Aachar & Co is a small-budget feel-good movie set in Bangalore in the 1960s. From the trailer, it seemed like the coming-of-age story of a girl and her family of 10 siblings.
It promised fun and nostalgia, especially for those of us who grew up in families like this, and I knew I’d watch it just for the aesthetics and nostalgia if nothing else.
Jayanagar And Me
I spent a large part of my childhood in the Bangalore neighborhood of Jayanagar. It was ‘The first planned layout in Bangalore’ designed by the great Sir M Vishweshwarayya, the former Dewan of Mysore State, and named after Sri Jayachamarajendra Wodeyar, the Maharaja of Mysore.
Of course, when you live there, that doesn’t matter so much; it wasn’t like Sir MV was hanging around every evening at Madhavan Park high-fiving us for living there. But we had our own vibe. We were definitely cooler than Basavanagudi, more grounded than Rajajinagar, and our transplants spoke better Kannada than the Iyengars of Malleshwaram.
One half of my family was extremely grounded in Jayanagar. We were a large clan - our Whatsapp group today has 60 people in it, and that’s not counting all the cousins too cool to join it and the section that quit in protest after a family feud (and didn’t join back after peace had been called). Plus there were other relatives who would come to stay with us from out of town, because they were studying at National College or NMKRV. We descended on Lalbagh every Sunday (because Saturdays were half-days… remember?), and when we went out to eat at Pavitra, it was a big occasion. Hanuma Jayanti meant everyone turned up to Ragigudda to offer Hanuman a vadamaalai, and every evening, we’d go to the Gangamma temple or the Rayar Matha (because our neighbors did) or the Jain temple (again, because our neighbors did, and because we’d have chaat on the way back).
My great-grandparents’ generation had lost our ancestral lands in famine. My grandparents’ generation grew up amid poverty and polio, and moved all over South India (actually even as far out as Karachi) looking for jobs. One of them finally struck gold working for HAL in Bangalore during WW2, manufacturing planes for the Royal Air Force (or something else, correct me if I’m wrong), and called all his brothers, sisters, cousins and any straggling family friends who dropped by for a meal to join him. Most settled down with some or the other stable job, usually some sort of factory work. Some others lived off the largesse of their relatives, hoping their kids would do better. From a lower-middle-class family not knowing where our next meal was coming from, we went to being a lower-middle-class family doing what we all could to give the next generation a better start.
So my family albums are replete with large groups of children all dressed in the same fabric that was bought by the yard from Chickpet and sewn into clothes at home, the girls with long braided hair, and the boys with oiled, side-parted combed hair. Our weddings were replete with the same gift wrap that was pink and yellow striped.
In other words, I’m exactly the target audience for this movie.
A few bizarrities in the movie
Aachar & Co is about the protagonist, Suma, go from being an irresponsible girl to becoming the family matriarch. Along the way, there are deaths, domestic abuse, and other disagreements, but we never dwell for more than a moment on any of them. It goes through a decade at a breakneck pace, giving us all the happy ending we knew was coming.
Several things screamed out as bizarre. There are siblings who get married and move away, and they never show up again, for one thing (long train journeys to attend weddings and funerals were all the rage back in the day). There are no uncles and aunts stepping in when the father passes away… it’s almost like both the mother and father are single kids, which would have been the utmost rarity in that era.
Also, in that era, they would have been considered quite well-off, so it doesn’t quite ring true where they live and how they live. Irrespective, it’s also odd that a family of that milieu would go to the Taj for a celebratory dinner. Even in my parents’ generation, to celebrate a promotion, you’d probably do a Sathyanarayana Pooja at home and host a feast for your friends and family.
And midway through the movie, Suma’s big issue is she is 27 and her family hasn’t found her a good bridegroom and got her married, and instead her brother is telling her to go find a job and contribute to the family.
I found this incredibly bizarre. First of all, being a working woman wasn’t considered to be conflicting with getting married. They weren’t an either-or proposition, often. When I think of that generation of women in my family, everyone worked for money one way or another. Having a string of children necessitated that the work would be from home or flexible, but otherwise, we had our spinster aunt who worked as a teacher, and another who was a government officer. I had great-aunts who tailored clothes, sold pickles and various sundried vegetables, tutored children, bathed newborns (essentially postpartum doula work), and even taught cooking to the new brides of celebrities for money, while managing 3-5 kids and playing household politics.
The thing that’s weird here is conflating elite attitudes (“women in our house don’t work because we can provide enough”) with a working class family that values education. That one thing made me wonder, had the writers of this movie lived in this milieu at all?
Besides, this is a milieu where people plan their children’s weddings the moment they come of age. Suma’s father passing away doesn’t mean her mother wouldn’t be actively looking to get her married. Sure, they explain it away with a throwaway “you’ve been rejecting everyone”, but that simply doesn’t ring true in the context of the movie.
But the oddest here is the father pressuring his sons to study engineering and become a government engineer like him. 1960 was like 13 years after independence. We had a literacy rate of 12% at independence. Precious few went to school at all, even in cities, and even fewer took up higher education. Being educated at all was hard. I mean, even if BM Sreenivasaiah was your close personal friend, you didn’t care that much about engineering. Engineering wasn’t even that prestigious back then. One uncle in the 70s got a diploma in engineering, and the best he could hope for outside of a government job was working on mechanical tooling at a factory. Not a bad job, but it was considered middling. Also, I doubt you needed an engineering degree at that point to be a government engineer.
It might have made more sense to pressure your children to qualify in the exams for the administrative services. Or if the dad character was a doctor, to pressure his kids to continue the family clinic or whatever. Now those were real prestigious jobs. Engineers back then only threw up images of sweaty men in khaki or blue workshop uniforms, moving heavy machinery. Even if your father was a respected engineer, he’d probably prefer his kids get a BA from National College and get a respectable government job.
But this undue focus on engineering made me think some millennial interests were at hand, and I dug further.
Milennial themes disguised as a period piece
I was watching Outlander, and it struck me that the protagonist, despite being an army nurse from 1945 transported back to the 1700s, had ideals that were very like the target audience from 2020. Aachar & Co suffers from the same issue.
The writers of the movie are Kanan Gill and Sindhu Sreenivasa Murthy. I don’t know much about Sindhu, but her credits seem to show she plays the homely friend to any Bangalorean character in indie movies, so I assume she’s from the city. Kanan Gill seems to have grown up in Bangalore, but I don’t consider studying in FAPS (Frank Anthony Public School, before you get any ideas) qualification to write about 60s Jayanagar… if anything, it’s a disqualification.
Kanan Gill’s standup, and Indian English standup comedy in general is super not grounded in anything, quite unlike American standup. Watch someone like Taylor Tomlinson or Fortune Feimster, or Raju Srivastav or Gangavathi Pranesh, and you get such a strong sense of time, place and identity. You don’t get relatability based in rootedness from Indian English standup comics. It’s just the same observations about contemporary life viewed with a values-imported-from-Netflix lens.
Given that, it’s not at all surprising that the core of the movie turns out to be a millennial’s idea of what the 60s was like. “My dad wants me to do engineering” is a struggle of 90s kids in an emergent economy where software was the safest way to success if you had no connections, NOT of an extremely connected 60s youth. “We’re making the patriarchy into a matriarchy” is not really a win for a post-independence era family. Keep in mind a lot of Indians died as soldiers in WW2, fighting for the Allies, and women-led families weren’t uncommon.
“We’re poorer but we’re wiser and happier” doesn’t even ring true in the context of the movie, because the older, off-screen siblings are all in positions that would make them, and by extension, Suma, well-off enough that weddings would not have to drop in quality as is shown in the movie.
And, as someone who had a great-great-aunt who left an abusive husband with three kids in tow and moved to Jayanagar to live with the rest of us, it doesn’t even feel like the domestic abuse storyline is the punch it thinks it is.
Am I just being nitpicky here? In a sense, but why do you set a movie in a particular milieu when you take nothing from it other than how people dress? In that way, this movie is better than Braveheart, because apparently that movie didn’t even get the clothing right.
But seriously, this movie could be set in rural Punjab. Or some fancy Delhi neighborhood in the 80s. Or a Gujarati household, like in Kyunki Saas. That doesn’t mean it has universal appeal though, like Kantara. It would have felt just as bizarre and inauthentic in all those settings.
That’s because the themes are mongrel themes. You take a very 2000s concern like studying engineering to not disappoint your dad, a generic ‘women in the past didn’t have as many opportunities’ concern, and another ‘I want to act but I also need to feed my family’ eternal concern and… you _could_ make them authentic enough, but not being familiar with the landscape and not bothering to really research or incorporate it beyond the aesthetics is going to lead to an inauthentic film that comes to Amazon Prime within a few weeks of release.
One thing I do wonder is why was this movie set in the 60s? Why not the 40s? Or the 80s, even? Why, straight up set it in the 90s and it wouldn’t change a thing (except maybe how horrible the ‘92 riots were).
What they could have done
They don’t even do any justice to the setting. There aren’t any references to any landmarks other than a shot or two of Ashoka Pillar. Like… throw a reference to the newly-built 4th block shopping complex. Show them praying at Ragigudda or Bull Temple for Suma to get married. Do a tie-up with Sreenivasa Brahmins Bakery and show the characters eating nippat there, and then benne gulkand a few yards down DVG road. Show us an old double-decker red bus or two, and have a Rajinikanth lookalike be selling tickets, after all Rajinikanth worked out of the Jayanagar bus depot in the 60s. Heck, he even visited the depot recently, don’t you think he would have put out a tweet if the producers had reached out to him (Given it’s Puneet Rajkumar productions, no lightweight). God, it’s like they weren’t even trying.
Literally the only reason I heard of this movie was because the comedian Sonu Venugopal, who has a very short role in the movie, was promoting it on her Instagram. I think this would have worked better if she was on there as a writer. Her standup is way more grounded than Kanan Gill’s for sure. Why not actually hire people from a more grounded setting with strong family connections and memories so you actually know how to depict such a movie? They’d actually promote it.
Another thing that was super annoying to me was the name. Aachaar is a name suffix that means ‘teacher’, not ‘pickle’. Governor-General C Rajagopalachari’s name doesn’t mean ‘Krishna of the spicy pickle’. So the whole pickle theme in the imagery, trailers and everything else was quite unnecessary, especially since pickles aren’t even a thing for most of the movie. Heck, Suma selling pickles and making her own money feels like one of those out-of-left-field things in the context of the movie. Because… it’s like she’s a horrible person in every way, but has this one talent that isn’t even like a plot driver or anything. If you had that whole pickle angle going in the background, like a Mistress Of Spices thing where you show her emotions and transitions through the pickles she makes, at least that would have tied the whole thing together.
How would I approach the same theme?
Okay, so the theme is about a girl growing into a woman without her dreams of marriage being fulfilled, right?
Well, I have one of those stories in my own family.
My great-aunt Radha was one of eight siblings. She had a pretty normal life to begin with, but as she approached her late teens, she had an accident that left her with only one working leg.
Typically, girls in that era studied upto Sixth Form (education between 16 and 18 years old, so high school) unless family compunctions demanded otherwise. Beyond that, you were expected to learn how to run a household, or learn a trade from the women around you while you waited to get married. Usually because higher education cost money. But Radha’s parents realized marriage was not in her future and sent her to teachers’ training.
Soon, she became a teacher at the famous Home School in Basavanagudi, and would walk the whole way from her brother’s house in Jayanagar with colleagues from the neighborhood. But after a bad fall, she couldn’t do stairs anymore, and had to stop working as a teacher.
While she looked for other employment, she had to listen to taunts from her sisters-in-law who were worried she’d be a burden on them, given they were all already in a resource-starved setting despite everyone working themselves to the bone. She was at the receiving end of a lot of pity, which she didn’t care for.
She would watch her nieces and nephews and was like a third parent to them (well, in that era, uncles and aunts were much closer than now). She literally raised all the kids in the family. But, she felt this wasn’t enough and needed to pull her weight.
Next door, a family from Rajasthan moved in. They were carpenters and other tradesmen. They only spoke their dialect of Rajasthani, and their children were struggling at school. Radha would call them over and try teaching them the same way she taught her nieces and nephews.
It didn’t work. The kids weren’t used to paying attention in class and learning, and besides, Radha barely knew a few words of Hindi. But the parents noticed, and they requested her to persist.
With a combination of patience, rote-learning and some sharp glares and painful flicks (hey it was the 70s), somehow Radha got those kids to learn basic maths, English and Kannada, apart from being able to recite several verses from the Vishnu Sahasranamam and sing several Kannada and Tamil folk songs. They were able to learn better at school, make friends, and weren’t getting up to no good all evening.
Seeing this, others sent their kids to her too, and she managed to get some miracles going.
Now in the movie version of her life, this is how she’d find success, like a weird Indian version of Dangerous Minds or Freedom Writers.
But in real life, Radha soon found a job in the accounting department of a factory and stopped tutoring as much. Her health too had ups and downs. But she managed to make a nice packet of money, invest it wisely, and even bought a small house from which she earned rental income. She led a pretty nice life, lot of regard in the community, and her nieces and nephews would always call her first when they had any news to share. She retired, and moved on to raising her grand-nieces and grand-nephews, getting all of us to be reading and writing in 3 languages at 3 years old, and telling us stories from the epics as well as old family stories (which somehow have turned out to be quite unreliable on cross-checking). She lived to be past 90 and was sharp as a tack the whole time.
Which sounds normal and boring… but the climactic end of the movie would be this one episode - Radha’s niece was having a hard time in her marriage. She didn’t want to leave, but staying was hard. She didn’t have a career, her father was retired, and her siblings were still in college. She felt like she had no options.
Radha stepped in and said “If you want to leave, you have the rental income from my house, all for you, as long as you need. I can make do on my pension for a little.”
Going from being made to feel like a burden to shouldering responsibility for the ones in the family with the least options - now that’s an amazing female-centric story.
And this one will definitely have Rajinikanth (he played cricket with one of my uncles). It will have a lot of the 4th block shopping complex (we went there every evening), and it will have Ragigudda (including a hilarious family story where one of my more rotund uncles slipped and rolled down the long, long flight of stairs cut into the hillside, and it took several people to rescue him due to the momentum he gained).
Yeah, anyone want to pay me to write this?