It’s almost as elusive as the Holy Grail – but we search nevertheless. Scanning numerous newspaper ads and waiting by the phone – all for those few square yards of reclaimed land to call our very own. We begin our quest on Juhu Tara road, where tiny designer boutiques occupy the ground floor of old apartment buildings . Clothes stores must flourish here – a new one opens every few weeks. I see these ‘openings’ on my way back from town to our rented apartment of many years. Traveling down the unevenly tarred roads, they appear as tiny traffic jams where cameras and crowds cluster outside , and the beautiful people sip their wine and cheese inside. They’re flats for sale here on this palm tree lined, pocket- handkerchief- glimpse- of -sea promenade. ‘Sea touch’ as the broker lingo describes them, these buildings are often over 20 years old. Many have spectacular views – glass windows that look onto a shimmering blue grey sea. But there’s damp on the walls and the plaster is crumbling . The sea air will ruin all your TV’s and CD players a musically inclined friend warns us. Need massive maintenance and structural repairs, another friend counsels.
So we move onto the cozy streets of the Juhu Scheme. There’s lots of new construction here, ‘TDR buildings’ as the local broker calls them. ‘Transfer of Development rights’ buildings are easy to spot. Newly erected giant columns prop up old apartment buildings. Fresh floors are then added on with generous abandon. Inside the flats look swankingly modern – granite floors and brass tapped bathrooms. Outside the parking spaces are defined in tightly squeezed slots. Not much green, but they’re gulmohar trees on the street and some parks in the neighborhood. “Madam, flat le lo , badiya location hai , Film star ka neighborhood hai”, our earnest faced part time broker ( he’s a fitness instructor in the other time) urges me. But the views from the windows depress me. They’re multi storied buildings coming up in at least two lots close by . Many more will come up soon, as property prices zoom and proliferating families trade their ancestral houses for neat little blocks of flats. Soon all the charming bungalows that line these streets will disappear.
So we carry on northwards to the Juhu Versova Link Road, where apartment buildings line the road with large spaces in between. These are the mangrove areas and the residents have fought bitter battles to keep them so. We maneuver our car through a tight band of metal spikes. Spikes that have been erected by residents to keep away trucks that made stealthy trips in the middle of the night to dump soil on reclaimed mangrove land. Many spacious buildings line the mangrove sea front – but this again is not to be. The land is Collectors Land , we’re told and comes with a whole barrage of pre conditions, most of which we, as ten year residents in the city do not fulfill. So it’s back to the streets again !
This appeared in the Mumbai Mirror November 25th 2005
Monday, November 28, 2005
Life at the Juhu Versova Naka
The Juhu Versova naka is (like all others of its ilk) a noisy and eventful confluence. Identity wise though, it has always been a bit quirky. Some years ago, a tiered and landscaped garden with green grass and fountains sat regally in the centre. Maintained by the Lokhandwala Builders , the circle, perhaps logically, was named in their honor. All very well, though as it turned out , Lokhandwala Circle was a few miles away from Lokhandwala Complex, with Four Bungalows in between. And unlike the dual name American cities like Cambridge and Rochester ( oceans away from their English namesakes), this circle was sufficiently close to its Complex counterpart to confuse most first time visitors to the area.
Then, in a traffic streamlining initiative, the circular garden was razed to the ground. In its place was installed that red, orange and green presiding deity of all urban movement- the traffic light. Free right turns and free left turns were now rigorously administered. Traffic policemen in the area suddenly turned prosperous.
Today the naka is somewhat uncertainly referred to as Juhu Circle. It sprawls over as many as six roads. One corner encloses the empty concrete spaces of a BEST bus depot, the other makes its way down to Mithibai College. Yet another goes down gulmohar tree lined double carriage roads, past star’s bungalows and spacious apartment buildings.
The naka is a little world in itself- the modern day equivalent of the village banyan tree- the home airport in the areas hub and spoke system. Always noisy and always lively. Two newsvendors hawk their wares from one corner- wooden newsstands filled with newsprint and glossy Elle’s and Outlooks. Peripatetic policemen in perpetual attendance on the traffic lights. Little balloon children who skip around on the pavement . Sometimes they sell colorful talismans – pale yellow lemons strung with a series of slim green chillies and sometimes they sell toys and sometimes they sell republic flags. A wizened old woman who taps hopefully on every car window. You know she lives here on this naka, you see her every day. The other families too - their pots and pans on the sidewalk, their clothes put out to dry on the road dividers . The news vendors, the policemen and the seller of spurious books – they all go home every evening , but these poor people , the new age urban nomads , many miles away from the villages of their birth , are perhaps the only constants in this traffic filled transit space.
This appeared in Mumbai Mirror September
Then, in a traffic streamlining initiative, the circular garden was razed to the ground. In its place was installed that red, orange and green presiding deity of all urban movement- the traffic light. Free right turns and free left turns were now rigorously administered. Traffic policemen in the area suddenly turned prosperous.
Today the naka is somewhat uncertainly referred to as Juhu Circle. It sprawls over as many as six roads. One corner encloses the empty concrete spaces of a BEST bus depot, the other makes its way down to Mithibai College. Yet another goes down gulmohar tree lined double carriage roads, past star’s bungalows and spacious apartment buildings.
The naka is a little world in itself- the modern day equivalent of the village banyan tree- the home airport in the areas hub and spoke system. Always noisy and always lively. Two newsvendors hawk their wares from one corner- wooden newsstands filled with newsprint and glossy Elle’s and Outlooks. Peripatetic policemen in perpetual attendance on the traffic lights. Little balloon children who skip around on the pavement . Sometimes they sell colorful talismans – pale yellow lemons strung with a series of slim green chillies and sometimes they sell toys and sometimes they sell republic flags. A wizened old woman who taps hopefully on every car window. You know she lives here on this naka, you see her every day. The other families too - their pots and pans on the sidewalk, their clothes put out to dry on the road dividers . The news vendors, the policemen and the seller of spurious books – they all go home every evening , but these poor people , the new age urban nomads , many miles away from the villages of their birth , are perhaps the only constants in this traffic filled transit space.
This appeared in Mumbai Mirror September
Thursday, November 17, 2005
The Sunday Philosophy Club - Book review
A fat lady detective in Botswana, who drinks red bush tea and drives a little white van around the Kalahari desert, Mma Precious Ramotswe has quickly notched up legions of fans, since her debut six years ago in the best selling No 1 Ladies Detective Agency.
Now her creator, 56-year-old bassoonist and Scottish medical law professor, Alexander McCall Smith, brings us another equally lovable and quirkily eccentric heroine.
Forty-one-year old Isabel Dalhousie lives in Edinburgh. She edits a philosophical journal called ‘The Review of Applied Ethics’, attends symphonic concerts and art galleries, whilst ruminating on Auden and Kant, solutions to the Times crossword and repressed Albanian film makers, in her spare time.
All very arty, but Dalhousie is no dilettante. She may live an industrial age away from the stout, sturdy Precious Ramotswe but both woman are uncannily similar in their honesty and their matter-of-fact zeal for fighting the evil in their worlds.
A young man falls to his death after a performance by the Reykjavik Orchestra and Isabel thinks that it wasn’t an accident. Her doughty Scotswoman housekeeper Grace, quick to pronounce devastating moral judgments on the world at large seems to agree. Twenty-four-year-old Cat, who runs a delicatessen and is Isabel’s niece, protests at Isabel’s involvement,” You simply cannot get drawn into other people’s business like this”.
For Isabel though, there’s a moral bond between them (“I was the last person that young man saw… Don’t you think the last person you see on this earth owes you something?”) She embarks upon an investigation of sorts– meeting a whole congregation of characters from the predatory paparazzi McManus to the art collecting fund Manager Paul Hogg and his ‘man-eating ‘, art-swindling fiancé, Minty.
Intrigues emerge as she finds out the deceased young man was called Mark and was also a fund Manager, working coincidentally in the same firm as Paul Hogg, and that his flat mates Neil and Hen are hiding something.
It’s an interesting story, beautifully told. McCall Smith’s cameo characters from Grace and Cat, to Cat’s rejected suitor Jamie, are well developed and distinct. There are a profusion of profound little plots and sub-plots.
Grace’s friends husband’s mid life crisis– “He’s bought teenage clothes. Tight jeans. Sweaters with large letters on them. And he’s walking around listening to rock music” grumbles Grace; Cat’s suitable and unsuitable suitors; Jamie the musically minded “bit of a wimp”; Tony with the “touch of cruelty in [his]; Face and Isabel’s speculation, “Why should anybody actually want a hunk, when non-hunks were so much more interesting”.
These delightful digressions also echo and enrich the main narrative in their subtle meditations on the foibles of human behaviour and McCall treads gently and entertainingly (“was he married or… “, Isabel asks and then pauses ,”People often did not bother to marry…and yet it amounted to the same thing in many cases”).
All of which makes The Sunday Philosophy Club that rarity– an interesting detective story that’s not necessarily a hurried page turner, the development being every bit as satisfying as the denouement.
Deccan Herald September
Now her creator, 56-year-old bassoonist and Scottish medical law professor, Alexander McCall Smith, brings us another equally lovable and quirkily eccentric heroine.
Forty-one-year old Isabel Dalhousie lives in Edinburgh. She edits a philosophical journal called ‘The Review of Applied Ethics’, attends symphonic concerts and art galleries, whilst ruminating on Auden and Kant, solutions to the Times crossword and repressed Albanian film makers, in her spare time.
All very arty, but Dalhousie is no dilettante. She may live an industrial age away from the stout, sturdy Precious Ramotswe but both woman are uncannily similar in their honesty and their matter-of-fact zeal for fighting the evil in their worlds.
A young man falls to his death after a performance by the Reykjavik Orchestra and Isabel thinks that it wasn’t an accident. Her doughty Scotswoman housekeeper Grace, quick to pronounce devastating moral judgments on the world at large seems to agree. Twenty-four-year-old Cat, who runs a delicatessen and is Isabel’s niece, protests at Isabel’s involvement,” You simply cannot get drawn into other people’s business like this”.
For Isabel though, there’s a moral bond between them (“I was the last person that young man saw… Don’t you think the last person you see on this earth owes you something?”) She embarks upon an investigation of sorts– meeting a whole congregation of characters from the predatory paparazzi McManus to the art collecting fund Manager Paul Hogg and his ‘man-eating ‘, art-swindling fiancé, Minty.
Intrigues emerge as she finds out the deceased young man was called Mark and was also a fund Manager, working coincidentally in the same firm as Paul Hogg, and that his flat mates Neil and Hen are hiding something.
It’s an interesting story, beautifully told. McCall Smith’s cameo characters from Grace and Cat, to Cat’s rejected suitor Jamie, are well developed and distinct. There are a profusion of profound little plots and sub-plots.
Grace’s friends husband’s mid life crisis– “He’s bought teenage clothes. Tight jeans. Sweaters with large letters on them. And he’s walking around listening to rock music” grumbles Grace; Cat’s suitable and unsuitable suitors; Jamie the musically minded “bit of a wimp”; Tony with the “touch of cruelty in [his]; Face and Isabel’s speculation, “Why should anybody actually want a hunk, when non-hunks were so much more interesting”.
These delightful digressions also echo and enrich the main narrative in their subtle meditations on the foibles of human behaviour and McCall treads gently and entertainingly (“was he married or… “, Isabel asks and then pauses ,”People often did not bother to marry…and yet it amounted to the same thing in many cases”).
All of which makes The Sunday Philosophy Club that rarity– an interesting detective story that’s not necessarily a hurried page turner, the development being every bit as satisfying as the denouement.
Deccan Herald September
Friends, Lovers, Chocolate - Book Review
This review appeared in the Deccan Herald November 6th 2005
A case of too much of a good thing
The latest book in the detective series is fairly radical in its own right, but not much new happens here, just more of the same.
Friends, Lovers and Chocolate is book two in the prolific Professor Alexander McCall Smith’s new detective series. His phenomenally successful first series, The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency was set in Botswana.
This new series moves, fairly radically too— from dusty underdeveloped third world Africa to the rarefied cultural capital of Edinburgh. Its Scottish single woman-of-independent-means protagonist, Isabel Dalhousie finds herself (a bit like Miss Marple) drawn into strange situations, called upon by her conscience to investigate anything remotely grey in her vicinity.
Last time around in ‘The Sunday Philosophy Club’, the forty-one-year-old editor of ‘The Journal of Applied Ethics’ found herself on the case of the strange suicide-that-wasn’t. This time Dalhousie is in the midst of an even more bizarre mystery. In a typical McCall setting of old world meets new (seen here as medical technology meets the supernatural), Isabel encounters a heart transplant patient.
Over mackerel and wine at the Arts Club, Ian of the transplanted heart, discusses his cellular memory theory (that it maybe “perfectly possible that the heart may be the repository of memory”) and of one such recurring memory of which he is “worried that it’s going to kill” him.
The mystery of a sinister memory he’s received via a heart transplant? It’s a theme that could with Stephen King be pregnant with possibility, but McCall Smith’s mysteries are mostly mundane (no racy chases of missing manuscripts please). His detective’s concerns are earthy and ‘slice-of-life’ and his protagonists, like the kindly car mechanic Maketoni, are prone to many delightful digressions on life, the universe and everything else.
So the story of the memory of “high browed face, with hooded eyes and a scar running just below the hairline” doesn’t go anywhere. The desultory detection that follows is dilute even by McCall Smith standards. And the ending when it eventually arrives is a complete anti climax.
So much so, that much of what had delighted in ‘The Sunday Philosophy Club’, the elegant twists and turns and the rich ruminations now prove irksome. For nothing happens except more of the same.
Isabel’s love life is still in limbo. Niece Cat’s rejected suitor Jamie, who Isabel likes, continues to play platonic. Salvatore, the intriguing Italian of ambiguous origin (another aspiring Cat Suitor) vanishes as abruptly as he arrives. Also, interspersed with these everyday events are constant and even cloying references to Auden, Burns and Haydn.
There’s reams of reflection too (“Did the Turks go over their history with a moral fine tooth com?”) and some contemporary commentary (“exactly the same emotions and energy that had gone into witch-hunting now went into the pursuit of our preferred modern victims”). Good, but also decidedly a case of too much of a good thing.
Still, read it if you’ve never read McCall Smith.
A case of too much of a good thing
The latest book in the detective series is fairly radical in its own right, but not much new happens here, just more of the same.
Friends, Lovers and Chocolate is book two in the prolific Professor Alexander McCall Smith’s new detective series. His phenomenally successful first series, The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency was set in Botswana.
This new series moves, fairly radically too— from dusty underdeveloped third world Africa to the rarefied cultural capital of Edinburgh. Its Scottish single woman-of-independent-means protagonist, Isabel Dalhousie finds herself (a bit like Miss Marple) drawn into strange situations, called upon by her conscience to investigate anything remotely grey in her vicinity.
Last time around in ‘The Sunday Philosophy Club’, the forty-one-year-old editor of ‘The Journal of Applied Ethics’ found herself on the case of the strange suicide-that-wasn’t. This time Dalhousie is in the midst of an even more bizarre mystery. In a typical McCall setting of old world meets new (seen here as medical technology meets the supernatural), Isabel encounters a heart transplant patient.
Over mackerel and wine at the Arts Club, Ian of the transplanted heart, discusses his cellular memory theory (that it maybe “perfectly possible that the heart may be the repository of memory”) and of one such recurring memory of which he is “worried that it’s going to kill” him.
The mystery of a sinister memory he’s received via a heart transplant? It’s a theme that could with Stephen King be pregnant with possibility, but McCall Smith’s mysteries are mostly mundane (no racy chases of missing manuscripts please). His detective’s concerns are earthy and ‘slice-of-life’ and his protagonists, like the kindly car mechanic Maketoni, are prone to many delightful digressions on life, the universe and everything else.
So the story of the memory of “high browed face, with hooded eyes and a scar running just below the hairline” doesn’t go anywhere. The desultory detection that follows is dilute even by McCall Smith standards. And the ending when it eventually arrives is a complete anti climax.
So much so, that much of what had delighted in ‘The Sunday Philosophy Club’, the elegant twists and turns and the rich ruminations now prove irksome. For nothing happens except more of the same.
Isabel’s love life is still in limbo. Niece Cat’s rejected suitor Jamie, who Isabel likes, continues to play platonic. Salvatore, the intriguing Italian of ambiguous origin (another aspiring Cat Suitor) vanishes as abruptly as he arrives. Also, interspersed with these everyday events are constant and even cloying references to Auden, Burns and Haydn.
There’s reams of reflection too (“Did the Turks go over their history with a moral fine tooth com?”) and some contemporary commentary (“exactly the same emotions and energy that had gone into witch-hunting now went into the pursuit of our preferred modern victims”). Good, but also decidedly a case of too much of a good thing.
Still, read it if you’ve never read McCall Smith.
Cross over Directors ..
This is a feature I wrote many years ago ..just found it online so decided to post it here
In director Tarsem’s Singh’s visually arresting debut film, The Cell, Jennifer Lopez, an expert child psychologist enters the mind of a serial killer in order to obtain information on the whereabouts of his victim.
With this as the basic storyline, we are transported by Tarsem Singh, an award winning music videos and commercials director, to a world of sights and sounds that embrace the full visual power of what cinema can do.
Wild flourishes and varied canvases bring the 'mindscape' of the subconscious to life and the imagery employed mixes the surreal textures of Salvador Dali, the gothic motifs of Tim Burton, Japanese-inspired costume design and some truly bizarre set pieces.
Stretching traditional cinematic boundaries we have a genre of directors, many first time, who bring with them the strengths and elasticities of their earlier disciplines, whether it is cinematography, ad filmmaking, painting or even film criticism.
For directors like Santosh Sivan, Rajiv Menon, M F Husain and Khalid Mohamed, direction has been a richly interactive experience, a process of being defined by cinematic traditions as well as defying them, and of positioning themselves at varying degrees on the art cinema-commercial cinema continuum.
For Santosh Sivan, this has meant moving from the award winning, low budget somewhat niche The Terrorist, where Sivan worked wonders with his camerawork and Ayesha’s Dharkers expressive eyes to magnum opus Asoka.
Inspired by the late Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, Sivan’s Asoka, based on the life the 3rd Emperor of the Mauryan Dynasty, is a three-hour epic love story, which deals with the transformation of the emperor Asoka from a bloody warrior to a peaceful monk.
Beset with controversy from the start as to historical accuracy, the film is however nothing short of sheer visual magic. Sivan’s cinematographer’s eye captures the essence of the changing seasons, the colors and the landscape as well the femme fatale of the piece, the Kalinga Princess Kaurwaki played by the oomph-laden Kareena Kapoor, with poetic accuracy and stunning virtuosity.
The film is a riot of colors, of contrasts, of light and shadow and striking sets sans the usual glitz and glitter. You can’t miss the cinematographer Sivan in his films, he is truly in every shot.
As fellow cinematographer, former ad filmmaker and director Rajiv Menon points out , "Cinematography helps you to keep the shooting problems in mind. It also helps you to think visually. Direction and Cinematography are related. The only difference between here and the west is that, there, the Cinematographer decides the shots while here the Director does the same job. I understand the cameraman better - my single greatest plus”.
For artist M F Husain, films have always been a passion. "It is", he declares, "a way for art to reach the people. Painting often becomes the preserve of a few art critics, who guard their knowledge jealously and do not want to share it with anyone. Besides painting, as even Dali put it is 'intellectually inadequate'. My intention in making a film like Gajagamini and casting superstars like Madhuri and Shah Rukh Khan was to bring art to the people.”
Gajagamini sketches the different forms of woman -- mysterious, multi-faceted and majestic. Filmed in surreal set pieces, with a format of a dance ballet, linear time and space progression are deliberately bent to artistic effect. Husain attempts to dispense with the concept of time by showing Leonardo Da Vinci and Shah Rukh Khan (playing himself) sharing screen space with Monica, a modern-day Madhuri, and Kalidas riding a bicycle!
Visually each frame is like a prize painting. In one of the many surreal scenes, Shabana Azmi is unable to hear Madhuri, Shilpa and Farida Jalal's voices, emphasizing that women down the centuries, want to be heard, but aren't. The role of women in keeping the cycle of creation going is established through the scene where Shilpa Shirodkar ceaseless pushes a laden-with-children giant wheel.
Yet there’s a surfeit of surrealism and symbolism here, and the Director whose celluloid brush endeavors to create a film that’s not too 'artsy artsy' and 'audience friendly', seems to have fallen short despite the star power.
Then you have film-critic Khalid Mohamed’s Fiza, that is fully accepting of the pop tradition, yet unusual in the very character of Fiza, the heroine of the film. One of the few really strong woman characters in Hindi cinema, Fiza as Director Khalid Mohamed points out is the rare film that shows a woman with a book. Amaan the hero is by contrast, shown as a well-intentioned but rather weak man.
The film delineates characters in detailed hues, though much criticism was leveled at the director for selling out to mainstream Bollywood song and dance traditions, thus situating his strong, intellectually inclined heroine in a bar and having her dance for dramatic effect. "It was however a natural progression", the director maintains, "a deliberate upset of the stereotype that Muslim woman have to exist in their mohalla and cannot dance."
Commercial successes in varying degrees, these films are nevertheless interesting ones to look out for, in the power of their imagery and in their cinematic explorations, transcending stereotype and tradition and yet also somewhat intrinsically and eventually contained by it.
In director Tarsem’s Singh’s visually arresting debut film, The Cell, Jennifer Lopez, an expert child psychologist enters the mind of a serial killer in order to obtain information on the whereabouts of his victim.
With this as the basic storyline, we are transported by Tarsem Singh, an award winning music videos and commercials director, to a world of sights and sounds that embrace the full visual power of what cinema can do.
Wild flourishes and varied canvases bring the 'mindscape' of the subconscious to life and the imagery employed mixes the surreal textures of Salvador Dali, the gothic motifs of Tim Burton, Japanese-inspired costume design and some truly bizarre set pieces.
Stretching traditional cinematic boundaries we have a genre of directors, many first time, who bring with them the strengths and elasticities of their earlier disciplines, whether it is cinematography, ad filmmaking, painting or even film criticism.
For directors like Santosh Sivan, Rajiv Menon, M F Husain and Khalid Mohamed, direction has been a richly interactive experience, a process of being defined by cinematic traditions as well as defying them, and of positioning themselves at varying degrees on the art cinema-commercial cinema continuum.
For Santosh Sivan, this has meant moving from the award winning, low budget somewhat niche The Terrorist, where Sivan worked wonders with his camerawork and Ayesha’s Dharkers expressive eyes to magnum opus Asoka.
Inspired by the late Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, Sivan’s Asoka, based on the life the 3rd Emperor of the Mauryan Dynasty, is a three-hour epic love story, which deals with the transformation of the emperor Asoka from a bloody warrior to a peaceful monk.
Beset with controversy from the start as to historical accuracy, the film is however nothing short of sheer visual magic. Sivan’s cinematographer’s eye captures the essence of the changing seasons, the colors and the landscape as well the femme fatale of the piece, the Kalinga Princess Kaurwaki played by the oomph-laden Kareena Kapoor, with poetic accuracy and stunning virtuosity.
The film is a riot of colors, of contrasts, of light and shadow and striking sets sans the usual glitz and glitter. You can’t miss the cinematographer Sivan in his films, he is truly in every shot.
As fellow cinematographer, former ad filmmaker and director Rajiv Menon points out , "Cinematography helps you to keep the shooting problems in mind. It also helps you to think visually. Direction and Cinematography are related. The only difference between here and the west is that, there, the Cinematographer decides the shots while here the Director does the same job. I understand the cameraman better - my single greatest plus”.
For artist M F Husain, films have always been a passion. "It is", he declares, "a way for art to reach the people. Painting often becomes the preserve of a few art critics, who guard their knowledge jealously and do not want to share it with anyone. Besides painting, as even Dali put it is 'intellectually inadequate'. My intention in making a film like Gajagamini and casting superstars like Madhuri and Shah Rukh Khan was to bring art to the people.”
Gajagamini sketches the different forms of woman -- mysterious, multi-faceted and majestic. Filmed in surreal set pieces, with a format of a dance ballet, linear time and space progression are deliberately bent to artistic effect. Husain attempts to dispense with the concept of time by showing Leonardo Da Vinci and Shah Rukh Khan (playing himself) sharing screen space with Monica, a modern-day Madhuri, and Kalidas riding a bicycle!
Visually each frame is like a prize painting. In one of the many surreal scenes, Shabana Azmi is unable to hear Madhuri, Shilpa and Farida Jalal's voices, emphasizing that women down the centuries, want to be heard, but aren't. The role of women in keeping the cycle of creation going is established through the scene where Shilpa Shirodkar ceaseless pushes a laden-with-children giant wheel.
Yet there’s a surfeit of surrealism and symbolism here, and the Director whose celluloid brush endeavors to create a film that’s not too 'artsy artsy' and 'audience friendly', seems to have fallen short despite the star power.
Then you have film-critic Khalid Mohamed’s Fiza, that is fully accepting of the pop tradition, yet unusual in the very character of Fiza, the heroine of the film. One of the few really strong woman characters in Hindi cinema, Fiza as Director Khalid Mohamed points out is the rare film that shows a woman with a book. Amaan the hero is by contrast, shown as a well-intentioned but rather weak man.
The film delineates characters in detailed hues, though much criticism was leveled at the director for selling out to mainstream Bollywood song and dance traditions, thus situating his strong, intellectually inclined heroine in a bar and having her dance for dramatic effect. "It was however a natural progression", the director maintains, "a deliberate upset of the stereotype that Muslim woman have to exist in their mohalla and cannot dance."
Commercial successes in varying degrees, these films are nevertheless interesting ones to look out for, in the power of their imagery and in their cinematic explorations, transcending stereotype and tradition and yet also somewhat intrinsically and eventually contained by it.
Author Profile - Bapsi Sidhwa
This appeared in the Hindu Sunday Magazine November 6th 2005
Novelist Bapsi Sidhwa talks about her writing, her best-known book about Partition and her latest one on Lahore.
BAPSI SIDHWA is in Bombay to promote a book of writings on the city of "sin and splendour" that she grew up in — pre- Partition Lahore.
I meet her at her cousin's elegant, old time Parsi apartment in South Mumbai. The heritage-like flat with its dark teak furniture and copper urns looks out onto an expanse of the Oval Maidan, onto the Rajabai Clock Tower and the gothic spires of the Bombay High Court.
It's a sumptuous setting. Also one that's immaculately appropriate for the petite Punjabi-Parsi- Pakistani writer sitting across me. Indeed this could be a still from a Merchant Ivory film. The fair 67-year-old writer, clad in a pink salwar kameez, with her carefully modulated tones, certainly looks the part. (The closest she's come to this, she confesses, is a cameo in the Deepa Mehta directed "1947 Earth", a film based on Sidhwa's classic story on Partition The Ice Candy Man.)
Early days
The last few days have been hectic as journalists and their photographers line up back to back. A TV shoot the day before, of the Houston-based writer hunting for bargains on Colaba's colourfully chaotic Causeway bazaar, has left her with a bad back. She also has a bad stomach ("All that Bombay duck," she exclaims, "I can't have enough of it.")
We talk of her days in Bombay, the five years of her first marriage. Sidhwa, like her eight-year-old heroine in the Ice Candy Man, had childhood polio and wasn't allowed to go to school. "I came to Bombay like a country bumpkin," she declares. "My first husband said, `you can't walk; you can't talk. What you can do?'"
Still, it was a city the young woman found enormously liberating. "Unlike Lahore where everybody knew you, in Bombay there was a wonderful anonymity, you could wear what you liked and just get on a bus".
Like Madhu Jaffrey, who tells an interesting ugly duckling story of how unattractive she felt as a young woman until she moved to the U.S. and threw her spectacles into the Atlantic, Sidhwa too, discovered the confidence of being a late bloomer.
Years later, on her second marriage honeymoon to the mountains, her first novel came to her ("I'd never written before", she says, "just some stupid little piece on pregnancy and how if you walked too far front you were carrying a boy"). It's a story I've read of before, but Sidhwa tells it beautifully, in the manner of a storyteller born. She describes the remote mountain fastnesses between Afghanistan and Pakistan ("you could lose a herd of elephants in there, let alone Osama bin Laden") and tells the tragic tale of a runaway young bride bought as a wife for a tribal man. The short story she set out to write (in secret, she was afraid she'd be laughed at), turned eventually into her first novel The Pakistani Bride.
Trauma of Partition
Interestingly, the story she'd carried inside her almost all her life — that of the terrors and traumas of Partition — was to emerge much later in 1988 — as The Ice Candy Man (published in the U.S. as Cracking India as "ice candy man" had colloquial connotations of a drug supplier).
It's an immensely powerful book, written from a child's point of view and based on Bapsi Sidhwa's own terrified memories. As she writes in an essay for The New York Times of those times, "Yet the ominous roar of distant mobs was a constant of my awareness, alerting me, even at age seven, to a palpable sense of the evil that was taking place in various parts of Lahore...(And when) the dread roar of mobs has at last ceased, terrible sounds of grief and pain erupt at night. They come from the abandoned servants' quarters behind the Singhs' house... why do these women cry like that? Because they're delivering unwanted babies, I'm told, or reliving hideous memories."
Later that evening, at the book's formal launch at a city bookstore, strangers come forward emotionally with their Partition stories — one lady wants the book of writings on Lahore autographed for her mother who used to live in Lahore, two young students from Xavier's introduce themselves, "We did a presentation on you." Question hour is animated.
Journalist Anil Dharker asks her, "You look so gentle and genteel. How then do you manage to write such ribald stuff?"
Sidhwa splutters, "But my writing is very decent — I don't write like writers like ... er ... Philip Roth" (the infamous Portnoy's Complaint being a prime example!).
"If a writer writes about a boy's sexual urges it is perfectly natural; but girls also experience the same feelings, the daze and the dazzlement, so how does that become ribald and indecent?" she queries, still smarting under the recent U.S. high school controversy on a couple of burgeoning sexuality scenes in The Ice Candy Man.
Novelist Bapsi Sidhwa talks about her writing, her best-known book about Partition and her latest one on Lahore.
BAPSI SIDHWA is in Bombay to promote a book of writings on the city of "sin and splendour" that she grew up in — pre- Partition Lahore.
I meet her at her cousin's elegant, old time Parsi apartment in South Mumbai. The heritage-like flat with its dark teak furniture and copper urns looks out onto an expanse of the Oval Maidan, onto the Rajabai Clock Tower and the gothic spires of the Bombay High Court.
It's a sumptuous setting. Also one that's immaculately appropriate for the petite Punjabi-Parsi- Pakistani writer sitting across me. Indeed this could be a still from a Merchant Ivory film. The fair 67-year-old writer, clad in a pink salwar kameez, with her carefully modulated tones, certainly looks the part. (The closest she's come to this, she confesses, is a cameo in the Deepa Mehta directed "1947 Earth", a film based on Sidhwa's classic story on Partition The Ice Candy Man.)
Early days
The last few days have been hectic as journalists and their photographers line up back to back. A TV shoot the day before, of the Houston-based writer hunting for bargains on Colaba's colourfully chaotic Causeway bazaar, has left her with a bad back. She also has a bad stomach ("All that Bombay duck," she exclaims, "I can't have enough of it.")
We talk of her days in Bombay, the five years of her first marriage. Sidhwa, like her eight-year-old heroine in the Ice Candy Man, had childhood polio and wasn't allowed to go to school. "I came to Bombay like a country bumpkin," she declares. "My first husband said, `you can't walk; you can't talk. What you can do?'"
Still, it was a city the young woman found enormously liberating. "Unlike Lahore where everybody knew you, in Bombay there was a wonderful anonymity, you could wear what you liked and just get on a bus".
Like Madhu Jaffrey, who tells an interesting ugly duckling story of how unattractive she felt as a young woman until she moved to the U.S. and threw her spectacles into the Atlantic, Sidhwa too, discovered the confidence of being a late bloomer.
Years later, on her second marriage honeymoon to the mountains, her first novel came to her ("I'd never written before", she says, "just some stupid little piece on pregnancy and how if you walked too far front you were carrying a boy"). It's a story I've read of before, but Sidhwa tells it beautifully, in the manner of a storyteller born. She describes the remote mountain fastnesses between Afghanistan and Pakistan ("you could lose a herd of elephants in there, let alone Osama bin Laden") and tells the tragic tale of a runaway young bride bought as a wife for a tribal man. The short story she set out to write (in secret, she was afraid she'd be laughed at), turned eventually into her first novel The Pakistani Bride.
Trauma of Partition
Interestingly, the story she'd carried inside her almost all her life — that of the terrors and traumas of Partition — was to emerge much later in 1988 — as The Ice Candy Man (published in the U.S. as Cracking India as "ice candy man" had colloquial connotations of a drug supplier).
It's an immensely powerful book, written from a child's point of view and based on Bapsi Sidhwa's own terrified memories. As she writes in an essay for The New York Times of those times, "Yet the ominous roar of distant mobs was a constant of my awareness, alerting me, even at age seven, to a palpable sense of the evil that was taking place in various parts of Lahore...(And when) the dread roar of mobs has at last ceased, terrible sounds of grief and pain erupt at night. They come from the abandoned servants' quarters behind the Singhs' house... why do these women cry like that? Because they're delivering unwanted babies, I'm told, or reliving hideous memories."
Later that evening, at the book's formal launch at a city bookstore, strangers come forward emotionally with their Partition stories — one lady wants the book of writings on Lahore autographed for her mother who used to live in Lahore, two young students from Xavier's introduce themselves, "We did a presentation on you." Question hour is animated.
Journalist Anil Dharker asks her, "You look so gentle and genteel. How then do you manage to write such ribald stuff?"
Sidhwa splutters, "But my writing is very decent — I don't write like writers like ... er ... Philip Roth" (the infamous Portnoy's Complaint being a prime example!).
"If a writer writes about a boy's sexual urges it is perfectly natural; but girls also experience the same feelings, the daze and the dazzlement, so how does that become ribald and indecent?" she queries, still smarting under the recent U.S. high school controversy on a couple of burgeoning sexuality scenes in The Ice Candy Man.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
Book Review - The Harmony Silk Factory
This review appeared in the Sept 22 issue of Time Out Mumbai
Booker long list contender , Tash Aw’s debut novel, is a fractured and complex tale. Set exotically enough in the jungles of Malaya, it tells the story of the “infamous Chinaman Johnny Lim” ‘s rise from illiterate peasanthood to power in Malaysia’s Kinta Valley.
The book, Rashomon- like has three narratives. Which do we believe ? Is Lim the ‘liar , a cheat, a traitor’ his embittered son Jasper tells us about ? Was his meteoric rise, a ladder littered with a litany of horrific crimes ? Or is he the blandly inscrutable, distantly adoring husband , his reluctant aristocratic bride Snow Soong describes ? In an extract from her private journal , she tells of the couple’s bizarre honeymoon in Malaysia’s Seven Maidens islands .Or do we believe the third narrative ? This from Johnny’s friend Peter Wormwood’s geriatric days in an Oriental people’s old age home. Wormwood describes a simple and likeable Johnny, in chapters that shift between landscaping the old age home and his memories of the strange honeymoon trip, an almost Conradian journey in to the ‘Heart of Darkness’ ?
‘The Harmony Silk Factory’ has received critical acclaim and it’s easy to see why – the novel has all the right elements - plenty of local color in the story of the rise of Johnny from his days as a brilliant mechanic in the tin mines of Malaya ,as well as the strange tale of a bizarre jungle honeymoon shared with an odd set of characters. There’s suave Japanese military man in disguise, Kunichika , also titled ‘Butcher of Kampar’, English tin mine owner Honey Fredrick , Peter Wormwood and of course Johnny and Snow . Add to that the novel’s narrative complexity of multiple points of view, its themes of appearance and reality and the heart of darkness where the jungle takes over (‘Broken branches littered the place I worked so hard to cleanse, and above us the canopy of leaves suddenly seemed more opaque than ever’). All very promising, but the multiple points of view disperse in different directions, minus any shades of Rashomon-like brilliance, and the story remains rather unraveled despite the dramatic denouement. It does however leave you looking out for more from Tash Aw.
Booker long list contender , Tash Aw’s debut novel, is a fractured and complex tale. Set exotically enough in the jungles of Malaya, it tells the story of the “infamous Chinaman Johnny Lim” ‘s rise from illiterate peasanthood to power in Malaysia’s Kinta Valley.
The book, Rashomon- like has three narratives. Which do we believe ? Is Lim the ‘liar , a cheat, a traitor’ his embittered son Jasper tells us about ? Was his meteoric rise, a ladder littered with a litany of horrific crimes ? Or is he the blandly inscrutable, distantly adoring husband , his reluctant aristocratic bride Snow Soong describes ? In an extract from her private journal , she tells of the couple’s bizarre honeymoon in Malaysia’s Seven Maidens islands .Or do we believe the third narrative ? This from Johnny’s friend Peter Wormwood’s geriatric days in an Oriental people’s old age home. Wormwood describes a simple and likeable Johnny, in chapters that shift between landscaping the old age home and his memories of the strange honeymoon trip, an almost Conradian journey in to the ‘Heart of Darkness’ ?
‘The Harmony Silk Factory’ has received critical acclaim and it’s easy to see why – the novel has all the right elements - plenty of local color in the story of the rise of Johnny from his days as a brilliant mechanic in the tin mines of Malaya ,as well as the strange tale of a bizarre jungle honeymoon shared with an odd set of characters. There’s suave Japanese military man in disguise, Kunichika , also titled ‘Butcher of Kampar’, English tin mine owner Honey Fredrick , Peter Wormwood and of course Johnny and Snow . Add to that the novel’s narrative complexity of multiple points of view, its themes of appearance and reality and the heart of darkness where the jungle takes over (‘Broken branches littered the place I worked so hard to cleanse, and above us the canopy of leaves suddenly seemed more opaque than ever’). All very promising, but the multiple points of view disperse in different directions, minus any shades of Rashomon-like brilliance, and the story remains rather unraveled despite the dramatic denouement. It does however leave you looking out for more from Tash Aw.
Life in the Bombay Chawls - Ravan and Eddie
This appeared in the Times of India Sunday edition 11th September
Ravan and Eddie, Kiran Nagarkar’s scathingly funny novel of two young boys in the Bombay chawls, began as a screenplay for a Bollywood film. The film (to be directed by Dev Benegal) was never made, instead Ravan and Eddie made their debut in the beginnings of a Marathi novel. Years later, Marathi writer Nagarkar, still grappling with the iniquities of language , rewrote this growing up story in English, a language he describes in the book as a “maha-mantra….an ‘ open sesame’ that doesn’t open mere doors, it opens new worlds and allows you to cross over from one universe to another”.
Ravan and Eddie are both occupants of Central Works Department (CWD) Chawl no 17. ”The Hindus and Catholics in Bombay’s CWD chawls (and perhaps almost anywhere in India) may as well have lived on different planets”, but Ravan and Eddie are connected in a bizarre, almost Rushdie-an way. Nagarkar’s narrative style, however, is anything but . It is casual and conversational and very slice-of-life, lit up occasionally by bitingly ironic authorial insights. The best known of these ( among the delightful asides on Snow the fairness cream , Shammi Kapoor and the Poverty Line ) is of course Nagarkar’s digression on ‘The Great Water Wars’ in the chawl- “ They should have killed for water, the men and women of the CWD chawls. People have been known to kill for less: religion; language; the flag; the colour of a person’s skin or his caste; breaking the queue at a petrol pump...”
For the rest, you follow Ravan and Eddie’s struggle for survival in the packed and proliferating world of the Bombay chawl .It’s a world where babies are space and energy consuming burdens and husbands almost vestigial. Ravan and Eddie’s families survive , like many in India due to the undefeated energies of the woman. Eddie’s father dies Pandu-like in a moment of lust. Ravan’s father Shankar bestirs himself from his bed only to bring in a mistress, leading his mother Parvatibai to obsessive temple visiting anxiety - ”The woman was a drain on the limited finances of the house…What would she do if instead of one intruder, there were two. All that hyperactivity on the bed was bound to bear fruit.” Meanwhile, Eddie’s widowed mother Violet is considering re-marriage and Eddie is tortured by grim imaginings, ”babies would start rolling in…whatever extra the new man earned would be wiped out by the new mouths that would have to be fed…So much for his mothers life becoming easier.” And so it goes on. The boys separate struggles and their growing up stories are comic, but also achingly sad. Eddie is inducted into the Hindu Mahasabha, hopelessly won over by his bribe of a Wilson pen and stories from the Mahabharata. Predictably all hell breaks loose when Violet finds out and Eddie is rushed to the Church to save his soul. Ravan, in the meantime, is in trouble with the more liberal Hindus over his earnest drive to recruit new members to the Sabha. Subject to such proxy battles, the two little boys also have to contend with life’s other tribulations – sexually predatory bully Prakash for one, besides poverty and prejudice. Yet there’s joy too – the thrill of a good story, the hit movie ‘Dil Deke Dekho’ and ‘Rock Around the Clock’, biryani in a Irani Café and kite flying on Sankranti. Nagarkar’s world maybe a poor one , but its not despairingly and hopelessly so. Wit and irony save his characters from becoming relentlessly miserable Rohington Mistry protagonists, many of whom are similarly boxed into tiny spaces, in a Bombay gone to seed.
Ravan and Eddie, Kiran Nagarkar’s scathingly funny novel of two young boys in the Bombay chawls, began as a screenplay for a Bollywood film. The film (to be directed by Dev Benegal) was never made, instead Ravan and Eddie made their debut in the beginnings of a Marathi novel. Years later, Marathi writer Nagarkar, still grappling with the iniquities of language , rewrote this growing up story in English, a language he describes in the book as a “maha-mantra….an ‘ open sesame’ that doesn’t open mere doors, it opens new worlds and allows you to cross over from one universe to another”.
Ravan and Eddie are both occupants of Central Works Department (CWD) Chawl no 17. ”The Hindus and Catholics in Bombay’s CWD chawls (and perhaps almost anywhere in India) may as well have lived on different planets”, but Ravan and Eddie are connected in a bizarre, almost Rushdie-an way. Nagarkar’s narrative style, however, is anything but . It is casual and conversational and very slice-of-life, lit up occasionally by bitingly ironic authorial insights. The best known of these ( among the delightful asides on Snow the fairness cream , Shammi Kapoor and the Poverty Line ) is of course Nagarkar’s digression on ‘The Great Water Wars’ in the chawl- “ They should have killed for water, the men and women of the CWD chawls. People have been known to kill for less: religion; language; the flag; the colour of a person’s skin or his caste; breaking the queue at a petrol pump...”
For the rest, you follow Ravan and Eddie’s struggle for survival in the packed and proliferating world of the Bombay chawl .It’s a world where babies are space and energy consuming burdens and husbands almost vestigial. Ravan and Eddie’s families survive , like many in India due to the undefeated energies of the woman. Eddie’s father dies Pandu-like in a moment of lust. Ravan’s father Shankar bestirs himself from his bed only to bring in a mistress, leading his mother Parvatibai to obsessive temple visiting anxiety - ”The woman was a drain on the limited finances of the house…What would she do if instead of one intruder, there were two. All that hyperactivity on the bed was bound to bear fruit.” Meanwhile, Eddie’s widowed mother Violet is considering re-marriage and Eddie is tortured by grim imaginings, ”babies would start rolling in…whatever extra the new man earned would be wiped out by the new mouths that would have to be fed…So much for his mothers life becoming easier.” And so it goes on. The boys separate struggles and their growing up stories are comic, but also achingly sad. Eddie is inducted into the Hindu Mahasabha, hopelessly won over by his bribe of a Wilson pen and stories from the Mahabharata. Predictably all hell breaks loose when Violet finds out and Eddie is rushed to the Church to save his soul. Ravan, in the meantime, is in trouble with the more liberal Hindus over his earnest drive to recruit new members to the Sabha. Subject to such proxy battles, the two little boys also have to contend with life’s other tribulations – sexually predatory bully Prakash for one, besides poverty and prejudice. Yet there’s joy too – the thrill of a good story, the hit movie ‘Dil Deke Dekho’ and ‘Rock Around the Clock’, biryani in a Irani Café and kite flying on Sankranti. Nagarkar’s world maybe a poor one , but its not despairingly and hopelessly so. Wit and irony save his characters from becoming relentlessly miserable Rohington Mistry protagonists, many of whom are similarly boxed into tiny spaces, in a Bombay gone to seed.
Multilplex madness
This appeared in the Mumbai Mirror September
You don’t expect to see fluorescent yellow and pink palm trees on the industrial stretch of the Andheri Malad Link Road. But they’re there – little beacons of festivity in a road crammed with one room garages, industrial parts shops and other unaesthetic nuts and bolts of our smoothly mechanized lives.
I like the trees. They make showy promises of glitz and glamour, never mind that they’re window dressing for ‘Neelam Bar and Restaurant’ type of joints. Like their larger and more showy avatars halfway across the globe – those myriads of flashing figures that light up Las Vegas. It’s always lights and showtime in that man made fantasy fairyland though its set in the unlikeliest of spaces, surrounded by barren stretches of the Nevada desert.
And its showtime here too, off the fume filled and pot holed Andheri Malad Road. More pink palm trees, and steps up to the greatest American temple of all – the Mall Multiplex. Yes, its glittering glass and chrome – No, it doesn’t have the art deco of Metro or the history of Eros. And sue me – but I love it – the go carting on the ground floor, the book and music shop on the first floor, the Coffee Shop downstairs and the smell of Caramel pop corn in the air...
Here’s where I brought my five year old daughter Aleya to attend her first school friend’s birthday party – the class enthralled by a little orange clownfish scouring the seas in search of his father. Later, after cake and burgers in the food court on the second floor, each child trooped home with a return gift of a little gold fish in a bag full of water.
And here’s the Café Coffee Day I hung out at for almost a fortnight. Perfecting near impossible jugglery of children’s school pick ups and playtimes, in between watching Francois Ozon’s compelling drama of creativity,’ The Swimming Pool’. Or the Croatian ‘The Horseman’ where tribesman war with each other as the Ottoman Empire collapses and a Muslim Romeo falls in love with a Christian Juliet. Another day it was Walter Salles touching tale ‘Central Station’ where a lonely middle aged woman and a little boy traverse miles of Brazilian highways in a Quixotean quest. Peter’s Greenaway’s intriguingly titled ‘The Cook, The Thief, his wife and her Lover’, a viscerally revolting tableaux of gourmand excess set in a Parisian restaurant, love and rebellion in Argentina’s coal mines , Shwaas, Black Friday and Amu… All at 60 rupees a film and best of all ,no traffic traumatized long and winding roads to YB Chavan auditorium in town.
Did anybody say anything about the cultural constraints of suburbia? I’m not listening - for this is definitely home delivered heaven .
You don’t expect to see fluorescent yellow and pink palm trees on the industrial stretch of the Andheri Malad Link Road. But they’re there – little beacons of festivity in a road crammed with one room garages, industrial parts shops and other unaesthetic nuts and bolts of our smoothly mechanized lives.
I like the trees. They make showy promises of glitz and glamour, never mind that they’re window dressing for ‘Neelam Bar and Restaurant’ type of joints. Like their larger and more showy avatars halfway across the globe – those myriads of flashing figures that light up Las Vegas. It’s always lights and showtime in that man made fantasy fairyland though its set in the unlikeliest of spaces, surrounded by barren stretches of the Nevada desert.
And its showtime here too, off the fume filled and pot holed Andheri Malad Road. More pink palm trees, and steps up to the greatest American temple of all – the Mall Multiplex. Yes, its glittering glass and chrome – No, it doesn’t have the art deco of Metro or the history of Eros. And sue me – but I love it – the go carting on the ground floor, the book and music shop on the first floor, the Coffee Shop downstairs and the smell of Caramel pop corn in the air...
Here’s where I brought my five year old daughter Aleya to attend her first school friend’s birthday party – the class enthralled by a little orange clownfish scouring the seas in search of his father. Later, after cake and burgers in the food court on the second floor, each child trooped home with a return gift of a little gold fish in a bag full of water.
And here’s the Café Coffee Day I hung out at for almost a fortnight. Perfecting near impossible jugglery of children’s school pick ups and playtimes, in between watching Francois Ozon’s compelling drama of creativity,’ The Swimming Pool’. Or the Croatian ‘The Horseman’ where tribesman war with each other as the Ottoman Empire collapses and a Muslim Romeo falls in love with a Christian Juliet. Another day it was Walter Salles touching tale ‘Central Station’ where a lonely middle aged woman and a little boy traverse miles of Brazilian highways in a Quixotean quest. Peter’s Greenaway’s intriguingly titled ‘The Cook, The Thief, his wife and her Lover’, a viscerally revolting tableaux of gourmand excess set in a Parisian restaurant, love and rebellion in Argentina’s coal mines , Shwaas, Black Friday and Amu… All at 60 rupees a film and best of all ,no traffic traumatized long and winding roads to YB Chavan auditorium in town.
Did anybody say anything about the cultural constraints of suburbia? I’m not listening - for this is definitely home delivered heaven .
Book Review - The Quiet of the Birds
This review appeared in the September 4th Hindu Sunday Magazine
The Quiet of the Birds, Nisha da Cunha, Penguin, Rs.295.
SAD may have been sweet so far as Shelley's skylark goes. Unfortunately the same doesn't hold good for Nisha da Cunha's collection of sad stories. They tell of illness, abandonment, and death in little country cottages with cypress trees, on "a lonely stretch of beach and sea and a bit of lane", in the hills, and on holiday in Goa or Greece.
Relentless tragedy
Tragedy — gentle, relentless and inexorable — comes calling, in story after story. All of which sounds sweetly sorrowful but in effect tends towards dreary morbidity. The recurring deaths and desertions, sans any of the passion and high drama of classical tragedy, make this collection tediously sad.
In "Old Cypress" the middle-aged female protagonist is abandoned by her husband of many years. "Allegra" is series of letters, most written by a young, tragically paralysed and bedridden protagonist to her mama. They tell of how tragedy struck the happily pregnant Allegra as she returned from a picnic in the sunny English countryside in a motor accident where her husband was at the wheel. Later, inevitably (for the story) he abandons her.
The title story, "The Quiet of the Birds" is another tragedy — that of Safia, a motherless innocent child of the woods. A strange obsessive father brings her up. With her father's death, Safia is thrust into an everyday urban reality she is catastrophically unprepared to handle. "The Permanence of Grief' takes us to another disturbing story where a strange brother-sister duo live together, under the shadow of their beloved dead pet, a dog (somewhat mysteriously) named Judas.
And so it goes on... Most of the stories are deeply disquieting. The protagonists inhabit an uneasy twilight world of reflective loneliness, a melancholic Neverland. Sometimes they have traitor-like names like Mordred or Judas, or Mukta, but most often they are "she" or "he" or "I". Dreadful things happen to them — El in "African Bird" loses a leg, the protagonist in "Down and Out, Washing up with Gladys" witnesses a self administered abortion and Allegra is permanently paralysed. Conversations tend to be lengthy monologues, often staccato and peppered with pedantic literary allusions.
Not gripping
Still, some stories have a haunting bittersweet feel. In "Autumn on a Summer's Day", a middle-aged couple grapple with the grim reality of the wife's terminal illness. So, also "There are no Brownies in St. Anthony", an acute and upsetting story of a just bereaved middle-aged woman. "Wedding" is touching and ends hopefully, as the young mother who ran away from an oppressive marriage leaving her five little children behind, now meets her youngest son on his wedding day. One of the few other non-illness/abandonment/death stories in this collection, "Teachers Day" with its tongue-in-cheek look at the ennui of the education system could have been effective too, if it weren't so long winded.
Indeed one couldn't use "crisp" or "crackling" to describe any of the stories here. Reading these is like walking into a melancholy maze. I struggled through the stories, many of them not particularly short. Also, perhaps unfairly, I compare them to the masters. Maybe this is because of their dreamlike timeless quality — for they have none of the gripping grittiness of everyday contemporary reality, the kind you find in Jhumpa Lahiri's portrait of Mrs. Sen in The Interpreter of Maladies or Lavanya Sankaran's "Mysore Coffee" in the recently published The Red Carpet.
So I long for the energetic verve of a Saki, the narrative vigour and cultural cameos of a Maugham, the imaginative bizarreness of a Roald Dahl or the feminine insights of a Doris Lessing. All of which seem so much more comforting on a grey monsoon day with the wind storming outside and the Mumbai streets in flood.
The Quiet of the Birds, Nisha da Cunha, Penguin, Rs.295.
SAD may have been sweet so far as Shelley's skylark goes. Unfortunately the same doesn't hold good for Nisha da Cunha's collection of sad stories. They tell of illness, abandonment, and death in little country cottages with cypress trees, on "a lonely stretch of beach and sea and a bit of lane", in the hills, and on holiday in Goa or Greece.
Relentless tragedy
Tragedy — gentle, relentless and inexorable — comes calling, in story after story. All of which sounds sweetly sorrowful but in effect tends towards dreary morbidity. The recurring deaths and desertions, sans any of the passion and high drama of classical tragedy, make this collection tediously sad.
In "Old Cypress" the middle-aged female protagonist is abandoned by her husband of many years. "Allegra" is series of letters, most written by a young, tragically paralysed and bedridden protagonist to her mama. They tell of how tragedy struck the happily pregnant Allegra as she returned from a picnic in the sunny English countryside in a motor accident where her husband was at the wheel. Later, inevitably (for the story) he abandons her.
The title story, "The Quiet of the Birds" is another tragedy — that of Safia, a motherless innocent child of the woods. A strange obsessive father brings her up. With her father's death, Safia is thrust into an everyday urban reality she is catastrophically unprepared to handle. "The Permanence of Grief' takes us to another disturbing story where a strange brother-sister duo live together, under the shadow of their beloved dead pet, a dog (somewhat mysteriously) named Judas.
And so it goes on... Most of the stories are deeply disquieting. The protagonists inhabit an uneasy twilight world of reflective loneliness, a melancholic Neverland. Sometimes they have traitor-like names like Mordred or Judas, or Mukta, but most often they are "she" or "he" or "I". Dreadful things happen to them — El in "African Bird" loses a leg, the protagonist in "Down and Out, Washing up with Gladys" witnesses a self administered abortion and Allegra is permanently paralysed. Conversations tend to be lengthy monologues, often staccato and peppered with pedantic literary allusions.
Not gripping
Still, some stories have a haunting bittersweet feel. In "Autumn on a Summer's Day", a middle-aged couple grapple with the grim reality of the wife's terminal illness. So, also "There are no Brownies in St. Anthony", an acute and upsetting story of a just bereaved middle-aged woman. "Wedding" is touching and ends hopefully, as the young mother who ran away from an oppressive marriage leaving her five little children behind, now meets her youngest son on his wedding day. One of the few other non-illness/abandonment/death stories in this collection, "Teachers Day" with its tongue-in-cheek look at the ennui of the education system could have been effective too, if it weren't so long winded.
Indeed one couldn't use "crisp" or "crackling" to describe any of the stories here. Reading these is like walking into a melancholy maze. I struggled through the stories, many of them not particularly short. Also, perhaps unfairly, I compare them to the masters. Maybe this is because of their dreamlike timeless quality — for they have none of the gripping grittiness of everyday contemporary reality, the kind you find in Jhumpa Lahiri's portrait of Mrs. Sen in The Interpreter of Maladies or Lavanya Sankaran's "Mysore Coffee" in the recently published The Red Carpet.
So I long for the energetic verve of a Saki, the narrative vigour and cultural cameos of a Maugham, the imaginative bizarreness of a Roald Dahl or the feminine insights of a Doris Lessing. All of which seem so much more comforting on a grey monsoon day with the wind storming outside and the Mumbai streets in flood.
Thursday, September 01, 2005
Changing face of the Juhu Scheme
This appeared in the September 1st edition of The Mumbai Mirror
Many quiet lanes criss-cross Mumbai’s Juhu Scheme. Walking through these uneventful streets feels deliciously old–world. Traditional housing societies in shades of grey, cream and beige rise no higher than three storeys. Occasionally you encounter a bungalow nestling between two co-operative societies. Surrounded by a concealing hedge and sporting a Delhi Defence Colony aesthetic, these starry structures come with their distinctive paraphernalia of a security guard at the gate and sometimes even a trailer parked outside. ‘Bappi Lahiri ka bungalow hai’, your autowala will inform you with casual pride, or ‘Jeetendra (and now Ekta Kapoor) ka ghar hai’.
Still you don’t see many people around — a few walk casually towards a cluster of shops at the end of the block. There’s a corner provision shop with its ubiquitous complement of mops, orange plastic balls and buckets hanging at the entrance. A black and white tin board on the Sagar Milk Centre across the road advertises its lassi and it’s srikhand, and next to it is a tiny Bharat Glass outlet, with rows of red cylinder stacked up diagonally across the road.
Walking through this tiny hub takes all of a minute and you’re back to the gulmohar trees that flank the road on either side. The roads are generous, with walkable mud pavements on both sides. I recall a discussion at the Juhu Citizens Committee Meeting the previous week, at Juhu’s charming Janaki Kutir society, home to the Prithvi Theatre. “The Juhu Scheme roads belong to the residents, so the BMC doesn’t want to touch them for maintenance,” a member explains, “this is a grouse that comes up again and again.” Still, the roads provide a pleasant walk. It feels miles away from the traffic snarled, red light dotted NS Road, only a few streets away, that connects Mithibai College to the Juhu Circle.
Lots of green and shade here, and the quiet – it’s almost perfect. Yet there is rubble in Paradise – piles of sand and slag, line of select plots on almost every street, as new construction creeps in. Some buildings have been granted TDR (transfer of development rights) and steel girders and grey unfinished walls protrude from existing ill-maintained structures.
A little further, a bungalow has been razed to the ground and there’s a construction crew complete with a bright yellow earth mover and workmen who tramp their way over a truckload of grey mud and steel cables. And at the end of the street in neo-pink and silver, many storeys high stands the almost complete Divinity. Concrete ramps, stairs and car parks, with tiered rows of big bay windows. As for the quaint cottage opposite with its little railing that runs the length of the upstairs verandah, I can almost see it disappear. The price of urban heaven I suppose.
Many quiet lanes criss-cross Mumbai’s Juhu Scheme. Walking through these uneventful streets feels deliciously old–world. Traditional housing societies in shades of grey, cream and beige rise no higher than three storeys. Occasionally you encounter a bungalow nestling between two co-operative societies. Surrounded by a concealing hedge and sporting a Delhi Defence Colony aesthetic, these starry structures come with their distinctive paraphernalia of a security guard at the gate and sometimes even a trailer parked outside. ‘Bappi Lahiri ka bungalow hai’, your autowala will inform you with casual pride, or ‘Jeetendra (and now Ekta Kapoor) ka ghar hai’.
Still you don’t see many people around — a few walk casually towards a cluster of shops at the end of the block. There’s a corner provision shop with its ubiquitous complement of mops, orange plastic balls and buckets hanging at the entrance. A black and white tin board on the Sagar Milk Centre across the road advertises its lassi and it’s srikhand, and next to it is a tiny Bharat Glass outlet, with rows of red cylinder stacked up diagonally across the road.
Walking through this tiny hub takes all of a minute and you’re back to the gulmohar trees that flank the road on either side. The roads are generous, with walkable mud pavements on both sides. I recall a discussion at the Juhu Citizens Committee Meeting the previous week, at Juhu’s charming Janaki Kutir society, home to the Prithvi Theatre. “The Juhu Scheme roads belong to the residents, so the BMC doesn’t want to touch them for maintenance,” a member explains, “this is a grouse that comes up again and again.” Still, the roads provide a pleasant walk. It feels miles away from the traffic snarled, red light dotted NS Road, only a few streets away, that connects Mithibai College to the Juhu Circle.
Lots of green and shade here, and the quiet – it’s almost perfect. Yet there is rubble in Paradise – piles of sand and slag, line of select plots on almost every street, as new construction creeps in. Some buildings have been granted TDR (transfer of development rights) and steel girders and grey unfinished walls protrude from existing ill-maintained structures.
A little further, a bungalow has been razed to the ground and there’s a construction crew complete with a bright yellow earth mover and workmen who tramp their way over a truckload of grey mud and steel cables. And at the end of the street in neo-pink and silver, many storeys high stands the almost complete Divinity. Concrete ramps, stairs and car parks, with tiered rows of big bay windows. As for the quaint cottage opposite with its little railing that runs the length of the upstairs verandah, I can almost see it disappear. The price of urban heaven I suppose.
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Women's voices from Partition
An edited version of this appeared in the 14th August Times of India Book section
The particular resonance of the female voice in Partition literature comes, perhaps, from the vulnerability of women as victims.
Subject to the most terrible abuse and alienation, at both private and political levels, these women find their voices in the fiction and commentaries of those times. Ayesha in the film ‘Khamosh Pani’ whose father orders her to jump into the well rather than risk dishonor, Lajwanti in Bedi’s eponymous story whose husband would not touch her after her abduction, are tragic archetypes that recur in Partition literature, and most powerfully in the following books.
The Ice Candy Man by Bapsi Sidhwa (1983)
Set in 1940’s Lahore, this classic Partition story employs an unusual narrative device. Told from the perspective of eight year old polio stricken Lenny, it portrays poignantly the insecurities, shifting allegiances and, betrayals of those tumultuous times. Petrol cans hidden in the back of the family car, great fires that can be seen from the family roof tops, the troubled house next door, where ‘fallen’ women cry and wail all night are some of the searing images in this book that echo and illustrate history the way no text book could. We are introduced to an unforgettable cast of characters, the ice candy man, the Masseur and of course Lenny’s beloved ayah. Ayah, who is betrayed to a mob gone mad, a mob made of men who were her friends and even suitors. And when Lenny eventually finds her again she is an empty shell of her former cheerful nineteen year old self.”I don’t want her to think she’s bad because she’s been kidnapped”, says Lenny, in stark contrast to the attitudes such abused women were subjected to, attitudes reflected in films like ‘Pinjar’ or in Bedi’s moving short story ‘Lajwanti’ . The Ice Candy Man (later editions renamed ‘Cracking India’) has also been made into a feature film, ‘Earth’ by Deepa Mehta.
‘My Temples too’ (Urdu 1948, trans. Eng. 2004) and ‘River of Fire’ (Urdu 1959 trans Eng.1998) by Qurratulain Hyder
Hyder belongs to a Lucknowi zamindari family and her novels mourn the loss of that golden world. In ‘My Temples too’ the young idealistic Rakshanda Begum , editor of the progressive Muslim magazine New Era and her friends are thrust from their hallowed Nehru’s autobiography and Confucius quoting world to a barbaric one. ‘Everybody seemed to have changed , or so it appeared to Rakshanda who noticed a group of Muslims on a wayside platform looking strangely scared .There they are, she thought bitterly, strangers in their own country.’
Hyder’s magnificent magnum opus ‘River of Fire’ looks at 2500 years of Indian history, coalescing and interweaving only to sunder irrevocably in the terrible tragedy of Partition.
‘Sunlight on a Broken Column’ by Attia Hossain (1961)
Largely autobiographical, this critically acclaimed book tells the story of Laila, who is the orphaned daughter of a distinguished Muslim family, and is, set in Oudh and Lucknow. Laila’s coming of age, her choices and fight for independence, are juxtaposed with the political upheavals of the time and their implications for her larger family.
‘What the Body Remembers’ by Shauna Singh Baldwin (1999)
This best seller tells the story of Sardarji, an engineer in the British government and his two wives, haughty barren Satya and young beautiful Roop. The saga of the woman’s lives is set against the back drop of the history of the day, culminating in the horror of their nightmarish journeys across borders. The description of these two journeys, Sardarji’s by train and Roop on the Grand Trunk Road emerges the most powerfully unforgettable section of the book
The Other Side of Silence, Voices from the Partition of India by Urvashi Butalia (1998)
A seminal collection that employs a mix of interviews, reminisces and personal recollections, diaries and autobiographies to look at the effects of violence on women including rape, kidnapping and then after that often the trauma of return. Original and analytical, though it does tend towards the abstrusely academic turn of phrase.
‘No Woman’s Land’ Ed. By Ritu Menon (2004)
Activist and Women’s Publisher Ritu Menon puts together a section of essays and stories by women from different countries. Some like Ismat Chugtai’s reflections on Partition literature are fascinating, so also Sara Suleri on ‘Papa and Pakistan’. Others catalogue personal stories of tragic deaths and displacement and memories of violence and abandonment. Some like Shehla Shibli speak more hopefully of life in ‘Either, Neither, or Both
The particular resonance of the female voice in Partition literature comes, perhaps, from the vulnerability of women as victims.
Subject to the most terrible abuse and alienation, at both private and political levels, these women find their voices in the fiction and commentaries of those times. Ayesha in the film ‘Khamosh Pani’ whose father orders her to jump into the well rather than risk dishonor, Lajwanti in Bedi’s eponymous story whose husband would not touch her after her abduction, are tragic archetypes that recur in Partition literature, and most powerfully in the following books.
The Ice Candy Man by Bapsi Sidhwa (1983)
Set in 1940’s Lahore, this classic Partition story employs an unusual narrative device. Told from the perspective of eight year old polio stricken Lenny, it portrays poignantly the insecurities, shifting allegiances and, betrayals of those tumultuous times. Petrol cans hidden in the back of the family car, great fires that can be seen from the family roof tops, the troubled house next door, where ‘fallen’ women cry and wail all night are some of the searing images in this book that echo and illustrate history the way no text book could. We are introduced to an unforgettable cast of characters, the ice candy man, the Masseur and of course Lenny’s beloved ayah. Ayah, who is betrayed to a mob gone mad, a mob made of men who were her friends and even suitors. And when Lenny eventually finds her again she is an empty shell of her former cheerful nineteen year old self.”I don’t want her to think she’s bad because she’s been kidnapped”, says Lenny, in stark contrast to the attitudes such abused women were subjected to, attitudes reflected in films like ‘Pinjar’ or in Bedi’s moving short story ‘Lajwanti’ . The Ice Candy Man (later editions renamed ‘Cracking India’) has also been made into a feature film, ‘Earth’ by Deepa Mehta.
‘My Temples too’ (Urdu 1948, trans. Eng. 2004) and ‘River of Fire’ (Urdu 1959 trans Eng.1998) by Qurratulain Hyder
Hyder belongs to a Lucknowi zamindari family and her novels mourn the loss of that golden world. In ‘My Temples too’ the young idealistic Rakshanda Begum , editor of the progressive Muslim magazine New Era and her friends are thrust from their hallowed Nehru’s autobiography and Confucius quoting world to a barbaric one. ‘Everybody seemed to have changed , or so it appeared to Rakshanda who noticed a group of Muslims on a wayside platform looking strangely scared .There they are, she thought bitterly, strangers in their own country.’
Hyder’s magnificent magnum opus ‘River of Fire’ looks at 2500 years of Indian history, coalescing and interweaving only to sunder irrevocably in the terrible tragedy of Partition.
‘Sunlight on a Broken Column’ by Attia Hossain (1961)
Largely autobiographical, this critically acclaimed book tells the story of Laila, who is the orphaned daughter of a distinguished Muslim family, and is, set in Oudh and Lucknow. Laila’s coming of age, her choices and fight for independence, are juxtaposed with the political upheavals of the time and their implications for her larger family.
‘What the Body Remembers’ by Shauna Singh Baldwin (1999)
This best seller tells the story of Sardarji, an engineer in the British government and his two wives, haughty barren Satya and young beautiful Roop. The saga of the woman’s lives is set against the back drop of the history of the day, culminating in the horror of their nightmarish journeys across borders. The description of these two journeys, Sardarji’s by train and Roop on the Grand Trunk Road emerges the most powerfully unforgettable section of the book
The Other Side of Silence, Voices from the Partition of India by Urvashi Butalia (1998)
A seminal collection that employs a mix of interviews, reminisces and personal recollections, diaries and autobiographies to look at the effects of violence on women including rape, kidnapping and then after that often the trauma of return. Original and analytical, though it does tend towards the abstrusely academic turn of phrase.
‘No Woman’s Land’ Ed. By Ritu Menon (2004)
Activist and Women’s Publisher Ritu Menon puts together a section of essays and stories by women from different countries. Some like Ismat Chugtai’s reflections on Partition literature are fascinating, so also Sara Suleri on ‘Papa and Pakistan’. Others catalogue personal stories of tragic deaths and displacement and memories of violence and abandonment. Some like Shehla Shibli speak more hopefully of life in ‘Either, Neither, or Both
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Plastics on Juhu Beach
This appeared in the August 11th edition of the Mumbai Mirror
Tere mere beach mein...
Walking down the narrow lane that leads to Juhu beach on a Sunday evening, is a strangely different experience now. There is no holiday crowd in noisy conversation and I miss the medley of shrill voices, motorbikes and the jingle-jangle of women’s anklets. Instead, the road is a deserted stretch, pitted and puddled. There’s a fierce wind though, chilly and uncontrolled.
At the beach the familiar set of hawkers with their red and white plastic chairs laid out in neat lines, is missing. There is no bhelpuri wallah in sight and even the ubiquitous nariyal pani guy isn’t in attendance. A woman at the lone corn on cob stall calls out to me hopefully. A selection of roasted cobs sit on red hot charcoal but there are no takers. I search my pockets for some change – “I have only four rupees,” I tell one of them. “No matter,” the woman says, “Take one.”
There are piles of broken branches and sticks washed up all around the beach-front. There are bits of wood and even a wrought iron gate lying forlorn. And everywhere the deadly rubble of the urban metropolis – the virulently non-living, non-breathing and non-decomposing plastic bag.
I am reminded of my parents visiting from Delhi last month. Of promising them a beautifully breezy beach walk just down the road, only to turn onto a sea-front littered with miles and miles of muddy plastic bags. “You throw all this rubbish into your streets and nullahs all year long, and then the rains send it all into the sea. Now look, the sea is throwing it all back at you,” my father observes disapprovingly, unaccustomed as he is even to the sight of an open dustbin in South Delhi’s leafy tree-lined neighbourhoods.
I try and ignore the plastic, focusing instead on the slate grey Arabian Sea. There is a swell I haven’t seen before, and the waves come in hard and fast and foam flecked. Further away the sky is laden, heavy with the threat of even more storm clouds. I walk away from the fishing village by the sea, along a polythene plastered promenade. Grey windswept apartment buildings alternate with the glass and stone facades of the hotels that line this much vaunted sea-front.
Sun ‘n’ Sand with a large blue polythene (oops, not again) cover for its poolside, Holiday Inn with its lamp-lit glass frontage and further down, a darkened almost abandoned Tulip Star previously known as Centaur in better days. Now sale scams and scandals have all but shut it down. Still further is the beige stone and halogen lighted JW Marriot. Near Juhu Chowpatty and there are a few stalls open-steaming hot sugary chai, nariyal pani and unexpectedly a kulfi and falooda seller appears as if from nowhere. There are few people though, some strangers and some resident regulars. Lots more plastic bags and a narrow stretch of land the tide is already trying to claim.
Tere mere beach mein...
Walking down the narrow lane that leads to Juhu beach on a Sunday evening, is a strangely different experience now. There is no holiday crowd in noisy conversation and I miss the medley of shrill voices, motorbikes and the jingle-jangle of women’s anklets. Instead, the road is a deserted stretch, pitted and puddled. There’s a fierce wind though, chilly and uncontrolled.
At the beach the familiar set of hawkers with their red and white plastic chairs laid out in neat lines, is missing. There is no bhelpuri wallah in sight and even the ubiquitous nariyal pani guy isn’t in attendance. A woman at the lone corn on cob stall calls out to me hopefully. A selection of roasted cobs sit on red hot charcoal but there are no takers. I search my pockets for some change – “I have only four rupees,” I tell one of them. “No matter,” the woman says, “Take one.”
There are piles of broken branches and sticks washed up all around the beach-front. There are bits of wood and even a wrought iron gate lying forlorn. And everywhere the deadly rubble of the urban metropolis – the virulently non-living, non-breathing and non-decomposing plastic bag.
I am reminded of my parents visiting from Delhi last month. Of promising them a beautifully breezy beach walk just down the road, only to turn onto a sea-front littered with miles and miles of muddy plastic bags. “You throw all this rubbish into your streets and nullahs all year long, and then the rains send it all into the sea. Now look, the sea is throwing it all back at you,” my father observes disapprovingly, unaccustomed as he is even to the sight of an open dustbin in South Delhi’s leafy tree-lined neighbourhoods.
I try and ignore the plastic, focusing instead on the slate grey Arabian Sea. There is a swell I haven’t seen before, and the waves come in hard and fast and foam flecked. Further away the sky is laden, heavy with the threat of even more storm clouds. I walk away from the fishing village by the sea, along a polythene plastered promenade. Grey windswept apartment buildings alternate with the glass and stone facades of the hotels that line this much vaunted sea-front.
Sun ‘n’ Sand with a large blue polythene (oops, not again) cover for its poolside, Holiday Inn with its lamp-lit glass frontage and further down, a darkened almost abandoned Tulip Star previously known as Centaur in better days. Now sale scams and scandals have all but shut it down. Still further is the beige stone and halogen lighted JW Marriot. Near Juhu Chowpatty and there are a few stalls open-steaming hot sugary chai, nariyal pani and unexpectedly a kulfi and falooda seller appears as if from nowhere. There are few people though, some strangers and some resident regulars. Lots more plastic bags and a narrow stretch of land the tide is already trying to claim.
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Gregory David Roberts
This appeared in the Hindu Literary Review dated August 7,2005
The bad boy of fiction
SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY
Because his life has been so notorious, it can overshadow his work, says Australian novelist Gregory David Roberts.
GREGORY DAVID ROBERTS (GDR), the latest bad boy of fiction, is in Mumbai working on a sequel to Shantaram, his best-selling novel of his own story as a runaway Australian convict on the mean streets of the Mumbai metropolis.
I meet him at Leopold's Bar and Restaurant, overlooking Colaba's colourfully chaotic Causeway. Humming with the buzz of many accented conversations in foreign tongues, Leopold's is, in many ways, a centre for the story. It was here, seated on cedar chairs that surround a profusion of glass-topped tables in "Leopold's little world of light, colour and richly panelled wood" (Shantaram), that everything began. Here's where the author — escaped convict, one-time junkie and gun-runner — began his career of crime in Mumbai, a life that was the inspiration for his stunningly compelling novel of crime and punishment, and of love and friendship.
Obvious question
So how much of the book is really true, I ask him, having spent the better part of the last few days mesmerised by the dramatic details of the author-narrator's life in the Cuffe Parade slums, battling fire and flood and municipal demolition, of drugs and dope and petty crime and of squalor and torture in the Colaba police pick up. Shantaram maybe a potent mixture of fact and fiction, but GDR is not enthused by this oft-repeated question. "Nine out of 10 people ask me this question," he complains. "Because my life has been so notorious and so bad, it can overshadow my work." The book itself, all 900-plus pages of it, makes for racy reading, as the author-narrator makes his living black-marketing and money-laundering on the streets of Colaba, then moves into the Cuffe Parade slum and establishes a clinic there, only to be imprisoned in the Arthur Road Jail, emerging again to more crime and then eventually gun-running in Afghanistan. Is the horrific jail section true, I ask him, did the "aeroplane" style beating really happen? "Everything I wrote about the jail is true; it was in fact much, much worse." And the Colaba police pick up? "That part too, is true", he says. "I met some of the same cops now — they are all good decent men, trying to do their job and they have a hard life and they are incredibly brave. Give a policeman in Australia or New York a piece of bamboo, and ask them to maintain order on their beat, they'd never do it."
The conversation veers from law and order to literature and GDR is equally enthusiastic. He talks about the structure of the novel, any novel, and then that of Shantaram. It is, he points out, extraordinarily complex. Shantaram echoes the central theme of the 21st Century — that of exile, and of mass migration, especially to the cities. Mumbai, as an island city, is a symbol of that exile, and the leitmotif that recurs in images throughout. He explains and illustrates literary parallels that inform the plot and the characters, parallels that may emerge only on a detailed or a repeat reading. GDR's literary influences have been the classical writers, Herman Melville, Lawrence Durrell, Flaubert, Dante and Shakespeare and he illustrates how some of these classics reverberate in Shantaram. His is a novel that is in the tradition of Cervantes' Don Quixote la Mancha and also of Dante's Inferno, in its themes of exile and descent into hell (read prison and a life of drugs and crime), and his little guide Prabhakar is akin to Virgil as a guide to Dante's hero and Sancho Panza to Don Quixote. Besides this, he discusses other, not-so-immediately apparent complexities of the novel's structure — the symbols and the self-referencing, and the "house of mirrors", as it were, with every character and event having a mirrored version occurring somewhere else in the book.
So what now? The screenplay for the film version where Johnny Depp plays "Shantaram" is complete. GDR divides his time between the sequel to Shantaram (of which he gives a gloriously alive preview of accents and action; he's as theatrical as he is literary!), his mobile clinic project and joint endeavours with artists — there's a collection in New York inspired by Mumbai and soon there will be a book of photographs on the island city. Coffee at Leopold's is over and the all-black-clad and booted, neatly pony-tailed, six foot-plus GDR, with associate Ader, is off on his bike to the Crossword bookstore to lend support to theatre personality Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal's reading at another book launch.
The bad boy of fiction
SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY
Because his life has been so notorious, it can overshadow his work, says Australian novelist Gregory David Roberts.
GREGORY DAVID ROBERTS (GDR), the latest bad boy of fiction, is in Mumbai working on a sequel to Shantaram, his best-selling novel of his own story as a runaway Australian convict on the mean streets of the Mumbai metropolis.
I meet him at Leopold's Bar and Restaurant, overlooking Colaba's colourfully chaotic Causeway. Humming with the buzz of many accented conversations in foreign tongues, Leopold's is, in many ways, a centre for the story. It was here, seated on cedar chairs that surround a profusion of glass-topped tables in "Leopold's little world of light, colour and richly panelled wood" (Shantaram), that everything began. Here's where the author — escaped convict, one-time junkie and gun-runner — began his career of crime in Mumbai, a life that was the inspiration for his stunningly compelling novel of crime and punishment, and of love and friendship.
Obvious question
So how much of the book is really true, I ask him, having spent the better part of the last few days mesmerised by the dramatic details of the author-narrator's life in the Cuffe Parade slums, battling fire and flood and municipal demolition, of drugs and dope and petty crime and of squalor and torture in the Colaba police pick up. Shantaram maybe a potent mixture of fact and fiction, but GDR is not enthused by this oft-repeated question. "Nine out of 10 people ask me this question," he complains. "Because my life has been so notorious and so bad, it can overshadow my work." The book itself, all 900-plus pages of it, makes for racy reading, as the author-narrator makes his living black-marketing and money-laundering on the streets of Colaba, then moves into the Cuffe Parade slum and establishes a clinic there, only to be imprisoned in the Arthur Road Jail, emerging again to more crime and then eventually gun-running in Afghanistan. Is the horrific jail section true, I ask him, did the "aeroplane" style beating really happen? "Everything I wrote about the jail is true; it was in fact much, much worse." And the Colaba police pick up? "That part too, is true", he says. "I met some of the same cops now — they are all good decent men, trying to do their job and they have a hard life and they are incredibly brave. Give a policeman in Australia or New York a piece of bamboo, and ask them to maintain order on their beat, they'd never do it."
The conversation veers from law and order to literature and GDR is equally enthusiastic. He talks about the structure of the novel, any novel, and then that of Shantaram. It is, he points out, extraordinarily complex. Shantaram echoes the central theme of the 21st Century — that of exile, and of mass migration, especially to the cities. Mumbai, as an island city, is a symbol of that exile, and the leitmotif that recurs in images throughout. He explains and illustrates literary parallels that inform the plot and the characters, parallels that may emerge only on a detailed or a repeat reading. GDR's literary influences have been the classical writers, Herman Melville, Lawrence Durrell, Flaubert, Dante and Shakespeare and he illustrates how some of these classics reverberate in Shantaram. His is a novel that is in the tradition of Cervantes' Don Quixote la Mancha and also of Dante's Inferno, in its themes of exile and descent into hell (read prison and a life of drugs and crime), and his little guide Prabhakar is akin to Virgil as a guide to Dante's hero and Sancho Panza to Don Quixote. Besides this, he discusses other, not-so-immediately apparent complexities of the novel's structure — the symbols and the self-referencing, and the "house of mirrors", as it were, with every character and event having a mirrored version occurring somewhere else in the book.
So what now? The screenplay for the film version where Johnny Depp plays "Shantaram" is complete. GDR divides his time between the sequel to Shantaram (of which he gives a gloriously alive preview of accents and action; he's as theatrical as he is literary!), his mobile clinic project and joint endeavours with artists — there's a collection in New York inspired by Mumbai and soon there will be a book of photographs on the island city. Coffee at Leopold's is over and the all-black-clad and booted, neatly pony-tailed, six foot-plus GDR, with associate Ader, is off on his bike to the Crossword bookstore to lend support to theatre personality Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal's reading at another book launch.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Why are immigrant stories so powerful ?
This appeared in The Hindu's Literary Review May 2004
Between memory and desire
Immigrant literature may seem to occupy a curious midway world, weaving a tapestry that is at once familiar and far away. Yet, it is a validation of the American way of life, with assimilation being seen as coming of age, says SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY.
WHAT is it that makes the immigrant experience such fertile literary ground? Popular and prize-winning, these angst-ridden accounts of the aspiring outsider seem to sweep the bestseller stakes. Whether it's Irish immigrant author Frank McCourt in Tis or British born Bangladeshi , Monica Ali's Brick Lane, the stories weave a tapestry that's both familiar and faraway .
For, the immigrant is in a unique position to tell a tale. Like every great epic, from The Odyssey to The Ramayana, his story is also that of a traveller. The immigrant journeys to the promised land and battles adversity, both mental and material. Jasmine in Bharati Mukerjee's Jasmine, for instance, begins her journey travelling through the underbelly of the immigrant trade route on forged papers, through the tiered bunks on the trawlers out of Europe, and ends up making good as a respected "caregiver" as opposed to the more servile Indian version of the "ayah" and then a wife . She moves from Jyoti to Jasmine and eventually to Jane Ripplemeyer, shedding personas like so many skins, eventually metamorphosing into a creature ready to fight fate and "reposition the stars".
Eighteen-year-old Nazneen, in Monica Ali's Brick Lane may have a smooth maiden flight to London, but she is to be married to a man she has never met, pot-bellied, stomach-stroking Chanu, and this is a battle for her nonetheless. Cloistered in her cluttered Brick Lane apartment, Nazneen struggles to find meaning in her day-to-day existence, gradually coming of age by attending activist meetings and eventually achieving economic independence and identity. Gogol in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake is born at Saint Auburn Hospital, overlooking Boston's Charles River and the Memorial Drive, but he must nevertheless struggle all through school and even later for a sense of self. He is not born Indian, definitely not yet American. Appropriately and wholly unintentionally, he is somehow given a name that is neither Indian nor American, taken from the surname of his father's favourite Russian author.
The immigrant, like the Greek hero, also takes on the force of Fate itself whether it's the Chinese mothers in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club or Nazneen in Brick Lane. The primeval power of Destiny and men and women's struggles despite it, has always been the stuff of compelling story-telling and these stories are no exception. Fate appears as a leitmotif in Brick Lane where Nazneen's is born stillborn and left to her fate but still survives, this being a precursor to the many events in her life. The opening pages of Jasmine, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, introduce an astrologer cupping his ears ("his satellite dish to the stars") and foretelling Jasmine's widowhood and exile. Such stories, then, deal with the self and spirit yet viewed through the safety of the prosperous western prism. This is also what perhaps gives these books their "feel good" factor and makes them prime contenders for Western awards — for all the trouble these immigrants endure, their dauntless participation in the Great American Dream is what ultimately "liberates" them. The figure of the immigrant is romanticised as a spiritual vagabond and his or his progeny's ultimate assimilation seen as "coming of age".
Besides, the many exotic trapping of these stories, sketched on a canvas that stretches backwards in time and space, give these the universal appeal of the traveller's tale. Spice-filled kitchens compete with arranged marriages and vermillion filled partings, all adding up to create an atmosphere of these foreigners and their quaint colourful little ways. Third world cultures are painted as better somehow, more spiritual, earthy and even sensual but in nice non-threatening ways as in Irish or Asian lamb stew or wrapped up neatly in fortune-cookie wisdom. There's a multicultural richness in these accounts, in their creation of an exotic backdrop, the literary equivalent of "Casablanca" or Arabia of "Lawrence of Arabia". The description of food, clothes and festivals is in a language that flows and enfolds, appealing in a quirky crossover way — Mrs. Sen's kitchen knife in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, for instance, is described vividly as a "blade that curved like the prow of a Viking ship, sailing to battle in distant seas". Yet for all the exoticism and nostalgia, the "home" left behind is undoubtedly not the place to be. Chanu in Brick Lane is muddled and misguided in his quixotic intent to return — the Bangladeshi village may be sylvan in retrospect, but Nazneen's sister Hasina's letters paint a dismal picture of the sordid life a woman might have to lead if trapped there. Gogol and Sonia in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake dread their holidays to Kolkata, the crowds and the discomfort, and rejoice in their return, "once again free to quarrel. To sleep for as long as they like". Immigrants like Hanif Kureishi's Karim in Buddha of Suburbia or Frank McCourt in Tis bring with them a whole new perspective on the structure of society, this brilliance of perception probably being possible only by virtue of their exclusion. Ultimately and importantly however, there is a complete validation of the Promised Land. Frank McCourt cribs and carps about the aloof unemotional American approach to life where taking in a meringue to a movie is construed as a huge breach of conduct, yet he can think of nothing worse than those poor souls who reached Ellis Island, who were turned back.
Set firmly in the context of a validation of the present way of life, an immigrant's story is thus powerful both in terms of story and setting, as well as politically correct. Asian historical memoirs from Wild Swans to Daughters of Arabia are stories of oppression and unhappiness, now safely told from the haven of the New World. Novels like The Joy Luck Club and Brick Lane reiterate this. They also deal with complex and very universal issues of enquiry into identity and being, striving to make sense of life mysteries — who am I, what is my name and where is home? It's a potent combination of the particular with the profound and in a world where boundaries simultaneously blur and yet don't go away; this is a story for us all.
Between memory and desire
Immigrant literature may seem to occupy a curious midway world, weaving a tapestry that is at once familiar and far away. Yet, it is a validation of the American way of life, with assimilation being seen as coming of age, says SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY.
WHAT is it that makes the immigrant experience such fertile literary ground? Popular and prize-winning, these angst-ridden accounts of the aspiring outsider seem to sweep the bestseller stakes. Whether it's Irish immigrant author Frank McCourt in Tis or British born Bangladeshi , Monica Ali's Brick Lane, the stories weave a tapestry that's both familiar and faraway .
For, the immigrant is in a unique position to tell a tale. Like every great epic, from The Odyssey to The Ramayana, his story is also that of a traveller. The immigrant journeys to the promised land and battles adversity, both mental and material. Jasmine in Bharati Mukerjee's Jasmine, for instance, begins her journey travelling through the underbelly of the immigrant trade route on forged papers, through the tiered bunks on the trawlers out of Europe, and ends up making good as a respected "caregiver" as opposed to the more servile Indian version of the "ayah" and then a wife . She moves from Jyoti to Jasmine and eventually to Jane Ripplemeyer, shedding personas like so many skins, eventually metamorphosing into a creature ready to fight fate and "reposition the stars".
Eighteen-year-old Nazneen, in Monica Ali's Brick Lane may have a smooth maiden flight to London, but she is to be married to a man she has never met, pot-bellied, stomach-stroking Chanu, and this is a battle for her nonetheless. Cloistered in her cluttered Brick Lane apartment, Nazneen struggles to find meaning in her day-to-day existence, gradually coming of age by attending activist meetings and eventually achieving economic independence and identity. Gogol in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake is born at Saint Auburn Hospital, overlooking Boston's Charles River and the Memorial Drive, but he must nevertheless struggle all through school and even later for a sense of self. He is not born Indian, definitely not yet American. Appropriately and wholly unintentionally, he is somehow given a name that is neither Indian nor American, taken from the surname of his father's favourite Russian author.
The immigrant, like the Greek hero, also takes on the force of Fate itself whether it's the Chinese mothers in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club or Nazneen in Brick Lane. The primeval power of Destiny and men and women's struggles despite it, has always been the stuff of compelling story-telling and these stories are no exception. Fate appears as a leitmotif in Brick Lane where Nazneen's is born stillborn and left to her fate but still survives, this being a precursor to the many events in her life. The opening pages of Jasmine, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, introduce an astrologer cupping his ears ("his satellite dish to the stars") and foretelling Jasmine's widowhood and exile. Such stories, then, deal with the self and spirit yet viewed through the safety of the prosperous western prism. This is also what perhaps gives these books their "feel good" factor and makes them prime contenders for Western awards — for all the trouble these immigrants endure, their dauntless participation in the Great American Dream is what ultimately "liberates" them. The figure of the immigrant is romanticised as a spiritual vagabond and his or his progeny's ultimate assimilation seen as "coming of age".
Besides, the many exotic trapping of these stories, sketched on a canvas that stretches backwards in time and space, give these the universal appeal of the traveller's tale. Spice-filled kitchens compete with arranged marriages and vermillion filled partings, all adding up to create an atmosphere of these foreigners and their quaint colourful little ways. Third world cultures are painted as better somehow, more spiritual, earthy and even sensual but in nice non-threatening ways as in Irish or Asian lamb stew or wrapped up neatly in fortune-cookie wisdom. There's a multicultural richness in these accounts, in their creation of an exotic backdrop, the literary equivalent of "Casablanca" or Arabia of "Lawrence of Arabia". The description of food, clothes and festivals is in a language that flows and enfolds, appealing in a quirky crossover way — Mrs. Sen's kitchen knife in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, for instance, is described vividly as a "blade that curved like the prow of a Viking ship, sailing to battle in distant seas". Yet for all the exoticism and nostalgia, the "home" left behind is undoubtedly not the place to be. Chanu in Brick Lane is muddled and misguided in his quixotic intent to return — the Bangladeshi village may be sylvan in retrospect, but Nazneen's sister Hasina's letters paint a dismal picture of the sordid life a woman might have to lead if trapped there. Gogol and Sonia in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake dread their holidays to Kolkata, the crowds and the discomfort, and rejoice in their return, "once again free to quarrel. To sleep for as long as they like". Immigrants like Hanif Kureishi's Karim in Buddha of Suburbia or Frank McCourt in Tis bring with them a whole new perspective on the structure of society, this brilliance of perception probably being possible only by virtue of their exclusion. Ultimately and importantly however, there is a complete validation of the Promised Land. Frank McCourt cribs and carps about the aloof unemotional American approach to life where taking in a meringue to a movie is construed as a huge breach of conduct, yet he can think of nothing worse than those poor souls who reached Ellis Island, who were turned back.
Set firmly in the context of a validation of the present way of life, an immigrant's story is thus powerful both in terms of story and setting, as well as politically correct. Asian historical memoirs from Wild Swans to Daughters of Arabia are stories of oppression and unhappiness, now safely told from the haven of the New World. Novels like The Joy Luck Club and Brick Lane reiterate this. They also deal with complex and very universal issues of enquiry into identity and being, striving to make sense of life mysteries — who am I, what is my name and where is home? It's a potent combination of the particular with the profound and in a world where boundaries simultaneously blur and yet don't go away; this is a story for us all.
Saturday, July 02, 2005
Book Review Tokyo Cancelled
This appeared in the Feb 20th edition of The Deccan Herald
Thirteen passengers stranded overnight in a strange airport tell each other stories all night in Rana Dasgupta’s debut novel. The darkened airport lounge (“like the back corridor between 2 worlds ..where people only alighted when something was seriously wrong with the eschatological machinery”) works effectively as an eerie setting for the strange and magical tales exchanged between these displaced individuals.
The stories themselves are striking - not only for their page turning ‘what comes next’ quality, but also for the richness of their resonances. Dasgupta draws inspiration from a timeless fairy tale genre, simultaneously subverting it, by situating each story geographically and temporally in a magical and yet tangibly disquieting reality. This could be our world, as on the streets of Paris and London, Delhi, Istanbul and Buenos Aires, poverty and the plague coexist with industry and money.
And yet it is a fantastic fairy tale world peopled by kings and princes as well as tailors, sailors and magic map readers, a rich Indian industrialist who makes a Faustian bargain with a cloning scientist and an Argentinean video store owner who turns recycler of garbage - or is he all along really the dictator?
The many tragic twists and turns in these modern day fairy tales make for racy reading and also for much provocative questioning - events are arguably driven not so much by destiny as by greed and power, and the magic that could so easily have been technology gone all awry. All this in events and symbols that could only belong to today.
So the Cinderella like figure in the fifth story is really actress Isabella Rossini’s illegitimate daughter and her Prince Charming none other than Robert de Niro’s illegitimate taxi driver son Pavel. Tellingly the transforming magic potion is no simple ‘Alice in Wonderland’s’ ‘Eat Me’. Instead in a world straddled with big brands, it is very appropriately, an Oreo cookie. This cookie when crumbled doesn’t make Isabella a predictable princess; instead it transforms her into a glass and concrete swanky super store on Madison Avenue.
Another story follows the fortunes of Riad, a modern day mariner, who like his ancient ancestor is also marooned at sea - and this time it’s not wind that’s the villain but matters of custom and immigration.
An albatross emerges from his throat flying to Istanbul, to his Bangladeshi sweetheart who organises a rescue mission.
Structurally the stories are somewhat thinly threaded to each other and even less so to the travelers who tell them. Unlike Chaucer’s pilgrims who are described in great detail, these commuters remain largely undefined except in indistinct glimpses like ‘a large middle aged man with remarkable crevasses across his face (the plague survivor?), ‘the Japanese man’ (the doll fetishist?) or ‘the backpacker girl’.
Yet their stories seem to come from the same world - a curiously dialectic space driven as much by possibility as by privation, its motivations sometimes magical and other times merely mercenary.
In fashioning this and in creating its protagonists, modern day versions of age old archetypes, Dasgupta gives us a powerful vision of both - the cloned rich industrialist’s daughter Sapna as modern Rapunzel, rich inventor and map reader Klaus as Blue beard, Riad as Sindbad, Katya as Karna and Isabella as Cinderella are strangely memorable, and the multiple resonances of their stories make them curiously haunting
Thirteen passengers stranded overnight in a strange airport tell each other stories all night in Rana Dasgupta’s debut novel. The darkened airport lounge (“like the back corridor between 2 worlds ..where people only alighted when something was seriously wrong with the eschatological machinery”) works effectively as an eerie setting for the strange and magical tales exchanged between these displaced individuals.
The stories themselves are striking - not only for their page turning ‘what comes next’ quality, but also for the richness of their resonances. Dasgupta draws inspiration from a timeless fairy tale genre, simultaneously subverting it, by situating each story geographically and temporally in a magical and yet tangibly disquieting reality. This could be our world, as on the streets of Paris and London, Delhi, Istanbul and Buenos Aires, poverty and the plague coexist with industry and money.
And yet it is a fantastic fairy tale world peopled by kings and princes as well as tailors, sailors and magic map readers, a rich Indian industrialist who makes a Faustian bargain with a cloning scientist and an Argentinean video store owner who turns recycler of garbage - or is he all along really the dictator?
The many tragic twists and turns in these modern day fairy tales make for racy reading and also for much provocative questioning - events are arguably driven not so much by destiny as by greed and power, and the magic that could so easily have been technology gone all awry. All this in events and symbols that could only belong to today.
So the Cinderella like figure in the fifth story is really actress Isabella Rossini’s illegitimate daughter and her Prince Charming none other than Robert de Niro’s illegitimate taxi driver son Pavel. Tellingly the transforming magic potion is no simple ‘Alice in Wonderland’s’ ‘Eat Me’. Instead in a world straddled with big brands, it is very appropriately, an Oreo cookie. This cookie when crumbled doesn’t make Isabella a predictable princess; instead it transforms her into a glass and concrete swanky super store on Madison Avenue.
Another story follows the fortunes of Riad, a modern day mariner, who like his ancient ancestor is also marooned at sea - and this time it’s not wind that’s the villain but matters of custom and immigration.
An albatross emerges from his throat flying to Istanbul, to his Bangladeshi sweetheart who organises a rescue mission.
Structurally the stories are somewhat thinly threaded to each other and even less so to the travelers who tell them. Unlike Chaucer’s pilgrims who are described in great detail, these commuters remain largely undefined except in indistinct glimpses like ‘a large middle aged man with remarkable crevasses across his face (the plague survivor?), ‘the Japanese man’ (the doll fetishist?) or ‘the backpacker girl’.
Yet their stories seem to come from the same world - a curiously dialectic space driven as much by possibility as by privation, its motivations sometimes magical and other times merely mercenary.
In fashioning this and in creating its protagonists, modern day versions of age old archetypes, Dasgupta gives us a powerful vision of both - the cloned rich industrialist’s daughter Sapna as modern Rapunzel, rich inventor and map reader Klaus as Blue beard, Riad as Sindbad, Katya as Karna and Isabella as Cinderella are strangely memorable, and the multiple resonances of their stories make them curiously haunting
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Book Review - Sangati
This review appeared in the India Today
There is perhaps no perspective more powerful than that of the outsider and Tamil Dalit Christian writer Bama’s ‘Sangati’ testifies to this. If Art has hitherto reflected ‘high life’ rather than life, such ‘outcaste’ stories, literary cousins to the historical subaltern study can be extraordinarily powerful and provocative. They reveal a consciousness long suppressed, that is increasingly finding expression in a trenchant idiom that eschews traditional literary aesthetic. Dalit writers like Bama and Sharankumar Limbale (‘The Outcaste’translated from Marathi), and Lakshman Gaekwad (‘The Branded’) works’ are, in the remorseless violence of their stories as well as the anguished emotion of their narrative voices, a world away from other more pop ‘outsider ‘stories like Hollinghursts ‘The Line of Beauty’ and ‘The Nanny Diaries’ where a delightfully self conscious ironic narrator views an alien world. In Bama’s autobiography ‘Karukku’ (pub. in translation 2000) for instance, chronology and characterization come a poor second to the primacy of protest – the book is a disturbing blur of anguished impressions, questions and reflections.
In ‘Sangati’, written after ‘Karukku’, Bama takes us into the elemental, impoverished and most often violent world of the Dalit woman – Bama’s paati (grandmother) tells her of her aunt’s death, “I reared a parrot and then handed it over to be mauled by a cat. Your Periappan actually beat her to death …He killed her so outrageously, the bastard”. Later on in the book we witness the village trial of the aunts daughter Mariamma who has been accused of being together in secret in the pump set shed with another village boy by the landowner Kumarasami, to hide his own sexually predatory actions . The entire episode in cinematic in its description, almost surreal if it were not so totally tragic. When Manacchi, a village girl becomes ‘possessed with a pey’, Bama watches the whole violent sequence of exorcising the demon with a skeptical eye, analyzing later why it was always a woman who was possessed,” in the fields there is back-breaking work besides the harassment of the landlord…And once they have collected water and firewood, cooked a kanji and fed their hungry husband and children, even then they can’t go to bed in peace and sleep until dawn. Night after night they must give in to their husbands’ pleasure…The ones who don’t have the mental strength are totally oppressed; they succumb to mental ill health and act as if they are possessed by peys.”
Centuries of history , folklore and economic deprivation may conspire together to heap every imaginable burden on the woman and yet Bama finds herself amazed by the Darwin like survival capabilities of the Dalit women – their spirit and energy as illustrated in their loud quarrels (“If he shows his strength of muscle, she reveals the sharpness of her tongue”), their immense capacity for hard physical labor and appreciates their freedom to work outside the house ( as opposed to upper caste women), the absence of dowry in their social system and the right to remarry. The vignettes of the women in this book from Mariamma to the little girl Maikkanni who works in a match factory and Sammuga Kizhavi (who pissed into the landowners water pot because he beat up a small child whose hand brushed against the pot), are vivid and compelling and the stories heart rending – all told in a style that maybe straightforward but is hugely energetic and elemental.
There is perhaps no perspective more powerful than that of the outsider and Tamil Dalit Christian writer Bama’s ‘Sangati’ testifies to this. If Art has hitherto reflected ‘high life’ rather than life, such ‘outcaste’ stories, literary cousins to the historical subaltern study can be extraordinarily powerful and provocative. They reveal a consciousness long suppressed, that is increasingly finding expression in a trenchant idiom that eschews traditional literary aesthetic. Dalit writers like Bama and Sharankumar Limbale (‘The Outcaste’translated from Marathi), and Lakshman Gaekwad (‘The Branded’) works’ are, in the remorseless violence of their stories as well as the anguished emotion of their narrative voices, a world away from other more pop ‘outsider ‘stories like Hollinghursts ‘The Line of Beauty’ and ‘The Nanny Diaries’ where a delightfully self conscious ironic narrator views an alien world. In Bama’s autobiography ‘Karukku’ (pub. in translation 2000) for instance, chronology and characterization come a poor second to the primacy of protest – the book is a disturbing blur of anguished impressions, questions and reflections.
In ‘Sangati’, written after ‘Karukku’, Bama takes us into the elemental, impoverished and most often violent world of the Dalit woman – Bama’s paati (grandmother) tells her of her aunt’s death, “I reared a parrot and then handed it over to be mauled by a cat. Your Periappan actually beat her to death …He killed her so outrageously, the bastard”. Later on in the book we witness the village trial of the aunts daughter Mariamma who has been accused of being together in secret in the pump set shed with another village boy by the landowner Kumarasami, to hide his own sexually predatory actions . The entire episode in cinematic in its description, almost surreal if it were not so totally tragic. When Manacchi, a village girl becomes ‘possessed with a pey’, Bama watches the whole violent sequence of exorcising the demon with a skeptical eye, analyzing later why it was always a woman who was possessed,” in the fields there is back-breaking work besides the harassment of the landlord…And once they have collected water and firewood, cooked a kanji and fed their hungry husband and children, even then they can’t go to bed in peace and sleep until dawn. Night after night they must give in to their husbands’ pleasure…The ones who don’t have the mental strength are totally oppressed; they succumb to mental ill health and act as if they are possessed by peys.”
Centuries of history , folklore and economic deprivation may conspire together to heap every imaginable burden on the woman and yet Bama finds herself amazed by the Darwin like survival capabilities of the Dalit women – their spirit and energy as illustrated in their loud quarrels (“If he shows his strength of muscle, she reveals the sharpness of her tongue”), their immense capacity for hard physical labor and appreciates their freedom to work outside the house ( as opposed to upper caste women), the absence of dowry in their social system and the right to remarry. The vignettes of the women in this book from Mariamma to the little girl Maikkanni who works in a match factory and Sammuga Kizhavi (who pissed into the landowners water pot because he beat up a small child whose hand brushed against the pot), are vivid and compelling and the stories heart rending – all told in a style that maybe straightforward but is hugely energetic and elemental.
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Book Review - Chasing the Monsoon
This appeared in the July 26th Books section of The Times of India
In Shantaram, the latest hip book on Mumbai’s seamy side, escaped convict hero Gregory Davis alias Shantaram, discusses the weather with acquaintance Lisa as they await the monsoon – “It’s always worst just before the monsoon…this is my fourth monsoon…You start to count in monsoons after you’ve been here a while,”, says Lisa, “This is my second”, says Davis,”I love the rain even if it does turn the slum into a swamp”.
Time and place are truly measured in monsoons for many of us and that’s why Alexander Frater’s excellent and even exciting ‘Chasing the Monsoon’ touches so many chords. Travel writer Frater grew up on an island in the South Pacific where “tropical depressions moved in and out like trains”, and where his favorite rainy scene bedroom print was entitled “Cherrapunji, Assam, The Wettest Place on Earth”.
Many years later, having moved to England, after a particularly dank, dismal and depressing winter, Frater decides to follow the monsoon on its journey from Trivandrum in South India onto Cochin, Goa, Bombay, Delhi , Calcutta and finally Cherrapunji. ‘Chasing the Monsoon’ is the story of that meteorological pilgrimage, an English weather buff ‘s account of people and places, meetings with weathermen, poets and politicians, monsoon massage men , waitresses and doormen. In Trivandrum, where ‘the monsoon hijacked every conversation’, Frater meets the Meteorological Departments Julius Joseph, who is reporting the monsoon’s progress to the PM’s office- “At eight am it was cutting through upper Sri Lanka…Well, two days maybe three”. In Cochin “in the dark harbor small boats ran for home. Waves bursting over the scalloped sea were suffused, curiously with pink light”. Frater meets the McCririchs, an expatriate couple with Harrisons Malayalam, a company that owns tea and coffee plantations. Sitting in their ‘enormous, high ceiling’ bungalow, Anne-Marie McCririch talks of monsoon power failures and the snakes and cobras the rains bring out. In Goa where ‘miles of flooded paddies and puddle roads reflected the pewtery light’, Frater attends a monsoon do, then going onto Bombay and then to Delhi where he runs the bureaucratic rounds for permission to visit the rainy , rebellion filled North East . Armed with his hitchhikers guide, a well thumbed ‘South East Monsoon’ by Y P Rao, Frater‘s delight in the vagaries of wind and weather is infectious. He dips into history ever so often, and generally ruminates on the rain. Of the deluge at Cherrapunji he says,” I felt little of the excitement I had known when the burst arrived in the South. Those had been occasions for public jubilation. This was a routine matinee….awesome certainly but exhilarating only to the collectors of meteorological records; such specialists would now be watching, incredulous, as their gauges foamed like champagne glasses.”
‘Chasing the monsoon’ is wonderfully entertaining and very empathetic , and while Fraters vantage point may not be a Cuffe Parade slum, (he “chases it [the monsoon] by plane with intermittent pit stops in the swankiest of hotels “ as one acerbic critic puts it) it is nevertheless quite the best monsoon story you are likely to come across.
In Shantaram, the latest hip book on Mumbai’s seamy side, escaped convict hero Gregory Davis alias Shantaram, discusses the weather with acquaintance Lisa as they await the monsoon – “It’s always worst just before the monsoon…this is my fourth monsoon…You start to count in monsoons after you’ve been here a while,”, says Lisa, “This is my second”, says Davis,”I love the rain even if it does turn the slum into a swamp”.
Time and place are truly measured in monsoons for many of us and that’s why Alexander Frater’s excellent and even exciting ‘Chasing the Monsoon’ touches so many chords. Travel writer Frater grew up on an island in the South Pacific where “tropical depressions moved in and out like trains”, and where his favorite rainy scene bedroom print was entitled “Cherrapunji, Assam, The Wettest Place on Earth”.
Many years later, having moved to England, after a particularly dank, dismal and depressing winter, Frater decides to follow the monsoon on its journey from Trivandrum in South India onto Cochin, Goa, Bombay, Delhi , Calcutta and finally Cherrapunji. ‘Chasing the Monsoon’ is the story of that meteorological pilgrimage, an English weather buff ‘s account of people and places, meetings with weathermen, poets and politicians, monsoon massage men , waitresses and doormen. In Trivandrum, where ‘the monsoon hijacked every conversation’, Frater meets the Meteorological Departments Julius Joseph, who is reporting the monsoon’s progress to the PM’s office- “At eight am it was cutting through upper Sri Lanka…Well, two days maybe three”. In Cochin “in the dark harbor small boats ran for home. Waves bursting over the scalloped sea were suffused, curiously with pink light”. Frater meets the McCririchs, an expatriate couple with Harrisons Malayalam, a company that owns tea and coffee plantations. Sitting in their ‘enormous, high ceiling’ bungalow, Anne-Marie McCririch talks of monsoon power failures and the snakes and cobras the rains bring out. In Goa where ‘miles of flooded paddies and puddle roads reflected the pewtery light’, Frater attends a monsoon do, then going onto Bombay and then to Delhi where he runs the bureaucratic rounds for permission to visit the rainy , rebellion filled North East . Armed with his hitchhikers guide, a well thumbed ‘South East Monsoon’ by Y P Rao, Frater‘s delight in the vagaries of wind and weather is infectious. He dips into history ever so often, and generally ruminates on the rain. Of the deluge at Cherrapunji he says,” I felt little of the excitement I had known when the burst arrived in the South. Those had been occasions for public jubilation. This was a routine matinee….awesome certainly but exhilarating only to the collectors of meteorological records; such specialists would now be watching, incredulous, as their gauges foamed like champagne glasses.”
‘Chasing the monsoon’ is wonderfully entertaining and very empathetic , and while Fraters vantage point may not be a Cuffe Parade slum, (he “chases it [the monsoon] by plane with intermittent pit stops in the swankiest of hotels “ as one acerbic critic puts it) it is nevertheless quite the best monsoon story you are likely to come across.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
Book Review - Maximum City
This review appeared in The Telegraph
IN THE RECYCLED MESS
Part of the rot
Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found
By Suketu Mehta, Penguin, Rs 595
Suketu Mehta’s magnum opus on Bombay is impossible to put down. The New York-based writer returns to Bombay 21 years after his family migrated to New York, this time to plumb the dark underbelly of the metropolis. Mehta moves from the cages of Kamathipura to the gullies of Madanpura, the slums of Jogeshwari and Dagdi Chawl to the matchboxes of Mira Road with ease. In this reportage of the city, fixers, shooters, rioters, policemen and film directors come alive in vignettes both stark and cinematic.
The stories are powerful and haunting. They shock with their graphic descriptions of violence and of police brutality. Mehta takes a hard look at Mumbai’s police force, socializes with Bandra cop Ajay Lal in a Bandra police station, and discusses police encounters with assistant police inspector, Salaskar. He befriends underworld shooters Mohsin and Satish, who explain their techniques and describe their habits in a matter-of-fact manner.
Mehta spends nights at Sapphire and other beer bars, hangs out with the sexy 20-year-old dancer, Mona Lisa, at trendy cafeterias or at her home, where she tells him her story. She talks about her father, who abandoned the family, her mother, who sent her to the beer bar, and the lover for whom she slashed her wrists.
He meets film director Vidhu Vinod Chopra, co-writing his script for Mission Kashmir. Mehta is relentless in his exploration of the urban landscape — both physical as well as mental. “What does a man look like when he’s on fire?” he asks Sena activist, Sunil. He analyses the men in the mob responsible for the horrific 1992-93 Hindu Muslim riots in Mumbai. “The vandals are young men, who, after working twelve hour days as peons in some office where they endure humiliation and even a slap or two from men who are richer and less Maharashtrian than they are, take the train home. Inside the train they bathe in perspiration; the air is fetid with sweats and farts …Such a man lives with a constant sense of his own powerlessness, except when he is part of a mob.”
The underlying theme that runs through the book is one of rot that comes through powerfully in the images of filth. In one such image adman Prahlad Kakkar tells Mehta, “Half the population doesn’t have a toilet to shit in. That’s five million people. If they shit half a kilo each, that’s two and a half million kilos of shit everyday”. When Mehta’s foreign-born children fall sick with amoebic dysentery he says, “We have been feeding our son shit. It could have come from the mango we gave him; it could have been in the pool we took him swimming in... There is no defense possible. Everything is recycled in this filthy country, which poisons its children, raising them on a diet of its own shit.”
The book is a deeply disturbing, disquieting portrait of a city where, as Sunil the local Sena boss declares, “even murder is all right”. Mehta’s Bombay has none of the magic of Salman Rushdie’s childhood world, or the affectionate idiosyncrasies of Pico Iyer’s travel tales or even the hopeless nostalgia of Rohinton Mistry’s Parsee protagonists. Instead, we are drawn into a world sans basic amenities, where the neighbourhood pav-wallah is set aflame, where the primeval impulse for territory makes men loot and kill with equanimity, where models and bar girls measure their grief in the number of slashes on their wrists. Mehta may be the quintessential artist as outsider, but he leaves behind a vision that is compelling.
SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY
IN THE RECYCLED MESS
Part of the rot
Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found
By Suketu Mehta, Penguin, Rs 595
Suketu Mehta’s magnum opus on Bombay is impossible to put down. The New York-based writer returns to Bombay 21 years after his family migrated to New York, this time to plumb the dark underbelly of the metropolis. Mehta moves from the cages of Kamathipura to the gullies of Madanpura, the slums of Jogeshwari and Dagdi Chawl to the matchboxes of Mira Road with ease. In this reportage of the city, fixers, shooters, rioters, policemen and film directors come alive in vignettes both stark and cinematic.
The stories are powerful and haunting. They shock with their graphic descriptions of violence and of police brutality. Mehta takes a hard look at Mumbai’s police force, socializes with Bandra cop Ajay Lal in a Bandra police station, and discusses police encounters with assistant police inspector, Salaskar. He befriends underworld shooters Mohsin and Satish, who explain their techniques and describe their habits in a matter-of-fact manner.
Mehta spends nights at Sapphire and other beer bars, hangs out with the sexy 20-year-old dancer, Mona Lisa, at trendy cafeterias or at her home, where she tells him her story. She talks about her father, who abandoned the family, her mother, who sent her to the beer bar, and the lover for whom she slashed her wrists.
He meets film director Vidhu Vinod Chopra, co-writing his script for Mission Kashmir. Mehta is relentless in his exploration of the urban landscape — both physical as well as mental. “What does a man look like when he’s on fire?” he asks Sena activist, Sunil. He analyses the men in the mob responsible for the horrific 1992-93 Hindu Muslim riots in Mumbai. “The vandals are young men, who, after working twelve hour days as peons in some office where they endure humiliation and even a slap or two from men who are richer and less Maharashtrian than they are, take the train home. Inside the train they bathe in perspiration; the air is fetid with sweats and farts …Such a man lives with a constant sense of his own powerlessness, except when he is part of a mob.”
The underlying theme that runs through the book is one of rot that comes through powerfully in the images of filth. In one such image adman Prahlad Kakkar tells Mehta, “Half the population doesn’t have a toilet to shit in. That’s five million people. If they shit half a kilo each, that’s two and a half million kilos of shit everyday”. When Mehta’s foreign-born children fall sick with amoebic dysentery he says, “We have been feeding our son shit. It could have come from the mango we gave him; it could have been in the pool we took him swimming in... There is no defense possible. Everything is recycled in this filthy country, which poisons its children, raising them on a diet of its own shit.”
The book is a deeply disturbing, disquieting portrait of a city where, as Sunil the local Sena boss declares, “even murder is all right”. Mehta’s Bombay has none of the magic of Salman Rushdie’s childhood world, or the affectionate idiosyncrasies of Pico Iyer’s travel tales or even the hopeless nostalgia of Rohinton Mistry’s Parsee protagonists. Instead, we are drawn into a world sans basic amenities, where the neighbourhood pav-wallah is set aflame, where the primeval impulse for territory makes men loot and kill with equanimity, where models and bar girls measure their grief in the number of slashes on their wrists. Mehta may be the quintessential artist as outsider, but he leaves behind a vision that is compelling.
SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY
Artist profile - Sunil Das
This appeared in the Deccan Herald in April 2005
Sunil Das is at Mumbai’s Jamaat Art Gallery in downtown Colaba for his exhibition entitled ‘Horses and Bulls’. The seventh floor gallery is full of light and breeze and tug boats and steamers glide by on the blue grey Arabian Sea, as the artist settles down with black coffee and a cigarette to talk art. The Gallery and its deceptively spacious Annex, once perhaps a sea view balcony, are today an appropriate setting for the paper and canvas works of impetuous animals that line its walls. You can almost see each magnificent animal draw in its breath, sometimes rearing, sometimes snorting or else gamboling. There’s mobility, power and a sinuous grace in every frame – Das’s skill lies in creating a form simultaneously abstract yet wholly representative, in definitive strokes that flow, using a palette that is minimalist and yet absolutely expressive, not only in terms of the sheer physicality of the beasts, but also in terms of its spirit – sometimes tempestuous, sometimes temperate or just plain playful! The black and white bull on a 6 by 4 feet canvas seems to almost leap at you from a background that somberly golden acrylic, there’s a flash of movement – perhaps he is charging and perhaps he is just spirited.
Sixty something, Kolkata based post modernist Sunil Das has an impressive oeuvre both in terms of the medium that he works with as well as his choice of subjects. Das uses paper, acrylic and canvas as well foil, nails or anything else that strikes him to impressive aesthetic effect. All this sells well and Das says he has sold even his student sketchbooks which figure several thousand horses. The first time he began to draw bulls, sitting at bull fights in Spain, people around him would buy the drawings then and there. Today, his soulful series on women and other work notwithstanding, horses and bulls continue to be a leitmotif of sorts for the painter, who explains why. Studying at the Government Art College in Kolkata, the young Sunil would complete his classes and spend the rest of the day walking around the streets of Calcutta, sketching everything he saw around him, and catching the very last train home. One day he was struck by the mounted police and followed the horses back to the stables, and began to sketch them. Thus began a life long affair with these magnificent beasts – “I became known as Horse Sunil – one of my horses was sent to Delhi to the President and I won the national Award as an undergraduate”, he recounts,” I suddenly became well known, the college had a special holiday, girls who had never even looked at me before now started to”. Das reminisces about his scholarship interview, where he enthusiastically walked into the office staggering under a load of all his drawings, unlike the other candidate with neat business like single file folder resumes – needless to say he won the scholarship! His stories of how the young, unsophisticated Sunil found his feet in Paris are fascinating, peopled with an unfeeling Indian Embassy (who later he delights to tell, found themselves wiping wine glasses for receptions for the now well known Indian artist!), a young African boy and a Frenchman who appeared miraculously in response to his fervent appeals to God.
Several exhibitions and awards later, Das has now opened his own Gallery at Kolkata, called Gallery Sunil where he discusses art with prospective buyers by appointment over a cup of coffee .
Sunil Das is at Mumbai’s Jamaat Art Gallery in downtown Colaba for his exhibition entitled ‘Horses and Bulls’. The seventh floor gallery is full of light and breeze and tug boats and steamers glide by on the blue grey Arabian Sea, as the artist settles down with black coffee and a cigarette to talk art. The Gallery and its deceptively spacious Annex, once perhaps a sea view balcony, are today an appropriate setting for the paper and canvas works of impetuous animals that line its walls. You can almost see each magnificent animal draw in its breath, sometimes rearing, sometimes snorting or else gamboling. There’s mobility, power and a sinuous grace in every frame – Das’s skill lies in creating a form simultaneously abstract yet wholly representative, in definitive strokes that flow, using a palette that is minimalist and yet absolutely expressive, not only in terms of the sheer physicality of the beasts, but also in terms of its spirit – sometimes tempestuous, sometimes temperate or just plain playful! The black and white bull on a 6 by 4 feet canvas seems to almost leap at you from a background that somberly golden acrylic, there’s a flash of movement – perhaps he is charging and perhaps he is just spirited.
Sixty something, Kolkata based post modernist Sunil Das has an impressive oeuvre both in terms of the medium that he works with as well as his choice of subjects. Das uses paper, acrylic and canvas as well foil, nails or anything else that strikes him to impressive aesthetic effect. All this sells well and Das says he has sold even his student sketchbooks which figure several thousand horses. The first time he began to draw bulls, sitting at bull fights in Spain, people around him would buy the drawings then and there. Today, his soulful series on women and other work notwithstanding, horses and bulls continue to be a leitmotif of sorts for the painter, who explains why. Studying at the Government Art College in Kolkata, the young Sunil would complete his classes and spend the rest of the day walking around the streets of Calcutta, sketching everything he saw around him, and catching the very last train home. One day he was struck by the mounted police and followed the horses back to the stables, and began to sketch them. Thus began a life long affair with these magnificent beasts – “I became known as Horse Sunil – one of my horses was sent to Delhi to the President and I won the national Award as an undergraduate”, he recounts,” I suddenly became well known, the college had a special holiday, girls who had never even looked at me before now started to”. Das reminisces about his scholarship interview, where he enthusiastically walked into the office staggering under a load of all his drawings, unlike the other candidate with neat business like single file folder resumes – needless to say he won the scholarship! His stories of how the young, unsophisticated Sunil found his feet in Paris are fascinating, peopled with an unfeeling Indian Embassy (who later he delights to tell, found themselves wiping wine glasses for receptions for the now well known Indian artist!), a young African boy and a Frenchman who appeared miraculously in response to his fervent appeals to God.
Several exhibitions and awards later, Das has now opened his own Gallery at Kolkata, called Gallery Sunil where he discusses art with prospective buyers by appointment over a cup of coffee .
Book Review - Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul
This review appeared in the Times of India dated May 1st
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s best selling ‘My Name is Red’ and ‘Snow’ have catapulted him centre stage onto a Western world, both politically baffled and intellectually bewildered by a rising Islamic sensibility. Western educated Pamuk, with a cultural consciousness that seems to alternate effortlessly between Flaubert and Turner, Turkish memoirist Hisar and journalist- historian Ekrem Kocu, has emerged as an interpreter par excellence, a subtler Edward Said, whose own 1978 brilliantly incisive ‘Orientalism ‘ transformed the world’s West-defined intellectual map. ‘My name is Red’ , a murder mystery set among the miniaturists of a medieval Istanbul vowed western readers with its mesmerizing mix of intrigue and aesthetic theory, as well as a tautly controlled ‘1001 nights’ structure of story and allegory. ‘Snow’ , the story of returning immigrant Turkish poet Ka’s struggle for identity , amidst the conflicting forces of a once glorious history and present day polity and poverty, went on to garner further intellectual praise for its poignancy and ironic sensibility.
Pamuk’s latest offering ‘Istanbul’, part early autobiography and part cultural memoir, is a hauntingly beautiful portrait of what is arguably, the most intriguing city in the world. ‘Istanbul ‘s opening lines, taken from late nineteenth century Turkish columnist Ahmet Rasim quote,’ The beauty of a landscape resides in its melancholy’, and indeed much of Pamuk’s urban love letter is suffused with this sentiment, one he describes as ‘huzun’, not merely the melancholy of what was once a great city but also the huzun shared as a community –“of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter…of the old booksellers who lurch from one financial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear…of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men..” Peppered with such ‘painterly’ observations and poetic reflections, Pamuk’s ‘Istanbul’ accompanied by its black and white reproductions of cobbled streets , boats and the Bosphorus and its stories of ‘Famous Fires and Other Disasters’ , is as vibrant in its own way as Kocu’s celebrated Istanbul Encyclopedia that Pamuk profiles so affectionately.
Pamuk’s personal memoirs follow a somewhat meandering narrative, with frequent digressions that range from fascinating to outright esoteric as he analyses perspective in Melling’s Istanbul paintings, tells anecdotes about Flauberts syphilis stricken anatomy and philosophizes on the ‘picturesqueness of ruins’ for prosperous other world travellers like Nerval and Gautier. A fascinating if arcane mix of geography, history, philosophy and aesthetic theory, Pamuk’s ‘Istanbul’ is a definite don’t miss for anyone ever intrigued by Istanbul and of course for all Pamuk fans.
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s best selling ‘My Name is Red’ and ‘Snow’ have catapulted him centre stage onto a Western world, both politically baffled and intellectually bewildered by a rising Islamic sensibility. Western educated Pamuk, with a cultural consciousness that seems to alternate effortlessly between Flaubert and Turner, Turkish memoirist Hisar and journalist- historian Ekrem Kocu, has emerged as an interpreter par excellence, a subtler Edward Said, whose own 1978 brilliantly incisive ‘Orientalism ‘ transformed the world’s West-defined intellectual map. ‘My name is Red’ , a murder mystery set among the miniaturists of a medieval Istanbul vowed western readers with its mesmerizing mix of intrigue and aesthetic theory, as well as a tautly controlled ‘1001 nights’ structure of story and allegory. ‘Snow’ , the story of returning immigrant Turkish poet Ka’s struggle for identity , amidst the conflicting forces of a once glorious history and present day polity and poverty, went on to garner further intellectual praise for its poignancy and ironic sensibility.
Pamuk’s latest offering ‘Istanbul’, part early autobiography and part cultural memoir, is a hauntingly beautiful portrait of what is arguably, the most intriguing city in the world. ‘Istanbul ‘s opening lines, taken from late nineteenth century Turkish columnist Ahmet Rasim quote,’ The beauty of a landscape resides in its melancholy’, and indeed much of Pamuk’s urban love letter is suffused with this sentiment, one he describes as ‘huzun’, not merely the melancholy of what was once a great city but also the huzun shared as a community –“of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter…of the old booksellers who lurch from one financial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear…of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men..” Peppered with such ‘painterly’ observations and poetic reflections, Pamuk’s ‘Istanbul’ accompanied by its black and white reproductions of cobbled streets , boats and the Bosphorus and its stories of ‘Famous Fires and Other Disasters’ , is as vibrant in its own way as Kocu’s celebrated Istanbul Encyclopedia that Pamuk profiles so affectionately.
Pamuk’s personal memoirs follow a somewhat meandering narrative, with frequent digressions that range from fascinating to outright esoteric as he analyses perspective in Melling’s Istanbul paintings, tells anecdotes about Flauberts syphilis stricken anatomy and philosophizes on the ‘picturesqueness of ruins’ for prosperous other world travellers like Nerval and Gautier. A fascinating if arcane mix of geography, history, philosophy and aesthetic theory, Pamuk’s ‘Istanbul’ is a definite don’t miss for anyone ever intrigued by Istanbul and of course for all Pamuk fans.
Artist Profile Badri Narayan
This feature appeared in The Deccan Herald dated 26th September 2004
Badri Narayan is a lot like his work, disarmingly gentle and simple, yet with a depth of meaning waiting to be discovered in his simple sentences, his stories, his illustrations and indeed, in all his art.
The recent exhibitions at Mumbai and Bangalore that highlight his paper and water color series emphasise this quality.
Born in Secunderabad, then part of the Nizam Dominions, Badri Narayan discovered that painting and story telling were skills that came to him, early in life.
He began writing for children, as well as providing illustrations for the stories.
Moving to Bombay, the artist continued with his labour of love, painting scenes from mythology, conducting workshops for children, as well as writing and illustrating mythological stories for children, like the beautifully produced Orient Longman illustrated “Mahabharata” and “Ramayana.”
This close association with children and belief in their art as well as the power of simplicity are profound influences on Badri’s art.
He has over the years, explored the nature of reality and the principles of religion through his stories and sketches.
In his works, archetypal figures like Prakriti, the artist and the wise man inhabit vibrantly washed worlds in shades of rusts, ochres, yellows and blues.
Clean, uncluttered lines delineate visages tranquil and ageless, yet firmly standing in the moment. Badri uses a wealth of mythological and aesthetic tradition in an exploration of both the spiritual and the artistic, his use of motifs like the drifting boat, the castaway garment and symbols like the unicorn and the elephant situate the artist’s personal quest in ancient philosophical traditions.
This is perhaps inevitable, given the artist’s deep involvement with Hindu and Buddhist philosophies as well as their wealth of mythology.
The book lined shelves of his studio at Sion in Central Bombay, bear voluminous witness to the weight of his philosophical leanings from The Puranas to the Jatakas, to Aurobindo and a “Survey of World Civilizations.”
This philosophical bent is what distinguishes his paintings, which frequently feature the exploring artist in several forms, whether in self portrait or as the wise man, the monk or the pilgrim.
Besides Hindu mythology, Buddhism and its tenets also recur.
The artist’s paintings of the Buddha and the Buddhist monk spring from this belief, as does the elephant, for the elephant is, as the artist explains, an illustration of the great principle of a unique combination of strength with gentleness.
Badri relates the pithy simplicity of the ancient mythological parable to the art of the child.
The aesthetic of children’s art was only recognised as late as the 20th century, and the artist states a favorite quote of Picasso’s, “Not for me the horses of Parthenon, but the rocking horse of my childhood.”
Badri’s own stories and illustrations, as well as his water colors seem to hark back to this intuitive expression, using story, mythology and vibrant color to create a mythical narrative world.
The uncertainties and paradoxes of this realm are reflected in the shadows and dark spaces as well as use of devices like the drifting boat, yet the overall mood is one of lightness and brightness, a sense of peace and of hope.
Badri Narayan is a lot like his work, disarmingly gentle and simple, yet with a depth of meaning waiting to be discovered in his simple sentences, his stories, his illustrations and indeed, in all his art.
The recent exhibitions at Mumbai and Bangalore that highlight his paper and water color series emphasise this quality.
Born in Secunderabad, then part of the Nizam Dominions, Badri Narayan discovered that painting and story telling were skills that came to him, early in life.
He began writing for children, as well as providing illustrations for the stories.
Moving to Bombay, the artist continued with his labour of love, painting scenes from mythology, conducting workshops for children, as well as writing and illustrating mythological stories for children, like the beautifully produced Orient Longman illustrated “Mahabharata” and “Ramayana.”
This close association with children and belief in their art as well as the power of simplicity are profound influences on Badri’s art.
He has over the years, explored the nature of reality and the principles of religion through his stories and sketches.
In his works, archetypal figures like Prakriti, the artist and the wise man inhabit vibrantly washed worlds in shades of rusts, ochres, yellows and blues.
Clean, uncluttered lines delineate visages tranquil and ageless, yet firmly standing in the moment. Badri uses a wealth of mythological and aesthetic tradition in an exploration of both the spiritual and the artistic, his use of motifs like the drifting boat, the castaway garment and symbols like the unicorn and the elephant situate the artist’s personal quest in ancient philosophical traditions.
This is perhaps inevitable, given the artist’s deep involvement with Hindu and Buddhist philosophies as well as their wealth of mythology.
The book lined shelves of his studio at Sion in Central Bombay, bear voluminous witness to the weight of his philosophical leanings from The Puranas to the Jatakas, to Aurobindo and a “Survey of World Civilizations.”
This philosophical bent is what distinguishes his paintings, which frequently feature the exploring artist in several forms, whether in self portrait or as the wise man, the monk or the pilgrim.
Besides Hindu mythology, Buddhism and its tenets also recur.
The artist’s paintings of the Buddha and the Buddhist monk spring from this belief, as does the elephant, for the elephant is, as the artist explains, an illustration of the great principle of a unique combination of strength with gentleness.
Badri relates the pithy simplicity of the ancient mythological parable to the art of the child.
The aesthetic of children’s art was only recognised as late as the 20th century, and the artist states a favorite quote of Picasso’s, “Not for me the horses of Parthenon, but the rocking horse of my childhood.”
Badri’s own stories and illustrations, as well as his water colors seem to hark back to this intuitive expression, using story, mythology and vibrant color to create a mythical narrative world.
The uncertainties and paradoxes of this realm are reflected in the shadows and dark spaces as well as use of devices like the drifting boat, yet the overall mood is one of lightness and brightness, a sense of peace and of hope.
Monday, June 13, 2005
On Corporates and Culture
Thsi appeared in the Deccan Herald
It’s monsoon time and Malhar, the festival at St. Xaviers College Mumbai is in full swing with animation and activity in every frame of an entire generation that populates these ancient premises with such joie-de-vivre.
The famous wooded quadrangle houses the festival stalls, and Pepsi very prominently, while BPCL banners and logos compete with red and white AirTel logos in the approach quadrangle. It’s an industrious mix of college and the corporate and a combination that seems completely Win-win.
For college fests today are increasingly becoming mega-events, mini microcosms as it were of a competitive world, where contestants write copy, design board games, plead cases in courtrooms and sing for a lot more than their supper. The heart of these creative, very “productive”, fun extravaganzas is of course the corporate sponsorship.
Types of sponsorship
Varying in degrees, such sponsorship could begin with contributing prizes for informal events like quizzes, to picking up the tab as the title sponsorship for amounts ranging from a few lakhs to ten lakhs. For the students it's the only way they can plan an event of such magnitude, and as Anindita Sanger of Sophia's Kaleidoscope succinctly puts it, “Without the money there’s no show”.
Festivals today typically have several competitive events packed into 3-4 days, with 2 or 3 special performances from well known artistes, both classical, pop, fusion et al. Besides this there are workshops on varied themes ranging from pottery and theatre to dream analysis! All this comes at a price though ranging from a couple of lakhs for the smaller fests to as high as Rs 25 lakh for fest at the larger better-known colleges. There’s a tremendous amount of fun and learning and talent that goes into both the organisation and the participation of such events and this is the other aspect of sponsorship — just as corporates invest in Art, as Alok Jhamb, CEO, AirTel explains, “Youth is all about fun and we as corporates should step in with our support.”
Market penetration
It’s also all about marketing and market penetration. For corporates, especially those who have a “youth brand” association, a college festival with its concentration of an ideal target audience, provides a unique advertising opportunity. As Suparna Mitra, Business Head, Lee explains, “For a youth brand like Lee, college sponsorships are an important part of the brand’s promotion plans. Connecting with the youth is a challenge in these times when media is fragmented and the lifestyles of the young involve “hanging out” in cafes, pubs etc rather than appointment TV watching. Also, the task is complicated as getting mind share is even more difficult as the young are often into multi-tasking when engaging in traditional media - e.g. sending SMS messages, surfing the net, reading magazines while watching TV or listening to radio.”
Alok Jhamb, CEO, AirTel, agrees with the importance of brand presence at a college festival. “We target the upwardly mobile youth segment, they are very critical to us both in terms of being brand ambassadors of a sort through their usage and also in providing a large potential as we take them up the lifecycle.”
For AirTel, College Fests are the beginnings of the student corporate interaction and one that sometimes develops into live projects and a marketing effort that is truly “viral”. Himanshu Chakrawarti, General Manager Marketing at Tata’s lifestyle store, Westside, also finds College fests an important marketing platform, “the college going crowd, which forms a large part of our target segment is difficult to reach through regular media. Participation in such festivals through sponsoring events like the fashion show gives us an opportunity to showcase our products and to build better bonding, encouraging students to come to our stores.”
Westside’s experience has been very positive, participation in college fests has actually seen an increase in sales every time- so much so that Westside has begun to conduct inter college fests in Pune and Chennai.
Yet for all this, marketing departments at the fests, whose job it is to go out and collect sponsorships describe it as a hard job. Sangram Kadam, Member of IIT Bombay’s Mood Indigo Core Committee, explains how marketing for the fest held in December every year begins as early as May. “It’s all about bargaining,” says Anshuman, marketing for Xaviers Malhar.
Value for money
Corporates in turn discuss the value for money concept, as sponsorship amounts for the larger festivals could be high enough to pay for 4 or 5 ten second spots on prime time television. The title sponsor for Xaviers Malhar, spread over 4-5 days with an exposure to several thousand students, could instead feature a hoarding at a prime location on Marine Drive, Mumbai for as long as two months for the same price. Besides this sponsorship has also to be woven in intrinsically into the festival rather than being pasted on.
As Suparna Mitra, Business Head, Lee elaborates, “Sponsorship and the brand should be worked well into the event rather than just be an exercise of putting up brand posters and banners in the event location and getting a few mentions from the MC. In Lee, for example, last year, we had sponsored freshers’ parties for a few colleges in Delhi where the brand was worked into a personality contest among the freshers and a Mr Lee and a Ms Lee was chosen from among the freshers.”
Where corporate sponsorship has transformed the face of the festival, it has also intensified commercial exposure to a class that’s increasingly consumerist. Yet in the ultimate analysis, it is a reflection of the real world as also a symbiotic meeting of mind and matter, with a product thrown in for every prodigy, be a it a biggie like the Hero Honda for Mr Umang at the N M College Festival or coupons for coffee.
It’s monsoon time and Malhar, the festival at St. Xaviers College Mumbai is in full swing with animation and activity in every frame of an entire generation that populates these ancient premises with such joie-de-vivre.
The famous wooded quadrangle houses the festival stalls, and Pepsi very prominently, while BPCL banners and logos compete with red and white AirTel logos in the approach quadrangle. It’s an industrious mix of college and the corporate and a combination that seems completely Win-win.
For college fests today are increasingly becoming mega-events, mini microcosms as it were of a competitive world, where contestants write copy, design board games, plead cases in courtrooms and sing for a lot more than their supper. The heart of these creative, very “productive”, fun extravaganzas is of course the corporate sponsorship.
Types of sponsorship
Varying in degrees, such sponsorship could begin with contributing prizes for informal events like quizzes, to picking up the tab as the title sponsorship for amounts ranging from a few lakhs to ten lakhs. For the students it's the only way they can plan an event of such magnitude, and as Anindita Sanger of Sophia's Kaleidoscope succinctly puts it, “Without the money there’s no show”.
Festivals today typically have several competitive events packed into 3-4 days, with 2 or 3 special performances from well known artistes, both classical, pop, fusion et al. Besides this there are workshops on varied themes ranging from pottery and theatre to dream analysis! All this comes at a price though ranging from a couple of lakhs for the smaller fests to as high as Rs 25 lakh for fest at the larger better-known colleges. There’s a tremendous amount of fun and learning and talent that goes into both the organisation and the participation of such events and this is the other aspect of sponsorship — just as corporates invest in Art, as Alok Jhamb, CEO, AirTel explains, “Youth is all about fun and we as corporates should step in with our support.”
Market penetration
It’s also all about marketing and market penetration. For corporates, especially those who have a “youth brand” association, a college festival with its concentration of an ideal target audience, provides a unique advertising opportunity. As Suparna Mitra, Business Head, Lee explains, “For a youth brand like Lee, college sponsorships are an important part of the brand’s promotion plans. Connecting with the youth is a challenge in these times when media is fragmented and the lifestyles of the young involve “hanging out” in cafes, pubs etc rather than appointment TV watching. Also, the task is complicated as getting mind share is even more difficult as the young are often into multi-tasking when engaging in traditional media - e.g. sending SMS messages, surfing the net, reading magazines while watching TV or listening to radio.”
Alok Jhamb, CEO, AirTel, agrees with the importance of brand presence at a college festival. “We target the upwardly mobile youth segment, they are very critical to us both in terms of being brand ambassadors of a sort through their usage and also in providing a large potential as we take them up the lifecycle.”
For AirTel, College Fests are the beginnings of the student corporate interaction and one that sometimes develops into live projects and a marketing effort that is truly “viral”. Himanshu Chakrawarti, General Manager Marketing at Tata’s lifestyle store, Westside, also finds College fests an important marketing platform, “the college going crowd, which forms a large part of our target segment is difficult to reach through regular media. Participation in such festivals through sponsoring events like the fashion show gives us an opportunity to showcase our products and to build better bonding, encouraging students to come to our stores.”
Westside’s experience has been very positive, participation in college fests has actually seen an increase in sales every time- so much so that Westside has begun to conduct inter college fests in Pune and Chennai.
Yet for all this, marketing departments at the fests, whose job it is to go out and collect sponsorships describe it as a hard job. Sangram Kadam, Member of IIT Bombay’s Mood Indigo Core Committee, explains how marketing for the fest held in December every year begins as early as May. “It’s all about bargaining,” says Anshuman, marketing for Xaviers Malhar.
Value for money
Corporates in turn discuss the value for money concept, as sponsorship amounts for the larger festivals could be high enough to pay for 4 or 5 ten second spots on prime time television. The title sponsor for Xaviers Malhar, spread over 4-5 days with an exposure to several thousand students, could instead feature a hoarding at a prime location on Marine Drive, Mumbai for as long as two months for the same price. Besides this sponsorship has also to be woven in intrinsically into the festival rather than being pasted on.
As Suparna Mitra, Business Head, Lee elaborates, “Sponsorship and the brand should be worked well into the event rather than just be an exercise of putting up brand posters and banners in the event location and getting a few mentions from the MC. In Lee, for example, last year, we had sponsored freshers’ parties for a few colleges in Delhi where the brand was worked into a personality contest among the freshers and a Mr Lee and a Ms Lee was chosen from among the freshers.”
Where corporate sponsorship has transformed the face of the festival, it has also intensified commercial exposure to a class that’s increasingly consumerist. Yet in the ultimate analysis, it is a reflection of the real world as also a symbiotic meeting of mind and matter, with a product thrown in for every prodigy, be a it a biggie like the Hero Honda for Mr Umang at the N M College Festival or coupons for coffee.
Author Profile - Jean Echenoz
This appeared in The Hindu Literary Review
`IT is fashionable in France to pronounce the novel dead every 10 years,' says best selling contemporary French novelist Jean Echenoz. Winner of France's prestigious Prix Goncourt, for his Je m'en vais (I'm Gone), Echenoz is at Cercle Litteraire in Mumbai's Fort district for the launch of Mark Polizzotti's critically acclaimed translation of the same. Published by Rupa France, in a slim black and white soft cover version, this tale, like Echenoz's others, fairly bubbles over with intrigue and unlikely adventures, all told in a delightful pop culture idiom.
The joy of fiction
Part of a literary legacy whose best known and translated writers, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, were winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and 1964, Jean Echenoz is today one of the leading lights of the stable of writers assembled by legendary editor Jerome Lindon at "Editions de Minuit", including Samuel Beckett and Nouveaux Romanciers novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet as well as contemporary, well known and translated authors like Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Marie Ndiaye and Marguerite Duras. These are cultural touchstones and influences that both fascinate and inform the author and he speaks at length about that amazing literary form — the novel, which, phoenix-like, reinvents itself every time. "The joy of fiction, the very words inspire me", he confesses, "and it is this love that enables me to write". Jean Echenoz's novels are anchored for most part in Paris, yet make great peripatetic leaps into exotic lands — Felix Ferrer, the failed artist turned contemporary art dealer in I'm Gone, journeys to the North Pole, while mysterious villain Baumgartner, travels through southwest France in picaresque fashion to Spain, Pons in Double Jeopardy moves to a Malaysian plantation, while Max in Piano wakes up to find himself as far away as in the afterlife. Shifts in time and place are handled almost cinematically, in prose that maybe spare, but is wonderfully inventive and evocative — the airport where Ferrer begins his journey "a belvedere... where rabbits with kerosene breadth leap and bound" to the Arctic; "the boreal summer progressed. Night never fell."
Like fellow novelist Daniel Pennac, Jean Echenoz's genius lies in his appropriation of the romans policier (detective story), once derided as railway station reading not worthy of a literary label. His novels may deliciously subvert the detective story genre, with their anti-heroes, in simultaneously prosaic and banal and then wildly improbable scenarios, but Jean Echenoz, an admirer of Dashiell Hammett`s hard boiled detective fiction, prefers to look at it as paying homage to the genre. Indeed, not only does he reinvent the romans policier, he uses it skilfully to experiment with multiplicity of narrative — the exploration of a shifting je; the "I" of the character moves to the narrator, the author or sometimes even to an unnamed, undescribed casual bystander who maybe witness to the action. Characters disappear, merge or reappear, and this confusion with identities often becomes, rather like Graham Greene's The Third Man, the heart of the mystery story. The denouement, when it finally arrives after many lively digressions, often ends up asking more questions than it answers. For Echenoz's characters, the central quest maybe defined in whodunit terms, but emerges as so much more fundamental and existential. Their quests never seem to go anywhere, rather like Felix Ferrer — "And since Ferrer, subject to these immutable orders asked himself every morning how to break out of this ritual, the question itself became incorporated into the ritual". Ferrer spends the rest of the novel travelling, both geographically and through a succession of relationships with women, only to return 364 days later, Sisyphus like, to where he began.
Moments of insight
So, does Echenoz view man as fundamentally isolated and alienated? "I am not a philosopher or a thinker, I am just a novelist," says the fair-haired, soft-spoken author, firm despite his hesitant English. For all that, his novels have more than their moments of extraordinary insight. Predominant aspects of pop culture appear delineated in a dry wit that moves from mild to mordant. Drugs, celebrity and murder (Big Blondes), gun running (Double Jeopardy) all get their fair share of attention. Echenoz's descriptions of the modern art world in I'm Gone are particularly striking — note Ferrer's recommendation of a work of juxtaposed aluminium squares painted light green, "at least when you come home and find that on your wall you don't feel attacked. There's always that." Or of the "smug and self satisfied" young plastic artist whose "trick is... instead of hanging a painting on a wall, he eats away at the corresponding place in the collector's wall with acid: small rectangular format... exploring the concept of negative work, so to speak." Echenoz's text fairly abounds with these instances. His wonderfully evocative descriptions, whether of the Arctic sled dogs or of Parisian art, make this book a delightful read. After this we look forward to his earlier works, already translated and available overseas, being made available here as well.
Book Review - Fearless Nadia
This book review appeared in The Week
Interest in Bollywood’s blond-haired and blue-eyed 1930s and 40s stuntwoman heroine Nadia, the ‘fighting, climbing, riding, courageous Lady Robin Hood’ of a whole genre of box-office stunt film hits, was revived with grand-nephew Riyad Wadia’s award-winning 1993 documentary, Fearless—the Hunterwali Story. Dorothee Wenner’s biography makes for fascinating reading, situating Nadia against the socio-historical and cinematic map of her day.
Stop me if you can: Fearless Nadia in Lutaru Lalna
The chronology of Nadia’s story is interspersed with a rich combination of analysis and anecdote, from stunt sequences to the ideological and creative impulses for various plot developments. Besides the daring and thrilling fighting scenes like those atop a train on Miss Frontier Mail (1936) or in a waterfall in Diamond Queen (1940), what made the Nadia films superhits were also their basic themes.
Wenner quotes film historian P.K. Nair: "The viewers always had the impression that the Nadia films dealt with precisely the conflicts which most affected them", going on to describe Nadia’s freedom dance in Bambaiwali (1941) and her fiery plea in Tigress (1947) against landholders. Yet ‘with raised eyebrows and slightly nauseated by the vulgar hurly-burly at Nadia’s showings—the secret of Nadia’s success was snobbishly put down as violence glorifying action entertainment’ and critics like Baburao of Film India repeatedly exhorted the Wadia Movietone Studios to move towards ‘social action’ themes.
This may have led to the split between the two Wadia Brothers. The elder J.B.H. wanted to move towards social drama like The Court Dancer, while the younger brother Homi, now married to Nadia, wanted to continue the stunt hits.
Wenner tells the Nadia story with all the delightful detail of an admiring insider, illustrating the radical social messages of the Nadia films, where the cult actress sidesteps the saint-immoral vamp polarity to emerge as a truly empowered individual.
Interest in Bollywood’s blond-haired and blue-eyed 1930s and 40s stuntwoman heroine Nadia, the ‘fighting, climbing, riding, courageous Lady Robin Hood’ of a whole genre of box-office stunt film hits, was revived with grand-nephew Riyad Wadia’s award-winning 1993 documentary, Fearless—the Hunterwali Story. Dorothee Wenner’s biography makes for fascinating reading, situating Nadia against the socio-historical and cinematic map of her day.
Stop me if you can: Fearless Nadia in Lutaru Lalna
The chronology of Nadia’s story is interspersed with a rich combination of analysis and anecdote, from stunt sequences to the ideological and creative impulses for various plot developments. Besides the daring and thrilling fighting scenes like those atop a train on Miss Frontier Mail (1936) or in a waterfall in Diamond Queen (1940), what made the Nadia films superhits were also their basic themes.
Wenner quotes film historian P.K. Nair: "The viewers always had the impression that the Nadia films dealt with precisely the conflicts which most affected them", going on to describe Nadia’s freedom dance in Bambaiwali (1941) and her fiery plea in Tigress (1947) against landholders. Yet ‘with raised eyebrows and slightly nauseated by the vulgar hurly-burly at Nadia’s showings—the secret of Nadia’s success was snobbishly put down as violence glorifying action entertainment’ and critics like Baburao of Film India repeatedly exhorted the Wadia Movietone Studios to move towards ‘social action’ themes.
This may have led to the split between the two Wadia Brothers. The elder J.B.H. wanted to move towards social drama like The Court Dancer, while the younger brother Homi, now married to Nadia, wanted to continue the stunt hits.
Wenner tells the Nadia story with all the delightful detail of an admiring insider, illustrating the radical social messages of the Nadia films, where the cult actress sidesteps the saint-immoral vamp polarity to emerge as a truly empowered individual.
Literature and the Immigrant Experience
This feature appeared in The Hindu Literary Review
WHAT is it that makes the immigrant experience such fertile literary ground? Popular and prize-winning, these angst-ridden accounts of the aspiring outsider seem to sweep the bestseller stakes. Whether it's Irish immigrant author Frank McCourt in Tis or British born Bangladeshi , Monica Ali's Brick Lane, the stories weave a tapestry that's both familiar and faraway .
For, the immigrant is in a unique position to tell a tale. Like every great epic, from The Odyssey to The Ramayana, his story is also that of a traveller. The immigrant journeys to the promised land and battles adversity, both mental and material. Jasmine in Bharati Mukerjee's Jasmine, for instance, begins her journey travelling through the underbelly of the immigrant trade route on forged papers, through the tiered bunks on the trawlers out of Europe, and ends up making good as a respected "caregiver" as opposed to the more servile Indian version of the "ayah" and then a wife . She moves from Jyoti to Jasmine and eventually to Jane Ripplemeyer, shedding personas like so many skins, eventually metamorphosing into a creature ready to fight fate and "reposition the stars".
Eighteen-year-old Nazneen, in Monica Ali's Brick Lane may have a smooth maiden flight to London, but she is to be married to a man she has never met, pot-bellied, stomach-stroking Chanu, and this is a battle for her nonetheless. Cloistered in her cluttered Brick Lane apartment, Nazneen struggles to find meaning in her day-to-day existence, gradually coming of age by attending activist meetings and eventually achieving economic independence and identity. Gogol in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake is born at Saint Auburn Hospital, overlooking Boston's Charles River and the Memorial Drive, but he must nevertheless struggle all through school and even later for a sense of self. He is not born Indian, definitely not yet American. Appropriately and wholly unintentionally, he is somehow given a name that is neither Indian nor American, taken from the surname of his father's favourite Russian author.
The immigrant, like the Greek hero, also takes on the force of Fate itself whether it's the Chinese mothers in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club or Nazneen in Brick Lane. The primeval power of Destiny and men and women's struggles despite it, has always been the stuff of compelling story-telling and these stories are no exception. Fate appears as a leitmotif in Brick Lane where Nazneen's is born stillborn and left to her fate but still survives, this being a precursor to the many events in her life. The opening pages of Jasmine, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, introduce an astrologer cupping his ears ("his satellite dish to the stars") and foretelling Jasmine's widowhood and exile. Such stories, then, deal with the self and spirit yet viewed through the safety of the prosperous western prism. This is also what perhaps gives these books their "feel good" factor and makes them prime contenders for Western awards — for all the trouble these immigrants endure, their dauntless participation in the Great American Dream is what ultimately "liberates" them. The figure of the immigrant is romanticised as a spiritual vagabond and his or his progeny's ultimate assimilation seen as "coming of age".
Besides, the many exotic trapping of these stories, sketched on a canvas that stretches backwards in time and space, give these the universal appeal of the traveller's tale. Spice-filled kitchens compete with arranged marriages and vermillion filled partings, all adding up to create an atmosphere of these foreigners and their quaint colourful little ways. Third world cultures are painted as better somehow, more spiritual, earthy and even sensual but in nice non-threatening ways as in Irish or Asian lamb stew or wrapped up neatly in fortune-cookie wisdom. There's a multicultural richness in these accounts, in their creation of an exotic backdrop, the literary equivalent of "Casablanca" or Arabia of "Lawrence of Arabia". The description of food, clothes and festivals is in a language that flows and enfolds, appealing in a quirky crossover way — Mrs. Sen's kitchen knife in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, for instance, is described vividly as a "blade that curved like the prow of a Viking ship, sailing to battle in distant seas". Yet for all the exoticism and nostalgia, the "home" left behind is undoubtedly not the place to be. Chanu in Brick Lane is muddled and misguided in his quixotic intent to return — the Bangladeshi village may be sylvan in retrospect, but Nazneen's sister Hasina's letters paint a dismal picture of the sordid life a woman might have to lead if trapped there. Gogol and Sonia in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake dread their holidays to Kolkata, the crowds and the discomfort, and rejoice in their return, "once again free to quarrel. To sleep for as long as they like". Immigrants like Hanif Kureishi's Karim in Buddha of Suburbia or Frank McCourt in Tis bring with them a whole new perspective on the structure of society, this brilliance of perception probably being possible only by virtue of their exclusion. Ultimately and importantly however, there is a complete validation of the Promised Land. Frank McCourt cribs and carps about the aloof unemotional American approach to life where taking in a meringue to a movie is construed as a huge breach of conduct, yet he can think of nothing worse than those poor souls who reached Ellis Island, who were turned back.
Set firmly in the context of a validation of the present way of life, an immigrant's story is thus powerful both in terms of story and setting, as well as politically correct. Asian historical memoirs from Wild Swans to Daughters of Arabia are stories of oppression and unhappiness, now safely told from the haven of the New World. Novels like The Joy Luck Club and Brick Lane reiterate this. They also deal with complex and very universal issues of enquiry into identity and being, striving to make sense of life mysteries — who am I, what is my name and where is home? It's a potent combination of the particular with the profound and in a world where boundaries simultaneously blur and yet don't go away; this is a story for us all.
WHAT is it that makes the immigrant experience such fertile literary ground? Popular and prize-winning, these angst-ridden accounts of the aspiring outsider seem to sweep the bestseller stakes. Whether it's Irish immigrant author Frank McCourt in Tis or British born Bangladeshi , Monica Ali's Brick Lane, the stories weave a tapestry that's both familiar and faraway .
For, the immigrant is in a unique position to tell a tale. Like every great epic, from The Odyssey to The Ramayana, his story is also that of a traveller. The immigrant journeys to the promised land and battles adversity, both mental and material. Jasmine in Bharati Mukerjee's Jasmine, for instance, begins her journey travelling through the underbelly of the immigrant trade route on forged papers, through the tiered bunks on the trawlers out of Europe, and ends up making good as a respected "caregiver" as opposed to the more servile Indian version of the "ayah" and then a wife . She moves from Jyoti to Jasmine and eventually to Jane Ripplemeyer, shedding personas like so many skins, eventually metamorphosing into a creature ready to fight fate and "reposition the stars".
Eighteen-year-old Nazneen, in Monica Ali's Brick Lane may have a smooth maiden flight to London, but she is to be married to a man she has never met, pot-bellied, stomach-stroking Chanu, and this is a battle for her nonetheless. Cloistered in her cluttered Brick Lane apartment, Nazneen struggles to find meaning in her day-to-day existence, gradually coming of age by attending activist meetings and eventually achieving economic independence and identity. Gogol in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake is born at Saint Auburn Hospital, overlooking Boston's Charles River and the Memorial Drive, but he must nevertheless struggle all through school and even later for a sense of self. He is not born Indian, definitely not yet American. Appropriately and wholly unintentionally, he is somehow given a name that is neither Indian nor American, taken from the surname of his father's favourite Russian author.
The immigrant, like the Greek hero, also takes on the force of Fate itself whether it's the Chinese mothers in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club or Nazneen in Brick Lane. The primeval power of Destiny and men and women's struggles despite it, has always been the stuff of compelling story-telling and these stories are no exception. Fate appears as a leitmotif in Brick Lane where Nazneen's is born stillborn and left to her fate but still survives, this being a precursor to the many events in her life. The opening pages of Jasmine, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, introduce an astrologer cupping his ears ("his satellite dish to the stars") and foretelling Jasmine's widowhood and exile. Such stories, then, deal with the self and spirit yet viewed through the safety of the prosperous western prism. This is also what perhaps gives these books their "feel good" factor and makes them prime contenders for Western awards — for all the trouble these immigrants endure, their dauntless participation in the Great American Dream is what ultimately "liberates" them. The figure of the immigrant is romanticised as a spiritual vagabond and his or his progeny's ultimate assimilation seen as "coming of age".
Besides, the many exotic trapping of these stories, sketched on a canvas that stretches backwards in time and space, give these the universal appeal of the traveller's tale. Spice-filled kitchens compete with arranged marriages and vermillion filled partings, all adding up to create an atmosphere of these foreigners and their quaint colourful little ways. Third world cultures are painted as better somehow, more spiritual, earthy and even sensual but in nice non-threatening ways as in Irish or Asian lamb stew or wrapped up neatly in fortune-cookie wisdom. There's a multicultural richness in these accounts, in their creation of an exotic backdrop, the literary equivalent of "Casablanca" or Arabia of "Lawrence of Arabia". The description of food, clothes and festivals is in a language that flows and enfolds, appealing in a quirky crossover way — Mrs. Sen's kitchen knife in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, for instance, is described vividly as a "blade that curved like the prow of a Viking ship, sailing to battle in distant seas". Yet for all the exoticism and nostalgia, the "home" left behind is undoubtedly not the place to be. Chanu in Brick Lane is muddled and misguided in his quixotic intent to return — the Bangladeshi village may be sylvan in retrospect, but Nazneen's sister Hasina's letters paint a dismal picture of the sordid life a woman might have to lead if trapped there. Gogol and Sonia in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake dread their holidays to Kolkata, the crowds and the discomfort, and rejoice in their return, "once again free to quarrel. To sleep for as long as they like". Immigrants like Hanif Kureishi's Karim in Buddha of Suburbia or Frank McCourt in Tis bring with them a whole new perspective on the structure of society, this brilliance of perception probably being possible only by virtue of their exclusion. Ultimately and importantly however, there is a complete validation of the Promised Land. Frank McCourt cribs and carps about the aloof unemotional American approach to life where taking in a meringue to a movie is construed as a huge breach of conduct, yet he can think of nothing worse than those poor souls who reached Ellis Island, who were turned back.
Set firmly in the context of a validation of the present way of life, an immigrant's story is thus powerful both in terms of story and setting, as well as politically correct. Asian historical memoirs from Wild Swans to Daughters of Arabia are stories of oppression and unhappiness, now safely told from the haven of the New World. Novels like The Joy Luck Club and Brick Lane reiterate this. They also deal with complex and very universal issues of enquiry into identity and being, striving to make sense of life mysteries — who am I, what is my name and where is home? It's a potent combination of the particular with the profound and in a world where boundaries simultaneously blur and yet don't go away; this is a story for us all.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)