"The freedom to say unpopular and shocking things"

Today, one of India’s greatest novelists, Salman Rushdie – a writer whose work enshrines doubt as a necessary and valuable ethical position – has been prevented from addressing this festival by those whose certainty leads them to believe that they have the right to kill anyone who opposes them [...] There are many rights for which we should fight, but the right to protection from offense is not one of them. Freedom of speech is a foundational freedom, on which all others depend. Freedom of speech means the freedom to say unpopular, even shocking things. Without it, writers can have little impact on the culture.

From the statement read out by Hari Kunzru during his session at the Jaipur Literature Festival two days ago. Also read Hari’s post about the events of that day, including the short Satanic Verses readings by him and Amitava Kumar, and the subsequent intimation that they might be in serious legal trouble if they stayed on in India.

I didn’t go to Jaipur this year, but – like everyone I know who cares about freedom of speech and worries about the increasing hegemony of the easily offended (the "bleeding-heart illiberals" as Rukun Advani cleverly put it in another context recently) – I’ve been feeling very dispirited about the events of the past few days. (This report about the police fabricating a terrorism threat was particularly mindboggling, but also completely believable.)

Earlier today in Jaipur, Nilanjana helped organise a petition to unban The Satanic Verses; I’m sure an online version of the petition will be up soon, do look out for it. Meanwhile, here are some relevant links: a fine piece in The Hindu about “the slow-motion disintegration” of a secular state; a clarification by JLF co-organiser William Dalrymple; and Salil Tripathi on India's "sepulchral silence".

Update: the online petition is here. Please sign and spread the word.

How to write about films - a workshop

Advance notice about a two-day workshop I’m conducting on film criticism at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in Mumbai next month. Dates: February 11 and 12. Time: 10 AM to 5 PM each day, with an hour off for lunch. Venue: the Bombay Natural History Society auditorium.

We are looking at a maximum of 25 attendees, and one thing I’m very keen about is that the participants have a serious interest in cinema and in the many issues surrounding film-related writing (even if they don’t intend to become professional critics themselves). As far as possible, we want to avoid a situation where people saunter in for a few minutes and then saunter out again as they become bored with film-theory talk or with screenings from old or “obscure” movies. And that’s one reason I’m putting up this post: because I know this blog’s readers include many movie buffs who might be interested in a workshop of this sort. This will hopefully be an interactive process, not a one-way “lecture”.

I’m still putting together notes for the workshop (and probably will continue doing this right up to the day it begins!), but here’s a quick and incomplete list of what you can expect:

- Thoughts on different types of film writing (from short-form mainstream reviews to long-form criticism, academic writing, trade writing etc), the contexts in which each exists, and the functions that each can serve.

- The qualities of an ideal film reviewer/critic.

- The important difference between story and storytelling – the “what” and the “how”; thoughts on how to read a film.

- Discussions on various aspects of screen craft, including acting, cinematography, writing, editing and music.

- The Auteur Theory and the many arguments around it: the differences between “personal” and “commercial” cinema, and the points where the two things intersect.

- How style or technique can enhance a narrative, and the approaches of different directors to the same subject matter (e.g. cinematic treatments of Shakespeare by directors ranging from Kurosawa to Polanski to Vishal Bhardwaj).

- A couple of writing exercises.

Fuelling these discussions will be short screenings from a variety of movies – both Indian films like Sholay, Charulata, Jaane bhi do Yaaro and Maqbool as well as international films made by such directors as Hawks, Godard, Welles, Ozu, Tati and Scorsese. I’ll try to pack in as many clips as possible, because there is really no better way to discuss movies and how to write about them.

Anyone who wants more details, feel free to write to me at jaiarjun@gmail.com.

Nightmare of Ecstasy, a good book about a very bad director

There’s a lovely scene in the 1994 film Ed Wood – a romanticised biography of the legendary “bad movie” director Edward Wood Jr – where Wood meets his hero Orson Welles. The sequence is fictional but it has a poetic aptness. Here is a man who made a series of eye-poppingly terrible movies (including the one facilely called the Worst Film of All Time, Plan 9 from Outer Space) and here is one of cinema’s greatest artists, the director of some of the most influential movies ever made – and yet they are kindred spirits in some ways: they share a boyish passion for the form and its possibilities, and their personal visions are constantly being messed with by other people who lack that passion.

The differences are more revealing though. Welles once mused (perhaps in an attempt to cheer himself up) that the absence of limitations was the enemy of art; that good art usually came out of constraints, not from unlimited freedoms. In Wood’s case, the many constraints (though they never produced anything resembling art) are what gave his story a romantic sheen. If he had received big-studio funding for scripts early in his career, his incompetence would quickly have been exposed and he would probably have ended up a tiny footnote in Hollywood’s long list of has-beens and never-weres. Instead, he independently made a number of barely financed, barely written D-grade movies, and some of them developed cult followings. Unwatchable as most of them are, they remain a mighty testament to what can happen when incredible zeal meets an equally incredible lack of talent. (“I am the patron saint of the mediocrities!” cries the composer Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, painfully aware that despite his lifelong love for music he has none of Mozart’s talent. But compared to Ed Wood, even Shaffer’s Salieri was a genius.)

Last week a friend gifted me the book on which Ed Wood was based – Rudolph Grey’s Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D Wood Jr. It’s a remarkable biography, being entirely made up of reminiscences by people who knew Wood, and with no authorial intervention or commentary (apart from a short Introduction). These reminiscences are presented in the style of a book-length conversation – with each quote preceded by the interviewee’s name – and this patchwork structure seems to mimic the disjointedness of Wood’s films, which were full of individual scenes that had seemingly little to do with one another.

Reading the very first page, you dive headlong into his life and career: you’re exposed to a flurry of opinions by various people, some of whose identities are not obvious (an index at the end explains who all the interviewees are). But the chatty tone turns out to be very appropriate for this material. Consider this deadpan, hillbilly quote from Wood’s mother: “Junior was born October 10, 1924, at 115 Franklin Street, off the main highway. Yep.” I love the scrupulous inclusion of that “Yep” at the end.

Wood spent most of his life and career off the main highway too. A man of many fetishes – cinema and angora sweaters being just two of the major ones – he thought up outlandish scenarios involving zombies, alien invaders and cross-dressers and wrote laughably trite scripts for them (in his universe they might all be found in the same living room or cemetery, looking confusedly at each other). He shot on minuscule budgets, with discarded props and stock footage; little wonder that this book contains several matter-of-fact utterances like “The octopus had to be covered so that the broken tentacle wouldn’t show.”

The stories and perspectives vary wildly (“Ed Wood was a crazy genius, way ahead of his time,” says one interviewee. “Ed had poor taste and was undisciplined. [His movies were] dingy, third-rate, fringe-type films,” says another) and this gives the book the feel of a diabolical jigsaw puzzle that resists completion. As Grey writes in his Introduction: “Conflicting versions of biographical incident are often charged with meaning and moment. Discovering the objective ‘truth’ of an individual’s life may be impossible beyond a schematizing of life events.” I think Wood himself would have smiled approvingly at these words – not least because they might easily be from the promotional material for one of his favourite movies, Welles’ Citizen Kane, the story of a futile attempt to understand a single life.

P.S. An inside-page blurb for the book – by Phantom of the Movies – reads “The literary even of the year” instead of “The literary event of the year”. It was most disappointing to discover that this was merely a typo, not a deliberate attempt at copying the earnest ineptitude of a Wood movie!

[Did a version of this for my Sunday Guardian column]

OMCAR conference on social media

I'll be speaking for a bit about my experiences with social media (this blog, basically) at the OMCAR 2012 conference at the India Islamic Cultural Centre, Lodhi Estate on Jan 13. The programme schedule and registration details are on the official website.

The maali who weeded out myth

[From my Sunday Guardian books column]

Early in A Gardener in the Wasteland, a new graphic novel based on the work of the 19th century social reformer Jotiba Phule, there is a deliberately provocative panel about caste discrimination. 1840s Poona, the text tells us, was “a hellhole of a town. A mob runs it: a Brahman mob”. The words and the imagery evoke the lawless American Old West, preparing the ground for the advent of Phule as a Wyatt Earp-like figure who will help clean things up. The drawings show decadent, hoodlum-like Brahmins (“Pass the Gangajal, will you,” one says to another, crudely probing his ear with his finger) lording it over the “lower castes”. One of them – shamelessly usurping the peasants’ hard-earned money – is depicted with bags of loot and a bank robber’s eye-mask.

These depictions can be mildly discomfiting even to readers who unconditionally denounce casteism (I admit to being briefly taken aback when I first saw them, and a friend who flipped through the book thought some of the content was extreme), but subtlety is beside the point here: this book is based largely on Phule’s polemical tract Gulamgiri (Slavery), which was an attack not just on the caste system but on the very foundations of the Brahmin way of life. He was quite the abrasive, first-strike radical, definitely not above expressing strident views if it helped make a larger point about social hypocrisy. Consider his skewering of the creation myth about the four castes being born from Lord Brahma’s mouth, arms, groin and legs (did Brahma menstruate in all four places, he asked sarcastically), or his irreverent deconstructions of the Vishnu avatars. (The Matsya avatar, he said, was a pointer that the invading Aryans came by sea.) Some of his arguments may seem muddled today, but one must never forget the context in which they arose, or the righteous anger that fuelled them. As an example of whimsical means being used to achieve a desired goal, I personally find them less objectionable than Mahatma Gandhi's suggestion that the Bihar earthquake was divine punishment for Untouchability.

Deeply influenced by Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Phule was sceptical of the idea that freedom from British rule would be a good result for all Indians; surely the non-Brahmins would be worse off than before? Writer Srividya Natarajan and artist Aparajita Ninan juxtapose his ideas with their own modern-day journey towards understanding the issues around caste discrimination, and with other historical struggles such as the Civil Rights Movement and the French revolutions. (One drawing based on the Delacroix painting “Liberty Leading the People” has a dark-complexioned Liberty followed by a very motley group of people ranging from Martin Luther King to Karl Marx to the Buddha!)

There are minor weaknesses in the narrative, among them the unevenness of the role played by Jotirao’s wife Savitribai. The authors wanted to stress her importance in her husband’s life – and as an activist-visionary in her own right – but because there is so little historical information on her, they were reluctant to fully incorporate her into the story, and she ends up making filler appearances (to inform us, for instance, that her husband too had subscribed to the Hindu way as a young man). Another passage that didn’t quite work for me was the paralleling of the Parashuram story (genocidal, axe-wielding maniac slaughters his enemies wholesale) with the 2002 Gujarat massacre. The intent here was probably to suggest the potential for violent oppression when a group of people becomes too powerful, but the linking is problematic because it implies a specific strain of brutality in the DNA of Hinduism – when in fact any form of isolationism (or religious fundamentalism) can cause similar atrocities.

Ultimately this book is a reminder that no old story is sacrosanct; that “history, like myth, changes depending on who writes it and who reads it”. We have had a few such reminders in recent times, but the furore over A K Ramanujan’s Ramayana essay suggests that we need more (and dare one say it, perhaps a few of the liberal voices need to get as shrill as those of their opponents). A Gardener in the Wasteland is also a useful introduction to Phule – it has certainly motivated me to get hold of a Gulamgiri translation soon. For quicker access to some of his writings, you can try the excerpts included in Ramachandra Guha’s fine anthology Makers of Modern India, including the intense essay “The Condition of the Peasantry”. (An interview with Guha about that book is here.)

Fizz in film: how Coca Colonised cinema

In-film advertising is a common thing these days – much too common (I sometimes fall asleep in a hall even before a movie begins, in the time it takes for the list of sponsors and media partners to display). But what happens when a brand is so big and so representative of a way of life that its very appearance in a film – however fleeting – can add layers to the narrative? Take the case of Coca-colonization, a term that links the world’s most famous soft drink with American cultural imperialism (and with enterprise, vitality, crassness and all the other supposedly American qualities that infuriate and fascinate people around the world).

Coca-Cola and cinema are roughly the same age (the drink was first bottled in 1894, a year that also saw the first copyrighted American film, Fred Ott’s Sneeze) and they have had many pleasing meetings over the past century. Once in a while, Coke has been central to a film’s plot – Billy Wilder’s One Two Three has an executive trying to get the drink into the Russian market during the Cold War years – but more often it has made humorous cameo appearances, as in Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin! where a bed-ridden German woman, unaware of the fall of the Berlin Wall, is startled by an enormous Coca-Cola banner outside her window.

In movies by directors as different as Jean-Luc Godard and Frank Capra, Coke has been used to denounce or celebrate aspects of Americana. Sometimes both things have been done in the same sequence: in I am Cuba (which I wrote about here), a distraught farmer sets fire to his crop when he learns that his land is being sold to capitalists; but simultaneously, in a joyous scene set at a nearby bar, we see his children drinking Coca-Cola and dancing at a jukebox playing rock music.

A lovely early sequence in the 1946 British film A Matter of Life and Death takes place in a black-and-white Heaven where deceased soldiers from battlefields everywhere (rugged Sikhs and excitable Frenchmen among them) are just arriving. When a group of Americans burst in, the background music becomes loud and strident, almost as in a radio commercial. The soldiers survey this strange new place, then point excitedly at something; the camera draws back to reveal a Coke machine, and the Yanks are feeling right at home again.



In a film that is largely about the differences between the English and the Americans (and the need to come together for a common cause during WWII), this good-natured but wary scene suggests the ambivalent attitude of the former Empire to the brash young country that was about to become the next superpower. ("Officer's quarters, of course," says one of the armymen, Coke bottle still in hand, to Heaven's receptionist. "We're all the same up here, Captain," she replies stiffly.)

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I confess to not having seen the 1950s Hindi film Miss Coca Cola, but the oldest instance I know of the use of Coke branding in a non-English-language movie is in the Ozu classic Late Spring (made in 1949, which was coincidentally the year Coca-Cola came to India for the first time). It’s just a two-second shot – as the heroine Noriko cycles with a male friend, we see a Coke ad in the foreground – but a notable one in a movie made just a few years after the war, and by a director who was known for calmly observing his society’s gradual shifts toward a more westernised way of life. (Here is a post about another later Ozu film Good Morning, in which television comes to Japan in the 1950s.)


My favourite cinematic Coke moments though are the ones that align comedy to subtle social observation. In the uproarious The Gods Must be Crazy, Kalahari bushmen discover an empty Coca-Cola bottle that introduces them to the concept of personal property; when this ferments feelings of envy and possessiveness, they decide that the ghastly object must be chucked off the edge of the world. But an equally funny – and more caustic – reference to Coke as a symbol of the Capitalist Way came in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. With the nuclear destruction of the world looming, a British group captain named Mandrake must get a crucial code across to the US president. He needs loose change for the phone booth, so he asks an American colonel, Guano, to destroy a nearby Coca-Cola machine and get a few coins out.

“That’s private property,” Guano bristles, “You’ll have to answer to the Coca-Cola company!”

The words are said with such reverence that there’s no missing the point: even at a time like this, corporate profit gets right of way. And when the Coke machine is eventually shot open, it’s almost like an apocalyptic prefiguring – because not long after this, the film ends with the planet blowing up. What we thought was just a fizzy drink turned out to be a cornerstone of our civilisation.

[If you remember any other notable Coke scenes in movies, please share them here]

Felanee: An Assamese tale, tarnished by drab storytelling

[This is from my Sunday Guardian books column. Also in the latest issue: this fine review by Aishwarya Subramanian of a new Ramayana retelling]

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Arupa Patangia Kalita’s The Story of Felanee (English translation by Deepika Phukan) is a novel about a woman who spends much of her life being buffeted by the winds of ethnic violence in Assam. This is promising material given the relative meagerness of English-language fiction from that state (and especially, the lack of writing about the sufferings of Bengali-speaking migrants in the 1970s and 80s), but I was disappointed by the dryness of the telling. Little thought is given to novelistic structure or flow, and the prose mainly follows the arrangement “This happened. Then this happened. And immediately after that, this happened.” (Sample: The boys departed. All was quiet. Suddenly she felt warm. There was a splitting sound. The dry heap right on top was on fire!)

In certain contexts this sort of writing can be very effective. It can, for instance, be used to convey horrors so profound that the only decent way to express them is through a deadpan narrative (or one that discerningly builds towards an emotional crescendo, as in William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice). But the inertia in the early chapters of Felanee doesn’t seem harnessed to a larger cause, it’s merely stultifying, and I’m not sure if this is a weakness in the original writing or in the translation. The story arc is odd too: the first, ten-page chapter is a static account of the lives of Felanee’s grandparents and then her parents; the chapter ends with the newborn baby girl being rescued, and before we know it Felanee is grown up and herself the mother of a seven-year-old boy. It’s at this point that the major action of the novel begins (with the agitations of the late 70s, which uproot Felanee and her family) but the meandering structure does little to create empathy for the book’s protagonist, or to even give us the impression that we know her.

I found these flaws instructive because they are reminders of the effort needed to create good fiction “based on real-life events” (and another reminder that story and storytelling are two different beasts). Many terrible things happen in Felanee: it contains descriptions of people being skinned alive, their fingers fed to dogs; of baby corpses split down the middle; of entire villages being massacred. There is no question that real people have had such horrors visited on them – in Assam, as elsewhere - but even the most responsive reader can become inured to a sequence of tragedies presented in the style of a textbook. Insensitive though this might sound, it isn’t always enough to know that ghastly things really happened - a good novel (and most good narrative non-fiction for that matter) has to make the reader invest in its characters. The more I read Felanee, the more I thought about an aphorism tossed off by Teju Cole at the Goa literary festival: “If it is well-written, it is true. If it is poorly written, it is a lie.”

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In fairness, the narrative does pick up after the first 50 or 60 pages: as it becomes more conversation-driven, Felanee and the other characters – mainly women from the refugee camps who are in the same predicament as her – feel a little more fleshed out. There are some strong pen portraits – such as one of a shrunken old woman with a prolapsed uterus – along with sharp reminders of how removed these lives are from the mainstream Indian experience. (When Felanee hears about the killing of the Prime Minister – Indira Gandhi – she can only think about this distant, unfamiliar woman in terms of her own life and reference points: “Who could have killed her? And for what? Could she have had enemies? What would her children do now? Did she have a husband, or parents?”)

But the missteps in the book’s first few chapters cast a long shadow, and even as I list the strengths I feel like the faux-objective reviewer who is trying too hard to be “balanced”. Felanee may have something to offer a reader seeking a strictly functional account of Assamese insurgency and militancy. It might work – just about – as a non-fiction book where the main aim is to provide a glimpse of a historical moment. But it isn’t what I would call a good novel.