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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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The Lede |
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And ... Action |
Reluctantly Lahore
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| The set of a Mira Nair film transforms a corner of Delhi |
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Published : 1 January 2012 |
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| On the set of Mira Nair’s film adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
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HE TANDOORI CHICKEN vendor pouted in front of his week-old wares, the shrivelling carcasses and sundry appendages having gathered a thick cloud of flies. A few metres away, a teenage jalebi-maker cracked jokes while flicking a gas burner on and off, refrying the same orange curlicues into increasingly ragged confections. Among these |
ersatz vendors gathered together—a date vendor thumbing through Saudi dates and khajurs, a sharbat vendor lackadaisically ladling through a treacly red liquor—I stood fiddling with a pendulous steel machine gun.
If you’re looking to shoot a film and your pockets are deep, many of the world’s great cities will eagerly proffer up their monuments and streetscapes. Paris’s Mission Cinéma will provide you with shooting tariffs for everything from the Arc de Triomphe to ramshackle football fields, its staff pleased to provide parking spots and weather updates. Directors clamouring for Manhattan sidewalks need only consult the City of New York Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting, which will dole out permits by the usurious square inch.
Delhi, by contrast, offers few such niceties. The funeral scene in Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film Gandhi—an estimated 350,000 extras were brought to Rajpath to reenact the procession—was no doubt as much a triumph of red tape as it was a feat of casting. Strong evidence of Delhi’s cinematic inexperience are the relatively piddling fees levied on Archaeological Survey of India sites: since 1959, shooting at Qutub Minar has been a  5,000-a-day bargain. (The savvier Metro, by contrast, used to ask for 100,000 hourly, in addition to 44 entry fares levied on the car’s standing capacity, before forbidding shoots this fall.)
Yet when the alternatives are worse, shooting in Delhi grows more enticing. Such was the logic, no doubt, that brought Mira Nair and an army of assistant directors to the capital in late November to begin filming her adaptation of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. With Pakistan’s ministries perhaps too busy to have established their own film branch, a battalion of scouts, set designers and casting agents were brought to the grounds of Delhi’s Anglo Arabic Senior Secondary School at Ajmeri Gate, transforming a tumbledown sandstone compound into a bustling Lahore alleyway.
Little imagination was needed, I think, to see in the school’s recessed archways and red sandstone hints of a city 500 kilometres away, but embargoed by border and bombshell. The greater magic was in the bit of subcontinental masquerade that the stenographers had effected. Hindi signage had been entirely excised in favour of Nastaliq’s dropping circlets. Rupee prices had been doubled as if to flaunt India’s champion exchange rate.
I had been brought into this Potemkin chowk as a lineless extra alongside a cell of other foreigners, each seduced by the opportunity to trade more staid work for a few fleeting seconds in front of the camera. As we were equipped by a cantankerous armourer flown in from Mumbai with a cache of hollow firearms, a hundred Delhi denizens were transformed into surrogate Pakistanis.
Outside the school, a mass of onlookers craned necks to see inside the shoot. From time to time, a green-and-white crescent and star pennant would waft over the wooden scaffolding; a tall spectator could no doubt see the face of Imran Khan fluttering on a banderole, or the Minar-e-Pakistan not far from the craggy cricketer. The crowd shrieked when a cross-dressing rickshaw, festooned in Urdu slogans atop Lahori lime green, puttered away from the set with ‘four-stroke’ grace.
Inside, leaning against a black SUV, my vantage near the commandeered hawker stalls allowed a better view: as the Pakistan Peoples Party candidates watched on like guardian angels, a squad of police officers—Haqs and Khans and Naqvis—puttered around with riot shields and lathis. Behind me, the chauffeur had grown cranky, as lunchtime was pushed back. “Watch the paint,” he snapped in Hindi, as the butt of my machine gun inelegantly gashed the Toyota Innova’s lacquer. I apologised with a smile as a cardboard Lahore registration plate dropped to the ground, unveiling a telltale PB, for Punjab.
Benjamin Siegel is a doctoral candidate in history at Harvard University, and is finishing his first novel.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Eve
9 February 2012
07:11 PM
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This article is factual and authentic regarding the author's experiences, and why not read and learn from his perspective of a place and event most of us will never get? As one who enjoys foreign films, and hopes to understand the story as well as the mechanism of creating the visual experience, I appreciate his descriptive tale- I can almost smell this scene!
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Belinda Gomez
31 January 2012
10:26 PM
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I'm willing to bet her crew is more than an "army of assistant directors". Too bad the writer couldn't put himself aside and learn something--India is a huge center for film production and shooting there is vastly easier than shooting in Paris.
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