Jai Arjun Singh's Blog, page 38

Help needed for Kambli the desi pup

Attention animal lovers — please read this and see if you can help in any way, or spread the word to anyone else who might be able to.

Archana Sreenivasan is currently fostering Kambli, an 8-month-old paraplegic and incontinent male puppy. He is an Indie and was rescued from a construction site as a 3-month-old with a spinal injury. After that, he was moved to two different shelters, and finally Archana brought him to her home in Bangalore three weeks ago because he wasn't getting the care he needed at the earlier shelter. She is unable to adopt him, and has not been able to find anyone else who can adopt him.

In Archana’s words:

"Kambli will not do well in any shelter in Bangalore. He needs extra care and multiple vet visits, which no shelter will have the bandwidth for. Kambli's urine needs to be expressed 5 times a day and he needs a surface that is smooth for him to drag himself about on (when he's not in his wheel cart.)
I came to know that some of the rescue dogs of Delhi are fortunate enough to find homes outside India, in the US, Canada and Netherlands, and I couldn't help dreaming for Kambli. I tried contacting the folks in Delhi who work on these international adoptions but haven't received any response from them.
I can help financially with Kambli. I can have him transported wherever required. I'm willing to help in any other way I possibly can, if anyone is willing to help out with his case.
Kambli needs a home, or he will not survive.”

Among the people Archana is trying to reach are:
Dr. Premalata Choudhary (http://www.choudharypetclinic.com/index.html)
Vandana Anchalia or Kannan Animal Welfare (https://www.facebook.com/kannananimalwelfare/)

But if anyone has suggestions for others who might be able to help, please weigh in. (One complication is that most agencies and shelters - Friendicoes etc - already have more dogs than they can handle, especially with people abandoning pets every day.)

Please feel free to share this post, or the poster I have included. Updates, including videos of Kambli, are on his Instagram page, here.

Please help if you can.

Two faces of Haribhai, a.k.a. Sanjeev Kumar

[Inadvertently continuing the mother theme, with this Mint Lounge piece about my mom's favourite actor. In the early years of blogging, I had many run-ins with Sanjeev Kumar fans because I mocked his Great Actor status. Actually, I was restrained and self-censoring compared to my friend Shamya Dasgupta, who often took over my comments threads and wrote sentences like: “Because Ray was the director, even a fool like Saeed Jaffrey acted well in Shatranj ke Khiladi. Sanjeev Kumar didn't have a choice but to do well."

Anyway, here’s an effort to say some vaguely nice things about SK]
------------------------------

When an acquaintance mentioned recently that Sanjeev Kumar’s 80th birth anniversary had just passed, and wondered why there was no biography of this actor, so admired in his time, I had two contrary responses.

The first went: yes, of course it would be great to have a well-researched book about “Haribhai” (as Kumar, born Harihar Jariwala, was affectionately known). Movie-star biographies – good ones, bad ones – appear nearly every month now, some of them about celebrities who are still in their prime. The recency bias irks me. I often encounter young film buffs who know little about film history, and Kumar is among the old-timers whose work is seen as quaint or stodgy. It’s easy to feel defensive on his behalf.

But the second reaction was a kneejerk one, rooted in my own less-than-kind feelings about Kumar the performer. In fact, a lot of my online time used to be spent mocking the poor man for what I felt was an inflated reputation. One enjoyable blog exchange – nearly 15 years ago – involved a friend and me taking on a Sanjeev Kumar devotee in a thread that became more hysterical and less sincere as it went on. (“Just for the record, Hari didn’t look too bad when he was playing the dhol while his wife made out with Amitabh to Rang Barse,” my friend conceded, tongue-in-cheek.)

Much of our trolling was calculated, aimed at driving our victim into paroxysms of righteous indignation. But it was also rooted in real annoyance about an actor getting disproportionate credit for his choice of roles, for “opting to” playing elderly character parts rather than “heroes”. I had grown up with the idea – expressed by sermonizing adults and by film magazines – that Kumar was a Real Actor, while others were Just Stars. Superb performances by his more glamorous co-stars (Dharmendra and Hema Malini in Sholay, for instance) were downgraded or taken for granted (while SK’s Thakur got all the plaudits for his gritted teeth and trembling lips). This was a simplistic celebration of “subdued” or “understated” over “showy” or “flamboyant”.

Another factor, for me at least, was the tedium generated by numerous bad SK films that continued to be released posthumously right up to the 1990s. I was particularly annoyed by the final scene of Professor ki Padosan, released in 1993: Amitabh Bachchan makes a cameo appearance to say a few nice things about Kumar, then solemnly places a garland over the actor’s photo – all this right at the end of a slapstick comedy, effectively taking the wind out of the audience’s sails and making us feel like we had to stand up for the national anthem.

Which is why it’s fun now to recall another SK avatar: the much younger, mid-1960s version in such films as Nishan and Ali Baba aur 40 Chor. To watch those costume dramas is to see a lithe, beaming young man gamely doing whatever he could with conventional leading roles. These are tacky films by most measures, and I wouldn’t ask you to watch them in their entirety, but look at some scenes like his first appearance in Nishan: an adolescent prince is seen riding and singing along, and then a dissolve gives us the adult version (played by SK), fitted in period costume, long curly hair blowing in the wind.

I’m not saying SK was great in those early roles. He often overdoes things spectacularly (watch him playing drunk while Helen sings “Aap ki Adaon Pe”; the scene at approximately 40 seconds in the YouTube video is unintentional-comedy gold). But in his better moments, he shows personality, panache and a sense of humour, things that faded in later years as he adopted the somber, old-man persona. I feel there’s an element of post-facto myth-building in the idea (often expressed in discussions about SK) that he always set out to be an Actor rather than a Hero. It’s more likely that Kumar would have taken whatever cards were dealt to him by fate and the box-office, but for some combination of intangible reasons, he never found large-scale popularity as a dashing lead. Maybe it’s because he did the wrong films early in his career, or wasn’t conventionally good-looking in the way that Dharmendra or Shashi Kapoor were, or didn’t have the visceral appeal that Rajesh Khanna rode such a wave on. From the mid-70s on, corpulence (brought on partly by alcohol and, rumour has it, romantic rejections) also played a role in his taking on restrained character parts.

Orson Welles once perceptively noted that hamming shouldn’t be synonymous with over-acting. “Ham actors are not all of them strutters and fretters […] a lot of them are understaters, flashing winsome little smiles over the teacups, or scratching their T-shirts.”

Sanjeev Kumar could, at different stages in his career, be both varieties of ham actor, but there was also a middle zone made up of many periods of grace, fueled by scripts and directors – most notably Gulzar, to a lesser extent Basu Bhattacharya, on one occasion Satyajit Ray – who tapped the best of him. Overall I preferred him in lighter parts — in fine comedies like Angoor and Laakhon ki Baat, of course, but also his Satyakam role as the hero’s boisterous friend. Even a non-fan like me can acknowledge that in such films, he found a character’s pulse without being either self-consciously subdued or theatrically over the top.

So, a biography? Bring it on. Just don’t turn it into a Rajkumar Hirani-helmed film with Aamir Khan playing SK as an alien who crashes down into the big bad world of Hindi films and improves it with gravitas.
--------------------------

[Here, in the interests of 'balance', is a piece where I say appreciative things about Kumar - in Gulzar's Koshish. And here's a post about SK and MacMohan - who would play Sambha in Sholay - sharing space together as young supporting actors 10 years before Sholay]

Rooms, private traps: on living with, and growing away from, a parent

[Re-posting this piece I wrote for Indian Quarterly magazine early last year, about my relationship with my mother — a genuinely close one but also one that had involved very little “casual" talk in recent years. And how that came to be tested when a special situation — her cancer diagnosis — arose in July 2016]

----------------------------------------------------

“Jack is five. He lives in a single, locked room with his Ma.”
(Terse summary on the back cover of Emma Donoghue’s Room)

****

The last film I watched with my mother in a movie hall was the 2015 Room, based on Emma Donoghue’s Booker-shortlisted novel. Two things about that sentence. First: our last film. That sounds bleak and final, and I hope there will be more to come, but at the time of writing there is more reason to be cautious than optimistic.

Second: it wasn’t just the last film we saw together in a hall, it was also the last film we saw together, period. And I can’t think of the last time we saw a whole film together in a more casual, everyday situation, just sitting in front of a TV set while chatting.

But I’ll return to these points.

Here’s how Room became that film. Years ago, before I had read the Donoghue or even known exactly what it was about, I realised that my mother had developed an attachment to it. The novel sat prominently for months on the table where she selected and stacked books that had come to me from various publishers, and whose titles or synopses -- or  jacket covers -- she  had found intriguing. The great majority of those books were abandoned after a few pages when she found they weren’t up her street, but Room she finished, over many sessions of sporadic reading: putting the book down after a few pages, returning to it between her dalliances with less demanding things such as movie magazines.

It wasn’t until I heard about the upcoming film version, and read plot details online, that I learnt what Room was about. And then, knowing that the film was going to show in Delhi and that mum might like to see it, I read the novel myself as preparation, and found myself thinking anew about what she might have found so compelling.

Room is told in the voice of a five-year-old boy who has spent his whole life with his mother in a single small room where she has been kept captive since being kidnapped as a teenager. Here are two people who have been victims of a terrible, ongoing crime -- one  of them in full possession of the facts, nurturing and guarding and making up stories for the other, who is still innocent and unaware that there is a life and a world beyond the tiny space he has known all his short life.

This is, needless to say, an extraordinary narrative situation. The broad premise, and what occurs within it, might be considered unrealistic -- or  at least, very improbable -- but  it also contains an allegory for aspects of a more “normal” mother-child relationship, especially a close one that involves a great deal of mutual interdependence. First there is the womb, a safe space from which the child must eventually be ejected to discover the outside world; and then, in that outside world, there is a still larger “room”, the sheltering one of parenthood, which this infant will stay encased in for at least a few years. Simultaneously the parent must prepare to “free” herself from the belief -- with  its attendant agonies and ecstasies -- that  she alone can walk her child through life.

Did my mother think about any of this when she became so involved with the book? I don’t know, I haven’t asked her (and I won’t), but even if she had, it would probably have been in a subconscious way; she wouldn’t have articulated these thoughts like I just did, all pedantic and reviewer-like. More than a tendency to intellectualise, she has always had what I think of as an intuitive, commonsense wisdom. (The only "literary" observation she made to me about the novel was that she had been first taken aback and disoriented, then gradually fascinated, by Jack’s fumbling first-person narrative; it took her a while to see that the reader was meant to understand more about the situation than the narrator himself did.)

Still, I wonder if she thought about my childhood.

******

“Jack is five. He lives in a single, locked room with his Ma.”

Jai is eight. He and his mother stay locked up in a room at the end of the house, down the hall -- not  all the time, but on days when things are especially bad at home; when the big bad wolf huffs and puffs and threatens to blow the door down.

We were always exceptionally close. She was my life-raft on a sea of uncertainty, at an age when I barely knew enough to be certain or uncertain about anything; a shield not just from my father’s unpredictable, alcohol-fuelled violence but also -- and this I realised only much later -- from  the possibility of my becoming over-pampered, turned into a privileged lout, by well-off grandparents trying too hard to compensate for their son’s behaviour.

I don’t want to get too dramatic about this: our lives were never close to being as bad as those of Room’s protagonists. The terrifying memories -- of  my father hammering on a locked door, or overturning a huge, heaped dining table with unfathomable strength, or physically assaulting a Sikh priest who was reading from the Granth Sahib during an akhand paath in our house -- intersect with other memories of going to school; going (once in a while) to friends’ parties; of mum taking up a part-time job as a doctor’s receptionist when she found that her monthly pocket money wasn’t enough (and maybe that she needed to feel useful). But the bad memories are always there too, and aspects of our life certainly felt horror film-ish -- the  many times we had to sneak out when it got dark, for instance, and spend a scared night at a neighbour’s place, or in the maid’s quarters behind the house.

And yes, ultimately, there is no undramatic way of putting this, we did "escape". Aided by the confidence we had in our relationship, and the rock-solid support of my mother’s widowed mother, who -- her own troubles notwithstanding -- took  us in hand when she realised that things had gone out of control. After a mercifully brief custody battle, we ended up living together in a then-very-green-and-quiet south Delhi colony called Saket, which means “heaven”. (But I won’t underline that. Mustn’t get too dramatic.)

*****

A few years after this, my interest in cinema as something one could think about, read in depth about, perhaps even write professionally about one day, began with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and the reservoirs of film literature it led me to. By this point my mother and I were leading secure enough lives that it was possible to smile at the film’s macabre Oedipal theme. Mum (or Amma as I have always called her for some reason, late as it is in this piece to reveal such a central piece of information) told me how, in the early 1960s when the film released in Bombay, her brother came home and solemnly informed their mother that he would like to have her “mummified” after she had passed on.

(“Needles, sawdust… the chemicals are the only things that cost anything,” Norman Bates says, explaining the practicalities of taxidermy; a horror-movie monster, yes, but also someone who knows what it is like to be so close to and so dependent on a parent that you want to keep their physical presence with you “forever”.)

Despite the emotional security that had come with leaving my father’s house, I was cripplingly shy, prone to melancholia and loneliness. And watching it when I did, Psycho touched something deep in me. I found sadness in it, in scenes like the one where Norman responds to the insinuation that he and his mother might have been looking for money to leave their motel and start a new life elsewhere. “This place happens to be my only world,” he says, “I grew up in that house up there. I had a very happy childhood.” He sounds defiant. “My mother and I were more than happy.”

Perhaps on some level, without being able to express it this way at age 14, I was instinctively realising how close I had come to leading the trapped, circumscribed life that Norman and his dead mother do. But then, as he says in the film’s most moving sequence, a long conversation with a conflicted young woman who has “gotten off the main road”, we are all clamped in our private traps anyway -- even  when we seem free. “We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other.”

*******

Imprisonment, Dependence, Liberation, Self-discovery, Stagnation… those are some big themes, and despite my professed reluctance to get dramatic, I can’t help returning to them. And it isn’t just by chance that I have been talking about two films that involve very intense mother-son relationships and the very unusual situations in which those relationships grow, ossify or decay. I have in recent years become aware of a glitch in my relationship with my mother. Put briefly: it seems that our closeness has almost always been founded on big things -- the Important and the Dramatic -- and not enough on the minutiae of life; the Casual, the Mundane.

From the beginning we always shared the really important stuff, and I never thought this was unusual until I heard stories about all the things my friends -- even  the ones from the seemingly open-minded, cosmopolitan families -- routinely  hid from their parents: about girlfriends, or bunking college, or their first cigarette. When I took my girlfriend -- a young woman in an unhappy marriage, on the brink of separation -- across to meet my mother for the first time, I felt none of the nervousness that most other young people I knew would feel in that situation. It was the most natural thing to do.

And this flowed from how things had always been between us, from my mother’s own openness. When I couldn’t have been more than 12 or 13, she told me about the marriage proposal she had got from an uncle, a childhood friend who had always held a torch for her, and how she had been very tempted but didn’t take it up because it would mean relocating to Lagos, too large a bridge for us to cross at that point in our lives. On another occasion, when the husband of one of her neighbourhood friends made a sexual overture -- figuring that a divorced woman was easy pickings -- I was the first to hear of it, and to be privy to her shock as well as her fear that she may have brought it upon herself by bantering with him at social gatherings.

Taking as much pride as I did in this candour, it took me a long time to discover that I may be undervaluing other sorts of conversations and interactions: the small talk that keeps people going day by day; the sort of behaviour that introverts sometimes dismiss as flippant or inconsequential, but which in its own way brings nourishment and meaning to a relationship over time. Casual chatter and gossip are ways of ventilating the heart, an old grandmother says in Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Embroideries. In Yasujiro Ozu’s 1959 film Good Morning, when a little boy tells his parents that he’s fed up of their polite, vacuous conversation -- the  repeated “good mornings” and “how are yous”, which seem vacuous or hypocritical -- one  of them responds that such talk is essential: “It's a lubricant for the world.”

My mother and I never quite learnt these lessons -- or perhaps we knew them once and gradually became careless about them. Partly this was a personality matter -- both  of us being, to different degrees, very private people -- and partly a result of circumstances; for many years while growing up I was intimidated by my nani’s boisterous personality and kept to my room while she was around. But it also reflects the growing-away-from-a-parent process that everyone (except, maybe, a Norman Bates) goes through.

The second half of Donoghue’s Room is made sharply poignant by the mother’s realisation that her son will never again be as dependent on her as he was during their years of incarceration. I have never really lived away from my mother -- even after getting married and shifting to another flat in the same colony, I continued spending my working day as a freelance writer in my old room, my comfort zone, in her house. But like most children do, I moved away in other ways: into new worlds populated by new friends, into a job and the circles it introduced me to, but also into my own inner spaces.

There was a time, long ago, when we played Scrabble together, or watched TV shows together, in the first years after satellite TV came to India. This gradually stopped. As I became embarrassed by the tackiness of some of the Hindi films we rented and watched on videocassette every Friday, I started lingering about outside the room where mum and nani were watching the film -- and shortly afterwards, I moved away from Hindi cinema altogether, and into new realms that excluded my mother. One thing followed another, and casual conversation became increasingly hard; we rarely even sat down and had meals together. Despite living in the same house, we became… not estranged, but something else -- something I don’t know the word for.

Can a relationship that is really, really close in essence also be distant and awkward in some important contexts? And when a new sort of special situation comes around -- one  that demands an everyday intimacy -- what then?

********

I have had to think about these things ever since the day last July when I sat down to talk with mum about what I thought would be a relatively mundane medical issue -- her  lingering discomfort and back pain, which I’d assumed was an offshoot of an old kidney condition, worsened by many years of self-medicating -- and she told me, all matter of fact, “No, it isn’t the kidney. It’s breast cancer. I have had it for a while, so it’s probably quite advanced by now.”

World-altering though that moment was, it’s almost funny when I think of it now. The fan whirring above us. A reality show playing on low volume in the background. Me, having come into her room, knowing her aversion to doctors and hospitals, with a speech carefully prepared to put her at ease (“We’ll go once, it’ll take just 10 minutes, you can tell them what medicines you’ve been taking, they’ll tell us if there’s something else you should be doing, and that’s it... you don’t have to agree to any intrusive procedures or examinations if you aren’t comfortable”), the deadpan look on her face as I recited the first two or three sentences of that speech -- as casually as I could, looking around as I said the words, at the dog, at the TV, so she wouldn’t think I was arm-twisting her -- and then her interrupting me with her grand revelation: oh no, this is the start of something much bigger than you think.

Another case of what should have been a quotidian exchange turning into something larger than life, like old Hindi movies about terminally ill patients. Another demonstration that the ‘Casual’ switch is jammed when it comes to the two of us.

In the weeks that followed -- a fortnight-long hospital stint precipitated by a worried-looking oncologist saying “Can we admit her right now? It’s important”; the realization that my mother, with her ridiculously high pain threshold, had a cancer-caused crack in her spine, which had to be mended before anything else could be done; the days and nights divided between handling things in the hospital and looking after our high-strung canine child Lara, who had been completely dependent on mum; watching the deterioration and immobilization of a woman who, to my eyes at least, had seemed in decent shape for her 63 years just a few weeks earlier, certainly capable of living alone -- through  all this and more, I had plenty of time to wonder how it had come to this: how a mother whom I saw every day had been diagnosed so late that the disease was almost certainly incurable; why it had to be her closest friend, an aunt who lived downstairs, who alerted me with a couple of phone calls to say that mum was in so much pain late at night that she had -- and  this was the biggest red light of all -- been unable to feed Lara.

And, naturally, I couldn’t help thinking that if I had spent more “casual” time with her in the previous few months -- even sitting around in the evenings in her room for 15-20 minutes each day while she watched TV or listened to music -- I would have been more alert to the little signs, the displays of pain that she had kept hidden.

*****

One side-effect of mum’s chemotherapy is that it has made her sentimental about little things, and at unexpected times. One day, apropos of nothing, she asked if I would massage her aching shoulder for a bit -- and then, smiling, squeezing my hand, told her nurse that I had “the healing touch”. And I winced. Only momentarily, but I couldn’t help it; this overt display of closeness and affection was discomfiting.

Visiting the toy store Hamleys with a friend and his little daughter the next day, I idly glanced at art-and-craft games that I thought might be useful for mum -- not so much to pass the time but to keep her mind active, since people with lesions in the brain, and risk of seizures or mental atrophy, need to do this. Soon I realised that I was looking mainly at the one-person activities. Given that I had flexible working hours, which I mostly spent in her house, shouldn’t I have made an effort to find something we could share, if only for a few minutes each day? Was I nervous about the small talk that would inevitably accompany such a joint endeavour? Or was I afraid that such proximity would make me privy to the involuntary groans of pain that came from her when she moved her shoulder or back at an awkward angle? And in either case, what did that say about me -- “such a good, dutiful son”, as I am often called by visitors to the house?

But even with the knowledge that time may be running out and every day is precious, how do you suddenly begin doing the things you haven’t been accustomed to doing for years? How do you force yourself to sit down and chat about “trivial” or “inconsequential” things, or just play Scrabble, with a parent-patient who might need a psychological boost, when the two of you have long fallen out of that habit and become locked in your own little boxes?

Inevitably, given the situation, the bulk of our interactions are about urgent and important things: I walk into her room at fixed intervals to check on her medicine intake and her meals, to confirm a blood-sample appointment, to discuss contacting a new nursing agency when the current one raises its fees. But I’m also making efforts now -- small, self-conscious, not very successful ones -- to turns things around: to chat with her about the currency situation, or banter about whether her post-cancer wig is more convincing than Donald Trump’s real hair, or show her a joke someone had shared on Facebook.

Still confined to our own rooms. Stuck in private traps. But trying.

---------------------------------------------------------------

[An earlier post about caregiving is here. And here is my long essay about Hindi-movie mothers for a Zubaan anthology]

Fractured narratives in Feroz Rather’s Night of Broken Glass

[Did this short review of an intriguing but uneven new Kashmir book for India Today]
-------------------------------------------

In one of the many interconnected stories in Feroz Rather's The Night of Broken Glass , a tyrannical Army major watches Hitchcock’s Rope on TV. As the passage becomes increasingly surreal, his private reminiscences merge with scenes from the film.

Like Rope, which was about a motive-less murder, Rather's book centres on tragic, untimely deaths and destructive hubris. But unlike the film, famously made up of long takes, The Night of Broken Glass is filled with the literary equivalents of slow dissolves. One story plays alongside and informs another. Voices and perspectives change. Chronology is uncertain. Nightmare scenes are told with the lucidity of reportage, and actual incidents related as if they were nightmares. The writing is raw and vulnerable and sometimes meandering, as if to capture the rhythms of oral storytelling.

All this adds up to an unusual, restless narrative that looks at the violence in Kashmir mainly through the experiences of young people who smoke Revolution cigarettes, wear Liberty shoes and strive for “Azaadi”, usually to no avail. A boy makes a rosary out of bullet shells collected by his father. A journalist writes a resignation letter to her boss, denouncing a profession made up of complacent, power-drunk men. (Later, the boss gets to speak to us too.) A story where a man finds himself looking after a cancer-ridden shell of a body, belonging to an inspector who had tortured him 25 years earlier, feels like it might be about grace and catharsis, but the final mood is that of injustice that was never redressed – a sense of frustration that the tormentor got off too easily (even if he spent his last few months wracked by disease and pain) while the victim spent decades in a state of limbo.

“I did not know where to direct my anger,” a frustrated narrator tells us, and this is true for so many of the victims in these stories. Grand-sounding ideas like forgiveness or benediction hold no meaning in a place where destroyed lives cannot be un-destroyed, and there is no closure even after death. (One passage is in a ghost’s voice.)

The Night of Broken Glass is terrific as a concept, with its many narrative detours and collisions – no safety nets for the reader, no familiar structures we can cling to. In execution, though, this book blows hot and cold. Rather tries to do many different things, which is always admirable in a debut, but sometimes he tries too hard. Many passages are unwieldy and some of the writing is over-earnest, straining for effect. One sample among many: “Wispy white roots drank their fill until they were soggy and satiated, the water soundlessly penetrated the hearts of the soil particles, suffusing the empty spaces in between […] a multitude of trickles descending to touch my bare, twinkling toes.”

That’s a pity, because this author can do much more with less. A single, terse sentence such as “The shop filled with the gloom of humiliation” – after a story is told about a respected man being slapped by a soldier – can be more effective than paragraphs of poorly constructed ornate prose.

----------------------------

[A somewhat related post: on Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider, and a chat with Basharat Peer]

Barsaat mein… some of my favourite rainy-day scenes

Did this piece for Mint Lounge’s monsoon special – a little ode to some beloved Hindi-film rain SEQUENCES (not just rain songs)
------------------------------------

One of Hindi cinema’s most indelible monsoon scenes – Nargis and Raj Kapoor holding a single umbrella between them, singing “Pyaar Hua Ikraar Hua” in Shree 420 (1955) – has a new resonance these days, given the fuss over the Sanjay Dutt biopic Sanju. When Nargis sings “Main na rahoongi, tum na rahoge, phir bhi rahengi nishaaniyan (We won’t be around forever, but the tokens of our love will remain)”, we see the two-year-old Rishi Kapoor walking down a drenched street with his siblings. Could any of the people involved in this shoot have imagined that six decades later, the son of that infant (Ranbir Kapoor) would play Nargis’s “baba” in a hagiographical film?

But while we know that actors can pass their nishaaniyan down to us in the shape of star-children and star-grandchildren, the Shree 420 scene is noteworthy in another way. How unusual it is for a star couple, at the peak of their popularity, to pause and remind us – midway through a passionate song about first love – that nothing is eternal; that they will fade away and be supplanted.

There could be something about rain that encourages this manner of philosophizing. A few years ago, Shyam Benegal (not himself a director you’d associate with “monsoon songs”) told me about an educational TV series he had worked on for UNICEF in the early 1970s, combining science with folk tales. One story about rainwater harvesting had an explanation of why water bodies disappear in extreme summer. “We started with a lake,” Benegal said in a charmingly staccato tone, “It looks up. Falls in love with the sky. Burns with love. Evaporates into a cloud. Goes looking for the sky. Does not find the sky. Weeps, becomes rain. And the cycle of life continues.”

Rain as regeneration: washing away the old, heralding the new. Such depictions occur in many types of film songs, such as the ones where villagers look to the skies, waiting anxiously for the “weeping” cloud that will bring fertility and future generations of crops. Interestingly, two of the most iconic sequences in this vein, shot fifty years apart – “Hariyala Sawan Dhol Bajaata” in Do Bigha Zamin (1953) and “Ghanan Ghanan” in Lagaan (2001) – don’t show us any precipitation. In a literal, visual sense, these aren’t “rain songs”, but in a spiritual sense they are: the scenes are soaked with the anticipation of the monsoon and its joyful, life-giving effects.

Then there is the romantic rain song, which seems like a cliché but operates in many modes and meters. We have the giddy, light-hearted sort (watch Aamir Khan, umbrella in tow, chanelling Gene Kelly as he serenades Neelam in Afsana Pyaar Ka’s “Tip Tip Tip Tip Baarish”) as well as the intense version that uses the raging elements as a metaphor for unrest in the heart. “Baahar bhi toofan, andar bhi toofan (There is a storm both outside and inside),” sing Amrita Singh and Sunny Deol in “Baadal Yun Garajta Hai” in Betaab – the scene articulates the elation and fear of young love, while also supplying a pretext for the lovers to cling to each other when the sound of thunder scares them.

Everyone knows about the sensual rain song, with the wet heroine catering to the male gaze, but the same sort of scene can offer something more complex: watch how Mr India – a lovely children’s film with Sridevi playing a desi Lois Lane to the titular superhero – takes a right turn into grown-up territory when the uninhibited heroine sways to “Kaate nahin kat te”. (For many of us kids watching in the mid-80s, this scene was a jaw-dropping introduction – not too common in the mainstream films of the time – to the possibility of the sexually desirous woman.)

There are the tragic love songs too: the ones that have a silver lining (in Chandni’s “Lagi Aaj Saawan Ki Phir Woh Ghadi Hai”, Vinod Khanna experiences both sad remembrance for a lost love and hope for the future) and the ones that don’t – the title song of Barsaat plays in the film’s last scene, as a young man, repentant much too late, lights the funeral pyre of the woman whom he had wronged.

But my all-time favourite rain sequence is probably the location-shot one in Manzil (1979), where Ajay (Amitabh Bachchan) and Aruna (Moushumi Chatterjee) splash through south Bombay’s monsoon-lashed roads and maidans while the second, female version of “Rim Jhim Gire Saawan” plays on the soundtrack.

Stunning as this scene – shot by KK Mahajan – is on its own terms, it also makes for a fine visual contrast with the earlier, more somber version of the song, which we saw at the film’s beginning when Ajay sings for an audience in a room. That scene was poised, tranquil, controlled (dare one say “climate-controlled”?), while the outdoor one is spontaneous, exhilarating, improvised. In a story about a man whose vaulting ambition leads him to bend ethical codes and then repent, the difference between “Rim Jhim” indoors and outdoors is a bit like the gap between theory and lived experience – sitting in one place and pontificating about life versus going out on the streets and facing it in its gusty, splashy, unpredictable madness.

Mime and thief, performer and audience, in Children of Paradise

[In my “moments” column for The Hindu, a tribute to Marcel Carne’s breathtaking film Les Enfants du Paradis – and to one of the greatest performances I have seen]
----------------------------------------------

The man with the white-painted face sits on the stage, immobile, expressionless – like a puppet or a performing seal awaiting its turn in the limelight. But a close-up shows us that his eyes are becoming alert and focused. He has noticed something happening in the audience of carnival-goers watching him: a pickpocket is stealing someone’s watch.

When a woman is falsely accused of the theft, our performer calls out that he has witnessed the incident. He then proceeds to wordlessly enact what happened. Justice is served; the crowd enjoys the performance; the woman throws him a flower; slapstick comedy and gallantry become unlikely bedfellows.

This sequence, early in the 1945 French film Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise), is our introduction to one of the most captivating movie performances I have seen: Jean-Louis Barrault as the mime artist Baptiste. His enactment of the pickpocketing is splendid, but I also love that close-up, our first clue that this seemingly peripheral figure will be one of the film’s protagonists.

Most of all, I like how the scene reverses the gaze between performer and audience: someone whose job involves being looked at is looking right back into the crowd, seeing a story unfold there, and interpreting it. It feels so right in a film that is about the theatre as life, and life as a giant theatre.

When you become an Old Movie nerd in your early teens, discovering hundreds of world-cinema classics, you can get jaded over the years: hard to surprise, a little smug about your bank of knowledge. It’s rare, then, to see a celebrated classic for the first time in your forties and to feel the thrill you felt as an adolescent visiting film festivals or embassy libraries. I knew that Marcel Carne’s three-hour epic – about a group of infatuated men orbiting around a courtesan named Garance in the 1830s Parisian theatre world – was considered a milestone of French cinema, but I was unprepared for the impact it would have on me when I watched it during the recent Navrasa Duenda festival in Delhi.

This is the sort of film one expects to think of in terms of its grand setpieces – but while Children of Paradise has those, it is also a collection of memorable little gestures, skits and razor-sharp bits of dialogue. Its theatre setting is the perfect vehicle for commentaries on life vs performance, for observations on how we behave in private and in public, and how both modes can involve putting on an act. One character, a theatre director, is in a constant state of excitement backstage, behaving like he is himself in a farce or melodrama. A ragman wandering the street announces himself dramatically, creating new designations each time. People self-consciously analyze their thoughts and actions. Curtains rise, come down, or are brutally drawn aside.

And Barrault is among a superb cast of performers who bring these people – loosely based on real-life 19th century figures – to life. What I find intriguing about Baptiste is that he is most alive and expressive when he is wearing a mask or a costume. In one lovely pantomime, he plays a would-be suicide thwarted by people who come along wanting to use his rope for their own purposes (as a clothesline, or a skipping-rope), and this tragic-comic scenario reflects his own real state of mind. During another performance, he chances to look behind the curtain, sees the woman he loves embracing someone else, and freezes – thus revealing his true feelings mid-act.

But when offstage, he often comes across as inert and passive, and the film’s plot hinges on this passivity. Despite being besotted with Garance, he fails to act on his impulse to spend the night with her in the boarding house they are both staying in. Infected by idealism or reticence, he backs away; another swain steps up; and the stage is set for a multi-pronged story about jealousy, pathos and retribution.

Watching Barrault as Baptiste, I was reminded of the sinister master of ceremonies in the 1972 Cabaret , magnificently expressive when performing numbers like “Willkommen” and “If You Could See Her” but never seen as a person in his own right, with a life away from the stage. I also thought of the great scene in Govind Nihalani’s 1984 Party (another story about people who wear many masks) where an old man lurches about a stage, declaiming fiery lines from the play Natasamrat – but later removes layers of makeup to reveal his real face, which is much younger and blander. And wearier too: he has expended so much energy on playing someone else, there is little left to go out into the world and “play” himself.

------------------------------------
[Related posts: Govind Nihalani's Party; Bob Fosse's Cabaret. My earlier columns for The Hindu are here]

Slipping past the censors

[Did a version of this piece for a Mint Lounge special about film censorship. While on the subject, it’s worth noting how the game has changed with the advent of a Netflix series like Sacred Games, which I wrote about here. That show contains some very strong profanity (stronger than Gangs of Wasseypur, for instance, and in more precarious contexts) as well as nudity. Doubtless it will engender many more debates about the need to “control” content]
-------------------------------------------

During a panel discussion at the Odisha Literary Festival last year, the actor Tillotama Shome remarked that a strict or even unreasonable censorship regime can, paradoxically, aid the cause of creativity – by forcing a filmmaker to find more inventive ways of saying what he needs to say.

Shome’s words were an echo of Orson Welles’s famous observation “The absence of limitations is the enemy of art”, and had a similar subtext, which went something like: Yes, we all know these aren’t optimum conditions for creative work, but let’s make the best of a tough situation.

Film history is full of examples of shackled directors coming up with creative solutions. Take the famous love scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1946 Notorious. Actors may lock lips for no longer than three seconds, declaimed the censor code of the time. So Hitch gave us Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, two of the all-time-great matinee idols, nuzzling each other for a couple of minutes in close-up as they moved through an apartment arm in arm – all the while making sure that each distinct kiss, punctuated by murmured conversation, stayed within the time limit. Ironically this brought a naturalistic, lived-in intensity to the sequence, making it more erotic than, say, a single five-second (gasp) clinch would have been.

But it would be short-sighted to look at censorship as a blessing in disguise just because cleverness is one of its byproducts. It can as easily – perhaps more easily – create stereotypes, encourage formulaic decisions and lead a filmmaking culture to stagnate. To take an obvious example, Indian cinema for much of its history had restrictions on kissing scenes, and our directors resorted to methods – cutaways to bobbing flowers, birds and bees – that may have been inventive at first, but which quickly became clichés through over-use.

As early as 1968, director Hrishikesh Mukherjee was so irked by these nature-documentary-like insets that he decided to simply fade to black during a scene in Aashirwad where two young lovers (played by Sumita Sanyal and Sanjeev Kumar) are drawing towards each other for what is indubitably going to be a lip-to-lip kiss. No coy giggling, no prancing away, no cuts to flora or fauna, just a fade-out that amounted to a filmmaker frankly telling his audience: “I’m not allowed to show you this, but I won’t use euphemisms either; so here are my handcuffs, in plain display.”

Other methods of bypassing the censors have included canny staging or camera positioning: in the 1966 Amrapali, a sensuous scene between Vyjayathimala and Sunil Dutt (the former playing a dancing girl, the latter a wounded soldier, both scantily dressed) is framed to suggest that she is straddling him (while he cries out in pain – or ecstasy?). But this risqué scene was also facilitated by the fact that the film was set thousands of years ago, in a period with different sexual mores. In a comparable vein, firangi or Anglicized characters in our 1960s and 1970s films – such as the fair-skinned vamp played by Helen – could be seen doing things that the more traditional Indian characters wouldn’t have got away with. Different strokes – pun intended – for different folks.

The power of suggestion, it is often pointed out, can be more provocative and effective than what is explicitly depicted – and harder for a censor board to take scissors to. The image of the crying infant whose parents have just been slaughtered at the end of Nagraj Manjule’s Sairat, the camera lingering on the child’s bloody footsteps as it totters away, is more devastating than a gratuitous depiction of the actual slaughter would have been. Then there is the equal-opportunity-offence gambit, often used – in films like PK and Kai Po Che among others – when it comes to depicting matters of religious sensitivity: if there’s a scene that potentially offends Hindus, make sure there is also one that potentially offends Muslims, or vice versa. It’s another matter that this doesn’t always work, since viewers bring their prisms even to very balanced films, and those who cherish being “offended” usually only see the barbs directed at their own side.

Oblique word-play and diction may be put to gratuitous ends – in the 1980 Red Rose, Rajesh Khanna points to a rose-embroidered handkerchief strategically tied around salesgirl Poonam Dhillon’s waist and says, with a leering expression, “Woh mujhe dogi kya?” (“Will you give that to me?”) – but they can also be made to suit a film’s tone or setting. In Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur Part 2, a youngster with a speech impediment can be heard muttering “bentot” – a distortion of a common but very strong Hindi abuse – while Vishal Bhardwaj’s Matru ki Bijli ka Mandola does something similar with the word “banjo”. It should be noted that these two films (which weren’t going to get a “U” certificate anyway) were made in a relatively permissive climate that might have allowed the direct use of the word in question, but the scenes in question felt organic to the material, not forced or incorporated for cheap laughs.

Ultimately, much depends on the nature of a censorship regime and its ability to recognize context or to appreciate the effect that a shocking scene might be reaching for. In one of my favourite scenes in No One Killed Jessica, Rani Mukerji – looking like a sweet Yash Raj heroine but playing a tough-as-nails reporter – shuts up a jingoistic man who is going on about the Kargil War being so exciting. Taking recourse to a word that would once have been a strict no-no in our mainstream cinema, she tells him that if he had actually been in Kargil, "Gaand phat kar haath mein aa jaati".

The moment is made perfect by its utter unexpectedness in a casual setting (the inside of a plane waiting to take off, full of passengers making small talk) as well as the fact that it is an expression of righteous anger, in a film that takes on swaggering, pompous, power-drunk people. Personally, I’d add that watching the urbane Mukerji cuss thus is also something of a turn-on – but that would probably be seen as an undesirable side-effect in a socially conscientious film, so please don’t tell the censor-board chief.

“The world is being run in brutish ways” – Saeed Mirza on memory in the age of amnesia

[Did this piece about writer-filmmaker Saeed Mirza’s new book for India Today magazine]
-----------------------

“It’s almost like there is a grand design at work in the world today,” says Saeed Mirza, “and it goes: Thou Shalt Not Think.”

“We are so obsessed with our short-term interests that larger contexts get lost. And this is true for both individuals and nations.”

Low attention spans, the loss of empathy, the danger of forgetting history’s lessons: these are running themes in the veteran filmmaker and author’s new book Memory in the Age of Amnesia: A Personal History of Our Times . Much like Mirza’s earlier Ammi , this is a compilation of reflections and vignettes, some disjointed, some directly linked. In discussing various manifestations of hegemony and injustice, Mirza moves restlessly across time and space, and everything is grist to his mill – from the 1993 Bombay riots to the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party, from Muhammad Ali’s anti-war stand to the murder of Gaddafi, from jingoism in India and Pakistan to corruption in mainstream media. Ruminative essays are intersected by short parables from the Panchatantra or the Mulla Nasruddin stories.

“As a writer, I am not constricted by linearity,” he tells me, “I like to move from one idea to another and still be comprehensible. I see this book as a big mural. But since it is more political than Ammi was, it had to be palatable as well – not just a dry tract.”

As so often in his films of the 1970s and 1980s – such as Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai and Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro – Mirza does very well when he focuses on the individual struggles of “little” people, much like he once depicted the inner spaces of characters like Arvind Desai, Albert Pinto and Mohan Joshi. The more engrossing passages in his book include a meeting with a locksmith in Greenwich Village, or an encounter with Rajasthani artisans at the Ellora temple (here one also gets an amusing view of Saeed Mirza the filmmaker trying to “direct” pilgrims to finish their prayers quickly so he can get on with taking a shot in the evening light). He writes affectionately of the residents of Bombay’s Fonseca Mansion, including his parents, living with people from other communities and cultures in the 1940s and 50s. There are vignettes about shared joy and sadness, reminiscent of the beloved TV show Nukkad, which Mirza once co-directed.

But when he moves beyond the personal and tackles the big picture head-on, the effect is often like a hammer blow: repetitive, school-teacherly. There are short, over-earnest essays saying things – about the resilience of the Vietnamese people, or about the history of terror in Afghanistan – that have been said more extensively elsewhere. Mirza’s righteous anger, understandable though it is, can also create tonal discord: there is attempted humour, a sense that he is ruefully winking at us, but there is also the sort of pedantry that can quickly erase attempts at humour, as when he offers advice to Silvio Berlusconi (“I know you wear expensive designer suits and shirts and your shoes are of the highest quality in leatherware […] however, I would like to add that it takes a damn sight more than this to become civilized”) or to “the hardline Zionist Israeli” (“You have one very powerful country as your ally. It is your friend so long as you serve its purpose […] Quid pro quos, however, don’t last till the end of time. Nothing does”).

One long passage, a record of a rambling conversation between a journalist and an aging, worldly-wise mafia don, should have been dealt with at the copy-editing stage. And on at least one occasion, there is a (probably unintentional) misrepresentation of facts. Writing about the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, Mirza takes a now-familiar liberal position: condemnation of the killings accompanied by a firm caveat. The cartoonists, he says, didn’t realise "that the tenets they espoused so forcefully [Liberty, Equality, Fraternity] were far from being true in their own backyard [...] didn't the satirists notice the deep political machinations of their own government?" But this is a strange question. Whatever you might feel about the Charlie Hebdo brand of humour – and the nastiness or tastelessness that is organic to it – any cursory look at their work over the decades shows that some of their most savage satire has been directed at their own political leaders, and at those in power generally.

All this said, there is no denying Mirza’s good intentions and the genuineness of his anguish about the state of the world. Given that the latter sections of his book include tributes to writers and activists who are fighting the good fight against bigotry, hegemony and fake news – people like Arundhati Roy, P Sainath and the journalist Rana Ayyub – does he feel there is room for hope? “I really don’t know,” he says, sounding tired, “I’m over the hill, and even making films is too much of a physical effort for me now. The world is being run in brutish ways, there is an ugly, masculine form of nationalism everywhere. I hope there are enough youngsters around who can see what is wrong, and how to make the right choices.”

------------------
[Here is an earlier piece about Mirza, an interview-review centred on his book Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother]

"I wanted to write a Mahabharata novel about men dealing with society’s idea of manhood"

[Did this interview with author Aditya Iyengar for Scroll.in]

---------------------------------

Introduction: Aditya Iyengar’s debut novel The Thirteenth Day dealt with one of the Mahabharata’s most dramatic episodes – the death of Abhimanyu – but treated it in a deglamorized, largely unsentimental way. His just-published sequel A Broken Sun continues the Kurukshetra-war trilogy and is told in a range of voices, including those of the grieving Arjuna, the introspective Yudhisthira and the tribal prince Ghatotkacha, unclear about what he is even doing in this war.

Iyengar demythologizes familiar stories (Arjuna’s vow to kill Jayadratha is depicted as a public-relations strategy retrospectively engineered by Krishna) while capturing something comically human and relatable about them: senior warriors in the Pandava camp squabble like petulant children during a conference; after a battle has briefly been interrupted, warriors look hesitantly at each other, wondering whether to resume fighting as if nothing had happened. The practical aspects of surviving a messy, chaotic war are dealt with, as are questions of masculinity and heroism.

Iyengar isn’t limiting himself to the Mahabharata, though; in a short but prolific novelistic career, he has had two other books published and is simultaneously working on other projects.

********

A notable thing about your two Mahabharata books is that there doesn’t seem to be a political or ideological agenda – you’re focused on telling a bare-bones story about fighting and strategizing, through the eyes of different people. There is little moralizing, no dwelling on dharma or adharma, and you have removed the narrative’s supernatural elements. What has your relationship with the epic been like, and what approach did you try to bring to it as a writer?

I believe I belong to perhaps the first generation of novelists that was introduced to the Mahabharata on screen first, rather than through literature. I must have been four or five years old when I saw the TV show on Doordarshan, so I suppose the first version I was ever exposed to was Rahi Masoom Reza’s brilliant screen version. Over the years, of course, I read CR Rajagopalachari’s, Kamala Subramaniam’s, and RK Narayan’s versions among others. And while I’m sure the debates on dharma have in some way shaped my understanding of the world, I’ve always loved the more surface attractions of the Mahabharata. Details like the old warrior Bhagadatta having to tie his forehead with cloth so that the wrinkles don’t fall over his eyes; or Bhima being able to eat all the food of the world but deciding not to, and earning the name Vrikodara for the slimness of his waist. It tapped a childlike sense of wonder within me.

As a writer, I wanted to tell a different kind of story, one that spoke about the nature of masculinity. I took out the supernatural details so that the reader could focus more on the internal conflicts of the characters rather than the ‘coolness’ of the weapons. I wanted to bring out the horror of the war and the sheer nightmare of having to kill your own family, which I feel gets lost in some modern retellings. In the translation of the Mahabharata I’ve read (KM Ganguli’s fine version) the descriptions of war are very stylized. Arrows are described as rays of sunlight, the bloody wound of a warrior is described as a flower in bloom. I wanted to take away the veneer of glory from this violence.

And I never really wanted to do a straight retelling: what’s the fun in that? There are so many writers who’ve done it better than I ever could. I was actually inspired by Balzac. Or more specifically, Patrick Rambaud who was inspired by Balzac. He’s a French author who wrote a trilogy about the Napoleonic wars. Balzac, it seemed, wanted to write a book on war where a reader would feel himself present in it. He never completed the work, but Rambaud was sufficiently enthused by the concept to create his own trilogy about Napoleonic battles.

I wanted to try something similar, where the setting of the battleground would be a place where a reader can truly see a character’s personality. It is a place of intense emotion, anger, and stress; and I felt that as a setting, it acted as a catalyst for the actions of the characters. The humour is a consequence of the absurdity of it all - of having to fight in circumstances like these, alongside people you normally would not agree with.

You have narrators as disparate as Bheema’s son Ghatotkacha (usually described as a “rakshasa” in the mainstream Mahabharata tellings, here presented as a tribal chief) and Duryodhana’s brother Duhshasana (here given the more benevolent name Sushasana). How does the multiple-narrator technique aid you as a writer?

The multiple-narrator technique was filched from Colleen McCullough’s stunning retelling of the Iliad – The Song of Troy. I’m more comfortable writing in the First Person than the Third Person, and also I felt it would be more interesting as a writer to try different narrators – especially lesser known ones from the epic. I wish I could say there was some grand thematic reason for using different voices, but I’ll stick to the truth: I got greedy, and wanted to get in the heads of all these people.

You seem particularly interested in the mundane aspects of fighting a large-scale war: the accumulation of gore and grime, the need for interpreters for warriors from other regions (and the practical question of how to communicate when an interpreter is killed mid-battle). What war literature has influenced your work?

I’m a huge fan of historical fiction and war literature in particular. ‘Fan’ is probably understating it. I’m more a history nerd than anything, and I’ve read historical fiction and non-fiction about everyone from the ancient Egyptians and Hittites and the Greeks; all the way down to Edo era literature, the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War and the World Wars.

Since this is a ‘gritty’ retelling, I thought it would be interesting to see the Mahabharata in granular detail, with all the thumb tacks visible. Interestingly enough, the original text (I’ve read parts of the KM Ganguli translation) has enough of these details from different kinds of arrows to the effects of different astras. However, most retellings avoid these details to focus on the higher-level messaging which I feel takes away from the fun of the story.

For me, the practical stuff (most of which I had to re-imagine to fit my narrative) is really the most interesting part of it, since these details make the war more relatable to readers. How do you communicate when you suddenly can’t understand what the soldier next to you is saying? And how do you keep your balance when the mud is slippery under your sandal? And does a battlefield full of corpses impede a chariot’s path?

At the heart of it, the Mahabharata is just such a great story. An eighteen-day war. A thirteen-year-long exile. An attempted rape. An abandoned child. Murder, arson, subterfuge, humiliation, revenge, and the great human truth—nothing is permanent, everyone’s time will come. While I love the philosophy it expounds, I do wish more people would just stand back and be amazed at the quality of imagination in the epic.

The earlier book, The Thirteenth Day, was largely about the death of Abhimanyu. In this follow-up, the voice that is most soaked with sorrow and introspection is that of Arjuna, who addresses his narrative to his dead son. It is also the only voice that is in the present tense. Was there a specific reason for that? Did you want to convey a dazed, stream-of-consciousness effect that would be notably different from the other voices?

Yes, absolutely. I wasn’t sure how to write that kind of grief effectively so I used as many literary devices I could to multiply that emotion. So the present tense is used to add urgency to the situation. I wanted to create an effective stream-of-consciousness but with an element of surrealness. Arjuna is present in the moment, but is doing as he is told rather than taking his own decisions. He is almost an observer - an outsider or bystander - to his own life, and he needs to be one in order to deal with the grief and keep it at a distance. 

Different notions about masculinity and heroism run through the voices in these two books – from the chest-thumping warrior (Abhimanyu) to the more unsure, less battle-suited narrator (Yudhisthira) to someone who admits to losing control over his bowels on the battlefield (Sushasana). Since you focus much more on the men and their interior struggles than on the women, these books might seem to be “macho” – but on another level, they are constantly undercutting our ideas about what a man “should be”. Is this something you intended?

I did want the novels to be about the interior lives of men, since I haven’t read too many novels that actually bring out the insecurities of men effectively. Cinema does it better. Take for example the works of Scorsese or Bertolucci who have influenced my reading of male insecurity heavily, or Bicycle Thieves, that inspired Ray and Scorsese and perhaps most filmmakers in the world. It is, at its heart, a story of male insecurity. Closer home, one grew up seeing the work of Yash Chopra, Basu Chatterjee, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, and so many others and that certainly shaped one’s view of how a man should be or what notions he must have. Mr Chopra’s depiction of Amitabh Bachchan’s character in Kaala Patthar as a man who is struggling with his own perceived cowardice is exquisite. And not all these depictions are so serious; take Utpal Dutt’s character in Golmaal.

I feel that this generation; i.e. born post 1979 at least has learned more about what it is to be a man through cinema, which is more raw and visceral than novels. Perhaps we had more access to cinema than previous generations and began preferring them to novels for entertainment. Or perhaps this is my shortcoming as a reader rather than the non-existence of such novels.

But what is the Bicycle Thieves/Goodfellas/Raging Bull/ Jalsaghar/ Golmaal equivalent in literature? Are there any novels than really bring out men at their vulnerable worst, without making villains of them, instead trying to evoke sympathy for their complete helplessness in the face of the rigid requirements of society? The closest answer I have is Kiran Nagarkar’s Cuckold. Maybe JM Coetzee’s Disgrace too.

As a man, I can talk about my own problems with the idea of masculinity though it has taken me time to articulate it. A big part of being a man is posturing, being macho as you’ve said, but go behind the scenes and look at his innermost thoughts, and you realize that every man is essentially petrified of losing control over their circumstances. Some are able to mask it, others take it out on those vulnerable next to them either by bossing them around and showing they are in control or being violent or mean to them. I wanted to create a novel about men dealing with society’s ideas of manhood, and how these characters are trying to live up to them; or not in some cases.

For a long time I wasn’t sure whether I had adequate insight into the interior lives of women to be able to attempt a novel about women. Thankfully, something went off in my head last year, and I was able to write my upcoming novel, Bhumika. I’m still not sure if I’ve succeeded in understanding other men or women (I come from the space that I can truly only attempt to understand myself as an individual), but one can only try.    

Closely tied to the masculinity theme is the relationship between fathers and sons – and how fathers very often don’t know how to deal with their sons as they grow away from them, or become extensions of them. You explore this through the Arjuna-Abhimanyu, Bheema-Ghatotkacha and Yudhisthira-Prativindhya relationships, among others.

The Mahabharata is essentially a story of parents and parent figures and how they eventually move further from their children. It is, like all great sprawling works of literature, about the generation gap, though no one is ever going to put it that way.  I’m very fascinated by the idea of what qualifies as ‘masculine’ and how it is almost completely linked with the idea of domination. To be masculine, one needs to be in control. But what happens when one can’t control what is happening? Does one become less of a man if he can’t impose his will on a situation? And what happens when one is put in a situation of chaos, and has to accommodate other people’s wills? These were questions I wanted to explore in this trilogy.

Interestingly, some readers have complained that Yudhisthira is a ‘wuss’ and a coward in my interpretation since he is not a great fighter like his brothers and hates having to live in their shadow. On the contrary, for me, he is the only man who is trying to see the war as the horrible situation that it is rather than a logical extension of a man’s masculinity. In a sense, it’s a little like Wilfred Owens or Siegfried Sassoon writing about the First World War.

A cynical question: over the past few years, mythological retellings have become a cottage industry within Indian publishing. I think your books are strikingly good additions to modern Mahabharata literature, but as an author do you feel it is risky to work in this field, because of the dangers of saturation? Do marketing teams, bookstore owners and browsing customers find it hard to distinguish between one “epic” novel and another?

It is risky if you are planning to stick only to one genre, and also if you view your writing career as a progression within a single, defined genre – like, say, Bernard Cornwell or Conn Iggulden, who only write historical fiction. There is a real problem of making your work stand out. Franchise bookstores, that have obvious advantages of distribution over independent book stores, are becoming less about books these days, and Amazon’s algorithm may not always benefit the sales of your work. 

There is also very little to differentiate one mythological fiction writer from another in terms of story since let’s face it, everyone knows what’s going to happen at the end of the Mahabharata/Ramayana/any other epic anyway. Social media and marketing can only go so far in convincing potential readers to buy the book. Still one feels that one’s style and perspective set one apart, and I guess that’s the reason, most myth writers try their hand at it; though as you’ve said, it may not be enough of a differentiator in the market.

Is there a solution? The only one I can tell is to create a culture of book appreciation and reviewing that creates a canon of sorts. Perhaps Indian myth fiction writing in English is too nascent a genre. Maybe, over time, there will be strong literary standards that writers and readers will have to guide them.

Also, writing episodic or character-driven novels about the epic is a more recent phenomenon within the genre. More writers are picking and choosing the stories they want to tell from the epics. There is no compulsion to tell the epic from start to finish like there used to be before.  Perhaps that has set us all free?

Apart from this war trilogy, you have begun work on a series about the Chola dynasty, and have also written The Palace of Assassins, an original plot centred on another Mahabharata character, Ashwatthama. What is your writing discipline like, and how do you balance the writing with your day job?

I began my career as a copywriter in advertising. As a consequence, I have now been conditioned to work within short and nearly unrealistic deadlines. I guess that accounts for the prolificness. I set myself very hard deadlines and keep to them mostly. When I write, I work every morning from around 6 to 8 AM, before going to the office. Most of my writing happens over weekends where I work from the morning till around five in the evening. It sounds a lot more impressive than it actually is though. In many ways, I’m also fortunate to live, and to have lived in situations where I can devote myself to writing without having too many other real responsibilities that can take up my time. More than discipline, I suppose circumstances maketh the writer.   

Tell us something about your plans for those other books – the Chola series, for example. Also, do you see yourself writing a story with a contemporary setting at some point? Or does history and mythology have enough to occupy you?

I’m a fan of many genres of literature. It is both a blessing and a curse. A curse because one wants to attempt as many genres as possible. My novel Palace of Assassins, which released last year, is actually the first part of a planned octet where Ashwatthama goes across the world over several centuries seeking the Syamantaka gem that only materialises during times of war. The Syamantaka can finally rid him of his curse and allow him to die. It can also rid him of Krishna, who is present as a voice in his head till the end of time - or till Ashwatthama ends his own life. It’s a mad quest series with Ashwatthama and Krishna that (if I can pull it off) melds various genres - historical fiction, picaresque adventure, gothic horror, etc. But it’s still a work in progress. The next part has Ashwatthama in the Trojan war, but I’ve still not begun writing it.

The Conqueror is my first foray into historical fiction, which is perhaps my favourite genre as a reader. It deals with Rajendra Chola’s conquest of Indonesia. I’m trying to follow it up with two other novels of historical fiction, but I’m still in the middle of researching these books. My next novel, due next year, is called Bhumika, and is inspired by liberal interpretations of the Ramayana by Volga and others. In my novel, the sage Vishwamitra shows Sita how her life may have been if she had never met Rama.

So I guess I do instinctively gravitate towards myth and history but I am trying a contemporary novels too. I’m fascinated by the Indian bureaucracy, and I’m trying to write a novel about modern-day bureaucrats. I feel there is something about mundane, boring office spaces that could potentially – like war – bring out the worst and most interesting aspects of us.

“Bhagwaan ko l*** pharak nahin padta” – religion as cannibalism in Sacred Games

[The much-awaited Netflix adaptation of Vikram Chandra’s underworld novel Sacred Games has just been released. I watched the first four episodes last week and did this piece for Vice.com]
--------------------------------

Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games is such a multi-layered novel, rich in detail and filled with subplots and insets, that scriptwriters adapting it for an eight-episode, 400-minute web series wouldn’t have to think up new material if they didn’t want to. But one of the joys of the new Netflix adaptation is that, while being respectful of and attentive towards its source text, it makes small alterations – shifting vantage points, finding new ways to cut between the stories of gangster Ganesh Gaitonde (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) and policeman Sartaj Singh (Saif Ali Khan).

For instance, the TV series retains the book’s horrifying – but also nihilistically funny – opening image of a Pomeranian being hurled out of a Bombay high-rise window. But there’s a subtle difference: in the novel, this scene is part of the narrative and introduces us to Sartaj who is half-heartedly investigating the incident of the defenestrated dog. Whereas the film uses it more abstractly, to segue into another bloody image – a wounded woman crawling away from her to-be murderer – and also as a visual accompaniment to Gaitonde’s profane-philosophical voiceover about the indifference of God. “Bhagwaan ko maante ho? Bhagwaan ko lund pharak nahin padta.” (“Do you believe in God? God doesn’t give a fuck.”)

God and religion were already important elements in Sacred Games the novel – mainly in Gaitonde’s journey from being agnostic to becoming involved with the faith business as an underworld don, and influenced by a “Guruji”. But it probably needed a Netflix original series – as opposed to a feature film subject to regular censorship – to get away with lines like the one mentioned above, with a strong cuss word in the same sentence as “Bhagwaan”. Just as notably, the series uses its own methods to stress the idea of religion as something that can be both nurturing and cannibalistic: a beast that consumes innocents, while providing opportunities for the shrewd.

In this context, one of the show’s notable departures from the book is its use of the Atapi-Vatapi legend about demon brothers (episode three is named for them) who invite weary travelers home for a meal, feed them generously, and then, using the dark arts, tear them asunder. Writers Smita Singh, Varun Grover and Vasant Nath turn this old tale into a metaphor for religion itself, drawing people into its fold, offering them hospitality and a sense of belonging, before destroying them. “Dharmon ka roop yeh hai,” a savant (played by the brilliant Pankaj Tripathi) explains to his followers in the episode in question, “Raahgir ko prem se ghar bulao, phir usski aatma par kabzaa karo.”

Closely linked to this theme is the idea that new deities can supplant the old ones; that fresh cults may be created around politicians, gangsters, swamis. Among Gaitonde’s first blasphemous acts – one that will ironically set him on the path to becoming God-like – is to conceal chicken bones in the rice served at a “pure vegetarian” restaurant for Brahmins, where he works as a waiter. Later, by killing his larger-than-life mentor Salim Kaka, he symbolically absorbs the dead man’s powers and aura, and takes his place.

Still later, as he becomes the leader of a gang that protects Hindu interests, his career runs parallel to – and comes to define – the politicization of religion and the rise of hardline communalism in 1980s India. The personal and the political merge as Gaitonde narrates his story, making colourful, throwaway remarks about minority appeasement by Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress, the growing influence of the TV serial Ramayana, and the subsequent rise to power of those who would destroy mosques or commit honour killings.

Little wonder that the series has plenty of religious iconography, much of it startling in its juxtaposing of the old with the new. The tacky promotion for a cola drink (Gaitonde’s own brand, “Apna Cola”) involves a Ramayana-inspired scene where the wounded Lakshmana revives – and jumps into his brother Rama’s arms – after drinking the beverage. Shortly after this, we see the actors playing the mythological heroes, still in costume, dancing at a very modern party. One episode is titled “Halahala”, for the poison that threatens to envelop the world when Gods and demons churn the ocean together for nectar (another reminder that when it comes to religion, it is never easy to separate the bad from the good). The poison in this case may be a roomful of fake currency discovered by the investigators.

But for me, one of the show’s emblematic images – again, one that doesn’t come from the book – involves an actress named Nayanika (Geetanjali Thapa), who plays the lead role in a mythological TV soap about the goddess Shakti. We glimpse an amusing scene from this serial, where she fells portly demons with laser beams from her forehead – but it turns out that Nayanika herself has long been exploited and manipulated, and there is a short but vivid nightmare scene where, dressed in full Shakti garb, she has her throat cut from behind by her underworld patron.

In that one frame, we have goddess and gangster in an unholy pact, a traditional deity sharing space with a modern power-wielder who bends religion to his own ends. As Gaitonde tells us elsewhere, “Kabhi kabhi lagta hai ki apun hi bhagwaan hai.” (“Sometimes I feel like I am God.”) But by the end, even he knows that Gods are unmade just as easily as they are made.

---------------
[Here’s a speculative piece I did when Sacred Games the series was first announced. And here’s an interview with author Vikram Chandra when the book first came out in 2006]