Book Review: Krishna learns to let go the Hindu way in this bestseller

Part popular romance, part spiritual melodrama, 'Krishnayan' by Gujarati writer Kaajal Oza Vaidya adds some real women to India’s mythological matrix 

Krishnayan by Kaajal Oza Vaidya, translated from the Gujarati by Subha Pande,
Eka-Westland, 272 pages, ₹499

The most remarkable thing about Indic civilisation might be the uninterrupted lifespan of its beliefs. Most Hindu gods and goddesses were already being worshipped in South Asia when the Greeks were building temples to Zeus and Athena, or when Jupiter and Diana ruled ancient Roman hearts. But while the Greek and Roman gods have been long superseded by the Semitic religions, ours live on. Deities like Shiva, Vishnu, Ganesh, Karthik and Durga, and divine epic heroes like Ram and Krishna remain a vivid presence for religious Hindus. Mythology is still the matrix for modern Indian life.

But as a cynical politics digs its claws into people's beliefs, that matrix is turned into a never-ending maelstrom of offense-taking and offense-giving. On Saraswati Puja this February, for instance, right-wing Indian Twitter trended demands for the arrest of a Dalit activist for having insulting the Hindu goddess of learning by referring to her as 'exploited' by Brahma. According to the myth, Lord Brahma, creator of the universe, fell in love with Saraswati after he made her. Philosophical-metaphorical readings (an artist besotted with his own creation), or anthropological ones (the fact that incest figures in most ancient creation myths) stand no chance in belligerent social media battles, where the dominant narrative frame is men avenging women's 'honour'.

Of course, such 'dishonouring' drives both our epics: the abduction of Sita in the Ramayana, the stripping of Draupadi in the Mahabharata. But while the plots may turn on women, the male characters receive greater attention. Relationships between them—Krishna and Sudama, Krishna and Arjun, Arjun and Karna, Ram and Lakshman, even Ram and Hanuman—have formed popular models of friendship, fraternal love and loyalty. Most literary retellings, too, have been through the eyes of a male character: Bhima in MT Vasudevan Nair’s famous Malayalam novel Randaamoozham, Karna in Shivaji Sawant's Marathi classic Mrintyunjay, and Yudhishtira, Bhishma and Abhimanyu in Aditya Iyengar's The Thirteenth Day (2015).

A female perspective on our epics has only begun to appear in recent decades, mostly in fiction by women. Draupadi got pride of place in Pratibha Ray's award-winning 1993 Oriya novel Yajnaseni and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's 2008 novel The Palace of Illusions. Sita got some play in the graphic novel Sita's Ramayana and Nina Paley's film Sita Sings the Blues. Lesser female characters are now getting their due in popular English-language fiction: for example, Aditi Banerjee's The Curse of Gandhari, and Kavita Kane's series of books centred on Ahalya, Surpanakha, Sita's sister and Karna's wife.

Kaajal Oza Vaidya's hugely popular novel Krishnayan, which has sold over 200,000 copies in Gujarati since its publication in 2006, is an important addition to this literature, using the figure of Krishna to explore aspects of the man-woman relationship.

Recently translated into English by Subha Pande, Vaidya's narrative starts where the usual telling of Krishna's life stops. What is traditionally called Krishna Leela, literally Krishna's play, is a set of stories about the birth, childhood and adolescence of the Yadava chieftain, with such set themes as the naughty baby Krishna stealing butter from the milkmaids of Gokul, or his youthful flute-playing assignations with Radha.

Krishnayan, by contrast, opens with Krishna awaiting death, reminiscing about his life. And in Vaidya's unusually frank telling, what emerges as significant as he waits for Gandhari's curse to take effect are his bonds with women. There are four primary ones: Rukmini, his intelligent, stately senior queen, his consort in the administration of Dwarka; Satyabhama, his younger queen, childish but captivating; Draupadi, loyal wife to the five Pandava brothers, but still carrying a special attachment to Krishna—and Radha, the childhood sweetheart he hasn't seen in decades, now not just a married woman and a mother, but a mother-in-law.

Vaidya's narrative can feel laboured, and her dialogue borders on florid, at least in Pande's translation. Here, for instance, is Rukmini, “The fire raging in my heart is trying to tell me that he is waiting to answer all my questions.” And here is Arjun on the eve of the war: “I have a lot to say and yet nothing to say. I am dumbfounded. I am hit by thousands of thoughts at times and sometimes, I just can't think. I am going through a strange period of indecision.”

But Krishnayan's fictional premise is as layered as any present-day polyamorous situation, and Vaidya has all the depth of the Mahabharata behind her as she moves deftly across characters and revisits familiar dramatic situations: the ethics of game of dice, or how the five Pandavas deal with their shared connection to Draupadi. She explores each of Krishna's loves for what makes it unique – intellectual partnership, sexual allure, emotional understanding, a shared history – and goes refreshingly beyond him, to these women's relationships with each other.

But for all the empathy with which she writes about women, Vaidya remains staunchly invested in an essential separation of the genders. The Krishna of Krishnayan is an adept lover, loving husband and devoted friend—but he remains a man. In some of Vaidya's most emotional scenes, Krishna claims limitations in gendered terms, applauding women for their greater capacity for selflessness. “While I have only been contemplating seeking moksha and preparing myself for it, these two dearly loved women [Draupadi and Rukmini] have... come forward to liberate me from the cycle of life. Only women can do this. Only a woman can control heart and mind and fulfil her moral duties... And only she has the magnanimity to accept a co-wife and give true meaning to the word life-partner, Krishna thought...”.

It probably helps that Vaidya's Krishna isn't a god in the way we usually understand gods. He may know what is predestined—the Mahabharata war, the end of the Yadava race, or his own death—but he is powerless in the face of it. Rather than an uber-manipulator who's playing everyone else, this is a Krishna almost surprised to find that he, too, is caught in in a web of expectations and desires. “Why is everyone surrendering their selves to me? Unacceptance would be immoral, but where would I take them with me even if I accept? I will have to break these shackles of attachment.”

Full of intense exchanges on desire and ownership, mind and body, attachment and the atma, Krishnayan is a sort of manual for letting go. And if you can deal with its somewhat repetitive melodramatic style, it helps thicken the most famous Indian plot of all. It adds some real women to our mythological matrix.

Published in Mint Lounge, 29 Mar 2021.

Book Review: A Gujarati literary legend finds a home in English

Celebrated Gujarati writer Dhumketu doesn’t get his due in the latest translation of his work

Gaurishankar Govardhanram Joshi (1892-1965), who wrote as Dhumketu, was a pioneering short story writer in Gujarati. (Wikipedia)

“The short story is not the miniature form of the novel... The novel says whatever it wants. The short story, by rousing the imagination and emotions, only alludes to or provides a spark of whatever it wants to say.” These words, in the original Gujarati, appeared in the 1926 introduction to Tankha (Sparks), the first collection of short stories by the Gujarati writer Dhumketu, the nom de plume of Gaurishankar Govardhanram Joshi (1892-1965). Nearly a hundred years later, you can finally read them in English, in Jenny Bhatt's translated volume Ratno Dholi: The Best Stories of Dhumketu.

Bhatt, a Gujarat-born writer and podcaster now based in the US, has clearly thought long and hard about the shape of the book. Taking seriously the burden of responsibility that comes with representing the pioneering Gujarati author to the contemporary English-speaking world, she has picked one story from each of his 24 published collections, plus two of her own favourites. The book certainly displays his range.

It begins with what is perhaps Dhumketu's most anthologised tale, The Post Office, in which a postmaster who once mocked an old man ends up haunted by his ghost. The ending teeters on the edge of the Gothic, making one think of the Russian short story giant, Nikolai Gogol, with its use of the supernatural to invoke a moral justice that social reality rarely seems to grant us. Dhumketu isn't writing ghost stories, but there is often a suggestion that deeply felt hurt or expectation leaves its imprint in the universe even after death—often in the minds of those who caused or ignored it.

In The Post Office, old Coachman Ali's lifelong wait for his daughter Mariam's letter only makes sense to the postmaster when he is anxious about his own daughter. In Svarjogi, an old shehnai player summons the painfully despondent notes of Raga Jogiya only on the death anniversary of his son—who had played them in life. In Ratno Dholi, a village drummer who thoughtlessly drives his lover to suicide ends up imagining her dancing to his dhol for the rest of his life.

Not unexpectedly for a writer born in the 19th century, Dhumketu was also drawn to historical romance as a genre, writing several novels set in the ancient India of the Guptas and Chalukyas. His historical fiction is represented here by Tears of the Soul, which retells the legendary story of Amrapali, a woman condemned by her democratic city state Vaishali to become a nagarvadhu (courtesan, literally “wife of the city”). If such a beauty was to accept any one man as a husband, went male logic, there would be civil war.

Although he turns a critical spotlight onto male-made laws, Dhumketu's real condemnation of Amrapali's predicament is tied to applauding her sacrifice as a mother. In some other stories, too, Dhumketu is revealed as very much a man of his time. Female deservingness is often premised on sexlessness, most sharply in When a Devi Ma Becomes a Woman, the Gorky-inspired tale of a hostel-wali deeply admired by her male hostellers—until it turns out that she is human enough to respond to the odd sexual overture.

But Dhumketu certainly emerges as a sympathetic observer of the unfairness of women's lives. In the tale of two Kamalas in A Memorable Day, the matter is treated as one of luck: one woman finds herself forced to sell her body, while the other has a like-minded partner and a tasteful home. In The Noble Daughters-in-law, the widowed bahu of a rich household is shooed out, and finds herself sheltering in the home of another unhappy daughter-in-law. There is the hint of attachment between the two women, including a kiss on the cheek, before the story ends in a dramatic double suicide that made me think of Deepa Mehta's 1996 film Fire, and of so many lesbian loves that end in similar tragedy in India.

Women are also embedded in social hierarchies of caste and class, and suffer their consequences. In The Gold Necklace, Dhumketu reverses the traditional social hierarchy between wife and mistress. Caste appears frequently, as descriptor and motor of plot: the vagharin, whose low social status taints a man who helps her; the gohil and kaamdaar who prop up the colonial-feudal structure of the Gujarati village; Brahminness mentioned by characters to establish their gentility in many stories, including the comical The New Poet.

Ratno Dholi: The Best Stories of Dhumketu, translated from the Gujarati by Jenny Bhatt, published by HarperCollins India, 324 pages, ₹399.

Dhumketu is no radical, but these stories show an abiding interest in marginalised figures—the penitent criminal in Kailas and The Prisoner of Andaman, the disabled person in Mungo Gungo, the sick low-caste woman Sarju in Unknown Helpers, or the ekla ram, a man who chooses to distance himself from the village's social norms, like Makno Bharthi in The Worst of the Worst.

Some of these solitary souls immerse themselves in art or music: Ratno the dhol-player, the shehnai player of Svarjogi, the sarangi player of My Homes, or even the literary young man of A Happy Delusion. When he writes about these musicians, or even about the aesthetic domesticity of the housewife Kamala in A Memorable Day, Dhumketu is both generous and appreciative.

Fittingly for a writer, perhaps, he displays greater ambivalence when describing literary ambitions. The aspirational poet or writer, especially, gets a drubbing, whether the clerk Bhogilal of Ebb and Flow, the highfalutin train passenger of The New Poet, or the intently focused but talentless Manmohan of A Happy Delusion.

Bhatt's dedication aside, her translations leave much to be desired. Her literal renditions of the original leave us repeatedly in the grip of florid, often archaic language (“Then, because they had not heard such melodious, sweet, alluring, rising and falling music in years, an illicitly joyful passion grew in the soul of thousands” or “Her memory did not endure anywhere now except during the rare occasions of general small talk”), not to mention constantly tripping up against such formations as “slowly-slowly” or “From downstairs, a melodious, bird-like voice came”.

However deliberate Bhatt's approach might be, the English feels jarring; the sentences marred by roundaboutness and redundancy. “What if this amusement was flowing due to his writing?" thinks one character, while a policeman tells a woman “to be careful with [her] tongue when speaking”. Very occasionally one gets a glimpse of what I imagine is Dhumketu's idiomatic Gujarati, such as in Old Custom, New Approach, where a man complains sardonically about modern bureaucracy: “Letters speak with letters. People avoid other people, this is called administration.”

One hopes someday he will receive a better interpreter. In the meanwhile, this is a valuable addition to your Indian classics bookshelf.

Published in Mint Lounge, 5 Jan 2021.

A Kite for Sore Eyes

My Mumbai Mirror column:

In Hardik Mehta's Amdavad Ma Famous and Prashant Bhargava's Patang, a city's universal passion for kites leaps off the screen in all its infectious energy and deeply immersive spirit

A still from Amdavad Ma Famous (2015), Hardik Mehta's award-winning documentary about the kite-flying festival of Uttarayana that takes place on 14 January in Ahmedabad.

 
“Ek din tum patang ka shauq kar loge, toh zindagi ke saatth saal tak woh shauq poora nahi hoyega [If you get into flying kites even for a day, you'll stay addicted for the next 60 years],” says an old Muslim cleric in Amdavad Ma Famous. “Yeh shauq aisa hai, bahut terrible shauq!” In case the maulana's words haven't convinced you, filmmaker and editor Hardik Mehta cuts from him to the sight of an old woman on a terrace – white sari, white hair in a loose bun, possibly older than the cleric – flying a kite with gusto.

Mehta's glorious 2015 short documentary, which won a host of awards across the world and was declared Best Non-Fiction Film at India's 63^rd National Film Awards, was set and shot during the festival of Uttarayan in Ahmedabad, when the whole city gathers on its rooftops to fly kites. The pivotal character is a young boy called Zaid Khedawalla, whose enthusiasm for the sport borders on the obsessive. Uttarayan is another name for Makar Sankranti, which falls on January 14 or 15 every year, based on the solar calendar. In the days leading up to the festival, Zaid wakes up very early in the morning to scout his neighbourhood for fallen kites. “By 10 am or so, he has gathered enough kites for the day,” says his father, laughing.

The fact that Zaid skips school to fly kites all day is a recurring theme in the film. His father tries to get him to go to class. The maulana tries to get the boys off the roof off the mosque. Mushtaq, caretaker of a bank building in the film's chosen neighbourhood of Astodia, tries to shoo them away, even locking up the terrace on some days. But Zaid, like thousands of other young boys in the city, is incorrigible. “You don't listen to your father, Zaid?” asks the filmmaker. “I do try,” grins Zaid. “But these kites are just too much fun.”

It is one of several charming moments in an utterly charming film. Mehta captures these boys in all their manic energy, but also locates them within the colour and chaos and community of a whole city abuzz with the same zeal – street markets selling varieties of kites, manjha-walas sharpening the thread with ground glass, ancillary products springing up to protect bike-riders from the sharp kite threads that criss-cross the streets at this time. Zaid's father later confesses that he was just as crazy about kites when he was Zaid's age. The crabby Mushtaq, who responds to someone calling the boys artists (“kalakaar”) by labelling them the face of the devil instead, is seen later in the film flying kites himself. When quizzed, his reply is hilarious: “I only fly the kites that have fallen on my terrace”.

Mehta's marvellous aides – he has a truly talented sound designer in Manoj M Goswami, and Alokananda Dasgupta has created a brilliantly uplifting soundtrack – help him make all sorts of other visual and aural connections. When Mushtaq speaks of the kites as bringing out the boys' “wild side”, Mehta cuts to monkeys clambering up and down the terraces, almost exactly in step with the boys. Dasgupta's soundtrack punctuates the bouncy ascent of all sorts of people – large, old, creaky – up roof ladders.

That heartwarming inclusiveness was also very much the point of Prashant Bhargava's lovely 2011 feature Patang, in which an Ahmedabad native, now settled in Delhi, returns to the city after many years during Uttarayan, bringing with him a teenaged daughter through whose fresh eyes we see Ahmedabad's old city. Patang contained one of Nawazuddin Siddiqui's earliest full-fledged performances, as the Ahmedabad-based nephew who bristles at his uncle's sudden descent upon the old family home.

But what is it about kites – other than the obvious and overdone fetishised idea of India as colour – that makes them cinema-worthy? Speaking to the legendary critic, the late Roger Ebert, about his film, Bhargava (who also died, tragically young, in 2015) said, “In India, kite flying transcends boundaries. Rich or poor, Hindu or Muslim, young or old — together they look toward the sky with wonder, thoughts and doubts forgotten. Kite flying is meditation in its simplest form.”

I recently came across a definition of meditation in another film, Matthew Vaughn's 2005 Layer Cake, that makes sense in this context. A man with a passion for high-quality guns says to Daniel Craig's high-stakes drug dealer character: “Meditation is concentrating the front of the mind with a mundane task so the rest of the mind can find peace.”

As you watch the myriad faces in Mehta's film, intensely concentrated on the kite in hand, eyes lifted to the heavens, it suddenly seems entirely clear why these fluttering bits of paper have captured the human imagination for centuries. And we have kites to thank for something else – at least they're not guns.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 Jan 2021

The Chairman and the Mahatma

Walter Bosshard’s photographs of Gandhi and Mao at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art offer a provocative contrast between the leaders of different mass movements

 Gandhi spinning at Dandi, April 2018. (Photo Courtesy: Fotostiftung Schweiz/Archiv fu.r Zeitgeschichte and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art)

Gandhi and Mao are not names often spoken together. So dissimilar do these giants of Asia seem, as men and leaders, that even thinking of them as contemporaries demands an imaginative leap. Luckily, Walter Bosshard met them both, and his pictures live to tell the tale.

Peter Pfrunder, co-curator of 'Envisioning Asia', the first-ever Indian showing of Bosshard's photojournalism, cheekily suggests in his brochure essay that "Bosshard himself could be seen as the link between Gandhi and Mao". Certainly, the 51 photographs and one silent film on show at Delhi's Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) make clear that both men "welcomed this foreign photojournalist with open arms", at shaping moments of their careers. Bosshard met Gandhi in 1930 at Dandi, after the Salt March. In a piece of historical serendipity, he also met Mao after a march: in 1938, when he journeyed six days from the provisional capital of Hankou to Yan'an, the closely-guarded 'Red Capital' where Mao had withdrawn after the Long March.

Yan'an City Gate, entrance to China's Red Capital, 1938. (Photo Courtesy: Fotostiftung Schweiz/Archiv fu.r Zeitgeschichte and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art)

Unlike his legendary subjects, Bosshard never marched the length and breadth of a country to mobilise his people. But if we set aside for a moment his position as a white man in an imperialist world, Bosshard's own travels are quite impressive. A Swiss primary school teacher from 1908 to 1912, he studied art history in Zurich and Florence and did military service in Italy during World War I. Bosshard's life after 1919 would be the envy of any experience-hunting millennial: he worked on a plantation in Sumatra, as a gem dealer in East Asia, and as a merchant in India and Thailand. In 1927-28, he was a photographer on a German expedition to Central Asia. By 1930, he had so established himself that the Munich Illustrated Press sent him to India on a 'study trip'. Between February and October, Bosshard travelled over 20,000 km, gathering enough material for his 1931 book, Indien Kampft! (India Fights!).

Preparation at Congress Headquarters for 'Boycott Week', Mumbai 1930 (Photo Courtesy: Fotostiftung Schweiz/Archiv fu.r Zeitgeschichte & KiranNadar Museum of Art

The highlight of Bosshard's India trip, though, was reaching Dandi in time to shoot the coming of Gandhi. With 78 volunteers, Gandhi had walked for 24 days along the coast, crowds joining him to protest the British monopoly on salt. The power of these pictures is still undeniable: hundreds wading into the water to pick up salt; a child walking jauntily off with a cloth bundle of dripping, salty mud. The presence of women is striking. In one great image, Bosshard captures rural women marchers mid-stride, one end of their white saris wound over their heads, the other end hoisted up to reveal their calves. Here is the female Indian form cast for once as a labouring body in political action, unselfconscious and thus, unfetishisable. There are also women leaders: a stoic Mithuben Petit at an anti-alcohol protest in Navsari; Sarojini Naidu, the poet and Congress leader, who had urged Bosshard to visit Gandhi at Dandi, saying "he will have time".

It appears Gandhi did. In Bosshard's images, the 60-year-old fighting the world's most powerful empire appears utterly relaxed: grinning at a satirical The Times of India editorial, spinning, eating onion soup, cackling with uninhibited laughter, shaving. "At this stage of his career in 1930, he is the only world leader who treated the camera like a confidant of his inner circle, to be trusted, silently," co-curator Sinha said in an email interview. "There is a heartwarming naturalness and spontaneity in these pictures. By the time Margaret Bourke-White or Kanu Gandhi were to shoot Gandhi at the charkha or in public meetings, he was much older, much more studied before the camera." In the KNMA brochure essay, Sinha argues that these images also highlight Gandhi's "most pronounced areas of reflection and engagement": his astute grasp of the media, his obsession with diet and the body, spinning the khadi as integral to his idea of swarajya (self-rule). Whether it was the photographer or the Mahatma who determined its elements, Bosshard's pictures established a Gandhi iconography that still holds sway.

1938: Mao in front of the Red Academy (Photo Courtesy: Fotostiftung Schweiz/Archiv fu.r Zeitgeschichte and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art)

The Yan'an images are a stark contrast to the Indian ones. Whether it's a young, serious Mao Zedong standing scrupulously straight before the camera, the cold mountainous expanses through which the Eighth Route Army marches, or simply the short hair, trousers and jackets both men and women wear, Bosshard's 1938 visuals reveal how China and India's paths diverged. "China broke from an older civilisation in a way India did not," says Shilpa Sharma, a PhD scholar in Delhi University's department of Chinese Studies. "Also, Gandhi was responding to a bureaucratic state, where there was law and order. China's many bloody wars meant ahimsa (non-violence) could not have emerged there. Mao standing strong physically in pictures was part of a show of strength needed to win," she adds.
Despite differences, "these were mass leaders who led their illiterate, poor societies out of feudal and colonial oppression," says Hemant Adlakha, who teaches Chinese Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. "There is comparable poverty, a shared idealism, the instruction of followers," says Sinha. "[Both had] a vision for change for their countries."

Nearly 90 years later, both India and China have diverged greatly from these men's visions.

'Envisioning Asia: Gandhi and Mao in the photographs of Walter Bosshard' runs at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art from 1 to 30 Oct 2018.

Published in India Today, 12 Oct 2018.

Finding Our Freedom

My Mirror column:

On 30 January 1948, Gandhi was assassinated for trying to stop the killing of Muslims in the new Hindu-majority nation. Seventy years later, Lalit Vachani's documentary might help us look at ourselves in the mirror.

A still from Lalit Vachani's documentary film, The Salt Stories (2008).

On 13 January 1948, distressed by ongoing violence against Muslims in the capital of the free nation for which he had struggled his whole life, Gandhi began what would be his last political fast. On 18 January, a Central Peace Committee – including members of the RSS, the Jamiat-ul-Ulema and Sikh organisations -- came to him with a declaration that said “we shall protect the life, property and faith of Muslims and that the incidents that have taken place in Delhi will not happen again”. Gandhi agreed to break his fast. Two days later, on 20 January 1948, a Punjabi refugee called Madan Lal threw a bomb at him during his prayer meeting at Birla House in Delhi. The device exploded a little away from Gandhi – luckily, no one was killed. Gandhi continued his work, holding meetings and talking to visitors, including angry Hindu refugees.

On 26 January, at his prayer meeting, Gandhi spoke of his sorrow at what the first few months of freedom had been like. He hoped, however, that the worst was over, and that Indians would work for the equality of all communities and creeds – “never the domination and superiority of the majority community over a minor...”. Four days later, on 30 January 1948, he was shot dead.His two most influential followers, Vallabhbhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru, responded with grief and resolve. Nehru appealed to Indians to stand against “that terrible poison of communalism that has killed the greatest man of our age”. “We did not follow him while he was alive; let us at least follow his steps now he is dead,” said Patel, appealing to people to carry his message of love and non-violence.

Seventy years after Gandhi's assassination, we are a country that has not just forgotten his message but turned actively towards that of his murderer. Nathuram Godse's stated reason for killing Gandhi was his “constant and consistent pandering to the Muslims”. That destructive falsehood has now become the common sense of our time.

Among the few films that have caught our devastating transformation on camera is Lalit Vachani's 2008 documentary The Salt Stories. Looking for Gandhi in Narendra Modi's Gujarat, Vachani decided to follow the route of the 1930 Salt March, when Gandhi walked 390 km from the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad to the coastal village of Dandi. There thousands would peacefully break a colonial law that barred Indians from making their own salt. Among Vachani's first stops is the village of Navagam, where he meets a self-proclaimed old Gandhian. He speaks admiringly of Gandhi's role in social reform. Then, having ascertained that there are no “Mohammedans” in Vachani's crew, the 'Gandhian' proceeds to describe the Muslim community as “raakshas”.

A dismayed Vachani moves on to Dabhan, where Gandhi caused a stir by bathing at a Harijan well. The well has been built over; it is now part of a woman's house. Her first reaction is to deny any knowledge of Gandhi's visit. When one old lady says she remembers her grandfather telling her of it, the woman snaps: “Were you there? Then stop your jabbering.” It takes some reassuring from the filmmaker for her to express her fears openly – when Vachani said he had come on Gandhi Kooch, she was instantly worried that her house would be torn down. Now she changes her tune. “I feel fortunate that I live on the place where Gandhi bathed. It's as if my home is in his heart. But if my house is broken down, what will I do?”

Across the road from the Harijan settlement was a dharamshala where Gandhi had stayed the night. Now a Patel function is in progress there. “We broke the old place down and made a Party Plot,” a man tells Vachani. The filmmaker's enquiries appear to have led two men to bring in a stone plaque on which the fact of Gandhi's 1930 visit is engraved. It looks like it might be a slab from the old building, a building that no longer exists.

Vachani's journey proceeds, acquiring a droll tenor as he encounters a series of Gandhi temples with oddly deformed depictions of Gandhi. At all these supposed shrines, the Mahatma is locked away behind bars, cobwebbed or broken, quite clearly never visited. In Surat, where Gandhi had his largest public meeting during the Dandi March, no one has any memory of the event. But the park is host to the Mahatma Gandhi Laughing Club, whose waves of terrifying hysterical laughter break upon a silent statue of Gandhi.

Earlier in the film, Vachani stops to chat with a group of teenaged boys outside a temple. Modi is their favourite leader, they tell him, and what he did was a good thing. Why, asks Vachani. Because the Hindu religion lived in fear before, comes the instant reply. “And now, do the Muslims live in fear?” asks Vachani. “Yes, they are scared. They fear,” comes the reply. “And do you think fear is a good thing?” Vachani asks. “Yes,” say the boys. “Someone or other must always feel fear.”

That is the distance that India has travelled from Gandhi. It's a long road back – and many may never want to walk it. But for those who do, perhaps we can start by ensuring that our definition of courage is not to make others feel afraid.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 Jan 2018.

Miya-Baniya Bhai Bhai?

My Mirror column:
Raees has its slow bits, but those dismissing it as politically tepid filmmaking are missing the wood for the trees.

Before making Raees, Rahul Dholakia made Parzania whose release was blocked in Gujarat by Sangh Parivar networks. Parzania and Raees have little in common on the surface. Although I thought it came off as distressingly inauthentic – it featured jarring English, with a pointless American character as the witnessing 'I' -- Parzania was pitched as a realistic 'political' film, with Naseeruddin Shah and Sarika turning in affecting performances as the distraught parents of a Parsi boy who went missing in the communal violence of Gujarat 2002, in which over 2000 Muslims were killed. Raees, in stark contrast, is pitched as entertainment: a big-banner Bollywood production with Shah Rukh Khan in the title role of a small-time bootlegger who rises to power and notoriety during an era of Prohibition.

What the two films share, of course, is an investment in the history of Gujarat's present. But the risks they take are very different. Parzania sought to wrangle audience sympathy at the lowest common denominator by constructing an utterlessly blameless victim – a child, and one who belonged to neither of the communities actively involved in the Gujarat violence. With Raees, Dholakia might be said to move in the opposite direction: giving us a textbook antihero.

In Raees, we have a protagonist who must remain both attractive and sympathetic while running a business empire that is entirely illegal and often violent, not to mention based on supplying a socially-disapproved product like alcohol. And most important, whether Shah Rukh Khan wishes to underplay the matter or not, it is absolutely important for the optics of this film that this protagonist is a Muslim in a Gujarat where the Hindutva project is on its way to political and social hegemony. Else why would the makers drive the point home with such marvellous bantering precision, emphasising even in the trailer that what makes Raees admirable is the fact that he combines in himself “Baniye ka dimaag, Miyabhai ki daring”? Miya is colloquial-speak for Muslims in several parts of India including Gujarat, and it is heavily marked – making the very use of the word 'Miyabhai' new for a mainstream Hindi film. But what is so remarkable about the power of Hindi cinema is that it can change the word's valence.

Despite the fact that the gangster film is an accepted genre -- in which such shades-of-gray protagonists are perhaps now the norm -- it seems clear to me that the greater creative-political gamble is Raees rather than Parzania. The rise of the gangster – in life as in cinema – is tied to the rise of organised crime in dense urban settlements. Sharp social and economic inequalities produce systems outside the system, with mob-lords emerging as alternative centres of power who are feared and revered in equal measure. Dholakia's portrait of Raees – modelled loosely on the real-life figure of Gujarati don Abdul Latif – is very much in this vein: a hero shown to live by his own personal code, in which violence is always the last resort, and the poor and innocent must not suffer.

At the centre of the film's construction of our sympathies is the idea of a system whose institutionalised hypocrisies are almost bound to produce crime. Dholakia does well to simultaneously appeal here to our entrenched belief in Gujarat as an entrepreneurial society, in which money will get made if there is money to be made: as SRK's Raees puts it, “Gujarat ki hawa mein byaapaar hai saheb. Aap meri saans ko toh rok lo, lekin is hawa ko kaise rokoge?”

In fact it is this uncompromising business ethic that is offered to us -- a mainstream, largely Hindu audience that might have otherwise little sympathy for the Muslim ganglord supplier of illegal, perhaps immoral daru -- as the reason to respect him. Raees is shown growing up with an independent-minded single mother who teaches him his life lessons even if she isn't in a position to help him with his school ones, and the lesson she teaches him most of all is that no business is too small, and no religion is bigger than business. “Hamare liye koi koi bhi dhandha chhota nahi hota, aur dhandhe se bada koi dharam nahi hota.” This is a thought that resonates both with an old-style Amitabh Bachchan/Salim-Javed appeal to dignity and khuddaari (self-reliance in “Main phenke hue paise nahi uthhata” mode), and allows the otherness of the 'Miyabhai' to be embraced via the familiarity of the 'Baniya'.

The Amitabh Bachchan film referenced in the film is Kaala Patthar, but it was Coolie that came to mind for me. The Apni Duniya dream is exactly the same as Amitabh's in Coolie: of independent little houses for poor working class people. Except that it is no longer a Prem Chopra or a Kader Khan but a Raees who makes that promise – the Muslim boy who dreams for his community is one who has risen up from it. It rings sadly true that that dream, in a film four decades after Coolie, must still fall through the cracks.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 Feb 2017.

A Feminist Fairy Tale

My Mirror column:

A picture-perfect desert village serves as the setting for Parched’s fantasy of female freedom.

Leena Yadav’s Parched, completed in 2015 and finally released in India last week courtesy Ajay Devgn, is a feminist fairy tale. By which I mean that absolutely terrible things happen to the four female protagonists — three women in their 30s, and one 15-year-old — but we know they’ll be okay in the end. And not just okay: the film allows us the pleasure of watching these women triumph over a system weighted entirely against them. This might seem to stay within the Hindi movie tradition of the happy ending. But unlike older Hindi films, Parched’s climax doesn’t force its fictional context to accommodate the heroines’ unfulfilled desires; instead, it suggests that fulfilment is only possible if they leave their context behind.

This seemed to me a bit of a cop-out. But I don’t mean to suggest that this is a film to be dismissed. There is plenty going on in Parched— and plenty going for it, too. Shot by Oscar-winning cinematographer Russell Carpenter (of Titanic and True Lies fame) and edited by Kevin Tent (The Descendants, Nebraska, Sideways), Parched is a pacy film that puts its desert locations to picturesque use, and comes packaged with an attractive folksy score that includes the one Manganiyar song perfect for a Rajasthan-set girl-power movie: Bai-sa laad ka ghana. It’s also full of engaging actors: Surveen Chawla as the feisty but insecure stage dancer Bijli, Radhika Apte overdoing it a bit as the happy-go-lucky “baanjh” Lajo, while Tannishtha Chatterjee underplays beautifully as the widowed, lonely Rani. Leher Khan, last seen as the award-winning child star of 2013’s sincere Jalpari, is wonderfully effective as the big-eyed teenage bride Rani brings home for her son Gulab (a very persuasive Riddhi Sen), as is Chandan Anand as Bijli’s tongue-tied and hopeful assistant Raju.

Given these ingredients and its pleasure-focused feminist politics, Parched could have been that terrific thing: a Mirch Masala-plus-Manthan updated to the 21st century. But Yadav (who has previously directed the abysmal Sanjay Dutt-Aishwarya Rai starrer Shabd and an Amitabh Bachchan-Ben Kingsley thriller called Teen Patti!) seems oddly shy of the specificity that would require.

She sets her film in an unidentifiable locale, refusing to choose between Gujarat and Rajasthan, or telling us what communities the hamlet is occupied by (the plot about bride price rather than dowry suggests tribal Gujarat, but that’s just one element in the mix). Accents, too, come and go quite a bit, allowing in a strong Rajasthani inflection before suddenly switching back to Standard Hindi.

The film hands Lajo and Rani potential NGO-supported careers based on their embroidering talent, but never gives us a real glimpse of their work. Their own clothes are always seductively embroidered, without letting us place them in any community. In general, the village and its interiors feel like a rather stunning Rajasthali emporium — all mirrored earthen walls and stunning silver jewellery, with not one broken or ugly or plastic thing in sight. And the ‘fairground’ outpost, where the badass Bijli entertains all comers, seems intended to unite every kind of exportable Indian dancing body — from a seductive Bollywoodised nautanki to a dehati pole dancer, even a man in ghodi costume. The film’s most fantastic fantasy, however, is reserved for the sexual sphere: Adil Hussain’s guest appearance as the ash-smeared, free-spirited sadhu who offers soft-focus service as both impregnator-for-hire and orgasm-initiator.

All this desi exotica is clearly intended to woo a foreign film festival audience. Urban Indian movie-goers who’re irritated might want to focus instead on fun Bollywood references — like Bijli Chashmewali’s Aishwarya-like pink shades, or the shy enthusiasm with which Rani greets her own Bidi Jalai Le mobile ringtone, suggesting that she may have aged before her time, but the embers aren’t quite dead yet.

Yadav and her co-writer Supratik Sen (credited for dialogue) create warmly memorable women, whose easy equations with each other — bawdy, angry and emotional in turn — make for a happy-making female friendship film. These women aren’t perfect; I was struck in particular by Yadav’s grasp of how patriarchy is often perpetuated by women who don’t know any other way to be: Rani is the product of a society in which women are set up to remain unfulfilled by male partners and end up focusing their aspirations on their sons, keeping the unfortunate cycle in motion. Also, despite a great deal of recurring male violence against women, Yadav is keen to keep her film from feeling grim — and she mostly succeeds. There are grave missteps, though: such as the mistreated Champa, who seems intended to remind us how much worse things actually are ‘in real life’, but ends up ringing false.

Pink, the other recent Hindi film to give us both believable female friendship and political engagement with women’s sexuality, was pitched very differently, and in seeking to convert an Indian audience, gave away its punchy political messaging to a man (and the Bachchan baritone). Parched doesn’t do that, but it makes its men horrific villains, clumsy cowards, or unreal receptacles for female fantasy. But maybe Parched’s parade of men as wish-fulfilling genies, saviour princes or ogres who have to be slain should simply be seen as part of its fairy-tale mode. I just wish escape wasn’t the only solution it had to offer.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 Oct 2016.

Post Facto - Name, Place, Religion, Thing: Understanding Kai Po Che’s Gujarat

Decided I have more to say about Kai Po Che. So here's my Sunday Guardian column:

(My previous piece, written for the Indian Express, is here.)

Kai Po Che, Abhishek Kapoor's film about three young men coming of age in Ahmedabad circa 2002, has become the subject of an avid debate that seems to centre on how it adapts Chetan Bhagat's 2008 novel The 3 Mistakes of My Life. But somehow the fascinating questions of what the film version leaves out, adds or changes have been subjugated to the seemingly all-important one of how these decisions relate to Bhagat's changing political agenda with respect to Gujarat.

Bhagat's alleged attempts to curry favour with Narendra Modi, though thoroughly depressing if true, seem unworthy of the attention they're getting. I have written elsewhere about why I think the changes from book to film (Bhagat is just one of four scriptwriters) make Kai Po Che a more powerful indictment of Gujarat's polarised society than the book was. By having one of the central characters actually enter into the madness of communal murder, the film forces us to engage with the possibility of violence as something within ourselves — rather than something that only certified villains are capable of.

It also seems clear to me that this film is more effective in reaching out to its audience—and potentially changing people's minds—than an imagined filmic naming and shaming of Modi could ever be. Why this is so is a complex question, and I shall return to it. But allow me first to speculate a little about a related question: why does the film feel so much better-etched than the book?

Many critics, including myself, have felt that Bhagat's characters – Govind Patel, Ishaan Bhat and Omi Shastri – seem more fleshed-out and well... characterful in the film than in his book. Of course, this is partly about wonderful actors, but might it also be because the film allows these people to be who they are at the most fundamental level – that of language? In The 3 Mistakes of My Life, these very middling middle class young men from Ahmedabad — one the son of a single mother who runs a small khakra-dhokla business, another the son of a local purohit — are made to speak in a slangy, American-inflected English that seems completely off-kilter: "Screw that, you were out of form, man," says Omi to Ish; "F**k your statistics, man," says Ish to Govind. And when the characters speak plain, unembellished prose, they sound unidiomatic to the point of being jarring: "No marble player ever became great," says Ishaan to the young Ali. Compare the flat dull thud of that sentence to the marvelously resonant version of it in the film: "Goti khel ke tu kya ukhaad lega?".

My point is not that the mixed-up, polyglot universe of our cities cannot be translated—after all, the film gives us these conversations in Hindi, where they might in the real world take place largely in Gujarati – but that it takes a special talent to be able to recreate it in English. That talent is not one Bhagat seems to have. Or perhaps his decision is a deliberate attempt to fuse identification with aspiration. Perhaps his dialogue for his characters is based not on how they might actually speak, but on his astute sense of how they — and his readers — might want to? Whichever it is, watching Kai Po Che, it is hard not to feel (as someone once said about Gopal Gandhi's translation of A Suitable Boy into Hindi) that it has been translated back into the original.

There are other changes that ground the narrative more firmly in its locale. The film does away with a free trip to Australia that felt more like a cricket fan's wish-fulfilment than any possible reality for three guys running a local sports shop. It excises political conversations that seem too wordy and too sensitive to actually be conducted. It replaces the Govind-Vidya romantic birthday-with-fancy-cake with a garba moment that has both sexual frisson and charming gawkiness.

The film also does away with the somewhat artifical gambit of having Govind be an agnostic, through whose narratorial voice religiosity is questioned and clunkily debated. Instead it lays out a world whose everyday Hinduness is remarkable for being unremarked, just as it often is in Indian life: the Ganesh statue on the dashboard, the instinctive gesture of touching new ground to one's forehead, or writing Om to inaugurate a new blackboard.

But this last might also be the most profound expression of the Hindu matrix within which Kai Po Che operates. Unlike a Firaaq or a Parzania (one superbly elegant, the other hamhanded), this is a Gujarat through Hindu eyes: the friends set up their coaching-centre-cum-shop in a temple complex, knowing that non-Hindu customers are unlikely; Ali, the cricketing prodigy whom Ishaan befriends, is their only window into a Muslim milieu. But — and here I return to why it might reach out to its audience — the film does not judge them for it. They are creatures of their milieu. If Kai Po Che's segregated universe has a message for us, it is not to applaud the fractured society it mirrors. It is to force us to see what exists – and grieve for how it came to be.

Read the whole piece on the Sunday Guardian site.

Framing the Divide: Kai Po Che and the politics of Gujarat

An opinion piece I did for today's Indian Express. 

Abhishek Kapoor’s recent film Kai Po Che, like the Chetan Bhagat novel on which it is based, revolves around the lives of three young men in Ahmedabad between 2000 and 2002. In both book and film, the personal trials of Govind Patel, Ishaan Bhat and Omi Shastri — and Ishaan’s young cricketing protege Ali — are tied to larger events that have shaped the history of our collective present: the 2001 Bhuj earthquake, India’s fabled cricketing comeback against Australia at Eden Gardens in 2001, the Godhra train burning incident of 2002 and the widespread communal killings that followed.

Revealing the power of Hindi cinema as compared to popular fiction in English (even a small multiplex hit versus a best-selling novel by India’s highest-selling English novelist), the film’s release — timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Gujarat killings — has led to a flurry of editorial commentary that takes more notice of Bhagat’s fictional politics than has probably ever been taken before.

The film, and Chetan Bhagat, have been accused of whitewashing Gujarat 2002, by excising those parts of The 3 Mistakes of My Life that might displease Narendra Modi, now the BJP’s unofficial prime ministerial candidate. These commentators argue that Kai Po Che is a feel-good Bollywood spectacle, that it steers clear of the damning references to the “Hindu party” that litter the book, that it rewrites state-sponsored killings into local-level, near-spontaneous vendetta, and lastly, that it provides justification for the post-Godhra violence by having a central character, Omi, lose both his parents in Godhra, rather than just a nephew.

Having watched the film and read the book, I must confess to being baffled by the conclusions these commentators have come to. To me, the film (whose script, it should be stressed, is the result of Bhagat’s collaboration with Pubali Chaudhari, Supratik Sen and director Abhishek Kapoor) is not just less clunky and better characterised than the book, but arguably also a more effective and affective comment on the politics of Gujarat.

In both book and film, for instance, the 2001 earthquake is shown as having a personal impact on the lives of the characters: when the new mall in Navrangpura, in which the three friends have staked a massive amount of borrowed money as deposit on the plush sports shop of their dreams, collapses before it can be completed. In both narratives, Govind is particularly destroyed, not just because the sum seems an impossibly large one to earn back, but because the risk he took has become the cause of their ruination, challenging his self-image as the one with a head for business. But the film adds new things. Before the quake, we see Bittoo Mama, Omi’s uncle and an up-and-coming politician of the Hindu chauvinist party, express reluctance to lend the boys the money for the shop deposit — because the mall owner is Muslim. And after the quake, the distribution of aid is shown as completely demarcated along community lines: so much so that when Ishaan tries to get Ali and his Juhapura neighbours access to the relief camp, he and his closest friend Omi nearly come to blows. These additions — sharp and cinematic moments that take the place of the long-winded political arguments in Bhagat’s book — establish the tragically polarised state of Gujarati society more powerfully than any political speechifying ever could.

Another thing the film does better than the book is to make a distinction that all too many secular commentators often fail to, between people who are religious, even orthodox, and those for whom a religious identity is the basis of socio-political action. Omi’s father is a deeply religious man, the priest of the local temple, but he is shown as clearly refusing to ally himself with Bittoo’s Hindu political party, and as being extremely reluctant to go to Ayodhya.

The “Hindu party” is certainly not excised from the film; in fact, its organised role in the post-Godhra attacking of Muslim neighbourhoods is personified in Bittoo Mama, who is if anything a more lethal figure here than he was in the book — armed not with a clumsy old-fashioned trishul, as in the book, but with a sleek, contemporary gun. He is not overwrought, drunken, debilitated by his son’s death (for it is Omi’s cousin, not nephew, who dies in the book), but completely in control, placing gleaming swords in the hands of those more easily swayed and propelling them towards murder.

But the most crucial thing that these critics fail to mention is how the film transforms the character of Omi, and through his altered fate, its addressing of the events of 2002. If Omi is emblematic of the slightly aimless, unemployed young man swayed by Hindutva because it gives him an easy, faux sense of belonging to a community, the film forces us to confront the fatal path down which that blindness can lead. The young man whose confused longing for a Hindu-majoritarian politics made him a sacrificial victim in the book, becomes in Kai Po Che the person responsible for violence. Omi’s complicity points to the dangers of our own. If this is a feel-good spectacle, let us by all means have more.

Is IT a bird? Witchcraft and the Computer Course

An essay I wrote in January 2002, some months after finishing a Social Anthropology degree at Cambridge, and in the immediate wake of a visit to Ganesh Devy's then-nascent Tejgarh Tribal Academy in Gujarat. 

The Azande of Sudan, immortalised by EE Evans-Pritchard in that wonderfully unselfconscious, "The-Tagawawa-are-my-best-friends" way that anthropologists still had in 1937, lived in a world in which witchcraft was all pervasive. Witches could be men or women, and had the hereditarily-acquired power to do harm to a person or his family, psychically. Those who suffered misfortune could try and find out who was responsible by consulting one of several oracles. The most common oracle was a chicken, who was fed a reasonable quantity of poison called benge and given the name of a possible witch. The truth or falsehood of the accusation was then established by whether the fowl lived or died.

The tribal world, if at all such a gross generalization is possible, is populated with a host of spirits and forces that are capable of having a powerful influence upon human beings. Some are usually associated with seriously deleterious effects on mind and body, while others might be rather more beneficial in their impact. In no way do I mean to suggest that only tribal people believe in ghosts and spirits, but it so happens that I recently spent a few days discussing these things with some adivasi students in Gujarat, and time and again in those conversations I found myself making, with a passion that I never realised I could invoke in the service of modern science, a case for rationality, (as opposed to belief in the ojha's powers or jhaadh-phoonk techniques).

I had gone to explore the possibilities of working with a Baroda-based organisation that has set up a first-of-its-kind Diploma in Tribal Studies. It's a two-year course, with a theoretical and a practical side to it. The idea is for adivasi students to be trained in development survey work in villages and introduced to some development jargon - so that the classroom is the constant site of discussions in which terms like Needs-Based Approach, BPL Families (Below Poverty Line families), Microcredit Mandli and so on, are bounced back and forth with as much faith and vigour as in any self-respecting TISS project report. The other parallel motivation is to provide exposure to viewpoints and theoretical perspectives that the students may not have had a chance to engage with before.

Already, at the academy, ideas for the preservation of traditional Rathwa medicine jostle with government schemes which rest upon doling out large quantities of additional vitamins and minerals in tablet form each month. There is a tradition of Pithora wall painting in the region, which the Artists' Cooperative is trying to preserve. The three-day ritual performance which culminates in the creation of Baba Pithoro might, they have realised, be a difficult thing to market. So they sell large expanses of cellophane-protected muslin, stretched taut on wooden frames. Caught behind the cellophane, whole forests teem with life. Peacocks and mynahs and raucous green parrots fly above the horses of Indralok, scarlet and green, their hooves kicking up the dust. To me, though, they seem constrained. In a way that they didn't on their mud wall in Malaaja village. But these seem like unsolvable dilemmas, and I decide to leave them alone for the moment.

Then the next day, fifteen young men -- graduates in Gujarati and sociology and economics, who have lessons in basic linguistics and computers, and have set up committees to deal with sickle-cell anaemia patients -- started talking to me about bhoots and prets who carry off children and daayans who bewitch families. One speaks of the ojha who cured him of an undiagnosed "weakness", another of a local Rathwa tribal ritual specialist, the badhwo - in the same breath as the 'modern' medical system: injections, haemoglobin counts, hospitalisation. And suddenly, I find myself shifting -- slowly, but surely, from the supposedly value-neutral anthropological position -- to that of the scientific, anti-superstition rationalist. The process alarms me slightly.

So when I come home, I find myself turning the pages of notes I wrote as part of a long-ago course on the anthropology of knowledge. Anthropology, right from its early Fraserian avatar, has been interested in what it saw as 'irrational' beliefs and practices: the world of gods and demons, magic and witchcraft.

{Often, the domain that the anthropologist describes as magic or witchcraft does not exist as a category in the minds of those who practice them. Evans-Pritchard makes clear, for example, that Zande magic, though it may be systematic, is not theorised or systematised by the Azande themselves. If the category is of the anthropologist's making, then there must be anthropological criteria that make certain practices or beliefs magical. Behaviour which seems not to be effective in the realisation of its apparent goal, or a belief in powers or beings whose existence is not substantial, can be classified as magical. Already, we have stepped beyond mere observation of behaviour into defining what its goals might or might not be.}

Three kinds of explanations have tended to emerge for such beliefs and practices. There have been those who categorise magic as ineffectual behaviour, based on mistaken or illogical belief systems: the so-called intellectualists (Fraser, Tylor, etc). The problem with a strong form of this position is that those who practice witchcraft also perform tasks that involve fairly complex abstract reasoning: the same 'primitive' who believes in voodoo also builds real houses, using techniques that are fairly complicated.

Then there are the symbolists - who provide an 'expressive' explanation of magical practices. As Peter Winch argued with regard to the Azande, the oracular revelation is not a matter of intellectual interest, but a tool which is used to decide how to act. Therefore, the question of refutation or confirmation does not arise. Winch's question is: does someone who presses the notion of witchcraft to its logical conclusion (and finds inconsistencies) necessarily act more rationally than the Azande (who do not)?

He argues that something can only appear 'rational' or 'irrational' to someone in terms of his understanding of what is and is not rational. Winch, in effect, suggests that Zande magical rites and practices express an attitude to human life, and a recognition that life is subject to contingencies, rather than an attempt to control these. This position has been taken also by others who draw a contrast between scientific explanation and magical analogy: the former can be judged true or false, the latter only legitimate or 'felicitous' - or not.

But does a strong form of relativism, a la Winch, tell us anything about rationality? If magic is an expressive ritual -- like kicking a chair when one is angry -- then belief, at least in the propositional sense needing rational approval, is not germane to the explanation of ritual/magic action. Yet, rationality is measured with respect to beliefs, coherence, consistency of thought and so on. Magic may have expressive and performative elements, but if it has any claims to an impact in the material world, then can it be considered a different type of thought from say, science?

Critics of the strong relativist position, like Robin Horton, point out that such an assumption of 'difference' would prevent anthropologists from making a studied culture intelligible to their own at all. Horton argues that western anthropologists, afraid to be seen as 'inegalitarian' or racist, have insisted therefore that much of what seems like theoretical thought in non-western cultures is actually thought of quite a different genre, with goals quite different from those of explanation, prediction and control.

Horton's argument is that science and magic are not so far apart. The opposition between them is not that between common sense and mystical thought. In fact, both explain the world in terms of underlying uniform laws. Both are forms of theory used to explain what common sense cannot: action at a distance. Magic is not used as a substitute for a theory of natural causation, but works as an explanation for particularity -- 'why did my son fall ill? In Evans-Pritchard's terms, beliefs about witchcraft and magic form a closed system - 'a web of belief' which insulates those who lived in it from anomaly. Thus, apparent falsifications - a mistaken prediction or an ineffective cure -- can be explained by bad materials, fraudulent practitioners, broken taboos or occult interference. Such 'secondary elaborations' help to preserve the truth of magic.

Horton argues that scientists, too, practice secondary elaboration in their explanations, citing bad apparatus or otherwise imperfect conditions as reasons for anomalies, or tagging caveats onto their theories to make them fit the evidence better.

Horton's conclusion: that it is wrong to think of magical thought as anything less than scientific. What is not scientific, or strictly rational, in magical thought is the fear of abandoning theory - the'closed predicament' in Popperian terms. Whereas magical thought and practice is hedged round with taboo, and believers react with fear when it is questioned, Horton argues that scientific thought is constantly actively challenged: a continuous critical monitoring of theory takes place.

But I do not know if 'science', when it appears as a solar lantern in an adivasi village in Gujarat, or even in the computer centre in Tejgarh Tribal Academy, is indicative of, or subjected to, a greater degree of critical questioning, than say, the spirits of the badhwo's dream-world or the bhagat priest's cure for jaundice. There is really not much difference in the faith that the badhwo asks the adivasi to place in his ritual incantations, and the faith we would rather he places in say, the power of two yellow tablets a day to keep him from fainting in the fields at noon.

Regardless of the particular effects of each, the point I am trying to make is this: seen from the point of view of the woman in Malaaja village, the workings of both processes -- traditional medicine and modern science - are equally hidden from view. And offered to her in quite the same way, from above, to be accepted unquestioningly.

All over India, and all over the world, perhaps, there is this sudden great desire to learn computers. In these days of IT, the computer course, from Bareilly to Belgaum, has come to represent a hotline to information that is knowledge that is power -- and of course, money. 'Computer course' : most potent symbol of the modern age, of science, of technological advancement - the word is almost magic.

There will be computers, too, in Malaaja. But having access to the tools of modern science does not change how people think. The astronomer who believes in Vishnu's creation of the world, the state trading associations which perform yagnas to ensure that stock prices will rise, all of us who read the Sunday newspaper horoscopes and feel that slight sense of apprehension -- or happy anticipation -- perhaps none of us subscribe to a single, coherent belief system. People often have views that are inconsistent with other views that they themselves hold -- and they may argue for different views at different times.

What then makes my belief in Bejan Daruwalla's predictions for heartbreak this week, or whatever, different from Veereshbhai's belief in the ghost who is the cause of his household's misfortune? Is it just that I have more choices, greater access to a greater variety of preventions and cures? Perhaps what is crucial is that we do not merely dole out the bounties of science, but attempt to spread that elusive thing -- its spirit. The spirit of critical enquiry, to which both the badhwo and the sarkari dawakhana must be subjected, so that one is not merely substituted by the other.

Published on the website 'digitaltalkies.com', January-February 2002.