Movies and shows, old and new, have helped us to live vicariously through them. They have allowed us to travel far and wide at a time borders are shut and people are restricted to homes. In our new column What's In A Setting, we explore the inseparable association of a story with its setting, how the location complements the narrative, and how these cultural windows to the world have helped broaden our imagination.
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In one of the early scenes in Sonchiriya, the head of the gang of dacoits, Maan Singh alias Dadda (Manoj Bajpayee), asks one of his fellow baaghis, Lakhna (Sushant Singh Rajput), if he fears death. Why would he be scared, counters Lakhna, when he had spent an entire lifetime in beehad. For rebels like him, the dry, dusty, and labyrinthine ravines of Chambal mirror the persistent play between the treachery of life and the inevitability of death, endemic to their very existence.
In a place where nothing germinates and blooms, people don’t seem to thrive either. Filmmaker Abhishek Chaubey creates a unique somber relationship between the region and its denizens, one that pivots on mutuality and reciprocity of death. Bookended by fatalities, with several bodies strewn all over the narrative, Sonchiriya is a searing parable of annihilation. One that is profoundly entrenched in and wholly belongs to Chambal.
What do we talk about when we talk about the place in a Hindi film? Is it a picturesque locale where the hero and heroine go traipsing and make the audience travel along? Is it a fanciful set up for a dream sequence where they exchange amorous glances and sing soulful love songs? Is it a glitzy backdrop against which to stage rambunctious dance sequences?
Alternatively, just as it could be an eye-filler with its larger-than-life majesty, the place is also the intimate space that anchors a film’s characters, contextualises their stories. It could be a silent witness to the proceedings or the keeper of secrets and memories. More so, it could be a character, the agent provocateur for the action, the driving force propelling a film in its designated direction. Chambal abides by the roll call, performs all these duties in Sonchiriya, tacitly, and, at the same time, emphatically and resolutely.
Chaubey is a rare director in mainstream Hindi cinema who apprehends the place that his films are set in, with acuity, and in all its multiplicity. He may have entered Chambal as an outsider but was quick to grasp its uniqueness. “The nature is beautiful but in a hostile way... There is a starkness, bleakness to the beauty,” he told me a while back in a conversation on the film. He found it rubbing off on people, reflecting in their stubborn ways, and in how they tackled the absurdly difficult life in the remote, backward, almost unreachable spots. In step with the harsh nature around them, he found them driven by a boundless rage, and wanted that “heat to leap out from the dusty frames."
Chaubey approaches Chambal with a researcher’s eye for detail, documentarist’s quest for authenticity, and an anthropologist’s zeal for discovery.
It’s not just in the surface realities — the rough sound and course cadence of the dialect (khari boli/Brij bhasha), the colourful invectives and abuses, the scatological humour, the trenchant terrain or the bloody sieges and encounters — but in the evocation of the culture, beliefs, and an entire way of living. The hinterland — spread from Naroda to Brahmapuri, Balkhandiya to Dholpur and Morena — is a layered tapestry knit with many complex threads, most important being those of caste, gender, and State atrocities.
No doubt the arid topography, the sparse vegetation, the maze of ravines are forbidding in their ferociousness, claustrophobic in their expanse.
But what’s more menacing and sinister is the discriminations and prejudices, inequities, and injustices that they harbour, the caste divides, toxic masculinity and patriarchal codes that they run by and are shaped from.
On the one hand, it’s an anarchic world where Baamans, Thakurs, Gujjars, Mallahs regularly clash with each other. On the other, it’s also a place where the pecking order is cruelly defined and cast in stone. “Upadesh Baaman de sake, Thakur nahin (it’s the Brahmins who can preach and sermonise, not the Thakurs)," expounds a character. Another sums up the brutal hierarchy of caste and class: “Saanp khavega choohe ko, saanp ko khavenge giddh; Yehi niyam duniya ko, kah gaye sadhu siddh" (The mouse will be eaten by the snake, and the snake will be preyed upon by the vulture as per the rules of the nature that the learned ones have spoken about). Words that reach out with a fearsome urgency in our revivalist, regressive times when caste, far from being steadily erased, is rearing its ugly head even more tellingly.
In that sense, Sonchiriya is specific to yet transcends the period in the lifetime of Chambal and its people. It is set during the Emergency, something that reaches out to you through the address of the prime minister to the nation on the radio, in the toys of children, and the slogans on the police vans. In the times of control, domination, and persecution, Special Task Force (STF) cop Virendra Singh (Ashutosh Rana) wants to ruthlessly cleanse Chambal of the rebels. “It’s the beginning of the end, the last hurrah of the baaghi culture,” said Chaubey. However, even as the insurgents are being jailed, maimed, and killed by the State force, one can see a magnification of many mutinies, a discontent that is still simmering deep within the disenfranchised.
It’s a dystopic universe where almost everyone is a victim but that doesn’t stop most of them from victimising others. Everyone has crossed the boundary; everyone has fired the gun. The Wild Wild West remains united in perpetrating atrocities. However, in this ugly powerplay of privilege, the women, specially the silent and discounted ones, languish at the extreme corner of the receiving end, “Sabse pare, sabse neeche" (far removed from everyone and at the very bottom of the ladder). Their plight is chillingly summed up in a line that stresses on possessing them in much the same way as owning a piece of land: “Joru jameen jor ki, warna kisi aur ki" (Keep the wife and land in control or else they will be poached by someone else).
The microcosm of Sonchiriya then is a dismally prescient and timeless evocation of our larger, hostile cosmos. In the barbaric Chambal of 1975, a Jhirsa caste girl is brutally violated by an upper caste man, and refused treatment by a doctor on realising that she belongs to the community of untouchables. The recent alleged gangrape, murder, and forced cremation of the nine-year-old Dalit girl in the supposedly urbane Delhi by four men, including a priest, is nothing but the same depravity in eternal perpetuation. Chambal might be far from Delhi yet is not quite so distant when it comes to the heinousness of crime. It’s also as if nothing has changed in these five odd decades in the life of the nation; as though we are in an inexorable continuum when it comes to trampling on our vulnerable sonchiriyas.
The saving grace, in Chambal, is the presence of a moral dimension. The good baaghis of beehad are men of principles and conscience. They might rob a marriage party but won’t touch the jewelry worn by the bride; they don’t believe in showing their back but in taking the bullets right on their chests. They dream of starting life afresh, but also realise that death is what Chambal, and its dacoits are eternally cursed with. It’s not brought on by inauspicious omens — the carcass of a snake or a dead cat — but their own deeds, the past sins that they must pay for. So they may change the course of their mission but can’t circumvent the march of destiny. There’s an acknowledgment of guilt, an accompanying repentance, and a search for salvation.
The deliverance of the outlaws of Chambal is in saving the sonchiriya of Jhirsa. However, in our contemporary urban wastelands, far from being saved and safeguarded, the sonchiriyas are still getting snuffed out. Where to seek penitence and redemption when law and order itself seems to have become a rare bird?
Read more from the What's in a Setting series here.
source https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/the-world-of-sonchiriya-arid-claustrophobic-ravines-hold-a-mirror-to-a-land-of-anarchy-injustice-and-inequities-9876221.html
