Book Review: Krishna learns to let go the Hindu way in this bestseller

Part popular romance, part spiritual melodrama, 'Krishnayan' by Gujarati writer Kaajal Oza Vaidya adds some real women to India’s mythological matrix 

Krishnayan by Kaajal Oza Vaidya, translated from the Gujarati by Subha Pande,
Eka-Westland, 272 pages, ₹499

The most remarkable thing about Indic civilisation might be the uninterrupted lifespan of its beliefs. Most Hindu gods and goddesses were already being worshipped in South Asia when the Greeks were building temples to Zeus and Athena, or when Jupiter and Diana ruled ancient Roman hearts. But while the Greek and Roman gods have been long superseded by the Semitic religions, ours live on. Deities like Shiva, Vishnu, Ganesh, Karthik and Durga, and divine epic heroes like Ram and Krishna remain a vivid presence for religious Hindus. Mythology is still the matrix for modern Indian life.

But as a cynical politics digs its claws into people's beliefs, that matrix is turned into a never-ending maelstrom of offense-taking and offense-giving. On Saraswati Puja this February, for instance, right-wing Indian Twitter trended demands for the arrest of a Dalit activist for having insulting the Hindu goddess of learning by referring to her as 'exploited' by Brahma. According to the myth, Lord Brahma, creator of the universe, fell in love with Saraswati after he made her. Philosophical-metaphorical readings (an artist besotted with his own creation), or anthropological ones (the fact that incest figures in most ancient creation myths) stand no chance in belligerent social media battles, where the dominant narrative frame is men avenging women's 'honour'.

Of course, such 'dishonouring' drives both our epics: the abduction of Sita in the Ramayana, the stripping of Draupadi in the Mahabharata. But while the plots may turn on women, the male characters receive greater attention. Relationships between them—Krishna and Sudama, Krishna and Arjun, Arjun and Karna, Ram and Lakshman, even Ram and Hanuman—have formed popular models of friendship, fraternal love and loyalty. Most literary retellings, too, have been through the eyes of a male character: Bhima in MT Vasudevan Nair’s famous Malayalam novel Randaamoozham, Karna in Shivaji Sawant's Marathi classic Mrintyunjay, and Yudhishtira, Bhishma and Abhimanyu in Aditya Iyengar's The Thirteenth Day (2015).

A female perspective on our epics has only begun to appear in recent decades, mostly in fiction by women. Draupadi got pride of place in Pratibha Ray's award-winning 1993 Oriya novel Yajnaseni and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's 2008 novel The Palace of Illusions. Sita got some play in the graphic novel Sita's Ramayana and Nina Paley's film Sita Sings the Blues. Lesser female characters are now getting their due in popular English-language fiction: for example, Aditi Banerjee's The Curse of Gandhari, and Kavita Kane's series of books centred on Ahalya, Surpanakha, Sita's sister and Karna's wife.

Kaajal Oza Vaidya's hugely popular novel Krishnayan, which has sold over 200,000 copies in Gujarati since its publication in 2006, is an important addition to this literature, using the figure of Krishna to explore aspects of the man-woman relationship.

Recently translated into English by Subha Pande, Vaidya's narrative starts where the usual telling of Krishna's life stops. What is traditionally called Krishna Leela, literally Krishna's play, is a set of stories about the birth, childhood and adolescence of the Yadava chieftain, with such set themes as the naughty baby Krishna stealing butter from the milkmaids of Gokul, or his youthful flute-playing assignations with Radha.

Krishnayan, by contrast, opens with Krishna awaiting death, reminiscing about his life. And in Vaidya's unusually frank telling, what emerges as significant as he waits for Gandhari's curse to take effect are his bonds with women. There are four primary ones: Rukmini, his intelligent, stately senior queen, his consort in the administration of Dwarka; Satyabhama, his younger queen, childish but captivating; Draupadi, loyal wife to the five Pandava brothers, but still carrying a special attachment to Krishna—and Radha, the childhood sweetheart he hasn't seen in decades, now not just a married woman and a mother, but a mother-in-law.

Vaidya's narrative can feel laboured, and her dialogue borders on florid, at least in Pande's translation. Here, for instance, is Rukmini, “The fire raging in my heart is trying to tell me that he is waiting to answer all my questions.” And here is Arjun on the eve of the war: “I have a lot to say and yet nothing to say. I am dumbfounded. I am hit by thousands of thoughts at times and sometimes, I just can't think. I am going through a strange period of indecision.”

But Krishnayan's fictional premise is as layered as any present-day polyamorous situation, and Vaidya has all the depth of the Mahabharata behind her as she moves deftly across characters and revisits familiar dramatic situations: the ethics of game of dice, or how the five Pandavas deal with their shared connection to Draupadi. She explores each of Krishna's loves for what makes it unique – intellectual partnership, sexual allure, emotional understanding, a shared history – and goes refreshingly beyond him, to these women's relationships with each other.

But for all the empathy with which she writes about women, Vaidya remains staunchly invested in an essential separation of the genders. The Krishna of Krishnayan is an adept lover, loving husband and devoted friend—but he remains a man. In some of Vaidya's most emotional scenes, Krishna claims limitations in gendered terms, applauding women for their greater capacity for selflessness. “While I have only been contemplating seeking moksha and preparing myself for it, these two dearly loved women [Draupadi and Rukmini] have... come forward to liberate me from the cycle of life. Only women can do this. Only a woman can control heart and mind and fulfil her moral duties... And only she has the magnanimity to accept a co-wife and give true meaning to the word life-partner, Krishna thought...”.

It probably helps that Vaidya's Krishna isn't a god in the way we usually understand gods. He may know what is predestined—the Mahabharata war, the end of the Yadava race, or his own death—but he is powerless in the face of it. Rather than an uber-manipulator who's playing everyone else, this is a Krishna almost surprised to find that he, too, is caught in in a web of expectations and desires. “Why is everyone surrendering their selves to me? Unacceptance would be immoral, but where would I take them with me even if I accept? I will have to break these shackles of attachment.”

Full of intense exchanges on desire and ownership, mind and body, attachment and the atma, Krishnayan is a sort of manual for letting go. And if you can deal with its somewhat repetitive melodramatic style, it helps thicken the most famous Indian plot of all. It adds some real women to our mythological matrix.

Published in Mint Lounge, 29 Mar 2021.

Book Review: Uttara—The Book Of Answers

Ramayan's backstories

If we could stop trying to prove the truth of the epic, it can tell us much about ourselves. 

Uttara—The Book Of Answers. By Arshia Sattar, Penguin Books India, 286 pages, Rs 499.

“I staunchly believe that Lord Ram travelled in the Pushpak Viman. There were no Wright brothers at that time. But the Pushpak Viman existed. We need to prove this now.” So said Jigar Inamdar, a senate member of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, to The Indian Express on 24 March, defending the university’s issuance of an annual diary and planner that credited mythical Hindu sages with scientific inventions. It may seem odd to begin a book review with a quote from the newspaper. But Inamdar’s assertion lets us see how the Ramayan has become something more than a great civilizational legacy in contemporary India—and something much less than one.

A multilayered literary treasure is being flattened into something that must be defended rather than actually read. The Ramayan is no longer an ethically complex story to be experienced in a variety of ways, as believers and non-believers in India’s many regions and subcultures have done for centuries, but something to be pushed on to us as religious and scientific truth.

It is in this terrifying context that we must read Uttara: The Book Of Answers. Arshia Sattar has rendered the Uttara Kanda, the seventh book of Valmiki’s Ramayan, from Sanskrit into eloquent, yet lucid English, and included some thoughtful essays on the text. Uttara seems a natural progression for Sattar, who translated Valmiki’s Ramayan in 1996, and who has since published a Ramayan for children, as well as Lost Loves: Exploring Rama’s Anguish, a fine set of essays on Ram’s sense of self. But as she writes in her acknowledgements, Sattar did not always find the Uttara Kanda interesting. For her 1996 Ramayana, she shaved its heft down to what she then saw as its few significant events: “Sita’s banishment, Ram’s reunion with his sons and Sita’s final and irrevocable departure.”

In her current Introduction, too, Sattar acknowledges that the Uttara Kanda might be read as recording a dull time after the tumultuous events of Ram’s life, his exile, and the biggest battles are really over: This is a text in which “nothing much happens”. In terms of style as well, she points out that the Uttara Kanda and Bala Kanda (the first book of the Ramayan, dealing with Ram’s childhood) do not have the glorious poetic verve of the epic’s central sections, and read more like the sectarian Puranas “in both language and attitude”.

Much of the Uttara Kanda consists of Ram asking questions of the sages, and backstories being related to him in return. If the five middle kandas—Ayodhya, Aranya, Kishkindha, Sundara, Yuddha—gave us the splendid narrative and rich characters we know so well, the Uttara Kanda is like a coda designed to explain why these characters acted as they did. So we return to Hanuman’s infancy, to explain why he did not know his own strength. Or we hear of Vedavati, who leaps into a fire to escape Ravana’s harassment, and whose return to earth as Sita is foretold “for the destruction of that rakshasa”.

The Uttara Kanda’s backstories revolve around boons, curses and past lives, thus shifting the characters’ decisions towards predestination and away from free choice. For instance, it tells of how Ravana once raped the apsara Rambha and was cursed that “his head (would) split into seven pieces” if he ever took another woman against her will. This becomes the uttara (answer) to the implicit question: Why did Ravana not violate Sita while she was his prisoner?

The Uttara Kanda thus robs Ravana of a rare redeeming characteristic—that he does not think of raping Sita. Departing radically from the Sundara Kanda, where Ravana’s effulgence is such that even Hanuman says he “has all the signs of a great king”, the Uttara Kanda portrays him as a harasser of women and belligerent challenger of kings and gods, placing him in a long genealogy of aggressive rakshasas.

Meanwhile, Ram gets treated less and less like a human being with frailties, and more and more as a god. He is Vishnu, and he can do no wrong. So even when he abandons a pregnant Sita because of the common people’s “vulgar talk”, Lakshman is persuaded to stop questioning Ram’s actions by his charioteer Sumantra, because the sage Durvasas predicted this fate. Ram’s kingliness is now also tied actively to caste: In the text’s most shocking moment, he kills a man “performing the best of penances” simply for being a Shudra, and is congratulated by rishi Agastya for having restored the caste order.

On a lighter note, reading Uttara can tell you why the peacock has a patterned tail, or serve as a much needed reminder of Indic standards of beauty, where “lovely hips” always win. If we could just stop trying to prove the truth of the Pushpak Viman, the epic can tell us many truths about ourselves.

Published in Mint Lounge, 3 June 2017.

PS: If Ramayana books interest you, my 2013 review of Devdutt Pattanaik's Sita (also for Mint Lounge) may be of interest.

Manly Women, Womanly Men

My Mirror column, on Akshayambara and Harikatha Prasanga:

A new play and a new film step into the world of Yakshagana performers to sharpen our sense of what it means to be a man — or a woman.

A still from Sharanya Ramprakash's play Akshayambara

The seated figure, stage right, is in the middle of buttoning a blouse over a patently false bosom. It is a tightly fitted sari blouse, closing laboriously over the hardness of the fake breasts, and yet transforming them before our eyes into an imagined curvaceousness. Still, when the man – for of course it is a man who turns this intimate act into something so frontal, so prosaic – stands up, what draws the eye is the line of hair that runs down his muscled torso, between where the blouse ends and the petticoat begins.

But then he covers himself with more of the paraphernalia of femininity: the twinkling nose ornament, the brilliant green sari swirling, the long thick plait that snakes down to the waist, the girdle that circles it. And lo and behold, we have before us Draupadi — on the morning of her swayamvara, picking flowers from her father's garden to weave into a veni for her hair. We are enchanted, thinking about how the humming Kshatriya princess is just another girl. Then our performer ambles back into his corner, hoists up his gorgeous sari and pisses – standing, like a man. Just as swiftly as the spell was cast, it is broken. The audience breaks into laughter.

The scenes above are part of Sharanya Ramprakash's remarkable Kannada play Akshayambara, staged in Delhi during the National School of Drama's annual theatre festival last week. Ramprakash is a Bengaluru-based theatre practitioner who started exploring the traditional folk form of Yakshagana with the Udupi-based Guru Bannanje Sanjeeva Suvarna after receiving an Inlaks fellowship in 2013. Akshayambara, which emerged out of this interaction and won Ramprasad the Best Original Script META award last year, casts long-time Yakshagana performer Prasad Cherkady (who won at META for Best Male Performance) in the role of a male actor who plays Draupadi. The play deals with his response to the arrival of a female actor (Ramprakash herself) who has been cast in the role of Kaurava (Duryodhana).

Performing in public has been socially stigmatised for women in South Asia. So most traditional dramatic forms, from Ramleela in the north to Yakshagana in the south, have a long history of men who play popular female roles. In the Kannada cultural sphere, the female impersonator of Yakshagana has clearly emerged as a lens through which gender and performance -- and gender as performance – can be thought about.

Akshayambara pushes Yakshagana's seeming embrace of cross-dressing to its political limits by bringing in a woman. When it is a woman who takes on a male role, the play asks, why does that seem to shake the traditional structure? Ananya Kasaravalli's debut feature film Harikatha Prasanga (Chronicles of Hari), itself based on a short story by Gopalakrishna Pai, approaches the same subject from a different angle.

Akshayambara needed to bring in a (biologically) female actor to push the man-acting-as-a-woman to actually encounter his vulnerability. Harikatha, in contrast, gives us a male protagonist who is vulnerable because his performative engagement with femininity has transcended the stage.

A still from Ananya Kasaravalli's film Harikatha Prasanga

What makes someone or something feminine is a recurring question here, too. The one time Hari (an affecting Shrunga Vasudevan) tries out a more vigorous style on stage, his jumping attracts his guru's ire as signifying the 'masculine'. “What kind of dance is that? When you act like a woman, you should make your gestures like a woman.”

Hari complies on stage. But soon he finds it harder and harder to persuade others – and soon, himself – of his masculinity off-stage. A proposed wedding falls through because a seasonal Yakshagana performer does not fulfil the traditional masculine role of breadwinner. He goes to see a sex worker, only to be distressed by her charmed reiteration of what she sees as his feminine softness. Gradually, he finds himself adopting female garb daily: a long skirt, and later a sari. Again, like with Akshayambara, we encounter the question of what makes up femininity: soft hands, long hair, feminine clothes?

While challenging us to think about what femininity and masculinity mean, Kasaravalli's film occasionally compresses both into stereotypes — and deliberately lets the moments ring out, waiting to watch if they will resonate. “[Women] need women to share agony with, and men for pleasure,” says a woman who has come to watch Hari act. Akshayambara moves more in the direction of an essential selfhood: “You can never be disrobed,” says the woman to the man.

What makes a man a man? Or a woman a woman? Is it about who struts and who mocks? Who performs, who applauds? Who deflates, who builds up? Who steps back? Must vulnerability be identified with the feminine? Both play and film, happily, do not provide pat answers. It is enough that they ask the question at all.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 February 2017.

Ram, Lokhon, Sinta. And Sabin.

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Altaf Mazid’s film on the Karbi version of the epic underlines why we need all our many Ramayanas.

It’s not yet Diwali, and the Ramayana season this year already feels more disturbing than festive. First, the Shiv Sena successfully prevented actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui from acting in the annual Ramlila in his hometown Budhana (which is in Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar, a district that was torn apart by Hindu-Muslim riots in 2013). So what if Siddiqui is the town’s most famous export by far and actually wants to return to fulfil a childhood dream? No Muslim had ever acted in the Budhana Ramlila, said the Shiv Sainiks, and there was no way they’d let one start now.

Then, timing it carefully to coincide with Dussehra, the Modi government announced a Ramayana museum with a Rs.151 crore budget. Part of a projected Ramayana tourism circuit, the museum - to be built in Ayodhya – clearly targets the BJP’s Hindutva voters in UP: building a Ram Mandir at the site where the Sangh Parivar demolished the Babri Masjid in 1992 has been part of the BJP’s manifesto for years. While a Ramayana Museum is a wonderful idea in itself, the present project — to be carried out in UP’s most politically sensitive town, in an election year, by a pernicious and culturally insecure government — does not inspire confidence as being anything but a sop to Ram temple enthusiasts.

The Ramayana museum I’d love would be one that lets us marvel at how communities across our vast and varied subcontinent have made the epic their own. Such a museum is unlikely to get built in the near future — but it would have benefited greatly from the knowledge and enthusiasms of Altaf Mazid, the Assamese filmmaker, critic and restorer who died in April this year.

I say this because I recently watched Mazid’s striking 50-minute film Sabin Alun (titled ‘The Broken Song’ in English), about how the Ramayana story is told and lived by the Karbis, an ethnic group in the hill areas of Assam. Although screened as ‘documentary’ (at the 2016 Mumbai International Film Festival and at Delhi’s Open Frame festival organised by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust which also funded the film), Sabin Alun refuses to fit into a pre-established genre. It rolls around playfully between ethnography and storytelling; between serious-minded, unadorned documentation of the epic and a tongue-in-cheek contemporary staging (in which the geeky Ram keeps adjusting his spectacles while the dark-suited Rabon drives Sinta off in a big black car).

Mazid’s film assumes — correctly — that we know the epic inside out. He does not so much describe the Karbi version as draw us into it, demonstrating with quiet beauty and unspoken ease how a story can be entirely retold while still remaining recognizable as the same story. The extent of reimagining is apparent from the very name — of the Karbi story as well as the film. Sabin Alun means ‘Song of Sabin’, and Sabin is what the Karbis call Surpanakha, Ravan’s sister.

It seems both marvellous and fitting that Surpanakha, as Sabin, comes to occupy centre space in the Karbi narrative — rather than being stuck on the periphery as the snub-nosed, dark-skinned villainess so horribly rebuffed by Lakshman that the episode is what triggers Ravan’s revenge, the abduction of Sita. Marvellous, because to those of us raised on upper-caste Hindu tellings of the Ramayana, there is still a shock when we’re made to see the tale from the other side, to perceive our fair-skinned heroes as the arrogant, marauding, misogynist outsiders they are in Sabin’s forest home. Fitting, because as a Karbi woman explains, “Sabin has her nose chopped off, and there is no mention of Sabin. So it is ‘Song of Sabin’.”

Even more than Sabin, it is Sinta — the Karbi Sita — who demands our attention. Of course, there are many other Sitas stronger than the prettily useless version thrust upon us by Tulsidas and Ramanand Sagar — in the Oriya 15th century Vilanka Ramayana, based on the older Adbhuta Ramayana, Sita is the one who finally kills Ravana, having assumed the form of Kali, but lets the world believe that Rama did the deed.

But Sabin Alun gives us a truly earthy Sita (though ironically Sinta is not found in a furrow, but in an egg). In the song sung in the film, we hear Sinta ask her mother for a knife. “And holding it in her hands... Sinta while on a tour... Felled trees big and small... So mighty was she.” Mazid maps these words onto a staging: a modern-day Karbi woman riding angrily off on a tractor. Later, he reiterates the epic’s agricultural basis among the Karbis, by asking an interviewee why Ram, Lokhon and Sinta had to go into the forest. She responds without a moment’s thought: they had to take up farming, and there were no fields like there are now. “So they went to clear the forest... and then they stayed to supervise the farming.”

Perhaps the finest moment of revelation for me, though, was the quietest: an old lady sings of how Lokhon refused to leave Sita when she bade him go to Ram’s rescue. “I am not going, my brother is not dying,” proclaims Lokhon. But Sita is not one to give up so easily. “Oh Lokhon, if you do not go,” she says, “You want to marry me. And this is what you have in your mind.”

The line is delivered in the same drone-like monotone as everything before and after it, and one can only wonder why it is such a shock. It is, after all, a perfectly imaginable dynamic to emerge between a woman and her attractive (temporarily single) brother-in-law. Or perhaps it is too imaginable? There is probably a reason why a man’s relationship with his saali (wife’s younger sister) and a woman’s with her devar (husband’s younger brother) are categorised as ‘joking relationships’ across North India. It takes the matter-of-fact frankness of the Karbi telling to let us see this aspect of the Sita-Lakshman relationship that we have suppressed for years.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23rd Oct 2016.

Starring Scripts, Scripting Stars

My Mirror column:

What made Salim-Javed so unique as screenwriters in Hindi cinema? 

 Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar during their partnership days 

Early in Diptakirti Chaudhuri's book, Written By Salim-Javed, Javed Akhtar recounts the tale of his first ever script narration. He had gone to a producer called Baboobhai Bhanji, having got an appointment with many sifarishes. "[T]he man had listened to the script without interruption. After finishing, a nervous Javed Akhtar respectfully enquired what the producer thought of the scene." "Darling," [came the reply], "your story is good, but there is a big risk involved...this hasn't been used in any film yet."

Telling this story to Chaudhuri decades later, Javed — who went on to form one half of Hindi cinema's most famous screenwriting duo — adds a half-joking postscript, an explanation for his future success in the industry: "I never wrote a story that has not come before." Later, Chaudhuri quotes Salim Khan as saying that he does not believe there is any story that does not derive from something older, except the Ramayana and Mahabharata. "Originality is the art of concealing the source," Salim says.

But what's interesting is that the duo have never actually tried to hide their borrowings. In his first job as a writer, as assistant to Abrar Alvi in the late 1960s, Salim says he "used to suggest ideas he had read in popular novels or seen in Hollywood films". Chaudhuri's book is a film buff and trivia lover's tribute and delights in digging out Salim-Javed's influences, from James Hadley Chase novels to Ibn-e-Safi's Urdu detective stories. Their script for Majboor, for instance, was an emotional reworking of a thriller called Zig-Zag, in which a dying insurance executive frames himself for a murder in such a way that his wife and daughter can benefit from the reward money. Instead of a wrong diagnosis, as in Zig-Zag, Amitabh Bachchan in Majboor is dramatically cured by an operation, but the resolution is very similar.

Even with Sholay, their most famous film, the duo have never shied away from speaking of their sources of inspiration. The coin toss scene to decide the course of action is something Salim attributes to a card scene in a film called Garden of Evil; the massacre of the Thakur's family was inspired by Once Upon a Time in the West; while Viru's famous tank scene drew on an Anthony Quinn film called The Secret of Santa Vittoria. The main idea of convicts hired as vigilantes to defend a village wasn't new either — Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, reworked into The Magnificent Seven, had already spawned such Hindi films as Mera Gaon Mera Desh.

It is also undeniable that Salim-Javed plots were full of recurring tropes. Some of these had a longer history in Hindi cinema, but became signature elements of their repertoire: a solidarity with the working class against the rich; the poor hero who would rather break than bend; the mother who raises her children alone; a family lost and then found; the thief with a code of honour; relatives pitted against each other by duty.

And yet, the writing partnership which began in 1971 managed to redefine the course of Hindi cinema, in a single decade. The innovation they are usually credited with is thematic: the figure of the Angry Young Man, whose intense rage against the system had a starkly different tenor from an older Hindi film hero, whose disillusionment was in a more soulful register (think of Pyaasa).

But I think it wasn't so much new plots, but new ways of presenting them and snappy, witty dialogue that made their films seem fresh. And, as with their scripts, it was the 'how' rather than the 'what' of their careers that really made them gamechangers: because unlike pretty much all Bombay screenwriters before them — and most who came after — Salim-Javed managed to position themselves as sole custodians of their scripts.

"Earlier when writers put together a script," says Salim Khan, "it had contributions from the novelist from whom the story was taken, the director who would make the film, the actor who would act in it. When we started working together, we said we will give you the complete script. You will neither interfere in the writing, nor change the finished script."

It was remarkable. They may have cobbled together ingredients from everywhere, but their recipe was sacrosanct. This confidence — which many in the industry perceived as arrogance — began to seem more justified as film after film became a box office hit.

Salim-Javed also took it upon themselves to ensure that their contribution was publicised, often putting their money where their mouth was. They were perhaps the first screenwriters to pay for trade advertisements in their own names. The most famous one appeared in the same Trade Guide that had forecast Sholay as "a sad experience for distributors". It said, "This is a prediction by Salim-Javed... Sholay... will be a grosser of Rupees One Crore in each major territory of India".

Amitabh Bachchan in Zanjeer (1973)

In their story of their rise — which sounds quite like one of their films — they got Rs 10,000 for their first film, and Rs 55,000 for Zanjeer. "After the success of Zanjeer, we decided to increase our price to Rs 2 lakh and did not sell a script for nine months." But eventually they did and by the end, their fee matched that of the top-grossing star in the film, Amitabh Bachchan — exactly as Salim Khan had once told Abrar Alvi it would.

But here's a final question: why did this achievement, stunning as it was, not translate into similar conditions for other writers? Had Salim-Javed simply been co-opted by a star-struck industry, which conceded them individual stardom — but left the ordinary writer as underpaid and overlooked as ever?

Published in Pune Mirror, 25 July 2016.

OUT OF THE BODY: On Devdutt Pattanaik's Sita

My piece on Devdutt Pattanaik's latest book, for Mint Lounge.

Sita: An Illustrated Retelling of the Ramayana joins an increasing tribe of books of Indian epics retold. Devdutt Pattanaik, the author of many books on Indian myth (Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata; Myth=Mithya: A Handbook of Hindu Mythology; The Pregnant King), here seems to be making a contribution to two growing sub-genres: the graphic book, and the retelling through women’s eyes. But unlike Amruta Patil's brilliant, jewel-like Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean, or the striking images of Samhita Arni and Moyna Chitrakar's Sita’s Ramayana, Pattanaik doesn’t seem invested in the visual. And while ostensibly structured around Sita’s life, it is stuffed with too much else to feel consistently like her story: Hanuman often seems more of a presence.

Pattanaik does offer more detail about women’s worlds than most versions of the Ramayan: the child Sita entering the kitchen, or Sita and her sisters as newly-arrived brides in Ayodhya spending “all day and all night listening to tales of the sons told by their adoring mothers”. He tries to bring relationships between women to the fore: Anasuya welcoming Sita into womanhood with a garland, a garment and a pot of cream—symbols of shringara (adornment), or Mandodari barring Ravana’s way, taunting him to wait for Sita to come to him willingly. “Only Sita understood what Mandodari had done; she had protected her own station in the palace while ensuring another woman’s freedom”.

Sita—An Illustrated Retelling of the Ramayan: Penguin, 328 pages, Rs499

Pattanaik stresses the remarkable fact that has puzzled readers and writers for centuries—that Ravana, having taken the hapless Sita from her forest hut, does not force himself upon her. Unlike Greek and Roman mythology, in which it is unremarkable for Zeus/Jupiter to rape Leda, Europa, and several others, Ravana woos Sita with stories and gifts and songs. He becomes, in other words, the most persistent lover. But Sita is unmoved. “This is not love,” she says to his sister Trijata. “He just wants to possess me.” Then Pattanaik puts in Sita’s mouth these transcendental words: “I am not my body. I will never ever be violated.”

It is a hope we have all nurtured: to cease to be identified only with our bodies. But Pattanaik’s insistence on Sita’s status as goddess (“I cannot be abandoned by anyone”) elides the fact that neither Sita’s world—nor, sadly, our own—is prepared to do women any such favours. Throughout the Ramayan, the married woman’s embrace of another man is heavily punished even when unintentional (the classic case being Ahilya’s of Indra, who has taken the form of Ahilya’s husband Gautama). And anyway, as the supremely tragic example of Sita shows, being “pure of thought and body” cannot protect any woman from having her reputation besmirched. Reputation is everything, and it is not in a woman’s hands. Ram declares that he has fought a war, but only to restore the honour of his family name; Sita is nothing but “grit in [his] eye”, for she has chosen to live under another man’s roof rather than kill herself. There, in a nutshell, is the tragedy of patriarchy: to keep “honour” alive, women must die. Men, meanwhile, are expected to acquire the wives of the men they slay, and considered honourable when they “accept” them as wives, rather than take them by force.

But while Pattanaik points to the killing of Tadaka by Ram as signalling the epic’s “acceptance of male violence against women”, he seems not to acknowledge the violence done to Sita by Ram’s spurning of her. In allowing Ram the privilege of splitting into the man who loves his wife, and the king who must reject his queen, Pattanaik allows “honour” in by the back door.

Eventually, if the Ramayan has been “criticized by feminists” and “deconstructed by academicians”, there are real reasons for it. In any case, Pattanaik’s categories seem sweeping and not useful. When he refers to the “Ram of academics” versus “Ram of devotees”, or “Western thought” versus “traditional Indian thought”, he means a certain kind of rationalist who-what-where history, while ignoring reams of philosophy, anthropology and religious studies, much of it “Western”, that has been crucial to studying Indian myth. Oddly, Pattanaik’s own book is strewn with distracting factoid “boxes” that draw on this work—providing alternative folk recensions and narrative variations of the sort that Paula Richman has spent a career gathering, mythic analysis of the Wendy Doniger variety. One is left wondering why he feels the need to diss the bricks of which his house is built. Pattanaik sees the richness and complexity thrown up by the living text, and then places it disdainfully in his supplementary narrative, as if he fears causing offence to some imaginary unquestioning devotee.

Published in Mint Lounge.

Book Review: Channelling the Mahabharata

Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean
Via Amruta Patil
Harper Collins, Rs 799
Pages: 276

Adi Parva is the richly imagined and stunningly executed first volume in Amruta Patil's forthcoming Parva trilogy, a pictorial retelling of the Mahabharata. As different as Adi Parva's jewel tones and lush forest glades are from the spiky, angsty, black and white world of Patil's first book, Kari (2008), they would both be described as graphic novels. Yet the two narrative endeavours could not be more unlike each other. Kari's authorial voice is so intimate and personal that at least one reviewer felt it read "like a reconstituted memoir". In contrast, Adi Parva positions itself self-consciously as a retelling of what is perhaps our most enduring story — if one can refer to the innumerable nested narratives that make up the Mahabharata as a single story.

In an essay called 'The Storyteller', Walter Benjamin made a characteristically fertile, provocative suggestion: that the rise of the novel marks the end of storytelling. "What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature — the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella — is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it," wrote Benjamin. In a 1977 lecture, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss made a similar throwaway reference to the moment "when myth disappeared as a literary genre and was replaced by the novel." Both Benjamin and Levi-Strauss gesture to a binary in which myth — and its community of oral re-tellers — form one end of the spectrum, while the novel — and its solitary, textual originator — forms the other.

Adi Parva is fascinating, first of all, because it attempts to marry these two apparent binaries: to enshrine the oldest stories in book form, to put her stamp on them not just verbally but visually. There's no denying that this involves freezing that which was meant to be perpetually retold, to be imagined differently each time it was heard. But in a world where less and less of us will hear these stories from a grandmother or a village bard, this book is a precious gift.

And Patil understands this clearly: the place of her book, and the place she must clear before she begins. Adi Parva is not "by" her, but "via" her. And when her preamble invokes the sutradhar —"Trust the humble storyteller who knows how to unravel thread. Beware the braggart who embellishes and confuses" — one can hear the echo of Benjamin's words — "it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it".

Her telling does steer clear of unnecessary explication. But the storyteller's voice is a very particular one: cool, wry, but always just this side of dramatic. The narrator is Ganga, "queen of celestial and earthly rivers", a central character in the origin-myth of the Kuru-Pandavas. She first appears here as a mortal in a white sari, telling her tale to a rapt street side gathering, even as passing men gather to challenge this woman "sitting brazenly talking to strangers in the middle of the night". Ganga and her listeners form a kind of Greek chorus, their comments and questions helping clarify the main narrative. Choosing a female narrator (rather than Ugrashravas) is a simple but radical move, allowing Patil to focus on the women with natural ease and empathy. We think, perhaps for the first time, of whether the mountain princess we have always only known as Gandhari had a name except that of the kingdom she represented, and of how Kunti must have felt when her husband King Pandu died making love to her rival queen Madri. (And we wonder how this will change in the next volume, when the narrator, we are told, will be Ashwatthama.)

There are occasions when Patil's narrative feels too clever, too knowing, too full of backchat. But textual pleasures are the least of the joys afforded by this book. With artwork that ranges from black and white sketches (for Ganga and her audience) to magnificent textured collages, with Patil drawing on and reworking everything from Botticelli's Birth of Venus to Matisse's La Danse to ancient Egyptian motifs with delicious abandon, Adi Parva is perhaps the most beautiful book you can own this year.

Published in the Indian Express.

The Real Demon: Ramlila, Ramanujan, and the freezing of tradition

A 'Perspectives' essay, published in The Caravan.

The week before Dussehra, I saw several performances of the Ramayana story. I went to Old Delhi, the site of three famed Ramlilas and one Ramayana-themed procession called Sawaari, to the sarkari heart of the capital, where I watched the dance drama Shri Ram, and finally to Mehrauli, where a resident friend said there was a local Ramlila.

I watched the Sawaari outside Chawri Bazaar Metro station: brass bands followed by a series of tableaux, actors dressed as Rama, Lakshmana, Ravana, Sita and Hanuman, looking more jittery than benevolent. Friends who grew up with the Sawaari announced it was no patch on what was. By Delhi standards, the watchers were few, the lack of excitement palpable. “Almost no one lives in sheher anymore,” said one friend, using the term for Old Delhi that means simply ‘city’, marking its originary claim to urbanity within the vast, disparate terrain that constitutes the National Capital Region. “And who has the time to come from elsewhere?”

The Sawaari did seem like a local tradition in decline, a ritual that once brought together an urban community and was now only perfunctory. In contrast, the Ramlilas of Parade Ground and Ramlila Maidan, with their gigantic sets and ear shattering sound systems, seemed to be thriving. Massive crowds came to watch the Ramayana story being played out episode by episode, culminating in the 10th day’s burning of Ravana, the symbolic victory over evil.

But these crowds, largely poor or lower middle-class, came from all across the city, and had no particular connection with Old Delhi or its specific history of Ramlila. In this repect, they resembled the better-off families who came to see Shri Ram, a two-and-a-half-hour show enshrined, in post-Independence Delhi tradition, as the Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra (SBKK) Ramlila.

If the SBKK performance was almost exactly as I had imagined it—a proscenium performance involving an impressive Kathakali-dancing Ravana and grave, pithy English supertitles that interpreted the Lakshman Rekha scene, for instance, as the marker of ‘moral order’ where ‘transgression’ could have terrible consequences—the Old Delhi Ramlilas surprised me by being spectacles that were almost as anonymous and non-participatory as SBKK. Perhaps it was my fault, showing up expecting some organic cultural expression of community in a place where everyone knew everyone else. My Bollywood viewing should have given me a clue: an idealised representation like the one in Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Delhi-6 can only come into existence once that which is represented is no longer. The only form of participation possible was through collective consumption: of the performance, but more importantly of the ferris wheels, maut ka kuans and food stalls in Old Delhi, and the more sanitised papri chaat, samosas and chai that constitute SBKK’s attempt to replicate an imagined sheher.

In Mehrauli, a neighbourhood most known for the Qutb Minar, I found the Shree Rama Dramatic Club. A rapt audience, packed tight as sardines, watched as a loud-voiced Hanuman strode about in a cloud of white hair. Behind him was a portly prompter in a pink shirt, intermittently visible when, overcome by emotion, he raised his hand to the heavens. Scenes were hurriedly ended to accommodate bhajans by one Mohanlal ji, the quality of whose singing implied he must be important in the mohalla for some other reason. When Samudra Dev appeared, the woman next to us giggled and held her breath: it was her husband. He was doubling up as Kaushalya, but that part was ours if we wanted it. “Par aapko dekha nahin pehle yahan, naye aayein hain kya (Haven’t seen you before. Are you new to the locality)?” said the woman. The community couldn’t have been less anonymous. And there was no mela in Mehrauli.

One might, on the basis of this stop-go ethnography, propose a neat little stage-by-stage theory, with largely lower-middle-class Mehrauli as the sole surviving bastion of local community and living tradition, if it weren’t for the fact that at the other end of Mehrauli Bazaar was an equally large crowd watching — on a large screen specially set up for the duration of Navratri by the local BJP MLA — Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan.

Some necessary context here: the broadcast of Sagar’s Ramayan from 1987 to 1990 marked a huge departure from the non-religious programming that had characterised Indian state television until then. It has been suggested that the mass-mediatised crystallisation of a Hindu viewing public around the figure of Ram was integral to the rise of an aggressive Hindu nationalist politics focused on the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid issue.

In a strange way, Mehrauli’s decision to showcase a 1980s television serial as the accepted ‘true’ Ramayana is only the final step in a continuum. The Ramlila in Old Delhi is already halfway there, with its ‘actors’ actually only lip-synching to a recorded soundtrack. And the SBKK Ramlila has been performed in the same way, to the same musical recording, for 54 years.

Last week, when Delhi University’s Academic Council arrived at a decision to withdraw from the undergraduate history syllabus an essay called ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation’, it was kowtowing to the singular vision of Rama’s tale that Ramanand Sagar anointed as indelible truth. The right-wing objection to the essay — an elegant piece by the late AK Ramanujan about the diverse narratives that go by the name ‘Ramayana’ — is that its non-judgemental account of Jain, Buddhist, Tamil or Thai tellings undermines the Valmiki-plus-Tulsidas version that most north Indian Hindus perceive as religious truth.

Ramanujan speaks of the Jaina Ramayana of Vimalasuri, in which Ravana is not an evil demon but a great Jaina ascetic undone by his passion for Sita, and of a Kannada folk Ramayana in which Sita is born of Ravana’s own womb — essentially a story about a daughter causing the death of her incestuous father. He points to differences between Valmiki’s Sanskrit and Kampan’s more dramatic Tamil. He describes Ramayanas for whom Sita is the main focus, and others that centre on Ravana.

But the essay also provides a vivid sense of the Ramayana as an ur-narrative, from whose characters and events our values and metaphors spring. And every fresh telling builds on that sense of always already there-ness: in one, when Sita pleads with Ram about accompanying him into exile, she clinches the argument by bursting out, “Countless Ramayanas have been composed before this. Do you know of one in which Sita doesn’t go with Rama to the forest?”

We have reached a stage in our modernity when we seem to believe that the only way to hold on to traditions is to immobilise them, recording final definitive versions from which any departure is either unnecessary or sacrilegious. The SBKK probably thinks of itself as far away from Ramanand Sagar. But traditions do not live when they are frozen. It is only by inhabiting them — letting them change us, and letting ourselves change them — that we will ever succeed in keeping them alive.

Published in the Caravan, November 2011.

Cinemascope: Harishchandrachi Factory; Ra.One

Manufacturing joy
HARISHCHANDRACHI FACTORY
Director: Paresh Mokashi
Starring: Nandu Madhav, Vibhawari Deshpande, Atharva Karve
***1/2

Dhundiraj Govind Phalke's life would be considered a remarkable one even if he was not credited with having made the first-ever Indian motion picture. The son of a Sanskrit pandit from Trimbakeshwar, Phalke was a young man with an unquenchable thirst for the new. At 15, he went to Bombay to study at the JJ School of Art. After several more years at Baroda's Kala Bhawan, he started a small photography studio in Godhra. Soon after this, he apprenticed himself to a German magician called Carl Hertz, who had been employed by the Lumiere Brothers. He then worked as a draftsman with the Archaeological Survey of India before entering the printing business: specialising in lithographs and oleographs, working for artist Raja Ravi Varma, even visiting Germany to learn more about the technology.

Sometime around now, Phalke watched his first moving picture, The Life of Christ. Struck by the possibility of making an Indian film where it would be Indian gods who flickered into life on screen, he sold his stake in the printing press and embarked on what was to be his most ambitious project yet. Harishchandrachi Factory focuses on this section of Phalke's life, showing us a man both eccentric and driven. Marathi theatre director Paresh Mokashi gives us a film whose finely-tuned sense of the tragicomic is reminiscent of Chaplin and Jacques Tati. Phalke is introduced in a black top hat doing magic tricks for delighted children, only to actually disappear when an angry debtor shows up. We laugh, but there's a sense that we could cry instead. We see a grieving wife and neighbours and prepare for the worst, but they're mourning a cupboard Phalke has sold off. Even his temporary blindness in 1912 is not off-limits for laughter: as Phalke lies there with eyes bandaged, someone says with mock gravity, "Your eyes will get cured – what shall we do about your mind?"

Mokashi extracts superb performances from his cast, especially Nandu Madhav as the irrepressible Phalke, Vibhavari Deshpande as his wife, and the child actors. The 'period feel' goes much beyond the slightly low-grade costumes and sets: one comes away thinking about modernity's transformation of everything, from technology to caste and the marital relationship.

(Harishchandrachi Factory is playing at PVR Director's Cut in New Delhi this week).

A bad Hollywood film
RA.ONE
Director: Anubhav Sinha
Starring: Shah Rukh Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal
*

The best thing about Ra.One, depending on the different people I've asked, is a) the kid (Armaan Verma): though truthfully, it's not him but his large Beatle-ish mop of hair; b) the spectacle of Bombay's VT Station cracking up into magnificent ruin, with accompanying sound effects; or c) Kareena Kapoor as a crazed automaton under the control of the evil villain, driving a Bombay local train towards certain death for its passengers and herself. No-one – not even the kids at whom the film is ostensibly targeted – seems in the slightest bit arrested by the epic battle between Ra.One and G.One – between the forces of evil and good – that is supposed to be the crux of this film.

The plot, for what it's worth, centres on a geeky South Indian dad (played by Shah Rukh Khan as a caricature that's worse than even his Om Shanti Om act), who designs a video game with a supremely powerful villain because his son Prateek thinks villains are cooler than heroes. The video-game villain (Ra.One) plays his first game with Prateek (who, in his badness obsession, calls himself Lucifer), is irritated at having been almost beaten and comes out of the video game to kill Lucifer in real life. Poor nerdy dad and his nerdy Chinese colleague die quick and pointless deaths, while the irritating kid has barely shed a tear for the dad who was too uncool for him when he gets a much cooler substitute: the video-game hero, G.One.

Unfortunately, though, there can be no substitute for feeling. And in this film, we feel nothing at all. When Shah Rukh Khan dies, we're too busy wondering how he gets put in a coffin only to emerge as asthi in a pot. Emotions probably run higher in an actual video game.

Nor does the film imbue its virtual world with any depth. The final video game encounter is the most underwhelming I've seen, while the Ra.One–Raavan connection is utterly banal (how much more Rakeysh Mehra did with Raavan in the flawed but fascinating Aks). The closest connection this film has to Indian mythology is a children's birthday party overrun, for some inexplicable reason, by women in skimpy green outfits and gold jewellery who look straight out of Amar Chitra Katha.

Watch Ra.One if you don't mind sitting through a series of pointless cameos (a ridiculous Priyanka Chopra defending her modesty in a red dress, Sanjay Dutt just so we can hear the word Khalnayak, and Rajinikanth as Chitti the robot – to compensate for the horrific South Indian treatment earlier?) to watch a lot of things being blown to smithereens.

Published in the Sunday Guardian.

Theatre Review: Uttararamacharita

Hindi/ Urdu, National School of Drama, June 3 & 4

In the Uttarakhanda (believed to be a later addition to the Valmiki Ramayana), Rama learns from his guptachar (spy) – the aptly-named Durmukha – that his subjects are scathingly critical of his acceptance of Sita after nearly a year in captivity. Rama decides to abandon his pregnant wife in the forest, and a heroic romance is transformed into tragedy.

Over the centuries, many attempts have been made to rework the text, to somehow bring Rama and Sita together. Bhavabhuti’s eighth century Uttararamacharita is foremost among these literary interpretations of the Uttarakhanda. This classic Sanskrit play in seven acts has been translated into Hindi by Satyanarayan Kaviratna, and condensed into a three-act production by veteran playwright-director Prasanna and the members of the National School of Drama’s Repertory Company. 

The play can be said to have two parallel tracks – the first, the main romantic-tragic events that unfold in the lives of Rama and Sita, and the other a comedy track involving side characters or “common people” who comment on, deliver news of, and in one instance, even re-enact the events of the primary track. The actors in comic roles all have brilliant timing. The tragic sequences involving a rather camp Rama and a (deliberately?) melodramatic Sita are less impressive, perhaps because the contemporary tone and tempo of dialogue delivery doesn’t seem of a piece with the rather formal, poetic, alliterative language being used. Both end up seeming a trifle contrived. It’s in the musical and comic interludes and the recitation-like speeches of the guptachars that the language seems to come into its own. Perfectly choreographed by Vimla Shimladka and backed by Govind Pandey’s superlative music score (drawing on Mohan Upreti’s original compositions), these sequences provide a marvelously energetic dramatic experience.

Like all NSD Repertory productions, a great deal of attention has been paid to stage design and costumes, and it shows – though the more traditional-looking white sari-clad Sita and partly bare-chested Rama of the later sequences were infinitely preferable to the Harlequin-like clothes they wore in the first act. Another highlight of the production is the lighting design (by Parag Sarmah) and the innovative use of moving silhouettes on a large screen to create mood and additional dramatic effects with minimal ingredients.


Published in Time Out Delhi, 2008.