KAHIHI

Having completed a day long hectic training, I made myself comfortable at the lounge of the hotel where I was accommodated. The lounge was aptly called “Unlock”.

A group of five young (younger than me) men occupied a table next to me. They were engaged in a conversation about movies, beers, girls, and politics, of course. No matter who they are and what we do, politics forms an inevitable part of our daily lives and discussions. You cannot ignore our politicians; you can simply hate them. With so much of dirt sprouting out from the numerous scams in the country the wrath is unavoidable.

Soon their discussion turned serious. Reality started to speak after few mugs of beer bloated their stomach. They expressed their anger, forms of punishment they would want to implement for the scamsters, the change they needed (Obamania perhaps), and that they would need to be a part of the system suddenly came like a revelation to them. Deep into their sub-conscious minds they might have remembered the appeals by the age old and young promotee politicians.

However, what I liked about the group was that they still remained intact to their topic of discussion, and now they were talking sense after they took several trips to the bathroom to empty. They had turned their attention to implement something that little easier than joining politics, possibly less expensive, and yet had a larger reach. “We will make movies, documentaries on political satire,” said one. The group seemed to be a movie enthusiast. So was I. And with their due permission, I joined them.

We discussed at length about the movies based on politics. Not many belonged to satirical genre. Most of them were serious – Hu Tu Tu, Gulaal, Rajneeti, Satta, Bombay, Aandhi, et al. None of them had a comical touchup. Nothing like “Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron” was ever made again. Serious movies often get restored on the superficial level of the memory while films like Jaane Bhi… go deep down into our memory – and that is one way to keep the political wrath kindled in us. Movies like Satta and Rajneeti tend to scare people making it look like an impossible preposition for people to enter politics.

While the whole day training may not have been that fruitful the evening session had lot many lessons to teach.

Back in my room, while browsing through the TV channels flooded with news about scams, I felt the strong urge to do something on political satire based movies. But are the satires seriously taken? A suspicion started piercining my brain. For a moment, I thought I should have been from Kerala or Bengal. Movies away from Bollywood and Tollywood are full of masala & make ups, Movies made in Kerala and Bengal have substance. It is because of the high literacy rate keeping ethnicity in tact, I presume.

Awareness about the social issues exhibited throught their life had made the likes of T. S. Pillai, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, V. M. Basheer and many others all the time great writers and periodical like Malayalam Manorama that has been the highest circulating periodical in regional space.

This literature gave us the director like Adoor Gopalkrishnan. He made serious movies based on serious literature.

His two movies out of eleven, I can quote in this space. Swayamwaram (1972) a debut movie written and directed by him based on middle class angst and transition of middle class of Kerala into a modernist society. It was an attempt to come to terms with the disillusionment in ideologies.

Mathillukal (1988) based on a novel by V.M. Basheer depicting an unsuccessful love story due to parting by a jail wall. When freed from jail Basheer asks, 'who needs freedom? Outside is an even bigger jail.'

And as the young boys were talking about the documentaries let me tell you that AG has made more than twenty documentaries and two short fiction films.

And Bengal has the legacy of Satyajit Ray.

Movies manufactured in Mumbai are more about dreams while those from Kerala factory are about reality. Adoor Gopalkrishnan followed the tradition of Ray to base his movies based on classical literature with social motifs. Of all the movies made in India, Malayalam movies have highlighted politics the most in terms of making issue based movies. Tamil and Hindi movies take politics as a subject only to showcase the hero’s valour of one-man-army fighting the system.

When sinking into the bed with drowsy eyes, I had a sense of hope squirting around my lips in form a smile. There is someone, and a younger generation, which is thinking about fighting the political mess in the country, to take the politicians to task, and bring shame to them. There is a wave of change that slowly erupting under the sea wherein everyone is frustrated with the chaos that politicians and power brokers of this country have created.

Not everyone needs to go the Gandhiji and Bhagat Singh to bring about a change. Few can take up what Tilak tried – gathering people through art and culture.

Hopefully that was what that young lot was trying to do.

Whenever I’m actually in a houseboat, say in Alleppy or in Malwan (only one houseboat so far owned by one city corporator, Rajan Sarmalkar), I can’t stop myself thinking about David Lean and his Ryan’s Daughter, a 1970 movie, shot on the sea shore of Ireland; why not in Alleppy and its backwaters, the nature’s extravaganza?

Ryan’s Daughter was a big flop in many countries, and consequently in India as well. Or at least it seemed so on the backdrop of unfathomable success of two of his earlier movies - Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Dr. Zhivago (1965).
(image courtesy: Terryballard, Wikipedia)

David Lean was a strange amalgam of rough nature and a creative mind. The two extremes nurtured inside him quite comfortably.

He used to hate India, however, later married an Indian woman, Leena Velinkar, a high-brow lady moving in political circles of Delhi. He would choose a vast backdrop, like say, Sahara desert as in Lawrence of Arabia, and throw a lanky, fleshless Peter-O-Toole alone to act, or rather parch or burn there. Peter-O-Toole, when the shoot was over, complained to Leena Velinkar saying, “Your husband had decided to kill me in the deserts”. So merciless was Lean.

In Ryan’s Daughter, Lean chose a place called Dingle Peninsula on the Ireland coast. The distant village was one Killary. We too have one in the same name and famous for the earthquakes, but far away from the sea.

The Irish married woman had an affair with a British army officer at the time of First World War. She had to leave the village as the villagers do not approve the affair and the suspicion arisen due to the ammunition stock hidden.

Such a simple plot! But that reminds me of as many waves have reached the Killary village in Ireland.

Sarah Miles, her husband Robert Mitchum, and lover Christopher Jones in the movie wore the Lilliputian appearance, ditto like Peter-O-Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, opposite sea front defying the limits of skyline.

It is Lean’s favourite game. Juxtapose opposites, the ultimate opposites that the super panavision camera available in his times would cover.

Perhaps, Sarah Miles was chosen for the same reason.

Twice, the wife of Robert Bolt (The Man for all Seasons), Lean’s favourite screen playwright, spoke fetid mouthed language. Bolt had Madame Bovary, a novel by Gustav Flaubert, in his mind for screen but after discussion with Lean he loosely adapted it.

Ramesh Sippy directed Hindi movie, Sagar, was loosely adapted from the story of Ryan’s Daughter. As Ryan’s Daughter was a commercial disaster, many did not know the roots of Sagar. The village idiot (Liliput) whom the heroine of Sagar kisses in the end is a cut-and-paste shot from Ryan’s Daughter. Sagar retrieved image of Dimple Kapadia (30) having two daughters to a teenage heroine from where she had given up acting. It won 4 Filmfare awards including that for cinematography. The village idiot missed it and went to the parallel hero.

Hero worshipping!

The team of Ryan’s Daughter and also the director had to face every kind of difficulty.

Alec Guinness, Marlon Brando, Peter-O-Toole, George C. Scott, Anthony Hopkins, Richard Burton, Richard Harris and Paul Scofield were all considered for different roles but had to back out for different reasons. To add to further woes the selected star cast kept on fighting and abusing each other.

Robert Mitchum during the making of the film clashed with Lean and famously said, "Working with David Lean is like constructing the Taj Mahal out of toothpicks."

There were two silver linings about Ryan’s Daughter though. John Mills, for the role of village idiot, won a kiss planted on lips by Sarah Miles and Academy Award for best actor in a supporting role (our Liliput was privileged only with Dimple’s kiss) and Freddie Young for best cinematography, Sarah Miles being nominated for best actress in a leading role and a nomination for sound, inter alia.

MGM spent one million pounds in 70s to reconstruct the forlorn village of Killary to save it from storms. The poor villagers worked as extras. The face of the village changed since then and it has become famous as a tourist spot reviving the economy, and the township around, Dingle Peninsula.

When I feel or read about the earthquakes in Maharashtra, as it happens often, I remember Killari earthquake. Our Killari village in Maharashtra where the worst earthquake that hit India in last seventy years killing ten thousand people in Sept, 1993 which had been well nigh condemned, is waiting for redevelopment for more than one and half decade and for reviving economy after that.