Why is Parzania the perfect film for the fifth anniversary of the Gujarat riots?

(The Telegraph
February 27, 2007)

HUMAN INTEREST STORY
Why is Parzania the perfect film for the fifth anniversary of the Gujarat riots? asks Aveek Sen

Moving image

Tomorrow — February 28 — will mark the fifth anniversary of the Gujarat genocide. Godhra happened today, five years ago; the ‘reactions’ followed from the day after. We started by calling them the ‘riots’. But now, to express our outrage at the role of the police and the state government in what we suspect were the results of careful planning, we prefer to use ‘genocide’ or ‘pogrom’. For most of us, these words are hiccups in a history of comfortable forgetting and ignorance. The nicest thing about the unthinkable or the unspeakable is that it absolves one of the responsibility of having to think or speak about it.

From time to time, perfectly sweet and peace-loving Indians — who eat gota sheddho for Saraswati pujo, haleem during Ramadan, and Nahoum’s plum-cake on Christmas Day — when asked, at dinner-parties, whom they would like to shoot if given the chance, merrily declare “Narendra Modi!”, and then get on with dinner. There are also a few visual traces that linger. Time has turned these images into icons; they are no more the photographs of things that happened or people who exist. The charred remains of a train-compartment, a terrified man pleading to be saved from death (to someone who first took his photograph), and Zahira Sheikh’s beautiful, blank, inscrutable eyes. Somehow, these lead back to that ur-image: a low-flying aircraft tilted close to a very tall building. As a sequence of images, it has a familiarity and logic that make the need for inquiry or action quite redundant: with these things, too much political correctness is terribly unchic. Besides, don’t we all love Sufi music and give our children quaint Muslim names? And those of us who live abroad, haven’t we signed petitions, joined protest marches, and put links from Communalism Combat on our blogs?

Into this easy world was released, this Republic Day, Rahul Dholakia’s Parzania (rhyming with Narnia). And this film — based on a ‘true story’ and made by a Californian from Ahmedabad — is proving to be the perfect ‘Gujarat Anniversary’ film. Every review describes, without a shred of critical irony, the “collective weeping” this film induces in the multiplexes (apparently, South Delhi wept the most), while carrying inset features on the Return of Sarika. Headlines play on the ironies that link her return with the film’s subject — the Parsi boy, Azhar Mody, lost during the Gulbarg Society massacre in Ahmedabad on February 28, 2002, whose return is still awaited by his devastated parents. Like Azhar, Sarika is “The Waif Who Vanished”, according to a leading news-magazine. Its main article on Parzania carries a large picture of the boy’s father, Dara, sobbing uncontrollably as he is held close by Naseeruddin Shah (in dark glasses), who plays him in the film; a famous news producer and anchor is looking grimly at them from behind.

This photograph is like an allegory of the Public Conscience: Human Interest Story in the arms of Cinema, as Television looks on, each eager to Tell it Like It Is. The article’s little box on Sarika begins, in the same breath as it tells the Modys’ story, with unabashed richness of feeling, “Long after Parzania gets over, you can’t forget Sarika in the role of Shernaz. You are haunted by her freckled, broken face, talking about her lost son…” Whom, or what, are you being urged to ‘remember’ here? And to what end? And who exactly are “you”? What is the nature and function of your memory?

This banquet of ready emotions and ‘good acting’ that Parzania offers its audiences acquires greater legitimacy by that most fortuitous of misfortunes to befall an Indian film — being banned by the Bajrang Dal and therefore patronized by the Congress. This immediately establishes its political coordinates, and sets the tone for the right kind of response, which can never henceforth be an ‘aesthetic’ one. If you then happen not to like the film, or are left cold by it, or find yourself resisting its designs on your feelings, then you must be a heartless monster. By this logic, if you thought Fire was a bad film, then you must be homophobic. Similarly, if you haven’t sobbed through Parzania, then you stand dubiously outside the spontaneous Consensus of Hearts. Your response to the film begins to get identified with your position on the ‘Gujarat issue’.

What does it mean when a society does not bother to acknowledge or confront the most unsavoury aspects of its past and present unless these are packaged as Reality TV or feel-bad-to-feel-good entertainment? Such a society’s most difficult ‘issues’ are made visible almost entirely by the popular media and cinema, determined, on the one hand, by the dictates of commerce and, on the other, by various kinds of censorship. What are the markets, the codes and clichés, rules and stereotypes, that produce the true stories and moving images of this society? How does its language of the ‘real’ shape the way it feels and remembers, and sustain its notions of the political and the apolitical, justice and injustice, what can be redressed and what must be accepted? What, say, would modern Europe have been like if the Nuremberg Trials hadn’t happened, and all that remained of the Third Reich were Sound of Music, Schindler’s List and the skinheads?

Dholakia’s “statement about the riot” comes “straight from the heart”. And that, according to him, is what makes it an “apolitical” film, which takes up the story of one family and brings out its “essential” as well as “universal” elements: “we wanted to make you feel as if you were part of it and how they were feeling”. If distancing oneself from the ‘political’ means taking refuge in such a simplified and presumptuous form of empathy, then something profoundly important has to be compromised in the process. This not only makes for deeply mediocre cinema (in spite of good acting), employing every visual, musical, narrative and sentimental cliché from B/C-grade Hollywood catastrophe films, but is also ethically dubious and politically dangerous.

Two devices help Dholakia achieve this. First, his odious American narrator — supposedly finishing a thesis on his wellness guru, the Mahatma, without ever having heard of the Parsis — through whose eyes and voice-over we are made to see the whole thing. Second, the film’s implicit ‘and-they-weren’t-even-Muslims’ theme, together with this American point of view, creates a rather lopsided effect of neutrality, as if neither is properly part of the central conflict of the riots and is only caught in it in spite of themselves, making the helplessness that much more unjust and tragic, the outrage and the empathy easier to draw out.

To be urged to look inwards, into our hearts, and seek there the ‘universal’ and ‘essential’ meanings of what happened, and continues to happen, in Gujarat, is to look deliberately away from the enormity as well as the particularity of what the victims of the genocide — dead, alive or still lost — suffered and continue to suffer. Denied justice for their dead, and cheated out of the promised compensation and rehabilitation, most of them remain abjectly dispossessed and internally displaced within a precariously divided society, while their killers, rapists and torturers, and those who helped these people pull the whole thing off, in the highest seats of power, go triumphantly unpunished in Modi’s Vibrant Gujarat.

India seems to have produced the perfect society, and State, for such an effortless containment of genocide and its long aftermath, of making a public crime of unprecedented proportions part of the texture of its everyday normality. And it is films like Parzania — allowing us to fit in a cathartic bout of weeping between checking out the Cottonworld sale and tucking in the Oh! Calcutta buffet-lunch — that make this incredible achievement a little easier to hold together.