"Hindi filmmakers should go back to the drawing board": Interview with Manoj Bajpayee

A wide-ranging interview with the celebrated Hindi film and OTT actor Manoj Bajpayee, published in Frontline in May 2024.

The team of The Fable was jumping up and down—for joy and for Instagram—in the mid century modernist foyer of Berlin’s Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts) building. Manoj Bajpayee, 54, stood graciously for the first few photographs, and then sat down a little to the left of where his 34-year-old director Raam Reddy and team continued their youthful photo shoot. Even at rest, Bajpayee exuded a kind of coiled nervous energy—quiet, unfailingly polite, but also watchful.  

Meeting the Mumbai-based actor in Berlin, on the fringes of the Berlin Film Festival where his film The Fable was premiering, felt unusual and yet oddly fitting. Born in 1969 to a farming family in rural Champaran, Bajpayee’s journey to becoming Hindi cinema’s best known ‘alternative hero’ has been nothing if not unusual. Rejected more than once by the National School of Drama, Bajpayee conquered his disappointment by finding work with Delhi’s theatre stalwarts like Barry John and N.K. Sharma, with whom he founded the Act One troupe in 1990. The route to cinema was not easy either. Bajpayee’s first film was Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen (1994), which premiered at Cannes and was India’s entry to the Oscars that year. But his minor role as the dacoit Man Singh did not get him any new work. What it did, though, was lodge his performance in the mind of Ram Gopal Verma, who when he met Bajpayee two years later, promised him a role in his next film, a gangster drama set in Mumbai. This, of course, was the era-defining Satya (1998), with Bajpayee’s Bhikhu Mhatre at its incandescent core. 

Fine turns in films like Shool, Kaun, Zubeidaa, Aks, and Pinjar followed. While it has not always been a smooth ride, Bajpayee has successfully stayed the course. In 2024, he is really everywhere, appearing in OTT offerings, in theatres and in film festivals. Bajpayee’s recent roles have run the gamut in terms of power and social position: a middle class lawyer in Sirf Ek Banda Kaafi Hai, a troubled business scion in Gulmohar, a semi-feudal plantation owner in The Fable, a dispossessed adivasi in Joram, and to top it off, a double role as both abusive, womanising husband and clingy, put-upon lover in Killer Soup. Clearly, this is an actor at the peak of his prowess.

Excerpts from an interview:

You were an Amitabh Bachchan fan but began your career in parallel cinema—Bandit Queen, Drohkaal—and were part of creating a more realistic mainstream cinema, Satya onwards. How would you evaluate the state of Hindi cinema today, especially given OTT platforms and the pandemic? 

I think Hindi cinema had reached a good place—experimenting, entertaining but also not compromising on art. So many films—Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, Gangs of Wasseypur, Special 26 and many others achieved this mix. Then Covid came and people got out of the habit of going to the theatre. They aren’t completely back yet. During the pandemic, audiences got a chance to explore the new medium [OTT] that had come into their households. Now that option of watching on your phone is always there. Post pandemic, the Hindi mainstream is confused. I see a desperate attempt to entertain that was not there before. Earlier, creators came from a place of conviction. Now they don’t know what will convince the audience to come out of their homes and spend the kind of money needed.

Thus the tilt towards spectacle? 

That is the Marvel effect! It was there before too, but it is much more now. Producers seem to feel that people need an extravaganza to come to the theatre. 

Is that true? 

I don’t think so. The success of Kantara, or a small film like 12th Fail, or the huge critical acclaim for a film like Joram… give me hope. Hindi filmmakers should go back to the drawing board. Before COVID-19, we were doing everything right: women-led films were doing well, films were engaging as well as entertaining… But now the fear of failing is such that there is a push towards extravaganzas. I think we just need to look at Amitabh Bachchan’s films. Larger than life characters, yes, often rags to riches plots, the triumph of good over evil. But the hero was a coolie, or an orphan, or a police inspector who was non-corrupt, or an unwanted child who becomes a multi-millionaire. People related and clapped for him. Replace Marvel-style films with this; you’d save a lot of money on VFX. 

But Hindi cinema no longer tells stories about poor people, they are not the paying audience… 

But the same audience is watching a Telugu film where the protagonist is from a poor background. They are watching Kantara in the non-Kannada circuit and making it successful. Kantara’s story is like a lok katha, with a hero from a village. If we take the lead from there, I think we will find clarity. 

By “from there” what do you mean? 

South India. I do not mean imitate them, but take a cue from them. Heroes should look like us, talk about the problems that the common man is facing. Very few Indians actually make it to the civil services, but when you make something like 12th Fail, the level of identification is huge. The Marvel model might make money once or twice, but that is not a long-lasting solution. I have no problem with larger-than-life films. But stories should be rooted in our society. Because people want hope, and you can’t give them hope by showing life on Mars. 

Has OTT helped or hindered? 

OTT has opened up possibilities for storytelling. You can make things with good intentions and find an audience. Take Sirf Ek Bandaa Kaafi Hai. A regular lawyer fighting for a minor, fearful that someone might come out of any gali and kill him. It became a streaming phenomenon overnight. So audiences are looking for relatable characters, stories that offer excitement—and hope. 

Sirf Ek Bandaa... is based on a real-life sexual assault case against Asaram Bapu. But are things getting more difficult, the stories that can be told?

The censor situation was as brutal 20 years ago. But filmmakers are intelligent people. You can’t sit down and say you can’t make a film. You are a creative person, right? Then you will find a way. Among just my films, think of Sirf Ek Bandaa… or Gulmohar—that “family film” speaks of so many things so cleverly. Or Joram, about a tribal man who is displaced… and Joram has a U/A certificate. 

Could these be exceptions? 

One can be an exception, not five. I think cinema and theatre has gone through changes and challenges in any decade, and always come out on top. 

Theatre was where you began as an actor. Do you miss it? 

I miss it. So much that I tried going back to it. But theatre does not give you crutches—no takes, editing, background music, or sound. What you see with your naked eyes is the truth. It is an actor’s medium, but the actor has to be completely prepared. I was not. I would have to completely stop working in cinema for a time, to work on myself and be ready for theatre. 

Is that something you might do? 

Yes, I might. 

What is it you miss about theatre? The audience? 

The audience used to be a blur. It was as if nothing else existed. The stage was my safest space in the world. That is what I miss. 

Is the film set not like that?

The film set, you can’t really own it. There are too many factors that own it. 

Do you still watch theatre? 

Yes, I do. Whenever I am free and there is a play by friends—Makarand Deshpande or Danish Husain, so many people—I go to Prithvi Theatre. 

Do you prepare for a role by seeking out real people who resemble your character? 

I have met lakhs of people, thousands of them very closely, from all strata of society. From a village to a Paharganj basti to a Vasant Vihar palace, life has taken me everywhere. Everything is stored in the hard drive of my brain. So no.

I may not have grown up as a rich businessman’s son, but playing Arun Batra in Gulmohar or playing Dev in The Fable was not hard. These people are all around me, I know how they think. What was hard was Zubeidaa. To play a prince is a whole different mindset. I still remember [Shyam] Benegal telling me, “You don’t know anything about poverty. You are raja and they are praja. And you are not an exploiter. Don’t complicate matters too much. From the moment you open your eyes, you have only known this.” 

Do filmmakers write roles for you now?

When you’re dealing with Raam Reddy or Devashish Makhija or Kanu Behl, these are very creatively committed people. They do not write roles for anybody. But if those roles suit me, they do give me scripts to read. There I can compliment myself, I have never led a closed life—and I think they also feel that if Manoj Bajpayee comes on board, he doesn’t go away easily.

Are there roles you want to play? Any historical figures, maybe? 

Oh no, I don’t want to do biopics. See, you need an Attenborough to make a Gandhi. And then Attenborough needs to give Ben Kingsley the time to prepare. We do not give our biopics that commitment of time, money, and energy. Also some shades of grey are needed, which Indian biopics don’t offer. The only biopic I have done is Aligarh. I based the character of Dr Siras on a one-minute interview clip with Barkha Dutt. It was almost nothing to go by. But people who knew Siras told me, “He was just like how you showed him.” 

Does acting ever seem scary to you, its power?

I think acting affects people, though only up to a point. Dev’s journey in The Fable makes people realise the void they unknowingly carry. Siras’ plight in Aligarh affects people because it is hard to see a person trapped in his own house. We relate to it, because we are all the time invaded. 

Have you had that Dilip Kumar experience, of being too close to the character? 

It happened with Shool. But I was very young then. I did not know how to switch off and switch on. But even now, am I ever totally off? How many bruises I carry, I will only know at the end of my life. Until then I am enjoying myself! Maybe my moodiness is also the effect of playing all these characters so deeply. But I love acting. If I love the perks, I have to love the bruises. 

Has acting ever felt strange to you, the combination of intensely feeling something internally but having to perform it externally?

Acting is like stripping yourself in front of everyone. If you are ready for that, then come into this business. But yes, it’s amazing there are many actors like me—people who prefer to be quiet, very shy in many ways—who suddenly feel completely comfortable when the camera is on. It excites me, what art can do to an artist. 

Do you feel like each role teaches you something new? 

Yes. Each role’s humanity affects me. Also, don’t forget that the script is written material. You are finding new meaning as you go through every line, repeatedly.

Are you a reader? 

I am a reader, but not a voracious one. Because I do not have time. I read my scripts on flights. 

Have scripts become more professional? 

They have. When I entered the industry, there was only narration. People looked at me strangely if I asked for a script. Then people started giving me a page. Then ten pages. Now you see professional bound scripts. I ask for them in Devanagari, I am from Hindi medium. To read Hindi in Roman is impossible for me. 

You would be an exception, since most Hindi film scripts are originally written in English, and most actors and even directors are increasingly only English-speaking. Does this disconnect not link to the lack of rooted stories? 

Definitely. Look at all the filmmakers who’ve made an impact, from Vishal Bhardwaj to Rakeysh Mehra to Hansal Mehta to Anurag Kashyap to Devashish Makhija: all of them write in Hindi, though they studied in English-medium. I’m glad you asked me this. If you’re from north India, and coming into this industry, Hindi should be something you practice. Sure, we need English, absolutely, it’s empowering. But the lack of Hindi is a handicap. I sometimes see on a talk show, people making fun of a [Hindi] word that some actor has used. I think, how can you do that? You are making fun of yourselves. And I tell my 13-year-old daughter, sit with me, work on your Hindi, you’ll be at a huge advantage. She gets irritated, but it will have an impact. Especially since she is very active in theatre in school, and she wants to act. We are heading towards a situation in this industry where knowing Hindi will be the exception.

Published in Frontline magazine, May 12, 2024.

Book Review: Desire and Despoliation

A book review for Firstpost:

A recent English translation brings Shivani's 1978 novel 'Bhairavi' to new readers

Bhairavi: The Runaway begins in medias res, with the protagonist slowly coming back to consciousness in a room she does not recognise, surrounded by strangers whose presence terrifies her. An “old hag” with a man's dhoti wrapped around “her enormous stomach” and her bare breasts are “covered in blood-red sandalwood paste”; a younger woman with a face “as black as that of an African”; an ash-smeared naked sadhu with bloodshot eyes and half-grey, half golden dreadlocks — these are characters that might throw anyone off. Certainly our heroine Chandan, a conventionally pretty, fair young woman whom we are to understand is 'from a good family', is scared as well as repelled.

Chandan's experience has the sensory overload of a nightmare: the semi-nakedness of those around her, the stale smell of chewing tobacco on the sanyasin's breath, the cave-like room filled with smoke, and occupied by rudraksha beads, marijuana chillums, a skull or two, and a live pet snake. And yet, what begins as a petrifying glimpse of otherness soon starts to feel arresting, even beautiful. Maya Didi has a sagging but once voluptuous body and a radiant face that “must have ensnared many men in its youth”; the “black girl” Charan has a laugh that “lit up her whole face”'; the guru's “divine face” is “like a light tearing into a room”. This ability to stay with what was initially frightening, to allow one's gaze to be transformed — perhaps this was the gift Shivani's writing gave her readers.

Shivani was the pen name under which the writer Gaura Pant wrote from the 1960s to the 1990s, her fiction often first appearing in serialised form in Hindi magazines. Bhairavi was her fourth novel, published in instalments in Saptahik Hindustan and then as a book in 1978. Shivani was hugely popular, but as far as I am aware, only some of her short stories have hitherto been translated into English: Trust and other stories (Calcutta, Writers Workshop, 1985); Krishnakali and other stories (Trans. by Masooma Ali, Rupa & Co., 1995) and Apradhini: Women Without Men (Trans. by Ira Pande, HarperCollins, 2011). (Ira Pande is Shivani's daughter, who has also written a deeply personal biography of her mother called Diddi, 2005). Priyanka Sarkar, Bhairavi's English translator, suggests in her introduction that the reason Shivani wasn't as feted as her contemporaries because “she was seen as a writer of 'love stories' and not a chronicler of society”. Other than Bhairavi, I have only ever read Apradhini, but based on what I know about the Indian, specifically Hindi, literary universe, I'd extend Sarkar's point even further. Shivani was probably not feted by the Hindi establishment precisely because she was popular, particularly popular with women — and not with literary-minded ones.

Reading Bhairavi: The Runaway revealed the possible reasons for that vast popularity. First, the story is fast-paced. Second, the central characters are all women. Men, whether fathers, husbands, lovers or sons, are often absent, and when they do appear, they're fairly one-dimensional figures whose sole purpose seems to be to drive the plot forward. Third, there's a racy, almost overripe quality to the narrative — a sort of Indian Gothic that combines two of this country's abiding concerns: mothers worrying about their daughters, and a deep-rooted fascination with ascetics.

What brings these two disparate threads together? A preoccupation with sex and sexuality — all the more powerful for being almost unspoken.

So on the one hand, we are told the backstory of Chandan, which is linked to the further backstory of her mother Rajrajeshwari — both revolving around the need to keep young women's sexuality in check, lest they lose their prized virginity and become unmarriageable. On the other hand we are plunged into the world of the Aghori ascetic, seeing through Chandan's eyes this storied space of Shiv-bhakt sadhus whose austerities, like those of other sects with an affinity to Tantrism, involve rituals that would be considered shocking by most ordinary Hindus. The 'ideal' Aghori embraces what others consider taboo — living off the cremation ground, drinking not only liquor but urine, consuming not just flesh but human corpses, and having intercourse with a female partner who is preferably infertile — the withholding of semen and the non-reproductiveness of the act being crucial. As the anthropologist Jonathan Parry argues in his classic study Death in Banaras, the Aghori route to siddhi (supernatural powers) not just allows meat-eating and intoxicants and sex, but makes them the very stuff of their sadhana (ritual practice).“For the tantrics, that which binds you — desire — is also what will set you free,” writes Madhavi Menon in her delightful book Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India.

Bhairavi offers the fascinated lay reader a glimpse of this tabooed universe, but Shivani was no anthropologist, and her Aghoris don't stick to the rules. Yes, the guru and his prime disciple Maya Didi do wander the cremation ground in search of enlightenment, seeking to attain mastery over life by surrounding themselves with death. But Shivani's narrative cannot go the whole hog. She makes their relationship non-sexual — or rather, unconsummated: Charan describes seeing them once at the cremation ground, “sitting across each other like a snake couple”, with Maya saying to the guru: “You are my only Shiva, Guru, and I am your Shiva Shakti”. Somehow, by keeping any actual sex out of it, Shivani manages to turn the relationship into something filled with sexual-romantic energy, even danger: a classic double bind that would be recognisable to all her readers.

Meanwhile, in the ordinary world, marriage continues to rule the roost, offering the only legitimate space for sexuality — if you're very lucky, some happiness is a possibility. But even marriage cannot protect women from the constant fear of sexual despoliation: Bhairavi has not one but two moments when (the fear of) rape becomes the motor of the plot. A woman can go from the grihasth (domestic) universe to the world of supposed renunciates, Shivani suggests implicitly, but she won't ever be free of this fear — if not on her own behalf, then on behalf of younger women. That's a bleak thought: one can only hope it's a little less true in 2020 than it was in 1978.

Bhairavi: The Runaway | By Shivani | Translated by Priyanka Sarkar

Simon and Schuster/Yoda Press, 2020 | 139 pages

This review was published in Firstpost, 27 Nov 2020.

 

 

The smells of others

My Mirror column:

Nicholas Kharkongor's Delhi-set dramedy Axone traces some of the fault lines that mark the urban Indian melting pot.

Growing up between cultures, I learnt long ago that smell was most people’s strongest, most intimate sense – and thus the one that lent itself most easily to kneejerk reactions, especially with relation to food. Members of my family’s staunchly vegetarian side, North Indian Jains of the not-even-egg variety, have sat me down as a child to tell me how difficult they found it to keep their own food down while having their nostrils assailed by the fried fish smells wafting down from a tenant’s house.

Nicholas Kharkongor’s film Axone, recently released on an online platform, is named for the strong-smelling fermented soya bean paste that forms a necessary ingredient in many traditional northeastern dishes. Often spelled akhuni, axone has a distinctive smell that you can’t ignore – which makes it a useful metaphorical marker of difference. And differences that cannot be ignored make for a strange but potent cocktail of attraction and repulsion.

That mixture of attraction and repulsion appears sharply in the film, in the alternately lascivious and judgemental gaze that Delhi folk turn upon the young northeasterners in their midst – being judged by the women for wearing ‘Western’ clothes and having boyfriends, while being the object of the men’s unsolicited attentions. But that attraction and repulsion also plays out, perhaps unintendedly, in Axone’s own cinematic form. The film plays out the food/smell motif against a tenant-landlord scenario in one of those urban villages in Delhi that thrum with the sounds of many languages, focusing on a group of friends from the Northeast who have to make an akhuni-flavoured pork curry for a last-minute wedding feast. That food-and-wedding narrative, though, feels like a mere sweetener, an attractive hook on which to hang a script full of bitter – abeit necessary – pills. Kharkongor's central concern is the racism, sexual predatoriness and aggression that migrants from the Northeast are forced to suffer in Delhi (and most other Indian cities). But what he does is to take that disturbing narrative and plonk it down in a Delhi-set middle class comedy that has become a Bollywood subgenre from Do Dooni Chaar and Vicky Donor to Queen to Badhaai Ho.

So alongside the central group of friends, we get a fairly detailed glimpse of the landlord's family: the hard-nosed landlady (Dolly Ahluwalia doing a version of her alcohol-swigging Punjabi grandmother from Vicky Donor), her layabout son-in-law (Vinay Pathak) and her overenthusiastic grandson, the curly-haired Shiv (Rohan Joshi). Shiv's multiple machinations and largely well-meaning mistakes form some of the film's warmer bits of comedy, but his father and grandmother's characters feel derivative and ungrounded. Still, there is something to be said for the fact that the homogenous lower-middle-class Punjabi milieu, a staple of so many previous Delhi films, has finally been extended to a whistle-stop tour of the very real admixture of so many Delhi neighbourhoods like Humayunpur, where locals rent out parts of their properties to people from across India and beyond.

Axone gently impresses upon us that everyone judges each other, using community and skin colour and language to make easy categorisations. If the Hindi-speaking landlords claim not to be able to tell northeastern faces apart, or remember their names, then the Nepali girl, too, can't get her head around her African neighbour's name – and the African neighbour, in turn, makes an assumption about her based on her looks. And the whole group of northeastern friends keep their distance from the landlord’s son, whose interest in them is very much a curious fascination with the coolness their clothes, their English-speaking-ness, their music represent for him.

Kharkongor’s real sympathies, though, lie with Chanbi, Upasana, Zorem and Bendang (played by Lin Laishram, Sayani Gupta, Tenzing Dalha and Lanuakum Ao), each of whom is dealing with their own troubles. Even here, however, his script constantly points out how their relationships with each other, and with themselves, are inflected by the politics of identity and belonging. These include some small observations that shape the plot – like the perceived difference between being Nepali and being northeastern, and other observations that don’t quite go the distance – like the fake American accent or the Bollywood lyrics that are needed to get by in a world in which those languages have bigger markets. But whether it be the northeastern man who feels emasculated by racist North Indian violence, or the northeastern woman exhausted by nonstop sexual slurs and harassment, Axone brings home the trauma and injustice of the migrant northeastern experience as perhaps no Hindi film has before.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Jun 2020.

Poetry in stealth mode

My Mirror column:

Fifty years after its release, Saat Hindustani feels both like a time capsule and a swinging pendulum: showing what has changed forever, and what we seem doomed to repeat. 

(The second of a two-part column.)

Last Sunday, a week after Amitabh Bachchan’s 77^th birthday, I wrote about his first film as an actor, Saat Hindustani, and how he landed that role. KA Abbas, who wrote and directed his debut, has written of how the tall, thin Amitabh matched his personal imagination of the character, who was modelled on an old Aligarh mate of his.

But watching the film, one has a sense that there was more to the casting. As the real-life son of a poet, Amitabh had cultivated the art of recitation. He was likely better equipped to play one than most debutante actors. His father Harivansh Rai Bachchan was a highly-regarded Hindi poet from Allahabad. Saat Hindustani's fictional Anwar Ali was an Urdu poet from a little further east: Ranchi, a city then in Bihar and now in Jharkhand.

The idea of poetry is crucial to the film. Syeda Hameed, co-editor of Abbas’s voluminous writings, has pointed to his abiding relationships with poets, and the importance of lyrics in his films. “The best poets of the 1960s and ’70s wrote for Abbas’s films, and that too for very little money: Ali Sardar Jafri, Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri and Prem Dhawan, to name a few,” Hameed writes. The lyrics of Saat Hindustani were by Kaifi Azmi, and it was Azmi’s words that Amitabh spoke on screen as the sensual, lanky Anwar Ali.

Quite early in the narrative, six of the seven Hindustanis board a train headed to Goa to provide secret support to the Goan freedom struggle. A young and purposeful Amitabh shuts the compartment window as instructed, then turns to his companions with a marvellous air of having something to say, and declaims:

“Aandhi aye ya toofaan koi gham nahi,

Hai abhi aakhiri imtehan saathiyon.

Ek taraf maut hai, ek taraf zindagi,

Beech se le chalo kaarwaan saathiyon.”

A half-smile flutters at the corner of his lips, and he looks pleased as punch. It was at that moment that I realised that although this was an ensemble cast, Amitabh was as close to being the film’s hero as possible. But what an unusual hero he was. The youngest and tallest of the assembled men – but also the one least capable of handling a gun, the one who hopes there will be no killing involved, who goes into shock when the security of the mission demands that a spy actually be eliminated. Weeping, Anwar actually has to be held back and comforted by the kindly Jogender (played, in Abbas’s anti-stereotype casting scheme, by Utpal Dutt). Traditional masculinity dies a quick death.

There are times in Saat Hindustani when the nazaakat of the North Indian gentleman-poet is served up for mockery – such as the laughter when Amitabh turns to the group and complains that the truck driver who has just dropped them off on the Goa border is “namakool” because he has just turned around and driven off “without even saying khuda hafiz”.

But later, captured by the Portuguese, Anwar is tortured and taunted by a faintly comic interrogator who has been informed of the young fellow’s diary: “Achha toh tum poet hai, kya kehta hai use, shaayar?” Hands and legs tied, Amitabh narrows his eyes disdainfully. “Hamare mulk mein har shaks shaayar hai.”

Abbas knew, though, that that mulk of poets, of possible empathetic connections across communities, was already threatened. In one scene set in the late 1960s present, an older Anwar Ali hears his house has been burnt down by anti-Urdu fanatics. Like his creator KA Abbas, who could simultaneously laugh at “jaw-breaking” Hindi and see it as a language a Tamilian Dalit might use as a way of entering the nation, the optimistic Anwar Ali immediately wants to write to his old comrade-in-arms, the Hindi campaigner Sharma. But his hope for civility is quickly dashed when his wife points him to a virulently anti-Muslim editorial by Sharma, directing all Urdu speakers to Pakistan.

In his more considered moments, Abbas presents an unusually calibrated idea of what constitutes leadership – and what courage might mean. The Gandhian model of non-violent resistance, satyagrah, is of course at the film’s muddled heart. But there’s more here than non-violence. For one, there is a clarity of goals, over and above a declared ideological arsenal of means: one man can be murdered if it means saving the lives of seven. For another, neither action nor leadership is to be trumpeted. No one is appointed to a position of permanent captaincy; members of the team are its “commanders” turn by turn. 

And crucially, what has to be done is done, preferably without announcement. When the selected men set out from the satyagrah camp, their departure is not flagged, they simply melt away. What will everyone at camp think of us, they ask their trainer. “That you are cowards who have run away,” he responds. "But the mission will succeed."

In that world, it was preferable to be thought of as a coward and succeed, than proclaim one’s heroism from the rooftops and fail. The past truly was another country.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 Oct 2019.

 

The seventh satyagrahi

My Mirror column:

A look back at KA Abbas’s Saat Hindustani (1969), in the 50^th year of its release, must begin with its most famous participant

On October 11, 1942, in the city then called Allahabad, a child was born to a Hindi poet and his wife. The Quit India movement, launched by Gandhi with his ‘Do or Die’ speech on August 8, was in full swing. Despite the immediate arrest of the Congress leadership, mass protests took place all over the country. These were not always successfully non-violent: police stations, railway stations, railway and telegraph lines and other symbols of colonial government were attacked. The British cracked down, making some 100,000 arrests and killing hundreds of civilians. Born into that mood of national revolt, the boy was named Inquilab: revolution.

The story goes that it was another Hindi poet, Sumitrananandan Pant, who later suggested the name Amitabh. And Dr Harivansh Rai ‘Bachchan’ decided that his poetic pseudonym – not the family name of Srivastava – would be his children’s last name. On November 7, 1969, the 27-year-old Amitabh Bachchan made his screen debut, in a film about another nationalist revolt: Saat Hindustani.

Saat Hindustani, scripted and directed by the indefatigable KA Abbas, is by no means a great film. Abbas was a great screenwriter, responsible for much of Raj Kapoor’s seminal work from Shree 420 and Awara to Mera Naam Joker and Bobby, as well as such diverse scripts as Jagte Raho and  Achanak, a film on the Nanavati case, which Gulzar directed. But his own direction could leave something to be desired, even in such fascinating projects as Gyara Hazaar Ladkiyan (1962), dedicated to urban working women, or Bambai Raat Ki Baahon Mein (1967), in which an aam aadmi journalist tries to hold out against corruption. Saat Hindustani is more ham-handed than these. And yet, like all Abbas’s films, it has a certain inexorable honesty, unusual in his time and our own.

The film is about the liberation of Goa from Portuguese rule. The plot contrivances are almost silly: a young woman called Maria, admitting herself for a heart surgery, insists the doctor wait a week. She makes a nurse write telegrams to six men, each from a different community and part of the country, urging them to come to Goa. As she dictates each of their addresses from memory, we cut to each man in the present, and then from each man’s memory into their collective past: the month and a half they spent together on a mission. The bulk of the film involves six men crossing into Portuguese-controlled Goan territory where, together with Maria, they hope to hoist the Indian flag at various places, inviting possible arrest and torture.

Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai are here turned into seven satyagrahis. Their modus operandi is non-violent resistance, and their ideology is nationalism (actual footage of a Nehru speech appears). Abbas’s casting, too, was crucial to his Hindustani project: as he later described it, he “wanted to prove... that there was no particular Hindu or Muslim, Tamilian, Maharashtrian or Bengali ethnic type”. To that end, he would transform “the smart and sophisticated and versatile Jalal Agha into the Maharashtrian powada singer”. His assistant “Madhukar, who hails from Meerut, would be a Tamilian; Sharma (Brahmin by caste) would also undergo a similar transformation; and Utpal Dutt, the cigar-chewing admiral, would be the tractor-driving Punjabi farmer” called Joginder. The Malayalam hero Madhu, fresh from the national success of Chemmeen, played “the sensitive Bengali” – a Mohun Bagan Club football player called Subodh. The Goan Christian Maria was played by Shahnaz Vahanvaty.

The two characters left to cast were a Hindi fanatic and an Urdu fanatic respectively. “Jalal one day brought with him his friend Anwar Ali (brother of the comedian Mehmood), in whose eyes I saw the Jana Sanghi fanaticism. So I decided to make him the Swayam Sevak who hates Urdu and speaks jaw-breaking Hindi,” wrote Abbas in an essay collected in the posthumous volume Bread Beauty Revolution.

The final character was an Urdu wallah, a man who when we meet him in the present, is getting his associate Mr Sinha to read out a letter from his son because he cannot read Devanagri. He was to be a poet from Bihar – whom Abbas named Anwar Ali – and who, he decided, “had to be thin, also corresponding to the thin image of my friend, the late Asrarul Haque ‘Majaz’”.

When a young man was recommended for the role, Abbas apparently looked at his photograph and asked that the fellow come and see him in person. “On the third day, punctually at 6 pm, a tall young man arrived who looked taller because of the churidar pajama and Jawahar jacket that he was wearing.”

After being told the story, he first asked after the Punjabi’s role. But then, told of Abbas’s cross-casting policy, he grew excited and said he would like the Muslim role “specially because he is under a cloud of suspicion” that is only removed at the end.

It was after offering him the standard fee of five thousand rupees that Abbas realised that the young man had actually arrived from Calcutta, and had apparently resigned his job to do so. “I was astonished. ‘You mean to say that you resigned a job of sixteen hundred rupees a month, just on the chance of getting this role! Suppose we can’t give the role to you?’ He said, ‘One has to take such chances’ with such conviction that I said, ‘The role is yours.’”

(To be continued next week.)

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Oct 2019.

The Spirit of Technologies Past

My Mirror column:

As we hurtle ever faster into a digitised present, some recent films cast an affectionate glance back at the technologies that made us who we are.

Right at the beginning of the recently released Shantilal O Projapoti Rohoshyo, director Pratim D Gupta tells us that his film is about a time “when porn was watched on DVD, news was read in print… and films were made for theatres”. Right from its charming children’s detective story title (the Bangla translates as ‘Shantilal and the Butterfly Mystery’), the film lives and breathes a certain gentle nostalgia. But its special focus is an era that existed until quite recently in India, a time that feels like it’s being elbowed out at top speed by technological transformation. What’s interesting is that the nostalgia is itself framed around an earlier era of technology: the newspaper, the cinema, the photograph.
The film’s deadbeat weather reporter protagonist, Shantilal, with his unquenched desire for a “front page story”; the neighbour who hounds him for a free spot in the matrimonial pages of The Sentinel; the DVD shop guy who urges Bertolucci, Bergman and Buñuel upon a customer who’s waiting for his supply of quality Malaysian erotica – all of these look back fondly to a time before the digital conquest of our lives. But the pirated DVD may be the one to focus on: a signifier of an in-between time. Not before computers, but before news stories began to be broken on Twitter timelines, before Shaadi.com, and before the endless glut of internet porn. It is an era that is not in fact that distant – which is perhaps why it feels so surreal that it is already gone.

Shantilal brings to the fore a theme that has, in fact, underlain many Indian films in the past five or six years: our memories of an analogue era. Ritesh Batra’s 2013 critical and commercial success, The Lunchbox, used a dabbawala mix-up to deliver a tribute to a fast-disappearing world – the Hindi music cassettes Deshpande Aunty still listens to, the Orient fan around which Deshpande Uncle’s stagnant life revolves, the Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi episodes recorded from Doordarshan that Saajan Fernandes watches endlessly in memory of his wife. (Using the voice of Bharati Achrekar as the never-seen Mrs Deshpande was, of course, the perfect meta-textual reference to Doordarshan, on which she was once such a profoundly familiar face.)

If The Lunchbox took a rather melancholy view, Sharat Kataria’s Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015) was a more enthusiastic, even raunchy tribute to the 1990s, featuring Ayushmann Khurrana as the small-town owner of a cassette shop. Some of the most endearing moments of the film’s post-marital romance between Khurrana and Bhumi Pednekar involved the VCR as a therapeutic sexual aid and the playing of songs as messages on a cassette player.

The audio cassette with songs personally picked out and recorded was, of course, the ultimate 1990s romantic gesture. That was the matrix of a more recent 1990s-set romance, the Yash Raj production Meri Pyaari Bindu (2017), also starring Khurrana. In that film, Khurrana plays a Bengali middle class hero (complete with a daaknaam – Bubla), whose largely unrequited love for his neighbour Bindu is tied up with the technology of their adolescence: Ambassador cars, STD-ISD booths, a nascent virtual universe embodied in email addresses such as muqaddarkasikandar1977@hotmail.com.


Video cassettes were crucial to both Nitin Kakkar’s Filmistaan and Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider. Both released in 2014: one set in Pakistan, the other in Kashmir, and both had political messages. Although tonally miles apart, the two films are united by their references to the early Salman Khan films Maine Pyar Kiya and Hum Aapke Hain Koun. Kakkar presents those films, as he does all Hindi cinema, as the great unifier of countries and people divided by Partition. Haider, written by the journalist and author Basharat Peer, adapts Shakespeare’s Hamlet to 1990s Kashmir: a dark and violent place, as searingly sarcastic as it is driven to desperation. In this world, the two Salmans – the original play’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern turned brilliantly into Bhai fans and lookalikes who run a videocassette shop – initially seem like comic relief. But as the film builds to its necessarily tragic climax, it becomes clear that no amount of grainy re-watching of MPK songs can keep Haider (Shahid Kapoor) from seeing the reality of the Salmans – or keep Kashmir from seeing the reality of India.

To return to Shantilal o Projapoti Rohoshyo: it isn’t just a simple tribute to a past era. The protagonists of Pratim Gupta’s not-quite-mystery live on the cusp of the present, and often display an active reluctance to cross over. Shantilal himself doesn’t have Whatsapp, though he does have a mobile phone. The film star in her prime (Paoli Dam, very effective as Nandita) expresses a nostalgia for autograph seekers in an era of selfies, and keeps a corner of her bedroom as a photographic shrine to her past. But she finds her future threatened by a photograph from that past. Old technologies can inspire nostalgia, but our attachment to them may tell us less about those forms than about ourselves.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1 Sep 2019.

Abhishek Majumdar: Theatre Interview

A two-part interview with the multi-talented Abhishek Majumdar, published on Firstpost in August:

At 38, Abhishek Majumdar is one of India's most exciting playwright-directors. An alumnus of the London International School of Performing Arts (LISPA), Majumdar grew up in a Bengali family in Delhi. For the last decade he has been based out of Bengaluru. The Indian Ensemble, which he co-founded in 2009 and ran until 2018 with his friend and colleague Sandeep Shikhar, has produced some of the most interesting Indian plays of recent years: the Kashmir trilogy of Rizwan, Djinns of Eidgah and Gasha, the 10th century philosophical-political drama Muktidham, and the Allahabad-set Kaumudi, which is both a tribute to Mohan Rakesh and a complex engagement with the epic heroes Ekalavya and Abhimanyu.

His plays have been published by Oberon Press, UK, and translated into multiple languages from Marathi to Czech. His play Djinns of Eidgah was staged by Jaipur's Jawahar Kala Kendra this January and at Mumbai's Prithvi Theatre earlier in August. Another production of Djinns by the Bread Theatre and Film Company of Cambridge is currently being staged at the Edinburgh Fringe until 18 August.

In this interview, he speaks about theatrical form and content, the politics of language in India, and his many interests beyond the stage.

Muktidham, written and directed by Majumdar

The first time I heard of your work wasn't a play; it was at Lekhana, in Bengaluru in 2013/14, where you read a Hindi short story. Do you still write short stories, or things other than plays?

I do, but I don't share them with the world. They're not necessarily about personal subjects, but the act of writing a short story is for me very personal. I like to keep it for my friends and family. I have consciously never published my stories. I compose music sometimes, for other people, for other plays, sometimes for professional musicians. I also paint a little bit. That helps me in scenography, but mainly I paint for myself.

Coming back to the short stories, there is a series called Lakdi ke Makaan, which I have been working on, about women who live in the villages of Shimla (my aunt lives in Shimla). Someday it might become a monologue by an actor. But right now only about 10 people in this world know that I write stories.

Your short stories are in Hindi, but would it be true to say that you wrote plays in English earlier, and now write plays in Hindi?

I write in three languages: Bangla, Hindi and English. My first play, an adaptation of Sunil Gangopadhyay's novel Pratidwandi, was in Bangla. Later I wrote Dweepa in Bangla, but it has only been performed in Kannada.

I'm currently writing an adaptation of Shakuntalam, that's in Hindi. I recently wrote a satire about Communist history, which hasn't been produced as yet, called Dialectical Materialism Aur Anya Vilupt Jaanwar. That's in Hindi, although it starts in Calcutta at the time of collapse of the Berlin Wall, and then goes back to Karl Marx and Adam Smith at the Garden of Eden. I'm still working on that play, but strangely it's been translated into Czech and won an award in Prague. [laughs]

Translations of my plays are happening/have happened into Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, French. Rizvan got translated from Urdu to Bangla, because there is a show in Bangladesh.

All my work internationally is in English. I write those plays in English whose natural language would not be Hindi or Bangla. So for example, Pah-la, which was staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London last year, is set in Tibet; that I wrote in English. I have another recent play, Batin, set in Medina on the two nights between the Prophet's death and his burial. It's about what happens when the word of God is not understood by everyone in the same way. The natural language of Batin would be Arabic. So that's in English. An early play of mine, Harlesden High Street, was in English. But now I don't produce any work in India in English.

So there has been a move towards Hindi?

Directorially, yes. Five years ago our company did make work in English. I consciously stopped. For two reasons. One, English is the only language in India where knowing the language is enough. In any other language, you also have to know how to act. Frankly, I find far fewer options for actors in English than in Hindi or Bangla or Kannada.

Secondly, an Indian audience watches Hindi or Bangla theatre differently than English. Their bodies change. Because theatre is fundamentally a community thing, you watch it with people. And when you get the third layer of the language — the language that you may have not gone to school in, but the language in which you make fun of people — that is the right language for that stage.

For example, if you read [Girish] Karnad in Hindi, that works much better than reading it in English (though some of the English translations are fantastic).

In India, my rehearsal room is also much more alive when I'm rehearsing in an Indian language. I am directing a play in New York in English, but there my actors' natural language is English. The contract of language is three-way: between the maker, the actor who is performing and the audience. [The play] has to be in the most suitable language for all three, not just for one.

Have you directed a play in a language you don't understand?

Yes, Kannada, which I follow, but don't speak. And I've done a play in London 10 years ago, which was seven vignettes: one in Hebrew, one in Cantonese, one in Arabic...

And that wasn't a problem?

No. Direction-wise, then it was less of a problem. Perhaps now it would be more of a problem. I was a drama school student then, more interested in form. Now I've gotten more interested in meaning.

Tell me more about your interest in form.

Essentially, a play is composing form over time. It's a bit like the work of an architect. One is always thinking about structure. And I've been an avid mathematics student, interested in pattern, shape, geometry, topography. Every play is a problem with multiple solutions.


Give me an example?

I'll give you two examples. For Muktidham, the problem was how do you write a play which from inside is European, but from outside is in the Indian epic format. Structurally, it's not a Greek play with three acts and five plot points; it is cyclical, there is a sense of elaboration. But the scene-work inside the play is not in the epic format: nothing is sung, for instance.

What is very Kathakali about it is that from the interval to the next scene, there is a big jump. We believe that time lapse for two reasons. One, because we believe there is a wall — the wall behind which the Buddhist king is standing. We never see it, but we believe it, and so we assume a certain urgency to everything else. Which is a very Kathakali thing to do. You know — “Duryodhana is coming”, but the scene only has Draupadi and the brothers. The other thing is that although you move forward in time, but the eclipse is stuck. It's nothing, really, it's one profab light on a disc! But it allows us, I think, to continuously imagine suffocation.

In Kaumudi, the challenge I set myself was linguistic: to write a play which used both the language of Aashaadh Ka Ek Din and Adhe Adhure [two classic Mohan Rakesh plays, one set in the time of Kalidasa, one in the 20th century]. So there is the play, and there is the play within the play. And there's a third language the characters use when they are playful, which is similar to Pandavani.

So each of your plays is a research project. Literary, anthropological, historical.

Yes. But art is about memory. It's about how you remember your research. That's the difference between researching and writing a paper, and researching and writing a play. A play has to go through oneself.  It can't be just your thesis — it's got to be your observation of life, your sense of taste, your politics, what you want to say.

But for me, if something doesn't have a hard problem to solve, it doesn't interest me. I can watch plays which are not very complex, I can watch anything live. But to work on an idea for two years of my life, it has to be intellectually complex.

PART II 

Is there one idea that each play starts with?

The theatre is all about confluence. For an idea to become a play, seemingly different things must stick together. Like in Kaumudi, you have a father and son, who mirror Ekalavya and Abhimanyu. The father is going blind, and there is a theatre inside a theatre. These could be four different plays. But I am fond of density, that's my thing. Though that is also one of the criticisms of my plays.

Abhishek Majumdar

Density leads us nicely to my next question. You work in Hindi, in a moment when there's increasing criticism of the elitism of English. But you also work in theatre. Do you ever think about reaching out to larger audiences?

I have a lot of confidence in the theatre. If a play is worth anything, it will outlive at least one generation. And over time, plays have large audiences with a much deeper level of engagement. So I think the idea of audience is a more complex matrix than just the number of people right now — it's also about density, how many, where. 

The paradox of our time is that in this political moment, you want to make work because it feels urgent. Which is of course necessary, in the face of what is going on. But at the same time there are so many philosophical problems in the humanities and sciences which are completely worth looking at. Is an entire generation of artists only going to look at Hindutva? Maybe it has to, but we also need deviations.

Having said that, I make theatre because I like every dimension of it. I love the craft of it, the art of it, the coming together of people to do it it, the teams that we build, having that audience live, reaching out, going to small towns, going to big cities. While closing Muktidham, we had a moment where Sandeep Shikhar's daughter Sanchi, who I have seen being being born, was sharing a room with Ram Kissar, who does our make-up, who has worked with BV Karanth since he was 20. This is possible in the theatre, because of the nature of its form. It's not like everybody has to be trained in one dance form. It is rough, rugged, it is mixed, it reflects the streets of your town. The street has an old man and a young woman, so the green room must have that. And that is for me the reaching out of the theatre.

But are you often accosted by the question of whether you want to direct a film? Or turn your plays into films?

Suman Mukhopadhay, I call him Lal Da, has won a major award to make a film out of Djinns of Eidgah. I am not a big fan of cinema, though I will direct a film at some point. What I am interested in is directing concerts. I grew up travelling a lot with Indian Ocean, and that gave me the idea that there is a dramaturgy to concerts. A couple of bands have asked me. Susmit [Sen] also asked, but I've looked up to him for so many years, I can't direct him! He will have no problem, but I will have a problem. But now I'm thinking of a concert of sound designers, as opposed to musicians.

A still from Majumdar's Djinns of Eidgah

Would you write the music for such a concert yourself?

Some of it. Right now I compose mostly for plays. I took music for granted, because I grew up with Hindustani music classes in my house, and my mother playing the piano every evening and singing Rabindrasangeet. I can use Bengali notation, Swaralipi, which is often used on the piano.

How do you see the state of theatre in India? Are there exciting things happening?

I think art and science need a lot more government support. These things are important for human beings to exist, and they can't be market driven. This emphasis on the commercial, treating ticket sales as the parameter of existence, as if without it you're not speaking to the people: that's a cop-out for not thinking deeply about what the human race needs.

Individually a lot of exciting stuff is happening, from solo performances to technological things. What in Europe is called 'site-specific theatre' has been happening in India in Prahallada Naatak for a thousand years. Going to the proscenium is a new thing for us. But now, the urban Indian is coming back from the West with the idea that only what's being made there is work.

As a person who teaches in a university, I straddle some of these worlds. For the last five years, I teach playwriting at the NYU campus in Abu Dhabi for a semester every year. I have never had two students in the same class from the same country.

How many students in a class?

Eight to eleven, from India, but also Jordan, Palestine, Latin America, the African countries. And the challenge is that they all need to find specific solutions to their postcolonial situations. We are much closer in the arts and sciences to Bangladesh or Algeria than to New York or London. But we have started thinking of the world as a ladder. That's not helpful at all. Yes, there are great things to learn from a cultural exchange of that sort. But just as the first world person is always operating out of a particular context, it is also important for us to operate out of our context.

I was telling a student the other day that if you want to know where you are making art, you have to ask yourself two questions. One, if about 10 to 12 percent of a country's GDP is spent on arts, then public support for the arts in say, Germany, is about 300 percent that of India. Second, you need to be conscious of historical imperative. It is lowest on Broadway, in New York, which is farthest from colonisation. You can make anything, it basically has to sell tickets. And it is highest in the Gaza strip, because right now, as you're making that play, you are colonised.

A still from Gasha, written by Irawati Karnik and directed by Abhishek Majumdar

Why is your idea of historical imperative limited to the experience of colonisation?

Yes, I'm being simplistic, in order to find an axis that works globally. There are other axes not directly related to colonisation. Within India, how many plays do we see with lower caste women as characters? Nothing, compared to the many with upper caste men.

You mentioned that developing a Dalit dramaturgy is one of the things you're excited about.

Yes. After we moved on from Indian Ensemble, Sandeep Shikhar and I started a new theatre company along with  Vivek Madan. It's called the Bhasha Centre, and our main focus are at the moment is to work with Dalit texts and Dalit writers, from Daya Pawar and Limhale on Dalit aesthetics to published Dalit autobiographies and the work of lok shahirs. It might not be a literature that already exists. We're collaborating on a version of Kisaan that will open at Prithvi Theatre in March 2020. Iravati Karnik is writing it, drawing on Prithiviraj Kapoor's original play Kisaan together with Daya Pawar's Baluta.

Any other ongoing projects you'd like to flag?

There's Tathagat, a street play we did in collaboration with Jan Natya Manch, which played in Mumbai from 9 to 14 August. There's a version of Eidgah ke Jinnat with Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur, with many Rajasthani actors. Djinns of Eidgah is also being staged at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this month, by Ananya Mishra and the Bread Theatre Company, formed by a lot of non-white Cambridge University students.

As someone who works in London and New York as well as in Bengaluru and Bangladesh, it is important to me to know how much time I work where. I am not making work in England in order to give up my work in India; that's not going to happen. But last year we were touring in Uttar Pradesh and sleeping in trains, and just after that I spent a month in New York. And that is absolutely fine in the theatre. But as time gets limited, it becomes important to choose, to measure.

I like that we have come back to the mathematics. Thank you, Abhishek.

Published in Firstpost in two parts, 19 and 20 August 2019.

First as tragedy, then as farce

A very short profile of the playwright-director Abhishek Majumdar, for India Today magazine.

THEY TAKE AS THEIR THEMES OUR MOST DIVISIVE ISSUES, BUT ABHISHEK MAJUMDAR’S PLAYS CAN STILL MAKE YOU LAUGH

"Oonchi jaat ka rajnitik sammelan hai. Log bhadakne ke liye hi aaye hain (It’s an upper caste political meeting. People have come only to take offense),” says one of a trio of actors playing Nats, traditional street performers who make up the ostensibly “comic relief” track of Muktidham. It is a packed closing night for Abhishek Majumdar’s brilliant 2017 play, and Bengaluru’s Ranga Shankara Theatre breaks into laughter. The next evening, during a show of Kaumudi, another Hindi play written and directed by Majumdar, the crowd laughs even more uproariously. Yet those who follow Majumdar’s work are unlikely to call it funny. Working in English, Hindi, Bengali and sometimes Kannada, the 38-year-old playwright-director has subjected some of the most divisive issues of our time—immigration, Hindutva, caste, Kashmir, Tibet—to rigorous research and intense ethical questioning.

Harlesden High Street (2010) dealt with working class Pakistanis in London. Muktidham, set in a fictional 8th century temple town, uses the historical tussle between rising Buddhism and a threatened Brahminical Hinduism to interrogate the narratives of both religions, especially the present-day Hindu right’s claims to non-violence and castelessness. Kaumudi, set in early 20th century Allahabad theatre, wrestles with epic figures like Abhimanyu and Eklavya in the context of a conflicted father-son relationship. Three of his plays are set in Kashmir. Rizwan, based on Agha Shahid Ali’s poems and Eidgah ke Jinnat, about state and non-state actors caught in the cycle of violence, are both written by him; while Gasha, in which a Kashmiri Pandit man returns to the state years after leaving it as a child, is by Irawati Karnik. Violence and non-violence are also central to his most recent production, Pah-La, whose depiction of the Chinese use of force on Tibetans caused London’s Royal Court Theatre to delay it for over six months.

Actors Ipshita Chakraborty Singh and Sandeep Shikhar
in a scene from Majumdar's play Muktidham 

Seated in the green room with a tumbler of Ranga Shankara’s strong Rs 20 coffee, a deadpan Majumdar demonstrates he can treat humour as seriously as he does other things (or is it the other way around?). “I’m often asked ‘Is this play a tragedy or a comedy?’ I say, when you think about your life, is it funny or is it sad? It simply isn’t one way or the other. Also, tragedy and comedy are western categories. What is the Mahabharata, or Betaal Pachisi, or the Arabian Nights?” That said, he is excited about advancing his grasp of humour, starting with Dialectical Materialism Aur Anya Vilupt Jaanwar, a new play about Communist history by him.

“I’ve written comedy into plays that aren’t of a comic form, but this is my first satire. I’m older and maybe tragedy is a form for the young,” says Majumdar, who did a Masters at the London International School of Performing Arts and, since 2013, spends a semester a year teaching playwriting and philosophy at the New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus. In India, most of Majumdar’s plays have been staged by the Bengaluru’s Indian Ensemble, founded by him in 2009 with actor-playwright Sandeep Shikhar. In 2018, in an attempt at de-personalised institution-building, they handed it over to Chanakya Vyas as artistic director. “Everyone who wants to run a theatre company shouldn’t have to start it,” he says.

Majumdar has since started a new one. The Bhasha Centre for the Performing Arts, started with Shikhar and actor Vivek Madan in 2018, focuses on South Asian languages, particularly Dalit dramaturgy. “We maintain many principles from Indian Ensemble: all members paid equally; free tickets for those who can’t afford them,” says Majumdar, who believes theatre deserves more government support. “The Ramayana, which people are now fighting over, wasn’t created as a market-driven exercise. Neither was Bhasa or Kalidasa. They are important for humans to exist and they can’t be market-driven... On that Friday, a play may not have the largest audience, but if you ask in about 80 years, it might.”

Published in India Today, 5 July 2019.

Prisons of the Mind

My Mirror column:

At 25, Ismail Merchant's In Custody (Muhafiz) remains a striking vision of poetry amidst pettiness, as well as a memorable tale about Urdu and Hindi.  

In 1984, Anita Desai was nominated for the Booker Prize for a novel called In Custody. It was a marvellous book about a shaggy old poet called Nur, whose last days we observe through the eyes of a college lecturer called Deven. Desai wrote her story in crystalline English, but the world she captured was that of the death throes of Urdu – as witnessed by a teacher of Hindi.

A decade later, the novel was made into a film by Ismail Merchant, starring Om Puri as the nervous, embattled Deven, and Shashi Kapoor – who had been a Merchant Ivory favourite from The Householder (1963) through Shakespearewallah, Bombay Talkie and Heat and Dust (1983) – as the teetering but still somehow charismatic Nur.

Interestingly, Desai agreed to adapt her book for the screen, collaborating with Shahrukh Husain, to whom we owe the fluid Urdu/Hindustani/Hindi in which Desai's imagined universe is translated back to life. Desai, the daughter of a German mother and a Bengali father who had been to school and college in Delhi, had set her novel between the hubbub of Old Delhi and the dusty provincialism of the fictional Mirpore, a trading town not far from Delhi. The film kept the poet's locational moniker “Nur Shahjehanabadi”, but transposed him (and the hole-in-the-wall magazine office run by Deven's friend Murad, which is angling for an interview with him) from the gullies of Shahjahanbad to Bhopal.

It was probably a practical decision, and certainly a more visually pleasing one. The circuitous route to Nur's house no longer went past “the reeking heart of the bazaar”, “evil-smelling shops” or the “lane lined with nothing but gutters”, but into a picturesque part of Bhopal. And the cinematic version of the haveli has a certain charm, despite the dysfunctional lives lived in it. The downstairs is presided over by the poet’s first wife, the perfect Sushma Seth, who spends her days supervising the fine chopping of onions and the utaaroing of nazar, while the upstairs is the preserve of the younger second wife, the complex, high-strung aspiring poetess Imtiaz Begum (Shabana Azmi).

Deven arrives with a very different vision of the life poetic than the one he finds being led by Nur. The film distils Desai's sharp-edged observations into something quite brilliant. An admirer of Nur's verse, Deven initially sees the great poet as trapped: when he seeks to escape the petty domestic squabbles of his household, his escape is limited to a circle of lowbrow sycophants. The delicacy of Nur's poetic imagination, it seems to Deven, cannot be nurtured by the coarseness that surrounds him. There is clearly an echo of recognition here – Deven, too, has aspirations to poetry, which he still writes – in Urdu. He feels defeated by having been tied to the mundane: the teaching job – in Hindi – that pays his bills but forces him to suffer the sly, mocking glances of students for whom romance tends more to dark glasses and motorbikes than literature; the harried, put-upon wife who does not understand poetry or the desire for it; the little son whose abilities seem too ordinary and unliterary to attract Deven's attention.

But Desai is not so one-sided as to allow even her favoured protagonists to get away with such easy self-delusion. The film incorporates these layers beautifully into the performances. We watch Deven's petulant, unnecessarily bossy behaviour with his wife Sarla (a superb Neena Gupta, who responds with the perfect balance between silent reproach and jaded complaints). We observe Nur’s own flaws: his indiscipline, his indulgence of the senses, his addiction to the excesses of alcohol and rich Mughlai cooking and late hours kept in the company of flatterers whose crude verse is so obviously no match for the quality of his. If coarseness there is, it is as much of Nur's making. And if the women are insecure, jealous, petty even when they have some ambition, In Custody is astute enough to show us that they cannot really be blamed: the limits of their imaginations are the limits of what their civilisation has allowed them.

The book went into much greater detail about the politics of Hindi and Urdu, with the poet often mocking Deven's employment in a Hindi department: “Forgotten your Urdu? Forgotten my verse? Perhaps it is better if you go back to your college and teach your students the stories of Prem Chand, the poems of Pant and Nirala. Safe, simple Hindi language, safe comfortable ideas of cow worship and caste and the romance of Krishna,” he derides Deven, in a line that seems bizarrely blind now. There are complaints about the Congress having placed Hindi and the Hindiwallahs atop the literary establishment, while Urdu is imprisoned in “those cemeteries they call universities”. Thirty-five, even 25 years ago, the fictional Nur and his bazaar hangers-on – largely Muslim, young, unsophisticated of taste and insecure of income – could still mock a Hindu lecturer of Hindi who had come to pay his respects to Urdu. If Nur stood for the decrepitude and self-delusion of Urdu, Hindi was represented by the innocuous wannabe poet Deven. That equation has changed, perhaps forever.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Apr 2019.