To Be And Just To Be

First published at Desicritics

It’s impossible not to feel anything when independent India turns sixty. Given our conjoined-twins-like history, India’s freedom reminds me of two Pakistanis; specifically, it reminds me of two Urdu short stories by writers who, post-Partition, became Pakistanis.

No-land’s man Manto’s Toba Tek Singh is arguably the more famous one. The story is about the dangers of asserting demarcations - what Richard Dawkins calls the “tyranny of the discontinuous mind”. Freedom lies in freeing our minds from such arbitrary categorical boundaries.
But it is the other story-Ghulam Abbas’s Anandi that really gets to the heart of the freedom issue. The struggle between arbiters and freethinkers is a perpetual one, still being played out in India and everywhere else. As Faiz observed (with typical melancholy),

na apnii rasm nayii hai, na unkii riit nayii
na apnii haar nayii hai, na unkii jiit nayii

My prosaic translation:
Ours are the same old ways, as are theirs too
Our defeats and their wins, none of these are new

But Anandi ends on a note of irony, not melancholy. Years after a new, vibrant city has sprung up around the banished red-light district, its own council is ready to banish them again. No society can flourish without mirth, and there is mirth in the freedom to think. That is the freedom that Taslima Nasreen, Fehmida Riyaaz, and countless others have sought from the Indian state:

You’re sixty, O Great Referee
Retire, and let us be.

Pan's Labyrinth: A Tale of Two Worlds

All of us have seen movies and read books that we love despite our disagreements with them: Guillermo Del Toro’s exquisitely shot Pan’s Labyrinth is such a film for me. Actually, it isn’t as much of a disagreement as a childish demand on my part that such a beautiful movie would conform entirely to my worldview (I don’t buy that “objective” review stuff. I review movies because I’m passionate about them. I’d rather be fiercely subjective, as long as I’m completely honest).

The plot is ingenuous and quite extraordinary: Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) and her pregnant mother join her stepfather (Sergi Lopez), a Captain in Franco’s army. Ofelia is a die hard fairy-tale buff and lives in her own universe, hobnobbing with fauns and fairies. Like Mercedes (Maribel Verdu), the guerilla mole in the Captain’s labyrinth, Ofelia too is fighting for a better world; only her fight takes place in that world of fauns and fairies. She is, we are told, a princess who must undergo some tribulations to unite with the king and queen in the underworld-the faun’s labyrinth. Ofelia and the Captain are cleverly introduced: she extends her left hand for a handshake, he corrects her. What a way to pit the creative mind against convention! You can’t help but cheer the doctor who mocks the Captain, “Obeying for the sake of obeying is for men like you”. Ofelia’s assignments parallel those of Mercedes. Mercedes, too, holds the key to a better world, and has to destroy the greedy monster at the root of Spain, so her country can flower.
Del Toro’s execution is remarkable; for the most part, he leaves room for viewers like me who don’t want to read the obvious religious subtext. But walking the tightrope between the real and the imaginary is never easy. And the couple of occasions (the priest’s affirmation of God when Ofelia’s mother dies, or Ofelia eating the forbidden fruit and being denied paradise) when he trips stand out-like one color smudging into another across a fine boundary. (This is almost a mirror image of Vishal Bharadwaj’s Makdee, where the reality smudged onto the imagination.)
It is to Del Toro’s credit that I could still see Ofelia not as Jesus (or Uncle Tom), sacrificing herself for the world, but as a little girl who possessed that rare gift: the power to imagine. In that light, Ofelia looks like Azar Nafisi, desperately clutching her fiction to make sense of reality, and Pan’s Labyrinth becomes a wonderful paean to human imagination, the escape it offers from reality (Ofelia warning her unborn half-brother that it’s bad out here), and the possibilities it creates to improve reality.

Bandini: Of Human Bondage

(First published at Desicritics)

A new batch of female inmates is ushered into the zanaanah ward of a pre-independence prison. Among them is Kalyani (Nutan), our protagonist, serving time for poisoning a woman to death. One night, an old inmate is struck by tuberculosis, and Kalyani is the only one who volunteers to nurse her-and how!-she insists that the jailor sign her papers right now, in the middle of the night, lest he should forget the next day. That's Kalyani-an unshakable confidence under a demure exterior. Is it any wonder then, that the good prison doctor Devendra (Dharmendra) is smitten by her?
The genius of Jarasandha's script surfaces in the scene where Deven first touches Kalyani: soon as the good doctor places a loving hand on the convicted woman's shoulder, the prison warning bell sounds. A freedom-fighter-inmate, we are told, has just struck a blow to a cop. And we're immediately brought home to the reality of moral authority, which will sound warning bells whenever Kalyani is touched by love.
The juxtaposition of personal and political freedom struggles is a recurring motif in Bimal Roy's Bandini. Throughout the film, authorities continue to silence the voices of freedom, just as the warden whacks an inmate for singing. Beauty has no room in a world governed by strictures, a fact the Superintendent of police makes explicit by voicing his dislike for flowers in prison. Even the slightly self-indulgent night sequence of a freedom-fighter's hanging ends with a pithy, ironical scene - the prison guard crowing at dawn break, "sab theeeek haiii!" This is scriptwriting at its finest.

In the flashback that leads up to Kalyani's imprisonment, Nabendu Ghosh's screenplay cleverly reverses the customary male gaze upon the village girl; here, it is Kalyani whose eyes twinkle when she first sees rebel freedom-fighter Vikas (Ashok Kumar), even before she meets him ("He laughs funny", she says. It's doubly effective because it's Ashok Kumar she's talking about!) It is through her perspective that we see Vikas. In the only romantic scene the duo gets, Vikas praises Kalyani, and the way Nutan stays true to character, shying coquettishly without losing that spark of defiance, speaks volumes about her acting finesse.
In the end, once she is free, Kalyani must choose between Deven and Vikas (Mark how, in all the important scenes between Kalyani and her suitors, there's a barrier between her and them). The characterization of the men is deceptively clever; it plays upon all our preconceived notions. Deven is young, handsome, clean-shaven and a doctor; while Vikas is older, gaunt, unshaven and sickly (he always has a fever). The casting seduces us: surely, on the face of it, Ashok Kumar would attract fewer women than Dharmendra, so that the viewer ends up rooting for Devendra (admittedly, I did). Even their names-Deven(king of gods) and Vikas(progress)-heighten their contrasts.
But a closer look reveals why Kalyani chooses Vikas. The good doctor is conventional; were Kalyani to go with him, she'd be walking back into society-a place scarier than prison (remember her pleas to the jailor not to be released). Vikas, on the other hand, is a rebel. He comes with no baggage; he'd long declared Kalyani to be his wife without officially marrying her, convention be damned.
Freedom isn't always neat, easy and clean shaven; it is often unattractive and full of hardships. Deven would've meant a comfortable life, Vikas means a free life. This, then, is Bandini's sophisticated take on the nature of freedom: it may run against all conventional wisdom, but being free means being able to choose.