Home on the Train

My column for TOI Plus/Mumbai Mirror:

What the 1956 Ava Gardner starrer Bhowani Junction tells us about the British, Anglo-Indians and the railways in colonial India 

In last week's column, I drew on Awtar Kaul's film 27 Down to evoke the way that India's train network can sometimes stand in for the country itself. But of course, the Indian Railways were not always so Indian. Along with cricket and the English language, trains are often spoken of as one of the 'gifts' of British colonialism. Such imperialist phrasing remains fiercely debated, as it should be, given that the British certainly didn't create the railway network to connect Indians with one another, or even primarily for passengers. The railways were built to help transport raw materials and finished goods, to speed up the opening of the Indian market to the colonial economy -- and British private investors were guaranteed returns by the government, based on Indian revenues.

But what was created was something that endured, and became the lifeline of the empire. It isn't surprising, then, that the British colonial imagination identified deeply with the railways. One of the films to display this most vividly was the 1956 MGM extravaganza Bhowani Junction, directed by George Cukor (Gaslight, The Philadelphia Story, My Fair Lady) and based on a bestselling 1954 novel of the same name by John Masters.

Masters, who had served in the British Indian army, set his narrative just before Independence, crafting a classic colonial story in which the noble British are only trying to pull out peacefully while the Congress leadership is intent on the non-violent but continuous disruption of peace, and a violent Indian Communist organiser is trying to make sure there is a “bloodbath” when the British leave – so that “Moscow” can take over. And fascinatingly, almost all the action in the film revolves around trains. Some sequences make only incidental or dramatic use -- such as a passing train hiding a murder. But in most, the railways have a starring role: The action involves either letting a train through (to rescue dangerous explosives), rescuing victims from a deliberate train accident (caused by the villainous Communist straw man), or preventing a train from blowing up with Gandhi on board (an artfully colonial postcolonial narrative, in which it is a British colonel who keeps the great Indian alive).

Whatever one thinks of this portrayal of India (with not a single Indian in the primary cast, of course, and white actors in blackface spouting a bizarre range of accents), Masters had enough experience of India to get some things right. He knew that colonial policy had staffed the railways, especially at the lower rungs, with Anglo-Indians – a mixed-race community that was equally a creation of empire. And so Bhowani Junction's heroine is an Anglo-Indian. Played by the striking Hollywood star Ava Gardner, Victoria Jones makes her cinematic entry getting off a train -- in uniform, but on leave. After four years at headquarters in Delhi, she's coming home – to her sleepy old town, her Anglo-Indian engine driver father and her waiting Anglo-Indian boyfriend Patrick, who also works in the railways.

But 'home' seems harder and harder to define. The British are preparing to leave India for good, leaving the Anglo-Indians vulnerable to both political and social upheaval. Their unspoken position in the social hierarchy is articulated in the film in Patrick's rather sad sense of racial superiority -- below the colonial masters, but striving to be somehow above the vast mass of Indians. Meanwhile, there are European villains -- British men who see Anglo-Indian girls as fair prey game; Western in tastes and dress, but not deserving of the same moral niceties as a genuine English memsahib. Victoria – despite her unsurpassably colonial naming for the late queen -- doesn't identify with the British, but she doesn't feel Indian either. So she spends much of the film trying to become 'truly' Indian, which seems to involve exchanging her skirts for diaphanous saris and contemplating conversion to Sikhism to marry her seriously dull suitor.

Victoria doesn't succeed. But what's incredible is how much Bhowani Junction, despite its impeccable Hollywood credentials, feels like an Indian melodrama. The slipping sari pallu, of course, but also a film told entirely in flashback by the hero – on a train; and sequences like the one in a gurdwara, where Gardner's character, with a dupatta on her head, has a dizzy spell while replaying all the film's previous important dialogues loudly inside her head, complete with imaginary echoes, in a way that would have fitted right into Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki.

Running (literally) from this crisis of identity, where does our Anglo-Indian heroine go? She turns up at the railway yard, to fall gratefully into the arms of her estranged engine-driver father – whom she calls Pater – and climb into the driver's cab with him. Like 27 Down's Sanjay, 20 years later, Victoria is a child of the railways. The trains she once childishly imagined as taking her to England, are now her safe space. India may be complicated, but the railway is home.

Published in TOI Plus/Mumbai Mirror, 11 Apr 2021.

Drives with a View - III

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Continuing our series on films about cabbies, we look at why Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese's 1976 creation, Travis Bickle, seems so eerily prescient today

Halfway through Martin Scorsese's 1976 neo-noir classic Taxi Driver, we hear a campaign speech from a US Presidential candidate. “Walt Whitman, the great American poet, said, ‘I am the man, I suffered, I was there’,” intones the fictitious Charles Palantine. “No more will we fight the wars of the few through the hearts of the many....” Palantine's words, like most dialogue in Paul Schrader's much-mythified script, speak to -- as well as for -- the film's cabdriver hero, Robert De Niro in a career-making performance as the disturbed Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle.

Unlike Palantine and Bickle, Whitman was real. His poem 'Heroes' -- appropriately chosen by Schrader – was written in the voice of the soldier-as-everyman. “Agonies are one of my changes of garments./ I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person,/ My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe...”

Other than this, Schrader's script isn't what one might call poetic. Taxi Driver is a New York film through and through, capturing the city in all its brutal, wry, laconic glory. Unlike many taxi drivers previously discussed in this column series, a cab ride with Travis Bickle rarely involves hearing his voice. Much of Scorsese's masterful tension is based on shots of De Niro's drawn, suspicious face framed in the rearview mirror as he listens to his fellow citizens in the seat behind him – and judges them harshly.

As a cab driver, Bickle is the perfect witness to the world around him. But he does not wish to be a mere witness. He sees the city as “an open sewer full of filth and scum”, a mess that needs to be cleaned up. The post-60s and pre-Giuliani New York of the film is riding high on a wave of freely available sex and drugs, and our hero wishes someone would rein it in. He wants to save it from itself. In one memorable scene, the wannabe Presidential candidate rides Bickle's taxi. When Bickle recognises him, he tells Palantine the city's dirt/immorality needs to be “flushed down the toilet” by whoever comes to power.

“Let me tell you something,” Palantine says earlier, “I have learnt more about America from travelling in taxicabs than in all the limos in the country.” The surround-sound of the campaign lets the film unfold against the backdrop of Palantine's catch-all slogan ‘We are the people’. 

Watching Taxi Driver in 2020 feels strangely prescient: Bickle appears as an early representation of a figure that has come to dominate post-Trump American political discourse; the White everyman who thinks of the country as having gone to the dogs and himself as the morally-superior saviour. As Bickle becomes increasingly unhinged, his monologues in the mirror – bookended by the famous “You talking to me?” line – refer to himself as a hero in the making: “a man who would not take it any more... someone who stood up against the filth”.

Travis Bickle is, in fact, a precursor to much else in the American nightmare of the late 20th and early 21^st century – a mentally ill man gripped by perpetual insomnia; whose sense of anomie and aimlessness leads him to gun violence. If politicians don't seem to want to 'clean up' society, he'll do it himself. But the subtext of what Bickle thinks needs to be 'fixed' is both racist and male chauvinist (though not uncomplicatedly). Meeting a White passenger who wants to murder the wife cheating on him with a “nigger” is followed by Bickle acquiring weapons – from a preppie, White, gun dealer who chooses Bickle over “a jungle bunny in Harlem” because he only deals “high-quality goods to the right people”. Bickle first uses the gun on a Black man who's amateurishly robbing his local cornershop. In one of the film's grimmest scenes, the unfazed Italian shop-owner waves Bickle off and says he'll take care of it. He then takes an iron rod to the thief's body, shouting “The fifth motherfucker this year!”

Another remarkable subplot reveals Bickle's deeply-conflicted relationship with sex and women. The same man who complains about the city's filth – this is a Central New York full of sex shows and prostitution – takes his pristine, almost prissy, date to watch a faux-instructional Swedish porn film. When she proceeds to shut him out afterwards, his interior monologue becomes bizarre and incel-ish: “I realise now how much she's just like the others, cold and distant. And many people are like that. Women for sure. They're like a union.”

The other subplot about sex is Bickle's violent rescuing of Jodie Foster's underage sex worker – a plotline echoed in Schrader's self-directed film Hardcore (1979), in which a young girl runs away from a religious suburban family to become a porn actress, and goes back home in a strangely unconvincing last scene, like Foster's Iris.

What is truly disturbing about Taxi Driver's end, though, is that he is feted for murder. Violence, when committed against 'immoral' people, it seems, makes you a hero. That once-fictional battlefield seems eerily closer to today's reality.

 Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 Dec 2020.

Shelf Life -- Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: Measuring Civilisation

Shelf Life is a monthly column I write on clothes in books.

In RL Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Alberto Manguel's Stevenson Under the Palm Trees, clothing makes us human

Banner: Poster for a theatrical adaptation of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

When a literary character becomes part of the language, you know that the writer – that strange solitary creature delivering into print the outpourings of her mind – has caught something in the zeitgeist that needed expressing. 'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde', thought up by Robert Louis Stevenson when Longman's Magazine requested a ghost story for their 1885 Christmas Special, first gained popularity as a “shilling shocker” or “penny dreadful”, a novel of crime or violence sold cheaply. Soon it seemed the Victorian parable par excellence – the respectable Dr Jekyll whose secret sinful side walks the streets as the evil Mr. Hyde was a fitting fictional allegory for an era of repressed feeling. But the “Jekyll and Hyde” idea acquired much wider resonance, the temptation of immorality striking a chord with anyone who has ever hidden a part of themselves from society, or suppressed their transgressive desires.

Book covers of RL Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde over the years.

Stevenson's writing may seem long-winded to the 21st century reader, but it is spare, offering detailed descriptions only when necessary to his narrative – the feel of the neighbourhood in which Hyde is first seen, the spatial arrangements of Dr Jekyll's house. Since we never hear of Dr Jekyll's clothes, we assume they were appropriate for a Victorian gentleman of the sort Dr Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S. undoubtedly was. But when the book's narrator, the doctor's old friend and lawyer Mr Utterson, is called upon to break into his laboratory, the “still twitching” body he finds there is “dressed in clothes far too large for him, clothes of the doctor's bigness”. Another eyewitness account describes Hyde's clothes as being “of rich and sober fabric” but “enormously too large for him in every measurement—the trousers hanging on his legs and rolled up to keep them from the ground, the waist of the coat below his haunches, and the collar sprawling wide upon his shoulders.” The effect, says Dr Lanyon, “would have made an ordinary person laughable” – but here the sense of evil makes laughter impossible.

Integral to Stevenson's tale is the idea of Dr Jekyll, described by his butler as “a tall, fine build of a man”, shrinking into a dwarf-like creature when he sheds his good qualities. The Jekyll and Hyde story influenced many future narratives of duality, the most popular of which might be the Incredible Hulk, a favourite Marvel Comics superhero. Writer-editor Stan Lee, who first created the Hulk in 1962, says he was inspired by Stevenson's story alongside Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's monster. Like the violent Mr. Hyde, the Hulk is an animalistic alter ego who takes shape when a respectable man of science – Jekyll, Bruce Banner – is overwhelmed by uncontrollable emotions. But instead of becoming smaller, the Hulk turns into a giant, his muscular green body ripping the mousy Banner's ordinary clothes to shreds.

Cover, The Incredible Hulk #1 Marvel Comics (May, 1962).

What is common to these visions of the hero's metamorphosis into something not quite human, though, is that his clothes no longer fit him. And shedding one's clothes is, in some ineffable way, to drop the veneer that keeps one human.

The writing of Jekyll and Hyde has been the subject of its own mythology. Stevenson wrote it while convalescing in the British seaside town of Bournemouth. In one version, it originated as a nightmare. Some have spoken of a first draft that Stevenson burnt after his wife Fanny said his story had “missed the allegory”, while his stepson Lloyd Osbourne has described him as coming downstairs in a fever to read half a first draft aloud. His later biographers have claimed he wrote it under the influence of cocaine, or a fungus called ergot.

Whatever the truth of these narratives, Stevenson certainly led an interesting life. Having fallen in love with Fanny – an American woman ten years older than him, with three children – in 1875, he travelled with her before and after their marriage in 1880. Stevenson and Fanny and their children travelled the South Seas for three years before settling down in 1890 on a plot of 400 acres he bought on a Samoan island, taking the native name Tusitala – 'Teller of Tales'. This was where he died in 1894. 

A book cover for the superbly inventive, deceptively simple Stevenson Under The Palm Trees.

The writer Alberto Manguel has crafted Stevenson's last Samoan years into a stunning little novella called Stevenson Under the Palm Trees (2002), mixing the known biographical facts with a disturbing reimagining that is perhaps a fitting tribute to Stevenson's own fevered mind – in particular, to Jekyll and Hyde. And here again, clothes come to the forefront. The nakedness of the Samoans is repeatedly contrasted to the buttoned-up world of Stevenson's Scottish childhood, his mother's stiff, lace-edged dresses to the sun-soaked softness of the Samoan matrons. Stevenson is well-loved in Samoa, his public persona perfectly at peace with the islanders' own comfort in their skin. But is it possible, asks Manguel's haunting story, that a lovely young girl's barely covered body arouses his basest instincts? Has the idea of nakedness seeped into our minds so deeply as 'uncivilised' that we dehumanise those without clothes? By making clothes the measure of civilisation, it is our gaze that reveals itself as bestial.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 17 Sep 2020

The context of power, the power of context

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The brilliant web series I May Destroy You opens up all the conversations we need to have on sexual assault, and its commitment to context illuminates a great deal about the contemporary moment

In a world where writing is unironically referred to as ‘content’, like some pre-flavoured filling for your social media sandwich, Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You (IMDY) feels not just rare but exceptional. The 12-episode series is actively genre-repellent. The awe-inspiring Coel, who is the show’s writer, co-director and lead actor, takes us on a semi-autobiographical journey through a Black millennial London world akin to her own, filling each riveting episode with enough emotional and intellectual energy for a whole show.

Coel plays Arabella Essiedu, a young British woman of Ghanaian heritage whose sharp Twitter voice made for a hit first book. But when we meet Bella, she has just spent a publisher-sponsored writing retreat in the arms of a dreamy-eyed Italian drug dealing lover. While pulling an all-nighter to produce a draft for her deadline, she takes a break to meet friends at a bar. The next morning, having delivered up a manuscript she can barely remember writing, she finds herself with a bleeding cut on her forehead and the choppy memory of a white man’s face.

IMDY has been described as a show about a woman processing the deeply disorienting effects of a sexual assault that she doesn't really remember. And it is very much that, with Bella's tale of slow recollection, relapse, recognition and eventual recovery offering us one of the most fine-grained accounts of what it's really like to live through something like this.

But it is also a show about a lot of other things: things not often seen on screen, things that have certainly never been treated with the sort of multiple POV complexity that Coel's writing achieves here. IMDY is such a powerful intervention because it embeds what others might have seen as an isolated sexual assault in a brilliantly thick description of its context. That context is illuminated by a nuanced politics of race, class, gender and sexuality, and yet the sociological irradiates without overdetermining, always allowing another possible reading, acknowledging the reasons for suspicion while pushing us to dislodge our fixities.

For instance, Bella is black, and all she really remembers of the man who raped her is that he's white. The show doesn't flag this, or at least not obviously – but IMDY is a powerful engagement with the politics of race in an ostensibly egalitarian society. There is, for instance, the flashback depiction of how white teachers in a mixed-race school instantly respond to a white girl charging a black male classmate with rape: “White girl tears have great currency,” says a younger version of Bella's friend Terry. Now, in adulthood, Bella's circle of friends is almost all Black and non-posh: an exclusivity that could be self-defence. That fear of white or brown or upper-middle class often turns out to be at least partially justified: the white girl who brings Bella into a vegan NGO turns out to have earned a commission on her Blackness, the Cambridge-educated South Asian boy gaslights his way out of an act no less horrific for being supremely common: stealthing (removing a condom secretly during sex).

For the non-Black viewer, watching the show often has the quality of being invited into a closely-guarded circle, offering much-needed perspective on what it's like to be Black in a society where white people still have cultural hegemony. Yet, and this is crucial: there is none of the ridiculous unidimensionality that plagues so much politically correct writing in our times. Being a Black person in IMDY is no more a guarantor of moral certitude than it is in real life. So within these twelve episodes, a Black man cheats on his Black wife with a secret girlfriend – also Black; another Black man forcibly humps his Grindr date – also Black; a publisher that Bella imagines solidarity with because of her being Black, proves just how instrumental the use of racial identity politics can be.

I've used the racial lens until now because it is one Coel foregrounds, her character's most strongly felt identity from which she must partially break in order to forge a sense of unity with other women. But the sharpness of IMDY is its ability to see that all solidarities are partial, often only extended until it suits someone to extend them. Coel's characterisation and subplots indict the gaslighters and victim-shamers – the Italian lover who blames Bella for carelessness when her drink is spiked, or the Black policeman who can't quite see beyond his heterosexual judgement of Grindr sex. But what makes the show so unusual and compelling is Coel's insistence on letting no-one rest in perpetual victimhood, to constantly show how the wheels turn, depending on context. So for instance, someone who is in a racial or sexual minority might still be able to have a certain gendered power over someone else – like Bella's best friend Kwame not telling a woman he sleeps with as an experiment that he is actually gay.

Equally significantly, IMDY unpacks the disturbing effects of call-out culture in real life: the addictive high of social media validation; the exhibitionism and distraction that allows people to not focus on the work they really need to do on themselves; and most of all, the unreflective high moral ground that can sometimes make the wokest people the most insensitive, because black and white allows for no forgiveness.

 

In the India of 2020, where we all seem terrifyingly keen to tag people as either victims or exploiters; where the display of fake victimhood has become the toxic malaise that defines our society, from our topmost political leadership to publishing to Bollywood; where even the best-intentioned wokeness often seems to merely insert itself into our centuries-old culture of hypocrisy, in effect overturning nothing – in this world, I May Destroy You might be the best thing you can watch to challenge your preconceptions.

 Published in Mumbai Mirror, 6 Sep 2020.

Book Review: The Dark Hours

I reviewed the new translation of a 97-year-old Bengali book, for India Today magazine.

A 1923 bhadralok account of Calcutta's seamy side is sociological and voyeuristic by turns.

In 1842, chief magistrate J.H. Patton drew up an elaborate plan to rid Calcutta of crime. Splitting the city geographically into upper, middle and lower divisions, Patton appointed 300 constables to the police in each. Their daytime duties were not unexpected, “preventing breaches of the peace, arresting persons against whom a hue and cry has been raised, ...drunk and disorderly persons and fakeers, and others making an obscene and disgusting exposure of their persons...” But at night, the constables were instructed to “on no account allow any person to pass along the streets or highways with a bundle, box or package after nightfall, without stopping him and examining the contents of his load...”. Night, it seemed, made everyone a suspect. The just-arrived rural migrant was to be treated as a potential burglar, or, at the very least, immoral. The city after dark was by definition illicit, a place of danger and debauchery.

In 1923, a well-known writer of Bangla detective fiction and children’s literature set out to map that city in words. Eighty years after Patton’s attempted clean-up, Calcutta had only grown in size, complexity and criminality. While claiming literary inspiration from Kaliprasanna Sinha’s irreverent 1862 urban classic Hutum Penchar Naksha, Hemendra Kumar Roy also insisted that his eyewitness account of the city’s seamier side would warn “[f]athers of young boys and girls where and what the real dangers are”. But the fact that Roy published Raater Kolkata under a pseudonym suggests he knew how his “adult male audience” would read it.

Recently translated into English by Rajat Chaudhuri as Calcutta Nights, Raater Kolkata is fascinating as a document of the 20th century city, but also for the tightrope it walks between salacious gossip and moral censure. The level of detail varies, from pure urban legend (e.g. women “from the western or north western part of the country” being sexually serviced by hired men in empty houses “on the banks of the Ganga, in the Barabazar area”) to descriptions that seem to draw on long observation.

Prostitution, for instance, is subdivided by race, class and location, from the Chowringhee hackney carriages that “take you to a white-skinned beauty”, to Jorabagan streets in winter, where poor sex workers stand “when the pye-dogs have also vanished”. The bhadralok in Roy clearly takes pride in his first-person exploits: entering an opium den in old Chinatown, escaping a police raid on a Mechhobazar goondas’ den, watching two sanyasinis fight it out at the Nimtola burning ghat. But it is in his descriptions of urban commingling, Durga Puja processions, or the theatre, that the anxieties of the upper caste male truly come to the fore. This is a book to be read as a sociological comment as much on the city as on its author.

Published in India Today, 1 Aug 2020.

The Hindustani Factor

My Mirror column:

Thinking about Tom Alter while watching Stephen Frears’ new film Victoria and Abdul makes one muse about linguistic connections.

In a great scene in Satyajit Ray's Shatranj ke Khiladi (1977), the somewhat hesitant Captain Weston is persuaded by the British general to whom he works as an assistant to recite something written by the king. The film, based on a short story by Premchand, was set in Lucknow, and “the king”, whom the British were then making plans to divest of his throne, was Nawab Wajid Ali Shah. Richard Attenborough, as the general, displays the perfect mix of bafflement and disdain at the thought of a king who spends his days praying (“Five times a day!” Attenborough remarks in shock), flying kites on his terrace, listening to music, watching dancers, and most mysterious of all, writing poetry. “I'm not a poetry man,” he confesses. “Many soldiers are. But I'm curious to know what it sounds like. I rather like the sound of Hindustani.”

Weston clears his throat discreetly, waiting. “Go on then, out with it,” says the general, with a gesture of faint impatience. “Sadma na pahunche koi mere jism-e-zaad par; ahista phool daalna mere mazaar par. Har chand khaakh mein thha, magar ta-falak gaya; dhokha hai aasmaan ka mere gubaar par,” recites Weston in an impeccable accent, before proffering an equally impeccable English translation -- and his opinion that the king is “really quite gifted, sir”.
Captain Weston must have been a strange part to play for the late Tom Alter. On the one hand, it allowed the white man with a love of Urdu poetry to channel both those aspects of himself on screen. On the other hand, the only way he could do that was as a British colonial army officer, someone whose job it was to help dismantle the very world he so admired.

Alter went on to play a string of colonial Angrez characters in a succession of popular Hindi films, but none of them, to my knowledge, ever displayed alove of Urdu. That attachment to the language was something Alter was forced to place in a different compartment: the theatre. In 1999 or 2000, Alter started working with some Urdu poetry by an old friend called Idraak Bhatti. Then his old FTII friends Uday Chandra and Chander Khanna got involved, one performing Kafka's Metamorphosis and the other with a rendition of Maithili Sharan Gupt's famous Jayadrath Vadh poem, and a production called Trisanga was born. Through the 2000s, in plays staged by the Delhi-based Pierrot's Troupe, Alter enthusiastically played the nationalist leader Maulana Azad, and later the Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib himself. In the last few years, Alter appeared often on Urdu programmes, telling us in impeccable Hindustani that the great Dilip Kumar had once told him that sher-o-shairi was the secret to good acting.

And yet, when Alter died on September 29 this year, very few obituaries placed his facility with the language in the historical context they should have. Alter belonged to the third generation of a family of Presbyterian missionaries who had come to India from Ohio in the mid-19th century. His father was born in Sialkot, but moved this side of the border at Partition. The 1950-born Alter spent his childhood in Mussoorie, Allahabad, Jabalpur, Saharanpur and Rajpur, learning – as did all members of his parents' order – to recite Biblical texts in Urdu and Hindi. With his blue eyes and blond hair, language was simply what allowed Tom Alter to claim his Indianness.

In a rather silly new film called Victoria and Abdul, the fetching Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal), low-level employee of aprison in Agra, is picked to go to England to present the queen with a gold coin issued for her Golden Jubilee in 1887. But the redoubtable, gluttonous Queen Victoria (played to perfection by Judi Dench, for the second time after Mrs. Brown) is portrayed as being thoroughly charmed by the much younger Abdul. Seemingly on the strength of a few faux-philosophical meditations he makes about carpets, she appoints him as her Urdu tutor, and soon becomes adept at writing such lines as: “Apni akalmandi pe rani ko naaz hai [The queen is proud of her intelligence].”

While making much of the age and racial difference, and the frisson that causes in the royal household, the film seems bizarrely blind to the imperial context in which their relationship unfolds. Cringeworthy scenes revealing Victoria's distressing ignorance about the country she rules are compounded by her seemingly un-ironic desire to see the exotic obliging servant play-act as an Oriental sultan in her personal tableaux.

And yet, at the centre of this colonial confection sits the queen's quite believable fascination with this otherness, exemplified in her learning of Urdu. Like Attenborough's gruff general, she rather likes the sound of Hindustani. Victoria is far from being a Tom Alter, or even a Captain Weston, but even in this most brutal colonial abyss, the learning of a language seems to hold out the dim possibility of building a bridge.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Oct 2017.

Urban Legend: Paul Beatty Interview

Paul Beatty’s Booker-winning novel is a sublime, savage satire about modern-day racism in America. The author tells Trisha Gupta why no one—not even him—should be off the table to poke fun at.

Photo credit: Outlook India

In 2016, Paul Beatty became the first American writer to win the Man Booker prize. The surreal tale of an urban farmer who re-institutes segregation and slavery in his corner of Los Angeles, The Sellout was rejected by 18 UK publishers before an independent press called Oneworld took it on. The book’s whiplash wit slices through the smug fog of political correctness surrounding race, class and just about everything in America. Yet, there’s an inspired everyday lyricism to the writing, which owes something to Beatty’s past as a poet. Nothing is sacred in this book, yet everything he touches in it—from the LA public bus system to old-school Hollywood racism—feels almost spiritual.

We met Beatty at the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), in January 2017, and talked about watermelons, stereotypes, life after the Booker, and why ‘intellectual’ isn’t a label he minds…

ELLE: I thought The Sellout was more brutal, much angrier, than the reviews let on. 
Paul Beatty: I don’t think of it as angry. Sad, sometimes. But it’s interesting how people read things. During the Man Booker event, the moderator said, “Paul, your book is so angry!” There was a book there about a guy serial-killing people, another about a woman who plots this murder. How come those [books] aren’t angry and mine is? I’m not saying it’s not angry...

ELLE: ...but other things are angry too. Yes, I see. A different question: what does fictionalising real stuff do for you? 
PB: In terms of its emotive present, [my book] might be authentic—the anger, the frustration, humour. But I’m not trying to duplicate reality... The thing is the imagining. I write about things I don’t know anything about. That’s the fun part: to make it seem like this person exists. I have some sense of the psychological stuff in the book. But I don’t know anything about this neighbourhood I’ve written. Or surfing. Or gardening. At the [JLF] session, a woman asked me, “Is there a question that no one asks you?” I thought, no one ever asks me about the fruit.

ELLE: You mean the watermelons your protagonist grows?
PB: Yes, and the satsuma oranges, the peaches...

ELLE: There’s also the stunning moment when the protagonist, Bonbon, asks his dad if slavery might have been less psychologically damaging if it was called ‘gardening’. Was there something you wanted to say, about gardening?
PB: [Laughs] No, not really. I don’t garden. My mum gardens, or she used to. The fruit is an important part of my memory of California, of how I grew up, with a lemon tree in the backyard, a peach tree... For me, the book is about those details as much as the larger stuff.

ELLE: The details are often a dense web of cultural references, from Mark Twain to BBC’s Masterpiece Theatre, Eva Braun to Nina Simone. Have you always done this?
PB: Good question. I think so. My poetry wasn’t so different. It’s a line between me and the reader. It’s a test for me, almost—who are these cultural touchstones? Who’s the right person to insert?

ELLE: Sometimes a name is enough to open up a world.
PB: And sometimes there’s the decision of whether the narrator needs to explain something or not. I’m writing for somebody who may not understand what I’m doing, but who’s open to hearing everything

ELLE: Has your style ever been called ‘too intellectual’?
PB: Sometimes. One angry review went, “I didn’t like the book; I had to look up all these words.” But someone else said, “That made me want to buy the book!” So nothing’s for everyone. It’s how I write. I’m not going to change.

ELLE: Does such feedback ever influence how you think about what you’re doing?
PB: Yeah, I think about this stuff. A book that helped me was Dante’s Inferno. Beautifully written. But full of references! He’s name-dropping—these popes from the 11th century, these bishops, archbishops, artists. No one can know all of these people. But you get the lay of the land. You get a sense of his anger, his judgementalism. It’s not important that everybody knows everything.

ELLE: A writer friend of mine is miffed about this ‘explaining’, about editors who tell her, “Not everybody knows this Delhi neighbourhood”. Would anyone say that if it were a New York neighbourhood, she asks.
PB: Yeah, and there’s something to that. There are some advantages to being American—the culture is inundated with these references. But hopefully things will start going both ways, so people have a sense of India beyond Slumdog Millionaire (2008).

ELLE: You resist labelling, and yet you have these comic riffs: on black women teacher-poets, for instance, or women who love Nina Simone. It’s hard to get away from categories.
PB: That’s how we communicate. It’s mean. But I start with ridiculing my labels for myself. I once wrote this poem called ‘Stall Me Out’, making fun of things my friends said about me, and things I know about myself. It freed me up to not take myself so seriously.

ELLE: That’s very hard to do...
PB: Yes, because you think: if I don’t take myself seriously, no one else will. But I learnt to use myself as a dartboard. Maybe I’m rationalising, but I think I really am making fun of things that matter to me.

ELLE: India, these days, specialises in taking offence. But I also worry about us left-liberal sorts, the ones giving offence in India—we rarely laugh at ourselves.
PB: People are trying to protect ground they’ve had to earn. I had a student, a lesbian, who said, “I want to make fun of my community, but we’ve worked so hard to get here.” But this is how you broaden your horizons. The problem is when people feel they’re progressive, and therefore must be beyond reproach.

ELLE: Do you still write poems?
PB: No. I haven’t written a poem in 15 years. As a poet, you have to be really public. I hate that.

ELLE: Do you mean the performative part, like when you were with the Nuyorican Poets Cafe?
PB: Yes. There was this one time I was writing a poem, and in my head I went, “They’re going to like that.” And I caught myself...

ELLE: …imagining your audience?
PB: Exactly. And I thought, I have to stop this. I was the intellectual New York poet, I was this, I was that. People can read you however they want. But how much do I want to participate in that?

ELLE: Did studying creative writing with Allen Ginsberg shape you?
PB: Absolutely. I’d never written a thing before I showed up [at Brooklyn College]. Allen was a gracious guy, especially if he liked you. His speech and his writing style were very similar. He was an excellent storyteller; a very good editor. His graciousness, his insistence on clarity were important to me. And his precision.

ELLE: Your book is very much about urbanity. Do you have a favourite city?
PB: In New York, I’ve encountered stuff, especially musically, that I wouldn’t have anywhere else. Now I live in California, too, since I’ve gotten married. When I first got to New York, I could be so anonymous; I loved that. Before I started teaching [creative writing at Columbia University], I would stay home all the time. I was invisible.

ELLE: Has the Booker changed that?
PB: Here, at something like JLF, it has. But otherwise, people don’t read, so no one knows who I am. [Laughs] And someone’s going to win next year. I’ll get shunted to the side. Next up!

Published in ELLE India, June 2017.

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.

Brown Girls in the Ring

My Mirror column:

An Iranian documentary and an Indian short trace the journeys of tough young Muslim women

A still from the short film Leeches (2016), set in the Muslim neighbourhoods of Hyderabad's old city

A still from the Iranian film Sonita (2015), about a teenaged Afghan refugee becoming a rapper

One of the particular pleasures of film festivals is the unexpected juxtaposition of cinematic worlds. Films from different parts of the globe, made on very dissimilar budgets, with strikingly different visual languages, can sometimes seem to speak directly to each other.

This is what happened with two of the several films I watched today in the crisp mountain air of McLeodganj, Himachal Pradesh, where the documentary filmmakers Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam have created what might currently be the finest small-scale film festival in India: the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF).

Both films are directed by women and happen to be about young Muslim women. The first is a taut, pacy 27-minute-fiction called Leeches, directed by the New York-raised and Tisch-trained Payal Sethi. The film opens in a hotel lobby where an old lady is awaiting the arrival of some big man. A photo album is unfolded before him: an array of young female faces, many with headscarves. It might have been an audition, but for the shiftiness and urgency with which it is conducted. A few scenes later, we find that a teenaged girl called Zainab has been promised in `marriage' to an old man, in exchange for 50,000 rupees. Luckily for Zainab, her elder sister, Raisa, decides to turn protector, and the rest of Sethi's film proceeds to tell the harrowing -- and sadly, entirely improbable --tale of how she achieves her goal.

The second film is called Sonita, which is also the name of its 14-year-old heroine. I use the word `heroine' deliberately, for although Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami's 91-minute-film is a documentary, the sharp, sassy Afghan teenager at its centre is definitely the star of her own life. Maghami, who is Iranian, first discovers Sonita Alizadeh as a young Afghan refugee working as a cleaner in an Iranian refugee centre. Sonita lives in one room-poverty with her younger sister and a niece, but she dreams of being a rapper - her fantasy identity is `Sonita Jackson', the imaginary offspring of Michael Jackson and Rihanna, into whose concert images she carefully cuts and pastes her face.

But the real reason Sonita is a star is that she doesn't just dream: she writes and performs fiery, exhilarating rap songs, with vivid Farsi lyrics that speak directly to her situation as a young woman who wants much more than the fate her culture thinks is her due. For Sonita -- like Zainab in Leeches -- must surmount the real threat of being married off in exchange for a tidy sum of money.

It is striking that in both cinematic scenarios -- the fictional one in Hyderabad and the non-fictional one in Teheran/Herat -- it is the girls' mothers who are intent on selling them off, driven apparently by financial need. Zainab and Raisa's fictional mother seems particularly awful; the unfeelingness with which she pushes her own child towards an inevitably traumatic violent encounter does not seem explainable by mere poverty. Sonita's real-life mother seems unfeeling, too -- but the film offers us a clue to that unfeelingness, via her resigned belief in a 'tradition' in which an older man acquiring a virgin bride is seen as the way things are. At one point, Sonita points to a faded black and white family photo, and says matter-of-factly: "My mother was so young when she married my father that she called him 'uncle'."

These are extremely watchable films, and crowd-pleasers to boot. But if I may sound another cautionary note: in both cases, the filmmakers are women a little older than their protagonists, and belong to a culture that is clearly distinguishable from theirs. Sethi, with a Punjabi-Hindu family name and a New York background, inhabits a world very different from the poverty-stricken Muslim homes of Hyderabad's old city that she seeks to depict here. Maghami is Iranian, but chooses to focus her feminist attention on Afghan practices -- rather than the more nuanced gender imbalances that afflict Iranian society. In 1994, the critical theorist Gayatri Spivak red-flagged the all-too-common phenomenon of white men saving brown women from brown men. We have seemingly only travelled a little way away from there.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 6th Nov 2016.

The Present Is Another Country

My Mirror column:

The unforgettable David Gulpilil, who won a 2014 Best Actor award at Cannes for Charlie's Country, first appeared on screen 45 years ago. 

While writing about Thithi last month, I was reminded of a film I saw at IFFI two years ago, called Charlie's Country. On the surface, the two films have little in common. Thithi's gently sardonic observational portrait of a Kannadiga universe stitches together an impressive multigenerational cast of non-actors, while Charlie's Country stays almost entirely with its principal protagonist, a grizzled Aboriginal man called Charlie. 

But at the vortex of Thithi's whirl of activity is also a wiry old man. Gadappa (literally 'Beardman') is determined not to be tied down by restrictions of religious ritual or law or property. Like Charlie, he wants to be free. The difference between them is that Gadappa has once been a householder. And that grihasthi, unhappy as it was, has left him a line of sons and grandsons. It is this family, this community, that wants to make him conform, and it is them that he defies when he wanders off with his preferred tipple instead of signing documents and lighting pyres. 

The restrictions Charlie wants to be rid of are of a wholly different kind. Though he ostensibly lives in an Aboriginal 'community', there is nothing left of the world he once knew. The old social fabric, ripped from its inherent connection to the land, is adrift. 

Rolf de Heer's film begins on a tenuously comic note. Frustrated with life on the dole and lowgrade industrially processed food, Charlie and his friend Black Pete rig up a battered Land Rover and leave the corrugated shacks they call home to set out on a hunting expedition. They manage to snag a water buffalo, but their guns, the car and the fresh meat-to-be are all confiscated by the local authorities. Down but not out, Charlie crafts himself a spear from a young tree. But this, too, is an unauthorised weapon, according to the white-fella policeman. When even the spear is taken away, Charlie decides the only way to reclaim his country is by living in it the old way. 

As you watch David Gulpilil walk into the wilderness, armed with not much except the clothes on his back, you cannot but remember the magnificent actor's first cinematic appearance — as a limber young fellow in Nicholas Roeg's haunting, hallucinogenic Walkabout, which turns 45 years old this week. The 1971 film, with Gulpilil as an Aboriginal teenager who saves two English children lost in the desert, remains memorable for, among other things, the quivering thread of incomprehension and fascination between Gulpilil and the white girl (British actress Jenny Agutter, then 17). 

In Roeg's film, Gulpili's character was on a walkabout, a traditional Aboriginal practice in which a boy who turns 16 must spend months learning to survive on his own in the bush, hunting and gathering food and water, essentially living without shelter. 

It is the genius of De Heer's film — and a profound source of its tragedy — to return the actor, some five decades later, to another filmic walkabout. This time, though, there is no fantasy of cross-cultural conversation. I don't know if they did even when Roeg arrived to make his film in 1969, but white people in Australia no longer live fearfully on the edges of the wilderness, attracted or frightened by its untamed beauty. Certainly they need no rescuing. 

Walkabout contains many scenes of Gulpilil spearing animals for food, from small lizards to kangaroos. A near-climactic sequence made clear the difference between Aboriginal hunting and the white man's hunting, between hunting for survival and hunting for sport. A lean, young, big-eyed Gulpilil is wrestling with a single buffalo, on foot. He has almost succeeded in bringing it down when he is swept off his feet by two white hunters in a jeep and a cloud of dust. Within minutes they have gunned down several animals, taking away only a couple and leaving the others to rot where they fell. Despite Roeg's somewhat dated zooms, jerky pauses and associative visual leaps (to a maggot-infested carcass, for instance, and later a pile of bleached buffalo skulls), it is a powerful sequence. 

Watching Gulpilil now as Charlie, heading out to hunt with a vehicle and guns, feels strangely wrong. And yet, if 'civilisation' has come to the bushman, why should the machine not be part of it? 

But the Aborigine has neither been equipped to handle Western industrial society, nor can he possibly remain the mythical being he once was. What little equipment Charlie has seems decrepit, like his surroundings. In any case, hunting even a single buffalo for food is now illegal. Having killed off animals on an industrial scale, the white man now forbids hunting. The irony is total. 

We may want to watch Gulpilil live off the land and hunt with a spear. Gulpilil may want to watch himself live off the land and hunt with a spear — for the wrenching quality of these films derives from the fact that the actor is playing a character whose predicament is not distant from his own. But people are not untouched by the histories that sweep over them. Having fractured this world into pieces, how can we now expect its members to present themselves as unharmed wholes?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3rd July 2016.

Picture This: The call of the wild

Forty-five years ago, a British director made a striking, surreal film about the idea of civilisation, shot in the Australian desert.

Sometime in the ’60s, a British filmmaker looking to make his transition from cinematographer to independent director zeroed in on a novel called The Children, by James Vance Marshall. First published in 1959, the book was about two American children stranded in the Australian outback after a plane crash. An Aboriginal boy helps them survive and make their way back to Western ‘civilisation’, but himself dies from the influenza virus he catches from the two.

I haven’t read Marshall’s book, but here’s what I see this narrative as suggesting: that cross-cultural communication in an unequal world is possible, but ends inevitably in tragedy for the colonised. And that white people might fail to communicate their emotions and intentions, but they communicate their diseases effortlessly.

The film, however, dropped the influenza part of the plot. The Children was written for a ‘juvenile audience’, today’s YA. I imagine that Nicholas Roeg — for that was the filmmaker’s name — wanted to retain the childlike excitement of the colonial adventure, but also produce something more open-ended and complex. Working from a screenplay by the British playwright Edward Bolton, Roeg made the children English residents of Australia. He also played with a shift of focus to the Aboriginal side of things: the film starts with this text: “In Australia, when an Aborigine man-child reaches sixteen, he is sent out into the land. For months, he must live from it. Sleep on it. Eat of its fruit and flesh. Stay alive. Even if it means killing his fellow-creatures. The Aborigines call it the WALKABOUT. This is the story of a “WALKABOUT”.”

Having announced this theme, however, Roeg’s camera — and our gaze — stays largely with the white people. Walkabout, released on July 1,1971 — exactly 45 years ago this week — cast Roeg’s own son Luc (credited as Lucien John) and the striking teenaged British actress Jenny Agutter as the siblings, while giving the role of the Aboriginal boy to the extraordinary David Gulpilil (wrongly credited in the film as Gumpilil).

Yet right from the opening scenes, the film is intent on defamiliarising white ‘civilisation’. The uneven, nasal drone of the Aboriginal didjeridoo is overlaid onto scenes from white Australian urban life, emphasising people’s disconnect from their surroundings: a middle-aged man in a suit sits down in a strangely alienating space; a little boy (John) in school uniform looks into a book as he walks. A magnificent shot shows the little boy walking home, framed by the ominous shadow of a gnarled old tree.

Strangeness, Roeg suggests, lies in the eyes of the beholder. Interspersed with the Aboriginal instrument are white-people sounds that seem as jarring — a single phrase of spoken French; a classroom full of white girls chanting the vowels of the English alphabet in unison. A woman making dinner in a white-cube apartment listens to a radio programme about the ortolan, a bird overfed in captivity and then drowned in alcohol to create a gourmet French dish.

Then things get really weird. A few minutes into a desert picnic, the father starts shooting at his children, and then kills himself. The girl (Agutter), being the older one, keeps what has happened from the boy. Gathering up the radio, a bottle of lemonade and tins of food, she walks him further into the desert.

Roeg’s cinematographic eye is extraordinary. Panoramic views of windswept dunes, flat red rocks and circling mountain ridges alternate with vivid close-ups of colourful, sometimes dangerous creatures that live in this landscape: frilled lizards, chameleons, scorpions, porcupines. The film pauses its narrative for us to observe these creatures, so comfortably at home here — unlike our hatted-coated protagonists, who are so profoundly not.

The little boy is initially excited to be on an adventure, but in a few days they have reached a state of extreme hunger and thirst. It is then that they encounter the Aboriginal boy. He looks blankly at the girl as she pours out floods of anxious words, but when the younger boy mimes drinking, he laughs and instantly crafts a reed pipe to draw out water from the ‘dry’ ground. He is as much of this world as the animals he kills for food. He can make spears out of branches, sunburn salve out of animal blood, and food out of nearly any living thing.

The white children, now shielded from the harsh vagaries of the landscape, begin to revel in its idyllic freedoms — swinging from branches, swimming in pools, roasting meat on naked fires. But what makes the film particularly intense is an unspoken erotic tension, the web of mutual fascination that quivers between Agutter and Gulpilil. But that fascination is ill-fated, because Agutter’s character is afraid of it, afraid to admit to it.

Before Walkabout, few films had dealt with Australian inter-race relations. Most notable was Charles Chauvel’s Jedda (1955), in which an Aboriginal baby is brought up in a white family. Jedda’s white mother is appalled when the teenager wants to join her Aboriginal age-mates on a walkabout. The tragic climax is framed by a white view of the wildness of the land — and the people.

A few years after Walkabout came Peter Weir’s eerie Picnic at Hanging Rock, based on the bestselling 1967 novel about a group of white schoolgirls who disappear while on a Valentine’s Day picnic in 1900. Weir, too, partook of the mystery and wildness of the Australian landscape — though here, any erotic charge was expressed by young white women, and suppressed by their Victorian schoolmistresses.

Those films could not go beyond whiteness, or the idea of a separation of spheres. In contrast, Walkabout feels startlingly fresh. The white girl and the black boy circle each other warily, their interactions filled with a nervous energy. Dreamlike though his film is, Roeg makes no outlandish claims. Things end badly for the boy. But it is her life that is forever shadowed by the remembered grandeur of the wilderness.

Published in BL Ink, 2 July, 2014.

The Strength of the Pack

Today's Mumbai Mirror column: 

A sparkling new adaptation of The Jungle Book is a chance to take a fresh look at Kipling.

The latest version of The Jungle Book hit Indian screens on April 8, a week ahead of the US. The fact that we get first dibs on the film, however, is about the only concession to 'Indian-ness' here. (I'm not counting the fact that the only actor on screen is a 12-year-old Indian-origin New Yorker called Neel Sethi.) 

Perhaps my brain has been permanently warped by The Jungle Book I grew up on (a lovely hardback with Disney images), but it seems to me a bit absurd to expect Indian-ness from something originally written by a white man in 1895, filmed in English as early as 1942 (by Alexander Korda), and successfully Disney-fied in 1967. 

What we think of when we think of The Jungle Book is Mowgli, a thin brown boy making the forest his own, accompanied by Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther. But Kipling's Jungle Book was actually several tales, first published serially in newspapers, and only some featured Mowgli. And even those didn't necessarily follow from each other: they had to be stitched into a single narrative. 

In some ways, it was the films that did this work. Korda spent most of his dramatic energy on Mowgli's ambivalent relationship to human society - in Kipling's memorable phrase, the "man-village". It was Walt Disney who created The Jungle Book most of the world now knows: the tale of Mowgli's battle with Shere Khan the tiger, encounters with the Bandar-log and Kaa the snake providing adventurous sidelights. 

Jon Favreau's version, in glorious live action 3D, remains largely faithful to the 1967 Disney film, though it darkens the tone and ups the pace considerably. It is Shere Khan who bookends this version, snarling and sneering to terrifying effect in the voice of Idris Elba, and asking the question that is at some level, at the moral centre of the Jungle Book: "How many lives is a man-cub worth?" Favreau gives the angry, embittered man-eater of the previous film a sharper identity as a tyrant, a power-hungry creature who wraps his unlawful activities in a cloak of hypocrisy and violence: "You did not respond to reason, so now you will know fear." 

On the other hand— not driving Mowgli out of the jungle but trapping him into self-doubt—is Kaa the snake: "Don't you know what you are?" 

And what is Mowgli - this creature who cannot ever be a wolf, no matter how much he tries, but who is too free, too wild to inhabit the world of men?
The idea of a feral child has long fascinated us. Romulus and Remus, mythical founders of Rome, were raised by a she-wolf, and famous cases of wolf-men have been the subject of films by European auteurs like Truffaut and Herzog. 

The appeal of Kipling's tale is that it reverses the perspective to that of the jungle: so not wolf-child, but man-cub. Instead of a return to human society, Kipling imagines what it would be like to be taught the ways of the wilderness. And what has made his text persuasive for generations of children is the richness of his conviction that the wilderness has ways. The Law of the Jungle seems, if anything, more clear, more just, and infinitely more navigable than the changeable codes of human societies. The idea of a Water Truce that would allow all animals to access the river in dry season, or the resounding call to togetherness in "The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack": these explain why The Jungle Book's evocation of loyalty, honesty and codes of honour were a huge influence on Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the Boy Scouts. 

Sure, Kipling was a British imperialist in whose eyes there was no possible equivalence between brown people and white ones. But our response to that doesn't have to be a bar on reading him. It's much more profitable to read him critically but carefully, to read him and marvel at his ear for language, and his eye for the Indian world he grew up in. For one thing, he could often be funny. Here he is talking about small boys in Indian villages being sent out to graze the herds: "The very cattle that would trample a white man to death allow themselves to be banged and bullied and shouted at by children that hardly come up to their noses." And here he is making a snarky comparison between human dispute settlement and the jungle version: "One of the beauties of Jungle Law is that punishment settles all scores. There is no nagging afterward." 

If we are to insist on mapping the Jungle Book onto Kipling's real-life surroundings, then the "man-village" would have to be the British, and the jungle representative of Indians. But then we would need to account for the fact that Kipling's man-village, although armed with the ultimate weapon ("the red flower", i.e. fire), is prone to fear and exaggeration. It is the jungle folk who are heroes - not just because they live simply and keep their word, but because they are able to take a man-cub in.

Regardless of whether it challenges or confirms colonial stereotypes, much of the power of the Jungle Book lies in Mowgli's learning how he can belong to the jungle, yet not fear the things that come naturally to him as a man. What Mowgli offers, eventually, is a model of accepting the different parts of oneself.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 April 2016.