REVIEW: Qissa

This review contains spoilers. A version that speaks of the queer themes that emerge in the film was featured in the Gaysi blog. We are also running a buzz page for the film.

It is hard not to be effusive about Anup Singh’s Punjabi film, Qissa, a masterful indictment of patriarchy set in partition-ravaged Punjab. Themes of displacement and loss of identity provide texture to a sprawling canvas awash with stunning visuals that are rich in symbolism, from the almost Biblical depiction of the exodus from Pakistan that sets up archetypes of men and women — the stoic Sikh refugee, Umber (Irrfan Khan), and his supportive wife, Meher (Tisca Chopra) who must now rebuild their lives — to the vertiginous shots of bodies that have fallen from great heights, to the conflicted half-smiles of its women that speak such volumes. Dedicated to Singh’s mother, the film is a tribute (even in its own gut-wrenching manner) to the resilience of women who manage to soldier on in the face of great repression. A luminous Chopra is cast in the mould of a pioneer woman in her own right who could be her husband’s equal in every way, but her Meher is slowly deprived of her agency. She becomes an object of abject domesticity, under pressure (as is still typical) to beget a male heir for Umber, given that she has only borne daughters — three cherubic girls lovingly shot in Renaissance frames by the cinematographer, Sebastian Edschmid.

Irrfan Khan & Tisca Chopra in Qissa

When his fourth daughter is born, Umber deludes himself that she is male, and raises her as a boy, Kanwar. Whether this is borne out of a primal desire ingrained in men or a result of the trauma that he has experienced (that can only be assuaged by such a balm), isn’t explained, but each time he embraces his ‘son’, he can hear the voices of his forefathers whispering in his ears, as if by commendation. Kanwar is played by Danish Akhtar during the childhood years, and later by Tillotama Shome, and the two actors inhabit a tragic persona who measures up rather well in being a good son for Umber, but remains a strangely half-formed being. Subversion informs almost every frame of Qissa. The irony of Kanwar, herself a girl but conditioned to be a boy, dressing up in Meher’s clothes as a child, plays itself out in a touching little scene that has been part of many films with a trans narrative (most recently in Zoya Akhtar’s segment in Bombay Talkies). When Umber thrashes her sisters for hurting her, Kanwar’s exalted status as the only boy in the household is highlighted. It certainly creates a distance between her and the other women in the household, but endears her to her doting father. In a finely calibrated performance, Shome employs no masculine tics — an initial stiffness in demeanor settles into a more fluid deportment that bring both dualities that afflict her palpably to the surface.

To this mix, is added the feisty gypsy girl, Neeli (Rasika Dugal), who, after a frisky courtship, is married off to Kanwar only to discover the subterfuge, which she refuses to play along with. Her free-spiritedness throws the narrative of male succession that Umber had diligently built, off the rails. Dugal is a force of nature in the performance — a sparkling presence that lights up each frame — but like the other women, even she must be tamed. Neeli’s sexual violation at the hands of her father-in-law (in an uncomfortably shot scene) is foreshadowed in many ways. Umber is killed by Kanwar and, the delusion of her gender now irrevocably broken, she must now escape with Neeli to another destiny.

Tillotama Shome and Rasika Dugal share an emotional intimacy in the film

Neeli attempts to help Kanwar come to terms with her actual self. There is no denying that there is certainly some sexual frisson between the women, thanks to Dugal’s smoldering intensity that is such a foil to Shome’s more stoic neediness. However, given the time frame of this period piece (the late 60s), it is unlikely to be articulated or even acknowledged, and the two women are perhaps not the kind to engage in wilful acts of transgression even if they now share an emotional intimacy borne out of understanding the ‘other’. Neeli can certainly conceive their living together as sisters or friends, but she doesn’t gloss over the fact that they had first encountered each other as star-crossed lovers, and Dugal provides a pellucid grandeur to this maturing of a child-woman into a noble and compassionate person aeons more self-possessed than the pining paragons of self-sacrifice that have filled the annals of Indian cinema.

In her turn, Shome makes it achingly self-evident that transitioning into a new gender identity is a complex psychological process that cannot be simply achieved by appropriating Neeli’s hand-me-down clothes, which, in fact, she is repulsed by. Neeli would rather Kanwar embrace her femininity, but even if her body is already that of a woman (and always has been), writ large on Shome’s magnificently conflicted visage, are two decades of cruel conditioning and the immediacy of a violent struggle between nature and nurture.

A possible denouement, gently hinted at, involves the two women living out their co-dependence even as Kanwar continues as a man, now simply as a charade, ironically making use of the male privilege, so brutally bestowed upon her by her father, to ensure that her ‘family unit’ remains above reproach in society’s eyes. One day they would celebrate Lohri together in the open, she assures Neeli, the only person who has accepted her as she truly is.

However, rather than spin a yarn whose resolution lies in an almost anachronistic lesbian wish-fulfillment as in Deepa Mehta’s Fire or more recently, Abhishek Chaubey’s Dedh Ishqiya, or even a feel-good female kinship free from the yoke of parochial oppression as in Nagesh Kukunoor’s Dor, Singh is content with leaving the window of possibilities open-ended. This is not because he is squeamish about following these storylines through (as most filmmakers dealing with queer subtext) but because of other overpowering thematic preoccupations. However, the accurately judged direction by Singh ensures Qissa is on a strong footing when it comes to its alternative themes.

Much has been made of Singh’s veering Qissa into the realm of the supernatural, a twist in the tale that hasn’t been appetising to many. The spirit of Umber, yearning for a misguided redemption, assimilates Kanwar’s embittered soul unto his body. It’s the only way the a crowds baying for the blood of the young women can be fobbed off. Khan is now the receptacle of Shome’s interior world, and the actor inhabits this leap with remarkable verisimilitude. Where this mystical exchange is achieved, in a little puddle of water in a wide expanse of desert, the scene plays out as an elegiac homage to the cloaked subversion so essential to the folk stories of Vijaydan Detha (two cinematic adaptations — Mani Kaul’s Duvidha and its spin-off, Amol Palekar’s Paheli — come to mind). The strains of a Rajasthani folk instrument pipe in, as if on cue. However, unlike the feminist triumphalism in Detha’s tales, it is clear that the unpaid debts in Singh’s despondent tale must now be accounted for.

Qissa is suffused with the extinguished spirits of its women. Meher’s complaisance proves to be her undoing. The third of her daughters, born in the throes of partition, unmarriageable because of her dyslexia, becomes an unhinged presence in the family home (an effective Faezeh Jalali) that has been razed to the ground. The fates of the women of Gulzar’s Namkeen comes to mind (with two actors from that film — Waheeda Rehman and Shabana Azmi — in attendance at a preview screening of the film). Neeli’s end is the most tragic, as she is unable the reconcile her love for Kanwar with the body of her rapist that he now inhabits. The surface of things becomes a powerful allegory of the spirits and essences held within.

A luminous Tisca Chopra in a still from the film

The tag-line, ‘The tale of a lonely ghost’, rings home with  Khan’s majestic performance, and the spectre of patriarchy that he bears so unyieldingly in the film. The spirit of Umber is consigned to be imprisoned forever in an echo chamber filled with the murmurings of his forefathers. Along with him, Kanwar, must also pay penance in perpetuity for being in service, however unwittingly, to the same parochial attitudes that have snuffed out the lives of countless women. There can be no redemption for these ghosts, the film seems to say. Whether this cruz is actually borne by men in the world outside is a moot question, but Qissa is merely a single episode in a monumental saga, and it remains a remarkable achievement that will not be lived down too easily by those complicit in the tragedies it depicts.✑

Comments

[Anup Singh]

Vikram Phukan, to be read with the nuanced reflection that you bring to Qissa affirms for me to never rue the 12 years that went into the making of this film.