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 recent posts here it seems). There’s constant talk about New World Order and it’s telling that the Western world (led by the US) has become united against Russia’s aggression and there’s been wide protest against of the war in Ukraine in particular. This in turn produced something without precedent to my knowledge – the final rush to switch or transition from fossil fuel dependency (in view of Europe’s and especially Germany’s dependency on Russian gas as well as oil and coal) to green energies. As this takes time and there’s always the German petroleum lobby and powerful car manufacturing industry to weight in their interests (in spite of what everyone thinks) – the ironic one sided result might be a reinforcement of Saudi Arabia/UAE oil producers, already big buyers of Western weapons (Germany and France have been selling weapons in the Yemeni Civil War in what is considered the biggest humanitarian crisis of the century). India has been a surprise so far since it parted ways with the other members of the QUAD alliance on the issue of Ukraine, being part of the small (just 4 countries ) group of governments at UN that didn’t call Russia aggressor.
Since a few years, there is a new specter of economic nationalism as a result of general dissatisfaction with globalism inequalities and lopsided effects. Yet the two – centrifugal & centripetal forces ae interdependent, two faces of the same coin. Both India and China have abstained from the unanimous condemnation of Russia and this poses several problems. I don’t want to make a bigger case here – but I try to emphasize it is good to keep an eye and mind open to (ignored or transformed into the big other) large parts (&most populous) of the planet that are being excluded from our daily reality in the extended West (speaking now and writing from Berlin, Germany) or the ones that the global North has been labeling ‘broken’, ‘rogue’, ‘the end of history’, ‘integrated’ etc. This 1989 history is always being forgotten or pasted over with incredibile duplicity. There is always a lot of ‘missing’ – coverage of people living and existing elsewhere. How does one relate to such non-existing images – the scarcity of other represented realities, other lives and places?
What Disciple offers is a small sample of another world and another life – nothing from the past but a contemporary world to ours, one that is neither idealized nor exoticized. The movie is a slow burner, what’s been called ‘slow cinema’ (which I do not indulge in very often) at its best. It is a series of tableaus of 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 musical tradition that was made familiar (in the West) by phenomenal instrumentalists such as Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan from the 1960s on. Following the growing Indian diaspora, Hindustani music has achieved recognition everywhere and patrons as well as students from outside its initial range of dispersal and far more from its original classical origins. Classical music – wasn’t just Bach & Co, but various other non European traditions.
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 (or lack of understanding of what others consider important), a path of austerity, exercices and a whole new range of expert knowledge. I enjoyed the sense of joyless dedication (there’s does not seem to be the usual success – or Euroamerican cheering) for something quite elusive, yet also the absence of major distractions, even the scenes of mastuebation. One is exercising on and on with consummate dedication even if one keeps failing. 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 