Aligarh (Hindi)
Director: Hansal Mehta
Cast: Manoj Bajpayee, Rajkummar Rao, Ashish Vidyarthi
Hansal Mehta may have named his film after a place but Aligarh is essentially an individual’s film. It is about one person at a traumatic juncture in his life, an acutely observed, dignified and sympathetic character study of a violated man.
The retelling of the life of Dr. Shrinivas Ramachandra Siras, who was ousted from Aligarh Muslim University for homosexuality and was later found dead under mysterious circumstances, is addressed in the backdrop of the contentious issue of criminalisation of homosexuality in India.
The film’s strength lies in capturing the personality and psyche of Siras. Not just as he looks from outside but more so his inner life: his loneliness, advancing age and the betrayal and humiliation in the winter of his life.
So you have Manoj Bajpayee, with method acting at its peak, interpreting Siras his own way: working at that fidgety gait, the halting voice, his love for Lata Mangeshkar captured through songs like ‘Aap ki nazron ne samjha’ and ‘Betaab dil ki tamanna yahi hai’.
There are some details that linger. Like how he dislikes the reduction of his passion for another man into a three-letter word: gay. “It can’t quite capture the depth of my feelings,” he says. For him it’s an uncontrollable urge.
If love is a word that needs to be felt and understood than spelt out then religion, according to him, is not something worth understanding. “The minute you put your mind to it your beliefs and value system will disappear,” he says.
There is his suppressed anger coming out at a young reporter hounding him, telling them that he is not a circus joker. Then there his quirk of signing with his own pen, the blush that creeps up when he is told that he is handsome, how he talks about searching for true poetry in the silences and pauses between words, or when he takes refuge in poetry during court proceedings claiming to be a reluctant activist, unaware of the legalese. All he wants is to be left alone, with his dignity in tact.
Despite the underlying violence — physical as well as psychological — of the situation there is a quietude, gentleness and sincerity of treatment which heightens the larger, central debate of the film: should we be bothered about a person’s so-called immoral conduct or take up cudgels against society’s uncalled-for intrusion into the privacy of an individual? The shabby homes and the wintry, foggy, sinister air of a north Indian small town are captured well by the camera of Satya Nagpaul. What is better is the evocation of the town’s warped public moral compass, the gloomy air of a university that took the lead in taking the scientific temper and progressive thoughts to the Muslims yet started going downhill because of internal politics.
Some elements don’t come together as well in the overall narrative.
Similarly Deepu’s illicit passion paralleling Siras’s becomes too pat a way of driving home a point. And, the scene of Deepu realising the eventual tragedy doesn’t quite pack in an emotional wallop and feels too awkward and worked at. The film is a unique step forward in reality cinema in that it uses actual names of people and places involved in the real incident. But then it still has to put a disclaimer at the start.
