Author: Omar Ahmed

The politics of racial hatred lingers in the rhetoric of a number of recent Indian films but it is often a subtext which comes and goes, failing to resonate such as in the overrated, faux Gully Boy, a deeply problematic work about Muslims in India today that wretchedly glances over the questions of representation in favour of condescending memoranda. In Arun Karthick’s Nasir, it is not rhetoric but something more substantial, pressing and unsettling in the trajectory the narrative takes. We are in Coimbatore, a Muslim ghetto, in Tamil Nadu. Nasir, a salesman who works at a local textile store, is played by Valavane Koumarane (a Franco-Indian theatre actor) who impresses in the lead role, projecting a composure that is measured in his benevolent social interactions. It would be wrong to argue a fatalism permeates the reticent mood of this gutsy work because it is a kind of political fatalism far removed from the genre context of noir. In fact, it is a fatalism nurtured by those around Nasir who in their both causal and explicit racism towards Muslims is part of a wider amplification of hate instigated and fuelled by the motley ways in which Hindutva has colonised popular discourse with an insipid brand of nationalism. Moreover, the film seems to ask to what degree have the so called ordinary citizens of India helped to instrumentalize communal bigotry through the distorted haze of social media. Dissent, a dangerous concept in Modi’s India, is re-imagined in the figure of Nasir, a Muslim who exists on the margins but grasps and practices the separation between religion and work. There is no fanaticism at work in the Muslim; that appears to be a problem inherently associated with an invisible mob, deliberately non descriptive whereby the suggestion that communalism can cut right through society becomes altogether terrifying.

The film opens with the Azaan (the Muslim call to prayer), an aural expression of Islam and the Muslimness of the ghettoized milieu, over the image of Nasir lying down. This unassuming opening is one of the most defiant and provocative political moments in contemporary Indian cinema in recent memory. But what exactly is being said here? Considering the extent to which the Azaan has been pithily derided and castigated in the public eye by Hindutva including personalities such as Sonu Nigam, the choice arrangement of the Azaan at the beginning of the film is of course a celebratory embrace of a faded secularism, remarking co-existence should and has always been an accepted part of Indian cultural life. Muslims do belong. However, as soon as Nasir and his wife Fatima go shopping in the markets, over the loudspeakers we hear a familiar political rhetoric of Muslims posing a danger to the values of India: ‘Today, danger advances on our motherland. Invaders, migrants, traitors and rebels seek to corner Tamilnadu and destroy it!’, comes the metaphorical refrain, a coded denouncement of Muslims as historically treacherous. If the othering of the Muslims as the enemy, denied a sense of belonging and citizenship, clashes with the aural symbolism of the opening Azaan, this is also the first instance in the film where racial hatred is not something going on beneath the surface or being discussed in secret amongst a few bigoted filled people, but is aired publicly since this is the new norm.

In terms of film style, the semi-observational approach coupled with an open frame is a welcoming sight, that mirrors Chaityanne’s award winning Court from a few years back. Both of these counter hegemonic works understand how politics can be communicated through quiet, uneventful and ordinary glimpses into life as it is. The everyday struggle Nasir faces is summed up quite brilliantly in the sequence in the textile store where he overhears a co-worker openly encouraging an upcoming Hindu festival to march through a nearby Muslim area. It is worth noting there is a brief exchange about videos the co-worker has forwarded, most likely of mob rule incidents, and shared of course through Whatsapp. Nasir, paralysed in the centre of the frame, is forced to listen to the rhetoric of religious intolerance. As Karthick notes in an interview, the use of the 4:3 ratio in which the film is shot, boxes in Nasir. Nasir feel anxious, never quite believing communal mob law could happen to him, finding a solace in his faith, although the film is careful never to categorise him as indiscriminately devoted to Islam.

The anxiety of continually being labelled as the other seems perpetual but it is faith that instils a tolerance in Nasir. In a sequence in a mosque, Nasir’s devotion is magnified in the rituals of Wudu and later prayer, the rhythmical combination of abstract shots amounts to something sublimely transcendental. De-centring the popular and damaging image of the threatening Muslim male is one that the film succeeds in achieving on a number of levels and that seems unheard of Indian cinema. Most films which depict the lives of Muslims often overlook or fail to address the wider socio-economic context of unemployment, deprivation and poverty faced by Muslims in India today. Nasir’s menial job as a salesman, the relatively poor housing conditions, and the lack of medical treatment for his ailing mother are interconnected in the oppression of Muslims in many facets of life in India.

Since events unfold over a day, creating a sense of impending doom, Nasir’s abundant social interactions amount to someone who never stops moving; consumed by the sheer pressures of daily life Nasir barely has time to think or get angry. One sequence towards the end finds Nasir on a mini excursion to an elite boy’s hostel to return blazers, trying his best to make some extra money, coming face to face with an economic and caste privilege that remains ingrained in the cultural fabric. Nasir won the NETPAC award at Rotterdam earlier this year and what director Arun Karthick has crafted with this second film is a virtuoso slice of neo-realism; augmenting the superfluous with an overriding, prescient ideological agenda that never feels strained. Karthick spent two years in the Muslim neighbourhood of Coimbatore, immersing himself in the milieu, unlocking palpable urban spaces, an invaluable detail that is reflected in the authentic feel for on location shooting. Where the film draws its greatest power is in the horrifying ending, one that resonated and left me moved to tears. At stake is not only the persecutory anti-Muslim mob violence that has taken hold of the paranoid subconscious but the erosion of religious tolerance and co-existence. In terms of political cinema, the final shot is nothing short of a miracle.

Filmmaker Buddhadeb Dasgupta opens with Lakhinder (Rajit Kapur), a bird catcher who has been traumatised by the early death of his three year old son, freeing a succession of birds. Juxtaposed to the morning sky, the benign gesture of Lakhinder opening his hand to release a bird crystallises a key theme; the want to escape from this fraudulent world. As we discover, the dreams that haunt Lakhinder, all of them to do with birds, are connected in his memories to his dead son. Dasgupta uses this personal narrative about loss to explore a wider existential theme to do with the equilibrium between man and nature, of which Lakhinder suspects he has violated and attempts to restore. Early on in the film, Lakhinder, a hereditary bird catcher, announces nonchalantly his refusal to catch and sell birds just so they can be consumed by city folk. This moral stance against the ways in which modernity and urban life continually exploit and swallow the environment, disrupting the everyday patterns of life disgusts Lakhinder. Rejecting the marketplace, Lakhinder becomes increasingly intertwined with the birds around him. There is a recognition the birds not only symbolically recall the ghostly memories of his dead son, but also harbour something sacred about the environment that demands to be protected. Disavowal turns into yearning for a physical transformation, Lakhinder expressing his want to become a bird and fly away, culminating in a spectacular deliverance. Lakhinder is played by Rajit Kapur, in one of his first roles, and who would go on to become a recurring presence in the later films of Shyam Benegal. Released in 1994, Charachar came at the end of Parallel Cinema, and is one of Dasgupta’s most visually arresting works; a haunting statement about nature, the environment, and a moving portrait of grief.

This series has tried to examine the role of the train as an iconographic component in the lexicon of Indian cinema, pausing to analyse sequences to detail the aesthetic and thematic significance of the train. Hutchings (1995: 69) argues ‘a film genre’s outer form was its iconography and its inner form its thematic identity’. If we interpret thematic identity as ideology and having surveyed the visual image of the train through Indian cinema, one of the first conclusions we can draw is that both the outer and inner form are in a constant dialogue with each other and it is impossible to separate them; iconography informs ideology and vice versa. Furthermore, the recurrence of the train through so many genres and cinemas does so in accordance with other readily identifiable visual elements (song and dance) offering an iconographic unity to the aesthetic structure of Indian films.

This shared visual grammar amongst Indian film directors and unspoken iconographic understanding challenges yet again the totality of auteurism. Still, it could be argued that since the train has never been specific to any single genre in Indian cinema, ‘the emergence of genre cinema’ (Vasudevan, 2011: 387) in recent years has inevitably meant the train as an iconographic component inherent to Indian narrative cinema could eventually disappear. Vasudevan (2011: 387) uses the example of director Ram Gopal Varma as epitomising this new genre sensibility, ‘reproducing a Hollywood standard of narrative integration, character-driven, and point of view storytelling’. Varma has worked in both the horror and gangster film genres with a Hollywood like approach to narrative and thematic choices.

Another decidedly patent discovery is the way the train has evolved over time as a narrative, thematic and ideological element ‘marked fundamentally by difference, variation and change’ (Neale, 1990: 56), representative of the way film genres function, extending the repertoire ‘by adding a new element or by transgressing one of the old ones’ (Neale, 1990: 56). Creative modernism has been key to the constancy of the train in Indian cinema. Filmmakers have always sought out new ways of visualising the train, thus feeding into what Steve Neale (1990: 46) calls ‘systems of expectation and hypothesis which spectators bring with them to the cinema’. Neale’s argument on the expectations engendered by film genres is an important one and although this series has not afforded me the opportunity to consider the role of the audience in relation to the train my final point towards the end of this conclusion will briefly outline potential audience research that could be undertaken to develop this study further.

I want to conclude, considering rapid transport in India, focusing on the Delhi Metro, which has the potential to challenge the train as a new site of urban ideological exchange for Indian cinema. The Delhi Metro began operating in 2002, offering Delhi a contemporary urban identity and Indian cinema a fresh new filmic space. The Delhi Metro has featured in a number of mainstream Hindi films including Paa (Father, 2009), Love Aaj Kal (Love Nowadays, 2009), Dev D (2009) and Delhi 6 (2009). In the cultural geography of spaces and places (see: Marc Auge, 1995) the Metro could be deemed a ‘non-place’, since it ‘cannot be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity’ (Auge, 1995: 77) unlike the train. Auge argues ‘supermodernity produces non-places’ (Auge, 1995: 78) such as hospitals, holiday clubs, supermarkets that are about ‘the temporary and ephemeral’ (Auge, 1995: 78). The Delhi Metro as new filmic mise-en-scene connotes a sanitised, controlled space, in stark contrast to the intimacy, noise and disorder of the train.

Simultaneously the Delhi Metro has been interpreted as a space of gender liberation. Here I want to bring in the ethnographic view of the Delhi Metro by Rashmi Sadana in which sees looks specifically at space as ideology. Sadana (2010: 82) says the ‘gender neutrality’ on the Metro makes it ‘a safe space for women’ and links her study to recent Indian films. In Delhi 6, Bittoo (Sonam Kapoor), a young Muslim girl, ‘trying to forge her own identity’ (2010: 82) is ‘framed by her going into and out of metro stations’ (2010: 82) in which ‘she sheds her salwar-kameez for belly button revealing tight tops’ (2010: 82). This refutes Auge’s argument about the Metro as a non-place, offering a cultural space for Bittoo to create a new identity while transgressing traditional gender expectations. In many ways, it is the newness of the Delhi Metro that has attracted Indian cinema, offering an image of a super modern, technologically advanced India that runs contrary to the old, polluting and archaic image of the ubiquitous train. It is unlikely that the Delhi Metro represents a threat to the iconography of the train but it does offer filmmakers with new possibilities with which to stage songs, action and romance.

Film genre as an academic discipline still leads to an ‘unduly prescriptive form of criticism’ (Ryall, 1978: 24) particularly when films are determined by thematic content. The iconographic interpretation of the visual culture of Indian films by film audiences is a question that remains unanswered in the context of this study. What role does the audience play in determining genre? What expectations are provoked when a train appears on screen? In many ways, the audience is intrinsic to the way genres function and the pleasures they offer. More research into the way audiences use Indian film genres would be useful here in answering significant questions about ‘whether the image has a meaning which is independent of the director’s use of it’ (Ryall, 1978: 32). Perhaps the most appropriate way of situating the duality of the train as an iconographic and ideological visual element of Indian cinema is through viewing genres as ‘patterns/forms/styles/ structures which transcend individual films, and which supervise both their construction by the filmmaker and their reading by an audience’ (Ryall, 1975: 27 – 28).

The train is one of many patterns, images and iconography present in the visual grammar of Indian cinema. Film genres are still defined on thematic and ideological lines. Then in the context of Indian cinema especially popular Hindi cinema that communicates with audiences in predominantly visual terms, the significance of Panofsky’s iconology becomes even more salient as ‘it emphasized the visual motifs and symbolic language of art rather than individual or mythic narrative’ (Flint, 2004: 32). If anything, the train is an enduring image in Indian culture, which films have used to narrate, negotiate and contest cultural, national and personal ideologies ‘that provide both familiarity and variety’ (Flint, 2004: 32-33) for audiences.

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Filmography (films appear in the order cited in the text)

Sattawis Down / 27 Down (Awtar Krishna Paul, 1974)
Chennai Express (Rohit Shetty, 2013)
Meghe Dhaka Tara / The Cloud Capped Star (Ritwik Ghatak, 1960)
Yaadon Ki Baraat / Procession of Memories (Nasir Hussain, 1973)
Aradhana / Worship (Shakti Samanta, 1969)
Satya / Truth (Ram Gopal Varma, 1998)
Company (Ram Gopal Varma, 2002)
Sarkar / Government (Ram Gopal Varma, 2005)
Ab Tak Chhappan / So far fifty six (Shimit Amin, 2004)
Kaminey / Scoundrels (Vishal Bhardwaj, 2009)
D (Vishram Sawant, 2005)
Black Friday (Anurag Kashyap, 2004)
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge / The Brave Hearted Will Take Away the Bride (Aditya Chopra, 1995)
The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012)
A Kiss in the Tunnel (G. A. Smith, 1899)
The Story of Film: An Odyssey (Mark Cousins, 2011)
L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat / The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (Lumieres, 1896)La Roue / The Wheel (Abel Gance, 1923)
Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
Panorama of Calcutta, India, from the River Ganges (1899)
Jawani Ki Hawa / The Wind of Youth (Franz Osten, 1935)
Vilasi Ishwar / Orphans of the Storm (Master Vinayak, 1935)
Achhut Kanya / The Untouchable Girl (Franz Osten, 1936)
Manzil / Destination (P. C. Barua, 1936)
Miss Frontier Mail (Homi Wadia, 1936)
Sholay / Flames (Ramesh Sippy, 1975)
The Great Train Robbery (Edwin Porter, 1903)
Khotey Sikkay (Narendra Bedi, 1974)
The Burning Train (Ravi Chopra, 1980)
The Towering Inferno (John Guillermin, 1974)
The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)
Dhoom 2 (Sanjay Gadhvi, 2006)
Solva Saal / Sixteenth Year (Raj Khosla, 1958)
Kala Bazar / Black Market (Vijay Anand, 1960)
Dil Se / From the Heart (Mani Ratnam, 1998)
Baazi / Gamble (Guru Dutt, 1951)
Jaal / Trap (Guru Dutt, 1952)
Taxi Driver (Chetan Anand, 1954)
The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007)
Barfi (Anurag Basu, 2012)
Parineeta / The Married Woman (Pradeep Sarkar, 2005)
Dabangg (Abhinav Kashyap, 2010)
Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)
Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948)
Pather Panchali / Song of the Little Road (Satyajit Ray, 1955)
Aparajito / The Unvanquished (Satyajit Ray, 1956)
Apur Sansar / The World of Apu (Satyajit Ray, 1959)
Abhijan / The Expedition (Satyajit Ray, 1962)
Nayak / The Hero (Satyajit Ray, 1966)
Aag / Fire (Raj Kapoor, 1948)
Lahore (M. L. Anand, 1949)
Chhalia (Manmohan Desai, 1960)
1947: Earth (Deepa Mehta, 1998)
Train to Pakistan (Pamela Rooks, 1998)
Swades / Homeland (Ashutosh Gowariker, 2004)
Ra One (Anubhav Sinha, 2011)
Main Hoon Na / I am Here (Farah Khan, 2004)
Mumbai Meri Jaan / Mumbai My Life (Nishikant Kumar, 2008)
Paa / Father (R. Balki, 2009)
Love Aaj Kal / Love Nowadays (Imtiaz Ali, 2009)
Dev D (Anurag Kashyap, 2009)
Delhi 6 (Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, 2009)