Roma Redux

My previous post leads me to paste here a comment on Roma I had sent Satyam some years ago; I had just returned from nine days in the city, and thereafter watched Fellini's masterpiece for the first time:

"It's interesting to speculate how (if at all) the bildungsroman strand ties into the rest of the film. One way to read it is as gently mocking notions of "decline and fall": one narcissistically reads one's own fate into that of the city. Thus it is not that Rome was better "then," but merely that one has grown old. I don't mean to be dismissive: perhaps the personal is the only way to come to grips with the enormous weight-- in this film, one could even say detritus-- of history. That weight is conjured up beautifully in more than one spooky and yet unbearably lovely dream-like vignette, none more so than the bike ride at the end, with a kind of fascist phalanx zooming past the statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Capitoline Square (the space a Renaissance creation, of Michelangelo), past (should one say, a la Finnegans Wake, back?) the Arch of Constantine, to the Colosseum (need I even say it, older than, and hence more "past," the Arch of Constantine), and then suddenly onto a highway zooming into the beyond...Freud's dreambook comes to mind, wherein he likens the unconscious precisely to the view of Rome from the Palatine, various historical epochs in view...



...Yet the nightmarish is also present: the sudden shift from Rome on the eve of war to contemporary gridlock and street protests earlier in the film is apocalyptic filmmaking at its best. Fellini mocks those who confuse "the end" with the twilight of their lives, yet also, it seems to me, mocks the complacency that sees eternal Rome surviving, continuing, no matter what-- a stance that legitimates political passivity. It is not surprising, then, that the film begins with Mussolini's long shadow. As stray moments in the film demonstrate, the attitude has outlived Mussolini.

PS-- the bike riders at the end are an ambiguous gesture, exhilarating yet all too mechanized (and hence other than human in a way), keeping all Roman history in view, only to zoom past to who knows where? The new mode is not one conducive to lingering..."



[The photos are courtesy my friend Zeeshan, from a trip to Rome in January 2005.]

Fellini and the Spectacle of Rome

An interesting discussion on Satyam's blog in the context of Fellini's Obituary for Cinema, specifically in connection with the following lines:

I too think that the cinema has lost authority, prestige, mystery, magic. The giant screen that dominates an audience devotedly gathered in front of it no longer fascinates us. Once it dominated tiny little men staring enchanted at immense faces, lips, eyes, living and breathing in another unreachable dimension, fantastic and at the same time real, like a dream. Now we have learned to dominate it. We are bigger than it. See how we have reduced it: here it is the size of a cushion between the library and the flower pot. Sometimes it’s even in the kitchen, near the refrigerator. It has become an electronic domestic servant and we, seated in armchairs, armed with remote control, exercise a total power over those little images, rejecting whatever is unfamiliar or boring to us… We wipe out the images that don’t interest us. We are the masters. What a bore that Bergman! Who said Bunuel was a great director? Out of the house with them. I want to see a ball game or a variety show. Thus a tyrant spectator is born, an absolute despot who does what he wants and more convinced that he is the director or at least the producer of the images he sees. How could the cinema possibly try to attract that kind of audience?



My responses:

I have great sympathy for Fellini mourning the “death” of cinema, but I must also confess to some discomfort with these lines. To state it differently, the image of Mussolini chosen for this piece seems to be appropriate, and these lines seem to betray some nostalgia for an idealized authoritarianism...



and, in response to Satyam's comment:

I think the representations of Rome in Fellini’s films like Roma and Satyricon offer a useful corrective of sorts to the problem I pointed out in my initial comment. For in these films, Fellini subverts the spectacle by presenting it as a permanently decadent one (as in Satyricon) or as a non-linear dreamscape that cannot really be impressed into the service of a political “project” (as in Roma), because the dream doesn’t really “point” anywhere, it is unstable and in perpetual danger of unraveling. Stated differently, Fellini is perhaps wise to the fascistic potential of the “muscular”, authoritarian spectacle — hence his grand Roman spectacles stage decadence, decay, perversity (as in Satyricon) or apolitical/autobiographical memory, art, and the strangeness of the familiar (as in Roma). Whereas an imagined and idealized history typically serves as the bedrock of the fascist project, in Roma we have the wonderfully strange sequence of the archaeological dig revealing fresco treasures — all of which turn to dust the moment they are exposed to daylight...

[The photos are courtesy my friend Zeeshan Hyder.]

Praveen Swami on The Decline of the "Encounter" Death

A fascinating piece appeared in The Hindu a few days ago, suggesting that communal targeting of minorities (and perhaps Dalits) by trigger-happy policemen might actually be on the decline. Praveen Swami isn't arguing in favor of complacency on this front, but his is a useful perspective, one that isn't seen too often in the mainstream English-language media, whether right or left:

Put simply, there is no evidence to support the claim that there is an increased incidence of extra-judicial executions of Muslims — or, for that matter, Hindus. Even though police forces across India have intensified intelligence-led operations targeting Islamist groups, the NCRB data for 2007 show a sharp decline in the use of lethal force. A large part of the decline came because of a dramatic decline in killings by the police in Chhattisgarh, where fatalities fell to seven. Andhra Pradesh also saw a sharp decline in police killings, from 72 to 45. Only in Uttar Pradesh did deaths caused by the use of lethal force remain at the 2006 levels.

...

What these figures point to is a slow but sure process of transformation: for which the social transformation brought about by democracy deserves credit. Less than a decade ago, the police forces across India faced credible charges of communal bias. Reports of judicial commissions, which investigated the 1982 riots in Meerut, the 1978 riots in Aligarh and the 1992-1993 carnage in Mumbai, showed systematic anti-Muslim biases in everything from the use of lethal force and patterns of arrest to the treatment of prisoners.

New studies, though, have thrown up signs of change. In January 2005, the Senior Superintendent of Police, Saharanpur, Safi Rizvi — now an aide to Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram — conducted a study of the district’s prison population. He sought to test the proposition that the police were disproportionately likely to act against Muslims and backward caste suspects. Mr. Rizvi’s study, however, demonstrated that the prison population of Saharanpur closely matched the district’s demographic profile. Hindus made up 58.5 per cent of the jail population, closely mirroring their overall share in the district population. Muslim prisoners accounted for 39 per cent of the jail population, marginally lower than their demographic representation. While Dalits made up 21 per cent of the district population, they constituted just 19 per cent of the prisoners; Brahmins, in a twist, were somewhat over-represented in jail.

...
Rather than religion or caste, Mr. Rizvi concluded, class constituted an accurate marker of which sections of the population were over-represented in prisons. More than 84 per cent of the prison population, he found, was made up of the poor — more than twice their share of the general population, as determined by the National Council for Applied Economic Research.

One only hopes that the procession of urban, middle- and upper-middle class students so many Indian news channels put on come election time, and who can reliably be expected to express reflexive cynicism about democracy (and to blame "politicians" for virtually everything under the sun, as if politicians acted on their own, with no support from "the people", and operated in a vacuum) are paying attention. Far too often, one gets the sense that "politicians" are blamed when they don't further one's own agenda -- indeed, far too many participants in "roundtable" discussions of the sort seen every day on NDTV or CNN-IBN don't even seem to recognize their own agenda as an agenda. Such blindness is dangerous, leading to the temptation of characterizing those who see things differently, not as having different constituents or different priorities, but as being monstrously wicked. No-one can deny the criminality and thuggishness of so many Indian politicians -- equally, however, the parroting of banalities and a comic-book view of the world that seem to characterize the sorts of students/professionals the Indian TV channels insist on presenting as the only face of "youngistan", is more than a little depressing. Swami's article serves as a reminder of what should never be forgotten, that democracy -- imperfect, corrupt, frustrating, and violent -- is the only option. On some days, it seems that upwardly mobile India only pays lip service to this idea.

This Rant Owed to Maneka & Varun Gandhi...

It's been a while since I dedicated a blog post to a rant, but Maneka Gandhi's polished, cynical, and dishonest comments on NDTV this morning got my goat. So no film review or essay here, guys, just an expression of my indignation.

Saw Maneka Gandhi’s statements on NDTV this morning, responding to the furore over Varun Gandhi's alleged comments about Muslims at a Pilibhit election rally a few days ago; and the subsequent clash between the police and Varun's supporters when he showed up again in Pilibhit to court arrest (and further fuel a new career as Hindutva's new posterboy -- encomiums from the RSS, the VHP, and the Shiv Sena have already poured in). In a word, her comments were shockingly dishonest; Maneka Gandhi professed shock and surprise, and asked what was so wrong if her son spoke "the truth", that "we all know", and asked was so communal about making statements critical of terrorism. The short answer to this is, of course, that there is nothing at all wrong with these sorts of statements -- except that these are hardly the statements for which Varun Gandhi has been booked, and his mother knows it. Rather, the statements Varun is alleged to have made include gems like “saare Hindus ek tarfa ho jao; in sab ko bhejo Pakistan”; and “kaise kaise naam hote hain in ke — karimULLAH, mazharULLAH; kaheen raat mein dikh jaayen to ...."; and references to the opposition Samajwadi party's Muslim candidate as Osama bin Laden. For Maneka Gandhi to pretend that her son is being targeted for speaking out against terrorism and anti-nationals is mendacity of the highest order (how come no other leader has been booked for criticizing terrorism or anti-nationals?) -- nothing prevented her from asserting that Varun Gandhi did not in fact make these statements (the doctoring theory seems far-fetched to me, because his lip movements in the video actually seem to match the words in the audio-track, but hey, I ain't no forensic expert), but that was a defense Maneka Gandhi and the rest of the BJP appear to be only half-heartedly interested in. The responses range from Advani claiming that it is the opposition that has made Varun Gandhi into a poster boy for the BJP; to Jaitley looking embarrassed on TV; to Balbir Punj pointing to the Congress itself trucking with communalists -- the common thread is that the BJP's initial attempt to claim the moral high ground by distancing itself from the statements has been completely abandoned. Not that I am surprised: this or that moderate face notwithstanding, the BJP has never been able to resist the lure of communal polarization, and certainly not where its lower-rung leaders are concerned. Thus India has been treated to the spectacle of Maneka Gandhi lending her credibility to the canard that Hindu leaders who are simply telling the truth are being bullied by the Indian state. “As you know”, she told the NDTV journalist interviewing her, “I am not communal at all, I don’t even think in that way” — not only do we not “know” any such thing, she had the temerity to say this after she had mischievously manufactured an issue by claiming that the policeman who fired on the mob in Pilibhit was a Muslim (the officer in question denies that he was either in Pilibhit or on duty when the clashes occurred -- although such statements from the Indian police are hardly dispositive; on a related note, the TimesNOW channel reported this morning that the DM for Pilibhit has already sent a report to the U.P. government to the effect that the violence was the result of deliberate actions by Varun Gandhi’s supporters). This Indian election season can only get uglier.

GULAAL (Hindi; 2009)

Gulaal begins in the middle of a fiery speech by Duki Bana (Kay Kay Menon), burning with anger over the injustices meted out to Rajputs in independent India, and convinced now is the time to take "Rajputana" back from India. The speech is convincing, cinematic testimony to the heady (and combustible) political cocktail made by resentment, history as active myth-making, and violence, but -- and this is the greater achievement -- it is profoundly disorienting. Rajputs are, after all, at the very core of "Indianness" (to the extent one is inclined to accord any community that distinction), whether one is thinking of the right-wing ideologue in search of Hindu defenders against Islamic invaders; or of the foreign tourist for whom Rajasthan's royal heritage is the ne plus ultra of Indian tradition. Director Anurag Kashyap's inversion, making a traitor out of that which conventional nationalism deems above reproach, is a daring act of political subversion, a sign that there is little essential or immutable in politics: given the right conditions, and the requisite degree of violence, even the unimaginable can seem inevitable. And so it is in Gulaal, where slowly but surely the viewer begins to get used to Duki's ideas; by the time the film re-visits the speech halfway through the film, one is no longer surprised and shocked. One simply accepts.

And there's more: by making the very cultural symbols of the Indian mainstream (that is to say, those symbols used by culture warriors as among the embodiments of Indian heritage and nobility) opposed to the Indian state, and, quite explicitly, to the idea of both democracy and India, Kashyap points a finger at his audience too. The real traitors, willing to sacrifice democracy and freedom at this or that violent altar; willing to follow charismatic pipers wherever they might lead; are us.

Gulaal is a political fable, and like the best of them, constructs a world that at once seems like a grotesque distortion of the world we live in, and a perfectly plausible representation of it. The story revolves around Dilip Singh (Raja Chaudhry), a newly arrived student at an unnamed university somewhere in Rajasthan; his roommate is dissolute aristocrat Ransa (Abhimanyu Singh), and his first day at the university a brutal round of ragging, by the end of which Dilip is stripped and locked up in a dark room with a naked and traumatized Anuja (Jesse Randhawa), a newly arrived teacher who has had her own hellish introduction to campus life. Sure enough, the meek Dilip gravitates toward Ransa's thuggery and Duki's protection: the latter wants Ransa and Dilip to spearhead his Rajputana party's efforts to take control of the campus; Dilip is too weak to resist, and Ransa seems intrigued by the idea. You can see the nastiness coming from a mile away, and Kashyap does not disappoint, throwing in a memorable cast of characters that includes Ransa's half-siblings Kiran (Ayesha Mohan) and Karan (Aditya Shrivastav), the out of wedlock offspring of Ransa's royal father; a Shakespearean fool in Duki's brother Prithvi (Piyush Mishra, who also wrote the lyrics and composed the music); Duki's long-suffering wife (Jyoti Dogra); and a neurotic, luscious dancing girl in Madhuri (Mahi Gill). No purity of purpose or character is possible in the dark world of this film, suffused as it is with spite, cruelty, and duplicity; Gulaal is Kashyap's most compelling work since Black Friday, and while it cannot be called a pleasant viewing experience, it is never anything but compelling, the sort of wake-up call we desperately need (and one not reducible to the sentiment that all politics essentially the same, that ideology is a combination of naivete and charlatanry; the sort of facile cynicism peddled by films like Satta or Hu Tu Tu).

Gulaal isn't perfect: like more than one Kashyap film, its coherence leaves something to be desired; in particular Kashyap dilutes his political focus by making too much of the film's second half "about" Dilip's betrayal by his lover Kiran, who in turn is suddenly transformed into a cold-hearted bitch, a characterization that simply does not follow from what she has been earlier in the film. Moreover, the dissonance, and reflexive resort to sexist stereotype (of the woman who uses her sexuality toward political ends), is particularly irritating in a film that has hitherto been sensitive to the connections between politics, patriarchal violence, and sexuality: near the film's beginning, Dilip is humiliated by being stripped (his tormentor later jokes that Dilip was so chikna he wanted to kiss him), but in the same situation, Anuja is almost preternaturally self-possessed. She is not seduced by the protection of the patriarchy as Dilip does; nor does she need a powerful man to protect her. Indeed her strength (turning the traditional gender stereotype on its head) seems to unnerve those around her -- and perhaps even herself, inasmuch as it might be read as bordering on the inhuman ("It isn't so bad to be a coward," she murmurs to Dilip in one scene). The contrast with so many other films, that insist on the finality of the sort of violence Anuja is subjected to, is stark. But equally notable is Kashyap's failure to pursue this suggestive story arc; in the film's second half the director prefers to spend more time with the relatively conventional figures of Kiran and Madhuri, all of it leading up to a rather weak denouement for Dilip's story.

The cast is almost uniformly good: Kay Kay yet again confirms the impression that he is never so compelling as when he plays a nasty character, although no-one steals the show from the wickedly enjoyable Abhimanyu Singh when he is on-screen. Mahi Gill underscores that Dev D was no fluke, and the sleek Jesse Randhawa surprises with her charisma. The camera, it must be said, loves her. A special mention must be made of Jyoti Dogra, who takes the hackneyed role of Duki's wife and imbues it with a spirited edge. Less impressive is Ayesha Mohan, but the fault here might well lie in a poorly written character. Aditya Shrivastav and Deepak Dobriyal (as Duki's man Friday Bhaati) don't have all that much to do, but keep up their end of the bargain. The weak link, alas, is Raja Chaudhry, whose Dilip is simply inert. There is also the small matter of Piyush Mishra, whose contribution is stamped on just about every facet of this film: as actor, his red-uniformed mad poet Prithvi has some of the film's most memorable lines; as composer, Mishra's music blends seamlessly with the film -- it is hard to think of it as existing independently (a compliment in my book); as lyricist, Mishra delights in the Hindi language (especially in the "Aaramb hai" anthem, at once rousing and disturbing), and certainly doesn't lack a playful edge -- as demonstrated in the "Ranaji" song with its references to aeroplanes ghuso-fying in towers and poor Afghanistan, jis ka "baj gayo band". Ultimately, as the "Duniya" song that closes the film makes clear, Mishra channels the revolutionary Urdu poetry of Sahir Ludhianvi, and also Majaaz Lakhnavi, Faiz, and others (perhaps including, obliquely, Yeats' The Second Coming), to drive home the reality that in our times, revolutionary fervor is a hallmark not of the "progressives" but of their reactionary counterparts. The film ends as it has begun.

Despite its flaws, and even apart from the wonderful atmosphere art director Wasiq Khan and cinematographer Rajeev Ravi have helped create,Gulaal is miles better than most other "political" films Bollywood produces: rather than pandering to the audience's prejudices, it insinuates itself into the viewer's imagination, only to unsettle -- serving as a reminder, if any were needed, that Kashyap remains one of the most fearless contemporary Hindi film directors, and also (and this is both good and bad) that age and relative fame have not dulled Kashyap's desire to be remembered as Bollywood's enfant terrible. No matter. One can forgive the publicity mongering trailers liberally peppered with bleeped out (and clearly recognizable) four-letter words: both the film industry and we could do with some shock jockery -- especially in an election year.

Lights; Camera; Politics! (from Chapati Mystery)

I've been a part of some interesting discussions on cinema and politics on Chapati Mystery recently: check out this thread, and this one.

On a third thread, in response to Conrad Barwa's comment on Eklavya: "....in this context, since I discussed films at length with Qalander on the previous thread, I must mention the uncomfortable casteist undercurrent to the Hindi film “Ekalayva” where Amitabh Bachchan’s character plays the eponymous hero, who is a loyal and sacrificing bodyguard to a Rajput royal family – the implications of service and sacrifice are clear as is who is meant to be doing the serving and the sacrificing and who benefits from these actions."

I wrote the following:

"Superb example, and completely agree — but, while Vinod Chopra doesn’t execute the film very well, you omitted to mention the subversion here (for those who haven’t seen the film, spoiler alert): by film’s end, the whole symbolism of Rajput patriarchy has been turned on its head, with the royal having been revealed as impotent, and the subservient servant the real father who, by impregnating the queen, continues the royal bloodline. The royal house in this film lives in a ghostly palace that seems like nothing so much as an anachronism, and the message is clear: India after the maharajahs belongs to Eklavya, not to the royals he serves. Lest anyone think I am reading too much into this, consider Sanjay Dutt’s brief cameo in the film: he is the “lower caste” cop who is investigating the murder at the palace, and his sneering demeanor towards the royals, his refusal to give them any deference, is in marked contrast to the attitude of Amitabh’s Eklavya. And his only “hero” at the palace is the lower-caste Eklavya — NOT any of the royals (memorably illustrated by a dialogue that is unusually blunt for a multiplex-friendly Hindi film: “Agar Eklavya-baba nahin hote na, to is haveli ki taraf mooth-ta bhi nahin” (”If it weren’t for Eklavya, I wouldn’t even piss in the direction of this mansion”))."

Banarsi Babu Redux

Some photos from my recent trip to Varanasi are now up HERE (tons of photos from a previous trip may also be found there, arranged by city).