The phantom of liberty

Director Anamika Haskar’s latest movie takes you through a cacophony of dreams.

The phantom of liberty

“The life of the imagination is a vital element of our total nature. If we starve it or pollute it, the quality of our life is depressed or soiled.”

— In Chinua Achebe’s The Truth of Fiction (1978)

I

It is not often that the title of a film draws one into a pregnant tale of imagination. Ostensibly a waggish riposte, Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Ja Riya Hoon, sticks with you just as it did for the director of the film, Anamika Haskar. The vivid phrase lived in her memory from a family conversation, enough to spin her own tale and imagery of the multitude and its quotidian humdrum in singing an ode to Old Delhi.

In flickers, it reminds one of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, Kamal Swaroop’s Om Dar-B-Dar (1988) and Emir Kusturica’s Black Cat, White Cat (1998). Slowly, however, it takes you to where Haskar wants you to be: in dreams - a cacophony of dreams. It’s not only that she wants you to dream; more importantly, she wants you to share the dreams of a pickpocket, a daily wager, a food vendor and a tourist guide as they produce hope and derive meaning from their banal existence. Told through a composite of animation, documentary, ethnography, theatre and cinema, Haskar strings together the mundane and dreamscape, thus offering dreams as a conduit for politics - the nightmares of living and labyrinth of histories - laid out in a disparate narrative that coalesce as our contemporary condition.

Over seven years in the making, more in a garb of an ethnographer, she elicited a texture of responses while quizzing on a range of stimuli — dreams, emotions, quotidian routines, attitude to money. It helped her create a set of characters, generally not foregrounded, and often seen as tertiary to a frame - without any dignity or individuality. Thus, not adjunct but central to her purpose, these four key characters emerge as a pickpocket, a tourist guide, a small time vendor, and a labour activist.

Situated in the stark reality amidst their te noire, Ravindran Sahu as Patru, the pickpocket (also a wedding band musician) emerges as the hinge of the story; with tourist guide Akash Jain (Lokesh Jain); vendor Chhadaami (Raghubir Yadav); and daily wager Lal Bihari (N Gopalan), these four span the spectrum of human emotions between life and death.

Neither a conventional arc nor structure, Haskar unhinges us from the singularity of a story and instead offers multiple stories shoved under the weight of a manufactured national narrative and societal tastes.

There is neither a conventional arc nor structure. Haskar unhinges us from the singularity of a story and instead offers multiple stories shoved under the weight of a manufactured national narrative and societal tastes. Unlike the cinema that portends to be a commercial product of a constructed market, it is not meant for the quintessential consumer that wants its popcorn flavoured servings of instant-tales. It is not as instant as the transitioning of a pickpocket into a beggar. Haskar is unrelenting as she takes on everyone including the elites - the custodian of culture (tehzeeb kay thekedaar).

One such character, Akash, who offers the romanticism of a bygone era in his heritage walks, reminds the audience of this. With a take-over by Patru, the heritage walks are transformed to sauntering “apni Dilli” - as an allegory for the nation. It nudges at Siddharth Deb’s exploration of India’s many contradictions through various individual and extraordinary perspectives in his The Beautiful and the Damned. The narrative wanders and meanders, as the dreams underscore despair. Yet, they empower the underdog. As a prisoner is imagined as a wrestler pulping the cop, the dreams become the counter-narrative.

What power do we have to change the world? In a telling moment in the film, when asked “what will you do if you get an Aladdin ka Chirag?” Patru replies, “Agar mil gaya toe main phaila dunga [If I get one, I’ll spread it].” This speaks to an authentic idea of democratic ethos beyond some slanted elitist capture of imagination in a top-down autocracy that the nation has become in the times of an image conscious leader.

Perhaps like the foreigner on tour who says “This is not the story I want”, it is the story that Haskar is varnishing through a seamless movement between different genres and forms - between shaky camera and tacky VFX, documentary shots and lyrical poetry. In her final salvo on our ocular regime, Haskar through Chadammi Lal, the street vendor warns: “Don’t turn into the spectacle yourself; you who watch the spectacle.”

The phantom of liberty

Taking the Horse to Eat Jalebis (Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon). 2018. India.

Directed by Anamika Haksar.

In Hindi; English subtitles.

122 min.



The writer is a critic and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva. 

The phantom of liberty