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Shoma A. Chatterji
Darkness is a powerful political film presented through the character of a retired university professor, Ramdas, a Left-leaning liberal thinker who writes weekly articles on social and political issues close to his heart for a magazine. He lives alone in a beautiful house, fills his hours tending to his garden religiously and an aquarium that forms part of the garden and as far as one can see, he probably does not have any household help. Ramdas has just two friends: Krishnan, the editor of the Left-wing magazine and Alex, its young designer. His slightly tedious life is often dotted with threatening telephone calls from anonymous Hindu Right members who command him either to stop writing secular articles or to be prepared to stop writing forever. Ramdas does not bend, nor do we find him getting scared.
The Malayalam film is directed jointly by the Babusenan Brothers, Satish and Santosh, and was stalled by the CBFC that demanded certain cuts before giving it the certificate. But the brothers stood firm and finally, it was allowed without a single cut. However, its strong political content seems to have put an invisible spanner at film festivals.
Says Satish about what triggered the idea, “the collective events of the past three or four years inspired us to create Ramdas. He is a liberal like us two brothers, leftist and secular too. Ramdas is anyone who believes in democratic values and stands up to fight for these values. He isn’t really based on any real life character. We created him. We wanted to create a man of compassion because we believe real democracy is possible only with compassion.”
Darkness opens on a stunning note. Before the credits begin to roll, the camera focusses on the back of an old man’s head. The head slowly turns around to face the audience, and we see that his mouth is stifled with a bandage covering the lower part of his aged face with a white beard, his silent eyes looking directly into the camera. It is Ramdas. The soundtrack is filled with the sound of a running printing press.
Darkness is a metaphor for the depressing reality of the world we live in and are living in at the present time.
It is an out-of-the-box film that belongs to an ambiguous genre created by the Babusenan Brothers, Satish and Santosh, who entered into filmmaking in Malayalam, their mother tongue, a few years back. The two have given us films that neither fall within the mainstream nor non-mainstream. These are a class unto themselves. The two do not bother about whether their film will have a theatrical release or not.
The regional office of the CBFC initially did not offer why they were refusing to clear the film. Subsequently, they wanted the brothers to delete some words that were used in the film’s dialogue such as “Saffronisation”, “beef eaters” “Maoists” and so on. These words are being used everyday in print media so why must these be deleted in a film? Why does the CBFC find these words objectionable?
But the Babusenan Brothers stuck to their guns and refused to make a single cut in Darkness. And voila! They succeeded! This success is, however, somewhat constrained by the fact that the film is designed for a very niche audience. This audience is both conscious and aware of what is happening around us. There is an urgent need to bring about a change in these mindsets that cause such incidents.
“These are dark times. The word Darkness has connotations of ignorance, fear, evil, etc. and those are what we see all around us today. So we felt Darkness denotes everything we wish to speak about,” Santosh sums up.
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