PROJEKT iVIEW : MERA GAON MERA CINEMA
iVIEW AUTHOR:
Dipankar Giri (Bombay, India)
email:
dipankar.giri [at] gmail.com
I was going thru the pages of “The motorcycle dairies” n suddenly Fusor hold my hand n drove me into The Amazon…was luking at him…the dark chamber of night has covered the whole water..n i was swimming wid him… Fuzor wanted to scrub this river to unite the two colonies… I was recalling these lines of Ernesto while my last breaths…
Is a piece of two lives taken in a moment when they were cruising together along a given path…… With identity of aspirations and a conjunction of dreams….. Was our vision too narrow, too partial, too rushed?
But I crossed the river safely…n this strange step chilled the other side..n I too was dancing n celeberating…. thousands of hands were bidding him a farewell….I m smiling on Fuzor ..is this an end or just a beginning for Fuzor…..Fuzor who is so well identified by d director that he stoles the whole show..
Ernesto (to Fuzor) :You know what your problem is………Your fucking honesty. n Fuzor is like that only….. I just love him like others do…I also bid a goodbye to him n the next moment I was at charanpur…with Mohan bhargav….closing the eyes of kaveri amma….mohaannnnnnnnn….and then there was Melaram n Nivaran….came together to educate the village. “Swades” was an attempt to show us the illiteracy…the poverty…n the castism…Melaram represents a villagers dream wer as nivaran dada’s character shows that how much our villages r desperate to become advance…true, these characters were captured beautifully….but what the director shows us is at very superficial level…only thing of swades which disturb me often is a dialogue..Mohan bhargav says that “humein andhere me rahne ki aadat ho gayi hai ” I don’t know Mr. Bhargava is referring to which “andhera”…. may be it’s poverty, backwardness, illiteracy….sori Mr. Gowarikar but this is not the real sketch of contemporary Indian village..it lacks the research….u r telling about andhera…but this andhera can be conquered if the government policies would implemented honestly…but what about the another andhera which is not so innocent…. these Indian villages has covered a long way…everything has changed…go to the villages…say UP …the streets r full of different flags…there were Mayawati’s flag…Samajwadi’s flag…replacing mythological bjarangbali’s flag….every village has divided …every family separated….
I think that after 60 yrs of independence Indian villages were more divided where they should ideally unite…go n meet some old woman or man.. no one feels for them in the village..they were left behind a lot in the race of politics n unemployment. the youth has diverted from their path….they have been converted into violent groups.. and over seventeen states are in the grip of Naxalism. They r disrupting the highways, railways, tunnels, bridges. They demands a heavy package from the companies like L n T who has the responsibilities to make roads for the government. The political dramas holding at state capitals is indirectly thrashing the unity among the naïve villagers..In UP n Bihar mass killing were done every month…the only byline….revenge for revenge…upper caste vs lower caste…
This is contemporary village. we are making globally accepted Malls, multiplexes, n stepping ahead towards a new India…world has become a global village..but where the real villages were heading….forget electricity,water,drought,floods…what is the answer of violence n politics which has surrounded these villages…meeting some communists Ernesto writes “Those eyes had a dark and tragic expression They told us about some friends that had disappeared under mysterious circumstances.. That was one of the coldest nights of my life….But meeting them made me feel closer to human kind.Strange, so strange to me…“. now the sentiments have dried up in villages also…the moral values are changing exponently in our villages…have read a story of woman who was left alone in the family.. when she died the question arises..who will offer agni to him…coz the man who will give the agni will have to follow all the rituals & formalties…till 12 days…no one in the village came forward ..so they hire a dom (a lower caste performs the task of cremation of dead bodies ) but he demanded some price for this work.. the money they collected was too less to pay even for the woods ….so to pay off the wood vendor and dom the villagers told them that the dead has a nathuni(an ornament used to wear in nose) made of gold which has kept under her mouth as a ritual. So as soon as u lit her up u can fetch the ornament….they agreed n dom tried his best to bring out the ornament safely but couldn’t find it….nobody could get the answer that what happened to the ornament…the writer wrapped the story leaving many questions….does professions are hijacking the emotions…
Ernesto writes “ Dear mom…I knew i wouldn’t be able to help that poor woman That up to a month ago she had been serving tables, panting like me Trying to live with dignity. In those dying eyes, there was a humble request for excuses And a desperate plea of consolation that gets lost in the emptiness Just as her body will get lost very soon in the magnitude of the mystery that surrounds us Yes, that’s it, that’s were we are from”
In the same way “helicopter” story of Vijay Pandit explores the rigidity of our political leaders. There is a big piece of land in the village called sarpatiya teela..which is surrounded by the large sarpat plants…the land was the soul of the village which was used as toilets by the women of the villages..the meeting point of lovebirds and also a number of handicraft work is executed there …in brief it was the most happening place of the village..a rally happens there n for security reasons the plants were cut n they converted the land into a plane surface…n with this landmark of faith n culture of village got ruined……the story has some brilliant moments n contains reality in pieces…it’s poignant that the leader who is the lone voice of dalits could not understand the sentiments of her own people n visits the village in helicopter, delivers her speech n fly away …..
recently when I visited my native village the panchayat elections were on the full swing..i was shocked to c the nomination register…for a single post of mukhiya there were 28 contestants ..n five to six of them came to me to write a speech for them…I felt that these contestants were not there to win the election but they just want to divide the vote…
Of all the tales of contemporary villages their reflection in Indian cinema is yet to be observed…the cinema must tell the story of these indigenous people…… I liked Swades due to its vulnerability. nobody could help haridas..The grief of haridas is very genuine n real but should not be told in the way it was told..it’s more like an interview…it’s not that the track had a problem..the audience just could not digest it..our cinema needs to be more intelligent…specially when we r dealing with our native characters…
The vast n deep reality of Indian villages is yet to b discovered…the global audience (specially NRIs) love n admire Yashraj films simply coz they helps their kids to brush up their hindi…we r showing an urban art to an urban audience…we r selling cozier life style to them who had already become used. to .recently shekhar kapoor raised an important point that we should show ur desi cinema to the world….i completely agree with him coz a foreign tourist comes India to take bath in Ganga (they have more clean rivers than us)..to visit qutabminaar (they have much taller buildings)….they never came to c a shopping mall.or multiplexes….n y we r crying only for global audience…our Indian audience has lot to discover in their own country…but do we tell them their real stories…moreover do we tell them in the style they like..u can’t beat the Indian humour..it’s the best way to tell the world about what we r for…but for that we too have to come out from our ac rooms to explore the real India…as fuzor n Ernesto did…n changed them a lot.. Ernesto writes..
…but that aimless roaming through our enormous America has changed me more than I thought
I…..am not myself anymore
At least, I’m not the same inside…
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Dipankar:
we shd wait for Shivmurty’s “Tarpan” to be adapted. had read its rights has been purchased by some filmmaker and film is under progress.
Villages have been changed since the time of Premchand. People still have dialogue there so we see more politics and division and clashes there. In City under the excuse of more civilized way these clashes have taken the cover of avoiding each other. Silent intrigues give illusion that people have less clashes and discriminations in cities. They dont meet with each other as villgers meet in daily life so village life is still more sxpressible and hence we can easily make comments and ideas abt life there.
Villages and villagers might have changed but this is not entirely impossible that there are no people like Mohan Bhargav.Its in idea. Mohan Bhargav is nothing but a small clone of Mohan Das Karam Chand Gandhi. Once realised they did not feel hitch to go back to their returns and did not feel weakness in trying to make things better at their original place.
Swades is not a film abt village’s conditions but more film of journey of Mohan Bhargav.
Mohan Das did so many things but are his efforts done between 1920 and 1940s, capable to keep all of us in that paradigm for which he had done his efforts? No situations have always been worse and someone who gets kick in consciousness has to raise his head that he has taken this responsibility to do something. On small scale this happens all the time but perhaps we always need Gandhi like giants, which happens seldom so we are most of the time in darkness.
Villages are more divided becasue countless Mohan Bhargav’s friend of NASA, once came out of their vilage then never kept any concern with the place where they took birth. Somebody’s son got chance to study in big city and joined good job, and his childhood fellows remained in village and indulged in farming, so families of both kinda guys have to be divided.
Nice article Dipankar:)
Dipankar,
A good informative article. I would agree with you that lot of villages remain in the same stage, they were 1000 years back.
The film makers for unknown reasons are not able to pin point the core issues.Many writers and film makers know the craft of scripting/film making but remain blind about our social fabric.
Swadesh was atleast an attempt in the right direction.
Its a very emotional article. I remember crying & feeling so guilty while watching MOTORCYCLE DIARIES.
Keep writing.
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Music – Jurassic 5
Book – THE GAME
swades was good attempt. but rare villages have that clean streets.
True villages can be seen in Satyajit ray movies or films like Bandit Queen.
Dipankar!!
What are you ranting about? degeneration of villages or lack of coverage of them in movies. Well if it is later, then blame globalization and its onslaught. People if villages have clearly understood the politics of majority in India these days – So they are dividing not to lose power, but uniting in the name of their caste to deal with the political power brokers. So division at the village level, but uniting in the caste level to create a vote bloc. If you are more worried abt lack of representation in movies, well regional cinema has long standing tradition of portraying realistic villages, sometimes with no apology, even showing some unsavoury aspects unlike Manoj Kumar’s glorfied village in Uphaar. Probably you should see the works of Adoor, Aravindhan from Malayalam, Bharathiraaja,Devaraj Mohan,Kamal Hassan (Thevar Magan and Virumaandi) Manivannan and a host of others in Thamizh – recently Ameer in Paruthi Veeran, Puttana Kanagal, Girish Kasaravalli and many more in Kannada, Telugu – I am not aware much of and offcourse Oriya movies by B.P.Mondal and A.K.Bir. These people have shown the lives of Village very clearly. However regional cinema doesn’t get the patronage to be shown in film festivals and nominations. Hence what you are ranting on applies only to Bollywood and in that case yours is a lost cause. The situation can improve if hindi belt can be split state wise to give state specific movies for “hindi” regional cinema. As far as other region are concerned, there is no dearth of good village movie. However I must regard the downright ignorance and lack of sensitivity and understanding of film critics too towards village themes and stories also as a dampner in the situation.