Out of the ordinary

The first Friday of August 2016 saw a range of releases lined up for Indian theatres. Among the choices available to viewers were a biopic on Oriya marathon runner Budhia Singh, who famously ran from Bhubaneswar to Puri at the age of four. There was also India's alleged first 'thrillex' (thriller + sex) called Fever. Among the seven Hindi and two Hollywood releases was also director Gurvinder Singh's remarkable second feature, Chauthi Koot, or the Fourth Direction. That the film managed a theatrical release is something of a triumph – a process that took over a year. After a debut at Cannes in 2015 in the 'Un Certain Regard' section, the Punjabi-language feature won several accolades which includes the India Gold at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival last year. It also had a French release before it found takers within India. It has been released in about 80 screens across India, in Punjabi with English subtitles. Subtitled films have worked to great success in the recent past, notably in the case the Nagraj Manjule-directed hit Sairat, that was released in Marathi with English subtitles across India. Videos show audiences dancing to the film's songs in cities like Delhi and Bangalore, and the film raked in around INR 60 crores at the box office. Similarly, the charming Kannada drama Thithi was relished by audiences across India, after an initial run in Karnataka. All this suggests that  the audience for such 'alternative' films is larger and more heterogenous than assumed. And while subtitling does restrict the film's reach to those who can read English, or those who are used to the idea of watching a 'foreign' film, it has (in my opinion) several advantages over dubbing. For a film as quiet and rooted in its milieu as Chauthi Koot, certainly, the idea of its characters mouthing lines in a dubbed language is jarring.

Already  appreciated by audiences abroad, the subtitled version makes it accessible to Indian viewers who will certainly find much to connect with. The film is above all a portrait of a feeling. It evokes the widespread uncertainty that marked the Punjab of the 1980s, at the height of the  Khalistan insurgency and its violent suppression by the Indian security forces. The plot weaves together two short stories by writer Waryam Singh Sandhu, one of them titled Chauthi Koot, the other Hun Main Theek Haan (Now I am Fine). A range of characters make their way across the screen – a group of passengers desperately trying to find a train to Amritsar on a cold winter night, a farmer named Joginder in a village trying to protect his home and family – this is the stuff of which Chauthi Koot is woven. The pace is deliberately slow, and the emphasis is constantly on the minutiae. The train rattles on its way, the family in the village goes through the mundane motions of routine. Even the catacalysmic events before and after Operation Blue Star (when the Indian army stormed the sacred Golden Temple, unleashing a wave of resentment against the state that included the assassination of Indira Gandhi) happen off screen, allowing the director to focus on the impact of these upheavals on the lives of ordinary people.