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Talvar makes us taste India's class war

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Kaveree Bamzai
Kaveree BamzaiSep 30, 2015 | 23:19

Talvar makes us taste India's class war

The camera pans to the room. Everything is pretty in pink. There are stickers on the wardrobe. A large bed. Bright, happy lights. Cut to another room in the same home. There is a single bed. An old TV. The lights are yellowish, subdued. Class war has rarely looked as ugly as it does in Meghna Gulzar's Talvar. Four people occupy one house in Delhi's fictional Sameer Vihar, but one of them may as well live on a different planet.

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Talvar poster.

In the thinly disguised version of Aarushi Talwar and Hemraj's murder, Talvar shows a cracked mirror to suburban India, and it's not a pretty sight. 

As the fictional Hemraj steps out of his room into the Tandons' (read Talwars) drawing rom, picking up a whiskey bottle from Ramesh Tandon's well stocked bar, it brings home the divide in most urban homes today. Servants live with their masters but on unequal terms. They look after their children, cook their food, serve them meals, and are "taken care of", but at the end of every day, when the family retires to their bedrooms, the servant retires to his sleeping "quarters", often no better than a wooden cubby hole, to retreat to the land he left behind. 

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Meghna Gulzar's Talvar is based on Aarushi-Hemraj twin murders. 

So if he has a TV, he or she will watch a channel which telecasts programmes from his land - in Talvar, the servant is watching a Nepali channel, singing along with his mates to a popular song, drinking cheap beer and wine, until he is prodded to steal an expensive whiskey bottle. If he has only a radio, it will be permanently tuned to a channel that broadcasts regional songs. 

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This netherworld has no rules. On the face of it, it is a familial relationship.

In Talvar, the older servant is said to have a paternal affection for the child, Shruti. Yet, he is the first suspect when the Tandons find their daughter dead in her bed, with her throat slit. It works both ways - the edifice of loyalty on the part of the servant and affection on the part of the master shatters the minute it is confronted with reality.

An angry servant, shouted at for making an incorrect cast, can become a vicious gossip when sacked. An angry master cannot even remember his servant's face or recall what he was wearing the night before, though they may have lived together in the same space for two years. 

Invisible India is still invisible to the urban middle class even if they live under the same roof. 

So Nutan Tandon looks shocked to see bottles in her servant's home. He didn't drink, she says, though he sometimes smoked a beedi. The parents who did not hear their child die in the next room are equally unaware of three intruders in their home, in what is clearly not the first time such a gathering has taken place. Some of it is just plain arrogance - the poor will always be docile and undemanding. Some of it is wilful indifference - how can you acknowledge that your help has another life where he is a living, breathing person who can get jealous of everything he doesn't have.

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The consequences are deadly, and you would rather the bubble didn't burst. 

The class war is everywhere in Talvar. In the scorn with which the Noida policeman greets the Tandons' clipped English responses. The ease with which they misunderstand Shruti reading Chetan Bhagat's Three Mistakes of My Life. The connotation they put on the word "sleepover".

The movie fairly reeks of our worst responses - our ingrained feudalism that makes us treat servants as slaves, with endless working hours; our innate scorn of the mofussil poilceman and his bucolic ways, (Meghna Gulzar doesn't show a single corrupt policeman without paan in his mouth) our insulation from the Invisible. Which reminds me of the scene from The Help when the mistress eats Minny's shit-laden chocolate cake. 

That's what class war tastes like.

Last updated: October 02, 2015 | 11:14
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