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.

Shelf Life: High Heels, Parkar-Polka and Other Dressing Dilemmas

My Shelf Life column for June 2020:

Clothes mark the lines between modest and modish in theatre actor Vandana Mishra’s memoir, translated from Marathi by Jerry Pinto

Thespian Vandana Mishra, née Sushila Lotlikar, was born on January 26, 1927, years before her birthday became known as India's Republic Day. Some of the loveliest parts of her vivid memoir, I, the Salt Doll, unfold in a time before that – her 1930s childhood in a chawl, her initiation into 1940s Bombay theatre. In her recounting, from the very start, her life seems like a stream flowing alongside many others, into the vast sea that was India.

The Mumbai of Mishra’s childhood held open the doors to that India, in all its glorious variety. And clothes were crucial to parsing that city. The Parsi ladies little Sushila admired in their “georgette saris and blouses without sleeves”, were clearly marked off from her teachers at the Lamington Road Municipality Boys and Girls School, who all wore nine-yard sarees – but “differently from the Saraswats”. Dr. Saibai Ranade, her mother's gynaecologist employer, wears the more modern five-yard sari, always in pastel shades: yellow, blue or pink. The girls wore frocks when very young, but shifted to “parkar-polka: a blouse and long skirt” in the fifth standard. Girls' clothes changed again at puberty: “By the time a girl was 14 or 15, she would move from parkar-polka and would be swaddled in saris forever after.”

Clothes in Mishra’s telling always mark the categories people are born into – gender, age, caste, community. But they must not mark you, the individual. If anything, they are a way of not standing out. Her municipal school has no uniform, but she says that “you couldn't tell the rich kids from the poor ones”. There is remembered beauty in the collective sight of clothing: the chawl's young women dancing in their parkar-polkas are like “a series of yellow, green and jamun-purple fountains...” But individual clothing is rarely mentioned. If it is, it must have a purpose beyond vanity. Her Aai's (Marathi for mother) silk sari is worn for ritual purity. Young Sushila's own outfits get mentioned only when marking a first: her first parkar-polka, “Dharwadi khunn with a broad border”, and her first sari, “pink with a green border”, bought for two rupees.

Two rupees was standard for an ordinary (cotton) saree, as against fourteen for a long-lasting “but flashy” georgette one. Flashiness was a constant danger—one that the middle-class girl-child internalised early. Sushila once tells a classmate's mother she is wearing too much powder. She gets slapped for rudeness, but the school's Pathan guard comes to her rescue. That moral front against make-up, in which little Sushila and the Pathan are on the same side, is a funny story. But it presages the book's repeated emphasis on modesty, on not dressing up, not attracting attention. It is boundary work that only gets exacerbated when the middle-class Marathi girl finds herself in a space meant for professionally dressing up: the theatre. 

Mishra came from a Konkani family of Saraswat Brahmins. When she was two, her accountant father died suddenly. Sushila's Aai – clearly a remarkable woman – refused to stay in the village, shave her head or stop educating her daughters. The family returned to Bombay. Aai did a midwifery course, and began educating three children on her nurse's salary. Then tragedy struck again: a horrible acid attack which kept Aai three months in hospital. Once home, she needed care. With her elder sister in Pune training to be a nurse, and her elder brother about to matriculate, it was Sushila who left school.

There is a powerful simplicity to the way Mishra describes these momentous events. One wonders if there was an equal simplicity to life itself. During her Aai's recovery, for instance, neighbours simply take over the family's upkeep, like others did when her father died. The family then scrapes by on savings, until an opportunity knocks: the chance to join Parshwanath Altekar's Little Theatre Group, at ₹30 a month.

Within months, on Nov 1, 1942, Sushila was asked to fill in for an actress who had stalked out, and found herself in a Mama Warerkar play. She was a hit, and soon became an actress of some repute on the Gujarati stage, and later, in the city's Marwadi theatre.

Suddenly, she is accosted everywhere: an admiring tailor offers to make her four blouses for free; a shoe-man offers her sandals. These are good working men. But there is also the local lech-cum-astrologer who offers to build her career, wooing her with an “expensive sari”. In the narrative of middle-class self-preservation, Sushila must throw that 'gift' in his face. She does.

But the real turnaround comes when she begins to wear high-heeled sandals “which made a tick-tock sound”. The chawl's caretaker tells her mother she is “walking around with a lot of pride”. Her mother warns her, she switches to Kolhapuri slippers, and simplicity is enforced.

In Krishna Sobti's autobiographical Hindi novel A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There, another young middle-class woman born in the 1920s is forced to abandon her education midway. Sobti's narrator recalls quarrelling with her hostel roommate over her high-heeled sandals “clacking about at night”. But in the book's last scene, as she walks to a job interview, it is “the click of her heels” on the asphalt that bolsters her confidence. Sometimes it is nice to feel like you stand out.

This column was first published in The Voice of Fashion, 18 Jun 2020.

The Art of Dress in Isherwood's Berlin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 15 February 2020.

Blue-sky filmmaking

My Mirror column:

The late Mrinal Sen’s career took off with a 1959 film, Neel Akasher Neechey, a rare portrait of a Chinese protagonist in Indian cinema.

Mrinal Sen’s directorial career started with a hiccup. Raat Bhore, starring Uttam Kumar and Sabitri Chatterjee as the lead pair, was released the same year as Sen’s contemporary Satyajit Ray released Pather Panchali (1955). But while Pather Panchali made Ray the immediate toast of the town (and the world), Raat Bhore sank at the box office and was panned by the critics.

In 1959, however, Mrinal Sen made a second film, Neel Akasher Neechey, and this one gained him both popular approval and acclaim from high places. Even here, though, Sen was not the first choice as director. The singer-composer Hemanta Mukherjee (known to Hindi film-viewers as Hemant Kumar) was starting his own film production house and initially approached Sen only to write the script. It was only later, when he had disagreements with the director he had chosen, that Hemanta decided to offer the job to Sen.

Based on a piece called ‘Cheeni Feriwalla’ from the famous Hindi writer Mahadevi Varma’s book Smriti ki Rekhayein (Lines of Memory), the film traces the unexpected connection that develops between an itinerant Chinese peddler and a Bengali housewife who is an active participant in Gandhi's Civil Disobedience Movement. The treatment of the central relationship tugs unabashedly at heart-strings – Mrinal Sen later looked back at it as embarrassingly sentimental. But the thematic content is interesting even today.

Neel Akasher Neechey opens in the Kolkata of 1930, and in bringing that historical-political context to life with shots of newspaper headlines, nationalist speeches, and street-corner protests, Sen shows glimpses of the full-frontal political filmmaking that he would later be identified with. The first time we see our protagonist, Kali Banerjee as Wang Lu, he is but a blip on a screen dominated by a horde of schoolboys chanting, “The policeman’s stick, we don't fear it!” The city is in the grip of nationalist fervour, and the Chinese street seller is caught unawares. But the policeman who grabs him also lets him go almost immediately, recognising an outsider even as they both speak in Hindustani – as Calcuttans used to call the hybrid Hindi of the city’s streets, a lingua franca likely shaped by the Bengali speaker’s inability to handle the high genderedness of Khari Boli Hindi, and spoken by the polyglot city of Biharis and Anglo-Indians and Armenians and yes, the Chinese.

Among the first interactions the film shows between Wang and the locals is another troupe of children following him in the streets, yelling, “Here comes the Chinaman, he’ll take you away!” The scene offers up the first of the urban myths that seem to follow the foreigner in India. One little girl tries to stop the other kids, but even her childish sweetness is based on the belief that if you call a Chinaman a Chinaman, you’ll turn into one yourself, conjuring up what is to her clearly a horrifying vision (“Chinaman ke Chinaman bolle, shobai Chinaman hoye jabe”). Another weird Chinaman myth is provided by a household help called Haran, who claims they save their ill-gotten gains as gold teeth.

The exchange between Wang and the little girl evokes another important film of the period, Kabuliwala, which was made in Bengali in 1957 and in Hindi in 1961. Based on Tagore’s 1892 short story, it was also centred on a man from a distant country who walks the streets of Calcutta selling things. And sure enough, this is borne out by what happens next. Where the Afghan Kabuliwala saw his far-away daughter in the figure of little Mini, Sen’s lonely Chinese-silk-seller begins to see his long-lost sister in Basanti, the Bengali bhadramahila whose colloquial use of “bhai” Wang hears literally.

The sister-brother theme is, of course, one that has particular resonance in Bengali cinema, from Pather Panchali’s Durga and Apu to Ritwik Ghatak's Subarnarekha and Meghe Dhaka Tara. But here Sen uses it to a broader effect, suggesting a bond of kinship across class and language and country. He even brings in the rakhi-tying that was adopted by Bengal’s Swadeshi movement to produce a ritual bond between communities.

Calcutta’s Chinatown appeared in several big Hindi films of the period, notably Howrah Bridge (1958) and Chinatown (1962), both made by Shakti Samanta. But it served primarily as a setting for illegalities, with the depiction of the Chinese community stopping at Helen singing ‘Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu’ and Madan Puri as a Chinese villain named John Chang. In Neel Akasher Neechey, that depiction feels more substantial: the Tiretta Bazar ghetto where Wang lives, the Chinese temple where he once prays, the dhaba where a mix of locals and Chinese men eat, the latter eating their rice with chopsticks from a bowl. Together with a running stereotype of all Chinamen being involved in the opium trade, Sen creates a vivid picture of life in Calcutta as a Chinese alien.

And yet, in what might be the film’s most wonderful exchange, when the Swadeshi khadi-wearing woman tries to tell the Chinese man she doesn’t wear foreign stuff, he insists he is not a foreigner: “Eyes not blue, not foreigner, Chinaman!” Released in the era of Panchsheel, the film’s unspoken message of Indians and Chinese as being on the same side of a colonial divide was much appreciated by Nehru, who told Sen: “You have done a great service to the nation.”

It is a sad comment on how little faith our state has in our people that declining Sino-Indian relations after 1962 led the same film to be banned, albeit briefly.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Jan 2018.

A Star Implodes

My Mirror column:

The newest version of A Star is Born updates the classic to our times — but its central narrative remains, more than ever, that of a man destroying himself.

Remakes are fascinating things, so long as you aren’t profoundly attached to the original. The first two versions of A Star is Born (1937 and 1954) revealed the underbelly of the Hollywood studio system, while the 1976 film and the newest one are set in the music industry.

Other differences abound. The pioneering grandmother figure who provided the 1937 heroine both inspiration and monetary backing, for instance, vanished from the 1954 and 1976 films, only to be reworked in the 2018 version into the heroine’s proud father — a chauffeur who talks of how he could have been a bigger crooner than Frank Sinatra.

But characters and setting apart, the new film directed by Bradley Cooper (and starring Cooper and Lady Gaga) retains the narrative core of the previous three iterations — a legendary male artiste with addiction issues discovers and helps promote a younger woman, only to find his career collapsing as hers begins to soar.

There’s something inescapably gendered about both parts of this premise. First, the supremely talented young woman who needs the older male star to tell her she’s good before she can even begin to see herself as an artist of any worth. And second, the man’s inability to deal with the fact of his romantic partner’s success, leading to jealousy and depression and growing substance abuse, ending in tragedy. Given that the first film was made over 80 years ago, it seems striking that this dual narrative — of female empowerment by a man and of the man’s consequent decline in the face of that empowerment — has stayed so substantially the same.

It isn’t, of course, that there have been no shifts in the dynamic. The 1937 Esther Blodgett first catches the 1937 Norman Maine’s eye based on her looks, not her talent. This despite the fact that their meeting is part of a scene that’s one of the only times we actually see Janet Gaynor’s Esther ‘act’: as a waitress at a big Hollywood party, she does slightly exaggerated comic imitations of various stars while serving hors d'oeuvres. But Fredric March’s Norman Maine begins a flirtation and decides she is star material without even having seen her do that little act.

By 1954, things are a little less shallow: James Mason’s version of Norman Maine starts flirting with Judy Garland’s Esther Blodgett after she has rescued him from a public drunken spectacle, and only pronounces on her talent after having heard her sing in the small band of which she is a part. In the 2018 film, real-life musical star Lady Gaga puts in an incandescent performance as Ally, a waitress who often performs among friends in a drag bar, but has never had the confidence to sing her own lyrics in public until literally dragged on stage by rockstar Jackson Maine (Cooper), who has secretly done an arrangement for a song she sang for him in private.

Many other parts of the romantic connection between the two protagonists have remained constant through all four films. For instance, the male star’s attraction to the younger heroine is expressed at least partly in assuring her that she is fine the way she is, and that her hair or face or nose doesn’t need to be altered in order to make her marketably attractive. That stress on Esther/Ally’s ‘naturalness’ is part of the vision of her character as ‘unspoilt’, a study in contrast to the artifice that is presented as the norm within the entertainment industry. Allied to this is the whirlwind romance, with the desire for a secret elopement and a quiet wedding coming up against the business interests that would benefit from making the star couple’s lives a media event, rather than letting them live out their fantasy of everyday domesticity.

But what seems to me particularly interesting about the heroine’s ‘unspoilt’ status is the way in which her freshness and her outsider status become ways in which the man seeks to rejuvenate himself. In the 1937 and 1954 films, that sense of rejuvenation is only personal, not professional: Norman Maine does not actually seek to recharge his actorly creativity by working with Esther. In 2018, though, Ally’s first appearance on stage is with Jack, and the video of their performance goes viral — making her instantly famous, but also giving him a new lease of life.
At many levels, Cooper’s 2018 hero is more sympathetic than the previous versions. Unlike in the 1937 and 1954 films, for example, Maine's drunken appearance at his partner’s award ceremony does not actually involve him snatching her microphone and taking over her acceptance speech to make a derisive or depressed one of his own. Male entitlement is not quite as vocal as it used to be. But the embarrassment Cooper’s character makes of himself is as bad, made worse by today's digital amplification. Also, his nasty jealous rage expresses itself in private, couched as accusations of selling out creatively.

It as if the more deeply intertwined their creative lives are, the more he actually draws artistic validation from her, the more sophisticated his competitive equation with her becomes. Somehow even the reconstructed man is still making it all about himself.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Oct 2018.

Presenting caste as fate

My Mirror column:

The release of Dhadak is a good time to look back at one of Hindi cinema’s first cross-caste romances.

I haven’t watched Dhadak yet. But Sairat is a masterpiece, and though Karan Johar’s new production is officially an adaptation of Nagaraj Manjule’s Marathi original, Dhadak isn’t likely to be anything like it.

The brilliance of Sairat was to take one of Indian cinema’s most generic themes — young love disapproved of by society — and underpin that deeply familiar screen trope with the lived reality of caste hierarchy. The effect was electric. 

Why does simply making caste visible have such power within the popular cinema format? Because caste has long been missing from our screen romances. Star-crossed lovers in our movies often come from different class or economic backgrounds, different regions or languages, even different religions — but to speak of their different castes is extremely rare.
But in the week of Dhadak’s release, it seems worth asking: was this sanitised filmic past as inevitable as it seems? On July 7, 1936, a film called Acchut Kanya had its premiere at Roxy Talkies in what was then Bombay. It ran there for 19 successive weeks. According to the Indian Cinematograph Yearbook of 1938, it also had a record run of 37 successive weeks in Paradise Talkies in Calcutta, and was among the nine big box office hits of the year. Directed by the German Franz Osten and produced by Himanshu Rai, the film dealt with the ill-fated love between an ‘untouchable’ girl and a Brahmin boy. The roles were played by Devika Rani — already a massive star — and Ashok Kumar, then a newbie.

Written by Niranjan Pal, the son of nationalist leader Bipin Chandra Pal and chief scenarist of Bombay Talkies, Acchut Kanya unfolds in flashback. A rich couple’s car is forced to stop at a railway faatak by a guard who staunchly refuses a bribe. Intrigued by a little shrine next to the crossing, the rich housewife emerges from her car and asks an old man who lives there to tell her more about the young woman thus deified. 1936 was still early for cinema in the subcontinent, and one imagines Pal used the figure of the storyteller as a device to draw in neo-film-literate audiences. “Listen, then,” says the old man. “I will draw aside the screen over the past.” And so begins the story of she who was “janam se achhut, lekin karm se devi”.

Despite that “lekin”, the scenario was socially radical. Yet, Acchut Kanya is very much an Indian tale. So the romance begins not with a meeting between two atomised individuals, but in the fortuitous encounter that bonded their families. In many ways that is the crux of the film: the unlikely connection that develops between a Brahmin named Mohanlal and a Dalit called Dukhiya, after the latter saves Mohanlal’s life. Seeing the upper caste man bitten by a snake, Dukhiya sucks the poison out of his leg. When Mohanlal opens his eyes, Dukhiya’s first words are an apology for having touched him. The scene showcases the ludicrousness of the purity-pollution idea. But the act also has a sense of intimacy, and lends itself to metaphor: the Dalit man draws the poison out of the upper caste man — forever.

Mohanlal and Dukhiya become friends for life, a relationship that threatens the status quo and is perceived as bizarre. At one point, faced with a police inquiry into the mob violence that set Mohanlal’s house on fire, the mob’s ringleader — one Babulal Vaid — says Mohanlal did it himself. “Are you saying Mohanlal is mad?” demands the daroga. “Totally mad,” says Babulal, deadpan. “If he weren’t mad, would a Brahmin sell groceries? Would he set aside the company of us upper caste folk to make friends with an acchut?”

But while allowances may be made for affection, marriage across the caste gap is unthinkable, even for the mad. As is choosing one’s own marital partner. So when Mohan’s son Pratap and Dukhiya’s daughter Kasturi reach marriageable age, the fathers broach the topic only to agree wistfully on its impossibility. The children try their luck, mildly. In one rather sweet bit of banter between father and daughter, Kasturi urges Dukhiya, “Why don’t you choose Pratap for me? Don’t you like Pratap?”

But Dukhiya cannot possibly choose Pratap. So Pratap suffers his fate quietly, marrying a girl called Meera, but growing slowly more despondent as he fails to get Kasturi off his mind. “Bhagwan, tumne mujhe bhi acchut kyun na banaya? (God, why didn’t you make me an untouchable, too?)” he says once. Later, when Kasturi’s wedding is being fixed, Devika Rani says meditatively to Mohan, “Ladki ka toh janam hi byaahe jaane ke liye hota hai (A girl is only born to be married off).” “Par kiske saath? (But with whom?),” presses Mohan, as if it’s a riddle. Kasturi’s reply is instant: “Apni jaat wale ke saath, aur kiske saath? (With someone of her own caste, who else?)”

Any love that challenged that social decree was ill-fated. As Kasturi puts it, “Bhaag se kisi ko chhutkara nahi.” Caste still remains an irrefutable fact of our lives — and we do not choose it. But 80 years later, fate has a few more challengers.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 July 2018.

The absurdity of Ayn Rand

My review of Ideal, by Ayn Rand, in today's Mint Lounge.

This early work, published now, reveals that by the 1930s, she had already arrived at the tenets of objectivism

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Ayn Rand. Photo: AP 

The publication of Ideal—the play and the hitherto unpublished novel—makes for a convenient addition to the literary estate of a woman who was never shy about either self-interest or money.

Ayn Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in St Petersburg in 1905, and arrived in the US in 1926. Unlike most Russian immigrants to the US, her change of name was no prosaic shortening or simple Anglicization. Instead of the obvious Alicia or Alice when she dropped Alisa, she took on “Ayn”, from the name of a Finnish writer she had not read. “Rand”, adopted later, was long believed to have come from the Remington Rand typewriter she brought with her but that particular myth of self-creation has been dismantled by two 2009 biographies, by Anne C. Heller and Jennifer Burns.

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Born to a Jewish father who spent his life waiting for the Bolshevik project to fail, young Alisa never had any doubt about where she was headed. At 13, she made a note in her diary: “Today, I decided to be an atheist.” At 16, having enrolled to study history at the University of Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg State University), she acquired a passion for Hollywood films. “By 1924, her senior year, Alisa Rosenbaum was going to the movies every night,” writes Claudia Roth Pierpont in an astute biographical essay on Rand in the collection Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting The World. By 1924-25, she was taking English lessons and had joined a film school in Petrograd, to learn how to “write for the movies in the new world that movies had taught her to see”.

Rand was nothing if not driven. She spent her first months in the US with relatives in Chicago, and by the time she left for Hollywood midsummer, she had with her her first story in English and four screenplays. One of them was about a “skyscraper hero” who leaps from one building to the next using a parachute.

That story didn’t sell, but Rand did manage to parachute her way into Hollywood. On her first day there, having failed to get a job in the screenwriting department of Cecil B. DeMille studios, she was standing outside when DeMille himself drove by. He gave her a ride, and soon, a job as an extra.

An absolutely remarkable feat which we do not often recognize is that Rand taught herself a new language, not just living and writing in it, but making it the medium of a lifelong ideological project. Her first novel, We The Living, was completed in 1933, but was rejected by a succession of publishers. In late 1934, she had her first commercial success with her play, The Night Of January 16th—a courtroom drama with a twist: The audience got to vote on the verdict. In the fall of 1935, Macmillan Company bought the rights to We The Living. But Ideal was written during the bitter interlude, and Leonard Peikoff, Rand’s designated intellectual heir, suggests in the Introduction that its depiction of “idealistic alienation from the world” is surely connected to “the intensity of Miss Rand’s personal struggle at the time”.

It is interesting then that Rand took as her partial milieu the world of the Hollywood studio, of which she was then a part. Ideal begins with the dramatic disappearance of the ethereal and mysterious film-star Kay Gonda (a kind of Greta Garbo-lite), who then appears in six consecutive stagy episodes, seeking shelter with six ordinary Americans who have written her fan letters that she considers particularly meaningful.

The novel is verbose and theatrical at the best of times, and the play, though crisper, remains a model of pomposity. Considering how early a work Ideal is, what is remarkable is that Rand seems to have already arrived at the principal tenets of objectivism, her stated philosophy. These are often stated thus: The proper moral purpose of one’s life is the pursuit of one’s own happiness, and the only social system consistent with this individualistic morality is laissez-faire capitalism. But this leaves out what seems to me the most disturbing aspect of Rand’s belief system: the filling of the vacuum left by God with an unshakeable faith in heroes—and occasionally heroines. “The motive and purpose of my writing is the projection of an ideal man,” she wrote in a 1963 essay,The Goal Of My Writing.

Ideal, certainly, stands grandly and ridiculously upon this foundation. “I kill the things men live for,” states Kay Gonda. “But they come to see me, because I make them see that they want those things killed. That they want to live for something greater.” That “something greater” seems to have no definition, except for being embodied in the person of Miss Gonda herself. “[I]n you—I have found one last exception, one last spark of that which life is not anymore,” one fan writes to her. “[Y]ou who are that which the world should have been,” gushes another. “None of us ever chooses the bleak, hopeless life he is forced to lead. But in our ability to recognize you and bow to you lies the hope of mankind,” writes the third.

But it isn’t only Gonda’s fictional fans who think she’s an ideal—it is Rand herself. “There is more honour in having killed than in being one worth being killed,” one character says to Gonda, with no one batting an eyelid at this sentiment. And later: “One thousand lives? What are they besides one hour of yours?” The culmination of the novel (and more believably, the play) is an innocent man dying for no reason, only because Gonda lets him. “He wanted to die so that I could live,” she says later.

The idea that there is something ineffably great about a few people, that they are meant to be worshipped by the many, wasn’t exactly original—think of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas of the death of God, and the Übermensch. What seems pernicious about Rand’s version of heroic individualism is her implication that everyone outside this minority is weak, valueless and hypocritical. And consequently, can be sacrificed.

Published in Mint Lounge, 29 Aug 2015.