Hindi cinema seems to be facing a crisis of confidence, with theatres screening older films rather than newer ones. And these films are doing well too: Laila Majnu (2018) and Tumbbad (2018), for example, earning more at the box office now than when they were initially released. Perhaps it is nostalgia, a sense of lapsed innocence that we keep insisting once existed, that draws us back to these films. Walking out of Veer-Zaara (2004), eyes clouded by torrents of ache, I wondered, as you may too, can we again make films where love is the only preoccupation of the characters?
Fantasy may be described as the absence of pressing material conditions. Do we not demand more from stories today, do we not demand less from fantasies? And in doing so, have we not fundamentally traded off the song for the sink?
Innocence is, in some sense, the opposite of experience. When we complain of lapsed innocence, what we are truly complaining about is the invasion of life.
Trending: The material life
To read the journalist Neha Dixit’s The Many Lives Of Syeda X then is to see life invade storytelling in one of the most thrilling Marxist texts. It is The Great Indian Marxist Book, a journalist’s account of one woman traced from the early 1990s to the present day, from the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 to the Delhi riots of 2020, threading through 50 different types of jobs.
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Dixit meticulously grounds the protagonist Syeda X in her material life—how much she gets paid, how much she pays. The chapters are divided into the various jobs she has performed and are listed according to the products she helped make: Zari, Raisin Gajak, Doorknob, Almond, Soft Toy, Incense Stick, Tricolour, and Wedding Card. Imagine your biography split into phases marked by the various jobs you might have endured—because let us be honest, we endure work. Doing this is to shift the very way in which we enter a person’s life. It is to dismantle the neoliberal fixation with the labour-leisure dichotomy.
Dixit’s descriptions help pin Syeda X’s material, not psychological, conditions.
“Their house had seven or eight rooms on each of the four floors which were rented out for Rs.1,500 each per month. Each room was 8 foot by 10 foot; up to five or six people would sleep next to each other, side by side, in each room. The electricity bill was extra. Even though the electricity company charged Rs.4 per unit, the tenants had to pay Rs.8. That was the norm.”
What emerges from this dense detailing is not a complete portrait of Syeda X because what Dixit wants to produce is not a complete portrait of Syeda X; she is interested not in her person but in the material grounding of her life, captioned by various parallel historical etchings: mosques being broken, temples being built, policies being churned, laws being inked. Dixit produces not a protagonist but instead a historical subject. Psychological interiority emerging as though, if at all, from the vapours of the political, the material, and the historical.
For example, Syeda is mad at her son, Shazeb, because he falls in love with and marries Babli, a Hindu, without fanfare or dowry. Dixit writes: “Syeda had hoped to get a dowry for Shazeb’s wedding, which could have been used for Reshma’s [her daughter] wedding”. No dowry to sap, so no dowry to be sapped off for her daughter, a recycled wretchedness. Dixit concludes: “[Syeda] cursed Babli under her breath and never forgave her for the spell she had cast on her son.”
The spell! An idea forms in her text, without so explicitly stating, that witchcraft has economic foundations. This is something economists like Edward Miguel have been theorising, studying witch hunts in African societies, that witches are often those women who need to be cast out of the family because they are no longer contributing to the household. Dixit looks at Syeda’s xenophobic resentment of the new migrants who had to leave their homes after the Muzaffarabad riots as being the effect of sub-contractors reducing wages because of surplus labour. There is, you can hear the whisper if you press your ear against the text, an economic underpinning to the social conditioning.
Even her descriptions of political violence are entrenched in economic output. How do we know of Muslim disenfranchisement in post-Babri Banaras? “In those… days, the police destroyed so many looms in the weavers’ houses”—Muslim, mostly—“that the threads of Banarasi sarees clogged the drains.”
Toeing the line of the late Marxist critic Fredric Jameson’s manifesto, Dixit’s rendering of Syeda X is not hopeless even if it is helpless. Hope, for Syeda, is merely the desire to keep moving forward, the sheer act of not stopping. Progress can mean two things: to be ahead today, to be better today. Syeda keeps scratching at the former, hoping that one day the latter will be caught under her nails.
The actor Parvathy on the sets of Thangalaan. The film is based on real events revolving around the lives of mine workers in the Kolar Gold Fields of Karnataka. In contrast, Hindi films attempting to portray realism are frail. | Photo Credit: Sathish P
Hindi films trading off the song for the sink
In the context of Dixit’s journalistic storytelling, one ponders about the realism in more recent Hindi cinema and streaming, framed as anti-fantasy, anti-romance, that is deeply suspicious. For example, The Viral Fever, the fountainhead of this movement of telling the “middle class” story—a hazy category where one can perform relative poverty, projecting monetary limitation as a virtue—carefully refuses Dixit’s specificity in storytelling. In Cubicles, we are shown how much the character’s bank balance is before the salary is credited—Rs.1,105.03—not after. And when details of the food are offered, it is only to evoke pity. In Panchayat, we know the salary—Rs.20,000 a month—only so that we can grieve for him when he finds out about his US-returned friend’s Rs.1.5 crore package.
In these stories, the specifics induce pity because that is how they want to see the middle class—as pitiful. The realism we are seeing in Hindi cinema is a false consciousness, creating a casteless collective of victims.
The fantasies that we used to see on the big screen had no barriers to entry; they were the point of least resistance that you could push at and sink into. It was a larger umbrella, though thinner. As we move towards realism, these barriers keep increasing because these films derive their value from portraying pity as a political act. Unlike Tamil subaltern cinema, such as this year’s Thangalaan and Vaazhai that build fantasy into realism, brim it with romance, make it a political powder keg—which is indifferent to pity, which is incensed, poetic, brash, and revisionist—Hindi cinema’s realism, its Tier 2 cinema, where a film titled Stree, or woman, can be made with male protagonists, is frail.
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In considering Jameson’s work on the political unconscious as something to fixate over, to ask whose rights are being asserted in cinema and along what lines of class (and caste) they are being expressed, you realise that nothing has fundamentally shifted. Even if we are telling stories of the middle class, they are still very much on the treadmill of class aspiration. If once we told stories of the rich, we are now telling stories of people who want to become rich. The tilt towards realism in Hindi cinema is not a tilt towards the subaltern but towards depicting the same hegemony at play disguised as inclusion. Class resentment girds these stories, one that can only be extinguished by class ascendance. The fantasies that were once expressed are now aspired to.
There comes a point though when this realism will harden, the desire for representation will be rendered sclerotic, and freedom and romance will disappear from the screen. Many are waiting for this crumbling point. I think we are already there
Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.
