All In The Family

Growing up with a gaggle of maashis and pishis meant there was no such thing as privacy. One could try keeping secrets, but it was futile in the face of their sophisticated surveillance, decryption, and interrogation skills. They could make you throw your pesky cousin under the bus for no good reason or betray yourself cheaply for fish fry and shingaras. Every now and then, our little rebellions would be swiftly crushed with stern warnings, sweet talk or, if nothing worked, emotional blackmail. There was patriarchy, of course, but it was also often subverted by women who talked and laughed loudly.

At the centre of it all was Dida, the matriarch, who held the whole sprawling outfit together with a particular mix of love and tact. And the spirit of Dadu, gone while we were kids, who had left behind material provisions and a philosophy of care that ensured his flock would not be left floundering. I was reminded of all of this and more after watching Anusha Rizvi’s The Great Shamsuddin Family (TGSF).

The family, as a social institution, has earned its terrible reputation. It has been a bottomless and thankless pit for women's labour. Even the male of the species is not spared the rough edges of the building blocks of an aadarsh parivaar – honour, tradition, duty, etc. – held in place by repression and violence, the quintessential family-building tools. So yes, the family is not a source of comfort for everyone. The difference between a family that holds and a family that harms is often a matter of luck.

Or, to look at it another way, the refuge and the danger are not always different families. They are sometimes the same family, on different days, or for different members. A celebration of family as shelter and covenant has to reckon with this dimension. However, as is the nature of history, things seem to be changing. Our expectations from our families of blood and families of choice are evolving.

Feminist movements over generations have given us the language to articulate these expectations. There are also more public addas, online and off, today, where people can talk about what they felt was private and particular, and what was, in fact, quite common. People are less willing to accept harm as the price of belonging. The holding and the harming live in the same family, sometimes in the same person, and TGSF does not neatly separate them. Someone can genuinely love you and still cause you a particular kind of damage. The film allows this much to be true without making it the whole story.

The way the film ends may have given some viewers pause, and not without reason. The conflation of family and nation is indeed fraught. The nation has too often borrowed the language of family to make what is a political arrangement feel as natural and warm as blood. TGSF is obviously aware of this. Or, to put it another way, it is unencumbered by it in an interesting way. It does not swaddle the nation in domestic warmth, making it easier to love. It instead asks: if different people with a lifetime of resentment and grievances can find a way to remain in the same room, talk, and even occasionally take care of each other, why can't the larger family?

It also asks what to do when the family itself is the source of harm? Because the nation that asks its citizens to feel grateful for membership, without addressing what some of its members have suffered, resembles the family where love is real, but so is the damage. Where you are asked to stay and to forgive, and to keep the peace. And where the keeping of peace has historically cost some members far more than others. The film raises these questions not so much as an anthem of resistance or a jeremiad; they are hummed like lingering hope without much expectation of being heard.

"बुलबुल को गुल मुबारक, गुल को चमन मुबारक,
हम बेकसों को अपना प्यारा वतन मुबारक,
ग़ुंचे हमारे दिल के इस बाग़ में खिलेंगे,
इस ख़ाक से उठे हैं, इस ख़ाक में मिलेंगे।"

The nightingale has her flower, the flower has its garden,
and we, who have nothing, have this beloved country.
The buds in our hearts will bloom in this garden,
we rose from this earth, and to this earth we will return
- बृज नारायण चकबस्त - Brij Narayan Chakbast

Orhan Pamuk, in his own thinking about how readers receive fiction, draws a distinction between the naive readers and the sentimental ones. The former tend to inhabit a story effortlessly and the latter tend to dissect it for larger meaning. TGSF asks for both kinds of attention. It allows one to simply be in the Shamshuddin household, to feel the warmth and the friction without immediately reaching for an interpretive framework. It also rewards the viewer who steps back and notices how Rizvi has carefully arranged the specific to carry something larger.

In Bani, many would have recognised the exhaustion of being the ‘sensible one’ in a family of irrepressible optimists or brooding pessimists. It made one think of Shoojit Sarkar’s excellent Piku, which too is about a kind of alienation that emerges from the friction of being too close to family that exhausts more than comforts. Piku is trying to build a life of her own while remaining tethered by love and duty to a parent and a past. The journey to Kolkata is a journey into everything she came from and cannot quite leave behind.

Those of us who have lived and loved complicated families know well that one does not wait for everything to be repaired. One watched TGSF just as one was coming out of Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes To Me, a deeply felt chronicle of her relationship with her formidable mother – her ‘shelter’ and her ‘storm’ – Mary Roy. It is a searing account of how one carries a complicated love and how one may make a life alongside the damage rather than waiting for it to be entirely resolved because it may never be fully resolved, and waiting would mean never beginning.

To make the larger family great again (pun entirely intended) one would perhaps need to start with the smaller great Shamsuddin families. To be a little stubborn. To not do what one does not want to do, where that is possible. To not let things pass that should not pass. To hold one's ground without making it a battle. And then, having done all that or some of it or even just attempted it, to have a laugh, to sing a little, to have a laddu. Joy is not a reward for having sorted everything out; it is part of the work. Our maashis and pishis, our teachers and mentors, the artists that inspire us – all of them understand this. They made their and our corner of the world safe and livable without waiting for the world to be fair. That is perhaps the oldest and most underrated form of wisdom there is.

Paromita Ghosh is a Mumbai-based media professional working across linear and streaming platforms.

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