Talking of Muskaan (and those who talk about her)

[Did this review for The Sunday Guardian]

“I’ve always liked the idea of breaking rules, doing stuff that raises eyebrows, but suddenly I wasn’t sure anymore. This wasn’t like the other delicious secrets that the gang shared – this was big. It was horrible.”

These words come from a normally poised 15-year-old whose world has just been shaken up by a close encounter with a friend. The “horrible” thing Aaliya has learnt is that her best friend Muskaan is homosexual, and that there may be a question mark about her own sexuality. But “I wasn’t sure anymore” is an equally important admission in a story about young people whose certainties and self-perceptions are constantly being challenged.

It is reasonable enough, given the marketing compulsions that demand the tagging of books, to describe Himanjali Sankar’s Talking of Muskaan as one of India’s first LGBT novels for young adults. The narrative, set over a six-month period and involving an urban, Anglicised group of Class X students – in an Archie comics-like world where two lovebirds might kiss in a secluded spot near a basketball court but not do much more – handles a delicate subject very well, ticking all the right boxes: showing how people who live outside the sexual mainstream are persecuted and made to feel like freaks; what peer pressure and the hegemony of adult prejudices, not to mention such judgements as the recent Supreme Court recriminalisation of homosexuality, can do to a young person already unsure of herself. We don’t get Muskaan’s story in her own voice – it is told in fragments, by three of her classmates – but we gather that she is increasingly isolated, thinking of herself as a creature of the ocean, perhaps now trapped in an aquarium with people gaping at her. (“When she told me about the bullying in the bus, she said that when they gave her a bad time she would zone out […] she imagined that she was underwater, in a soundless zone.”)

In another sense though, it is limiting to classify this as an LGBT book, much the same way as it is limiting to classify people by just their sexuality – what makes Talking of Muskaan effective is its awareness that there are many different ways of being an outsider or misfit (or “queer”). The three narrators have their own insecurities and kinks. There is Aaliya, thoughtful and open-minded and a natural candidate for understanding Muskaam’s problems, if it weren’t for the fact that her much-too-direct involvement with the situation has created self-doubt and guilt. There is Subho, the class topper, ordered and proper and scholarship-obsessed, conscious that being from a not very well-off family he has to work twice as hard as many other students; his politeness conceals the resentment he feels towards spoilt rich kids like Prateek, who can casually misplace a phone that costs four times as much as the combined monthly salary of Subho’s parents.

And there is Prateek himself – self-absorbed, quick to form judgements, living in a bubble built for him by his money-minded dad and uncle, but with a vulnerable, restless side too. Within the world of this story, he is the nominal antagonist – the person most likely to be intolerant or nasty towards “other” types of people – but I also thought him the most interesting character in a sense: beset by a persecution complex, reacting impulsively to little stimuli (whether it is the sudden thrill of happening to touch a girl’s fingers during a chemistry class or seeing a footprint on his jacket after a football game). In his personality more than in anyone else’s one can see the part played by family background and upbringing, by adults hidden behind the curtains, and conjecture that all those smart-phones may not have been adequate substitutes for emotional security.

Throughout this book, there is an eye for detail, for little observations about how people change in some ways while remaining unbending in others; for the complications that can attend rites of passage such as girls waxing together for the first time. And the many dimensions in a youngster’s personality – how defensiveness can mix with thoughtless cruelty, or how you might one minute be debating whether to wear hot pants or tracks to a dance class and then reflecting on Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula ( “sort of chilling and quite beautiful in parts”) the next. The writing glides a little close to stereotype at times – with the brainy Bengali underdog or the crass businessman who sneers at “homos” and says things like “Let us thank God for that. He is always looking after us. Always” in situations involving other people’s misfortunes – and I had a couple of tiny quibbles: would someone like Subho use the precious, Blyton-esque word “horrid”, for instance? But such things are noticeable only because most of the time the voices feel so authentic, from Aaliya’s introspecting to Prateek’s inarticulacy while talking about things that lie well outside his experience (where he is really just parroting ideas he has picked up from his parents).

“In those days we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives,” goes one of the chapter epitaphs, taken from Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. The line is very appropriate to this book about the tenuousness of being young. Even when these youngsters seem smart and self-sufficient and opinionated, one is reminded that in many ways they are not fully formed, they carry many potential futures inside them and things could easily go one way rather than another. And that it is the adult figures in their lives who so often prepare the ground for a lifetime of bigotry or closed-mindedness.

Love, longing and philanthropy in Parvati Sharma's Close to Home

[Did this review for The Sunday Guardian. When writing about film, I often – too often perhaps – bring up Manny Farber’s “termite art-elephant art” formulation. Well, here’s a novel that I thought might be classified as good termite art]
-----------

Among the many carefully observed moments in Parvati Sharma’s novel Close to Home is one where the protagonist, a young woman named Mrinalini, is entertaining her maid’s little daughter Anjali with cartoon films. They are in Mrinalini’s room – her husband Siddhartha is also around – sitting together on the bed in front of the laptop, when the maid Beena comes in to check on the child. Mrinalini craned her neck to look up at Beena; mother and daughter had the same smile: willing to be pleased, then delighted. “See,” said Mrinalini, “it’s a cartoon. Sit?” She wasn’t sure where Beena would sit and counted on her declining the offer, which she did.

The notable things about this episode, and the larger scene it is situated in, include the suggestion that the class barrier separating the two sets of people in the room doesn’t quite apply to the little girl yet; Anjali, barely three and hence not a card-carrying citizen of one of the many countries adults create for themselves, can casually make the bed her own (though Siddhartha is a little concerned that she will get her heavily oiled hair on the pillows), but it would be an immediate, noticeable transgression if her mother were to sit on it. The scene also depicts the mixing and mashing of backgrounds and cultural reference points in a world where one can shift from watching kung-fu pandas (“too much in English” for this little girl) to watching an animated Ganesha (wherein an upper-middle-class woman might feel self-conscious when a servant’s child commands her to “do namoh” to the cartoon God) or listening to a bhajan about the infant Krishna. And there is the description “willing to be pleased, then delighted”, which lets us imagine Anjali and Beena, so happy to be in the unusual position of watching shiny images on a computer in this room – but also allows us to reflect that maybe this is just Mrinalini’s perspective, born of self-congratulation.

This slim, sharp book centres on a woman trying to fill a blank screen, at work and in life. As a writer, Mrinalini stresses over the empty word-files on her computer. As a person, she wants to prove – to herself and to others – that she cares, that she can make a difference, and perhaps that confronting discrimination in the real world is more meaningful than writing about it. But being well-off carries its own traps. Even with the best intentions, you may have to deal with the possibility that the poor aren’t just an amorphous mass of eyes brimming with tears of appreciation for the little things you do for them, the favours and kindnesses you dole out at your own convenience; they are just as complex as you are, they have their own capacities for resentment or pettiness, or for wanting more than you think they should be satisfied with. The ayah whose child you are self-consciously looking out for isn’t always going to be the grateful supplicant, she might turn out to be a shrill-voiced bitch who rants about you behind your back, accusing you of using her daughter as a toy. And there could be some truth in that charge.

These are some of the things this book “is about”, but to list them like this makes Close to Home sound ponderous and doesn’t adequately convey what a fun, fast-paced read it is. (It took me just three or four hours to finish it.) The seven chapter heads are lines that come together wittily to make up a little poem – the sort where “Jangpura Ext” can be made to rhyme with “vexed” – and the main narrative has its own rhythm and flow. It begins with a chapter set before Mrinalini is married – she is smoking a joint with her roommate Jahanara, who confesses her love for her. Here as elsewhere, Sharma uses long sentences with unfussy, elegant flair. (Mrinalini was so obviously delighted by this – the dotcom, though unstinting by way of motivational talk and pizza lunches, offered little real excitement, and Siddhartha only called on Sundays – and so eager with her questions and generous in her felicitations, that Jahanara, who had tensed after uttering the words I think I’m gay, had uncoiled and unfurled and unthinkingly discovered, in the time it took them to roll another, that she only ever wanted to tell Mrinalini all her secrets and fears, and the strength of her feeling being what it was, it must be, it had to be, reciprocated.) There is an eye for detail, for pithy observations about behaviour and body language – whether in a description of a character laughing “from fear and happiness”, or a long, seemingly indolent chat between two people where layers of desire, insecurity and awkwardness are revealed. (Mrinalini indulges Jahanara a little, they banter and speculate about a fantasy future together, it seems like harmless fun but the frothy surface is misleading, and it all ends with Jahanara accusing her friend of being insensitive. This is the set-up for much of what follows.)

Though an easy read, Close to Home is in some ways a hard-to-classify book, and this is true of its characters as well – which is probably part of the point. Mrinalini and Sidhartha are well-meaning people, potentially non-conformist in some ways (he gives up a job in banking – though shortly afterwards he lets his father settle him in a government job), but there is something synthetic about their conversations, the hip self-awareness mixed with naiveté. They are so lovey-dovey, so much in tune all the time, articulating their thoughts so clearly even when they disagree – and you just know they will have fantastic make-up sex (“I’ll make your world spin, baby”) just a few hours after a nasty, crippling fight – that I found them a bit annoying. But it would be too easy to say this book invites us to judge them wholesale, even though some passages seem to play out that way. One subplot has their tenant Brajeshwar, also an author, writing an “ethnographic memoir” in which he casts them as a bubble-gum couple who have superficial conversations about important things, and even patronisingly gives them the names of the lead characters in Dilwale Dulhaniya le Jaayenge. There is some truth in this description, but counter-perspectives are immediately presented too, and we get to see the gaps in Brajeshwar’s own understanding (and later, his vulnerabilities as well).

All of which means that this story about the troubled relationships between the advantaged and the disadvantaged, and how philanthropy is so often about the giver rather than the beneficiary, should cut close to the bone for any privileged reader (and by “privileged” I mean anyone who has the means and ability to read this book in the first place) – even someone whose first instinct may be to see Mrinalini as a shallow dilettante. Possibly she is, but then possibly the best of us are too, forever struggling with the question that makes up the final chapter head: “Do you choose good or bad, or merely all right?"

Faulaadi mukka - on Naseeruddin Shah's autobiography

[Did a version of this review of And Then One Day… for Open magazine]

Naseeruddin Shah’s account of his life up to age 32 – or 33, since Shah himself is unsure whether he was born in 1949 or 1950 and says this allows him to be “whichever age it suits me to be on any particular day” – is one of the two best books I have read by, or even about, an Indian actor. The other one is Dev Anand’s ego project Romancing with Life. That might sound like a flippant comparison (and it may even be a little insulting to And Then One Day..., which is unquestionably the “better written” book in the generally understood sense of that term). Could two performers be more different? One was a larger-than-life movie star who spent decades embracing his own fame and “connecting” with his adoring fans; the other is a non-starry actor who determinedly eschews larger-than-life-ness, prioritises finding a character's inner truth, and says he turned a corner in his career when he became conscious of his own arrogance.

But the memoirs have this in common: you can almost hear each man saying the words as you read along. Anand’s book was florid, often narcissistic, always sanguine about how others viewed him (even as he continued to make embarrassing films in his last years) and founded on a certainty that his story HAD to be told in his own special way; that he had a moral duty to live up to the Image. Shah’s is hard-hitting, caustic, constantly aiming for self-awareness, and often uncertain and self-deprecating in the process. “What this book will mean to anyone I have no clue but I had to get it out of my system,” he writes drily in his preface. It is a moot point how “honest” a memoir can ever be, but both these approaches are utterly authentic, and both are true to the subject’s personality.

The elliptical title “And then one day”, with its sense of neither a clear beginning nor a clear end but a story constantly in progress (the words don’t refer to a single episode in Shah’s life), is apt for a book about someone who expects never to stop learning things about himself and his craft. Which doesn’t mean Shah is averse to narrative-creation. Trying to explain his passion for acting, he writes, “It does seem like an aberration of behaviour to want to be someone else all the time, and I think it happens to people who, like me, can find no self-worth early in life, and thus find fulfillment in hiding behind make-believe.” Describing being back-stage before a performance, and the opening of the curtain, he says: “Suddenly the womb was gone and I was staring into a black void.” And here is the rationalist mesmerized by a childhood memory of an actor (or was it a clown, or are they the same thing?) looming above him on a platform: “I have since steadfastly believed that the only magic that happens in this world happens on the stage.”

The question of employing a ghost-writer probably never arose. Shah has shown himself to be a fine essayist before (as in a piece he did about actors in Bimal Roy’s cinema, for an anthology) and his interest in writing is palpable almost from the start of this book, when he describes his first school St Joseph’s College as a version of Transylvania, “with the brooding atmosphere of self-denial clinging to it […] Nainital’s rains, gusty winds and frequent mist probably reminded these Irish adventurers of home, but all it needed was rider-less carriages and giant bats flying around at dusk to complete the picture”, and himself as a pre-teen afflicted by a stammer during a class play. It was here that his lifelong love for cinema began, mainly through regular screenings of American and British movies, but also a dubbed Sivaji Ganesan-starrer that he hated; it would be a while before he was more properly introduced to Indian films.

In these early chapters he writes about a conflicted relationship with his father (one that would see a form of closure only years after the latter’s death), a series of academic failures, the raging of hormones in a time “before prudery became fashionable”, a first sexual tryst at age 15 when he was still ignorant of masturbation (“I must be one of very few guys who had sex before learning to worship at the altar of Onan”) and the advent of marijuana in his life. Scattered through these sections are many things that are relevant to understanding his long and winding journey to becoming a professional actor. (He could imagine himself in the roles of an NDA cadet or a doctor – “I could probably make a great impact white-coated and stethoscoped, striding down a corridor issuing curt instructions to my assistants” – which were professions that his parents would rather have seen him take up in “real life”.) Some bits – accounts of property-related bloodshed in his extended family, or an early, failed trip to Bombay where he got to play an extra in two movies – are meandering and repetitive, held together mainly by his wry, unsentimental narration. But by the time he arrives at the National School of Drama (NSD) in the late 1960s – a period that coincides with a rushed wedding to a woman 14 years older – and later at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), the narrative has coalesced and the “David Copperfield kind of crap” (the first chapter head, channeling JD Salinger) has made way for a portrait of a young man on the cusp of self-realisation.

Reading this book, one usually gets the impression that Shah is organising scattered memories, articulating them for himself, without thinking about his importance as a public figure or the impression any of this will leave on fans or detractors. There is a breathlessness in the writing, there are long paragraphs with few visual breaks (the sort of thing writers and publishers are often cautioned against in an attention-deficit age, but which works very well here) as well as parenthetical asides (describing a homecoming and a tonga ride in Ajmer, Shah mentions that the horse “would invariably crap on the way” and then adds, apropos of nothing, “an ability I’ve always envied, to be able to do that while running full pelt”). To select a passage at random, here is part of an account of a nerve-wracking physics exam: “There was a question on the Wimshurst machine (if I’ve got the name right and an astrophysicist I know assures me I haven’t), an object the size and shape of a knife-sharpener’s wheel with what looked like a number of cut-throat razors attached to it in circular fashion. I had spotted the accursed thing in a physics lab and had always left it well alone, as evidently had the rest of the class. What it is used for I still couldn’t tell you but I managed that night to chew the cud and ingested enough information to regurgitate it all on to the paper the next day and scrape through by the skin of my whatsits.” Anyone who has spoken with Shah will recognise the voice immediately – it is almost exactly as he might tell the same story in a tone that manages to be eloquent, casual and sing-song at once, with a few effective pauses sprinkled through the telling.

He doesn’t skimp on the admiration when discussing such personal heroes as Geoffrey Kendal – who combined humility and purity of purpose with a missionary-like zeal for teaching Shakespeare – or mentors such as Shyam Benegal and the FTII professor Roshan Taneja. But there is also casual irreverence, whether disclosing his love for corny old Dara Singh films with such titles as Fauladi Mukka or his regard for the eccentric Raaj Kumar, “not for his acting which was dreadful, but for the way he safeguarded his interests, prolonged his career and sent all Follywood for a flying fuck to the moon whenever he felt like it”. He is frank, even cutting, about various people he knew or worked with over the years – from Satyadev Dubey to Peter Brook – but reserves some of the sharpest barbs for himself, describing his inability to be a father to his first child Heeba (“I played the part of the obnoxious adolescent to perfection […] I completely shirked my share of the duties, while idiotically attempting at the same time to assert my rights as a husband”), realising at the FTII that he had allowed himself to become complacent as an actor (“The thought would hit me like one of Delhi’s hot winds that in these three years I had grown only in my conceit”) or dismissing his own work in such key films as Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai (“I had gone all Elvis Presley and James Dean when it was street cred that was required. Mine is an immature, self-adulatory performance”).

****

One of the most affecting things in this book – all the more so because Shah himself doesn’t get maudlin about it, though much of it must have been deeply upsetting when it happened – is his account of a friendship with an actor named Rajendra Jaswal. They were so close in NSD and later in FTII that they were treated as a single person and even referred to as “Jaspal / Shah”, but the intensity of the relationship had ugly repercussions, as Jaspal – a talented actor undone by his own insecurities – became pathologically obsessed. Things came to a head with a murderous attack in a dhaba around the time Bhumika was being shot, culminating in a surreal scene – more “filmi” than anything in the movies Shah was doing at the time – where clueless policemen smack a wounded Naseer about before taking him to the hospital.

So dramatic is this story (in terms of its inherent content, not the telling) that I briefly wondered if Jaspal – about whom an initial online search revealed nothing – was an invented doppelganger, a sort of sly literary device incorporated within the text of an otherwise “honest” memoir, used to comment on the perils of too much closeness and identification (things that Shah himself is wary of as an actor – he has little patience with the theories that demand “immersion” into a character). The story is true though, and it’s tempting to compare “Jaspal / Shah” to the Mozart-Salieri story, except that would amount to romanticising a dismal tragedy – and anyway, Shah has never been anything like the archetype of the genius possessed with God-gifted brilliance, conquering the world one symphony (or performance) at a time. As he repeatedly indicates himself, hard work, passion and constant curiosity got him where he is, along with a measure of that essential but often-unmentioned factor, sheer good luck (perhaps things would have been tougher for him if he hadn’t been a fluent English-speaker, or if his FTII years hadn’t coincided with the beginning of Benegal’s feature-film career and the emergence of a new kind of cinema).

Even after becoming a “star” in the parallel-film circuit, Shah continued his efforts to find inner truth as a performer, which led to a disillusioning stint with the theatre innovator Jerzy Grotowski in Poland, complete with a bizarre workshop in a forest, much pretentious talk about reaching the “primal state” and (there is a neat, circular irony here) a variation on the personality cults he was constantly trying to escape in the big bad world of Bombay cinema. (“This had the smell of proselytizing and prophet-building.”) And so, poignantly, And Then One Day... closes by recounting a series of failures or uncertainties: the disenchantment with Grotowski; the falling through of Shah’s dream of playing Gandhi in Richard Attenborough’s film; an apprehensive reunion with the daughter he hadn’t seen for 12 years, at precisely the point (though this isn’t underlined for the reader) where he is preparing to shoot Masoom, in which his character must take responsibility for a son he has never met before. Though his relationship with Ratna Pathak, whom he married in 1982, brings emotional security, the impression as the narrative ends is that of a man, and an actor, still trying to find his way forward.

****

For me, the main value of this book is that it provides a fuller, more elaborate view of Shah’s sharp, searching mind than one gets from the interviews that usually appear in media – and this is particularly important for someone whose default mode is to be strongly critical, even rude. The short newspaper or TV interview can never do such a person justice, and indeed Shah has sometimes come across as one-dimensionally condescending in such interactions. (The journalistic tradition of condensing and using quotes as sensational headlines adds to that image.) By writing a book entirely on his own terms, giving himself this much space to expand on his opinions and set them against a larger context – even at the cost of some rambling – he shows a more measured side to his personality.

There are many glimpses here of Naseeruddin Shah the curmudgeon (and who would have it any other way?) but there is also a clear sense of where those qualities stem from. During a conversation a few years ago, I inwardly bristled when Shah snapped “This Auteur Theory, it’s bloody rubbish!” (That’s a silly remark, valid only as a response to the straw-man idea that “the director is the sole author of a movie”). Yet when you read the details of his strife-ridden time at the FTII – the struggles of actors who were treated as outcasts by the establishment, not given the same basic respect due to every other element of filmmaking – it becomes easier to understand his anger and frustration towards self-important directors. Or when you hear of his later experiences in the film industry – being peremptorily summoned for a meeting by big-money producers, for instance, and informed that he had been selected to play a role in a big film, which would naturally mean abandoning midway the “small and inconsequential” project he was working on.

Shah is upfront about doing certain films purely for money, but I have always been a little foxed by just how bad he has been in some of his commercial ventures. Take the 1992 Tahalka – in a film packed with dreadful performances trying manfully to outdo each other, his is arguably the worst, less credible even than Aditya Pancholi’s. Yet there may be a part-explanation here: “My attitude to Hindi cinema turned even more condescending, possibly because I couldn’t see myself fitting in in it[…] the thought that I was not qualified to be the lead in popular movies pinched greatly, so this reaction was very possibly my defence mechanism working in advance to counter the rejection I anticipated […] Being so appallingly bad in my early commercial movies was not entirely my fault. The only two who could make the schmaltzy Hindi film dialogue and ersatz situations believable were Dilip Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan, and I was nowhere in their league. Being effective in popular movies requires a certain kind of sensibility and an unshakable belief in them, neither of which I possessed.” It is the sort of admission that has sometimes been made even by actors - such as Waheeda Rehman - who had far more success in commercial cinema than Shah did.

It is possible to disagree strongly with some of Shah’s opinions (such as his dismissal of popular films, his contempt for the personality-driven acting that has been an essential, vitalising part of movie history for over a hundred years, his scoffing at critics who read meaning into Sholay and “other equally shallow films” – as if serious, considered analysis must be reserved only for the works of Ray or Fellini or the obviously highbrow artists – and, on a lighter note, his description of Asha Parekh as a “perky sex bomb”!) while at the same time being glad that someone of his stature, someone hard to ignore, is willing to be an enfant terrible in an industry so intent on self-congratulation, so full of political correctness and celebrity-adoration. More than once, he expresses doubt about the wider appeal of this book, implying it is a selfish exercise, “an exorcism”, something he hopes his children might read “if they wish to understand me better”. Which could be a euphemistic way of saying (and this is not generally speaking a book of euphemisms) that he gives a flying so-and-so whether or not you, dear reader, find any of it useful. But that candour, and the sharpness of thought and expression that accompanies it, is what makes this memoir so readable in the first place. So don’t trust the crabby old man trying to short-sell his authorial gifts – trust the tale instead.

--------------------------------

EXTRA!!

Here is a long interview I did with Naseer in 2010. And pasted below is a piece I wrote for The Sunday Guardian that same year, shortly after meeting Naseer on the sets of Anup Kurian’s The Blueberry Hunt (a film that has been long completed but never released, in large part because of its star – but that is another story, and best not told here).

****

I’m standing outside the cafeteria of a guesthouse in the hills of Kerala, expecting to see Naseeruddin Shah any minute. An old man walks by, slightly hunched, dressed in jeans and a windcheater, his hair arranged in a set of white dreadlocks. No light goes off in my head until one of the film’s co-producers shouts across, “Weren’t you looking for Naseer? There he is!”

The missed connection could partly be the result of my being a little distracted, but even so there’s something apt about the moment. Apart from being one of our finest actors, Shah is an immediately recognisable figure in both mainstream and non-mainstream cinema, but you’d expect a first encounter with him to be unobtrusive. It ties in with his grounded approach to his craft.

We are at the shoot of Anup Kurian’s The Hunt, in which Shah plays a recluse named Colonel who lives in a mountain retreat, growing marijuana and fending off (potentially dangerous) trespassers. The dreadlocks were his idea and they aren’t just a flamboyant accessory; they are right for the character. “Colonel is an enigmatic figure leading an unconventional life, and the hair adds to the sense of him being an outsider in this setting,” he says.

As it happens, Shah is not the sort of performer who makes elaborate use of masks and disguises to change his features from one role to the next, but he has something subtler and, in many ways, more impressive: a chameleon-like quality that enables him to slide into a character, to become a different person almost before you realise what’s happened. A friend who saw him as Mahatma Gandhi in the play Mahatma Vs Gandhi observed that he almost seemed to have shrunk physically when he was on the stage and that it was startling to see him later, outside the theatre, talking with friends.

I witness a similar metamorphosis one evening in his room in the guesthouse, during a scene reading. Shah lounges on the bed, cigarette in hand, looking even more hippie-like now that the Rastafarian locks are complemented by a sleeveless blue shirt and pyjamas. With him are Kurian and actor Vipin Sharma; the scene being rehearsed is a tense encounter between Colonel and Sharma’s character Sett. They read the lines, banter lightly, focus on words and inflexions, discuss character motivations. Anup laughs a little nervously when Naseer improvises the word “behenchod” into one of his Hindi lines, Naseer points out that part of the dialogue will have to be altered because the scene it refers to was never shot. It’s all very laidback so far; an uninformed outsider walking into the room would think this was a group of friends having some fun over drinks.

But then Kurian suggests that the scene can be performed with Colonel pressing his gun to Sett’s back, pushing him ahead so that they are walking and saying their lines simultaneously. Something flickers in Shah’s eyes. “Good idea,” he says, he puts away his cigarette and they start reading again, but this time Shah says his lines with much greater vitality than before. Now he’s holding an imaginary gun and waving it around, the words are spoken at twice the speed as before, and Sharma responds, as one performer often will to another during an intense scene; suddenly there’s an electric charge in the room and I get a very real sense of what the scene will look like the next day, when they play it for the camera.

In the cafeteria over dinner, we behold the actor as raconteur, polymath and jokester, holding everyone’s attention without making an obvious effort. He regales us with stories, anecdotes, acting some of them out – not in a self-conscious, “look at me, I’m putting on a display” way but as if it’s the most natural thing to do; why content yourself with describing when you can show? We talk about cinema and other things. When I chance to mention Monty Python’s Life of Brian, he roars into life with an imitation of the Roman centurion’s Cockney accent: “Yes? Crucifixion? Out of the door, line on the left, one cross each.”

One often reads about actors who internalise a role or immerse themselves into a scene so thoroughly that it can take hours, or even days, for them to come “out of character”. Shah isn’t like that, and in fact he enjoys taking little digs at the pompousness that often accompanies discussions of acting theory. (“Some people like to say ‘charakter nikaalna hai’, par character ‘nikalta’ kaise hai, yeh baat mujhe kabhi samajh nahin aayi!”) “Chalo, let’s do some out of-focus acting now,” he jokingly tells Vipin Sharma, when they are informed that an evening shot taken in fading light will be slightly out of focus.

One evening I watch him perform an abstract, wordless scene where his character, wounded by a bullet, has a vision of three tribal singers and follows them through a forest. The camera rolls, Shah staggers past us as if in a trance, eyes glazed, hand clutched to his abdomen. But almost the second the camera stops rolling he snaps back to normalcy, joking about the faux-artiness of the scene and the grand old time Film Institute students will have reading meaning into it. There are no Method Actor hang-ups here.

“Most acting theories are tedious,” he likes to say. “There’s nothing mystical or grand about the process, it’s a craft like any other.” This casualness seems like a subterfuge when one watches the wrenching scene from Parzania where, as the father of a little boy missing in communal riots, he conveys his anguish by twisting his head in despair as if that would help him get all the bad thoughts out of it. Or his pitch-perfect turn as the blind professor in Sparsh, where he eschews the upturned-eyeball look that passes for “playing blind” in much of our cinema and instead uses careful movements to suggest an unsighted person’s reliance on his sense of hearing. Surely pulling off roles like these requires a high degree of natural skill allied with an uncanny talent for putting oneself in someone else’s head? But no, he says. Observing and imitating – and lots of practice – are the cornerstones of a performance.

Perhaps he imitates better than most others. Perhaps it really is that simple.

Angels and rooms, flying chairs and dressing tables - an anthology about women writers

An excerpt from Mishi Saran’s essay “Split in half, six ways”, one of my favourite pieces in the new anthology Shaping the World: Women Writers on Themselves:

I had this strange notion that when they ask you to write about writing, it’s all over, because they are not asking for a poem, or a novel.

They are saying, “Tell us what you do all day long.”

There is no good, clean answer for this, since the backstage of writing is a cluttered, blood-spattered arena, overrun with escaped ghosts, dented friendships, the stink of lost battles and a tenuous sense of self.

Besides, it’s not what I do all day, it’s what I am, and what I am is split in half, six ways.

First, there’s me, walking, looking, chatting, eating, sleeping, cooking, living in Shanghai.

Then there’s the dwarf clamped to my shoulder – a mini-me – hissing into my ear: “You could use that.” Very few moments in my day are purely, fully, simply lived, because each one must be dissected for its potential to feed the blank page.

Edited by Manju Kapur and featuring 23 writers from the subcontinent – all published novelists, many of them poets and non-fiction writers too – baring their souls, analysing their relationship with their craft, this is a valuable collection for anyone trying to understand the nuts and bolts of writing (whether from a safe distance, with no intention of treading these waters themselves, or as an aspiring writer). But some of it also works if you’re simply in the mood for a good horror story. “Writing is a narcissistic and powerful and self-absorbed God; it will take all we can offer and leave dead, dry shells behind,” writes Lavanya Sankaran. “Having written is a powerful fulfillment, but the act of writing is not a nice thing to experience,” says Meira Chand, who also offers an account of the simultaneous terror and exhilaration of waking up at 2 in the morning with new words crowding one’s head, and the knowledge that two hundred labored pages must be discarded in order to facilitate a fresh beginning.

“When the novel is done I feel I have come out of a long sleep,” says Shashi Deshpande, “The world looks different: I see things I had missed for months; I see colours which had somehow seeped out of my vision until then.” Bina Shah believes writing is like walking a tightrope – “the minute you stop what you’re doing to look down, you start to wobble and sway.” And here is Saran again: “The successful (read ‘sane’) writer must navigate two worlds. She must hop around the hubbub and arc lights of quotidian life, then pull apart those red velvet curtains – carefully, for it turns out they are edged with hard wire – a and she must dive into the darkness of ropes and pulleys. She must go from one land to another without too much flesh torn in transit.”

Some of this – and the many other passages in this book about the agonies and ecstasies of writing – can sound self-important and precious, but any writer who has experienced these things will understand. (I have, and I quickly lose patience with anyone who says this kind of talk is just a way of needlessly romanticising the creative process.) And though the details of the authors’ life experiences are naturally very different, each essay makes it clear that whatever the difficulties, these writers wouldn’t have it any other way: they need to do what they are doing. (“Nervously I count how many more years I might live,” writes Kapur in her own piece, as she contemplates the possibility of not being able to write again, “How will I fill them?”)

Included here are accounts of early influences and inspirations, and anyone who grew up in the subcontinent, reading in English from a young age, will find much to relate to: for instance, both Janice Pariat and Moni Mohsin mention the effect Enid Blyton’s Famous Five had on their early reading and writing lives, despite the unfamiliarity of such things as potted meat sandwiches and galoshes, or such exclamations as “Golly!” Consequently, these pieces are also about gradual shifts in perspective and self-knowledge, about negotiating cultural identity and discovering new interests. So Namita Devidayal writes of believing in flying chairs that could transport a bored child to a magical new world, or expecting to find “little foreign elves” in the garden – but also how, years later, journalism grounded her, taught her to be respectful towards the seemingly mundane, to discover magical possibilities as a writer in everyday things. And Anita Nair relates her initial struggles to find the right voice (given that she was writing in English but telling stories set in suburban and rural India) and on the puzzlement of her first book Ladies Coupe being labelled a feminist novel when Nair herself had no such conscious ambitions for it – she was simply writing, as honestly as she could, a book of stories about women.

Of course, women writers are confronted by labels – beginning with “woman writer” – to a greater degree than men are. (Some have to deal with labels twice over: what does it mean to be a “north-eastern writer”, Pariat wonders.) And in a relatively conservative society, there are other challenges. No wonder the ghost of Virginia Woolf makes repeated appearances through this collection, with many writers alluding to her famous essay “A Room of One’s Own” – about the financial independence and the emotional and physical space a woman needs in order to write – or her sharp dismissal of the idealised “angel in the house”. But George Orwell’s “Why I Write” is referenced a few times too, which is a reminder that many of the discussion points in this book are gender-neutral ones. More than one writer underplays the distinction between “male and female literature”. “I think in some sense writers lose their sexuality when they walk into the world of words,” says Nair. “Once I sit at my table to write, I am just a writer; nothing else remains,” says Deshpande. And Sankaran amusingly incorporates this blurring of sexual identity into the form of her own piece; discussing the importance of taking a break, she says, “I need to spend some time with my eyes crossed and my tongue hanging out, scratching my balls and picking nits out of my beard”. Yes, you think – writing can do that to you!

Or, you can simply continue toggling between your many selves. During a session at a literature festival a few years ago, a (male) moderator asked the women panelists a flip, patronising question about how it felt to spend one’s time at a writing table instead of at a dressing table. The session was problematic in conception anyway - its raison d’être being the bringing together of “three female writers” even though their work didn’t have much in common - and the moderator’s question implied a clear line between the writing life and the things a woman is “supposed” to do, or expected to be interested in; that one thing excluded the other. Yet here is Amruta Patil, in her illustrated essay, divulging that even if she has a full day of working ahead, involving no human contact, she dresses up immaculately each morning, “earrings coordinated, every detail in place”. The image with this text is of a woman in a summery dress sitting at a table, a kettle of tea in the foreground, a reminder that being a female writer – or any writer – doesn’t necessarily mean letting go of one’s other identities; that you don’t have to be the stereotype of the unshaven (or unwaxed) slob, completely lost to the world.

Many women writers don’t have that option anyway, often having to juggle their work with domestic obligations – but real or figurative rooms can always be sought out. Saran describes leaving her home for her writing sanctuary each morning, against the objections of her little daughter - I pick her up and rub her nose with my nose and say, “Baby girl, I’m a writer. It appears that I’m happier when I’m writing, I’m even a better mum when I write” - and Jaishree Mishra feels guilty about completely forgotting about her child – arriving home by the school bus – thanks to an intense writing session that spanned many hours, but also admits that “All maternal and domestic concerns fell right away, inconsequential, trivial even in the face of this, my new love.” In any case, children don’t have to be made of flesh and blood: Patil describes her text and image as “monozygotic twins, born of one egg, identical of DNA, but quite apart. They run holding hands. One leads, the other gamely tries to catch up. Sometimes one steps back to allow the other centre-stage.”

Other epiphanies include Anjum Hasan finding unexpected resonance in the work and life of Pablo Neruda (“this is still part of me: an image of Neruda eating sour plums alone in a tree, thinking of a book, nestling within the experience of me on a bed, reading about Neruda eating sour plums…”) and Mohsin learning that it is possible to be deeply affected by a book like Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, but to eventually find one’s own voice in a satirical newspaper column titled “Diary of a Social Butterfly” (“The Butterfly freed me as a writer … I had always thought that if I ever wrote it would be ‘serious stuff’, and yet my most convincing fictional creation has been this ditzy airhead. But over time I have come to realize that funny is not necessarily non-serious.”)

Some of the essays here ruminate on process and rituals, on time, place, mood: Ameena Hussein recalls working not in hallowed silence but while playing music by Guns ’n Roses and Depeche Mode. Kapur’s piece is a firsthand account of the frustrating, dead-end-ridden process by which a novel may slowly find its final (or almost-final) shape – how ideas coalesce, how an incident or perspective works its way from the middle of a story to the beginning. Others look at the big picture, at the arc of English-language publishing in the subcontinent: Anuradha Marwah posits that until the late 90s, women novelists were mainly overshadowed by “Rushdiesque writing – grandiose and phallic”, and that even the space created for women’s voices “is hijacked by the market that prioritises glamour and femininity over the writers’ activist impulse against patriarchy”, while Deshpande expresses the non-activist view that a novel has no space for ideology – “that to bring an ideology into a novel, that to use a novel to send out a message, is to destroy the novel”. And Tishani Doshi points out that even a dark, self-absorbed, seemingly pessimistic poem is a gift, “an act of reclamation. It is saying, Even though I was born out of a howl in the dark I am offering you a song.”
 
All of which means that though such a book can seem circumscribed (a bunch of writers navel-gazing?), there is enough variety here in the insights, in the experiences, and in the writing itself, to make it more than worthwhile. Some pieces – Saran’s, Pariat’s, Hasan’s among them – are carefully constructed, with the rigour of a good literary essay, while others are chattier, more informal, like a free-flowing compilation of thoughts or a linear description of a writing career, but they are all candid and revealing in different ways. The one minor lack I felt (it is covered to an extent by Mohsin’s thoughts on her flighty Lahore socialite) was that of a piece by a popular, commercial writer who operates outside the ambit of “respectability”, working in such genres as the derisively named Chick Lit. In the current publishing scenario, such labels can be equally limiting (and again seem to attach themselves to women writers more than men) and the obstacles just as many, even if we sometimes convince ourselves that popular writing doesn’t require similar levels of effort or introspection.

[Also see: Ann Patchett on killing her butterfly. And an old conversation with Anita Desai, which touches on some of the issues facing a woman writer in India]

On Krishna Shastri’s Jump Cut (and notes from a humour discussion)

Here’s a paradox. A panel discussion about humour, populated by people who are funny for a living, may very possibly not be funny itself. Because it involves analysing and intellectualising something that is often analysis-resistant. Understanding the workings of comedy, and the many ways in which different people respond to it, is no easy task. No wonder Isaac Asimov once wrote a short story, “Jokester”, suggesting that humour is part of a psychological experiment being conducted on us by Godlike extraterrestrials, to study human behaviour the way we might study rats in a laboratory.

Anyway, here is the funniest thing that happened during a humour-related talk I participated in at a Chandigarh lit-fest last year: a very angry man – an acquaintance of the deceased comedian Jaspal Bhatti – bobbed up and down in his seat, banged on the chair in front of him, shook his fists at us panelists, and declaimed through a quivering moustache, “I tell you, Bhatti was NOT a comedian! He was a starrist!”

Clarity alert: he meant “satirist”. But what was really amusing was the moral indignation on display – how keen he was to defend his friend’s sullied honour, and how convinced that the very word “comedian” was a gruesome insult (though Bhatti himself, I am sure, would have had no objection to being described thus). Just a few minutes earlier, the author Krishna Shastri Devulapalli and I had been speaking about how comedy is often a thankless, underappreciated job; about literary awards rarely shortlisting funny books; about the Oscars’ reluctance to nominate comic performances even though most actors will tell you comedy is so hard to do. And now here was someone from the audience unwittingly demonstrating the point – comedy was flippant, he implied, while “satire” was respectable because it suggested social conscience and purpose.

But any sort of comedy, if well done, has a clear-sightedness that most other modes of expression don’t have. “Humour assaults us with a slice of truth,” says a character in Manu Joseph’s The Illicit Happiness of Other People. A case can be made that if you simply look at the world and record what you see, you automatically become a comedian. During our session, Devapulalli read out a passage from his novel Jump Cut in which a man named Selva – originally from a village, now living in Chennai – is required to visit a fancy store selling women’s undergarments. As Selva gapes at a pair of flimsy panties, he considers the much more durable elastic on his own underwear, “which could be cut out to make a slingshot that could kill a squirrel at twenty paces if the need arose”. A thong seems to him like a hyped version of the “komanam” worn by old men in his village. Here is an example of a funny passage that is merely showing a particular man in a situation far removed from his everyday experience. We know the kind of store this is, we can picture the “black pant-suited” salesgirl who is described as having the same glassy expression as a mannequin, and even this seemingly lowbrow situation provides food for thought: the urban reader is allowed to temporarily step outside of himself and look at things through the perplexed eyes of someone who has not grown up in a world of high-priced brands, plush malls and supercilious salespeople.

Humour can be tied to nihilism – tossing a banana peel under the feet of human self-importance, mocking the idea that there is order in the world – but it can also facilitate empathy. The Illicit Happiness of Other People is about a sad man trying to understand why his 17-year-old boy killed himself, while Jump Cut is a story about another father-son relationship, as well as an ode to the “little person”, in both life and in a cut-throat movie-making industry. These synopses don’t sound funny, but both books understand that the profound and the ridiculous coexist in our lives, and they make the reader laugh while letting us stay emotionally invested in the protagonists.

Having had firsthand experience of Krishna Shastri's sense of humour in Chandigarh, I was surprised to find that Jump Cut wasn’t as full of wisecracks and clever one-liners as I had imagined it might be (not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that sort of book). What unfolds instead is something more measured, where the idea isn’t so much to be “funny” from one paragraph to the next as to provide a light, slanted take on an essentially serious premise. The book has a prologue, set in 1992 Madras, where a boy named Ray and his sister watch the preview of a film that their father has worked on. The card they have been excitedly waiting for appears on the screen. “It says ‘Story, Screenplay and Dialogue by Vasant Raj’ in big letters that fill the screen, the drum-roll underlining their importance.” That’s the father’s name on the screen, thinks the reader, but then comes the deflating coda:

At the bottom of the screen, in barely readable letters, is the legend:

Associate: Raman

Then it is gone.

As this opening should make clear, there will be a tinge of melancholia throughout this story, even if it is largely hidden beneath the warm, good-natured tone of the writing. We never really get to “meet” the anonymous Raman in the narrative’s present tense, but the early chapters in which the adult Ray uncovers things about his deceased father are interspersed with short diary entries written by the dead man over the years: entries that reveal something of the inner world of a man who must have been taciturn and unobtrusive – a father who notices that his teenage son has a crush on a girl and also knows that he must never let on that he has noticed; a widower who drily notes that “the editor of real life can be quite abrupt” as he recalls how suddenly and randomly his wife was taken from him.

Jump Cut touched a chord for me because I have been thinking about the hidden or unnoticed cogs in the filmmaking process (some recent posts: on the documentary The Human Factor, about the neglected musicians who played in orchestras for Hindi-film composers; and about the actor MacMohan, who played Sambha in Sholay), and I liked the divide the book sets up between the grand, “filmi” narrative and the mundane, unglamorous way in which things usually happen in the real world.

That said, the real world can make fiction seem feeble at times. A few months ago a writer and stand-up comedian wrote a blog post about being asked to stop a show midway because he was “mocking Indians” in front of a non-desi audience. (The provocation? Relatively innocuous, and accurate, jokes about Indian drivers honking at traffic signals.) Reading that post, I pictured all the “serious men” huffing and puffing, getting all hot under their collar and chastising the poor comedian for offending their sentiments and for being “unpatriotic”. In a world where skins keep getting thinner, being funny for a living can be tricky. But the ability to laugh at yourself and at your holiest cows is one of the essential steps on the road to growing up, and this is a lesson well learnt in the company of skilled comedy writers – so what if they don’t win all those big literary awards.

[Here is a related post about "tasteless humour", with an anecdote I had thought of using at the Chandigarh lit-fest - the Punjabi audience may have appreciated it - before chickening out]

Pop goes the epic: Draupadi in High Heels, Karna’s Wife and other new-age retellings

[Yes, here I go obsessing about you-know-what again, this time for the Indian Quarterly, and with a focus on two new novels with Karna in a starring part. This is a slightly different version of the piece that appeared in the magazine]

-----------

In the glossy new TV version of the Mahabharata, there is a scene where the princess Gandhari blindfolds herself so she can join her soon-to-be-husband Dhritarashtra in the world of the unsighted. This is among the most dramatic early moments in Vyasa's epic, and is usually presented in exalted terms - the princess proclaiming her resolution; the flamboyant, and decisive, binding of the cloth around her eyes - which is why I was intrigued by the new show’s handling of the scene. Much of the shot is filmed as point of view: we see Gandhari holding the blindfold, but then we watch it through her eyes as it comes closer and closer to them, eventually blurring the whole screen. The effect is akin to a handheld-camera horror film, complete with scary music and agitated breathing on the soundtrack. An earlier episode has established that the princess is afraid of the dark and awakens in a cold sweat if the wind blows out the dozens of diyas in her room. What she is now doing to herself feels much more immediate.

One doesn’t have to read too much into this, of course. High production values and reasonably thoughtful script notwithstanding, this Mahabharata, telecast five days a week, is very much aimed at viewers of daily soaps – which means presenting incidents in mundane, homely terms, stretching scenes out endlessly, and setting up episode-closing cliffhangers. The blindfold scene is a set-up for the next, hyper-dramatic sequence where Gandhari enters the Kuru sabha for her wedding, and viewers – along with the other characters in the story – get to see her with her eyes covered for the first time.

But the scene works on another level too, by showing a majestic act in human terms. Rather than a self-assured princess reaching for the Grand Gesture with her thoughts on posterity, this is a scared, impetuous girl who may have made a decision without realising its implications (and of course, there will be major implications for the story). It makes Gandhari easier to relate to, sympathise with or chastise, and it also ties in with what a number of recently published books have been trying to do – to make these old stories more accessible, with results that are inventive and facile in equal measure.

Such retellings of epics are not in themselves a new phenomenon. There have been countless “perspective” versions across the Indian languages, some notable ones being from major writers such as MT Vasudevan Nair (Randaamoozham, translated from Malayalam into English by Prem Panicker for his blog, and then by Gita Krishnankutty for Harper Collins) and Shivaji Sawant (the Marathi classic Mrityunjay). But a majority of those works were in the realm of literary fiction, and aimed at readers who had a deep enough knowledge of the epic to want to explore alternate narrative possibilities. What has been happening recently is a little different: stories from the Mahabharata and Ramayana are being revisited in ways that would appeal to a wider range of readers, and in the garb of fast-paced genre fiction.

And inevitably, certain characters have special appeal for the new generation of bards. Prominent among them is Karna, half-brother of the Pandavas, who is abandoned as an infant, raised by low-caste foster parents and discovers his true identity too late. One of ancient literature’s most compelling tragic heroes, Karna is a notably "modern" figure even in straightforward Mahabharata translations. His presence continually runs against the very assumptions of the period – such as the “God-granted” division of people into social hierarchies by their birth rather than their capabilities – and raises uncomfortable questions for the other characters as well as for the reader. (What happens when a person comes up against consistently hostile circumstances, or when personal dharma collides with what is perceived as the greater good?) The new TV show gives Karna rousing speeches where, apparently addressing the camera directly, he punctures the hubris of the high-born people around him, including one where he sharply tells the Brahmin teacher Drona that there is no such thing as a divine or magical birth, because every birth is a wondrous event for the parents concerned.

An earlier issue of this magazine carried an essay about literary crushes. As a child, traversing the vast landscape of the Mahabharata, I was obsessed with Karna, and could see him as the template for the angry young men played by Amitabh Bachchan in films like Trishul. Reading C Rajagopalachari’s translation of the Mahabharata aloud to my mother, I would sometimes excise sentences that showed Karna in a poor light. In my defence, I was all of ten years old; but it means I can relate to the many attempts now being made to turn Karna into an almost conventional, vanilla hero rather than a deeply complex person capable of extremes of anger and spite.

My literary crush was a platonic one, but two new books, both written by women who clearly feel strongly about Karna, explore his possibilities as a romantic hero. In these novels, Karna – about whose love life we learn almost nothing in the original Mahabharata – has transformed into an irresistible, golden-eyed (or blue-eyed) hunk, a sensitive new-age metrosexual, a darkly mysterious stranger who is essentially good-hearted and who might be saved by the love of the right woman. Both books begin with the heroine’s first glimpse of this man, whose physical features and personality are described in near-fetishistic terms. A strong strain of wish-fulfillment runs through them, and both are roughly classifiable (if you like classifying books) as “commercial” or “mass-market” fiction, though in my view they are very different in quality.

The less interesting of the two, Aditi Kotwal’s Draupadi in High Heels – an entry in Penguin India’s Metro Reads imprint for popular fiction – centres on a poor little rich girl named Deeya Panchal who, in the midst of jet-setting around the world, socialising with the likes of Sonam Kapoor at fashion shows and brooding about ex-boyfriends, discovers that her life has uncanny parallels with the mythological Draupadi's. For one thing, she is in degrees of romantic or potentially romantic entanglements with three suave, business-family brothers, the modern-day versions of the Pandavas (“Uggh. I suddenly felt like a doll which was being passed around from one brother to the other”). She also confides important matters to a close friend named Krish Gopinathan (Krishna), and is drawn to a handsome social outsider named Karan, whose origins are “shrouded in mystery”.

Though the framework here is the genre often derisively called chick-lit (“brat-lit” might be more accurate for this novel), the central idea has been explored before. The possibility of an unarticulated connection between Karna and Draupadi – both fiery, headstrong people – has persisted for a while in folklore and in regional extrapolations of the epic; it was there in Pratibha Ray’s celebrated Oriya novel Yagnaseni, in P K Balakrishnan’s Malayalam Ini Njan Urangatte (translated into English as “Now Let me Sleep”) and more recently in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions, which ended in a bohemian post-war Heaven where Draupadi is finally free to express her real feelings for Karna.

In contrast, the Deeya of Draupadi in High Heels goes about her work on terra firma. She not only chooses Karan to be her life partner, but also helps him discover his real identity. (He was the product of a hushed pre-marital affair involving a socialite and her German boyfriend in England!) The book’s final two sentences – “As I looked into his light-brown eyes which glowed with abundant love, I realized that a man with a golden heart like his deserved all the happiness and acceptance in this world. And I was so glad that I got to share these moments with him!” – should tell you everything you need to know about the mawkishness of the prose, as should the supposedly descriptive passages (“What fascinated and captivated me the most was his face – which was the most perfect that I had ever seen!” and “Some strong, indefinable feeling swept through my body and found its place at the bottom of my stomach”). 

But they will also tell you that this is an attempt to give Karna a happy ending, to retrospectively correct the wrongs done to this anti-hero – and in fact, this impulse is common to many Mahabharata-retellers. In 1991, the acclaimed film director Mani Rathnam made Thalapathi, with Rajnikanth as a modern-day Karna, which ends with the protagonist achieving validation and self-worth. “[As a reader] I’ve always wished that he lived on,” Rathnam told Baradwaj Rangan in one of the interviews in the book Conversations with Mani Ratnam, “So much has gone wrong. There’s so much stacked against him. Maybe there’s a bit of hope, a bit of optimism in this, but I felt that his death would look too doomed, too tragic.”

The other new Karna-as-romantic-hero book is Kavita Kane’s Karna’s Wife, redundantly sub-titled “The Outcast’s Queen”. Despite its weak points – flat dialogue, for one – this is unquestionably a more serious-intentioned work than Kotwal’s, and founded on a closer psychological understanding of the epic. (Kane has probably read her Mrityunjay too.) The protagonist here is a freshly created character, a princess named Uruvi who becomes Karna’s second wife after performing an action that is exactly the opposite of Draupadi’s: she rejects Arjuna, whom everyone expected her to marry, in favour of the intense social outcast.

A problem with some “perspective” versions of the Mahabharata is that they turn their protagonists into near-omniscient narrators – The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata, for instance, is part-narrated by an Ashwatthama who seems blessed with a panoramic view of everything that is happening to all the other characters. The same charge could be leveled at Karna’s Queen: the fictional Uruvi conveniently happens to have grown up around the elders of Hastinapura and is even the foster-daughter of Kunti (mother of Karna and the Pandavas), which means she is privy to all sorts of information. The very opening page is a description of her first view of Karna when he challenges the Kuru princes during their competition; Uruvi has a ringside seat here, right next to Kunti, and she chirps on in modern slang, providing such commentary as “Bhima is downright mean!” and “Ma, please, it’s fair enough!”

At this stage I was ready to dismiss Karna’s Wife as another facile retelling, but reading on I found points of interest in it. Uruvi – even though she is part of Karna’s life and is affected by his actions– can be viewed as a sutradhaar figure who is essentially outside the narrative, a stand-in for the author. It is almost as if Kane traveled in a time machine to Hastinapura (think of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court) and then set about confronting major characters like Bheeshma, Kunti, Duryodhana, and Karna himself, and either telling them off or getting a clearer understanding of their feelings. If one were to be really generous to this book, one might say that what she has attempted (consciously or otherwise) is a form of literary and social criticism – revisiting the story as a 21st century person, bringing modern morality to it, and doing this not from a safe distance but as an insider. (In an interview, Kane was asked which character from the Mahabharata she would like to meet and speak with. “Karna, of course!” she replied, “And I would have done exactly what Uruvi did.”)

If Karna is a dashing lover in these books, the new TV show also presents him in terms that resemble the Western comic-book superhero. Poetic licence has been taken with the impenetrable armour and earrings attached to his body, gifts from his divine father, the Sun God. In a touch that may remind you of Clark Kent turning into Superman in the phone booth, the new serial has the protective armour making its appearance only in specific moments of crisis; it then spreads across Karna’s muscular abdomen, which, seen in close up, resembles that of modern superheroes in full gear. The parallel with Superman, who is encased as a baby in a protective bubble by his father Jor-El, is hard to resist. And of course, the armour will also turn out to be Karna’s Kryptonite when he has to give it away. All of which may be a way of reminding oneself that the Superman story is itself a modern myth that is derivative of ancient ones. The circle completes itself here.

****

It’s worth asking why the epics are such an endlessly replenishing mine for contemporary writers. One obvious answer is that these are rich stories with multiple strands, forever open to new interpretations and psychological analyses. A more cynical answer would be that they provide lazy or unimaginative authors with a ready-made template: the plot, structure and character types are largely in place, and the embellishments (or twists, as in Draupadi choosing Karna over Arjuna) are all that are needed.

Everything hinges then on the quality of execution, on what new ideas are introduced, and how convincingly they are injected into an existing palimpsest. One of the more notable (in theory at least) attempts to shift the epic to a modern setting was in Sandipan Deb’s gangster novel The Last War, which set the Mahabharat in the Mumbai underworld, casting Arjuna and Karna as Jeet and Karl, two expert hitmen primed for a final showdown. It was a good idea to move the story to the Bombay of the last 60 years, letting the many familiar dramatic episodes play out against the backdrop of a fast-changing city, with occasional references to such real-life events as cricket match-fixing. (In this version, Yudhisthira goes to jail when he is tricked and implicated in a cricket-betting controversy.) And there is an irreverence built into the book's very fabric: the very first chapter has the modern versions of Krishna and Arjuna faux-philosophising over glasses of Scotch, and all the characters are basically thugs.

But this also raises questions about Deb’s decision to lift plot details and even dialogues wholesale, and to clumsily stick them into situations where they become anachronistic. For instance, the episode of Arjuna seeing only the eye of the wooden bird he has to shoot at is presented exactly as it is in the original, except that of course he is using a rifle. After Draupadi (called Jahn here) is nearly raped, she swears that she won't tie or oil her hair until she has soaked it in her assailant’s blood. Besides, the prose includes several pretentious references to “dharma” or duty. Deeply ambiguous as this concept already is in the original Mahabharata, it is rendered meaningless in a situation where everyone is operating outside the law.

However, one might note that even in this amoral version – where there are no real standards of “good” and “evil” – the Karna character is the one who secretly makes the phone call that helps preserve Draupadi’s honour. It seems that even the author of a hard-boiled underworld rendition of the epic can’t resist whitewashing Karna, almost to the point where his complexities are siphoned away.

That’s another feature common to contemporary retellings though: the need to subvert conventional ideas about the “bad guys”, or to reveal the shaky moral foundations of the “good guys”. Among recent books, there are Anand Neelakantan’s Asura and Ajaya, which eschew the history-as-told-by-the-victors narrative to present the Ramayana and Mahabharata through the eyes of Ravana and the Kauravas respectively. The Rama-Sita relationship has been thoughtfully dealt with in such modern-lens retellings as Samhita Arni’s The Missing Queen (a “speculative thriller” about a journalist’s search for Rama’s missing wife after the war with Lanka) and Sita Sings the Blues, an animated film by the American Nina Paley, who intersperses episodes from the Ramayana with the story of Paley’s own estrangement from her husband.

And always, there is the story of Surpanakha, Ravana’s sister who becomes the catalyst for events in the Ramayana after she is rebuffed and disfigured by Rama and Lakshmana. The incident – though presented in terms of the good guys giving a demoness her just desserts – is an inherently ambiguous one, and can be interpreted in terms of gender-directed or caste-directed violence. This has been done many times in modern fiction (an example being Amit Chaudhuri’s spare, uncompromising short story “An Infatuation”), but one of the most enjoyable Surpanakha retellings I have read is a piece in the anthology Breaking the Bow, which collects speculative fiction inspired by the Ramayana. Kuzhali Manickavel’s “The Ramayana as an American Reality Television Show” is a clever account of how the Surpanakha episode may have unfolded in the voyeuristic-exhibitionistic cyber-age, with statements from the aggrieved rakshasi’s blog, the hysterical social-media reactions by her fans and detractors, and Twitter ripostes by the “Real Rama”. It adds up to a commentary not just on the ancient epic (it is easy for contemporary writers to poke holes into the social mores and pomposities of an earlier era) but also on the vagaries of our own time.

In any case, the past few months alone have brought us romantic Karnas, a gangster Mahabharata and the Ramayana as science fiction and thriller, along with prolonged daytime soaps where one might conceivably, in future episodes, get to see Duryodhana helping his son with his Algebra homework. And all this in addition to the ever-growing corpus of books by Amish Tripathi, Krishna Udayashankar, Ashok Banker and others, where Indian mythology is retold in a style resembling 20th century Western fantasy from Tolkien onwards. Or Amruta Patil's beautifully illustrated visual retelling, Adi Parva. But why stop there? Other genres and tropes are yet to be explored. Personally I am toying with the idea of getting onto the bandwagon and fashioning two of my personal obsessions – tennis and irreverent humour – into Mahabharata novellas. One of them would stage the Kurukshetra war as a series of Grand Slam matches, with the Karna-Arjuna battle played out in the manner of a Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal epic in a Wimbledon final. (As Orwell said, sport is war minus the shooting. Such a story would require no “arrows can be injurious to health” signs.) The other would cast Groucho Marx as a non-sequitur-spewing Krishna, confounding Arjuna and everyone else on the battlefield with a modern Gita that begins “These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.” Like Groucho, the epic is whatever you want it to be.

-------------------

[Some related posts: the Rashomon-like world of the Mahabharata; Iravati Karve's Yuganta; The Palace of Illusions; The Last War. The PDF of Prem Panicker's Bhimsen is here. And something about the Karna-as-Rafa illustration that went with the piece.]