| Subject: FIRAAQ - a film not to be missed! |
Author:
Ramnik Shah
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Date Posted: Thu, October 23 2008, 19:17:42-4
The London Film Festival is on right now and among its offerings are a number of remarkable Indian films that should resonate with members and friends of GSA. FIRAAQ is one of them, a true masterpiece - a rounded, probing, conscience pricking, highly accomplished directional movie debut by Nandita Das better known as a star of films such as Deepa Mehta`s controversial `Earth` and `Fire`.
It is set in the aftermath of the Gujarat riots of 2002, in Ahmedabad (though the name of the city is not exactly spelt out). The credits tell us that it is a work of fiction based on a thousand true stories, but as Nandita explained both before and after the show, what she and her co-writer have done is to piece together many different factual accounts - from a variety of people of what they experienced or witnessed during the troubles - into a powerful fictional narrative on film.
The characters represent a whole cross-section of society, from slum-dwellers to the upper middle-class, both Hindu and Muslim. Their lives are intertwined on a multiplicity of levels - through incident, accident, chance and fate - and the film clevely weaves them together. There is the very middle-class Hindu family, where the loud-mouthed husband rules the household with an iron fist, which he is not ashamed to use even on his middle-aged, mostly servile and silent wife, who is guilt-ridden because she had ignored the pleas of desperate Muslim women from her neighbourhood seeking sanctuary from Hindu mobs engaged on a frenzy of killing and destruction. She later gives shelter to an orphaned Muslim boy called Mohsin (renamed Mohan by her to protect him from her own bigoted family) searching for his father whom he had last seen being attacked, again by another group of Hindu fanatics. But Mohsin runs away when he sees her husband hit her and finds the atmosphere in their house oppressive - though this kind of macho culture also did cut across the religious divide. Then there is the young working class Muslim couple, with a child, whose house has been vandalized and virtually gutted after they had fled it (to save themselves). The interaction between Muneera, the child`s mother, and her Hindu friend and neighbour, who work together as henna artists, is one of the running threads of the film, with Muneera putting searching questions to her friend about the destruction of her house, which she suspected was caused by her friend`s husband and his anti-Muslim gang. There is another young couple - but upper middle-class with a `mixed` marriage, between a Hindu wife and a Muslim husband with the `neutral` first name of`Sameer` that has insulated him against the prejudice and hostility of the majority Hindus among whom they all live. To him the riots are a rite of passage to a painful understanding of his vulnerability and second-class status, because even the dynamics of a mixed marriage were rooted in an implicit acknowledgement of an overwhelming Hindu hegemony, in order to break out of which the westernized upper middle-class husband had to undergo a conflict of emotions to come to terms with the sheer ignorance and patronizing attitudes that surrounded him. There is also a group of angry young Muslim men who are plotting their revenge, and again we are shown a side of India that is rooted in a reactive chain of violence and revenge. Finally, there is the old music maestro, played by Nasreeudeen Shah, a Muslim living among Hindus, a weak character out of his time and place, who too has to come to terms with the ugly realities of Hindu-Muslim dynamics despite the valiant efforts of his faithful servant to shield him from them.
Without divulging any more of the plot, suffice it to say that Nandita has so neatly and graphically woven together its complexity and detail that it comes across as a seamless whole. Throughout the narrative was interspersed with dismissive or insulting references to Muslims that characterised the racist attitudes of perfectly ordinary Hindu individuals and institutions. This came across vividly through any number of episodes and incidents. The police apparently were all Hindu (no minority representation there!) who scarcely disguised their disdain, bordering on hatred, for the Muslims. One could almost say it was a police state. They would swoop down here and there, have road blocks and stop passers-by, demanding to know their names, and while some Hindus tried to cover up for their Muslim friends (eg. by putting `bindus` on their foreheads for the women or encouraging them to give misleading or incomplete names) who were however resigned to accept discrimination as a routine feature of life.
The film is a grim reminder of the fact that in India religion is an inescapable badge of personal identity, willy nilly. It is manifested in the way people dress or through some other symbol or ornament attached to their outward appearance or behaviour. The paradox is that this contrasts with the country`s secular credentials. This is precisely where India`s other inheritance - the English language and the infusion of western cultural and intellectual traditions which cut across stereotypical images of ethnicity, religion and regional orientation - is no doubt valued by the country`s modern, urban `globalised` middle-class.
As it happens, Nandita Das also stars in the Pakistani film called `Ramchand Pakistani`, also shown at the LFF (see next item). Firaaq has not yet been screened in India; it had its international premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, only last month. Nandita Das said she was nervous about its opening in India, because of likely violent protests, and that for the same reason they did not advertise where they were to shoot the film. Most of it was actually shot in Hyderabad, some in Mumbai and one or two scenes surreptitiously in Ahmedabad itself. It will be interesting to see how authentic, `desi` Gujaratis react to the film.
RAMNIK SHAH
Surrey, UK
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