prize of marriage and respectability, can end up more patriarchal than the men, resorting to ever-lower measures to guard their practically nonexistent turf.

Faced with this intriguing cocktail of lust and revenge, our UP policeman hero presents himself as “not such a low-level man”. Jatil's striving for moral fibre is real, and yet it is also clear that he must operate within the system as it currently exists. And that system is one where the extra-legal has become the norm, where it is a public secret that only a saffron-hued MLA can risk owning a tannery, and an inconvenient cop is as easily 'encountered' as an out-of-favour gangster. In this post-procedure world, even being a stickler for truth can now mean finding extra-legal ways to uncover it. Whether it's marriage or murder, the show must go on. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 Aug 2020.

Book Review: The Dark Hours

I reviewed the new translation of a 97-year-old Bengali book, for India Today magazine.

A 1923 bhadralok account of Calcutta's seamy side is sociological and voyeuristic by turns.

In 1842, chief magistrate J.H. Patton drew up an elaborate plan to rid Calcutta of crime. Splitting the city geographically into upper, middle and lower divisions, Patton appointed 300 constables to the police in each. Their daytime duties were not unexpected, “preventing breaches of the peace, arresting persons against whom a hue and cry has been raised, ...drunk and disorderly persons and fakeers, and others making an obscene and disgusting exposure of their persons...” But at night, the constables were instructed to “on no account allow any person to pass along the streets or highways with a bundle, box or package after nightfall, without stopping him and examining the contents of his load...”. Night, it seemed, made everyone a suspect. The just-arrived rural migrant was to be treated as a potential burglar, or, at the very least, immoral. The city after dark was by definition illicit, a place of danger and debauchery.

In 1923, a well-known writer of Bangla detective fiction and children’s literature set out to map that city in words. Eighty years after Patton’s attempted clean-up, Calcutta had only grown in size, complexity and criminality. While claiming literary inspiration from Kaliprasanna Sinha’s irreverent 1862 urban classic Hutum Penchar Naksha, Hemendra Kumar Roy also insisted that his eyewitness account of the city’s seamier side would warn “[f]athers of young boys and girls where and what the real dangers are”. But the fact that Roy published Raater Kolkata under a pseudonym suggests he knew how his “adult male audience” would read it.

Recently translated into English by Rajat Chaudhuri as Calcutta Nights, Raater Kolkata is fascinating as a document of the 20th century city, but also for the tightrope it walks between salacious gossip and moral censure. The level of detail varies, from pure urban legend (e.g. women “from the western or north western part of the country” being sexually serviced by hired men in empty houses “on the banks of the Ganga, in the Barabazar area”) to descriptions that seem to draw on long observation.

Prostitution, for instance, is subdivided by race, class and location, from the Chowringhee hackney carriages that “take you to a white-skinned beauty”, to Jorabagan streets in winter, where poor sex workers stand “when the pye-dogs have also vanished”. The bhadralok in Roy clearly takes pride in his first-person exploits: entering an opium den in old Chinatown, escaping a police raid on a Mechhobazar goondas’ den, watching two sanyasinis fight it out at the Nimtola burning ghat. But it is in his descriptions of urban commingling, Durga Puja processions, or the theatre, that the anxieties of the upper caste male truly come to the fore. This is a book to be read as a sociological comment as much on the city as on its author.

Published in India Today, 1 Aug 2020.

Do weep for Salim the lame

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro won two National Awards in 1989. Thirty years later, its fierce indictment of the working class Muslim experience emerges as chillingly prescient -- right down to the police.

There are many things in Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro that would have been recognizable to the mainstream Hindi film audience in 1989. There's the family thrown upon difficult times when the father loses his long-time job; the mother who takes on small-time tailoring work to augment the household income; the sweet-faced, dearly beloved younger sister who is 'of marriageable age'; the hero's turn to illegality placing him in conflict with his law-abiding father – as well as the remembered, almost hallowed figure of his elder brother. Also, as in so many commercial films, the hero is the leader of a trio, with him and his bumchums going everywhere together; and his love interest is a tawaif at the nearby brothel.

But Saeed Mirza's award-winning film – it won National Awards for Best Film and Best Cinematography in 1989– also contains a great deal that would have felt unfamiliar to Hindi film watchers. Or at least unfamiliar on screen, though perhaps deeply familiar from life. For instance, though the film doesn't actually take us into the mills of Bombay, it evokes the socio-economic world that existed around them, and the stark instability of Indian working class life in the late '80s. Salim's father has lost his job after decades of service, and is sitting at home, unable to find another. His son Javed, an electrician at a factory, is dead; killed in a tragic labour accident. Salim, the less academically inclined son, dropped out of school early on, because the family didn't have enough money to educate both sons. There is no mention of their younger sister Anis having been sent to school at all – though her suitor Aslam raises local hackles by pushing for the education of girls from the community.

The dialogue between Salim and Aslam is, in many ways, at the core of the tale Mirza wants to tell about poor urban Muslims. Salim and his mates, who are essentially all illiterate, have fallen early into a life of small-time crime: collecting hafta from local tailors and shopkeepers, conducting small and occasionally larger thefts, and acting as henchmen for local big men. Their fantasies of school and college are just that, fantasies -- as made memorable in a scene where Peera and Ahmad (played by theatre director Makarand Deshpande and filmmaker Ashutosh Gowarikar) perform a hilarious little spontaneous skit about how they imagine college girls and boys behave with each other.

Meanwhile the studious Aslam cannot find a job except as a poorly paid proofreader, because his MA was in Urdu literature. As he says, “Urdu zabaan ka istemaal hi kucch kam ho gaya hai.” Salim, appalled at his salary, initially rejects Aslam as a husband for his sister. His own ambitions are much grander: he and his friends dream of becoming as rich and well-connected as the local toughs who have risen to run illegal empires. As we watch Salim guiltily leave Aslam's book-filled room, we see little children unloading boxes. In fact Mirza's film, which thanks “the residents of Dongri, Do Tanki, Nagpada and Bachoo-Ki-Wadi”, is filled with working children in the background.

But it's Aslam's defense of Muslim girls' education that brings local men angrily to his doorstep. Salim shoos them away, but then asks Aslam why he's going against their religion. The ensuing conversation is a powerful one. Through Aslam, Saeed Mirza indicts Muslims for letting fear and ignorance keep them in a vicious cycle, while using Salim's experience to underline the poor urban Muslim's harsh experience of life in post-independence India: “Aa ke dekho, kaise log Musalman log ko nafrat karte hain! Kachra samajhte unko. Daraate hain, hamesha khallaas karne ka baat karte hain.”

Mirza's perspective on the causes of Hindu-Muslim violence, from Partition to the Bhiwandi riots that form the backdrop to the film, is simple -- and tragically, still entirely valid. “Why did this Partition stuff happen?” asks Salim. “So that powerful people on both sides could have a hissa to rule over,” responds Aslam. Later, a filmmaker who shows up in the area to screen his documentary on the Bhiwandi riots makes the distraction argument -- that high communal feeling and the threat of violence only serve to keep people from asking why they don't have education, food, shelter.

Shockingly, thirty years after Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro, we have elected a government that has made such deliberate distraction their full-time occupation. But only one side is being successfully distracted. One hopes they will open their eyes, before it is too late.

Mirza's film does not depict police brutality, but it doesn't shy away from referencing the systemic communalisation of the system. Early on, we see a police officer on the phone. “Yes, it's a Muslim area, but we'll control it, sir,” he says easily. “Maar-maar ke khaal kheench lenge. They only understand the language of the stick. And if there is a problem, we'll impose Section 144.” A little later, we see another cop catch hold of Salim and his friends, heading home late, while Section 144 is officially still imposed in their area. “Are you planning a riot?” says the cop. “Nahi sahib. Aap hain na,” he responds, almost bantering. In December 2019, after all that has happened in Jamia, Aligarh, Lucknow and Mangalore – and possibly many other places whose news is still to reach us – it is impossible to summon up a laugh.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Dec 2019.

No connection home

(This was my Mirror column on 11 August 2019, six days after the Indian government announced the abrogation of Article 370, stripped Jammu and Kashmir of statehood, and bifurcated the region into two Union Territories -- while simultaneously plunging it into a total communications shutdown that continues indefinitely.)

The innocent Kashmiri child saved from a vengeful, violent future may still work for a Hindi film audience. But is it a delusional hope?

In Aijaaz Khan's Hamid, a CRPF soldier finds himself in an ongoing conversation with a little Kashmiri boy. One day, Hamid calls from outside when Abhay is on his way to disperse an ongoing protest. “I hope you're not with the stone-pelters! Go home!” Abhay yells into the phone. “I don't throw stones,” says Hamid. “Abbu used to say, you throw stones, they will shoot. And stones can't compete with bullets.” “Your Abbu made perfect sense,” the soldier agrees approvingly. “And Abbu also said, only Allah has the right to take away life, no one else,” the child patters on. “Tell me, have you ever taken a life?” The soldier's pleased expression crumbles.

Hamid, which won the National Award for Best Urdu Film last week (and can be streamed online), is built on a one-line premise: when the seven-year-old Hamid connects to Abhay, he thinks he's on the phone with Allah. Why does Hamid so badly want to speak to Allah? To urge him to send back his father, who disappeared a year ago -- and who he has been told is now with Allah.

The film uses the cuteness of its child protagonist in manipulative ways, draws out its one-line premise to excess, and often feels stilted in its performances. But in scenes like the one I described above, it opens up the possibility of conversation. The innocence of the child asking the question forces the adult to take a moment to confront his guilt – instead of responding, as Abhay does the rest of the time, with a torrent of thoughtless anger. In a time when all questions asked by Kashmiris seem only to elicit taunting counter-questions, when both grief and grievance is sought to be angrily bulldozed into compliance, such a cinematic moment is of great value.

The child protagonist is not a new device through which to view a conflict zone, and the effects do not need to be childish or cloying. Think of the marvellous clear-eyedness of Andrei Tarkovsky 1962 classic Ivan's Childhood, of Ziad Doueiri's atmospheric debut West Beirut (1999), Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi's moving Turtles Can Fly (2004) or Yosef Baraki's underwatched Kabul-set film Mina Walking (2015). But Indian cinema hasn't really got there yet, certainly not with regard to Kashmir.

The best we seem to manage is the child poised on the precipice of losing his innocence – which in the case of Kashmir, seems to invariably involve losing him to a violent movement for Azadi. In 2008, Santhosh Sivan directed a film called Tahaan, also named for its child protagonist, and when I went back to watch it this week (it is also available online), I was amazed by how much it shared with Hamid. Sivan's film, like Khan's, centres on a young boy with a missing father, and a grieving mother who hasn't yet given up, but whose finances and hopes are fast dwindling. Unlike in Hamid, the object of Tahaan's cinematic quest isn't directly his father, the 8-year-old spends the film trying to get back his donkey from a merchant (played, interestingly, by Anupam Kher). But like Hamid, Tahaan contains scenes in which the protagonist's mother makes a harrowing journey to identify what might be her husband's corpse, and later, joins a silent assembly of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (the APDP is a real UN-backed human rights organisation founded by Praveena Ahangar).

Sivan's English title for Tahaan was The Child With a Grenade, and his child actor spends a lot of the film being roped into transporting -- and almost throwing -- a bomb. There was a deep disingenuousness to that film, especially the way it staves off the threat of violence to produce an immediate, miraculous justice. Tahaan's delusional ending made it a political travesty in the name of a fable.

Ten years later, Hamid and his mother have given up hope of his father's return. But the film's depiction of their calm acceptance of this terrible injustice may be another sort of delusion.

Talha Arshad Reshi, who plays Hamid, has won the National Award for Best Child Artiste (along with three others). But the total communication shutdown since Monday's announcement of revocation of Article 370 and bifurcation of J&K has meant that Aijaz Khan has been unable to share the news of the awards with Reshi.

In July 2016, during one of the worst shutdowns (after Burhan Wani's death), a ScoopWhoop reporter asked six children in Kashmir what they thought of when they thought of India. 

“India is police who beats boys. I hate India,” said one. “India is a cunning country. They oppress us. If it would have been our own country they wouldn’t have killed so many people. We don’t like to be with India,” said another. “India is tyrant. India kills people and disappears them. I want free Kashmir. I don’t want to be with India or with Pakistan. I am afraid to go out. Policemen can do anything to me. I can’t trust them. They can kill me. I rarely study. And I can’t play outside. Who should I play with? The Indian army men on the street?” said a third.

No Hamid is likely to talk to Abhay. Even if his phone connects again.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 11 Aug 2019.

Status and the status quo

My Mirror column:

Anubhav Sinha’s fearless Article 15 uses a pacy police procedural to make Indians sit up and pay attention to an aspect of our lives we pretend not to see: caste.

In an early scene in Article 15, a newly anointed IPS officer called Ayan Ranjan is being driven to his first posting when another policeman tells him a story. When Ram returned from his 14-year exile to finally claim his late father’s kingdom, the villages of Ayodhya lit up their homes with diyas in celebration. But one village had lit no lamps. “Why is there no light here?” asked Ram of the villagers. “Our darkness makes your palace shine even brighter,” they replied.

This story is, of course, told in the Ramayana, a part of the origin myth of Diwali, and one among thousands of tendrils of story that curl out of the central vein of the great epic. Its appearance at the beginning of Anubhav Sinha’s film may seem to come apropos of nothing – but in fact we are being led expertly, chillingly, to the underlying darkness that illuminates our palaces.

For it seems no coincidence that this story, about an epic hero’s ascension to the throne, is told to Ayushmann Khurrana’s character, Ayan: a young man about to ascend to a less mythic, but very real position of power. And it also seems no coincidence that the teller is an older colleague, a local man with far greater experience as a policeman, but one who is fated to remain much lower down the bureaucratic hierarchy. Almost none of those who enter the police at a lower level are able to rise through the ranks into the top administrative grades that are automatically handed to those who qualify through the national civil service examination. The Indian Police Service, too, is a kind of caste.

As a St Stephen’s College graduate who only returns from travelling around Europe at his father’s bidding, Ayan is clearly from the upper echelons of what we Indians insist on calling the middle class. He has the educational grounding and the cultural capital needed to clear the civil services examination (which, it is suggested, his old friend Satyendra (Aakash Dabhade) does not). He is also a Brahmin. And now, as the IPS officer in charge of Lalganj, he sits at the top of every possible hierarchy. And hierarchy, with caste at its root, is Sinha’s chosen theme.

By making their protagonist the epitome of privilege, Sinha and his screenwriter Gaurav Solanki demonstrate how hierarchy can be invisible to those who do not suffer its privations. But when that privileged outsider sets out to educate himself, we see how insiders identify themselves and others by their birth-based positions in the pecking order – and how each and every action is governed by a knowledge of those positions. So if the shop is in a Pasi village, then water from it will not be consumed by anyone higher up in the caste hierarchy – i.e. most people. The feisty Dalit woman activist (Sayani Gupta) might get a job cooking midday meals for government schoolchildren, but as soon as her caste becomes known to the eaters, the food is simply thrown away. From sharing a meal to giving a job, from education to marriage to party politics, caste is the invisible filter through which all Indians perceive one another.

Even for those who successfully fight or work their way out of their ascribed positions, it is almost impossible to achieve social equality. The film offers a sharp take on how this is true even within the police force, whose members wield so much institutional power. The most complex character in this regard is that of Jatav ji (played by the ever-brilliant Kumud Mishra), and its most powerfully etched relationship that of Jatav with his colleague Brahmdutt (an equally superb Manoj Pahwa, whose opening line “In fact Brahmdutt Singh, sir” reveals a great deal about him – as does his feeding of stray dogs, which evoked for me the UP chief minister’s feeding of calves).

The point Sinha and Solanki drum in is that our collective belief in hierarchy is still way more powerful than the equality on which our republic is premised. It is civilisational. And more than 70 years since we elected to govern ourselves by a Constitution that declares us all equal, we are still unable to see beyond the filter.

Those at the bottom of the hierarchy are hardest hit by this: as the film’s most promising but least fleshed-out character, the “Daliton ka Robin Hood” Nishad (Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub), puts it, “We sometimes become Harijan, sometimes Bahujan, we just haven’t managed to become plain and simple jan yet, that we might be counted in the Jan Gan Man of the national anthem.”

But those at the top are loath to cede their positions of power, often justifying the status quo in ‘practical’ terms. “Aukaat mein nahi rahengeSir, toh kaam hi nahi kar payenge (If people don’t stay in their place, no work can be done),” says local contractor Anshu Nahariya. Then he adds, “Aukaat joh hum denge wahi hai. Aur jo humko milegi woh hamari hai. Aukaat toh sabki hoti hai na Sir. (Status is what we give them. And what is given to us, that is ours. Of course everyone has a status, Sir.)”

But our philosophical justifications are much worse. “Sab baraabar ho jayenge toh raja kaun banega? (If everyone becomes equal, then who will be king?)” as the driver of the police jeep asks, not quite rhetorically. To live in a country where Article 15 is not just the law, we shall have to become a people no longer seeking a king.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 July 2019.

Book Review: Heat (Vekkai)

I reviewed a modern Tamil classic now in English translation, for Scroll.

Poomani's vivid 1982 novel Heat, translated by N. Kalyan Raman, is about a boy on the run, and the gap between law and justice. 

Poomani, the name by which generations of Tamil readers have known the writer P Manickavasagam, published Vekkai in 1982. It was his second novel, unfolding in a subaltern rural Tamil landscape, like his first, Piragu.The two books together established Poomani, then in his mid-thirties, as a new star in the Tamil literary firmament.

A thirtieth anniversary edition of Vekkai was brought out in 2012, acknowledging its status as a modernist Tamil classic. In 2014, Poomani won the Sahitya Akademi award for his magnum opus Angyadi, a historical novel set in the late 19th century (for which he researched the Nadar community in Madurai and Tirunelveli with the aid of a two-year grant from the India Foundation for the Arts).

Despite Poomani’s undisputed stature in the Tamil world of letters, it has taken nearly four decades since his literary debut for his first two novels to be available in English. An English translation of Piragu is being brought out later in 2019 by Chennai-based Emerald Publishers, while Vekkai was recently published as Heat, in N Kalyan Raman’s spare yet vivid translation.

Here is how Heat opens:

“Chidambaram had only planned to hack off the man’s right arm.

He was aiming for the shoulder, but instead the sickle had sliced through the upper arm, its sharp tip entering the ribs. The severed arm had dropped near his feet. He kicked it away, grabbed the sickle and fled. As he ran, he heard the man’s scream rise and fade like the final cry of a goat in a butcher’s yard.”

It is a grisly way to begin a tale. But it does not quite portend the tone of what is to come. Little about Poomani’s novel is predictable. Neither his characters nor the events he describes have predetermined outlines that might be fillable with a broad brush. People, relationships, histories are built up slowly, with small, deftly drawn strokes that make for the finest sort of shading. So the 15-year-old protagonist may have killed a man, but he is not a killer.

Chidambaram’s father Paramasivam, whom he calls Ayya, may lose control of himself whenever he drinks, but that does not tar him as an alcoholic. The narrative may begin with a murder, but it is neither a mystery or a thriller or a police procedural. Much of Heat unfolds in flashback, and read backwards, it might be seen as a revenge saga: I’m waiting to see if this is how it will be interpreted by Tamil film director Vetri Maaran, of Aadukalam, Visaranai and Vada Chennai fame, who is adapting it into a film.

The nuance I flag seems to me crucial not just to Poomani’s storytelling, but to his worldview. For instance, Chidambaram is indeed a fugitive: he is running from the law. But what the book reveals, over conversations present and past, is that it is not so easy to slot him under that common phrase: a “fugitive from justice”. Poomani is centrally concerned with the difference between law and justice. The enmity between our protagonists and the murdered man, Vadakkuraan, stems from Vadakkuraan’s avaricious desire for their land, and the cycle of violence he starts. The law, it seems, will never punish him – so Chidambaram decides to.

We have, of course, developed an extended tradition of popular cinema in India that is concerned with this gap between the legal and the moral – in Hindi cinema, for instance, that trajectory has only grown sharper from Awaara (1951) to Deewar (1975) to Raman Raghav (2016). I imagine Vekkai,published in1982, was an early fictional instance of such open criticism of the police. “[E]very policeman is allowed to keep a weapon tucked behind his arse and one more in front, long with a round club in his hand,” complains Paramasivam to his brother-in-law. “But we are not allowed to carry weapons... if we do the same thing, it’s a crime.”

At another point, he warns Chidambaram to beware police corruption, based on class and caste loyalties and actual bribes, “The police may not come after us today. But if our enemy gives them money, they’ll come running like hound dogs. So many atrocities take place in our courts. The law is what the rich people lay down.”

Poomani doesn’t wish to make this about caste, but he makes it clear enough that the systemic violence stems from the astounding inequity at the foundation of our social structure. Families like Chidambaram’s are resisting a long history of socio-economic oppression. A third of the way through the novel, we realise that the father, Paramasivam, committed a crime that sent him to jail in his youth – and that, too, was in retaliation for unwarranted, long-term oppression. “The rich guys couldn’t stomach the fact that we were farming our own piece of land.”

The novel also details other forms of informal justice, which might use the law strategically – “A good man from that village gave evidence” – or remain outside it entirely, like the cotton-thieving ganglord Muthaiah, whose men “will never step inside land that belongs to a poor man”, and who is a respected mediator of local disputes.

The other way in which to read Heat is as a palpably experiential journey into the Tamil countryside. This is a world in which cash crops like cotton and sorghum are beginning to be grown, and a ginning factory figures prominently, but which is also still brimful of wild plants and trees and animals whose ways a fifteen year old boy knows well enough to live off: the sour-bitter taste of a guduchi vine, the joys of cactus fruit, a rabbit killed by a vulture. And these are supplemented by cultivated pickings: sugarcane, sweet tubers left buried in a field, padaneer collected in toddy tappers’ pots which the boy climbs for.

And yet, even as a fugitive, Chidambaram is never purely utilitarian. Whether it is making a garland of kurandi flowers to put around the neck of a temple horse, crafting a hammock out of roots and palm leaf mats, or just admiring the skill of men hunting and skinning a snake, he wanders through his ordinary world with an unerring eye for its beauty. Seeing through his eyes might make you see it, too.

Published in Scroll, 22 Jun 2019.

In the name of a cause

Second part of my two-part Mirror column on Delhi Crime:

Almost unconsciously, Delhi Crime puts its finger on the disconnect between the police and the public. (The second of a two-part column)

The worst written character in Delhi Crime is not one of the rapists. Richie Mehta's fictional depiction of the December 16, 2012 gang-rape gives the six men a rationale. Jai Singh, the driver of the bus as well as of the crime, gets to speak of his own motivations, however misguided. He had become 'unstable' after his wife died, unable to bear the sight of happy couples. 

As for the five younger men (including his own brother), they saw him as their leader, whose uncontrollable temper they knew not to get in the way of. Mehta and his co-scriptwriters resist the temptation to vilify them, instead giving us a remarkably sympathetic sense of their milieu – their poverty, the instability of their working lives, their attachment to their mothers and to family honour, so much so that they would rather be arrested quietly than face a public shaming. 

A long monologue by the series' bespectacled philosopher-cop, Sudhir Kumar (Gopal Dutt Tiwari, superb), offers a decent pop-psychological explanation for their actions: socio-economic deprivation set against a growing consumer culture, deep-rooted patriarchal assumptions about women running amok in a swiftly changing urban environment, in the absence of either sex education or gender equality.

But Delhi Crime affords no such explanation to the protestors. It doesn't help that the character who represents an entire city in tumult is the daughter of the DCP in charge of the case: a protected, spoilt, clueless teenager with the irritatingly alliterative name of Chandni Chaturvedi. Yashaswini Dayama is a good actor (she plays the funky teenage neighbour in both Phobia and Made in Heaven) but she cannot save this character, made up of so many stereotypes as to be downright unsympathetic. 

Chandni hates Delhi. She has grown up in it, but doesn't feel of it. She spends all her time glued to various screens. She is so alienated from her surroundings that her mother Vartika (the show's DCP protagonist) has requested two weeks' time in which to show her “the good side of Delhi” so that she stops clamouring to go off to firang lands for college.

To make Chandni stand in for the thousands of people who came out on to the streets that fateful December, to march and shout and weep and stand in solidarity with Jyoti Singh and with each other, is to not only support an establishmentarian politics that reads public criticism as a rejection of the city/country, but also to be utterly clueless about what the Nirbhaya protests meant. This cluelessness lies, unfortunately, at the very foundation of Delhi Crime. 

The show's dismissive, cynical attitude to protest emerges first in the way that Vartika eyerolls at a knot of students beginning to assemble outside Vasant Vihar Police Station. “Yeh lo, in students ko extracurricular activity mil gayi. They'll sit, soak in the sunshine, in the name of a cause. If they're lucky, they'll get on to TV. Aur is sab mein hamari lag jayegi,” says Shefali Shah's character to her subordinate Bhupender. “Yeh log itni jaldi signboards kaise banwa lete hain?” Bhupender responds on cue. Then the two of them chortle, as if they've made the funniest joke in the world. But really, if this is how disconnected the police are from the public they serve, then the joke is on them.

In another giveaway moment, an unnamed young policewoman working to deal with the gathering crowds at India Gate says to her colleague Neeti (Rasika Dugal), “Ek case ke liye itna sab? Ho kya gaya hai yaar?” The scene ties the quiet gravity of Neeti's response to an accident of circumstance: Neeti just happens to be in personal contact with the survivor. If she hadn't had that chance, the series suggests, she might well have been as baffled as the other young policewoman, untouched by the fervour that had taken hold of thousands of people her age, and her gender.

In turning the Nirbhaya case into a police procedural, the  makers of Delhi Crime have somehow missed the incredible power of that moment in our national life. The heightened public response that the show seems only to comprehend as a measure of the heinousness of the rape, the baffling crowd that must be dispersed as it gets 'dangerously' close to the PMO on a day when there are preparations to receive the Russian president at Hyderabad House, was not about “just one case”. True, there was something extraordinary about the violence, but there have been equally terrible rapes before and since (a point the show makes, again in bafflement).

But there was much more about the case that made it the symbolic epicentre of a vast spontaneous uprising, the spark that set a tinderbox city on fire: the young lower middle class physiotherapy student from a Hindi-speaking family who'd gone out to watch an English film, in one of the city's recently built malls, with a boy who may or may not have been her boyfriend. 

Each of those who protested that bleak, cold December drew from the not-yet-dead Jyoti Singh courage to wage our collective ongoing battles. We congregated in the streets to demand the equal rights to life and love and freedom that our cities will not award us without a fight. If we soaked in any sunshine, it was of our own making.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 April 2019.

(Read the first part of this column here.)

A blinkered vision

First part of my two-part Mirror column on Delhi Crime:

Delhi Crime's retelling of the 'Nirbhaya' investigation is gripping. But it sees things so completely through police eyes that it can sometimes feel deliberately blind.

For me, the most revealing moment in Delhi Crime arrived a day or so into the Netflix series’ recreation of how the Delhi Police apprehended the six men later charged in the December 16, 2012 rape case. In director Richie Mehta’s screen version, a man called Banke Lal arrives at the Vasant Vihar police station to tell the cops that at about 8.30 pm on December 16, a little before the rape took place, he had boarded a similar white bus from Munirka Bus Stand, been attacked and robbed of his phone and wallet by the six men on board, and thrown out of the bus near the IIT overpass.

“Had I landed on my head, I’d be dead,” says Banke Lal.

“Why didn’t you report it that night?” asks Vartika Chaturvedi, the senior cop in charge of the case, played by Shefali Shah.

“Who would I have complained to? I was asking everyone for help, no one listened,” Banke Lal replies. “I managed to borrow a phone from a passing auto driver and called my brother, who told me to come home. I figured, what would the cops do? It was only when I saw the news that I realised that this had to be the same gang.”

The sequence ends with Chaturvedi thanking Banke Lal for coming to them and asking for another case to be filed against the same suspects. She then goes out of the room, leans against a wall as her right-hand man Bhupender (Rajesh Tailang) wonders if there might be other victims to be found.

“If he had made a complaint that same night, maybe we could have prevented this,” responds Chaturvedi.

“We don't know that,” says Bhupender. “Ismein hamari kya galti hai?”

“Try saying that to Deepika,” says Chaturvedi, half swallowing her words.

As I watched the sequence, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that we live in a country in which a citizen who has just been robbed, beaten up and thrown off a bus can respond to his predicament with “What could the police have done in this?” It seemed to me to offer an involuntary glimpse of something the show appears to take entirely for granted: that we as a citizenry have so little faith in our police force that we don’t go to them for help, even when we’re victims of an act of targeted violence and robbery, bang in the middle of the country’s capital.

Then, as I sat down to write this column, reliving my own memories of December 2012, as all Indian women who watch it will do, I remembered that there had indeed been such an incident. A man had been robbed on the night of the gang rape, by the very same men, aboard the very same bus.

It didn't take much looking up online to find reports. What I found in them was distressing. The Times of India reported on December 23, 2012, that three constables from the Hauz Khas police station had been suspended for their failure of duty when approached on December 16 by one Ramadhar Singh, who had been picked up “from RK Puram Sector 4 by the six gang rape accused, and robbed and dumped near IIT”.

The report continued: “The three cops were on patrol duty around 8.15pm when they were approached by Ramadhar. He had told them that he was robbed and that he had lost his mobile and, hence, cannot call 100. The cops, however, told them they were from the Hauz Khas police station and he needs to go to Vasant Vihar to register a case. They neither sent out a wireless message to track the bus nor had they informed Vasant Vihar cops about the incident,” said a source.”

I describe this incident in such detail not to make the point that the heinous gangrape that would end up making Delhi the notorious site of frenzied international attention was preventable. That may be true, or it may not. The “what if” that it becomes on the show is easily voiced — and almost as easily dismissed. Richie Mehta’s version is so insistent on showing Delhi Police in good light that he simply erases the inconvenient truth that the victim of the robbery did in fact try to report it and was turned away by cops. It then absolves the police of even the glimmer of responsibility by making his female cop protagonist have a moment of guilt, that can, however, be painted as emotional, even irrational — since in Mehta’s version the onus is on the citizen who didn’t come to the police earlier.

In many ways, this is transparently the position the show takes: it makes the police the put-upon heroes, under-appreciated figures whose valiant efforts to fight crime while being enormously understaffed and under-budgeted are not appreciated by a thankless citizenry. All we ever see are good cops being treated badly. The DCP who hasn’t gone home for three nights is taunted by a judge as being someone who spends her time at parties and has probably never been to a crime scene. Children in a posh South Delhi school regurgitate their parents’ assumptions about the cops being corrupt. In a less monied class, too, Bhupender tells Vartika that he hides his job from any prospective in-laws he’s meeting because “no one wants either a dosti or dushmani with the police”.

Vartika chastises Bhupender for not seeing that a family that doesn’t respect his job will not “protect his daughter”. But the larger issue, the fact of why a city of 20 million people has a relationship with its police force that is one of “Best if we never have to deal with them” rather than “They will help us get justice”, is never really discussed. When we get unwitting glimpses of the reasons why — such as when some constables on duty taunt and torture the not-yet-convicted suspected rapists, driving three of them to attempt suicide — it is not treated as an abuse of power, but simply as something strategically unfortunate that happens.

But surely if the police in Delhi and in the rest of India are assumed by the man on the street — and even more so, by the woman on the street — to be not just professionally incompetent, but a power-seeking, corrupt and potentially malign class of people that is best avoided, there must be some reason why. Surely the answer cannot be the one Mehta provides by ventriloquising the ex-police commissioner Neeraj Kumar, who is a consultant on Delhi Crime: that it’s every other constituency who’s wrong — the politicians, the media, the judiciary, ordinary people, students — and the police who are right.

(To be continued next week)

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror.