This column is meant to be about moments that illuminate something about a film, or about cinema in general. But films don’t exist independently of the people who watch them — the viewers who bring to the table their personalities, life experiences, ideological prisms, or the mood they happen to be in on the day. And sometimes, it’s impossible to predict what will affect you. Watching Ravi Jadhav’s Marathi film Nude , for instance, it was a setting that struck a personal chord with me.
I knew the plot beforehand: a poor woman named Yamuna, despite initial reservations, starts working as a nude model in an art school, and feels somewhat empowered in the process. But it wasn’t until around 20 minutes into the film that I realised a great deal of it was going to be set in Mumbai’s Sir J.J. School of Art. The first time we see the place is through the eyes of the protagonist, as she discreetly follows her aunt and is scandalised to discover that the latter sheds her clothes for a living. This sequence takes us into the spacious garden of the famous art institution; we see the outdoor sculptures, the exterior of the 160-year-old building designed in neo-gothic style… and then the hall where students sit at their easels.
Great affection
I was shaken by these scenes for reasons that had nothing to do with the film’s narrative. My mother, who died earlier this year at only 65 after a brave fight with cancer, studied at J.J. School of Art. She continued drawing and painting — sporadically, diffidently, not with professional ambitions — until late in her life, and always spoke of the school with great affection: about hanging around in the gardens with friends and boyfriends, feeling like they had a place to themselves, a sanctuary within the broader idyll that was the South Bombay of the 60s.
I often tell people Churchgate is my motherland — it’s where my mother spent her best years before circumstances led her to a bad marriage in Delhi, and a very different life from the one she might have envisioned as a teenager. When I made my first trip there as an adult in 2006 and walked around Oval Maidan and Kala Ghoda, I felt that odd sensation — a strong nostalgia for a time and place that one has never actually experienced. But I didn’t visit J.J. School, and this was the first time I was ever seeing it. On a screen, in Delhi!
This informed my whole experience of Nude , though I had no problem registering other things about the film: I admired the lead performances by Kalyanee Mulay as Yamuna and Chhaya Kadam as ‘Akka’; I rolled my eyes at an oracular Naseeruddin Shah cameo. But J.J. remained the most immediate and vivid takeaway.
Once that unexpected kinship with the film was established, other threads came into focus. Perhaps the connection was deepened because as a child I had seen my mother’s many struggles as a divorced woman, and Nude is about a woman who has left an abusive husband and is doing whatever she can to raise her son well. Or perhaps it was something more fleeting, like the scene where a student tells Yamuna that a bitch has just laid a litter of pups in the garden. This created a sense of the college premises as a friendly refuge for stray animals. One of the defining features of my mother’s life was her love for dogs, and I couldn’t help picturing her as a student, cooing over a stray in the J.J. lawns.
Under attack
And there is also the fact that my mother’s death coincides with a time when the arts — especially provocative, discomfiting art — always seem to be under attack. Though she wasn’t an intellectual in the commonly used sense of the word, she had a no-nonsense wisdom, understood concepts like freedom of expression very well, and took them as essential conditions of civilised life. Despite a prim-seeming surface, she could appreciate very dark, wicked or caustic humour.
And even when she did wrinkle her nose in distaste at some things I liked — gory films, books with subversive content — she never came close to suggesting I shouldn’t experience them. When I was barely 13, she took on a relative who was aghast that I was reading a German retelling of the Mahabharata with explicit sex scenes between Draupadi and Yudhishthira.
As Nude becomes more overtly political in its latter half, there’s a scene where hooligans storm into J.J.’s premises and desecrate the “dirty” paintings and sculptures that their minds cannot process or accept. For reasons that should be obvious by now, this scene felt to me like a private violation.
The Delhi-based writer and film critic finds it easier to concentrate on specific scenes than entire films as he grows older.
