Two thousand years ago the Greek historian Plutarch raised this question: if the planks of a ship were replaced part by part, until nothing remained from the original build, could the preserved one really be the original ship? Centuries later the English thinker Thomas Hobbes took this parable further, asking which would be the original ship if all the replaced parts were collected and another one was built?
Without attempting to answer these questions and instead choosing to celebrate contradictions over the finality of conclusions, Indian filmmaker Anand Gandhi ponders upon the notion of duality in his film Ship of Theseus.
The first part of the film is about Aliya, a photographer who took up the practice after losing her eyesight completely as a child. After a successful eye transplant, Aliya finds the chaotic world of Mumbai rather mundane, and her pictures suffer. She admits she took photos to archive, document, remember when she was blind. But Gandhi steps in with the question of what is the difference if the fully-sighted Aliya is motivated by the same reasons, especially if she needs to blindfold herself to take good pictures?
In the second part, monk Maitreya has filed a case of animal rights abuse against pharmaceutical and cosmetic research companies. Maitreya is also diagnosed with liver cirrhossis and is advised to take medication produced by the same companies. Pestering him constantly is a young lawyer who tries to quantify the elder’s dualist philosophy in order to keep him alive. The monk wants to practice what he preaches in spite of failing health. But Maitreya’s self-harm seems inconsistent with his care for the plight of animals - is his love for them really reciprocated?
The third story is about Navin, a stock-broker who has no interest in anything else than his job. There is much more than happiness in the world, his hospitalised grandmother tells him, but Navin is not keen to explore. One night after he finds out someone nicked a man’s kidney when they were operating on his appendix, the quiet and unassuming Navin plunges into the shady world of organ theft. As someone who had a kidney-transplant recently, Navin speculates whether he received one in a similarly
dodgy way and is ultimately fighting on behalf of a victim.
Before he made films Anand Gandhi wrote screenplays and dialogues for popular Indian soap operas, therefore Ship of Theseus does feel didactic at times. But where it succeeds is in making age-old musings strangely contemporary. Fresh new faces have acted out stories unexplored in any other Indian film of late.
Although Ship of Theseus never opened in theatres in Kathmandu when it was released in mid-2013, it got the plaudits it deserved when it won Best Feature Film at India’s National Film Awards on 2 May for being a “quietly powerful film that depicts issues of intuitive brilliance, metaphysical belief and intricate morality in a world full of contradictions.”
The meditative nature of all three stories means Ship of Theseus is a film made for second, and possibly solitary, viewings. And you can do that with ease because the entire film is available for free downloads.