A Hundred Years of Indian Cinema: First Favourites List

As many of you cinephiles already know, 2013 celebrates Indian film industry's centenary, marking a hundred years since Dadasaheb Phalke's Raja Harishchandra was first released. I hope to write other pieces during this year on the evolution of Indian cinema but as I began thinking about film-making in India, I realised that many of my favourite films don't make it to the 'big' lists compiled by film critics and mainstream media.  So in this post, I decided to list some of my own favourites.

It is worth noting that this first list is made up entirely of commercial Hindi cinema - with its rather awful short hand, Bollywood - and not all cinema from India, as the country has multiple industries in multiple languages, each with its own canon of film conventions, milestones and texts.  The list is also weighted heavily towards the last forty years of cinema, reflecting perhaps my own location in time and a generational shift. Unlike many film scholars who write about Indian cinema's 'golden ages' of the 1930s or 1950s, I firmly believe that 1970s threw up some amazing films, stars and film-makers, all of which have received less attention than they warrant. Moreover, we have not stopped making great films a hundred years later, despite the overwhelming narrative of nostalgia that many of our filmmakers, critics and scholars repeat incessantly. Finally, the best Hindi films of the past century have not been necessarily 'art-house' or parallel or independent cinema, but often the purest form of commercially driven, blockbuster enterprise.

I have to say that picking this list was particularly difficult as I could come up with ten favourite films within all of ten seconds. However, this first list makes up the films I can not only watch as a film fanatic but also those texts that leave me wondering about technical and stylistic choices of the films themselves, and make me want to place these cinematic texts in their social, political, cultural contexts to understand the processes that informed such cultural production. I also wanted to stay off the usual list of 'greats' although you will notice that could not NOT include Sholay (Am a 70s kid, so no chance). So here goes:

1. Amar Akbar Anthony (1977): this mad-cap Manmohan Desai adventure with dizzying plot twists is also perhaps one of the most tightly constructed scripts.  Adbhuta (wonder) as its primary rasa is a risky strategy in of itself as it relies on non-realist narrative tropes but Desai pulls it off.  Indian independence, the Partition, communal harmony, urbanisation, class issues, post-coloniality all get pulled into this mind-boggling family saga but with his signature light touch so that the film is enjoyable for a child but provides layer upon layer of textual complexity for the scholar.  Only quibble: the women don't get much screen time although they do demonstrate more agency than most heavy-handed 'arty' cinema of the time.

2. Sholay (1975): The big boss of them all! Gabbar, Veeru, Jai, Thakur, Basanti, even Dhanno....the most stylish homage to Sergio Leone and one of the most superbly constructed films of the past century. Each technical element - sound, camera, editing, so on - all deserve entire books discussing the choices and complexities of constructing those.  Then add the perfectly plotted script, great acting by some of India's iconic stars, and powerful dialogue and there really is no argument against this being the best.  However, the film makes far more sense and is more powerful in the original (or now director's cut) rather than the censored version released during the Emergency. The uncut version is longer but has more narrative and emotional cohesion right to the final conclusion.

3. Bandini (1963): A Bimal Roy classic, though unrelenting for its karuna rasa, with possibly one of the bleakest endings in cinema. India's independence movement, changing social mores, and prisoner rehabilitation all collide in this neo-realist gem that ranks alongside the best in Indian cinema, which also features an extraordinary expressionist sequence where Kalyani poisons her lover's wife.  It also features this most gorgeous song which also marks Gulzar's debut as a lyricist.

4. Jaal (1952): Yes, a Guru Dutt movie! What I love about this early film by the director (and writer) is the deft Indian-ised use of noir elements. The camera, lighting, mise en scene, costumes, all echo well known elements of Hollywood noir, helped in part by the Goan setting which allows the film to deploy 'western' imagery with ease. At the same time, elements of crime, retribution, morality, as well as Indian cinema's long standing preoccupation with modernity, urbanisation and westernisation are tackled with a stylish, light directorial touch. In context of the full film, this beautiful song takes on far more complex - and sinister - tones of forbidden desires than often noticed.

5. Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai (1960): Often ignored as one of Raj Kapoor's minor films, this is also one of his overtly political films and not only for the nation-building narrative that many RK films took up during the 1950s and 1960s.  The 'naive' Raju also references the attempts to persuade the pre-independence Chambal 'baghees' (Bollywood has often elided baghees with dacoits) into mainstream, post-independence India. Unlike later films, Kapoor chose an overt political narrative with Raju as the idealistic outsider to bring change rather than a redemption based entirely on love.

6. Rang de Basanti (2006):  After 9/11, a quintessentially human exploration of terrorism, its motivations, and the human face of violence. History and modern politics collide and blend, with layers of film-within-a-film, past and present time scales and digital media all come together in an engrossingly post-modern text.  This is one of my favourites for its editing choices and the ways in which sepia and colour, digital images and mass media elements are deployed to collapse the boundaries of filmic narrative, history and memory and extra-filmic reality. Strangely enough the images from this film seem to have bled into reality after its release, not only in the candle-light marches for Jessica Lal murder but also in the televised footage of police brutality in December 2012. Yet another Bollywood film that gives lie to the myth that the industry does nothing more than candy-floss romances and sentimental melodramas.

7. Maachis (1995): Yes, a Gulzar movie. This time as a director.  This director's oeuvre over the past four plus decades merits an entire list of his own (Watch this space!) as each of his films is gorgeously crafted to blend narrative, literature, aesthetics and politics. But this film stands out for me as the first major critique of the excesses by the Indian state in Punjab. It  is also prescient in its exploration of the ways in which the state and individuals interact and how narratives of 'terrorism' help sustain (and extend) the state's hegemony of violence at the cost of human rights and lives. Events after 9/11 around the world have sadly proven Gulzar's view of the state right.

8. Chak de India (2007):  One of the past decade's 'small films' with very large ambitions. It plays out as a straight forward sports movies with all the well-known cliches, but with a difference.  The film puts women's hockey at its heart, features a restrained performance by Shahrukh Khan who breaks out of his star persona for a change, and begins to articulate an Indian Muslim identity that can move beyond the Partition and is de-linked from Pakistan.  And yes, some how all this is handled in a way that is fun and moving.

9. Chalti ka Naam Gaadi (1958): Wacky, slapstick and outright hilarious comedy classic that turns into a gothic mystery mid-way, complete with a sinister mansion and a madwoman in the attic.  For an early film, the sexual agency and independence exercised by the women in this film (not counting the one locked up, of course, although she too escapes and organises help rather than wilting) is quite extraordinary. And of course it helps that it features the fabulously over-the-top eccentric Kishore Kumar and the most gorgeous woman to ever appear on Indian celluloid, Madhubala.

10. Gangs of Wasseypur (2012): Yup, I am right from the Hindi heartland so this one has to be included. This film is not only extraordinary in narrative scale, aesthetic choices and technical expertise but also is one of the most unabashed celebrations of the rural and popular cultures of UP and Bihar. Everything from the language to costumes to the music is global and local at the same time, capturing the global nature of the Hindi heartland today, freely mixing Chutney influences with folk songs, Ray Bans with behenjis, and high drama and violence with black comedy. In many ways, this film is an interesting beacon for the ways this industry may evolve into the future.

I hope to post again during the year about more films from India so this is really a starter list. I would love to know yours! But till I get to post again, happy 100th birthday, Indian cinema!

Each time I behave as an angry, loud woman, I feel less shame and less fear

This post has been a long time coming: first, because I have not updated this blog in a long time as I spent most of the past year focused on my novel; and second, because internet trolling is something I have been thinking about, discussing and tweeting for a couple of years now.

I have been blogging, first for a separate, now defunct, site and then here, for over a decade and although I am an infrequent blogger, I learned the first rule of placing myself online early on. Initially, and for the first couple of years, my blog was read mostly by friends and family, and a few strangers who stumbled upon something I wrote by accident and who left interesting and thoughtful comments. However, even back then, my brother, who also built my first website and helped me initially design this blog was adamant that all comments be moderated. I wondered about his protectiveness and laughed it off. After all, wasn't the net the brave new world where all humans were equal?

Then one bright morning, I checked my email and found the notification for a comment awaiting moderation. Strangely enough, it was left on a post about Shilpa Shetty and Celebrity Big Brother.  It read simply, "You dumb bitch. Shut up."

The unexpected venom of the comment, left anonymously of course, stunned me.  With a great deal of naivete, I spent quite a bit of the morning wondering if I should publish the comment, and respond to it.  I walked around my flat, another cup of tea in hand, veering between anger, shock and an unreasonable flush of shame, trying to un-bundle all my emotions and thoughts, trying to make sense of a stranger's abuse. Then I remembered the very first time I had been physically harassed. I had been a teenager walking down Third Avenue in New York, when a man had suddenly reached out and grabbed my breasts.  It had only been an instant, but I remember the shock I had felt, and the instant sense of violation. And I can still call up the ineffectual fury I felt at the grin on the man's face as he stepped back, leered and then kept walking.  The teenage me had cried secretly for days, even wondered if some how my sweat pants and bulky coat were 'wrong,' or 'provocative.' Finally, a friend had talked me through it, pointing with acute insight that I had simply been on the street: "I bet you have never walked on a street alone in India. You were alone. As a female, you are prey." Those words have lingered in my mind since, with even harsher significance as that friend's country soon disintegrated into civil war and massive sexual crimes against innumerable women.

Eventually, I went back to my blog and deleted that first abusive comment, realising that online, just as in real life, I had done the same thing: by simply existing as a woman, I was prey.

As social media has grown, and more women have begun claiming a space online, this sort of abuse has also grown. The classics scholar Mary Beard's trolling has opened the debate on misogynist online abuse in the UK, yet many more women are harassed daily and receive far less attention.  On social media, especially twitter, the worst abuse appears to be directed at women who express opinions on politics, economics, security or other seemingly 'male' matters. When male commentaters express similar opinions, they do often get abused, but rarely does the abuse descend with skidding, rapid, efficiency into graphic, sexualised violence.

For example, few men active online will have received these responses to expressing their opinions: "fucking bitch, all you need is rape" (for commenting on EU economic policy); "ugly whore, I'll fuck you till you are dead (for my remark on global financial crisis); "Arab whore, how many Muslims fuck you every day" (for reading Gilad Atzmon's book); "you're so ugly, I will have to cover your face with a pillow while I fuck you" (for tweeting about Delhi gang rape); the last comment was cheered on by various others who suggested anal rape because that way they would not have to see my face. And more recently, "I will cut your cunt and ass, and fuck your mouth till you die, whore. Just like the bitch in the bus" (for tweeting on how religions, including Hinduism, aid misogyny).

Why have I listed the above? Because I have come to believe that this kind of online abuse is exactly like facing sexual harassment on the street. Women are told to keep their head down, walk fast, walk away, not make eye contact, and a thousand other little 'safety tips.' All of these apparent remedies subtly but clearly shift the blame from the abusers to the abused. They make the abuse a 'women's problem' rather than focusing on the men who make safety, even basic dignity, impossible for women.  Same happens with online abuse: too many men have told me that I am giving abusers air by naming and shaming them, that I should ignore the men who spout sick violence about women, that if I ignored them the abuse will disappear. And in that wonderful social-media condoning, I have been told by many men that "I am unfollowing you because you keep talking about abuse and not more interesting things."

Such arguments, attitudes and reactions ignore the evidence: women have stayed silent in real life for generations and there has been no palpable reduction in misogyny.  Most women in print, online, on social media, who speak their minds are harassed on a daily basis, in terms of sexualised violence and the only way the abuse stops is when they stop speaking their minds, by stopping to publish, or by leaving social media. On twitter, some of the most extraordinarily brilliant women have locked accounts to avoid abuse, and to retain the ability to express themselves in a protected space. Sadly, such online veiling also ensures they speak only to those who are allowed past their protective boundaries, limiting their audiences and reach.

For everyone who thinks women should ignore online harassment, I would ask, would you do so? How would you react if you woke up every morning to a dozen emails detailing explicit sexual violence for you and your family? Would you 'ignore' it if people you loved were abused and threatened?

Over time, I have come to believe that the only way for women to stop sexual harassment online and in real life is for more of us to speak up, as loudly, and as often as we can. But the only way to not treat sexual harassment as a 'women's problem' but a social one is for more men to actively get involved. If more men spoke up against sexual harassment of women, the abuse would be seen as less acceptable.  If more men insisted on claiming a masculinity that does not rely on non-consensual, power-based sex, we could start thinking of sexual harassment as a social, political and economic problem and not one that only impacts women (and is thus treated less seriously).  If more men acted when they saw a woman being abused (and this is more so online, as I do realise there are real safety concerns for many on the streets), fewer men would think it 'funny' or indeed 'safe' to abuse women.

After that first experience of street harassment, I promised myself that I would learn to react, physically and mentally. In subsequent instances, I have shouted and shouted loudly; I have reacted physically, hit out, and in one case, confronted abusive men (this time in London's Brick Lane) till they backed down. For years, my sister walked in Delhi with a hockey stick and full backing from my father for using it as a weapon. Even now, we automatically keep the heavy handle lock my dad acquired for the family car in close reach while driving in India.

But more importantly, each time I take a stance, each time I behave as an angry, loud, woman (yes, a bitch, a cunt, a harpy as some of the abusers would surely consider it), I feel less shame and less fear. In taking a stand against harassment, I run the risk of escalating the abuse, but I feel more empowered and more pride for not letting myself be cowed, frightened, and pushed back to the margins.

I am fortunate. I have many men who stand up alongside me in support. And they speak for me not only because I am their daughter, sister, aunt, lover, friend, or colleague, but because they recognise me as an individual and a human being who deserves safety and dignity. More importantly, they stand as allies to women elsewhere and everywhere. I have always wished that there would be more such men because then more women, including me, would be able to participate more fully in social, economic, political struggles of our times. But then, I guess that is exactly what the abusers want to stop!

PS: Discussions with women activists across the world has thrown up an interesting little nugget: online abusers seem more able and secure in directing their vilest, most violent, abuse at women they see as their 'own' or ethnically, nationally, religiously, of their own grouping.  So the worst abuse I have received is not from the random Islamists or Middle East regime supporters, or Christian evangelists. It has come from self-professed 'Indian patriots, proud Hindus.'  This neatly mirrors the abuse my Arab women friends get, generally from men of their own countries, religions, and ethnicity, as well as the abuse focused at white, middle-class women commentaters in US and UK whose abusers are similar to them in class, race, etc. It seems, as has been noted by many feminists, there is an unspoken pact for men of each grouping to keep 'their' women in line!

PPS: This post has been long time brewing but today's post by Soraya Chemaly with its extraordinary list of abuse against women online as well as evidence that confronting abuse works gave me the impetus to actually write down my thoughts. Thanks to Soraya and to Darshana, the tweeter with @lilforeigngirl handle who sent me the piece so it was my first reading of the morning.

Update on my short story, A Cup Full of Jasmine Oil

UPDATE: The short story is included in a Queer Ink's anthology, titled Out: Stories from the New Queer India, of short fiction, edited by Minal Hazratwala and published this year and stocked in book shops across India.

A few years ago, I was approached to contribute to an anthology on LGBT fiction by Indian writers. I pointed out to the editor that my position was that of an ally and perhaps I was not the best person to contribute to the anthology. The reason for my hesitance is one that applies to much of my writing: the power to create narratives is immense and so those of us with the privilege to exercise this power must behave with responsibility. Marginalising voices, or erasing marginalised voices, is all too easy when wielding the pen and I have always been particularly careful about this issue of ethics.

However, after prolonged discussions, I was persuaded to contribute a short story, titled A Cup Full of Jasmine Oil. As an LGBT ally, I hoped that perhaps my story in the collection could contribute to the discussions around the issues facing LGBT community in India.  For this reason, I set the story in an unnamed small Indian town, in a domestic space. At the time, and alongside the story, I was working on an academic paper on LGBT representations in popular Indian culture and had noticed that unlike western narratives where non-heteronormative relationships were located 'somewhere far beyond the domestic realm' and 'out there,' Indian tradition placed homo-eroticism squarely at the centre of the home. This idea formed the core of my short story.

Sadly, the anthology never materialised and after a while, the short story went to publication in The Drawbridge.  It was in good company, with the issue carrying writing by Mario Vargas Llosa, Jose Saramago and Saadat Hasan Manto, amongst others.

Strangely, as has often happened with other pieces of my writing, the short story then took on a life of its own. I was invited to read it at a conference in Cologne, Germany in 2010.  The reading gave rise to much debate, not only on aspects of hetero-normativity and its discontents but also on cultural ideas, postcoloniality, and art. In a further twist of the tale, the Orientalia Suecana journal of the University of Uppsala, Sweden, put together an issue devoted to writings and discussions from the panel. The issue is now available online in pdf format for download. 

It contains a reprint of my short story, A Cup Full of Jasmine Oil. 

More interesting (for me at least), is the inclusion in the issue of an experimental academic paper by Thomas de Bruijn. The essay "juxtaposes a reading of the story from a more conventional western perspective with an interpretation from the point of the Indian system of aesthetics based on rasa. From this double perspective, it discusses various stylistic and thematic aspects of the story. Diverging interpretations are presented in the role of the characters, the functionality of their characterization, and the use of description and suggestion to evoke the semantic framework of the story."  The essay includes a discussion between Dr. De Bruijn and me on the two systems of interpretations and how they impact our understanding of literature. 

I am particularly happy about this essay as it begins to address one of my political issues about cultural production and its study. For far too long, too much of academic production has disguised its "West as theory, East as object" politics as 'universalist.'  By opening up literary discussion to non-Western theories, this essay begins to overturn this paradigm. In doing so, it also brings together my academic and creative writings.

While I have embedded the links to both the story and the essay in this post, am posting them here again: 

Short Story: A Cup Full of Jasmine Oil

Reading and Q & A with Sunny Singh on A Cup Full of Jasmine Oil by Thomas de Bruijn.

Enjoy the reading. And do comment.