A katori of kheer as an ice-breaker between a sulking father and a daughter. The birthday gift of a recorder that plays back the voice of a beloved interspersed with romantic songs. A furtive phone chat on a terrace amid clothes drying under the sun. The banter with a roadside chaat vendor. Strings of lights that surge with joy above a Durga Puja pandal. A heart-shaped eraser pushed by a young boy towards his girl-friend. And the other side of life. Wounded and naked like the body of a young lover being carried towards an ambulance. The terrifying and yet glorious sparks that a funeral pyre emits. The gentle waves that carry away remnants of loved ones.
This montage of joy and grief and the eternal continuum of life, hope and love sums up Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan, a film that got a five-minute standing ovation at the Cannes film festival and has won a slew of awards already. A film that on one hand reminds you of the train in Pakeezah and these lines, “Har raat, ek rail gaadi apni patriyon se utarti hai aur mere dil se guzar jaati hai’’ and also of conversations cut short like young lives in their prime. Varun Grover who wrote the evocative songs of the film and also its screenplay revisits the influences that shaped a film that is already a modern classic.
The wonder years…
I was born in Sundar Nagar in Himachal Pradesh and moved to Dehradun when I was six, then to Lucknow when I was 11, and then I went to college in Banaras (IIT-BHU) at the age of 19.
My first influences were children’s magazines.My younger brother and I read Baal Hans, Nandan, Nanhe Samraat, Paraag, Suman Saurabh, and Champak. Then at the age of 11, we got posted from Dehradun to Lucknow and I started writing letters to my best friend. That was my first serious writing experience. We used to write really long letters to each other and to be able to write well, I started reading English newspapers seriously. Then came the phase of reading magazines like India Today, Outlook, The Week etc. In college, I discovered Hindi literary giants like Dharamvir Bharati, Kamleshwar, Manohar Shyam Joshi as well as Western airport-fiction (Eric Segal, John Grisham, Robin Cook). That was the first time I truly fell in love with the written word.
On definitive films
We were so cinema-deprived in the 80s that I would watch anything that played on TV. I oscillated between a Khatron Ke Khiladi and a Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho and found the perfect balance of lightness and depth in Sai Paranjape’s films like Chashme-Baddoor, Katha, and Sparsh. I think these were the first films that made me curious about cinema as a mix of art, craft, and instinct.
The love for Indian poets..
I have always loved poetry. Thanks to CBSE’s great selection of poetry, I grew up reading greats like Dinkar, Nirala, Dhoomil, Agyeya, Bachchan and many more. And these poets are still very much a part of the ethos in North-India, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. I remember meeting a cabbie in Delhi who proudly told me that Dinkar belonged to his village and recited to me lines from Rashmirathi.
So while writing Masaan, I thought we must bring out this facet (of love for poetry) through a character. And I don’t think Dushyant Kumar (whose ‘tu kisi rail si guzarti hai’ features in the film) is a forgotten poet yet. On the day of the release of Masaan, the #shair group on twitter (hosted by Rana Safvi) conducted a day long poetry session featuring Dushyant Kumar and the entries kept pouring in from all parts of the country and the world.
The towns forgotten by films
I think cinema, especially commercial cinema, doesn’t offer much scope for the detailing. So we only see broad-strokes while depicting a city. And that’s true not only for small towns but for bigger cities depicted in our films. There’s only one kind of Delhi we see and only two or three kinds of Bombay. As Masaan was set in Banaras, Neeraj and I spent a month there and went to Harishchandra and Manikarnika ghats almost daily. We observed the life there, chatted with people working there, and then conducted long interviews with the family of the current Dom Raja (Kallu Chaudhry).
How Masaan came about..
The original idea came from Neeraj (of a Dom boy falling in love with an upper-caste girl) and when I joined the film, we both developed the other story threads around it. Mainly by reading the local newspapers in Banaras and observing the kind of characters we saw there.
On the suppression of female sexuality
I’d like to believe I am a feminist. Though growing up in India as a male comes with so many privileges that sometimes men get too conditioned to see where they are behaving like the standard MCPs or ‘mansplainers’ or apologists and it is a constant process of self-assessment and evolution.
My full-time profession is observing the world and my part-time job is writing. And I think anybody who does that constantly and honestly, will know how the mechanics of the world are skewed towards men and against women. Same rules apply to the lower-castes in India.
The screenplay subtly points towards this imbalance. When the cop tells Pathak, “Aapki izzat bachaane aaye hain,” it is one man telling another that a woman is just a tool for them to insult each other.
That’s why, we wanted Devi to redeem herself on her own and without any external help (like that of the railway clerk she befriends). That’s a subtle statement about her independence. She chose to start it alone, she will finish it alone too.
On the poignant love story..
The story of Deepak and Shalu is inspired by a school friend who wooed this girl (now his wife) during the seven days of Durga Puja in Lucknow, and later made a mix-tape of songs interspersed with her voice that he captured from the telephone conversations on a landline phone.The honesty and simplicity of that story is all because it’s based on real life.
On Neeraj Ghaywan
Neeraj is a deeply emotional and liberal person and that reflects in the film too. We both have Kendriya Vidyalaya schooling and that makes us very compatible while dealing with cultural nuances as KV was truly a melting pot in the 80s and 90s. The reaction to the film has been beyond our expectations. It is like a collective catharsis for a common pain or loss for viewers around the country.Such an emotional response overwhelms me and at the same time leaves me feeling incapable of handling it.
with The New Indian Express Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former Urdu RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be silent with her cats.