The Hindi film industry shows signs of change and a growing maturity

THERE IS A fleeting moment in one of the finest Hindi films of this year, Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Paan Singh Tomar, which almost cries out for subtextual analysis. The title character— once an upbeat army man and athlete proudly serving his country, but now a baaghi driven to a life outside the law—is nearing the end of his personal race. This section of the story is set in 1980, and on a transistor belonging to the policemen pursuing Paan Singh we hear the news about the death of actress Nargis. Given the film’s larger themes, it is reasonable to wonder if this scene is an allusion to Nargis’s most famous role: does it reflect the end of the Mother India ideal for the film’s embittered protagonist? If so, it would be in keeping with this film’s subtle, plaintive tone. Though Paan Singh Tomar is based on a real-life tale that has the resonance of a Shakespearean tragedy, it doesn’t strain self-consciously to be one. There are no grand epiphanies— it stays in the moment, and there is a understatement in scenes that could easily have been overmany. Clearly, our modes of storytelling have been changing. Mainstream Hindi cinema has always been full of stories about the disaffection of the wronged individual with the System, or with the nation state, but such narratives tended to be presented in dramatic terms, accompanied by flashes of over-expository declaiming. Paan Singh Tomar does have scenes such as the one where our hero remarks that apart from the Army everyone in the country is a thief, but they are handled with restraint—not least thanks to Irfan Khan’s brilliantly measured performance. In fact, the better, more provocative Hindi films of 2012 have shown unusual maturity in dealing with such subjects as patriotism, national integration and the idea of India. If Dhulia’s film tells the story of an individual and his times, the claustrophobic gloom of Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai gives expression to a number of different stories—adding up to a tightly-knit comment on the aspirations and power struggles that brush against each other in a overmany- layered society. The film’s protagonists include a lower-class man who fantasises about a job where he might one day get to wear a tie as well as a privileged man in a high-profile job who loosens his own tie every opportunity he gets; such polarities and contrasts can be seen elsewhere in the story too. In some ways, Shanghai is a “non-Bollywood” film. It has the self-consciously stygian look of a contemporary noir movie—it even makes Mumbai’s busy nightlife seem sinister in a way that has rarely been achieved in our cinema before. (During an interview, the film’s cinematographer Nikos Andritsakis told me that this was how he experienced the city when he first arrived in it.) And it is adapted from a Greek novel, Z, which was about a very specific political context. But Banerjee and his co-writer Urmi Juvekar have done a thoughtful job of fitting it to the contemporary Indian situation—this is a depiction of a world where there is no lasting solution to the hegemony of power, where underprivileged people unwittingly participate in their own exploitation, and the rich marginalise the poor while indulging the hubris of turning Mumbai into a glistening “Shanghai”. Trying to keep your equilibrium, turning your face away from injustice until your conscience no longer lets you...these are repeated motifs in this film, and they are reflected in its ending. The bureaucrat Krishnan (played by Abhay Deol) does something that in a more simple-minded film might result in the summary cleaning up of the political order, but here we see that nothing has really changed. So, is Shanghai a cynical film? Banerjee himself sees it as an ode to individual conscience in a harsh world, while Juvekar told me during a recent conversation that they didn’t want to tie up loose ends and provide the audience any false comfort. No wonder the film, even as it was widely acclaimed, left so many viewers with an uncomfortable, unresolved feeling. Other major films of the year don’t deal explicitly with “national issues”, but they do reflect an increasing willingness by Bollywood to visit places that are not often charted. The authenticity of the hinterland depiction in Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur has been called into question, but there is no doubting the film’s ability to establish the mood of a very particular setting; while the bulk of the action is in Dhanbadthere are also two scenes set in Varanasi, revealing—with typical Kashyapian humour—an incongruously sinister side to one of our holiest towns. Meanwhile, Sujoy Ghosh’s fine thriller Kahaani—in which a pregnant woman comes up against a calculating IB officer as she tries to find her missing husband—made excellent, atypical use of Kolkata as a setting, and even provided solid roles to the popular Bengali actors Parambrata Chatterjee and Saswata Chatterjee (as well as a supporting part for the veteran Dhritaman Chatterjee, who was such an arresting presence 40 years ago in Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi). Bengali characters also featured in cute takes on inter-community relationships in two of the year’s warmest “little” films. In a charming scene in Shoojit Sircar’s Vicky Donor, a Bengali girl hums a few notes of Rabindrasangeet to her Punjabi boyfriend; they are in a car somewhere between Lajpat Nagar and Chittaranjan Park (two south Delhi colonies located near each other in physical space, but traditionally the bastions of very different communities), and the scene is an important bonding moment in a romance between two people who hail from different universes. And there is an interestingly similar moment near the end of Sameer Sharma’s Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana, where a young Punjabi man serenades his lover with a Bengali song in the presence of his startled family, who can’t even make sense of what they are hearing. The scene feels a bit like cultural stereotyping at first (“Punjabis masculine, Bengalis effeminate”) but the film is clearly on the side of the young lovers, so it works well. In any case, both Vicky Donor and Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana overturn the conventional tropes of “Punjabiyat” and allow us to see their characters as individuals rather than as representations of groups. And perhaps, in the final analysis, that is the best way to make a film about the many colliding realities of a complex country. Bollywood has certainly succeeded in doing this in the past 12 months.