Why our enduring romance with the railways makes for great cinema

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Awtar Krishna Kaul's 27 Down, which won two National Awards in 1973, remains a visually arresting reflection on India's train journeys 

The connection between films and trains dates back to cinema's origins. One of the Lumiere brothers' first films was of a train arriving at the station in La Ciotat, a small French town near Marseilles. Arrival of a Train, shot in 1895, is central to the mythology of the movies. The claim (made in several film histories) is that early audiences leapt from their chairs in alarm as Lumiere's locomotive seemed to race towards them. Even in soundless, jerky black-and-white, the story goes, the power of the moving pictures was such that people – almost -- couldn't tell them apart from life.

 

In recent times, film historians have cast doubt on this narrative, some pointing to confusion with a later stereoscopic version that Louis Lumiere exhibited in 1934. But what is indubitable is that there was something endlessly watchable about this simplest, single shot of a train. Trains had screen presence.

 

Both the railways and the cinema arrived in India soon after their invention, swiftly becoming integral to our social and cultural life. So it's no surprise that trains are a fixture in our films: The staging ground, as much for crime and thrills as romance and recreation.

 

But perhaps the most devoted train film we've ever had is Awtar Krishna Kaul's 1973 feature, 27 Down. Kaul, who had left his diplomat job to study filmmaking in New York, returned to India in 1970 and became part of the Indian New Wave: A spectrum of directors ranging from Basu Chatterjee to Mani Kaul, beginning to make their mark in an era popularly defined by Bobby and Yaadon Ki Baraat. 27 Down was Kaul's first feature, made with the encouragement of Filmfare editor BK Karanjia, who was then chairing the Film Finance Corporation.

 

Based on a Hindi novel called Atharah Sooraj Ke Paudhe, the film stars a young MK Raina as the ticket-checker protagonist Sanjay, and Rakhee as his girlfriend Shalini. Filmed in atmospheric black and white by cinematographer AK Bir (who had just graduated from FTII at the time and never shot a film before), it won National Awards for Cinematography and Best Hindi Feature -- days after Kaul died tragically in a drowning accident.

 

The film begins with the familiar drone of the Indian Railways announcer: “Number Sattaaees Down platform number teen se jaane ke liye taiyyar hai”, and is shot very substantially on trains and in stations. Often assembling his shots to accompany a meditative monologue, Kaul's work seems closer to the more experimental end of the New Wave. 27 Down starts off ploddingly, in a self-consciously literary voice: “Phir koi pul hai kya? Shaayad pul hi hai [Is it a bridge again? It's probably a bridge],” Sanjay thinks to himself, lying supine on a berth as the train moves. “It feels like I'm constantly crossing bridges...”. But there are playful moments, too. The song Chhuk chhuk chhuk chalti rail, aao bachchon khelein khel adopts the train's rhythm to create a visual and aural paean to it, with shots of the locomotive moving through tunnels juxtaposed with children lining up to form a train.

 

Son of an engine driver, Sanjay's life seems to keep circling back to the railways. Born between two stations, as a child he is insatiably curious about trains. He tries to study art in Bombay, but his father urges upon him the stability of a railway ki naukri. As a ticket checker, Sanjay discovers anew his love of trains. He starts to eat and sleep on trains, even when not on duty. Neighbours, landlords, even his father finds his peripatetic existence strange. “Tumhare liye toh train hi ghar ho gayi hai,” his father writes him.

 

It is on a train that he meets Shalini, who lives alone in a rented room in Kurla and works in the Life Insurance Company of India. It is a railway romance: She takes the train to work, he takes the train as work. When his life plans are again forcibly aborted by his father, Sanjay surrenders himself to the trains again – in metaphor and then in reality.

 

“I wanted a long path, instead I got these iron roads, where the direction is already decided,” Sanjay muses sadly. A minute later he's grateful for the effortlessness of the journey: “Chalti train hi sahara hai [The moving train is my only support].” But then, there's the sense that he isn't really getting anywhere. “Main guzar jaata hoon, aur jagah khadi reh jaati hain [I move past, and places stay where they are].”

 

Then he gets on a train to Banaras, looking to beguile himself with women and wine, his beard getting scragglier. The sequence echoes so many tragic Indian heroes, and yet it feels distinct. He looks at an old man on the train, the old man looks intently back at him, and we imagine (wordlessly, like Sanjay) that he is Shalini's long-lost father who may have become a sadhu in Banaras. In a more conventional melodrama, Sanjay's echoing of Shalini's father's escape from an unchosen domesticity would end in discovery, reunion. Here, it ends in a dream of death.

 

Perhaps what 27 Down's languid melancholy really captures is the duality of the long-distance Indian train ride: You're in a crowd, yet alone; relentlessly moving, but not of your own accord. And yet, the solidity and predictability of India's trains makes them feel like something to believe in. Get on a train, and the country seems to stretch out before you: Distant, but somehow accessible. When Sanjay says, “Mera train aur bheed se vishwas uthh gaya hai [I've lost my faith in crowds and trains]”, we know it's over.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 Apr 2021.

Awtar Krishna Kaul’s 27 Down, which won two National Awards

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/why-our-enduring-romance-with-the-railways-makes-for-great-cinema/articleshow/81893897.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Taking back the country

My Mirror column:

Mulk addresses the subject of Islamic terrorism with not just heart but honesty. It doesn’t shy away from the real tough questions.

Two trailers were shown in the Delhi cinema in which I watched Anubhav Sinha’s Mulk. The first was of Vishwaroop II, which marks veteran Tamil actor Kamal Haasan’s return to the tale begun in Vishwaroop I, where he played Vishwanath, a Kathak teacher in New York who turns out to be an ex-RAW agent named Visam Kashmiri.

The second trailer was of a film called Genius, which is Gadar: Ek Prem Katha director Anil Sharma’s launch vehicle for his son Utkarsh, featuring Sharma Junior as an orphan brought up by priests in the Krishna Janmabhoomi terrain of Mathura-Vrindavan. His two passions are science and Hinduism: when he isn’t reciting Sanskrit shlokas, the IIT engineering student with a photographic memory is — yes — a RAW agent. Both films appear to be fantasies of the self generated by the same New India drug: a potent cocktail of supposed technological genius and Hindu high culture, shaken together with an aggressive patriotism.

I’m not suggesting, obviously, that Mulk was made with an awareness of these particular films. But films like Vishwaroop and Genius do represent the zeitgeist, and it’s clear that the zeitgeist has defined Muslims as the unspoken other. Haasan’s character in Vishwaroop II says such things as “Musalmaan hona gunaah nahi, lekin aap jaisa insaan hona haraam hai” and “Main mazhab nahin mulk ke liye khoon bahaata hoon”. Watching Mulk right after makes it hard not to see Rishi Kapoor’s Murad Ali Mohammad as a response.


Anubhav Sinha, who has previously made such films as Dus (2005) and Ra.One (2011), moves into very different terrain here. A Banaras boy himself, Sinha crafts a portrait of the mixed mohalla life that feels both affectionate and authentic. Once replete with the sights and sounds of a Banaras morning —which include the ‘Ram Nam Satya Hai’ of a Hindu funeral procession as much as the azaan from the city’s mosques — we are introduced to the portly, devout and bearded Murad Ali Mohammad, addressed by his neighbours as Vakil Sahab.


Part of Murad Ali’s morning ritual is to walk back home from his morning namaaz, stopping at his neighbour Chaubey’s shop for a cup of tea. As long-time residents of the neighbourhood, Hindus and Muslims of the same age-set have warm, cordial relationships that allow for banter — even on topics that are increasingly being labelled ‘sensitive’. So at Murad Ali’s birthday celebrations, Chaubey gulps down some kababs on the sly — but must suffer in silence when Murad takes a bowl of the mutton korma tantalisingly past his nostrils, because he is still vegetarian in front of his wife. Sinha is sharp enough to allow for differential degrees of integration — one Hindu lady at the gathering is heard to say quite unselfconsciously to another: “Naachne gaane ke liye toh thheek hai, khana nahi khate hum inke ghar par.”


This particular Muslim family also has a Hindu daughter-in-law called Arti (Taapsee Pannu), who happens to be visiting from London when events take a sudden turn into catastrophe. Murad’s nephew Shahid (Prateik Babbar) turns out have been one of the bombers involved in a terrorist attack that kills 16 passengers on a bus and is soon thereafter killed in a police shoot-out.


The rest of the film unfolds in a courtroom, in which Shahid’s father Bilal, who is Murad’s not-so-bright younger brother, is accused of having foreknowledge of the terror plot. As the media gets to the case, the whole family is tainted by association. Even Murad Ali must move from being the old lawyer defending his brother to someone who is put in the dock himself. The film shows the enormous pressure placed on inter-communal relationships in today’s India, and how easily they can break: the same Chaubey who has known Murad for decades can turn around and berate him in public as treasonous, based on his nephew’s image on TV. Friendship across religion is not the only tie that’s tested — another Muslim family abandons the Mohammads rather than take the risk of their son getting embroiled in the case.


Where Sinha scores is in creating a world in which there is not only one kind of Muslim. Murad Ali may remain standing even under pressure, insistent both on his constitutional rights as a citizen and his religious rights as a practicing Muslim. But we also meet those Muslims who meet Murad in the mosque, for whom the growing suspicion and abuse directed at the community is a reason to come together to treat Shahid’s death as a form of martyrdom. And alongside, we have the figure of police officer Danish Javed (Rajat Kapoor, effective as always), whose response to crimes by his co-religionists is one of overcompensatory punishment. As emerges in one of the film’s slightly overwrought court scenes, Javed’s mercilessness comes from a desire to make an example of the rotten apples — before they infect the whole basket.


Mulk does not provide flawless answers, but it has the courage to ask the right questions. The real question is not how every Muslim is to prove her love of the country. The real question is whether punishing a whole community for the crimes of some individual members is really the way to rid us of the rot. Or is that only helping the infection spread, producing more real wounds that the country may never be able to heal from?


Published in Mumbai Mirror, 12 Aug 2018

The Securing of Freedom

My Mirror column:

Young women on campuses are waging a war against inequality, most recently seen in the events at BHU. Bina Paul’s documentary tracks the battle in Kerala.

A still from Bina Paul's The Sound of Silence, which confirms the findings of the Samaagati Report on the gender injustices in Kerala's campuses

As with most events in India these days, what you think of last week’s protests at the 100-year-old Banaras Hindu University (BHU) might vary widely based on your age, location and gender, not to mention what sources you get your news from. But I shall quickly summarise the events as I understand them to have unfolded: on 21 September, a student of BHU’s Arts faculty was allegedly harassed by three motorcycle-borne men inside the BHU campus when she was returning to the Triveni Hostel. The student alleged that when she reported the incident to the hostel warden, instead of raising the matter with university authorities, the warden wanted to know why she was out ‘so late’. The incident of molestation and the response of the authorities —callous about the security concerns of its women students while marshalling the force of moral judgement against them — triggered a massive protest three days later.

The women students were calling for better security and better lighting while also protesting the unequal treatment long being meted out to them — from much earlier curfews and lack of WiFi, to the denial of non-vegetarian food in women’s hostels. But the Vice-Chancellor, Girish Chandra Tripathi, instead of recognizing the grievances as legitimate, called in the police to violently disperse the protest, hinted at the involvement of ‘anti-national’ elements and cut off water and power supply to hostels last Sunday. The university was then shut down three days in advance of the scheduled Dussehra vacation.

Some damage-control measures have since kicked in, with a woman being appointed as the university’s first female Proctor, and the possibility being floated that the Vice-Chancellor, who is due to retire in end-November, might be asked to go on leave. An Additional City Magistrate and two of the police officials who led the lathi-charge have been suspended. But an FIR has also been filed against hundreds of unidentified students of BHU.

Meanwhile, the V-C has been recorded asking students why they brought “dishonour to the university” by protesting, and whether they thought it right to “have taken a girl’s honour and gone into the market with it” [“Ek ladki ki izzat bazaar mein leke nikle tum log. Yeh sahi hai?].

It is not surprising to learn that Tripathi is a proud sympathiser of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a man who when asked by a Youth ki Awaz journalist last year what the university meant by instructing female students to wear ‘appropriate clothing’, responded, “Don’t think like a journalist, think like a father. Think of what ‘appropriate clothes’ would mean to a father.” It does not seem a coincidence, either, that these events are unfolding in Uttar Pradesh, a state in which the discourse of women’s safety has such enormous valence that practically the first measure adopted by Adityanath’s government was to institute ‘anti-Romeo squads’ to ‘save’ women from sexual harassment in public places.

But just a week before things at BHU came to a head, I happened to watch a thoughtful documentary about female students in a state usually perceived to be as different from UP as is possible: Kerala. Directed by Bina Paul, wellknown film editor and long-time curator of the International Film Festival of Kerala, The Sound of Silence is centred on the findings of 2015’s Samaagati Report, on the state of gender issues on college campuses in Kerala. Speaking after a screening in Delhi, Paul said, “My starting point was... how does a place with such high indices... on women’s education... stay so gender-unjust?”

Patriarchy clearly unites left and right, with establishments across the political spectrum using fear and ‘honour’ to police women’s freedoms. In Paul’s film, we meet women students from a variety of Kerala colleges and universities, and again and again we hear of how they are silenced with statements that VC Tripathi would no doubt approve. If a female student wants to go out to buy something at 6pm, she is told “Don’t you know it’s dangerous? Why are you inviting danger?” Boys can roam around their campus until 6 or 8 or even 10pm, but girls will be told to go back into their rooms even at 4.30pm. So why do female students accept unequal status on mixed campuses? Why do they not protest the prison-like conditions of most all-women campuses? Paul interviews a psychologist who offers this depressing insight: “For the girls, since they are used to confined spaces, whether in the family or in public, with little freedom, they don’t find it surprising or different when it happens within the campus. They’re used to it.”

Like our families and communities, the Indian university has long been telling women that they alone must be responsible for their own security: ‘boys will be boys’, so it is girls who must be careful.

As is standard in patriarchal discourse, freedom here is pitted against security: if you want one, the message goes, you better give up on the other.

But of course, as both Paul’s film and BHU women’s experience shows, the curtailment of liberties is no guarantor to safety. As more and more young women realize that they have a right to both, the era of that supposed trade-off might well be coming to a close.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 Oct 2017.

Death in Banaras

My Mirror column:

Shubhashish Bhutiani's Mukti Bhawan treats a potentially grand theme with a sensibility that is both gentle and droll.

Anyone who has been to Banaras has encountered death. There is no other place in India, likely in the world, where death is thus placed centre stage. That primacy is mapped geographically onto the city: the smoking pyres of Manikarnika Ghat occupy a central chunk of the city’s riverfront. But even if the visitor isn’t hovering purposefully around Manikarnika, not a day passes in Banaras without seeing a corpse being carried off to its final resting place, held aloft by a set of briskly striding mourners chanting Ram Nam Satya Hai (‘God’s name is truth’).

Death in Banaras is both ubiquitous and part of life, because every day new people arrive in the city, hoping that their lives will end there. To die in Kaashi, Hindus have long believed, is the best death possible, because it frees the soul from the cycle of life and rebirth. As the saying goes, Kaashyaam maranam muktih – ‘Death in Kaashi is Liberation’.

As the scholar Diana L Eck points out in her brilliant book Banaras: City of Light, there are several categories of people who want to die in Banaras. There are the hundreds of yogis and renouncers who practice their austerities here. There are the thousands of ordinary people who come for Kaashivasa (“to live in Kaashi”), retirees of both genders and many widows, settling down in neighbourhoods associated with different regions: the Bengalis in Bangali Tola, the Maharashtrians near Rama Ghat and Panchaganga Ghat, the Tamilians around Hanuman Ghat, and so on. And finally there are those ill or very old people who arrive in the nick of time, for what is called Kaashi Laabh: the Benefit of Kaashi. For them there are hospices like Kaashi Laabh Mukti Bhawan, where guests may stay only fifteen days – if they haven’t managed to check out of this world into the next by then, they must vacate. The attitude to death in Banaras, then, is both otherworldly and stunningly practical. Death in other places is something that arrives unannounced, to be staved off as long as possible. Not in Kaashi. “Death, which elsewhere is feared, here is welcomed as a long-expected guest,” writes Eck. It is this remarkable philosophical reversal that Shubhashish Bhutiani puts at the centre of his directorial debut, Mukti Bhawan.

Bhutiani’s script revolves around a 70-something man (Lalit Behl, last seen in his real-life son Kanu Behl’s film Titli) who decides one morning that he is ready to die, and insists that his son Rajiv (Adil Hussain) take leave from work to accompany him to Banaras and check into Mukti Bhawan. The film isn’t really interested in plot, or even particularly in the social or religious underpinnings I’ve just mentioned. What it sets out to do – and for the most part, achieves – is to capture the drollness of it all, and the strange sort of power that an outer world can exert on our inner one.

The film’s other focus is relationships – the husband and wife may squabble, but they also seem to recognise that the squabbling binds them. The old man who is crotchety and inflexible with his son is charming and supportive with his granddaughter. She reciprocates his trust – when he asks, before leaving home, if she will come to see him, she jokes, “Kahan? Banaras? Ya...?” raising her eyes upwards to heaven. In the taxi on the way there, the old man admonishes the driver for driving rashly: “Banaras pahunchne se pehle hi kahin oopar mat pahuncha dena.”

With moments like this, even before we arrive in Banaras, Bhutiani establishes a tone that is somehow warm without being mawkish, funny without ridiculing. It is a supremely rare tone in Indian cinema, especially when the context is religious and the subject is death. We have seen death in Banaras powerfully on the Indian screen before, in very different registers. In Masaan, we saw it at its most unexpected, the cruel and unnecessary deaths of a young man and ayoung woman. In Satyajit Ray’s Aparajito, perhaps its most famous instance, Harihar collapses and dies suddenly on the ghats, and the camera cuts to a flock of birds taking off into a darkening sky. Mukti Bhawan does something very different, refusing drama and the assumed ‘gravity’ of death in favour of a slow dawning of recognition.

That recognition, the film suggests, is as much about this world as the next. To die at peace, one must first fully embrace life. And so Daya’s demands for the preoccupied Rajiv’s attention might also be a way of making him focus on the here and now: salt in the food, milk in the morning. Preparing to leave the body involves first consciously cultivating it: yoga, kapaal bhaati, massage, but also through what it ingests (Daya toys with a fruit diet), or watching how it behaves on bhaang. In a superb late scene, we see how making oneself laugh and clap can alter one’s emotional state: it’s about making the body work on the mind, rather than vice versa.

My only real quarrel with the film is that Bhutiani’s too-serene frames of the river and ghats, with the city’s sounds overlaid with Tajdar Junaid’s meditative soundtrack, made me miss the raucous, full-blooded chaos I remember as Banaras. But then these are cities of the mind, and who knows: the experience of Mukti Bhawan may alter my next trip.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 9 April 2017.

A River Runs Through It

Yesterday's Mirror column:

Masaan brings to life a Banaras of sweetness and power, melding the ache of the old with the shock of the new.

Masaan ticks many of the boxes people might think of when they think of Banaras. There is a retired Sanskrit teacher, and a drunken dom raja. There is the pulsating excitement of Durga Puja, and the quiet tableau of life along the ghats. But this Banaras is neither the sweetened Yash Raj variety that leavened the teariness of Pradip Sarkar's Laaga Chunari Mein Daag (2007), nor the relentlessly dialoguebaaz version that enlivened the first half of Aanand L Rai's Raanjhana (2013). Rai and his scriptwriter Himanshu Sharma might be said to have specialised in a self-referential, sardonic, streetsmart Banaras - opening their film with Kundan (Dhanush) remembering his first sight of Zoya (Sonam) in childhood as "Banaras's first gift to me", or having Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub wistfully declare, "Mohalle ke laundon ka pyaar aksar doctor aur engineer utha ke le jaate hain" only to have our hero Kundan retort with "Murari, yeh Banaras hai. Agar launda sala yahan bhi haar gaya, toh jeetega kahan?" The masculine energy of the city that the film channelled was perhaps best summed up in the song "Banarasiya", in which Irshad Kamil punned on the word for a denizen of Banaras and the fact of becoming a pleasure-seeker, a lover: "bana rasiya". 

For Masaan, director Neeraj Ghaywan and scriptwriter Varun Grover adopt a very different tone. Here Banaras is not a label to be tossed around for pleasure, or invoked for drama. Grover and Ghaywan are talented enough to deposit us smack bang in the middle of everything that makes the city unique, and alternate wordlessly yet powerfully, between the grand narratives that Banaras makes so effortlessly possible and the small-town self it clings to with such tenacity. 

"Chhoti jagah, chhoti soch," mutters Richa Chaddha's Devi in a moment of disgust at the place she must call home, a place where the Banarasiya hero might take his pleasure, but which can only stifle spirited, curious young women like her. For Devi, Banaras holds no romance. It is a North Indian small town like any other, complete with stultifying sexual morality and venal corruption, and even the internet cannot offer freedom from its terrible lack of anonymity. The virtual world opens up a window - but leads down an abyss. 

In the film's second narrative thread, too, the city shackles its inhabitants. It is the internet - Facebook, to be precise - that enables an otherwise unlikely encounter, bringing the son of a corpse-burning dom into contact with the poetry-reciting daughter of a well-off Baniya family. The astoundingly talented Vicky Kaushal plays Deepak with a haunting mixture of passion and resignation. In what is possibly Deepak's most memorable scene (and there are many) with the charming Shalu (Shweta Tripathi, superbly underplayed), she asks him playfully why he hasn't taken her home, and makes several chirpy attempts to guess where he lives. Unable to deal with her light-hearted banter about a geography that for him is laden with unwanted meaning, Deepak explodes into cruelty. 

The motifs of stagnation and escape, of crossing over and staying put, recur through the film in other forms. Grover makes marvellous use of the Hindi poet Dushyant Kumar's lines, "Tu kisi rail si guzarti hai, main pul sa thartharata hoon" ("You pass by like some train, I tremble like a bridge") to produce an all-new love song. The train passing in the distance comes a little closer when our protagonists take jobs in the railways - and yet, as the railway babu (played wonderfully by Pankaj Tripathi) points out, of the trains that come to the station, only 28 stop. 64 just pass by. 

What flows through everything is the Ganga, churning the lives of all the film's characters into a single swirling stream. It is upon its banks, by the raging fires of Manikarnika, that they must embrace death, and from its murky waters that they must draw a renewed desire for life. 

In what is perhaps the film's most underrated thread, a precocious little boy called Jhonta (the winsome Nikhil Sahni) tries to help his blustering Guruji (Sanjay Mishra, in his finest turn since Ankhon Dekhi) by literally diving into the depths. And here, too, the river offers something like resolution. 

It is fitting, then, that when the film does leave Banaras, it is not to go too far away: not London or New York, nor even Delhi or Bombay. It is to the Sangam in Allahabad - the point where the Ganga meets the Yamuna and the hidden, mythical Saraswati. And the Sangam proves worthy of the name. 

Masaan is beautifully conceived, and lyrically shot by cinematographer Avinash Arun (who directed one of the best films of recent years, the Konkan-set Killa. I have two complaints about the film: one about a figure of unrelieved evil, and the second that there is one grand plot twist too many: I felt a bit manipulated. But to have made a film about a city and a river as overdetermined as Banaras and the Ganga, to have taken something so heavily laden with meaning and made it seem fresh, is a huge achievement. To have done so while also making us weep, for our past and our present and our future, is an unmitigated triumph.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

Thumris lost and found deptt.: a search for the Gaya thumri

This is the first instalment of Post Facto: my new column for the Sunday Guardian. At 7 o' clock, the conference room in the India International Centre basement was only half full. Any ditherers still deciding if they should stay were arrested by the arrival of a slender sari-clad lady with cropped silver hair, who announced (in impeccable IIC English strewn with equally impeccable Hindi) that Dr Kumud Jha Diwan, soon to begin her lecture-demonstration on 'The Earthy Thumris of Gaya — Revival of a Lost Tradition', was both a scholar-researcher and a thumri singer blessed with "a voice like Rasoolan Devi". Diwan is a striking woman in her 40s. Dressed in a dark sari with just enough zari to be festive, her still-black hair left open but kept carefully off her face, she exuded a combination of managerial efficiency and enthusiastic determination (her manner fell into place nicely when she said she had a PhD in Business Studies). Bustling between the podium and the small low stage, she moved fluently between school-teacherly historical declamation and seductive ada-kari (ada is integral to the courtesanal art of thumri). She also constantly switched languages: English when standing, Hindi as soon as she sat cross-legged on the stage. The thumri lyrics, of course, were in Braj and other Poorabiya dialects. The thumri, said Dr Diwan, reached its creative zenith in 19th Century Lucknow, in the court of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, which sustained such thumri greats as Moizuddeen Khan, harmonium maestro Bhaiya Saheb Ganpat Rao (a Gwalior royal) and legendary kathak dancer Bindadeen Maharaj, of the renowned family of dancers from which Birju Maharaj descends. Apart from being a great patron of the arts, Wajid Ali Shah was himself a rather good poet, and – under the pen name Akhtarpiya — composed many thumris. (The most famous of these is probably Babul Mora Naihar Chooto Jaye, immortalised in filmic form by K.L. Saigal's superbly melancholy rendition of it in Street Singer (1938). The naihar of the song was both the departing bride's natal home, and Lucknow: the beloved home from which the British had exiled the Nawab.) With the splintering of the Awadh court, its poets and musicians got scattered. For many, the obvious thing to do was to follow the Nawab to Metiabruz, a small township near Calcutta, on the banks of the river Hooghly, where a 'second Lucknow' was being created. With the coming of the railway network, said Diwan, the cities of Banaras and Gaya, both of which had many rich patrons of music, became stops for musicians on the way to Calcutta and back. "A golden triangle was established," Diwan said. { The pandas of Gaya, familial priests who facilitate pind daan ceremonies, made enormous fortunes. Their mansions became the sites of night-long musical baithaks

The Lucknow thumri, Diwan told the IIC's Music Appreciation audience, since it was created to accompany the vigorous rhythms of Kathak, tended to follow a fast taal cycle like Teentaal or Ektaal. Because the bol (lyrics) would often be split into syllables by the inherent rhythm of the taal, it became known as bol-baant ki thumri. The thumri of Banaras, made famous by courtesan-singers like Badi Moti Bai, Siddheshwari and Rasoolan, had a slower tempo. With its stylistic emphasis on which bol would be musically highlighted, it became known as the bol-banao thumri. Having demonstrated both styles, Diwan turned her attention to the Gaya thumri, the subject of her Sangeet Natak Akademi research in 2008-9. Gaya is a centre of Hindu pilgrimage, where people come to give pind daan to their ancestors at the famed Vishnupad temple. The pandas of Gaya, familial priests who facilitate these ceremonies, made enormous fortunes. Their mansions became the sites of night-long musical baithaks. Diwan showed a black and white slide of one such soiree: it looked every bit the straitlaced, teetotalling affair she described. "It was a gathering for musicians," said Diwan, "You could sing the same phrase all night long if you wanted." The Gaya ang thumri has an even slower tempo than Banaras, and is known as the thaah ki thumri (Thaah means stoppage). The Gaya thumris were sung by Diwan's co-performer, the marvellous Rajan Sijuar of the Gaya gharana. Gaya-based Sijuar was the quiet foil to Diwan's exuberance, smiling gently even when Diwan suddenly decided to turn him into Exhibit A in her narrative: "Those panda families have so much money you can't imagine... Rajan ji is from one of those families!" She showed pictures of the major figures of Gaya thumri: the unfortunately named Dhela Bai (dhela means pebble) seated fashionably with one leg crossed over the other, the harmonium maestro Soni Maharaj, the legendary singer Ramuji Mishra. She played a rare tape of Ramuji Mishra singing, and bemoaned the shocking fact that Dhela Bai's descendants had destroyed all her recordings because they wished to erase all association with a tawaif ancestor. She raged against the Nagphopha family, who were refusing to give her access to the vast collection of recordings they had. "The Gaya thumri is lost to us," Diwan said many times. "You people must listen to it, so that it can be preserved." Sijuar made no comment.

Book Review - From Ghats to Gondolas

Geoff Dyer’s narratives about Venice and Varanasi are eerie and oddly moving, says TRISHA GUPTA

JEFF IN VENICE,DEATH IN VARANASI
Geoff Dyer
Random House India
291 pp; Rs 395

TO ATTEMPT to write about a mythic place, a place only as real as the many representations of it, is ambitious. To attempt to write about two such places — and in the same book — seems almost foolhardy. But Geoff Dyer pulls off this impossible task with élan. His newest offering, the mischievously and memorably named Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, serves up both a perfect postmodern Venice (“the city that never disappointed and never surprised, the place that was exactly like it was meant to be… exactly synonymous with every tourist’s first impression of it”) and a strangely affecting tourist Banaras that is equally about commerce and death (“It was like arriving at the world’s first-ever seaside resort… in serious need of repair, but its popularity… undiminished. Whatever else had happened to Varanasi, it had never fallen into ruin — and never would…”)

In keeping with Dyer’s predilection for genre-defying books — seemingly nonchalant marriages of fiction and nonfiction (But Beautiful on jazz) or autobiography and cultural theory (Out of Sheer Rage on DH Lawrence) — what he gives us here is actually two novellas. The first revolves around a middle-aged British journalist called Jeff Atman who goes to Venice to cover the 2004 Biennale. The all-pervasive haze of cynicism around Junket Jeff (as one acquaintance addresses him) is punctured by falling in love-lust, on his first night in Venice, with the lovely Laura. This section is a highly tongue-in-cheek reworking of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. If Mann’s Aschenbach is austere, serious and overwrought by his work, Dyer’s Jeff is clever about and disparaging of everything — including himself (“However much he despised other people, when he did the math and added things up, Atman always found himself more despicable still”). The first thing we learn is that “the morning’s work had bored the crap out of him”; even his enthusiasm about the Biennale is reserved for the ceaseless bellinis and cocaine.

There is, however, a degree of selfawareness about Jeff (who is not Geoff, though one feels they might have stuff in common) that makes him almost endearing: “It was pathetic, it was unbelievably immature, but even now, aged 45 and counting, Jeff felt his heart sink when he heard that someone… had been having more fun than him”. Or when, transfixed by an exhibit, he is “glad that he’d seen it right at the beginning of his tour, before he became punch-drunk, sated and oblivious.” And his observations are often spot-on, as when he conjures up the cocktail of outrageousness and stark ambition that characterises the art world: “The work may have been puerile, but the hunger to succeed of which it was the product and symbol was ravenous. In different historical circumstances any number of these artists could have seized control of the Reichstag or ruled Cambodia with unprecedented ruthlessness.”

The pleasures of the flesh that engorge the Venice section are replaced in the Varanasi section by the exact opposite — the sensory excess outside seems to result in an inner quiet, a contemplative emptiness, even a lack of desire. The central figure, also a journalist (nameless, he might or might not be Jeff Atman), arrives in Banaras for five days to do a piece for a London paper, but ends up staying for weeks, maybe months, settling into a rhythm of doing not very much except watching dead bodies burn and eating pancakes at the Lotus Lounge. Even with the ubiquitousness of the bizarre in Banaras, his transformation from baffled tourist to semi-permanent resident who shaves his head and dresses in a dhoti is both unexpected and eerie. As are the serendipitous connections, constantly evoked, between the cities. This is an arresting book, but not always an easy one. As the protagonist puts it when he first sees Banaras, “There was uncomprehended meaning everywhere…”

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 17, Dated May 02, 2009