The Disciple — some impressions in the guise of a review
This is a republish from 12 May, 2021
Listen to the Audio Version of this Piece : https://www.dropbox.com/s/x0ve2s9d1yfk16i/thedisciple.m4a?dl=0
Spoiler Alert : Several Spoilers, end also given away.
Credits : Nanda Padmanabhan for inspiring me to write this piece.
Trailer : https://youtu.be/XvGuvEsRwf0
Ifound it irritating to read perfunctory reviews comparing this film to Bandish Bandits or talking about its “slow pace” (i mean, why was this reviewer expecting OTT bpm from a film by Chaitanya Tamhane on Hindustani Classical Music that too with advertised philosophical leanings?) — sure, those are perspectives too, but here’s mine. This was supposed to be a review but ended up with me doing a bit of emotional processing, so i’m sorry, reader.
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The Disciple to me is a long drawn out coming of age tale, but fundamentally a story of loss — formats, methods, lives, ambitions, talent, values, attention, meaning — and through loss finding what needs to be found.
What does it mean to come to terms, to find peace when you see your dreams slip away? How long does it take to know? How long is time in a scale that starts only at mid-life? What does it mean to be talented but not good enough in one’s talent subjectively and objectively? How is it that some are effortlessly talented, secure in their effortless talent, with a talent that doesn’t incite questions? Is a deficiency in talent pre-requisite for developing a mind questing for truth, that sand grain in the oyster? If you are so effortlessly producing your art, what questions do you have remaining? Perhaps your performance is so honed for ticketed presentation, so technically adept, so satisfying for the silk-saree-kurta, neighbour’s-envy-owner’s-pride savarna NRI crowd that really never needs to stumble over questions? Perhaps you have reached a place of production (i don’t like that word but even genius manifests itself in perfectly produced gems that tell complete stories with perfect sentences, questions, answers, arcs and stories) where you don’t ask, you be. Perhaps the critically searching mind is yearning for that hallowed place of simply being. I am of course only speculating, since i will never know genius myself, though i am fortunate in having heard the questioning, the search come through to me in the genius of John Coltrane or Joe Henderson’s teachings. But coming to the film, there is no story to be told in effortless talent (of course there is effort, don’t get me wrong — there are minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades of moments that are spent honing, sharpening, shedding, sculpting), for its goals and milestones are clear. Effortless talent probably doesn’t question who its receivers are since it doesn’t need to ask such questions in its perfect beauty (of course nothing is perfect, don’t get me wrong — but some do dance close to that asymptote of perfection, which most of us mere mortals will not understand). Sharad Nerulkar (played by Aditya Modak) is the form through which Tamhane tells this story.
Nerulkar’s best performance on stage reveals to him the truth. This is a climactic scene, it brings closure — the asymptote finds its end, it isn’t a pathetic fade out that remains a forever background noise. You see him embody this truth by walking out of his own performance. I remember his utterly beautiful performance where you hear him paint haunting, clear brushstrokes with his voice. I cried because he found a kind of closure but also for the utter beauty of the singing. The unfinished-ness of the piece (not just because of his literal walking out mid-performance), the unfinished aesthetic quality of his complete brushstrokes as he accessed parts of the raag he never had before apparently, was stunning to me. The perfection was in the unfinished-ness, but also in the ideas he put forth — his guru had sensed that he had it in him to find such ideas i think. I could hear Bombay’s sun in his song as it glided along an afternoon of fleeting aural pleasure of a time that is meant to be lost, whose quality it is to torment you years later in its loss, when you were lost in it in that afternoon and were painfully aware of its fragility. It was a moment for me of excellent filmmaking. Tamhane says something in an interview about how he doesn’t know the world of Hindustani Classical performance & its audience. I understand this world from a parallel world of Carnatic Classical performances, so i found it remarkable how he executed this moment, along with how he set up and captured the ambience, ethos, eccentricities, pretence etc. of this upper-caste defined, exclusionary, purity-flaunting clique space in the film. The performers made the moment, Aditya Modak is a Hindustani vocalist himself and clearly Tamhane knows how to cast that world, even if he says he doesn’t know that world as intimately as i’d imagine a creator such as he might expect of himself to know.
The guru’s circumstances contrasting his dignified unfazed presence, his expression of his reality of payments and being shafted by show producers is all too familiar. It is infuriating to me how people are valued and why there has to be such indignity and disrespect towards some forms of “productivity” and giving, vs. others (not just in the so called art-world but in general).
The see-and-be-seen genteel SoBo art-lovers patronising the guru with exalted words and a cup of tea and a plate of chiwda, as opposed to the honesty (if the nakedness of their intentions can be termed that) of neoliberal popularity contest TV music shows which are purely about payout as the value of art — this is not an esoteric theme — was interesting for me to think about. I found the representation of the young woman on the music show being conditioned to package her utter talent — which first turns Nerulkar’s head and which later turns into his bewilderment — quite hilarious. It’s a discussion my parents and i have often, as we sometimes watch Indian Idol type shows, appreciate the nuances of voices and singing, and observe transformations of genius singers from far flung towns paraded as objects or feelgood inspiration-porn stories to be pitied for their circumstances, and for the show’s and its audience’s self-congratulation via their benevolent bestowing upon the singers of “polish” and recognition. The singers, though, seem to be wise in their playing along with the demands of a time that has completely distorted away from the truth that they speak in their song. I find this utterly humbling.
Technically, i appreciated how entire concerts were presented. It was like seeing a glimpse of a painting but somehow getting a full view of the painting, like a fractal structure. The camerawork of the Netflix conditioning of today was evident — but there was a delicacy to it — which is captured in the promo still with Nerulkar looking at his guru with longing and a wistful, yet-unacknowledged knowing. I generally never like pre-2000s flashback sepia scenes with contrived colour corrections, costumes etc., and here too i didn’t quite care for the execution.
And Maai, the mystical voice, unattainable mirage, an embodiment perhaps of Annapurna Devi and her contrast with the Ravi Shankar commodity. The NRI audiophile collector snob doing a 360 on the perception that was built of Maai, as he tells his coveted insider stories over drinks to a young earnest sanskari Nerulkar, was quite fun. The evaporation of Maai’s maya was to me a post-modernist nod — Whom to believe? What is real?
The austerity that Maai talks of came through to me visually in the riverside lecture scenes, and auditorily and visually as it flowed within Nerulkar’s mind stream as he cruised the city in his searching reverie to his own metronome that slowed time. There are really no loose ends in the film with its signature Tamhane slickness fit for Netflix. It is a tight film with its own tempo or i should say tempi since threads had their own visual tempo in scenes as well as individuals having their own beat within those scenes. The visualisation of the palpable change in our times over the past decade and half was moving for me, especially when Tamhane gets to the contemporary. I was bawling at the end at the forlorn figure of the Nirguni singer with his instrument in the train, words of humanity and his voice from a lost world and a displaced time, fading into the cold metal Western Railway AC local — how ruthless time is, how meaningless meaning is, how cruelly beauty is tread upon, how it all ends too soon or simply fades away as you watch helplessly.
That way, Tamhane knows the right elements to use to do the tearjerking i suppose lol. I came away lingering on how history doesn’t change in how it treats parts of cities better than others — the Harbour Line will never be this slick, and i’ve never ridden a steel and glass WR AC local to Bandra, but am glad for the hawa i get to eat on the Vashi bridge and for the smile etched in my mind of the jasmine-seller girl whose carefree magenta dupatta i’d rescued from flying out of the open door.
