Speaking English, Doing Desi

Last Sunday's Mumbai Mirror column:

'Convent' English, Hinglish and the non-filmi journalist: the last in a three-part series on the Indian film magazine.

Devyani Chaubal, columnist for Star'n'Style magazine

There was something strange about Indian film journalism, at least as it was conducted by English language journos writing about Hindi cinema. For the last two weeks, as I've written about how this world came into being, I've been trying to put my finger on what that was. Now I think I have it: the more magazines became about film stars, the less their writers needed to know about the films. In fact, the snob value that the Indian elite of the time attached to not watching Hindi films became the cachet of the English-language film journalist.

Film journalists who wanted to be taken seriously had long maintained a social distance from the film world. Last week, while writing on the venerable BK Karanjia who edited Filmfare for 18 years and Screen for ten without attending filmi parties, I stumbled upon Karanjia's own charmingly matter-of-fact explanation. Talking about the big bash Dev Anand threw when BKK became Filmfare editor, he recalled: "There was too much drinking going on, dinner was served at 4.00 a.m. and I had to attend office five hours later. That put an end to my partying."

But Filmfare was "the stuffy dowager", "a widowed aunt", as Shobhaa De's 1997 memoir put it. In the '70s, its place at the top was threatened by a host of upstart mags, staffed almost entirely by twenty-somethings. These included Stardust (launched in October 1971 with De as editor), Cine Blitz (started in Dec 1974 by Russi Karanjia's Blitz group, with BKK's niece Rita Mehta as editor) and Super (ran 1976 to 1982). Just before them came Star'n'Style (1965), and later Movie (1982) and Showtime(1984).

All these new magazines lived off filmland gossip -- and not the coy variety of it in which heroines "confessed" to sleeping with their teddy bears. The uncrowned queen of gossip columnists was Devyani Chaubal of Star'n'Style, known as Devi, and a bit of a publicity magnet herself. When she was famously assaulted by a sloshed Dharmendra for having written various things about his sexual appetite, Khushwant Singh, who enjoyed her "bitchy pieces", felt quite free to write a bitchy piece on Chaubal herself. "I wrote in my column that had I been in his shoes, I would have done exactly what Dharmendra had done to her," Singh wrote in his 2002 autobiography. Even when she was issued sexual threats by the drunken sons of an actor whose histrionic talent she had scorned, Singh's interpretation of Devi's teary retelling was bizarre: "I was not sure if she was really upset with the threats... or... looked forward to their being fulfilled". (All this despite - or perhaps because? - Singh had "the feeling that we were meant for each other"!)

Shobhaa De had her own mixed feelings. "With her paan-stained mouth, fair skin, curly strands of hair and voluptuous figure, Devi was irresistible to some men," De wrote in 1997. "It was her practice to hold court at parties, often sabotaging the host's efforts by staging a parallel soiree of her own in one corner of the lawn or bungalow... she was a high-profile star in her own right, unlike our schoolgirlish reporters speaking 'convent' English to all the 'Punjab da putters' who couldn't tell a compliment from a slur."

De's recognition of her staffers' "convent" English didn't reduce her disdain for Chaubal's own. Describing how Stardust's hit column "Neeta's Natter" was first written by a freelancer called Mohan Bawa, she writes: "Short, thickset and very camp... Bawa was also the only film journalist who wrote decent copy in grammatical English - entire sentences with punctuation marks. This was more than anybody could say about... Devi's 'Frankly Speaking'... written in catchy but clumsy Marathi-English."

The last comment is particularly fascinating, because Khushwant Singh liked Chaubal's columns for her "brand of Hindustani English (Hinglish)", and because De's own much-feted contribution to the new film journalism was also Hinglish. Namita Gokhale, who published Super, described Shobhaa (then Kilachand, nee Rajadhyaksha) in her marvellous 2011 essay "Super Days" as having "unleashed a whole new dhakar street vocabulary via Neeta's Natter". 

Namita Gokhale in the Super days.

Clearly there was a discernible difference - linguistic, but also social - between someone like Chaubal, who was, for instance, notoriously besotted with Rajesh Khanna, and these "convent girls" for whom Hindi filmdom held a horrifying fascination at best, and no interest at worst. De writes proudly that she watched only four or five Hindi films a year. Bhavana Somaya's parents, who disapproved of her working for a film mag (Super), were lied to whenever she had to cover a film party. Gokhale was fresh from literature at Delhi's Jesus and Mary College, and went back to books, but at least the stars had some frisson for her. De (like BKK, but more grandly) declares that barring two film parties, she "did not step into a film studio, attend a muhurat, visit a star home, or party with the film crowd", while editing Stardust. 

De is right that this "enforced distance" helped create a "credible level of objectivity". But there was more to it, as is made apparent by De's take on stars who "dared to show up at the Cat House" as "setting themselves up for further ridicule in... the magazine". De's description of "Shatrughan Sinha, with his broad Bihari accent and crude manner", or the drunken Sanjeev Kumar's crassness as that "of a grain-seller... a shop-keeper... a frustrated labourer" reveals how new English-language journalists often experienced their difference from the Hindi film world in class terms. And they felt no need to hide it. In fact, they wore their fluent English and "well-spoken" backgrounds like armour against the industry's perceived boorishness. Vinod Mehta once told me that his "England-returned" accent helped impress filmwalas for his Meena Kumari book.

It needed liberalisation to turn "Bollywood" into something Anglophone Indians could find cool. That transformation has coincided with the rise of the fully English-speaking star -- and perhaps, the disappearance of the snooty film journalist?

Stars, scandals and fandom

Today's Mirror column:

Reading in English about Hindi movies: a very brief history of the Indian film magazine as we know it.

Writing about films is one thing; writing about film stars is quite another. There are those who do both with aplomb. But in India, most long-running film magazines have been much more interested in the lives of film celebrities than the content of films.

The first Indian magazine completely devoted to cinema coverage was the Gujarati Mauj Majah, first published in 1924. Among English magazines, Baburao Patel's well-regarded monthly FilmIndia, published from 1935 to 1961, was one of the first. (The legendary and indefatigable Patel, who produced the entire content of the magazine himself – later aided and finally replaced by his wife Sushila – is the subject of a new book called The Patels of FilmIndia, which I'm looking forward to reading).

This was followed by the first trade publications, like KayTee Reports and Tradeguide, concerned not with stars but with predicting the commercial success or failure of particular films. In 1951 came Screen, launched by the Indian Express group in a colour broadsheet format. Screen, because it was concerned both with recent events in the industry and with films under production, could “be situated somewhere between the trade and the fan magazines”, writes film scholar Rachel Dwyer.

Close on Screen's heels came Filmfare, launched by the Times of India group in 1952. Filmfarewas glossy and upmarket, but it intended to be a family magazine and a sophisticated one. The first issue contained a manifesto that stated, “This magazine represents the first serious effort in film journalism in India. It is a movie magazine – with a difference. The difference lies in our realisation that the film as a composite art medium calls for serious study and constructive criticism and appreciation from the industry as also from the public.” This noble intention was cemented by the institution of the Filmfare Awards in 1953. Filmfare remained biweekly until 1988, when financial troubles forced it to become a monthly, which it has been since.

But the big moment of change in English-language film journalism in India was the 1970s, when a clutch of new magazines changed both the way we related to the stars and the language in which we were meant to do it. Jerry Pinto summed up the 70s magazine scene in his superb bitchy-funny Introduction to The Greatest Show on Earth, a spectacular anthology of writing on Hindi cinema that he edited in 2011. “Filmfare was the grand old lady, still published in an improbable size that meant you couldn't open it fully in a crowded bus or train. Stardust was the snazzy newcomer with a hint of middle-class contempt for the arrivistes and outsiders that made up the film industry. Cine Blitz came later and launched itself on the unsuspecting public with Protima Bedi – a Bollywood citizen through her open marriage with Kabir Bedi – running nude on a city beach. In between, for a brief while, there was Super, which had an almost indecipherable column, written as a letter, by Bubbles. Since Bubbles assumed we all knew the stars' nicknames, I often read it wondering at what was really happening and who was doing what to whom. When one did know (Daboo was Randhir Kapoor and Kaka was Rajesh Khanna) one felt validated in one's knowledge.”

Stardust, writes Dwyer, was founded in 1971 by Nari Hira of the Magna Publications group “as a marketing opportunity for his advertising business”. It was meant to be something along the lines of the American celebrity gossip mag Photoplay, more salacious than the then-staid Filmfare. Dwyer's 2001 essay contains the following wonderful account: “Twenty-three year old Shobha Rajadhyaksha (later De), who had been working for Hira for eighteen months as a trainee copywriter, was hired as the first editor. She had no interest in the movie world and had never worked as a journalist, but was hired on the strength of an imaginary interview with Shashi Kapoor, whom she had never met.” The imaginary interview was clearly a thing, combining an opportunity for writerly showing-off with a jokey fantasy that indulged the star's fans. Jerry Pinto cites one ridiculously risqué one with Bindu, from the now-defunct Film Mirror, which ends with the “reporter” waking from a dream. But more of that in another column.

To return to Shobhaa De, she apparently produced the first Stardust issue alone (with one paste-up man). She was later joined by a production staff of three and a team of freelance reporters who “collected stories which she wrote up”: a one-woman show not far from Baburao Patel. But De seems to have stayed put in her office, somewhat unusual for a young journalist. In her memoir Selective Memory: Stories from My Life, De's version of it is: “My eyes and ears were so attuned to reportage that I preferred my colleagues' version of their meetings with the stars to personal encounters.” Dwyer puts it somewhat differently. “De stubbornly refused to move in the film world, only meeting the stars if they came into the office,” she writes, making one envisage a scenario that seems nearly unimaginable today, when a respected and senior film journalist told me that even he finds it difficult to get interview appointments with current stars. Most stars, he added, seem in such a huge rush to finish the interview that it can barely become a conversation.

Super, too, was founded by an exceptionally young team that included Bhavana Somaya and Namita Gokhale. Gokhale, then 20, encountered Dev Anand some four decades later at the Jaipur Literature Festival, and was amazed to have him recall the last time they had met. “It was in 1981, I think,” he mused. “You were with your editor Rauf Ahmed – what was the magazine called...?” Whether it was the fact that these young people were just exceptionally memorable, or that stars in those days met less journalists, I don't know.

Book Review: AIDS Sutra

A book review, for Biblio:  

 

AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories from India.
Edited by Negar Akhavi; with a Foreword by Amartya Sen.
Photographs by Prashant Panjiar.
 

Random House India, New Delhi, in collaboration with Avahan, the India AIDS initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2008, 340 pp., Rs 395. ISBN 978-81-8400-039-9

 

An anthology should be, by definition, varied, but rarely does one come across one whose various parts complement each other with such élan. Aids Sutra contains pieces by sixteen writers of different ages and persuasions, each focusing on a different aspect of the HIV-AIDS epidemic and often, a different part of the country. So, for example, we have Jaspreet Singh’s quietly gutwrenching visit to a Delhi home for children with HIV, Sunil Gangopadhyay’s engaging take on Sonagachhi, replete with anecdotes both historical and autobiographical, Siddhartha Deb’s bleak but superb account of the conditions in which Manipur’s young people take to drugs, or Mukul Kesavan’s thoughtful elucidation of the world of Bangalore’s kothis.

Styles, too, vary enormously. CS Lakshmi’s ‘At Stake, The Body’ chooses anonymity as a haven for the voices of sex workers she inscribes with a kind of collective economy, while Nikita Lalwani’s ‘Mister X Versus Hospital Y’, whose very subject is the right to confidentiality, is anchored around a life story disclosed in a single conversation. In a book such as this, where much of the writing is based on specifically arranged encounters between the authors and the people they’re describing, observations need to be particularly fine-grained, and many of the authors recognize the need to abandon the conceit of objectivity. But there are those who cling to the illusion of old-style ethnography (or old-style documentary) – the narrator as a fly on the wall, seemingly observing people and place without recogiszing how his presence contributes to the nature of the scene, or alters it. William Dalrymple is one of those whose style gives away nothing of himself. The first two pages of his essay on devadasis, ‘The Daughters of Yellama’, for instance, form a stream of dialogue: first one woman speaks, then the other. There is precisely one sentence spoken by the author. But they are responding to some invisible third party. It is as if an interview had been transcribed without the questions asked.

In stark contrast is the piece by Shobhaa De, who takes it upon herself to describe, in admirably frank detail, her response to the discovery that her “children’s driver”, Shankar, had AIDS. She is frank, first of all, in admitting that she knew very little about a man who had worked for her for several years – and how normalized this ‘not knowing’ is for upper middle class people. “People who work in our homes, and who are an integral part of our lives, become almost invisible – their presence reduced to an almost shadowy figure at which we shout daily orders. ‘Go here. Get that. Be back on time… So you need leave? Again? Didn’t you just take a day off last fortnight? Why does there seem to be a weekly emergency in your village? How many times do your cousins die?’ All this is said briskly, everybody is so damn busy, so preoccupied. There are a thousand things to do. Who on earth looks up to notice boils on their driver’s scalp?” She is equally honest in admitting that the discovery forced her to confront a host of inner demons: “I imagined all kinds of unpleasant things. He must have got the virus from visiting prostitutes after this wife left him. Maybe he was gay, and had multiple relationships? Had he tricked his wife into marrying him? …Where was my liberal self when I needed it most?”

Vikram Seth also tells a quasi-personal story, of a poem he once wrote in the voice of a man dying of AIDS. But apart from gesturing to the way in which the fearful voice of the poem’s narrator echoes the ill-informed, panic-stricken reaction Seth remembers from California in the 1980s, the piece remains disappointingly slight – and impersonal. His account of reactions from readers then is interesting for the historical light it casts on the life of the disease. But Seth is so tightly focused on trying – and failing – to reconstruct the moment of the poem’s writing that he refuses the opportunity to meditate on wider questions, personal or political.

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, like De and Seth, elects to tell a story whose origin lies in past personal experience, though in Shanghvi’s case it is not, strictly speaking, his own. ‘Hello Darling’, about a flamboyantly gay filmmaker called Murad, doesn’t do too bad a job of recreating the not-so-far-away world of 90s Bombay, in which Murad’s slick first film about homosexuality was enough to give him “a patina of notoriety” and a lot of press. But his asides about American “bug parties”, or discrimination against HIV positive patients in India – seem tacked on, and even Murad’s story never quite achieves the “darkly nostalgic” tone Shanghvi aims for. Perhaps the problem is Shanghvi’s amateurish prose, teetering perpetually on the brink of purple: “…the greatness he aspired to was one elusive eel. Unable to deal with fate’s tumult, Murad fled to New York… to live his life on high tilt – artistically, independently, hedonistically”, or worse, “Having given filmmaking his best shot, and failing nonetheless, the dark music of HIV played in the background as the echo of salvation”. What does emerge without a doubt, though, is that the stigma – and resultant secrecy – that surrounds HIV cuts across class: a publicly homosexual, glamorous, Page Three figure feels as compelled to keep his positive status secret as a middle-aged Marathi chauffeur.

The most rewarding pieces in the book are those where research is woven into a personal narrative, one that makes visible the layers through which perception is filtered. One such is Amit Chaudhuri’s careful account of the HIV wings of Bombay’s hospitals, and the doctors who run them. Chaudhuri is, as always, simultaneously reflective and detached. His memories of younger days may inform his experience of the city, but with Chaudhuri, memory is not nostalgia. His estimation of Bombay is clear-eyed (and at this moment when the city is the subject of so much impassioned prose, especially welcome): “As I walked with streams of happy people on Perry and Carter Roads, I sensed again this city’s reserves of optimism, which makes it unique among the world’s cities: but was reminded, too, from my own life here, of what I’d forgotten – its infantilism, its susceptibility to charm and excitement, a susceptibility that, in the early 21st century, has its own unforgiving momentum.”

Also clear-eyed is Chaudhuri’s unraveling of the various registers within which the history of AIDS treatment unfolded: partial information from abroad, professional rivalries, increasing but ill-informed media attention, issues of prejudice, sexual morality and secrecy. And at every juncture, he is attentive to the crucial question of class. For instance, visiting hospitals like GT (Gokuldas Tejpal) and JJ (Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy) for the first time, Chaudhuri recognizes that his “not knowing” such landmarks must be placed in the context of a classed urban geography, in which public hospitals do not need to figure for ‘people like us’. More importantly, within the hospital, class matters. Though it may no longer affect access to Anti Retroviral Treatment (ART) (JJ Hospital became the first to offer free ART in 2004, and others have followed), knowledge of and attitudes to healthcare have much to do with levels of class and education. Chaudhuri correctly points out that ART is “incomplete but, as of now, indispensable knowledge [that] partially removes HIV from the hysteria that surrounded it in the eighties and nineties”, but deaths continue to occur even among those who are diagnosed in time, often because working class patients stop the treatment when symptoms recede.

Class and social background are also important variables in Sonia Faleiro’s hard-hitting portrayal of the complex relationship between sex workers and the police. Faleiro’s piece is significant for its twin insights – first, that the police’s relationship with sex workers is not merely one of law enforcement, but of regular economic and sexual exploitation, and second, that it will not do to paint all policemen as agents of evil: they themselves are cogs in a larger, deeply flawed system. “Policemen’s attitudes mirror that (sic) of the society from which they are drawn. If the average policeman comes from a small town or village where people generally equate sex work with promiscuity, disease, and lawlessness, then he will, unless his training teaches him otherwise, carry those sentiments to work. What makes this mirror image dangerous is that the police have the power to act on their bias.” While this means that there are a large number of policemen like Madhav Rao, who tells Faleiro that sex workers are meant to be beaten, chased away (giving her the title of her piece, ‘Maarne ka, bhagane ka’), it does not preclude the possibility of there being others like Ram Naik, for whom the sex workers of the neighbourhood he patrols are the women he knows best.

Kiran Desai’s account of the Kalavanthalu women – a subcaste of “hereditary courtesans and temple dancers famous for their elegant beauty” – breezily builds up an image of a “normal” Andhra village, only to tear it down : “I notice an overabundance of beds”. Her sure-footed descriptions, of brothels with all the stuffiness of a middle class home, and others that are no more than hovels, are interspersed with statistics, local proverbs and all-female banter, expertly but gently rendered: ““And who likes the sex? Any of you girls?” And immediately they all jump on one woman… yelling, “She! She! She! She does!”

There are other pieces well worth reading that I haven’t mentioned for lack of space, and a measured introduction by Amartya Sen that deals with much more than the economics of HIV. The book also contains some exceptional -- albeit badly printed -- photographs by Prashant Panjiar, adding yet another layer to what is already a generous, nuanced introduction to one of the most complex issues of our time.

Published in Biblio: A Review of Books
Vol. XIII, Nos. 11 & 12, Nov - Dec 2008
To see this article as it originally appeared, with photographs, go here.