On Watching ‘Pavsacha Nibandh’ in Heavy Monsoon
It has been raining heavily all season here in Kolkata — a first Bengal monsoon for me. I have always been very fond of the rains, embracing their romance in high-spirited glee, particularly I suppose because of their true deliverance from Delhi’s dry, scorching, annually record-breaking heat, to which I am habituated. But now, not having spotted the sun for days at an end, and having witnessed the devastating fury of the super cyclone Amphan three months back, I have crossed Cherrapunji off my bucket list and have joined everyone around in whining about clothes that never seem to dry, vegetables that are rotting rapidly, and a garden overgrown with weeds. Gloom notwithstanding, thankfully the chai-pakode-khichdi routine still makes comforting sense, the Bengali excitement over the season’s hilsa is a sight to behold, and the pleasant breeze following each downpour is soul-refreshing. And then a few days ago, a friend told me that this short film I had been looking for was now available for online streaming — Nagraj Popatrao Manjule’s Marathi short film Pavsacha Nibandh. I have been following Manjule’s films with keen interest for a while now, but what particularly struck me about this film was its translated title, An Essay of the Rain. Of? Surely the correct preposition here would be on? Since I don’t know Marathi, and thus the form and meaning of the word ‘pavsacha’ were quite beyond me, I was intrigued at the prospect of a mistranslation. And so I waited for the film to be available for public viewing.
The story begins with an overcast sky and then heavy rains, with a young boy sitting in a packed classroom, listening to a teacher hold forth on the ‘international poet Goldsmith’, the beauty of nature encapsulated in rainfall, our good fortune at being born in such a great nation, and the students’ obligation to pay tribute to this natural/national beauty with that most customary of schooltime homework — an essay on the rain. School over, the boy then sets out for his home amidst relentless downpour with only a plastic sack for cover, trudging through mud and clutching his notebook to his chest. On the way, he comes across his sister standing guard over their drunk father who lies passed out near the marketplace, goes to fetch his mother, helps her take the cattle back home, and spends the rest of the evening ensuring the home is not flooded by rainwater. He vividly experiences the brute force of the rain, but does not get around to writing that essay on it.
The rain in this film that holds the viewer in intense atmospheric thrall is not the thunderstorm that forms the cosy backdrop of romances nor the ominous setting for a thriller, and certainly not the kind that inspires dreamy poetry, but merciless, torrential rain that threatens to wash everything in sight away. And yet, it visibly affects different people differently. The contrast in this difference of experience will be most visible in the climax, but is also present throughout the film, especially in the long shots of the spectacular Western Ghats that surround the boy’s home, which presents itself as a monsoon tourist destination for others like the two foreigners who arrive in search of a waterfall despite the inclement weather. The boy — ironically named Raja — cheerfully gives them directions to the waterfall, and then continues homewards in the opposite direction with his mother, cattle in tow. For him, rain is not composed of the sights and sounds that are a source of enjoyment, but as a deluge that is to be survived, and the film’s strength lies in simply showing the viewer how he goes about doing so, without any fuss or anger or frustration. We are presented with a harrowingly intimate portrait of Raja’s family and immediate surroundings — a small, rickety hut of a home that is in all probability isolated from the pucca houses of the village because of the caste status of its inhabitants, with its roof leaking into pots and pans placed strategically all over, and its spare belongings including a lone kerosene light that is needed by the cooking pot placed on a primitive stove…and of course, a father in stupor throughout, a frustrated mother struggling to keep home and hearth together, a sister whose hunger only irritates the mother… As the film progresses, the sheer impossibility of Raja’s writing any essay at all, but especially the kind of essay that is expected from him, grows upon us; indeed he tries to begin repeatedly, but never makes any headway at all, sometimes called upon to bring in the cattle, then to pass on the lamp, scoop out the water…
We are confronted with the portrayal of a kind of childhood different from the one that forms our collective nostalgia — one where children silently adapt themselves to their parents’ neglect and frustrations born out of helplessness, where their labour is essential to help run the home and meals are precarious. It is a childhood with limited choice and with seemingly little scope for joy, and yet Raja is invested with dignity and an alternative innocence, one not unacquainted with hardship, but graceful and even charming, despite it. This is Manjule’s speciality — whether in Pistulya or Fandry or Pavsacha Nibandh — he strips away the veneer of romanticised innocence associated with (different stages of) childhood that cloaks the many forms of violence that children are subjected to, and which are beyond their control. Specifically, the violence of caste. The undercurrent of caste is present not just through the depiction of Raja’s obvious poverty in the film, but also in the difference evident in the status between him and his classmates. In one sequence, Raja’s mother stops outside a house and asks a girl sitting with her notebook in the verandah to inquire from her mother about her wages — an appeal that is conveyed and then deferred. Raja’s mother doesn’t enter the house, or insist on immediate payment, even though she is in obvious need of it; she only asks whether she would be paid that day. The girl happens to be Raja’s classmate, ostensibly writing out the essay that she will read out later in the film. Her mother remains indoors and outside the cinematic frame, suggesting that the worlds of these two women are separate and can only meet either through the equation of exploited labour in continuation of tradition or in a classroom (through their children) that promises a break from that tradition, and in neither instance on equal terms.
The last section of the film takes us back to the classroom, with each student rising on their feet to parrot out the romantic essay on rain that had been assigned to them, all rainy day joys that would be familiar to many of us: the pitter-patter of the rain on the roof, the joy of sipping tea and watching the rain from the cosy interiors of the home, ditching the umbrella and raincoat to get drenched on purpose and being scolded by the mother, the rainbow at the end of it. But Raja is not to be found in the classroom, for he stands outside it, bent over in punishment, with his notebook balanced on his back, the empty pages flipping over to reveal the smudged words that were to be his prompt for the unwritten essay. The rain has washed away his writing, the notebook that could have been a symbol of his deliverance from his current circumstances, becomes a tool of further violence, as he is struck with it by the teacher. There is no space for him in that classroom, only punishment for his inability to share with the others their joyful experiences of the rain. As the camera zooms out to show us a bent-over Raja outside the door of the classroom, against the backdrop of a still relentless rain, we see the walls of the school that literally add a larger frame to the narrative. It is the portrait of V D Savarkar painted there that allusively but firmly, underscores the connection between a homogenous imagination and strident, cultural nationalism, a rhetorical link that had been made by the teacher in the very beginning but had seemed inexplicable then. The film shows us how these discourses are intertwined, and can only be challenged by an unflinching realism of the kind we have been witnessing through its narrative. What a deceptively simple, yet devastating rupture of the myth of ‘merit’ and equal opportunity that undergirds our collective denial of caste discrimination. How many hurdles can lie in the path of an innocuous task like that clichest of clichés, writing an essay on the rain. The film confirms that niggling suspicion that we all want to turn away from — that nature is only benign to the privileged. That while some of us write essays on the rain, others have the rain write its essays on them. Here, it is rain that is the protagonist, the doer in the phrase, An Essay of the Rain.
Pavsacha Nibandh is streaming on Zee5.
