Movies and shows, old and new, have helped us to live vicariously through them. They have allowed us to travel far and wide at a time borders are shut and people are restricted to homes. In our new column What's In A Setting, we explore the inseparable association of a story with its setting, how the location complements the narrative, and how these cultural windows to the world have helped broaden our imagination.
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I haven’t been on a family vacation in the last 10 years. That’s not to say, the family hasn’t been on vacation. They’ve travelled to icy mountain peaks, arid deserts, and sunny beaches in this last decade, humbled and awed by the spoils of nature and the privilege of being able to pause life for a brief while. At times, their itineraries have even expanded to include several different members of my extended family.
Over the years, I’ve preferred to watch from afar, enthusiastically responding to the vacation updates that are relayed to me through calls and texts. Still, a week before they set out on their adventure, I have come to expect a pleading call from my father, highlighting the attractive parts of the excursion, hoping I’d be swayed and agree to join them. I politely refuse. He sounds disappointed but he knows I will. We act out the same script every year.
It’s been this way since I moved out of home 10 years ago. Living in another city and operating on different responsibility schedules than my parents has given me a solid alibi to miss these vacations. As unkind as it sounds, I’m grateful for the excuse and the distance. Growing up, I went on several vacations, banded together with noisy cousins and shipped across the length and breadth of the country with my parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. I came back from each of them, drained and frazzled by the illusion of enjoyment that their very existence seemed to promise. At the time, being secluded with a group of people with wildly dissimilar definitions of personal fulfillment, seemed like a ridiculous social experiment to me.
For one, I didn’t recognize the versions of people that everyone around me changed into, especially because I hesitated to slip into any other shoes. I enjoyed myself the most when I was left on my own. It was no different during any of these trips. Everyone else — even my otherwise introverted younger sister — didn’t see the point of my demand for solitude when I could be part of the crowd. To them, it was the very definition of having fun. To me, it looked like an obligation. I remember going out of my way to make myself invisible on these vacations. I’d crouch under a bed minutes before we had to leave for a sightseeing excursion or fake a nap on the couch so that they would leave without me. Even when I was successful in my attempts, it was clear to me that I was the one who was always left out. Even when I was next to them, I was the one who watched my family from a distance, reluctant to be a participant and angered at being an outcast.
When I watched A Death in the Gunj, Konkona Sensharma’s luminous debut in 2017, the film’s underlying horrors of familial incompatibility spoke directly to me. I hadn’t travelled with my family in seven years but I didn’t have to in order to recognise the bruises.
During its 107-minute runtime, A Death in the Gunj effortlessly underlined the terror of family vacations, where every minute feels like it is going to last an eternity and survival isn’t an act of resilience as much an exercise in defeat.
Set in 1980s McCluskieganj, a sleepy, forested town in Jharkhand, a few miles from the capital city of Ranchi, A Death in the Gunj is a film about many things: the permanence of grief, the dangers of toxic masculinity, and the price of fragility in a hardened, almost cruel world. But every time I’ve watched the film, it has seemed to me, more and more urgently, as a parable about the demons that families are capable of conjuring up when boundaries of civility are all but blurred. A vacation is nothing if not, an agreement. An agreement to be someone everyone around you expects you to be. An agreement that the obligation of enjoyment can be imposed at the cost of self-preservation. An agreement to be both, an object of entertainment and humiliation; and more crucially, an agreement that the wounds gained in the duration of the vacation doesn't really count. But what happens when you choose to not honour this precise agreement? Does that make you the villain or the victim?
In the film, the victim of the vacation is Shutu (Vikrant Massey in a career-defining turn), a sensitive, grieving young man in urgent need of care and tending. Yet, all he is destined to are bullies — they just happen to look like his own family. His aunt, brother, sister-in-law, and their friends treat him as if he is a caged animal who has escaped from the zoo. He’s always falling short of their expectations, whether it is while learning how to drive or being a romantic possibility. They promptly look through Shutu even when he is present in the room, and simultaneously chide him for being nowhere to be found. Shutu is the kind of participant who is merely an observer in the game of life. He is never meant to win, and Sensharma’s script evocatively underlines the losses he accrues during the vacation.
If A Death in the Gunj meets its own ambitions of being an ensemble study that is vivid and haunting in equal measure, it is partly due to the specificity of its setting. McCluskieganj, a secluded forested town, where Shutu’s family is at a far remove from the world, mimics the extent of Shutu’s isolation from his own family.
Throughout the film, he is surrounded by people and yet surrounded by no one, really.
Even then, I’d argue, the true setting of A Death in the Gunj is claustrophobia. McCluskieganj is just the catalyst. In my reading, this detail feels like it is of prime significance because much of the film actually unfolds in the deep recesses of a troubled mind. In that sense, it’s the complexity in Shutu’s emotions toward his family that makes the film for me. It’s clear that he is incompatible with his family, who favour a display of masochism over kindness and it is also clear that Shutu realises it. But he still can't bring himself to despise the people they become on the fateful vacation in McCluskieganj. That’s the real tragedy of the film.
In the years since my last family vacation, I’ve come to realise that family vacations, just like the one that unfolds in the film, is ultimately a tragedy disguised as an adventure — an abject failure of communication and compassion. A Death in the Gunj is then, a story about being held hostage by your own family. Some result in bloodshed and others, in missed calls.
Read more from the What's in a Setting series here.
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