A genuinely interesting TV serial at last?

We all know that the prime time serials on our television channels revel in the mundane, and remain strangers to subtlety. Whether they take us to the ancient eras of Hanuman or Draupadi, or to present day happenings in Rajasthan or Uttar Pradesh, all serials move at a snail’s pace, replacing speech with bombast.

The dialogues are so trite that you can “speak along”. But what annoys you most is that after every sentence, speech sinks into silence, as the camera dwells on every face to register every single “response”.  The bahu’s protestation of innocence is followed by close ups of wicked saasoomaa, woeful daadi, vengeful nanad, wishy-washy sasurji, cat-on-the-wall devarji and inquisitive maidservant.  The villain’s thunderings are spliced with shots of multiple faces recording stock reactions. There are repetitions galore. Finally, viewing becomes an endurance test for anyone who is not a certified zombie.

Idly surfing channels a few months ago, I stumbled into a serial called Siyaasat on Epic channel, depicting the fairytale romance of Nurjahan and the Mughal Emperor Jehangir. I know! Television serials about the past — on any channel — can be perfectly ghastly.  But based on Indu Sundaresan’s novel Siyaasat had — wonder of wonders — a camera that actually “moved” along at a cogent pace.

Exploring its content a bit more I saw that true to its name, the channel Epic had lots of heritage stuff. Unexciting pageants of historic sites, ruined forts and ancient temples, accompanied by lots of buk-buk-buk by presenters and experts. Mercifully they were spiced with little known details. The channel’s culinary adventures fared somewhat better, featuring a nerdish young man hunting for lost recipes. He joins locals as they cook under the trees, trying to reclaim forgotten techniques and yes, region-specific cultures.  More recently, Mid Wicket Tales has been featuring suave Naseeruddin Shah to take us through the history of Indian cricket. And Javed Akhtar shares his Jaane Pehchaane memories of Bollywood favourites — from comedians to courtesans.

Obviously, the channel is trying to avoid run-of-the-mill shows, and to develop its own identity,  thematic content and lighting style. But the problem remains. How to minimise verbal chatter and make the visuals speak? For example, even the commissioned song clip fillers, refreshing in themselves, continue to be mismatched with pedestrian landscapes.

But Epic has a genuine success in its new narrative series, retelling stories from Rabindranath Tagore’s oeuvre. A challenge that director Anurag Basu has met head on.  Some of them like Chokher Bali have been filmed quite recently. And can we forget how Balraj Sahni reached tragic dimensions in the evergreen Kabuliwala? Finally, who can compete with Satyajit Ray’s classic  Charulata?  But Basu’s courage and creativity have produced a confident series marked by sensitivity and style.

True, sometimes the sentimentality is overt, but isn’t Bangla culture heavy with sentiment? The sets are certainly prettified, props hand-picked from some upmarket craft bazaar, and sarees from an ethnic boutique. But the overall aesthetics is so right that this deliberate stylisation is quite acceptable. Western notes and Indian trills crisscross in the backscore to capture the impulse of Rabindra Sangeet. Word, visual and sound are planned to allow for much to be said with glance, gesture and silence.

What makes the serial is the lighting, so canny that it becomes both narrator and character. In an amber chiaroscuro of a bygone era it details a range of moods from the stark to the tender. Basu has achieved a fine balance between the populist and the elite. I  hope this is the start of a new genre which does not insult viewer intelligence.

The author is a playwright, theatre director, musician and journalist writing on the performing arts, cinema and literature