Narrow Gauge Cowboy

Narrow Gauge Cowboy

From Junagadh to Paris and Ladakh, it’s been some trip for filmmaker Pan Nalin. A roadmap byShalini Singh

At an NID entrance test in 1979, applicants were asked to fill up a room with materials worth ten rupees. While others picked salt and cotton, Pandya Nalin Kumar wrote, “Instead of ten rupees, with one rupee I’ll buy a candle and fill the room with light.”

Today, while most Indian filmmakers are still timid to experiment, Pan Nalin, as he’s known, is set upon finding an “innate Indian voice” in his cinema. His debut feature, Samsara, a spiritual love story set in picturesque Ladakh, opened the Osian Cinefan festival in 2003 (and made it to the top ten in Italy and France), and his second, Valley of Flowers, is set to repeat the honour next month.

At 43, Nalin’s journey seems like a page out of Fate’s Best Tales. The son of a railway platform tea stall owner, he grew up in a village near Junagadh in Gujarat. “Even the railway there was a narrow gauge, seems like no one needs to pass through Saurashtra to go anywhere else, it’s so remote and undeveloped,” he laughs. “We never thought we were poor, because everyone was like that.” The first film Nalin ever saw was a mythological thriller called Jai Mahakali. It left a fearful impression. Soon after, backed by his father, he left home to study fine arts at Baroda, and later Visual Communications at NID. The filmmaking bug bit him there. Later on, in Mumbai, he began working with Durga Khote and landed his first ad film, again by ‘fate’, getting noticed storyboarding an absent artist’s work.

For three years, Nalin made corporate films. Then he kicked it all up. He enjoyed Indian popular cinema but didn’t want to start his career with that — “I found it too star-and-music driven.” Fearful of being typecast and paranoid about his ‘purity’, Nalin refused to assist anyone. “Most filmmakers were telling Indian stories in an occidental form — trying to play a raga on a guitar. Even a genius like Satyajit Ray took refuge in the Italian neo-realist style. I wanted to find a new instrument true to the Indian spirit. It was like a crazy obsession. If the Italians discovered neo-realism, and the Germans expressionism, why couldn’t we invent our own style?”

Karma Chameleon:Nalin

‘It was like a crazy obsession, finding a new instrument true to the Indian spirit’

Nalin set out on what he calls a journey of “unlearning”. The commercials had earned him enough to wander India and on into Thailand and Nepal. As a boy, he had learnt English from a Christian missionary in Baroda — “In return, I helped to load hundreds of copies of the Bible into his van everyday.” Now, he’s learnt a smattering of Sanskrit and picked up French. His debut Samsara is in Tibetan. The fact that you can comprehend the story even without subtitles says much for the cinematic language Nalin has evolved beyond the crutch of words.

Ironically, Samsara wasn’t released in India though it opened the Cinefan festival. Nalin says, “It was shown in nearly 60 countries except India! Still, now is a better time to show it in India than three years ago.” There were major censorship issues then — the lovemaking scenes were considered too bold for home audiences.

Curiously, searching for his Indian core, Nalin stumbled upon a twin spirit in Paris — “I fell in love with Paris because every film I wanted to see was playing there.” One day, he says, he woke up and realised he had apartments in both Bombay and Paris — “I was paying taxes in both countries. It was an unconscious immigration.” Fate’s Best Tales: the boy from Junagadh had escaped the narrow gauge.

One of Samsara’s many curiousities is Nalin’s ‘Zenematography’. A keen spiritualist, he had his line producer Dilip Shankar hold mediation for the crew and cast; the dialogue coach from the UK introduced everyone to Tai-Chi; yoga and ayurveda followed.

In some ways his work evokes Robert Flaherty’s 1922 documentary, Nanook of the North. Flaherty’s idea was to make a film in collaboration with local communities, a premise echoed in both Samsara and Valley of Flowers. Samsara cast real monks and local farmers, using workshops to draw them out of their usual patterns of life. Again, Nanook documented an Eskimo family’s survival in the extreme cold of the Canadian Arctic. Much of Samsara’s appeal also comes from the fact that it was filmed where no other feature has been shot before — Ladakh. Says Nalin, “Leh has an infrastructure of hotels, Ladakh didn’t. With a crew of 200 people, we pretty much had to build our own hotel.” Braving the climate was another challenge: 35 degrees in the day, minus 10 at night. Oxygen masks had to be provided for. “It seemed more like a mountain expedition than a film shoot!” Nalin laughs. Flaherty was accused of reinventing a past culture to construct an exotic document of humanity. Many have criticised Nalin for packaging an exotic East for the West. A charge he doesn’t take kindly. “As long as I’m honest about telling a story, it doesn’t matter what people say. Samsara is on the Bangkok University comparative religion curriculum. If it wasn’t any good, why would it top box offices in Thailand, Korea, Taiwan…? That’s East too.” Point taken.

The inevitable question then: how autobiographical is Samsara? “I had everything in Bombay, a great career. One day I renounced it all, literally in 24 hours. Twenty people worked for me. It was a hard decision. I hurt a lot of people. Had I stayed on, I’d still be making ads, living a luxurious life — but that’s not what I wanted. I had also lived a love story where I hurt someone badly. Samsara looks very carved but it was born in complete chaos,” he smiles.

Nalin’s latest, Valley of Flowers is a love story about passion, death and reincarnation. vof features a host of trans-Asian actors and non-actors; ex model Milind Soman plays a bandit, while Naseeruddin Shah is the “abominable snowman” — the Yeti. Shah calls vof a “western spiritual”. “I’m not sure if Nalin would agree,” he chuckles, “vof follows a cowboy Western adventure form, with a dose of eastern spiritual. It was a complicated piece of storytelling; I must confess I didn’t fully understand it sometimes. But it is based on an interesting premise. And guns and horses are always fun to work with!” Shah also says Nalin is someone he’s been keen to work with. “As a director, he was very clear, always well prepared and attentive to everyone.” That’s high praise from an old hand. So will Peter Pan find his voice in Cineland?