Deepanjana Pal's Blog, page 9

Ram Kumar: 1924-2018

[image error][image error][image error]Ram Kumar photographed by Richard Bartholomew[image error]

An edited version of this was published in today’s Hindustan Times. I don’t own rights to the images used in this post. If you do and you’d like me to take them off, please let me know.

Close your eyes and think of Ladakh (or search for it on Google). See the ungreen mountains, the painfully-bright sky and the shapes in which that landscape has been carved by wind and water.

Now look at how artist Ram Kumar interpreted those sights. These slashes of colour and contrasts aren’t realistic in the technical sense and yet, when you look at it, you know it’s a landscape, you know there’s a sky, a few low houses and craggy peaks. More importantly, you can feel how unforgiving this terrain is. It’s expressed in the jutting angles and the dusty colours (made all the more dry because of the richness of the contrasting blue). And so, with a few angular shapes and slashing, dark lines, the abstract is made real. In the paintings inspired by Ladakh’s harsh but spectacular landscape, Kumar’s talent for using colours almost like emotional accents is unmistakable.

In 1948, Ram Kumar had a difficult decision to take. Should he devote all his time to becoming an artist, or pursue it as a hobby while continuing to work in a bank? Kumar, whose younger brother was well-known Hindi writer and novelist Nirmal Verma, chose art. It seems like a sentimental decision today but back then, Kumar was being practical. You could sell two paintings, earn ₹300 — and that covered his monthly expenses in a way that was much more enjoyable than banking.

That year, Kumar would have his first exhibition. Not too many paintings sold, but Kumar had found his calling. It was an ironic beginning for an artist who wouldn’t make headlines for the prices his paintings fetched, but whose art is a national treasure.

Ram Kumar was perhaps the least famous of those who belonged to the Progressive Artists Group. Founded in 1947, in Bombay, the collective drew some of India’s most brilliant young artists and then started disintegrating in the early 1950s. By 1956, it had officially disbanded.

While it lasted, it enriched the imaginations of some India’s finest artists, and long after the group had collapsed, the label of Progressives remained because these artists truly lived up to that tag. Inspired by European art but determined to develop a distinctive visual vocabulary for a modern, newly-independent India, the Progressives were incandescent. Some, like FN Souza and MF Husain, became iconic as much for their art as their flamboyant personalities and scandals. Ram Kumar was not among the founders, but he was friends with Raza, Husain and others. Photographs of him from those decades show a slim, good-looking man, who stared intensely whether he was looking into the camera or away from it. He would go on to dabble in journalism and write short stories in Hindi, but most importantly, he’d develop a strikingly new artistic style that was abstract and yet rooted in realism.

On April 14, the legendary artist Ram Kumar passed away in Delhi. He was 94.

Born in 1924, in Simla, Kumar discovered art while studying economics at St Stephen’s College. His first teacher was the Shantiniketan artist Sailoz Mookherjea and in 1949, Kumar went to Paris to train under André Lhote and Fernand Léger. The sights and sounds of post-World War II Europe would have a deep impact on young Kumar, as would the way French artists and poets grappled with the suffering they witnessed.

Kumar returned to India in 1952 and became friends with Raza, Husain and others from the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group. After briefly dabbling in figurative painting, Kumar started painting landscapes and cityscapes that had obvious connections to Cubism, but developed into a visual vocabulary that was unmistakably Kumar’s own. These weren’t pretty pictures, but had imagery that reduced a scene to near abstraction. He dismissed realism and, instead, recreated the feeling of a place through precariously-balanced shapes, bold lines and earthy colours. To remove people from a scene is an unusual device. Most artists keep human figures to give a sense of scale or add an emotive quality. To remove people from scenes set in India was a radical concept. India’s people have been the cornerstone of how the country and its culture had been depicted. Kumar, instead, focused on geometry and architecture for the bulk of his career. People and faces would return to his paintings during his last years. It was almost as though these figures of his imagination were the company he wanted to keep.

Despite the absence of figures in Kumar’s paintings, they’re not lifeless. On the contrary, they teem with emotion. There’s depression, a searing sense of disillusionment and sometimes, a meditative calm that radiates from his work. At their darkest, the paintings feel like wombs in which sadness is festering. The deserted streets and lanes make you wonder about what is locked away in the buildings that will not open up to the viewer’s gaze. They convey the sense of isolation that comes with being in a big city. The naturescapes contain textures and layers — often literally, since Kumar liked using the impasto technique to create accents. There was a sense of human toil that you could feel as your eye followed the unwavering lines. Abstracted by Ram Kumar, the world became all the more unnerving and yet so fascinating that you had to linger before his paintings.

Disinterested in the media and unimpressed by how little actual interest he saw for art and culture in India, Kumar didn’t become a headline-grabbing artist. When he spoke about art he was both undiplomatic and honest. He didn’t mince his words when criticising the government for how little it had done to nurture artists and promote art in India. He didn’t shy away from saying Indian audiences weren’t interested in art by and large, and that this was a shame. He was one of the few who didn’t miss a beat or attempt diplomacy when asked which contemporary artists’ work he liked (Atul Dodiya and Subodh Gupta was what he’d told me).

In 2010, Kumar was awarded the Padma Bhushan.

Kumar is perhaps best known for his paintings of Varanasi and Ladakh. He first went to Varanasi in 1960-1961 with MF Husain, and the city fascinated him. He would later say that he turned to an almost-abstract visual language because he just couldn’t imagine being able to recreate the misery and pain radiating from the human form he saw. Varanasi, crowded with those seeking blessings and salvation, turns into a ghost town in Kumar’s paintings — a cityscape of stark slabs, flares of colours, jagged lines, pointy roofs and a curving river that’s bent into an embrace.

Part memory, part imagination and part abstraction, Kumar’s style was ahead of its time. He didn’t offer the pretty peace and stability of his friend Raza’s abstract art. Kumar’s paintings were often messy, ugly and even hinting violence with the way his lines slashed their way across the canvas. His art demanded you to linger and look beyond the obvious. The world in Kumar’s paintings is an organised chaos of shapes, almost as though he’s looking down from above; the ruminations of an angry god.

The Incomplete Works

“There are many qualities one must possess to be a working writer or artist. Talent, brains, tenacity. Wealthy parents are good. You should definitely try to have those. But first among equals, when it comes to necessary ingredients, is selfishness. A book is made out of small selfishnesses.” ~ Claire Dederer

A biography, a kids’ book and a thriller — all of them written while working full time as a journalist, at jobs that were unforgiving, demanding and time-consuming. I am, clearly, a masochist.

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If you think that the hard part is finding the time to write outside of working hours, you’re wrong. There’s always time to write. It’s just that this is time upon which others stake claims and we — particularly women — usually don’t privilege ourselves over others. Certainly not to do something that isn’t guaranteed to earn money or praise.  “So you write on the side,” someone said to me recently, reducing my writing to a quarter plate. It wasn’t meant to offend or belittle, but I couldn’t help it. Up went my hackles. Because the quarter plate is for an extra serving of bacon or spinach or onion rings. It’s for what isn’t essential, but is either an indulgence or an afterthought. No, sir, I do not write ‘on the side’. I write. Just as I’m not a journalist ‘on the side’. It’s the reason I can afford to order quarter (and full) plates.

These are the moments when I want to be back in the era of gowns and fans — just so that I can flick my fan to denote savage dismissal and flounce out of the room. Then I think of the corsets etc and give thanks to be born in these corset-less and plumbing-enriched times. 

But I digress.

It used to irk me that women artists are asked how they managed to “juggle” home and work. “No one asks the male director how difficult it was for him to balance his family and his film,” one woman director I know once grumbled. The more I think about it, though, I’m glad women are asked this question because hopefully, it will give them an opportunity to point out how domesticity is still assumed to be the woman’s business. It’s considered normal for men to have passion projects and we applaud them for being selfish and making time for their interests. As they should, and as women should too, without guilt or apology. I hope more women will come out and say that they didn’t “balance” anything, that some things suffer and other things sort themselves out. What they did do was prioritise themselves and the work they want to do. They scavenged time that really isn’t there to do the work that is important to them (possibly with the help of allies and a support system). Is it inconsiderate to give yourself priority over others? Possibly. Will it upset friends and family? Yup. Will they survive this shock to the chauvinistic system? You betcha. Is it worth it? Hell yes.   

This anxiety about being good enough is something I find fascinating. It’s as though we earn the privilege of being creative only if we’re excellent at it. If what you’ve created is a dud, then how can you argue that you are (with apologies to L’Oreal) worth it? Return to your humdrum existence and cease thinking of yourself as creative. Don’t be reasonable and keep in mind that some people are more talented than others, and that doesn’t mean the less talented should become wallpaper. It means we, the audience, get variety. While we’re at it, who decides what makes a creative work worthwhile? Do we judge it by the money it earns, the number of likes it gets, the crowds an artist can draw, the enjoyment it brings? What’s the yardstick and when it’s so shifty, why does it even matter?

Personally, I begin on the premise that my writing is most definitely not worth it, but it’s how I make sense of the world around me and it’s fun. Good reasons to write in an age of nonsense, right? Any moment now, I expect the arrival of what Amanda Palmer christened the Fraud Police. (“We’ve been watching you, and we have evidence that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE DOING. You stand accused of the crime of completely winging it … you do not actually deserve your job, we are taking everything away and we are TELLING EVERYBODY.”) This will then be followed by a tug of war in which Fraud Police say, “In conclusion, we’re taking away your Macbook” and I hang on to it like a hulking limpet because dammit these gadgets are expensive.

Annoying as they may be, I’m full of gratitude for all the writers who continue to write despite producing rubbish. Good on them for being convinced that this is their calling even though it’s obvious to the rest of us that they’re wrong. More of us — especially women — should take a leaf out of their book and just write. (Replace “write” with your chosen creative pursuit.) Ignore the haters, be selfish, and worry about the work being good enough after you’ve finished it. It’s entirely unhelpful to be swamped with doubts before. Enter the self-criticism swamp afterwards, preferably holding the hand of a good editor.

I write fiction because that gossamer space where words turn unreal into real, it feels like home. Despite knowing this was where I belonged ever since I was a child, it’s only taken me about 34 years to find my way in. When I did, I was more fragile and lost than I’ve been in decades. Thinking back to the months I spent on Hush A Bye Baby, I realise I was piecing my self-esteem back together, sentence by sentence. At the time, the only thing that registered was how much fun it was to struggle and succeed at telling a story. Writing reminded me that I’m not the sum of my failures. That whatever else may happen or be taken away from me, in this little cave where I imagine stories, I’m good. I’ve got stories in my head and I’m selfish enough to tell them.

(In the mean time, be a sport. Hush A Bye Baby can be bought here and A Book for Puchku is here. They make for excellent gifts, if I do say so myself.) 

Baaghi 2: Heroism ≠ Human Rights

[image error] Human shield in Baaghi 2, starring Tiger Shroff (in the driving seat). 

Three and a half minutes into Baaghi 2, the hero of the film — an Army officer named Ranveer Pratap Singh — ties a terrorist to his jeep and parades him through a Kashmiri town.

Baaghi 2 is actually set in Goa. As far as its plot is concerned, there is absolutely no reason to have an opening sequence in Kashmir or to refer to the incident in which Major Nitin Gogoi tied a shawl maker named Farooq Ahmed Dar to his jeep. Gogoi patrolled villages in Budgam district with Dar as his ‘human shield’ against stone pelters. This happened in April 2017.

Principal photography for Baaghi 2 began in August 2017. Director and writer Ahmed Khan and his co-writers Abbas Hierapurwala and Niraj Kumar Mishra (yes, THREE people wrote Baaghi 2) decided that the best grand entry for the hero was with a human shield. When the film was being shot, actor Tiger Shroff decided it was a-ok to re-enact it. All the celebrities who are now praising the film couldn’t have missed this scene and when they tweet their appreciation of Baaghi 2, they’re applauding the decision to show a human rights’ violation as an act of bravery.

Remember this the next time someone says Bollywood is only interested in making money and doesn’t care about politics.

My mind is sort of exploding that Tiger Shroff’s entry in Baaghi 2 hasn’t led to some serious outrage. It’s not that reviewers haven’t mentioned it. Most have and they’ve made their disapproval clear, but they’ve all gone on to, well, review the rest of the film. Which is fair I suppose given it’s a film and they’ve got to review it, but YOUGAIZ, THEY JUST SAID THAT USING A HUMAN SHIELD IS AWESOME.  

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It’s doubly messed up because not only are we told that disrespecting the Indian flag is reason enough to violate human rights, there’s also this minor detail that Baaghi 2 misinforms its audience when it claims the man used as a human shield was a terrorist. Whether or not one is a terrorist, they shouldn’t be strapped to a jeep but the truth is, there is absolutely nothing to suggest Dar is a terrorist or even a stone pelter. He’s a shawl maker who was going to cast his vote — it doesn’t get more peaceful, democratic and unterroristy than that — when he caught Gogoi’s attention. So here’s Baaghi 2 not just defending the indefensible, but also twisting facts.    

Cinema — particularly the commercial variety — is rarely just entertainment, no matter how fluffy and unreal it may seem. Its politics maybe subtly layered in the plot and dialogues, leaving space for writers and directors to say “That’s your interpretation”. Or it could be plain to see, like in the human shield moment of Baaghi 2 or the misogynist conservatism of Padmaavat. Especially in films that aim to be blockbusters, there are ideas being normalised through their storytelling — what patriotism means, the ideal woman, good, evil, masculinity etc. Filmmakers and writers may argue that they’re just putting up what is considered a formula for box office success. However, like the decision to celebrate a man being used as a human shield or show jauhar as a heroic action filmed in romanticised slow-mo, these choices articulate a certain politics and worldview. One could use the resources and talent at their disposal to package and sell any number of ideas to the public. Padmaavat could have shown how difficult it was for women to exercise agency in the patriarchal Rajput family, but instead it applauded a Buddhist Sri Lankan princess giving up all trace of her pre-marriage identity and wholly adopt a Rajput Hindu persona. Similarly, Baaghi 2 chose to valorise using a human shield and give the impression that all Kashmiris are terrorists. The fact that this vignette has no real bearing on the plot is what makes it important. It didn’t need to be there, but it is.  

It’s not that Ahmed Khan doesn’t have the right to be #TeamGogoi. He does. So do producers Sajid Nadiadwala and Fox Star Studios. It’s a free country so everyone has the right to be obnoxious. However, dear Bollywood, if this is where your politics lie, then don’t complain about lacking freedom of expression. You’re backing the same political conservatism that supports censorship, discrimination and thuggery. The people who think it’s ok to use a human shield are also the ones who think films need moral policing. 

We like to imagine Bollywood, India’s most high-profile film industry, is progressive and capable of glamorous rebellion. With stories of outsiders making it big, directors ignoring pragmatism to pursue passion projects and inter-religious marriages, Bollywood has built a reputation for being open, creative and liberal. We do have a history of disruptive stories (the angry young man, love stories that privilege individual over family etc), but those days are long gone. Today’s film industry is deeply and desperately conservative. It has no intention of making space for alternative ideas, politics and aesthetics, which is why indie-spirited films struggle to find footholds and backers. This is an industry in which a leading woman producer would like to remind us that “it is always not true that the person who does not have power is the victim” and that actors “use their sexuality to get things done.” (Don’t hold your breath for a desi #MeToo is all I’m saying.) While Hollywood speaks out against Donald Trump and his policies, Bollywood makes films that are effectively publicity campaigns for the government.

And all the while we’re supposed to ignore the politics because you know, Bollywood is only interested in making money.

Here’s the thing: even if that were true, it wouldn’t be ok. To go around pandering to narrow-mindedness and fundamentalism just because you’re interested in profits does not deserve applause. In the process of being seen by audiences and making money, cinema influences people and this is a detail that informs too few of the films that make it to our screens. I wish Sanjay Leela Bhansali had knocked on door after door, looking for people to fund and act in his abominable Padmaavat. But no. The truth is that because this thoroughly mediocre director (with a history of overspending) has delivered hit films of late, everyone lined up to work with him. The truth is that one of the top actresses didn’t find it problematic to speak about women’s rights off camera while on camera, she played a heroine who told audiences that a wife is her husband’s possession. The truth is that an A-list actor found nothing wrong in contributing to a narrative that demonises the role of Muslims in Indian history and reducing a historical figure to a caricature of villainy. Why? Because they were all hoping it would make money, and it did.   

Bollywood gets away with its hypocrisy and ill-informed politics because we don’t hold it to high standards. Film criticism is at best a bonsai in India. We don’t have institutions or organisations that consistently analyse Bollywood films for their biases, like Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and many others do with respect to Hollywood. We don’t study Bollywood and see its releases being broken down into statistics (like, who gets speaking parts, what kind of roles are written for minorities etc). The only numbers that matter are box office collections. While it’s worth knowing Baaghi 2 has had an excellent opening, that’s not a good reason to ignore its politics and messaging.

Bollywood has traditionally shirked the responsibility that comes with its commercialism and we don’t have a critical or academic establishment in India that examines it. For instance, instead of just dismissing it as one element in a generally bad film, we should be analysing the psychotic masculinity that Tiger Shroff embodies on screen. It’s amazing to me that reviewers didn’t weigh in on what has been taken from Rocky and the changes between Baaghi 2 and its Telugu original, Kshanam. I’m not naïve enough to think film criticism can change the way people think or the kind of films that are produced, but I do believe criticism can jumpstart conversations; which in turn could nudge sections of society towards rethinking their attitudes.

If moviegoers are communal, conservative, narrow-minded cretins who are turning tripe into blockbusters, then at least some of the blame for this has to fall on the film industry for the kind of entertainment it has provided its audiences. After all, it’s not like they don’t back the exceptions to Bollywood rules from time to time. Put a little money and resources behind the offbeat film, and we’ve seen it go the distance time and time again. Yet those successes don’t end up making it easier for the next indie film and every dubious creative decision continues to be explained as something done for the audience. It’s about time at least critics and cinephiles interrogated that claim. 

An Army of Saraswatis

The other day, I made my way to a little neighbourhood of idol sculptors in south Kolkata, near Kalighat temple. It’s tiny compared to the much-photographed Kumartuli. All along the lane were unfinished Saraswati idols because it’s the upcoming puja in the Hindu calendar. I remembered the lane when I read about Darwin’s theory of evolution being pronounced “scientifically wrong” by former police commissioner of Mumbai and current minister of state for human resource development. Seeing the long row of idols in my mind’s eye, I imagined an army of Saraswatis taking to the streets and thumping the bejesus out of ‘intellects’ like Singh with the business end of the veena. Or maybe twanging so loudly that mortal neurons get scrambled and eardrums burst. 

Maybe the Saraswati battalion could also lavish a little attention to Singh’s colleagues, like Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar (“If they [women] want freedom, why don’t they just roam around naked?”) and the people changing school syllabi to rewrite history. Although the BJP and RSS are undeniably special, they’re not the only ones saying rubbish. Our public life seems to be teeming with fools who feel no qualms at spouting utter nonsense. Follow the news and it’s like being the one sober person at a particularly drunken party. 

The right wing (or at least those who deign to flood my phone with ‘educational’ missives) is noticeably unenthusiastic about Saraswati. This is not surprising. Saraswati has been a thorn in patriarchal Hinduism’s side. In her stories, she challenges Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva in different ways. She seems to be constantly working to pull the rug out from under the male gods and with each successful ploy, she establishes for herself distance and solitude. Not surprising then that the conservative, chauvinist bunch isn’t falling over itself to worship her. If anyone in the Hindutva brigade genuinely believes in Saraswati, they should be very afraid because this is not a goddess with much of a track record for forgiveness and tolerating stupidity. She’s constantly rebelling against the kind of male-dominated status quo that the conservative right wing gazes at with hearts in their eyes.  

Imagine street after street lined with these clay idols, which suddenly come to life and calmly, relentlessly close around our idiotic ‘leaders’ and their foot soldiers. Steady, silent steps; a delicate smile that might be a smirk; strong hands with fingers calloused by hours of veena-playing; unblinking eyes, and perhaps the soft hum of a harmony that’s sweetly menacing. Not a word from she who was once known as the goddess of speech because what’s the point of dialogue with someone who won’t hear and will not listen? Just one step and another, accompanied by a bevy of hostile, honking hansa (band name, anyone? you’re welcome). 

It’s not just our politicians though. Line up the teachers who stifle curiosity, the tuition coaches who make children into automatons and everyone responsible for making students think death is the fitting response to a low score. Drag out all those who have turned our universities into arenas for thuggery. Show her the geniuses who think the humanities are subjects for fools, that philosophy is a waste, and analysis is unnecessary. Single out the ones who ridicule good taste and mock the idea of having standards. Point out those who judge a work by what it cost and what it earned. Let her hear how we flatter. Let her see how we celebrate mediocrity. 

How much of what passes for culture in today’s India would get Saraswati’s stamp of approval? What of our present-day creativity is worth preserving so that it transitions from being a thing of the present to an inheritance in the future?    

Once upon a time, for reasons no one recorded in myth or history, Saraswati the goddess slipped out of the spotlight. Tomorrow is Saraswati Puja. Say a prayer that she may reappear and once again rebel. 

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(All photos mine. Please don’t nick without giving credit.)

Dear Ms Bhavsar…

Madam,

You know that backpack that you pulled off the conveyor belt at Mumbai Airport last evening? The blue and grey Quechua one? Yeah, that’s mine. If you open it — which I presume you have by now, unless you were carrying it for someone else. In which case they should have opened it — then you (or they) will find not your (or their) earthly possessions, but mine.

You see, I’ve just moved cities, from Delhi to Bombay. So that backpack has one-fourth of all the objects that make up my life and my self. As you might have noticed, it’s also new. I bought it last month from the Decathlon in Ansal Plaza, which is why if you’ll take a look, you’ll notice it’s very clean and thus unlike yours despite the shared colour scheme. Yours is battered, weathered, has a wad of tissue noticeably stuffed into the front netting, and is still in Mumbai airport. I know because it was lying forlorn and unclaimed at Baggage Services (that’s how I know your name. It was on the baggage tag. 20-20 vision for the win!), where I stood for more than an hour in an effort to goad SpiceJet into acknowledging my not getting one item of luggage is a violation of the financial and legal contract between me as a passenger and them as an airline. They’re blaming it on you, accusing you of carelessness for having taken the wrong backpack and either not turning on your phone or giving an incorrect number for their records. In SpiceJet’s defence, they did try to call you repeatedly, but your phone is unreachable. This led to the speculation of whether you’re a spy or a terrorist who has abandoned their bag at the airport, and that wad of tissue is a secret code.

Presuming there isn’t an Operation Used Tissue unfolding among us, that is an excellent way to distinguish your backpack, I think. The white tissue is very visible, stands out in contrast to the black and grey surrounding it and who’s going to pull out that wad, after all? Unfortunately, it didn’t work. You picked up my new, clean and un-tissue-marked backpack. You didn’t even notice that it’s significantly more stuffed than your backpack, which makes me admire your muscular capacity almost as much as I do your ability to ignore details.

After much pontification, I’ve come to the conclusion that you hate airports. It’s the only explanation that accounts for you scampering off with my backpack and not returning it in all this time. Clearly you don’t want to be anywhere near the place where airplanes take off and land. Why else would you not return to the airport a backpack that is obviously not yours? Or when, upon opening the zip on the top flap, you found approximately six to eight knickers, of which two need to go to the wash? Maybe you didn’t open the zip and opened the flap instead. Were you also carrying to Mumbai one of those small kadais that are brilliant for roasting dry masala and making tadka? I can understand someone wanting to keep my bronze, dokra Saraswati. She’s beautifully imperious. Wanting to keep my saris and blouses also makes sense. Those are some sexy backs in those designs, which you can get copied even if you’re not the same size as me. But do you really want that notebook that has mostly doodles and some notes on basic psychology, heroism and masculinity? Because if so, please feel free to photocopy and then return the backpack.

Keep the Saraswati, if you so desire. My father always says Saraswati isn’t to be claimed for yourself. If she wants to stay with you, who am I to object? But my running (ok, walking) shoes are in there. It’s the first time in years that I’ve spent money on something that has nothing but an athletic purpose. Madam, you not returning the backpack is the reason I’m growing fatter at this moment because had I had those shoes, I could have gone for a walk. That backpack also has material that’s essential to the project I’m supposed to be working on next month, so if you don’t return it, you’re actively involved in rendering me unemployed and distinctly close to penniless in the near future.

If you can’t bear to come to the airport, please send it via someone (maybe Scootsy can do it for you?) or call SpiceJet and get them to pick it up. To rely upon SpiceJet to sort this matter out for us is probably going to be a mistake. I don’t have all the empirical evidence to back this up, but I’m pretty certain that SpiceJet is basically an agent of malevolent evil, intent upon obstructing my return to Mumbai. First, the flight from Delhi (SG 161), as you know, was delayed. Then, they seated me next to a man who was hale and hearty for the entire duration of the flight but, literally seconds after we landed, vomited copiously all over my row. (This is why I am not in possession of my boarding pass anymore.) I’m convinced the only reason no disaster struck me between the jet bridge and the conveyor belt is that this area is Mumbai Airport authority’s domain, rather than SpiceJet’s. We already know what happened at the conveyor belt, so no need to rehash that story.

A special shoutout to Rahul of SpiceJet’s supervisor who thinks SpiceJet has no responsibility to make sure I as a passenger get my bags from the belly of the aircraft that carried my luggage and me to Mumbai. According to this fine gentleman, if I haven’t got my bags at the conveyor belt, then it’s my job to go on a detective spree across the airport and then city to locate my property. It’s not like I paid for SpiceJet to carry my luggage or anything. It doesn’t help that the Baggage Services desk is no longer picking up my calls. I’ve ended up writing this letter to you while waiting for them to first pick up and then return the phone to an area where it is not “unavailable”. Perhaps they’ve saved my number in the contact book as She Who Thinks We’re Responsible For Her Luggage (We’re Not). (But you are. Just saying.)

Anyway, the long and short of it is, please give me my backpack back because just the thought of having to fight for compensation from SpiceJet is giving me anxiety attacks. Let us make possible backpack retrieval, not war with customer care.

Thank you,

Yours sincerely and hopefully,

Deepanjana

Arundhati Roy and Utmost Happiness

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Just before The Ministry of Utmost Happiness came out in India, I had a chance to meet Arundhati Roy, which also meant that I got to read the book a little before it arrived on bookshelves. To me, the book is uneven. It has both spectacular craftsmanship as well as eye-roll-inducing clichés. It’s ambitious and flawed, struggling to maintain a balance between all the stories contained in the novel and the issues to which it wants to do justice. The novel demands patience from the reader and if you give it that, it rewards you with fragments of terrible beauty. Moments like the one in which Musa and ‘Garson Hobart’ meet without Tilo; the story of the kidnapped poet who left behind a Hansel-and-Gretel trail of his poetry; the dead fists out of which mustard flowers bloom; the soldier who is torn apart by those who don’t want to remember him. But that doesn’t mean you won’t be frustrated by Roy the storyteller. There are clichés, descriptions that are sticky with romanticism, and tropes burrowing their way through the novel. This is a book that needed an editor who is as gifted, brave and determined as the author. One as ready to fight the good fight for literature as Roy is for her beliefs. Unfortunately, it didn’t get one and so we’re left with a book that manages to be both rewarding and unsatisfying. 

Yet, for all its jagged bits and potholes, I would ask you to buy and read The Ministry of Utmost Happiness because it is one of the bravest responses that we’ve seen to the rigidity that threatens India’s society today. Perhaps there is a future in which we will be able to see Roy’s second independent through a prism that shows it independent of the world that birthed it, but I find myself unable to do that. This novel is a response to what we have around us — an India of shallow clichés, mortifying conservatism, shape-shifting violence and shrinking freedoms. You could argue that the politics of the country are creating a blind spot and as a result context is being prioritised over content as far as this novel is concerned. I’ll take that criticism, but how can you ignore the courage that is needed to be anti-establishment today? 

Here’s what I wrote after meeting Roy. This was published in the Mumbai Mirror.

*

“Nothing makes me happier than to talk particularly about writing,” author Arundhati Roy said as we sat down to chat about the most anticipated novel of 2017, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (MUH). As the poster woman of liberal and Left-leaning India, Roy, 55, has spent the better part of the past two decades talking about subjects that are far from fictional.

In 1997, her first novel, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize and she pole-vaulted into stardom. Since then, fans have waited for the next novel and Roy has gone from famous to notorious, thanks to her anti-establishment essays. A day in jail, threats of sedition, musclemen looking for her address only to land up at the wrong door, controversies — all this is everyday for Roy. But a new novel? That hasn’t happened in 20 years.

About 10 years ago, Roy began writing what would become MUH. At one point, she realised that almost every sentence she was putting down on paper unnerved her. “There was this sense of foreboding,” said Roy. “I would write something and think, ‘Oh my god, I can’t say this, or that, or that either’.” Finally, she told herself, “Write as you think” and whatever felt too provocative or dangerous, “we’ll put it in a drawer.” As it turned out, nothing went into a drawer. “Your ego doesn’t let you do that,” Roy said with a wry smile.

There’s delight in her eyes and laughter on her lips as she speaks about MUH, but there’s also a hint of tautness to Roy’s delicate beauty. She’s charming, but guarded. Her anecdotes and insights bubble forth, but are carefully chosen. She listens not just for questions, but for the intent behind them. Roy isn’t just a bestselling author; she’s a bestselling author anticipating attacks. And she’s ready for them.

A novel approach

Set mostly in Delhi and Kashmir, MUH is precisely the novel you expect from Roy — lyrical and political. Over the years, Roy’s non-fiction essays have been about the underdogs in and victims of the Indian political establishment. Now, those thoughts have wound their way into her fiction. Roy, however, dismissed the overlap. “I don’t think the idea was to channelize ‘issues’ into the book at all,” she said. “But the thing is, over the last 20 years, all these layers of understanding have accumulated inside myself, like some kind of sedimentary rock.”

MUH begins with Anjum, a hijra from old Delhi who survives the crushing violence of the Gujarat riots of 2002 and ultimately finds solace in a graveyard. As a witness, Anjum is reliable because she’s an outlier — both feared and neglected, powerless and powerful. “Anjum has the border of gender running through her,” said Roy. Shuffling between male and female, life and death, Anjum rises as a matriarch who is able to protect the future because she’s survived the past. In the graveyard, she gathers a brood of people who have crossed borders of different kinds — caste, religion, propriety, convention — and now belong nowhere. It’s a celebration of the unorthodox that consciously strives to be more magical than real. Perhaps Roy is also informed by the fact that her own life is thoroughly and joyously unconventional. She’s walked with rebellious outcasts and also into rooms that gleam with privilege. Roy and environmentalist Pradip Kishen remain technically married though they’ve been separated for years. Born in the east, raised in the south, at home in the north and wandering everywhere, she can’t be fitted into the conventional grid. Much like her characters, Roy crosses borders and lines with ease.

About one-third into MUH, Anjum retreats from the novel and Roy begins another tale. This one is set in Kashmir, the blood-stained Jiminy Cricket to India’s Pinocchio. Our most reliable narrator ends up being an outsider named Tilo (who contains more than a few shades of Roy herself), but there are also others who have stories to tell. We’re shown Kashmir through the eyes of a bureaucrat, a militant, an Army man and Tilo. The Valley comes together as an unsolveable problem, a state of melancholia and where hope lives, dies and is reborn. As a Kashmiri says in MUH, “You may have blinded all of us, every one of us, with your pellet guns by then. But you will still have eyes to see what you have done to us.”

“I’m not interested in current affairs”

The novel is jam-packed with issues like state oppression, Naxal violence and casteism, which are regularly being discussed daily in mainstream media. Yet Roy insists these debates had little to do with what is in MUH. “I’m not interested in current affairs,” she said. “I’m interested in the understanding of human nature there. Obviously current affairs affects that, but one of the reasons I’m never in a hurry when I’m writing fiction is that I need to let it settle.” Her own experiences in places like Bastar and Kashmir are the pivots upon which her fiction is balanced. “The understandings of these places are very deep,” she said. “In Kashmir, it’s a deep understanding of the nature of state oppression. You’re always worrying about living and dying, trying to think and counter-think and counter counter-think, and plot and plan. … And people have lived with that for 20 years.”

The other conflict that has captured Roy’s imagination both as a fiction and non-fiction writer is the Naxal movement in central India. “Inside the forest in Bastar, I believe is a war that is fundamental to the future of the human race,” she said. “That absolute disregard for water, river, forest people and ‘We’re going to make a steel city and increase our GDP’. Eventually there aren’t any winners in that war.”

In MUH, hope for the future comes from out of the gruesome conflict in Bastar, which shows both Roy’s optimism and the romanticism that lurks in MUH despite all the harsh reality that informs it.

“I was trying something”

Despite Roy’s efforts to make the two main plots converge, MUH feels like two novellas and many short stories stitched together. It teems with characters and their tales. “I was trying something,” Roy said. “How do you write a novel in which you never walk past anybody? I didn’t want to walk past the guard who’s guarding the Honda city poster, I didn’t want to walk past the cobbler, I just wanted to sit down and smoke a beedi with them. When you do that, what’s the story?”

Yet what emerges out of this isn’t a tale of the little people (the underdogs of MUH are rather obviously heroes and too unoppressed to fit that bill), but an angry rattling of the cage. Particularly in today’s India where resistance and questions are met with rage and abuse, MUH is a strikingly brave book. Roy hasn’t hidden her distaste for our leaders or obscured her opinions of how institutions have failed citizens.

Roy perches her fiction upon real episodes like the 2002 Gujarat riots, the murder of Kashmiri human rights lawyer Jalil Andrabi, and the anti-corruption protests of 2011 that captured the national imagination. The horrors that she describes are all rooted in truth, whether in Kashmir where cinemas became interrogation centres or mainland India where casteism trumps patriotism. Even the incredible episode of a baby appearing in the middle of a protest in Jantar Mantar is a true story. “Years ago, one night in Jantar Mantar, this baby did appear,” Roy insisted.

Anjum is quite evidently modelled on Mona Ahmed, once the capital’s most famous transperson and the subject of Dayanita Singh’s poignant book, Myself Mona Ahmed. The brutal interrogator Major Amrik Singh has much in common with Major Avtar Singh, a former Indian army officer who is believed to have been involved in numerous cases of killings and abductions in Kashmir. Realities like this are all over MUH and frequently overpower the fictional elements.

Surrounded by morality police, vigilantes and state censorship, there’s a growing anxiety about speaking freely in India, which every now and then erupts into debates about intolerance and freedom of expression. Public spaces can no longer promise security to the dissenter. Private spaces are becoming increasingly public as we begin to distrust those who might overhear or insidiously invade our privacy using technology. To write MUH in this climate is an act of courage. Whether or not you agree with Roy or even like her writing, the fact that she has written out the histories that are in MUH makes the novelist a gladiator. It also begs a question that only the future can answer: is this novel limited by the context of our present?

MUH remembers the past that is not yet old enough to be fixed into history books. Roy returns readers to the same scene again and again, each time seeing it through another person’s eyes. “So it’s like a building, and you keep looking at it through different windows and different rooms,” Roy said. Remembering in MUH is the opposite of dismembering, and it’s only possible to do this with fiction. As Simon McBurney wrote in his play Mnemonic, “Every memory that you remember is different because it is remade in the very present that you remember. In other words, in order to remember, you need the imagination.”

“I’ll be proud to say I was wounded.”

Roy, however, insists that MUH be seen as fiction first. “It’s not that you take real people and place them [in the novel], not at all,” she said. “It’s almost like a tree where the tap root, the nourishment comes from deep inside the soil and the air that you live in. But it’s not that the fruit are those things.” She agreed though that the novel wasn’t “based on nothing”. “The air we breathe is seeded with these things,” she said.

Last year, when she was finishing MUH, events in India forced Roy to flee India for the first time. Kashmiri stone pelters were making headlines. Heated debates on television discussed whether they should be seen as anti-nationals because they were attacking Indian security forces. Roy became the symbol to attack because she has been vocal in her criticism of the Army’s human rights violations in the Valley. As people started baying for her blood, Roy left the country and retreated into a hotel room in London. It’s not a decision she’s proud of because India remains the only place in which Roy wants to live and fight.

“I should be what Shakespeare says, ‘Then shall he strip his sleeve and show his scars,” said Roy, quoting from a monologue from Henry V, in which an underdog king speaks to his troops on the eve of a war they’re certain they will lose. He tells them that the fact that they fought is a victory in itself. “I’ll be proud to say I was wounded,” said Roy.

For the author, the bottom line is simple. “Jitna bhi gaali do, would I like to write something else? No,” she said, answering her own question. “Would I like to see it some other way? No. Would I have liked to have written a different book? No.”

Most importantly, it’s only here in this cradle of reality and culture that Arundhati Roy can dream up The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

Hall of Nations

[image error]Photo courtesy Ariel Huber via Wikipedia Commons

Yesterday, the Hall of Nations at Pragati Maidan was demolished. Built in 1972, it’s not old enough to be considered a heritage structure and so, was not considered worth preserving. LC Goyal, Chairman and Managing Director of India Trade Promotion Organisation (ITPO), which owns the building, promised all those who were anguished by the building being torn down that good things would replace it. “It is part of the larger plan under the 130-acre Pragati Maidan redevelopment project,” he told The Indian Express. “In fact, it goes beyond Pragati Maidan itself. Everything has been done in a fair and transparent manner — not just to decongest traffic but to also bring India in sync with global standards. We changed the land use to also include hotels, which will come up in 3.7 acres of the complex.” 

These plans aren’t mollifying anyone, least of all Raj Rewal who was one of the architects who designed the Hall of Nations. “We are being ruled by people who are philistines. They have good knowledge about how to make money, but art and culture are their weak points,” Rewal told The Hindu back in February and he’s hardly likely to feel any different now.

It’s a particularly cruel twist that a piece of modernist architecture has been torn down to way way for modernisation, but the Hall of Nations is not the first building to suffer this fate and nor will it be the last. So why the loud laments? Yes, it is a historic building, built in 1972 to commemorate 25 years of Indian independence and its massive, pillar-less structure was an architectural feat at the time. But it isn’t the fact that it’s from the Indira Gandhi-era that made Hall of Nations significant, though you could argue that this is a rather blatant effort to erase that part of Indian history and build something atop it. However, buildings get torn down and make way for something new all the time. That’s just how it is, particularly in young, growing, shape-shifting cities. But the buildings we deem worthy of preservation are indicators of the identity we’re forging just as our new monuments will be.  

As an ‘ism’, modernism is actually old. This philosophy of rejecting the past, establishing a new aesthetic and grounding one’s creativity in a sparer, more analytical and severe worldview gained traction in the 20th century. Off with the curlicues of the past, break the walls, throw away the rulebook, and focus on the new. It was a vague, manifesto-less, stirring philosophy that was strikingly embodied in architecture. Modernist architecture redefined our notions of modernity itself. Without it, we wouldn’t have the skyline, that visualisation of a city’s heart rate through rectangular high rises, that we all associate with a future-forward city today. The cubist shapes, the emphasis on functionality, the open plans were in stark contrast to labyrinthine, palatial buildings of the past.  

Tearing down the Hall of Nations is a decisive break from the past. This “space-age building made with bullock cart technology” (that is reportedly how Buckminster Fuller described the Hall of Nations) is not how the new India wants to be known. The Hall of Nations is a reminder of a poor country, one that didn’t have resources, one that had to do jugaad. “Anywhere in the industrialised world, the space-frame is made with steel joints,” said Mahendra Raj, the structural engineer of the project, to The Times of India. “In India at the time, we didn’t have enough steel. So we improvised, made it in concrete, hand-poured and cast on site.”

There’s no glory in this for the India of today and so, we shall have a “world-class” convention centre that, if not anything else, can be centrally air-conditioned (one of the reasons for tearing down the Hall of Nations is that it supposedly could not be air-conditioned. Rewal has said this is bunkum). I haven’t seen the design of the structure that’s supposed to take the Hall of Nations’ place, but I’m willing to bet it will be shiny, tightly-shut against the elements and one that is rich with the ornamental Indian-ness that’s on display at new Indian airports. Mudras, art, sculpture and detailing that teeters between awkward and kitschy. But for the decorative elements, these buildings could structurally belong to anywhere and consequently, belong nowhere.

The thing is, buildings like the Hall of Nations are public and visible. Without exerting themselves, they influence the way we imagine both ourselves and progress. We know what the Hall of Nations embodied — a notion of India that was resourceful, hand-crafted and a beehive of activity. It wasn’t perfect, but it was distinctive. Those crafting the new Indian identity have decided that distinctive isn’t enough. 

Is ‘world-class’ simply a euphemism for replica of Western design, with glassy surfaces that reflect rather than encourage others to look in? An air-conditioned monument — with hotels! — in the age of global warming; in a city where to breathe clean air, you have to be rich enough to afford to keep the windows shut and an air purifier on; in a country, where farmers are are driven to desperation by drought. The Hall of Nations spoke of a nation and its dreams of building itself despite its limitations. It’s fallen down like the house of cards that it formally resembled. What is this new structure that replaces it going to embody? What will it reflect of us and what will it inspire in all those who look upon it?    

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

I don’t know whether this date will go down in written history, but I would like to not forget it, which is why I’m here, tapping away at my keyboard while struggling to formulate a clear sentence at the end of what has been a battering ram of a day.

Just before 6pm this evening, the Finance Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha. By this time, most of the Opposition, for whatever its worth, had staged a walkout. Among the few who stood their ground against the government and its Finance Bill — which doesn’t need the upper house’s approval because it’s been introduced as a money bill — and fought the good fight were the MP from Cuttack, Bhatruhari Mahtab of Biju Janata Dal; and NK Premachandran, MP from Kollam, member (fittingly) of the Revolutionary Socialist Party. 

It was Premachandran who pointed out yesterday (March 21) that the Finance Bill contained details that had no business being disguised as a money bill. “According to me, amendments to the RBI Act, and to the Representation of the People Act are in respect of issuance of the electoral rolls,” he said, pointing out one specific example. “How an issuance of the electoral rolls fall within the taxation proposals over matters incidental to the taxation proposal? That is the question which I would like to know.”

There were 27 more such questions that would be raised with the list of amendments to the Finance Bill that were circulated yesterday afternoon. I’ve seen the 30-page document that listed the amendments and I have enormous respect for all those who have decoded it. It is designed to confuse us lesser mortals. However, what is not confusing is that this Finance Bill is, as Premachandran described it yesterday, “backdoor legislation”. Why? Take a look at the list of laws that have been amended in just this document (according to Premachandran, the original Finance Bill amended another 10-odd. I’ll take his word for it): 

The Securities Contracts (Regulation) Act, 1956The Depositories Act, 1996The Companies Act, 2013The Industrial Disputes Act, 1947The Employees’ Provident Funds & Miscellaneous Provisionst Act, 1952The Copyright Act, 1957The Trade marks Act, 1999The Railway Claims Tribunal Act, 1987The Railways Act, 1989The Smugglers & Foreign Exchange Manipulators (Forfeiture of Property) Act, 1976The Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999The Airports Authority of India Act, 1994The Control of National Highways (Land and Traffic) Act, 2002The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India Act, 1997The Information Technology Act, 2000The Airports Economic Regulatory Authority of India Act, 2008The Competition Act, 2002The Cinematograph Act, 1952The Income Tax Act, 1961The Customs Act, 1962The Administrative Tribunals Act, 1985The Consumer Protection Act, 1986The Securities and Exchange Board of India Act, 1992The Recovery of Debts Due to Banks and Financial Institutions Act, 1993The Electricity Act, 2003The Armed Forces Tribunal Act, 2007The National Green Tribunal Act, 2010.

Who knew everything from the Cinematograph Act to Airports Authority to NGT is a finance issue?

There’s also the minor issue of the Finance Bill replacing Tribunals and from the look of things, it seems the Centre is basically going to decide all these appointments. Fun times for anyone who’s facing the government as a litigant before one of these Tribunals. 

Oh and Aadhaar, which is not mandatory according to the Supreme Court, but without which we will no longer be able to file taxes, and the absence of which will render our PAN cards invalid. The government reserves the right to exempt people from having Aadhaar, but for those of us without an ‘in’, it’s time to hand over your personal data. The grand plan is to merge all the data that the government has on you with Aadhaar to make one database, which at one fell swoop lets those with access know everything from biometrics to religion to bank transaction to internet browser history. Is this the point where you tell me, “But I have nothing to hide.” Neither do I, but that doesn’t mean I lose the right to control who gets my data or my right to privacy. It’s like this. We all know that all of us have genitalia, but that doesn’t mean we go around naked from waist below. Why? Because we choose who we would like to flash and to what extent, if at all. Same difference with data.

Except of course I, and every other Indian who isn’t exempted by the Centre, have lost my right to privacy and am left vulnerable to all sorts of attacks. The only saving grace at this point is that the Aadhaar is anything but systematically done, going by the accounts of Aadhaar being done without biometrics and for dogs, trees and chairs. Whether it can be used to pick out dissidents or targets during riots, who knows? 

At one point today, this happened: 

[image error]

This, ladies and gents, was in Parliament. The country’s Finance Minister admitted in Lok Sabha that he was ignoring the Supreme Court and forcing citizens to bow to a governmental will. Hooray for our democratic republic. 

I’ve no idea what lies ahead for us. I hope it involves a law regarding online privacy at least, but I have to admit, I’m struggling to care because watching an elected government systematically clip democratic freedoms is…overwhelming.

Today, at least, fiction actually feels more powerful and capable than parliamentary democracy. Maybe Bend Sinister after that, followed by The Life And Times of Michael K. I’m open to suggestions, by the way. If we’re going to give up our liberties, let’s at least have a good reading list to show for it. 

Victoria Finlay And The Arnolfini Portrait

[image error] The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan Van Eyck, 1434

This passage describes the painting above and is from Victoria Finlay’s book, Colours: Travels Through The Paintbox:

It shows a couple standing inside a richly furnished room; they are holding hands but to me they do not look as if they are in love. In fact, quite the opposite: the man looks old and cold in his fur cloak and huge hat; the woman is looking away from him, and both of them seem to exude a deep sadness. For years the painting was believed to be a portrait of the marriage of a wealthy merchant called Giovanni Arnolfini and his young bride Giovanna. But why should they have commissioned such an unhappy picture? And why are they surrounded by objects that might be read as symbolising corruption?

On a wooden chair there is a tiny carving of St Margaret of Antioch, a virgin martyr, who became the patron saint of childbirth — reinforcing the suggestion that this lady is pregnant. The very large and very red bed in the room rather suggests the same. More disturbing, however, is the mirror. It is decorated with scenes from the Passion of Christ (a cycle of suffering), and it also has ten ‘teeth’ around it, reminiscent of the ten-spiked wheel under which another virgin martyr, St Catherine of Alexandria, was tortured to death. St Catherine’s story, like St Margaret’s, is one of brutality — and the room in Van Eyck’s painting is full of objects that could signal a brutal relationship. There is a gargoyle hovering above the couple’s clasped hands, and a brush that looks like a parody of male and female private parts, hung up like a trophy. As I looked at it one day, I wondered whether this object may possibly have been intended to symbolise sexual abuse, and whether this painting might actually be an allegory rather than a wedding picture.

The couple have always seemed to me to look like Adam and Eve (transposed to Van Eyck’s own time in terms of costume) just after the Fall, and that idea is reinforced by fruit tumbling over the window sill. And if this was the artist’s intention, it perhaps solves the mystery of the woman’s ermine-lined dress. It is green — and therefore symbolic of fertility and gardens. And it is also made of verdigris, a manufactured substance that is born from the corruption of pure metal. Although today it is almost as bright as when Van Eyck painted it, the artist cannot have known for sure that his new technique would last the centuries and be named after him as a result. For him, verdigris would have been a seductive green paint that sometimes turned black: a perfect pigment, perhaps, to represent the fall of humanity.   

That is how closely a critic observes a painting. That’s how many stories their mind must store, so that they don’t miss a single clue that an artist may have embedded in their work of art. You’re welcome to disagree with Finlay — after all, The National Gallery does — and say that she’s reading too much into the painting, but just look at the possibilities that she opens up. How can you not start imagining and using the zoom tool on the National Gallery page with a vengeance?

There’s a popular notion that critics offer the last word. What they pronounce about a work is the last word. I think that’s tosh. The job of a critic is to open up possibilities, provided the artist has done their bit and created a work with possibilities.  

Eye-rolls are frequently directed at critics for finding depths in relatively shallow pools of creativity. I don’t disagree that those who see — not just critics, but literally anyone who is paying enough attention to any work of art — might find nuances that the artist didn’t realise were layering their work. After all, the act of seeing completes a work of art. A viewer’s perspective, informed by their own experience and learning, is the finishing touch. So yes, perhaps critics sometimes do read more than was necessarily intended, but that isn’t any reason to dismiss the act of observing, analysing and knowing how to use both your learning and your imagination. Also, artists — even the talentless wannabes — pour themselves into their art. I’m yet to come across any one with a creative shred in their DNA who doesn’t try to pack in as much meaning and emotion as possible in every detail of their work. If they’re not gifted, this business of storytelling and detailing may be clumsy or incomprehensible. It doesn’t mean the story isn’t there in the work though; only that it’s been bludgeoned into becoming unrecognisable. So yes, a critic might add depth to a work of art, but to begin with the assumption that a creative work is meaningless? That’s unfair. 

What I love about Finlay’s reading of The Arnolfini Portrait is that it meshes her knowledge of Van Eyck’s times (the significance of Christian iconography, the meanings associated with colours and objects in the 15th century, etc) with a sensitivity and awareness of violence against women that is far more modern. By which I don’t mean that no one abused women in the 15th century — I’m not an idiot — but that it’s in more recent centuries that we’ve started acknowledging those stories. If Van Eyck did make this painting as a way of recording a young girl being raped, for instance, then it’s a story that he would have had to hide in the details because a) the man is a wealthy merchant which means he was probably influential too and wouldn’t take kindly to being called an abuser. B) Women’s suffering was only to be talked about if it was the martyrdom of a saint. Ordinary women were not subjects, but objects. Their suffering could at best be gossip. It was not to be discussed openly and certainly not to be immortalised or made real in a painting.

How do you record something that has officially not happened? How do you document something that no one will admit to or talk about? Perhaps you ignore it. But maybe, just maybe, you paint in details that seem just a little random and hints of suffering, and hope that someone will look close enough at your painting.   

P.S. 

So I was looking up St Margaret’s story since I didn’t know it and it turns out she had a rather horrible life and death, like pretty much all the saints and the virgin martyrs in particular. Keep in mind she would have had all this happen to her when she was a teenager. St Catherine, she of the wheel that sparkles so festively in fireworks, was dead by the age of 18 after having:

beaten 50 of the best (male) philosophers of Alexandrian Egypt at debatebeen whippedbeen imprisoned long enough for 200 people to visit herbeen torturedbeen spiked on a breaking wheel that mercifully shattered at her touch. 

In between all this, Maxentius, who was in charge of torturing Catherine, also found the time to propose marriage to her. I wonder why she said no… . 

Anyway, so it turns out there are three women among the Fourteen Holy Helpers, who are believed to protect people from diseases and also guided Joan of Arc. St Margaret, St Catherine and St Barbara. St Barbara was removed from the General Roman Calendar because there aren’t definite dates for this third century saint’s story (small eye-roll here).

Briefly, Barbara was the daughter of Dioscorus. After her mother died, her father got mad protective and because she was beautiful, she was locked up in a tower a la Rapunzel, sans the hair that doubled up as a rope ladder. Left to her own devices and only occasionally visited by her teachers, Barbara realised her father and teachers’ idols were false. She secretly became a Christian and in a move reminiscent of Meerabai, offered herself completely to the Christian god. Which meant saying no to the offers of marriage that soon came her way.

When Barbara finally told Dioscorus that she was a Christian, he responded by pulling out his sword. Smartly, she ran away. Dioscorus found her, beat her, starved her, and locked her up. Then he handed her over to the prefect of the city, and the two men tortured her together. Nothing like a mangled woman to bring two men closer. One of the stories says she would be tortured by day and Jesus would heal her wounds at night, which sounds horrible because that just meant more torture. In case you were wondering what “torture” entails, here’s one detail: “Barbara, along with another virtuous Christian woman named Juliana, were injured with rakes and hooks and led naked throughout the city.”

Keep in mind, her father, who ‘loved’ her so much, is party to this. Ultimately, he would be the one who beheaded her too. Apparently Dioscorus and the prefect were struck by lightning as punishment and died right after. You’ve got to wonder about God’s sense of timing. A little earlier and maybe Barbara could have survived?

Anyway, that’s not the twist in the tale. Guess who are the professions that enjoy Barbara’s patronage? Armourers, architects, artillerymen, firemen, mathematicians, miners, tunnellers, chemical engineers, and prisoners. I’ve got to admit, I did not see that coming. These are professions that would conventionally be considered intensely masculine and yet looking over them is this Rapunzel-meets-Meerabai woman whose story only refers to her torture and femininity (which was used against her), but must have once contained details of ingenuity, resistance, stratagems and escape plans because why else is she the patron saint for this set of professions?     

She needs…

[image error]

Then maybe, just maybe she’ll allow a little dream to be born. 

I’d written this just a few months after moving to Delhi. A year later, having decided to stay put in this city for a little longer, I wonder if Delhi’s got the piece of me it wanted.