Shankar's Fairies: Set in a police officer's home, a child sees that the king is naked

At times a child’s innocent gaze can say it better than words. Filmmaker and theatre director Irfana Majumdar’s gentle yet powerful debut feature Shankar’s Fairies dwells on the many ambiguities and equivocations that have been endemic to us as individuals and spread deep and wide in our families, relationships and society as well, all seen through the eyes of its nine-year-old protagonist.

Majumdar trains the camera on the faultlines intrinsic to our world but hidden well behind the garb of propriety and politeness and often wished away in our preoccupation with order, method and hierarchies. The divisions of caste, class, religion knit together by a nimble thread; a delicate fabric that threatens to tear asunder but has also stayed in place, nonetheless.

Points to ponder on, on the eve of our 75th Independence Day. Appropriately so, the film had its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival just a couple of days before, on August 13.

Based on the childhood memories of Majumdar’s mother, Nita Kumar, a professor of history and anthropology and also the film’s producer, Shankar’s Fairies is set in Lucknow of 1962, during the IndoChina war. The film was in the Work-InProgress lab at NFDC Film Bazaar in 2019 and part of the five films in NFDC Film Bazaar Goes to Cannes initiative at the first online edition of Marche du Film last year.

While the nation itself is united in fighting the enemy under Nehru’s leadership, a divided house stares from within. At the core is the theme of class dynamics explored through the relationship of the nine-year-old daughter of the Senior Superintendent of Police in Lucknow with the family’s domestic help, Shankar. A bit like Lenny’s relationship with her nanny Shantha in 1942 Earth? However, to me it was reminiscent of Kabuliwala Rahmat’s filial love for Mini even as he keeps longing for and thinking of his own daughter in Afghanistan in Rabindranath Tagore’s short story Kabuliwala. But more than the emotions and affections, the relationship here is about the inequities, discriminations and exploitation that the child slowly gets exposed to even as her own bond with Shankar transcends all the divides.

Majumdar sets it up right at the start with the death of a supposed bandit during crossfire in a police encounter and the assertion by the cop that police need to use punishment, be it corporal or capital and that in no system can all people ever be equal.

The hypocrisy rears its head more sharply ahead. The cop might lecture his juniors about the needless divides between Shias and Sunnis but is gently cruel in deciding to not to attend the wedding in a staff member’s family because he is not of the same class: “Naukar ke ghar koi jaata hai kya (Does anyone visit their servant’s home)?”

It’s the duality of the genteelness and a simultaneous callousness and nonchalance that makes the moment come on stronger. Similarly, the wife is resistant to the idea of Shankar visiting his ailing daughter and eventually allows it with several conditions attached. These incidents creep in so quietly in the film that they end up feeling more sinister and hit you harder in their seeming affableness. A potent portrait of benign despotism.

Mjumdar’s filmmaking is not about any dramatic highs and stylistic flourishes. It’s about offering the audience a slice of life, stringing together of small day-to-day moments, not noticeable individually but that hold some deeper truths and meaning collectively.

She never lays things out, is not expository. The approach is observational, be it tracking the characters from a distance or getting closer into their spaces. It is as much about placing a wide lens on people as about framing them in close-ups. A film that is both encompassing and intimate by turns.

Little things hold profound meaning. The child observing Shankar eating all alone in the kitchen after everyone else has had their fill, makes her awaken suddenly to the unfairness inherent in the world. Even the moment of grief allowed to him later is short and lonely. There is the limited space Shankar inhabits in his quarters as opposed to how he floats around in the large home, always busy with never-ending chores, guiding the retinue of staff, while cooking, changing bedsheets, dusting the chinaware and laying out the table himself. The defined spaces become a reinstatement of the divides.

Beyond the inequities, the film is also about proxy parenting. The mother, a lady of idle leisure would play the piano and paint and organise parties while Shankar becomes the default guardian of sorts. One who tells tales of fairies and witches, sadhus and gods and djinns and feeds the child’s imagination. These stories are as fanciful as they are real.

Shankar is the formative influence and also the philosopher and guide through whom worldly knowledge is filtered to the child. Who is a kayastha and who is a baaman? She asks him. The religious divides are spoken of in a story about holy men fighting over which God in the pantheon is bigger. The place of people in society finds a metaphor in flowers—some are used in praying to God, some are displayed in a vase, others presented in bouquet to the teacher—each has a dharam (duty) and a defined place.

The film is also an ode to Majumdar’s ancestral house, its sprawling spaces, the intimate nooks and crannies and the prized objects and possessions. It is about an entire way of life contained behind the sturdy colonial era walls, a culture steadily getting eroded and lost. Most so Shankar’s Fairies is about the life of a nation. It makes us pause and reflect on how far we have come since we got free. How deeper have the divides got entrenched and how much more brutal the inequities have turned.

We might be free but have we truly liberated ourselves? Or have we chained ourselves even further? Majumdar’s film is as much a coming of age saga of a little girl as it is a “personal journey into the heart of India”.