Book Review: A Bit of Everything

A fine new novel I reviewed for Scroll, about Kashmir and much else:

 In ‘A Bit of Everything’, author Sandeep Raina travels with questions of memories and victimhood.

About ten pages into Sandeep Raina’s novel, the Kashmiri Pandit protagonist is asked if he would like to watch a film about the history of the concentration camp he is visiting. Rahul Razdan has just arrived in Europe after six despairing years in Delhi, and walking around Dachau has already filled his mind with thoughts of his homeland. Something about the Austrian stranger’s innocuous question jolts the usually subdued young professor out of melancholia into sudden rage. “I have seen it all, I have felt it, I have been the film. Why would I want to see it all again?” he snaps.

A Bit of Everything is punctuated by incandescent moments like this one, where the light – and heat – from a still-smouldering bit of memory suddenly illuminates the drab, papered-over present, sometimes threatening to set it on fire. But such sparks are rare, because they are dangerous. Most people, most of the time, prefer to view the past nostalgically, and Rahul is no different. In the nostalgic mode, too, the mental analogy is with a film – but a film one watches over and over because one yearns to inhabit it again. 

“The past could be recalled easily, it could be comforting. He could rely on it. He could replay his fondest memories. Sitting here in a cold lounge on a cold leather sofa, he could recall a summer garden, a breezy afternoon, a book aglow under a winter candle, the smell of a wooden bukhari, warm toes in woollen socks, the scent of apples in straw boxes, pine-needle charcoal smoking in a kangri, Doora’s fluttering sari. The past could be relived as he wanted. The problem was with the present.”

A Bit of Everything, by Sandeep Raina. Westland, 2020.

A slow souring

Raina understands the workings of memory from the inside out. His book is a self-reflexive take on how we craft the narratives of our lives: as individuals, as families, as communities, as nations. It is no coincidence that Raina’s fictional narrator, the mild-mannered Rahul, has the rare ability to accept himself – his bafflement, his grief, his anger – without denying others his empathy. That empathetic quality is particularly valuable in a paean to a lost Kashmiri Pandit homeland, because the granular personal memory of that loss is too often dissolved into a politically expedient history of collective Hindu victimhood.

After they were forced to leave the increasingly communalised valley in the early 1990s, the Pandits’ painful and legitimate grievances have been sucked more and more into a narrative not of their making. The community is now a crucial pawn in the Sangh Parivar’s game of whataboutery, a game which politicians benefit from keeping alive.

We live with Rahul and the others the wrenching violence of the Pandit experience, of having been uprooted from the only home they had ever known, with little notice and few avenues for return. But their fear and hurt and befuddlement is not marshalled into some easy post-facto rationalisation. Raina’s protagonists refuse to play the static parts assigned to them in that never-ending majoritarian game: Pandits are not perpetually wounded victims, Muslims are not perpetually ungrateful traitors. (Even those from the “forces’ families” are allowed complicated inner lives by Raina – though he makes it clear that India’s defence establishment is its own social category in Kashmir.)

Instead, Raina’s narrative burden is the slow souring of once-warm relationships – and like his professorial narrator, he takes it seriously. If he revels in the sights and smells and sounds of his beloved house and garden, painting a often-idyllic picture of the sleepy small town of Varmull (I had to google to realise it’s the Baramulla of news reports), Rahul is equally punctilious about recording the fault-lines beneath the surface. The cross-community connections of Tashkent Street are real, but they contain within them the seeds of discord.

On Tashkent Street

So, for instance, we learn that Rahul and Doora build their “Haseen House” on a spur of the fields belonging to Doora’s family. It’s a detail, but one that helps understand how historical resentments brew: Pandits own all the arable land for miles, while it is poorer Muslims like Firoz and his brother who know how to cultivate it.

Rahul’s relationship to Firoze lies at the core of the novel: their bonding over the garden; Rahul’s awkward silence when Firoze takes the blame for a theft that his brother may or may not have committed; his attempt to compensate by teaching Firoze English literature for free. The inequality once tempered by neighbourly attachment becomes unbridgeable as social distrust deepens.

Then there’s the story of Kris, originally Krishna, who lives in one of the derelict houses on Jadeed Street where most of Varmull’s Dalits lived, “no one knew since when”. After his father dies cleaning a gutter, he comes to work in Rahul and Doora’s house at 13, hoping to acquire some education alongside his domestic duties. But Doora catches him pilfering and sends him away, launching him on a series of adventures in religion. First disallowed into the temple on Gosain Hill, then offered a new name and a Koran but barred from the mosque as “napaak” (impure), the Dalit boy finally becomes a Christian at 14.

Tashkent Street enables unlikely connections, but also watches them with suspicion. If the relationship between Kris and the poor Pandit girl Ragnee raises eyebrows, so does the fact of Firoze’s and Asha Dhar’s mother becoming friends over their daughters’ weddings – and the Ramayan. “I can’t understand the trittam-krittam, trit-pit Hindi they speak in the show, and no one at home tells me anything,” says Firoze’s mother to her son to explain why she goes to Asha Dhar’s house to watch the Hindu epic on Doordarshan every Sunday. 

“Mother, focus on your Pashto, not your Hindi,” laughs Firoze, while telling Rahul privately that it’s the Dhars’ cooking she can’t stay away from. Asha Dhar’s husband Pt Dhar, too, is unhappy with the friendship, which brings the Khan family – including their younger son Manzoor – into unnecessary proximity with his teenaged daughters.

Coming home

Over and over, Raina catches cultural and linguistic undercurrents that are the waves of the future: Iqbal Bano playing at a Pandit wedding before being turned off for its Pakistani-ness; Arun Dhar averting his eyes when asked about his friend Manzoor, or Pt Dhar dropping his voice to a whisper when he talks about his son-in-law’s “Shankhi” leanings so that the shopkeeper can’t hear him, or telling Rahul that he should say “poshte” because Muslims say “mubarakh”.

Raina’s radar may be stronger in Varmull, but it is alert to signals of contradiction even in Delhi and London – the intra-Muslim divide between Pashto-speakers and others; his Babri-destroying cousin Chaman who assures Doora that Rahul won’t fall into bad habits abroad, while winking at him and talking about marrying a mem; the Trinidadian Hindus who toast “Raoul” with beef doner kababs and whiskey while enlisting his services as a pandit for their planned Sanatan temple in Tooting.

Rahul’s final return – to India and to Kashmir – is the only unconvincing part of the book, perhaps because Raina’s attempt to unravel all the knots of the past at once feels more like wish-fulfilment than reality. But this is still a book to be read for its closely observed, deeply felt sense of Kashmir: a world seen from the inside, and then sadly, painfully, from afar. 

In this, A Bit of Everything is the complementary opposite of Madhuri Vijay’s award-winning 2019 novel The Far Field, in which we travel into Kashmir alongside a privileged young woman for whom the place is just a name. It is her slow and revelatory transition, from clueless to tragically embroiled, that helps forge ours.

Unlike Shalini, whose understanding grows as she embeds herself in Kashmir, Rahul begins to understand many things as he is removed from them, once he is no longer a “god of education” in Varmull. Distance and time help recalibrate the familiar.

The British section of the book is powerfully evocative, offering a rare glimpse of the South Asian immigrant experience in all its trials and excitements. As someone who studied in England at an age and time close to the fictional Rahul, I found much that felt deeply recognisable: the insufferable white academic who generously “simplifies” his name for the brown person (while not even thinking to ask how to pronounce yours), the sad, desperate search for ingredients to cook your own food, and the unexpected intimacies with other brown people.

Sometimes these connections with strangers feel stronger than with one’s known people, like Rahul and the man who sells Kashmiri noon chai on a London street. In a world governed by whiteness, brown skin can stretch to cover the bones of class and caste, religion and nation. The differences magnified in the sameness of Varmull can shrink to nothingness in London. That, too, is a revelation.

Published in Scroll, 30 Jan 2021.

Fictional motherlands, real relationships

My Mirror column:

Some recent fictions illustrate how totalitarianism thrives on turning on real people into mythical enemies – and pitting an attachment to family and friends against the love of an imaginary nation

A still from the 2019 film Jojo Rabbit

A third of the way through the sadly aborted Leila, the series’ protagonist Shalini (Huma Qureshi) finally manages to trace her lost daughter to a school that looks like a prison. Her fake ID gets her past the gun-toting security-men into a cavernous grey interior, where stiffly-dupatta-ed girls are learning the call-and-response of new nationhood. “Hum kaun hain?” demands the teacher. “Aryavarta ke nanhe sipaahi!” comes the response. As Shalini’s anxious gaze travels along the children and finds Leila’s familiar features, her face uncreases into a joyful smile. Almost unconsciously, her feet begin to move towards the child she thought she might never see again.

But is this really the same child as the one who was abducted from her parents’ arms, only two years before? “My name is not Leila, my name is Vijaya,” the little girl says to a stunned Shalini. She pronounces the words carefully, like she’s learnt them by rote. The scene’s emotional kicker comes when a big car draws up, with a woman in it that Shalini knows well from a previous life, and Vijaya runs to embrace her – this time, with an unrehearsed “Mummy”. But as the finale of Leila makes indubitably clear, that woman is only a placeholder. The entity that has really replaced Shalini is so powerful that there is no way a mere human even try to compete - the nation-state. To quote the slightly dubious gendering chosen by Leila’s makers, “Tum meri maa nahi ho. Aryavarta meri maa hai.”

The idea of a nationalism that pits children against their parents is one that has appeared in another Indian webseries, Ghoul, where the ultimate betrayal of a parent is committed by an adult protagonist who has tragically learnt to trust the nation-state over and above family. I was reminded of these shows this week, as I watched Taika Waititi’s 2019 film Jojo Rabbit, currently free to stream, in which a single mother (Scarlett Johansson) has to deal with her only child being indoctrinated by a state she isn't exactly enamoured of.

Instead of a chilling dystopian future, though, Jojo Rabbit takes us on a madcap fantasy ride into the past. Ten-year-old Johannes Betzler is as cuddly a protagonist as you could ask for. He is also an incipient Nazi, who spends a lot of time talking to his imaginary best friend Adolf: a goofball version of Hitler who's alternately sulky and encouraging. Right from the opening sequence, which splices its fictional boy hero's frenzied self-motivation for a Jungvolk training weekend with historical black and white footage of Hitler's screaming youthful fans to the Beatles iconic anthem I Wanna Hold Your Hand, you know this film isn't traditional fare. Jojo's repeated 'Heil Hitlers', getting louder and crazier as he bursts out of his front door and careens in faux-aeroplane mode through his small-town streets, aren’t scary so much as ridiculous. The same could be said of the cast of characters that have assembled to turn the town's little boys into men and little girls into women – the hipflask-swigging Captain K, demoted from active wartime service by the avoidable loss of an eye, and the pudding-faced Fraulein Rahm, who seems a little young to have had “eighteen children for Germany”.

Waititi ups the tenor of ridiculousness even further when it comes to Nazi indoctrination against Jews. The descriptions proffered by the camp leaders, complete with chalk sketches, reminded me of Roald Dahl's checklist for witches in The Witches. Jews look deceptively like human beings, but they have horns under their hair and scales on their bodies and they smell like Brussels sprouts.

But of course, the film's whole point is that Jojo – like the entire brainwashed German nation -- believes in this mythology. So when, in a nice doffing-of-the-hat to Anne Frank, a teenaged Jewish girl turns out to be hiding behind the wall of his dead sister’s room, Jojo is baffled when she doesn’t fit the criteria. In return for keeping her secret, Jojo demands of Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) a detailed insider's account of Jewishness, taking notes as she speaks. Their evolving relationship lets us walk the tightrope fantasy does, between wish-fulfilment and danger. An illustrated ‘expose’ full of ‘facts' about Jews, fictitious letters from a boyfriend who may or may not exist – these are the flip side of a real world in which Elsa can only survive if she can successfully parade her dead classmate’s papers.But it is in Jojo’s relationship with his mother Rosie that the film's heart lies. Johansson is pitch-perfect as the single mum who can blacken her face and turn into an imaginary ‘Daddy’ to indulge her little boy’s demand for his missing father – but who also refuses to let him avert his eyes from the bodies of ‘traitors’ strung up in the town square. She is happy to let him be part of the masquerade of Nazi boyhood, but draws the line at a real gun. Jojo Rabbit, like Rosie, knows the magical power of fiction, but also knows exactly when reality counts.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 Apr 2020.

The Art of Dress in Isherwood's Berlin

My Shelf Life column for the website The Voice of Fashion looks at literature through the prism of clothes. 

This month, it's about people living on the edge in a city turning Nazi: Germany at the end of the Weimar era in Christopher Isherwood's much-adapted Goodbye to Berlin.

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”

So wrote Christopher Isherwood in 'A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930)' -- the first of the six interlinked stories that made up his 1935 book Goodbye to Berlin, a brilliant document of a city turning Nazi, a world changing shape before one's eyes.

Isherwood was both stylist and storyteller, gifted with an authorial voice that convinced you that things happened exactly as he wrote them, even as he categorically forbade readers from assuming that his sparkling characters were “libellously exact portraits of living persons”. Whether Sally Bowles and her many friends and lovers ever walked the decadent streets of 1930s Berlin, Isherwood's “camera” kept them running in readers' minds long after. Over the next several decades, as Goodbye to Berlin was adapted first into a play called I Am A Camera, then into a Broadway musical, and later the brilliant 1972 Bob Fosse film Cabaret, they shapeshifted, acquiring new nationalities, sometimes new names and new emotional lives.

Sally Bowles, for instance, went from being the 19-year-old daughter of a Lancashire mill owner who sings at an arty bar called The Lady Windermere to an older American cabaret dancer with daddy issues (the father who's “practically an ambassador” never actually shows up). Sally's rich lover, who in the original story was an American called Clive became, in Bob Fosse's film, a married German called Maximilian. The book's narrator, Chris, became Brian in the film, his relationship with Sally going from platonic to not.

Christopher Isherwood (centre) with the poets WH Auden (left) and Stephen Spender (right)

Among the things that stayed constant, though, was the crucial role of clothes. In what might now be seen as a predictable trait for a gay man, Isherwood paid attention to what people wore. And his characters dressed well for members of a 1930s demimonde. Or perhaps precisely for that reason. So we meet Sally first “in black silk, with a cape over her shoulders and a little cap like a pageboy's stuck jauntily on one side of her head”: befittingly theatrical, aided by cherry lips and emerald green nail polish. Meanwhile Sally and Chris's common friend Fritz Wendel has a “usual coffee party costume” that evokes summer even when it is cold and grey: “thick white yachting sweater and very light blue flannel trousers”.

Clothes are the first external sign of the self in this world – and looking respectable can take you a long way. For Frl. Schroeder, the landlady of Chris's lodging house, that means having her “flowered dressing gown pinned ingeniously together, so that not an inch of bodice or petticoat is to be seen”. For Chris, it is keeping his overcoat on because it hides the stain on his trousers. In Cabaret, Fritz surreptitiously pulls his coat-sleeve down to cover his frayed cuffs.

More than most people, Sally Bowles understands the value of looking fine. She constantly performs an exaggerated femininity – at the club, but also in life. And yet under all the high drama lies a childish make-believe, and you realise that her primary performance is for herself. She paints her toenails because it makes her feel sensual. During one of her frequent break-ups, she and Chris spend a lot of time sitting on benches. People stare at Sally “in her canary yellow beret and shabby fur coat, like the skin of a mangy old dog”, while she only thrills to the thought of “what they'd say if they knew that we two old people were to be the most marvelous novelist and the greatest actress in the world.”

Michael York as the English protagonist Brian with Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972)

When she takes up with Clive, Sally accepts as gifts four pairs of shoes and two hats. And when Clive wants to get Chris a gift, she persuades him that six silk shirts would be better than a gold cigarette case. “Yours are in such a state,” she tells Chris with her usual cheerful brutality. In the book, these items of clothing are all that the two supposed gold-diggers get out of Clive – and 50 marks to be saved towards new nightdresses. The film makes everything more outré. Sally's rich lover Max actually gives the narrator that gold cigarette case – and lends him fancy clothes.

In Isherwood's last piece in the book, an ex-lodger called Fraulein Kost returns to visit the landlady in a fur coat and genuine snakeskin shoes, gaining Frl. Schroeder's grudging but real respect, despite her knowledge of her profession: “Well, well, I bet she earned them!... That's the one kind of business that still goes well, nowadays...”. In the film, it is Sally who acquires a new fur coat from Max – only to have to later sell it for an abortion.

Meanwhile, beyond Isherwood's charmed circle, other people are changing their clothes. Groups of young men in brown shirts and armed men in S.A. black uniforms have begun to attack solitary passers-by perceived as Communists. In one description that should resonate perfectly with present-day India, a young man is lynched and his eye poked out while dozens of people look on, and heavily armed policemen, “hands on their revolver belts...magnificently disregard the whole affair”.

On the eve of his return to England, the winter of 1933, Isherwood hears Frl. Schroeder talking reverently of 'Der Fuhrer' to the porter's wife. She voted communist last November, but she would probably hotly deny it. She is merely acclimatising herself, writes Isherwood, “like an animal which changes its coat for the winter.” Isherwood doesn't say it, but those animals are preparing for a long hibernation.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 15 February 2020.

A Student of Resistance

My Mumbai Mirror column:

As India's students speak out, it seems worth recalling a film about a student who defied another regime

Sophie Scholl was 21 when she was executed by the Nazi stateCharged with having distributed leaflets co-authored by a non-violent political resistance group called the White Rose, she was guillotined after a trial on 22 February 1943. The 2005 German film Sophie Scholl: The Last Days, directed by Marc Rothermund from a script by Fred Breinersdorfer, dramatises her interrogation, trial and execution. Though perhaps “dramatises” is not the best word for a film so deliberately spare, choosing to rely almost entirely on the historical transcripts left behind by the Gestapo (the Nazi Secret Police) and the “People's Court” -- and thus unfolding, to a great extent, within the confines of an investigator's office and a courtroom.

Calling themselves the White Rose, the student group to which Sophie belonged brought out six different leaflets between June 1942 and February 1943. Distributed mainly in Munich, with copies also appearing in Stuttgart, Cologne, Vienna, Freiburg, Chemnitz, Hamburg and Berlin, the pamphlets warned Germans that Hitler was leading them into the abyss, and called for people to speak out against Nazi terror. “Support the Resistance Movement!” they urged, for “Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and protection of the individual citizen from the arbitrary action of criminal dictator-states”.

Those words from eight decades ago leap off the page in a month in which India has seen massive protests against a new Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAA), which together with the proposed nationwide National Register of Citizens (NRC), introduces religion as a criterion for Indian citizenship for the first time in the history of our republic. Watching Sophie Scholl, it seems no coincidence that the resistance to the CAA and NRC, which has gone far beyond criticism of the letter of the law to a sorely-needed defence of the secular spirit of our Constitution and of our democracy itself, has been spearheaded by students.

The power of Sophie Scholl: The Last Days is in the details – especially as you watch it in 2019 India, where everything from the aesthetic remodelling of middle class fashion to the lines of 'argument' used by Fascist officials in the film are chillingly recognizable from our real-life political situation today. The junior officer of the Third Reich who hustles the film's 21-year-old student heroine into the custody of Investigator Mohr, for instance, has a moustache clearly modelled on Hitler's. Later, as Sophie (Julia Jentsch) is led into her cold prison cell, we hear in the background one of the Fuhrer's numerous speeches to the nation on the radio, his rasping voice rising to the familiar nationalist frenzy as he identifies an internal enemy. “Total war is the demand of the hour,” he proclaims, to loud clapping from his audience. “We must also put an end to the bourgeois attitude which we have also seen in this war. The danger facing us is enormous. The time has come to remove our gloves and use our fists...”.

Many of the arguments levelled by the Nazis against anyone who criticised their government are voiced in the film by Mohr and later, the infamous judge Roland Freisler. Over and over, we hear them berate these students as “parasites” and “spoiled brat[s] who foul [their] own nest[s], while others are dying on the front.” They are painted as ungrateful wretches who do not appreciate that they are only able to be students “thanks to the Fuhrer.” Time and again, too, Sophie's refusal to buckle under pressure drives Mohr off the deep end. “How dare you raise your voice!” he shouts at her, the irony of the statement clearly invisible to him. “The Fuhrer and the German people are protecting you.”

Reading a pamphlet in which Sophie's brother Hans argued that the war needed to be brought to an end and expressed his hatred for “the way we treat the Occupied Territories”, Mohr yells: “This is troop demoralisation and high treason!” The insistence on celebration of the army, and the idea that being critical of militarisation is antinational will sound familiar to anyone who has lived through the last five years of BJP rule.

Some of the film's best moments come when Rothermund focuses on the bafflement of the fascist in the face of openness: familial, but also individual. It is a fascinating fact that Scholl had been, for a time, a member of a Nazi youth group, before she and her brother and his friends began to question what the regime wanted them to believe, based on things they had witnessed on the Eastern Front as well as information they had begun to access – about institutionalised violence against Jews and disabled people, among others. Asked why her father – a known critic of the regime who had served a sentence for describing Hitler as “God's scourge to mankind” – had even let Sophie join the Nazi Girls Organisation, she replies, “Our father never influenced us politically.” “Typical for a democrat,” sneers Mohr, lighting another cigarette. “Why did you join?” Sophie's reply should resonate with all Indians who live with the promise of Acche Din: “I heard that Hitler would lead our country to greatness and prosperity and ensure that everyone had work and food and was free and happy.”

I will leave you with what to me is the film's most important exchange. Mohr insists that what he is doing is only to execute the law of the land. “What can we rely on if not the law?” he says. Sophie's answer seems simple, but it is one all of us need to hear: “On your conscience!”

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Dec 2019

Alone Together

My Mirror column:

Living in collectivities can not only produce new relationships, but also new forms of individuality, as two powerful European films reveal.

I write this column from a friend’s charming old wooden Himachali house: a huge open balcony to welcome the sun and tightly shuttered rooms to block out the cold. The house is only opened for the summer, when she retreats here from the heat and dust of Delhi, bringing a variety of people with her. This summer’s assemblage consists of the friend, her 15-month-old baby, her 50-something male friend (whom I met here), the baby’s 18-year-old maid, and me. There are also two friendly locals who come in to help with provisions, cleaning and additional babysitting. Barring occasional expeditions to the river or the village, the emotional and material life of the household revolves around the next meal, the cooking of which is subject to the all-important task of Feeding The Baby. It has been an interesting exercise in communal living.

Serendipitously, while I’ve been up here, two friends in Delhi have been calling with updates on their respective rental searches: where to live, is the question – and whom to live with? Most people share domestic space with others at some point in their lives. Middle class young people leaving family homes often move to organised communal quarters – school or college hostels, or shared university flats. Shared homes remain the norm in early careers, too, for financial reasons.

But if you’re single and can afford it, then living alone, it seems, is the unspoken top of the hierarchy. The older one gets, the more unusual it becomes to live with anyone who isn’t either family or a romantic partner. The socially normative heterosexual coupledom at the core of these living arrangements is so deeply embedded as to really only strike most of us in absentia.

It is true that once your personal rules are set, to live with others is to test the limits of your adaptability. Unlike youthful communal spaces, whose appeal often lies in the suspension of childhood’s rules (or in breaking institutional ones), shared domesticity in later life is likely be based on the establishment of new ones.

In Thomas Vinterberg’s The Commune (2016), an architecture professor called Erik Moller inherits a house he dismisses as too large for his family. “Living together is about seeing each other,” he says, telling a broker to sell it for a million. But his wife Anna and teenaged daughter Freja have other ideas. Anna loves Erik, but two decades in, she needs newness – and what better way to create it than by inviting new people into a new sort of domestic life? “You speak all the time, and it’s sweet when you do, but it’s as if I’ve heard it all before. I need to hear someone else speak, otherwise I’ll go mad,” she says to her befuddled husband, proposing that they turn the many-roomed mansion into a commune. Friends bring in other friends, and soon there is a collective, a united front interviewing potential applicants.

And so, without any rebuilding, a classically bourgeois European home becomes a space that challenges the norms of bourgeois family life. Decisions now are made not to preserve coupledom, but a more expansive domesticity. It is not that familial love ceases to exist, but rather that the commune allows difficult emotional burdens – like a child’s terminal disease – to be shared across more shoulders. Meanwhile new freedoms and new proximities mean that people fall into new relationships – and sometimes out of old ones. The self-important Erik, increasingly lonely as the commune fills Anna’s emotional needs, starts an affair with a student. Anna, shaken but deep in her own love affair with the commune, invites Erik’s lover into it, saying: “There should be room for you, too. That’s what it’s all about.”
I happened to watch The Commune within a day of watching Swiss-born director Hans Steinbichler’s 2016 German-language feature The Diary of Anne Frank, in which, too, an unlikely assortment of people find themselves holed up together – though in rather more involuntary circumstances. Steinbichler’s is the latest cinematic version of the famous diary, kept by the Jewish teenager during the Nazi-ruled wartime years that she and her family lived hidden above a workshop. Unlike the deliberate newness inaugurated in The Commune, the Franks’ communal life in the annex strives to recreate their home. It is a forced exile into which they take as many possible accoutrements of their bourgeois life, from clothes and dinner sets to books and the writing instruments that make possible Anne’s startlingly frank record of emerging selfhood.

These things – the thingness of these things – help sustain something of the illusion of normalcy, but life in the commune produces its own effects. There is something about the inauguration of a collective domestic arrangement with people you wouldn’t ordinarily expect to live with that pushes buttons and expands boundaries. We are far from the free-spirited world of Vinterberg’s childhood memories, but here, too, the new freedoms and new proximities conjure new relationships – and alter old ones.

The communal life certainly allows for more openness than the traditional family unit, and yet in its difference, it can feel closed off from the world. Both the teenaged Freja in The Commune and the teenaged Anne develop an enhanced sense of privacy, not just because they are exploring their sexuality, but because they are beginning to see themselves as separate from their parents. The breakdown of the old family unit perhaps also enables each of the girls to see her parents separately, as individuals. Embracing the collective, it turns out, can be strangely individuating.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 June 2017.

Filming the Factory

My BL Ink column this month:

Two engrossing documentaries — a German film from 1995 and an Indian one from 2015 — make for a bleak but thoughtful engagement with the figure of the factory worker

Harun Farocki’s 1995 film Workers Leaving the Factory is named for that originary moment of cinema from 1895, of men and women leaving the Lumière factory in Lyons. The original footage was shot by the Lumière brothers to demonstrate that cinema could capture movement. But Farocki, in his characteristic style, entered into a sustained engagement with the subject. After a year-long effort to track as many variants as he could of this theme — workers leaving their workplace — he produced an essayistic assemblage of archival footage that is both haunting and playful.

One of the first things Farocki’s film does is to show us several clips of workers coming out of factories. In almost all, the speed with which they emerge is extraordinary. Often they are actually running, as if they would rather be anywhere other than the factory.

The strike features occasionally. In an American film by DW Griffith, the confrontation between workers and capitalists assumes the face of civil war. An excerpt from a Soviet film contains an exchange in song, a rhythmic face-off between striking workers and the factory supervisor that’s almost gentle by contrast: “You’ve got us the piece of bread, but where is the whole loaf?”

Farocki points out that the moment when workers are leaving the factory produces, as at no other time, the feeling of a multitude: because of the simultaneity of their dismissal, and the compression produced by the exits. The film moves between images that suggest the oppressive squeezing of workers, and the potential power of their collectivity.

“Where the first camera once first stood, there are now hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras,” says the voice-over in Workers Leaving the Factory. The technology of film has taken its place on the side of capital.

“Most narrative films begin after work is over,” the voice-over continues in this vein. “Whenever possible, film has moved hastily away from factories.”

Farocki’s film (free to watch on Vimeo) was recently shown at Delhi’s Max Mueller Bhavan alongside a recent Indian documentary called The Factory, directed by the filmmaker Rahul Roy. The juxtaposition threw up interesting conjunctions, not least the fact that Roy never got to shoot inside the factory of his title.

The reason for this is not complicated. Roy’s film is a meticulously researched, disturbing account of the Maruti Suzuki case, in which 147 workers from the automobile company’s factory in Manesar, Haryana, were arrested and imprisoned without bail for several years, on charges that include arson and the murder of a human resources manager called Avanish Kumar Dev. Thirty-six are still in jail.

The Factory is told entirely through the eyes of workers. The many dismissed workers Roy speaks to suggest a grave miscarriage of justice by the Maruti establishment, aided by the full might of the state: public prosecutor KPS Tulsi was paid ₹5.5 crore for this one case. The workers say that Dev’s death was caused by hired bouncers. It was, they believe, a conspiracy to do away with the one member of management who had helped them organise, while simultaneously framing them and demonising the union.

Harun Farocki’s film contains footage of a strike by English car workers in 1956. “The workers’ disputes are far less violent than those carried out in the name of the workers,” says the voice-over.

Roy started shooting a year after the incident, on July 18, 2013. He presents, without comment, the disproportionate increases in salaries that framed the growing divide between labour and management. In 2007 a senior permanent worker at the Maruti factory earned ₹2.8 lakh annually. By 2013, he earns ₹3 lakh. Meanwhile, in 2007, the CEO earned ₹47.3 lakh. By 2010, he earned ₹2.45 crore.

The film goes on to paint a depressing picture, of a management increasingly distant from workers, while intent on applying the greatest possible pressure on them.

Not allowed to film inside the factory, Roy melds archival footage and conversations with fired workers to recreate life on a production floor where a new car was readied every 45 seconds.

Every group of workers in an automated assembly line is usually provided with one reliever, a worker who can take over if another worker needs to go to the toilet or drink water or simply take a few minutes’ break.

If earlier there was one ‘reliever’ for every 10 men, at Maruti it became one for every 25. Often if a worker was absent, the reliever might be made to take his place, leaving the group without a reliever.

A worker’s absence was penalised with harsh pay cuts — the minimum cut for one day was ₹2,000, which was a fourth of a worker’s monthly variable pay. If a man missed four days, he would lose his entire variable pay, which was half his salary.

Lunch breaks and even toilet breaks were strictly policed. Mistakes on this punishing assembly line resulted in not just verbal ticking-off and written complaints, but also humiliating physical punishments.

“It is a common characteristic of all capitalist production...” wrote Marx, “that the worker does not make use of the working conditions. The working conditions make use of the worker, but it takes machinery to give this reversal a technically concrete form.” The rhythm of production on a conveyor belt, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, means that the article being worked on comes into the worker’s range of action without his volition, and moves away from him just as arbitrarily. In working with machines (wrote Benjamin), workers learn to coordinate “their own movements with the uniformly constant movements of an automaton.”

“Workers changing shift in the film Metropolis. Uniform dress and equal step,” announces the voice-over in Harun Farocki’s film, as we watch that classic 1927 visual of bodies marching in unison through the hellish corridors of Fritz Lang’s imagined dystopia. Heads drooping, movements robotically coordinated but painfully slow: these are human beings with their humanity leached out of them.

If this vision of the future has not come to pass, it seems to me, it has not been for lack of trying.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, 9 April 2016

Graphic Designs

While Germany might be a late starter as a comics nation, India has much to learn from it. (My piece in last week's BL_Ink, drawing on a recent trip to Germany organised by the German Book Office, New Delhi.)

One of the primary aims of the Delhi-based German Book Office (GBO) is to explore different aspects of book publishing in India and find ways of developing them further. A few years ago, for instance, their focus on children’s book publishing led to the establishment of an annual programme called Jumpstart, whose fifth instalment is due to unfold in Delhi and Bangalore at the end of this month. In general, most Indian publishers and editors do not have sufficient opportunities to meet their international counterparts and see how things happen in other markets. As a joint venture between the Frankfurt Book Fair and the Foreign Office, Berlin, the GBO is well-placed to facilitate such contact. With this in mind, it organises an annual editors’ trip to Germany, centred on a different genre each year.

This year, the trip focused on graphic books and young adult (YA) writing, enabling editors from five Indian publishing houses — Penguin Random House, Rupa, Roli, Vani and National Book Trust — to meet representatives of German publishers such as Mosaik, Oetinger, Carlsen, Reprodukt, Carl Hanser, Suhrkamp, S Fischer and Büchergilde.

As presentations and conversations unfolded, it became apparent just how varied and mature German publishing is in these genres, both of which are still nascent in India. German YA fiction, for instance, ranges from tender coming-of-age narratives that take on board issues of race, disability and sexual identity to disturbing, even erotically charged (though not explicit), murder mysteries.

The comic/graphic book scene is even richer. There are independent publishers such as Mosaik, which nurtures the legacy of Abrafaxe, a very popular series that began in East Germany in the 1950s, and Reprodukt, which specialises in graphic novels. There are also larger houses such as Carlsen, which began a Manga imprint in 2000 and also publishes some of the most acclaimed graphic artists, including Isabel Kreitz and Reinhard Kleist.

Considering this range and excellence, it came as a surprise that within the Euro-American universe, Germany is considered a late starter as a comics nation. Andreas Platthaus of the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung argues that the reason for this was, ironically, the historical popularity of picture stories in Germany: humorous illustrated periodicals became popular in the 19th century, and the strength of that tradition made Germans dismissive of American-style comics, even as they spread through Europe in the early 20th century.

Then came the Nazis, who famously ridiculed comics, making it near-impossible for publishers to promote them. Even after 1945, with American occupation, comics did not really take off in Germany (unlike, say, in Japan).

Thus many Germans started out reading comics from Belgium, France and Italy, and their classics such as Asterix and Tintin remain hugely popular. A visit to X-tra Boox, an excellent little comic bookshop in Frankfurt, revealed the German market’s continuing openness to other cultures, with a top floor filled with Manga in translation and a basement devoted to American superheroes.

It was after German reunification in 1990 that the first generation of avant-garde German graphic artists emerged. Anke Feuchtenberger and others became university professors, helping groom a second wave.

“Now we’re into the third wave and the fourth wave,” said Sebastian Oehler of Reprodukt. “At the end of the ’90s, there was a big discussion on whether comics were art. And now the discussion is, are comics literature?” More graphic artists now address ‘serious’ subjects — like Ulli Lust’s Flying Foxes on World War II, or Nicolas Mahler, who has produced graphic versions of Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters and The Do-gooders.

The trip also provided occasion for the participating Indian editors to discuss the challenges they face. The German comic reader, while exposed to international comics, reads German books avidly. But one of the problems in India, said Ameya Nagarajan of Penguin Random House, is that Indian readers who actually buy graphic novels prefer to buy wellknown Western names, rather than risking money on Indian newbies. And this, as Nagarajan points out, is that small proportion of readers who are visually literate.

Regional runs

The costs of good-quality graphic publishing are also a real hurdle, especially for smaller publishers. “We are bringing out our first graphic book series on Param Vir Chakra bravery award-winners,” said Neelam Narula of Roli Books. “We had published a non-fiction book on the subject earlier, but the author wanted to reach out to a younger age group, 12-18 years. The first two books are doing well. But to sell these 32-page books at ₹100 each, we had to keep our costs down and increase our print runs.”

The situation is even tougher when it comes to publishing in the regional languages. “Visual culture is the next big thing, but it is still not the choice of the masses,” said Aditi Maheshwari of the Hindi publishing major Vani Prakashan. “We’re trying to create a body of work through translation. But we have to create a buzz for each book.” Vani has just released one of the first graphic books in Hindi, in collaboration with the Japan Foundation.

Neerav Sandhya ka Sheher, Sakura ke Desh is the Hindi translation of an award-winning Manga calledTown of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, on what happened in Hiroshima after the atomic explosion. Also in the pipeline is a Hindi translation of Persepolis.

What about original graphic books in Hindi and other regional languages? “The Vani Foundation has just instituted four ₹20,000 fellowships for writers and illustrators of children’s books,” says Maheshwari. “Selected fellows will get to attend masterclasses at Jumpstart 2014, receive mentoring from Gulzar and Paro Anand, and get a three-book contract with Vani.” It’s going to be a long haul, but it looks like the visual book is here to stay.

(Trisha Gupta is a writer and critic based in Delhi)

Post Facto: Too graphic for grown-ups? Thoughts on pictures in books

A spread from the book 'Hope is a Girl Selling Fruit' by Amrita Das. Tara Books, 2013.

	ave you ever thought about what it means that we think picture books are for children? Clearly, it's not that we think pictures are for children: visual art in other forms, whether paintings or movies, is seen as perfectly grown-up. But somehow, when pictures enter a book, they become, in the eyes of most people who consider themselves "real" readers, a form of dumbing-down. One reason for this sort of thinking is obvious. If books are meant to be about text, then anything that detracts from the serious business of words is an illegitimate interloper, that›s managed to sneak in without the permission of the Book Guards. As the kid who never quite got why anyone should want to read comics when they could read real  books, I get that thought. And certainly, I agree that we respond differently to narrative when the only pictures we have access to are the ones in our heads. Images might hook you faster, but they also change the rhythm of your reading. Some people might only look at the pictures. Some look at the pictures first, and then go back to read the text. Some — like me — might race through the text (and wonder at there being less of it) before realising that sometimes, pictures demand a slowing-down — quite different from the swept-up feeling that can characterise a good story. But if placing images alongside changes our experience of text, why is that necessarily a bad thing? Who decided that books have to be about text, anyway? And that art must only hang on a wall? I started thinking these thoughts because of three stunning publications that came out recently from Tara Books, the Chennai-based independent publisher. All three are drawn by Indian folk artists, all women. In Drawing from the City, the Ahmedabad-based Teju Behan tells, in beautiful black and white pen-drawings, the tale of how she and her late husband Ganesh Bhai Jogi went from the village to the city, and how they became artists. In Hope is a Girl Selling Fruit (2013), the Mithila-style folk painter Amrita Das draws — and draws us into — meditations on her life, the life of a girl she sees on a train, the lives of women in India. The third book is Sultana's Dream, Rokheya Sakhawat Hussain's famous 1905-fable about a world where peace-loving women rule over men, is illustrated by the Gond artist Durga Bai. The text in these books is spare and simple, but it talks about serious things. The images, though, are what one lingers over. Like the albums in which the Mughal aristocracy housed their miniature paintings, this is art between the covers. { And certainly, I agree that we respond differently to narrative when the only pictures we have access to are the ones in our heads. Images might hook you faster, but they also change the rhythm of your reading.
	started to think about these things again on a recent trip to Germany, where six Indian editors and I had been sent to meet German publishers of graphic novels, young adult and children's books. Some entered these genres for somewhat instrumental reasons. Carl Hanser Verlag — publishers of Sophie's World — said their children's list first emerged because they wanted to stop their authors from taking their manuscripts for kids to other publishers. Similarly, the venerable Suhrkamp, known for publishing theory and literary heavyweights, started its graphic novel list partly as a way of keeping all versions of their great books. So they started with celebrated Austrian artist Mahler doing a graphic version of Thomas Bernhardt's novel Alte Meister (Great Masters), and a graphic interpretation of Robert Musil's mid-century novel The Man Without Qualities. But last year, they stopped playing safe like that: they brought out the graphic autobiography of Volker Reiche, veteran of the German comics scene. Also, publishing Mahler's Musil was a radical thing to do — turning Musil's dense, thousand-page classic into a fairly slender set of pages, with barely six sentences to a page, could easily be seen as sacrilege. And really, one part of me agrees vociferously: how can reading Mahler be the same as reading Musil? Other German publishers we met come from the opposite side. They have not, shall we say, had to readjust their reading glasses to see the pictures. Some of these are, like Mosaik, comic publishers first and foremost, their adventurous Abrafaxe threesome dating back to the East German 1950s. Others, like Reprodukt, are part of the coming of age of the German graphic novel. Their recent Kinderland, about a seventh grader before the Berlin Wall fell, has won awards and critical acclaim from the "serious" quarters of the press. But it was at our last meeting, with the Frankfurt publishers Edition Buchergilde, that I saw the most imaginative responses to the text/image debate. Buchergilde has long published illustrated titles for adults, and they're unafraid to tap into our most childlike forms of wonder: I saw a truly remarkable edition of Patricia Highsmith's dark thriller, The Talented Mr. Ripley, with 3-D illustrations that need accompanying 3-D glasses. More recently, Buchergilde published Arthur Schnitzler's classic  Traumnovelle (Dream Novel, the origin of the film Eyes Wide Shut)in a graphic version. What's great is that Jakob Hinrichs' graphic version is an adaptation, and says so — but Buchergilde pleases everyone — and both aspects of everyone — by publishing the full original text as an appendix to the graphic novel. If the Tara books I spoke of appeal to the thoughtful side of children, Buchergilde appeals to the playful desires of adults. And yet you could reverse that assumption about pictures just as easily: Hinrich's images can be pretty disturbing. Anyway, don't we all need both? Published in the Sunday Guardian.