An India viewed through French eyes

My Mumbai Mirror column:

For screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who died on February 8, adapting the Mahabharata was both a way to enter Indian culture -- and to look at it from the outside.

"Writing for film is filming," Jean-Claude Carrière used to tell his screenwriting students. "You have to know that what you write, is not written to be published. It is written to be forgotten and to be transformed into something else. Into another kind of matter. [That is] absolutely essential."

The legendary French screenwriter, who died on February 8 at 89, exemplified the art of collaboration so necessary when writing for cinema. Over a wide-ranging career, he worked with some of the finest directors of the 20th century, from the masterfully comic Jacques Tati (who originally hired Carrière to novelise his films), to the surrealist Luis Buñuel (with whom he wrote six memorable films, including Belle De Jour and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), Louis Malle and Jacques Deray, the master of thrillers (their La Piscine was recently remade by Luca Guadagnino as A Bigger Splash). His ability to think with - sometimes within – other minds gave him a rare talent for reworking the literary greats: He adapted Günter Grass and Marcel Proust for Volker Schlöndorff, Dostoevsky for Andrezj Wajda, Edmond Rostand's Cyrano De Bergerac for Jean-Paul Rappeneau and Milan Kundera for Philip Kaufman.

But he was most famous, certainly in India, for having adapted the Mahabharata.

Even by Carrière's standards, the epic may have provided him with his most ambitious project. An idea that grew out of a chance conversation with the maverick British theatre guru Peter Brook, turning the twelve-volume Sanskrit poem into a nine-hour-long French play became, for Carrière, much more than a job. I've never seen Brook's play, first staged in Paris in the 1980s, and I confess that the 3.5-hour English film version felt impossible to enter when it was shown to me as a young student. It is on YouTube now, and it remains hard to get past the odd mishmash of 'Indianness' sought to be evoked by Rabindra Sangeet, cave-like temples lit with diyas and a comically masked Ganesha - or the international actors speaking in English. But whatever one might think of the aesthetics and politics of the thing, its makers clearly took it seriously. 

None more so than Carrière, it became clear to me this week, when I finally read his Big Bhishma in Madras: In Search of the Mahabharata with Peter Brook. First published in French in 1997, it is a stunning little book about his journey into India and the epic. Part-travelogue, part-diary, and illustrated with Carrière's quirky sketches, it was delightfully translated into English in 2001 by Aruna Vasudev (herself an iconic Delhi figure who edited the Asian film magazine of my youth, Cinemaya, and founded the film festival that became Osians' Cinefan).

If you've grown up in India, you know the Mahabharata. Or you think you do, when all you likely know are the barest bones of the most capacious story ever told. Something similar is true of India: We live in our own little corners of it, hemmed in by walls of class, caste, language and religion, and imagine that what we're clutching in the dark is the whole elephant. Sometimes it takes an outsider to cast fresh light on a thing - and Carrière is that outsider.  

Like an ignorant but sharp child, he sees things an insider would ignore – and paints them with the lightest touch. Cows seen in the darkness of Delhi's avenues are "like pale ghosts"; a Calcutta hotel is "a British masquerade". He observes our turns of phrase, our ways of being. Meeting Rukmini Arundale, he talks of how in India the word "beautiful" seems reserved for women over 50, "a quality that is acquired". In Purulia, the actors return from the fields and are made up for Chhau, and as "the peasant becomes a god," his co-villagers treat him more respectfully.

Of course his references are Western, often Orientalist, the modern European's view of the past: The Meenakshi temple "possesses and swallows up the city...it is Babylon dreamt up by Cecil B. De Mille and directed by an Indian"; a Kerala meal served to them by an army of servants, supervised by a white-haired man in a lungi "could easily be a patrician home in ancient Rome".

But Carrière's vision is vivid and free. His glimpses of our dance, music and theatre, while preliminary, often catch something essential. At a dhrupad rendition at the Dagar brothers' home, "among all the instruments of music, the human voice reigns supreme. And one understands why". Bharatanatyam dancers seem to him to return over and over to the earth - which he perceives as the opposite of ballet, whose movements seem always poised for flight. 

There is also that rare thing, especially in the Westerner in India: Self-reflexiveness. And with that comes clarity. "Tradition here is very strong, with an energy that is constantly renewed...We cannot hope for anything to equal it. In the West we will, on the contrary, present an unknown story. Therein lies the danger of exoticism, of picturesqueness...".

Whether Carrière successfully avoided that danger, I don't know. But he manages, as always, to ask the sharp question. "On the other hand, in India, this all-powerful and omnipresent tradition must have a paralysing effect on contemporary expression. And even beyond that: To continue a tradition does it not mean, in a way, that the order of things is good as it is, that the caste system is excellent and nothing must be touched?" As he says quietly, "It is at least worth thinking about." 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Feb 2021.