Recently, an article on Irrfan Khan written by Abhrajyoti Chakraborty for Hazlitt sneaked into my twitter feed. What followed was a rabbit hole dive that had me watching and re-watching a few of Khan’s works. I’ll limit my focus to two of these for this writeup: the ‘Namesake’, and his storyline in ‘In treatment’. What follows is filled with spoilers for both so, please be warned. In the former, the Namesake, Ashoke (played by Irrfan) is an Indian-Bengali who ends up living in New York after surviving a train crash. In this unfortunate journey, he happens to interact with a stranger who, after making his trip to the UK, pushes Ashoke to be adventurous as well. Eventually, Ashoke settles in the US and ends up marrying Ashima (played by Taru). She bears him two children: Gogol and Sonia.
The movie sees most of the main characters struggle with identity. Gogol wants to wash away his Indianness and chooses not to indulge in the nostalgia of his parents. Eventually, when Ashoke passes away, Gogol does what many do: he over-indulges in nostalgia and eventually finds out that the decisions he made as a result of this, were founded on a superficial sense of his Indian identity. Ashoke, on the other hand, manages to maintain a sense of semblance by creating a partial world, the part that he has under his control, on his own terms of Indian-ness. In more than a few ways, his story also concludes on his own terms.
Similarly, in ‘In treatment’, Irrfan plays one of the characters, named Sunil, who visits a certain psychologist. He is brought in by his son and his white wife and they insist that he’s become discreet and withdrawn. While it takes some time, and a few extraordinary compromises on the psychologist’s part, Sunil eventually opens up. What we hear is a wild, incoherent tell-tale of Sunil’s past. He delves into deeper secrets of his past, only to brush them off with random observations of his present. In one visit, he infers to the psychologist that he feels some aggression towards his daughter-in-law, something she herself implies when she drops Sunil off on the first day. Fearing for her safety, the psychologist warns the daughter-in-law who, in turn, calls the police. When the police arrive and ask Sunil for his immigration papers, he refuses to show it to them. Eventually, he is taken to jail and is scheduled to be deported. The psychologist and Sunil have one last conversation while divided by a safety glass in the jail. It is then that Sunil unpacks what he did: he confesses that he’d wanted to go back to India but as his dying wife had made his son promise him to keep Sunil in the US, he would not be allowed by his son to go back. So, the only way he could go back was to shape circumstances so that he’s forced to go back. Sunil admits that he fabricated the aggression claim knowing that if the psychologist intervened, the police would be called. And, if he refused to show his papers to them, they’d have no option but to send him back home.
Both of these touch upon the migrant condition: where one is divided and yearning for a past that continues to remain relevant in their today. It’s a condition that remains important no matter the realities one faces. Which is why, I contend, living this way (and this is indeed the norm for a larger majority of everyone from the global south who leaves their homes) is an example of emotional violence. It’s a hard choice, after all. Unfortunately, the colonial, capitalist society has distributed the world into developed and underdeveloped countries. There is no denying the fact that the quality of life is exponentially better in these developed countries. However, living such lives comes at an expense and, for many of those who’ve left their homes, the cost is too much to bear. The liberal, capitalist norms dictate that one will be happy once one enjoys a good quality of life. This means that they have enough money (indeed, the more the [much, much] better), rights, and the opportunity to ‘progress’. What this conception of happiness misses out on is that there needs to be a direction to live towards. True happiness, as science has recently revealed via happiness studies, comes not from a bigger bank balance (for, the marginal glee attributed to increase in income starts decreasing after a certain point), or even a secure existence, but from devoting oneself and one’s time to a cause greater than oneself. This can be anything: it can be love where one thrives on loving and being loved by another, it can be a devotion to a cause and even a community. Interestingly, while we get several things wrong in our forms of living in the developing countries, this is where we excel. The cause to live comes natural to us: it is instilled in us as we grow up and are nurtured through a communal form of living.
Returning to the two works of Irrfan, in both cases the characters are simply not contended with the opportunities their new form of living provides them. Instead, they either create small worlds within these dynamics or go out of the way to return back to what they deem as normal. It is then that they find a flash of direction in a directionless world. It is then that they find a sense of semblance and, at the end of the day, even if we articulate it differently, that’s all that we are all striving for.
The movie sees most of the main characters struggle with identity. Gogol wants to wash away his Indianness and chooses not to indulge in the nostalgia of his parents. Eventually, when Ashoke passes away, Gogol does what many do: he over-indulges in nostalgia and eventually finds out that the decisions he made as a result of this, were founded on a superficial sense of his Indian identity. Ashoke, on the other hand, manages to maintain a sense of semblance by creating a partial world, the part that he has under his control, on his own terms of Indian-ness. In more than a few ways, his story also concludes on his own terms.
Similarly, in ‘In treatment’, Irrfan plays one of the characters, named Sunil, who visits a certain psychologist. He is brought in by his son and his white wife and they insist that he’s become discreet and withdrawn. While it takes some time, and a few extraordinary compromises on the psychologist’s part, Sunil eventually opens up. What we hear is a wild, incoherent tell-tale of Sunil’s past. He delves into deeper secrets of his past, only to brush them off with random observations of his present. In one visit, he infers to the psychologist that he feels some aggression towards his daughter-in-law, something she herself implies when she drops Sunil off on the first day. Fearing for her safety, the psychologist warns the daughter-in-law who, in turn, calls the police. When the police arrive and ask Sunil for his immigration papers, he refuses to show it to them. Eventually, he is taken to jail and is scheduled to be deported. The psychologist and Sunil have one last conversation while divided by a safety glass in the jail. It is then that Sunil unpacks what he did: he confesses that he’d wanted to go back to India but as his dying wife had made his son promise him to keep Sunil in the US, he would not be allowed by his son to go back. So, the only way he could go back was to shape circumstances so that he’s forced to go back. Sunil admits that he fabricated the aggression claim knowing that if the psychologist intervened, the police would be called. And, if he refused to show his papers to them, they’d have no option but to send him back home.
Both of these touch upon the migrant condition: where one is divided and yearning for a past that continues to remain relevant in their today. It’s a condition that remains important no matter the realities one faces. Which is why, I contend, living this way (and this is indeed the norm for a larger majority of everyone from the global south who leaves their homes) is an example of emotional violence. It’s a hard choice, after all. Unfortunately, the colonial, capitalist society has distributed the world into developed and underdeveloped countries. There is no denying the fact that the quality of life is exponentially better in these developed countries. However, living such lives comes at an expense and, for many of those who’ve left their homes, the cost is too much to bear. The liberal, capitalist norms dictate that one will be happy once one enjoys a good quality of life. This means that they have enough money (indeed, the more the [much, much] better), rights, and the opportunity to ‘progress’. What this conception of happiness misses out on is that there needs to be a direction to live towards. True happiness, as science has recently revealed via happiness studies, comes not from a bigger bank balance (for, the marginal glee attributed to increase in income starts decreasing after a certain point), or even a secure existence, but from devoting oneself and one’s time to a cause greater than oneself. This can be anything: it can be love where one thrives on loving and being loved by another, it can be a devotion to a cause and even a community. Interestingly, while we get several things wrong in our forms of living in the developing countries, this is where we excel. The cause to live comes natural to us: it is instilled in us as we grow up and are nurtured through a communal form of living.
Returning to the two works of Irrfan, in both cases the characters are simply not contended with the opportunities their new form of living provides them. Instead, they either create small worlds within these dynamics or go out of the way to return back to what they deem as normal. It is then that they find a flash of direction in a directionless world. It is then that they find a sense of semblance and, at the end of the day, even if we articulate it differently, that’s all that we are all striving for.
