 "Movie hall")
When a friend comes to visit Priyanka (Tanaya Jha Khan), the female protagonist of Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar, their reunion is bittersweet. Priyanka is living in a room of a boys’ hostel in Darbhanga, a small town about 140 kilometres northeast of Bihar’s capital Patna, with Sumit (Abhinav Jha). Sumit and Priyanka eloped earlier and migrated to New Delhi, but have been forced to return to their hometown in the wake of the Covid 19-induced lockdown and loss of income. Unable to return to their families, the couple struggles to find economic and emotional stability.
The two girls — both called Priyanka — represent two possibilities, both tragic. The dialogue between them reveals that after one of them eloped, the other was forced to break off her relationship with a boy and get married. Neither went to college, they barely finished high school. The married Priyanka asks her friend if her life in Delhi is also besieged by such visible markers of poverty. She claims to be in relative prosperity, having recently returned from a holiday with her husband in Kathmandu. But marriage is no guarantee of happiness. “When my husband found out about my boyfriend,” she says, “he locked me in the bathroom.”
Directed by Parth Saurabh and written by him and Jha, Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar, recently released on Mubi, is an addition to a recent slew of films set in the Mithila region of Bihar. The trend began with Gamak Ghar (2019), directed by Achal Mishra, which chronicled the fate of a family house in a village in the Darbhanga district over two decades. The film, also starring Jha, won a slew of awards at festivals in India and abroad. Jha also served as the protagonist of Mishra’s next film, Dhuin (2022), where he plays a theatre actor who wants to migrate to Mumbai to try his luck in films. Both of Mishra’s films — and now Saurabh’s — are similar to each other not only because of their small-town settings, their shared language, of their focus on unglamorous characters, but also through a certain visual texture.
Each of these films is shot through with a sort of diffused light — smog and mist; overcast skies — reflecting the nostalgia, despondence, disappointment, or desperation of the characters helplessly watching their dreams and aspirations slowly disintegrate. Early in Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar, Priyanka walks past a garage of sorts for abandoned cars. The vehicles are piled on top of each other, a bus is stalled in a pool of glassy water, possibly a metaphor of Priyanka’s stultified life. The hostel in which she and Sumit live is an old mansion, possibly once belonging to the Darbhanga princely state, but now dilapidated. Their room is grimy, and one of its corners is monopolised by a ceiling-high pile of old, dusty paper. “What is this?” Priyanka asks Sumit during one of their frequent fights. It is, metaphorically, all the baggage they are carrying around.
This is a clear departure from so many Hindi films set in north-Indian small towns, starting with Gangs of Wasseypur 1 & 2 (Anurag Kashyap, 2012) to comedies such as Bareilly Ki Barfi (Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, 2017), Badrinath Ki Dulhania (Shashank Khaitan, 2017), to Ramprasad Ki Tehrvi (Seema Pahwa, 2019). Literary scholar Anupama S. Varma argues that these films “decentre” Mumbai, the home of the Hindi film industry, and locate their narratives in settings away from the metropolis, exploring different dialects and languages, lifestyles and perspectives. Film critic Avijit Ghosh claims that the spectacular rise of the Bhojpuri film industry since 2004 provides a counterpoint to the globalisation of the Hindi film industry and its rebranding as Bollywood in the 21st century.
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Not everyone, however, sees this regionalisation as a positive development. Film scholar Pallavi Rao, in a study of the film Toilet: Ek Prem Katha (Shree Narayan Singh, 2017) that promoted the Swachh Bharat Mission, writes “the recent resurgence of cinema from the Hindi heartland valorises Brahminical notions of modernity.” Rao argues that these films locate the upper-caste Hindu male as the driving force of narratives, creating a space where the imagination of the nation is “tied to patriarchal caste dharma”. In recent years, though, such narratives have been challenged, writes Harish S Wankhede, in films and streaming series such as Dahaad (Reema Katgi and Ruchika Oberoi, 2023) and Kathal (Yashowardhan Mishra, 2023), both of which have female and Dalit protagonists — that too, police officers.
Films like Dhuin and Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar abjure the drama — or melodrama, if you please — of the conflicts of class, caste, and religion that embroil the lives of Indians by depicting these through a dispassionate, almost documentary, style. These conflicts are lived realities, not narrative conveniences. A World Bank report from last year claimed that 5.6 crore Indians had been pushed into poverty — almost 80 percent of those impoverished by the Covid 19-induced economic downturn — since 2020. What happened to these people, where did they go?
Vaibhav Vats, in a review of “pandemic cinema”, that is films responding to the pandemic, describes Dhuin as “a glimpse of the great pandemic cinema of the future”. Perhaps such a cinema is around the corner. Or perhaps, the eager amnesia with which we have responded to the lessons of the pandemic will also allow us to forget people like Sumit and Priyanka, and allow their stories to be lost to the smoke and the smog.
Uttaran Das Gupta is a New Delhi-based writer and journalist. He teaches journalism at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat
