Tag: Newton film

‘Paatal Lok’ Missed the Opportunity to Break Tradition and Make Hathiram a Dalit Cop

The web series scores points on many fronts, but its representation of Dalits and anti-caste politics fails to convince.

When criticised for having a ‘savarna saviour’ character in his acclaimed film Article 15, director Anubhav Sinha had responded that this film was just the beginning. More Dalit characters would appear in movies and perhaps, the next step might even be a Dalit character as the lead.

What Anubhav Sinha had unwittingly admitted was that Bollywood’s lead actors are not yet ready to play a Dalit. This is such an entrenched tradition in the industry that even a director who is ready to make “off-beat themes” could not challenge it.

Perhaps nor did Anushka Sharma, producer of the web series Paatal Lok. But Jaideep Ahalawat’s character Hathiram Chaudhary, the lead in the series, belongs to a lowly police station in Delhi and is often ridiculed by his seniors. Yet, he fights for justice and truth and could have been made a Dalit character to break the industry’s norms.

A web series is not a film, and unlike the latter, does not cater to a mass audience. But this format allows its producers more liberty, as there is less censorship compared to a commercial movie. Director Avinash Arun Prosit Roy had the opportunity to make history, but missed the chance or maybe chose not to.

Also Read: Caste, Class and Populist Political Anxieties in ‘Paatal Lok’

A hierarchical society

The show begins with a cryptic description of a hierarchical society. There is Swarglok, or gods who are revered, Dharti Lok, composed of privileged people, and Paatal Lok, where the banished ones whose lives have no value live. Thus, the Paatal Lok police station has cockroaches, jurisdiction over a basti of very poor people and functions with inefficiencies.

In the show, Hathiram explains that the people of Swarglok are disgusted by Paatal Lok and believe that the people of there are always bound to fail.

Here, showing Hathiram as a Dalit man would have been a perfect allegory to show that caste and caste discrimination are not just as a rural problem – especially when the person is surrounded by upper caste media.

The proverbial Paatal Lok comprises of ‘banished’ people, mainly the Dalits and the Muslims. You find a Muslim cop as an assistant to Hathiram, but a Dalit character is conspicuously absent.

The character of Hathiram fits that bill perfectly.

Hathiram’s son is bullied at school and called ‘Hathi ka baccha’ in the same way that Dalit children are taunted in schools.

Yet, the director does not even drop subtle hints to suggest that Hathiram is a Dalit.

A poster for ‘Paatal Lok’.

You have to watch Newton – India’s entry to the 2018 Oscars – very carefully to know that the lead character is a Dalit. The hint comes in the form of a one-second flash of B.R. Ambedkar’s photo in Newton’s room. (It’s strange, isn’t it, that upper caste characters are loud, but Dalit characters are subtle unless the movie is about caste discrimination, such as Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan?)

Also Read: Is Newton a New Kind of Dalit Hero in Hindi Cinema?

Yes, Paatal Lok has a Dalit character in Tope Singh – an obsessive lover who used to fight oppression as a militant in his village before he moved to the city. This portrayal of a Dalit character is similar to that in Article 15, where the Dalits are shown as militants. But in Paatal Lok, Tope Singh is the worst among the four criminals caught red-handed by the police in a conspiracy to murder a highly placed journalist in Delhi.

The question still remains, where are the normal Dalits of Paatal Lok in Delhi?

A missed opportunity

The series is set in the current era; you see posters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in flashes at railway stations and so on. But the director chooses to make a caricature of contemporary Dalit politics. In the show, the Dalit Samaj Party, which is obviously based on the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) that represents the scheduled castes, is led by a Brahmin named Vajpayee who is so casteist that he washes himself with gaumutra after every visit to a Dalit house. Perhaps the director was worried about too obvious a resemblance to BSP or other parties like the BJP or the Congress, but this portrayal of Dalit politics is unreal and unconvincing.

In the show, a young Kashmiri police sub-inspector called Imran Ansari (played by Ishwak Singh) faces subtle taunts because he is a Muslim. But the show provides no explanation why his immediate boss, Hathiram, is also taunted by senior police officers, making it unconvincing.

Paatal Lok scores multiple points on many fronts. Its portrayal of racism towards people from the northeast of India is highly effective. So is its display of most Indians’ insensitivity towards the LGBTQ community, the deep misogyny in the country, the equally deep anti-Muslim prejudice and the prevalence of domestic abuse in cities and villages. But there is no plausible explanation why Delhi’s Paatal Lok has all the marginalised communities in the city, except the Dalits who have been relegated to the margins for millennia.

The series continues to present the mainstream view that caste and discrimination are prevalent only in villages. All references to caste are in rural settings. Even the Brahmin leader of the Dalit party is from remote Uttar Pradesh.

Had the show portrayed a Dalit character as an upright inspector, it would have demolished the stereotypes that are held about the people of Paatal Lok. They are not “small”, as Hathiram discovers in the end.

A Dalit Hathiram and a Muslim policeman aspiring to enter the administrative services would have represented two of the most oppressed communities in India today – Dalits and Muslims.

The end, where fate plays a part, reinforces the narrative around the importance of astrology. This is bad, but for me, the bigger failure is the missed opportunity to have a Dalit policeman as the lead character in a mainstream series. It would have been easy to do this. Only a few changes in the dialogue and a few hints of the character’s caste would have turned Indian cinema’s social charturvarna structure upside down, just as the promos of the show display upside-down images.

The ‘Newton’ Character That Missed Our Reviews – the Forest

If the jungles of Dandakaranya are seen as a character in the movie, it is fair to aver that democracy in the jungle has to follow the rules of ecology, local knowledge and custom.

If the jungles of Dandakaranya are seen as a character in the movie, it is fair to aver that democracy in the jungle has to follow the rules of ecology, local knowledge and custom.

A scene from the film Newton. Credit: Eros

A scene from the film Newton. Credit: Eros

Neha Sinha is a Delhi-based conservationist.

In Satyajit Ray’s acclaimed short story, Big Bill, the unflappable protagonist Tulsi Babu visits the forests of Dandakaranya to procure a medicinal herb that works like magic. In the same forest, he finds an egg-shaped object.

As he watches, the egg begins to hatch. “The head was already out of the shell. It was not a snake, nor a crocodile or a turtle, but a bird… Its purple wings were unique, as was its alert behaviour so soon after birth.”

The rest of the story is devoted to Tulsi Babu’s adventures with the newly born chick, named Bill – and what Bill actually turns out to be. The deep, primitive forest of Dandakaranya has nearly the same importance as Bill in the story. In the Ramayana, too Dandakaranya has symbolism: it is the abode of Dandak, a demon. Surpanakha, sister of Ravana, meets Lakshman here, which leads to decisive events in the epic. In both Ray’s world and that of the Ramayana, Dandakaranya forest is brimful of mystery, medicine and terror, and is ultimately unknowable.

It is poetic justice then that Newton, one of the best films to have released this year, has Dandakaranya in its backdrop. The way the movie characterises the forest and its resident tribals is significant for Hindi cinema. In creating a forest that encompasses both an urban and tribal gaze, the movie holds a nuanced mirror to oft-neglected ground realities.

As you watch Newton, you may be convinced that Dandakaranya forests are not just a backdrop but a protagonist, or character, altogether. The movie follows the story of an electoral clerk – named Newton – who sets up an election booth in Dandakaranya to cater to 76 tribal voters. The forest is formed for you, taking shape, menace and meaning through the accounts of others. For security agencies who are “carrying the weight of the nation” on their shoulders, the forests are a chessboard for Naxal guerrilla warfare.

This is both political and biological warfare: the security forces warn of both hidden ammunition and venomous snakes. Newton himself is the urban outsider, hopelessly adrift in the forest, trudging through painfully in his tight, dark formal shoes. And then there are the tribals, particularly Malko, Newton’s assistant for a day, who merge seamlessly into the forest, becoming one with the canopy and hidden paths, stripping down the menace seen by security forces and urban outsiders.

This creates an important prism to view both the understanding, and taking over, of the forest. Dandakaranya is “Naxal-infested” for the nation but it is also home to the Gond tribe. For non-tribals, it is at best a complicated question and, at worst, a thing that needs to be sanitised. This is a reflection of what is happening with tribals, who are viewed as complicating state-led ‘development’ and ‘mainstreaming’. The historian Upinder Singh argues that states have always had violent political arguments with forest-dwelling tribals. Naxalism or other contemporary insurgencies are not an exception.

“Now, as then, the forest remains a borderland with a difference. It does not lie on the margins of the state. It lies within it,” Singh writes in her new book, Political Violence in Ancient India.

For Newton, tribals are human beings with dignity, something he tries to hammer into everyone around him with sanctimonious fervour. “Aap inse aise nahi baat kar sakte (You can’t talk to them rudely),” he repeatedly says to the security forces. While the forces – represented by both the police and the paramilitary – view themselves as paternalistic towards the adivasis and the idea of India as unified nation-state. Expectedly, their narrative slips into threats and farce. Because no one gives a fig as to what the tribal really wants or thinks.

Speaking of figs: The movie has a deft ploy of contrasting traditional indigenous knowledge of the tribals with that of the outsiders. Which one will you privilege, the audience seems to be asked. The Gonds take figs, fruit, herbs and medicinal remedies from the forest. In one scene, Malko offers an ant-covered branch to electoral assistant Loknath after Loknath says he is scared of getting malaria in Dandakaranya. The ants will bite, the man will sweat and malaria will not take root in his body, Malko deftly adds. The ant-studded branch then becomes an extended olive branch, a coming together of forest wisdom and modern life.

Loknath, cleverly played by Raghubir Yadav, flatly refuses this peace offering. He is repulsed by the idea and also fairly disdainful – a metaphor for the way tribal knowledge is often looked at. In India, the Forest Rights Acts was enacted in 2006 to give access and sustainable use rights to forest-dwellers. Before that, the Biodiversity Act was brought about in 2002 as a means of capturing local biodiversity knowledge and ensuring local communities benefited first from commercial exploitation.

However, the road to sustainable livelihood has been and is long and hard. For years, activists have campaigned for bamboo (which is a grass) to be declared as not a tree but as grass – so that forest-dwellers can legally use and sell it. Tendu leaves also are an important forest produce but don’t always fetch the right prices. In the movie, when asked who they will vote for, the Gonds say they will support whoever gives them the best tendu leaf prices.

What does the audience make of this? Some may find it flippant. Others may find it just as spot-on as Delhi’s voters giving their votes to the Aam Aadmi party, which promised the slashing of electricity and water prices.

If the jungles of Dandakaranya are seen as a character in the movie, it is fair to aver that democracy in the jungle has to follow the rules of ecology, local knowledge and custom. If you look at the jungle like security forces in the movie see it, it is more Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. If you care to listen to tribal wisdom, the jungle is dignified, ordered, even magical, more like the depiction of the forest in the movie Avatar (2009), or in Satyajit Ray’s work.

Like Malko, exasperated by Newton’s blinkered, suffocating do-goodness, quips – establishing a link between a good deed and a benign jungle: “Koi bhi baada kaam ek din me nahi hota. saalon lag jate hai jungle banne me” (No big deed can be done in a day. It takes years to create a forest).”