At a time when politics is fast becoming a risky if not a bad word in our films, screen writer Urmi Juvekar dares to be different. For this long time collaborator of Dibakar Banerjee even Happy New Year is a political film. “I think politics and economics is the basis of human condition. It may take the actual backdrop of a power struggle or not. Because of my educational background I am always aware of the political nature of the world. Even a love story explores politics,” says this graduate in Social Work from Mumbai University, who actually proved it with Rules: Pyar Ka Superhit Formula. “Every word you use has a political connotation. Like when you say meaningful cinema, responsible cinema it has a political undertone. I was speaking to a fellow writer on the current issue of censorship and he said do no harm but harm is also a label. Who is harmed, who is harming, what is the harm. Suppose you say something should not change because it will harm. That is exactly what my great grandfather faced when he sent my grandmother to school. One girl from a town in Maharashtra went to an English school. People threw cow dung on her; her father was ex-communicated from all the functions. Just because he was sending her daughter to a convent school meant that it was a bad activity. He was supposedly doing harm. That makes me see the world in a political sense,” says Juvekar whose adaptation of Greek novel “Z” with Dibakar as “Shanghai” was much appreciated. “There the guy who runs the truck over an activist, later drives the bulldozer on his own house. We all comment, ‘udaa diya’when a newspaper reports about an activist killed in an accident. I wanted to explore the mechanics of these political crimes.”
This week the duo has loosened up a bit with Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! When the young detective introduces himself as Bakshy, Byomkesh Bakshy we find it a little infantile considering the kind of standards they have set. “It is a homage kind of thing. It is a kind of fun thing, a little private joke. Also we also need to loosen up but it is not frivolous. Fun films need not be frivolous or sloppy. You will find a lot of detailing in the film. Our production designer Vandana Kataria was influencing the script because she started the research almost parallel with us and she kept on sending us images, police records, newspaper articles, which found their way in the story.”
A Marathi, Juvekar is quick to admit that she didn’t grow up on a Byomkesh diet. “Byomkesh was not translated into Marathi. Even Feluda was translated much later. I grew up on Marathi crime stories which were not in the same league as Bengali crime stories. We had slightly sleazier ones, which we were not allowed to read. I grew up on Agatha Christie and so apart from Sherlock you can also find some references of Poirot in the crafting of Byomkesh,” who only reads crime novels in the fiction segment apart from gorging on non-fiction.
Juvekar says the film will remind viewers of the kind of writing which happened in the ’50s and ’60s. “In Marathi it used to happen in Diwali magazines. In Bengal they appeared in Puja magazines. Simple middle class detective stories, not threatening but still threatening enough. We have not suffered the World War II, the annihilation, the anarchy. So in a way ours was a relatively safe society. For me the biggest challenge was adapting it to take it to ‘saving the world’ kind of level. I have expanded the scope of simple middle class story. I used the politics of that time to enrich my story, taking it to a larger level.”
Dibakar concedes that it is Juvekar who turned it into a coming of age story. “What fascinated me is Byomkesh’s image as a Satyanveshi. If he is a seeker of truth then obviously his truth is going to be threatened. And there is no one truth. We all agree on death as the ultimate truth but then different religions interpret the truth of death differently and because of our belief systems we believe in these different truths. Through a coming of age story I wanted this young detective, fresh out of college to realise this complexity of truth,” sums up Juvekar.
Social contract and consumerism
Juvekar is now working on a film that takes a look at people who are 50 plus, who are waking up to a reality that they slept through in interim and ignored certain realities of India. “They created this India and now they are waking up to see their children and find oh! this is not what we wanted to create. In their drive for good life may be they made mistakes. In my generation people have been deeply focussed on ambitions and somehow the sense of social obligation completely went out of the window with rupee becoming completely convertible, economy opening and consumerism taking over. We allowed a lot of our systems to rot. One day all of us have to wake to the reality of what we have done with India.” She feels contract system has broken the entire organisational bonding. “I grew up in times when people belonged to the organisations. This is very deep personal space but what happens when 20 million people are affected, it becomes a social phenomenon. For instance, I read a study which says China has one child policy and today they have a work force where children who come from one child policy are unable to work in groups. This is the prism I look the world from.”
