Me Divided by Zero: 2010

I see my beloved city burning, turning as flames consume the last remaining vestige of life. My city illumined, my city raging, my city rising in smoke, settling in ash. All your smiles, and laughter, all your narrow streets of refuge and solace, in dreams imbricated, in fumes destroyed. I have been in your by-ways, your corner streets that engulfed me, making me anonymous. I have learnt to distrust, beloved city, your charms, your spectacles like a wasted harlequin with tried tricks . As you burn down, will you return in dreams, in paranoa, in fantasies, or will you fade, your cinder mix with the earth, forever forgotten, and in turn forgetting me forever. What fire can consume you, what heat have you felt, you are no more than stones, mortar, grids and maps. How many did you teach to love and then return only cold indifference, the signs and signals lost in streets dark with something much more than night. Goodbye.

The city fascinates me. Earlier this year, the film journal Silhouette asked for papers relating to city and cinema. To be published in Silhouette volume VIII, the paper can be read here .

The anti-colonial struggle in India has produced a rich anthology of overlapping and conflicting perspectives on nation and nationalism. For a long time the divergent discourses within the anti-colonial movement on issues of modernity, identity, and "building the nation" remained dormant and it was only post independence, with the advent of social mobilizations that some of the older inquiries particularly those raised by Gandhi's ideologies, acquired greater importance.

The post-colonial period in the 50s decade saw a restructuring of Nationalism under Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India. There was a transition towards modernity through the building of institutions of state order that would effectively remodel the national space for purposes of industrialization. Against this scheme of things, the Gandhian approach of situating the ‘secure site of citizenship’ in the village was seen as contradictory. What emerged from this debate between Gandhian economics and state development policies is a kind of crisis, which was most marked in urban spaces. It is what Ranjani Majumdar has called a kind of ‘psychic dislocation’, which found its expression in the films made in the 50s. Films like Awara, Sri 420, Bazi, and Kismet communicate a desire for a world of security by uprooted individuals and an antagonism between the city its rural other forms a thematic refrain in these films. I will try to trace this split between the modern as represented by the city and the traditional as embodied by the village in Chetan Anand’s 1954 film, Taxi Driver [1954]

The world that unfolds in Taxi Driver is decidedly urban. As the camera tracks through the roads of the city in the opening credit sequence, or when it lingers on shops, restaurants, bars, bridges, buildings, weget images that congeal to form the vision of a metropolis. It is Bombay, the city of dreams and yet with the introduction of Mala, a sense of village ethos, or if you allow me to say, morality is brought in. she is naïve, ignorant of the ways of the world, and her simplistic ways offer a foil to the fast, tricky modes of city life. She embodies the city’s idealized representation of the village, an ideal Hindu woman, free of artifice. She reads the Gita, visits the temple, and becomes a tacit voice of conscience for Hero, when he drops the money won at the gambling table, visibly contrite. To some extent although the sister-in-law also becomes a reference point for the urban-rural rupture, she is removed from the cityscape, while Mala stays on to learn the survival strategies of the metropolitan life. What is interesting here is that she has to give up the constraints of her gender. She cannot be Mala and smoke a cigarette; she cannot be Mala and swear. That would visually disrupt the image of her as a traditional woman in the eyes of the spectator. Instead, she undergoes this Shakespearean romantic-comedy-heroine-like transformation, where the girl assumes a male identity for the sake of love. She returns to the male guise for a second time during the movement of the film, when she has to fend or her living, again stressing the cruel deceitful trappings of urban life, which has no sympathy for the innocent artless ways of the village. As pointed out in the essay ‘Realism and fantasy in representations of metropolitan life in Indian cinema’ the country ‘serves at once to privilege the values of the countryside…over the thematic of…the urban disillusion’. In this context even the character of the lead male protagonist, Mangal becomes interesting.

Contrasted against the people around him, he seems to be stuck midway. He possesses a criticalsensibility that empathizes with the dishonest nature of the city and yet resists against succumbing to its temptations. He has a residue of the sense of morality, which is amiss in the city. He usually abstains from drinking inspite of having a permit and in the only scene we find him inebriated he is ashamed in front of Mala and keeps making oblique references to her, so that she can guess that he is drunk. Again he refuses to gamble, refuses to have any share in the money Mastana swindles out of his unassuming victims. He frequents the pub, but becomes judgmental about the place, dismissing it as a ‘dirty bar’ to Mala. Mala becomes a presence, which keeps invoking the dormant memory of morality in Hero, and through him, within the urban space.

But above everything else, Taxi Driver is a film about the city, a film about the hopes, despairs,disenchantments and the lived social realities of urban life. How a ‘real city’ is distilled through the lens to present a ‘cinematic city’ becomes interesting. The two cultural preoccupations- the city and cinema have drawn from each other, and cinematic commentary on city spaces, customs, way of life have systematically engaged the filmmaker from Lumiere brother’s Paris 1895 to Synecdoche New York by Charlie Kaufman. Cinema is a compelling signifying system that captures the aural and visual realities of a metropolis and becomes as Ranjani Mazumdar has pointed out, ‘an allegory of urban experience’. Taxi Driver operates by reorganizing the cinematic space around the urban experience of that demography of the population, which has no access to power- in other words the subaltern. It is through their lived experience, through their dreams, through the places they haunt, the streets they walk that a mise-en-scene representing the city, Bombay is created. The pub embodies a microcosm, a mini-community of common people trying to survive in Bombay. We have con-men, gamblers, drunkards, the pub-owner who dreams of making it big by betting on horses, and together we achieve, quoting from the essay, ‘Realism and Fantasy’, ‘a view from below’. This subaltern perspective is further brought out through Hero’s drunken ranting against the oppression suffered at the hands of the law enforcers and the money-yielding class.

It is a city of exploitation and the low angled shots of Dev Anand while he inquires about Ratan Lal and later Mala, seem to emphasize the well defined class divisions. Mala faces the manipulative side of the city and has to resort to the male disguise to stay afloat in this fraudulent city. However, Bombay is also the city of dreams where scores of nameless faces come to try their luck. Mala runs away to Bombay to become a singer and as Samia pointed out yesterday, it is also the city where rags to riches stories do come true. Each character brings in his or her own perceptions and personal narrative to form, once assembled, a vision of the city. The city, through frame by frame becomes a space for, a ‘space of infinite metonymy’.