“It is stunning,
captures darkness and light, motion and stasis in accompaniment to music that
is like breathing. Great.”
Watch AAJ RUNG DE on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Md3QkwrkQYY
Reviewer -- Lalita
Pandit Hogan, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse;
her most recent publication is “A Country
Without Borders: Poems and Stories of Kashmir” 2Leaf Press (2017), distributed
by the University of Chicago Press (2018).
Aaj Rung De, a Two Minute
Film (direction, script and concept by Arin Paul) is a succinct capture of a
moment that many can relate to. Cinematic time is built through a series of
brilliant images that pack a lot of feeling and meaning. One of the film’s
striking features is juxtaposition of images. In the foregrounding shot, an
atmosphere of darkness spread over the railway platform is interspersed with lamp-light;
this half-lit scenario is aligned briefly with an almost surreal image of a hearth-fire
somewhere below, with vague outline of a figure in the posture of waiting. The
fire image below, is then, juxtaposed with rising columns of smoke as a lone figure
walks over to the tracks pushing a barrel. The train is, most likely, a coal train,
not an electric train. As time passes, the train that slowed down on one side
of the station before coming to a halt, departs. A fluid transition to a faster
moving train on the opposite track highlights opposite side of the platform,
different in its structure and ambience. It is now in full view: fully lit.
This train too passes, and the movie ends with a clear sense of closure because
semantic unity is achieved through non-diegetic music, namely, strains of a
song by none other than the Sufi poet, musician and scholar, Amir Khusro
(1253-1325): “Aaj Rang Hai Ri Maa.” Though the colors seen in the visuals are
mostly of train tracks and the platform dressed in light and darkness, Khusro’s
poem, at its literal level refers to “rang,” that is, “color.” As a viewer, I,
at first associated “rang” and the refrain of “aaj rang hai” with Holi: colors
of a jubilant festival in India. However, Arin Paul, in a note, said he was not
thinking of Holi, and this film’s visual content, in accompaniment to Amir
Khusro’s famous lyric, is not about Holi.[1]
Though an auteur’s aesthetic intention
cannot subsume the meaning his movie will have for the viewers, in this case,
the auteur is right. My mind had
drifted to how the “aaj rang hai” refrain of Khusro’s poem is used in M. F.
Hussain’s 2004 film, Meenaxi: A Tale of
Three Cities[2]
There is a flamboyant exuberance of color in that segment of Hussain’s film
and the connection to Holi is explicit, as Khusro’s “aaj rang hai” line is
grafted to a typical Bollywood song and dance sequence.[3]
In contrast, Arin Paul’s film steps aside from mainstream cinema and
establishes its own micro-genre of a film
lyric. The conversation with Arin Paul made me realize that in Khusro’s
poem, the word, “rang” does not mean color, even at the literal level. It means
“jubilation” and it is a song celebrating spiritual union with Nizamuddin
Aulia. That is, arrival of the sublime into life and art. The addressee in the
opening line of Khusro’s poem is “mother”: real and symbolic, an attachment
figure as well as life itself, the world, time and the self. Unlike Khusro’s lyric, Arin Paul’s film lyric is
not about a moment of jubilation; it is a
meditation on the impermanence of life, its departures and the arrivals. A poignant,
though meditative, journey motif is implied by the absence of a dwelling, a
city street, a garden, a yard, with the universe being squeezed into a railway
platform personified as someone marking time through the repetitive karma of arriving and departing trains. To
this psychological reality, Arin Paul adds the enchantment of Khusro’s transforming
poetry. The music is un-intrusive and blends with silence. In fact, it is more like silence, like breathing. In
sum, Aaj Rung De is a beautiful film.
Though not expressive of joy, rather somber in its mood, it elicits peace that
comes from acceptance of life. The unhurried brevity of screen time stands in
contrast to the interminable, unendurable lengths of social time in which
dreams remain unfinished, and sleep brings unwelcome wakefulness.
