‘In India, you become an engineer first and then decide what to do with your life.’

For those of us who grew up during the last decade of the 20^th century and the first decade of the 21^st century, one knows exactly what this means. The reason this adage holds true for millions of engineer-turned-whoevers in this country is because of the sheer incapacity of our systems to offer any freedom in choosing the purpose of our lives. We were made to find a purpose only within the economic realities of our class and the social realities of our caste.

Being a lower middle-class Savarna boy meant that we were to complete our engineering and find a job with a multi-national corporation (MNC) that would potentially offer us the opportunity to work in a first-world country. Once this dream was realised, we were to find a community to belong to and make that country our home. After that we were to re-produce, contribute in rearing an entire generation away from their roots and when they developed an identity in the new culture, guilt-trip them into accepting our roots as their own – basically exercise our patriarchal privilege on our off-spring, thus snatching away from them any agency over their own identity.

Nothing new, as far as middle class Indian parenting is concerned.

As somebody trying to break out of this cycle of hopelessness, I was successful in resisting this ‘Neo-liberal Indian Dream’ on two counts – one was a discovery, the other was a challenge.  The discovery was of finding a purpose in the performing arts. And the challenge was to break the cycle of guilt inherent to the Indian parenting set-up.

Resources were scant but hope was high. And of course, there were the good-old modern values. Those that taught you to look art as a mirror of society. And a society whose fault-lines were witnessed through lived experiences was the perfect candidate to be shown a mirror to.

Conflict

A mirror reflects, after all. Technically this meant that art is supposed to show society the way it is – the naked reality. It meant showing this naked reality with the intention of creating a shift in how one perceived it. It meant evaluating this reality against a human standard – a standard that a society set for itself.

At least, this was what we were taught by our earlier generations.

Questioning the standards that one is conditioned into needs a certain disengagement. Let us refrain from calling it objectivism. Because the first step towards being objective is to disengage. This disengagement is a long-ish process. And there are layers to it – emotional, psychological, physical. Moving from the personal to the social (and eventually political) needs, and takes, time.

That is why the initial expression of an artist is always localised. It comes from their immediate reality. And most of the times, it discounts privilege.

My earlier stories were thus about my immediate surroundings. Starting with a short film about the spirit of Bombay and then slowly moving on to cutting sarcasm about a certain police officer who would not allow the young to drink or romance peacefully were subjects that I thought were of prime importance. The Religious Divide bothered me but did not force me to question the reason behind it. Through one more short film, I had tried to connect it with the idea of God and its futility. But it did not address the consequent bigotry within humans.

And caste? That was completely out of the question – I was inert to it.

It took an incident like the death of Rohith Vemula for any understanding of caste privilege within me and the need to question the Savarna system that I was a product of.

What transpired in India after that had woken an entire generation up to a reality they were completely unaware of. The sheer apathy showed by the Indian media was followed by a counter-attack by powerful and regressive forces. This vicious counter-attack involved demonisation of the entire student community right after the JNU incident. These series of incidents were to have a lasting impact. This put into question the very meaning of art being a mirror of society.

The behaviour of the Hyderabad Central University Vice-Chancellor, Appa Rao Podille and the consequent response from the then HRD Minister, Smriti Irani, had led to the institutional killing of a bright student like Rohit Vemula. This shocker, for me, brought out the real meaning of what it meant to be ‘disadvantaged’ by birth in our country. Immediately after came the JNU incident. Student leaders were targeted by the State, misinformation was used as a major tool in manufacturing an ‘enemy of the people’ and very conveniently, this enemy was picked on the basis of their religion. This is more evident from the fact that of all the students who were targeted by the State at that time, Umar Khalid today happens to be the only one still behind bars after 1000 days of incarceration.

In such a scenario, it became immensely important as an artist (and more as a filmmaker since films have such a deep impact on the psyche of the Indian society) to respond to this new reality of the society around us. One could not just be satisfied expressing one’s immediate issues.

The idea of being ‘disadvantaged’ was gaining massive proportions – it was not just limited to a one-off incident that one could talk about, express concern and walk away. With new ways and waves of oppression came a greater understanding of the machinations functioning behind them.

Meanwhile social media started emerging as a powerful tool. And with its new ways of expression came a greater responsibility of cutting through the flak and standing out as a storyteller. Because story-telling had not remained the monopoly of those who had dedicated their lives to it. Now it was a house-hold item for consumption and the shorter the form, the better its reach. A story’s impact was evaluated through the number of hits on it and not by how deeply it affected one’s senses.

As a filmmaker, there was a double-edged challenge now – to understand my society at a wider level if I had to have any deeper understanding of it and to express that understanding in the quickest possible manner.

Epilogue

It is at this time when Annie Zaidi’s story ‘Two Way Street’ came to me. A ten pager that Annie had carved out while waiting for a meeting in an obscure office in Bombay spoke of all the changes I was seeing around me in a way that only Annie could. The depth of her understanding combined with the brevity of her thought was a breath of fresh air for a mind like mine that was still trying to find its own language of expression.

I started working on the script almost immediately. Through innumerable pitches to prospective producers, the drafts kept changing shape as the nature of tolerance around kept shifting. Every few days a new incident of intolerance towards minorities would come to the fore and a new attempt needed to be made to make the script relevant to this new low of hate that we were witnessing. After a few drafts, I actually gave up.

The more one tried to incorporate the intensity of the prevalent violence against minorities in the script, the more it started getting rejected by investors. Nobody wanted to touch it. Well, it was not a good business proposition to talk about prevailing hate, you see. A non-existent romance one can talk about. But not seething, burning hate. It just did not fall in line with market standards. Hate could be expressed on the streets but not spoken about in our stories. Unless one found a market for it. The script itself became an ‘untouchable’.

The next challenge was to then make the story palatable to the market. One good thing about capitalism is that its loyalty is only towards opportunity. While socialists fought for values, capitalists resisted for the sake of opportunity. And opportunity is a two way street (pun intended).

If the market was not conducive to one story, we decided to make it into four stories. Four stories of hate and prejudice. Then it becomes a package, you see? A similar package of lust was already famous in the OTT markets. A lot of people were working on such packages. It had just become the flavour of the season to deal with stories in packages. It was then that it dawned upon us that it was not that our stories did not find place in the market. It was how we were packaging them.

Consequently, it was not that our politics did not have a place in society. It was about how we were expressing this politics.

This intervention formed the backbone of the treatment for Two Way Street. We were living in an opportunistic time. Hate had become an industry that had a large market. If we spoke about it in exactly the same way as it was expressed on the streets, then we were to be of the same category as those who were benefitting from it. Hence, it was imperative for us to find a way of expression that was unique to our politics. If our politics stood for inclusion, it was because we believed that that was the inherent value on which our society was built. And so, our expression needed to derive itself from something that is inherent to the hate we were seeing around. And it’s projection needed to have an inherence that resonated with the market.

With this learning, we went back into the market. This time armed with an expression which was unique to our politics and a package that seemed familiar to those backing us. The trick worked and magically, we had a producer. Although they were funding only 50% of the costs, we were confident of building a team of artists who would work with us for the sake of our politics. The rest of the 50% would come from their labour. This calculation worked for the market and for us too. A win-win situation as they call it and today, we find ourselves on course to make an anthology of four short films around the subject of ‘Inherent Prejudice’.

The first film Escort dealt with the subject of ‘able-ism’. After winning Best Screenplay at the Venice Shorts, it is well on its way in the festival circuit.

Our second film, Two Way Street has had five selections and an award for Best Director. It is gathering the response that we expected.

It is a film that has taught us the importance of having a malleable stance in our expression while staying true to our values in these ever-changing and ever-shifting times. It is a film that evaluates the hate spread within our society and offers tools for resistance – tools that might seem miniscule when thought about but become larger when implemented, tools emanating from the values the founding fathers of our country set for us, tools that have helped us make this film in these crazy times.

The plan is to now carry this learning ahead and apply it to the forthcoming stories. After all, since Art is a mirror to society and the society of today is in more of a flux than ever before, it is imperative that our expression from now on keeps evolving itself and as artists we are ever ready to shape-shift based on what the universe around us becomes.

Art thus can also mirror a universal need. And I am glad that for now, in this moment, the work I am engaged in with and after Two Way Street, meets that need. 

(Asmit Pathare straddles the world of theatre and films. He is a screenwriter, filmmaker, stage lighting designer and a theatre-maker.)

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