THE CITY BEAUTIFUL (SUNDAR NAGARI)
Hindi with English subtitles, 78 mins, 2003
Directed by Rahul Roy
Produced by Aakar Productions for Unifem 2003

A fly-on-the-wall account of two families in a low-income neighbourhood of New Delhi , living on the edge of globalisation, on the edge of ‘ India Shining’

Screened as part of Vikalp: Films for Freedom, organised by OPEN SPACE in Pune, July 31 - August 29, 2004

Rahul Roy’s camera turns into a fly on the wall as it “unobtrusively” observes the lives of two families in a low-income neighbourhood in New Delhi . At the same time, Roy himself is a felt and heard presence who asks questions and whom the subjects include in their comments and observations. This paradox, the simultaneous presence and absence of the “stuff” of documentary filmmaking (i.e., the filmmaker and his equipment), serves to enrich Roy ’s film that has far more to it than an interesting relationship between form and content.

The film is concerned with the unseen and unaccounted effects of globalisation, the unemployment and under-employment that faces those who are engaged in traditional work (like weavers) and those who are ill-equipped to deal with the changing employment needs of the city.

In Hiralal’s family, large and spanning three generations, there is more than one bread-winner, even as there are the chronically unemployed young men. All is relatively well as long as Hiralal’s loom remains active, but that is dependent on market demands and often, the looms shut down for months on end. The mother works outside the house, getting home tired and worn each day. Normal family tensions and conversations ensue in the course of the evening but when the looms are silent, another element enters the dynamic – Hiralal drinks. A new set of tensions are unleashed, created as much by the shortage of money as by the fact that at this point, only the women are bringing money in.

In the other family, only the man can go out to look for work for reasons of honour and family reputation. The woman does piece-work sewing at home to make ends meet while her children play in the streets. The man looks for work every now and then, but the one time there is a promise of employment, it ends up being a hoax and he loses money. This family does not appear to live in a community (as the weaver’s family does), and manifests a strange modernity in the fact that the only relatives that appear in their filmed lives are the woman’s mother and a generic uncle from the same village, sympathetic to the plight of the unemployed young man.

For the most part, the film is situated in the eternal present in which emptiness and hope for better times both exist. What we are watching is urban desolation – when the men are jobless, they stare vacantly at the television, or drink the hours away. The women are never jobless, there is either housework that calls or the small work that they do for money from the home that keeps their hands busy. Though the film is not overtly about gender, the viewer cannot help but notice the difference in attitude, in work and in aspiration between the men and women.

Roy brings into sharp focus the fact that even though these families have pucca houses and television sets and wear nice clothes, these are lives on the edge, on the edge of globalisation, on the edge of “ India shining” and on the edge of defeat. We are now well aware of farmers’ suicides (the result of drought, mounting debt and global agricultural trade agreements), but the steady extermination of the human spirit in the metropolis has yet to receive attention as one of the side-effects of globalisation.

For more information, contact: khel@vsnl.com

InfoChange News and Features September 2004