Dr Ruchi Kher Jaggi, PhD
Director, SIMC Pune
There are stories and then there are stories behind those stories! For me, watching Matar Paneer as part of the Symbiosis Film Festival was led primarily by the story behind the film that I had heard from my colleague. This was a story that had me from the start: how an untrained filmmaker who submitted this film did not even have an online account to pay for the registration and how one of my colleagues actually had to negotiate with the accounts team to ensure an alternative instead, and then how the film finally got registered! This was when I had just seen the poster, which had already piqued my interest. But it was the story about how the film was made, who made the film, how people didn’t understand what they were doing at the location where they were shooting, not finding anybody to fund the film to finding, like, a local producer, pooling in some resources, and then finally making a film and then having the determination to send it to a film festival. And then I learnt that out of the 130 films submitted to our festival, only 16 were curated by the jury and selection committee and that Matar Paneer had made it onto that list. Later, to be told that it had also won one of the prizes was remarkable. The recipe was already very enticing!
I think this backstory was the very reason why I was really looking forward to watching this film. And I must say that the way this film came to me as something I was looking forward to watching, and then the actual story of the film had so much in common. I think in this case, real life somewhere won over the film, right! The filmmaker’s registration came through, the film came to the festival, and then the jury also awarded the film. In the film’s story, the most delightful meal that the children get together to cook, for which they are driven, and which is the metaphor for so much more in life, they never got to taste. I was rooting for the children with all my heart. They didn’t get the victory I hoped for, but in the end, the filmmaker did.
I do not know if I can review the film justifiably and if there is anything on the craft and technique that I want to reflect on. This write-up transcends that conversation. The metaphor of Matar Paneer stands for many things. If you look at it from different points of view, it can read as aspiration or desire. In that sense, you could read it as a form of mobility, a kind of movement through a hierarchy that becomes visible.
What felt very delightful was that even after the three children came together to cook that wonderful dish (the imagery they had seen on television had already pulled them in), the larger narrative of the place they live in, where this dish was something rich people served to their guests, gave it a kind of metaphorical aspirational value. It stood for effort, for possibility, and for something you had to truly work hard to achieve. So when something carries that much value, when both the object and the effort behind it hold so much meaning, it matters how you finally experience it. Instead of rushing through it, they paused. They chose a spot where all of them could sit together. They wished to create a small shared moment, an environment where they could respect their effort, enjoy what it had led to, and talk about it while they relished it.
It is so heartening to see how every younger generation creates their own ideas of aspiration and upward mobility, as compared to the generation preceding them. What it means to them, and therefore, what they are willing to do for it is another dimension of resilience and human spirit. We continue to look for bigger stories and socio-economic narratives to understand what that means. And then you find such a small story where the human spirit embodies itself in the form of a culinary delight!
Eventually, from the point of view of the film, when the three children are unable to eat what they had cooked with so much effort, struggle, and emotion, it becomes deeply painful. It is genuinely heartbreaking. In that moment, the scene comes to stand for everything that is denied to them, for the daily injustices that shape their lives. All of that lands, and it stays with you.
For me, what will also stay is the response to a question that was asked to the writer and director of this film. One of the students (in all earnestness) asked him to deconstruct the scene where the dish holding the Matar Paneer falls to the ground (which is the climax of the film) through the lens of the silliness of childhood or, more philosophically, as the futility of life. But what will stay with me is the response of the filmmaker. And he said, “Well, you try to do something. You make an attempt. You fail. And then you make another attempt, but it does not happen! Things do not work out so easily. So, you just try again.” The profound simplicity of his response eventually became the whole film for me. The story before I watched the film and the story after I watched the film is the story of the film for me.
So I do not know if this is a review or even a view. It is my experience of what I watched – from why I wanted to watch it to after I watched it. And yet, the bittersweet ending kept giving me a heavy feeling till the storyteller made it sound like the simplest way in which one has to look at the idea of life or maybe life itself.