A friend recently expressed his desire to watch Abhishek Chaubey’s Sonchiriya, set in the once-dacoit-dominated Chambal region of Madhya Pradesh. More than the plot or the misdeeds of the dacoits, he was interested to encounter such a place through a film. Though part of popular folklore, places like Chambal have only recently been reappearing in mainstream Hindi films. My friend also mentioned how excited he is now to encounter small towns or rural areas in contemporary Hindi cinema.
Earlier, the rural always existed in Hindi films. It was a regular narrative trope: characters from rural areas would always be arriving in the city. Those films created a split between the rural and the urban: the rural was seen as pure and the urban as impure, the rural as innocent and the urban as corrupt. They created a binary between the village and the city.
Manoj Kumar furthered this split through his nation-loving films, which cast the West invariably in a poor light, robbing people from the East of their principles. In the 1970s, the Hindi ‘new wave’ filmmakers also made films set in the rural. However, 1990 onwards, the rural gradually disappeared from Hindi films. The urban took centre stage and, slowly, so did the middle class and the rich.
A clutch of new films and filmmakers is attempting to restore the rural to Hindi cinema. And they are going beyond the idyllic hamlets of Punjab. But what does it mean to encounter a place through film? People make a place. We attribute an identity to a location vis-a-vis its people, who constitute its socio-cultural fabric.
Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara, set in the badlands of rural Uttar Pradesh, added a new dimension of caste-based politics to the film, thereby rendering it contextually true. Gangs of Wasseypur was a trendsetter in this regard. It introduced a range of idiosyncratic characters to Hindi cinema. The rural does not appear as a caricature, as it did in Priyadarshan’s Malaamal Weekly . Anarkali of Aarah took us to the by-lanes of the hinterlands of Bihar. Newton was a plunge into the Adivasi settlements in the forests of Chhattisgarh. Bareilly Ki Barfi showed us a free-spirited girl who refused to bow down to the pressures of marriage.
All these films have had myriad depictions of the rural — from the oppressed to the celebratory. Through them we recognise people as individuals with wants and desires and not case studies or objects of anthropological lust, as they were at one time.
The writer teaches literary and cultural studies at FLAME University, Pune
