When silent films speak of a lost past

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The discovery of a treasure trove of forgotten nitrate films from the early 1900s is the inspiration for a magical documentary

Sometimes a film feels like an epiphany. Watching Bill Morrison's Dawson City: Frozen Time, currently streaming on an international film platform, had that sort of effect on me. It tells the strange and wondrous tale of how nearly 400 silent films from the early 1900s, managed to survive in the permafrost of what had once been a small-town swimming pool -- emerging from the ground in the 1970s, to finally find their place in the history of humanity.

Technically a documentary, Morrison's film is an exquisite assemblage of facts and footage so artfully and lovingly crafted that it feels like an epic. That epic quality comes from two historic elements – the Canadian gold rush, which originally brought Dawson City into being, and the invention of cinema, which created these thousands of feet worth of early film images, only to abandon them. What Morrison captures, without ever spelling it out explicitly, is the way the treasure trove -- known as the Dawson City Film Find -- offers up a conjoined history of these two lost worlds: A forgotten town and a forgotten technology.

And yet both the town and the technology were, a century and a quarter ago, part of the crucible of modernity. Morrison begins with the fact that film originated in an explosive, nitrate cellulose. The Kodak company turned it into nitrate film by adding camphor to it and then coating it with plastic emulsion. But nitrate film, on which all early cinema was stored, remained highly inflammable, and the documentary shows, over and over again, that the history of early cinema is also a history of fire. From Thomas Alva Edison's film manufacturing plant exploding, to the Solax Film Company Fire in 1919, from the repeated burning down of Dawson City's film theatres, down to the 1967 warehouse fire in which the National Film Board of Canada lost its entire nitrate film collection, the sense of tragic loss comes to be replaced by a sense of inevitability.

The film is also a deep dive into Dawson: Now a small town with a tiny population of 1300-odd people (as of 2011), but once the site of a remarkable moment in world history. Gold was discovered near here on August 17, 1896, at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers near the boundary with the US state of Alaska. Over the next three years, thousands of prospectors made the extremely difficult journey to this freezing-cold terrain, often crossing snow-covered passes on foot, hoping, literally, to strike gold. During the height of the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898, Dawson City’s population exceeded 30,000.

Naturally, entrepreneurs of all sorts arrived, hoping to ‘mine the miners’, as Morrison puts it. Fred Trump opened a brothel called the Arctic Hotel and Restaurant in the nearby town of Whitehorse -- the origin, says Morrison, of the Trump family fortune. Casinos were the other gig in town, as you might expect from a place full of men on the make. An athletics association building came up, with boxing matches organised for a largely male audience. Soon, there were not one but three theatres screening films.

But as the more accessible mines began to be exhausted, and gold was discovered some distance away in Nome, Alaska, the city of Dawson emptied out, becoming a quarter of its size in a year. Films continued to come to Dawson, but they often took two or three years after their first release, to arrive. The town was at the end of a film distribution line, and the distributors didn't want to pay for their passage back. The films were already old news. So they ended up being stored in Dawson. As the years passed, and the town's buildings started running out of space, thousands of old silent film reels were burnt, or simply disposed of in the Yukon river. A small section remained -- and the rest is history: A history whose incredible details you should watch the film for.

Yet Morrison's film is no mere history book on screen. What he does is a marvel in terms of film form. He uses still images -- including photographs taken during the Gold Rush by a photographer called Eric Hegg, which have their own magical history of survival and recovery -- as well as newspaper articles, printed posters and archival letters. He uses newsreels from Pathe and Fox. And he combs all of this archival visual material for Dawson history, from an early instance of baseball match fixing to a real-life Hollywood murder with a Dawson connection. And of course, Dawson's connections with early cinema. But he goes far beyond using the footage as factual archive; he uses the reels from the Dawson Film Find, their edges marked by decades of water damage, to craft a magical visual history of their time. A sentence like “The years and decades passed Dawson by” is illustrated with shots of silent film heroines sleeping, as if waiting to be awakened by the kiss of some fairytale prince. We watch entranced as a series of unidentified film characters gamble, or wrestle with their lovers, or wait outside doors, eavesdropping. It feels like we're eavesdropping too, on history.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 Mar 2021

Social maladies

My Mirror column:

Two films about contagious infections, in the starkly different milieus of the USA and Kerala, point to the cracks in which a virus can really make a home.

 
Films about pandemics have catapulted to unprecedented fame in the last two months, as people across the globe seek out fictional material that resonates in the age of Covid-19. Two of the better films available to stream online in India are Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 medical thriller Contagion, where a highly infectious fictional new virus makes its way from Hong Kong to the USA, and Aashiq Abu’s 2019 Malayalam film Virus, which depicts how the state of Kerala dealt with the outbreak of the Nipah virus in 2018.

In both films, one is constantly struck by the use of terms that most of us are only beginning to learn – “incubation period”, “treatment protocol”, “index patient”. Both films deal with zoonotic viruses that have entered the human body from animals, and the fear factor derives from the fact that the scientific situation we are dealing with is not just new, but unknown – and therefore extremely difficult to predict. In an early scene in Contagion, the scientist working on a vaccine seems to almost marvel at the novel virus. “It's still changing," she tells the head of the Centre for Disease Control, Dr Ellis Cheever. "It's figuring us out faster than we’re figuring it out.”

“It doesn’t have anything else to do,” says Dr Cheever, looking unimpressed.

It’s a droll little moment in a relentlessly grim film, but you barely register the comment as dry humour because you’re too busy registering it as fact. Contagion makes it very clear that human beings are on the back foot here. Unlike the virus, we have a great deal to do if we’re to protect the species from the deathly microscopic foe – and from ourselves.

For there are two seemingly contradictory facts about human beings that both Virus and Contagion make visible. First, that the virus piggybacks on the existence of community: the fact that human beings live with each other, and don't seem to know quite how to do without. Second, that human beings are quick to suspect each other, and the way the virus can really conquer is if our leaders choose to divide and rule.

Contagion opens with an off-screen cough that may or may not have had the same chilling effect in 2011 that it does now. In 2020, we are more than primed to watch the film’s opening sequence of people going about their closely proximate urban lives as a series of dangerous acts – pressing elevator buttons in public places, clutching the same steel pillar on the metro that a thousand other hands have clutched, sitting next to each other on planes, in stations, at bar counters, in hotel casinos. Kate Winslet, playing an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer called Dr Mears, has the job of contact tracing – finding out who the first American casualty, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), may have met and infected in the days before her death, and thus hoping to prevent the further spread of the virus.

Virus unfolds in a less transnational context, but contact tracing is very much at the centre of the narrative. A medical volunteer called Annu (Parvathy) conducts a painstaking investigation, following up with patients and their friends and family members to try and establish the links between seemingly unconnected cases. She is aided in her task by Kerala’s fairly well-organised administration – the fact that there are tickets given out at government hospital, for instance – and by increasingly ubiquitous technology – the presence of time-stamps on mobile phone photos, for instance. But what is really striking about the film’s depiction of the process is not just Parvathy’s sharp instincts, but her sensitivity.

In fact, sensitivity is what distinguishes the actions of almost all those who populate Aashiq Abu’s film: doctors and nurses most of all, but drivers and attendants, and because this is Kerala, even ministers and bureaucrats.

If Contagion maps all the ways in which an infectious disease can bring out our worst selves as a society – people profiteering off potential fake cures, panicked hoarding of goods that creates grocery store shortages, stampedes and food riots – Virus suggests that it is also possible to combat our fears. The mother of a young man who has died is surprised that Annu is willing to have tea in her house. The ration delivery for her place is now dropped off on the road, with the driver honking before leaving. When a crematorium is chosen for the last rites of Nipah patients, villagers in the vicinity block the road in fear. But a set of volunteers is found to conduct the rites elsewhere. In a revealing conversation, the district magistrate says that enforcing the cremation through the use of police force would have been the easiest thing to do – but the point is to try and do it without. Even the debate about whether it is unsafe to bury the bodies of virus-affected patients is conducted without rancour or religious fervour, and resolved with the scientifically approved solution of deep burial.

As an ill-prepared India waits for whatever is to come in the next few weeks and months, we have a socio-political climate that tragically encourages the well-off to turn away from the poor, while turning Muslims into scapegoats by testing the participants of one ill-advised religious gathering rather than all those that have taken place. Watching Virus makes it clear that we will sink or swim based on our ability to allay each others' fears and suspicions, not stoke them.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 April 2020

Under the influence

My Mirror column:

The under-watched classic Bigger Than Life turns family drama into almost-horror, with prescient warnings against modern medicine and delusional masculinity

 
The first 20 minutes of Bigger Than Life seem to paint a picture of the perfect family man, who’s also a hard-working, pleasant colleague. A schoolteacher in suburban 1950s America, Ed Avery (James Mason in a career-defining performance) is the nice guy you ask to help push your stalled car, the guy who lets the kid in detention go if he can name one Great Lake out of the five, the guy who sprints on to the last bus after school to work a second job at a garage.

But those first 20 minutes also show us that Ed is also the sort of guy who thinks he can handle everything, and do so alone: he hasn’t told his wife about the garage job because she’ll think it’s beneath him, nor mentioned the pains he’s had for six months because he thinks they’re nothing. So it doesn’t seem surprising that when he’s forced to go to hospital after a blackout, his first instinct is to instruct his little son Richie to be “the man around here” and “take care of your mother”.

On the surface, Nicholas Ray’s film is about the dangerous mental side effects of a miracle drug for the body. Ed is diagnosed with a rare inflammation of the arteries, and treated successfully with cortisone – until he starts to take it in excess. The mood swings, paranoia and manic depression that result only reinforce his impaired judgement, making him take still more pills. Screenwriters Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum based the script on an article called ‘Ten Feet Tall’ by Berton Roueché, medical staff writer for The New Yorker, about a real schoolteacher’s experience with high-dosage cortisone. And though this is 1950s America, and patient and doctor are well-acquainted, even friendly, the film clearly indicates how alienating hospitalisation is: the non-stop tests, the solitary confinement, the ghostliness of barium meal, the unrecognisable medical jargon in which you hear your own body described.

But Ray, a director more famous for films such as Rebel Without a Cause and In a Lonely Place, was a man both ahead of his time and able to see into the depths of it. Released in 1956, when much of America was watching the era-defining sitcom Father Knows Best, Bigger Than Life revealed the frightening cracks in that idyllic ’50s family picture. At one level, Ed Avery’s symptoms are those of a mentally ill man, but he can certainly also be viewed as a barely-exaggerated version of the ordinary neighbourhood patriarch, the father who thinks he knows best even when he clearly doesn’t. This is the man insecure about being a “male schoolmarm”, who also has delusions of grandeur about schooling the nation. He insults his wife (“What a shame I couldn’t have married... my intellectual equal!”) and pushes his child beyond breaking point in the name of prepping him for the real world (“If you let it at ‘good enough’ right now, that’s the way you’ll be later on.”).

The film is also a powerful indictment of the pressures of life in a consumerist era, for a man trying to give himself and his family a good life on a single schoolteacher’s salary. The Averys’ house is filled with posters of faraway European holiday destinations, and there are wry, hopeful conversations about vacations and “getting away from it all” – while the camera often focuses on James Mason’s watch, and time and lateness is a frequent topic. The tight budgeting that makes Ed work a secret second job has as its flip side the grandiose display he indulges in when under the influence of the cortisone: hustling his wife into a fancy designer store, being rude to the saleswomen, and insisting on buying her two expensive dresses with a cheque that eventually bounces.

The more unbalanced Ed gets, the more he is convinced that he is the only smart person around. The milkman’s jangling of a bell seems to him deliberately designed to annoy him “because I work with my mind”, the other drivers on the street irritate him, his son and wife disappoint him, and the children he teaches for a living seem to him idiots. “We’re breeding a race of moral midgets,” he declares at a PTA meeting, eliciting mostly gasps of disbelief – but also a couple of votes for future school principal.

Watching Bigger Than Life in 2020, the self-aggrandising family man who thinks the country needs to do away with “all this hogwash about self-expression, permissiveness and emotional security” and focus on inculcating “a sense of duty” feels terrifyingly familiar. He might be your neighbour, your uncle, your father or your boss. And his condition is getting worse, under the influence of a collective drug called nationalism, being doled out for free at a counter near you.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 February 2020.

Hairy Situations

My Mirror column:

A new film casts Jennifer Aniston as a New York City hairdresser caught up in a very European murder, making our columnist think about another fictional hairdresser embroiled in another murder

Jennifer Aniston as a hairdresser in the recent film Murder Mystery

Kyle Newacheck’s Murder Mystery (on Netflix) is an affectionate takedown of the genre, mixing comedy with thrills – and caricatures with characters – in a way that feels surprisingly satisfying. An ordinary New York couple called Nick and Audrey Spitz (Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston) land in the midst of a European murder that’s equal parts hamming and high intrigue.

The setting, a high-volume homage to all those Agatha Christie plots with a cast of suspects stuck on a train or in a country house, is a yacht in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, with the first murder taking place while all the guests are literally present in the same room. There’s a charming viscount with a perfect jawline; there’s his sultry young Japanese ex-girlfriend who’s recently dumped him for his ancient uncle; there's the uncle himself, a millionaire with a mane of white hair that doesn't make up for his shrivelledness. There’s the obligatory colonel, updated from the moustachioed white man with a past in India to a black man who once lost an eye saving the millionaire’s life. There’s the colonel’s bodyguard, Sergei, a hulk made more forbidding by his refusal to make conversation. There’s a preening actress, a racing car driver, and the millionaire’s unhappy unsatisfactory son. Just as soon as we’ve met everyone, the millionaire announces his intention to disinherit everyone present in favour of his new bride – and is promptly murdered. Enter the other necessary stock character: a detective with a French accent and a high opinion of himself, a la Hercule Poirot.

Screenwriter James Vanderbilt (of Zodiac fame) keeps things zippy and droll, making Nick and Audrey prime suspects for a murder we know they haven't committed – and that they now need to solve in order to save themselves. The film is good fun at this level. But alongside the US-Europe jokes – the NYPD cop converting from dollars as he tips a caricaturish butler, or wearing shorts to the banquet on board yacht – I enjoyed the film for the oddly believable married couple at the centre, with their totally believable US-style quarrels over brands of allergy medication and anniversary gifts. Sandler, as a cop who's failed the detective test three times and taken to keeping that fact from his wife, surprised me with a sense of unspoken vulnerability. But Aniston, as his frustrated hairdresser wife waiting for the European honeymoon he promised her 15 years ago, surprised me more.

We first meet Audrey in the salon where she works, bonding with female clients over the unromanticness of men. As the film moves along, Vanderbilt gives Aniston a more sharply defined sense of unfulfilled aspirations. While her husband snores beside her, Audrey is the one who sneaks into business class and befriends a flirtatious viscount. When he invites the couple to his uncle's yacht in lieu of their tour bus, Nick flies off the handle, thinking it's an Indecent Proposal moment. And yet Nick is supposedly the practical one, the 'real cop' to Audrey's naive murder mystery fiend. The more earnestly his wife throws herself into her honeymoon-turned-adventure, the more he undercuts her: “This is what I do for a living, sweetheart – you're a goddam hairdresser!” Nick apologises quickly after, but the barb sticks. “Look who figured it out, the hairdresser!” Audrey taunts him later.

Kirsten Dunst as the hairdresser Peggy Blomquist in the crime series Fargo (2015)

Watching Audrey reminded me of another hairdresser in another sort of narrative: Kirsten Dunst's fabulous 2015 performance as Peggy Blomquist in the second season of the magisterial crime drama Fargo. Peggy, too, is a woman in a marriage and a life that doesn't quite live up to her desires. Her husband's only dream is to own the butcher shop in their small town. Peggy, meanwhile, thinks she has great style, hoards fashion magazines and is increasingly obsessed with a self-discovery workshop recommended by her beauty salon boss. Like Audrey and Nick, Peggy and her husband find themselves caught up in an increasingly surreal murder case. Fargo's iteration of this is of course chilling, not funny. Peggy's response, which is to start to imagine that expensive course as the bridge to an all-new life, is chilling, too. Murder Mystery makes Audrey's aspirationalness much more familiar, as in a hilarious scene when her budget fashionista self is mocked: “Your shoes still have a sticker from Marshalls,” sneers the Japanese heiress holding them at gunpoint. “They have name brands now,” says Nick defensively, even as Audrey scrambles to take the sticker off.

Is there something about hairdressers that makes them such evocative carriers of the unfulfilled American dream? We don't, in either Murder Mystery or Fargo, see very much of Audrey or Peggy at work, but it is as if they carry deep within themselves the desire for the makeover. The transformative hairdos they give other women are a gift they would love to receive themselves.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 

A brief guide to Guide

My Mirror column:

60 years ago, RK Narayan wrote a novel that became a Hindi film classic. But he was not happy. Ahead of his 112th birth anniversary, let’s ask why that might have been.

Most readers of this column have probably seen the 1965 Guide: Dev Anand plays a dapper tour guide who falls for an unhappily married Waheeda Rehman. But this Hindi film classic was based on an even earlier literary classic: RK Narayan’s 1958 novel The Guide.

The film retains most elements of Narayan’s narrative, and yet it is almost unrecognisable. For instance, the Waheeda we first meet in the film is a sad lady in a big car; all we know is that she’s the hero’s love interest. In the book, Rosie has more scope for surprise: because we learn about her slowly, she comes into her own in remarkable ways.

Reading The Guide, one can see why Dev Anand, who set things in motion by reading the book in London, was entranced. Railway Raju, as his character is called in the book, is a disarming layabout who runs a shop at Malgudi Station, but soon finds himself in demand as a tour guide. He falls for Rosie and helps launch her as a dancer before landing in jail, and eventually being anointed a saint.

The novel is already a fifth of the way through when Raju says: “There was a girl who had come all the way from Madras and who asked the moment she set foot in Malgudi, ‘Can you show me a cobra — a king cobra it must be —which can dance to the music of a flute?’” Within four pages, the resourceful Raju fulfils this whimsical farmaaish, and the two are face to face with the snake. “The whole thing repelled me, but it seemed to fascinate the girl...” writes Narayan. “She stretched out her arm slightly and swayed it in imitation of the movement; she swayed her whole body to the rhythm — for just a second, but that was sufficient to tell me what she was, the greatest dancer of the century.”


In Vijay Anand’s Guide, this half-a-page encounter between the cobra and Rosie (for that, of course, is who she is) became the sequence described on YouTube as “Serpent dance by Waheedaji”. Like the men in the scene, two generations of Hindi film viewers have gaped admiringly as Waheeda Rehman turns from primly elegant memsahib into a woman seemingly possessed by the sapera’s flute. Things delicately suggested in the novel — Rosie’s dancing talent, her repressed passion, the snake as sexual symbol — become full-blown in the film. The heroine’s suppressed erotic energy is channelled into the popularly understood naagin theme.

Otherwise, too, the sequence is emblematic of how the English novel was altered to make the popular Hindi film. What in Narayan’s tragicomic description was a forlorn place — bare-bodied children gaping at the arriving car, the poor snake charmer wearing nothing but a turban and “a pair of drawers” — gets amped up into Hindi cinema's familiar ‘tribal’ setting: thatched huts around a convenient circular clearing, with a ghaghra-choli-clad dancer present so that the heroine can join in.



An English version was also made, with the famous novelist Pearl S. Buck collaborating on the script with director Tad Danielewski, and the Indian cast speaking in English. (Buck apparently helped Rehman with her English.) RK Narayan described his brush with cinema in an essay called 'Misguided Guide'. The tone is characteristically mild, but the sarcasm is palpable. Danielewski and his crew requested the writer to show them the locations that had inspired his book. After the tour, however, Narayan was informed that the film was now to be shot a thousand miles away, in Udaipur and Jaipur. He tried to suggest that Malgudi, the imaginary South Indian small town in which he had set all his novels, was nothing like those places. His brother RK Laxman, the cartoonist, tried to suggest that real, filmable monuments on screen would undercut Raju’s character, since his talent was conjuring up historical grandeur out of nothing.



But the filmmakers would have none of this. “We are out to expand the notion of Malgudi,” they told a nonplussed Narayan. “Malgudi will be where we place it, in Kashmir, Rajasthan, Bombay, Delhi, even Ceylon.” In the Hindi film, this national tableaux idea gets underlined when Dev Anand's Raju takes groups across Rajasthan, speaking Punjabi to the Punjabis, Gujarati to the Gujaratis — and of course, farraatedaar English to the British.



The English film version is hard to find. Though screened at Cannes in 2007, I've never seen it, nor met anyone who has. But a contemporary review by New York Times critic Bosley Crowther suggests why it sank in America. “The script is sluggish and uncertain, and Mr. Anand, who seems throughout to be modeling his style of acting on one of the more romantic Hollywood stars, bouncing about in boyish fashion and wearing his hat on the back of his pompadoured hair, is stumped by the staggering requirement of acting the weird, ironic twist,” wrote Crowther. “He leaves us feeling that we, as well as the people of this poverty-stricken area, have been hoaxed.” The externalised quality of Hindi film emotion clearly did not translate for an American audience.



What is remarkable, though, is that the American critic found the film authentic precisely for the “Indian scenes” that Narayan had so cringed at: “a succession of colorful views of sightseeing spots, busy cities, temples, dusty landscapes and crowds”. As Railway Raju says: “One thing I learnt in my career as a tourist guide was that no two persons were interested in the same thing.” Our satisfaction depends, I suppose, on what we most wish to see.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 Oct 2018.

Film review: Seeing Allred

My review of an absorbing and important new documentary on Netflix, for India Today:

Lawyer Gloria Allred (right) with Norma McCorvey ('Jane Roe' in Roe vs. Wade), 1989

Seeing Allred is a fascinating introduction to a figure who ought to be better known outside the USA: the lawyer Gloria Allred. Allred, whose website calls her a “feminist lawyer” and “discrimination attorney”, is known for having battled some of America's most powerful men, across the political and social spectrum. She has represented Paula Jones against Bill Clinton, Summer Zervos against Donald Trump, murder victim Nicole Brown's family in the OJ Simpson trial, and 33 women who accuse the comedian Bill Cosby of sexual misconduct – some of whom appear in the film. Famous Allred targets the documentary doesn't name include Michael Jackson, Tiger Woods, Eddie Murphy, former Congressman Anthony Weiner and former Hewlett Packard CEO Mark Hurd.

However, Allred has also fought many cases away from the limelight, on sexual harassment, child support and workplace discrimination. She has been a long-term advocate of same-sex marriage and equal rights for transgenders. 

Filmmakers Roberta Grossman and Sophie Sartain follow the indefatigable 76-year-old as she meets clients, holds press conferences, appears in court and (very reluctantly) speaks of how her own life experiences – single motherhood, being raped at gunpoint and a back-alley abortion in a pre Roe vs Wade era – have shaped her career.

The film traces Allred's initiation into feminism and the law, including early pathbreaking suits: against a toy store for labelling good as “boys'” and “girls'”, against a fancy restaurant for having a 'women's menu' that didn't show prices, against a clothing store that charged more to alter women's clothes than men's. It also uses archival TV clips to present a colourful record of sexism in American popular culture. On one 80s debate, when Allred says, “We don't think our daughters should have to trade sexual favours in order to get a raise.” Then another female guest cuts in, “Why not, we did. How do you think we got on this show?” [Cue raucous laughter].

A vocal feminist long before it was fashionable, Allred is unpopular – to put it mildly. Critics paint her as publicity-hungry, money-minded, aggressive. But these charges fall away as we watch her meet warmly with dozens of grateful, often emotional clients, and respond calmly to nasty commenters.

What remains controversial is her use of the media as an extension of the courtroom – and sometimes in lieu of it. A 2017 New Yorker profile explained her approach as seeking “to influence the court of public opinion by getting the victim's perspective in the news”.

The feminist principle that victims of sexual assault and harassment must always be believed often conflicts with the legal principle that suspects are innocent until proven guilty. But in a world where women are still far from equal, Allred has no doubt which side needs her more.

A slightly shorter version of this review was published in India Today, 1 Mar 2018.

Urban Legend: Paul Beatty Interview

Paul Beatty’s Booker-winning novel is a sublime, savage satire about modern-day racism in America. The author tells Trisha Gupta why no one—not even him—should be off the table to poke fun at.

Photo credit: Outlook India

In 2016, Paul Beatty became the first American writer to win the Man Booker prize. The surreal tale of an urban farmer who re-institutes segregation and slavery in his corner of Los Angeles, The Sellout was rejected by 18 UK publishers before an independent press called Oneworld took it on. The book’s whiplash wit slices through the smug fog of political correctness surrounding race, class and just about everything in America. Yet, there’s an inspired everyday lyricism to the writing, which owes something to Beatty’s past as a poet. Nothing is sacred in this book, yet everything he touches in it—from the LA public bus system to old-school Hollywood racism—feels almost spiritual.

We met Beatty at the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), in January 2017, and talked about watermelons, stereotypes, life after the Booker, and why ‘intellectual’ isn’t a label he minds…

ELLE: I thought The Sellout was more brutal, much angrier, than the reviews let on. 
Paul Beatty: I don’t think of it as angry. Sad, sometimes. But it’s interesting how people read things. During the Man Booker event, the moderator said, “Paul, your book is so angry!” There was a book there about a guy serial-killing people, another about a woman who plots this murder. How come those [books] aren’t angry and mine is? I’m not saying it’s not angry...

ELLE: ...but other things are angry too. Yes, I see. A different question: what does fictionalising real stuff do for you? 
PB: In terms of its emotive present, [my book] might be authentic—the anger, the frustration, humour. But I’m not trying to duplicate reality... The thing is the imagining. I write about things I don’t know anything about. That’s the fun part: to make it seem like this person exists. I have some sense of the psychological stuff in the book. But I don’t know anything about this neighbourhood I’ve written. Or surfing. Or gardening. At the [JLF] session, a woman asked me, “Is there a question that no one asks you?” I thought, no one ever asks me about the fruit.

ELLE: You mean the watermelons your protagonist grows?
PB: Yes, and the satsuma oranges, the peaches...

ELLE: There’s also the stunning moment when the protagonist, Bonbon, asks his dad if slavery might have been less psychologically damaging if it was called ‘gardening’. Was there something you wanted to say, about gardening?
PB: [Laughs] No, not really. I don’t garden. My mum gardens, or she used to. The fruit is an important part of my memory of California, of how I grew up, with a lemon tree in the backyard, a peach tree... For me, the book is about those details as much as the larger stuff.

ELLE: The details are often a dense web of cultural references, from Mark Twain to BBC’s Masterpiece Theatre, Eva Braun to Nina Simone. Have you always done this?
PB: Good question. I think so. My poetry wasn’t so different. It’s a line between me and the reader. It’s a test for me, almost—who are these cultural touchstones? Who’s the right person to insert?

ELLE: Sometimes a name is enough to open up a world.
PB: And sometimes there’s the decision of whether the narrator needs to explain something or not. I’m writing for somebody who may not understand what I’m doing, but who’s open to hearing everything

ELLE: Has your style ever been called ‘too intellectual’?
PB: Sometimes. One angry review went, “I didn’t like the book; I had to look up all these words.” But someone else said, “That made me want to buy the book!” So nothing’s for everyone. It’s how I write. I’m not going to change.

ELLE: Does such feedback ever influence how you think about what you’re doing?
PB: Yeah, I think about this stuff. A book that helped me was Dante’s Inferno. Beautifully written. But full of references! He’s name-dropping—these popes from the 11th century, these bishops, archbishops, artists. No one can know all of these people. But you get the lay of the land. You get a sense of his anger, his judgementalism. It’s not important that everybody knows everything.

ELLE: A writer friend of mine is miffed about this ‘explaining’, about editors who tell her, “Not everybody knows this Delhi neighbourhood”. Would anyone say that if it were a New York neighbourhood, she asks.
PB: Yeah, and there’s something to that. There are some advantages to being American—the culture is inundated with these references. But hopefully things will start going both ways, so people have a sense of India beyond Slumdog Millionaire (2008).

ELLE: You resist labelling, and yet you have these comic riffs: on black women teacher-poets, for instance, or women who love Nina Simone. It’s hard to get away from categories.
PB: That’s how we communicate. It’s mean. But I start with ridiculing my labels for myself. I once wrote this poem called ‘Stall Me Out’, making fun of things my friends said about me, and things I know about myself. It freed me up to not take myself so seriously.

ELLE: That’s very hard to do...
PB: Yes, because you think: if I don’t take myself seriously, no one else will. But I learnt to use myself as a dartboard. Maybe I’m rationalising, but I think I really am making fun of things that matter to me.

ELLE: India, these days, specialises in taking offence. But I also worry about us left-liberal sorts, the ones giving offence in India—we rarely laugh at ourselves.
PB: People are trying to protect ground they’ve had to earn. I had a student, a lesbian, who said, “I want to make fun of my community, but we’ve worked so hard to get here.” But this is how you broaden your horizons. The problem is when people feel they’re progressive, and therefore must be beyond reproach.

ELLE: Do you still write poems?
PB: No. I haven’t written a poem in 15 years. As a poet, you have to be really public. I hate that.

ELLE: Do you mean the performative part, like when you were with the Nuyorican Poets Cafe?
PB: Yes. There was this one time I was writing a poem, and in my head I went, “They’re going to like that.” And I caught myself...

ELLE: …imagining your audience?
PB: Exactly. And I thought, I have to stop this. I was the intellectual New York poet, I was this, I was that. People can read you however they want. But how much do I want to participate in that?

ELLE: Did studying creative writing with Allen Ginsberg shape you?
PB: Absolutely. I’d never written a thing before I showed up [at Brooklyn College]. Allen was a gracious guy, especially if he liked you. His speech and his writing style were very similar. He was an excellent storyteller; a very good editor. His graciousness, his insistence on clarity were important to me. And his precision.

ELLE: Your book is very much about urbanity. Do you have a favourite city?
PB: In New York, I’ve encountered stuff, especially musically, that I wouldn’t have anywhere else. Now I live in California, too, since I’ve gotten married. When I first got to New York, I could be so anonymous; I loved that. Before I started teaching [creative writing at Columbia University], I would stay home all the time. I was invisible.

ELLE: Has the Booker changed that?
PB: Here, at something like JLF, it has. But otherwise, people don’t read, so no one knows who I am. [Laughs] And someone’s going to win next year. I’ll get shunted to the side. Next up!

Published in ELLE India, June 2017.

Singing the Bawdy Electric

My Mirror column:

A lavani dance performance and a film about American burlesque offer sparkling, subversive ways to think about women’s sexual freedom.

The incomparable Shakuntala Nagarkar during a Sangeet Bari performance

Judith Stein, ex-burlesque dancer, dresses up for a return to the stage

Recently, Delhi's Studio Safdar, an unusual performance space that also includes a second-hand bookshop and a cafe, hosted something rarely seen outside of Maharashtra: a performance of (and about) lavani. The result of Bhushan Khorgaonkar and Savitri Medhatul's years of careful research and enthusiastic engagement with the folk dance form, the show draws its name, Sangeet Bari, from the traditional theatres in which lavani troupes perform turn by turn (thus ‘bari’). It is from the same tradition that Sangeet Bari draws its prize performers: the winsome Akanksha Kadam and the incomparable Shakuntalabai Nagarkar, affectionately known as Shakubai.

Lavani is known as an erotically charged dance form, but the songs make space for irreverent commentary on anything from marriage to the current hot-button topic of the day (think demonetisation, or elections). The lavani dancer embraces unapologetically the pleasures of the body, while never forgetting that what fires up those physical connections is often the mind. Watching Shakubai, in her nine-yard sari and jewellery, move effortlessly from the seductive to the comic and back again, is a treat and an education. Flirtatiousness – of both banter and gesture -- is raised to an art form. One marvels at how Shakubai's feet measure the ground in perfectly calculated strides; how not just her face and hands, but every quivering muscle in her back expresses the chosen emotion; and how expertly her eyes scan the room, selecting a man to cajole, challenge, or mock-disdainfully reject.

This seduction routine – and you can tell that it is in many ways a routine – is integral to the performance of lavani. And yet somehow Shakubai's practised ease is also full of improvisational energy, each eye caught in the audience an invitation to create a spontaneous new moment of intimacy. And although the songs are written by men to be performed for an audience of men, these women of lavani display a frank, joyful embrace of their own sexuality.

Women taking an open-faced pleasure in the erotics of their own selves was also the most delightful aspect of a documentary I saw last week, as it closed the 13th Asian Women's Film Festival, organised in Delhi by the indefatigable India chapter of the International Association of Women in Radio and Television. League of Exotique Dancers (2015), directed for Canadian television by Rama Rau, profiles eight ageing ex-burlesque dancers on the eve of their return to the stage – often after three decades or more – as part of Las Vegas' remarkable Burlesque Hall of Fame. Having worked for decades in what is considered (and perhaps was) – like lavani -- an industry created by men for the pleasure of men, you might be forgiven for imagining that these women would seem embittered, angry or at the very least, exploited. Instead, Toni Elling, Holiday O'Hara, Kitty Navidad, Judith Stein and the others all emerge as unbelievably badass women, with stunning clarity not just about the milieu they agreed to be part of, but also about what their work meant to them.

Each woman's journey was different. For Navidad and Elling, the move into burlesque was partially because of the frustratingly low-paid, boring assembly-line jobs their gender and class had equipped them for. Once on stage, though, they enjoyed themselves. “All those years I had worked as a waitress, a telephone operator, you know? But I found myself on stage, and I know who I am now,” says the Detroit-born Elling, among the first black women to be a burlesque dancer.

For O'Hara, who had spent her childhood as the nerdy 'ugly' girl damaged by self-doubt about her attractiveness, being publicly admired for her sexual, sensual identity was liberating. “With dance I got to recreate myself. It allowed me the opportunity to reclaim my body. And that healed my mind, too.” Meanwhile Judith Stein, whose feminist friends disapproved of her becoming an erotic dancer, has no doubt that her choice empowered her. “Feminism [for us] wasn't about not shaving your legs. Feminism was about shaving your legs and working in a bar and working as a 'sex object' and knowing that you were. And not trading your soul and your pussy for a wedding ring,” says Stein, unflinching.

The theme of financial independence comes up repeatedly. But equally significant is these women's aura of sexual confidence. “I refuse to believe the men were in charge here,” says O'Hara. “No-one's there to BS you. You're BS-ing them,” says another dancer. “Being a stripper, or being a sex trade worker, that has been the job... open to women through the ages. The belly dancer, the flamenco dancer... it was about being sexual, being able to be comfortably display their sexuality. And that's strong,” says Stein.

Sexuality, the film persuades us, is as legitimate a part of a woman's identity as her mathematical skills, or her talent for answering phone calls. And given that the world is what it is, why should using one's erotic skills – and indeed, developing them more fully to give pleasure to one’s self – not be something to celebrate? The body is not everything. But we have insisted for far too long that it ought to be nothing.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Mar 2017.

Mere saamne wali sarhad par: thoughts on Aisi Taisi Democracy

My piece on the political comedy show 'Aisi Taisi Democracy', published in the Footprints section of the Pakistani newspaper, Dawn. 

I’d almost given up on stand-up comedy, to be honest. The first couple of shows I went to, while at graduate school in New York City, largely passed over my head. I’d like to think the reason wasn’t that I have no sense of humour, but that the humour was firmly rooted in the specific culture and politics of mid-2000s America — and I wasn’t.

When I returned to India, it seemed that stand-up was beginning to be a thing here, too. So I gave it another try. But the comics I heard in Delhi, circa 2007-08, seemed neither sharp nor funny. They had precisely the opposite problem from the Americans I’d heard before — they weren’t rooted enough in contemporary India.

Aisi Taisi Democracy (ATD) doesn’t have that problem. A three-person act made up of Sanjay Rajoura, Varun Grover and Rahul Ram, ATD’s brand of often caustic, unabashedly political humour, delivered in a linguistic mix that is 80 per cent Hindi/Hindustani and maybe 20pc English, is anything but derivative. Rajoura, 42, lives in Delhi and is a full-time comic. Grover, 35, is based in Bombay, where he used to write for television and now does lyrics and scripts for films. Ram, well-known as the lead vocalist and bass guitarist of the band Indian Ocean, came on board last year, when Rajoura and Grover had agreed to combine their acts. “Because Rahul Ram agreed, we had to become more organised. We had a big musician now, so we had to give the show due respect,” Grover told me, characteristically poker-faced. The trio first performed together in Gurgaon last July, and has now done 12 shows across India, playing to full houses everywhere.

Nandini Nair, writing in The Caravan in 2010, pointed out that the Indian-American stand-up comedy scene was dogged by “[j]okes about ‘cheap’ parents, rebirth, recycling, computers, mispronounced names, Indian male ugliness, Indian female beauty, and traffic at home”, highlighting “the homogeneity of the group”. There is indeed a thin line between an appeal to familiarity and a rehashing of stereotype. Humour must be site-specific, and certainly ATD represents a particular subset of urban India. There are references to the Mumbai metro and TGIF; there are swipes at Facebook posts about Father’s Day.

Both Rajoura and Grover, however, bring with them a richness of experience that refuses some flattened idea of the Indian metropolis as unconnected to the hinterland. This is immanent humour, emerging from lives lived at many levels, and often producing almost affectionate insider jokes. If Rajoura draws on his decade-long career as a software engineer to poke fun at the hierarchies and frustrations of the corporate world, Grover’s years growing up in Lucknow and Banaras throw up laugh-out-loud takes on small-town cybercafes and Uttar Pradesh train toilets. Rajoura’s solo acts in the past have focused hilariously on his Jat family background, though the ATD show in Delhi reserved most of its community-centric jokes for Komal Trilok Singh’s opening act, which dwelt lovingly on Sardars/Punjabis (“Other people have sex. We have chicken.”).

The choice of language is crucial, and I was glad to learn that performing in south Mumbai and Bangalore haven’t forced ATD to abandon their wonderful idiomatic Hindi. “We tried translating ourselves into English in Bangalore,” says Grover, “But halfway through the show, we knew the flow wasn’t as good. Never again, we decided.”

What makes ATD stand out, though, are the unapologetic take-downs — and biting send-ups — of contemporary politics. Narendra Modi’s fashion sense, Arvind Kejriwal’s quarrelsomeness, the Ambanis’ philanthropy and our ridiculous defensiveness about Bharatiya sanskriti are all suitably skewered. The songs — performed by Ram, but written by Rajoura and Grover — tick some more political boxes, though with fewer imaginative sparks. A take-off on ‘Barbie Doll’ is called, what else, ‘Babri Doll’. Pakistan comes in for some ribbing, too, mostly aimed at the rocky history of the country’s democracy and the figure of the Pakistan-based terrorist.

“Stand-up is very lucrative in India right now, and if you’re not doing political comedy, then you will make more money, since then you can be invited anywhere,” said Grover. “Taking the risk of offending some people — that’s a gamble few take.” Grover characterised ATD’s politics as anti-establishment, “whether it’s the Indian establishment, the American or the Pakistani”. He continued, “Pakistanis have a great sense of humour — or perhaps just better material for making fun of? I enjoy two Pakistani shows, Hum Sab Umeed Say Hain and Loose Talk. Maybe 20pc of the humour doesn’t reach us, but the rest is common. Our success may be at different levels, but in our failures, we are very similar. And we are here to point out our failures.”

ATD can certainly marshal subcontinental unanimity on our unending supply of corrupt politicians, prying relatives and badly-behaved children. But the ATD song Mere saamne wali sarhad par, kehtein hain ki dushman rehta hai has already elicited a critical Pakistani rejoinder, ‘Aisi Taisi Hypocrisy’, urging Indians to swap easily-made bhai-chara promises for a more honest estimation of popular views on either side. The Pakistani response does cotton on to what might be ATD’s weakest link — that we aren’t as divorced from our politicians as we might want to believe. Perhaps in this respect, ATD could still up their game a bit. And perhaps Pakistan needs to up theirs, too: shouldn’t ‘Aisi Taisi Hypocrisy’ be a full-fledged show?

Published in Dawn, September 22nd, 2015

Book Review: Annie Proulx's 'Fine Just the Way It Is'

My review of Annie Proulx's collection of short stories in Biblio, in 2009:

Running into Heavy Weather

Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories
By Annie Proulx
Fourth Estate,
an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
221 pp, Rs 325

In Annie Proulx’s 1993 novel The Shipping News there is a bar that figures often: a place near the water’s edge, with a filthy linoleum floor, where “the talk was of insurance and unemployment and going away to find work”. It’s called the Heavy Weather. The choice of name isn’t incidental. It’s not massively important either. What it is is a little nod and chuckle, a sort of in-joke between Proulx and her characters, as well as between her and her readers. Because anyone who’s been reading Proulx for a little while knows that whether she’s writing about the stark, icy coast of Newfoundland (as in The Shipping News) or the merciless clarity of the Wyoming desert (as in her several collections of short stories: Close Range, Bad Dirt, and now Fine Just the Way It Is, her characters are sooner or later going to run into heavy weather – sometimes metaphorically, but quite often literally. Schoolteachers die in blizzards looking for their cats, a cowcatcher catch pneumonia searching for stray cattle in half-frozen swamps, a lonely hiker with her leg stuck in a crevice struggles to survive cruelly cold mountain nights and scorchingly sunny days. Weather is what gets everyone in the end; it’s also what brings everyone down to the same level. So when Proulx wants to tell her readers that a character really thinks of himself as above everyone else, she describes him thus: “Match seemed to indicate that blizzards, windstorms, icy roads and punishing hail were for other people; he moved in a cloud of different, special weather.”

But the weather isn’t always bleak, nor does it always map neatly on to the emotional arc of the story. Sometimes it’s a way in which to enter the landscape, the physical terrain in which her characters’ lives unfold, and into which she wishes to transport us. But the weather in Proulx’s stories is always a living presence, something that retains its power over human lives despite all the technological achievements of the last two centuries – something against which it is impossible to win. But it is possible to work with the weather: to understand its vagaries and move in tandem with it, rather than struggle foolishly to resist it. Proulx realizes that there are those who don’t think of these things her way, and she is able to articulate perfectly this modern desire for battle with the elements, even if she has little sympathy with it: “There was something about skiing in storms that thrilled certain people – climbers of dangerous rock at night, kayakers in ice-choked rivers, hikers who could not resist battering wind and hail.” But most of the time, her characters are in harmony with her: rural folk in brutal landscapes, they recognize the need to conserve their energies through long unforgiving spells of cold or heat. They know that they must fight only when absolutely necessary. As Proulx once said of her own writing, “The characters in a story, like people in life, behave as their landscape makes them behave…”.

Proulx has always had a profound sense of place, and in these stories, the vast sagebrushed expanse of Wyoming rises up to tell the stories of those who have inhabited it over the centuries. In ‘Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl’, which she tells us was inspired by the discovery of an ancient fire-pit during the construction of her house, as well as the presence of a chert quarry and a limestone cliff nearby, Proulx is able to conjure up from these rather sparse, unglamorous remains a living, breathing historical tableaux, complete with the sights and smells and sounds that would have made up life on that prairie two thousand years ago. She describes the shaman’s chanting “as elemental as chirring grasshopper wings”, the bellowing of bison “that made bedrock quiver”, the still air as clear as pure water, “everything as distinct as pebbles at the bottom of a spring” – and the hot, breathless day, affirming that summer “still lay on them like a panting wolf on a red bone”. This almost mythic narrative, which imagines a community of American Indians driving a herd of bison over a cliff, is perhaps the strongest statement of Proulx’s belief that men live both in the pincer-like grip of nature and in concert with it. Another example of Proulx’s wry take on nature is ‘The Sagebrush Kid’, the poker-faced tale of “an inanimate clump of sagebrush [with]… the appearance of a child reaching upward as if piteously begging to be lifted from the ground [that]… became a lonely woman’s passion,” swiftly growing into the biggest tree of its kind “in the lonely stretch of desert between Medicine Bow and Sandy Skull station”.

Proulx’s other concern – in these stories and in her writing in general – is with the world of work. She collects dictionaries of work and trades, gleaning from them a hoard of specialized phrases and names that have come out of human work. In The Shipping News, she prefaced each chapter with a sentence or two from the 1944 Ashley Book of Knots, which she found at a yard sale. “Old work words are falling into the pit of obsolescence as we abandon the labor of hands and bodies,” she lamented in 2001. Proulx’s love of work words, of course, is only symptomatic of the importance she accords to the actual processes of work. Mostly, this work is done by men. “I am interested in the rural world,” she wrote in that same 2001 piece, “and in that world it is men and men's work, whether logging or fishing or running cattle or growing soybeans, that dominate the culture and the history of the region.”

Oddly enough, in The Shipping News, Quoyle, the main male character isn’t very good with his hands, and makes a living writing a column about interesting ships that come into the Newfoundland harbour where he lives, but even here there is a trace of the author’s fascination with the ships themselves, the building of seagoing vessels, whether big ocean liners or small boats whose life-saving efficiency lies in not keeling over in a storm. In the same novel, there is also a detailed, loving description of the upholstery work done by an important female character, Quoyle’s aunt: how she starts off upholstering chairs at home, how she takes on more challenging jobs, and finally becomes a yacht upholsterer. In Proulx’s Wyoming world, though, women rarely have the opportunity to acquire a specialized skill – they’re too busy doing everything the men don’t have time for. “On the ranches the wives held everything together – cooking for big crowds, nursing the sick and injured, cleaning, raising children and driving them to rodeo practice, keeping the books and paying the bills, making mail runs and picking up the feed at farm supply, …and often riding with the men at branding and shipping times… [but] treated with little more regard than the beef they helped produce.”

Whether for men or for women, there’s work that is treasured and there’s work that simply feels wrong. In the superbly evocative ‘The Great Divide’, set between the 1920s and 1940s, a man forced to work in the coal mines is unable to come to terms with the loss of his outdoor life. “Hi was surprised to find that he missed horse catching with Fenk, riding through the chill-high desert, the grey-green sage and greasewood, the salt sage sheltering sage hens, pronghorn, occasional elk, riding up on ridges and mesas to spy out bands of wild horses… Not even Helen could understand the pull of the wild desert. And as much as he despised Fenk’s ways, the man loved the wild country and it was a bond. Now, to go down in a metal cage with men in stinking garments unchanged for weeks or months, to work bent over in a cramped space in dim light was misery.” In the unrelentingly depressing ‘Tits-up in a Ditch’, set sixty years later, the unloved and confused Dakotah decides to chuck school just before graduation only to find herself in a pointless marriage and an even more pointless job waitressing at Big Bob’s travel stop. When she starts to see that she’s made a mistake, telling her school counsellor, “You were right. It would of been better if I’d graduated. Get a better job than this,” Proulx slips in a dose of humour so dark you almost can’t see it. “It could be worse,” said Mrs. Lenski. “You could have been a school counselor.”

Unlike in Proulx’s previous work, where people emerge from the shadow of forlorn childhoods and mismatched marriages into the almost redemptive sunshine of love born of familiarity, these tales are about people who never escape their pasts. Every single person has a genealogy, often a generational one that transcends verbiage to assume fate-altering dimensions. If Verl in ‘Tits-up in a Ditch’ names his granddaughter Dakotah after his pioneering great-grandmother, known for having worn black for her husband “an insulting six weeks” before taking up a homestead claim, Dakotah’s future married life seems involuntarily affected by this. In ‘Family Man’, an eighty-year-old stuck in a deliberately sunny old age home is first dismayed to find that he’s sharing his final days with “a coaltown slut… the first female he had ever plowed.” Worse, when he tries to tell his family’s darkest untold secret to his “smart” granddaughter, she thinks he should have gotten over it long ago. But as the old man mutters to himself, “That was the trouble with Wyoming, everything you ever did or said kept pace with you right to the end.” There is something unforgiving about Proulx’s Wyoming lives, something relentless which ought to put you off. But they also have an addictive quality – you go on reading, just as they go on living.

This review was published in Biblio: A Review of Books, Jan-Feb 2009 issue.

A Little Bit Of Magic - Photography Review

Richard Bartholomew’s poetic sensibilities animate his stunning photographic collection.

ONE COMES away from the exhibition of Richard Bartholomew’s photographs at Photoink Gallery, New Delhi, wondering whether it should really have been entitled ‘The Critic’s Eye’. It’s true that Bartholomew was best known as an art critic. But he was also a curator (running the first museum of Tibetan art in Delhi and serving as Secretary of the Lalit Kala Akademi), a poet and a painter. And it’s his poetic and painterly sensibilities, and his documentary skills, that really animate this stunning photographic collection.

The most accessible images are his portraits of some of India’s famous artists, or of his family. One recurring composition is the artist with his painting: a pose in which we get an intense Ram Kumar, a gesticulating FN Souza, a quiet Biren De, and then Bartholomew himself. More unusual are the photographs of painters socialising: groups of serious-faced men in dark suits, thick-rimmed spectacles and precisely-held cigarettes, which would not have seemed out of place in a Calcutta boxwallah’s office. Then there are a remarkable set of images of his wife Rati and his sons Pablo and Robin: bathing, drying clothes, sitting around, but most often sleeping or reading. This is a domesticity in which books and cameras are ubiquitous, even if people sleep on the floor. It’s also, of course, an extremely unusual portrait of motherhood: Rati always has a book and a cigarette, even as she lies comfortingly close to her sleeping child. There is an intimacy to these images that is both startling and warming.


The same affectionate yet perspicacious eye captures Delhi, the city in which he spent 42 of his 59 years, after fleeing Burma during the 1942 Japanese occupation. But even as he records the city’s life as everyday experience, his gaze remains oblique, picking out the detail at the edge of the frame that both counters and sets off the central image. In one photograph, a man stands poised on the edge of a flat-roofed governmental building while construction workers below lift malba, and a man cycles slowly to work. In another, an umbrella-holding man picks up his pyjamas as he wades carefully through a crowded street.

Some of the most striking images are from Bartholomew’s travels in the US in the 1970s. The human body, here, is framed against the landscape of consumer capitalism — not held by the environment, but divorced from it. But here, too, some of the most haunting images are ones that seem least dramatic at first glance. The girl at the Metropolitan Museum is a study in serenity — until you find that the culture-gazer is herself being looked at, by a baby in a pram. The woman with a suitcase, striding purposefully away, turns out to be barefoot.

The best thing about the exhibitionary form is that choices and placement conduct a magic dance of their own. When a plane flying over Delhi’s fields reappears over an American cemetery, one image becomes bound to the other. It is such unexpected secret connections that make Bartholomew’s oeuvre a little bit magic.

A Critic’s Eye is on at Photoink Gallery, New Delhi, until February 28

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 7, Dated Feb 21, 2009