Life's Little Ironies: the stories of Upendranath Ashk

I interviewed the scholar and translator Daisy Rockwell on Upendranath Ashk, one of Hindi literature’s greatest writers, a selection of whose short stories has just appeared in Rockwell's translation as Hats and Doctors.

Ashk’s stories often unfold inside crowded railway compartments. Photo: Terry Fincher/Express/Getty Images

Upendranath Ashk (1910-96) is one of Hindi literature’s biggest names, a writer whose oeuvre spanned over a hundred volumes of fiction, poetry, memoir, criticism and translation. Hats And Doctors offers the English reader the first proper glimpse of Ashk’s very particular sensibility: profound yet light-hearted, satirical yet deeply engaged.

He unravels the ironies of his protagonists’ lives with a wry humour: sharp as a scalpel, yet somehow understated. In some stories, like Who Can Trust a Man?, this is achieved through a glancing narratorial style: People are bereaved, remarry, undergo all kinds of tumult, seemingly without great emotional labour. In others, like In the Insane Asylum, wryness emerges from tragedy. These stories range as widely across 1940s-1960s India as Ashk himself did, from the Bombay film industry to Kashmir, and across the north Indian towns he knew well: Delhi, Lucknow, Jalandhar, Allahabad.

The milieus are delightfully detailed: if Brown Sahibs gives us a marvellously credible sociology of Allahabad’s rickshaw pullers and its bureaucrats, the title story contrasts the ills of Lucknow’s allopaths and homoeopaths.

Upendranath Ashk. Photo courtesy: Neelabh

Excerpts from an interview with Daisy Rockwell, Ashk’s translator and biographer:

How did you come to be interested in Ashk’s writing?

In graduate school at The University of Chicago, I did a lot of reading on Hindi novelists. One writer compared Ashk’s novels to (Marcel) Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. This intrigued me and I ended up writing my PhD thesis on Ashk’s six-volume novel cycle Girti Divarein(Falling Walls). There are indeed many similarities with Proust, but Ashk never actually read his novels.

You wrote a biography of Ashk for Katha Books in 2005. Tell us a little about Ashk’s early life.

Upendranath Ashk: A Critical Biography was based on my PhD thesis. Ashk was born Upendranath Sharma, the second of six sons in a Saraswat Brahmin family in Jalandhar. His father, a station master, was an alcoholic with a violent temper. Girti Divarein is semi-autobiographical, and there are many riveting passages about the impact of Ashk’s father’s violence on the family.

Ashk has said that his father wanted his sons to grow up to be the best at whatever they chose to do. He was just as intent that they learn English and Sanskrit well as he was that they become first-class pehelwans (wrestlers). Ashk and his Bhai Sahib, who became a dentist, failed miserably at this second task, but some of the other brothers did become top-notch pehelwans. After college, Ashk escaped his family, and what he saw as the provinciality of Jalandhar, to make a start for himself as a writer in Lahore.

You met Ashk in the last years of his life. What was it like?

It was terrifying. He was very ill, but quite sharp. I think he believed that researchers should come armed with lists of numbered questions. I had in mind a more organic process of discovery which he didn’t really understand. He wanted me to come to see him every morning to ask these questions that didn’t really exist. His family thought these daily visits were not good for his health, and I’m sure they were right, but his word was still law in the house. So I’d spend the afternoons coming up with new questions, dreading what the morning’s session might bring. Sometimes he would berate me and send me away. There was no knowing what would happen.

It’s fascinating that Ashk started by writing in Punjabi and then Urdu, before shifting to Hindi. Was the choice a difficult one? What did it mean for him as a writer, and for the Hindi-Urdu divide in general?

Hats and Doctors: By Upendranath Ashk, 

translated by Daisy Rockwell, Penguin, 240 pages, Rs 299

Ashk has said that in those days Punjabi poets were usually “the lowest class of people in the city, illiterate loafers and thugs”—the Urdu crowd was decidedly more sophisticated, and Ashk was probably attracted to it for that reason. He moved from poetry to prose by his early 20s and then was persuaded by Premchand, with whom he corresponded in those days, to switch to Hindi in the spirit of the nationalist movement. Ashk was really not a political animal, however, I’m sure the fact that Hindi was starting to look like the language of independent India was not lost on him. This meant there would be more money in Hindi than in Urdu, and perhaps a wider audience.

 I’ve never seen Ashk write about this rationale explicitly but he was not an impractical man. He didn’t come from money and he always supported himself through his writing. Hindi was difficult for him, however, because in those days educated Punjabi Hindus were much better versed in Urdu than Hindi. The entire first volume of Girti Divarein he wrote first in Urdu and then translated into Hindi himself.

Ashk seemed to have critical, often publicly hostile relationships with many of his peers, most famously (Saadat Hasan) Manto. According to Aftab Ahmad and Matt Reeck’s recent introduction to Manto’s ‘Bombay Stories’, Manto even left his All India Radio job because he couldn’t stand Ashk editing his plays…

Manto’s conflict was more with Rashid, the station manager who gave Ashk the play to edit. There was a dushmani, however, that Ashk recorded in his long essay Manto Mera Dushman (My Enemy Manto); they both had combative personalities and enormous egos. But Manto later helped Ashk get a job in the film industry in Bombay, so the animosity wasn’t that deep. But yes, Ashk was famous for making enemies. His multi-volume memoir Chehere: Anek (Many Faces) listed the shortcomings of all his contemporaries. Ashk also self-published all his work (his wife, Kaushalya, ran their publishing house, Neelabh Prakashan), and his introductions go on about critics and writers who had unfairly attacked him or deceived him. Ashk strongly believed that the Hindi world had it in for him—and by the end of his life that became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

How autobiographical was Ashk’s writing?

Very, although the novels more than the stories. Ashk did have TB and stayed at the Panchgani sanatorium described in Mr Ghatpande. The protagonist in the title story Hats And Doctors, like Ashk, had many interesting types of headgear and suffered from all sorts of maladies. Other than that I wouldn’t say they’re about himself. But Ashk was a firm believer in “write what you know”.

Do you have other projects on the anvil?

Yes, I am in the middle of translating the first novel in Ashk’s Girti Divarein series. I’m also working on my third novel (the first two will surface in print in the next year) and, of course, painting, as always.

Published in Mint Lounge, Sat May 18, 2013.

Film Review: Gippi

It really is a bit hard to believe that Gippi is a Karan Johar production. No, it’s not surprising that the first Bollywood film about 14-year-olds comes from the man who arguably first imported the American high school fantasy – a la Archie Comics’ Riverdale – into our cinema, with Kuch Kuch Hota Hai in 1998, and also gave us last October’s updated version: Student of the Year.

What’s surprising is that unlike the perfectly-coiffed glossy creatures masquerading as schoolkids in Johar’s films, his production of Sonam Nair’s Gippi has a school that actually seems like a school, and kids who mostly look and behave like kids. Most surprising of all is its heroine. Admittedly, the plump child (who might have something to do with Johar’s own past, if his interviews are to be believed) has figured occasionally in his oeuvre: but either he grows up to be Hrithik Roshan, as in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, or he’s relegated to being the nerdy nice boy who’s still sadly single eight years after school, as in SOTY. It’s pretty remarkable, then, that Nair’s directorial debut not just allows its plump protagonist to be the film’s heroine, but actually celebrates her refusal to be made over.

The plot is uncomplicated but the things it deals with are refreshingly new on the Hindi film screen. Gurpreet Kaur, better known as Gippi, is a regular 14-year-old with regular issues, stemming mostly – but not only – from her slightly more-than-regular weight. Her school uniform’s grown too tight for her over the summer, she feels fat and unattractive and a bit of a klutz.

Add to all this the problems of puberty: growing breasts, getting your period, acquiring a bra – and falling in love. But what makes everything worse is that whenever Gippi has an embarrassing moment – her chair tipping over or her buttons popping open or her chemistry experiment blowing up in her face – her Little Miss Perfect classmate Shamira is waiting around the corner, ready to rub it in. And then Gippi finds herself competing for school elections against Shamira…

What’s ironic is that Shamira – the slim, high-achieving, fashionable rich girl – is really a version of the heroine in a Kuch Kuch or SOTY. Except that instead of being a Poor Little Rich Girl that we’re supposed to sympathise with, Shamira’s version of Little Miss Perfect is here cast as nastiness personified. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, then, that Jayati Modi’s rather-too-shrill attempts to bring Shamira’s excessive villainy to life are responsible for the falsest notes in the film: especially her cruel outburst against Gippi at the party.

The only time Shamira seems somewhat believable is during the climax, when the film decides to turn around and give us an insight into the pains it takes to maintain her self-anointed heroine status. “I haven’t eaten ice cream for three months,” she declares in a hilarious self-pity speech. “Even my goddamn socks have to be perfect!”

But if Shamira is a cardboard cutout, Gippi and her friends are endearingly recognizable – even if they’re types...

My review of Gippi continues. Read the whole review here, on Firstpost.

Theatre: The Winter's Tale

Two theatre directors add a bit of sparkle (and some masala) to a Shakespearean gem.


When Anirudh Nair first approached Neel Chaudhuri two years ago with the idea that they direct a play together, they didn’t know the collaboration was going to lead them to The Winter’s Tale. Or even Shakespeare. Having cut his teeth on ShakeSoc (as the St. Stephen’s College theatre society refers to itself), Chaudhuri admits, may have dulled his enthusiasm for Shakespeare -- or at least “the myopic reverence that seems to colour everyone's attitudes towards studying and performing Shakespeare”. In any case, says Chaudhuri, he was “dying to work on a Chekhov text”.

The desire to work with a straight-up classic was something new for Chaudhuri. As he put it himself, his trajectory as a playwright and director until now “seems to have studiously avoided any affinity for classical modes of drama and performance”. From the improvised vignettes of Positions (2006) to the rather adventurous Mouse (2008), an unsettling interaction between an ‘actor’ and a ‘director’ which unfolded at least partially in the dark, via the thoroughly remarkable A Brief History of the Pantomimes (2008), right down to the superbly realized Taramandal (2010) (which won the Hindu Metroplus award for playwriting), Neel Chaudhuri’s plays have been about storytelling with a certain economy. Even when the dialogue is absolutely crucial, the dominant sensation you take away from his productions is one of quiet. And even when his starting point has been a well-known text – in Ich bin Fassbinder (2011) it was Fassbinder’s epochal film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, in Taramandal it was Satyajit Ray’s short story about thwarted ambition, ‘Patol Babu, Film Star’ – Chaudhuri’s way has been to push at its edges, or to create narrative echoes for it, never simply to take the text as is.

Nair, on the other hand, has been working a lot with Shakespeare over the past four or five years – on using physical theatre in Shakespeare and also studying original practice (working with the specificities of Shakespearean rhythms, pentameter, how to use the punctuation, and so on). Nair’s Wide Aisle Productions has also been working on a project that takes Shakespeare to schools, and many of the actors who’re part of that project are also part of the Tadpole Repertory. Tadpole, founded in 2009, is a loose confederation of talented actors in concert with whom Chaudhuri has produced pretty much all his plays.

Chaudhuri was excited about what he and the Tadpole actors could learn from incorporating Nair’s physical training and gesture work. So Shakespeare it was. The group decided they wanted a play that had possibilities as an ensemble piece, not centred heavily around one or two characters – this eliminated, for instance, Hamlet and Othello – and something that Indian theatre-goers weren’t likely to be familiar with – this meant Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, King Lear and The Merchant of Venice were all out. From a shortlist that included The Taming of the Shrew and Pericles, the final choice was The Winter’s Tale.

One of Shakespeare’s later works, the play is split into two: the first half is a tragic tale of jealousy that unfolds in the court of King Leontes of Sicilia, while the second, which opens 16 years later in the kingdom of Bohemia, is exuberant in both its comedy and its romance. “The duality was both beguiling and bewildering,” says Chaudhuri. “It struck us as quite unique – court and country, tragedy and comedy, death and restoration, tyranny and abandonment. After a point it seemed really clear to us that it was a play ripe for all our ambitions.” The production that unfolded amid the astonishingly apt lily ponds and landscaped grassy mounds of Zorba the Buddha in Delhi this March certainly realized those ambitions. The cast moved with marvelous felicity -- from one part of the open-air venue to another, between the play’s inherent binaries, and most admirably, from a never-stiff Shakespearian English to a glorious, mobile Hindustani.

The confidence of that linguistic decision lies at the root of what is most striking about the play. It plays off the duality that already exists, and creates new ones. Tanzil Ahmad’s superb translation is finely attuned to changes of register in the original, recreating both high and low – and within the low, shifting between “the playfully exaggerated, the bawdy and the mundane”. So the trickster Autolycus’s aside to the audience, “If the springe hold, the cock’s mine!” becomes “Idhar phanda laga, udhar murga phansa!!”; the Clown’s exclamation, “I’ the name of me—” becomes “Arre teri!”. There is even room for the occasional Hinglish moment, without it turning into a fetish or a quirk. And whether they are speaking in English or Hindustani, the actors successfully inhabit the dialogue, bringing to their speech the individual accents and styles that come naturally to them.

Despite what anyone might tell you, Shakespearean language takes a while to get used to. And yet when your ear accepts it, it can be more poetic and brilliant than anything you imagined. Nair and Chaudhuri’s production provides the wonderful sense of being at home, both in the language of Shakespeare and in a language a lot of us know but no longer really speak. This is a production that is both absolutely universal and yet utterly located in the here and now of 2013 India. There is something remarkable going on here. As Leontes says at the end of the play, “If this be magic, let it be an art/ Lawful as eating.”

Published in the April-May issue of Le City Deluxe, an international luxury lifestyle magazine that has recently launched in India (and was kind enough to want to publish a theatre-related piece).

Post Facto -- Celluloid Man: PK Nair & the future of our cinematic past

"At one point in Shivendra Singh Dungarpur's affecting documentary — released on 3rd May to coincide with the centenary of Indian cinema — the octogenarian PK Nair stands in front of one of those old-fashioned weighing machines that you could find at every Indian railway station even until a decade ago. He inserts a coin into the slot, and receives in return the little rectangular piece of cardboard with his weight printed on one side, and a grainy B&W image of Aishwarya Rai on the other. Nair smiles, a smile of pure pleasure. He inserts a fresh coin, and the machine releases another card. As new cards (and actresses) tumble out of the machine, a voiceover has Nair reminiscing about collecting these cards as a boy. He collected cinema ticket stubs, too, he confesses happily. It's one of the moments of Celluloid Man that illuminate just how well-suited India's premier film archivist was to the job that consumed him for 30 years."

Read the rest of this column on the Sunday Guardian site.

Film Review: Bombay Talkies

 

Bombay Talkies is made up of four short films created by four different Hindi film directors as a tribute to the power of cinema in India. The first film, directed by Karan Johar, is perhaps the one least obviously ‘about cinema’.

Yes, Gayatri (Rani Mukherjee) is the editor of a filmi gossip mag called Mumbai Masala, her television news anchor husband Dev (Randeep Hooda) is a Hindi film music aficionado with a “special room” that’s a shrine to old songs, and Avinash (Saqib Saleem) – the new intern in Gayatri’s office – often climbs up on a railway overbridge to listen to a little street child sing “Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh”. But really, this is a tale about truth and love and sex and selfhood, and Johar leavens a clichéd gay coming-out narrative (which does exist) with more brutal honesty than one could have hoped for.

Of course, since this is still Johar, his ‘ordinary people’ are all rather too fetching – but he gets many things right. The actors are perfectly cast, and we’re right there with them from the word go. There’s the early shot where the husband and wife, dressing for work, look into the same mirror. Rani’s Gayatri is dressed to kill, her low-slung sari blouse revealing a shapely back. She looks longingly into the mirror, no longer at herself but at her husband, but he barely seems to see her. In the next scene we see her walk into her office and become the cynosure of all eyes. That appreciative glance that comes her way from a male colleague now seems to us her due.

The other thing Johar nails is the casual sexual banter upon which Avinash’s relationship with Gayatri is forged. A milieu in which a newly-arrived intern can greet the boss-woman with a remark like “Gale mein mangalsutra, aankhon mein kamasutra” may seem a little much, but it taps into the deliberate sluttiness so often cultivated in the new liberal workplace, with sexuality played up partly for laughs and partly to establish coolness.

But it is the little girl on the railway bridge who’s the scene stealer. There is something so intensely pure and true about the quality of her voice as she breaks into “Lag Ja Gale” that one is willing to buy completely into her later dialogue about honesty, however trite. And here Johar cottons onto something that really does exemplify Hindi cinema: the undeniable pull of the song lyric, the sense one so often gets of it’s being the truest thing you’ve ever heard, even if – perhaps especially when? – it comes wrapped in a cloud of emotional excess of the sort that is no longer allowed.

This review was written for Firstpost. Read the whole of it here.

Post Facto -- Cinema Non-Paradiso: Make-believe and the movies in Bellissima

A still from Bellissima uchino Visconti is universally recognised as one of the world's great filmmakers. His neo-realist works — the rough-edged La Terra Trema and the masterful Rocco and his Brothers — are on countless film school lists, and his lush literary adaptations — Lampedusa's The Leopard and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice — are regularly numbered among the world's best films. But his third film, Bellissima (1951), has never got the attention it deserves. Such praise as has come its way has been focused on the exceptional performance Visconti drew from its lead actress: the magnificent Anna Magnani, playing a movie-mad nurse obsessed by the idea of having her five-year-old daughter snag a part in a film. Magnani aside, the film has been relegated to the status of a 'minor work', a comedy. The great Pauline Kael, for instance, condemned it with characteristic pithiness as "full of contradictory impulses, and... marred by a too pat ending glorifying the wisdom of the common people". I can see what Kael means about contradictory impulses — Bellissima does seem to speak in multiple voices — but I think that is its strength (more in a bit about that). It remains, for my money, among the finest films ever made about the complicatedness of parental ambition — and about what the movies mean to us. Bellissima opens in Cinecitta, Rome's famous film city, where Maddalena (Magnani) has brought her little daughter Maria (Tina Apicella) to audition. But the child has disappeared, and we see Magnani wandering the grounds, searching desperately for her, even as a man with a megaphone announces the missing child's name over and over again at a piercing volume: "Maria Cecconi! Maria Cecconi! " From that frantic start, the film transports us quickly to the little girl being discovered placidly dipping her feet in a pool of water. The shift in tone is played for laughs. But it is also an instance of the multiplicity that seems to me to make this film so fascinating — the constant fluctuation between broad caricature and unbelievably nuanced characterisation, between a satirical distance and a warm, profound sense of empathy.

he most obviously caricatureish moments appear in the 'crowd scenes': Maddalena's nosy neighbours descending upon her as soon as they scent a domestic quarrel, or the masses of pushy mothers at Cinecitta, each trying to edge her child forward in what is clearly a cutthroat scenario. They all seem cut from the same cloth: petty and ridiculous, deliberately spreading rumours to dishearten the competition. They are not meant to elicit our sympathy or even interest — only our laughter. And yet, it was a real scene like this one that created the film: Bellissima (lit. beautiful) was conceived when Visconti was looking for a child actor for a different production and found himself surrounded by 4,000 mothers, each shouting, "Mine is bellissima!" But Visconti's achievement is to zoom in on a woman who is very much part of this crowd, and turn her into someone we cannot dismiss. Maddalena's frenetic attempts to cobble together money for whatever she thinks will get her daughter the part — a fashionable haircut, an acting coach, a crash course in ballet, a bribe to a man who offers to send flowers to the director's wife — may seem utterly irrational, and just the sight of the child's wan, tired face as she jumps through these hoops is likely to elicit outrage from a contemporary audience. But it is a tribute to the film's humanising of Maddalena that as one plan after another collapses, what we feel is not so much relief for the child, but disappointment for her mother. Maddalena's actions might seem short-sighted, but her gaze is set on a screen in her imagination. And seen in the light of that dreamscape, her frailties seem utterly and resolutely human. This is a woman like so many we know, for whom the drudgery of real life is made bearable only by the thought that there is another kind somewhere out there — illuminated, however briefly, in the dark of the cinema. "It's so not make-believe," she insists to her husband, her trustfulness both vulnerable and determined. The film's most devastating scene involves the shattering of that trust, with Maddalena watching in disbelief as the film crew dissolves into laughter while viewing her daughter's screen test. She stomps into the studio and tells them all what she thinks of them, grown men laughing cruelly at a child crying, but the damage has been done. The dream is broken. Visconti could have ended the film here. But he adds a second climax: the director sends word that the crying girl is the one he wants to cast, but Maddalena refuses to sign the contract, having seen through the illusion that is the cinema — or the world. I am loath to sound as dismissive as Kael, but my subconscious self seems to agree with her about the ending: I first saw Bellissima ten years ago. When I watched it again recently, it was as marvellous as I remembered — but my memory had erased the final scene, preserving the film as I felt it ought to have been. Published in the Sunday Guardian.