Lessons in perspective - how we see a free-spirited young woman in Lessons in Forgetting

Last year’s National Award winner for Best Feature Film in English, Unni Vijayan’s Lessons in Forgetting – an adaptation of Anita Nair’s 2010 novel – is playing in exactly four halls in the Delhi region this week. One of those is the ultra-luxurious PVR Director’s Cut in Vasant Kunj. You might well question the decision to screen a low-profile, relatively low-budget film – with potential word-of-mouth appeal – in a venue where the tickets are priced at Rs 1200 each, but that’s a subject for another piece.

Though this is a well-intentioned film with a certain visual flair, I had problems with it – much of the English dialogue wasn’t convincing to my ears, the story was diffused and a crucial lead performance was stiff and impassive. However, one thing I did find interesting and want to discuss here is how the narrative structure leads the viewer down a winding path, making us confront our attitudes to things like personal morality and the gap between “modern” and “traditional” lifestyles – issues that have been central to much of the discourse around sexual harassment recently, including the many outrageous statements about rape that continue to be made by people in positions of authority, and the voyeuristic attention directed at the “westernised” woman whose behaviour and dressing sense are seen as directly related to the bad things that happen to her.

(Plot discussion to follow, but no major spoilers) Very early in Lessons in Forgetting, we learn that a 19-year-old girl named Smriti had a terrible accident (though it might also have been an attack) on a beach in the town of Minjikapuram, Tamil Nadu: having suffered brain damage, she is now in a vegetative state at home, and her father Jak (Adil Hussain) is trying to understand what happened, while also learning things about the person she was. In one of the first scenes, a doctor at the hospital where Smriti was taken puts on a show of conditional sympathy. Yes, this is such a terrible thing, "but, you know, this Western culture..." and then his voice trails off, but he begins again: “I’m not blaming anyone, but when girls are let loose...” And he tells Jak that tests indicated his daughter had “been with” more than one man shortly before the tragedy.

Jak is stunned. He knew Smriti was leading a fairly independent life, that she was part of a theatre troupe and had gone on this trip with friends, including boys. But there are some images and ideas that his mind can’t directly process. And so it is apt that the narrative now resorts to stylised imagery, with a sand-art animation sequence that is one of the very best things in the movie.

As the opening credits play, the animation shows us a father and his little daughter on a beach; he playfully throws her in the air, she flies away from him (literally, for she has sprouted wings) and mid-flight she begins to turn into a adult woman, her hair growing longer, her breasts filling out. In the frank and daring cartoon visuals that follow, we see this young woman having sex with a man, then possibly participating in an orgy too – and this image looks like a throbbing brain, perhaps suggesting that much of what we are seeing represents the febrile imagination of the father, pondering what his “little girl” might be doing, with other men, with more than one man. Here is a loving, protective dad who also has a sliver of male sexual jealousy in his reptile brain, as so many loving, protective dads do.

Or at least, that’s how I interpret the sequence. The story of this father’s quest to understand his daughter’s life – and perhaps to reclaim or redeem her – also reminded me a little of Ethan Edwards’ obsessive search for his “defiled” niece in The Searchers (and of another film, Paul Schrader’s Hardcore, in which George C Scott plays a man looking for his daughter who may have joined the porn industry).

Frankly, Adil Hussain’s bland, one-note performance as Jak doesn’t allow these comparisons to be sustained beyond a point, but what follows is still intriguing. Jak meets some of Smriti’s friends and discovers that she had been sexually intimate with more than one boy in her group. Through their stories (presented in inter-woven flashbacks) we learn that she was promiscuous and possibly a little flighty and irresponsible in how she treated the people she was close to. The boys themselves have clearly been scarred by their involvement with her: one has become a depressive alcoholic, another has taken quick-fix solace in religion but doesn’t seem to be at peace, and while all this is presented very simplistically we get the point. 

To an extent, these scenes define our initial attitudes to Smriti. We are seeing her mainly through male eyes (and of course I can’t separate my own maleness from what I’m writing here) – as a free-spirited girl with showy eyebrow piercings, riding a scooter in a short skirt, flitting from one guy to the next without always being mindful of hurt feelings; and later, walking about a little imprudently in torn jeans in a small, conservative town, standing out from the other members of her group, constantly drawing attention to herself.

But late in the film, there is a subtle shift in perspective. The character comes into her own, the male gaze is supplanted, and vital gaps in the story are filled in by a sympathetic older woman who knew Smriti. We learn that she was plucky and good-hearted, with a conscience and an insufficient sense of self-preservation (“Don’t run away from the things that terrify you,” her father told her when she was a child – advice that he will have cause to regret later), and that what eventually happened to her was not only grossly disproportionate as “punishment” for her (real or imagined) faults, it is also a direct result of the compassion that stems from her “modern” upbringing.

The film's intensity meter rises in these final sequences: the slackness of the earlier scenes gives way to greater pace and urgency, and more convincing performances by Maya Tideman (as Smriti) and Raghav Chanana (as her last boyfriend Soman). And it builds towards an unflinchingly disturbing sequence where male group aggression takes on a carnival-esque form, with undertones of the faux-righteous double-think that lies behind so many cases of sexual assault: “Let’s teach her a lesson.”

Given how effective that ending is – and how powerful and lovely that animated sequence in the beginning was – it’s a pity that so much of the midsection of Lessons in Forgetting is trite and uninvolving, the dialogues and the acting rubbing against each other in awkward ways. “They? They who? I thought this was an accident,” Jak says when he hears for the first time about people who had scores to settle with his daughter. Each word is enunciated clearly in Hussain’s refined voice, but there is little tension behind them; this isn’t so much a grieving father wanting to uncover the truth as a student in an elocution class. (It’s just as well that the residents of Minjikapuram are allowed to speak their own dialect rather than a stilted version of English, which so afflicts much of the film.)

I was also puzzled by some of the decisions made while adapting Nair’s novel. In the book, Jak is one of two central characters, the other being a middle-aged woman named Meera, who works for him and is going through a personal crisis of her own. The film chooses to focus on the Jak-Smriti story, which is fine – but it is done in a half-baked way so that Meera (Roshni Achreja) continues to be nominally important, a sort of second lead, without ever becoming a fleshed-out character. We get only fragments of her life and it feels like bits and pieces have been carelessly left out (her teenage daughter, for instance, appears to be shaping up to be an important counterpoint to the Jak-Smriti story, but then simply fades out of sight). Watching the scenes about Meera and her family, I felt like the film had originally been an hour longer but had had an unseemly encounter with a chopping block.

Still, the good bits in Lessons in Forgetting reminded me of the good bits in two other flawed but interesting films I saw in the last few months: Jalpari: The Desert Mermaid and Listen... Amaya. The link with the former is clearer – both Lessons in Forgetting and Jalpari deal with female foeticide, with a well (or a pool) of dark secrets harboured by small, self-contained communities, and both link gender discrimination with a damaging imbalance in nature. (In Jalpari, the village that is determined to stop producing women also has a serious water scarcity; Nair’s book uses cyclones as an important metaphor, one that isn’t really explored in the film.) 

The more tenuous similarities with Listen... Amaya have to do with the relations between children and single parents who are very close to each other: if the latter can be over-protective and reluctant to loosen the strings, children can be just as insecure about the idea of their parents having a sexual side. In this context, I felt Lessons in Forgetting may have been a better-realised film if it had explored the bond between Jak and Smriti at fuller length, letting us see how a certain type of parent-child relationship can be a little like walking gingerly across a beach littered with very sharp shells – and how it can affect the subsequent choices and actions of both sets of people.

A tribute to Balraj Sahni as he nears his 100

(Did a version of this for my DNA column)

With the birth centenary of one of Hindi cinema’s most respected actors just around the corner – May 1 is the date – I came across an amusing little anecdote about Balraj Sahni. In his biography Balraj: My Brother, Bhisham Sahni recalls a Bombay producer saying the young Balraj resembled the Hollywood legend Gary Cooper. “Balraj took this as a compliment, but it was meant to convey that he had grown too lean and thin for the role of a hero in Hindi films; the Indian audiences preferred chubby and round-faced heroes.”

There were other ways in which Balraj would confound expectations of the Indian movie star in the 1940s and 50s. Having trained as a BBC announcer in England, and also being familiar with a relatively “realistic” stage tradition – compared to the Parsi theatre that gave Hindi cinema many of its florid conventions – he had a knack for understatement that recalled the best work of such American star-actors as Spencer Tracy ... or Gary Cooper for that matter, of whom Orson Welles once said: “You’d see him working on the set and you’d think my god, they’re going to have to retake that one! He almost didn’t seem to be there. And then you’d see the rushes, and he’d fill the screen.”

Those who observed Sahni may have felt similarly. Watching him as the idealistic Dr Nirmal in the 1960 film Anuradha, I was most struck by his performance in the scenes where the doctor, doing his rounds on his bicycle, casually chats with patients. Nothing very important or purposeful is happening here in terms of the narrative, but so much lies in the way Sahni listens and responds; you feel that the character has a life and personality that extends beyond the restricted world of the film.

We sometimes label acting as subtle or loud, quiet or exaggerated, but there are variances even within those categories. Dr Nirmal represents a different sort of understated performance from the one Sahni gave in Garm Hava, where you can see that Salim Mirza (losing family and status but holding on to personal dignity as the hot winds of Partition blow around him) is constantly suppressing his feelings; that a reservoir of emotion lies behind the stiff posture, the pursed lips and even the way he grips his cane. For contrast, watch him as the large-hearted Pathan in Kabuliwala: the role is marked by flourishes (for this is a flamboyant man, especially when he is trying to impress children with his wares) and by an accent that draws attention to itself. But though the film sometimes comes close to caricature in its depiction of boisterous Afghanis rolling their eyes and singing jolly songs together in an alien land, Sahni's performance has an internal consistency that transcends the role’s superficial trappings – and everything important about the character comes together brilliantly in his brief look of terror at the end when he realises that his beloved “Mini bacchha”, now grown up, may not have recognised him.

None of this came easily to the actor, if Bhisham Sahni’s book is to be believed. It reveals things about Balraj’s many struggles with film acting and his realisation that even the so-called “natural” performer needed to switch gears when the lights came on; you didn’t simply go in front of the camera and continue to be yourself, the process was more complicated than that. There are descriptions of his fear of the camera (“it was like going before the gallows”), of having to shake off stiffness, even wetting his pants in nervousness between shots – all indicative of how much it mattered to him that he did the best possible job. But there is also a story about how he became less self-conscious after a conversation with a real-life rickshaw-puller whom he met while shooting Do Bigha Zamin; the encounter helped him to stop obsessing about acting methods and to relax into his role, by seeing it as an opportunity to pay tribute to real people undergoing real hardships.

Sahni’s career was not exactly sprinkled with classic films, and most fans will agree that the three movie roles he will be best remembered for are Shambu the farmer who moves to the city to earn money in Do Bigha Zamin; the kabuliwala who travels from Afghanistan to Hindustan for similar reasons and forms a bond with a little girl; and the beleaguered Salim Mirza. These are all men in debt, separated from the people they love, adjusting to new things, watching the way of life they knew passing them by – in other words, tragic heroes. Yet they are also vibrant and multidimensional. Do Bigha Zamin is often thought of a relentlessly bleak film, but Shambu is a cheerful, upbeat sort at heart. Even after he is reduced to a wreck in front of his greedy landlord, he is optimistic enough to think that it doesn’t matter that he knows no one in the big city; he can make friends after getting there. (“Jaan pehchaan wahaan jaane par hee hogi, bapu.”) In a film with a somewhat overblown reputation for De Sica-like realism, Sahni grounds the edifice by playing the character as a well-rounded individual rather than just a victim or a symbol.

Here and elsewhere, it is also worth noting what a fine, attentive lover Sahni could be on screen. His latter-day role as the elderly Lala Kedarnath ardently singing “Ae Meri Zohra Jabeen” to his wife in Waqt is well known (perhaps too well known; it sometimes invites annoyingly patronising attitudes about old people), but he was equally moving in less demonstrative romantic parts. An undervalued aspect of Do Bigha Zamin is the depiction in its early scenes of the love between Shambu and his wife, the playfulness of their banter, which makes onlookers say “They’ve been married for 10 years, why does he still keep whispering to her?” The humour and affection stays intact even in times of stress (“Tujhe khareedne ki himmat hai kissi mein?” he jokes when his wife complains that he should sell her too, along with their other valuables), and much of the film's power comes from watching the gentle smile erased as circumstances become much worse.

It may be a mistake though to judge Sahni only by his work in “respectable” cinema. “He seemed to lend his gravitas to many films that did not seem worthy settings for his talent,” sniffed Leela Naidu in her memoir, but I’m not sure this is a bad thing. Recently I saw him in a tiny, inexplicable part as Rajendra Kumar’s father in Aman, a film that also has a famous special appearance by the then 94-year-old Bertrand Russell. In his one big scene, Sahni – who is chummily credited only as “Gautamdas’s dad” in the IMDB credits – tries to persuade his doctor son to stay in India instead of going to Japan to help nuclear-radiation victims. He then masterfully keeps a straight face - and continues speaking his own pain-soaked lines with conviction - when Kumar likens himself to a sweet-smelling flower whose sugandh isn’t meant only for the maali who tended it.

The scene is a reminder that the measure of actors can lie not just in their obviously great roles, but in their ability to make the best of preposterous situations. A continuing joy for any true Balraj Sahni fan is discovering his performances of integrity in dozens of “unworthy” roles, a reminder that acting in a commercial medium isn’t just an ivory-tower pursuit, and that the true artiste can achieve big things across a range of canvases.

The lady varnishes

Lata Mangeshkar has watched every Hitchcock film...and then some. Today's HT City tells me that Lata-ji loves Hitchcock's Gaslight in particular. Now, given that this isn't a Hitch film in the first place (which is okay, she is in her 80s and memory is treacherous for those of us less than half that age), I enjoyed the report's fussy inclusion of the correct year of the movie next to the title - even though the reference is part of a direct quote and it's unlikely that the great lady would have said something like "I loved Gaslight (1944) especially." Good to see some serious research going on at the copy desk.

(Having said which, what does one do when you're interviewing a legend and collecting quotes for a one-column snippet, and she makes a factual error? Do you gently correct her [assuming you know better yourself]? Can you simply leave the inaccurate bit out of your story, if the story is rendered pointless without it? And what does the poor guy on the copy-desk do when, after googling for a small detail, he discovers that the whole premise is dubious? I'm glad I don't have to face any of these dilemmas firsthand.)

Pandavas in the sky with diamonds (on Sandipan Deb’s modern Mahabharata)

[Did a version of this review for Biblio. And here I had thought this piece was the last thing I would ever write about the great epic. To quote Michael Corleone, or is it Bheeshma, “Just when I thought I was out, they PULL me back again”]

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Even if you don’t know beforehand that Sandipan Deb’s bulky underworld thriller The Last War is a modern version of the Mahabharata, the dots will begin connecting within the first couple of pages. In the opening chapter, set in July 2007, a conflicted gunman named Jeet and his family friend and advisor Kishenbhai discuss a great war that lies ahead. Over glasses of Glenmorangie, they speak indolently of “dharma”, mull the ethics of taking up arms against friends and family. The conversation is full of high-sounding hokum. “Now listen, brother, and I will explain the fucking philosophy of action,” Kishenbhai says (as he pours himself a stiff drink and plumbs the ice bucket), “If we allow the mind to stray, it can take you into all sorts of unrelated detours.”

You were born and you are going to die. That’s the writing on the wall. Then you are reborn and take a look at the wall, and it’s still the same message out there. Who knows where’s the beginning, where’s the end? What we see are the intervening formations. Do your stuff, get the fuck out. Your duty.

Mumbo-jumbo aside, this prelude – which is, as should be clear, a tongue-in-cheek variation on the Bhagwad Gita – puts some of the story’s blocks in place. The men are interrupted by Jeet’s lover Jahn – this narrative’s Draupadi – who fierily demands vengeance for what was done to her years earlier (we are also told she “shares a bond” with Kishenbhai, who “instinctively sensed her slightest desire and fulfilled it even before she had articulated it properly in her own mind”). There are allusions to a period of banishment, to a young son named Abhi (Abhimanyu), to Jeet’s nemesis Karl (Karna), and to family elders named Yash Bauji (Bheeshma) and BK Acharya (Drona) whom Jeet is reluctant to kill.

Having served this aperitif, the book flashbacks to 1955, when the saga of the “Kuru clan” begins with the gifted archer Yash Kuru practising his skills near the Gateway of India (much as the young Bheeshma did on the banks of the Ganga). Yash happens to catch the eye of an elderly Parsi smuggler and goes on to become a hitman and eventual caretaker for the latter’s crime empire; over the decades, he tutors generations of businessmen, beginning with his own nephews and their children, who grow up to be versions of the Pandavas and Kauravas. Then things get ugly, as they will do if you're living and working in the underworld.

There have been many Mahabharata retellings in recent years, including point-of-view ones that filter the story through this or that character, and creative treatments like Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel, which used tropes from the epic to examine modern India’s political history. The Last War is an addition to that large corpus, and it is a promising idea to shift the tale to the organised-crime world of the last 60 years, letting the familiar dramatic episodes play out against the backdrop of a fast-changing city, with occasional references to real-life events. There is a certain irreverence built into the book’s fabric too: the very first chapter, after all, give us a Krishna and Arjuna faux-philosophising over Scotch, and we know that all the characters, including Kishenbhai, are basically gangsters.

Yet, as this narrative lumbers on, it turns out to be less imaginative than many of the seemingly more conventional Mahabharata tellings – the one that retain the original setting. There are a few good twists – Yudhisthira goes to jail when he is tricked and implicated in a cricket-betting controversy – and I liked witty little touches such as the transformation of the original story’s Jarasandha (born as two halves and eventually returned to this state after a wrestling bout with Bheema) into twin brothers Jara and Sandha, small-time players challenging the Kurus for control of the underworld, who sometimes complete each other’s sentences. But in a nearly 600-page book, these touches are too few and far between, and too much of the other invention occurs at a sniggering, schoolboy level (Arjuna’s famous bow Gandiva becomes Jeet’s pet gun Gandu).

Instead of using the Mahabharata template discerningly, Deb lifts entire episodes, plot details and even dialogues wholesale, and clumsily sticks them into situations where they are laughably anachronistic. Thus, the episode of Arjuna seeing only the eye of the wooden bird he has to shoot at is presented exactly as it is in the original, except that of course Jeet is using a rifle. After Jahn/Draupadi is nearly raped by Ranjit/Duhshasana, she swears that she won't tie or oil her hair until she has soaked it in his blood. In one mind-boggling passage that shows how mundane these episodes can be if unthinkingly replicated, Preeti maaji (Kunti) recognises that the adult Karl was the baby she had abandoned because of – wait for it – the azure colour of his eyes. (In the original, it was the divine, unmistakable, Sun-gifted armour and earrings glued to Karna’s body. Presumably there weren't a lot of other young men running around with those accessories.) As if to acknowledge the existence of the many Mahabharata perspective tellings, a few random chapters are narrated in the first person by a different character (Jahn, Karl), but there is no pattern to this – it is a device indulged in for its own sake. And because the author is so keen to stick to the basics of the story, while also getting on with the action, there are passages like the one where we are hurriedly informed of the exact months and years of birth of the three “Pandavas” and the two “Kauravas”.

Preeti gave birth to Rishabh in December 1962, followed shortly afterwards by Shankar’s son Rahul, in April 1963. Preeti’s second son Vikram arrived in the world in April 1964 and then Jeet in March 1965. Aditi’s second son Ranjit was born in July 1964...

And so on, but you get the idea. (Apart from the laziness of this writing, that first sentence is grammatically problematic, appearing to suggest that Rahul is also Preeti’s son.) This is compounded by trite character summaries – Rishabh (Yudhisthira) is virtuous and introverted and fond of playing cards, Vikram (Bheema) is strong and naughty but also a protector of the weak – and by bombastic language. The characters say things like “This is my word to you as Rahul, son of Shankar” and “I curse you, Rahul, that if you are lying to me, then at the most important moment of your life, when you will require your physical and mental strength the most, that strength will desert you, and you will be left a weak man. This is a mother’s curse. It will be true.” Jeet and Karl make pronouncements about how each has to prove he is the greatest gunman of the age. “I have not come here with hope that I will be able to secure a peaceful settlement,” says Kishenbhai affectedly, “but only in order that the world will not hold me to blame.”

All of which may prompt the reader to ask, “Who cares about your silly ego games, you nobodies?”

This is not a minor point. To read the original Mahabharata is to buy into the conceit that the very public actions and interrelationships of these royals affect the whole of Bharatvarsh. There is the inbuilt assumption that every last family in the land is invested in the saga of the Pandavas and Kauravas; that their exploits amount to a Dwapara Yuga version of front-page news (or in some cases, page-three news); that bards are roaming every corner of the kingdom, regularly updating the “common people” with the stories; that the great war will alter all lives for good and for ill.

For such a conceit to work in a contemporary scenario, one would probably have to hypothesise a situation where, say, Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi and their supporters were facing off in a dharma-yudh being breathlessly covered by every TV channel in the land, with the future of India and the world on the line. Or a subtler thriller where battlefield action was substituted by the twists and turns of electoral politics. But the scale of the action in The Last War is very modest - even given what we know of the Mumbai underworld's reach - and the narrative itself inadvertently reveals this in places. (At one point the cricket betting subplot includes a needlessly prolonged account of the 1996 World Cup final between Sri Lanka and Australia, complete with mentions of real-life participants – Arjuna Ranatunga, Glenn McGrath etc. But this, like a later allusion to the September 11 attacks, becomes a reminder that a much larger world exists outside the one inhabited by these self-absorbed characters, and that they are fairly inconsequential in the overall scheme of things.)

Given this, Deb’s decision to use the archaic, self-aggrandising prose of an ancient epic seems ridiculous. In the context of underworld skirmishes, what does it mean to say that it has to be “decided” whether Jeet or Karl is the "greatest warrior"? It is not as if they are even going to face off in an old-style gun duel. The Arjuna-Karna battle was governed by certain rules of warfare; their final duel, even if it was settled unjustly, was a one-on-one confrontation involving individual skill that would be gaped at by others on the battlefield. The situations are not remotely comparable, it amounts to a lazy transposition, and after a while one begins to wish for Quick Gun Murugun or Chulbul Pandey to turn up and show these boys what is what.

The prose also includes multiple esoteric references to “dharma” or duty. Deeply ambiguous as this concept already is in the original Mahabharata, it becomes meaningless in a situation where everyone is operating outside the law to begin with. To his credit, Deb does show awareness of this in an early character sketch of Yash bauji that captures something of Bheeshma’s relentless self-righteousness, as well as the self-deception of anyone rationalising a position of power and privilege.

There was a tight framework of logic within which Yash’s mind functioned, and almost any problem was attacked from the first principles of that logic or the carefully worked out corollaries. It was a system complete in itself [...] its building blocks would effortlessly rearrange themselves to adapt and respond to every situation.

And yet, the characters go on saying things about “the malleability of dharma”, and doing it in a languid, theoretical way that seems to have no real relevance to their own lives and actions. (Incidentally, it is indicated that English is their primary language of communication, which makes some of this dialogue seem even more woodenly incongruous.)

For me, two questions were central to understanding whether this book worked or not. First: does it do anything especially fresh or creative with the Mahabharata? As indicated above, no. Whereupon the second question follows: does it work on its own terms, as a good, fast-paced thriller? This is a little more difficult to answer. Certainly there is a lot of action, there is a sense of a multidimensional saga with people flitting in and out of the frame, and in a few – too few – passages there is interesting use of setting (as in a sequence set in Dharavi) and a glimpse of a shadowy, noirish Mumbai. (“They call this the city full of life, but should life be like this? [...] It was a city of mediocre, obedient zombies. What a place to run your sort of business, Rishabh.”) But it all drags on for too long, and besides it is never possible to read this as a stand-alone story, for the Mahabharata reference points are everywhere, constantly weighing the narrative down.

Searching for a key to the tonal incongruities, I returned to one of the Gita conversations. (Turning to the Gita for “answers” does seem like a reasonable thing to do.) At one point, cutting through Jeet and Kishenbhai’s psychobabble, Jahn asks Jeet to sing to her, whereupon he begins droning the lyrics to the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (and she joins in by screaming the line “The girl with kaleidoscope eyes”). The moment made strange sense. Perhaps this whole story is a drug-induced fever dream, with these bored people amusing themselves by using the ancient epic as a palimpsest for their own lives. In which case, I wish Deb had been much more over the top and thrown in a few more flourishes as well as an extended Epilogue set in heaven as an opium den where all the assassinated Kurus would carry on as if nothing had happened. After all, as Kishenbhai sagely puts it, “Why grieve? Either for the dead or the living? No point at all. We are here today, we were here yesterday, we will be here tomorrow. There was never a time when we were not around.”

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[A selection of Mahabharata-related posts from the archives: Ekta Kapoor's Kahaani Hamaaray Mahabharat Ki - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; flash fiction on the fall of Bheeshma; astonishing births in the Mahabharata; Karna and the Madraka women; how Rukmi learnt to stop worrying; on Prem Panicker's Bhimsen; The Palace of Illusions; Groucho Marx as Krishna; Irawati Karve's Yuganta; a long piece for Caravan about perspective tellings; Devdutt Pattanaik's The Pregnant King]

Rendezvous with Drama - quick notes on Nautanki Saala

In one of the smoother throwaway moments in Rohan Sippy’s film Nautanki Saala, as emotions run high backstage during a performance of a play titled Raavan Leela, one character yells at another, “Yeh theatre hai, yahaan drama nahin chalega!” The line is a cousin to Dr Strangelove’s “This is the War Room, you can’t fight in here!” and the conceit involved is similar: that it’s possible for a group of professionals to coolly play God in a sterile, controlled environment (whether directing actors on a stage to manipulate an audience’s emotions or making political decisions that will affect millions of lives) without letting their own feelings get in the way, or indeed, without showing feelings at all.

Nautanki Saala is officially inspired by the French film Apres Vous (which I haven’t seen) and I hear that some scenes, such as one involving a grandmother and a potentially incendiary letter, are direct lifts. But it entertainingly uses the Ramayana story as a parallel for its own narrative (the glimpses we get of the Raavan Leela suggest a Phantom of the Opera-meets-Zangoora-in-Lanka production, for which I’m fairly sure there is no equivalent in the French film) and it is also thematically similar to Sippy’s earlier movie Bluffmaster. In that one, a conman played by Abhishek Bachchan finds himself on the receiving end of a giant, convoluted con which eventually has a therapeutic effect on him. In Nautanki Saala, RP (Ayushmann Khurana), who is a different sort of “conman” (being the director and lead actor of a play), goes through a similar process of self-discovery. Ostensibly he is the one helping someone else – a suicidal young man named Mandar (Kunal Roy Kapur) – but the story’s arc leads up to a point where RP is asked “Jaal sirf tum biccha sakte ho?” Or, as someone else puts it, “Sacch jaanne ke liye kabhi kabhi nautanki karni padti hai.”

That probably makes this film sound more interesting than it is; actually, it’s very uneven, alternating between a few inspired comic moments and some prolonged and awkwardly performed scenes. Given the premise – with people constantly putting on a show, both inside the theatre and outside it – there are naturally lots of inside jokes (the very title derives from an exclamation from a legendary film made by Sippy's dad) and self-referential humour. The soundtrack plays “Dramebaaz” at regular intervals, there are one-liners like “Stop playing God, Ram”, Ayushmann gets to say his own name onscreen (something that wouldn’t be practicable in most regular movies) courtesy a cheeky little “Ayushmaan bhav”. And people speak to each other back-stage in the archaic language of the play (“Peeda kya hai, vats?”) – the best of these scenes don’t feel like forced attempts to extract humour, they provide a sense of artistes who are so steeped in what they are doing that this language comes naturally to them (or perhaps speaking like this just helps them stay in character). But of course it can also bespeak an inability to separate life from theatre, which is a lesson RP has to learn.

Some of the sight gags are good too, such as the use of the Mean Streets poster with De Niro’s Johnnie Boy, or the scene where Mandar emerges from a steamy bathroom after a shower, looking like a halo-soaked deity, his hand raised in what seems like a gesture of benediction (though he’s really just trying to swat a mosquito), giving RP the inspiration to test him for the role of Rama. And there are a few lunatic asides, such as the scenes involving a fast-talking, expressionless nurse whose speech has to be interpreted by an assistant (a reminder of the joke about chemists being the only people who can decipher a doctor’s handwriting). In moments like these Nautanki Saala shows a knack for off-the-wall comedy that it doesn’t quite take all the way.

The thing is, with a film that has a few good ideas, some sharp one-liners and a couple of likable performances, you can make it sound consistently good just by listing some of those high points (as I’ve done above). But my lasting impression of Nautanki Saala wasn’t the little moments that worked – it was the large, dull stretches between them. There are too many scenes where the script squeezes a premise dry and then continues wringing away while the actors flounder. Even Kunal Roy Kapur’s masterful act as the dull-eyed Big Moose-like depressive – mooning over a broken relationship, sleepwalking his way through life and making things complicated for others – can’t salvage the needlessly extended scene where an audition turns into a Dumb Charades game. And Pooja Salvi’s non-performance as the much-desired Nandini makes nearly all her scenes flat and uninvolving – which is problematic because here is the girl who is supposed to be the beating heart of this comic-drama, the object of Mandar and RP’s affections.

That said, it might be noted that when we first see Nandini, it is as an unmoving silhouette in profile, behind a translucent curtain. Her function is that of a muse, a blank slate, like the sculpture Pygmalion falls in love with, and she is also the one character who isn’t putting up an act (for most of the film anyway) – and so, a more generous reviewer than me might point out that having a better actor in this role might have defeated the purpose; that a bland performance is appropriate. I’ll abstain from that line of subtextual analysing though – it would mean being as gullible as the Raavan Leela audience members*** who nod at each other and say “ah, okay” when Ram makes an accidental entrance with “Nandini” on his lips and then hurriedly modifies it to “Janak-Nandini Sita”.

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[*** two of whom are played by the excellent Anuvab and Deepanjana Pal, whose parts here should really lead to the institution of a “best cameo” category at our film award shows]

Our films, our selves: thoughts on the upcoming Bombay Talkies

[From my new cinema column for DNA newspaper. The e-paper version is here]

The enthusiastic if somewhat diffused celebrations around the 100th anniversary of Indian cinema found a new focal point last month, with the unveiling of the trailer for Bombay Talkies. This is an anthology film made up of short movies – each around 25 minutes in length – by four of our best-known directors; Karan Johar, Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee were each given choice of subject and treatment, as long as it had something to do with cinema. So Kashyap’s film, for instance, is about a man from Allahabad on a mission to meet his hero Amitabh Bachchan.

While a celebratory project can be expected to run along such lines, it is worth noting that much of modern cinema is about cinema anyway. It feels like we have been living in an age of meta-film for a while, where movies constantly reference other movies (and in some cases are impossible to properly appreciate unless you are familiar with those reference points). Even remakes, while updating a story, miss no opportunity to make nudge-wink allusions to our cinematic past. I haven’t seen the new Himmatwala yet, but I wasn’t surprised to hear the dialogue where the hero tells the heroine how to bandage his wound: “Yeh 1983 hai, yaar. Pallu phaado aur baandh do.” The patronising tone is almost enough to make one feel defensive about the terrible 1980s.

As it happens, two of the four directors in the Bombay Talkies project have already made feature-length films that can be viewed as tributes to cinema. Anurag Kashyap’s epic from last year, Gangs of Wasseypur, was – to me at least – less noteworthy as a straight-faced depiction of gang wars in Dhanbad, and more stimulating as a commentary on how people interact with their popular culture, even modelling their own personalities and relationships on what they see in movies. (In one of that film’s many witty little touches, the sole character who is uninterested in cinema is played by a real-life director, Tigmanshu Dhulia. Naturally, this grinch is also the story’s primary villain.) Zoya Akhtar’s excellent Luck by Chance, on the other hand, was explicitly about the workings of the movie industry – a sympathetic yet hard-edged tale about the fortunes of two aspiring actors, neither of whom are to the manor of a filmi khandaan born. The multiple cameos in that film by real-life actors and directors might easily have become tiresome, but they were marvellously done. Two of the most delightful, in fact, were by Akhtar’s Bombay Talkies co-directors: Karan Johar played himself as someone darker and more intriguing than you’d ever think from watching his actual movies, while Kashyap played a writer whose artistic cravings are rudely snuffed out by money-minded producers. Such are the ways in which an industry comments on its own underpinnings.

Of the four short films, the one I’m most looking forward to is Dibakar Banerjee’s updating of Satyajit Ray’s story “Patol Babu, Film Star”, about a small-time actor and dreamer who is hired to play a tiny part in a film. (It is a pleasing coincidence that Ray’s story was first published in 1963, Indian cinema’s half-centenary year, though I doubt he had that in mind while writing it.) I met Banerjee last year during one of the script sessions, and learnt that his alterations included making the protagonist younger (the original Patol is 52), putting in a little subplot about emu-farming, and shifting the setting to contemporary Mumbai. But what I thought most interesting was his stated intention to bring elements of non-fiction filmmaking into fiction, to “explore the method of serendipity of documentaries within the format of a pre-written story”. 

Part of the idea was to work with an actor who might relate to Patol Babu’s struggles – someone whose own emotional trajectory resembled that of the character. It seems appropriate then that the role is being played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui, a short, dark-complexioned, “non-hero type” who has gone from being a bit-part player to one of our most respected performers, and a poster boy for the heart-warming (if illusory) idea that if you have talent, you can make it big no matter what. The last I heard, Banerjee and his collaborators were plumbing Siddiqui’s own background for cues to the updated Patol, though I don’t know how much of this has made it into the final film.

What Banerjee probably realised was that the line between fiction and non-fiction can become very blurred in a context where cinema is commenting on cinema. Two of the best documentaries I have recently seen are not part of the 100-year celebrations, but they could easily have been. Faiza Khan’s affectionate Supermen of Malegaon chronicles the struggles of small-town filmmakers as they make a superhero movie on a tiny budget with basic computer technology; this is a story about people fighting the odds (the plural “supermen” in the title refers to director Nasir Shaikh and his team in Malegaon), trying to highlight their daily problems – poverty, pollution, apathy – while also indulging their passion for filmmaking.

Even more compelling is Jagannathan Krishnan’s Videokaaran, about the world of underground video parlours. The lead character here – he is a real person, but one instinctively thinks of him as a “character” – is a colourful young man named Sagai, and as he addresses the camera, holding forth about his life, analysing his own personality, we see that (like the people in Gangs of Wasseypur) he is partly a construct of the movies he loves. As he and his friends argue passionately about the relative merits of Rajinikanth, Amitabh Bachchan and other heroes, it is obvious that they are already performers themselves – the cockiness, the braggadocio, the smart one-liners come easily to them. If they watch Bombay Talkies, they are likely to see their own movie-obsessions mirrored in it.

On Jayant Kripalani's New Market Tales

[Did a version of this for the Hindu Literary Review]

“This story you can tell. People need happy stories,” says a man named Amol at the end of the tale bearing his name in Jayant Kripalani’s New Market Tales. The lines, along with the context in which they are spoken, are pointers to the good-natured directness – but also the subtly bittersweet tone – of the better pieces in this collection. The narrator has recently encountered Amol, an old Calcutta acquaintance, in a Manhattan stationery shop, and found that he now moves around by wheelchair, having lost his legs. Amol refuses to say how this happened – “so many sad stories in the world...if people do not know one more, there will be no harm” – but he is also, improbably, eyeing advertisements for branded footwear. This seems like whimsy, but eventually a pair of prosthetics enables him to wear the Gucci shoes he fancied.

It’s a small triumph, but a meaningful one for the man in question, and this is reflected elsewhere in the book too. Not all the stories here have conventionally “happy endings”, but there are degrees of joy and sorrow in them, and the breeziness of the telling seems to give more weight to the former. Consider the tale of a young boy named Francis, a baker’s son who yearns to be a maker of jewellery. Early in the story we are told (again, without being given the details) that Francis died very young, but we also learn that he achieved a measure of self-validation and appreciation in his short life.

These protagonists are mainly the residents of Calcutta's New Market area – including the “marketeyr bachcha” or the shop-owners’ children – in the 1960s and 1970s, and the first six stories, which take up close to half the book, are the ones I liked best. These are pen-portraits of a variety of colourful characters – people with quirks, dreams, and their own special ways of dealing with the world – such as the perpetually sleepy Rathikanta Chatterjee (nicknamed Atiklanta, which means “so weary”) who goes to Darjeeling for a quiet holiday and finds himself in the centre of a storm, as an abetter of local riots. Or the feisty Gopa, daughter of the owner of an undergarments shop, who learns practical lessons about business and life when she insists on being the first woman to “man” the shop counter.

In telling their stories, the narrator shows some nostalgia for a time when horse-drawn carriages would clip-clop along at 10 miles an hour. (“Today, with all the fast cars, the crowds and the mushrooming of pavement shops, the average speed is five miles per hour. That is progress.”) But there is also a matter-of-fact portrayal of a cosmopolitan city, as in the candidly sexy “Mita” with its view of a Calcutta where old and new constantly brush against each other; where a married woman might show up at an ex-boyfriend’s place for a drunken sleepover and later, during a Hooghly ride in an ancient boat, tell him that her husband is having an affair with...her mother. The writing is mostly direct and minus frills, though Kripalani has a flair for description when required. (“He had a broad forehead over bright, inquisitive eyes, across which ran one black eyebrow, as if the Almighty had dipped his thumb in surma and run it across all the way from left to right in one stroke.”) The copy-editing could have been more careful though; in stories like the long “Mesho”, there is incomplete and confusing use of quote-marks in a narrative within a narrative.

Some of the later pieces, though pleasant on their own terms, feel – in terms of tone or subject – like they belong to a different collection. “Zack’s” begins with a woman initially known to the young narrator only as Sati G, one of his mother’s more bohemian acquaintances – and the owner of a nightclub with a salty-sounding “Sailors’ Night” – before resolving itself into a poignant story about a life transformed by political and social circumstances. “Harish”, in which a man suddenly steps out of his old life and reappears with a different identity in another part of the city, goes on a bit too long, and comes to feel like a stretched-out motivational tale. And “Anila” is an outright incongruous piece that appears to have been given a hurried New Market reference and included here just to make up the numbers. This doesn’t detract from the wider appeal of these stories though. If you remember Kripalani’s urbane roles in film and television – such as the perpetually drunk Francis (no relation to the baker’s son) in Trikaal, and more recently as a likable parent in such films as Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na – you won’t have much trouble imagining him as their raconteur-author, reading them out in a reassuringly genial voice.

About a brief encounter with Roger Ebert

Sad to hear of the passing of Roger Ebert. I hadn't read much by him in the past few years (no particular reason - my online reading in general has thinned out), but his reviews were staples in my early years of net-surfing, circa 1998-2000 (when the Chicago Sun-Times site was one of the first pages I opened each time I got online) and I particularly enjoyed his Great Films essays. In a somewhat surreal turn of events, I found myself in correspondence with him around six years ago, after he mailed to say he liked something I had written in Business Standard. This begat a comical email exchange because, although his ID and the tone of his mail seemed authentic, my blog had been plagued by some inventive troll activity around the time, and this seemed a little too good to be true. So I sent "Ebert" a very cautious, split-personality response expressing my happiness if the mail really was from him, but also being careful not to get too fulsome, and repeatedly using the phrase "assuming this really IS you". Then he would reply trying to convince me. He used faux-philosophical lines like "How can I prove I'm me?" He even sent across two photos from the 1999 Calcutta Film Festival, which I knew he had attended; the subject line of his mail was "Would an imposter have this?"

Even then I continued to be a little wary (the photos did seem to be insider views of the fest, but he wasn't in either of them). The pleasing clincher came a few weeks later when I was browsing through an entry on his blog and saw his response to this comment. (Yes, I'm showing off. Deal with it.)

At which point I mailed him back, apologising for my earlier reserve and saying the fanboyish things I had held back from saying earlier. He replied, sounding amused and relieved (and possibly also wondering if I was missing a few bulbs in the old chandelier). After that, however, we were only sporadically in touch - this was also around the time that his health problems were escalating.

As a very small tribute, here is a link to an Ebert piece that I often returned to in the old days, his review of Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel. No idea why this review in particular struck such a chord (partly perhaps because I had just seen the film and was trying to collect my own thoughts about it), but the quality and the passion of the writing left a big impression on me during a difficult, depressing period when I was wondering if it was possible to pursue a career writing about the things I was interested in. (Or if I even knew what I was interested in.) On some level, this and dozens of other Ebert pieces helped me decide, though back then it was beyond imagining that I would one day get an email from the man himself, saying "We are similar in having strong interests in both film and literature."

P.S. I first came across Ebert's writings on my Cinemania 95 CD-ROM in the pre-Internet days (that was also where I discovered this fascinating new concept of the hyperlink). Hard to believe it's been nearly 20 years.