Why India’s Oscar entry matters in the age of amnesia

The premiere of Neeraj Ghaywan’s ‘Homebound’ felt like being inside an Instagram scroll. The film had just been selected as India’s national submission to the Academy Awards. After its shiny world premiere at Cannes, it was being screened for guests in Juhu. People had turned out. It was hard to keep your eyes from resting too long on all of the very familiar, very-online faces.Two hours later, that feeling had changed into something like its reverse. The opposite of the content scroll – the ever-advancing feed of new information and images – is the act of pausing to remember.There are plenty of reasons ‘Homebound’ is so interesting. Many of them I’d known in advance: its origins in a news photo from 2020, and a later piece of reportage about that photo; that it came to be produced by Karan Johar, the poster-boy of louche Bollywood glamour and big-city liberalism, who put a cast of dewy young stars to work at portraying the hard lives of working-class India. That it somehow squeezed through the Censor Board, with only some forced cuts, to become India’s official entry to the Oscars.The film is affecting, though, not because of its blockbuster treatment, but because it simply remembers – and lets us remember – in a way that feels increasingly rare. Its story first appeared in the form of a news photograph in May of 2020, in the middle of India’s first pandemic lockdown. By the side of the highway, a man cradles his friend’s head in his lap. The friend is sick, lying unconscious on the bare ground, and the young man is visibly bewildered. The two men, both in their early twenties, were Mohammad Saiyub and Amrit Kumar, one a Muslim and the other a Dalit Hindu.The image of their tender, stricken situation went viral. It was an intimate view of what many of us were watching from an emotional distance; the huge, forced exodus of working-class Indians out of cities, where their workplaces had been shuttered, onto the highways to try and find a way home. It drove home the private crises taking place within the masses of people on the move. It was also a rebuke to the script of Hindu-Muslim conflict that ran on endless repeat in the Indian media (which had already tried to report the pandemic’s outbreak as a conspiracy: “Corona Jihad”).Those bewildering early weeks of Covid, and the mass-exodus of Indians from urban centers, seemed like events we would never forget. Many events in those years felt that way. Among privileged Indians, though, the memory of lockdown has dwindled into hazy, private reminiscences: about sleeping in late, and listening to podcasts while you swept your own floors.Covid as a national event – a collective crisis we all witnessed or experienced in one way or another – seems suppressed from collective memory. In March and April of 2022, for instance, we had experienced a near-unravelling of society during the second wave: people falling sick, with no route left to a hospital bed or any medical care. For a period, there was no way to meet a specialist, no way to fill a prescription, no oxygen to bring home; there were only dozens of hopeless phone numbers and registries. It was a traumatic event on a national scale.Yet this summer, the five-year anniversary of the first lockdown passed by us in eerie silence, without remark or remembrance. ‘Homebound’, arriving now, at the end of monsoon, is like a rush of oxygen to the brain. The act of remembering feels like an exceptional – in the sense of rare – phenomenon in our present lives. The twin engines of social media and 24×7 news drive our attention continuously to the present and the new. Breaking news used to reach us once or twice a day, in the morning paper or evening broadcast; now it arrives every minute of the day.As an asset to a democratic society, breaking news is highly overrated. It serves very little purpose to have news and information come at us without pause; without time to understand it, or even to properly feel anything about it. What is underrated is the opposite of breaking news: memory. But it’s so hard to sustain a thought nowadays. How do we sustain our interest in what mattered to us five years, five hours ago or even five minutes ago? We’re too busy being informed about everything to care about anything.Technology and media manufacture amnesia about even the largest, most destabilising events we’ve lived through together. They suppress collective memory, as if by design. Instead, we argue viciously about history and the ancient past. The political crises of 500 years ago are dragged into our view again and again, while the crises of five years disappear. The courage to reverse that is radical, even when it’s hidden behind the bright lights of a big premiere.Karnad is an award-winning author Go to Source