Why Bollywood should watch this Shahrukhkhan’s humanist tale of ordinary Muslim life

A still from Shahrukhkhan Chavada's film Kayo Kayo Colour? (2023)

Growing up in a pravasi Bengali household in the national capital in the early ’90s, the very first Muslim fictional character I was introduced to was a Pashtun dried-fruit seller from Kabul, Afghanistan, in Rabindranath Tagore’s Kabuliwala (1892). Like Tagore’s Mini, I’d sit by my windows, hoping some kabuliwala would come along with goodies for me, too. The early ’90s in India — the Babri Masjid demolition followed by Bombay riots of ’92-’93 — were a highly charged, politically rife time, which our parents and schools shielded us from. We would play doll’s house, kitchen/doctor sets and gully cricket with colony kids, unaware of what creed our friends belonged to. It was a different era. Although, when my mother was growing up in the border district of Murshidabad in West Bengal decades ago, she’d hear young Hindu girls being told by their own: ‘marry anyone but not a Madrasi or Musholmaan’. The Othering begins early. Those we don’t meet or know — up close, in real sense, after letting go of our ego — are often seen as different, and thus unlikeable, because we don’t know any better. It is a base survival instinct to preserve the familiar.

The day I turned a year old, I met my first real-life Muslim. The then-soon-to-become King of Bollywood. A lanky and scrawny Shah Rukh Khan had come to wish me. My then-cinematographer father was working on the DD serial Fauji (1988). There, however, remains no photographic proof of the day, and, as is true of today, truth only counts if there’s a kaagaz (document) to show for it.

Years later, SRK would oscillate between being the best romantic hero Hindi cinema has produced since the ’90s and being the good Muslim — the trap of yet another trope — in the hope to undo Bollywood’s wrongful incarceration into a stereotypical image of skull cap-wearing polygynous Muslims: as either the meek victim (Sholay) or the villain. The ’90s onwards, they were imagined as either militants (Mani Ratnam’s Roja paving the way), terrorists, and, in the last decade, as evil Mughal rulers. Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Animal revisits the Muslim villain trope. Benevolent Muslim villains (Zanjeer’s Sher Khan/Pran) or radicalised Hindu heroes (Dharmputra’s Dilip Rai/Shashi Kapoor) who have a change of heart were a rarity, and now, impossible for our films to imagine. Had it not been for Shyam Benegal (Sardari Begum, Mammo) and Saeed Akhtar Mirza (Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro, Naseem) films that showed ordinary Muslim life, the majoritarian audiences wouldn’t have been able to break free of their own indoctrination. However, even in these films, the Muslim-ness of the characters catch up with them. In that pool, and in today’s escalating Islamophobic global climate, a small film Kayo Kayo Colour? (What Colour?) by Shahrukhkhan Chavada, that premiered last year at the prestigious International Film Festival Rotterdam, is rare and essential.

Independent filmmaker Shahrukhkhan Chavada.

If 2023 belonged to King Khan, with his three releases, Pathaan, Jawan and Dunki, it also belonged to this other SRK from Ahmedabad. His debut feature What Colour? has picked up awards at most of the festivals it screened in, from Jio MAMI to Jogja-Indonesia. Next up is Mumbai, on February 17 (7.30 pm) at G5A Cinema House. Delhiites can watch Arbab Ahmad’s personal documentary Insides and Outsides on February 19, 5.30 pm, in Ghitorni. As minority lives are getting hemmed in, it’s important that the rest of us don’t let the cacophony on the streets drown out these stories.

One thing about Chavada’s debut feature that surmounts every other lens of engaging with the film is its honesty, its authenticity. It would make every viewer iterate what King Khan said in Ahamaq (1989), Mani Kaul’s adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Idiot: Agar sach bol rahe ho toh wakayi ek paak aadmi ho, uparwala tumhare jaise logon ko hi chahta hai (you are a pure person if you speak the truth, God loves such people).

Chavada’s debut drama that unspools over 24 hours in the life of an ordinary Muslim family in Sodagar ki Pol, Kalupur, in old Ahmedabad, and enacted by local residents, in all its black-and-white glory, is a visual masterpiece, a terrific cinematic experience, which embraces the flaws to show life as it is. It borrows from the documentary format and fiction to create a new form of filmmaking. It cogently wrests the Muslim experience from the “victim or villain” trope of Bollywood.

The camera opens in Razzak’s house. It’s dawn, and is still dark outside. His wife Raziya is washing clothes, imploring her children to leave for school. The film spans over 24 hours in the life of this family. As we watch, anticipating something ominous to happen, Chavada denies feeding into our expectations. In his cinema of yore, he holds our hand and takes us inside a Muslim home to meet these characters and see for ourselves how they live. The only ominous/violent thing to happen, in the film as much as in reality, is the announcement of an economic policy: demonetisation, which crushes a child’s desire and a financially-strapped family’s hopes of survival.

Tagore’s Mini could have been Ruba but she has nobody who’d bring her the Dracola drink she so wants, after seeing a young boy (in a cricket T-shirt that says Shahrukh) buy the drink. But she can’t pay Rs 100 for it. By the end of the film, when she does secure a Rs 500 note, demonetisation has brought her long-held hope to a naught. The last scene, in which Ruba looks straight into the camera, almost as if holding the viewer accountable for her misfortune, with their silences or complicity, will haunt much after the film has ended.

A still from Kayo Kayo Colour?

Kayo Kayo Colour? is a striking, unsentimental portrait of a family’s toil, shown with great restraint. Everyday chores, structured around class and gender roles, is the axis around which the narrative gyrates, and how the politics governs day-to-day existence. Fact becomes fiction in this working-class Indian Muslim’s story, where unemployed Razzak — reminiscent of Antonio Ricci in postwar Rome in Bicycle Thieves (1948) — is desperate for work to support his family. But Razzak would rather drive an autorickshaw instead of an office job, but, like his daughter Ruba, he doesn’t have enough money to buy the vehicle. Neither will he let his wife work outside home. His son Faiz chases chickens on the street while Ruba plays quietly indoors. Girls play with kitchen sets; children learn early their gender-ascribed roles.

A still from Kayo Kayo Colour?

In stark contrast to his home are Razzak’s rich sister’s modern, spacious house and his mother’s tiny crammed one-room dwelling, which, as the year scribbled atop the door indicates, is a makeshift home in this area of Kalupur that came up after the Gujarat riots in the February of 2002. Here’s a distinct visual language in which the camera resonates with the characters’ social reality. Chavada uses the camera’s gaze as a tool to map spaces and show class divide.

A still from the film.

“Carefree children playing in the streets were shot using a hand-held camera. We used three types of cameras, which took on a character itself, to tell of the stable or precarious economic backgrounds of the three households. Inside Razzak’s home, the camera’s angle was fixed on tripod, it reflects the congested space and mirrors his sticky financial situation. In Razzak’s Aapi’s (sister’s) home, the camera, stable on tripod, moves fluidly and smoothly, capturing the vastness of the space and also symbolising her progressive outlook. In the dadi-dada’s tiny place, the camera is fixed but handheld and mostly the shot was to be taken from one angle only, there isn’t any camera movement to reflect their helpless condition,” says Ahmedabad-based Chavada, 28.

The lens is mostly wide, about 98 per cent of the film is shot on 14-24 mm lens, with a 50 mm in one place. The creative challenge for him was how to portray the structural violence visually? Almost the entire film is in boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, the blackout at night (to indicate notebandi/demonetisation, and when electricity comes, from there, the aspect ratio changes to 16:9, even then, the house structure still remains within the 4:3 frame, to visually speak of how their lives are hemmed in rigid boundaries, and in the end, Ruba’s walk, to buy the drink, even then she stays with that structure.

A still from the film.

“I’ve not studied cinematography academically,” says Chavada, who manned the camera on the film but has actually studied VFX and animation from Reliance AIMS (Animation Infotainment & Media School), Pune, instead. “All that I have learnt about camera setting, etc., is from watching YouTube videos. In Ahmedabad, I have done quite a few corporate shoots, events, semi-documentary and film, wedding films, in which I have done both photography and cinematography. These were honing my technical craft. And to develop a sensibility and understanding for the philosophical aspect of cinematography, on how to do storytelling through images, I watched a lot of old cinema.”

Chavada names Abbas Kiarostami, Lav Diaz, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming Liang, Alfonso Cuarón and adds, “I’ve only watched the world cinema filmmakers’ works in the last three-four years, before that, it was all Bollywood and Hollywood mainstream, I’d watch everything but didn’t particularly have a favourite director so to speak.”

A still from the film.

Though Chavada and his co-producer Wafa Refai were inspired by Assamese filmmaker Rima Das in terms of film production, which was assisted by the local kids. Refai showed Iranian films to these children who’d act in the film. The disappointment of Ruba’s face when she realises she can’t buy the cold drink reminds of the disappointment on the face of the brother from Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven (1997) who wanted to come third in the race and not win so as to bag the prize for his sister: a pair of sneakers.

When Chavada watched Alfonso Cuarón’s three-Oscars-winning Roma (2018), he came out excited and inspired, that cinema can also have an objective experience and observational approach, which he applies to his own film. He was excited because he found Sergei Eisenstein’s Montage theory ‘heavily manipulative’ in the way it depicts a community. “This isn’t a way to speak of a community.”

A still from the film.

He, instead, gravitated towards mise-en-scène and long takes. Though, a dilemma remained. Of “how to imply the subjective viewpoint while giving the objective experience? Accidentally, our first shoot was in the rich sister’s house, in the scene where the sister is folding dried clothes and talking about her brother Razzak, in a split second, unconsciously, she breaks the fourth wall when she looks straight at the camera and then reverts to look and speak her dialogues to her mother. The moment was exciting, I felt this was the moment that resolves my creative dilemma, the fly-on-the-wall concept cannot be 100 per cent objective. The observant is aware of the observer’s presence, the truth changes then, so I realised this could become a creative tool in my film, the random breaking of the fourth wall, the presence of the camera, if someone looks into the camera, those takes were okay for me” — it’s interesting because that brings the documentary element into a feature film, almost like a response of how some documentary filmmakers, of late, have been infusing fiction film elements into their form. That and to defy the Montage theory of filmmaking.

The very fact that Shahrukhkhan Chavada’s film Kayo Kayo Colour? (Which Colour?) is in black and white and its title is derived from an eponymous game children play, in which the veracity of the colours thus found can’t be verified by the viewers, places the film in the post-truth era. And through this micro lens, the film signals at the macro. “As an indie filmmaker, black-and-white is very economical over colour, the monochrome helps in dissipating distraction, it makes the viewer conscious subconsciously. If you want to draw the audience’s attention to the drama immediately, black-and-white is the best choice,” says Chavada, affirming that his default films will always be in this shade unless colour is crucial to the story.

A still from the film.

The other thing is the absence of music and sounds save the ambient sounds. In the din of our times, in real life and in our cinema, a film like What Colour?, shorn off sentimentality and hammering of message, stripped to a visual and aural minimalism, soars. A quiet, subtle, simple, poetic, empathetic neo-realist humanist story. To quote Italian philosopher Umberto Eco, from his book of essays Inventing the Enemy (2011), in a chapter on censorship, he talks about how “a lot of noise is made to drown out the more relevant sounds (with apologies to [Ludwig] Wittgenstein...‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must talk a great deal’).”

It is indeed the greatest irony that Bombay cinema has thrived, benefitted from the Islamicate culture to become a global phenomenon and has dehumanised the Muslim character at once.

A still from the film.

Chavada affirms that he will keep up the filmmaking ethos of the likes of Shyam Benegal and Saeed Akhtar Mirza in portraying the common Muslim life on cinema. Mirza, in particular, because “save a few, our Muslim community remains underrepresented in Indian cinema, which has thrived on the misrepresentation, stereotyping of and hate against the community,” he says, “No child learns to be violent in his mother’s womb.” Nothing is more crippling than the lack of money, nothing is more violent than the wresting away of agency over your own life.

Talking about how all minority communities, “not just us Muslims but the Adivasis and Dalits, too, have been feeling suppressed,” says Chavada, adding, “I should remain a human first and only later comes the matter of where do I belong. For me, humanity and humanistic screen representation are a non-negotiable. The reason of my choice of telling the Muslim story is because this is one community that I know well. Having been born into it, I know its ways, culture, nuances, political influences, how they stay, eat, congregate, what they talk about. I also hope that a better change can come through authentic representation of a community, that can challenge and break the stereotype, change people’s perception as well as become a part of the art of resistance against propaganda and wrongful image creation. My future projects might have Muslim characters and families but will they be only about them? Perhaps not.”