The reviews of Photograph praised the film’s aesthetics and cherished its delightful and delicate moments. Yet there is unease about the film lacking substance. It appeared too thin for those trained in the methods of Bollywood. Photograph disappoints for not offering overt clarities in the plot that Bollywoodish hearts pine for.
When the same reviews gloss over the most crucial aspect of the film, what do we blame it on?
Blinded by habit, no reviewer seems to have paused on the central moment of the film that is crucial for us to understand the “secret” behind Miloni’s growing affection towards Rafi. It is a mysterious moment which is edited out in the film to create the suggestive element in the plot.
I would argue that “secret” is deeply political.
We do not get to hear what Rafi tells Miloni in the park, before she agrees to play the prospective bride for Rafi’s grandmother. What did Rafi tell Miloni that propels her to stray into the unfamiliar world of a Muslim photographer and his grandmother? After all, Miloni comes from a middle-class, Gujarati Hindu family. Her father boasts to friends of his daughter topping the foundation course in Chartered Accountancy.
Miloni’s decision to play Noorie and help Rafi, an older Muslim man she barely knows, breaks predominant social norms. Their growing closeness is a scandal, particularly in the times of love jihad. More than a class difference, a middle-class Hindu woman’s bold step to befriend a Muslim stranger out of genuine intrigue forms the political core of the film’s plot.
When Rafi’s grandmother asks Miloni about her parents, she tells her a story that Rafi invented for her. We learn her parents were killed trying to save people when the walls of a mosque were falling apart.
The otherwise talkative and curious grandmother strangely does not ask for details. Just because the script demanded that Noorie’s parents had to be done away with to avoid complications, they did not have to die in that fashion. It’s too dramatic and tragic a story to offer an old lady.
Which mosque was this? Which year was it?
It is odd to imagine, a mosque crumbled on its own. Was it demolished?
Also read: ‘Photograph’: A Nostalgia Tinged ‘Love Story’ Weighed Down by a Shallow Core
Rafi is a migrant from Uttar Pradesh, living in a close-knit Muslim ghetto in Mumbai. The neighbourhood vendor, and the cabbie, much to Rafi’s irritation, know and show concern for his grandmother in the village for giving up her medicines to protest against Rafi’s reluctance to get married.
Rafi’s friends, with whom he shares a one-room shanty, also persuade him to get married. Rafi, dealing with his masculinity, refuses to be a “softie”. His friends emphasise that Rafi is a man who barely smiles, and seems disturbed by something. His grandmother speaks of the boyhood charms of his slanted smile that he inherited from his grandfather.
What robbed that smile away from Rafi? What disturbed him? What caused the death of innocence? Was it the memory of a demolition, the demolition of memory?
Rafi does not show signs of religiosity. Yet he lives close to his community and shares common ties of livelihood. His friends drive away the blues after work, by carousing, humour and fatalism. In the middle of a conversation, a character says: the nation is large enough to have room for all things.
The response cuts it to size: except what it does not remember. When a Muslim migrant talks about the nation’s memory and forgetting, the matter is not about the cultural nostalgia of old music and habits. The matter is political.
We learn Miloni did stage shows as a girl, before evidently being pushed into the machine of middle-class aspiration. Noorie gave Miloni the chance to relive her secret desire and break away from the harsh routine of day-long classes and late night study. Even though she plays Noorie to temporarily fulfil a mix of desire and intrigue, the closeness to Rafi grows real. She looked conflicted and not very convincing to herself, when she tells her domestic help that the man seen with her was not her boyfriend.
Miloni was transforming into the woman in Rafi’s photograph. She confessed, it made her look happier and more beautiful. The photographs she discovered below Rafi’s mattress revealed, the man was dreaming her. Rafi’s photographs made Miloni dream of herself as another. Noorie grew roots in Miloni. Her heart was turning into a migrant. She was getting drawn to a man who cared for his grandmother and the memory of his late father, the way she was attached to the memory of her late grandfather. The vacuity of city life intensifies longing for the anchor of memory.
Also read: Fighting For Interfaith Couples Whose Marriages Are Attacked As ‘Love Jihad’
Though Miloni was gentle and tongue-tied at home, wrestling with her silence by rubbing her feet below the table, she resembles the girls in Alok Dhanwa’s famous poem, ‘Run-Away Girls’, who, despite being at home, were secretly running away from it.
To a fellow passenger’s query in the bus if she was the crowned, pinup girl on the billboard, she declined, refusing to identify (anymore) with the lifeless, marketable image of advertising. She earned the disinterest of a prospective bridegroom from the US, telling him her dream was to live in a village and sleep below a tree with the sun falling on her face. She firmly declines to have coffee with the insistent tutor who tries to exploit her with a photograph of her that he deliberately kept with him.
Miloni was beginning to speak her mind, and find her voice, her ground.
Rafi’s photographs had transported Miloni to a different world. His craftiness enchanted her with a new image of herself, through photographs that introduced, as Susan Sontag said, “a new form of hallucination”. Miloni was intrigued by how Rafi and his camera saw her differently from the world, and closer to a dream she was too timid, till then, to acknowledge. Rafi’s photographs had touched the visual image of her solitude.
Rafi and Miloni making little memories of Mumbai together, its cab rides, its sudden rains, its quiet lanes and street food, is reminiscent of the bare intensity of an Abbas Kiarostami film – slow, minimalist, and revealing the dilemmas of the world’s minor and unusual characters. The “secret” bond between Rafi and Miloni is what nationalism wants to destroy and erase: the accidental love between a Hindu and a Muslim.
The fact that Photograph keeps what transpires behind Miloni’s decision to be Noorie a secret, can be read as a comment on the censorship on inter-religious love by the Hindu vigilante. It is our task to unravel and welcome that secret, and develop the photograph’s negative.
In Immortality, Milan Kundera wrote, “Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.” But you can make a film on the memory of photographs.
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Looking for the Nation: Towards Another Idea of India, published by Speaking Tiger Books (August 2018).
