Tanaav deserves a round of applause for casting local Kashmiri talent as Kashmiris

About time, one would say. Applause Entertainment deserves a round of applause for casting local Kashmiri talent in their tense, thoroughly engrossing anti-militancy series Tanaav. In  2018, when Vidhu Vinod Chopra had tried to use local Kashmiri Pundits in his film Shikara,  there was widespread outrage about local Kashmiri talent being used as junior artistes.

The Jammu administration had asked Kashmiri Pandits residing in migrant camps at Jammu to participate in the shooting of the film being produced by Vidhu Vinod Chopra Production. The official communiqué informed that each person, irrespective of age, will be provided Rs 800 per day. There was widespread outrage among the Kashmiri Pandits in Bollywood at what they saw as Vinod Chopra’s “pathetic patronizing attitude towards a community that has suffered enough already without having to be reduced to junior artistes in a Bollywood film.”

Tanaav is the first show set in Kashmir which has used local actors and technicians organically. The Kashmiri actors include veteran M. K Raina, Sumit Kaul, Ekta Kaul, Sheen Dass, Rocky Raina, Sahiba Bali and Arslan Goni .

Slow clap for casting director Mukesh Chhabra for getting it right each time.

In addition, Adhir Bhat, who wrote the dialogues for Tanaav is also a Kashmiri. Another  proud Kashmiri in Tanaav, Kapil Mattoo has worked closely with director Sudhir Mishra from behind the scenes .

Shabana Azmi is all for this fruitful culture of casting beyond the traditional Bollywood net. “What inclusiveness does is to ensure a participative and cast and hence, a much wider  audience for your product. Nowadays, I see cinema, particularly the crew, as a microcosm of world cinema. In Steven Spielberg’s Halo, the diversity was mind blowing even among the actors: there was Korean, African ,Chinese, Australians, Caucasians, Hungarians and  Indian(yours truly!). Diversity and inclusiveness is very important to cinema now.”

However, inclusiveness is not always  a desirable goal. There are limits to how much we can pretend that colour doesn’t matter. It does! Which is why there is so much inequality everywhere. In Armando Iannucci’s The  Personal History Of  David Copperfield, a stylish, slyly witty film but finally way too slight and colour-blissed to be taken seriously, the titular role  of  Charles Dicken’s young hero is played a brown actor Dev Patel, who is as  convincing as Copperfield as he was when he played a Sikh in the 26/11 drama Mumbai Hotel.

Patel’s Copperfield looks like an Asian masquerading as Charles Dickens’ English hero born to a privileged mother (Morfydd Clark, who later in the film show up with incestuous  bizarreness as David Copperfield’s love interest). There is no explanation at all as to why David’s mother is unmistakably Caucasian while the son looks as brown as the toast she enjoys at her breakfast every morning. Much later, David has a Caucasian friend James who’s played by Aneurin Barnard and his mother is a Black woman played by Nikki Amuka-Bird!

James’s mother has an important role in the impressionable David’ life. When they are together, I could only see the film’s producers trying to please as many communities and  countries as possible. This is Gone With The Wind with blizzards blowing away physical credibility.

It was very hard for me to concentrate on the characters’ function in the sprawling Victorian coming-of-age saga when the director was way too taken up with converting Charles Dickens’ epic novel into a cauldron of cultural cosmopolitanism. Let’s  look beyond colour  and race by all means. But not at the cost of a film’s credibility!

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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