Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources, 2013. 1 DVD (74 min.) US$245.00, Institutional Use; US$24.95, Personal Use. In English and Hindi with English subtitles. URL: http://www.der.org/films/mallamall.html
Lalita Krishna’s documentary Mallamal guides us through that classic showdown: “Old India” versus “New India.” On the one hand are the 5000-odd vendors of the 250-year-old KR Puram street market (called sandi) in Bangalore that cater mainly to the majority poor, while on the other hand are a group of whip-smart consultants and collaborators who wish to build malls and retail stores all over the city for the aspirational and booming middle class. Will KR Puram street market be able to hold out much longer against the government injunction to vacate their lands? The documentary is a riveting look at two competing business and cultural models.
In his well-regarded book Provincializing Europe (Princeton University Press, 2000) social scientist Dipesh Chakravarty used the image of “time-knots” as a metaphor for the post-colonial condition: an illustration of an India that cannot be understood as a nation moving in a temporally linear, constantly juggernauting manner. Krishna’s film is full of these knots. We might be in a department store, a sleek design firm, or an air-conditioned car in one moment and then transported to a centuries-old farmers’ market, a rustic, low-income home, or inside a small grocery store in the next scene. Each of these locations and the people in them seem to be as “Indian” as the next. The documentary captures this constant ambiguity well—the camerawork is fluid and the fast intercutting effective because of the film’s back-and-forth storytelling style. The music is somewhat predictable: hip and fast-paced for the modernization segments, and more local-classical for the scenes covering the old markets and “traditional” themes. While somewhat clichéd, the trope does work.
Three strong, persuasive characters guide us through the documentary. Yele Srinivas is an articulate, confident street-store merchant advocating for his many hundred colleagues who are threatened by the government’s plans to seize their commercial land. Representing the capitalist dream is Anand Arumigam, a young, ambitious, MBA degree-holder who partners with a Canadian retail design firm Perennial and wishes to get bullish on the Indian retail market. He shares with us their aspirations to transform shopping in India into a sleek, convenient, air-conditioned experience. Nandini Sethuraman, recently returned from Canada, is an urbane, senior retail manager with a fondness for malls and cooking foreign dishes. Through her character we get a glimpse into the lifestyle of the successful executive who lacks little in material and Western-style comforts. At the same time, Nandini seems well-embedded in all of the disparate worlds around her—equally at ease planning elaborate dinner parties at her gated residential enclave, and in rolling down the window of her chauffeured car to give packets of biscuits to beggars. She is very possibly someone Anand would wish to be like someday.
What is striking about Krishna’s narrative construction is that all three characters are given the space to articulate their ideas and come across as genuinely believing in their aspirations and the ethics of their different lifestyles. There are additional commentators in the film, notably Dharmendra Kumar, the director of a foreign investment watchdog NGO who decries the Westernization of India’s business model from traditional-market-based individual sales, to large wholesale retail. Canadian marketing guru Scott Harrison thinks otherwise, he is convinced that this shift will jumpstart an already fecund economy. He is unabashedly in it for the money.
After a somewhat slow first half, with analyses on society and politics from various directions, the film settles on its core stories: the developments of the Canadian design firm with a branch in Bangalore trying to break into the Indian market, and the struggle of the sellers of sandi trying to hold onto their plot of land. Although their paths never cross in the narrative, their parallel stories are interwoven well. So convincing are the major players, that viewers might find themselves in an odd conundrum: rooting for both sides. It is the ability to bring out these contradictions with little bias that makes Mallamall an excellent documentary.
As the film progresses, we are privy to a number of intimate scenes in these various settings: the Canadian offices of Perennial where executives lock their heads together to work on their India strategy, a new Bangalore office where team members are involved in round-the-clock meetings to find new business, and Anand’s grass-roots organizing of his fellow shopkeepers so they can hold on to their market space in KR Puram. The camera is unobtrusive as emotions peak and the story gradually shifts from an analytical mode to a more dramatic unfolding of events.
Perhaps predictably, given Krishna’s remarkable lack of bias, in the end both sides seem to gain concessions. Anand cinches a deal for his fledgling Canadian-Indian branch. The government decides not to go ahead with the new mall in KR Puram. We are relieved not to have to witness failure on either end. It seems to be just a matter of time, however, before retail stores and malls do take over. A minor criticism is that viewers might have benefitted from some discussion around a sustainable economic model where both sides—the rising middle class, and the still enormous below-poverty-line groups—will manage to find a habitable balance.
With the recent elections and the ushering in of a government that has promised rapid economic development, Mallamall is released at an especially relevant time in India’s socio-political history. The film will make for excellent discussion in any course that studies Indian law, economics, politics, governance or sociology.
Sandeep Ray
National University of Singapore, Singapore
pp. 387-389