Aligarh
Director: Hansal Mehta
Actors: Manoj Bajpayee, Rajkummar Rao
Rating: ****
Of all communities discriminated against, it’s easy to sense through this film, and otherwise as well, how homosexuals perhaps get it the worst.
Even in cases challenging the Indian law criminalizing homosexuality itself, several people possibly don’t come out, as it were, to accept they’re homosexuals to begin with.
This is natural. The victims fear further persecution—from the law much later, but from their own family and friends first. The same strange paradox applies to rape survivors I suppose.
It’s hard to imagine what it must be like to live such alie—far more than a letter away from life. Professor Siras, the lead character in this movie, makes a rare exception.
He accepts his sexual orientation in public. The case he is fighting is personal. He is up against his university. That moment where he says yes, like the rest of the movie, is so beautifully downplayed that if I didn’t draw your attention, you may not even realise its significance.
This sort of simplicity won’t surprise you either, if you’ve been following this gently under-stated and frail professor thus far—a man past 60, drooping shoulders, creased forehead; wearing a thick grey stubble, and a tie equally thickly knotted over the V-neck of his sweater…
While Siras is pretty much fighting for his life, he’s inward enough to be more at ease listening to Lata over Royal Stag whiskies at home. The professor is also a poet. He is an introverted, lonely man, perhaps aware that the world is what it is. It equates love to shame, and reduces an “uncontrollable urge” to a three-letter word g-a-y.
You get instantly drawn to this guy and therefore this film. Sure, the issue it addresses is urgent (homophobia, section 377, right to privacy, etc. etc.). But there is something very deeply unaesthetic about mere activism posing as art. It rarely works. This film does. Because of its very personal, painfully heart-felt writing (Apurva Asrani), first.
The director (Hansal Mehta) steers clear of hyperbole. There is quietness in the air. Nobody talks at you, or just tries to drive home a point. Except maybe in the courtroom sequence that seems to have been designed to make conversations directly with the audience rather than between litigants and the judge.
Manoj Bajpayee plays the vulnerable Professor Siras, looking so effortlessly cocooned from the madness that surrounds him. From distant memory, I could recall Tom Hanks from Philadelphia (1993). But hey, Bajpayee has himself been around for nearly two decades in films. He knows how to hold a moment, rather than only express an emotion.
If anything, this film proves yet again that he is such an under-rated actor still, mainly done in by the decade that followed the memorable Satya (1998), where he wholly immortalised a Marathi goon.
Bajpayee is a prof who teaches Marathi in this picture. Four fellow professors barge into his apartment. They salaciously watch and thereafter broadcast a clip that was secretly filmed by a shady television crew of the professor making love to a man in his house. Siras is suspended. A rookie reporter (Rajkumar Rao) tries to get access to him.
This is a true story. It happened in 2010. Unlike, say last year’s The Imitation Game, on Prof Alan Turing, that was set in 1950. The setting is, well, Aligarh. Or rather the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), referred to as the Aligarh University, captured almost as it is.
Now I haven’t been to that campus. And would very much love to. I’m told a famous guest speaker at AMU once encouraged students and teachers to dig up the soil there. He said a place that had so many conservative fanatics must have oil underneath!
Of course that’s a joke. Surely this isn’t only about AMU. Most Indian universities aren’t universities in the true sense. And maybe hatred and bigotry is intrinsic to the human gene, whether you choose to get yourself educated or not. But aren’t laws made to protect us from these very prejudices?
Section 377 continues to operate in India, despite popular wisdom and mainstream voices against it. Any law that criminalises love (of any kind) only legalizes hatred. Lawmakers could have saved someone like Prof Siras. We elect them to. They must watch this simple but such a significant film. As must you.
Review By: Mayank Shekhar
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