Garm Hava (Scorching Winds) [1973]

 M.S. Sathyu’s celebrated film Garam Hava delved into the minority experience during India’s Partition, not in terms of physical violence and political intricacies, but on its social and economic costs, by steadfastly focusing on a Muslim family that served as a microcosmic representation of the community. Additionally, it provided a mirror to three disparate periods – 1948, recently independent yet divided nation, on the backdrop of Gandhi’s assassination, when the story is set; 1973, on the verge of being plunged into Emergency, when the film was made (against considerable odds); and now, a polarized time replete with ghettoization and persecutions. The slice-of-life parable – adapted from a short story by Marxist and feminist Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai, and adapted jointly by Urdu poet Kaifi Azmi, and script writer, art director and Sathyu’s wife Shama Zaidi – is centred on the Mirza family in Agra, which is headed by two contrasting brothers. While the elder brother, who’s involved in politics and is aware of his self-interests, relocates to the newly formed Pakistan, the idealistic and gentle-natured Salim (veteran thespian Balraj Sahni, in a distinguished turn, that was also his final), who runs a shoe business, and stays back with his wife, kids and aged mother. His deep optimism that things will soon improve is continuously undermined as he loses their ancestral home, sees his business spiral, and faces religious hostility, while his love-stuck daughter (Gita Siddharth) suffers debilitating heartbreaks, elder son checks out, and younger son (Farooq Shaikh) fails to get employed. Yet, despite these relentlessly tragic setbacks, Salim refuses to surrender his dignity and hope, and ultimately embraces progressive politics, with this humanist streak providing a moving mirror to these turbulent times.

Director: M.S. Sathyu

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Political Drama

Language: Urdu/Hindi

Country: India

Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai [1980]

 Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s excellent tapestry Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai opened with an absorbing ride through the streets of Bombay, accompanied by a smooth jazzy score, which immediately made this seem like an intoxicating love letter to the city. Being the gentle, erudite and politically invested filmmaker that he was, Mirza had of course in mind a much more nuanced exploration and complex investigation of the city than that. He accomplished that through interlacing of three fervently political themes – with an infectious mix of satirical chuckle, simmering angst and defiantly Marxist gaze – viz. portrayal of minority experience, depiction of a heretofore “apolitical” working-class protagonist’s furiously evolving class consciousness, and an impassioned probe into the early days of what would erupt into the “Great Bombay Textile Strike” during the early-1980s. His infusion of elements of documentary and reportage into the narrative, and a dialectical reworking of the “angry young man” persona, brought in intriguing additional dimensions to it. The film’s eponymous protagonist, played with insouciance and aplomb by Naseeruddin Shah, is a Christian auto-mechanic who starts off as an aimlessly angry, smug, opinionated and insular guy who’s proud of his wealthy customers, is incorrigibly boorish to his independent-minded girlfriend (Shabana Azmi), and is casually derisive of any protests by workers. However, when his father (Arvind Deshpande), a veteran textile worker, is beaten up by lumpen thugs at the best of the mill owners for participating in strikes, he starts experiencing a remarkable change in his political views and expressing solidarity towards those who he’d been dismissive of. The fine cast also comprised of Smita Patil as Albert’s wry sister and Dilip Dhawan as his disillusioned brother, among others.

Director: Saeed Akhtar Mirza

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama/Political Drama/Romantic Drama

Language: Hindi

Country: India

Khandhar (The Ruins) [1984]

 Made during the 1980s, his final productive decade, Mrinal Sen’s Khandhar was as much about physical ruins as emotional ones. The interplay between the two, especially how one informs the other, added nuanced undertones to this quietly evocative work. Like many films before and since, it’s around a few urbane and carefree friends going on a short fun getaway out of the city, only to experience something far deeper and more complex than what they’d expected. It begins with Subhash (Naseeruddin Shah), a photographer, reliving a lasting melancholic memory elicited by an old photo of a woman that he’d taken in the past, and that’s followed by a double click into that memory. Dipu (Pankaj Kapoor) had coaxed him into taking a weekend trip to his ruinous ancestral home located far from the madding crowd; Shubhash’s thoughtful nature and Dipu’s matter-of-factness are complemented by the goofy spirit of Anil (Annu Kapoor), who also joins them. Upon arriving at this dilapidated estate – which had once boasted of prosperity but eventually turned into a crumbling wasteland as residents moved out and scattered elsewhere, and which seems to be stuck in a time warp that’s far removed from modern city amenities – they meet Jamini (Shabana Azmi), an intelligent but lonely woman who too is irrevocably stuck. Her blind and dependent mom, obsessed with a guy who’d promised to marry Jamini but never did, starts assuming that he’s finally returned, and that leads to the formation of a fleeting yet profound attachment between Shubhash and Jamini. Elegantly shot by K.K. Mahajan, comprising of a particularly memorable turn by Azmi, and filled with deafening silences, this clearly remains one of Sen’s most low-key works.

Director: Mrinal Sen

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama

Language: Hindi

Country: India

Bhuvan Shome [1969]

 Mrinal Sen’s first Hindi film, Bhuvan Shome, came at an intriguing juncture. While he’d already made 8 features – including the delightfully roguish romcom Akash Kusum – he was still a year away from transitioning into an emphatically political filmmaker. This seriocomic ‘slice of life’ tapestry – which he adapted in an understated deadpan vein from a story by the pseudonymous Bengali novelist “Banaphool” – nevertheless amply demonstrated his burgeoning love for formal playfulness, from jump cuts, freeze frames and animated doodles to whimsical episodes, wry internal monologues and sardonic narrations (by Amitabh Bachchan in his first movie credit). Incidentally, Satyajit Ray, who’d derisively summarized it as “Big Bad Bureaucrat Reformed by Rustic Belle” – his seven-word synopsis, though, was inch-perfect – may’ve been influenced by it to an extent when he made his first Hindi feature 8 years later, viz. the deliciously satiric period film Shatranj Ke Khiladi. The eponymous Mr. Shome (Utpal Dutt), a high-ranking Bengali civil servant and middle-aged widower – is an incorrigibly proud and uncompromising stickler for rules. Growing mid-life existential crisis leads him to a “hunting holiday” – in a farcical attempt to cure loneliness with adventure – and finds himself in an isolated terrain in rural Gujarat. At the end of an absurdist last-mile bullock cart ride, he’s inadvertently acquainted with Gauri (Suhasini Muley), a lively, unambiguous and friendly village girl who helps the gauche Shome, clearly a fish out of water, while also reforming him without really meaning to. During his bumbling expedition, Gauri’s vivacious charm and nonconformist views end up striking a deep chord within him – probably falling in love with her too – and he finds himself a light-hearted and uncharacteristically forgiving man upon his return to the city.

Director: Mrinal Sen

Genre: Comedy/Social Satire/Adventure

Language: Hindi

Country: India

A Night of Knowing Nothing [2021]

 Payal Kapadia’s stunning hybrid docu essay A Night of Knowing Nothing – alternately hypnotic and urgent, intimate and shared, impressionistic and pulsating, melancholic and feverish, fragile and radical – fluidly glided between epistolary narrative, found footage and defiant activism. The ‘Film and Television Institute of India’ graduate made her institute both canvas and springboard for her inquiries into individual and collective memories, and invoked Milan Kundera’s powerful statement in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. The delicately muted yet boldly shapeshifting work, unsurprisingly, bore eclectic cinematic traces – from being informed by Chantal Akerman, Chris Marker and John Abraham to directly nodding to Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Pasolini and Ghatak. Set to the heartbreaking voiceover of an unnamed film student – lamenting, over letters to her estranged boyfriend, the breakdown of their relationship as she belongs to a lower caste, and thereby touching upon how love is as much political as it’s personal in an intensely patriarchal and caste-ridden society like India – it expanded into a rousing testament to dissent, disobedience and resistance by students. Starting with the massive protests that’d rocked FTII upon the outrageous appointment of a loyalist of the country’s reactionary government – which Kapadia had herself fearlessly participated in – it then segued into student activism movements that erupted across various public universities, and the violent wrath of the state machinery that they faced. The film’s contrapuntal texture – interlacing elegiac meditations and dream-like images with the thrilling here-and-now verité of archival footage – was magnificently woven through its amorphous structure, exquisite photographic compositions – grainy, low-fi, 8mm and 16mm B/W images, interspersed with shots of saturated colours – and deeply absorbing sound design.

Director: Payal Kapadia

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Hindi/Bengali

Country: India