Good girls, bad ghosts and goddesses

My Mumbai Mirror column

Bulbbul reworks ideas from several Bengali film classics to craft a superhuman response to women's depressingly human troubles.

When Anvita Dutt's Bulbbul came out last July, several critics applauded producer Anushka Sharma and her brother Karnesh for their trilogy of films placing the ghost story in the service of feminist goals. The first of these, Anshai Lal's Phillauri (2017), featured Sharma as an early 20^th century ghost who haunts the present in the hope of being recognised as the author of Punjabi poems that everyone thought were written by her male lover. The second, Prosit Roy's Pari (2018), with a plot featuring the impregnation of women by spirits called ifrits, and the murder of the resultant half-demonic children by vigilantes, was an allegorical response to the violence of rape and forced abortion. Both were interesting ideas, but neither was executed to any real degree of competence.

Bulbbul, set in late 19^th century Bengal, might be the best realised of the three. The film is named for its protagonist, who is named for the chirpy, red-tufted bird (usually spelled bulbul, without the extra 'b'). It is no coincidence that Bulbbul is a child bride who metamorphoses from climbing trees to being the senior daughter-in-law of an oppressively grand zamindar family -- and then, in her magical afterlife, to climbing trees again.

Visually rich, almost to the point of excess, the film alternates between a glowing, blood-red enchanted forest (a bit foreign-looking, of which more later) and a gloomy, minimally styled zamindar mansion which Dutt chooses to keep underpopulated – no children, practically no servants.

While riding the global wave of 21^st century Gothic popular culture, the film is dense with Indian literary and cinematic references which are ultimately also sociological. For instance, the theme of the Indian wife's relationship with a young brother-in-law, often easier to talk to than an older, forbiddingly grave husband, has been with us long enough to be enshrined in our jokes and popular culture; a common consequence of the patriarchal system of adult men marrying virginal girls. That intimate devar-bhabhi dynamic was perhaps most vividly captured in Tagore's 1901 novella Nashto Nir (The Broken Nest), possibly based on Tagore's own early life, which Satyajit Ray transposed onto the screen in Charulata. The Soumitra Chatterjee-Madhabi Mukherjee relationship in Charulata is echoed here by Bulbbul and her brother-in-law Satya, going from hide and seek to writerly collaboration. What the sister-in-law Binodini tells Bulbbul's husband Indranil bitchily is not untrue: Bulbbul and Satya have grown up together, and are close in a way that Bulbbul and Indranil can never be. Meanwhile Binodini herself -- married off to Indranil's halfwit brother Mahendra, but in a sexual arrangement with Indranil -- is eventually widowed, in another Tagorean reference: The duplicitous, unfulfilled widow Binodini of Chokher Bali.

But Bulbbul also reminded me, complicatedly, of another Ray film. Devi (1960), adapted from Prabhat Mukhopadhyaya's story The Goddess, also centres on a child bride who may or may not have acquired power over life and death. The 17-year-old Doyamoyee (played by Sharmila Tagore under Ray's magisterial direction), beloved of her twenty-something college-going husband (Soumitra), but also a favourite of her deeply religious father-in-law, suddenly finds herself anointed as an avatar of Goddess Durga, after the father-in-law sees her thus in a dream.

 

 

Bulbbul, set in the same Shakta Bengali milieu, where female energy is worshipped as Durga and Kali, draws on that association. Mahendra's murder on Durga Puja explicitly suggests that Bulbbul's first effective use of her shakti is tied to the mother goddess. The film's iconography, too, partially echoes the familiar Durga-Kali one: Long, open tresses and an enigmatic smile. “Not a churail, but a devi,” says Dr Sudip, and the film's dead men had all been abusive, thus flipping our perception of Bulbbul's power from possible evil to a form of violent justice.

 

Watching Devi again, though, I was struck by how deeply Ray investigates the power of belief, especially the young woman's own conflicted sense of self. Perhaps the most complex scene in this regard is the one where Doya refuses to run away when she has a chance, because she has half-begun to believe in the divinity thrust upon her. And yet, even in this belief, her primary response is fear – any power she has is not in her control. “Ebhaabe choley gele tomaar jyano omongol hoye? [What if leaving this way brings you bad luck?],” she asks her husband, terrified.

 

The husband understands and takes her back, raging later to his professor in Calcutta, that “she is only 17”. He is a sympathetic character, and yet – he is an adult married to a teenager who just happens to have come of age sexually. In one of Devi's most moving moments, Doya clings to her little nephew when he is placed in her lap after ages – she accepts the task of curing him as a young woman who misses a child, but she is judged as a goddess.

 

I recently re-watched Pedro Almodovar's 2006 masterpiece Volver, also about women, male sexual violence and the possibility of a female ghost returning to finish incomplete business on earth (‘Volver’ means 'return' in Spanish). But Volver's sensibility is very different from Devi or Bulbbul; some of its magnificent easy charm lies in the idea of a ghost who bakes, helps out who hairdressing and cares for the sick and aged – as women do. 

 

Earlier in Volver, the heroine is in the middle of hiding one horrible man's dead body when another man spies an incriminating spot of blood on her neck. “Oh, women's troubles,” she says, waving him away. As long as men are the prime cause of women's troubles, I thought to myself, there will be blood.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 Feb 2021

Earlier in Volver, the heroine is in the middle of hiding on

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/good-girls-bad-ghosts-and-goddesses/articleshow/81251984.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Driven From Home - I

My Mirror column (24 May 2020):

It’s time to revisit Bimal Roy’s 1953 neorealist melodrama, Do Bigha Zamin, which remains one of the earliest and most moving depictions of the urban migrant in Indian cinema

Another poster for Do Bigha Zamin (1953), designed by the artist Chittaprosad

A poster advertising Do Bigha Zamin in the 15 May, 1953 issue of Filmfare contains eight moments from the film etched into memorable black-and-white linocuts by the artist Chittaprosad. Linocut 5, at the centre of the page, foregrounds a young boy, barefoot, a palm held up to his face, as if he's just been slapped. The blank wall to the right is occupied by “Vote For” graffiti, above which is a strategically-placed poster of a gun-toting gangster, captioned “Criminals”. Behind the boy, the Indian city is pared down to its essentials: a mailbox, a lamppost, tall buildings -- and two other children: one polishing shoes under a streetlight, and the other being marched away by a uniformed policeman.

If you have never seen Bimal Roy's era-defining film -- or even if you have -- now is the time to revisit it. Perhaps in this cruel summer of 2020 you will see, as I did, that it is not some timeless tale of a single hard-working farmer stripped of his land by feudal exploitation, but a very particular postcolonial Indian story, in which Shambhu's dispossession is caused much by pre-modern landholding structures as by modern-day legal injustice (perhaps you'll hear the mocking laughter of the lawyers in the courtroom scene, as the non-literate Shambhu's oral calculation of his dues is superseded by the zamindar's duplicitous figures, for which Shambhu's own fingerprints become legal 'evidence'). Perhaps you'll see that this is a film as much about the city as the village, and that while it pinpoints the shortages and shortcuts that already marked the lives of India's urban poor, it is also, like the early cinema of Raj Kapoor, KA Abbas and others, filled with the warmth of nascent urban communities. Perhaps you'll see, like the great Chittaprosad did, that as crucial as the film's adult tragedies are the moral dilemmas of Shambhu's little boy Bachhua (played by Ratan Kumar, a much-favoured child actor of the time, who was soon to be seen polishing shoes again in Prakash Arora's 1954 film Boot Polish, produced by Raj Kapoor). Perhaps you will notice the film's depiction of 1950s Calcutta, with its white colonial buildings gleaming in the sunlight and its neon signs for Kodak and Polar and Castrol and KC Das glittering through the nights, and the poor homeless people who sleep under them – and think about whether the city currently suffering the debilitating effects of Cyclone Amphan is any different.

Bimal Roy, who had begun his career as a camera assistant at Calcutta's New Theatres, moved to Bombay in the early 1950s with a team of talented crew members that included such future stalwarts as Salil Choudhury and Hrishikesh Mukherjee. He had already made his directorial debut in Bengali with Udayer Pathe, which Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen describe in their Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema as “introducing a new era of post-WW2 romantic-realist melodrama that was to pioneer the integration of the Bengal school with that of De Sica”.

Do Bigha Zamin, Roy's Hindi debut, was crucial to continuing that trajectory, and it is unsurprising that it took him back to Calcutta. The film reveals a very particular constellation of influences, reflective of the time and the people who came together in it. The core idea, of a peasant robbed of his small plot by an avaricious zamindar, came from a Rabindranath Tagore poem in Bengali, called 'Dui Bigha Jomi'. The poem was turned into a short story by Salil Choudhury, which also formed the basis of Satyen Bose's Bangla film called Rickshawala. Choudhury's story was reworked into a 24-page screenplay by Hrishikesh Mukherjee (also credited as Editor and Assistant Director), which became a Hindi film with the assistance of Paul Mahendra's Hindi dialogues.

The IPTA connections were also important here. Launched in 1943, the Indian People's Theatre Association was informally affiliated to the Communist Party of India, and had links with the Progressive Writers Association (PWA). It was a nationwide network composed of travelling musical and theatre groups focused on reclaiming and working with vernacular folk traditions in various parts of the country, particularly Bengal, Telengana, Kerala, and later also Assam, Punjab, Orissa and urban centres like Mumbai. “For a brief period following WW2 and in the early years of independence,” write Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, “virtually the entire cultural intelligentsia was associated with or influenced by IPTA/PWA activities...”. Salil Choudhury was a self-taught composer who had been a peasant activist in Bengal, and began his musical journey scoring for IPTA plays. Bimal Roy's own Udayer Pathe also drew heavily on IPTA style. Sahni, too, was a regular IPTA actor, and had previously played a peasant in the IPTA-backed film Dharti Ke Lal (1947).

The Tagore poem does not contain the spectre of the factory as the zamindar's reason for land-acquisition. In it, the dispossessed farmer becomes a mendicant's assistant. But the film -- informed as much by Vittorio De Sica's visuals of a father-son duo grappling with the city in Bicycle Thieves as by the Indian left's understanding of the pressures of industrialisation and urbanisation -- turned its protagonist into a rickshaw-puller on the streets of Calcutta. 

The first part of a two-part column. The second part is here.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 May 2020. 

Literary Heroines and Necklaces of Tears

The second instalment of my TVOF column Shelf Life, in which I look at literature through the prism of clothing.

From coveted possession to unfulfilled desire, jewellery has had a starring role in fictional women’s lives.

There is something brilliantly non-functional about jewellery. Clothes, no matter how attractive, always also serve to protect our bodies from heat and cold, rain and sun. Jewellery, in contrast, is so wholly useless that that fact has been enshrined in the English language: it is, by its very nature, ornamental.     

Or is it?

Humans have a way of imbuing the things we make with meaning, and jewellery seems right at the top of the symbolic value heap. We will never know exactly what the 46,000-year-old kangaroo bone nose ornament found in Australia in 2016 meant to its prehistoric wearers, or what powers were attributed to the 75,000-year-old shell beads discovered in South Africa's Blombos Caves in 2004. What we do know is that we've travelled some distance from those likely gender-neutral beginnings. 

As societies grew more complex, jewellery increasingly became something women wore. That gendered cultural history runs alongside a socio-economic one, in which women are pushed increasingly out of the public sphere into the domestic, private sphere of unpaid labour. In a world in which upper- and middle-class women didn’t have their own money (and were not allowed to earn it), jewellery was often the only financially valuable item a woman possessed—something that could be exchanged for money, provide a woman security when the patriarchal family did not. 

Sudha Koul’s The Tiger Ladies, an elegiac memoir of growing up in Kashmir, describes how Kashmiri Pandit weddings involved fathers giving their daughters solid gold ear ornaments called dejahor, so long that they hung “all the way down to their nipples”. Appalled at her as-yet-unpierced upper earlobes, Koul’s grandmother (Dhanna) hopes she might yet restore her modern grandchild to the way of tradition by explaining the socio-economic purpose of jewellery: “When women needed money, or when their daughters got married, they would cut off one dejahor, sell it, and make two of the other one. The size was the same, but it was hollow inside and no one would know that they had troubles.”

The Tiger Ladies by Sudha Koul

Dhanna’s ear ornaments remained solid till the end; it was her husband's Lahore University gold medal that was melted down to make ornaments for their daughters (“The fact that he stood first was enough—they knew it and everyone else knew it”). But few marriages are as well-adjusted, few households as equitable. And where there is familial strife, jewellery is frequently at its centre. Late 19th to mid-20th century Bengali literature is filled with women (especially widowed old aunts) guarding their jewellery from rapacious relatives: from Leela Majumdar’s children’s classic Padi Pishir Barmi Baksho (Aunt Padi’s Burmese Box, also a 1972 film by Arundhati Devi) to Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s Goynar Baksho (made into a 2013 film by Aparna Sen). 

Hearts Made of Stone

The woman obsessed with protecting her jewels appeared in a much darker register in Rabindranath Tagore’s 1898 story Manihara, translated as The Lost Jewels. The horrific vision that ends Tagore’s tale—and Satyajit Ray’s film version, since it forms part of Ray’s 1961 triptych Teen Kanya—is the wife as a ghostly skeleton, whose “bones glistened with gold and diamond ornaments”. 

The female ghost who preys on unsuspecting men is an old folktale trope from Kashmir to Japan. But Tagore is no simplistic misogynist. The narrator of Tagore’s tale pours scorn on Phani Bhushan for belonging to a “new race of men”, so without “a trace of masculine barbarity” that he “was quite incapable of saying bluntly to his wife, “Dear, I’m in need of money, bring out your jewels.” But he has also told us how things came to this pass: because the misguided Phani Bhushan demanded nothing from Mani Malika—he only gave, and “imagined that by giving, he would receive”. “The wife had no particular fault, yet the husband was not happy. And so he went on pouring diamond and pearl jewellery into the cavity of her heart, thereby filling her iron safe but leaving her heart as empty as ever.”

A still from the film adaptation of Tagore's story Manihara, which is part of Satyajit Ray’s 1961 triptych Teen Kanya

Not Quite a Girl’s Best Friend

In two famous European stories, jewels are used to pillory women's desires for other lives, other loves. If The Earrings of Madame De is about its married heroine's fickleness, Guy de Maupassant’s famous 1884 story, The Necklace is a brutal tale of comeuppance for a pretty woman who wallows in self-pity because she has “no dresses, no jewels, nothing; and these were the only things she loved.” The necklace she borrows for one grand party becomes a lifelong noose around her neck—and her loving husband's.  

Indian fiction seems to have been more forgiving of the unhappy wife, perhaps because it contains few loving husbands. To end on a classic example, think of the tragically neglected Choto Ma of Bimal Mitra’s Saheb Bibi Golam, who became Meena Kumari’s Chhoti Bahu in Guru Dutt’s classic 1962 film. Half-mad with loneliness, she accosts her dissolute zamindar husband, asking what she should do while he is entertained by his tawaif mistress. His response cruelly suggests the dispensability of both her jewels and her feelings. “Gehne banwao, gehne tudwao,” he sneers. “Get jewellery melted, get new jewellery made.” 

An English translation of Bimal Mitra's Bangla classic, Saheb Bibi Golam

Perhaps, in the end, that is what makes jewellery such a powerful fictional symbol. It stands in for money, and somehow that means people keep trying to make it stand in for love.

Published in The Voice of Fashion,  6 Aug 2019.

The Journey of Modern Indian Art

A piece for India Today about the state of modern Indian art, (occasioned by a new book on the subject, Modern Indian Painting, edited by Giles Tillotson and Rob Dean). 

'Assassin', by the late Ganesh Pyne. (Tempera).

Last week, an “art market intelligence” firm called Artery India announced on its website that India’s ‘Top 3 Artists’ over the last five years are V.S. Gaitonde, M.F. Husain and S.H. Raza. Husain and Raza, once colleagues in the Progressive Artists’ Group, are running neck and neck, with 494 and 454 works sold for Rs 331 crore and Rs 321 crore respectively. Gaitonde is the dark horse, having totted up Rs 392 crore with just 81 works.

The racecourse metaphor may seem undignified, but it’s also sadly accurate in a country where art is only discussed for its price tag. When Christie’s sells a Tyeb Mehta work for Rs 22.9 crore, or an “unseen” Souza is a Sotheby’s auction highlight (as will happen on March 18 in New York), modern Indian art can provide temporary grist to the national pride mill. Five artists—Raza, Husain, Gaitonde, F.N. Souza and Mehta—account for two-thirds of the top 500 lots sold at auctions. The market’s unrelenting appetite for big names can lead down murkier paths. In February, several works listed for auction by the Neville Tuli-run Osian’s-Connoisseurs of Art Pvt. Ltd—an untitled 1957 Souza, Shadow of Death by Bhupen Khakhar, a 1964 Jehangir Sabavala and a 1952 Akbar Padamsee—were charged with being potential fakes.

Kito de Boer and his partner Jane Gowers began collecting modern Indian art 25 years ago during a seven-year sojourn in India. Their collection, now 1000-odd images strong, offers an example of how informed private collectors might depart from such a highly skewed art market. The de Boer collection is now the basis of a new book, Modern Indian Painting, edited by Giles Tillotson and Rob Dean.

The de Boers' personal tastes sometimes align with the market, for instance on the Bombay Progressives. Yashodhara Dalmia’s essay on them usefully contextualises each artist: e.g. Raza’s move from early cityscapes and representational works, like the arresting Three Artists, to the abstract, ever more luminous oils that he began to make in the 1960s; or Souza’s iconoclasm, including ghoulish depictions of Christian themes and unprecedented sexual imagery. Dalmia includes a great anecdote from artist Krishen Khanna: a woman he once heard muttering “Disgusting, absolutely disgusting”, as she stepped away from a nude self-portrait by Souza.

The late S.H. Raza's 'Three Artists'

The de Boers also display a strong interest in art from Bengal, and because the region has been so crucial to modern Indian art, the book works superbly as an introductory historical survey. Partha Mitter’s essay on the Bengal School explains succinctly how Indian art first became wound up with nationalism. The rise of western art training in colonial India first gave rise to an artist like Raja Ravi Varma, who “used the syntax of Victorian academic art for his ‘authentic’ recreations of the Hindu past”. Varma’s style of portraiture, spread by his printing press, became the new norm in the popular imagination. But, Mitter writes, by the early twentieth century, there was a reaction to western academic art. The Bengal School, under E.B. Havell and Abanindranath Tagore, led a formal movement against western-style three-dimensional illusionism. This included using watercolours rather than oils, and looking East (e.g. to Japan’s colour wash techniques), or to India’s own past (e.g. Ajanta frescoes or Mughal miniatures) for ‘Swadeshi’ form and subjects.

The book illustrates this period with Tagore’s own Bharat Mata and The Passing of Shah Jahan, A.R. Chughtai’s Shah Jahan Looking at the Taj, Kshitindranath Majumdar’s Chaitanya images and, most interesting of all, Prosanto Roy’s works in variegated styles, from Untitled (Arabian Nights) to the Tibetan thangka influences in Mara’s Attack on the Buddha. Tillotson’s essay further amplifies our sense of this early period, illustrating how the Tagore-led Bengal School was challenged, not just by the Bombay School’s portrait painters, like M.V. Dhurandhar and M.F. Pithawalla, but from within Bengal itself. Practitioners in oils like Motilal Pai created ‘realistic’ perspectival architectural settings for epic themes, while the Calcutta Naturalists like Hemendranath Mazumdar, B.C. Law and Satish Sinha focused on naturalistic female figures and landscapes.

Bezwada, by Chittaprosad.

Sona Datta’s essay frames the mid-century change in Bengal’s art as a rural idyll (Jamini Roy, Nandalal Bose, Benod Behari Mukherjee and others at Shantiniketan) disrupted by famine, war and Partition. The standout figure here is Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, whose woodblock prints and ink-on-paper drawings are a scathing commentary on stark times. But Datta also helps explain the darkness of major mid-century Bengali artists, like Nikhil Biswas, Rabin Mondal, Somnath Hore and Prokash Karmakar.

The book ends with three fascinating interviews with living artists: Ganesh Pyne and his unsettling, ghostly temperas, A. Ramachandran’s vegetally embellished re-workings of Indian myths and Rameshwar Broota’s eclectic career that was “never influenced by the watercolours of the Bengal School”. As he says, “I am influenced by universal art.” May all future Indian art be as confident.

Published in India Today, 15 Mar 2019. A brief accompanying interview with Tillotson is here.

Heartless Days

My Mirror column: the 2nd in a series of tributes to Mrinal Sen

In Baishey Shravana (1960), the late Mrinal Sen created a film as much about callousness during a famine as about the cruelty of time itself.

Mrinal Sen was 20 when he witnessed the Great Famine of 1943, a manmade tragedy wreaking havoc in the streets of Calcutta. Seventeen years later, in 1960, he made a film about it. Unlike many of his later films, where the politics was upfront and the city centre stage, this film was set in a village, and the famine remained the backdrop for a very intimate story: that of one marital household.

In another somewhat odd decision (which caused him great trouble with the Censor board), Sen titled the film Baishey Shravana. Some context might be useful here: Since 1941, that date—the 22nd of the month of Shravana—had been observed as Rabindranath Tagore’s death anniversary, and a Bengali audience would have assumed they were in for a film about the legendary writer. But of course, Sen never did what was expected of him. In his film, it is the date on which the couple’s wedding takes place, but that fact barely registers. To anyone who watched Baishey Shravana, it would seem to have nothing to do with Tagore or his death.

The connection existed— but only in Sen’s mind. In 1941, at 18, he had been present at Nimtola Ghat when Tagore’s body was being laid to rest. In that crush of public mourning, he had witnessed a terrible scene—hundreds of ostensibly grief-stricken people stepping over a dead child’s body. Somehow, in Sen’s memory, the callousness of that crowd appears to have merged with the cruelty of the famine—with that sense of eroded humanity reconstituted in Baishey Shravana as the callousness of a husband to his wife.

Many years later, Sen spoke of the clichés he was hoping to avoid: “I made it a point that mine would never be a journalistic approach, that I would not count the number of people who starved and died, that I would not show vultures and jackals fighting over the carcasses.” That decision about what not to show perhaps led organically to what stayed in focus: “The camera remains indoors, picking on the cracks appearing in their relationship, and moves outside only once. A long shot of the starving villagers abandoning the village in search of food...”

But the film’s non-obvious, somewhat contrarian origins are only important if you’re interested in understanding the way Sen’s mind worked. It is perfectly possible to watch it without factoring them in. Baishey Shravana is a remarkable film for many reasons.

It is, first of all, a tender portrait of an arranged marriage, perceptive about how romance in these circumstances involves both newness and security: the quietly giddy realisation that you now belong to another person, and they to you. The relationship between Priyanath (Gyanesh Mukherjee) and his bride Malati (Madhabi Mukherjee) starts out with scope for awkwardness: he is much older, graver, slow to cotton on to her playful ways.

The film is also notable for being Madhabi’s second film appearance. The lovely mobility of the face that would illuminate later classics like Charulata and Mahanagar is already in place. But there is still something of the child about her here, as witnessed in the lovely scene where she runs and hides in response to hearing Priyanath’s bicycle bell approach. Malati’s initial youthfulness is also gestured to in her stealing mangoes off a neighbour’s trees with the other village girls: this seems to have been a popular Bangla trope about the childish freedom of girls before marriage, it appears both in Pather Panchali and in Samapti, a Tagore tale that is one of the three stories in Ray’s Teen Kanya.

Ageing, in fact, is one of Baishey’s grand themes: the inevitability of it, but also the tragedy. We see both of those in the way Priyanath’s widowed mother accepts the shift of power within the household from herself to her daughter-in-law. Her son now listens to everything his wife says, he bids her goodbye where once he had bid his mother. But embedded in that recognition is the sense that Malati’s time of deprivation will come: she should go to the fair now, while she still can, before the baton of responsibility passes from one generation to another

This turnover of generations is inevitable for men, too, but in the world of work. Priyanath, who sells women’s cosmetics on trains, finds himself at a loss to compete with younger men. Even as tragedy makes him less and less appealing, Priyanath never seems an unsympathetic character, only a weak one. And yet, as Sen so sharply perceives, the same man who yells about injustice at the ration shop can obliviously consume his wife’s share. Sen’s shot of Priyanath gobbling down rice, his cheeks puffed up, apparently caused outrage. 

As with much of Sen’s work, the brilliant sound design is integral to the film. In the very first scene, when we see Priyanath hawking his wares in a local train compartment, the loud rumbling of the train is overlaid with a child’s voice singing a song that goes, ‘Mon re krishi kaaj jaano na (Oh heart, you don’t know the work of cultivation)’. It is only when watching it a second time that I realised it was no coincidence in a film about a famine; a drying up of both food and affection.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Jan 2019.

God is in the details

My Mirror column:

Satyajit Ray would have turned 97 earlier this week. Looking back at what we might learn from him.

An early scene in Satyajit Ray's marvellous 1966 film Nayak has the bespectacled heroine Aditi Sengupta (Sharmila Tagore) go up to Uttam Kumar – Bengal's reigning matinee idol, whom Ray had cast as his film star hero Arindam Mukherjee – for an autograph. It's for her cousin, she says carefully, leading Arindam to make some backhanded remarks about her not watching Bengali films. “They lack realism,” says Miss Sengupta. “Yes, you're right,” says Arindam, looking up at her. “Heroines with BA degrees must not sing songs of separation.” “And heroes need not be godlike just because they're heroes,” is her sharp comeback.

Returning to her seat, Ray's rationalist heroine spins her argument out. “Have you seen Joy Porajoy?” she asks. “The one where he plays tennis?” responds her train companion eagerly. “Not just plays it: he's a champion. He's a tennis champion, swimming champion, knows how to sing, how to dance, progressive, gets a First Class in his MA, great lover... all at the same time. Is that plausible?”

Miss Sengupta's is a fairly standard critique of Indian popular cinema. But thinking about Satyajit Ray in the week of his 97th birth anniversary (he was born on 2nd May 1921), I caught myself giggling at the thought that in reality, Ray was just the sort of multi-talented figure that his heroine had dismissed as implausible.

Not only did Ray write and direct a lifetime's worth of films that are counted among the classics of world cinema, he was also a prolific and gifted writer of Bengali fiction for both children and adults. For many years, he ran the superb children's magazine Sandesh, a publication originally begun by his grandfather Upendrakishore Raychaudhury in 1913 and then edited for many years by Satyajit's father Sukumar Ray, the stupendously talented author of the nonsense verse and fantasy classics Abol Tabol and Ha-Ja-Ba-Ra-La. As a young man he had cultivated an interest in Western classical music, and as a filmmaker he displays an unerring grasp of the power of Hindustani classical as well – not as a pedant, but as a craftsman who can tap into the enormous emotional reserves of a particular instrument or raag to create the mood he wants – the shehnai standing in for the human wail in Durga's death scene, or the astounding bucolic perfection of Ravi Shankar's Pather Panchali soundtrack, or the swing between performative excess and melancholy in Jalsaghar, to name just the first three things that come to mind.

His talent as an artist, of course, preceded his filmmaking career – and in many ways, foreshadowed it. Having always had a natural talent for drawing, Ray had already decided – after three not-so-happy years studying science and then economics at Presidency College, Calcutta – that he was going to get a job as a commercial artist. It was only at his mother's urging that the city-bred Anglophone, Hollywood obsessed boy decided first to study art at Vishwabharati University. Ray's two and a half years at Shantiniketan were shaping, providing him access routes not just to what he later described as “the magnificence of Oriental art” — from Ajanta and Ellora murals to Japanese woodcuts — but to the rural Bengal countryside.

These influences were crucial to Ray's first choice of project – Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay's classic Bengali novel which Ray called “something like an encylopaedia of rural life”. In that same statement, Ray also wrote: “While I learnt a lot about the craft of filmmaking from watching Hollywood films of the '40s and '50s, my primary influences when I stared my first film were Jean Renoir and the De Sicas Bicycle Thief & Umberto D. And yet, soon after I started shooting, I realised that the form, rhythm and texture of my film would derive from elements that were deeply rooted in my own culture, which had little to do with the culture of France or Italy.”

A page from the Pather Panchali Sketchbook, showing Ray's sketch of what would be the train sequence

A handwritten version of this statement is reproduced in a remarkable publication brought out by HarperCollins India in 2016, The Pather Panchali Sketchbook, which offers Ray enthusiasts (and anyone interested in the links between cinema and painting) a delightful gift – Ray's immensely detailed storyboards for what would be his first film. The sketchbook – which was donated by Ray to the Cinematheque Francaise – consists of a series of watercolour sketches which almost exactly presage the film in its final form. Looking at a sketch in which the ancient Pishi reaches up to caress Durga's face when she brings her a stolen guava, or Apu and Durga dwarfed by a darkening stormy sky, gives one goosebumps. Ray's plan leaves nothing out, it seems: fades, dissolves, long-shots and closeups, minor scenes and characters including even birds flying in the sky are already there in the painter's eye.

Not many filmmakers can duplicate Ray's graphic technique of working – simply because not many filmmakers are also painters. Nor do most have a musical and literary talent to match their visual imagination. We cannot all be godlike. But as I pored over the Sketchbook, it seemed utterly clear that what we can all learn from Ray is an attention to detail. As the world hurtles ever more towards the grand gesture, instructing us not to get “bogged down by the details”, being able to observe Ray's mind at work is an inspiration: because the fragments he is laying out are really pieces of a grand jigsaw, whose final form he already sees – in his mind's eye.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 6th May 2018.

Recasting Tagore

My review of the play Her Letters: Qissa Kothi's Hindi adaptation of Tagore's story 'Streer Patra'

Indian artists tend to treat the celebrated work of Rabindranath Tagore with kid gloves. But in adapting the master's 1914 Bengali short story Streer Patra, the Mumbai-based collective Qissa Kothi has taken a bold, and mostly successful, approach.

Tagore's tale is a first-person narrative, framed as a letter in which a woman explains, with quiet resolve, why she has left home. But in playwright-director Sharmistha Saha's able hands, it becomes an intense two-person performance in Hindi, Her Letters, which comes to Mumbai's Kala Ghoda Festival on February 5 after performances in New Delhi last month.

"To Thine Auspicious Lotus Feet", Mrinal's letter begins, marking the abyss of inequality between an Indian wife and her husband. Few women would use such an expression today. But even a century later, candour and reflectiveness like Mrinal's rarely emerge from the confines of a marriage. For her marital household, she was only Mejo Bou, 'Middle Daughter-in-law', a label she cannot squeeze herself into any longer. It's taken 15 years, writes Mrinal, but she has finally realised that she has other relationships: "with the world and the World-Keeper".

The terrifying familiarity of Mrinal's epiphany says everything about why 'Streer Patra' still works. No man's path to selfhood has ever been dependent on his marital status. But wifehood still defines women -- enshrined in religious ideology, in social behaviour, in our very language. Think of the Hindi word suhaag, for instance. The state of being married is ostensibly neutral, but really only implicates women. A man's body, like his mind, need never be marked by marriage: no bindi, sindoor, mangalsutra or kangans. There is no male equivalent of the category 'suhaagan'.

That category takes unspoken centre stage here, politically and aesthetically. Markers of suhaag, a tulsi plant, a gota-edged dupatta, a red bangle -- dominate the stage design. The atmosphere is redolent with the sights and smells of traditional Hindu domesticity, its sensory excess deliberately suffocating. A brass diya is lit and blown out; marigolds are crushed in a closed fist; spices are ground on a stone. Actors Manisha Mondal and Bharati Perwani wear the richest of crimson saris, using their yards of silken sheen alternately to suggest unravelling and bondage, eroticism and blood.

Given the reverence with which Tagore is treated, Saha's confident adaptation is noteworthy. She leaves out lines, weaves in the voices of Virginia Woolf and Amrita Pritam, and calls the play Her Letters rather than 'The Wife's Letter'. But its animating force remains the unnamed, unnameable relationship between Mrinal and Bindu, a young girl she takes under her wing and who, in turn, adores her. As in Tagore's tale, Mrinal's husband remains a distant cipher. The greatest irony of all this wifeliness is how little her husband has touched her soul.

Published in India Today, 3 Feb 2018.

When the Spirit Moves You

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

Fifty years after Bimal Roy's death, his gorgeously-filmed Madhumati still haunts Hindi cinema.

Simultaneously derided and applauded as Bimal Roy's most commercially successful film, Madhumati (1958) has a plot that combines two of Hindi cinema's most abidingly popular narratives. The first of these is the educated city-dwelling babu falling in love with a simple village girl (an early example of that storyline was Raj Kapoor's 1949 hit Barsaat, written by Ramanand Sagar). The second is reincarnation: a plot theme which Madhumati is said to have inaugurated in Hindi cinema - though Kamal Amrohi's Mahal, which released the same year as Barsaat, also had the hero arriving in an old house for the first time and coming to believe that he is the reincarnation of someone who had once been associated with the place in a previous life. 

Bimal Roy certainly took some inspiration from Mahal, but Madhumati - based on a script written by, of all people, Ritwik Ghatak - is much more comfortable with the reincarnation theme than Mahal was, not shying away from it in favour of scientific explanations. The ghost here really exists. 

Roy shoots the house with painterly ghostliness -- the doors that seem to swing open by themselves, the slowly swaying chandelier, the shadow of the old chowkidar's stooping frame as he climbs the stairs is grotesquely enlarged. 

Paintings - present and absent - are in fact a crucial element of Madhumati's realisation of the unseen. The first thing that Dilip Kumar says on entering the empty haveli is "Wasn't there a painting hanging on the wall here?" Later, like with Ashok Kumar in Mahal, it is a painting that helps brings the past back to him. Unlike in Mahal, though, the painting is not of our hero, but by him. I'll come back later to why this seems of some consequence. 

Ghatak's script echoes what I once described (in a 2011 essay called 'Tagore for Beginners') as a classic Tagore narrative, and what might be a classic Bengali one: the urban young man who arrives at a small provincial outpost, his head full of a modernity that seems to cut him off from his surroundings. In Tapan Sinha's 1960 film version of one of Tagore's most famous ghost stories, Khudito Pashan (The Hunger of Stones), for instance, Soumitra Chatterjee plays a young revenue collector in a remote area who is ostensibly too rational to listen to the locals, and ends up being haunted by a beautiful phantom. 

A man becoming besotted with a spirit is perhaps one of the oldest ghost story tropes, extending across the world to Japan—I'm thinking of one of my favourite supernatural films, Kenji Mizoguchi's marvellous The Tale of Ugetsu. 

But Madhumati is not set in a timeless past. Between Ghatak and Roy, it is not surprising that the script features quite a specific politico-historical structure: a tribal hill milieu in which we're told that a rebellion against the feudal-capitalist landlords has been crushed brutally in the past. The decadent, exploitative zamindar at the top of the social hierarchy is challenged by the educated young Nehruvian socialist hero. The young hero works for the zamindar's timber company and thus represents the same extractive interests, but his relationship to the locals is one of attempted egalitarianism. 

In Madhumati this relationship between the new, modernising world and the old one is not one of proselytisation. Instead it's in what I'm going to call the 'Discovery of India' mode: conjuring up an urban, rational viewer only to let the hero experience the inescapable sweep of the land that surrounds him: through its natural beauty, its music and dance, its beliefs. 

The Dilip Kumar we meet first is a typical shehri babu: hurrying his hapless chauffeur along the rain-lashed mountain road, acting irritable when a landslide blocks the path, and only very reluctantly walking up to the old haveli to take shelter. But once inside, this city-slicker who was least interested in anything except reaching his destination, finds himself gripped by the old house. The house seems to pause time, and allow us to enter another time. 

The Dilip Kumar of that previous time is a much more open, curious sort. He arrives in the same hills walking, not being driven. As he pauses to take in the sights and sounds, so do we. Painting emerges as his way of documenting this world: he draws the trees and plants and hills, but also the merry-go-round at the local mela. Finally he requests a sitting with local belle -- and it is while painting her that love happens. 

The painting reappears in the narrative after Madhu has disappeared: the image is now a ghostly surrogate for the missing girl, even seeming to come alive with jealous rage when her lover is distracted from the thought of her. It is also a form of evidence on whose basis Dilip Kumar persuades a real-life double of Vyjayanthimala -- a modern young woman called Madhavi who is coincidentally holidaying in the region - to enact the part of Madhu, prompting the murderer (a superbly effective Pran) to confess. (That particular part of the plot was used without credit in Farah Khan's Om Shanti Om, leading to Bimal Roy's daughter Rinki Bhattacharya filing a complaint). 

Unlike, say, Hitchcock's Vertigo, where the hero's obsession with a face is such that he manages to fall 'in love' with a different person bearing the same features, Madhumati suggests a more binding union of souls. The sophisticated "Miss Madhavi" may reproduce Madhu's seductive 'Bichhua' in a proscenium performance of "Santhal dance" for "poor schoolchildren", but she cannot embody the untainted folk spirit.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 Mar 2016.

Insiders, Outsiders: Ghare Baire

My Mumbai Mirror column today: 

Satyajit Ray's film adaptation of Tagore's 1916 novel brings to life the dangers of nationalism, then and now.



Over the last week, as the BJP government gave its most lawless supporters free rein to harangue and harass anyone who dare question their party line on 'nationalism', I have thought often of Tagore. If you think Tagore was a nature-loving, poetry-spouting sort, writing paeans to the ineffable spirit and teaching young people to think about history, literature and the arts in a tree-filled setting - well, yes, he was that. But unlike what the newly-emboldened tribe of JNU-bashers (Chetan, Chandan, et al) would have us believe, sensitivity sharpens the brain. 

Reading Tagore on nationalism is startling. He is uncannily clear-eyed about an ideology still bearing poisonous fruit, a hundred years after he critiqued it. 

In the 1916 essay 'Nationalism in India', he wrote: "I am not against one nation in particular, but against the general idea of all nations. What is the Nation? It is the aspect of a whole people as an organised power. This organisation incessantly keeps up the insistence of the population on becoming strong and efficient... thereby man's power of sacrifice is diverted from his ultimate object, which is moral, to the maintenance of this organisation, which is mechanical. Yet in this he feels all the satisfaction of moral exaltation and therefore becomes supremely dangerous to humanity." All those currently abusing and beating up people in the Nation's name are certainly experiencing moral exaltation--while they grow ever more dangerous to humanity. 

But this is a column about cinema, and it is a film that I am here to recommend. In 1984, Satyajit Ray adapted Tagore's novel Ghare Baire, also published in 1916, for the screen. The Home and the World is often relegated to Ray's minor works. Perhaps it is too much of a chamber piece for a political period drama, and perhaps the acting is occasionally stilted. But Ghare Baire is a film of rare political complexity, made rarer by its accessibility. 

Relationships between the three primary characters unfold against the backdrop of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal. The serious Nikhil (played by Victor Banerjee) is the educated zamindar, a believer in companionate marriage, who urges his wife not just to get lessons from a memsahib, but to step out of purdah. Only if she is free to meet other men, says Nikhil, will her love for him pass the test. His wife Bimala (Swatilekha) is first reluctant to break out of her traditional role, and later overwhelmed by the choices such freedom offers. Finally, there is Sandip (Soumitra Chatterjee), Nikhil's college-mate and a charismatic orator who wants to use the zamindar's house as a base for nationalist mobilisation. 

It might have seemed a simplistic device - one character for, one against, and the third temporarily swayed - were the characters not so well-etched. With Sandip, Tagore is able to portray all the attractions of nationalism - and its horrific dangers. The first of these is that nationalism celebrates an immediacy of feeling over rational thought, 'natural' intuition over argument. Having been introduced to Bimala, Sandip asks her opinion of his rousing speech. "I haven't had much time to think about it," she says shyly. "But that's why I want to know what you *feel*," declares Sandip. "Leave the thinking to him!" 

Bimala concedes that hearing the assembled crowd chant Vande Mataram gave her goosebumps. "And so it should," says Sandip. "But do you know your husband doesn't believe in our mantra?" Nikhil's reply is perhaps the film's most memorable line of dialogue: "But I do not believe in any sort of intoxicant." 

Tagore is also scarily prescient about how turning the nation into an imagined figure called Bharat Mata allows people to do anything at all in the name of "worshipping her": "Ja korchhe shob-i ma-er jonno (Everything they're doing is for the mother)," says Nikhil drily. Young boys under the spell of Swadeshi hurl stones at a harmless old memsahib, rob innocents, even murder. When poor Muslim tradesmen refuse to heed the Swadeshi call because their economic survival depends on cheap British goods, Sandip's nationalism is quick to adopt both underhand and violent tactics, eventually leading to a communal riot. 

"Do the traders in the haat not belong to the nation?" asks Nikhil in anger when a group of angry young Hindu men try to coerce him into banning British goods in his zamindari area. "There are Muslims in this country, this is a historical fact." Tagore's 1916 essay had also pointed out the hypocrisy of claiming to forge a political unity called the nation while society remained so starkly divided: "The very people who are upholding these ideals are themselves the most conservative in their social practice. Nationalists say, for example, look at Switzerland, where, in spite of race differences, the peoples have solidified into a nation. Yet, remember that in Switzerland the races can mingle, they can intermarry, because they are of the same blood. In India there is no common birthright. And when we talk of Western Nationality we forget that the nations there do not have that physical repulsion, one for the other, that we have between different castes." 

Sandip's high-minded speeches pay lip service to Hindu-Muslim unity -- after all, Swadeshi arose in the wake of Lord Curzon's division of Bengal. Yet his politics, on the ground, involves the unashamed oppression of poor Muslims. The manipulation of the majoritarian mind, the cynical polarisation of people by demagogues -- the scenario enacted in Ghare Baire is chillingly familiar. It seems unbelievable that we have been living this narrative for at least a century -- and still cannot not see through the fog.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Feb 2016.

Post Facto - The Marrying Kind: Domestic portraits from east and west

From this fortnight's Sunday Guardian column:

"We tend to talk informally about other people's marriages and to disparage our own talk as gossip. But gossip may be the beginning of moral inquiry, the low end of the platonic ladder which leads us to self-understanding. We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves..." It was with this remarkable train of thought that Phyllis Rose set in motion her absorbing examination of the private lives of five 19th century couples — Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1983). Her motives were partly feminist — scrutinising the balance of power and equality within each relationship — and partly literary. 'Literary' not just because at least one half of each couple is a writer — Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle, Effie Gray and John Ruskin, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes — but in the wider sense that the act of living involves imposing a narrative form onto our experience. Marriage — and Rose was concerned with the long-term nature of these partnerships, not their legal status — was thus fascinating to the biographer-critic, because it takes the same life experience and gives us two (often contrasting) narratives of it. 

So Ruskin is able to see his failure to consummate his marriage as a choice, and his wife's desire for company as wilful and petty — while Effie sees him as strange and cold, brutal in his refusal to accommodate her normal human desires. Dickens' marriage provides a different sort of example, in which Dickens' own narrative changes. In the early years, Dickens was thrilled with being married: his household was arranged for him, the distraction of romantic entanglements was curbed, he could focus wholly on work – and children seemed only to make him happy. "He enjoyed himself as a family man, the centre of a growing circle of devoted people. He took satisfaction in how well he was able to provide for them." It was only after 15 years that Dickens decided that his wife and he were absolutely mismatched. The amiability and willingness to go along that had made Catherine a perfectly adequate partner now appeared to him as supine acquiescence. He transferred onto her all his dissatisfaction with the marriage, even — in a bizarre but recognisable pattern — the responsibility for her continuing pregnancies."

This column continues on the Sunday Guardian site. Read all of it here.