Home on the Train

My column for TOI Plus/Mumbai Mirror:

What the 1956 Ava Gardner starrer Bhowani Junction tells us about the British, Anglo-Indians and the railways in colonial India 

In last week's column, I drew on Awtar Kaul's film 27 Down to evoke the way that India's train network can sometimes stand in for the country itself. But of course, the Indian Railways were not always so Indian. Along with cricket and the English language, trains are often spoken of as one of the 'gifts' of British colonialism. Such imperialist phrasing remains fiercely debated, as it should be, given that the British certainly didn't create the railway network to connect Indians with one another, or even primarily for passengers. The railways were built to help transport raw materials and finished goods, to speed up the opening of the Indian market to the colonial economy -- and British private investors were guaranteed returns by the government, based on Indian revenues.

But what was created was something that endured, and became the lifeline of the empire. It isn't surprising, then, that the British colonial imagination identified deeply with the railways. One of the films to display this most vividly was the 1956 MGM extravaganza Bhowani Junction, directed by George Cukor (Gaslight, The Philadelphia Story, My Fair Lady) and based on a bestselling 1954 novel of the same name by John Masters.

Masters, who had served in the British Indian army, set his narrative just before Independence, crafting a classic colonial story in which the noble British are only trying to pull out peacefully while the Congress leadership is intent on the non-violent but continuous disruption of peace, and a violent Indian Communist organiser is trying to make sure there is a “bloodbath” when the British leave – so that “Moscow” can take over. And fascinatingly, almost all the action in the film revolves around trains. Some sequences make only incidental or dramatic use -- such as a passing train hiding a murder. But in most, the railways have a starring role: The action involves either letting a train through (to rescue dangerous explosives), rescuing victims from a deliberate train accident (caused by the villainous Communist straw man), or preventing a train from blowing up with Gandhi on board (an artfully colonial postcolonial narrative, in which it is a British colonel who keeps the great Indian alive).

Whatever one thinks of this portrayal of India (with not a single Indian in the primary cast, of course, and white actors in blackface spouting a bizarre range of accents), Masters had enough experience of India to get some things right. He knew that colonial policy had staffed the railways, especially at the lower rungs, with Anglo-Indians – a mixed-race community that was equally a creation of empire. And so Bhowani Junction's heroine is an Anglo-Indian. Played by the striking Hollywood star Ava Gardner, Victoria Jones makes her cinematic entry getting off a train -- in uniform, but on leave. After four years at headquarters in Delhi, she's coming home – to her sleepy old town, her Anglo-Indian engine driver father and her waiting Anglo-Indian boyfriend Patrick, who also works in the railways.

But 'home' seems harder and harder to define. The British are preparing to leave India for good, leaving the Anglo-Indians vulnerable to both political and social upheaval. Their unspoken position in the social hierarchy is articulated in the film in Patrick's rather sad sense of racial superiority -- below the colonial masters, but striving to be somehow above the vast mass of Indians. Meanwhile, there are European villains -- British men who see Anglo-Indian girls as fair prey game; Western in tastes and dress, but not deserving of the same moral niceties as a genuine English memsahib. Victoria – despite her unsurpassably colonial naming for the late queen -- doesn't identify with the British, but she doesn't feel Indian either. So she spends much of the film trying to become 'truly' Indian, which seems to involve exchanging her skirts for diaphanous saris and contemplating conversion to Sikhism to marry her seriously dull suitor.

Victoria doesn't succeed. But what's incredible is how much Bhowani Junction, despite its impeccable Hollywood credentials, feels like an Indian melodrama. The slipping sari pallu, of course, but also a film told entirely in flashback by the hero – on a train; and sequences like the one in a gurdwara, where Gardner's character, with a dupatta on her head, has a dizzy spell while replaying all the film's previous important dialogues loudly inside her head, complete with imaginary echoes, in a way that would have fitted right into Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki.

Running (literally) from this crisis of identity, where does our Anglo-Indian heroine go? She turns up at the railway yard, to fall gratefully into the arms of her estranged engine-driver father – whom she calls Pater – and climb into the driver's cab with him. Like 27 Down's Sanjay, 20 years later, Victoria is a child of the railways. The trains she once childishly imagined as taking her to England, are now her safe space. India may be complicated, but the railway is home.

Published in TOI Plus/Mumbai Mirror, 11 Apr 2021.

Book Review: Archaeology and the Public Purpose

A special book about a special man. My review for Scroll.

This study of archaeologist MN Deshpande’s work highlights the integrity and zeal of a true scholar

Archaeology and the Public Purpose: Writings on and by MN Deshpande
by Nayanjot Lahiri. Oxford University Press, 2020.

Before anything else, a personal disclaimer, or rather, a claim: I briefly had the pleasure of knowing MN Deshpande. I met him not in the capacity of archaeologist and scholar, but as my school friend Mita’s grandfather, calling him Azoba as she did.

As Class XI students at Delhi’s Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, Mita and I often came back from school together to the Deshpande home. I was already interested in history, and although Madhusudan Narhar Deshpande was not the sort of grandfather to lecture teenagers floating around the house, I remember wonderful occasional conversations with him about ancient India. 

After one such chat, Azoba lent me his copy of Heinrich Zimmer’s Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. A classic of Indology, it was the perfect book to give an aesthetically and literarily-inclined history student at Delhi University, which I was to become soon after. I did not become a historian, but the book has remained in my bookshelf, its front page stamped with “MN Deshpande, Retired Director General of Archaeology”.

Heinrich Zimmer had held the Chair in Indian Philology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany from 1924 to 1938, but was forced to leave because of his criticism of Hitler. He moved first to Oxford and then to the USA. Soon after his arrival in New York, though, Zimmer died suddenly of pneumonia. Myths and Symbols is a collection of the lectures Zimmer delivered to his Columbia University students in the winter of 1941, posthumously compiled and published by Joseph Campbell in 1946 – the year the young Madhusudan became an Assistant Superintendent in the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), where he would serve his entire career, eventually retiring as Director General in 1978.

Deshpande was born exactly a century ago, in 1920, and historian Nayanjot Lahiri’s six essays in Archaeology and the Public Purpose do a stellar job of placing his career in context.

Since the early 2000s, historians have begun to engage with the history of Indian archaeology. Upinder Singh’s fine 2004 volume The Discovery of Ancient India, for instance, traces the establishment of the ASI as well as the individual contributions of archaeologists like Alexander Cunningham, JDM Beglar and James Burgess. 

Tapati Guha Thakurta’s Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India, also published in 2004, moves expertly between the colonial and postcolonial periods, and between institutional and individual histories. There are portraits of early Indian archaeological scholars like Rajendralal Mitra and Rakhaldas Banerjee, while other chapters explore moments when ancient Indian art and archaeology have emerged as crucial basis of flashpoints in our contemporary cultural politics: MF Husain’s depictions of Hindu goddesses, for instance, or the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi dispute, which hinged on archaeology.

But little has been written about Indian archaeology after independence. Recent Indian history is often a tricky project for historians, partly because sources are often scattered and hard to pin down. So it is fitting that Lahiri’s work on Deshpande emerges, at least partially, from her discovery of an archive.

Early career

The scholar-archaeologist’s family had preserved his personal papers, including personal diaries, notebooks, files, photographs (many of them not in the ASI archives) and professional writing (much of it previously unpublished). Lahiri adds her own research, archival and secondary, including things gleaned from her exchanges with family members, to paint a portrait of Deshpande as a member of a generation that came of age with Indian independence – personally as well as professionally.

The sole exception in a family of Maharashtrian doctors, he was raised by a father who had given up his government job in response to a call from Lokamanya Tilak. Having become a staunch Congressman, Deshpande’s father attended the 1936 Congress session at Faizpur, taking the sixteen-year-old Madhusudan along, though it was some 500 km from their home town Rahimatpur. It was on the same trip that father and son made an excursus to see the famous Ajanta caves – on which Deshpande would come to be an expert.

The search for academic excellence led young Madhusudan to Pune for the later years of schooling, and then to Fergusson College, renowned for language studies. But having started out as a traditional language-based scholar, specifically a Jainologist specialising in an ancient Prakrit language called Ardhamagadhi, how did Deshpande enter the relatively lesser-known field of archaeology?

Again, Lahiri’s answer to that question traverses the academic, institutional and social history of an era: the setting up of Deccan College as part of Pune’s educational renaissance; HD Sankalia’s rise to being the head of its archaeology department; Deshpande’s move to Deccan College coinciding with a two-month field training school in Taxila in 1944, devised by newly appointed ASI chief Mortimer Wheeler to address India’s scarcity of archaeological staff; Sankalia responding to Wheeler’s call by sending his best students to Taxila. Deshpande went too, becoming part of what was to become the defining cohort of post-independence South Asian archaeology.

He did return to Deccan College, but only to find that a Phd had been submitted on a topic very similar to his own, the scholar having remained under the radar because he was in jail (one assumes, though Lahiri doesn’t go into it, that this was one of many promising young Indians imprisoned during the Quit India agitation of 1942 – my mother’s father BM Singhi topped Banaras Hindu University’s Hindi MA exams from jail). Deshpande’s academic ambitions in Jain studies thus dampened, he took Sankalia’s advice and accepted one of the new ASI scholarships offered by Wheeler.

Multifaceted work

Lahiri’s biographical history of Deshpande and his cohort is full of details that offer unexpected pathways into the present. She reproduces, for instance, Wheeler’s Note to the Standing Committee on Education, in which he argues brilliantly and vociferously for an improvement in research on Indian heritage, rather than a “faint and usually sentimental consciousness that this great inheritance exists”.

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“[W]ithout a high standard of research at the back of it all, even the most general education will fall short of its goal,” predicts Wheeler. He adds a great metaphor that new India’s research-scorning new technocratic elite might benefit from hearing: a country’s ability to conduct high quality research, he writes, is like its ability to produce a Rolls Royce: it helps maintain “the standard of the less intricate piece of machinery with which most of us have to be content.”

Deshpande himself did not become a university-based teacher-researcher, but his academic interests – in the caves of the Western Deccan, in Prakrit inscriptions, and in the relationship between archaeology, ethnography and history – remained. But this volume’s rarity lies in capturing the enormously multi-faceted work of the practicing public archaeologist in the second half of the 20th century: someone who “conserved monuments, undertook fieldwork, managed museums, dealt with infractions of laws relating to antiquities and protected sites, spearheaded new legislation as also replied to the stream of questions relating to archaeology raised in every parliament session”.

Deshpande’s career ranged from excavations at remote field sites – he writes of working with his mentor Sankalia on “the banks of the Sabarmati in Gujarat and in the river valleys of the Malaprabha and Ghatprabha in Karnataka” – to supervising the conservation of protected monuments, a task that involves a great deal of science, from structural engineering to acoustics to chemistry.

Highlights from Deshpande’s career include executing a conservation plan for the famed Gol Gumbad in Bijapur; following up on Sheikh Abdullah’s personal interest to bring Srinagar’s Hari Parbat fort under ASI protection; working with Indira Gandhi’s government to help pass the watershed Antiquities and Art Treasures Act in 1976 to help prevent smuggling – and arguing against the same government when it proposed a polluting oil refinery at Mathura, only 40 km from the Taj Mahal, and a “beautifying” weir on the Yamuna that would affect the Taj’s foundations.

Much before Indira, Deshpande had encountered her father – when Nehru visited the Ajanta Caves in 1958 and Deshpande, then superintendent of the South-Western circle, took him and Edwina Mountbatten around the caves as “the highest ranking archaeologist of the ASI based in Aurangabad”. Lahiri’s delighted, delightful account – aided by ASI file notings on special toilet cleaning and candid photos from Deshpande’s albums – shows us a man who never missed a chance to visit historic ruins even as a supremely busy Prime Minister, wandering about Mandu for his free day after a Congress meeting in Indore, making and executing a second Ajanta visit to experience the enchantment of the paintings again – and to show them to Edwina.

At the heart of the book is a very different sort of instance of the archaeologist at work. Deshpande’s “jugalbandi” with the famed Chipko activist Chandi Prasad Bhatt is a little-known event that changed the fate of a well-known shrine. The story of how the historic Badrinath Temple was saved from being turned into just another Birla Mandir is a remarkable one.

The temple’s amalgamation of structures, built from the 11th century through to the early 20th, was in the process of being replaced with an all-new structure by the Jayshree Trust, named for the daughter of Basant Kumar Birla. A massive new concrete wall had been built and red sandstone had arrived from Agra, which would have led to a new temple in an architectural style far from local pahari traditions, and an altogether different modern scale.

Chandi Prasad Bhatt’s interventions – reaching out to Deshpande as the ASI chief in Delhi, appealing to the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, HN Bahuguna, and organising a public demonstration against the renovation – set in motion a train of events that eventually helped save the old structure. So different was Indian democracy in 1974 that we had politicians in power actually responding to agitating locals rather than being automatically on the side of the industrial magnates. 

More remarkably, when viewed from the flattened kneejerk responses of our present, public culture in that India did not equate service to history with being against tradition. A figure like MN Deshpande was emblematic of that India.

Own writings

The book is both on and by Deshpande, with more than half the volume devoted to an edited selection of Deshpande’s own writings (many translated from Marathi). These writings range widely across region, subject and style. Never verbose, Deshpande combines the archaeologist’s fine-toothed comb with an eye for what might interest the present-day layperson.

In a piece on the Maharashtrian site of Bahal, for instance, where he conducted fieldwork in 1952-3, Deshpande suggests that it may have lain on “the ancient route joining Bhrigukachha (Broach), the Barygaza of Ptolemy and Periplus, with Paithan (Pratishthan)”, been part of the kingdom of the Yadava kings of Devgiri in medieval times, and retained some degree of importance till Maratha times. He then explains why the place lost its importance: it did not lie on the railway route and became subservient to Chalisgaon, which is a junction on the Central Railways.

A scholar who limited himself to ancient times may not have ended the piece the way Deshpande does – his approach helps bring the ancient world alive, while also making a point about how the historical significance of a place depends on the vagaries of technocratic modernity.

Like his guru Sankalia, Deshpande wrote often in his native tongue, Marathi, to help communicate the archaeological worldview to laypeople. As a language scholar turned archaeologist, he was as comfortable with etymological theorising about the origin of the name Ajanta based on Pali proper names and local pronunciations as he was describing the specific architectural features of the chaityas at the site. In later life, Deshpande further developed his interest in local worship of various deities in the region, carrying out a fascinating archaeological anthropology that links the present with the past.

Despite his humanism and interest in communicating beyond scholarly circles, MN Deshpande was a true archaeologist: someone whose respect for the past was supreme. And unlike the bombast and lip-service that increasingly passes for “respect for the past” in India, this respect was measurable in the material details.

In a wonderful interview reproduced at the end of the volume, Deshpande explains how in conservation archaeology – the repair and maintenance of old structures and artwork – “structural stability is of prime importance, closely followed by aesthetic considerations.” He continues, “Some might argue that aesthetics is subjective but they would be wrong. An ancient monument signifies the achievements of a particular age and thus bears an indelible imprint...the solution of the problem of conservation of a monument lies in the complete understanding of the monument itself, that is why it cannot be left to civil engineers and practising architects.”

Spending time in Deshpande’s company helps us learn how to learn from the past. It is a lesson Indians sorely need.

Published in Scroll, 7 Feb 2021.

Shelf Life -- Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: Measuring Civilisation

Shelf Life is a monthly column I write on clothes in books.

In RL Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Alberto Manguel's Stevenson Under the Palm Trees, clothing makes us human

Banner: Poster for a theatrical adaptation of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

When a literary character becomes part of the language, you know that the writer – that strange solitary creature delivering into print the outpourings of her mind – has caught something in the zeitgeist that needed expressing. 'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde', thought up by Robert Louis Stevenson when Longman's Magazine requested a ghost story for their 1885 Christmas Special, first gained popularity as a “shilling shocker” or “penny dreadful”, a novel of crime or violence sold cheaply. Soon it seemed the Victorian parable par excellence – the respectable Dr Jekyll whose secret sinful side walks the streets as the evil Mr. Hyde was a fitting fictional allegory for an era of repressed feeling. But the “Jekyll and Hyde” idea acquired much wider resonance, the temptation of immorality striking a chord with anyone who has ever hidden a part of themselves from society, or suppressed their transgressive desires.

Book covers of RL Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde over the years.

Stevenson's writing may seem long-winded to the 21st century reader, but it is spare, offering detailed descriptions only when necessary to his narrative – the feel of the neighbourhood in which Hyde is first seen, the spatial arrangements of Dr Jekyll's house. Since we never hear of Dr Jekyll's clothes, we assume they were appropriate for a Victorian gentleman of the sort Dr Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S. undoubtedly was. But when the book's narrator, the doctor's old friend and lawyer Mr Utterson, is called upon to break into his laboratory, the “still twitching” body he finds there is “dressed in clothes far too large for him, clothes of the doctor's bigness”. Another eyewitness account describes Hyde's clothes as being “of rich and sober fabric” but “enormously too large for him in every measurement—the trousers hanging on his legs and rolled up to keep them from the ground, the waist of the coat below his haunches, and the collar sprawling wide upon his shoulders.” The effect, says Dr Lanyon, “would have made an ordinary person laughable” – but here the sense of evil makes laughter impossible.

Integral to Stevenson's tale is the idea of Dr Jekyll, described by his butler as “a tall, fine build of a man”, shrinking into a dwarf-like creature when he sheds his good qualities. The Jekyll and Hyde story influenced many future narratives of duality, the most popular of which might be the Incredible Hulk, a favourite Marvel Comics superhero. Writer-editor Stan Lee, who first created the Hulk in 1962, says he was inspired by Stevenson's story alongside Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's monster. Like the violent Mr. Hyde, the Hulk is an animalistic alter ego who takes shape when a respectable man of science – Jekyll, Bruce Banner – is overwhelmed by uncontrollable emotions. But instead of becoming smaller, the Hulk turns into a giant, his muscular green body ripping the mousy Banner's ordinary clothes to shreds.

Cover, The Incredible Hulk #1 Marvel Comics (May, 1962).

What is common to these visions of the hero's metamorphosis into something not quite human, though, is that his clothes no longer fit him. And shedding one's clothes is, in some ineffable way, to drop the veneer that keeps one human.

The writing of Jekyll and Hyde has been the subject of its own mythology. Stevenson wrote it while convalescing in the British seaside town of Bournemouth. In one version, it originated as a nightmare. Some have spoken of a first draft that Stevenson burnt after his wife Fanny said his story had “missed the allegory”, while his stepson Lloyd Osbourne has described him as coming downstairs in a fever to read half a first draft aloud. His later biographers have claimed he wrote it under the influence of cocaine, or a fungus called ergot.

Whatever the truth of these narratives, Stevenson certainly led an interesting life. Having fallen in love with Fanny – an American woman ten years older than him, with three children – in 1875, he travelled with her before and after their marriage in 1880. Stevenson and Fanny and their children travelled the South Seas for three years before settling down in 1890 on a plot of 400 acres he bought on a Samoan island, taking the native name Tusitala – 'Teller of Tales'. This was where he died in 1894. 

A book cover for the superbly inventive, deceptively simple Stevenson Under The Palm Trees.

The writer Alberto Manguel has crafted Stevenson's last Samoan years into a stunning little novella called Stevenson Under the Palm Trees (2002), mixing the known biographical facts with a disturbing reimagining that is perhaps a fitting tribute to Stevenson's own fevered mind – in particular, to Jekyll and Hyde. And here again, clothes come to the forefront. The nakedness of the Samoans is repeatedly contrasted to the buttoned-up world of Stevenson's Scottish childhood, his mother's stiff, lace-edged dresses to the sun-soaked softness of the Samoan matrons. Stevenson is well-loved in Samoa, his public persona perfectly at peace with the islanders' own comfort in their skin. But is it possible, asks Manguel's haunting story, that a lovely young girl's barely covered body arouses his basest instincts? Has the idea of nakedness seeped into our minds so deeply as 'uncivilised' that we dehumanise those without clothes? By making clothes the measure of civilisation, it is our gaze that reveals itself as bestial.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 17 Sep 2020

Shelf Life: Do Clothes Make the Woman?

The August edition of my column for The Voice of Fashion, on clothes seen through the prism of literature:

A story from Nisha Susan’s The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories casts clothes as signifiers of selfhood

All the world's a stage, but not all men and women are players. Meena, Annie and Nayantara – the self-declared “goddesses” of Nisha Susan's story 'The Trinity' – clearly are. Susan's deftly-drawn Kochi undergrads are all crackling confidence, their position atop the social pyramid propped up by each other's presence. Even before their 'fusion dance' choreographies start to win gold medals and glory, the trio is already living out their lives before an imagined applauding public. “In college, when the three of us walked in, I used to feel like we were in those campus film-like slow motion scenes,” says the story's narrator Nayantara. “Not like the fat twenty-five year-old heroines in Malayalam campus films, but Hindi film heroines.”

Costuming, of course, is crucial to a successful performance – and the trinity is always ahead of the curve, not part of the herd: “We were thin and tall before anyone else was thin and tall... We had good sunglasses, not those big, ugly Gulf-return ones. We wore ghagras at weddings before anyone else did. We draped dupattas over our elbows casually, even though our arms ached by the end of the day.” Sometimes their clothes stage liberatory forms of public disguise. On a trip to Thiruvananthapuram, they walk around “pretending to be NRI Malayalis who did not understand Malayalam”, their tight jeans and sunglasses a license to do things that local girls might attract censure for, like inspecting the city's famously naked giant mermaid statue. At other times, they design costumes for an actual stage – on the same Thiruvananthapuram trip, their combining of sleeveless sari blouses and salwars with tightly draped dupattas electrifies and scandalises the Malayali youth fest audience. (“Malayalis have this thing about 'sleeveless'. Sleeveless means bad girl. Usha Uthup-voice bad girl. Never mind that stomach and back and breasts are showing when you wear a regular sari blouse.”)

'The Trinity' is part of The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories (Westland, 2020), Susan's debut collection. The book's unifying thematic premise is India's digital landscape: it couldn't be more contemporary. But reading it made me think of a story from 132 years ago: Rudyard Kipling's 'A Second-Rate Woman', first published in 1888, and reissued most recently in a selection of Kipling stories named for a recurring character, Lessons for Mrs. Hauksbee (Speaking Tiger, 2017). Mrs. Hauksbee is the toast of colonial Simla (or Shimla), her very name a suggestive nod to her eagle eye and her queen-bee-like talent for gathering the young and bright around her. 

In this particular story, Mrs. Hauksbee is preoccupied with a recently-arrived Mrs. Delville, who is drawing disproportionate male attention in Simla society. This is grossly unfair, says Mrs. H, because Mrs D always looks like she “stood in middle of the room while her ayah – no, her husband – it must have been a man – threw her clothes at her”. “To dress as an example and stumbling block for half Simla... and then to find this Person... draws the eyes of men,” she rages, “It's almost enough to make one discard clothing.” So “disgustingly badly dressed” is Mrs. D, that Mrs. H labels her the Dowd – and the man paying court to her the Dancing Master. Back to Susan's opening paragraph: “We used to have names for everyone, and everyone had names for us.”

That bitchily competitive fashion-first vibe, the ruthless gaze the cool girls turn upon uncool ones, has apparently been around forever – and isn't going anywhere. Mrs. D's bonnet is terrible, her Terai sunhat has elastic under her chin, and “if she ever darkened these doors, I should put on this robe... to show her what a morning wrapper ought to be,” says Mrs. H to her friend Mrs. Mallowe. Whether the stage is the stiflingly small British circuit of 1880s Simla – the Mall, Library, horse rides to Jakko (Jhakhoo), dances at the Viceregal Lodge – or the equally tiny Indian college fest scene circa 2000, it seems that clothes remain our top signifiers of selfhood. When Mrs. M ventures timidly, “Do you suppose that the Delville woman has humour?”, Mrs. H scoffs at the possibility: “Her dress betrays her. How can a Thing who wears her supplément under her left arm have any notion of the fitness of things – much less their folly?” I thought of the goddesses with dupattas over their aching arms.

A vintage image of Lower Bazaar, Simla (Shimla).

When persona is crafted from clothes, getting them wrong makes one non grata. In both stories, though, it is the sharp dressers that get it wrong. The Dowd turns out far stauncher than Mrs. Hauksbee imagines, telling men off and saving babies, provoking Mrs. H to declare, “I love that woman in-spite of her clothes.” Meanwhile the goddesses conducting feisty sex lives on the internet – without getting caught on camera like their silly college-mates – abruptly become arranged-marriage wives. Perhaps clothes can only tell you so much. 

And yet sometimes they catch up with our inner selves, when we are not looking. We used to call girls with white lace hankies Kerchief Kumaris, says Nayantara at the start of 'The Trinity'. When, she wonders, did she start carrying one?

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 27 Aug 2020

"You Maid Me Better"

Forgot to put this up earlier: my Shelf Life column for April. (Shelf Life is a monthly column I write for the website 'The Voice of Fashion', on clothes seen through the prism of literature.)

Doris Lessing, who debuted with the great novel The Grass is Singing

As the national COVID-19 lockdown enters its third week, privileged Indians are being forced to acknowledge how many of our comforts are enabled by the labour of those we euphemistically call 'help'. Servants are the invisible glue that keeps the Indian family together, taking up the physical and emotional burdens of domesticity that most middle class men dump so blithely on their wives. But if dependence is one aspect of our unacknowledged relationships with servants, the other is intimacy.

In 1765, British judge Sir William Blackstone listed the master-servant relationship as the first of three “great relations of private life” (the other two were between husband and wife, and parent and child). He saw something many are still loath to admit. The greater the ubiquity of domestic staff, the more the social distance between employers and servants is policed. In her wonderfully readable Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth Century Britain, Lucy Lethbridge remarks on the separation of social spaces enforced by the British aristocracy, “whose most intimate secrets, paradoxically, had long been shared with the valet or the ladies' maid who undressed and bathed them”.

Clothes have been central to this relationship. For centuries, the personal servant took care of the employer's clothes, laid out their outfits – and often actually dressed them. The servant's role in the master's or mistress's toilette has been at the centre of many literary depictions. One such relationship is between PG Wodehouse's bumbling young aristocrat Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, his valet. Jeeves rules Bertie's wardrobe with an iron hand, perpetually giving away clothes that he thinks inappropriate for a true scion of the upper classes, scotching Bertie's attempts at fashion. Under Jeeves' stiff upper lip lie unutterable depths of emotion: Bertie's one-time decision to grow a moustache creates a rift between him and Jeeves that feels almost lover-like.

That “almost” ripens to fullness in Sarah Waters' marvellous thriller Fingersmith (2002), in which a petty thief sets herself up as ladies' maid to an heiress. The orphaned Sue Trinder is a perfect Dickensian character. Her version of Fagin is called Gentleman, a trickster swell who teaches her the ins and outs of clothes she has never had occasion to wear. Beginning with the delicious double entendres of Gentleman's first lesson (“Are you ready for it now, miss? Do you like it drawn tight?...Oh! Forgive me if I pinch.”), Waters imbues the Victorian lady's wardrobe with frisson. The layers of garments are secret links between mistress and maid: the chemise, camisole, corset, the stays that hold the body close, while the nine-hoop crinoline floats, unwitting, above it all. Sure enough, Sue's pleasure in the keeping of Maud's gowns and silken petticoats blooms slowly into a sensual attachment to the keeping of Maud herself—a secret love that will not be suppressed.

Sue's relationship with Maud's clothes reminded me of the chilling scene in Daphne Du Maurier's iconic 1938 novel Rebecca, when the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers insists on making the book's unnamed young heroine caress the late Rebecca's nightgown, laid out on her bed as if she might walk in any minute. “'Feel it, hold it,' [Mrs. Danvers] said, 'how soft and light it is, isn't it? I haven't washed it since she wore it for the last time... I did everything for her, you know... We tried maid after maid but not one of them suited. “You maid me better than anyone, Danny,” she used to say. “I won't have anyone but you.’”

The fictional Rebecca's inability to find a single maid that “suited” was probably Mrs. Danvers' wishful imagination, but it may have also reflected an upper class predicament that grew more widespread, as the First World War and then the Second altered the social aspirations of the working class in Europe. In the colonies, of course, there was an inexhaustible supply of cheap labour only too grateful to find work in the white man's household. The friction in the early years of empire resulted from attempts to train domestic staff across the vast gulf not just of class, but of cultural knowledge–and racial suspicion. Emma Roberts was likely fairly representative of the colonial memsahib in India when she complained in 1835 that native ayahs did not take the “slightest pains to make themselves acquainted with the mysteries of the European toilette; they dress their ladies all awry, and martyrdom is endured whenever they take a pin in hand: they have no notion of lacing, buttoning, or hook-and-eyeing...”That clueless privileged voice, complaining of the 'uncultured' servant, can still be heard all around us.

But a class of colonial servants was gradually trained, and as Lethbridge points out, the domestic life of the British in India grew to levels of display unmatched in world history. In the more remote outposts, in Africa for instance, English-style formalities could be impossibly tough to keep up. Among the great depictions of such fraught intimacy between black servant and white mistress is in Doris Lessing's stunning debut novel The Grass is Singing (1950). Towards the end, a white visitor is shocked to find the native servant Moses buttoning up his mistress Mary's dress. He attempts to joke about it, telling Mary about an empress of Russia who “thought so little of her slaves, as human beings, that she used to undress in front of them”. Lessing is astute as always, commenting: “It was from this point of view that he chose to see the affair; the other was too difficult for him.”

Anthropologist Raka Ray's fieldwork in Kolkata poses a similar question: how do people reconcile having male servants with a highly sex-segregated society like India's? Male servants walk in and out of bedrooms, are present at intimate moments when other men wouldn't be and handle women's clothes. One elderly lady says to Ray, “A servant isn't really a man; a servant is a servant.”

Among the subtlest fictional portrayals of this space of unsettling intimacy is Manto's short story 'Blouse'. When Shakeela Bibi flings off her vest for the teenaged Momin to take to the shop, he finds himself rubbing it between his fingers. “[I]t was soft as a kitten”, “the smell of her body still resided in it”, and “all this was very pleasing to him,” writes Manto. Shakeela's newly stitched purple satin blouse triggers a dreamscape whose eroticism is not even part of Momin's conscious mind. The deputy saab's wife and daughters remain oblivious, like saabs and memsaabs too often are: “Who could play that much attention to the lives of servants? They covered all of life's journeys on foot, from infancy to old age, and those around them never knew anything of it.”

As our unacknowledged intimates, servants have too long been treated as shock absorbers for our inner lives, our troubles. It is high time we recognise that they have their own.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 13 April 2020.

Not Just Company Ltd.

A piece I did for India Today in February:

Indian art created for the East India Company is a revelation in both content and style.

By the late 18th century, Indian artists found it increasingly difficult to earn a living from the declining centres of the Mughal court or its successors. Meanwhile, they began receiving commissions from patrons affiliated to the East India Company. The art these painters created for expatriates has never received its due.

As the sun set on the British empire, these were no longer displayed proudly in the UK, nor studied much in a newly independent India. In 2014, when art historian B.N. Goswamy picked out 101 images for his Spirit of Indian Painting, only one was a Company commission.

The very name ‘Company School’ betrays its emphasis on the colonial patrons “while excluding any reference (even geographical) to the artists who created beautiful works of art”, notes art historian Henry Noltie, whose essay on 18th and early 19th century Indian botanical drawings is part of a superb new volume called Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, published alongside the first exhibition of Company-commissioned Indian art, on at the Wallace Collection in London till April 19, 2020. The show and the book have both been put together by author and historian William Dalrymple, whose interest in early colonialism has sustained a literary career, from White Mughals (2002) to his most recent, The Anarchy (2019). 

Sumptuously produced yet scholarly, Forgotten Masters features a hundred masterworks by artists like Bhawani Das, Sita Ram, Shaikh Zain ud-Din of Patna, Shaikh Amir of Karraya, Yellapah of Vellore, and Ghulam Ali Khan of Delhi. As the names show, ‘Company School’ artists were from different communities and may have trained in the Mughal, Maratha, Pahari, Punjabi, Tamil or Telugu traditions. Their subjects, too, were varied—botany, architecture, but also daily life, festivals, modes of transport and, crucially, ordinary people.

The Impey Children in Their Nursery,
by Shaikh Zain ud-din, C 1780 (Courtesy: Private Collection)

Since previous Indian courtly art was dominated by rulers, durbars and deities, Mildred Archer argues that this documentation of the Indian natural and social world “democratised Indian painting”. Many ordinary Indians appear, from dancing girls to servants of the new colonial household, palanquin bearers, the huge staff assembled for ‘The Impey Children in their Nursery’, or Shaikh Amir’s portraits of Indian grooms with the sahib’s dogs, horses and children. Nature had interested some Indian rulers, like Jahangir, but none appointed artists to document a personal zoo, as Justice Elijah and Lady Impey did in Calcutta. These gorgeous botanically accurate renditions of yams, palms or other plants by Manu Lall, Vishnupersaud and others; Shaikh Zain ud-Din’s birds or Haludar’s studies of macaques, gibbons or sloth bears for the surgeon Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, were new for India. 

Unlike the thick jewelled tones and decorative settings prized by Mughal and other Indian traditions, these images of soldiers, pujaris or city panoramas were often watercolours on white laid paper from England, with the surrounding area left empty. 

Cheetah, by Shaikh Zain ud-Din, for the Impey Album.

In Forgotten Masters, we see the European patron’s eyes turning the Indian miniaturist’s brush to the service of architectural and anthropological precision, for a brief glorious period before photography made these skills superfluous. These works should be celebrated as Indian, but also serve as a reminder that modernity in India began as colonial modernity.

Published in India Today, 28 Feb 2020.

Book review: An Englishman In Pune

A tiny book review of a not-so-tiny book, for India Today magazine in February:

Uday S. Kulkarni’s rendezvous with James Wales is a trip down an 18th century lane in India.

One of the first records of the artist James Wales is from 1777. Aged 30, he was evicted from his two-room tenement for failing to pay rent. According to the Edinburgh City Archives, his belongings were auctioned for £11 to pay off his landlady. In 1783, Wales moved to London and set himself up as a portrait and landscape painter. A chance meeting with the artist James Forbes led to a commission to complete Forbes’s sketches of India and, in 1791, with permission from the East India Company, Wales, by then 44 years old, boarded a ship for Bombay. 

Uday S. Kulkarni’s book is a painstakingly detailed and fulsomely illustrated account of Wales’s career in India, where he lived from July 1791 till his sudden death in November 1795. India had proven to be good for Wales—by February 1792, he was advertising a framed set of engraved prints of his ‘Twelve Views in Bombay’ for Rs 350. But the real turnaround in his fortunes came when Charles Malet, long-time British Resident, suggested Wales move to Pune. Based on Malet’s recommendations, he became the painter of choice for the local elite, from the Peshwa and Nana Phadnis to Company officials.

Wales’s masterful oil portraits (‘Peshwa in Durbar attended by his Minister’, ‘Nana Phadnis’, ‘Mahadji Scindia’, and ‘Con Saib’, a portrait of Nuruddin Hussain Khan) and his watercolours (of Ellora and Elephanta, among other antiquarian sites) provide a rare visual record of late 18th century India. But what makes this more than a coffee table book is Wales’s daily journals and frequent letters to England, which bring to life this enterprising, curious foreigner’s experience of a lost world, from ‘nautch’ girls dancing before antelopes at the Maratha durbar to observing preparations for a local sati. 

 

Published in India Today, 28 Feb 2020.

Blue-sky filmmaking

My Mirror column:

The late Mrinal Sen’s career took off with a 1959 film, Neel Akasher Neechey, a rare portrait of a Chinese protagonist in Indian cinema.

Mrinal Sen’s directorial career started with a hiccup. Raat Bhore, starring Uttam Kumar and Sabitri Chatterjee as the lead pair, was released the same year as Sen’s contemporary Satyajit Ray released Pather Panchali (1955). But while Pather Panchali made Ray the immediate toast of the town (and the world), Raat Bhore sank at the box office and was panned by the critics.

In 1959, however, Mrinal Sen made a second film, Neel Akasher Neechey, and this one gained him both popular approval and acclaim from high places. Even here, though, Sen was not the first choice as director. The singer-composer Hemanta Mukherjee (known to Hindi film-viewers as Hemant Kumar) was starting his own film production house and initially approached Sen only to write the script. It was only later, when he had disagreements with the director he had chosen, that Hemanta decided to offer the job to Sen.

Based on a piece called ‘Cheeni Feriwalla’ from the famous Hindi writer Mahadevi Varma’s book Smriti ki Rekhayein (Lines of Memory), the film traces the unexpected connection that develops between an itinerant Chinese peddler and a Bengali housewife who is an active participant in Gandhi's Civil Disobedience Movement. The treatment of the central relationship tugs unabashedly at heart-strings – Mrinal Sen later looked back at it as embarrassingly sentimental. But the thematic content is interesting even today.

Neel Akasher Neechey opens in the Kolkata of 1930, and in bringing that historical-political context to life with shots of newspaper headlines, nationalist speeches, and street-corner protests, Sen shows glimpses of the full-frontal political filmmaking that he would later be identified with. The first time we see our protagonist, Kali Banerjee as Wang Lu, he is but a blip on a screen dominated by a horde of schoolboys chanting, “The policeman’s stick, we don't fear it!” The city is in the grip of nationalist fervour, and the Chinese street seller is caught unawares. But the policeman who grabs him also lets him go almost immediately, recognising an outsider even as they both speak in Hindustani – as Calcuttans used to call the hybrid Hindi of the city’s streets, a lingua franca likely shaped by the Bengali speaker’s inability to handle the high genderedness of Khari Boli Hindi, and spoken by the polyglot city of Biharis and Anglo-Indians and Armenians and yes, the Chinese.

Among the first interactions the film shows between Wang and the locals is another troupe of children following him in the streets, yelling, “Here comes the Chinaman, he’ll take you away!” The scene offers up the first of the urban myths that seem to follow the foreigner in India. One little girl tries to stop the other kids, but even her childish sweetness is based on the belief that if you call a Chinaman a Chinaman, you’ll turn into one yourself, conjuring up what is to her clearly a horrifying vision (“Chinaman ke Chinaman bolle, shobai Chinaman hoye jabe”). Another weird Chinaman myth is provided by a household help called Haran, who claims they save their ill-gotten gains as gold teeth.

The exchange between Wang and the little girl evokes another important film of the period, Kabuliwala, which was made in Bengali in 1957 and in Hindi in 1961. Based on Tagore’s 1892 short story, it was also centred on a man from a distant country who walks the streets of Calcutta selling things. And sure enough, this is borne out by what happens next. Where the Afghan Kabuliwala saw his far-away daughter in the figure of little Mini, Sen’s lonely Chinese-silk-seller begins to see his long-lost sister in Basanti, the Bengali bhadramahila whose colloquial use of “bhai” Wang hears literally.

The sister-brother theme is, of course, one that has particular resonance in Bengali cinema, from Pather Panchali’s Durga and Apu to Ritwik Ghatak's Subarnarekha and Meghe Dhaka Tara. But here Sen uses it to a broader effect, suggesting a bond of kinship across class and language and country. He even brings in the rakhi-tying that was adopted by Bengal’s Swadeshi movement to produce a ritual bond between communities.

Calcutta’s Chinatown appeared in several big Hindi films of the period, notably Howrah Bridge (1958) and Chinatown (1962), both made by Shakti Samanta. But it served primarily as a setting for illegalities, with the depiction of the Chinese community stopping at Helen singing ‘Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu’ and Madan Puri as a Chinese villain named John Chang. In Neel Akasher Neechey, that depiction feels more substantial: the Tiretta Bazar ghetto where Wang lives, the Chinese temple where he once prays, the dhaba where a mix of locals and Chinese men eat, the latter eating their rice with chopsticks from a bowl. Together with a running stereotype of all Chinamen being involved in the opium trade, Sen creates a vivid picture of life in Calcutta as a Chinese alien.

And yet, in what might be the film’s most wonderful exchange, when the Swadeshi khadi-wearing woman tries to tell the Chinese man she doesn’t wear foreign stuff, he insists he is not a foreigner: “Eyes not blue, not foreigner, Chinaman!” Released in the era of Panchsheel, the film’s unspoken message of Indians and Chinese as being on the same side of a colonial divide was much appreciated by Nehru, who told Sen: “You have done a great service to the nation.”

It is a sad comment on how little faith our state has in our people that declining Sino-Indian relations after 1962 led the same film to be banned, albeit briefly.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Jan 2018.

The Chairman and the Mahatma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published in India Today, 12 Oct 2018.

The Hindustani Factor

My Mirror column:

Thinking about Tom Alter while watching Stephen Frears’ new film Victoria and Abdul makes one muse about linguistic connections.

In a great scene in Satyajit Ray's Shatranj ke Khiladi (1977), the somewhat hesitant Captain Weston is persuaded by the British general to whom he works as an assistant to recite something written by the king. The film, based on a short story by Premchand, was set in Lucknow, and “the king”, whom the British were then making plans to divest of his throne, was Nawab Wajid Ali Shah. Richard Attenborough, as the general, displays the perfect mix of bafflement and disdain at the thought of a king who spends his days praying (“Five times a day!” Attenborough remarks in shock), flying kites on his terrace, listening to music, watching dancers, and most mysterious of all, writing poetry. “I'm not a poetry man,” he confesses. “Many soldiers are. But I'm curious to know what it sounds like. I rather like the sound of Hindustani.”

Weston clears his throat discreetly, waiting. “Go on then, out with it,” says the general, with a gesture of faint impatience. “Sadma na pahunche koi mere jism-e-zaad par; ahista phool daalna mere mazaar par. Har chand khaakh mein thha, magar ta-falak gaya; dhokha hai aasmaan ka mere gubaar par,” recites Weston in an impeccable accent, before proffering an equally impeccable English translation -- and his opinion that the king is “really quite gifted, sir”.
Captain Weston must have been a strange part to play for the late Tom Alter. On the one hand, it allowed the white man with a love of Urdu poetry to channel both those aspects of himself on screen. On the other hand, the only way he could do that was as a British colonial army officer, someone whose job it was to help dismantle the very world he so admired.

Alter went on to play a string of colonial Angrez characters in a succession of popular Hindi films, but none of them, to my knowledge, ever displayed alove of Urdu. That attachment to the language was something Alter was forced to place in a different compartment: the theatre. In 1999 or 2000, Alter started working with some Urdu poetry by an old friend called Idraak Bhatti. Then his old FTII friends Uday Chandra and Chander Khanna got involved, one performing Kafka's Metamorphosis and the other with a rendition of Maithili Sharan Gupt's famous Jayadrath Vadh poem, and a production called Trisanga was born. Through the 2000s, in plays staged by the Delhi-based Pierrot's Troupe, Alter enthusiastically played the nationalist leader Maulana Azad, and later the Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib himself. In the last few years, Alter appeared often on Urdu programmes, telling us in impeccable Hindustani that the great Dilip Kumar had once told him that sher-o-shairi was the secret to good acting.

And yet, when Alter died on September 29 this year, very few obituaries placed his facility with the language in the historical context they should have. Alter belonged to the third generation of a family of Presbyterian missionaries who had come to India from Ohio in the mid-19th century. His father was born in Sialkot, but moved this side of the border at Partition. The 1950-born Alter spent his childhood in Mussoorie, Allahabad, Jabalpur, Saharanpur and Rajpur, learning – as did all members of his parents' order – to recite Biblical texts in Urdu and Hindi. With his blue eyes and blond hair, language was simply what allowed Tom Alter to claim his Indianness.

In a rather silly new film called Victoria and Abdul, the fetching Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal), low-level employee of aprison in Agra, is picked to go to England to present the queen with a gold coin issued for her Golden Jubilee in 1887. But the redoubtable, gluttonous Queen Victoria (played to perfection by Judi Dench, for the second time after Mrs. Brown) is portrayed as being thoroughly charmed by the much younger Abdul. Seemingly on the strength of a few faux-philosophical meditations he makes about carpets, she appoints him as her Urdu tutor, and soon becomes adept at writing such lines as: “Apni akalmandi pe rani ko naaz hai [The queen is proud of her intelligence].”

While making much of the age and racial difference, and the frisson that causes in the royal household, the film seems bizarrely blind to the imperial context in which their relationship unfolds. Cringeworthy scenes revealing Victoria's distressing ignorance about the country she rules are compounded by her seemingly un-ironic desire to see the exotic obliging servant play-act as an Oriental sultan in her personal tableaux.

And yet, at the centre of this colonial confection sits the queen's quite believable fascination with this otherness, exemplified in her learning of Urdu. Like Attenborough's gruff general, she rather likes the sound of Hindustani. Victoria is far from being a Tom Alter, or even a Captain Weston, but even in this most brutal colonial abyss, the learning of a language seems to hold out the dim possibility of building a bridge.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Oct 2017.

DJs, poets, dramatic desi loves

My Mirror column:

Ae Dil Hai Mushkil falls flat when it aims for high romance. So do any of our old languages of love survive?

In many ways, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil is a fairly standard-issue Karan Johar movie. First, it is a soppy romance about people who’re confused between love and friendship (and trying hard to sacrifice their feelings for the blissfully unknowing beloved) -- think back to Kajol and Shah Rukh Khan in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, or Saif Ali Khan, Preity Zinta and SRK in Kal Ho Na Ho. Second, it contains that classic K-Jo cocktail of oblivious upper-class-ness and self-conscious Indian-ness that emerges in full measure only when the protagonists are ‘abroad’. The first purpose served by this is in the aesthetic-emotional register: supremely well-off, well-dressed desis get to play out their overheated romances in picturesque cold countries. The second purpose is what we might as well call political: it is no accident that Johar has been among Bollywood’s pioneers of desi coolth, given his originary adeptness at turning not just firang locations but firangs themselves into mere backdrops for our Empire-writes-back moments.

Nowadays, Johar seems to have stopped enjoying making British characters stand for the Indian national anthem, and no longer even seems to get off having rude Hindi remarks made in front of foreigners who can’t understand them (admittedly, Kajol managed to make this reverse racism seem very funny in Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham). What ADHM offers instead, is a breezy world-is-our-oyster feel, in which South Asians on private jet vacations can bump into [also South Asian] ex-boyfriends DJ-ing at French discotheques (And just in case you were wondering about such prosaic things as visas, the film throws in two separate mentions of characters having British passports.) The resultant air of bonhomie is aided by the Empire choosing, whenever in doubt, to sing back: the oddly patriotic pleasure of watching white people sway to Hindi/Punjabi songs is amplified particularly in ADHM by having Parisians galvanised by the corny energy of Mohammad Rafi’s 1967 chartbuster An Evening in Paris.

Most of Johar’s romantic messaging is pretty spelt out in the film: such as Alizeh’s rather programmatic declaration, “Pyaar mein junoon hai, dosti mein sukoon hai (Love has madness, friendship has peace)”or her insistent idea (pretty much taken from Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar) that only a broken heart can produce good art. Or the film’s avowed thesis, that unrequited love can be more powerful than a relationship: “you have full control over it... because you don’t have to share it with anyone”. How much any of these statements affects you depends partly on your mood at the moment you watch it spoken on screen, partly on who speaks it (Ranbir does best), and partly on your general propensity for dramebaaz mohabbat.

But it is more interesting to read Ae Dil Hai Mushkil for the things it does not spell out. Many of those filter through to us via language. The film seems, for instance, an expression of Johar’s desire to unite two very different landscapes of romance that I will go out on a limb and suggest he personally inhabits: the thumping rhythms of smoky nightclubs on the one hand, and the mellifluous Urdu that was for years the language of high romance in Hindi films. The film’s dialogue (by Johar and his long-time collaborator Niranjan Iyengar) moves constantly between a conversational Hindi peppered with English words — eg. “Tum mujhe seriously nahi le rahi, lekin yeh mera God’s gift hai” — and a high-faluting Urdu/Hindustani that is largely expressed in dubious ‘philosophical’ statements that neither Anushka Sharma nor Aishwarya Rai can carry off.

Rai, in particular, is saddled with the impossible task of playing what Johar in all seriousness calls a ‘shaaira’. The Urdu word for poetess is one I last heard in the 1994 film Muhafiz, in which too it was used as a self-descriptor – but it came accompanied by the devastating force of Shabana Azmi’s hauteur and pronunciation, and the context was mid-twentieth century Delhi. Having Rai, in a white airport lounge somewhere between London and Vienna, introduce herself as “Main shaaira hoon” elicits a hilarious but apt response from Kapoor’s Ayaan, who assumes that Shaaira is her name. “Main shaaira hoon, mera naam Saba hai,” says Rai, her eyes glinting dangerously.

The moment is, sadly, one of the very few in which the film takes on board the hilarious unbelievability of this uber-posh, uber-glamorous Vienna-based character being an Urdu poet. But at least Saba is meant to be a poet. For Alizeh, a hyperactive London-based dilettante recovering from her break-up with a Sufiyana DJ, the Urdu she speaks makes even less sense. The only way we can make sense of Alizeh’s language (and her 80s film obsession and her kurta-clad entry into clubs) is if we replace her supposed Lucknow origins with Lahore. Given just how much political fracas has been caused by the mere presence of a Pakistani actor (Fawad Khan in a thankless role as the DJ), I suppose it is not surprising that Johar decided to keep Alizeh’s real origins — like her legs —covered up.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30th Oct 2016.