MARGINALIA
Shot by Vishal Bendi
Paromita Vohra’s Manohar Kahaaniyaan – The Love Jihad edition
​
In 2007, SCM alum Paromita Vohra made a documentary film called Morality TV aur Loving Jehad: Ek Manohar Kahaani. Today she heads up Agents of Ishq, a project to start public conversations about sexual matters—which have always been
considered personal and private and therefore somehow unimportant.
​
Tanvi Dalvi caught up with Vohra in a free-wheeling interview.
​
As the attack on interfaith couples accelerated in 2021 with many governments thinking to give credence to the communally-weighted term of ‘Love Jihad’, Marginalia talked to SCM alum and documentary-filmmaker Paromita Vohra about her film Morality TV aur Loving Jehad: Ek Manohar Kahani. The film, released in 2007, came into public prominence subsequently after the discourse on Love Jihad took centre stage last year. Vohra spoke at length about her filmmaking, the larger cultural framework within which the idea of ‘Love Jihad’ is set, as well as how her labour of love, Agents of Ishq, informs her work.
​
Excerpts from the interview:
​
Marginalia: Could you unpack the title of the film Morality TV aur Loving Jehad: Ek Manohar Kahani?
​
I started to make the film when I saw an incident on television where the UP police had attacked couples in a public park which they called ‘Operation Majnu’. For about a year and a half before that, I had been recording television news on and off, though I wasn’t very sure why I was doing it. There was perhaps an intuitive feeling that something unusual was happening. I started doing this during the Shakti Kapoor Sting Operation where a young woman approached him and he tried some casting couch manoeuvres. Tehelka had done a sting operation on the Defence Ministry which was very famous; this was the first sting operation that had something to do with sexuality. And after that, a lot of TV channels would use sting operations to expose something. The Shakti Kapoor Sting Operation was essentially a Casting Couch Sting Operation. But while watching it, I felt that there was something theatrical about it. I had the feeling that all these were threads of a story but I couldn’t be sure what the story was. It may explain why, if you see Morality TV, that the film doesn’t just have footage from ‘Operation Majnu’. It has footage from a number of other news items which I had recorded over a two-year period, all out of some sense that there was a bigger picture somewhere that might emerge and I might need all this material.
​
At that time many things were happening in parallel: St. Xavier’s College decided to have a dress code; the Mayor wanted to make kissing on the seafront in Mumbai illegal; and there were all kinds of murmurs about moral policing that were becoming louder. When I saw the Operation Majnu incident, I was shocked because they had made love a criminal activity. It was no longer legal to sit in a park and make out. What struck me also was the amount of violence that was used. There wasn’t that much footage, maybe two minutes of it, but it was playing in loops. We are used to that now but in 2006, this stood out.
It seemed as if there was a contradiction between the message and the medium. The message was: This is what the police did, attacking these young people, which is so wrong. In their repeated playing, it seemed that TV channels were licking their lips over the juiciness of the footage, as if they were gossiping about those people rather than reporting news. All the television news that I had recorded, I then realized, was something or the other that was telling women not to cross certain sexual boundaries.
After the Shakti Kapoor Sting Operation, Hema Malini went on to say that if a girl comes to join the film industry in Mumbai, she is definitely going to have trouble. She should come with her parents or with someone to protect her. This meant that the onus was on the girl who had to be careful. There was no discussion about the system that put women at risk, nothing about its inherent sexism, nothing about how the system sucks. All the news items were related to this – for instance, a big deal would be made that during a raid at a massage parlor, condoms were found. These sting operations never happened to men. They always happened to women. The camera would be in a dance bar, say, and the women would be paraded…it was continuously portrayed as a morality tale. When I began to make the film, I thought it was about how television had become a kind of moral police. So the working title of the film was Morality TV.
But as I researched Operation Majnu, I noticed something interesting: everybody who had written about it was actually a crime reporter. Initially, I had not planned to make the film about television news, per se. I was going to talk about moral policing and television news would be a part of it. I began to understand that news television was beginning to take on this morally coded language. Today the phrase ‘Love Jihad’ is common. But the phrase was nowhere in the public domain during that time. The first time it was in anything was in this film.
When I met Sandeep Pahal of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, I realized that Operation Majnu had been mounted because of the general feeling that a Love Jihad had been mounted. In just three or four days of research, numerous different narratives emerged, all saying the same thing: Operation Majnu was a good thing. Some people did feel that the police should not have acted as brutally as they did, but they felt that it was good that the police had intervened. Nobody felt it was a bad thing. Also, a lot of pulp fiction comes out of Meerut, including the Hindi magazine Manohar Kahaniyaan, a popular true crime magazine. There is a long tradition of such storytelling in all cultures, not only in India. There were always these crimes of transgressions, of the crossing of boundaries. The transgressors were women, women who elope, women who marry outside their caste, women who have sex outside marriage… When I began to read those magazines, I could see that the language those magazines used was exactly the language that the television reporters were using. It had the same syntax, the same vocabulary. At that time they were calling it Loving Jihad. And that’s why the film came to be called so because in fact Operation Majnu is a Manohar Kahani. Television news operates on the model of making a scandal out of a case. In reality, it is a morality tale and the moral is this: If you transgress, this is what will happen to you. This is not just in the sexual domain. Television news operates in that fashion in the political domain as well
​
The idea of ‘Love Jihad’ must be read against the backdrop of many simultaneous historical and communal tensions. To what extent did the people who claimed there was love jihad believe in it as a reality? And is it a conversation that can be countered with facts?
​
I don’t think beliefs can be countered with facts. Significantly, Sandeep Pahal says something to the effect that there are a lot of things for which you don’t have proof. But you know they are true. It’s very easy to scoff at Sandeep Pahal, but we ourselves talk about these things. There are subjective truths and objective facts and if I am firmly convinced of something, it’s very difficult to change it because I am looking at the world in that way. It’s called a confirmation bias. There’s such a long legacy of this anxiety that Muslim men are going to take away Hindu women. In the nineteenth century, many pamphlets, storybooks, and magazines came out telling stories that there are Muslim men taking our women away. That there are lower caste men taking our women away. Bhaabhi-devar stories also started coming out at that time. It was a time of upheaval in every sphere and the sphere of personal mores was no exception.
This is connected to the idea of mass communication: something may seem factual because it is printed. Print makes things seem official. If what is printed seems to confirm your prejudices, you are likely to believe it because of the anxiety generated by a fast-changing world where you are struggling to keep up. For instance, at the time that the film was shot, Meerut had just been incorporated into this National Capital Region. There was a sense of going from being a small town to a city. Meerut, like any other old town, was an old city which was very congested, as you see in the film. It was contrasted by Meerut as a new city with gated communities. There was a division that happened just like in Delhi – there is an old Delhi and a New Delhi. Old Delhi is underdeveloped and is full of Muslims, poor people; New Delhi is full of upper caste, upper class people and all funds for development go there. So you see this kind of a dynamic playing out in many towns. The other thing is that there is a new economy and everyone wants to be a part of this new economy but it’s not so easy. The economy gives you the false impression that you can participate in it and prosper but there are all kinds of barriers and hidden obstacles. There are also all kinds of prices that you have to pay. You want your daughters to go to the Polytechnic in Delhi, you want them to work in a call center, but you have anxiety that you will lose control over their sexuality.
One of the things that I learnt while I was researching was that there was a boom in the meat-packing industry at that time. It also meant that Muslims in Western UP were doing better. So there was resentment of that prosperity. There were many different things happening. And so it became a very convenient thing to pin your anxieties on – the anxiety of losing control over your daughters and the women in your family. Your anxieties about supremacy over Dalits, over Muslims, over minorities, over women.
The idea that a belief can be countered with facts is a problem of left-liberal thinking which is extremely persuaded of a legalistic means of thinking which tells you that that if you present the facts, the other person will agree, or else they must be very stupid. To do that is also foolish because we are all impacted by the way we think and we all doubt other people’s so-called facts. We are very sure that our facts are the real facts and other people’s facts are the wrong facts. The truth about politics is that it’s a complex mixture of desire, beliefs, and calculations. So to some extent, everybody believes the part that they have to believe. So many people truly believe that the current government will be a good government. It doesn’t matter that there is a history of communal tension, but they will say that that is not proven. I know people were so convinced that the Gujarat model would work but when you asked them to explain it to you, they couldn’t.
I think their intentions are more banal than evil because people just want to believe in something new. There are people who are communally committed and believe in the right-wing government. There are people who are waiting to get the chance to feel this hatred and to be violent and they have got that permission. But there were many people who were like, ‘No, it could be cool; I got this feeling that it could be good’, and that’s the basis on which many people vote. People are also opportunistic so they decide to believe in something if it’s going to work in their favour. Facts are to be embedded in an entire universe of emotion, desire, resonance and recognition of one’s reality.
​
When you were researching for the film, did you sense any caste or class dimensions to the idea of Love Jihad or was it solely about religion?
​
At the time of making the film, it seemed solely about religion. Like facts, different strands of history and different equations of social reality are always part of every event. As a film, Morality TV or Loving Jihad talks about film language but unlike the television news which reduces the incident to an occurrence with an absolute meaning, the film actually starts discovering that there is meaning upon meaning upon meaning in a single incident.
There is this story of Love Jihad, there is an existing history of communal tension, there is social and material development in the city, and then there is anxiety about changing family relationships and changing dynamics with children, and young people. There are Archie cards, there is illicit love. Television news and the internet is bringing more and more change before you. And of course, caste is a very big part of everything in India. There is nothing in India that is not infected by caste.
​
An anxiety about losing control is an anxiety about your identity becoming unimportant in a society. When old people think young people are rude and are unaware of the larger reality today, there is truth in it but it is also true that the older you get, the more upsetting you find this, because the entire world that you have known is shifting and you’re not very sure what your place in all of this will be. So all of those things intersect at any given moment.
​
When the young woman in the film, Priyanka, speaks up to the cop, it enrages the cop because it is understood that as a Dalit woman, you are not supposed to speak up for yourself. So the cop takes the opportunity to demean Priyanka.
​
When you cast aspersions on the character of people by asking, ‘Who are these people sitting in a park and making out?’, you’re revealing an anxiety about losing control. There are fears about Bahujan women crossing borders in intimate life and leading to a change in status quo. That’s the whole idea of ‘Svastha Manoranjan’ [healthy entertainment]– that when you are with the family, intimacy is something that is permitted and constrained by the family, that it is endogamous, as opposed to when you are out with someone on your own. When cops in Bombay, for instance, see you with someone, they will ask you, ‘Why are you sitting with this boy outside? You seem to belong to a good family’. The idea that you are going to transgress a boundary of class, caste, religion as well as that of sexual control is a very big part of why moral policing occurs. It is in order to maintain the hierarchy of society that moral policing exists.
​
When you were interviewing people during the making of this film, how did you deal with bias? When someone says something filled with hate, how do you navigate that conversation?
​
It’s been a long time since I made that film and compared to today, it all looks like kindergarten. It looks very mild. Somebody asked me this question after I made the film. I just laughed and said, ‘With a lot of whiskey’. When you are making a film, your job is to listen, even to someone you don’t agree with. Not to express your disagreement, but to listen. And I have a position that I never lie to people I talk to about my political position. So they know that I disagree with them. Because I don’t want to trap anybody into giving me answers they don’t want to give.
Shot by One Sen
But I think at that moment you have to find a way of asking that question of disagreement without judgment. That’s your job. If you don’t know how to do your job, then you are as much a victim of your privilege as anything else; when you decide that what you think is the only way to think, or that you don’t have to be polite with the people who are giving you their time. Eventually, even the nastiest person doesn’t owe you their time. I believe there is a pact. I will ask the question, I will express my disagreement, but I have to find a way to do it without judging the person in the moment. The question to ask them is: How do you know this?
​
But the judgment tends to enter the editing of the film. I believe that the sting operation as a form is wrong because then the whole investigation assumes a moralistic tone and I don’t think that makes for good politics. When I was making Morality TV…, I was critiquing the liberal approach of ‘exposing’ the right wing as a way of proving your liberal credentials. We all live in the same world. We don’t know if we are right. Maybe we are wrong. I don’t know. I really don’t know. In a way the manner of making films and doing work to express your politics has to shift from a judgment mode into a discursive mode. To try to understand what’s going on rather than to decide the meaning of it before you even explore it.
​
How did the media in Meirut help in shaping this narrative of Love Jihad? Was talking about it merely a means to increase TRPs or was there also a nexus between the police and the media?
​
The media and the police need each other. One of the men I interviewed, said, “Media aur police mein choli-daaman ka rishta hai” (The media and the police are like the blouse and the bosom). Operation Majnu happened as a collusive activity between the police and the media, who decided to sensationalise it. It was meant for the local news, and not the national news. It was just something they wanted to do by responding to their anxieties and their desire to control people. Motives were very mixed. But when the cameras began to roll, the cops became more violent than expected. It is very interesting that the media always ends up going to the place where the volume is highest. The initial idea of Operation Majnu had been that they would round up a few couples and it would be the couples who would be chastised. But the cops became so violent that the volume of the violence shifted direction, and the media knew it. So they shifted their focus right there and the story turned and got picked up nationally. There were many other sting operations that happened, which remained on channels like India TV and Aaj Tak, which were not very popular at the time.
​
We only accept love in certain palatable forms when it comes to age, class, caste, gender. With the labeling of a certain kind of inter-religious relationship as ‘Love Jihad’ taking a larger shape today, do you think our belief in the value of love is diminishing?
​
I don’t think it is only about love. I see it as being about sex. Sexuality is an entire universe of meanings; it is not only about having sexual desires but about having numerous sexual desires, having the ability to understand them, actualize them, define them, have them recognized by law or practice. All these are interlinked to who we are as people but exist in an area of the self that is always kept hidden. If there is one thing that brings the left, right, and center together, it is fear of sex and talking about sex.
Love is a word that people use for abstraction and vagueness. We need to restore the connection between love and sex. We need to acknowledge that what we talk about when we talk about love is also sex; and that when we talk about sex, there may also be love. So love and sex are on a spectrum, on a fluid continuum of private desires. A lot of this is really about how much we think of private life, which we hardly do. It is not considered to be a political issue. Politics is always something anthropological, something sociological, but private life has always been at a lower stratum. It is not respectable to discuss it. It is not taken seriously.
When this film was made, a lot of people didn’t take the issue seriously. Now when the horse has bolted, talking about interfaith love is becoming normal. You have to fight for the right of every individual to privacy, and adulthood is about privacy. It’s about me being something beyond my religion, my caste, and my location. Political conversation always falls short over there. Unless we do that, we can’t have a hope of a more liberal society.
​
In this climate of political polarization, we often neglect the common thread that ties us all, which is the need for love. In that context, where do you situate your work at Agents of Ishq? What would you say is its core philosophy?
​
I had always been very interested in the idea of love and desire, not in that romantic-story kind of way, or by a linear idea of romance which inevitably leads to marriage and monogamy, that is promoted by so-called respectable conversations about love. We always discuss love in this framework: X and Y fell in love and then got married. In this viewing, love marriage is seen as loftier than arranged marriage, but that creates a template and leaves many complicated inter-sections and behaviours found within relationships untouched. According to me, until marriage ceases to exist as a compulsory ending, we are not going to change anything. Marriage is a means of preserving gender, caste, class and religious equations. The idea that you celebrate marriage as a happy ending, whether inter-faith or same faith, to me is laughable.
Feminism, as such, is interwoven with the idea of challenging the notion of marriage. When you challenge the notion of marriage, you are being intersectional. You are saying that marriage need not be the goal of people, that they need not end up with people of their class or caste or religion or they need not end up with anybody at all when they don’t want to, and that there are actually numerous relationship styles that are possible and must be treated equally.
When I made Morality TV… however, I understood much more strongly than before that this is a really crucial area of politics which nobody is working on or thinks is important. Everybody thinks it’s silly. But I wanted to do it because I believe it is the key to a change in political discourse. Unless we change how we talk about things, we cannot change anything. Morality TV… is about how we talk about things.
It’s your language that determines the meaning of something. So if we don’t change the way we talk about intimacy and private life, we are not going to change anything. It took some years for Agents of Ishq to shape up the way that it did but I think all my work post 2007 began to go more in that direction. I felt that everything people said in the post-Nirbhaya discourse about sexual violence would become just another way to control women rather than to ensure their freedom. It would lead to more and more ways to constrain women and promote casteism because ‘other’ men are threatening our women and the outside world is full of danger for women. And you can see the importance of speaking about private space in a majority of cases of sexual violence. Most women are raped by someone they know, not by strangers. So the whole idea that you will step out of the Lakshman rekha and something horrible will happen to you is untrue because bad things are happening inside the boundary and that area is never questioned.
There is also a lot of talk about the good guys and the bad guys. And the bad guys are always the men of the lower castes, who don’t speak good English. They are the creeps. And the bhadralok boys, the woke guys, are supposed to be the good guys. This is the way in which the conversation about sexuality was always about controlling women rather than ensuring freedom and equality of women. For me, this was really stressful to watch and that is why I created Agents of Ishq.
I felt that comprehensive sexuality education, which talks about the whole area of private life, should happen on the terms of people. It should happen on women’s terms, on queer people’s terms; it should happen on intersectional terms and not on these paternalistic terms that the media carries out. Because just like in Morality TV and in every Manohar Kahaani ever, if the only way you talk about sex is by talking about sexual violence, then you are not doing women any favors. People may be feeling very flattered that everyone is so concerned about sexual violence but they’re being stupid. Women are being told that sexual violence is the reason they should not leave home, they should not be out at night; that they should have an app to track them. But the same apps now are used to arrest people in the current moment. So if women have not understood that somebody knowing where they are at all times is very bad news, then it is time for them to wake up and think about it.
This has to be something we as people believe in as an article of faith. You have to believe that people have the right to privacy and a private life and that does not have to be defined by anybody else but them. Whether I want to have a kinky relationship, want to marry someone of my own faith, whether I don’t want to marry, whether I am asexual – all of it is rooted in the adult right to define my own life and to have consent for it. I think that this is an important political idea which is the building block of consent even at a larger level.
The situation I am in today is that I can’t even have my own political views. I have to have the same political views as everybody. So the consensual relationship between the state and the citizen is mirrored by the consensual relationship between people themselves—between parents and children, between spouses, between lovers, between friends. The idea of consensuality is rooted in the idea of equality and the idea of choices that are made mutually. Those choices are rooted in the idea of a system which tries to accommodate heterogeneity.
If we won’t talk about it from the heart onwards, we are never going to disturb the larger order. If we don’t talk about it in the hierarchy of gender, class, and caste, which is so intertwined, it’s never going to get threatened. That is why Agents of Ishq was created. It is now over five years old. It is also a project that says that emotions and experiences of people – these are political. That facts are not everything and that experientiality is also very important. Emotions are also facts. They’re not non-factual.
It’s a very masculine view of the world to say that emotions are shit and statistics are truth. They’re all factual and they’re different aspects of factuality. Unless we can reintegrate the emotional, intellectual and political aspects of our existence, we’re not going to be able to do it at a larger level. We’ve certainly discovered in the last five years that there’s a deep schism within people. Not just in society, but there is a deep loneliness, ignorance, shame, and self hate inside people which feed into the larger languages of hate and shame.
​
Your films veer away from the serious and self-righteous gaze that characterizes most documentaries and may be called genre-defying. So to what extent do you associate yourself with the label of a documentary filmmaker?
​
I totally associate myself with that label. I think of myself as a documentary filmmaking artist because I think all my work is a documentary, including Agents of Ishq, which is like a long film I have been making for years and years. I think that if the question arises at all, that’s a deficiency in the labeling mechanism. Because I think that working with templates means you are not learning anything new. I am not making a film to tell that I know the 8 times table or that I can recite the 32 times table, or that I am so advanced that I know what 32 times 32 is. That is not what filmmaking is about. In order to say something new, you have to find a new way to say it. And that’s why the genres shift.
One of the reasons that my films combine fictional elements like enactments and songs, and non-fictional elements, is because I believe that the subjective truths like experientiality and emotion also have to be rendered in a documentary. I don’t believe in the division that says that fictional films are about inner truth and documentary films are about outer truth. Every film is made up of those objective facts and subjective truths. The reason I combine them is that I also believe that there is a lengthy and terribly boring tradition of boring people which says that if something is boring, then it’s serious. That if I’m enjoying it, then I can’t take it seriously. The notion of the polarization of seriousness and pleasure is very linked to the idea of sexual shame, where sex for pleasure is not okay but sex for reproduction is okay, because reproduction is serious business and pleasure is bad business. I do not believe in this division and I think that it’s created to control people. It’s a hierarchical division. Instead, I think making films which are pleasurable; which you watch with your whole self, your whole body, your whole mind is important.
​
Shot by Milan Gupta
You can disagree with the filmmaker but there should be a common meeting ground of conversation. When we have the confidence to disagree with each other, we have a place where we can meet. When we say that I’m going to make you laugh through my films, it’s a vulnerability, and I may fail. But if we don’t allow that to happen by having forms which are top-down, which lecture the viewer, we can’t bring ourselves to the same level as our audience. After we see a documentary, different people should feel different things – that’s a heterogeneous world. You can’t have that without having forms that are not schematic. Normally, if we know which direction a film is headed in within the first five minutes of watching it, then that’s a schema. To challenge political thinking, you have to break the schema.
​
People who fear associating with the label of a ‘documentary’ filmmaker may be people who believe in the structure too much. The fact that I have an audience tells me that there are quite a few people out there who respond to this form, so who is anybody to decide that it’s not meaningful? Every time someone has told me that my films are too Indian and may not work abroad, I have not found it to be true in my own experience. Cultural gatekeepers are also a form of moral police. All my work is about these kinds of ideas – about somebody else telling you the meaning of something. Morality TV is a kind of a thesis of this idea. I don’t believe in that Manohar Kahaani. So I guess I’m free.
​
Could you talk about your relationship with music and how you decide the musical landscape of your films?
​
I love music. Your inspiration may often be from a form that you may or may not practice and for me it happens to be music. I also come from a family that worked in Bollywood. My grandfather was a very famous music director so I grew up with a lot of Hindi music. We also lived in different places when I was a kid, so there were a lot of musical tastes in my house. My father would listen to Begum Akhtar and loved classical music. My mother loved Hindi film songs. With my friends I was discovering Western music. With every new boyfriend or best friend you make, they introduce you to new music. So the world of music was very plentiful and was a part of who I am.
People then didn’t admit that they liked Hindi films. When I was growing up, it was considered to be uncool to watch Hindi films or to know Hindi songs or god forbid, to play Antakshari. In order to be cool you had to be un-desi. All of that changed in different ways post liberalization. One of my early jobs after liberalization was working at Channel [V] on a program called Videocon Flashback which was about old songs because those songs were in demand and I knew a lot of them.
​
What music teaches you is about how spoken and unspoken languages come together and how many different things can find a way to be joined. Like film, music is also made up of numerous elements. The way that those come together is that each one of them stands out and yet each of them is dancing together. Every song you listen to is telling you a story of how different things can come together for some time. At a kind of instinctive level, music tells you a lot about storytelling. It’s very emotional without naming the emotion. It allows you to pinpoint an experience that’s common to many people without labeling it. Everyone is able to enter it on their own terms.
​
Music is a lot of fun and is just very enjoyable. Sometimes while making a film people would tell me a song and I would include it. So the way in which music is present in our lives was important to me. Documentaries are usually not supposed to have fun music. I hated the kind of serious music they had. So when I finally had money to actually get music composed for my films, it had got to be music I loved.
​
Unlimited Girls had a king of hip-hoppy remix music because the film’s look was like that. When I made Q2P, I gave my composer a Miles Davis soundtrack and I said that I wanted it to embody a particular feeling and he took one note from the soundtrack and built the entire soundtrack to that. That was exactly correct for the film because the toilet (as shown in Q2P) is always a place where we enter and leave in a sequence, so the note, too, was always in a place where we entered and left in a sequence.
​
In the interludes of the songs in Morality TV..., you have the words and the chorus and you have this music in between. Most Indians know the in-between music. They imitate the musical instruments that come in the interludes. The interludes are really fantastic because that’s when the orchestra does its thing. It’s a kind of improvisational place. But it also communicates the vibe of the song even if the lyric is something else. The songs I used in Morality TV… were mostly songs from the 1970s films, those which had mention of cabaret and sex and danger. I gave my composer a reference of murder and dons. The stories in those movies were also kind of manohar kahaanis. The interludes always had a raunchy, crude Westernized feel in the middle. It’s really heightened, as if I have gone to the middle of the jungle. It also approximates the way in which the manohar kahaani language is manufactured.
​
There is a lot of color in your films; from their narration to the tunes that they contain. This charges them with a sense of energy and fun and pleasure. When I watch your films, I often feel like I’m at a party because of all those elements. Is that a way to balance the grimness of the subject matters?
​
I don’t think that anything needs to be balanced. Everything needs to be experienced fully. Lots of bad things happen at parties. The way I make my films, they allow the viewer to think about things without panic. The way people watch movies about serious things can be very ritualistic, similar to how everyone goes to pay condolence when somebody dies. They may not mean it but everybody’s got a long face. My cousin passed away two weeks ago. After the chautha, I went back home with my cousins and my nephews and we were laughing a lot. What normally happens when someone dies is that you start telling stories about that person and sometimes you laugh and sometimes you also start saying unflattering things about the person. In actual life, we are capable of loving somebody, criticizing them, missing them, and remembering them. We feel many different things in our everyday lives and art, too, does that for us. I always think that art is an invitation to somebody to see the world from your point of view. Therefore it is like a party. It’s like inviting somebody over.
We cannot show somebody else’s experiences beyond a point, so art makes us sympathetic rather than empathetic. But we can become open to it. At the same time, your identity does not cease to exist. The idea that because I have money for food to eat so I shouldn’t make films about people who don’t have money for food to eat is false. It doesn’t make me a hypocrite. My life and my politics is always a bit of a lag. We want the world to be a different place but in that different place, you and I may not have the luxuries we have. Maybe the different world needs to be differently imagined. But there is an anomaly in what we believe and what our lives are and they’re often at odds with each other. And rather than being moralistic about it, it’s better to recognize it and accept it and move forward from it and think about how I can change this in a loving way. To pretend that you care about somebody else is a melodrama that I don’t want to get into. The mixture of experiences while watching the film actually mirrors the reality of life.