Studio portraits

My Mirror column:

The mid-20th century Tamil film world of SS Vasan and Gemini Studios had a marvellous chronicler in the late Ashokamitran: the third of a multi-part column.

Dr. Rajendra Prasad with the founder of Gemini Studios SS Vasan (left) during his visit to the Studios in connection with the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Fund. Madras, April 1949. Photo credit: Times Group.

Last week, discussing Perumal Murugan’s novel Current Show and Shenbagam Ramaswamy’s 1981 story ‘The Saga of Sarosadevi’, this column had suggested that modern Tamil literary fiction might be particularly invested in popular cinema as a symbolic space for the interplay of dream and reality.

In that context, it is worth noting that one of the undisputed masters of modern Tamil fiction, the late Ashokamitran, famously spent 14 years from 1952 to 1966 working for Gemini Studios. Run by the legendary entrepreneur SS Vasan, Gemini Studios was for nearly 30 years from 1940 a fulcrum of film production not just for Madras but India. Ashokamitran wrote enjoyably of his time there in a series of essays first commissioned in 1984 by Pritish Nandy as editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, later published as My Years With Boss (2002).

The ‘Boss’ of the title was, of course, Vasan. Why the head of a Tamil cinema studio in the 1940s came to be called Boss (even by his family) when he “had never worn a trenchcoat, brandished a gun or chain-smoked cigars” is explained by the fact that Vasan’s first deputy, an American called William J Moylan, called him that, and the appellation stuck.

The book is full of wonderful anecdotes from a time of great cross-fertilisation of ideas. The winds of literature, theatre and politics all swept through Gemini Studios. One of Ashokamitran’s drollest tales involves the famous poet Stephen Spender arriving at Gemini Studios. The existential mystery of what “an English poet [is] doing in a film studio which makes Tamil films for the simplest sort of people” is met by such authoritative speculations as “He is not a poet. He is an editor. That’s why the Boss is giving him such a big reception.” The respect for editors was self-explanatory, since SS Vasan was also editor of the popular Tamil weekly Ananda Vikatan.

More than the event, though, it is Ashokamitran’s poker-faced laying out of the setting that is beguiling. “Gemini Studios was the favourite haunt of poets like SDS Yogiar, Sangu Subramanyam, Krishna Sastry and Harindranath Chattopadhyaya. It had an excellent mess which supplied good coffee at all times of day and for most part of the night. Those were the days when Congress rule meant Prohibition and meeting over a cup of coffee was rather satisfying entertainment,” he writes. Then comes the sentence of true genius: “Barring the office boys and a couple of clerks, everybody else at the Studios radiated leisure, aprerequisite for poetry.”

Ashokamitran’s own specific work as a young man, which he relates with relish, was to copy out, in long hand, thousands of articles and reviews from the magazines and trade journals to which Gemini Studios subscribed but which “were not to be cut up”. “If Baburao Patel had only known how I rewrote the majority of his editorials and the Bombay Calling pages of FilmIndia, he would surely have made me an ingredient of his later-day homeopathic preparation, Shivsakthi (which he qualified as ‘the tonic of gods’).”

Ashokamitran’s more general location in the Studios was in the Story department, “comprising a lawyer and an assembly of writers and poets”. His brilliantly deadpan take on the lawyer “looking alone and helpless—a neutral man in an assembly of Gandhiites and khadiites” is followed in natural progression by the story of how one day “The Boss closed down the Story Department and this was perhaps the only instance in all human history where a lawyer lost his job because the poets were asked to go home.”

In his fiction, Ashokamitran took this milieu and made of it something that could alternate between deadpan humour and ineffable tragedy. In the magisterial story ‘Tiger Artiste’, for instance, he describes the visit to the Studios of a man who describes himself as ‘Tagar-Foight Kader’. He turns out to have been sent by one agent Vellai who rounds up extras for crowd scenes. Told that they aren’t casting any crowd scenes at the moment, the man looks disheartened, but then persuades the narrator and his associate, an ex-cop called Sharma, to watch him do his thing: impersonate a tiger.

The men are reluctant at first, but the emaciated-looking Kader produces a performance whose ferocity is matched by its life-threateningness. “On his fours, he sprang higher than a man’s height and planted himself on the two-inch wide ledge above our heads. Then, clutching the iron railing of the ventilator, he let out yet another roar.” The air of torpor in the Story Department office is entirely ruptured. “Careful, ‘pa, careful, ‘pa,” shouts Sharma.

Then Kader returns to the ground – and to reality. He falls at Sharma’s feet, weeping. He has had no work for months. “‘My wife has asked me not come anywhere near our house, saar.’ This was the man who had been a tiger a few minutes ago.”

The story is about the widespread poverty from which people came looking for jobs in films, but also about the illusory quality of all performance. The cinema, again, is a place of betrayal.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 May 2018.

Book Review: Eighty eight ways to read Tamil literature, one story at a time

A book review published in Scroll: 

Neil Gaiman once described short stories as “journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.” The Tamil Story: Through the Times, Through the Tides, translated from the Tamil by Subashree Krishnaswamy and edited by Dilip Kumar, is a whopping collection of stories: capacious enough to work as a mode of immersive slow travel, or as 88 little trips into as many Tamil worlds.

Kumar and Krishnaswamy have worked hard to produce a volume that offers up variety alongside a sense of historical context that is all-too-rare in Indian publishing, especially for literature in translation. So while it's fun to dip in and out of the book's different literary registers and locations, I was glad to be able to look up the writer of a story I particularly enjoyed in the Bio Notes.

And once you've read a bunch of stories, Dilip Kumar's Foreword helps place the writers within his brief history of the Tamil short story: from the earliest experimenters of the first two decades of the twentieth century, to the writers who made their name with the journal Manikodi in the 1930s – Mauni, Pudumaippittan, Ku Pa Rajagopalan – through the sharper, more cynical post-independence decades, and into the 1990s, when Dalit writing began to emerge as a distinct voice.

Across space and time

The stories assembled here range as widely as possible across time and space and milieu. So for instance, there are striking depictions of rural settings, past and present. I found Ki Rajnarayan's humorous 1969 tale The Chair, about how a household acquires their first-ever chair and finds that the whole village has a use for it, full of thoroughly enjoyable detail – the sub-judge who starts everything off by visiting in “suit-boot” rather than coming “like one of us, in a veshti and shirt”, or the grandmother who keeps pressing her own stretched legs.

Na Muthuswamy's Ghee Stain (2004) is starkly different in tone, couched as an artful address to the present-day reader, who is assumed not to be able to visualise – and yet urged to understand – the rural world being described. The whole text feels like a paean to that remembered life – the houses with their courtyards, the screens of coconut fronds, the line of sight from the outer pial to the interior of the kitchen – before the ending disrupts the nostalgic mood entirely.

The city, too, features often, starting early on. The 1921 story Subbayan, for instance, harks back to Victoria Park / Singara Park / Rani Park as the site of a great fire in 1876. Pudumaippittan's The Great Graveyard (1941) is a devastatingly caustic take on urban poverty, describing the Mount Road round-tana as a “good place to die”. There is representation both of the multicultural life of Madras – the Anglo-Indian community in Faraway Land comes across as deeply rooted in this Tamil landscape – and of Tamilians in other places, ranging from Mexico to Bombay.

One of my favourite urban stories in the collection is The Sound of Footsteps, a taut and surprising 1971 story about a working woman whose worries are wifely: “Would he have eaten? She had left only after cooking. She had asked him to eat if it got too late. He would of course be worried... He would be peeping out from the balcony.” The city isn't named, but the protagonist traverses what appears to be a Delhi geography, taking a bus from Gol Market to “Motibhagh I” and walking along an unlit Ring Road.

Themes that return

Certain recurring themes are exactly the ones you might expect from a collection of Tamil writing: caste, electoral politics and the cinema. Reading these stories makes it apparent that caste consciousness hasn't gone anywhere, only acquired altered forms and new spaces for expression. Among the earliest iterations of caste here is in the story Kannan's Grand Mission, in which five women are returning from their bath in the river with “dots of kumkumam on the foreheads of their glowing Brahmin faces” when they meet “untouchables” and abuse them for not stepping aside. Lest this 1925 tale and Ghee Stain fool us into thinking that the pollution-purity aspect of caste is buried in some distant past, the editor includes two razor-sharp contemporary stories – Bama's The Judgement (2003) and Sivakami's A Long Train Journey (1999), in both of which a world with all the accoutrements of modernity – trains, municipal water supply, public schools – is shown up as riven by caste feeling.

In another story from 1977, Jeyanthan's Bonds of the Daytime, a caste feud rocks a government Panchayat office. More devastatingly, caste enters insidiously into the most intimate of spheres, becoming a way for a woman to taunt her husband.

Caste has always lain just beneath the surface of Indian politics, and the stories here are no exception. Nanjil Nadan's story Vote Grabbers is a deliciously sarcastic 1981 account of the partitioning of electoral constituencies to ensure the victory of certain communities: “Anyway, in the constituency, despite dinning in from Standard Five...that this is a secular, egalitarian republic, no one other than a Velaalan who belonged to the Marumakkal community could ever win here. Not even Mahatma Gandhi.” The figure of Mahatma Gandhi appears more literally in Saarvaagan's droll Flag Hoisting in Chinnoor – as a bust “imported from Italy for five hundred rupees”, on which kumkumam must be smeared before every speech.

I also really enjoyed Daily: A Pandian Express, a lovely telling of the day in the life of a political fixer – a man from Madurai who is now 'our man in Madras' for a steady stream of favour-seekers from his hometown.

The cinema hall was clearly the temple of the Tamil twentieth century. It appears as a place of refuge, but also of dramatic action. If Prapanchan's In a Town, Two Men lays out his urban geography in terms of the non-stop sprouting of cinema halls, The Story of Saroja starts its bathos-filled tale with the birth of a baby in the cinema.

The fictional pull of cinema also appears. In the rather odd The First Cheque Arrives, a couple stage a 'murder' to test if the story is convincing enough to bag a film contract. Ashokamitran's affecting Tiger Artiste is a very different take on film's fictional universe: seeing it from the unglamorous perspective of stuntmen and junior artistes, but still managing to imbue the idea of performance with magicality.

Other stories could be transposed easily from Tamil Nadu to elsewhere in India: like several portraits of marriages, from youthful newness (Timepass) to jaded argumentativeness (In Search of Truth). Kumudhini's The Passing of a Day casts an affectionate glance at a whole universe by tracking an old lady who could be considered a busybody or an indispensable pillar of the community. Two stories that deal with animals and their relationship to human life – Dhavamani, in which a woman loses her treasured cow because of a neglectful family, or Shards, about a man who shoes bulls’ hooves for a living – could have been written by Premchand. The familial cruelties administered to poor old Naagu Paati for continuing to have a taste for food – i.e., life – in Journey reminded me of Sarbajaya's sharp-tongued responses to the withered old Pishi in Pather Panchali.

The translation strategy

Subashree Krishnaswamy's translation pays a great deal of attention to language, especially to the figures of speech that bring a world to life. In Journey, for instance, the younger women who taunt Nagu Paati never fail to use the symbolism of food: “to pour ire into my stomach”, “my belly is burning”, “everyone is going, and you are still sitting digesting all this”. As the translator points out in a Note at the start of the book, they have given “a free rein to Indian English”.

This worked well for me in the dialogue, even when it was clear that the characters are speaking in Tamil. So in In a Town, Two Men we find: “What, 'pa, Gopalu, you've completely forgotten, is it?” or in Busting of Bravado: “From then I'm listening, next time, next time... This fellow is a great leader it seems.” In the superbly told The Opposite End by SA Kandasamy, about a physical education teacher with a reputation for temper, we get: “What, saar, you are talking like this and all...” and “Why, saar, all this unnecessary quarrel?”

But much of the time this Tamil English enters into the telling of the tale, spilling over from the dialogue into the narration. For instance, in the same story, we have, “Vasudevan had accused that the brother hadn't shown the correct account”. Or in Faraway Land, we get “They both were neighbours”. In Scribe, “A doubt suddenly appeared: would he ask money for writing?”, or in Their Separate Ways, “Very fair she was, almost bloodless.” Or in Vote-Grabbers: “Eight to ten open carts and three fully-covered ones. Besides all these, to go around a crane-white Ambassador car.” This is something of an experiment in translation. To find out if it works to immerse you further in the Tamil universe, or occasionally brings you up short, you'll need to read the book yourself.

Published in Scroll, 2nd July 2016.

Picture This: Studio sagas

My 'Picture This' column for BL Ink:

Two books by Ashokamitran offer a richly storied account of the '50s film world, as seen from Gemini Studios.

An Indian poster for the Gemini Studios extravaganza, Chandralekha (1948)

Another poster for Chandralekha, this one for its international release, makes the film seem like an Indian circus coming to town

Was the studio era in Indian cinema its most colourful, or is it just that it has had the frankest chroniclers? “When Najmul Hassan ran off with Devika Rani, the entire Bombay Talkies was in turmoil,” begins Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s vivid essay on Ashok Kumar. Manto’s sketches of film personalities in Stars from Another Sky offer glimpses of the workings of several major Hindi film studios of the 1930s and ’40s: Filmistan, Bombay Talkies, Hindustan Movietone, V Shantaram’s Pune-based Prabhat.

But Manto did not focus on a particular studio. 

Recently, I came across a book which does. The acclaimed Tamil writer Ashokamitran, it turns out, spent his youth at the Public Relations Department of SS Vasan’s Gemini Studios, which produced huge hits such as Chandralekha, Avvaiyar and Samsaram. In the ’80s, Pritish Nandy, who was then editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, persuaded Ashokamitran to write a series of reminiscences — in English — about his years at Gemini. These were later published in the form of a (very) slender book called My Years with Boss. It covers only five of those 14 years, but brims with wry, entertaining anecdotes of how things were done at what was then among India’s grandest film studios.

To start with there is Ashokamitran’s description of his own job, which he describes as “respectably insignificant”. It seemed to consist, first and foremost, of cutting out news clippings about the film industry and filing them under various heads from ‘Aarey Milk Colony’ to ‘Zoroastrianism’. “Seeing me sitting at my desk tearing up newspapers day in and day out, most people thought I was doing next to nothing,” he writes. Magazines were not allowed to be cut up, so chosen articles had to be copied out in long hand. “If Baburao Patel had only known how I rewrote the majority of his editorials and the ‘Bombay Calling’ pages of Film India...” writes Ashokamitran.

Other parts of his job are more recognisable: such as bringing out special souvenir volumes before the release of a big film, or dealing with the “assault of the visitors”. Most were turned away with masterfully obfuscatory responses. “But a film studio can’t afford to turn everybody out. It can’t take chances with guests of income tax commissioners and cousins of joint secretaries. Also traffic constables. Or the airlines people.” Ashokamitran mines these visits for a terrific vein of observational humour: “[I would] let them sit on the swivel chairs of the makeup rooms and say, ‘This is the very mirror Madhubala sat in front of’. Visitors ever (sic) could never resist the temptation to adjust their hair.”

Other visitors included some unlikely big names: the Chinese Premier Chou En-lai “sat through an hour’s shooting of a dance by a large princess wriggling with abandon”, while the poet Stephen Spender made a baffling speech. Gemini Studios may not have been quite the place for Spender, but Ashokamitran makes it apparent that SS Vasan, though he may have been a “hundred per cent free enterprise man”, had respect for poets and artistes. One of the book’s highlights is the lifelong battle between Vasan and C Rajagopalachari, over many things including the loyalty of the hugely popular writer Kalki. Another brilliant story involves Vasan’s arrival in Calcutta for the premiere of his star-studded Hindi film Insaniyat — pause here to think about this remarkable world, in which the only film starring both Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand was produced by a Madras studio and premiered in the capital of Bengal — to find that a strange sort of Bengali film, that no one had expected to be more than a stopgap between the previous film and the Gemini production, was running very well. Vasan insisted on the contractual arrangement, and on September 30, 1955, the film was stopped for the release of Insaniyat. But he was intrigued enough to take the unsubtitled reels back to Madras, and Ashokamitran, who saw them soon after in the studio theatre, remembers being stunned. The film was Pather Panchali.

Insaniyat also marked the end of the studio era. Until 1955, Vasan had really been the Boss: all his projects flowed from his own ideas and intuitions, and “[t]he scores of men and women needed for a film were all his employees”. “But from the early 50s, he would have to take into consideration the whims and fancies of men and women who may not have had the slightest feeling for him, or may have been far less mature or wise, but who enjoyed at that moment the adoration of the film-going masses.” The rise of the star-based era also meant the jettisoning of many studio employees — writers, song-writers, musicians, technicians, even actors and actresses.

Ashokamitran describes some of these unsung heroes lovingly. But he also drew on those years to produce a meditative novel called Manasarovar, about the unexpected bond between a studio scriptwriter called Gopal and a Bombay star. The film world that appears here is terribly prosaic, and still shunned by middle-class morality: wives are suspicious of husbands who work in films, even studio drivers judge stars for talking to junior artistes. 

The portrait of tragic hero Satyan Kumar, son of a fruit seller from Peshawar, derives much from the real-life Dilip Kumar, even down to his special relationship with Nehru. It is an odd, melancholic book. Ashokamitran’s unornamented prose sculpts a profound contrast between the scriptwriter’s dry-eyed response to personal tragedy and the star’s near-breakdown, heaving with tears. The actor who must channel grief for practically every film has no idea how to deal with it in real life. The book ends with a final nod to the strangeness of performance. ‘You know how to bathe in a river, don’t you?’ Gopal says to Satyan Kumar, and then adds: ‘Of course you do. You have done it in so many films!’

Published in the Hindu Business Line on on July 31, 2015.