Post Delhi Modern

Published in the Business Standard last Saturday.

Tucked away in a corridor at Madan Mahatta’s magnificent show of photographs of Delhi’s modernist architecture from the 1950s to the 1980s is a small image of Sapru House. Taken in 1957, the photograph records — in black and white — a building whose red-and-white sandstone façade and stupa-like dome is an unmistakeable echo of the stately architecture of British New Delhi, though with the pillared verandah becoming a column-embedded wall, and the chhatris more extreme than anything Lutyens might have done. And yet this was a post-independence construction, built to house the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) and inaugurated by Nehru.

From the colonnaded exterior and stupa-dome of B L Doctor’s Sapru House to the stark horizontals of Habib Rahman’s World Health House building seems a huge leap. But the gap between them is a mere nine years: Sapru House is 1955, the WHO building 1964.

Delhi Modern — curated by photographer Ram Rahman, Habib Rahman’s son — contains very few buildings like Sapru House, many more like WHO. Rahman’s grid-like Hindustan Times Building, the sweeping curved exterior of Kuldip Singh’s NDMC tower, the rolling roofs of Joseph Stein’s American School — what the Delhi-based Mahatta documented was the work of a new generation of modernist architects.

In the modernist dream, the Indian city was an empty space in which the future could be literally inscribed, in architectural form. It was a dream voiced by Nehru in 1949 when he visited the site for Chandigarh, declaring it “free from the existing encumbrances of old towns and traditions” and enthusiastically calling for Le Corbusier’s city to be “the first large expression of our creative genius flowering on our newly earned freedom”. A decade later, inaugurating a conference in Delhi on the future of Indian urban form, Nehru’s speech was a characteristic melding of the personal with the epochal. He proclaimed his distaste for the “dark corridors” of older South Indian temples (“they suppress my spirit”), declared his love of “sun and air”, and asserted that function must govern form.

I cannot help wondering if Nehru’s rather un-Indian desire for sun was the result of a gray English childhood. But psychobabble aside, India’s modernist intellectuals could not have had a better advocate. If MARG magazine’s 1946 founding issue (on ‘Planning and Dreaming’) announced the need to start “on a clean slate and… build our industrial civilisation”, Nehru was no less programmatic: “The past was good when it was the present,” he said, “but you cannot bring it forward when the entire world has changed into a technological period.”

Their manifesto may have been all about minimalism and functionality and a refusal to kowtow to previous traditions, but modernists had their own desire for monumentality. Kuldip Singh’s impressive National Cooperation Development Corporation Building (1981) on Khel Gaon Marg (which I grew up calling “the bell-shaped building”) has what looks like a gigantic pillar drilled through its core. The technological splendour of Raj Rewal’s pyramidical grid for Asia 72 at Pragati Maidan, the massive concrete bulk of the Shriram Centre: these were meant to awe the population of a developing country — and they did.

The open circulatory spaces Nehru saw as anti-“oppression”, urbanist Ravi Sundaram suggests, was crucial to modernity’s disciplinary regime. Visibility, as Michel Foucault famously argued, is a way to manage and govern populations: the deliberately external staircases of JK Chowdhury’s IIT buildings might bear thinking about this way.

Staircase of a teaching block with the main building in the background, IIT-Delhi, c.1968
Architect: J.K. Chowdhury. (Photograph Courtesy: Madan Mahatta/Photoink)

The most extreme modernist fantasies — like Brasilia, where Le Corbusier’s disciple Oscar Niemeyer did away with the plazas of Latin American urban tradition — displayed a hostility to everyday forms of community, estranging people from the spaces they were in. Chandigarh had its problems. Delhi suffered the consequences of an imported Master Plan, where Albert Mayer’s team put in place a segregated land-use policy whose alienness has led to decades of inevitable ‘non-conforming’ developments.

Reams have been written about the dullness of Delhi’s sarkari architecture, but Mahatta’s ’50s and ’60s images document an island of genteel elegance: hotels (Claridges), intellectual-cultural spaces (Stein’s India International Centre, Rahman’s Rabindra Bhavan, IIT), international institutions (the WHO, the American School, the Ford Foundation, the International Trade Fair buildings), and the homes of modernist architects themselves, all furnished with Taaru furniture, Riten Mozumdar wall-hangings and John Bissell’s Fab India linens. “Almost every Delhi home in those days was outfitted by these three designers,” writes Ram Rahman. Even as I balk at the elitist obliviousness of that “every”, I can see why he would wax nostalgic about a moment “when India’s design confidence…was truly internationalist”.

John Bissell, Shona Ray and Bharati Sharma, 1975, Furniture designer: Mini Boga

But the pictures that give me most joy are those of Rahman’s RK Puram (1965); Kuldip Singh’s 1975 DDA flats (Malviya Nagar/Saket); Ranjit Sabikhi’s Yamuna Apartments. Delhi’s modernists — elite though they were — had a vision of middle class urban living in which privacy did not yet mean a withdrawal from the world. Balconies were staggered for privacy, but still open; brick tower blocks have badminton courts in their shadow. Boys lean on cycles outside their building, others sit on a low boundary wall. Workmen walk through. One wishes in vain to be back in this world, where Gurgaon’s gated condominiums were not yet the inevitable future.

Shanghai's Mirror

A guest column for yesterday's Business Standard.

Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai, while receiving much acclaim, has also been subjected to scathing criticism. The first line of attack, ostensibly aesthetic, compares Shanghai with Costa Gavras’ 1969 political thriller Z, and finds it sorely wanting. The second type of criticism, often merging with the first, holds Shanghai’s politics up as either ridiculously unbelievable, deeply compromised, or both. By not showing working-class activists, “by portraying only the hypocrisies and the futilities of middle and upper class characters, whose so-called good intentions and attempts for justice are constantly thwarted by ‘the system’”, the film “betrays the one place where inspiration is found: the protest in the people’s movement,” writes one critic. Another criticism, in the pages of this newspaper, contrasts the “brilliant agitprop” of Costa-Gavras’ “protest classic” with Shanghai’s “elitist” tale of “middle-class saints, villainous politicians, and cartoonish proletarian thugs”; “in a movie supposedly realistic”, it argues, “Mr Banerjee cannot handle politics except as a joke”.

Z, based on a 1966 novel by Vassilis Vassilikos, was a thinly fictionalised account of the 1963 assassination of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis. In the film, an activist leader referred to as “the doctor” arrives from abroad to lead a peace rally, and becomes the target of a drive-by clubbing. A young magistrate is appointed to investigate the incident, and proceeds, almost accidentally, to uncover evidence that it was not an accident but an assassination.

In Shanghai, an activist leader called Dr Ahmadi (Bengali actor Prosenjit) arrives, also from abroad (“America”), to address a meeting in a dusty little North Indian town. He is there to oppose the International Business Park, pet project of the chief minister of the “most progressive state in the country”. He is mown down by a pick-up truck, and a young IAS officer called TA Krishnan (Abhay Deol) is put in charge of an inquiry into the incident.

Despite these surface plot similarities, I would argue that what Dibakar Banerjee does with Shanghai is quite different from what Costa-Gavras did with Z — and deliberately so.

The most striking difference between the films is one of tone, and of the possibility of identification. Z is clever and obviously satirical: you enjoy the fall of the buffoonish generals, you revel in the unmasking of their pretence of rule of law. But you’re kept at a distance: you know nothing about these people, and you cannot identify with any of them. Not the activists sniping at each other even as the doctor lies dying, not the photojournalist who seems driven only by a desire for a scoop. And yet it seems very clear indeed who the good guys and bad guys are.

Shanghai replaces Z’s generals with high-level political operators – Supriya Pathak’s smilingly sinister “CM Madam”, Farooq Sheikh’s smooth Principal Secretary – who are no buffoons. Mr Banerjee also gives his characters just enough of a past that we might begin to understand them — but their histories are grayer than anyone in Z’s world. Dr Ahmadi is charismatic but glib, a clever opportunist, his womanising and his clay feet hinted at by his wife; his student Shalini is a wide-eyed acolyte with a scam-accused father; sleazy porn videographer Jogi has a history of running away. So much for “middle-class saints”.

As for “cartoonish thugs”, that seems much more accurate as a description of Z’s Yago and Vago than Shanghai’s Jaggu and Bhaggu. Unlike Z, Mr Banerjee’s film actually opens with these characters: we see Jaggu reluctantly acquiesce to a plan that the more optimistic Bhaggu has already promised to carry out. We hear of Bhaggu’s aspirations: encapsulated in the short term by the eating of mutton, and in the long term by the learning of English, sole ticket to a white-collar life: “manager ban ja, tie pehen ke bindaas”. Jaggu and Bhaggu, much more sympathetic characters than Yago and Vago, are dupes of a system that can easily sacrifice them — and does.

But the most crucial re-orientation here is in re-orienting the magistrate from a neutral face, in Z , to a figure known to be “CM ke favourite”. It is Krishnan’s investment in the International Business Park’s vision of development that makes the possibility of his turnaround significant. If he can be made to see the rot, the film gently suggests, so might the rest of the educated urban elite.

But to accuse Mr Banerjee of turning “the movie’s sole upright, religious, overeducated, upper-class man” into an agent of “salvation” is simply wrong. Salvation, or the possibility of it, is precisely what Shanghai does not offer us. Even the much-criticised “filmi” climax only gives us a small personal victory: the system carries on.

The new Bombay cinema of the multiplex cannot produce a “protest classic”. Mr Banerjee, I suspect, would be the first to tell us that that was not his aim. Far from being a failed attempt at realism, Shanghai is the stuff of nightmares. It is a mirror in which the middle class might see its distorted face.

Honesty, at home

In the worlds most real people inhabit, honesty is a burden the householder cannot afford to shoulder.

Ferrari ki Sawaari is the story of a mild-mannered Parsi with a government job that doesn’t pay very much. It pays enough for him to put his son in a school that offers up such temptations as under-14 cricket coaching camps at Lord’s — but not enough to have a bank loan approved so that he can pay the camp fee of Rs 1.5 lakh. And yet Rustom Deboo, head clerk at the Regional Transport Office, Worli, is a paragon of honesty. When someone mentions “gifts”, he squirms uncomfortably in his chair. When he cuts through a traffic light by mistake, he rides his scooter to the next traffic cop and insists on paying a fine. “But no-one saw you,” says the exasperated havaldar. “Someone did see me,” answers Rustom, eyes twinkling gently behind his spectacles. “My son. And what he sees is what he’ll learn, no?”

Like a good parable, Ferrari ki Sawaari (FKS) sets up two father-son pairs to represent the possibilities inherent in this principle of “Jo dekhega, vahi seekhega”. On the one hand there’s Rustom, whose ethical compass is set by his desire to set a good example for Kayo. On the other is the goonda-politician Tatya (Vijay Nikam), whose son Pakya is a tragically cartoonish spectacle of how badly things can go wrong when sons imitate not-so-good fathers.

But in the end, the fate of Tatya and Pakya is tangential to FKS. The central ethical conundrum of the film is this: what keeps Rustom honest is his son — but his departure from the straight and narrow is also driven by his love for his son. It is a desire to give his child the things he can’t afford on his meagre salary that makes him steal a car.

FKS is a fairy tale, so Rustom only “borrows” Sachin Tendulkar’s red Ferrari, and after a long and charmingly silly series of detours, all is well. But fathers and their dilemmas are at the core of two more realist fictions I encountered recently — and their resolutions are not as reassuring.

The first of these is Girish Kasaravalli’s Kurmavatara, which won the National Award for Best Kannada Film this year. Kurmavatara, too, is about a government employee (it is fascinating, this fictional predilection for the public sector as the site of corruption — or its acid test). Unlike Rustom in FKS, Anand Rao is an old man on the verge of retirement. He has already lived most of his life the way he wanted to: incorruptible, devoted to his work, and seemingly oblivious of his family’s unfulfilled desires. It is only when the makers of a popular television serial about Gandhi zero in on Rao for the title role that he is forced to confront the dilemma he has managed to keep at bay all these years. His grown-up son is convinced that his TV earnings might finally provide the extra push the family needs to secure its financial future: “We can send Abhi for engineering,” the son says, speaking of the seven-year-old grandson.

Rao agrees. But as the film unfolds, we hear the son berate the father again and again for never having made enough money to give his family the good life: “Great! You were honest! But what did you get in return?” The father is cornered into silence. The son tries every trick he can think of to capitalise on his father’s temporary fame: signing him up for a detergent advertisement, getting him to be the mascot of a local political group. Meanwhile, the old man, told to research his character, enters deeper into the spirit of Gandhi. When the son suggests extracting money from the producers by threatening to back out of the part, he asks mildly: “Would that be ethical?” The son throws a fit: “Never seen anyone more unsupportive of his own family,” he rages. The film ends with the son, his wife and child moving out — having stuck to his principles, our protagonist must make his peace with being alone.

In stark contrast is Naresh Kumar, the protagonist of Amitabha Bagchi’s new novel, The Householder. “If you can’t become an officer, the next best thing is to become an officer’s doorkeeper,” Naresh’s father told him in the early eighties. “If nothing else, you can make money by refusing to open the door.” Now “PA to Shri R K Asthana, Joint Director”, Naresh is a very powerful minion. And unlike Rustom and Rao, he has never had any qualms about lining his pockets.

Mr Bagchi’s achievement – discomfiting, and powerful – is to take us into the mind of this man, for whom what textbooks call corruption is simply what he feels is necessary to provide for his family. There is no dilemma here. The path leads straight from the first 70-rupee-kadhai for his wife to gold, shops, plots of land. And when Naresh’s son Praveen proves himself more adept at power games than his father, and even better at absolving himself of guilt, it all makes absolute – if terrifying – sense. “You see, Babuji,” he said. “I have learnt some things from you.”

Only in a wholly fantastic universe, it seems, do sons thank fathers for their honesty. In the worlds most real people inhabit, honesty is a burden the householder cannot afford to shoulder.

Published in the Business Standard,  Jun 23, 2012

She Belongs to the City

An op-ed I wrote for the Indian Express, on Kahaani and women in the contemporary Hindi cinema city.

Kahaani, the Vidya Balan-starring thriller which released just over a week ago, may or may not be full of unforgivable plot holes, but is being applauded pretty much across the board for having brought to the screen an Indian city that looks and feels real. Partly, of course, this is simply to do with the fact that the city in question is Kolkata, a place where so much living takes place in public that it cannot but be cinematic.

The visual pleasures of Calcutta (as it was then) were once afforded us not just by Bangla cinema, but by many Hindi films, too: think of Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa, Shakti Samanta’s Chinatown, Sombhu Mitra’s Jaagte Raho or the immensely enjoyable 1959 noir Howrah Bridge (with that terrific song, “Kahin Mukherjee kahin Banerjee, kahin Ghosh kahin Datta hai, Suno ji yeh Kalkatta hai”). These days, though, the few filmmakers for whom the texture of the urban experience is important — Ram Gopal Varma, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee, Raj Kumar Gupta, Habib Faisal, Maneesh Sharma — focus on Bombay/ Mumbai, the uncrowned First City of Hindi cinema, and increasingly, Delhi.

But more than its loving, detailed embrace of all that makes Kolkata distinctive, from musty government offices to the old-world charm of Park Street restaurants, what makes Kahaani truly remarkable (and it is surprising that so few people have remarked on it, even when going on about Vidya Balan — a heroine! — carrying the film on her shoulders), is that this is a city film with a woman at its centre. For the female Hindi film viewer, there is much joy to be derived simply from watching a woman walking the streets of an Indian city, often alone — and doing so with pleasure.

To be sure, Vidya Bagchi’s wanderings are not quite the pleasurably aimless saunterings of a flaneur — that attractive Baudelairian-Benjaminian creature, the gentleman stroller of 19th century Paris whose only reason to walk the city is to experience it, has remained to this day irredeemably male. Kahaani’s heroine, like almost every woman in an Indian city, has a good reason to be out and about. Her reason is so elemental, in fact — searching for her missing husband, the father of her unborn child — that her journey might have been shot as a mission. Yet, remarkably, Sujoy Ghosh’s film manages to keep alive a sense of the city as a space that isn’t just something that a woman must negotiate, circumvent, battle with — but might actually savour.

This is so rare an achievement as to be spectacular. To set it in context: any wandering through cities by women in contemporary Hindi movies is one of two types. The first is in foreign locales, where such wanderings are deemed safe, and good upper middle class Indian girls can thus liberate unhappy boys: refer to Katrina Kaif’s carpe diem diving instructor in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, teaching Hrithik Roshan’s uptight banker how to truly live (through holidays in Spain), or Kareena Kapoor in Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, speeding through Los Angeles (and life) on a pink electric scooty in a happy haze that couldn’t be more different from Imran Khan’s unhappy plodding. The second type of girl-in-the-city scenario is a spree that takes place before arranged marriage to a suitable boy. Here the safety of the wild-child heroine is ensured by her being in the company of a man (usually the boy-we-know-she’s-actually-falling-in-love-with) — think Nargis Fakhri in Rockstar, giggling through a “morning show” with her Jatboy BFF Ranbir Kapoor, or Katrina in Mere Brother ki Dulhan knocking back beers with Imran the night before she marries his brother.

Of course, there are exceptions to this typology — No One Killed Jessica (Vidya Balan again, criss-crossing Delhi to get justice for her murdered sister), The Girl in Yellow Boots (Kalki Koechlin traversing seedy city underbelly, but she’s British and psychologically damaged) and Delhi Belly where Poorna Jagannathan plays a journalist caught up in a crazy urban adventure.

But rarely, if ever, have we had a protagonist like Vidya Bagchi, a woman who travels alone to a new city and takes it as her right that she should be able to stay as long as she likes, alone and unharassed, in a cheap hotel. Whether she is drinking tea at a street stall, or haunting a particular police station until they respond to her request for help, she is neither setting out to be radical, nor on some temporary joyride. She is simply doing what all women, everywhere, ought to be able to do — but so rarely feel confident enough to. In a country in which a spate of rapes only spurs the administration to suggest curfews for women, a film like Kahaani feels like a collective dream — the unvoiced dream all women have, in which the city might belong to us as much as it does to men.

Trisha Gupta is a Delhi-based writer and anthropologist.

The maid’s tale

An op-ed I wrote for today's Indian Express.


The Help may seem like a sentimental movie about another time and place, but it deeply implicates the Indian viewer.
Based on a bestselling 2009 novel by Kathryn Stockett, The Help — released in four Indian cities last Friday — is among the most talked-about American movies of 2011. Odd as it may sound, one wishes it were among the most talked-about releases in India, too.

Set in Jackson, Mississippi, just before the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, The Help centres around a 23-year-old southern white girl who puts together a book on the experiences of the black women who work in her friends’ homes. The conflicts of the segregation-era South may appear very far away from our 21st century urban Indian lives, but it only takes a few minutes of clear-eyed watching to render the distance superfluous. No Indian middle class viewer can possibly see this film without thinking about his or her own relationship with that figure who has largely disappeared from contemporary Western life but still features so crucially in ours — the maid.

The plot runs as follows: Eugenia ‘Skeeter’ Phelan returns to her home-town after college, full of writerly dreams. The girls she grew up with are already married, with children, and Skeeter is an awkward, slightly bored presence amidst the charity evenings, bridge and chocolate pie, until she is struck by the idea of looking at this world through the eyes of the black women upon whose labour it is largely founded. It’s also a personal quest: to get to the truth about the disappearance of Constantine, the maid who raised her.

The servant’s significance in the bourgeois child’s life is, of course, undeniable. The German critic Walter Benjamin began his wonderful 'A Berlin Chronicle' thus: “Now let me call back those who introduced me to the city. For although the child grows up at closest quarters to the city, he needs and seeks guides to its wider expanses, and the first of these — for the son of wealthy middle-class parents like me — are sure to have been nursemaids.” For most well-to-do Indian children, as for the white children in the film, the maid is the first guide not just to the city, but to every aspect of life — simply by virtue of being the adult with whom the child spends most time.

But while ostensibly foregrounding the black experience, the narrative produced by Stockett and Tate Taylor — the film’s director, also Stockett’s friend from a late-’70s Jackson childhood — is filtered through the eyes of the sensitive white person, the adult who still remembers with affection the wise old maid who brought her up. This undeniably heart-tugging device — the bond between a (white) child and a (black) maternal figure — allows us to hold on to the convenient old-fashioned idea that love can cut across race. And, in our case, class.

Which, of course, it can. But the child who is still blind to distinctions of race and class is also blind to the harsh hierarchies of the world s/he inhabits. Stockett has herself said in an interview that until she was 20, she didn’t notice that her grandparents’ help had to use a separate outside toilet.

But in a culture like ours, where the deep divisions of class come weighed down by the invisible ballast of entrenched pollution-and-purity beliefs often not even recognised as being about caste, such blindness can last all our lives. Servants are central to the Indian middle-class home — and expected to be invisible within it. Hilly Holbrook’s argument for separate toilets for the help — “everybody knows they carry different kinds of diseases than we do” — isn’t something we can laugh at, because we hear versions of it all around us. The separate toilet — not to mention separate utensils, eating in the kitchen, never sitting down except squatting on the floor — is simply assumed to be the way things are, not just by Indian employers but also, tragically often, by the help. The slightest glimmer of a refusal to kowtow to that norm is met with anger, irritation or at the very least, bemusement: we all know the conversation that begins, “Maids these days...”.

Stockett’s Skeeter gives the privileged viewer a comfortable position from which to safely empathise with the disadvantaged other: we’re only too happy to identify with Skeeter, “cause she the kind that speak to the help”. It makes it easier to distance ourselves from the truly evil white people — the ones who make their maids work punishing hours, enforce domestic segregation, refuse loans in the interest of self-help and are quick to levy accusations of theft. But as we watch the pasty-faced Hilly Holbrook satisfyingly given her cinematic comeuppance, we might do well to think how close we really are to her.