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Release date:
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February 26, 2016
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Director:
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Hansal Mehta
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Cast:
Language:
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Manoj Bajpayee,
Rajkummar Rao, Ashish Vidyarthi
Hindi
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In terms of
timeliness, Aligarh hits the bull’s
eye like few others, in a country where film industries hesitate to touch
contemporary history. It arrives in theatres in a year when the national debate
on the rights of LGBT (lesbian gay bisexual transgender) persons is louder than
it has ever been here, with the Supreme Court earlier this month agreeing to
re-examine Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that currently criminalises
homosexuality.
Aligarh is based on the true story of Professor Shrinivas
Ramchandra Siras who was thrown out of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in 2010
after he was filmed by intruders while having sex with a male rickshaw puller
in his quarters on campus. This happened in the year following the Delhi High
Court’s historic ruling reading down
Section 377 to effectively decriminalise
homosexuality (overturned in 2013 by the Supreme Court and now once again
under the lens of a larger SC bench).
Professor Siras
successfully sued AMU in the Allahabad High Court. Shortly afterwards, he was
found dead in mysterious circumstances in his apartment, in what was at first
suspected to be a suicide.
For those who
refuse to see the reality, his tragedy is a perfect illustration of how
homophobia can destroy people. National Award-winning director Hansal Mehta (who earlier made Shahid and CityLights) and writer-editor Apurva Asrani have chosen to
chronicle his life through a friendship that developed between the shy academic
and real-life journalist Deepu Sebastian who wrote about the case in The Indian Express (called India Post in the film). Therein lies the film’s strength and
its Achilles’ heel.
Young Deepu’s
well-meaning questions to the elderly gentleman are used in a telling fashion
to convey the point that this story is not about LGBT rights or an individual’s
homosexuality alone. This is also very much about invasion of privacy, the
fluid definition of privacy in a conservative society, loneliness and the right
to dignity. It is about marginalisation that results from social prejudice and
a potential victim’s fear of ostracism. This is a story of a reticent man who
balked at labels, was rudely shoved under the spotlight and became a reluctant
poster boy for India’s LGBT rights movement though all he wanted was to be left
alone with his books, his Lata Mangeshkar and his self-respect.
Were you thrown out
because you are gay? Was the rickshaw puller your lover? Any journalist in
those circumstances would absolutely have to ask these questions. The aim must
be to ask with sensitivity, and Deepu does well on that front, which is
evidenced by Professor Siras’ willingness to engage with him in the midst of
fools who would thrust a mike into an old man’s face and ask about a personal
calamity, “Aapko kaise mehsoos ho raha
hai (How do you feel)?”
Aligarh’s screenplay deftly and delicately handles these
matters while making sure that the film is not ‘about an issue’ so to speak,
but about a human tragedy.
The writing is well
complemented by Manoj Bajpayee, who is unrecognisable here in the role of the
elderly academic. The transformation is not merely cosmetic, he appears to have
absorbed the professor into every cell of his being.
Like the character
he plays in the film, the actor would know a thing or two about the sidelines,
having inhabited the outskirts of Bollywood for almost two decades after his
career-defining performance as Bhiku Mhatre in Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya (1998). Life has been tough until
recent years for artists like him who are not in the
singing-dancing-and-romancing-the-pretty-heroine mould. He was back in the
reckoning with Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) in which he played a bloodthirsty, horny gangster. Chameleon-like though he was in that
film, it is nothing compared to the genius of his performance in Aligarh.
Rajkummar Rao as
Deepu matches up to the veteran, although he is done in by the excessive focus
on his character and in particular, by an awkwardly handled scene in the end
when he hears of the professor’s demise. This brings us to the film’s big
failing.
Despite the pluses
described in the preceding paragraphs, the screenplay appears to forget early
on that the subject of Aligarh is
Professor Siras and not his relationship with Deepu. It would have been fine to
use the reporter as a narrative device, but the film gradually loses focus as
it becomes equally about both men rather than about one observing the other.
In fact, a brief
interlude in which we are shown a sexual encounter between Deepu and his female
boss ends up harming the cause the film seeks to espouse. This scene is
clumsily juxtaposed against Professor Siras in bed with the rickshaw puller,
clearly in an effort to underline the stance that casual sex between consenting
adults should be okay irrespective of whether the couple in question is gay or
straight.
Apart from the
in-your-face nature of this messaging, what is bothersome is Aligarh’s narrow, shallow understanding
of consent and the effort to position Deepu’s boss as the epitome of coolth. Errr…there
is nothing cool about a woman boss inviting a male subordinate to consume
alcohol with her on a darkened office terrace and then sexually propositioning
him. The point, dear Team Aligarh, is
not whether Deepu agrees to drink with her or sleep with her but whether there
might have been professional consequences for him if he had refused.
No, she does not
physically overpower him, she does not literally hold a gun to his head (though
figuratively speaking, who is to say that is not what she was doing?) and we do
not know her well enough to know whether she might have victimised him if he
had said no, but given the complexities of sexual harassment at work, it is extremely
simplistic to not have considered these questions before choosing to insert
this scene in the film.
The argument
attempted here could well have been conveyed without the woman having been
Deepu’s boss, but because she is, and because this scene is inter-cut with
Professor Siras coaxing the rickshaw puller into bed, what the film has
unwittingly done is to draw a parallel between the professor and a character
who should rightfully be viewed as a sexual predator at an office.
Ask yourself this,
Team Aligarh: would you not have been
troubled by these doubts if there had been a gender reversal, if Deepu had been
a woman and the boss had been a man?
Because of the
contrived and very obvious effort to establish an analogy between the two
relationships, the power equation at the office ends up showing the class
divide between Siras and his lover in a bad light. This is particularly
unfortunate because the sexual liaison between a middle-class teacher and an
impoverished man despite the social chasm separating them should otherwise have
been a cause for wonderment.
Professor Siras was
much older, highly educated, an award-winning writer, Maharashtrian, a Marathi
teacher, a Hindu in a university originally set up for the education of Muslims
and, as he points out in the film, he was resented by some for being successful
despite being an outsider. His partner was Muslim yet could perhaps be deemed
the vulnerable one of the two in the relationship: young, presumably not
educated, a rickshaw puller and poor.
That they could
have found tenderness between them despite their differing circumstances is
fascinating and intriguing. Yet we are robbed of any exploration of that beauty
by the super-imposition of his initial reaction to Siras’ overtures against
Deepu’s hesitation when his boss makes a move on him.
There is an eternal
lesson in here for us all. The fact that a film is inspired by a moving
real-life story does not automatically make it a moving film. The fact that a
film supports a genuine and very important cause does not automatically make it
effective.
Despite a sterling
performance by Manoj Bajpayee and other positives, Aligarh ends up being an inconsistent biopic – on the one hand
providing a beautiful portrait of reclusiveness, yet elsewhere doing a
disservice to a man to whom this country owes an apology.
Rating
(out of five stars): **1/2
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CBFC Rating (India):
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UA
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Running time:
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120 minutes
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