New Delhi: ‘Those were the days’. ‘Those were different days’. ‘In those days…’ Every time Sudhir Mishra reflected on a question put to him at the India International Centre on Saturday, he ended up drifting back to ‘those days’, the time when filmmakers in India had to do everything: writing, directing, editing, and also wiping the floors, pushing the trolleys, giving tea, cooking food, and waking the directors up. But is there something else that separates India of today from ‘those days’? During the 90-minute talk titled ‘Hazaaron Khwahishen Aisi’, with author-curator Sujata Prasad and theatre artiste Oroon Das, Mishra quashed the Indian society’s current assumption, or the afwaah—that the disaster won’t happen.
“But the disaster will happen. All we can hope for is that it’s a manageable disaster,” said the writer-director, whose latest film, Afwaah (Rumour), has shocked everyone who has seen it — but not because of its premise of two strangers on the run as a viral social media rumour chases them across a small town in Rajasthan. The question that confounded everyone, including the audience at IIC, is the one that historian Mukul Kesavan asked Mishra after the film’s first screening in front of “political editors and political people”: “How the hell did you get it [past] the censor board?”
As the audience broke into laughter, Mishra explained what worked for his film that shows a mirror to the communal ‘love jihad’ bogey. “The advantage with Afwaah is that it’s a film about nothing because actually nothing is there,” he said, emphasising the use of his film’s title. “Sometimes things pass. Afwaah isn’t sensationalist. It is not asking to be banned.”
The IIC hall was unanimous in appraising Mishra’s film as “brave”, and in touching upon the inconceivability of such a film to even exist in today’s time. But Mishra was glad that Afwaah was made. “At least it gives courage to a lot of younger people that you can [make such a film], that you can’t just sit down and not react.” He then cautioned an audience member who commented how the message of his films “doesn’t go through to censor people”. You shouldn’t look at it like that, Mishra said. “It’s a liberal view that there are fools on the other side.”
While his camera in Afwaah followed people actively involved in the business of spreading fake news or making a rumour go viral, and bared a section of India’s litfest-consuming elite that “won’t open the door” to a Muslim screaming to save his life, it was at the IIC event that Mishra unmasked the ‘afwaah’ hiding in plain sight. “These rumours of Hindu-Muslim are just a tip of the thing. The rumour that we are going to escape disaster is the most problematic rumour… that nothing will happen.”
Perhaps that explains why Mishra was “angrier” when he made Afwaah. But balancing his anger with the need to ensure his film wasn’t stopped at the censor board could have meant he was holding himself back. Did he? “Not consciously. If I left something out, it was part of the process of picking and choosing,” he later told ThePrint.
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Not a liberal
Mishra’s journey into the “corrupt world of cinema”—only to be considered by his peers as “one of the betrayers of the theatre movement”—began in 1983, when he was 22. It started with Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, the film he wants to be kept “in the sidelines” of any discussions on it. “It was this mad guy, genius, exasperating, brilliant, unique Kundan Shah. When you talk about Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, you should keep Kundan in the centre. I was there as an assistant,” Mishra said, informing his audience that he was paid Rs 4,000 for the film.
In his four-decade cinematic career, Mishra, who self-admittedly carries “a disdain for politics”, compiled a body of work that often delved into India’s politics and showed his own “Leftist” views. And yet, as Oroon Das said, it is difficult to figure out Mishra’s affiliations and allegiances. “Because of Badal da [dramatist and theatre director Badal Sircar] and the interaction with that mind, I knew what the real Left was. I knew what led me to study some actual things instead of some pamphlets,” said Mishra, who still considers himself a Leftist. “I don’t think I have changed that much. I am not liberal. But these days, they are taken together. There is confusion.”
It made Sujata Prasad quip that the director was a little in the seditious category. “I am a filmmaker,” he replied. “If you remain true to the dharma of storytelling, of cinema, then the film will always lead you to a question rather than to an answer.”
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On the ‘fringe’
Through clips of some of his major films—such as Dharavi (1991), Chameli (2004), Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (2005), Serious Men (2020), and finally Afwaah—the IIC event opened to a round of applause and proceeded to dissect various characters from them. It allowed the director to share insights regarding who these characters could be in real life—his mother, his second wife, and himself.
Despite his stellar filmography, Mishra said he is “on the fringe” of the Hindi film industry. “But on the inside of the fringe, not outside,” he quickly added. “I am not unpopular in the industry. I exist because of the grace of a lot of people,” he said, naming some of them — Kundan Shah, Ketan Mehta, Javed Akhtar, Shekhar Kapur, and his own brother, Sudhanshu. If he regrets anything, Mishra added, it is “cutting off from Delhi…from that MPhil background”.
True to Mishra’s reflective style, the IIC discussion straddled between the past and the present, the famed years of parallel cinema and the India of today, where there is a “misunderstanding of who the establishment is and where people have gone”. When asked by ThePrint if there’s something holding today’s filmmakers back, Mishra was clear: “Every film needs money. The censor is not just the government; the censor is also market forces.”
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)