Photography Review: One Step in their Shoes

The Passerby, a photo exhibition of Indian street scenes, shows us the worlds we are walking past. 

(A short review essay I did for India Today magazine, on this gorgeous show, mounted in mid-2022.)

The 23 still images on display in PhotoInk’s garden-set gallery space in Delhi’s Vasant Kunj are a balm for tired eyes. The black and white—and certainly over fifty shades of grey—help recuperate from the nonstop ocular assault of lives lived on multicoloured moving screens. But the healing and stillness The Passerby offers come from some- thing more than form. Street scenes picked from the archives of Raghu Rai, Sooni Taraporevala, Ketaki Sheth and Pablo Bartholomew, these formally stunning photographs paint a portrait of an urban India that’s swiftly passing (if not already past). They range from 1970 to the early 2000s, but the pre-liberalisation era dominates, letting a quiet nostalgia wash over us.

The street scene has historically been among the most popular photographic genres, the PhotoInk brochure points out, and is easier now without a heavy, obtrusive camera: “Everyone with a mobile phone is now a street photographer.”

Everyone could be, yes. But we aren’t. It is striking just how little the glory and grimness of our streets enter the artfully arranged world of Facebook or Instagram. Perhaps it should be no surprise. Street photography needs you to be on foot, and to actually look around as you walk. And while the Indian street remains infinitely more interesting than anything the German philosopher Walter Benjamin imagined when writing of the flaneur in 1930s Paris or Berlin, the upper middle class that controls image-making in our digitally-divided republic has withdrawn indoors. India remains full of street weddings and street-side shrines; the poor—of necessity—still work and sleep and fight and make love in the street.

But between Uber/Ola and app-based delivery, urban white-collar Indians needn’t put foot to asphalt, for taxi, auto-rickshaw or groceries. The few who do either make no images, or pirouette and fetishise.

The Passerby yields many insights into our recent past, and how photographers saw it. For instance, beasts of burden are often juxtaposed with motorised transport. An Ambassador and a bullock cart share in Rai’s majestic 1984 Delhi downpour; a white Fiat faces determinedly away from Taraporevala’s 1977 camel on Marine Drive. These animals have disappeared from city streets, as have these vehicles. Gone, too, is the sidecar-style scooter in which a 1976 Shravan Kumar transports his aged parents (Bartholomew’s ‘Family on a scooter’). Taxi drivers no longer nap with doors ajar; they use the car AC.

But much remains the same. Rai and Bartholomew both capture cart pushers to devastating effect, moving mountains with their bodies. Horses stand in symmetry in Rai’s Turkman Gate, their blinkered gazes evoking that of the purdah-clad woman beside them. Hijras still pose performatively, while few women on the street meet the photographer’s gaze— Sheth’s shy mother and child and Taraporevala’s striking tableau of Kamathipura sex workers both needed women behind the lens.

Given our increasingly enclosed present, The Passerby images are not just a way into the past, but a call to the future— what do we want for our streets, and ourselves?

(The Passerby is on view at PHOTOINK, New Delhi, till June 26)

Published in India Today, May 2022. 

Note: Pablo Bartholomew's photographs, included in the show and discussed above, are not available for view on the PhotoInk gallery website to which I have linked above. 

When silent films speak of a lost past

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The discovery of a treasure trove of forgotten nitrate films from the early 1900s is the inspiration for a magical documentary

Sometimes a film feels like an epiphany. Watching Bill Morrison's Dawson City: Frozen Time, currently streaming on an international film platform, had that sort of effect on me. It tells the strange and wondrous tale of how nearly 400 silent films from the early 1900s, managed to survive in the permafrost of what had once been a small-town swimming pool -- emerging from the ground in the 1970s, to finally find their place in the history of humanity.

Technically a documentary, Morrison's film is an exquisite assemblage of facts and footage so artfully and lovingly crafted that it feels like an epic. That epic quality comes from two historic elements – the Canadian gold rush, which originally brought Dawson City into being, and the invention of cinema, which created these thousands of feet worth of early film images, only to abandon them. What Morrison captures, without ever spelling it out explicitly, is the way the treasure trove -- known as the Dawson City Film Find -- offers up a conjoined history of these two lost worlds: A forgotten town and a forgotten technology.

And yet both the town and the technology were, a century and a quarter ago, part of the crucible of modernity. Morrison begins with the fact that film originated in an explosive, nitrate cellulose. The Kodak company turned it into nitrate film by adding camphor to it and then coating it with plastic emulsion. But nitrate film, on which all early cinema was stored, remained highly inflammable, and the documentary shows, over and over again, that the history of early cinema is also a history of fire. From Thomas Alva Edison's film manufacturing plant exploding, to the Solax Film Company Fire in 1919, from the repeated burning down of Dawson City's film theatres, down to the 1967 warehouse fire in which the National Film Board of Canada lost its entire nitrate film collection, the sense of tragic loss comes to be replaced by a sense of inevitability.

The film is also a deep dive into Dawson: Now a small town with a tiny population of 1300-odd people (as of 2011), but once the site of a remarkable moment in world history. Gold was discovered near here on August 17, 1896, at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers near the boundary with the US state of Alaska. Over the next three years, thousands of prospectors made the extremely difficult journey to this freezing-cold terrain, often crossing snow-covered passes on foot, hoping, literally, to strike gold. During the height of the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898, Dawson City’s population exceeded 30,000.

Naturally, entrepreneurs of all sorts arrived, hoping to ‘mine the miners’, as Morrison puts it. Fred Trump opened a brothel called the Arctic Hotel and Restaurant in the nearby town of Whitehorse -- the origin, says Morrison, of the Trump family fortune. Casinos were the other gig in town, as you might expect from a place full of men on the make. An athletics association building came up, with boxing matches organised for a largely male audience. Soon, there were not one but three theatres screening films.

But as the more accessible mines began to be exhausted, and gold was discovered some distance away in Nome, Alaska, the city of Dawson emptied out, becoming a quarter of its size in a year. Films continued to come to Dawson, but they often took two or three years after their first release, to arrive. The town was at the end of a film distribution line, and the distributors didn't want to pay for their passage back. The films were already old news. So they ended up being stored in Dawson. As the years passed, and the town's buildings started running out of space, thousands of old silent film reels were burnt, or simply disposed of in the Yukon river. A small section remained -- and the rest is history: A history whose incredible details you should watch the film for.

Yet Morrison's film is no mere history book on screen. What he does is a marvel in terms of film form. He uses still images -- including photographs taken during the Gold Rush by a photographer called Eric Hegg, which have their own magical history of survival and recovery -- as well as newspaper articles, printed posters and archival letters. He uses newsreels from Pathe and Fox. And he combs all of this archival visual material for Dawson history, from an early instance of baseball match fixing to a real-life Hollywood murder with a Dawson connection. And of course, Dawson's connections with early cinema. But he goes far beyond using the footage as factual archive; he uses the reels from the Dawson Film Find, their edges marked by decades of water damage, to craft a magical visual history of their time. A sentence like “The years and decades passed Dawson by” is illustrated with shots of silent film heroines sleeping, as if waiting to be awakened by the kiss of some fairytale prince. We watch entranced as a series of unidentified film characters gamble, or wrestle with their lovers, or wait outside doors, eavesdropping. It feels like we're eavesdropping too, on history.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 Mar 2021

The Lives of Others

Watching Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 murder mystery, in a post-COVID world 

“The movies make us into voyeurs. We sit in the dark, watching other people's lives. It is the bargain the cinema strikes with us, although most films are too well-behaved to mention it,” wrote the hugely popular film critic Roger Ebert in his 1999 review of the film Peeping Tom. Michael Powell's film caused great outrage upon its release in 1960, and Ebert speculated — nearly 40 years later — that it was because it broke that unspoken contract between the audience and the filmmaker. By making its protagonist a serial killer who liked to film his victims in the throes of death, Peeping Tom forced viewers to contend with the violence of our own scopophilia, the pleasure we derive from looking.

Six years before Peeping Tom, another British director had made a film about the pleasure of looking, featuring a news photographer instead of a film studio focus-puller. But Alfred Hitchcock was too clever to make his audiences too uncomfortable. The kernel of Rear Window (1954) lay in a 1942 Cornell Woolrich short story called 'It Had To Be Murder', where the temporarily laid-up narrator's view of the windows across from his own leads him to suspect a murder. “I could have constructed a timetable of [my neighbours'] comings and goings, their daily habits and activities. Sure, I suppose it was a little bit like prying, could even have been mistaken for the fevered concentration of a Peeping Tom,” concedes Woolrich's narrator, before quickly denying any intentional voyeurism. “That wasn’t my fault, that wasn’t the idea.”

Hitchcock's hero doesn't get let off so easily. Within the film's first few minutes, his no-nonsense nurse Stella berates him as a 'window shopper' who spends his days looking at newly married couples and “bikini bombshells”. Stella has no doubt that spying on other people is a modern-day evil: “We've become a race of Peeping Toms. They used to poke your eyes out for that sort of thing, with a red-hot poker...” . But Hitchcock, along with his superb screenwriter John Michael Hayes', transforms the original story to make his hero a professional viewer of the world — and his film all about looking.

LB Jefferies, better known as Jeff (James Stewart) is a globe-trotting photographer who's fractured his leg on a particularly adventurous shoot. When the film opens, he has been holed up in his New York apartment for five weeks, with nothing better to do than look out of his rear window. While he converts these telling glimpses of his neighbours into stories — and in Hitchcock's unspoken self-referential extension, into cinematic fictions complete with a plot — Jeff himself is never seen. Or at least, he tries his best to ensure that he isn't: wheeling his chair back, keeping his lights off, even hiding at opportune moments. Not really the usual style of a cinematic hero.

There is all sorts of genius in this Hitchcock treatment, starting with the fact that Jeff thinks of himself as being of generally superior intellect to others in his locality. He does have an interest in the outside world, but usually it is reserved for distant places that impinge on his consciousness only in some headline-making way — when his editor calls to propose a trip to Kashmir because the “place is about to go up in flames”, Jeff's excited response is “Didn't I tell you that's the next place to watch?”. His immediate vicinity he thinks of as dull, lulling us into that assumption — and also making us feel a little guilty about the voyeuristic gaze that seeks excitement.

Dullness appears to be a problem both for those outside relationships and those in them. One single female neighbour — Jeff calls her Miss Lonelyheart — often drinks herself to sleep. But her efforts to date are ill-fated, too: we watch one much-awaited young man thrust himself on her as soon as the front door is closed. Another single woman — Stella's 'bikini bombshell', named 'Miss Torso' by our hero — has no shortage of male admirers, but none of them looks worth having. A single male songwriter above Miss Torso seems equally starved for love.

Meanwhile the couples lead lives of sweetly boring domesticity, or else bitter conflict — the sort that can lead to murder. Our hero himself has a girlfriend most men would have killed for, Grace Kelly as a model called Lisa Fremont who appears on the covers of magazines, but he isn't happy either. He thinks she isn't cut out for marriage to someone like him, who spends weeks on the road in rough places. “If she was only ordinary,” Jeff whines to Stella. We're meant to see that Lisa's Park Avenue perfection and high fashionista status is dull as ditchwater to Jeff: once he even asks what her cocktail companion was wearing, only to ruthlessly mock her reply.

Alfred Hitchcock lets Jeff tell many an uncle joke about nagging wives and the sad fate of husbands. But Rear Window can also be seen as undercutting Jeff's rather comfortable narrative: the rough-and-ready adventurer remains tied to his chair till film's end, while the exquisitely-turned-out Lisa does all the mystery-solving legwork, even putting herself at risk. Lisa's physical fearlessness is what finally impresses Jeff — he seems to think he's kindled her sense of adventure. And of course, Jeff's fracture literally bars him from legwork. Even so, his reliance entirely on visual tricks is fascinating: even when the murderer walks into his room, all Jeff can think of as a weapon is a battery-operated flashlight to blind him temporarily. And it's definitely possible to read Rear Window in a way that sees Jeff's immobility as emasculation, and emasculation as marriage — Hitchcock's hero ends the film with both legs in a cast and firmly embedded in traditional coupledom.

Rear Window is a ridiculously apposite watch for a post-COVID world, where travel for travel's sake seems to have gone, well, out the window. For one, Lisa's attitude turns the perfect side-eye upon Jeff's grandstanding travel stories. Other aspects of the film ring even truer in an era in which rising authoritarianism and the ubiquity of social media, combined with pandemic-enforced isolation, is pushing us more and more into the once socially dubious roles of the lurker, the invisible spectator in the dark. On our screens and off them, stalking and surveillance have greater currency than ever before. Stella's “homespun wisdom” — from a 1939 Reader's Digest — seems almost poetic in its appropriateness: “What people ought to do is get outside their own houses and look in for a change.”

Published in Firstpost, 25 Oct 2020

Speak, memory

My Mirror column:
 
Ritesh Batra’s Photograph is an underappreciated gem of a film, gleaming with quiet revelations about the stories we tell ourselves.

Ritesh Batra’s Photograph (2019), much like his acclaimed 2013 film The Lunchbox, is based on a particular idea of romance: two people from very different worlds united by happenstance. In both films, that unexpected connection is forged by the big city, the vast anonymous wilderness suddenly letting two people see each other. In The Lunchbox, Batra used a mix-up by Mumbai’s much-feted dabbawalas as the device that brought a neglected housewife in contact with an office-going widower. In Photograph, the unlikely bond that Batra wants to us to believe in, between a street photographer called Rafi and a modest Gujarati girl prepping for her CA exams, is tied to something just as iconic in the city: the Gateway of India.

Yes, perhaps there’s a kernel of reality there. Where, except at the Gateway of India, would a working class Muslim man from a village in Ballia, Uttar Pradesh, living five to a kholi in Mumbai, have a chance to speak to a fair, English-speaking, academically-inclined girl from an upper middle class Hindu family? But for Miloni to have her photo taken by Rafi is one thing; to have her actually respond to a personal request from him days, even weeks later, is quite another. It is in making us believe in their slowly unfurling connection that Batra wins, and in the ever-so-delicate performances he draws from Nawazuddin Siddiqui as the watchful Rafi and Sanya Malhotra as the almost painfully quiet Miloni.

The gulf between them has been described as “cultural”, and I suppose that is one way to put it. But the financial inequality is stark enough to ensure that even a simple transactional moment between them is experienced completely differently by both parties. Miloni can forget to pay the Rs 30 for her instant photo not just because she is distracted, but because the amount is so little as to not even register in her mind. Meanwhile, for Rafi, who counts out even his petty change to send home, one disappeared client can turn a good day into bad.

What Batra does beautifully is to show us these quiet people, both adamant to resist the paths laid out for them. For Rafi, the prospect of marriage is not entirely unattractive, but he thinks pining away for a wife in the village will make him a “softy”. It is soon clear that he resists because he is the sentimental grandson who revisits his childhood in story after story, recognising in his grandmother’s childhood stories the power of fiction (“She made us laugh so much that we wouldn’t even know if the stove had been lit that day”) – and returning her gift now with an elaborate fiction of his own. For Miloni, life so far has been defined by her parents: home to tuition and back, the CA examination, arranged marriage to an eligible boy, America. She is so unused to choosing anything that even the colours of her clothes are of no consequence to her. Spending days with Rafi and his dadi becomes the furthest she has strayed from the straight and narrow.

At the centre of the film is the photograph of Miloni that Rafi takes. But Batra’s style is literary, in the best possible ways, and so it is no coincidence that we don’t ever properly see the picture. The image here is but a prop for stories – for Rafi’s story that he has a fiancée, and later for Miloni’s story of how she and Rafi got together. She makes it up for Dadi’s benefit, as she does her dead parents. But what she sees in it is true: a happier self, now invisible to her, that Rafi’s gaze seems to capture.

There is nostalgia here aplenty – the breeze on the ferry, the old Hindi film song in a kali-peeli taxi on a rainy Bombay night, Campa Cola as the taste of a childhood self. But the quality that felt slightly contrived in The Lunchbox – handwritten notes, the repeated error of the dabba delivery, no mobile phones – has also been smoothed into something more convincing here, something in which the past is not a simple refuge. The pleasure of the ice gola is destroyed by a stomach upset, the old single screen theatre by a rat. The old lady urges Rafi to let go of the past: to forget the mortgaged house, the deprived childhood. In a darker subplot, the story of the man who hung himself in the room where Rafi and his four mates live is told and retold in their drunken sessions: now with humour, now with pathos, but most of all with a kind of desperation – as if telling and retelling the tale might exorcise the ghost of the past.

Perhaps what makes Photograph so rewarding is its recognition that we live in the past and the present simultaneously, and that it isn’t necessarily the end of the story that matters most, but what you remember of it. In the words of Rafi’s marvellous sales pitch to prospective customers: “Saalon baad jab aap yeh photo dekhenge, toh aapko aapke chehre pe yahi dhoop dikhai degi, aapke baalon mein yeh hawa, aur aapke kaanon mein hazaaron logon ki awaazein. Sab chala jayega. Hamesha ke liye sab chala jayega. [“Years later when you look at this photo, you will see this very sunlight on your face, this breeze in your hair, and the voices of thousands of people in your ears. Everything will go. Everything will be gone for ever.”]. Everything will end, but a memory can still be a gift.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Nov 2019

Living in the Ruins

My Mirror column:

Continuing her tribute to Mrinal Sen, our columnist writes about his rarely watched gem, Khandhar (1984).

Shabana Azmi in Mrinal Sen's Khandhar (1984)

Famine, as I wrote last week, was one of the recurring motifs of Mrinal Sen’s cinema. An even more ubiquitous image in his films was the ruins. Since most of Sen’s films drew on modern Bangla literature and were set in Bengal, it’s no surprise that the ruins were almost always those of a zamindar bari. These huge residential mansions that had represented the heights of feudal grandeur in the eighteenth or nineteenth century now dot the Bengal countryside, their colossal staircases and many-pillared verandas slowly crumbling into nothingness.

Sen’s first cinematic ruin was in Baishey Shravana (1960), where it serves as the film’s first marker of the cruelty of time. When his young wife (Madhabi Mukherjee) scampers out of their hut giggling, Priyanath follows her. He watches the spring go out of her step as she enters the ruins of the old family mansion. It is impossible to be anything but grave here, standing in the shadows of what they once were, what they will never be again.

In Akaler Sandhane (1980), the decrepit zamindar bari has managed to survive into the present — not as a home, but as a film set. Its ownership is farcically split among multiple descendants, who live all over the country. The only family members still on the premises are a middle-aged woman and her paralysed husband.

But it was with Khandhar (1984) that Sen really placed the ruin centre stage. Taking a classic Bangla story by Premendra Mitra called ‘Telenapota Abishkar’ (The Discovery of Telenapota), Sen adapted the atmospheric tale of three young men making a weekend visit to a ruined rural zamindari into the 1980s and into Hindi. Dipu (Pankaj Kapur) is the surviving scion who decides to bring two friends to see his crumbling ancestral home.

As in Akaler Sandhane, the city visitors treat the ruins as merely a picturesque setting. The dry, meditative Subhash (Naseeruddin Shah) is lured literally by the prospect of a ‘photographer’s paradise’, while the more talkative Anil (Annu Kapoor) is mainly happy to have a break from the city. The fact that real lives are lived here seems not to percolate into their consciousness; not even when Subhash has an awkward encounter with Dipu’s cousin Jamini (Shabana Azmi), an attractive young woman who is wasting away in the ruins.

Sole caretaker for her paralysed mother, the fine-featured Jamini remains unmarried, half-beginning to inhabit her mother’s delusional hopes about a Niranjan who was once betrothed to her. The figure of Jamini’s mother echoes the bedridden husband in Akaler, both also producing a doomed aura of clinging on to some pride from the past. Meanwhile, the unseen Niranjan, upon whose arrival all hopes seem to be pegged, brings Khandhar into synch with other Mrinal Sen films in which an important character is the subject of conversation for much of the running time but remains unseen: Chinu (Mamata Shankar) in Ek Din Pratidin, Professor Roy (Shriram Lagoo) in Ek Din Achanak, the servant boy Palan in the scathing Kharij.

Naseer’s photographer here is allied to Dhritiman Chatterjee as the filmmaker protagonist of Akaler, both figures making reference to Sen’s own observing, extractive artistic self. The camera is Subhash’s medium of communication with people, but it is also a shield against them: a boundary.

The photograph can be a memory created for the future. It can be a way of offering attention in the present. It can also be a way of enshrining the past — or enshrining the living as if they were dead. When Subhash decides to go along to Jamini’s house, the camera is his ticket. He’ll take a picture of the paralysed aunt, he tells Dipu: “You can use it to hang on the wall when she pops it.”

There is something about Khandhar that feels haunted, without the presence of anything supernatural. Unlike in the famous Tagore tale ‘Khudito Pashan’ (The Hungry Stones), in which a young man in another ruined palace became possessed by the spirit of an ancient dancing girl, the yearning spirit here is human, and very much alive.

And yet all the photographer/filmmaker can do is to frame her through the bars of a window, atop a terrace, or against a crumbling wall covered in cowpats. Whether he picks her out by the light of a torch or a camera, all he succeeds in illuminating for an instant is her loneliness. The ruins are inescapable. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 Feb 2019.

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.

Feeding the soul

My Mirror column:

Food seems to bring out feelings. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that films about chefs are films about family and fatherhood. The first of a multi-part column.

Sometime in 2011, an award-winning Italian photographer called Alessio Mamo decided to travel through Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, taking pictures for what he called The Hunger Project.
Last Sunday, when Mamo’s pictures showed up on the World Press Photo’s Instagram page, they were met with outrage. Here were real poor, underfed people, posing before tables laden with fake food. Mamo’s explanation — that he meant to make “western people think, in a provocative way, about the waste of food” — does not excuse his bizarre insensitivity. The attempt to shock by displaying malnourished Indian bodies has led to allegations of ‘poverty porn’. But the more widespread anger is triggered by the fakeness of the food. Making hungry people dream of lavish meals with no intention of actually satisfying that longing seems deliberately cruel.

Thinking about the controversy made me think about how deeply food is wound up with our emotions. Hunger is the purest physical sensation, but it is also the strongest metaphor for a sense of deprivation -- just as the act of feeding someone is often a stand-in for love and care. Almost all over the world, almost all of the time, it is women who do that cooking and feeding. Meals are the most crucial part of the invisible, unpaid labour that keeps the household going. But of course cooking can only get its moment in the sun once it is taken out of the domestic arena, and when men who wouldn’t lift a finger in their own kitchen are willing to lay claim to it as a terrain.

Worldwide, as well as in India, any celebrated chef is invariably a man. Yet a man’s association with cooking isn’t something we can take for granted. It remains something that demands thinking through, making a big deal about. Further, being associated with a traditionally ‘feminine’ activity seems to push restaurant kitchen culture in the direction of an overcompensatory machismo.

So it’s interesting to find that films about chefs are so often about finding a balance between what's often understood as masculine and feminine, between worldly ambition and the nurturing of family. Jon Favreau’s 2014 film Chef, for instance, centres around a well-known Los Angeles chef called Carl (played by Favreau himself), whose public meltdown in response to a nasty review goes viral on Twitter. Having lost his job, he ends up on an unanticipated trip to Miami with his ex-wife and ten-year-old son Percy — and finds himself starting anew by opening a food truck.

Many elements of the plot aren’t new: the road trip, the father-and-son bonding, a man trying to reinvent himself after a midlife crisis. But putting food and cooking at the centre of this cinematic journey allows Favreau to wax gently philosophical about what we really need to nourish our souls. The battle between Carl and his restaurant owner boss Riva (Dustin Hoffman) speaks of how catering to a known market can kill all creativity, making you feel distant even from a job you love in theory. The road trip is another classic trope in a world of deadening capitalist routine – moving into unfamiliar surroundings to re-familiarise yourself with your feelings.


It’s in rejigging the beat-up old truck, though, that the film really hits its stride. There is something here about actual physical labour, about father and son working side by side, that feels wonderfully real. What’s nice is that it isn’t just about being able to summon up strength — something that might be seen as the displayable test of masculinity. Here, instead, we have a forty-year-old man initiating his ten-year-old son into a thoughtful work ethic. Clearing out the old doesn’t always mean acquiring shiny new stuff, Carl suggests to Percy: it can often mean the slow and laborious process of saving what can still be used, and the drudgery of actually cleaning it. The unglamorous stuff needs to be done, even if it’s not what goes into the social media pictures.


Favreau’s film was officially remade last year in India by Raja Krishna Menon, starring Saif Ali Khan in Favreau’s role. Rather than the overweight Carl, who has a hilariously deadpan verbal contest with his father-in-law about who’s dropped more pounds recently, Saif’s Roshan Kalra is super-fit — but with anger issues, expressed in actually punching a customer in the US restaurant where he works. His return to India is spearheaded by losing his job as well as adesire to see his son Ary, who lives with Roshan’s estranged wife Radha in Kochi.


That seems believable. What doesn’t is the food truck — especially Menon’s attempt to relocate the father-son bonding over work into an Indian upper middle-class scenario. The ethic of dignity of labour is practically impossible to translate into a world in which all cooking and cleaning around a child like Ary is done by servants.


In Favreau’s film, the labour we see – even under Hollywood conditions and with the fetishising of such things as the chef’s knife – feels undoubtedly like work. In Menon’s film, neither father nor son can make us believe that it is anything but play.

(To be continued next week)

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 July 2018.

Coffee Break: thoughts on Stuart Freedman's pictures of Indian Coffee Houses

The Palaces of Memory: Tales from the Indian Coffee House is Stuart Freedman's visual journey of urban India.

 

The Indian Coffee House, Kollam (now closed), 2013

When Stuart Freedman first arrived in Delhi in the mid-90s, it felt overwhelming. "I'd been to Pakistan, I'd been at the siege of Kabul, but India was something else," laughs the British photographer, now a veteran of many visits. "When I needed a break from the relentless push and pull of the city, I'd go to the Coffee House and be quiet. It was a refuge." But it wasn't till about 2010 that he picked up his camera inside one of them. Soon after, on assignments in Jaipur and Kolkata, he ended up photographing the Indian Coffee Houses there. "Then I knew it was a book," says Freedman, in Delhi for the Indian launch of his photo-exhibition and accompanying book, The Palaces of Memory: Tales from the Indian Coffee House (Tasveer/ Dauble, 2017).

If you grew up in urban India before liberalisation, the Coffee House, or at least the idea of it, is likely to have been part of your coming of age. Set up by the British government in the 1930s as a response to the Depression-era decline in coffee exports, the India(n) Coffee House chain did much more than create a local demand for the beverage. Its outposts across India became places where middle-class people met, to drink coffee, yes, but also to discuss politics and poetry and the day's gossip, to meet classmates after class or colleagues after work, or to conduct a romantic rendezvous in a place that offered anonymity but also safety. In short, to do all those things that not many places in the 20th century Indian city yet enabled, and to do so in a public place, inexpensively.

Yet, while the Coffee House experience captured something of modern western urbanity, it also represented India's unabashed, wholehearted claiming of it. Here, we produced our own version of modernity: where the coffee came in white ceramic cups (with saucers) but the kettles were aluminium; where you might cut up a mutton cutlet with a knife and fork but happily eat sambar-vada with your hands. Palaces of Memory does the much-needed job of making us look afresh at these remarkable places in our midst, their unpretentious formica tables and faded Gandhi-Nehru images offering a magical window into a vanished past. As the post-liberalisation city around it grows ever more brash and shiny, the more the Coffee House seems like a holdout: the last surviving outpost of what Amit Chaudhuri's 'Prologue' calls a "deliberately, almost jealously protected austerity".

A waiter serves schoolgirls beneath a portrait of Rabindranath Tagore in the Indian Coffee House, Kolkata, 2013

Freedman's images do not shy away from this plainness, or signs of age: the peeling walls, the fraying pockets of uniforms, the blackened switchboards, table legs balanced in empty Amul cheese tins. But his gaze is affectionate, forgiving, even celebratory. Even a fly sitting in a bowl of sugar seems innocuous, yet another visitor to the Coffee House who hasn't been turned away. "I'm not romantic about India, the nonsense about elephants and maharajas. But there is a romance about what the Coffee Houses allow people to do. You can sit all afternoon with a cup of coffee and no one's going to tell you to leave," Freedman says. "I'm from Hackney, from a working class background. The Coffee House became this kind of translation device for me because I saw the same people there as in the cafes at home."

Of course, Coffee Houses are not all the same. "South Indian ones have much more substantial food," says Freedman. And one Coffee House might cater to different constituencies: retired old men, college students, middle-aged couples or a family on a ritual outing, young lovebirds. But what all these people are likely to have in common is that they are lower middle class.

Men sit and talk in the Indian Coffee House, Baba Kharak Singh Marg, New Delhi, 2010

Freedman is clearly drawn to places that democratise leisure. If England's greasy spoon cafes summon up an era of post-war rationing that he didn't quite witness, his book on another dying British institution, the Eel, Pie and Mash shop, "is really about [his] past" and "that section of London's working class that feels dislocated". He has also photographed the cafes of Cairo "as a way to examine the Egyptian revolution". Does he see Indian Coffee Houses as resisting the neoliberal economy? "Modern cities privatise space," Freedman agrees. "Places where people gather and are not monetised like Starbucks are places where people discuss. And discussion is dangerous to the state. Indira Gandhi knew this; she closed the Coffee House during Emergency, saying it was seditious."

Indian Coffee House, Chandigarh, India, 2013

What also makes the Indian Coffee Houses unique is that they are worker-run. In the 1950s, after the Coffee Board decided to privatise 43 outlets and fired many employees, the workers formed cooperative societies and persuaded the management to let them run the outlets.

Freedman's many superb portraits of waiters and kitchen staff are testament to the wonderful sense of ownership that pervades the Coffee Houses as a result. In one image in Palaces, a frail old man in a dhoti sits with his back to a man in collared shirt and trousers. As they raise their identical cups of coffee to their lips, one has the sense of a world in perfect balance, something sadly missing in the world outside.

Published in India Today magazine, 16 Mar 2018.

Thin Grey Line

An essay I wrote for the Taj Magazine.

Is photography a science or an art? And how does a photo change if it is posed or embellished? Is image manipulation part of a larger artistic progression? Trisha Gupta maps the long history of the Indian photograph. 

Waswo X. Waswo, Night Prowl, 2008, Black and white pigment print hand-coloured by Rajesh Soni. Courtesy: Tasveer

Photography is a strange art. After the camera was developed in the mid-19th century, photographs began to replace paintings, especially in portraiture. But unlike the other visual arts (drawing, painting, engraving ), the photograph has always been understood as giving us direct access to the real. As Susan Sontag wrote in her classic book On Photography: “A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image ), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask”.

The strangeness of photography as an art, then, stems from its parallel status as a science: the idea that the camera is a transparent medium, and that photographs actually capture experience –rather than producing an artistic response to it. The history of Indian photography, as the Bangalore-based gallery Tasveer’s recently concluded exhibition in New York showed, is particularly shaped by this split identity–suspended between artifice and reality, embellishment and documentation, theatre and truth.

Photography arrived in India in 1840, only a few months after its European beginnings, and was “taken up with alacrity by amateurs, aspirant professionals, individuals with ‘scientific’ agendas and within two decades, by the apparatus of the colonial state,” writes the anthropologist Christopher Pinney in his 1997 book Camera Indica. The Indian context was particularly ripe for photography’s arrival, as Pinney’s archival sources reveal. British colonisers, confronted with India’s insurmountable otherness and near-infinite anthropological variety, had long been anxious about the accuracy of native reproductions – whether written or drawn or engraved – as a way of transmitting knowledge. Photographs – with the ‘stern fidelity’ evoked by the Reverend Joseph Mullins in his 1857 address to the Photographic Society of Bengal – seemed just the solution. Mid-19th century manuals of medical jurisprudence and criminal investigation alike had already begun to recommend photography as an evidentiary tool that was, like fingerprinting and cranial measurements, “almost absolutely free from the personal equation of the observer”. Photography for identificatory purposes was already understood as a measure of control: “No measure would... impress more vividly, even upon the minds of the ignorant and superstitious common people, a conviction of the difficulty of eluding our vigilance,” wrote Dr. Norman Chevers, Principal of the Calcutta Medical College, in 1856. A century and a half later, by imposing Aadhaar’s non-voluntary photographic and biometric identification upon its citizens, the Indian government is bringing that surveillance state to final fruition.

Yet alongside this history, in which the photograph was held up as the very embodiment of truth, ran another Indian history of photography as art – and this was, more so than in the rest of the world, a history of photographic manipulation. The hundreds of photo studios that had come into being across India by the 1880s often advertised themselves as “Artists and Photographers” – some of them actually put images of paintbrushes and palette on their cabinet cards, like the EOS Photographic Company, or the Vanguard Studio, Bombay. The artistry of these Indian images involved not just studio backdrops and carefully arranged props, but also the application of paint. European photographers also used paint to retouch negatives and enhance colour on the final print, writes Pinney, but painted photographs in India were a whole different order of business. Studios produced numerous images in which paint overlaid and obscured the photograph – rather than merely supplementing it. Given the tremendous popularity of the painted photograph it comes as no surprise that Judith Gutman’s study, Through Indian Eyes, documents some studios as having up to twenty-nine painters “to do outlining, background scenery, retouching and oil painting”. The Indian photographic studio was a successor to the miniature painter’s karkhana.

The new show put on display many such painted photographs – mostly Indian princes and princelings posing for what Andrew Wilton has appropriately called the “swagger portrait”: a style that “puts public display before the values of personality and domesticity.” Dressed in their finest clothes and richest jewels, the princes in these images allowed studio artists to glory in their skilled reproduction of detail – whether it be the carpet under their subject’s feet, the patterned curtain behind him, or the feathered, bejewelled headdresses that propelled their attire from being merely clothes to costume. A princeling in a posed studio photograph had already been inserted into a coded fiction of rulership – the embellishment provided by the painter made that fiction even more elaborate.

D. Nusserwanji Studio Bombay, Rajasthani merchant with his son, 1940, Overpainted silver gelatin print. Courtesy: Tasveer

WaswoXWaswo. Zakir and Tarif Smoking. (2008), Black and white pigment print, hand-coloured by Rajesh Soni, 20 × 13 in. Courtesy: Tasveer

But those images, embellished though they were, involved rulers (or rulers-to-be) posing in finery they actually owned, signalling the social and political status they wished to lay claim to. The painted photograph was theatre in whose truth we were meant to believe. In WaswoXWaswo’s playful reimagining of the painted studio portrait, his subjects appear much more clearly to have ‘dressed up’. Whether it is the archly half-turning Chandra “with a Shell Headdress”, or the bearded ascetic in ‘Another Follower of Shiva’ who holds up a trident – painted in tiger stripes, presumably after the photograph was taken – and a bunch of peacock feathers, we are now clearly in a conscious realm of make-believe.

WaswoXWaswo’s images are a homage to the painted photographs of the 19th century Indian studio, and in fact they are the product of collaboration with Rajesh Soni, an artist who handpaints digital photographs. He is the grandson of Prabhu Lal Soni (Verma). who was also a renowned hand colourist of photographs - once court photographer to the Maharana Bhopal Singh of Mewar. Soni and WaswoXWaswo’s images are fantastic in the proper etymological sense of that word: dreamlike, phantasms that take in all possible Orientalist signifiers of Indianness: tigers, peacocks, jungles, tribals, ascetics, maharajas, rural belles. But part of the effectiveness of these images as dreams derives from containing within themselves a pinprick that brings you back to reality. So the peacock feathers which seem to vie with the backdrop for tropical lushness are held aloft by a suspicious looking travelling salesman with a cycle and a Vimal shopping bag – signs of unposh urbanity that quickly unravel the forested dream the image has partially built up. In ‘Zakir and Tarif Smoking’, the subversion is much more in-your-face – the two sombre young men framed against a red velvet curtain and a richly patterned carpet could have played at being princelings, but instead they sit there in plain white kurta-pyjamas, a cigarette dangling from each of their mouths with careful casualness. ‘Tribal Dreams’ and ‘Night Prowl’ escort us into the jungle more mysteriously. In the first image, the subject’s face is hidden – we see only his body, illuminated with golden dots. In the second, too, the body is painted, this time with yellow stripes, to evoke a tiger. The figure is on all fours, staring out at the viewer through the eyeholes of a tiger mask. Masks, of course, are metaphors for many things – most commonly, theatre. The Tasveer show contained another young boy with a mask – in the memorable image shot by the Ahmedabad-based photographer Jyoti Bhatt, the young tribal boy seems dwarfed by the huge earthen mask he holds. The 1934-born Bhatt spent several decades from the mid-1960s onwards photographing folk and indigenous art forms in rural India, and his work is a marvellous glimpse of that archive.

Jyoti Bhatt. 'Three Oriya women in front of their house with a wall painted.' Courtesy: Tasveer

Bhatt’s photographs are the opposite of theatrical. But as he places his shy, mostly reluctant subjects – women and children half-covering their faces, or looking studiously away from the camera, a cow that seems to be trying to curl itself into nothingness – against walls of the homes and barns in which they live, one’s attention is drawn constantly to the traditional artistic practices of embellishment that turn those walls into such arresting backdrops for everyday life.

The work of Dutch artist Bas Meeuws invokes a different Indian artistic history – Mughal floral motifs as they appear in inlay work on monuments, and in the borders of paintings and manuscripts. Meeuws’ digitally manipulated ‘still lifes’ of these individually photographed flowers – poppies, carnations, cornflowers, canna lilies – have a strangely hypnotic quality: petals rich and glossy against a pitch black backdrop, leaves glowing a preturnatural green. The Tasveer show gestures to complex Indian histories of embellishment: either carried out before the picture was taken, or involving the manipulation of the photographic image. The images here declare their created-ness, but we live in a world in which fake images proliferate. Every photographic documentation must compete against the manipulated fictions floating up as fact in the nebulous sea of WhatsApp forwards.

© Bas Meeuws, Mughal Botanical (#03),2015, C-print on dibond behind acrylic. Courtesy: Tasveer

In this post-factual world, the line between fact and fiction can sometime seem a blurred matter of artistic license. Recently, an award-winning photojournalist called Souvid Datta admitted to Time magazine that he had “foolishly doctored images” in 2013-15, infringing on the work of well-known photographers including Mary Ellen Mark. Asked why he had done it, the 1999-born Datta replied: “In part, I was also discovering the technology of Photoshop... and the creation of something new excited me. It felt like a very basic artistic achievement. There are other images... not intended as journalistic work, which have also been altered using post-production techniques... I didn’t understand what a photojournalist was for a long time, let alone the weight of trying to assume that title.” Photography is indeed a strange art. Because it is so often also called upon to be a science -- and the burden of being both is too much to bear.

Published in the Taj Magazine, June 2017 issue.

Not Papered Over

My Mirror column:

New Delhi Times depicts an Indian media threatened by the growing nexus of business and politics — thirty years ago.

Shashi Kapoor and Sharmila Tagore in New Delhi Times (1986)

In Ramesh Sharma’s New Delhi Times, a Delhi-based news editor called Vikas Pande (Shashi Kapoor) is caught in a communal riot in his hometown of Ghazipur. Being driven to safety in a police jeep, he jumps out to rescue a photojournalist friend being accosted on the street. Back in the quiet of the Circuit House room, the photojournalist Anwar (played by theatre director MK Raina) tells Vikas that he’d come to shoot a photoessay on opium smuggling, but on hearing of a riot, took his camera and jumped into the fray: “Mazaa aa gaya!”

“Tumhe riot mein mazaa aata hai?” Vikas chastises him. “Amaa miyaan,” drawls Anwar, “You know what I’m saying! You get a good story, I get some good photographs: what else?” Vikas looks disturbed. He says: “You know, Anwar, sometimes I feel a strange fear – that we professional journalists simply bypass the real tragedy of whatever we’re covering. We don’t even feel it.” Anwar looks up gravely, his veneer of easy cynicism gone. “We used to feel it,” he says. “When it happened once in a while, we felt it very deeply. But now, now that it is an everyday spectacle, we feel nothing at all.”

New Delhi Times (1986) was an early portrait of the Indian media: how the growing nexus between business and politics threatened its independence. Although it won Sharma the Indira Gandhi award for the Best First Film, and Shashi Kapoor his only National Award for Best Actor, it was then seen as political hot stuff, and Doordarshan chickened out of screening it at the last minute. So much water has flown under the bridge since that Sharma’s chilling expose now doesn’t make us bat an eyelid. As Anwar puts it: “Now that it is an everyday spectacle, we feel nothing at all.”

There are other ways in which the film hasn’t aged well: Louis Banks’ background score is incongruous, and the pace often laboured. Several sequences – a hotel striptease (the plump dancer is a nicely realistic ‘80s touch), or black and white freeze frames interrupting a riot – might now seem so overused as to make your eyes glaze over.

But the strength of New Delhi Times, based on a script by Gulzar, is its web of believable characters, each one a type that somehow steers clear of seeming a caricature. And while real-life versions of these exist even today, the difference thirty years make is apparent. The urbane English-speaking editor in 1986 smokes a pipe constantly, but remembers being taught by a Maulvi saab and retains close links to his well-off UP origins. His nationalist father (AK Hangal) is still a respected figure in Ghazipur, even if his clear-eyed view of local politics makes him cognizant that their honouring him is a way of coopting him. Vikas’s genteel lawyer wife Nisha (Sharmila Tagore) fights dowry death cases but also – an Indian Mrs Dalloway – arranges the flowers herself. Jagannath Poddar, the newspaper owner (Manohar Singh) is happy to entertain a rising politician at home, but feels no need to kowtow to him in the paper.

Vikas Pande also seems from another age because of his fearlessness-—which today might be called naivety. Even after being roughed up by unidentified men, threatened by anonymous callers and having his house cat gorily killed, Pande can tell his employers that management has no right to interfere in editorial decisions. Where does this strength come from? From his belief that another paper will gladly print his piece, and his skills are valued enough for him to keep his job.

The film is clear that a fearless journalist like Vikas Pande can only thrive while there are still men like Jagannath Poddar, who not only has the financial clout to run a paper, but also the moral fibre to not treat the media as equivalent to other forms of moneymaking.

“Baaki sab vyopaar hai, vyopaar ki tarah chalta rahta hai. Is akhbaar ko main dharam maankar chalaata hoon. (The rest is business, it runs like businesses do. This newspaper I treat as my religion.)”

But generational change is afoot: Poddar’s son Jugal (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) wants Vikas’s hot-button allegations off the front page, and tries to tempt him off the paper with a new magazine to edit. And while the film does not focus on it, in the Hindi heartland, the rot has long set in: “If we publish the headlines as we see them,” the local Ghazipur editor laughs wryly, “our paper supplies may suddenly dwindle, or our press shut down.”

The Ghazipur editor may not be out and about in a curfew, but Vikas Pande will be escorted into town in a police jeep – not just because of who he is, but who his father is. While not making that the centre of its politics, New Delhi Times seems inherently aware of how networks of privilege, old and new, cocoon its club-going, squash-playing protagonists. It is the poor chowkidar, the bike-riding young reporter, the Scheduled Caste MLA who die unsung deaths. The honest bourgeois hero suffers profound disillusionment, but no palpable losses.

But Sharma’s film also points the way to our present. At one tense moment, Vikas meets his immediate boss, who laughs off any real threat to an eminent journalist like him. Vikas looks unconvinced. “Anything can happen now. These people can do anything.” he says. That may or may not have been true in 1986, but it does seem true now.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16 Apr 2017