Ishqiya: Sex and Sensibilities

(First published at Desicritics)

Abhishek Chaubey's Ishqiya opens with a shot that will rank among the most sensuous ones in Hindi cinema. The camera zooms in on a half asleep Krishna (Vidya Balan), as Rekha Bharadwaj's husky voice breaks into a couplet on the end of longing. The aesthetic here, as in much of Vishal Bharadwaj's work, is that of the finest Urdu poetry and literature. Indeed, the two male perspectives on love, personified by Babban (Arshad Warsi) and his Khaalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah), respectively mirror the majaazii (figurative/sensual) and haqiiqii (real/spiritual) layers of meaning in Urdu poetry, the name Krishna underscoring the bhakti element.
Babban's sexuality, then, is overtly carnal - he reads Hindi soft-porn, likes catchy numbers, frequents whorehouses, and plays peeping Tom on Krishna (though she knows this, and is simply seducing him). A line in word-czar Gulzar's penned to perfection ibn-e-Batuta could well be a description of the fly-by-night playfulness of Babban: "uR uR aawe, daane chuge, uR jaawe chiRiyaa phurr". It takes an actor of Arshad Warsi's cool and acumen to endear such a character to the audience.

Babban's Khalujaan, by contrast, is a man of refined sensibilities, an old-school romantic who cherishes the Hindi film melodies of Jaidev and Hemant Kumar. The closest he comes to voyeurism is listening in on Krishna's riyaaz. Krishna is something of a goddess to Khaalujaan; he even refers to her as "Krishnajii". His song is "dil to bacchaa hai jii", excellent in its composition (Bharadwaj's use of the accordion gives it that old world charm), its poetry ("saaree jawaanii qatraa ke kaaTii, peerii meN Takraa gaye haiN") and its picturization (Chaubey's camera seeks out the beauty in simplicity, the girl on a bus, the cook chopping almonds in a dhaabaa - just the sort of imagery that proves that the Hindi film song can be a thing of beauty when it's done right). So when Khalujaan sees Krishna boogie woogie with Babban to a Mika Singh number, in Babban's clothes at that, it isn't just jealousy he feels; it's also the inevitable disillusionment of a romantic who has seen his ideals in tatters - Krishna's sacrilegious fall from grace. Naseeruddin Shah's finesse as an actor comes through in the expression of this disillusionment and loss on his face. How fitting that the very same tragedy of a hopeless romantic was writ large on the very same face, two mentor-generations ago, in the climax of Gulzar's Ijaazat!

This tug-of-war of sexualities, and its result, are reminiscent of a Manto short, wherein a civil servant's bourgeois double standards on sex prevent him from meeting the advances of a village belle, who is eventually whisked away for a roll in the hay by a truck driver with no such qualms. Like Manto, Chaubey, Bharadwaj and co-writer Sabrina Dhawan subvert Khalujaan's romanticism to expose his attraction to Krishna. "So your love is love, while mine is lust?" asks a justifiably indignant Babban - the haqiiqii is the majaazii, and attraction is attraction even when it's dressed up as poetry. Neither are the writer-trio content with fitting Krishna into one of the male moulds of Eros or Agape - she's a woman with a bit of both and some. When Khalujaan complains, "You can never tell if a woman is a houri or a whore", Krishna shoots back, "Who are you to call me names?"; and later quips to Babban, "(Khaalujaan) can't swallow the truth; it's stuck in his throat". From an iron-willed urban mother in Balki's Paa to an earthy seductress here, Vidya Balan emerges as the most intelligent actress in present day Hindi cinema.

The sexual politics play out in the UP hinterland where politics of another kind are prevalent. In a clever shift of perspective, we're shown how the city world must appear to those outside its privileges. "In the city, you pelt a mongrel with a stone, and hits a crorepati", we're told. Here, too, there is the Mantoesque use of sex (the S&M kind, no less) to expose the seamier side of respectable society. I've said this before but it bears repeating. Bharadwaj's cinema, and Chaubey's in his footsteps, is centered on characters who don't usually figure in the urban viewer's main stream of consciousness. That the proceedings are peppered with top notch humour is simply a result of the meticulous craftsmanship of Chaubey's team of writers. They're well aware of the serious business that comedy is. Sure, the idiomatic wit and the foul language get our laughs, but they also serve to evoke empathy. Thus, unlike most Hindi films, here we're laughing with the characters not at them. In Ishqiya, Bhopalis with kohl-lined eyes aren't comic garnish (who can forget Jagdeep as Soormaa Bhopali ?); they're the dish itself.

In his production house, Vishal Bharadwaj has created an ecosystem where stories of the dusty landscapes of villages and small towns tend to flourish. To tell such stories is, in itself, a political act. But to do so in a manner that the viewer also gets her money's worth of entertainment takes genius. The Hindi film viewer has for too long been held captive to the mindset that films are either meaningful or entertaining. Ishqiya reminds her that they can be both.

A Radically Skeptical Ramayana

(First published at Desicritics)

An epic has something to offer to everyone. Its spectacular range of characters, situations and emotions allows for a multitude of interpretations. Its tragedy, of course, is that blind men will insist on what the elephant looks like. A radically skeptical Ramayana, which is what Aubrey Menen imagines Valmiki to have written, is not for those who insist upon the One Authentic Version of the epic. The Valmiki Menen imagines is the voice of an Indian Enlightenment whose skeptical realism is nothing short of shocking (even to yours truly godless). Here's how Menen thinks Valmiki's ilk would address us:

“We have nothing against this elaborate toy you call civilization. It is very pretty, especially when all parts are in working order. We do not suggest for a moment that you pull it to pieces and start anew. We do not suggest you do anything at all. So far as we are concerned, our only wish is, with the greatest good will, never to see your face again. If you are curious to know what we propose to do, we shall endeavor to explain, but not very often. We intend to set about the proper business of a human being, which is the improvement of his own soul. In this you cannot join us because you cannot call your souls your own. Since you depend every minute of your existence on everybody, you yourself are nobody. However, we will agree, in parting, that you are a jolly good fellow."

(At one point, Valmiki likens our habit of building societies to a gnat-like insect's act of creating beautiful and elaborate stones in the sea - a likeness that evolutionary psychology would bear out, I think.)

In Menen's view, the Valmiki Ramayana was written in this irreverent vein but Brahmins later sanitized it, depriving it of its piquancy in the hope of making it palatable. (In the following, read "Valmiki as imagined by Menen" for "Valmiki". Of course, I could just write "Menen" but I'm much more intrigued by the Valmiki that Menen wants to resurrect.). The Brahmins' version of Valmiki is that he was a brigand who stole and killed, and was outlawed for these crimes. But, Menen warns us, this could also be because Valmiki's "verses scanned better than anything the Brahmins could ever write."

The entire Ramayana that ensues is garnished with such delightful jabs at propriety, both in its prose and in its narrative elements. Thus Dashratha is described as a rotund, unattractive, hedonistic king who "was loved by all his subjects, and he loved certain of them in return, especially if they were women". Being such a king, he naturally spends most of his time in his harem, leaving the administration of the kingdom to the Brahmins. Ayodhya, as described here, comes pretty close to a liberal-democratic monarchy, warts and all. Thus, the king is a functional head and the Brahmins hold the strings tied to this head. (I don't think Valmiki would be surprised to learn that in our time, the people get to choose their functional head as well.) Valmiki's satire attacks the hypocrisy that is the hallmark of political rhetoric. For instance, Ayodhya’s impartial judges are described as men who have proven their expertise in manipulation of the law; or just before Rama’s army attacks Lanka, both Rama and Ravana propose “peace treaties” that are tantamount to the subjugation of the other side. And there are sexual politics too. Manthara, the woman who poisons Kaikeyi's ears, is Dashratha's spurned concubine; and Kaikeyi extracts Dashratha's promise to send Rama away on an exile through blackmail: she threatens to go public about the king's non-performance on their wedding night.

This emasculation of power is very much in keeping with Valmiki's brand of iconoclasm and it returns even more provocatively when Ravana enters the scene. In this account, when Rama, Laxman and Sita are camped at Valmiki's hermitage, Sita takes long walks and meets up with Ravana a couple of times before she's taken to Lanka. Her reason? She's bored by the intellectual Rama and all the philosophizing at the hermitage. "He loves me", she tells Laxmana matter-of-factly about Ravana, and wistfully wonders if anyone would notice if she never returned from her walks. We understand, as Laxman does, her alienation and the hint of attraction she feels towards Ravana, if only because he is everything Rama isn't.

Laxman is a born fighter - the brawn to Rama's brain, he's always baying for a battle, and is himself not too happy with the daily doze of discourse at Valmiki's hermitage. So, seeking a skirmish in the woods, he chances upon Ravana and picks a fight with him. Ravana retaliates by attacking the hermitage. The odds are naturally in Ravana's favor; he has soldiers and all Rama and Laxman have are hermits. Seeing this, Sita, ever the smartest of the trio, walks up to Ravana and agrees to accompany him to Lanka if Rama and Laxman are spared. As she later explains her decision to Laxman,

"I made up my mind when your bowstring snapped...You looked around and I saw your face and I said to myself, 'Laxman's getting ready to die'...It wasn't very difficult to make up my mind, but I had no time to explain - especially to Rama. He was never an easy man to explain things to."

Valmiki's Sita isn't a sacrificial sati; she's much more - a woman who knows exactly what the need of the hour is. She does save Rama from imminent death and defeat at Ravana's hand, but she is human and all the more admirable, accessible and venerable for it. It is fitting then, that in this account, she is seduced by Ravana. There's remarkable candor and clarity of mind in her confessional dialogue with Laxman:

Sita: "I'd have been a heroine. I meant to be. I meant to kill myself rather than keep my promise [to Ravana]. I think I would've killed myself if he'd come at me as I expected, all drunk and brutal. But I hadn't allowed for one thing."
Laxman: "He played a trick on you, eh?"
Sita: "Yes, Laxman, the oldest trick of them all. He just said that he loved me above everything else in the world and that he would never force me to do anything I did not want. I was pleased at first. Then I was sorry for him. Then he kissed me. Then I wasn't a heroine any more."

The friendship between Laxman and Sita is a tender and true one. As seen above, some of the most personal and disarmingly human lines in the book are the ones uttered by Sita when she confides in Laxman. It's Laxman who makes Rama realize that Rama has wronged Sita and not the other way round.

If Sita is Valmiki's heroine, Rama is very much his hero. On the eve of his exile, Rama is a naïve, cerebral prince. The general opinion of him is that he is "generous, warmhearted, loyal, well-meaning, intellectually brilliant, idealistic, and a damn fool". Valmiki's skeptical realism turns out to be the perfect philosophical antidote to Rama's jejune idealism. In true storytelling spirit, the narrative is interspersed with pithy parables that Valmiki narrates to Rama. My favorite is the one with a locust who insists on reading all the important scriptures; his guru agrees to educate him provided he gives up eating leaves. After a while, the locust is naturally unable to keep his end of the bargain. (The locust is a clever choice because reading voraciously is to gorge on the leaves of a book.) The parable directly attacks Rama's quest for the meaning of life in books, reminding him (and us in these Twittering times) that information isn't knowledge, and knowledge isn't wisdom. Here's Rama acknowledging his debt to Valmiki upon returning to Ayodhya from his exile:

"Looking at the city of my birth again brings back to me something of my youth - the time that is, before I had the melancholy advantage of your wisdom."

And here's this "melancholy advantage" at work:

"[Rama] next thought that he might make a great study of the laws of his country and produce a code which would endure for a thousand years, the Code of Rama the Wise: but he remembered the locust and tempered his ambitions."

This is a matured man indeed. The trial-by-fire he holds for Sita is just a theatrical act of political appeasement, a charade where the fire is a fake "Egyptian fire" that looks like fire but doesn't burn at all; all it manages to do is to put out the wildfires of gossip. And this is the only possible trial that would be fair to Sita, vindicating her innocence; anything else would be a de facto guilty plea.

The most important lesson Rama learns from his hardships in exile and under Valmiki's tutelage is the sobering lesson - it could be said - of all good literature: we are fallible and imperfect. Seen as such, the Ramayana (literally, "the travels of Rama") is a wonderful coming-of-age journey, a Making of the Mahatma of sorts. (At some level, it is also a deeply satisfying classical comedy). This ripening of Rama also redeems the Ramayana from Valmiki’s bleak cynicism; the book rises above wisecracking political satire to become an epic story of human triumph. Valmiki’s literary genius is that he is able to give his narrative an ending that is not only happy but also profound because it turns his skepticism inward. After all, Rama’s return to Ayodhya as its king is a man’s return to the messy business of civilization (at its helm, at that) – a graduation, a leap of faith - and by granting Rama the possibility of redemption within the framework of civilization, Valmiki is, like all seasoned skeptics, acknowledging the limitations of his own outlook.

One wonders if such a Ramayana could be published in today's zeitgeist. Exploiting our desperate yearning for a Ram-rajya, militia crop up in Rama's name and large cut-outs in political processions portray him as a fiery, blue superhero with a bow and arrow. But that wasn't Valmiki's hero. Valmiki's hero was a man who was great because he learnt that he was imperfect and chose to step back into life with this wisdom - a humble skepticism diametrically opposed to the proud certitude of his self-proclaimed champions. Sita's tryst with Ravana may offend the machismo of those who created the warrior-god in their image, but Rama was far more sentient than they are. He knew better than to mistake Sita's independence for her dissolution, and would never place the burden of her character on her chastity. How could he be threatened by Sita's individuality when that was what saved him? A man who first nearly lost his life, then nearly lost the love of his life, and in the end emerged humbled by the experience, is certainly worthy of worship - as is the woman who saved him. The real richness of Indian culture lies in the multi-layered texture of stories like theirs. Let's preserve it, shall we?

Shock and Aww

(First published at Desicritics)

zaraa mulk ke raahbaroN ko bulaao

yeh kuucheh, yeh galiyaaN, yeh manzar dikhaao

jinheN naaz hai Hind par un ko laao

jinheN naaz hai Hind par woh kahaaN haiN?

Summon the nation's leaders,

Show 'em these lanes and quarters,

Summon the nation's proud flag-bearers,

Where are the nation's proud flag-bearers?

- Sahir Ludhianvi.

Years ago, on an Indian talk show, a lady in the audience fumed about Shekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen, "Do you have to parade a woman naked in front of the camera just to be realistic?" On the discussion panel was Gulzar, whose apt - if equivocal - reply was, "It depends on your aesthetic sensibilities." And suddenly, I became aware of a fundamental disconnect: being male, I hadn't seen how gratuitous and humiliating the scene might have seemed to a woman.

In Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, the thematic equivalent of parading a woman naked before the camera is the sequence where little Jamal, plastered from head to toe in shit, jostles through a crowd, all for an autograph of Amitabh Bachchan. Perhaps there is an aesthetic sensibility here; it just doesn't overlap with mine. To me, some subjects - sexual and economic exploitation certainly rank high among them - just don't lend themselves to flippancy. (That's one reason why I hated Anthony Burgess's gratuitous Clockwork Orange and, despite being a Kubrick fan, haven't cared to watch the film.) It would be one thing if an astute director (of any nationality, for the record) were to make a film that questioned the dominant India shining/poised narrative or exposed the systemic morass of corruption and exploitation in Indian society; Slumdog Millionaire is not that film, and Danny Boyle is not that director. (In recent times, Dibakar Banerjee's Khosla ka Ghosla and Oye Lucky, and Shaad Ali's Bunty Aur Babli are much more up to that task). To me, the shit and autograph scene is an in-your-face, shock-the-hell-out-of-them intro to Jamal's tenacity and the rich - poor divide. And speaking of Gulzar, let me point to how it's done: the scene in Hu Tu Tu where Suneil Shetty and Tabu land their private jet on a road, upending a hapless bicycle-rider.

To be sure, Boyle is clever enough not to attempt anything approaching social commentary - at least not on the face of it. Thus, ostensibly, the film is a filmier-than-thou imitation of those Hindi films of yore (as evinced by shots of Coolie and Zanjeer). But, mirroring the malaise that affects Hindi film makers who ape Hollywood, the imitation is all in form and schema, not in spirit. Jamal Malik is not the angry anti-establishment hero that Bacchan (or Kamal Hassan in Mani Ratnam's Nayakan) was; he is far too bourgeois for that - what subversive hero would exact his revenge on the system by getting rich on Kaun Banegaa Crorepati? Even Salim, his brother on the dark side, ends up mouthing such platitudes as, "India is at the center of the world", reinforcing the cherished delusions of grandeur instead of challenging them. Surely the romanticized urban common man fared far better in the folklores of Manmohan Desai (Mard, Coolie, Amar Akbar Anthony, Shahenshah), Prakash Mehra (Zanjeer) and Yash Chopra (Trishul, Deewaar); or in the socio-political commentaries of Guru Dutt (from whose Pyaasa comes the above verse of a de-Persianized version of Sahir's scathing poem), early Raj Kapoor (Sri 420), Bimal Roy (Do Beegha Zameen) and Aziz Mirza (Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman, Yes Boss).

As a fairy tale, too, the film isn't engaging enough. In narrating a story that is, to quote the inspector (Irrfan Khan), "bizzarely plausible", Boyle resorts to such gimmicks as jump-cutting to flashbacks in case you didn't connect the all too obvious dots. Even the badness of the baddies is exaggerated; Javed (Mahesh Manjrekar) growls, scowls and throws things around, looking more like a brat than a brute. And Jamal must face obstacles at every step; getting sheathed in shit isn't enough – his mother must be hacked to death in a communal carnage, his girl must be pimped out, and the quiz show host Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor) must thwart his attempts at making the millions. My wife put it best when she quipped, "It's like (Sanjay Leela Bhansali's) Black", where every conceivable ailment and impediment, and a stylized storytelling stifle any possibility of a human connection between the viewer and the characters.

You don't really know what to make of Jamal, for instance. Setting aside the leap of imagination it requires to see any Ayush Khedekar growing up to be a Dev Patel, it isn't clear who Jamal is. Even if you accept the story as allegorical, Boyle is too self-conscious (or perhaps too conscious of the poverty that just won't recede to become a mere backdrop) to paint a large, magic-real canvas in the unapologetic way that, say, Forrest Gump or the more recent Benjamin Button do. Unlike his counterparts from the American South, Jamal never quite becomes the everyman's voice of his period in Indian history; we never hear him telling us other people's interesting stories from his vantage point as an 'outsider' (h/t Amrita's post on Button).

All this makes Slumdog a half-hearted, comme ci, comme ca endeavor that wants to both be a fairy-tale and capture urban poverty but falters on both counts. I, for one, can’t see how you can hide abject poverty behind a “feel good” façade any more than you can hide rape. Can you imagine a sexually abused Cinderella finding her Prince Charming? Wouldn't it end up being a glossier version of a B-grade flick? (Indeed, Seema Biswas once joked about how many such roles she was approached for, post Bandit Queen). As the talk show lady’s gripe with Bandit Queen shows, a sentient film maker would create a film Phoolan Devi could watch and experience something of a catharsis, without feeling like a prop. Sometimes, the artist had better not be a predator. Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay was a stark but empathetic and grounded ode to Bombay’s slum dwellers (and the characters were complex, recognizable human beings. How childlike Chillum was; how Oedipal Chai-pau's rescue of Rekha!).

Reading reviews of Slumdog, you’d think the movie had some unique, far-reaching significance. Here’s a mis-reading by Anand Giridharadas from the NY Times: “It channels to them [Americans] their own Gatsbyesque fantasy of self-invention, and yet places it far enough away as to imply that it is now really someone else’s fantasy”. Gatsby, the writer forgets, ended up being shot dead in a pool, not kissing his childhood sweetheart in a triumphant “aww” moment. To that extent, Bacchan in Deewar and the protagonists in Satya and Johnny Gaddar were much more Gatsbyesque.

Slumdog, then, is at best an attempt to cook a saccharine dish in a bitter sauce. Unfortunately, when it comes to the hardships of the disadvantaged, I have no palate for bittersweet. If you have a sweet tooth, Karan Johar's your chef (in whose films, hardship is conspicuous by absence). Me? I'm sticking to Sahir's talKhiyaaN - that's Urdu for bitterness.