Collecting trivia: actors and real-life characters

Just realised that Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, is a few months older than Zuckerberg in real life. Can anyone think of other instances of actors playing real-life characters who were younger than them? I have a niggling feeling that there have been a few such cases (and possibly a couple that are very obvious), but I can't put my finger on many.

The ones I have so far:

- Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford were both several years older than their real-life characters, reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, in the film about the Watergate expose, All the President's Men.

- Gary Cooper as baseball star Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees.

- In The Great Dictator, Charles Chaplin played Adenoid Hynkel, a barely disguised version of Adolf Hitler (who was a mere four days younger than Chaplin in real life).

- In The Boys From Brazil (an adaptation of Ira Levin's excellent novel), Laurence Olivier played a Nazi-hunter modelled on Simon Wiesenthal - who was a year younger than Olivier - but the character had a different name.

As you'd expect, there are a few close contenders from biographical movies about sportspeople and musicians who achieved a lot at a young age: in Fear Strikes Out, Anthony Perkins played Jimmy Piersall, who was just two years older than him. Then there's James Stewart in The Glenn Miller Story (four years) and Paul Newman as the boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me (six years).

Any additions to this list? Movie buffs?

Update: just to clarify what I mean, I'm talking about actors who were born before the real-life people they portrayed.

Look, book!

Got my first copy of the Jaane bhi do Yaaro book on Friday. It looks good. Very compact (272 pages, with a six-page insert of photos) and it turned out just the way I was hoping it would when I first saw the cover on email. The black colour, the clapboard with the title and the movie reel on the sides make it look a bit like one of the Faber books on film, which is pleasing.


One thing I really appreciate (and I think I have Harper Collins’ Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri to thank for this) is that they put an Index at the end. It adds a touch of gravitas, but more than that it gave me a kick just to read the movie titles and people names mentioned in the Index – Godard’s Bande à part, Werner Herzog’s Woyzeck and Milos Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball sharing space with the Jeetendra-Jaya Prada starrer Tohfa. Not to mention Socrates, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov and Raj Kumar Kohli's Jaani Dushman. Heck, if I hadn’t written this book I might almost want to read it!

My way on the highway: Looking for America

[Did a version of this review for the Hindustan Times]

“Everyone’s seeking change. Know what um sayin’?” writes Avirook Sen in the opening chapter of Looking for America. It’s a sly bit of wordplay, used to link a wheelchair-bound man begging with a coffee cup on a Chicago street corner and Barack Obama’s PR machinery inviting donations for the 2008 election campaign. But the line is also a mood-setter: this book is about the author’s road-trip across the US in an attempt to get to know a country struggling with recession, with the repercussions of the war in Iraq and with the burden of history as it moves towards a date with its first black president. It’s a time when America too is “seeking change”.

Parts of Looking for America should be an eye-opener for the Indian reader whose impressions of the US have come primarily from mainstream Hollywood movies – the ones that present “America” as a sum of the lives of beautiful people in the coastal metropolises. Sen spends time in the in-between places, in states and towns that you might only dimly be aware of, and his journeys in Greyhound buses and Amtrak trains provide a window to the more mundane aspects of life in the country. Among the places he travels to are Gary, Indiana (now a derelict town but historically significant for electing the country’s first black mayor); Stone Mountain, Georgia (once a hub for the Ku Klux Klan, but now a place where a white man, a former drug mule, asserts “I’m for Barack”); Dinosaur, Colorado, where he learns that a chunk of the state’s votes will be determined by who is the better president for hunters; and the house of Joe the Plumber in Toledo, Ohio.

Along the way there are chance encounters and strange visions, such as a glimpse of a lone camel on a green Texan ranch. The prevalent tone is warm and conversational, though there are a few flat jokes. (“The Jackson Five lived here, but they beat it a long time ago,” he says of the town of Gary. And this about a Gujarati who directs him to a Kentucky Fried Chicken office: “It was a little odd to ask this particular species of vegetarian how to get to the place that began the war against the chicken – a bird he probably had no quarrel with, unless it owed him money.”)

Those of us who are fed stereotypes about Western permissiveness tend to lose sight of what a conservative place the US is in many ways – not least in the religious fundamentalism of swathes of the Christian population. In this context, Sen’s visit to Dayton, Tennessee – where the famous Scopes “Monkey” Trial, pitting evolution against Biblical creation, took place in 1925 – is revealing, as is his experience at a church service in Alabama. I thought I knew a bit about the Scopes Trial, but until I read this book I didn’t know it took place in Dayton mainly because a waning coal company wanted to cash in on the publicity, and that even the arrest of the schoolteacher John T Scopes was carefully stage-managed.

On the other hand, much of my knowledge about the trial comes from the classic film Inherit the Wind, and there’s something comforting about the fact that Sen himself uses pop culture as reference points (a young black truck driver reminds him of “Bubba” in Forrest Gump; his curiosity about the town of Saginaw is fuelled by the Paul Simon song “America”; in Fargo he discovers that no one says “Yaah” the way they do in the Coen Brothers film of the same name). It adds to the sense that the book is being written not from a position of remote authority but by someone who is finding his own way around, picking up things as he goes along.

Which also means that Looking for America has a certain inbuilt randomness – an occupational hazard for any narrative non-fiction endeavour of this sort. More than a unified whole, it’s a collection of vignettes – some very interesting, others less so – and there are inevitable hits and misses. Some bits – a report of an odd, Samuel Beckett-like conversation between two people sitting behind Sen in a bus, for instance, or the more overt political analysis towards the end – feel like they could have been tucked into an “Extras” section at the back of the book.

However, given that the author’s intention wasn’t to present a single proposition and stick doggedly with it, the free-flowing format mostly works. Eventually it’s the little things that hold this book together, such as the pen portraits: an elderly woman whose rhetoric suggests that she might have ghostwritten Bush’s speeches (“I do know that the end-time war, Armageddon in Revelation, is going to be somewhere in the East”), a harried coach attendant ineffectually hitting on two passengers, a black woman who directs racist taunts at "fuckin' mixtures", a born-again Republican who turned anti-abortionist because she herself couldn’t have a baby at age 30 and it seemed so wrong to see 17-year-old girls wasting their opportunities! Or that man in the wheelchair who says “Anything’s possible, know what um sayin’?” It could be the catchphrase for the book and for the period it chronicles.

Archdeacons and earthworms: Charles Darwin, the good novelist

Enchantment, Utopia, epiphany, sublime insight – the grand words of Romanticism are not Darwinian words. (In fact, they never occur anywhere in his writing.) Slight, small, varied, struggle, helpful, hopeful, natural, selection, modification (not revolutionary change) – these are the words of Darwinism, and they have become the words of liberalism. By giving us a new set of words, Darwin changed our minds.

Extended essays don’t usually make compelling books, but Adam Gopnik’s Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life is an exception. It began life as two long pieces Gopnik wrote for the New Yorker last year, and some critics might say the very premise of those essays was a little dubious: they were based on the coincidence that two great men – Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, whose collective achievements altered the way human beings think about their relationship with other species as well as with other races of people – were born on the same day in 1809.

But Gopnik, to his credit, doesn't over-romanticise this coincidence of birth. “Coincidence is the vernacular of history, the slang of memory,” he writes, “the first strong pattern where we begin to search for subtler ones.” Angels and Ages examines many aspects of the life and work of Darwin and Lincoln, but the one I found most interesting was the observation that both men had a lucid, direct writing style that was the perfect conduit for the (radical for their times) ideas they needed to express. Alone among major scientists of his time, Darwin wrote books that an amateur reader in the 21st century can understand and enjoy (I’m currently halfway through The Voyage of the Beagle), while Lincoln's writing was marked by what Gopnik calls a “liberal eloquence” even though his profession required him to deal in rhetoric. Their styles can be seen as natural offshoots of their personal qualities, including clarity of thought and the questioning spirit.

I’ve been very interested in Darwin’s life and work for some time, and I thought the outstanding passages in Angels and Ages were the ones where Gopnik analyses him as a writer – even comparing his work to some of the great novelists of his time.

Turning the pages, we realise that Darwin, the greatest Victorian sage, does not write like a Victorian sage. He writes like a Victorian novelist ... [his] prose is calm and exact and, in its way, witty – not aphoristic, but ready to seize on a small point to make a large one, closer to George Eliot and Anthony Trollope than to his contemporary defenders ...

Gopnik shows how Darwin moved almost imperceptibly from studying small, seemingly insignificant things to raising large and difficult questions about the workings of the natural world, and how – importantly – he did this in an almost diffident way, without ever beating the reader over the head with his knowledge; how he anticipated many of the objections that could be made to his theories and pre-empted his critics by raising those points himself (and occasionally expressing self-doubt).

Little wonder that Gopnik says if he had to pick a single book “to sum up what was great and rich in Charles Darwin – a book to place alongside Middlemarch and Phineas Finn and Through the Looking Glass and Great Expectations”, it would be not his obviously important works but the almost oddball On the Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, which Darwin published near the end of his life. Here was a book with an apparently narrow subject (the title tells the story), which ends up demonstrating that even a “lowly” creature like an earthworm can play a very important part in the history of the world, given enough time.

I love this passage, which likens Darwin’s methods in On the Origin of Species to the Barchester novels of Anthony Trollope:

... Both Trollope and Darwin work in the mock-epic mode: the acts of very small and humble and comic creatures, archdeacons and earthworms, are shown to be not just illustrative of heroic and cosmic workings but an aspect of them. Trollope’s Barchester is a smallish place, but its acts are not diminutive; every kind of passion and betrayal and tragedy can be found within those narrow, provincial precincts. Archdeacon Grantly is a Greek hero and Mrs Proudie as big as Clytemnestra if we pay them the right kind of attention. England’s pastures are small, and its kennels cosy, but for Darwin they contain the keys to all creation ...

... Darwin had the gift – the gift of any good novelist – of making the story sound as if it just got pushed out by the descriptions. The plot seems to grow out of his observations rather than being imposed by his will; in reality, the plot came first, as it usually does.

In the reviewer's parlance, it might be said that Darwin, like the best novelists, was adept at "showing rather than telling".

P.S. While on great thinkers who expressed themselves lucidly, consider this quote from Mahatma Gandhi’s editor K Swaminathan:

Gandhi’s literary style is a natural expression of his democratic temper. There is no conscious ornamentation, no obtrusive trick of style calling attention to itself. The style is a blend of the modern manner of an individual sharing his ideas and experiences with his readers, and the impersonal manner of the Indian tradition in which the thought is more important than the person expounding it. The sense of equality with the common man is the mark of Gandhi’s style and the burden of his teaching.

On liberal reformers, Muslim modernists, subaltern feminists and Rediff.com: a conversation with Ramachandra Guha

In Makers of Modern India, the historian Ramachandra Guha presents excerpts from the speeches and writings of 19 thinkers – beginning with Raja Rammohan Roy – whose ideas influenced the formation of the Indian republic. Included in this tidily organised anthology are views expressed by Gandhi, Ambedkar, Nehru, Jinnah, Jyotirao Phule, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya and others – some of these are complementary while others are in direct opposition, and it makes for quite a tapestry. Also included are lesser-known thinkers such as the 19th century feminist Tarabai Shinde – the author of a powerful tract comparing the situations of men and women – and the liberal Muslim writer Hamid Dalwai, who encouraged social reform and modernism within his community.

Here's an interview I did with Guha some time ago (a shorter version of this appeared in The Sunday Guardian):


How, for the purposes of this book, did you define “modern India”? What criteria did you use while selecting these thinkers?

“Modernity” here is defined in terms of the challenge posed to the culture and civilisation of the subcontinent by a more technologically dynamic and aggressive civilisation – which is what happened when the East India Company came in. These challenges provided a wake-up call, which was then accepted by Raja Rammohan Roy, who scrutinised his own tradition to find its deficiencies and so on.

There’s a very good textbook I've read which defines modern India as starting in 1858, when the Crown assumed direct control. Another book defines modern India as starting in 1757, the year of the Battle of Plassey. But since this was a history of ideas, I had to start with an individual rather than a specific date or a battle or an administrative happening. I call Rammohan Roy “The First Liberal” because he was clearly someone who confronted head-on this encounter with another civilisation.

As for the criteria for selection, there were several: the originality of their ideas, the quality of their writing, and whether their ideas travelled across the centuries. Some people – such as Aurobindo or Vivekananda – are excluded partly because of the archaic nature of their prose, which hasn’t travelled well; it was very much of its time. But when Roy talks in the 1820s about the freedom of the press, you can still see the relevance of what he’s saying.

Also, they had to be thinkers AND doers. I didn’t take pure intellectuals and I didn’t take pure practising politicians. Two obvious omissions are Patel and Indira Gandhi, but they didn’t write much. Indira Gandhi, unlike her father, didn’t write most of her speeches.

More than once, you state your view that the modern manifestations of democracy and secularism didn’t have ancient origins; you’ve had an argument with Amartya Sen on this topic. Why (for instance) would someone like Akbar not be included here, given his very liberal – for the time – attitude to religion?

Akbar comes to us as second and third hand. He was probably illiterate, he never wrote anything. (Other thinkers like Kautilya wrote treatises, though again those were very much products of their time; they don’t travel well.) Secondly, there is a hiatus between what Akbar said in the 1580s and what happened in the 20th century. People like Akbar and Ashoka were rediscovered for us by British scholars – that’s when we started thinking about them and looking at them. There’s a disconnect.

Most importantly – I mentioned this in my debate with Amartya Sen – if you look at the proceedings of the Constituent Assembly of India, which went into the shaping of the Indian Constitution, Akbar’s ideas on secularism are NEVER discussed. The Indian idea of secularism is an adaptive, innovative response to Hindu-Muslim conflict in the 20th century. Hindus and Muslims have become political blocs in the modern voting system, they vote as blocs, as parties, and those are things Akbar never had to deal with. Akbar had great religious acumen, and he’s an interesting figure from a historical point of view. But he’s problematic in many ways to invoke: he had no influence on Gandhi or Nehru or Ambedkar.

Having said that, of course the history of ideas as a field has an ancient lineage. It would be wonderful if historians pay attention to social debates in the medieval or pre-medieval period, in different linguistic traditions – not just in Persian. And scholars ARE beginning to do that – there’s some very fine work now, particularly on Telugu and Tamil ideas of politics, by a great scholar Velcheru Narayana Rao, with his associates David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. They are working on ideas of politics and statecraft in late medieval south India, which is very interesting as a scholarly exercise. But to understand the making of the modern Indian nation-state, the framing of the Constitution, the practice of politics in the 21st century, you have to really start with Rammohan Roy.

In a sense, what you’re saying is that one should abandon the rose-coloured view of the very distant past as a brilliant, utopian, highly developed period – and that the social and political developments of the last 200-300 years have been progressive in a more immediate sense.

Absolutely. And they are related to our current predicament. The fact is, things like gender equality were not on the horizon five hundred or a thousand years ago. Neither was freedom of the press. These are thoroughly modern concepts.

The disagreements between these thinkers make for fascinating reading – there are differences of opinion ranging from the respectful arguments between Tagore and Gandhi to the outright hostility that Ambedkar shows towards Gandhi, to the complex relationship between Nehru and Rajagopalachari. Is there a conflict that you find particularly illuminating or relevant, in terms of how it pits one idea of India against another?

I wouldn’t want to pick just one. I think there are a series of very interesting conflicts, starting with Tilak (who I designate “the militant nationalist”) vs Gopal Krishna Gokhale (“the liberal reformer”), and even Phule versus the Congress. Then you move on to Gandhi’s friendly debates with Tagore and polemical debates with Ambedkar, and so on. The book is constructed as a series of arguments and debates and dialogues, and that’s part of any political tradition. It’s cumulative, continuous, interactive, dialogic, and that’s how I’ve tried to arrange it. I’m glad you see it that way.

These are debates about principles, and sometimes they can have a sharp edge – for example, Ambedkar is quite bitter about Gandhi personally. But the substance is about the origins of the caste system, the structural inequalities and how one can remove them. If you can get beyond the sneering remarks, it’s really a debate about (as the very fine Kannada scholar D R Nagaraj said) “self-purification vs self-respect”. Gandhi’s perspective was that the upper-caste Hindus should purify themselves, while Ambedkar said no, the lower castes should assert their self-respect. So these are two different routes to reform, to the emancipation of the Dalits, and that’s what makes it so interesting, even though there is sometimes a personal colouring to them.

This is a multi-vocal book, with multiple legacies. It’s for the reader to decide – it’s not a prescriptive book at all. Obviously there is my editorial hand and my decisions, but all these voices do come out. One can sympathise with Gandhi, or with Ambedkar. Similarly, on the subject of the English language, there’s a brilliant polemic by Lohia against it, while there’s an equally vigorous argument by Rajagopalachari in its favour.

I thought your structuring of Part III (“Nurturing the Nation”) was very interesting. First you have a selection of Gandhi’s writings on various subjects, followed by the views of his adversaries like Jinnah and Ambedkar, and then in the final chapter you return to Gandhi who revisits or clarifies his position while answering his critics. Why this unusual structure?

Gandhi was the fulcrum around whom these debates arose. In 1997 I taught a course at the University of California called “Arguments with Gandhi”, where I had Gandhi, Tagore, Ambedkar, Jinnah, the Marxists – and since then I’ve been interested in the history of arguments in modern India. And though Gandhi has developed a reputation for rigidity, what’s always struck me is his open-mindedness – his ability and willingness to revisit certain positions he took, to modify them. When I was doing this section, I thought this would be a nice way of showing that side of the man.

There is a tendency to create polarised images of these people – a Gandhi person on the one hand and an Ambedkar person on the other hand. But as I’ve argued in the past, they were both necessary for Dalit emancipation. They may have been adversaries in their own time, but for us, 60-70 years later, they are co-workers in a cause.

In any case, I wanted to avoid presenting stereotypes of these figures, which is one reason why I took care to select Jayaprakash Narayan’s slightly more moderate writings. He was more than the man who opposed Indira Gandhi!

The excerpt from Tarabai Shinde’s book about the suppression of women in Maharashtra is such a raw, angry, sarcastic piece of writing. To a modern eye, it’s also shrill and repetitive in places, but one can see how difficult it must have been for a woman to write something like this in the 1870s – it’s truly remarkable for its time. Why is this “subaltern feminist”, as you call her, not better known?

I was fortunate that Shinde has been very skilfully translated, by Rosalind O’Hanlon. But there are books where certain excerpts travel well and others don’t. When O’Hanlon did her first translation of the whole pamphlet, it was a goldmine for scholars. But the bits I excerpted were the ones that would appeal to a reader like yourself, who isn’t an expert on Maharashtra but is interested in the history of India and literary craftsmanship more generally.

One shouldn’t get the impression from my book that everything these thinkers wrote was so brilliant or incisive; often there was bombast and meandering. These excerpts might give a slightly exaggerated picture of the quality of their writing. I had to cull out the relevant stuff. Gandhi, of course, is consistently clear and direct. So is Ambedkar.

There are excerpts here from Nehru’s more obscure writings – his letters to chief ministers. Are efforts underway to make his less-known, post-independence writings more accessible?

For Nehru, it requires a detached eye. It can’t be done by an official historian, a paid-up devotee of the Gandhi-Nehru family. It has to be done by an independent historian. The writings would have to show some of the ways in which he was wrong, locate him in his time, show some aspects of his writings about China which proved foolish. Unfortunately, it’s only darbari, courtly historians who are allowed access to Nehru.

But Nehru aside, I hope some young scholar does a good, one-volume anthology of Rajagopalachari’s political writings. Or Lohia’s political writings. In this book they are represented in only 30-40 pages.

You’ve included the RSS leader M S Golwalkar, who stridently called for a “Hindu Rashtra”. Though you don’t say it explicitly, you mention in the Introduction to the section featuring him that one member of this section is perhaps less sophisticated intellectually than the others. What legacy justifies his inclusion in a book full of more nuanced thinkers?

Golwalkar wrote and spoke, and presented a very influential philosophy in very direct and clear terms. I had to have someone who expressed the Hindu political philosophy – the point of view that Hindu ideas and thought are the bedrock of Indian civilisation and should continue to be so. Aurobindo and Vivekanand expressed similar views in a more open-ended way – saying we should learn to adapt, engage the modern world etc, but the basis of modern Indian culture should be Hindu culture.

An extension of that idea is that the basis of the modern Indian state should be Hindu political principles, and Savarkar and Golwalkar belong to this line of thought. I had to choose one of them. Savarkar may have been more intellectually sophisticated, but Golwalkar had a much bigger impact, in terms of the RSS and the BJP. Advani, Vajpayee, Murli Joshi were all trained indirectly or directly by him. His ideology, his ideas about statecraft, our attitude towards the west, relationship between religions, had a profound impact on one of India’s major political movements. So even if I didn’t like him, he had to be there – he had helped shape modern India.

His writings express the Hindutva paranoia one sees even today, about the possibility of the Muslim population growing out of control and becoming increasingly powerful.

Very much so, and what’s equally important is that he articulates these thoughts in a very paranoid way! It’s intense and compelling and alarmist, and it resonates with his followers today for that reason.

You end the book with a very intriguing figure, the Muslim liberal Hamid Dalwai, who is relatively obscure even though he lived recently. What makes him so significant? Is it because of the omnipresent problem of Islam being a religion that exists in its own cocoon, at odds with modernity, and with not enough moderate voices representing it?

I discovered Dalwai in the mid-1990s. I bought his book Muslim Politics in Secular India, became fascinated by it, and talked about him with his friend and translator Dilip Chitre – Chitre did a great service by taking time out, setting aside his own work, to translate Dalwai.

Anyway, Dalwai stayed in my mind as a very interesting figure. I quoted him in an article I did for the Times of India around 10 years ago, and that got my Muslim friends very angry, because they couldn’t stomach his radicalism. As you know, these things become very black and white. A Hindu can’t say Muslims must reform themselves, even if he’s already been telling Hindus to be less bigoted – someone like me, for instance, whose views on Hindutva are well known (chuckles).

But Dalwai’s real significance struck me in the post-9/11 global world, and given the crises Islam is facing now. He speaks to those issues. If I had done this book 8-10 years earlier, maybe he would not have figured. You’re right, he’s the most obscure figure in the book, but he is utterly relevant, and to my mind it made sense to end with him, especially because I began with Rammohan Roy, whom everybody knows. They are complementary figures. Both were fighting the prevalent orthodoxies of their time – Rammohan Roy was as much of a heretical Hindu for his time as Dalwai was a heretical Muslim in his. But Roy lived into his 60s, became well-know, while Dalwai died in his early 40s just as he was moving from fiction writing to political commentary.

If you had to pick one person to round off the number of thinkers in this book to 20, who would it be?

It’s interesting you ask this, because the one thing I knew for sure about this book was that people would ask me questions about the exclusions. That always happens with a work of this sort! Last week (before the book came out) I got a letter from a very dear friend – an IIT/IIM student who could have got a job anywhere but was inspired by Vivekananda to devote his life to the tribal poor of West Bengal. He wrote to me, saying “Why is Vivekananda not there? He shaped both progressive Hindus like Gandhi and reactionary Hindus like Golwalkar.” So that was the first complaint. Then, when the ToI ran a story on the book, Swami Agnivesh rang me up and said I’m very pleased your book is out, but Dayanand Saraswati kyun nahin hain iss mein?

Then I came to Delhi and a friend I respect greatly said “Why is Bhagat Singh not in the book?” Now, I have answers for all of them. With Dayanand Saraswati and Vivekananda, I’ve mentioned in the book that Gandhi superseded them. With Bhagat Singh, my answer is that if he’d lived 10 years more he might have been the first original Indian Marxist thinker. Because he was broadening his mind; if you look at the reading he was doing – Tolstoy etc – you don’t know where he might have gone. But his writings are the writings of a young man who was still searching for his place in the world, and the corpus as it is doesn’t merit his inclusion.

However, this morning it struck me that there was one person I should have included. He represented a very influential and important point of view, and he was very eloquent and precocious in his articulation of this view: I’m talking about the engineer M Visvesvaraya, a technological modernist who wrote a famous book Industrialise or Perish. He would have been a critic of Gandhi (who said “industrialise and perish”). He was an outward-looking, rational person who was famous for building a steel dam in Karnataka, much before Nehru. He anticipated the high-tech model we have now, with technology transforming society, and he also anticipates Nehru, J R D Tata and Narayana Murthy in different ways. He would have made a fitting twentieth.

Verrier Elwin [about whom Guha wrote the book Savaging the Civilised] was the last inclusion – I wasn’t going to include him, but given the growing importance of the Naxalite movement, the adivasis, I thought he should be included. I’ve deliberately let Savaging the Civilised go out of print, but it will be out next year in a new edition. I want to do a long epilogue on his relevance to the Naxalite issue.

What are you working on now? You mentioned a biography of Gandhi.

Yes, that will be in two volumes – the first will be about Gandhi in South Africa, the second about the subsequent years. It will take a few years to complete.

I want to locate Gandhi in the history of South Africa; most people have located South Africa in the history of Gandhi. But he was there for 22 years and there’s lots of interesting material which people skip over. He was there at a very important time, when the Apartheid state was being made and the relations between different races were being solidified. He was right in the middle of an important transformation in the country’s history.

I’ve also renewed my interest in environment, and might go back to that after the Gandhi biography is done. Otherwise, there are collections of essays, and I’m also updating the history of environmentalism I wrote.

OUTTAKES FROM THE CONVERSATION: GANDHI’S POINT-SCORING

I was amused by the excerpt (“Revisiting Nationalism”) where Gandhi repeatedly refers to Tagore as the Poet – the word almost becomes a poetic refrain in its own right! Notwithstanding the mutual respect between the two men, do you think there could be a tinge of sarcasm there? Using “Poet” to connote a dreamy, impractical figure who doesn’t quite face up to hard realities?

Oh, it certainly could be. Gandhi was not above sarcasm, and he certainly could be suggesting that Tagore was “only” a poet, not a political thinker.

Incidentally I edited out something from the essay “Revisiting Caste”, where Gandhi mentions Ambedkar not being allowed to make an address. (Reading aloud) He says: “Dr Ambedkar was not going to be beaten by the Reception Committee. He has answered their rejection of him by publishing the address at his own expense...”

I removed a line that follows this, where he gives Ambedkar a completely gratuitous piece of advice. Gandhi says, “Dr Ambedkar has priced the pamphlet at 1 rupee. It would be better if he had priced it at 8 annas, then it would have reached a wider public.”

So he was not above a bit of point-scoring, though normally he was very decent and civilised, of course.

INDIA’S ‘GLORIOUS PAST’ - A YOUNG, MALE, MACHO THING

We spoke earlier about the excessive glorification of the very distant past. There’s an ancient-world chauvinism one often sees in the views of hardliners today – in the idea, for example, that rishis who lived 5,000 years ago knew all about nuclear weapons and were more advanced than modern scientists. Do you see this sort of thing as an impediment to the debates and discussions about modern India?

There’s nothing wrong with looking back, as long as there is some relevance or focus. When people talk about 1857, it’s all about the Mutiny, and those discussions quickly become about heroism or patriotism – but that was also the year in which the first Universities were formed, and that’s something that tends to get forgotten. But it was so important in terms of taking us forward. I mean, did anyone really want a political order based on the ideas of Bahadur Shah Zafar? (Laughs). One has to confront these ideas. There tends to be a kneejerk anti-Westernism sometimes.

As you point out, the Indian electoral system is based on the Westminster model.

Yes, and the greatness of people like Rammohan Roy, Tagore, even Gandhi and Nehru was that they told you what to take and what not to take from foreign cultures – what could be grafted on, what could be adapted.

I think the idea that India once dominated the world and was superior in so many things and we HAVE TO recover our pre-eminence in the world – that idea is a very male thing. A young male, macho thing.

I take it you’ve seen message-boards like Rediff.com, which are full of the most astonishingly jingoistic comments, mainly by young people?

I have seen some of it, but two things: one, how representative is something like Rediff.com? It’s only the most frustrated guys who write – most people who have moderate views, who may constitute the majority, don’t write in.

Also, how many of these commenters are NRIs who are totally dislocated from their home country and not integrated in their new country, and venting their frustrations?

My own sense is that this sort of thing is going down. I have with me a long, unpublished essay that I've written about the Hindutva hate-mail that I’ve received over the last 15 years. But one reason I haven’t published it is that the mail has been declining in recent times.

In any case, non-fiction history is getting more prominence than it did 10 years ago. The books that have made an impact in this field - Dalrymple, P Sainath, Sunil Khilnani, my work – these are all, in one way or another, non-Hindutva or explicitly against glorifying the past. And they are all being published and doing well, and coming out in Indian languages. So I think the hardliners have been pushed into a corner, and as a result they are shrieking louder and louder.

[A little more on Makers of Modern India in this post]

The musical conquests of Goopy and Bagha

My latest movie column for Yahoo! India is about Satyajit Ray's most playful and timeless film, and the minor disconnect I once felt from it as a non-Bengali-speaking viewer. Here goes.

------

Update - here's the full column:

I'm watching Satyajit Ray's fantasy-adventure classic Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, about two simpletons - the singer Goopy and the drummer Bagha - who use their music and their generally upbeat outlook towards life to help save the land of Shundi from an attack by a rival kingdom. I've seen the film twice before, and each time the subtitling has been inadequate (to say the least). Besides, on the first occasion years ago, I wasn't familiar with the original story written by Ray's grandfather Upendrakishore, and so I had to draw my own conclusions about some of the plot details.

Thus, when Goopy and Bagha used a boon given to them by the king of ghosts and accidentally reached a land called Jhundi, I figured this couldn't be a real place in Bengal because the landscape was snowy. A while later, the subtitles vanished altogether for a 10-minute stretch, leaving me clueless about what the Raja of Shundi was saying to our two heroes. Since I had guessed by this point that Shundi too was an imaginary land, I briefly wondered if the Raja was speaking an invented language that the viewer wasn't supposed to understand. (Not a very improbable idea given the Ray family's flair for fantasy, including the nonsense verse composed by his father Sukumar.)

On the DVD I have now, there is an attempt of sorts to capture the rhythmic playfulness of the film's dialogue and songs. For instance, in a scene where Goopy sings a song to thwart (and "freeze") the cunning minister of Halla, the subtitle for the opening lines read:

"Oh Mr Minister with Plots so Sinister...
Stop!
Don't you try concealing
Your crafty double-dealing!"

But even the most imaginative subtitles can't replace the experience of understanding the words as they are spoken, and therein hangs a tale of disconnect. I love Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, but I'm aware that it can never be part of my childhood mythology in the way that Hindi movies were - or the scone-and-macaroon-filled world of Enid Blyton for that matter.

The first time I saw Ray's film, the language was a barrier. Take the enchanting scene where the king of ghosts, speaking in a singsong voice, offers Goopy and Bagha three boons. The impact of the scene - the sense of mystery and wonder it creates - hinges on the cadences of the ghost's speech as well as Ray's use of a syncopated electronic tune; it requires an immediate link between the viewer and the characters. And so, there's a big difference between the experience of the Bong viewer - who understands the words and their inflections directly - and the experience of the gatecrasher whose eyes must flit back and forth, from the subtitles (which in any case are often so poor that a second layer of conscious interpretation is required) to the expression on the ghost's face (it's delightful how he looks wide-eyedly from Goopy to Bagha and back again as he speaks, as if they, not him, are the oddities).

Similarly, when Goopy and Bagha sing about the various types of ghosts they saw in the forest ("Tall ghosts, squat ghosts! / Fat ghosts, lean ghosts! / Ripe ghosts, mean ghosts!"), it wasn't much fun having to read the rapid-fire flow of English words at the bottom of the screen instead of simply enjoying the song and dance, and the expressions on their faces. (Watching the scene on DVD now, with the subtitles turned off, is much more satisfying.)

As a result, my perspective on this film is necessarily different from that of the Bengali viewer who grew up with it (and perhaps with the original story as well). The reference points and associations are different too. Watching Ray's occasional use of wipes to separate one scene from the next, I wonder if he was influenced by Kurosawa's use of this technique in films like The Hidden Fortress and The Seven Samurai. The repeated call for an executioner to "chop off their heads" is reminiscent of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. When the king of Halla breaks into song in the presence of a group of distinguished ambassadors who are visiting his court, I think of Groucho Marx's loony "Just wait till I get through with it" act in Duck Soup. (This isn't a stretch: Ray once wrote that if he had to take a single film with him to a desert island, he would choose a Marx Brothers film without a moment's hesitation.)

****

But it would be a mistake to suggest that the Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne experience can be spoiled by not knowing the language - it contains so many fine examples of pure visual storytelling. Watching it now, I marvel at how playful and experimental Ray was here (possibly one reason why this film and his other movies for children are neglected by Western critics: their existence is inconvenient for those who pigeonhole him as a director rooted in realism). He very effectively uses tracking shots and close-ups (as in the gloating faces of the village elders who get Goopy into trouble early in the story). There are freeze frames, there is even a series of jump cuts (when Goopy claps his hands while singing "Maharaja Tomare Selaam" for the king of Shundi), and many striking compositions that create a sense of unease: a scarecrow in the foreground as Goopy makes his way across a field; a shot of water dripping onto a drum followed by a slow pan to Bagha sleeping nearby. Best of all is the film's most famous sequence: the inventive and multidimensional ghost dance, which is a superb example of an aspect of Ray's creativity that many people are still sadly unfamiliar with.

The dance begins with four groups of ghosts (representing different classes of society - noblemen, soldiers and so on) posturing grandly, but it ends in all-round massacre, with everyone dead, and this foreshadows a key theme of the film. I doubt that anyone watching Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne even at the level of "mere entertainment" can fail to be moved by its understated yet clear-sighted pacifism, which finds its final expression in the uplifting climactic scene where hungry soldiers lay down their weapons and make a beeline for the pots of sweets that Goopy and Bagha have conjured for them. Ray doesn't underline the anti-war theme, but it's there for anyone to see.

Warmth and empathy are qualities found in all of Ray's movies, but this genre allows him to display them in their rawest, least guarded form: where else could you have that lovely visual of Goopy and Bagha performing for the Shundi Raja (played by the wonderful character actor Santosh Dutta, whose smiling presence is one of the most reassuring things about any movie I've seen him in), all three men so caught up in the moment that they beam unselfconsciously at each other, with the Raja swaying and clapping his hands like a little child in tune to the song? Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne is about many things - it's about the strange and complex interactions between kings and commoners, about underdogs who triumph in the end, and about the value of good companionship (Goopy and Bagha must stay together if they want to continue availing of the ghost's boons). But most of all it's about two little heroes who want nothing much more than to "please people with our music" - though it doesn't hurt that in the best fairy-tale style they also end up winning the hands of beautiful princesses along the way! It's one of the most timeless films I've seen.

'A profession that respects itself'? Ha

It's been a long time since I've had illusions about "journalistic integrity" (including any that might be found in the publications I regularly write for), but what is life without the occasional mild surprise? For the latest edition of her Stet column in Business Standard Weekend, Mitali Saran wrote about the India Today-Slate-Rajinikanth plagiarism episode. The piece, which you can read here, includes this accurate observation:

It’s not as if ours is the only media in the world with big problems. But when ours is confronted with its own scandals, you can hear the clang of a fraternity closing ranks, followed by the weird sound of thousands of furious back-scratchings, followed by the thunderous silence of stones not being thrown in glass houses.

Well, Business Standard took that bit about rank-closing quite seriously and demonstrated its truth in the directest way possible. They didn't publish the column. Instead they filled the space with - hold on to your sides now - a New York Times article about wingtips. Is that furious back-scratching you hear or just the sound of dirt being scraped off the soles of expensive shoes?

P.S. to my knowledge, Aditya Sinha of the New Indian Express was the first mainstream-media journalist to do a piece about the plagiarism incident - here it is - but Nilanjana S Roy did write about it on her blog, making the good point that there's something very wrong with a copy-desk that fails to recognise the inappropriateness of phrases like "the Indian state of Tamil Nadu" and "if you haven't heard of Rajinikanth before" in an India Today edition meant specially for south Indian readers. Plagiarism is one thing, but plagiarising without discernment? Tch.