GOING UP NORTH
Director Mathukutty Xavier is making his Hindi-language debut with Mili, a re-rendering of his Malayalam hit, Helen
After Mathukutty Xavier quit his well-paying job as a graphic designer, he wrote several scripts and pitched them to the biggest male actors in the Malayalam film industry. “Sometimes, they just weren’t interested, but even when they were, I’d be told that they can start my film only after a year or two,” he says. Xavier and his scriptwriting partner, Alfred Kurian Joseph, then moved to “Plan B”—to write a fresh story with a woman at the centre.
“That’s how we landed on survival stories. When we started research, one of the articles I came across was about a girl in Atlanta who got trapped in a freezer.” Xavier cast the then one-film-old Anna Ben as Helen in this eponymous survivalist thriller that went on to win two National Film Awards, including Best Debut Film of a Director. The film has since been remade into Tamil (Anbirkiniyal, 2021) and now, on November 4, it will release in Hindi as
Mili, with Janhvi Kapoor essaying the role of the protagonist. Set in Dehradun, the Hindi remake’s screenplay has been adapted by Ritesh Shah, who has done films like Airlift (2016) and Sardar Udham (2021). “The story is, obviously, the same, but Ritesh sir has added nuances that help root it. Like the food joint where Mili works is called ‘Doon’s Kitchen’ because we noticed that many establishments there [Dehradun]—from schools to shops—had ‘Doon’ in their name,” says Xavier. The 29-year-old also spent some time in the terai town to understand this new world his story was set in.
To Xavier, directing the remake felt “like doing an entirely new film”, and that was not just because of the changes that Shah brought to the script. “The budget for Helen was Rs 2.8 crore. I really had to cut corners when it came to technique. Like there’s a camera I really wanted to use but couldn’t because it cost Rs 5 lakh per day to just hire. But we managed to do that for Mili.” One of the reasons Xavier decided to direct the Hindi remake was producer Boney Kapoor’s unflinching faith in the original: “He told me to do exactly what I had done with the original story.” And, then there was an opportunity to work with Janhvi. “At the time, I hadn’t seen
Gunjan Saxena (2020) or Dhadak (2018). I had seen Janhvi only in that one short from Ghost
Stories (2020) directed by Zoya Akhtar and I thought it was a really good performance.”
As he awaits the verdict on his Hindi debut, Xavier has, in the meanwhile, produced another Malayalam film that he has co-written with Joseph, who is making his directorial debut. He also has a script in place for what he wants to direct next. “It’s a story that can be made in any language. I’ll wait to see how Mili is received before deciding.” ■
Mirza Ghalib, the greatest Urdu poet, apparently did not think much of Urdu and, in his mature years, wrote mostly in Persian. His Persian works, like those of other Indian poets, from Amir Khusrau to Mohammad Iqbal, remain largely unread and unsung, both here and in Persia. If a single masnavi by Ghalib running into 108 couplets is now and then rescued from oblivion—as it has been in an Urdu translation in 2015, a Hindi translation in 2018, and now in this English translation—this has as much to do with the felt needs of our troubled times as with the literary value of the poem.
Temple Lamp is a poem about Banaras where Ghalib stayed for a month in December 1826 on his way from Delhi to the new British capital, Calcutta.
He knew no one in the city and seemed stranded there, waiting for friends in Delhi to send him money before he could resume his travels.
The poem, in its loose structure, constitutes a sort of triptych. In the first 20 verses, Ghalib complains that his friends in Delhi seem to have forgotten him: “I burn in lament…a kebab on the flame of my own song,” he says (and that bathetic “kebab” comes straight from the Persian original). Having lost Delhi, he resolves to make a new “nest” in the salubrious
Banaras that seems to him like jannat, or paradise.
In the central section of about 60 couplets, Banaras is extolled for two main reasons: its conch-blowing, idolworshipping inhabitants are assured of deliverance from rebirth, and for the other kind of idol worshippers (butparast), that is, lovers of female beauty, the city offers glimpses of ravishing unveiled women, bathing and frolicking in the Ganga. They have a god-given glow, delicate waists, graceful gait, and are in bed like Nowruz, the Persian New Year’s Day that marks the beginning of spring.
But then, Ghalib wakes up and begins cursing himself for having gone “raving mad”, because “to dither and delay” in Kashi was to act like a “kafir”. As translator Maaz Bin Bilal puts it in his 73-page introduction, Ghalib now felt “a sense of guilt” and an urge “to break through the bonds of the city”. With all its spiritual and erotic allure, Banaras seems to have been a beguiling dream. He must push on to Calcutta.
But the poem then takes another abrupt turn and ends with a self-exhortation by Ghalib towards attaining a Sufi fanaa-like closure: “…say Allah, and like lightning/ extinguish the rest”—including, presumably, Delhi, Banaras and himself.
Read as a poem, Temple Lamp is a work of deep complexity and ambivalence that is characteristic of great writers. But its simple and urgent message today is to reassert, in Bilal’s words, “not just the ecumenical spirituality of Islam and Hinduism but also the cosmopolitanism of his [Ghalib’s] own Persian poetry”. ■