It was the year 2008, and I was a freshly minted postgraduate working for a city newspaper as a journalist, covering the arts and culture beat. It was also the year Nandita Das made her directorial debut with her incredibly subtle Firaaq (in the aftermath of Gujarat 2002 riots).
It was a movie about violence, the worst of human qualities and hatred, that didn’t have a frame of violence in it. I remember speaking to her clearly, even today ten years later. Because Das spoke eloquently about the need for the female gaze in our cinema and that conversation would sow the seeds for my interest in the gender discourse around cinema and eventually lead to this column.
The essence of our interview from ten years ago was that undermining of women is one thing — and the way it finds itself on screen another - but because of the former, the way the general (male) gaze represents women is so many times so skewed.
A decade later, Das is back and at the heart of her film is a real man, a storyteller, the author Manto (a crackling, different Nawazuddin Siddiqui), who’s told on screen, “Your stories always show a special empathy for women.” To which he says, “Not for all women. Some for the one who isn’t selling herself, but is still being bought. And some for the one who works all night and sleeps in the day, dreaming of old age knocking at her door.”
Das showcases the poignancy of the female gaze – by balancing the frames between the man, his prowess and his fears without diminishing others around him. In the hands of a lesser artist, Manto might have been made into a larger than life – extreme character, what with this great art that will go on to outlive him, his pain over the Hindu-Muslim divide and the India-Pakistan divide, his descent into alcoholism and his paranoia and of course all the rich material that is his own writing.
But Das handles it all lightly, without being burdened by the man’s genius. She shows him in the best light possible – a flawed, real flesh-and-blood human. An artiste who cared about others’ opinion, particularly those he held high. As a writer of short fiction, I understood Manto’s insecurities too, I felt it through Das’ steady gaze. Be it the women who were the centre of some of Manto’s stories that has been woven into this script, or the women around Manto (especially his wife Sadia – the charismatic Rasika Dugal), no one stands small just to make Manto tower. They are all equals in this equal journey.