Anusha Rizvi’s The Great Shamsuddin Family is billed as a comedy. So why does it leave you unsettled?
Dolly Ahluwalia (Asiya) and Farida Jalal (Akko) in a still from the movie. Set within one house, and one day, the film maps how personal choices—marriage, migration, belief—are influenced by a wider climate of suspicion.
If you wish to observe, all at once, the anxieties, concerns, and hopes of a Muslim family—its struggle between tradition and modernity, its desire to forge new relationships while holding on to its identity—then you must watch Anusha Rizvi’s film The Great Shamsuddin Family.
This film tells the story of the complex relationships within a Hindustani Muslim household. It also explores how the threads of their attachment to this land are becoming fragile, yet how they continue to clutch them.
The film captures with great subtlety the uncertainty that has seeped into the everyday lives of Indian Muslims. This uncertainty is not of their own making. It has lodged within them a particular kind of unease—one that is often difficult for non-Muslims, especially Hindus, to comprehend. Muslims have grown accustomed to living with it. Yet it has not extinguished their desire for life.
In ordinary language, Rizvi’s film could be called a comedy or a family drama. Indeed, it is the story of a family—one with which most Muslims will feel an immediate sense of connection. But it is essential viewing for Hindus, especially for many of whom Muslims exist only as rumours.
The story unfolds over the course of a single day in the home of a single, divorced, fairly well-educated Muslim woman living alone. We discover very early in the film that she is a writer, and that her decision to move out of India is not driven only by the prospect of a better pay packet; it also has something to do with her vocation.
The camera moves mostly through different corners of the house. This young Muslim woman, Bani—played superbly by Kritika Kamra —is trying to find work in America. She sits down to prepare a proposal she must send off within hours. But, as we soon realise, she will not be able to complete it. Phone calls and the doorbell do not allow her to concentrate on her writing. One by one, in strange and unexpected ways, her friends, her cousins, her mother, and her aunts descend upon her home and ask her to help them find a way out of crises they have created through their own decisions.
The story has been woven deftly. Bani’s work on her proposal is interrupted by a phone call from her mother, who has decided to go on Umrah with her sisters and sister-in-law. Their sudden yearning for Makkah intrigues Bani, since she has not seen them even performing namaz regularly. Do you need to be a devout believer to be able to go to Makkah?
Crises upon crises
Then arrives her sister, whose divorce has been finalised, and who wants Bani’s help in depositing the cash she has received as mehr from her divorced husband. She has illegally withdrawn the same amount from her mother’s account to invest in a business project conceived by a friend who is now not taking her calls. Now she is in a hurry to deposit this cash so that her mother does not find out that her account was emptied by her. Bani is shocked to learn that her sister has forged her mother’s signature to withdraw the cash and invest it in what appears to be a shady deal. But she must be helped, even if Bani cannot tolerate her naivety.
Then comes the mother, Asiya (Dolly Ahluwalia) and her sister Akko (Farida Jalal), followed by their sister-in-law, the women preparing to go for Umrah. They banter with each other, badmouth absent relatives. Are they traditional or modern, or half-traditional and half-modern?
The question of being modern arises again with the entry of a seemingly eccentric academic friend, Amitav (Purab Kohli), and his student Latika (Joyeeta Dutta), who is besotted with him, mesmerised by his knowledge. They are self-assured about their liberalism, but we soon discover that they carry the same ideas about Muslims as “non-liberal” Hindus do, when the “liberal” student asks Bani if she was given “TT”. What TT means is left for the audience to decipher.
And finally comes the ultimate crisis moment, when Bani’s cousin Zohaib (Nishank Verma) arrives with a woman who is Hindu. They are planning to marry, but the marriage cannot be solemnised because the marriage registrar has suffered a heart attack. One immediately realises that the censor has played mischief here, for the desperation on the faces of the couple—who want to be married, but “cannot get married”—suggests that it is something else from which they are seeking safety.
They have come to Bani’s house seeking security and a way out. Everyone knows they are playing with fire, but love, after all, remains love.
The absent patriarch
The one person who might resolve these entanglements is Tousif (Anup Soni), the husband of the eldest sister Humaira (Juhi Babbar Soni). The eldest jamai is the man all Indian households look up to when they face a problem. He is stuck in a traffic jam between Gurgaon and Delhi.
As they wait for him, Humaira receives news that a car has been set on fire somewhere on the Gurgaon–Delhi road. He is not responding to her calls. This news generates another wave of anxiety and tension—one that Muslims understand better than anyone else. But the older women should not get a scent of it. In the midst of this tension, these elderly women of the Shamsuddin family agree to the wedding.
Everyone has taken refuge with Bani, expecting her to rescue them from their crises. But she has a crisis of her own. Who understands her predicament? Why does she want to go to America? This question hangs in the air throughout the film.
The weight of wanting to leave
Completely unaware of her unease, her mother and aunts are busy preparing for Umrah (voluntary Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca), and then fretting over the sin of the family’s boy marrying a Hindu girl. The question of why Bani wants to leave keeps resurfacing. Ultimately, Bani fails to complete her proposal.
Her sister Humaira is unhappy with Bani’s decision to go to America. But while waiting for her husband to arrive, when she reads the news of a car being set ablaze, she and Bani are gripped by the fear of some calamity. Muslims understand this fear very well. But will Hindus be able to appreciate their anxiety?
In this moment of fear and tension, Humaira—who did not like the idea of her sister leaving India—tells Bani that she should complete her application for America.
This is a moment when it feels as though the film could end. But the film moves forward. In the midst of wedding songs and preparations, Tousif arrives. The expression on Humaira’s face when she sees him is among the most memorable images in the film.
Muslim women, recognisably so
The elderly women voice their prejudices without hesitation. In their mutual clashes and bickering, every Muslim will recognise their own home. These women love their daughters while remaining sceptical of their ways of living. The younger generation of Muslim women—who argue with their elders, are irritated with them, and then find ways to live alongside them—are not only Muslim women; they are Muslim women very recognisably so.
This film is the story of Muslims struggling with the uncertainty of their existence while holding fast to their identity and their confidence in their claim upon this homeland—without portraying themselves as victims.
Humour is used with abandon in the film, but it is never frivolous. The film unfolds through a series of coincidences, yet all of them feel believable. Every performance is as precise as the film itself. Each character emerges with distinct clarity.
As noted earlier, this is a film in which nearly everything unfolds under one roof. Yet it never loses its grip. The film resists the usual Muslim motifs that cinema so often relies upon and treats these Muslim women as “normal” human beings. The costumes and dialogues achieve this with great finesse.
A happy ending?
I could see faces smiling as the film unfolded, and yet there was tension in the air. The film ends on an apparently happy note: elders overcome their reservations about interfaith marriage; the issue of the cash is resolved; Tousif returns home safely; the marriage finally takes place—music and bonhomie all around.
And circumstances make it impossible for Bani to complete her proposal for her American job. Is her intended—or forcible—stay in India the real happy ending of the story? Is this what all the interruptions to her work were conspiring towards?
As said at the beginning, this is a film that every Muslim household can relate to. But it is also a film that all Hindus must watch if they wish to understand Muslim lives—to see them in all their humanness, with all their flaws and desires and conflicts and fears and hopes and helplessness and tenacity.
So, The Great Shamsuddin Family is a gift to Hindus from Anusha Rizvi, wrapped in love: they can feel this large heart, quivering with foreboding and pulsating with desire for life.
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