ANAMIKA HAKSAR’S SECOND ACT

Theatre director Anamika Haksar, 59, who has taught at institutes all over India, including her alma mater, the National School of Drama (NSD), always held a fascination for stories human bodies tell. “At one point, tired of doing theatre productions, I became very interested in contemporary practices related to the body and started studying acupressure,” she says. “Eventually, my colleagues and I ran an acupressure camp for women and children in Old Delhi for three months and, as I learnt the stories of these women and their ailments, ideas emerged. For instance, one lady talked

about the terrible headaches she started getting after she moved from her spacious village home to a room in the city. It was so small that she would bang her head against the ceiling every time she got up from her bed. Her anger was causing her headaches. Her story was connected to her ailment.”

Some of these stories became the source of inspiration for Haksar’s first feature film, Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon (Taking the Horse to Eat Jalebis), which won accolades at film festivals in India and was also screened at the Sundance Film Festival in the US (January 24-February 3, 2019).

“We were shocked when it got selected at Sundance, that too in the New Frontier section, which has a lot of experimental films, working with sound, puppets and extinct languages,” says Haksar. She has trained under theatre director Badal Sircar, and later worked under theatre personality B.V. Karanth at the NSD and also studied at the State Institute of Theatre Arts, Moscow. However, the prospect of making a film made her nervous. “At 59, though, you lose all fear and become bindaas,” she says. In preparation, she enrolled herself in a film-making course at Digital Academy The Film School, Mumbai.

The film brings Old Delhi to life through the lives and dreams of the protagonists—a pickpocket, a tourist guide, a labourer and a street food vendor. “Shahjahanabad ki in tilismi galiyon mein…Salaam” says the tourist guide in Urdu, referring to the walled city of Delhi by its old name as he welcomes tourists to the “magical streets of Shahjahanabad”. The film weaves together elements of documentary and fiction, playing with magical realism, fantasy, dreams and memories, all tweaked with animation and folk art. The dreams are cryptic and morbid—the pickpocket dreams of Mickey Mouse in a remand home; the vendor dreams of his children burning in his village home. Written, directed and produced by Haksar (who raised the money for it through family, friends and crowdfunding platforms), the film features actors Raghubir Yadav, Ravindra Sahu, Lokesh Jain, K. Gopalan and about 400 people living on the streets. The title comes from a story told by her aunt. “Once, the driver of a tonga being pulled by an emaciated horse had refused to give her a ride saying he had to go feed his horse jalebis,” she said in an interview.

The film’s stream-of-consciousness narrative draws inspiration from art, rather than film traditions—corpses wrapped in white sheets, suspended in the air, one man’s dream intruding into another’s, a red Communist flag poking a smug goddess Lakshmi.

It also displays an empathy with the poor, a throwback to parallel Indian cinema of the 1970s and ’80s, which makes sense, given Haksar’s background. Her own family, originally from Kashmir, settled in Shahjahanabad, a melting pot for migrants. “My film is Leftist, yes. There is honesty and courage in the stories of these people, and I celebrate the robustness of their spirit,” she says.

She’s also quick to acknowledge the contributions of her collaborators for the success of the film, the script for which she wrote in 2012. “I had a lovely team of cinematographer Saumyanand Sahi, sound designer Gautam Nair and actor Lokesh Jain, who also did the dialogues and the survey,” she says, referring to the survey of 70 street people carried out by her team over two years. Dialogues from the transcripts were included in the final script of the film. “Of all the people surveyed, barely three or four under 30 knew the Ramayana, Mahabharata or folk stories, which is terrible for an oral story-telling culture like ours,” she says. The film has been quite an adventure, but now Haksar is ready to return to theatre.

The film’s streamof-consciousness narrative draws from art rather than film tradition and has an empathy with the poor