Goa and the Filmmaker

Dil Chahta Hai to Dum Maro Dum marks a decade of the Goa film. Yet, has the state really found a chronicler of its true story?

The recent film Dum Maro Dum points out how expatriate networks in different areas of Goa control the narcotics trade. Is this depiction of foreign mafias merely Hindi film hyperbole? Is there any justification for tarring the lovely state of Goa with a single brush that describes it as the exit point for the Indian drug trade?  How does a state, culture, language or ethnic group defend itself from the sweeping generalisations of a medium that is so all- pervasive and so ‘pop culture’ oriented as Bollywood? 

With this powerful medium speaking in cliché, formula and stereotype, how does Goa put forth a counterpoint that says that the narcotics trade infiltrates any recreational outlet in the country you name—bar, club or rave party—and not just Goa? That the state has a unique ethnic culture and history that goes back centuries and which has nothing to do with beaches and hippies? It does so by producing a Goan narrative, by producing writers and filmmakers who tell the story of Goa from a Goan point of view.

But does Goa possess an interpreter of its maladies? In order to provide an alternative reading of itself as a society, it needs to have this version of itself, a construct that is wholly indigenous, completely home-grown and original, articulated by a native. This is the only bulwark against popular cinema, not just for Goa but for misrepresented cultures across the world.

It was recognised, right at the beginning of the evolution of film, that societies must provide this medium with form, narrative and narrators (filmmakers) who can give cinema a local habitation and a name.

Thus it was that the concept of ‘national cinema’ evolved, and thus it is that cinema has documented cities, nations and political movements for the last hundred years. Sometimes, it is individual filmmakers who record history, as Russians like Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov and Kuleshov did after the 1917 revolution, and sometimes it is an entire movement in cinema that does so.

Italian cinema, for instance, between 1945 and the late 1950s, meticulously describes the post-war devastation of Italian cities after the war, and then lovingly details, through the works of Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini and Visconti, the gradual economic, social and architectural reconstruction of the country and its cities in film after film across the next decade. 

So if we have Rome, Open City in 1945, with the metropolis flattened and its citizens struggling to come to terms with themselves as a defeated people, we also have La Dolce Vita in 1960, with the same city, the same people, but with some of its sweet life back: women in stilettos, short skirts and attitude, restaurants, cafes and streets all lit up.

Feature films, sometimes deliberately, but often unintentionally, record a city, state or nation as it exists.  If that location is going through political or developmental upheaval at the time the film is in production, and if that film script happens to be aesthetically and technically strong, with a sense of rootedness in time and space, then what you are likely to get is a pretty authentic documentation.

The city of Kolkata and state of Bengal, for example, have been fortunate in this sense. The first quarter of the 20th century has been beautifully recorded  by Satyajit Ray in The Apu Trilogy;  Apu’s family leaving the desperate poverty of rural Bengal at the end of Pather Panchali, making ends meet in Benares in Aparajito, and then the lonely young man wandering about the railway tracks in Apur Sansar. Similarly, Ray’s city films—Mahanagar, Pratidwandi, Seemabaddha, Jana Aranya; together, they form the most fascinating testimony of social and economic transition in Kolkata between 1963 and 1975.

Then there is Ritwik Ghatak, profoundly affected by the Bengal famine of 1943 and Partition in 1947. His is the cinema of displacement, of fracture, of loss of identity, of wandering across  stark landscapes and barren visuals in films like Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha. Ghatak is nomadic by temperament and his aesthetics are quite different from that of Ray, who is completely rooted, culturally and in cinematic narrative. Even so, their works function today as parallel historical verifications of the middle of the century in Bengal . 

Other parts of India have not been lucky enough to have two such outstanding cinematic historians constructing parallel narratives, based on their personal and ideological interpretation of the same transitions and often at the same location.

Goa, for instance, never had a reliable recorder of its history, at least in cinema. There have been any number of ‘Bollywoodisations’ of the state, but accurate depictions, as defined by the seriousness with which a  filmmaker takes the culture and history of Goa, have been  few and far between.

Most stretch the popular image, the great holiday destination, to the fag end of its generic function. Goa has contributed to some of the biggest money spinners in recent comedy, such as the Golmaal films and All The Best. What you get of Goa in these movies is sun, sea and scantily-clad White women.

The interesting cult film Dil Chahta Hai treats Goa as a getaway from stressed-out  Mumbai, a place to chill, have a few beers and maybe get laid, as Sameer (Saif Ali Khan)  hilariously attempts  to do before he gets cleaned out by a sharp babe angling on the beach.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s approach to Goa in Guzaarish is more civilised. First of all, the protagonist, Ethan Mascarenhas (Hrithik Roshan), is Goan, and he lives in an environment that is carefully art-directed and shot to express his Portuguese heritage. The music, too, is recorded with care, with  instrumentation and vocals largely Iberian. The beautiful churches and lush greenery of Goa in the rains have been incorporated with sensitivity into the general ambience of the film. The movie tells the tale of a quadriplegic who argues in favour of euthanasia. He identifies himself and his family as Goan, and even uses fragments of Christian theology while defending his position. Yet, Guzaarish is not a Goan movie. It works, in the end, for what it is meant, a smart movie set in the largely derived ‘never never land’ of a Bhansali fantasy.

More representative is My Brother Nikhil. The film was shot in Goa with good reason. The story is inspired by an extraordinary case in the 1980s when a young man in Goa was detected HIV positive in a routine blood test. The hysterical media response to the news, which quickly led to the destruction of his personal life and much else, is altered and turned into fiction by director Onir. Let down by his old world conservatives parents (Victor Banerjee is the father), Nikhil (Sanjay Suri) is championed by his sister (Juhi Chawla) and a friend. But even here, Goa slowly becomes unimportant and recedes into the background. The sea that batters the coast becomes the cinematic metaphor for his struggle against an ignorant state government (they actually arrest him for being HIV positive). That sea could well have been on any other coast.

In truth, there is just one fairly accurate record in cinema about Goa and that is a period piece set on the eve of the Indian Army takeover from Portuguese rule in 1961. Trikal is not Shyam Benegal’s best film, but it is certainly the only authentic film about an important part of the state’s history. Gorgeously photographed by Ashok Mehta on the fastest film available then, with some scenes shot, it is said, in candlelight, the movie is an elegy to a generation of Goans who were unable or unwilling to make the transition from being a privileged society of descendants of mixed marriages between Portuguese and locals, to ordinary Indian citizens.

Alfonso De Albuquerque, the Portuguese nobleman who occupied Goa in 1510 (and finds jocular reference in Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani), encouraged a policy of mixed marriages for the better integration of  South Asian Portuguese settlements with Lisbon. This attitude, together with the conversion of some upper-caste locals to Catholicism, stands in stark contrast to British social apartheid ielsewhere. These major colonial and cultural differences explain why many Goans of that generation did not view 1961 as a ‘liberation’, but saw it, initially at least,  as an ‘occupation’.

Trikal is good history, if somewhat lukewarm drama. But the point is this:  Benegal, as many other movie directors before and after, loves Goa, but only a fully resident filmmaker can document modern Goa accurately and from a Goan perspective. And if a native cinema movement does not begin quickly in Goa, the Hindi film narrative will continue unabated, without a cinematic contradiction, and as wildly one-sided as Dum Maro Dum.

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