Filming: A Love Story
Tabish khair
picador Rs 495

This is a complex novel, which is written at many different levels of filmmaking, of fragile relationships and of communalism. And each idea or level has its own narrator and cast propelling the story through to its culmination where all three strands of the story finally collide and implode. The format of writing is not simple either, as no narrator is ever introduced: they are only identified through their speech, very much like in a movie where the principle is to “show and not tell”. Both to simplify and to add to the illusion that this is a film-within-a-book, a cast of characters is given at the beginning of the novel. The period is, interestingly, mainly the early part of the 20th century leading up to Partition.

Khair has tried to invoke the memory of people who worked in the early Indian cinema, and the impact of Partition when it rudely split the film community into Hindu and Muslim camps. He has created intricate characters with multiple identities such as the gay Chote Sahab who bargains with Durga, who was a prostitute, to give up her son so that her husband Harihar, the Bioscope-wallah, can set up a film studio. The boy, Ashok, is handed over to Chote Sahab’s family to be brought up, so that he is free to pursue his dreams, and need not be trapped in a marriage. A freshly invented triumvirate — Rajkunwar (previously Chote Sahab), Bhuvaneshwari (the former Durga) and Hari the Director (ex-Harihar) — then set up the Rajkunwar studio, which many years later, during Partition, becomes the target of a frenzied Hindu mob deluded into believing that it has become a refuge for Muslims.

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