Neeraj Ghaywan’s three elder sisters would often recount stories of how they pampered him as a child, and would dress him up as Krishna, with blue colour all over his body. At some point, these stories lost the patina of nostalgia and humour for the 41-year-old filmmaker, when he began to understand the workings of the patriarchal household he grew up in.
“I asked them to not tell their children these stories because it’s obvious why I was given special treatment,” Ghaywan remembers. It is this awareness and deep empathy that is reflected in the characters he has created in both feature and short films – Meena (Shor), Devi (Masaan), Manju (Juice), and Bharti and Priya (Geeli Pucchi).
His latest short, Geeli Pucchi, starring Konkona Sensharma and Aditi Rao Hydari, is a part of Netflix anthology Ajeeb Daastaans. The film revolves around Bharti, a machine operator and Priya, a soft-spoken newcomer in the factory. Bharti hopes to get a desk job but her Dalit identity is a major roadblock while Priya, who is ‘Sharma ji ki bahu,’ enjoys her privileges with complete naivety. Geeli Pucchi explores their relationship as they navigate patriarchy, caste, and desires for both love and dignity.
Ghaywan does not shy away from giving us characters that are morally ambiguous but he contextualises their actions and intent ‘because humans aren’t black or white.' “To show an extremely outright bigoted and casteist person would have been very easy, but doesn't make for a very great narrative for me. In our lives, if we're the heroes of our own films, we always think we're the most righteous. It takes a while for us to acknowledge guilt, shame or wrongdoing of our own kind. That is the nature of human duality that I'm most intrigued by, which sadly, we don't look into much in our cinema,” he explains.
He gives Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon and Gillian Anderson-Jamie Dornan series The Fall as examples of other works that contextualise the villain. “While The White Ribbon talks about the origin of Nazism, The Fall explores with really tender gloves, how a sociopath comes into being and how male toxicity comes into our lives.”
The core idea of exploring ‘women going after what they deserve and want’ came to Ghaywan while he and Varun Grover were writing Masaan but they decided that thematically, ‘it was incongruous with the world of the film.' When Ajeeb Daastaans producer Dharmatic Entertainment invited him, it seemed like the right time to return to the idea. Only this time, he decided to add layers of caste and queer love to the lens.
“Intersectionality is something that I'm very intrigued by. Gender cannot be seen in isolation; it also has to be seen through the other marginalisations that limit us.”
When Ghaywan sat down to write Geeli Pucchi, he had two challenges – to write a balance between the themes and to write about queer women with as much authenticity as possible. “The first was obviously tricky because you inevitably end up picking one marginalisation over another. As for the other, I decided to involve people from that particular subaltern in the process. I actually ran it past friends of mine who are lesbians, and who gave me a lot of perspective on things.” In a previous version of the story, there was a moment where Bharti feels jealous of Priya’s husband. “A friend of mine said that doesn't happen, and that they don't really care. There's also no jealousy because you're living in such marginalisation that it doesn't affect you much. It's when I realised it was my male gaze looking at things, and I corrected it,” he adds.
There was one theme, though, that Ghaywan did not need much help with – caste. The Hyderabad-bred director ‘came out’ as Dalit in 2018. One of the six principal characters in Masaan belonged to the Dom community of Varanasi that are designated to handle and burn corpses. In Geeli Pucchi, Sensharma’s character identifies herself as a Dalit, and there is even a dialogue where a fellow worker reminds the ambitious Bharti that the reason she does not get the job is because she does not have a ‘privileged-caste surname like Banerjee or Sharma.'
There has been some critique of this as an exposition of the Dalit identity. While Ghaywan believes the assessment is warranted, he explains his reasons. “I feel like a lot of people still don’t know about caste or understand how it is problematic. Once when I was house hunting, the broker asked for my caste. I was initially taken aback, and then I realised that she meant to ask my religion, which is equally bad but often class or religion are confused with caste. So I felt it required to be expositional.”
There has also been some criticism of casting an upper caste, heterosexual actor to play a queer Dalit character. “How does one navigate through casting someone who is dalit and queer? I can’t outright ask someone if they’re both or either,” says Ghaywan while making the point that “It's impossible to find an actor like Koko (Sensharma), who gets the complexity of the character, and also comes from a place of absolutely wanting to own it. And I didn’t want to compromise on my art because if I did, this would become a form of tokenism. I know we compare ourselves to Hollywood when it comes to inclusivity but we are decades behind.” There has been some talk that Konkona was brown-faced for the film but Ghaywan was appalled at the idea. “I detest the idea of brown-facing. In fact, I have called it out when Bhumi Pednekar’s character was brown-faced (in Bala). I would never brownface an actor, no matter what. I also want to clarify that I didn’t cast Koko for her complexion.”
Hindi films traditionally have either erased caste or depicted Dalits in minor roles of helplessness and poverty. It is only recently that films like Newton and Mukkabaaz have began to very tentatively explore caste. The much-hyped Hindi remake of Nagraj Manjule’s Marathi film Sairaat, Dhadak, also produced by Karan Johar's Dharma Productions (the parent company of Dharmatic Entertainment), completely removed the searing critique of the caste system in the original that formed the backbone of the film. Ghaywan remembers being invited for a screening for the Ishaan Khatter-Janhvi Kapoor-starrer by Johar, and telling the producer ‘however much I appreciate the director’s intent, erasure of caste is problematic.' That someone as ‘mainstream’ as Johar has used their platform to showcase Geeli Pucchi signals a shift, however small.
After a little over a decade in the industry, Ghaywan believes that second-generation Bollywood producers and directors do not see religion, class or caste.
“I've seen more of classism and religious bias from the small-towners who have come and made their mark. But if you look at the core industry, there are none of these biases. It's actually sheer ignorance. Living in their cocoons, they've never seen or heard of how things happen and don't understand at all.”
While Ghaywan feels a responsibility to represent a subaltern, he does not want it become his whole identity as a filmmaker. “I want to be known as a filmmaker, and not have the adjective ‘Dalit’ added to it. It's a very very dichotomous position. On the one side, I want to be an artiste, and I believe strongly – deriving a lot from Satyajit Ray's films – that your narrative should be at the fore, and your politics should be secondary. At the same time, I feel if I'm the only one, I have to pull in more people. I'm equipped to tell these stories, and I've amassed a little bit of privilege at this point with some cred in the industry with which I can make these narratives happen. But then I also will be bracketed.” This is where co-directing Sacred Games Season 2 or the forthcoming season of Made In Heaven helps the director to stretch his wings a little.
Ghaywan’s foray into serialised storytelling has also been a way to release the pressure of what he calls the ‘second-film syndrome.' It’s been six years since the release of his globally acclaimed debut film. “There are no aspirations of greatness or anything else – it is just that you want to do something that augurs well with your world view, and just screams at you to be made. It's just that simple. I'm toying with a couple of ideas but this year, I have to start my feature at least. I don't want to do anything else after Made in Heaven. I want to be harsh with myself, and not say yes to any more TV shows or whatever. No more of the artistic delays and wallowing in pity and all that - I want to slap myself and say, 'Get on with work now. Chop Chop. Write your scripts right now.'"
Ajeeb Daastaans is streaming on Netflix India.
from Firstpost Bollywood Latest News https://ift.tt/3u0c9rE
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