Dev N Pathak
Dear home: Letters from an NRB
Gangs of Waaseypur: a drain inspector’s movie?
By Dev Nath Pathak
The filmography of Anurag Kashyap cinema presents a case for critical study. In a short time of twelve years, starting with a short film Last Train to Mahakali in 1999, with an unreleased controversial Paanch (The Five, 2003), coming to notice with his first full length feature film Black Friday (2004), Kashyap could manage to direct over half a dozen films which earned critics’ rave reviews.
In the meantime he wrote scripts for some of the noted Ram Gopal Verma films such as Satya (1998), Shool (Thorn, 1999), Kaun (Who?, 1999) and attracted the attention of critics for redefining the cinematic narratives. In public sphere, there have been frequent appearances of Kashyap as confidently glib talker on the issues pertaining to art and craft of cinema, struggles of the outsiders in Hindi cinema industry, and problems with the champions of formula cinema. In sum, Kashyap manages to present himself as a progressive, non-formulaic film-maker, who has struggled his way through the success in national and international cinema market. He has voiced the necessity to survive in the Hindi cinema industry where the big banners are like gigantic sharks ready to devour the tiny outsiders.
But it may be claimed that in spite of the niche he created for himself and earned all the name and fame, he fails to overcome the limitations of his own plight in telling the tale of Wasseypur for a simple reason. His fear has become his faith, and his faith underpins his arrogance. That he is an outsider in Hindi cinema, struggling against the monopoly of big banners and conventional styles of story telling, and that the world-at large is full of predators ready to devour him, and so on. That he can always be distinct in his stories, that others are conventional-formulaic and hence regressive, and that he finds nothing serious about something called ‘cinematic responsibility’, paves way for his arrogance starkly visible in his cinema-works.
However, the fact remains that he needs a network for the distribution, publicity and consumption of his works. And it is easily available in the time of philosophical poverty, dominance of nihilistic celebration of the ethnic and local, mindless consumption of fragmentary nativism, and narcissistic display of subjectivity.
The tale of Wasseypur operates on the regressive axis, which pits the grand narrative against the mini-native-narrative. The dichotomies, stemming from the placing of modernity, between universal and parochial/local, between structure and agency, between secular and religious, and most importantly between order and disorder/anomie, continue to influence the story tellers of our age of crumbling binaries. But then, a grain of difference is characteristic of the contemporary obsession with cognitive binaries. The prelude to the advent of the age of ‘midnight’s children’ had the anthropologists documenting the Indians as exotic/barbaric/unpredictable/irrational ‘other’. This other was ‘oriental’ and hence quirky. Even the native scholars participated along this line only with a sleight of intellectual hand and terming it ‘Indological’. But then the oriental construction of ‘the other’ did not leave the intellectual space, philosophical deliberations and praxiological arena. The neo-orientalism of the natives and non-resident Indian scholars is not far too away from the manifest reality. There is hitherto a hegemonic significance of the intellectually constructed ‘other’. But then, it persists with a slight difference. What is the difference?
Midnight’s children, who opened their eyes in sync with the Nehruvian declaration of a grand Indian plan, stood over the ground of philosophical confluence. They celebrated the local, they pursued universal, they sought order, they also sought to redefine order, they pieced together fragments, and they sought for reforms. The moral-philosophical burden of the men of Nehru was shared by not only his colleagues-in-the cabinet, also by his opposition, native scholars of his time, the intellectual discourse of juncture, the public sphere of that age, the friends of that milieu and the foes of that era. They however persisted with the baggage of binaries and hence we find so much of cry about tradition and modernity in the public discourses of that time. The notion of ‘other’ was still prevalent; the notion of ‘other’ was also undergoing a critical transformation for the native scholars, leaderships, and storytellers. Now, the ‘other’, for the native ethnographers and other who indulged in any kind of documentation of the local, was the regressive part of the self. The other, as an undesirable but charming, is the alter ego of the hypermodern (also predominantly known as postmodern) natives.
The intents of the storyteller of Wasseypur crassly expressed the dynamic romance between the hypermodern self (of the storytellers) and the alter ego vis-à-vis the charming brute. It takes the cognitive route (in singular) to the root (in singular) in the age of cognitive and praxiological pluralism which have rendered the binaries of bygone times nearly superfluous. This is the time whereby, as a sociologist argued, Microsoft and Al Qaida as well as debenture and dowry have assumed similarity of sound and sight. The tradition is modern and the modern is tradition in this scheme of thing. The hybridity redefines not only the manifest cultural forms but also the quests of the same. Thereby the ‘route to root’ is perceived in plural sense and thus surfaces multiplicity of ‘ways’ to understand the multiplicity of ‘traditions’. It hence becomes philosophically impossible to imagine the oriental other as a monolithic whole, which can outdo the inherent critical plurality. As a matter of fact, there is now a step forward from the stance of hybridity, as allegedly the latter also perpetuates the imposition of cognitive categories on the local forms. The stance of hybridity hinges upon the reactions of the moral-philosophical burden of midnight’s children and thereby inches closer to another kind of grand theorization. So, a step backward from this, the storyteller of Wasseypur, obsessed with the undesirable yet entertaining alter ego, presents the local mayhem in smartest possible cinematic fashion.
The brute unleashed quenches our hidden thirst in a climate of helplessness when our modern institutions have failed us in more than one way. The disenchantment of contemporary Indian audience is addressed by resorting to the seemingly enchanting law of nature in the land of Wasseypur. We seek to fulfill our anguished mind by feeding the mutilated bodies, clanking guns, and foul-mouthed protagonists. The characters tumble out of the nicely sealed closets of the modern India, which was meticulously crafted by the midnight’s children. The locked mystery of brutality surfaces in the narrative spin through sleek cinematography and nearly perfect editing in the throbbing musical tune. While this happens on screen, the storyteller mouths platitude in the public sphere on the significance of reality-cinema in contemporary India.
Watching the tale of Wasseypur, with a tolerance for the innate narrative diarrhea and strategically (again crassly) packaged abuses from the hinterland of North India (province of Jharkhand), and listening to Anurag kashyap waxing eloquent about the reality-cinema, makes one skeptical at multiple planes. One is that the reality of the so-called reality cinema is as unreal as the reality of a reality-show popular on television in our times. The opening note, before the credit rolls, sounds and shows the strategic mixing of reality and fiction. It says that the film is based on the real incidents, which were reported in news, and the presentation is fictionalized. It is an unusual Freudian slip leading a skeptic to fathom the politics of reality cinema. Furthermore, it is not difficult to reckon with the musical embellishment added to the folksong of Musahar (an untouchable caste in Bihar), which translates the pangs of the untouchable into a palatable number for the consumption of the privileged class.
Also, despite innovation, the whole acoustic underpinning of the folksy lady sangeet popularly sung by women during the prelude to the wedding of a daughter/sister in ‘womaniya song’ discloses the transformation of the folk material into the Kashyap material. Getting back to the details in the narrative, it is less than a visual thick description, for it fails to present the mundane beyond the objective of the narrative (like we see in other Kashyap films like Dev D/No Smoking).
Wasseypur: what do you see?
Wasseypur is not a place that really exists; it is a place as Kashyap imagines it to be. It is very much akin to the politics of colonial ethnographers who would convince us that they are conveying facts while they would also not shy away from accepting that there is methodological dubiousness in our approaches to truth. It is also very much in tune with the early crops of native scholars who imagined India through the borrowed categories and got embroiled in the reification of reality. Most importantly, it is in kinship with the genre of a reality TV show that will appeal to the audience to believe in the truthfulness of the events on air. So, what makes the tale of Wasseypur is the thick description, which thins out intermittently, no matter how much it succeeds in tickling the monster in us awake. And we indulge in laughter as and when a titillating remark reverberates in the theater and as and when a tantalizing move appears. In a bid to be real, the tale of Wasseypur is no different from B R Chopra’s Insaaf ka Taraju, which gave us a detailed scene of rape with revealing angles of camera, on the pretext of arousing the sense of injustice in the act. It is anybody’s guess as to what it succeeded in arousing. Therefore, it is not surprising that in the touted reality of Wasseypur, the love interest of one of the protagonists (Sardar Khan: Manoj Vajpeyi) wears a kind of blouse unfamiliar to the women of small towns in the decade of 1980s. She has to wear it because the ‘reality of Wasseypur’ has to sell and the desperate strategy of the storyteller has to accomplish what it aims at. In consequence, the whole documentation of Wasseypur comes closer to the temper of Catherine Mayo’s Mother India, which Mahatma Gandhi called ‘a drain inspector’s report’.
The tale of Wasseypur thus suffers an acute poverty of philosophy disabling the viewers to a great extent. This is much dearer a poverty than the financial kind, which leads us to intellectual myopia, disabling us to see the past, present and future in a continuum. Then ‘time’ is an category available for blatant manipulation and space is eclectically frozen at the narrative junctures of the storyteller’s choice. This is how the tired binaries of past are refashioned and repackaged for sale. This is what characterizes the neo-orientalism in Hindi cinema which seeks to render everything quirky as ‘the other’, to be repackaged and sold out for the consumption of the privileged.
————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Dev Pathak teaches Sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi, is among our panel of columnists. He writes his column ‘Dear home: letters from an NRB’ exclusively for bihardays on Saturdays.
————————————————————————————————————————————————————