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| The director (left) with Agra cast members Aanchal Goswami and Mohit Agarwal |
India’s independent filmmaking scene witnessed a flurry of activity this month. It began with Kanu Behl posting an alert on social media before his film Agra’s release. “We’re being denied shows because of the so called ‘big blockbusters’ and because small films ‘don’t fit into’ multiplex chain programming...,” he wrote.
Days later, 46 indie filmmakers from across India issued a statement on “the shrinking space for independent cinema”. Behl has since stated that efforts are on to set up a formal collective.
Agra is one among numerous Indian indies that have earned critical acclaim at international and even Indian festivals, but struggle to get theatrical space in India. It was premiered in May 2023 at the Director’s Fortnight, which runs parallel to the Cannes Film Festival. Behl’s debut feature, Titli, a crime drama set in Delhi, was premiered at the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes in 2014.
In my review on Himal Southasian in 2023, I had summarised Agra in these words:
“Guru’s dingy house…lies at the heart of the conflict in his family. The troubled 24-year-old and his mother occupy the ground floor, while his father occupies the upper storey with a live-in partner. Guru is dissatisfied with this arrangement and demands a room on the terrace for himself and his girlfriend. His mother, bitter about being abandoned by her husband, wants a section of the building apportioned to her and her niece. The atmosphere is thick with an acrid rage as members of the household constantly clash. Guru is lonely, desperate for a woman in his bed, brimming with a volcanic intensity and potential for savagery… Throughout Agra, he is conscious of two wants: sex and space.”
Guru is played by newcomer Mohit Agarwal. Theatre and film artiste Priyanka Bose stars here as Priti, a woman who runs an Internet café and enters into a relationship with him. His father is played by Rahul Roy whose calling card remains the 1990 blockbuster Aashiqui.
This interview with Behl is part of the Director’s Cut series I began in 2016, in which I speak to a director after watching their new film, and dissect it with them to the extent that they are willing. The idea is to defy the norm prevalent in India of the crew and cast of films giving interviews while promoting a new venture without previewing it for the press, thus robbing the public of enriching conversations on cinema. Such as this one in which Behl gives me his interpretation of certain aspects of Agra, and addresses concerns that the film left me with.
Excerpts:
Q: It’s clear to me from Agra and Titli that you’re interested in a study of violence as a consequence of male sexual repression, patriarchy, and segregation. What is the root of that interest?
A: I slightly differ from this view. Titli was about family, how images pass on within a family from generation to generation. It had a direct connection to violence. Agra is about sexuality, how our sexual lives affect the physical spaces we occupy and our relationships, and how these spaces in turn affect our sexual lives. It so happens that both films are set in a similar culture and background, and we live in a patriarchal society, so even if that’s not the intention, you see those things play out. But essentially, they are about entirely different things.
Q: I’m not saying Agra and Titli are similar. But for me, one of Titli’s most striking scenes was the one in which a man tries to force himself on his bride. It doesn’t define the film, but it shook me up, which is why I ask about your interest in violence as a consequence of male sexual repression, patriarchy, segregation, etc.
A: I’d like to put it the same way, Anna – that’s not what I’m pinpointedly interested in. For me, it’s about going into different metas of these two different worlds. Once you’re on that path, you want to do as much of a 3D exploration as possible of the characters you’re playing with, including their myriad qualities of desire and sexuality, and portray them with nuance.
Q: The name Agra automatically brings to mind two things in north India: the Taj Mahal and the mental asylum. Mental health is an element in this film. Did you intend to contrast the eternal love the Taj is supposed to symbolise versus the cynicism – is it correct to call it that? – with which you view “love” in this film?
A: I was not trying to speak about love. Anyway, the conventional idea of love is almost advertising material. It’s sold to us. I’m not interested in that way of looking at it.
This film is not about mental illness either for me. It’s a thin line. The name Agra is more an ironic reference to Agra Ka Paagalkhana, the mental asylum, and not because a conventional person might look at Guru and say, ‘Yeh ladka bimaar hain.’ (This boy is unwell.)
I feel that if Guru is unwell, then the remaining characters in his house are even more unwell. Because in his own damaged way, without having the vocabulary, he’s the only one trying to ask troubled questions in that house. When he says, “Main Mala ko ghar laoonga, kamra banaoonga, main rahoonga vahaan jaise aap rehte ho Aunty ke saath,” (I’ll bring Mala home, I’ll make a room and live there just as you live with Aunty), in essence he’s saying, ‘What the fuck is going on in this house? You’re living with a mistress, I’m sleeping in the same room as my mother. What are you doing?’ To his mother in his anger, he’s saying, ‘Why are you not talking about it? How can you accept her?’ To the mistress, ‘How are you still in this house?’ or ‘If you want to be in this house, how is the mother still here?’ He doesn’t know how to say it in as many words. But he’s the only one fighting for the truth in that house.
It’s a reverse coming of age. By the end, it’s almost an acceptance of defeat, ki ‘Theek hai, if you don’t want to discuss anything openly and honestly, and if all that’s important to you is the transaction of space and the house in our relationships, then fuckers let me show you how the transaction is done.’ Because in today’s world, you cannot be naive enough to think that patriarchy and having three women, or running your life around your cock – pardon my word – will get you anywhere. In today’s world, with the crunch of space, if you want a five-storey house, then there will be an amputation. The foundation of the house will go. The bottom two floors will go to the builder. ‘So if you want the five-storey house, I’ll get you it. But then, let me show you the world we are heading to. Let’s all feel the amputation.’ The long montage of the construction of the house towards the end is, in essence, all these people dissolving their differences, suddenly happy with each other. They even accept the woman who two scenes back they said didn’t love Guru, just because the two have facilitated the house.
I wanted Agra to represent all the madnesses of each character. It was my attempt at a gaze into all our daily lives that are full of transactions.
The deeper I went while writing with Atika, the more we realised – I remember both of us said it at one point – ki ‘Yaar yeh ghar hi paagalkhana hai’ (this house itself is a madhouse). The moment we said that, we decided to set it in Agra and call it Agra. Because in India, Agra is not first associated with the Taj, but with Agra ka Paagalkhana. So it felt like an apt, not-overbearing metaphor for the film.
[Note: The reference here is to the Institute of Mental Health and Hospital, Agra, once known as Agra Lunatic Asylum.]
Q: You said you don’t subscribe to the notion of love that’s like advertising material. Is Agra your way of saying that the notion of love is just a romanticisation of lust and carnal desire that humans invented to make ourselves feel superior to other living beings that make no pretence of sex being anything other than purely functional?
A: Yes, in some ways the idea of love is built around a sort of romanticisation of the act of having sex, and hiding our most carnal, animal selves. It contributes to our view of our species as being more social, whereas I think underneath our social garb, we’re all still solitary and unable to connect with others. On the other hand, I also think there’s a form of evolved love that we start to acknowledge as we grow older. That’s the love we feel – or let’s call it kinship – as we witness each other’s lives. The former can seem too cynical, and I don’t have that gaze on personal relationships. My idea of love is about witnessing another person, about listening, not just talking.
Guru and Priti in the film are damaged people who have a strange sort of kinship and faith in each other, which they choose to call love. It’s both sexual and transactional. They’re trying to find a truth within that transactional moment and be with each other with some sort of unity. For me, that’s the purest coming together in the film.
Q: What do you mean by calling them damaged?
I’m talking about perception. The world’s gaze on them is that they are damaged goods, ki ‘yeh paagal hai’ and ‘yeh langdi hai’. But when they come together they find the human beings in each other. They accept the transactionality they’re feeling in each other. They’re ready to form some sort of bricks and mortar with it. That relationship speaks of the possibility of making connections that human beings have within ourselves.
Q: What was your thinking in not showing the Taj at all during the film?
A: I’m not interested in the Taj as the symbol of love. It’s banal now. Just going there is banal. I don’t think I had anything further to explore through that lens.
Q: How much of Agra is taking place in Guru’s mind, how much is reality?
A: (Laughs) That’s a tough one. I don’t know how to answer this.
If you’re asking me this storytelling-wise, because there is an imaginary character in the story, so you want to know if anything else is imagined, then no, everything else is real.
But if you’re asking this perception-wise, then all of it is happening in Guru’s head. And after a point, all the characters are Guru. Because you’re seeing all the characters essentially from the stomach of their sexual sides. Hence the use of the colours in the film.
I wanted a little negative space in the film so that we could enter his head, feel the chaos in it, and sense the white noise you feel when you’re so sexually repressed. Because everyone has a public face, a private face and a secret face. When I started writing the film, I was afraid because I’d felt sexual repression in my life, but probably not to the degree Guru has felt it. I’m probably at 10, the character I’m about to write is at 100. I didn’t want to do an external job of it. So I underwent a six-month process to get close to the repression he’s feeling. I put myself in some situations, obviously staying safe for myself and others, like extensively surfing chat rooms, sometimes posing as women, sometimes as boys or as myself, and just lived Guru’s life. I knew I had the time, space and texture of this film when I realised that if you’re this sexually repressed, the negotiator between your public and secret space completely breaks off, your private space gets annihilated, and you end up living two separate lives – a public life and a secret life. You lead your public life to feed your secret life. And there’s no private life left, because you don’t have space for it any more. The moment I knew this and sensed the chaos it brings, the white noise you feel, I got the idea for those colours in the film.
That’s my answer to your question, “How much of this is happening inside Guru’s head?” It’s all happening in his head because he’s the creator and the finder of that white noise mode. He’s creating it in order to figure out how to exit it. As soon as you enter this world through his gaze, you explore the same white noise to various degrees through all the characters in the film.
Q: Would you explain the public self, private self and secret self?
A: The secret self is Guru alone with himself in the bathroom. The private self is Guru having sex with Priti. Our private lives are with our spouse, our children, our parents. Our secret lives are alone – our kinks, our deviant selves, the moments we spend with ourselves, playing out our fantasies exactly the way we want them, even away from what we might do with our spouses. The moment we get out of that masturbation or fantasising session, we push it to the back of our heads. We forget about it. We don’t want to live with our secret lives. Our secret lives are that silo of our lives that we only play out with ourselves.
All of us have these silos. Forget acknowledging it to other people, we don’t even acknowledge it to ourselves. Sometimes, we wake up in the morning, and in the first half second of waking, we think about things that we push to the back of our heads for the rest of the week. But it is there in our head. We did feel it or think about it in that half second.
Q: What did you feel for Guru?
A: I feel sorry for him. Because in the larger context, if we look at men trying to survive in patriarchal structures while desperately trying to keep their masculine external images intact, the amount of posture that is needed is a travesty. I don’t know if Guru is separate enough from me for me to be able to feel separately for him. I think he is so much me also, that I can only say what I was trying to feel through him. The film is sort of my lament, like a boy saying, ‘Why are you not talking about this stuff?’ and eventually deciding, ‘If you don’t talk about it, this is what happens.’
Q: Is it necessary to empathise with such a violent man in order to tackle these issues?
A: It’s necessary to empathise with each and every human being, however difficult they are. Because no one is born a murderer or rapist. We are all little children born from similar wombs, if not the same womb. If we cannot reserve our empathy for the most difficult birds of our nest, how do we call ourselves human? It’s easy to love a healthy child. Let’s not go to the extent of empathy – if we stop even having the tolerance to attempt to understand our difficult children, how do we call ourselves human?
Q: But Guru almost rapes a woman.
A: What he did is unacceptable to you and me. And it is unacceptable. But the point is, he did do it. And there are people like him around us. So there are two approaches to such people. We can call for their death, but will it stop rapes? It hasn’t. Because we’re not trying to understand, so we don’t have any insight into the pain of where that person is coming from. You might not feel it is pain, you feel it’s violation, and rightly so. I stand by you and I say it’s violation. But in order to stop this violation, is capital punishment or any sort of external punishment better than understanding the person’s pain?
I’m not just speaking of sexual pain or repression. Is it better to understand all of it and address it through education, sex education, the way adults behave with children? And to be able to do that, isn’t it better first to have the stomach to see it at least, to look around and see that it’s around us, and not just read about it in newspapers? If we don’t, how are you hoping to find a solution to it?
Q: You speak of Guru’s pain. Increasingly, I see conversations about men in pain due to feminism and a changing world in which they feel isolated, and that this pain is leading to violence. We must study the causes of violence, but I’m concerned about how the focus is turning to sympathy for violent men instead. I saw this in the show Adolescence and wrote about it.
A: I read your article, but I haven’t seen Adolescence, so whatever I say doesn’t have the context of Adolescence.
Q: It’s frustrating to hear about the pain of such men, when they’re inflicting violence on women. Are you making a distinction between the study of violence and sympathy for male perpetrators of violence?
A: Firstly, I want to clearly state that there’s a huge distinction between sympathy and empathy. A piece of work that wants to be reckoned with as comprehensive cannot stop at sympathy for a character, male or female. You’re actually gunning for empathy. If an audience is left feeling sympathy, that’s troubled territory. It’s a thin line, and there’s a lot of confusion about this that can happen in different works. Number 2: ultimately it cannot just be about showing a troubled character and not having your own external gaze on the person. By this I mean there’s a thin line between condoning that behaviour or characterising it as definitely problematic by the end of your piece. Trying to be empathetic and understand where the behaviour is coming from, but not condoning it – that lens, that gaze is important.
Q: Priyanka Bose is very interesting. Something about her makes you stop and notice.
A: Priyanka was the only one I had in mind while writing Priti. She’s a great combination of vulnerability – her gut feels so vulnerable – and a solid, hard-boiled, stay-away-from-me, no-nonsense, I’ll-mess-you-up-if-you-mess-with-me feel. She has a vulnerable, honest disposition and a softness in her eyes that pulls you in immediately.
Q: What prompted you to cast Rahul Roy?
A: We knew we needed someone who’s a charmer and has a debonair quality, because Daddy is a ladies man. But when you meet him in the film, he’s on the cusp of decay. You’re seeing the death of a patriarch, in essence. So I also knew I needed someone who’d been privy to that sort of decay. Rahul pretty much cast himself after that. I think he read the part and connected personally to many things. He could see where I was coming from. That was coupled with his dedication. We did a three-month workshop, and literally every day, he’d be the first to arrive and the last to leave, even after the younger actors. I’m not kidding. All three months.
At the end of Week 1, he took me to a corner, looked into my eyes and said, “Sir, yeh main hi karoonga.” When someone comes at you with so much dedication and love for what they’re reading, we don’t have to do anything. He sort of snatched the role from us.
Q: What do you mean by “someone who’d been privy to decay”?
A: After all the highs Rahul had with Aashiqui, Junoon and other stuff, he went through a low that rivalled the high. He’d seen that decay as an actor. If the actor is emotionally connected enough to the human being, which I think Rahul is, then obviously your experience as an actor seeps into how you’ve lived your life over those years. I think he’d felt that decay and was able to tap into it.
Q: During the two-and-a-half-year wait for Agra’s release, footage of the sex scenes got leaked. How did that happen?
A: Our best guess is that someone subscribed to an OTT platform in France on which the film had come out, and hacked the system. That could have been the only source. The reason I say this is because the version of the film that came out is the French version with hard-coded French subs. So it doesn’t feel like it got out from the Indian Net.
Q: Such an episode is particularly tough in a society like ours where Priyanka would be judged in ways that men are not.
A: Priyanka and Ruhani (Sharma) too. The best we can do is pick up the phone, meet, call. I personally called up Priyanka. She had a terrible, stormy few days. The best we can do is protect her in whatever way we can, reassure her.
Q: Protect her, meaning?
A: I mean, meet, have a drink, talk through it, and say, ‘Listen, we never intended this film for a titillatory purpose, but we always knew that even if it did come out at the right time, people who were going to react to it in that way would anyway have reacted in that way.’ I hesitate to say these people were never our audience, because I have faith that a time will come when even some of them will revisit the film, not just for the sex scenes, but to watch it in its context when they’re done jacking off to certain portions. All we can do is remember that we are on a journey, we fulfilled the purpose with which we set out to do a film like this. Beyond that, as individuals in such an atmosphere, there’s nothing we can control.
Q: How did you get Agra past the Censor Board?
A: I was pleasantly surprised. When I walked into the Censor committee meeting, I was prepared for Agra to be reduced to a short film. But they only asked for three visual cuts, out of which I talked them out of two. I convinced them that those two were necessary, and I could achieve the same effect with alterations they wanted. I had to eventually cut just one shot from the film and do some audio dubs, and I got an A certification.
Q: What cuts were you asked to make?
A: The only shot that’s gone is a tight close-up of Guru’s ass. They had a problem with nudity. Of the other two shots that had nudity, one featured Guru, the other featured Priti. I covered those shots. I did not delete them.
Q: Did you pixelate them?
No. Let’s just say I found a creative way to deal with the problem.
Q: I assumed you’d be told to cut the sex scenes. I did a year-long pan-India investigation into censorship, and came across people being asked to blur shots of chicken, characters’ names being changed, and Honey Trehan’s film about an activist is not being cleared. What does it say about our system that it’s stopping such films?
A: We must not get into a debate about what needs to be censored and what doesn’t. We need a broader debate in which we reiterate that we’re all adults, we must move to a system where a film gets a rating and it’s your call whether or not to watch it. There should be no censorship if we are a democracy, as we claim to be.
Images Courtesy IMDB and Agra’s Instagram account
Footnote: My first Director’s Cut was with Anurag Kashyap about Raman Raghav 2.0. It was published on Firstpost in 2016. The one just before this was a Payal Kapadia interview about All We Imagine As Light, and was published on The News Minute and Newslaundry in 2024. Read it here:
