Anusha Rizvi’s JioHotstar film The Great Shamsuddin Family offers an intimate, unexoticised portrait of ordinary Muslim life, a rarity in Indian cinema, set amid family banter, work, relationships, fear, and uncertainty, exploring identity, vulnerability, and resilience without reducing its characters to stereotypes
By Qudsiya Ahmed
Anusha Rizvi’s JioHotstar film The Great Shamsuddin Family is an unusual portrait of contemporary Muslim life in India, avoiding familiar and often dehumanising stereotypes. It is about ordinary homes, family relationships, careers, friendships, political anxiety, and the quiet fear that has become part of everyday life for many Muslims.
The film would have fallen through the cracks had it not been for a phone call from a friend’s mother. In her words, she saw ‘the two of us’ in the film (in the characters of Bani and Erum). Us—the two of us who often get caught up in the banalities of life, and tend to overthink the chaos that we seem to be steadily slipping into? But that was not possible? It has not been, in the past few decades since we have been watching Indian cinema. Our cinema does not represent us, as we are, but as how they imagine us to be.
But as the film started, I could see my home in it—well-lit, white hand-block print curtains earnestly letting the sunlight barge in, the chaos of a variety of hardbound books, a wise owl on the shelf, a half-shut laptop shrieking for attention, and a woman dressed in no particular style and outfit roaming her house, immersed in thoughts about life and career.
Muslim identity, fear and belonging in India
This house did not have green walls. Bani did not wear surma (kohl) in her eyes, and the first few minutes of the film were indeed quite welcoming for anyone who has always yearned to be represented with a semblance of normalcy, a depiction that neither eulogizes one’s beauty and appearance nor banishes the choice of clothing, and does not typecast one’s everyday existence as either exotic or primitive. It was indeed a good feeling, and the film did not let me down.
It is just a few hours of anybody’s everyday, in this case a young Muslim woman’s, that unfolds in front of our eyes, and speaks to us since it could just be our everyday—the emails, office deadlines, the commotion of household chores, the distractions of friends and family, the innocuousness of family jibes, punctuated by moments of more stress, humor and laughter.
While it does all of this, it also captures, and very powerfully so, the mundanity of fear and vulnerabilities that both imprisons and slowly lets go of a young Muslim mind, as one negotiates with their overwhelming political identity. Bani’s stare into the hollowness outside her window at her own lack of understanding for her cousin’s decision to marry into a different religion despite everything, and Humeira’s (Bani’s cousin) fear that a ‘mob might just turn up at their door’ at this, is not extraordinary or a figment of their imagination anymore.
Muslim lives between migration, microaggressions and fear
A conversation between Bani and Humeira about a job hunt in the US and leaving the land not just for better opportunities but a safer haven is a subject of all dining table conversations of the young and able who have worked hard to beat a not very favourable system, and who are now subsumed by the fear for their young ones who negotiate and are in search of, sometimes from a very tender age, a safe space at schools, universities, cafes and all those places that are not home, and will not be home to them.
Amitav’s young (and utterly infatuated) student’s intrusive questions about Bani’s ‘TT’ are a perfect depiction of microaggression grounded in ignorance and sometimes innocence, but most often coming from a position of self-righteousness, and when confronted, her typical response, ‘I am just saying,’ is what one experiences in the garb of questions, concerns and scrutiny about individual choices of Muslim women and their perceived fragility to take charge of their lives.
As the film progresses with both gentility and restraint in articulating the everyday despair one is pushed into, it enters the dark alley of fear in the few hours that Humeira is not able to get in touch with her husband as a riot unfolds in the city. And just as it is about to hit us hard, it brings us back into life with hope and resilience—an update about the husband’s well-being is all it takes for the characters to brighten up, for Humeira, Bani, Erum, Pallavi, Zohaib and Amitav, and everyone in the audience, to find sense in life again with humour, belief, and courage.
Family, friendship and finding home amid uncertainty
While the older generation of cousins of the Shamsuddin family wind up their day with endearing engagements about besan or bundi ke laddu, they are completely oblivious to the concerns of the present generation, mildly shifting the frames into how families respond to what happens around, and how only some of us have a strong desire to recede into a shell, and yet be seen, and the resilience of seeing through moments of inertia and vulnerabilities.
Amitav is the distraction that friends are, a person you love to hate, and is also the anchor that many of us have—they moor our life as we remain suspended in a chase of unfinished applications. As Amitav sings on the terrace, the moment offers a flashback of one’s own life—the many opportunities let gone, unexplored, half-hearted decisions, all because of the uncertainty of the times that have left us unsure of where home is, yet holding on to the belief that we are home.
The film winds up; the hours of confusion and madness transform into songs of celebration as the Shamsuddin family prepares for Zohaib and Pallavi’s wedding. To my aunt, who thought Bani and Erum were us, yes, we might just be two women taking life head-on, sometimes, and a few times getting lost at every turn, but we are not forging our mother’s signature yet!
Qudsiya Ahmed is a writer and editor interested in questions of identity, politics, and society
