Sound-shadows and autobiographies - on The Essential Ved Mehta

[Did this review-profile for The Caravan, about a writer I have a lot of regard for (though I find it hard to read too much of his work at one go, for reasons mentioned in the piece). The magazine version is here]

Among the excerpts in the new anthology The Essential Ved Mehta is a passage from the 1982 memoir Vedi, where Mehta recalls his childhood in a school for the blind. The school principal, attempting to gather material on how the inner worlds of visually impaired people differed from those of the sighted, would call the children in by turn and ask them to relate their dreams. Central to the effect of the passage is the reader’s awareness that Ved, having lost his vision at age three, may have a dim memory of colours, and that his reference to a white-and-brown dog has slightly thrown off the principal. But equally vivid is the child’s incentive for “telling a dream” that might prove useful: the reward of a sweet from a jar in the office. He recalls praying that the candy that fell into his hand would be the long-lasting orange one (“if I kept the sweet in the inside of my cheek for some time, it would stamp its sugary impression there, and I could taste the orangy sweetness long after I’d finished”) rather than the lemonish one, which was nice enough but melted quickly.

This collection is a little like that jar, but with the distribution of sweets happily skewed in favour of the orange ones that have lasting value. The few pieces that make for pleasant reading without necessarily lingering in one’s mind afterward are the ones that would have been topical and urgent in their time: an account of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, another piece about the Indian media’s posthumous deification of Sanjay Gandhi, both written for the New Yorker during Mehta’s three-decade-long stint there. But there is much in The Essential Ved Mehta to remind us of what an important writer Mehta has been. The 22 excerpts here, taken from most of his 26 published books, with his introductions putting each piece in context, add up to a fine primer—no mean achievement given the length and whimsicality of a career that has seen Mehta write about such subjects as theology, politics, history and, perhaps most notably and enduringly, about himself.

Mehta turns 80 this March. Exactly 60 years ago, as a student in California, he began writing his first book Face to Face, about his life up to that point: his time at a boarding school (which turned out to be more like an orphanage) in central Bombay’s Dadar, his return to Lahore, his admission—after dozens of unsuccessful applications elsewhere —into the Arkansas School for the Blind, and his moving to the US in 1949, gradually settling into a world where towns and roads were laid out in an orderly way, traffic rules followed, and an unsighted boy had a chance of becoming self-reliant and feeling useful.

Despite the apparent limitedness of its subject, Face to Face now has sufficient heft—both on its own terms and as a drum-roll for a long and honourable career—to have just been republished in a Penguin Modern Classics edition, along with three other Mehta books. It holds up remarkably well as a coming-of-age tale, a record of a family and community affected by Partition, and an account of constantly negotiating the unfamiliar (arriving in Bombay, the barely five-year-old Ved, already disoriented and sad, is addressed first in Marathi, then in English, neither of which he understands; he lands in America 10 years later having not eaten anything on the long flight because of his embarrassment about being unable to use a knife and fork). And there is a “news peg” too, if you insist on one: before he left for the US, 15-year-old Ved was invited to the residence of Prime Minister Nehru, an episode he describes with touching matter-of-factness. “I was the first blind boy, it seemed, who had ever left home to go to America. Panditji, therefore, wanted to see me.”

A memoir begun at age 20 can still seem self-indulgent, and Mehta is upfront about this in a note in the new anthology, recalling his insecurities about his poor English during his student years and confessing that Face to Face was “more than anything, a love letter to my amanuensis while we were both at college … What kept me dictating … was a feeling of urgency to overcome my inadequacies – to prove to her that I was a man worthy of her time and attention.” His confidence would grow over the years, but it might be said that his writing life has been an extended demonstration that he is worth a reader’s time and attention.

Having temporarily got autobiography out of his system with that first book (published in 1957), Mehta moved to new pastures: over the next two decades, with the encouragement of the New Yorker editor William Shawn—who became a mentor and father figure—he wrote a travelogue (Walking the Indian Streets; 1960), a collection of conversations with British philosophers and historians (Fly and the Fly-Bottle; 1963), a book on Christian theology (The New Theologian; 1966), profiles of such literary figures as Noam Chomsky and the Urdu critic Ram Babu Saxena (collected in John is Easy to Please; 1971), a large study of Indian history and society (Portrait of India; 1970) and a book about Mahatma Gandhi told largely through the accounts of living Gandhians around the world (Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles; 1976). But he never left the terrain of memoir: his affectionate, searching books about his parents and the worlds they inhabited—Daddyji (1972) and Mamaji (1979)—heralded what would become known as the Continents of Exile series, which so far run into 12 volumes. Since 1982, these autobiographical writings—many of which were, again, first published in the New Yorker—have formed the bulk of his output.

And this has sometimes invited criticism. A well-known artist I recently met—someone who has a distant association with Mehta, and must remain unnamed—recalled joking with relatives who, whenever they heard about his excursions into the lives of “Daddyji” or “Mamaji” or “Chachaji”, would throw up their hands and say, with good-natured Punjabi rambunctiousness, “Bas ji!” (“Enough ji!”) Other readers have probably felt the same way; charges of navel-gazing are easily directed at someone who writes extensively about his personal history and the histories of his parents and ancestors. But closer attention to the books reveals how Mehta uses the particular to illuminate the universal. His books about his parents, for instance, are also a social history of the north India of the early 20th century, chronicling a traditional Indian family’s shift from village to city—into a modern world—at a time when the country was reaching for autonomy. 

This straining for national identity is, at a micro-level, paralleled by the young Ved being encouraged to be his own man despite his disability. (His parents might easily have discouraged him from doing more than sitting about the house, with no professional prospects—which was the fate of so many unsighted people in Indian families of the time, and would almost certainly have been the case a generation or two earlier.) In this context, it is worth considering how rare it was back in 1949 for any 15-year-old Indian, not just a blind boy, to travel alone to America, a place more culturally distant than Britain.

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All the same, it is true that Mehta’s oeuvre has a circumscribed feel to it. Even if you’re a fan—as I am—of his elegant prose and his ear for conversation, it can be stifling to read many of his books over a short period of time, because they all centre around a single life. It is better to approach them at intervals. And Mehta himself seems to have been aware of this: for all the talk about Continents of Exile being a continuous autobiography, he wrote each book as a stand-alone.

Perhaps the need to explain himself and his background is why a clear, precise writing style has been a Mehta hallmark through his career. His books also bear the stamp of someone who has reached for self-sufficiency from an early age. He was not yet five when his father lifted him through the compartment window of the train that would take him to Bombay and announced “Now you are a man”. In a Dickensian setting in Dadar (“I was thrown together with adolescent boys and girls picked up by the police from the street … Abdul pulled both my hands into his, and feeling their texture, remarked they were smooth and asked if I had ever worked”), little Ved learnt his first lessons in independence, discipline and the possibility of doing “regular” things with other visually impaired boys: fighting, throwing tantrums, being petty and selfish.

The pride generated by these experiences was not undiluted—mixed with it were phases of insecurity, even despair. (“We all probably felt unwanted and inadequate,” he admits in an introduction to an excerpt in The Essential Ved Mehta, “I certainly imagined that I and the world would be better off if I disappeared into the night.”) The fierce desire to be normal ran hand in hand with the knowledge that there were certain things he couldn’t do unassisted. In Face to Face he describes furtively cycling at a distance behind his sisters—guided by their voices—as they rode to their school, but then having to wait outside until their classes were over because he knew he couldn’t find his way back alone. The incident could be a metaphor for his writing and reading life—being energetic and keen to work nonstop, but having to rely on readers, on books being available in Braille, on assistants to take notes and transcribe.

At any rate, unwillingness to be an object of sympathy or curiosity—or to telegraph his blindness to the world—led to an authorial decision that would repeatedly cause controversy: Mehta wrote as if he could see, providing detailed visual descriptions. “Any and all visual details I always set down in passive voice,” he explains in his introduction to the excerpt from Walking the Indian Streets, “so as to tacitly acknowledge that they were experienced firsthand by someone else and I was only reporting on them.” Thus, the Taj Mahal is “seen through haze from two thousand feet” when he and his friend, the poet Dom Moraes, are about to land in Agra; “there are no visible concubines” in a droll account of their stay in a palace apartment in Kathmandu. The passive voice often makes way for a more direct mode of expression in his later writing though, which can flummox the uninitiated reader. What to make of descriptions such as this one from a meeting with R K Narayan: “A neither too stout nor too lean figure, he strolled in rather boyishly. One shoulder appeared to be lower than the other, and his lilting walk recalled the end of the Bharat Natyam … a smile revealing a great many polished teeth…”

But this is another reason why The Essential Ved Mehta is such a useful anthology: it lets us see how Mehta’s writing illuminates itself, or folds back on itself, over time; how a personal story can cast fresh light on the circumstances around the writing of an earlier book. This means a degree of overlapping, but more often the effect is kaleidoscopic. In All for Love (2001), about his relationships with four women over the years, he recalls his time with another amanuensis, Lola, “the first woman – indeed, the only woman – who became an integral part of my writing life … It was only long afterward that I realised I was so connected with her that she was almost like my second self, but with an extraordinary eye and an ever-ready shorthand book”. This is an engaging relationship story on its own terms, but there is another dimension to it: since Lola was of invaluable aid to him during the writing of Portrait of India , this account of their professional and personal association, and their travels together, provides a fresh perspective on the earlier book.

So a passage in Portrait of India (where Mehta only uses “I” as if he were conducting an interview alone) begins “Mother Teresa comes in. She is tiny and slim, but imposing….”, while All for Love gives us this:

I asked Lola if she had transcribed Mother Teresa’s exact words.

“Yes, of course.” She read some of her notes to me in a whisper.

“Were you able to get down all the details of her clothes?”

“Yes. A plain white sari with the order’s blue edging […] she had a crucifix hanging where she pins the sari’s hem to her shoulder.”

“Also jot down that she is tiny but imposing, and very no-nonsense,” I said.

Now that I have her at my side, I don’t have to tax my memory to try to remember every detail, I thought. Instead, I can concentrate on general impressions.

The emphasis on visual detail is linked to a notable feature of Mehta’s work: his best writing, even when he is drawing on documentation and chronicling things that really happened, reads like good fiction (and no one would say that a blind novelist should avoid descriptions). “His imagination always tried to make everything more interesting than it actually was,” he once said of Moraes, “It was as if the worlds inside his head were more exciting than the world outside”. A similar point could be made about his own work. Between Face to Face and the later memoirs, he became a more confident writer and began experimenting with narrative technique, even while retaining his unshowy prose style—hence the use in the Continents books of devices such as flash-forwards, shifting perspectives, even stream of consciousness as in this passage in The Stolen Light (1989), about a sexual encounter on a rainy night during his college days.

I felt the same charge of electricity as when she had stroked my hand in the library. Our mouths clamped together.  I didn’t turn off the light – a real blindism. Maybe the light was never on. But what if it was? Stop worrying. I should put on my undershirt. Why? I read somewhere women like it.

Or take two accounts – first in Face to Face and then, 30 years later in Sound-Shadows of the New World (1986) – of the same event: in Little Rock, Arkansas, young Ved is allowed to travel downtown by himself for the very first time, his guide having given him detailed instructions about how to take the trolley, gauge turns and crossings, and get off at the correct stop. The adventure, a key one in Ved’s life (“this is the first real day of my independence, I thought”), is described at length in both books, but in Face to Face the emphasis is on relating things faithfully and linearly, whereas by the time he wrote Sound-Shadows Mehta had developed a flair for the dramatic moment, for expanding and compressing time in turn, so that his account reads almost like a passage from a suspense thriller. In the earlier book he says “I found that the noise of the cane made me very self-conscious and was quite distracting, so I flung it into the gutter”. In the later book this becomes “Tap-tap, here comes a blind boy from the blind school – look out! the cane seemed to shout” and this is followed by a description of his attempt to break it before discarding it. Soon afterwards, he regrets his foolhardy act and the first book says “When I unexpectedly stepped off a curb, that fraction of a second between the curb and the street was so frightening I almost wished I had my cane back” but the later account of the same fraught moment goes “The sidewalk suddenly ended in an abrupt drop. It’s a manhole, I thought. My cane, my cane!”

The flair for storytelling, for sharply observed character portraits and for setting an individual tale against a larger background, gives even the most personal books—like The Red Letters, Sound-Shadows and Up at Oxford—a novelistic timbre. The Red Letters, about Mehta’s gradual discovery of his father’s extra-marital affair, can be read as a well-observed fiction about guilt, regret and the workings of the parent-child relationship in a conservative society. Remembering Mr Shawn’s New Yorker (1998) is a record of a vital period in the real-life history of an important magazine, but as a story with broader themes—the importance of mentorship, the growth of confidence, seeking narrative patterns amidst the messiness of the real world—it should appeal even to readers who aren’t specifically interested in the New Yorker, or in Mehta’s personal life.

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Much of the journalistic work he did for the magazine between the 1960s and the 1980s, on the other hand, reads today as the sort of clinical reportage that might have been produced by any number of diligent journalists – writing that doesn’t have much personality, is about things widely covered elsewhere, and hence doesn’t date particularly well; the lemon sweets in the jar. A question hangs over Mehta’s relevance as a reporter. There are those who feel he overstayed his welcome at the New Yorker, that Shawn over-indulged him. He is often behind the curve, constrained by information not always being available in media he can access. (In an interview four years ago, he spoke to me of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance—published in 1995—as if it were a brand-new publication.) Partly because his focus in the past three decades has been on the Continents series, partly because he lost his New Yorker job in 1994, you wouldn’t turn to him for insights on very recent events.

Some of his truisms about India can seem patronising—writing in the early 1990s about the hegemony of power and the exploitation of women, he said “The travails of the Indian political establishment may well be only a reflection of the problems of contemporary India, in which a patina of modernity overlies what is essentially a medieval society”. In a mostly warm account of the friendship he struck up with RK Narayan in New York (“it was very late and over Fifty-seventh Street hung a sort of Malgudi hush, shattered only now and again by the clap of a passing truck”), he mentions that Narayan “spoke a certain sort of Indian English; he … prefixed ‘y’ and ‘w’ respectively, to words beginning with ‘e’ and ‘o’. It gave his English a soft, balmy tone” and then throughout reports the older writer’s speech with these and other inflections (“the winter breeze is yeverywhere”, “Oh Lard, what is this modernity?”). Is this a case of a writer-reporter faithfully recording what he hears, or is there a hint of pandering to a readership that expects a dose of exotica in accounts of India and Indians? The answer may be an unknowable mix of the two things. (In another passage, during a conversation with Satyajit Ray, Mehta defends the stilted English spoken by EM Forster’s Indian characters.)

I would still make the case that a sprawling work like Portrait of India, also just out in a Modern Classics edition, deserves to be revisited, rather than dismissed as a Big India Book written by someone viewing—or imagining—the country from a distance. Some passages are dry and read like compilations of basic facts and history for the lay-reader, but this is also a personal project where one sees a writer picking his subjects, focusing on things that intrigue him rather than trying, vainly, to be encyclopedic. There are chapters on such disparate things as jazz in Bombay, birth control, the “liquid gold” in the then-new Bhilai steel plant, a sound-and-light show at the Red Fort; there is a passage on Calcutta with a number of pages written as if in free verse. (“Girls in frocks and boys in knickers playing hopscotch, babies in prams, young men with books of Bengali verse, Europeans, athletes at gymnastics, masseurs giving rub-downs on the grass, sadhus … Howrah Bridge. People taking the evening air. Dramatic bore tide. Jetties bobbing, small boats hurrying to middle of river.”) Importantly, this book wasn’t an armchair project: Mehta worked hard on the book, travelling 30,000 miles “by airplane, train, boat, rickshaw, pony, mule, yak, elephant and, of course, my own two feet” in the course of writing it.

Since it puts these earlier books in context, The Essential Ved Mehta is not just a collection of writings but also an account of the nuts and bolts of a singular writing life. It provides a glimpse of the writer’s many divided selves: the boy from Punjab working within a new culture, writing for an American magazine about such topics as Western philosophy, theology and student life in Arkansas and Oxford while not letting go of the “Indian” subjects like Mahatma Gandhi and the national politics of the 1970s and 1980s; the man who may have become an Anglicised “sahib” figure after his time at Oxford (there are accounts of peremptory behaviour during his New Yorker days) but was still keen to honestly and meticulously chronicle the life of his family and the Indias they lived in; the seemingly arrogant, self-assured writer living with the knowledge that he was dependent on others for many important things.

In my view Mehta’s best books are the personal ones where the main subject is Mehta himself, or where he is a protagonist (as in Walking the Indian Streets). But other readers may disagree, and certainly there are other things worth discovering here, such as his understated sense of humour in an account of the Member of Parliament PC Sethi storming into a telephone exchange with a gun, or an anecdote about those two American subversives Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso being let loose in genteel Oxford and tormenting poor WH Auden. (“Ginsberg thereupon got hold of Auden’s tie and started shoving it into his mouth, while Corso grabbed Auden by the knees, and both men cried, “Maestro, maestro, don’t leave us! Let us be your servants and students!”) The sense one gets of Mehta is that of someone who has spent decades writing as a way of holding on to things—experiences, sounds, tactile impressions—that must otherwise seem in danger of slipping away, while also using himself as a prism to examine a larger socio-cultural universe. Given that his books have not always been easily available in India, and that he continues to have a low profile—or to be considered unfashionable—this collection comes not a moment too soon.

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[Here are two earlier pieces about Mehta - an interview-profile done for Tehelka, and this review of The Red Letters]

Quick thoughts on the pulping of The Hindus (and the benevolent bully)

Some thoughts in connection with the depressing - but not, in our times, very surprising - news about the “pulping” of Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus by Penguin India (after a petition that, among other things, alleges that Doniger’s “approach is that of a woman hungry of sex”, that a Shiva linga can only be a cigar, so to speak, and that the idea of Krishna having an erotic life is unthinkable and un-Hindu).

I have written before about the smug certitudes that so often accompany religious belief, and the sophistry/cherry-picking inherent in the thought process that goes: “THIS is what the scriptures really meant, and it’s all good and clean and pure and exactly as I want it to be. Anything else – anything that makes me uncomfortable, or doesn’t fit the accepted moralities of today, or makes the Gods seem imperfect, or even vaguely suggests that those old books may have been a product of their age rather than containing unassailable wisdom and truth for all time – any such thing HAS to be a flawed reading, or a later corruption of the text. Or, wait, it can be interpreted THIS way, which makes everything okay again.”

This thought process isn’t limited to those whom we can conveniently label “fanatics”. Some generally intelligent people I know, including some who aren't especially religious, often bring up that beautiful, soothing – and nonsensical – idea that all religions “in essence” or “in their original form” teach love, universal brotherhood, tolerance and non-violence. A cursory reading of the major works of ancient literature shows how bizarre this claim is. But of course, once you know, with absolute certainty, that they really are all divine texts, that so-and-so really WAS a God, and that Gods by definition are good and all-knowing and so on, it becomes easy to rationalise anything.

I had an email conversation with a friend today – it touched briefly on the Doniger episode, but it began as a discussion of the new TV Mahabharat, which (no surprise) depicts Krishna as a forever-in-control avatar, constantly manipulating events towards the Greater Good, interfering in every scene to such a degree that you feel all the other characters could easily have been played by mannequins with little strings attached to them. Compared to this beacon in man-shape, even the Krishna of the B R Chopra serial – a fairly populist show in its time – was a flawed, sometimes conflicted, likably human character.

Anyway, I was telling my friend about the new show’s whitewashing of nearly every dubious action performed by the “good guys”, the Pandavas and Draupadi, how it glibly stacks the cards in their favour, and against those who are on the side of “adharma”. There is a scene at Draupadi’s swayamvara where Krishna meets Karna for the first time and tells him something like, “If you don't get respect – sammaan – it means you have not followed the path of dharma.” Karna asks “But what about someone who has never known respect, right from his earliest days?” and to this Krishna smiles sweetly and wags his finger and says “Oh, in that case, you must strive all your life for respect. But don't do it by siding with adharma.”

One gets the gist of what is being said, and even buys into it to a degree if one is hung up on the Bhakti Tradition Krishna and the Mahabharata-as-Morality-Tale. And I’m not suggesting that the injustices done to Karna be used to justify or even gloss over the wrongs he participates in. But this scene (and there are others like it) presents such a simple-minded view of what is good and what is bad, and such an undermining of lived experience. As I told my friend on email, if this Krishna travelled to modern-day Delhi and met an autorickshaw driver who had just been smacked hard by a rich kid in a BMW because their vehicles had grazed each other, he'd probably say the same thing with the same expression.

She replied: “That is what I find so fearfully disturbing about the […] discourses of today: they all conspire (consciously or otherwise) to vindicate a certain hierarchy by transforming it into benevolent, enlightened patriarchy, striving to achieve everyone's well-being. Poppycock.” Well said. There are so many versions of this benevolent patriarchy. (“Yes, yes, we believe in freedom of speech too,” they say with indulgent smiles, “But, you know, this will hurt so many feelings. Couldn't you avoid writing it?”) And we see a form of it in the objections to books like Doniger’s, by people who want a single, standardised, comforting version of things, with nothing that will rock any boats.

[Related thoughts in these posts: Arun Shourie on innocents in a Godless world; divine savages and “real” truth; tales from a crematorium; Chetan Bhagat and “liberal extremism”]

United we shoot - quotes from a few good men in movies

[This is a piece I did for Elle magazine last year. It was done to a clearly specified brief: here’s a list of eight men who are doing interesting, behind-the-scenes work in Hindi cinema, and whom we have gathered for a photo shoot; speak to them and weave their quotes into an essay. As such, it wasn’t much of a challenge writing-wise – apart from the fact that there were a disproportionate number of cinematographers in the list, which made it tricky to divided up the quotes – but the conversations were nice. I have other bytes that I hope to use in a column sometime]

“There is usually a sound in my head when I am writing a scene,” says director Bejoy Nambiar, “and when the time comes to score the film, I look for musical possibilities to match that sound.” In one of the best scenes in Nambiar’s stylish film Shaitan, a brilliantly reworked, trippy version of the old romantic song “Khoya Khoya Chand” plays during a violent action sequence shot partly in slow motion. This is a conceit that might not have made sense on paper, but on screen it perfectly fits the film’s hallucinatory mood.

It also suggests a couple of things about contemporary movie-making: that a director with a strong vision can bring his stamp to every aspect of the process (“My films must have me in them,” Nambiar says, “they have to be expressions of my personal tastes and interests”), and that there is a greater willingness to experiment, to do things that would once have been considered very radical. Music producer and composer Mikey McCleary, who reworked “Khoya Khoya Chand”, points out that filmmakers are no longer hung up on having a single composer doing the music for their movies, and that they often choose pre-existing tunes from the independent scene, rather than commissioning scores from a familiar set of insiders. “This brings in more variety and opens up fresh possibilities for a film.”

More generally too, today’s Hindi cinema has shown a willingness to step outside traditional comfort zones. Thanks to a combination of the Internet, the DVD culture and greater dissemination of information, a generation of young writers and directors have been absorbing the best of other cinemas and bringing their own sensibilities to them. There are offbeat stories, newer settings, more realism in language, and greater emphasis on background detailing and production design – things that are vital for capturing a sense of place and time. The industry’s newfound confidence about being part of a larger filmic universe is also reflected in the growing participation of non-Indians – such as McCleary or the cinematographers Nikos Andritzakis and Carlos Catalan – who are now key contributors to major films.

“Earlier, our films were largely about escapism, such as showing Switzerland to an audience who would never go there,” lensman Kartik Vijay points out, “but today directors are making films about things they have firsthand experience of.” Naturally, to realise their visions, these directors need high standards of craftsmanship in every field. Speaking with some of our leading technicians, one is reminded that the best films represent a smooth synthesis of different elements, aimed at maintaining the reality of the world depicted in the movie. Vijay – who has worked with such major directors as Vishal Bhardwaj and Dibakar Banerjee – relates how he used bright colours to capture the vibrancy of the West Delhi Punjabi culture in Banerjee’s Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, and how subtle alterations in lighting can signal a narrative shift from a warm, happy mood to something more hard-edged. For Bhardwaj’s Matru ki Bijli ka Mandola, he tried to reflect the character Mandola’s darker shades by gradually letting the colours go out as the story progresses. While shooting Banerjee’s Shanghai, the Greek-born Andritzakis converted his first-time impressions (as a foreigner) of Mumbai busy street-life into images that matched the grim mood of the story, and also worked closely with the art designers to get the right look. McCleary, who did the soundtrack for the same film, embellished the sound of Mumbai street-drums with dark, ambient music to achieve an effect that would be familiar and sinister at the same time.

“The entire team needs to work in tandem from the very beginning – you can’t have a situation where two departments don’t know what the other is doing,” says costume designer Kunal Rawal, pointing out that a well-conceptualised wardrobe can help an actor get into the skin of a character long before shooting begins. Rawal recalls once designing a shirt with subtle off-white stripes that he thought would work very well for a scene, but then the lighting rendered the stripes invisible. On another occasion, carefully chosen shoes were wasted in a scene that only had close-ups and medium-shots. Little wonder then that he now wants to be present even at a DoP meeting, to understand the shot breakdown and the quality of light for a particular scene.

Those of us on the outside make simple distinctions between “commercial” and “art” cinema, or grumble that financial considerations always undermine artistic integrity, but things aren’t so cut-and-dried – big production houses are more open to fresh, edgy films. Director Shakun Batra, who is a big fan of Woody Allen and Wes Anderson and has a taste for quirky, character-driven stories himself, speaks of his producer Karan Johar being happy to finance the kinds of films that most viewers would never associate him with. “He is very supportive, never interferes or pushes you to do things in a particular way.” As Batra points out, the film world today is more balanced, allowing creative helmsmen with an indie sensibility to get the budgets for what they want to do. “You have to be good enough to win your producers’ confidence and trust.”

But as Andritzakis points out, even mainstream films are becoming better crafted, and there is less self-consciousness now about categories. Cinematographer Ayananka Bose, who has worked on a number of very high-profile, big-budget movies, says every film presents its own special challenge: for instance, Jhoom Barabar Jhoom required a flamboyant, colourful, big-musical feel, but Kites had to be suffused with the heat of the desert and the Las Vegas setting. “I don’t think much about the ‘big-budget’ or ‘glamorous’ tags,” he says, “What matters is quality of execution. The camera is the same, the lens is the same – you are in control of your craft.”

Speaking of which, changes in technology have been levelling the playing field and making filmmaking much more democratic than it once was. “Technology has put a movie camera in the hands of anyone who has a smart-phone,” says Vijay, and this means young talents have an early outlet for their imagination. Simultaneously, social media has made filmmakers more accessible: Nambiar speaks of musicians sending him their tunes online, which he can listen to instantly. Naturally this can cause clutter, but the best work does tend to stand out; as Bose points out, ultimately, the mind behind the equipment is what matters. “You can always identify someone who is a pseudo-intellectual imitator of Godard or Truffaut vs someone who has originality.”

Communication can flow in the opposite direction too. There have been cases of directors and writers getting their films financed by reaching out to like-minded people on Facebook or Twitter: one such film, Onir’s I Am, even went on to win a National Award. Meanwhile, viewers too are more aware and sophisticated than before, which means they are open to new forms and idioms. “Audiences are exposed to more, and willing to accept more,” Rawal says, “Animation for grown-ups is a field that I am very excited about – I think Indian cinema is going to go places in it.”

What all this adds up to is a scenario where people with a passion for cinema are pulling each other up, showing a collaborative generosity that represents the opposite of the crabs-in- a-well mentality. It comes out of a genuine sense that everyone can be part of the change. No wonder the enthusiastic statements made by these young talents don’t seem glib or facile. When Batra says “It is the beginning of a golden age in Hindi cinema”, or Andritzakis says “I’m very lucky to have arrived at a time when things are starting to explode”, it sounds like an accurate response to working in an increasingly vibrant industry. “Every time I am at a film festival,” says Carlos Catalan, “I realise that there is a talented wave of Indian directors telling different stories in different ways. World audiences are hungry to watch those films.” With these good men working away behind the scenes, that appetite should increase.

[A related piece: short profiles of 10 trailblazers of the new Indian cinema, across categories]

Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! – the town boy, the city and a pyramid of gags

When I interviewed writer-director Kundan Shah for the Jaane bhi do Yaaro book a few years ago, he mentioned learning one of the principles of movie comedy while watching silent films at the FTII – how to “build a gag on a gag on a gag on a gag on a gag on a gag until you have a pyramid of gags”. Watching the 1923 Harold Lloyd-starrer Safety Last! (on a newly acquired Criterion disc-set), I thought again of those words. The film, with its multiple gag-pyramids – which add up to form one giant pyramid – is testament to how much thought, effort and practice can go into little moments that achieve nothing more “consequential” than making people laugh, or gape, or do both things at the same time.

I came to Safety Last! much later than I should have, but like so many others who haven’t seen the film I knew it by its most famous image: the scene where Lloyd (playing his stock character, the bespectacled everyman known here as The Boy as well as Harold) hangs for dear life from the face of a building clock. That scene is a cornerstone of the film’s biggest “pyramid” – circumstances having forced the hapless Harold to climb a 12-storey building for a publicity stunt – but there is so much more to Safety Last!. Watching it was a reminder that good silent-film comedy – with its sight gags, set-ups, incredible feats of timing, balletic physical movements, and minimal reliance on inter-titles – was one of the purest expressions of “pure cinema”. And that Keaton and Chaplin weren’t the only masters of those underrated arts.

In the best cases, even the inter-titles (which performed a functional role in most silent movies) would be used to clever effect. Consider the grim one that opens this film, and the shot that immediately follows it:

The camera then draws back to show two weeping women – the Boy’s mother and girlfriend – on the other side of the bars. A policeman and a priest enter the frame too, and the meaning of the scene appears clear from these elements – but of course it’s a set-up, the first of many fine sight gags: it turns out that they are all at the railway station, the “hangman’s noose” is really a loop used to attach mail for passing trains to pick up, and the Boy is only going to the big city for a job.

Once this has been revealed, it would be understandable if the film slowed down for a bit to establish the situation and the characters. Yet, after only a brief interlude – where Harold and his girlfriend Mildred (played by Lloyd’s real-life wife Mildred Davis) express their hopes for the future – the gags continue with a seamlessly executed scene where Harold, rushing to catch the train, picks up a pram with a baby in it instead of his suitcase. In itself, this is nothing special – a staple comedy-of-errors scene – but it is the necessary build-up to the final visual gag of this sequence. The baby’s mother catches up with him just as he is about to climb aboard, the mix-up is sorted out, but the distracted Harold doesn’t realise that the train has started moving away. Without looking, he stretches his arm out behind him …and ends up on a passing horse-cart instead. Discovering his mistake, he runs after the train and leaps on, by now a receding figure, but with enough presence of mind left to wave a second cheery goodbye. Fade out.

A description like this is no substitute for watching the two-minute scene play out, of course. It is a marvelous line of comic sketches, building on – and running into – one another: an opening shot that catches us off balance before allowing us a little chuckle of relief, then the mix-up culminating in the agile physical comedy. And in between all this, an important “serious” moment – a close-up of the lovers before they part – that suggests what is at stake for the main character: what the Big City, with its tall buildings, office politics, expensive food, menacing clocks, and rich shoppers bullying overworked salespeople, will mean for him.

The film has many more such sequences, leading up to that super finale where Harold climbs the building unaided, in pursuit of a 1000 valuable dollars. This is one of the great ascents in any movie, right up there with King Kong – also a visitor from the boondocks trying to make sense of the city – climbing the Empire State Building 10 years after Safety Last! was made. (Or this opening scene from another great silent film, King Vidor’s The Crowd, where a camera “climbs” a skyscraper.) The gags in this last act literally build as Harold climbs from one floor to the next, facing a new challenge each time. It is heart-in-your-mouth thrilling, but – without detracting from the “fun” – it is also emotionally resonant for anyone who has come to sympathise with the Boy (easy to do; Lloyd is a natural and likable actor). Here is a scene that literalises the idea of the small-town boy as social climber. As critic Leonard Maltin and archivist Richard Correll point out in the Criterion commentary track, not only do the obstacles pile up in the final sequence, they get tougher and more outlandish. (A vagrant badminton net? A mouse running up his pants leg? A photo shoot somewhere on the 10th floor, involving a man with a gun?) 

Which means this could be an image of the upwardly mobile professional climbing the ranks in a cutthroat world, with the stakes constantly increasing: the danger of falling and losing everything becomes more pronounced the higher he goes. This lovely, light comedy – while consistently being a lovely, light comedy – is up there with any of the more serious-minded examinations of what can be lost and gained in the move from a “simpler” way of life to a more competitive one; a worthy companion piece to other silent classics of the time like Greed or Sunrise or The Crowd, which offered the big city as a place where you might lose your footing (or your soul).

I watched Safety Last! alone, on DVD, with a prior idea of what the film was about, and I was still deeply stirred by it (the orchestral soundtrack by Carl Davis from 1989 goes very well with the film too), so I can't imagine what it must have felt like to unprepared audiences in a theatre in the pre-CGI era – people who had never been exposed to such stuntwork in a movie. Even today’s viewers might find their mouths hanging open when a dazed Harold swaggers about on the very edge of the roof after being struck by a weather-vane. No wonder the last shot – with the Boy back on firm ground and in the safety of the Girl’s arms – brings such a sense of release. It is a little like King Kong with a different ending, one where the ape and the blonde are reunited for ever on the rooftop. But is this a happy ending exactly? Even a thousand dollars may not go a very long way, and if the city is going to keep throwing up such challenges perhaps the young man may have been better off with his head in that noose after all.

P.S. two shots from films about a struggler in the city. A tram sequence in Safety Last! with hordes of men clinging to the outside of the vehicle and to each other, like bees to a hive:

And Kishore Kumar on a bus in Naukri 30 years later:

Kitty litterateurs: on Suniti Namjoshi's Suki and other cat books

[Did this for the magazine Democratic World]

There was an email forward doing the rounds recently, a comparison of hypothetical one-page diary entries written by two house pets – a dog and a cat. The dog’s entry was short, semi-literate and full of sunshine and cheer, with such exclamations as “Oh boy! A car ride! My favourite!” and “Oh boy! Tummy rubs on the couch!” while the cat’s was written in full, elegant sentences and was sardonic and world-weary: the very heading read “Day 183 of my captivity”.

Anyone who knows the two species well should agree that this is a good summary of their broad personality types. And anyone who knows professional writers – at least the ones who brood for hours over the construction of a paragraph or sentence – will agree that temperamentally they tend to be cat-like: mostly reserved, unsocial and irritable, but willing to purr for a short time if a satisfying turn of phrase has been achieved, or a deadline more or less met. There are also practical reasons why writers are more often “cat people” than “dog people”. Dogs are dependent on human attention, needing to be regularly spoken to and taken down for walks, but cats are more self-sufficient, and hence suitable companions for people who spend much of their time in fierce concentration.

In this light, it is interesting to consider the difference in tone between books about dogs and books about cats. The former – especially the ones about life with a pet – tend to be sentimental and emotionally demonstrative, whereas cat books have a certain coolness built into them. And this can be the case even when they belong to the Motivational or Self-Help category. Take David Michie’s very engaging The Dalai Lama’s Cat, told in the voice of a kitten who is rescued by the Dalai Lama at a traffic signal near Delhi and brought to Mcleodganj, where she soon settles into the temple complex and becomes known as His Holiness’s Cat (HHC).

HHC – alternately known as Snow Lion and, to her dismay, “Mousie-Tung” – spends much of her time in the company of the Buddhist leader, soaking in his presence (“had he recognised in me a kindred spirit – a sentient being on the same spiritual wavelength as he?”) and listening in as he discusses the conundrums of existence. Each chapter follows a broad format where a human character discovers the need to rethink his attitude to things, and the cat then applies some of these teachings to her own situation, with varying degrees of success. Thus, an insight about how self-absorption can make one sick and unhappy (a valuable lesson for writers, as it happens!) is linked to our narrator coughing up fur balls after spending an inordinate amount of time grooming herself. She realises that a period of self-pity combined with fear of exploring a new setting cost her precious time that she might have spent getting to know a new friend; and she is even inspired to deal with her gluttony, a by-product of being pampered silly.

As an old cynic wary of quick-fix advice and pat life lessons, I am not really a fan of this genre. But The Dalai Lama’s Cat worked for me because even in times of emotional epiphany, the cat nature retains a certain distance. At one point HHC overcomes her feelings of distaste for a new arrival, a dog named Kyi Kyi, when she learns about his sad back-story. “We reached an understanding of sorts,” she says, but then she quickly adds: “I did not, however, climb into his basket and let him lick my face. I’m not that kind of cat. And this is not that kind of book.”

Such emotional reticence can make brief, unexpected flashes of sentimentality very effective. Suniti Namjoshi’s recently published Suki, a tribute to her deceased cat, takes the form of conversations between human and feline. They talk about such things as morality, social injustice and hypocrisy, and the tone is mostly droll, faux-philosophical and chatty (or catty). But there are deeply affecting moments too. At one point in the middle of a casual conversation, the ghost-cat remarks that towards the end of her life it had been painful for her to open the cat-flap to go outside, and the author responds with a spontaneous cry of “Oh, Suki!” And another exchange, where the cat mentions that she would have liked to meet the author’s family (who were not animal lovers), should cut deep for anyone who has ever had a special, intense relationship with an animal and been unable to share it with their human world.

At the same time, one knows that these conversations are fictional, that Namjoshi is imagining things about the cat’s inner life and rendering them into human language. And so, the book becomes as much about the author herself – it is a form of therapy, a way of examining her deepest feelings, including love, grief and regret. This is also a reminder that there are many types of cat books. Cats can be used to examine a particular milieu as in Pallavi Aiyar’s novel Chinese Whiskers, in which the adventures of two Beijing cats give us a window into aspects of Chinese society including insularity, city-dwellers’ prejudices against migrant workers and the materialism of the young. Or they can serve purely representative or symbolic purposes: Art Spiegelman’s brilliant graphic novel Maus depicts the Holocaust by drawing Jews as mice and their Nazi oppressors as cats, but there is no pretence that the book is about animals.

Even overtly cat-centric books like The Dalai Lama’s Cat don’t always try to provide a detailed picture of the feline world and its tactile sensations, which is why Nilanjana S Roy’s delightful The Wildings, and its sequel The Hundred Names of Darkness, are such unusual additions to the kitty-lit corpus. These novels try to imagine what the world might feel like to a cat, from the furniture and carpets inside a house to the smells and textures of the outdoors, or the visceral knowledge that a predator is stalking you in the darkness. And an important plot device is the concept of “linking”: the feral cats of Nizamuddin, Delhi, can transmit whisker signals to each other across vast distances, allowing them to form a network that humans around them are oblivious to. 

This should resonate with anyone who has long-suspected that there is something otherworldly about cats; that they aren’t letting on everything they know; or that they are, like the cat in that diary entry, plotting something diabolical. “When my cats aren't happy, I’m not happy,” the poet Shelley said once, “because I know they’re just sitting there thinking up ways to get even.” Or to telepathically work themselves into the next book or poem.

[A post about Suniti Namjoshi's The Fabulous Feminist is here]

All hail The Honey Hunter

When he woke, the sky was green: not blue, but green and brown, a sky of leaves and branches with a moving, shifting land below.

He saw colours flashing, changing, disappearing ... mudskippers and fishing cats and hermit crabs, not one staying still long enough for him to be sure he had seen them.

And beneath it all, beneath the chatter of cormorants, egrets and woodpeckers; alongside the rustle of the terrapin and the pythons, and the heavy tread of the water buffalo, he heard the music of the bees: the hum of gazillions of bees hard at work.

Advance word for a book I can’t wait to get my hands on. The Honey Hunter is written by my multi-talented friend Karthika Nair (poet, scriptwriter, dance producer, and fellow Mahabharata-obsessive - we have long, subtextual email conversations about the epic), with breathtaking illustrations by Joëlle Jolivet. The story is about a little boy who loves honey and ventures into the Sunderbans to get it, reviving an ancient tussle between a demon king in tiger guise and a benevolent Goddess, both of whom ultimately have the forest’s best interests at heart. Lovely, gentle narrative, full of mystery and awe, but also a cautionary tale with a clear-sighted (and non-pedantic) ecological sense. And this plot synopsis doesn’t begin to do it justice.

In any case, I “read” this book in an unusual, fragmented way: I first saw the drawings page by page on a computer in the Zubaan office, but couldn't read the story then because it was the French version, Le Tigre de Miel; subsequently I read the English version in a text-only file. So I haven’t yet experienced the text and images in conjunction, but that will happen soon.

More about the book here, including a short trailer (for the French translation) that provides a glimpse of some of Jolivet’s artwork. The launch is in various cities this month, including at the Kala Ghoda festival in Mumbai and the World Book Fair in Delhi. (Schedule of events here.)

Rafa the low-born (tennis at Kurukshetra)

Had to share this. I wrote a piece for the magazine Indian Quarterly recently, about a new crop of epic retellings being done in popular genres such as young romance and the underworld thriller. The piece – which centred on two new books about Karna, one of my childhood literary heroes – ended with a jokey line about how, if I ever did a Mahabharata-retelling myself, I would merge my personal obsessions and present the Kurukshetra war as a series of Grand Slam tennis matches: 128 warriors, falling by the wayside one by one (over 18 days, or over a fortnight), all of it leading up to a grand finale - the decisive Arjuna-Karna battle, cast as a meeting between Roger Federer and my favourite sportsperson Rafael Nadal.

It was a throwaway reference, not central to the piece in any way, so imagine my surprise when I saw a PDF of the story and found that the illustration done for it brought together Karna and Rafa (dressed in Wimbledon whites, including the sleeveless kavacha he wore until a few years ago) in one surreal, bow-and-bandana juxtaposition. I didn't have anything to do with planning the image, so this was most fortuitous, and I must thank the illustrator Salil Sojwal. Here’s the picture:

Illustration: SALIL SOJWAL

Of course, one is now tempted to make Nadal: Federer = Karna: Arjuna analogies, based on nothing more concrete than the facile perceptions we form of sportspeople. Thus, Roger as the privileged prince and favoured son, all grace and artistry, seemingly born to conquer the world, his destiny pre-written in stone; and Rafa as the dark cloud on his horizon, the upstart shaking up the fraternity with his unconventional style of play and his apparently uncouth mien (which conceals a sweet but defensive nature). Roger pirouetting his way across tennis courts with a sense of entitlement, while Rafa plays catch-up, struggling with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: chronic injuries, a style of play that doesn’t meet the aesthetic demands of people who want their tennis to be like ballet, and an inability to make himself properly understood – which in one famous case after the 2006 French Open led to public booing because he had been mistranslated. (“Chale jao, suta-putra,” yells the Hastinapura crowd.)

I could go on, but I won’t. Instead here are two photos of cho-chweet bonding between rivals. The first is from the great years of the Roger-Rafa bromance (more on that in this post); the second is from a recent episode of the Star Plus Mahabharat where Karna helps Arjuna (disguised here as a brahmin) lift a chariot wheel out of the mud (!!). Can't see the resemblance? Either there is no poetry in your soul, or you have better things to do with your time.

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"VAMOS!!!"