Many a family migrated from one country to the other during the partition of Hindusthan and Pakistan in 1947. Hakim Sayed Hashmutallah’s was one such family. Hakim Sahab’s predecessors settled down in Lahore because the city resembled Delhi, their erstwhile home town. With passage of time, the alumni of prestigious medical institutes, the degree holders, usurped the esteem and stature enjoyed by the guilds of indigenous Hakims and Vaids. The decline was gradual and before Hakim Sahib could utter ’Lillah’, penury had set in.
Those who adapt with changing times are called survivors. Those who refuse to accept fait accompli, fight a losing battle. Hakim Sahib represented the latter kin. Pushed to the boundaries, he fought, wildly...fiercely...
To err is human. Hakim Sahab undoubtedly erred. To forgive is divine. But is it easy to forgive one who is unrepentant and blind to his blunders? Hakim Sahab’s obsession for a successor, a male successor, enforced Suraiya Begum to labour fourteen times. Seven survived - six daughters and the seventh, a transgender, whom Hakim Sahab refused to acknowledge as his own blood. It was much later that a pimp (kanjar Saqa) who made Hakim Sahab realize how lucky he was to father a girl child, her sky-high ’saleability’ in a consumer society!
To have his own blood exhibited in a tawaiaff’s kotha was much more derogatory than killing her in the manger. It was not the first time that Hakim Sahab had bloodied his hands. He had done it before, in the dead of the night, asphyxiating his own son, Saifu, with a plastic bag!! But this time, it was different. Zainab, his eldest daughter and severest critic and opponent, would not witness two murders under the same roof. She retaliates with a vengeance...
Writer, Director and Producer, Shoaib Mansoor’s Bol is not just a movie. It’s an experience which one broods over long after the journey is over. Bol is not merely the story of a tyrannical father (Hakim Sahab) and a rebellious daughter (Zainab), it is the clash of the thesis and the anti-thesis. It is the bloody war between the decadent which refuses to retreat and the present, armed to strike again and again till the enemy is dethroned. A macabre end is inevitable.
When Zainab confesses to her father, “kaiibaar socha hai ya khud mar jaaoon ya aapko maar doon”, she refers to a decayed patriarchy symbolized by Hakim Sahab in flesh and blood. Bol wreaks fire and oozes blood yet its narrative does not recourse to savagery. It weaves seamlessly into its folds the tale of an order chaotic and confused in transition and brings forth the imminence of systemic overhauling as remedial necessity. Bol talks of those little day-to-day irksome deprivations and mindless restrictions which torture the soul and plague the mind resulting in stunted growths and depraved faculties. Bol, in this sense, is expansive as it sweeps over a cragged landscape of social inequities, cultural aberrations, political apathies and economic immediacies.
It will be a half hearted attempt if one speaks of Bol sans an allusion to the monumental performances of Manzar Sehabai as Hakim Sahab, Amr Kashmiri as Saifi and Humaima Malik as Zainab. Sajjad Ali’s “Din pareshaan hai raat bhari hai, zindage hai ke phir bhi pyari hai” is like a lament hanging in the air long after the wail has subsided. On the other hand, “Dil jaaniyan” has a feet-tapping zing to it.
The audience gets a feel of Lahore without stepping a foot on its soil. The “India” hangover is very well crafted in the fabric of the narrative what with Saqa kanjar’s cronie referring to Hakim Sahib as “Indian currency” and Meena (Iman Ali), the tawayaff’s infatuation for Meena Kumari.
Bol is, in one word, a multi-layered magnum opus more to be felt than to be seen. Shoaib Mansoor, by drawing attention to the heart-aching realities of the other side of the border, has done a huge favour by way of shaking us up to the disparities and deformities, not dissimilar to those underscored in the film, which, whether we tend to conveniently overlook or not, are still unfortunately existent in the nooks and crannies of the sub-continent, underneath the dazzling casement of neo-urban razzmatazz.
Though the tumultuous saga closes with a positive note of prosperity after irreparable loss, it also at the same time leaves behind an urgency to cogitate and build opinion for and against the issues raised and much in need of a public debate, if not outcry.
Watch Bol (link available online) to participate in the ‘plebiscite’.