The churning around us

Ira Pande

For years now, many of us have been able to sense a social churning outside our metro towns. It is happening across the country, from small towns as remote as Bahraich in Uttar Pradesh to Thrissur in the South. I still don’t understand its exact contours or depth, but can tell you that each time I step out of Delhi and travel to small-town India, I am taken aback by how rapidly the young are changing the attitudes and social taboos that were once a standard feature of these old bastions of patriarchy and privilege. By clubbing it carelessly under a vague rubric like ‘rural aspirations’, our media has failed to even notice these rumblings and tremors shaking old havelis and cityscapes. Except perhaps for a Ravish Kumar, they are so busy putting together the panelists for their usual slanging matches on prime time that they have missed the real social revolution that will one day overwhelm this complacency.

From the time we read our newspapers in the morning to when we park ourselves in front of the TV news at night, we are fed the same bilge about corruption, communalism and hate crime. Often, even the panelists are the same as they scurry from one studio to another — this is lazy journalism at best. Mountains are made out of molehills and planted stories leaked by ‘sources’ are paraded as gospel truth. No wonder many of us have stopped hearing this noise. To all such disgusted viewers and readers, let me tell you there are other sources of understanding the truth: books and films. If you wish to see the truth, go to fiction is my advice. I have just waded through a pile of over 30 books as a juror for a translation prize and am stunned by the energy and raw power of Indian writers in Marathi, Malayalam, Bangla, Oriya, Assamese, to name just a few. The chic-lit and breezy romances offered by our English-language writers seem so simplistic and shallow when placed alongside these works that I find it difficult to understand why they are published at all.

The same is true of our cinema: the fun days of Karan Johar wedding tales with their designer homes and clothes are so unreal because they depict the problems (if one can call them that) of a miniscule set of rich NRIs and entitled families. Come on, who has ever lived in or even seen the interiors of those marble-floored, sweeping staircases and limousines of these characters and their homes? The supposed sexual liberation in Veere di Wedding is nothing compared to the raw animal energy I just saw in Manmarziyan. Set in the galis of Amritsar with its closely-knit families and neighbourhoods, this film is about a young girl and her lover who can’t keep their hands off each others’ bodies. His daring leaps over chajjas and terraces to steal a few kisses from his lover make you gasp at the sheer power of hormones when ignited. I do not want to give the plot away but even I (of the quintessential aunty generation) found myself cheering this young love.

More importantly, the film shows us that the family (including the venerable patriarch, Darji) feels it is helpless in controlling a wilful daughter. In another generation, she may have been killed to save the family’s honour or married off to a suitable boy, but now even a traditional joint family has accepted that old rules need to be revised. Tell me, where do you find this so openly stated except in our Bombay films? The Facebook and Twitter users who consider themselves so ‘with it’ and in touch with an alternate social reality are clueless about this phenomenon. I haven’t seen a single article by any academic, sociologist or cultural anthropologist on this slow fuse that is frying young brains in our small towns. If you don’t fully agree even now, please recall the recent celebrations over the scrapping of Article 377. What opened my eyes was the whole-hearted endorsement that came from our small towns. And for those who like to believe that we are still trapped in an illiterate, bigoted and religious universe, please remember that India was able to push through LGBTQ rights in just 20 years. Compare this with the century-old battle for this in older democracies with more liberated and educated citizens. That should count for something, don’t you think?

Two talented filmmakers — Vishal Bharadwaj, who directed Omkara in 2006 and Anurag Kashyap, who is at the helm of Manmarziyan — belong to small towns and bring with them a spicy street vocabulary that our city slickers have never heard. Behind them is a battery of young actors who are not your chocolate box heroes and heroines but faces you encounter on the street. This is what makes the stories they tell you so real and intimate. Where the box-office and multi-million productions chase big stars and multiple casts, these small town sagas use real locations and ordinary neighbours as characters. Think of any recent film that was worth seeing (Queen, The Lunch Box, Masaan, Mulk and Aligarh, for instance) and you will begin to see these nameless faces more clearly.

Only after we begin to register such cultural changes will we be able to see more clearly where the country is moving. Politics and economics have their limits.