Newton: A lazy satire with an activist subtext

In 1988, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s debut novel English, August was published and drew a satirical portrait of the state apparatus in the fictional town of Madna located somewhere in the hinterland of undivided Madhya Pradesh. Seen through the eyes of a city slicker and greenhorn bureaucrat Agastya Sen, an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) probationer, the book caricatured the labyrinths of Babudom in mofussil India for the consumption of the English reading class of metropolitan India. It had a strange exotic quality, a type of appeal that an assembly line of small town plots exploring the hinterland on Hindi screen have sought in recent years for the consumption of cineplex India. Amit V Masurkar’s Newton is another lazy offering in interpreting hinterland India, though it will find its takers in people who rely on cinematic narratives to access those parts of the country and reinforce thoughts they already have.

Given that an account of the banal efficiency of the Election Commission of India administered procedural democracy on polling day has rarely made its way to the Indian screen, Masurkar falls for the melodramatic aberrations of the electoral process in the Naxal violence-hit Dandakaranya forests of Chhattisgarh in central India. What could have been a chance to make an election day film India never had, he fritters away the opportunity in satirising the evident problems in administering the electoral process in a region where Naxalism poses a deadly threat to state processes, including elections. Even in the peculiarity of the case, the political satire would have worked if Masurkar hadn’t revealed where his heart lies – he ends up throwing enough hints about it.

Newton Kumar (played by Rajkummar Rao), the quirkily named twenty-something upper division clerk in a district collector’s office, is entrusted with the responsibility of Presiding Officer for a remote 76 voter-booth in Dandakaranya. With the zeal of a type of young recruits to state bureaucracy (though he is quite low in hierarchy compared with the higher civil services), a section called Mad (making-a-difference) brigade in small towns, Newton is a stickler for the rulebook in following his administrative brief on conduct of election in the violence-prone booth. He has his turf battles for demarcation of administrative and security powers with Assistant Commandant Aatma Singh (played by Pankaj Tripathi). Being the protagonist, obviously, Newton has been invested with the moral capital of the film – a dangerous thing for a political satire to do.

Newton’s fetish for procedure may remind people of the youthful zeal with which a section of recruits to Babudom seek to leave their mark on their initial postings-often bordering on quixotic naivete, though earning brownie points in the folklore of local iconography, media narratives and in cinematic tales, of course. To its credit, the film has a scene in which an election official, played by Sanjay Mishra in a guest appearance, puts that in perspective – “By being honest, you are doing nothing extraordinary, that’s expected of you” (read – you are paid a salary for it too).

However, while showing his journey and ordeals in conducting an election at a booth in a forest sparsely inhabited by tribals, the film gets trapped in the blinkers of clichéd activism. You have Malko Netam, a school teacher on election duty (played by Anjali Patil), reasoning that Maoists have written threatening slogans on houses because villages were burnt, while the presiding officer has no question like – why do they need to come with such armed protection to conduct polls? Or why Maoists have called for a boycott of the polls? How security forces manage to live under such conditions of fear of Maoist violence in dense forests? Five years ago, IAS officer, and then Sukma district collector in Chhattisgarh, Alex Paul Menon, perhaps realised the merit in understanding the other side of the narrative when despite all his efforts to reach out to tribals, he was abducted and kept in captivity by Naxals after killing his two security guards.

Just as lazy journalism, the film gets lazy with a default mode of potshots at the state in the name of satire and assuming an innate superiority of a set of well-meaning concerns over the demands of territorial state and security in the insurgency-hit regions of third world democracies. Its homilies about electorate’s indifference rooted in elections failing to bring substantive change in the lives of tribals could be true for any section of people anywhere expecting electoral democracy to bring radical transformation. The promise of the system has always been that of an incremental change, political representatives seen as facilitators of that gradualism.

Pankaj Tripathi, playing the Assistant Commandant Atma Singh, outshines the cast of the film as he gets the man-of-world mannerisms of an insurgency-hardened paramilitary officer right with necessary nuances. This is something that Rajkummar Rao, despite visibly earnest efforts, fails to do that – perhaps let down by poor detailing in the script. Rao comes across as too sophisticated for an upper division clerk working in Chhattisgarh (without resorting to stereotypes) – his mannerisms and voice isn’t typically conveying the social profile of his character, can only be an exception to it. Having most of the funniest lines in the film, Raghubir Yadav (playing a low-ranking election official Loknath Singh) does his job with trademark ease.

In its earlier part, the film’s reconstruction of small-town Chhattisgarh suffers from spells of unimaginative handling. Families in small towns are as unlikely to fight over marriage proposals in public transport (as Newton and his parents do) as they are in Delhi Metro. Melodrama could have been attempted without loss of social authenticity.

In evoking empathy for tribals inhabiting remote forests, the film wears its concerns on its narrative quite well in parts but in demonising the state apparatus, and in being devoid of the subtext of internal security challenges, it ends up being visual polemics draped in satire. If India needed an election day movie, it can wait longer. Newton, with the exceptionalism of India’s electoral experience in an insurgency-hit area, can’t be an introduction to a day in the life of an average Indian voter. In the abnormalities of its case, well-meaning, as it may be, Newton isn’t a cinematic primer for our lived elections but a contentious, and hence coloured, chapter for distress-specialists.