timespace coordinates: India 21st century
“The Disciple is a 2020 Indian Marathi-language drama film written, directed and edited by Chaitanya Tamhane.[2] It stars Aditya Modak, Arun Dravid, Sumitra Bhave, Deepika Bhide Bhagwat, and Kiran Yadnyopavit. Alfonso Cuarón serves as an executive producer.[3] It was entered into the main competition section at the 77th Venice International Film Festival, becoming the first Indian film since Monsoon Wedding (2001) to compete at the festival.
Sharad Nerulkar has devoted his life to becoming an Indian classical music vocalist, diligently following the traditions and discipline of old masters, his guru, and his father. But as years go by, Sharad starts to wonder whether it’s really possible to achieve the excellence he’s striving for.” (wiki)
There is a lot of reasons one might watch this movie – it offers a good break from the usual – self-absorbed Euroamerican world (this has become a leitmotif of my recent posts it seems). It is important and telling that the Western world has become united against Russia aggression and the war in Ukraine, or that there is somehow a rush to switch off from fossil fuel dependency (in view of Europe’s and especially Germany’s dependency on Russian gas (as well as oil and coal). There is the new specter of economic nationalism as a result of general dissatisfaction with globalism inequalities and ill effects. Both India and China has abstained from the unanimous condemnation of Russia and this poses several problems. I don’t want to get into that but to keep an eye and mind open to large parts that are excluded from our daily reality in the West (speaking now and writing from Berlin, Germany). There is always a lot of ‘missing’ – coverage of people living and existing elsewhere. How does one relate to such non-existing – still rarely represented realities and places?
What Disciple offers is a small sample of another world – and a contemporary world, that is neither idealized nor exoticized. The movie is a slow burner, it is slow cinema (which I do not indulge in very often) at its best. It is a series of tableaus or concerts of classical Hindustani music (i will not go into detail since I do not want to make blunders nor pretend knowledge in this area). I have had previous contact with Indian music tradition via friends and mediators. There is today a translational and International scope of this Hindustani that was made familiar by instrumentalists such as Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan since the 1960s in the West. Following the growing Indian diaspora, it has achieved recognition everywhere and patrons as well as students from outside the range of its original classical origins.
I like the frankness of this movie – it is really an amazing piece of cinema (not just because it has been nominated for prizes). It presents some incredible encounters with both disciple-master relations and with current striving for skill & perfection, of austerity and a whole range of expert knowledge. I enjoyed the sense of dedication, of intense givingness on the side of the disciple. One is exercising on and on with consummate dedication. From archival precious materials of tapes or highly specialized traditions and even masters who refuse recordings and who show us a very different facette, an anti-spectacular form of performativity. Maai – the legendary singer mentioned is a representative of Khyal tradition – (ख़याल) that is a major form of Hindustani classical music in the Indian subcontinent.
With The Disciple one can say that one enters for a short while a different world of sound – and improvisation. There is a lot of hard lessons there for us and for the eponymous disciple. A lot of the time it is not even clear why such sacrifice is included in his practice. I liked the presence of the online – and also of the whole analog tape collector mania. There is also a fine sense of irony when actor Aditya Modak encounters one such famous collector-expert that somehow smashes all his idols and provokes in him a rare show of violence. I also like the time passage and how time is measured in this movie.
TimeSpace Warps 