[Reader-list] Child City Cinema

[Nandini Chandra]

This is technically my first posting. As they say
better late...!
Nandini

The common image of the country is now an image of the
past, and the common image of the city an image of the
future…(Raymond Williams, The Country and the City,
1973, p.297) 

I select two films in which the theme of the child
lost in the city (Bombay) is explored as a central
strand. These are K. A. Abbas’ Munna (1954) and Chetan
Anand’s Aakhri Khat (1966).  Briefly, Munna is about a
five-year-old boy played by Romi who leaves the
oppressive walls of his orphanage to avowedly explore
new relationships in the city. What is a
mother/father/brother/sister are questions he
routinely asks of the various characters in the film.
Aakhri Khat (or AK) is about the wanderings of a
fifteen-month-old infant (Bunty) who has recently lost
his mother. His unwed mother(Indrani Mukherjee), a
hill tribal had come to the city to leave him with the
upper class father (Rajesh Khanna) as she knew she was
going to die very soon.   

The urge to prove that human beings are all good and
there is innocence at the base is crucial to the
unleashing of children in the city in the IPTA seeped
films of the 1950s. While the city ensnares the child,
the child sanctifies the city, converting it into an
idyllic enclave by virtue of his indifference to the
many dangers. For example, in Munna, the modernity of
the city is negotiated by the fact that its streets
are inhabited by the motley, which largely consists of
the poor. They may be pick pockets, petty cheats or
drunks, but faced with the guilelessness of the child,
all are revealed to have a golden heart. Even the most
ruthless black marketeer relents when confronted with
the truth of the child. 

In AK however, danger exists in a maze of roads. There
are neither any Dickensian begging rackets nor any
throat-slitting rogues on the prowl. The street folk
too have been depersonalised. The icecandy man greets
the child by saying, “tu dobara aa gaya, agli baar
paise ke bina nahin doonga”. The women he chases
deluding them to be his mother, seem amused, but are
kept free of maternal longing. In fact, a pair of
lovers with balloons in their hands whom the child
accosts, pass by laughing without parting with their
balloons. Throughout the film, the child is not
touched or embraced. Only under the dire circumstance
of the train passing over him while he is asleep on
the rail tracks, does the linesman pick him up. This
deprivation of the human touch is deliberate as the
only attempt at pathos is created when the dead mother
sings about the child bereft of the mother’s god or
lap. Even when he seeks out his mother’s statue in the
homecoming climax, the father relishes the act of the
child’s play with the mother’s breasts and stops his
girlfriend from picking him up. Considering the fact
that the film is partly about the father’s mission to
rid him of the guilt at having deserted his wife and
the drawn out agony of recovering the lost son is seen
as redemptive, this may be a way of showing relief.
But the gesture also attests to the awareness that the
experience of the city roads have left the child
unscathed.

Munna on the contrary meets with willing parents
everywhere. The world is full of mothers and fathers
and Munna is equally eager to adopt them. He sleeps
with them, is held by them and becomes a part of their
lives until some larger consideration leads him away.
In fact, he even spends a night with his real mother
without any special sentimentality or epiphanic
recognition. He leaves her as he realises that she
will go hungry in order to keep him fed.

In AK, the child is bereft of this precociousness that
characterises the older child in the 1954 films
(Jagriti, Boot Polish and Ferry). This is because he
is still an infant and can’t speak. And precocity is
above all a verbal quality, closely linked with the
ability to ask fundamental questions in a style, which
consists in drawing one’s breath inwards and being
wide eyed. The fundamental questions (Ma kya hoti hai,
Baap kya hota hai etc.) expose the less than perfect
adults to the gap between the ideal and the murky
reality as it were. In AK, the moral conscience is
verbalised by the police inspector who berates and
bullies the recalcitrant father, who has deserted his
pregnant village wife, into an acceptance of moral
responsibility. In both films however, one hardly
finds any trace of the fear that the child may be
stolen leave alone of the sexual ogre that lurks in
dark corners. Evil, which oils the axle of children’s
genres is pointedly absent from these social realist
narratives.

Traffic is the evil, if at all. It is as if motors
have their own volition, which is at odds with the
child’s rhythm, even though to the current viewer, the
roads invariably appear evacuated and quaint. In AK,
the city with its railway lines, intersections,
traffic snarls, cross-connecting lanes, flyovers and
accidents is conjured up with the help of the top
angle to convey the impression of a labyrinth that has
the power to engulf the child. The accent is on
diagonal and perpendicular movements to produce the
city as a grid. For instance, the search for the child
is always conducted from a moving vehicle, either the
father’s convertible or the police jeep. Again the low
angle shots help to convey the ensnarement of the
child in a melee or a throng of legs. 

In a way, the child is retracing his mother’s
footsteps. As a pregnant woman in search of her lover,
she has already faced the cruelty of the streets. But
the alarm bells that ring when the hero goes in search
of her are different from the ones which accompanies
the search for the child. Her wanderings amid the
citylights are far more menacing. Her struggles to
gain shelter, give birth and procure food for her
child and herself are shrouded in mystery probably to
conceal the fact that she may have resorted to
prostitution. She is rejected precisely because her
tribal habit proclaims her subaltern servant status.
Therefore she makes doubly sure that her son is
dressed nattily so as not to embarrass his father. In
fact, she calls herself his mama, not ma. In Munna, we
are told by an overly precocious Baby Naaz that the
difference between ma and mummy is the difference
between the real as opposed to the evil step mother.
And finally Munna has to choose his ma over his rich
mummy, even though the latter is not at all
step-motherish. 

Munna’s ma played appropriately by Tripti Mitra is
socially justified as her desertion of her child has
taken place in the context of famine and her survival,
as a daily wage labourer makes it difficult for her to
go back to retrieve her son. Therefore the biological
“ma ki mamta” is given a premium and her claims on her
son triumph even as other mothers and fathers prove
equally maternal and more materially capable. 

The child is technically not lost. We are introduced
to the child’s peregrinations through the city at a
moment when the parents have simultaneously become
aware of the presence of the child in the city. So the
narrative of loss is from the point of view of the
adults. While the child’s wanderings is accompanied on
the sound track by the mouth organ, jaltarang, tabla
or the sitar, the search of the hunting parent, who is
continuously missing the child by inches or seconds,
is conducted with heavy drumbeats or shrill violin
notes. This is punitive as far as the parents are
concerned, but for the child it has exploratory
possibilities in the form of yet another adventure.
The child is thus guarded by secular shrines, fed by
street vendors and the plenty of the city, even though
this may be in the form of leftovers. The child may be
perpetually hungry, but he does not have to starve.
Given the IPTA framework, scavenging is imbued with a
sheen of innocent respectability. The child more
likely enamours himself to strangers and thus derives
food and lodging, but he never begs. 

The child protagonists are thus haloed creatures
distinguished by the fact of their clothes and looks,
which in a Gandhian turn is supposed to convey their
moral integrity. Physically, the cherubic look, large
expressive eyes and an elfin structure enhanced by
loose baggy clothes out of which their thin arms and
legs stick out was the preferred ideal of the 1950s
embodied by Master Romi and Daisy Irani. However, in
Anand’s film, the infant is not merely cherubic. He is
well endowed. His fat is moreover enhanced by his
tight fitting clothes, and his unbalanced toddling is
a precursor to the norm of cuteness established for
bourgeois childhood in the late 1970s and 80s a la the
Glaxo baby.    

While Munna touches and changes the lives of all those
he comes in contact with, and returns to the street in
a gesture symbolic of the possible transformation of
the nation along democratic and secular lines, Bunty’s
role is confined to the redeeming of middle class
guilt that becomes necessary as the bourgeois national
dream can be realised only when certain aspects of the
street and village life are exorcised. The village is
strictly sylvan and its inhabitants will not be
tolerated outside. The street is an unfeeling place
and the bourgeois child needs must have a home even as
this home is shown derisively as a place where
children have to be cajoled, petted and pampered by
their grandparents and servants into eating their
meals, while little Bunty eats mud.




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