Om Dar Babar
Kamal Swaroop, 1988, 101 min

To summarise the plot of Om Dar Badar is to attempt articulating the truly incomprehensible. Steering clear of the modernist collisions of meaning and desire, Kamal Swaroop spins an 'ism' denying prism of absurdly fragmented surrealisms, positing Indian society as intrinsically postmodernist, regardless of prevailing religious conservatisms and contradictory philosophical musings, or rather, because of it. On the face of it, the film is a portrait of life in Ajmer, Rajasthan, telling us the story of a boy named Om during his carefree adolescence, gifted with the skill of holding his breath for a long time. His father, Babuji, a government servant, leaves his government job to dedicate his life to astrology. His sister, with a sense of independence and agency, dates a spineless good for nothing. He studies science, but grows increasingly fascinated with magic and religion, visiting a fantasy city and taking a home close to a frog pond. Avowedly non-committal to any theme or plot, the film whimsically satirises the interspersing of Western concepts with Hindu religion, blending the sacred with the profane, the carnal with the divine, and antiquity with modernity. In doing so, it mocks the sacred pursuits of meaning and desire, weaving together an idiosyncratic pastiche of consciously contradictory nonsense. The kind of nonsense that happily subverts all cinematic expectations into a satirical anti-cinema of scientific and religious aphorisms, pseudo moralistic science fiction, pop mythologies and ingenuously purposeless musical numbers.

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Showing as part of Deviant Traditions of Desire: Asian Cinema at the Intersection of Folklore and Transgressive Desire