The Idea behind ‘Mard Hamdard’
MARD HAMDARD (which literally translates to ‘Man/men Sympathetic’) is a collage film which functions like a long format essay documentary that builds on the rare representations of ‘non-toxic masculinities’ portrayed across mainstream Bombay Cinema to the regional art house and commercial cinemas across India. It was conceived during the 2020 Lockdown by Satchit Puranik and Pranav Patadiya: it involves no shooting but building upon about a hundred years of film footage in India.
Constructed by a re-editing of existing feature films, this essay film redefines and critically re-evaluates the icons of cinema that people are accustomed to see in a certain light. There has been no serious exploration, documentation, creative curation and juxtaposition of male characters who have been written with a progressive, feminist lens, or have been performed sensitively by a nuanced actor, and who has been given a gender equitable vocabulary ranging from his romantic flirting to his choice of expletives.
While working with the NGO MAVA (Men Against Violence and Abuse) in Mumbai and during gender sensitisation workshops, Puranik realised that there is a paucity of material to show examples of non-toxic and other masculinities, and representations of toxic masculinity in cinema gets all the boys clubs’ whistles in the halls. This led to the search for ‘other’ representations of masculinity in cinema where the creators have made the space of ‘other’ masculinities to come forth or recognising the spectrum of masculinity which is often ridiculed and marginalised on screen. Through this essay collage, the makers aim to explore the ignored aspects of Indian cinema: from girls playing boys since the boy has to appear adorable, or the politics of casting boys across ages, boys with disabilities, physical and mental, men from different social classes, caste identities, physical built and emotional complexes. Thus Puranik and Patadiya aim to compile a collage from hundred and seven years of Indian cinema across languages, across genres to really look at the representation.
The much-exploited hetero-patriarchal ideas of the man as the destructive lover, stalker, societal protector, self-proclaimed provider, and competitive beast among others are nauseating. The men who have been vulnerable, are the men who have suffered substantially on accounts of the patriarchal structures and cultures practiced by Indian society at large. Indian cinema with all its colours, kitsch, diversities has largely been disappointing in how it deals with gender as a subject. At the same time, it is a medium which when used well, really helps in deconstructing and starting a discourse of pluralistic versions and variations of different, diverse ‘masculinities’ that Indian society has. Thus the search to find stories, characters, gestures, dialogues, songs, dance movements among others which can help one to see the legacy of Indian films as an art form that managed to capture the complexity of the human condition at large, of which gender is a substantial construct, and as a nation obsessed with fan clubs, one needs to see one’s unlikely heroes. This film is an exploration into the world of Satyajit Ray’s male characters or the fraternal interaction in Kumbalangi Nights to the homo erotic friendship in Dosti.
The popular Amitabh Bachchan dialogue from a film titled ‘Mard’ said “Mard ko dard nahin hota” translated, ‘A man feels no pain’; a dialogue which subsequently became the title of another film, and hence the play with the Urdu word ‘hamdard’ which literally means one who can feel another’s pain. Thus, the creators sought out to unearth the ‘hamdard’ boys and men from Indian cinema: allies on whose foundation one can not just make gender-inclusive cinema in the future, but propagate a gender sensitive culture of watching, responding, deconstructing cinema.
