From Saas Bahu and Flamingo to Dahaad India’s desert regions are brimming with stories
From Saas Bahu and Flamingo to Dahaad India’s desert regions are brimming with stories
In a scene from Disney+Hotstar’s Saas Bahu aur Flamingo, after a girl and a man climb over a boundary wall, the girl warns the man of stepping over hidden snake holes. The man looks lost, a tad bemused by the suggestion coming from a woman. In the background, a snake, casually slithers away. It’s a scene that embodies the many contradictions of a wry, patriarchal world. Only women can sense the snakes (read men) worming out of parched, unremarkable landscapes. Men themselves, on the other hand, walk around delusional and unaware of what goes on around them. More recently, in Amazon Prime Video’s Dahaad, the desert becomes the setting for a cat and mouse chase between a team of dogged police officers and a notorious serial killer. At times this sandy earth subsumes the peculiar nature of edgy stories, at other times its languid, unornamented baseline allows characters to hold onto something raw.
The desert regions of Rajasthan and Gujarat are a relatively recent phenomenon in our cinema. Rich in colour, texture and folklore, they purport a sophisticated inner world that though musical and vibrant in appearance, also seems rooted in a harsher reality. Kalpana Lajmi’s Rudaali, was an eerie foray into the region’s eccentricities, making it the perfect fit for a whimsical story about professional weepers. In J P Dutta’s Border, a sand-covered, invisible border becomes the site of a brave conquest. Men must surpass invisible lines to vouch for both, the motherland and their own self-worth. In JP Dutta’s Refugee, the desert is another pattern-less expanse of land that can only really be comprehended through love and loss.
In Amol Palekar’s Paheli, we return to the eeriness of Rudaali, immersing ourselves into the folklore that makes the region casually exhibit both whimsy and tomfoolery. Eccentric characters seem at home here with the endless scape of sand and ruin to stretch into. In Radhika Apte’s Parched, the desert, its inherent hostility towards the human body, becomes a metaphor for a woman’s unacknowledged desires. In a land so vast and without obstruction, the only echoes you might hear are of your imagination. Your voice on the other hand may never make it across the weather-beaten earth. The desert therefore also serves as the hairy sight of magic and feminist fairy-tales, from the Arabian Nights to most recently, the site of Aarya’s resurgence as a mom/drug lord. It’s possibly the shrivelled nature of the earth that evens out, what humanity can’t in spirit and soul. It’s why women of the desert, feel emboldened by its precariousness. In Netflix’s Thar, for example the violence has a sort of equity. Men die consumed by their lust for vengeance.
It’s probably worth analysing this momentous shift in our stories, in the context of both technology and modern civilisation. Because our cities and towns are so well surveyed by technological input, it has perhaps become impossible to place stories in lands that are also not compressed by data and direction. In Dahaad, for example, the procedure of locating is painfully arbitrary considering vast swatches of dry land remain unwatched and unwired by the gaze of bureaucracy. Understandably, the cat-and-mouse game here plays out in the alternate dimension of undefined borders, directionless paths and journeys that begin without destinations in mind. In Saas Bahu aur Flamingo, a drug cartel is set up in a fictional desert village, because its inaccessibility is precisely the point of its location. The lack of resources is merely the conceit its narrative is built upon.
There is obviously a feminist streak to the many stories being set in these regions. Women here must regularly navigate external and internal emptiness, a quandary that can only be complicated by the presence of broody, brash men. In Dahaad, when several women go missing in a quaint little town, gross social secrets tumble out of the drawers, faster than any clues that the police can chase down on their own. In Disney+Hotrar’s Dahan, another desert village is gripped by the fear of a bloody folk tale and the possibility of corporate overhaul. In a land where nothing else exists, the sand itself becomes a priced possession. Every direction the wind blows in is thus observed and recorded with caution, a sense of protection and ultimately violence.
Maybe there are social risks to packaging a challenging terrain, an understudied culture as dubious and suspicious. Strangely, it’s only between the extremes of royalty (think JLF) and the desiccated, sun-baked exterior of the native that these stories have been created. There is no middle-ground, to also view the urban, 9-to-5ers who go about their work like the rest of us in landlocked, concretised cities. Characters in their own right, freed from the cultural underpinnings of a land full of camels, mirages and pagdi-wearing soothsayers. You get why it has caught the imagination of late, but you’d also wish for stories to look beyond the most obvious ticks.
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