Hansal Mehta: Fear and the Filmmaker

Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh is an important film for many reasons. It is a story that deals with the common Indian man’s right to privacy, one that is constantly threatened. It underlines discrimination due to one’s sexual preferences, a subject struggling for attention ever since the Supreme Court refused to revoke Article 377. It promises to give our Censor Board officials a chance to prove how grown up they really are with a theme as bold as this. It is an Indian filmmaker’s take on a global issue, which has already been tested with an international audience. And, in the role of a gay professor who teaches Marathi at Aligarh Muslim University, it is Manoj Bajpayee like you have never seen him before.

However, for director Hansal Mehta, it’s not the promise of the subject that drew him to the story. “Focusing on an issue will never evoke reactions as much as focusing on the human story,” he says. Sitting in his Andheri office, busy prepping for the first India screening of the film at The Mumbai Film Festival (MAMI), Mehta lets us in on his reasons for telling the story of Aligarh.

“When too many people start talking about one issue, it gets lost in the chaos. Aligarh is not an issue-based film. It’s a personal film. It deals with two characters, their chemistry, one person’s sense of longing, loneliness, his yearning for privacy. If you take that story back home you will question your empathy. You will question your own attitude. No matter what end of the axis you are from,” he says.

Inspired by the life of professor Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras—who was suspended from Aligarh Muslim University for having homosexual relations with a rickshaw puller—here’s a film that echoes the emotions of many in Siras’ shoes today. Apart from India, gay men and women in over 76 countries in the world are still fighting for the right to live and love freely. This includes the writer of the film and Mehta’s close confidant Apurva Asrani who has been fervently speaking out for gay rights for years now. “My experience with homosexuality has been shaped by my friendship with Apu. I have observed relationships through his lens and realised that there is no difference. When we met we were going through problems with our respective partners. The only difference was that his was with a man, and mine was with a woman. But the issues were the same. We dealt with it in the same way. We both broke off,” Mehta says with a hearty laugh. According to him, that’s what Aligarh does. It does not differentiate—a fading quality in today’s world.

Though Mehta’s motive is not to turn his film into a mouthpiece for gay rights, gauging from responses online, one can be positive Aligarh will inspire a debate at the least. A review from London’s ScreenDaily says, ‘Aligarh could be too familiar to fight its way into the more mainstream international art-house which has seen this issue examined before, but this film should attract a fervent, noisy following as the Indian film industry confronts this taboo issue head-on.’ The film ran to packed houses at both Busan and London film festivals. “I spoke to the editor of a gay rights magazine who watched the film and he said the film resonates globally because even in the western world the gay community is put in a box. It is always ‘them’ and ‘us’. And it’s the kind of polarisation that exists everywhere, not just due to sexual preferences but caste, creed, colour, religion. There are Hindus, Muslims, immigrants, non- immigrants, Asians, Whites, Blacks… putting people in a box is constant. How many distinctions will we make? And how equal is equal?” asks Mehta.

It has been the underlying theme in his most gripping films—the need to question our concept of equality. Be it Shahid (2012) about a defence lawyer and a Muslim rights activist, or CityLights (2014) about a family from Rajasthan trying to find a home in Mumbai, or his very first feature film Jayate (1997), they are all stories of ordinary people trying to find their individual space and voice in society. Jayate, which portrays the struggle of a failed lawyer fighting for a woman in a state of coma due to hospital negligence, never managed to find a commercial release. Last year Mehta put up the film’s online version on his blog urging people to watch it. “It’s amateurish, but a film with a certain heart in it,” says Mehta who began his journey by wanting to tell stories of the common man walking the streets of India. “I have always seen myself as the man on the streets. I am concerned about the life that I lead vis-à-vis the majority of the people that live in this world. That concern I try to reflect in my films.”

The journey to be able to tell the stories he wants to was anything but easy. At the very start of his career Mehta discovered that he was among the majority who had an opinion, but not the courage to actually stand up for it. Within a couple of years of his first film, he was confronted with a situation where he needed to put his ideals to practice, but by his own admission failed miserably. Few know of this but, after the release of his film Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar!! (2000) his office was vandalised by hundreds of Shiv Sena activists to protest a particular dialogue in the film that apparently offended the sensibilities of the kohli (fishermen and women) community. “My face was blackened by the Shiv Sena. I was called to Danda village and made to touch the feet of an elderly fisherwoman in full public view as a mark of apology. I did it because I thought it was okay to apologise to someone who was old enough to be my grandmother, but I did not know what I was sorry for. That’s when I realised that I was only aspiring to be opinionated. I did not know what it really meant. I was not bold. I was a coward. I chose to retreat. I did not do anything about it. It took me 15 years to even write about it on my blog.”

There is a hint of regret still lingering as he talks about how he chose to take the advice of a political leader and vanish for 15 days after that incident. It changed a lot in him, but for the worse. He chose to numb himself from any kind of injustice, happening to or around him. “My films after that were terrible. None of them had any individual voice. No reason. I was dead.” Films like Woodstock Villa and Raakh were as bad as bad can be. “I emulated anything popular that was working. I made films because I had to pay my bills. I stopped enjoying my work. I remember spending those years semi-comatose. I was finished in those six-seven years,” he adds.

Between 2006 and 2007 he packed his bags, moved to a village between Lonavla and Pune with his second wife and daughter. He had given up on films and now only wanted to lead a simple, healthy life. “We left everything in Bombay. It was cheaper to live there. There was no compulsion to make films or anything. There was good quality life, open space, organic food, good air to breathe. My wife is a social entrepreneur and I started helming a start-up she had launched. It was doing well, we were paying our bills and my sense of failure had finally started to fade away a little.”

However the frustration stayed buried within him. The sense of a journey that was left incomplete made him restless every now and then. It’s then that the story of Shahid Hashmi happened. Like a stark reminder of why he had chosen to tell stories in the first place, Hansal Mehta was confronted with the life of this Muslim lawyer who fought for the people within the minority he believed were sheer victims of circumstances. “Shahid sort of sparked desperation within me. It shook my life up. He was that man who flirted with the radical space, but became someone who opposed it. Hidden between the headlines was a vibrant tale of hope and inspiration that helped me find my voice again. It made me more political, made me speak up,” he says.

The journey to making Shahid was no less a herculean task either. Mehta was out of circulation. Nobody wanted to meet or talk to him. Actors were unwilling to work with him. Producers refused to invest in the film. He had to build a team from scratch with a writer who worked in a BPO and had never written a film, a DOP who had never shot a feature and an editor who had given up on cinema and settled in Bangalore. “It took me two years, but we put Shahid together thanks to a fantastic team including Rajkummar Rao who showed faith in me when no one else did,” says Mehta. Shahid won Mehta the National Award for best director and Rajkummar Rao the best actor. Through the process of the film, he discovered his purpose behind the camera. “I discovered that as a filmmaker it is not you who is trying to say something through the film, but it is the film that’s saying something to you. All you need to do is to listen.”

Today he makes films under a tight budget, with strong yet sensitive plot lines. The politics in Mehta’s cinema lies in between the characters, within the relationships, and within the silences in his film, more than the subject itself. It makes his films more real, relatable and scrapes out every bit of superficiality that could come with cinema that claims to be socially relevant. “In Aligarh, the fact that Siras was gay is just a truth. But that’s not all the film is about. Manoj Bajpayee found Siras’ passion is various things. There are long, uncut sequences with Siras listening to Lata Mangeshkar and Madan Mohan songs.” Audiences from London found subtext in the deep friendship between Manoj and Rajkummar’s character, which wasn’t a direct statement in the film. “These are things that happen only if you surrender to the sanctity of the space you are filming in,” he adds.

He takes pride in the fact that one of the international reviews calls Aligarh a film that underscores the growing diversity of Indian independent cinema. He is anxious about the audience reactions to his film, but unlike most filmmakers who share his space, he seems overwhelmed by his viewers. “They have appreciated, Shahid, Ship of Theseus, The Lunchbox, Ankhon Dekhi. They are more evolved than we think they are. We have to remind them that we respect them. We have to remind them that they are intelligent,” he adds.

However, nothing seems penultimate to Mehta at the moment. Not the audience, not the censors, not the critics, not the fact that someday he may once again choose to let go of it all. “Whatever you are creating, the key is to keep creating and be honest with it. The rest will follow.”

AligarhDil Pe Mat Le Yaar!!filmmakerHansal MehtaManoj BajpayeeRaakhRajkummar RaoWoodstock Villa