In the quest to modernise the ancient, in concrete and character, can the sarvashreshth stand on slippery ghat (slope)? Benares, Mark Twain had said, is “older than history, older than tradition, older than even legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together”. The “oldest continuously habited city in the world”, is where Beat poet Allen Ginsberg saw the best of minds walk naked. Kashi is where one goes to die and be reborn.
When the sandhya aartis end, and bones and flesh are burnt to ash, the night falls, and the din and lights are dimmed, the lives of the marginalised in the ancient city of Varanasi come alive in Ritesh Sharma’s debut Hindi feature film Jhini Bini Chadariya (The Brittle Thread). Sharma juxtaposes the stories of Shahdab (Muzaffar Khan) and Rani (Megha Mathur), both dispossessed, both a minority, one by faith and class and the other by class and gender, respectively. While their stories move like the parallel rails of a railway track, their predicament is familiar.
The 2019 NFDC Film Bazaar Recommends film, which had its world premiere last year in Tokyo, and India premiere at the International Film Festival of Kerala this year, is screening on November 4 at the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF), at 5.50 pm, Picture Time 1, and then travels to Seattle, the US, at the Tasveer South Asian Film Festival.
The Ganga in Venice-like Varanasi draws many, provides for many more, and yet, by showing two lives removed from it economically, the film tries to illuminate the ontological liminality of the city and that of those on its margins. The camera’s gaze stays at a respectable mid-shot length, that of an empathetic outsider’s. At times voyeuristic, at times helpless. The headspace given and glimpses of city help put their narratives in context. The camera also documents events in real-time — real footages within the fictional world — of political campaigns, sloganeering and speeches, the razing of temples and the streets for a face-lift, and soundbytes of Ravish Kumar on TV keeping the world abreast of the “real” news.
Rani is a ballsy street dancer, who has a deaf-and-mute daughter to bring up and no other means but her body to provide for it. Her body, which is a site of exploitation is also her site of rebellion against a perverse, patriarchal, capitalist society. Her bawdy “performance” is consumed by pre-pubescent boys, signalling the cyclicality of social savagery. His earlier documentary, The Holy Wives (2010), too, trained the lens on gender-based violence.
Shahdab, a reclusive weaver of the famous Banarasi sari without which a wedding trousseau is incomplete, is a man of little words. And, of little emotions, until he strikes up an unlikely friendship with an Israeli tourist. While Israeli tourists are commonplace here, by making Adah an Israeli and making her say “Why is this normal? I’m tired of all the hate in the world” — a reference to the one at her home (anti-Palestine conflict) — a geopolitical parallel, Sharma makes Adah speak for a lot many beyond the realm of the film.
In Varanasi, often one would hear “humhu Banarasi, tumhu Banarasi”, where all dichotomies and binaries dissipate to make way for one entity — Banarasi, a specimen of Purvanchal’s Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb. Hindu and Muslim, like man and woman, are the warp and weft of this sheet of cloth (chadariya) which is the city — the cloth is the sari Shahdab weaves for the Hindu women and it is that which is removed from Rani’s body by the torchbearers of her own community. The 15th century mystic weaver-poet Kabir likens the human body, which takes nine months to make, to a brittle thread. He asks who’s soiled the body, in his doha/bhajan, Jhini bini chadariya — from which comes the film’s title — for that body is what’s given to us pristine and is to be returned unsullied. The body stands for the city — Kabir’s birthplace, the premier’s constituency — and the nation, too. One thread doesn’t a sari make, but one thread pulled wrong and the whole sari comes apart.
In a month, 30 years would have passed to that pivotal point in India’s history that changed the course of Indian politics and society. The rubble of the Babri Masjid, demolished in Ayodhya became the fire that engulfed other parts of the country. Kashi’s holy waters couldn’t douse the conflagration, which consumed Shahdab’s parents. There were three riots in Varanasi, between 1989-90 and 1992, among the areas affected was the weavers’ colony in Lallapura, where lives Shahdab in the film. The history is not spelt out, but felt — in Shahdab's reticence.
What could happen to Rani and Shahdab — Sharma’s script leaves little to the imagination. While we don’t get to know how Rani really feels at the core when she’s by herself, what goes on in her mind, when she's not thinking of the boxes she needs to tick in order to hope for a decent life, the impenetrable Shahdab’s moments of solitude have been filmed with heart. A poignant scene of his loneliness evinced by his draping a sari around a mannequin evokes pathos because those who come into his life leave soon after.
Sharma’s Brittle Thread comes in the league of a handful of independent films in the recent times which deconstructs the machination of our times and how it upends or tangentially impacts the life of a common man. Among others is another Varanasi film, Gaurav Madan’s 16 mm slice-of-life Barah by Barah, Arun Karthick’s Nasir, Fahim Irshad’s Aani Maani, Natesh Hegde’s Pedro, and Prasun Chatterjee’s Dostojee, the latter two — along with the Indian documentary films which have garnered global accolades (the Cannes winners A Night of Knowing Nothing and All That Breathes; the Oscar-nominated Writing with Fire) — are also screening at DIFF. The counterculture of independent art (including cinema and music) is, perhaps, a compelling platform to display what Ginsberg coined, “flower power”.
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