THE DISCIPLE and Labours of Being Alive
Through a tight focus in the sphere of the Indian classical music subculture, Chaitanya Tamhane’s 2020 film The Disciple asks larger questions about the relentless pursuit of art and excellence in the face of existential crisis.
In his landmark 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus introduced his philosophy of Absurdism with the timeless allegory of Sisyphus, the tragic character from Greek Mythology. Sisyphus has been cursed by the gods to push a rock up a mountain—only for the rock to roll down again from the very top, leaving Sisyphus to head back down and push it up again, over and over, for all eternity. Camus argues that there remains a fundamental conflict in what we want from the universe and what we find in it, a conflict that reveals that life is nothing but ‘formless chaos’, an absurdity, meaningless.
So, devoid of all meaning, what does one do with the labour of being alive? Is it possible to live cursed like Sisyphus, rolling a rock to the top forever, without a true answer, without an end to the tribulations, a peak to the mountain, a moment of enlightenment? If life is meaningless, what should stop one from committing suicide? Or can one only find meaning by blind faith in a god or some higher purpose?
Despite its bleak subject matter, The Myth of Sisyphus has a truly affirming silver lining: Camus argues that its possible for us to accept the absurdity, the meaningless, and still continue to find reason to be alive. That is not to say, however, that the journey will be easy to keep driving forward, to live without meaning in the face of nauseating existential crisis.
It is these questions of purpose and chaos that haunt Sharad Nerulkar, the primary character of Chaitanya Tamhane’s striking 2020 film Marathi-language film The Disciple. Sharad is dogged by an endless, painful pursuit of excellence, striving to become a great Indian classical music vocalist, to become a truly timeless practitioner of the art. But, the passage of time and the revelations of the world reveal to him deeper, uncomfortable truths about the futility of his pursuit in the face of that Sisyphean curse.
Previously known for the award-winning 2014 film Court, Tamhane wrote, directed, and edited The Disciple. Academy Award winning Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron served as the film’s executive producer. The Disciple became only the second Indian film since Monsoon Wedding (2001) to compete at the Venice International Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize presented by the International Federation of Film Critics and the Best Screenplay award. It was also screened at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival, where it was named a winner of the Amplify Voices Award. The film was acquired by Netflix earlier this year, where it was released in April.
In Court, Tamhane examined the Indian legal system through the experiences of a folk singer at the Mumbai Sessions court. He returns to the city in The Disciple, and this time, makes the profession of singing his entire subject. The Disciple is a love letter to the artistes of the Indian classical genre, those chasing their passions while hardly gaining recognition outside of their niche world.
Sharad—played by Aditya Modak—is a 24-year-old aspiring classical vocalist, whose young life has been singularly focused on mastering the art. His father was a passionate but ultimately unsuccessful artiste who raised Sharad to prioritise singing lessons over spending time with his friends, discussing the intricate styles of the masters of the genres, and taking him on field trips to watch the masters perform. Sharad eventually becomes a disciple of the acclaimed Guruji—played by Arun Dravid—who himself inherits a lineage of the Alwar Gharana tradition of classical music, a student of ‘Maai’. In The Disciple Maai—voiced by Sumitra Bhave—was a mythical artiste who is survived by no recorded performances; all that remains of her memory are recordings of her musings on the philosophy of the classical music tradition, of art, and how one spends a life devoted to art.
Maai’s voice haunts and inspires Sharad, it pushes him in his pursuit of excellence, rings in his ears on the way to each important performance. Through a tight focus in the sphere of Mumbai’s classical music world, Tamhane’s film asks larger questions about pursuing art for the self or the audience, the dangerous balance between genius and failure, experimentation and conservative repetition. Sharad echoes the voice of his predecessors when he sneers at artists performing for fame; and yet, he stares longingly at the televised, sexualised performances of a classical vocalist on mainstream talent shows.
The dictums he has lived by have been challenged, the people whom he has chosen to model his obsessions portrayed as nothing more than, simply, people. What does he stand for, if there is no fortified ground on which to stand?
Sharad struggles in his youth and grows impatient, as all young artists tend to do. He is often lonely: just him and his tanpura drone machine; or just him in a dark room in front of the glow of a computer screen. He often suppresses his anger and sorrow, best demonstrated by Modak’s forlorn, defeated gaze as he gently plays the tanpura behind Guruji at the performances. He complains to Guruji that all he does his practice, and is frustrated by coming up short.
The Disciple also explores the pursuit of excellence for the sake of joy—or only for the sake of excellence itself. When, at an older age, Sharad finally settles for a photograph for his personal website, the photographer has to request him to smile as if he’s actually enjoying singing. The difficult smile eventually appears, joyless behind the temporary mask.
Most prominent of all are the themes of the guru-shishya parampara in Indian music—and larger Indian traditions of teaching—the heritage of respect, admiration, and near-blind devotion from a disciple to their master. Maai’s voice tells Sharad in no uncertain terms that she performed not for any audience but to impress her guru and god. As Sharad’s own Guruji grows older and feebler, the young singer sees an unfamiliar sense of mortality in his revered master: after all his achievements and reverence, all that is left is an old man in a humble Mumbai lodging, only in pain.
And, when Sharad becomes a teacher himself, he faces a new generation of students, a generation less enamoured with this tradition of guru-dedication. For Sharad, the inspiration of a guru feels as essential as the unrequited void of a disciple.
For the role of Sharad, Tamhane specifically chose to cast Modak—a classical singer and chartered accountant—because he “figured it would be easier to get a musician who could act rather than vice-versa”. Modak plays his role sensationally, expressing a range of complications and emotions with little flickers of his eyes, frustrated twitches of his mouth, and the small strains of his movement. Already familiar with the world of classical music, he embodies the frustrations of unfulfilled excellence both on and off the stage.
It is the on-stage scenes that, rightfully, are some of the film’s most provocative. Tamhane often chooses a slow-moving camera, zooming in from the audience to the performers, or from the performers to the audience. Scored by a background of classical music—impassionate vocals, sitar, tabla, and tanpura—these shots mimic the hypnotic feeling of the music itself, slowly lassoing the viewer to itself to match with the music’s intended emotion. And through Modak, there is tension in even the seemingly-soothing performances.
Sharad ages by the dozen years by the second half of the movie, and Modak—who reportedly underwent drastic physical transformations for this role—grows into the body of an older, more settled performer. The disciple is now the guru, the impatient young vocalist is now a middle-aged man, marginally successful—like his father—but somewhat eroded by the pursuit. He is a teacher, a regular performer, and has started his own business; he is an artiste of an underappreciated art-form in a changing world—he has ‘made it’, but his life now faces that old Sisyphean question of the universe we want versus the universe we actually find.
If this understated film has a true climactic moment, it’s in flashback, a scene where a younger, idealistic Sharad is introduced to an experienced critic of classical music, an older man who has seen Sharad’s idols in performance and is clear-sighted about separating the art from the myth surrounding the artists. The critic shares stories that offend Sharad’s sense of awe around the gurus he has so admired; his idols are suddenly humanised, their mythologies stripped away, their warts exposed.
Sharad reacts sharply; we, the viewers, can perceive that this is a deep moment of loss for him; the dictums he has lived by have been challenged, the people whom he has chosen to model his obsessions portrayed as nothing more than, simply, people. What does he stand for, if there is no fortified ground on which to stand?
And yet, Sharad persists: he grows older, he continues to pursue the path of classical music, he continues to push the rock up the mountain. He finds moderate success, but the viewer doesn’t need to wait for The Disciple’s final shot to predict that he may never see the peak. The rock rolls back down, and Sharad—cursed like Sisyphus, like all of mankind—can only return to push it up again. It’s absurd—and it’s the only reason to be alive.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose fiction, translation, and poetry have appeared in Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, FirstPost, and more. His debut novel is forthcoming on the Aleph Book Company. You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
