A filmmaker's philosopher and a philosopher's filmmaker

On January 17, Om Darbadar, the cult classic that unites (and divides) all streams of Indian cinema, will be re-released more than 25 years after it was first released in 1988. The release of the film has special meaning for me because I am lucky enough to count the maverick director of the film, Kamal Swaroop, as one of my few close friends in Mumbai.

I met Kamal Swaroop for the first time one Saturday morning in November 2011. A week earlier he had accepted my Facebook friend request and, over a casual Facebook chat, reluctantly agreed to meet me. When I reached his house, a one-room flat in one of the many housing clusters in Sai Baba complex, Goregaon east, I found the door locked. I called up Kamal Swaroop and asked him what to do. “Just push the door. It is not locked. I am having breakfast and will soon join you,” he said. I wanted to ask him if he was having a Nitrogen breakfast but he hung up.

It is universally acknowledged in Indian film school circles that to have a conversation with Kamal Swaroop is as good as dropping acid without actually dropping acid. What isn’t universally acknowledged and agreed upon is the pleasantness of the trip. Waiting there, in his unkempt and disorderly living room, surrounded by cigarette stubs, staring at his dusty 14-inch computer screen and the primitive keyboard it was attached to, I began thinking of Om Darbadar and had the acute sense that I was transforming into a tadpole. The room terrified me. On the small table next to the computer was lying the screenplay of Kamal Swaroop’s unproduced Ommiyam. Next to it were the two volumes on cinema by Gilles Deleuze. I smoked a few cigarettes to relax but that only made me more nervous and sweaty. Finally, in order to create some semblance of order around me, I opened my notebook and began going through the questions I had prepared for Kamal Swaroop.

Kamal Swaroop is a filmmaker’s philosopher and a philosopher’s filmmaker, which is why I think, for all practical purposes, he is a dangerous man: his ideas are unassumingly bold, preposterously original and tend to cut against the grain almost by design. In one very long sentence, he can refer to astrology (he loves to talk about how the sky was the blackboard where man wrote his first stories), the 15 volumes Ambedkar wrote on the caste system, the deployment of sexuality in popular cinema, the caste bias of modern filmmakers, the science of religion, and the religion of science, without once having to wonder if he is making sense. Perhaps sense is the last thing Kamal Swaroop is after, which is why Om Darbadar makes so much sense even after 25 years.

Kamal Swaroop came in half an hour later. He was wearing dark glasses, which he didn’t remove. “I have an eye infection,” he said. Settling down on the small chair next to me, he smoked one cigarette after another as I talked. After listening to me for about fifteen minutes, Kamal Swaroop stubbed his third cigarette and looked at me straight in the eye through his dark glasses. “Boss you irritate me. Your energy is very desperate,” he said. The tadpole I had turned into, started croaking. “Maybe we should get a drink then,” I offered. “One second, let me check my blood sugar today, I am diabetic now… or leave it, I feel fine. Let’s go,” he said.

In a crowded Goregaon permit room surrounded by overflowing ash trays and empty beer bottles, my nervousness dissipated and dealt with, his dark glasses finally off, Kamal Swaroop stared at me with his infectious eyes and began: “I hate the word genius…”