A subtle film is also a misunderstood film. While speaking to the director Vikramaditya Motwane at a Q&A session after a screening of Indi(r)a’s Emergency—his documentary on Indira Gandhi and the clamping of both freedom and sperm ducts under her and her son Sanjay Gandhi’s forceful thumb between 1975 and 1977—I asked if he was comfortable with his film being misread.
The tightly wound, densely researched documentary begins with 1942’s Quit India Movement, quickly flips to Independence, Partition, the Constituent Assembly debates, the early decades, Indira’s initially limping but eventually strident rise to power, and then the Emergency. This much is clear: the film is not interested in Indira’s journey as much as in what she does when she reaches her destination.
It is claustrophobically factual—every sentence of the documentary is a fact, narrated in the chilling monotone of Swanand Kirkire. The film’s thrust is clear to those who read between the lines: Motwane is interested in Indira as an allegory, another incarnation of which is Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The point is to make that connection. But what if that connection is not made? Does the film lose its moral purpose?
Also Read | Bollywood’s shallow realism
The liberal will be sated having made the connection. The demagogue and his coterie, too, would be sated, seeing that brutal Congress legacy given voice. What gets lost between the two is the film. If Roland Barthes argued for the death of the author, Motwane here argues for the death of the text itself. You see in it and take from it what you want. In itself, it is immaterial. Ideology, after all, grounds facts, which themselves have a habit of floating in the wind.
Motwane insists that the film is a mirror of the times. It is a transcription, not a translation. It is the usual posture of objectivity, which rarely holds when you test it, for objectivity itself is a myth. Motwane cites and suggests Gyan Prakash’s Emergency Chronicles, but the opening of the book made its disdain for neoliberalism, for the current status quo, gin clear. We are always standing at a slant to the world. Why pretend otherwise?
The producer Sameer Nair, also on stage, replied: “All subtext is purely coincidental.” A chuckle ruffled the audience.
Vikramaditya Motwane, the director, insists that the film is a mirror of the times. It is a transcription, not a translation. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
This is not to argue against subtext, but when we grab onto subtext out of fear, not form, it is a different kind of reading we have to perform, one of valourised pity. Unless fear itself has become a form. In which case, the very act of spectatorship turns into one of patronising investigation, the eyes serving as telescopes, the watching inflected by reading. When in Anurag Kashyap’s Kennedy, we hear about “bade papa” (big daddy) and his consummate influence over civic life, we have to know he is talking about Mukesh Ambani and only then the joke lands. To state things plainly would be implausible, especially given that the film had its India premiere at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre to a packed audience—a coup, if you ask me. The state cannot be called out, and Ambani has cemented his state-like status with unambiguity. Something must shimmer.
Skirting censorship by placing it in the future
For example, in Dibakar Banerjee’s film Tees—a triptych that traces a Muslim family from 1990s Kashmir to present-day Mumbai to a dystopian Delhi in the future—it is the future that is the site of state censorship. The protagonist Anhad Draboo, a poor writer from a well-to-do family, is trying to get his book published but is rejected by a committee. He ignores their inane suggestions and does not resubmit his manuscript. He will remain poor and unpublished; that is his stance as a principled artist—oblivion.
Banerjee has displaced the censorship regime of the present to the future. He satirises it, making the tragic comic, easier to swallow. The other stories, of the present and the past, are told without this comedy. The tragicomic genre is, after all, meant to sweeten the consumption of pain.
Also Read | Speak, don’t shriek: Why do some progressive films tell us how to think?
Why not make state censorship part of the present day’s story? This was the question a few of us discussed after the screening. Banerjee’s present, instead, is preoccupied with an upper-class Muslim woman and her female lover unable to get a flat in Mumbai. Sometimes it is sexuality, elsewhere religion, that is a bottleneck. The state is not involved here, it is society and its unwritten rules. The state is a culmination of society. That culmination, a regression, is darting towards the future.
OTTs squirm at unsubtle subtext
Both Tees and Indi(r)a’s Emergency were commissioned by Netflix. Both were dropped when the OTT platform developed cold feet after seeing the final cut. Both directors have a significant filmography against their name. Both are progressive voices and make no bones about it in their fictional films whose subtext is apparent even if dangerously close to being unsubtly textual. They use political subterfuge—if you can even call it that—in these specific films by displacing the commentary, either by burying it under the text or by fabulating a future that gives voice to the present.
Displacement is a strategy that filmmakers use in fascist regimes. In Iran, for example, where you are not allowed to show kisses or even physical contact between the sexes, filmmakers show love through poetry, through images of the sea. We have to develop strategies, noted Maryam Tafakory in her video essay Irani Bag (2020), to “touch without touching”. Tafakory gives an example of a man and a woman on a bike, a bag between them, the bag an extension of her body and his, the incarnated promise of touch. It is also why in the 1980s and 1990s you had more films featuring children, who could evade the no-touch policy for adults. Even a close-up of a woman was a subversion. This kind of displacement can lead to what Hamid Taheri calls “fetishising resistance”, where we read small progressive gestures in a film as its general progressive posture, mistaking the part for the whole. We turn the capacity to evoke pity into an artistic virtue.
I suppose if we are looking for strident filmmaking, we must look towards filmmakers coming from India’s non-fiction space: Arbab Ahmad’s Insides And Outsides, Nausheen Khan’s Land Of My Dreams, Nishtha Jain’s Farming The Revolution, any film from Anand Patwardhan or Rakesh Sharma. These films state artlessly but directly. But maybe art is a luxury that can be afforded only by those who perform displacement.
Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.
