[my latest Lounge column, about a loony mid-80s film by the director who later made the more widely watched Chaalbaaz] --------------------------------------
I have a confession: the acclaimed Raazi, about a young woman, Sehmat, who marries into a Pakistani family circa 1971 so she can spy for India, left me a little cold. Sensitive and well-intentioned though the film was, I thought it inertly paced, lacking impetus – even when it moved towards what was meant to be a dramatic climax. The story did work on some levels: it can be read as a commentary on marriage as a pact that involves moving out of one’s comfort zone into a new space (and as a ticking time-bomb that can blow up in everyone’s face, even when no one is to blame). But the espionage angle fell flat for me.
Perhaps distracted by the solemnity with which the film treats Sehmat’s spying, I began picturing the suspicious old family servant Abdul (played by Arif Zakaria) as a Pakistani version of Rebecca’s Mrs Danvers, swishing about in a black gown, holding candles. My mind also turned to other, madcap treatments of the spying theme. The “Spy vs Spy” comic strip. Austin Powers. Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clousseau pretending to be a telephone repairman (nobody is fooled) and asking, in a heavy French accent, to see the defective “fern”.
Or, closer home, the 1986 comedy Peechha Karro, a rough synopsis of which makes it sound much like Raazi: Vijay (Farooq Sheikh) is told to spy on his father-in-law, a Brigadier who is selling the nation’s secrets. (Or exporting drug-laced toffees. Or both.)
That also makes Peechha Karro sound like a more organized film than it wants to be. This is essentially an assortment of comic sketches – some inspired, others that play like school-level skits – held together by the shenanigans of Ravi Baswani and Satish Shah as two policemen who say things like “Desh ko tum pe naaz hai” (“Your country is proud of you”) in such bizarre situations that even Raazi’s heroine might consider becoming a defector. The result being a hit-and-miss film with some unoriginal lowbrow humour (a Chinese-looking martial-arts expert is called “Choos Lee, son of Guth Lee”) and a few unnecessarily stretched-out scenes, I can’t recommend it as a whole. What I would propose, though, is a highlights package: a list of the funnier moments where everyone involved seems to be having a good time. For instance, even viewers who aren’t fans of the Rajendra Nath school of comedy should enjoy the aging actor’s performance as Vijay’s father, who quotes Hindi-film lyrics but attributes them to mythological figures. “Yamraj ne Savitri se kaha tha: jeena yahaan, marna yahaan, isske siva jaana kahaan? (The God of Death told Savitri: we live and die here, where else can we go?)” he says with a wise and faraway look.
There are some nice little scenes like the one where Vijay – hoping to renege on his duties and go on a honeymoon instead – is confronted by his stern-looking zameer (conscience), who orders him to be a patriot. “Agar desh bachega, toh Kashmir bachega aur tum sainkron honeymoon mana sakoge.” (“If the country is saved, Kashmir will be saved and you can go on as many honeymoons as you like.”) In its more ponderous stretches, Raazi could have done with a dream-interlude of this sort.
Much like another comedy by director Pankaj Parashar – the 1984 Ab Aayega Mazaa – Peechha Karro exists at the intersection of parody, homage and derivativeness. It takes little digs at mainstream cinema’s clichés: when a girl behaves like the stereotype of the lovelorn, dreamy-eyed Hindi-movie heroine, the scene is made ironical by her father commenting on her behaviour – “Tumhare iss tarah kaleen pe letna, yun haath mein gulaab rakhna, aur dheemi dheemi suron mein kuch gungunana ..saaf pata chalta hai ke tumhein pyaar hua hai” (You’re lying on the carpet, holding a red rose and sighing and humming to yourself. Hmm, this means you’re in love. Come, tell me the boy’s name.) But at other time, it also straight-facedly employs those clichés it. And sometimes, you can’t tell when it is doing what: there are romantic song sequences that appear to exist mainly so Farooq Sheikh gets a chance to have some of the fun that was denied to him in more sombre roles; to wear bright shirts and shake his hips like Jeetendra.
Some fun is had with other star personas too. Since the Brigadier is played by Amjad Khan – forever immortalized as Sholay’s fearsome Gabbar Singh – this film can’t resist a nod to Gabbar’s “Kitne aadmi thay” entrance scene. And you have to sympathize with Vijay here: being damaad to such a man must be as scary for him as it is for Ben Stiller in Meet the Parents to discover that his future dad-in-law is a grimacing Robert de Niro, looking like Al Capone in The Untouchables, baseball bat in hand.
Peechha Karro belongs to a moment in mid-1980s cinema when a very particular brand of crazy humour was in the air. The signpost of this mini-zeitgeist was, of course, Jaane bhi do Yaaro, but other such works include Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho (a pedantic social-message film with some eye-popping scenes featuring Amjad Khan – again – as a heartless landlord, and Pankaj Kapur as a sinisterly poker-faced “promoter”) and Khamosh (a thriller that was also a cheeky commentary on filmmaking). Their knowingly over-the-top tone was sometimes difficult to identify as such because so many of the regular films of the time were (unintentionally) over the top anyway.
To explain Peechha Karro and those other films, you may have to posit that the crew were on the hallucinogenic substances that the Brigadier smuggles in sweets – delivered only after he has squawked code messages like “Miaow! Miaow! Kuttay ko billi ka salaam!” (“The cat salutes the dog!”) Or it could be that the technology of the period – such as unwieldy rotary-dial phones – naturally inspired funny situations in the spying context. “Telephone exchange ho gaya,” is the punch-line after a phone inadvertently gets tossed around in Peechha Karro; it’s a reminder of the famous slapstick scene involving Naseeruddin Shah, Satish Kaushik and two telephones in JBDY, but it also made me think of Sehmat setting up complicated bugging devices in her bathroom (with Abdul Danvers keeping an eye on her from the next room), and what those scenes might have looked like in a different sort of film.
--------------------------------- [Here's a post about Pankaj Parashar's Ab Aayega Mazaa]
[my latest Mint Lounge column is on a Braj Bhasha film about a little boy obsessed with an immortal warrior] ------------------------------
“This film is not mainly concerned with telling a kahaani (story),” writer-director Pushpendra Singh said before the screening of his feature Ashwatthama, at the Habitat Film Festival in Delhi. “It is more about mood – about capturing the feel of a place and a way of life.”
When a filmmaker makes such assertions, there is often a trace of condescension aimed at the average viewer who is interested only in such trivialities as “plot” or “entertainment”. But Singh was speaking matter-of-factly and there was no superiority in his tone, even when he said making Ashwatthama was like a process of meditation for him, and that he hoped watching it would be similar for the audience. Aayiye, saath mein meditate karte hain (come, let’s meditate together), was his closing line before exiting the stage. Shot mostly in elegant black and white (with flashes of colour for dream-like, slow-motion scenes), his film did indeed turn out to be a paean to the sights and rhythms of the starkly beautiful Chambal landscape along the Rajasthan-Uttar Pradesh border, where the story is set – and from where its cast of non-professional actors, many of them Singh’s relatives, was drawn.
But intriguingly, given his caution that this isn’t a narrative film, it begins with a mother telling her little boy a story – about the mythological Ashwatthama, who launched a nighttime massacre on the Pandava camp after the Mahabharata war was officially over, and was then cursed by Krishna to wander the earth, wounded and friendless, for all time. It’s a tale that will haunt the little boy, Ishwaku, especially when he himself is orphaned and has to live with distant relatives.
For anyone who has a more than casual acquaintance with the Mahabharata, Ashwatthama is among the epic’s most fascinating figures, both condemned and celebrated in our literature: he is one of the protagonists of Dharamvir Bharati’s renowned play Andha Yug, for instance, and a narrator in Maggi Lidchi-Grassi’s The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata. As Pushpendra Singh pointed out, the character is a folk-hero for rural people in many parts of the country. “There are places where the Ashwatthama cult is bigger than that of more conventional heroes like Krishna or Arjuna,” he said. “Ordinary people tell each other in an awed voice, last night we heard the chant of Ashwatthama. He connects the past and the present.”
A motif of this film is the wide-ranging relationship that people have with their mythology. In one scene, devotees lament: you heeded Draupadi’s call, oh Krishna, but when will you visit me and help me with my troubles? In another, a woman spreads hope by narrating the Bateshwar legend of a daughter magically becoming a son after she jumps into a river – thereby allowing her father to honour the promise he had made to an old friend.
Elsewhere at the Habitat festival too, the link between the grand mythological world and the quotidian, present-day one arose in other contexts. For instance, Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s S Durga (originally “Sexy Durga”, retitled after protests) centres on the contrast between Durga the goddess – worshipped during a festival, by men who maim themselves for her – and a flesh-and-blood woman named Durga, who is terrorized in increasingly unsubtle ways when she and her boyfriend hitch a ride late at night. The Ashwatthama story has a different resonance – as one of the chiranjeevs or immortals of mythology, he bridges a fabled Then and a mundane Now. Characters like Arjuna and Karna are remote figures fixed in time’s amber; when we think of them, we think of a long line of dramatic incidents with them at the centre. But someone like Ashwatthama has had enough time – thousands of years – to become anonymous and unremarkable, and perhaps this is his real appeal today. It’s oddly comforting to think that a mythical character, who once did heroic and terrible things, is still roaming among us, now much diminished – just like us. The story can enrich a child’s imagination, but it is also a reminder of how slow-paced and uneventful the real world can be. Little Ishwaku’s mother might have been killed by bandits, but that doesn’t mean his life is going to be a nonstop adventure. Instead it simply drifts along – an idea that is brought to visual life in the film’s stunning final shot.
The closing dedication of Singh’s film says “Victor Erice, tumhare liye”, a reference to the Spanish filmmaker, with the words written in the Devanagari script – a reminder of how cinema can erase differences between languages and cultures. Ashwatthama certainly is evocative in places of Erice’s most famous achievement, the 1973 Spirit of the Beehive, a similarly abstract, slow-paced film about a little girl negotiating the adult world. Both films are about the wonders and terrors of childhood, about real and imagined bogeymen, from the Frankenstein monster to a cursed immortal from an ancient epic. But both stories are also about a child’s discovery of monotony and about the limits of “narrative”. -------------------------------------
[Earlier Mint Lounge columns here. A piece about Erice's Spirit of the Beehive is here]
[In my “cinematic moments” column for The Hindu, I pay a very small tribute to my mother, who died earlier this year. Lots more to write about her, and about the other people I have looked after and – somewhat carelessly – lost in the past two years; but for now snippets like this will have to do] ------------------------
This column is meant to be about moments that illuminate something specific about a film, or about cinema in general. But films don’t exist independently of the people who watch them – the viewers who bring to the table their personalities, life experiences, ideological prisms, or just the mood they happen to be in on the day. And sometimes, it’s impossible to predict what will most affect you. Watching Ravi Jadhav’s Marathi film Nude, for instance, it was a setting that struck a personal chord for me. I knew the plot outline beforehand: a poor woman named Yamuna, despite initial reservations, starts working as a nude model in a Mumbai art school, and feels somewhat empowered in the process. But it wasn’t until around 20 minutes into the film that I realized where a great deal of it was going to be set: in Bombay’s Sir JJ School of Art. The first time we see the place is through the eyes of the protagonist, as she discreetly follows her aunt and is scandalized to discover that the latter sheds her clothes for a living. This sequence, and others to follow, take us into the leafy and spacious garden of the famous art institution; we see the outdoor sculptures, the exterior of the 160-year-old building designed in the neo-gothic style…and then the hall where students sit together at their easels.
I was unprepared for these scenes, and shaken by them for reasons that had nothing to do with the film’s narrative. My mother, who died a few months ago at only 65, after a brave fight with cancer, studied at the JJ School of Art. She continued drawing and painting – sporadically, diffidently, not with professional ambitions – until late in her life, and always spoke of the school with great affection: about hanging around in the gardens with friends and boyfriends, feeling like they had a place to themselves, a sanctuary within the broader idyll that was the south Bombay of the 1960s.
I often tell people that Churchgate is my motherland – it’s where my mother grew up, and where she spent her best years before circumstances led her to a bad marriage in Delhi, and a very different life from the one she might have envisioned as a teenager. When I made my first trip there as an adult in 2006, spent time walking around the Oval Maidan and Eros and Kala Ghoda, I felt that odd phenomenon – a strong nostalgia for a time and place that one has never actually experienced. But I didn’t get to visit JJ School, and this was the first time I was ever seeing it. On a screen, at a film festival, in Delhi!
And this informed my whole experience of Nude, though I had no problem registering other things about the film: I admired the lead performances by Kalyanee Mulay as Yamuna and Chhaya Kadam as her “Akka”; I even rolled my eyes at an over-expository Naseeruddin Shah cameo (he plays the oracle delivering the film’s Message). But JJ remained the most immediate and vivid takeaway.
Once that unexpected kinship with the film was established, of course, other threads came into focus. Perhaps the connection was deepened by the fact that as a child I had witnessed my mother’s many struggles as a divorced woman, and Nude happens to be about a single mother who has left an abusive husband, and is doing everything she can to raise her son well. Or perhaps it was something more fleeting, like the scene where a student cautions Yamuna that a bitch has just laid a litter of pups in the garden and not to go too near. This created a sense of the college premises as a friendly refuge for homeless animals. One of the defining features of my mother’s life was her love for dogs, and I couldn’t help picturing her as a student, cooing over a stray in the JJ lawns. And there is also the fact that my mother’s death coincides with a time where the arts – especially provocative, discomfiting art – always seem to be under attack. Though she wasn’t an intellectual in the commonly used sense of that word, she had a no-nonsense wisdom, understood concepts like freedom of expression very well, and took them as essential conditions of civilized life. Despite a prim-seeming exterior, she could appreciate very dark, wicked or caustic humour. And even when she did wrinkle her nose in distaste at some things I liked – gory films, books with subversive content – never did she come close to suggesting that I shouldn’t experience them. When I was barely 13, she took on a relative who was aghast that I was reading a German retelling of the Mahabharata that contained explicit sex scenes between Draupadi and Yudhisthira.
As Nude becomes more overtly political in its latter half, there is a scene where hooligans storm into the JJ School premises and desecrate the “dirty” paintings and sculptures that their minds cannot process or accept. For reasons that should by now be obvious, this scene felt to me like a personal violation. ------------------------------------------ [An earlier essay about mum – written shortly after her cancer was diagnosed – is here. My earlier Hindu columns are here]
[Did this review – of two novellas by the celebrated Telugu writer Satyanarayana – for Scroll] ---------------------------
Strange, anachronistic beings – misfits in the contemporary world – feature in the new Penguin Modern Classics publication Ha Ha Hu Hu, which collects two novellas by the renowned Telugu writer Viswanadha Satyanarayana. In the first story, “Ha Ha Hu Hu”, Londoners find a wounded, unconscious creature with a horse’s head and a human body in their city. (The story’s sub-head is “A Horse-Headed God in Trafalgar Square”.) When it shows a deep intelligence – unlike any they have encountered before – they don’t know how to deal with it, or how to explain the rules of their own civilization (beyond caging it and demonstrating for its benefit that their guns can kill). Even a Sanskrit scholar, who realizes this might be a gandharva fallen to earth, is puzzled.
In the second story, “Vishnu Sharma Learns English”, the scholar Vishnu Sharma – who is believed to have written the Panchatantra – and the 13th century poet Tikanna (who translated the Mahabharata into Telugu) appear first in dream form, and later as flesh-and-blood humans, to a lecturer, requesting that he teach them English. The king of the Gods, Indra himself, has asked them to return to earth to do this, so they can “get the education suitable for these days”. But the lessons that follow prove confusing to both the students and their master. “Ha Ha Hu Hu” was first published in 1932, while “Vishnu Sharma Inglishu Chaduvu” came nearly 30 years later; these two English translations are by Velcheru Narayana Rao, who also provides an Introduction and Afterword. Many readers prefer to skip such essays and go to the stories directly, letting them speak for themselves. Personally, as someone who had never read Viswanadha Satyanarayana before, I found it useful to go through Rao’s pieces for context.
Almost the first thing the translator tells us is that Satyanarayana was, unlike many of his contemporaries in the early decades of the 20th century, a traditionalist. Modernists saw him as someone who was anti-progress, anti-social reform, bound to the old rules. But as Rao puts it, it was not easy to marginalize or dismiss him. “He was too modern to be outdated and too outdated to be modern. He was everywhere – as a writer, critic, public intellectual and a formidable opponent of everything the new middle class stood for. For about half a century, he walked the Telugu literary scene like a four-hundred-pound gorilla in the living room who could not be ignored.”
That last analogy is intriguing, given that “Ha Ha Hu Hu” is about a beast that people don’t know what to make of – a cerebral, category-defying animal whose very existence seems to contradict everything one thinks one knows.
Central to this story is the lament that pre-modern, pre-Enlightenment ideas and forms of expression are seen as quaint, childlike and inferior by western civilization – and by those who have grown up under western influence. (As Rao notes in his Introduction, Indian nationalists may have fought for freedom from colonial rule, but most of them wholeheartedly embraced the modern literary culture that came in through the English language – consequently, people like Satyanarayana found themselves in a minority in the world of the progressive writers.) The first few Londoners who see the horse-headed creature exoticise it and comment on its clothes in the same way that an insular Englishman of the time might mock traditional Indian attire. Ha Hu (as he comes to be called) responds by mounting an argument for keeping one’s mind open to the many possibilities in creation, rather than staying restricted by a single value system: “There are many different animals on this earth […] If there are many types of people, their habits vary too.”
The interactions between the horse-man and those who want to study him make up the bulk of the story: Ha Hu gets the better of the scientists and scholars who are smug about their knowledge and try to compartmentalize him in terms of their narrow experience – but he says equally smug and reductive-sounding things at times. (“Knowledge comes through tapas, not by cutting up animal bodies”.) The story loads the dice in favour of the gandharva, and a reader can feel ambivalent about this, given the constant attempts – even in 21st century India – to haul us back into a supposedly golden age where everything was pristine, uncorrupted by newfangled ideologies or scientific progress.
While “Ha Ha Hu Hu” is the shorter of the two stories, and in some ways the more simplistic allegory, “Vishnu Sharma Learns English” is more wide-ranging – in fact, Rao says he had his work cut out as a translator because the story was so full of digressions. By this point in his writing career, Satyanarayana “had grown somewhat carefree. He began writing novels by the dozen, often dictating several novels the same day to scribes who worked in shifts […] no one edited his work, and apparently no one proofread it either.”
But this also works well for the novella, giving it a stream-of-consciousness quality and a dream-logic suited to its premise. At one point, the lecturer frets about the rules of etiquette in dealing with his spectral visitors. (He should get up from his bed to offer them water – but if he does that, he will wake up and they will be gone!) There are passages that are droll and poignant at the same time, such as the one where Tikanna mentions that he went to see a river he remembered from his own time, but couldn’t recognize it because someone had put “a belt” on her.
And there are many comical, incisive observations on English, some of which might strike a chord for anyone who has seen Hindi films such as Namak Halal or Chupke Chupke. This is a funny, illogical, unnecessarily complicated language, mull the two heavenly visitors – how ironical that it has come to be so closely associated with a rational, progressive world. Vishnu Sharma wonders why English requires small as well as big versions of every letter. “If they are the same, why do I have to learn them separately? This is like showing me your uncle when he has his shirt on and then with his shirt off. It’s the same uncle.”
“A language has to follow the inner movements of the mind and its syntax should support it,” Tikanna says; in his view, English fails this test and lacks the “conceptual purity” of the older tongues. It’s possible to see this as a metaphor for the difference between a newer, more egalitarian world (made up of many parts, which don’t always fit together well) and an older, more regimented one where people (like letters in an alphabet) knew their exact place and function, and it was possible to tell by looking at someone what his social role was – much the same way as, in a “pure” language, one can look at a word and know exactly how it is to be pronounced. (None of the ambiguity one finds in English – “go” being said in one way, “do” in another.)
However, Rao also suggests – and I think this is borne out by the story – that “Vishnu Sharma Learns English” shouldn’t be reduced to the message: Telugu or Sanskrit are superior to English. An important part of the point is that people like the lecturer inhabit an in-between world, where they have not fully understood or absorbed either the old or the new, and where they are thus susceptible to the bullying of those who insist that their way is the only correct one.
“Viva twentieth century!” the lecturer cries in triumph during one conversation, where he seems to have temporarily silenced his visitors with his arguments. This sort of thing can come across as obvious, heavy-handed satire – but then, such is the nature of this material, and such must have been Satyanarayana’s position as a writer expressing his reservations with modernity even while grudgingly accepting some of its assumptions.
------------------------ [Some of my other reviews for Scroll.in are here]
The result being a hit-and-miss film with some unoriginal lowbrow humour (a Chinese-looking martial-arts expert is called “Choos Lee, son of Guth Lee”) and a few unnecessarily stretched-out scenes, I can’t recommend it as a whole. What I would propose, though, is a highlights package: a list of the funnier moments where everyone involved seems to be having a good time. For instance, even viewers who aren’t fans of the Rajendra Nath school of comedy should enjoy the aging actor’s performance as Vijay’s father, who quotes Hindi-film lyrics but attributes them to mythological figures. 
“Yamraj ne Savitri se kaha tha: jeena yahaan, marna yahaan, isske siva jaana kahaan? (The God of Death told Savitri: we live and die here, where else can we go?)” he says with a wise and faraway look. 
But at other time, it also straight-facedly employs those clichés it. And sometimes, you can’t tell when it is doing what: there are romantic song sequences that appear to exist mainly so Farooq Sheikh gets a chance to have some of the fun that was denied to him in more sombre roles; to wear bright shirts and shake his hips like Jeetendra. 
