The (Hindi) medium is the message
Hindi Medium examines the divide between those fluent in English and those who are not, the urban rich and the urban poor. It’s about the social ambition of the middle middle class which is neither vernie hardscrabble nor Angrezi swish.
Raj (Irrfan Khan) and Mithu (Pakistani actress, Saba Quamar) live in Chandni Chowk. Mithu dreams of sending her daughter to a fancy school, not a government school, like the one her husband went to. Raj owns a sari shop but in the social hierarchy he is a mere shopkeeper.
They have money but lack finesse. They’re aware of a world that is bigger than theirs, know the words, but just don’t know how to say it, pronouncing Eton as "E-Tawn" and elite as "ee-lite".
Laidback Raj is content with his station in life but Mithu isn’t. On her prodding, the couple leaves the old town and move to New Delhi’s Vasant Vihar.
When a worker at Raj’s shop manages to get his child admitted to a posh school, under the quota for economically weaker sections, the couple changes tack, moving into a slum to avail of the loophole. You go high, you go low, as long as it gets what you want. Being the middle of the middle is a cul-de-sac.
The film requires some suspension of disbelief, which is fine. It plays on the absurd and the farcical and pulls it off most of the time. The story moves at a steady clip, with twists and turns, but the real film lies in certain scenes, situations and dialogues that bring the tragic-comedy of Indian aspiration to life, where the ground is constantly slipping from underneath our feet.
The fun in this picture is in the parts, not the sum. As with that other little classic on class, Nil Battey Sannata, about a maid’s daughter wanting to escape the cycle of poverty, released around the same time last year, the end is preachy and moralistic.
The easy messaging caters to the filmmakers’ tax-free ambitions, which Nil achieved; Hindi Medium is already tax-free in Maharashtra and Gujarat.
Like Nil, Hindi Medium is well-cast and the actors never fail to lift the script. Deepak Dobriyal, who himself grew up in Delhi’s Katwariya Sarai, and attended a government school in Begumpur, is exceptionally brilliant at portraying the slum-dwelling working-class everyman.
Neel asked the question: is a maid’s daughter condemned to being a maid the rest of her life? In Hindi Medium, the question is: is a shopkeeper’s child condemned to sitting in the family’s sari shop all her life? In both the films, the protagonists feel education is what will eventually deliver them from the present.
The message then becomes one about the crumbling public school system, which was in much better shape in the post-Independence years.
In the 1950s, my own aunts and uncles (all fluent in English) on my mother’s side went to the local MCD school in Vile Parle, Bombay. I remember my late uncle telling me how they were first introduced to English in standard eight; the first rhyme they learnt being: "Happy, happy shall we be/ When we have learnt our ABC."
Hindi Medium is at heart a comedy and applies situational humour to good effect. It catches small everyday moments, exchanges and conversations beautifully. The realism is accurate, seemingly effortless. At times, it uses exaggeration and caricature to hammer home the point.
The moments stay with you: Overly protective Mithu sending her daughter to the playground in a helmet and a bomber jacket; the types of Delhi schools: experimental, where "learning is fun", the five-star ones with AC classrooms, swimming pools and horses trotting on the school green; a proud mother who brags about her son’s sitar recital at India International Centre; pre-schoolers who trot out the definitions of and distinctions between types of dinosaurs, and speak German and Mandarin; Hindi-speaking Raj who dances Bollywood moves in front of horrified Vasant Vihar neighbours, and who fills up his daughter’s school form with a little help from Rapidex; the factory supervisor who won’t let workers pee because it affects the company’s productivity; the hardened admission counsellor who trains the parents in political correctness for their school interview: "What will you do if your child refuses to go to school?" "Give her a lollipop" is the wrong answer; you can’t be seen as bribing your child.
There is a moment in the film, where Mithu, who is pretending to be a slum dweller, accidentally lapses into English, instinctively telling her daughter: "Don’t touch." It reminded me of the moment in historian Dilip Simeon’s autobiographical story, OK,TATA, Mobil Oil Change (and World Revolution), where, in 1969, at the height of the Naxal movement, he drops out of St Stephen’s and goes undercover as a truck driver’s cleaner. His cover — like Mithu’s — is blown when he starts discussing world cinema with foreign hitchhikers, in English.
We might all want to escape from where we are but who we are is a stubborn animal. It’s the guinea pig hidden in the overcoat pocket that peeks its little neck out when one least expects it to.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)
Also read: What Irrfan Khan's Hindi Medium teaches us about privilege and class divide