On the 12th of april 2004 senior BJP leader Lalji Tandon’s friends decided to celebrate his birthday by distributing 12000 saris to poor women from in and around Lucknow. Hundreds of women lined up early that morning for the booty. Allegedly at some point, perhaps impatient with the never ending queue, the organizers started flinging saris at the crowd. A stampede ensued killing 21 women and an infant and injuring several others. Filmmaker Nishtha Jain visited the area with a camera and her crew curios about what really happened that morning and why. Her journey and its findings are documented in her film 6 yards to democracy. Starting from testimonies by women who survived the incident and relatives of those who did not, Jain widens the angle to look at the state of women in the concerned area in general- perhaps seeking to understand why they might have risked their lives for the gift of a single sari.
Jain’s film is not a well thought out argument, but a journey of discovery that she invites you to take with her. It is neither comprehensive, nor cohesive and while looking into housing and employment problems when the filmmaker’s gaze gets transfixed at the lack of sanitation and latrines for women, you are stuck there with her engaging in her quiet outrage against the abominable indignation of their daily lives. Clearly the conditions that so stump her might offer no new insight to those in the know but the sincerity of her reaction should move them afresh. Jain’s vision is permeated by a lyrical humanity that is often missing in documentaries of this nature, whose agenda tends to become clinical and impersonal. The women she speaks with are not merely witnesses in favor of her argument but characters she gives space and time to. Tender shots of them marveling awkwardly at the grandeur of a five star hotel, applying make-up or singing a bittersweet folk song layer their testimonies. But the journey into their personal spaces is at the cost of certain facts that do not find their place in the film. And it is precisely those facts that amplify its relevance.
Attempting to ‘buy’ votes violates the election commission’s code of conduct. Even though news channels gave a lot of attention to the event it was mostly in the form of political cross fire between personalities. As with election coverage in general, the real issues of the people concerned were lost in airing campaign trails and opinion polls. The official death toll was debated to be half of the real number. Lalji Tandon was given a clean chit and the others accused got out on bail by manipulating legal technicalities. The educated television viewer was too busy deciding the fate of film stars to protest. The accused issued a statement claiming the stampede was a result of the hysterical stupidity of the victims. Maybe they have a point. If our poorer classes still believe democracy has something to offer them, even a free sari, they must be stupid.
(the article originally appeared in Mumbai Mirror)
Showing posts with label indian cinema. Show all posts
Showing posts with label indian cinema. Show all posts
Monday, September 8, 2008
Jahaji Music- Playing out exile
Winds put out small fires and fuel the larger ones. The same could be said of distances and passions. Indian expatriates have struggled to hold on to a piece of their country and the struggle has often expressed itself through distinct musical sub-cultures from Birmingham to Jamaica. Surabhi Sharma’s documentary Jahaji Music follows singer Remo Fernandes as he travels into the Caribbean islands to discover the music of a culture where it has often been the means and the end of survival.
The film is mounted as an impressionistic collage of fragmented narratives, which do not always link up . The camera sets the pace for the journey with lingering long and mid shots, which soak up the city and culture scape, turning curious and intrusive when the rhythm picks up.
We drive into the heart of Trenchtown with Bob Marley’s teacher and Rastafarian philosopher Mortimo as he pays tribute to the land that nurtures the greatest of artists while remaining decrepit with poverty, violence and political neglect. The trance like beats of the steel pan (a musical instrument that “came from nothing’ when the colonial government imposed a ban on the African drum) set the mood for volatile protest songs against the system, the police and even the queen of England. There is a more uplifting chat with a visual artist in the Savannahs and dancehall queen Stacey. Denise Belafon takes us through the performance of her new song “I want an Indian man” in her characteristic saucy style and talks of the protests that followed from the Indian community as she stripped off her sari mid song.
Indians were shipped into the islands in nineteenth century and they landed with little except seeds and songs to work their way into an alien culture and country. Generations later it is hard to tell them from the majority of the population except for the pictures of Indian deities that adorn their walls and the strains of Karan Johar’s ‘Mahi Ve’ which waft around as they go about their daily chores. Popular musicians from the community have worked hard at being accepted into the local music scene and are mindful of not sounding like ‘foreigners’ when they sing. Soca and Calypso have shaped their identity and they are acutely aware of that as is evident when Rikki Jai croons “hold de Lata Mangeshkar, give me Soca” but then he follows it up promptly with Bindiya Chamkegi revamped to fit into Soca Rhythms. Clearly they are not up to abandoning their Indian cultural heritage either. Most of them do not speak or understand Indian languages but they must assimilate their popular folk and film rhythms into their music to complete their expression. Lyrics are written and translated for them by their mothers or grandfathers often. And strange as it may sound to hear “sanwariya hum hu chalab tore saath” in a distinct Caribbean accent it packs the same emotional punch as it would in non descript north Indian village.
The documentary is an emotional and musical journey worth taking. And deep in its folds lies an uncomplicated answer to the raging debate of who is the ‘real Indian’. A real Indian is someone you can take out of India but you cannot take India out of.
(The article originally appeared in Mumbai Mirror)
The film is mounted as an impressionistic collage of fragmented narratives, which do not always link up . The camera sets the pace for the journey with lingering long and mid shots, which soak up the city and culture scape, turning curious and intrusive when the rhythm picks up.
We drive into the heart of Trenchtown with Bob Marley’s teacher and Rastafarian philosopher Mortimo as he pays tribute to the land that nurtures the greatest of artists while remaining decrepit with poverty, violence and political neglect. The trance like beats of the steel pan (a musical instrument that “came from nothing’ when the colonial government imposed a ban on the African drum) set the mood for volatile protest songs against the system, the police and even the queen of England. There is a more uplifting chat with a visual artist in the Savannahs and dancehall queen Stacey. Denise Belafon takes us through the performance of her new song “I want an Indian man” in her characteristic saucy style and talks of the protests that followed from the Indian community as she stripped off her sari mid song.
Indians were shipped into the islands in nineteenth century and they landed with little except seeds and songs to work their way into an alien culture and country. Generations later it is hard to tell them from the majority of the population except for the pictures of Indian deities that adorn their walls and the strains of Karan Johar’s ‘Mahi Ve’ which waft around as they go about their daily chores. Popular musicians from the community have worked hard at being accepted into the local music scene and are mindful of not sounding like ‘foreigners’ when they sing. Soca and Calypso have shaped their identity and they are acutely aware of that as is evident when Rikki Jai croons “hold de Lata Mangeshkar, give me Soca” but then he follows it up promptly with Bindiya Chamkegi revamped to fit into Soca Rhythms. Clearly they are not up to abandoning their Indian cultural heritage either. Most of them do not speak or understand Indian languages but they must assimilate their popular folk and film rhythms into their music to complete their expression. Lyrics are written and translated for them by their mothers or grandfathers often. And strange as it may sound to hear “sanwariya hum hu chalab tore saath” in a distinct Caribbean accent it packs the same emotional punch as it would in non descript north Indian village.
The documentary is an emotional and musical journey worth taking. And deep in its folds lies an uncomplicated answer to the raging debate of who is the ‘real Indian’. A real Indian is someone you can take out of India but you cannot take India out of.
(The article originally appeared in Mumbai Mirror)
Friday, September 5, 2008
A MARRIAGE OF CULTURES
One of those best of Madan Mohan collections has him speaking about his craft. With a characteristic understated passion he recounted what it took to craft a melody. The result was work that was sophisticated and accomplished, popular at the time and classic ever since. Why is it that today’s Indian finds it so hard to create what might be popular and artistically/intellectually gratifying? Why has the gulf between sensible critical acclaim and mass appeal widened beyond comprehension when it comes to art in general and cinema in particular?
We are negotiating with a very important curb in our history where economic growth, dominance and discrepancy are the preoccupation in all quarters. Are we making any classics along the way though? In these times of the pettiest of bloody politics and a surging feel-good factor despite of it, what is happening to our art?
Bed and Board is a classic as nearly all films directed by Francois Truffaut are thought to be. It is a deceptively simple tale of a marriage and its graph principally. Antoine is married to a violinist and lives out his days in a quaint neighborhood dyeing flowers for a living. Their blissfully ordinary existence is threatened when Antoine embarks on a nearly inexplicable affair with a Japanese woman. Drawn apart (after a dramatic scene in which his wife on discovery of his infidelity greets him in a horrific madame butterfly getup), they are nonetheless unable to settle down without one another and come back together soon enough. This ‘end’ however is happy in only a skeptical sort of way as they are shown not to live ‘happily ever after’ but slip into a life of stable bickering indifference.
Truffaut’s classic brings to mind our cinematic middle class spokesperson Aziz Mirza’s Chalte Chalte or atleast the second half of it.
After reliving his Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge role in a less flamboyant, more vulnerable avatar, Shahrukh Khan(Raj again) who only ever plays a superstar, settles down in a middle class neighbourhood in Mumbai with his much different wife, Priya.
The ordinariness of their life is shown among familiar character sketches of ‘regular people’ reminiscent of the ‘Nukkad’ life. The wife cooks, cleans, shops for veggies while anda-walas and dhobis walk in and out of her tiny apartment. The husband does his job, hangs with his buddies, comes back home to bicker with wife or woo her with his boyish charm. The break here is not an extra marital affair but Raj’s brash, complexed mindset. He is jealous, loud and feels inferior at the drop of a hat. In both films the ‘fault’ comes from the husband but it was too much to expect a hindi film hero to cross the sacred line of sexual commitment up until Karan Johar’s rebellious but misguided Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna. Nonetheless Raj is grey and real. He broods dramatically and displays only melancholic shades of anger, depression and longing after the wife leaves. Naturally Truffaut is not given to such show of undiluted emotion. Antoine’s journey is highly personal and internal - his attachment to his wife is palpable but never obvious. Equally stark is the wife’s ‘forgiveness’ of her husband in the end in contrast to Chalte Chalte’s traditional teary climax (replete with sukhwinder singh’s heart rendering high pitch). The end is happier here despite bickering thrown in for good measure, but then anything would be happy after that melodramatic climax at the airport, no less.
It would be easy to see, Mirza made Bed and Board within the Bollywood formula (not implying he copied it. It is a theme often visited by writers/filmmakers and common enough not to attract insinuations of plagiarism). But beneath the obvious conclusion is another story - that of our cultural psychology and philosophy. Evidence is simply in the names of the films. Bed and Board, is as stoic as the film- a demystification on the institution of marriage. It intends to reveal the shallow waters of a much-touted social more and strengthens its case with a strong disillusioning end. Chalte Chalte is more poetic (borrowed from one hindi film song or another), conveying a sense of journey, its mystery and even a hint of fatalism, linking up with its own end brimming with ras. The significance of rasas infact is an Indian cultural obsession from time immemorial. Its unpopularity in the west can be gauged by considering there is no equivalent word in the language for it. the closest one can come is a literal ‘syrupy’ which has derogatory intonations. Bed and Board perhaps unintentionally addresses France’s, rather Europe’s fascination with existentialism. In the end it all means little. Chalte Chalte is rooted deeply in india’s unshakeable romanticism that springs from the abundant faith in our DNA. We are the children of God (and literally too, there are castes a dozen claiming descent from one or the other avatar of the holy trinity) and religion is our single-minded passion. Marriage like all else is tied up with it and therefore sacrosanct (to be fair there is little India that is not sacrosanct in some way or the other, even rats). In the final moments of the climax Raj gives away his Allah charm to his wife. This moves her sufficiently to return home and say, “my place in life is with you”. Religion, fatalism and an pursuit of emotional intelligence underpin the formula to audience appreciation. We go to the cinema “leaving our brains at home” (a popular phrase coined by Indian critics to deride/describe most Indian masala movies), but we take our hearts along and how. You can titillate us all you want but you’re not a bumper hit unless you move us, shake us. The difference in Chalte Chalte and Bed and Board is of bad and good cinema, undoubtedly. But the concept of good and bad cinema is derived intellectually in India from the west. But marriages were made in India. Like heaven was.
We are negotiating with a very important curb in our history where economic growth, dominance and discrepancy are the preoccupation in all quarters. Are we making any classics along the way though? In these times of the pettiest of bloody politics and a surging feel-good factor despite of it, what is happening to our art?
Bed and Board is a classic as nearly all films directed by Francois Truffaut are thought to be. It is a deceptively simple tale of a marriage and its graph principally. Antoine is married to a violinist and lives out his days in a quaint neighborhood dyeing flowers for a living. Their blissfully ordinary existence is threatened when Antoine embarks on a nearly inexplicable affair with a Japanese woman. Drawn apart (after a dramatic scene in which his wife on discovery of his infidelity greets him in a horrific madame butterfly getup), they are nonetheless unable to settle down without one another and come back together soon enough. This ‘end’ however is happy in only a skeptical sort of way as they are shown not to live ‘happily ever after’ but slip into a life of stable bickering indifference.
Truffaut’s classic brings to mind our cinematic middle class spokesperson Aziz Mirza’s Chalte Chalte or atleast the second half of it.
After reliving his Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge role in a less flamboyant, more vulnerable avatar, Shahrukh Khan(Raj again) who only ever plays a superstar, settles down in a middle class neighbourhood in Mumbai with his much different wife, Priya.
The ordinariness of their life is shown among familiar character sketches of ‘regular people’ reminiscent of the ‘Nukkad’ life. The wife cooks, cleans, shops for veggies while anda-walas and dhobis walk in and out of her tiny apartment. The husband does his job, hangs with his buddies, comes back home to bicker with wife or woo her with his boyish charm. The break here is not an extra marital affair but Raj’s brash, complexed mindset. He is jealous, loud and feels inferior at the drop of a hat. In both films the ‘fault’ comes from the husband but it was too much to expect a hindi film hero to cross the sacred line of sexual commitment up until Karan Johar’s rebellious but misguided Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna. Nonetheless Raj is grey and real. He broods dramatically and displays only melancholic shades of anger, depression and longing after the wife leaves. Naturally Truffaut is not given to such show of undiluted emotion. Antoine’s journey is highly personal and internal - his attachment to his wife is palpable but never obvious. Equally stark is the wife’s ‘forgiveness’ of her husband in the end in contrast to Chalte Chalte’s traditional teary climax (replete with sukhwinder singh’s heart rendering high pitch). The end is happier here despite bickering thrown in for good measure, but then anything would be happy after that melodramatic climax at the airport, no less.
It would be easy to see, Mirza made Bed and Board within the Bollywood formula (not implying he copied it. It is a theme often visited by writers/filmmakers and common enough not to attract insinuations of plagiarism). But beneath the obvious conclusion is another story - that of our cultural psychology and philosophy. Evidence is simply in the names of the films. Bed and Board, is as stoic as the film- a demystification on the institution of marriage. It intends to reveal the shallow waters of a much-touted social more and strengthens its case with a strong disillusioning end. Chalte Chalte is more poetic (borrowed from one hindi film song or another), conveying a sense of journey, its mystery and even a hint of fatalism, linking up with its own end brimming with ras. The significance of rasas infact is an Indian cultural obsession from time immemorial. Its unpopularity in the west can be gauged by considering there is no equivalent word in the language for it. the closest one can come is a literal ‘syrupy’ which has derogatory intonations. Bed and Board perhaps unintentionally addresses France’s, rather Europe’s fascination with existentialism. In the end it all means little. Chalte Chalte is rooted deeply in india’s unshakeable romanticism that springs from the abundant faith in our DNA. We are the children of God (and literally too, there are castes a dozen claiming descent from one or the other avatar of the holy trinity) and religion is our single-minded passion. Marriage like all else is tied up with it and therefore sacrosanct (to be fair there is little India that is not sacrosanct in some way or the other, even rats). In the final moments of the climax Raj gives away his Allah charm to his wife. This moves her sufficiently to return home and say, “my place in life is with you”. Religion, fatalism and an pursuit of emotional intelligence underpin the formula to audience appreciation. We go to the cinema “leaving our brains at home” (a popular phrase coined by Indian critics to deride/describe most Indian masala movies), but we take our hearts along and how. You can titillate us all you want but you’re not a bumper hit unless you move us, shake us. The difference in Chalte Chalte and Bed and Board is of bad and good cinema, undoubtedly. But the concept of good and bad cinema is derived intellectually in India from the west. But marriages were made in India. Like heaven was.
(This article originally appears on www.passionforcinema.com)
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