Subham Malpani
The simplified idea “You know your reality, but the bigger reality is that you’re afraid of your reality” becomes the premise of the movie, All We Imagine as Light, that attempts to follow the harsh realities of three working women in Mumbai.
The older nurse – Prabha’s escape from her reality is the thought of her husband in Germany.
The younger nurse, Anu, escapes through her Muslim boyfriend, rebelling against caste norms around love.
Parvaty, a widow, whose house has been demolished by the developers, is perhaps the best adjusted to her harsh reality.
Romanticism becomes the medium to escape their reality. The movie rolls with this premise, but doesn’t go much further.
I appreciate the movie’s exploration of style and form. As Anurag Minus Verma notes, ‘while rooted in real space, the form beautifully transcends reality in exploring loneliness and relationship with the city, it’s a form that would stay with you after the movie.’
Some of the appreciation is that ‘you won’t get it’, and therein is the exclusion. Yes, the movie has a confusing plot, that doesn’t really get anywhere, and was the man who came out of the ocean Prabha’s husband?
I fail to understand the liberal hype elevating this movie to unassailable status. While film critics have unanimously only celebrated this movie, one can see that the audience reviews are really mixed. Gramsci argues that cultural hegemony normalizes the worldview of the dominant group. And therefore, one should be able to question it.
As I watched it at the movies in a small town in California which has more than a third of hispanics, it was the white boomer audience that was eager to consume this guilt. As American cultural theorist Catherine Liu would argue, this commodification and consumption of guilt becomes important to the liberal elite in the capitalist world, as it helps them keep and hoard virtue, and feel better than the often vilified (conservative) working class. Here the curiosity is perhaps to learn about the land where the fast fashion of H&M and Zara is cheaper than the food here.
The question that kept nagging me was – who is this movie made for? And whose reality are they portraying here? The film is clearly made for Cannes and white liberal validation. It gets its validation from Obama – a landmark figure in the neo-liberal culture of performative politics of identity and victimhood.
The so-called ‘progressive’ savarnas want to look cool to the western audience and their film festivals. They want to make movies like the western lands of liberty, without contributing to the development of that liberty. They don’t like the bahujan audience. The politics of love in All We Imagine as Light (AWAIL) were well contextualized for the white audience I was watching it with. This savarna gaze is anxious about movies of mass appeal like RRR performing overseas, just like until the passport act of 1961, the savarna state was anxious about sending ‘everybody’ overseas.
Some nude scenes seemed unnecessary. If the movie seeks to challenge caste norms around love as political, why these unsettling, ‘artsy’ additions that would gate-keep family audiences? Prabha’s open defecation scene only seems to feed into a stereotype of poverty fetishization, made for guilt consumption (with pop-corn and coca-cola), establishing how consumption of guilt is part of capitalism.
‘The Great Indian Kitchen’, a movie that studies brahmanism in Indian patriarchy, is unsettling to this ‘progressive’ savarna culture. The main character’s struggle here ends with the defiance of brahmanical patriarchy, and her ending her marriage to become independent, and take up work.
While AWIAL does end with Prabha accepting Anu’s rebellion, it also ends with a whimsical escape of these working women, from a more anonymous metro city of Mumbai, to a feudal Ratnagiri, where life is just good.
While the so-called ‘progressive’ savarna cinephiles revered AWAIL to a holy status, another movie that released at the same time – Pushpa. Its mass appeal was met with sheer contempt. Pushpa’s flaws aside, there were no lessons to learn from its mass appeal. As Dr. Ravikant Kisana points out, Telugu filmmakers don’t care for validation from French audiences, or even from audiences outside the Telugu land. Their movies speak to the aspirations and struggles of their people. It also resonates with Hindi audiences since Bollywood has estranged them.
There’s a very similar theme in AWIAL to that of Kaala – urban poor home demolition in the same city of Mumbai. But that is just philosophized away with Parvaty saying “perhaps my life means nothing without the papers”. Here the ‘understated’ collective political resistance amounted to nothing, and the Phule reference ended up serving no purpose except gaining some points for political correctness.
This gaze also doesn’t like the political resistance of Kaala. They don’t see the political assertion of fraternity, the belief in negotiating brahmanical oppression with electoral power (a power fought for by Babasaheb), the ‘educate, agitate, organize’, and the ‘hero’ as a tactical negotiator. They don’t see the Ambedkarite symbolism serving a purpose (which kudos to Pa Ranjith, was never made for the savarna consciousness).
The critique of Kaala is that the action scenes defy physics, and it’s just another ‘hero leading a crowd’. They will read bell hooks, and rave black music forms, such as hip-hop, blues and jazz, but bahujan positionality, or anything with mass appeal, is not worth studying, and only to be put aside, met with uncritical contempt.
The meaningful resistance of Kaala is shot down on the grounds of being not ‘real’ enough in portraying realities (that speak to their consciousness like of place or language), or of just being ‘uncouth’. One could argue that AWIAL is hardly real. It attempts to humanize ‘others’ and their struggles to be palatable to the savarna gaze, and their understated ‘soft’ Prateek Kuhad aesthetic. It chases this style of ephemeral soft rebellion, and nihilism – as if nothing can change – like the vedas profess – to stay adjusted to their place, and reality. There is no hero, no hope. Who needs hope?
AWIAL positions itself as a critique of a system through radical love in the caste society, but it only ends up catering to liberal politics of identity, commodifying victimhood for guilt consumption rather than genuine resistance. It doesn’t even seem to care to engage the Indian audience at large. Kudos to its thematic endeavors, and its celebrated successes in acting, or place/dialect-specific realism, but the sanctification of this movie – to be beyond criticism – is troubling.
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Subham Malpani works as an architect in California, and has a graduate degree in architecture from Penn State University. He has taken a keen interest in politics, culture, and sociology.
