The Pain of Others: a short review essay on Somnath Hore

Somnath Hore was a great artist of collective hope and hardship, but his abiding legacy is to make us feel each human tragedy as our own.

(My India Today review of a Somnath Hore retrospective 'Birth of a White Rose', held at the Kiran Nader Museum of Art in the summer of 2022. To see some images from the exhibition, click here.)

What makes someone become an artist? Somnath Hore, who would have been 101 this summer, was first moved to draw in December 1942 by a moment of violence: the Japanese bombing of a village called Patia in what is now Bangladesh. Hore was then a B.Sc. student at City College in Calcutta, but World War II evacuation had forced him to return to his Chittagong home. The ghastly sight of Patia’s dead and wounded seemed to demand recording in some way, and it was images to which the young man turned.

In Calcutta, he had begun to design posters for the Communist Party, but it was Chittagong that really put Hore on his political and artistic path. Two things happened in 1943: the Bengal famine began, and Hore met Chittaprosad. Six years Hore’s senior and also from Chittagong, Chittaprosad was already a prolific artist documenting the lives of Bengal’s rural poor. As a man-made colonial tragedy killed millions around them, Chittaprosad encouraged Hore to draw portraits of the hungry, sick and dying. “From morning to evening I used to accompany him on his rounds,” Hore wrote later. “He initiated me into directly sketching the people I saw on streets and hospitals.”

In 1945, Hore enrolled for formal art training at the Government College of Art and Craft. In 1946, the Communist party sent him off to Tebhaga in North Bengal, where he created a diary-like documentation of the massive peasant protests. It was a tumultuous decade, moving between politics and art while having to make a living by teaching school students art. When the government again banned the Communist party, he went underground. It was not until 1957-58 that Hore got his diploma, and left Calcutta and politics to become a lecturer at the future Delhi College of Art.

The show at Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art is superb; its gravitas undimmed by ill-advised curatorial versifying: sample “He witnessed as a child a world not so fair,/ Disparities between rich and poor had no compare....” 

It’s clear that Hore experimented with form and material through his six decades of art-making. It’s also clear how much his lifelong sensibility was sculpted by the tragic events of his youth. Over and over, you see him depict the suffering human body. Until the 1950s, he also depicts the magical charge of hope produced when these same bodies come together—to plant seeds, flags, ideas. But the stunning realism of the early woodcuts and linocuts gives way to abstraction, and a greater economy of the line. His figures are all concave stomachs, stick-like limbs and begging hands. 

They transition into the jagged, torn, blistered bodies of his bronze phase (animals, too, show effects of violence), and an almost meditative late style, using pulped paper. Here the lacerated body is conceived as texture rather than as line: white on white, paper scored, torn and moulded back into paper. The pain of others remained, forever, under his skin.  

(Birth of a White Rose is on at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, until June 30, 2022.) 

Driven from home - II

My Mirror column (31 May 2020):
 
The second of a two-part column.

Balraj Sahni's suffering rickshawala in Do Bigha Zamin (1953) inaugurated a migrant worker narrative whose themes continue to resonate tragically, in our films and reality.

The migrant narrative in Indian cinema is that no-one leaves home if they don't have to. In Muzaffar Ali's Gaman (1978), which I wrote about earlier this month, Ghulam (Farooque Shaikh) only decides to leave his Awadh village when he realizes that there is no work for him there, and increasingly little income. The local landlord has taken advantage of Ghulam's father's death to gobble up the better portion of his land. And Ghulam has a friend (Jalal Agha) who has been talking up the city as a place overflowing with money. The city is as much of a last resort in Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zamin (1953), which I started to write about last week. The protagonist Shambhu (Balraj Sahni) is desperate not to lose his land to a cheating zamindar, and the city seems the only possible way to earn the money he needs. But it is the 1950s, and Shambhu has no friends in Calcutta. He hears of one villager who works as a 'boy' in Firpo's Hotel. “What's a 'boy'?” Shambhu asks. “Must be some important position, he wears a fancy uniform,” comes the answer. A similar ironic register reappears a little later when Laloo the shoeshine boy points out the Grand Hotel to Shambhu's little son Bachhua as the place where he lives. He neglects to spell it out: on the pavement.

The pavement does end up being a temporary home to Shambhu and Bachhua, just as it is to Raj Kapoor in films like Shree 420 and Phir Subah Hogi. And on the pavement, that very first night, they find themselves beside a man who yells in his sleep, reliving every night the mill accident in which he lost a limb. That accident reference seems to presage the dangers of industrialisation: the dangers the machine can pose to the human body. The accident will hit closer home later in the film, through a chilling scene in which a pair of urban lovers make two rickshawallas race each other. And you see it instantly then: that what is dangerous is not the machine, but the human being callous enough to treat other human beings like machines.

Not all humans in the city are callous, though. In Roy's vision of the city, the poor help each other out, forging bonds across region and language and community. The Bengali woman who controls the slum has adopted the orphaned girl from Bihar as her 'granddaughter'. The sick older man in the adjacent kholi (Nazir Hussain) whom Shambhu helps out becomes his route to pulling a rickshaw.

Young Bachhua makes fast friends, too. He learns to polish shoes from Laloo, and at one juncture, befriends a pickpocket. Alongside making direct references to Awara, DBZ uses the pickpocket as the figure against which the honest hero must define himself. But Bachhua's plotline with the young pickpocket is also a way for the film to step away from being preachily unrealistic. Through Bachhua's eyes, we see how the temptation of dishonesty rises with the sheer impossibility of trying to make an honest living when you have no access to capital. And in his pickpocket friend's attempt to help him, we see quite clearly that the thief can be a good friend. Most remarkable, though, is the scene where the pickpocket jeers at Bachchua for imploring him. Begging, DBZ suggests perspicaciously, is against the honour of thieves.

But unlike in Bicycle Thieves, where we empathise with the adult protagonist who finds himself reduced to theft, DBZ's empathy has a limit. The boy can be forgiven for a lapse, but the adult man cannot succumb at any cost. Balraj Sahni's portrayal of Shambhu takes the dignity of labour to its acme, continuing to take two little girls to their school when their middle class father can no longer afford the cost of the daily rickshaw ride.

That theme of heroic honesty was repeated in several other films that decade, about migrants who came to Calcutta from even further away – the dry-fruits trader from Afghanistan in the case of Tapan Sinha's 1957 Bengali film Kabuliwala, remade in Hindi in 1961 by Hemen Gupta with Sahni in the lead role, and the cloth-pedlar from China in the case of Mrinal Sen's breakout film Neel Akasher Neechey (1959). But in DBZ, as in so many Indian classics of the 1950s, from Pyaasa to Shree 420, the hero's exhortation to honesty is couched in terms that pit the city against the village: “Kisaan ka beta hoke tune chori ki? (You're the son of a farmer, and you stole?)” Shambhu berates Bachhua.

But heroic honesty does not bring any of these migrant heroes either joy or justice. What seems to govern these tragic lives is the accident. The accident that injures Shambhu in Do Bigha Zamin propels the family into an abyss from which they look unlikely to emerge at film's end. The accident recurs in later Indian films about migrants – Gaman in 1978, or two other films I wrote about recently, Liar's Dice, which premiered at Sundance in 2013, and I.D. (2012), which should be watched more widely. In Gaman, an accident kills another taxi driver: someone close to the hero. In Liar's Dice, the female protagonist makes her way to the city because her migrant husband has stopped answering messages (just like Nirupa Roy's Parvati did in DBZ) -- and learns that an accident has claimed him.

In Chaitanya Tamhane's quietly astounding Court (2015), a sewage worker's accidental death is sought to be pinned on a Dalit shahir's song about suicide. But as every worker knows, when no safety nets are provided, an accident is just a euphemism for institutionalised murder. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 31 May 2020. The first part of this column is here.

A Wizard of Song

My Mirror column:

Sahir Ludhianvi, whose 99th birthday it is today, brought remarkable sophistication to the Hindi film lyric, yet never lost the simplicity of the popular. The first of a two-part column.

A collage of Sahir Ludhianvi's letters, poetry and photographs recovered from a scrap shop in Juhu by archivist Shivendra Singh Dungarpur in 2019.

Sometime in 1937, a young man who had just taken his matriculation examination in Ludhiana read the words of the poet Mohammad Iqbal bemoaning the loss of the 19^th century poet Daagh Dehlvi, and found in them the pen-name by which he would be known forever. The words were these: “Is chaman mein honge paida bulbul-e-shiraz bhi,/ Sainkdon sahir bhi honge, sahib-e-ijaaz bhi... /Hubahu kheenchega lekin ishq ki tasveer kaun?/ Uth gaya nawak fagan, maarega dil pe teer kaun?” [“There will be many nightingales born in this garden/ Countless magicians, men who work miracles as well... But who will sketch such a vivid portrait of love, Who will enchant the heart, now that the marksman is gone?”]

Young Abdul Hayee decided that he would henceforth be ‘Sahir’, and in the well-worn tradition of Urdu poets, he took the town of his birth as the second part of his name.

Akshay Manwani’s book on Sahir Ludhianvi, from which the above anecdote is taken, cites the poet’s reasons for this decision from Naresh Kumar Shaad’s ‘Sahir Ke Saath Ek Shaam’ – “Since I never had much of an opinion about my poetry and always considered myself one amongst several poets, the word “sahir” and its use in the poem immediately caught my attention and I chose it as my takhallus”.

The story seems to me to reveal a great deal about Sahir, his personality and his politics. In drawing his pen-name from the words of one great Urdu poet about another, Sahir placed himself squarely within a grand literary tradition. And calling himself a magician was a lofty claim to make. Yet he simultaneously undercut the claim to uniqueness, because Iqbal had spoken of “sainkdon sahir”. That self-deprecation suggests a political position: a man who holds that poets, too, are a class: a class of those who do magic with words. It is also an early glimpse of a man who could make himself immortal with a song about being a poet of the moment. “Main pal do pal ka shayar hoon, pal do pal meri kahaani hai”, picturised on Amitabh Bachchan’s poet hero in Yash Chopra’s ‘Kabhie Kabhie’, became one of Sahir’s most popularly sung lyrics: “Kal aur aayenge naghmon ki khilti kaliyan chunnewale,/ Mujhse behtar kehnewale, tumse behtar sunnewale,/ Kal koi mujhko yaad kare, kyun koi mujhko yaad kare?/Masroof zamana mere liye, kyon vaqt apna barbaad kare? [Tomorrow there will be more who can pick buds that bloom into songs/ Speakers better than me, Listeners better than you,/ Tomorrow if someone remembers me, why would someone remember me,/ The future will be too busy to waste its time on me.”

There was something of the romantic hero about Sahir, and very occasionally, that quality seeped through into the films that used his verse. That this happened even in an industry that rarely gives writers their due speaks to the power of Sahir’s words as much as his persona, his close – if often fraught – relationships with colleagues. Much before Kabhi Kabhie – a film whose very title comes from a poem from Sahir’s hugely successful book ‘Talkhiyan’ that director Yash Chopra had read as a young man in Jalandhar – there was ‘Pyaasa’, in which Guru Dutt’s hero Vijay is a young poet who goes from youthful romantic idealism to bitter disillusionment with the world around him. Sahir’s own trajectory as a Progressive poet – his critique of feudalism and capitalism, his attacks on social hypocrisy, especially around prostitution – gave Vijay his poetic voice.

Sahir’s songs for ‘Pyaasa’ also displayed his unrivalled range. “Jaane woh kaise log thhe jinke pyaar ko pyaar mila” is an anthem to unrequited love that could make anyone feel sorry for themselves. “Jinhe naaz hai Hind pe woh kahan hain” and “Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye toh kya hai” are two of the most trenchantly critical songs ever written for the Indian screen. But ‘Pyaasa’ also contains the immortal “Sar jo tera chakraye”, a tel maalish song which manages to be socially sharp, and “Aaj sajan mohe ang laga le”, a love song in the form of a Vaishnava lyric, allowing us to see the sex worker Gulab’s (Waheeda Rehman) longing for Vijay as Radha’s for Krishna.

There were many things that made Sahir Ludhianvi unusual, and certainly this was true of the songs he sometimes put into the mouths of female characters. Poetry everywhere, and Urdu poetry especially, is filled to the brim with paeans to the physical beauty of women, and Sahir wrote many such love lyrics, often sung by Mohammad Rafi.

But only Sahir could make the heroine sing in praise of the hero’s beauty. So Vyjayanthimala could sing with perfectly believable abandon about Dilip Kumar’s hair “Ude jab jab zulfein teri,/ Kunwaariyon ka dil machle, jind meriye”. Or Reena Roy could describe herself as lost in Rakesh Roshan’s eyes in ‘Dhanwan’ (1981): “Yeh aankhein dekh kar hum/ Saari duniya bhool jaate hain,/ Inhein paane ki dhun mein/ Har tamanna bhool jaate hain”. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Mar 2020. (Second part follows.)

Under the influence

My Mirror column:

The under-watched classic Bigger Than Life turns family drama into almost-horror, with prescient warnings against modern medicine and delusional masculinity

 
The first 20 minutes of Bigger Than Life seem to paint a picture of the perfect family man, who’s also a hard-working, pleasant colleague. A schoolteacher in suburban 1950s America, Ed Avery (James Mason in a career-defining performance) is the nice guy you ask to help push your stalled car, the guy who lets the kid in detention go if he can name one Great Lake out of the five, the guy who sprints on to the last bus after school to work a second job at a garage.

But those first 20 minutes also show us that Ed is also the sort of guy who thinks he can handle everything, and do so alone: he hasn’t told his wife about the garage job because she’ll think it’s beneath him, nor mentioned the pains he’s had for six months because he thinks they’re nothing. So it doesn’t seem surprising that when he’s forced to go to hospital after a blackout, his first instinct is to instruct his little son Richie to be “the man around here” and “take care of your mother”.

On the surface, Nicholas Ray’s film is about the dangerous mental side effects of a miracle drug for the body. Ed is diagnosed with a rare inflammation of the arteries, and treated successfully with cortisone – until he starts to take it in excess. The mood swings, paranoia and manic depression that result only reinforce his impaired judgement, making him take still more pills. Screenwriters Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum based the script on an article called ‘Ten Feet Tall’ by Berton Roueché, medical staff writer for The New Yorker, about a real schoolteacher’s experience with high-dosage cortisone. And though this is 1950s America, and patient and doctor are well-acquainted, even friendly, the film clearly indicates how alienating hospitalisation is: the non-stop tests, the solitary confinement, the ghostliness of barium meal, the unrecognisable medical jargon in which you hear your own body described.

But Ray, a director more famous for films such as Rebel Without a Cause and In a Lonely Place, was a man both ahead of his time and able to see into the depths of it. Released in 1956, when much of America was watching the era-defining sitcom Father Knows Best, Bigger Than Life revealed the frightening cracks in that idyllic ’50s family picture. At one level, Ed Avery’s symptoms are those of a mentally ill man, but he can certainly also be viewed as a barely-exaggerated version of the ordinary neighbourhood patriarch, the father who thinks he knows best even when he clearly doesn’t. This is the man insecure about being a “male schoolmarm”, who also has delusions of grandeur about schooling the nation. He insults his wife (“What a shame I couldn’t have married... my intellectual equal!”) and pushes his child beyond breaking point in the name of prepping him for the real world (“If you let it at ‘good enough’ right now, that’s the way you’ll be later on.”).

The film is also a powerful indictment of the pressures of life in a consumerist era, for a man trying to give himself and his family a good life on a single schoolteacher’s salary. The Averys’ house is filled with posters of faraway European holiday destinations, and there are wry, hopeful conversations about vacations and “getting away from it all” – while the camera often focuses on James Mason’s watch, and time and lateness is a frequent topic. The tight budgeting that makes Ed work a secret second job has as its flip side the grandiose display he indulges in when under the influence of the cortisone: hustling his wife into a fancy designer store, being rude to the saleswomen, and insisting on buying her two expensive dresses with a cheque that eventually bounces.

The more unbalanced Ed gets, the more he is convinced that he is the only smart person around. The milkman’s jangling of a bell seems to him deliberately designed to annoy him “because I work with my mind”, the other drivers on the street irritate him, his son and wife disappoint him, and the children he teaches for a living seem to him idiots. “We’re breeding a race of moral midgets,” he declares at a PTA meeting, eliciting mostly gasps of disbelief – but also a couple of votes for future school principal.

Watching Bigger Than Life in 2020, the self-aggrandising family man who thinks the country needs to do away with “all this hogwash about self-expression, permissiveness and emotional security” and focus on inculcating “a sense of duty” feels terrifyingly familiar. He might be your neighbour, your uncle, your father or your boss. And his condition is getting worse, under the influence of a collective drug called nationalism, being doled out for free at a counter near you.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 February 2020.

Blue-sky filmmaking

My Mirror column:

The late Mrinal Sen’s career took off with a 1959 film, Neel Akasher Neechey, a rare portrait of a Chinese protagonist in Indian cinema.

Mrinal Sen’s directorial career started with a hiccup. Raat Bhore, starring Uttam Kumar and Sabitri Chatterjee as the lead pair, was released the same year as Sen’s contemporary Satyajit Ray released Pather Panchali (1955). But while Pather Panchali made Ray the immediate toast of the town (and the world), Raat Bhore sank at the box office and was panned by the critics.

In 1959, however, Mrinal Sen made a second film, Neel Akasher Neechey, and this one gained him both popular approval and acclaim from high places. Even here, though, Sen was not the first choice as director. The singer-composer Hemanta Mukherjee (known to Hindi film-viewers as Hemant Kumar) was starting his own film production house and initially approached Sen only to write the script. It was only later, when he had disagreements with the director he had chosen, that Hemanta decided to offer the job to Sen.

Based on a piece called ‘Cheeni Feriwalla’ from the famous Hindi writer Mahadevi Varma’s book Smriti ki Rekhayein (Lines of Memory), the film traces the unexpected connection that develops between an itinerant Chinese peddler and a Bengali housewife who is an active participant in Gandhi's Civil Disobedience Movement. The treatment of the central relationship tugs unabashedly at heart-strings – Mrinal Sen later looked back at it as embarrassingly sentimental. But the thematic content is interesting even today.

Neel Akasher Neechey opens in the Kolkata of 1930, and in bringing that historical-political context to life with shots of newspaper headlines, nationalist speeches, and street-corner protests, Sen shows glimpses of the full-frontal political filmmaking that he would later be identified with. The first time we see our protagonist, Kali Banerjee as Wang Lu, he is but a blip on a screen dominated by a horde of schoolboys chanting, “The policeman’s stick, we don't fear it!” The city is in the grip of nationalist fervour, and the Chinese street seller is caught unawares. But the policeman who grabs him also lets him go almost immediately, recognising an outsider even as they both speak in Hindustani – as Calcuttans used to call the hybrid Hindi of the city’s streets, a lingua franca likely shaped by the Bengali speaker’s inability to handle the high genderedness of Khari Boli Hindi, and spoken by the polyglot city of Biharis and Anglo-Indians and Armenians and yes, the Chinese.

Among the first interactions the film shows between Wang and the locals is another troupe of children following him in the streets, yelling, “Here comes the Chinaman, he’ll take you away!” The scene offers up the first of the urban myths that seem to follow the foreigner in India. One little girl tries to stop the other kids, but even her childish sweetness is based on the belief that if you call a Chinaman a Chinaman, you’ll turn into one yourself, conjuring up what is to her clearly a horrifying vision (“Chinaman ke Chinaman bolle, shobai Chinaman hoye jabe”). Another weird Chinaman myth is provided by a household help called Haran, who claims they save their ill-gotten gains as gold teeth.

The exchange between Wang and the little girl evokes another important film of the period, Kabuliwala, which was made in Bengali in 1957 and in Hindi in 1961. Based on Tagore’s 1892 short story, it was also centred on a man from a distant country who walks the streets of Calcutta selling things. And sure enough, this is borne out by what happens next. Where the Afghan Kabuliwala saw his far-away daughter in the figure of little Mini, Sen’s lonely Chinese-silk-seller begins to see his long-lost sister in Basanti, the Bengali bhadramahila whose colloquial use of “bhai” Wang hears literally.

The sister-brother theme is, of course, one that has particular resonance in Bengali cinema, from Pather Panchali’s Durga and Apu to Ritwik Ghatak's Subarnarekha and Meghe Dhaka Tara. But here Sen uses it to a broader effect, suggesting a bond of kinship across class and language and country. He even brings in the rakhi-tying that was adopted by Bengal’s Swadeshi movement to produce a ritual bond between communities.

Calcutta’s Chinatown appeared in several big Hindi films of the period, notably Howrah Bridge (1958) and Chinatown (1962), both made by Shakti Samanta. But it served primarily as a setting for illegalities, with the depiction of the Chinese community stopping at Helen singing ‘Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu’ and Madan Puri as a Chinese villain named John Chang. In Neel Akasher Neechey, that depiction feels more substantial: the Tiretta Bazar ghetto where Wang lives, the Chinese temple where he once prays, the dhaba where a mix of locals and Chinese men eat, the latter eating their rice with chopsticks from a bowl. Together with a running stereotype of all Chinamen being involved in the opium trade, Sen creates a vivid picture of life in Calcutta as a Chinese alien.

And yet, in what might be the film’s most wonderful exchange, when the Swadeshi khadi-wearing woman tries to tell the Chinese man she doesn’t wear foreign stuff, he insists he is not a foreigner: “Eyes not blue, not foreigner, Chinaman!” Released in the era of Panchsheel, the film’s unspoken message of Indians and Chinese as being on the same side of a colonial divide was much appreciated by Nehru, who told Sen: “You have done a great service to the nation.”

It is a sad comment on how little faith our state has in our people that declining Sino-Indian relations after 1962 led the same film to be banned, albeit briefly.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Jan 2018.

A Star Implodes

My Mirror column:

The newest version of A Star is Born updates the classic to our times — but its central narrative remains, more than ever, that of a man destroying himself.

Remakes are fascinating things, so long as you aren’t profoundly attached to the original. The first two versions of A Star is Born (1937 and 1954) revealed the underbelly of the Hollywood studio system, while the 1976 film and the newest one are set in the music industry.

Other differences abound. The pioneering grandmother figure who provided the 1937 heroine both inspiration and monetary backing, for instance, vanished from the 1954 and 1976 films, only to be reworked in the 2018 version into the heroine’s proud father — a chauffeur who talks of how he could have been a bigger crooner than Frank Sinatra.

But characters and setting apart, the new film directed by Bradley Cooper (and starring Cooper and Lady Gaga) retains the narrative core of the previous three iterations — a legendary male artiste with addiction issues discovers and helps promote a younger woman, only to find his career collapsing as hers begins to soar.

There’s something inescapably gendered about both parts of this premise. First, the supremely talented young woman who needs the older male star to tell her she’s good before she can even begin to see herself as an artist of any worth. And second, the man’s inability to deal with the fact of his romantic partner’s success, leading to jealousy and depression and growing substance abuse, ending in tragedy. Given that the first film was made over 80 years ago, it seems striking that this dual narrative — of female empowerment by a man and of the man’s consequent decline in the face of that empowerment — has stayed so substantially the same.

It isn’t, of course, that there have been no shifts in the dynamic. The 1937 Esther Blodgett first catches the 1937 Norman Maine’s eye based on her looks, not her talent. This despite the fact that their meeting is part of a scene that’s one of the only times we actually see Janet Gaynor’s Esther ‘act’: as a waitress at a big Hollywood party, she does slightly exaggerated comic imitations of various stars while serving hors d'oeuvres. But Fredric March’s Norman Maine begins a flirtation and decides she is star material without even having seen her do that little act.

By 1954, things are a little less shallow: James Mason’s version of Norman Maine starts flirting with Judy Garland’s Esther Blodgett after she has rescued him from a public drunken spectacle, and only pronounces on her talent after having heard her sing in the small band of which she is a part. In the 2018 film, real-life musical star Lady Gaga puts in an incandescent performance as Ally, a waitress who often performs among friends in a drag bar, but has never had the confidence to sing her own lyrics in public until literally dragged on stage by rockstar Jackson Maine (Cooper), who has secretly done an arrangement for a song she sang for him in private.

Many other parts of the romantic connection between the two protagonists have remained constant through all four films. For instance, the male star’s attraction to the younger heroine is expressed at least partly in assuring her that she is fine the way she is, and that her hair or face or nose doesn’t need to be altered in order to make her marketably attractive. That stress on Esther/Ally’s ‘naturalness’ is part of the vision of her character as ‘unspoilt’, a study in contrast to the artifice that is presented as the norm within the entertainment industry. Allied to this is the whirlwind romance, with the desire for a secret elopement and a quiet wedding coming up against the business interests that would benefit from making the star couple’s lives a media event, rather than letting them live out their fantasy of everyday domesticity.

But what seems to me particularly interesting about the heroine’s ‘unspoilt’ status is the way in which her freshness and her outsider status become ways in which the man seeks to rejuvenate himself. In the 1937 and 1954 films, that sense of rejuvenation is only personal, not professional: Norman Maine does not actually seek to recharge his actorly creativity by working with Esther. In 2018, though, Ally’s first appearance on stage is with Jack, and the video of their performance goes viral — making her instantly famous, but also giving him a new lease of life.
At many levels, Cooper’s 2018 hero is more sympathetic than the previous versions. Unlike in the 1937 and 1954 films, for example, Maine's drunken appearance at his partner’s award ceremony does not actually involve him snatching her microphone and taking over her acceptance speech to make a derisive or depressed one of his own. Male entitlement is not quite as vocal as it used to be. But the embarrassment Cooper’s character makes of himself is as bad, made worse by today's digital amplification. Also, his nasty jealous rage expresses itself in private, couched as accusations of selling out creatively.

It as if the more deeply intertwined their creative lives are, the more he actually draws artistic validation from her, the more sophisticated his competitive equation with her becomes. Somehow even the reconstructed man is still making it all about himself.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Oct 2018.

Unfortunately, Him Too.

My Mirror column:

Watching the 1960 classic Shoot the Piano Player in the age of #MeToo makes one realise that most men’s views on women haven’t changed much in 58 years.

Sriram Raghavan might be the biggest film nerd we have among current Hindi film directors, and in his most recent release, the savagely funny Andhadhun, he’s on a roll. The film’s starting premise as a thriller-—what happens when a blind pianist ends up being the only witness to a crime?—is swiftly buried under an avalanche of twists, making it impossible to write about without spoilers.

Watching Andhadhun felt like a rare reprieve in a harrowing week when #MeToo testimonies from media and Bollywood began to make a long overdue dent in Indian patriarchy. So I particularly didn’t want to ruin it for anyone who hasn’t yet had the chance to catch it. Instead, I thought, I’d follow up on one of Raghavan’s references by watching Shoot the Piano Player: Francois Truffaut’s 1960 cult classic from the French New Wave which, like Andhadhun, features a piano player embroiled in a crime.

Imagine my surprise, then, when this sparkling Truffaut film actually turned out to be about men and women: what men think of women, how they behave as a consequence and what women think they must do in response. In other words, things we are still grappling with 58 years later—and doing so badly at that we desperately need #MeToo.

The first scene has a man running in the dark, a car hot on his heels. He careens down an ill-lit pavement and gets knocked out by a lamppost. It feels like film noir. So when another man appears and slaps the fallen man’s face, one doesn’t know whether he is friend or foe. But then the stranger helps him up and says, “I’ve gotta run. She still waits up for me,”—and with that, Truffaut has engineered the first of the nonstop changes of tone that mark this film, from thriller to droll humour.


“I wish I were married, too,” says the first man. The ensuing dialogue tracks the emotional turnarounds of coupledom with a remarkable throwaway honesty: he went with her for a year before developing feelings and buying a ring. Still, the marriage didn’t start well: “I’d watch her over breakfast, wondering how to get rid of her.” “A question of freedom, maybe?” inquires the first man. The second shrugs. When his wife first gave birth, he says, he fell in love with her.


In one of those bits of non-linearity that mark this as a New Wave film, the married man disappears, and the injured man dashes off to a bar to appeal for help to his brother Charlie, the film’s pianist hero (played by French singing legend Charles Aznavour, who in a strange coincidence, passed away at 94 two weeks ago). Jean Cocteau once said, “Before Aznavour, despair was unpopular.” Here he plays Charlie as a shy man with sad eyes, a half-smile turning down the corners of his mouth. And yet, he is apparently a fount of wisdom on women. “Don’t be afraid of women,” he tells the bar owner Plyne. “They’re not poisonous.” “You don’t really believe that,” responds Plyne.


What’s remarkable is that this exchange takes place after a sequence featuring men doing the following: (1) singing a song complaining about a bargirl who wouldn’t “hand out” anything but beer; (2) drunkenly proposing marriage to a woman just met—and when told she isn’t single, leaning in for a kiss so that she has to flee claiming work; (3) dancing with such a laser-like focus on his dance partner’s breasts that she is moved to ask scathingly, “Is my chest that fascinating?” (Yes, says the man, I’m a doctor.)


None of these interactions are ‘serious’, and I too might have glossed over them if we hadn’t been in the historical moment we’re in. But it is hard not to see that this ‘humour’ lies at the root of our problem with consent: as Laurie Penny put it in a stellar 2017 essay, the assumption that men want sex—and women are sex. The nonstop infringement of women’s boundaries is completely normalised: this, we are told, is what men will do if women let them. It thus becomes women’s job to keep men from harassing them.

In another comic sequence, a hood who’s abducted Charlie and his girlfriend Lena says he has an “eye for a moment”: “when the wind’s going to lift a skirt, or some nice legs gonna board a bus”. “I tell you. No matter what women say, they all want it,” agrees Hood No. 2. Why else do they all dress up, why do they wear stockings when they could wear socks like us? The exchange is not criticised, though Truffaut punctures its ludicrousness when Hood No. 2 says immediately, ah yes, women would look great in knee-length socks.

In another revealing scene, a besotted Plyne pleads with Lena to “feel his muscles”, saying “I’m not just anybody”. She mocks him, and a minute later, he is declaring that “She’s a slut! She’s not a girl, she’s not a woman. A woman is pure, delicate, fragile. To me, women have always been supreme.”


The film sets Charlie up in contrast to these men. He is the supposedly sensitive man that women fall in love with. When Lena gets together with him, she says it’s because he doesn’t play the ladies’ man or the tough guy. “You’re shy, you respect women.” And yet the tenor of Charlie’s relationships is tragic for the women concerned: his waitress wife Theresa sleeps with a customer to get Charlie his break as a concert pianist, and like Lena later, ends up dead because of him.


Charlie’s father used to say about women, “If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.” Perhaps, just perhaps, that might be what Truffaut is really saying about men.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 Oct 2018.

Book review: The Revenge of the Non-vegetarian

A book review for Scroll:

Upamanyu Chatterjee’s new novel is a minimalist study of revenge (and features Agastya Sen’s father). 

Speaking Tiger Books, June 2018. 128 pp, Rs. 350.

Upamanyu Chatterjee’s most recent book, The Revenge of the Non-vegetarian, is a sharp departure from his previous work – in the best ways. His earlier predilection for excess has been pared down into something almost unrecognisable: a tautly told tale which prizes control rather than the lack of restraint, its humour confident enough to be buried below the surface instead of being perpetually paraded for laughs. At the age of 59, exactly thirty years after the publication of his first (and best-known) novel, Chatterjee might finally have stopped needing to shock.

His debut, English, August (1988) was an India book that got off on the idea of not being one. Its bored, horny young IAS officer protagonist Agastya Sen, having been forced out of his tiny Westernised urban pond into the terrifyingly unfamiliar ocean that is the Rest Of India, responds with deliberate flippancy to everything the respectable middle class world would have him take seriously. Sample dialogue: “I’d much rather act in a porn film than be a bureaucrat. But I suppose one has to live”.

Inside Agastya’s brain, everything is either sexual or scatological. So his cook’s surprise at being asked to bring milk is “as though Agastya asked for his wife’s cunt”; when asked what his name means by the District Collector, he wants to say it is Sanskrit for “one who shits only one turd every morning”, and so on. Several of Chatterjee’s later books, like The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000), and Weight Loss: A Comedy of Sexual and Spiritual Degradation (2006), continued to cultivate this quality of deliberate affront to decorum, and circle around the world of Indian bureaucracy.

The father of principles

With The Revenge of the Non-Vegetarian, Chatterjee returns – again – to the figure of the city-bred Indian bureaucrat posted in a remote small town. Only this time, the protagonist is not Agastya Sen but his father Madhusudan Sen, ICS. The senior Mr Sen first appeared in English, August, writing serious advice-filled letters to his dissolute, incorrigibly cynical son. In Non-Vegetarian, we meet him at at an earlier stage of his life: he is the newly appointed Sub Divisional Magistrate of Batia, in the period just after independence.

He leads the recognisably dull life of the bureaucrat in a provincial posting, surrounded by punkhahs, peons and other eavesdropping functionaries. His daily stimulation, such as it is, consists of the walk back from the magistrate’s court to his Civil Lines bungalow, followed by a glass of Cutty Sark whiskey and a single Gold Flake cigarette. Unlike his future son, however, Madhusudan Sen is the opposite of dissolute, cynical, or confused.

Chatterjee’s crisp telling cannot be accused of something so florid as nostalgia – and yet there is a lingering sense here of a finer, uncorrupted past. At this previous point in the history of the nation-state, Chatterjee seems to suggest, the very same conditions that produced an Agastya could (and did) produce the principled pillar of bureaucracy, upright and correct.

The meating point

But Sen does have desires that he is unafraid to voice. Soon after his arrival in Batia, when he learns that his official residence on Temple Road is part of an unofficial no-meat zone because of its geographical proximity to the town’s resident vegetarian deity, he devises a complex arrangement to get himself a non-veg meal every evening.

If Madhusudan Sen is “both cautious and intelligent”, a highly educated man with a commitment to justice, a servant of the people, the other figure who occupies centre-stage in this 124-page novella might be seen as his social, intellectual and moral opposite. Sadly, Basant Kumar Bal, servant to the six-member Dalvi family, is not someone whose interiority we learn much about. At one point in the book, we are told that Bal “did not wonder what was going on in the world beyond [the walls], whether anyone remembered him. He was not that kind of human being.”

Chatterjee does allow Bal one monologue that might gain him our understanding, if not our empathy – and that understanding is routed through Madhusudan Sen’s. Fittingly, it is about the eating of meat. “They always ate well,” says Bal of his late employers. “They had non-vegetarian almost every day, saab, goat or chicken or fish or egg. They ate like rakshasas themselves and always left only two pieces of meat in the pot, one each for the sister-in-law and her daughter.”

The desire for meat is all the sahib has in common with the servant, the judge with the accused. It is a delicious premise, and one that Chatterjee manages to manoeuvre perfectly towards a wicked, satisfying conclusion. Like a well-made mutton curry, this is a book whose pleasures are dependent on the attention you give it. Don’t eat while you read.

To see this review as it was first published online: see Scroll, 4 Aug 2018.

Dressing the Part

My Mirror column:

Phantom Thread, nominated for six Academy Awards, is a disturbing portrait of the relationship between an acclaimed 1950s designer and his muse.

"Try these, they’re delicious,” says the good-looking young woman at the breakfast table, holding out a plate of Danish pastries and cinnamon rolls. The striking older man she is addressing barely looks up: “No more stodgy things. I told you.” “I didn’t know that,” the woman says, looking dismayed. And then, softly, defeatedly, “You may have told it to someone else.”

The young woman, Joanna, having made a last, desperate plea for attention, soon disappears from Phantom Thread, leaving us to our dismissive hero, Reynolds Jeremiah Woodcock (Daniel Day Lewis in an unsettling performance that he has declared will be his last). But this early scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film (nominated for six Academy Awards this year) holds the key to much more than might at first appear.

In her few moments on screen, Joanna offers a distressing glimpse of what it’s like to be in a relationship with a man like Reynolds: fastidious to a fault, his perfectionism requiring everyone in his orbit to spin just so. To be his lover is really to be his willing student, thrilled to receive instructions – and to expect censure for failing to follow them. It is also to remain forever on tenterhooks, waiting for the moment when he will tire of her devotion. Because of course, devotion can get boring; casting someone in one’s own mould is only fun until the cast is complete.

So Joanna is packed off. Immediately after, as appears to be his wont, Reynolds meets and begins to court another young ingénue. Alma (Vicky Krieps) is a waitress at a small country hotel, and it seems of significance that their very first meeting involves her serving him.

Soon after she has been brought into the household, unsurprisingly flattered to be the muse of so great an artist, we get another scene at the breakfast table. Alma is merely buttering her toast and pouring her tea, but to Reynolds’ oversensitive ears, it is as if she had ridden a horse across the room. He goes off in a huff. Alma holds out briefly. Then Cyril –Reynolds’ sister, aide and housekeeper rolled into one – tells her that if breakfast goes badly, his day can get ruined.

“I didn’t know that,” says Alma finally, deflated. The words are the same as Joanna’s. It is as if knowing what Reynolds likes and dislikes is a secret, one that gives the women in his life the only power they have. He is a man, and even his most unreasonable demands need only be known in order to be fulfilled. Even attempts to pamper him can backfire without this ‘knowing’. So when Alma plans to cook a surprise dinner for Reynolds, saying she must get to know him in her own way, we know it isn’t going to go well.

We have had rather too much of this dynamic in heterosexual romance: the man fully-formed, someone whose peculiarities are a privilege to know, and the woman who is trying her hardest to get to know him, a formless creature, only too happy to assume the shape of his dreams.

This idea – of the man giving shape to the woman – assumes more than metaphorical weight in Phantom Thread, because Reynolds is a highly regarded fashion designer in 1950s London: his work is crafting women’s silhouettes. He is dressmaker to the very well-off – as long as they are very grateful. His creations are tailored to each woman who comes to him. And yet somehow it is he who retains power over those he chooses to dress. “You have no breasts,” he announces drily to Alma, as he takes her measurements the first evening he has taken her out. Her response, of course, is not offence but apology: “I know. I’m sorry.” Having extracted that expression of less-than-confidence, Reynolds changes tone: “No, no, you’re perfect,” he says. “My job to give you some. If I choose.”

One of Alma’s few statements about what she gets out of her relationship with Reynolds is about how the clothes he puts her in make her forget her youthful dissatisfaction with her body: “in his work, I become perfect.” His control – and her powerlessness – is total.

In this iteration of love, Alma can only be strong when Reynolds grows weak. His illness – mysteriously unexplained – is what changes his mind about marriage to Alma. And her fantasy of their romance is articulated precisely in terms of power: “I want you helpless, with only me to help you, and then I want you strong again.”

Phantom Thread is a painstakingly crafted film. Despite its deliberately excessive air of mystery, there is pleasure to be derived from its sensual attention to detail: the stunning confections of lace and silk and taffeta that are Reynolds’ world, and the mingling of egg and mushroom, the sizzle of butter that are Alma’s. The film gestures ever so slightly to Alma’s cooking as a form of private artistry, a reply of sorts to Reynolds’ féted, public one. And yet how can we see it as a reply, when he does not? When he barely condescends to consume the fruits of her labours?

This is a film that sets domesticity up against artistry, and believable as the final settlement between them is, one wishes for it no longer to be called love.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 Mar 2018.

The Religion of Women

What can Mehboob Khan's Mother India, the biggest Hindi hit of 1957 and our first entry to the Oscars in 1958, tell us about our ideals of Indian womanhood?

Mehboob Khan's Mother India was not just the most successful film of 1957, but a social epic that became, from the 1960s to the 1980s, one of India's most successful cultural exports ever, watched and re-watched in cinemas and homes across the Middle East and Africa by people who didn't necessarily know Hindi, becoming in many ways the most emblematic 'Indian' film of all time.

In 1958 it was India's first official entry to the Oscars, and apparently came rather close to winning, losing out in the Best Foreign Film category to Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria by a single vote.

This, despite the fact that the film's visual style was powerfully influenced by Soviet socialist iconography – think of the many memorable tableaux in which Nargis (as the film's heroine Radha) is framed with a plough, or with her two sons and sheaves of wheat – and the fascinating fact that Mehboob's insignia of hammer and sickle was removed from the print sent for Oscar nomination. The film was also banned in Turkey as a 'Communist' film.
What is indubitable is that Mehboob's grand, melodramatic, technicolour vision of an unlettered Indian woman raising two sons against terrible odds managed to speak a wide range of audiences. Perhaps it is just in the nature of popular Indian cinema to be able to combine a host of messages: Mehboob's identifiably Marxist insignia of hammer and sickle, as the film scholar Rosie Thomas has pointed out, appeared on the screen next to an Urdu couplet that translates to 'Man proposes, God disposes'.

Certainly, for Indian audiences, Nargis's status in Mother India as the exemplary mother and wife is undeniably constructed by her association with the archetypes of mythical Hindu femininity. She is named Radha while her husband (Raaj Kumar) is called Shyamu, their post-marriage courtship evoking the eternal romantic pairing of Krishna and his gopi lover Radha. After Shyamu is disabled and abandons the family in a fit of depression, Radha is left alone to raise her two young sons. There are strong allusions here to Sita's epic tribulations – her abandonment by an ethical but weakened husband, a trial by fire, as well as an unspoken evocation of the villainous Ravana in the lecherous moneylender Sukhi Lala, against whose overtures Radha must defend her chastity. The film's more overt religious references are to Lakshmi – the goddess of wealth, to whom Sukhi Lala compares the poverty-stricken, half-starving Radha in a crucial ironic scene – and to the 'devi', whom Radha beseeches for help against Sukhi Lala and who, in the tradition of Hindi cinema's depiction of faith, gives her a sign that strengthens her fading resolve.

But more central to Mother India is its construction of Indian womanhood. Radha is the exemplary daughter-in-law who presses her mother-in-law's feet as well as her husband's, who quietly eats the few morsels left after her husband and sons have eaten, who doesn't only cook and clean and take care of the cattle but labours alongside her man in the fields, and voluntarily surrenders her jewelry in the family's time of need. But over the course of the film, we watch this shy bride who barely opens her mouth in front of her mother-in-law or her husband transform into a mother who can beat up her grown sons – or even kill them.

What unites the self-sacrificing femininity in the earlier half of the film with the ethical vision of motherhood shown later is the film's unequivocal embrace of a model of female sexual virtue at the cost of all else. As one of the film's immortal songs 'Duniya mein hum aayein hain toh jeena hi padega' goes, “Aurat hai woh aurat jise duniya ki sharam hai,/Sansaar mein bas laaj hi naari ka dharam hai.”. Trying to translate these sentences is difficult precisely because the words 'sharam' and 'laaj' -- literally shyness, bashfulness – are here used to denote the much more complex idea of honour. A woman's only religion in this world, the song says, is to safeguard honour.


The climactic confrontation between Radha and her son Birju (Sunil Dutt) is the outcome of precisely this belief: faced with a choice between saving her son's life and saving the 'honour' of a young woman of the village (Sukhi Lala's daughter Rupa, whom Birju has abducted as payback), Radha chooses to kill her own son. “Main beta de sakti hoon, laaj nahi de sakti [I can lose a son, but not honour],” she declares. The dialogue is about Rupa's (and the village's) 'laaj', but gestures equally to the originary moment when Radha chose her chastity over Sukhi Lala's offers of food and money, despite the fact that she had lost one child to starvation and might have lost the other two, too.

Mother India's conclusion can be read as a spirited defense of young women's sexual honour by an older woman, even against the depredations of her own son. This may seem worth celebrating in a world in which the patriarchal norm is probably that which appears in the final segment of an NH10, where Deepti Naval's character is the most patriarchal and violent in her defense of her family and caste 'honour'. And yet somehow there seems to be a continuum between the premium placed on chastity by Mother India in 1957, and the policing of honour we see around us in 2017.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Sep 2017.

Humorously Hopeful

The Kishore Kumar and Vyjayanthimala starrer Aasha may have ‘Ina Mina Dika’ as its claim to fame, but what else can we make of its runaway box-office success sixty years ago?

That a film clicks at the box office is no guarantee of its quality. But the fact that audiences flocked to watch a film does tell us something about the zeitgeist that brought it into being. So the fact that MV Raman’s comic drama Aasha was the seventh highest grossing film of 1957 could be attributed to the runaway success of the song ‘Ina Mina Dika’ — but it seemed to me worth looking at the film as a whole.

Looking at the top ten Hindi hits of 1957, as I have done over the last few weeks, brings several actorly personas and directorial careers into focus. My column on Tumsa Nahin Dekha (TSD) zoned in on Nasir Hussain’s directorial debut, and on Shammi Kapoor, who acquired his foppish star persona with that film.

I didn’t really talk about Pran, who was by then an established villain. Watching Pran in Aasha, I thought again about how effortlessly the actor had come to inhabit the part of the bad character in the garb of the urbane man-about-town — and how crucial his subtle, sneering demeanour was as foil to the invariably chatty charm of the heroes he played against. In Aasha, as in TSD, Pran’s city-slicker villainy unfolds against a feudal backdrop in which there is land and a title to be inherited. Here he plays Raj: cynical philanderer, moneyminded bridegroom and scheming older cousin to Kishore Kumar’s bumbling do-gooder Kishore.

Kishore Kumar, who played a chirpy young man in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s debut Musafir the same year, seems to have begun to craft his future madcap nice-guy persona properly with Aasha. He plays a talented but guileless young man, the true heir to the Belapur jagirdari, whom Pran embroils in a false murder case — a fact which of course means that his character turns fugitive, giving Kishore Kumar several opportunities for comic disguise, including a sustained turn as an ‘Arab’ theatre owner-performer, which is the persona in which he performs ‘Ina Mina Dika’.

Interestingly, though, the film is as much a vehicle for its heroine Vyjayanthimala, giving her ample opportunity to showcase not just her talents as a dancer but as an actor and mimic. She even snags a version of Ina Mina Dika in colour, a circus-inspired bit of rock-and-roll, rather gamely performed by an all-woman team that includes Asha Parekh (Parekh was a child actor who was then still on the cusp of her debut as heroine, having missed out on Tumsa Nahin Dekha).

As the feisty Nirmala, Vyjayanthimala’s introductory scene has her performing on a college stage. Later in the film, she becomes first a member of one theatrical troupe and then another, appearing before us once in the garb of a ‘tramp’-style young male prisoner and then as a bent old woman who claims to have been acting in naatak companies since the time of the Gadar (the revolt of 1857). It is difficult for anyone to compete with Kishore Kumar’s manic energy, but Vyjayanthimala manages to hold up her end fairly well (except when saddled with sugary theatrics, like playing the ‘soul of truth’ in a climactic play within the film).

The film’s ‘message’ of goodness and truth-seeking is muddled and generic, but its take on women seemed to me quite specific. We begin the film with a woman called Kamini, who is one of Pran’s conquests as feudal playboy, and though her status as the duped girlfriend gets worse with a pregnancy, the film never places any blame on her morals in having succumbed to his charms. In fact, with the murder of her father and her own abduction, Raman chooses to make her a victim — though in the end she does die, as all fallen women must.

But the film’s other supposedly fallen woman, Munni, gets a chance to redeem herself when Kishore first respectfully pays her hotel bills and then urges her to forge a new path that doesn’t involve prostitution. Munni must be among the very few such women characters in Hindi cinema who gets to live, and to recast herself as a respectable professional — by becoming a performing member of Nirmala’s theatre company.

A tiny scene right at the start shows us a girls’ hostel as a place whose members might occasionally leap over the wall to get back in — in this case, it’s Asha Parekh) — but the film never makes a big deal of it. Elsewhere, the bike-riding Vyjayanthimala displays a remarkably independent spirit for 1957: having been rejected as bahu by the martinet Lalita Pawar, she declares she has no desire to join the household of a ‘Hitler ki cheli’.

Although a turn in her family’s fortunes is offered as necessary reason for her to take up a profession, Nirmala conducts herself with flair and free-spiritedness, becoming the nodal point for a sort of unspoken sorority that includes Munni, Kamini and Asha Parekh. In one comic scene, when told that the condition of a theatre job is that she not marry or romance anyone, Nirmala’s only response is laughter. There is certainly something here about modern Indian womanhood coming into its own -- firmly with a sense of humour.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Sep 2017.