Pink: The Inside Story

By Gautam Chintamani

'Na' sirf ek shabd nahi ... apne aap mein pura vakya hai. Isey kisi tark, spashtikaran, explanation ya vyakhya ki jaroorat nahi hoti ... 'No' ka matlab 'no' hota hai. Usey bolne wali ladki koi parichit ho, friend ho, girlfriend ho, koi sex worker ho ya aapki apni biwi hi kyu na ho. 'No' means 'no' and when someone says 'no', you stop ...

Seldom has a contemporary film's dialogues fired the general imagination the way Pink's did. Seldom has a film challenged 'Bollywood's popular misogynistic tropes' like Pink did. Released in September 2016, the film began to trend immediately. Over the next few months, as it became a phenomenal box-office success, it also became the subject of social and cultural debates - on the rights of women, and the justice and penal system in India. Not only did it manage to capture the zeitgeist but also established itself as a yardstick by which future films making a socio-political statement would be judged. The film became a tool for organizations to sensitize people about crimes against women. For a Hindi film to be able to do that is unheard of.Pink: The Inside Story looks at the making of the movie and tries to understand why it resonated with large sections of society. With inputs from its principal cast and crew, Gautam Chintamani tracks the journey of the film - from its inception to the writing of its numerous drafts that kept being shaped by real-life events and personal experiences of the people connected with it, to its toils to wangle a producer within 'Bollywood' as the big studios refused to come on board, and from its spot-on casting to the immediacy with which it endeared itself to its audience. Including the much-feted screenplay of the film, this is a riveting account of how one of the most important films of our times came to be made.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Release date: Sep 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9789352770397

Gautam Chintamani

Gautam Chintamani is the author of Dark Star: The Loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna (2014) and Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak: The Film That Revived Hindi Cinema (2016). His writing has featured in national publications, including a compilation on Dadasaheb Phalke Awardees published by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Legends of Indian Silver Screen. He was on the National Film Awards jury for Best Writing on Cinema in 2016. Gautam is the great-grandson of literarian Sir C.Y. Chintamani and the grandchild of Telugu poet laureate Aurdra and noted feminist writer K. Ramalakshmi. He and his wife, Amrita, along with their dog, Buddy, live in Gurgaon and in the hills of Himachal.

Book preview

ALSO BY GAUTAM CHINTAMANI

Dark Star: The Loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna

(HarperCollins, 2014)

Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak: The Film That Revived Hindi Cinema

(HarperCollins, 2016)

GAUTAM

CHINTAMANI

PINK

THE INSIDE STORY

To my grandparents,

the late Dr Arudra and Dr K. Ramalakshmi,

the first feminists I ever knew

‘A film is, or should be, more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.’

—Stanley Kubrick

‘Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.’

—Joseph Conrad, Chance

Contents

Foreword by Amitabh Bachchan

Prologue

1.Genesis

2.Coming Together

3.Preparing for Take-off

4.Taking Off

5.The Flight

6.Soaring

Epilogue

Afterword by Shoojit Sircar

Cast and Crew

PINK: The Screenplay

Notes

Photographic Inserts

Acknowledgements

About the Book

About the Author

Copyright

Foreword

We live off cinema as much as cinema lives off us. It is important to understand this fact to understand a film like Pink. The gang rape and death of Nirbhaya in December 2012 awakened our conscience to the widespread crimes against women in our country. There was outrage, grief, but perhaps, more importantly, there was a call for introspection. This was especially true for those in the film industry as cinema is an integral part of society. As an older member of that industry, I felt there needed to be a change in my engagement with my profession, as well as in the institution that is cinema, and Pink was a golden opportunity to respond to that call to action.

A new generation is about to take the reins of our country in its hands, and there has been a great change in attitudes towards women. Yet, patriarchal mindsets still hold sway over large swathes of the nation, so that for every step or two we take forward, we regress a step. Pink, for me, is an important attempt to capture this cultural change and the distance we still have to cover.

Women today are more educated and financially more secure; they are ambitious and assertive; and yet, there seems to be no end to the atrocities perpetrated against women. You just have to pick up the newspaper every morning to know this. Pink’s protagonist Deepak Sehgal, an accomplished lawyer, is a prominent member of a society that is witness to all this. When the first promo came out, the first voice that you heard there was Deepak Sehgal standing in the court and asking a woman who had been sexually assaulted, ‘Are you a virgin?’ It is an old question, something that is so familiar to legal processes in the country; but unlike his predecessors, Deepak Sehgal asks this question not to question the integrity of a woman but to establish it.

In many ways, his relationship with the three girls reminds me of my own with my granddaughters. It’s important for me that they grow up in a society that offers them the necessary protections and privileges. I have reiterated many times that what I did as Deepak Sehgal in Pink had been done with the utmost personal conviction.

One of the things that make Pink so remarkable is its screenplay. It is the result of a rigorous process of research in various courts in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai. The legal case in Pink was adapted from real-life cases, and the language and the circumstances that were used were all parsed from real women, lawyers and judges. This is what the producer, Shoojit, told me, and how wonderful to be able to do that. Consider the tagline, ‘No means no’. It is so dramatic in its simplicity. That is what made everyone stand up and say, ‘My God! What is happening here?’

The courtroom sequence was especially unique. What Shoojit and Tony (Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury) did was that they placed six to seven cameras all together, and all the characters, even unimportant ones, were told to emote. Even after I did a shot, I had to wait and see what impact it has had and what my opposing lawyer is going to argue. The emotions were beautifully captured and that is what made the courtroom sequence so remarkable.

As with all films, Pink may have its shortcomings, but no one can doubt its motivation, no one can question the issues it raises and addresses. Pink is a brazen film because it puts on trial the very prejudices against women we all have in some way been part of and holds up a mirror to society. Many crimes against women go unreported precisely because women are scared to go to the police station, where they may face further harassment. Legal recourse is the fundamental right of every citizen and women have been denied that right because society does not like a woman who confronts her tormentors. Pink wishes to stand by the woman who wants to reclaim her dignity, and has already strengthened many women to do so.

It is heartening to see its impact in the form of this book that documents its making and includes its powerful screenplay, releasing to mark the first anniversary of the film.

AMITABH BACHCHAN

Prologue

In 2015, Sandesh Baliga, a thirty-two-year-old security guard, was brought in front of a court magistrate in Hobart, Australia, on charges of stalking two women, one for eighteen months and another for four. Born in India, Baliga had moved to Australia in 2012 and within weeks of arriving there, he began approaching women on a regular basis by calling and texting them endlessly and even referring to himself as their boyfriend. Baliga’s lawyer, Greg Barns, told the court it was rather normal for Indian men to obsessively target women and argued that Baliga, in fact, did not consider his behaviour to be incorrect or criminal. Baliga pleaded guilty and said that it was ‘Bollywood’ and its heroes that inspired him to go after women. He believed that like in the films, his dogged persistence would pay off as they would eventually say ‘yes’ to him.¹ The Tasmanian court accepted the argument that it was Baliga’s ‘cultural background’ that influenced his behaviour and Michael Hill, the magistrate, not only adjourned the complaint against the accused for five years as he did not want to damage the accused’s job prospects but ‘after anxious consideration’ was also satisfied that the security guard’s ‘cultural background’ meant he did not realize the seriousness of his actions and therefore did not imagine they could be classed as criminal.²

It is said that in designing their films, film-makers take the cultural value of sections of the society that their cinema caters to into account. If this be the case, can one be wrong in suggesting that what is depicted in popular Hindi films, now globally referred to as Bollywood, is Indian culture? It is not a hidden fact that popular Hindi cinema blatantly endorses misogyny. We may get to know of a few Sandesh Baligas but the truth is that there are millions of men across the length and breadth of India who would also consider stalking women to be normal behaviour. In Violence Against Women in Contemporary Popular Hindi Cinema, which was her PhD thesis, Arundhatie Biswas notes that by definition popular culture occupies the lower levels of socially and historically constructed cultural hierarchies and therefore, popular cinema, in a way, is a cultural institution that helps to mediate a broad spectrum of social meanings, values and structure. The irony is that the leading man in popular Hindi cinema has been the biggest perpetrator of either blatant or disguised misogyny. This is almost ingrained in the ‘hero’ of mainstream Hindi cinema so much so that it has come to be seen as ‘chalta hai’.

Cinema is one of the many institutions that generate discourse on violence against women but the camera approaches it in a manner that often sees it transformed into a spectacle.³ In Hindi cinema, much like in the real world, the woman’s critical narrative is either absent, distorted or rejected. Bollywood’s narrative on violence against women, notes Karen Gabriel in her essay ‘Reading Rape: Sexual Difference, Representative Excess and Narrative Containment’, popular Hindi cinema is also characterized by ‘certain representational paradoxes such as visible invisibility, narration, and the denial of narrative’. The reality of violence against women is more complex than what Hindi cinema makes it out to be because this violence is just not physical; it is also about societal norms and the traditional ways of treating women.⁴

Perhaps this is what makes Pink stand out both as a film as well as a treatise on the depiction of violence against women on-screen as well as off-screen. It showcases a complex combination of what happens every single day around us and how popular Hindi film narrative routinely fails to confront it. Traditionally, mainstream Hindi cinema has rarely allowed leading ladies to reflect the reality of the modern Indian women. To a great extent, Pink manages to negotiate this image by highlighting dissent and consent (I said ‘no’), not justifying sexual aggression through excuses like provocation (‘she asked for it’) and tackling head-on the issue of slander that the woman is invariably subjected to in such cases.⁵

1

Genesis

An idea whose time has come might be the most powerful thing in the world, but who decides when the ‘right’ time has come? More so when one thinks of something as mercurial as the making of a film where different minds come together and usually need to work in perfect synchronicity despite their differences. In the case of a film, when can one really say ‘it’s time’? Is it at the time of the germination of an idea? Or is it at the point where the first creative collaboration takes shape? Could it be the stage where the foundation of the idea (the script) is laid? Perhaps it is all these and much more or perhaps something else. Yet, every once in a while, there comes a film where everything seems to fall in place. In the case of Pink, the immediacy with which it has created a place for itself in the hearts and minds of audiences as well as critics, surprisingly enough, is a departure from the way the three individuals who contributed the most to the film came around to this ‘idea’.

It was a stray incident in 2009 that led writer and film-maker Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury to come up with the outline of what would eventually become the film Pink. The National Award-winning director of Bengali films such as Anuranan (2006) and Antaheen (2009), Roy Chowdhury used to know a single woman living in the same building complex as him and his wife. They shared a cordial relationship with the woman. A manager in a multinational company in Kolkata, the young woman often suggested that they should get together some day for some good music and a single malt. One evening, some residents came to meet Roy Chowdhury and told him, ‘Yahan pe galat kaam ho raha hai (Something fishy is going on here).’ They said that the single woman staying alone often had ‘boys’ coming over on weekends and they partied till late. When a few of them insinuated that she could be a prostitute, Roy Chowdhury lost his cool. ‘I abused them and threatened to take them to court,’ fumes Roy Chowdhury. He told them that they could be saying the same thing about his wife when he was away or even about both of them as they too often had friends over. For someone who grew up with liberal parents, especially a mother who had offered him his first drink at home with her so that he needn’t go experimenting with his friends in some dingy watering hole, Roy Chowdhury simply couldn’t suffer narrow-minded, judgemental people who branded a woman simply for her choice of lifestyle or dress. ‘These were educated people,’ says Roy Chowdhury. This incident left a mark on him. A few weeks later, at an adda with a couple of friends, one of whom also happened to a film producer, the film-maker pitched an idea that was based on this interaction. Perhaps, there was also the desire to break free of the relationship-film genre that Roy Chowdhury found himself trapped in.

‘When an idea comes to you, it brings many images as well,’ says the film-maker. He thought of a former college mate, a woman, who later went on to become a journalist, and remembered how she would often tell him that if she wanted she could kiss him but it would have to be according to her wishes. Roy Chowdhury combined the two characters—his college mate and the single woman in his residential complex—and came up with a story that he thought he would make as a quickie and in Bengali. The film-maker asked his producer friend for ₹70-80 lakhs to make a film featuring three girls in Santiniketan—one going steady with an older man, one a dancer from Manipur and the third who ‘loves sex and welcomes it but her consent must be there’—and how people brand them. Roy Chowdhury felt that each of his characters would address commonly held female stereotypes and help debunk them. ‘We always comment "solah saal ki ladki hai aur woh chalees saal ka aadmi (she is sixteen and he is forty)" but who are we to judge?’ says the film-maker, adding that if his daughter were to love a sixty-year-old-man, it’s her business and not society’s.

Enthused by the idea, Roy Chowdhury began writing the film and even scouting possible locations. Sometime later, Shoojit Sircar and his associate Ronnie Lahiri, who had also produced Sircar’s Vicky Donor (2012) and would go on to produce Madras Cafe (2013) and Piku (2015) (and later Pink), offered him a film to direct. An adaptation of the Bengali novel Dui Naari Hatey Tarobaari by the acclaimed author Sunil Gangopadhyay, Aparajita Tumi (2012), was to be shot on location in San Francisco, United States, and it was during the long flight from Mumbai that Roy Chowdhury told Sircar and Lahiri about his ‘next’ film. ‘We were getting bored, and standing at the back of the aisle I told them the story,’ says Roy Chowdhury and mentions that one of their first reactions was that this should be a Hindi film.

But Sircar was not too enthused with the idea. Sircar says that when Aniruddha first pitched the idea it was about two or three girls who are flatmates, harassed by neighbours for certain reasons, who are then involved in an incident where one of the girls hits a guy for trying to take advantage of her—but he did not find the idea very appealing. ‘I remember telling Tony (Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury), Let’s think about it…, and at that point I had not planned anything,’ recalls Sircar, not sure if he wanted to get involved in it. But he told Roy Chowdhury to keep him in the loop with the progress.

By 2012, Roy Chowdhury’s 2009 idea had been shaped into a Bengali script, armed with which he started meeting writers in Mumbai to take a shot at a Hindi version. ‘I met a lot of writers in Bombay and half of them asked me so what? at the point where one of the girls hits the boy on the head with the bottle.’ He adds that most of them shook their heads or rolled their eyes. It was at this point that Roy Chowdhury came across a writer who not only understood what it meant for the girl to smash a bottle on the guy’s head but also why it was necessary to do so. This writer would go on to