Photography Review: One Step in their Shoes

The Passerby, a photo exhibition of Indian street scenes, shows us the worlds we are walking past. 

(A short review essay I did for India Today magazine, on this gorgeous show, mounted in mid-2022.)

The 23 still images on display in PhotoInk’s garden-set gallery space in Delhi’s Vasant Kunj are a balm for tired eyes. The black and white—and certainly over fifty shades of grey—help recuperate from the nonstop ocular assault of lives lived on multicoloured moving screens. But the healing and stillness The Passerby offers come from some- thing more than form. Street scenes picked from the archives of Raghu Rai, Sooni Taraporevala, Ketaki Sheth and Pablo Bartholomew, these formally stunning photographs paint a portrait of an urban India that’s swiftly passing (if not already past). They range from 1970 to the early 2000s, but the pre-liberalisation era dominates, letting a quiet nostalgia wash over us.

The street scene has historically been among the most popular photographic genres, the PhotoInk brochure points out, and is easier now without a heavy, obtrusive camera: “Everyone with a mobile phone is now a street photographer.”

Everyone could be, yes. But we aren’t. It is striking just how little the glory and grimness of our streets enter the artfully arranged world of Facebook or Instagram. Perhaps it should be no surprise. Street photography needs you to be on foot, and to actually look around as you walk. And while the Indian street remains infinitely more interesting than anything the German philosopher Walter Benjamin imagined when writing of the flaneur in 1930s Paris or Berlin, the upper middle class that controls image-making in our digitally-divided republic has withdrawn indoors. India remains full of street weddings and street-side shrines; the poor—of necessity—still work and sleep and fight and make love in the street.

But between Uber/Ola and app-based delivery, urban white-collar Indians needn’t put foot to asphalt, for taxi, auto-rickshaw or groceries. The few who do either make no images, or pirouette and fetishise.

The Passerby yields many insights into our recent past, and how photographers saw it. For instance, beasts of burden are often juxtaposed with motorised transport. An Ambassador and a bullock cart share in Rai’s majestic 1984 Delhi downpour; a white Fiat faces determinedly away from Taraporevala’s 1977 camel on Marine Drive. These animals have disappeared from city streets, as have these vehicles. Gone, too, is the sidecar-style scooter in which a 1976 Shravan Kumar transports his aged parents (Bartholomew’s ‘Family on a scooter’). Taxi drivers no longer nap with doors ajar; they use the car AC.

But much remains the same. Rai and Bartholomew both capture cart pushers to devastating effect, moving mountains with their bodies. Horses stand in symmetry in Rai’s Turkman Gate, their blinkered gazes evoking that of the purdah-clad woman beside them. Hijras still pose performatively, while few women on the street meet the photographer’s gaze— Sheth’s shy mother and child and Taraporevala’s striking tableau of Kamathipura sex workers both needed women behind the lens.

Given our increasingly enclosed present, The Passerby images are not just a way into the past, but a call to the future— what do we want for our streets, and ourselves?

(The Passerby is on view at PHOTOINK, New Delhi, till June 26)

Published in India Today, May 2022. 

Note: Pablo Bartholomew's photographs, included in the show and discussed above, are not available for view on the PhotoInk gallery website to which I have linked above. 

Warp & Weft of History: Mishal Husain's Broken Threads

I read the BBC presenter's Mishal Husain's family history and then interviewed her about it for this India Today piece:

British journalist Mishal Husain’s Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence is a rare mix of research and storytelling, making it a great read for anyone who wants to understand the history of South Asia’s present.

Mishal Husain’s Broken Threads begins with the actual frayed threads of a sari from her grandparents’ wedding. A cousin uses its brocade border on a shawl, and gives it to Husain as a wedding present. Beyond this, though, the book contains surprisingly few object histories, for a family memoir in an age of Instagrammable nostalgia. It quickly becomes clear that Husain, a well-known BBC journalist, wasn’t just looking for a place to inscribe her own memories. She had access to her grandparents’ memories: “I had the books written by one grandparent (Shahid), an unpublished memoir left by another (Mumtaz), some audio tapes recording my grandmother Tahirah, and a 97-year-old sibling of Mary’s to talk to,” Husain says in an email interview. The book’s structure stemmed from this: Chapters 1-4 are devoted, in succession, to her grandparents Mary, Mumtaz, Shahid and Tahirah. 

But the real achievement of Broken Threads lies in contextualising each grandparent’s individual trajectory. “I realised early on that I needed to begin a few decades before, going back into the 19th century and the period before and after 1857,” says Husain. “I turned it into history as well as memoir because I didn’t feel I could understand these individuals without understanding their times.” We hear about Mary’s childhood, for instance, only after Husain has described the arrival of Europeans in India. But instead of a generic history of the East India Company, Husain focuses on what is relevant to explain Mary Quinn, daughter of Mariamma and Francis Quinn: the relationships between Indian women and European men which led to the emergence of the Anglo-Indian community. 

She does something similar with each grandparent, tapping into histories of communities, professions, ways of being. Writing about her grandfathers Mumtaz and Shahid enables her — and us — to dive into the modern South Asian histories of medicine and the army. As context for her grandmother Tahirah, who grew up in Aligarh, Husain provides a deft account of Syed Ahmad Khan and his awakening to the need for Western education for Muslims, who after 1857 had fallen into a state of nostalgia for the past and resistance to the future. 

What brings all these threads together is the British colonial frame. As Husain puts it, she “felt the environment into which Shahid, Tahirah, Mumtaz and Mary were born, between 1911 and 1922, had been shaped by prior events and the entrenchment of British power”. “They grew up seeing New Delhi being built as a grand capital...and I don’t think they envisaged that era ending in their lifetimes,” she tells india today. This may have been particularly true of Shahid, “who had a ringside seat to the circle of power in Delhi for the 18-month run-up to Independence and who wrote about that period, making clear his dim view of Lord Mountbatten.” There is something deeply tragic about this portrait of her grandparents as part of a colonial elite in a united South Asia, who didn’t feel at home anywhere after Independence and Partition. 

Husain seems to share Shahid’s sense of disappointment. “As a journalist working primarily on the UK,” she says, writing Broken Threads made her return often to “a dispiriting reality: how did a nation with such an established democracy, developed institutions, and a system of checks and balances, not do better in its ending of Empire?” 

That the book is written for a British audience is apparent in both the language — a great-grandmother’s “white dupatta scarf ”— and references —“Babur, a near contemporary of Henry VIII”. And yet, the rare mix of research and storytelling makes this a great read for anyone who wants to understand the history of South Asia’s present. The political divides of the 1930s and ’40s emerge more intimately than in most academic histories: Nehru and Jinnah being disturbed by Gandhi’s use of religious symbolism, or Mohammad Ali Jauhar, of Khilafat Movement fame, saying, “Nationalism divides, but faith binds.” 

It is disturbing to see the present-day resonances, Husain agrees, “in how much of what drove decision-making in 1947 — or has happened since — remains, whether it’s the insecurity minority communities can experience, or the role of the military in governance.” But I felt also a great distance from the past, in ordinary people’s identification with something greater than the self. When Shahid is en route to England for military training, his cousin Shaukat writes to him: “Remember that this poor, disorganised, half-fed country is your native land.... Bring back to its shores the accumulated experience of other people.” I do not know if many ordinary South Asians today feel such idealism.

Published in India Today magazine, 4 Nov 2024 edition, in print. Also online here.

Book Review: Anuja Chauhan's 'Club You To Death'

Decided to update the blog in the new year, with pieces I've written in the interim. This is a book review I did for Scroll in 2021 and hadn't put up here. Some of you might still find it of interest, especially since ACP Bhavani Singh's career continues with Anuja Chauhan's more recent book, The Fast and the Dead (Oct 2023).

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Anuja Chauhan’s new novel may be a whodunnit, but its people are its pleasure, as usual

In ‘Club You To Death’, the popular writer with a perfect ear for conversation uses crime as a vehicle to portray the ‘beautiful people’ of Delhi society.

Early in Those Pricey Thakur Girls, Anuja Chauhan’s thoroughly enjoyable novel set in 1980s Delhi, there’s a scene where the retired Justice LN Thakur and family pile into the khandaani Ambassador to see off their daughter Debjani aka Dabbu for her first day as a newsreader at DeshDarpan (an obvious fictional stand-in for Doordarshan). Chauhan’s latest book, set in present-day Delhi, opens with a charming display of similar familial intimacy, squabbling but deeply affectionate: the retired Brigadier Balbir Dogra and family, four generations “stuffed into a rattling, eight-year-old Maruti Swift”, head off to play Tambola.

The similarities don’t end there. In Thakur Girls, Debjani’s glamorous job (DD newsreaders were then the acme of fashion) had the family dhobi excited to iron her sari and the Bengali Market chaatwala refusing to charge for golguppas because he had seen “Baby” on TV. In Club You To Death, the fetching young lawyer Akash “Kashi” Dogra is flaunted proudly as a customer by his Nizamuddin street barber, plays cards with the drivers parked under his house and chats affably about politics with old security guards who call him Kashi Baba.

The feudal quotient is a smidgeon less – it is 2021, after all – and Chauhan has moved a teeny tiny bit leftward in the transition from Hailey Road to Nizamuddin, making her new protagonist a jhuggi-defending lawyer. But Kashi enjoys much the same cosy relationship with the world as Dabbu did. He’s just woke enough to express some discomfort with it.

The privileged insiders

With his rented shared barsati and JNU-trained activist-architect girlfriend, Kashi Dogra may think he’s stepped away from privilege. And maybe he has travelled some distance from studying at the Doon School and dating a rich industrialist’s daughter. But Chauhan is too smart a writer to let even her likeable hero rest on such self-congratulatory laurels. When Kashi judges someone for having made up a new name and identity, Chauhan is quick to have another character reflect privately “that it is only people with great privilege who can afford to think like this”.

In this obliviousness, ironically, Kashi is following in his father’s footsteps. Brigadier Dogra belongs to that class of people that’s more than comfortably off, with their children attending the best schools (often the same schools they themselves went to), swinging the best jobs (sporting the old school tie does no harm) and generally getting a much better shot at success than 99% of the rest of the population. But they remain convinced they’re not the elite, because – as Brigadier Dogra splutters “Elite people go to five-stars and seven-stars”.

The Dogras? They go to the club.

Anuja Chauhan’s heroes and heroines have always come from the tiny sub-section of India that’s privileged enough to measure its privilege in memberships rather than money. So it’s perfectly fitting that her new novel is set in an institution emblematic of that class: a club that sounds a lot like the Delhi Gymkhana, dealing with a political milieu that sounds a lot like the present.

Speaking the language

As always, Chauhan knows her characters inside-out, turning out pitch-perfect comic set-pieces where pretty much everyone comes in for some needling, from pompous military heroes to poor little rich girls from The Vasant Valley School. But almost everyone also gets a degree of understanding. It helps that Chauhan is adept at dialogue, rendering each character in a suitably Englished version of their specific Hindi-mixed lingo, endowed with just a little extra colour and cusswords.

“It’s my own fault! I was the one who had bete-ka-bukhaar, and kept hankering for a son in spite of having such lovely daughters!” says a posh Punjabi mother berating her loser of a son. “I wanted to tell him ki listen, behenchod, we have a huge-ass CSR wing and we do a lot!” rants an heiress defending herself against the charge of being rich and oblivious. “Banerjee, apne saand ko baandh [Tie up that bull of yours],” says the friendly male who’s text-warning a woman about her boyfriend’s seductive ex.

Ever the old advertising hand, Chauhan constantly ups the linguistic absurdity quotient in delicious little ways: old Brigadier Dogra insisting on calling his wife Mala-D; a line of sculpted semi-precious stone lingams being called Shiv-Bling, or a potential scandal involving an army hero getting hashtagged as “Fauji nikla Mauji! Hawji Hawji!”

The perfect outsider
In a gleeful departure from her previous work, though, Club You To Death serves up murder as the main course – of course, with a breathy little romance to make the medicine go down. The setting offers plenty of scope for political intrigue, classist snark and just plain gossip, and Chauhan sets to work with relish, plotting the crime onto all its possible social and cultural axes. For starters, the murder is committed on the day of the club elections, one of those sorts of events that occupies mindspace in a proportion inversely related to the power at stake.

The rival candidates, both insiders, seem equally keen on winning. But could either – the retired military hero or the classy female entrepreneur – really want the job enough to kill for it? Or is the murderer just trying to pin the blame on one of them?

Second, there’s the victim, with his own secrets. Was the dead Zumba instructor a self-made Robin Hood, or a devious social climber? Was he playing his rich clients, or were they playing him?

And finally, there’s the wider socio-political context: such unsavoury news doesn’t bode well for a club already in the bad books of Delhi’s new rulers (not least for its connections to the old ones). As new rivalries and old secrets tumble out of the DTC closet, the citadel of Lutyens’ Delhi privilege begins to seem rather doddering and vulnerable. It’s a clever trick – especially when we wonder if it’s just true.

Either way, having crafted this perfect insider atmosphere, Chauhan places the case (and us) in the hands of the perfect outsider. A policeman who’s upper caste and English-speaking but not quite Club Class, ACP Bhavani Singh is somehow observant enough to imagine other people’s compulsions, be they of caste, class, gender or something else. Instead of the Singham-variety cop “who makes the criminals piss their pants”, Bhavani makes “all the crooks leap up grinning, and ask him how his granddaughters are.”

Stolidly incorruptible, staunchly non-violent and persuasively gender-sensitive, the old Delhi Police officer feels even more like a form of wish-fulfilment than Chauhan’s dishy romantic heroes. So, of course, we dearly want to believe he might exist. Much of the pleasure of Club You To Death comes from watching the amicable old policeman piece the case together quietly, his “little grey cells” keen enough not to draw attention to himself.

Under the radar, as Chauhan well knows, is the best way to fly.

Published in Scroll, 10 April 2021.

A Closer Look

My piece on a marvellous new Google Arts exhibit, for India Today:

The National Museum’s miniatures are now in augmented reality, on a screen near you.

Swami Haridasa with Tansen and Akbar at Vrindavana. Unknown, 1700 AD - 1760 AD. National Museum, New Delhi.

If you’ve ever admired a miniature painting on a museum wall, you might know the feeling of wanting to hold it in your hands for a closer look. Life in Miniature partially fulfils that desire. The latest India-centric project by Google Arts and Culture makes over 1,000 miniatures, from the National Museum’s and 24 more collections available in gloriously high resolution. “These paintings were not meant to be viewed from behind glass. You now have an experience close to that of the original patrons,” says Kavita Singh, professor of art history at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, who has also written an essay for the virtual show.

So, for instance, if you were to click on a painting of the Mughal emperor Akbar accompanying Tansen to meet the latter’s guru Swami Haridas in Vrindavan, the painting, at first glance, simply shows Tansen kneeling before his mentor, while the emperor stands behind him. Then you might notice Tansen’s tanpura, richly ornamented, sitting quietly by his side, while he looks reverently at the saint plucking his simple brown one. You’ll see three white-clad figures, but a closer look at their clothes reveals their social positions. The swami wears only a loincloth, while Tansen and Akbar wear jamas with a gold-edged sash. But then you might notice that Akbar is barefoot: perhaps in deference to Haridas?

The pleasure of these paintings extends beyond social analysis. As you zoom in, monkeys, squirrels and many birds become visible in the foliage. Google’s curators urge viewers to “find the parrots” or “spot the weapons”, and group images into “stories”, instead of the dryer chronological or geographical approaches. “A lot of older arcane scholarly work did not serve these paintings well. Narrative and thematic approaches are more prevalent now. This exhibition is rooted in visual delight, which was the intention of the painters,” says Singh. “Grouping images by subject or colour offers lively pathways into the art for people outside the academy. Perhaps the next step can be to make these resources available in other Indian languages. But this is a great start.”

Published in India Today magazine, 20 Nov 2020