Warp & Weft of History: Mishal Husain's Broken Threads

I read the BBC presenter's Mishal Husain's family history and then interviewed her about it for this India Today piece:

British journalist Mishal Husain’s Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence is a rare mix of research and storytelling, making it a great read for anyone who wants to understand the history of South Asia’s present.

Mishal Husain’s Broken Threads begins with the actual frayed threads of a sari from her grandparents’ wedding. A cousin uses its brocade border on a shawl, and gives it to Husain as a wedding present. Beyond this, though, the book contains surprisingly few object histories, for a family memoir in an age of Instagrammable nostalgia. It quickly becomes clear that Husain, a well-known BBC journalist, wasn’t just looking for a place to inscribe her own memories. She had access to her grandparents’ memories: “I had the books written by one grandparent (Shahid), an unpublished memoir left by another (Mumtaz), some audio tapes recording my grandmother Tahirah, and a 97-year-old sibling of Mary’s to talk to,” Husain says in an email interview. The book’s structure stemmed from this: Chapters 1-4 are devoted, in succession, to her grandparents Mary, Mumtaz, Shahid and Tahirah. 

But the real achievement of Broken Threads lies in contextualising each grandparent’s individual trajectory. “I realised early on that I needed to begin a few decades before, going back into the 19th century and the period before and after 1857,” says Husain. “I turned it into history as well as memoir because I didn’t feel I could understand these individuals without understanding their times.” We hear about Mary’s childhood, for instance, only after Husain has described the arrival of Europeans in India. But instead of a generic history of the East India Company, Husain focuses on what is relevant to explain Mary Quinn, daughter of Mariamma and Francis Quinn: the relationships between Indian women and European men which led to the emergence of the Anglo-Indian community. 

She does something similar with each grandparent, tapping into histories of communities, professions, ways of being. Writing about her grandfathers Mumtaz and Shahid enables her — and us — to dive into the modern South Asian histories of medicine and the army. As context for her grandmother Tahirah, who grew up in Aligarh, Husain provides a deft account of Syed Ahmad Khan and his awakening to the need for Western education for Muslims, who after 1857 had fallen into a state of nostalgia for the past and resistance to the future. 

What brings all these threads together is the British colonial frame. As Husain puts it, she “felt the environment into which Shahid, Tahirah, Mumtaz and Mary were born, between 1911 and 1922, had been shaped by prior events and the entrenchment of British power”. “They grew up seeing New Delhi being built as a grand capital...and I don’t think they envisaged that era ending in their lifetimes,” she tells india today. This may have been particularly true of Shahid, “who had a ringside seat to the circle of power in Delhi for the 18-month run-up to Independence and who wrote about that period, making clear his dim view of Lord Mountbatten.” There is something deeply tragic about this portrait of her grandparents as part of a colonial elite in a united South Asia, who didn’t feel at home anywhere after Independence and Partition. 

Husain seems to share Shahid’s sense of disappointment. “As a journalist working primarily on the UK,” she says, writing Broken Threads made her return often to “a dispiriting reality: how did a nation with such an established democracy, developed institutions, and a system of checks and balances, not do better in its ending of Empire?” 

That the book is written for a British audience is apparent in both the language — a great-grandmother’s “white dupatta scarf ”— and references —“Babur, a near contemporary of Henry VIII”. And yet, the rare mix of research and storytelling makes this a great read for anyone who wants to understand the history of South Asia’s present. The political divides of the 1930s and ’40s emerge more intimately than in most academic histories: Nehru and Jinnah being disturbed by Gandhi’s use of religious symbolism, or Mohammad Ali Jauhar, of Khilafat Movement fame, saying, “Nationalism divides, but faith binds.” 

It is disturbing to see the present-day resonances, Husain agrees, “in how much of what drove decision-making in 1947 — or has happened since — remains, whether it’s the insecurity minority communities can experience, or the role of the military in governance.” But I felt also a great distance from the past, in ordinary people’s identification with something greater than the self. When Shahid is en route to England for military training, his cousin Shaukat writes to him: “Remember that this poor, disorganised, half-fed country is your native land.... Bring back to its shores the accumulated experience of other people.” I do not know if many ordinary South Asians today feel such idealism.

Published in India Today magazine, 4 Nov 2024 edition, in print. Also online here.

The Pain of Others: a short review essay on Somnath Hore

Somnath Hore was a great artist of collective hope and hardship, but his abiding legacy is to make us feel each human tragedy as our own.

(My India Today review of a Somnath Hore retrospective 'Birth of a White Rose', held at the Kiran Nader Museum of Art in the summer of 2022. To see some images from the exhibition, click here.)

What makes someone become an artist? Somnath Hore, who would have been 101 this summer, was first moved to draw in December 1942 by a moment of violence: the Japanese bombing of a village called Patia in what is now Bangladesh. Hore was then a B.Sc. student at City College in Calcutta, but World War II evacuation had forced him to return to his Chittagong home. The ghastly sight of Patia’s dead and wounded seemed to demand recording in some way, and it was images to which the young man turned.

In Calcutta, he had begun to design posters for the Communist Party, but it was Chittagong that really put Hore on his political and artistic path. Two things happened in 1943: the Bengal famine began, and Hore met Chittaprosad. Six years Hore’s senior and also from Chittagong, Chittaprosad was already a prolific artist documenting the lives of Bengal’s rural poor. As a man-made colonial tragedy killed millions around them, Chittaprosad encouraged Hore to draw portraits of the hungry, sick and dying. “From morning to evening I used to accompany him on his rounds,” Hore wrote later. “He initiated me into directly sketching the people I saw on streets and hospitals.”

In 1945, Hore enrolled for formal art training at the Government College of Art and Craft. In 1946, the Communist party sent him off to Tebhaga in North Bengal, where he created a diary-like documentation of the massive peasant protests. It was a tumultuous decade, moving between politics and art while having to make a living by teaching school students art. When the government again banned the Communist party, he went underground. It was not until 1957-58 that Hore got his diploma, and left Calcutta and politics to become a lecturer at the future Delhi College of Art.

The show at Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art is superb; its gravitas undimmed by ill-advised curatorial versifying: sample “He witnessed as a child a world not so fair,/ Disparities between rich and poor had no compare....” 

It’s clear that Hore experimented with form and material through his six decades of art-making. It’s also clear how much his lifelong sensibility was sculpted by the tragic events of his youth. Over and over, you see him depict the suffering human body. Until the 1950s, he also depicts the magical charge of hope produced when these same bodies come together—to plant seeds, flags, ideas. But the stunning realism of the early woodcuts and linocuts gives way to abstraction, and a greater economy of the line. His figures are all concave stomachs, stick-like limbs and begging hands. 

They transition into the jagged, torn, blistered bodies of his bronze phase (animals, too, show effects of violence), and an almost meditative late style, using pulped paper. Here the lacerated body is conceived as texture rather than as line: white on white, paper scored, torn and moulded back into paper. The pain of others remained, forever, under his skin.  

(Birth of a White Rose is on at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, until June 30, 2022.) 

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.

The medical missionary

My Mirror column, the first in a series on films about doctors:

V Shantaram’s 1946 film about the legendary Dr Dwarkanath Kotnis sheds an odd light on the contemporary India-China moment and our pandemic year

2020 has been a year of medical heroism. It might be a good time to remember a heroic doctor from a very different period in the history of India and the world: Dr Dwarkanath Kotnis, whose valiant medical service in Communist China from 1938 to 1942 is still enshrined in that country's public memory. On August 28, even as Chinese and Indian soldiers faced off in a border conflict that remains far from being resolved, it was reported that a statue of Dr Kotnis was to be unveiled outside a medical school in North China named after him: the Shijiazhuang Ke Dihua Medical Science Secondary Specialised School. (‘Ke Dihua’ is Kotnis’s Chinese name.)

Kotnis is not often remembered in contemporary India, but barely four years after his death, his life and work were made the subject of a film by the great Indian director V Shantaram. Free on YouTube as well as available to stream on one subscription-based platform for world cinema, Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani makes for interesting viewing for many reasons.

Released in 1946, a year before independence, Shantaram’s film commemorates Kotnis's as the ideal nationalist life: a life led – and lost – in the service of the nation. As one of the rousing patriotic songs from the film’s rather wonderful lilting soundtrack put it: “Jaan dene ka hi naam hai zindagi (Giving up your life is what living is really about)”. A film called The Immortal Tale of Dr Kotnis was clearly not shying away from either myth-making or propaganda.

What is fascinating to me, though, is that Kotnis’s nationalism is presented as what leads the youthful doctor to another country, where he helped their war effort. Heeding a Congress leader’s call for Indians to come to China’s aid during the Second Sino-Japanese War (Mao Zedong had apparently made such a request of Jawaharlal Nehru), the young graduate from Mumbai’s Seth GS Medical College decided to join a five-member medical mission to China in 1938. Watching Shantaram’s film in 2020, it is impossible not to be struck by the way Indian nationalism in the 1940s could be so naturally folded into an internationalist milieu of cooperation between what were then two poor Asian countries in a still-colonised world. (Some villains do exist: fittingly for a post-Second World War Indian film, it’s the Japanese, who are called ‘shaitan’ but shown as buffoons, in the almost classic tradition of the war movie.)

Scripted by the great KA Abbas, Dr Kotnis opens with the handsome young doctor (played by Shantaram himself) returning from Mumbai to announce to his shocked parents that he has just pledged to serve in China. His ageing father, caught off-guard while proudly displaying the clinic he’d had made for young Dwarka in their hometown of Solapur, has a teary turnaround. It’s a remarkable propagandist scene, where Shantaram and Abbas take the figure of the obedient son and finesse the resonant Indian idea of filial duty into duty to the motherland. The sacrifice is dual, because Dwarka’s father too must give up his ‘budhaape ki laathi’. The Hindi phrase about children as the support of one’s old age is propped up by an actual laathi that Dwarka presents to his father – which falls symbolically from the old man’s hand as his son boards the ship to China. The dramatic foreboding has a reason: the father will die without seeing his son again, and Dwarka will never return.

Shantaram cast himself as Kotnis, and the actress Jayashree – who had become his second wife in 1941 – as Kotnis’s assistant Qing Lan (pronounced Ching Lan), whom he married and had a son with. The relationship between them is tenderly depicted, though it doffs its hat quite obviously to both nationalist propaganda and Hindi film romance. For instance, Qing Lan first meets the good doctor disguised as a boy, and there must be some singing and dancing before love can be declared. But it is striking for a mainstream Indian film in the 1940s to have a foreign, Chinese, heroine, who wears trousers and a shirt all through (except a sweetly comic interlude when she attempts to wear a sari during their wedding) and is as deeply devoted to her work as her husband is to his. It helps that Vasant Desai’s lively, memorable soundtrack is so superbly integrated into the narrative: I loved Jayashree’s ‘Main hoon nanhi nayi dulhan’, though it is clearly not a traditional song sung by Chinese brides, and one of the film’s enduring images for me is the sight of the good doctor watching lovingly as his pregnant Chinese wife sings a rousing song to lead the Red Army to its next destination: “Ghulam nahi tu, josh mein aa / Yeh desh hai tere, hosh mein aa”.

The Chinese-Indian relationship and the internationalist iteration of patriotism apart, the film is remarkable for the way that the medical profession is celebrated. Dr Kotnis’s heroism is no less integral to the national war effort than the Red Army general whose camp he joins – he is captured by the Japanese, endangers his own life to create a vaccine for a plague that breaks out among the Chinese population, and succumbs to epilepsy, but after having saved the general from certain death of his bullet wounds. An internationalist nationalism that talks about saving lives, rather than merely laying down one’s own or killing one's enemies: that's propaganda almost worth having.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Sep 2020

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.

A Wizard of Song

My Mirror column:

Sahir Ludhianvi, whose 99th birthday it is today, brought remarkable sophistication to the Hindi film lyric, yet never lost the simplicity of the popular. The first of a two-part column.

A collage of Sahir Ludhianvi's letters, poetry and photographs recovered from a scrap shop in Juhu by archivist Shivendra Singh Dungarpur in 2019.

Sometime in 1937, a young man who had just taken his matriculation examination in Ludhiana read the words of the poet Mohammad Iqbal bemoaning the loss of the 19^th century poet Daagh Dehlvi, and found in them the pen-name by which he would be known forever. The words were these: “Is chaman mein honge paida bulbul-e-shiraz bhi,/ Sainkdon sahir bhi honge, sahib-e-ijaaz bhi... /Hubahu kheenchega lekin ishq ki tasveer kaun?/ Uth gaya nawak fagan, maarega dil pe teer kaun?” [“There will be many nightingales born in this garden/ Countless magicians, men who work miracles as well... But who will sketch such a vivid portrait of love, Who will enchant the heart, now that the marksman is gone?”]

Young Abdul Hayee decided that he would henceforth be ‘Sahir’, and in the well-worn tradition of Urdu poets, he took the town of his birth as the second part of his name.

Akshay Manwani’s book on Sahir Ludhianvi, from which the above anecdote is taken, cites the poet’s reasons for this decision from Naresh Kumar Shaad’s ‘Sahir Ke Saath Ek Shaam’ – “Since I never had much of an opinion about my poetry and always considered myself one amongst several poets, the word “sahir” and its use in the poem immediately caught my attention and I chose it as my takhallus”.

The story seems to me to reveal a great deal about Sahir, his personality and his politics. In drawing his pen-name from the words of one great Urdu poet about another, Sahir placed himself squarely within a grand literary tradition. And calling himself a magician was a lofty claim to make. Yet he simultaneously undercut the claim to uniqueness, because Iqbal had spoken of “sainkdon sahir”. That self-deprecation suggests a political position: a man who holds that poets, too, are a class: a class of those who do magic with words. It is also an early glimpse of a man who could make himself immortal with a song about being a poet of the moment. “Main pal do pal ka shayar hoon, pal do pal meri kahaani hai”, picturised on Amitabh Bachchan’s poet hero in Yash Chopra’s ‘Kabhie Kabhie’, became one of Sahir’s most popularly sung lyrics: “Kal aur aayenge naghmon ki khilti kaliyan chunnewale,/ Mujhse behtar kehnewale, tumse behtar sunnewale,/ Kal koi mujhko yaad kare, kyun koi mujhko yaad kare?/Masroof zamana mere liye, kyon vaqt apna barbaad kare? [Tomorrow there will be more who can pick buds that bloom into songs/ Speakers better than me, Listeners better than you,/ Tomorrow if someone remembers me, why would someone remember me,/ The future will be too busy to waste its time on me.”

There was something of the romantic hero about Sahir, and very occasionally, that quality seeped through into the films that used his verse. That this happened even in an industry that rarely gives writers their due speaks to the power of Sahir’s words as much as his persona, his close – if often fraught – relationships with colleagues. Much before Kabhi Kabhie – a film whose very title comes from a poem from Sahir’s hugely successful book ‘Talkhiyan’ that director Yash Chopra had read as a young man in Jalandhar – there was ‘Pyaasa’, in which Guru Dutt’s hero Vijay is a young poet who goes from youthful romantic idealism to bitter disillusionment with the world around him. Sahir’s own trajectory as a Progressive poet – his critique of feudalism and capitalism, his attacks on social hypocrisy, especially around prostitution – gave Vijay his poetic voice.

Sahir’s songs for ‘Pyaasa’ also displayed his unrivalled range. “Jaane woh kaise log thhe jinke pyaar ko pyaar mila” is an anthem to unrequited love that could make anyone feel sorry for themselves. “Jinhe naaz hai Hind pe woh kahan hain” and “Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye toh kya hai” are two of the most trenchantly critical songs ever written for the Indian screen. But ‘Pyaasa’ also contains the immortal “Sar jo tera chakraye”, a tel maalish song which manages to be socially sharp, and “Aaj sajan mohe ang laga le”, a love song in the form of a Vaishnava lyric, allowing us to see the sex worker Gulab’s (Waheeda Rehman) longing for Vijay as Radha’s for Krishna.

There were many things that made Sahir Ludhianvi unusual, and certainly this was true of the songs he sometimes put into the mouths of female characters. Poetry everywhere, and Urdu poetry especially, is filled to the brim with paeans to the physical beauty of women, and Sahir wrote many such love lyrics, often sung by Mohammad Rafi.

But only Sahir could make the heroine sing in praise of the hero’s beauty. So Vyjayanthimala could sing with perfectly believable abandon about Dilip Kumar’s hair “Ude jab jab zulfein teri,/ Kunwaariyon ka dil machle, jind meriye”. Or Reena Roy could describe herself as lost in Rakesh Roshan’s eyes in ‘Dhanwan’ (1981): “Yeh aankhein dekh kar hum/ Saari duniya bhool jaate hain,/ Inhein paane ki dhun mein/ Har tamanna bhool jaate hain”. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Mar 2020. (Second part follows.)

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.

A Student of Resistance

My Mumbai Mirror column:

As India's students speak out, it seems worth recalling a film about a student who defied another regime

Sophie Scholl was 21 when she was executed by the Nazi stateCharged with having distributed leaflets co-authored by a non-violent political resistance group called the White Rose, she was guillotined after a trial on 22 February 1943. The 2005 German film Sophie Scholl: The Last Days, directed by Marc Rothermund from a script by Fred Breinersdorfer, dramatises her interrogation, trial and execution. Though perhaps “dramatises” is not the best word for a film so deliberately spare, choosing to rely almost entirely on the historical transcripts left behind by the Gestapo (the Nazi Secret Police) and the “People's Court” -- and thus unfolding, to a great extent, within the confines of an investigator's office and a courtroom.

Calling themselves the White Rose, the student group to which Sophie belonged brought out six different leaflets between June 1942 and February 1943. Distributed mainly in Munich, with copies also appearing in Stuttgart, Cologne, Vienna, Freiburg, Chemnitz, Hamburg and Berlin, the pamphlets warned Germans that Hitler was leading them into the abyss, and called for people to speak out against Nazi terror. “Support the Resistance Movement!” they urged, for “Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and protection of the individual citizen from the arbitrary action of criminal dictator-states”.

Those words from eight decades ago leap off the page in a month in which India has seen massive protests against a new Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAA), which together with the proposed nationwide National Register of Citizens (NRC), introduces religion as a criterion for Indian citizenship for the first time in the history of our republic. Watching Sophie Scholl, it seems no coincidence that the resistance to the CAA and NRC, which has gone far beyond criticism of the letter of the law to a sorely-needed defence of the secular spirit of our Constitution and of our democracy itself, has been spearheaded by students.

The power of Sophie Scholl: The Last Days is in the details – especially as you watch it in 2019 India, where everything from the aesthetic remodelling of middle class fashion to the lines of 'argument' used by Fascist officials in the film are chillingly recognizable from our real-life political situation today. The junior officer of the Third Reich who hustles the film's 21-year-old student heroine into the custody of Investigator Mohr, for instance, has a moustache clearly modelled on Hitler's. Later, as Sophie (Julia Jentsch) is led into her cold prison cell, we hear in the background one of the Fuhrer's numerous speeches to the nation on the radio, his rasping voice rising to the familiar nationalist frenzy as he identifies an internal enemy. “Total war is the demand of the hour,” he proclaims, to loud clapping from his audience. “We must also put an end to the bourgeois attitude which we have also seen in this war. The danger facing us is enormous. The time has come to remove our gloves and use our fists...”.

Many of the arguments levelled by the Nazis against anyone who criticised their government are voiced in the film by Mohr and later, the infamous judge Roland Freisler. Over and over, we hear them berate these students as “parasites” and “spoiled brat[s] who foul [their] own nest[s], while others are dying on the front.” They are painted as ungrateful wretches who do not appreciate that they are only able to be students “thanks to the Fuhrer.” Time and again, too, Sophie's refusal to buckle under pressure drives Mohr off the deep end. “How dare you raise your voice!” he shouts at her, the irony of the statement clearly invisible to him. “The Fuhrer and the German people are protecting you.”

Reading a pamphlet in which Sophie's brother Hans argued that the war needed to be brought to an end and expressed his hatred for “the way we treat the Occupied Territories”, Mohr yells: “This is troop demoralisation and high treason!” The insistence on celebration of the army, and the idea that being critical of militarisation is antinational will sound familiar to anyone who has lived through the last five years of BJP rule.

Some of the film's best moments come when Rothermund focuses on the bafflement of the fascist in the face of openness: familial, but also individual. It is a fascinating fact that Scholl had been, for a time, a member of a Nazi youth group, before she and her brother and his friends began to question what the regime wanted them to believe, based on things they had witnessed on the Eastern Front as well as information they had begun to access – about institutionalised violence against Jews and disabled people, among others. Asked why her father – a known critic of the regime who had served a sentence for describing Hitler as “God's scourge to mankind” – had even let Sophie join the Nazi Girls Organisation, she replies, “Our father never influenced us politically.” “Typical for a democrat,” sneers Mohr, lighting another cigarette. “Why did you join?” Sophie's reply should resonate with all Indians who live with the promise of Acche Din: “I heard that Hitler would lead our country to greatness and prosperity and ensure that everyone had work and food and was free and happy.”

I will leave you with what to me is the film's most important exchange. Mohr insists that what he is doing is only to execute the law of the land. “What can we rely on if not the law?” he says. Sophie's answer seems simple, but it is one all of us need to hear: “On your conscience!”

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Dec 2019

A love for all seasons

Continuing my tribute to RK Films, a look back at the banner’s first success, Barsaat (1949). What was its place in Raj Kapoor’s life and career, and in Hindi cinema?

A moment between Raj Kapoor and Nargis from Barsaat (1949) -- Raj Kapoor's first hit as a filmmaker -- became first the poster (left) and then the RK Films logo (right)

Raj Kapoor’s second film as a producer-director was Barsaat (1949). His father Prithiviraj had been the hero of all the Prithvi Theatre plays he directed over 16 years. Raj Kapoor, too, cast himself as his own protagonist from his directorial debut Aag (1948) until Mera Naam Joker (1970). That penchant for playing the hero may have been connected to the semi-autobiographical quality he brought to his cinema.

The central tension of Barsaat is between the philosophical worldviews of two friends, Pran (Kapoor) and Gopal (Prem Nath). They are educated young men of the same class background, both babus from the city who end up romancing naive girls from the mountains. Kashmir is never named, but the clothes, the women’s jewellery and the shikara rowed by Reshma (Nargis) establish Barsaat as part of a long history of Hindi films in which the unhappy state has figured as a beautiful playground for mainland heroes, “pardesis” who love and leave. The metaphorical weight of that cinematic history is undeniable, especially as we watch it in August 2019, when what seemed an innocuous theme 70 years ago has come home to roost as an Indian ‘national’ claim on Kashmiri territory and women.

But to return to the film’s more frontal concerns: the two men stand for very different things. Pran is a sensitive violin-playing poet, waiting for his one true love, while the pragmatic Gopal has a girl in every port – taking his pleasure where he can and never looking back. As one of the film’s multiple brilliant songs went, “Main chanchal madmast pavan hoon, ghoom-ghoom har kali ko choomoon”. If wind was one metaphor for moving unapologetically on, a flowing river was the other: in the words of scriptwriter Ramanand Sagar, later of Doordarshan Ramayan fame, Gopal describes himself thus: “Bas dariya ke lehron ki tarah guzar gaya, laut ke phir us ghaat ka khayaal tak nahi aaya.”

Prem Nath had already played foil to Raj Kapoor in Aag, where Kapoor’s character Kewal describes Prem Nath’s artist Rajan as a worshipper of the body rather than a seeker of the soul. In Barsaat, too, Nath’s Gopal is a man of lusty appetites while Kapoor plays a true romantic, who believes love must contain pain as much as pleasure: “Jismein ansoo nahi hote, woh saccha pyaar nahi hota”. Barsaat cemented the persona Raj Kapoor had already begun to create with Aag: that of a man in love with love.

But while he constantly berates Gopal for saying that love is only lust by another name, Kapoor's romantic hero is not quite the pure disembodied lover he wishes to be. Raj Kapoor had placed that quandary about loving ‘inner beauty’ versus physical attractiveness upfront in Aag, with the hero saying his life might have been different if he hadn’t been so attracted to beautiful girls. There, Kewal went to the extreme of disfiguring his face as a test of real love. Here, in Barsaat a year later, Kapoor seems more at ease with his own vanity, letting his on-screen lover Reshma (played by his off-screen lover Nargis) refer to the depths of his blue eyes (she talks of them in Aag, too, but there her attraction is punished).

These were themes that lasted through Raj Kapoor’s life: vanity, physical beauty, lust versus love, body versus soul. A man of average height in a family of tall Pathans, he was always insecure about height: he once said he knew when Nargis was going to leave him because she came to see him wearing heels. His pride in his blue eyes was also legend: Madhu Jain’s book on the Kapoors tells of how he finally scheduled a long-needed eye surgery because the surgeon also had light eyes. Only a man who knew the value of those eyes personally would safeguard them from harm. Jain also mentions that Kapoor wanted to make a film called Soorat Aur Seeratstarring Lata Mangeshkar as a disfigured heroine with a magic voice. Many years later, he came back to it in Satyam Shivam Sundaram.

Perhaps these are irresolvable questions. Barsaat came down emphatically on the side of one true love, the film’s Nargis-Raj Kapoor track suggesting the almost miraculous power of loyalty and longevity. It also made the Nargis-Raj Kapoor jodi the stuff of legend, their undeniable passion enshrined forever in the film’s posters, and later even more permanently and publicly, in the RK Films logo. The man who holds his woman and his violin in the same passionate embrace, suggesting that his art and his love were inextricably linked, may have been an accurate depiction of Raj Kapoor’s relationship with Nargis. And yet Barsaat was also the work of a man who had married his wife Krishna in 1946, a woman who sold her jewellery to help him make Barsaat. He met Nargis four months after, and had entanglements with other creative muses after her – Padmini, Vyjayanthimala and Lata Mangeshkar among them – but he never left his wife.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Aug 2019.

Fire in the Belly

My Mirror column:

The demolition of RK Studios last week marked the end of an era. That era began with Aag, released 71 years ago this August

Raj Kapoor’s first film under the RK Films banner, released on August 6, 1948, wasn’t a commercial success. Perhaps with good reason, for it was in many ways a raw work, an early and rather theatrical expression of the sensibility of the man who would come to be known as India’s ‘great showman’. But Aag (Fire) also contained several elements that would often recur in Raj Kapoor’s early films: melodious, soulful songs, grandly choreographed stage sequences, a hero out to forge his own path in the world, and Nargis.

I watched Aag as a child, under the encouraging influence of my Nani and her RK-loving sisters. But although it features an adorable ten-year-old Shashi Kapoor daydreaming in history class (and at one point, even putting on a show of Bilwa Mangal, complete with a fake moustache), Aag really isn’t a film meant for ten year olds. All I remembered of it all these years was its opening scene. The just-married hero enters the room where his new bride is seated on the bed, bejewelled and veiled. There is some banter on his part about her ghoonghat getting longer; she laughs bashfully in response. We see him approach her, slowly working up to unveiling her face as traditional Hindu suhaag raat heroes must. He does, she lifts her eyes shyly to look at him for the first time – and lets out a scream. The reversal that Raj Kapoor engineers here is memorable – making all the verbal build-up about the woman's face, while it is the man’s face, burnt by fire, in which the story lies. Between that perfect bit of cinematic deceit and the almost gothic horror quality of the scene, Aag’s remains one of Hindi cinema’s most interesting suhaag raat scenes.

A ten-year-old Shashi Kapoor, as a child actor in Raj Kapoor's directorial debut Aag

Watching the film last week, though, I was struck by other things. The genteel hero estranged from his father, who leaves his comfortable home and is penniless in the big city, first appears in incipient form in Aag. The figure who would grow into the Raj Kapoor tramp archetype in later films like Shree 420 and Awara is seen in Aag in a short sequence that is a turning point in the narrative. The film’s runaway protagonist Kewal Khanna (Kapoor) walks into an apparently empty theatre, delivers a teary soliloquy about having left home, and is instantly embraced as friend and partner by the theatre’s owner Rajan (Prem Nath), who has been sitting silently through Kewal’s monologue and is impressed by his passion, for life and for theatre.

Kewal’s speech is interesting, because it is essentially a call for the young Indian to be allowed to decide his own future rather than follow in the footsteps of family. What makes it more interesting, though, are the possible biographical extrapolations. Like the fictional Kewal Khanna, Prithviraj Kapoor had been a young man from a bourgeois Punjabi family who failed his first year law exam and decided to leave Peshawar for Bombay to start a new life on the stage. But unlike in Aag, where the angel who invests in Kewal’s future is a theatre owner who’s male and Hindu, the 22-year-old Prithviraj was picked out of a line of extras at Ardeshir Irani’s Imperial Studios by Ermeline, the Jewish star of Bombay’s then silent film industry. Struck by Prithviraj’s physique and Greek-god good looks, Ermeline decided she had found the hero of her next film, Cinema Girl. Prithviraj never returned to the extras queue.

The story of Prithviraj’s entry into the world of acting, as Madhu Jain tells it in her wonderful book The Kapoors, is filled with supportive collaborators and encouraging mentors like Ermeline, Ardeshir Irani, Sohrab Modi, KA Abbas and various others from the IPTA (the Indian People’s Theatre Association). Earlier, during his undergraduate years, his theatre dreams had been nurtured by his professor’s wife from Peshawar’s King Edwards College, an Englishwoman called Norah Richards. To this delightfully mixed world of the colonial Indian city, Prithviraj Kapoor eventually added his own contribution in 1944: Prithvi Theatres.

Raj Kapoor, as Prithviraj’s eldest son, necessarily underwent an apprenticeship in the theatre. But the elder Kapoor was a hard taskmaster, instinctively socialist in his staunch egalitarian treatment of all troupe members – rather than the feudal Indian father who might spoil his own children or give them more. He was apparently worried that Raj was naalayak; Jain suggests that those who knew him believe he wanted Raj to “have a proper education, followed by a proper job”, though he had himself rejected that path. 

Odd as it may seem, then, the anguish of Aag’s hero was not just that of Prithviraj’s battle against his father – but also of Raj against his.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 Aug 2019.

Heartless Days

My Mirror column: the 2nd in a series of tributes to Mrinal Sen

In Baishey Shravana (1960), the late Mrinal Sen created a film as much about callousness during a famine as about the cruelty of time itself.

Mrinal Sen was 20 when he witnessed the Great Famine of 1943, a manmade tragedy wreaking havoc in the streets of Calcutta. Seventeen years later, in 1960, he made a film about it. Unlike many of his later films, where the politics was upfront and the city centre stage, this film was set in a village, and the famine remained the backdrop for a very intimate story: that of one marital household.

In another somewhat odd decision (which caused him great trouble with the Censor board), Sen titled the film Baishey Shravana. Some context might be useful here: Since 1941, that date—the 22nd of the month of Shravana—had been observed as Rabindranath Tagore’s death anniversary, and a Bengali audience would have assumed they were in for a film about the legendary writer. But of course, Sen never did what was expected of him. In his film, it is the date on which the couple’s wedding takes place, but that fact barely registers. To anyone who watched Baishey Shravana, it would seem to have nothing to do with Tagore or his death.

The connection existed— but only in Sen’s mind. In 1941, at 18, he had been present at Nimtola Ghat when Tagore’s body was being laid to rest. In that crush of public mourning, he had witnessed a terrible scene—hundreds of ostensibly grief-stricken people stepping over a dead child’s body. Somehow, in Sen’s memory, the callousness of that crowd appears to have merged with the cruelty of the famine—with that sense of eroded humanity reconstituted in Baishey Shravana as the callousness of a husband to his wife.

Many years later, Sen spoke of the clichés he was hoping to avoid: “I made it a point that mine would never be a journalistic approach, that I would not count the number of people who starved and died, that I would not show vultures and jackals fighting over the carcasses.” That decision about what not to show perhaps led organically to what stayed in focus: “The camera remains indoors, picking on the cracks appearing in their relationship, and moves outside only once. A long shot of the starving villagers abandoning the village in search of food...”

But the film’s non-obvious, somewhat contrarian origins are only important if you’re interested in understanding the way Sen’s mind worked. It is perfectly possible to watch it without factoring them in. Baishey Shravana is a remarkable film for many reasons.

It is, first of all, a tender portrait of an arranged marriage, perceptive about how romance in these circumstances involves both newness and security: the quietly giddy realisation that you now belong to another person, and they to you. The relationship between Priyanath (Gyanesh Mukherjee) and his bride Malati (Madhabi Mukherjee) starts out with scope for awkwardness: he is much older, graver, slow to cotton on to her playful ways.

The film is also notable for being Madhabi’s second film appearance. The lovely mobility of the face that would illuminate later classics like Charulata and Mahanagar is already in place. But there is still something of the child about her here, as witnessed in the lovely scene where she runs and hides in response to hearing Priyanath’s bicycle bell approach. Malati’s initial youthfulness is also gestured to in her stealing mangoes off a neighbour’s trees with the other village girls: this seems to have been a popular Bangla trope about the childish freedom of girls before marriage, it appears both in Pather Panchali and in Samapti, a Tagore tale that is one of the three stories in Ray’s Teen Kanya.

Ageing, in fact, is one of Baishey’s grand themes: the inevitability of it, but also the tragedy. We see both of those in the way Priyanath’s widowed mother accepts the shift of power within the household from herself to her daughter-in-law. Her son now listens to everything his wife says, he bids her goodbye where once he had bid his mother. But embedded in that recognition is the sense that Malati’s time of deprivation will come: she should go to the fair now, while she still can, before the baton of responsibility passes from one generation to another

This turnover of generations is inevitable for men, too, but in the world of work. Priyanath, who sells women’s cosmetics on trains, finds himself at a loss to compete with younger men. Even as tragedy makes him less and less appealing, Priyanath never seems an unsympathetic character, only a weak one. And yet, as Sen so sharply perceives, the same man who yells about injustice at the ration shop can obliviously consume his wife’s share. Sen’s shot of Priyanath gobbling down rice, his cheeks puffed up, apparently caused outrage. 

As with much of Sen’s work, the brilliant sound design is integral to the film. In the very first scene, when we see Priyanath hawking his wares in a local train compartment, the loud rumbling of the train is overlaid with a child’s voice singing a song that goes, ‘Mon re krishi kaaj jaano na (Oh heart, you don’t know the work of cultivation)’. It is only when watching it a second time that I realised it was no coincidence in a film about a famine; a drying up of both food and affection.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Jan 2019.

A half-told tale

My Mirror column:

Nandita Das’s ambitious biopic of Saadat Hasan Manto feels like a showreel of what could have been.

Many Indian film heroes have drunk themselves to death over a lost love. Manto might be the first one to do so over a lost city. Bombay was not the place of his birth, but Manto thought of the city as both muse and workplace. Its streets spawned many of his strongest stories and its film industry gave him both livelihood and community.

He was clearly profoundly shaken by Partition, writing several stories about how the new boundaries around nations and religions were also carving up human beings. Still, given Manto’s strong attachment to Bombay, his departure remains somewhat inexplicable — and it appears as such in Nandita Das’s biographical film about him.

Das’s ambitious tapestry of a script weaves Manto’s fiction in and out of the life he may have lived. So some of his most well-known Partition stories — ‘Khol Do’, ‘Thanda Gosht’ — are interwoven with moments when the communal divide inserts itself between Manto (Nawazuddin Siddiqui, for once a bit out of his depth) and his best friend, the actor Shyam Chaddha (the sadly wooden Tahir Raj Bhasin). We also hear, at a filmi party, the jibe that Bombay Talkies — the film studio where Manto worked — had “too many Muslims” in its employ.

More interestingly, in a scene set on the eve of Partition, we see Manto witness a conversation in a Bombay shoe shop where his wife Safia is shopping. “Mera toh watan Bhendi Bazaar hai. Main isse chhod kar Grant Road na jaaoon, aur tu mujhe Karachi bhej raha hai?” Manto hasn’t said the words himself, but the idea of the locality as stand-in for the nation has been introduced — allowing us to think of it later, when Manto’s nostalgia and sense of exile moulds itself around a city rather than a country.

In real life, Manto wrote scathingly and prophetically about the directions in which Pakistan’s politics would go. But the film fails to establish why he never felt at home in Pakistan — barring glimpses of his obscenity trial and a single scene based on one of Manto’s ‘Letters to Uncle Sam’ (lit up by Neeraj Kabi’s performance), there is little of his political bite on screen. Instead Das focuses excessively on Manto’s rather performative mourning. Like a dramatic lover trying to forget a past relationship, he refuses to even open letters from Bombay written by friends like Shyam and Ismat Chughtai. When a policeman rifles through his desk and says rudely, “I believe you write many things, where is it all?”, Manto’s retort is to hand him a scrap of paper. “Ismein toh Bambai ka pata likha hai,” says the Lahore cop. “Wahin toh hai sab kucch,” mutters Nawaz’s Manto. A cinematically stereotypical descent into lovesick madness follows, with Nawaz pricking up his ears and saying he hears a melody that Shyam used to sing.

Das’s film succumbs to another familiar filmi motif: muftkhor drinking partners whose appearance foreshadows the hero’s decline. These hangers-on, who serve to insulate the hero from self-realisation in films as disparate as Muhafiz / In Custody (also about a writer in free fall) and Guide, are here concentrated into the single figure of Shaad (Shashank Arora). But even the talented Arora cannot breathe life into this one-note character, whose only brief appears to be to provide Manto company as he drinks more, and more darkly.

Another of the film’s themes — because it was one of Manto’s longstanding fascinations — is the sex worker. The film opens, for instance, with one of his finest stories: ‘Ten Rupees’, in which a young girl is taken out by three older male clients. The scenario has the whiff of doom, but Manto does something unexpected: he preserves Sarita’s marvellous state of innocence till the story’s end, depositing us and our fears at the edge of a precipice. In another fictional segue, we see Tillotama Shome as a sex worker pushed to the brink by her pimp (Paresh Rawal).

The segments enacting Manto’s fictions contain the film’s better performances (Ranveer Shorey, Divya Dutta, Vinod Nagpal). But their near-pulpy high drama throws into relief the dullness of the rest of the film. Das tempts the cultural-historical junkies among us with a period recreation of a mythical Bombay in which Progressive Urdu writers mingled with film folk. But the interactions are flat; the characters —Krishen Chander, Ismat, Himanshu Rai, Ashok Kumar — cardboard cutouts. Only one, Ila Arun as the courtesan-turned-filmmaker Jaddan Bai (Nargis’s mother), has any spark. The only other interactions that achieve any immersiveness are those between Manto and his wife Safia (the excellent Rasika Dugal).

Given that so much of Das’s dialogue is provided to her by her inimitable protagonist, it is a shock when it falls flat. Even Manto’s sharpest barbs — “Agar aap mere afsaanon ko bardaasht nahi kar sakte, toh woh isliye ki zamaana hi na-kaabil-e-bardaasht hai (If you can’t tolerate my stories, it is because the age is an intolerable one)” or “Accha toh tum bhi tarakkipasandon ki tarah is daur mein bhi optimistic rehna chahte ho? (Oh, so you’re like those Progressives who want to stay optimistic even in this era?)” — fail to offer the non-Manto-knowing viewer a bridge between our times and his. Like Toba Tek Singh, Manto remains stuck in a no-man’s-land.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30 Sep 2018.