Book Review: UR Ananthamurthy's Avasthe

My piece for Firstpost on a truly great Indian novel.

Politics can make things better, UR Ananthamurthy seems to suggest, but only if its wellspring is a love of the world, not a desire to conquer it. 

Avasthe, by U.R. Ananthamurthy (1978). Translated by Narayan Hegde (2020).
Harper Perennial. 240pp. Rs 499.

UR Ananthamurthy's 1978 Kannada novel Avasthe, in a chiselled new English translation by Narayan Hegde, is presented to us as “an allegory that suits our times even more than the times when it was written”. At least, those are the poet K Satchidanandan's words on the first page of the translated volume, published at the fag end of 2020. And it is true that Ananthamurthy's protagonist Krishnappa Gowda – poor Shudra boy turned revolutionary peasant leader, now immobilised by paralysis and parliamentary politics — spends much of the novel contemplating how best to engage with the corruption of the body politic, represented by defections, money, the backing of industrialists — and an unnamed prime minister with dictatorial desires. 

It is also true, however, that from the absurd heights of 2021, even that disturbing moment in the life of the nation looks immeasurably distant. This is despite the fact that Avasthe unfolds in the long shadow that Indira Gandhi's Emergency cast over Indian democracy. It also describes, in unforgettable and graphic detail, the police state, its violence already institutionalised and banal. One of Krishnappa's mentors is arrested and killed in a fake encounter, and when a youthful Krishnappa protests, he finds himself in jail, suffering excruciating torture. 

What makes that world unrecognisable is that Krishnappa seems authentic even in decline. Edging towards chief ministership, he contemplates his own power with mingled thrill and distaste. He may compromise for his health and to provide some middle-class comforts to his long-suffering wife and child, but he is aware of each step away from his ideals. His rest cure at an urban farmhouse makes Krishnappa feel disconnected, but his roots aren't yet severed. In one of the novel's loveliest moments, his mother brings him tender mango pickle, asking him to identify the particular village tree the fruit was picked from. I felt an inexplicable joy when Krishnappa passed the taste test.

Krishnappa is no uncomplicated hero. When we meet him, he is bedridden and nearly immobile, his legendary rages reduced to ineffectual tears – but still hitting his wife. Yet his capacity for reflection and change gives him a rare appeal. And that capacity is shaped by the people he has been close to. In Ananthamurthy's fluid telling, we hurtle from person to person, bumped along by Krishnappa's stream of consciousness. The first to see something special in him is the memorable Maheshwarayya — a “great pleasure-loving man” who is “also a great ascetic”. Hearing the young Krishnappa sing on the riverbank, Maheshwarayya tells him: “What a dumb boy! All this time you haven't understood who you are, have you?” Giving his stupefied family a talking-to, he arranges for Krishnappa to live in a hostel so that he can continue his education. 

Later, Krishnappa meets Annaji, a leftwing organiser who teaches English as a cover – and for a living. If Maheshwarayya represents a traditional feudal Indian masculinity that exposes the goatherd boy to classical music and Sanskrit poetry, Annaji is his introduction to modernity. He opens Krishnappa's mind to the contradictions of politics – and life. What the two men discuss are the questions of the mid-20th century: What is the relationship of workers to production? What is the role of religion in society? Is romance bourgeois? Does individualism lead to fascism? Krishnappa and Annaji don't just dream of revolution, but argue about what it would mean for ordinary people. All political dispensations are up for criticism, at the level of the village, the party, the country, the world.

Then a rot sets in, its banality revealed in Krishnappa's cringeworthy marriage, and the worshipful Nagesh to whom Krishnappa is dictating his memoirs. Yet now, on his sickbed, he suddenly finds himself able to hear criticism again: from his scathing younger colleague Nagaraj, his old love Gowri, but most of all, himself. “That he can talk contemptuously of the corrupt makes him pleased with himself, but it also worries him that deriving such pleasure has now become a habit with him.”

This self-reflexivity makes Krishnappa endlessly interesting – whether he is remembering the complexity of his filial relationship with “the brahmin Joisa” (his village teacher), the caste politics of his university days, or his response to Annaji's way with women – simultaneously judgemental and jealous.

Such honesty forces the reader to be honest, too. An insistent openness about love and sex, in fact, is at the heart of the novel, with Ananthamurthy displaying a rare ability to parse the politics of sexuality in the Indian context. Again, Krishnappa's strength is to learn as he lives. So, for instance, his early mentor Maheswarayya is described as “so decent towards women of respectable families that he would not look at them” – while also having a fancy for prostitutes. That seeming contradiction resolves itself later, when Annaji tells Krishnappa that seeing women as sacred is part of his feudal upbringing: “Tell me, why is a woman sacred? Because she is someone's property... Those who say she is sacred are themselves wifebeaters, who think women are good only for cooking, for singing and as ornaments.”. It still takes practically a lifetime for Krishnappa to unblock himself, to stop being one of those millions of Indian men who “regard the women who are willing to sleep with them as trash”. But he manages it. By the end, he is able to wish the same to others, with generosity and without judgement.

For me, the crux of this magnificent novel lies in Krishnappa's realisation that politics is inseparable from life, and yet, life is greater than politics. Politics can make things better, Ananthamurthy seems to suggest, but only if its wellspring is a love of the world, not a desire to conquer it. I closed Avasthe with the fervent hope that we may again have politicians who can hear the wind in the bamboos, who can experience sex as something deep rather than shallow, who have old friends that laugh at them. 

Published in Firstpost, 24 Apr 2021.

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.

Not quite queens of all they survey

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Bombay Begums may not have top-notch storytelling, but at least it's willing to let its female characters be richly, complicatedly human.

With Bombay Begums, writer-director Alankrita Srivastava re-opens a conversation she helped kick off in 2017 with her film Lipstick Under My Burkha: A discussion about what Indian women want, and mostly don't get. If  Lipstick turned an unprecedented spotlight onto the lives and desires of four Bhopal women,  Bombay Begums features five in Mumbai, aged 14 to 49, cutting across class, educational background and (in Srivastava's usual non-sequitur) religion.

In today's India, though, wherever there's conversation, there's also controversy. Soon after Bombay Begums released on March 8, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights threatened to go to court against the OTT platform broadcasting the six-part series for the “inappropriate portrayal” of minors. The statutory body was referring to the 14-year-old protagonist, Shai – played by Aadhya Anand, whose precociously verbose voiceover almost makes the series impossible to watch – who is shown once smoking a cigarette, and once snorting coke and kissing an older boy at a party. We could discuss the ethics of that depiction till kingdom come, although the show makes it clear that the coke-addled making out was dangerous, while treating the one-time cigarette with the lightness it deserves, and incorporating a sharp criticism of the critics (a housing society that uses smoking as the 'moral' ground to turn away a single, female tenant).

What's more interesting -- though not unexpected – is that Bombay Begums has polarised audiences far beyond this 'official' controversy. What people are debating on social media is whether these women are complex, identifiable victims of a patriarchal world -- or selfish, oversexed and immoral.

The latter viewpoint isn't surprising, because these women are complicated and desirous in a way that female protagonists on the Hindi film screen rarely are, even in 2021. Three of them operate in a cutthroat corporate universe, and Srivastava and co-writer Bornila Chatterjee do a good job of setting up the possibilities for friction between these characters. Rani Irani (Pooja Bhatt) plays the powerhouse CEO of the fictitious Royal Bank of Bombay. Once a Kanpur bank teller, her rough edges and raw hunger still make her a study in contrast to her urbane, somewhat inscrutable IIM-educated deputy Fatima Warsi (Shahana Goswami, delivering a layered performance that lifts her sections of the show out of choppy mediocrity). Far below them both in the hierarchy is the overconfident but often stupid Ayesha Agarwal, a 23-year-old trying to break away from her smalltown middle-class background (Plabita Borthakur, talented enough to make us believe in her character's confusions). The fourth is the aforementioned Shai, Rani's sulky stepdaughter, pining for her dead mother while grappling with puberty problems: Periods that won't start, breasts that won't grow, secret crushes that don't reciprocate. The fifth is the class outlier -- a bar dancer who had to turn to sex work when the city's dance bars were shut down 14 years ago. Lily (the superb Amruta Subhash) yearns for a good education for her son.

What unites these women is that they want many things, and desire can slip them up – or make them ruthless. Rani wants to be a spectacular CEO, and a great mother and Karwa Chauth-observing wife, but can she? Fatima wants the skyrocketing career alongside the happy marriage and the baby, but it isn't easy with a husband whose priorities are different (Vivek Gomber, whose character gets more interesting as the series progresses). Ayesha thinks she knows what she wants – but opportunities turn out to have costs. Lily's ambitions for her son can make her turn to blackmail. Shai is willing to fake it till she makes it, pretending she's grown-up – but it's a risky game. And all five want love, which makes them wind up in the messiest situations.

The series is well-plotted, and many of the actors are talented. But it often feels rushed, and the situations seem contrived to achieve certain results. Characters arrive with one-line backstories that don't translate onto the screen – like Rani's Kanpur past, or Ayesha's being from Indore but already having an ex-boyfriend in Mumbai who she's been 'hooking up' with post-break-up, or Fatima's being Muslim, a fact which is literally used only to give us one shot of her performing namaaz in a moment of tragedy. The dialogue is often clunky -- “You're not developed enough for us to take your picture,” says Shai's annoying classmate -- and always ridiculously expository. “Survival is a battle for every woman,” says Rani. “Women can have it all, no?” says Fatima. "I'm not untouchable. I want respect," says Lily.

As for the ludicrous voiceover, the less said the better. Sample sentence: “Sometimes it seems like the stars are within reach... and my body is full of delight and anticipation”. Or “I think women who love are more lonely than those who don't love”.

Yet there is greater honesty and complexity here than most Hindi cinema and OTT work have given us, especially with regard to women's relationship with sex and love, and with each other in the context of #MeToo. Women can be selfish, oversexed and immoral, because they're human – while also being victims of patriarchy. Good women can find themselves on the wrong side, believing the wrong men. Smart, powerful women can find themselves sold into silence. The greater the stake you own, the more the system binds you. These are all crucial lessons. But let's hope the next season will be more show, less tell.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Mar 2021.

Shelf Life: Making Love, With Clothes

My Shelf Life column this month:

What did clothes mean to the ancient Indian poet?

You wouldn't think it to look at us now, but ancient Indians were a sexy people. The delight we took in the erotic seems to have been unabashed. Love-making was a legitimate form of aesthetic pleasure, often described in the allied arts of dance, music, art, architecture – and poetry. And as I dipped into The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems, edited by Abhay K., I found myself noticing how frequently our ancient poets mentioned clothes. 

Perhaps, you might say, it is unsurprising for clothes to come up when the subject is sex, and female beauty. “A wet, transparent skirt clings to her thighs,” writes the 11th century Bhojya Deva in 'Apparition on the River Bank', translated from Sanskrit by Bill Wolak and Abhay K, while Kalidasa's epic work 'Ritu Samhara' maps the seasons by looking, among other things, at women's changing attire. It is summer, for instance, when “young girls, proud and blooming, beads of sweat shining on their perfect bodies, take off their fancy garments and cover their high and pointed breasts with thin linen stoles”.

A cover of 'The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems'.

But real artistry lies in turning object into metaphor. Many an ancient Indian love poem describes a woman's response to finding herself unclothed, turning the literal fact of undressing into a charming motif – shyness. “She tries to find her clothes moving her hands/ and throws her broken chaplet at the lamp, she laughs shyly and tries to cover my eyes,” writes the eighth century Sanskrit poet Amaru, in Abhay K.'s rendition. “Have patience, my love,/ don't take off my clothes yet,/ Though parrot is asleep, mynah is still awake,” runs a Braj Bhasha poem by Keshavdas, also translated by Abhay K, while a poem from the Subhashitavali in A.N.D. Haksar's translation begins: “Wait a bit! Let go my skirt! Others will wake! O you are shameless!” 

In an extension of the shyness motif, the poets make the woman's clothes speak of her unspeakable desire. Over and over, the woman doesn't undress herself – her clothes have a mind of their own. “[A]nd with wanting alone/ her clothes by themselves/ fell down her legs,” goes another Amaru poem 'Did she vanish into me', beautifully translated by W.S. Merwin and J. Mousaieff Masson. In an older John Brough translation of Amaru, collected in Making Love: The Picador Book of Erotic Verse (ed. Alan Bold, 1978), the woman stops her ears and hides her blushing face in her hands, but her lover's coaxing words work their magic: “But oh, what could I do, then, when I found/ My bodice splitting of its own accord?” 

A book cover of Making Love: The Picador Book of Erotic Verse.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Frescoes in the portico of cave 2, Ajanta.

Another Amaru poem in the same anthology gives us a female narrator 'tricked' by a dexterous lover, who uses his feet “in pincer-fashion” to catch her sari “firmly by the hem”, obliging her (she says) “to move the way he ought”. And finally, there is Vijjakkaa in the Subhashitavali, capturing the voice of a woman being archly competitive about lovemaking, while pretending a disarming frankness: “Friend, you are very fortunate/ to be able to narrate/ the sweet exchanges full of joy/ in meeting with your lover boy./For when his hand my darling placed/ On the skirt knot at my waist,' I swear I cannot then recall/ any, anything at all.”

But not all ancient women were shy. In one cheeky Bhartrihari poem, we hear that “On sunny days there in the shade/ Beneath the trees reclined a maid/ Who lifted up her dress (she said)/ To keep the moonbeams off her head.” “All my inhibition left me in a flash,/ when he robbed me of my clothes,” writes Vidyapati, in Azfar Hussain's translation from Maithili. In Kumaradasa's 'She Bites Him', a woman pretending to be asleep has her clothes ripped off her by her lover: “Thief!” she cries/ and bites his lower lip --/ what a girl!”

A cover of the book 'Speaking of Siva'.

The Gathasaptashati, which means 'seven hundred lyrics' in Sanskrit and is also known as the Sattasai, is a collection of love poems written in Maharashtri Prakrit in the first century AD. Mostly in the voices of women, these lyrics are more frankly joyous about sex than most things us moderns can imagine. Sample the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's translation of one, from his 2008 volume The Absent Traveller: “He groped me/ For the underwear/ That wasn't there:/ I saw the boy's/ Fluster/ And embraced him/ More tightly.” And here is another, radical and beautiful in its cross-generational embrace of sexual experience: “As though she glimpsed/ The mouth of a buried/ Pot of gold,/ Her joy on seeing/ Under her daugher's/ Wind-blown skirt/ A tooth-mark/ Near the crotch.”

The Sattasai poems are a far cry from the stigma and hypocrisy now the norm in India, but clothes are still part of the hide and seek of sexual pleasure. It took another 11 centuries to produce an Akka Mahadevi, whose paeans to her beloved Lord Shiva allude to clothes only to reject them. “People/ male and female,/ blush when a cloth covering their shame/ comes loose,” she writes. “When all the world is the eye of the lord,/ onlooking everywhere, what can you/ cover and conceal?”  

When love is all-knowing, all-embracing, clothes have no purpose.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 7 Jan 2021.

A love that breaks class barriers

My Mumbai Mirror column:

An unlikely relationship reaches across social boundaries in Rohena Gera's understated romance Sir.

It may seem difficult to recall in the cold light of the present, but cross-class romance once warmed the hearts of Hindi film audiences. The poor boy who won the heart of the rich girl (and the wrath of her family), was a staple of the single-screen era. Even then, the rich hero-poor heroine equation was less frequent -- and for that fantasy to extend to the master-servant relationship was rarer still. Rohena Gera's lovely film Sir, completed in 2018 and released online earlier this month, tries to turn that dream into reality.

Ratna (Tilottama Shome) works as the live-in domestic help for Ashwin (Vivek Gomber), who is due to get married to his girlfriend Sabina. When the wedding – and the relationship – suddenly falls through, the quiet Ashwin finds himself being hectored from all quarters. His overweening mother wants him to reconsider, his father seems to assume he can't handle his part in the family business and his friends want to steer him into dating again. Increasingly isolated, he begins to notice the unobtrusive warmth of Ratna's presence. She comes from a space of experience far removed from Ashwin's upper class Mumbai universe – a poor rural family, a hurried marriage, early widowhood with its attendant social and economic fallout -- but her halting words are both genuine and wise. The gulf between them is huge, but Sir manages to make us believe in the possibility that it might just be bridgeable.

The America-returned Ashwin has never been anything but polite to Ratna. But as his appreciation of her grows, he baulks more and more at the rudeness of those around him. Gera's deft script and direction is aided by the wonderful understated performances she draws from both Shome and Gomber, Shome in particular delivering scenes of great devastation with a quiet wallop – such as when a boutique manager responds to Ratna's entry by yelling for the watchman, or Ashwin's party guest makes a scene over her spilt wine. Gera makes clear that nothing said or done to Ratna is out of the ordinary; it is what the servant-keeping classes in India mete out unthinkingly. From Ashwin's businessman father dissing his construction workers to the neighbour who insults her child's ayah (Geetanjali Kulkarni in a great supporting role) rather than chastise the child, the film throws into relief Indians' constant othering of those less privileged than us. It is upper middle class common sense to think of servants as 'lazy' or 'cheats' or inept, 'morons' who need to be kept in check with low salaries, stark boundaries and harsh punishments. The more we want to exploit the poor, the more it suits us to think of them as less than human.

 

It is against this usual wall of invisibility that Ashwin's gestures – that would be common courtesy if Ratna were not a servant – stand out as excessive. It isn't just in his class that they attract attention, but also in hers. Offering to wait for a servant to finish eating, asking if she needs a ride home -- these are acts so unthinkable on an employer's part that they arouse the mockery and suspicion of other servants. And for Ratna, made vulnerable by both class and gender, they can lead to social extinction.

 

And yet, it is in Ashwin's spontaneous crossing of that wall, his apparently unconscious transcendence of the very boundaries society wishes us to guard, that the possibility of any real relationship lies. Because even as Ratna fears the weight of social censure, she demands the respect of social acknowledgement. “Main ganwaar hoon [I may be a country bumpkin],” she tells Ashwin, “Lekin main aapki rakhail ban ke nahi rahoongi [But I won't live here as your mistress].”

 

In Zoya Akhtar's powerful segment of the 2018 anthology film Lust Stories, another quietly efficient domestic help (Bhumi Pednekar) finds herself taking care of her young male employer (Neil Bhoopalam). The intimacy between them feels far from furtive, and the banter that accompanies such frank, lusty sex holds at least the glimmer of equality. But that distant promise is shattered when Bhoopalam's middle-class parents arrive, with a suitable girl in tow. In front of his parents and prospective in-laws, the good middle-class boy behaves impeccably – which is to say he betrays not the barest hint of his real relationship with the maid.

But perhaps that's the point. When something only exists behind closed doors, is it ever really real?

 

In contrast, it is Ashwin's insistence that he isn't afraid of what people might say that makes his attraction to Ratna so heartwarming. It may seem utopian, but that's why it feels like love.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Jan 2021.

A Reel Holiday

My Mirror column:

The grand tradition of the holiday movie, from Eric Rohmer to Luca Guadagnino, spins wisdom out of sun-kissed beach breaks.

There used to be many ways to take a year-end vacation. But with sightseeing, parties and travel all deemed dangerous post-pandemic, more and more people have had to be content with a movie-watching staycation. And when you can't escape dreary city life in reality, there is much pleasure to be derived from movies about other people's holidays.

So my vicarious vacation was centred on the late French director Eric Rohmer, who was a kind of patron saint of the holiday film. As central to the French New Wave as more flamboyant members like Truffaut and Godard, Rohmer was a film critic first. He edited the pioneering journal Cahiers du Cinema for years, before making his feature debut with The Sign of Leo in 1959. By the time of his death at 89, on January 11, 2010, he had over 50 films to his credit. One of cinema's gentlest, most perspicacious commentators on the vagaries of courtship and romance, Rohmer often placed his characters, usually young to middle-aged, and bourgeois, in a classic French summer vacation locale where connections and cross-connections could unfold at leisure. A quiet beachside country house is the setting for several of Rohmer's finest films in this vein: La Collectionneuse (1967), Pauline at the Beach (1983) and The Green Ray (1986), all beautifully photographed by Nestor Almendros and all currently streaming on a well-known online platform.

In La Collectionneuse, Adrien (Patrick Bauchau) decides to spend a month alone after his girlfriend (Brigitte Bardot's sister Mijanou, to whom Bauchau was married in real life) leaves for London. Arriving at a friend's cottage, he vows to rise early every day, go for a swim, spend his time without any conscious purpose other than to enjoy his leisure. He is intent upon doing nothing, and doing it well.

But his plans of what we would call ‘me-time’ are easily disrupted, primarily by lustful thoughts of the charming younger woman with whom he happens to be sharing the summer house. The more studiously Adrien declares his lack of interest, calling Haydée ugly or ordinary or common, the more apparent it becomes that she's on his mind. In the wonderful tradition of Rohmer romances, our attention is directed as much to what happens as what does not, with Adrien's actions coinciding less and less with the claims of his self-examinatory voice-over. As an article in the French Review put in 1993, “Rohmer's prideful heroes charge into the summer with dreams of lush beauty and luxurious freedoms, only to be chastened by the heat, the boredom, and, above all, the aimlessness and acute self-preoccupation that are the dubious rewards of those who gain as much freedom as they desire.”

It isn't just Rohmer's heroes whose attempted holiday resets only reveal their confused mental states. In Pauline at the Beach Rohmer cast the delicately blonde Ariella Dombasle as the soon-to-be-divorced Marion, who is spending her vacation with her fifteen-year-old niece Pauline. On paper, Marion is the adult, and she does try to think of Pauline's needs -- as she imagines them. But as with Adrien, so with Marion. The more we hear about her romantic hopes for herself and her cousin, the more apparent it is that she has no idea what she's doing. Extricating herself from her mistake of a marriage, she is now so in love with le grand amour that she imagines it with the first man who seems vaguely interested – blissfully blind to the fact that he's only in it for sex with a pretty girl.

There are other echoes between the two films, like the way this form of vacationing throws together people of different backgrounds and ages, allowing for conversations that wouldn't happen in everyday life. And in both, the younger people emerge as the less confused ones. Both Haydee and Pauline, who volunteer their views a lot less than the others in their respective settings, seem much more clear-eyed about who is and who isn't a good match. While Marion throws herself at her pretentious older lover and tries to matchmake Pauline similarly (with Marion's own ex-boyfriend!), Pauline finds herself a more age-appropriate summer fling. Both she and Haydée in La Collectionneuse also emerge as perfectly capable of handling the unwanted attentions of dodgy older men.

Other filmmakers have followed Rohmer in depicting the vacation as a time to establish a new kind of routine, even discipline. In the British indie filmmaker Joanna Hoggs' meditative 2007 debut Unrelated, Anna (Kathryn Worth) joins an old friend's family on their Italian vacation, giving herself a break not just from work but also from a faltering marriage. Luca Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash (2015) has its rockstar heroine (Tilda Swinton) fully silent on her Italian vacation, to help her voice recuperate after an operation. Hoggs' camera lingers tenderly as an often distraught Anna jogs virtuously up and down a local hillock, and teeters on the brink of an affair with her friend's much younger son (Tom Hiddleston). Guadagnino's tone is even less Rohmeresque than Hoggs' melancholia, with his characters going straight for the jugular rather than circling gently around their issues. But there's something that these very different films all share: the realisation that holidays never achieve what we hope they will.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 Jan 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

Book Review: Out of the ordinary - Tanuj Solanki's The Machine Is Learning

A book review for India Today magazine:

Tanuj Solanki’s quietly savage third novel digs for high-stakes drama under the surface of dull office life.

Indian literary fiction has rarely engaged with the office. Unless it’s glamorous or powerful milieus like big business, entertainment, crime or law enforcement, fictional workplaces often remain unidimensional backdrops, the wings from which characters emerge on stage to fight their real psychological or ethical battles. Drawn from his own experience in insurance companies, Tanuj Solanki’s The Machine is Learning makes a conscious departure from that norm, and does so with aplomb.

Solanki plonks us into a sea of office-speak that a less ambitious writer might not have risked, while crafting a plot thick enough to keep us afloat. As we find ourselves suddenly au fait both with standard corporate self-inflation (“business process excellence”, “strategic projects group”) and more specialised insurance terminology (underwriting, reinsuring, local operations executive), it becomes clear that the zone-out dullness of this linguistic universe can mask very real drama. One begins to suspect, in fact, that the masking may be intentional. In Solanki’s splendid pacy telling, office politics emerges as an undeniable microcosm of politics in the deepest sense.

The book’s appeal is aided by its narrator, a 29-year-old who combines corporate ‘dudeness’ with an aspiration to good spelling and non-conformism, his cockiness tempered with just enough insecurity to make him interesting. In his corporate bubble, Saransh Malik is a rising star and he knows it. But he is also smart enough to know what he doesn’t know; willing to let his “ex-journalist, do-gooder” girlfriend Jyoti stoke his uncertainties. Saransh is the perfect hero for a novel of ethical questioning: someone with something at stake, but not yet frozen irredeemably into the guarding of turf.

Since his Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar-winning Diwali in Muzaffarnagar (2018), Solanki’s prose has become cleaner, and his insights sharper. There is a pared-down quality to this book, though it never avoids the self-reflexive detail, Saransh implicitly contrasting his boss Mitesh’s arranged marriage wife and “this year’s bonus” life with his own Tinder-dependent one, or marking the class difference that separates him from Jyoti, even as she pushes him to confront his role in the capitalist juggernaut. Thoughtful but never ponderous, scrupulously deadpan in its descriptions of sex as much as office spaces, this is a great book about aspects of Indian life only just finding their way into fiction.

Published in India Today, 29 Aug 2020

Shelf Life: Run of the Mill

The July edition of my 'Shelf Life' column on clothes viewed through the prism of literature, for the website 'The Voice of Fashion':

A reading of literary works set in and around the Industrial Revolution which remain relevant today, showing that no technological innovation is by itself any guarantee of social betterment

 Power loom weaving in a cotton mill in Lancashire England, ca. 1835. Engraving with modern watercolour. (Shutterstock)

As any school textbook will tell you, the Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the mid-1700s. Production became increasingly mechanised, accelerating a process of economic change that altered the very character of society. What the textbooks don't stress enough is how much of the technological innovation that drove the Industrial Revolution was in textiles. John Kay's flying shuttle, patented 1733, allowed wider cloth to be woven faster. The greater demand for yarn was met by James Hargreaves's 1764 spinning jenny, where one person could work many spindles, and Richard Arkwright’s 1769 water frame, with spindles operated by water rather than manually. Both were supplanted by Samuel Crompton's 1779 spinning mule, which spun thread strong enough for Britain to finally start producing cheap calico cloth. Then came Edmund Cartwright's vertical power loom in 1785.

Combined with Britain's colonial status, these innovations meant that by the 1830s, 85 per cent of the world's raw cotton was being processed in the mills of Lancashire. Manchester and the surrounding mill towns began to draw researchers and writers concerned about the new working class. Benjamin Disraeli, later Britain's Prime Minister, wrote a novel called Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), in which an upper class character travels to the industrial north to see working class conditions. The popular Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell set her first book Mary Barton (1848) in Manchester: a romance between her working class heroine and a mill-owner's son. In Gaskell's North and South (1854), we see workers’ troubles and early strikes through the eyes of a heroine who clashes with a cotton mill owner, only to eventually marry him.

Real-life romance in the mill town could sometimes expand on the novelist's imagination.

Friedrich Engels, born into a German textile dynasty that had made its fortune from linen yard bleaching, mechanised lace-making and silk ribbon manufacture, came to Manchester because his father had a thread factory there. Expected to learn the textile business, Engels instead produced The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), establishing in horrific detail how early industrialisation had actually worsened workers' lives. Low wages and terrible living conditions led to much higher mortality from disease in Manchester than in the surrounding countryside. Karl Marx's reading of the book helped forge the intellectual partnership of a lifetime – and Marx and Engels' critique of capitalism.

But Manchester is also where Engels forged a long-term partnership with Mary Burns, then a worker in his father's factory. Rachel Holmes' delightful 2014 biography of Marx's daughter, the feminist and trade unionist Eleanor Marx, describes Mary Burns' role in Engels' life as “directive and Socratic”: “Engels took Mary to bed; Mary took Engels to the tenements and to the heart of the Irish immigrant community of Manchester... [explaining] the conditions of factory and domestic workers.”

Among the sharpest fictional takes on the textile industry came almost a century later, in 1951, when Roger MacDougall's superb play, The Man in the White Suit, was turned into a Ealing Studio comedy by his cousin Alexander McKendrick. Starring the great British actor Alec Guinness, The Man in the White Suit is a cynical comedy, with its cynicism extending all the way across capitalist society.

The film opens with a younger textile mill owner called Michael Corland romancing Daphne, the daughter of an older and richer mill owner called Birnley, with purely monetary desires. Guinness plays Sidney Stratton, a misunderstood scientific genius who takes yard jobs in one textile mill after another so that he can stealthily use the labs. When Sidney devises an artificial fabric that will last forever and repels dirt, Daphne convinces her father to test it. But when word gets out, the mill-owners gang up to prevent what they see as a calamity for business. “The spinning jenny and the mechanical loom increased output,” says one captain of industry. “This'll finish it!”

Sidney somehow escapes their clutches and is trying to reach the newspapers, but is stopped by his old worker friends: the unions, too, are dead against a fabric whose production has an inbuilt time limit. Even these socialist workers, aware enough to describe themselves as “flotsam floating on the high tide of profit”, cannot actually imagine a world beyond the short-term goals of capitalist production. If obsolescence is not built into the things workers produce, then things will last forever; demand will dry up – and so will jobs.

A still from The Man in the White Suit, an Ealing Studio adaptation of Roger MacDougall's play

The Man in the White Suit is even more relevant today, when late capitalism's need to artificially inflate demand ensures greater inbuilt obsolescence. It is more so because technological innovation is constantly being thrown at us as a panacea, without enough attention paid to the politics that surrounds that technology: think, in post-2014 India, of the discourse around the digital, in relation to demonetisation, lockdown relief or Covid-tracking apps.

Just as with the textile industry at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, technological innovation is not by itself any guarantee of social betterment. Who has access to that technology, who controls it, and to whose benefit – that is what determines whether it is good for the human race: whether, in fact, technology will mean progress.

Published on The Voice of Fashion, 16 July 2020.

The faults in our stars - I

My Mumbai Mirror column: the first of a two-part column.

What can Indian Matchmaking -- and other recent takes on the arranging of marriages -- teach us about ourselves? 

A still from A Suitable Girl, the 2017 documentary made by Smriti Mundhra, who has directed Indian Matchmaking

It's been exactly a month since the reality show Indian Matchmaking (IM) took social media by storm. Indian-centric content, even when it's on international streaming platforms, rarely attracts non-desi audiences. IM broke through. Several non-Indian friends and acquaintances on my Facebook and Twitter timelines seemed as hooked to watching matchmaker Sima Taparia from Mumbai attempt to find suitable marital partners for her clients in India and the diaspora -- deploying not only her own social knowledge and networks, but also a battery of face readers, astrologers and life coaches. That realisation, that the rest of the world was watching 'us' with a mix of horror and fascination, was probably what resulted in Indian viewers displaying so much anxiety about the show's portrayal of realities that no Indian can be unaware of. The most obvious of these social facts is that marriage in India remains first and foremost a kinship alliance between families, and that therefore what must be 'matched' -- much before any individual preferences come into play -- is the caste and socio-economic background of the two people concerned. A second social fact: the patriarchal, patrilocal norms of North Indian upper caste society mean that the girl must be the one who leaves her family for her husband's home – by extension, leaving her existing life for a new one. As Taparia puts in early in the show, “In India, there is marriage and there is love marriage.”

Taparia, with her lines about fate and the alignment of the stars, has become an easy-to-mock target, the subject of many a Sima Aunty meme -- while at least two of the women she fails to find matches for, the Houston-based Aparna and the Delhi-based Ankita, have emerged as underdog heroines, being increasingly interviewed and feted for holding firm against Taparia and another matchmaker called Geeta, who labelled them “inflexible” and “negative”.

Watching the show, though, I felt like Taparia's clients were really a bit of a double act. The India-based families were all from traditional North Indian business communities, like Taparia herself, and seemed within her sociological comfort zone -- while the US-based diasporic candidates represented a much wider spectrum of professions and backgrounds – Guyanese, Sikh, Sindhi and Tamil Americans from Houston to Chicago, including lawyers, a motivational speaker and writer, a dance trainer, even a public school teacher.

Naturally, these two sets of clients had very different requirements and expectations. Someone like Akshay, the younger scion of a Mumbai-based business family who was only marrying because of his mother's insistence that 25 was way past marital age, may have mouthed a few platitudes about wanting a mental match with his partner, but anyone who watches the show can tell that any prospective wife for him would first have to meet his mother's requirements – in order to be able to effectively replicate her. Taparia's job in this scenario is finding a suitable daughter-in-law to fit into a large business-oriented joint family – which is a rather different requirement from finding someone who fits the psychological and professional expectations of an independent mid-career professional like Aparna.

As Taparia says early on, “In India you have to see the caste, the height, the age, and the horoscope.” How the system usually works is expressed in a rather revealing sentence from the father of one candidate: “Pradhyuman ki dedh sal ke andar dedh sau file aa chuki hai”. The subtitles call them “offers”, but the way Pradhyuman's father puts it -- “Pradhyuman has received 150 files in one and a half years” -- really tells you what Indian matchmaking usually feels like: a bureaucratic process, no less competitive and standardised than a job application. It's Taparia, in fact, who tries to bring a new personal touch into this database-driven arranged marriage scenario. But it isn't easy to get rid of the old.

Indian Matchmaking's director Smriti Mundhra (daughter of the late Jag Mundhra, who alternated between US-based exploitation films and women-centric Indian films like Kamla and Bawander) has known Sima Taparia for some years now, and has filmed her in more vulnerable circumstances. In her 2017 documentary debut A Suitable Girl, made over seven years, Mundhra tracked Taparia's real-life quest for a groom for her own daughter Ritu. An MBA whom we watch engage in a spontaneous appreciation of the merits of Macro versus Micro Economics with another female client of her mother's, Ritu is often silent on camera while her mother speaks avidly of her marriage. But she also speaks candidly to the filmmaker about knowing that she must marry soon. She does reject many candidates before agreeing to wed Aditya, who apart from meeting her parents' economic and caste criteria, has an MBA like herself and “is witty”.

The second young woman in A Suitable Girl is Dipti Admane, who works as a pre-primary school teacher. Touching 30, her inability to find a suitable match despite years of scouring the newspaper matrimonials has propelled her and her parents to the edge of depression. Commentators on Indian Matchmaking have singled out Nadia and Vinay's first-date discovery of a shared dislike of ketchup as a flimsy hook upon which to hang a potential relationship. The 'boy' who comes to see Dipti remains utterly silent while his mother makes sure Dipti can run a house and calls her job “good time-pass”. But all an excited Dipti marks after their departure is that he likes sweet lime juice -- like she does -- and that his birthday is the same as hers.

The second part of this column will appear next week.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16 Aug 2020

In the dark of the night

My Mirror column:

The absorbing Raat Akeli Hai stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui as a UP cop learning a little about himself as he unravels a web of murderous intrigue

Radhika Apte in a still from the atmospheric new murder mystery Raat Akeli Hai

The shaadi ka ghar has been a favoured backdrop for the dramatic unfolding of countless Hindi film romances, but it’s likely never been the setting for a murder mystery. Nor has the ubiquitous wedding video been turned into evidence for a police investigation before. Honey Trehan’s slow-burn directorial debut Raat Akeli Hai does both things with delicious conviction, giving us an atmospheric whodunit that feels deeply embedded in the dystopic state of Uttar Pradesh. What makes the film even more satisfying is that Trehan – a long-time casting director who has done films with Vishal Bhardwaj, Meghna Gulzar and Abhishek Chaubey – casts Nawazuddin Siddiqui as his detective hero, and places his unmarriedness centrestage.

Saddled with the near-giggleworthy name of Jatil (literally ‘complex’) Yadav, Siddiqui’s plain-speaking Kanpuriya cop is introduced as a man with some complexes of his own. We first set eyes on him in a photograph that his mother (the effortlessly watchable Ila Arun) is trotting out at a wedding, attempting to convince a female guest that her son is an eligible match. The fair-skinned young woman has her spangly sari draped over a spaghetti strap blouse, but her views on skin colour remain hopelessly unreconstructed. “Rang saaf nahi hai (His complexion isn't clear),” she says, dismissing Jatil at a glance. “Par mann saaf hai (But his heart is),” says Arun, turning away only to be accosted by her embarrassed and angry son.

But while we might sympathise with the fact that Jatil’s dark skin makes him an inferior candidate in a world where Ajay Devgn is the exception that proves the rule, his own views on women reveal a rather muddy mann. “Did you see the clothes she was wearing?” he says to his mother. “I just want a susheel girl.” As the film unfolds, however, Jatil’s socially-learned disgust for the sexually independent woman (“Tumhare jaisi aurat ko apne paas phatakne bhi na dein”) clashes often with his simultaneous attraction to what he acknowledges as courage and honesty.

And no wonder, given the rarity of a “saaf mann” in RAH's grim world. In a scenario with several shades of last year’s Hollywood crime comedy Knives Out, Jatil is called upon to investigate the murder of the patriarch of a well-off family whose members seem not to like each other very much, and who might all have had motives to kill him. Knives Out hid its sharp politics under parodic excess. Here Trehan and cinematographer Pankaj Kumar (Haider, Tumbadd) create a brilliantly atmospheric web of oppressive rooms and half-lit corridors to match a much darker milieu that feels true to present-day North India: corrupt, power-hungry, sexually exploitative and two-faced. When our hero gets there, the terrace and balconies are still lit up for the wedding that has just taken place, of the widowed dead man to his much younger mistress. And the sight of the new wife Radha (Radhika Apte, looking the part but never completely inhabiting it), still in her wedding finery, sitting in her upstairs room with a ghunghat half covering her face, is very much part of the filmi marriage fantasy (from Mother India to Kabhi Kabhie to Tanu Weds Manu) that RAH both evokes and toys with.

What Trehan and his exceptional screenwriter Smita Singh do with elan is to make that image of the marriageable woman the film's recurring subtext. The dogged small-town detective whose Achilles’ Heel is attractive women has been with us at least since Polanski’s Chinatown. Here the mirage-like quality of Siddiqui’s first sight of Radha also reminds one of Manorama Six Feet Under, Navdeep Singh’s 2007 adaptation of Chinatown. But while our cop hero may have a soft spot for the supposed femme fatale, almost everyone else (in the family and beyond) has already decided that she must be the murderess. “Woh ladies rijha rahi hai aapko (She's seducing you),” Siddiqui's colleague says knowingly. When Siddiqui protests that she barely gives him the time of day, the colleague pounces on him with the sort of unsustainable circular logic that otherwise rational men single women out for: “That's exactly it! That's how women seduce you, by not giving you attention.”

The slow accretion of words and images creates a dark picture of this skewed world, in which women are damned if they don't – and certainly damned if they do. From Siddiqui's “duffer” colleague to the dead man's feckless but good looking “hero-type” heir, every man in town is out to make a sanskaari match, while secretly lusting after women whose attraction is precisely that they're not 'wife material'. “Baazaaru se gharelu hone ka safar kitna kathin hai aapko maloom hai?” asks the politician Munna Raja (Aditya Srivastava). And yet the gharelu women, who've won the supposed big prize of marriage and respectability, can end up more patriarchal than the men, resorting to ever-lower measures to guard their practically nonexistent turf.

Faced with this intriguing cocktail of lust and revenge, our UP policeman hero presents himself as “not such a low-level man”. Jatil's striving for moral fibre is real, and yet it is also clear that he must operate within the system as it currently exists. And that system is one where the extra-legal has become the norm, where it is a public secret that only a saffron-hued MLA can risk owning a tannery, and an inconvenient cop is as easily 'encountered' as an out-of-favour gangster. In this post-procedure world, even being a stickler for truth can now mean finding extra-legal ways to uncover it. Whether it's marriage or murder, the show must go on. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 Aug 2020.

A Wizard of Song

My Mirror column:

Sahir Ludhianvi, whose 99th birthday it is today, brought remarkable sophistication to the Hindi film lyric, yet never lost the simplicity of the popular. The first of a two-part column.

A collage of Sahir Ludhianvi's letters, poetry and photographs recovered from a scrap shop in Juhu by archivist Shivendra Singh Dungarpur in 2019.

Sometime in 1937, a young man who had just taken his matriculation examination in Ludhiana read the words of the poet Mohammad Iqbal bemoaning the loss of the 19^th century poet Daagh Dehlvi, and found in them the pen-name by which he would be known forever. The words were these: “Is chaman mein honge paida bulbul-e-shiraz bhi,/ Sainkdon sahir bhi honge, sahib-e-ijaaz bhi... /Hubahu kheenchega lekin ishq ki tasveer kaun?/ Uth gaya nawak fagan, maarega dil pe teer kaun?” [“There will be many nightingales born in this garden/ Countless magicians, men who work miracles as well... But who will sketch such a vivid portrait of love, Who will enchant the heart, now that the marksman is gone?”]

Young Abdul Hayee decided that he would henceforth be ‘Sahir’, and in the well-worn tradition of Urdu poets, he took the town of his birth as the second part of his name.

Akshay Manwani’s book on Sahir Ludhianvi, from which the above anecdote is taken, cites the poet’s reasons for this decision from Naresh Kumar Shaad’s ‘Sahir Ke Saath Ek Shaam’ – “Since I never had much of an opinion about my poetry and always considered myself one amongst several poets, the word “sahir” and its use in the poem immediately caught my attention and I chose it as my takhallus”.

The story seems to me to reveal a great deal about Sahir, his personality and his politics. In drawing his pen-name from the words of one great Urdu poet about another, Sahir placed himself squarely within a grand literary tradition. And calling himself a magician was a lofty claim to make. Yet he simultaneously undercut the claim to uniqueness, because Iqbal had spoken of “sainkdon sahir”. That self-deprecation suggests a political position: a man who holds that poets, too, are a class: a class of those who do magic with words. It is also an early glimpse of a man who could make himself immortal with a song about being a poet of the moment. “Main pal do pal ka shayar hoon, pal do pal meri kahaani hai”, picturised on Amitabh Bachchan’s poet hero in Yash Chopra’s ‘Kabhie Kabhie’, became one of Sahir’s most popularly sung lyrics: “Kal aur aayenge naghmon ki khilti kaliyan chunnewale,/ Mujhse behtar kehnewale, tumse behtar sunnewale,/ Kal koi mujhko yaad kare, kyun koi mujhko yaad kare?/Masroof zamana mere liye, kyon vaqt apna barbaad kare? [Tomorrow there will be more who can pick buds that bloom into songs/ Speakers better than me, Listeners better than you,/ Tomorrow if someone remembers me, why would someone remember me,/ The future will be too busy to waste its time on me.”

There was something of the romantic hero about Sahir, and very occasionally, that quality seeped through into the films that used his verse. That this happened even in an industry that rarely gives writers their due speaks to the power of Sahir’s words as much as his persona, his close – if often fraught – relationships with colleagues. Much before Kabhi Kabhie – a film whose very title comes from a poem from Sahir’s hugely successful book ‘Talkhiyan’ that director Yash Chopra had read as a young man in Jalandhar – there was ‘Pyaasa’, in which Guru Dutt’s hero Vijay is a young poet who goes from youthful romantic idealism to bitter disillusionment with the world around him. Sahir’s own trajectory as a Progressive poet – his critique of feudalism and capitalism, his attacks on social hypocrisy, especially around prostitution – gave Vijay his poetic voice.

Sahir’s songs for ‘Pyaasa’ also displayed his unrivalled range. “Jaane woh kaise log thhe jinke pyaar ko pyaar mila” is an anthem to unrequited love that could make anyone feel sorry for themselves. “Jinhe naaz hai Hind pe woh kahan hain” and “Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye toh kya hai” are two of the most trenchantly critical songs ever written for the Indian screen. But ‘Pyaasa’ also contains the immortal “Sar jo tera chakraye”, a tel maalish song which manages to be socially sharp, and “Aaj sajan mohe ang laga le”, a love song in the form of a Vaishnava lyric, allowing us to see the sex worker Gulab’s (Waheeda Rehman) longing for Vijay as Radha’s for Krishna.

There were many things that made Sahir Ludhianvi unusual, and certainly this was true of the songs he sometimes put into the mouths of female characters. Poetry everywhere, and Urdu poetry especially, is filled to the brim with paeans to the physical beauty of women, and Sahir wrote many such love lyrics, often sung by Mohammad Rafi.

But only Sahir could make the heroine sing in praise of the hero’s beauty. So Vyjayanthimala could sing with perfectly believable abandon about Dilip Kumar’s hair “Ude jab jab zulfein teri,/ Kunwaariyon ka dil machle, jind meriye”. Or Reena Roy could describe herself as lost in Rakesh Roshan’s eyes in ‘Dhanwan’ (1981): “Yeh aankhein dekh kar hum/ Saari duniya bhool jaate hain,/ Inhein paane ki dhun mein/ Har tamanna bhool jaate hain”. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Mar 2020. (Second part follows.)