Our childhood is shaped by curiosity, questions, and magical stories. Director Irfana Majumdar’s Hindi film Shankar’s Fairies drops us into 1962, following a young girl named Anjana (Shreeja Mishra) who grows close to Shankar (Jaihind Kumar), the man working as her family’s housekeeper.
Anjana is the elder daughter of a senior police officer (Gaurav Saini) and his artist-homemaker wife (Irfana Majumdar). They live in a village, and the era is that of the tumultuous Indo-China War. With its after-effects reaching the remotest corners of India, Anjana’s schoolmates amusingly joke about chowmein, linking it to a possible Chinese invasion. While I found it a little too mature for the children’s understanding of the larger political context, it makes sense if we assume they overheard family members cracking the same one-liner.
Overhearing and observing are also how Anjana feeds her inquisitiveness. While she shares a warm bond with her police superintendent father, her mother is enterprising yet strict. However, it is through Shankar that her imagination truly blossoms. The man is a fountain of vivid folk tales. By painting simple yet magical images of otherworldly beings such as witches and fairies, Shankar helps Anjana nurture a sharp, creative mind. Her teacher even applauds the young girl at one point for her writerly bent of mind.
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Aside from the warm yet somewhat distant bond that Anjana shares with Shankar, the film also works as a fine character study of the latter. Serving his employer for decades, Shankar is from a faraway village. Through his simple worldview, the film addresses concepts such as caste, class, and economic barriers that (still) separate people in developing countries. There are fleeting mentions of the war, the dacoit culture in the area, police brutality, convent school discipline, and religion, besides throwing light on politics, hierarchy, and the never-ending loop of disparity in Indian society.
What makes this relationship interesting is that Shankar is both familiar and unknowable to Anjana. He is close enough to become the source of her imagination, yet distant enough for his own life to remain largely beyond her understanding. In that sense, the film captures something revealing about privilege: Anjana can marvel at Shankar’s stories and see him as a figure of wonder, but she can only understand the man from within the limited world she inhabits.
Shankar’s Fairies plays out like a memoir. The mood is similar to Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, but a lot less eventful. Majumdar seems as fascinated by capturing the period as she is by exploring her lead character Anjana’s inner world. Shankar’s thoughts remain unexplored, and understandably so. For a story conceived from the perspective of a school-going daughter of a privileged couple, there’s only so much the narrative can reveal about their loyal yet mysterious family servant. The film wisely maintains that distance, never putting us right inside Shankar’s head. He remains, in part, mysterious, but also the centre of Anjana’s emotional and imaginative world.
The piano-based music is easy on the ear and fits the film’s relaxed mood rather than inviting attention. The period-accurate set design and production details also draw us into the world of the 1960s, which is authentic and never ornamental. By the end, Majumdar’s vision and storytelling leave an emotional impact, as we are brought back to the divide beneath Anjana’s seemingly idyllic childhood: the deep-rooted class hierarchy that separates her world from Shankar’s.
Rating: ★★★★
Shankar’s Fairies was screened at the 74th Locarno Film Festival.
