Makers of Modern India – a preview

Ramachandra Guha can make any subject clear and accessible, and I really enjoyed reading Makers of Modern India, in which he profiles and excerpts the work of 19 Indian thinkers whose ideas shaped the modern nation-state: among them Rammohan Roy, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Tagore, Nehru, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya and Jayaprakash Narayan. I did an interview with Guha a few days ago – can’t put that up on the blog until next week, but I highly recommend the book. It has a lot of varied material, but highlights for me included Jotirao Phule’s vivid and descriptive “The Condition of the Peasantry” (excerpted from his book Shetkaryacha Asud, or “The Cultivator’s Whipcord”) and Tarabai Shinde’s acerbic “A Comparison of Men and Women”, which was a quite extraordinary tract for its time:

The fifth point, then – that women are the storehouse of all guilt. In fact, it’s the other way round – when women go wrong it’s always because of you. See now. Many fathers marry off their daughters of ten or eleven, girls who shine like little stars, they marry them for a fat wad of rupees to some rich old man of eighty or ninety. They eye the old man’s wealth and say, ‘Well – it won’t really matter if he does die, will it? She’ll never want for money, after all.’ ... with words like that they hand her over shamelessly, like a goat to the tiger ... What’s the point of this empty ceremony for her?

Other highlights include a record of the disagreements between Gandhi and Ambedkar and Gandhi and Tagore (adversarial, sometimes bitter, in the former case, cordial and respectful in the latter), the paranoid ramblings of the RSS leader M S Golwalkar (“The Pakistani Muslims have been infiltrating into Assam for the past 15 years...What else is this but a conspiracy to make Assam a Muslim-majority province so that it would automatically fall into the lap of Pakistan in course of time?”) and a revealing look at the Muslim modernist Hamid Dalwai, who made radical calls for reform in his own community (“Indian Muslims believe they are a perfect society and are superior to all other communities in India ... [based on] the assumption that the Islamic faith embodies the vision of a perfect society and therefore being a perfect Muslim implies not having to make any further progress. This is an unacceptable claim by modern criteria”).

Watch this space next week for more from Guha.

As long as there's a world...the journey of Saramago's elephant

[Did a version of this review for Business Standard Weekend]

...I will send for you when the pigeon arrives so that you can witness for yourself the removal and reading of the message tied to the bird’s leg, If it’s true, it won’t be long before messages can fly through the air with no need of a pigeon, That would be rather more difficult, I imagine, said the mayor, smiling, but as long as there’s a world, anything’s possible, As long as there’s a world, That’s the only way, captain, the world is essential...

The work of the Portuguese writer José Saramago demands a lot of concentration, even when the story is a simple, charming one told in language that most adolescents would understand. This is because Saramago confounds our expectations of how sentences, paragraphs and chapters in a novel must be experienced. He rarely provides paragraph breaks and doesn’t capitalise proper nouns; he never uses question marks and uses full-stops very sparingly, so that there are entire passages where commas provide the only visual breaks. On the other hand, he might perversely use a full-stop when a speaker is cut off-mid-sentence, as in the following exchange:

I need another pair of oxen for the cart and I thought I might find them here, The count is not at home, and only he. The commanding officer interrupted him, You do not seem to have heard what I said...

During a dialogue between two characters, there are no quote-marks or line separations to let the reader know where one person has stopped speaking and the other has begun; the only indication is that the first word spoken by each person is capitalised, and this takes some getting used to. These stylistic choices can be frustrating for the reader who wants a book to be simply the vehicle that carries a story from point A to point B, but in Saramago’s work the journey is more important than the destination. In a sense, his style is especially apt for the retelling of a real-life tale about an Indian elephant traveling – by royal decree – from Portugal to Austria in the mid-16th century. There is never much doubt that Solomon the pachyderm will get to Vienna; what matters is what will happen along the way.

The Elephant's Journey begins with the Portuguese king Dom Joao III deciding to present Solomon as a wedding gift to his cousin, the Archduke of Austria, to the unexpected sorrow of the queen (“deep inside, which is where the contradictions of the self do battle, she felt a sudden sadness at the thought of sending Solomon off to such distant lands and into the care of strangers”). The elephant and his mahout Subhro, accompanied by a troop of officers and a large supply of forage, must travel – mostly by foot – across diverse landscapes, first to reach the city of Valladolid, where the Archduke and his wife are waiting, and then to continue apace to the new country. En route, there is to be a meeting with a group of (possibly unfriendly) Austrian soldiers.

The distrust of other races and nations, often based not on personal experience but on conditioning and hearsay, is a recurring theme in The Elephant’s Journey – one of its first occurrences is a theological discussion where Subhro tries to explain the complex legends of Hinduism (including the story of Ganesha, the elephant God) to a sceptical commanding officer. We are constantly reminded that the world was a much larger, much more daunting place five centuries ago, with people having fewer opportunities or incentives to understand those who lived differently, in far-off places. At the same time, we can scarcely forget that this story centres on an Indian elephant making the most improbable of cross-continental journeys, having already made a very long one to get to Portugal in the first place.

Solomon himself is the most passive of central characters. We are never made privy to his feelings about the strange things that are happening to him, and so it’s possible to see him as a blank slate on which different people write different stories. (One is unavoidably reminded of the fable about blind men conjecturing what an elephant looks like by feeling various parts of its body.) There are droll descriptions of the effect he has on people along the way – from a count’s steward who behaves as if his happiness depends entirely on being able to see an elephant (“an elephant, so that’s an elephant, he murmured, why, he must be at least four ells high, and then there’s the trunk and the tusks and the feet, look how big those feet are”) to the accompanying porters who, in a moving passage, must say their farewells to him. There is even a manufactured “miracle” that involves Solomon kneeling before a church, an incident that soon produces opportunities for commercial exploitation (which is, of course, the natural arc of every organized religion).

Describing all these events is the all-knowing narrator, who moves back and forth in time, alluding to things that will happen in the future (“the fireworks would provide spectators with a finale that would, many years later, merit the adjective wagnerian”) and playing with language (“there wouldn’t be room in the statue’s belly for even a squadron of children, unless they were lilliputians, but that was impossible, for the word hadn’t even been invented yet”). He draws attention to the process of storytelling (“the column of men set off, and that was that, we will not see them in this theatre again, but such is life, the actors appear, then leave the stage ...”), reproaches himself for something said earlier (“we hereby recognize that the somewhat disdainful, ironic tone that has slipped into these pages whenever we have had cause to speak of austria and its people was not only aggressive, but patently unfair”), or simply muses to himself (speculating, for instance, that the “great mistake made by heaven” is that it overestimates man’s powers and so doesn’t do enough to help him).

And this is where Saramago’s special style really comes into its own. In a more conventionally printed book, the different elements of a narrative – the straightforward relating of plot, the philosophical detours and so on – would be clearly demarcated. For instance, a paragraph reporting a conversation between two characters might be followed by a separate paragraph where the narrator takes over with his own observations or (as often happens here) quips. But reading The Elephant’s Journey, you process everything at once: the words flow into each other and wash over you, multiple patterns of meaning emerge simultaneously, and the boundary between the story and the storyteller vanishes.

This gives the writing a breathless, poetic quality – once you get into its flow, you feel like you’re liberated from the formal demands of the publishing machinery. Instead you’re in the company of a garrulous old man who intersperses anecdotes with words of wisdom about emperors and mahouts, men and animals, social mores and hypocrisies. You could well be at a campfire – look over your shoulder and you might even see a stoical elephant preparing for his night’s sleep before the journey resumes the next day.

Great snakes of our time

It’s considered impolite these days to refer to India as a land of snake-charmers (oh no, we’re all about the slumdog millionaires now), but that doesn't stop movie producers from commenting on the social and sartorial habits of the famed ichadhaari naag - a snake that can transform itself into a human and back again. I say this apropos a quote from a recent newspaper interview with Govind Menon, co-producer of a film titled Hisss:

The whole concept of nudity is justified because when you transform into a snake, you can’t have a dress or even a cloth or even a piece of jewellery on you!

Ah, such attention to detail, such concern for authenticity – the result, no doubt, of years of research. The nudity that Mr Menon is justifying is that of Mallika Sherawat, and his quote is a good variant on the patented ones we’ve heard from Bollywood starlets for decades. “What do you expect me to wear in a swimming pool, a burkha?” is so passé, whereas “What do you expect me to wear while turning into a snake, leather tights?” has a nice ring to it.

Hindi cinema has a solid tradition of snake movies, but in this, as in most things, you can trust Rajinikanth to have the last word. The much-hyped Robot was built on a dubious premise (why cast the superstar as a multifunctional android when he has for years been playing omnipotent human characters who do things that the most advanced robots wouldn’t dare attempt?), but it did have a spectacular climactic sequence where hundreds of evil Rajini robots arrange themselves into various menacing shapes. The final and most impressive one: a giant mechanical cobra that opens its jaws and swallows cars and helicopters whole. This truly awesome ichadhaari snake makes all the others look like measly little earthworms - Ms Sherawat, clad or not, has quite a challenge ahead of her.

[A little something about my favourite ichadhaari naag film - Rajkumar Kohli's Nagin - in this old post]

Hell is other people: the discreet charms of Luis Bunuel

[My latest Persistence of Vision column for Yahoo! India]

I figured my friend Amit Varma was being tongue-in-cheek when he wrote, in his Viewfinder column, about the artistic value of the reality show Bigg Boss. But then this sentence struck a chord: "Pundits say that the purpose of art is to reveal the human condition, and in my view few things reveal it quite as well as a bunch of disparate people shut up in a house for a few weeks, away from the rest of the world."

It's a long journey from Bigg Boss to Luis Bunuel, but the Spanish director's 1962 film The Exterminating Angel is about a group of upper-middle class people in a large mansion, finishing dinner and then finding that they are mysteriously unable to leave. The question that naturally arises is: what happens to people in situations where they have nothing but each other's company, and not much else to usefully keep their minds occupied?

"Hell is other people," Sartre congenially noted once. In a documentary titled The Last Script, Bunuel's son Juan Luis remarks that his father "hated groups of people clustered together", and that the idea for The Exterminating Angel first came to him when he saw Gericault's painting "The Raft of the Medusa", which depicted shipwreck survivors adrift. "How horrible that must have been," the great director said, probably less horrified by the prospect of an agonizingly slow death at sea than by being surrounded by other human beings while it happened.

The Exterminating Angel gets to the point right from the opening scene, which has a young member of the kitchen staff fleeing the mansion with a scared look on his face. Inside, other servants talk urgently about "needing" to get out even though they have nowhere to go for the night. Meanwhile the guests saunter in (they've been to an opera together), making polite conversation, but as dinner progresses the small talk becomes vacuous. The host makes exactly the same toast twice; the first time he does it, the others nod in the correct way and flash their pearly whites, but the second time no one pays much attention. We see that ennui is already setting in.

I first saw this film at an impressionable age, when just about any black-and-white European movie made by a respected director was guaranteed to leave me feeling like I had experienced something Worthwhile (even if I was secretly bored by it). But this one was different: it had an art-house reputation, but it was also very accessible, full of bizarre sight gags and dialogue. Not having encountered Bunuel before, I was scarcely prepared for his brand of deadpan madness.

Artists who use the tools of surrealism tread a thin line - exaggerated humour keeps drawing attention to itself and pushing the boundaries, which means it can become forced. But Bunuel uses his techniques so matter-of-factly that you know he's only doing what comes naturally to him. The Exterminating Angel contains many little moments that manage to be absurd and completely truthful at the same time. Early on, when two people are introduced to each other, they nod impassively - but a few moments later they see each other across the room as if for the first time and behave like old friends. A young couple, shortly to be married, pretend that they don't know each other's names and ask each other questions; is this a cute bit of romantic role-playing, or bourgeoisie boredom?

When the guests realise they are stuck in the house and will have to bed down in the living room, the outer markings of civilisation start to fall away - literally. A couple of the men remove their waistcoats, mumbling that these stiff clothes "are for statues, not for people". "Aren't they going too far?" the hostess wonders to her husband in a scandalized undertone.

But as the hours turn into days, everyone goes much further. They form cliques to bitch about each other, make accusations, then shift allegiances and rearrange themselves into new groups. (What could be more typical of human behaviour?) Having shown nothing but warmth towards their host Nobile when they first arrived, they come to suspect him of foul play. Later, there are displays of hysteria, even violence, as they become desperate to get out. A large closet - filled with fancy ceramic vases - is used as a toilet, and when people emerge from it they describe their experience in poetic language, a faraway look on their faces. (Years later, Bunuel will lampoon the embarrassed secretiveness surrounding toilet-going even more forcefully, in a famous scene in The Phantom of Liberty.)

Those who have no appetite for pettiness are dispensable. "I've got no stomach for mumbo-jumbo," says an elderly guest who doesn't care for small talk. Naturally, he will be the first to die. (Imagine a straight-arrow Bigg Boss contestant who refuses to engage in gossip or do anything that will keep the ratings high; he'd be voted out fairly quickly.)


Reading essays about the film, I gathered that the story of the entrapped guests could be a political allegory or a symbol for the class struggle, but I wasn't so interested in it on those levels: I liked looking at the individual people and how they changed over the course of the story; how they became less mindful of their appearance, how their behaviour became more aggressive. Bunuel's films about high-society types are made so effective by his recognition that human beings, for all their self-importance, are essentially animals that have dressed themselves up in fine clothes and learnt how to eat with knives and forks and pass plates around. Thus, his characters start off by following the etiquettes expected of their upbringing, but gradually their primal natures surface. In one scene, the hostess enters a small room where she has a whimpering bear and three sheep tied up together, for "after-dinner entertainment". To my mind, the scene immediately places the sophisticates sitting outside in the position of the most dominant - and cruelest - members of the animal kingdom. Sitting down to dinner in their tuxedoes and gowns, they remind me of the ending of Orwell's Animal Farm: "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which."


****

Revisiting The Exterminating Angel today (having seen many other Bunuels in the interim), I'm a little underwhelmed: the film rides on the novelty of its conception, but the execution - especially the acting - is somewhat clunky. It lacks the smoothness of the great movies Bunuel later made in the 1970s, notably The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and my personal favourite, The Phantom of Liberty - a film that adamantly refuses to stick with a single narrative thread, following first one story, then abandoning it for another just when things seem to have become interesting.

A few years ago, at Delhi's Cinefan film festival, I spoke for a few minutes with the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, who had collaborated with Bunuel on his last few movies. When I asked him about The Phantom of Liberty, he related the story of how they got the idea for it:

We stumbled on the seed of a scenario that we were both fascinated by. It involved a man and a woman - probably a married couple - having a furious argument. While we don't know the exact reason for the fight, we learn that it hinges on the contents of a letter that is shortly to be delivered to the house. The argument continues - the dialogue is very intense and engrossing, it grips the viewer's interest, and we're wondering what the letter could possibly contain. Then the doorbell rings; it's the postman. He hands the letter over to the couple, they start to open it, but instead of staying with them the camera tracks to the right and follows the postman out the door!

Though that scene didn't make it to the film, The Phantom of Liberty is full of frustrating little cul de sacs. But in a sense, Bunuel was doing this sort of thing since very early in his career - in 1928, in a burst of anarchic creativity, he and Salvador Dali created the short film Un Chien Andalou by putting together half-remembered material from their dreams: Bunuel sees a sliver of cloud bisecting the moon, Dali sees a hand crawling with ants, so fine, throw the two images together and let film critics debate the possible meanings till the end of time!

Little wonder then that his movies feel like fragments of a giant jigsaw. They create a very distinctive world - the sort of world where a priest, on discovering that a dying man was responsible for the death of his parents, first blesses him and then does him in with a shotgun (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie). Or where a one-legged girl becomes the subject of a morbid obsession by her adopted father (Tristana), or a young, spry Jesus Christ prances about, smoothing his hair and talking to his mom like any teenager (The Milky Way). Bunuel's work is an acquired taste, but it's a taste that you can very quickly get addicted to - after which it can be difficult readjusting to the real world, or whatever fragments are left of it. I wonder if Bigg Boss contestants feel the same way when they finally exit their giant cocoon.

The Jaane bhi do Yaaro book cover

The cover of my monograph on Jaane bhi do Yaaro is ready. Behold:

The book should be out by mid-November. Since it's part of Harper Collins' film series, it will be published alongside two other titles: Anuvab Pal's take on Disco Dancer (which I'm really looking forward to) and Vinay Lal's book on Deewaar. More updates soon.

(Update: have replaced the image with a slightly modified one - the crane holding up the film's title, and "Jaane bhi do Yaaro" written in the clapper)

Mix and match: fragmented women in Mean Streets and Contempt

This is part of an occasional series I'll be doing about little connections between films – scenes that echo each other in some way, even if it's a couple of fleeting shots that may have been conceived as a tribute (and even if it's all only in my head!). Apologies if this sounds film-schoolish – that isn't the intention. Just being self-indulgent really, and sharing an aspect of movie-watching that I personally find rewarding.

There’s a playful scene in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, which reminded me of Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt. (As mentioned in this post, Scorsese admits to being a big fan of Godard's movie.) The Contempt sequence, quite a famous one, has a nude Brigitte Bardot lying on her stomach – she plays Camille, the wife of the film's protagonist Paul, and they are in bed together. As they talk, she asks him to look at various parts of her body and assess them. “Do you like my ankles? My knees?” “What do you think of my behind?”

The back-story is that Godard was instructed by his producer to include a few nude shots of Bardot (what's the point of having Bardot in your film if she's covered up?) – something he was reluctant to do because it was such an obvious sop for the mass audience. Eventually, he retained some of his integrity by coming up with a scene where the sex symbol deconstructs herself (or her screen image) by explicitly drawing the viewer’s attention to parts of her body. The idea was to de-eroticise Bardot, though I'm not really sure that happened: I think the scene is still quite sexy in its own way, partly because of how it suggests the relaxed intimacy between a married couple who are very familiar with each other's bodies – it just isn't sexy in the way that more typical Brigitte Bardot films tended to be.

Now for a scene in Mean Streets, made a decade later. Charlie (Harvey Keitel) is in a post-coital moment with Teresa (Amy Robinson). They banter, he gets defensive about something, she gets annoyed, jumps out of bed and stands at the window naked. They fool around some more, and Scorsese fools around too; when Charlie forms a gun with his hands, points it at Teresa and pulls the “trigger”, we hear a real gunshot on the soundtrack.


Then she starts to get dressed and tells him not to look. Charlie obeys, but after putting his fingers over his eyes he splays them so he can see her. He moves the hand covering his right eye from a vertical to a horizontal position and spreads his fingers out again – it's like a film’s clapboard opening and closing. Effectively, he's changing the angles, like a camera shifting perspective. (It reminds me of Godard's use of colour filters while photographing Bardot in that scene in Contempt.)

Finally there comes a moment where Charlie, still looking through his fingers, contemplates Teresa's bare bottom (partly covered by her shirt) from an unusual side-angle – there's nothing erotic about this image, in fact it's faintly ridiculous, and Charlie can't stop himself from giggling at the sight.

But the undercurrent to this lighthearted scene is that Charlie knows he’ll never be able to marry Teresa (his family has warned him not to get involved with her, and he’s an obedient, partly repressed Catholic boy). Being aware of the barrier between them, he keeps trying to distance himself from this girl. In this scene, I think the detachment takes the form of his “fragmenting” Teresa, so that he can view her as a set of dissociated parts rather than as a whole woman, a person with feelings. And it’s typical of Scorsese that he pays homage to a favourite film in such a way that he enriches his own movie in the process. There’s nothing gimmicky or derivative about this scene – it’s an echo, but it works perfectly well on its own terms.

On Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, and the celebrity cult

It would be putting things very mildly to say that recent Hindi movies haven’t made journalists – TV journalists in particular – look good. The typical representation is that of shrill, parasitic creatures tripping over each other in a mad frenzy, exhibiting buffoonery and insensitivity in equal measure as they thrust microphones into the faces of the unwilling.

The classic example of this theme was, of course, Peepli [Live], in which vanloads of predatory reporters arrive at a small village on the scent of the TRP-boosting “story” that a poor farmer has promised to kill himself. It was a portrayal of media both as an intrusive force in its own right and as a mirror in which a middle-class society built on “traditional values” could see its darker, more primal face.

But the template for the “ugly media” movie is Billy Wilder’s 1951 classic Ace in the Hole. Watching it again recently, I found it hard to believe it was six decades old – the story, about a personal tragedy being turned into a media carnival, is so ahead of its time that the film looks fresher and more relevant with each passing year.

To some extent, that’s true of most of Wilder’s work. His best movies are driven by acerbic screenplays that poke holes into just about any aspect of modern life – or social institution – you can think of. But even by his standards, Ace in the Hole is unusually savage and bleak. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, no happy ending, no bending to Hollywood norms about a lead character finding redemption.

In a recent film, Michael Douglas reprised the role of Gordon Gekko, the cold-blooded Wall Street trader whom he first played in 1987. But few actors could portray single-minded, obsessive characters as well as Douglas’s father Kirk. In Ace in the Hole, the senior Douglas is Chuck Tatum, a down-on-his-luck reporter stranded in a small town, working for an uninspiring local paper called the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin (its high-mindedness as well as general lack of imagination summed up by the depressingly earnest motto “Tell The Truth”). When a local tourist guide named Leo gets trapped inside an old mountain cave, Chuck realises he has a story that could help him get back to the top of his profession (read: back to the big newspapers in New York), and he milks it for all that it’s worth.


“I don’t make the news, I only report it,” Chuck says defensively at one point, but we see him manipulating events for his own benefit – even to the extent of coercing the rescue-operation chief to use an unnecessarily time-consuming method to save Leo. Some scenes are spine-chilling: during his first conversation with the trapped man, when Chuck discovers that the cave was an ancient Indian burial ground, his eyes gleam and become animated; you realise he’s less concerned with Leo’s plight than with the tantalizing headline of the next day’s paper.


Typically, Wilder fills the screenplay not just with brilliant lines that draw attention to themselves but sly asides as well (“We’re the press, we never pay!” grumbles a young photographer when asked to shell out 50 cents for admission). But watching Ace in the Hole, I was repeatedly reminded of Wilder’s great visual sense – something that is occasionally forgotten because he is seen primarily as a man of words. Consider the breathtaking overhead tracking shot that reveals dozens of cars and trailers recently arrived in what was once a deserted outpost. Or the scene where Chuck draws Leo’s manipulative wife towards him for a clinch by roughly grabbing her head (with the camera positioned behind her so that his giant fist nearly fills the screen) – it’s one of the most subversive variants I’ve seen on the classic Hollywood kiss.

But the most most striking images – and perhaps the abiding one – is a long shot of carnival debris being swept along by the wind, as Leo’s father wanders desolately about; the shot is almost a symbol for the grime that accumulates over the course of the movie. At the end, there's no one left to clean it up.


P.S. In a way, I think Ace in the Hole makes for an interesting companion piece to Sunset Boulevard, which Wilder made the year before – the visual and thematic similarities between the two movies should have any fan of the Auteur theory smacking his chops. For instance, both films begin with a man incapacitated by not having a working vehicle (or in danger of being deprived of his vehicle) – a situation that leads him to an isolated setting where he will feel trapped and creatively stymied. Without giving away specifics, both films, at key moments, have very artistically executed close-ups of a dead man seen from underneath, so that his face is almost looking down at the camera.

And of course, both stories, in different ways, are about the creation of the celebrity cult. For me, one of the most disturbing moments in Sunset Boulevard is the brief shot of the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (playing herself) in the final scene, where Norma Desmond (former silent-screen star, now a delusional old woman) descends the staircase, imagining she is about to make a grand comeback. Hopper is shown teary-eyed as she watches the faded star, but one can hardly forget the role that her own pen played in creating, sustaining and then destroying the image of Norma Desmond.

[Two earlier posts on Wilder films: Stalag 17 and Some Like it Hot]