Hindi can be music to the ears in Mumbai: pure, poetic, pleasing Hindi unsullied by those throwaway English words or street patois. Poet, essayist, critic Ashok Vajpeyi had many of us mesmerised in Bandra’s St Andrews Auditorium last week with his fluent Hindi discourse on kahani (the story). It wasn’t just the eloquence of his prose but the thought behind it, the questions he raised, that rang a bell. And not just for film writers — veterans and budding — huddled together for the fourth screenwriter’s conference. But writers of any kind, journalists included.
“What kind of raconteurs are we?” he asked us to introspect. Are we the narrators of the tales of the violence unleashed by poverty, hunger and droughts and floods? Are we empathetic and brave enough to bring these dark realities to light? Will we ever tell the tale of a Medha Patkar whose face glows despite dealing with disappointments and failures? Or will we just celebrate the glossy, glib, successful faces? Will we rise above the religious/caste/class divides to see ‘them’ in ‘us’ and ‘us’ in ‘them’? Will we question the world around us with our works? We have begun to dream of trivial pursuits. Will we have the vision of ringing in a major change? Will we deepen the desire for independence, equality and justice in individuals and the society?
In a nation of plurality — be it the languages, dialects, religions, religious texts and gods and goddesses — how diverse are the stories we write, read, hear and see? Vajpeyi’s rhetorical question was: “ Hamari abhivyakti ka bhoogol kitna vistrit hai (how expansive is the canvas of our expression)?” Do we have the independence of spirit and an unfettered imagination? Not quite.
As if on cue, veteran journalist P. Sainath came up with a stirring keynote address (widely circulated in the media, and justifiably so) which spoke of the kind of stories we should ideally be writing: those on the cross-section of our multiple realities, spanning the yawning urban-rural/rich-poor gaps (“The fastest growing inequality in the world”, from 2000-2015). He had ready statistics: 15 richest Indians own more than what the bottom 50 per cent do, 100 richest Indians own more than the bottom 69 per cent do. The richest Indian (we know who) owns more than bottom 20 per cent of the population.
Eye-opening statistics
The ludicrousness of some of the examples he gave: of pouring tanker water into the Godavari river, of sending dodgy billionaires to Parliament, of 82 per cent of current parliamentarians being crorepatis, of 150 Mercedes cars sold at one go at seven per cent interest in Aurangabad while a woman banjara farmer was given a tractor at 15.9 per cent interest, of beer factories paying 4 paise for a litre of water while a woman in Aurangabad pays between 45 paise and Rs 1 for a litre, of “luxury home with attached forest reserve”, something not available to even the Indian tigers. All these could (to take a filmi example) make an absurd scene out of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron feel ridiculously sensible in comparison. “We cannot plead lack of inspiration when many such ideas kick us in our face,” Mr. Sainath said.
Since the days of liberalisation we have spoken of how our films have had an overt NRI tilt and an urban skew. In this urban reality where are the poor and those on the margins? Do they fit in our scheme of films? When, as Sainath pointed out “a Dharavi is as much a reality as Malabar Hill”.
Just a few days before the conference, in a conversation with the moving force behind the event, Anjum Rajabali, we ended up discussing if our young writers and filmmakers are consuming too many films and television shows, that too contemporary, foreign ones. Are they seeing and experiencing life — a small, limited slice of it in fact — through the screen than picking up the multiplicities by walking on the streets? It was not to dismiss feel-good/fantasy/entertainment/Mumbai or Delhi from our films. Just wondering about zooming in on alternate realities; after all, like love, cinema also needs to be a many-splendoured thing.
Yet as I move around in the Bollywood enclaves of Mumbai I find a literal deluge of talent — a majority from middle-class, educated families and from far-flung places like Madhepura and Hazaribagh — that seems to have descended in Aram Nagar, Versova. Will they unspool the multitudinous realities that they would have been a part of or will they also cop out to the overwhelming feel-good factor?
A quick look at the films of 2016 shows the promise of stepping away from the fantasy/entertainment zone in which our cinema has always lived, even if in a small measure: Chauranga , Aligarh , Nil Battey Sannata , Udta Punjab , Dhanak , Laal Rang and most recently, Budhia Singh: Born To Run . Who knows stories of the beef bans we currently face, of Bezwada Wilson who represents, as Sainath put it, “the greatest fight for human dignity on planet earth” will hopefully also come into our pictures soon. Change, after all, is continuous and cumulative.
Are we the narrators of the tales of the violence unleashed by poverty, hunger and droughts and floods?
