“Each day comes like a new torment/Sunless or sunlit, it’s all the same. It’s a strange tale, my friend/Of days that grind and nights that rend,” intones Patru the pickpocket (Ravindra Sahu) in theatre stalwart Anamika Haksar’s debut feature film, Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon, which released in selected theatres on June 10, two years after it was selected to be screened in The New Frontiers section of the Sundance Film Festival, the only Indian film in that category. Patru is the centrepiece of the multi-layered universe inhabited by the poor Haksar portrays in her film: the hardscrabble worlds of the street vendors, migrant workers, loaders, daily-wagers and several others struggling to make ends meet in Shahjahanabad, Old Delhi. “They are people who survive against great odds with a lot of warmth and compassion,” Haksar tells Outlook.
Quirky, offbeat and experimental, Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane... is beautiful in its bleakness, epic in its vision, and radical in its visual politics. After seven-years-long ethnographic fieldwork in the winding alleys of Old Delhi, the Mumbai-based theatre veteran has come up with a love song for the precariat.
Decades after the pioneers of parallel cinema depicted the underprivileged as virtuous and made known their struggles on the celluloid, the subaltern is gradually being invisibilised in popular culture. Haksar’s film fills that gap in the history of contemporary Indian cinema. She delves into the subterranean consciousness of these people and highlights their innate fears and dormant dreams—with a dash of magic realism and dark humour.
A pastiche of the fictional and the imagined, the magical and the allegorical, Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane... follows no linear storyline, moving from one fragment to another. When the film opens, we are instantly plunged into misery. Amid the filthy hellscape, there is a leaky pipe, dripping in the dark. We get the drift that this is not a saccharine, feel-good story, but a brutal, unflinching look at the impoverished living on the margins. Soon, the camera pans to show the varied dreams of its protagonists. Patru’s sleight of hand enables him to make some extra bucks, over and above his meagre earnings as a band worker. He dutifully passes on some of it to his bed-ridden father. The vagaries of capitalism-driven change (havelis turning into malls, for instance) force Chhadami (Raghubir Yadav), the street-food vendor, to keep changing his vocation, graduating from a khasta and kachori seller to a chamatkari (magical) baba, who offers remedies for the multiple maladies of the poor towards the end of the film.
Lokesh Jain, who has also written the dialogues, plays a heritage walk conductor (Akash Jain). He sells the romanticised idea of Old Delhi in chaste, flavoursome and idiomatic Urdu to firangs and corporate types. Senior theatre actor K. Gopalan, who plays a trade unionist named Lalli, represents the ideological locus of the film. Early on, he appears on-screen holding a communist flag in the air, even as thousands stand below holding candles; it’s a slice of his dream that has spilled from his subconscious and enveloped the screen. In the end, we see him deliver a rousing speech, but the revolution’s trumpet seems to be far from blazing.
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The film features real-life dialogues from 70-odd people on the streets, including pickpockets, vendors, and beggars. Haksar first wrote the story with a fictional structure. But then prepared a ‘social questionnaire’ for the people of Shahjahanabad which probed how they felt, what their dreams were, and what images often came to them. When the street folks, who work as the supporting cast in the film, were given these dialogues, it was easy for them to deliver them: “They saw the dialogues as echoing their lives, and faced little difficulty in entering that zone.” In the end, Haksar juxtaposed the fictional with the contextual. So, while there are fictional characters, like Patru and Chhadami, their dialogues are sourced from the texts of a real pickpocket and a vendor. “That’s also an experiment of a kind. It was interesting to look into their subconscious mind to see what was happening there,” says Haksar.
Like their dreams, the lives of these characters are enmeshed, and intertwined; they are united in their collective hardship and heartache. Each of their dreams is dealt with differently; sometimes through painting and folk tradition, and sometimes realistically and cinematically: “We didn’t set out to animate. As we talked to people and they shared with us their visions, we started thinking about how to portray them.” Contrasting the film’s realistic and gritty imagery, 2-D animations pop up during the sequences that depart from the real. The animation is rough-cut and matches the jagged edges of the dispossessed’s lives.
The life of Old Delhi’s poor, however, is too vast and unwieldy to fit the format of a film. So, Haksar kept the focus on its underbelly: “Through their dreams, I started coming to their states of mind. It was my point of curiosity. As a middle-class person, I was conscious that it didn’t become a drawing-room piece, but was suffused with the lived reality.” Haksar, who studied at Lunacharsky State Institute for Theatre Arts in Moscow (now known as the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts), and has been directing plays for over three decades, says theatre actors introduce a different language of acting in the film: “There is a certain aspect they bring to the film which is quite unique
to them.”
Sahu, a popular theatre actor, pulls off a series of scintillating scenes with finesse. Besides his pickpocketing prowess, we witness his felicity with conducting an alternative heritage walk of Old Delhi that is soaked in its earthy hustle and bustle, giving the reluctant walkers a taste of ‘subaltern history,’ which is at odds with Akash Jain’s sanitised version that only focuses on the glory of the past and the interest in its fabled cuisines and arched gateways with intricate carvings.
Scenes showing the abject, hand-to-mouth condition of the poor are heartbreaking. A ragpicker, for instance, has to make do with one stale slice of bread for nearly a week, a part of which she heats up and eats every day; the hunger pangs trigger a perennial throbbing pain in her gut. In close-up shots, we see the dark, sinewy, sweat-soaked arms, shoulders and backs of loaders toiling in the sun. Haksar says that while the history of the British and the Mughal periods abounds, little has been written about the pathetic condition of loaders in Old Delhi: “I have always been intrigued by how people pick up a load, which is so heavy, and their bodies so thin. It’s slightly strange, but it kept coming back to me.”
Amid the unsightly locales where the poor scrape out a living, Haksar finds decorum. When Patru versifies the plight of the poor, he does it in a way that makes it clear: the poor don’t like pity. Just a bit of empathy will do. “We see them as drug addicts and sexual abusers. But the poor I have met were always nice and dignified.” Through the film, she intends to “celebrate the honesty, compassion, and dignity” that the disadvantaged have.
To Haksar, whose early theatrical consciousness was shaped by the works of B.V. Karanth and Badal Sircar, content comes first. Once the story is mapped in her mind, the imagery starts flowing. The rehearsals with actors are always transformative: “We work together, collaborate, and improvise. We do several exercises to arrive at the truth of a particular situation or the multiple ways of looking at that situation.”
The rigorous training in direction that she received during her student days in Moscow has familiarised her with the craft of Russian greats like Andrei Tarkovsky. She could imbibe that style of composition, mise-en-scène, and other tools of direction in Ghode Ko Jalebi..., in which she collaborates with Saumyananda Sahi, the film’s cinematographer.
An admirer of Marathi writers like Laxman Gaikwad (she adapted his novel Uchakka in 2008) and Namdeo Dhasal, Haksar is currently mulling over the material of love jihad, rapes and lynching. She doesn’t like realism as a genre, but is tempted to work around these themes. In order to find a structure to do that, she has been reading Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (1992) by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, an American psychologist, who analyses the women’s condition through the lens of mythology. She hopes that her next work, a play, will eventually get enriched by this osmosis.
After her film has hit the big screen, Haksar has grown busy with another experiment. Since the subjects of her films can’t afford a multiplex, she has devised a plan to take it to them through ‘Digiplex,’ the portable, inflatable, water-fire-proof cinema hall. She hopes to pitch a tent in front of the Red Fort, charging Rs 50 per ticket: “Let’s see who comes. If it works, it may help other filmmakers in the future to show their films among different communities.”
(This appeared in the print edition as "On The Boulevard of Broken Dreams")
