{"id":3784,"date":"2017-10-08T09:01:03","date_gmt":"2017-10-08T03:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/?p=3784"},"modified":"2017-10-08T09:12:17","modified_gmt":"2017-10-08T03:42:17","slug":"father-brothers-unholy-hunger-looking-kaaka-muttai-sahaj-pather-gappo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/father-brothers-unholy-hunger-looking-kaaka-muttai-sahaj-pather-gappo\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Father, Brothers and an Unholy Hunger \u2013 Looking at Kaaka Muttai and Sahaj Pather Gappo"},"content":{"rendered":"

The absent father<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Garth Davis\u2019 Oscar-nominated Lion<\/em> (2016) five-year old village boy Saroo gets separated from his elder brother Guddu as Saroo mistakenly gets on a train that takes him to Kolkata which is far away from his native village and State. Saroo and Guddu steal coal from freight trains and sell them for food to earn for the family. In a truly Dickensian first half of the film we find how Saroo, all on his own survive the onslaught of a cruel metropolis. The big city which offers hope for many also lays traps for the na\u00efve and the uninitiated. Saroo wanders in the city, wriggling himself out from the clutches of pimps, poverty and an indifferent humanity that has no space for the impoverished down-trodden without the polish of the great Indian middle-class. Much later after two decades and a half and with an Australian fragrance to boot Saroo returns to find his long lost family and discover that Guddu had died the same night when he boarded the train to a future he never imagined. Though separated only by a few years Guddu to Saroo was a protector and a friend. He was not exactly the father figure (the father had already been dead) but definitely one in the making.<\/p>\n

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Chhotu waits for the rain to stop in ‘Sahaj Pather Gappo’<\/p><\/div>\n

The \u2018absence\u2019 of the father or his physical existence is ironically omnipresent in Manikandan\u2019s Tamil film Kaaka Muttai<\/em> (2014) as well. Here the father is in jail, shown a few times and has a sparse shadow on the sons who remain nameless and are known only as Big Crow\u2019s Egg and Little Crow\u2019s Egg to be referred to as BCE and LCE henceforth in this article. The brothers like Saroo and Guddu steal coal from the suburban line in Chennai and live in the slum with their young mother and aged grand-mother. Unlike Saroo whose innocence is straddled by the big city\u2019s capitalist pollution, for the brothers in the Tamil venture this is commonplace. For them stealing is probably the only form of existence they are acquainted with. Deep beneath the film is about aspirations and how hunger regulates the dream of the multifarious strata of the Indian society.\u00a0 It is a story of desire \u2013 to own a cell phone that can take pictures of the crippled slum boy, to have the \u2018unhygienic\u2019 road-side paani-puri of the upper-class children, to savour and be part of an exclusive experience of having pizzas of the brothers. It transcends the desire of the children of the Chennai slum and sweeps over a nation which salivates continuously to move upward in the value chain on the basis of deprivation and in ignoring the right of others.<\/p>\n

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The family is glued to the advertisement of pizza on television in ‘Kaaka Muttai’<\/p><\/div>\n

In the film the brothers yearn for pizza when a new pizza parlour opens up in the space where they used to play. \u2018Pizza\u2019 \u2013the metaphor comes up in television advertisements, in handbills and in hoardings that cover up the skyline of the city. As the garbage-choked Cooum River stagnates, the claustrophobia is expressed from a top shot of the city. When the camera descends to ground level it is a common scene for any Indian metropolis where the haves and the have-nots rub shoulders symbolically as they inhabit different physical spaces.<\/p>\n

And amidst their crude urban experience their na\u00efvet\u00e9 shines through the bright eyes when they hold up a torn 10-rupee currency note against the Sun shimmering through, not with hope but with heat and sweat. And with so many films on child characters, cinema forms an important vehicle to depict the role of dream in their lives. As the Tamil actor Silambarasan, playing himself comes to inaugurate the pizza parlour and bites into the first slice of it the slum urchins go berserk, the actor is all that they are not but aspire to.\u00a0 It is not important whether the brothers get their bite on the pizza slice (they eventually get to through some political squalor), what is more important is that all throughout their experiences made them wiser. The bitter incidents don\u2019t leave them with a bad taste, since life moves on even when there is stagnation.<\/p>\n

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There is a wait for the pizza in ‘Kaaka Muttai’<\/p><\/div>\n

The free egg<\/strong><\/p>\n

Egg symbolizes nutrition, a diet that is seldom missed amongst non-vegetarian middle-class Indians and also a substantial population of the world that can afford. It is hence ironical when we find the young boys stealing eggs (this is how they got their names) \u2013 not of chickens but of crows, birds of inferior pedigree almost like indispensible outcasts like they themselves whom the upper-middle class India is unwillingly forced to share the collective physical space with. Eating birds\u2019 eggs that are readily available and hence of less value are also exhibited in Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu\u2019s tantalizingly heart-wrenching I Was Born But\u2026<\/em> (1932). In the film we find the young boys eating sparrow eggs raw with the hope of gaining energy and vitality!<\/p>\n

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‘I Was Born But…’<\/p><\/div>\n

Set in the suburban Tokyo the film depicts two brothers Keiji and Ryoichi along with their parents. Like in the films referred above this one also plays with the representation of the father \u2013 an idol of the boys who suddenly find out that their father is a \u2018nobody\u2019, a clown to his peers at work and almost like a doormat to his boss. This negation of the \u2018image\u2019 of the father-figure in pre-war Japan has its own connotations but quite interestingly it is again with the help of moving images (in this case a personal film) that the young ones get to experience a reality of life, albeit bitter in this case. Yet, like Kaaka Muttai, <\/em>in I Was Born But\u2026 <\/em>as well there is humour in the small nothingness of life and in the directors\u2019 decision to not dramatise it. Life reflects as vignettes with warm softness and with near-unreal perfection.<\/p>\n

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The two brothers along with their father in ‘I Was Born But…’<\/p><\/div>\n

Egg as the symbol of easy yet timid wish-fulfillment like the boys of Kaaka Muttai <\/em>and I Was Born But\u2026<\/em> binds another contemporary film as well \u2013 Manas Mukul Pal\u2019s Sahaj Pather Gappo.<\/em> Based on Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay\u2019s short story \u2018Tal Nabami\u2019 (5 pages with less than 1500 words) the film has already created a few ripples. Set in rural Bengal it depicts the life of two boys Gopal and Chhotu. Much like BCE and LCE, within their meager possessions the boys of Sahaj Pather Gappo<\/em> portray tenderly how the mainstream filmstars (Mithun Chakraborty) inhabit and influence their virgin, rural heads. They live in abject poverty as their rickshaw-puller father met with an accident and hence incapacitated. Here again, the father\u2019s influence is slender apart from the conventions of patriarchal mores whereby their economic condition is directly linked with the absence of the \u2018active\u2019 father.<\/p>\n

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The brothers in ‘Kaaka Muttai’<\/p><\/div>\n

By making the father disappear the film also reminds us of Satyajit Ray\u2019s elegant first feature Pather Panchali<\/em> wherein the father who is a priest is predominantly out of the home and hence the audience memory. However Sahaj Pather Gappo<\/em>\u2019s main resemblance with the Ray masterpiece is due to the common author Bibhuti Bhushan and the setting of both these narratives in rural Bengal. Bandyopadhyay is a master story-teller, lyrical yet harsh, the minute details form the grandeur of a Persian carpet without sticking out ugly. In an age when the \u2018non-mainstream\u2019, \u2018parallel\u2019 Bengali films as well prefer to confine the characters, the plot, the settings and the dialect to one that is prevalent in the city of Kolkata, this film is a happy departure. It holds the colours of the rural Bengal in a poignant palette. That is why the images linger longer than the persistence of vision. This is such a welcome relief that we wish to overlook that the feature film in the end remains primarily a montage of shots with sensitive acting by the central two characters (and also their mother) \u2013 the subplots tend to be weak and the script insufficient.<\/p>\n

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Gopal in ‘Sahaj Pather Gappo’<\/p><\/div>\n

Train \u2013 the aggressor and the provider<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Lion<\/em> the train takes Saroo away from Guddu and his family. In a sense it took him away from his roots. Later we find him lost and lonely in a crowd of people in Kolkata\u2019s populous Howrah Station. Yet the railway track provided them with their livelihood.\u00a0 The brothers in Kaaka Muttai<\/em> also thrive on their conquests along the railway track \u2013 the railway track acts as a provider. In one touching shot LCE kneels before the track and puts his ears on it. Is he listening to the beats of the track as a train advances? Surely for them the track has a heart.<\/p>\n

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Saroo moving away from his brother in a train in ‘Lion’ – starring Sunny Pawar
(Photo: Mark Rogers)<\/p><\/div>\n

Train does come in the first dream sequence in Sahaj Pather Gappo<\/em>. The village\u2019s geography doesn\u2019t lend us with the opportunity to understand if the railway track is part of it. Nonetheless the dream, rather nightmare of Gopal takes the breath away momentarily as the mother runs to the track to commit suicide. The train hurries past as Gopal winds her sari from beneath its wheels \u2013 the image acts as subtraction of life. The frame reminds us, though in an opposite sense, of the iconic Pather Panchali<\/em> scene where we find Apu\u2019s first tryst with modernity as he runs towards a speeding train. The camera here as well holds the wheels but they resemble speed of evolution and less that of destruction. Train remained a recurrent metaphor in the whole of Apu Trilogy<\/em> with significantly altered meanings.<\/p>\n

Train and trolleys intersect Ozu\u2019s frame multiple times in I Was Born But\u2026 <\/em>as well to signify the separation of the brothers from their father \u2013 the dissociation of their perceived image and the real one as well as the bifurcation of the two worlds, the children\u2019s and the adults\u2019 which in another shot are merged as identical parallels.<\/p>\n