Deepanjana Pal's Blog, page 8

One Tight Slap for Love

“Intimidation has its own charm,” director Sandeep Reddy Vanga informed us while being interviewed by film critic Anupama Chopra on the YouTube channel, Film Companion. Vanga is the director of the Telugu film Arjun Reddy and its Hindi remake, Kabir Singh. The latter has made a little more than Rs 200 crore at the box office – a number that Vanga flaunts with much smugness in the interview, which is fair. After all, when a film with a regressive plot, insipid acting and unremarkable filmmaking goes on to become a blockbuster hit, it must feel good. Especially when said film has been ripped to shreds by respected film critics.

While Arjun Reddy received its share of criticism for being sexist, the reaction that Kabir Singh got from most Anglophone film critics was intensely negative. Most of them couldn’t believe that in 2019, a man declaring a woman his possession (“Meri bandi hai wo”, Kabir says of the heroine early in the film. Incidentally, bandi originally translates to ‘captive’ or ‘servant’, but we’re supposed to gloss over that detail) and slapping her around could qualify as a romantic ideal. Or that forcing a woman to strip at knifepoint could pass for charming.

Public service announcement: Boys and gentlemen, do not try this at home. In fact, do not try this at all unless your partner specifies that they’d like to be dominated. Why is that detail important? Because in the latter scenario, you have a consensual partner in your sexcapade, as opposed to a mute bandi who gets kissed, slapped, abandoned, retrieved etc. There are umbrellas in the Virar Fast that have been treated with more love and consideration than Kabir shows Preeti.

Vanga may pretend that all he cares about is the box office, but from the way he attacked those who have criticised Kabir Singh, it’s evident that he’s hurting, the poor dear. When Anu mentioned certain women had felt uncomfortable about the film’s celebration of toxic masculinity, Vanga said, “So I feel these women [critics] who are talking about this [toxic masculinity], I feel that they were never in love.” If your response to this is, in the words of Haddaway, “What is love?”, rest assured that Vanga has the answer – one tight slap.

“If you can’t slap, can’t touch a woman wherever you want, can’t kiss or use cuss words,” said Vanga, “I don’t see emotions there.” What one also can’t see in there is consent. He is also genuinely perplexed that anyone would object to such random violence and declares that without the freedom to inflict random acts of violence on one’s partner, “there is nothing unconditional about it [love], it is all conditional.” Evidently, Vanga isn’t conversant with the meaning of either conditional or unconditional. He doesn’t clarify if, in the name of love, women are free to slap and touch men wherever they want too.

For anyone who has seen Arjun Reddy and/ or Kabir Singh, these sentiments will come as no surprise. Had there been a feminist romantic lurking behind Vanga’s unkempt beard, confessing to loving Bridesmaids and Maid in Manhattan, that would have been newsworthy. Instead, Vanga shares a predictable kinship with his hero, beginning with the mulish conviction that he’s being victimised.At least in the first 12 minutes – which is as long as I could watch Vanga without suffering a stroke – everything that Vanga says, you can imagine being said by Arjun or Kabir.

Which begs the question: Why give Vanga a platform from which he can insult the critics he doesn’t like and champion toxic masculinity? Couldn’t his incoherent rambling about slap-happy love, “fat” critics and other demons have been edited? (I live in hope Vanga has something else to say about cinema.) Would an editorial stand against his obnoxious behaviour be out of place? Even if it wasn’t edited to take out his guaranteed-to-go-viral diatribe, couldn’t at least the cover image for the video (“The Criticism Was A little Bizarre”) give some indication that Vanga isn’t exactly as mild-mannered as “a little bizarre” implies?

There is an impression that journalism tends to give that Q & As (or question and answer sessions) are neutral. The implication is that since the subject – rather than the journalist – is doing most of the talking, there is no editorialising. Even if you turn a blind eye to the fact that it is up to the journalist (or publication) to make the questions easy or difficult for the interviewee, the business of deciding to whom one gives a platform and why can only be neutral if the subject is uncontroversial.

Even on the internet, it is physically impossible for every person who makes a film or show to get coverage. As a result, there are choices that every editorial team makes. When someone is chosen for an interview, they’re being given an opportunity to put their point of view across without interruption. This is a privilege. It is a privilege that Vanga misused when he chose to spend 12 minutes on insisting that consent is inconsequential and justifying toxic masculinity. He made wild claims that can’t be substantiated (like the contention that women have come up to him saying they want an Arjun/ Kabir in their lives) or are inaccurate (like his declaration that critics are crushing creativity and are more damaging to the film industry than piracy). He attempted to emasculate critic Rajeev Masand by repeatedly referring to him as a “fat” (insert eye roll here) and essentially tried to discredit his critics by making odious, personal attacks (they’re stupid, they haven’t fallen in love etc). And Film Companion let him.

You could argue that in the interview, Vanga was given enough rope to hang himself with, but I would argue that all he got was a platform for self-aggrandisement. The Hindi film critics are attacking me because they hate me, he said at one point (I paraphrase for coherence). No, they attacked your film because they’re mature professionals. That distinction was not made for his benefit and neither was there a proper takedown in the early portions of the interview. Here’s a director who already has a film in the theatres to do his preaching for him, and now he’s got a web interview that will also circulate his views.

Especially when we as a society are trying to respond and redress long-standing power imbalances, particularly in the way media has functioned, the question of who gets a platform is more critical than ever now. Recently, author Kiran Nagarkar — who has been accused of misconduct by several women journalists — was interviewed by Mint Lounge in what the publication’s editorial team probably figured was the most neutral way to deal with the release of his new book. The interview is not a particularly riveting read, but that’s not the point. It gives Nagarkar a chance to put his denial across, which is not a privilege accorded to his accusers by the publication. We’re also told that the author’s partner was present at the interview along with a mysterious third person, and that they cut in when the questions got “sticky”. To most of us this sounds like code that is looking to cover up “sticky” bits rather than lay anything bare.. The introductory paragraph doesn’t state clearly that the author probably asked his partner and a third person to be present because he has been accused of behaving inappropriately with interviewers in the past. Neither does it make the point that to interfere in the interview is either attempted censorship or intimidation. Nor does the publication explain why it chose Nagarkar over other authors whose books are out this month. Personally, I’d be far more comfortable seeing a review of his book, rather than an interview in which Nagarkar gets to clear his name again. Why? Because it’s his personal opinion and as in so many cases of #MeToo allegations, due process is not an option. Under the circumstances, to present Nagarkar’s claims without any counterbalance is far from neutral. Arguably, it is actively unfair to his accusers.

Similarly, in the first 12 minutes of Vanga’s interview on Film Companion, the director’s opinions flow as freely and foully as the Mithi River in monsoon. I appreciate that it’s tricky to take to task a person you’ve invited to interview. Still, Anu’s gentle and polite demeanour is both grating and frustrating because Vanga behaves like a boor. I appreciate that he must be feeling defensive about the barrage of criticism. However, there are more graceful ways of dealing with it and I doubt he got any sense that there was anything wrong in the way he attacked his critics or his attempts at logical reasoning. More importantly, neither will anyone who thinks he’s justified and his opinions are sound. For instance, when Vanga made the tired and ridiculous argument that though he grew up watching gangster movies from the 1980s and 1990s, he didn’t become a gangster, Anu accepted his contention that films don’t influence their audiences. She didn’t point out that Vanga has replicated that era’s sexism and alpha masculinity in Arjun Reddy and Kabir Singh.

The effect of those old films – which fetishized violence against women and normalised male-dominated narratives and agency-less, objectified heroines – in Vanga has been to replicate that regressive gender equation in Arjun Reddy and Kabir Singh. It’s too early to tell what the impact of Vanga’s films will be on audiences, but what we do know for certain is that masculinity is a social construct. This means that it shapeshifts depending upon its context. One of the factors that influences this construct is mainstream entertainment.

Critics (whom Vanga dismisses as “parasites”) could point out that there was briefly a period in the early 2000s when popular Hindi cinema woke up to the 21st century and flirted with the idea of vulnerable men and complex women as leads. Popular Telugu cinema is yet to see such a phase. While Hollywood – read: Disney and Marvel – films have been encroaching upon the multiplex audiences in India, the Hindi film industry’s reaction has been to woo a different demographic to bolster its dipping earnings. Telugu cinema has helped to that end. Ever since 2011, when Ready (another remake of a Telugu film) became a blockbuster and reintroduced the over-the-top male as hero, Bollywood seems to take one step forward and then two steps back as far as gender dynamics is concerned. To argue these films don’t impact how masculinity is constructed in our societies is naive. We can only say that it’s too early to tell the nature of the impact for sure.

At one point within those first 12-odd minutes, Vanga alleges that Hindi film critics are clueless and would commit suicide if they were forced to confront the kind of reality that south Indian films like Paruthiveeran show. Just to give his chosen film credibility, he tells us that Priyamani won a National Award for it. She did indeed and it is true that compared to what happens to Priyamani’s Muththazhagu in director Ameer Sultan’s, Vanga lets Preet(h)i off easy. Because hello, what’s a little slap and emotional abuse next to proper violence, threats of chopping her into little pieces, gang rape, murder and dismemberment. What Vanga chooses not to mention is that while praising Paruthiveeran, critics did point out that there’s a lot about Muththazhagu that is frustratingly patriarchal, beginning with her falling in love (at age 8) with the man who literally saves her life to the way her dignity is equated with sexual purity at the end. It is far from easy to watch the violence that Muththazhagu suffers, but it’s worth noting that she’s not a ‘bandi’ who suffers in silence. You may not agree with her, but there’s resistance and agency in her decision to oppose her father and love the outcast(e) hero. In a film about caste and injustice, the fact that the innocent Muththazhagu faces the brunt of the violence from practically everyone is arguably a comment on the way women are treated by patriarchy. Also, the hero doesn’t emerge triumphant at the end of Paruthiveeran the way Arjun Reddy and Kabir Singh do.

Particularly because we’re surrounded by a reality that is verging on dystopic, art – particularly popular entertainment – has a responsibility to do better than it’s doing now in India. Like most creative media, cinema both reflects reality and influences it. We absorb what it shows us and glean meaning from it. It helps impose an order upon the chaos around us, either by explaining it or by offering an escape from it. Cinema with its music and imagery slips into our dreams. It gives us ideas and it teaches us to dream of a better, happier ideals. It makes sense of our relationships by offering parallels and it helps to make the tangled mess of our own emotions seem more legible. To argue that films, with all their persuasive charm, won’t impact how boys, men, girls and women understand and construct the concept of masculinity is naive.

In 2014, the International Center for Research on Women and the United Nations Population Fund released a study titled Masculinity, Intimate Partner Violence and Son Preference in India. The study spoke to 9,205 men and 3,158 women, between the ages of 18 and 49, from Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh about gender norms and relationship control. Perhaps the most heartening finding of the study is that notions of masculinity are influenced by social and cultural factors. Men pick up cues as boys – from parents, in particular – and from peer groups. This means that all those men who have snapped back and rejected Vanga’s vision of masculinity are potentially moving society towards creating a new model of positive masculinity. Let’s hope this is true, because do we ever need an upgrade on the current version.

Among the findings of the study is the statistic that two out of three men expected partners to agree if they wanted to have sex. One out of three partners admitted to controlling how partners dressed. One out of two men wanted to know all the time where his partner was. The study found that 93% of the men they spoke to believed that “to be a man, you need to be tough” and that 93.6% men believed “a woman should obey her husband”. And in case you were wondering, the women agreed with them in almost the same percentages (85% and 91.1% respectively). Is it a coincidence that these attitudes are also reflective of how gender identities and roles in Hindi cinema have been depicted for years?

On June 29, a teenaged boy threw a teenaged girl off the eighth floor of a building in Mumbai, allegedly because she had rejected him. The last words she heard were the boy saying, “Meri nahin toh kisi aur ki bhi nahi [If you won’t be mine, then you can’t be anyone else’s].” On July 2, two boys, 10 and 11 years old, allegedly raped a five-year-old girl in Delhi. The three were friends and used to play together. The sexual violence that is becoming a regular feature of our news is born of myriad factors. One of these is an increasingly visual culture filled with images depicting a certain kind of sexuality, violence and gender dynamic. We could argue that cases like the above are outliers, but the reports of horrifying sexual violence keep coming. Films like Kabir Singh don’t cause these crimes, but they do inform the imagination. It might feel like a slap on the face of men who see themselves in Kabir Singh, but when such cinematic characters become ideals, there is something rotten in the state of Indian masculinity.

[image error] The Preethi Shetty/ Preeti Sikka we deserved, but didn’t get

Hope Is a Grey Cloud

They say there used to be forests here and bad roads. Now there’s a smooth highway — interrupted by small stretches of ongoing construction — and even when you turn off it, the roads are reasonably well-maintained. They say the road was built to give security forces easier access to these areas that were once rife with Maoists, who have since been wooed or cornered (depends on where you’re standing) using welfare measures like a free rice scheme and the intelligence gathered from local informers. They say the forests were burnt down because there was no other way to flush out the insurgents.

Jhargram, where we were, is still categorised as “highly affected” by insurgency. They say what they’re highly affected not by Maoists, but by herds of wild elephants who go on regular mini-rampages. The elephants pick the best mangoes, can smell mahua in bloom from kilometres away and if they pluck unripe fruit, they smash it underfoot. They grumble that the fruit is ruined that way, but also smile as they point out that this way, seeds are buried into this red, dry, temperamental earth that yields lush fruit, unremarkable cashews and won’t make good rice no matter how mulishly the state tries to replace forests with rice fields. The elephants, they can’t be stopped, especially when they go mad like that mother elephant did last month after her calf died. The humid, horrible heat; it’s a killer this year.

We haven’t seen any elephants. This is a source of disappointment for us and relief for them.

Where we are, it’s easy to imagine the forests restored. There are old trees here, some of them the stuff of fairytales. There’s a banyan tree that has a mahua tree wrapped around it. Two different textures of bark, two different sets of leaves, distinct and yet unseparateable. The sal trees, which give the area the name Salboni (forest of sal trees), stand so tall and straight. The mango trees spread out their branches, like they’re reaching for the fruit in the next tree.

They don’t think the forests will actually grow back and neither do they put much faith in the few brick and cement factories that have sprung up. Landowners complain the “labour” is impossible to work with because the people are lazy and are happy to live off welfare schemes. The others say that ever since the factories started operating, dust has turned darker and the water goes red from time to time.

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We’re bat-out-of-hell-ing our way out of a house that feels haunted. We don’t talk about it until we’ve crossed the river because folklore assures us that at least in Bengal, ghosts can’t swim even though humans can. What time did you wake up last night? Do you remember what you saw in your dream? Did you also feel that? Most of our conversation for the past few months — maybe even years — has been about far more frightening things, like the amendment to the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order that empowers states to set up their own Foreigners Tribunals. And the fact that while we should be horrified that the 52,398 migrants in America’s detention centres are in “a manufactured health crisis” (in addition the psychological trauma that ICE has inflicted upon them), we know next to nothing of the conditions of those who have been deemed foreigners by the NRC and have been held in Indian detention centres. Our centres are not open to human rights’ workers, but last year activist and researcher Harsh Mander visited two of them. “In a jail, inmates are at least permitted to walk, work and rest in open courtyards. But the detainees are not allowed out of their barracks even in the day, because they should not be allowed to mix with the “citizen prisoners … In the women’s camp, in particular, the inmates wailed continuously, as though in permanent mourning.” Assam will be constructing 10 detention centres as part of the administration to “maintain our level of readiness”. Also, the deep, stomach-clenching dread that we feel at the delayed onset of monsoon and the way drought is spreading its cracked-earth footsteps across the country. By 2020 — that’s next year — at least 20 cities, including Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad, are expected to run out of groundwater. By 2030, approximately 30% of the country’s population will have no access to drinking water. These are government (well, Niti Aayog. Same difference) figures. Not to mention the recent election results and the anecdotes circulating of phantom votes, EVM discrepancies and ballot boxes being taken out. Not all of this is entirely in the realm of speculation. Nine “other” category voters turned into 1,912 votes cast in the Andaman and Nicobar islands. In 373 constituencies polled in the first phase, The Quint found surplus votes in 220 of them when going through the data released by the ECI.

Next to all this — and I haven’t even mentioned the poisonous religious and caste bigotry — a ghost is a far more comfortable terror.

When we do exchange notes, something goes through us and I’m reminded of an ugly-looking word that describes something beautiful and sounds unexpectedly musical when you say it out loud — psithurism. The sound of wind rustling through the leaves isn’t just an aural experience. It makes the wind a tangible, palpable thing. The leaves as they part for the wind give it form and the sound gives you a sense of how the wind is moving. All the details that felt just uncanny in the house seem to become more real now in the car. It’s almost as though we are giving it form by speaking of it out loud. We still don’t feel fear, but we do feel unease. We’re on land that has seen centuries worth of anger and shattered dreams. Considering all the blood that has been spilt here and the bitter feuds that have been buried in this scorched earth, it’s a wonder that everyone here doesn’t feel haunted.

We might have have dwelled longer on the house and its presences, slipped under the closed door of being unnerved into the great outdoors of being afraid, but the sky darkened. Rain has saved us every year for as long as this land has memories. These days it seems to be delayed every year, but it still comes just when you think you just can’t survive another day of summer. The clouds push out heat and hide the sun; the wind clears the air and shakes the trees and the rain sinks into the earth. For us in a country that is a patchwork of drought and anxiety, hope is a grey cloud.

There are clouds and then there are the mighty grey-blue giants that swirl in the skies of Bengal. Bengali teems with songs about the arrival of rain, the way the pulse quickens when you hear the deep rumble of thunder, the ecstatic pleasure of being surrounded by the sound of rainfall and the smell of wet earth. In Rabindranath Tagore’s compilation of song lyrics, the fattest section is the with the one for Barsha, or rain. Of course, it has also meant waterlogged streets, deaths by lightning, disease from dirty water and other very real ‘Third World’ problems. Still, we’re just a little bit in love with the rain. When you see the clouds of Bengal, you know why.

We have to slow down despite a mostly-empty highway and smooth roads. It isn’t raining yet, but the winds are hard and strong. I can’t hold the phone steady but I still take photo after photo, mesmerised by these clouds that seem to be coming down from the sky towards me, for me. Thunder rolls for what feels like endless minutes and every now and then, thin streaks of lightning tear across the clouds, turning them violet for a fraction of a second. Hindu myths are full of stories of Indra, god of the gods and the thunder-wielding lord, who takes on different forms to seduce women (mostly married) on earth. Watching the clouds, I think to myself that all Indra really had to do was become like the clouds that consume the skies in Bengal during monsoon. Who could resist this?

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The rain comes a little later and when it does, it doesn’t fall as much as crash down. A million, tiny fists thumping the surface — strong, angry, loud. The wonder of the rain is that it isn’t gentle or forgiving. It wakes you up, rips fruit from trees, washes topsoil away. And yet, despite this violent glee, it’s beautiful and nourishing. In the car, we can’t feel the rain, but we hear it. It cocoons us for a slice of time, surrounding us with its pounding heartbeat, and when we emerge out of the rain into the dry, wet noise of the shiny, neon city, despite the horns and the mayhem, everything feels muted and almost silent. I feel unhaunted, restored and desperate for a cup of a lemon tea.

And fittingly enough for a road trip in Bengal, my mind wanders towards poetry.

Remember the sky that you were born under,

know each of the star’s stories.

Remember the moon, know who she is.

Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the

strongest point of time. Remember sundown

and the giving away to night.

Remember your birth, how your mother struggled

to give you form and breath. You are evidence of

her life, and her mother’s, and hers.

Remember your father. He is your life, also.

Remember the earth whose skin you are:

red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth

brown earth, we are earth.

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their

tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,

listen to them. They are alive poems.

Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the

origin of this universe.

Remember you are all people and all people

are you.

Remember you are this universe and this

universe is you.

Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.

Remember language comes from this.

Remember the dance language is, that life is.

Remember.

~ Remember, Joy Harjo, 1983

Remembering Mrinalini Mukherjee

During my first meeting with sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee, our time was spent with me asking questions and her giving me terrible, unusable answers like, “I don’t know. I like trees. And leaves. I like leaves a lot.” (Later when I’d see her again and remind her of that terrible interview, Mukherjee was taken aback. “Really? But I thought we had such a nice chat,” she said, genuinely perplexed.) The only point at which that first conversation got interesting was when I told her that I wouldn’t have thought someone who seemed as gentle and cheerful as Mukherjee would make the gigantic bronze monsters that were on display in her show. She mulled on the word ‘monsters’ and asked if I found the sculptures scary or repulsive. They were neither, I told her, but there was something about the shapes that she’d moulded bronze into that made them weirdly defiant of natural order. But then what is the natural order, Mukherjee asked me, her eyes suddenly unblinking behind her thick glasses. I told her I had no idea, but I hoped her benign monsters would protect it.

Two years after that first meeting, Mukherjee would pass away in 2015, a week after her retrospective Transfigurations opened at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. She was only 65 and in the most creative phase of her life. No one who had seen her would have been surprised that her lungs were protesting, given the packets of cigarettes that she made her way through in a day despite wheezing for breath, but that Palm Scapes IX would be the last sculpture Mukherjee made felt absurd and wrong. She was finally getting the recognition that was her due and possibly because she was one of those artists who wanted to listen more than she wanted to talk, she hadn’t made headlines. This despite making a sculpture of a outsized vulva with its central lips, sorry, petals swollen and red, back in 1993.

Every article about Mukherjee, born in 1949 in Dehradun, would have you know she’s the daughter of the legendary artist and teacher Benode Behari Mukherjee, who is perhaps best known for not letting his blindness stop him from continuing as an artist. (There’s a lovely profile of her here.) Links are drawn – with good reason – for the importance that Benode Behari paid to nature in his philosophy of art and Mukherjee’s sculptures, for which she consistently turned to the natural world for inspiration. The influence of artist KG Subramanyan, whom Mukerjee studied under while she was a student at MS University, is also always noted; again, with good reason. Subramanyan encouraged his students to draw inspiration from crafts and indigenous art traditions, and reconnect with artistic histories that had been looked down upon by colonial and Brahmanical establishments. What tends tend to be overlooked is that Mukherjee was also the daughter of artist Leela Mukherjee. In the notes I have from the godawful interview, one reads, “MM: ‘My mother was also an artist.’ Check what she made.” Leela Mukherjee made works in bronze. They were nothing like the enormous complexities that her daughter would make in the last years of her life, but she was the one who introduced the medium to Mukherjee.

Embedded as these legacies may be in Mukherjee’s work, ultimately her practice and her art were distinctively her own.  

[image error]From the display of Phenomenal Nature, at the Met

     Last week, The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened Phenomenal Nature at The Met Breuer (definitely read the exhibition guide). It’s a retrospective that shows 57 of Mukherjee’s works, including sculptures that have never been publicly shown and standout pieces from her 40-year career in fibres, ceramic and bronze. Pushp is on display as is Squirrel from 1972, a strange and vaguely terrifying creation of an animal caught in the net-like grasp of what looks vaguely a chaarpai. Also on display is Palm Scapes IX, her last work. Curated by Shanay Jhaveri, the show makes very literally an exhibition of what an incredible imagination and radical aesthetic sensibility Mukherjee possessed.   

[image error]Black Devi

One of the fibre sculptures on display at Phenomenal Nature is Black Devi, loaned from a private collection and on display for the first time. It’s a magnificent figure in full regalia – her spine is straight, the pleats are in place, a dark crown upon her head. Come closer, and the body is revealed to be an incredible net of knotted fibre. Look up to gaze upon her face, and all you can see is an eerie combination of knots, emptiness and negative space.

The sad truth is that photographs do not do justice to the grandeur of the large fibre sculptures, particularly something like the two Van Rajas (it means “king of the forest”). They’re humanoid figures but they’re also lush, looming trees that tower over us, offering shelter and refuge. (Move over Ents, we’ve got Mukherjee’s Van Raja.) Although Mukherjee’s names for her sculptures might suggest that she’s referring to figures from Hindu mythology, these divinities were actually her personal creations. (From my 2013 notes: “MM says yogini etc not sacred, no ref to Hindu traditions. So mythology is personal? Her own imaginary pantheon?”) Decades later, these forms would shape-shift to become the curious hybrids in bronze. For now, the natural and human were in a balance that tilted towards the human form, seeking to invoke in the viewer the sense of awe that you feel in an inner sanctum.  

Mukherjee made fibre sculptures between the 1970s and 1990s. They look like nothing you’ve seen even now. The idea that someone could make an eight-foot tall sculpture by knotting fibres like natural rope by hand, without a sketch to follow, is mindboggling. Add to that the sheer and beautiful arrogance of saying that raw material that wilts and has no ability to stand will be transformed into something sold, substantial and upright. Not for Mukherjee the granite or metal that male-dominated Indian sculpture used. Instead, she picked up the natural rope she spotted at a shop near her home in Delhi and dyed it in colours that are intense, earthy and glow with vitality. (From my 2013 notes: “Why natural rope? MM: It feels nice.”)  

Made of natural fibres that are tough, resilient and flexible, her sculptural figures don’t stand on floors or lean against walls; they are suspended from ceilings, as though they are either ascending to the heavens or have descended from them. The almost-human figures should have looked like giant sweaters, but Mukherjee created structure using folds and layers – all through simple armatures and knotting, which was definitely not seen as an artistic technique when Mukherjee was doing it. It was the stuff of everyday labour and at best, ‘folk’ art. As the daughter of Benode Behari (and Leela) Mukherjee, she could have laid chosen to do anything for her practice. She chose a technique that was looked down upon, physically demanding and required an incredible imagination. No, seriously, you try looking at a coil of rope and imagining it as a human form; and then turning it into one.   

Seen from a distance or from the corner of your eye, Mukherjee’s figures seem recognisably human. Their poses are often reminiscent of nayikas sculpted on ancient pillars. Many have the strong, solid stance of women as they’re drawn in some tribal art traditions. Come closer, and the figurative dissolves and becomes an abstract impression of a human form. Now you notice the textures, the neatness of the knotting; the way the shadows in the hollow bits create an illusion of substance with their darkness. This shift between figurative and abstract is particularly mischievous in the fibre sculptures like Nag Devta and Aranyani, in which male and female pubic architecture is beautifully realised. If you’re open to them, there are plenty of vulva and penises (erect and flaccid) to spot in Mukherjee’s fibre sculptures.

[image error]Night Bloom VI

One of my abiding regrets is that I didn’t ask Mukherjee about either the show she’d done of obviously sexual fibre sculptures (I think this was some time in the 1990s) or the ceramic sculptures she’d made. I can’t say the ceramic sculptures that I have seen had made much of an impression on me in person, but thanks to the photographs I’ve seen of the works in Phenomenal Nature, I’m fascinated by Night Bloom VI. There’s something almost nightmarish about this piece. Peeking out of a cluster of rippling tendrils – are they tentacles? Tree roots? Waves? – is a breast (complete with an Instagram-unfriendly nipple). Has the rest of the body been consumed by those ripples, like the temple of Ta Prohm in Angkor which is both held up and being swallowed by the white roots of the mysterious, predatory/ protective tree?

When I met Mukherjee at her show of bronze sculptures at Nature Morte in Delhi, she’d said that one of the most enjoyable parts of working with ceramics was getting to play with clay. When it became a challenge to find kilns that could fire her sculptures (the regular ones used by potters wouldn’t do. I don’t know why), Mukherjee started playing around with wax. Why? The answer was a smile and a shrug. It was cheap, easy to access and she was just having fun with it — until wax’s ability to carry imprints led her to make bronze sculptures using the lost-wax casting process. The importance that Mukherjee attached to working with her hands made me realise how art has always been a tactile affair for Mukherjee (possibly a legacy of seeing her father work using his sense of touch as his sight weakened?). Whether the medium was rope, clay or wax, Mukherjee enjoyed feeling the material as she refashioned it to reflect the images in her head.

As I’m writing this, I find myself frequently frustrated by how little there is by way of interviews when it comes to writing on Mukherjee. In my experience, she was easy to talk to and difficult to interview, which has meant that there is so little to read if you want to know what informed her thinking and choices. On the flip side, though, is the agency that Mukherjee gave her audience through her unwillingness to put thoughts to words. Her sculptures stand on their own, having sprung full-formed from her imagination like Athena from Zeus’s forehead. The viewer stands before them without anything to influence their perspective or tint their interpretations of the fantastical imagery on display. You have to make sense or nonsense of it for yourself and as a result, what is forged is a curiously personal experience. All you have to guide your approach is knowledge of her process, whether it’s knotting or lost-wax casting.

Considering how emphatically futuristic Mukherjee’s bronze sculptures look, it’s interesting to note that aside from being ridiculously complicated as well as time and labour-intensive, the lost-wax casting process dates back to the 3rd millennium BCE. An old-world process to make objects born out of impressions left by nature, a timeless inspiration, upon the artist’s imagination.

Mukherjee liked the element of surprise that the lost-wax casting process brought because there are details that you can’t predict or control even as you channel the molten metal to become what you want it to be. Sprued through her imagination and techniques, bronze, known for its solidity and immutability, became delicate and almost fluid. The metal that is usually seen as flat, polished and trusted to remain unaffected by the environment – think of brass thalis, for instance – was transformed into surfaces that had been stilled mid-ripple. It seemed to defy gravity, stretching out into almost-droplets and lacy tendrils that seemed to be floating (despite being spine-bendingly heavy).

In 2013, she made the Cluster series, which looks like shipwrecked treasure that has been claimed and almost consumed by fronds, shells, leaves and seaweed. A few look vaguely animalistic. All of them give the impression that the moment you look away, they’ll drop their stillness and spring to motion and life. Even though they’re inspired by the natural world, there’s an otherworldly quality to Mukherjee’s bronze sculptures.

The fantastic foliage truly bloomed with the Palm Scapes sculptures, which is the last series that Mukherjee made. It didn’t strike me when I saw them at Nature Morte, but having seen Annhilation, Mukherjee’s Palm Scapes today remind me of the alien-earthly hybrids in that film. Based on a novel by Alex Garland, Annhilation was a film that I would have loved to see on big screen because visual effects supervisor Andrew Whitehurst and his team created a mesmerising (and frequently chilling) landscape that showed nature bursting with mutant abundance. Mukherjee’s  Palm Scapes would have fit right in.

This last series is, for me, the most powerful of works of Mukherjee’s career. They were large, intricate and lush. Despite being elemental, metal rarely feels natural and alive. We tend to associate it with the loss of life — weapons are made of it as are robots — and stillness, rather than vitality. Mukherjee’s bronzes, however, hum with life. Because of how cleverly Mukherjee used lost-wax casting, the metal acquired a multitude of textures in the Palm Scapes sculptures — from a smoothness that feels slippery to the soft friction of grooves as delicate as fingerprints, the bumps left by burst bubbles and swirling whorls. She found fragility in a material as dense and unyielding as bronze. Much like the way she worked fibres, this wasn’t Mukherjee revealing bronze’s nature; she transformed her materials by the force of her imagination, will and physical labour.  

The Palm Scapes sculptures aren’t installed in a space; they occupy it. Each of them is made of metal that has been made to stretch and contort into shapes that are clearly inspired by nature but are also wildly alien. The curve of a scorpion’s tail, the style of a flower, the fold of a leaf on a stalk, the swell of a ripe fruit – you could see traces of the familiar in Palm Scapes, but they had been rendered unrecognisable. These strange, metallic creatures that Mukherjee had imagined into reality were a fantastical mix of vegetal, floral and animal. They were weirdly menacing as things that make a mockery of the natural order tend to be. Inside the white box of the gallery, the large sculptures looked like they were barely being contained by the walls. Their curves sliced the geometry of a room, making them seem smaller. Here there be monsters; benign perhaps, but distinctly monstrous and unmistakably present.

At some point in the future, perhaps Mukherjee’s bronze sculptures will be displayed in the open, placed in the context of the immensities that inspired her to make these fantastic forms. I can imagine them gleaming and golden, scattered in a dense labyrinth with tall hedges, or under the canopy of a forest, lit by dappled sunlight. Or perhaps on a beach at twilight, disrupting the neat flat line of the horizon; the curve of the moon in the sky mirrored in the elegant semi-circle of the Palm Scape on a plinth, suspended between sand, sea and sky.

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Real nature may have been Mukherjee’s life-long inspiration, but the electric lushness that we see in Palm Scapes or even in the petal-like folds and tendrils of the older fibre sculptures feels like the stuff of fantasies. Looking at the sculptures she made over the course of her career, you see its nature change. While her fibre sculptures hint at phantasmagoria, they’re mostly calm and unthreatening. The nature in her bronze sculptures, however, is a mutant that is beautiful but also occasionally terrifying. With landscapes being denuded and distorted, it’s chilling to think that there may be a future not so far away when sculptures like Mukherjee’s will be all that we’ll have by which to remember what nature looked like once. As our cities are churned into concrete and our irresponsibly-skewed idea of development nudges species of flora and fauna closer to extinction, Mukherjee’s weird and wonderful sculptures of natural hybrids are reminders of nature’s resilience. We can only hope that there are benign monsters watching over them, and hopefully us.

  

The Eyes Have It

[image error]Photograph: mine.
Please don’t nick without giving credit

Earlier this week, someone painted one sentence on the Mahim pipeline: “Who will watch the Watchmen???” A short gap away, written in the same white paint is “Daku” (dacoit), which is rather perfect for the watchman metaphor and may also be the artist’s signature, but I have no confirmation if this is indeed India’s Banksy at work again. Whether that painted question is a challenge, an empty threat, a prank or just vandalism depends on the eye of the beholder. By the time the elections are over, it’ll probably get dulled by fumes and grime, but for now, the almost 2000-year-old question gleams brightly against the shadow-coloured slums and dust-smudged skyline of a 21st-century city.

The unknown artist who is responsible for that graffiti is obviously making a cheeky reference to the current conversation regarding watchmen (which translates to chowkidar), while drawing upon American pop culture (the phrase has been used by Star Trek and the film Watchmen), but they’re also quoting a Roman satirist named Juvenal who coined that phrase around 100 CE.

The best part is that Juvenal appears to have been a bit of a sexist homophobe who was anti-immigrants – just the sort of gent you expect would be for a National Register of Citizens, for example. Yet here in Mumbai, his words are being used to attack that very worldview. That’s the trouble and beauty of art. Despite the best intentions of its creators, art tends to have a mind of its own, moulding itself upon the needs of the hive mind of the audience and artists who keep it alive.

Ping Pong and Pico Iyer

Most travellers don’t like owning up to being tourists, but author and essayist Pico Iyer claims the label with a sense of pride. Iyer, whose travel writing over the past 30-odd years has been celebrated for its insightful observations and lyrical beauty, describes himself as a “global wanderer” who has lost count of the number of countries he’s visited. And he’s done it all on tourist visas. Even the place he lives in for the better part of the year – Japan – is one he has returned to year on year, since 1992, on a tourist visa. “I choose to be a tourist in Japan so I don’t have illusions about belonging,” says Iyer, “and because a tourist is someone who brings her or his curiosity to everything around her and doesn’t assume she knows everything.”

Iyer’s career in travel began unofficially when he was seven years old, and his parents moved to California after his father accepted a job with an American think tank. School was in England while home was with his parents in America. Airports and flights became familiar, special places for the boy who was pampered by the airline staff and had little adventures, like being on the same flight as Oscar award winners who were showing off their shiny statuettes.

More formally, Iyer came to writing after a distinguished stint in academia, studying literature for eight years. “I had no employable skills whatsoever,” Iyer said, laughing. Over the years, writing as a profession has taken a beating, becoming a difficult job to hold down for many. Iyer, however, remains committed to it. “I stick with writing because it’s what keeps me sane. And the more difficult life becomes, the more I cherish walking into that cabin in the woods that is my writing and sitting still, processing everything around me, trying to make order out of a tangle of thoughts and impressions, striving to understand everything around me,” he said.

The reputation that travel writing enjoys today for inspiring epiphanies has much to do with how writers have transformed the genre from being utilitarian to philosophical over the past few decades. Iyer is one of that tribe. Through his writing, Iyer has explored the shifting sands of culture and society – as you’d expect from someone with a name straddling three philosophical traditions. His parents named him Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer – Siddharth, after the Buddha; Pico after the Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola whose achievements include writing, at age 23, the first printed book to be universally banned by the Church; Raghavan, his father’s name, signifying their Tamil Brahmin heritage. If there was ever a name that raised expectations, this was it.

In his first book of travel writing, Video Night in Kathmandu, Iyer wrote, “The only special qualification I can bring to my subject, perhaps, is a boyhood that schooled me in expatriation. For more than a decade while I was growing up, I spent eight months a year at boarding school in England, and four months at home in California, in an Indian household. As a British subject, an American resident, and an Indian citizen, I quickly became accustomed to cross cultural anomalies and the mixed feelings of exile. Nowhere was home, and everywhere.” Today, these blurred boundaries and the idea of a multicultural identity have become more common, but back in the 1980s, it was unheard of and prescient.

Equally unusual for the time was how Iyer approached the places he was writing about. While most of us would ask locals for a recommendation for a restaurant or a swim-friendly beach, Iyer the tourist tilted his head and wondered about the impact of American pop-cultural imperialism in Asia, or how remoteness was less about geographical location and more a psychological state or an economic condition. What emerged were travelogues that usually acknowledged all the superficial attractions that would draw a tourist in, and then dug deeper into the experience of being present in this chosen location. With descriptions of simple elegance and an eye for quirk and detail, Iyer’s carefully-chosen words transport you to the place he’s writing about.

He is the first-person narrator finding his way around the place he’s exploring, rather than a third-person presence who pretends to be informed and objective. It’s an interesting writing device because it urges the reader surrender to the illusion that they’re stepping into his shadow and relating to Iyer at a personal level, even though few of us can lay claim to having much in common with an Oxford and Harvard-educated writer whose list of friends includes the Dalai Lama and Leonard Cohen. Iyer doesn’t ask you to ignore the way privilege affects the power dynamic between a tourist and locals. Instead, he places himself (and the reader accompanying him) in situations where his outsider status, with all its advantages and drawbacks, is unmistakable – like on a crowded train to Varanasi, or while acclimatising to the thin air of La Paz, or when he’s outplayed by a septuagenarian player in ping pong game.

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The rhythms of ping pong beat at the heart of Iyer’s most recent book, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells. Set in Nara, where Iyer has lived with his wife Hiroko Takeuchi since 1992, the slim volume is the first of two books on Japan that Iyer will bring out this year. The second, expected around autumn, is titled A Beginner’s Guide to Japan and is intended as a practical aide to a reader new to Japan. Autumn Light is far more intimate and Iyer hopes readers will relate at a personal level to this closely-observed portrait of a slice of ageing Japanese society. “I took great pains not to mention Japan in either my title or my subtitle. This book has a Japanese setting and is rooted in certain particular Japanese rites and customs, but at heart it’s about the same stories you’ll hear everywhere from Mumbai to Mombasa: Parents getting older, children scattering, all of us moving one step closer to the end,” said Iyer.

In many ways, Autumn Light feels like a companion to The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto, in which Iyer wrote about falling in love with one Japanese woman in particular and Japan in general. Published in 1991, The Lady and the Monk is full of bright fascination with a place that dazzles a relatively wide-eyed Iyer. “I had passed through a looking glass and into a world of dreams,” he writes early on in the book. Going against the grain of the standard travel narrative of Japan that delights in the country’s rich history, Iyer focused on modern Japan and how its people negotiate between the present and tradition. One of his subjects is Sachiko, a married woman with two children and broken English (which Iyer quite deliberately doesn’t mend in transcription). As their relationship deepens, Iyer, the exotic outsider, becomes the object of Sachiko’s fascinated gaze even as we see her and her society through his eyes.

In Autumn Light, Iyer’s wife Hiroko Takeuchi doesn’t hide behind the screen of a fake name (yes, she’s Sachiko). Her English is a little better, but still gloriously uncaring of grammar and convention. She also provides the best possible summary of Autumn Light, which Iyer quotes faithfully:

“‘Little no- action movie,’ she says, visibly unpersuaded, and closing the pages of this book without needing to open them. ‘Rain come down window. Car stuck in traffic jam. Quiet music playing. Autumn light.’”

Autumn Light is exactly that: A meditative and melancholy book that explores with care and tenderness the conflicts between elderly parents and their tired, grown-up children. There’s a distinctly Shakespearean feel to the family dynamics that Iyer presents in the book. Perhaps because King Lear is still one of the most acutely observed portraits of old age, in Iyer’s mother in-law, whose mind is slowly unravelling, we see a matriarch who is strangely reminiscent of Lear himself. The grief that Hiroko feels for her father – Autumn Light opens with him passing away – also offers a parallel to the father-daughter bond that Cordelia and Lear share before their relationship is twisted out of shape. There’s also the absent presence of Takeuchi’s brother who is estranged from the family. One can’t help but wonder who Iyer would be in this adaptation of King Lear: Perhaps the all-perceiving Fool who isn’t an insider but is a familiar?

Offsetting the sadness in Autumn Light are Iyer’s dazzling descriptions of both the season after which the book is named and the group of older folk whom Iyer meets when he goes to the neighbourhood club for his ping pong sessions. This collective includes immaculate housewives, gangsters and other curious characters whose real lives are put aside when they pick up the paddle. Seeing himself through their eyes, Iyer describes himself as “a sporty proto-Bieber in his mid-fifties”, thus proving that the cult of Justin Bieber truly is inescapable.

As a sport, ping pong doesn’t have the most glamorous of reputations, which makes it a perfect vehicle for Iyer’s self-deprecating humour. The sport becomes his way of building his own community in Japan. While playing ping pong, each of them stand on their own, independent of the social ties that usually help identify and categorise people. They are neither husband nor wife; anything they do outside the club is sparingly shared. They’re just playing ping pong, with elegance and poise while younger, more able-bodied amateurs make ungainly spectacles of themselves. “One thing I love about ping-pong is that my friends, in their seventies or even eighties, are often more skilful than kids of eighteen. It reminds me that life is cyclical and doesn’t proceed in a straight line of either progress or decline,” said Iyer.

In another chamber of Autumn Light’s heart lie the films of Yasujiro Ozu, particularly Late Spring and Tokyo Story. Although Ozu began his career in the silent era, his most celebrated films are from the 1950s and offer a portrait of the Japanese society grappling with change and rebuilding a war-struck country. For Iyer, there’s nothing anachronistic about Ozu’s films from the 1950s shining a light on the broken shards of Japanese society in the 21st century. “Art can’t fix society, but it can offer a much more nuanced and imaginative way forward,” he said.

Iyer strives to imbue his own descriptions in Autumn Light with the stillness that characterises the cinematography in Ozu’s films. The long, slow shots of interiors, with their barely-moving people and still life objects, are adapted into scenes of solitude and silences in Autumn Light. Some of the most moving sequences in the book are about the feelings that everyday objects, like a casually-taken but carefully-preserved photograph, evoke; reminding us that often, people are most vibrantly present when they are absent.

Ozu, who began making films in the silent era and died in 1963, may not seem the most contemporary of choices, but though the details in Ozu’s films are distinctly of their time, their conflicts remain strikingly relevant to this day, especially since Iyer’s ping pong companions belong to those Ozu depicted as the young in his films. The children in Tokyo Story – which is essentially about the sense of abandonment that ageing parents felt as their offspring focused their attention upon the future – would be the same age today as his father in-law and the senior ping pong players. From being the ambassadors of the future in the past, they are now the elderly, struggling to find their place in present-day society.  

What’s evident in the new book is the sense of familiarity Iyer feels in Japan, having spent more than two decades there. Yet conversely, it seems one of the features that keeps him grounded in the country is that he remains an outsider. “I feel a very strong sense of belonging there – to a family, to a neighborhood, even to my ping-pong community – but I never kid myself into thinking that any Japanese wants me to be part of their world,” said Iyer. “I’m the outsider stumbling into a professional orchestra without a score, and without a sense of how to play a note of music!” What also makes his eyes sparkle is the fact that it’s a country that he still gets lost in all the time. “I love being lost because it suggests that there’s always more for me to learn, I can’t take anything for granted and I can’t imagine I’m on top of things. Being lost gives me the chance of being found again,” he said.

In an age obsessed with youth and newness, Iyer with his analogue ways – he doesn’t have a cellphone or a digital camera; his notes are handwritten – should seem outdated, but in fact, he has repeatedly proved to be perfectly in sync with the times he’s in. In the 1990s, Iyer travelled out to the farthest corners of our world, mirroring the ravenous curiosity of a generation that found itself not just free to travel practically anywhere, but also able to afford it. Since the 2000s, Iyer’s travels have been increasingly inward, focusing on internal processes, like in The Global Soul. Gauging the sense of exhaustion that characterises the contemporary, he wrote The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere. In conversation and in writing, the generic pronoun Iyer uses is not “he” or “they”, but “she”. He says he doesn’t think men have “earned the right” to have “he” stand in for humanity, sounding almost millennial as he rues the mansplaining that tends to dominate discourse in public spheres.

Fittingly for a writer who has managed to stay relevant over periods of dramatic social change, Iyer has little interest in going back places. While he readily returns to favourite works of literature – The English Patient, The Snow Leopard, the works of Graham Greene, the poetry of Emily Dickinson – he’s less enamoured by the idea of returning to a city or country, though places like Cuba have drawn him back repeatedly. Part of this disinclination is a refusal to revisit, and part of it is confident conviction that he’s seen past the façades to see the reality of that spot. “For me places are very much like people,” said Iyer. “They lose hair, gain wrinkles, go through all kinds of dramas and changes, but fundamentally the sparkle and sense of mischief you see in a little girl of eight is usually there in the grandmother of eighty.”

Suddenly though, his eyes lit up. “I’d love to go back to Bengaluru,” Iyer said, adding that he’d last visited the city more than 20 years ago. He remembers it as a place of gardens, he says and adds that he imagines that it’s probably unrecognisable now. And suddenly there’s a glint in his eye at the prospect of facing the unfamiliar again, of being a tourist.

Made in Heaven

Made in Heaven, a web series streaming on Amazon Prime, created by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti, has no shortage of pretty shots and prettier people. This one below is perhaps my favourite one because it tells a story.

[image error]Sobhita Dhulipala in Made in Heaven

The bejewelled woman reminds you of the ritual of sringara, which translates to dressing up or decoration and is an important element of depicting romantic, erotic love in classical Indian art — but here, it’s gone terribly awry. This is not a woman who has dressed for her lover. She’s dressed for herself and clearly, it’s done nothing to make her feel any better. A woman in a bathtub isn’t exactly indigenous as imagery goes, but a bathtub screams aspiration in an Indian context. It exists only in bathrooms that are aiming for ridiculous luxury or are remnants from a past when someone was trying for ridiculous luxury. In European art, the bathtub has been used to show naked women (usually unaware of being watched, unlike this Indian woman in the bathtub who is very much in performance mode) or as the site of a suicide. Except, even as she radiates melancholia, she’s alive and she’s smoking a cigarette.

Unfortunately, this is not the image that Amazon Prime decided to go with on the title cards for Made in Heaven. There’s one in its publicity material that shows the major characters seated at a long table, like a glossy, opulent version of The Last Supper. If you’re browsing through the Amazon Prime home page, you might chance upon a title card with actors Jim Sarbh and Kalki Koechlin. If that made you skip the show, here’s the good news: Sarbh and Koechlin are only the whitest people on the show, not the leads. Sarbh plays the role of Adil, a rich Delhi businessman’s son. The star of the show is his wife Tara (Sobhita Dhulipala), who runs a wedding planning service named Made in Heaven with her friend Karan (Arjun Mathur). The bad news is that if you want to follow Tara’s story, then you have to endure Sarbh’s ‘intensity’ and Koechlin playing yet another poor little rich girl who is lucky in sex and unlucky in love.

The first time I felt sorry for Tara was when in an early episode, Sarbh’s Adil kissed her. Usually, I’m a fan of seeing people kiss, particularly in Indian entertainment because we’ve spent decades behind bobbing dahlias that made kissing on the lips seem far more radioactive than it needs to be. However, there is no reason to commend the sight of Adil devouring Tara’s face. Sarbh’s attempt at communicating passion was remarkably similar to the reaction a starving dog would have to a bowl of kibble. Women in this country have enough problems without men taking a tip from Sarbh’s Adil ‘technique’.

Offering relief from and sharp contrast to Adil’s confused accent and ravenous sexuality was Mathur as Karan, who finds gorgeous men with unerring regularity and has one-night stands with them. His love scenes range from raw, mechanical to tender, showing how much can be communicated about a character’s emotional state through these moments. Karan’s supposed to be the one with the messed-up love life in comparison to Tara and Adil’s stable marriage (at least at the start of the show), but long before Adil’s missteps, Tara had all my sympathy. Those eyes, that clavicle, that grit and allshe gets is Sarbh’s Adil?  There is clearly no justice even in this fictional world where people gate crash prayer meetings and wedding planners are a combination of event managers, counsellors and match makers.  

The standards aren’t particularly high, but as far as television and the web streaming world is concerned, Made in Heaven is possibly the best writing we’ve seen in an Indian show. Admittedly, the decision to set the show in Delhi is a curious one since the writers fail to capture the capital city’s deranged charm. The city in Made in Heaven is how sections of Mumbai imagine all of Delhi to be like. What the show does get right, however, is the fact that the real estate in Delhi is much nicer than in Mumbai.

Each episode of Made in Heaven shows Tara and Karan organising a different wedding while navigating the challenges of their personal lives. Very few of these situations are realistic and the resolutions are occasionally so pat that they’re laughable, but as devices, they mostly work. The show creates an artificial reality that is reminiscent of Bollywood that draws viewers in, dazzling them with gold and gloss. Embedded in this fantasy are real biases, prejudices and hypocrisy as well as characters who feel familiar.

Written by Akhtar, Kagti and Alankrita Shrivatsava, Made in Heaven boasts of a host of complex and charismatic roles, particularly for women, which is a refreshing change. The men in the show are less encouraging, but Mathur sinks his teeth (and other body parts. Insert eyebrow waggle here) into the role of Karan. Without resorting to melodrama or stereotypes, Made in Heaven presents perhaps the most well-observed depiction of homosexuality in urban, upper middle-class India that we’ve seen on screen.

Yet, just as you start falling in love with the show, the show starts revealing its own biases. It begins with the condescension that’s directed at Jazz (Shivani Raghuvanshi) for being gauche and unanglicised. Raghuvanshi is charming as the determined girl from lower middle-class Delhi, but the writing clearly seeks to first have fun at her expense and then belittle her for being naïve. In contrast is the mansplaining videographer Kabir (Shashank Vora), who not only gets to be the cool rebel, but is also given a monologue at the end of each episode. God forbid we ever understand what people (particularly women) are going through if a man doesn’t explain it to us using his words and assumptions. Then there’s the landlord (Vinay Pathak), who installs a hidden camera so that he can watch his tenant have sex. We’re supposed to feel sorry for him because he’s repressed. So what if he’s a creepy stalker who is ok with having an innocent person thrown in jail? At least he knows what he did was wrong and apologised. Right? (Ans: Wrong. If in the real world people can choose to not be creepy stalkers despite troubled and traumatic histories, then it’s possible in fiction too.)

The deepest of disappointments, though, is what Akhtar, Kagti and Shrivastava do to Tara. She begins as the epitome of elegance, but quickly, cracks appear in her façade. We realise that behind that sculpted poise are anxieties about fitting in because Tara grew up with a single mother, in a tiny apartment, with little exposure or access to the world of privilege and wealth into which she has married. She’s hyper aware that as the woman who was once Adil’s secretary, she may be seen as a gold digger who lacks class. For the better part of the show, Tara’s anxieties seem paranoid.

Until, in an effort to add a final twist to the tale, the show reveals its misogynist, elitist heart.

(For those who haven’t seen Made in Heaven, SPOILERS AHEAD.)

After building up sympathy for Tara as the wife who silently suffers the pain and indignity of being cheated on, the writers thrust a meltdown upon her. Then she confesses that in addition to ‘stealing’ Adil from his then-fiancée, Tara broke into the office, went through security camera archives, found footage of her and Adil having sex in his office, copied this onto a CD, snuck out and shared it anonymously. All this to guilt Adil into marrying her.

The most immediate problem with this setup is that it creates a situation in which the audience is expected to feel sorry for Adil – the guy who has lied to his wife, cheated on her and criticised her for her “low class” background. Even though he’s played by Sarbh, one is likely to feel sorry for him because he’s being shown as the fly caught in Tara’s web.   

More importantly, three women wrote this chauvinist male fantasy of how women callously manipulate men, unfazed by dishonesty and untraumatised by the prospect of being reduced to a sex object. I’m sorry, did I say “women”? I meant middle-class women. That is, women who aren’t rich enough to afford progressive thinking and behaviour. The only thing missing was Tara saying she loves Ayn Rand while reading out the bit from The Fountainhead in which Howard Roark rapes Dominique Francon.

Tara could have been shown as manipulative and ambitious to a fault using a variety of means, yet the writers chose to go with a plot device that strengthens ill-informed stereotypes about women faking trauma and the poor coveting privilege with unscrupulous intensity. Not only is this elitist, it’s also criminally insensitive considering the reality of how vulnerable women have become with the easy access to smartphones with video capacity, internet and social media.

While India does have laws that target those who have violated someone’s privacy online, these don’t appear to be working as deterrents as the Pollachi case of sexual assault and extortion shows. In February, the Tamil Nadu police uncovered a racket in which a gang of four men set up an extortion racket that profited from our willingness to think the worst of women. One of the four would lure women to a secluded house or hotel, have sex with her (with or without her consent) while the others (hidden from view) filmed the act. This footage was then used to blackmail the woman into either handing over cash and valuables or performing sexual favours. The threat was that the videos would be circulated using Whatsapp or social media. There is no confirmation of the number of women who may have been victimised by this gang, but it could be anywhere between 50 and 200 according to media reports. The racket was exposed when one victim came forward and filed a police complaint. Guess how the police returned the favour? By revealing the name of the complainant without her consent. The accused, you ask? Oh, they’re out on bail.

The Pollachi gang are not outliers. Over the past few years, there’s growing incidence of violating women’s privacy and blackmailing them. In 2016, Banda Rupesh, 27, was arrested for posting intimate videos of his ex-girlfriend online and sending a CD with the videos to her in-laws. In 2017, Animesh Bakshi, 23, was arrested for uploading a nude video of his girlfriend on a pornography website after she broke up with him for blackmailing her. The same year, there were at least two cases of husbands secretly taping and sharing videos of their wives without the women’s consent. There’s actually an industry of selling “rape videos” in Uttar Pradesh, and these are reportedly more popular than regular pornography. There are no reported cases of women either blackmailing men with their sex videos or graphic photographs, or uploading them as pornographic content without the subject’s consent.

This is the reality that makes the fiction in Made in Heaven insensitive, irresponsible and ultimately repulsive — it pretends to hold up a (crazy) mirror to our society while being either uninformed about or disconnected from reality. These are writers who should know better and as the way they’ve written Karan shows, they can do better if they choose to do so. However, what Made in Heaven gets right doesn’t make it acceptable for them to turn a blind eye to a deeply-gendered problem that’s taking on monstrous proportions in our society. Especially since the show clearly wants brownie points for its sensitivity and progressive attitudes.

Let’s hope they do better in season 2.

Connecting Threads

Earlier this month, Mumbai Mirror reported that there is a very real possibility that the BMC will take over the Bhau Daji Lad Museum in September this year. I wonder if this news would have hit me as hard as it did if there was a tiresome or boring contemporary art exhibition on at the museum because the only reason to worry about the museum becoming a purely government-run institution is that none of the people in charge will put in the attention that the space deserves. Since it opened to the public in 2008, the BDL has hosted enough strange shows, but even the least impactful ones have engaged viewers and made them think a little harder. Connecting Threads: Textiles in Contemporary Practice isn’t one of those exhibitions; it’s one of the good ones. 

Enter past the turnstile, and you see Sharmila Samant’s “The Bombay Weaves”, an installation of a loom and 50 spindles. Each of them is a different colour and stands for a community. The labels range from regional and religious groups, to philosophical leanings (no. 20, a spindle with shining gold thread, is labelled “Humanist”). Visitors are encouraged to write down the number that they feel describes them. On the loom, white thread stretches taut for the length of the device and towards the front, where the actual weaving happens, there’s the woven final product in which the white thread has turned into a multicoloured piece of cloth. I’m not sure if Samant plans to use the numbers that people put down to add to the woven fabric. The days I went to the BDL, it was interesting to see that many people had picked no.1 (white, “absent”). We could have had a shining cloth of gold if everyone picked no. 20, but that’s not where this pattern is headed and so — possibly for the first and last time — I found myself sad that cotton wouldn’t be replaced by gold zari. It says a lot about a city that it leaves a chunk of its residents feeling like they’re invisible.   

[image error] The Bombay Weaves by Sharmila Samant

“The Bombay Weaves” is both a reminder and potentially a reflection of how the city is made up of different communities. It also feels just a little bit romanticised, particularly because it uses a traditional loom, and maybe even a little laboured, which is an ironic word to use given the city’s history of textile mill workers’ strikes in the early 1980s. The installation also reminded me of the different roots of two words that are often (wrongly) used synonymously: fabric and textile. Etymologically, textile comes from the Latin verb that means “to weave”, so the textile is simply that which is woven. Fabric, on the other hand, is born of the Latin “fabrica”, something that is skilfully produced and was always associated with machinery and structure. 

The idea of manufacture, but by hand and with the intention of structuring narratives, guides Paula Sengupta’s installation, which in its cabinet almost blends in with the BDL’s permanent exhibits. Perhaps it’s the fact that you can’t really peer into the cabinet or that the writing on the glass front is easily-missed; or maybe it’s just that the whole thing feels too laboured, but this one didn’t do much for me. 

Just a few steps away from “The Bombay Weaves” is Manish Nai’s untitled sculptural installation — a huge wooden frame with what looks like multicoloured poles from a distance and up close reveal themselves to be made of clothes. In contrast to the textile being made on the loom, these are pieces of fabric, made to perform a certain function, discarded when they had lost their utility in some way, and now repurposed to create a completely different structure. Add to this the layer that Nai comes from a family of textile artisans, and the work becomes an ode to survival and evolution.

[image error]Untitled by Manish Nai

It’s fascinating to see these clothes that have lost all their softness after being heat-fused into these squarish columns. They’ve gone from being useful and malleable, to useless and then becoming precious (and expensive) primarily because they’re no longer utilitarian.  

The clothes in this work are discarded clothing acquired from Nai’s family — the notes specify his mother among other relatives — and the installation looks vaguely like a gigantic window with colourful grills. The way the colours and patterns are smashed together also made me think of Mumbai with its perennial space crunch, and the way it forces people to share space. You hold on to certain aspects of yourself, but the city also crushes you into a shape and form that will fit its contours and requirements.

Because of the way the works are laid out in the museum, it’s unlikely you’d notice Nai’s installation while standing at “The Bombay Weaves”. Instead, you’d probably end up seeing the room full of Monali Meher’s installations first. Dangling at eye level is a chandelier that’s wrapped in red wool (“Auspiciously Red III”) . Strings of wool drip off the chandelier like red wax and below it are 12 balls of the same red wool that’s been used on the chandelier. It’s like a yantra, but just a little askew. On one wall are objects — some domestic, all feminine — transformed because they’ve been wrapped in red wool. You can recognise some, like the pair of high-heeled shoes, by their shape. Others, like the kitchen implements, are partially wrapped, as though they’re either submerging into or breaking out of a cocoon. Next to this hangs “Wrapped Bridal Photos from 2005” which looks a screen of red wool. It has two black panels joined by red wool again. Peer through the spaces Meher has deliberately left and you’ll see images that look like negatives on the panels. They show images of a ghostly woman, her body covered in henna motifs, and now wrapped in red wool.

[image error]Works by Monali Meher

Come out of Meher’s red room of meditative repetition and you see Nai’s installation, standing a short distance away, like a giant window or grill, containing the feminine, domestic world with its bars made of his mother and other relatives’ discarded clothes. 

Make your way around this barrier and up ahead are Shakuntala Kulkarni’s hollow women — cane armour that looks like the frame of a warrior woman. These restrict as much as they protect their wearer and in their craftsmanship is a certain sturdy artistry. After all, armour provides protection, but it also encases you in an ideal body. Traditionally, men’s armour is made of hard, once-malleable-now-unyielding metal and soft but resilient leather — symbols of human industry and predatory behaviour, brought together by craft to be strong and solid. Cane, on the other hand, is flexible and capable of delicacy despite its tensile strength. It’s particularly special to have these cane figurine/ armour guard the marble statues at the centre of the BDL’s ground floor. 

[image error]Works by Shakuntala Kulkarni

As you go up the stairs, Meher’s red wool shows up again. This time, it’s wrapped around the golden curves of the balustrade, nudging us to remember all those who make wishes at pilgrimage spots and the master craftsman Daedalus who came up with the idea of tracing a way out of the labyrinth using a ball of string. On the two walls, towering majestically over the paintings of the men who had originally built this gorgeous structure are two paintings by Anju Dodiya, in which shadow-stained women fight the good fight against encroaching darkness. Both of them are watercolour and charcoal on fabric. Thematically, they fit in beautifully, but at a simple, visual level, I think they would have felt more striking if they weren’t surrounded by all the gilt-edged, multicoloured excess of the BDL’s interiors in the Grand Renaissance Revival style. 

Upstairs, the room next to the staircase is a dark, air-conditioned vault full of allusions to colonisation and capitalism, should you be inclined to look past the gorgeous visual appeal of both Lavanya Mani and Archana Hande’s work.    

Mani’s large embroidered pieces, with their jewel colours, gleam with opulence. I particularly loved “Vices (Vanity)”, in which a woman in Elizabethan-esque attire (but dark skin) sits at a table that has a collection of objects that have a whiff of sin about them (a halved apple, an ornate bottle — poison? perfume? —  an extinguished candle, a skull). Designed like a playing card, the bottom half of the work is the woman’s mirror image. It begs the question whether she’s the queen or the one being played. 

Mani’s work is a reminder that international trade isn’t a new phenomenon and that the Bombay’s cotton industry was born out of the British Empire’s efforts to reduce its dependence on America as a colony (cotton from America was of higher quality at the time, but then the Americans went ahead and started demanding independence etc).

The tour de force in this room, however, is “All is Fair in Magic White” by Archana Hande, which turns the history and present of Dharavi (possibly the most famous of Mumbai’s slums and a hotly-contested mass of potentially-prime real estate) into a fable involving three rather charismatic lady adventurers and a small businessman. The businessman asks the women what is the connection between class and race, because the daughter he had when he was poor is dark-skinned while the girl born after her father became rich is fair.

One the wall are 12 block-printed works that Hande made in collaboration with block printer Tarak Das. The intricacy and neatness of Das’s block prints is incredible. In one work, he not only creates a tiled floor on which there is a TV cabinet, but also includes images on the television on the screen (a plane flying towards a grove of trees). Next to the prints is a video.

A lot of what Hande talks about in the video and prints can be traced back to attitudes and ideas we’ve absorbed during our colonial history. At the same time, the technique being used to tell the tale — block prints — is a quintessentially Indian art and craft.

On their own, the printed pieces may seem a little random, but take 10 minutes to watch the accompanying video, which animates the motifs and details from the fabric pieces to create a fable that Aesop would probably applaud (animation by Sarat Nayak). My favourite frame is one in which a ship flies across the sky but we’re shown the sky from the perspective of one down below and standing in a courtyard surrounded by gorgeously-crafted old windows and balconies. It’s reminiscent of the airplane shots from Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma. I don’t mean that this is a copy — Hande’s video is from 2009, so really, no — but that they’ve both used the idea of looking up and using that perspective as a sort of medium to connect flights of fancy with ground realities.

[image error]Vices (Vanity) by Lavanya Mani[image error]From Archana Hande’s work[image error]From Archana Hande’s work

Step out of the room, walk across the model ships and dioramas showing scenes from everyday life of a Mumbai that’s rapidly slipping into the realm of the documented and imagined histories, and you enter a room in which Anita Dube and Pushpamala hold court. On two of the walls, in black and white photographs, Pushpamala elegantly interrogates feminine stereotypes in selections from “The Bombay Photo Studio” series. They’re lovely photographs and I wish they were out as a book because you really can linger over these. However, it’s hard for any work to be able to commandeer a viewer’s attention away from the macabre beauty of Dube’s “Silence (Blood Wedding), in which bones are covered in red velvet and embellished with beading and lace. 

Dismantled, the bones are no longer parts of a skeleton (used by Dube’s brother while studying medicine), but elements of a bridal trousseau (take that Game of Thrones). Rejecting the skeleton that symbolises death, Dube repurposes the bones to make something that is preserved in glass boxes and destined for eternity (or at least something close to it). This work was made at a time when Dube was processing her father being diagnosed with cancer, but you don’t have to be in that headspace to respond to this work. In fact, completely independent of Dube’s personal context, “Silence (Blood Wedding)” works as a powerful statement on the fetishising of matrimony and weddings, the idea of a woman’s jewellery being her security (and the very thing taken from her by abusive in-laws) as well as the position a woman occupies in the structure that matrimony upholds. What’s truly messed up is that even though you know they’re bones that look blood-smeared, each of these items are just so utterly beautiful.       

From the not-so bare bones of Dube’s sculptural works, you step into a red room very different from Meher’s. Titled “Fruits of Labour (A Monument to Exhaustion”), Rakhi Peswani’s installation is essentially a fabric tent in which you enter, only to find yourself cocooned in red fabric and a soundscape of dripping water in your ears. If it’s in a large room or corridor, the installation feels like a canopy. In a more contained space, like the one at the BDL, the installation surrounds you. Hanging from the floral-embroidered top, on which you can see outlines of an assortment of objects ranging from clothes to scissors, are large, globule shaped sacks of red cloth. Hanging on the sides are ragged pieces of fabric, torn and frayed. The resemblance to a uterine chamber or a womb is obvious, especially with all the red. But Peswani would also have you think of migration, life in tents and seeing narratives about rupture and displacement in the physicality of fabric.

It’s also one of those art works that really bring home how varied subjective responses can be. Depending upon one’s experiences and attitudes, “Fruits of Labour” could feel calm and comforting, or painful and claustrophobic. Perhaps the one thing that would be the same for all viewers is that the work makes you feel tiny. I’m not putting up a photo because whatever photos I have really don’t do the work justice. From the hanging globules to the ragged strips and the embroidered surface on which you can also see the outlines of other objects, the different elements of the work are masterfully placed to push you into deep into wells of feeling.

Emerging from “Fruits of Labour” to stand before the shrunken architectural spaces of Manisha Parekh’s “Enshrined” series feels vaguely like a sci-fi trip, but in an underwhelming way. The dolls’ house-sized structures are made of rich, beautiful fabric and inspired by pilgrimage sites across South Asia. Compact in size and embellished with minimalist detailing, these personal shrines are stripped of all the chaos and pomp that we usually associate with temples. Instead, they are, despite their size, grand abstractions (grandeur = courtesy the fabric). On their on, the series is charming, but it barely makes an impact after Peswani’s installation. 

[image error]Anita Dube’s Silence (Blood Wedding)



[image error]Enshrined by Manisha Parekh

Still, it’s more powerful than the works in the final room, which are mostly neutral in terms of colour palette and in terms of tone, trying far too hard. A few large panels by Nilima Sheikh are on one wall and they have some exquisite print work, but the room’s lighting reflects relentlessly off the glass. For short people like me, the panels are also hanging too high. It’s hard to get a sense of the whole work, which is in muted colours and contains a galaxy of different elements. I love the way Sheikh weaves words, patterns and painted figures into her panels — her “Terrain: Carrying Across, Leaving Behind” is one of my favourite art works of all time — but “Rozgar” at the BDL just wasn’t installed in a way that’s viewer friendly. 

I have no shame in admitting that I didn’t get the first thing about Priya Ravish Mehra’s untitled works which showed the traditional style of repairing shawls (known as rafoogari). Hopefully, whole and real pashminas were not sacrificed for the cause of this series. 

Across the courtyard, in the special exhibition space, Reena Saini Kallat and Desmond Lazaro round off Connecting Threads.

“Walls of the Womb” is the third red room in Connecting Threads, and along with 12 floor-to-ceiling, silk, tie-and-dye panels, there’s a display case in which you can see old notebooks opened to pages that have recipes written on them. The contrast between the high art on the walls and the everyday art in the books (recipes for Nargisi Kofta, Sweet and Sour Fish, Tomato Soup and Gulab Jamun) is beautiful and just heart-wrenching. On the panels, the white bandhani dots are the recipes written in Braille, turning the real into something as abstract and inscrutable as memory. Beauty, the rage of heartbreak, violence, the stability of pattern and the lyricism of the everyday are all woven together to create a structure that serves to preserve Kallat’s sense of loss at losing her mother when she was a little girl. 

I’m just going to retype Saini Kallat’s note which accompanied the installation, because it provides the context for her work: 

“My relationship with my mother, who I lost when I was eight years of age, has been built around the objects she left behind: those sewn by her, stuffed toys she made me, photo albums, her personal books, stories related to me by other family members, besides my own faint recollections. I’ve spent a good part of my childhood going through my mother’s personal belongings, such as sarees, cosmetics, bags, sometimes bringing them out of closed cupboards to look at while at other times trying them on myself.” 

Few artists will explain as candidly the inspiration for their work as Saini Kallat does in that note. Sometimes, it doesn’t really matter if you don’t know the personal core of a work. Occasionally, though, knowing lets you wear the artist’s emotions like an invisible cloak and when that happens, your own stories meld with the ones she’s telling through her art.  

I’ve wanted to see Kallat’s “Walls of the Womb” for years (I’d seen photos when it was installed abroad, about 10 years ago) and while the display isn’t ideal here, it’s still such a powerful work that I think you can’t help but feel moved. In the BDL, you don’t feel surrounded by the redness, which means you can physically and emotionally step away from the intensity. I’d want the panels, with their coded messages in white, to surround me. Here you can step back and create a distance that lets you breathe, rather than feel overwhelmed.

[image error]Walls of the Womb by Reena Saini Kallat[image error]Promise: The Family Portraits by Desmond Lazaro

From the lost matriarch to the remembered patriarch: In the adjoining room is Lazaro’s “Promise: The Family Portraits”, a set of fabric panels that are also hanging, but feel starkly different from “Walls of the Womb”. The material used in “Promise” is light and pretty, which is fitting for a story that is full of hope rather than tragedy. The panels offer glimpses of Lazaro’s family’s fascinating story of migration which covers Rangoon, Madras, Leeds (and Pondicherry, if you include where Lazaro is now based) through elements that are deeply personal (like the floral wallpaper pattern from Lazaro’s home in England) to fragments of public record (like a passport). On the wall is a piece of text that Lazaro turns into an installation – the words were embedded on his grandfather’s passport, the document that let him travel legally across political boundaries.

An interesting parallel to the migrant story shimmers in the translucent panels of white on which pichhwai motifs of exquisite beauty have been embroidered by the artisans who work with Chennai-based Jean Francois Lesage. In the 1920s, Lesage’s grandparents bought an embroidery studio that belonged to Napoleon III’s embroiderer, Albert Michonet, and started the Lesage tradition of haute couture embroidery. Maison Lesage is now owned by Chanel and was run by Lesage’s father till he died. Today, Lesage — who wasn’t interested in embroidery until he came to India as a 19-year-old tourist — runs his own studio in Chennai and hangs on the walls of his home portraits of south Indian people he doesn’t know but refers to as his “adopted ancestors”. Lesage came to India to set up his own embroidery studio in 1991 and in 1993, he founded Vastrakala, which has made it possible for 200-odd, third- and fourth-generation embroiderers of Sriperumbudur continue a family trade that was dying a slow death till the Frenchman came along. Technically speaking, Lesage is a migrant worker in India; one with financial, racial and cultural privilege. This serves to make him a cherished visitor, rather an unwelcome addition, which is the experience of most migrant workers.

Lazaro’s “Promise” also made me think long and hard about collaborations and the whole ‘artist or artisan’ debate because not only are the embroidered panels the most beautiful parts of the installation, the other panels feel infinitely grander and more poetic when seen through the embroidered ones. Lazaro’s own training is in painting and in addition to studying art formally, he also apprenticed with a master of the pichwai tradition of Rajasthan. The painted panels of “Promise” aren’t the most striking examples of Lazaro’s work, which otherwise uses the colours and detailing of the pichwai but on canvases that are large and subjects that are modern. The idea of literally layering his own story — symbolised by the pichwai motifs that have been embroidered by others – with that of his family, whose stories he himself paints, is rich with complexity and almost impossible to pull off singlehandedly. Without the embroidered panels, I’m not sure I would have even remembered “Promise”, but without the painted panels, those panels would be gorgeous (and impractical) curtains.

I’ve been back to see this show three times now and it’s only the last time – when I told myself I’d just zip through the museum to take the photos that I wanted of the works that I liked – that I managed to finish my tour in less than an hour (50 mins). My only complaint is that curators Tasneem Zakaria and Puja Vaish didn’t include anything in the exhibition that looked directly at the city’s relationship with textile mills (residential and commercial complexes in central Mumbai are built on plots that are graveyards of the once-thriving textile trade) and the trade union movement that broke Bombay in the 1980s.

 There’s time for at least one more exhibition before September and I hope it’s a cracker, but if it isn’t, at least we can remember BDL Museum as it is now, adorned with Connecting Threads. 

VS Naipaul: 1932-2018

Just yesterday, a friend and I met for a long overdue brunch and ended up fretting over Sir Vidia the man and VS Naipaul the author. (It was our version of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie society; just without the eye candy of Michiel Huisman, sadly, but with excellent eggs. So there’s that). Naipaul came up because the conversation had found its way to that familiar fork in the road: can the personality and politics of a creator be separated from their work? I struggle with that question because of people like Naipaul, I told my friend after we’d compiled a quick list of authors (all male. What a coinkydink…) who occupy a spectrum of dickishness, but are nevertheless extraordinarily gifted when it comes to writing and storytelling.

Less than 24 hours later, there are headlines announcing the passing of literary giant VS Naipaul, Sir Vidia. It made me think of the mysterious Colossus attributed to Francisco Goya. Protector or one on rampage? Trapped in the landscape or rising out of it? Causing people to flee, forcing us to stare at him? I wish I’d thought of this curious parallel when I was sitting in the audience, listening to Sir Vidia speak, charmed and disgusted by the man and his words in equal parts.  

If you’ve never read any of Naipaul’s writing, pick up A House for Mr. Biswas, An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization, The Enigma of Arrival and A Bend in the River. But don’t begin or stop there, because this writer who wrote precise, perfect sentences and offered slicing insight through his narratives was also a man who could make your skin crawl with his brutish conservatism. He was charming and he was offensive. He was brilliant and he was infuriating. His personal flaws are visible in his writing, in the good writing especially. His obnoxious, regressive beliefs were wounds he carried, wounds that oozed the pus of Brahmin pride, misogyny, Islamophobia and racism. And yet somehow, they hardened into unexpectedly powerful literary scar tissue.

Naipaul was born in 1932, in rural Trinidad, to journalist Seepersad Naipaul who had literary ambitions and overbearing in-laws. Seepersad, born to a man who came to the island as indentured labour, and the turbulent relationship he had with his wife were the inspiration for A House for Mr. Biswas.Naipaul’s childhood was difficult. He would later reveal he was molested as a boy; his parents fought constantly; there was little money — his refuge was literature. He consumed European literature and devoted himself to writing when he grew older (especially after his father passed away).

His intellect and affinity for literature had wrapped him in a sense of superiority that suffered cruel blows when Naipaul came to England in the 1950s, as a scholarship student to Oxford University. It didn’t matter how perfect his English was, he didn’t belong with the whiteness he’d vaguely idolised but neither did he want to belong to the communities with which he was effectively lumped in a violent, racially-divided culture. Naipaul’s early years in England were tormented, lonely and angry. As a student, he vowed to beat the Englishmen in his class — rub their noses in the fact that this coloured, colonial migrant had claimed ‘their’ language with his mastery. As an author, he challenged them with his style, his subjects and the genre boundaries that he blurred.

To a reader (particularly one who of postcolonial lineage), Naipaul’s writing is powerful and troubling because he exposes a postcolonial society’s lies and brutality with ferocious elegance. But his rage is also directed at the (de)colonised, whom he unforgettably described as “half-made”. At a time when we demand political correctness, the unrepentant chauvinism and racism in Naipaul’s writing is shocking. Think twice before picking up that quotable quote in which he savages someone or something you dislike. What exactly are you saying you agree with, when you quote Naipaul, and why? Because he’s also gone on to justify and even make a virtue of Islamophobia and racism.    

From the migrant outsider who was isolated and segregated, Naipaul would go on to become as central to British English literature as is possible. He would be knighted in 1990 and awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2001. As journeys from periphery to centre go, this was epic. Fortunately, it’s been written down both in Naipaul’s own words – he often mined his own experiences for his fiction and as an author of non-fiction, he is the narrator who lords over his narrative — and those of others. There are at least two books on Naipaul that deserve to be read and re-read: Patrick French’s The World is What it is and Paul Theroux’s Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents. The first is an authorised biography and one of the most gripping and candid portraits of the man that Naipaul was. The second resulted in one of English’s literature more juicy feuds, which lasted 15-odd years.

What the biographies and so many of Naipaul’s interviews reveal is the tormented, abhorrent man who hated himself and lashed out at so many others. In addition to trotting out opinions like, “Africans need to be kicked. That’s the only thing they understand” to emotionally abusing his wife with his words and infidelities, and physically abusing his mistress, Naipaul list of flaws is monstrously long. A lot of it seems to be transmuted self-hate, but it’s still toxic and the only bulwark against Naipaul’s vileness is his skill as a storyteller. But even as you’re awed by the lyrical precision of his sentences, remember that his odious beliefs are nested in his writing.  

And what is one to make of the fact that Naipaul has admitted to being a monster? Some give him credit for his candour and honesty when questioned about ex-wife Patricia Hale and former mistress Margaret Gooding? (Hale was the one he cheated on and abused emotionally, going so far as to admit at one point that the hurt over the years, even after they’d parted, may well have hastened her death. Naipaul beat Gooding viciously and would later tell French, “I stayed with Margaret until she became middle-aged”.) Others — I’m part of this tribe — are horrified by not just his actions, but the fact that he feels empowered and secure enough in his male privilege to make such admissions.

Usually, RIP trips off the tongue when someone passes away, but I don’t want Sir Vidia to rest in peace. I don’t think his brilliance affords him that privilege. One doesn’t mourn the passing of a monster. But one does remember them and the fact that they were characterised by both their magnificent rage and their ugliness.

*

The Washington Post’s obit for VS Naipaul is a wonderful read. It also has this interview with Naipaul in which he says a whole bunch of odious things and then says something that you want on a t-shirt: “If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.”

The charm of Sir Vidia is beautifully remembered and represented by Teju Cole in this essay from The New Yorker.

The Guardian’s review of Patrick French’s The World is What it offers a summarised version of some horrific aspects of Naipaul’s personality.

Naipaul’s “On Being a Writer” is a thought-provoking read. “ The point that worried me was one of vocabulary, of the differing meanings or associations of words. Garden, house, plantation, gardener, estate: these words mean one thing in England and mean something quite different to the man from Trinidad, an agricultural colony, a colony settled for the purpose of plantation agriculture. How, then, could I write honestly or fairly if the very words I used, with private meanings for me, were yet for the reader outside shot through with the associations of the older literature?”

“And I start to speak again.”

[image error] Statue of a Woman, 2400 BC, Iraq, from The British Museum.
This Mesopotamian statue would have probably been placed in a temple where it would have stood in perpetual prayer on behalf of a temple donor. Her eyebrows meet in the middle, which at the time, was considered a sign of great beauty. This statue was part of a gorgeous exhibition titled
India & The World: A History in Nine Stories, at CMSVS in Mumbai.

One of the lovelier things about the internet is the way scraps of poetry get shared as quotes and photos, like notes being passed around in the classroom while the teacher’s back is turned. At the same time, these are fragments. Sometimes they obscure the uncomfortable truth that those selected bits are the only truly good lines in the poem. And then there are the others, like “North American Time” by Adrienne Rich which deserves to be read in full, all nine parts. 

NORTH AMERICAN TIME

I

When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond border
when walking in the street I found my
themes cut out for me
knew what I would not report
for fear of enemies’ usage
then
I began to wonder

II

Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill.

We move but our words stand
become responsible
for more than we intended

and this is verbal privilege.

III
Try sitting at a typewriter
one calm summer evening
at a table by a window
in the country, try pretending
your time does not exist
that you are simply you
that the imagination simply strays
like a great moth, unintentional
try telling yourself
you are not accountable
to the life of your tribe
the breath of your planet

IV
It doesn’t matter what you think.
Words are found responsible
all you can do is choose them
or choose
to remain silent. Or, you never had a choice,
which is why the words that do stand
are responsible

and this is verbal privilege

V
Suppose you want to write
of a woman braiding
another woman’s hair–
staight down, or with beads and shells
in three-strand plaits or corn-rows–
you had better know the thickness
the length the pattern
why she decides to braid her hair
how it is done to her
what country it happens in
what else happens in that country

You have to know these things

VI
Poet, sister: words —
whether we like it or not —
stand in a time of their own.
no use protesting I wrote that
before Kollontai was exiled
Rosa Luxembourg, Malcolm,
Anna Mae Aquash, murdered,
before Treblinka, Birkenau,
Hiroshima, before Sharpeville,
Biafra, Bangla Desh, Boston,
Atlanta, Soweto, Beirut, Assam
–those faces, names of places
sheared from the almanac
of North American time

VII
I am thinking this in a country
where words are stolen out of mouths
as bread is stolen out of mouths
where poets don’t go to jail
for being poets, but for being
dark-skinned, female, poor.
I am writing this in a time
when anything we write
can be used against those we love
where the context is never given
though we try to explain, over and over
For the sake of poetry at least
I need to know these things

VIII
Sometimes, gliding at night
in a plane over New York City
I have felt like some messenger
called to enter, called to engage
this field of light and darkness.
A grandiose idea, born of flying.
But underneath the grandiose idea
is the thought that what I must engage
after the plane has raged onto the tarmac
after climbing my old stairs, sitting down
at my old window
is meant to break my heart and reduce me to silence.

IX
In North America time stumbles on
without moving, only releasing
a certain North American pain.
Julia de Burgos wrote:
That my grandfather was a slave
is my grief; had he been a master
that would have been my shame.
A poet’s words, hung over a door
in North America, in the year
nineteen-eighty-three.
The almost-full moon rises
timelessly speaking of change
out of the Bronx, the Harlem River
the drowned towns of the Quabbin
the pilfered burial mounds
the toxic swamps, the testing-grounds

and I start to speak again.

1983, Adrienne Rich

Freedom and Lust

In 2014, a study offered biological evidence to back something most of us have known to be true thanks to that elaborate experiment called life: you can tell love from lust just by the way a person’s gaze travels. Stephanie Cacioppo, whose previous research had shown different networks in the brain are activated by love and sexual desire, co-authored a study in which a group of subjects were shown a set of images. They were then asked to decide whether the image evoked romantic love or sexual desire.

“People tended to visually fixate on the face, especially when they said an image elicited a feeling of romantic love. However, with images that evoked sexual desire, the subjects’ eyes moved from the face to fixate on the rest of the body. The effect was found for male and female participants,” reported the study.

(Incidentally, none of the images that were given to the subjects contained nudity or erotica, but some inspired lust anyway. Feel free to toss that into the next conversation in which anyone suggests a variation of “she was asking for it”.)

[image error] Sneaking into the Mirror, Kalam Patua, 2009

Most classic depictions of lust do rely upon the gaze. There is an illicitness to the lustful gaze, a hushed acknowledgement that hormones have flushed logic out of your system. The question of whether that gaze is sleazy or tempting depends upon the ‘object’ of that attention. Desire unhinged from emotion can be delicious when there’s consent and complicity. Remove that consent and complicity, and all you have is sleaze and power play. Add it to the mix, and everyday behaviour gleams with longing — that side-eye glance that acknowledges the other, the back that arches just to preen, the parted lips, the tapping fingers, crossed legs. It’s our dirty secret so we don’t put it to words.

*

For about 30 seconds, when Radhika Apte stuck her head out of a car window and enjoyed the wind in her hair, Lust Storieslived up to its promise. A vintage Bollywood song chittered in the background. You felt the night, the neon and music tugging at her. Yellow streetlights lit her up, catching the shine on her lips and the glint in her eyes. Darkness lingered on her curves and hollows, creating a map of shadowy desire. For about 30 seconds, all you saw on screen was sensuality.  

Then the scene ended and it all went downhill when Apte’s character, Kalindi, started talking.

If the idea of Anurag Kashyap’s short in Lust Stories was to show Kalindi as an unhinged, delusional maniac (with a side serving of sexually predatory behaviour), Apte’s performance is electric and brilliant. There’s no reason we can’t have a film about a woman like that, but since characters are devices of communication, you’ve got to ask, what is the point that Kalindi is trying to make?

Listening to Apte explain herself and talk about sexual freedom, I was reminded of an old theatre exercise in which an actor is told to deliver the same line in four different ways. Depending on the speed, the tonal inflections, the way they hold themselves, the look in their eyes, the meaning conveyed by the words can change completely.

Had Kalindi lounged rather than looked tauter than a guitar string about to snap, and spoken with languorous confidence about her open marriage, she might even have convinced you to give it a shot. Instead, Kalindi’s words come at you like a train wreck. Every line in her body underscores how out of control she is and the jumbled ideas that she articulates seem like defensive justifications for deviant behaviour. Because that’s what lust reduces a woman to?

It gets worse when you see Kalindi’s story in the context of where India’s ongoing gender rights conversation, but I’m getting ahead of myself.  

Fun fact: it wasn’t until the 1500s that the word ‘lust’ came to be associated with sin and sex. Until then, lust (from the Proto-Germanic lustuz) was a word for appetite, desire or even inclination. It could be a little unruly, but there doesn’t seem to have been much judgement attached to it. Then came the task of translating the Bible. That’s when lust became a bad word. Blame it all on the difficulty of translating “concupiscentia carnis” into English. Had it not been for such challenges of translation, lust wouldn’t have the crackle of transgression and sin that it does today.

Of course we can lament how, in this process, shame came to be attached to perfectly normal physical processes, but there is a silver lining. Lust, as we understand it today, is both a reminder of the boundaries that regulate sexual behaviour as well as a force that can (and often does) force its way past those regulations. It rattles our cages. That’s why following its demands is so often depicted as freedom.

Lust Stories is an anthology of four films, all of which place sexually-active women in the spotlight. This is a big deal for Indian commercial cinema. Let’s not forget that just last year, the disaster that is the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) refused to certify Lipstick Under My Burkha for release in theatres because it was “lady-oriented”. The idea of making Lust Stories about its heroines is also a big deal because in our cinema and society, women have usually been the cast as the passive sexual objects.

Released on the streaming platform Netflix, Lust Stories has four unrelated segments directed by Anurag Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee and Karan Johar. The real disappointment is that four of the our most talented filmmakers in Bollywood were given creative freedom and a topic like lust — and for the most part, they went ahead and stuck to stereotype and convention anyway. 

With neither box office nor the CBFC breathing down their neck and practically no reason to fear some disgruntled khaki-short-pant-loving uncle would slap a case of obscenity on Lust Stories, the directors were free to think out of the box. They could have been provocative with the subjects they chose, experimental in the storytelling styles they adopted; they could have rattled our cages. Yet, Lust Stories is for the most part studiously cautious and steers clear of scandal.

Meanwhile critics and ‘influencers’ cheered on Lust Stories like it had ushered in a revolution. It’s as though they saw a different version of the anthology or they’re a herd of Pavlovian sheep. Either way, it’s disappointing.

If this is how low we’re going to set our standards — particularly as critics — how is cinema and storytelling in this country ever going to reach any level of maturity? Lust Stories is on a platform with films and series from all over the world. Imagine a Netflix subscriber clicking on Lust Stories after watching a season of The Affair.

Despite the title and the presence of people who do have sex in Lust Stories, not one of the four films in the anthology is actually about lust. The first two are about extracurricular sex. The last two are about marriage. All of them look at the expectations that develop after one has had sex with a person, rather than the hormones or attraction that throw logic and caution to the winds. All of them are acutely aware of the society in which they’re set and the rules that regulate feminine behaviour. Except for the heroine of Karan Johar’s film, the women in the film are true to established types — bunnyboiler, submissive domestic, bored wife, dominating mother in-law, oomphy divorcee, etc.    

Johar and Akhtar’s are the most easily enjoyable of the lot. Akhtar’s has the only proper sex scene in Lust Stories and the first one in commercial Bollywood that isn’t strategically wrapped in silk sheets or obscured by conveniently-placed furniture/ furnishings (rejoice!).  Johar’s has the only proper orgasm (once more! With feeling!).

Akhtar’s film is about Sudha, a maid who thinks she’s in a relationship with her employer, but discovers he’s about to marry someone else. The lust story in this one is actually the employer’s, who isn’t the focus of the story. Bhumi Pednekar as Sudha communicates a wealth of emotions wordlessly. Heartbreak, pain, disappointment, anger, despair, hope – yes. Lust? No.

There’s nothing wrong with Akhtar’s film. It’s fine, beautifully shot in fragments, but bland because it carefully steers clear of the power dynamics that must inevitably layer a sexual relationship like the one between Sudha and her employer, especially in a society like ours where inequality is taken for granted. Like, for instance, there’s no exploration of the questions raised by the slapping sound we hear when Sudha’s having sex. I have been reliably informed that it’s Sudha doing the slapping (missed that detail when I was watching*), which is presumably included as a red herring so that we’re suitably shocked when we realise the maid was slapping her ‘master’. But this is a throwaway detail in the story. Had it been explored, we’d have at least dipped our toes in the paddle pool of power play, hierarchy and lust; but no.

Akhtar’s is the second film this year that shows a love story between a maid and her employer. Rohena Gera’s Sir, which was screened at Cannes Film Festival, has a similar premise but the two films have little in common. The key divergence is in the character of the male employer rather than the maid – the ‘heroes’ are the ones who take the two films in different directions. The heroines, on the other hand, are similar. Both maids are quiet, efficient and caring. To me, the similarity in characterisation suggests these films show us how maids are viewed by the privileged (those who hire maids, effectively). Both Akhtar and Gera’s gaze is sympathetic and respectful, but the identification feels more superficial than intimate. The maids in these films aren’t personalities. They’re a type. That the fact of a maid being the heroine feels like a breakthrough says volumes about the inherent biases that dominate our society and collective thinking.

Johar’s film, set in a candy-coloured world that exists only in Johar’s imagination (bless), is the only bit of good cheer in Lust Stories. It’s about Megha, a newly-married teacher who has a loving husband and a boring sex life. Then she discovers the vibrating bullet. Unfortunately, so does her family since it (and Megha) get turned on in the living room, with mother-in-law, sister-in-law and husband as audience.

It’s a sweet little film and possibly the most enjoyable one in Lust Stories. Contained in the candy floss fluffiness of Johar’s film are some golden nuggets of progressive thought: that it’s not the visible cleavage that’s the problem but the mindset of those who ogle at it; that a woman has a right to pleasure; that men need to be allies. That said, do not use another person’s vibrator without washing it thoroughly.

In Megha we finally get a heroine who isn’t clichéd, despite the artifice that surrounds her. She has the self-confidence that comes from being a working woman, along with the hesitation that comes from her lack of sexual and romantic experience. She feels real (even if she does have the smooth prettiness of a Barbie doll). We’ve rarely seen heroines like her in commercial cinema, and that (rather than Megha orgasming) is a real shame.

Unfortunately, although there’s curiosity in Megha about sexual pleasure, there wasn’t one moment when we saw lust in her eyes – not for her husband, or ice cream, or even the vibrator. Still, with the masturbation scene and the way Megha’s in-laws react, Johar does show how lust is vilified. Apparently Lata Mangeshkar’s family is upset by the “desecration” of a song she sang, “Kabhie khushi kabhie gham” (Megha orgasms while it plays in the background), which is used in the film. They’ve said Johar has turned the “dream song” into a “nightmare”, which shows you just how unnerving female sexuality is to the bulk of India.

Sandwiched between Akhtar’s and Johar’s films is Banerjee’s study of an urban (and urbane) marriage. It opens with Reena, a beautiful anti-nymph, frolicking among waves. In its delighted sensuality, the shot is reminiscent of Kalindi in the cab, at the start of Lust Stories.

The man accompanying Reena stays on the beach, enjoying the view but determined to keep a safe distance. He’s Reena’s lover – though you’d never guess from the way they look at each other – and also Reena’s husband’s best friend. When her husband shows up, their triangle reveals different kinds of partnerships. On one hand is the old friendship between the two men, held together by shared memories and rapport. On the other is the understanding of a long-married couple, built upon the foundation of being able to anticipate one another simply because of years spent together.

By the end of the film, you realise both relationships are pivoted upon secrets and lies. There are glints of darkness in Manisha Koirala’s portrayal Reena, who, for all her loneliness, is ultimately revealed to be an expert manipulator. She plays both men and ultimately has them exactly where she wants them. We never really get a sense of what turns her on, though. It’s evidently not the men, but neither does it seem to be the power play even though she is very much the puppeteer.

I liked the quietness of the film and the subtle way that each character tried to manipulate the other, but if lust played any role in Banerjee’s film, I missed it. And hello, I’ve been reading Mills & Boon romances (Modern AND Desire, thank you very much) for more than 20 years. Maybe it’s supposed to be an exploration of lust by way of its absence.    

Considering how insipid most of Lust Stories is, the one thing that can be said for Kashyap’s segment is that it’s not bland.

Kalindi, a lecturer in a college, has sex with one of her students, 21-year-old Tejas. After having sex, she breaks the fourth wall and tells us she hopes Tejas won’t get clingy and entertain delusions of a relationship. Then she starts worrying that he’ll accuse her of raping him and orders him to record a statement in her phone, declaring their sex was consensual. Meanwhile, we learn that Kalindi is in an open marriage with her husband, who is literally and figuratively out of the picture. Then she starts stalking Tejas. When Tejas finally tells her that he wants to be with her, Kalindi tells him to hold on to his shorts because boss, she’s married.

I’d just like to take a moment to assure everyone that although I burst many blood vessels in the process of watching this misogynist nightmare (more on that later), I am still alive and more coherent than Kalindi.

Four films and 90 minutes later, you’re left with neither revelation nor insight. There are no moments that make your pulse race or that you want to remember when you lie in bed, in the dark. Despite being made by four of our most celebrated directors, not one is brilliant and the best of them is just about good.

But we’re still supposed to give the filmmakers a round of applause for their efforts. Why? Because of the context in which Lust Stories is made.

Context (kɒntɛkst), noun

the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood.

The tricky thing about context is that the same factors that get you bouquets can also earn you brickbats. So, for instance, Lust Stories has received widespread critical acclaim for privileging women and talking about sex in a society that considers it a taboo subject. To talk about sex in stories about women has been applauded for being a double whammy of progressive awesomeness, which it is. But this also means that at least some of us are going to look closely at what is being said and what is being added to ongoing conversations.

There’s no doubt that India needs to loosen up about sex. Not because there’s silence on the subject, but because these conversations are held in secret and riddled with ignorance and confusion. The only sex education the average Indian gets is when they visit places like Konark and Khajuraho, and see the temples covered in friezes showing impossible sex acts. It is still normal for a couple to be beaten up by vigilantes and local police because they’re out on a date. Virginity is still a prized commodity and homosexuality is still illegal. So yes, we really do need to talk about sex and related topics.   

Invariably, when sex is discussed on public platforms, it’s in the context of crimes like rape, molestation and harassment. The conversations have got louder thanks to the internet and we’ve tussled with thorny subjects like the age bracket to define juveniles when it comes to sex crimes. The legal definition of crimes like rape and harassment have been updated, both by Justice Verma Committee and court cases like the recent one against Mahmood Farooqui.

The Farooqui case — in which a lower court stated that forcible oral sex qualifies as rape and a high court pronounced that a “feeble no” does not communicate absence of consent — is particularly relevant to the opening film in Lust Stories, directed by Kashyap and written by Apte and Kashyap.

Of the many intensely uncomfortable moments in this film, one is when Kalindi orders her student and lover Tejas to say the sex they had was consensual. He doesn’t know how to say the word, but he parrots what he’s told to and at one point, Kalindi tells him to speak louder. Because you know, when you say something feebly, you don’t convince anyone. The Delhi High Court taught us that.

In another scene, Kalindi is in the staff room where her colleagues are discussing a news report of a teacher having had sex with an underage student. One colleague points out that the student isn’t so young as to be an innocent. Another says the point is not the student’s age, but that a teacher having sex with a student is exploitative (these aren’t the words used, but it’s the sense of the argument). Kalindi doesn’t say anything, but you can see panic rising in her. She’s had sex with her student. She knows he was a virgin. She doesn’t know how old he is. Was this statutory rape? (He’s 21, so it wasn’t, but from the power dynamic that the film shows, it’s evident that she’s in a position to command him, which makes the case for his consent … feeble.)

Kalindi’s actions are reminiscent of stunts pulled by men when they’re pursuing unwilling women. The manipulation, the emotional blackmail, the stalking – it’s almost textbook and for those who have had to suffer this compulsive behaviour, Kalindi is a trigger. Her words, however, are not the claims of possession ( “she’s mine”) that abusive men usually offer by way of justification. Instead, Kalindi’s presents a patchwork ensemble of arguments made by feminism in favour of equality and sexual freedom for women. Only she delivers them in manic monologues that not only serve to make Kalindi sound insane, but also reduce the words to hollow rants.

The cruelty of the film lies in the complete lack of empathy for Kalindi. In fact, in the way the scenes are arranged, the storyteller’s gaze positively revels in watching Kalindi wreck herself. Take something as simple as breaking the fourth wall, which Kalindi does early on in the film. It’s a device that allows a character to articulate the subtext. It also emphasises how much of a person’s behaviour is fake and performative. In Kalindi’s case, the more she talks directly to us, the more incoherent she sounds. Her words contradict her actions, making her seem hypocritical. She has different rules for herself and different ones for Tejas. She wants the freedom to date other men and remain married, but she’ll stalk Tejas and demand his complete attention.

It’s almost as though the film is taunting feminists. Kalindi is excessive, angry and incoherent. She’s a man-eater. She’s a tease. She’s exploitative. She’s manipulative. While Kalindi exhibits the dysfunctional behaviour of toxic masculinity, the film seems to sneer at us and ask, “Do you dare call this out in a woman? Or is it only a problem if a man does it?”

And with that, Kashyap’s film reaffirms all the negative tropes about feminists, feminism and strong women.

Is that really what we needed to add to the conversations about consent, sexual freedom and women’s autonomy?

*

In 2017, a study titled ‘The State of Artistic Freedom’ calculated that 20% of all censorship cases in film came from India. According to their calculations, India had censored the most films among the 78 countries included in the study.

You wouldn’t think sex or the romance of a heterosexual couple would be considered particularly interesting in a country of more than a billion people, but love and sex are political minefields in India. Falling in love is often a political act. There is rebellion in an Indian getting married. You’re resisting family traditions when you choose your own partner. When you do marry the person selected for you, there are set of structures and constraints that you’re strengthening with that action – structures and constraints that tend to belittle women while demanding more of them. If you fall in love with someone from another community, then you can actually be killed for it or be identified as a perpetrator or victim of “love jihad”. In 2018, we needed the Supreme Court of India to remind us that a woman has a right to choose whom she marries and the court cannot annul a marriage that has been consensually entered.

In this country and in this context, something like Lust Stories had the potential to stand for freedom. There was no CBFC to appease. There was no pressure to ‘make money back’ at the theatres. There were (presumably) no starry whims and insecurities that needed catering. Four of India’s most talented filmmakers were given freedom with Lust Stories.

What we see in those 90-odd minutes is not just that they didn’t know what to do with freedom, but something far more tragic. Most of them volunteered to stay within the confines and play it safe. Not one of them was bold enough to explore the transgressive powers of lust. None of them dared to rattle the cage.