Book Review: Krishna learns to let go the Hindu way in this bestseller

Part popular romance, part spiritual melodrama, 'Krishnayan' by Gujarati writer Kaajal Oza Vaidya adds some real women to India’s mythological matrix 

Krishnayan by Kaajal Oza Vaidya, translated from the Gujarati by Subha Pande,
Eka-Westland, 272 pages, ₹499

The most remarkable thing about Indic civilisation might be the uninterrupted lifespan of its beliefs. Most Hindu gods and goddesses were already being worshipped in South Asia when the Greeks were building temples to Zeus and Athena, or when Jupiter and Diana ruled ancient Roman hearts. But while the Greek and Roman gods have been long superseded by the Semitic religions, ours live on. Deities like Shiva, Vishnu, Ganesh, Karthik and Durga, and divine epic heroes like Ram and Krishna remain a vivid presence for religious Hindus. Mythology is still the matrix for modern Indian life.

But as a cynical politics digs its claws into people's beliefs, that matrix is turned into a never-ending maelstrom of offense-taking and offense-giving. On Saraswati Puja this February, for instance, right-wing Indian Twitter trended demands for the arrest of a Dalit activist for having insulting the Hindu goddess of learning by referring to her as 'exploited' by Brahma. According to the myth, Lord Brahma, creator of the universe, fell in love with Saraswati after he made her. Philosophical-metaphorical readings (an artist besotted with his own creation), or anthropological ones (the fact that incest figures in most ancient creation myths) stand no chance in belligerent social media battles, where the dominant narrative frame is men avenging women's 'honour'.

Of course, such 'dishonouring' drives both our epics: the abduction of Sita in the Ramayana, the stripping of Draupadi in the Mahabharata. But while the plots may turn on women, the male characters receive greater attention. Relationships between them—Krishna and Sudama, Krishna and Arjun, Arjun and Karna, Ram and Lakshman, even Ram and Hanuman—have formed popular models of friendship, fraternal love and loyalty. Most literary retellings, too, have been through the eyes of a male character: Bhima in MT Vasudevan Nair’s famous Malayalam novel Randaamoozham, Karna in Shivaji Sawant's Marathi classic Mrintyunjay, and Yudhishtira, Bhishma and Abhimanyu in Aditya Iyengar's The Thirteenth Day (2015).

A female perspective on our epics has only begun to appear in recent decades, mostly in fiction by women. Draupadi got pride of place in Pratibha Ray's award-winning 1993 Oriya novel Yajnaseni and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's 2008 novel The Palace of Illusions. Sita got some play in the graphic novel Sita's Ramayana and Nina Paley's film Sita Sings the Blues. Lesser female characters are now getting their due in popular English-language fiction: for example, Aditi Banerjee's The Curse of Gandhari, and Kavita Kane's series of books centred on Ahalya, Surpanakha, Sita's sister and Karna's wife.

Kaajal Oza Vaidya's hugely popular novel Krishnayan, which has sold over 200,000 copies in Gujarati since its publication in 2006, is an important addition to this literature, using the figure of Krishna to explore aspects of the man-woman relationship.

Recently translated into English by Subha Pande, Vaidya's narrative starts where the usual telling of Krishna's life stops. What is traditionally called Krishna Leela, literally Krishna's play, is a set of stories about the birth, childhood and adolescence of the Yadava chieftain, with such set themes as the naughty baby Krishna stealing butter from the milkmaids of Gokul, or his youthful flute-playing assignations with Radha.

Krishnayan, by contrast, opens with Krishna awaiting death, reminiscing about his life. And in Vaidya's unusually frank telling, what emerges as significant as he waits for Gandhari's curse to take effect are his bonds with women. There are four primary ones: Rukmini, his intelligent, stately senior queen, his consort in the administration of Dwarka; Satyabhama, his younger queen, childish but captivating; Draupadi, loyal wife to the five Pandava brothers, but still carrying a special attachment to Krishna—and Radha, the childhood sweetheart he hasn't seen in decades, now not just a married woman and a mother, but a mother-in-law.

Vaidya's narrative can feel laboured, and her dialogue borders on florid, at least in Pande's translation. Here, for instance, is Rukmini, “The fire raging in my heart is trying to tell me that he is waiting to answer all my questions.” And here is Arjun on the eve of the war: “I have a lot to say and yet nothing to say. I am dumbfounded. I am hit by thousands of thoughts at times and sometimes, I just can't think. I am going through a strange period of indecision.”

But Krishnayan's fictional premise is as layered as any present-day polyamorous situation, and Vaidya has all the depth of the Mahabharata behind her as she moves deftly across characters and revisits familiar dramatic situations: the ethics of game of dice, or how the five Pandavas deal with their shared connection to Draupadi. She explores each of Krishna's loves for what makes it unique – intellectual partnership, sexual allure, emotional understanding, a shared history – and goes refreshingly beyond him, to these women's relationships with each other.

But for all the empathy with which she writes about women, Vaidya remains staunchly invested in an essential separation of the genders. The Krishna of Krishnayan is an adept lover, loving husband and devoted friend—but he remains a man. In some of Vaidya's most emotional scenes, Krishna claims limitations in gendered terms, applauding women for their greater capacity for selflessness. “While I have only been contemplating seeking moksha and preparing myself for it, these two dearly loved women [Draupadi and Rukmini] have... come forward to liberate me from the cycle of life. Only women can do this. Only a woman can control heart and mind and fulfil her moral duties... And only she has the magnanimity to accept a co-wife and give true meaning to the word life-partner, Krishna thought...”.

It probably helps that Vaidya's Krishna isn't a god in the way we usually understand gods. He may know what is predestined—the Mahabharata war, the end of the Yadava race, or his own death—but he is powerless in the face of it. Rather than an uber-manipulator who's playing everyone else, this is a Krishna almost surprised to find that he, too, is caught in in a web of expectations and desires. “Why is everyone surrendering their selves to me? Unacceptance would be immoral, but where would I take them with me even if I accept? I will have to break these shackles of attachment.”

Full of intense exchanges on desire and ownership, mind and body, attachment and the atma, Krishnayan is a sort of manual for letting go. And if you can deal with its somewhat repetitive melodramatic style, it helps thicken the most famous Indian plot of all. It adds some real women to our mythological matrix.

Published in Mint Lounge, 29 Mar 2021.

Drives with a View - III

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Continuing our series on films about cabbies, we look at why Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese's 1976 creation, Travis Bickle, seems so eerily prescient today

Halfway through Martin Scorsese's 1976 neo-noir classic Taxi Driver, we hear a campaign speech from a US Presidential candidate. “Walt Whitman, the great American poet, said, ‘I am the man, I suffered, I was there’,” intones the fictitious Charles Palantine. “No more will we fight the wars of the few through the hearts of the many....” Palantine's words, like most dialogue in Paul Schrader's much-mythified script, speak to -- as well as for -- the film's cabdriver hero, Robert De Niro in a career-making performance as the disturbed Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle.

Unlike Palantine and Bickle, Whitman was real. His poem 'Heroes' -- appropriately chosen by Schrader – was written in the voice of the soldier-as-everyman. “Agonies are one of my changes of garments./ I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person,/ My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe...”

Other than this, Schrader's script isn't what one might call poetic. Taxi Driver is a New York film through and through, capturing the city in all its brutal, wry, laconic glory. Unlike many taxi drivers previously discussed in this column series, a cab ride with Travis Bickle rarely involves hearing his voice. Much of Scorsese's masterful tension is based on shots of De Niro's drawn, suspicious face framed in the rearview mirror as he listens to his fellow citizens in the seat behind him – and judges them harshly.

As a cab driver, Bickle is the perfect witness to the world around him. But he does not wish to be a mere witness. He sees the city as “an open sewer full of filth and scum”, a mess that needs to be cleaned up. The post-60s and pre-Giuliani New York of the film is riding high on a wave of freely available sex and drugs, and our hero wishes someone would rein it in. He wants to save it from itself. In one memorable scene, the wannabe Presidential candidate rides Bickle's taxi. When Bickle recognises him, he tells Palantine the city's dirt/immorality needs to be “flushed down the toilet” by whoever comes to power.

“Let me tell you something,” Palantine says earlier, “I have learnt more about America from travelling in taxicabs than in all the limos in the country.” The surround-sound of the campaign lets the film unfold against the backdrop of Palantine's catch-all slogan ‘We are the people’. 

Watching Taxi Driver in 2020 feels strangely prescient: Bickle appears as an early representation of a figure that has come to dominate post-Trump American political discourse; the White everyman who thinks of the country as having gone to the dogs and himself as the morally-superior saviour. As Bickle becomes increasingly unhinged, his monologues in the mirror – bookended by the famous “You talking to me?” line – refer to himself as a hero in the making: “a man who would not take it any more... someone who stood up against the filth”.

Travis Bickle is, in fact, a precursor to much else in the American nightmare of the late 20th and early 21^st century – a mentally ill man gripped by perpetual insomnia; whose sense of anomie and aimlessness leads him to gun violence. If politicians don't seem to want to 'clean up' society, he'll do it himself. But the subtext of what Bickle thinks needs to be 'fixed' is both racist and male chauvinist (though not uncomplicatedly). Meeting a White passenger who wants to murder the wife cheating on him with a “nigger” is followed by Bickle acquiring weapons – from a preppie, White, gun dealer who chooses Bickle over “a jungle bunny in Harlem” because he only deals “high-quality goods to the right people”. Bickle first uses the gun on a Black man who's amateurishly robbing his local cornershop. In one of the film's grimmest scenes, the unfazed Italian shop-owner waves Bickle off and says he'll take care of it. He then takes an iron rod to the thief's body, shouting “The fifth motherfucker this year!”

Another remarkable subplot reveals Bickle's deeply-conflicted relationship with sex and women. The same man who complains about the city's filth – this is a Central New York full of sex shows and prostitution – takes his pristine, almost prissy, date to watch a faux-instructional Swedish porn film. When she proceeds to shut him out afterwards, his interior monologue becomes bizarre and incel-ish: “I realise now how much she's just like the others, cold and distant. And many people are like that. Women for sure. They're like a union.”

The other subplot about sex is Bickle's violent rescuing of Jodie Foster's underage sex worker – a plotline echoed in Schrader's self-directed film Hardcore (1979), in which a young girl runs away from a religious suburban family to become a porn actress, and goes back home in a strangely unconvincing last scene, like Foster's Iris.

What is truly disturbing about Taxi Driver's end, though, is that he is feted for murder. Violence, when committed against 'immoral' people, it seems, makes you a hero. That once-fictional battlefield seems eerily closer to today's reality.

 Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 Dec 2020.

Drives with a view - II

My Mirror column:

Two Iranian films -  Jafar Panahi's 2015 Taxi Tehran and Abbas Kiarostami's 2002 Ten - use the taxi ride as a space for confession, comment and confrontation.

Early in Jafar Panahi’s 2015 Iranian docufiction Taxi Tehran, two passengers in a taxi get into an argument about the death penalty. “If they hang two people, the others would see,” says the man in favour. The woman argues against, saying that people mustn’t be hanged for such minor crimes committed out of need. “After China, we have the most executions in the world,” she points out. The more coherently the woman argues, though, the more rudely the man jeers at her. “You don't know jackshit,” he says at one point, accusing her of living in a world of fiction because she is a teacher – someone who he thinks reads too many books and spends her days with children.

Children in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, of course, have been the chosen carriers of filmic truth – especially in Panahi’s own film career, right from his 1995 debut The White Balloon and his 1997 feature The Mirror (which shares with Taxi Tehran the docufiction device of having an actor engage in conversations with real people). Taxi Tehran also contains a precociously sharp child – the director’s niece, who films everything on her mobile camera. Between showing us the articulate female passenger and the whipsmart little girl, it’s more than clear that Panahi intends us to laugh at the man’s words.

But the car is, in Taxi Tehran, very much a space of dialogue; a place where unusual exchanges can take place. Taxi Tehran was the third film Panahi shot illegally after the Iranian state banned him from making films, and it won him the Silver Bear at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival. In the film Panahi turns his vehicle into a faux-taxi, picking up strangers, family members and acquaintances from all over the city and dropping them off at their destinations. Except we learn soon enough that some of these exchanges are staged – and in the finest Panahi tradition, it’s often difficult to say which ones.

The film is strewn with references to the ubiquity of the camera in our lives. From the niece who wants to make a film in a month and has already recorded a real-life crisis in the lives of some acquaintances, to the neighbour who brings Panahi footage from a security camera to describe something terrible that happened to him, to the state placing a political prisoner's visiting mother in a room with cameras, life seems increasingly something that unfolds on screen rather than off it.

But Taxi Tehran feels like an update on an older Iranian film which was also set entirely inside a car driven by one person – Abbas Kiarostami's Ten (2002). In the unforgettable first segment of that Palm d'Or-nominated film, a young boy shouts at his divorced mother for a long length of time as she drives him through the city. We don’t see the driver – played by the actress Mania Akbari – for the first few minutes, instead experiencing the claustrophobia inside the car build with the child’s terrifyingly adult remarks. “That makes three sentences and they’re all rubbish,” he shouts, or “I can't live with you because you are a selfish woman,” or “You'll never know how to talk and you’ll never be anything” - all of which make it seem like he is ventriloquising his father, from whom she has got a divorce. The boy constantly instructs his mother to “say it calmly” or “don't shout in the street”, while himself plugging his ears against her voice and yelling louder to drown her out.

Like in Taxi Tehran and in the two films about taxis that I discussed last week (World Taxi and Night on Earth), the car in Ten is an unspoken site of confession. Or sometimes, a refuge. When the driver’s seven-year-old complains that she starts talking as soon as they get in the car, she retorts unselfconsciously that there’s no privacy at home – the home she shares with the new husband she's so happy to have acquired.

Driving around the city seems to allow for long, frank exchanges, even with women passengers she doesn't know well. A sex worker whose face we never see insists that wives are also in a kind of trade with their husbands. “You’re the wholesalers, we’re the retailers,” she scoffs. Another woman who has lost a fiancé to a rival contender talks of another kind of exchange, the one we conduct with God. “Before, praying seemed ridiculous,” she says softly. “I used to say, you pray to force God to give you things.” But both she and the car’s driver now find themselves deriving a semblance of peace from their visits to a mausoleum.

If the content of Ten’s conversations reveals a society politically and legally skewed against woman, the form, too, has something to offer. Male drivers often block Akbari’s path, she has to keep demanding right of way. So there’s some quiet courage to be drawn from the penultimate segment in which her young son returns, and inquires about first and fifth gears. If he thinks his mother can teach him about driving, perhaps that’s not a bad start.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Dec 2020.

Book Review: Desire and Despoliation

A book review for Firstpost:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simon and Schuster/Yoda Press, 2020 | 139 pages

This review was published in Firstpost, 27 Nov 2020.

 

 

Shelf Life: Out of Vaidehi's Closet

My Shelf Life column for October 2020:

The link between clothes, sexual attractiveness and power is incestuous and can be unnerving. Kannada writer Vaidehi’s stories literally disrobe it.

Vaidehi's stories shocked me when I first read them. I don't mean in the manner that the 1945-born writer has apparently “sometimes shocked Kannada intellectuals”, by publicly declaring such things as 'The kitchen is my guru, that's where I have learnt many lessons'. The incongruity there, as a critic cited by editor-translator Tejaswini Niranjana in her introduction to Vaidehi's Gulabi Talkies and Other Stories (2006) points out, lay in one of modern Kannada's most successful writers speaking like a 'full-time grihini or housewife'. And yet, what Vaidehi was doing by adopting such a public stance was precisely why her fiction jumped out at me: she was forcing the (male-dominated, genteel, largely upper caste) world of Kannada letters to engage with the world of women as she knew it. She refused to be co-opted into literariness as they knew it. 

Since the late 19th century, women have been writing fiction about women's lives, not just in Kannada, but in Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Hindi and more. So Vaidehi, also Janaki Srinavasa Murthy, born 1945, married to KL Srinivasa Murthy at 23, and mother of two daughters, wasn't the first. But her words lift the ceaseless labour of women's lives out of the domestic space and onto the page with a ringing clarity. Somehow, the closer she sticks to the materiality of these circumscribed, cyclical lives – food and rituals, weddings and babies, illness and mortality – the more starkly we see their political, even philosophical ramifications. As she puts it: “What is important to us [women] is not whether the world is truth or lie. But work, work and more work.”

A still from the film Gulabi Talkies (2008), adapted from Vaidehi's short story by the director Girish Kasaravalli.

Among the material objects that recur in Vaidehi's stories are clothes. At one end of the spectrum is what is ritually and socially prescribed for women: the red saris encumbent on shaven-headed Brahmin widows; the gold jewels to measure a bride’s status. At the other are clothes as markers of individuality, the body as a canvas on which fashion can paint new identities.

But what was fashion in this India of sleepy villages and one-street towns, where the age-old injunctions of caste and age and community controlled so much of what people wore? In the title story Gulabi Talkies the opening of a local cinema triggers new dreams: “Day by day the bangle shop began to stock various kinds of face powder and other cosmetics...the seamstress struggled to tune her skills to the new fashions and her creations were passed off as fashionable, causing a commotion in the world of clothing which crossed over into the speech and gait of women...”.

The fashions of Vaidehi's tales may seem basic to us – but oh, how women wanted them. And how willing they were to suffer the consequences, because fashion felt like freedom. In ‘Remembering Ammachi’, for instance, the child narrator helps the grown-up Ammachi pleat her sari pallu “so that both its borders could be seen”. They set out for a neighbour's puja, but are barred by Venkappaya, who has arrogated to himself a status somewhere between adoptive brother and future husband. “How coquettishly you're going to town,” he rages. “That pallu has been pleated in such a way as to show both the breasts.”

Kannada writer Janaki Srinavasa Murthy, also known as Vaidehi. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The poorer the women are, the more meagre their aspirations – and the more excruciating their non-fulfilment. In Tale of a Theft, the hungry Bachchamma thinks of the prohibitive price of glass bangles while sitting next to women covered in gold. In Vanimai, the titular central character is a woman with mottled, flat feet whose “biggest dream was to own a pair of slippers”. This is nothing short of radical in a milieu where a man called Narasimha can tell Vanimai’s elders never to buy her slippers, declaring with perfect assurance: “Those who use footwear are either the prostitutes of Bombay or the mistresses of the town. Not decent people...” 

The spectre of the whore, in fact, is ever-present in these tales. Whether it's Narasimha taunting Vanimai or Venkapayya deliberately ruining Ammachi's secretly-tailored back-button sari blouse, being fashionable makes women attractive – too attractive. 

The late Nirad C. Chaudhuri, one of our most politically incorrect writers, once speculated that Indian women have historically had so little free contact with men that they dress only to compete with each other, that is they are acquisitive and overdressed. “It follows from this tradition,” wrote Chaudhuri in 1976, that “a woman in “very smart or piquant dress”... “must be fair prey”. To prove his point he recounted two anecdotes, in both of which “lower-class” men associate being well-dressed with sluttiness. 

But of course it isn't only poorer men, or even only men, who tar women for wearing certain clothes. In Vaidehi's Chandale, watching Beena “climbing up the compound in her short skirt” makes the older Rami “want to scream”. In a stunning image, the nervous housewife suddenly imagines the carefree teenager “winking at [her son Satisha] in the style of a Mumbai prostitute”. So obvious is the link between clothes and sexual attractiveness, and between sexual attractiveness and power, that it is all we can do to suppress it in those we believe don’t deserve power. Mostly, that’s other people. Sometimes, it includes ourselves.

Banner: A book cover of Gulabi Talkies and Other Stories (2006)' a still from the film Gulabi Talkies. (2008)

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 23 Oct 2020.

In Vino Veritas -- II

My Mirror column:

In Sanal Kumar Sasidharan's An Off-Day Game (2015), a drunken day unmasks a society intoxicated with its own sense of power.

Four men gather for a day of drinking in Sanal Kumar Sasidharan's harrowing An Off-Day Game (Ozhivudivasathe Kali, 2015).

Last week's column on The Mosquito Philosophy was about what truths might emerge when a group of men get together to drink. This week, too, my subject is a film about an all-male drinking session – An Off-Day Game (Ozhivudivasathe Kali) directed by Sanal Kumar Sasidharan. Sasidharan is best known outside Kerala for his internationally award-winning film Sexy Durga (2017); An Off-Day Game won him the 2015 Kerala State Film Award for Best Film and is currently streaming on two platforms.

and is currently streaming on two platforms.

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/in-vino-veritas-ii/articleshow/79345533.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

The film is adapted from Unni R's Malayalam short story 'Holiday Fun', available in J Devika's wonderful English translation as part of the collection One Hell of a Lover (Westland 2019). Barely nine pages long, Unni's tale begins with a reference to Boccaccio's 14th century Italian classic in which seven women and three men gather in a remote villa to escape the plague-stricken city of Florence - an interesting aside in a pandemic year. “They were like refugees from the plague in The Decameron,” writes Unni. “Only, they were escaping the monotony of work, the four of them... gathered in Room No 70 of Nandavanam Lodge, that Sunday, as usual, around a bottle of liquor.”

Unlike Unni, though, Sasidharan does not launch straight into the action. Instead, as he would do two years later in Sexy Durga, he begins his film with a semi-documentary prelude: footage from a real-life by-election in Kerala, where we see red Communist flags challenged by a rising wave of saffron BJP ones. We also see a Kathakali dance performance as part of the election campaign: this is a state where art and politics are allowed to cross-fertilise each other. It is from the assembled crowd at a rally that the camera first picks out two of our protagonists, following them as they join the other two at a little bend in a stream: a picturesque spot for daytime drinking. Another man driving by is tempted to join them, and a plan is made for another drunken assignation on Election Day.

The electoral backdrop serves Sasidharan well, allowing the film to fit in both India's official dry day rules, that bar the sale of liquor on polling days, and the simultaneously ubiquitous unofficial fact that liquor changes hands during almost all Indian elections: as a bribe, or more categorically in exchange for votes. It also works beautifully as a way of working up to the conversations between his characters – and to the 'game' of the film's title, in which four players pick chits labelled 'King', “Minister', 'Police' and 'Thief', and the one who's picked 'Police' must then guess who the 'Thief' is.

But plenty happens before the game unfolds. Unni's story has an early paragraph laying out the quality of the men's weekends in Nandavanam Lodge: “The usual criticism of the government, the rant about bedroom squabbles, the description of the body of the young girl one brushed against in the street or on the bus...”. Among Sasidharan's achievements is the way he takes this bare-bones description and gives it flesh, adding dialogue, characters and subplots that make his film into the terrific, terrifying slow-burn watch that it is. There is no woman actually present in Unni's scenario, for instance -- but Geetha in An Off-Day Game is crucial. Right from the moment that the men arrive at the lodge, she is the cynosure of all eyes, and not in a good way. She tries her hardest to just do her job: preparing a meal for her boss's visitors. But being the sole woman in a remote location with an increasingly drunken group of men, as we will see, isn't quite conducive to just doing one's job.

The relationship of each character to their 'job' is, at a deeper level altogether, the subject of Sasidharan's film. Much before the 'game' plots each man into a 'professional' role, the film has begun the perspicacious process of observing how even within a circle of friends, every man is supremely conscious of social status – his own and that of the others. “The kind of places this Brahmin fellow digs out,” says one man as they approach the lodge. “He always howls when he sees the jungle,” says another. What may have felt like gentle ribbing turns darker and darker as the film proceeds, especially as everyone presses first the woman and then Dasa into unwanted tasks. “You need me to pluck a jackfruit and now kill a rooster,” says Dasa.

As befitting a film set in Kerala, politics is the matrix of all things – the idea of democracy, for instance, is the context for a sharp argument about the man-woman relationship, and an anecdotal history of Emergency for a discussion of the 'duties' of citizens: “the cops did cops' job, the scavengers did scavengers' job, the army men did army jobs...”. Caste, or its modern-day version, serves an authoritarian society perfectly: no-one is meant to challenge their socially-ordained roles.

Some of Sasidharan's long scenes are pure genius, and the long takes and the stunning forest soundscape create an atmosphere of menace that is unerring in both its sense of beauty and danger.

The 'game' may feel a little contrived, but the conversational fluidity the film achieves is astounding. Under the influence of alcohol, everything is laid bare. In vino veritas.

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

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Nov 2020.

 

In vino veritas – I

My Mirror column:

Jayaprakash Radhakrishnan’s deceptively simple film The Mosquito Philosophy (2019) leaves you asking, who really are the suckers?

A drinking session becomes a place for revelations in The Mosquito Philosophy (2019).

About ten minutes into Jayaprakash Radhakrishnan's sort-of-mumblecore Tamil film The Mosquito Philosophy (2019), a man complains to his friend that the liquor shop overcharged him, but no-one in the crowd supported his case against the cheating shopkeeper. “Do they have no self-respect or guts?” Suresh mutters. “Well, it is to gain self-respect and guts that we drink!” laughs his friend JP (played by Radhakrishnan himself). “Don't expect anything from the men in a liquor shop until they're high!”

It feels like a throwaway line, just a bit of humour. But as we get deeper into the nightlong drinking session that is the film's chosen milieu, we are made to realise that alcohol does serve that purpose, among others. In fact, The Mosquito Philosophy feels almost inspired by that old Latin proverb, In vino veritas - In wine, there is truth. As an English poet called Abraham Fraunce put it as far back in 1592: “Wine moderately taken maketh men joyfull; he is also naked; for, in vino veritas: drunkards tell all, and sometimes more then all.”

The four men have met because Suresh has some news that deserves a celebration. The only single one in their group, he’s finally decided to get married. But he is just a little cagey about telling his friends, and it soon becomes clear why: he has sworn for years that he would only have a love marriage. Now, at forty, he has made a decision to accept an arranged marriage prospect. It's all to make his mother happy, he insists – and then it turns out that the girl chosen by his mother is fifteen years his junior.

What makes the film successful is its quality of creeping up on you, rather than bombarding you with the things it wants you to think about. The predictable wife jokes at the start ease the viewer gently into a familiar middle class Indian milieu dominated by them. “Oh don't worry, no wife thinks her husband's friends can ever be a good influence,” says JP, and over the course of the film, each man in turn gets mocked for being afraid of his spouse. “Suresh, that's life after marriage,” the friends say to the soon-to-be-married man when one of them rushes back home to eat because his wife hasn't given him permission to be out for dinner.

JP seems the best adjusted of the men with respect to his wife – she is in and out of the room while his friends drink, and even joins in the conversation occasionally. But he has also asked his friends over for a drinking session without first checking with her - if he asks her first, he chuckles to Suresh, she is likely to refuse. Again, it's a throwaway moment – but it finds a larger echo when we hear over the course of the evening that JP followed his wife around for nine months before she agreed to marry him. What he describes as a college romance, a drunken Suresh now points out, could well be understood as stalking – JP simple didn't take no for an answer.

Is there is something worrying about a world in which husbands must ask their wives' "permission" to go have a drink or hang out with their friends? Yes, but there is also something worrying about a world in which a twenty-four-year old woman finds herself in the position of accepting an arranged marriage with a not-particularly-attractive man over fifteen years her senior. There is something particularly sad about the fact that a man who isn't even married already feels put upon, not excited, when his fiance calls him to make weekend plans. 

"Truth is like fire, it glows and burns," Suresh quotes the artist Gustav Klimt as having once said. The scalding truth of this society is that men and women continue to look at each other as separate species, each brought up to perceive the other as a creature that needs to be tricked into captivity -- not lived with in mutually defined freedom. It is no coincidence that even the alcoholic haze that lets home truths be spoken is closed off to one gender. 

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

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Nov 2020.

Isolated incidents

My Mirror column (3rd May 2020):

Placebo takes a personal deep dive into one of India's premier medical colleges and comes up with a disturbing, affecting vision of where we’re headed.

In 2011, a young filmmaker made a visit to his younger brother Sahil, who was studying to be a doctor at India’s premier medical college, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi. It was the time of the annual college festival, Pulse, and as happens during ‘fest’ season, enthusiasms and emotions were running high. Before the night was over, Sahil had been admitted to hospital, with his right arm so badly damaged that he would not be able to return to the hostel for three months. The twist, though, is what made the tale possible: Abhay, the filmmaker brother, didn’t go home with Sahil. He decided to stay on his brother’s hostel instead, gradually inserting himself in – and his handycam is – into life on the AIIMS campus. And so began the dark, dark cinematic ride that is Placebo.

Free to stream on YouTube, Placebo is a strange and vivid film, combining special effects, hand-drawn black and white animation, found footage and still photographs with Abhay Kumar's footage. The 96 minutes that we finally see on screen apparently draws on 800 hours of footage, and the filmmaker edited 80 different versions before finalising this one. That process sounds terrifying. The film is a little less so – but not by much.

Placebo is a film about many aspects of the Indian present seen through a sharply angled lens: education, privilege, individualism, community, institutional failure and our failures as a society. Kumar starts by pointing to the competition that these students have dealt with to reach these peeling hostel buildings. According to a statistic cited in the film, MIT has an admittance rate of 9 per cent, and Harvard (the university, I'm assuming, not the medical school) has one of 7 per cent. The rate for AIIMS’s is 0.1 per cent.

Kumar’s voiceover repeatedly emphasises the 'brightness' of these students, and they mirror his framing, telling stories that reveal their sense of achievement in having, as we say in North Indian slang, “cracked” the medical entrance. But watching these nerdy young men talk about girls or play music or collapse in laughter after a doobie or a round of bhang pakoras consumed appropriately on Mahashivratri, what one is struck by is precisely how ordinary their desires are. They seem like any other 23-year-olds, with the same fears and desires and anxieties as young men everywhere – just bearing a heavier weight of academic/professional expectation, without the emotional or therapeutic support structure needed to deal with the pressure. Those who break, the film shows, are not helped to mend themselves. The cracks are papered over, and the fragments swept under a carpet.

All that the Indian educational system seems to have given these young men is the heady sensation of entering an elite. The path from AIIMS could take them on to a well-paying career as a doctor, or a powerful position in the Indian civil services, or to more specialised medical research in India, but more desirably in the USA. There is ambition aplenty – but even among the four or five students that Placebo keeps in fairly tight focus, there is no sense of a vocation.

There's Sethi, a fair North Indian chikna hero type who says his greatest desire is to “look good naked” – “like the guy in American Beauty”. He categorises the species called girls into different colours: “There are orange girls, there are green girls”, and the one who got away, “she was so white”. Sethi wants to be confident enough to ask out girls in America. Getting to America is his second ambition after getting to AIIMS.

There's the tall, bespectacled, pudgy-faced Saumya Chopra, who begins his AIIMS life terrified of ragging but becomes the senior who's suspended for two months in 2008 after a Supreme Court judgement makes the authorities crack down on ragging incidents. There's a tangent here that the film doesn't follow, about how our educational culture is so toxic and so isolating that ragging was the only way to forge intergenerational connections.

There's K, the most meditative of the lot, whose self-reflection does not in fact help him deal with his inner demons. “The respect I have for the word doctor is far more than the respect I have for me as a doctor,” K tells Abhay.

Ostensibly at the other end of that spectrum is someone like Saumya, who's only answer to why he wants to be a doctor is “My parents want me to be a doctor.” “What do you want?” asks the filmmaker. “Whatever my parents want,” comes Saumya's reply. “Our life is a debt to our parents... You can't pay it back ever but one must try at least.”

Saumya's words reminded me of another young Indian captured on camera in a documentary: a Durga Vahini leader-in-the-making called Prachi Trivedi, in Nisha Pahuja's superb 2014 film The World Before Her, who says she would do whatever her father wanted, because she was eternally grateful to him for not having aborted her as a female foetus.

This idea that our earthly existence is essentially beholden to our parents feels chilling to me, and will do to many who see human beings as free-standing individuals. Yet the flip side of that individuation is also a chilling aspect of Placebo, and particularly resonant in these solitary, socially distanced times. As K says to the filmmaker: “Even though we have been talking for so many months, you and me, we're isolated, that is a fact.”

It is a bleak vision of humanity, but perhaps also a self-fulfilling one.

It is a bleak vision of humanity, but also a self-fulfilling

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/isolated-incidents/articleshow/75513645.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

It is a bleak vision of humanity, but also a self-fulfilling

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/isolated-incidents/articleshow/75513645.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 May 2020. You can watch the film for free, here.

"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.

Status of women, women of status

My Mirror column: 

Thappad's single slap shakes the foundations of one marriage, but exposes the imbalances upon which most Indian families are built

Pavail Gulati and Taapsee Pannu play husband and wife in Anubhav Sinha’s thought-provoking film Thappad

Described in a sentence, the premise of Thappad seems rather all or nothing: a man slaps his wife once, and she decides to leave him. “Will a slap decide whether a couple can stay together or not?” was the response from the director of Baaghi 3. The actions of Thappad's heroine Amrita (Taapsee Pannu) look particularly outré in a country where domestic violence is not. Our last National Family Health Survey (2015-16) indicates that 31 per cent of India’s married women experience physical, sexual or emotional violence by their spouses - and 52 per cent women think it’s all right for a man to hit his wife.

Anubhav Sinha is that rare Indian filmmaker who’s gone from crafting money-spinners to slapping audiences in the face with ugly reflections of ourselves. His recent subjects of choice are all ones that New India would rather keep ‘in the family’ – i.e. things we don't like to talk about until people actually die, and even then the problem isn't us. In Mulk, it was the nationally normalised injustice of treating the Muslim community as guilty until proven innocent. In Article 15, it was the unconscionable continuance of caste hierarchies. In Thappad, Sinha targets the misuse of power often found closest home: gender. The aimed-for confrontation with the self here takes place within a two-person context: a marriage. But Sinha and his co-writer Mrunmayee Lagoo display a keen awareness that in this country even more than others, heterosexual domestic partnerships are part of an intricate web of familial, social and professional relationships. And that web is suspended in a matrix that’s invariably patriarchal.

With that in mind, let me re-describe the premise of Thappad. Confronted with a professional crisis while hosting a private party at his home, Vikram (Pavail Gulati) loses his temper at his wife Amrita and slaps her, in front of the assembled guests: his bosses as well as the couple’s family, friends and neighbours. Amrita, an educated upper middle class woman who has chosen not to pursue a career in favour of being a devoted wife to Vikram, finds herself unable to forget, forgive, ‘move on’. It doesn’t help that Vikram is entirely unable to see Amrita’s shock and humiliation – and unable to comprehend what he does see. It definitely doesn’t help that he assumes his wife’s forgiveness, even as he explains instead of apologising. “Saara gussa tum hi pe nikal gaya [All the anger tumbled out onto you],” is all he can manage before turning the marital conversation back to his only real preoccupation: himself.

The film is largely well cast and acted, with adeptly-written scenes that prevent characters from seeming like ideological messengers, even when delivering that usually bludgeoning thing: a climactic monologue. There are clever little touches, like Vikram complaining unendingly about feeling hard done by at work - “Vahan rehna hi nahi jahan value nahi hai [Who wants to stay on where you have no value?]” - while remaining tone-deaf to Amrita’s silences. What emerges, with empathy and without drama, is the patriarchal context that normalises the ‘working’ husband’s dependence on the ‘non-working’ wife - while invisibilising her labour, both physical and emotional. The wife is a full-time companion, hostess and cheerleader; manager of their upper middle class household, primary caregiver to him and his ageing mother and any potential children. But her husband doesn’t notice when her foot is hurt – so of course he doesn’t notice when her heart is.

Demanding empathy, support and sacrifice from their female partners while giving none back is simply the norm for men, and women have previously had no choice but to live with it. “Thoda bardaasht karna seekhna chahiye auraton ko,” says Amrita’s mother-in-law, not unkindly. “Aap khush hain bardaasht kar ke?” is Amrita’s counter-question. “Mere bachche khush hain,” the older woman replies.

Subjugating personal desires to the ‘larger’ cause of “family” is something women learn subliminally, becoming agents of our own submission. It is this acceptance that Thappad pushes back against: the notion that women should be content to derive satisfaction from satisfying others, not set out to find their own. “We know how to keep our families together,” says Vikram. “Hamare yahan ladkiyan chhoti chhoti baaton pe nahi jaati ghar chhod ke.” The totemic power of “ghar” is also the binding agent in the film's other relationships. Amrita's father (a superb Kumud Mishra) seems the gentle, supportive dad every girl needs, and a considerate husband. But the film makes him – and therefore us – come to see that his wife never had the freedom he did. She may not have been barred from pursuing her musical talents, as Amrita isn’t from dancing, but the household always took precedence over self-development. In other marriages, coupledom takes precedence over self-respect.

Divorce remains stigmatised in India (think Mohan Bhagwat), and so Amrita’s unshakeable resolve, however quiet, has raised hackles. As the film lets one of its own characters point out, if all women who’ve been slapped once by their husbands started leaving their marriages, the majority of Indian families would not be ‘together’. But like a before-her-time Preity Zinta insisting on being able to respect her man in Kya Kehna, Amrita isn’t most women. And Thappad is powerful because it isn’t programmatic. It doesn’t lay down the law about what you as a woman should do. It only lays out the possibilities for what you could.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Mar 2020.

Unsuitable arrangements

My Mirror column:

Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan mainstreams same-sex love and battles the insistence on marriage with wit and warmth.

Hailing an auto rickshaw the other day, I found myself thrust into an ongoing conversation. “He has no problems,” said the 50-something driver, waving goodbye to another autowallah. "His children are married. I have to make plans.” Did his son and daughter want to get married yet, I asked, and might they have partners in mind? The driver was surprised, then miffed: “If they decide, we’ll have nothing further to do with them. And if the marriage runs into problems, it’ll be their lookout!”

Arranging the marriages of their progeny, whether male or female, is the great universal burden of the South Asian parent. Romantic love is something we only celebrate in song and cinema; marriage is meant to ensure social and individual reproduction, and it is non-negotiable. “Shaadi toh karni hi hogi,” as the auto driver said, peering curiously into the mirror at me, “aur samaaj ke andar ho toh behtar.”

It is into this universe that a film like Shubh Mangal Zyaada Savdhan drops like a little grenade, exploding the smooth heteronormative shell of arranged marriage.

Many Hindi film heroes have refused particular girls, but Aman Tripathi (Jitendra Kumar) wants a boy. The boy is, by his very gender, unsuitable. And as unsuitable boys do in Hindi films from DDLJ onwards, Kartik (Ayushmann Khurrana) must win the family over.

The plot is slender: Aman goes home for a family wedding, taking Kartik along as a friend – but after his relationship with Kartik becomes known, finds himself being forced into marriage instead. The subplots also involve arranged marriages – people desperately pushing for them, people trying to dodge them, people realising they aren’t happy in them. In almost the very first scene, the boys help one young woman (Bhumi Pednekar) elope. Meanwhile, Aman’s cousin Goggle is desperate to be married, even though the marriage market places her at the very bottom of the ladder, giving her ‘options’ that make her feel terrible about herself. Then there’s the hilarious (but perfectly believable) Kusum, Aman’s suitable bride, who turns out to have some unsuitable marital desires of her own. And finally there’s Aman’s parents’ marriage, with Shankar (Gajraj Rao) and Sunaina’s (Neena Gupta) accusations ending in the rare admission that it hasn’t been all that great.

All of this may seem like serious stuff, but Hitesh Kewalya (who adapted the 2013 erectile dysfunction comedy Kalyana Samayal Saadham from Tamil into the 2017 Hindi hit Shubh Mangal Savdhan) writes and directs SMZS with an in-your-face honesty and a zany energy that makes it hard to be bored.

Last year, Shelly Chopra Dhar and writer Ghazal Dhaliwal did something similar for lesbian love, putting a timorous Sonam Kapur to the test of resisting an arranged marriage. But Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga had only half the madness of SMZS – and double the tears.

Kewalya’s film doesn’t shy away from things; it externalises them into a deadpan excess. “First floor ki ladkiyan sabse pehle patti hain, saare Dilli ke ladke jaante hain,” goes one great line. “Kangan aur beta ek hain (These bangles are my son),” says Sunaina, handing Kusum (Pankhuri Awasthy) the traditional gold bangles that promise a girl entry into North Indian family heaven. And while its dialogues perfectly capture the escalating madness of the Indian joint family quarrel, some of the film’s best moments come when it chooses actions over words.

So when Professor Shankar Tripathi (Gajraj Rao) stumbles onto the facts of his son’s sexuality, he responds by actually throwing up. He doesn’t make a long speech about gay sex grossing him out: he simply pukes. There’s something about this as a cinematic device that both allows us to see how starkly he experiences this – and also lets us laugh at him. Rao’s bodily responses make for some more hysterically funny sequences: the hosepipe scene, for instance, or his dancing face-off with Kartik. Another character with a hilarious bodily tic is Kusum, whose performance as the blushing bride involves a fake tinkling laugh on cue.

SMZS is unabashed about its case for the freedom of sexuality, and it uses anything at hand to prop up its argument – new rights in Indian law, humanity, common sense, filmi melodrama, and in one very entertaining thread, science. After the hypothalamus and oxytocin have been pressed into argument, the kaali gobhis (black cauliflowers) that form a crazy projectile backdrop to the film become a metaphor for the foolhardiness of trying to interfere with nature. The social arrangements Indians insist on making for their children, Kewalya seems to say, are unnatural too.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1 Mar 2020.

Fear Eats the Soul

My Mirror column:

Kamal Haasan's Hey Ram, released twenty years ago this February, is a complex, unresolved film about India's unresolved inner life. 

A man returns to the Calcutta building in which his wife was raped and murdered in a riot. He stands in the street, looking up at their old balcony, and she appears there, beckoning him as she used to. When he climbs up the stairs, the new occupant mistakes the name he mentions for that of the person he is looking for. 

Mr. Nair: “All the tenants here are new. What's the name again?”

Saket Ram: “Saket Ram.”

Mr. Nair: “When did you see him last?”

Saket Ram: “Whom?”

Mr. Nair: “Saket Ram.”

Saket Ram: “A year ago, exactly.”

Mr. Nair: “A year ago there was a massacre. Many of the people in this building died. Maybe your friend also... Sorry.

Saket Ram: “It's alright.”

Mr. Nair: “What was your relationship to this Saket Ram?”

Saket Ram: “Like that of the body to the soul. We were very good friends.”

It is a moment typical of Hey Ram: the visuals dense with imagery, the dialogue packed with associations, a certain excess that seems ready to leap off the screen. Our Tamil protagonist's lovely Bengali first wife Aparna -- played by Rani Mukherjee, her character's name a nod to Sharmila Tagore as Apu's wife in Satyajit Ray's Apur Sansar, a cinematic emblem of perfect young marital domesticity and early death -- is dead. But she haunts her living husband, appearing everywhere – in the balcony of what was her own home, but also writhing in a pool of blood in his new wife's bathroom, or smiling in the faces of other women, or assuming the form of a goddess. Meanwhile, Saket Ram (Kamal Haasan, his character carrying the old poetic name for Ayodhya) lives through the trauma of Aparna's death, but in his acquiescence to Mr. Nair's words, we hear a tacit acknowledgement that perhaps he is not quite alive. Did Saket Ram's soul die with Aparna that Direct Action Day, leaving his body to wander the streets, available for possession by more devious spirits?

It seems no coincidence that Haasan's Saket Ram first encounters the film's other Ram in those very Calcutta streets, in a moment that has the two men literally mirroring each other, in name and in gesture. But Saket Ram is a man in trauma, speaking of surrendering to the police to confess about the Muslim men he has just killed, only one of them the actual rapist and murderer of his wife: he carries the stains, literally, on his white kurta. Shriram Abhyankar (Atul Kulkarni) is a RSS-influenced Hindu fundamentalist, who has covered over an old wound with a new skin of pure hatred. “There is no punishment for doing one's duty. If killing is a crime then so is war, isn't it?” asks Abhyankar. And when Ram protests that he is a mere civilian, Abhyankar counters smoothly: “This is civil war.”

And it is certainly no coincidence that the film's other reference to body and soul is when Abhyankar, finding himself paralysed waist downwards in a riding accident, tells Ram that he must now “be his body” and carry out their mission of assassinating Gandhi, whom Abhyankar and his ilk believe a traitor to the so-called Hindu cause, because of Gandhi's sustained support to the idea that the Muslims have as legitimate a claim to live in India as the majority community does.

Haasan's film is among the most detailed filmic depictions we have of the Hindutva mindset -- not just the admiration for Hitler and the distaste for Gandhi, but how that maps onto an eroticised masculinity in which violence and nationalism come together with a reworked Hindu renunciatory ideal. But there is great confusion in this mindset. In one of the film's most honest, most complicated scenes, Ram imbibes an opium drink given to him by Abhyankar, and it is in that opium-induced haze that he both finally feels the stirrings of sexual attraction to his new young wife Mythili, and agrees, in effect, to leave her side. When he makes love to her, he fantasises about a giant gun. To become a warrior for Hindutva, Ram must take a pledge to “renounce bondage and relationships”. We see him touch, in one seamless gesture, the picture of his unseen dead mother and the map of India, both of which he can only love as abstractions – and leave the house, abandoning for his grand masculine mission all the real, maternal figures he knows, including the newly-pregnant Mythili (Sita to match Ram).

In a directorial sleight-of-hand that makes fine use of both melodrama and coincidence, Haasan ensures that this would-be Godse suddenly finds himself being defended from suspicious Muslims somewhere near Jama Masjid by his trusted old Muslim friend Amjad (Shah Rukh Khan) – and then, in a matter of minutes, defending Amjad and all the other Muslims holed up in the nicely-named Azad Soda Factory.

There is a great deal more that can be said about Hey Ram, but let me end here on the note that Amjad does. In a dying declaration to the police trying to identify the armed Hindu assailant whose entry into the curfew-bound Jama Masjid area set off the bloodbath, Amjad is asked if he had ever seen Bhairav before. Bhairav is the name Ram had assumed on that excursion, and also the name of Lord Shiva's destructive form. “I have never seen that animal before,” says Amjad. “I only know Ram, my brother. He saved my life.”

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23 Feb 2020.