The ABCs of Our Home

Shabdita is learning the ABCs of this household. A for Apple computers, B for Bollywood and C for Cricket. We are open to suggestions for other letters of the alphabet. Yes, K would definitely be for Kyunki Saas bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, but, as it has to be meaningful for both of us, may end up being for Khanwalkar.

In a bid to make Shabdita a true blue Bollywood baby, we decided that we would each pick one dialogue that we would repeat to her endlessly, and hopefully make it her first line. I decided to go with the iconic and the appropriate "Mere paas maa hai". After all, even A.R. Rahman felt compelled to refer to it, irrelevantly but endearingly, in his Oscar acceptance speech. I was pretty happy with my choice, and even felt bad for Vipul. After all, the most iconic line for a father is "Mera baap chor hai". Until I heard his pick. Now, morning and evening, Vipul tells Shabdita "Ek chutki sindur ki keemat tum kya jaano Ramesh Babu". Its beyond iconic, definitely epic, and I'm jealous about how uncool my choice now seems to be.

Shabdita however seems to have a favourite line of her own, that she lives up to through her actions rather than words. Her line is "Aankhen nikal ke gotiya khelta hoon". After all, my spectacles come off, so why would not my eyes? Everyday she goes after them with a vengeance, pausing only to try and pull off my nose or teeth. I think we should forget cricket and go with C for Crime Master Gogo.

Aiyyaa - On making an idiosyncratic film

Aiyyaa is a difficult film to like. It can be easily dismissed as having no plot, and dragging out one idea for too long into the plot, and then jumping into a quick conclusion. The tone does not help either - it is neither entirely realistic nor entirely parodic. The actors seem to constantly shifting from subtle to over-the-top, which makes them irritating both as characters and as actors. We left the movie thinking of it as a waste of time, energy and money. However, I've been thinking about the film. It hasn't grown on me, nor will I claim that it is actually a wonderful film that has been misunderstood. I want to use this blog post to think through certain things that I found interesting about the film, and about my reactions to it.

The premise of any story can be outrageous, and it is up to individual viewers whether the story resonates with them or not. Logically, it is absurd to suppose that a wife would not know her husband (Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi) or that a man could pass off a concentration camp as a massive game (Life is Beautiful). I've heard people tear the former apart while waxing eloquent about the latter. I'm sure there are also people out there who love Rab Ne and don't mind the logical inconsistency. I'm not saying that the two films are at par with each other. The point I am trying to make is that both films accept seemingly outrageous premises as givens and go ahead with their narratives. As I strongly feel that films/books should be allowed to tell the stories they want to rather than those that seem more logical or natural to any individual viewer/reader, an outrageous premise rarely bothers me. 

Aiyyaa too has a premise that seems illogical, that of a woman who is attracted to the way a man smells. Come to think of it, smell is difficult to convey on film. You have to rely on familiarity and on audience experience. Like all human experiences, smell is subjective. It is difficult to explain the power of the smell of the mud after the first rains in India to someone who's never smelt it. It took me time to appreciate the smell of winter in Australia, though now I love the smell of the nip, though I still hate feeling the cold. It is easier to make films about colour, about touch, about sensation and Aiyyaa too brings in colours - yellow for Rani and blue for Prithvi - and uses them to play around with notions of smell. Perhaps they thought that colours would make smells more tangible. Aiyyaa also reminds one of the odour that one so completely takes for granted in India, showing public toilets and garbage lying open on the streets. Who in India has not scrunched one's nose, and then passed on?  

The other major motif of the film, intertwined with smell, is desire. Meenakshi desires Surya, and is somehow convinced that he is not the monster that everyone else thinks him to be. There is no logical reason behind this belief, and part of the disconnect you feel with her character is because of how illogical her behaviour is. Yet it is good to see female desire in Bollywood cinema, though of late this has become quite regular. Dreamum Wakeupum (and Ijjajat papad!) is pure genius on the part of Amitabh Bhattacharya. All those thrusting, pumping, heaving dance steps in all those Hindi films over the ages - they were all metaphorically sexual, and this song dispenses with the metaphor.

The other major problem area in the film is the falling in love narrative. Meenakshi tries to speak to Surya often, but never actually gets to do so. Until one miraculous evening, wherein they talk, the mystery about him is solved, they confess their feelings, and get engaged to one another, all in the space of one evening. This is again something that induces impatience - how illogical can you get? Behind this impatience however is the assumption that other things that are shown in more realistic narratives are more 'natural', whereas they just have become more sedimented in our minds as ways of being in love, ways of performing romance.

Aiyyaa juxtaposes desire, as represented through smell, and the stifling nature of social life in India, as indicated through the odour of the garbage that haunts Meenakshi even in her dreams. The film finds some subtle moments here and there - walking around the clean, rose-garden terrace of a man whom Meenakshi does not find attractive does nothing for her. This garden of red roses must presumably smell great, and brings in notions of conventional romance, but she is entranced neither by the smell nor the appearance of this ideal space because this is not the man for her.

Ultimately, my reaction to the film is as much about my expectations as about the film itself. I like films to stick to tones and genres. I liked the realistic feel of a college library - the old computers, the library membership cards, the dust on the books. The presence of an overtly sexualised librarian, however, was jarring - such a person would never exist in such a space. But do films have to necessarily be either realistic, or fantasy as accepted by Bollywood convention (i.e. either melodrama or a fantasy of excess, a la Karan Johar or Salman Khan), or totally bizarre? Can a film not be a little bit of each?

The attempt to make a film that is a little bit of each is jarring, but I think that it is a brave attempt. It would not have been that difficult to make Aiyyaa a bit more like Vicky Donor and English Vinglish: emphasise the Marathi - Tamil aspects of both families, show them as more lovable and less quirky, remove the bizarre, give the hero-heroine more conversations, show the heroine as the underdog who finally convinces her family that she has the right to choose her own life partner and so on. I do not think Anurag Kashyap and co. are stupid enough to have not thought of this alternative, safer option. It would have been an easier option to sell too, and that is often a big criterion that drives the way films get made. While I do not like the final product that Aiyyaa is, I do admire the fact that they made it their way - bizarre, quirky and idiosyncratic.

Homosocial spaces in Cocktail

Spoiler alert: the following is a discussion of the film, and as such refers to the plot in detail.

Cocktail has been criticised in the Indian blogsphere and social media for reinforcing the very stereotypes that it sets out to challenge - namely that the good Indian girl is always better than the Westernised/modern Indian girl. The most articulate of these criticisms was Shoma Chaudhary's opinion piece in Tehelka, available here. I do not disagree with these opinions, and am aware that the film's core choice is misogynistic. At the same time, I had guessed the story more or less accurately from the trailers, and did not expect the film to be any different from what it was. Perhaps that was why I was pleasantly surprised by the strong homosocial moments of the film, and its emphasis on homosocial relationships, i.e. on same-sex friendships.

In most discursive frameworks, whether it be Bollywood or Hollywood films, all other relationships are subordinated to the heterosexual relationship. Love, therefore, has to then carry the burden of having to be the most significant and the most sustaining of all relationships. Perhaps love should sue - it is overhyped, oversold, overworked and more is demanded of it than it could possibly deliver. Friendships, on the other hand, are recast as the new family. As the family that you choose yourself, it is assumed that the idiosyncrasies of the family are herein erased. Through generations of American sitcoms, (Seinfeld, Friends, How I Met Your Mother and so on) we have learnt that friends are those who will help you laugh when parents drive you mad. Both love and friendship are then cast in comfortable slots, with clear places in the hierarchy - love comes first, friendship second. Family may come third. Any kind of social commitment to other people or to an ideal - er, when did that have to be on any list?

To return to Cocktail, it is Veronica who does what the hero usually does, and 'rescues' Meera in her hour of need. The two of them become friends and support systems for each other, and in that sense it is almost their story rather than a romantic one, since the man, though he has made an irritating appearance, is not yet significant to either of them. Even after he enters their space (both figuratively, by becoming involved with Veronica, and literally, by moving in with them), he is not immediately the most important. In a significant scene, Meera suggests that she should move out, leaving the couple alone together. Veronica asks her not to do so. She points out that men will come and go, but when they go, it will be her friend who she will need. At that point, she also says "You've turned that house into a home." Its a testament to how important friendships can be, and a nod to the many more things that they could be.

The Westernised girl has always existed to be rejected and sacrificed, but most narratives give this rejection a token "smiling with tears in eyes/is crying but hiding it in front of the hero" shot. What stands out in Cocktail is the amount of time the story gives to Veronica after the rejection, instead of summarily dismissing her narrative as done. After Gautam and Meera, improbably, fall in true love with each other, the film focuses on Veronica's sense of betrayal, pain, and self-loathing and, to a lesser extent, on Meera's guilt for having caused her friend that pain. Meera is quite clear that the reason she cannot be with Gautam is because her friend loves him. And the film cannot reach the traditional 'happy ending' until amends have been made to Veronica, until she intervenes to show Meera that she is all right with their relationship. This could be interpreted as Meera being the good Indian girl, but I would argue that it is also about moral responsibility, about acknowledging one's role in causing pain to another, about being answerable not just to your friendships but to yourself. The weakest person in the film, morally speaking, is Gautam, because he initially looks after Veronica at Meera's behest, and only then gradually seems to grow into it. He may be the source of love, but he is not the source of strength for either of the two women - both find their strength from within themselves. Ironically, they assert this strength through the same gesture - of rejecting Gautam.

This is why, for all its flaws, I thought that Cocktail had more to offer than is generally suggested. It is what happens in the interstices of the main plot that is open to alternative readings, and to possibilities suggested by such readings.

Govinda at the Oscars

Picture Clint Eastwood applauding loudly at Govinda's eclectic dance moves. Picture Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart smiling approvingly at the same dance.

This scene is not a product of my overactive imagination. It is a part of a film called Censor, a film that tops my list of "Bollywood movies that are so bad that they are good". If you have not had the pleasure and the privilege of watching Censor, here is an outline.

As the name suggests, the film is a satire on the Censor Board of India. Dev Anand plays a director who makes a revolutionary film about "Indian youth", that truly maligned group that all kinds of filmmakers make all kinds of assumptions about! The Censor Board of India refuses to pass the film because of its inclusion of sex and violence, not realizing that this is a profound film about "reality". I've forgotten most of the film within the film, because I was switching between Censor and something else. Yes, till that point in the film, I was still able to tear myself away from it.

The Indian Censor board declares that this film within the film cannot be released in India. One of the producers, Archana Puran Singh, decides to release it in America, where it is a runaway success and is nominated for the Academy Awards. From this point on, the film had me: there was no way I was changing the channel. Dev Anand used footage from actual Oscar telecasts in the film, and put it together with his narrative.

Naturally, the film wins the Oscar for Best Film, for which various Hollywood stars, including Clint Eastwood, applaud heartily. Not just that, in true Indian style, before the next award is announced, there is going to be a dance performance. And this is how Govinda gyrates on a stage, while various Hollywood stars look on approvingly. After Govinda's performance, Dev Anand wins the Oscar for Best Director, making a speech wherein he thanks his wife, and takes pot shots at the Indian Censor board. And Hollywood dutifully goes on applauding.

At that time, I couldn't stop laughing at how ridiculous this was. Today, I remember that hyperbolic moment most fondly. It was part of the fantasy of excess that made Dev Anand who he was, that makes Rajnikant who he is. More realistic cinema is all very well, but there are moods when I'd rather see something visually or imaginatively "over the top". It is soul food, but is definitely an acquired taste.

Ra.One's decolonial moment

What does one say about Ra.One that hasn’t been said already? The script is banal, and all its flaws have been summed up well by the vigil idiot here. There is one flaw that particularly irks me. A character with the name of Shekhar Subramanium dies, and first gets a Christian burial, after which his family is shown releasing his ashes in an unspecified English river, probably the Thames considering that the movie is set in London. But if you bury someone, there are no ashes!!! Ashes come from the cremation of a dead body. There are other flaws/loopholes/'what were they thinking' moments in the movie, but this one irritated me the most. In this post, however, I do not want to enumerate the faults of the film further. Instead, I want to explore the question: Is Ra.One decolonial?
My nephew, who turned 4 last week, loves Spiderman. He regularly ‘convinced’ his parents to buy every piece of Spiderman merchandise, including the Colgate Spiderman toothpaste. Then he saw Ra.One, and now he has the Ra.One and G.One toys. And we are only allowed to listen to “Sarrati sarrati raftarein hai” in the car. He has not forgotten Spiderman, but Ra.One is high in his list of superhero favourites.
I am not making the argument that replacing Hollywood corporate franchisee filmmaking with Bollywood corporate franchisee filmmaking is a grand decolonial step. I am trying to tease out the idea of the physical location of cultural imagination. As a child, I remember reading Enid Blyton and desperately wanting to go to Malory towers and drink ginger beer. It wasn’t just about the boarding school or the food – it was a longing to be a part of a world that I found in the books I was reading, a world that had no place for my world within it. I did read some Gujarati or Hindi books now and then, of which I remember Bakor Patel and Chako Mako most clearly, but they did not inspire longing.
For my generation, it was Enid Blyton. When I left India children were reading Goosebumps and Harry Potter instead. A few children read Indian books; most often slick retellings of Indian mythology as graphic novels. The key difference was not only availability, in that more and different books were available, but also merchandising: most of the products mentioned in children’s literature are available in the Indian market. Here longing, then, is training in being the ideal future consumer.
My first grown-up memory of this feeling came when I read Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters, in which the children retreat into the world of Enid Blyton.

Muffins, porridge, kippers, scones, steak and kidney pie, potted meat, dumplings. Their father said if they ever tasted this insipid foreign stuff instead of merely reading about it in those blighted Blyton books, they would realize how amazing was their mother's curry-rice and khichri-saas and pumpkin buryani and dhansak. What they needed was an Indian Blyton, to fascinate them with their own reality.
-- Family Matters, quote found on the blog onehotstove

That feeling was not just restricted to India either, as I discovered, to my surprise but not joy, when I heard the delightful talk “The Danger of a Single Story” by Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie. Incidentally, other things in the talk resonate too. I am often asked which language I spoke in Delhi, and people are disconcerted when the reply is English.



Ra.One’s decolonial moment is the moment when a train is speeding towards CST station in Mumbai, unable to stop and putting thousands of lives at risk. The superhero saves the day, albeit with the help of some divine intervention. What is interesting is that this is happening at CST, in Mumbai, rather than in New York or in London, the “centres of the civilized world as we know it”. In other words, the most familiar trope of a superhero movie is sundered from its always inevitably Western location and shifted to Mumbai, setting up a new cultural landmark. This geographical-cultural landscape is still thinly populated, and its features are not as familiar to us as Notting Hill or Manhattan, courtesy numerous books and movies. This imaginative landscape may eventually be left barren or become densely populated, though this moment in Ra.One does gesture towards a potential decolonial way of being.
There is another potential argument: that Ra.One is decolonial because they used Akon and apparently only Indian SFX experts and so on. I am not very enthusiastic about this, because in the interviews that I have seen, the point of reference has still been Hollywood/the West: “We can hire Akon too”, or “We did not use their technology”. The people who made the film must have been passionate in their belief and desire to do this as an assertion of identity and pride, and that is a different discussion. Ra.One’s decoloniality lies elsewhere.

The Disappointing Picture

Silk Smitha, underneath the facade of being a semi-porn actor, was only looking for love and acceptance. Aren't we all?
My disappointment with The Dirty Picture is not that it humanizes a person supposedly outside the bound of respectability, but in the way in which it does so. This is how the film goes: Silk wants to be an actor, but becomes a sex symbol when being an actor does not work out. She is not apologetic about it, instead making the most of it. Her life goes on a downward spiral later, which is narratively tied up with two heartbreaks in her life. This is familiar narrative territory: after all, women are emotional, vulnerable to exploitation as they do not learn from heartbreak and go on trusting men. As for the men, almost all men are exploiters. I honestly cannot decide which sex should be more offended by such reductive categorization.
At the same time, there is always one notable exception to the exploitative man - and if the film is a romantic comedy that man is the one the woman will end up happily ever after with. In The Dirty Picture, that man is found too late for the happy ending. Even if the story is about them, corrupt women, though usually redeemed by remorse, are unlikely to be shown as living happily ever after. Think, too, of the pressure on love: as an eternal saviour it operates as replacement for deity in a secular world.
Commodification of the self is not restricted only to actors. We all sell ourselves in certain ways in the workplace. Some people sell the idea of themselves as sexual objects, some as intellectual objects and some as service providers. In the capitalist marketplace, we are all threatened by younger, more attractive or smarter replacements. That threat does get a token nod in the film. Silk may have been losing roles and money, but it is emotional betrayal that gets the most prominence as the reason for her depression and eventual demise. In such a situation, desire for love, and by extension, acceptance, is a way of re-inserting the heroine into respectable bourgeois morality and into universality.
At one point in the film, Silk declares that she only looks at her pictures in newspapers and keeps the good ones, but never reads the accompanying articles. When she does finally read them, she is upset about what is being said about her. The film had shown her laughing at the conventional morality used to judge her, but at this moment it affects her. This moment marks the beginning of her downfall. She becomes acceptable by accepting how unacceptable she is, not by questioning the strictures that mark some people as outside acceptability.
After Love, Sex and Dhokha I had expected more from Alt Entertainment. Should I be thankful that they did not show a dying mother and/or sister to justify Silk's agreement to be a sex symbol?

Of Urdu titles and Muslim socials

It was great to see the name of the movie in English, Hindi and Urdu in both Mere Brother Ki Dulhan and Mausam. Using Urdu in film titles is something that is lost in Indian cinema, along with the film genre called the 'Muslim social'. Muslim socials were being made up to the 1990s, such as Salma Pe Dil Aa Gaya and Sanam Bewafa. The last examples of Muslim socials that I can remember are on television, which is where all archaic film genres go, and they are Henna and Khwahish. Tees Maar Khan did have an Eid song which went mostly unnoticed. These films and soaps were not thematically different or qualitatively superior to usual Bollywood films and soaps. The only difference, which today seems major as it has gone missing, is that the characters, settings and contexts of the film were Muslim.
For those who remember Muslim socials, or wish to:

Films where the major characters are Muslim and/or speak Urdu gets made only within certain contexts - to make 'serious' films like Kurbaan (which, for all its good intentions, conveys that a Hindu girl is never safe marrying a Muslim guy, even the most seemingly progressive Muslim professor teaching a course in Islam will turn out to be a terrorist), My Name is Khan, or, to go back a few years, Fiza. A film, however, wherein the lead characters are Muslim and the story is about love or marriage, Muslims customs and festivals, the usual staple of Bollywood cinema in fact - when did you last see that? [I know Mausam features a Muslim heroine, and I'll do a separate blog post about it sometime soon].
A Muslim social made today would seem anachronistic, but that is not because Muslim culture has disappeared from India. Muslim culture still exists, in different ways that need new cinematic interpretations. However, such a film would seem anachronistic, it seems to me, for two different reasons.
The first is, of course, the way in which Indian identity has become conflated with Hindu identity, and with mostly North Indian (Punjabi, Sikh, Jat, UP, MP, 'from Delhi' etc.) or West Indian (Gujarati or 'from Mumbai') identity in cinema. When did you have a lead character from Assam or South, except again in an 'issue' film? This conflation is dangerous in its erasure of forms of difference. As a friend pointed out to me recently, it is not just Muslim identity, but all other religious identities - Christian, Parsi, Sikh - that have disappeared from cinema. At the same time, this conflation of India with Hindu is not as simple as it sounds, given that the most popular actors playing these generic 'Rahul' 'Raj' 'Rohan' 'Chulbul' are Muslim.
What I want to focus in this blog, however, is on the second reason. Any film that emphasizes religious identity in a non-issue based context seems anachronistic because what we understand and see as 'natural' or 'real' is a depoliticized, non-religious space. Muslim characters in films today are like Imraan in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. Imraan knows Urdu literature and poetry (apart from Javed Akhtar's poetry, he quotes another Urdu poet, will check and update here), but his being a Muslim is incidental and does not essentially affect his being in any way.
Is it conservative to talk of religious identity? Isn't it better to have one's religious identity as a de-political, 'cultural' aspect of one's life? After all, doesn't fanaticism lie in a valorisation of religion?
I am not advocating an unquestioning return to traditionalism. Traditionalism is often used to continue exploitative positions, and the disappearance of the Muslim social is also partly due to the traditionalism of conflating India with Hindu identities. But I would like to question this relegation of religious identity to the private sphere.
When you are stuck in a situation where the other person only sees you in terms of your religion, it does not matter if you were more religious or more 'cosmopolitan'. At that time, your religious identity is an issue, whether you like it or not, whether you want it or not.
Liberalism would have me celebrate the individual - the glorious, depoliticized, de-ethnicized individual who is the same the world over - whose difference exists at the surface level - in terms of clothes, food practices and so on.Religious identity, in this formulation, is 'cultural' rather than political - it affects the personal sphere and is to be kept strictly away from the public sphere. Difference, thereby, is always containable as difference, is never contentious or disturbing, i.e. there is a line, wherein difference on one side of the line is 'multiculturalism', is celebratory. And once difference crosses this line, it becomes threatening and fanatic. Because this line is never clearly defined and is subjective, that which is once a marker of cultural difference can become a source of threat. Examples of this include the veil in European societies or the turban in post 9/11 times in America.
I am not comfortable with such homogenization and sterilization of difference. Neither does my feminism sit well with a split between the public and the personal. It was challenged by feminism as enabling exploitation. Today, when religion is seen as essentially a private matter, maybe it is time to challenge this split again.

Bodyguard

We saw Bodyguard. That's 2 hours 32 minutes of my life that I'll never get back again. Sigh.

The 'controlling bitch' v/s the 'free-spirited woman'

Call it homesickness, call it lack of social options, call it what you will - V. and I watch almost every Bollywood movie that releases. We saw Delhi Belly and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. While watching them, I enjoyed both these movies, but something kept bothering me, which I think I have now figured out. In both movies, the female characters are ostensibly more 'independent' than usual Bollywood heroines - they function as more than love interests. However, within this larger rubric, there seems a duality in play - the 'controlling bitch' opposed by the 'free-spirited' woman. The 'controlling bitch' is the one you have to get away from, while the free-spirited and independent, secure with herself woman is the one you have to be with. Shenaz, Vir Das's girlfriend whom you remember as 'chudail' rather than by a name and Kalki are the 'bitches'in these two films, while Katrina and Poorna Jaganathan are the evolved modern women.
My problem with this is that the idea of independence in these scripts is not independence in itself, but rather an independence that functions to make the woman more attractive to the man. They may not be 'only the love interest', but the implication is "Become your own person. It makes you way more cooler, i.e. makes you desirable."
In contrast with this is Anushka in Band Baaja Baaraat. Shruti is independent and her own person, but unless you hit Bittoo on the head with that fact, that is not how he is going to articulate his attraction towards her. Does that mean that all male leads have to be Jat boys for the women's independence to be 'of itself?' I don't think so. I think it needs better writing, a bit more thinking. As far as the writers of these movies are concerned, they do seem well-intentioned, so here's hoping we can see less forced oppositions and more multilayered characters in the future.