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DOCUMENTARY

The film looks at the idea of love in the Hindi heartland from three different angles, and what we take home is a rueful smile and a head full of questions…

The space to feel: Paromita Vohra.

But there are expectations. Viewers expect to take home something conclusive from a documentary. “So that is how the Chang-pas live,” they might say after seeing Gaurav Jani’s “Riding Solo to the Top of the World”, or “That’s the truth about Gujarat,” after seeing Rakesh Sharma’s “Final Solution”. But there is no such “message” to carry home from Paromita Vohra’s latest documentary, “Morality TV aur Loving Jehad — Ek Manohar Kahani”. The film looks at the idea of love in the Hindi heartland from three different angles, and what we take home is a rueful smile and a head full of questions: Why do we get so uptight about love? Why do we fear it so much? Why do we outlaw an emotion that is so natural to humankind?

Vohra does not like to tell a linear story linearly. She likes to explore an issue for all the complexity it can yield. She rejects outright the prevailing notion amongst documentary film-makers that art and culture must be kept apart from politics. She believes her films are political precisely because she uses the methods of art in making them. To make people think is more political than to tell people what they should think.

“Morality TV...” began with no pre-conceived thesis. In December 2005, Hindi TV channels “broke” the story of police action against couples in Meerut’s Gandhi Baug. Meerut is known as a TRP city. The channel that garners the greatest number of eyeballs in Meerut is Number One. Inter-channel competition is therefore intense. Apart from the big fish in the sea, there is a local channel as well. City Hulchul prides itself on getting to the action faster than anyone else and wrapping up a story in two sound bytes. In December 2005, when the police invited TV channels to the Gandhi Baug party to see how they ferreted out, slapped, abused and humiliated couples sitting or walking in the park, the channels came with pleasure, tongues hanging out.

This story, promptly named “Operation Majnoon”, could have led a documentary film-maker to investigate the whole murky business of “Breaking News” and come to a conclusion that anybody who wanted publicity could get it if they created enough mayhem for TV channels to lap up and regurgitate in a “breaking news” loop. Vohra was not interested in going that way. She was interested in making “Operation Majnoon” the nucleus around which to weave a denser story of what Meerut thinks, feels and says about love. Who makes the police the arbiters of morality? Who is on their side — politicians? Parents? What do young people think of love and romance? Where does the phrase “Loving Jehad” come from?

Sandeep Pahal, a VHP activist, tells us where he “knows” it comes from. Like everything else in Meerut, it comes from a Muslim conspiracy he says. Muslim boys seduce Hindu girls by assuming false Hindu identities. By the time the poor girls realise it, they are too far gone in the relationships. This is “loving jehad”, a no-weapons terrorism. “We have no objection to love,” he explains. “But in Hindu culture there is love between mother and father, mother and son, children may love their books...” The audience bursts into hoots of laughter. But you look around the auditorium uncomfortably for people who are not laughing. There are many who may share Pahal’s beliefs and might not be so amused.

Flip the love coin and Pahal is replaced by Ved Prakash Sharma, one of the most widely-devoured writers of pulp fiction in the Hindi belt. He is aware that his latest best-seller, Because They Swapped Wives, might mislead people into thinking that he endorses illicit love. Nothing could be further from the truth he claims. As a staunch believer in licit love, he merely wants to warn his readers of the dangers of such immoral practices as wife-swapping. The phrase “Ek manohar kahani”, the third part of the unwieldy three-tier title of Vohra’s film, comes from this side of love, illustrated copiously by book covers that dance seductively on the screen.

Other stories crowd the film to contextualise “Operation Majnoon” further. It makes for a lot of material for a 28-minute film. How to organise it into a coherent structure was a problem for Vohra and her editor Sankalp Meshram, till they hit upon the idea of a split screen. This not only allowed them to get more into less, it also referred nicely to news channel screens that go ballistic, with bands flashing “Breaking News” below the newscasters’ ribs, and strips running frantically at the bottom carrying tidbits of news and advertisements.

What does this do to clarity? Do you get everything that is happening on the screen? Not quite. But that is fine with Vohra. She believes that sensing and feeling things is just as important as seeing and understanding them. In an essay on media advocacy, she argues, “To take on more conversational or formal and creative approaches may mean accepting less definite responses; it may mean that we have to abandon the anxiety that our message needs to be crystal clear, that our stand should be perceived as unequivocal.”

She has clearly abandoned this anxiety in “Morality TV aur Loving Jehad — Ek Manohar Kahani”. Perhaps we can take a cue from her; abandon our anxiety about a crystal clear message and just go with the film. If nothing else, it makes us laugh at our cultural hang-ups while feeling frustrated, angry and horrified at the same time.

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