It was deep at night when my cousin got a
phone call in his apartment in Lansing, Michigan. It was December and an
unusually cold night and in those prehistoric days of wired phones he grew numb
hearing the news – my uncle passed away a short while back in their Kolkata
home. Another instance was that of my friend’s father having had a heart-attack
and he had to rush back from Los Angeles, California. After the arduous 36
hours long journey across more than half of the globe my friend arrived too
late. He did not get to see his father. These are two fleeting images which
sweep my mind every time I see Mira Nair’s The
Namesake. It also takes me 12 winters back to the chill down the spine when
the phone rang after 11 pm and the caller id showed an Indian number in my
quaint Minneapolis home.
Why do I remember these while watching The Namesake’s gamut of emotional
situations; particularly the moment when Ashoke breaks the news of her father’s
death to Ashima? Probably not because of this singular image, but rather, as a collective
whole, it makes me feel haunted, sad and lingeringly unhappy. It awakens me to
the fact that one of the several uncertainties in life an immigrant experiences
is the possibility of not getting to meet loved ones.
The
Namesake changes its narrative down the
story-line by concentrating on Gogol, the son of Ashoke and Ashima, and soon
enters the terrain of confusion that first-generation immigrants are compelled
to live with. This confusion stemming from a lack of identity is probably
inherent in all immigrants who essentially migrate to a country that differs
largely from their own in terms of culture, religion and most importantly
physical appearance. A second generation American friend of Japanese origin
once chuckled how his little daughter was all tears when a curator of a museum
she was visiting asked an apparently simple question –“How are you finding
America, little girl?” It reminds me of Nair’s earlier film Mississippi Masala where Jay’s childhood
friend Okelo tells him “Africa is for Africans…Black Africans.” This indeed
shatters Jay whose Indian ancestors moved to Uganda and he, born in Uganda
thinks himself as “first an Ugandan and then an Indian”. Much later Jay tells
his grown up daughter Mina, “people stick to their own kind” which reflects how
the Indian community like other migrants tend to ghettoize themselves.
Similar cross-cultural complexities are
depicted in other films which deserve mention here – America so beautiful by Babak Shokrian on Iranian immigration to
the US; the push-pull of familial bonds and clashing cultures in the comic
drama Chutney Popcorn by Nisha
Ganatra and Krutin Patel’s ABCD [‘American-born
Confused Desi’] or Bala
Rajasekharuni’s Green Card Fever
about an Indian immigrant who is stretched to all lengths for a green card.
Pietro Germi’s [1914-1974] 1950
film of neo-realistic genre Il cammino
della speranza [The
Path to Hope] traces the lives of a group of Southern Italy’s mining
workers and the abject poverty they are inflicted with. Seduced by a pimp they
plan to move to France in search of a better future. It is indeed one of the
early Italian films on the emigration theme. In September 2015, when three-year-old
Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body was found in the Turkish shores, the world wept with
his father Abdullah. The Syrian family who left the war-torn nation was living
in Turkey in poverty and without a valid identity. Thus they had planned on moving
to Greece. In a statement to the police,
Abdullah had recounted how he had to pay the smugglers twice to take him and
his family to Greece but their efforts had failed. They had then rowed a boat on
their own which eventually capsized, drowning Abdullah’s wife and both his
sons. Doesn’t it seem like Germi’s film is resonating after six decades?
The history of colonialism in
many of European countries, primarily France and Netherlands, transpires into
immigration from these colonies, mainly from Northern Africa including Morocco.
But the film that captivates me with the issues of migration in Europe is
German master Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali:
Fear Eats the Soul [1974]. It is a film which showcases how the
light-skinned Europeans at times marginalise the migrant other –– notably the
Arabs and Africans. And even before this, in 1968, Fassbinder’s Katelmacher deals with a Greek migrant’s
unsettled life in a German cityscape.
Migration from “home” to a remote
land has been primarily dictated by situations that persuade one to
de-anchor roots and sail away in search
or prosperity.
Even in Satyajit Ray’s
masterpiece Aparajito [Unvanquished], young Apu sets his feet
in Calcutta, in search of a bigger world the city may offer in lieu of the
rural existence in his village.
Migrations can often be unfortunate.
My father holds director Ritwik Ghatak closest to his heart for the latter’s
unrelenting barrage of emotional narratives based on Bengal’s partition of
1947. “The partition was of Bengal and Punjab, not of India as a whole”, my
father claims even today. His ancestral homes in Sylhet and Dhaka were abandoned
one fine morning when the powers that were, decided to cut the land into pieces
and scatter it over the corpse of a wounded Bengali psyche. I am moved
even now, when the opening shots of
Ghatak’s sublime Komal Gandhar, show
a theatre-within-the-film where an old man asks himself, “Why should I leave my
beautiful home by the river Padma?” He goes on and clarifies that to leave home
is to leave his mother, whose soul is buried there in erstwhile East Bengal,
now Bangladesh. Another character answers his rhetoric – “For food”- he must
become a refugee to survive, like millions of Bengalis in 1947.
The life of a migrant in an
unfamiliar city is depicted with sensitivity in Nobel laureate Rabindranath
Tagore’s Bengali story Kabuliwala
which was made into a beautiful film by Tapan Sinha. Rahmat, the Afghan protagonist
Kabuliwala, remains in the margins right through, because of the cultural,
religious and physical differences. In another classic film Do Bigha Zameen [Two acres of land] by
director Bimal Roy, a debt-ridden peasant, Sambhu, migrates to Calcutta from
his village with a hope to be freed from the clutches of heartless landlords. However,
it ends with the dream going up in smoke.
In most of such films on migration from
across the globe, the underlying canvas is that of a search; a search for a
migratory identity. The image of people drifting in the metropolis is so
vividly explored that it touches universal chords. People have to deal with
dispossession and struggle for a true meaning of his/her identity. Is this
identity linked with the patch of land on which one is born or is it with the family
album which one identifies as his own? These questions remain, haunt and
resonate strongly. Not for anything else but because man is essentially a
migratory animal.
[ Published in International Gallerie Vol 19 No. 1, 2016 (Migration theme) ]