Jai Arjun Singh's Blog, page 33
April 5, 2019
One way of reading anthologies (and a memory of two Guy de Maupassant stories)
[my “Bookshelves” column this month is about my teenage love of short-story collections, including a 1000-page anthology of Maupassant’s writings]
-------------------------------------
Opening a new anthology, The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction, I found myself reflexively following a ritual developed in childhood. I looked at the page numbers listed on the Contents page, homed in on the shortest stories, and picked one. After finishing the story, I put a little dot next to the title, as a reminder that I had read it (this is especially useful if the anthology is a fat one), before moving on to the next, slightly longer story.
I have dozens of thick books filled with those little dots. (A time-lapse video depiction of my encounters with Contents pages over the decades might begin with a close-up of a child’s hand awkwardly marking a story title with a pencil, then dissolve into a shot of an adult hand, this time holding a pen, doing the same thing on the page of a more grown-up-looking book.) Such anthologies – short-story collections, organized by genre or author – were a big part of my teenage reading life. They helped me discover some favourite writers, including Roald Dahl, Damon Runyon, Saki… and Guy de Maupassant, a collection of whose short fiction became – improbably – a treasured book.
I don’t remember how I stumbled on Maupassant, but I remember the little thrill I felt when an acquaintance who knew a bit of French saw my book and, sotto voce, let me into a secret that I could impress friends and family with: the “Guy” was pronounced “Gee” with a soft G. I still have the simple-looking anthology, which was priced at just Rs 125 (in 1991). The printing and binding standards aren’t great, but it has held together. No translator’s name is mentioned anywhere in this book. And the cover, while it may have been apposite to some of Maupassant’s stories, seems like it was there purely to tantalize the casual browser: a young woman holding up a cloth in front of her, her bare back turned towards the reader. Having become a cinephile around the same time (and watching films I was too young to watch), I thought this woman looked a little like the beautiful French actress Catherine Deneuve in one of the steamier scenes from Belle de Jour.
Much as I enjoyed this book, it was a daunting beast – more than a thousand pages in very small font – and looking at the little dots on the Contents pages now, I find that I have read only around half of the 200-plus stories in it. So I won’t make any grand statements about Maupassant’s body of work. What I do remember is that for me, much of his writing was “adult” in ways that had little to do with sexually explicit content. It opened a window of insight into the mysteries of adult behaviour, and examined ideas and conflicts I had no firsthand experience of at the time.
Two stories in particular stuck with me, creating associations that I couldn’t have articulated as an adolescent, but which I understand better now. The first, a reflection on how the human mind moves constantly between rationality and irrational dread, was “Beside a Dead Man”, in which two men are tasked with spending the night alongside the dead body of the philosopher Schopenhauer. Unpleasant as this vigil is, it is made more so by the fact that the deceased had “a frightful smile” even in life; as the night wears on, the men are terrified by the sense of an “immaterial essence” – a soul, or something scarier? – persisting after death. Then they catch a glimpse of something white flying out of the corpse and through the air, and notice that his grin has become even more macabre than before. The story ends in an offhand manner, with a non-supernatural explanation, but that almost doesn’t matter: so tangible is the sense of fear and claustrophobia that has been created along the way.
The other story is also, in a way, about the process of decomposition or decay – but in life, rather than after death. In “A Family”, the narrator meets an old friend named Simon – a once-vigorous, intellectually robust young man – and finds him transformed after 15 years of marriage into a stout, parochial householder: someone who now seems to regard the fathering of children as his life’s major achievement, having concluded which he can sit back in satisfaction. “I felt profound pity, mingled with a feeling of vague contempt, for this vainglorious and simple reproducer of his species who spent his nights in his country house in uxurious pleasures.”
The story’s depressing climax is a dinner-table scene where Simon, his wife and children, much to the narrator’s horror, derive pleasure from the suffering of a 90-year-old grandfather who is denied the food he wants to eat because “it might harm him”. And also because watching the old man beg and cry is one of their few daily sources of amusement.
As a teenager, long before I knew about the more contemptuous associations around the word “bourgeoisie”, I intuitively understood how this narrator felt. I had had a similarly disenchanting encounter with a much older cousin whom I once hero-worshipped, and discussed books and films with – but who had turned into a corporate type, incapable of talking about anything other than his business-related anxieties.
And yet, rereading “A Family” recently, I found a subtle shift in my response. To a degree, I could still relate with the narrator’s dismay, and the family’s treatment of the old grandfather had lost none of its nastiness. But I also found much to cringe at in the smug superiority with which the narrator denounces the domestic life, and his description of Simon’s wife as “a commonplace mother”, “a brood mare” and a “machine of flesh which procreates without mental care”. These judgements now felt just as narrow, petty and provincial. Whether or not Maupassant consciously intended such conflicting interpretations, his stories, like so much other good literature, are a reminder of how we change with time and experience – and how what we read changes with us.
[Earlier Bookshelves column here]
-------------------------------------
Opening a new anthology, The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction, I found myself reflexively following a ritual developed in childhood. I looked at the page numbers listed on the Contents page, homed in on the shortest stories, and picked one. After finishing the story, I put a little dot next to the title, as a reminder that I had read it (this is especially useful if the anthology is a fat one), before moving on to the next, slightly longer story.
I have dozens of thick books filled with those little dots. (A time-lapse video depiction of my encounters with Contents pages over the decades might begin with a close-up of a child’s hand awkwardly marking a story title with a pencil, then dissolve into a shot of an adult hand, this time holding a pen, doing the same thing on the page of a more grown-up-looking book.) Such anthologies – short-story collections, organized by genre or author – were a big part of my teenage reading life. They helped me discover some favourite writers, including Roald Dahl, Damon Runyon, Saki… and Guy de Maupassant, a collection of whose short fiction became – improbably – a treasured book. I don’t remember how I stumbled on Maupassant, but I remember the little thrill I felt when an acquaintance who knew a bit of French saw my book and, sotto voce, let me into a secret that I could impress friends and family with: the “Guy” was pronounced “Gee” with a soft G. I still have the simple-looking anthology, which was priced at just Rs 125 (in 1991). The printing and binding standards aren’t great, but it has held together. No translator’s name is mentioned anywhere in this book. And the cover, while it may have been apposite to some of Maupassant’s stories, seems like it was there purely to tantalize the casual browser: a young woman holding up a cloth in front of her, her bare back turned towards the reader. Having become a cinephile around the same time (and watching films I was too young to watch), I thought this woman looked a little like the beautiful French actress Catherine Deneuve in one of the steamier scenes from Belle de Jour.
Much as I enjoyed this book, it was a daunting beast – more than a thousand pages in very small font – and looking at the little dots on the Contents pages now, I find that I have read only around half of the 200-plus stories in it. So I won’t make any grand statements about Maupassant’s body of work. What I do remember is that for me, much of his writing was “adult” in ways that had little to do with sexually explicit content. It opened a window of insight into the mysteries of adult behaviour, and examined ideas and conflicts I had no firsthand experience of at the time.
Two stories in particular stuck with me, creating associations that I couldn’t have articulated as an adolescent, but which I understand better now. The first, a reflection on how the human mind moves constantly between rationality and irrational dread, was “Beside a Dead Man”, in which two men are tasked with spending the night alongside the dead body of the philosopher Schopenhauer. Unpleasant as this vigil is, it is made more so by the fact that the deceased had “a frightful smile” even in life; as the night wears on, the men are terrified by the sense of an “immaterial essence” – a soul, or something scarier? – persisting after death. Then they catch a glimpse of something white flying out of the corpse and through the air, and notice that his grin has become even more macabre than before. The story ends in an offhand manner, with a non-supernatural explanation, but that almost doesn’t matter: so tangible is the sense of fear and claustrophobia that has been created along the way.The other story is also, in a way, about the process of decomposition or decay – but in life, rather than after death. In “A Family”, the narrator meets an old friend named Simon – a once-vigorous, intellectually robust young man – and finds him transformed after 15 years of marriage into a stout, parochial householder: someone who now seems to regard the fathering of children as his life’s major achievement, having concluded which he can sit back in satisfaction. “I felt profound pity, mingled with a feeling of vague contempt, for this vainglorious and simple reproducer of his species who spent his nights in his country house in uxurious pleasures.”
The story’s depressing climax is a dinner-table scene where Simon, his wife and children, much to the narrator’s horror, derive pleasure from the suffering of a 90-year-old grandfather who is denied the food he wants to eat because “it might harm him”. And also because watching the old man beg and cry is one of their few daily sources of amusement.
As a teenager, long before I knew about the more contemptuous associations around the word “bourgeoisie”, I intuitively understood how this narrator felt. I had had a similarly disenchanting encounter with a much older cousin whom I once hero-worshipped, and discussed books and films with – but who had turned into a corporate type, incapable of talking about anything other than his business-related anxieties.
And yet, rereading “A Family” recently, I found a subtle shift in my response. To a degree, I could still relate with the narrator’s dismay, and the family’s treatment of the old grandfather had lost none of its nastiness. But I also found much to cringe at in the smug superiority with which the narrator denounces the domestic life, and his description of Simon’s wife as “a commonplace mother”, “a brood mare” and a “machine of flesh which procreates without mental care”. These judgements now felt just as narrow, petty and provincial. Whether or not Maupassant consciously intended such conflicting interpretations, his stories, like so much other good literature, are a reminder of how we change with time and experience – and how what we read changes with us.
[Earlier Bookshelves column here]
March 30, 2019
Many partitions: on Krishna Sobti’s last book गुजरात पाकिस्तान से गुजरात हिंदुस्तान
[Did this book review for Open magazine]
---------------
Around 80 pages into A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There – the English translation of Krishna Sobti’s novelized memoir about a young woman seeking a preschool job in the princely state Sirohi shortly after Partition – comes a chapter that marks a shift from the narrative we have so far experienced. Up to this point, the book has been in a third-person voice, albeit a subjective or limited one that keeps us tied to Krishna’s actions and thoughts. Now this chapter, printed in another font – more cursive and childlike – has Krishna writing in the first person, recalling a birthday picnic she had successfully organized for her friends during her college days in Lahore.
Food and tea were ordered – from a restaurant that had its own van, which could deliver anywhere in the city – and the Principal Sahiba was persuaded to allow a riverside party. A minor boat accident during the picnic led to two boys joining the group. Folk songs, ghazals and poems were recited, everyone had a good time. But in Krishna’s telling, the party also lost some of its sheen because it grew dark very suddenly – and because she didn’t know if she and her friends would ever return to that idyllic spot for another such celebration.
Is this a premonition of partings to come, one wonders, or is she writing with the benefit of hindsight, adding a dab of melancholia to an episode that was unrestrictedly happy when it took place?
The sense of a childhood lost – or ending before one realizes it, in the storm of Partition – is vivid, but equally notable is how it sneaks up on us. The change in font and perspective has prepared us for something different, but as the memory-dream unfolds we yield to its languid flow. And then, in the last lines, without anything overtly dramatic taking place, the chattering of young people gives way to an ominous stillness. There is something very cinematic about the episode, and very haunting in the way it disrupts the main story.
That story is a seemingly straightforward one. A refugee from Delhi, young Krishna – headstrong and wavering in turn – arrives in Sirohi where she must deal with self-doubts as well as some resistance from the educational director, Zutshi Sahib, who would have preferred another candidate for the job. She meets the more welcoming Divan Sahib, as well as members of the royal family; she travels on work to Ahmedabad and Bombay, in the process also spending time with some of her relatives and slipping into other distant memories; on returning to Sirohi, since the preschool has not yet opened, she is employed as governess to the four-year-old Maharajah Tej Singh, and witnesses the political intrigues and inter-clan rivalries bearing down on a way of life that is about to fade.
****
Reading this memoir, with limited knowledge of Sobti’s earlier work, two things leaped out at me. First, the celebrated author – who passed away this year, aged 93 – was well into her eighties when she wrote this book (the original was published in 2016). Second, the playful experimentalism of the writing. Though I was personally very taken by the picnic interlude mentioned above, that isn’t the first instance of the book deviating from linear storytelling – there are other asides and disruptions. Early on, for instance, there is a long stream-of-consciousness passage, made up of disjointed thoughts about the 1947 massacres: about the many Abduls and Rams who turned on each other; how the gulistan ki bulbulein (the rose garden’s nightingales, a reference to a line from the Indian national anthem) stopped making sweet music in unison and took up knives and cleavers instead.
Much later, even as the third-person narrative continues, a delicate shift occurs: where Krishna was earlier referred to only as “she” or “her”, she is now variously called “Bai” or “the Governess” or “Ma’am”, with the reference sometimes changing from one paragraph to another depending on context and terms of engagement. It is as if the book’s canvas is expanding to accommodate the perspectives of other people – the maids appointed to serve her, the child maharajah, the other royals – and her identity is being broadened from being just “that refugee girl” to something fuller, something that commands respect. Or perhaps this is only happening in her own mind?
Then there are the many short, staccato sentences – in that picnic account, for example. “Colourful dupattas and fresh river breezes. […] The imposing height of the principal sahiba. A unique glow to her face. Her hair pulled back in a small bun. A white sari with a white border. Kanchan Lata Sabarwal. A unique personality. […] The banks of the Ravi. Boating. Girls splashing into water, then a rescue. Tea from the Standard.”
It’s possible to wonder if some of these characteristics of Sobti’s prose might have a practical source: an aging writer putting things down as quickly as possible, perhaps even conserving energy by not writing full sentences. As translator Daisy Rockwell suggests in her Introduction, this book has the feel of an old person drawing on ancient memories, including seemingly trivial ones, and setting them down simply because she remembered them and wanted to
preserve them. However, Rockwell also points to the more general difficulty of translating Sobti, who doesn’t set out to make things easy for a reader by describing things at length, but often uses language in a condensed, fragmentary way to convey impressions.
These formal qualities – the restlessness, the memories bleeding into each other, the shifting of viewpoints even within a broadly standardized narrative voice, the hint of fractured personalities – are well suited to a book that has the shadow of Partition over it. The title refers to two Gujarats – the Indian state that Sirohi is on the verge of being assimilated into, and the district that is now in Pakistan (usually spelt “Gujrat” in English, but spelled the same way as the Indian Gujarat for the purposes of this book). But there are other partitions here, as there are elsewhere in Sobti’s writings. Having used the male pseudonym Hashmat for some of her work (as Rockwell points out, she even took a little dig at “Krishna Sobti” while writing in this voice!), she certainly knew about the many dualities present in people. The Krishna of this story is internally divided herself, vacillating in her early days in Sirohi (she contemplates going back to the station a few minutes after arriving) – and interestingly, when she does make up her mind, it comes from defiance, after she happens to learn that Zutshi Sahib doesn’t want her in the position.
Other divides that run through this book include the one between past and present (or looking back and looking forward), between childhood innocence and adult pragmatism, between Rajputs, the merchant class and Brahmins, between the types of clothes that people wear in different states and kingdoms, between the old world where a little child may be taught how to comport himself as a ruler, and the rapidly arriving new one where there is only a proud young democracy with no time for the fancies and protocols of kings (at least not of the old variety).
And there are the partitions that separate ghosts from the living, as Krishna discovers when she is haunted by the spirits of friends and acquaintances who were murdered during the riots. “Krishna Krishna,” one of them teased her when they were children, “As thirsty as a well / How much water will you pull / How much thirst will you quench / As much nectar as you drink / That’s how long you’ll live.” It’s a reminder of the pressures that the octogenarian Krishna Sobti must have carried as a living well of memories, writing furiously, using mind and pen to give voice to those whom she had survived by so many decades.
---------------
Around 80 pages into A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There – the English translation of Krishna Sobti’s novelized memoir about a young woman seeking a preschool job in the princely state Sirohi shortly after Partition – comes a chapter that marks a shift from the narrative we have so far experienced. Up to this point, the book has been in a third-person voice, albeit a subjective or limited one that keeps us tied to Krishna’s actions and thoughts. Now this chapter, printed in another font – more cursive and childlike – has Krishna writing in the first person, recalling a birthday picnic she had successfully organized for her friends during her college days in Lahore.
Food and tea were ordered – from a restaurant that had its own van, which could deliver anywhere in the city – and the Principal Sahiba was persuaded to allow a riverside party. A minor boat accident during the picnic led to two boys joining the group. Folk songs, ghazals and poems were recited, everyone had a good time. But in Krishna’s telling, the party also lost some of its sheen because it grew dark very suddenly – and because she didn’t know if she and her friends would ever return to that idyllic spot for another such celebration. Is this a premonition of partings to come, one wonders, or is she writing with the benefit of hindsight, adding a dab of melancholia to an episode that was unrestrictedly happy when it took place?
The sense of a childhood lost – or ending before one realizes it, in the storm of Partition – is vivid, but equally notable is how it sneaks up on us. The change in font and perspective has prepared us for something different, but as the memory-dream unfolds we yield to its languid flow. And then, in the last lines, without anything overtly dramatic taking place, the chattering of young people gives way to an ominous stillness. There is something very cinematic about the episode, and very haunting in the way it disrupts the main story.
That story is a seemingly straightforward one. A refugee from Delhi, young Krishna – headstrong and wavering in turn – arrives in Sirohi where she must deal with self-doubts as well as some resistance from the educational director, Zutshi Sahib, who would have preferred another candidate for the job. She meets the more welcoming Divan Sahib, as well as members of the royal family; she travels on work to Ahmedabad and Bombay, in the process also spending time with some of her relatives and slipping into other distant memories; on returning to Sirohi, since the preschool has not yet opened, she is employed as governess to the four-year-old Maharajah Tej Singh, and witnesses the political intrigues and inter-clan rivalries bearing down on a way of life that is about to fade.
****
Reading this memoir, with limited knowledge of Sobti’s earlier work, two things leaped out at me. First, the celebrated author – who passed away this year, aged 93 – was well into her eighties when she wrote this book (the original was published in 2016). Second, the playful experimentalism of the writing. Though I was personally very taken by the picnic interlude mentioned above, that isn’t the first instance of the book deviating from linear storytelling – there are other asides and disruptions. Early on, for instance, there is a long stream-of-consciousness passage, made up of disjointed thoughts about the 1947 massacres: about the many Abduls and Rams who turned on each other; how the gulistan ki bulbulein (the rose garden’s nightingales, a reference to a line from the Indian national anthem) stopped making sweet music in unison and took up knives and cleavers instead.
Much later, even as the third-person narrative continues, a delicate shift occurs: where Krishna was earlier referred to only as “she” or “her”, she is now variously called “Bai” or “the Governess” or “Ma’am”, with the reference sometimes changing from one paragraph to another depending on context and terms of engagement. It is as if the book’s canvas is expanding to accommodate the perspectives of other people – the maids appointed to serve her, the child maharajah, the other royals – and her identity is being broadened from being just “that refugee girl” to something fuller, something that commands respect. Or perhaps this is only happening in her own mind?
Then there are the many short, staccato sentences – in that picnic account, for example. “Colourful dupattas and fresh river breezes. […] The imposing height of the principal sahiba. A unique glow to her face. Her hair pulled back in a small bun. A white sari with a white border. Kanchan Lata Sabarwal. A unique personality. […] The banks of the Ravi. Boating. Girls splashing into water, then a rescue. Tea from the Standard.”
It’s possible to wonder if some of these characteristics of Sobti’s prose might have a practical source: an aging writer putting things down as quickly as possible, perhaps even conserving energy by not writing full sentences. As translator Daisy Rockwell suggests in her Introduction, this book has the feel of an old person drawing on ancient memories, including seemingly trivial ones, and setting them down simply because she remembered them and wanted to
preserve them. However, Rockwell also points to the more general difficulty of translating Sobti, who doesn’t set out to make things easy for a reader by describing things at length, but often uses language in a condensed, fragmentary way to convey impressions. These formal qualities – the restlessness, the memories bleeding into each other, the shifting of viewpoints even within a broadly standardized narrative voice, the hint of fractured personalities – are well suited to a book that has the shadow of Partition over it. The title refers to two Gujarats – the Indian state that Sirohi is on the verge of being assimilated into, and the district that is now in Pakistan (usually spelt “Gujrat” in English, but spelled the same way as the Indian Gujarat for the purposes of this book). But there are other partitions here, as there are elsewhere in Sobti’s writings. Having used the male pseudonym Hashmat for some of her work (as Rockwell points out, she even took a little dig at “Krishna Sobti” while writing in this voice!), she certainly knew about the many dualities present in people. The Krishna of this story is internally divided herself, vacillating in her early days in Sirohi (she contemplates going back to the station a few minutes after arriving) – and interestingly, when she does make up her mind, it comes from defiance, after she happens to learn that Zutshi Sahib doesn’t want her in the position.
Other divides that run through this book include the one between past and present (or looking back and looking forward), between childhood innocence and adult pragmatism, between Rajputs, the merchant class and Brahmins, between the types of clothes that people wear in different states and kingdoms, between the old world where a little child may be taught how to comport himself as a ruler, and the rapidly arriving new one where there is only a proud young democracy with no time for the fancies and protocols of kings (at least not of the old variety).
And there are the partitions that separate ghosts from the living, as Krishna discovers when she is haunted by the spirits of friends and acquaintances who were murdered during the riots. “Krishna Krishna,” one of them teased her when they were children, “As thirsty as a well / How much water will you pull / How much thirst will you quench / As much nectar as you drink / That’s how long you’ll live.” It’s a reminder of the pressures that the octogenarian Krishna Sobti must have carried as a living well of memories, writing furiously, using mind and pen to give voice to those whom she had survived by so many decades.
March 27, 2019
The Flashback series: why you should watch Guru Dutt’s Mr and Mrs 55
[my latest Film Companion piece]
--------------------
Title: Mr and Mrs 55
Director: Guru Dutt
Year: 1955
Cast: Madhubala, Guru Dutt, Lalita Pawar, Johnny Walker
Why you should watch it:
Because it’s Guru Dutt Lite (but points the way forward to his more personal work)
A confession: though I admire the major Guru Dutt films – the grandly dramatic ones, Pyaasa and Kaagaz ke Phool – and especially the individual elements that make them great (camerawork, music, lyrics, Waheeda Rehman), I am sidestepping them in this column. Part of this has to do with my reservations about Guru Dutt the actor when he is playing an overtly serious, sympathy-seeking part.
At the same time, Dutt’s earliest ventures into directing – such as Baazi and Jaal – don’t have enough of his distinct authorial personality. A fine middle ground can be discovered in Mr and Mrs 55, which has a charming performance by Dutt the actor and solid contributions by some of his most important collaborators – notably writer Abrar Alvi and cinematographer VK Murthy – while being both a romantic comedy and a (mildly pedantic) social statement.
And it even has a key Guru Dutt motif, which would be seen in his two iconic tragedies later in the decade – the theme of the artist in the gutter, impoverished and trampled on – but treated with lightness in this film. Dutt plays an unemployed cartoonist named Preetam, dependent for money and accommodation on his reporter friend Johnny (the wonderful Johnny Walker, who, you may recall, was also the rescuer-in-chief in Pyaasa). Then he meets the heiress Anita (Madhubala) as well as her aunt Sita Devi – a man-hating firebrand feminist, played by the great Lalita Pawar – who wants Anita to get married so she can get her inheritance (followed quickly by a divorce). Preetam is hired to be the temporary husband, but meanwhile he and Anita are falling in and out of love with each other.
For the sharp writing, the general air of zaniness… and RK Laxman
The film’s opening credits combine an image that could easily have come out of a Hollywood classic like The Philadelphia Story (a newspaper headline reads “Husband of Heiress Admits Infidelity”) with the work of a celebrated Indian cartoonist: RK Laxman, who did a very funny drawing specifically for the film (it shows the authoritarian Sita Devi riding a chariot pulled by Preetam and Anita).
The wacky tone persists for much of the film. Alvi’s dialogues sparkle, especially in the more lighthearted first half where we see professionals like doctors and lawyers – such solemn characters in other films of the time – behaving somewhat like Groucho Marx. Take the hilarious scene where a sad-looking physician examines the unwell Preetam and then has a surreal conversation with Johnny, shaking his head at the plight of this BA Pass cartoonist who only has a single pair of trousers. Or the one where an impish lawyer annoys Sita Devi while she tries to discuss the terms of her brother’s will.
Among the many other little moments, I love the scene where a non-nonsense nanny remarks “Hamaaray zamaanay mein prem karte thay khaana khaakay, bhookhe pet nahin” when a lovelorn Anita refuses to eat. Or the expression on Sita Devi’s face when she asks “Tum Communist ho?” after Preetam makes an observation about the plight of people who have to sleep on footpaths.
As Arun Khopkar notes in his book Guru Dutt: A Tragedy in Three Acts, Dutt often did unusual things with song sequences to incorporate them into the narrative. There are some notable instances in Mr and Mrs 55. Preetam doesn’t speak at all in his first two scenes, and the first time we see his lips move it is when he abruptly breaks into song in Mohammed Rafi’s voice (“Dil par hua aisa jadoo”). Later, the superb “Jaane kahaan mera jigar gaya ji” begins with Johnny Walker briskly picking up the phone as if he is about to report a theft, and then singing into it. And near the film’s end, two versions of the same song are wonderfully integrated into two separate situations.
For Madhubala
A critic once said of Marilyn Monroe that she was often livelier in still images than in moving ones – a glib remark that undermines what a fine comic performer Monroe was. I can imagine someone saying something similar for Madhubala, and again, it would be wrong. Madhubala isn’t as good in Mr and Mrs 55 as she was in, say, Chalti ka Naam Gaadi (it’s so much more fun playing the foil with a Kishore Kumar!), but she’s still warm and fun. Divested of the terrible burden of being our Most Ethereal Actress, she shows many dimensions to her personality, including the ability to send herself up or look silly if required.
For the subtle movement between a happy-go-lucky tone and a more cautionary one
The narrative arc shifts from a breezy celebration of modernity – young people flirting and bantering at tennis clubs and swimming pools, Sita Devi celebrating the passing of the Divorce Bill, which will give Indian women more freedom – to a more conservative, tradition-based outlook that goes something like: Settle down into matrimony, young people! And oh, women, your greatest fulfilment will come from looking after your house.
This movement is reflected in the changing look and sound of the film. In the early scenes, there are many Hollywood influences: the genre itself (screwball comedy complete with a “meet cute” and many misunderstandings); the famous zither theme from The Third Man, which plays from a music box in Anita’s house; Anita reading a magazine with Gregory Peck on the cover. But in the final third, where things get more serious, not only does the tone become more recognisably overwrought, like a regular Hindi film of the period, but the use of music too – in songs such as “Preetam Aan Milo” – has a more classical, rooted feel than the early numbers like “Thandi Hawa Kaali Ghata”.
Progressive viewers of today will cringe a little at some of the later scenes – or perhaps say, with a rueful shake of the head, “Well, that’s how people thought in those less enlightened times.” Personally, I would have preferred it if the film hadn’t turned Sita Devi into an out-and-out antagonist at the end. As Pawar plays her, she certainly has many likable qualities in the early scenes, but the film eventually gives her short shrift by unfavourably placing her in opposition to Preetam’s heavily domesticated and self-sacrificing bhabhi.
Even so, it would be reductive to say that the film is making a plea for women to be doormats. Both the carefree view and the home-bound one are accommodated in the narrative, and what one mostly remembers when all is done are the lighter moments. (Even the last shot has four young people skipping away from the camera!) The love between Anita and Preetam is organic and believable, as are the little displays of petulance or silliness that both engage in at different times – the impression one is left with is that of a relationship between equals. Which, again, is more than can be said about Guru Dutt’s martyred romances in his more “serious” films.
--------------------------------------
[Earlier Film Companion Flashback pieces are here]
--------------------
Title: Mr and Mrs 55
Director: Guru Dutt
Year: 1955
Cast: Madhubala, Guru Dutt, Lalita Pawar, Johnny Walker
Why you should watch it:Because it’s Guru Dutt Lite (but points the way forward to his more personal work)
A confession: though I admire the major Guru Dutt films – the grandly dramatic ones, Pyaasa and Kaagaz ke Phool – and especially the individual elements that make them great (camerawork, music, lyrics, Waheeda Rehman), I am sidestepping them in this column. Part of this has to do with my reservations about Guru Dutt the actor when he is playing an overtly serious, sympathy-seeking part.
At the same time, Dutt’s earliest ventures into directing – such as Baazi and Jaal – don’t have enough of his distinct authorial personality. A fine middle ground can be discovered in Mr and Mrs 55, which has a charming performance by Dutt the actor and solid contributions by some of his most important collaborators – notably writer Abrar Alvi and cinematographer VK Murthy – while being both a romantic comedy and a (mildly pedantic) social statement. And it even has a key Guru Dutt motif, which would be seen in his two iconic tragedies later in the decade – the theme of the artist in the gutter, impoverished and trampled on – but treated with lightness in this film. Dutt plays an unemployed cartoonist named Preetam, dependent for money and accommodation on his reporter friend Johnny (the wonderful Johnny Walker, who, you may recall, was also the rescuer-in-chief in Pyaasa). Then he meets the heiress Anita (Madhubala) as well as her aunt Sita Devi – a man-hating firebrand feminist, played by the great Lalita Pawar – who wants Anita to get married so she can get her inheritance (followed quickly by a divorce). Preetam is hired to be the temporary husband, but meanwhile he and Anita are falling in and out of love with each other.
For the sharp writing, the general air of zaniness… and RK Laxman
The film’s opening credits combine an image that could easily have come out of a Hollywood classic like The Philadelphia Story (a newspaper headline reads “Husband of Heiress Admits Infidelity”) with the work of a celebrated Indian cartoonist: RK Laxman, who did a very funny drawing specifically for the film (it shows the authoritarian Sita Devi riding a chariot pulled by Preetam and Anita).
The wacky tone persists for much of the film. Alvi’s dialogues sparkle, especially in the more lighthearted first half where we see professionals like doctors and lawyers – such solemn characters in other films of the time – behaving somewhat like Groucho Marx. Take the hilarious scene where a sad-looking physician examines the unwell Preetam and then has a surreal conversation with Johnny, shaking his head at the plight of this BA Pass cartoonist who only has a single pair of trousers. Or the one where an impish lawyer annoys Sita Devi while she tries to discuss the terms of her brother’s will. Among the many other little moments, I love the scene where a non-nonsense nanny remarks “Hamaaray zamaanay mein prem karte thay khaana khaakay, bhookhe pet nahin” when a lovelorn Anita refuses to eat. Or the expression on Sita Devi’s face when she asks “Tum Communist ho?” after Preetam makes an observation about the plight of people who have to sleep on footpaths.
As Arun Khopkar notes in his book Guru Dutt: A Tragedy in Three Acts, Dutt often did unusual things with song sequences to incorporate them into the narrative. There are some notable instances in Mr and Mrs 55. Preetam doesn’t speak at all in his first two scenes, and the first time we see his lips move it is when he abruptly breaks into song in Mohammed Rafi’s voice (“Dil par hua aisa jadoo”). Later, the superb “Jaane kahaan mera jigar gaya ji” begins with Johnny Walker briskly picking up the phone as if he is about to report a theft, and then singing into it. And near the film’s end, two versions of the same song are wonderfully integrated into two separate situations.
For Madhubala
A critic once said of Marilyn Monroe that she was often livelier in still images than in moving ones – a glib remark that undermines what a fine comic performer Monroe was. I can imagine someone saying something similar for Madhubala, and again, it would be wrong. Madhubala isn’t as good in Mr and Mrs 55 as she was in, say, Chalti ka Naam Gaadi (it’s so much more fun playing the foil with a Kishore Kumar!), but she’s still warm and fun. Divested of the terrible burden of being our Most Ethereal Actress, she shows many dimensions to her personality, including the ability to send herself up or look silly if required.
For the subtle movement between a happy-go-lucky tone and a more cautionary one
The narrative arc shifts from a breezy celebration of modernity – young people flirting and bantering at tennis clubs and swimming pools, Sita Devi celebrating the passing of the Divorce Bill, which will give Indian women more freedom – to a more conservative, tradition-based outlook that goes something like: Settle down into matrimony, young people! And oh, women, your greatest fulfilment will come from looking after your house.
This movement is reflected in the changing look and sound of the film. In the early scenes, there are many Hollywood influences: the genre itself (screwball comedy complete with a “meet cute” and many misunderstandings); the famous zither theme from The Third Man, which plays from a music box in Anita’s house; Anita reading a magazine with Gregory Peck on the cover. But in the final third, where things get more serious, not only does the tone become more recognisably overwrought, like a regular Hindi film of the period, but the use of music too – in songs such as “Preetam Aan Milo” – has a more classical, rooted feel than the early numbers like “Thandi Hawa Kaali Ghata”.
Progressive viewers of today will cringe a little at some of the later scenes – or perhaps say, with a rueful shake of the head, “Well, that’s how people thought in those less enlightened times.” Personally, I would have preferred it if the film hadn’t turned Sita Devi into an out-and-out antagonist at the end. As Pawar plays her, she certainly has many likable qualities in the early scenes, but the film eventually gives her short shrift by unfavourably placing her in opposition to Preetam’s heavily domesticated and self-sacrificing bhabhi.Even so, it would be reductive to say that the film is making a plea for women to be doormats. Both the carefree view and the home-bound one are accommodated in the narrative, and what one mostly remembers when all is done are the lighter moments. (Even the last shot has four young people skipping away from the camera!) The love between Anita and Preetam is organic and believable, as are the little displays of petulance or silliness that both engage in at different times – the impression one is left with is that of a relationship between equals. Which, again, is more than can be said about Guru Dutt’s martyred romances in his more “serious” films.
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[Earlier Film Companion Flashback pieces are here]
March 19, 2019
The "anyways" conundrum
Here's something that puzzled me while I was reading a collection of Richard Matheson’s short stories. Most grammar-pedants of my generation will agree that “anyways” — a corruption of “anyway”, and widely used by millennials and other mentally feeble groups — is an evil word. Also a rare case of a word or phrase being turned into “cool”-sounding slang by making it longer rather than shorter. (I’m sure it will soon be legitimised by the Oxford English Dictionary — because language “evolves” etc etc — and then the joke will be on us; but that’s another matter.)
Thing is, I was also certain that “anyways" was a recent creation: the first time I recall hearing it was in glossy Hindi films of the early 2000s where people like Sunil Shetty and Celina Jaitley would say it to each other while wearing sunglasses and cavorting on yachts. (Just conveying an impression, not saying there was exactly such a film.) For some reason it also felt like a particularly Indian mistake, like our famous habit of using a singular noun rather than a plural one at the end of “one of the…” or “one of my…”
But now I have found at least seven or eight occurrences of “anyways” in separate stories — mostly written between the 1950s and the 1960s — in this Richard Matheson anthology. In suspense classics like “Duel” (which was made into a super film by the young Steven Spielberg), “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, "Shipshape Home" and “No Such Thing as a Vampire”. It’s clear that Matheson routinely used the word, and not just in quoted speech.
Having read a lot of American and British genre/pulp writing from the 1920s through the 1960s, I can’t offhand recall other instances of this usage. Also, I rate Matheson a lot higher than many of the other “pure pulp” writers who wrote mainly for the cheapest magazines of their day, and much of whose work has not endured. (Read Matheson’s short story “The Doll That Does Everything” for a sense of the brilliantly zany and bold linguistic flourishes he could pull off when it suited a situation.) So it felt even stranger that his work should contain this satanic nonword.
Anyone who has come across other such cases in 20th century literature?
P.S. Researching, I learnt that “anyways” is a modification of “anywise”, which was used as far back as the 13th century. But it still feels like the current, slang-ish, 21st century version has a different provenance. It conjures up the image of young people, too lazy or privileged to complete a sentence without a servant to help them do it, curled up on a beanbag in Cafe Coffee Day, staring into their phones and thinking “What’s the point of life anyways?"
March 16, 2019
On Kundan Shah, Paigham, and Vyjayanthimala as the comic foil
Ten years ago this week, I visited Kundan Shah’s Bandra office for the first of a series of conversations for the Jaane bhi do Yaaro book. Kundan gave me a lot of his time (over the course of a few meetings in March 2009, then another few in May) and I have many transcripts (much of it went into the book, obviously, but there are a few others too). The one below is an observation about a lighthearted scene in the 1959 Dilip Kumar-Vyjayanthimala-starrer Paigham:
"I remember one or two things that really impressed me about Paigham. One scene was Dilip Kumar’s introduction – he doesn’t have a place to stay so he’s sitting on a footpath under a lamppost and reading, I think it was Gandhi’s My Experiments with Truth. And then there’s a beautiful scene, which was copied later by Salim-Javed for the Amitabh film Dostana. Now this scene had nothing to do with the main narrative – you could easily have cut it and thrown it out. But it was a beautiful, static, fortuitous moment — like we say, 'It wasn’t planned, but it happened somehow.' Vyjayanthimala is in love with Dilip Kumar, and after singing a song together they are sitting and she casually asks, “There must have been other girls beside me in your life?” Dilip Kumar says, you are the only one. But she keeps saying there must have been some girl in school or college who fascinated you, and when she keeps probing he decides to invent a story about a girl and a fantastic love affair – a chance meeting, which develops into a major thing. And as he spins the story, Vyjayanthimala starts getting more and more jealous.
Now the thing here is that she has to play the comic foil – and if your foil is not working the comedy can fall flat. There’s also a famous scene in Pyaar Kiye Jaa where Mehmood is narrating the script of a film he wants to make, Mehmood is using all the tricks at his disposal, but the scene wouldn’t have worked if Om Prakash hadn’t given the proper reactions at the right time. In comedy, it often looks like one person is doing the main work but the other person is equally important. Even Amitabh can't carry a whole comic scene on his own shoulders. When this Paigham scene was redone in Dostana, it fell flat because Zeenat Aman couldn’t play the foil the way Vyjayanthimala did."
Note what Kundan says about how the scene, though one of the best things in the film, could easily be “thrown out" since it had nothing to do with the main narrative. This is true of many of the great serendipitous (or “inessential”) moments in cinema — so many of them retain their vitality long after the film as a whole has become jaded.
In fact, watching Paigham on Amazon Prime recently (a good print), I found this was exactly what had been done: the scene was treated as inconsequential and ineptly shortened. (Vyjayanthimala asks Dilip Kumar if he had ever sat with another girl the way he was sitting with her, and he replies “ISS tarah? Nahin”, and that’s it - abrupt cut to the next scene. Makes no sense.) Luckily the full version is on YouTube, though not in a good print.
----------------------
[Here's a tribute to Kundan I wrote a little over a year ago, after his untimely passing]
"I remember one or two things that really impressed me about Paigham. One scene was Dilip Kumar’s introduction – he doesn’t have a place to stay so he’s sitting on a footpath under a lamppost and reading, I think it was Gandhi’s My Experiments with Truth. And then there’s a beautiful scene, which was copied later by Salim-Javed for the Amitabh film Dostana. Now this scene had nothing to do with the main narrative – you could easily have cut it and thrown it out. But it was a beautiful, static, fortuitous moment — like we say, 'It wasn’t planned, but it happened somehow.' Vyjayanthimala is in love with Dilip Kumar, and after singing a song together they are sitting and she casually asks, “There must have been other girls beside me in your life?” Dilip Kumar says, you are the only one. But she keeps saying there must have been some girl in school or college who fascinated you, and when she keeps probing he decides to invent a story about a girl and a fantastic love affair – a chance meeting, which develops into a major thing. And as he spins the story, Vyjayanthimala starts getting more and more jealous.Now the thing here is that she has to play the comic foil – and if your foil is not working the comedy can fall flat. There’s also a famous scene in Pyaar Kiye Jaa where Mehmood is narrating the script of a film he wants to make, Mehmood is using all the tricks at his disposal, but the scene wouldn’t have worked if Om Prakash hadn’t given the proper reactions at the right time. In comedy, it often looks like one person is doing the main work but the other person is equally important. Even Amitabh can't carry a whole comic scene on his own shoulders. When this Paigham scene was redone in Dostana, it fell flat because Zeenat Aman couldn’t play the foil the way Vyjayanthimala did."
Note what Kundan says about how the scene, though one of the best things in the film, could easily be “thrown out" since it had nothing to do with the main narrative. This is true of many of the great serendipitous (or “inessential”) moments in cinema — so many of them retain their vitality long after the film as a whole has become jaded.
In fact, watching Paigham on Amazon Prime recently (a good print), I found this was exactly what had been done: the scene was treated as inconsequential and ineptly shortened. (Vyjayanthimala asks Dilip Kumar if he had ever sat with another girl the way he was sitting with her, and he replies “ISS tarah? Nahin”, and that’s it - abrupt cut to the next scene. Makes no sense.) Luckily the full version is on YouTube, though not in a good print.
----------------------
[Here's a tribute to Kundan I wrote a little over a year ago, after his untimely passing]
March 15, 2019
Flashback series: human pain and human comedy in Boot Polish (1954)
[the latest in my “flashback” recommendations for Film Companion]
Title: Boot Polish
Director: Prakash Arora (with some parts possibly ghost-directed by Raj Kapoor)
Year: 1954
Cast: Baby Naaz, Rattan Kumar, David Abraham, Chand Burke
Why you should watch it:
Because two child actors get top billing in a 1950s Hindi film… and earn it
Boot Polish is a Raj Kapoor film, produced by the celebrated actor-director, and by all accounts a project very close to his heart. But it was an atypical RK production. Here, the studio’s trademark images – Prithviraj Kapoor offering prayers, followed by the logo of Raj Kapoor and Nargis striking a romantic pose – yield to a less familiar sight: an illustration of two children hand in hand, pointing towards a dawning sun in the distance. The opening credits then give us the names of the child actors – Baby Naaz and Rattan Kumar – before the film’s title.
Which is as it should be, for the beating heart of this story is the love between orphaned siblings Bhola (Rattan) and Belu (Naaz), and their contrasting relationships with two adults in the slum where they grow up: the caring John Chacha (played by the splendid David Abraham), though a bootlegger himself, encourages them to be self-sufficient and earn money through honourable work; their shrew-like aunt Kamla Devi (Chand Burke) wants to exploit them by making them beg on the streets.
It’s almost inevitable, given this premise and the dominant tone of 1950s Hindi cinema, that there would be a few over-cutesy moments in the children’s (and adults’) performances. But there are also scenes that have the ring of heartbreaking truth, especially when it’s just the two of them on screen, trying to balance principles and ideals (in an innately unfair world) with the hunger in their bellies. Baby Naaz’s special distinction prize at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival was well deserved, even if there are times – especially in the musical sequences – where she comes across as a self-conscious, Shirley Temple-like movie star. She and Rattan work so well together that the film’s last 45 minutes, where they are separated by a series of contrived situations, feels like a relatively weak link, though one understands the narrative intent.
For its dualities: how it manages to be funny and very poignant at the same time; a gritty social document with location shooting, but also an effective big-studio melodrama
The children’s aunt is far from a sympathetic character (though the film does allow us to reflect that she too is driven by dire poverty), but there is a quirky early scene where, sending them out to beg, she hums the tune they should use to coerce money out of people’s pockets – and much to our amusement, for a few seconds this woman’s harsh voice becomes imbued with sweetness and melody. Beautiful music at the service of an ugly cause.
There are many other such bittersweet moments where human pain and human comedy run side by side. A crusty palm-reader tells Bhola “Tu saari umar jootay polish karega”, and the boy takes that as an uplifting prediction: I will become a big man, a shoe-shiner! There are sight gags such as the one where the siblings, in an early, amateurish attempt at polishing, stain a customer’s socks and quickly cover the mess with the man’s trousers. And there are social critiques, such as the comparison of the children’s sincerity with the smugness of a pandit who also gets money, but only because of his position as a religious leader. (A companion image to this one has John Chacha respectfully making the sign of the cross when he sees the shoe-polish and brush placed next to an image of Jesus Christ. For him, the tools of work are just as deserving of worship.)
Very early in Boot Polish, there is a stark close-up of the helpless faces of the children; at this point, you might expect a film from the Cinema Verite or neorealist schools (the title and theme are similar to Vittorio De Sica’s 1946 Shoeshine), but while those elements are present here, this is also very much a Hindi film in the
melodramatic tradition. It is episodic and mixes tones, moving from a sad situation to a goofy song that links hair loss with drought. (This is “Lapak Jhapak Tu Aa Re Badarwa”, superbly sung by Manna Dey in Raga Adana.) You can carp about this if you’re looking for an organic narrative; personally, I think nearly all the individual parts work fine in their own right.
For the 1950s conceit of the Beautiful New World or Nav Bharat
Only a few scenes are built around the boot-polishing profession (we learn, for example, that it’s pointless to go around asking people to have their shoes polished in rainy weather) – this is more of a stand-in for dignity of labour; for the idea that in the New India, no profession should be beneath contempt. “Aaj se hamaara Hindustan azaad hota hai!” the children exult when they save enough money to buy a shoe polish and brush. The film moves towards a too-tidy happy ending, but this also illustrates the thought that if you take even a small initiative in a hopeless situation, fate is likely to smile on you.
It isn’t like there are no pessimistic counterpoints. “Kidhar hai yeh nayi duniya? Hum kal bhi bhookha marta tha aur aaj bhi bhookha marta hai,” a jaded adult asks. But the thesis is that this first generation of children growing up in independent India will show the adults by example what the coming world should look like. Many other films made around the same time (like the hard-edged satire Mr Sampath, which imagines a utopian but highly improbable India of the future) were presenting such ideas from different perspectives. Boot Polish is among the sincerest and most hopeful of those films.
Because, at the height of his stardom as an actor-director, Raj Kapoor appears here for a few seconds – but doesn’t speak, or even open his eyes!
You’ll hear conflicting opinions about whether Kapoor ghost-directed chunks of this film (it is officially credited to his assistant Prakash Arora), but either way he didn’t cast himself in it. There is always something intriguing about a film by a major actor-director where he doesn’t appear onscreen (or doesn’t appear in his most
familiar screen persona: like Charles Chaplin in Monsieur Verdoux). Kapoor does show up for a few seconds in his tramp costume, asleep on a train with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. A self-indulgent cameo, or a way of telling his audiences that he was taking a breather for a while and letting two children do the heavy lifting?
---------------------------
Trivia: Boot Polish won the Best Film prize at the second edition of the Filmfare Awards, in 1955. Interestingly, the child actor Rattan Kumar – Bhola in this film – played prominent roles in each of the first three movies to win this prize. [The other two were Do Bigha Zamin (1954) and Jagriti (1956).]
[Earlier Flashback pieces are here]
Title: Boot Polish
Director: Prakash Arora (with some parts possibly ghost-directed by Raj Kapoor)
Year: 1954
Cast: Baby Naaz, Rattan Kumar, David Abraham, Chand Burke
Why you should watch it:
Because two child actors get top billing in a 1950s Hindi film… and earn it
Boot Polish is a Raj Kapoor film, produced by the celebrated actor-director, and by all accounts a project very close to his heart. But it was an atypical RK production. Here, the studio’s trademark images – Prithviraj Kapoor offering prayers, followed by the logo of Raj Kapoor and Nargis striking a romantic pose – yield to a less familiar sight: an illustration of two children hand in hand, pointing towards a dawning sun in the distance. The opening credits then give us the names of the child actors – Baby Naaz and Rattan Kumar – before the film’s title.
Which is as it should be, for the beating heart of this story is the love between orphaned siblings Bhola (Rattan) and Belu (Naaz), and their contrasting relationships with two adults in the slum where they grow up: the caring John Chacha (played by the splendid David Abraham), though a bootlegger himself, encourages them to be self-sufficient and earn money through honourable work; their shrew-like aunt Kamla Devi (Chand Burke) wants to exploit them by making them beg on the streets.It’s almost inevitable, given this premise and the dominant tone of 1950s Hindi cinema, that there would be a few over-cutesy moments in the children’s (and adults’) performances. But there are also scenes that have the ring of heartbreaking truth, especially when it’s just the two of them on screen, trying to balance principles and ideals (in an innately unfair world) with the hunger in their bellies. Baby Naaz’s special distinction prize at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival was well deserved, even if there are times – especially in the musical sequences – where she comes across as a self-conscious, Shirley Temple-like movie star. She and Rattan work so well together that the film’s last 45 minutes, where they are separated by a series of contrived situations, feels like a relatively weak link, though one understands the narrative intent.
For its dualities: how it manages to be funny and very poignant at the same time; a gritty social document with location shooting, but also an effective big-studio melodrama
The children’s aunt is far from a sympathetic character (though the film does allow us to reflect that she too is driven by dire poverty), but there is a quirky early scene where, sending them out to beg, she hums the tune they should use to coerce money out of people’s pockets – and much to our amusement, for a few seconds this woman’s harsh voice becomes imbued with sweetness and melody. Beautiful music at the service of an ugly cause.
There are many other such bittersweet moments where human pain and human comedy run side by side. A crusty palm-reader tells Bhola “Tu saari umar jootay polish karega”, and the boy takes that as an uplifting prediction: I will become a big man, a shoe-shiner! There are sight gags such as the one where the siblings, in an early, amateurish attempt at polishing, stain a customer’s socks and quickly cover the mess with the man’s trousers. And there are social critiques, such as the comparison of the children’s sincerity with the smugness of a pandit who also gets money, but only because of his position as a religious leader. (A companion image to this one has John Chacha respectfully making the sign of the cross when he sees the shoe-polish and brush placed next to an image of Jesus Christ. For him, the tools of work are just as deserving of worship.)
Very early in Boot Polish, there is a stark close-up of the helpless faces of the children; at this point, you might expect a film from the Cinema Verite or neorealist schools (the title and theme are similar to Vittorio De Sica’s 1946 Shoeshine), but while those elements are present here, this is also very much a Hindi film in the
melodramatic tradition. It is episodic and mixes tones, moving from a sad situation to a goofy song that links hair loss with drought. (This is “Lapak Jhapak Tu Aa Re Badarwa”, superbly sung by Manna Dey in Raga Adana.) You can carp about this if you’re looking for an organic narrative; personally, I think nearly all the individual parts work fine in their own right. For the 1950s conceit of the Beautiful New World or Nav Bharat
Only a few scenes are built around the boot-polishing profession (we learn, for example, that it’s pointless to go around asking people to have their shoes polished in rainy weather) – this is more of a stand-in for dignity of labour; for the idea that in the New India, no profession should be beneath contempt. “Aaj se hamaara Hindustan azaad hota hai!” the children exult when they save enough money to buy a shoe polish and brush. The film moves towards a too-tidy happy ending, but this also illustrates the thought that if you take even a small initiative in a hopeless situation, fate is likely to smile on you.
It isn’t like there are no pessimistic counterpoints. “Kidhar hai yeh nayi duniya? Hum kal bhi bhookha marta tha aur aaj bhi bhookha marta hai,” a jaded adult asks. But the thesis is that this first generation of children growing up in independent India will show the adults by example what the coming world should look like. Many other films made around the same time (like the hard-edged satire Mr Sampath, which imagines a utopian but highly improbable India of the future) were presenting such ideas from different perspectives. Boot Polish is among the sincerest and most hopeful of those films.
Because, at the height of his stardom as an actor-director, Raj Kapoor appears here for a few seconds – but doesn’t speak, or even open his eyes!
You’ll hear conflicting opinions about whether Kapoor ghost-directed chunks of this film (it is officially credited to his assistant Prakash Arora), but either way he didn’t cast himself in it. There is always something intriguing about a film by a major actor-director where he doesn’t appear onscreen (or doesn’t appear in his most
familiar screen persona: like Charles Chaplin in Monsieur Verdoux). Kapoor does show up for a few seconds in his tramp costume, asleep on a train with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. A self-indulgent cameo, or a way of telling his audiences that he was taking a breather for a while and letting two children do the heavy lifting?---------------------------
Trivia: Boot Polish won the Best Film prize at the second edition of the Filmfare Awards, in 1955. Interestingly, the child actor Rattan Kumar – Bhola in this film – played prominent roles in each of the first three movies to win this prize. [The other two were Do Bigha Zamin (1954) and Jagriti (1956).]
[Earlier Flashback pieces are here]
March 8, 2019
His girl Friday: Sanjeev Kumar and the ‘computer’ in Trishul
[The latest in my “One Moment Please” columns for The Hindu is about an economical, unobtrusive little moment in a larger-than-life film]
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Watching the 1978 Trishul again after many years, a short, seemingly mundane scene caught my attention. It’s the one where we are introduced to the middle-aged version of the businessman RK Gupta, played by Sanjeev Kumar, and his superbly resourceful secretary Geeta (Raakhee).
What the scene establishes is the pace of RK’s day – the unending phone calls, meetings and damage-control – and his dependence on Geeta (described later in the film as the company’s “Computer”). He summons her, she enters his office, promptly reels off the information he needs; as another employee prepares to leave the room to check on something, Geeta tells him the exact number of the file required. Someone else comes in with a document for the boss to sign; simultaneously a phone rings; Geeta picks it up, takes a message, conveys it to RK while he is signing, then moves past him to pick up another phone. The second caller is RK’s wife, reminding him that their son is returning from vilaayat after two years; he checks his calendar, ruefully says he won’t be able to go to the airport.
On the surface, this is very basic shorthand for “work-obsessed industrialist”. But in a film that is otherwise a little flabby in places (and not just around Sanjeev Kumar’s midsection!), this scene is compact and executed with economy. It isn’t a single shot – there are cuts – but it has the feel of a long, well-choreographed take. The performances and the staging create a sense of a lived-in world, an environment that must be managed with clockwork efficiency if it is to succeed at all.
****
I felt this was a notable establishing scene because most of us, including those who are big fans of 1970s mainstream cinema, think of those films as not too detail-heavy. They are larger than life, built on archetypes: one expects them to do the Big Moments well, mainly through some alchemy of strong writing and acting. Linked as this cinematic mode is to older forms such as the Parsi theatre, the emphasis tends to be on the foreground, on the main characters, what they say to each other, and how this leads the plot from one setpiece to the next. We don’t expect much attention to detail when it comes to “filler” scenes or smaller moments.
Today’s films are generally more intricate in these matters. Since I’m talking about Trishul, which was co-written by Javed Akhtar, an easy comparison can be made with a film directed by Akhtar’s daughter Zoya. In Zindagi na Milegi Dobara (ironically the most mainstream of her work, certainly more glamorous and old-world in its form than her latest Gully Boy), Zoya gave us a marvelous scene where a son meets the father he has never known, who had
left his mother years earlier. It’s a moment that offers a conversation, across time, space and cinematic idioms, with the more dramatic father-son conflict in Trishul. The ZNMD scene gets much of its effect from a whimsical touch: Salman (Naseeruddin Shah) casually rolls a joint throughout the conversation with his son.
The office scene in Trishul isn’t subdued or quirky in a similar way, but it performs a comparable function – telling us something important about a character, a situation and an environment with a few minute brush-strokes.
****
The scene also ties in with a larger vision of a mechanized, carefully ordered world where people must sacrifice their dreams and their individuality. Much as RK Gupta himself did as a young man when he discarded love at the altar of ambition (thereby setting the plot in motion), and much as he expects his son Shekhar to do (give up a passion for music and finish a business-administration course instead). But this sterile setting will be ruptured by the arrival of Gupta’s other, illegitimate son Vijay, who shakes things up so much that even the efficient Geeta shows a human side in his presence.
Much has been said about how the Yash Chopra-Salim-Javed films – Deewaar, Trishul, Kaala Patthar – were central to the creation of the Angry Young Man figure. But these films also get much of their narrative tension from the opposition between the climate-controlled world of mansions and skyscrapers and the grittier outside one where people can express their real selves.
In the climax of Deewaar, the anti-hero Vijay ends the career of the chief villain by tossing him through the window of a hotel room. Don’t tell Salim-Javed I interpreted it this way, but to me the shattering of that glass represents the destruction of a corrupting space and has the effect of liberating both Vijay and the film itself. An apt resolution to a narrative about individuality brushing up against a world of businessmen, smugglers… and computer-like secretaries.
---------------
[Earlier Hindu columns are here]
------------------------
Watching the 1978 Trishul again after many years, a short, seemingly mundane scene caught my attention. It’s the one where we are introduced to the middle-aged version of the businessman RK Gupta, played by Sanjeev Kumar, and his superbly resourceful secretary Geeta (Raakhee).
What the scene establishes is the pace of RK’s day – the unending phone calls, meetings and damage-control – and his dependence on Geeta (described later in the film as the company’s “Computer”). He summons her, she enters his office, promptly reels off the information he needs; as another employee prepares to leave the room to check on something, Geeta tells him the exact number of the file required. Someone else comes in with a document for the boss to sign; simultaneously a phone rings; Geeta picks it up, takes a message, conveys it to RK while he is signing, then moves past him to pick up another phone. The second caller is RK’s wife, reminding him that their son is returning from vilaayat after two years; he checks his calendar, ruefully says he won’t be able to go to the airport.On the surface, this is very basic shorthand for “work-obsessed industrialist”. But in a film that is otherwise a little flabby in places (and not just around Sanjeev Kumar’s midsection!), this scene is compact and executed with economy. It isn’t a single shot – there are cuts – but it has the feel of a long, well-choreographed take. The performances and the staging create a sense of a lived-in world, an environment that must be managed with clockwork efficiency if it is to succeed at all.
****
I felt this was a notable establishing scene because most of us, including those who are big fans of 1970s mainstream cinema, think of those films as not too detail-heavy. They are larger than life, built on archetypes: one expects them to do the Big Moments well, mainly through some alchemy of strong writing and acting. Linked as this cinematic mode is to older forms such as the Parsi theatre, the emphasis tends to be on the foreground, on the main characters, what they say to each other, and how this leads the plot from one setpiece to the next. We don’t expect much attention to detail when it comes to “filler” scenes or smaller moments.
Today’s films are generally more intricate in these matters. Since I’m talking about Trishul, which was co-written by Javed Akhtar, an easy comparison can be made with a film directed by Akhtar’s daughter Zoya. In Zindagi na Milegi Dobara (ironically the most mainstream of her work, certainly more glamorous and old-world in its form than her latest Gully Boy), Zoya gave us a marvelous scene where a son meets the father he has never known, who had
left his mother years earlier. It’s a moment that offers a conversation, across time, space and cinematic idioms, with the more dramatic father-son conflict in Trishul. The ZNMD scene gets much of its effect from a whimsical touch: Salman (Naseeruddin Shah) casually rolls a joint throughout the conversation with his son.The office scene in Trishul isn’t subdued or quirky in a similar way, but it performs a comparable function – telling us something important about a character, a situation and an environment with a few minute brush-strokes.
****
The scene also ties in with a larger vision of a mechanized, carefully ordered world where people must sacrifice their dreams and their individuality. Much as RK Gupta himself did as a young man when he discarded love at the altar of ambition (thereby setting the plot in motion), and much as he expects his son Shekhar to do (give up a passion for music and finish a business-administration course instead). But this sterile setting will be ruptured by the arrival of Gupta’s other, illegitimate son Vijay, who shakes things up so much that even the efficient Geeta shows a human side in his presence.
Much has been said about how the Yash Chopra-Salim-Javed films – Deewaar, Trishul, Kaala Patthar – were central to the creation of the Angry Young Man figure. But these films also get much of their narrative tension from the opposition between the climate-controlled world of mansions and skyscrapers and the grittier outside one where people can express their real selves.
In the climax of Deewaar, the anti-hero Vijay ends the career of the chief villain by tossing him through the window of a hotel room. Don’t tell Salim-Javed I interpreted it this way, but to me the shattering of that glass represents the destruction of a corrupting space and has the effect of liberating both Vijay and the film itself. An apt resolution to a narrative about individuality brushing up against a world of businessmen, smugglers… and computer-like secretaries.
---------------
[Earlier Hindu columns are here]
March 2, 2019
From my bookshelves: The Jackal and the Elephant
[I have started a “My Bookshelves” column for First Post — reflections on some of the key books in my life – and here’s the opening piece, about a fondly remembered but morbid Amar Chitra Katha]
----------------------
Two questions, not self-evidently linked:
“What was the first book in your life?”
“But how am I to get to the flesh of this elephant?”
The first of these is reductive, unanswerable, even pointless if you direct it at anyone who has been a greedy reader from an early age, having been encouraged by a parent to read as widely as possible. Even without taking into account all the colouring books that one must have sullied as an infant, how to be certain of the very first book one read?
Where do I place my Ladybird books (with their different grades, from Reading Level 2 all the way up to Reading Level 5) compared to the Tinkle comics and Enid Blyton’s Noddy series? There was so much overlapping in the reading experience. (And this isn’t restricted to early childhood. When I read my first Somerset Maughams and John Steinbecks around age 12, I was also still reading the Hardy Boys Casefiles.)
Yet a cover image does come into my mind when I hear the words “first book”. It’s an illustration of a very large dead creature lying on the ground in a jungle, while a smaller creature stands disrespectfully on the corpse, looking pensive. Reader, meet Amar Chitra Katha title number 163: Panchatantra – How the Jackal Ate the Elephant, and Other Stories.
This could be a manufactured memory, but I’m almost sure it’s true: we are parked outside the disordered Malviya Nagar market in south Delhi, I’m sitting in the car, waiting (possibly because it is raining outside –in my mind, it was always raining and dark and muddy in Malviya Nagar’s back-lanes), and my mother comes across and hands me a comic – or a bunch of comics, among which is the jackal-elephant one. I think I remember blinking at that cover for the first time sitting in the back seat in the dim evening light.
So, an image of death straight away, but there’s more to come. Turn the page, ye inquisitive tot, and find that here, in a comic book created for the delight and edification of children, is a story about a jackal coming across an elephant carcass (“All this meat! All for myself! I need not look for food for weeks”) but needing the help of an animal with sharper teeth to help him make a tear in the thick hide – so he can feast on the delicious, juicy gore within.
Enter a lion, a tiger, a leopard and another jackal, in that order, and we see how our hero gets them all away from his food while also achieving his purpose. As he settles down to eat, there is a heartwarming moral for all of us “Mighty brawn is no match against nimble brain.”
****
When I recovered the jackal-and-elephant comic from an ancient closet recently, I realised that this was one of the more unaesthetic Amar Chitra Kathas. The colours run into each other, or spill outside the lines, which could be a printing problem (I don’t see it in online images from a newer edition of the comic), but there is also something careless and ungainly about the actual drawings, done by Ram Waeerkar, who also illustrated a great deal for Tinkle. The jackal, when he stands on two legs, looks disproportionate, like a very gangly human – the anthropomorphizing is too in-your-face. Other images, such as a tiger bounding away in fright, are tacky.
Taking out a few other ACK comics, I noted clear variances in the quality of the artwork. Hitopadesha: Choice of Friends and Other Stories, for instance, is packed with much more detailed illustrations – by Jeffrey Fowler – while Ashok Dongre’s work on another Hitopadesha (How Friends are Parted, and Other Stories) has a distinct, quirky character. Since many of these stories feature the same animals and similar incidents – including a distressing number of donkeys getting mercilessly beaten – the comparisons become easier.
I briefly wondered if the casual artwork in How the Jackal Ate the Elephant was deliberate, given the inherent unpleasantness of the tale: perhaps they wanted to avoid making things too realistic? But that can’t be it: we see blood flowing from the elephant’s hide only
in two panels, and there were other, better-drawn ACK comics around the same time with grislier content. Consider Vishnu’s avatar Narasimha tearing open the chest of the asura Hiranyakashipu in the 88-page bumper issue Dasha Avatar: The Ten Incarnations of Vishnu, drawn by the celebrated Pratap Mulick.
I don’t know what the parents of my strictly vegetarian friends – the ones who were traumatized when they realized that the jelly their kids had tasted at a birthday party had animal bones as an ingredient – thought of the jackal’s culinary adventure. But looking back, this may have been one of the books that helped me refine an already-existing taste for morbidity and gore. In years to come, I would enthusiastically watch horror films and also develop a special interest in gruesome real-life crime cases. A psychiatrist with enough time on his hands and a facility for making oddball connections might see something promising there. “Jackal the Ripper? Could that be where it all began?”
------------------------
[And a related piece: Tinkle tinkle, little store, about Tinkle comics and the first “bookstore” in my life]
----------------------
Two questions, not self-evidently linked:
“What was the first book in your life?”
“But how am I to get to the flesh of this elephant?”
The first of these is reductive, unanswerable, even pointless if you direct it at anyone who has been a greedy reader from an early age, having been encouraged by a parent to read as widely as possible. Even without taking into account all the colouring books that one must have sullied as an infant, how to be certain of the very first book one read?
Where do I place my Ladybird books (with their different grades, from Reading Level 2 all the way up to Reading Level 5) compared to the Tinkle comics and Enid Blyton’s Noddy series? There was so much overlapping in the reading experience. (And this isn’t restricted to early childhood. When I read my first Somerset Maughams and John Steinbecks around age 12, I was also still reading the Hardy Boys Casefiles.)
Yet a cover image does come into my mind when I hear the words “first book”. It’s an illustration of a very large dead creature lying on the ground in a jungle, while a smaller creature stands disrespectfully on the corpse, looking pensive. Reader, meet Amar Chitra Katha title number 163: Panchatantra – How the Jackal Ate the Elephant, and Other Stories.This could be a manufactured memory, but I’m almost sure it’s true: we are parked outside the disordered Malviya Nagar market in south Delhi, I’m sitting in the car, waiting (possibly because it is raining outside –in my mind, it was always raining and dark and muddy in Malviya Nagar’s back-lanes), and my mother comes across and hands me a comic – or a bunch of comics, among which is the jackal-elephant one. I think I remember blinking at that cover for the first time sitting in the back seat in the dim evening light.
So, an image of death straight away, but there’s more to come. Turn the page, ye inquisitive tot, and find that here, in a comic book created for the delight and edification of children, is a story about a jackal coming across an elephant carcass (“All this meat! All for myself! I need not look for food for weeks”) but needing the help of an animal with sharper teeth to help him make a tear in the thick hide – so he can feast on the delicious, juicy gore within.
Enter a lion, a tiger, a leopard and another jackal, in that order, and we see how our hero gets them all away from his food while also achieving his purpose. As he settles down to eat, there is a heartwarming moral for all of us “Mighty brawn is no match against nimble brain.”
****
When I recovered the jackal-and-elephant comic from an ancient closet recently, I realised that this was one of the more unaesthetic Amar Chitra Kathas. The colours run into each other, or spill outside the lines, which could be a printing problem (I don’t see it in online images from a newer edition of the comic), but there is also something careless and ungainly about the actual drawings, done by Ram Waeerkar, who also illustrated a great deal for Tinkle. The jackal, when he stands on two legs, looks disproportionate, like a very gangly human – the anthropomorphizing is too in-your-face. Other images, such as a tiger bounding away in fright, are tacky.
Taking out a few other ACK comics, I noted clear variances in the quality of the artwork. Hitopadesha: Choice of Friends and Other Stories, for instance, is packed with much more detailed illustrations – by Jeffrey Fowler – while Ashok Dongre’s work on another Hitopadesha (How Friends are Parted, and Other Stories) has a distinct, quirky character. Since many of these stories feature the same animals and similar incidents – including a distressing number of donkeys getting mercilessly beaten – the comparisons become easier.I briefly wondered if the casual artwork in How the Jackal Ate the Elephant was deliberate, given the inherent unpleasantness of the tale: perhaps they wanted to avoid making things too realistic? But that can’t be it: we see blood flowing from the elephant’s hide only
in two panels, and there were other, better-drawn ACK comics around the same time with grislier content. Consider Vishnu’s avatar Narasimha tearing open the chest of the asura Hiranyakashipu in the 88-page bumper issue Dasha Avatar: The Ten Incarnations of Vishnu, drawn by the celebrated Pratap Mulick.I don’t know what the parents of my strictly vegetarian friends – the ones who were traumatized when they realized that the jelly their kids had tasted at a birthday party had animal bones as an ingredient – thought of the jackal’s culinary adventure. But looking back, this may have been one of the books that helped me refine an already-existing taste for morbidity and gore. In years to come, I would enthusiastically watch horror films and also develop a special interest in gruesome real-life crime cases. A psychiatrist with enough time on his hands and a facility for making oddball connections might see something promising there. “Jackal the Ripper? Could that be where it all began?”
------------------------
[And a related piece: Tinkle tinkle, little store, about Tinkle comics and the first “bookstore” in my life]
February 23, 2019
‘Verily, memory is a tricky wench’ (and other wisdom in HM Naqvi’s The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack)
[Did this book review for Scroll]
--------------------
Reading HM Naqvi’s second novel The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack, I was faced with a tricky question, which goes something like this: what if an author does a good, authentic-seeming job of capturing a narrator’s distinct, idiosyncratic voice – and yet this voice itself is so affected, so rambling and at times grating, that even as you admire the book’s achievement and seriousness of purpose, the reading experience often becomes a drag? **
I speak of the narrator-protagonist Abdullah K, known as the Cossack (we learn why around a hundred pages in), a 70-year-old resident of Karachi, or as he writes it, Currachee. (“This orthographic tic can be attributed to my affinity for the sonorous, indeed alliterative quality of the colonial appellation for the city – after all, I came of age during the Raj – but the long and short of it is that it’s my city and I’ll call it what I want.”) Abdullah is a brilliant man in many ways, but a notably unaccomplished one – if you define “unaccomplished” as having little tangible to show for the grand projects he has been working on or contemplating. “I am more phenomenologist than historian,” he tells us; he claims to be writing “a mythopoetic legacy” of his city’s patron saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi.
Now, as the book opens, a few situations descend on him, creating both peril and a renewed sense of purpose. First his old friend Felix Pinto (“the Last Trumpeter of Currachee”) asks him to look after his adolescent grandson Bosco for some time. (“You know things. Teach him something. Character building and all that jazz.”) Then, Abdullah learns that three of his four brothers are planning to dispose of their ancient family estate, the Sunset Lodge, the only place he has ever known as home; the fourth brother, Tony, may be his only hope, if he can locate him. Meanwhile fate also throws into his path a young woman named Jugnu, obsidian-eyed and caught in gangland trouble, and the possibility of a dangerous romance arises.
So here is a man who, at an advanced age, is at risk of losing his moorings – and his most prized possessions, including his library – but has also at the very same time acquired a surrogate family, which brings with it new responsibilities and new fire. It’s almost as if fate had said: let’s get this chap to stop pottering around and procrastinating and theorising, and give him things to do, as well as new things to think about.
*****
Conceptually, there is much to relish in this ambitious novel, which arrives eight years after Naqvi’s award-winning debut, the dynamic Home Boy. If that book was about three young Pakistanis in post-9/11 New York, this one has another protagonist who is an outsider in his own way, even though he is a Muslim in Pakistan. The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack is filled with memories of a cosmopolitan Karachi, made up of jazz clubs, bars, cabarets and musicians with such nicknames as Caliph of Cool (I was reminded a little of the smoky, glamorous world described by the Urdu writer Ibn-e Safi in his Jasoosi Duniya series) – a place that might be less inclusive today than it was in the 1950s and 60s heyday of Abdullah and Felix. It’s clear that they miss that world and feel sorely out of place in the current one.
Along with its many references to the city’s cultural and sociological history, this book is also a study of a complex man. Naqvi conveys the sympathetic side of Abdullah – we see his loneliness, his eagerness to please beneath the pedantry and archness that might easily put people off, his fear that he might lose his new “family”, his sense that time has passed him by. “You will be judged by what you finish, not what you begin,” he recalls his dying father say, and those words hang over his life like a giant neon sign. A running motif is the difference between knowing and doing – between, say, providing a scholarly discourse on the culinary history of a region and cooking a meal yourself in the thrill of new love.
All this is so promising. And yet, there is the matter of Abdullah’s actual prose, which may test the patience of even readers who have a high threshold for showy writing. I would have to quote entire passages to properly make my case, but consider even short declarations like “Verily, memory is a tricky wench.” (There are many occurrences of “verily” and “veritable” in this book.) Or “Nobody has offered me any biscuits & I do relish a biscuit, a splendid genus incorporating everything from the modest saline to the vanilla wafer.” Or the random appearance, in the middle of a regular sentence, of an all-capitalised observation like “Apparel Doth Maketh the Man”. Or this bit about a woman who is suspected of being a 'transvestite': "What to do? Discreetly explore the topography of her nether lands with my divining rod whilst she is asleep? What if I discover a bitter gourd in the brush?"
It bears mentioning that The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack has a Foreword and an Afterword, which present the main text of this novel as an actual written manuscript, received by one of Abdullah’s acquaintances (I won’t say who) and edited together. In other words, perhaps this is his lifetime’s accomplishment, his mythopoetic legacy, the thing that he sat down and completed, making him something more than a dabbler or a dallier. And this makes the floridity of the writing more plausible: one can believe that someone like Abdullah would, when putting pen to paper, make conversations more ornate than they actually were, allow himself to get carried away, or just amuse himself by repeatedly using words like “espy” where “see” would do.
Up to a point, this sort of thing can be cute or create a drolly comical effect – but to me at least, it started to feel tired after a while. The writing in Home Boy had many stylistic flourishes too – the main characters, who think of themselves as global citizens until hard reality strikes, speak a language that mixes the rhythms of gangsta-rap with Punjabi slang – but there was an energy and an internal rhythm to that book, which I felt lacking here.
Perhaps it’s the burden of expectations: I went in thinking this book would be wildly funny, and on that score I was disappointed. Take the prolific use of footnotes. This is a device that can be put to very good use in a humorous narrative requiring sharp or witty asides, but here the footnotes often just contain random information, including things that could have been added as a paragraph in the main text without affecting the narrative flow. (Incidentally, the one footnote I was genuinely grateful for is a detailed recipe for orange pulao!) This again is something that might be “true” to the meandering thought process of a narrator like Abdullah, showing off his store of knowledge on various subjects including his city’s history. But we, the readers, must still deal with it.
*****
Eventually the prose became such a barrier that I only dimly registered what was happening at the plot level in the book’s second half – as Abdullah reunites with his brother Tony (and his new wife) while also trying to stay clear of gunmen, and figure out what Jugnu is up to. And yet, somehow, I never quite lost interest in this protagonist, or stopped feeling concerned for him.
Reading some passages, I thought of a certain variety of old gentleman (it’s always a man) who routinely stands up from the audience at the end of a literature-festival session, ostensibly to ask a question but really to supply autobiographical detail in a baroque tone. The wannabe poet, now 86 years old but convinced as early as age 10 that he was destined for great things. (It didn’t work out, of course: now, decades later, he is fated to sit among the audience, watching pretenders.) Or more specifically, the gentleman I once saw at a Chandigarh fest who, apropos of nothing, stood up and went on about how he had been the first man in his city to get a vasectomy.
The point is, it’s possible to be irritated by such people and their self-obsessed hijacking of an occasion, while also feeling sorry for them and realizing how, with just a minor twist in fortunes or personality, they might have been the ones sitting on stage, blabbering about their bestselling books.
I felt a comparable sympathy for Abdullah, who, beneath the occasional pomposity of his tone, is like a lost, lonely child. Little wonder that one of the book’s most resonant passages – a very short one – has him walking through a house during a mourning ceremony for a distant relative and overhearing a conversation about someone with great promise and potential but fated to be a failure. We realise, though he himself does not, that it is him being discussed. It is one of the rare times in this book where we get a break from Abdullah's constant expounding and information-imparting and are privy to someone else’s perspective on him – and the results are unexpectedly moving.
-----------------------------------------------
** This might be likened to an actor playing a screechy or obnoxious character as the lead role in a film. The empathetic viewer might recognize that the performance (and the script) is honest, not an exercise in overacting; but what does one do with such knowledge if this unlikable or irritating person occupies nearly every minute of the film’s running time?
--------------------------------------------
[Some of my earlier book reviews and author interviews for Scroll are here]
--------------------
Reading HM Naqvi’s second novel The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack, I was faced with a tricky question, which goes something like this: what if an author does a good, authentic-seeming job of capturing a narrator’s distinct, idiosyncratic voice – and yet this voice itself is so affected, so rambling and at times grating, that even as you admire the book’s achievement and seriousness of purpose, the reading experience often becomes a drag? **
I speak of the narrator-protagonist Abdullah K, known as the Cossack (we learn why around a hundred pages in), a 70-year-old resident of Karachi, or as he writes it, Currachee. (“This orthographic tic can be attributed to my affinity for the sonorous, indeed alliterative quality of the colonial appellation for the city – after all, I came of age during the Raj – but the long and short of it is that it’s my city and I’ll call it what I want.”) Abdullah is a brilliant man in many ways, but a notably unaccomplished one – if you define “unaccomplished” as having little tangible to show for the grand projects he has been working on or contemplating. “I am more phenomenologist than historian,” he tells us; he claims to be writing “a mythopoetic legacy” of his city’s patron saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi.
Now, as the book opens, a few situations descend on him, creating both peril and a renewed sense of purpose. First his old friend Felix Pinto (“the Last Trumpeter of Currachee”) asks him to look after his adolescent grandson Bosco for some time. (“You know things. Teach him something. Character building and all that jazz.”) Then, Abdullah learns that three of his four brothers are planning to dispose of their ancient family estate, the Sunset Lodge, the only place he has ever known as home; the fourth brother, Tony, may be his only hope, if he can locate him. Meanwhile fate also throws into his path a young woman named Jugnu, obsidian-eyed and caught in gangland trouble, and the possibility of a dangerous romance arises. So here is a man who, at an advanced age, is at risk of losing his moorings – and his most prized possessions, including his library – but has also at the very same time acquired a surrogate family, which brings with it new responsibilities and new fire. It’s almost as if fate had said: let’s get this chap to stop pottering around and procrastinating and theorising, and give him things to do, as well as new things to think about.
*****
Conceptually, there is much to relish in this ambitious novel, which arrives eight years after Naqvi’s award-winning debut, the dynamic Home Boy. If that book was about three young Pakistanis in post-9/11 New York, this one has another protagonist who is an outsider in his own way, even though he is a Muslim in Pakistan. The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack is filled with memories of a cosmopolitan Karachi, made up of jazz clubs, bars, cabarets and musicians with such nicknames as Caliph of Cool (I was reminded a little of the smoky, glamorous world described by the Urdu writer Ibn-e Safi in his Jasoosi Duniya series) – a place that might be less inclusive today than it was in the 1950s and 60s heyday of Abdullah and Felix. It’s clear that they miss that world and feel sorely out of place in the current one.
Along with its many references to the city’s cultural and sociological history, this book is also a study of a complex man. Naqvi conveys the sympathetic side of Abdullah – we see his loneliness, his eagerness to please beneath the pedantry and archness that might easily put people off, his fear that he might lose his new “family”, his sense that time has passed him by. “You will be judged by what you finish, not what you begin,” he recalls his dying father say, and those words hang over his life like a giant neon sign. A running motif is the difference between knowing and doing – between, say, providing a scholarly discourse on the culinary history of a region and cooking a meal yourself in the thrill of new love.
All this is so promising. And yet, there is the matter of Abdullah’s actual prose, which may test the patience of even readers who have a high threshold for showy writing. I would have to quote entire passages to properly make my case, but consider even short declarations like “Verily, memory is a tricky wench.” (There are many occurrences of “verily” and “veritable” in this book.) Or “Nobody has offered me any biscuits & I do relish a biscuit, a splendid genus incorporating everything from the modest saline to the vanilla wafer.” Or the random appearance, in the middle of a regular sentence, of an all-capitalised observation like “Apparel Doth Maketh the Man”. Or this bit about a woman who is suspected of being a 'transvestite': "What to do? Discreetly explore the topography of her nether lands with my divining rod whilst she is asleep? What if I discover a bitter gourd in the brush?"
It bears mentioning that The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack has a Foreword and an Afterword, which present the main text of this novel as an actual written manuscript, received by one of Abdullah’s acquaintances (I won’t say who) and edited together. In other words, perhaps this is his lifetime’s accomplishment, his mythopoetic legacy, the thing that he sat down and completed, making him something more than a dabbler or a dallier. And this makes the floridity of the writing more plausible: one can believe that someone like Abdullah would, when putting pen to paper, make conversations more ornate than they actually were, allow himself to get carried away, or just amuse himself by repeatedly using words like “espy” where “see” would do.
Up to a point, this sort of thing can be cute or create a drolly comical effect – but to me at least, it started to feel tired after a while. The writing in Home Boy had many stylistic flourishes too – the main characters, who think of themselves as global citizens until hard reality strikes, speak a language that mixes the rhythms of gangsta-rap with Punjabi slang – but there was an energy and an internal rhythm to that book, which I felt lacking here.
Perhaps it’s the burden of expectations: I went in thinking this book would be wildly funny, and on that score I was disappointed. Take the prolific use of footnotes. This is a device that can be put to very good use in a humorous narrative requiring sharp or witty asides, but here the footnotes often just contain random information, including things that could have been added as a paragraph in the main text without affecting the narrative flow. (Incidentally, the one footnote I was genuinely grateful for is a detailed recipe for orange pulao!) This again is something that might be “true” to the meandering thought process of a narrator like Abdullah, showing off his store of knowledge on various subjects including his city’s history. But we, the readers, must still deal with it.
*****
Eventually the prose became such a barrier that I only dimly registered what was happening at the plot level in the book’s second half – as Abdullah reunites with his brother Tony (and his new wife) while also trying to stay clear of gunmen, and figure out what Jugnu is up to. And yet, somehow, I never quite lost interest in this protagonist, or stopped feeling concerned for him.
Reading some passages, I thought of a certain variety of old gentleman (it’s always a man) who routinely stands up from the audience at the end of a literature-festival session, ostensibly to ask a question but really to supply autobiographical detail in a baroque tone. The wannabe poet, now 86 years old but convinced as early as age 10 that he was destined for great things. (It didn’t work out, of course: now, decades later, he is fated to sit among the audience, watching pretenders.) Or more specifically, the gentleman I once saw at a Chandigarh fest who, apropos of nothing, stood up and went on about how he had been the first man in his city to get a vasectomy.
The point is, it’s possible to be irritated by such people and their self-obsessed hijacking of an occasion, while also feeling sorry for them and realizing how, with just a minor twist in fortunes or personality, they might have been the ones sitting on stage, blabbering about their bestselling books.
I felt a comparable sympathy for Abdullah, who, beneath the occasional pomposity of his tone, is like a lost, lonely child. Little wonder that one of the book’s most resonant passages – a very short one – has him walking through a house during a mourning ceremony for a distant relative and overhearing a conversation about someone with great promise and potential but fated to be a failure. We realise, though he himself does not, that it is him being discussed. It is one of the rare times in this book where we get a break from Abdullah's constant expounding and information-imparting and are privy to someone else’s perspective on him – and the results are unexpectedly moving.
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** This might be likened to an actor playing a screechy or obnoxious character as the lead role in a film. The empathetic viewer might recognize that the performance (and the script) is honest, not an exercise in overacting; but what does one do with such knowledge if this unlikable or irritating person occupies nearly every minute of the film’s running time?
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[Some of my earlier book reviews and author interviews for Scroll are here]
February 14, 2019
Right said, Fred (a chance encounter in Guwahati)
This is about a massively improbable, and very pleasing, encounter/reunion at the Brahmaputra Literary Festival in Guwahati, where I curated and moderated two sessions last week.
Some context: I have spent a great deal of time on tennis messageboards over the past 13-14 years (ever since my Rafa Nadal fandom -- often chronicled on this blog -- began), but the most I was ever an active participant was around 2006-2010, when the Tennis World website was on Typepad and facilitated long, in-depth conversations. During one of those phases, I had a few exchanges — including genial arguments — with a poster named “Freddy”, one of the nicer, more balanced Federer fans on the board. One exchange was particularly vivid: it had to do with sports fandom as deriving from the personality connect you sometimes feel with a particular athlete. If I remember right, Freddy was shaking his head at what he saw as Rafa’s false humility and his “sandbagging” — his habit of constantly undermining his own chances, always saying “very difficult, I’ll have to try my best, no?” even when the next match was against a low-ranked opponent.
I countered that I didn’t think this was fakery at all, that Nadal quite likely really had that diffident side to him — a side that didn’t believe he belonged up there with all-time greats like Federer. And I mentioned that in a very different context, I understood something about “sandbagging”. I was often accused of it by friends in school when I came out after an exam all depressed and hangdog-like, convinced I had done badly, but subsequently got high marks. This wasn’t dishonesty, it was how I really felt at the time. It may have been chronic pessimism, or a constant fear of letting oneself down; it’s also possible my friends were so OVERCONFIDENT — or so sure about their own answers when we exchanged notes after the exam — that there was always likely to be this sort of mismatch between our expectations and our results.
(Incidentally, I wrote about this aspect of my Rafa fandom in this First Post piece in 2011)
Anyway, I had no idea about — or interest in — Freddy's real identity (I think I assumed that was his actual name — it wasn’t self-evidently a chatroom pseudonym), and I didn’t seriously consider the possibility that he was Indian. But returning to the present and to a series of chance happenings:
* At Guwahati, I attended the “Sports is stranger than fiction” panel discussion — only because my friend Shamya Dasgupta was moderating it and because the writer Shehan Karunatilaka, whom I was meeting after a long time, was on it.
* During the session, one of the panelists, Sriram Subramanian — about whom I knew nothing beyond what was sketchily said in the session introduction—mentioned the randomness of his Ivan Lendl fandom in the 1980s, and how it led to an antipathy for Lendl’s rival Boris Becker, and so on.
* This story touched a chord, but it still wouldn’t have led anywhere — I’m not the sort to go up to someone I don’t know after a session and start chatting about something he said — except that later that evening I was sitting with Shamya at the hotel bar when Sriram came by and joined us.
* In the inevitability of small talk, I brought up the Lendl thing, and this led to a chat which created an escalating sense of deja vu: we found ourselves talking about TennisWorld and the many colourful commenters there in the good old days, and next thing I was asking him if he had ever posted there himself and what name he used… and you can guess the rest.
So here, many years after our cyberspace conversations, “Freddy” and I end up meeting in Guwahati of all places: he travelled there from Pune, I from Delhi. And even with both of us participating in the same festival, the probability of running into each other, much less having a tennis-related conversation that would connect these dots, was vanishingly small.
Moral of the story: if sports is stranger than fiction, life is stranger than sports, and lit-fests are stranger than Manmohan Desai films.
(Also, when a diehard Federer fan and a diehard Nadal fan pose together for photographs, you know the world belongs once again to the Serbian Prince of Darkness. But that's for the next tennis piece.)
Some context: I have spent a great deal of time on tennis messageboards over the past 13-14 years (ever since my Rafa Nadal fandom -- often chronicled on this blog -- began), but the most I was ever an active participant was around 2006-2010, when the Tennis World website was on Typepad and facilitated long, in-depth conversations. During one of those phases, I had a few exchanges — including genial arguments — with a poster named “Freddy”, one of the nicer, more balanced Federer fans on the board. One exchange was particularly vivid: it had to do with sports fandom as deriving from the personality connect you sometimes feel with a particular athlete. If I remember right, Freddy was shaking his head at what he saw as Rafa’s false humility and his “sandbagging” — his habit of constantly undermining his own chances, always saying “very difficult, I’ll have to try my best, no?” even when the next match was against a low-ranked opponent.
I countered that I didn’t think this was fakery at all, that Nadal quite likely really had that diffident side to him — a side that didn’t believe he belonged up there with all-time greats like Federer. And I mentioned that in a very different context, I understood something about “sandbagging”. I was often accused of it by friends in school when I came out after an exam all depressed and hangdog-like, convinced I had done badly, but subsequently got high marks. This wasn’t dishonesty, it was how I really felt at the time. It may have been chronic pessimism, or a constant fear of letting oneself down; it’s also possible my friends were so OVERCONFIDENT — or so sure about their own answers when we exchanged notes after the exam — that there was always likely to be this sort of mismatch between our expectations and our results.
(Incidentally, I wrote about this aspect of my Rafa fandom in this First Post piece in 2011)
Anyway, I had no idea about — or interest in — Freddy's real identity (I think I assumed that was his actual name — it wasn’t self-evidently a chatroom pseudonym), and I didn’t seriously consider the possibility that he was Indian. But returning to the present and to a series of chance happenings:
* At Guwahati, I attended the “Sports is stranger than fiction” panel discussion — only because my friend Shamya Dasgupta was moderating it and because the writer Shehan Karunatilaka, whom I was meeting after a long time, was on it.
* During the session, one of the panelists, Sriram Subramanian — about whom I knew nothing beyond what was sketchily said in the session introduction—mentioned the randomness of his Ivan Lendl fandom in the 1980s, and how it led to an antipathy for Lendl’s rival Boris Becker, and so on.
* This story touched a chord, but it still wouldn’t have led anywhere — I’m not the sort to go up to someone I don’t know after a session and start chatting about something he said — except that later that evening I was sitting with Shamya at the hotel bar when Sriram came by and joined us.
* In the inevitability of small talk, I brought up the Lendl thing, and this led to a chat which created an escalating sense of deja vu: we found ourselves talking about TennisWorld and the many colourful commenters there in the good old days, and next thing I was asking him if he had ever posted there himself and what name he used… and you can guess the rest.
So here, many years after our cyberspace conversations, “Freddy” and I end up meeting in Guwahati of all places: he travelled there from Pune, I from Delhi. And even with both of us participating in the same festival, the probability of running into each other, much less having a tennis-related conversation that would connect these dots, was vanishingly small.
Moral of the story: if sports is stranger than fiction, life is stranger than sports, and lit-fests are stranger than Manmohan Desai films.
(Also, when a diehard Federer fan and a diehard Nadal fan pose together for photographs, you know the world belongs once again to the Serbian Prince of Darkness. But that's for the next tennis piece.)
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