Courtly Indifference To Sudra Persecution

In the past quarter century or so, New Marathi Cinema has come to be enriched by important contributions from several young directors, including Mumbai-based Chaitanya Tamhane. Tamhane’s debut film, Court, won the Swarna Kamal in 2013. Tamhane was then only 29 years of age, weaned more on theatre than any other art form. Yet, strikingly, even whilst occasionally reminding the viewer of the director’s preoccupation with theatre, Court is never burdened with any trace of theatricality. The film attracted popular attention after winning more than one prize at the Venice Film Festival. Apart from awards at home and abroad, Court drew fairly large Marathi-speaking audiences. In fact, largely on account of the challenging personal style in which it is made, the film gained the notice of niche audiences across the country. In other words, Court is that rare film that has proved to be a hit with both connoisseurs of the ‘other’ cinema, as well as with the reasonably engaged ‘commoner’ with his or her interest divided between mainstream films and those of the more thought-provoking kind. Come to think of it, it is almost a phenomenon associated with New Marathi Cinema that in the case of more than one director, all sorts of viewers have shown interest in ‘new’ kinds of films which interrogate and argue even as they entertain. It is indeed encouraging to note that the idea/concept of ‘entertainment’ has gained fresh affirmative meanings in the hands of people like the Bhave-Sukthankar duo (Vastupurush, Ek Cup Chai), Umesh Kulkarni (Vihir), Sachin Kundalkar (Restaurant), Mangesh Joshi (Lathe Joshi), Baburao Kharade (Khwada), Avinash Arun (Killa) or Chaitanya Tamhane (Court).

Tamhane started young in the creative field. He was still in his teens when theatre became his first love and, perhaps, his early passion for the proscenium still holds. He is on record that he joined Mithibhai College in Mumbai when he was sixteen with the intention of doing theatre seriously, the college having a reputation for encouraging those with a flair for the stage. Today’s film director wanted to be a theatre actor but, by his own admission, it did not take him long to realise that acting was not for him. Gradually, his focus shifted elsewhere. He wrote plays and made a documentary on plagiarism in Indian cinema. He has spoken at some length about how his family has been supportive in his theatre activities. “One of my uncles is a playwright. In my family, there is also someone who has been an actor. But at the age of 23, when I made my first short film, my family started losing hope. They saw that I was not making money. It had not turned out the way they had wanted it to do. So, they began putting pressure on me. But things smoothened out later. With Court winning the national award, they are very happy. On the whole, they have been very supportive.”

The incredibly fast-paced and shockingly violent Brazilian film on cocaine and juvenile crime, Cidade de Deus (City of God) by Fernando Meirelles, was Tamhane’s introduction to the world of cinema. “That film opened a completely new world for me. After that film, my journey of exploration of cinema and its language began. I used to watch three or four films a day. I would work as an assistant writer at Balaji Telefilms and put all the money I earned into renting DVDs of foreign language films. I got deeply interested in films. I realised I wanted to make my career in films.”

Even though Tamhane ‘exposed’ himself to the learning process by watching different sorts of films from different parts of the world, including documentaries by Raymond Depardon or shorts by Kieslovski, when it came to making his own debut film, it was on his own, as it turned out, flawed genius, that he reposed his faith the most.

It is significant to be told by the director that in the making of Court, “we used Jai Bhim Comrade (by Anand Patwardhan) as a big reference”. However, before I go on to other things, I feel the need to point out my apprehension that the director of Jai Bhim Comrade would, in all probability, distance himself from Tamhane’s subsequent statement, “I must clarify that I don’t personally endorse the sentiments that Narayan Kamble expresses in his songs.” (The Times of India, April, 2015) Patwardhan has over a period of more than forty years consistently worked from a position of ‘the personal is political’. Here is a young director expressing his disinterest/disapproval of such ‘sentiments’ as are at the very core of the former’s epic documentary on the life and legacy of Dr.Ambedkar and its ongoing influence on the thoughts and activities of Dalit activists and dissenters in particular. How can someone appreciate the social politics of Jai Bhim Comrade and, at the same time, disapprove of the same politics when espoused by Kamble? There is a basic contradiction here that I think Tamhane should explain.

Court has Dalit characters, but it is not a Dalit film, in the sense that it depicts not just Dalits. Rather, it would seem that the film is more about certain individuals belonging to the middle and upper classes of other communities, without deserting the Dalit story which is at the centre of the narrative to begin with, but in time, pushed to the periphery. Let me put it another way – Tamhane’s film, which has the look of a roller-coaster ride across different physical, and arguably, polemical spaces in the metropolis of Mumbai – illustrates a lot of things to do with better-placed people, with a direct or indirect bearing on the lives of some Dalits. Caste politics and class politics come together in an engaging visual discourse to question both the visceral and mental health of a society that claims to be compassionate when the truth is something more complex; the truth buried under layers of as much deception as self-deception. Each episode, usually short, swift and strikingly laden with details, is akin to a layer peeled off deftly by the director in the manner of an exploratory artist who has perhaps decided to be a sociologist and a story-teller at one and the same time.

When the dead body of a Dalit sewage worker is discovered in a manhole, a case of instigation to suicide is brought by the police against one Narayan Kamble, an aging folk singer with a long and proud personal history of participation in Dalit activism. The public prosecutor, acting on police reports of doubtful authenticity combined, perhaps with personal prejudices, is shown trying her desperate best to secure a conviction against the accused. Perhaps, she is labouring under the belief that if she is able to nail the accused it would make for swifter professional advancement; a judgeship on the anvil? In this context, Tamhane may be quoted: “People have told me that she is a victim of her own circumstances, while some have told me that she is the most evil character in the film. I like both interpretations. I would like the audience to look at the characters in their own way. I have my own interpretations. But I would not like to impose my interpretations on the audience.”

Even as the public prosecutor tries her best to convince the judge about the necessity of speedily conducting the case and convicting a (supposedly) dangerous element like Kamble, the traditional culture of prevarication, of delay and drift, that governs our law courts, keeps working against the singer who, as it transpires in course of the trial, is in no physical condition to stand the trials of the trial. Fresh dates for court hearings are given by the judge with a casualness that shows no concern whatsoever for meeting the ends of justice in a responsible manner. But this elderly child of a lesser god is made of sterner stuff than the upper caste custodians of the status quo can imagine.

The innocent viewer would normally expect the director to concentrate on the dramatic possibilities of the court battle on hand, but clearly, Tamhane’s interest lies elsewhere. Even as the trial progresses in fits and starts and the pitfalls of the judicial system increasingly come to view, expressed mostly in snatches, the camera keeps moving away every now and then to other social sites focussing on the personal lives of the two lawyers and the judge hearing the case. The investigation into the attitudes and concerns of the three is conducted by the director in a realistic, minimalist style frequently informed by a deadpan irony that is as far as it can get from the heaps of loud and unintelligent ‘court dramas’ that Indian audiences have been subjected to down the decades.

Perhaps it would not be a mistake to claim that, using the death of the sewage worker and the subsequent trial of the Dalit cultural activist as ‘a peg’, as ‘an excuse’, Tamhane makes revelatory forays into the daily routine outside the courthouse of the three representatives of the legal system.

Tamhane: “I had never imagined that a courtroom drama would be my debut film. But when I went to a lower court in Mumbai, I realised that it was very different from what I had seen in conventional courtroom films. I was immediately fascinated by the setting and the people who inhabited that world. I have always loved researching and engaging with different worlds during my scripting process. This time, exploring the legal world became my research project… I didn’t have to consciously keep myself away from the conventional depiction of courts in other films. My source of inspiration was always real life and what I had observed rather than films. The narrative, right from the beginning, was meant to have a naturalistic tone. The only aspect where we had to consciously move away from the established norm was in building the courtroom sets. Since you cannot shoot in an actual courtroom, we had to rely on the sets. All the sets available in Mumbai were the very typical ‘filmy’ courts that we have seen in Hindi films. We decided to build a set of our own, from scratch, to depict the sessions court…”

Court is, in a way, a difficult film to write about. One is never sure as to where to place it in the context/tradition of filmmaking not just in Marathi but any other Indian language. Its uniqueness, whether in style, technique or treatment, is as baffling, even bewildering, as it is charming and pleasurable. And, if one may add, disconcerting. Tamhane’s film lends itself to a variety of contradictory meanings and interpretations. Each of the main characters is composed of many shades. They are this way because they are products of different value-systems in operation in the different socio-cultural and economic spheres they inhabit, be it their families, their workplace, the larger society, or, come to think of it, their places/modes of relaxation.

The public prosecutor travels by train, perhaps a ladies special, between home and workplace discussing sarees and cooking oils with a fellow-passenger; she picks up her young son from a crèche where he awaits her after his school is over; she cooks dinner for the family, but manages to answer phone-calls as well, perhaps from clients and others; and readies herself for court the next day after the family consisting of husband and children, has gone to bed. She appears to be reasonably happy doing what she routinely does, but perhaps she yearns for more, judging by the way she pushes herself in her argumentative life at court. She is average urban middle-class Marathi in her choice of how to spend a Sunday afternoon – a meal with husband, son and daughter in a none-too-expensive vegetarian restaurant, followed by a play pandering to the politics of victimhood by virtue of which at least one outfit has since long enjoyed spells of political office in Maharashtra. It is a reasonably inexpensive/enjoyable way of spending a holiday outside one’s home in what is perhaps the costliest city in the country to live in.

If the restaurant food appears to be relishing, the play provides an outlet for the pent-up emotions of those who are given to seeing themselves as second-class citizens on home turf, on account of the alleged misdoings of hordes of migrants who have descended like locusts on the Bombay/Mumbai El Dorado. In the play, an irate father who fears losing his daughter to such an upstart from north India, fumes: “You people take away our jobs and properties, we say nothing; but when you lay your hands on our daughters, we will show you that we can react.” This appeal to Marathi Manoos – a lethal mix of injured innocence and undisguised belligerence – produces a roar of approval from the audience!

Tamhane may be said to be critiquing a certain mental/psychological insularity/vulnerability as he shows us a full-house clapping enthusiastically when the girl’s father kicks out of his house the young man from, most likely Bihar, come to ask for his daughter’s hand. Here Tamhane is playing the role of the ‘critical insider’ that Professor Ananthamurthy identified as an essential and wholesome presence if the character of a society is to be assessed with insight. Practically every important film belonging to the Kannada ‘New Wave’ of the 1970s and ’80s critiqued the stranglehold of the orthodox Brahmin community on society, aided by the landed gentry. It is worth noting that the directors of such films belonged almost wholly to the Brahmin community – Ghatashraddha (Girish Kasaravalli), Chomana Dudi (BV Karanth), Phaniyamma (Prema Karath), Vamsha Vriksha (Girish Karnad), etc. With a suppressed anger and sympathy for the ‘lesser peoples’, these films explored the iniquities of the caste system. Each of them was a ‘critical insider’. In the same way that Tamhane is, although the site or sites he visits are different. Where the Kannada New Wavers were concerned more with caste and its inescapable fall-out in both the material and moral arenas, Tamhane focuses on the politics of identity around language and culture. Tamhane could not have endeared himself to many fellow-Marathis when he grappled with the subject of regional chauvinism as it is laid bare in the encounter between the hopeful suitor and the angry father.

In sharp contrast to the parsimony that characterises the tenacious, no-nonsense-type public prosecutor’s manner of relaxation, the Gujarati-speaking advocate fighting for Kamble free of cost is shown wallowing in wealth. The advocate, who is also at home in Hindi and English, belongs to the city’s cosmopolitan moneyed elite with expensive taste in food, drink, mode of transport, or choice of watering hole. At the end of a day’s work, which includes participation in an amateurishly-conducted meeting of human rights activists, he is shown visiting a well-stocked provisions store from where he picks up snacks and drinks which he has at home whilst watching television. On certain evenings, he visits an exclusive joint with a girlfriend and listens to a female singer whilst having a drink. The singer has just sung a snatch from a song in Portuguese which she claims to have picked up from a street singer in Brazil when the scene changes. In other words, it is a world of affluence that the advocate inhabits outside the court where he has, of his own volition, chosen to fight for Kamble, the quintessential street-fighter. In an extension of the court battle, the advocate arranges for Kamble’s bail and, subsequently, pays for his treatment and medicines when bad health forces him to go to hospital. The earnestness of the young man is not to be doubted, though it does look at times that he likes playing the role of the Good Samaritan.

Many questions are likely to crop up in the viewer’s mind as to how the young lawyer can inhabit such dissimilar worlds at one and the same time. Is Tamhane trying to say something about the nature of social activism where one comes across the occasional man or woman born to wealth and blessed with learning, taking up cudgels for ‘lost causes’? Are the descriptions of the lawyer’s lifestyle, or the banal proceedings at the meeting of activists, a measure of the director’s scepticism about the ‘do-gooding’ activities of social crusaders? Are the intentions of the well-fed and well-heeled arguing for the marginalised and the unjustly persecuted, being subtly questioned? Could it be that at the psychological level, a guilt complex about the perceived immorality of the existence of islets of affluence surrounded by ubiquitous waters of poverty, is at work here, causing a select group to stand up and asking to be counted as ‘dissenters’? Is it altruism or expiation? Or, is it something as easy to follow as sheer exhibitionism? Playing to the gallery, or existentialist angst?

Watching Court closely, one might be led to believe that the role its director is playing is that of a social subversive of an implicit kind, couching his agenda in an unusual film language. Tamhane is perhaps both a moralist and a stylist, meaning he is adept at questioning many a discourse on social justice or the lack of it, by the use of a language that is at once deeply personal and strangely unconventional. Where others would in all likelihood use words to register their interrogative self, the director of Court relies on detailed imagery to tell  his story. Using verbal and, more often, visual ‘stabs’, he brings out the contradictions in his principal characters, enriching them in the process as far as the construction of their composite personalities is concerned.

For instance, just when the viewer has started feeling weary and almost overwhelmed by the generosity/nobility of Kamble’s selfless advocate, he is brought back to terra firma by the summary refusal of the dead sewage worker’s wife to accept monetary help offered by the lawyer. Instead of unearned money, it is better if you can get me some work – that is what the poor young woman with a child to bring up, seems to be saying to her self-imposed benefactor. One can imagine that the woman’s quiet defiance, her call for dignity and self-empowerment, deflates the lawyer’s ego, but in a deep and almost spiritual sense, elevates both – the one who offers and the one who declines; it dignifies them in their own eyes and in the eyes of the world, which watches with hope and amazement how the deprived will sometimes not agree to being disgraced by ready acceptance of doles and hand-outs from above. It can be expected that the lawyer will never repeat the mistake, perhaps inadvertently committed, of taking anyone for granted, especially if she or he belongs to the labouring classes. Again, not that everyone belonging to the disenfranchised masses is a model of pride and dignity, but as the saying goes, exceptions prove the rule.

The compassionate lawyer was perhaps ‘emboldened’ to do what he did because he has been brought up in a home lorded over by a filthy rich and insensitive father; where the prevalent culture, as can be guessed from the breakfast table sequence in the film or the restaurant sequence where the family is shown having lunch, might well suggest that society’s jetsam and flotsam can be bought or tamed by a single snap of the finger. It is Tamhane who is to be ‘blamed’ for the plethora of ‘readings’ that viewers and critics have come up with already and are likely to continue to produce for at least some more time to come, for he is someone, as evident from the many interviews he has given, who refuses to pass any judgement himself, preferring other people to make what they wish of his film. This is a marked departure from old masters like Satyajit Ray or Mrinal Sen who held definite views about the films they made, or even someone like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, the Malayali auteur. In this context, the young Marathi prodigy reminds one more of Girish Kasaravalli, in that both are willing to give a long rope to viewers in the matter of interpretation of their work. It may well be a case of a filmmaker trying to provide as wide a margin as possible for viewers to scribble as many and as varied opinions as they feel the need to, in the hope that these would enhance the richness of the discourse on different aspects of their work.

Respecting the intelligence of his best viewers, Tamhane seems to want to drive them to make newer and bolder interpretations of his long and sustained ‘take’ on the ‘Maximum City’ he knows well, having lived there all his life with all his senses apparently glued to the ground, so to say. Suketu Mehta’s “Maximum City’ is maximum in both its callousness and compassion to people, but it is in written words that he memorialises the past and records the present. Tamhane, in his turn, captures in moving images married to song and music, incidental sounds and the spoken word, the same general indifference to popular plight relieved once in a long while by the generosity of a rare individual. More specifically, Tamhane focusses his interest, but only in passing, on the institution of the judiciary and its listless handling of offenders, victims and others at the receiving end. But, what finally engages the director’s concentrated attention is the daily interaction between the metropolis and at least three of its black-robed citizens outside the ambit of one of the principal organs of society, namely, the courtroom/judiciary.

Finally, there is the sessions court judge whose lifestyle is shown the least, yet has the potential to cause ‘dramatic’ interest/alarm in the viewer the most. After the supposedly auspicious ritual of coconut-breaking is performed to the accompaniment of wisecracks and guffaws, the judge is shown getting on to a luxury bus that will take him and his family and friends to an expensive resort over the weekend, perhaps outside the city limits. At the resort, an air of affluent abandon and camaraderie reigns. The men and women play games, swim, have food and fun. The children have a run of the place; they are a world unto themselves, separate from the adults. These are people of means and know how to enjoy life at their upper-middle-class level. The judge, who can soon be made out to be of the high-strung sort, holds centrestage as he relates corporate stories of ambition and success with relish to an assorted group of admiring listeners. From the way he conducts himself in word, specific gestures, or general body language, it would seem that the judge has come to the resort not just to relax, but also to impress, even if at times subtly and for a short while, his superior credentials by virtue of the position he holds in the courtroom. In both an immediate and a far-fetched sense, the judge is a metaphor for power, the defining strength of which its wielders will never allow society at large to forget.

We have seen the judge earlier in court where he comes across as a stern purveyor of the law, given to making the occasional sarcastic comment at the expense of the man in the dock. He is unlikely to impress the viewer as a particularly likeable person. So, we are a little surprised when in one scene at the resort, we see him with a young man, perhaps a relative, enquiring with seeming concern about what the latter is doing in the matter of education of his hearing-impaired son. Going by the exchanges between the two men, one might be momentarily led to think that there is a compassionate side to the judge’s nature which has hitherto been hidden from view. But the film’s ending showing the judge sharply slapping the challenged youngster for the ‘offence’ of having disturbed him in his siesta, exposes the worthy in no uncertain terms. The earlier show of familial concern for the young boy and his anxious father is exposed for the hypocrisy it actually was. Or, should the chastisement be viewed as a momentary loss of temper which might happen to anyone, given the circumstances; as, no more than an inadvertent reaction, for which he might feel remorseful later on. Going by the words of the director, he is clearly averse to taking an extreme view of the outburst which by virtue of both its suddenness and severity, shocks the viewer no less than the persecuted child who simply cannot bring himself to believe that he could have been taken to task thus for what must have seemed to him as nothing more than an innocent prank.

If there is any room for doubt here, Tamhane gives the benefit of the doubt to the judge on whom, along with the child, the camera rests for what looks like ages before it starts moving slowly towards the end of the film. Tamhane: “I wanted to understand who is this judge who is presiding over this case for a long time. We always take for granted figures of ‘authority’. Ultimately, the judge is also a human being. The end is not just a sequence about him. It is about the collective in a way. It is about his entire family.”

Not all viewers of Court are likely to agree with everything that Tamhane says in the interviews he has given to national dailies and other publications from time to time. This critic feels particularly disturbed at the unsympathetic way in which Kamble has been spoken about. It is open to argument whether the film, whilst doubtless impressive in visual and narrative terms, doesn’t suffer from an anti-Dalit bias. Perhaps, it would not be uncharitable to claim that it looks as though the director is straining himself to keep Kamble out of the area of discussion even as he is concentrating with a vengeance on the lives of the lawyers and the judge outside the confines of the courtroom. These three characters in Tamhane’s scheme of things live in worlds far removed from the one peopled by the likes of Kamble, subaltern victims all of a universe that the ‘haves’ would simply love to wish away! Ambivalences and equivocations appear to have been studiedly worked into the script with the questionable intention of creating a ‘different’ film at any cost. One would have thought that Kamble’s anti-upper caste ‘tendencies’ (in the sense that Mizoguchi’s ‘tendencies’ were socialistic and pro-women) which give a definite purpose and direction to his life, deserved more space in the narrative, thereby enriching the ‘presence’ of the three principal figures when ‘read’ in relation to the trajectory of the victim’s condition. Kamble could have been ‘dignified’ with a little more attention without disturbing the overall design or rhythm of the film.

This critic feels that Court, for all its surface brilliance, is weak and, one daresay, even dangerous in the sense that the director seems to be claiming, by implication, that he is not especially bothered if anyone accuses him of working from a position of ideologylessness. By now, those working in the area of ‘politics of cinema’, or even passively interested in that aspect of cinema, are aware that not having an ideology is an ideology in itself. Speaking from personal experience, this critic has come across some films that he found not immediately impressive (Saeed Mirza’s Naseem, for instance), only to get closer and closer to their profound life-affirming humanist core with every successive viewing. In the case of Court, it was the reverse. Initially, this critic was struck by what can only be described as a sense of awe. It was later, perhaps at the third or fourth viewing, that he thought he had begun seeing through the chinks in the apparently splendid armour.

If one may use an expression in Hindi – Chakit karne ki koshish (attempt to startle) – is in constant operation here, resulting in a certain emptiness or bleakness of the spirit. How else could an aging, old-fashioned appreciator of life and the arts like the present writer, have reacted to the director’s disrespectful impatience with someone like Kamble who, come to think of it, is the very source of the ‘grand narrative’ that is erected around others to the exclusion of the activist himself. Is this ‘touch-and-go’ attitude towards society’s peripheral creatures symptomatic of the middle-class artist’s pathetic condition of selective, manufactured indifference? Or, is it an unmistakable pointer to an inclination, currently increasingly evident among the talented ‘cowards of cinema’, not to engage in any serious discussion with discomfiting ideas, let alone high ideals? Not to be seen within miles of any life-affirming philosophical or political concept seems to be the ideal today to many a so-called artist.

Lindsay Anderson, a major figure in the film and theatre history of Britain in the second half of the twentieth century and winner of many film awards including the Golden Palm at Cannes and an Oscar, said no work of art is worth much if it lacks in social relevance, meaning an engagement with the histories of past and present persecution of especially the lowest common denominator. In the context of Court, it would seem that Chaitanya Tamhane’s cinematic vision and his social philosophy are on a collision course, indicating among other things, an urgent need for greater introspection on burning public issues and their inescapable effect on individuals who refuse to shy away from taking on those issues in the way they think best. It is precisely here that Court falls short of the critic’s expectations. Where films like Mangesh Joshi’s Lathe Joshi or Baburao Kharade’s Khwada have revealed a rare directorial astuteness in fusing image and idea to raise the consciousness of the viewer to impressive heights, Tamhane, arguably, suffers from an inability/refusal in the critical matter of broadly suggesting, or subtly hinting, the possibility of creating an awareness about adverse conditions on the ground.

If it is accepted that a film is only a work of art and nothing more, then the critic is unlikely to have any argument with the director, but if a film is simultaneously expected to be a vehicle of social communication complete with a sense of outrage, if need be, at what is transpiring in an imperfect world, then Court is a fit case for being hauled up for questioning before a court of contemporary consciousness. The repeated use of the word ‘interpretation’ in Tamhane’s interviews comes to attain the character of an exercise in evasion in no time. The attitude of ‘could be/may be/perhaps’ is reflected in Tamhane’s replies: “(Court) could be interpreted as if there is no enemy (as if such a thing is possible –VC) and it could be interpreted as if the entire collective is its own enemy (again, as untenable as the earlier argument –VC).” This deceptive and not very skilful playing with words with the likely intention of refusing to be pinned down to a definitive position, could well be an attempt at trying to mean all things to all people, ending in meaning nothing to anybody. Court is appetizing to look at, but difficult to digest.

Vidyarthy Chatterjee is a veteran writer-critic based in Culcutta