Literary Heroines and Necklaces of Tears

The second instalment of my TVOF column Shelf Life, in which I look at literature through the prism of clothing.

From coveted possession to unfulfilled desire, jewellery has had a starring role in fictional women’s lives.

There is something brilliantly non-functional about jewellery. Clothes, no matter how attractive, always also serve to protect our bodies from heat and cold, rain and sun. Jewellery, in contrast, is so wholly useless that that fact has been enshrined in the English language: it is, by its very nature, ornamental.     

Or is it?

Humans have a way of imbuing the things we make with meaning, and jewellery seems right at the top of the symbolic value heap. We will never know exactly what the 46,000-year-old kangaroo bone nose ornament found in Australia in 2016 meant to its prehistoric wearers, or what powers were attributed to the 75,000-year-old shell beads discovered in South Africa's Blombos Caves in 2004. What we do know is that we've travelled some distance from those likely gender-neutral beginnings. 

As societies grew more complex, jewellery increasingly became something women wore. That gendered cultural history runs alongside a socio-economic one, in which women are pushed increasingly out of the public sphere into the domestic, private sphere of unpaid labour. In a world in which upper- and middle-class women didn’t have their own money (and were not allowed to earn it), jewellery was often the only financially valuable item a woman possessed—something that could be exchanged for money, provide a woman security when the patriarchal family did not. 

Sudha Koul’s The Tiger Ladies, an elegiac memoir of growing up in Kashmir, describes how Kashmiri Pandit weddings involved fathers giving their daughters solid gold ear ornaments called dejahor, so long that they hung “all the way down to their nipples”. Appalled at her as-yet-unpierced upper earlobes, Koul’s grandmother (Dhanna) hopes she might yet restore her modern grandchild to the way of tradition by explaining the socio-economic purpose of jewellery: “When women needed money, or when their daughters got married, they would cut off one dejahor, sell it, and make two of the other one. The size was the same, but it was hollow inside and no one would know that they had troubles.”

The Tiger Ladies by Sudha Koul

Dhanna’s ear ornaments remained solid till the end; it was her husband's Lahore University gold medal that was melted down to make ornaments for their daughters (“The fact that he stood first was enough—they knew it and everyone else knew it”). But few marriages are as well-adjusted, few households as equitable. And where there is familial strife, jewellery is frequently at its centre. Late 19th to mid-20th century Bengali literature is filled with women (especially widowed old aunts) guarding their jewellery from rapacious relatives: from Leela Majumdar’s children’s classic Padi Pishir Barmi Baksho (Aunt Padi’s Burmese Box, also a 1972 film by Arundhati Devi) to Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s Goynar Baksho (made into a 2013 film by Aparna Sen). 

Hearts Made of Stone

The woman obsessed with protecting her jewels appeared in a much darker register in Rabindranath Tagore’s 1898 story Manihara, translated as The Lost Jewels. The horrific vision that ends Tagore’s tale—and Satyajit Ray’s film version, since it forms part of Ray’s 1961 triptych Teen Kanya—is the wife as a ghostly skeleton, whose “bones glistened with gold and diamond ornaments”. 

The female ghost who preys on unsuspecting men is an old folktale trope from Kashmir to Japan. But Tagore is no simplistic misogynist. The narrator of Tagore’s tale pours scorn on Phani Bhushan for belonging to a “new race of men”, so without “a trace of masculine barbarity” that he “was quite incapable of saying bluntly to his wife, “Dear, I’m in need of money, bring out your jewels.” But he has also told us how things came to this pass: because the misguided Phani Bhushan demanded nothing from Mani Malika—he only gave, and “imagined that by giving, he would receive”. “The wife had no particular fault, yet the husband was not happy. And so he went on pouring diamond and pearl jewellery into the cavity of her heart, thereby filling her iron safe but leaving her heart as empty as ever.”

A still from the film adaptation of Tagore's story Manihara, which is part of Satyajit Ray’s 1961 triptych Teen Kanya

Not Quite a Girl’s Best Friend

In two famous European stories, jewels are used to pillory women's desires for other lives, other loves. If The Earrings of Madame De is about its married heroine's fickleness, Guy de Maupassant’s famous 1884 story, The Necklace is a brutal tale of comeuppance for a pretty woman who wallows in self-pity because she has “no dresses, no jewels, nothing; and these were the only things she loved.” The necklace she borrows for one grand party becomes a lifelong noose around her neck—and her loving husband's.  

Indian fiction seems to have been more forgiving of the unhappy wife, perhaps because it contains few loving husbands. To end on a classic example, think of the tragically neglected Choto Ma of Bimal Mitra’s Saheb Bibi Golam, who became Meena Kumari’s Chhoti Bahu in Guru Dutt’s classic 1962 film. Half-mad with loneliness, she accosts her dissolute zamindar husband, asking what she should do while he is entertained by his tawaif mistress. His response cruelly suggests the dispensability of both her jewels and her feelings. “Gehne banwao, gehne tudwao,” he sneers. “Get jewellery melted, get new jewellery made.” 

An English translation of Bimal Mitra's Bangla classic, Saheb Bibi Golam

Perhaps, in the end, that is what makes jewellery such a powerful fictional symbol. It stands in for money, and somehow that means people keep trying to make it stand in for love.

Published in The Voice of Fashion,  6 Aug 2019.

Heartless Days

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Jan 2019.

Tagore for Beginners: DVD review

The NFDC’s box set, comprising five films based on Tagore’s stories and a documentary on his life, is a good introduction to his world.

Published in The Caravan, July 2011.

'The Postmaster', from Teen Kanya (1961), is the story of a city-bred postmaster who teaches a young village girl how to read and write.

THE REPUTATION Rabindranath Tagore enjoys as a literary figure in India has never been in doubt. He towers over the national imagination as the exemplary man of letters, whose astounding versatility as a writer encompassed everything from short stories, novels and plays to poems, songs and essays. And yet, while his stories, plays and poems are enshrined in syllabi, performed in colleges and sung every day by thousands of people in West Bengal and Bangladesh, it has always been somewhat difficult for those who do not speak or read Bengali to fully appreciate his genius. As several commentators have noted, Tagore suffers greatly in English translation.

Many of these translations are, of course, Tagore’s own. But Tagore himself was long unsure of his texts: “I am sure you remember with what reluctant hesitation I gave up to your hand my manuscript of Gitanjali, feeling sure that my English was of that amorphous kind for whose syntax a schoolboy could be reprimanded,” he wrote to his friend William Rothenstein, an artist who first sent the Gitanjali poems to the poet WB Yeats. Even Yeats, who worked with Tagore on the English version of Gitanjali and was at least partly responsible for the initial rave reviews that Tagore got in the West (leading to the Nobel Prize in 1913 and a knighthood in 1915, which he later renounced in protest against the Jallianwala Bagh atrocities), later made public his distaste for Tagore’s translations of his own work. “Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English,” Amartya Sen cites Yeats as having written. Even if one leaves aside Yeats’ somewhat extreme positions, it is undeniable that most English translations of Tagore had a florid, often overwrought quality that doesn’t merely camouflage the power and beauty of Tagore as a literary stylist, but actually turns the modern reader away from him.

While the task of the translator remains crucial (and some of the newer English translations may well achieve what previous efforts have not), one rather pleasurable way in which the non-Bangla reader may enter the world of Tagore is by circumventing the literary route altogether—in favour of a cinematic one. Over 100 filmic adaptations of Tagore’s work have been made over the years, and the National Film Development Corporation’s recently-released DVD box set, ‘Tagore Stories on Film’, is the perfect introduction. The NFDC brought out this commemorative collection to mark the 150th birth anniversary of Tagore on 7 May.

Of the five feature films in the set, three are in Bengali and two in Hindi. Of the Bengali films, the first is Khudito Pashan (Hungry Stones, 1960) directed by Tapan Sinha, while the other two are directed by Satyajit Ray - Teen Kanya (Three Daughters, 1961) and Ghare Baire (The Home and the World, 1984). Teen Kanya is a triptych, consisting of three unrelated stories: The Postmaster, Monihara (The Lost Jewels) and Samapti (The Conclusion). The Hindi films are Kabuliwala, Hemen Gupta’s 1961 remake of Tapan Sinha’s Bengali film, and Kumar Shahani’s Char Adhyay (Four Chapters, 1997), based on Tagore’s novel of the same name. The set also contains a high-quality English-language documentary on Tagore made by Ray in 1961, and a 34-minute-long film called Natir Puja, essentially the surviving portion of a silent film based on a stage play that Tagore made in 1932, which really has only archival value.

All the older films have been restored and are a visual delight. But more importantly, the collection does a superb job of bringing to the fore several of Tagore’s lifelong concerns: his profound engagement with the condition of women, especially within the context of the upper-caste Hindu family; his complicated relationship with nationalism and with modern politics in general; and his attempt to grapple with the colonial condition, with the relationship between India and the West, with tradition and modernity.

In film after film, we see events through the eyes of the educated Bengali man trying to deal with a world that has either changed too much—or too little. The protagonist is often a young man from the city who arrives at a small provincial outpost, armed with a modern Western education and little else, his head full of glimpses of another world that seem only to succeed in cutting him off from everything around him. Think of Soumitra Chatterjee as the personable young revenue collector who goes to work for the Nizam’s government in Khudito Pashan, ostensibly too rational to listen to the locals who urge him not to stay in the haunted palace. Or of the amiable (if faintly ridiculous) Anil Chatterjee in The Postmaster, who talks of writing poetry and refuses an invitation to the local gaaner ashor (musical evening) because he’s “just started on a work by Scott”. Or Soumitra again, as the would-be lawyer in Samapti, returning to his mother’s village home with the barely-disguised impatience of the urbane, reading a copy of Tennyson’s poems on the boat.

These are characters under the mythic spell of what they understand as Western civilisation. It was a feeling that Tagore knew all too well. “Before I came to England,” he wrote in 1878, “I supposed it was a small island and its inhabitants were so devoted to higher culture that from one end to the other it would resound with the strains of Tennyson’s lyre.”

But while he sees the incongruity of these characters, and is able to laugh at the absurdity of their attempts to distinguish themselves from the supposedly uneducated masses—the postmaster attempts to sit and read his Walter Scott on a chair, but it collapses under him and he is forced to crouch on the mud floor, under the gaze of the village madman; the would-be lawyer with his highly polished shoes refuses to heed the boat boy’s warning and falls headlong into the mud—Tagore never fails to take seriously the fact that these are men who are striving to be modern, to break from the past.

And the objects of their desire for change, most often, are women.

Based on a novella by Tagore, Kumar Shahani’s Char Adhyay (1997) is a tale of the adverse effects of nationalism and patriotism.

So in Samapti, Soumitra’s character agrees to oblige his mother by marrying, but he rejects the ‘suitable girl’ his mother has chosen for him, the girl who can cook and sew and sing and will never answer back. Instead, he picks the village tomboy, Mrinmoyee (memorably played by the shockingly young Aparna Sen, then Dasgupta), who spends her days climbing trees with the local children and is generally so unsocialised into proper femininity that she is referred to as “Pagli” (mad girl). But the radical thing here is not only that he chooses the “unfeminine” girl, but that he then has to deal with the fact that she has not chosen to marry him. He must wait, then, for her consent. In a different but related register is the postmaster Nondo’s attempt to educate the village waif who works for him. Ratan, as the girl is called, is a willing and able student, and a gentle camaraderie springs up between her and Nondo, so much so that when he decides to leave the village, she feels profoundly betrayed. In Tagore’s story, Ratan’s response is to ask Nondo whether he will take her with him. When he laughs her off, she refuses his pity and his gift of money, in a flood of tears. In Ray’s film, Ratan acquires an even stronger sense of self: she never asks to be taken along, and her response is not to show her grief, but to hide it.

The education of women into selfhood — the possibility of their being independent, self-determining individuals — also lies at the core of Ghare Baire. Here it is Nikhil, the educated, sensitive zamindar played by Victor Banerjee, who seeks to equip his wife Bimala (Swatilekha Chatterjee) with an education. More than piano lessons, Western-influenced fashion and English etiquette, however, what he wants is for his wife to step out of purdah, to form her own opinions freely on every subject, including, most radically, on whether she really loves him.

'Monihara', from Teen Kanya, is a disturbingly dark take on the attempted companionate marriage.

The companionate marriage was something that Tagore seems to have striven for—and never quite achieved—in his own life. Even during his shortlived marriage, from 1883 until his wife Mrinalini’s death from illness in 1902, the kind of relationship he dreamt of eluded him. “If you and I could be comrades in all our work and in all our thoughts it would be splendid, but we cannot attain all that we desire,” he once wrote in a letter to her. If the fictional Bimala is a complex articulation of Tagore’s wifely dreams, then the cold, uncaring wife in Monihara, whose husband ceaselessly gifts her jewellery on the plaintive condition that in return she should “love him a little”, is her nightmarish doppelganger. The missing link here, of course, is Ray’s magisterial Charulata, based on Tagore’s novella Noshto Neer (The Broken Nest). Sadly not included in this collection, Charulata tells the story of a woman who is neglected by her much older husband and forms a half-filial, half-romantic attachment to her young brother-in-law: the kind of bond that, in writer Amit Chaudhuri’s words, “almost thrives on the permanent impossibility of consummation”. Again, the autobiographical element cannot be ignored: Tagore is known to have been very close to his elder brother’s literature-loving wife, Kadambari Devi, dedicating several of his early poems to her. Tragically, she committed suicide four months after Tagore’s wedding for reasons that are not entirely clear.

Satyajit Ray’s Ghare-Baire (1985) is adapted from a Tagore novel by the same title, which is set during the nationalist movement in the early 20th century.

The other way in which women figure in Tagore’s world is as the (often unwilling) objects of idealisation by men. The gentlest version of this in the NFDC collection is to be found in Kabuliwala, where the superb Balraj Sahni plays a burly Afghan trader who makes a little Bengali girl named Mini the object of his fatherly affections, imagining in her a replacement for the daughter he has left behind in Afghanistan. In Ghare Baire and Char Adhyay, the idealisation of the feminine is carried out under the auspices of nationalism, with the primary motif being Bharat Mata, the nation as mother—but nationalist discourse does not allow women to speak, they are merely a sign within it. Sandip, the fiery swadeshi leader in Ghare Baire, wants to anoint Bimala as the movement’s mascot. But while he talks of women’s native “intuition” as superior to men’s educated ideas, he never tells her what his political activities actually consist of. Char Adhyay takes the inhumanity and hypocrisy of this symbolic adoration to its logical end, with the hapless Ela unable to escape the chains of idealisation that bind her to the armed nationalist group of which she is the mascot.

Both these films also give one a glimpse into Tagore’s deep ambivalence towards what the political theorist Sudipta Kaviraj has spoken of as “the morally destructive effects of political enthusiasm”: not just the likelihood of a drift towards violence, but also the modern mass movement’s inherent tendency to substitute arguments with slogans, the inevitable stifling of internal moral diversity. Tagore started out as a supporter of the nationalist movement, but gradually came to see it as necessarily submerging one’s individuality in a collective flood of feeling, something of which he could not approve. As the thoughtful zamindar Nikhil says to his mocking nationalist friend Sandip in justification for his anti-swadeshi stance, “Ami kono nesha-i kori na”, meaning “I consume no intoxicants.”

As a novel, Ghare Baire is perhaps the most remarkably fleshed-out articulation of Tagore’s worldview. And Ray’s filmic interpretation of it is astute, even if the structure of cinema (and of our expectations as viewers) makes it less open-ended than fiction has the privilege of being—for example with regard to the question of whether Nikhil is mortally wounded in the end. The open-endedness of Tagore’s vision is largely lost in Tapan Sinha’s version of Khudito Pashan, too. A wonderful English translation of this classic ghost story is available in Amitav Ghosh’s The Imam and the Indian (2002), and it is fascinating to set it alongside the film and see what gets excised and what altered. The original is a tale within a tale, a story told by a man that the narrator and his cousin meet on a train on their “way back to Calcutta after a trip around the country during the Puja holidays”. His narration is broken off before the tale comes to an end, leaving the reader with no clear answers and much room for imagination.

But cinema, as we all know, has other pleasures. Tapan Sinha’s film has a brilliantly suggestive background score by Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, which more than makes up for whatever is lost in the shift from word to image. Kumar Shahani’s highly experimental interpretation of Char Adhyay, with its deliberately stagey, ostensibly ‘poetic’ dialogue (“Baat koi yah bhi?” or “Jaanti thi kaise main, de doge sab kucch?”) may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but there is no doubt that it is astonishingly lovely to look at, filled with stunning, sometimes surreal, imagery: waterlilies reflected in pools, a stream turning crimson with blood, white-khadi-clad women swinging in glades, a beach covered with red crabs. Among the other joys of this collection is being able to see the legendary actor Soumitra Chatterjee go from playing an innocent young man obsessed with a beautiful phantom in Khudito Pashan to playing the charismatic but dubious leader of men in Ghare Baire. And once you’ve seen all the five features, there is much pleasure to be had in turning to Ray’s stellar documentary, if only to be able to watch the handsome young Rabindranath, looking for all the world like a bewhiskered Russian aristocrat, grow slowly into the venerable sage-like presence that we now think of him as.