Out of the Closet with Kitty and Nan

The third instalment of my TVOF column Shelf Life, in which I look at literature through the prism of clothing, is about a book I have loved for twenty years:

In the 19th-century London of Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet, clothes can help keep secrets—or reveal new selves. What looks like display might well be a disguise.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” runs the famous speech in As You Like It. It is fitting that history's most famous playwright made the theatre a metaphor for the unfolding of human life. But the stage can also be the perfect literary take-off point for stories of self-transformation—and the first step in becoming something—or someone—else is to dress the part. Sarah Waters' extraordinary first novel Tipping the Velvet, published 20 years ago and set in the Britain of the 1880s, begins on the music hall stage. That is where, in the Canterbury Palace of Varieties, the entranced Nancy Astley first sets her eyes upon Kitty Butler.

At first glance, Miss Butler is a girl dressed up to look like a posh young man: in a gentleman's suit, tailored to her size and lined at the cuffs with bright silk, with a white bow tie at her collar and a top hat on her head. But as Nancy's hungry gaze takes in more detail, she realises that though Kitty strides and sings like a boy, and stands with her hands “thrust carelessly into her trouser pockets”, her slender frame is unmistakably rounded “at the bosom, the stomach and the hips, in a way no real boy's ever was”.

What makes Kitty attractive is her changeability: now she seems like an exceptionally pretty boy, and now a slender, boyish girl. And much of that sense of changeability—for Kitty, and later for Nancy—is achieved in the novel through clothes.

Clothes are crucial, too, to the unlikely relationship that springs up between the upcoming music hall star and the Whitstable oyster girl. The adoring Nan begins to visit Kitty in her dressing room, folding up her stage clothes with quivering fingers, secretly pressing to her cheek “the starched linen of her shirt, the silk of the waistcoat and the stockings, the wool of the jacket and the trousers” —receiving from the clothes an erotic charge that their wearer has not yet acknowledged. Soon, the growing familiarity with the costumes becomes the route to intimacy with the person: Nan becomes Kitty's dresser, and her companion in London.

It is after this that the novel really comes into its own, laying out in scintillating narrative a world of performance, both off-stage and on it. Hoping to distinguish Kitty from a rising tide of male impersonators, her agent tells Kitty and Nan that they must “go about the city and study the men”, so that her act can broaden into a host of different male guises, each with its own song—and crucially, its own costume: “What think you of a policeman's jacket? Or a sailor's blouse? ... all that handsome gentlemen's toggery that languishes, at this very minute, at the bottom of some costumier's hamper, waiting, simply waiting for Kitty Butler to step inside it and lend it life!”

The Pleasures of Dressing Up

A still from the miniseries adaptation of the novel

But Kitty is not the only one to experience the magical power of clothes; the book's real heroine is waiting in the wings. On their first Christmas, Kitty gives the normally drably dressed Nan a “long, slim evening dress of deepest blue”, which Nan thinks far too fine for her. At Kitty's insistence, she wears it to dinner, only to find herself attracting more male flirtation than she ever has—followed by Kitty's inchoate jealousy, which finally lights the spark that turns them into lovers.

“The dress was so transforming that it was practically a disguise,” writes Waters in that passage, presaging Nan's future. For she will soon join Kitty on stage, their double act rising to top billing.

Among the book's most perceptive moments is the one where the shy, reluctant Nan realises that performing gives her pleasure. From that on-stage frisson “in the wearing of handsome suits, the singing of ribald songs” to recognising that the thrill of “display and disguise” only becomes more acute if the performance is live, off-stage—that is the journey that transports Nan first into London's lewd side-streets, then into its upper crust lesbian boudoirs, and finally into feminist-socialist circles. 

Kitty had resisted the pull of her masculine clothing, trying almost obsessively to keep her stage persona apart from her ordinary life. But the inner and the outer cannot be delinked so easily. Kitty’s fear of public censure (for being seen as a “tom”, a lesbian) is also a fear of her inner self.

Nan, in contrast, seems to revel in the inner possibilities opened up by changing her external appearance. And those possibilities—like her costumes—are unendingly changeable. Dressing as a boy in real life begins as a strategy for safety, but it is risk that keeps her hooked.   

Clothes are, in many ways, the driving force of Waters' narrative of sexual selfhood. New costumes seem to propel Nan into new selves. And yet somehow, simultaneously, it is she who animates them, her very physicality altering with each new avatar. Perhaps that, then, is the ultimate power of clothes: they can turn all of us into shapeshifters, performing ever-new roles on a real-life stage. If we can just enjoy the performance, it might no longer feel like one.

Published in The Voice of Fashion,  6 September 2019.

Interview: Neeraj Kabi

Actor Neeraj Kabi came into the limelight with Ship of Theseus (2013). His work has since been appreciated in content as different as Hichki and Sacred Games. He spoke with me about the stage, films and streaming TV.

For film audiences, you burst onto the scene as the ailing Jain monk in Ship of Theseus (2013). Tell us something about your life before that.

I'm from Jamshedpur. My father is Oriya, my mother Parsi. I finished college from Pune and came to Bombay in 1991. I did all kinds of work for survival. In 1997, I did an Oriya feature film called The Last Vision, by AK Bir. It won a National Award. But nothing happened till 2010. I did form my own theatre group. Veenapani Chawla's Brihannala lit a spark in me. I directed plays; I did a Hamlet which drew on Yakshagana and Dhrupad. But I don't like to discuss that 'struggle' period much. What I went through is my strength.

Do you see film and stage as different kinds of acting?

In theatre, you're there from start to finish; you understand context, subtext. In films, you might shoot Scene 56 today and Scene 1 tomorrow. Actors who've never done theatre can end up with a mishmash. My training in theatre helps me stay centred, to produce continuity of character in a film. You have to be larger than life to be on stage. In films, you can get by without. Everything I did as a theatre actor was defined by physicality. It was stylised. I was not in the realist zone. I played Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, where I was on stilts. Another time I did a Moliere play, all jumps and somersaults, landing on the knees. When I came into films, it became all about realism, getting deeper into the psyche of the character.

What inspires you as an actor?

I have this madness of falling into character when I'm outside, in public. Say, if I'm limping right now because I've hurt my leg, can I add a limp to one of my current characters? Maybe a character has a psychological limp: can I can translate that into something physical? The set or the stage, that's my office. But I'm living as an actor all the time. Like you have a way of the warrior, you have a way of the actor. If you do this, nothing in your life is a waste. You don't crib about it. You use it. Life and acting cannot be separated. You can't perform by reading books on acting!

Any books ever seemed useful?

[Shakes his head dismissively]

Do you miss the physicality of the stage?

I do.

Is a different kind of performance needed in an independent film like Ship of Theseus versus a Hichki or a Byomkesh Bakshy?

Thankfully, not yet. Maybe because the directors have been people like Meghna [Gulzar] or Dibakar [Banerjee]? And our audiences are not so insensitive that they only understand flamboyant acting. Both coexist: entertainment films and parallel films. I am a fan of all the Khans. For my entertainment, as Neeraj, I love it! And Imtiaz Ali, Zoya Akhtar, Aditya Chopra, Abhishek Chaubey make great entertainment films, which I'd love to be in as well. But for an industry to make only entertainment films is to numb an audience. It misrepresents Indian cinema to the world. Asked about actors, we name entertainers. With all due respect, they're not actors: they are stars. If you seem the same on screen as in real life, you haven't used the craft of acting at all.

Any trends in the Hindi film industry that look exciting to you?

One, audiences are transforming. It's slow, but they're starting to accept everything. There's no formula any more that guarantees a hit. Two, entertainment content is becoming slightly better. Films like Raazi, or Vishal Bhardwaj's work, these are somewhere in between, written to appeal to a larger audience.

Is streaming allowing for different kinds of content – aesthetically, socially, politically?

Absolutely. One, the format of cinema is two hours: you can't say everything. The web series format allows more space and freedom. Also, there is no censorship, so people are trying every damn thing they can do over here. It's like a new school has opened, where there's no principal. It'll settle down soon. But yes, right now that fire is there.

You've done many grey roles. Did playing the romantic lead exercise different muscles?

I was very excited. I'm a diehard romantic, I'll be that until I'm 90. But I came into the industry in my 40s, and the love stories are written for 25-30 year olds.

Unless you're Shah Rukh Khan.

All the Khans, even the Kumars have an audience that's seen them at 25. They can do this till they're 70. People will still accept them. But I'm doing this mature love story; I wanted to look good! Ship of Theseus, I was a monk in a dhoti; Byomkesh I had a massive beard; Talvar, I had a paunch; twice I've played Gandhi with head shaved: I thought a change would be nice. I'd like the audience to love me, even fall in love with me.

Do awards matter to you?

When you're acting, no. Critics and awards are the cherry on the top, after it's done. I used to get excited about award nominations. Now I don't care as much. I'm more keen on getting my audiences in place. I plan to create a theatre residency soon. I want to direct my own kind of films. I don't want to feed the audience what they say they want. I want to give them what I think they deserve.  

A shorter version of this interview was published in India Today, 15 Sep 2018.

Found in Adaptation

My Mirror column: 

Sometimes what makes a narrative gripping is not what you don’t know, but what you do.

Basil Dearden's All Night Long (1962) is a finely calibrated adaptation of Othello 

A few weeks ago in these pages, I wrote about the Ramayana as ur-text, looking at how the filmmaker Altaf Majid combined documentation and enactment to explore the possibilities of the Karbi version of the epic. If the Karbi telling, Sabin Alun, meaning 'the song of Sabin' (Surpanakha), allowed new insight into the Ramayana, Majid's staging of parts of it — with modern-day actors playing a modern-day Karbi version of Ram, Lakshman, Sita and Ravan — was yet another glimpse into the inner life of the text.

Stories are strange things. The element of surprise we so value in the modern-day narrative is often the very thing that is missing from repeated renditions of any ur-text — and yet we are absolutely gripped by the story. Knowing what will happen liberates us from the tense prediction of plot. It means that we watch for the how, rather than for the what or when of it. Apart from all our traditional performances — Kathakali, Yakshagana, Ramleela, Alha-Udal — we, in India did this for years with mainstream Hindi cinema (even as smartalecky Anglophone folk felt superior by ‘predicting’ what would happen in films that were essentially variations on the same story, once you knew the genre).

Last month, at the India International Centre's annual cultural festival, cinematic variations on another sort of ur-text were screened: the plays of William Shakespeare. At one level, adapting King Lear or Macbeth could be perceived as being different from adapting the Ramayana or the Odyssey because the original text exists only in one accepted final form, and thus departures from it are more rigidly circumscribed – or at least must be more obviously authorly. Sometimes close adaptations, especially those that decide to use Shakespeare's own words, can seem to lack newness. Among the films I watched at the IIC was a Roman Polanski-directed 1971 Macbeth, which seemed to me to stick very close to the grain of Shakespeare's play in terms of the language, the approximation of milieu and the emotional register — the craven ambition and bloody intrigue and high dudgeon of it.

Reading about the film later, though, I discovered that Polanski had started work on the film soon after the Manson family's murder of his then wife Sharon Tate and several of their friends in Polanski's Beverley Hills home in August 1969, and that Pauline Kael, among other film critics, believed that the murder of Macduff's family in the film was a deliberately lurid take on that. The scenes with the witches, too, though they seemed to me exactly the sort of subversive outcasts that I imagined when I first read the Macbeth story in high school, might be seen as hallucinatory in a way that might easily be read as born of the psychedelic 1960s as likely lived by the filmmaker and his crew.

The IIC also screened Kurosawa's unfailingly chilling Throne of Blood version of Macbeth, and Grigory Kozintsev's 1964 Russian version of Hamlet, whose grand, craggy grey cliffs and general sense of desolation remain with me though I watched it nearly two decades ago. But the most unusual and interesting film of the lot was Basil Dearden's All Night Long (1962): Othello set in a 1960s London that is all rain-streaked streets and jazz, with Delia 'Desdemona' Lane being a white jazz singer who has abandoned the stage for a marriage to the loving but broodily possessive Aurelius Rex (the Moorish Othello here can actually be played by a Black actor, Paul Harris – rather than, say, 1951's Orson Welles in blackface).

Lest you imagine something smoky and seductive, let me say that this is a very British film in some ways – barring Johnny's (Iago) white-hot rage at the end, the characters project a strange wholesomeness even when they are devastated: something that can only be explained by the national stereotype of emotional reserve.

But Dearden has several other things going for him. Setting the film in that time and place allows him to delve into such twentieth-century inventions as psychoanalysis, or a very early instance of exploring recording technology as a falsifying mechanism that masquerades perfectly as truth. Dearden has the lazy English self-mockery of the moment down pat: a baffled young woman arrives at the cavernous Warehouse and asks why it's all the way out here. Comes the reply: “Haven't you heard, honey? Jazz is noisy. You can't have it in Mayfair.” There is also the beautifully lit double-level set of the jazz club, with its winding central staircase for melancholy romance, and closeted back terraces for secret intrigue and pot-smoking. Political correctness isn't a problem: “Jazz is appreciated by three groups: Negroes, adolescents and intellectuals,” runs one dialogue.

The film's biggest freebie is Dave Brubeck and Charlie Mingus appearing and playing themselves. With such atmosphere for the asking, it's amazing how tensely we still wait for the plot to unfold. It's definitely the how, not the what that matters.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Nov 2016.

Book Review: The Long Voyage of the Ibis

My (long) review of Amitav Ghosh's Flood of Fire. Published in the Wire.

A recent article in Slate on the surprising survival of “the very long novel” suggested that it works as counterprogramming. In these times of avowed attention deficit, reading a VLN feels ever more like resistance. The novels that make up Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy, at 550-600 pages each, don’t quite qualify as VLNs. But a trilogy goes one further, by returning us to the committed seriality that was once de rigueur for literary consumption.

At the Delhi launch of Flood of Fire, one gentleman in the audience managed to ask the question on many people’s minds. “If I want to read this book, do I have to first buy and read the other two books?” Ghosh smiled and assured him that he didn’t. I wasn’t quite convinced: as one of those devoted Ghosh readers who read Sea of Poppies with great excitement and River of Smoke with a patience born of waiting, I’m not the ideal candidate to test this claim. But having now read Flood of Fire, I think it actually does manage to be a stand-alone narrative. This is a remarkable feat, given that it is also within these 600-odd pages that all surviving loose threads from the previous two books must be tied up.

Several characters from the previous books reappear, many having transformed themselves, chameleon-like, as they travel through time and space. Neel, an English-educated Bengali who was once the Raja of Raskhali, is now a translator in Canton; the Bengali-speaking French orphan Puggly has emerged fully formed as the botanical collector Paulette; the ‘half-caste’ son of a Parsi seth and a Chinese woman has gone from being the convict Ah Fatt to the rather less threatening Freddy Lee. Among those who undergo truly radical change in this book are Mrs. Burnham, who acquires both a past and an interiority one might never have suspected, and Seth Bahram Modi’s wife, who emerges from a sequestered, literally purdahed existence at the top of the Bombay mansion she was born in, to take her place in a new world. (Ghosh helps her along, slyly dropping the “Shirinbai” of the previous books for the more contemporary “Shirin”.)

There are new characters, too, none more important than Kesri Singh, the elder brother of Deeti,  who was the centre of the first book, and whose invisible presence continues to haunt the third. I will refrain from naming the other new characters, but what is remarkable to me is the degree to which Ghosh is invested, in this book, in chance reunions. The coincidental coming together of long-lost characters–lovers, siblings, parents, children–after a long and complex plot involving their separation, is very much among this book’s narrative pleasures, both Shakespearian and filmi.

A petarrah of words

One of the other pleasures of the Ibis Trilogy has been the joyful proliferation of multiple Englishes, allowing the hybrid speech of a polyglot colonial world to roll off our tongues. Sea of Poppies made enjoyable use of this, having characters switch from one sort of language to another—I think particularly of ship’s mate Zachary, moving from the slangy American “What the hell you pesticatin me for at this time o’night?” to the sahebi civility of “If I may be so bold”. River of Smoke contained not just negotiations, but even flirtation and lovemaking in the pidgin-English of Canton’s boat-people. Flood of Fire is no different. Some characters make do with a couple of signature interjections, like the young banjee-boy Dicky’s use of “ya” and “bugger”, and Freddy Lee’s “lah” and “ne”. But the book bubbles over with the vocabulary of the Raj, in which English met Hindustani to create a unique lingo used not just between English masters and native servants, but between white colonialists themselves: the Burnhams, thus, are looking for a mystery (mistri) for the purpose of bunnowing (banaoing) their boat, and are willing to offer a good tuncaw (tankhwah).

Certain aspects of Raj life threw up a greater number of hybrid words, such as the British Indian army, whose workings form the most engaging chunk of Flood of Fire. Within the first two pages of the book, we’ve already seen the tamasha of a paltan going by, with ox-drawn bylees and a host of army camp-followers: dandiawallas, syces, berry-wallahs, bhisties, naach-girls, mess-consummers (a combination of the English ‘mess’ and the Hindustani ‘khansaama’) and bangy-burdars (“men who are each obliged to carry forty pound weight, in small wooden or tin boxes, called petarrahs,” says my Hobson-Jobson). On page 5, we encounter ‘badmashes’, ‘coolie’ and ‘subedar’ as part of a (fictitious) report in the Calcutta Gazette. By page 22, Ghosh brings this linguistic hybridity explicitly into his narrative, when Neel is asked for help by an Englishman in Canton who is puzzling over the many Indian words in an article on opium production in the Chinese Repository: maund, tola, seer, chittack (all weights and measures), arkati (a kind of agent), ryot (raiyat, peasant) and carcanna (karkhana, meaning workshop or factory).

In Ghosh’s compelling vision, words emerge as aides to love—and to war. We giggle at Mrs. Burnham’s Hindustani-inflected sexual banter, describing her lover’s “bahawder sepoy” as “a lathee always ready to be lagaoed” and informing him that “In India, chartering is what you do with… your jib”. We also wonder at how conflict can result from deliberate misconstruals, even at the level of states: as when Compton accuses inaccurate translators of “twisting the Chinese language in order to make trouble” with the British. Still, when Neel writes of being “besotted with words”, one imagines Ghosh’s own voice, reaching out to readers who might share that particular intoxication.

Not quite a peace pipe

Although the trilogy is named for the Ibis, the schooner on which its disparate cast of characters first come together, the ship plays less of a role in the second and third books. What in fact does unite the books is opium. Opening in the poppy fields of Ghazipur, by the Ganga, the first book offered an arresting account of opium production: how the sap from ripe poppy bulbs was harvested to be made into opium in the East India Company’s factory. The second book described its transportation, and how large a role opium played in financing British rule in India. In Flood of Fire, more layers emerge: we observe an opium auction in Calcutta, discover a trade in opium futures, and learn that Indian sepoys often took a form of opium known as maajun to calm their nerves before battle.

Opium is the intricate web that links these characters: Deeti and Kesri belong to a district where most fields have been opium-growing since they were children; there is Deeti’s addicted first husband, and her discovery of how the opium she harvests for a living can be put to more surreptitious uses. There are Bahram Mody and Benjamin Burnham, whose trade is built on opium exports to China, and Ah Fatt, who smokes it. Opium, finally, is the link that brings Britain, India and China together—or drives them apart—in the First Opium War.

That war forms the climax of Flood of Fire, and much of the book’s second half is taken up with the slow-burn build-up, as merchants, soldiers and ordinary folk prepare themselves for upheaval. One of the reasons why River of Smoke didn’t entirely work was that it felt like a middle, and often a slow, meandering one. Also, despite its vivid descriptions of Fanqui-town and its strange rules (no foreign women, for instance, were allowed in), or the flowering plants that went from Canton to the West, the primary characters – Paulette and her botanist mentor, Bahram and the Co-Hong merchants, and the overly chatty Robin Chinnery – just weren’t that interesting. Or they needed a grander Grand Finale.

Flood of Fire moves much more purposefully. As I said, it is full of uncanny reunions, and the outbreak of war provides a crescendo of sorts (although Ghosh is not the writer to pretend that everything happened in one fell swoop; he plays the war out, with at least some of the tortuous waiting that it actually involves). But the new characters, too, take you along with them. The strongest of these is Kesri Singh, through whose eyes Ghosh offers a fine-grained sense of the life of an East India Company sepoy.

Castes of mind

I cannot begin to describe here the book’s impeccable research (as a snarky friend once said, Amitav Ghosh writes novels for graduate students). But unlike in The Hungry Tide, or River of Smoke, the historical detail never weighs this book down. Let me offer one example: that of caste in the army.

In a superb monologue early on, an army recruiter explains to Kesri’s father that the English, contrary to his anxieties, care “more about the dharma of caste than any of our nawabs and rajas ever did”. Earlier armies, he points out, were routes for caste mobility, but the Angrez are very clear about hiring only Brahmins and Rajputs. “Under the sahib’s guidance every caste will once again become an iron cage,” the recruiter says, and one can only applaud how Ghosh distils years of academic scholarship by the likes of Bernard Cohn into the fictive brilliance of this passage. Later,  a group of Ghazipur-born sepoys decide to act as a caste-panchayat, which is also an informal court martial. And caste is the unspoken reason for sepoys balking at carrying loads.

Why is this important? To anyone who reads the Trilogy—or in fact anyone who’s read In An Antique Land, or The Shadow Lines—it will be clear that for Ghosh, the draw of historical fiction is to create a version of the past in which old shackles are broken, and unexpected connections made. This can lead him to underplay or ignore the ways in which his characters might realistically have behaved with each other. One feels this less in Flood of Fire. Here, when a memsahib recognizes a sepoy, or a Rajput lets an untouchable feed him when sick, the characters are strong enough to make us believe in the uniqueness of their actions. Perhaps because we have seen how stratified their world is, we strive – with Ghosh – for them to forge another.

Sons and Lovers, Redux

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

Vishal Bhardwaj's takes on Shakespeare have produced female figures of rare frankness and sexual vitality, but their power is shaped by a constricting masculine world. Haider is no exception.

With his adaptation of Hamlet into Haider, Vishal Bhardwaj completes his supremely ambitious trilogy of Shakespeare tragedies reimagined in Indian contexts. Since this is not a review, all I'll say here is that Haider shares with the two previous films in the trilogy -- 2004's Maqbool and 2006's Omkara -- Bhardwaj's now-trademark accomplishments: stunning frames composed with an eye for beauty that does not preclude terror, pitch-dark humour, and consummate detailing, including an unerring ear for the cadences of both speech and music in each milieu he chooses to evoke. 

Of course, all this detailing would come to nought if Bharadwaj were not able to make Shakespeare's four-hundred-year-old characters seem to emerge organically from his fully-realized contemporary settings. But he does. And he does so by sticking close to the bone of the most elemental fears and passions. What struck me particularly, as I watched Haider, was that Bhardwaj's interpretations of Shakespeare all come to centre on sexual jealousy. In Omkara, the emphasis does not need to be created: Othello's climactic conflict was already about jealousy. Like Othello's suspicion of his wife Desdemona, Omi's niggling doubt about Dolly grows from a speck into a dark cloud that engulfs their whole universe. But in Maqbool and now in Haider, it is Bhardwaj's rejigging that makes jealousy the prime motive force. 

But unlike in most popular cinema, in India and beyond, the jealous rages of men do not erupt over women who are playthings. If anything, their frank expressions of preference make Bhardwaj's women rare. In both Maqbool and Omkara, Nimmi (Tabu) and Dolly (Kareena) must compel their tongue-tied lovers to confess their attraction - and do something about it. [Another Bhardwaj heroine, Priyanka Chopra's Sweety in Kaminey, had to literally draw the words out of the stuttering Guddu (Shahid Kapoor)]. Left to themselves, Bhardwaj suggests, Irffan's Maqbool may well have remained Abbaji's loyal right hand man; Ajay Devgn's awkward Omkara may never have picked up the courage to express his love to the white-as-milk Dolly. These men may embody physical power, but the sexual agency is all women's. As Tabu's Nimmi -- a vision of loveliness in white brocade -- taunts Irrfan's brooding Maqbool in an early scene, "Darpoke ho tum. Hamaare ishq mein gal jaoge, lekin chhoone ki himmat nahi..." 

By turning the Lady Macbeth character into Duncan's unhappy mistress, Bhardwaj made Maqbool a chilling examination of sexual power. On the one hand, we see, in Nimmi's acceptance of Abbaji's sexual obeisance, a sense of queenliness. She is bound by many things, but the most powerful man in Mumbai is her captive. She is the only person in the film -- other than a foolhardy police officer -- to call the don by his first name, Jahangir. And yet Nimmi is a profoundly vulnerable character, a woman with a million unfulfilled mannats, forced to sleep with a paunchy old man who disgusts her. So her craving for romance is expressed in desperate ways: stepping on a thorn to get Maqbool to bathe her foot, making him say "meri jaan" to her on a Hindi movie cliff at pistol-point, making him search for her lost earring in the dirt by firelight. 

With Haider, Tabu reprises the part of a woman whose unfulfilledness in her marriage sets in motion -- if unwittingly -- a cycle of destruction. Ghazala -- Bhardwaj's take on Hamlet's mother Gertrude -- takes the devotion that comes to her from men as natural, whether her brother-in-law playing the fool to amuse her, or her son Haider, her relationship with whom contains a visible strain of possessiveness. In both films, Tabu plays to perfection the woman of sexual vitality. (In both Maqbool and Haider, the only other female character is an innocent young girl in love.) 

Ghazala is not as morally compromised in the matter of her husband's death as Nimmi was. But Haider, like Hamlet, believes for most of the narrative that she knowingly brought it about. Her compulsions, though not entirely clear, do seem to stem from her desire for sexual fulfilment. And Bhardwaj knows what this means for most of his audience. It is no coincidence that he gives Ghazala a line where she says she will be the villain no matter what she does. And yet Haider, as a film, does not make her the villain of the piece. 

And in this, in their recognition of Gertrude's sexual vitality as something that does not necessarily make her villain, Haider follows in the footsteps of those feminist literary critics who first pointed out that Gertrude's attachment to Claudius was clearly a weakness of the flesh, not of the intellect. "The character of Hamlet's mother has not received the specific critical attention it deserves," began Carolyn Heilbrun in a path-breaking 1957 essay which went to challenge the longtime portrayal of Gertrude as weak, silly, vacillating, sheeplike and shallow. Male critics, wrote Heilbrun, found it impossible to imagine that a woman over 45 could arouse or experience sexual passion, so they ignored what the Ghost, Hamlet, and Gertrude herself tell us in the play, insisting on turning her "frailty" into something more than an admission of sexual need. 

Ghazala is not frail, and she has much more influence in this narrative than Gertrude did. The (masculine) revenge motive remains crucial, but Bhardwaj effectively robs it of pivotal status: "intekaam se sirf intekaam paida hota hai". And yet the sacrificial ending he gives us seems to suggest an identification of woman and motherland that left me somewhat discomfited.

Theatre: The Winter's Tale

Two theatre directors add a bit of sparkle (and some masala) to a Shakespearean gem.



When Anirudh Nair first approached Neel Chaudhuri two years ago with the idea that they direct a play together, they didn’t know the collaboration was going to lead them to The Winter’s Tale. Or even Shakespeare. Having cut his teeth on ShakeSoc (as the St. Stephen’s College theatre society refers to itself), Chaudhuri admits, may have dulled his enthusiasm for Shakespeare -- or at least “the myopic reverence that seems to colour everyone's attitudes towards studying and performing Shakespeare”. In any case, says Chaudhuri, he was “dying to work on a Chekhov text”.

The desire to work with a straight-up classic was something new for Chaudhuri. As he put it himself, his trajectory as a playwright and director until now “seems to have studiously avoided any affinity for classical modes of drama and performance”. From the improvised vignettes of Positions (2006) to the rather adventurous Mouse (2008), an unsettling interaction between an ‘actor’ and a ‘director’ which unfolded at least partially in the dark, via the thoroughly remarkable A Brief History of the Pantomimes (2008), right down to the superbly realized Taramandal (2010) (which won the Hindu Metroplus award for playwriting), Neel Chaudhuri’s plays have been about storytelling with a certain economy. Even when the dialogue is absolutely crucial, the dominant sensation you take away from his productions is one of quiet. And even when his starting point has been a well-known text – in Ich bin Fassbinder (2011) it was Fassbinder’s epochal film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, in Taramandal it was Satyajit Ray’s short story about thwarted ambition, ‘Patol Babu, Film Star’ – Chaudhuri’s way has been to push at its edges, or to create narrative echoes for it, never simply to take the text as is.

Nair, on the other hand, has been working a lot with Shakespeare over the past four or five years – on using physical theatre in Shakespeare and also studying original practice (working with the specificities of Shakespearean rhythms, pentameter, how to use the punctuation, and so on). Nair’s Wide Aisle Productions has also been working on a project that takes Shakespeare to schools, and many of the actors who’re part of that project are also part of the Tadpole Repertory. Tadpole, founded in 2009, is a loose confederation of talented actors in concert with whom Chaudhuri has produced pretty much all his plays.

Chaudhuri was excited about what he and the Tadpole actors could learn from incorporating Nair’s physical training and gesture work. So Shakespeare it was. The group decided they wanted a play that had possibilities as an ensemble piece, not centred heavily around one or two characters – this eliminated, for instance, Hamlet and Othello – and something that Indian theatre-goers weren’t likely to be familiar with – this meant Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, King Lear and The Merchant of Venice were all out. From a shortlist that included The Taming of the Shrew and Pericles, the final choice was The Winter’s Tale.

One of Shakespeare’s later works, the play is split into two: the first half is a tragic tale of jealousy that unfolds in the court of King Leontes of Sicilia, while the second, which opens 16 years later in the kingdom of Bohemia, is exuberant in both its comedy and its romance. “The duality was both beguiling and bewildering,” says Chaudhuri. “It struck us as quite unique – court and country, tragedy and comedy, death and restoration, tyranny and abandonment. After a point it seemed really clear to us that it was a play ripe for all our ambitions.” The production that unfolded amid the astonishingly apt lily ponds and landscaped grassy mounds of Zorba the Buddha in Delhi this March certainly realized those ambitions. The cast moved with marvelous felicity -- from one part of the open-air venue to another, between the play’s inherent binaries, and most admirably, from a never-stiff Shakespearian English to a glorious, mobile Hindustani.

The confidence of that linguistic decision lies at the root of what is most striking about the play. It plays off the duality that already exists, and creates new ones. Tanzil Ahmad’s superb translation is finely attuned to changes of register in the original, recreating both high and low – and within the low, shifting between “the playfully exaggerated, the bawdy and the mundane”. So the trickster Autolycus’s aside to the audience, “If the springe hold, the cock’s mine!” becomes “Idhar phanda laga, udhar murga phansa!!”; the Clown’s exclamation, “I’ the name of me—” becomes “Arre teri!”. There is even room for the occasional Hinglish moment, without it turning into a fetish or a quirk. And whether they are speaking in English or Hindustani, the actors successfully inhabit the dialogue, bringing to their speech the individual accents and styles that come naturally to them.

Despite what anyone might tell you, Shakespearean language takes a while to get used to. And yet when your ear accepts it, it can be more poetic and brilliant than anything you imagined. Nair and Chaudhuri’s production provides the wonderful sense of being at home, both in the language of Shakespeare and in a language a lot of us know but no longer really speak. This is a production that is both absolutely universal and yet utterly located in the here and now of 2013 India. There is something remarkable going on here. As Leontes says at the end of the play, “If this be magic, let it be an art/ Lawful as eating.”

Published in the April-May issue of Le City Deluxe, an international luxury lifestyle magazine that has recently launched in India (and was kind enough to want to publish a theatre-related piece).