The Return of the Gleaming Frog

I was in Bangalore about a decade ago when there was an incredible screening of Kamal Swaroop’s iconic 1988 film Om Dar-B-Dar at a large cinema hall. Once the film was over and the audience trickled out, an impromptu Q&A session took place in the foyer between the few of us hanging behind and the director. An elderly gentleman put up his hand and said: “Mr. Kamal Swaroop, if you don’t mind my asking, what is the story of your film?” Swaroop answered by telling the story of Om, one of the film’s central characters, to the 40-odd people listening wonderstruck. I don’t think the story he told was of the film; nothing we had seen in the film correlated to what he was telling us. But we were fascinated by the story anyway.

At the end, the elderly man said, “Thank you so much. I really get what your film is about now.” It is one of my favorite moments – straight out of the world of Om Dar-B-Dar.

I first saw Om Dar-B-Dar when I was in film school in 1996, nearly a decade after it was made. The screening had been organized by GRAFTII, a group of Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) alumni. I had heard about the film’s iconic reputation and the excitement surrounding its making. The fact that it had never been released by the National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC) had only added to the intrigue. I’d also heard about Swaroop’s work on Phalke, so when I heard that the avant-garde Om Dar-B-Dar would be screened, of course I went eagerly.

The film centers on Om, a boy on the cusp of adulthood and modernity with its promise of science and technology, teetering on the edge of mythology and rituals. A song about Rana Tigrina (the Indian bullfrog) sung in his biology class eventually leads to the film’s climax where a mob looks for frogs rumored to have diamonds in their stomachs. That’s about all I can say about the plot, since looking for a sequence of events leading from one to the other simply defeats the experience of the film.

Om Dar-B-Dar has this extraordinary intensity with which we’re able to enter the world of Om, Babuji, Gayatri, Jagadish and Phoolkumari. But there isn’t a single narrative to pull you through it; the viewer has to piece together the sequences in her own head to draw out meaning. Every viewing (I’ve now seen the film four or five times) speaks to you differently. Sometimes it’s because your own reading has changed over the years, but it is equally about the audience with whom you watch it. The ferocity of the film, because of the way it is, allows for a different experience each time as if you’re seeing it anew.

What struck me most the first time I saw Om Dar-B-Dar was that at no point during the film does everybody laugh together. Someone or the other does laugh out loud every few minutes. It is a film that doesn’t have moments evoking collective laughter or a collective sigh – it allows each individual to accept and enter and savor it in his or her entirely unique way, and I think that’s the central purpose of the film. I laugh at different moments every time I watch it, and even while I’m anticipating my favorite sequences, I find new ones along the way.

Surreal and absurd, Om Dar-B-Dar radically attacks the realist mode in which parallel films were being made in the 1980s. Swaroop chose to explore small-town India, a place that was completely invisible even in parallel cinema. You had rural India or you had the fringes of urban India that were being spoken about in the social realist mode, but here was Swaroop making a film set in Ajmer that challenged this in every gesture – every cut, every composition, every dialogue, every character.

Today, we might have gone past the dichotomy presented in movies of the 1980s, which were either big budget ventures or socialist realist films. But even now, as a digitally restored version is finally released 25 years later, it is not a film that feels commonplace. The gap between Om Dar-B-Dar and what you’ve been led to expect from cinema remains as wide as ever. Its attack on conventional cinema remains fresh.

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Another interesting aspect of this film is its place in cinematic tradition. In the 1990s, when I was at film school, one already had a sense of avant-garde cinema in the tradition of Mani Kaul, with whom Swaroop worked, and Kumar Shahani. We were aware of the lineage of Om Dar-B-Dar within world cinema (Swaroop himself admitted to being influenced by Dadaism), but I think that within Indian cinema – even today – Om Dar-B-Dar continues to be a moment that explodes conventions around character, cuts, composition, sound, dialogue and narrative. No convention was good enough to be used in its familiar mode in this film. It marked a new moment in filmmaking, and the tragedy (or maybe the excellent thing) is that no film was ever made in that mode again, even by Swaroop. (After Om Dar-B-Dar, he directed several documentary films and in 2013 he released his most recent documentary called Rangbhoomi on Dada Saheb Phalke’s life in Varanasi). If Swaroop had continued making feature films regularly, perhaps the ideas he threw up in Om Dar-B-Dar would have settled down or got ironed out, but that isn’t what happened. There’s no lineage it can be linked to in Indian cinema. And there’s no trajectory to draw out of it.

All aspiring filmmakers have felt the impact of multiple viewings of this film, and I feel that some filmmakers such as Vipin Vijay and Amit Dutta have engaged deeply with it in their own work. I can’t say my own films carry any visible influence of it; however, in the process of my work, I’ve found refracted structures and narratives the only valid way to work. Attempting to delineate a smooth, clean graph seems banal and impossible, and perhaps Om Dar-B-Dar can be credited with disrupting that familiar urge towards neatness.

This is the reason I find references to Swaroop’s film on television and in mainstream films boringly literal – they take the obvious meanings of his sequences and package them within straight and narrow narratives. It’s something of a trend to make references to Om Dar-B-Dar, and you see it in MTV or Channel V’s style of filmmaking from the 1990s. They allude to Om Dar-B-Dar’s characters, content or location with a playful, funky attitude towards kitsch, but they come nowhere close to the film’s structure or its language, which it carved out for itself. In the song Emotional Atyachar in his film Dev.D, Anurag Kashyap doffs his hat respectfully and affectionately at Swaroop, but it’s a reference that does no more than scratch the surface.

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Om Dar-B-Dar is a film that cannot be thought through: you have to just go in and let the sounds and images, the cuts, the dialogues and the characters take you on a journey. But it’s a journey that’s deeply thought out within a milieu, a much larger political project connected to a specific moment in India’s history. Its script and dialogue is rooted in modern Hindi literature, with works by Muktibodh or Vinod Kumar Shukla. The film belongs to the larger intellectual and cultural atmosphere of the time. But if you were to ask Swaroop about all this, it may well be the case that he’d deny these cultural links and say something like: “This film comes straight out of my dreams!”

Twenty-five years later, there are themes from the film that still remain relevant. Gorakhpur/Wasseypur is the flavor of the day – we could argue that they are the new Switzerland for Bollywood.  With small town India a current fad, Swaroop’s Ajmer and Pushkar come alive in ways that go beyond merely being cutesy art direction and costume design with exotic, gritty stories. Two decades later, this film stands alongside these other slickly made films without being conscious of its low-budget rawness, with a far richer sense of its location.

I saw the film again recently, and this time I was struck by the women Swaroop portrays. One is Om’s sister Gayatri (played by Gopi Desai) and the other is Phoolkumari (played by Anita Kanwar). You don’t think about them as being small town women or traditional women or modern women – there are no such categories in the way Swaroop pictures them. They evade the roles defined for them not just by Indian society but also by Indian film. There’s a moment when Gayatri and her Jagadish are alone at home and they want to get into bed with each other. Jagadish is trying to undo his boxer shorts, but finds the drawstring is knotted up; he’s very tense because someone might come in any moment. They are forced to use a pair of scissors to snip it. An abrupt cut later, Jagadish is dressed and deflated. Gayatri bursts out laughing. That laugh is devastating, the moment unflinchingly subversive but without being self-conscious. Twenty-five years later, nothing in Indian cinema has still prepared you for this moment.

Surprisingly, Swaroop once said that, back in the early days after making the film, he was cornered by important women practitioners within the arts and culture scene and asked why his gaze was so sexist. It’s a reading of his women that I cannot comprehend – I’m still blown away by Gayatri and Phoolkumari. They were scripted in a way that challenged the way women were imagined and represented. Both roles were performed fabulously by the two actors, but the script and the editing has to be credited for the edge and bristling energy they bring to bear on the film.

It’s impossible to have a favorite scene from the film, there are just so many. There’s Om holding his breath underwater, Nehru’s hurried walk, a party announcing Armstrong’s landing on the moon, diamonds swallowed by frogs, Babuji dictating a letter to the prime minister addressed ‘Dear Raju’, Gayatri’s forward action of sitting in the men’s section in a cinema hall, radio requests from Jhumritalaiya, Babuji’s astrology… These words course through my head in a stream that just cannot be fixed into clear descriptions.

Om Dar-B-Dar is a film that defies any reading. You may think you’ve become so familiar with it that you can now sit outside it and read into it, but that doesn’t happen at all. It is too determined to provide you with an experience. This is the one and only truly mad film ever made in India.

A few months ago, Swaroop sent out a message on Facebook asking for people to send him a synopsis of the film. And we all, fan boys and fan girls, sent him one. You might as well have read 70 synopses of 70 different films (or maybe it wasn’t 70, but with this film, everything gets into the mode of myth-making). The only commonalities were, possibly, that there is a boy called Om and there is a plethora of frogs who have swallowed diamonds that a jeweler is looking for.

It’s hard to explain why Om Dar-B-Dar is a film that must be seen, other than to say, “Arre, but you must watch this. How can you not?”

Surabhi Sharma is an independent documentary filmmaker based in Mumbai whose work is centered on the themes of music, migration and labor. Her most recent film is Bidesia in Bambai.

More on Yahoo! Originals: In Surabhi Sharma’s latest documentary Bidesia in Bambai, Bhojpuri music manages to reflect both the angst and the passions of migrant workers in Mumbai.