Ian Jack’s thoughtful, wide-ranging collection of essays and reportage, Mofussil Junction: Indian Encounters 1977-2012, has been one of my favourite reads of the year so far. Here is a review I did for The Sunday Guardian.
Sabtu, 30 Maret 2013
Kamis, 28 Maret 2013
From dusk till yawn - why Django Unchained was a bit of a grind-horse
Even those who don’t think too highly of Tarantino give him credit for certain things, such as his limitless enthusiasm for cinema, his imaginative use of references and tributes, and the hip, ironic writing – the love of flamboyant dialogue for its own sake – which achieves a poetic force in his best work. Watching a Tarantino film with prior experience of his work, we anticipate the interplay between the long wordy scenes and the sudden bursts of violence, the former leading up to the latter; we brace ourselves for the eruptions.
The first few scenes in Django Unchained have this quality, most of it courtesy the erudite bounty hunter King Schultz (an author-backed part, perfectly played by Christoph Waltz), who uses words like “acolyte” and “parley” with the same ease as he draws his gun. English is not his native language, but lines like “If you can keep your caterwauling
down to a minimum, I’d like to finish my line of enquiry” and “On the off-chance there are any astronomy aficionados among you, the North Star is that one” trip off his tongue. You don't take the character, and the way he speaks, at face value, but all this is just as enjoyable as the incongruously sophisticated banter between Jules and Vincent in Pulp Fiction.Many intriguing things happen in this story about the adventures of Schultz and the freshly liberated slave Django (Jamie Foxx). The triumphal, wish-fulfilling aspect of Tarantino’s cinema has been on full display in his two most recent films (Inglourious Basterds being the one before this), which present alternate-universe versions of slavery and the Holocaust in terms that a good-hearted little boy with an appetite for fast talk, gore and contemporary music might want to see them presented. (If Woodrow Wilson, or whoever, said of The Birth of a Nation nearly a hundred years ago that it was “history written in lightning”, Basterds and Django are history rewritten in celluloid, by someone who is more interested in cinema’s past than in the real-world past.) But the idea of the underdog who must prevail – through the magical power of film – was there in the earlier, non-period works too. For instance, Kill Bill played like a long psycho-dream of vengeance achieved against impossible odds; if we suspend our disbelief enough to buy that The Bride can singlehandedly overpower dozens of Yakuza fighters, it is largely thanks to
the power of choreography and editing. And even Pulp Fiction (still for my money Tarantino’s best film, however unfashionable that view might be) used its sinuous, non-linear structure to provide the illusion of a happy ending, by “resurrecting” one of its most likable characters after we have seen him die midway through the film. It showed a new dimension of cinema’s capacity for supplying the feel-good moment.In reaching for its own happy conclusion, Django Unchained moves between two meters: there is an apparently serious effort to depict the moral codes and assumptions of a long-past age (the American South in the 1850s), to show people being confronted with new possibilities that can upend their established way of life and are therefore threatening. “Why come into my town and start troubling? These are nice people,” a sheriff asks Schultz (the “nice people” being townsfolk who have been shaken up by the mere sight of a black man riding a horse as if he was one of them). But this being Tarantino, the social commentary goes hand in hand with cartoon violence, nods to B-movies and slapstick comedy: how could he possibly resist a broad comic skit about the unfeasibility of the white hoods worn by the Ku Klux Klan? So here is a film that revels in gratuitously “funny” bloodletting as well as super-fast zoom-ins and zoom-outs during dramatic encounters (in imitation of low-budget spaghetti westerns full of “HUH?!” and “OUCH!” moments) – but also attempts the self-consciously languid pace of a Sergio Leone film, and provides over-sentimental moments such as the one where Django fancies he sees his lovely wife everywhere he goes. (Incidentally, for most of the film, Django himself is less a hero and more a foil, being humourless and relatively inarticulate – and remember, in the Tarantino universe, inarticulacy is a character flaw.)
For me, these clashing tones didn’t work as well as they did in the earlier Tarantino movies; the first 40 minutes or so were terrific, but the lack of energy in the film’s second half was surprising. After a point, the pauses and silences, instead of being exercises in anticipation – the lull before the explosion – become merely...pauses and silences. The dialogue is not as crackling as it could have been, the pacing is dreary (the scene where the Leonardo Dicaprio character gets phrenological could have been so much smarter, but I got the impression that Tarantino was content with setting up the sight gag of the skull on the dining table) and the performances, though good, aren’t enough to cover the holes. (In his early scenes, Samuel L Jackson is brilliantly hysterical as the old slave who is just as keen to maintain the status quo as his white masters are; but after half an hour or so, I wanted him to shut up and stop doddering around.) Even the Ku Klux Klan setpiece – which is funny in a Monty Pythonish way, and makes a practical point in addition to exposing the banality of Evil – goes on for longer than it needed to.Late in the film, in a casting decision that typically combines self-indulgence with self-deprecation, Tarantino appears in a short role as an Australian slave-driver. The character gets a spectacular, explosive end, much the same way as the film eventually does – but he also looks as flabby and distracted as Django Unchained so often is. And his accent is way off.
[Did a version of this for Business Standard Weekend]
Selasa, 26 Maret 2013
Lost men in Rajorshi Chakraborti’s new story collection
[Did a version of this short review for Time Out magazine. Also see these earlier posts on the work of Chakraborti, who is one of my favourite contemporary writers: an interview; Or the Day Seizes You; Derangements; Balloonists]
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“When did I go to sleep and where had I awoken?” wonders the narrator of one of the stories in Rajorshi Chakraborti’s new collection, “In an askew world where everything was familiar but nothing unfolded as I foresaw it?” It’s a question that might come from any of Chakraborti’s protagonists, going back to his excellent debut novel Or the Day Seizes You, the dominant tone of which was hinted at by a cover jacket that combined two Dali paintings about dreamscapes and endless drifting.
That novel’s mood of escalating paranoia had reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s great, surreal The Unconsoled, a book about a man who – as Pico Iyer once memorably put it – is “lost in a foreign place and unable to read the signs”. Chakraborti, one of the most provocative Indian English novelists of his generation, has often worked with this theme in his fiction, and the stories in Lost Men (one of which, “The Good Boy”, was – in full disclosure – first published in a Tehelka collection that I co-edited) are vignettes about lives that have spun into disorder. For instance, the darkly comic “Viju’s Version” – my favourite of these pieces – begins by recounting the series of missteps that lead a well-meaning boy to bring public humiliation to his school, before segueing into a narrative about the same luckless Viju’s entanglements with Maoists and organ-buyers (“he was always the victim of accidents far outside his control,” an acquaintance sarcastically reflects). In “The Last Time I Tried to Leave Home...” another young man – embarking on a life-changing journey – finds himself unable to tread a straight path to the airport. Two other stories are about people who literally cannot play ball: the narrator of “Knock, Knock” is assailed by a bank employee who “bowls” stones at him; in “The Third Beside Us”, a boy is invited to join a cricket match that turns into a nightmare, including a batting stint that he likens to Sunil Gavaskar’s infamous 36 not out in the 1975 World Cup.
Lost in time as well as in space, many of the characters here attempt to understand – or just to properly recall – their own pasts. This might take the form of a man unexpectedly encountering his old family doctor in a place far from his hometown (in “City Lights”) and shortly afterwards finding himself in a part of the city made familiar by a childhood memory of letters from a friend. Or it might (in “Half an Hour”) take the shape of a boy being distracted from an urgent errand by a glimpse of someone who may or may not be an old classmate, now apparently wearing a blind person’s glasses. Often, the characters’ growing desolation is concealed beneath a restrained tone. “I kept moving around, met a few diverting people,” says the title story’s narrator – a man whose wife has recently died – but this is a deceptively simple summary of what is a very layered tale about grief and love.
Occasionally the narratives conduct metaphysical conversations with each other, as in “A Good Dry-Cleaner is Worth a Story”, which describes a road accident that has been alluded to (as a dream) in another piece. This means that though Chakraborti’s prose is consistently direct and elegant, these stories are elliptical, sometimes claustrophobic, and demand a reader's full concentration. (They didn’t all work for me: my attention drifted during passages of “Down to Experience: A Novella”, a rambling tale set in late 1940s Europe, involving people caught between groups and ideologies, unsure what side they or their friends are on, or if sides even exist.) However, once you acquire a taste for this writer’s very particular universe – with its glimpses of the inner spaces of people confounded by delays, detours, bad luck and unreadable signs – it is very hard to leave it.
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“When did I go to sleep and where had I awoken?” wonders the narrator of one of the stories in Rajorshi Chakraborti’s new collection, “In an askew world where everything was familiar but nothing unfolded as I foresaw it?” It’s a question that might come from any of Chakraborti’s protagonists, going back to his excellent debut novel Or the Day Seizes You, the dominant tone of which was hinted at by a cover jacket that combined two Dali paintings about dreamscapes and endless drifting.
That novel’s mood of escalating paranoia had reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s great, surreal The Unconsoled, a book about a man who – as Pico Iyer once memorably put it – is “lost in a foreign place and unable to read the signs”. Chakraborti, one of the most provocative Indian English novelists of his generation, has often worked with this theme in his fiction, and the stories in Lost Men (one of which, “The Good Boy”, was – in full disclosure – first published in a Tehelka collection that I co-edited) are vignettes about lives that have spun into disorder. For instance, the darkly comic “Viju’s Version” – my favourite of these pieces – begins by recounting the series of missteps that lead a well-meaning boy to bring public humiliation to his school, before segueing into a narrative about the same luckless Viju’s entanglements with Maoists and organ-buyers (“he was always the victim of accidents far outside his control,” an acquaintance sarcastically reflects). In “The Last Time I Tried to Leave Home...” another young man – embarking on a life-changing journey – finds himself unable to tread a straight path to the airport. Two other stories are about people who literally cannot play ball: the narrator of “Knock, Knock” is assailed by a bank employee who “bowls” stones at him; in “The Third Beside Us”, a boy is invited to join a cricket match that turns into a nightmare, including a batting stint that he likens to Sunil Gavaskar’s infamous 36 not out in the 1975 World Cup.Lost in time as well as in space, many of the characters here attempt to understand – or just to properly recall – their own pasts. This might take the form of a man unexpectedly encountering his old family doctor in a place far from his hometown (in “City Lights”) and shortly afterwards finding himself in a part of the city made familiar by a childhood memory of letters from a friend. Or it might (in “Half an Hour”) take the shape of a boy being distracted from an urgent errand by a glimpse of someone who may or may not be an old classmate, now apparently wearing a blind person’s glasses. Often, the characters’ growing desolation is concealed beneath a restrained tone. “I kept moving around, met a few diverting people,” says the title story’s narrator – a man whose wife has recently died – but this is a deceptively simple summary of what is a very layered tale about grief and love.
Occasionally the narratives conduct metaphysical conversations with each other, as in “A Good Dry-Cleaner is Worth a Story”, which describes a road accident that has been alluded to (as a dream) in another piece. This means that though Chakraborti’s prose is consistently direct and elegant, these stories are elliptical, sometimes claustrophobic, and demand a reader's full concentration. (They didn’t all work for me: my attention drifted during passages of “Down to Experience: A Novella”, a rambling tale set in late 1940s Europe, involving people caught between groups and ideologies, unsure what side they or their friends are on, or if sides even exist.) However, once you acquire a taste for this writer’s very particular universe – with its glimpses of the inner spaces of people confounded by delays, detours, bad luck and unreadable signs – it is very hard to leave it.
Sabtu, 23 Maret 2013
Exit, pursued by a bear (a grizzly TV set and other horrors in Aatma)
The new film Aatma knows something the cinema of horror has known for decades now – that there is nothing quite as terrifying as a sweet little girl, especially a sweet little girl who looks into your eyes and chirrups “I love you, mama.” Aatma, subtitled “Feel it Around You” (displayed on the neon ticker outside the hall as “Feel Around You”), begins with a sequence where we see just such a girl, Nia, watching a home video on a fancy plasma TV screen that appears to be.... nestled inside the belly of what is either a giant panda or a polar bear with a zebra gene.
It is a heart-stopping moment and yet, astonishingly, it turns out that this is not what we are meant to find scary! The panda is mere interior decoration in a child’s nursery, unremarked on and never held up for judgement or scrutiny. The film doesn’t ask us to consider the effect that this creepy ursine wall-adornment (along with what look like a number of Angry Bird soft toys on a giant bed) might have on the girl’s mental state. Instead, the intended object of terror is harmless little Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who plays the ghost of Nia’s over-possessive father and looks only as menacing as he did in his early scenes as the drug-wasted Faisal, timidly asking for “permission” in Gangs of Wasseypur.
As the deceased but still angry Abhay, Nawazuddin gives the best performance in this film (which is saying very little), but I maintain that the real source of the chills is the girl – not in the scenes where she is possessed (those are just funny) but in the ones where she is being a normal privileged child doing the things normal privileged children these days do with their fake pink cellphones and their furry TV sets.
Okay, seriously: being a big fan of the genre and defensive about the snobbery that comes its way, I really wanted to like Aatma. And this is a good-looking film in many ways, with some interesting – if derivative – things happening at the level of camerawork and framing: a showy tracking shot early on plays like a tribute to Kubrick’s The Shining as well as some of De Palma’s great 70s work; there is a long, self-consciously stationary shot in a judge’s chamber where Abhay is denied custody of his child (and Nawazuddin gets to Act with a capital A). But given the minor flair for psychological tension that the film shows in its initial scenes, I wish it had held back for a while before moving into the realm of the explicitly supernatural. Perhaps it could have kept us guessing for a bit longer, allowed us to wonder if Nia’s mother Maya (Bipasha Basu) is to be trusted, whether Abhay really is dead (and then again, whether he really is undead), or if the kid and her mom have serious emotional issues and are imagining things. But the ghostly stuff kicks in too fast, putting paid to any larger-narrative suspense.
A predictable story arc follows, as the people who offer help or support to Maya are bumped off one by one. This is not in itself problematic, but what could have been fine setpieces are irritatingly listless in their execution, and most of the characters are underwritten and barely performed at all. Consider Nia’s class-teacher, who merely looks a little put out during a spelling session when the little girl spells out words that haven’t even been enunciated yet. Later, working alone in the school, the teacher sees a recently deceased boy walking the corridors, and her ludicrous reaction is to call out “Paras! Paras!” in a flat voice as she follows him around.
Tilottama Shome, who plays this thankless part, is capable of better things, which is a reminder that dialogue-writers and actors working in horror films are often content to be foot-soldiers to the paisa-vasool moments – the ones that they know will (if handled with even minimum competence) make viewers bolt up in their seats or splay their fingers across their eyes. Thus, while Aatma has a couple of obligatory scary moments, it has many more slack “dramatic” scenes where indifferent writing meets (or facilitates) indifferent acting. “Nia, papa se baat kar rahe ho?” Maya asks in an expressionless tone when she sees her daughter talking to her ghost-dad on her pink toy phone. “Aur kya kaha papa ne?” She seems equally impassive after the grisly murder of her child’s psychiatrist (while he was sitting in his office with little Nia) and even manages a rueful little smile (or maybe that’s just the natural curve of Bipasha’s mouth) when she speaks with her colleague shortly after the body has been discovered.
And so it goes. There are purifying havans and jaadu-tona and amulets intended to ward off evil. There are unintentionally funny shots such as the one of the ghost plaintively looking up at the balcony with his arms spread out, after Maya has thwarted one of his attempts to have his daughter join him in the after-life. (Nawazuddin here looks a bit like a sad farmer hoping for rain.) There is not the slightest attempt at making the past history of Maya and Abhay credible, or fleshing out the family’s inner dynamics, or explaining how Abhay managed to simultaneously be so savage towards his wife and so tender towards his daughter.
And maybe I’m becoming bleeding-heart socialist in my old age, but I can invest only so much emotion in the misfortunes of beautiful rich people who react to a loved one’s savage murder with mildly worried expressions (as if the new Koala Bear-TV has malfunctioned and eaten the new Gucci handbag). At least Nawazuddin looks and sounds somewhat like a human being capable of real emotion (even if that emotion is wife-beating rage). It’s another matter that he also looks like a boy from Wasseypur suddenly teleported to Malabar Hill. As a police officer played by Jaideep Ahlawat – who was also in Wasseypur and looks like he preferred it there – says, “I have a bad feeling about this.”
Speaking of Wasseypur and Malabar Hill, in theory at least it is interesting that the film’s two main male figures are rustic types who speak coarsely and seem out of place in this luxurious setting, while the women are self-sufficient, chic and upper-class. If Aatma had been a better-written film, it might have done intriguing things with this men-as-primitive-women-as-modern subtext. It might, for instance, have been a comment on conservative men who feel threatened by confident, working women (Abhay flies into a temper when he suspects Maya has been talking on the phone with her male colleague; the police officer has a nightmare where he sees Maya and her daughter at the edge of his bed, looking back at him menacingly, perhaps implying that he sees them, rather than the father, as the problem). But the implications of this aren’t explored, and what could have been a subtle exploration of the man-woman relationship within the changing contexts of marriage, parenthood and modernity – while also being a very good horror film – ends up being neither.
P.S. (Spoiler Alert) It seems a little unfair that even after dying you have to dig your way out of a pit while other ghosts stand around cackling at you. But at the film’s end Maya heroically overcomes this inconvenience and shows up in time to beat the crap out of Abhay and save their daughter. What she saves her for is questionable though: make what you will of the final scene, in which an 18-year-old Nia, surrounded by zombie-like friends and whatever surviving family members there are, celebrates her birthday in the same mansion while the spirit of her mother watches fondly from a distance (and the television-bear growls “Who’s been sleeping in my bed?”).
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*** The Fellini short “Toby Dammit” is just one of many movies that cast little girls as Satan. More on that here
It is a heart-stopping moment and yet, astonishingly, it turns out that this is not what we are meant to find scary! The panda is mere interior decoration in a child’s nursery, unremarked on and never held up for judgement or scrutiny. The film doesn’t ask us to consider the effect that this creepy ursine wall-adornment (along with what look like a number of Angry Bird soft toys on a giant bed) might have on the girl’s mental state. Instead, the intended object of terror is harmless little Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who plays the ghost of Nia’s over-possessive father and looks only as menacing as he did in his early scenes as the drug-wasted Faisal, timidly asking for “permission” in Gangs of Wasseypur.As the deceased but still angry Abhay, Nawazuddin gives the best performance in this film (which is saying very little), but I maintain that the real source of the chills is the girl – not in the scenes where she is possessed (those are just funny) but in the ones where she is being a normal privileged child doing the things normal privileged children these days do with their fake pink cellphones and their furry TV sets.
Okay, seriously: being a big fan of the genre and defensive about the snobbery that comes its way, I really wanted to like Aatma. And this is a good-looking film in many ways, with some interesting – if derivative – things happening at the level of camerawork and framing: a showy tracking shot early on plays like a tribute to Kubrick’s The Shining as well as some of De Palma’s great 70s work; there is a long, self-consciously stationary shot in a judge’s chamber where Abhay is denied custody of his child (and Nawazuddin gets to Act with a capital A). But given the minor flair for psychological tension that the film shows in its initial scenes, I wish it had held back for a while before moving into the realm of the explicitly supernatural. Perhaps it could have kept us guessing for a bit longer, allowed us to wonder if Nia’s mother Maya (Bipasha Basu) is to be trusted, whether Abhay really is dead (and then again, whether he really is undead), or if the kid and her mom have serious emotional issues and are imagining things. But the ghostly stuff kicks in too fast, putting paid to any larger-narrative suspense.
A predictable story arc follows, as the people who offer help or support to Maya are bumped off one by one. This is not in itself problematic, but what could have been fine setpieces are irritatingly listless in their execution, and most of the characters are underwritten and barely performed at all. Consider Nia’s class-teacher, who merely looks a little put out during a spelling session when the little girl spells out words that haven’t even been enunciated yet. Later, working alone in the school, the teacher sees a recently deceased boy walking the corridors, and her ludicrous reaction is to call out “Paras! Paras!” in a flat voice as she follows him around. Tilottama Shome, who plays this thankless part, is capable of better things, which is a reminder that dialogue-writers and actors working in horror films are often content to be foot-soldiers to the paisa-vasool moments – the ones that they know will (if handled with even minimum competence) make viewers bolt up in their seats or splay their fingers across their eyes. Thus, while Aatma has a couple of obligatory scary moments, it has many more slack “dramatic” scenes where indifferent writing meets (or facilitates) indifferent acting. “Nia, papa se baat kar rahe ho?” Maya asks in an expressionless tone when she sees her daughter talking to her ghost-dad on her pink toy phone. “Aur kya kaha papa ne?” She seems equally impassive after the grisly murder of her child’s psychiatrist (while he was sitting in his office with little Nia) and even manages a rueful little smile (or maybe that’s just the natural curve of Bipasha’s mouth) when she speaks with her colleague shortly after the body has been discovered.
And so it goes. There are purifying havans and jaadu-tona and amulets intended to ward off evil. There are unintentionally funny shots such as the one of the ghost plaintively looking up at the balcony with his arms spread out, after Maya has thwarted one of his attempts to have his daughter join him in the after-life. (Nawazuddin here looks a bit like a sad farmer hoping for rain.) There is not the slightest attempt at making the past history of Maya and Abhay credible, or fleshing out the family’s inner dynamics, or explaining how Abhay managed to simultaneously be so savage towards his wife and so tender towards his daughter.
And maybe I’m becoming bleeding-heart socialist in my old age, but I can invest only so much emotion in the misfortunes of beautiful rich people who react to a loved one’s savage murder with mildly worried expressions (as if the new Koala Bear-TV has malfunctioned and eaten the new Gucci handbag). At least Nawazuddin looks and sounds somewhat like a human being capable of real emotion (even if that emotion is wife-beating rage). It’s another matter that he also looks like a boy from Wasseypur suddenly teleported to Malabar Hill. As a police officer played by Jaideep Ahlawat – who was also in Wasseypur and looks like he preferred it there – says, “I have a bad feeling about this.”Speaking of Wasseypur and Malabar Hill, in theory at least it is interesting that the film’s two main male figures are rustic types who speak coarsely and seem out of place in this luxurious setting, while the women are self-sufficient, chic and upper-class. If Aatma had been a better-written film, it might have done intriguing things with this men-as-primitive-women-as-modern subtext. It might, for instance, have been a comment on conservative men who feel threatened by confident, working women (Abhay flies into a temper when he suspects Maya has been talking on the phone with her male colleague; the police officer has a nightmare where he sees Maya and her daughter at the edge of his bed, looking back at him menacingly, perhaps implying that he sees them, rather than the father, as the problem). But the implications of this aren’t explored, and what could have been a subtle exploration of the man-woman relationship within the changing contexts of marriage, parenthood and modernity – while also being a very good horror film – ends up being neither.
P.S. (Spoiler Alert) It seems a little unfair that even after dying you have to dig your way out of a pit while other ghosts stand around cackling at you. But at the film’s end Maya heroically overcomes this inconvenience and shows up in time to beat the crap out of Abhay and save their daughter. What she saves her for is questionable though: make what you will of the final scene, in which an 18-year-old Nia, surrounded by zombie-like friends and whatever surviving family members there are, celebrates her birthday in the same mansion while the spirit of her mother watches fondly from a distance (and the television-bear growls “Who’s been sleeping in my bed?”). -------------
*** The Fellini short “Toby Dammit” is just one of many movies that cast little girls as Satan. More on that here
Rabu, 20 Maret 2013
On the streets and in the workshops - Salaam Bombay!, 25 years later
[Salaam Bombay! is being rereleased by PVR Director’s Rare on the 22nd, in a fine restored print. I strongly recommend watching it on the big screen. Did this piece for Tehelka]
“I believe I may have been put on this earth to tell stories of living between worlds,” writes Mira Nair in her introduction to the soon-to-be-published book The Reluctant Fundamentalist: From Book to Film. It’s a theme that runs through her wide-ranging movie career, and it takes on a very large scale in her adaptation of Mohsin Hamid’s novel; The Reluctant Fundamentalist is about nothing less than the clash of civilisations, about the East-West conflict that hangs over the planet. But the canvas was smaller, more intimate – and no less powerful for it – in Nair’s first feature film Salaam Bombay!, which is being released this week in a re-mastered print to mark its 25th anniversary.
That movie’s version of “between worlds” is summed up in a quiet scene where the 12-year-old protagonist Krishna/Chaipau and his older, more experienced junkie friend Chillum sit talking together in a graveyard. (Coming as it does in a frequently Dickensian film, the scene might make you imagine a more genial version of Magwitch sharing a peace-pipe with a more confused version of Pip.) Living in the big city, they yearn for the pastoral life, for the cool air of the “muluk” that they left behind. Chaipau has at least a theoretical chance of returning to that world – the film centres on his efforts to earn the 500 rupees that will allow him to do this – but for Chillum, we will soon see, it is already too late.
A quarter-century after it was made, there are many ways to take stock of Nair’s extraordinary film. There is, of course, the saphead position – having little to do with meaningful criticism – that goes roughly like this: any depiction of our poor is inherently demeaning, or amounts to exoticising poverty for a western audience***. Salaam Bombay! was, to an extent, insulated from such charges because it had the stamp of government approval, being co-produced by the NFDC. But watch it and there is no doubting the seriousness of its intentions and the quality of its execution. Two decades before The White Tiger won the Man Booker and Slumdog Millionnaire got its grubby hands on all those Oscars, Nair’s film depicted the lives of Bombay’s street children with a pragmatic refusal to be either maudlin or voyeuristic. After all, one of her reference points was Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, a film that, as Andre Bazin put it, “did not refer to moral categories” or sentimentalise the poor.
Just as remarkable is Salaam Bombay!’s nearly seamless mixing of two disparate cinematic modes: this is a fiction narrative with scripted characters, but it also has elements of the Cinema Vérité in which Nair was trained in the US, including lengthy held shots where the camera is doing little more than observing life unfolding at its own pace. It was shot - on an unprecedented scale - on Bombay’s streets, in real train stations and real brothels, and hidden cameras were used for some scenes. The adult roles were played by professional actors such as Anita Kanwar, Nana Patekar and Raghuvir Yadav (magnificent as the snivelling, giggling Chillum, driven to animal-like whines and bursts of impotent rage as addiction corrodes him), but working alongside them were a group of wonderful non-professional child performers, and there is no telling the difference. Workshops were conducted to siphon out the children’s preconceived ideas of what “movie acting” should be; in other words, to get these real-life street kids to play versions of themselves, Nair had to make them unlearn the larger-than-life mannerisms they knew from watching commercial Hindi cinema. (This is a telling comment on the 
relationship between a society and its popular culture, also reflected in scenes like the one where a boy sings "Hawa Hawaii" as he pees on the tracks, or in the raunchy use of the lyrics "Chal chal dhakha maar" from the title track of Haathi Mere Saathi.) The final film is a testament to the effectiveness of those workshops, as well as a reminder that assiduous preparation can pave the way for on-set improvisation and the illusion of spontaneity – something that would also be seen in Nair’s Monsoon Wedding years later.
Handled with less care, some of Salaam Bombay!’s characters could have been hollow symbols (consider “Solah Saal”, the 16-year-old virgin from Nepal whose “seal” is valued at Rs 10,000 and who becomes the mute, uncomprehending catalyst for the viewer's understanding of the people around her) but Nair’s direction and Sooni Taraporevala's writing achieve a synthesis between sympathy and detachment. Sandi Sissel's cinematography creates numerous elegant frames without over-prettifying. And then there is the way in which L Subramaniam's beautiful violin-led score - a masterstroke by Nair that might have seemed an eccentric or "Western" decision on paper - embellishes, as opposed to thickly underlines, the story's dramatic moments.
With the passage of time, we can see that Salaam Bombay! helped open doors for a newer, grittier brand of Bombay filmmaking, beginning with the 1990s work of Ram Gopal Varma. It also led to the creation of the Salaam Baalak Trust, which has provided financial and emotional support
to thousands of street children over the years. And so it is fitting that Penguin India has reprinted Nair’s 1989 book about the film’s genesis and legacy, a singular account of “private madness”, as she called it then (and her new Foreword to which mulls the question "Can art change the world?"). But there is no substitute for watching the film itself, especially on the big screen and in the re-mastered print. This is “pure cinema” while also being quasi-documentary, and it is as fresh today as when it was made.
-----------
*** At Nair's Spring Fever session on Sunday, a member of the audience asked her that tired question "Why are filmmakers so obsessed with India’s poverty?" The man expressed his views genially and mentioned his admiration for Nair's work, but I was amused when he said that Monsoon Wedding was the only high-profile international film he could think of that presented a "positive" picture of India to the West. Now I absolutely love that film, but it's odd to think that a depiction of an upper-class family spending obscene quantities of money on an ostentatious wedding can be construed as an unqualifiedly positive representation of modern India, while a portrayal of street-children's lives should be seen as something to frown at.
“I believe I may have been put on this earth to tell stories of living between worlds,” writes Mira Nair in her introduction to the soon-to-be-published book The Reluctant Fundamentalist: From Book to Film. It’s a theme that runs through her wide-ranging movie career, and it takes on a very large scale in her adaptation of Mohsin Hamid’s novel; The Reluctant Fundamentalist is about nothing less than the clash of civilisations, about the East-West conflict that hangs over the planet. But the canvas was smaller, more intimate – and no less powerful for it – in Nair’s first feature film Salaam Bombay!, which is being released this week in a re-mastered print to mark its 25th anniversary.
That movie’s version of “between worlds” is summed up in a quiet scene where the 12-year-old protagonist Krishna/Chaipau and his older, more experienced junkie friend Chillum sit talking together in a graveyard. (Coming as it does in a frequently Dickensian film, the scene might make you imagine a more genial version of Magwitch sharing a peace-pipe with a more confused version of Pip.) Living in the big city, they yearn for the pastoral life, for the cool air of the “muluk” that they left behind. Chaipau has at least a theoretical chance of returning to that world – the film centres on his efforts to earn the 500 rupees that will allow him to do this – but for Chillum, we will soon see, it is already too late.A quarter-century after it was made, there are many ways to take stock of Nair’s extraordinary film. There is, of course, the saphead position – having little to do with meaningful criticism – that goes roughly like this: any depiction of our poor is inherently demeaning, or amounts to exoticising poverty for a western audience***. Salaam Bombay! was, to an extent, insulated from such charges because it had the stamp of government approval, being co-produced by the NFDC. But watch it and there is no doubting the seriousness of its intentions and the quality of its execution. Two decades before The White Tiger won the Man Booker and Slumdog Millionnaire got its grubby hands on all those Oscars, Nair’s film depicted the lives of Bombay’s street children with a pragmatic refusal to be either maudlin or voyeuristic. After all, one of her reference points was Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, a film that, as Andre Bazin put it, “did not refer to moral categories” or sentimentalise the poor.
Just as remarkable is Salaam Bombay!’s nearly seamless mixing of two disparate cinematic modes: this is a fiction narrative with scripted characters, but it also has elements of the Cinema Vérité in which Nair was trained in the US, including lengthy held shots where the camera is doing little more than observing life unfolding at its own pace. It was shot - on an unprecedented scale - on Bombay’s streets, in real train stations and real brothels, and hidden cameras were used for some scenes. The adult roles were played by professional actors such as Anita Kanwar, Nana Patekar and Raghuvir Yadav (magnificent as the snivelling, giggling Chillum, driven to animal-like whines and bursts of impotent rage as addiction corrodes him), but working alongside them were a group of wonderful non-professional child performers, and there is no telling the difference. Workshops were conducted to siphon out the children’s preconceived ideas of what “movie acting” should be; in other words, to get these real-life street kids to play versions of themselves, Nair had to make them unlearn the larger-than-life mannerisms they knew from watching commercial Hindi cinema. (This is a telling comment on the 
relationship between a society and its popular culture, also reflected in scenes like the one where a boy sings "Hawa Hawaii" as he pees on the tracks, or in the raunchy use of the lyrics "Chal chal dhakha maar" from the title track of Haathi Mere Saathi.) The final film is a testament to the effectiveness of those workshops, as well as a reminder that assiduous preparation can pave the way for on-set improvisation and the illusion of spontaneity – something that would also be seen in Nair’s Monsoon Wedding years later.Handled with less care, some of Salaam Bombay!’s characters could have been hollow symbols (consider “Solah Saal”, the 16-year-old virgin from Nepal whose “seal” is valued at Rs 10,000 and who becomes the mute, uncomprehending catalyst for the viewer's understanding of the people around her) but Nair’s direction and Sooni Taraporevala's writing achieve a synthesis between sympathy and detachment. Sandi Sissel's cinematography creates numerous elegant frames without over-prettifying. And then there is the way in which L Subramaniam's beautiful violin-led score - a masterstroke by Nair that might have seemed an eccentric or "Western" decision on paper - embellishes, as opposed to thickly underlines, the story's dramatic moments.
With the passage of time, we can see that Salaam Bombay! helped open doors for a newer, grittier brand of Bombay filmmaking, beginning with the 1990s work of Ram Gopal Varma. It also led to the creation of the Salaam Baalak Trust, which has provided financial and emotional support
to thousands of street children over the years. And so it is fitting that Penguin India has reprinted Nair’s 1989 book about the film’s genesis and legacy, a singular account of “private madness”, as she called it then (and her new Foreword to which mulls the question "Can art change the world?"). But there is no substitute for watching the film itself, especially on the big screen and in the re-mastered print. This is “pure cinema” while also being quasi-documentary, and it is as fresh today as when it was made.-----------
*** At Nair's Spring Fever session on Sunday, a member of the audience asked her that tired question "Why are filmmakers so obsessed with India’s poverty?" The man expressed his views genially and mentioned his admiration for Nair's work, but I was amused when he said that Monsoon Wedding was the only high-profile international film he could think of that presented a "positive" picture of India to the West. Now I absolutely love that film, but it's odd to think that a depiction of an upper-class family spending obscene quantities of money on an ostentatious wedding can be construed as an unqualifiedly positive representation of modern India, while a portrayal of street-children's lives should be seen as something to frown at.
Selasa, 12 Maret 2013
When Sambha danced - on the strange fame of Mac the naif
In his most famous movie role, he sat atop a big rock with a gun in his hand and replied to his master’s calls of “Arre O Sambha”. It was a small part, but it became so iconic that his profile could be used as the sole image on a “minimal Bollywood poster”, and anyone would know instantly that the film was Sholay. Yet what did the actor MacMohan himself feel about being defined and shadowed by that tiny role for the rest of his career?
I ask because a few weeks ago I caught a glimpse of an alternate future for the man, via a song from a 1964 film titled Aao Pyaar Karein. In the sequence (which you can and must see on YouTube here), the young MacMohan dances – daintily play-acting as a woman – with the movie’s leading man Joy Mukherjee, while their friends sit around clapping, shaking their heads and generally being baboons. Minus the distinctive beard and the streak of white hair, dressed in a formal suit with a bow-tie, filmed in black-and-white, MacMohan is unrecognisable from the screen persona he would eventually inhabit. His movements are lithe and graceful even during a strip-tease that ends with him in vest and striped shorts; with the always-affable Mukherjee giving him company, it doesn’t seem in poor taste (the woman who makes occasional appearances in the scene is more problematic).
Watching little Mac here is a reminder that a performer with disparate talents might get so pigeonholed that it becomes impossible to imagine him doing anything else. At this point in his career he was probably a young actor hoping for a big break, and on this evidence he might have had a future as a reliable supporting player: as the hero’s foil or a genial comedian. If he had been more personable and good-looking (whatever those words might mean in the context of the dubious physiognomic history of the Hindi-movie leading man, about which more in Mukul Kesavan’s essay “The Ugliness of the Indian Male”), he may even have hoped for something better.
Something else that’s amusing about the Aao Pyaar Karein scene: clowning about on the periphery – as one of the other buddies – is the young Sanjeev Kumar, years before his stardom. In other words, here are two bit-part actors on level ground, long before their respective destinies in Hindi cinema were set, and a decade before they found themselves on opposite sides of the law – and at opposite ends of the fame continuum – as dacoit-minion Sambha and upright hero Thakur Baldev Singh.
****
In a way it is fitting that one of MacMohan’s last screen appearances – 45 years after he danced with Joy Mukherjee – was in Zoya Akhtar’s Luck by Chance, a film that knows about the serendipitous moment; about the combination of events – a chance encounter, a portfolio that happens to make its way to an office at just the right time, catching the eye of this rather than that person – that can make the difference between good fortune and continuing struggle. It is a film with sympathy for the underdogs, has-beens and never-weres of the movie industry, and it gave MacMohan the respect of a bona fide cameo part (as opposed to the anonymous sidey roles he played in so many films). Playing himself, he visits an acting workshop, where he is asked by enthusiastic students to speak the line that made him famous. He looks down, pauses for a moment, looks up and says “Poore pacchaas hazaar”.
It’s a touching moment, a view of a career summarised in – and frozen by – three words. The cynical might look at his worn expression and at the students' grinning faces and say this is a case of a man invited to participate in self-parody. But you can also see a performer making a serious effort to “act” for the two seconds or so it takes him to say the line. In its quiet acknowledgement of the dignity of labour, the scene reminds me of Satyajit Ray’s fine short story “Patol Babu, Film Star”, in which a middle-aged man hired to play a part in a film discovers that he is required to say nothing more than “Oh” in his scene, but then gets over his disappointment by uncovering the possibilities contained in the single word:
P.S. the "Patol Babu" excerpt above is from Ray’s own English translation of the story, most recently published in Classic Satyajit Ray. Incidentally, this is also the story that Dibakar Banerjee has adapted for his short film for the 100 Years of Cinema project. As mentioned in my Banerjee profile for Caravan, Nawazuddin Siddiqi - an actor who struggled for years before breaking into the big league - is playing the lead role in that film, which will incorporate elements from Nawazuddin's own real-life story.
And an anecdote from an email exchange: probably not something one should read too much into, but then again who knows. A few months ago a photo of the young MacMohan from the Aao Pyaar Karein song was doing the rounds on the internet; movie buffs were asking each other to identify the man, “who became unexpectedly famous in the 1970s”. A friend tells me she was astonished by how many of her correspondents wrote back asking if the picture was that of a skinny young pre-stardom Rajesh Khanna, because “the smile is the same”. Perhaps the angle of the photo was particularly flattering to MacMohan, or perhaps this was because Khanna had recently died and everyone had him on their mind. But as my friend put it, “even if they were seeing things, clearly in that snap he did look hero-like enough for them.” (Or nearly as hero-like as Rajesh Khanna, which is not an unequivocal compliment.)
I ask because a few weeks ago I caught a glimpse of an alternate future for the man, via a song from a 1964 film titled Aao Pyaar Karein. In the sequence (which you can and must see on YouTube here), the young MacMohan dances – daintily play-acting as a woman – with the movie’s leading man Joy Mukherjee, while their friends sit around clapping, shaking their heads and generally being baboons. Minus the distinctive beard and the streak of white hair, dressed in a formal suit with a bow-tie, filmed in black-and-white, MacMohan is unrecognisable from the screen persona he would eventually inhabit. His movements are lithe and graceful even during a strip-tease that ends with him in vest and striped shorts; with the always-affable Mukherjee giving him company, it doesn’t seem in poor taste (the woman who makes occasional appearances in the scene is more problematic).
Watching little Mac here is a reminder that a performer with disparate talents might get so pigeonholed that it becomes impossible to imagine him doing anything else. At this point in his career he was probably a young actor hoping for a big break, and on this evidence he might have had a future as a reliable supporting player: as the hero’s foil or a genial comedian. If he had been more personable and good-looking (whatever those words might mean in the context of the dubious physiognomic history of the Hindi-movie leading man, about which more in Mukul Kesavan’s essay “The Ugliness of the Indian Male”), he may even have hoped for something better. Something else that’s amusing about the Aao Pyaar Karein scene: clowning about on the periphery – as one of the other buddies – is the young Sanjeev Kumar, years before his stardom. In other words, here are two bit-part actors on level ground, long before their respective destinies in Hindi cinema were set, and a decade before they found themselves on opposite sides of the law – and at opposite ends of the fame continuum – as dacoit-minion Sambha and upright hero Thakur Baldev Singh.
****
In a way it is fitting that one of MacMohan’s last screen appearances – 45 years after he danced with Joy Mukherjee – was in Zoya Akhtar’s Luck by Chance, a film that knows about the serendipitous moment; about the combination of events – a chance encounter, a portfolio that happens to make its way to an office at just the right time, catching the eye of this rather than that person – that can make the difference between good fortune and continuing struggle. It is a film with sympathy for the underdogs, has-beens and never-weres of the movie industry, and it gave MacMohan the respect of a bona fide cameo part (as opposed to the anonymous sidey roles he played in so many films). Playing himself, he visits an acting workshop, where he is asked by enthusiastic students to speak the line that made him famous. He looks down, pauses for a moment, looks up and says “Poore pacchaas hazaar”.
It’s a touching moment, a view of a career summarised in – and frozen by – three words. The cynical might look at his worn expression and at the students' grinning faces and say this is a case of a man invited to participate in self-parody. But you can also see a performer making a serious effort to “act” for the two seconds or so it takes him to say the line. In its quiet acknowledgement of the dignity of labour, the scene reminds me of Satyajit Ray’s fine short story “Patol Babu, Film Star”, in which a middle-aged man hired to play a part in a film discovers that he is required to say nothing more than “Oh” in his scene, but then gets over his disappointment by uncovering the possibilities contained in the single word:
Patol Babu uttered the word over and over again, giving it a different inflection each time. After doing this for a number of times he made an astonishing discovery. The same exclamation, when spoken in different ways, carried different shades of meaning. A man when hurt said “Oh” in one way. Despair brought forth a different kind of “Oh”, while sorrow provoked yet another kind. There were so many kinds of Ohs – the short Oh, the long-drawn Oh, Oh shouted and Oh whispered, the high-pitched Oh, the low-pitched Oh, the Oh starting low and ending high, and the Oh starting high and ending low...Patol Babu suddenly felt that he could write a whole thesis on that one monosyllabic exclamation. Why had he felt so disheartened when this single word contained a golden mine of meaning? The true actor could make a mark with this one syllable.I wonder if MacMohan, in his post-Sholay life, sometimes quietly muttered “Poore pacchaas hazaar” to himself, examining the phrase for depth and meaning, and reflecting on the strangeness of his fame.
P.S. the "Patol Babu" excerpt above is from Ray’s own English translation of the story, most recently published in Classic Satyajit Ray. Incidentally, this is also the story that Dibakar Banerjee has adapted for his short film for the 100 Years of Cinema project. As mentioned in my Banerjee profile for Caravan, Nawazuddin Siddiqi - an actor who struggled for years before breaking into the big league - is playing the lead role in that film, which will incorporate elements from Nawazuddin's own real-life story.
And an anecdote from an email exchange: probably not something one should read too much into, but then again who knows. A few months ago a photo of the young MacMohan from the Aao Pyaar Karein song was doing the rounds on the internet; movie buffs were asking each other to identify the man, “who became unexpectedly famous in the 1970s”. A friend tells me she was astonished by how many of her correspondents wrote back asking if the picture was that of a skinny young pre-stardom Rajesh Khanna, because “the smile is the same”. Perhaps the angle of the photo was particularly flattering to MacMohan, or perhaps this was because Khanna had recently died and everyone had him on their mind. But as my friend put it, “even if they were seeing things, clearly in that snap he did look hero-like enough for them.” (Or nearly as hero-like as Rajesh Khanna, which is not an unequivocal compliment.)Jumat, 08 Maret 2013
Mira Nair and others at Spring Fever
The schedule for Penguin India’s Spring Fever (March 15-24 at the India Habitat Centre's Amphitheatre) is out. On March 17 I’ll be speaking with director Mira Nair about her career, specifically the 25th anniversary of Salaam Bombay! (and the reprinting of Nair’s book about the genesis and making of that film), the upcoming release of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and the process of adapting Mohsin Hamid’s enigmatic novel into a movie. There are also sessions featuring Vikram Seth, Shobhaa De, Ruskin Bond, Gulzar and others. Full schedule below.
Rabu, 06 Maret 2013
Naak naak, who's there?
[So, Kindle magazine asked me to do a piece for their cover spread about women “reclaiming” their bodies, and I obliged with this series of vignettes about the Nose. (The essays in the issue are about various body parts.) Still a bit unsure about what I was trying to do exactly, and it reads like a mix of personal anecdote and po-faced social commentary from the “look-at-me-I’m-such-a-sensitive-male” catalogue. But hopefully it isn’t a complete... stinker.
Post title courtesy that adroit punster, Baradwaj Rangan]
---------------
My favourite photograph of my wife Abhilasha is, of all things, an X-Ray - a profile of her face that shows the outline of the nose and the jaw clearly enough, but with one tiny, jarringly non-organic substance visible in the nasal region. You feel like you're looking at an embedded metallic chip from a dystopian story about people being monitored by a totalitarian government.
Learn the context though, and it becomes funnier. Two years ago Abhilasha had a nose encounter of the weird kind. She had been wearing one of those small nose-rings that looks very compact on the outside but which comes with all sorts of complicated paraphernalia that lies just out of sight: a tiny cap screw, a bolt, and for all I know a warehouse supply of ball bearings and rotating-gear wheels too. Anyway, over time the little screw somehow got embedded in the wall of the nose, with the skin closing over it – and she discovered this only when she managed to remove most of the ring and realised something was still lodged inside, where only a surgeon’s delicate tools could reach.
Hence the X-Ray. Hence a quick appointment with the local clinic, where all of us had trouble keeping a straight face. (Surgeries involving a family member are not normally things to be laughed at, but.) Hence the giggling doctor – and I tell you, a big burly Sikh surgeon teehee-ing like Tinkerbell as he exits an operating theatre is a rare sight. Eventually Abhilasha came out looking sheepish, a small bandage-gauze awkwardly attached to half her proboscis. “Aaj tumne hamaari naak kaat ke rakh di,” I told her with the sternest expression I could muster.
It seemed the obvious thing to say. After all, we are the smugly liberal ones, right? We have grown up hearing – and superciliously shaking our heads at – those melodramatic pronouncements in Hindi movies. We feel we can use them in humour, even though we know they so often assume much darker expression in the real world: as condemnations, to suppress rights and freedoms; that they can even be a matter of life or death. A few months earlier, we had read the story about Bibi Aisha, the Afghan woman whose nose was cut off by her husband and in-laws
when she tried to escape them after years of abuse. Aisha did eventually gain a measure of freedom – and became a poster-child for commentary on sexual oppression when she was featured on the cover of Time magazine – but one can safely assume that thousands of other women aren’t as lucky.
However, this attempt to construct otherness – to not acknowledge the large spectrum that links our own presumably enlightened lives with the uncivilised lives of "those" people – is self-deceptive. Years earlier, Abhilasha herself had been on the receiving end of a more serious “naak” denouncement. It was during one of her first stints in journalism. An unexpected “graveyard shift” happened to arise during a week when her parents were out of town and she was staying at her maasi’s house. Destined to be stuck in office past midnight and reluctant to disturb a household that had old people living in it, she decided to stay over at a friend’s who lived nearby – after having informed her aunt, of course. It was the practical thing to do in the circumstances. But the next day, when her mother returned, hell broke loose: there was screaming, there were wails and imprecations. What were you thinking? What will they think of us? What kind of a job is this? And that damning sentence: “Naak kaat di tumne hamaari.”
Two things worth noting here: one, that her parents seemed less concerned about what she had really been up to the previous night, and more concerned about what their relatives would think; deeply upset that the situation had been such that others knew. And two: Abhilasha’s mother had once been the principal of a small school and had in her younger days written short stories that might be described as feminist laments for the ways in which women are made to live in the shadows of men. Her apparent volte-face when it came to her own grown-up daughter seems like a classic case of a victim of patriarchy becoming absorbed into the system.
Here was an urban family that hadn’t thought twice about giving their daughter the same level of education as their son, and about encouraging her professional ambitions. But that didn’t erase the Lakshmana-rekha: it was untenable to stay out this late, to fail to be the Good Girl treading a straight path from office to home.
*****
The other “lakshmana-rekha” in the Ramayana – the one that doesn’t get described as such – is the clean slash Rama’s younger brother made across Surpanakha’s face with his sword, severing her nose and setting a chain of events in motion. It’s easy to see why this ambiguous episode has lent itself to so many literary retellings and alternate psychological explanations. In a short story titled "Surpanakha", for instance, the novelist and poet Amit Chaudhuri casts Rama and Lakshmana as posturing bullies, unable to deal with the idea of a woman as a sexually autonomous being. “Teach her a lesson for being so forward,” Rama tells his brother chillingly when Surpanakha propositions him; the words echo “punishments” meted out by patriarchal societies to women who dare express sexual desire.
Lakshman came back; there was some blood on the blade. “I cut her nose off,” he said. “It,” he gestured toward the knife, “went through her nostril as if it were silk. She immediately changed back from being a paradigm of beauty into the horrible creature she really is. She’s not worth describing,” he said as he wiped his blade.
“Horrible creature...not worth describing.”
To see that Time photo of Bibi Aisha is to be reminded of why the nose is so key to our perceptions of human beauty as well as personal dignity. Try looking at the photo with your finger awkwardly blocking out the missing organ, and you get a hint of inner radiance and poise; you see the forthright, proud gaze of someone who survived an ordeal. And yet, without the nose, the illusion becomes difficult to sustain – the organ is, to put it simply, central. With a gaping hole right in the middle of the face, the resemblance to a death-head is inescapable, and we are uncomfortably reminded of what we are beneath our hubristic ideas of our own beauty.
The nose is also, of course, the breathing apparatus – directly associated with the most fundamental activity of human existence. And in the “naak kat gayi” context, it can be an uncomfortable reminder of what existence is for so many women around the world. It means being the repository of a family’s or society’s “honour”, someone whose “transgressions” – real or imagined – can shame everyone around her. It means being custodian and possession, goddess and slave, at once. It means you have no identity as an individual, only as a symbol or as an object. As Nivedita Menon points out in her fine new book Seeing Like a Feminist, the obsession with a woman’s “honour” lies at the heart of the belief that rape is “a fate worse than death”; that once a woman has been “shamed” thus, she is a blot that society must purge itself of. (Or even marry off to the rapist so that a non-consensual sexual act is retrospectively legitimised.)
Something else Menon’s book discusses at length is gender performance: how women have internalised aspects of behaviour expected of them – keeping their eyes averted, focussing inward, occupying the least possible space in public places. Interestingly, an inversion on the Pinocchio story – Pinocchio’s Sister: A Feminist Fable, written by Abraham Gothberg – features a girl whose nose grows longer when she tells the truth, a metaphor perhaps for how women are often forced into living up to an ideal rather than being true to themselves.
*****
I offered a morbid view of the nose-ring at the start of this piece, which is perhaps unfair. Nose-rings can of course serve graceful decorative purposes, enhancing a woman’s aesthetic appeal (and why not a man’s too?) and making life more colourful and attractive generally. But beauty and ugliness can go hand in hand, in much the same way that many festive rituals can be celebratory fun while also being subliminal ways of maintaining a regressive tradition. I have friends – women among them – who cluck their tongues exasperatedly when I say that the large nose-ring worn by Indian brides in certain traditions reminds me of the rope threaded through a buffalo’s nostrils, used by its master to lead it about. And apparently I’m being a wet blanket and a grouch when I spell out my feelings about customs like the “nath atarna” – the removal of the nose-ring – which is often a euphemism for the end of a woman’s virginity. Or the sight – so touching to many eyes – of an adult woman sitting on her father’s lap during a wedding ceremony (the nose-ring prominent on her face), an object waiting to be transferred from one man to the other.
Of course, in many such cases, the custom is “harmless fun”, containing a sense of irony, with young people joking about the implications of what they are doing even while they are doing it. But it is useful to be aware of how firmly embedded certain ideas are in our social framework; how they become part of our everyday lives and assumptions, and are propagated by even the most innocent-seeming aspects of our popular culture. Consider the suhaag-raat scene in Yash Chopra’s Kabhi Kabhie, with Shashi Kapoor removing Raakhee’s ornaments one by one as she sings in memory of a lost love. On the face of it, this is a tender scene from one of our most beloved romantic movies, and the film is trying hard to present Kapoor’s Vijay as a caring, sensitive man. (It’s a terrible performance, incidentally – the actor has absolutely no clue how to play this scene, and can one blame him?) But think about what is really going on here and it becomes a little icky: a woman, who is in love with another man, is about to be bedded by a husband whom she barely knows (and in the patriarchy, deflowering is of course code for “possessing” – she is now his). The last ornament he removes is the nose-ring, as the song ends and the scene fades to black; it is as obvious a symbol as all those Hindi-movie shots of bees buzzing around flowers whenever two lovers draw near each other.
Metaphors for virginity aside, the author-mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik has noted the many ways in which a woman wearing a nose-ring may be perceived. “The scientist said it has no scientific basis. A rationalist mocked her for mutilating her body in the name of beauty. Another rationalist pointed out that it was an ancient acupuncture technique. A feminist said she was sporting the symbol of patriarchy. A secularist said that made her a Hindu.” And so on. At the end comes the kicker: “Everybody saw the nose-ring. No one saw her.”
In a better world we would be able to see the whole person, as opposed to a cluster of disjointed parts. Perhaps it will happen one day.
Post title courtesy that adroit punster, Baradwaj Rangan]
---------------
My favourite photograph of my wife Abhilasha is, of all things, an X-Ray - a profile of her face that shows the outline of the nose and the jaw clearly enough, but with one tiny, jarringly non-organic substance visible in the nasal region. You feel like you're looking at an embedded metallic chip from a dystopian story about people being monitored by a totalitarian government.
 |
| Illustration: SOUMIK LAHIRI |
Hence the X-Ray. Hence a quick appointment with the local clinic, where all of us had trouble keeping a straight face. (Surgeries involving a family member are not normally things to be laughed at, but.) Hence the giggling doctor – and I tell you, a big burly Sikh surgeon teehee-ing like Tinkerbell as he exits an operating theatre is a rare sight. Eventually Abhilasha came out looking sheepish, a small bandage-gauze awkwardly attached to half her proboscis. “Aaj tumne hamaari naak kaat ke rakh di,” I told her with the sternest expression I could muster.
It seemed the obvious thing to say. After all, we are the smugly liberal ones, right? We have grown up hearing – and superciliously shaking our heads at – those melodramatic pronouncements in Hindi movies. We feel we can use them in humour, even though we know they so often assume much darker expression in the real world: as condemnations, to suppress rights and freedoms; that they can even be a matter of life or death. A few months earlier, we had read the story about Bibi Aisha, the Afghan woman whose nose was cut off by her husband and in-laws
when she tried to escape them after years of abuse. Aisha did eventually gain a measure of freedom – and became a poster-child for commentary on sexual oppression when she was featured on the cover of Time magazine – but one can safely assume that thousands of other women aren’t as lucky.However, this attempt to construct otherness – to not acknowledge the large spectrum that links our own presumably enlightened lives with the uncivilised lives of "those" people – is self-deceptive. Years earlier, Abhilasha herself had been on the receiving end of a more serious “naak” denouncement. It was during one of her first stints in journalism. An unexpected “graveyard shift” happened to arise during a week when her parents were out of town and she was staying at her maasi’s house. Destined to be stuck in office past midnight and reluctant to disturb a household that had old people living in it, she decided to stay over at a friend’s who lived nearby – after having informed her aunt, of course. It was the practical thing to do in the circumstances. But the next day, when her mother returned, hell broke loose: there was screaming, there were wails and imprecations. What were you thinking? What will they think of us? What kind of a job is this? And that damning sentence: “Naak kaat di tumne hamaari.”
Two things worth noting here: one, that her parents seemed less concerned about what she had really been up to the previous night, and more concerned about what their relatives would think; deeply upset that the situation had been such that others knew. And two: Abhilasha’s mother had once been the principal of a small school and had in her younger days written short stories that might be described as feminist laments for the ways in which women are made to live in the shadows of men. Her apparent volte-face when it came to her own grown-up daughter seems like a classic case of a victim of patriarchy becoming absorbed into the system.
Here was an urban family that hadn’t thought twice about giving their daughter the same level of education as their son, and about encouraging her professional ambitions. But that didn’t erase the Lakshmana-rekha: it was untenable to stay out this late, to fail to be the Good Girl treading a straight path from office to home.
*****
The other “lakshmana-rekha” in the Ramayana – the one that doesn’t get described as such – is the clean slash Rama’s younger brother made across Surpanakha’s face with his sword, severing her nose and setting a chain of events in motion. It’s easy to see why this ambiguous episode has lent itself to so many literary retellings and alternate psychological explanations. In a short story titled "Surpanakha", for instance, the novelist and poet Amit Chaudhuri casts Rama and Lakshmana as posturing bullies, unable to deal with the idea of a woman as a sexually autonomous being. “Teach her a lesson for being so forward,” Rama tells his brother chillingly when Surpanakha propositions him; the words echo “punishments” meted out by patriarchal societies to women who dare express sexual desire. Lakshman came back; there was some blood on the blade. “I cut her nose off,” he said. “It,” he gestured toward the knife, “went through her nostril as if it were silk. She immediately changed back from being a paradigm of beauty into the horrible creature she really is. She’s not worth describing,” he said as he wiped his blade.
“Horrible creature...not worth describing.”
To see that Time photo of Bibi Aisha is to be reminded of why the nose is so key to our perceptions of human beauty as well as personal dignity. Try looking at the photo with your finger awkwardly blocking out the missing organ, and you get a hint of inner radiance and poise; you see the forthright, proud gaze of someone who survived an ordeal. And yet, without the nose, the illusion becomes difficult to sustain – the organ is, to put it simply, central. With a gaping hole right in the middle of the face, the resemblance to a death-head is inescapable, and we are uncomfortably reminded of what we are beneath our hubristic ideas of our own beauty.
The nose is also, of course, the breathing apparatus – directly associated with the most fundamental activity of human existence. And in the “naak kat gayi” context, it can be an uncomfortable reminder of what existence is for so many women around the world. It means being the repository of a family’s or society’s “honour”, someone whose “transgressions” – real or imagined – can shame everyone around her. It means being custodian and possession, goddess and slave, at once. It means you have no identity as an individual, only as a symbol or as an object. As Nivedita Menon points out in her fine new book Seeing Like a Feminist, the obsession with a woman’s “honour” lies at the heart of the belief that rape is “a fate worse than death”; that once a woman has been “shamed” thus, she is a blot that society must purge itself of. (Or even marry off to the rapist so that a non-consensual sexual act is retrospectively legitimised.)
Something else Menon’s book discusses at length is gender performance: how women have internalised aspects of behaviour expected of them – keeping their eyes averted, focussing inward, occupying the least possible space in public places. Interestingly, an inversion on the Pinocchio story – Pinocchio’s Sister: A Feminist Fable, written by Abraham Gothberg – features a girl whose nose grows longer when she tells the truth, a metaphor perhaps for how women are often forced into living up to an ideal rather than being true to themselves.
*****
I offered a morbid view of the nose-ring at the start of this piece, which is perhaps unfair. Nose-rings can of course serve graceful decorative purposes, enhancing a woman’s aesthetic appeal (and why not a man’s too?) and making life more colourful and attractive generally. But beauty and ugliness can go hand in hand, in much the same way that many festive rituals can be celebratory fun while also being subliminal ways of maintaining a regressive tradition. I have friends – women among them – who cluck their tongues exasperatedly when I say that the large nose-ring worn by Indian brides in certain traditions reminds me of the rope threaded through a buffalo’s nostrils, used by its master to lead it about. And apparently I’m being a wet blanket and a grouch when I spell out my feelings about customs like the “nath atarna” – the removal of the nose-ring – which is often a euphemism for the end of a woman’s virginity. Or the sight – so touching to many eyes – of an adult woman sitting on her father’s lap during a wedding ceremony (the nose-ring prominent on her face), an object waiting to be transferred from one man to the other.
Of course, in many such cases, the custom is “harmless fun”, containing a sense of irony, with young people joking about the implications of what they are doing even while they are doing it. But it is useful to be aware of how firmly embedded certain ideas are in our social framework; how they become part of our everyday lives and assumptions, and are propagated by even the most innocent-seeming aspects of our popular culture. Consider the suhaag-raat scene in Yash Chopra’s Kabhi Kabhie, with Shashi Kapoor removing Raakhee’s ornaments one by one as she sings in memory of a lost love. On the face of it, this is a tender scene from one of our most beloved romantic movies, and the film is trying hard to present Kapoor’s Vijay as a caring, sensitive man. (It’s a terrible performance, incidentally – the actor has absolutely no clue how to play this scene, and can one blame him?) But think about what is really going on here and it becomes a little icky: a woman, who is in love with another man, is about to be bedded by a husband whom she barely knows (and in the patriarchy, deflowering is of course code for “possessing” – she is now his). The last ornament he removes is the nose-ring, as the song ends and the scene fades to black; it is as obvious a symbol as all those Hindi-movie shots of bees buzzing around flowers whenever two lovers draw near each other.Metaphors for virginity aside, the author-mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik has noted the many ways in which a woman wearing a nose-ring may be perceived. “The scientist said it has no scientific basis. A rationalist mocked her for mutilating her body in the name of beauty. Another rationalist pointed out that it was an ancient acupuncture technique. A feminist said she was sporting the symbol of patriarchy. A secularist said that made her a Hindu.” And so on. At the end comes the kicker: “Everybody saw the nose-ring. No one saw her.”
In a better world we would be able to see the whole person, as opposed to a cluster of disjointed parts. Perhaps it will happen one day.
Senin, 04 Maret 2013
Thoughts on Kai Po Che! as an adaptation
The process of comparing a film with the book it was adapted from is often ridden with simplifications; such comparisons also tend to have an inbuilt bias towards the book, being premised on the condescending idea that cinema is merely illustrated literature. But I think most people who have seen the new film Kai Po Che! and also read the Chetan Bhagat novel The 3 Mistakes of my Life will agree that the film is a more fully realised work, and it may be worth looking at where its strengths lie vis-a-vis the source text.
At his best, especially when writing about things that he has firsthand experience of, Bhagat knows how to pace a story for his target readership and give them characters and conversations they can relate to. (An old post about this here.) But a self-conscious strain enters his work when he deals with situations requiring gravitas – such as violence during a communal riot – and in The 3 Mistakes of My Life, the writing becomes most clunky at the points of highest drama. Consider this bit from the book's climax, which reads more like the first draft of a screenplay than a well-crafted passage in a finished novel; an inert, disjointed description of things happening one by one, rather than an attempt to convey the messy, urgent wholeness of the moment:
device (in which Bhagat receives a suicide note from an Ahmedabad businessman) was a sensible one, as was the paring of a couple of flabby subplots and peripheral characters such as the Australian cricketer who uses similes like “I’m off like a bride’s nightie”.
In the history of Auteurism (which I will not go on about here!), there are many instances of directors choosing source material that will enable them to revisit their cherished themes and personal obsessions. Though it’s way too early to call Abhishek Kapoor an auteur – even if you’re using the word in the most modest possible sense – one should note that like his last film Rock On!, Kai Po Che! is about the gap between innocence and experience, and about how life can scupper the best-laid plans of shiny-eyed young people. In this coming-of-age tale set mostly in 2001-2002, the three central characters – the friends Govind, Ishaan and Omi – are affected by various important things that happened to Gujarat and to India during that period: the Kutch earthquake, the emergence of a mall culture with the promise of attractive retail space and new business opportunities, the historic India-Australia Test match in Kolkata in March 2001, and most significantly the Godhra massacre and the anti-Muslim riots that followed it. The book’s narrator Govind is the film’s quiet anchoring figure (extremely well-played by Raj Kumar Yadav), a young man whose interest in Mathematics – the one certainty in a world where pretty much everything else is ambiguous and up for discussion – was one of the more entertaining things about the novel (it is somewhat toned down in the film). Ishaan (Sushant Singh Rajput) is a temperamental cricket player who develops a bond with a 12-year-old Muslim boy, the extraordinarily gifted Ali. And Omi (Amit Sadh) is falling under the influence of his uncle Bittu maama, a leader of the chauvinistic local Hindu party.
With this basic information, it is easy enough to guess how the lives and personal equations of these three friends will be altered by the communal clashes – especially after Omi loses his parents in the Godhra attack. But I thought the film’s climax was more layered and challenging than the novel’s, partly because of how it makes Omi a participant in the riots. In the book he retains his innocence when crunch time arrives; he even ends up taking the trishul-blow intended for the boy Ali (as you might gather from the passage quoted above). And this allows the maama, a distant character in whom the reader has little emotional investment (fleshing out side-characters is not one of
Bhagat’s strong suits anyway), to conveniently become the figurehead for Evil. Much of the responsibility for the bad things that happen in the end are fobbed off on him, while the three protagonists remain young innocents, our unsullied points of identification.
The film, on the other hand, has dramatic impetus (which is lacking in the final passages of the novel) along with a more developed sense of how “good” people – or “apolitical” people – can be engulfed by tides that they don’t fully understand. Long before Godhra, we have already seen Omi becoming a little closed and distanced from his friends, gradually turning into a puppet for his maama and a handsome public-relations man for the party. (Even his freshly grown moustache underlines his new status as his uncle's minion-clone and a card-carrying member of a group that feels the need to emphasize their masculinity because of the perception that they have been weak for too long.) Later, driven by personal vendetta in the climactic scenes where a Hindu mob attacks one of the city’s Muslim quarters, he is for a while indistinguishable from the older, more hardened men around him, and unrecognisable from the cheerful kid who helped his friends set up a sports shop earlier in the story.
Manav Kaul’s thin-lipped maama is a scary figure – the sort of man whom you can imagine planning a massacre, carefully examining the trunk-loads of scythes with which he will slit the bellies of his enemies. But watch Omi’s face near the end of the film – initial confusion and anguish slowly turning into watchful determination – and you see how he might become a similarly cold-blooded rabble-rouser a few years down the line. Eventually it takes a friend’s senseless murder – with his own hand on the trigger – for Omi to regain something of his humanity, but something much deeper has been lost. In the face of his transformation, the good guys-vs-bad guys dichotomy is no longer so easy to believe in. And this moral ambivalence belongs mostly to the film; there is no real parallel for it in the book.
[Some earlier posts on adaptations: Susanna’s Seven Husband/Saat Khoon Maaf; A Kiss Before Dying; notes from the Times of India lit-fest]
At his best, especially when writing about things that he has firsthand experience of, Bhagat knows how to pace a story for his target readership and give them characters and conversations they can relate to. (An old post about this here.) But a self-conscious strain enters his work when he deals with situations requiring gravitas – such as violence during a communal riot – and in The 3 Mistakes of My Life, the writing becomes most clunky at the points of highest drama. Consider this bit from the book's climax, which reads more like the first draft of a screenplay than a well-crafted passage in a finished novel; an inert, disjointed description of things happening one by one, rather than an attempt to convey the messy, urgent wholeness of the moment:
Mama closed his eyes again and mumbled silent chants. He took his folded hands to his forehead and heart and tapped it thrice. He opened his eyes and lifted the trishul. Ali stood up and tried to limp away.Even a moderately well-directed and well-performed movie sequence would be an improvement on the above passage (a competent sound designer might also replace the “dull thud” when a sharp weapon enters human flesh with a more appropriate sound), and Kai Po Che! is more than a moderately good film. It is wonderfully acted and has a real sense of character development. The screenplay – on which Bhagat collaborated with Pubali Chaudhari, Supratik Sen and director Abhishek Kapoor – is more focused, and the dialogue more authentic-sounding, than the often flat prose in the book. The decision to remove the novel’s framing
Mama lifted the trishul high to strike.
“Mama, no,” Omi screamed in his loudest voice. Omi pushed the man blocking him. He ran between Mama and Ali. Mama screamed a chant and struck.
“Stop Mama,” Omi said.
Even if Mama wanted to, he couldn’t. The strike already had momentum. The trishul entered Omi’s stomach with a dull thud.
“Oh...oh,” Omi said as he absorbed what happened first and felt the pain later. Within seconds, a pool of blood covered the floor. Mama and his men looked at each other, trying to make sense of what had occurred.
device (in which Bhagat receives a suicide note from an Ahmedabad businessman) was a sensible one, as was the paring of a couple of flabby subplots and peripheral characters such as the Australian cricketer who uses similes like “I’m off like a bride’s nightie”. In the history of Auteurism (which I will not go on about here!), there are many instances of directors choosing source material that will enable them to revisit their cherished themes and personal obsessions. Though it’s way too early to call Abhishek Kapoor an auteur – even if you’re using the word in the most modest possible sense – one should note that like his last film Rock On!, Kai Po Che! is about the gap between innocence and experience, and about how life can scupper the best-laid plans of shiny-eyed young people. In this coming-of-age tale set mostly in 2001-2002, the three central characters – the friends Govind, Ishaan and Omi – are affected by various important things that happened to Gujarat and to India during that period: the Kutch earthquake, the emergence of a mall culture with the promise of attractive retail space and new business opportunities, the historic India-Australia Test match in Kolkata in March 2001, and most significantly the Godhra massacre and the anti-Muslim riots that followed it. The book’s narrator Govind is the film’s quiet anchoring figure (extremely well-played by Raj Kumar Yadav), a young man whose interest in Mathematics – the one certainty in a world where pretty much everything else is ambiguous and up for discussion – was one of the more entertaining things about the novel (it is somewhat toned down in the film). Ishaan (Sushant Singh Rajput) is a temperamental cricket player who develops a bond with a 12-year-old Muslim boy, the extraordinarily gifted Ali. And Omi (Amit Sadh) is falling under the influence of his uncle Bittu maama, a leader of the chauvinistic local Hindu party.
With this basic information, it is easy enough to guess how the lives and personal equations of these three friends will be altered by the communal clashes – especially after Omi loses his parents in the Godhra attack. But I thought the film’s climax was more layered and challenging than the novel’s, partly because of how it makes Omi a participant in the riots. In the book he retains his innocence when crunch time arrives; he even ends up taking the trishul-blow intended for the boy Ali (as you might gather from the passage quoted above). And this allows the maama, a distant character in whom the reader has little emotional investment (fleshing out side-characters is not one of
Bhagat’s strong suits anyway), to conveniently become the figurehead for Evil. Much of the responsibility for the bad things that happen in the end are fobbed off on him, while the three protagonists remain young innocents, our unsullied points of identification.The film, on the other hand, has dramatic impetus (which is lacking in the final passages of the novel) along with a more developed sense of how “good” people – or “apolitical” people – can be engulfed by tides that they don’t fully understand. Long before Godhra, we have already seen Omi becoming a little closed and distanced from his friends, gradually turning into a puppet for his maama and a handsome public-relations man for the party. (Even his freshly grown moustache underlines his new status as his uncle's minion-clone and a card-carrying member of a group that feels the need to emphasize their masculinity because of the perception that they have been weak for too long.) Later, driven by personal vendetta in the climactic scenes where a Hindu mob attacks one of the city’s Muslim quarters, he is for a while indistinguishable from the older, more hardened men around him, and unrecognisable from the cheerful kid who helped his friends set up a sports shop earlier in the story.
Manav Kaul’s thin-lipped maama is a scary figure – the sort of man whom you can imagine planning a massacre, carefully examining the trunk-loads of scythes with which he will slit the bellies of his enemies. But watch Omi’s face near the end of the film – initial confusion and anguish slowly turning into watchful determination – and you see how he might become a similarly cold-blooded rabble-rouser a few years down the line. Eventually it takes a friend’s senseless murder – with his own hand on the trigger – for Omi to regain something of his humanity, but something much deeper has been lost. In the face of his transformation, the good guys-vs-bad guys dichotomy is no longer so easy to believe in. And this moral ambivalence belongs mostly to the film; there is no real parallel for it in the book.
[Some earlier posts on adaptations: Susanna’s Seven Husband/Saat Khoon Maaf; A Kiss Before Dying; notes from the Times of India lit-fest]
Sabtu, 02 Maret 2013
Meeting Nikhil Bhagat: a former actor remembers his brush with fame
[Did a version of this piece for the March issue of The Caravan]
On an unusually chilly Kolkata evening this January, at the inauguration of the Apeejay Literary Festival at the Victoria Memorial, I chanced to witness a little reunion. As guests gravitated towards the event's keynote speaker Shyam Benegal, the tireless festival director Maina Bhagat brought her 49-year-old son across to say hello to the filmmaker. “You haven’t changed at all, sir,” said Nikhil Bhagat, a wide, boyish smile peeling the years off his face. Trim, youthful-looking, Bhagat himself hadn't changed all that much since 1985, when he played a small but important role in Benegal’s classy ensemble film Trikaal. The year before that, aged barely 20, he was the rebellious football player Raghu, locking horns with a discipline-seeking sports coach in Prakash Jha’s Hip Hip Hurray.
Not many actors can claim to have made their only two films (playing key roles in both) with directors of the stature of Benegal and Jha, and then to have slipped conclusively out of the movie world. Nikhil Bhagat’s star had shone briefly in the firmament of “parallel” cinema: this article by Avijit Ghosh on the Times of India website notes that he “induced nationwide hysterical squeals from pretty young things” after the Hip Hip Hurray release. He was nominated for a Filmfare Award as best supporting actor for that film, losing to the more experienced Anil Kapoor in Mashaal. And yet you will be very lucky to find a photo of him on Google Images today. (Even the official Shemaroo DVD cover of Hip Hip Hurray has pictures of others who had smaller roles in the film, but none of him.)
Having coincidentally watched both movies over the past year (I wrote about Trikaal here), and perhaps swayed by dramatic filmi narratives myself, I had wondered if a tragic tale lay behind his enigmatic disappearance. All such thoughts dissolved that evening at the Victoria Memorial. Bhagat is still handsome, well-turned-out, and apparently comfortable in his own skin. But speaking with him then, and on the phone afterwards, I could tell he was unused to being interviewed; he struggled to make sense of his movie stint, admitted to its randomness.
He was studying in St Xavier’s College in 1983 when Prakash Jha made a hurried Calcutta trip to scout for an athletic young man who could play football. The college put up a notice, 19-year-old Nikhil went with some friends to the hotel where Jha was staying (a couple of hundred students must have showed up in all) and nearly left after a while (“who’s going to wait so long?”) – but before he knew it he was in a final shortlist of three, and then Jha, who had already got permission from the college, was telling him to pack his bags for Ranchi. For Nikhil and his flummoxed parents, who hadn’t even known about the auditions, everything happened in a blur. He had just enough time to collect a pair of contact lenses from the one optician in the city who dispensed them at the time.
He spoke very little Hindi and his voice would have to be dubbed by someone else (friends would later tease him about this, his mother Maina told me), but Jha had clearly seen in him a combination of rugged insolence and vulnerability that would suit the role very well. Raghu is a posturing, cigarette-smoking teen who is confused on the inside. (“Don’t butt your head against a wall before your horns have even grown,” the coach, played by Raj Kiran, witheringly tells him; their clash is the earliest representation of what would become a recurrent theme in Jha’s cinema, the channelling of masculine energies into leadership, with positive and negative consequences.)
Later, Benegal saw him in Hip Hip Hurray and got in touch, and Trikaal happened. Nikhil would also work briefly with Benegal on his TV series Yatra, set on trains travelling the length and breadth of India. “My role got over quite fast,” he told me, “but I was on that train journey almost throughout the shoot, for two months.” (He has a small part in this episode.)
It would be an overstatement to say that those two films reveal a brilliant performer (and it would be unfair to expect that much from someone who only had brief experience of acting in school plays, and none at all for the camera). What they do show is a callow young man with definite screen presence, someone who might – with experience and nurturing – have gone on to big things. In Trikaal – a more sophisticated, better-directed film than Hip Hip Hurray – he already looks maturer, a little more at ease in front of the camera, even though he might have been lost in the large ensemble cast. He has a striking entrance scene too: Naseeruddin Shah’s narrator, introducing the viewer to figures from his past, says “Aur woh main, 25 saal pehle” and the camera picks out Nikhil, standing amidst a crowd at a funeral wake, the hint of a cocky smile on his face as he looks towards Anna, the girl he has a crush on.
There is something ingenuous and unrehearsed about Nikhil’s recollections of his acting stint. He couldn’t relate to Raghu, he says, but having watched movies like To Sir with Love, he knew about such character types and played it by instinct. He had never serenaded, or sung a lament for, a girl himself, but “you know, at that age one does have experience of raging hormones” – and so he lip-synched through a memorable little scene in Trikaal where Remo Fernandes strums a guitar next to him while Maqsood Ali – later famous as Lucky Ali – watches from a distance; with hindsight, this is a touching image of three young people with very different futures in the entertainment industry.
Nikhil's closest firsthand brush with his own celebrity came when Hip Hip Hurray was released in a Calcutta hall and friends spread the word that he was in the audience. “The crowd became unruly and I ended up sitting in the manager’s office until they had dispersed.” That apart, the St Xavier’s boy lived in a world far removed from the Bombay film industry, and he sounds nonchalant even when he speaks about the Filmfare nomination – “I was aware of it, but there was no real question of going to Bombay for it.” He had college to finish.
Belatedly, after graduating, he did go to Bombay for a while to try his luck, but soon realised, first, that public memory was short - "I hadn't struck when the iron was hot" - and second, that he lacked the inner drive needed for this profession. “You have to be either passionate about acting or desperate to become a star, and I was neither. I am a private person, and was unwilling to push myself beyond a point.” Besides, the divide between mainstream and non-mainstream cinema was sharper then: most serious movie buffs today know of Trikaal’s cinematic worth, but in 1985 it fell under the radar of most audiences; having it on his resume wasn’t going to get him auditions. There were missed opportunities too. Ketan Mehta called him for an interview for Holi – the film that would mark the debut of a youngster named Aamir Khan – but Nikhil couldn’t go because the floods in Kolkata that year made travel impossible for five crucial days.
For 25 years now he has worked in leather exports – he is now the director of Orbit Leathers – and says that while life has had its ups and downs, “as in any business”, he has no regrets. “How many people become film stars anyway, even if for a very short period? And those who do often end up living in golden cages, without the freedom to be normal people.” In fact, one doesn’t have to look far for cautionary tales about stardom and the dream factory: consider the sad story of Nikhil’s Hip Hip Hurray co-star Raj Kiran, who was last heard to be recuperating from a mental breakdown in the US. And then remember the rousing final scene of that film, the proud coach handing the baton of progress to the transformed Raghu.
--------------------
The photos above are courtesy Maina Bhagat. And here are two pictures of Nikhil as he is today:
On an unusually chilly Kolkata evening this January, at the inauguration of the Apeejay Literary Festival at the Victoria Memorial, I chanced to witness a little reunion. As guests gravitated towards the event's keynote speaker Shyam Benegal, the tireless festival director Maina Bhagat brought her 49-year-old son across to say hello to the filmmaker. “You haven’t changed at all, sir,” said Nikhil Bhagat, a wide, boyish smile peeling the years off his face. Trim, youthful-looking, Bhagat himself hadn't changed all that much since 1985, when he played a small but important role in Benegal’s classy ensemble film Trikaal. The year before that, aged barely 20, he was the rebellious football player Raghu, locking horns with a discipline-seeking sports coach in Prakash Jha’s Hip Hip Hurray.
 |
| 20-year-old Nikhil Bhagat with co-star Neena Gupta during the Trikaal shoot in Goa |
Not many actors can claim to have made their only two films (playing key roles in both) with directors of the stature of Benegal and Jha, and then to have slipped conclusively out of the movie world. Nikhil Bhagat’s star had shone briefly in the firmament of “parallel” cinema: this article by Avijit Ghosh on the Times of India website notes that he “induced nationwide hysterical squeals from pretty young things” after the Hip Hip Hurray release. He was nominated for a Filmfare Award as best supporting actor for that film, losing to the more experienced Anil Kapoor in Mashaal. And yet you will be very lucky to find a photo of him on Google Images today. (Even the official Shemaroo DVD cover of Hip Hip Hurray has pictures of others who had smaller roles in the film, but none of him.)
Having coincidentally watched both movies over the past year (I wrote about Trikaal here), and perhaps swayed by dramatic filmi narratives myself, I had wondered if a tragic tale lay behind his enigmatic disappearance. All such thoughts dissolved that evening at the Victoria Memorial. Bhagat is still handsome, well-turned-out, and apparently comfortable in his own skin. But speaking with him then, and on the phone afterwards, I could tell he was unused to being interviewed; he struggled to make sense of his movie stint, admitted to its randomness.
He was studying in St Xavier’s College in 1983 when Prakash Jha made a hurried Calcutta trip to scout for an athletic young man who could play football. The college put up a notice, 19-year-old Nikhil went with some friends to the hotel where Jha was staying (a couple of hundred students must have showed up in all) and nearly left after a while (“who’s going to wait so long?”) – but before he knew it he was in a final shortlist of three, and then Jha, who had already got permission from the college, was telling him to pack his bags for Ranchi. For Nikhil and his flummoxed parents, who hadn’t even known about the auditions, everything happened in a blur. He had just enough time to collect a pair of contact lenses from the one optician in the city who dispensed them at the time.
He spoke very little Hindi and his voice would have to be dubbed by someone else (friends would later tease him about this, his mother Maina told me), but Jha had clearly seen in him a combination of rugged insolence and vulnerability that would suit the role very well. Raghu is a posturing, cigarette-smoking teen who is confused on the inside. (“Don’t butt your head against a wall before your horns have even grown,” the coach, played by Raj Kiran, witheringly tells him; their clash is the earliest representation of what would become a recurrent theme in Jha’s cinema, the channelling of masculine energies into leadership, with positive and negative consequences.)
Later, Benegal saw him in Hip Hip Hurray and got in touch, and Trikaal happened. Nikhil would also work briefly with Benegal on his TV series Yatra, set on trains travelling the length and breadth of India. “My role got over quite fast,” he told me, “but I was on that train journey almost throughout the shoot, for two months.” (He has a small part in this episode.)
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| With Shyam Benegal |
It would be an overstatement to say that those two films reveal a brilliant performer (and it would be unfair to expect that much from someone who only had brief experience of acting in school plays, and none at all for the camera). What they do show is a callow young man with definite screen presence, someone who might – with experience and nurturing – have gone on to big things. In Trikaal – a more sophisticated, better-directed film than Hip Hip Hurray – he already looks maturer, a little more at ease in front of the camera, even though he might have been lost in the large ensemble cast. He has a striking entrance scene too: Naseeruddin Shah’s narrator, introducing the viewer to figures from his past, says “Aur woh main, 25 saal pehle” and the camera picks out Nikhil, standing amidst a crowd at a funeral wake, the hint of a cocky smile on his face as he looks towards Anna, the girl he has a crush on.
There is something ingenuous and unrehearsed about Nikhil’s recollections of his acting stint. He couldn’t relate to Raghu, he says, but having watched movies like To Sir with Love, he knew about such character types and played it by instinct. He had never serenaded, or sung a lament for, a girl himself, but “you know, at that age one does have experience of raging hormones” – and so he lip-synched through a memorable little scene in Trikaal where Remo Fernandes strums a guitar next to him while Maqsood Ali – later famous as Lucky Ali – watches from a distance; with hindsight, this is a touching image of three young people with very different futures in the entertainment industry.
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| With Remo Fernandes in Trikaal |
Nikhil's closest firsthand brush with his own celebrity came when Hip Hip Hurray was released in a Calcutta hall and friends spread the word that he was in the audience. “The crowd became unruly and I ended up sitting in the manager’s office until they had dispersed.” That apart, the St Xavier’s boy lived in a world far removed from the Bombay film industry, and he sounds nonchalant even when he speaks about the Filmfare nomination – “I was aware of it, but there was no real question of going to Bombay for it.” He had college to finish.
Belatedly, after graduating, he did go to Bombay for a while to try his luck, but soon realised, first, that public memory was short - "I hadn't struck when the iron was hot" - and second, that he lacked the inner drive needed for this profession. “You have to be either passionate about acting or desperate to become a star, and I was neither. I am a private person, and was unwilling to push myself beyond a point.” Besides, the divide between mainstream and non-mainstream cinema was sharper then: most serious movie buffs today know of Trikaal’s cinematic worth, but in 1985 it fell under the radar of most audiences; having it on his resume wasn’t going to get him auditions. There were missed opportunities too. Ketan Mehta called him for an interview for Holi – the film that would mark the debut of a youngster named Aamir Khan – but Nikhil couldn’t go because the floods in Kolkata that year made travel impossible for five crucial days.
For 25 years now he has worked in leather exports – he is now the director of Orbit Leathers – and says that while life has had its ups and downs, “as in any business”, he has no regrets. “How many people become film stars anyway, even if for a very short period? And those who do often end up living in golden cages, without the freedom to be normal people.” In fact, one doesn’t have to look far for cautionary tales about stardom and the dream factory: consider the sad story of Nikhil’s Hip Hip Hurray co-star Raj Kiran, who was last heard to be recuperating from a mental breakdown in the US. And then remember the rousing final scene of that film, the proud coach handing the baton of progress to the transformed Raghu.
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The photos above are courtesy Maina Bhagat. And here are two pictures of Nikhil as he is today:
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