Cast: Pankaj Kapoor, Supriya Pathak Kapoor, Pankaj Tripathy, K K Raina, Hrishita Bhatt Director: Bhavna TalwarHow does religious belief, rooted in tradition, stack up in our amoral times? Pandit Chaturvedi, steeped in the orthodoxies of the shastras, is a staunch keeper of the Hindu faith. He believes in purity, scoffing at a fellow pandit who sells his services over the internet to ‘foreign clients’. And then one day, something happens, and his life is never the same again.Dharm also has a few elements which have become staples in such movies, chief among them being a western journalist doing research on what makes the Hindu dharma so unique, a Banaras thakur family whose scion believes that firangis need to be shown the error of their ways, and scenes of resurgent right-wing religiosity through rioting and bloodshed. First-time director Bhavna Talwar has made a film with universal appeal. You can replace Banaras with another holy town, and the Hindu priest with one of another religion, and examine how a crisis in faith can lead to a stronger, more lasting dharm. But you wonder who this film, filled with broad brushstrokes, is aimed at: at the handful of Indian viewers who will come in to see what Pankaj Kapoor will make of the pot-bellied Brahmin, and welcome the luminous Supriya Pathak back on the big screen, or the devouts at international festival circuits who never tire of watching Banaras, magically shot here, and given easy access to, by the presence of a firang journalist, just like in the recent Parzania. Dharm was showcased at Cannes last month.This is a question which niggles at you, but keeps receding in the face of a well-intentioned film with good performances, which asks to be watched because of what it arrives at: that dharm paalan is not just about following a set of thousand-year-old rituals; piety is not graven in stone. It’s about being human.
