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 But while the Greek and Roman gods have been long superseded by the Semitic religions, ours live on.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: A Gujarati literary legend finds a home in English

Celebrated Gujarati writer Dhumketu doesn’t get his due in the latest translation of his work

Gaurishankar Govardhanram Joshi (1892-1965), who wrote as Dhumketu, was a pioneering short story writer in Gujarati. (Wikipedia)

“The short story is not the miniature form of the novel... The novel says whatever it wants. The short story, by rousing the imagination and emotions, only alludes to or provides a spark of whatever it wants to say.” These words, in the original Gujarati, appeared in the 1926 introduction to Tankha (Sparks), the first collection of short stories by the Gujarati writer Dhumketu, the nom de plume of Gaurishankar Govardhanram Joshi (1892-1965). Nearly a hundred years later, you can finally read them in English, in Jenny Bhatt's translated volume Ratno Dholi: The Best Stories of Dhumketu.

Bhatt, a Gujarat-born writer and podcaster now based in the US, has clearly thought long and hard about the shape of the book. Taking seriously the burden of responsibility that comes with representing the pioneering Gujarati author to the contemporary English-speaking world, she has picked one story from each of his 24 published collections, plus two of her own favourites. The book certainly displays his range.

It begins with what is perhaps Dhumketu's most anthologised tale, The Post Office, in which a postmaster who once mocked an old man ends up haunted by his ghost. The ending teeters on the edge of the Gothic, making one think of the Russian short story giant, Nikolai Gogol, with its use of the supernatural to invoke a moral justice that social reality rarely seems to grant us. Dhumketu isn't writing ghost stories, but there is often a suggestion that deeply felt hurt or expectation leaves its imprint in the universe even after death—often in the minds of those who caused or ignored it.

In The Post Office, old Coachman Ali's lifelong wait for his daughter Mariam's letter only makes sense to the postmaster when he is anxious about his own daughter. In Svarjogi, an old shehnai player summons the painfully despondent notes of Raga Jogiya only on the death anniversary of his son—who had played them in life. In Ratno Dholi, a village drummer who thoughtlessly drives his lover to suicide ends up imagining her dancing to his dhol for the rest of his life.

Not unexpectedly for a writer born in the 19th century, Dhumketu was also drawn to historical romance as a genre, writing several novels set in the ancient India of the Guptas and Chalukyas. His historical fiction is represented here by Tears of the Soul, which retells the legendary story of Amrapali, a woman condemned by her democratic city state Vaishali to become a nagarvadhu (courtesan, literally “wife of the city”). If such a beauty was to accept any one man as a husband, went male logic, there would be civil war.

Although he turns a critical spotlight onto male-made laws, Dhumketu's real condemnation of Amrapali's predicament is tied to applauding her sacrifice as a mother. In some other stories, too, Dhumketu is revealed as very much a man of his time. Female deservingness is often premised on sexlessness, most sharply in When a Devi Ma Becomes a Woman, the Gorky-inspired tale of a hostel-wali deeply admired by her male hostellers—until it turns out that she is human enough to respond to the odd sexual overture.

But Dhumketu certainly emerges as a sympathetic observer of the unfairness of women's lives. In the tale of two Kamalas in A Memorable Day, the matter is treated as one of luck: one woman finds herself forced to sell her body, while the other has a like-minded partner and a tasteful home. In The Noble Daughters-in-law, the widowed bahu of a rich household is shooed out, and finds herself sheltering in the home of another unhappy daughter-in-law. There is the hint of attachment between the two women, including a kiss on the cheek, before the story ends in a dramatic double suicide that made me think of Deepa Mehta's 1996 film Fire, and of so many lesbian loves that end in similar tragedy in India.

Women are also embedded in social hierarchies of caste and class, and suffer their consequences. In The Gold Necklace, Dhumketu reverses the traditional social hierarchy between wife and mistress. Caste appears frequently, as descriptor and motor of plot: the vagharin, whose low social status taints a man who helps her; the gohil and kaamdaar who prop up the colonial-feudal structure of the Gujarati village; Brahminness mentioned by characters to establish their gentility in many stories, including the comical The New Poet.

Ratno Dholi: The Best Stories of Dhumketu, translated from the Gujarati by Jenny Bhatt, published by HarperCollins India, 324 pages, ₹399.

Dhumketu is no radical, but these stories show an abiding interest in marginalised figures—the penitent criminal in Kailas and The Prisoner of Andaman, the disabled person in Mungo Gungo, the sick low-caste woman Sarju in Unknown Helpers, or the ekla ram, a man who chooses to distance himself from the village's social norms, like Makno Bharthi in The Worst of the Worst.

Some of these solitary souls immerse themselves in art or music: Ratno the dhol-player, the shehnai player of Svarjogi, the sarangi player of My Homes, or even the literary young man of A Happy Delusion. When he writes about these musicians, or even about the aesthetic domesticity of the housewife Kamala in A Memorable Day, Dhumketu is both generous and appreciative.

Fittingly for a writer, perhaps, he displays greater ambivalence when describing literary ambitions. The aspirational poet or writer, especially, gets a drubbing, whether the clerk Bhogilal of Ebb and Flow, the highfalutin train passenger of The New Poet, or the intently focused but talentless Manmohan of A Happy Delusion.

Bhatt's dedication aside, her translations leave much to be desired. Her literal renditions of the original leave us repeatedly in the grip of florid, often archaic language (“Then, because they had not heard such melodious, sweet, alluring, rising and falling music in years, an illicitly joyful passion grew in the soul of thousands” or “Her memory did not endure anywhere now except during the rare occasions of general small talk”), not to mention constantly tripping up against such formations as “slowly-slowly” or “From downstairs, a melodious, bird-like voice came”.

However deliberate Bhatt's approach might be, the English feels jarring; the sentences marred by roundaboutness and redundancy. “What if this amusement was flowing due to his writing?" thinks one character, while a policeman tells a woman “to be careful with [her] tongue when speaking”. Very occasionally one gets a glimpse of what I imagine is Dhumketu's idiomatic Gujarati, such as in Old Custom, New Approach, where a man complains sardonically about modern bureaucracy: “Letters speak with letters. People avoid other people, this is called administration.”

One hopes someday he will receive a better interpreter. In the meanwhile, this is a valuable addition to your Indian classics bookshelf.

Published in Mint Lounge, 5 Jan 2021.

Book Review: Desire and Despoliation

A book review for Firstpost:

A recent English translation brings Shivani's 1978 novel 'Bhairavi' to new readers

Bhairavi: The Runaway begins in medias res, with the protagonist slowly coming back to consciousness in a room she does not recognise, surrounded by strangers whose presence terrifies her. An “old hag” with a man's dhoti wrapped around “her enormous stomach” and her bare breasts are “covered in blood-red sandalwood paste”; a younger woman with a face “as black as that of an African”; an ash-smeared naked sadhu with bloodshot eyes and half-grey, half golden dreadlocks — these are characters that might throw anyone off. Certainly our heroine Chandan, a conventionally pretty, fair young woman whom we are to understand is 'from a good family', is scared as well as repelled.

Chandan's experience has the sensory overload of a nightmare: the semi-nakedness of those around her, the stale smell of chewing tobacco on the sanyasin's breath, the cave-like room filled with smoke, and occupied by rudraksha beads, marijuana chillums, a skull or two, and a live pet snake. And yet, what begins as a petrifying glimpse of otherness soon starts to feel arresting, even beautiful. Maya Didi has a sagging but once voluptuous body and a radiant face that “must have ensnared many men in its youth”; the “black girl” Charan has a laugh that “lit up her whole face”'; the guru's “divine face” is “like a light tearing into a room”. This ability to stay with what was initially frightening, to allow one's gaze to be transformed — perhaps this was the gift Shivani's writing gave her readers.

Shivani was the pen name under which the writer Gaura Pant wrote from the 1960s to the 1990s, her fiction often first appearing in serialised form in Hindi magazines. Bhairavi was her fourth novel, published in instalments in Saptahik Hindustan and then as a book in 1978. Shivani was hugely popular, but as far as I am aware, only some of her short stories have hitherto been translated into English: Trust and other stories (Calcutta, Writers Workshop, 1985); Krishnakali and other stories (Trans. by Masooma Ali, Rupa & Co., 1995) and Apradhini: Women Without Men (Trans. by Ira Pande, HarperCollins, 2011). (Ira Pande is Shivani's daughter, who has also written a deeply personal biography of her mother called Diddi, 2005). Priyanka Sarkar, Bhairavi's English translator, suggests in her introduction that the reason Shivani wasn't as feted as her contemporaries because “she was seen as a writer of 'love stories' and not a chronicler of society”. Other than Bhairavi, I have only ever read Apradhini, but based on what I know about the Indian, specifically Hindi, literary universe, I'd extend Sarkar's point even further. Shivani was probably not feted by the Hindi establishment precisely because she was popular, particularly popular with women — and not with literary-minded ones.

Reading Bhairavi: The Runaway revealed the possible reasons for that vast popularity. First, the story is fast-paced. Second, the central characters are all women. Men, whether fathers, husbands, lovers or sons, are often absent, and when they do appear, they're fairly one-dimensional figures whose sole purpose seems to be to drive the plot forward. Third, there's a racy, almost overripe quality to the narrative — a sort of Indian Gothic that combines two of this country's abiding concerns: mothers worrying about their daughters, and a deep-rooted fascination with ascetics.

What brings these two disparate threads together? A preoccupation with sex and sexuality — all the more powerful for being almost unspoken.

So on the one hand, we are told the backstory of Chandan, which is linked to the further backstory of her mother Rajrajeshwari — both revolving around the need to keep young women's sexuality in check, lest they lose their prized virginity and become unmarriageable. On the other hand we are plunged into the world of the Aghori ascetic, seeing through Chandan's eyes this storied space of Shiv-bhakt sadhus whose austerities, like those of other sects with an affinity to Tantrism, involve rituals that would be considered shocking by most ordinary Hindus. The 'ideal' Aghori embraces what others consider taboo — living off the cremation ground, drinking not only liquor but urine, consuming not just flesh but human corpses, and having intercourse with a female partner who is preferably infertile — the withholding of semen and the non-reproductiveness of the act being crucial. As the anthropologist Jonathan Parry argues in his classic study Death in Banaras, the Aghori route to siddhi (supernatural powers) not just allows meat-eating and intoxicants and sex, but makes them the very stuff of their sadhana (ritual practice).“For the tantrics, that which binds you — desire — is also what will set you free,” writes Madhavi Menon in her delightful book Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India.

Bhairavi offers the fascinated lay reader a glimpse of this tabooed universe, but Shivani was no anthropologist, and her Aghoris don't stick to the rules. Yes, the guru and his prime disciple Maya Didi do wander the cremation ground in search of enlightenment, seeking to attain mastery over life by surrounding themselves with death. But Shivani's narrative cannot go the whole hog. She makes their relationship non-sexual — or rather, unconsummated: Charan describes seeing them once at the cremation ground, “sitting across each other like a snake couple”, with Maya saying to the guru: “You are my only Shiva, Guru, and I am your Shiva Shakti”. Somehow, by keeping any actual sex out of it, Shivani manages to turn the relationship into something filled with sexual-romantic energy, even danger: a classic double bind that would be recognisable to all her readers.

Meanwhile, in the ordinary world, marriage continues to rule the roost, offering the only legitimate space for sexuality — if you're very lucky, some happiness is a possibility. But even marriage cannot protect women from the constant fear of sexual despoliation: Bhairavi has not one but two moments when (the fear of) rape becomes the motor of the plot. A woman can go from the grihasth (domestic) universe to the world of supposed renunciates, Shivani suggests implicitly, but she won't ever be free of this fear — if not on her own behalf, then on behalf of younger women. That's a bleak thought: one can only hope it's a little less true in 2020 than it was in 1978.

Bhairavi: The Runaway | By Shivani | Translated by Priyanka Sarkar

Simon and Schuster/Yoda Press, 2020 | 139 pages

This review was published in Firstpost, 27 Nov 2020.

 

 

Shelf Life: Stitching the Past into the Future

 My Shelf Life column for November 2020:

What wartime women's fashion can tell us about the world

 

                  Christian Dior's 'New Look' was a massive departure from the clothes women wore in war-torn Europe
 

Elizabeth Gilbert's chatty doorstopper of a novel, City of Girls (2019), begins in the summer of 1940, when the narrator arrives in New York, “nineteen years old and an idiot”. Vivian Morris has just dropped out of Vassar College, judging as dull both the revolutionary young women in “serious black trousers” and the academic girls in shapeless wool skirts “that looked as if they had been constructed out of old sweaters”. While she knows nothing about the world, she knows clothes. And what makes the fashionable teenaged protagonist of 1940 different from one in 2020 is this: Vivian doesn't only wear cool clothes, she can make them.

Trained to sew by an exacting grandmother, Gilbert’s excitable heroine soon finds herself designing costumes the doddering theatre owned by her aunt Peg. It is wartime, and the Lily Playhouse is barely kept afloat by formulaic musicals: there’s really no budget for clothes. But the actors constantly need new outfits, so Vivian learns to improvise. She scours New York's cheaper garment districts and discovers the used clothes shops on Ninth Avenue, becoming a regular at a grand old shop called Lowtsky’s, owned by a Jewish family ejected from eastern Europe.

Vivian becomes adept at digging ancient dresses out of discount bins and transforming them into spectacular customised creations. From showgirls like her friend Celia, she moves on to designing for Edna Parker Watson, grand dame of British theatre stranded in New York by the war. 

 

Gilbert's narratorial preferences can try one’s patience, like addressing her novel to a young woman whose connection to Vivian is kept deliberately mysterious, to anticlimactic effect. But I enjoyed Gilbert’s enjoyment of fashion, a topic she addresses first with girly excitement and then subversive pleasure. The subversion begins with Edna who, though on first names with French couturier Coco Chanel, is no handmaiden to fashion. Her advice on how to dress—“if you dress too much in the style of the moment, it makes you look like a nervous person”, or “I want brilliant dresses, my dear, but I don't want the dress to be the star of the show”—is really advice on how to live.

 

But the book’s real subversion of fashion comes in 1950, when Vivian’s friend Marjorie Lowtksy, sharp young heir to the Lowtsky Emporium, comes up with a plan to cater to the post-war marriage boom. “[We] both know that the old silk and satin is better than anything that's being imported...” says Marjorie. “I can find old silk and satin all over town–hell, I can even buy it in bulk from France, they’re selling everything right now, they’re so hungry over there–and you can use that material to make gowns that are finer than anything at Bonwit Teller.” 

 

The USP? Their dresses “wouldn't be industry; they would be custom tailored”.

Vivian and Marjorie's business makes them rich.

The same era seen from across the Atlantic, in Eric Newby's drily hilarious memoir Something Wholesale: My Life and Times in the Rag Trade (1962) reveals a much more damaged continent. The family firm of Lane and Newby, begun by the writer’s father in the 1890s, is somehow carrying on against a backdrop of bombed-out cities and drastic rationing. Even the upper workrooms of its grand old London offices, writes Newby with brilliant British understatement, “went up in smoke in 1944”.

In some deep metaphorical way, the firm’s continuance into a post-war world now rests increasingly on an army of “outworkers”, elderly women in the suburbs. Meanwhile, their buyers still make orders conditional on unprofitable “Specials”: customised versions for women too misshapen or too snooty to wear the standard designs.

Like Europe itself, the continent's fashion business feels like a creaky old warhorse that can't figure out the new world. “Evening dresses, like the gatherings at which they were intended to be worn, were dispirited”, writes Newby. “[T]he world of fashion had ground to a standstill”. Young Newby tries to come up with new designs on his own. But just after he places his orders, in March 1947, the French designer Christian Dior shows the insanely feminine excesses of his new collection: what would make history as the New Look.

But at that moment, Newby’s creaking world isn’t quite ready. “It was thought to be absurd... a last despairing death-kick by Paris which was no longer to be the centre of the fashion world.” British wholesaler manufacturers, “[h]alf-throttled by clothes rationing”, and too afraid to implement Dior’s radical changes, just make what they have been making for seven years “with a slightly longer skirt”. Of course, nothing sells. The glossies for 1947 are filled with suggestions for women readers with wartime budget constraints, on how to drastically cut and reshape their old clothes.

European fashion, led by Dior’s bold move, slowly begins to recover. But where Europe can only move on by cutting away from its past, America—at least in Gilbert's telling—is already making money off it: repackaging the dead European past as nostalgia. The difference between alteration tailor and vintage couture is writ large onto the history of the world.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 19 Nov 2020.

Freeing Films

My Mirror column:

A delightful new online film festival to mark South Asian Women's Day defines feminism as “a politics based on principles of equity, equality, justice and peace”

A still from If You Dare Desire (2017), directed by Debalina.

Anantha Ramanan's short film Ticket Please (Sri Lanka, 2018) begins with an older woman preparing a younger man, who might be her son, on how to get to a particular part of town. “The bus conductor speaks Sinhala only,” she says, speaking from the kitchen where she is washing something at the sink. “Give ten rupees exactly. It's very difficult to get the balance from him... If the conductor asks you again whether you have paid, say “Dhunna”. Dhunna means “I have given”.” Before he leaves the house, she instructs him to carry a newspaper in English, saying it will help. I felt a mild sense of irritation. Wasn't the older lady overdoing the multiple instructions, I wondered? And why force the young fellow to pretend to be something he's not? But from the second the young man got to the bus stop, I started to realise that she had been right. Sometimes when you don't fit in, it just makes it easier to pretend that you do.

The young man in Ticket Please is marked by his inability to understand Sinhala; his being a Tamil speaker is cause for irritation. And yet the strapping young bus conductor, so impatient with him for not knowing Sinhala, is only indulgent and excited when an Indian passenger gets on – speaking bad Hindi, gushing about Salman Khan and singing 'Tujhe dekha toh yeh jaana sanam'.

Linguistic politics in Sri Lanka may not seem, on the surface, to have much to do with feminism. But what is feminism really about? Ticket Please seemed to me to make the point quietly but clearly -- it isn't our differences from each other that are the problem, it's whether we've been brought up to regard that difference as either threatening or inferior.

Organised by well-known documentarian Reena Mohan, Aanchal Kapur of the Kriti Film Club and Sangat (a network begun by veteran feminist Kamla Bhasin in 1998), the exciting new South Asian Feminist Film Festival expands the meaning of feminism to make us think about difference and equality in a variety of South Asian contexts. Among the host of wonderful films and panel discussions at the festival (streaming free on http://www.doculive.in/ until 30 November) are Prateek Vats' brilliant debut feature Eeb Allay Ooo!, Vaishali Sinha's Ask the Sexpert (2017), Saba Dewan's Sita's Family (2002), the Ektara Collective's Chanda ke Joote (2011) and Nirmal Chander's Dreaming Taj Mahal (2010).

A good film festival always lets you connect the dots in expected and unexpected ways. From linguistic differences made visible on a busride, I moved to gender difference made visible on a metro ride in Please Mind the Gap (2018), a wonderful short film directed by Mitali Trivedi and Gagandeep Singh. An affectionate documentary portrait of transman Anshuman Chauhan as he negotiates the Delhi Metro, Please Mind the Gap never rubs in its metaphors. Anshuman is an effortlessly engaging subject, though, bringing his wry, laughter-filled gaze to bear upon everything he speaks of. In one early conversation, for instance, he maps his personal sense of space onto the world of public transport with a marvellous lightness. “I instinctually create a gap and maintain it,” he tells the filmmakers, going on to describe how he keeps a distance from everyone, men and women, choosing for himself the space between metro compartments, where the wall has his back, as it were. “Kisi se touch nahi hoge”.

But no matter how much he may want not to be touched, or even just to pass unseen, it isn't always easy. Men who have mistaken him for a man jump up apologetically when they see his face and think they have accidentally touched a woman. Security queues, public toilets, the metro's own Ladies compartment -- every space seems insistent on compartmentalising by gender.

In If You Dare Desire (2017), Debalina's fictional telling of the lives of real-life couple Swapna and Sucheta, their difference is less visible on their bodies -- but that doesn't make it easier. Swapna and Sucheta committed suicide by consuming pesticide together in Nandigram, West Bengal, in 2011, with Swapna leaving behind a six-page suicide note. As the film puts it, “Only this much is fact in the film. The rest, fiction.” The poetic urban interlude Debalina creates for the two young women is no idyll, but it allows us to see how it might have been for them if they had escaped to the city, how it probably is for the many South Asian women whose love seems invisible to the heterosexual worlds they inhabit. Until it becomes visible, is instantly interpreted as difference, and that difference as grave and present danger.

But sometimes when you don't fit in, you can no longer pretend that you do. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Nov 2020. 

Taking the festivities online

With the pandemic raging on, film festival organisers are making the most of the digital space.
 

Gaza Mon Amour, above, is part of the line-up for DIFF 2020. Passes to this year's online film festival: www.online.diff.co.in

Among the many communities barred from assembling by the coronavirus is that of devout Indian film buffs. Movie theatres have been shut for eight months, and even the very occasional new film ‘dropping’ on an OTT platform makes for sad, solitary viewing. Theatres cautiously reopened on October 15, but it might be a while before audiences, and thus filmmakers, risk a Friday release in the cinema. Even worse is the fate of that critical mass of film buffs who eagerly await the annual Indian film festival season, held from October to January, with big and small festivals taking place across the country. Given the new social distancing and hygiene norms, organisers have had to grapple with whether to go digital, cancel, or postpone and hope for the pandemic to reduce in intensity. The bigger festivals, which attract larger crowds and members of an international film fraternity, have almost all chosen the latter two options.

The Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival was the first to cancel its 2020 edition, rescheduling to October 2021. Two other highly-awaited festivals, the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) and the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), have postponed. IFFI, organised by the Directorate of Film Festivals and the Entertainment Society of Goa, has been pushed from November to January 16-24, 2021, and IFFK from December to February 12-19, 2021.

The start of the lockdown saw an explosion of energy online with many film archives and commercial sites making selected films free to stream, like Criterion expressing its support for the Black Lives Matter movement by removing its paywall on classic black cinema. In June, when 21 festivals including Berlin, Locarno and Cannes, collaborated on We Are One, a free 10-day digital festival, MAMI contributed three films. Festivals like KASHISH, the Mumbai International Queer Festival and the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala held successful online editions. The Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) ran an online Viewing Room for months, screening critically-acclaimed Indian and world cinema previously shown at DIFF.

“At that time, many said [the virtual] was the new normal. Online screenings got huge audiences as people were starved,” says Bina Paul, artistic director, IFFK. “But we are busier now, and the distractions are many. It is harder to take time out for an online festival.” There are also piracy concerns, especially for new films, since India has a particularly well-developed network of hackers. “Most crucially, people are realising that films are only part of the festival experience,” adds Paul. “That sense of community is not there online. For filmmakers, the feeling of the film finding its audience cannot come from a scattered, anonymous viewership.” Subasri Krishnan, curator of the Urban Lens festival (Delhi and Bengaluru) for the Indian Institute of Human Settlements (IIHS), agrees that a festival is a space of validation for independent and documentary filmmakers, and 100 people gathering in a dark room is integral to that. But IIHS is moving Urban Lens 2020 online, to be held over six days in December. “One cannot substitute for the other,” says Krishnan, but adds, “Real spaces can sometimes be exclusionary; an online festival may find new audiences. Also, geography becomes irrelevant.”

For DIFF co-founders Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, too, the prospect of attracting new viewers across South Asia makes their upcoming digital version exciting. “We love the warmth of the physical festival, but we realised that both for indie filmmakers ready with new films this year, and for viewers, there aren’t many options,” says Sarin. DIFF 2020, which will run online from October 29 to November 4 at Online.diff.co.in, is larger than the previous eight editions, with over 100 films screening over a week. Acclaimed international films include Babyteeth (2019), Air Conditioner (2020) and the Wuhan-set documentary 76 Days (2020). There’s an exciting new section of Indian documentaries and an extended programme of shorts, including Ashmita Guha Neogi’s CatDog, the only Indian film selected for Cannes this year. “Without the logistical constraints of time or venue size, we could accommodate more films. And we’re starting an Audience Award for Best First Film, which seems easier to achieve online,” says Sarin. “Next year’s festival may well be a hybrid of online and off.”

For smaller independent or crowd-funded film festivals, going digital can open up exciting possibilities, says Nitya Vasudevan, co-organiser of the Bangalore Queer Film Festival (BQFF). “There’s the prospect of inviting international filmmakers that we would find impossible non-virtually, while freeing up time and money spent on venue hire, brochures and tech. But as a queer festival, the roles it plays are many,” says Vasudevan of BQFF. But she may speak for all film festival regulars when she says, “People look forward to attending because it’s a space of intimacy: you can dress a certain way, have certain conversations you can’t have outside.”In true community spirit, BQFF is currently contemplating an audience poll of the festival’s regulars to decide on whether the festival should be held online in February-March, or wait until it can be held safely offline. Of course, the poll itself would be online.

Published in India Today magazine, 23 Oct 2020.

Book Review: Out of the ordinary - Tanuj Solanki's The Machine Is Learning

A book review for India Today magazine:

Tanuj Solanki’s quietly savage third novel digs for high-stakes drama under the surface of dull office life.

Indian literary fiction has rarely engaged with the office. Unless it’s glamorous or powerful milieus like big business, entertainment, crime or law enforcement, fictional workplaces often remain unidimensional backdrops, the wings from which characters emerge on stage to fight their real psychological or ethical battles. Drawn from his own experience in insurance companies, Tanuj Solanki’s The Machine is Learning makes a conscious departure from that norm, and does so with aplomb.

Solanki plonks us into a sea of office-speak that a less ambitious writer might not have risked, while crafting a plot thick enough to keep us afloat. As we find ourselves suddenly au fait both with standard corporate self-inflation (“business process excellence”, “strategic projects group”) and more specialised insurance terminology (underwriting, reinsuring, local operations executive), it becomes clear that the zone-out dullness of this linguistic universe can mask very real drama. One begins to suspect, in fact, that the masking may be intentional. In Solanki’s splendid pacy telling, office politics emerges as an undeniable microcosm of politics in the deepest sense.

The book’s appeal is aided by its narrator, a 29-year-old who combines corporate ‘dudeness’ with an aspiration to good spelling and non-conformism, his cockiness tempered with just enough insecurity to make him interesting. In his corporate bubble, Saransh Malik is a rising star and he knows it. But he is also smart enough to know what he doesn’t know; willing to let his “ex-journalist, do-gooder” girlfriend Jyoti stoke his uncertainties. Saransh is the perfect hero for a novel of ethical questioning: someone with something at stake, but not yet frozen irredeemably into the guarding of turf.

Since his Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar-winning Diwali in Muzaffarnagar (2018), Solanki’s prose has become cleaner, and his insights sharper. There is a pared-down quality to this book, though it never avoids the self-reflexive detail, Saransh implicitly contrasting his boss Mitesh’s arranged marriage wife and “this year’s bonus” life with his own Tinder-dependent one, or marking the class difference that separates him from Jyoti, even as she pushes him to confront his role in the capitalist juggernaut. Thoughtful but never ponderous, scrupulously deadpan in its descriptions of sex as much as office spaces, this is a great book about aspects of Indian life only just finding their way into fiction.

Published in India Today, 29 Aug 2020

The Remembered Village

My Mirror column (7 June 2020):

A young filmmaker's atmospheric Maithili debut refracts the experience of his family's village home through layers of distance and memory.

Using an old house as the central motif for a film is not a new idea. Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s fine directorial debut Musafir (1957), an under-watched film that I discussed in an earlier edition of this column, made a house and its neighbourhood the common factor in a narrative about three separate sets of tenants. The French director Alain Resnais, better known for spare, intense films like Hiroshima Mon Amour and Night and Fog, used an outlandish 18th century chateau in the Ardennes Forest as the unifying setting for his era-jumping tripartite 1983 film Life Is a Bed of Roses (currently streaming online). More recently, the Ukrainian director Dar Gai’s dubiously named Teen Aur Aadha (2017) built a composite narrative around a 50-year-old Mumbai building in which there had been a school and a brothel as well as families. People leave, houses remain. Some memories don't need a house to dwell in: it can be a car. The Yellow Rolls-Royce, a somewhat overblown, star-studded 1965 film with everyone from Rex Harrison to Shirley MacLaine, had three very different lives linked only by the eponymous car. It was based on a play by Terence Rattigan, who apparently took the idea from a post-war German film called In Those Days, directed by Helmut Käutner, which used the seven lives of a car built in 1933 and dismantled in 1947 to comment on the Nazi era.

But Gamak Ghar doesn’t really remind you of other films. It reminds you of other houses.

Streaming on an online platform for another day, 23-year-old Achal Mishra's debut feature is a quiet love letter to his grandparents' village home in Madhopur, Bihar. Mishra uses a three-part structure, beginning in 1998 and ending in 2019, and the house does allow us to see its owners grow older, change, move away and return. But Mishra is not interested in plot.

His set is the actual house that he visited twice a year as a child, but whose role in even the family’s ceremonial life began to decrease as the grandparents died. His characters – if you can call them that – are fictionalised versions of his own extended family, played by a mixed cast garnered from amongst existing local actors and acquaintances who had not acted before. And his narrative interest is a socio-economic transition that is specific to his own upper caste Maithil Brahmin family as well as familiar to many, many migrant families across India whose connections with the village have grown irreversibly distant, especially in the decades since liberalisation.

What makes Gamak Ghar unusual is its single-minded interest in capturing a certain experience of time and space. Mishra has, in a recent interview, mentioned the writer Amit Chaudhuri as one of his sources of inspiration, and one can see why. From its very first frames, the film refuses even a glimmer of drama for stillness, displaying a conviction that art can lie in the observation and recreation of sensory detail. So we see the piles of Malda mangoes from the family orchard, and the curds set in an array of flat earthen pots. We observe how people look through a mosquito net, we watch the smoke rising from an agarbatti. We remember rooms lit at night by a hurricane lamp, and recall how tuneless the singing can often be during a religious ritual.

There is almost nothing flashily cinematic here, though an occasional filmic reference gets made – most obviously when a conversation about one of the brothers moving to Delhi is followed by a stunningly beautiful shot of a train viewed through a field of snowy-white kaash flowers, a la Pather Panchali, evoking and portending Apu’s move to the city later in Ray’s Apu Trilogy. There are rapt faces bathed in the glow of a TV screen, and the lone female cousin who, when asked “Sunny Deol or Salman Khan”, says a categorical no to watching a Salman film on the VCR.

And as the film traverses the last two decades, the nods to change are everywhere. We watch as the large wooden bed on which the men played cards in the balcony is replaced by wooden chairs over the years, and then dull brown plastic ones; we note the gradual shift from community feasts laid out on the floor – where everyone knew exactly how much someone was eating and could make fun of them for their appetite – to meals served on chairs apart from each other, and finally, meals eaten by each brother alone in a bedroom.

Evocative and nostalgia-inducing as these sights and sounds are, I was glad that Mishra seems simultaneously able to suggest that this world we have lost – or are in the process of losing – was held up by all sorts of hierarchies and rigidities that we took for granted. In the rosy remembered time of family togetherness in the 1990s, for instance, the women cooked vast meals and looked after the children, while the men played cards and demanded to know whether the food was ready. The daughter-in-law who covers her head with a ghoonghat all through the first segment has become a confident Delhi woman a decade later, leaving her hair open.

But she still joins her sisters-in-law to chop vegetables for the family dinner. The links with the past aren't quite broken yet. At the end, the roof is being dismantled -- but it is part of a house renovation, to host a new child's initiation ceremony. Gamak Ghar isn’t meant to be a sociological or anthropological record, and yet it is that thing we rarely produce in India: a self-conscious cinematic document.

Published in Mumbai Mirror,  7 Jun 2020. 

Shelf Life: The Hand-Me-Downs

My Shelf Life column for May 2020.

Other people’s clothes can be prickly things, fulfilling neither the wearer’s desire nor the giver’s expectation of gratitude.

In Vinod Kumar Shukla's magnificent 1979 novel Naukar ki Kameez, a low-level desk employee in a government office is forced to do duty at the big boss's home. In his spare, masterful style, Shukla condenses his narrator's class-ridden predicament into a single object: a shirt. The sahib's first servant, we are told, wore ill-fitting clothes, obviously belonging to someone larger than him. So a thick white shirt was stitched for him. But the servant didn't last. His replacement, too, was fired soon. The shirt, like the position, now lies empty, awaiting someone who can fit into it. “Naukar ki kameez ek saancha tha, jisse adarsh naukaron ki pehchaan hoti,” writes Shukla: 'The servant's shirt was a mould, which would help identify the ideal servant'.

In an unsettling episode, Shukla's naive young narrator Santu is tricked into visiting the big boss's home, and physically held down until his own “bush-shirt” has been exchanged for the servant's waiting white kameez. Forced to wear it home, Santu returns the next day in his own clothes. When made to take his boss's wife shopping or conduct other semi-domestic duties, he goes along reluctantly. He doesn't see how else to keep his job. His resistance condenses into not wearing the servant's shirt.

The attempt to preserve one's self while being compelled to wear someone else's clothes is also the theme of the Hyderabadi writer Wajida Tabassum's famous story 'Utran' ('Cast-Offs'), translated by Sayeeda S. Hameed and Sughra Mehdi for Parwaaz, a now-classic volume of Urdu short stories by women. 'Utran' features a servant, too – but Chamki is the epitome of insubordination from the very first scene in which we meet her, as a seven-year-old who wants to exchange dupattas with her much richer playmate and 'become sisters'.
Her mother Anna Bi is wet-nurse to an aristocratic family, and so Chamki receives all of Shahzadi Pasha's innumerable cast-offs. But where Shahzadi's hand-me-downs leave Anna Bi thrilled and grateful, the one-way traffic only makes Chamki angrier: “Ammini! I am prettier than Bi Pasha. Then why doesn't she wear my cast-offs?”

 It is no surprise that the single saffron-coloured outfit that the mistress has tailored for Chamki, though it is of cheaper material than Shahzadi would ever wear, becomes the girl's favourite. Those clothes “elevate her to the heavens”, giving her a heady confidence that leads to the story's denouement.

And yet, there can also be confidence in wearing someone's old clothes. Upendranath Ashk's 1961 Hindi story 'The Ambassador' demonstrates this perfectly. It begins with a man arriving at the narrator's well-appointed bungalow in “a dirty shirt with no buttons, a loose coat full of holes, baggy trousers patched and torn, and boots that seemed worn down by centuries of use.” The houseboy is chasing the stranger away when he stretches out his hand, says “Hello, Bakshi” and advises the narrator, in perfect English, to fire his impolite servant.

By the end of Ashk's tale, the narrator's old roommate – for that is who he is – has eaten a sumptuous meal, wiped his dirty hands on his tattered clothes and demanded a set of clean old ones. As he walks away with them thrown casually over his arm, the narrator is struck that he hasn't even said 'thank you'.

Is this what makes old clothes so fraught? Those who receive them might use them, they might even be glad to have them. But the giver's demand for gratitude, wanting to be thanked for a 'gift' that the receiver knows to be mere surplus: that can cause heartburn.

And yet, clothes are often so powerfully desired that someone else's clothes can also become fetishised, objects of illicit passion. In Saadat Hasan Manto's story 'Kali Shalwar', a prostitute down on her luck tells her new lover that she really wants a new black shalwar for Muharram. When he actually brings her one, Sultana is very happy. It is just like the satin one her friend Anwari recently got made. Then she realises it is the same one.

Published in 1942 in the Lahore-based journal Adab-i-Latif, its frank portrayal of the margins of polite society got it banned for obscenity. But in fact the story displays Manto's characteristic combination of deceptively casual plotting and rare emotional subtlety.

If coveting a black shalwar brings Sultana quiet sorrow, coveting a dead sister's wedding trousseau brings grand gothic tragedy in Henry James' 1868 story 'The Romance of Certain Old Clothes'. Two New England sisters find themselves, as the daughters of 19th century gentry apparently often did, vying for the same man. One marries him, but dies soon after giving birth. The second, Rosalind, promptly inveigles herself into the widower's life, becoming the new Mrs. Lloyd. It is interesting that James seems to judge her less for wanting her dead sister's husband than for desiring her locked-away wardrobe. Of course, like a good gothic tale, when Rosalind opens the forbidden trunk, her sister's spirit finds a way to punish her. 

Aspiring for more can seem ungrateful. The sahib of Shukla's novel knew what he was doing: scotching desire. “I would never give my own shirt to the servant,” he tells his head clerk. “The tastes we know, they should never know. If they do, they will be ungrateful.”

Seen through the eyes of those who rule, even old clothes can disrupt status quo.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 21 May 2020.

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.

What the burqa and the bindi (and the hijab) stand for in our books, and in our current lives

An essay published on the website Scroll.in:

There’s a scene in Prayaag Akbar’s 2017 novel Leila that never made it to the Netflix adaptation. In a not-too-distant dystopian future of water shortage, Riz and Shalini throw a grand poolside party for Leila’s third birthday. The children get their fill of inflatable slides, the parents of champagne. It’s a posh, Westernised crowd, where the women are comfortable leaving a shirt slightly unbuttoned, or showing some leg through the slit in a long dress. So Shalini’s sister-in-law Gazala stands out by being “sheathed in a flowing single-pleat abaya... with a dusty-pink silk hijab that brings out her alabaster complexion.”

“Cheeks glowing with rouge,” Akbar’s description continues. “This is probably as much sun as she ever gets.” The bitchiness is explainable as Shalini’s, not the author’s. But given Akbar’s otherwise nuanced characterisations, Gazala seems an easy stand-in for tradition-bound Muslim femininity. She is somehow both decorative and covered up, and never gets to speak. Her burqa does the talking.

Earlier, Shalini’s reluctance to live in the Muslim sector with her husband’s family is also routed through the veil. “Look, no disrespect to Gazala...,” she tells her brother-in-law Naz. “But I don’t want my daughter in a burqa.” In response, Naz shames Shalini – for offering him a beer, for not knowing that her maid has taken her child out. And Gazala, his hijab-wearing wife, gets held up as the contrast to the liberated, cosmopolitan Shalini: “She might not know as much about the world as you. But she knows our culture.”

Typecasting the burqa

 

The fact that Gazala’s burqa stands in for her is disappointing, but not surprising. No matter where one looks, it seems that the burqa comes to us always already loaded with meaning – and rarely a positive one. In Indian popular culture, it has long been trotted out either as a comic disguise worn by the Hindi film hero, from Shammi Kapoor to Rishi Kapoor to Aamir Khan in Delhi Belly, or as a symbol of women’s oppression. Sometimes, as in the dubious Islamicate subplot of the recent Ayushmann Khurrana starrer Dream Girl, it is both.

Feminists don’t necessarily do better: even a thoughtful film like Alankrita Srivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha can only see the burqa as the agent of the teenaged Rehana’s oppression. Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy is a welcome exception, giving us in Alia Bhatt’s lovely Safeena a headscarf-wearing Muslim girl who is neither a prude nor a pushover. Bhatt is also burqa-clad in Meghna Gulzar’s superb Raazi, where her fetching coloured hijab does fascinating triple duty as good Muslim, good daughter-in-law – and spy.

In Alice Albinia’s 2011 novel Leela’s Book, too, the burqa has the quality of subterfuge. First, an upper class Hindu woman purchases it secretly, hiding it from her liberal Muslim husband. Then her young Muslim maid Aisha takes it from its hiding place, wearing it to walk through her own neighbourhood unrecognised. It is an “Arab-style burqa”, heavy and black “with some gauzy thin material over the eyes”, writes Albinia, such as “some women in the basti [Nizamuddin] now wore”.
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It allows Aisha to rescue the man she loves from unjust police custody, but Albinia the author cannot resist describing her character’s experience of wearing it as a limiting one. The burqa is too big for Aisha; the tree canopy seems denser and darker through it; her lover does not recognise her in it: “he peered at her, disturbed by the distance this... fabric put between them: it was as if they were seeing each other through a crowd of people”. The liberal non-burqa-wearer, it seems, can only attribute to the burqa-wearer a sense of alienation from herself and the world.

A sign of unfreedom

 

One way to normalise the burqa’s existence is not to dwell on it. In Altaf Tyrewala’s whipsmart novel No God In Sight (2005), we meet multiple Muslim female characters without being told if they veil. And when someone does, that doesn’t become the important thing about them. Jeyna-Bi’s burqa attracts attention because it is fluorescent orange, not simply because she’s got one. In the accepting cultural mix of Tyrewala’s Mumbai, a burqa can be a topic of banter, it can get sadly soiled when poor Jeyna-Bi throws up her portion of a wedding feast. It can be, in effect, just another piece of clothing.

But the space for such a perspective is steadily narrowing. Since mid-December 2019, as unprecedented numbers of Indian Muslim women have emerged into public space to protest against the discriminatory religious basis of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the burqa has become even more heavily charged with meaning. Not all the women protesting in Shaheen Bagh (or the many female-led sit-ins it inspired nationwide) wore a veil or headscarf. But the fact that so many did seems to have caused great bafflement and unease.

Because the burqa has become, for anyone who does not wear one, a sign of unfreedom. And if you aren’t free, how can you possibly be out on the streets, resisting an oppressive state? How can you be the living embodiment of oppressed Muslim womanhood that the Hindu right claims to be saving from Muslim men, and simultaneously be leading a political protest?

And so, according to the Sangh’s Whatsapp factory, the lakhs of women who sat out in the wind and weather for three months, while braving police lathis, abusive goons and horrific communal violence, were not doing it to claim their threatened rights as Indian citizens, but for Rs 500 a day and free biryani. What is chilling is that so many other Indians want to believe that canard.

We saw another glimpse of that suspicion and ill-will on March 23, when the mainstream media reported the police destruction of the gloriously democratic art-filled protest sites at Shaheen Bagh and elsewhere as some sort of desperate public health measure – as though the women had not already vacated the sites.

Wearing an identity

This tarring of burqa-clad women as not being legitimate citizens with legitimate concerns dovetailed perfectly with the Prime Minister’s statement in December that those protesting against the CAA-NRC “can be recognised by their clothes”. That shamelessly partisan taunting of a community fighting its own legal marginalisation has sparked a new kind of battle, with people turning their marked bodies into sites of symbolic display.

Refusing to be shamed for wearing burqas, caps or other identifiable markers of their community, many Muslim protesters have instead responded by embracing them. But histories of religious populism elsewhere suggest that such a move can be a double bind. In Meena Kandasamy’s recent novel Exquisite Cadavers, a Tunisian film-school student in London finds his white British teachers pushing him to tell his country’s history through the hijab.

A French-influenced secular diktat banned headscarves in Tunisia in 1981 – so when the dictatorship was unseated, wearing the hijab became a form of community identity. The Islamic right exploited people’s desire to reclaim their religion, and a country where a hijab-wearing “Arabian Barbie” had once caused a liberal outcry, Kandasamy writes, became one that provided the largest number of foreign fighters to the dreaded Daesh.

Closer home, as the recent violence in North East Delhi makes clear, such defiant wearing of religious identity on the body reaches its tragic, terrifying limits when social fissures widen into the abyss of communal violence. Symbols have power: they can mark us or unmark us, divide or unite. In Leela’s Book, the same Hindu woman once buys a packet of gold-embossed bindis for the maid Aisha, only to have her Muslim husband tell her, “They don’t wear bindis”.

Fear and loathing

Among the fascinating ways in which women have chosen to express cross-community solidarities these last few months is the interlacing of burqas and bindis. The young poet Nabiya Khan’s words rang out across many anti-CAA-NRC posters: “Aayega Inqilab, Pehen Ke Burqa Bindi Aur Hijab”.

Optimists of various stripes are bringing bindis and burqas together. But those whose minds are filled with poison can only see conquest, not mingling. To such commentators, like the virulently anti-Muslim “Katyayani” on hindupost.in, a poster saying “Women Will Destroy Hindu Rashtra” with a fierce female face wearing both a bindi and a headscarf, with sunglasses on her head and her tongue out, looks like a “demonised” Kali “surrendering” to the Islamic veil.

Another anti-CAA-NRC poster, of three women wearing both bindis and burqas, underscored by Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s now-viral poetic challenge to all dictatorships “Hum Dekhenge” (“We shall see”), seems to the same writer a call to “to ‘free’ bindi-sporting Hindu women by converting them into burqa-clad ones”.

Communal polarisation now involves a repeated insistence that the way people look is who they are – and yet when what is on display doesn’t fit the entrenched majoritarian narrative, then suddenly it is dismissed. “Bharatiya women of non-sanatani faith are also sometimes seen sporting the bindi, but that is just how a demography raised in mixed-culture behaves,” declares Katyayani when faced with the sociological fact of non-Hindu bindi-wearers.

No God In Sight contains a biting scene in which a young (upper middle class Hindu) wife must report her missing (Muslim) husband to the police. She wears her most saffron-like nylon sari, and borrows a mangalsutra and a bindi from her maid Gangu-bai, hoping that the Mumbai police will treat her complaint more seriously if she looks like a practising Hindu. They tell her to go to Pakistan.

Published in Scroll, 28 Mar 2020

Fear Eats the Soul

My Mirror column:

Kamal Haasan's Hey Ram, released twenty years ago this February, is a complex, unresolved film about India's unresolved inner life. 

A man returns to the Calcutta building in which his wife was raped and murdered in a riot. He stands in the street, looking up at their old balcony, and she appears there, beckoning him as she used to. When he climbs up the stairs, the new occupant mistakes the name he mentions for that of the person he is looking for. 

Mr. Nair: “All the tenants here are new. What's the name again?”

Saket Ram: “Saket Ram.”

Mr. Nair: “When did you see him last?”

Saket Ram: “Whom?”

Mr. Nair: “Saket Ram.”

Saket Ram: “A year ago, exactly.”

Mr. Nair: “A year ago there was a massacre. Many of the people in this building died. Maybe your friend also... Sorry.

Saket Ram: “It's alright.”

Mr. Nair: “What was your relationship to this Saket Ram?”

Saket Ram: “Like that of the body to the soul. We were very good friends.”

It is a moment typical of Hey Ram: the visuals dense with imagery, the dialogue packed with associations, a certain excess that seems ready to leap off the screen. Our Tamil protagonist's lovely Bengali first wife Aparna -- played by Rani Mukherjee, her character's name a nod to Sharmila Tagore as Apu's wife in Satyajit Ray's Apur Sansar, a cinematic emblem of perfect young marital domesticity and early death -- is dead. But she haunts her living husband, appearing everywhere – in the balcony of what was her own home, but also writhing in a pool of blood in his new wife's bathroom, or smiling in the faces of other women, or assuming the form of a goddess. Meanwhile, Saket Ram (Kamal Haasan, his character carrying the old poetic name for Ayodhya) lives through the trauma of Aparna's death, but in his acquiescence to Mr. Nair's words, we hear a tacit acknowledgement that perhaps he is not quite alive. Did Saket Ram's soul die with Aparna that Direct Action Day, leaving his body to wander the streets, available for possession by more devious spirits?

It seems no coincidence that Haasan's Saket Ram first encounters the film's other Ram in those very Calcutta streets, in a moment that has the two men literally mirroring each other, in name and in gesture. But Saket Ram is a man in trauma, speaking of surrendering to the police to confess about the Muslim men he has just killed, only one of them the actual rapist and murderer of his wife: he carries the stains, literally, on his white kurta. Shriram Abhyankar (Atul Kulkarni) is a RSS-influenced Hindu fundamentalist, who has covered over an old wound with a new skin of pure hatred. “There is no punishment for doing one's duty. If killing is a crime then so is war, isn't it?” asks Abhyankar. And when Ram protests that he is a mere civilian, Abhyankar counters smoothly: “This is civil war.”

And it is certainly no coincidence that the film's other reference to body and soul is when Abhyankar, finding himself paralysed waist downwards in a riding accident, tells Ram that he must now “be his body” and carry out their mission of assassinating Gandhi, whom Abhyankar and his ilk believe a traitor to the so-called Hindu cause, because of Gandhi's sustained support to the idea that the Muslims have as legitimate a claim to live in India as the majority community does.

Haasan's film is among the most detailed filmic depictions we have of the Hindutva mindset -- not just the admiration for Hitler and the distaste for Gandhi, but how that maps onto an eroticised masculinity in which violence and nationalism come together with a reworked Hindu renunciatory ideal. But there is great confusion in this mindset. In one of the film's most honest, most complicated scenes, Ram imbibes an opium drink given to him by Abhyankar, and it is in that opium-induced haze that he both finally feels the stirrings of sexual attraction to his new young wife Mythili, and agrees, in effect, to leave her side. When he makes love to her, he fantasises about a giant gun. To become a warrior for Hindutva, Ram must take a pledge to “renounce bondage and relationships”. We see him touch, in one seamless gesture, the picture of his unseen dead mother and the map of India, both of which he can only love as abstractions – and leave the house, abandoning for his grand masculine mission all the real, maternal figures he knows, including the newly-pregnant Mythili (Sita to match Ram).

In a directorial sleight-of-hand that makes fine use of both melodrama and coincidence, Haasan ensures that this would-be Godse suddenly finds himself being defended from suspicious Muslims somewhere near Jama Masjid by his trusted old Muslim friend Amjad (Shah Rukh Khan) – and then, in a matter of minutes, defending Amjad and all the other Muslims holed up in the nicely-named Azad Soda Factory.

There is a great deal more that can be said about Hey Ram, but let me end here on the note that Amjad does. In a dying declaration to the police trying to identify the armed Hindu assailant whose entry into the curfew-bound Jama Masjid area set off the bloodbath, Amjad is asked if he had ever seen Bhairav before. Bhairav is the name Ram had assumed on that excursion, and also the name of Lord Shiva's destructive form. “I have never seen that animal before,” says Amjad. “I only know Ram, my brother. He saved my life.”

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23 Feb 2020.