Thinking Aloud: Jerry Pinto maps identity, cinema, and making of a nation

Thinking Aloud  by Jerry Pinto

Published by Seagull Books

143 pages ₹299

  One of the books in the History for Peace Tracts series by Seagull Books is writer, poet, and translator Jerry Pinto’s Thinking Aloud. Each volume from this series aims to “grapple with what is and prepare for what is likely to be, as a nation, as a people, as a community, as individuals”. While the title of the book is unobtrusive and casual, something one says when they’re not necessarily sure about their unprocessed trains of thought, the book’s content invites readers to think of, principally, identity formation from interesting tangential routes.

 

The three essays that comprise this book are updated versions of talks Pinto delivered at conferences organised by History for Peace, an initiative of The Seagull Foundations for the Arts. In the first, titled “Bollywood and the Idea of the Nation,” Pinto proposes using the movies made (largely) in the Hindi language as a prism to witness how a nation is built. He submits this fragment of a song from Kismet (1943): “Door hato eh duniyawalon, Hindustan hamara hai,” then asks, “How did the British censor allow it?” Answer: “Because the producer and director argued that while the Second World War was raging, the message was directed at the Axis powers: ‘We are saying this to Japan. We are saying this to Germany. They will come and attack us. We don’t want them here.’” 

 

This “strategic duplicity” was no longer needed in the 1950s. “At this point in time, the nation is equated with motherhood,” writes Pinto, citing Mother India (1957). Suffering, penance, sacrifice, and morally upright actions were required to nurture a nation. Equally, it is upbringing and positionality that inform opinions, which is why Pinto writes, “Iconographically, the image of Radha [from Mother India] leaning a weary head on the plough always brought to my mind the image of Christ dragging his cross along the Via Dolorosa, en route to the crucifixion. Or was this only the result of my Roman Catholic upbringing?”

 

Those whose ideas of a nation or a way of life Mother India didn’t quite represent found the “angry young men” version of everyday life relatable. This dramatic shift, Pinto notes, also signals that the nation wasn’t a woman anymore.  In Pinto’s arguments on nation-building through movies, a crisis of masculinity is reflected inevitably. He notes that “even though the woman has been held to be central to the making of the nation-state, I don’t think most Indian men know how to converse with a woman who is not their mother or sister. What kind of state can we devise if half of it has no way of communicating with the other half?” Which is why India fails to make one-half of its population feel safe, because the other half has complete faith in several oversubscribed dialogues of mainstream cinema, such as Hasee toh phasee or a woman’s “no” is a “yes”, too. 

 

Interestingly, Pinto remarks that Shah Rukh Khan’s presence on screen “gave off an easy sensuality”, which itself seems like a compromise — look, at least he’s not angry, he can balance tradition and modernity, and, oh my god, he’s in the kitchen, too. Khan’s characters’ virtue signalling in several movies makes for a tiring watch. Anyway, it took until 2016, with Pink, for Bollywood to register that a “no means no”; to have messy characters where audiences had to work to consider for themselves what was acceptable or not, which, to my mind, is precisely the kind of labour required to see, build, and remake identities. Nation, in a way, can be customised.

 

Which brings me to another crucial strand of Pinto’s essay where he relates an anecdote about Manmohan Desai (director of Amar Akbar Anthony). Desai once noted that he was making a film, not a documentary, when asked about a blood-donation scene in the movie. Desai is pointing out that truth can’t be manufactured but stories can. However, in the context of nation-building, one can’t forget the role stories play in dividing, too. When falsehoods are repeated as facts, they replace something that was thought essential. Which one would you call a better “love story”: Kabir Singh (2019) or Darr (1993)? The choice is yours, it seems. However, it seldom is. Why is Jaggi (2022), which actually shows real-life consequences of “gossip” — an essential element, too, in Pinto’s mind — not part of popular imagination, and only part of the ‘film circuit’? And why leave documentaries out of the process of nation-building? These were perhaps questions equally important to raise in this essay. 

 

In the second essay, “Biography as History”, Pinto talks about stories of many Indias that remain inaccessible to large sections of the population for a variety of reasons. This essay is insightful for demonstrating the use of language as a political tool, asking probing questions about representation and highlighting how historiography reveals that history is “always unbelievable and always weird”. Then, Pinot makes a statement that may unsettle many, but makes absolute sense: “Every moment in literary history is fraught and incomplete, a reflection of human imperfection.” He ends this essay with history inspiring other histories, working together to imagine something to which one can relate — an experience, a community,  a nation.

 

The final piece in this collection is “Mothers and Others: How to Bring the Margins Back into Young Lives”. This essay is also a reflection of Pinto’s experiments with teaching. He is proud of the label he attracted — “Duffer Sir”. Decentring is the word Pinto employs to make students living in upscale neighbourhoods visit neglected areas to document something about them. It may be to make them witness something entirely new to them, but I believe privileged reflections are something the privileged must keep to themselves. A nation can’t rely only on second-hand histories for too long. If one can empower people living their lives to tell stories about themselves, then that’s as close as one can get to a compelling story.

 

(The reviewer is a Delhi-based  culture critic.  On Instagram/X: @writerly_life)