What the burqa and the bindi (and the hijab) stand for in our books, and in our current lives

An essay published on the website Scroll.in:

There’s a scene in Prayaag Akbar’s 2017 novel Leila that never made it to the Netflix adaptation. In a not-too-distant dystopian future of water shortage, Riz and Shalini throw a grand poolside party for Leila’s third birthday. The children get their fill of inflatable slides, the parents of champagne. It’s a posh, Westernised crowd, where the women are comfortable leaving a shirt slightly unbuttoned, or showing some leg through the slit in a long dress. So Shalini’s sister-in-law Gazala stands out by being “sheathed in a flowing single-pleat abaya... with a dusty-pink silk hijab that brings out her alabaster complexion.”

“Cheeks glowing with rouge,” Akbar’s description continues. “This is probably as much sun as she ever gets.” The bitchiness is explainable as Shalini’s, not the author’s. But given Akbar’s otherwise nuanced characterisations, Gazala seems an easy stand-in for tradition-bound Muslim femininity. She is somehow both decorative and covered up, and never gets to speak. Her burqa does the talking.

Earlier, Shalini’s reluctance to live in the Muslim sector with her husband’s family is also routed through the veil. “Look, no disrespect to Gazala...,” she tells her brother-in-law Naz. “But I don’t want my daughter in a burqa.” In response, Naz shames Shalini – for offering him a beer, for not knowing that her maid has taken her child out. And Gazala, his hijab-wearing wife, gets held up as the contrast to the liberated, cosmopolitan Shalini: “She might not know as much about the world as you. But she knows our culture.”

Typecasting the burqa

 

The fact that Gazala’s burqa stands in for her is disappointing, but not surprising. No matter where one looks, it seems that the burqa comes to us always already loaded with meaning – and rarely a positive one. In Indian popular culture, it has long been trotted out either as a comic disguise worn by the Hindi film hero, from Shammi Kapoor to Rishi Kapoor to Aamir Khan in Delhi Belly, or as a symbol of women’s oppression. Sometimes, as in the dubious Islamicate subplot of the recent Ayushmann Khurrana starrer Dream Girl, it is both.

Feminists don’t necessarily do better: even a thoughtful film like Alankrita Srivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha can only see the burqa as the agent of the teenaged Rehana’s oppression. Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy is a welcome exception, giving us in Alia Bhatt’s lovely Safeena a headscarf-wearing Muslim girl who is neither a prude nor a pushover. Bhatt is also burqa-clad in Meghna Gulzar’s superb Raazi, where her fetching coloured hijab does fascinating triple duty as good Muslim, good daughter-in-law – and spy.

In Alice Albinia’s 2011 novel Leela’s Book, too, the burqa has the quality of subterfuge. First, an upper class Hindu woman purchases it secretly, hiding it from her liberal Muslim husband. Then her young Muslim maid Aisha takes it from its hiding place, wearing it to walk through her own neighbourhood unrecognised. It is an “Arab-style burqa”, heavy and black “with some gauzy thin material over the eyes”, writes Albinia, such as “some women in the basti [Nizamuddin] now wore”.
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It allows Aisha to rescue the man she loves from unjust police custody, but Albinia the author cannot resist describing her character’s experience of wearing it as a limiting one. The burqa is too big for Aisha; the tree canopy seems denser and darker through it; her lover does not recognise her in it: “he peered at her, disturbed by the distance this... fabric put between them: it was as if they were seeing each other through a crowd of people”. The liberal non-burqa-wearer, it seems, can only attribute to the burqa-wearer a sense of alienation from herself and the world.

A sign of unfreedom

 

One way to normalise the burqa’s existence is not to dwell on it. In Altaf Tyrewala’s whipsmart novel No God In Sight (2005), we meet multiple Muslim female characters without being told if they veil. And when someone does, that doesn’t become the important thing about them. Jeyna-Bi’s burqa attracts attention because it is fluorescent orange, not simply because she’s got one. In the accepting cultural mix of Tyrewala’s Mumbai, a burqa can be a topic of banter, it can get sadly soiled when poor Jeyna-Bi throws up her portion of a wedding feast. It can be, in effect, just another piece of clothing.

But the space for such a perspective is steadily narrowing. Since mid-December 2019, as unprecedented numbers of Indian Muslim women have emerged into public space to protest against the discriminatory religious basis of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the burqa has become even more heavily charged with meaning. Not all the women protesting in Shaheen Bagh (or the many female-led sit-ins it inspired nationwide) wore a veil or headscarf. But the fact that so many did seems to have caused great bafflement and unease.

Because the burqa has become, for anyone who does not wear one, a sign of unfreedom. And if you aren’t free, how can you possibly be out on the streets, resisting an oppressive state? How can you be the living embodiment of oppressed Muslim womanhood that the Hindu right claims to be saving from Muslim men, and simultaneously be leading a political protest?

And so, according to the Sangh’s Whatsapp factory, the lakhs of women who sat out in the wind and weather for three months, while braving police lathis, abusive goons and horrific communal violence, were not doing it to claim their threatened rights as Indian citizens, but for Rs 500 a day and free biryani. What is chilling is that so many other Indians want to believe that canard.

We saw another glimpse of that suspicion and ill-will on March 23, when the mainstream media reported the police destruction of the gloriously democratic art-filled protest sites at Shaheen Bagh and elsewhere as some sort of desperate public health measure – as though the women had not already vacated the sites.

Wearing an identity

This tarring of burqa-clad women as not being legitimate citizens with legitimate concerns dovetailed perfectly with the Prime Minister’s statement in December that those protesting against the CAA-NRC “can be recognised by their clothes”. That shamelessly partisan taunting of a community fighting its own legal marginalisation has sparked a new kind of battle, with people turning their marked bodies into sites of symbolic display.

Refusing to be shamed for wearing burqas, caps or other identifiable markers of their community, many Muslim protesters have instead responded by embracing them. But histories of religious populism elsewhere suggest that such a move can be a double bind. In Meena Kandasamy’s recent novel Exquisite Cadavers, a Tunisian film-school student in London finds his white British teachers pushing him to tell his country’s history through the hijab.

A French-influenced secular diktat banned headscarves in Tunisia in 1981 – so when the dictatorship was unseated, wearing the hijab became a form of community identity. The Islamic right exploited people’s desire to reclaim their religion, and a country where a hijab-wearing “Arabian Barbie” had once caused a liberal outcry, Kandasamy writes, became one that provided the largest number of foreign fighters to the dreaded Daesh.

Closer home, as the recent violence in North East Delhi makes clear, such defiant wearing of religious identity on the body reaches its tragic, terrifying limits when social fissures widen into the abyss of communal violence. Symbols have power: they can mark us or unmark us, divide or unite. In Leela’s Book, the same Hindu woman once buys a packet of gold-embossed bindis for the maid Aisha, only to have her Muslim husband tell her, “They don’t wear bindis”.

Fear and loathing

Among the fascinating ways in which women have chosen to express cross-community solidarities these last few months is the interlacing of burqas and bindis. The young poet Nabiya Khan’s words rang out across many anti-CAA-NRC posters: “Aayega Inqilab, Pehen Ke Burqa Bindi Aur Hijab”.

Optimists of various stripes are bringing bindis and burqas together. But those whose minds are filled with poison can only see conquest, not mingling. To such commentators, like the virulently anti-Muslim “Katyayani” on hindupost.in, a poster saying “Women Will Destroy Hindu Rashtra” with a fierce female face wearing both a bindi and a headscarf, with sunglasses on her head and her tongue out, looks like a “demonised” Kali “surrendering” to the Islamic veil.

Another anti-CAA-NRC poster, of three women wearing both bindis and burqas, underscored by Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s now-viral poetic challenge to all dictatorships “Hum Dekhenge” (“We shall see”), seems to the same writer a call to “to ‘free’ bindi-sporting Hindu women by converting them into burqa-clad ones”.

Communal polarisation now involves a repeated insistence that the way people look is who they are – and yet when what is on display doesn’t fit the entrenched majoritarian narrative, then suddenly it is dismissed. “Bharatiya women of non-sanatani faith are also sometimes seen sporting the bindi, but that is just how a demography raised in mixed-culture behaves,” declares Katyayani when faced with the sociological fact of non-Hindu bindi-wearers.

No God In Sight contains a biting scene in which a young (upper middle class Hindu) wife must report her missing (Muslim) husband to the police. She wears her most saffron-like nylon sari, and borrows a mangalsutra and a bindi from her maid Gangu-bai, hoping that the Mumbai police will treat her complaint more seriously if she looks like a practising Hindu. They tell her to go to Pakistan.

Published in Scroll, 28 Mar 2020

A Student of Resistance

My Mumbai Mirror column:

As India's students speak out, it seems worth recalling a film about a student who defied another regime

Sophie Scholl was 21 when she was executed by the Nazi stateCharged with having distributed leaflets co-authored by a non-violent political resistance group called the White Rose, she was guillotined after a trial on 22 February 1943. The 2005 German film Sophie Scholl: The Last Days, directed by Marc Rothermund from a script by Fred Breinersdorfer, dramatises her interrogation, trial and execution. Though perhaps “dramatises” is not the best word for a film so deliberately spare, choosing to rely almost entirely on the historical transcripts left behind by the Gestapo (the Nazi Secret Police) and the “People's Court” -- and thus unfolding, to a great extent, within the confines of an investigator's office and a courtroom.

Calling themselves the White Rose, the student group to which Sophie belonged brought out six different leaflets between June 1942 and February 1943. Distributed mainly in Munich, with copies also appearing in Stuttgart, Cologne, Vienna, Freiburg, Chemnitz, Hamburg and Berlin, the pamphlets warned Germans that Hitler was leading them into the abyss, and called for people to speak out against Nazi terror. “Support the Resistance Movement!” they urged, for “Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and protection of the individual citizen from the arbitrary action of criminal dictator-states”.

Those words from eight decades ago leap off the page in a month in which India has seen massive protests against a new Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAA), which together with the proposed nationwide National Register of Citizens (NRC), introduces religion as a criterion for Indian citizenship for the first time in the history of our republic. Watching Sophie Scholl, it seems no coincidence that the resistance to the CAA and NRC, which has gone far beyond criticism of the letter of the law to a sorely-needed defence of the secular spirit of our Constitution and of our democracy itself, has been spearheaded by students.

The power of Sophie Scholl: The Last Days is in the details – especially as you watch it in 2019 India, where everything from the aesthetic remodelling of middle class fashion to the lines of 'argument' used by Fascist officials in the film are chillingly recognizable from our real-life political situation today. The junior officer of the Third Reich who hustles the film's 21-year-old student heroine into the custody of Investigator Mohr, for instance, has a moustache clearly modelled on Hitler's. Later, as Sophie (Julia Jentsch) is led into her cold prison cell, we hear in the background one of the Fuhrer's numerous speeches to the nation on the radio, his rasping voice rising to the familiar nationalist frenzy as he identifies an internal enemy. “Total war is the demand of the hour,” he proclaims, to loud clapping from his audience. “We must also put an end to the bourgeois attitude which we have also seen in this war. The danger facing us is enormous. The time has come to remove our gloves and use our fists...”.

Many of the arguments levelled by the Nazis against anyone who criticised their government are voiced in the film by Mohr and later, the infamous judge Roland Freisler. Over and over, we hear them berate these students as “parasites” and “spoiled brat[s] who foul [their] own nest[s], while others are dying on the front.” They are painted as ungrateful wretches who do not appreciate that they are only able to be students “thanks to the Fuhrer.” Time and again, too, Sophie's refusal to buckle under pressure drives Mohr off the deep end. “How dare you raise your voice!” he shouts at her, the irony of the statement clearly invisible to him. “The Fuhrer and the German people are protecting you.”

Reading a pamphlet in which Sophie's brother Hans argued that the war needed to be brought to an end and expressed his hatred for “the way we treat the Occupied Territories”, Mohr yells: “This is troop demoralisation and high treason!” The insistence on celebration of the army, and the idea that being critical of militarisation is antinational will sound familiar to anyone who has lived through the last five years of BJP rule.

Some of the film's best moments come when Rothermund focuses on the bafflement of the fascist in the face of openness: familial, but also individual. It is a fascinating fact that Scholl had been, for a time, a member of a Nazi youth group, before she and her brother and his friends began to question what the regime wanted them to believe, based on things they had witnessed on the Eastern Front as well as information they had begun to access – about institutionalised violence against Jews and disabled people, among others. Asked why her father – a known critic of the regime who had served a sentence for describing Hitler as “God's scourge to mankind” – had even let Sophie join the Nazi Girls Organisation, she replies, “Our father never influenced us politically.” “Typical for a democrat,” sneers Mohr, lighting another cigarette. “Why did you join?” Sophie's reply should resonate with all Indians who live with the promise of Acche Din: “I heard that Hitler would lead our country to greatness and prosperity and ensure that everyone had work and food and was free and happy.”

I will leave you with what to me is the film's most important exchange. Mohr insists that what he is doing is only to execute the law of the land. “What can we rely on if not the law?” he says. Sophie's answer seems simple, but it is one all of us need to hear: “On your conscience!”

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Dec 2019

In the name of Gau Mata

My Mirror column:

A stark new film by Amit Madheshiya and Shirley Abraham documents the normalisation of Hindu vigilantism.

Gyandev Ahuja, ex-BJP MLA (best known for his remarks about condoms in JNU), appears in the documentary at the head of a troupe of gau rakshaks. 

“When the public lynches in daylight, they make videos of it,” says the man. “It happened at night. Had it happened in daylight, there would have been a video of him.”

The man speaking is a family member of Rakbar Khan, a 28-year-old cattle farmer from Nuh, in the Mewat region of Rajasthan, who was murdered while bringing home two cows one night in July 2018. He is speaking of the circumstances of Rakbar's death, as part of a new documentary called The Hour of Lynching, directed by independent filmmakers Amit Madheshiya and Shirley Abraham, which was released for public view on The Guardian website yesterday.

We live in surreal times, and the more surreal things get around us, the less we seem able to see them for what they are. An increasingly thick ideological smokescreen seems to stand between us and the violence of post-2014 India: violence against solitary or small groups of Dalits and Muslims, invariably committed by larger groups of upper caste Hindu men.

But perhaps if you pause and simply listen again to that line I quoted, you might hear the madness echo, even through the blur of allegations and counter-allegations that is our new soundscape. Here is what I heard in it: that in the India in which we now live, so many incidents of “mob lynching” have taken place that there is now an accepted public understanding of the practice, and that public understanding includes, first and foremost, the fact that lynchings are public events, mostly conducted in broad daylight. They are recorded, sometimes by bystanders but quite often by the lynchers themselves. (The most well-known instance of such self-recording was in Una, Gujarat, in 2016, when four members of a Dalit family were stripped, paraded and thrashed by upper caste men who had come upon them skinning a dead cow.)

Rakbar Khan is one of the 47 people killed in cow-related hate crimes since 2014. The government does not keep records of cow-related violence, but the website https://lynch.factchecker.in/ documents 127 incidents of violence centred around the transportation of cattle and/or meat that is rumoured to be beef. Almost all of them have been against Muslims and Dalits, with the frequency of attacks rising steeply since 2014, across both BJP- and non-BJP-ruled states.

A still from Amit Madheshiya & Shirley Abraham's The Hour Of Lynching (2019) 

The cow has been seen as sacred in India for centuries, but it was only under conditions of colonial modernity, in the late 19^th century, that it became a symbolic rallying point for the organisation of Hindu identity. Swami Dayanand Saraswati, founder of the Arya Samaj, set up the first sanctuary for cattle in 1879, and also began the first gaurakshini sabha in 1881 in Agra. 

The banner of cow protection slowly grew into a countrywide campaign against cow slaughter. Akshaya Mukul’s exemplary work on the Gita Press documents the history of the movement, which was preoccupied enough with the cow to be organising an anti-cow slaughter day on August 10, 1947 – five days before independence. Over the next three decades, the banner of cow protection united various non-political Hindu organisations, including the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, with orthodox elements within the Congress. Such Congress figures as Seth Govind Das, Purushottam Das Tandon and Thakur Das Bhargava opposed Nehru's position on the matter, even defying the Congress party whip on occasion.

In September 1966, various cow protection groups came together to form the Sarvadaliya Goraksha Maha Abhiyan Samiti (SGMS), whose supreme council had members from the Hindu Mahasabha, the RSS, the Arya Samaj and various religious groups alongside the Congress and the Jana Sangh, the predecessor of the BJP. In November 1966, a massive gathering assembled in Delhi before a stage that included MS Golwalkar, Gita Press's Hanuman Poddar and the Jana Sangh's Atal Bihari Vajpayee, turned violent. At the end of a police lathi-charge, as Akshaya Mukul writes, “The movement for non-violence against the cow had led to widespread violence in the heart of New Delhi with eight dead and several more injured.”

I offer this distilled and necessarily incomplete history of cow protection to draw attention to something that will certainly strike you if you watch The Hour of Lynching: the bitter irony of violence committed in the name of non-violence. 

“Look closely at Mother Cow,” says Gyan Dev Ahuja, a BJP ex-MLA (who had hit national headlines for saying “thousands of condoms were found on the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus in New Delhi daily”.) “You will see that she is deserving of compassion [“daya ka paatra”]”. He goes on to speak of “cow smugglers” as people of “rakhshas vritti”, and painting the battle between this imaginary enemy and his army of gau rakshaks as that between Ravan and Ram.

A little later in the film, we watch as another BJP politician is cheered resoundingly for exhorting the crowd to heed the call of Gau Mata, take out their swords and behead the heathens (“dussahasi vidharmiyon ka [sar] kalamkar do”). “You mere 200 million Muslims, we are 1 billion Hindus. If we lose our minds, we will sacrifice you 200 million – and the country will be cleansed.”

On May 23, the country gave Narendra Modi’s government another resounding electoral mandate. We can only hope that this #Tsunamo will not involve such cleansing.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 May 2019.

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.

New lamps for old

Watching BR Chopra’s Naya Daur in Narendra Modi’s New India can produce a strange resonance — even as we look at it across the gulf of sixty years.

Dilip Kumar as the labouring Shankar in Naya Daur (1955)

1957's third biggest Hindi hit might never have got made if BR Chopra had listened to Mehboob Khan. As actor Dilip Kumar tells the tale in his 2014 autobiography: "Mehboob Sahab read the story and found no meat in it for entertainment. He told Chopra Sahab it could be made into a fine documentary on the doomsday awaiting the labour force in the country once machines replaced them but, as a feature film, it was not a great idea."

The younger man listened carefully — he had, after all, gone to solicit the senior filmmaker's opinion —but made up his mind to go ahead with the film if Dilip Kumar agreed to come on board. Yash Chopra, BR's younger brother and then working as his assistant, remembered how that almost didn't happen, because Dilip Kumar was committed to working on a film by Gyan Mukherjee. But when that film fell through, Dilip Kumar said yes promptly — and then spent a month doing story sittings in his shack in Juhu with producer-director BR Chopra and the film's writer Akhtar Mirza.

Most people remember Naya Daur for staging the confrontation between man and machine in a climactic race between a bus and a horse-drawn tonga. But how was such a battle to be made believable? Dilip Kumar writes that he was himself unconvinced by the original idea that the bus was to be beaten "by some kind of manipulation". As Yash Chopra remembered it, it was the thespian who first gave writer Akhtar Mirza the idea of the horse-cart taking a short-cut to get to its destination — "something that was logical and convincing".

There is something charming about how the universe of popular Hindi cinema perceives and produces its own internal logic — and when it abandons it. In Naya Daur, for instance, the village, while standing in for the country, has no farmers. The on-screen populace is divided between tonga-drivers and karkhana-walas, men who work as woodcutters and carpenters in the wood-production unit owned by the kindly local landlord (Nazir Hussain).

Hussain's departure on a pilgrimage to Banaras leaves the village open to the heartless machinations of his city-returned son Kundan (Jeevan), who brings in first a wood-cutting machine that robs the sawmill workers of their jobs, and then a bus that takes away the business of the tonga-drivers. In the era of demonetisation and Digital India, sixty years after Naya Daur first released, there is something distinctly sinister about watching the thin-lipped Jeevan pronounce his decisions the sole route to progress and development, even as the technology he brings in rides roughshod over the lives of the labouring poor.

Dilip Kumar's delightful portrayal of the film's protagonist Shankar, too, shares this on again-off again approach to logic. Shankar is somehow both shy and flirtatious, hot-blooded and calm. He seems wonderfully logical in his arguments with the crooked Kundan, or his sister's father-in-law-to-be, but becomes totally beholden to fate when it comes to resolving the love triangle in which he, his friend Krishna (the future popular villain Ajit in an important early role) and his sweetheart Rajni (Vyjayanthimala) find themselves.

Since it is obviously not an option to simply ask the girl which of the men she would prefer to marry, the two friends arrange instead to gamble on fate — if Rajni places white flowers in the Shiva temple the next morning, she is Shankar's, and if the flowers in her pooja thali are yellow marigolds, she is Krishna's. Naya Daur may come off as a sort of socialist musical (its iconic song is the infectiously choreographed 'Saathi Haath Badhana', with lines of villagers digging the earth in unison). But it is embedded in a deeply religious milieu —the temple atop a hill, with its massive statue of Shiva, is the locale for both intense romantic moments and the sort of monologue between the hero and God that later became a fixture of Hindi cinema.

And yet, this faith — the powerful sense of a superior being who can be appealed to for the things that really matter — does not blind the film or its hero to how religion can be used for cynical purposes. The most remarkable instance of this in the film is when Kundan and his devious accomplice, the greedy village Brahmin, secretly conceal a statue of a goddess along the road that Shankar and the villagers are constructing for the race. When the trusting villagers stop digging to fold their hands in prayer, we hear the villains intone, "Yahan mandir avashya banega", it is hard not to feel a chill go down one's spine. Naya Daur had heroes capable of circumventing the cynical appropriation of religion and of technology. The ordinary people of New India might not be so lucky.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Sep 2017.

Picture This: Signs of the Times

My BL Ink column: on watching Naseeb in demonetized India.

I watched Manmohan Desai’s 1981 hit Naseeb, and it spoke strangely to the world we live in.

Kader Khan and Amjad Khan as paired villains in Naseeb (here being quizzed by uber-villain Amrish Puri, who is not visible in the image)

This week, for no reason, I had a sudden craving to watch Naseeb. It is a film I’d definitely seen in childhood. But all I remembered were the songs: Hema Malini crooning ‘Mere Naseeb Mein Tu Hai Ki Nahi’ to an already besotted Amitabh Bachchan; Reena Roy twirling with impeccable tragic swag to ‘Zindagi Imtehaan Leti Hai’; Rishi Kapoor’s hilarious ‘Chal Mere Bhai’ night-walk trying to get Bachchan off his drunken high horse — as well as an actual equestrian statue; and the requisite pre-climactic dress-up song: the wonderful ‘Dhoom Machaake Jayenge’, in which Bachchan and Hema finessed the flamenco into the perfect villain’s den dance, while Rishi did a rather sweet Chaplin impersonation.

Sometimes one doesn’t know why a particular old film beckons. I certainly didn’t have a reason to watch Naseeb. But as I sat embarrassingly glued to YouTube in the middle of the day, a few things about why my subconscious so wanted the comfort of Naseeb began to click into place.

First things first. Naseeb is a Manmohan Desai film, made four years after Amar Akbar Anthony, and clearly intended to replicate the specificity of that magic. Like almost all Desai films in that era, it is a multi-starrer with a labyrinthine plot whose many tentacles allow for the incorporation of as many heroes, heroines and comedy sequences as ridiculously villainous villains.

One of the assured pleasures of watching mainstream Hindi cinema in the ’80s was, of course, predicting who would play what — or better yet, predicting the arc of the character’s on-screen life based on our recognition of the actor. So when, in the film’s opening moments, we saw Kader Khan (an established villain, apart from being the film’s dialogue writer) and Amjad Khan (whose very entry into Hindi cinema was as the immortally evil Gabbar Singh of Sholay) as supposedly ordinary men, pretending to be close friends of Namdev (Pran) and Jaggi (Jagdish Raj), our guard went up right away. No good, even the smallest child in the cinema knew, could come of having Amjad as a friend. And as expected, none does.

Within the film’s first 15 minutes, a lottery ticket has been won, one good man murdered for it and a second falsely implicated in his death — while the certified villains we identified at a glance have taken the money and transformed themselves from lowlife criminals into hi-fi seths, whose shiny suits and Black Dog-stocked bars carry no traces of their original sin.

Perhaps it was these villains I really wanted to see again. As we crawl through the daily indignities of the Modi era — in which at a FICCI event in central Delhi, a Niti Aayog bureaucrat was heard telling an audience of suits to encourage digital payments among their “servants” — perhaps I simply wanted to be allowed again the comfort of a world in which everyone already knew that big men in suits are guilty until proven innocent, slimy until proven straight. And the fact of having risen up from the street — Amjad’s Damu starts as a smalltime photographer, Kader’s Raghu as a tangewalla — did not make them honest men. In Naseeb, they give the falsely implicated Namdev’s little boy a waiter’s job in the hotel built from their ill-gotten gains, and keep trying to stop him from educating his younger brother. They do, in other words, exactly what the big men of our time are doing: patronising the poor, closing off their options, while all the while telling them it’s for their own good.

The other thing which the Desai film serves up with heart-imploding ease is the lost world of bhai-bhai secularism. Unlike Amar Akbar Anthony, where brothers separated at birth are raised in three different religious traditions, Naseeb gives us all-Hindu heroes and a single Christian heroine. But Desai is a master craftsman — he takes the smallest tokens and builds from them a highly emotive multi-religious climax. Three signet rings worn by Namdev — one each from Islam, Christianity and Hinduism — allow each religion’s God to punish at least one of the villains, as well as functioning as pulleys that eventually save our heroes’ lives.

The three different rings with religious insignia that Pran wears in Naseeb (and that save lives)

That combination of the religious-emotional register and a kind of faux-scientific jugaad marks the film in general. There is a fascination with distances and the use of technology to bridge both time and distance. A 20-year-old photograph is produced as proof of the real murderer. A telephone is used by a villain to stage a fake dying confession that implicates Namdev. A telescope is used by one of the heroines (the forgotten Kim Yashpal) to lipread what the villains are saying across the street. The camera is constantly swooping down from a height — sometimes from the perspective of a killer (Shakti Kapoor trying to shoot Amjad from a hilltop, through layers of glass) and sometimes a rescuer (Shatrughan Sinha’s view of a boat on the Thames, on which Hema Malini is being harassed).

Something about all of this reminded me of Mr Modi’s hologrammed appearances, and a recent much-touted speech he gave at a UP rally, via the phone. We are supposed to have grown up, as a country and as a cinema audience. But sandwiched between (real) counterfeit currency, (false) rumours of notes with chips implanted in them, and non-calibrated non-working ATMs, it’s clear we haven’t left the Manmohan Desai universe. Only the secular bhaichara, sadly, now needs our nostalgia.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, 16 Dec 2016.

Post Facto -- Vernacular Claims: Malgudi, Modi and the Vox Populi

My most recent Post Facto column, for the Sunday Guardian:

	A still from Malgudi Days algudi Days had only to re-appear on YouTube for me to immediately surrender my afternoon to its warm, nostalgic embrace. The first episode of the 1987 TV series inaugurates the war between school ruffian Mani and posh new boy Rajam. Our unheroic hero, Swami, admires them both. Rajam, son of the town's police chief, comes to school in a spotless khaki uniform complete with matching cap, exuding a hauteur that many, including Swami, can only gaze upon in wonder. Clearly Rajam is the prince of this grubby schoolboy world, and his royal mien invites strong reactions. But what Mani objects to is not Rajam's clothes, car, high marks or light eyes – it is his language. "Saala Rajam ka bachcha. Apne aap ko Angrez samajhta hai," he says, glaring into the distance as the object of his hatred disembarks from his chauffeur-driven vehicle. Our Shankar has more marks than Rajam, says Mani, but he doesn't speak English "hang-tang karke", with "firangi nakhre". But this is a British colonial universe, and it is also quite clear that much of the weight of Swami's father's letter to the headmaster lies in its impeccable English. From Class I to Class VIII, I studied at a girls' school in Calcutta. It wasn't even a convent, but it was unremarkable to have teachers walk in and interrupt classroom conversations with the plummily-delivered injunction, "Girls, girls. No speaking in the vernacular." And this was an old-school school, which took language learning seriously. Bengali and Hindi were compulsory and you weren't let off for being — or pretending to be — unable to speak them, as you might in some fashionable schools today. In some ways, the vernacular is possibly worse off now than in Swami's times. Structures of power embed themselves in language. Consider the word "vernacular" itself. The dictionary starts with a neutral "the standard native language of country or locality", but moves on to "the vulgar tongue of the masses." And "native or indigenous (opposed to literary or learned)". By the time you reach the etymological origin: "from Latin vernaculus, 'domestic, native' (from verna, 'home-born slave')", you can literally see English sitting fatly on the "vernaculars", squashing them with its weight.
	uch airtime and newsprint has been recently devoted to what Prime Minister Modi's speechifying in Hindi will mean for our status as a world power. I'm not sure the world is that interested. But within India, Modi's choice of Hindi makes his speeches accessible to a much wider cross-section than Gujarati on one hand and English on the other might have done. A shift in Hindi's status — away from "vernacular" — is welcome. But the danger is that a language that feels so threatened by English might want to use this moment to flex its muscles — against other vernaculars? There are those waiting in the wings to renew that age-old controversial rashtrabhasha argument. And certainly, the reports congratulating the Congress's Mallikarjun Kharge for delivering his verbal set downs to the Treasury benches "in chaste Hindi despite being from the Southern state of Karnataka", or the AIADMK's V. Maitreyan for giving his fellow Rajya Sabha members "a pleasant surprise" by speaking in Hindi, would seem to suggest a political recognition that the linguistic ground is shifting. Also language, it seems to me, has implications far beyond realpolitik. Certain ways of thinking and feeling are embedded deep within language. Would Kharge have used those Kaurava-Pandava analogies if he were speaking in English? I doubt it. Would Modi have said "temple of democracy" in English? Anointing Parliament "lokatantra ka mandir", calling it "pavitr" (pure, connoting sacredness): these linguistic choices connect seamlessly to touching his forehead to the ground as he entered Parliament — idioms most Indians watching would recognize as religious respect. But even more than the implicit religiosity, I was struck by the register in which the Prime Minister chose to address the question of women. "Nayi sarkaar desh ke gareebon ko samarpit hai, desh ke koti-koti yuvakon ke liye samarpit hai, aur maan-sammaan ke liye tarasti hamari maa-behenon ke liye samarpit hai," said Modi. Sure, he could have said this in English, too. But try it: "The new government is dedicated to the country's poor, to the country's crores of youth, and to our mothers and sisters, aching for respect." Youth and the poor belong to "the country". Women are "our mothers and sisters". By casting women not as citizens, but in familial roles, Modi's words also implicitly transform his "hum" — "we" — into an audience of men. Women, meanwhile, are pushed into a position of "tarasna" — tarasna in Hindi is used mostly in a romantic context to indicate yearning, a kind of aching desire, sometimes the earth's desire for rain. An appeal tailored to a male citizenry, delivered in an idiom it understands — an act of communicative genius, or a depressing reminder of that Wittgensteinian thought: the limits of our language are the limits of our world? Swami and Friends was written in English. And yet, when Shankar Nag — a Kannada actor and director, active in Marathi theatre — made the Doordarshan television series, he did so in Hindi. Later, it was also telecast in Telugu. On YouTube, there is a version in Tamil, in which a real-life Swami would have spoken. Lakhs of people in India who remember Swami fondly today would not know him if Nag hadn't broken the English barrier. And yet, Narayan made those acute observations on the linguistic politics of English in English. Clearly, we can be sensitive to political nuance in any language — and tone-deaf in any, too. It just depends on whom we want to speak to.