Anuja: Poverty, Family, and a Girl Just Starting to Come of Age

The cast of Adam J. Graves’ Anuja carries the film. The story of a Delhi factory worker girl negotiating with the chance to go to a decent school—and escape the same poverty that is also grinding down her older sister, it is a concoction of familiar and comfortable elements of a rags-to-riches narrative. The film wisely limits its scope to the transitory point of such stories. As a result, the 22-minute film feels both humble and prestige. 

The titular Anuja (Sajda Pathan) is barely ten, though her spittoon toting boss (Nagesh Bhonsle) would have her asserting she is fourteen—it helps with staying out of jail or not paying fines, or at least, preventing a minor inconvenience. With her sister (Palak, played by Ananya Shanbhag) for a mother and a friend, Anuja enjoys the little delights of being a very young child. The burden of responsibility falls largely on Palak, who is too good-humoured to be bitter and too unpretentious to try to be stoic. She just is. Which is perhaps the reason why she cannot be the (rags-to-riches) heroine; there is no magic spark to entertain. But Anuja, though just as okay with her lot in life, has that magic spark that we love to love: she is a math whiz. 

The story is familiar. A few things give it vitality. For one, a little bow on a dress in a store so posh you might slip on the shiny floor, and Anuja’s recognising gaze as the film flashes back to when those bows were attached on her own factory floor. It is a brief but significant pause during a chase sequence; the child is growing up to realities so bitter people drink to burn away its taste. Two, at the end of the same sequence, the motion all but stops on a shot of Anuja. Just as brief and just as significant, it seems to speak in a language of its own. Three, a direct to camera sequence detailing Palak’s own ambition. It sketches more or better than it builds, but the existence alone is a happy jolt.

Four, though the narrative does press down on the characters with its inescapable demands, the cast puts up a robust fight. Pathan, for instance, delivers a triumphant performance. She has adapted each of her lines to her own feeling, marking Anuja as the kind of character who has had the scope to flourish because of the shelter of a sacrificing (and sacrificial) sister’s care. Shanbhag is especially memorable; audiences love a good sacrificial lamb and a better heartbreak over it. Bhonsle as Verma is agreeably disgusting as the paan-chewing Hindi heartland brute that became a staple with New Bollywood. The fun arrives when he butts heads with Mr Mishra (Gulshan Walia) a good samaritan who has come bearing the possibility of good fortune for Anuja. Amid arguing in self-interest, Verma decides to take offense at Mishra’s indelicate and self-betraying girls like you remark at Anuja. The moment is soon over, but for a brief few seconds the film dangles a hearty scope for the imagination.  

 Anuja the film, like the character herself, hesitates between being two kinds of film. One the one hand, it reaches for the seamless heavy drama. On the other, it cannot help but want more for itself. Perhaps the girl too will recognise the strains of both lives within her. Two roads do diverge, and one must be taken. But the other must be remembered just as well. 

Watch Anuja – Oscar Nominated Short Film Trailer