Subhash K Jha turns the focus back on Atul Sabharwal’s In Their Shoes, which released in 2015. We hear from the director as he reveals the inspiration for the film and how he got inside the story while making this fascinating documentary.
Atul Sabharwal, who made the underrated Aurangzeb for Yash Raj Films, has spent two years of his life making a documentary In Their Shoes on the shoe traders of Agra.
Interestingly, Atul’s father is in the shoe trade.
Speaking on the impulses that prompted Atul to undertake this journey into the shoe-making business in Agra, the filmmaker reveals, “It was a combination of some emotions and incidents that led me to this documentary. During the making of Aurangzeb, I was discussing and exploring father-son emotions with my actors and technicians, and it struck me that I am here, shooting this big studio film because my father nudged me out of the family business.”
The tradition of the son continuing the father’s legacy was broken by Atul when he was prompted out of his father’s shoe business.
Says Atul, “In our country, sons normally take over, usually successfully, one’s father’s or family’s legacy, be it in politics, business or arts. Families often encourage children to do so. Therefore I found my father as an interesting and odd, a somewhat misfit character in that regard. Once that thought came, a whole lot of incidents and memories from my childhood and some recent ones too came bubbling to the surface.”
Atul thought of going to his father and asking him what led him to push Atul and his brother out of the family business.
Instead, he made the documentary. “I just didn’t want to ask him that. I wanted to document it because I knew he had grown up and done business as a young man in the era of ‘license raj’ and later during the ‘liberalization’ brought in by Manmohan Singh and Narasimha Rao. The urge to document my father’s and his peers’ journey on camera led me on this journey of my own.
As a young boy, Atul was tempted to join the family business in Agra. “As a schoolboy, I was fascinated by the whole camaraderie and hob-nobbing that happened around ‘Hing Ki Mandi’ and ‘Shoe Market, ’ the nerve centres of the shoe trade in Agra. For most of the young businessmen, some of whom were college dropouts like my father, that market was a campus, like a college.”
Atul recalls formal education in the 1990s as no avenue of learning and enlightenment. “College in Agra meant nothing back then. It was just a hotbed of aspiring politicians and breeding goondaism. I am talking about the early 90s. So men who had no interest in politics or goondaism went to their father’s shops, factories, petrol pumps, or hotels and learnt business and formed college-like friendships within the markets. And as a schoolboy I was in awe of these young businessmen and the fun that they had. And I couldn’t wait to finish school and jump into it.”
It was a filmmaker that Atul wanted to be. “My dream job was to be a film director from childhood, but I didn’t know how to go about it since we had no connection whatsoever with any professional within the film industry. So I kept that desire to myself, never once discussing it with my family or friends, and just waited to be granted entry into the shoe business by my father.”
Atul continues his link with his father’s show business in Agra. “I go and sit at the shop when I am there. I don’t do much. I just soak it all in. But apart from family I don’t have many people to hang out there with. Emotionally, it was difficult to ask my father those questions. I was also afraid of embarrassing myself with the film, with such personal emotions. But then I just took the plunge and went ahead with it without stopping to think again.
The re-visitation to his past helped Atul understand his family history. “It helped me understand my present mostly, the construct of my thoughts at the moment, which I had not known.”
Making the documentary was not as hard as marketing it. “The apparatus for marketing does not exist in our country for a non-fiction film. A non-fiction film, a documentary film, cannot make use of the ‘free-play’ of songs on TV channels, cannot afford heavy media buying, does not have star faces that newspapers and supplements are eager to publish, or the reality shows are eager to invite. That is the apparatus we have for publicizing our mainstream films. There is no alternate, tailor-made marketing apparatus for documentaries. Anyone who taps into it now will definitely get the early-bird advantage. I don’t know whether it will be a studio or an individual. But the scope is broadening every year.”
