Qissa, the tale of a man who brings up his daughter as a man, is about the dislocation of gender identities and nationalities, says Amrita Madhukalya
Umber Singh is tired of the girls that his wife bears him year after year. So when the fourth daughter comes along, an impatient Umber fabricates a lie: he begins to believe that the newborn girl is the son he's been waiting for all along.
That is the premise of Qissa, a post-Partition tale directed by Anup Singh, starring Irrfan Khan and Tillotama Shome, that hits theatres this Friday.
The film, shot by German cinematographer Sebstian Edschmind, explores what happens when Kanwar (Shome), brought up as a truck driver, marries Neeli (Rasika Duggal). Once Kanwar finds out the extent her father can go to have a son, she runs away, in a way helped by her new 'wife', to understand her femininity.
Umber Singh, essayed by Irrfan, is an embittered man who's lost his land, country and people. The character is based on director Anup Singh's grandfather. "When Partition disrupted their lives, my grandfather became a refugee. He refused to go to the new India, and settled in Tanzania instead. That is where I was born. But the uprooting of his identity left him a violent man and he had nowhere to express it. So, he would express it on his family instead," says Singh.
Women camouflaging as men was not unheard of, and many women took up men's clothes to escape the violence of Partition. "Women were attacked even within mobs that escaped the violence. After Partition, many women took up male identities for property matters and obsessive fathers," says Singh.
Shome was drawn to the script and says that she went through seven months of kalaripayattu and swimming lessons to neutralise her body language, apart from taking Punjabi classes and truck-driving lessons.
She remembers the experimental audition she had to undergo after Singh approached her for the role. "Anup asked me to twist my body, contort it to have my arm under my leg and my leg over my neck, in a way, make me as uncomfortable as possible. And when I couldn't take it anymore, he asked me to release my body and say, 'maa'. At that time, I found this quite esoteric, but only later did I realise the significance. In the whole movie, Kanwar has no relationship with her mother, and the only time she utters her name is when she's in a lot of mental agony and asks her why could she not protect her as she had protected her sisters," says Shome.
The movie, made in 2013, has been funded by the National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC), the Netherlands Film Fund and a German production company, and has been waiting for a theatrical release since. It was released simultaneously in cinemas, on DVD and on NFDC's new video-on-demand site.
Qissa has picked up many awards at international film festivals. It won the NETPAC Award at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival and the Silver Gateway of India at the Mumbai Film Festival. It also got the best actress award at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival and International Film Festival of Queensland, apart from bagging the best actor award at the latter.
"One of the threads in the movie is dislocation of desire, be it of gender, or identity, or nationality. Skewing someone's gender identity to compensate for a personal loss is deranged; so is annihilating one identity for another," says Shome. "But our country has never been kind to its women."
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