Aligarh (A)

Director: Hansal Mehta

Cast: Manoj Bajpayee, Rajkummar Rao, Ashish Vidyarthi

Running time: 120 minutes

Aligarh opens with this wide shot, straight out of a Michael Haneke film, where we see from a distance a man entering an apartment followed by the rickshaw puller who has brought him home. The lights of the inside room go on and off in quick succession quite a few times. Then a couple of more men, one with a video camera, enter the same apartment. And chaos ensues.

What happened that February night in 2010 in that Medical Colony apartment in Aligarh will thereafter play many times, from different perspectives, in private and in public, in print and on TV, reducing the entire life and work of a respected 64-year-old professor to three letters: g-a-y. 

Based on actual people and real incidents, Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh is a haunting portrait of loneliness and longing centred around S.R. Siras (Manoj Bajpayee), professor and chairman (Marathi) in the linguistic department of Aligarh University. With just a few months left for his retirement, Siras was suspended by the university for “immoral conduct” on the basis of that video footage, which was clearly a pre-planned sting operation.

A rookie reporter from Delhi, Deepu Sebastian (Rajkummar Rao), picks up the report from the wires and goes to Aligarh in search of the truth. What he finds there is the scattered life of a tired man who digs poetry and loves his evening drink with old Lata Mangeshkar film songs playing on his tape deck. In the middle of his long pauses, the once-married Siras mentions the words “feelings” and “uncontrollable urge”, without delving deep into his sexual orientation.

A public petition later, Siras vs Aligarh University becomes a court case in Allahabad, with Section 377 of decriminalising homosexuals having been amended some time back. The professor is there but he is “bored” and writes English translations of the one book of Marathi poems he had written and even sleeps off inside the courtroom.

When he does win the case, Siras finds no reason to celebrate; no court victory could rinse out the social stigma, that took away his job, tonked him around from apartment to apartment and completely rubbed out his identity as a man. There were traces of poison found in his blood after his sudden death even before the court order revoking his suspension could reach the university.

Writer-editor Apurva Asrani, director Mehta and Bajpayee transform the trials and tribulations of one man into a deeply resonant and unflinchingly human tale. In the way Siras carries himself, his concept about relationships, the buried chambers of pain he opens up at times, the love that surfaces... is beyond any sexual preference. 

Bajpayee has given us some terrific performances in the past, from Satya to Shool to Special 26 to Gangs of Wasseypur, but Aligarh stands taller than everything. The eyes, the body language, the speech, an act so flawless (only that bare body didn’t look 64 years old), you want to hold Siras’s hand and help him overcome the vagaries of time and society he is in.

Just look at that close-up where he is humming Aap ki nazron ne samjha pyaar ke kaabil mujhe, sipping his cheap Indian whisky, and getting lost in the maze of his own memories; his eyes well up, so do yours.

Giving him great company is Rajkummar Rao, who finally helps Indian films get a print journalist right on screen. The discomfort in asking the awkward questions, switching the dictaphone on and off at the right moment, the bullheadedness of a true reporter, the magic in his performance lies in the details. No wonder, the best scenes of Aligarh feature the two actors, playing off each other. And since one of those scenes is set in a restaurant, it reminds you of the Irrfan-Nawaz show from The Lunchbox.

There have been so many photos in the media of celebrities, here and abroad, peeking out of their windows or balconies, checking out or keeping track of the paparazzi outside. Reluctant prisoners of fame that they all are. But the image of Bajpayee’s Siras looking out from his apartment in fear of being attacked and accused, one more time, will haunt forever. Till prisoners of love like him are freed. For good.

Pratim D. Gupta
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