Anusha Rizvi, who was one of the speakers at the Think and spoke on a completely inappropriate and gender insensitive topic, “The Cats have got their tongue: Three Women in Bollywood” along with Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti. In fact, an exasperated Kagti asked anchor Nidhi Raazdan “This woman filmmaker thing,” said Kagti, “why are you making a big deal because I’m a woman?” The Goan, though, met her to discuss her much anticipated upcoming movie Afim, based on Amitav Ghosh’s acclaimed first of the Ibis trilogy “The Sea of Poppies”
The book “Sea of Poppies” was written by a globetrottingworld Bengali citizen Amitav Ghosh. The movie is being written by an extremelytalented Muslim scholarly filmmaker couple, who made India’s Oscar nominatedfilm Peepli Live. The narration of the script to Amitav Ghosh , which won themthe rights to make it was done in three spell binding sessions in AmitavGhosh’s home in Aldona, right here in Goa.
Anusha Rizvi, who left NDTV many years ago to be the filmmaker, scholar, consumer and adaptor of history and her husband and co-directorMahmood Farooqui are close to finalising their second draft of a riveting bookthat was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker prize
Anusha wrote and directed the hugely successful 2010 filmPeepli Live, which was India’s nominee for the Oscars. Mahmood is a RhodesScholar, with degrees in history from Delhi University, Oxford and Cambridge.He is also a gifted scholar of Urdu, (his uncle, Shamsur Rahman Farooqui, isone of the towering figures of contemporary Urdu literature).
“While we were shooting Peepli Live, a friend gifted Sea ofPoppies to us. We both read it in one go and were amazed at the cinematic scopeof the book. We left it at that, but the material and the book never left us,till we realised that we had to make a film,” says Anusha.
For the uninitiated, the Sea of Poppies is a remarkably richsaga at the heart of which is this ship Ibis. We reproduce one of the bestreviews of the book in Vogue to tell you the story. “Her (the Ibis’) destiny isa tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean shortly before the outbreak of theOpium Wars in China. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together adiverse cast of Indians and Westerners on board, from a bankrupt raja to awidowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a free-spirited Frenchorphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historicalcounterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. Thevast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of theGanges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of Canton. With apanorama of characters whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial historyof the East itself, Sea of Poppies is "a storm-tossed adventure worthy ofSir Walter Scott".
For Rizvi though, it will be film about all the little andnot so little characters in the film, the history of the various familiesthrown together into what becomes a realm of humanhood in which flowers adventure,romance, love and retribution. Anusha, looking into the expanse of the Arabiansea from the hotel on whose lawns we sat for this chat, says ‘This is more thana film for us. It’s a project that has many layers. We are recreating history,bringing to life the entire conflict over opium that history has forgotten andalso of the East India Company, a corporate which actually took over India.”
Amitav Ghosh is equally excited. He writes in his blog “Fromthat day on, the more I thought about it the more I came to be persuaded thatAnusha and Mahmood were right for Sea of Poppies. I always knew that to make afilm of this book would require great reserves of passion,energy, convictionand perseverance – and I could see that Mahmood and Anusha possess all of thesein plenty. Another factor that weighed greatly with me is that Mahmood grew upin Gorakhpur and speaks Bhojpuri: he has a visceral connection with the book’sthemes and characters.
And so it happened that Mahmood and Anusha came to Goa wherehe performed a ‘narration’ of the script over three spell-bindingsessions. (The first draft of the scriptwas chosen for the Mumbai Mantra – Sundance global filmmaking awards 2012 andwas also part of the first ever Sundance screenwriters Lab held in India, Lonavala, 2012) Ghosh gushes “Listening to the lastpart of the narrative, where the climactic events unfold in rapid succession,was an unforgettable experience: I found myself marveling, not just atMahmood’s performance but also at the thought that this story had sprung frommy own head”
For Anusha andMahmood (who is currently on a fellowship in the USA), the main task ahead isfinalising the script and bouncing it off Ghosh. ‘It will be shot mainly inBihar, also because of the language of Bhojpuri that will permeate through themovie. The sea scenes will probably be short in an animated studio inSingapore.”
And she, much like the person she is, will work with unknownand likely theatre actors, each of whom will fit their parts to the T. Muchlike Anusha Rizvi, emerging as one of contemporary India’s most relevant filmmakers.
