RENU’s MUMBAI / रेणूजी की बम्बई
Amrit Gangar The title might sound as unpredictable as Renu Saluja’s ‘cuts’ in the films that she edited in her short but brilliant career in Mumbai. Renu Saluja (1952-2000) sailed across the shores – both parallel and mainstream. And on both sides of the river, we’d invariably discover precious pearls of her creativity. When Praba Mahajan informed me of the titles of the films to be screened as part of the GraFTII’s homage to her, I found that out of eight films, five – Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho! (A Summons for Mohan Joshi, 1983), Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron (Who Pays the Piper, 1983), Parinda (1989), Dharavi (1991), Split Wide Open (1999) – had a direct relationship with Mumbai, the city where Renu lived all her working life.[1] It’s all about Renu’s Mumbai, thought I. A strange claim, but in the film production line-up, she was the final artist who had to weave a definite story from the available footage; cutting and splicing shots and sequences, honing the director’s vision, and imperceptibly her own, too. In the process, she had a legitimate claim on the ‘city’. These films so palpably demonstrate how strongly she must have felt about her city, else how could have they evoked its indomitable self and spirit in their peculiar pace and pep?[2] To me Bombay is the city of ‘cuts’ (not in the corrupt sense of ‘cut’ practice, but in its dramatic sense), the astonishing ‘experiential cuts’ that you find while walking on her streets, or driving on her roads, or travelling in her trains, you always encounter the unexpected, on every step, at every moment. And these ‘cuts’ Renu Saluja must have experienced and internalized to give back their spirit to the films that she gave the final shape to as editor. In the crevices of their ‘cuts’, the punctuations chosen by Renu Saluja breathed the city. It matters little whether she was born in Mumbai or not. But cumulatively she was writing a meta-cinematographic ‘editorial’ about Mumbai. I think she was giving us a Baudrillardian high, “Where is the cinema? It is all around you outside, all over the city, that marvellous continuous performance of films and scenarios,” said the philosopher.[3] Editing was the final scripting stage of a film, Renu believed. A script is first written on paper – once, twice, ten times; it is then rewritten in the director’s mind and in the minds of the technicians and actors. Then a major rewrite takes place in shooting. Finally in the editing, it is constructed bit by bit with images and sounds. As she once said, one needed as much time to do sound as the actual picture cutting did. She always worked in close liaison with the sound recordist after the final cut.[4] I had the privilege of seeing her very briefly when she was working on Ketan Mehta’s film Sardar.[5] However, in that short time, I could see how terribly frank she was in voicing her opinion, how deeply and frenetically committed towards ensuring that the final work excelled. Within her svabhāva, temperament, she seemed to be in a perpetual quest, fathoming pace and rhythm of a moment, and that was the magic of her art and craft of film editing. Practically she travelled through the linear-non-linear, analog-digital span of the Moviola to the Steenbeck to the Avid. It has often been speculated that editing is a process that draws its momentum from the editor’s subconscious and Renu, through her subconscious, was able to make visual and emotional connections even between seemingly unrelated aspects. For every filmmaker, I suppose, the initial challenge is how to take off, how to set the story ball rolling on the screen. Watch any of the films edited by Renu and mark the ways they take. In those few foundational minutes, she skillfully quintessentializes the macro world of the story into its contextual microcapsule, while the rest, as it were, would be just an elaboration, an unfolding. The way she ‘cut’ the first seven minutes in Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho! is remarkable. It is difficult to make out whether she cut it on music and song or was it the other way round. I saw it over a decade and a half ago but still can’t forget the juxtaposed image of the dying fish; perhaps because of the power of Renu’s montage that could enter the Brechtian conscience. The way we are introduced to Mohan Joshi and his wife Rohini and their ensuing struggle to get their chawl tenement repaired – it sustains even today. It is Saeed Mirza who has so consistently evoked Bombayness in his oeuvre – the city’s neighbourhoods, its lifestyle, its street language, its hybridity, its oddities, its aspirations, its agonies and ecstasies.[6] Last year, while participating in the IBM² seminar on the New Wave, Mirza said, he was the most regional filmmaker in India.[7] As editor, Renu very subtly understood the filmmaker’s urban ethos. In Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, she introduces us to the city through her initial cameo-cuts, as the photographers Vinod Chopra and Sudhir Mishra (screen names for Naseeruddin Shah and Ravi Baswani, respectively) wait for clients at their newly opened studio. We get the snatches of its streets and high-rise buildings, passersby and a lonely puppy stopping and peeing on his way forward, as if from a Jaques Tati. Renu’s ‘cuts’ create a characteristic atmosphere within the film’s pupa that would gradually pave way for the film’s developed ecology. I think film editing is an art of ‘ecology’. Only an accomplished editor such as Renu Saluja could explore its intricate sub-texts for the director. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron was an epicenter of the youthful creative energy and camaraderie. You have to just look at the credits and the naming of its characters. Besides being editor of the film, Renu also assisted Kundan Shah on direction, along with Sudhir Mishra. Today, it would sound like a fairy tale but this great and meaningful comedy was made
Precarity against Heroic Virility: Ramkumar Chetankranti’s Veerta Par Vichlit
Prasanta Chakravarty “पावर में एक कमी थी, तन्हाई से डरती थी” ~ आर. चेतनक्रांति (There was but one lack in power, despondency terrified it) ~ R. Chetankranti “Who will say, and in which language, the distance between two bodies?” ~Fernand Deligny Contemporary forms of statelessness, homelessness and destitution under unequal political conditions mean encountering new ways of social-existential vulnerability in daily living. The concept of political precariousness—sometimes called precarity— especially in contemporary settings, involves instability, lack of livelihood protection, insecurity and social or economic vulnerability or some combination of these factors. The pervasiveness of precarity is coterminous to the rise of the powerful fascist forces which have spawned across the world, forces which are able to sell the claim that they will be able to address and mitigate such economic and political inequality with greater efficacy than the previous regimes. Their violent and masculinist ways are supposed to take whole nations into a new era of civilizational self-realization. Given such heroic and grandiose right-wing claims, what kind of realities are we actually witnessing at the ground level in a country like India, especially in the urban and semi-urban centres, where labour is radically being informalized and all forms of collective bargaining thwarted? Who are the teeming multitudes in our towns and cities now? What kind of conditions are they arriving from and what are their expectations and ideas of success in a virile, developing nation? What new biological life-forms and relations might develop in the midst of such precarious social existence? On the other hand, to be precarious also denotes an ontological condition. It constitutes a primary form of reciprocal vulnerability to and with our closest interlocutors—lovers and comrades, childhood friends and colleagues—relations from which we cannot will away without ceasing to be creatures of feeling and responsibility. Relational forms of precariousness—ineradicable fruits of human dependency— in fact, may well be the precursor to physical and social precarity or at least may be radically intertwined with the latter. Ramkumar Chetankranti’s long awaited second collection of poems—Veerta Par Vichlit, manages to do something quite incredible: collectively the poems are able to connect and combine our intimate dilemmas and existential vulnerability with a radical critique of the political, conspiratorial and grandiloquent configurations of right-wing masculinity. The latter, by means of intensifying new ways of social disquiet (instead of mitigating), hasten and nurture a kind of pallid and suffused social pathos all around us. This social pathos and anguish, in turn, play back into the hesitations of our inmost relations. This is where poetry can address our current social and material existence. In other words, Chetankranti’s poetic sensibility underscores the scars and bruises of our heightened, harried living —a kind of living that runs the risk of being assessed by history as a colossal endeavour in human hubris and futility. The Boys of Seelampur Have Turned Patriotic There is this mould. The boys of Seelampur (virtually a human scrapyard teeming with life) used to be hungry and unemployed in the days of yore. Disgruntled: with home, family, society and country. There was no blueprint for life. So, they would yawn and take to All India Radio, with nary a clue about whom or what the radio was babbling. School text-books seemed alien and distant. Teachers harrying. The studious ones, dazzling like fire-crackers in the mohalla, would be the boys’ target in every game they played. Education was high idealism—at best a means to bag a government job, a feat that the boys would not dream of ordinarily. Education, if any, was a default mechanism. Evenings would be spent watching feature films at the neighbour’s. And a huge door of fantasy would beckon—which they would bolt and unbolt for years. And then: फिर वह अंततः जब खुला और नब्बे का दशक मुहावरा बनने से पहले चार सौ साल पुरानी एक मस्जिद की धूल हवाओं को सौंप कर खिड़कियां खोलने में जुटा वे अपने अंधेरों से ऊब चुके थे फिर रोशनी हुई सब तरफ़ उजाला सब साफ़ दिखने लगा यह भी की जिन स्वार्थों को बल्लियों पर टांगकर दुर्लभ कर दिया गया था सबके लिए प्राप्य थे जिन्हे धर्मग्रन्थ त्याज्य कहा करते थे वे भी And then, when that door finally opened The Nineties Before it turned into an idiom Got engaged in Unbolting its windows After broadcasting The dust particles Of a four hundred years old mosque To the winds The boys got bored With their darkness And then there was light Every direction beamed Everything was limpid Those desires which were Tied and nailed to the rafters And made rare Were available to everyone Even the ones Prohibited in the Scriptures It was the magic carpet moment for the boys of Seelampur. The horizon felt closer. The soul would unchain itself and the spine, once again, appeared upright. Every new day triumphantly announced that money was not such a bad thing after all. Love was not a sin. Nor was masturbation. Truth was beckoning. And truth was not scary. But the boys still felt ungendered and the mobile phone was not sufficient a toy to impart a sense of power. They wanted a sip of the nectar of virile masculinity that runs the world. In anger and retribution they left many a judge and minister, doctor and engineer rotting in the manholes. वीर्य और रक्त की बाल्टियां कन्धों पर टाँगे वे रात रात भर घूमते कामनाओं की तस्वीरें बनाते बसों, रेलों, पेशाबघरों में और पूलों के निचे लिख लिख छोड़ते रहे अपने सन्देश जिनका कोई जवाब उन तक नहीं पंहुचा Dangling buckets of semen and blood over their shoulders Night after night they would patrol Sketching landscapes of desire On buses, trains, pissing stations Scribbling down their message underneath flyovers The reply to which they never ever received The older language of sacrifice made no sense anymore. Power and machismo ruled. Motorcycles: the answer! (“On motorcycles, up the road, they come:/Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boys ,/Until the