What happens when an innocuous folk tale begins to question our cultivated understanding of right and wrong, us and them, man and woman? Set around Partition, Anup Singh’s “Qissa” talks about partitions within and outside as it tells the story of a Sikh, scarred by the events and obsessed by the desire to have a male child, decides to raise his fourth daughter as a boy. Though the film is head lighted by Irrfan as the father struggling to come to terms with reality, the biggest revelation of the film is Tillotama Shome playing the son trapped in the body of a girl.
It has been more than a decade since we danced to “Monsoon Wedding”, but Tillotama is still etched in public memory as the dainty housemaid Alice. Few know that in between this Alice has ventured out to embrace difficult parts in different languages and different film industries. Critics might recall her short but solid appearance in “Shanghai” but what is going to stay in their mind for long is “Qissa”, releasing next week.
“I was thrilled to be a part of this film, scared to play the part, excited by the challenge, relieved to get work and hopeful after having met Anup Singh,” says Tillotama, who has already garnered two international awards for best actress for the film. The petite Bengali actress doesn’t seem to be the obvious choice to play Kanwar. “I too had asked Anup why he did not choose someone bigger as they could pull off playing a man with greater ease. But Anup did not want Kanwar to play a man effortlessly; he wanted to show the rupture, the violence that happens when we force ‘a girl’ to be more like ‘a boy’.”
In fact, she continues, Anup warned her against trying hard to be “manly”. “Instead, he encouraged me to just be the best son I could be to my father. He did not want prosthetics to the rescue, but he wanted us to experience the tremendous effort that this girl made to be a man for her father. So he guided me to explore the interior life of Kanwar, an entity that struggles to navigate between his public face and her private face.” Tillotama says she often wonders what the film would have been had he cast a woman who had a big built, and how it would have impacted its dynamics.
To play Kanwar, she trained for seven months in Punjabi, swimming, kalari and driving. “It was a rigorous training and it helped me enter the physical aspects of Kanwar’s walk, his voice and neutralise my own gait. I don’t want to give away anymore, as I hope the audience will discover it for themselves as they watch the film.”
For Tillotama the primary reference point was the script. “And my compass Anup Singh’s conversations with me. In the seven months of preparation he met me a few times and each time introduced a new element to work with. It was a gradual and patient indoctrination into the world of the film and Kanwar. Anup had also asked me to watch two Dilip Kumar films, ‘Aan’ and ‘Tarana’ as reference for body language. It was not a reference that I expected, and what a delight it was to watch this tragic hero approach the light-hearted swashbuckling peasant in ‘Aan’.”
And Kanwar left her core stirred. “I did not think this film would be any different from the others as I am not a method actor. But there were certain restrictions like my chest was taped down, I was trying to be something I was not. And there were freedoms, like driving truck, trying to impress a girl who had never driven a truck. But it was a film and it got over. Much after I walked away from the film, I realized that gender is a very slippery slope and it is difficult to describe what is masculine and what is feminine. I think the film helped me celebrate androgyny.”
Talking about the contemporary relevance of the film, the actress says even though the Partition might be dated for many in our generation, unfortunately none of the issues of identity and gendered violence are dated. “There has been a sickening increase of violence against women, violence against minority groups and this film perhaps is a step towards creating understanding and a space for dialogue.”
The film seems to take the obsession of the father rather literally. “Why does a man want a boy child and not a girl child? Why are little baby girls killed even before they have learnt to walk? ‘Qissa’ explores the psyche behind this obsession and creates empathy and hopefully some understanding,” she counters. “There are women who were forced to be like men and today still masquerade as men, even though the environment does not force them to anymore. Does she feel safer in a man’s guise? Hopefully, this film will raise more such questions.”
A product of Lady Shri Ram College and Asmita theatre group, Tillotama honed her craft in New York University. There she also taught theatre to murder convicts at the high security prison. “The greatest training did not happen at NYU but while doing drama therapy in a prison called Rikers Island for two years. I think I learnt more about acting there than I did in school. They taught me that there is a very fine line between sanity and insanity, between being guilty and not guilty. I got to explore comedy, farce, physical theatre, things that I would not be cast for and to play parts that were not written for someone like me. Essentially I left feeling I had learnt to try, even if I failed.”
The film was shown at various international film festivals and Tillotama says the reactions were heartening everywhere. “There were many questions raised by the audience about the symbolism of a scene and often it would be answered by another member from the audience. In Toronto, in the audience was a lady from Syria who understood the film deeply despite not knowing historical specificities of our Partition. The separations that are tearing her country apart allowed her to embrace our film without any translations. Many of the male audience members in Abu Dhabi came and apologized to me, as if they were apologizing to all the Kanwars in the world who had to become something else in order to survive.”
Tillotama gets a lot of response from filmmakers outside. She will soon be seen in Jeffery Brown’s “Sold” but at home her potential has not been exploited. Despite a lot of the so-called heroine oriented films the definition of heroine is still very stereotypical. “I definitely feel I have only scratched the surface and there is a long way ahead. This is a highly competitive and commerce driven enterprise with many variables at play. And I can spend the rest of my life lamenting about it or just do what I have to do and stay inspired by people who did not have godfathers, rarely got to playing leading roles or a steady flow of work and yet today their voices are celebrated. Besides, the definition of the hero is as stereotypical as that of the heroine.”
