The Dissolution of a Home: Achal Mishra’s Gamak Ghar

Writing about the entropy of her family home in New Orleans in her book The Yellow House, American writer Sarah M. Broom asks, “Who has the rights to the story of a place? Are these rights earned, bought, fought and died for? Are these rights a token of citizenship belonging to those who stay in the place or to those who leave and come back to it?” As most houses do, the Yellow House abides axiomatically, and as Broom writes, it goes on to defy weather and hubris, surviving in and as memory, object and person. In a similar undertaking that excerpts the lifecycle of a house, Gamak Ghar (2019) by Achal Mishra is a film about time. Set in Madhopur, Darbhanga, Mishra’s directorial debut sketches the intimate portrait of a house, built by his grandfather in the 1950s in their ancestral village. An attempt to portray the Mithila region and the Maithil community of Bihar, the film is set across three distinct time periods—1998, 2010 and 2019—and follows the microhistory of a family, silhouetted against the statuesque facade of their house. From festivities and shared community rituals to migration, death and departure, we see a non-committal narrative unfold. Sensitive and semi-autobiographical, it circles the house as a site—one grappling with the inevitability of change as it affects the lives of the various family members.

In an interview with Platform Magazine, Mishra recollects his childhood in Bihar, spent not far from where the film was shot. Situating the figure of his grandfather—who passed away before his birth—at the centre of what drove him to make the film and cast real people as his characters; Mishra saw the appeal of the cinematic as something that would allow him a route to his own past. As he continues in the interview, it was important for Mishra to envision and present the house as a fulcrum, a transient space characterised by its own vagaries, colloquialisms and reverberations. It appears as inanimate yet alive, populated by festive conversations as well as a silent resignation to fate. A keenly observant filmmaker, Mishra’s referenced his own family photographs to stage the inundations of Maithil family life, and his photographic proclivities are evident in his experiments with colour tones and aspect ratios, serving to outline and distinguish the three temporal phases.

1998—almost album-like in its format—unfolds as a nostalgic summer, brimming with banter, celebration and the novelty of familial togetherness. We are introduced to the house as a centripetal force defining this burgeoning familiality, which is further upheld by the pillars of lineage and the ceremony of tradition. 2010 is transitory and autumnal in mood, though longer than the other two phases in screentime. It maps a tangible difference in the stilted conversation and the awkwardness of lives at odds with each other. In an evening shot, we see someone ask the ageing matriarch if she has already slept, only for her to reply that she is simply resting. Somewhere in this nondescript exchange, there is a perceptible change in energy and expectation, and we see the house exhale gently in the wake of gears shifting. With the second phase, the narrative is more richly textured in an effort to tie together ways of remembering with the recalcitrance of forgetting that the house begins to embody. In the scenes that follow, interpersonal conversations have urgent inclinations and divergent life-paths; more tedious rites of passage are eschewed for quicker initiations, space is indispensable, and there is a faltering before the promise of return. As the family disembarks, the present-day in 2019 dawns with an unbearable weight of emptiness and an unrecognisably dilapidated house, as the camera follows the travails of the lone resident housekeeper. Though the fog of the wintry morning clears, Mishra writes into the inescapability of abandonment a distant warmth, conveyed by imminent dusk settling intrusively into the frame.

In divination, Death is read as the harbinger of change—of endings and possibly transformative beginnings—to which there is both opposition and acceptance. The film capitalises on a sweet spot somewhere within this duality, thinking through the convolutions of what is bequeathed to us from within the familial. Mishra’s filmmaking positions Gamak Ghar in a yearning for permanence that materialises in his meditative shots of thresholds. Women cook, children play, and men chew languidly as the camera frames the defining lines of doors, windows and passageways. The liminal space of family life is feeble yet determinedly unyielding; it is what holds genealogies together and also what shatters them. As Broom writes, “Does the act of leaving relinquish one’s rights to the story of a place? Who stays gone? Who can afford to return?” In the film, in 2010, a teenager peruses through his late grandfather’s belongings and arrives at a family photograph that we actually see being taken at the close of the first phase. Later, in 2019, as the house sits tremulously at the start of the cycle it is doomed to relive, a family member lifts and dusts a framed portrait of the late patriarch off the wall. In a circuitous reaffirmation, Mishra subtly brings to the end of the film that which endures—an image made to persevere in the belief that there will be indelible motivations to overthrow the severity of separation.

All images from Gamak Ghar by Achal Mishra. 2019. Images courtesy of the director.