MOMENT, META-MOMENT AND THE MINIATURE: NAINSUKH, THE ARTIST AND AMIT DUTTA’S FILM
Amrit Gangar _______________ [This is the pre-screening lecture-text given at the Rachana Sansad, College of Architecture, Mumbai, on 24 January 2017.] This is a beautiful moment indeed, beautiful because it connects me with yet another moment not in a distant past, but nonetheless in भूतकाल – in the sense of a past continuous, where भूत , वर्तमान and भविष्य keep coagulating! That was in far away Zurich, in Switzerland, where I had the opportunity to curate an Indian film program under a big umbrella event called Bollywood in Switzerland, which also had an exhibition around it at the city’s Museum of Design. My week-long stay there took me to the Museum Rietberg that has one of the biggest collections of Indian Pahari paintings. In that elegant museum, a graceful moment made me meet its director Dr. Eberhard Fischer, who welcomed me very warmly and took me around. During our conversation he asked me about the young film maker Amit Dutta and whether I knew him. Well, I did knew Amit Dutta. I said. But not very well, from his film institute days; in fact he was still studying at the Film & Television Institute of India in Pune. He also referred to Prof Suresh Chabria, whom I knew very well. He had been Amit’s professor at the FTII, and it was he who had first recommended Amit’s name to Eberhard Fischer to make a film on नैणसुख And how appropriately so – as we see it now! Amit was a brilliant student and undoubtedly promising to be a distinguished film maker. That pre-birth moment of the film नैणसुख (Nainsukh) to now, when she has grown into a 7-year old lady, (in fact over 15 years from the time she was conceived) – this is a momentous occasion for me, to be here, and talking about her. Cinema or cinematography to me is feminine, but she might turn androgynous off and on during my talk. I must thank the management of Rachana Sansad, Prof Rohit Shinkre, the Principal, Prof Gangadharan, my old friend and a comrade-in-cans for giving me this moment. Cinema has lost her Can-Yug, she is now on DCPs, pen drives, blu-rays, links and tubes. I also thank all of you who have gathered here to see an extraordinary film by Amit Dutta. Actually, it is to him that I owe my presence here today. From far away Palampur in the Himalayas, it was Amit who said this to me on the phone that in his absence, he wanted me to talk about the film in whatever manner I wanted to. I must thank him for reposing faith in me. I will also talk about him and his filmosophy in my own way. There is also my constant wrestling with the God of our times, Googleshwara, as he keeps challenging us all the time, while making things already known universally and all across the board, this God has blurred the difference between guru and shishya. But yes, it is a constant battle, particularly for teachers across the world on how to surprise this god and the shishya at the same time. If I am able to surprise you even a little during the course of my talk, I shall feel I haven’t wasted your time. One way, as I humbly believe, is to create or evoke a भाव or भाव जगत, the state of being and its universe, rather than search for meaning, because meanings keep changing and Googleshwara already has a huge museum of meanings for all of us to see. For me, Amit Dutta’s cinematography is an evocative bhava, his is the cinema of feelings, like music or painting, it touches our heart and enduringly so. Any ‘moment’ that endures, is a good moment. Also, any film that endures, is a good film. And any such film, I believe, defies synopsis. Often, I ask students to try and write a synopsis of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Mirror. Wanting always to comprehend films through conventional simplistic synopses, they find it impossible to synopsize Mirror. Amit Dutta’s oeuvre is largely synopsis-defying and yet extremely engaging because he is an extraordinary bhāva-sarjak or evocator, both in words and in images and sounds. I will later briefly talk about his recent Hindi novel called Kaljayi Kambakht, which, as Prof. B.N. Goswami has said, is like a दिव्य विमान , a divine aircraft – but more on that later. Invoking a prefix, an = उपसर्ग प्र and its illumination Amit Dutta likes the word प्रक्रिया (prakriya), the process. And that induces me to dwell for a bit on two prefixes – प्र and सं (pra and sam); these miniaturized letters called उपसर्ग and प्रत्यय, if wedded or welded to another word – a verb, a noun or an adjective – have the ability to achieve greater metamorphosis, they have the ability to imbue an expanded meaning – in motion. प्र is an engine. Look, what it does to the word योग (yoga), for instance. प्रयोग (prayoga) to me is a much richer word than the English ‘experiment’. Or what it does to गति (gati), just prefixing गति with प्र and turning it into प्रगति (pragati) pushes the motion forward, making it progressive. In a similar way, it turns simple क्रिया (kriya, performance, activity) into प्रक्रिया (prakriya), which could be both a complex and a forward process. Even in भूमीति (Bhoomiti), in Geometry प्र turns simple मेय (meya, measurable) into a प्रमेय (prameya, a theorem).मेय is also ज्ञेय, meaning discernible. Or what this does to the adjective शांत , it turns it into प्रशांत , which could be, ocean, the world’s largest and deepest ocean, the प्रशांत महासागर, the Pacific Ocean. I believe, Amit Dutta’s cinematography is an invocation to such महासागरú. And you will feel this in his film Nainsukh, as it inaugurates herself. So is the prefix सं (sam). Your own institution, for instance, has it – संसद (samsad or sansad) which is an assembly, a meeting. With Rachana