Nil Battey Sannata: Endearing, real and simple

Cast : Swara Bhaskar, Ratna Pathak Shah, Pankaj Tripathi

Rated : 8/10

Nil Battey Sannata is a confusing title but an endearing, simple, gentle and real film. Besides, the title confuses only till Swara Bhaskar as Chanda explains it to you with endearing simplicity much ahead in the movie. It literally means zero understanding and zero marks — in her and her daughter’s case, in Mathematics.

But this one is not just about the mind-boggling numbers that have become the bane of students and parents alike. It is about the maths, algebra and geometry of life itself — an equation that director Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari puts on the blackboard in an engaging, simplified format.

Nil Battey Sannata is a film sitting on a very real firmament, a very you-and-me story about the in-your-face problems that everyone encounters. In here, it is about misrani  (cook) Chanda and her full of life but anti-studies daughter Apeksha Sahay’s daily churn. Thankfully, it is not the drudgery of a slum existence that comes into sharp focus but the life that happens despite the vagaries all around.

Chanda, for example, works her bone out from morning to night doing time at a doctor’s house in the day, evenings in a bakery and late shifts at a shoe factory to add currency to her dream of making her daughter something much better than a bai. She does this with a smile and a robustness that comes with the ultimatum of coping with life. She has a happy, healthy relationship with her daughter even though the two bicker about her complete lack of interest in studies. Apeksha is a brazen, uncontrollable teenager who has no dreams. “Bai ki beti bai, toh main kyun padhoon?” is her irrefutably candid query to her hapless mother.

Together, and under the expert guidance of director Ashwiny, the mother daughter duo fight, love and study Maths as a challenge of life.

Swara Bhaskar comes into her own in this slice of life that she almost entirely powers through. The film set in Agra catches the city’s ambience not just through the long shots of the Taj Mahal but also through its lingo, its shoe factories, its chowmein obsessions and its slum areas. Everything is beautifully crafted and caught on camera, and, of course, brought to life not just by Bhaskar but also by the pithy role of Ratna Pathak Shah as the city’s known doctor and also by the Government School principal played to near perfection by Pankaj Tripathi.

Words and phrases like lalli (girl) and lalla (boy), ek rehpat doongi (will give you a tight slap) are so delightfully colloquial and so, so Agra that there is no need for petha and daalmoth to make their presence felt in the film.

This gentle mount comes with a strong message and cuts into your heart almost immediately. Chanda’s dreams, Chanda’s frustrations, Chanda’s struggles to somehow make her daughter understand the importance of studies, the cut-throat and greedy coaching industry, the Government school blues, the children of that strata and their take on life — everything comes in correct and right measure in the film.

The beauty of this film, however, lies at a different level. Though pivoted around a lower middle class existence and fear of studies among their children, it relates to similar problems of children and their parents in all strata of society. Its simple emotions bring tears of both joy and sorrow but in the end the film and its characters leave you smiling.

A must-see for all parents and children, especially ones with the Mathematical dread. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 24 April, 2016