[Did a version of this piece about a lush new film and a haunting TV series – both of which are about greed, hubris and overvaulting ambition – for my Mint Lounge column] --------------------------
One of my pet fetishes as a movie buff is looking for little connections – tenuous, whimsical ones or clear and resonant ones – between films that might be very different on the surface. This might be sparked by a minor detail, such as a similarity in names, which then leads to a deeper engagement and, perhaps, an identifying of thematic and visual links.
A recent example: Tumbbad and the Tuunbaq.
On first hearing about Rahi Anil Barve’s Tumbbad, and learning that it was (in part) a horror film, my thoughts went back to the excellent limited series The Terror, released in eight episodes early this year (and available on Amazon Prime). Based on Dan Simmons’s bestselling historical novel, this show is about an 1840s Arctic expedition beset by a monster called the Tuunbaq.
A phonetic connection between two unusual words, then, and a shared genre: nothing more at this point. But on watching Tumbbad, I found that it shares a visual and aural lushness with The Terror, making for a very distinctive experience. Both works are spooky, majestic and affecting at the same time. And in each, these qualities come from the set design, the use of music, and the evocation of a place that is like a breathing thing, slowly corroding the thoughts and actions of the people in it. In The Terror, that place is the vast Arctic where two Royal Navy ships are stuck in the ice in the middle of nowhere, with 120-odd men left to fend for themselves; as if this weren’t enough, they are stalked by a huge, bear-like creature that may be a manifestation of an ancient demon from Esquimaux lore. In Tumbbad, the setting is the Maharashtrian village that gives the film its title, and which – as the story opens in 1918 and continues through the next three decades – is the last abode of a long-forgotten deity-demon. Within this village, the film will later show us another, confined space, but I’ll leave you to discover that for yourself.
Here are two period works that draw on invented mythologies – one Indian, the other Inuit – and pit our hubris against the detached implacability of nature. Tumbbad and The Terror are, in different ways, about human hunger and covetousness: the need to push ever further, the need for instant gratification, altering the cosmic balance in the process. And in both, the characters face a hideous, misshapen comeuppance.
Tumbbad opens with a Gandhi quote about the world having enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed, and then tells us a story about a goddess who gave birth to all of creation, while also mothering an insatiable child called Hastar. One reading of such a story could be that our species is the child that can never have enough. And perhaps this is why there is something so unsettling about the most explicitly “horror-film-like” sections of Tumbbad, which are set, literally and metaphorically, inside a womb. A very specific story plays out here: the protagonist Vinayak (Sohum Shah) travels into the belly of the beast, knowing he might come away with priceless riches, or be destroyed in the attempt. Or that both things might happen at the same time – he might realize his dreams while relinquishing his soul. But at a broader level, if you accept this film’s conceit that the womb contains the universe, what we see isn’t just the story of one man or one family: it is the stuff of life itself, with Vinayak a representation of a species always trying to find that eternal balance between self-interest and restraint. And it is telling that the film ends in 1947, the year of India's independence, with a character achieving another sort of freedom.
The Gandhi quote is applicable in another sense to The Terror, which, apart from being a horror story about a group of explorers, is also a commentary on British colonialization, its devastation and exploitation of the more pristine parts of our planet. I was reminded of the show again last week when I read about the recent report by the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change, presenting the possibility that our planet might reach a point of no return as early as 2040 – and the likelihood that we won’t be able to do enough about it, so firmly complicit are our political and corporate systems.
Each film also has an eerie, otherworldly music score, one that doesn’t feel manmade but seems to flow from the deepest recesses of nature (more than once I thought of the Ray Bradbury story “The Fog Horn”, where a lonely monster living in the ocean’s depths falls in love with a lighthouse siren, thinking it is the sound of a long-lost mate). In The Terror, the music heightens the sense of agoraphobia created by the boundless Arctic; in Tumbbad, it creates the opposite sensation, claustrophobia, evocative of distant heartbeats in caverns deep beneath the earth.
Through the plaintive soundtrack, both places seem to cry out: don’t ravage us, take only what you need. But can humans ever heed such entreaties? We are a contradictory lot, and our worst qualities are inseparable from our better ones. We plunder and destroy in the name of advancement, but in so doing we also create things – like art, or cinema – that give us a channel for reflection and self-criticism. And then we go back to being our narcissistic selves. ------------------------------------ [An earlier mix-and-match piece here, about Madhumati and Vertigo. And a short piece about The Terror is here; but if you watch the show, do read these wonderfully detailed episode-by-episode reviews on the AV Club]
(My latest Mint Lounge column, on how old Hindi cinema dealt with the invisibility theme in its own special way) -------------------------------------------
Many people of my generation who grew up watching Hindi films in the mid-80s will remember their well-worn Mr India videocassettes: there was so much repeat value in this fantasy-romance about a compassionate underdog who acquires the gift of invisibility just as evil forces are bearing down on him. Those of us who knew HG Wells’s The Invisible Man felt an added frisson of excitement that a popular Hindi movie –close to home, with stars and songs – could draw on a classic sci-fi book, even while working with the vigilante-hero format. Watching the film multiple times, a scene that always had me leaning forward in anticipation was the one where the genial Professor Sinha (Ashok Kumar) snaps at a student who asks him about invisibility. This is it, I would tell myself as the scene began and Sinha droned on about how today’s technology would have seemed like magic to people living centuries ago; this was where the film’s main plot device came into focus, and one felt vaguely pleased that it was endorsed by that most daunting of subjects, Science.
Little did I know that Ashok Kumar himself, thirty years earlier, had played the lead in what is widely considered India’s first film involving invisibility: the 1957 Mr X, directed by Nanabhai Bhatt (Mahesh Bhatt’s father), which was spun into a minor franchise.
I haven’t seen the original Mr X, but I remember the 1964 spin-off Mr X in Bombay, in which Kumar’s younger brother Kishore got to perform both physical comedy and pathos within a pseudo-sci-fi plot. More recently, I saw the 1965 Aadhi Raat ke Baad (that’s a generic title – it could have been called Mr X in Rangoon, since it deals with an invisible man’s adventures in that city), which also stars Ashok Kumar. This one gives us one of the most (unintentionally) harrowing filmic introductions to an invisible hero: pouring liquids into test tubes with only his white gloves visible, he slowly comes into view as a twang of star-heralding music plays on the soundtrack. And he is shirtless! With a coy expression, he turns sideways and puts on a white gown. Now, I’m an Ashok Kumar fan on many levels, but not so much at the level of chest hair and man-boobs; on the physical-attractiveness gauge, I defer to Mukul Kesavan’s observation that mid-career Dada Moni resembled a cupboard wearing a dressing gown.
But once I had survived this scene and started to relish Aadhi Raat ke Baad’s corniness and tonal shifts, I found myself thinking about the main function of the invisible hero in our films. Internationally, such characters have done many things in cinema and literature, from crime-fighting to crime-committing to being martyrs in the interests of science to, well, just being smutty: the title character in the 1988 The Invisible Kid directs his energies to sneaking into girls’ locker rooms; Kevin Bacon in Hollow Man isn’t a paragon of virtue either when it comes to such matters; and in the comic series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Alan Moore successfully recasts Griffin (the protagonist of Wells’s story) into a sex-starved psychopath.
But since our mainstream films moved blithely from one register to another, Aadhi Raat ke Baad isn’t required to pick a motif and stick with it. It combines suspense, sci-fi, B-movie noir and goofy slapstick – the last involving the fine comedian Agha, who gets his invisible friend to perform “magic” for him by moving ashtrays around. This leads to an unexpectedly sweet and poetic scene where Agha sings to a roomful of young women – some of them dancing and playing musical instruments – while a lone saxophone (held by our unseen hero) sways plaintively in the middle of the room. A quasi-horror moment follows, with the excellent line “Abbay yaar, yeh bhi koi tareeka hai aane ka? Bagair sar ke koi aata hai kya?” (“Is this any way to show up? Who comes without a head?”)
It must be remembered that the above sequence is an interlude in a story where the hero is preoccupied with serious and urgent things – clearing his own name of a murder charge, finding the real killers as well as his own kidnapped girlfriend. But there is still time for some tomfoolery along the way.
Tomfoolery is also central to the 1971 Elaan, arguably the most entertaining invisible-man film I have seen (with apologies to Mr India, which will always occupy a special place in my shrine). Elaan has too many eye-popping things to mention here, but consider just this: Vinod Mehra must take off his shirt, pop a ring in his mouth, then remove his trousers – in precisely that order – before he can become fully invisible. And if someone so much as throws a cloth on him, he becomes visible again.
This, it can be argued, makes Elaan as much about the revitalizing power of nudity as about anything else. Whatever you make of the film’s main plot, you’ll never forget the sideshow antics involving the complicated obtaining and discarding of clothes. Ah, to be riding naked on the leather seat of a motorcycle, with best buddy Rajendra Nath cracking cheesy jokes as he sits behind you clutching your bare (but thankfully invisible) midsection. HG Wells may never have imagined such a thing, but we pulled it off. ----------------- [A more elaborate piece about that eye-popping classic Elaan is here]
Some welcome news. The Marathi translation of my book The World of Hrishikesh Mukherjee is now ready. Sharing the final cover and the poster below. (Cool to see that both "Bemisal" and "Khubsoorat" have been incorporated into the book's title.)
Thanks again to Manasi Holehonnur, who worked so hard and so enthusiastically on the translation — and to Mugdha Kopardekar and Indrayani Sahitya, who took the project on. I hope the book reaches many more film enthusiasts this way. Please do spread the word about this to any Marathi readers who are interested in cinema.
[My latest “moments” column for The Hindu is about watching the cinematic past come alive in Manto] --------------------------------
There are so many good and honourable things in Nandita Das’s Manto – which intersperses vignettes from Saadat Hasan Manto’s life with scenes from his short stories – that I feel a little sheepish mentioning the moments which aren’t central to the film but which sent me into a pleasant reverie.
One was the early scene, set in the mid-1940s, where the writers Ismat Chughtai, Rajinder Singh Bedi and Krishan Chander sit at a table with Manto, bantering away and no doubt thinking about the challenges and repercussions of India’s impending independence. Watching this was to be reminded that Bedi had scripted Satyakam, which has a scene set in 1946 where a group of idealistic youngsters discuss how things will change forever once the British leave.
The other was the scene at the film-industry party where Manto mingles with such personalities as the singer Jaddanbai (played by Ila Arun), her teenage daughter Nargis – headed for movie stardom – and one of Hindi cinema’s first major male stars, Ashok Kumar. For anyone who knows the young Kumar – through films of the 1930s or 40s, or through the writings of Manto, Nabendu Ghosh and other contemporaries – an essence of the man was recognizable in Bhanu Uday’s performance even though there was no recourse to caricature. Tapping a glass to make an announcement, then swaying unselfconsciously as Jaddanbai sings, here is the star who was steeped in a tradition of Indian classical music but also slipped easily into an urbane, westernized avatar, becoming a producer, mentor and an anchoring figure in the Hindi-film industry.
I liked that Das didn’t underline things too much in these scenes. Discussing the film at a class a few days after watching it, I had the sly pleasure of seeing looks of astonishment spread over the students’ faces when told that the woman who sang in that party scene was the grandmother of Sanju baba – Sanjay Dutt – and that the beaming, smooth-complexioned girl next to her… that was Dutt’s mummy, of whom they had seen a more fully fleshed out version in Rajkumar Hirani’s Sanju.
(If the students had been closer to my age, I might have mentioned that the “Ashok Kumar” shown amidst star-struck crowds was the peak-career version of the well-loved Dada Moni who introduced Hum Log and played small avuncular parts in films like Mr India. But oh, well.)
I can’t say if these scenes and performances would have worked if this had been a full-fledged biopic about the Hindi film industry, but they worked just fine as a snapshot of an era and its people. They reminded me of scenes from Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, such as the depiction of an episode I had first read about in a film book: Howard Hughes flies down from the clouds, lands on a beach where the 1935 film Sylvia Scarlett is being shot, and saunters across for his first meeting with Katharine Hepburn. While Hughes and Hepburn (played by Leonardo Dicaprio and Cate Blanchett) are central to the film, this scene also has a split-second shot that only a bona-fide lover of old Hollywood would register: we see Cary Grant and director George Cukor looking with bemusement at the aviator.
Not long after this comes a rambunctious party scene where Errol Flynn (played by Jude Law) turns on the charm, swaggers about and gets into a brawl – all within a minute or two! Though sensing that this scene was a bit of affectionate myth-indulging by Scorsese (who is a huge movie buff and historian), I also gave in to the spell: this is how it might have been like in those days, I thought.
And it made me yearn for the gift of time travel. Having recently read Trisha Das’s novel Kama’s Last Sutra, in which a young archeologist is sent back to the 11th century, I could relate to the character’s awe at participating in the history she had read about – much the same way I could relate to the protagonist of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, rubbing shoulders with Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein in a Paris of a bygone time.
For someone obsessed with cinema’s past, the nearest thing to a time machine would be a good, well-scripted film – or a long-form series! – about pivotal moments from our film history. International shows like Feud – about the Bette Davis-Joan Crawford rivalry – have managed to be seriously researched while also pleasing star-struck fans of the era in question, and there’s no reason why something along those lines can’t be done for Indian cinema.
Personally, I would love a filmic depiction of V Shantaram’s early years, and the setting up of the Prabhat Film Company. From there, we can move slowly – very slowly – into the 1930s, and then let our time machine determine its own course. Any takers?
--------------------- [An earlier, related nostalgia post is here. Other Hindu columns are here]
[Did this short review for India Today magazine] -------------------
For readers like yours truly, conditioned to think of Bengali culture as dauntingly highbrow, the idea of Bangla pulp can be hard to digest, much like the realization –late in one's movie-watching career – that veteran actors like Soumitra Chatterjee didn’t feature only in Satyajit Ray’s polished cinema but also in dozens of shoddily made potboilers. Of course, the jury will always be out on what “pulp” truly is. The new collection The Moving Shadow: Electrifying Bengali Pulp Fiction includes a sinister, gripping Ray story – “Bhuto”, about rival ventriloquists – though it’s debatable whether anything Ray wrote can be labeled pulp in the disreputable sense of that word. But as Arunava Sinha, whose prolific career as a translator-curator has given non-Bengali readers much to cherish, puts it in his Introduction, most Bengali writers considered themselves all-rounders and attempted “a more genteel version of pulp fiction […] more in the genre of noir as a literary form, an excuse to tell a literary story without being bound by the plausible”.
Sinha divides the book’s eight stories into two sections: “Crime stories”, which includes the three longest pieces, and the much slimmer “Horror stories”. My favourites include the title tale by Swapan Kumar – in which a mysterious figure known as the Moving Shadow conducts strange, illegal acts, while claiming to be working for the public good – as well as Gobindolal Bandyopadhyay’s creepy interior monologue “Saradindu and This Body”, and Muhammed Zafar Iqbal’s weird “Copotronic Love”, in which a robot named Prometheus becomes both refined and lovelorn.
An allegation often directed at Indian genre writers (and story-writers for popular cinema) is that of derivativeness, or outright plagiarism. The central mystery in Premendra Mitra’s “Parashar Barma Makes a Bid” (I won’t give details but it involves a dream about a suicide) is taken directly from an Agatha Christie short story called "The Dream". At the same time, the Mitra story has a more elaborate storyline and makes some entertaining detours before even arriving at this mystery.
Similarly intricate is Vikramaditya’s novella-length “The Secret Agent”, which at first seems like the archetype of the seedy pulp narrative: rambling and convoluted, with dashing men and love-starved women buzzing around two high-society Delhi clubs, caught up in espionage and extra-marital affairs. But the resolution reveals the story – and its heavy-drinking protagonist Maqbool – to be sharper and more self-aware than one may have thought.
Perhaps because most of the crime anthologies I have read are very bulky, my main complaint is that this one got over too soon – it’s more a tasting menu than a full-fledged meal. But what is here is consistently entertaining, full of corny dialogue and wondrous sentences like “Don’t you know I dream of handsome men after lunch?” and (this one is more literal than you might realise) “The Moon has returned to Mother Earth”. And perhaps most befuddling, from a story no doubt set in a very distant age: “It was 9 pm. Most of Delhi was already asleep.”
[Did this interview with Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif – mainly about his new novel – for Scroll. Note: this interview was conducted on email, which isn’t the ideal way of discussing a book at length; there isn’t much scope for a free-flowing conversation or an unexpected detour created by one of the answers. But Hanif is always an engaging subject regardless] --------------------
Introduction: Before we meet the vivid red birds on the cover – and in the title – of Mohammed Hanif’s new novel, we encounter other sorts of animals. There is Momo the lab rat, an ambitious 15-year-old in a refugee camp, who becomes a research tool for a woman trying to understand the Teenage Muslim Mind. There is the American soldier, Ellie, a sort of vulture (or angel, depending on your perspective) who falls from the sky when his plane crashes and he goes from being a predator to becoming part of what he was targeting. And there is Mutt the dog who really is a dog but also a bullied victim and a savant for our troubled times. Red Birds is Hanif’s third novel, after A Case of Exploding Mangoes and Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, and like its predecessors it is marked by irreverent, absurdist humour and deep sadness – both things often coming together in the same paragraph. A sad woman is described as “making her afternoon tea and working her rosary with such passion, as if she was a teenage boy self-pleasuring”. The dog, electrocuted while peeing on a pole, screams and yelps like “a Mutt prophet who has just received his first prophecy and wants to return it to the sender”. Ellie discovers the gap between Desert Survival courses and real life, but doesn’t quite realise an important truth about his own state of being.
This book is about a madcap clash of civilizations but it is also about the importance of not forgetting, about lingering ghosts, and about the coexistence of the savage and the compassionate in human nature. As the pilot puts it, “If I didn’t destroy, who would rebuild? Where would all the world’s empathy go?”
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You don’t name the novel’s setting – we only know it’s a Muslim country that the Americans first bomb and then set up refugee camps in. What was the thinking behind this, given that your first two novels were set in a very identifiable Pakistan, and built around real-life incidents?
I think the process with this novel was completely different. I of course exaggerate when I use the word process, I didn’t really have an excel sheet or flow charts. It came to me in little revelations, with long periods of silence and mourning. My eyes were mostly blurred during this period. It could be that when I wrote the first two novels and a little book of non-fiction I was missing Pakistan too much. I think maybe I got over that lingering homesickness.
The setting is not that abstract, I think, it’s a refugee camp. We have been at war for about forty years now, with a few years’ break here and there. The refugee camps of my childhood are proper slums now, some are even proper towns and villages. And new refugee camps are still coming up. We keep forgetting about the ones that were set up last year. So I guess it’s that idea about our own rather smug, comfortable lives that are made possible by forgetting that we set up a camp last year.
You have three main narrators here, which then broaden into many more voices later in the book. Which of these voices, if any, is closest to your own?
All the voices are mine, or at least they are filtered through a certain madness going on in my head. They are all me and I am trying to hear all those voices and then somehow try and recreate them on the page. I think finding Momo’s voice was a struggle, but having found it, it took me back to a much younger self when you used to be able to jump from roof to roof on a sizzling July afternoon and forget where you left your slippers.
Have your own experiences as a pilot informed any of Ellie’s narrative?
No, not at all. Except for some half-forgotten bits about jungle and desert survival tips.
Mutt the dog is – overtly at least – the wisest of the narrators and thinks of himself as a philosopher, though it’s also possible his brain got fried in an accident. Is he a prophet, a philosopher, just raving mad – or are they all the same thing?
I think before anything else he is a Mutt, I kind of refuse to believe that dogs don’t have philosophical thoughts or don’t deal with ethical dilemmas. Most prophets were declared raving mad in their times (and in some cases posterity confirmed it). He is a wild dog who is trying to curb his wild side for love, which is a struggle we are all familiar with or should be.
Momo is probed by a researcher trying to understand the “teenage Muslim mind”, but his mind is full of things that she probably wouldn’t have guessed at. Do you feel there tends to be over-analysis of what young Muslims are thinking? Too much presuming and judging?
Of course there is. We do the same thing. I live in a place called Defence Phase 5 in Karachi and most of us constantly judge people who live in Phase 2 Extension. White people presume more because most of them see us as a blur of brown or black or yellow faces, and think we have a claim to some silly innocence. A long time ago when a Pakistani could roam the streets of Delhi, I asked a young man what did he know about Pakistanis. He said they sleep with their sisters. I was so flabbergasted that I couldn’t even tell him that no I have never slept with my sister, and don’t plan to and I don’t know anybody who does.
I told this to a journalist friend in Delhi and he said the young boy probably meant you guys sleep with your cousins. And I was like, maybe he has a point.
In one passage, there is the intriguing suggestion that the cyclical process of destruction and rebuilding is organic to human nature. Is it futile to expect the world to ever become a better, violence-free place? I have a young child, so I have to hope that this world will become a violence-free place. But I also realize we parents inflict a lot of violence on this world in the hope that it will become a safer place for our children. I don’t know how that can work out.
Simplistic question: what do the red birds in this novel represent to you? This is another way of asking what the book’s principal theme is.
Missing someone who is gone. And hoping someone who has gone misses you as well.
In all your novels, a fantastical, exaggerated approach is employed to deal with real and pressing issues. Would you consider writing a completely straight, dramatic novel?
Trust me, I start every novel as a straight, dramatic novel. And then the first bit of drama happens and you know that your characters are not as straight as they appeared to be. The world is not as straight as it promised to be. Increasingly, you can’t match the absurdist comedy going on around yourself, I think people like me have to actually tone down stuff – believe me, my books are much less violent and less absurdist than the life on my street. And I am not even talking about Trump, Modi, Netanyahoo, Bashar ul Asad. I am just talking about my own neighborhood.
Does absurdist comedy also help a writer be less pedantic? Your stories involve oppression and cultural hegemony, yet there is a lack of judgementalism or preachiness in the telling; the emphasis is on observing people and their idiosyncrasies.
I do get very angry sometimes and then realise that it's just high blood pressure and my anger will fade away if I just sit down and have a glass of water. I do get angry when someone close to me is killed or dies randomly. But all that rage is quite impotent. So I think I do grief better than I do anger. I am sure I judge people all the time, but I think if you spend seven years with a character, you begin to empathize with their worst traits. (That already sounds judgmental.)
What about writing a novel in Urdu?
I do a lot of journalism in Urdu, so I guess Urdu ka shauq poora ho jata hai. I have recently started doing some video blogs in Punjabi and I feel more free than I ever have; it’s like there is no wall between me and the audience. I think I am very tempted to write fiction in Punjabi. But there are about seventeen-and-a-half people who read in Punjabi and most of them are my friends. But I think I’ll give it a go anyway.
You have also written a play, a libretto on the life of Benazir Bhutto, and columns that attempt to explain Pakistan while also satirizing aspects of it. Which of these forms do you like best?
I think my favourite form doesn’t involve writing, it involves sitting down with a bunch of friends sharing stories, trying to remember old couplets, and songs – but that form doesn’t earn you a living. So I write anything and everything because that’s pretty much all I can do. Within that, novels are my favourite because you can spend year after year living with the same characters, in the same house, it’s like having an imaginary family.
You have a childhood story about asking your teacher “Even if Ahmedis are heretics, can’t we buy things from their shops?” and being slapped. Given the current controversy about the removal of Atif Mian from the Economic Advisory Council, so soon into Imran Khan’s prime-ministership, what are your expectations of this new era in Pakistani politics?
Oh dear. That was like forty years ago, I was probably in class 2 and the Pakistani parliament was in the middle of declaring Ahmedis kafir. Since then we have declared them kafir many times over and we are still looking for new ways to torment them.
I do have expectations from this new era: they will find new names for old cruelties, they will inflict the same old insults on their own people. And I fear they will succeed.
------------------------
[Related post:here are a few outtakes from a story I did long, long ago about Pakistani writing
in English - snippets of conversations with Kamila Shamsie, Musharraf
Ali Farooqi, Moni Mohsin, Aamer Hussein and Azhar Abidi]
In The Terror, that place is the vast Arctic where two Royal Navy ships are stuck in the ice in the middle of nowhere, with 120-odd men left to fend for themselves; as if this weren’t enough, they are stalked by a huge, bear-like creature that may be a manifestation of an ancient demon from Esquimaux lore. In Tumbbad, the setting is the Maharashtrian village that gives the film its title, and which – as the story opens in 1918 and continues through the next three decades – is the last abode of a long-forgotten deity-demon. Within this village, the film will later show us another, confined space, but I’ll leave you to discover that for yourself. 
A very specific story plays out here: the protagonist Vinayak (Sohum Shah) travels into the belly of the beast, knowing he might come away with priceless riches, or be destroyed in the attempt. Or that both things might happen at the same time – he might realize his dreams while relinquishing his soul. But at a broader level, if you accept this film’s conceit that the womb contains the universe, what we see isn’t just the story of one man or one family: it is the stuff of life itself, with Vinayak a representation of a species always trying to find that eternal balance between self-interest and restraint. And it is telling that the film ends in 1947, the year of India's independence, with a character achieving another sort of freedom.
In The Terror, that place is the vast Arctic where two Royal Navy ships are stuck in the ice in the middle of nowhere, with 120-odd men left to fend for themselves; as if this weren’t enough, they are stalked by a huge, bear-like creature that may be a manifestation of an ancient demon from Esquimaux lore. In Tumbbad, the setting is the Maharashtrian village that gives the film its title, and which – as the story opens in 1918 and continues through the next three decades – is the last abode of a long-forgotten deity-demon. Within this village, the film will later show us another, confined space, but I’ll leave you to discover that for yourself. 
A very specific story plays out here: the protagonist Vinayak (Sohum Shah) travels into the belly of the beast, knowing he might come away with priceless riches, or be destroyed in the attempt. Or that both things might happen at the same time – he might realize his dreams while relinquishing his soul. But at a broader level, if you accept this film’s conceit that the womb contains the universe, what we see isn’t just the story of one man or one family: it is the stuff of life itself, with Vinayak a representation of a species always trying to find that eternal balance between self-interest and restraint. And it is telling that the film ends in 1947, the year of India's independence, with a character achieving another sort of freedom.
