Everyone wants a happy ending

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Ludo tries hard to present the world as breezily anarchic, but it's hard to sustain while going on about good and evil

Anurag Basu likes to cultivate the idea of chaos, creating a tangle of threads so he can have the aesthetic pleasure of disentangling them. His latest film Ludo, which launched on a streaming platform earlier this year, takes that aesthetic conceit to its acme. A film with four different tracks needs a structuring motif, and Basu's choice is the popular board game with a board and counters organised into four primary colours. At first it seems that the only uniting factor among these disparate narratives is an unkillable don called Sattu Bhaiyya (Pankaj Tripathi), from whose gun -- and whose den -- all stories flow.

But while the four tracks appear to be treading their individual way to anarchy, Basu has clearly spent some time imbuing them with a fundamental premise. At the centre of each is a pair of individuals who seem like they ought to come together neatly: fill each other's blank spaces, so to speak. But they're also unlucky pairings, disunited by fate and selfhood. There's a bullied nurse and a bullied mall attendant; a neglected little girl and an ex-goonda separated from his own child; a besotted dhaba owner and his unrequited childhood love, reeling from her discovery of a cheating husband; and a pretty girl obsessed with hunting down the perfect husband, unlike the laidback guy she has fun sex with. There is also Sattu Bhaiya himself-- he who cannot be killed -- and the senior Malayali nurse Lata Kutty, to whom he takes an unexpected shine.

All of Basu's characters need rescuing -- but in each pair, there's one that we're told needs rescuing more. Abhishek Bachchan's Bittu, for example, is a sad man who wants his daughter back, and transfers some of his affections to the lost little girl he stumbles on one evening. The child (Inayat Verma) is named Mini, in Basu's clear tribute to the classic Kabuliwala narrative about another tall burly man who's actually a softie missing his faraway daughter. You'd think the child would be the more vulnerable one, but of course it's she who delivers the life lesson: if the object of your affections is happy elsewhere, you've just got to be happy for them. Bittu refuses to listen when his ex-wife delivers it as a stinging remark on confusing love and ego, but he absorbs it perfectly out of the mouth of a child.

Thankfully the little girl isn't implied to be exploiting Bittu – which does feel like the case with some of the film's other women characters. Aditya Roy Kapur's Akash seeks (and finds) casual sex on a matrimonial website. But it's his sexual partner Shruti (Sanya Malhotra) that we're told needs to be saved from her dream of finding a rich provider. Meanwhile Fatima Sana Sheikh's Pinky exploits Rajkummar Rao's unyielding affections all the way through school into adulthood, and even beyond – even her marriage to an ostensibly more suitable boy cannot prevent Alloo (Rajkummar) from being the only man she can turn to in a crisis.

Crisis, though, is what makes the film's boardgame-level philosophising work to the extent it does. “Jo bin matlab de saath, usi ka pakad le haath (When someone helps you without a motive, that's the one to hang on to),” Shruti quotes her grandmother as having proclaimed. The bullied twosome have no language in common – Pearl Maane's Sheeja can't speak much Hindi, Rohit Saraf's Rahul Awasthi certainly understands no Malayalam. As they find themselves launched on an adventure not quite of their making, the thrill of the ride is all they have in common. But when you see them at film's end, having exchanged their sad working lives for a hot pink car and fancy clothes, you wonder how long the spark can survive through such comfort. As Akash tells Shruti, in another of the tracks, having too little can make happiness hard – but having too much makes it impossible.

But for all Basu's attempts at Seventh-Seal-type commentary in the guise of Yamraj (the Hindu god of death), Ludo can't have only neat conclusions. As Yamraj says, “If the Kauravas were villains, what was Duryodhana doing in heaven at the end?” So Ludo leaves us with at least one un-deserved sad ending.

But the randomness he claims isn't really sustained – most characters get their just desserts, including Sattu Bhaiyya's deserved ludic one: paralysis followed by life with a loving caretaker, a vision of a lifelong future we've seen in previous Indian films, most visibly Hazaaron Khwaishen Aisi. Anarchy isn't as easy as they make it out to be.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Dec 2020.

With clipped wings

My Mirror column:

A damaged young woman discovers her strengths in the recent Malayalam film Uyare (Rise).

The new Malayalam film Uyare begins at a college fest somewhere in Kerala. Four or five young women in matching long skirts and kurtis are dancing on stage with unbridled enthusiasm. One in particular catches the eye, her enjoyment is infectious. A young man looks pointedly in her direction, but refuses to catch her eye. Instead he turns from her to the largely male college-going audience, some of whom are taking phone videos of the performance. Lip curled in disdain, he walks out. When she comes out to meet him afterwards, he has nothing to say about her performance, or the prize her group has just won. All he can get out is: “Weren’t you supposed to be wearing something else? Why didn’t you tell me when it changed?”

The boyfriend who can take no pleasure in his girlfriend’s dancing because he is too busy imagining the pleasure other men might derive from it is, unsurprisingly, also the boyfriend who when told she has qualified for pilot training in Mumbai, can only speculate about the girls’ and boys’ hostels being on the same floor at the academy – and the prevalence of late-night parties.

Too many women in India, sadly, will recognise men they know in the suspicious, sour-faced Govind – brothers, fathers, uncles, but also boyfriends and husbands. What makes the film’s internal landscape so effective is its baseline assumption: that the controlling, insecure lover is so common a figure as to be normalised. It doesn’t take long for Pallavi’s friends at the academy to cotton on to the power dynamic of the relationship: a female friend scrolling through Pallavi’s photographs asks if she’s sent Govind the one with a male instructor’s arm around her. “All that power you feel in the sky nosedives when it comes to Govind,” she says to Pallavi – but the acuteness of the observation is somehow blunted into a joke.

Pallavi’s father, too, wonders what she sees in him. But she convinces him otherwise with the story of the adolescent origins of their relationship, when Govind rescued her 14-year-old self from public humiliation. The fact that he was then her school senior seems crucial to his ‘niceness’: he could automatically assume a superior, guiding role. That dynamic is one we have all encountered before, most recently in the much-discussed Kabir Singh, where Kabir’s relationship with his medical college junior Preeti is grounded in a very similar experience of his ‘choosing’ her as the recipient of his attentions.

Unlike Kabir in Kabir Singh, though, Govind is not heroic, or even good at what he does. By making him a loser who can’t find a decent job, Uyare turns audiences against him, while Pallavi, following her dreams, has the author-backed role. Her ambitiousness and positivity are a glaring contrast to his unrelenting pessimism: “No miracles happened,” he says dourly when she asks him how a job interview went. Pallavi’s successes and joys are things that threaten Govind. It seems understandable when she begins to keep her real life from him – and one wants to applaud when she finally speaks up – and wants out. (Spoilers ahead.) Of course, Govind will not give her her freedom. When his suicide threats fail to elicit a reaction, he decides to wound her rather than himself.

Both before and after the acid attack, Manu Ashokan keeps the directorial focus on his aspiring pilot heroine (Parvathy Thiruvothu). But the film is also conscious of the skewed gender dynamics of its Indian middle class universe, from boardroom to courtroom: the ‘humour’ lined with casual sexism, the deeply non-egalitarian assumptions about men and women. The women’s toilet in the pilot-training academy is labelled “Bla bla bla ba bla bla” – in contrast to the men’s toilet’s strong and silent “Bla”. A visitor to the academy, confronted by a pretty woman on the reception committee, assumes she is not a pilot-in-training but a PR woman – and further, that he is free to criticise her outfit for being “cheap”. The judge in the acid attack case is less moved by Pallavi’s present than Govind’s potential future – especially once he offers to marry her. “Why would he offer to marry her if he had committed this crime?” asks Govind's lawyer. In a discursive variation of something notoriously frequent in rape trials, the accused – merely because he is a man – is still imagined as being able to take the survivor “back under his wing” – merely because she is a woman.

The film’s resolution of Pallavi’s pilot dreams – scotched because her vision no longer holds up to the medical standards required – is to make her an air hostess. There’s something fascinating and full-frontal about the acid attack victim claiming a job traditionally defined by physical attractiveness. It doesn’t come easy. When spoilt brat airline  owner Vishal suggests a new role, an angry Pallavi responds with her air hostess ambition, yelling: “You should think twice about making promises to people who lack beauty!” Her anger spurs him to actually examine his thoughtless offer. In some ways, Vishal’s capacity for change is also a reflection of Pallavi’s power.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Oct 2019.

Redeeming Men

My Mirror column:

The Malayalam film Kumbalangi Nights, now streaming on Amazon Prime, casts a warmly human look at not-so-eligible men -- while undercutting the ones we usually lionise.

Soubin Shahir, Shane Nigam and Sreenath Bhasi as brothers in Kumbalangi Nights

There's a scene midway through Kumbalangi Nights when an abashed son-in-law apologizes if he's put his mother-in-law to too much trouble by mentioning that he hasn't eaten pooris for a while. Then, still smiling under his perfectly trimmed moustache, Shammy pulls the protesting old lady to sit down in the chair next to him, calling out to his wife to serve her mother a poori. In a few minutes, the three women of the family are sitting down with him at the dining table. “In future, we should all eat together like this,” declares Shammy expansively.

In almost any other Indian film, such a scene would be a picture of domestic bliss. An educated, modern Indian family man, fondly requesting a treat from his new mother-in-law, and making sure that he eats his dinner not before but alongside the “three hapless women” he has taken charge of by marriage. But in Madhu C. Narayanan's directorial debut, we see the layers that would ordinarily be covered over. When Shammy – played masterfully by popular Malayalam star Fahadh Faasil – calls out for the poori, the film cuts to his wife and sister-in-law in the kitchen, making us note who is actually doing the cooking. We see the two women turn to each other, as they do often in the film, their eye movements and gestures an often silent commentary on the tension that actually animates life with Shammy.

Syam Pushkaran's script offers clues to Shammy's dangerousness right from the time we are introduced to him. He is the new occupant who has the neighbourhood children afraid of playing football near his house; the new husband who makes his wife nervous; the young man whose response to an older man's cooking for him is to mock him for time spent in the kitchen. Pushkaran's dialogue is brilliantly subtle, every unpleasant remark delivered with a smile, twisting the knife even he seems to be passing the butter. And so perfect is Faasil's delivery of it that it seems utterly believable when the film's simpler, more transparent characters take his statements at face value. In one superb scene, Bobby and his brother Saji come to Shammy's barber shop to ask for his sister-in-law Baby's hand in marriage. Shammy mocks the proposal with such finesse that Saji can't even see what's hit him. But we do.

“Cheta, this Ramayana was written by a forest-dweller, right?” says Shammy, which Saji takes as suggesting that anyone is capable of anything: his unemployed brother Bobby may yet get a job that makes him husband-material. But in fact it is proof only of Shammy's disdain. And that disdain extends beyond the poor Christian family of fishermen that thinks it is his equal; it extends to the law that allows women the freedom to decide their own fates: “Mr. Saji, you know, a girl can marry any scoundrel she wants. Unfortunately that's the law of the land.”

When the film begins, we see Bobby and Saji through the disappointed eyes of their youngest brother Franky, who has returned from school just in time for their father's death anniversary. But even as the schoolboy cooks a fish curry and waits for their fourth brother, Bony, to get home and eat together, Bobby and Saji have begun their usual brawl. It is a household of men – unkempt, unemployed and entirely unmotivated to any activities beyond drinking and fighting.

But by pitting Shammy's outward respectability, his perfect clean-cut exterior, against the dishevelled, largely unemployed bunch of layabouts that make up this family, Kumbalangi Nights achieves something quite remarkable. It shows us that men can redeem themselves, even those who seem beyond that hope. Sometimes the agents of that redemption are women, the promise of love and family, the softening -- if also demanding -- influence of children. But sometimes – as the remarkable arc with Saji and the therapist suggests -- the agent of redemption can be grief itself. Sometimes women refuse to be mothers, and men learn take care of each other.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 July 2019.

Book Review: Jasmine Days

With his new novel ‘Jasmine Days’, Benyamin once again skilfully presents fiction as fact.

The Malayalam author’s new novel is told in the voice of a young Pakistani woman in an unnamed Middle Eastern country.

Juggernaut Books, 2018. 280pp.

Benyamin is a reader’s writer. His fiction aims to make the reader believe that it is fact; to believe that the narrator was “really there”. His style is a particularly good example of what the critic James Wood in his book How Fiction Works calls “Flaubertian realism”, in which the voice of the narrator is writerly in terms of how much she notices, but simultaneously not writerly “because he is not expending any labour to put it down on the page”.

In at least two of Benyamin’s novels that have so far been translated from Malayalam to English, this is achieved by effacing anything that might be described as literary style – by creating a non-literary narrator. So Goat Days is told in the voice of a poor Malayali Muslim man who arrives in Saudi Arabia to earn money, but ends up becoming a slave for a goat farmer somewhere in the desert. Jasmine Days is told in the remarkably forthright voice of Sameera, a young Pakistani woman who works as a radio jockey in an unnamed Middle Eastern country.

The truth-claim made by both novels is amplified by presenting themselves as autobiographical narratives, personal histories that have fallen into the author’s lap. So Goat Days has an “Author’s Note” that begins: “One day, my friend Sunil told me a story about a person called Najeeb. I thought it to be one of the typical sob-stories from the Gulf.” Upon meeting Najeeb, however, Benyamin explains, he grew deeply affected by the recounting of his experience, and “couldn’t fight the urge to write about it”.

In the case of Jasmine Days, Benyamin goes a step further to establish authenticity in the eyes of his readers. His name appears as author on the front cover, but inside, we are told that the book we’re holding is Benyamin’s translation of Sameera Parvin’s A Spring Without Fragrance, originally written in Arabic. In a “Translator’s Note” appended to the main narrative, Benyamin says it is “by accident that this book ended up in [his] hands”, and that he only gained the rights to “translate” this manuscript into Malayalam when he agreed to “ghostwrite” another novel for another writer: Al Arabian Novel Factory (this is the actual name of Benyamin’s next novel). For those of us reading the book in English, of course, there is another layer of meaning created by the fact that what we have here really is a translation: Shahnaz Habib’s translation into English from Benyamin’s Malayalam.

The book’s ability to persuade us of its authenticity beyond language also feeds into – and emerges out of – the multivocality of its milieu. This is a Malayalam novel in which neither the locale nor the main characters are Malayali. Benyamin does not name the country, but it is well-known that he lived and worked in Bahrain for many years before moving back to Kerala. He chooses to introduce his Malayali readership to the Middle Eastern migrant life through the eyes of a Pakistani young woman. Right from the start, when Malayalis do appear in the book, Benyamin’s reversal of the gaze forces his readers into self-reflexivity. For instance, Sameera’s use of the term “Malayalam Mafia” for her colleagues who are “experts in speaking exclusively in Malayalam, without using even a single word from Hindi or English, so that the rest of us might not even guess what they were saying” is Benyamin holding up a mirror gently to his countrymen, showing them quite how insular they can seem to others.

As the book proceeds, one begins to realise that this is very much part of Benyamin’s project: his fiction pushes his readers to enter worlds they might close off in real life; to meet people they might live cheek by jowl with, but never befriend. Sameera’s daily life unfolds in two primary locales: home and work. Her conservative joint family setup is headed by her father’s eldest brother, known to her as Taya and the larger Pakistani community in the city as Ashraf Sahib. “A job for someone, a job dispute back in the village, suspicion about a wife....”: favour-seekers come to Taya Ghar with all kinds of problems, and “[l]ike a zamindar, Taya would sit in a chair in the middle and listen.” Taya Ghar represents all the good and the bad things about feudal patriarchy: there is place here for everyone with a need, but how that need is dealt with is determined by ever-present hierarchies of age, caste and gender: visitors like Baluchi Barber and Chamar Chacha have one status, Sameera’s father has another, her Sippy Aunty and her Aisha Bhupoma yet another.

The many characters in Taya Ghar allow Benyamin another kind of multivocality. One of Sameera’s favourite visitors, Kareem Chacha, declares that love makes women angels, and that they should therefore be allowed to choose their own husbands. But meanwhile, the women of Taya Ghar have all had arranged marriages: they are expected never to go anywhere alone, even to the souk. Facebook is off-limits as well: “The men of the house called it the ticket booth for the train to hell. But apparently those tickets only took women to hell.”

But generational change is afoot: the youngest female member of the household, the school-going Farhana, is conducting a secret life on her mobile phone. Sameera, too, negotiates for her independence within the family and community context, but her style is more upfront than Farhana’s:

“By the age of twelve I had learnt to return ma’s fierce glances and respond with twelve words for every word she spoke. By the time I was in college, I had learned to ignore her scolding and retreat into my room with my cellphone. Remember how you guys used to call me, secretly and not-so-secretly, a harami chhokri? That was me, not just outside but also inside the house. I did not waste too much obedience on my dada and dadi, or chachas, mamus and mamis. I can even say proudly that my family grudgingly learnt to respect me for expressing my opinions to anyone’s face, for charming my way into getting what I wanted.”

As her adopted country plunges into political turmoil, an ill-informed Sameera walks both real and virtual paths to educate herself on the issues at stake: the ills of the monarchy, the historical conflict between Sunnis and Shias, debates over censorship and the freedom of the press, battles over ideological purity when the state tries to wean its citizens away from protest by offering subsidies. Her friendship with a male, Shia, Arabic-speaking colleague, forged over a secret music group and virtual visits to each other’s homes in a Facebook game called City Villa, becomes increasingly fraught with controversy. As the political temperature rises, she finds herself torn between her family’s (and community’s) pragmatic establishmentarian loyalties – and her growing empathy with the Arab protestors.

The immersive quality of Goat Days was based on our identification with a solitary protagonist, a single, hellish locale, and the struggle to escape it. Jasmine Days has more locales, many more characters and a much more complex political landscape. But what Benyamin pulls off again is Sameera’s voice: the almost spoken-word simplicity with which this landscape is rendered makes it hard not to listen.

Published in Scroll, 8 Sep 2018.

*A longish piece I wrote in 2015 about how being published in English translation is changing things for literature in other Indian languages is here. (One of the writers I interviewed for that piece was Benyamin.)

A Patriarchal Narrative

My Mirror column:

Films S Durga and Nude show a reality where Indian women can be either sexual individuals or mothers and sisters — not both. The second of a two-part column.

S Durga opens with a religious procession. The sequence is fairly long and shot in an observational documentary style. Men in flaming vermilion mundus are fastening each other’s garments tightly around their waists. Their brown torsos are bare but for several necklaces around their necks. As the drum beat rises to a crescendo, some of the younger men start to go into a trance. We watch as they suspend themselves from heavy iron hooks. The hooks are attached to orange metal frames, so that these young men now dangle before the goddess, like carcasses from cranes.


The Garudan Thookkam procession is an annual ritual recreation of a myth in which the insatiable Goddess Kali/Durga was placated by the blood of a wounded Garuda. From the sacrificial fervour of these spread-eagled young ‘garudas’, the film cuts to an empty highway at night. A few cars zip by. A woman in a salwar-kameez waits by the roadside, nervously examining her phone for messages. A pair of men draw up on a motorbike. One gets off and urges the other, Kabeer, not to waste any time. Then he and the bike are gone, and Kabeer and the young woman, as yet unnamed, set off. They try to flag down a bus, but fail. The dark road stretches out endlessly before them.


Two drunken men in a car see the couple walking, slow down and ask them where they want to go. The railway station, says Kabeer. The men offer them a ride. The couple hesitate for an instant, but their choices are limited. They get in the back seat.


Almost instantly, the man in the front seat turns the spotlight on them — literally — with a torch and a suggestive question: “What’s the plan for tonight?” Then, getting no answer, a second question — brasher, more direct: “What’s this girl to you?” “Friend,” says Kabeer quickly. “Oh, friend, aa? Some people say ‘sister’ at night,” says the man, continuing to look the woman up and down. “What’s your name, Chechi?” he demands of her. Durga starts to cough. “Drink, sister,” the man insists, trying to thrust a bottle upon her.

Director Sanal Sasidharan has taken a profoundly simple idea and turned it into a full-length film that keeps you on tenterhooks for much of its running time. Every word, every gesture made by the men in the car (and the other men who join them as the film progresses) is couched as protection but feels like a sexual threat. Their repeated use of the word ‘Chechi’ — ‘elder sister’ in Malayalam — to address the cowering, increasingly weepy woman at their mercy is thus painfully ironic. But it is no surprise.

The inability of so many Indian men to see a woman simply as a human being is something that constantly assails us, in films as in life. What makes the Hindi-speaking Durga the target of so much unwelcome attention is not just her momentary vulnerability. It is that she has stepped out of her home, her community, and that leaves her — in the eyes of these men — unprotected. Yes, she is with a man, but a man who has not been chosen for her by society. By exercising free choice in the sex-and-romance department, as in the ‘Nirbhaya’ case and so many others, the woman has apparently lost her right to be respected.
Because in this entrenched patriarchal narrative, women can either be sexual individuals or they can be mothers and sisters — not both.

Last week, in the first part of this column, I tried to show how Ravi Jadhav’s Nude also works with this impossible binary that women are forced into. The only way Yamuna’s son feels able to respect his mother is through some notion of her sexual chastity. Her courage in leaving an abusive marriage and her lifelong focus on fulfilling his desires at the cost of her own mean nothing to him, as soon as he can tar her as being sexual. If this were a radicalism test, I might say that Jadhav takes the easy way out by making Yamuna so deeply invested in her own chastity, even as she works as a nude model for art students. But that is also what makes Yamuna so believably tragic — she has internalised patriarchy’s lessons accurately: she knows that to be respected as a mother, she must never be seen as a sexual subject.

Some might find Nude’s final scene unnecessary or distasteful, but it is the culmination — and converse — of this double bind. Years after Yamuna’s passing, her estranged son enters an exhibition. The huge nude painting before him has an instantaneous effect on him — that of arousal. And then, with a sickening thud, he realises that it is a painting of his mother.

The problem, Jadhav’s film suggests, is not in Yamuna’s quiet claiming of sexual agency by being painted. The problem, as in S Durga, is in the gaze. If a woman shows any sign of sexual-ness, it is assumed she is there to turn men on. And suffer the consequences.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Jun 2018.

Worship, motherhood, lust

My Mirror column:

A close look at two of last year’s most ‘controversial’ films – S Durga and Nude – reveals the same demons in the mirror. The first of a two-part column.

At first glance, there seems little in common between S Durga and Nude. The first, a Malayalam film directed by Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, is a surreal, often chilling road movie, featuring a couple who’re forced to hitch a ride with a carful of men somewhere in Kerala. The second, a Marathi film directed by Ravi Jadhav, is about a poor, illiterate woman who takes up a job as a nude model at the JJ School of Art in Mumbai.

When both films were barred at the last minute from the Indian Panorama screenings at last year’s International Film Festival of India in Goa, I hadn’t seen either. What seemed to unify them, then, was the mere fact that their titles – S Durga had been called Sexy Durga until the CBFC insisted on tweaking the name – spoke of the body. This May, though, both films were screened at the Habitat Film Festival in Delhi. And as I watched them, in close proximity to each other, some similarities swam to the surface.

One should start with the disclaimer that in terms of treatment, the two films couldn’t be more different. Sexy Durga had no bound script. The film was improvised during a 20-day low-budget shoot, from an idea that had been with Sasidharan from after the December 2012 gang rape in Delhi. “We did not have high-end equipment and we used to tie the cameraman [Prathap Joseph] to the vehicle,” he told The Week. Jadhav, meanwhile, worked from a screenplay by Sachin Kundalkar, a novelist and filmmaker himself. Nude is carefully plotted -- although it seems to me to fluctuate between a preexisting set of emotional/cinematic cliches and a desire to confront the certainties of our gaze. But of that, more later.

Jadhav’s film opens in a village, where Yamuna (Kalyanee Mulay) is suffering both insult and injury in her marriage. Her husband is carrying on a full-fledged affair with another woman. When his assault and public humiliation reach unbearable limits and he starts to rob her of even the meagre income she earns from rolling bidis, Yamuna decides to take her young son and run away. She arrives in Mumbai, seeking shelter under the roof of a woman she calls Chandra Akka (Chhaya Kadam).

Yamuna’s early days in the city are finely etched – the initial timidity with which she approaches the feisty Chandra as well as strangers, the exhaustion of walking the streets asking for work and the slow, dramatic uncovering of the secret of Chandra’s job. Mulay’s mobile, expressive face is put to marvellous use as she transitions from shock to moral censure to acceptance -- and eventually, the courage to follow Chandra into the art classroom and shed her clothes for money.

Rather than starting with a dogged ideological defence of nudity – couched either as personal freedom or as aesthetic choice – the film offers the potentially resistant viewer a way in, through empathy with Yamuna. The film’s portrayal of her -- first as blameless battered wife and then as self-sacrificing mother –makes it impossible to cast moral aspersions on her choice.

The really interesting metamorphosis is still to come. Slowly, Yamuna transitions -- from the hapless woman who is only doing this job to educate her son to someone who now treats herself and her body with the same dignity with which this new world of artists treat her.

But dignified distance is one thing and sensual self-control another. It is only as Mulay’s Yamuna begins to acquire a quiet new confidence, sometimes sneaking admiring glances at the students’ depictions of her body, that we remember that Kundalkar’s screenplay has thoughtfully provided us an early glimpse of her potential sensuality: the film’s first scene, where she leaves the clothes she is washing by the riverside and leaps into the water, watching from the sidelines in frank yearning as another woman revelled in her husband’s attentions.

Whatever her inner desires, though, Yamuna in her public persona allows herself no pleasures. She guards her chastity fiercely, as she assumes she must. Her primary sense of self remains tied to motherhood. As her son acquires more expensive tastes -- for cigarettes, the cinema and art school -- she takes up private modelling assignments to cater to his growing monetary demands.

The aching gulf between Yamuna’s fluid, ever more sensual presence on canvas and her tightly wound-up persona in daily life is something the film suggests visually, but does not push enough. But this, I want to suggest, is the crux of the problem both Nude and S Durga are trying to grapple with: when might we accept women as sexual beings without tarring them as “available”? Can Indian women ever escape the stifling double-bind of worship and lust?

(The second part of this column is here.)

The Art of the State - II

My Mirror column:

Schools, guns and graffiti in two films about the Indian state: When the Woods Bloom and Newton.

(This is the second of a two-part column. The previous column is here.)

I return this week to my discussion of Amit Masurkar's Newton and D. Bijukumar's Kaadu Pookkunna Neram (When the Woods Bloom, WTWB): very different films that deploy strikingly similar motifs to depict a similar subject. In both, an incident of anonymous violence is followed by the uniformed might of the Indian state descending on a Maoist-controlled adivasi area -- centred, in both cases, on a school. 

In the Malayalam film, the policemen have arrived to stay. "Two rooms will be enough for us," pronounces a senior cop, being magnanimous. "There are only four rooms in the school," replies the teacher. "But even if you wanted to take over the whole building, we could not stop you." The fact that the police sit at the top of this ecosystem becomes even clearer when a sleeping cop wakes up and starts hitting two curious children who have sneaked past him to touch some guns. When the teacher objects, he retorts rudely: "You're here to teach children. Don't try to teach cops!" The teacher keeps quiet, but later stops the cops from using the schoolchildren as free labour. Some of the loveliest scenes in Dr. Biju's film involve the tribal children singing.

The songs they sing are clear and sweet, a world away from the raucous film music that the policemen bring with them. "We are the masters of the forest," run the lyrics of one, its dulcet tones belying the sharp irony of the words as they ring out in a forest that no longer seems theirs. In Masurkar's film, where black humour replaces lyrical melancholy, two tribal children are forced to sing songs to entertain the cops. In both WTWB and Newton, local anger can only be expressed in graffiti -- scrawled on the walls of the sole pucca structure for miles around: the school.

But the sentiment of those messages, let alone the irony of their location, does not seem to be reaching the state, which remains intent on widespread repression — which can only produce greater public anger. Early in WTWB, a truckload of cops is unleashed on a village to search for a single 'terrorist'. In the end, when the protagonist (Indrajith) returns to the police post, he is greeted with surprise - and told that that six Adivasis have been jailed for a month on the non-bailable charge of killing him. Newton, where the police have come only for a day, with the ostensibly benign purpose of holding an election, also underlines the casual terror they wield.

In one silently sarcastic sequence, the cops barge into huts, extracting tribute as they rough up people to make them exercise their 'voluntary' right. Poor adivasi India, it seems, is where the state only shows up to replenish its stocks of fresh-brewed liquor and freshly-killed chicken. Newton takes a lighter approach than Biju's film to deliver the same depressing message - the police do not merely implement the law: they are the law. At least while they have the weapons.

This, too, is a motif both films share. WTWB puts the gun in the hands of a woman and a Maoist, letting us see how contingent power is when she taunts the now-unarmed cop: "You're afraid too,without a gun, isn't it?" Newton's climax, too, depends on a gun changing hands - though here we are under no illusion that it will eventually return to those who are licensed to use it. In this utterly skewed world, if you think you can challenge a police officer, you must either be powerful — or a fool. Which is why the long-serving Loknath ji, having observed Newton Kumar's refusal to kowtow to Aatma Singh, sidles up to him to ask after his political connections.

The chatty, diabetic Loknath ji is the excellent Raghuvir Yadav, who began his cinematic career in Pradip Krishen's Massey Sahib as a lower functionary of the colonial state, and now embodies to perfection this lower functionary of the postcolonial state. Both as the youthful Massey and as the middle-aged Loknath ji, Yadav offers up an everyman character whom we laugh at, but also with. And in so laughing, we also laugh at ourselves.

Loknath ji also offers a humorous indictment of the status language and literature have in today's India. An MA in Hindi sahitya who now advises people to focus on English, which he is teaching himself by watching American slasher comedies on his phone, he combines a deadpan cynicism about our times with a hope that he might still catch up.

But in his desire to write a "jombie story" about a police team that enters a jungle in a Maoist area (and never coming out), Loknath ji also gives us a momentary reprieve from realism, a pleasurable dip into the sensational that reminded me of Lalmohan Babu in Satyajit Ray's Feluda stories. Fiction makes other appearances in the film: as indulgence, as entertainment, as a trap. We hear a policeman reading a novel aloud to his mates, a potentially erotic romance about one Ramju. Less innocuously, in the pre-climactic scene, it is by telling the story of the day aloud that Newton realizes that that is what it is: a story he has been sold.

I have not yet watched Dr. Biju's other films, but I was fascinated to learn that none of the characters in his last five films have names. Masurkar and screenwriter Mayank Tewari are clearly equally cognizant of the significance of naming. Their protagonist has already shed the weight of his caste surname. His new first name rids him of the femininity of 'Nutan', while putting him on par with a famous Englishman - and making us instantly think of gravity. At some fundamental level, naming lies at the core of fiction. The fact that Newton can name himself anew is testament to the power of imagination.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Sun 19 Nov 2017.

Not the Usual Suspects

This week's Mumbai Mirror column: 

Thoughts on cops and the everyman, on the cop as everywoman: from 'Singham' to 'Drishyam' via 'Mardaani'

Tabu as IG Meera Deshmukh, with her posse of policemen, in Drishyam

Drishyam is by no means a great film. It's not even a particularly good film. Several performances and locales leave much to be desired. But having not been previously exposed to any of the previous versions - neither the 2013 Malayalam film of the same name, starring Mohanlal, nor the Japanese or Korean films that were more faithful renditions of the original inspiration, a Japanese novel called The Devotion of Suspect X - I found it watchable. It has a plot (which is already more than one can say for most big-budget Hindi releases), it has some suspense, and even posits something like an ethical dilemma. 

But this is not a review. Readers trying to decide if they should watch Drishyam are unlikely to find this piece helpful. What I want to think about is Drishyam's depiction of the police. The first interesting fact here is that the film casts Ajay Devgn - the very man who has made a career out of playing an outlandish supersize cop in Rohit Shetty films like Singham and Singham Returns - as the supposed everyman, a guy who finds himself in a tight spot, ranged against the police. Had Devgn been a little bit more in touch with his acting self (and I'm convinced he used to have one), he could have had some fun with this rolereversal, especially since even the location is the same as those films: a Marathi-fied Goa. It's a pity he's now so used to sleepwalking his way through the larger-than-life muscleman parts that he can no longer seem to convey either vulnerability or middle-class-ness with any degree of conviction. 

Second attention-grabbing tactic: Drishyam makes its tough cop a woman. The figure who must match Devgn's moves, play the cat to his mouse, is played by Tabu. It's not that Tabu hasn't played a cop before - I can think offhand of Fanaa (2006), where she had a small but effective role as an anti-terrorist bureau agent. But as IG Meera Deshmukh, she must marshal a different combination of attributes. There is an obvious comparison to be made here, between Meera Deshmukh and the last policewoman heroine we've seen on the Hindi film screen, Shivani Shivaji Roy, in last August's Mardaani. On the surface, they aren't similar at all. Rani Mukherjee's Shivani, as I had noted in these pages at the time, always appears in masculine garb: either in uniform or in loose collared shirts and trousers, with her hair tied back and her fists ready to hand out a punch or two. Tabu's Meera, in contrast, makes her 'entry' in near slow-motion, clad in an uber-flattering uniform that clings to her curves, and for much of the film's latter half, appears in fashionable churidar-kurtas and perfectly draped saris, her lovely auburn hair flowing loose even while she supervises the 'interrogation' of Devgn and his family by a violent junior. Meera, unlike Shivani, doesn't like to get her hands dirty. 

But there's one way in which both these characters mirror each other: their 'feminine' instincts are written into the roles in the most obvious fashion. If the childless Shivani Shivaji Roy, for all her mardaangi, is accused by male colleagues of taking things "too personally", and proves it by being pushed over the emotional edge by the abduction of an orphaned girl with whom she has a nurturing, quasi-filial relationship, Meera Deshmukh is more straightforwardly cast in the maternal mould. Her actions, which might be unforgiveable as a police officer, are meant to be condoned as those of a mother. And eventually, it is a failed mother that her character is judged. 

Outside this though, Tabu remains the unexamined Bollywood supercop: "Hum policewalon ko aadmi ke baat karne se pata chal jaata hai ki woh sach bol raha hai ya jhooth," she declares in one of the film's more dangerous ideological moments. And beyond the major characters, Drishyam offers a glimpse of a darker vision of the police. The film's small town of Pondolem, despite having flattened Goa's mix of communities into a Hindu milieu (complete with a Swamiji and a satsang in Panjim), comes across as rather idyllic. From the start, the only unpleasantness in town is created by the police. The bullish, corrupt Gaitonde (wonderfully played by Kamlesh Sawant) doesn't ever pay his bills at the eatery he frequents, and has illegally locked up a young man for defaulting on a loan payment to a company owned by Gaitonde's cousin. Most of Devgn's early exchanges with Gaitonde and his more amenable senior point out how unfortunate it is that the public fears policemen instead of trusting them. 

Charmy Harikrishnan's helpful comparison of the Hindi film with the Malayalam version points out that [spoiler alert] "Mohanlal protects his family precisely because he knows the boy is a police offer's son and the entire police force will come after them." This "grave mistrust between the ordinary man and the police" which, as Harikrishnan correctly points out, is "blurred" in the Hindi film. Thinking about this reminded me of another recent Malayalam film in which a policeman's family is the focus, albeit from the very different perspective of a policeman's son becoming witness to a murder. That film, Rajeev Ravi's superb, haunting Njan Steve Lopez (2014), suggests that Malayali filmmakers recognize the chilling fact that the police in this country often function as just another gang of thugs -- and are willing to engage with it with some complexity. Hindi filmmakers, still so abjectly tied to heroes and villains, could really learn a lesson or two.

Published in Mumbai Mirror

Interview: KR Meera

The explosive Malayali writer KR Meera talks on the need to preserve regional languages in literature and the value of translation.

KR Meera is among Kerala's most celebrated contemporary writers. Born in 1970, she worked as a journalist for many years, writing short stories on the side. In 2006, she gave up her job to write fiction full-time – which, as her prolific output reveals, she really does. 

The provocative and disturbing tale of a young Bengali woman appointed state executioner, Aaraachaar was originally serialised in Madhyamam Weekly and published as a book by DC Books in 2012. It has now sold nearly 50,000 copies in Malayalam. In 2013, it was published in J. Devika's vivid English translation as Hangwoman, and placed KR Meera firmly in the national literary spotlight. Meera speaks about her place in the Malayalam literary sphere, the strange but powerful impact of English translation, and why we must preserve languages to preserve our Indianness. 

You've been publishing fiction since 2002, and been a full-time writer since 2006. Your output – five collections of short stories, two novellas, five novels and two children's books – is extraordinary. When would you say your books started to get attention among Malayali readers?
Actually, there is one more book, Trisha, a collection of essays. Also, the number of novels will soon be six, as the one which is currently being serialised will be published in book form.

When did my books start getting attention among Malayali readers? Well, that is a difficult question. As we Malayali writers start by publishing stories and serialising novels in periodicals, by the time the books are in the market, we would already be noticed by the discerning readers. For example, I had published only three short stories in different periodicals when DC Books contacted me and offered to bring out my first short story collection, one among 10 books by debut writers. There were 1,000 copies in the first impression. The next book got released along with the second impression of the first book.

In those years, even if the copies were sold out, we (the then-young writers) had to wait for months before the reprints came. By 2005, I think I had earned a strong base of sincere readers who patiently waited for my works. They were not many in the beginning, but each year the number kept growing. I was writing with both hands those days – columns, articles, novels, serial scripts and even film scripts (which unfortunately didn't develop into films due to several reasons).

I realised that readers do pay attention to what I write, when people started coming up to me in public places and started quoting lines from my stories. By the time Aaraachaar ( the Malayalam original of Hangwoman) came out, I was getting calls from readers almost daily.

How much of that attention, and the actual copies of your books sold, do you think was a result of reviews, media coverage, awards? 

When the first book came out, I was not sure whether readers took my stories seriously. But by the time my short story Moha Manja (translated as Yellow is the Colour Of Longing) and Ekanthathayude Noor Varshangal (translated as Noor: Light Years of Solitude) appeared in the periodicals, there were signs of acceptance. Though the very first book was selected for about four awards, it didn't have overwhelming sales at that time. In those days, critics in Malayalam were yet to take our generation seriously. So there were not many reviews. But we were sought after by periodicals for stories for their special issues. A photo along with the story was all the media coverage we were assured.

In my case, it was with Aaraachaar that the readers’ love was converted into sales. When DC books proposed printing 5,000 copies with five different covers for the first edition, I was worried, visualising bundles of unsold copies. But the first edition got sold out in four months. From then onwards, there are reprints every two months, sometimes every month.  When it was selected for the coveted Vayalar Award and the Odakuzhal Award followed by the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award, the sales increased further. And there was a steep increase in demand for my other books, too.

Generally speaking, my observation is that awards and media coverage do help in directing the spotlight on a book for a while. But if the book fails to touch the heart of the reader, it would just fade away. On the other hand, if the book is good, the sales figures will grow slowly but steadily.

An example is my novel Nethronmeelanam (literally the eye-opening ritual of the idol), written in 2006. While writing it, I was sure that the book would be well-received as the craft and the theme were not expected from a young woman writer. But somehow, it went unnoticed, in the sense that there were no awards or reviews. There was not much publicity either. But Thrissur Current Books, the publishers, were ready to reprint it, as there was demand from those readers who went in search of my other books after chancing upon one or two stories in periodicals.

Slowly, I started getting feedback from very serious readers that the book is brilliant. And after Aaraachaar, Nethronmeelanam also got renewed attention and now more and more readers tell me that the book is equally haunting, though the theme, craft and narration have a sea of a difference.

When were you first translated into English?
My first story to be translated was Ormayude Njaramapu, as The Vein of Memory , by Dr Jayasree Ramakrishnan Nair. It was published in the journal Samyukta.

It was in 2004 that Dr J. Devika, whom I knew only through her articles, called me and asked whether she could translate my story Moha Manja. I consented, though I didn't expect the translation to be successful, as the rhythm of my language is difficult to capture in English. But when she mailed me the translation, my ego crashed. That was the closest translation I could ever imagine.

Later Devika translated 15 pieces of my short fiction and Penguin brought out the collection in 2011 as Yellow is the Colour of Longing, and then Aaraachaar as Hangwoman. She has also translated Aa Maratheyum Marannu Marannu Njan (as And Slowly Forgetting That Tree)and Karineela (working title: Poison Blue) for Oxford University Press. Another short novel, Gospel of Judas, has been translated by Rajesh Rajamohan.

Could you give me a rough sense of the number of copies sold in Malayalam, versus the number of copies sold in English, of Moha Manja/Yellow is the Colour of Longing and of Aaraachaar/Hangwoman?
Moha Manja as a single book is nearing 10,000 copies in sales. The book was out of print for a long time, after the publisher (Thrissur Current Books) published the story as part of a collection of stories from three books. Aaraachaar is nearing 50,000 copies and the book remains the top Malayalam seller for the past two years, ever since its release. 

Yellow is the Colour of Longing was long-listed for Frank O'Connor prize and short-listed for the Crossword award, but it was not converted into sales. There were 2,000 copies in the first edition. There is no reprint yet. Hangwoman was brought out in hardback, with 2,000 copies as the first imprint. R. Sivapriya, until recently Commissioning Editor at Penguin, had informed me that they are shortly bringing out a paperback reprint.  

How was the media reception to the English editions of your books different from the media reception you experienced from the Malayalam press?
Of course, the space allotted in the English media for literature is much greater than that in the Malayalam press. But in the case of Aaraachaar, I have no reason to complain as there were many in-depth studies and interviews in almost all media. Thankfully, the English press has extended very good coverage to Hangwoman, with rave reviews and prominently displayed interviews.

You've received the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award, and a host of other awards, for Malayalam literature. Do these awards create the same kind of buzz in Malayalam publishing that literary awards seem to create in the English-speaking world in India? Also, are there literary festivals for Malayalam writers?
Malayalam is a small language in terms of the number of speakers compared to the English-speaking world. So how can we expect the same kind of buzz, if we define 'buzz'  in terms of numbers, or the amount of money involved? But considering the highest literacy rate and the vibrant publishing scenario, I feel that there are many reasons for the Malayalam writers to feel proud of their language and people.

Still, it is very difficult to make writing a means of living in Malayalam. I have heard that there are attempts to conduct Malayalam literature festivals, but I am yet to participate in one.

As someone already well-established and acclaimed in your own language, was being translated into English still necessary for you to be “discovered” at the national level? What has been your experience?
Seven years ago, when I attended a women writers’ colloquium in Delhi, I felt like a government school kid attending an international school day. Nobody knew me or noticed me. Last year, Penguin sent me to the Jaipur Litfest. That was a marvellous occasion where I could see all the who’s who of India around me. There also, nobody other than Malayalis recognised me.

That was in January 2014. Hangwoman got released in July. In October, I participated in the Goa Writers and Readers Festival. I didn't expect anybody to notice me there, too. But soon after the inaugural session, a young man came to me and asked whether I am not KR Meera. I was surprised. Then he said he came to that festival only to meet me! He was Vivek Tejuja, critic and writer. My day was made.

And then at the Chandigarh Litfest in November, more surprises were in store for me. Writers like Anjum Hasan and Suresh Menon recognised me. While I was a journalist, I had read Bitter Chocolate and become an ardent admirer of Pinki Virani’s. At Chandigarh, she came to me and told that she attended the festival only to see me! This was repeated in the Odisha Fest also. Hangwoman was released by Arundhati Roy.

When she talked highly of the book, I thought I was dreaming. Then one day, Anita Nair surprised me by reviewing the book in Outlook. In Jaipur, hers was one session I attended religiously. But for Devika’s translation, I don't think this would have happened.

On being discovered at the national level, I feel proud of reminding the world that top class literature is produced in regional languages, too. It is very exciting as a writer to be opened to another world, where there are a new group of readers with a new set of evaluation tools subjecting your work to the tests of literary significance and universality.

Any other thoughts on being translated into English – for instance, the fact that Bengalis were suddenly able to read Hangwoman, which is set in Calcutta?
While writing Aaraachaar, that it would be read by non-Malayalis was not in my wildest dreams. So when it was translated, I was waiting for the response from Shatarupa Ghoshal, the editor of the book at Penguin who is a Bengali. Till she okayed it I remained nervous. Then after the book came out, one of the first calls I received was from Kadambari, a famous Odissi dancer and actress, originally from Kolkata but settled in Mumbai. When she talked fervently about the book and about Chetana, I felt like crying with joy.

Recently, when I went to Muscat to receive an award, a friend told me that someone from Bengal is eager to meet me. She came to the friend's place to meet me. I was really surprised to meet her. She was Toolika Chaudhari, daughter of the renowned Salil Chaudhari, who has composed many hit songs in Malayalam also. I can never thank Devika enough.

Now I wait for the day when it will be translated into Bengali.

What would be your response to Bhalchandra Nemade's recent comments on Indian writing in English?
When my daughter was a kid, I used to force her to read Malayalam stories and learn Malayalam poems by heart, which she would resist vehemently. But when she came home after her 11th grade exams, she surprised me. She said that she wanted to learn more Malayalam poems, as she has realised that when she reads Malayalam, she feels stronger in English too. I was so glad that she arrived at the discovery so early, all by herself.

It is so sad that writers like Salman Rushdie do not appreciate the wisdom of Nemadeji (I am not sure whether he was politically motivated; I am not for BJP at all), nor realise how important and integral regional languages are to Indian English writing. What would be the role of Indian English writers in the ocean of English literature if we subtract the diversity of Indian life, nature, flora and fauna?

But for the actuality of Indianness, do Indian English writers have any identity or relevance in the global scene? And if the Indianness is to be preserved, how can we do that without strengthening the regional languages?
Language is a tool for communication, but it is also a record of various forms of life and information regarding the complex relationships evolved between humans and humans and between humans and nature over centuries. If an Asian or African regional language dies, along with it die a number of words which would denote the indigenous culture, environment and time-tested knowhow of the people who spoke that language, too. Global English has never been successful in bringing out the myriad nuances of these languages.

It is meaningless to compare writers with one another, because each one has his or her own importance and role in the literary ecosystem. I am sure that Nemade’s work will be read and appreciated even after a hundred years, but I am not sure that many of our celebrated Indian English books will survive their authors. I think that Indian English writers (who are rich, powerful and influential compared to the regional language writers) should be sensible enough to come forward to revive and revere regional languages, for their own sake.

Published in Scroll, 4 July 2015.