Kayo Kayo Colour? (Which Colour?): a radical departure for Indian cinema

• Reviewed from the 2023 International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Shahrukhkhan Chavada’s debut feature Kayo Kayo Colour? (Which Colour?) offers a sobering, quietly radical corrective to a certain tendency in Indian cinema – one that reduces Muslim characters to a narrative trope, political argument or fetish object. Chavada’s film follows a working-class family in a Muslim ghetto in Kalupur, Ahmedabad, over 24 hours: as Raziya (Samina Shaikh) gets up early to do the chores and take care of her children Faiz (Fahim Shaikh) and Ruba (Yushra Shaikh), her unemployed husband Razzak (Imtiyaz Shaikh) sets out to procure funds for an autorickshaw in the hope of financial independence.

In charting the family’s everyday routine, Kayo Kayo Colour? zeroes in on the social mores and gender codes that determine life in the neighbourhood, where girls play house indoors as boys chase chicken in the streets. Razzak chafes under the pressure of not having a job, but nevertheless seeks the privileges of a traditional breadwinner. Ruba is sent on errands so her brother can focus on his studies, Faiz is taunted by his mates for playing with the girls, and Razzak’s mother balks at the idea of moving in with the family of her married daughter, who has made it out of the ghetto.

In elegant frame-within-frame static shots, and with an eye comparable to Hirokazu Koreeda, Chavada documents the family’s cluttered, lower-middle-class home: buckets filled with water suggesting the intermittence of supply, a now-useless piece of kids’ furniture dumped on an equally useless sewing machine, a swivel chair relegated to an inaccessible spot next to the refrigerator. This material ‘excess’ stands in stark contrast to the sparse furnishing of the upscale apartment in which Razzak’s sister lives. The bare walls and modish décor of this deluxe flat conveys an expansive sense of domestic space that Chavada multiplies through striking mirror shots. The film’s physical environment thus assumes a subtly expressionist quality, reflecting the characters’ diverging prospects in life.

As the sun sets, the film becomes suffused with a mix of hope and despondence, a faint sense that the walls are closing in on Razzak even as he figures a way out of his money crunch. A revelation late in the film dramatically recasts our perspective of the day’s events, unveiling the essential precarity of the lives on display. Yet Which Colour? allows its characters ample scope to carve out a space outside the drama, to find meaningful connections in a benevolent community, to simply exist as human beings, capable of enjoying a range of experiences and emotions. In that, it has surprisingly few precedents in Indian cinema.