Erasures in Saffron: On Ritesh Sharma’s Jhini Bini Chadariya

The film Jhini Bini Chadariya (2021)—or The Brittle Thread—is built on a delicate scaffolding of human stories shaped by socio-political forces that are, in turn, determined by agents of institutional power. Directed by Ritesh Sharma, the film focuses on two characters whose lives intersect only at the point of communal violence in an aberrant string of events. The film weaves a picture of present-day Varanasi through the rise of right-wing extremism, ultimately culminating in mob violence.

In a departure from the normative cinematic lens on the city of Varanasi as a holy site, Sharma maps it out through the alleyways familiar to him from his formative years, foregrounding those who inhabit the margins. Shahdab (played by Muzaffar Khan) is one such character; he is a weaver, and works in a diminishing handloom industry that caters to a primarily Hindu clientele. Taking a cue from this meditative practice around warp and weft, the film goes on to present a tapestry of multilingual intimacies, cultural impasses and the complexities of romantic desire, as the characters engage in intrigue, dialogue and a violence begot by cultivated prejudice.

The film makes multiple references to the ruling Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) in India and its proud anti-Muslim rhetoric. This is further amplified in the narrative (with a subversive intent) disseminated through the media of loudspeakers, radio and interpersonal networks of xenophobia. An atmosphere of simmering anger is hinted at and referenced through historical precursors, such as the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 and the subsequent communal riots in 1992-93, while the viewer constantly anticipates a cumulative realisation of these currents on the vulnerable Muslim body.

At the end of the film’s screening at the recently concluded Kolkata People’s Film Festival (KPFF) 2022, an audience member reflected aloud on how it rolled towards the “only possible ending,” when Hindu extremists finally unleashed violence on Muslim neighbourhoods. Consequently, Shahdab—who, until now, was presented as a demure man in a skull-cap and a long beard—cycles through the streets of Varanasi without both. Unrecognisable in this sudden absence of the visual markers that had rendered him familiar, Shahdab registers as an unwitting figure compelled to invisibilise himself against a landscape that could persecute him for the hypervisibility of his “Muslimness”. The “only possible ending” (and its causal acknowledgement as inevitable) is then a grim note for present-day India, which is currently witnessing an alarming rise in anti-Muslim violence. This violence is actively fanned by a government that has further sought to legitimise the discrimination through the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 as well as the soft power of cinema designed to fabricate anxieties around an imagination of Hindu victimhood in the contemporary. The Muslim body in the film assimilates with the dominant forces through the tool of erasure. On the other hand, a syncretic history of the city is invalidated in favour of majoritarian aspirations, including a “smart city” vision of the modernisation of Varanasi.

The presence of an Israeli traveller in the narrative—whom Shahdab develops feelings for—extends the scope of the film beyond the borders of the nation. Here, references to the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine point to anti-Muslim violence on an expanded geopolitical scale. Adah (played by Israeli actor Sivan Spector) is present in the film in the capacity of a tourist, and her tender friendship with Shahdab subdues her social location as an oppressor to the Arab Muslim minority. The relationship comes across as incongruous, sustained only by a mutual curiosity and quiet defiance of predatory gazes. Followed through a delicate navigation of desires, this friendship registers as a possible—and welcome—anomaly.

Placed in a parallel narrative, Rani (played by Megha Mathur) performs raunchy numbers for a primarily male audience—a vocation she defends vehemently. But her physical agency is predictably disrupted as the vagaries of the profession make her supremely vulnerable to exploitation by men, whose favours she depends on to fend for herself and her disabled daughter. Rani’s boyfriend, Baba (played by Utkarsh Srivastav), disapproves of her career and is repeatedly rebuffed when attempting to talk her out of the job. In a fit of anger directed towards revenge, he murders one of Rani’s abusers, who happens to be an influential leader among right-wing enthusiasts. The murder leads to widespread speculation, and progressively, to an unfounded conclusion that the Hindu leader was killed by a Muslim commoner (who is conveniently captured dead). The incidents are thus moulded into a digestible narrative whose inner complications remain absent to the diegetic public.

Rani’s position as a woman in a profession that assumes her agency, places her in regular transactions with masculinities premised on consuming, protecting or desecrating her “honour”; her intermittent assertions of personhood are met with harrowing reactions. This speaks to not only the micro-instance of a man like Baba determined on executing his understanding of masculinity through impulsive acts of violence, but also the macro-body of Hindutva fascists whose masculinity stems from the steady and coordinated oppression of vulnerable bodies. Both Rani and Shahdab are then unwitting victims of this parochial nationhood that appropriates their labour while rendering them abject. Inspired by a poem of the same title composed by the 15th-century mystic Kabir, Jhini Bini Chadariya is ultimately a searing gaze on lived realities as well as the fragile bonds threatened by dissolution. Sharma mentions that the people of Varanasi do not talk about their weavers or dancers anymore. In this new history, Rani and Shahdab are absent and persist only as indiscernible palimpsests.

All images from Jhini Bini Chadariya by Ritesh Sharma. 2021. Images courtesy of the director Ritesh Sharma and the KPFF team.

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